“What about you?” I ask. “Don’t you have any right to this power?”
“I do,” she says, calm and steady. “And I chose to keep it from you until you understood why you have it in the first place.”
I sit with that for a moment, searching myself for some sudden revelation I must have missed. Nothing clicks into place. Not fully.
“Did I?” I ask. “Realize?”
“Partially,” she says. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to disclose the other part to you directly.”
The darkness in front of us shifts. The scenery turns fluid, as if the space has become water, flowing and flowing without end. At first there is only motion, an endless current pulling at my senses. Then color bleeds into it like ink, spreading in slow blooms until shapes begin to form. Eventually, what settles before us is a place, unmistakable the moment it finishes taking shape.
My grandma’s home. The place where it all started. The place of my death.
Just as I used to watch it for all those years, I watch it now again. Except it’s not Mark’s and Jessica’s life that is unfolding inside it. It’s mine. Back when I was still alive.
I see myself in the kitchen, cooking, splattering something on my favorite clothes, then hurrying to the sink to rinse it out under running water. I see Mark upstairs in his study. I see time pass in a rush of ordinary moments, days stacking into months, months slipping into years.
And then I see something I never once let myself imagine I would see.
I see myself old, settled into my grandmother’s rocking chair, with Mark beside me on the porch, staring out at the sky.
The version where we both grow old together.
“You finally know what you are,” the other me says. “You are no longer part of the living plane, but you still grieve for it.”
My gaze locks onto the face of my older self. She cannot hear us. She is sealed inside her own universe, rocking back and forth, back and forth, as if the motion alone could hold the years in place. A tear stings my eye.
“But I wonder,” the other me continues. “Do you think this version of your life would have been better?”
My first instinct is to say yes. I want to say it without thinking, without touching the question at all. But at the last second I hesitate. I look at Mark again, and it hits me that he hasn’t really changed. He is still the same man, just housed in an older body. The detachment is still there, the cold distance that makes warmth feel like something I have to earn. We are sitting together, and yet I might as well be alone.
Would it have been better to spend that many years beside him? Would it have been better to never taste the love I found after I died?
“There is no such thing as a bad life or a good life,” the other me says. “You should know that by now.”
I think of all the souls I have carried in the five years of my duty as a Grim Reaper. I’ve seen so many lives, each one different, each one shaped by different choices. In the end, every soul had to stand before its own judgment. Not to be condemned, but to decide whether they could live with what they lived.
“All this time you grieved the prospect of a life,” she says. “The idea of one. But yours wasn’t bad just because it ended quickly.”
The image in front of me dissolves into darkness again, and with it, the air of this place changes. It feels like we are moving through the void, except it isn’t the void I know now. It’s the one from my memory.
My conversation with Death plays somewhere behind the darkness, the moment he told me to get rid of the wraith.
“Why did you agree to fight the wraith, Skye?” the other me asks.
“Because Death said he would destroy my soul otherwise.”
“And how would that be different from dying?” she asks.
“I… I don’t know,” I say, because the answer slips away the moment I reach for it.
The image shifts again. This time I see the Candy Maker’s wraith in the middle of the street, the air warped around her as she fought me. Behind us, my men lay crashed and broken, and I had been the only thing between them and oblivion.
“It wouldn’t be different,” she says softly. “You simply never wanted it to end.”
The scene changes again, and now I see myself forcing Cassian’s soul back into his chest, my hands shaking with a grief so sharp it feels like it could cut.
“I was so sad back then,” I mutter.
