“That was a monster!” I managed to blurt, thoroughly confused. Were Reapers somehow a type of monster too? That didn’t make any sense, considering all the ones I had seen so far were human. Even the Lord of the Dead was a half-human demigod. Granted, six wasn’t exactly an overwhelming sample size, but it was a pretty good base.

  “Good to know that you have basic vision and reasoning skills,” Gildebrak chided while continuing to herd me.

  “Is that normal?!”

  “No, I wouldn’t exactly say normal. He’s one of the few monsters that’s actually allowed here in the land of the dead. But he’s a really hard worker, and he genuinely cares about that whole broker mess. Bores the hell out of me, lemme tell you that.” She paused to gently elbow my ribs, sending me a cheeky sort of grin. “Get it? Hell out of me, and we’re in the afterlife?”

  When I could only stare at her, she just gave a shrug. “You’ll get it eventually.”

  Oh, I got it alright, it was just that the dozen more questions that popped into my head overrode pretty much everything else.

  “So, monsters generally aren’t allowed in these lands between?”

  “Not usually, no. Their souls don’t go into any of the gods’ afterlives, being the sworn enemies of life and all that.”

  Right, so at least that part of my life hadn’t been a lie. “But if they’re enemies of life, then why is Ker . . . Kyier . . .”

  “Ky’ek’shaw. And I don’t know, he’s just different. Could be there’s aberration in every data set.”

  I suppose that was somewhat believable. Like the occasional cat who loved water or a dog who enjoyed the vet. Even some constant rules of nature were defied. That eliminated a few questions, but I definitely had more. Like:

  “What do you mean by a broker?” Because even in the real world, I only had a vague idea of what that was, and I was pretty sure that in the land of the dead, it was something that likely didn’t have anything to do with money. Or at least, I hoped not. Some of the things he had said about predatory offers and baseline value did make me think that there was at least some sort of economy in the land of the dead, which had some really concerning implications.

  “Right, right, I imagine that’s not information that would just come naturally into your head. I kind of half expected that voice in your head to say something about it.”

  “She’s a bit hit or—”

  “Soul brokers largely deal with reintegrating lost spirits back into the system.” My inner voice finally spoke up. “Ultimately, even spirits with no information on file must be sorted into an afterlife, and so these brokers work with gods to figure out what afterlife will be the best fit for them.

  “Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. So often now, it turns into a bidding war. But it’s been that way for so long, hardly anyone remembers otherwise.”

  “But you do?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Ah, I’m guessing she just chimed in again?”

  “She did,” I said slowly, trying to digest everything that had just been infodumped on me. “But what is this about lost spirits and having no information on file?”

  “Hoo boy, we’re getting right into the weeds, aren’t we? Let me guess, you learned to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool?” Before I could answer, she was grinning at me again, all cheeky and far too toothy. “Don’t worry, I like that. Means you’re a real go-getter.”

  Was Gildebrak messing with me? I genuinely couldn’t tell.

  “So basically, the general design of things is when a human dies, they are supposed to go to the afterlife of the god they pledged their life to, said Gildebrak. “I’m sure now that the gods have revealed themselves that you’ve seen all sorts of recruitment stations.”

  That was absolutely true, and I avoided them like the plague. I had no problem with other people having their own faith, but I still had such trouble believing that these giant magical beings were just able to sweep in and fix everything. It felt too good to be true. And also, a bit like a fever dream. And even though that was the world I had been born into, since they arrived before I had, it still felt so fake.

  Because really, if these gods were all-powerful and here for our benefit, why had they let all of that happen to my mother?

  Not to mention, the recruitment centers and their “volunteer” workers came across as just so cheesy to me. So many of their followers came across as high school cliques or college sororities and fraternities that it really turned me off. I could go on and on about it, but the worst offenders were definitely the Greek and North pantheons. Or maybe that was just my bias because both of them had recruitment centers nearby one or multiple of my jobs.

  There were the Cupids, which were by my barista gig, and they were building a brand-new temple on my bike route to my favorite library. Despite dedicating their lives to the literal god of love, they were super psychologist-coded, but not in a good way, with a dash of mad-scientist. They always reduced everything down to chemical reactions and over-intellectualized to a nauseating point. Love, hate, happiness. Their recruitment pamphlets were full of stuff that honestly felt like pseudo-science. I remembered my “friend” Poppy had led me to a seminar they held during my senior year, excitedly telling me that they used math to explain things, only for the whole event to be filled with actual equations and chemical recipes to achieve internal happiness.

  Gross.

  And while I wasn’t the smartest person in existence, not by a long shot, I did know that chemicals played a very significant role in how our bodies did anything, but the obsessive nature of the Cupids turned me off entirely. That along with the fact that they often insisted there were no such things as morals. Very much the epitome of being so concerned with whether they could, they never stopped to think if they should.

