“Ah, what the heck,” muttered Shawn, behind them. “I got nothing better to do anyway. Maybe at least this will be interesting.”
Chapter Fourteen: Plans Pre-Hatched.
“All right,” said Cookie, somehow still not entirely sounding convinced. “So we’re all agreed on saving the world. What now?”
Jude said, “My guess is we need to know why time has stopped. If we know why, then we can figure out how to re-start time. End of the world averted.”
“Already covered,” Shawn said, waving his hand dismissively. “They said upstairs that the Spindle of Necessity is broken.”
“I see,” said Jude. “And just what is this ‘Spindle of Necessity’ thing?”
There was a pause as all three reapers tried to think of an answer. The Spindle was something to do with time, Ellie thought of saying, but that seemed redundant.
After the pause lasted, Jude said, “Oh, come on. You mean you don’t know?”
“And what about you, college boy?” Shawn replied, stuffing hands into his pockets. The words would have been harsh in another time, but apparently Jude’s threat of violence earlier had instilled some kind of respect, or at least self-preservation.
Jude glanced down at Ellie, but she just shrugged. “We never heard of it before today. We’re just reaper grunts. What makes you think we know everything about everything?”
“Look,” said Jude. “Y’all are the weird supernatural reaper creatures. I assume you know more than me. I’m just a dude majoring in astrophysics.”
“In what?” said Cookie, looking baffled, and in that moment Ellie was reminded: fourteen year old from the seventies. Cookie had never even graduated middle school.
“I want to be an astrophysicist,” said Jude, as though this was something ordinary. “You know, to study how stars move, how exoplanets might support life, that sort of thing.”
Ellie snorted, “Yeah, you’re gonna love when the stars fall.”
“Not really,” said Jude. “The stars falling means that the earth will burn to a crisp way before they get here. Although—” and he paused— “the idea doesn’t really make sense. I mean, the words ‘stars falling’ suggests that the earth itself is ‘downward,’ but there is no such thing as ‘down’ in the universe.”
Cookie did not look like she appreciated this conversation. Instead, she said, “Can we get back on track? Spindle of Necessity?”
Shawn shrugged. “Dunno. Bet nobody of us knows.”
Jude said, “All right. Then how do we figure that out?”
“Ask a mentor?” said Cookie, hesitantly. “They might tell us.”
Ellie cut in, “No. I’ll bet the mentors will try to stop us if they knew what we are doing. So we can’t ask them, it might tip them off.”
“Wait,” said Cookie, “the mentors will try to stop us?”
“I think so,” said Ellie. “I already talked to Niles about stopping the end of the world. He was like everybody up there, thought the end of the world was great. Wouldn’t even think of helping. In fact, he gave me the same reaper talk as you.”
Now Cookie looked more than troubled. Her brows creased the lines of her face, her grin flipping as her lips pressed together. She said, “Maybe there’s a reason why they don’t want to stop the end of the world? Like, something we’re missing?”
“Come on,” Ellie said. “We just went through this. They probably just think the same way you did, that the end of the world is fate, stopping it is damaging, yadda yadda.”
“Not to be a downer,” Shawn broke in, gazing at Ellie, “but if the mentors are going to try to stop us, we’re kind of screwed. You ever try to fight a mentor?”
“I’m sure you have plenty of experience with that,” Ellie replied, rolling her eyes.
“Oh. Ha ha, good one Ellie, you got me,” Shawn sniped, but added, “Yeah. I’m probably the only one of us with experience. Let me say: they clobber you like you’re nothing. And,” he kicked his leg, clinking the ball and chain, “there are consequences.”
“Oh no,” said Ellie. “A ball and chain. However shall I deal with that.”
“Just saying, they hear about any plans and decide to stop us, our little team rebellion is over,” said Shawn. “And somebody is going to check on us, eventually.”
Ellie jerked her thumb at Jude. “Well, that’s what he’s for.”
