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Well you can fight it but you know that you won’t get your way in the end
Too many people, the King and all of his men
And if you’re dealing in a line of cards
Won’t you take me to the queen of hearts?
And if you’re trying to tear down what you see
Pack up the stars before you come for me
And if you’re dealing in a line of fate
Who’s going to tell her the reason I’m late?
…And if you’re dealing in a trick of the light
I need to see her face for one last time
—“The King And All Of His Men” lyrics by Wolf Gang
Later, when pieces of the dream would come back to him, surfacing in his memory like quiet gasps of air rising through dark, deep water, Spike would not be able to say how much of it was the coma (or the infection, or the drugs, or the new kidney, or the fever) and how much was his own neglected subconscious demanding its say. He hoped it was one of those things. Spike didn’t think he could take an actual spiritual experience on top of everything else.
For a long time, the dream was hallways. The hallways of an office tower, shattered glass and plaster riddled with bullet holes. A shabby hallway of a shabby brownstone lined with peeling wallpaper that was supposed to lead to Julia’s apartment, but just kept going on and on, reaching nothing. A dirty alley—not technically a hallway, but in the dream it was. The ground was wet with rainwater and oil slick and blood. There was no sky. All the hallways faded into shadow, faded into each other, and Spike walked them at an even pace and emotional remove.
There were no doors.
He walked and he walked, hands in his pockets. Most of the time, he could only see a few feet in front of himself, and his footsteps barely made a sound.
Sometimes, Spike would turn a corner and a room would be there. An unattended convenience store with packs of ramen and cigarettes and lottery tickets under greenish fluorescent lighting. A wide hangar with the noses of ancient, half-together zipcrafts peeking through the dark edges where his field of vision ended. An empty dive bar with ripped stools and an unfinished game of pool on the table by the silent jukebox. Spike didn’t bother trying to disturb the things he found. He kept walking.
He walked for days. For weeks. For months? Spike knew he was dreaming, and so he knew that no matter how long it seemed like he’d been walking, there was no way to know the actual time. Likely, he was still face down on those steps, bleeding out. Likely, this gloomy maze was the work of moments, rather than eons.
Likely.
Spike could wait. Wherever it was, his body would run out of blood eventually, and he knew that. So, he kept walking for more dream hours, more dream days, into the murky nontime of the endless halls. It was all so monotonous, so hypnotic, that Spike didn’t even realize at first when something changed.
This time, the hallway of the dark, snaking labyrinth was metal. The corridor of a ship. The floor was metal too, and the echo of his own footsteps against it was so familiar that Spike did not notice his steps were louder here than they’d been previously.
He did notice the other noise: Laughter. Children’s laughter. And the bark of a dog.
That’s new, Spike thought.
The sound bounced against the deckplating from a distance and as Spike followed it, as it got louder, the yawning stretch of corridor shrank to a more manageable size. He knew where he was. He knew how to get where he was going. Spike turned a corner and—There.
For the first time, there was a door.
The Bebop’s circular door out to the hanger stood in its rightful place at the top of the stairs. And below the door, below those stairs, was that living room with its worn, hideous yellow furniture lit greenish blue by the glow of Ed’s computer.
Ed herself was lying on her stomach on the living room floor in front of Tomato, kicking her rubbery legs and cackling.
“Look!” she shouted triumphantly, pointing at the screen. She was not talking to Spike. “See? Edward has found it! Edward can find anything!”
“Wow,” said the other girl. She was Ed’s size, and sat cross-legged on the floor next to the hacker, with Ein in her lap. “That’s amazing, you really can!”
“Edward told you so! Now watch this…”
They sat shoulder to shoulder while Ed beat on the keyboard like a piano. Then other girl turned her head and saw Spike standing there just outside the living room. She brushed a hand through her dark bangs.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
Ed looked up. “That’s Spike-Person,” she said. “He died.”
She stared at Spike with an eerily serious expression. Only for a moment, but it was a long moment. Longer than he could ever remember seeing her sit still before. Then, Edward slid her goggles down from her mop of hair to cover her eyes, and returned to her work.
“Oh,” said the other girl. He knew that girl. “That’s sad.”
She slid Ein off her lap and rose, crossing the length of the living room to stand in front Spike, who still lingered in the entryway.
“I died, too,” she said. This time she was talking to him.
Spike stared down at the young Faye—that little Betamax girl with the big eyes and shy voice—and she stared back up at him without blinking. It was nearly familiar. He’d stood in this same corridor before, locked eyes with her before, stared her down before. Her, but not her.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
The voice was quiet. Curious. It was a normal question—but the words hit Spike’s chest as though she’d screamed them at him. Where are you going? Why are you going?
