The light would have been blinding had it not been for Rhett’s new existence as Death personified. But it was still bright.
The sun hammered itself into everything, and as the five of them stepped through the doorway onto the gouged, scorched dirt, Rhett didn’t even need to force his senses to feel the heat.
They were in the middle of nowhere. Desert stretched out around them like the ugly underside of a painter’s canvas, with jagged rocks spiking up here and there, bristling with weeds and a few bulbous cacti. Low mountains warbled along the horizon like flexing muscles.
Ahead there was a cluster of squat brick buildings crowded around a single road, where the heat was baking off the pavement in watery shimmers. It looked like the main drag of some little town.
The five of them looked absurd standing there, surrounded by the dirt and the blue, cloudless sky, in their shadow-colored clothes and armed to the teeth with weapons that were better suited for serial killers and trained assassins than a bunch of dead teenagers.
Rhett glanced behind him, at where they had come from. Half-buried in the ground was a battered Airstream trailer, coated with rust and textured with dents. The windows were caved in, and a ragged hole grinned wide, showing tufts of insulation and the swirling galaxies of dust and bugs inside the trailer. It looked like a mouth chewing on a wad of cotton candy. The door stood open, but within it, where the filthy guts of the trailer were supposed to be, was instead the room of doors inside the Harbinger. It was crooked now, trapped inside the confines of the slanted trailer, but there was nothing different about it. It was like an optical illusion—such a big space behind such a tiny door.
“Theo,” Mak said. Her voice was different now without all the high ceilings and wide rooms to amplify it. Out here in the badlands, she was far less intimidating.
Without needing further instruction, Theo stepped past Rhett and Treeny and swung the Airstream’s door shut. It clacked against the trailer with a plastic-y smack, and when it bounced back again, the view of the inside of the Harbinger was gone. The doorway between worlds was closed.
Somewhere far off, an eagle screamed.
“Now what?” Rhett said, reflexively squinting against the sun. He wasn’t a huge fan of the desert. “How are we supposed to know where we’re going?”
Mak whirled around, a look of pure curiosity on her face.
“You can’t feel it?” she asked. Her tone was suspicious, accusatory. The others looked at Rhett, their faces more interested than anything.
“Feel … what?”
There was silence, and the stifling tension ramped back up again. There was a part of Rhett that wished he could crawl back through the trailer door to the ship and go hide out in his cabin. He had no idea what she was talking about.
Then Theo spoke, saving him.
“It’s like … uh … like my Nana’s blueberry pie,” he said. He was grinning from ear to ear, proud of this profound explanation.
“I … I’m not sure what you mean, buddy,” Rhett said, afraid of pissing off the behemoth.
Theo thought, drumming his fingers against his lips. “It’s just a warm feeling in ya gut. Makes ya feel full and happy. Ya know? It’s … it’s … what’s the word?”
“Instinct,” Treeny murmured.
Theo snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Instinct.”
Basil chuckled, and Rhett just barely caught the fading afterimage of a smile on Mak’s face.
“You just need to focus,” she said, her voice back to that prosecuting tone. “You should feel it if you try not to think about it.”
“I don’t even know what you guys are talking about,” Rhett responded. “Maybe I’m really not supposed to be—”
“Oh, will you just shut up?” Basil cried. “Close your eyes. Forget about blueberry pie and think about a lasso. Should be easy, considering our current environs.”
Rhett gave him a skeptical look but did as he was told. He closed his eyes.
“Now imagine the lasso is around your waist. Imagine it pulling you gently.”
Rhett did. He thought about the time his dad had taken him to an indoor rodeo upstate. Along with the bull riding, there had also been riders lassoing calves. He thought about the loop circling around in the air above his head and then coming down around him and cinching tight at his waist. And he imagined some invisible hand tugging on it, nudging him, and …
He felt it. Really felt it. Some sort of force—like a wind or a vacuum—pushing and pulling him. He remembered the way the others had reacted back at the mess hall. Surely this is what they had been feeling. Already he knew there was no other choice but to follow it.
