Chapter One 

Dear Sparks, how have you been? We haven’t talked in a little while. Sorry, I kept meaning to reach out, but I’ve been busy, and time flows differently here at Afterlife Incorporated. I think it’s been about a year since I died. Does that sound right to you?

Before I let you in on all the stuff I’ve been doing, I want to take a moment to do a simple visualization exercise. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. In through your nose, out through your mouth. That’s it. One more time. In your nose. Out your mouth. Got it?

Now imagine you don’t need to do that anymore. Like ever. Because you’re dead, and while you can breathe as a hobby, you don’t actually need to do it for survival. One less thing to worry about. Sounds pretty cool, right?

Well, that’s good, because currently I am worrying that I might have to kill an entire room of immortal reapers just to get this meeting to end.

In through your nose, out through your mouth. And again. Close your eyes if you have to.

“Okay,” Bang says, checking something off her tablet. “Where are we on the ATT?”

The boardroom gets quiet. I hide my clenched fists beneath the heavy wooden table so no one can see my frustration. We’ve just spent the last two hours—I assume it’s been two hours, but it might have been two days, what with that whole wibbly wobbly time thing here at good old Afterlife HQ—debating the curriculum for wraith reading hour, even though it’s unclear whether wraiths are even sentient enough to read anything. But no, rather than pausing the discussion to find out that crucial piece of information, Zach, Bang and Minerva went around in circles debating whether the best place to start would be Shahnameh from Ancient Persia—this was Zach’s pick, which he says he read sometime in his wanderings after he died and got lost by Afterlife—or Confessions of a Shopaholic—a surprising pick from Minerva who only justified the choice by saying, “Richard said it was very relatable.”

Two hours!

Someone clears their throat, and I realize they’re all looking at me.

“You’re next on the agenda,” Minerva says, with an arch of her bright blue eyebrow. She taps her nails on the table, and sparks shoots from them, blackening the wood.

I sit up a little straighter, struggling to remember what was just said. The ATT. What the hell is that? I don’t have anything to do with—

“You mean the Afterlife Transition Team?” I ask, dread already settling in the bottom of my stomach.

“Yes,” Bang says with an eager nod. She shoots a nervous glance towards Minerva, then back to me, clearly trying to urge me into action before Minerva gets even more irritated.

“We’ve talked about this before,” I say, still fighting for patience, “but acronyms can be really alienating, especially for people in unfamiliar territory. It creates a real us-and-them divide, which is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve with the Afterlife Transition Team.”

More silence. Minerva might actually be carving her name into the tabletop like she’s a one-reaper wood-burning kit. Tiny tendrils of smoke spiral up from her fingertip. Zach’s staring off into space while running a finger just beneath his chin in a motion that says he’s trying to decide if the pimple there is ready to be popped yet. Only Bang is paying attention to me, though all she does is give me an apologetic smile.

“We’ve had pretty good uptake from the lost souls who came from the Other Side. They’re keen to be of use”—I don’t mention that their enthusiasm is motivated in part by the fact there’s currently nowhere else for them to go, since Minerva and Bang haven’t reopened the districts yet and no one has signed up for voluntary memory wiping—“but we’re having trouble getting buy-in from reapers who are looking to be partnered up.”

The silence is punctuated by an uncomfortable cough, though no one makes eye contact long enough to own up to the interjection. The Afterlife Transition Team has been my baby for the last few months. I tried to get involved with the district reopening, but Bang assigned me this task instead, and since she’s in charge now, I decided to run with it. Prove myself, as it were. Which turned out to be easier said than done, unfortunately.

Since we’re still waiting on the districts, the most recently dead have basically been put in holding in unused parts of Afterlife. Like an endless waiting room. With the Afterlife Transition Team I’m trying to create a partnership between experienced lost souls and reapers, so that when we’re finally ready to move these new ghosts to the districts, it’s quicker to get them acclimated. The lost souls function as a translator of sorts, since reapers can’t be bothered to explain anything. Sort of like a post-mortem buddy system. But as much as they don’t like to explain, reapers also don’t like to show up, as it turns out. I’ve had a couple open houses—Bang wanted to call them AEA, “ask Ember anything,” but I declined for the reasons regarding acronyms I’ve just stated above—to provide more information for my vision of the plan. But only a handful of reapers attended, and most admitted they were there because they’d heard I’d brought snacks. I had—what’s a meeting without coffee and Timbits?—but tiny sugary donut holes should not be the motivator for trying to make things work better at Afterlife.

