They went headlong into the shadows for the last time, leaving the battle behind them. They all knew the way.
The Harbinger continued to sink. It tilted into the water, and everything inside the ship listed drastically. As Rhett and Mak and Basil ran down the tunnel, it became almost like running up a hill.
Rhett had left the sword behind. He didn’t have the will to pick it back up again. It hadn’t been his weapon of choice to begin with. The image of Theo’s face breaking up into all those miniscule specks of dust wouldn’t leave him. Having the sword in his hand just would have made it worse.
The end of the tunnel almost seemed to come to meet them. As did the two psychons that stood guard above the trapdoor.
Mak didn’t stop. Even in the darkness, Rhett heard her drop and slide across the uneven wooden floor between the psychons’ legs. She threw the trapdoor open, and the faint blue light from the steam room illuminated the back of the tunnel just enough for Rhett and Basil to see what they were doing.
Basil dug the end of his scythe into the first psychon’s hollow eye socket. Shards of bone and gristly tendrils of muscle flew. The blade cracked into the cavity of the skull, and black ooze came dripping out. The psychon dropped to its knees, then fell flat on its chest. In the next instant, Basil tossed the slime-covered scythe to Rhett. Rhett caught it, bent down below the swipe of the second psychon’s claws, and took off its legs below the knee. It fell, squirming, to the floor. Rhett inserted the blade into that one’s skull, too.
Rhett held on to the scythe as he stepped down through the trapdoor and said, “This has an awesome swing to it.”
“You have no idea,” Basil replied.
Mak was already halfway down the ladder into the steam room when Rhett and Basil caught up to her. But by now the ladder had been angled to the point that it was almost like traversing a set of monkey bars. The ship was going down. Fast.
From far-off, they could hear iron wrenching and twisting, the haunted moan of things bending out of place and being swallowed by the waves. There were more explosions, and the sound of the battle back in the atrium was growing. The psychons were pushing the syllektors back into the tunnel, making their last run to capture the souls.
Inside the steam room, the walls groaned and cracked under the pressure of being forced out of true. The wood was old and weak. It wouldn’t stand up to the discord for very long.
“How does this work?” Rhett asked. For the moment, he was able to put Theo out of his thoughts.
Mak didn’t reply. Instead, she sidestepped over to the cube, its size making her look like a tiny action figure standing next to a huge toy chest. The tank gave off its ephemeral glow; the cloud of life lost pulsed behind its glass walls. Mak put her hand on the cube’s door, and for one horrible second, Rhett thought she was going to open it and let all the souls out. But this time, the door didn’t open.
There was a sucking sound, like something being slurped up by a vacuum, and the extension tube that jutted out from the side of the cube and disappeared into the wall was suddenly emptied. All the souls that had been moving throughout the Harbinger, helping to give it power, were pulled back into the main tank. With a hiss, the extension tube detached itself from the tank. Now the cube was on its own. And so was the Harbinger.
Along with the continued sounds of the ship struggling to keep itself afloat, there was a sound of engines and machines powering down, of propellers ceasing to spin and whole sections of lights going dark. The glass cube filled with souls was the Harbinger’s life support. And Mak had just pulled the plug.
“Okay,” she said, stepping back. “The containment tank is secure. Even if there’s a breach in the circulation system somewhere else on the ship, the souls are safe. Nothing but a syllektor is getting in there now.”
“You forget, love,” Basil said. “That she-devil back there can control syllektors. Look what she did to Theo.” He paused, looking away. “And Treeny.”
Rhett was grateful to Basil for laying the blame on Urcena. Truly, that’s where it belonged. But that didn’t help with the guilt. From the look of it, Basil was dealing with some guilt of his own.
“And what about the ship?” Rhett said. “We just cut the power when she needs it the most.”
Mak only shook her head. “She’s going down anyway, Rhett.”
As if to solidify her point, the floor beneath them shuddered and buckled. Splintered boards sprang free, flipping up like snapped bones and spinning into the air, showering the room with dust. The containment tank dropped about a foot into the floor with a teeth-rattling crunch.
When everything settled, all three of them let out a breath.
“Shit,” Rhett whispered.
Above their heads, the battle raged on as if nothing had happened. Rhett could hear metal stabbing into bone and bone stabbing into flesh. Someone slammed the trapdoor shut. A second later, the door exploded inward. The dimly lit shape of a syllektor formed out of the shower of splinters. The syllektor, a guy with shoulder-length white hair, fell into the steam room. His body clanged against the nearly sideways ladder and fell some more, until he hit the damaged floor and broke through it, disappearing below.
“If we’re getting the tank off the ship,” Rhett said, “we better do it now.”
“Mak,” Basil said. “Go. Go.”
Rhett and Basil took up positions on either side of her, almost as if they were out gathering a soul. In a way, they were. They were gathering all the souls.