“I feel it,” he said. His voice was low, excited. “I seriously feel it.”
“Show us,” Mak said challengingly. “Take us where we need to go.”
Rhett glared at her, but he was also smiling. “No problem.”
He marched past them, following that unseen guide, confident for the first time since arriving aboard the Harbinger. The thought that they were going to find a dying person at the other end of that invisible lasso hadn’t even crossed his mind yet.
The town crept closer, and Rhett was sure that their destination was somewhere within it—the shapeless push was leading him straight there.
It was a sleepy-looking place, with a handful of cars parked along the sidewalks. The buildings themselves were mostly businesses, or what used to be businesses. They had boarded-up doors and big sheets of brown paper taped up in the windows, squares of poster board with OUT OF BUSINESS or CLOSED FOR GOOD scribbled across them. The few remaining ventures were the usual staples: a bank on one corner, a decrepit realtor’s office halfway down the street, a McDonald’s at the far end. This was a town—one of many—that had been left behind.
As Rhett led the group onto the broiling asphalt, focusing on the push, on where it was taking him, he caught sight of a faded, weather-beaten sign just at the edge of where the town began: WELCOME TO TURNSTILE, ARIZONA—POP. 743.
“Quaint, isn’t it?” Basil murmured. Mak shushed him.
The group paced down Main Street with Rhett still in the lead, feeling the invisible guide growing stronger. They were getting closer.
As they passed the bank, Rhett glanced over and saw the lone teller with her pinky jabbed up her nose, digging around. He grinned. He felt like he was in the old west, part of a gang of outlaws about to hold up the entire town. Their feet clopped against the hot road and he could almost hear the sound of spurs rattling.
They walked on, with the defunct shells of Turnstile’s businesses rolling past them, until they got to the end of the street, where the McDonald’s sat on one side. On the other, sitting in an oversize, rock-strewn, weed-littered lot, was a diner.
It was a relic, a long cylinder of metal, like a bullet with windows, propped up on cinder blocks and reflecting the sun in slippery glints. There were tubes of cracked or broken neon lining its edges, and the few signs that were hanging in the windows (OPEN, TODAY’S SPECIALS, ASK ABOUT GIFT CERTIFICATES) were barely legible, the words blasted out by the sun over the span of who knew how many years.
Rhett stopped in front of the diner. The push, now almost overpowering him, propelled him closer to it.
“This is the place,” he said. And without waiting for anybody to doubt him, he took the steps up to the door and let himself in.
A bell over the door jingled as he stepped inside, but nobody looked up or glanced in Rhett’s direction. He wasn’t even sure if he’d heard the bell himself. It had sounded more like a clacking sound than a jingle, the way a bell sounds when you cup it in your hand and shake it. And had the door really opened? Or had his mind fabricated that so he wouldn’t have to deal with the wild concept of walking through walls? He could ask himself these questions until his ears bled, but he doubted that the answers would ever get any easier to hear.
While he glanced around at the tacky 1950s décor, the bell did its weird clack-clack-clack a few more times. The other four hadn’t doubted him after all.
There were only a couple of small groups in the diner. A foursome of teenagers in the back corner, cracking jokes at one another and trying to stifle their laughter for the sake of the atmosphere—they just had glasses of water in front of them. Near the window, there was a group of older folks still nursing their coffees, chatting quietly, occasionally darting annoyed glances at the teenagers. There was a single waitress. Her pretty brown hair fell to her shoulders, and her peach-colored uniform hugged her curves. She might have been just out of high school. Maybe the teenagers in the corner were some of her friends. Rhett doubted it.
The waitress was helping an older gentleman with touches of gray in his hair who was sitting by himself at the bar. She was leaning close, trying to hear his order.
Rhett felt the push nudge him in that direction.
“There,” he said, pointing at the man.
What would it be? Rhett thought. Heart attack? Stroke? Would he accidentally choke on a mouthful of steak and eggs? Would the guy just keel over for no …
But then the waitress was done jotting down the man’s order, and she had tucked her little notepad back into the pocket of her uniform as she stepped away from where the man sat, to pass his order along to the cook. When she moved away, the push moved with her.
