By the time Ellie was standing next to the construction beams strung across the tomb’s outer building, she was playing hot potato with the shard, and decided to hold it through the fabric of her scarf. Her irritated bruises throbbed in time with the pulse emanating from the Spindle, now that she was close enough to distinguish the variation in the humming of its trapped power.
“Hold it up,” said the demon, but now its voice was faint, background noise.
Ellie did so—and the stone leapt from her fingers, like a flash of lightning, springing up to fill one of the cracks in the Spindle’s long beam of wavery light.
Ah, thought Ellie. So that’s how easy it is. Almost like the Spindle wants to be fixed.
She had been expecting to find this as the world’s worst puzzle game. Ellie hated puzzles. She had always found them a useless pastime; you spent hours putting pieces together, and when you were done, you just broke everything and shoved it all back into a box. Might as well use those few hours of your life doing something fun instead.
The Spindle’s radiation, if that is what Ellie could call the pulsing, was quickly becoming unbearable. Ellie had thought the room was bad enough, but now coming closer was teaching her a lesson by comparison. She backed away, headache beating against her sinuses, her ears ringing, the bruises on her throat throbbing.
“You see,” said the demon, once Ellie was in range to hear it again. “Simpler in some ways, harder in others. But look—see what is still missing?”
Ellie observed the Spindle, and the spot where the shard had been restored. It was in the middle of a crack, she realized, and there were pieces still missing up and down the fault line, like the channel of a river. And there was a small intersection—one now blocked off by the shard that she had restored.
“So there’s a lot of missing pieces,” she said.
“You soul-stealers are blind,” said the demon. Ellie turned to glare at it, but its head was cocked, gazing down at her shrewdly. “I never knew how blind.”
“Don’t be cryptic,” said Ellie. “Explain, I’m not gonna wait all day.”
The demon began scaling down the wall, and Ellie forced herself not to back away. It has more need to be afraid of me, than me of it, she told herself. Still, as it reached the floor, the demon reminded Ellie of times in her life when she had reason to be afraid of small animals, such as discovering a spider on the floor, a mouse in the closet.
“We have hundreds of shards collected already,” said the demon, “but we cannot replace them, not yet, because we need them to find more of them. Like calls to like. If we find one piece of shard, it can lead us to its neighbors. We could find them all, in one long chain, but then there are pieces like that.” And it jerked its head at the piece Ellie had replaced.
With a heavy feeling, Ellie looked harder at the Spindle, and saw that not only had the shard she replaced cut off an intersection, there were also small slivers missing in isolation, without the river-channels of missing shards connecting them.
“And so you see why we need the soul of the traitor, the world-ender,” said the demon. “Like calls to like. He broke the Spindle, he is now connected to every shard. He can find all the pieces that are cut off from being found.”
Ellie said, trying not to let her anger boil over, “You tricked me.”
The demon cocked its head again, “Beg pardon?”
“You gave me that shard, and now it is not able to be used to find the other missing piece,” said Ellie. “You intentionally cut off a way to find that other piece, so now we need this man’s soul, because I replaced that one piece too soon.”
“You are so cynical,” the demon replied. “What makes you think I knew where in the Spindle that shard belonged? And besides—you saw its light fading. Soon it would have evaporated and been gone, and then there would be no fixing the Spindle, ever.”
Ellie heaved in a breath, forced calmness. She did not believe these protestations of innocence for even a moment. I’ll squish you later, she thought. Revenge.
“Are we aware of our needs?” said the demon. “Are we agreed?” And before Ellie could answer, the thing’s neck and face were bulging again, as it hocked up another piece.
How many you got in there? Ellie almost wanted to ask, feeling her features twist in disgust. Why would demons have a digestive tract fit to store shards anyway? Do you poop out souls when you’re finished chewing on them?
When the demon was finished puking up the shard, it asked, “Will you accept this as a binding agreement? You will find the shards connected to this one, and when we are running out of shards to find, you will retrieve the traitor’s soul?”
“I’ll take it. I’ll do whatever it takes,” Ellie said, and turned to Cookie to finish, “Someone has to do what it takes, because other people want to keep their hands clean.”
She did not know why she did this, even as she did. Cookie’s objections were reasonable—even if they ultimately did not solve anything. But as Cookie flinched, Ellie realized: she was happy that Cookie was still here, but she was furious that Cookie was standing there, instead of beside her. That Cookie had forced her to be the bad guy.
Why couldn’t you just grin and go along with me? The words neared her lips, but Ellie stifled them in time. Best not to go overboard. Cookie was still here, she thought.
Gingerly, Ellie picked up the new, more slimy shard. The demon was standing in the spit puddle, so as Ellie did so, her face got closer to the thing than any demon before. Smelled awful. Putrid, like rotting flesh. Ellie wrinkled her nose, pulling away quickly.
Ellie held the shard between thumb and forefinger as though it might bite her. Lifting it to her face, she saw that it was bigger than the other, its light stronger. Not in danger of evaporating, then. Probably why this one was the one to search with.
“We cannot find connecting pieces to that shard,” said the demon. “But we can feel that it does have some. So it must be connected through time, which we cannot access.”