Mak placed her hand on the glass of the tank again, and the faint, foggy image of her handprint appeared on the smooth surface. Rhett had deposited enough souls into the cube now to know how cool that glass was, even without his senses. It wasn’t even really a sensation or a feeling. It was more like an assurance. An assurance that within that block of glass and steel, there were no hard edges or boiling rooms. That there was comfort in death.
From this angle, there was a narrow gap where the trapdoor had been that Rhett could see through. He could see the fluttering cloaks of psychons and the winking blades of syllektors.
“Whatever you’re doing, you need to do it n—” a voice up top started to yell before it was cut off.
They waited.
A few seconds later, Mak stepped back from the tank, looking at it, then looking at her hand. Confusion and panic were etched all over her face.
“What’s wrong?” Basil said frantically.
“It’s not working,” Mak replied. It sounded almost like a question.
“What’s not working?” Rhett asked.
“The fail-safe. It’s supposed to … to disappear. Go somewhere else.” She was still staring at her hand. “The way we do, when we go out to collect a soul. There’s supposed to be a door, and it’s supposed to disappear.”
“So what’s wrong with it?” Rhett heard the edge in his own voice.
“I don’t know!” She stepped up to the cube and planted her hand on it again. She waited. Then she stepped back, frustrated. Fury took over her face and she started banging on the glass with her fists, creating an odd bonging sound that echoed around the room. “Fucking piece of shit!” she screamed.
Basil came up behind her and caught her by the wrists.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, pulling her back gently. “It’s okay. We’ll figure something out.”
Mak whirled around. “Figure what out? Huh? What are we going to figure out?” With a finger that was shaking just slightly, Mak pointed up at the trapdoor. “They’re coming. For this.” She moved the same finger so that it was directed at the cube. “And we are not enough to stop that from happening.”
She sank to the floor, surrounded by bent and twisted boards. The glow of the cube behind her stretched her shadow into a long, thin line.
Another syllektor fell through the trapdoor but caught herself on the ladder. She continued to swing with a sword up through the hole, clashing with a psychon that fought to get through. The sword might have been the same one that had ghosted Theo, but Rhett couldn’t tell for sure.
The Harbinger screamed and whined and tilted. Everything was turned now, leaning dangerously. In other parts of the ship, Rhett imagined furniture sliding across floors, knickknacks tumbling off shelves. He imagined the old wooden parts of the ship snapping apart just like the steam room was. He imagined the dark shape of the ship as it began to point upward out of the water, lights flickering, the surviving smokestack coughing up its last dark clouds, the kymaker and the Cyclops nearby, the storm hammering on around them all.
It was a car wreck all over again, this one on a monstrous scale. This one concerning the lives—or afterlives—of thousands instead of just three.
Because they were lives, even if they were lives that had ended. Their souls had continued to be, either as the glowing white cloud inside the cube or as syllektors. Life echoed on in those faint remains, doing good, being good. And they deserved better than this.
Rhett looked down at the scythe that was still in his hand. His washed-out, scraped-up face looked back at him. He thought about the night of the crash, about the moment he swerved the car in front of the truck. He could clearly see Urcena in his memory now, standing in the middle of the road, her desperately evil glare connecting with his for just an instant. Of course he wouldn’t have remembered that, not after everything else—he had barely been able to remember his own name in those first moments after his death. He was angry now. So angry. But it was also a relief to know that his anger hadn’t killed him, or his parents, in the first place.
Maybe it had been a sudden, too-early death for him. But to think about all the good that he’d done with it, all the good he could still do with it, was comfort enough to make it okay.
Rhett held the scythe out to Basil, who just looked back, confused.
“Use it,” Rhett said. “On me.”
“I’m sorry,” Basil said. “I’m not sure I got that. Because all I heard was fucking bollocks!”
Rhett pulled the scythe toward him, laying it against his chest.
“Think about it,” Rhett said. “Urcena came after me first. She can’t do anything with the souls in the tank without me. You heard Mak—only a syllektor can get into it, and the Harbinger is sinking anyway. Let it. Even if the psychons could somehow get the tank off the ship in time, there’s no way that Urcena would let them have any of the souls until she’s done with them. We make it as hard as we possibly can for her to get her hands on the tank, and in the meantime, we get me and … and whatever it is I can do as far out of her reach as we can. This is the fail-safe.”
Mak was still on the floor, staring at a dark knot in the wood.
“So you want us to ghost you,” she said, “and let the ship take the containment tank down with it.”
“Exactly,” Rhett replied. “It was stupid for me to come here in the first place. If I’m gone, Urcena can’t use this power that I have. Defend the tank for as long as you can. Once the psychons realize they can’t get to it without drowning themselves, they’ll give up and regroup. Then you two and whoever else is still on board can abandon ship.”
Basil took a step back, taking the scythe with him but letting it fall to his side.
“And go where?” he asked. “Do what? What are we supposed to do with the rest of the souls?”
