I didn’t know why some ghosts stayed fresh and strong while most others faded—though sometimes it was because the living paid too much attention to the dead. But that didn’t make the ghosts into the person whose face they wore; it just made them stronger ghosts. I’d seen souls tied to their ghosts once, and I’d never again made the mistake of thinking of a normal ghost as a real person. This woman’s soul had gone on a long, long time ago. I was coming to believe that ghosts were something, though, something that could think and plan and do. Not living, precisely, but not inert, either.