“Right,” said Ellie. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Use your infernal tool, soul-stealer,” said the rat-thing. “It should guide you.”
With her clean hand, Ellie dug into her breast pocket and retrieved her pocket-watch. She held the face up to the shard, and to her surprise the dials and gears began to turn, soundlessly, until they were another setting. She read the numbers and her eyes widened. This would be a heck of a trip.
“Okay guys,” she said, “you heard the rat. Time is wasting, let’s get going.”
This time, it was Shawn who took Jude by the sleeve. As Ellie clicked the knob of her reaper’s tool, her last sight of the present was the demon grinning.
Chapter Nineteen: Shard Collection in 1967.
They were standing in a street rather reminiscent of the first, with jigsaw houses assembled in a motley of centuries. There was a cast of light in the east—the rising sun, Ellie guessed. But she was distracted by something else:
Everything was moving.
Makes sense, she thought, this is the past, time hasn’t frozen yet. Still, she found it all invigorating: the currents of air as though the atmosphere was breathing, wisps of grass among the cobblestones, moths hovering around a streetlamp.
The lamp flickered, went out. Ellie heard roaring, far away like thunder—and in the wake came a rumble, so that she could feel the earth trembling all the way up her boots to her knees. Not lions, she thought. Explosions.
“Where are we?” asked Jude, gazing around, and then he must have realized from the buildings they were still in Jerusalem, and corrected, “When are we?”
Ellie glanced back at the dials, to reconfirm. “June 7, 1967.”
“Huh,” said Cookie, quietly. “That sounds... familiar, somehow. Is something going on?”
All three reapers glanced at Jude, who had been eager to explain Schrodinger’s Cat and the double slit experiment, but he shrugged. “I dunno. The sixties? Time of peac
e and love and hippies?”
“Some college boy you are,” Shawn repeated the words he had said before in the library, though this time his voice was nastier.
Another roll of thunder—but closer, more discernable as manmade, familiar as the sound from a film, something exploding. Loud enough to make Ellie’s ears pop. And the shout of a man up the street. Whatever was happening was coming closer.
“This is not our problem,” Ellie said, clearing her head. “We have to find the shard.”
At once they started looking, like children hunting for easter eggs. Cookie combed through the pavestones with her head tilted; Shawn and Jude looked along the curb and walls, Shawn’s ball-and-chain clinking and clunking as he traveled down the street. Ellie followed, wondering why the other shard was not immediately visible.
In frustration, Ellie held up her shard, which was drying but still slick with demon spit.
“That nasty piece of work had better not tricked us,” she muttered. As she did so, however, she was surprised when the shard began to brighten, just a bit.
“Uh...” came Cookie’s voice. “Guys? We got company.”
Ellie approached to where Cookie was, and found a group of men in hiding. They were wearing what looked like old military uniforms that had round bowl-shaped helmets with some kind of netting stretched over them. And big guns.
One of the men said to his companions, in what Ellie’s reaper senses told her was Hebrew, even though she understood plain as English: “I’m sick of waiting.”
He was looking right at Ellie as he said that, and this would have been uncanny, but Ellie had been a reaper long enough to remember she was invisible.
“Are they...?” Cookie asked, as she and Shawn strode past Ellie for a better look. Ellie glanced at Cookie and held up the shard, which was ever slightly brighter.
“Look,” she said, “It’s glowing more.”
“Does that mean the other shard is close?” Cookie wondered. Shawn and Jude, hearing this, looked over the men and their position but, finding nothing, shrugged, and started walking further down the street, still searching.
Ellie began: “I don’t understand why we can’t see it—”
—but she was interrupted by an oblong box the size of a small bus trundling around the far corner of the street. Ellie’s senses recognized a tank, yet her mind took a moment to catch up. She inhaled and let out a breath that sounded like, “Well, shit.”
The men crouched in the alley were quicker. Someone yelled “Run!” and they scattered.
The tank cranked its squat neck and lifted its nose. The treads kept crawling. Ellie only saw the trap just before the tank rolled overtop. Its metal husk lifted in a pillar of fire.
Ah, she thought, as heat blasted her face, so those guys were as worried over their booby-trap as they were over that thing shooting them.
Scorched, Cookie and Shawn took a step back, but Jude hit the pavement with his arms over his head, even as shrapnel fell around him. As Ellie suspected, the rules for Jude were the same as any other soul—he was dead, and therefore also invisible.
While this meant nothing would harm Jude, he could still feel the echoes and aftereffects of events, same as Ellie. Sweat beaded against her scarf in the heat. Cookie and Shawn, although the fire had passed over them, were unburnt, but blinking their eyes to clear spots in their vision, like they had both looked into the sun.
The fire remained even after the explosion was over, providing enough light to see that while the body of the tank was mostly intact, it would not be rolling or aiming anywhere anytime soon. One of the men in the alley, his netted helmet particularly knotty, let out a whoop of joy and scrambled over a small stone wall to see closer.
The top of the tank popped, and another man’s torso emerged in the flames.
“Pig Jews!” the tank man screamed in Arabic. “Allah curse you sons of apes and swine!”
