Double-Shawn opened his mouth and coughed, “I don’t want to die.”
Inside the car, the girl struggled in her bonds and tipped over across the seats. Somehow despite her own lack of air, she managed to say: “Get back in here.”
“No,” and Shawn was whimpering, “I don’t wanna.”
“We agreed!” the girl screamed. “You promised, bastard! We’re almost done!”
Shawn said, “I’m scared.”
The girl in the seat was relentless. She began screaming the same phrases over and over, you promised, you promised me we’d do this, you bastard, don’t back out now, you’ll have to face them, all of them, when I’m dead and you’re alive, you’ll go to jail, your life is over anyway, this is our way out, finish it finish it finish it.
“Finish it, you loser! You scaredy-cat! You coward! Coward! Coward!”
And, sobbing like a small child, Shawn blindly reached up with a trembling hand, caught a hold of the steering wheel, and pulled himself into the car like a puppet tugging on its own strings. The door swung shut behind him. The engine purred.
Ellie sat on the dirt and just breathed.
When the pressure descended upon her, Ellie almost screamed, would have if the air had let her. Terror spoke that the hand of God was back on her. Then she was sliding against the ground, fighting to remain in place as though struggling against the wind—
Only the sight of Cookie and Jude also being pulled along told Ellie that she still retained her sanity. They were being pushed by an invisible force, reality itself gone dense and heavy, tossing the three of them through space—and time—
It’s the time travel principle, Ellie realized. Shawn is about to die. That means Josephina will be here any moment—we’re about to engage in a paradox, because Shawn has already died and Josephina reaped him. You can’t change the past.
So the universe is kicking us out of this time, and back into—
The present.
Like a switch flipped, turning a room from dark to light, sunset to midday. The four of them were splayed in various states of panic and fear in the middle of the parking lot just outside of Kramer Library, with the Rocky Mountains brilliant purple to Ellie’s right.
Kramer Library looked like it has seen better days—the roof was gone, and the clock face on the tower was missing both hands. Only the shape of the building and the surrounding cars in the parking lot told Ellie that they were near Kramer at all.
Stumbling to her feet, Ellie felt the need to wave her arms, pat herself down. She was free from that horrible pressure, the bending of reality to expel her like vomit. And she was mostly intact—all her limbs sturdy, joints flexing in the right directions.
Tugging at the scarf wound around her bruised neck, Ellie glanced at Jude, who was upright and viewing their surroundings with a critical eye. Cookie was closer to Ellie, her arms crossed at the elbow and hands on opposite hips, like she was hugging herself.
Shawn lay on the pavement, motionless, his eyes unblinking at the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Niles Hepburn Speaks in Circles.
“Shawn,” said Cookie, nudging him with her toe. “Hey. Wake up, bastard.”
There was not the same amount of venom in her voice as usual, Ellie thought. But there was still some—hard to break a year’s worth of animosity in thirty minutes, she supposed. Cookie bit her lip, poked instead of nudged with her shoe.
Shawn remained still.
“I don’t know what to do,” Cookie said, and Ellie knew she was speaking not only about how to wake Shawn, but also how she should react if he did.
Not that Shawn was sleeping. He was simply unresponsive. A puppet with strings cut.
Jude had taken a seat on the hood of a pickup. The young man’s eyes were lidded, and he was rubbing the backs of his hands, his knuckles, which were unharmed even though they had broken Shawn’s face open. Jude kept grimacing as if in pain, though.
Cookie kept nudging Shawn’s body to no effect, as Ellie turned and viewed the mountains, the ruins of the library. Yellows and the others had said something about reaping everything manmade, she thought, but only after they reaped all the bodies.
The library was in demolition. That meant they had finished reaping humanity.
This seemed impossible. The four of them had spent thirty minutes at Shawn’s death, if that. But the library was missing a roof and part of a wall—and with time frozen, what else could be the cause but reapers? They were accelerating, reaping faster.
Demons also were unaffected by the end of time, but Ellie doubted they would tear apart Kramer Library. They should be busy looking for shards from the Spindle.
Just like Ellie, Cookie, and Jude should be. Like Shawn would be, if he had not been such an idiot and messed himself up so that he now lay still and silent like a dead thing.
Which, technically, was what he was. All reapers were.
Ellie’s lungs filled near bursting. She wanted Shawn to wake up so she could rant and rave at him, how stupid he had been, to make his personal hangups or whatever his problems were more of a priority than the simple necessity of saving the world. In a sheer numbers game, Shawn’s concerns were dwarfed by humanity.
But as she fantasized about this, a little voice in the back of her mind piped up: Putting our personal problems before others is the specialty of all reapers, right? Considering how one becomes a reaper in the first place. Suicide: the ultimate “Me” gesture.
Shut up, she told herself. Focus on the important things. Don’t be like Shawn.
There will be time to deal with my problems later. If we save the world.
As Ellie looked out at the library, a lone shape strolled across the top of Kramer’s wall, a man on a tightrope. Then the stick figure must have spotted them, because it raised an arm and gestured like someone raising the alarm.