In short, in the year since I died, I’ve accomplished a big fat nothing, other than wasting hours and possibly days of my afterlife sitting around this meeting table while Bang talks about activity items and I remind her the term is action items, and then the three of them all laugh at me for being such a silly little lost soul in a room full of big bad reapers. Never mind that Zach isn’t even a reaper, though honestly I don’t know what he is. He’s got powers like a reaper but still has his memories. And somehow, after trying to take over the place by sneaking in the backdoor, these days he’s part of the inner circle, and I’m left handing out flyers and hoping people turn out for my grassroots endeavours, only to get sneered at when I try to make progress reports.

This is so not what I visualized when I thought about death.

The door to my right slams open, making Zach jump. Minerva and Bang both lean a little farther back in their chairs, like they’re trying to make room for the presence that has just entered. Fortunately for me, I felt them coming long before they opened the door, just like I pretty much know where they are all the time as long as we’re both either in Afterlife or at home in Toronto. Since Kelly got their powers back, their presence is like the soft ambient noise of a fridge running or the TV being on in another room. I’m aware of it all the time, but unless they get closer, I can mostly tune it out.

When they walk into the meeting, though, it’s like magnets. I have to put a palm on the table because it feels like my chair is about to roll across the floor towards them, taking me on an involuntary trip. It’s not Kelly, per se, that pulls at me. They’re the same as they always are. Flat gaze, wide mouth. Their hair is braided along the top of their head, before being left to flow over their back and shoulders in a bleached blond cascade. Same old, same old. Infuriating and unearthly.

But what’s inside them. The thing that makes them a reaper and not a lost soul like me is undeniable. Kelly’s reaper power keeps me from losing my sense of self, but also it wants me to reach out and touch it whenever I’m close. Tap into it. Just a puff. We could slide from here to the house in Etobicoke in the space between two thoughts. I’m getting better at it. The last time Kelly let me try, we wound up at the end of our street, which was a vast improvement over the time before when we landed somewhere in the middle of Lake Ontario.

“You’re late,” Minerva says with a narrow glare.

“You told me to bring Ziggy,” Kelly says to Bang, ignoring Minerva entirely.

Bang glances around, like the errant keeper of HELL might be hiding behind the doorframe, ready to pop out and play a hilarious practical joke.

“Where is he?” she asks.

Kelly slides into the chair beside me with a careless shrug.

“Couldn’t find him. The reaper on duty at HELL said something about him being mad that no one wanted to hear his suggestion for wraith book club.”

Minerva scoffs. “It’s called wraith reading hour. Which Ziggy would know if he ever bothered to show up for these meetings.”

I can only roll my eyes. Despite having been here for almost a year, I still have never met the infamous Ziggy. Somehow he’s always away from the office when I pop down to HELL to introduce myself. In a place where allies are few and far between, I’m getting desperate, but I can never seem to pin him down long enough to say hi.

“If you couldn’t find Ziggy, what are you doing here?” Zach asks Kelly with a sneer. Never mind that Kelly could almost certainly send Zach off into another plain with no more effort than it would take to flick an ant off a picnic table. Now that Zach’s got Minerva at his back, he’s getting bold. And super annoying. He always had that smooth tech/finance bro attitude, but now that he’s been given a seat at the table, it comes with a sense of authority that makes me grind my teeth at the very sight of his salesman’s smile.

“I came to get Ember,” they say. “We have to go.”

I blush like a teenager with a crush. Because when in doubt, at least Kelly’s looking out for me . . . as much as anyone is. They’re not super interested in bettering things here at Afterlife, but they’re happy enough to carpool when they’re not busy collecting souls in Toronto and making sure they don’t slip through the cracks at intake. It’s sad that even their tiny bit of caring is enough to make me sit up a little straighter. All they’re really saying is they’re bored and ready to go home, and it’s up to me if I want to slide with them or take the subway. What with changing stations, the solo commute is over an hour, and by the time I get home, I’m usually pretty strung out and twitchy. Staying close to Kelly or sticking near Jupiter’s runes once I’m back in Etobicoke are the only things that keep me from degrading into a predatory lost soul and feeding on new ghosts. I can manage the subway, but the timing is tight on a good day, and on a day like today when I’m already frustrated and fed up with the lack of progress at work—as much as I can call Afterlife a job, since they don’t pay me or even seem to want me around most days—I’ll be lucky if I don’t eat someone on my way home.

“We need more reapers to volunteer for the ATT.” I grimace as the acronym slips out from between my lips. “The Afterlife Transition Team. Bang, is there anything we can do to get more of them interested?”

She shakes her head. “We can barely keep the regular SRU fully staffed. When I suggest being partnered with lost souls, most are refusing.”

