Song Dingbo was walking home late when he met the ghost.

Home was still fifteen li away. The road was dirt, frozen into ridges that caught the moonlight. Winter had killed the cicadas. The only sound was the crunch of his straw sandals on the hard ground. Song was eighteen years old and did not believe in ghosts. He had buried both parents before he turned twelve. He had watched his older brother cough blood into a rag for six months until the rag stopped being necessary. He had learned, in the way that only people who have lost everything can learn, that the world owed him nothing and he owed the world less. A ghost would have to work very hard to frighten him.

The figure appeared at the edge of the road. Tall. Still. Wrapped in a dark traveling cloak despite the season.

Song kept walking. “Late for a journey.”

The figure turned. Its face was pale in the moonlight. Pale as the underbelly of a fish. “I’m heading south.”

“South works for me,” Song said. “We’ll walk together.”

They walked. The figure’s sandals made no sound on the dirt. Song noticed this. Filed it away.

“What brings you out at this hour?” Song asked.

“Business,” the figure said. “And you?”

“My brother died. I’m coming back from the funeral.”

A pause. The figure’s head tilted. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Song looked straight ahead. The road bent east through a stand of bare mulberry trees. Their branches scraped against each other in the cold wind. “No,” he said. “Do you?”

The figure smiled. Its teeth were too white. “I am one.”

Song’s stride did not break.

“A ghost,” he repeated. Flat. The way you’d repeat a price at market when you wanted the seller to know you weren’t impressed.

“You don’t seem afraid.”

“I’m newly dead myself. What’s there to be afraid of?”

The ghost stopped walking. Its feet hovered half an inch above the dirt. Song had been watching for that. He filed it away.

“Newly dead,” the ghost said. “Where are you headed?”

“The underworld. They’re expecting me before dawn. What about you?”

The ghost seemed almost disappointed. It had been looking forward to the screaming, probably. The running, the pleading, the slow unraveling of a living mind faced with the impossible. Instead it had Song Dingbo, a boy who’d watched his whole family die and now walked beside a ghost with the same expression he’d worn at the funeral. Polite. Patient. Waiting for the next bad thing.

“I’m going to Wan City,” the ghost said. “To frighten someone.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“A merchant. He cheated me when I was alive. I’ve been waiting three years for the travel permit.”

Song nodded. This was interesting. Ghosts required permits to haunt, apparently. Bureaucracy followed you past the grave. He filed that away too.

“We could take turns carrying each other,” the ghost offered. “It’s faster. One of us walks while the other rides.”

Song agreed. The ghost went first. It crouched. Song climbed onto its back. The ghost’s body was cold—not the cold of winter air but the cold of stone that had never been warm, deep-earth cold, the temperature of things that had stopped metabolizing a long time ago. Song wrapped his arms around the ghost’s neck. The skin was dry. Papery. Like the shed skin of a snake.

“You’re heavy,” the ghost said after a hundred paces. “Heavy for a dead man.”

“I died recently,” Song said. “The flesh hasn’t lightened yet.”

The ghost accepted this. It kept walking. Song felt the unnatural smoothness of its gait—no bounce, no sway, no rhythm. A body moving without the mechanics of living joints. He watched the landscape slide past and made mental notes.

When his turn came, Song crouched. The ghost climbed onto his back. The weight was wrong. He braced for eighty jin of bone and flesh. His arms received the shape of a body, the cold papery suggestion of one. His muscles found nothing to push against—a weight that registered in the mind but not the spine. His teeth ached from the contradiction.

They reached a river. The water ran black under the moonlight. The ghost crossed first, stepping from stone to stone without a single splash—no disturbance in the water, no ripple, as if it moved through the world on a slightly different frequency. Song followed. His sandals slapped the wet stones. Water sprayed his ankles.

“You’re noisy,” the ghost said from the far bank. “A dead man should cross water in silence.”

“I told you,” Song said. “Newly dead. Still learning.”

