“I don’t want to talk about it.” Zara shuddered. “It’s disgusting.”
“Swiping internship?” Lex said.
“The owners of all the shops and restaurants in town—mostly retired Grims and Etceteras—are called swipers,” Elysia said, all too happy to have more stuff to explain. “It’s their job to take things from the outside world for our own purposes, like food, clothes, medicine, toiletries—”
“Veal, tongue, gizzards,” Zara said with a look of revulsion.
“Swipers use their scythes a little differently,” Elysia continued. “They open up small windows into the ether—just large enough for them to reach through—and take supplies that generally go unnoticed from places like large warehouses, back rooms of grocery stores, Laundromats—”
“Laundromats?”
“You should see our sock inventory,” Driggs said. “Massive.”
Elysia nodded. “We’re pretty isolated out here, so it’s a really efficient system.”
Lex was dumbfounded. “I had no idea petty theft was such a noble endeavor.”
“Well,” said Zara, “when you think about the gracious services we provide to the citizens of this world, it’s only fair. People should be thankful we don’t charge more.”
“But don’t you ever get caught?”
“Nope,” she said, combing through her staticky silver hair with the long, bony fingers that everyone in Croak seemed to possess. “We only take enough to sustain our small population. People out there never notice their things are missing, and if they do, they blame themselves anyway.”
Lex longingly thought of her mother, and of all the clothes she had complained about losing over the years. Now, definitive proof that the washing machine wasn’t a “ravenous, blouse-eating monster,” as she put it.
“As for me, I’m currently trying out Afterlife Liaisons,” Elysia said. “And Ferbus, well . . .”
“Ferbus wanted to hone his defensive skills,” said Ferbus. “So Ferbus took up the Vault Post.”
“Right, defensive skills,” Lex said. “Bet those come in real handy on dragon raids.”
Ferbus narrowed his eyes. “My job may seem pointless,” he said testily, “but if any unauthorized individuals come upstairs, it’s my job to make sure they don’t get into the Lair or Afterlife.”
“And how do you do that?”
“I can’t tell you. Suffice it to say that Mort trained me, and in the time it’d take for any intruder to say ‘Who’s that handsome devil?’ I’d have already broken their neck in three places.”
“But he still can’t tie his shoes,” said Driggs.
Everyone laughed. Elysia laughed the hardest.
“I guess you have to learn how to entertain yourselves around here, without TVs or anything,” said Lex.
“Oh, we have a TV,” Elysia said.
Lex grabbed her arm. “Say that again?”
She laughed. “At the Crypt. That’s our dorm. And what’s ours is yours, come over whenever you want. We all live there, except for you and Driggs.”
Driggs nodded. “Best not to mingle with the dirty peons.”
“It’s only because Uncle Mort is my uncle,” Lex said, rolling her eyes. “My parents would shit a brick if I had to live on my own.”
Had this exchange taken place in a cheesy comedy movie, a record needle scratch would have sounded at this moment to denote the stunned silence that Lex’s statement had produced, followed by an uncomfortable cough or two. But in a noisy diner, the sudden hush of a small group of people went largely unnoticed, and Lex became aware that she had said something wrong only when she realized that all of the Juniors were staring at her, their mouths agape. Driggs swore under his breath.
“What?” Lex asked, perplexed. “What’s wrong?”
“You—you have parents?” choked Elysia.
“Um, yeah.”
“Two of ’em?” Ferbus asked.
“How many should I have?”
Ferbus eyed Lex with a furious glower. Elysia bit her nail and looked like she was about to cry. Everyone else stared at the table.
Driggs lightly touched Lex on the elbow. “Lex,” he said, his blue eye flashing sadly, “the rest of us don’t have parents.”
Elysia sniffed. Zara wore a hard expression.
“Sorry, guys,” he said to the group. “I didn’t tell her.”
Lex awkwardly shifted in her seat, not knowing what to do or say. She felt ill.
