by Devon Taylor
Trier paused, with his head down and his eyes vacant, as if trying to remember where he’d left something important. Then he said, “You’re thinking about the cube. The steam room.”
Rhett nodded.
“I have one more question,” he said, forgetting about all the other questions he’d had rolling over in his head while coming up here.
“I’m listening,” the captain replied, not unkindly. It was obvious he could already tell what Rhett was going to ask.
“What comes after this? I mean … can syllektors die … again?”
Trier smiled wanly. “That’s a pretty simple one, actually. Syllektors obviously can’t be killed. We’re already dead. We have certain control over our faculties, as you’ve already found out. We can manifest and show ourselves to the living if we absolutely need to—though, that’s a bit trickier. We can be injured in much the same way as we could when we were alive. The only difference is that most injuries that would be considered fatal to the living won’t do anything to a syllektor but land them in the medical bay. There’s only one sure way to destroy a syllektor.”
“How?” Rhett asked.
“By destroying their heart,” Trier said.
“Is that what happened to the fifth teammate? The one that I replaced?”
Trier sighed, and for the first time his eyes looked weary.
“That’s not for me to tell,” he said. “But I will say this—what you’re thinking is … an impossibility. Syllektors are not meant to join with the souls in the cube.”
“So, what happens to them? To us? When our hearts are destroyed do we just … go away?”
“Not exactly. The working theory is that syllektors who are ‘killed,’ so to speak, become … ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” Rhett said, raising his eyebrows. “Like white-sheet-with-holes-in-it ghosts?”
“Something like that,” Trier answered, grinning. “Whatever part of the soul that’s still tethered to the mortal world finds its way back there, to whatever place is most meaningful to the person that was. Usually the place where they died, but not always. You don’t normally hear of a house being haunted by the ghost of a person that died under typical circumstances. It’s because that ghost probably passed through this ship first. As a syllektor.”
Rhett let that sink in, feeling his brain throb under the stress of all the wild, unbelievable knowledge it had been taking in. With that, he turned his physical reactions off, squashing the headache but not the stress, stifling the tears but not the grief.
“I assure you that your parents’ souls are on board this ship,” Trier said, reaching out a hand to help Rhett to his feet. “It might not be easy to find them, but I can tell you that they are here.”
“I know,” Rhett replied, taking the hand and allowing himself to be pulled up.
The captain gave him a questioning look.
“Down in the steam room,” Rhett said. “When they open the door. All those voices come spilling out. And at first it’s hard to hear anything but this weird static. But after a second, I swear I can hear their voices. They’re just saying my name, calling out to me, maybe trying to find me. I don’t know. But I know I’ve heard them.”
Trier was nodding, stroking his beard, his face as serious as ever.
“Can we really talk to them?” Rhett finally asked. “Is there any way to say good-bye?”
It took a long time for Trier to speak again. When he finally did, his voice was quiet but confident.
“We’re going to find out,” he said.
EIGHT
The first time Rhett collected a soul, only two weeks after his own death, it was at the throat of an alley, with the sun dipping down below the skyline of the surrounding city—Boston.
They had come through a door that was tucked between two stalls at Quincy Market. It was busy, crowded with tourists and locals. The five of them stood amid the foot traffic as people subconsciously avoided them, the subtle force of their presence enough to guide the passersby around them, giving them a moment to catch their bearings.
Treeny looked especially uncomfortable, standing close to Rhett’s side, clutching her tablet to her chest. Basil took a big sniff of the air and gave his stomach a melodramatic rub. Mak and Theo were … Mak and Theo, standing stoic and on guard, ever-prepared for some kind of attack.
Rhett closed his eyes and focused on the push, trying to drown out the noise. He’d been here once before, when he and his parents had been in Boston to visit his aunt Lorraine, but could scarcely remember anything about it—just that he’d eaten a lot of really good food. He took a fraction of a second to wonder how Aunt Lorraine was doing, how she’d handled the news …
But then the push was beckoning, and he knew where he needed to go.
He guided the group through the masses of incoming and outgoing people, some of them stopped in front of different booths, yelling over the din to order their food. They passed through the dining area, under the great height of the old building’s domed ceiling, yellowish and brightly lit and echoing with voices.
A moment later they were out in the streets, breaking free of the orbit of the market and leaving the crowds behind. The sun winked at them between high-rises and skyscrapers.
The push nudged, and Rhett followed.
They came around a few corners, letting pedestrians dodge them instead of the other way around. There was no other city like New York, but Rhett still felt a pang of homesickness at the sight of the old architecture and scattered graffiti, honking taxis and hordes of tipsy weekenders stumbling out of bars.
The push got stronger. And stronger. And Rhett felt his apprehension threatening to knock him out of focus. He didn’t think he was ready for this. But Mak had insisted that he was. She had certainly warmed up to him (at least to the extent that she was capable of warming up to anybody—which wasn’t much). Rhett still felt like she was watching him, though. Maybe because of what he knew about her and Basil. Maybe because he really didn’t belong.