The ghost studied him. For a moment Song thought the game was over—the ghost had seen through him, would open that too-white mouth and do whatever ghosts did to the living they caught lying to them. But the ghost only nodded, the slow sage nod of an elder correcting a junior, and resumed walking.

They walked until the sky behind the eastern hills went gray as a bruise. The ghost had grown chatty. It talked about the underworld bureaucracy—the waiting periods, the travel restrictions, the territorial disputes between ghosts who had claimed the same stretch of road. Song listened. He asked questions. He learned that ghosts could be dispersed by spitting on them. He learned that ghosts feared peach wood and cinnabar and the sound of a rooster’s first crow. He learned that a ghost, if it trusted you, would let you get close enough to do almost anything.

Dawn was a thin line of gold on the horizon. The ghost glanced toward it.

“We should part here,” it said. “The sun and I don’t get along.”

“One question first,” Song said. “In all your years of haunting, what’s the one thing that can truly destroy a ghost? Not disperse it. Destroy it for good.”

The ghost laughed. A dry sound. Leaves crumbling. “I wouldn’t tell a living man that.”

“But I’m not living.” Song met its eyes. “And you’ve been carrying me all night. What kind of ghost would I be if I turned on you now?”

The ghost considered this. The sky was getting lighter. Roosters in a distant farm began their predawn noise—not the full crow, just the throat-clearing, the first stirrings of sound. The ghost’s form flickered slightly at the edges.

“Saliva,” it said. “Human saliva, applied directly. It binds us to a fixed form. Sheep, usually. Sometimes goats. Once a snake, but that was a very old ghost and the man who spat on him had been eating fermented rice for three days. The alcohol content matters, I think. Nobody’s studied it properly.”

Song spat on the ghost.

He aimed for the chest. His saliva hit the dark traveling cloak and soaked in instantly. The ghost made a sound—not a scream, more like the noise a fire makes when water hits it, a hiss of offense and surprise. Its form buckled. The edges of its body blurred into the dawn light. The cloaked figure collapsed inward, condensing, reshaping.

A sheep stood in the road. A large sheep, well-fleshed, its wool the gray of a winter sky. It blinked at Song with the same pale eyes the ghost had used to watch him across the river.

Song grabbed it by the wool before it could run. He dragged it to Wan City. The market was just opening—vendors laying out vegetables, a butcher sharpening his cleaver on a stone, an old woman arranging live chickens in bamboo cages. The smell of fresh bread and cold meat and animal dung filled the air. Song walked to the livestock merchant, the sheep trailing behind him with the resigned dignity of something that had been a predator until very recently.

“How much?” the merchant asked.

“One thousand five hundred copper coins.”

The merchant examined the sheep. Squeezed its flank. Checked its teeth. “Twelve hundred.”

“Thirteen.”

“Done.”

Song walked home with a bag of coins that weighed more than the ghost had. He did not look back. He did not need to. Behind him, in the marketplace, the butcher was already sharpening his cleaver.

The money bought Song a small house. A plot of land. A wife, eventually. Children. He lived to be old—older than his parents, older than his brother, older than anyone in his family had lived for three generations. He never told anyone what happened on the road that night. He never walked through the Wan City market again. He never looked at sheep without pausing, just slightly, his eyes tracking the animal’s movements a beat longer than necessary.

Some nights, in the deep hour between midnight and dawn, he would wake to the sound of something moving past his window. Footsteps on dirt. Muffled. Weightless. The sound of straw sandals that made no contact with the ground. He would lie still and listen. The footsteps would pause outside his door. They would wait. Then they would move on, fading toward the road where he first met the ghost, where somewhere a creature that used to wear a traveling cloak was learning to walk again.

Song Dingbo never spat on the ground again in his life.

He did not believe in ghosts. But he had learned, in the careful way of someone who had once sold one at market price, that belief was not required for a ghost to believe in you.