Lysander’s trips away grew shorter and shorter, and his stays with Kwai Un grew longer. During assassinations—both far away and in the city surrounding the Great Library—he found his mind wandering to his servant mentor, the woman with a husband and children who had no idea an inji lived among them.

He could wed Kwai Un and happily grow old with her. Their conversations were endlessly fascinating, and when he was with her, he felt as if he were something. He wasn’t certain what exactly, but he knew that it wasn’t Nothing.

Finally, he told her, “I love you, and I want to be with you always. Do you feel the same way, or is it only me?”

She flicked a few of her lenses back and forth idly in a gesture he’d come to recognize as her thinking fidgets.

“Based on the texts I’ve studied, I believe I can safely conclude that I feel love for you,” she said. “What do you propose we do about it?”

“Marriage,” he said, shrugging.

She nodded. “I accept.”

They were married the following week. Lysander stopped taking trips to the far reaches of the continent, instead seeking that knowledge which he could gather and those kills he could make within a few day’s journey of the Great Library.

Time passed. When Lysander was with Kwai Un, he walked in the daylight as a living man, married to a living woman. A ghost could never feel such happiness. A restless soul could never find such a home.

With no desire to travel far from the one he loved, Lysander began training to become a Lesser Librarian, the highest level attainable by an outsider who hadn’t been raised in the Great Library. When they spoke about his transition, however, Kwai Un didn’t sound convinced of its merits.

“But who will bring me the best texts if you’re stuck here in the stacks?”

Over her shoulder, he caught sight of his clay pot in the window. It was turned upside down.

“Texts will always come in,” he said, crossing to the window and righted the pot. He memorized the name written on the sill beneath before the ink could disappear. “This way, we’ll be able to study them together. Are you hungry? I’m thinking of going to the market.”

Months later, when he finally did become a Lesser Librarian, Kwai Un presented him with a special never-emptying flask. Lysander uncapped the ivory container and tested the drink inside. It smelled of fresh-cut clover and tasted of the most delicate liquor.

“So your words will never dry up,” she explained. “Even when you’re trapped in the Library, far away from the world of inspiration.”

He saw then her flicker of fear that he would grow tired of her if they were always together. She didn’t realize that everything he was only existed through her.

He reached up and flipped the azure lenses away from her eyes. “When I’m around you, the words are an ocean drowning me.”

In the months to come, Kwai Un’s fears proved unfounded. Lysander’s brush had never laid down more words. At the same time, the Great Library was flooded with new arrivals from around the continent to pore over and catalogue.

For two years Lysander was something. He belonged somewhere, and he thought he would always be there.

*

When political unrest in the oasis surrounding the Great Library threatened to upset their life together, Lysander threw himself into the surge of assassinations, seeking to quell the menace. The calls to the unnamed path became so frequent that he was out away from his post at the Library as much as he had been while traveling—though it was always in snatches of an hour here or there, when Kwai Un was otherwise engaged and wouldn’t miss him.

Late one night, after an assassination, Lysander returned to his house to find his wife gone. No surprise there. He’d left her at the Great Library, and that was where she tended to stay unless someone reminded her to go home.

He slipped through the darkened streets, avoiding the braziers and lanterns and willing himself to disappear out of habit. Suspecting he would find her in their favored reading hole up on the ninth story, Lysander manifested a set of climbing spikes for his hands and boots, then scaled the Library’s exterior to the closest balcony.

No safety lamp was burning on the ninth floor when he climbed into the stacks, but Lysander didn’t need light to find his way.

Sensing the solidity of the books, shelves, and piles surrounding him, Lysander ghosted through the story to their secret place.

As he approached, he sensed a presence. He could smell his wife, that subtle, familiar scent of clover wine mingled with the musty parchment and old ink. He heard her breath—short gasps rather than the slow waves of sleep—and the close-cropped hair on the back of his neck stood up. She sounded as if she were in pain.

