Ways to See a Ghost

looked at her plate, like she was waiting for me to start on her as well.
    “Because of all the lights flying around?” I asked. After all, Cally was right – nothing we saw looked much like the spaceships in films.
    Isis lifted her eyes. “Did they look like lights to you?” she asked.
    “Yeah, of course. I mean, they were all floating upand stuff…” Then I stopped. I remembered who I was talking to, and what I’d seen for that second in the field, before the UFO turned up. “What did you see?” I asked.
    “Birds,” whispered Isis. “Thousands of them. Millions. Flying out into the sky.”
    I tried to believe her, but I’d only seen the rising lights, and the net across the sky, then the burning sphere. I mean, that was crazy enough, but it’d been like the time before.
    “I didn’t see anything that looked like birds,” I said.
    Isis shook her head. “I saw the lights, just like you filmed them, but the birds were there as well, at the same time.”
    I just didn’t get it, I thought maybe she meant alien birds.
    “What kind of birds were they?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know, they were all the same though.”
    “That doesn’t help much.”
    She thought for a moment. “They lived in the marshes,” she said slowly. “There were lots of them for a long time, thousands and thousands of years. But then, not long ago, they started disappearing.”
    “What, like going somewhere?” I thought she meant the aliens were flying away, but she shook her head.
    “Dying. They all died,” she said, and she startedshivering, holding her arms tight around herself. “They kept on being killed, until none were left.” She made this coughy gulp, and wiped tears off her face.
    “Like going extinct?” I asked, trying to puzzle what she was saying. “You mean the aliens went extinct? But I filmed them, and their spaceship.”
    “Not
aliens
!” she snapped. “They were from here, from this planet.”
    “How can you know that?” I snapped back. “There were only lights, I
filmed
lights.” It had been such a great night, and now it felt like she was trying to ruin it.
    “Lots of people see lights,” she said. “If they go somewhere haunted. They think they’re just reflections in glass, or flickering light bulbs, but they’re not. People have even filmed them.”
    I sucked in my breath, finally getting what she meant.
    “You didn’t see aliens?” I asked, and she shook her head.
    “You didn’t see a spaceship?”
    She shook her head again.
    “You filmed lights,” she said, “and your dad thinks it’s a UFO. But I saw the sky full of ghosts.”
    Oh, Isis. She was turning into such a clever girl. I always thought
she’d be something special, that I’d be so proud of her one day. And now I can’t even tell anyone about her, because I’m not supposed to be here.
    Nothing personal, that was the first rule I had to swear to.
    I know I should never have got involved, but I did… so involved my real identity was close to being revealed. And even after I gave all of them up, I couldn’t stop myself from watching.

“It’s not quite what I expected,” said Cally, looking around.
    Why not?
The thought fizzed angrily in Isis’s mind, but she kept her mouth shut. They’d had a fight last night, and they were still barely speaking to each other.
    Early morning sunshine dazzled through the glass roof of Wycombe’s main shopping mall, bouncing off the gleaming, tiled floor and glinting over the shopfronts with their logos and displays. The shop doors were all still closed; a woman in one of the windows was fiddling with the clothes on a mannequin. Angel helter-skeltered past, transparent in the bright light, unseen by anyone but Isis.
    Cally put her bag down and stared at the tall, striped tent in front of them. Its door flaps were pulled open,and a banner taped across the top read F ORTUNE T ELLER. Nearby, a young man with a shaved head and patchwork trousers was laying out some juggling clubs. A bit further off, an older man dressed in a black evening suit was carefully placing various items onto a small table. A top hat, a handkerchief, a deck of cards, a wand.
    Isis heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie and the centre manager bustled over to them. She was smartly dressed and thin faced, with short, grey hair and bright pink lipstick.
    “Is everything all right?” she asked, but not as if she cared.
    Cally pointed at the banner.
    “I’m not a fortune teller,” she said. “I’m