  “You having a conversation with that voice again? You kind of went off somewhere.”

  I shook my head at Gildebrak, trying to pull myself back to the present, but my mind was still chasing the rabbit down the hole, as it were. Lovely side effect of ADHD, lucky me.

  “Just thinking.”

  “Alright, you do that while I get us to the sorting system. Then I’ll finish answering your question, because if I do it now, I suspect it’ll go in one ear and out the other.”

  “You’re not entirely wrong.”

  I continued to let her pull me along as I tried to look around and focus, but sometimes when I got on a mental rant, I just couldn’t stop.

  Because while the Cupids were bad, the Apollos also weren’t great. They all seemed so snooty and like they thought they were so enlightened compared to other nonbelieving jocks and would often preach how they could become more enlightened by swearing fealty to their god. But in reality, they were just artsy jocks. Artsy jocks who were high on their own egos. But at least they didn’t proselytize that all of human existence could be boiled down to an equation.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Then there were the Aresians, who worshipped the god of war Ares. I liked to call them Martians, however, since that was their god’s original name. They corrected me every time, but I never listened. I just couldn’t help but think that I could never worship a god whose idea of conflict resolution was demanding his enemies’ heads. They would always say that it was deeper than that and that Ares wasn’t a warmonger but rather preached for peace and justice. I didn’t buy it.

  Then there were the Lopteirs, who worshipped the trickster god Loki. While I liked that the god was an outspoken figurehead for queer folks, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about a lot of their wibbly-wobbly positions on morals and trickery. And while I wasn’t really a serious person, I couldn’t stand how so many of their followers came across as the rich kid in theater class who was so certain they would make it to Broadway.

  The Aldabarn, who worshipped Odin, were so obsessed with study and secrets that they didn’t seem to care about actually experiencing life. The Cesti, who worshipped Aphrodite, outright made me uncomfortable. The Lakshimites were basically wolves on Wall Street, and if I had to listen to one of them come to the diner and try to talk to me about blockchains, I might scream.

  “Okay, wherever you are, you should come back now.” Gildebrak squeezed my arm to get my attention.

  I blinked again and looked around, realizing that my tour guide and I were standing at what looked like a subway station, but the cleanest one I’d ever seen. Much like the main hub, everything was blindingly light, although the edge of the platform in front of me had long blue light runners to indicate the drop-off.

  Wait, could a Reaper be hurt by being hit by a train? What happened if someone died in the lands between? More questions, it seemed.

  “I’m here,” I said finally, rubbing the back of my neck a bit. It really had been quite the exhausting day for me, even with my little unplanned nap. “What were we talking about again?”

  “You mean before you went on your little mental journey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry about that, I’m just teasing you. We all get lost in our own little world sometimes. But anyway, I was explaining soul brokers a little more in depth than the voice in your head did. Or at least, I assume so. It’s not like I can hear what she tells you.”

  “Right, I got lost in a mental tangent thinking about the recruitment centers.”

  “Ah, not exactly a fan?”

  “That is an accurate way to put it,” I said sourly.

  “You’re not alone. I find them hokey. But I suppose gods gotta promote themselves some way. Either way, people swear fealty to a god, and they get to go enjoy that god’s afterlife when their life here is done. As long as they aren’t evil or break the tenets of their faith and all that.”

  “What happens if they are evil?”

  That was the one thing that had always tripped me up about the gods ever since I was old enough to understand their existence. All of them promised this amazing afterlife based on certain aspects of them, but none seemed to deal directly with where the bad people went. People who unapologetically hurt others without remorse. A generation earlier, before the gods had come out publicly, bad people were supposed to suffer an eternity of torment in some arbitrary hell. But now? Now, most of what people thought of as bad fit into the tenets of one god or another, and no god seemed to want to take responsibility for the truly evil souls in the world. There were still people who broke all the rules of all the gods, after all. So, where did that leave them?

  “Oath breakers, murderers, people who are just heinous monsters all go to Ayelala, no matter what god they swear their souls to.”

  “Ayelala?” I repeated. I’d never heard of that name at before.

  “Yeah, she’s the goddess of evil dead, justice, and punishment. She’s actually pretty much the big boss around here.”

  “If she’s such an important goddess, how come I’ve never heard of her? If she handles all the sinners, so to speak, why isn’t she being used as a scare tactic on Earth?”

  Gildebrak shrugged. “She probably doesn’t want to recruit people to her afterlife. There will always be bad people. People who want to take advantage of the system. People who don’t care about others. They need a place to go. If we just let them go into any god’s afterlife, they would poison that paradise.

