Ash and Gray walked side by side up the stairs towards the fourth floor. Ash kept one hand on the railing as he moved, catching Gray’s eye as they continued upwards. “I’m surprised you want to touch that with how gross you said this place is.”

  “I’m not too worried about catching a cold anymore,” Ash’s grip on the railing tightened as he took another step to make it onto the fourth floor landing, “besides, holding onto something helps me think.”

  As Gray made it onto the landing beside him he raised an eyebrow before giving Ash a small smile. “So what, you think with your hands? First time I’ve heard of that.”

  “Really?” There was genuine confusion in Ash’s voice, with surprise clearly up and down his face. “I’m sure you know someone that likes to go for runs or walks when they want to think about something, right?”

  “I guess so,” Gray didn’t sound very convinced, and even went so far as to grab the railing himself as he continued along.

  “Well if that’s thinking with your feet then thinking with your hands isn’t that weird.” Ash walked over to the stairwell’s exit to the fourth floor and peered into the little glass square that showed him a hallway of identical beige doors. “It helps ground you a bit, put your focus where it matters.” Ash turned back around to face the stairs leading up, and Gray who almost looked like he was deeper in thought than he was.

  “Speaking of what matters, what floor is this Vander guy on again?”

  “Vandal,” he corrected as he was pulled out of his thoughts, “we dropped in from the roof, and it was my job to secure the building from below. He’s still up there as long as there weren’t any problems.”

  “Did you find anything interesting?” Ash probed a little.

  “Besides you? Not much, pretty much every door I tried was locked.” Gray gave his arms a stretch behind his head as if recalling the experience made him feel a little sore. “It’s a little interesting that we can see the whole city from up there though.” Gray looked off to the side, slipping back into the thoughts that preoccupied him before, this time letting go of the railing as he walked, as he decided it didn’t help.

  “That’s pretty normal if you’re up on the roof, isn’t it?” Ash wasn’t sure how to phrase his question, but as far as he could remember, he could always see most of the city from the roof.

  Gray hummed a single note to himself before he landed on a way to answer. “Spaces like this, they’re usually,” he paused, clearly searching for a word, “concentrated?” He didn’t sound very confident in the word he decided on. “Selective, focused, exclusive,” he tried out several more words, none of them sounding more correct than the other.

  “Dense?” Ash offered a word of his own.

  “Not quite, what’s the opposite of expanded?”

  Ash gave him a shrug which made Gray’s excitement over word searching droop. “Well whatever that word is, the scope here is a lot bigger than what I’m used to seeing, on the outside at least.”

  “You’ve lost me.” Ash wasn’t sure if Gray ever had him, but he was doing his best currently to go along with everything.

  “Dying creates, or I guess releases a lot of energy, and that energy takes shape, usually latching onto what you remember most. Your apartment complex is pretty normal, even the surrounding buildings, but the way the sky looks, and being able to see almost the whole city from here? It’s pretty impressive.”

  “Is that a compliment?” Ash felt more like he was being studied than complimented.

  “I’ll let you know if it is when I find out what it means, it’s mostly interesting for now.”

  “Oh yeah,” he snapped back, grabbing a hold of the thought he was originally looking for, “you said you live here, or lived I guess, so your room should be unlocked, right?” Ash was still a little sore about the use of past tense, but what bothered him much more than that was his room being brought up. The memory of the smell of fresh decay brushed against his nostrils and he had to clench his fingers against his palms to stop his stomach from turning.

  “Yeah, I woke up in there,” he didn’t meet Gray’s eyes, “just like I did every morning.” Gray stayed silent for a few moments, and as Ash finally looked back towards him he finally spoke. “Guess there wasn’t anything worth talking about in there then.” He turned towards the stairs, taking another step. “Let’s go on ahead then, if Vandal found anything on the fifth floor we’ll be the first to know.”

  Ash waited a second or two before he followed after him, grabbing the railing as he went up. “How did you two get here anyway? I get that I wound up…wherever this actually is because I died, and I guess made it, but that doesn’t explain either of you.”

  “It’s kind of complicated,” Gray trailed off, and Ash was starting to get used to that as an answer to anything he asked, but he soon continued. “Divers have a bit of a sixth sense when places like this open up and leak out into the physical world. You’ll see what I’m talking about if you become one too.”

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  “So what? Something just trips an alarm in your head and you can just waltz on in?” Ash had a number of followup questions, but he struggled to find the words for them.

  “The way it got explained to me is that when a soul fails to pass all the way to the other side, it’s kind of like it gets clogged in the afterlife pipes. When the pipe gets clogged, all the spiritual energy gets backed up and overflows. That overflow is what lets other people that can see it dive inside."

