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Jack took another sip.

“Any chance you got another spare body lying around I could hop into?” It was a joke in tone, but Jack could hear the tint of a plea coloring the edges. “It’s just, Savannah’s gonna be a wreck, you know?”

“I got lucky,” Jack said, almost apologetically. “The reaper assigned to my case gave me an in and I took it, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t standard protocol.”

“Is that what you are now? Some sort of grim reaper?”

“Basically,” said Jack. “Though they get real testy when you say it like that.”

“So you know everyone who’s gonna die before it happens?”

Dale spoke with the kind of awe he’d previously reserved for Jack’s most brilliant schemes, and for a moment Jack considered not correcting the assumption. It couldn’t do any real harm; Dale wouldn’t be sticking around for much longer anyway. But that would only lead to more questions, which would only lead to the need for more lies, and frankly, Jack didn’t have the energy for that anymore. Being in your eighties really took it out of you.

“Not quite,” he said. “I just get files for whoever’s dying each day.”

“Oh,” Dale replied, awe fading quicker than sunshine in midwinter. “That’s still cool, Jackie.”

Jack took another swig of his coffee in reply. The bitter, mildly tangy sludge coated his throat in the comfortingly off-putting way it always had.

“So where do the files come from?”

Jack completed his laborious swallow. “Huh?”

“The dead people files. Where do they come from?”

Jack contemplated another sip of his coffee, but he wasn’t entirely convinced his new body could handle whatever weapons-grade ingredients Billy put in there. In truth, Jack had never given much thought to the S.C.Y.T.H.E. chain of command, less out of a lack of curiosity and more because his afterlife depended on keeping his head down and not asking too many questions.

“They’re just on my desk when I get there in the morning,” he admitted finally.

“Sure, but who writes them?”

This wasn’t right. The tone in Dale’s voice. The glimmer in his eyes. Jack knew them too well. They used to be his. He shifted in the booth, lifting a shred of fabric off his seat with the motion.

“Hey, tell me something. The whole world looks at me and sees Margaret Chen, right? So how come you can see me in here?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

“I guess now that I’m dead it’s easier to see the soul under the body. And I’d recognize you anywhere,” said Dale.

Jack considered this for a moment. Had his other collections been able to see him too? Were they confused as to why there was a young man hanging out in the shell of an old woman? No one had ever said as much, but it certainly would explain a few odd looks he’d attributed to the confusion of being recently dead.

“Anyway,” Dale said, dragging Jack out of his thoughts. “You were saying?”

“I was?”

“Yeah. About the files. About who writes them.”

Something pricked at Margaret’s neck. Jack didn’t like where this conversation was going, but it felt like that impressively spherical boulder from Indiana Jones, picking up speed and difficult to dodge now that the booby trap had been triggered.

“Above my pay grade,” Jack said into his mug. “So, how’s Savannah? Still waxing eyebrows?”

“Yeah, yeah, she does pubes now too,” Dale said, his tone distracted. “Look, Jackie, I have an idea.”

The words struck Jack as wrong, not because they didn’t belong here, in this booth, where they’d been uttered a million times before, but because it should have been Jack who said them.

“Oh,” said Jack, a discordant combination of nostalgia and dread running through him.

“Look, after everything that happened back in the day, you always said we’d do one last big job. You promised it and everything. Said I might even get to try being in charge and stuff, remember?”

“I remember.”