“Time to go,” Ellie said, as Jude, who had also noticed this, hopped from the car hood. Cookie stepped back from Shawn and put a palm on Ellie’s shoulder, and Ellie pulled out her pocket-watch, fished in her pocket for a shard with her free hand.
“Hey,” said Jude. “We’re not leaving him.”
But he’s useless, Ellie wanted to say, would have said, but somehow could not make herself. Not while Jude was frowning so deeply and Shawn was not sneering in reply.
“But—” Cookie began, probably going to say something about wasting time, or that he would get help faster if they just left him to the others, or maybe even that she did not like Shawn and did not want his problems to be her problems, but she stopped.
Jude looked between her and Ellie, and said, “You break it, you buy it.”
Cookie bit her lip, and Ellie saw a smear of blood bead against one of her teeth, then Cookie swiped her tongue. She angled herself, crouched, and took Shawn’s boot in her hand, moving her other to Ellie’s knee. Nodding in approval, Jude placed his fingers on Ellie’s other shoulder. Ellie stuffed the shard back into her pocket.
She set her pocket-watch to the one place that came to mind. She knew Stella’s Café and Bakery was empty of reapers for the previous day, because there had been nobody around when she had first arrived. She clicked the knob.
Nothing happened.
Must have dialed wrong, Ellie thought, checking the pocket-watch again and finding the settings correct. She clicked the knob again—nothing. In frustration, she re-wound the time dials back to the present, ready to re-enter them like turning a computer off and on again. Cookie realized something was wrong, glanced up at Ellie in confusion.
“Who’s that?” said Jude, on the verge of alarm, and Ellie craned her head around to see what he was talking about.
Niles. He was across the parking lot, walking toward them with his astrolabe in hand.
“You—” Ellie found herself shouting, holding up her reaper’s tool, the conviction behind her words emerging as quickly as they did, “What did you do to my pocket-watch?”
Ni
les frowned, placed his astrolabe into his front coat pocket. He called, “Ellie. You think you’re the first reaper who has tried to escape by running through time?”
Makes sense, Ellie considered, If reapers can travel anywhere in time and distance, what is to stop troublemakers from attempting endless escapes? Mentors must have some kind of shut-off setting, something that stops other reapers from fleeing.
This was the kind of thing Shawn probably knew more about.
Niles, seeing Ellie’s animosity, approached the group slowly and took them all in. Cookie stood up and nodded to him with respect. What a butt-kisser, Ellie thought, even as she watched Niles nod back. His face became grave when he observed Shawn.
And Niles’s eyes widened when he spotted Jude—but just the slightest bit, enough for Ellie to notice, but perhaps for someone who did not know Niles’s face normally the motion would have been imperceptible, mistaken as the tail end of a blink.
She expected that Niles might say something, but instead he merely fixed Ellie with a disappointed look, and moved to kneel next to Shawn’s motionless form.
And Ellie knew, then, that Niles knew exactly what was going on: her plan to stop the end of the world, her releasing Jude even though—or perhaps more accurately, because of—she had orders not to mess with souls untrapped in time, and dragging Jude around on her quest. Getting Cookie and Shawn involved in everything.
He might not have known the details. But Niles was good about figuring out motives, and big broad lines of action, at least. Sort of like how a parent could figure out when a child was lying even without having witnessed any of the event in question. There was some kind of higher cognitive function that allowed such deductions.
Or, Ellie amended, recalling her suspicion about Niles’s age, could just be experience.
“What happened?” Niles asked, placing his hand on Shawn’s forehead, as if checking for fever—although reapers did not get fevers. Ellie did not respond.
Cookie said, “He kind of lost it. He went back to his death and—something weird. I’m not sure. He joined with his past self, or something like that. Now he’s like this.”
“I see,” said Niles, and if he had been some other mentor, he probably would have started asking whether they had followed the rules—Did you try to talk him out of it? Did you try to physically stop him? Why didn’t you dial a mentor for help?—but Niles was Niles. He bent over Shawn and started talking in a voice too low to hear.
Shawn’s eyes flickered, only once.
Niles kept speaking, without further effect. Ellie glanced at Jude, at Cookie, to gage whether either of them was ready to run while Niles was distracted—but they both looked mesmerized by Niles’s attempts to rouse Shawn. She nudged Jude, who looked at her in confusion, and jerked her head to signal, Let’s get out of here.
Before she could do the same to Cookie, however, there was the sound of shoes padding closer; their owner was not stepping but rather flopping along, letting gravity lower each foot rather than his muscles. John, his squinting eye aimed at Jude, emerged from among the cars to say, “Hey, boss-man, you need help here?”
Great, thought Ellie. Now we’re surrounded. Well, Jude versus Niles might work, if superhuman monsters can take on mentors after all. And Cookie and I can take on John. Or at least one of us can slow him down so the other can get away.
How far did Niles’s ability to interfere with her reaper’s tool extend? Was it a blanket ban on travel in one area? Did it only affect Ellie? Did it have a time limit? Or was it like a switch—had Niles turned off her pocket-watch permanently, until he turned it back on? Ellie did not know—again, she suspected Shawn would have.
But Shawn was the one out of his mind. This was a mess.
