Cycl0n3 knew something was different as soon as he returned to the Sample house, but it took him a while to figure out what it was. He felt different, even when he engaged in the same hobbies he always enjoyed.

For one thing, he knew he couldn’t go home. Sometimes he wasn’t sure where home was. And people reacted to him strangely at first, though the Samples had at least gotten used to after a while. He settled into Jared’s discarded room. Lance and Layla moved into the master bedroom where Lance’s parents had slept. The space-themed bedroom was left for Zahra when she got a little older. And though he got some weird looks from the older Samples, they let him stay and after a while talked to him.

There were ghosts in the Sample house. Shadows of Connor, Susie, and Jared lingered about some nights after the clock struck tweleve. They did a lot of the same things they did in life.

And a few things they didn’t.

(Jared’s haunting of the toilet would have been far more effective if anyone had been awake to see it.)

The most reclusive of the ghosts was Susie. Cycl0n3 had only seen in the house once, briefly.

The ghosts had no insight into the afterlife.

They didn’t even seem to know they were dead. And they reacted to Cycl0n3 like he was something weird and scary.

(Cycl0n3 and Connor simultanously freak out at seeing a ghost.)

That’s when it dawned on him. Cycl0n3 was dead too. He just didn’t know it. And he wasn’t the same as the others. He could affect the physical world more, for one thing. And most importantly, he could go out during the day. Susie had done it the day she died, in that visit to the Science Center. He had no idea what she’d done. It was pretty creepy to think about. And he couldn’t even ask her ghost because it appeared so infrequently in the house.

But he was here. He might as well make the best of it.

And someone didn’t seem to think he was so strange.