“Wait…” Rhett said. But Basil was patting him on the shoulder in that infuriatingly patient, parental way.
“Good work,” he said into Rhett’s ear. “We’ll take it from here. Just watch and learn.”
“But … that wasn’t…” He was stammering, trying to make sense of what was about to happen.
Mak, Treeny, Theo, and Basil all moved toward the young waitress, who was pouring a cup of coffee for the man she’d just taken the order from. She was whistling along with Ritchie Valens playing “La Bamba” out of speakers in the ceiling. She finished pouring the coffee and turned to put the pot back on the burner, her hips swaying with the song now.
Before Rhett could even imagine what might happen next, the girl stopped. She was standing between the bar and the back counter, where the coffeemaker was waiting to receive its steaming pot. But the pot was still in her hands. And then it wasn’t. The coffee pot slipped out of her fingers and dropped to the linoleum, where it shattered and sprayed hot liquid in every direction. The sound was like an enormous egg cracking.
Mak stepped behind the bar, casually, slowly, while Basil, Theo, and Treeny took up positions around her, creating a blockade. Mak moved closer to the girl, who was now just standing there, facing the back wall, steam from the spilled coffee curling around her legs. The older guy, the one the waitress had helped just before, was looking at her, obviously concerned. He was saying something that Rhett couldn’t quite make out—“Hey, hun, you all right?” maybe.
Then the girl collapsed.
She sank to the ground, folding in on herself like an accordion, right into the spreading puddle of coffee, right into the waiting field of glass shards.
In some kind of trance, Rhett stepped up to the bar and peered over it. Beside him, the older guy was shouting something, yelling for help, but Rhett could barely hear him. His voice was lost in something else. It sounded like static. But buried in the white noise, Rhett could hear another sound. Something like a heartbeat, slowing … slowing.
The waitress lay on her side in a pool that was now equal parts coffee and her own blood. Sharp triangles of glass stabbed into her. Her eyes were open, darting around, panicking. Rhett could almost hear her thoughts: What’s happening to me? She looked terrified.
Mak knelt beside the girl, her knee dipping into the coffee, and Rhett had a flash of his own death, of the men trying to pull his body out of the car, hunting for a pulse. But Mak didn’t look for a pulse. She reached over and took the girl’s hand. Immediately the girl’s eyes focused, finding Mak and locking on to her, asking a hundred questions without speaking.
“It’s okay,” Mak whispered. Her face was all at once devoid of its rigid, bitter tension. Now her eyes were kind. She smiled a sad smile at the girl. Mak could have been an entirely different person. “You’re dying,” she said. “I don’t know why exactly. Something in your brain. It’s failing. But it’s okay. You can follow me. I’ll carry you over the threshold, to the clearing. We’ll be each other’s anchors. You are my weight and I am yours. I will find your way. And you will find mine. There is no emptiness on this side. There is no pain. This is not the end.” Mak leaned in closer until her nose was almost touching the girl’s. A tear ran out of the girl’s eye and rolled down her cheek. “This is not the end,” Mak whispered again.
Around them there was all kinds of commotion. The teenagers were standing in their booth, stretching their necks, trying to see what was happening. The elderly folks by the window were trying to get out of their seats, trying to come over and help. One of them was on the phone. But to Rhett, none of this was happening fast enough. It had the quality of a record playing on the slowest setting. Voices were long, moaning howls, and movements stuttered as if broken down into individual seconds.
Rhett sensed all this but never took his eyes off the dying waitress. He had been so eager to get here, to prove himself. For what? For this?
The girl’s head seemed to get heavier, sinking down into the soft cushion of her arm. Her eyes found some far-off point, and the light dwindled out of them. She was still.
Rhett wanted to tear his gaze away from the awful sight. But something else was happening. A wisp of thin, almost invisible white smoke crept out of the girl’s mouth and floated toward the ceiling. At first, Rhett thought it was more steam from the spilled coffee. He could see the tendrils of swirling mist stretching down into her throat, though. It was like a snake made out of fog, roping itself through the air as if coaxed by a song.