Then Lysander sensed the second presence. Larger. Male. Holding his breath. Moving.

Lysander grabbed the safety lamp from the corner of the table where they always sat it when they were up here late into the night. It burned him to the touch, but he welcomed the pain, grabbing the top with the other hand and twisting.

Flickering yellow light flooded the space, illuminating Kwai Un in the lap of a tall, slender man with a top knot. Lysander recognized him as Tyeng, a scholar and poet who had begun traveling for the Great Library in the last year. Lysander had studied and catalogued a few of the man’s finds, but for the most part, Tyeng tended to bring them to Kwai Un along with rolls and rolls of parchment filled with his poetry.

Things unfolded so suddenly after light filled the little reading hole, but they seemed to Lysander to move at less than half speed.

Kwai Un and Tyeng mercifully pulled away from one another. The poet grabbed for his robes, but Kwai Un stood naked, talking to Lysander. He heard her apologies and explanations, but they flowed through him as if he weren’t there.

Lysander was no stranger to pain, but he’d never felt it this deeply before. Like his marrow was agony and his bones were diseased.

The Nothingness engulfed him from the inside out. He’d forgotten that he was nothing, had come from nowhere. He could only be thankful that he wasn’t there right then and never would be. Nothing couldn’t love or be loved. It didn’t even exist. If he had only remembered that back when he met Kwai Un, he wouldn’t be in this position.

With a twitch of his hand, Lysander shot a glowing ruby snap-garotte around the poet’s thin neck and broke it. He could have killed the man in a dozen different ways that Kwai Un never would have seen, but he didn’t.

She watched the poet crumble, disbelief warring with horror on her face. The body fell across the table, scattering ink and parchment and crushing her multicolored lenses with a crunch.

When Kwai Un raised her eyes to meet Lysander’s, they were wide with the dreadful knowledge that she was seeing her husband for the first time and realizing that he wasn’t a living creature like she or her lover had been.

“You killed him,” she said, her voice wavering at the edges.

“Nothing killed him,” Lysander said. “I’m nothing. Not to you. I never was.”

A tear streaked down her face.

“You were everything to me.” Kwai Un swiped the wet track away with the back of her hand. “I made a mistake—”

Lysander was an inch from her face before she could flinch. Her wild curls brushed his forehead and nose, trembling with her shaking body.

“And it cost him everything,” he said, pointing to the corpse on the table.

The tears were pouring down her cheeks now, dripping onto her breasts. He could feel more on his own face, but he ignored them. If he wasn’t there, then they couldn’t be, either.

Kwai Un backed away from him slowly, as if any sudden motion would cause him to attack. When her thighs pressed against the balcony’s rail, she drew a shuddering breath.

“I did think I loved you,” she said. “But then, I thought I knew you, too.”

She let herself fall backward over the rail.

Lysander felt the impact in his chest when she hit the ground below.

*

He should have stayed in the Great Library. Gone about his work and played the part of the grieving, befuddled husband until no one could imagine suspecting him of the deaths.

But he disappeared instead. He left behind everything he’d accumulated while pretending to be alive except for the never-emptying flask and her crushed multicolored lenses. The flask he kept in a hidden pocket, and the lenses he threaded on a thin chain tucked inside his robes, close to his punctured heartcenter.

Days passed. Lysander retreated from them until he was exhausted to the point of collapse, keeping his consciousness as ethereal as his Ro. It was hard work. Nightmarish claws of existence kept trying to drag him back into the world of the living, but there was nothing but madness in a ghost returning to a fantasy of life as if it belonged there. The clover liquor in the ivory flask turned bitter in his mouth and burned in his stomach, but it provided his only protection from existing.

He didn’t know how long he’d been ghosting through space when it happened, but he was in Seok Iri on the other side of the continent from the Great Library when he felt killing intent fill the air like smoke.

