The tattooist stood there in shock. Her pain in the moment was a thick swirl of mad emotions coursing through me. Tears flowed hot down her face. . . There was a mania in her head that made it hard to keep myself separate from her jumble of irrational thoughts. Her fingers ached from clutching the powerless tattoo gun. She looked down at it, and then dove for the outlet where the cord had pulled from the wall. It roared to life and she stared down at the pulsating needle, before raising it to her face. Whatever she was going to do next, I couldn’t watch. I pulled my mind’s eye back to the present.

The ghost woman—Cassie—was still sitting right in front of me in her tattooing chair, her head craned up to look at me. Her face was still half-hidden by the sunglasses. I could guess why.

“What did you do to yourself?” I asked. I couldn’t help it.

The tattooist gave me a wide, grim smile. “I couldn’t bear to see him with another woman,” she said, “so I didn’t want to see him at all. But you’re not him. You’re not Jeremy.”

Residual sensations of her anger and jealousy forced themselves on me, the tattooist’s raw emotions overpowering my own. The return of a person’s psychometric emotional state was such an unfamiliar and unbidden force, so violating, that I staggered, grabbing for the barber’s chair.

“Look out!” Jane shouted. The floating structure overhead shifted and faltered. It continued to whirl around, but with the woman’s growing agitation, it jerked unsteadily in its course above us. Standing under it didn’t strike me as the smartest idea right now, either, and I backed away from the chair as bits of glass started falling from the unstable array of floating lamps above.

The woman cocked her head off in the direction Jane had spoken from. “Is she here, too?” the woman said, the rising anger in her voice cutting into my ears like glass. “Your little blond friend?”