The Soul Keepers Series, Book 1 Read online

  The guy hopped off the bar anyway, splattering into the brown, crimson-swirled lake, standing over the girl’s body, staring at it with a kind of rapt horror. The body lay on its side, soaking up one liquid and dispelling another, its eyes open, staring at nothing, staring at everything. There was no touching that. Not unless you wanted it to haunt you forever. And maybe it would anyway.

  “Oy!” Basil yelled.

  Rhett looked up and saw him and the other three standing in an archway under a handwritten sign that said RESTROOMS, and beneath that: LADIES FIRST.

  “Snap out of it, mate,” Basil continued, though his voice was gentle. “The longer we hang around, the better chance we have of running into the you-know-whats. They’ll have sensed it by now, so it’s time to boogey.”

  Rhett glanced out the window at the unyieldingly bright desert spread out around Turnstile, trying to make out any hooded figures that might be coming this way. There was nothing. But what reason did he have not to believe the others? This morning he’d been on a boat in the middle of an unknown ocean. He had taken one step through a door and now he was here, in a failing diner in a washed-up town on a great big slab of hot, rocky nothing. And something told him that they were about to step through another door and end up right back on that boat again.

  Could he walk away?

  Could he just ignore Basil and walk back out through the front door and leave them and the Harbinger and Captain Wise-Ass Trier behind? Would he always feel the push? Would he always feel the need to scoop up souls as they were thrust out of dying bodies? Probably. He had a feeling that it would eat away at him until his mind—the only thing that was truly his anymore—was a liquefied pool sloshing around in his pretend skull. Not to mention that he’d be alone. Completely alone.

  “Mate!” Basil cried again over the commotion of diners still panicking, trying to make sense of the scene that had played out in front of them.

  Rhett let go of the thought of running away and turned back, following the other four into the little alcove. Theo had to hunch over just to fit.

  There were three doors back here. The one closest to the dining area was obviously the women’s room, and another farther down was for men. The third door had yet another handwritten sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  “Treeny,” Mak said. “Little ladies, little boys, or employees only?”

  Treeny stepped out from behind Theo, her rail-thin frame making her look like a tiny bug buzzing out from behind a tree. She was holding her tablet and glancing down at it, then up at the doors. Rhett didn’t know what kind of underworld Wi-Fi signal she got on that thing, but it must have been magical.

  “Little … boys,” Treeny squeaked after a moment.

  “You sure?” Mak asked, leveling her gaze at the tiny girl.

  Treeny lowered her eyes and nodded as if she were embarrassed or ashamed. “I’m sure,” she said in, impossibly, an even smaller voice.

  Mak nodded at Basil, who stepped over to the men’s room door and gripped the knob. He held it for a second, leaning close to the door as if trying to hear something. Then he jiggled the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open.

  The sign on the door—the little stick man with the giant circle head—swung away from them, revealing the room of doors in the belly of the Harbinger. The hydraulic piston at the top of the door hissed and then popped, and then it began to smoke. It was trying to push the door shut against the force of another dimension.

  Basil glanced up at this and said, “The connection’s not great. Everybody in.”

  Theo went first, then Treeny, then Mak. Basil did a melodramatic bow and gestured for Rhett to go ahead of him, so Rhett did. He stepped through the door, imagining that if his body had been able to react to such things, his ears would probably have popped the way the hydraulics on the door had.

  He glanced back just as Basil stepped through. There was a barely perceptible warble in the air around him as he did, and the image of the diner wavered slightly. Basil casually kicked the door shut with his heel, like a man who’s just gotten a snack out of the refrigerator. It slammed into its frame with a thudding finality, silencing the wailing sirens of an ambulance as it approached the diner.

  * * *

  “Mak,” Basil said. “Why don’t you show Rhett the steam room?” He waggled his eyebrows at her.

  Behind him, Rhett could see other groups of dark-clothed syllektors moving around the room, coming in from some doors, going out through others. He caught sight of cities and forests, hallways and bedrooms, fields and highways, even what looked (and sounded) like a dense jungle. The place was like Grand Central Station but with direct access to any place on Earth.

  Mak sighed and rolled her eyes, and that brought Rhett back to the moment.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “Why not? He’s earned it, I guess.”

  “Precisely. Good work indeed, mate. Not many people come to grips with the lasso thing that quickly. I know I didn’t.”

  “Uh … thanks,” Rhett replied, his voice distant even to himself.

  “Not really great at taking compliments, are you?”

  “What? No! I’m sorry. I’m just … I guess I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything. That girl, she was so young, she…” He trailed off. What he wanted to say was She wasn’t ready. He thought about the way it sounded and then he said it anyway. “I don’t think she was ready to go.”

  The others stared at him with a mixture of pity and some species of annoyance. It’s the kind of look an employee gets at a job when they’re new and still excited to be there. Except Rhett wasn’t excited—he was completely overwhelmed.

  “That’s not our call to make,” Basil said, a slightly bitter tinge hanging in his voice. “We don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. We just have to be there to collect the soul. And protect it. That’s all.”

  “Are you coming or not?” Mak said. She was walking away, obviously tired of the conversation.