Mak leaned in again, with her lips nearly kissing the roiling smoke, and inhaled. What had escaped the dead girl’s mouth was captured by Mak’s. The pale smoke swirled down into Mak’s throat and vanished. Then she stood, giving the girl’s body one last sad look.
“All right,” Mak said. “Time to go.”
The world around Rhett returned to its normal speed and vividness, snapping back like an elastic string. Suddenly people were shouting for the cook to call 911. The guy who had been the last person served by the girl was clambering over the bar toward her body, knocking over saltshakers and napkin holders, trying to look brave but seeming more petrified. What is he going to do? Rhett thought. Surely this guy knew what Rhett knew, that this young woman, who had probably been stuck in this tiny town her entire life, had poured her last cup of coffee.
The guy hopped off the bar anyway, splattering into the brown, crimson-swirled lake, standing over the girl’s body, staring at it with a kind of rapt horror. The body lay on its side, soaking up one liquid and dispelling another, its eyes open, staring at nothing, staring at everything. There was no touching that. Not unless you wanted it to haunt you forever. And maybe it would anyway.
“Oy!” Basil yelled.
Rhett looked up and saw him and the other three standing in an archway under a handwritten sign that said RESTROOMS, and beneath that: LADIES FIRST.
“Snap out of it, mate,” Basil continued, though his voice was gentle. “The longer we hang around, the better chance we have of running into the you-know-whats. They’ll have sensed it by now, so it’s time to boogey.”
Rhett glanced out the window at the unyieldingly bright desert spread out around Turnstile, trying to make out any hooded figures that might be coming this way. There was nothing. But what reason did he have not to believe the others? This morning he’d been on a boat in the middle of an unknown ocean. He had taken one step through a door and now he was here, in a failing diner in a washed-up town on a great big slab of hot, rocky nothing. And something told him that they were about to step through another door and end up right back on that boat again.
Could he walk away?
Could he just ignore Basil and walk back out through the front door and leave them and the Harbinger and Captain Wise-Ass Trier behind? Would he always feel the push? Would he always feel the need to scoop up souls as they were thrust out of dying bodies? Probably. He had a feeling that it would eat away at him until his mind—the only thing that was truly his anymore—was a liquefied pool sloshing around in his pretend skull. Not to mention that he’d be alone. Completely alone.
“Mate!” Basil cried again over the commotion of diners still panicking, trying to make sense of the scene that had played out in front of them.
Rhett let go of the thought of running away and turned back, following the other four into the little alcove. Theo had to hunch over just to fit.
There were three doors back here. The one closest to the dining area was obviously the women’s room, and another farther down was for men. The third door had yet another handwritten sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“Treeny,” Mak said. “Little ladies, little boys, or employees only?”
Treeny stepped out from behind Theo, her rail-thin frame making her look like a tiny bug buzzing out from behind a tree. She was holding her tablet and glancing down at it, then up at the doors. Rhett didn’t know what kind of underworld Wi-Fi signal she got on that thing, but it must have been magical.
“Little … boys,” Treeny squeaked after a moment.
“You sure?” Mak asked, leveling her gaze at the tiny girl.
Treeny lowered her eyes and nodded as if she were embarrassed or ashamed. “I’m sure,” she said in, impossibly, an even smaller voice.
Mak nodded at Basil, who stepped over to the men’s room door and gripped the knob. He held it for a second, leaning close to the door as if trying to hear something. Then he jiggled the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open.
The sign on the door—the little stick man with the giant circle head—swung away from them, revealing the room of doors in the belly of the Harbinger. The hydraulic piston at the top of the door hissed and then popped, and then it began to smoke. It was trying to push the door shut against the force of another dimension.
Basil glanced up at this and said, “The connection’s not great. Everybody in.”
Theo went first, then Treeny, then Mak. Basil did a melodramatic bow and gestured for Rhett to go ahead of him, so Rhett did. He stepped through the door, imagining that if his body had been able to react to such things, his ears would probably have popped the way the hydraulics on the door had.
