Scorch

  Lex smirked and held up her mug. “I am now.”

  “Oops!” A cry rang out as something wet sloshed down Lex’s back.

  Lex whirled around to face Sofi, whose brown hair was swirled atop her head, its bleached stripes looking like they’d been drizzled on. “Sorry, Lex, toootally my bad,” she said with a stiff smile, handing her a napkin. Though Sofi was the sole Ether Traffic Controller nerd among the Juniors, she still held the rather paradoxical reputation of being the ditziest of the bunch. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lex didn’t know what else to say. Ever since she and Driggs had become an item, Sofi had been treating them like war criminals. True, they had embarrassed her and gotten her in a heap of trouble, but Lex suspected her vexation had less to do with the job and more to do with the location of Driggs’s arm, which was currently around Lex’s waist.

  “Well, toodles,” Sofi said, wobbling away on a pair of skyscraping pink heels.

  Lex watched her leave, as did Snodgrass, his eyes moving up and down with each bouncing step. “Ew,” Lex said. “Bet they’d vote her in as a Senior in a heartbeat.”

  At the mention of the big S word, the group fell silent. Kloo and Ayjay stared into their mugs.

  “Oh, crap,” Lex said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Kloo. “It’s just—God, this is so unfair.”

  “It is,” Driggs said. “Which is why you have to work your asses off for the next two months. Show them how good you are, and by the time the next vote rolls around, they’ll have to promote you.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kloo with a frown. Lex was unnerved; it was scary to see their calmest and most composed friend so upset. “Maybe we should just stay Juniors forever,” Kloo said. “You guys are more fun.”

  “Oh yes,” said Lex in a sullen voice. “Barrels of laughs, we are.”

  Kloo sighed. “I mean, we’ll make the effort, but I’m not sure it’ll work. They just seem so dead set against us. And who knows how much longer we’re going to be here anyway.”

  “What?” Lex looked back and forth between them. “You’re leaving?”

  Kloo made a guilty face and snuggled closer to Ayjay. “Well, not for a few years. But yeah, eventually.” They shared a smile. “We want to start a family.”

  “You can’t do that here?”

  “Children aren’t allowed in the Grimsphere,” Kloo said. “There aren’t any schools, plus it’s not the most ideal place to raise them.”

  “Because of all the death,” Ayjay added unnecessarily.

  Lex just stared at them, unable to fathom their stupidity. “You mean you’d give up all this—and wipe your memory clean—just to squirt out a couple of screaming brats?”

  Kloo shrugged. “I want to go to med school, and Ayjay wants to open up his own gym. That’s the plan, anyway. Although now I’m wondering if we should leave sooner rather than later.”

  She chanced a look at the menacing Seniors.

  “It’s starting to get a little too dangerous here.”

  5

  Over the next couple of days Lex fell back into her old schedule so easily it began to feel as if she’d never left. None of her skills as a Killer had diminished—in fact, they seemed to have grown sharper, cleaner, more polished.

  This did not go unnoticed by Driggs. “Were you practicing while you were gone?” he asked, pocketing his sapphire scythe as they approached an impaled truck driver. The Gamma, or soul, burst from the man’s body as soon as Lex’s finger graced his arm. The deathflash bathed them in a white light while the shock that accompanied all her Kills shot through her body like a lightning bolt. Driggs bent over the target, collecting the soul into his hands and guiding it into a Vessel. “Your speed is insane.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Lex muttered, polishing the pitch-black obsidian of her scythe. In simpler times she would have milked these compliments for all they were worth. But she wasn’t sure anymore how proud she should be of her exceptional abilities, especially since they seemed to be the source of everything that had gone wrong in her life. As if having to lock herself in her room and Damn a pencil cup while Leonardo DiCaprio watched from the Titanic poster across from her bed wasn’t embarrassing enough.

  They next scythed to a police officer. An impossibly red, shimmering bullet hole sat in the middle of his chest. “And you’re doing better with those, uh, urges,” Driggs added.

  “What?” Lex said distractedly, unable to tear her eyes away from the man holding the gun.

  “I said you’re doing a pretty good job of not tackling that guy and Damning the ever-loving shit out of him for shooting a cop,” Driggs said more loudly. “I’m proud of you.”