“Mine left when I was ten,” Kloo said bitterly, breaking the silence. “Dumped me at my senile grandmother’s and never looked back.”
“Mom overdosed,” Ayjay said. “Dad’s in jail.”
“Kicked me out of the house,” said Elysia.
“I got bounced around every foster home in the state.” Ferbus was seething. “Ask me how many parents I have.”
Lex looked down. “I didn’t know,” she said in a barely audible whisper.
After a moment Kloo spoke up. “It’s not your fault, hon. We’ve got better lives now, anyway. That’s why we’re here.”
“But then what—” said Sofi to Lex, her eyes still troubled, “what are you doing here?”
“Yeah,” said Ferbus with a sneer. “If you’ve got such a loving family?”
Driggs sat up a little taller. “Hey, she turned delinquent just like the rest of us,” he said defensively. “And remember, it was Mort’s decision to bring her here. So if any of you have a problem with that, I suggest you take it up with him.”
That seemed to do it. The rest of the group softened, though the sour look on Ferbus’s face never quite went away.
“Omigod!” said Elysia, looking at her watch. “I have to go. I promised Ben I’d watch his next kite experiment. I keep telling him that electricity is a pretty well-known concept by now, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to one-up Thomas Edison all the frickin’ time.” She turned to Lex. “Seriously, sometimes grown dead men act like children.”
Lex let out a nervous laugh as the Juniors gathered their trash and got up to leave. Pandora shot Lex a friendly wink as they piled out the door. She limply waved back.
“So I guess we’ll see you later,” said Kloo once they got outside.
“Right,” Lex carefully replied as the group separated. “Have a good day?”
No one answered.
After they had walked a considerable distance away, Lex jabbed Driggs in the rib. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I honestly forgot to,” he said. “I mean, you were actually having a good time and getting along with everyone. Imagine my shock.”
“Well, I hope you enjoyed the ride, because now they hate me.”
“I thought you wanted to be hated.”
“Only by you.”
He snickered. “They’ll come around. I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”
“I only lose sleep when you bang on those goddamned drums.”
“Good. It is my mission to annoy.”
“Mission accomplished.”
Driggs threw a lingering smile at her, which Lex, to her surprise, returned.
Luckily, she caught herself, and quickly followed it with a scowl.
11
Lex picked at her lips as she leaned against the Ghost Gum tree and watched pairs of Senior Grims swapping out for their lunch breaks, emotions swirling through her mind like unflagging hurricanes. So many unanswered questions, moral debacles, social insecurities, and mysterious feelings, both hormonal and otherwise . . .
She dismissed those last ones easily enough. Lex had never taken any interest in the moronic half of the human race, and she didn’t plan on starting anytime soon.
Her eyes wandered up the trunk of the tree, where the craggy branches scratched at the sky like skeletal fingers. She then glanced at Driggs’s hands and snorted at the similarity.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. Your bony hands of death amuse me, that’s all.”
“Wait until yours look the same,” he said, preparing to scy
the.
“Wait—what?” She batted the sapphire blade out of his hands. “What do you mean? Is that why everyone around here has such creepy fingers?”
“Yeah.” He bent down to pick up his scythe. “I don’t know why it happens, though. Probably the same weird reason our hair goes all wonky.”
“What?” she barked, knocking his scythe to the ground once more.
“Stop that!”
“What happens to our hair?”
He gestured at the disaster atop his head. “You think I want to look like a drunken hedgehog all the time? It’s from hanging out in the ether so much. It messes with your follicles or something. Doesn’t happen to everyone, but I can assure you that Ferbus’s wasn’t always the color of a prison jumpsuit, Zara wasn’t born Silvylocks, and Mort’s been rocking the electrocution look for years. Look, yours has gotten straighter already.”
Lex ran a hand through her hair. It had lost some of its poofyness. There had been so many other circuses of insanity to deal with that she hadn’t even noticed. It was calm, manageable, even—she shuddered to think it—sleek and shiny.