“Refusing?” Kelly asks.

“More like they’re threatening to walk off the job. They all want to go to the archives.”

I slump in my chair. Of course they are. Since Richard’s revelation that reapers are just humans with no memories of their past life, more and more have walked off the job to go search for the details of their lost identities. It’s understandable. Finding out who they used to be is no different than an adopted person looking for their birth family or a child asking their grandparents for another story of what it was like growing up in the good old days. We all want to know who we are and where we come from, and the reapers quite literally had that taken from them without their consent. But every one of them who goes chasing their old identity is one less reaper to collect souls, which leaves us even fewer for things like new initiatives. Change is hard, and made harder given our work force is leaking like a sieve.

Also, there’s the fact that so far no one’s been able to find any information in the archives, even though the cavernous facility houses literally every record the reapers have ever kept. Apparently that paper trail doesn’t stretch as far as the souls that were deemed strong enough to survive the conversion process to become a reaper. And, of course, Richard has no idea who he might have selected for the special privilege of ferrying souls off the living plain without realizing they had once been one of those very same souls. Richard’s replies to questions along that line have been very “chill out, man” and “why would I bother remembering that when there are so many sunsets to remember?”

“It’s been centuries,” he said with a lazy wave of his hand when we pressed the issue. “I can’t even remember if my favourite food when I was a cat was tuna or sardines. You think I remember the names of the souls who became reapers?”

But his thoughtlessness means that those who go searching for their identities will be off work for an indefinite amount of time. With no way of knowing where or how they will find the information they’re looking for—or if that information even exists in the first place—their return to office date is unclear. So far, the number of reapers who have stepped back from their duties is still a minority, but every day a few more seem to decide knowing their full history is more important than a job they never signed up to do. And while I can’t blame them, I’m allowed to be annoyed when that decision impacts my ability to accomplish the tasks I set out for myself. The Afterlife Transition Team program was my idea, and if the reapers are unwilling to participate, it’s already dead in the water.

As I sulk silently, Kelly coughs a few times into the sleeve of their shirt. Each exhalation is punctuated by a small burst of power than buffets me. I raise a protective arm, mostly out of an old living reflex to ward off germs. Not that reapers get sick. And not that I get sick either. What would a virus want with me? I’m already dead.

“I’ll talk to the reapers,” Kelly says to Bang. “Organize a meeting next week with the ones most likely to come back to the project.”

For all they didn’t want to run things, Kelly still has a lot of pull at Afterlife. Minerva didn’t do herself many favours with her centuries of “because I said so” leadership. Despite the fact they still spend a lot of their time back in Toronto blowing up stuff in video games, whenever Kelly pops into Afterlife, heads turn. If anyone can convince the reapers to reconsider, Kelly can.

Bang gives them a grateful smile. She’s the right reaper for the job, but she appreciates their support. Reorganizing Afterlife in a way that treats human souls fairly without disrupting the day-to-day tasks of collecting ghosts before they turn into wraiths is not for the faint of heart. I’m frustrated with our slow progress. We have way too many chefs in the supernatural kitchen and ghostly fingers in the pot, but Bang is doing her absolute best to keep the wheels of death turning.

With a final nod, she taps on her tablet screen again. She opens her mouth, but Minerva speaks first.

“All right, that’s everything for today. I’ll have my assistant send out the hours and if you can get back to me on your assigned activity items by the end of the month, that would be great.”

Neither Zach nor Kelly reacts to Minerva’s declaration. Bang’s brows pinch into a frown beneath her cat-eye glasses. Technically, Richard left her in charge, but it’s not the first time Minerva’s talked over her like that. I wait for her to say something to make it clear she’ll be the one following up on action-activity items, but all she does is nod one more time before making a beeline for the door while she clutches her tablet.

“Kelly,” Zach says with a mocking dip of his chin. “Pleasure as always.”

Then he and Minerva exit the same way Bang did, and Kelly and I are left alone.

The ripple of power that fills the space makes me stand up straighter as I shiver. Whenever Kelly uses their abilities, I want to find out how far they can go, because part of me thinks I might be able to do the same someday.

“You don’t have to keep coming to these things, you know,” Kelly says, sounding casual. They always sound casual. I’d make a joke about how if they got any more relaxed, they’d be dead but . . . well . . . Ghost, meet reaper.

“Someone has to. Otherwise, the only action item after the meeting would be to have another meeting and they’d pat themselves on the back for achieving their targets.” I sigh. Ghosts don’t get tired, but I can still be over it. All of it. For now, anyway. Time to recharge a little. So Kelly’s right. I hold out my arms. “Let’s go. My turn to drive.”

