Below, in the center, an empty chair.
Robbie’s chair, she knew. Not hers. But Ellie could pretend all the same.
You bastards, came the thought, air burning in her lungs. You’re better without me, than with me. Why couldn’t you all be lovely like this when I was still alive?
Maybe then I wouldn’t be dead.
The frozen family did not respond, would not respond, even when time re-started. Ellie knew this. She was invisible. She was dead. Nothing would change the past—but she wanted. Oh, how she wanted to march up the stairs to her old room, click her pocket-watch, and go back. To stop herself. To paradox herself alive again.
Ellie let out her breath. She scuffed her boot, scowled. I thought I was going to be less sentimental from now on, she told herself. This was a bad idea to come here.
They ban reapers from visiting family for a reason, after all. She squeezed her eyes shut, counted to ten, opened them again. Her family looked strangely pastel in the afternoon light, her father’s lips curled into a smile even as he was opening his mouth to chew them out. But playfully, this time. Not in bitter seriousness.
And then Ellie realized:
Time was not re-starting.
Chapter Seven: Niles Hepburn Stops a Disaster.
For a long moment Ellie stood and stared at the three-dimensional portrait of the perfect family that only became perfect when one member was missing.
They did not move.
Sucking in a breath, Ellie yanked out her pocket-watch and stared at the dials. The one for space was correct, listing her address. And the one for time was correct, too—
But it was frozen.
The seconds hand had stopped, was not struggling to tick to the next dash. It read:
Prime Meridian, Four Hours, Twelve Minutes, and Eighteen Seconds. 4:12:18 P.M.
Between the rivets, all the moving pieces—the gears, the dials, the discs—were motionless. Lifting the golden birdcage to her ear, she found no ticking.
Something’s gone wrong with my reaper’s tool, thought Ellie. Has to be. She had never heard of anything like this before, but that was the only explanation. Frustration boiled into her, a mask over any other emotion. She shook the pocket-watch.
There was no response. Like a rock. She resisted the urge to fling it away.
Somehow, her pocket-watch had broken.
Time had broken with it.
Shaking her head, Ellie snorted. Time broke, indeed. Perhaps this was part of why reapers were not supposed to visit their families. Or perhaps she had abused her pocket-watch one time too many, or dialed something wrong, and this was the result. She should go and report upstairs what had just happened.
They would fix her pocket-watch, and then she would endure whatever amount of solitary breaking one of the reaper’s tools had earned her. And somebody else would come and re-start time here using his own reaper’s tool. Probably Niles.
When he was done with Cookie and Shawn, anyway.
Ellie knew she should dial for upstairs and report what had happened. There was no getting out of this, time could not be frozen in her childhood home for long before someone would notice. If she acted quickly, then that would be a point in her favor. Trying to avoid consequences just made them worse.
But the silent pocket-watch was heavy in her hand. She felt numb. She should be concerned about what her punishment would be—but instead she did not care.
Why were they all so happy? They had not been so happy before she died.
Ellie scuffed her boot on the floor, observed her family again. Her father’s open mouth, her mother smiling mid-snip on a coupon. Her brother was still pouring, cup half-full, water running from spout to glass like a river of ice, but clear and crisp and glittery.
Above them all, the word-art seemed to be mocking Ellie:
...FOR THE FORMER THINGS HAVE PASSED AWAY.
Yeah, Ellie thought, and I’m the former thing. Bastards.
The words were Biblical, must be. Her father’s job at St. Andrew’s was the central focus of family life. Where was that passage from? Ellie racked her brain, and then memory came to her: Revelations. The Apocalypse of St. John. The endtimes prophecies.
Ellie’s body went from numb to cold.
What would happen if time did not re-start?
This was like an apocalypse, right here. Had she killed them, her family, simply by coming here and breaking her reaper’s tool? By flouting the rules about visiting?
