Joshua is not his name.
The face isn’t his either.
Seventeen or thereabouts. Dirty-blond hair, piercings, sulky skater look. Billy cut it from a magazine and scanned it into an old computer. The voice belonged to a Californian student. The expressions were a short sequence of instructions, repeating whenever an ancient necromancer wanted to laugh, glare or look innocent.
The innocent one rarely worked.
People looked at the screen and saw Joshua.
They weren’t wrong.
He’d been moving through bodies for centuries before Billy caught him between a dead pharmaceutical executive and a boy dying on a London street. Corpses when he could get them. Coma patients when he couldn’t. Each body gave him a face, a voice and a little more time.
There’s no tidy way to put that. Joshua survived at other people’s expense. Some were already dead. Not all of them were. A cheerful manner and a useful line in soul magick don’t wipe the blood away.
Billy offered him refuge in a computer instead of oblivion. Offered may be generous. The refuge had locks.
Still, it gave Joshua another borrowed home. Billy supplied the name, the avatar, the voice and a fair amount of the vocabulary. That’s why a being over two thousand years old sounds like a Californian teenager who spent too long in East London.
Billy created the presentation.
He didn’t create the man.
That distinction matters because almost everything recognizable about Joshua belongs to somebody else. Name. Face. Accent. Body. Even the screen he first peered from.
The only reliable evidence we have is what he does with them.
As the pharmaceutical executive, he sold cancer medication cheaply to non-profits. It cost the company an obscene amount of money. They objected. The sick were less vocal about it.
Later, when Billy released him to fetch Tazia’s father from Hell, Joshua could have kept going. Freedom had been the subject of the bargain, after all.
He came back.
When Billy decided Tazia had to die, Joshua argued with him. When that failed, he followed him through the electrical wiring to a hospital, fought with a mobile phone to warn the others, then sent enough current through a switch to put Billy into a wall.
Not an easy choice. Billy was jailer, rescuer, programmer and friend. Sometimes all four before breakfast.
Joshua chose Tazia’s life anyway.
There’s a scene in Raw Deal I’ve never managed to make respectable. A little girl lies dead beneath playground equipment in East London. Joshua, weak after months of captivity, crawls from a phone into her body through the heart. A blue light catches there, faint and unsteady, until she sits up.
Then she asks Billy for a cigarette.
It’s grotesque. It’s also funny, which makes it worse.
Joshua smokes through the child’s mouth, complains about his imprisonment and passes on what he learned while trapped between Hell and the Advocate’s domain. Deals. Betrayals. A plan already moving beneath everyone’s feet. Once he has enough strength, he leaves the body and goes ahead to scout.
Billy closes the girl’s eyes after he’s gone.
That moment tells you something unpleasant about Joshua. He can make almost any vessel ordinary within minutes. That adaptability kept him alive across centuries. It also allowed him to stop seeing the body as a person once its first occupant had left.
Useful trait, in a crisis.
Dangerous one everywhere else.
But he went back to the crisis.
That’s the pattern. Given a gap in the lock, Joshua bargains, complains, steals whatever current or cigarette is available—and then, more often than sense would recommend, goes back for someone.
I’m not calling him good. Good is a clean word, and Joshua has worn too many dead faces for cleanliness. I’m saying that a face can be borrowed. So can a voice, an accent and a body.
A choice repeated across centuries is harder to steal.
I don’t know his first name. I’m not convinced he remembers his first face. If he does, he has kept both out of the record, which may be the only thing he owns outright.
We haven’t seen the last of him. The Author tells me he may be back sooner than expected.
I’m curious to see what he’s wearing when he arrives.
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