Rhett could only blink at him. “The rest…?”
Basil chuckled. “Just because the Harbinger sinks, mate, doesn’t mean that people are going to stop dying.”
From the trapdoor, they heard more clashing. The girl who had fallen onto the ladder had managed to get herself back up into the tunnel, but the fight was still close, and there was no way of knowing how many psychons were still trying to get through.
Rhett wasn’t paying any attention to the fight, though. He ran a hand through his hair. Now that he was standing still, he could focus on it. It wasn’t nearly as strong or insistent as it had been earlier in that impossibly long day, but it was here, nagging at the edges of his mind: the invisible lasso. The push.
Basil was right. Nothing that was happening here had any effect on the real world. There were people out there who were still dying, who still needed their souls protected.
He looked from Basil to Mak, then back again.
“I don’t know what else to do,” he whispered.
“It doesn’t matter what happens to us, mate,” Basil said. “If there aren’t any syllektors to gather the souls of the dead, then the psychons win anyway. They get a feast one way or the other.”
“What about Urcena?” Mak said, finally standing again. “We can’t just pretend she doesn’t exist. Rhett’s right. She needs him and the tank if she wants control over anything. And whatever she has planned is going to be way worse than anything a bunch of psychons are capable of.”
“So that’s it?” Basil asked. His voice rose, cracked a little. “We’re just supposed to give up? I already had to ghost one of my teammates today. I … I can’t take another one. I just can’t.”
“Once you guys are safe,” Rhett went on, a strange certainty overwhelming him, “you can find me. Captain Trier said that the part of my soul that’s still attached to the living world will go back there. Find me. We can fix this.”
“Fix it?” Basil cried. “Mate, this ship is dead!” He pointed at the containment tank, which was turned almost completely on its side now. “They are dead! You’ll be dead! Like, dead dead! And nobody can—”
“I can,” Rhett said, cutting him off. “I can. I don’t know how or why, but I know it the way that I know my parents loved each other, that they loved me even as we all died together. I know it the way that I know you love Mak. I have the power to fix all of this. All I need is a chance.”
Basil looked at Mak. She reached out and squeezed his hand, then she reached out with her other hand and squeezed Rhett’s. Rhett was surprised but comforted. He was also afraid.
“That power is what Urcena wants,” Mak said. “We won’t let her have it.”
The ship was canted at a sharp angle. The three of them struggled to even stand up straight. The walls continued to groan and flex. Water began to seep through the cracks in them and drip from the ceiling. The battle in the tunnel seemed to fade for a moment and then came back full force. Rhett could see the movement in the shadows through the trapdoor.
He leaned down and grabbed Basil’s hand, the one that was holding the scythe, completing the circle of their grips. He lifted the hand. He leveled the point of the blade at his chest.
Mak and Basil stood in front of him, their eyes red and wet and angry and sad.
“We’ll find you,” Mak said. She opened her mouth, as if there was something more she wanted to say, then closed it again.
“I’ll be the one that looks like a ghost,” Rhett replied. And, somehow, they all choked out a little bit of laughter.
There was a strange pressure pushing against him—not like the push, but something nearly as strong. He pushed back, and when he looked down, the curved blade of the scythe was buried in his chest, slipped between his ribs to the left.
“See you soon, mate,” Basil whispered.
All around them, the floor began to get soft, began to crumble into liquid tendrils that floated into the air. Rhett watched them burst into tiny fragments and continue floating up. Beneath the floor and behind the walls, there was only solid black.
As the world disintegrated around him, Rhett saw a psychon leap down through the trapdoor. Mak let go, pulling her dagger out. When he lost his hold on her, Rhett fell to his knees. Basil sank down with him and then Mak was there again, and they were both staring at him. Mak ran a hand through his hair, and he was sure that she was crying now, unable to keep the force of her emotions at bay, the way he’d been unable to keep his emotions back that night on the bridge, when he told the captain about his parents.
The blue light from the tank darkened, plunged into a deep hue, somehow bright and dark at the same time, an antishadow. And under that light, the ship continued to break apart into those atomlike pieces and float away into the nothing.
For a while he could still see Mak’s and Basil’s faces. And then they were Theo’s and Treeny’s faces, and then they were his parents’ faces. They were talking to him, saying his name, the way they’d been trying to communicate with him from the tank where their souls now lived. They were still in there. He knew that he would save them somehow. If he had nothing else to fight for, he had them.
The last specks of reality funneled themselves away, vanishing into the wide-open black. He wondered if this was what being in space felt like. Probably not. At least in space there would have been the stars to keep him company. When the two faces in front of him broke apart and disappeared, Rhett Snyder was alone.
In the great distance, a circle of intense, almost blinding light appeared. It grew and grew. It consumed the black and turned it white. As it drew closer, preparing to swallow him, all he could think was Finally. Then it washed over him—the light, the warmth.
And all the world was brilliance.