The first man’s eyes were blocked from Ellie’s view by his netted helmet, but he must have understood he was being insulted, for his mouth flexed into a grin.
The man in the tank heaved a gun to his shoulder and fired. Bullets came in one long mechanical roar. Flecks of stone pavement and dust chopped through the air at the net-helmeted man, but he charged straight along the street toward the downed tank.
It was the craziest thing Ellie had seen in a long time.
Even Shawn and Cookie, despite their experience as reapers, forgot themselves and dodged out of the man’s path, each ducking close to opposite sides of the street.
If the world was made only of order and logic, then by rights the net-helmeted man should have been chewed into ground beef. But instead—as living proof that the world was magical, supernatural, and therefore insane—Ellie watched as net-hat lifted his pistol and fired, a clean shot that blew the tank man’s face off.
Cookie screamed. Shawn yelled a rushed version of “Ohshit!” Jude, still sprawled on the pavement before Ellie, stared at the three reapers in amazement, as if more concerned about their invulnerability than the net-helmeted man’s.
And Ellie—she was close to laughter, close to tears, exhilarated. She had seen far too many people die in more gruesome and stupid ways to be upset by witnessing the death, and watching this man survive and succeed against all odds had her insides clotted, twisted, close to bursting. She thought: sometimes you do win!
The man with the netted helmet stopped running, and began patting himself down, huffing and gasping. When he finished providing himself with evidence that he was unharmed, he turned and shouted: “You guys will never believe—”
But his voice trailed off, and Ellie saw his eyes widen as he looked through her to his companions—except he was not looking past her—he was seeing her—
Confusion smeared across his face. He paused. Which was why he did not see another man emerge from the tank to shoot him in the back.
Shit, thought Ellie. And I was rooting for you, too. The soldier fell, writhed in clear agony. Blood bubbled and gurgled from his back like a fountain, oddly black and brackish in the fire-light of the burning tank husk. He clawed at the dust on the cobblestones.
Then he gazed up at Ellie and groaned, “Help me.”
Ellie’s mind stuttered. Now the man in front of her was not a young twentysomething wearing a net-helmet, but instead was a sixtysomething with greying hair and buggy eyes lying on the pavement in front of Stella’s Café and Bakery. Two images superimposed, begging, lifting their hands to her. Mercy. Help us.
She did not know what to say to either of them.
But this time Cookie was here. She was at the soldier’s side, immediately, her hand reaching for his. She said something, a murmur like, “It’s all right, you’re not alone...”
Ellie blinked, heaved in a breath, reminded herself that time had not frozen, not for her. It’s not the same, she argued to herself; he was already out in the street, even if he hadn’t seen me, he probably would have been shot. I didn’t cause this death.
This couldn’t be another paradox.
But as she thought these words, Ellie realized what was happening—
They were in a warzone. People were dying.
Death meant reapers.
Reapers meant observers—who could not be observed. If they did not find the shard soon, then soon they would be unable to remain here. The cosmos, the laws of nature, God—whatever, they would be kicked out.
Jude, who had regained his feet, stood beside her and said, “So, is this an average day on the job for you, or what?” His voice was hard to read, not humor, not condemnation.
“Kinda,” said Ellie, stepping forward to nudge Cookie, interrupting her reaper’s talk, “Leave him. We gotta—” find the shard, she was going to finish—
“No,” Cookie shot back, sounding more sure than anything Ellie had heard before.
“His real reaper will be along soon,” Ellie pressed, and then louder, “We have to find the shard. Rig
ht now. No observing the observer, remember? Other reapers show, and we’re sunk.” That would be her luck—to fail saving the world on the first try.
“Is that it?” said Shawn, who had stepped closer and was pointing at the puddle of blood expanding around the man’s prone body, which was heaving big, rib-expanding breaths, as though air could replace loss of circulation.
Ellie had to peer around Cookie to see what Shawn was pointing at, but when she lifted the shard she held like a flashlight in the dusky morning, she saw a corresponding glow begin to grow from the man’s wound, and there was the second shard, opaque in blood.
I see, she thought. As that demon said: Like calls to like.
Snatching the new shard with her free hand, uncaring if her fingers got wet, Ellie found that both shards glowed brighter, blinding, in proximity. She shoved them in her pockets to save her eyes from the light and heat. They were two coals burning holes in her coat.
“I’m sorry,” said Cookie to the man, Ellie just barely heard the words below the sound of more roaring further off. “We have to go. But someone will be along to help you. Soon. I promise. He’ll come and help you, and things will be all right. It won’t hurt. And when it’s over, then you’ll be in the place where you are meant to be.”
“Girl,” the man gasped back. “What is your name?”
Ellie saw her friend smile and say, “Cookie. What’s yours?”
“I don’t know if I should tell,” gasped the man, his body beginning to heave. Death throes. “My mother tells the story of the angel of death. She said, if near death, change your name and you will be passed over. If I change my name, will I be spared?”
Uncertain, Ellie glanced at Cookie. She was not familiar with this story, would have guessed that Cookie was not, either. If Ellie had been left to her own devices, all she could think of would be to shake her head, or not respond at all.
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