“Let me get this straight,” I said. “These ‘shades’, as you call them, were set loose from the underworld…as in the real underworld. Hades, Tartarus, fucking Cerberus, and the ferryman. Are you shitting me?” I itched idly at my chest and stomach, realizing the only sign of the previous night’s battle was the tatters of my shirt hanging over what was now unbroken skin. Everything else might be going to shit, but I couldn’t find it in myself to mind rapid healing.

  Richard raised an eyebrow at me. The aging hippie seemed like he was trying not to laugh. “Have you ever heard of the parable of the five blind men?”

  I sighed, barely stopping myself from snarkily asking whether he’d heard that it was bad form to answer a question with another question. He either didn’t notice or chose to ignore my irritation and simply continued on. “The five men come across an elephant in the middle of the road…”

  “What were blind men doing out in the middle of the road?” I interrupted. “Was there a convention or something?”

  “What?” he asked, looking confused. “No, Max. Just listen…each of the men touched a different part of the elephant. The one who touched the ear said that an elephant was like a fan. The one who touched the leg said an elephant was like a pillar. The one who touched the trunk said an elephant was…”

  “Like a huge cock?” I asked, snickering.

  He groaned. “Can you please let me finish? I’m trying to answer your question the best way I can.”

  I nodded and held up my hands. It probably wasn’t the best idea to be a smart ass to the guy who had just saved me and was offering to teach me about the hidden world I found myself in. I just hated riddles.

  “The elephant is the underworld in this case…or the afterlife, if you prefer. The Greeks referred to Death as Thanatos. The Egyptians called him Osiris. The Persians had multiple names for aspects of Death. So did the Zoroastrians. The point is…”

  “They were all wrong,” I announced, feeling pretty proud of myself.

  He shrugged. “Yes and no. They were all also correct. Each culture described different parts of the whole.” I waited for Richard to continue, but he simply looked at me expectantly.

  “That’s not an answer. You’re gonna have to give me more than that. Up until a few weeks ago, I assumed that when someone died…”

  “They were just gone?” he asked, finishing my thought. I nodded. “You have to understand that I’ve never been there, so I can’t tell you with 100% certainty, but I’ve always had my suspicions, and nothing I’ve seen so far has truly challenged them.”

  “I get it. Just tell me what you think is true, even if you’re not sure. Please.”

  “I could get in a lot of trouble for this,” he muttered. “But given your situation, I think any information is better than none. You already know that we live in a polycosmic system, right?”

  “Um…a what?”

  “A multiverse. Multiple worlds across multiple realities. It’s really trippy if you think about it too hard. But there is only one afterlife. In every communication I’ve had with the Weaver, they’ve referred to the ‘underworld’ as Terminus.”

  “Who’s the Weaver?” I asked.

  “There are three Fates, each of which acts as a leader for one of the three departments that make up the Bureau. I don’t know their real names, but the one we call the Cutter is in charge of the Reapery. The Weaver is in charge of the Transit Corps, which we refer to as the Endrs. The third department you’ll likely never interact with. The Keeper is in charge of that department. Those employees are called Echos. They basically tend to the spirits who are already in Terminus.”

  My head was whirling. I already knew about the Reapers, and it wasn’t a huge stretch to envision a bureaucratic leader for each department within the greater organization. I guess it made sense that the Cutter would be in charge of the employees who collected souls at the end of their lives. Huh, Disney hadn’t actually been all that far off after all. Motherfucker.

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  “So….” I said slowly. You report to the Weaver?”

  “Yeah, man. That’s who all Dispatchers get their directives from.”

  “And these shades are coming out of Terminus, not one of these other worlds?”

  He nodded. “Only one place a shade can come from.”

  “And you’re also saying someone is letting them out. Have shades ever intentionally been let out before?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that, Max,” he said. “Shades escape all the time, but I’ve never seen them hunt together. That’s how I know something weird’s going on.”