“Excuse me?” said Jude, sounding surprised.
“Well, you say you’re human,” said Ellie. “Okay, whatever. You’re still some kind of super-human. I mean, we were told specifically not to interact with anyone not frozen in time like normal humans. Sounded like only mentors deal with things like you.”
“But that doesn’t mean he could fight a mentor,” said Cookie. “It could just mean there are bad things that happen when a soul like his—no offense,” she nodded at Jude— “is out, bad things happen. I mean, Jude, do you even know how to fight?”
“I placed second in regional high school kickboxing,” Jude said.
The three reapers processed this. It seemed absurdly like good fortune. But Ellie decided not to complain at luck smiling at her for once.
“If nothing else,” Shawn said, at last, “he’ll be a good distraction.”
“Back to the point,” said Jude. “What is the Spindle of Necessity? How do we find out?”
There is something, Ellie wanted to say, but I just can’t remember what it is. The idea was right at the back of her mind, but as she reached out the idea receeded. Cookie and Shawn were both muttering—some kind of initial plan on getting another reaper to tell the information, or some way to trick a mentor into revealing the truth.
Jude looked impatient. Ellie could not blame him.
Some saviors of the world we are, Ellie thought. Five minutes into our planning session and we’re all stumped. Still, it’s not as though we’re not all new at this. What is step one of stopping the apocalypse? If only they had a guidebook for how to save the world.
A guidebook. Of course. I’m really stupid, Ellie thought. She said: “Guys. The rulebook.”
“The what?” asked Cookie.
Ellie sighed. Her memory paged back to just before the announcement about the end of the world, how she had hypothesized that neither Shawn nor Cookie would know about the reaper rulebook Susan kept in her desk. She hated being right.
“There is a rulebook for reapers,” she explained. “Susan keeps it in her desk. Niles showed me back when I started. Susan was reading from it upstairs before.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Shawn, understanding dawning on his face. “I saw that. Big leather thing. I guess I was just too shocked to wonder what that book was.”
“There’s a rulebook?” Cookie frowned. “I’ve been a reaper for like fifty years. How come I only heard about this just now?”
You would be upset about that, Ellie thought. Maybe it’s better Cookie didn’t know, because otherwise she’d be up there every layover reading the thing cover to cover.
“C’mon, Cookie,” Ellie said. “Since when does Carson tell you anything?”
“He tells me lots of stuff,” Cookie said, defending her mentor. And Ellie supposed that Carson was rather all right, if you were okay with his cigar smoke. He and Cookie got along fabulously. Then again, Cookie got along with almost everyone.
Except Shawn, but even Cookie had her limits.
“But okay, then,” Cookie said, and Ellie saw her eyes gleam. Great. If they survived this end of the world, Ellie knew she would be treated to Cookie quoting from that rulebook for the rest of eternity, however long that lasted. “It’s the best lead we got. We find this book, and then we skim to find any reference to the Spindle of Necessity. Explanations, co-ordinates. Then we get there and see what’s wrong.”
Cookie dug out her reaper’s tool from her pocket, which was a compass. It never pointed north, but instead the needle inside always pointed in the direction of something Ellie did not know. The dia
ls and gears glistened in the water like confetti.
“You said this Spindle thing is broken?” said Jude. “Maybe we can fix it?”
“I think,” Cookie replied, “that fixing it is probably going to be hard, or the mentors or whoever is in charge of it would have done that already. And,” she paused, bit her lip, “there’s no guarantee it can be fixed.”
That was a little too pessimist for Ellie’s liking. Don’t back out on me now, Cookie, she thought, and added, “Which we won’t know until we try.”
Cookie seemed a little hesitant, but she said, “Right.”
“Okay,” said Ellie. “We get the rulebook.”
“Well I’ll just pop up there, then,” Shawn said, voice forcibly placid. “Take myself a look, get what we need and pop back down. When the mentors ask, I’ll say I’m expanding my literary horizons.”
