“What’d you do?” said Yellows, when Shawn emerged. “How’d you break this thing?”
“Never underestimate my ingenuity,” said Shawn. The other three reapers laughed. Ellie was insulted, somehow, that they could be so light-hearted. The world was ending and they were still pleased about finishing their long workday, it seemed.
Yellows said, “I’m half a mind to report you to Josephina. She really pulled out the stops to make sure you were punished but still able to work, all hands on deck for the last reaping and all that. But you not only broke free, you’re also ducking work, yeah?”
Shawn squared his shoulders, and said, with confidence: “Well, yeah.”
“Thought so,” Yellows said. He readjusted his cap, which remained crooked. “Still... I guess it’s for the best. Don’t want you messing with souls as a last hurrah.”
Shawn shrugged. “I might have played a bit.”
Yellows clucked his tongue. Marcus and Sven frowned. Yellows said, “Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because playtime and vacation are over. You can get back to reaping now that we don’t have to watch you to make sure you don’t screw with someone.”
Ellie’s lips twisted in confusion, just as Shawn said, “What do you mean?”
“While you were dicking around, all the souls have been reaped,” said Sven.
Ellie felt the insides of her mouth go dry. Her gums tightened around her teeth.
Behind her, Jude let out a puff of air that might have finally been a real curse, but she could not tell for sure. Ellie felt her hand moving, reaching up, and did not stop herself from grabbing her scarf and pulling until her head felt ready to separate from her neck.
Every soul had already been reaped? That included—
Mom, she thought. Dad. Robbie.
Where were they now?
When they had been frozen, they had been none the wiser. But now they were probably upstairs. In the waiting room, or whatever the mentors had constructed to temporarily house the souls. Reap first, weigh hearts later. Did her family even know what was going on? Perhaps they were still naked, did not realize they could project clothes.
Maybe they think they’ve been abducted by aliens or something, Ellie thought. This end of the world doesn’t exactly match what happened in the Left Behind books. Unless someone tells them, they probably won’t realize this is the apocalypse.
Ellie did not know which was worse: that her family might think they were hallucinating, or kidnapped, or for them to know the truth. That this was the end of everything.
Not if I can help it, she thought, even prayed, as if her words could reach them. Her vision was tunneling, as if she could reach upwards with her mind and project her thoughts. I’m working on it, Mom, Dad, Robbie. I’ll stop this. You’ll get to go home to our dumb house and clean up the Halloween decorations and play with that stupid parrot.
I won’t let things end for you like this. Not when you all were finally so happy.
What were they doing now? Was her mom crying? She imagined her father’s helpless frustration. He had never been good at managing women crying. The one she had trouble picturing was Robbie—he had changed so much, she did not know whether he would be more like her and their father, uncertain how to react to emotion, or more like their mother, who knew all the right things to say when someone was upset.
Ellie’s vision was darkening. Her head felt unattached to her spine. Floating free like a balloon. She tipped her skull forward and rested her forehead against the metal of the bookcase. Then there were hands, so strong that they were almost unrecognizable as such, grabbing at her own and tugging her scarf knot to loosen it.
Air filled her lungs. Ellie glanced up to find Jude staring down at her with fear and anger on his face. He whispered, simmering, “You often choke yourself half to death?”
Ellie resisted the urge to giggle at the absurdity of the question. Half to death, indeed.
But she must have made some noise, probably a snort, because the three reapers around Shawn called out, “Okay, who else is here?”
Cookie, further down the aisle, was watching Ellie and Jude with careful eyes, and when the three companions called this, she must have taken herself as appropriate bait rather than Ellie. She stepped out of the bookshelves and said,
“Hey, guys. How’s it going. What’s with saying all the souls are reaped? There’s no way you could have gotten to them in all in just a few hours.”
Ellie tried not to wince. Her vision was still spotty, not fully recovered, but she was aware enough to know this was one of the worst conversational segues she had ever heard. Things were not helped by Cookie being a terrible liar, so the stress of hiding Ellie and Jude was making her voice waver like a reed in the wind.