Spike didn’t know how to answer her this time—because it wasn’t her, of course. It was a child he’d never met. It was the bloodloss talking. It was just a dream. He looked past the GirlFaye, over her head to the hanger door. It seemed to float there in the dark. The stairs leading up barely reflected the low light, and the bulkhead around it was invisible.
“That the way out?” Spike asked. It was strange, almost surprising to hear his own voice again.
The girl followed his gaze to the door and shrugged. “I think so? It might be.”
“You don’t know?” Spike smirked down at her. “Didn’t you just say you were dead, too?”
GirlFaye shrugged again. Looked back at up at him through her bangs. “Yeah, but I’m a ghost,” she said. “I don’t get to leave.”
Something in his subconscious clicked when she said that, and Spike realized that the shadows were wrong. He’d thought the source of the weak, bluish light in the common room had been the computer screen, but when the girl had moved away from it to meet him in the hall, the light had followed with her.
Her pale skin and light clothes gave off a dim glow that could be mistaken for ghostlight. But no. It was the glow of an ancient CRT television. Spike could remember Faye—the real Faye—sitting in that light as she rewatched and rewound that Beta tape, over and over and over, searching for answers from the child that stood in front of him now.
“You’re not a ghost,” Spike said. “You’re—” a recording “—a memory.”
The girl flickered. Her edges seemed to soften into scan lines and for just a moment, there was a static hum in the air from the decay of magnetic tape. She still did not blink.
“Do you really believe there’s a difference?” the girl asked, and before Spike could consider an answer, she reached out her hand.
It passed through his chest.
The pain was instant, and searing. Spike could not feel that intangible hand brush his heart, but the sensation of molten fire expanded from the point of would-be contact so quickly he saw white. His blood boiled. A shout lodged in his throat, unable to escape from paralyzed lungs. He was burning, burning from the inside out, and…
She pulled her hand back—she’d only touched him for a moment, after all—and as the pain receded, the shadows returned.
Spike thought he heard a soft “…sorry…” as the dark rushed back around him. The ghost was gone, the familiar bulkheads were gone, replaced by foggy nothingness.
He was back at the beginning again.
*
As he trudged through color-leeched hallways of buildings he barely remembered and a maze of might-as-well-be-identical Tharsis back alleys, Spike considered how inefficient this stupid dream was.
Wasn’t your life supposed to flash before your eyes just before you died? This wasn’t a flash, it was a chore.
The dark non-sky was low. It seemed to promise rain, but it never delivered. Shapes peeked out of the nothing—headstones from that cemetery. Julia was not there to meet him. Spike kept walking. He was on a rooftop now, but she wasn’t there either. Not even so much as a drop of blood on the cement.
Reuniting with your lover in death was a romantic idea, wasn’t it? But Julia was as elusive at the end as she’d been at the beginning. Spike had already walked forever. He would never catch up.
The path, such as it was, took him through Mao’s office. Over a Persian rug dimmed gray and an overstuffed ashtray on a real-wood desk imported from Earth. The chair behind it was empty. Spike kept walking.
Old Bull’s tent was empty, too. Nothing but a mound of sand in front of the canvas flaps. Sand that had surely once poured through weathered fingers like an hourglass counting down. Sand that should have been a rich Martian red, but was as gray and nothing as everything else.
It was strange, really. If Spike was going to have some death’s-door vision of anyone, Laughing Bull would have made sense. That old man had been a bit of a mystic, as far as Spike believed in that sort of thing. Julia or Mao or Annie would have made sense—spirits he deserved to be haunted by, but were somehow absent. Vicious would have made sense. They could chase each other to hell.
Instead, Spike turned a corner and there was GirlFaye again. She was right where he’d left her, though she was sitting on the floor of the ship’s corridor this time. She looked up when he approached, but then turned her attention back to the Bebop’s living room where Ed and Ein were playing tug-of-war with a one of the dog’s chew toys. Ed was on all fours, of course, growling with one end of the toy in her mouth, meeting Ein on his level.
No Julia, no Bull—hell, not even Jet. Just the dog, Ed, and Faye.
And it wasn’t even the right Faye!
Spike sat himself down across from self-proclaimed-ghostgirl and leaned his back against the wall. He was surprised to find a pack of cigarettes still in his jacket pocket, and set one between his lips. Out of pure habit, he held the pack out to Faye. Her big, child eyes glared at him with a familiar ‘Are you fucking stupid?’ expression.
“I’m thirteen,” she said.
…And his lighter didn’t work. Of course. Sighing around his unlit cigarette, Spike gave up and joined her in watching the show.
