The sharp wail of police sirens pierced the ever-present drone of the city around her, bouncing off the towering skyscrapers and reverberating down the back alleys. Everyone knew that the police were just a token display or effort, but it didn’t make their sirens any less obnoxious. Zoe dragged herself up off the ledge of the building she had been sitting on, staring down at the concrete and wondering what she would feel if she leaned forward and slipped away from it all. Would she be afraid? Exhilarated? Peaceful?

“Let’s go, Z.” Nihil spoke up from behind her, his voice like the rumble of an old car engine idling. “We have work to do.”

“Yeah, I know.” Zoe sighed and hopped down off the ledge back onto the rooftop, her well worn sneakers crunching the gravel. She shoved her torn up hands into the front pocket of her ragged hoodie and traced her fingers over the weapon inside.

The pair walked in their customary silence down the street, passing through the crowds like ships sailing against the current. Hundreds of faceless people on their way to thankless jobs or loveless families. A crashing tide of malformed malcontents meandering through mundanity moment by moment, Zoe hated them, or maybe it was more accurate to say she resented them. They had free choice, and they were wasting it, throwing it away in the act of grinding themselves up to satiate some insatiable corporate God. If they only knew what the real thing was like…

“Here, Z.” Nihil turned a corner and led her down the alleyway to a heap of blood soaked cardboard boxes. A woman lay there gasping for breath, cradling a birth-slick infant in her arms and weeping. It made no sound as it lay limply in its mother’s arms, but still she rocked it gently.

Zoe approached the woman and crouched to eye level, watching her and waiting. The threads around her were fraying, and it was only a matter of time.

“Now, Z.” He instructed evenly.

She drew the scissors from her hoodie and held the glistening silver and gold blades in the air, plucking one of the strands from the weave, and cutting it with a precise and delicate snip.

The mother’s breath caught in her throat as she hugged her baby tighter, suddenly sensing something was wrong. Hot tears burst forth and she screamed - She begged, pleaded, and railed against the loss of her child.

That was God’s mercy… not to ease her suffering or to save her or her child from their awful circumstances, but to push her closer to the brink, to see if she would break. They were toys - playthings in the hands of a cruel and unloving maker.

“Z. We have other clients.” Nihil snapped his old leather-bound journal closed and tucked it into the interior pocket of his ragged black duster. She didn’t rise. He fixed her with those dark, stormy eyes from beneath the brim of his hat and repeated himself more firmly.

Z stood and sighed, slipping the scissors back into her pocket. She produced a small notebook with a variety of stickers adorning the cover - skulls, roses, toxic waste symbols, barbed wire hearts - and jotted down the proper note. A name, a time, a place, the completion status. She sighed and closed the notebook and returned it to the pocket next to the scissors.

Walking with Nihil made her feel like a child who had been disciplined. She was a good foot shorter than the gaunt figure, and clearly much younger. He had an air about him that exuded the sort of cold detachment to the work that a veteran reaper should possess. Z wondered if she’d end up like that in a few more centuries of this work.

She’d only been a reaper for a decade or so - and they often told her that she was still too ‘human’. As if that was something someone could be. The human condition ended for her when she hit the pavement from six stories up, drowning under the influence of enough alcohol and drugs to kill a racehorse. All she had wanted to do was escape her abusive family. Too bad for her she didn’t know just how ‘real’ the most abusive Father in all creation was.

At first she worried she would be sent to hell - some fiery pit of torment. But that was only half true. Hell was nothing like they talked about in the numerous books of human falsehoods. Hell was having to go back to the writhing cesspool of humanity, but this time you would be alone, invisible to everyone, and given a menial task to do for all eternity. Zoe had drawn ‘soul collection’, and so it was that she came to be beside Nihil, her mentor, who would in time also fade away and leave her truly alone to her duties. More than once she had taken her scissors to her own body, trying to sever whatever held her here. But it was in vain. A decade later and she was still here, still cutting threads to send souls on to meet their malicious maker.

“Here.” Nihil shook her from her thoughts as they stood in front of a fine looking home. She stepped through the doorway and into the well decorated foyer. The owners clearly had money, lots of it. They had been devout servants to the corporate God, clearly. She followed the pull from her innate sense of duty up the stairs, towards the destination, with Nihil close behind, observing her.

Within the room beyond an ornately carved door was a man and a teenage girl in an opulent bedroom suite. The woman was screaming for help as he muffled her, ripping at the dress she wore to try and free her from it. Z recognized the terror in the girl’s eyes. Not so long ago that had been her. She shuddered and reached for the scissors. She wanted to make the cut, to save this girl, but the threads weren’t unraveling fast enough. She couldn’t pick the right thread - not yet.

Suddenly the girl’s eyes flitted from the man who was trying to rape her and locked with Zoe’s.

‘Help me, please!’ they seemed to scream, over and over again on loop in Zoe’s mind. Her grip tightened on the scissors.

Nihil placed a hand on her shoulder firmly. It was not a gesture of comfort - but a warning.

“No, no! Please, no, I don’t want this, I don’t want this, stop!” the girl was screaming, struggling against him as he slipped a hand into her tights.

Snip

Zoe held the scissors in outstretched hands, a cut thread drifting in the wake of her impulsive action. The girl’s screams and protests fell silent as she went still in the bed.

“You cut the wrong thread.” Nihil said, locking eyes with her. “You took a life before it was destined to end.” He pulled his journal from his jacket and clicked the ornate pen. “As penance, Zoe Carter, you will carry on in her place until the proper moment arrives.” He swept the page with an emotionless flourish of his pen, and the world lurched around her.

Being alive again was a shock. The warmth of human flesh, and then came the emotions- the fear and revulsion. The sensations from the hands of the man on top of her. She screamed and shoved against him, scratching at his face with her perfectly polished nails. At the foot of the bed she saw Nihil, the silent observer.

“Do it, Nihil! Do it! Reap him! Nihil! NIHIL PLEASE!” she begged.

“Who are you talking to? Who is Nihil?” the man asked, his breathing ragged as he struggled to free her from her clothing.

Just as the man managed to pull down her panties, his hand flew to his chest, clutching at nothing, before he slumped forward on top of her. She screamed and shoved him aside, crawling out from beneath him and off of the bed. She scanned the room quickly, but there was no sign of Nihil.

‘He left me… He left me here…’ her mind was racing, and she reached for the notebook in her hoodie pocket - it wasn’t there - neither the hoodie nor the notebook. She looked down at her unfamiliar body, wearing partially torn unfamiliar clothes.

“No, this isn’t… this can’t be… I’m not her… I’m not M-megan… It’s not me… I’m... I am… who… who am…?“ She trailed off, staring at the slumped over corpse of the man on the bed. “D-dad?” She slowly rose to her feet and reached out to him tentatively. He wasn’t moving, he wasn’t breathing. She felt a mix of emotions surge through her, but the one that won out was happiness, no, pure elation. She giggled and took a step back.

‘He’s dead. He’s really dead. I’m free! I’m free!’ she thought, before a pang of something else hit. ‘But wasn’t I free before? ...This feeling is strange...A tall man… a dark coat? … striped leggings and a torn up hoodie? ….Are these memories mine?’

She shook her head. There was a more pressing issue here. Megan pulled her cell phone from her bag and dialed 9-1-1. If she waited too long to report it to the police, it would be suspicious.

“9-1-1 what’s your emergency?”

“Yes,” Megan forced a measure of panic into her voice, “I think my father had a heart attack!”

Nihil watched from the imperceptible veil between the living and the dead. It was going to be a long wait for the return of his apprentice.