Excerpt: CITY OF OTHERS by Jared Poon

CHAPTER ONE

So there I was in the office, processing paperwork to register a batch of undead ducklings.

Four of the yellow fluffballs crowded the scarred table in front of me, the glint of malevolent intelligence in their beady eyes the only clue that they’d been raised through black magic to serve as familiars. Three were angrily testing the boundaries of the ward circle that kept them penned in, while the fourth fought valiantly to stay awake. None of them were having much success.

Across the table, Seng—short for Chong Jun Seng—watched me, smiling with irritating familiarity. He was a licensed necromancer and the CEO of one of the largest funeral services companies in the country, distractingly handsome, with the slight build and fine, classic features you’d expect from a leading man in a period drama. His charcoal suit and gold watch probably cost more than several months of my salary, their quality a sharp contrast to the worn-out conference room with its wheezing air conditioning and herd of broken office chairs in a corner. New money juxtaposed against the miserly prudence of the Singapore public service.

“Seng,” I said, clicking through the Ministry’s slow, outdated form system on my laptop and consciously unclenching my jaw. “You can’t just walk in here. Appointments exist.”

“Come on, Ben,” he said. “Friends, right? Us against the world and all that.”

Friends. That word. Our families had been neighbours and we’d played together as kids, gone to the same primary school. Back then, he’d made me help him with the most random things. Mosquito bites. Maths homework. Rehearsing talking to a girl he liked. Having his back when he—

I didn’t want to think about that right now.

Later, we even served in the same unit in the army. Since then, we had drifted apart, perhaps because of his not-fully-legal use of necromancy to build his fortune, perhaps because that was just what happened to adults. You lose friends, to death or to life.

I hadn’t heard from him in years, but some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed. He was still making me fix his messes.

And this time, the mess was four baby birds giving me the stink eye.

The ducklings had apparently come to the conclusion that I was responsible for their predicament and were glaring at me with seething fury from inside the hastily drawn boundary of the ward. One of them was obviously trying to memorise my face for later revenge. Even the sleepy one was trying to join in, but its head kept drooping mid-glare, only to snap back up with a stiffness that didn’t seem quite natural.

I ignored them the same way I was intently ignoring the notifications blinking in the corner of my screen—colleagues from my other meeting, I assumed, frantically messaging to ask why I wasn’t there. But I couldn’t very well leave Seng wandering around here unsupervised with this cargo.

“So, let me get this straight.” I squinted at the screen and navigated yet another sluggish drop-down menu. “You want to transfer ownership of these… What are they even?”

“Toyols, technically,” Seng said. “Used to be made from human fetuses, but I don’t do those these days. Ethics and all that. Ducks are more loyal, anyhow. If you want, I can—”

“You’re probably thinking of geese. Titus Livius actually credits them for saving Rome from the Gauls—which is apocryphal, obviously, but… You know what, it doesn’t matter. You want to give these toyols to your nephew so he can… impress some girl?”

“It’s not just some girl. Her family’s important. Powerful.”

“And you thought a set of postmortem poultry was the solution.”

“The family,” Seng said, glancing away as if embarrassed. “They’re jinn. Wei Jie’s got nothing compared to them. And her family…” He hesitated. “They’re already talking about forbidding the match.”

Of course. The jinn were big players, notoriously mercenary in all their dealings. I could see why they’d not approve of one of their own hooking up with some human nobody, and why Seng might have thought that a retinue of toyol servants would give his nephew some supernatural cachet.

And I could see why Seng would want this. A connection like this could mean security, legitimacy, maybe even a little respect. For Seng, these were worth almost anything.

I set my laptop aside and took off my glasses, already feeling the beginnings of a headache. “Look, I can do the paperwork to make sure these get proper IDs. The permits should come in within a couple of weeks. I can help you with the transfer forms after that, but I’m really not sure saddling the kid with zombie ducks is the way to go. Please tell me you asked him.”