Niles seemed to accept that whatever he was saying to Shawn was not working. He rose, with a sigh, and said, “Cookie,” fixing her in place with his green eyes.
“I know you and Shawn have your differences, but right now he needs help. Would you please take him upstairs to Susan and wait there until Josephina can come to him?”
Visibly struggling, perhaps as much with loathing herself as she loathed Shawn, Cookie nodded. She glanced at Ellie with a look of apology, and pulled out her compass, began dialing for upstairs. Ellie opened her mouth to object—except Cookie nudged her as she stepped to kneel by Shawn, and Ellie realized that she had slipped her shards from the Spindle into Ellie’s pocket. Ellie closed her mouth: Cookie was serious, then.
A push of a button, and Cookie and Shawn were gone.
“Now,” said Niles, turning to Ellie. “The only souls left on earth are in the hands of demons. But in order to retrieve them, we need to reap all the places demons hide.” He tilted his head to her. “I don’t suppose you’ll help out?”
“Why would I?” Ellie snapped back, so sharply that she surprised herself. Niles lifted both eyebrows, then raised his hand to pinch at the bridge of his nose. Ellie hoped that she had given him a headache, which was as much damage as she could inflict.
Jude looked about to say something, but Ellie glanced in warning and he kept quiet.
After a moment, Niles sighed. He put his hands in his pockets and in a motion that reminded Ellie of a child, rocked back on his heels. He said, “I guess I should have checked on you earlier. I just didn’t think you would get into trouble so quickly. It was right after you left to begin reaping, wasn’t it? When you started messing around.”
“You tried to dial me,” Ellie surmised. “Keeping tabs on your minions?”
“I was concerned,” Niles said. “Given how our last conversation ended. You were sent into the field because of the emergency, although you were still upset about time ending. I figured you might try something if you were left alone too long.”
“Oh, you know,” Ellie said, tossing a hand to the demolitioned library. “It’s only the end of the world. No biggie. I’ll just follow orders like a good drone.”
“The world was going to end sometime,” said Niles, and he sounded so patient that Ellie would have struck at him, if she had been closer with no audience. But even now embarrassment—to throw a tantrum in front of Jude and John and even Niles—held her back. Niles was aware of the effect these words had on her, because his eyes softened. “But I see again that hearing and accepting this is two different things.”
“Go quietly into the good night,” sneered Ellie. “Right?”
“The good night is already upon us,” Niles corrected. “If we cannot accept that reality, it is because we have prioritized the lesser over the greater. Eighty years is the span of a man—a few billion is the span of earth itself. That’s nothing compared to eternity.”
“It would be a lot more than a few billion—if you would just fight,” Ellie said.
Niles crossed his arms. He seemed ready to argue, but then the arms became constricting—holding himself back. He said, “This is a discussion I should’ve had with you earlier, before you became so rebellious.” He breathed in, and Ellie saw the change in subject before he spoke. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me what you’ve been up to?”
Ellie let her silence reply for her.
“Very well,” said Niles. “I’m going to give you the choice to stay within my eyesight, or else go upstairs and help with the weighing of the souls.”
Ellie just glared. Her answer to that false choice was apparent enough.
Apparently her message was received, because John stepped closer to her. His hand reached out like a claw to grab at her arm. Jude tensed, ready to intervene. But Ellie burst back several steps, raised her fists, and snarled, “Just try it!”
John paused, confusion across his features. He seemed stunned that Ellie would threaten to attack him. He turned to Niles, uncertainly, and Niles shook his head.
“Leave her be,” he advised John. “There’s no reason to get into a fight.”
“She’s been mucking through the timeline,” said John. “Up to no good.”
I’m standing right here, Ellie wanted to say, but she was not going to interrupt when Niles was arguing her case of freedom for her. Especially because John took Niles’s recommendation, stepping away from Ellie, but with a look that told her he was still watching and could change his mind about grabbing her anytime.
Ellie scowled at him. John had never been her favorite person—he was not the worst, but despite his bad boy punk appearance he was always shadowing Niles around like an apprentice, to the point that he sometimes copied body language. Everyone laughed about his mimicry upstairs, despite that nobody ever laughed at Niles. The lack of initiative was funny before, but now it seemed twisted, slavish in devotion.
There would have been a time, Ellie thought, when I might have ended up like him.
Niles was hard not to like—even now, as he gave Ellie a severe look, he was not directing that sharpness at her, but rather around her, as though what made him upset was not her actions but rather the results, or even the situations that had pushed her to action—though, Ellie suspected, he blamed whatever circumstances caused her to value the earth, rather than the end of the world, for her misbehavior.
But she could not have imagined him accepting the end of the world like this, before. She had always thought that he placed value on life, even as he had talked about how it was temporary—certainly, those lessons on reaping had shown him as concerned about the assignment’s welfare. He cared far more than Ellie did about them. Was that not one of the Commission’s requirements—To comfort the dead?
And yet now he was at such odds with her, Ellie felt every positive thing she had ever thought about him become tainted, sour like rotten food in her mouth. Perhaps reality was complex enough that good people could disagree—although, prior to this moment, Ellie deep down would never have called herself ‘good.’ She knew her faults. Mostly.
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