A man. Lysander didn’t recognize it as belonging to any of the mentors he’d known, though the texture did remind him in a way of the sailor’s. Perhaps this inji had been trained by the same mentor. Or perhaps he had taken up the life of a sailor as well and that had shaped his killing intent.

Lysander considered letting the other inji triumph. He knew what had happened, after all. He had killed one of the living whose name had not been called. Like every other law in the unnamed path, it was unspoken but unanimously known.

But from the moment he sensed the other inji’s presence, he began to react on instinct.

An invisible Ro dart crashed uselessly against the lenses beneath Lysander’s robes. A Ghost Piercer, used to stop the heart in full view of unsuspecting witnesses. He manifested a Phantom Buckler, pretending to scratch between his shoulder blades, but in truth covering his heartcenter from behind as he retreated casually into a nearby alley.

Lysander and the other inji were both projecting waves of Nothingness so hard as they entered the darkened passage that a drunkard pissing against the wall hurried to finish and stumble away.

The inji remained hidden. Lysander willed himself to disappear as well. A snap-garotte whined toward his throat. He threw up his hand, catching it around his wrist. The Ro wire bit deep, blood welling up and spilling down his forearm. At the same time, in his free hand, he manifested an Unseen Wraith Chain Sickle and whipped the invisible weapon out in a wide arc. It slammed into a solid body. Lysander dropped his chain sickle at the same moment the hidden inji dissolved his snap-garotte.

A sense of pressure approached his right side. With a flick of his hand, Lysander scattered invisible Ro caltrops to that side, then pulled a bag of silver links from his robes. He couldn’t maintain two separate types of Ro weaponry without losing their invisibility and showing himself, but he could fight with a physical weapon while maintaining the caltrops.

The muffled thunk of sharp points punching through leather soles let him know where his opponent was, though the man made no sound of pain. Lysander ducked. A clawed hand tipped in invisible Night Eagle’s Talons raked through the air where his eyes had been. Before the arm could retract, Lysander whipped the bag of links just above the place where his attacker’s shoulder would be.

The strike landed with a meaty thud and the jingling of metal.

Already, however, the talons were swinging back, tearing for his face. Lysander ghosted under the strike and rose directly in front of the inji. He felt the change in the breeze as air dove out of the way of a blade. The slice was headed for his throat.

Lysander let the caltrops dissipate and manifested the chain sickle once more. Just before the blow cut into him, he snapped open the chain and wrapped the inji’s arm in its length. He snapped his knee up and jerked the chain down, shattering the inji’s elbow.

A trio of invisible Starlight Wheels studded Lysander’s side and bicep, their spines embedding themselves in his flesh, screwing deeper into muscle with every move he made. The only way to get the Ro weapons out without carving into his own body would be to force the thrower to try another method of attack or kill him outright.

Without releasing the inji’s arm from the chain, Lysander sliced the sickle upward. It caught and resisted, then tore through the flesh. But even this wound could be healed if the inji was skilled enough. The Starlight Wheels dissipated, but Lysander moved before the man could manifest his next weapon. He wound the rest of the chain around the inji’s neck and snapped it.

The inji became visible as he fell limp into Lysander’s arms. Lysander let his chain sickle dissipate, the invisible Ro retreating back through his pathways and into his heartcenter.

A cloud of ruby Ro, visible now that its master could no longer hide it, rose from the chest of the still-warm corpse and filtered into Lysander’s heartcenter as well. He set to work integrating it unconsciously as he slipped down the alley and onto another street. There was no time to linger.

He was one of the fallen now, a murderer where he’d once been an assassin, and his fellow ghosts would descend on him until they had swallowed his sin up.

*

They hunted him everywhere, as merciless and untiring as the restless dead they were named for. More than he would ever have guessed existed. Inji he had known. Inji he had never met. Men, women, old, and young. In forests and fields and cities, behind locked doors and on open stretches of road. While he drank, while he ran, while he shat.