Don’t be stupid, she told herself. If they were going to die, then upstairs would have known. They would have been placed in files and there would be a reaper or two here for them. Then the others would have seen me and taken me back upstairs.
Because reapers don’t reap family.
Letting out a breath, Ellie told herself: It’s just a fluke. A solveable mistake. No other reaper is here—and upstairs doesn’t make mistakes. Even when they send a reaper to a man who only died because she was there...
No. It’s my mistake, not theirs. There is no reason to worry.
I’m not afraid.
But last time she had thought those words, she had done the stupidest thing in her life. She had been lying to herself that time, too. Glancing away from her family, she turned and walked into the hall, past the living room where Paprika was motionless, wings flapping in midair. To the end of the hall, where the staircase rose.
Upstairs. The bedrooms.
Ellie halted at the foot of the stairs. In all her visits she had not gone up there. It was banned—more than visiting her family, more than using her reaper’s tool to muck around in time—no reaper was allowed to visit the location where they had died. But there it was, just up the stairs.
Her room, the first door on the right. Visible from where she stood. The door closed.
She did not know what she was thinking, coming to stand here. Maybe trying to justify her fear. Give herself a reason—because this frozen time thing was not a reason. No, the thought of going up there, of standing in the room was what frightened her—
Words floated to her, seemingly from down the stairs. Words that she had heard before. She knew that if she could sleep, they would appear in her dreams every night.
Niles’s voice:
Ellie Sullivan, you are sentenced to the commission of a reaper of souls.
You are to retrieve the immortal from the mortal, to consign the damned to Hell, to bring the saved to the gate of Heaven, and to comfort the dead.
This is an eternal sentence, without pardon and without parole, and worked diligently will be the sanctification of your soul.
“Ellie,” said the same voice, and she jumped in surprise—for a second, Ellie thought she had been wrong, a reaper had come for her family. Then she recognized the speaker, even as she turned. He would not be the one sent for them. Her family was safe.
Niles stood in the hallway, frowning. But Niles had a way of never directing frowns or frustration directly at you. As though the bad things you did were blamed in themselves, like he had achieved some kind of clear delineation between sin and sinner.
Somehow, Ellie thought, that made Niles’s frowns worse. She would rather he be angry than disappointed; she was all the more condemned for upsetting a man who did not blame her. It made Ellie want to do the right thing simply to avoid her conscience.
Niles was a tall, middle-aged man with a frame like a scarecrow. His hair was wild, as if he had not brushed it since he had died—whenever that had been. Ellie did not know Niles’s death story, but suspected that he was old. He wore a blue jacket no matter the weather, and never seemed out of sorts whether cold or hot. There were dimples on the bridge of his nose, but like all reapers, Niles did not need or wear glasses.
Ellie realized that he was waiting for her to speak, green eyes observing her. She said the only thing that came to mind: “Did Cookie bash Shawn’s brains in?”
“Ellie,” Niles repeated. There was something s
trange in his voice, as if he was distressed. He was not frowning now, though, but instead held a suspended expression, as though he did not know how to feel, or else was hiding what he felt.
I’ve done it now, Ellie thought. He’s more than just a little disappointed in me...
Sucking in a breath, Ellie said, “I did call you about them, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you certainly did,” and Niles settled on calmness as he slowly extended his fingers, like a man tentative to pet a stranger’s dog. “Give me your hand.”
That’s odd, Ellie wanted to say. Niles, you’re being odd. But she reached out and took his offer, and his grip closed with just enough gentleness that she did not feel like pulling back, but just enough firmness to tell her pulling would not work anyway.
“Come along,” Niles said, and she found him guiding her back down the hall, away from the foot of the stairs. She found herself glancing back, as though lured, but Niles tugged her arm and distracted her. They ended up in the kitchen, viewing her family tableau.
“Yeah,” Ellie said, quickly, so she could get her point in. “I didn’t do this on purpose.”
Niles was still frowning, but in confusion now. Whatever oddness had overtaken him at the foot of the stairs was gone, and he let Ellie’s hand go. “You did this?”