“No, but—”

Of course not.

“Listen.” I slid my glasses back on. “This isn’t going to solve your problem anyway. You think the jinn family is going to respect your nephew just because he’s got a bit of power from his uncle?”

Seng started to argue, but I held up a hand to stop him. “And you know what’s likely to happen? Wei Jie is going to do something stupid with these things—blow shit up or demonstrate his love or even worse. You remember what jackasses we were back when we were teenagers. Someone’s going to get hurt—maybe the jinn girl—and then the family will escalate, and then my Ministry will have to get involved, and then it’ll end up on my desk next week as some sort of diplomatic incident.”

I sighed, softened at the look on his face. The confidence he always wore like armour—it was cracked at the edges. He had looked like this, that one day when we were thirteen. He’d asked me for help then, too.

“Look,” I said. “What we… what you need to do is have a little faith. Let the kids work it out themselves. In the meanwhile, I can reach out to the jinn side, see if there’s a way to nudge them in the right direction. It’s way above my pay grade, but I’ll see what I can do.”

Seng’s shoulders relaxed a fraction, and he gave me a small smile. “I knew you’d come through for me.”

“I haven’t come through yet,” I said.

“You always do, Ben. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

And there it was. He’d been saying versions of that since we were kids. Most of the time, I’d indeed come through for him. But we both remembered the one time I didn’t.

He’d forgiven me. I hadn’t.

Seng left without looking back, taking the ducklings with him. As the door clicked shut, I wiped the ward circle from the table and slumped back in my chair, a familiar tug of resentment twisting in my chest. It was a sharp-edged feeling, a thorned weed I had to burn out before it took root.

Seng shouldn’t have put this on me. But he also knew I couldn’t turn him away.

So that was one more thing on my plate. I eyed my laptop screen, the accusing blink of notifications, the column of tiny red flags marking out emails I needed to respond to today. A few from the Strategic Planning team, requesting inputs on the workplan slides and how our projects for the next year would fit into the key pillars of the Ministry’s work. A couple from the Heritage Sites division, who were in charge of this year’s Ministry-wide Sports Day, asking me to make sure the team signed up. More from our PS and DS—Permanent Secretary and Deputy Secretary, the head honchos around here—with PDFs of articles on psychology or philosophy or leadership they thought we should read. One from Rebecca, my boss, asking about the status of this email update I’d been working on.

I felt my headache get worse. The update was our quarterly report to Minister, who for all intents and purposes seemed like a very nice, very reasonable man. The problem was that Rebecca was his gatekeeper, convinced that he would be scarred by any contact with inconsistently indented paragraphs, the active voice, or reality. We were now on our fifth round of edits, each iteration improving in elegance of phrasing but diminishing in actual content.

I thought I could catch the tail end of the meeting I’d missed, so I could at least know what next steps they’d agreed to. Then I could get those edits for the update to Minister done in an hour or so. After that, if I skipped lunch and really focused, I might be able to give everyone the replies and inputs they needed by five. Then I’d have the last part of the day to do the part of my job I actually cared about—what I’d done for Seng, if I was being honest with myself. Not bureaucratic bullshit but something more tangible.

On my list, there was a minor avatar of the goddess Annapurna, who’d put her pride aside to ask for help with racist landlords, and a goblin family who couldn’t get their kid into any public schools but also couldn’t afford the exorbitant fees for a private school. I could help them navigate the bureaucracy, get their issues seen by the state, as long as there were no last-minute interruptions—

A knock on the door of the meeting room, and then, without waiting, a young woman poked her head in. She was maybe twenty, short, her T‑shirt printed with some anime thing and the tudung that hid her hair an alarming shade of pink. Her smile was bright but uncertain.

“Sorry! Mr. Toh? Ms. Saanvi from HR said to find you here.”

“Wait, who are you?”

“Oh! Sorry, I’m Fizah. I’m here for my internship?”

