“Come here, Skye,” it says.
I stand and peer into the darkness, trying to see who’s speaking, but it’s too dark to make out anything beyond the shapes of seats and shadow.
The sound of it is so familiar that fear doesn’t even occur to me. It feels like something I should know, like it belongs to me the way my own hands do.
And yet I still can’t place it.
Something prickles at the base of my skull. Before I can think better of it, my body is already moving. I slide through the narrow gap between Talon’s legs and the seat in front of him, then step into the bus aisle.
“Is this a dream?” I ask, though I do not really know why.
It is not in my nature to throw my doubts into the open like that. Usually, I keep them close to my chest. They stay within me, where they are safe, where other people cannot use them against me. This time, though, the question spills out anyway, as if I have no say in it.
“Not quite,” the voice replies. “But it’s not the waking world either.”
“Is that so?” I reply.
My legs carry me toward the back of the bus, one step at a time. I pass the sleeping girls, Mark, and the two killers without slowing.
As soon as I move beyond them, the aisle seems to stretch into something longer than it has any right to be, and the row of seats that should mark the very end of the vehicle sinks into a darkness deeper than the rest of the space.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“I’m here,” it replies, as if nothing has changed at all.
I take a few more steps, and my destination finally emerges from the shadows. It looks like a bench with someone sitting on it, a bench that has no business being inside a bus. Made of natural wood, it stands with its back to me. The person on it sits the same way, shoulders turned away, offering me nothing but the line of their spine.
“Come sit here with me,” the person says.
I do as the voice asks without hesitation. My pace slows just a fraction, but I keep moving. When I reach the bench, the wood catches my attention for a split second. I study the grain and the shapes in it, then lower myself carefully to sit. The moment I do, everything shifts. The scenery around me changes, and so does the stranger beside me. The bench seems to stretch and widen beneath us, growing bigger with each breath until it is not a bench at all.
It is a thick, wide branch.
A willow tree.
“You finally made it,” the voice says. I lift my head to look at its owner and come face to face with my own reflection. “You realized what you were missing all this time.”
“I…” I start, and then stop. Halfway through the word, it hits me that I don’t know what to say, because I don’t even know what it means. Missing what, exactly? What have I been missing all this time?
“I know it’s confusing,” the other me says gently. “Sometimes I wonder why we were given a task this profound when all we are is human.”
“I don’t understand,” I manage to say.
The other me smiles, then turns her head to look forward. She lifts her hand, and in the blink of an eye a little Grim Reaper scythe appears in her palm. It’s tiny, a miniature version like the one Pain sometimes carried in his beak when he was still a raven.
I haven’t seen this form of the scythe in what feels like forever.
It’s nostalgic.
“The source of a Grim Reaper’s power doesn’t lie in anything external,” she says. “Even the scythes are nothing but vessels.”
She lets the miniature scythe slip from her fingers. I watch it drop off the branch and fall, and keep falling, swallowed by the darkness below. I brace myself for a thud or a splash or for any sign that it has met a surface, but nothing comes. It is as if it will fall forever.
“Itcanbe falling like this forever,“ the other me says. “If that’s what you want.”
I turn to her, baffled. “I have a choice?”
“You always had and you always will,” she replies. “That scythe symbolizes your power, and it’s yours to do with as you please.”
