Warcry’s burning prosthetic slammed into the side of the ninja’s head, but instead of knocking the ninja off me, Warcry’s metal shin crunched around the ninja’s cloth-covered face. The ninja didn’t even flinch.
Warcry cussed and ripped his bent leg back, stumbling unsteadily.
Another space moth, this one packing a huge cutlass made of blackberry-colored Spirit, darted down the hallway of cages toward us, and Warcry had to stop worrying about me and keep himself alive. I was on my own.
The ninja’s grip hadn’t loosened at all when he took that kick to the head. Dark curtains started to close in from either side of my vision. The sound in the hallway pulled back until it was miles away, and the theme song to Gunsmoke started playing, introducing James Arness as Matt Dillon.
“Grady!” Gramps’s voice morphed into Sushi’s. “Grady!”
It was like having cold water splashed on my brain.
Down by my right side, I opened my hand and called out the Lunar Scythe. I was so close to passing out that I didn’t feel my fingers stretch open, just a tingly numbness, and even the tearing sensation of the scythe ripping the meat from my bones as it passed was muted.
The sudden shove of the ridiculously huge weapon appearing in such a small space and wedged underneath the ninja knocked him off-balance. Through the red haze in my vision, I saw the guy’s eyes bug out in a panic when he saw my skin and muscle disappear. I shoved the scythe and twisted my hips to throw him while he was distracted, but the ninja leapt away from me like he suddenly weighed nothing.
My lungs finally opened, and I gasped and choked, sucking down ragged whooping coughs of beautiful oxygen. Still coughing, I rolled onto my side and used the handle of the scythe to lever myself to my feet.
The ninja stared at me, blinking nervously. Sweat ran down his forehead into his eyes, but he kept his gaze locked on the scythe. I took the gleaming black handle in both hands like I was about to chop him in half, knowing that if I looked down, there would be nothing of me but a skeleton in tattered scraps of what I’d been wearing.
The ninja backpedaled, then split into four of himself again.
I raised the scythe and took a step toward the clones.
The ninjas turned and sprinted off in four directions—left, right, back, and straight up like there was an invisible staircase leading to the ceiling. Instead of hitting the walls or cages, the ninjas disappeared through the walls like ghosts.
When I turned around to see how Warcry and Rali were doing, the space moth with the Spirit cutlass and the rest of the Contrails who’d been defending this floor were down. That ninja had been the last one.
Rali and Warcry were staring at me.
“Hake?” Rali asked, the lace in his eyes shifting with uncertainty. “Are you...uh...you?”
I tried to reassure them, but then I remembered I didn’t have the vocal cords to make words. Opening my palm, I sent the scythe tearing back across my skeleton. The flesh melted back onto my bones.
“Yeah, man,” I said when I could talk again. “I was still me, just with less meat.”
“What was that, grav?” Warcry growled, flames still dancing across his shoulders and down his arms like he might have to fight me next. Although the way he was keeping all his weight off his bent-up prosthetic hinted that it probably wouldn’t have been a long fight.
“That,” a cold feminine voice said from a cage down the hall, “is my Lunar Scythe, and you are not supposed to have it, Grady Hake.”
Angel of Death
RALI OFFERED WARCRY his walking stick, but Warcry turned it down. He limped along behind Rali and me as we picked our way through the fallen Contrails.
The angel of death was bunched up inside the cage at the end of the row, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. Even all torn up and dirty and caged, she was so beautiful it felt like I shouldn’t get too close or I’d ruin it.
“You refused to be consumed by the creatures in the Shut-Ins, you got me put on disciplinary action, you killed an ancient Heavenly Scale Balancer, and you stole my scythe,” she growled, ice glinting in her silver eyes. “You are by far the most troublesome reap I have ever made.”
I really wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t round up enough of it to drown out the pity. The cage was too small for her to stretch out or stand up. She looked pathetic trapped in there, with a Transferogate attached to her left shoulder, wires running in through her white marble skin, and the Heavenly Contrails’ phoenix tattooed on her throat ready to shock her if she stepped out of line. My indenture to the OSS hadn’t been fun, but at least I had been able to stand up and walk around freely.
“I think you mean the most troublesome mistake you ever made,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Reapers do not make mistakes.”
“And I was told I won your scythe because I defeated you,” I said.
“You did not defeat me!”
Basically, she was never going to admit she’d screwed up, even if it killed her. It was infuriating, mostly because I knew deep down that part of me was exactly the same. A memory of Mrs. Greenwell, my Advanced Lit teacher, writing hubris on the whiteboard flashed through my brain.
“If I let you out of here, are you going to kill me?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“Do you
