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on the investigations, acting as sounding board but also revealing a useful talent for writing detailed précis of the scenes before them and the stories he drew out of the scenes. She also had a memory, could recite back to him the things he said as he wandered about the burned spaces, had become a repository for his mutterings and thoughts.
    Stepping back and looking at his board, with its crossing threads and pinned pieces of paper, Fool was struck again by the depth of his ignorance while in the gathering shadows below it the ghosts of Summer and Gordie looked on. Summer smiled encouragingly but Gordie merely shook his head slightly, as though disappointed.
    Gordie and Summer, his colleagues, his dead colleagues, the last of the Information Men to die before this new Information Office had been set up, before the Information House had had its derelict upper floors opened up as barracks so that demons and humans now coexisted uneasily, sleeping in quarters that stretched the length of the building. Gordie and Summer, his friends, returned to him these last weeks as these pale and silent ghosts standing in the room’s shadows, as these pallid reflections of the people he had known and still missed.
    Gordie was looking at Fool’s notice board, peering at the ever-expanding diagram detailing the fires. So much information, and so little
fact;
the number of crossing threads and handwritten notes growing every day, more and more ideas being laid out among the sketches and thoughts, pushing off the corners of the board and spreading across Fool’s walls like some creeping fungus.
    “Can you see something I’m missing?” asked Fool, going to stand by Gordie. When the ghosts, or spirits, or whatever they were, had first appeared, or Fool had first started to imagine them, he had been frightened. Frightened of what they might represent. Now he was almost glad to see them.
    Gordie did not reply, simply carried on looking at the board, his pale eyes darting along lines of thread and then returning, trying another tack. His lips were moving soundlessly as he read the board. Fool tried to follow the same lines that Gordie was traveling, tried to watch the man’s face as well as the board, to see the routes the little ghost followed, but he couldn’t keep up and in the end he simply stood and looked for himself. It was like looking into the water of a pool that was filled with floating, whirling debris, trying to see what lay in its muddy depths. Sometimes, Fool would think he was almost grasping the outlines of something and then it would shift, twist, break apart, and he would be looking at meaningless patterns again. It made his head ache and he turned away and went to Summer.
    She was sitting at the small desk by Fool’s bed and was writing despite the fact that she held no pen. Black marks were appearing across the surface of the scarred wood, meaningless marks that faded after a few seconds. Fool watched them closely, hoping to see something recognizable, a word or a sketch of some place or person or thing he could identify, but no; Summer’s scrawls were as shifting and arbitrary as everything else in this fucking investigation.
    Sighing, Fool turned away. Alive, Summer and Gordie had been his friends and his allies; as ghosts, they were just pictures given movement, dumb images without sense or opinion, and he had work to do.
    The Information Office, although still housed only in this one building, expanded seemingly every day, and he had to try to keep track of it. Already there were troops whose names he knew he would never know appearing in the ranks, inventories of equipment to submit and sign off on, lower-ranking officers he had never met sending him reports on crimes he did not know had taken place, and above or below them all the Evidence, a thing under its own control snapping at their heels. Turning to the first of the reports, Fool began to read.

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    Hand was on duty.
    “Fool,” Hand said as he walked into