Right. The new intern—jinni, if I remember her application correctly. Jinni, like the girl Seng’s nephew is dating.

I blinked at Fizah, staring for a fraction longer than I meant to. What were the odds…? No, it couldn’t be. There were enough jinn families in the city that jumping to conclusions would just make my headache worse.

Coincidence, I decided. I was overthinking things again. With all my other work, I’d forgotten she was starting today. Jimmy was supposed to be in charge of the internship programme, so it really should be him giving her the onboarding talk, but this poor girl looked frazzled enough as it was, and I didn’t want her first experience with us to be getting turned away. My day was probably shot anyway.

I set aside my headache and pushed my laptop away, composing myself, with some effort, into a semblance of friendliness.

“Come in,” I said. “Let me tell you about the team.”

My team was the Division for Engagement of Unusual Stakeholders, or DEUS—the post-colonial irony of a government team with a Latinate acronym was not lost on any of us. We were part of the Ministry of Community, the MOC, and I suppose it was a quirk of history that we were here instead of, say, the Ministry of Home Affairs or the Internal Security Department. Unlike most other developed nations, Singapore had quickly made it policy to count our spirit mediums and sorceresses, our hantus, our devas and asuras, as citizens to be served and regulated rather than monsters to be suppressed. This didn’t spring from particularly liberal ideals about equality or moral community. Rather, it came from anxiety about Singapore’s lack of natural resources and the pragmatic conviction that we needed everyone to work together if we were to survive. We could not afford to completely sideline our traditional gods and demons. We needed them to contribute to our nation’s actual gods and demons—our government, our economy, our security, our new Leviathan and Moloch.

The job of DEUS was straightforward—keep the weird people content, get them to be productive members of society, and keep them out of sight. That is, don’t bother the good, normal citizens of Singapore with disturbing things, and certainly don’t bother your bosses (or other Ministries) with that stuff. They had more important things to worry about.

Thankfully, keeping the supernatural from normal human beings and senior management wasn’t hard. People don’t see what they don’t want to see, and our minds are marvellous confabulators.

That lady on the MRT with frangipanis growing where her eyes should be? Don’t look at her face, don’t remember seeing her, focus on your phone and the K‑drama you’re watching.

That temple near your old house, where you’ve only seen people leaving but never entering, where you’ve seen something enormous and many-limbed and holy dancing inside? Well, it’s usually dark, and it could have been something else.

That canteen stall you went to all the time in primary school, where you could pay with promises and the food tasted like thunderstorms? Your friends don’t admit to recalling anything like that, so you probably just misremembered. You know how fanciful children’s imaginations can be.

So we whistle to ourselves as we walk deserted streets home at night, singing tuneless little songs, our brains protecting us from the horrors around us. Officially, this phenomenon is known as Deviant Occurrences Blind Eye Syndrome, or DOBES, following the British government’s understated (and poorly chosen) name for it, but no one calls it that except in official reports, not even the Brits. They call it “the jumblies,” I heard, and here in Singapore, we call it the DKP effect. Don’t kaypoh, don’t be a busybody, mind your own business.

The DKP effect did make life easier for those of us who had to manage the supernatural stuff, that being the four of us on the team. Jimmy was our resident goofball and psychic—precognition, psychometry, all the usual. He spent an hour every morning, after his tea break, contemplating a printed map of Singapore and using a dowsing pendulum to sniff out neighbourhoods with unusual supernatural activity. Mei was our spell- slinging bomoh, always perfectly poised in her enchanted heels, and she had been doing this for a long time—don’t let her pixie haircut and apparent youth fool you. Rebecca was our boss, the head of the department, but she also double-hatted with two other teams, so she was always at other meetings and never around. I was a Gardener and our ersatz field agent, for whatever that was worth.

And now, we also had a jinni.

“Technically, half-jinni, um. Sorry. My dad’s just a teacher,” Fizah said, fiddling with the edges of her notebook. “How old is Mei, anyway? I mean, because…”

“Probably not the best idea to ask,” I said.