And then Ellie realized that Shawn was seeing what they had all missed.
“Right,” Cookie muttered, voicing Ellie’s thoughts. “The mentors. They’re still up there.”
“Yeah,” Shawn sniped. “And won’t they think it’s all a little weird? I mean,” he gestured to himself, “I am never going to be caught dead with a book in my hands, so I can’t go, and you,” he gestured to Cookie, “wouldn’t read a book when there are souls to be saved, and you,” to Ellie, “have already raised Niles’s suspicions. Good job.”
“I suppose me going is out of the question,” said Jude.
“I’m afraid so,” Cookie said, sounding apologetic. “This location of upstairs is small enough, everybody knows everybody, mostly. And you don’t feel like a reaper.”
“I don’t?” said Jude, his eyebrows raising. “What do I ‘feel’ like?”
“Cold,” Shawn supplied.
“What?” and now Jude was baffled.
“When a soul is first brought out,” Cookie explained, “it can’t regulate its temperature very well, so it’s hot. Usually. But you feel cold. It’ll wear off in a bit as you stabilize.”
“Huh,” said Jude, sticking his hands into his pockets. “Now that would present some interesting questions, if we had time. What are the thermodynamics of a soul?”
“If we had time,” Ellie repeated, stressing that time, frozen as it was, was still running out. But even as the words left her mouth, she realized the way out of their dilemma.
“Time,” she repeated, and they looked at her with identical faces of confusion.
Pulling her reaper’s tool out of her breast pocket, Ellie tried not to shudder when she felt how the hands of her pocket watch were still frozen. She held it up to them. “Time, guys. We use these, go back in time, get the rulebook. No mentors to stop us.”
Three faces of confusion turned contemplative, as each of them considered her point. Then, they responded at once:
Cookie, worried: “I don’t think that’s what a reaper’s tool is for, Ellie. It’s for reaping.”
Jude, incredulous: “You mean you guys can time travel?”
Shawn, articulate as always: “Huh.”
Ellie ignored the speculative look in Shawn’s eyes, as he was no doubt considering how to play head games with time in the mix. She said, “I’ve done it loads of times, guys. You work the time dials without the location dials, and you time travel.”
“You can do that?” said Cookie, looking down at her own compass. And Ellie realized; the dials there looked a little different. One did not usually look too much on another reaper’s tool, but she sidled closer and peered down, studying. Cookie bowed her own head to study Ellie’s pocket-watch in turn, which Ellie thought a fair trade.
Took her a moment to begin processing what she was seeing. Like all reapers, Ellie had a sixth sense to assist in working a reaper’s tool, but looking at Cookie’s tool was like looking in a funhouse mirror. Everything distorted. Understanding came slowly.
Cookie can’t, she realized, her location and time dials... they’re linked. She can’t apply one without the other—she has to go to a different location, to get to a different time.
“I didn’t know that reaper’s tools were different like this,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Cookie. “Ellie, yours is weird. The time and location dials... they’re combined, somehow.”
That brought Ellie up short. “What?”
“Look,” said Cookie, pointing with the tip of her pinky finger, noting the dials on Ellie’s clock face. “The location dials, they’re over the time dials. You have to go to a different time to get to a different location. Not by much, I imagine you can get pretty close to the present, you probably slip enough to equalize. But you can’t just appear.”
“I slip enough to what, now?” said Ellie, who was still processing that she had apparently been traveling a bit through time every time she switched location.
“Equalize, to the present,” Cookie said, gesturing to Jude. “Like how we were just saying how a new soul needs to spend time out-of-body to stop being hot—or cold—time is the same way. Carson explained it like everything wants to go to the present, even when you go back in time. Because the measurement isn’t enough. I mean, time is artificial. Ten seconds is a length of time artificially divided into ten spans.”