The three other reapers stared at her in confusion. Sven said, “A few hours? What’s that mean?”
Cookie narrowed her eyes at them, like they were being intentionally obtuse. She said, “Since the world ended. You mean we reaped the world in a matter of hours?”
Now all three reapers wore creases in the middle of their foreheads. Marcus said, “Seriously? A few hours? I know none of us has a working watch, but I can’t be the only one who can kinda guesstimate how much time has passed.”
Cookie said, “What do you mean?”
“We can’t know for sure, obviously,” said Marcus. “But I’ll bet it’s been like three days since time stopped. Maybe more.”
Ellie’s mouth was already open because she was breathing heavily after choking herself, but Jude’s dropped. She gazed through the bookcases without quite seeing anything. Three days had passed? Impossible. They had been to upstairs to read the rulebook, to Jerusalem, and found four shards. This was hardly half a day of work.
Cookie was also reacting badly. “Guys... no way. It’s been a couple hours since I got upstairs to find out what’s happened. Three days? That’s... crazy. It can’t be.”
And now they were looking at her like she was the crazy one. Yellows said, “Yeah... that sounds weird. I dunno what happened to you. Lost track of time? But,” and his voice was raised, “Ellie’s here too, yeah? Come on out, bratty girl.”
Not wanting to risk them coming to look for her and finding Jude, Ellie straightened and emerged from the aisle. The shards in her pockets felt heavy, and she hoped that their glow did not show through the fabric. She said, “How’d you know I was here?”
Marcus and Sven laughed. Yellows said, “What? Cookie and Shawn in the same place and not beating each other to a pulp? Someone had to intervene. And Cookie likes you enough to hang out, so it’s probably nasty girl Ellie Sullivan. Easy enough.”
“Plus, you’ve all three been kind of declared MIA,” said Sven. “So make sense that you’d be together. Niles and Josephina tried to find you by dialing your codes, but they couldn’t manage it.”
Ellie forced her face to remain calm, hoped that Cookie’s nervousness would not give them away. So, they had almost been caught. Reapers could jump to each other, if they knew the other’s code—that was how Cookie found Ellie so often.
But this only worked in the present. Both reapers had to be in the same time period to find each other this way. If a reaper was in the past, then no jump could occur unless the other also was in the same time of the past. The idea was to prevent interruptions during the weighing of hearts.
Don’t show any guilt, Ellie thought, as if the words could reach Cookie telepathically. Don’t give them the idea that we’ve been hopping through time. That’s the logical conclusion they would reach, but if we don’t give them reason to discuss it, they’ll probably chalk it up to sightseeing or chasing Shawn or whatever.
Their three interrogators examined Ellie’s face, then Cookie’s, then Shawn in turn. But they must not have seen anything worth commenting on, because Marcus asked,
“Have you guys been reaping one soul at a time for all this? That’s gotta be like the biggest drag ever. No wonder your sense of t
ime is screwed up.”
Marcus may have been acting normal, but Yellows kept frowning. He gazed at Ellie and adjusted his baseball cap again, except this only made the angle more crooked.
And Marcus approached, holding up his reaper’s tool, the slide rule. “Here. This is the code for reaping the bodies. That’s what we’re doing now, and next we’ll take on things like buildings, cars, stuff. Gotta get everything manmade before starting on nature.”
“Right,” said Cookie, lifting her compass and inputting the code, which Ellie saw involved setting time to zero, somehow. Shawn kept a respectful distance from Cookie and Ellie as he padded closer to take a look for himself.
Ellie did not even pretend to follow along. She stared at Sven, Marcus, Yellows, waiting for them to say, “Gotcha! We pulled one over on you! We actually are still reaping souls. Now tell us what you’ve been up to, troublemakers.” But they seemed sincere enough.