He was about to find out.
When the push was at its highest insistence, thrumming inside of Rhett’s head like a swarm of insects, he stopped the group in front of an alley, narrow and infected with shadows. High above, the sun was still bright and orange against the facades of the surrounding buildings. But down here, the day had already gone.
At the back of the alley, Rhett could make out a mound of ratty cloth quivering on the pavement. The push leaned toward it.
“What do I say?” he asked, not directing the question to anyone in particular. The other four were behind him, waiting.
“Whatever feels right,” Mak said.
Rhett allowed his feet to carry him into the alley, past a couple of empty dumpsters, to the hump that lay among the littered bits of trash.
The man was on his back, a long beard caked with grime and crawling with lice stretched away from his face. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, staring up at the purple sky as if he were seeing an alien spaceship hovering there. His hands trembled at his chest, smudged with grease and mud. The tattered clothes he wore pooled around his starving frame. Those same trembling hands were more like claws, scratching at his rib cage, searching for his heart.
Basil and Mak and Theo and Treeny were there, watching the open end of the alley, and Mak, in her paranoid, overly tactical way, was watching the opening above the alley, where the rooftops reached for the darkening sky.
Rhett didn’t think. He couldn’t—he would lose his nerve if he did. He grabbed one of the man’s shaking hands, and immediately those shell-shocked eyes found Rhett and hooked in. He leaned close to the man, feeling the push fade, replaced by something else, some sense that belonged as much to the man as it did to him. There was something wrong with the man’s heart—something in it was breaking.
There was no need for Rhett to consult his memory. He spoke the words that he knew and added some of his own.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. And in the deepest, furthest part of his
brain, he could imagine Mak kneeling over his mother, just as he was kneeling over the man now. “It’s okay. I’m here to help you. I don’t know why this is happening to you. I just know that your heart is giving out. You don’t have to be afraid. We’ll cross together. We’ll hold each other down. You are my weight, and I am yours. There’s no pain on the other side. There’s no fear. You’ll never have to feel this way again. This is not the end.” He squeezed the man’s hand even as the man’s grip slackened. “This is not the end.”
When the man died, his head turned away. His open eyes found a brick wall and stared through it. And a moment later his soul came creeping out from between his lips, curling up in a languid spiral. Rhett leaned in, at the same moment turning his senses on, wanting to truly feel this as it happened, and inhaled.
The soul filled him the way an icy breath of winter air does, cold and sharp.
Rhett stood and found Mak staring at him, her eyes fierce but almost apologetic. Was it respect? Had he passed her final test? Or were there more to come? Maybe she would keep at it forever, never really admitting that Rhett was a true member of the team, of the crew even. He didn’t care. Right now what he cared about was the soul that he carried.
“Treeny,” he said, taking control before Mak could even get her mouth open to speak.
“On it,” Treeny responded, poking away at her tablet.
Theo and Basil continued to stand guard.
He left the body behind and took the soul with him, through the back door of a nearby restaurant, into the room of doors aboard the Harbinger. He didn’t wait for anyone to try and instruct him—he knew what came next. And when he made his way down to the steam room, feeling the weight of the soul inside him, feeling the breezy movement of it circling through his body, when he put his hand on the door of the glass cube, it clicked open for him the same as it did everyone else.
Amid the restless whispers of the other souls, Rhett released the one he carried into the fold. He watched it slip into the cloud and become indistinguishable, just another swirl of luminescent white smoke. Then he pushed the door to the cube shut and put his head against it. His senses were gone again—he’d let them go when he’d released the soul.
But if they had been there, he would have wept with relief.
* * *
After that it was easier.
It was easier to fall in line with the others. He could talk more. He could recognize the push when it nudged him, whether it was at breakfast or in the middle of the night. He could go down to the armory in the morning and grab his knuckle blade without feeling that foreboding sense of regret, the idea that maybe he didn’t belong here. And without that thought, he found that he didn’t need to force himself to fit in. He fit in just fine.
After Rhett’s first gathering, Mak laid off him a little bit. And he continued to keep the secret that she had asked him to keep. He didn’t much care what she and Basil did behind closed doors, as long as he had their respect. Their friendship.
Basil and Theo turned out to be easy to hang out with. When the team wasn’t together gathering souls or training or doing work around the ship, the three guys spent a lot of time just dicking around, catching movies, playing arcade games, utilizing the entertainment that was built into the Harbinger. Basil liked to call these get-togethers “bro-downs” in his best American accent.
Rhett learned a remarkable amount about his team, things that he would never have suspected, things that were pretty obvious, things that sometimes broke his heart. But the biggest thing that he learned was that nobody, not a single syllektor aboard the ship filled with dead people, wanted to talk about how they died.
That was okay with him. He didn’t want to talk about how he died, either.
He spent time with all of them, either within the group or alone. He integrated himself. And while he was doing so, Captain Trier continued to find a way to track down Rhett’s parents.