Hacker and corgi faced off, opposite ends of nylon bone between each set of jaws. Finally, with a great yank and a convincing growl, Edward won the chew toy. She remained on all fours, cackling as Ein gave chase. They would have knocked the furniture over if it hadn’t been bolted to the floor.
“Why is Ed here?” Spike asked. He didn’t bother asking about the dog. Ein would follow Ed, that was a given.
GhostFaye shrugged. “I think she just goes wherever she wants.”
And that did make a sort of sense, come to think of it. There probably wasn’t anywhere Radical Edward couldn’t hack her way into, somehow. Including Spike’s fucked-up head.
He turned back to the girl.
“Why are you here?”
Flicker.
Static.
“I’ve been here the whole time.”
Flicker.
Static.
Repeat.
*
There was movement in the shadows. Hulking shapes of bullet-ridden animatronic animals twitched in the corner of Spikes eye as he walked through the carnival-game booths in an empty theme park. The rotting wood of a dock creaked under his shoes, and something splashed in the dark water below.
Where are you going?
A shape loomed above him— It was a pyramid of television sets. It was transmission tower. It was a stairwell climbing up and up and up. It went on forever and mad, monstrous laughter echoed down from the top.
Why are you going?
Motes of the nothing drifted around Spike as he walked. Was it gray snow? Was it ash? Was it Venusian pollen? Was it just his imagination when it flapped like butterfly wings and diffused into the air like cigarette smoke?
Flicker.
Static.
“How did you die, anyway?”
The ghost-girl shrugged. “You don’t know. You never asked.”
That was true. Spike had barely registered it at the time when Faye told him her memory had come back. He’d had one foot out the ship already, his vision tunneled to a single, final point. But the information must have meant something to him, what from the way Faye was lodged so obtrusively into his subconscious and blocking his path.
Except she wasn’t.
It wasn’t the right Faye, and she wasn’t actually blocking anything—just leaning against the corridor wall with plenty of room to walk on by. All Spike had to do was walk past her, get to the door, and leave. That was all he had to do, and he’d most certainly done it before.
That was all Spike had to do, and he didn’t.
Flicker.
Static.
Repeat.
Repeat.
Repeat.
*
“You don’t look so good,” GirlFaye said. The real Faye would have told him he looked like shit, and she’d have been be right. Spike certainly felt like shit. He’d looped so many times he’d lost track, but each time he did the dream got worse.
The ashy hallways weren’t quiet anymore. There were things in the shadows that jerked and darted in his peripheral vision. He couldn’t get a good look at what followed him, but Spike knew it was getting closer.
Sometimes the gray maze baked like he was standing under Tijuana sun, or being blasted with the hot wind of a Zipcraft taking off. Sometimes he walked as though in the cold of Pluto, or the vacuum of space. Sometimes Spike had his gun, but he was out of bullets. Sometimes his pockets were empty. Sometimes he felt a breath on the back of his neck coming out of the blankness.
Where am I going?
The air smelled like copper, like cigarettes, like burnt bell peppers, like antiseptic, like ozone, like exhaust.
From far away, Spike could hear a jazz band, music distorted as it echoed through concrete shells of ruined buildings. Closer was the sound of gunshots. No way to tell what direction they were coming from. All of them, probably. It clashed with the gaudy dings and whistles of slot machines as Spike trudged through a room that had probably been a casino before the nothingness had warped and decayed it.
Why am I…
He almost caught the distant notes of a lullaby before they were quickly drowned out by the whirr of the robotic claw that had removed Spike’s eye.
And then came the clash and clang of his gun just barely blocking the strike of Vicious’s sword in time. That mad laugh. That mad laugh that had once been relaxed and good and…
…and the snip of clippers cutting through the branch of a bonsai tree. The clunk clunk of a water heater that had so many replacement parts it arguably wasn’t the original machine anymore. The hiss of oil hitting a hot wok. Ed’s singsong chants echoing from somewhere deep in the ship…
“You’re all sweaty,” said the girl. “It’s gross.”
“Shut up.” Spike leaned against the wall opposite her, trying to suck the flavor from his unlit cigarette. His mouth tasted like ash without the nicotine. Pointless. The Bebop’s hallway, lit pale from the incandescent glow of the ghost-girl, was the only place it was still calm. But Spike could feel the rest of the dream creeping in near the edges, scraping and skittering closer like a mutated rock lobster.
The round hangar door still hovered over the dark living room beyond the corridor. Spike just had to cross the room and climb the stairs. Walk past Not-Faye and that ratty yellow couch that probably still had some of his blood stained down to the stuffing.
He didn’t move.