Until Yellows, clearly watching her lack of acquiescence, said, “Ellie.”
She merely glanced back at him—Yellows and her did not know each other very well, but they crossed paths occasionally like everyone else.
Yellows was on the murder squad. Rumor said he had been training to be a cop but, secretly depressed, he had shot himself in the belly with blanks meant for a training exercise with the other rookies. Except they were not blanks. He had deliberately replaced them with live ammo. A rather theatrical way to go out, Ellie thought.
Whenever Ellie was around Yellows, she felt rather like a suspect. As if Yellows in death was the policeman he never got to be in life, and was judging everyone and everything. This probably made him ideal for the murder squad anyway.
“You should head upstairs,” Yellows told her. “Niles sent out an announcement. He’s looking for you.”
Great, thought Ellie. Just great. Niles was the only one I told about wanting to stop the end of the world. He probably knows what I’m up to. Or at least suspects.
“He’s really worried, I think,” said Yellows, and Ellie shrugged.
“Niles worries about a lot of stuff,” she said. Yellows frowned at her, tilted his head until the crooked baseball cap was oriented parallel to the ground. As if Ellie was a puzzle and looking at her from a different angle would make her easier to figure out.
Wonderful, thought Ellie. Now I’ve got Yellows on the case. From what I hear, he’s as bad as Cookie when it comes to responsibility and following the Commission.
But this was enough distraction—Marcus with Cookie and Shawn and the new code, and Yellows with Ellie—that she lost track of Sven. The next she knew, Sven was out of sight, behind her, back in the stacks.
“What the—” Sven’s voice came. “Who are you?”
And Ellie knew, even as she whirled to see Jude emerge from the stacks, that they had been caught. They should have left the moment they ran back into the shelves. She should have grabbed Cookie and Jude and made Shawn take one or the other, and then moved them all to somewhere else. Escaped unnoticed.
Cookie and Shawn looked like deer in headlights. Jude was not much better. Ellie knew, from her own senses, that Jude did not feel like a reaper, was clearly a soul. All three of their interrupting companions were staring at Jude like he was a unicorn.
“Um, hi,” said Jude. He lifted a hand to wave, painfully awkward. “These three were just... reaping me. Something about the end of the world?”
“Yeah,” said Marcus, recovering from shock. “Sorry to break the news, buddy.”
Yellows was glaring at Shawn, then at Ellie. “You guys playing games with souls, huh?” He turned his glare on Cookie and his glare deepened enough to nearly make Cookie wilt. “I’m disappointed with the lot of you. And you, Cookie. You the most.”
Ellie was startled to have Yellows reach that conclusion, but she supposed in retrospect that it made sense. This was not a conclusion she would have reached, simply because Cookie was present and not beating Shawn, but then again Yellows probably did not know Cookie that well, either. She had a reputation for being good to her assignments, but reputations and personally knowing someone were different things.
In any case, Marcus was doing what any other reaper would have done. He approached Jude, adjusting the dials and gears of his slide rule, and said, “Hey, they’ll explain everything upstairs, all right? Your family and friends are up there too.”
And he reached out to take Jude’s wrist. Ellie felt a call of alarm rise in her, but Jude must have not needed the warning—as Marcus grabbed him, he must have realized he was about to be sent away.
Jude twisted his arm, like the whirl of a fan, and broke Marcus’s hold. Easily.
“Actually,” Jude said, “I think I’d like her to take me,” and he pointed at Ellie.
Idiot, Ellie thought, wildly. You don’t know what you’ve done.
The three new reapers now stared at Jude like he was a dragon, not a unicorn. Marcus’s face was lined with fear as he backpedaled.
Sven’s mouth worked, “What the actual—”
Marcus spoke at the same time: “He—he broke free—”
And Yellows shouted, “Get away from him, you morons! I’m dialing a mentor—”
Someone shoved Ellie from behind, and the world changed. She stumbled forward, blinded in the sudden dark, and realized that they had switched locations and times, because there was a sunset in the corner of the horizon. Cookie was next to her, grabbed her as something snagged her foot and nearly tripped her.