  “If we’re going to do water metaphors could you pick one that doesn’t remind me of a clogged toilet?”

  “I wasn’t the one who came up with it,” Gray looked over his back as he took a few more steps, “but I still think it explains how it works pretty well. When the pipe gets backed up, it starts to leak until we get a space like this that lives somewhere in between life and death.”

  “So I’m clogging the spirit toilet right now?” Ash felt grimy the moment the question left his lips.

  “Probably, unless someone else died here recently.” Gray stopped on the fifth floor landing, waiting for Ash to climb the next few steps. “Know any neighbors with gang ties or depressive episodes?”

  “Someone threw themselves off the roof about a month ago, does that count?” Ash took the last step before he touched down on the landing. He gestured towards the door leading to the fifth floor hallway since roof access was at the other end of the hall.

  “I only got into the city last month, so I didn’t hear about that, but it’s probably not related.” Gray opened the door that Ash had pointed to, holding it open behind him to let Ash pass through afterwards. “Did they die?” Gray finally thought to ask after a few seconds had passed.

  “A five story jump is probably enough to take out most people, isn’t it?” Ash looked towards the first beige door towards his right with large gray numbers reading ‘501’ on the front, and a little viewport just underneath it.

  “You really didn’t hear anything else about the guy that died in your building?”

  “Outside the building, but no, should I?” Ash looked away from the door and at Gray who didn’t seem very impressed.

  “Do people die here a lot?”

  “Enough to keep the rent low enough for me to still live here,” he scratched at the back of his head before correcting himself, “lived, I guess.” Ash gave the question a little more thought. “Shouldn't you know more about that than I do?”

  Out of all the questions asked so far, Gray chose to ignore that one, which in itself was an answer.

  The pair passed door after door, barely giving each a glance as Gray made a small “Eugh” of displeasure each time his shoes connected with a particularly crunchy spot of carpet. Gray spoke up again when they finally reached the door on the other side of the hall. “He should be up on the roof still, he was checking something out while I swept the rest of the building.”

  “There shouldn’t be much up there, except maybe a few cans I left up there by accident.” As Gray pushed the door to roof access open, he shot Ash a look that had more judgement sitting behind his eyes than the last few stares. “Look I said it was an accident,” he said, catching on to what the problem was, “I don’t usually litter on purpose, just sometimes I get a little drunk up there and forget about it.”

  “If there's litter in a place by your soul then it happens a lot more than sometimes” Gray hurried on ahead, taking the short path up the stairs while Ash followed. The rest of the short journey was in silence before Gray threw the roof access door wide open to expose the stairwell to the stale city air.

  “Vandal! I found the clog!” He shouted out onto the roof as he took a few steps out into the open air.

  “Can we not call me that?” Ash held up a hand to shield his eyes from the expected morning light, but when he looked up he caught an eyeful of bright red sky, littered with orange clouds. The sky felt frozen mid sunrise on an impossibly cloudy day as the horizon was almost too captivating for him to look away from. Ash put his hand down, no longer needing the shield as he took in the unexpected sight while a small breeze ruffled his clothes.

  “Just one?” a deeper voice responded from a distance, but was slowly coming closer. “He’s up and about too, good job, Gray.” Gray gave off a small salute.

  Ash finally took his eyes off the frozen sky to look the new voice in the eyes, but there was nothing more than the red horizon at eye level. He looked to his left, seeing Gray standing there with an arm behind his back before he gestured down at the ground. Ash looked a little further down until there on the roof he saw a black cat with yellow shining eyes staring back up at him.

  “I can’t call you Clog,” the cat told him as his long black tail flicked to one side before resting there “so how about you grace me with your name? You’re probably already familiar with mine.”

  He only blinked once before replying. “It’s Ash, newly dead, or still dreaming, at your service.”

  “It seems you’re the type that just rolls with the punches, people normally have a fairly adverse reaction to talking cats.” His right ear twitched as he briefly looked over to one side of the roof, but he looked back up at Ash right after.

  “It’s been a long week, on top of an even longer day, and talking animals are pretty low on my list of things I’m not willing to believe.” Ash looked back up and towards the skyline, watching the clouds barely move as red light peeked through them.

  “Gray,” Vandal spoke as he looked towards him, “did you catch him up to speed?”

  “I was kind of hoping you’d do that, the best I could really do was the toilet analogy.” Gray slowly stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, his gaze mostly lingering on the red sky.

  “I’ll take over from there then.” Vandal turned back towards Ash, making him look back down at the cat in kind. “I may not have every answer you’re looking for, but now that you’re here and this area is secure I can make sure you’re left in the dark no longer.” His tail gently flicked to his left as Ash was sure he smiled, even if the cat’s face remained the same.

  “Please, allow me to shed some light on what your soul has created here.”