  “I wonder if the Keeper knows that souls are being released from Terminus. It would be in their jurisdiction, right?” Richard nodded, and I shook my head. “Man, this shit is so far over my head, I don’t even know where to go from here.” I stepped out of the car and stretched. My aching muscles and joints popped in the cold dawn air.

  Richard stepped out to stand at my side. He gazed over the early morning light catching on the solar panels. “I don’t know what’s going on, but if I were you, I’d start preparing for the next wave of shades.”

  “You think there will be more?” I’d barely survived this encounter, and even thinking about having to do it again made me tired.

  “I don’t know.” The older man said, facing the rising sun. He closed his eyes and smiled. “The morning sun never gets old, no matter how many times I see it.”

  “How long have you been a dispatcher?”

  “1977. I was 59 years old when the Reaper came for me.” He opened his eyes. “Another overdose. I’d had a few of those, but this was the one I wasn’t coming back from. When I saw him, I knew what he was. Somehow. Maybe it was the psychedelics. I just knew that I had to get away from him. So I ran. I ripped half a dozen tubes out of me and limped my way out of the hospital as fast as these old legs could carry me.”

  “Then what? Someone passed on a phone to you?” I asked.

  He chuckled. “Nah man… no such thing as a cell phone in the 70s.” He closed his eyes again and began moving through Tai Chi poses, his face serene. “Anyway, I was running and raving like a lunatic and stumbled into some guy on the beach. Set us both on our asses. He wasn’t mad, though. Took one look at me and handed me a slip of paper with a phone number on it, said to call it, and when I sobered up. I would have said yes to just about anything after seeing the Reaper.”

  I nodded. I knew what he was talking about. When you find out you were dying, you would do almost anything, agree to almost anything, to put off the inevitable doom.

  “Now, I look back and think maybe dying wouldn’t have been so bad.” He turned back to me, opening his eyes. “It happens after a while. I’ve never known a Dispatcher or an Endr who lasted as long as I have. The whole thing wears on you after a while. Most Endrs don’t make it past D20.”

  I wondered how long it normally took a new Endr to reach D20. I was already at license level D13, but was pretty sure that killing those Fines had propelled my level forward at an unusually accelerated rate. Couldn’t hurt to ask.

  “Normally, my license only goes up one level after each fare, and I’ve only had a few fares. But I just shot up ten levels, or whatever you call them, on my license–I’m already at D13. Guessing that’s because of the Fines?”

  “This is new ground for me,” he replied. “But I would imagine so. It probably has something to do with the fact that they were shades, or more likely, the kind of shades that crossed over.”

  “The kind of shades that were LET OUT, you mean,” I said, thinking about the massive pile of shit I seemed to be in the middle of.

  “You’re right. The proverbial door could be opened on either side.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, and immediately followed up with what made sense to me. “Are you saying that it might not be that someone in Terminus is letting them out, but that someone here could be letting them in?

  He nodded, his snarled gray hair bobbing. “An even more concerning question is WHY.”

  Why the hell would anyone want spirits of the dead outside of Terminus? And why hadn’t the Weaver or the Keeper noticed it? Or if they had, why weren’t they doing something about it?

  “I suppose a more pressing issue for you right now,” Richard began, “is the fact that whoever is doing it now sees you as a threat. Why else would they send multiple shades after you?”

  “I have no idea. I barely survived the last attack, and I don’t see how I can keep fighting them off if I don’t even know when they’re coming or how many there might be.”

  Richard looked confused. “Hasn’t anyone shown you how to turn on and off the map filters?”

  We spent the rest of the morning at the solar farm while Richard gave me the Elysium Pro tutorial that Dan Driver hadn’t been able to do. It turns out there were way more map features than I had initially thought, including the “Termina Signature,” which helpfully–and horrifyingly–showed three additional shades moving toward Mt. Desert Island.

  “Welp,” Richard said. “I suppose that means it’s time for you to start experimenting with those sweet new powers of yours.”

  - - -

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