GirlFaye cocked her head at him in a birdlike gesture. “Did you come here to die, or not?” she asked, still not blinking.
Come here? Spike thought. He hadn’t come here, he simply was here. Dreams were involuntary like that. Or maybe the ‘here’ was the Red Dragon’s headquarters, where Spike presumed he still was. How long had he been lying on those stairs? Just how much damn longer would it take to die?
Spike had told Faye—the real Faye, Faye-Faye (ha!)—that he wasn’t going off to die. That had been a lie, hadn’t it? No, the answer was too simple to be a lie. Spike had left the Bebop to finish what he’d started years ago. The Dragons had shot Jet in the leg, ambushed the ship, killed Julia and Annie. If he hadn’t gone to meet Vicious, Vicious would have come to meet him. And so, Spike went. Simple.
He hadn’t gone with the intention of dying; Spike simply hadn’t expected to live. So he hadn’t lied to Faye, not technically. And if he had, so what? She was a liar, too.
Months ago, before he’d gone to fight Mad Pierrot, Spike had provoked her. He wasn’t sure why, probably just to see what she’d do. He’d joked that he might die, and sure enough, Faye had chased after and tried to save him.
And wasn’t that it? Wasn’t that the reason Spike had told her he wasn’t going off to die? Faye was such an obstinate brat. If he’d told her to stay put, she might have ignored him on principle. So he’d told her to stay alive the only way he thought she would listen. The only way he knew how to say it.
Stay alive, you crazy bitch. You still have a future.
Spike eyed the kid in front of him in her clean, unbloodied clothes. White shirt, white skirt, and a yellow vest with some kind of insignia. Was she wearing a school uniform? That was such a pre-Gate, vintage Earth thing. He’d only seen those in movies. God, she was old. And so young, too.
“You’re not dead,” Spike said.
The girl shrugged. “If you say so.”
“You didn’t follow me.”
Again, that You’re a fucking idiot stare. “It’s your dream,” Definitely-Not-Dead-Faye said. “If you don’t know, I don’t know.”
The RedTail had been too damaged to chase him, right? Though maybe not the Hammerhead… No, Jet wouldn’t have let her follow him. But Jet wasn’t gonna outrun her with that bullet wound in his leg…
“You didn’t—”
The girl flickered again, and he could see the bulkhead behind her through the snow of digital noise forming the outline of her body.
The nothing rushed back around him.
Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat…
*
The hallways-that-weren’t-hallways had grown too tight; the not-a-sky ceiling too low. Spike had never been claustrophobic in life, but this pressing tunnel of blankness was too much for him in death.
“This is hell, right?” Spike asked. He was panting. The air was thick and hot and his limbs were too heavy.
“I don’t know,” said the ghost girl. She was following behind him now, steps silent, like a pale shadow. “Do you believe in hell?”
He hadn’t seen the Bebop in a while. The places he passed through had ceased to be places several restarts ago. Rooms he’d known rendered to dust. Ships he’d flown now a nest of black cobwebs. The crunch under his shoes indistinguishable between gravel, bones, dead leaves, cracking ice…
“What happened after I left?” Spike tried to change direction, taking a right at an asteroid-like lump of grayness. The next room-that-was-not-a-room was full of tall things that were perhaps supposed to be lampposts, or maybe trees.
“I can’t tell you that,” the girl answered. He knew she’d say that.
From far away, and from far too close, he heard a repeating, metallic crash-screech. Like a katana hitting and scraping against something with enough force to throw sparks.
The sweat was cold on Spike’s neck. “I got them all, didn’t I?” he asked. “Vicious’ loyalists. There’s nobody to avenge him now, right?”
“I can’t tell you that either.”
And he was never going to know. That was the bitch of it, he was never going to know! Never going to know if he’d done enough to make one good thing out of all that death. Julia. Shin. Lin. Annie. Mao. Vicious. And a hit out on the Bebop unless he won.
He had won, hadn’t he? Making his way back to the bottom floor of the tower, sunrise blinding him, a weight lifted. Spike had felt like the war was finally over. He’d finished the worst of it, so what did it matter what happened next?
“If you don’t make a choice soon,” GirlFaye said, “you’re not gonna have a choice at all.”
Spike didn’t know what she meant by that. “Whatever happens, happens,” he said. The words didn’t sound as cool as they used to, what with the way he was sweating and fighting for breath.
Because nothing was happening next. There was nothing in front of him. Nothing next to him. A crushing nothing all around.
There was a blur of pale light as the girl sidestepped into his path, bringing Spike up short. She leaned forward and he leaned back, remembering that searing pain from when she’d touched him before. The ghost girl stared hard into his eyes.