He glanced back just as Basil stepped through. There was a barely perceptible warble in the air around him as he did, and the image of the diner wavered slightly. Basil casually kicked the door shut with his heel, like a man who’s just gotten a snack out of the refrigerator. It slammed into its frame with a thudding finality, silencing the wailing sirens of an ambulance as it approached the diner.
* * *
“Mak,” Basil said. “Why don’t you show Rhett the steam room?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
Behind him, Rhett could see other groups of dark-clothed syllektors moving around the room, coming in from some doors, going out through others. He caught sight of cities and forests, hallways and bedrooms, fields and highways, even what looked (and sounded) like a dense jungle. The place was like Grand Central Station but with direct access to any place on Earth.
Mak sighed and rolled her eyes, and that brought Rhett back to the moment.
“Yeah, sure,” she said. “Why not? He’s earned it, I guess.”
“Precisely. Good work indeed, mate. Not many people come to grips with the lasso thing that quickly. I know I didn’t.”
“Uh … thanks,” Rhett replied, his voice distant even to himself.
“Not really great at taking compliments, are you?”
“What? No! I’m sorry. I’m just … I guess I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything. That girl, she was so young, she…” He trailed off. What he wanted to say was She wasn’t ready. He thought about the way it sounded and then he said it anyway. “I don’t think she was ready to go.”
The others stared at him with a mixture of pity and some species of annoyance. It’s the kind of look an employee gets at a job when they’re new and still excited to be there. Except Rhett wasn’t excited—he was completely overwhelmed.
“That’s not our call to make,” Basil said, a slightly bitter tinge hanging in his voice. “We don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. We just have to be there to collect the soul. And protect it. That’s all.”
“Are you coming or not?” Mak said. She was walking away, obviously tired of the conversation.
“Go on,” Basil said.
“Have fuuun,” Theo called, his deep voice toying and playful, the way it had been before breakfast.
Rhett went after Mak.
He caught up with her when she was already halfway up the steps to the next deck of the Column. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence, but she didn’t acknowledge him, either.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He struggled to keep up with her double-step strides, avoiding other syllektors as they meandered past them.
“Steam room,” she said. She didn’t offer any further explanation.
“I … I don’t know what that is.”
“Well then maybe you should wait and see,” she said through gritted teeth.
Two decks up from where the group had transported themselves to the Arizona desert and back, Mak got off the stairs and headed down a long hallway that was more like a tunnel. It was empty. Their footsteps rattled off the walls.
As they walked, Rhett noticed the walls changing, shifting to other versions of the ship’s decorum, the same stuff that he’d seen when Basil first brought him aboard. Here was the ornate carpet and the delicate woodwork, followed by the length of metal bulkheads bathed in their unhealthy yellow light, then the warped, twisted wooden floorboards and the flickering torches, tucked at the very end. The hall—the tunnel—came to a dead end at a wall of gray, moldy wood with a single torch hanging from it, the fire huffing from the breeze of their movement.
“Could you move?” Mak snapped.
“What?” Rhett looked at her. She was pointing at his feet. He looked down sharply. There was a trapdoor beneath him, with a metal ring to open it right between his shoes. “Oh,” he murmured. “Sorry.” He stepped back.
Mak sighed, reached down to yank on the handle. The trapdoor yawned open, groaning like the mouth it resembled. Mak let it fall open with a bang that swept back down the hall like a shock wave, then climbed in, using a ladder to descend into blackness.
“Grab the torch!” she called up.
Rhett mumbled, mostly to himself, “How the hell am I supposed to climb down there with a torch in my hand?”
“Then don’t grab it!” Mak yelled from the hole in the floor.
Rhett rolled his eyes and decided to leave the torch. He gripped the rungs of the ladder and started down, letting the shadows consume him. It didn’t take long for complete darkness to settle in around him. Above his head, the opening was a wavering orange square.
A few moments later, the darkness was washed out.
