Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

HAUNTING THE DEAD
SETH LINDBERG
looked strangely triumphant, like this was all her
doing. She marched back to her station as if she had
personally solved the world’s problems.
Anders shook his head, went back to his nachos. He
got an extra helping of cheese, paid, and fled the store.
***
A spectre is haunting Orpheus.
The words kept on slipping into his thoughts on the
drive home. He knew this was the kind of incident he
should really report to someone in the corporation, but
he felt a little bitter about the place now: tired, annoyed,
a little frustrated. The honeymoon was over.
This was his vacation, a time to forget about all the
weirdness, the stupid office politics, the fucked up
assignments, and to just live life.
But it didn’t feel much like life without Lila around.
That was the rub. And it’s not like the various managers,
directors, and project leaders hadn’t been aware of
their relationship—but despite their similarities, he
and Lila were different enough that the powers-that-be
kept them on different teams. They always arranged to
have their vacation times coincide, but missions always
ran late, directors always pushed for more time on
pet projects, and debriefings and those stupid ILPs—
Incident Learning Processes—always got in the way.
Apologies could be, and were, made later.
Nothing was ever anyone’s fault. So fuck them. Let
them find out about this from somewhere else. The
Group always seemed to catch wind of these things
anyways.
He made it home, toyed with his nachos for a while
and drank ridiculous amounts of some kind of new
sweetened, caffeinated soda. He picked up a book, A
History of Secret Societies, by Arkon Daraul, that Agent
Dennison had recommended to him in one of her
crabby rants about his need to expand his own knowledge
of “the unknown.” This, for the guy who flunked
those mandatory Kundalini yoga classes. He paged
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