“Sorry, sorry!” She flipped through her notes, her handwriting neat and perfectly aligned. Perhaps there was hope for the next generation yet. She looked up. “Um, so what do I, like, do around here?”

It was a valid question.

“For today, why don’t you go check with Mei or Jimmy and see if they need any help.” I knew real work was unlikely to get done—Jimmy would brag about his daughters, Mei would rant about third-wave feminism and the societal pressures forcing her to use magic to look young, and then they would all go out for cake. But hopefully that would give me the space to clear my emails, check in on Mdm. Annapurna and the goblin kid, and tackle that damned update in the evening.

Her face lit up at my suggestion. “Okay! Should I introduce myself, or—?”

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed. Against the sandy landscape that was my lock screen—a photo of Mars taken by the ill-fated rover Opportunity—notifications blinked. Missed calls from an hour ago from my father and from Adam, this guy I was seeing, and a message from Jimmy on the DEUS group chat:

Ghost cat! L3 pantry, come now!

We threaded our way out through the labyrinth of cubicles that made up the third floor. This close to lunchtime, every department had bifurcated into two camps. First: the sprinters, desperately trying to dash off their last four emails or final annex to a paper so they could leave. The second: the defeated, so far from the finish line they’d given up on leaving for lunch, picking at cold noodles while staring at their screens with dead eyes. They don’t call it a rat race for nothing.

By the time we reached the pantry, Jimmy and Mei had cleared the area, blocking it off along with a whole section of the adjacent corridor with signs that said SENIOR MANAGEMENT FILMING IN PROGRESS.

Clever. There was no better way to make civil servants avoid a place than with the threat that their bosses might be there.

“Get me a cup,” Mei said the moment we stepped in, her manner imperious. “Quickly. Water from the tap will do.” She had her back to us and was spreading her scarf—peacock green and gold—on a table. Jimmy waved a broom around threateningly.

There had been rumours about this cat for months—gossip about scratching in the walls once the sun had set. How stationery on your desk would wind up in a different place from where you left it. How papers sometimes looked like they had been chewed on. Sok Ling, from Legal, was convinced that the perpetrator was the ghost of her cat’s late best friend.

Hauntings like these were fairly common where we worked. We were in a heritage site that used to be a police barracks, and people said that terrible things happened here when the Japanese occupied Singapore during World War II. The occupation only lasted for about two years, but the pain, fear, and depravity that soaked into the brick and plaster during that time remained. Supposedly the building sat on a conjunction of ley lines and dragon meridians, and so the structure itself stayed, even as everything else around was torn down and rebuilt into shopping centres and skyscrapers, becoming a powerful node for spirits of the darker kind. Or so I have been told by those knowledgeable in such things. History speaks. Stones remember. Buildings accrete memories and excrete ghosts.

But now the inside of the building had been remodelled into air-conditioned government offices, rows of cubicles and meeting rooms, and it was civil servants instead of prisoners of the regular variety who spent their days there. The torture had gotten slightly more sophisticated, the shootings had become (for the most part) metaphorical rather than literal, and we had Wi‑Fi. But the decor hadn’t improved much, and now you had to buy your own snacks. So, you know, win some, lose some.

The cat didn’t seem to think we were winners. It turned out to be a small tabby, one of those kucintas you’d find lounging around any housing estate—except this one was sitting very securely about two metres off the floor on absolutely nothing. It glared at us, slow-blinking with supreme indifference—at me, at Mei bent over her scarf and muttering, at Jimmy brandishing a broom, and at Fizah grinning with open delight. Then, as if to underline just how little it cared, the cat started licking a paw. It was a little insulting being ignored like that, to be honest.

I edged past Jimmy and got Mei her cup of water, which she placed on her scarf. The water gleamed momentarily, opalescent.

“Can we help?” I asked.

Mei shook her head, not breaking off from her chanting. Fizah came over to peer into the mug, then up at the cat, then into the mug again. She was practically vibrating with excitement.