The dark walls around Rhett opened up. The ladder fed into a massive chamber at least the size of a small baseball stadium, which seemed to tilt to one side. It was made up of the same bowing wooden walls and floor. Ancient mold crept out of the corners, and the crossbeams were no longer straight but curved, in some places rising and falling in permanent squiggles.
What got Rhett’s attention, though, wasn’t the sad state of the chamber itself but what the chamber contained.
Settled into the middle of the floor, sitting more level than any other part of the room, was a glass cube. It had to be as tall and wide as a New York apartment building, with metal framework, making it look like some ultramodern living space. There was an extension jutting out from one side of the cube, with the same metal frame and glass walls, like a square tube, stretching away from the cube and disappearing into the wall. Behind the glass, glowing a silvery blue like the moon, was a cloud of mist that looked exactly like what had come from the dead waitress’s throat. Only this one was four stories tall and lit the chamber with the same watery, ethereal glow as an aquarium.
Rhett could only stare, and Mak didn’t speak. They finished descending the ladder, stepping off one after the other onto the slanted wooden boards. Mak approached the cube while Rhett stood gaping up at it, mouth hanging open, wondering how, after all he had seen just today, he was still in awe.
There was an average-size door cut into the bottom of the cube, sealed by more glinting metal framework. Mak stepped up to it and placed her hand on the glass. When she took it away, a foggy imprint of her splayed fingers and palm remained. It faded slowly, then the door clicked open.
The moment it did, the room was flooded with the sound of whispering voices. The noise was such that you couldn’t make out any individual words, but the tangle of them was maddening. Rhett wanted to cover his ears. But he wouldn’t look like a coward in front of Mak. Not after he’d just started to prove his worth.
He watched Mak pull the door open and get as close to the cube as she could. She leaned in, opened her mouth, and exhaled. The mist, the soul of the girl from Arizona, came pluming out of Mak’s mouth as if it were her breath on a frigid day, and it was gathered up by the gently swirling cloud inside the cube. Mak stared inside for a moment, with the incessant whispers of the dead echoing around them, until a satisfied look spread across her face. She pushed the door shut. The room went quiet again, and Rhett could barely contain his relief.
“I don’t have to explain what this is to you, right?” Mak asked, walking back to where Rhett stood.
“It’s … incredible,” he said in response, staring up at the luminescent storm in the box.
She looked with him. She crossed her arms, admiring what was at least partially her own handiwork. “It is.”
“It protects them?”
“From everything. Not even a psychon could get inside that thing. If the ship goes down, the souls are safe. No matter what.”
Rhett pointed at the off-shooting tube. “Where does that go?”
“It circulates throughout the ship. The Harbinger is meant to carry and protect the souls, but the souls also help to power it … to power us. Without the Harbinger there would be no souls…”
“… and without the souls there would be no Harbinger.” Rhett thought about his first journey inside the ship and the glass staircase with what he had thought was a big aquarium under it. What he’d actually been looking at were more souls.
“You ready for another go?” Mak asked.
That snapped Rhett back to attention. “Wait … what?”
“You can’t feel it?” she said, echoing the same question she’d asked when they’d first arrived in Turnstile.
And, as a matter-of-fact, Rhett did feel it this time. The push was back. Somebody else’s time was up.
“Another one?” he asked, his voice low.
“Another one,” Mak said.
* * *
They went again.
And again.
All they had to do was follow the push. The push gave them a door through which they would turn up at any seemingly random location. The push guided them to a person, a person who was about to lose hold of their soul, sending it thin and vulnerable into the open air as they died. After that, Rhett realized, the push was always gone. Once the soul was collected, they were on their own to find a way out of there. But Treeny always found a second door somewhere close by that would get them back on board the Harbinger.
Rhett wasn’t ready for any soul-gathering just yet. He was more than happy to follow the push and guide the others to where they needed to be—which Mak made him do every time, anyway. But the idea of pulling another soul into himself, of carrying that burden even for the brief journey from the living world back to the Harbinger, was more than he was ready to commit to.
So Basil and Theo both had their turns.
