Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome. - Isaac Asimov

  The train was, well, exactly like a subway car on the inside, except perfectly clean and sparkling white. I had no idea how my corneas weren’t being burned out of my own eyeballs with the overwhelming gleam to everything, but that was yet another mystery of the land of the dead.

  As for the people on the train with Gildebrak and me, there was a mix of people in business attire, in Reaper robes, and a select few in casual clothes. I was curious about them but didn’t exactly want to ask a question about them right in front of their own faces. While I wasn’t always the most socially aware, I wasn’t that dense.

  “How many workers are in the lands between?” I asked.

  “How many workers?” Gildebrak wrinkled her nose. “Whew, that’s a doozy. I can tell you that for us Reapers, we have a hard time keeping more than a thousand or two.”

  What?! Less than two thousand Reapers for the entire planet? That didn’t seem quite possible. “Why so few?”

  “Mostly because we keep dying.” She gazed at the others on the train, not meeting my eye.

  . . . what?

  If I had taken a moment to think about it, I would have known that Reapers die. Of course they did. Because that was how I became involved in this whole mess. Yet despite seeing a Reaper die right in front of me, the idea still seemed strange.

  “What, did you think that we were immortal?”

  “The Lord of the Dead is a demigod, and you literally said that you've known someone for a thousand years,” I pointed out.

  “I did say that, didn’t I? Well, time is different for us, especially when we’re here.” Gildebrak motioned around us with one hand. “The thing is, us Reapers don’t die of old age, but we very much can be mortally wounded. Unfortunately, it’s a risk of the job.”

  “But why not just resurrect you or do a reincarnation thing?” After all, it seemed to me that reaping was probably a pretty difficult job, and the powers that be wouldn’t want to get rid of an experienced employee by losing them to some other god’s afterlife.

  “We can’t just go resurrecting people all willy-nilly. The whole entire system would break apart, and everything would be thrown into chaos. Although us Reapers do have abilities, in the end, we are not gods. We will eventually die, and that is the natural way of things.”

  “So, what then? Are you just ushered off to the afterlife of whatever god you swore to?”

  “That depends.” She chuckled. “This is one way where Reapers are given a bit of special treatment. We can go to the afterlife of the god we’ve sworn fealty to, or we can choose to go to Hel’s.”

  “Wait, hell is real? And why would anyone choose to go there?” I yelped.

  I was surprised when Gildebrak laughed. “No, no, not hell, Hel’s. She’s a goddess of death, and her entire realm is for any of the staff from the Dead Offices. Clerks. Brokers. Café workers. All of us are welcome. And a lot of us Reapers do end up going there. Either because we have no family, or our family has long passed.”

  “Did . . . did the Reaper I found in that alley get to go there?” I asked, a strange sort of sorrow building up in my gut. It felt a lot like mourning, but I figured I had done enough of that in my short lifetime.

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  “Perhaps. I’d certainly like to think so. But I have to be honest with you; it is impossible to know. That choice is deeply personal, and most people don’t share what they’ve chosen to do . . . when the end comes.”

  That made sense. I didn’t even want my coworkers to know where I lived. “I do appreciate your honesty.”

  “Of course! This whole situation is complicated enough without adding lies into it. But in the spirit of being honest, I do have to admit that part of me likes testing you and seeing your reactions.”

  That was a bit of an uncomfy admission.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like I said, it’s been ages since I’ve been able to interact with anyone who’s new to all of this. It’s interesting to see what things are second nature to me but so new and impossible to you. Kind of helps me put things into perspective, you know? Also, compared to the few people that I have shown around, your reactions are a lot . . . different. And frankly, that fascinate me. When you’ve been around as long as I have, it’s hard to find something that surprises you.”

  “So, I surprise you?”

  “Indeed you do, Miss Bridges. Call me optimistic, but I’ve got a good feeling about you.”

  I didn’t have a clue what to say to that, but I was saved from the awkward silence by Gildebrak clapping her hands.

  “Here’s our stop coming up.”

  Sure enough, the train slowed down as we reached another station. There was a surge toward the doors, but it wasn’t violent or even hurried. Just sort of a natural flow of people needing to go wherever they needed to go. It was really weirding me out how many things in the land between were so similar to what was on Earth and yet so entirely different. Like aliens had studied the world without ever living in it and created an uncanny replica.

  Honestly, that probably wasn’t far from the truth of things.

  Once we were out on the platform, we all filed toward a set of double doors perpendicular to the train. Although I was in quite a large crowd, I still felt like I stuck out far too much. I couldn’t really tell if people were staring at me, but maybe they were just being very polite about it. I was a bit too overwhelmed and socially anxious to look around, fearing I might meet the eyes of someone and be compelled into conversation.

  “Here we go,” Gildebrak said as we passed through the doors. “I hope you’re ready for this.”

  “Ready for wh—,” I started to ask, but those were the last words that left my mouth before the ability to speak fled my body.

  I wasn’t sure quite what to expect for a “sorting room.” Something grand, of course, Probably with a lot of filing cabinets. But that wasn’t what was waiting for us at all.

  The crowd parted rapidly as we stepped in, all going their different ways, while Gildebrak led me forward onto a platform. A platform from which it was possible to see so much of the impossible scene before us.

  The room was just as blindingly white and austere as the rest of the place, built in a circle instead of the more angular shapes I’d seen already, but it went up so high that I couldn’t even view the ceiling. And I was pretty sure that there wasn’t even a ceiling, considering something bright and ethereal suddenly rocketed down from above our heads, plummeting through the center of the room.

  It was too fast to really make out any details, but the mysterious substance seemed almost primordial in a way. I watched, completely gobsmacked, as it rocketed past us and down into the giant open hole taking up the middle of the room.

  Leaning a bit over the railing, I saw it eventually splash into a pool of liquid hundreds of feet below. And yet, it didn’t seem to be made of water. No, almost like steam and energy combined to make something completely intangible and yet entirely there. The power I felt emanating from it made my stomach flip and my skin crawl, but at the same time, I wanted to touch it.

  I watched the swirling miasma for several moments before finally realizing that there were at least fifty different tubes sticking down into the impossible not-liquid. Except it didn’t seem to be sucking up any of the magical soup, and instead, something similar to the ethereal light that fell would shoot up through the tube every few seconds before disappearing via the clear pipe into the walls.

  “So yeah, I imagine this is pretty self-explanatory, but this is the sorting room. Souls come in from above, join in the storage system down below, then are siphoned off into different pantheons, then to individual gods. While it is pretty polished, they’re always doing some sort of work to improve it in some way and keep up with the ever-expanding population. It seems like the construction crew isn’t here today, which must mean that they finished up their last project here and are likely waiting for a new one to be commissioned.”

  I stared at the tangle of tubes that squiggled every which way before eventually disappearing through walls and tried to imagine all the gods in the world were somehow connected by those fifty or so clear pipes. Maybe the human mind wasn’t meant to have something so complex as death in the afterlife be dumbed down to essentially something between steampunk and cyberpunk plumbing.

  “All the souls in the world come through here?” I finally asked.