“I mean it,” she said. Then she flickered away.
Spike waited for yet another reset, for this nothing to become a new nothing, but it didn’t happen. The dark remained dark. The not-world continued to close in, slowly and sharply.
*
The shapes formed and deformed and formed again. Broken things. Dead bodies. Bullet casings crushed into gray snow under his feet. Puddles of blood shattered like stained glass.
*
Tires screeched. He could hear the rattle of a chainlink fence as something—several somethings, maybe—climbed it. There were too many stairs. Too many dead ends.
*
Wasn’t hell supposed to be hot? He was drenched in so much sweat he was freezing…
*
Grave markers, but nobody was buried under them. The rock was worn down from centuries of rain and dust, but the dead were fresh on the ground. He knew them. He knew all of them. They weren’t supposed to die. They weren’t—
*
Somewhere, there was a room. The blinds were always down and caked with dust and cigarette ash. The windows had never been opened. The furniture was all but melted into the dirty carpet. All that was visible, all that was distinct, was a television so cheap it couldn’t even pick up channels from outside Mars’ orbit. He hadn’t known there were other channels back then, anyway. That television was always set to just the one: a freebie station dedicated to the most ancient martial arts movies. Spike could remember that TV, even if he couldn’t remember the name he’d been called when he watched it.
*
Spike hadn’t realized he’d come to a decision until he heard Ed’s voice again.
It was high and melodic, muffled through the bulkheads. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, but the lower, more patient voice that answered her was definitely Jet’s. The sounds were coming from the kitchen, punctuated by familiar clinks and clunks of dinner being prepared.
He was back in the Bebop’s corridor again, but it was different this time. For one thing, the lights were on properly. It looked normal. It sounded normal. If it weren’t for the bullet marks in the ceiling, Spike could imagine he was just coming home after a bounty hunt, and nothing had changed.
When he reached the living room, Faye was there. And also Faye was there.
The ghost girl was lying on her stomach on the floor in front of Tomato. The grown-up, proper Faye Valentine was sitting cross-legged on the couch, playing solitaire on the coffee table. Big Shots was playing on the TV, volume low. Neither Faye acknowledged the other.
When Spike finally stepped over the threshold into the living room, the girl stood up. She met his eyes just the once, blinked, and then walked quietly past him down the hall, deeper into the ship. Spike wondered if she was going to wander the Bebop forever, like the ghost she claimed to be, or if she was off to Faye’s room to climb back inside the beta-box she’d come from.
The real Faye continued her game, not even looking up when Spike approached the couch. Ace of spades to the top. Three of diamonds on the four of clubs. Six card stack to the Queen of hearts. Her expression was somehow completely bored and completely focused at the same time. Could she see not him, or was she ignoring him on purpose? Both were equally possible.
Spike looked up. The round door was still at the top of the stairs. It did not look so portentous now. Maybe, if Spike opened it, he’d see that blinding sunrise on the other side. Maybe that awful gray labyrinth was behind it, waiting to pull him in again. Maybe the door was locked. Or maybe it would just lead into the hangar as it always had.
He would never know.
Spike grabbed Faye’s hand just as it was reaching down for another card and pulled her to her feet in one fluid motion. Now she saw him. The look in her eyes was pain and anger and sadness and fear. Spike remembered that look. This had happened before, or something like it.
“You,” Spike tightened his grip on her hand, “Are not a ghost.”
He slammed her palm against his chest and felt a surge of victory when her hand did not pass through him. He caught fire anyway. A white-hot, burning pain, worse than the first time. His heart was a sun fighting to burst through his ribs, his blood was lightning, every nerve alive and awake with agony. Spike welcomed it. He pressed her hand harder.
The ship fell away.
*
*
*
*
Dark again. A more run-of-the-mill kind of dark.
It was cool and there was an astringent smell in the air. Spike’s eyes were crusty and it took several blinks to feel like he’d done the motion right. Even then, he only managed to make out some shapes with his false eye while the real one struggled to catch up.
Medical equipment. The lights were off. He was lying down, and Spike couldn’t see much farther beyond the glow of a few monitors close by the bed, full of numbers and lines in dull greens and blues. They moved and changed and beeped, and that surely meant something. He was too exhausted to care.
“Hey, Doctor, look,” somebody said. “I think his fever broke.”
“Huh!” came the reply. “Thought the poor bastard was done for. Guess he decided to live after all.”
Before Spike drifted off again, he was almost sure he saw one of the monitors flicker and warp into a weird, toothy happy-face. Just for a second, and then it was gone. But maybe that was just a dream.
*
*
*