After Arizona, there was Tokyo, a smear of throbbing lights with arteries of pedestrians flowing through it. Basil collected the soul of a man who had been hit by a car. He lay on the street, with a huge screen announcing some kind of juice product flashing above him, while others paced around him, maybe not realizing what was happening, maybe not caring. He was bleeding out of his ears and his shoes were missing. Basil was as delicate with the man as Mak had been with the waitress, using essentially the same words to ease the process of death.
This is not the end.
Then it was Theo’s turn. And the big guy was about as good at being gentle as a rhinoceros would be. In fact, he seemed more nervous than anything—his interests were obviously more in the realm of security. The soul he collected belonged to a woman in northern Canada, in the mountains, where she’d gotten lost and was freezing to death. Theo fumbled some of what he was trying to say, but he got the job done. He pulled the woman’s soul into his lungs and left behind the blue, frostbitten shell.
That one had been a bit of a trek, and at one point Mak was sure that Rhett had lost the push and had resorted to leading them around aimlessly. She couldn’t quite hide her surprise when the poor woman finally turned up.
After that, Mak went again. Rhett was curious why Treeny wasn’t taking a turn but decided it was best not to ask.
They were in Brazil, in a shimmering patch of rain forest, where someone had built a small house and was living on their own, maybe doing research, maybe just enjoying the beauty of the enormous trees and the dapples of sun falling on the forest floor. Inside the house that was really more of a hut, they found a boy. There was a picture on the table of the kid with who must have been his father, and there were things that belonged to the father, like clothes and books. But the boy was alone, lying on a cot, shivering, dripping sweat, curled up under a blanket that he had bunched up under his chin. Rhett noticed a pot still dripping in a strainer. Wherever the dad was, he hadn’t been gone very long. And when Mak knelt down beside the boy and took his hand, she told him that she didn’t know why exactly he was dying, but that she thought he might have been poisoned by something.
All of it must have happened so quickly, Rhett thought. The dad was going to come back to find his son dead in his cot. What would that look like? Rhett didn’t want to know. Mak was gentler than any of them had been all day.
Over the course of the day, they intersected with other teams, passing through the room of doors, passing through the steam room. Groups of five or six each were spending their day doing the same thing Rhett and his teammates were doing. Rhett was so overwhelmed by it all, by the sheer vastness of the operation, that he was almost impressed. Was every day like this? Were there slower days? He hoped so. He hoped against his better nature that every now and then there was a day when not a single door was opened and not a single soul collected.
But he knew better.
Rhett insisted on following everybody to the steam room as they went. He couldn’t quite get enough of it. It was brilliant and beautiful. It was life and death at the same time, the essence of humanity but without all the bodies. He could have spent entire days in there, watching it, imagining that lovely fantasy of a day when it wouldn’t have to be opened.
As Rhett and Mak made their way down to the steam room for the last time that day, they passed several groups heading back. The tunnel was crowded with syllektors who had finished dropping off their last … what? Deliveries? Deposits? What do you call the most important cargo ever?
“Last one out as usual, Mak?” someone called. It was a lanky guy with tattoos scrawled up and down his arms, images that might have once had color to them but were now completely black—they were just shapes. Rhett couldn’t tell if the guy was being sarcastic or not. Either way, Mak ignored him.
They did their business. Mak transferred the soul of the little boy into the cube, and Rhett watched, already trying to mentally prepare himself for the moment when he’d have to do the transferring.
When it was done, they climbed back up the ladder to the trapdoor. Mak swung it shut with another vicious bang. They walked together down the tunnel toward the stairs.
“Heading to the mess hall for dinner?” Mak asked.
At first Rhett didn’t even realize she had said something to him. Some still-wonky part of his brain interpreted the sound as his own thought, a question to himself.
“Are you … actually speaking to me?” he said. “Like, with words?”
She rolled her eyes. “The captain told me I should try to give you a break.”
“When did you talk to the captain?”
“Last night.” She had her hands behind her back, walking with the same impenetrable purpose. But her voice was softer, more casual.
“It took you all day to warm up to me?” Rhett asked.
