Cassandra “Cass” Johnson is a twenty-three-year-old biracial woman and is separated from her husband. She’s short and a bit round, with curly, light brown hair and hazel eyes. She’s originally from Washington D.C. but came up to Boston for college. She met her future husband and dropped out of school when she got pregnant. They married too early, and their marriage fell apart after the baby was born but died a few days later. The baby was a girl, and she didn’t live long enough to get a name. (Cass and her husband wanted the gender to be a surprise.) Her parents are still together and live in the D.C. area; her father is black and her mother white. They were not thrilled that Cass dropped out, but have tried to support her after the death of the baby and the collapse of her marriage. Her now-separated husband lives in the area and works in the tech corridor in Tewksbury. Cass rents a room in a subdivided Victorian house in Malden and works at Artistic Blossoms Floral design on Newbury Street in Boston. She has houseplants and a hamster for company, and doesn’t really interact with her housemate, Lloyd Tremblay. During the riots of August 2008, Malden was outside the radius of the violence, so Cass spent those terrible days hunkered down in her room with her hamster.

Monday December 21st, 2009: After a weekend of bleary dreams, Cass gets up on Monday morning, jumps into the shower, and heads to work. She gets off the green line at Copley Station and runs into the nearby Dunkin Donuts on Newbury Street for her usual coffee and breakfast; the barista – a pierced, tattooed, and punk-hair dyed young woman named Amanda – has her food waiting; Cass thanks her and heads to work. She spends the morning filling orders for poinsettias and Christmas cactuses. The flower shop always sees an uptick in business this time of year, mostly for hostess gifts. She’s dragging by lunchtime, and runs back to Dunks for her usual food. While in line, she starts to hear whispering, but no one in the lobby is saying anything. She gets outside and realizes the whispering is coming from the north, so she checks her watch. She has fifty minutes left on her break, so she decides to find out what is going on. She heads north after wolfing down her sandwich, still cradling her coffee.

As she walks, snow starts to fall and a hush settles over the streets of Boston. With a start, she realizes the whispers are calling her name – Cassandra! She stops and looks around for the first time in a while, and realizes she’s in the middle of a neat graveyard. She knows there’s no graveyard in this part of the city – especially not one this large – but she can’t see the city skyline through the snow. She keeps walking, following the whispers, but notices the snow seems to part for her. She sees a massive tower suddenly loom out of the snowy sky right in front of her, and then realizes someone is standing behind her. She half-turns to see a tall figure in a cowl, who holds out a bony hand carrying her dead daughter’s onesie! Realizing she has a choice – go back to the comfort and pain of her mundane life, or go forward and learn some awesome truth – Cass takes the onesie and moves to the tower with the figure gliding behind her.

The door to the tower is locked, but some instinct propels Cass into jamming the onesie into the keyhole – ad it unlocks! The door swings open soundlessly to reveal steps heading upwards; Cass reclaims the onesie and starts walking, still clutching her Dunks cup. The figure does not follow, but waves with surprising tenderness. Cass climbs for hours, but then spots a tiny figure swaddled in a cowled robe waiting for her on the stairs. The figure reaches out a hand, and Cass moves the onesie into the hand also containing her coffee cup. They ascend together, and reach the top. The roof of the tower is covered in snow, except for a bare patch of stone floor. The child-figure leads her over there, and Cass stares at the blank patch. The figure suddenly squeezes her hand, and a sharp pain brings up beads of blood on her thumb.

In that instant of painful clarity, Cass realizes what she has to do – and also that this figure is her daughter. She kneels in the snow and starts scrawling her name in blood on the stone. As she writes, more names starts to appear on the floor and walls, each glowing a different color. When Cass finishes, her name doesn’t glow at first, but then starts to shine a golden yellow before breaking up to shimmer along the colors of the spectrum. In that instant, Cass Awakens. An instant later, a man’s voice asks in a rough Boston accent, “Lady, you ok?” Cass blinks, and finds herself on the street a few steps from the Dunkin Donuts, her thumb bleeding, and still carrying the coffee – and the onesie. She nods in thanks as she sticks her thumb in her mouth and checks the time – only to stare as she’s got forty-eight minutes left on her break!

Shaken, Cass turns and starts walking back to the flower shop. She gets a strong whiff of saltwater, which is strange because she’s not near the ocean. Amanda is staring at her from the window of Dunkin Donuts, and Cass swears the ocean smell is coming from her. She nods in greeting as she stumbles past, and returns to the flower shop. The owner – Gary Papadopoulos, a large gay man – asks if she’s ok, and Cass lies and says she just needs to sit. She settles in the breakroom and drinks her coffee – only to realize there’s a dead man sitting across from her! She bolts to her feet and rushes out of the breakroom. She tells Gary that she’ll take him up on his offer to take the afternoon off, and bolts. She practically runs to the T-station, and settles into a car. Next to her, a man sidles up and starts asking about G-men, and Cass realizes she’s sitting next to the ghost of a bootlegger. She touches the railing of the seat – and instantly knows the exact composition of the alloy used to make it.

Cass realizes that the train is crawling with the dead, from all periods in Boston’s history. She mutters something about why colonials need to take the red line, but then hears, “Tickets, please.” She looks up to see a ghostly conductor embedded in the wall of the train, holding out a skeletal hand. The bootlegger produces a ticket, but the conductor repeats the request to Cass. She fishes out her Dunkin receipt and hands it to the conductor. The receipt vanishes, apparently acceptable as a ticket. She makes it home and rushes into her room – ignoring the fact she seems immediately aware of the exact composition of anything she touches.