“That’s what nanoseconds are for,” said Jude. “But yeah... even those are artificial. It’s the old mathematics problem: if you take something and cut it in half, then you have half of what you had before, but you can just keep on doing that over and over.”
“Not forever,” said Ellie. “If you take a foot and cut it to six inches, eventually you’ll reach like the atomic level, and then there won’t be anything.”
“Hypothetically,” Jude said, “It would still be divisible, just not with current measurement ability. And besides, on a purely numerical level, you can just keep going forever.”
“So now that we’ve confirmed that God is crazy,” Shawn interrupted, holding up his own reaper’s tool, which was like a rubik’s cube. “How about the rulebook?”
“Well,” said Ellie, still trying to process what Cookie had said—everything wants to go to the present—I don’t think that’s what a reaper’s tool is for... It’s for reaping—“What I would do is go back to a time when the mentors aren’t all up there, and get the book.”
“On it,” said Shawn, flicking the blocks of his cube like a magician with a deck of cards.
“Wait—” Cookie said, but then Shawn was gone.
Ellie snorted. Impatient idiot.
Chapter Fifteen: Theft of the Rules.
“Huh,” said Jude, staring wide-eyed at the shelves behind where Shawn had been standing before he disappeared. “So that just happened.”
It will take Shawn a bit, Ellie thought. If only because he’s lugging that ball-and-chain around. She turned to Cookie.
“Explain this equalization thing to me,” she said. “I still don’t get it.”
Cookie sighed. “I’m probably not explaining very well. I don’t quite understand myself. And you know Carson—he’s sweet, but he speaks with that cigar in his mouth.”
“But you still know more than me,” Ellie objected.
Shrugging, Cookie said, “I suppose. I just heard that all reaper’s tools are for reaping, not for whatever you want. When you go back in time, your body actually wants to return to the present. If you stay too long in the past, you run the risk of breaking time. So the universe is designed not to let you.”
And Ellie recalled when she had tried to visit the same time twice—the way that the air felt thick, constricting, and how no amount of force could get her into the same location and time. It was like trying to pick herself up—to lift her own weight—without stabilization. Impossible, and foolish to even try.
Time traveling did seem to carry consequences when used incorrectly—even though one could not observe the observer, and so never got caught in any loops.
She had never stayed very long in the past, because she knew someone would co
me looking for her. But she felt tired at the end of longer moments in the past, like she had gained several pounds. Was that equalization, trying to pull her back to the present?
“You know...” Ellie said, interrupting her own thoughts, “It seems odd that our reaper’s tools are different. I never noticed that mine was about time first and location second.”
“Well,” said Cookie, “your tool is a pocket-watch. Mine’s a compass. So I guess you are more oriented to time, and I’m more about location.”
“Shawn’s is a puzzle,” Ellie said, “because he’s constantly confused.”
“Carson has a lock,” said Cookie. “Like, a big version of a combination lock with lots of dials. Maybe because he used to run a Wild West bank? What does Niles have, again?”
“An astrolabe,” said Ellie. “He said the planets were frozen when time stopped.”
“Wow,” Jude said, “that... is not how an astrolabe works.”
“Well, you’re an astro-whatsit, so I guess you would know,” Ellie responded. There was something harsh in her words, and she realized she was defending Niles and his odd reaper’s tool, but automatically, the way Cookie had defended Carson earlier.
Jude did not seem offended. He glanced at Cookie, who shrugged, and seemed to realize enough to leave this topic alone, switching tacts.
“But... equalization,” said Jude, thoughtfully. “Everything returning to some kind of normal state? Whether in time to the present, or a soul starting out hot and cooling... It kind of sounds like entropy.”
Then he frowned, and his gaze wandered over the full bookshelves, “But entropy... strictly speaking, while it’s necessary for the world to exist, it’s also why the universe must end some day.” His roving gaze fell upon his mother’s corpse, and he blanched.
“Let’s go sit on one of the couches,” said Cookie, noticing his reaction.
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