Chapter 20
The Reaper stands inside the room with its scythe lowered at a diagonal, the tip hovering at the level of someone lying on a bed.
I feel the hairs on my arms rise.
The main circle of light falls over a central table where a man lies restrained with leather straps across his wrists, ankles, and chest. Tubing snakes from his arms, his neck, his nose.
An endotracheal tube protrudes from between his teeth, taped sloppily to one cheek.
His skin is waxy, mottled with dusky patches across his chest and limbs.
“What the hell…?” Talon murmurs.
The monitor above his head is on but not alarming. Someone has silenced the indicators. The waveform representing his heart rhythm is a chaotic mess, somewhere between agonal and non-functional. Blood pressure reads as a string of question marks. Oxygen saturation blinks at him in the sixties.
Someone turned off the safeguards. Disabled the machine’s ability to panic on his behalf.
I move to his side immediately, hands already checking pupil response, chest movement, pulse. The Reaper doesn’t acknowledge me at all.
The man’s pulse is rapid and threadlike, barely there. His breathing is shallow and entirely dependent on a ventilator set to a cruelly low volume. His fingertips are blue. When I press my thumb into his sternum the skin doesn’t pink back up. Capillary refill is all but absent.
“Now we know where the Reaper was headed,” Cassian says. “How long has he been like this?”
“Too long,” I answer. “Whatever they were doing, they kept him balanced on the edge and then let him fall.”
I scan the equipment. Beside the bed sits a drip stand with several unlabelled bags, no pharmacy stickers, no documented dosages.
Either black market product or something someone is paying to have tested by means that don’t agree with ethical conduct.
One bag is nearly empty, crusted at the port with dried residue that looks almost black.
On the counter I see vials. Sedatives. Neuromuscular blockers. Compounds I recognize only from journals discussing experimental metabolic modifiers.
Harrow’s obsession, and Keene’s neuromuscular knack.
“We gotta do something, man,” Talon says. “Unhook him from this shit and get him out of here.”
“By the time anyone arrived, he’d be gone,” I say quietly. “He’s dying.”
I look at the patient’s face. He’s young. Late twenties, maybe. Dried blood crusted at the corner of one nostril. His eyelids flutter weakly, as if some part of him is still trying to claw its way back up through the layers of chemical restraint and oxygen debt.
He looks like there might still be a chance but there isn’t.
Behind us, the Reaper stands at the foot of the table, so close its blade nearly intersects the man’s ankles.
Waiting.
“Can you still see it?” I ask softly, without looking back. Just in case.
“Yes,” Cassian says.
“Yeah,” Talon adds.
The man on the table makes a tiny, broken sound in his throat. The ventilator compensates with a shallow hiss. His fingers twitch against the restraints, nails scraping uselessly at the leather.
I place my hand flat over his sternum.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “You should never have been here.”
Then I do what anyone who values mercy over suffering would do. I take his head in my hands and snap his neck. There’s no resistance. Maybe I imagine it, but in the instant before it’s over his eyes find mine and what I see in them looks like relief.
The monitor gives one last jagged line. Then another. Then nothing. A flat, unbroken line stretches across the screen.
Nobody says a word. Cassian and Talon don’t look at me. They just stare at the man who was already gone before I touched him.
It hits me a beat later that I just killed someone in front of these two without a second of hesitation. The thought of caution didn’t even cross my mind. I followed the most basic impulse I had and didn’t second-guess it.
A hand lands on my shoulder and Cassian squeezes gently.
“Thank you,” he says. “I would’ve done the same.”
My eyes find his and stay there. I don’t know what to say or do in response, so I just look at him.
I have never been in a situation where there was no need to perform in front of someone.
No mask. No calibration. Not even when I killed Leonard Garza.
Every moment of my life has had an audience that required management.
Not this one.
What do I do with this?
I’m already scrambling for something to say when the Reaper moves.
It slides toward the body with the tip of its scythe lowering until it intersects the man’s chest. There’s no physical contact that I can see, but something in the air thickens and then splits. A small blue light leaves the man’s chest and gets absorbed into the blade.
For a fraction of a second I feel a coldness that doesn’t belong to this room. Then it’s gone.
The Reaper steps back. The light on the blade dims slightly, as though something has been taken in and settled. It turns, and without so much as a glance at the three of us, glides toward the far wall and disappears through it the same way it did before.
“So that’s how it works,” Talon mutters.
“Exactly like that,” Cassian agrees.
Bizarre. Far less grand than what humanity decided death should be.
I stare at the body on the table, at the silent monitor, at the mess of unauthorized medications and hastily discarded tubing.
But even if death turns out to be ordinary, even in this new metaphysical world I’ve barely gained access to, it should still have rules.
Human deaths should be judged by human laws.
And this one, this life, this man who spent his last conscious days staring at a dark ceiling without a single person beside him to help him through the agony, deserves justice.
My colleagues did this.
Men I have worked beside. Men whose names sit on research papers and lecture slides. Men who once asked me if I wanted to join them in “innovative trials.”
I feel something inside me turn over slowly and lock into place.
“I want to avenge this patient,” I say.
Cassian looks at me. “Are you sure?”
I nod. “I am.”
Silence settles between us one last time before Talon breaks it.
“What do you say we give this man a proper burial first?” he asks.
I couldn’t agree more.
I look at the door, at the empty space where the Reaper vanished, at the quiet machinery of a system that failed long before tonight. Maybe the measure of who I am isn’t how I fit inside that system but what I’m willing to do to tear it down.
“And when we’re done,” I say, “we come back for Harrow and Keene.”
Cassian nods once.
Talon exhales shakily. “Guess we just found our first project together.”
I look down at the man on the table one last time and straighten his head on the pillow. A pointless act of respect. I do it anyway.
Something tells me this is only the beginning. The beginning of an end, some would say.
I’m fine with that. I’ve been fine with that from the very start.