  Lex scowled, taking care not to let him see her searing hands.

  In terms of grumpiness, however, no one could match the sheer exasperation of Ferbus and Elysia, whose new partners were proving to be a lot harder to tolerate than they had anticipated.

  “I. Give. Up.” Ferbus yelled one afternoon to Driggs and Lex in the Juniors’ circular red-leather booth at the Morgue, the town diner. “It took him two days—two days—to figure out how to scythe without dropping the damn thing. And now that we’ve finally made it out to the Field, everything is a question! ‘Where are we now, Ferbus?’ ‘What happened to this guy, Ferbus?’ ‘Why are you banging your head against a wall, Ferbus?’”

  “At least yours talks,” Elysia said, irritably shoving a fry into her mouth. “Mine just stares. Like a cow. I try to engage, I try to take advantage of teachable moments, but how am I supposed to know if anything’s even sinking in?”

  Lex stifled a laugh. She loved Elysia, but the thought of the poor girl trapped for several hours with someone who wouldn’t talk back to her was surely her idea of hell.

  “Give them a chance,” Driggs said. “Maybe you just need to get to know them better.”

  “Like you did with your partner?” said Ferbus, gesturing at Lex. “Good point. Maybe I should shove my tongue down Pip’s throat and see what happens.”

  Moments later, Pip sat down at the table and started right in. “What happens if someone dies underwater, Ferbus? Or underground?”

  “I’ll show you this afternoon!” Ferbus shouted. “Now stop asking! Just stop!”

  “Pip,” Driggs interjected in the hopes of avoiding an Incident, “why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? What was life like before coming here? We all have really crappy backgrounds, so we’ll understand.”

  Pip looked surprised, as if unable to comprehend being the one to answer questions rather than ask them. “Foster home. Too many kids, not enough parents.”

  Ferbus, a well-traveled former foster kid himself, softened a bit. “Amen to that,” he muttered.

  “What kind of stuff did you do once you turned delinquent?” Lex asked. “Don’t be shy, we’ve all—”

  “Robbed a Seven-Eleven,” Pip said matter-of-factly, without a trace of embarrassment.

  Ferbus dropped his onion ring. The other Juniors exchanged shocked glances. “Excuse me?” said Elysia.

  Pip chomped at his fries. “Stole some licorice sticks, fashioned them into fake guns, and then threatened the clerk until he gave us some money,” he replied. “Bang thought it would be a hoot.”

  “Interesting.” Elysia glanced at Bang, still waiting for her food at the counter. “Why doesn’t she talk?”

  “I dunno. She never has.” He shoved another handful of fries into his face and chewed as he talked. “Her family came over from India when she was three and who knows what happened to them after that. We both went into the foster system when we were six, and we’ve been shuffled around together ever since.”

  Elysia gave him a sad smile. “Is that why you’re so protective?”

  Pip shrugged. “She’s my best friend. I watch her back, she watches mine.”

  Bang brought her tray to the table, cracked open her book, and started reading and eating. Ferbus nudged Pip. “She’s cute too,?
?? he fake-whispered.

  Bang stopped chewing and looked up, a string of cheddar stretching from her grilled cheese to her mouth.

  Pip gave Ferbus a strange look. “I guess.”

  “Nice eyes.”

  Bang chewed once more, then stopped. Pip was still confused. “. . . Right.”

  Ferbus gave him a playful shove. “Come on, Pipster. You never thought about her that way?”

  Bang sprayed her food across the table in a silent laugh. Pip looked horrified. “No! She’s my sister! Ew!”

  “Whoa, okay. Sorry.”

  “Besides, I’m not exactly interested.”

  Ferbus stared.

  “In girls,” Pip clarified, dunking another fry.

  “Oh,” Ferbus said automatically, then slowly grasped his meaning. “Ohhhh,” he said again, his eyes widening, most likely in horror at his earlier comment regarding his tongue and Pip’s throat.

  Bang was still laughing to herself. Gradually, everyone else joined in. Including Ferbus, until he realized that he was the one they were laughing at.