  “Go on,” Basil said.

  “Have fuuun,” Theo called, his deep voice toying and playful, the way it had been before breakfast.

  Rhett went after Mak.

  He caught up with her when she was already halfway up the steps to the next deck of the Column. She didn’t seem bothered by his presence, but she didn’t acknowledge him, either.

  “Where are we going?” he asked. He struggled to keep up with her double-step strides, avoiding other syllektors as they meandered past them.

  “Steam room,” she said. She didn’t offer any further explanation.

  “I … I don’t know what that is.”

  “Well then maybe you should wait and see,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Two decks up from where the group had transported themselves to the Arizona desert and back, Mak got off the stairs and headed down a long hallway that was more like a tunnel. It was empty. Their footsteps rattled off the walls.

  As they walked, Rhett noticed the walls changing, shifting to other versions of the ship’s decorum, the same stuff that he’d seen when Basil first brought him aboard. Here was the ornate carpet and the delicate woodwork, followed by the length of metal bulkheads bathed in their unhealthy yellow light, then the warped, twisted wooden floorboards and the flickering torches, tucked at the very end. The hall—the tunnel—came to a dead end at a wall of gray, moldy wood with a single torch hanging from it, the fire huffing from the breeze of their movement.

  “Could you move?” Mak snapped.

  “What?” Rhett looked at her. She was pointing at his feet. He looked down sharply. There was a trapdoor beneath him, with a metal ring to open it right between his shoes. “Oh,” he murmured. “Sorry.” He stepped back.

  Mak sighed, reached down to yank on the handle. The trapdoor yawned open, groaning like the mouth it resembled. Mak let it fall open with a bang that swept back down the hall like a shock wave, then climbed in, using a ladder to descend into blackness.

  “Grab the torch!” she called up.


  Rhett mumbled, mostly to himself, “How the hell am I supposed to climb down there with a torch in my hand?”

  “Then don’t grab it!” Mak yelled from the hole in the floor.

  Rhett rolled his eyes and decided to leave the torch. He gripped the rungs of the ladder and started down, letting the shadows consume him. It didn’t take long for complete darkness to settle in around him. Above his head, the opening was a wavering orange square.

  A few moments later, the darkness was washed out.

  The dark walls around Rhett opened up. The ladder fed into a massive chamber at least the size of a small baseball stadium, which seemed to tilt to one side. It was made up of the same bowing wooden walls and floor. Ancient mold crept out of the corners, and the crossbeams were no longer straight but curved, in some places rising and falling in permanent squiggles.

  What got Rhett’s attention, though, wasn’t the sad state of the chamber itself but what the chamber contained.

  Settled into the middle of the floor, sitting more level than any other part of the room, was a glass cube. It had to be as tall and wide as a New York apartment building, with metal framework, making it look like some ultramodern living space. There was an extension jutting out from one side of the cube, with the same metal frame and glass walls, like a square tube, stretching away from the cube and disappearing into the wall. Behind the glass, glowing a silvery blue like the moon, was a cloud of mist that looked exactly like what had come from the dead waitress’s throat. Only this one was four stories tall and lit the chamber with the same watery, ethereal glow as an aquarium.

  Rhett could only stare, and Mak didn’t speak. They finished descending the ladder, stepping off one after the other onto the slanted wooden boards. Mak approached the cube while Rhett stood gaping up at it, mouth hanging open, wondering how, after all he had seen just today, he was still in awe.

  There was an average-size door cut into the bottom of the cube, sealed by more glinting metal framework. Mak stepped up to it and placed her hand on the glass. When she took it away, a foggy imprint of her splayed fingers and palm remained. It faded slowly, then the door clicked open.

  The moment it did, the room was flooded with the sound of whispering voices. The noise was such that you couldn’t make out any individual words, but the tangle of them was maddening. Rhett wanted to cover his ears. But he wouldn’t look like a coward in front of Mak. Not after he’d just started to prove his worth.

  He watched Mak pull the door open and get as close to the cube as she could. She leaned in, opened her mouth, and exhaled. The mist, the soul of the girl from Arizona, came pluming out of Mak’s mouth as if it were her breath on a frigid day, and it was gathered up by the gently swirling cloud inside the cube. Mak stared inside for a moment, with the incessant whispers of the dead echoing around them, until a satisfied look spread across her face. She pushed the door shut. The room went quiet again, and Rhett could barely contain his relief.

  “I don’t have to explain what this is to you, right?” Mak asked, walking back to where Rhett stood.

  “It’s … incredible,” he said in response, staring up at the luminescent storm in the box.

  She looked with him. She crossed her arms, admiring what was at least partially her own handiwork. “It is.”

  “It protects them?”

  “From everything. Not even a psychon could get inside that thing. If the ship goes down, the souls are safe. No matter what.”

  Rhett pointed at the off-shooting tube. “Where does that go?”

  “It circulates throughout the ship. The Harbinger is meant to carry and protect the souls, but the souls also help to power it … to power us. Without the Harbinger there would be no souls…”

  “… and without the souls there would be no Harbinger.” Rhett thought about his first journey inside the ship and the glass staircase with what he had thought was a big aquarium under it. What he’d actually been looking at were more souls.

