Deathless

Chapter 4: Jackson

Back in the lift, the shuddering shift as the gold and glass cage descends flips my stomach. Paris turns into a sepia blur. Sunlight bounces off the window and pierces my tired eyes. I place my palms against the glass, looking down at the familiar streets. At a world frozen in time. Like me, unmoving, unchanging. My conversation with Jeanette, the drip-drip of fear that was echoing through Scythe, frightening people like Frank and Vera. Good people were scared. And if someone could get into Death's office, maybe that someone could find some answers.

There are whispers he'd chosen a successor.

I swallow hard. I hadn't seen Death in a long time. He'd trained me, and for a long time I'd spoken to him every day. He'd been a person I'd never known I needed, filled a role I didn't know I needed filling. And then he smashed it all to bits.

I remember our last conversation in his office. The most powerful being in the universe, the original Ethereal. The only being in the universe who hadn't been born or created. When life first sparked into existence, so had Death, like a puff of smoke following a lit match. But that day, he'd squirmed in his chair like an anxious schoolboy. His bottom lip quivered as he spoke. He had a proposition for me, but first, there were some things I needed to know.

I remember the way my blood had pounded in my ears, the slam of the door as I'd left, and how the echo had followed me down the hall. How it still followed me in my nightmares. I'd run that day and didn't look back. And he didn't come after me. He never came after me.

Maybe I wanted nothing to do with Death, but Scythe means something to me. As do the people who work here.

The lift hits the ground floor with a faint screech, the glass windows ahead revealing the dark but bustling atrium. Death's ever-watching monument to himself peers down at me, those dark sockets staring, judging me. The doors ping open, but I don't walk out. The Death Wardens watch me curiously behind their skull-shaped masks as I linger.

Groaning, I slam my palm on the glass and swear to myself. Fighting everything urge in me to just leave. To go back to my life. I press a button on the control panel. The doors shut, and I step back, leaning against the gilded handrail as the lift jerks to life once more. And goes down and down and down.

***

The dark labyrinth of halls and corridors that make up the lowest floors of Scythe are not spaces people go through too often. And it's partly why they're so neglected. They're also the crevices and corridors that Death used to haunt like the dark spectre he is. I always got the impression he loved the darkness, the creeping neglect like it reflected him in some way. Not the myths and legends that created an infinite number of tattoos, and logos and slogans, but the person he was beneath the hood.

A person I sometimes miss, as much as I wish I didn't.

I stride down the hall that passes the centre of the basement, the space under the atrium. I speed up, wanting to avoid anything to do with what's inside. There is a faint sound of clacking. It grows and grows, morphing into an ear-splitting chatter, ricocheting off walls and surrounding me in a wave of sound as I get closer.

This is the true face of Scythe. And I have no intention of looking at it today.

I pass by the arches that lead in, walking so fast I'm practically running. The hall is long and will take me minutes to cross. The noise is making my head throb.

"Hey, you! I seriously hope you haven't come all the way here not to pop in and say hi." Carmel leans casually against one of those great archways, its matte carvings reaching what seems like miles over our heads.

Busted. I stop sharply and turn, grinning broadly, trying to avoid glancing over her shoulder at the massive space behind her. And at what lives there.

"Wouldn't dream of it."