It was like trying to catch an electric eel with a soup can, he told him. Souls were fragile, sensitive things. You couldn’t just dive into the tank in the steam room and start digging through them. Too much disruption could cause the souls turmoil, to possibly break down, which in turn would cause the Harbinger to break down. They had to be careful.
Rhett didn’t mind waiting. What else was going to happen? At least he had something to wait for.
There were deaths, of course. Many, many deaths.
There were hospital rooms. Dozens of them, hundreds of them—he stopped keeping count. Hospital rooms with all their stark, discomforting gray, where elderly men and elderly women who were deflated and liver-spotted sank into their beds, hitched in their last crackling breaths, and became smoke; where there were kids with cancer who were losing their battles, their beds decorated with cards and flowers and toys, balloons floating up near the ceiling, sparkly stickers plastered to the wailing heart rate monitors, where the lines had gone flat; where babies who were mere days old were trapped in incubators, struggling to see, to breathe, to live, and were failing—their souls were the purest white, perfect, milky tendrils of smoke.
There were houses. Houses where husbands lay down next to their wives at night and slipped inexplicably into darkness, casting their souls out into bedrooms that were silvery with moonlight. Houses where kids ran out to play, chasing balls or runaway skateboards into the street and meeting fast, heavy cars. Houses where ceilings collapsed and ovens caught fire and hunks of food got lodged in throats.
There were cities, clogged with traffic and noise, where construction workers came tumbling off scaffolding; where earthquakes and floods brought whole buildings down in cascades of dust and glass; where cars slammed into lampposts and buses tore in two and vans exploded on purpose; where the sky and the sun winked across sparkling metal and cooked the life right out of some people.
There were diseases, pitiless and unbiased, that swept across rundown countries, strangling their victims with their own blood or squashing their lungs like underinflated balloons.
There were hurricanes that swirled onto coastlines with the force of a bomb and erased entire neighborhoods.
There were unforgiving winters in Russia, brutal heat waves in Australia, landslides in India, avalanches in Colorado, war zones in Syria, collapsing ice shelves in Antarctica.
There were guns firing in every place, knocking down bodies and unleashing souls.
There was death everywhere, all the time, and Rhett was never more aware of it than when he was right in front of it, collecting the lives that had been. Death ran rampant, like a ferocious animal, slaughtering, destroying. And he began to realize that the syllektors were not Death itself, but messengers of Death. They were the unseen deliverers of that final peace, that tranquility where acceptance is the only option. Because to fight it is to fight the unstoppable force of nature.
He collected those souls, and in them he felt more life than he ever thought possible, more warmth and purpose and love. There was death, sure, but it never felt as strong as the life that made up the souls that Rhett brought back to the Harbinger. In some backward way, he felt like he was actually saving lives instead of waiting around for them to end. And there was peace in the idea that he might exist that way forever.
PART
TWO
NINE
Rhett opened his eyes one day a little over ten months after he’d first set foot on the Harbinger.
He was greeted by the same flat gray light and the same shush of the ocean as it seethed around the hull of the ship. Thunder grumbled from far off, like the sound of water gurgling down a sink drain. He was also greeted by the push, tugging at him, yanking impatiently at that invisible lasso.
Before he could even flip his feet out of bed, someone was banging on his door.
“You gettin’ it, mate?” Basil called from the other side.
“Yeah,” Rhett called back. “Be right out.”
He got out of his bunk and stared at himself in the mirror, the way he had that fir
st morning. His clothes were now just shadows of their former selves, the plaid pattern faded out of his shirt, and the jeans, which had been blue denim, were now entirely black.
From behind him, there was the sound of water dripping against the floor. No, not just dripping—splashing. And he knew that when he turned around, there would be nothing there but the dry floor. He had never asked about the leak. Every time it might have come up in conversation, he missed his opportunity. It just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Just another quirk of the ship.
When he opened the door, Basil and Mak were there, standing too close together, giving themselves away. Rhett noticed that as time went on, their caution had waned, giving way to something else, something that wasn’t quite reckless abandon but was pretty close. Either way, Rhett had kept his mouth shut about what he knew was going on between them, and he never mentioned to them that the captain knew, either.
“Took you long enough,” Mak said.
“Well I’m sure you guys had a head start,” Rhett shot back, smiling. Mak gave him a pissed-off look.
They hit the armory, where they met Theo and Treeny, and then the five of them followed the push through the quiet, mostly empty ship.
When they got to the room of doors, it was Rhett who stepped out in front of the group and closed his eyes. He had a particular knack for picking up on the push, and the others were happy to let him lead the way, waiting for him to mess it up. The new guy was still proving himself, even after ten months.
He let the push hum around him, plucking the unseen paths to the doors like guitar strings, trying to find the one that was most in tune. When he found it, he pointed it out, went to it, and opened it.
The room filled with a cacophony of blaring car horns and angry shouts. Through the door, Rhett could see headlights and wet asphalt and not much else. There was a dense fog that pushed up against the door. In fact, the fog actually started falling through the door into the Harbinger. But the push remained, and it would guide them to their soul, fog or no fog.
