1
Echo
Adistant bell tolls with all the moody drama of the metal song my sister Jet is currently blasting out of her mini speakers. Dirt devils of ash and sand swirl high over the barren wasteland and a baking heat runs through the air like a thrill, scorching the earth. Our grief-seekers huddle together in the middle of the plain, a few hundred feet from the outskirts of the town, with its wooden shacks groaning against the growing wind.
I glare at Jet while keeping my smile for the customers in place—which probably makes me look a little too killer-clowny to be comfortable. I’ve told her a million times that we don’t need to have music on our tours. This place is plenty atmospheric enough without her bursting our eardrums with her choice of music. Sadly, she ignores me and the act of widening my eyes just leaves me with an eyeful of sand and dust.
Sugar lumps and shitshows. This is why I hate the grief-seekers tour. We’re at the end of the world and still my sister is making me mad. Plus, not all of our customers appreciate the music or the fact she’s head-banging along like she couldn’t give a fig that there are people around… or that the world is ending.
“Isn’t that a bit insensitive?” One of our clients asks me, gesturing in Jet’s general direction.
“Because all these people are going to die soon, you mean?” Jet asks. My sister, ever the sensitive soul. “It’s not like it’ll change anything for them. They’ll all be gone soon either way. I don’t think it matters if we have a bit of fun while we’re here.”
As insensitive as she is, Jet is right. We call this the ‘grief-seekers tour’ because it’s a very weird place which is caught in a kind of loop in time, so the world is always ending here. Every day, midday strikes and the apocalypse begins. Every night, midnight comes and the place resets. Like clockwork.
We always get at least one Judgemental Jessica whenever we come here, despite us being very clear with the disclaimers before they sign up. On this particular tour, we pop in, sniff the sulfur-filled air and despair, hang around for a bit and then pop out.
Unsurprisingly, this tour is mostly popular with demons since they get to absorb a lot of yummy energy from all the raw emotions in the air.
Also unsurprisingly, it’s always the humans that give us grief and pile on the guilt trip. I say that with love as a person who grew up in the human world. They’re always the ones best at playing ostrich until reality slaps us in the face.
Today’s tour has thirteen customers plus me and Jet. We’ve got five humans or human-ish folk, four demons, two witches, and a couple of unknowns. There’s one in particular that hasn’t removed their hood for the whole time we’ve been here and I can see Jet’s itching to bump into them just to see if it’ll slip and we can get a peek at what’s beneath. We had to stop allowing vamps to book onto this tour once we realized that something about the whole apocalypse atmosphere drives them absolutely wild with blood lust. I’m not really into decapitating or staking rabid customers.
Not part of my job description. All I’m here to do is hop us into the world, put on my best smile and spout my usual spiel for a couple of hours, and then hop us right back home again. I’m pretty good at it too. Not to toot my own horn, but I can talk up anywhere, no matter how bad it stinks like rotten eggs.
And holy meatballs, does this place stink.
For the past three and a bit years, ever since we absconded in the dead of night, Jet and I have hopped from place to place, world to world: from beaches, mountains, cities, visiting in all manner of seasons and experiencing all types of weather. We saw glitter tornadoes and sentient snowstorms, we visited the grand hallways of Hades and snuck around in just our socks so we wouldn’t get caught. We visited the Labyrinthine Caves—an entire world that is just an intricate labyrinth… of caves. It was dark and creepy and we wandered around, lost, for hours before giving up and hopping out of there.
And then we decided, after a couple of weeks of camping on beaches and fluttering our eyelashes for snacks, plus a brief stint where Jet tried fortune telling and was absolutely terrible at it, we turned our trips into a business. Two boss bitch sisters raking in cash while still flitting from place to place.
Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t hard to find customers. Then we got more and more as word spread and people told their friends.
It was great. For a bit, anyway. Then we both remembered how people suck—a sentiment, it turns out, that extends to all people across all worlds. As soon as you make something transactional and get people to hand over their cash, they talk about ‘customer service’ and ‘service with a smile’ and ‘find us a proper restroom, we will not pee behind that bush’.
We quickly learned that doing tours is like looking after five to twelve adult babies. Someone always gets sick on the journey, someone always wears totally inappropriate shoes, someone is hungry and someone else needs yet another pee break even though we just went.
It’s a lot. And we both sometimes get sick of each other, sick of spending all day, every day together.
And the grief-seekers tour is probably my least favorite of all. The atmosphere, the smell, the taste of the place, blech. But it’s popular, so we’ve been here a lot.
But it makes me feel so guilty. We come here and we stay as late as we can, skirting the edges of the apocalypse and witnessing it like it’s a geyser going off. A natural phenomenon, one that we can’t do anything about.
… but if anybody could do something. It’s me.
I’m a destiny weaver, after all.
That’s what I was created to do. To weave the threads of destiny and carry people along… somewhere. I spent nearly six years at the weaver academy, learning about weaving and feeling waay over my head. Since I never technically graduated, I never went through the placement ceremony that would tell me exactly what I was supposed to do with the abilities I got from being a weaver.
And since Jet and I are technically on the run from the higher level weavers, we set ourselves a few rules when we first escaped the academy: like we don’t go back to the same place too often, we never go back to the Ether, where the weaver academy is located, and we keep on going forward.
It means that if I were to, say, move hundreds of people from this place, to save them from the apocalypse, that would be like waving a million flares and announcing our presence. The higher-ups would find us. And then who knows what they’d do.
So… I do nothing. Apart from feeling guilty as all hell.
I don’t even know what would happen if we relocated the people that live here. Would they somehow get stuck back here the very next day? Would someone else take their place? Who knows? I could just end up making things worse.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