“Not exactly,” said Ellie.
“What happened?” and Niles moved to observe her father, peering into the other man’s eyes. For a moment, Ellie felt disoriented, as though looking at someone else looking into a funhouse mirror. But then Niles moved to her mother, and to her brother. When Ellie did not answer, he glanced at her with an eyebrow, prompting.
“I went back a couple years,” Ellie said. “I was a bit rough with the time dials,” she held up her pocket-watch. “And now it’s not working. I think it’s broken.”
“Broken,” said Niles, in a voice on the edge of incredulous. He reached out to touch the water spout that her brother was pouring, and—in a way that reminded Ellie of astronauts in zero gravity—the water moved with his finger, but did not fall. Nor did it keep moving—instead, the moment his pressure stopped, so did the water.
That’s odd, Ellie wanted to say. She wanted to recite something from an old science class: an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by... But apparently, in frozen time, that was not the case. Because time is motion, she thought.
Niles observed his finger, which Ellie could also see was dry. Rubbing his fingers together, he turned to her and held out his hand for her pocket-watch. She handed it over without a thought, but the moment the golden rivets left her skin she shivered, felt coldness sweep over her body. Like being outside without a coat.
Tilting the pocket-watch, Niles read the location and time on the dial, held it to his ear to confirm there was no ticking. He fiddled with the dials, but when that did not work to re-start the mechanisms, he handed it back. Ellie was grateful to find herself warm again.
“Well?” Ellie asked. “Am I going to get six months’ solitary, or what?”
“Nobody gets six months solitary,” said Niles, for once sounding vaguely admonishing. His frown did not go away. “But it is strange. If I didn’t know better, then I’d say you were right and it was broken.” He crossed his arms, seemed to look inside himself, contemplative. “But that’s impossible. Reaper’s tools do not break.”
“Beg to differ,” said Ellie, gesturing toward her family, then holding up her frozen pocket-watch. Niles turned to observe them again, and he shrugged.
“It is a mystery,” he said. “Let’s hope it is not a kerfuffle.”
“A what?” said Ellie, and the word was unexpected enough to almost make her laugh. She had almost forgotten: Niles had a hobby, much like Cookie’s theories and Shawn tormenting his assignments. Except Niles’s hobby was finding new or rare words.
“An unsolvable problem,” defined Niles. He gestured to the tableau. “We can re-start time for them, Ellie, but only if we figure out what happened first. Your reaper’s tool cannot be the source of the problem. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“But you’ve seen lots,” Ellie said, with an edge of petulance. She found it hard to believe that Niles did not know something. “And besides, what else can it be? There aren’t any baddies around here. And my reaper’s tool is on the fritz. It has to be the problem.”
“It cannot,” said Niles. “Trust me, Ellie.”
“But there isn’t anything else,” Ellie said, thinking back to the event. “And besides, it made this weird sound.”
And now Niles froze, his mouth downturned. “What sound?”
“Oh,” Ellie said, “like a grandfather clock. ‘Ching.’ I didn’t know reaper’s tools chimed.”
Niles sucked in a deep breath, dug in his jacket. He revealed his own reaper’s tool, which despite the similarities—the gold, the rivets, the gears and dials—was not a pocket-watch. Niles carried an astrolabe. Enscribed around the outer edge were foreign letters that, he said, represented constellations and intersections of planets.
Like Ellie’s pocket-watch, Niles’s astrolabe also told the time, but in terms of planetary motion. There were tick marks to show how far along each of the seven planets—minus Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto, but counting the sun and moon—had progressed.
Niles scanned the front dial’s face, and began to look grim. He held it up to his ear and then, clearly unsatisfied, lowered it to observe the face again.
Ellie’s eyes widened when she realized:
Niles’s reaper’s tool was frozen, too.
“What is it?” the words felt pulled from her. “What’s wrong?”