  “Oh, hey,” said Lex. “I wanted to show you guys something I found in the library. In the Grotton section.”

  “What’s a Grotton?” asked Pip.

  “Who’s Grotton.” Elysia excitedly launched into one of her lectures, a “teachable moment opportunity!” neon sign practically lighting up over her head. “Only the most evil Grim of all time. Back in the fourteenth century, he found a Loophole —that’s this little scroll that when placed in a jellyfish tank can give you the ability to Crash—which meant he could scythe off the grid whenever he wanted to. Then he figured out how to Crash with a specific destination in mind. Plus he was the only one ever born with the ability to Damn, which meant that he could kill people without removing their souls and instead curse them to an eternity of pain and torture. Add that all together, and you end up with a guy who terrorized both the Grimsphere and the real world, Damning hundreds of people. He’s the worst of the worst.”

  Lex decided to jump in before anyone pointed out that Grotton wasn’t the only one who had been born with the ability to Damn—Lex had, too. And she wasn’t in the mood to discuss it, or her burny hands, or any of the other things that set her apart as having an innate streak of evil. Or whatever it was.

  So she described what she’d seen in the library, all the Grotton books with WRONG BOOK scratched into them. Then she took out the note she’d found and flattened it on the table.

  “‘The key to the dead awaits overhead’?” Ferbus read. “What, like in a storage compartment?”

  Elysia rolled her eyes. “Ferbus, you are the densest person on the planet.”

  “Well, do you know what it’s talking about?”

  “No, but—” She read it over once again, then shrugged. “No, not really.”

  “Just keep a lookout, okay?” Lex said. “For anything strange. Or overhead. Or keylike.”

  Just then a copy of The Obituary dropped onto the table. “Right there, front page,” Ayjay said briskly as he and Kloo walked by. He looked exhausted. Lately the two of them had been putting in so many hours they often had to skip lunch.

  “Atlanta this time,” Kloo said out of the side of her mouth, pointing to the article and a picture of Zara. “She Damned the head of a dogfighting ring.”

  “Good,” Lex said before she could stop herself. The other Juniors stared at her. Driggs looked especially disapproving.

  “I mean—” She refrained from saying what she was thinking, that the world was probably better off, that Zara had done society a favor. Such unpopular opinions were what had gotten Lex into so much trouble in the first place. So she kept them to herself.

  But she never stopped thinking them.

  “How are you guys holding up?” Elysia asked Kloo and Ayjay. “And why are you talking all funny?”

  Kloo grimaced. “We’re not supposed to talk to you. It’s stupid, I know, but Norwood will give us hell if he catches us. If we want to be Seniors, we have to act like Seniors,” she said in a mocking tone.

  Driggs almost growled. “Norwood is not in charge.”

  “I know,” she said, her gaze fretfully flitting around the room. “But still, these longer shifts are hard enough. Maybe we can catch up sometime at Corpp’s, okay?”

  Ayjay sleepily grabbed a handful of fries as he left. “Doubtful.”

  Elysia watched them go. “Poor kids. Doesn’t Norwood realize how crazy this is?”

  “You know what’s crazy?” said Pip. “Those things we put the souls in. Vessels, right? What are those things made out of? Looks like thread or something. Is it thread, Ferbus?”

  “I’LL SHOW YOU LATER.”

  ***

  After lunch the Juniors headed to the Bank to get their scythes programmed for their afternoon shifts. While the rookies and their beleaguered partners were required to check in with Norwood and Heloise, Lex and Driggs could choose any available Etcetera in the hub. Each sat at his or her own cubicle, fingers flying across the keyboards of their Smacks, the computer-like devices connected to jellyfish that determined when and where a death was occurring.

  “Sofi?” Driggs suggested, pointing. Sofi had skipped lunch as usual, dutifully pecking away at her Smack. “She’s the only one who’s free.”

  Lex groaned. They’d always checked in with Sofi over the summer, but lately Lex had done everything within her power to avoid the girl, choosing even the hostile Senior Etceteras over her. Especially now that Sofi’s desk featured a new frolicking-fairy snow globe.

  “Fine,” Lex said. “Just don’t be surprised if she tries to stab me with a nail file.”