  “So, Ayelala takes on the incredible responsibility of handling all that. She judges each and every soul that comes into her realm, then concocts the perfect torture for them in their own permanent reality. It’s specifically designed to punish them for whatever they did but also to try to teach them the error of their ways.”

  I was horrified at the idea of someone being tormented for all of eternity. “That’s intense. Do they get to leave if they do learn the error of their ways?”

  “Yes, actually, and that’s a part of what us Reapers are for. If Ayelala judges them worthy of another chance, they’re either released to try again as a new person, or they’re put back in the sorting system. Don’t get me wrong; it’s pretty rare considering the types in her realm, but it does happen every now and then.”

  “Wait, so like reincarnation?”

  Gildebrak nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “And how are the Reapers used for this?” I had to know.

  “That actually ties back in with the soul brokers,” she replied. “If things work right, when someone dies, they simply go into the appropriate afterlife. Easy-peasy. But sometimes, something happens, and a soul gets lost. There’s a lot of ways that can happen, but ultimately, those souls are what turn into that thing that chased you. We gather them and return them to the sorting system so they can be sorted properly. Usually, that’s pretty straightforward, too. Sad, but straightforward.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “As much as any of this does,” Gildebrak agreed. “When we find these lost souls and reap them, the good ones go right into the sorting system, and the bad ones get judged by Ayelala. Her power, like all of the gods, is derived from her afterlife, so in order to maintain her strength levels, we have to make sure that we are very good at our jobs.”

  “Doesn’t that just incentivize her to make it impossible for these souls to be redeemed?” I asked, my mind coming up with so many loopholes and complications of such a system. Maybe I was crazy, or maybe I was just too skeptical, but it just seemed so . . . ripe for corruption. It also made me wonder what kind of god would want to torture people for all eternity. Didn’t really seem like someone I would want to know.

  Gildebrak shook her head. “I’ve known her for about a millennium or so, but Ayelala takes extreme pride anytime a soul is able to remove themselves from her realm. She considers it proof that she’s done a good job as the point of her realm isn’t to punish, but rather to rehabilitate. I’m not really sure on that last part, but that’s what she says. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about her, it’s that she always says what she means. She’s a real hardnosed type, but honest.”

  “So, your explanation covers the good and the bad, but I don’t understand where the soul broker comes in. The voice said that it’s for spirits with lost information or no file? Does that mean you have a file on every single person to have ever lived on Earth?”

  “Yeah, a new one is made every time a human is born. That’s actually in the records department. And then we have people who update the files with major information like religious beliefs and death date, which is the clerical department. Those two work together, but they are separate. They used to be one and the same, but it was way too much work even for a bunch of immortals to keep up with.”

  There was something so uncanny about incredibly complex systems having to do with metaphysical things such as souls and eternity being put into an office setting. It really was scrambling my brain in a way that I wasn’t used to. While I did have one heck of an imagination, this was a bit much, even for me.

  “But anyway,” Gildebrak continued, “if a soul has been wandering for too long and isn’t one of the evil ones, their celestial affiliation fades. The time it takes for that to happen is related to a person’s level of true devotion, but even the most fervent followers lose their god stamp after a while.”

  I couldn’t help but snicker, picturing a bunch of sorority girls wearing low-rise jeans and crop tops to show off the god stamps tattooed on their lower backs.

  She glanced at me sideways, then shrugged and continued. “So, when these souls are returned to the sorting system, they end up not having a place to go. The soul brokers basically gather up all of these lost souls and auction them off to the highest bidder. Apparently it used to be a lot different, but it is what it is. Not my department, you know? But our orc friend is one of several who really wants to make the sole broker department better. To make it more focused on the needs of the souls rather than the wants of the gods who are bidding for them.”

  Learning that definitely made me see the orc in a very different light. Because the idea of gods bidding on souls who had the misfortune of getting a little lost seemed way too dystopian, and that was from me, someone who was already born in a dystopia.

  “This is all a lot.”

  “Yeah, you’re not kidding. But we’re just getting started. Oh, here comes our ride!”

  I expected a rumble below our feet at the supposed approaching train, but there was none. For a moment, I wondered if my companion was mistaken, but then I looked down the tunnel and saw a truly blinding light hurtling toward us.

  I suppose that out of everything I had seen, I shouldn’t have been so rattled by a train that didn’t make the floor shake, but it just seemed so impossible. The world I was in clearly functioned by completely different rules than Earth. That wasn’t exactly a surprise, but it just hit me hard as a completely white train pulled to a stop in front of us.

  “Come on,” Gildebrak said, tugging me through the doors as soon as they noiselessly opened. “I have so much to show you!”

  I shook my head.

  She really isn’t kidding, is she?