Died Once? Now I Date Ghosts!

The dead can be put to work. In the world she wakes up in they are trained as exorcists and sent back into places where resentment has built up, and the road home to her own life runs through that job. She had been a college student who believed only in what she could measure, and she died at her desk after a run of nights without sleep. Her first posting is a survey of the resentment at a second middle school. The reading is high enough that the detector comes apart in her hands, and her communications go out with it. A colleague at the bureau who stands to be promoted if she does not come back has kept the danger out of the briefing and is holding the support team back. She is shut inside the campus with ghost students coming down the corridors after her, and she gets up to the music room on the top floor. The files kept there cover two spirits: a boy who went off the roof after being bullied, and a boy who was killed for trying to expose it. The piano starts behind her. The boy at the keys has his back to her and no feet, and when he turns around the black comes off him and fills the room. Bloody hands reach for her, and a voice in her head says a system called Heartbeat Signal has registered an abnormal reading and is binding to her. Time stops, and the hands stop where they are.