Strictly speaking, we don’t need more than a handhold to do this anymore. Kelly says reapers can do it without any contact at all if the ghost is close enough and willing to slide. But Kelly is heavy, in a metaphysical sense. Carrying them through the dimensions takes concentration, like if I stopped paying attention, the power could consume me and we’d show up in Toronto as a jumble of arms and legs connected in the wrong places from one torso. Being close to them means I don’t have to work so hard to control it.

They settle into my arms with a gentle grunt like I’ve stepped on their toe.

“Everything okay?” I ask, mentally rooting around for the link that lets me tap into their power. Sometimes I find it helps if I think of it as separate from them. Less invasive. Kelly knows what I’m doing, but even their consent doesn’t keep me from feeling like I’m freeloading on something I’m not meant to touch.

“Fine,” they say, oblivious to my moral quandaries. “Just thinking about next week. Convincing the reapers to leave the archives and get back to work is a pain in the asshole. This is the problem with giving them choices. They take them even when it’s inconvenient.”

“Have you been to the archives?” I ask. “You’re not curious to find out more about who you used to be?”

Kelly’s old. We all know this. After Minerva and Richard—though I’m still not sure Richard isn’t a god instead of a reaper—Kelly is the oldest reaper here. They’re old in the same way the pyramids are so old, even ancient Egyptians considered them to be even more ancient.

“Why would I be curious about that?” they ask.

“People want to know where they come from?”

They knit their brows together in an expression I’ve come to think of as Ember is being unnecessarily sentimental.

“Context is only important when everyone around you has it and you don’t. None of the reapers know who they are, so it doesn’t bother me that I don’t either. What would I gain from learning that information? Everyone I ever knew in my life would have burned out thousands of years ago.”

It’s not really that I get overly sentimental, it’s that Kelly never lets something as pedestrian as sentimentality enter their train of thought. Richard’s belief that stripping lost souls of their memories builds a more efficient reaper has its poster child in Kelly. No sense letting feelings get in the way when there is always another ghost to cross over to Afterlife.

They cough again, sounding more uncomfortable than before. “Were you planning on going back to Toronto any time soon?”

We’re still embracing in the boardroom. If anyone walked in on us, the scene would be embarrassingly intimate, when it’s really just about transportation. Heat flushes over my cheeks, and I close my eyes, focusing on the energy that will take us home.

As the room fades away, Kelly lets out another gentle cough. My hold on them slips. It’s like they’ve suddenly grown three sizes. That not-physical weight grows accordingly, and holding on to them is like trying to keep a concrete block from sinking to the bottom of the ocean. I gasp, concentrating on not letting them slip away, but suddenly I’m alone. The space around me is completely dark. I’m standing on solid ground, but when I look down, I can’t see anything.

What the hell? Except not HELL. Afterlife’s version of eternal damnation is endless hallways of paranormally reinforced cells. This is just . . . nothing? I could be in a cell myself or a space the size of an aircraft hangar. It’s so dark, I’ll never be able to tell.

“Kelly?” I don’t know why I’m whispering.

“Ember?” Their voice is crystal clear, like they’re standing right behind me, but when I turn, no one’s there. I put a hand out, expecting to find their strong solid body in the darkness, maybe paired with a weary request to not grope them without their permission, but there’s nothing.

“Kelly?” I ask again, louder this time. Fear prickles in my chest. What is going on?

“Are we going?” they ask.

“Yes. Yes. We were and then—” I don’t know what happened. I’m not an expert at sliding yet, but I’ve been getting better. The hardest part is the landing. Taking off is pretty straightforward. All I have to do is turn my attention to the pressure of Kelly’s arms around me, imagine we’re two bright balls of light and—

The dark vanishes. We’re still in the boardroom. Kelly’s still in my arms.

“What just happened?” I gasp.

“Are we going or not?” they ask, ignoring my own question, because of course they do.

“We did. We are.” I blink, trying to piece together how we went from here to nothing and back here again.

Kelly lets go of me, clearing their throat impatiently.

“I’m meeting some people online for a raid soon. Do you want me to do it?”

“No.” I shake my head, more to wipe away questions than in denial. Kelly would be more worried about their games than making sure my sliding technique doesn’t get us separated in an empty room. I take hold of their shirt, crushing the material in big fistfuls. “I’ve got it.”

Baby steps. My sliding technique isn’t perfect. It was probably just a glitch. Kelly doesn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong. I press into them, mostly to make sure I won’t drop them, but also maybe to make myself feel better. Being close to Kelly, as annoying as they can be, always makes me feel more confident. I can do this.

Time to go home.