“Did you see it?!” Neal, P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L.’s sole other intern excimed, targeting Cecelia as soon as the brunette stepped into the agency’s office. The guy was about the same height as her, though his spiky bck hair gave him an extra inch or two. The pockets of his cargo capris were stuffed full of pens, snack bars, and charging cables. Neal’s fnnel pullover, rolled up at the elbows, was making her wish she’d grabbed a jacket on the way out of her apartment. “The blimp?!”

  “It was kinda hard to miss,” Cecelia answered with a nervous chuckle. She had never seen the other intern outside of the agency; all she knew about him was some small talk facts, like that he went to a different university than she did. At work, she typically ended up avoiding him. Neal was nice enough but he had a lot more energy than she did. (Besides, making friends had never worked out for her in the long run.)

  “Sure. If you were already outside or looking out just the right window,” Neal said. He (finally) took a step back, adjusting his silver, slim-framed gsses that stuck out compared to his darker skin. “Which I wasn’t. Nope, I had to stay te and reorganize all the stupid files that weren’t put away right. By the time someone thought, ‘Hey, maybe we should tell Neal about the giant airship not crash-nding into some buildings so he can run like hell to try and catch a glimpse,’ it was gone.”

  “It hurt my brain a bit,” Cecelia admitted. “Especially at the end, when it got all… fuzzy.” Just like Mr. Benton had been when she and Agent Fisher had found the man. ‘That can’t have been an overp. A whole airship?’ But what else could expin the sight? ‘Agent Fisher saw it too, so that rules out the pasta I had for dinner.’ That would have been a lousy (and maybe st) taste of her favorite microwave meal. ‘Some mass hallucination gas thing, maybe?’ It hadn’t felt like she was hallucinating, just tons of disbelief. ‘And my project was off, so there’s no way it’s reted to—‘

  “You okay there, Cecelia?”

  “Hm?” Cecelia shook herself out of her thoughts. “Sorry, just…” she hopelessly gestured with both hands, trying to encompass everything.

  Neal looked a little worried, which was odd because, again, they barely knew each other. “That’s fair. Plus, it must have been really awkward, running into Agent Fisher outside of the office.” At her confused squint, the other intern raised his eyebrows. “Well, you came in together. Or, oh, wait. You both probably just got here at the same time, huh? You’re really dedicated, coming in before being called.”

  Cecelia ughed in a way that she really hoped didn’t come off as forced as it was. ‘Nope. She was about to arrest me for stealing, and I bckmailed her into putting it off to give me some time to get things back on track.’ “W-Well, when something like that happens, it was pretty obvious something, quote-unquote, ‘paranormal.’” She ran her fingers through her hair, just to get some of the nervous twitches out. “Besides, what was my other option? Go crazy listening to the news making wild guesses and calling in so-called experts?”

  Neal ughed, catching Cecelia off guard and making her flinch in surprise. “Who would they even ask for something like this?” He pointed to a shadow on the wall that didn’t quite seem to match what the yout of the small cubicles that dotted the main area of the building – a weird type of imprint that had shown up recently and everyone in the office had just accepted as not going away. “Most of the government doesn’t know the stuff we do. Or doesn’t believe it. We’re pretty lucky, in that case.”

  “Yeah,” she replied, watching her gray sneakers start to take step after step over the old marble floor. ‘Lucky’ wasn’t something she was used to cssifying her life as. “I guess we are.”

  ~

  “That’s the best footage we’ve got so far,” the head of the agency, Ms. Echo expined, pausing the video pying on her ptop. Her hands trembled as she set the remote back down and then adjusted her knit shall, a silver bracelet jiggling on her right arm. Her thinning, long, white hair was mostly loose with a few braided sections, and the too-strong artificial light overhead made the older woman’s wrinkles more obvious against her dark skin. Cecelia had heard of an ‘underground’ betting pool for when the woman was finally going to retire, but no one would be rude enough to bring it up to her face. If P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L.’s agency hadn’t chosen this building specifically because it was ‘base universe steady’ (for the most part), Cecelia would have expected various Mr. Echoes to roam the office even after this world’s one did leave.

  “That’s a blurry mess,” Agent Beller grumbled, fiddling with the golden buttons on the ends of his suit sleeves. The senior agent was probably Cecelia’s least favorite person to work for – he was grumpy and snapped at her for every little action. When he gnced over at the intern, leaning around Agent Fisher to do so, Cecelia mentally flinched. “You were there. Surely a teenager like you had her phone out already.”

  It was hard, but Cecelia managed to hold back an eye roll. “I didn’t, actually.”

  The man huffed, fingers combing through slicked-back, graying hair. “Interns. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

  (‘Agent Fisher could have pulled out her cell phone, too,’ she mentally shot back.)

  “That was uncalled for, Roger,” Ms. Echo scolded. “Besides, as you saw, the footage we have was from someone almost directly underneath the airship, and it was still blurry. Even if Cecelia had taken some video, it wouldn’t have been any better than what we already have. Now—“

  The office door smmed open, banging against the aged-yellow walls. “Sorry! Sorry!” Mr. Caldwell – Cecelia didn’t think he had an actual title – stumbled into the room, holding an open ptop banced in the crock of his right arm and a pile of notebooks in the other.