“Oh my God,” she said in disgust. “I’m a shampoo commercial.”
“And you’ll soon get a nice pair of death claws to boot.” He wiggled his fingers at her nose.
“Get those spindly things out of my face,” she said. “What about my eyes? Are they gonna morph into monstrosities, like yours?”
“Nope,” he said, twirling his scythe. “These are a hundred percent ugly, mutated me.”
Lex snickered, though she begrudgingly conceded to herself that of all the words to describe Driggs, “ugly” wasn’t one of them. She pulled her hood up over her flushing cheeks and readied her scythe. “Well, they nicely complement the rest of your hideousness,” she overcompensated.
Uncle Mort wasn’t kidding when he promised Lex that she’d be going full throttle. Their afternoon shift was just as intense as the morning one, if not more—though her unsettling feelings were starting to dissipate now that she had seen the Afterlife. If she really was sending souls to such a wonderful place, what she was doing couldn’t possibly be all that wrong.
Unless not all of them got there.
“Hey,” she said to Driggs as they landed in a large corner office. She tapped the elbow of a man who had just blown his brains out all over the windows. After the deathflash, the Gamma flowed from the man’s body, curling into the air like an iridescent vapor. “You said before that almost everyone gets to go to the Afterlife when they die. So who doesn’t? I know that if I don’t do my job, the soul gets trapped, but what happens if you don’t do yours?”
As an answer, Driggs pointed at the Gamma diffusing through the room.
“Um, okay,” she said, her voice edged with panic as she stared at the escaping light. “What if you don’t catch it?”
Driggs’s face clouded. “You believe in ghosts?”
“No.”
“Might want to start.” The Gamma flickered as it flowed into Driggs’s waiting hands.
Lex let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Oh.”
She worked in quiet reflection for the next couple of targets until they landed in a thin forest next to a playground. Lex took one look at the ground and gasped. A young girl, bruised and bloodied, lay across a fallen tree. A red-spattered teddy bear sat in the crook of her arm.
Driggs looked away. “Just do it,” he said. “Better to get kids done fast, especially the brutal ones.”
Lex, still staring in horror, bent down and inspected the girl’s face. Her skin was smooth; she couldn’t have been more than eight years old. Lex felt the contempt welling up once again, the same kind that had arisen when she was with Zara and had seen that woman with the gun . . .
She stood up abruptly and scoured the area. “Driggs—”
“What?”
“The guy’s still here.”
Blinded by fury, Lex could no longer see anything but the man retreating through the trees, hardly ten feet away. Hatred engulfed her body, her hands grew white-hot, and her tongue detected the metallic taste of blood. Emitting a faint growl, she gripped her scythe and stalked across the grass toward the man—closer and closer, until the blade was mere inches away from him. “That pervert, that sick f—”
“STOP!” Driggs shouted, grabbing her arms and wrestling her back to the target. “Touch her. Now,” he said, holding her hand over the child.
“But she’s only a kid!”
“She’s already gone! You want her soul to be trapped?”
Lex resisted a moment longer, then looked away as she bitterly poked her finger into the little girl’s skin.
Driggs somehow managed to Cull with one hand as he continued to restrain Lex. “We’re leaving.” Tugging on her wrist, he ripped his scythe upward through the air and pulled her back through the ether to the Field.
This did not go over well. Lex erupted into a flurry of punches, madly flapping about like a wounded ostrich, but Driggs—now a tad wiser—put his hand on her head and held her at arm’s length, rendering her swings futile.
“Are you done?” he asked after a couple dozen swipes.
Lex dropped her hands. Unfortunately, Driggs followed suit, affording her the perfect opportunity to kick him in the crotch. Which she did.
“That . . . was . . . unnecessary,” he groaned from the ground.
Lex blew a tuft of hair out of her face.
“I disagree.”
