The Expert System's Brother (Expert System, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The left side of her face puffed out like a fungus, over those days. The skin broke, wept, healed over again so fast I could almost watch it happen. It was worst about her eye and temple, where the ghost was remodeling the substance of her skull so it could go in and out when it pleased, or that’s what I think now, having seen a ghost-bearer’s bones. She lost her eye when the flesh bloated up like a clenched fist around it. What was left when the tight, angry swelling died down was just a hole, a socket that seemed to go too deep into her head. It wasn’t the only one, either. Pits and pockmarks opened up around it, as though she’d need more eyes or senses than the rest of us, to do her new job. She twitched and turned, and the blankets were drenched with sweat no matter how fast I changed them. She would mutter numbers or meaningless fragments of words, and I think everyone was terrified that she’d be another Corto, that it had been the ghost that was senile, and not just the man. As she lay there, sometimes her right eye would open wide and she’d stare up at me as though begging for help. We had always been alike: So people said and our reflections in still water confirmed it. We shared our mother’s straight dark hair, sharp chin and narrow eyes—like and unlike each other, just as we two were like and unlike the rest of Aro. Now the mirror was breaking. I would never look into Melory’s face and imagine my own. That was the first way the ghost took her from me, even before...