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The Wordwood’s socomprehensive now that we couldn’t have entered all the information it now holds even if each of us had spent all our time keying it in, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And the really weird thing is, it’s not on the hard drive of our server anymore. It’s just . . . out there, somewhere.”
    I give her a blank look, still not understanding why she’s not excited about this, why she hasn’t trumpeted their accomplishment to the world.
    â€œThe Wordwood’s everything we hoped it would be and more,” she explains when I ask. “It’s efficient beyond anything we could have hoped for.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd we’re afraid of screwing around with it, or talking it up, for fear that it’ll go away.”
    â€œIt.”
    I suddenly find myself reduced to one-word responses and I don’t know why.
    â€œThe program,” Holly says. “The entity that’s taken up residence in the Wordwood, whatever it is. It’s like a piece of magic, our own guardian angel of books and literature. Nobody wants to take the chance of losing it—not now. It’s become indispensable.”
    â€œHolly—”
    â€œDid you recognize its voice?” she asks. I shake my head.
    â€œSome of the others using the program recognize its speech patterns, the cadence of its language, as belonging to people they once knew—or still know, but rarely see anymore.”
    I finally manage a whole sentence. “You mean it’s mimicking these people?”
    â€œNo. It’s more like it really is these people—or at least it is them when you happen to be talking to it. When I’m online with the Wordwood, I hear my grandmother’s voice in the way it responds to me. Sometimes . . .” She hesitates, then goes on. “Sometimes it’s like I’m actually sitting in a forest somewhere with Gran, talking about books.”
    I love a good mystery and this has all the makings of the best kind of urban myth.
    â€œHow long has this been going on?” I ask.
    â€œAbout two years.”
    It’s not until much later that I realize this is around the same time Saskia first arrived in Newford.
9
    Spirits and ghosts.
    My last serious relationship was with a woman who wasn’t so much flesh and blood as a spirit borrowing her cloak of humanity. Her name was Tally. Tallulah. The essence of the city, made manifest for the nights we stole from its darker corners, the hours in which we made light between us when everything else lay in shadows. She left because she had to be hard, she had to be tough to survive, the way the city is now. Loving me, she couldn’t meet the spite and meanness with like intent. She couldn’t survive.
    She’s out there still. Somewhere. I don’t see her, but I can still feel her presence sometimes. On certain nights.
    The last time Geordie got serious about a woman, she turned into a ghost.
    My therapist would have a heyday with this material, but I’ve never come right out and told her about any of it. I couch the truths I give her with the same thin veneer of plausibility that I slip onto the facts of some of my stories. I know how weird that sounds, considering what I write, but I’ve seen things that are real—that I know are true—but they’re so outrageous, the only way I can write about them is to start with “Once upon a time.” Truth masquerading as lies, but then it’s all artifice, isn’t it? Language, conversation, stories. All of it. Since Babel fell, words can no longer convey our intent. Not the way that music can.
    And the music I hear now . . .
    I can’t get enough of it. Long, slow chords that resonate deep in my chest for hours after Saskia and I have been together, tempered only by the fear that she’s too deeply cloaked in mystery and that, like Tally, that mystery will one day take her away.
    I don’t mean