She shrugged. “I needed to see you. Out there, I mean. Anyone can come onto this ship and claim to be okay with what goes on here. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to stomach the actual work.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly an easy sell.” In fact, he still wasn’t entirely convinced.
“That’s what the captain said,” Mak replied. “I just needed to see you respect it.”
“Respect what?”
“The fact that it’s not a choice. It’s not a system. It’s random. And it’s cruel. That little kid back there … he probably just ate some random berry or something. Perfectly innocent. And that was all it took for his life to be over.” She was focusing hard on her feet as they moved below her, leading them out of the tunnel. “Us. You. Your parents. Nobody sees it coming.”
Now Rhett reached out and stopped her, grabbing her forearm. He didn’t think she’d allow herself to be turned, but she surprised him. She spun, her eyes wide, not quite angry, not quite sad.
“My parents?” Rhett said, his voice rough. He searched her eyes. “Which one did you bring back? My dad?”
She broke his gaze and took a small step away from him, pointing herself back down the tunnel toward the steam room.
“Theo got your dad,” she barely whispered.
“So my mom, then. My mom…” He wanted to be angry. He wanted to scream and shake her. But she’d wanted this. She’d brought it up so that he would know. And somehow he was grateful. The image was just too much, though. “You watched her die,” he said. “You let it happen even though she wasn’t ready.”
“That’s my point, Rhett. You heard Basil. It’s not up to us. None of us are ready. And that’s what I need you to understand.” She was still facing away from him, arms folded across her chest now.
“Is that why you didn’t want me on the team?” Rhett said. “Or was it because of what happened to your old teammate?”
Mak whirled around. She buried her gaze into him like a sword.
“Don’t ask me that question again,” she said. “Ever.”
Rhett nearly stumbled back. “O-okay. I’m sorry,” he stammered. She tried to step around him, but he blocked her. “And thank you,” he said quietly. “For taking care of my mom.”
Mak stared back at him for the briefest of seconds and then gave him a stiff nod.
With that she kept walking in silence, and Rhett had to collect himself before catching up.
“I’m going back to my cabin,” she finally said, her voice rough and edgy again.
“You’re not hungry?” he asked.
“Are you?”
Rhett thought about it, and of course he wasn’t hungry. Not in the way he used to be. But the night before and this morning he’d had a desire to eat. Just another formality of the living that helped give him a sense of normalcy. But tonight?
“No,” he said. “I’m not. Can I walk you back to your room?”
She looked at him sidelong, slitting her eyes. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know. I just … don’t want to be totally alone. Not yet.”
After a pause, Mak nodded. “Just to my door.”
They went on without speaking. There were a million questions that he could have asked. A million things to speculate on and comment on and wonder aloud about, just to get some kind of feedback. But he suspected that once he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He decided to let the silence be, a weird species of contentedness falling between them.
Her room was down another hall opposite from where Rhett’s was. He followed her down it, surprised to see her hands fidgeting behind her back.
Mak turned to say good-bye, reached behind her, and pushed her door open a crack. From within, a voice called out.
“It’s about bloody time, love!” Basil said. “How long does it take to drop off a single soul?”
Mak had her eyes shut, grimacing. Rhett was still struggling to comprehend.
When Mak pushed the door open all the way, Rhett got a full view of Basil lying in her bunk, a blanket covering his lower half … and nothing covering the upper half. Basil and Rhett locked eyes.
“Oh…’allo, mate!” Basil said, exaggerating his accent either on purpose or from his surprise.
“I’m sorry,” Rhett said quickly. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Mak cut in. “Just … don’t make a big deal. Okay? And keep it to yourself.”
“I … yes, I can do that.” For one horrible second, Rhett thought he was going to pantomime locking his mouth shut and throwing away the key. He caught himself just in time.
“Training tomorrow,” she said. “Someone has to teach you how to use that ridiculous thing.” She gestured to Rhett’s thigh, where the knuckle blade had rested in its holster all day, unused.
Mak backed into her room, with Basil still looking wide-eyed behind her, and shut the door without another word.
“Good night,” Rhett said to no one.