***
Lex looked at her hands as Driggs dragged her down the street. They felt like they were on fire. She inhaled deeply, shoved them into her pocket, and blinked back the hot tears stinging at her eyes. Sure, she’d gotten mad before—the past two years of feral outbursts were proof enough of that. But they were nothing compared to this.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Uncle Mort said as Driggs dragged Lex into the Croak Public Library.
“She cracked out in the Field, tried to go after someone,” Driggs said, seating her at a large wooden table. “You’d better go over the Terms.”
“I thought this might happen,” said Uncle Mort, staring pointedly at his niece. “I’ll go get the slides.”
As he bumbled into the closet, Lex glanced around the room. In addition to an army of hulking bookshelves stacked with hundreds of dusty, forgotten tomes, the walls of the library also boasted a sweeping display of old-timey photographs of old-timey people, all unsmiling and wearing heavy black cloaks. She scowled back at them.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said to Driggs. “I reacted the way any decent human being would. Okay, I get that the girl was already dead, fine. But that guy—how could you just ignore him? Did you see what he did to her?”
“Lex—”
“First Zara, then you. You people are sick.”
“Wait—what about Zara?”
“When we were training yesterday, the same thing happened. This woman shot her husband or lover or whatever, so I tried to go after her, but Zara stopped me and told me not to tell Uncle Mort because it would get me into a lot of trouble.”
Driggs sighed and rubbed his eyes. “There are so many things wrong with that sentence.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, Zara should have known better. She knows the protocol for rookie training. That’s the sort of thing we’d report right after it happens.”
“Which would make this all part of the jealousy-sabotage thing, right?”
“Right. But that’s not the point.” He leaned in. “You can’t just go around doling out vigilante justice, Lex. If you ever lose your temper like you did back there and end up attacking a nontarget—trust me, you have no idea how severe the consequences are for executing whatever plans your spiteful little mind is concocting.”
“Enlighten me, then.”
“That’s his job,” Driggs said as Uncle Mort emerged from the closet.
“I found the slides,” he said, stuffing them into a projector. A
myriad of flow charts appeared on the wall before them. Uncle Mort uselessly grappled with the focus until the text became clear, then blurry, then unreadable.
“Okay, forget it,” he said, hurling the entire contraption back into the closet. “You’re a smart kid, you don’t need pie graphs.” He grabbed a weighty book from a nearby shelf and dropped it onto the table, where it landed with a resounding thud. A cloud of dust puffed up into the air, through which Lex could read Terms of Execution embossed in gold lettering across the cover. Uncle Mort loomed over them.
“The Terms of Execution are the guidelines that all Grims adhere to,” he said. “They are strict—some of the strictest laws ever written—and anyone who chooses to break them does so with the knowledge that punishment will be swift, severe, and astronomically unpleasant.” He indicated the book. “Of course, it’d take years to properly teach you each and every one of the rules the Grimsphere has devised over the centuries, so I’ll save both of us the trouble by saying that they all boil down to essentially the same thing: do your job, and only your job. Kill the target. This needs to be done with as little judgment as humanly possible. Just because time is stopped and murderers are powerless to defend themselves doesn’t mean you can run around like a maniac and exact vengeance on them, no matter how evil you think they are. We are objective, unbiased third parties, Lex.” He leaned in, that scary gleam in his eyes again. “It is not up to us to decide who lives and who dies.”
“But that monster in the woods, with that girl—he’s just going to do it again!”
“It’s an awful thing to turn away from, I know,” Uncle Mort said sadly. “But whenever those feelings surface, you’ve got to repress them. It’s not in our job description to impose justice. It’s unfortunate, yes, that people kill each other, but that’s how the world works. And we have no right to change that. We can’t interfere with human nature and free will any more than we can meddle with the fundamental laws of the universe. It’s not our place.”
Lex shook her head. “That’s so messed up. If we have the chance—the power—to stop someone from killing again—”
“Let me ask you this,” Uncle Mort said. “You’re a New Yorker. How often do you give spare change to homeless people?”