“Well,” Ellie said, recovering her balance. “We’re caught now.”
“I...” Jude said, as Shawn released his wrist. “I don’t know what just happened.”
“You pulled away,” said Cookie, sounding out of breath. “Normally souls can’t escape a reaper. So by doing that, you told them that you were unusual.”
“Oh,” Jude said. “My bad.” He heaved in a sigh. “This is going to make things harder, isn’t it? Are they going to come after us?”
“They don’t know where we are,” said Cookie. “Not if this is a different time.”
“We’ve got to avoid the present, now,” Ellie said. She wondered how much harder that would make things. Pondering this, she observed their surroundings.
The four of them were standing on one of the crags in the foothills, just before the beginning of the Garden of the Gods park. The sky was darkening, light cast up over the mountains before them, a sure sign of sunset. The red of the sky blended with the red of the Rocky Mountains, casting the entire world the color of blood.
What a morbid thought, Ellie realized, and bit her lip, trying to clear her mind. But the truth was this was harder than she anticipated: because while the scenery was morbid, it was also beautiful. This was one of those moments when Colorado impressed her, despite that she had grown up there: she was standing in the middle of a painting, something dreamed up from the mind of an artist. But this was all real.
How can anyone let this world die? She wondered. What was God thinking, creating a world like this with an expiration date? And then, oddly, Nile’s voice echoed to her:
...Life is merely a shadow, an echo, of all that will come after. That life is short is what gives it meaning at all...
These were distractions that Ellie could not afford. She shook her head, told herself: Back on target, girl. As she did so, she caught sight of Shawn, standing away from them and putting his cube back into his pocket. So it was you, she thought, you chose this place? What is this place? But her questions were halted when she saw his expression:
His face was tight, like the skin had shrunken and strained at the corners.
Movement from Cookie. She pulled a shard from her pocket, looked at it like the thing was poison. Ellie wondered who had died while Cookie and Jude were retrieving it.
Jude said, somber. “So. They got everyone.”
“Yeah,” said Ellie. “And that... that was weird. Three days have passed? Marcus is usually good about k
eeping track of time, too. How can there be a difference in time between them and us? Even if we were in the past, we follow the same timeline.”
Cookie, still glaring at the shard, held it up. “What if it’s this thing?” She heaved in a breath. “I don’t know about astro-physics or whatever. But I do know this thing travels through time, and it’s present when people die. Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘If you kill one person, it’s like killing the whole world’? These things are cursed.”
She stared out at the rest of the group, pinning Ellie with her eyes. “When we’re around them, we’re cursed too. That’s why we’re behind everyone else.”
“Well,” said Jude. “I guess it’s possible that the Spindle has something to do with time, and there could be some kind of effect by being around the shards.” He seemed to ponder this for a longer moment, and then asked, “Speaking of time. When are we?”
Ellie and Cookie had no answer, but Shawn said, “Somewhere I go sometimes.” He paused. “I didn’t think about it, I just dialed what was familiar, pretending to dial the code for reaping bodies.” He heaved in a breath. “And I chose the time for...”
He trailed off, picked his words back up again. “But I guess this is a good thing, since the world is ending and I’ve finally got the guts for this, now or never.”
That doesn’t sound ominous at all, thought Ellie, her own sarcasm biting in her brain.
Shawn was interrupted by the sound of tires, and a car pulled up on the next crag over.
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Coward’s Way Out.
The car was a Jeep, rusty red in color, with fresh new tires that tore rivets into the dirt, chewing the topsoil. Jude raised a single eyebrow. “Off-roading?”
The four of them watched as someone hopped from the driver’s seat. Windswept, boy-band hair and a slouch made him unmistakable, even in the dimming sunlight, especially when compared to the reaper standing beside them.
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