“The people you grieve…” Cassian starts. “They didn’t die peacefully, did they?”
“Don’t.”
“I don’t mean any disrespect,” Cassian says. “Quite the opposite. I want to help them.”
It sounds as if Talon steps back and drags his hands down his face.
There’s a long beat of silence.
The short break has ended, and the counselor is clapping her hands softly, urging everyone back inside, but none of the three of us move.
“Fuck…” Talon stops, swallows, tries again. “Man, I’ve got nothing left to lose. If this is some sick fucking joke…”
“It’s not.”
“Yeah, but you should know—I’ve killed people. I will kill you if you’re lying to me. With my bare fucking hands. Don’t test me on that.”
There’s a scoff, and then Cassian’s voice drops to a whisper.
“I kill people all the time.”
And everything in me freezes to the bone. All the unease I felt about the two of them suddenly clicks into place and I understand what it was that I sensed from them.
A sense of foreboding. On some instinctual level, I have recognized that these two men and I are the same.
Murderers.
I should leave them behind and rejoin the group. If I care about what I have built, my career, the legacy I have started to create, I should just push off the wall and go sit down in the circle.
But I stay. Because this man’s words—Cassian’s words—linger in my mind.
What if?
I’ve never believed in fate. Or divine balance. Or cosmic fairness. The world I understand is governed by biology and physics and chemical inevitability. The heart stops because potassium rises and membranes fail. The lungs stop because muscles can no longer contract. Death is measurable, predictable, a collapse of form and function.
But what if that collapse is not the end of the function?
What if the system extends beyond the body?
What if failure continues somewhere else?
And if it does… who regulates it?
Doctors? No.
Scientists? No.
God?
If Cassian is right, then the question becomes painfully simple:
Who decides what happens to the dead?
And who holds them accountable?
Just like Cassian said, two weeks ago I wouldn’t have cared to know the answer as much as I do today. Two weeks ago, my mother was still here, and the answer didn’t indicate what had happened to her.
“Okay… we’re on the same page, then,” Talon mutters. “So let’s say this is real. What do I do? How do I… I don’t know… how do I see them too? Those Grim Reapers?”