  “And I thought the interns were bad,” Agent Beller muttered under his breath. Miss Echo either didn’t hear him or, more likely, she didn’t think it was worth calling him out on every little remark. Especially when the target himself didn’t notice.

  “—just fascinating!” Mr. Caldwell continued, not looking up from his computer. His blond hair was pulled back into a messy, short ponytail, matching the wrinkles on his casual clothes. “An overp event this rge has never been officially reported, not at least since P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L. was started up. There— “

  “So this was an overp event,” one of the other two agents (and who Cecelia couldn't remember the name of at the moment) said. The athletic-looking woman was leaning back in her chair, arms crossed. “As hard as that is to believe.” The fourth and final of P.A.R.A.L.L.E.L.’s agents, Agent Ning, sitting beside the third was scrolling through something on his phone, grimacing.

  “The ‘news’ gossips have started publishing stuff,” Agent Ning said. “It seems like preliminary reports are that about half the people who were in the buildings affected have been found unconscious. I’d bet a good portion of those are shock, but the rest….” His round face scrunched up again. “There’s at least one reported ‘smooshed’ body.”

  “ ‘Smooshed?’” Agent Fisher repeated in a ft tone.

  A third grimace. “I thought it sounded better than ‘crushed.’” ‘No,’ Cecelia mentally groaned. ‘No, it doesn’t.’ On her side, Neal made a sound that had the girl worried he was going to get sick. “ ‘Fttened’ would also work.” Oh, the other intern was definitely close to throwing up.

  “So, what?” Agent Beller asked. “A ‘ghost’ blimp? That’s what you think happened?”

  “But objects can’t be pulled,” Cecelia unintentionally argued. It was the electrical energy that living creatures gave off that could get tugged on by multiple dimensions. One hypothesis added that movement might also be necessary, at least for active events, but no one knew for sure yet. “And pulling sickness isn’t the same as being fttened.”

  “I think I prefer ‘smooshed,’” Neal muttered, still looking a little sick. “Because then I can pretend we’re talking about ants.”

  Mr. Caldwell chuckled, straightening out his pin T-shirt. “Sorry for being a bit te; I lost track of time. This is just so fascinating! And, really, trying to figure out— “

  “Aren’t you supposed to be one of the leading experts in the field?” Agent Beller rhetorically asked.

  “Did this interrupt one of your gameshows or something?” the agent still scrolling on his phone quietly snarked. Cecelia tried to cover her snort with a cough, which might have worked if Neal hadn’t done the same. Agent Beller gred at the two interns, making the brunette guiltily look down at the empty table in front of her.

  Agent Fisher sighed. “Could we return to the actual problem here?”

  “Right!” Mr. Caldwell had set his stuff down all around him, empty seats on both sides, and was typing into his computer. “Do you want simple or—“

  “Simple,” Ms. Echo answered for everyone. “You can give me the details ter, but right now we need to understand what caused this odd event in the first pce.”

  “I’m not sure if ‘understand’ is the word I’d use,” the researcher said before looking up from his computer. “It was an overp event, and that’s all I can confirm.” Noise erupted around the room, although Cecelia stayed silent. “No idea yet what caused it. I might reach out to Dr. Warrin, but this could just be a freak accident. Actually, if so, this could be an expnation for some of those historical rge-scale ‘paranormal’ sightings. The ‘haunted’ hotels that boast a ghost in each room, for example. Giant overp events. It might be more common than we know.”

  “This killed someone,” the third agent (‘Summers!’ Cecelia finally recalled) tensely said, uneven fingernails tapping on the table.

  Mr. Caldwell shrugged, picking up one of his notebooks and flipping through the pages. “Most ‘paranormal’ deaths are bad attempts at covering up murders, but it’s possible not all were.”

  Cecelia nudged Agent Fisher’s leg with her foot, receiving an insulting gre before the woman spoke up. “There was one other thing, though I’m not sure if it’s directly reted or not. Cecelia called me over to her apartment complex because of a sudden increase in dimensional activity.” (‘That’s a good lie,’ the intern thought. Although, judging by the look she was receiving from Ms. Echo, the agency head knew the real reason Agent Fisher had dropped by her apartment.) “Her neighbor witnessed a typical overp event, but then a man on another floor colpsed from pulling sickness.”

  “And you near where the ghost blimp was, right?” Neal asked. Cecelia nodded, aware of every eye in the room on her. “Dang, I should move.”

  “Two opposite events like that, and then a rge one….” Ms. Echo said to herself, fingers interlinked under her chin. “Cecelia, how far apart were the ones at your apartment complex?”

  ‘Does she think it’s my fault?’ “Maybe five minutes?”

  “Any other day, that would be a high priority, but I want everyone focusing on the airship. Even if this blimp and the resulting deaths were a random occurrence, the more we can find out, the better.” Ms. Echo gnced around the small conference room. “Sylvia and Cecelia. Since you two saw the apparition in person, I want you to go over the details with Darryl. Darryl, put all other work aside for right now. Wilma, you head back to the overp location. Talk to everyone you can, except the press. Bobbie and Neal, I want you two to search the records. Look for any events like today’s, particur mass hallucinations or such.” She sighed, massaging her temple. “I suppose I’ll go talk to PR about dealing with the garbage heap modern society calls news.”