He was nothing, and what had never existed could never tire, but his shoulders grew heavier with every inji he sent back to the grave. He should stop fighting and accept his sentence. He had committed the crime, after all.

And yet.

Lysander drank and fought his way north, through the swamps to the abandoned shack, arriving covered in blood and bursting with absorbed Ro His heartcenter strained to contain it while he integrated. Under normal circumstances, he would have long since advanced, but he held the progression brutally at bay. He couldn’t risk being helpless for even a second.

As he stepped over the threshold, glowing ruby Ro flowed into his heartcenter and the corpse of his latest attacker dropped onto the rotting steps behind him. The thud seemed to resonate in his shoulders. Ghosts, it seemed, were inordinately heavy.

The section of floor was already open to reveal the lightless hole below. They were waiting for him. Lysander took a deep drink from his flask, grimacing at the taste that had once been so sweet. He trudged down into the darkness, muscles coiled and senses alert in spite of the drink, prepared for a final mass attack to send him to his grave for good.

Green-white corpse candles flared to life, illuminating the faces of his mentors. The ones who remained. Gaps stood where the dead would have.

“You murdered one of the living without a call to do so,” the servant woman said.

“No one murdered him,” Lysander said, listing slightly with drunken exhaustion.

“You are no one,” the prefect said. “Do you deny this?”

Lysander snorted. “How can what never existed deny anything?”

Motion to his right. The calligrapher was nodding.

“A ghost that loses its way can never return,” she said.

“I don’t wish to return,” Lysander said. His overfull heartcenter throbbed painfully in his chest. “I only wish to stop killing my brothers and sisters. The empty space they leave behind is crowding the world. They’re heavy. Heavier than nothing, every one of them.”

He knew he wasn’t making any sense, but he was too weak and tired to try to understand his own insane babbling.

“To leave the world of the living would forever rid you of their weight,” the monk said, tilting his head speculatively. “And yet you wish to remain?”

Lysander closed his eyes, swaying on his feet. He should feel some measure of shame, but as nothing, he could feel nothing. Time passed in silence. Perhaps he slept. The next voice startled him.

“A fallen inji can never be cleansed of his sin outside the grave,” the prefect said. “He is a slave to it for as long as he walks among the living. We will grant your wish to remain in this world, but not your wish to stop killing your fellow ghosts. From today, you will hunt and kill fallen inji like yourself. The weight you carry and crowding you feel is nothing more than you deserve.”

Lysander’s mind reeled. “How many must I kill?”

“How much more worth did the life you took have than a ghost’s?” the merchant asked.

At the question, Lysander didn’t see the face of the poet who’d cuckolded him, but Kwai Un’s wild curls and ink-stained fingers as she flicked her lenses back and forth in thought.

“Infinite,” he said and knew it was the truth.

“Then your sentence is infinite,” the prefect responded. “From now until you leave this world for good, you will rid the living of those ghosts who have strayed from the unnamed path. Do you accept your punishment?”

“How can what never existed refuse anything?” Lysander said.

As one, the circle of inji surrounding him sent out a condemning wave of agreement.

The agony in Lysander’s heartcenter burst free like an overburdened dam then, and he dropped to his hands and knees, his advancement punctuated with unstoppable screams. The torment continued, emphasizing his Nothingness with depth of pain. The surplus of Ro condensed until it approached a nearly infinite mass, then imploded with a final shimmer of multicolored light like shards of broken lenses.

What remained when Lysander opened his eyes an unknowable time later was a black hole where light should have been. He tried to manifest a Ghost Blade, but what came to his hand was a darkness so deep it seemed to absorb the light from the corpse candles. The puncture hole in his heartcenter, finally free of its Ro stopper, sucked at the world around it, trying to drink in vital life force. Around the circle, he felt his mentors closing their Ro pathways as if to protect themselves.

Lysander raised his head and met the prefect’s severe gaze.

“Rise, reaper of the fallen,” the prefect said. “Disappear into the land of the living, but be prepared to answer our call.”