  “Hi, Lex!” Sofi exclaimed, her honeyed voice dripping with false warmth. “Hi, Driggs!”

  Lex was taken aback, but only slightly. Of course the little tramp would play nice in Driggs’s presence.

  Sure enough, Sofi gave him a playful shove. “Checking in?”

  “Regrettably,” Lex snipped under her breath, eyeing Sofi’s roving hand.

  “Omigod, I’ve totally missed you guys,” Sofi said as she plugged their scythes into the Smack. “I guess we just keep missing each other, huh?”

  Driggs smiled, ever the nice guy. “Something like that.”

  “I mean, I’m surprised they’re still allowing you to do shifts at all,” Sofi went on, almost frighteningly cheerful. “Because, like, I got suspended for two weeks after I got caught helping you.”

  Lex and Driggs exchanged glances. “Look, we’re really sorry about that,” Driggs said. “We didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

  “That’s okay,” Sofi said, leaning forward so that the neckline of her blouse dipped a little lower. “I’m sure you can figure out a way to make it up to me.”

  Driggs barely noticed the oncoming cleavage. A thoughtful look had come over his face. “Actually, I don’t know why we weren’t suspended.”

  “Maybe they want to keep you around so there are more chances for you to screw up,” Sofi suggested, a slight edge to her voice.

  “Or maybe they decided my sister getting killed was punishment enough,” Lex snapped.

  “Relax, spaz,” Driggs muttered to her under his breath. He smiled at Sofi and pointed at her new snow globe. “So, where’d that come from?”

  “Oh.” Sofi’s eyes fluttered. “It was a gift.”

  Something about her tone made Lex suspicious. “From?”

  Sofi cleared her throat and started typing. “Um, Norwood and Heloise.”

  “What?” Lex exclaimed. “They hate the rest of us Juniors with the burning of a thousand suns and they’re giving you presents?”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do, say no?”

  “Yes! Junior solidarity!”

  Driggs folded his arms and glared at the directors. “Did they give you a reason, Sof?”

  “Something about favors. I think they want me to keep tabs on the rest of you. But I’m not,” she added quickly. She gave Lex a supersized smile. “Junior solida
rity, totally.”

  On their way out of the Bank, Lex didn’t know whether to laugh or punch her fist through a wall. “Norwood and Heloise are really barking up the wrong tree if they think they can turn that bimbo into a spy.”

  “True,” said Driggs. “But we’re not doing anything wrong, so really, we have nothing to worry about.”

  Lex huffed. “I don’t get it. I mean, Zara killed Cordy—why in the world would anyone think I’m on the same side as her?”

  “They don’t know the whole story. They just see Juniors as one big threat, regardless of who killed who.”

  “But if they really think we’re such threats, why haven’t they kicked us out?”

  “Because it would have to be over Mort’s dead body. And Sofi’s probably right about them waiting for you to screw up. They know what you’re capable of, and they’re going to twist it in a way that’s to their advantage. You’re their Exhibit A. Obviously, we know you’re not going to lose your mind and go on a murderous Damning rampage, but the townspeople don’t. The best way to get rid of the Juniors is to paint us as wild, out-of-control monsters, and that’s exactly what Norwood and Heloise are doing.”

  “Unbelievable,” Lex said as they arrived at the Ghost Gum. She stared at its smooth, chalky-white trunk, all the way up to the ghostly nest sitting atop its highest branches. Four months ago she didn’t even know these people. Now they were plotting her demise.

  For whatever reason, she thought of her mom. And dad. No matter how badly she’d misbehaved over the past couple of years, they’d always gone to bat for her—arguing with the principal to let her stay in school, meeting with the gym teacher to negotiate a way to replace all those punctured dodgeballs. They’d been such good parents. And yet she’d left them to come back to this bottomless fiasco.

  It made her chest sting.

  She ignored the pain, willed their faces out of her mind. “So now what?”

  “We lie low, I guess. Maybe convince some of the more open-minded Croakers to come over to our side. We’ve already got Corpp and Pandora, and everyone loves them.”

  Lex sighed and readied her scythe. “Yeah, well, love doesn’t always beat out fear.”