Niles shook his head, and twisted a dial, flicked one to its reverse side like an eye-doctor tinkering to test eyesight. “Ellie,” he said, “let’s go upstairs.”
He held out his hand to her, again, and then they were off.
Chapter Eight: Demolition Orders.
Upstairs was a mess. Ellie had never seen so many reapers in one place. There were familiar faces—Susan, bustle swinging as she hurried about—and plenty that Ellie knew only in passing. Even people she had never seen before.
Were these only the squads of Colorado Springs? But no—Ellie saw someone she knew was from the Castle Rock squads. And another reaper from Pueblo. And... and strangers. So many strangers. Who knew where they could be from—
Niles did not let go of her hand. He strode forward and Ellie followed, feeling a little like a child with its mother, but while this was embarrassing it was also strangely comforting. A large reaper with his belly big enough to fit a fetus bumped into her, nearly knocking her from her feet, but Niles pulled her upright and kept going.
“Josephina!” he shouted, above the ruckus, pronouncing the “J” as an extra-hard “H.”
She must have heard him in the fray, because Ellie saw the tall woman lift a hand and wave Niles over. The silvery rings that she wore on every joint of her fingers, together with the bracelets up to her elbows, glinted and made her easy to spot.
When they approached, Ellie was reminded of just how tall the other mentor was—over seven feet. She was even taller than Niles because she wore six-inch heels. Ellie had never seen her stumble in them, either, which was unfair.
“I see you found your troublemaker,” said Josephina, emphasizing the “your.” Ellie realized that Shawn sulked in Josephina’s shadow. A ball-and-chain was clipped around his ankle. Ellie had not seen this sort of punishment before.
“What are you,” she asked Shawn, “the ghost from A Christmas Carol?”
“Aren’t you funny,” sneered Shawn, but before he could say anything more, his mentor pivoted on her heels and slapped him upside the back of his head.
“No more,” said Josephina, and clearly meant it. Shawn went quiet. Niles frowned but did not intervene. Ellie realized, then, that he had delivered Shawn over to Josephina in lieu of punishing him or letting him off. Seemed that even Niles had limits.
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Ellie was about to ask what had happened to Cookie, but Niles had more important things on his mind. He gestured to her and said, “Ellie here heard the chime.”
Josephina snorted. “We all heard the chime.”
“I didn’t,” muttered Shawn, but so low that Ellie wondered if he had spoken at all. He probably was too busy whining and screaming about Cookie to Niles, she thought. No wonder Niles acts like he didn’t hear it; he probably hasn’t.
Behind Josephina, a third mentor—Oliver Carson, with his handlebar mustache—spoke, his words distorted by his cigar: “D’you think it’s a false alarm?”
“Has there ever been such a thing?” said Josephina, sounding baffled.
“Not that I’ve seen,” answered Niles. His voice sounded overly—forcibly—placid. The other mentors nodded as though this was a satisfying answer to the question. Mentally, Ellie added this comment to the evidence she kept to figure out Niles’s age—it seemed as though he was older than both Shawn and Cookie’s mentors.
“Besides,” added Niles, “for the chime to be mistaken reduces it to a fribble. Something of this importance cannot be rendered frivolous.”
Josephina snorted, but with fondness, and Carson grinned through his mustache.
Ellie was about to speak, to demand what was going on, but then among all the chattering bouncing on the golden pillars and the marble tile and echoing in the high ceiling, a voice like an elephant trumpet boomed: “Quiet! Quiet, everyone!”
The noise did not stop—if anything, it got louder. Foolish, Ellie thought, for this person to try to stop a bunch of gossiping reapers.
John Quinton, one of Niles’s former students, appeared at Ellie’s elbow. John had his blue hair done in a mohawk, but clumpy because he used spraypaint instead of dye. He was squinty in one eye, consequences of putting a bullet through his eyesocket into his brain. Problem was, which eye was squinty swapped every so often.
Ellie had never been able to figure out why.
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