“It’s so cute!” she squealed. “And this is all so cool. Maybe it’s not the only one— maybe there are, like, ghost kittens? Do you think there might be ghost kittens? Could we keep one? Like, what would we do with ghost kittens? Is there like an SPCA or… wait…”

She looked at Mei’s water, a look of dawning horror on her face. “Are we…?” she said, swallowing. “Are we going to exorcise it?”

All right, that was enough. Mei needed space to do her work.

“Hey, Fizah,” I said. “Can you help guard the entrance? No, the other one. We need you to watch and see if PS or DS pass by, and distract them if they want to come in. Can you do that?”

We had to get this done under the radar. If Rebecca found out we were doing exorcisms without official clearance and a risk management plan, there would be hell to pay.

Fizah parked herself dutifully at one of the doorways, but she looked a little glum, her earlier enthusiasm for the work dampened now that she knew what Mei meant to do. All this on her first day. I’d have to find a time later to explain that ghosts were just echoes, not conscious things, and exorcisms were less like murder and more like wiping a cassette tape. Not that someone her age would even know what a cassette tape was.

Throughout all this, the cat remained unconcerned by what we were doing. It blinked slowly at us, then rolled over in mid-air, exposing a fuzzy white belly.

That was when Mei threw the cup of water on it, and all hell broke loose.

The cat yowled and shot straight up, tail rigid and bushy with indignation. It bolted through the air, landing on the back of a couch before springing to a table, Mei’s scarf getting caught in its scrabbling claws. Then it launched itself onto a shelf, knocking off a tower of plastic cups and piles of mismatched paper napkins. Amidst all the clattering, the cat took a moment to turn and scowl at us before walking with injured dignity through the back of the shelf. We watched as the scarf disappeared behind it.

It was definitely a ghost.

“It is not a ghost,” Mei announced. “It is something else.”

“It walked through a wall!” Fizah said. “I mean, that’s a ghost thing, right?”

Mei shook her head, patting her hair back in place. “It is not a ghost. If it were, my Working would have dealt with it. Few ghosts can ignore the blessed waters or have enough physical presence to tear up a couch like that. Jimmy, Fizah, come with me. We must figure out what it is.

“We will find it,” she declared, her sharp glare making clear her new personal vendetta. “I will get my scarf back.”

I was just about to add “scarf retrieval” to my very reasonably sized mental task list when Jimmy lowered the broom and turned to me, his expression serious.

“Hey, uh, boss,” he said. “Since I have you here. I got a signal earlier. Clementi, Block 375. Energy spike. Ghosty one.”

I froze for a moment. Jimmy’s morning dowsings didn’t catch everything, but what they did catch we couldn’t afford to ignore. Especially not in a residential housing district.

“Define ghosty,” I said.

“I’m not sure. Something dead and left over, maybe? It showed up for a few minutes, then disappeared. Not like a normal haunting. Felt… deep, but not strong. Not old, not big. You know what I mean?”

“Nope.” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I’ll go over there tomorrow morning and take a look.”

Fizah was still staring at the spot where the ghost cat had vanished, looking shell-shocked and lost. Her notebook was clutched tightly in both hands.

“How do you feel about coming along?” I said.

She blinked at me. “Me? For real?”

“Yes, for real,” I said. “Clementi, tomorrow. Ghosts aren’t dangerous, and it sure beats sitting in the office on your second day. You’re just there to observe, but you might learn something.”

Jimmy snorted. “You’ll learn that Ben is entirely too chipper in the morning.”

Fizah’s grin was so wide I briefly worried that she might spontaneously combust. “Thank you, Mr. Toh! I’d love to!”

I sighed, already regretting my decision. Ghosty was new, and the last time Jimmy had invented a new word to describe something weird, it had cost me three nights of sleep, four email reports, and one pair of perfectly good shoes.

Surely this couldn’t be that bad.