Home by Stacia Kane

1.
    Most—no, all—of her cases started the same way: A homeowner or building resident called the Church to report a haunting. The Church assigned a Debunker to the case to investigate the haunting and hopefully disprove it, to make sure the person in question wasn’t just faking in order to get a nice fat settlement in exchange for the Church’s failure to protect them from the dead.
    After all, just because the population was smaller thanks to Haunted Week twenty-four years before, when the ghosts had risen and killed every living person they could, and just because the Church of Real Truth was in charge now, didn’t mean people didn’t still need money. They did. Just like Chess. She needed money for food, for rent, for the electric bill and the cell phone bill and all of those other things. And of course for drugs: the things that made her life worthwhile.
    So Chess worked, and she worked hard, and she’d handled a lot of cases and gotten a lot of bonuses for disproving a lot of hauntings. But she’d never had a case before where a neighbor called the Church to report the ghost and the homeowners insisted there wasn’t one.
    She’d rather not have the case. It was probably a huge waste of time; time she could be spending with Terrible, in his big gray bed. Just thinking about him made her smile, sent a cheerful little shiver up her spine. Love was terrifying, and weird, and sometimes uncomfortable. But it was so fucking sweet.
    It was also going to fuck up her concentration if she didn’t stop thinking about it. With effort she tamped down the heat rising in her chest, reached into her pillbox and popped a couple of Cepts to help chase the feeling away.
    The street looked like any other in Cross Town. Like any other street in any of the suburbs of Triumph City, really, or any in the District. Houses with smooth blank faces, all of them alike, watching each other across a wide expanse of concrete, two shiny cars in each driveway like weapons laid out on a table before them. So living-the-good-life. So upwardly mobile.
    So rotten. The people living inside those assembly-line buildings were people who gave a shit what others thought of them, and that made them dangerous. That made them people who’d sell out their mothers if it meant getting into the right person’s address book.
    Chess knocked on the pale blue front door of number 422, a bland two-story with peaked windows and a tiny afterthought of a front porch. The woman the door revealed when it opened looked like every self-satisfied suburban real-estate agent Chess had ever seen. The scent of smug drifted from her in waves.
    “Yes?”
    “Mrs. Brent?”
    “Yes?”
    “I’m Chess Putnam, from the Church. You made a complaint about a haunting—”
    “Yes, yes, get inside. Hurry, please.” Mrs. Brent’s clawlike fingers wrapped around Chess’s upper arm and pulled, exhibiting the sort of wiry strength Chess usually associated with desperate speed-pumpers on a long run. Chess almost stumbled over the threshold; Mrs. Brent slammed the door behind her.
    The second she flipped the lock, Mrs. Brent’s entire manner changed. Her face didn’t move—Chess didn’t think it was capable of that, not with all the surgeries and injections the woman had obviously had—but her shoulders relaxed, her back straightened.
    “There. May I offer you a drink, Miss…Parkman, did you say? Are you related to Judge Parkman, by any chance?”
    “It’s Putnam, actually. No, thank you, I don’t need a drink. Why don’t you just tell me about the ghost? What made you call the Church?”
    Mrs. Brent motioned Chess into the wide living room to the left, so full of beige it was almost invisible: the interior design equivalent of a bowl of porridge. The couch was comfortable enough, though, especially when sweet opiate peace started drifting through Chess’s bloodstream from the Cepts she’d taken outside.
    “I’ve been watching them.” Mrs. Brent sat too close,