  “You ready for another go?” Mak asked.

  That snapped Rhett back to attention. “Wait … what?”

  “You can’t feel it?” she said, echoing the same question she’d asked when they’d first arrived in Turnstile.

  And, as a matter-of-fact, Rhett did feel it this time. The push was back. Somebody else’s time was up.

  “Another one?” he asked, his voice low.

  “Another one,” Mak said.

  * * *

  They went again.

  And again.

  All they had to do was follow the push. The push gave them a door through which they would turn up at any seemingly random location. The push guided them to a person, a person who was about to lose hold of their soul, sending it thin and vulnerable into the open air as they died. After that, Rhett realized, the push was always gone. Once the soul was collected, they were on their own to find a way out of there. But Treeny always found a second door somewhere close by that would get them back on board the Harbinger.

  Rhett wasn’t ready for any soul-gathering just yet. He was more than happy to follow the push and guide the others to where they needed to be—which Mak made him do every time, anyway. But the idea of pulling another soul into himself, of carrying that burden even for the brief journey from the living world back to the Harbinger, was more than he was ready to commit to.

  So Basil and Theo both had their turns.

  After Arizona, there was Tokyo, a smear of throbbing lights with arteries of pedestrians flowing through it. Basil collected the soul of a man who had been hit by a car. He lay on the street, with a huge screen announcing some kind of juice product flashing above him, while others paced around him, maybe not realizing what was happening, maybe not caring. He was bleeding out of his ears and his shoes were missing. Basil was as delicate with the man as Mak had been with the waitress, using essentially the same words to ease the process of death.

  This is not the end.

  Then it was Theo’s turn. And the big guy was about as good at being gentle as a rhinoceros would be. In fact, he seemed more nervous than anything—his interests were obviously more in the realm of security. The soul he collected belonged to a woman in northern Canada, in the mountains, where she’d gotten lost and was freezing to death. Theo fumbled some of what he was trying to say, but he got the job done. He pulled the woman’s soul into his lungs and left behind the blue, frostbitten shell.

  That one had been a bit of a trek, and at one point Mak was sure that Rhett had lost the push and had resorted to leading them around aimlessly. She couldn’t quite hide her surprise when the poor woman finally turned up.

  After that, Mak went again. Rhett was curious why Treeny wasn’t taking a turn but decided it was best not to ask.

  They were in Brazil, in a shimmering patch of rain forest, where someone had built a small house and was living on their own, maybe doing research, maybe just enjoying the beauty of the enormous trees and the dapples of sun falling on the forest floor. Inside the house that was really more of a hut, they found a boy. There was a picture on the table of the kid with who must have been his father, and there were things that belonged to the father, like clothes and books. But the boy was alone, lying on a cot, shivering, dripping sweat, curled up under a blanket that he had bunched up under his chin. Rhett noticed a pot still dripping in a strainer. Wherever the dad was, he hadn’t been gone very long. And when Mak knelt down beside the boy and took his hand, she told him that she didn’t know why exactly he was dying, but that she thought he might have been poisoned by something.

  All of it must have happened so quickly, Rhett thought. The dad was going to come back to find his son dead in his cot. What would that look like? Rhett didn’t want to know. Mak was gentler than any of them had been all day.

  Over the course of the day, they intersected with other teams, passing through the room of doors, passing through the steam room. Groups of five or six each were spending their day doing the same thing Rhett and his teammates were doing. Rhett was so o
verwhelmed by it all, by the sheer vastness of the operation, that he was almost impressed. Was every day like this? Were there slower days? He hoped so. He hoped against his better nature that every now and then there was a day when not a single door was opened and not a single soul collected.

  But he knew better.

  Rhett insisted on following everybody to the steam room as they went. He couldn’t quite get enough of it. It was brilliant and beautiful. It was life and death at the same time, the essence of humanity but without all the bodies. He could have spent entire days in there, watching it, imagining that lovely fantasy of a day when it wouldn’t have to be opened.

  As Rhett and Mak made their way down to the steam room for the last time that day, they passed several groups heading back. The tunnel was crowded with syllektors who had finished dropping off their last … what? Deliveries? Deposits? What do you call the most important cargo ever?

  “Last one out as usual, Mak?” someone called. It was a lanky guy with tattoos scrawled up and down his arms, images that might have once had color to them but were now completely black—they were just shapes. Rhett couldn’t tell if the guy was being sarcastic or not. Either way, Mak ignored him.

  They did their business. Mak transferred the soul of the little boy into the cube, and Rhett watched, already trying to mentally prepare himself for the moment when he’d have to do the transferring.

  When it was done, they climbed back up the ladder to the trapdoor. Mak swung it shut with another vicious bang. They walked together down the tunnel toward the stairs.

  “Heading to the mess hall for dinner?” Mak asked.

  At first Rhett didn’t even realize she had said something to him. Some still-wonky part of his brain interpreted the sound as his own thought, a question to himself.

  “Are you … actually speaking to me?” he said. “Like, with words?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The captain told me I should try to give you a break.”