It was cold on the day I reaped my first soul. I had known it was coming—had been preparing for it. Although I had watched my mentor do it all summer, although I had prepared for this day, I was not ready. He knew this, so he stood behind me to make sure I made no mistake.
It was past noon as two little boys chased each other around the village. With sticks in their hands, they slashed and stabbed at each other in jest. Their game was familiar, the same game I had played in a different life. At the time, it had been just a feeling, but the memories of a life I once lived now played in the back of my mind. If I had remembered, would I have done the same thing?
There were rules I had to follow. The angels, a council of divine beings who governed over us, had made it clear that we were to be subservient to them. Although I stayed silent, it was difficult as I transitioned into the life of a reaper. I understood rules, but I could not help but question them.
The boys had ventured farther into the forest, playing the same game they played a hundred times before. The difference this time was that only one of them would return home.
I still felt sorry for the boy who had lost his friend, but I felt more pity for the boy who was lost. I held the latter’s hand as I told him why there were two of him, why the other him would not wake up. I told him about the doors that would open for him and bring him to the afterlife.
That boy looked up at me with tears in his eyes. “I want to say goodbye.”
“But they cannot see you,” I told him. “They will not be able to hear you.”
“Then can I leave something for him to remember me by?”
There was a procedure. I was not supposed to delay the soul’s crossing by even a minute. My mentor had been silent through the whole process, watching me even as I bent the rules for one little boy. He didn’t scold me, but I apologized, promising it would be the only time I would step out of line.
When my mentor and I parted ways, I thought that I would miss him; we had been each other’s company for almost a year. I played the part of his niece from the moment I was sentenced to reap souls at the beginning of summer. He taught me how to manipulate energy, to conceal my presence when I would fetch a soul. Although he was not a friend, he was all I had. But as the days grew colder in winter, I realized there was no real fondness for the man.
The emptiness in those early days was back, heightened by the memories that the angels had given back. This was my punishment for falling out of line as a reaper. The life of a reaper was supposed to be punishment enough, but my disobedience pushed them. For failing to act the way they wanted, they made sure that I knew what exactly it was I had done to suffer.
It was my fault that Alina was gone. I didn’t know if the angels had taken her away as part of my punishment or if it was just the way of the world. Her friend called me some nights ago. It was just before I stood trial in front of the angels, just before I realized how much power they had over me. The girl asked if I had seen her. Alina had gone out to see me but never came home. I told her the truth. “I don’t know where she is.”
Fate had kept us together for nine lifetimes. Every life we had lived, we lived together. Every death led to a new life with each other. Until I tested fate.
Our last life, the last time we were truly together, ended because of a kiss. Forbidden, because she was betrothed to another. But we had been in love and we had thought that was enough. We would have rather died than lived without each other. Or it had been just I who could not live without her. She would have fought for us. I had given up. That was the crime that led to my eternal punishment: To go against fate and die by my own hand. For that, I would exist but I experienced life without truly living.
It was fall when I saw her again for the first time. A century had passed since then. Like every reaper on this Earth, I lived like the humans—ate, slept, breathed, bled—as I did my duty as a reaper. It had been easier before when I could settle into a village and be the local hermit. Humans were more superstitious—more afraid—back then. It was more difficult now to move without being noticed.
That must be why she had noticed me, the girl who seemed just a little behind the times.
We met when I applied for a human job. Having just been assigned to reap souls in the city, it would have taken a while for me to blend in. Moving had always been a hassle, adapting to the rules and the customs was an annoyance. Alina was the manager at the coffee shop I would work at, although I was not supposed to work at all. The rules of the reapers were that we would be human on paper because we needed the money to survive in this day and age, but we would exist at a distance from the humans. There were no friends to be made in the lonely life of a reaper, but she had made it impossible to stay far away.
I hadn’t known then how we were connected, but there had been a tugging at the back of my mind and a voice that seemed to say, “Remember.”
Being with her was déjà vu. Everything about her clawed at me like a distant memory, desperate to rip me apart. She had felt it, too, she said, as if we knew each other best. Every moment was heaven and it stirred up the longing for the human life I had lost.
The rules I followed meant I should not have gotten attached. I had to leave her in a month or a year. Reapers did what they were told. There were rumors of those who went against the angels, that they were given worse consequences that destroyed them. We were not alive, and there were worse things than death. I did not want that, but I loved the comfort when she would hold me in her arms.
The more time we spent together, the more I tried to forget what I was. What I had been told I was—a demon, a reaper, a sinner.
But I was also hers. Even when I could barely let her know the real me. She knew the lies, the name on the forged documents I used, but I could never get close to telling her the truth. She would ask and, every time I deflected from saying more than I should, she would have that look in her eyes that tore up my insides. She would brush it off, then call me her mystery girl. We pretended that it was okay. I pretended that we were okay.
After all, being a mystery to her was better than the truth.
I didn’t know the entire truth either. The angels had told us to never ask, to stifle our curiosity. I was not supposed to do anything else.
I was not supposed to forget that I was not human.
So she was taken from me. The day she disappeared seared my brain. It had been a week since I had seen her then, and while I pretended not to know, it was because she had been avoiding me.
“You confuse me,” she said when I came to her. Her tone was quiet and calm, but also accusing. “You keep me at arm’s length, even as you hold me close.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her; what else could I have said?
“I can’t walk away.” Her voice drowned in the frustration she must have felt. “So, I’m asking you to be the one to leave.”
What I did next was selfish. Despite my better judgment, despite the consequences to come if the angels ever found out, I kissed her.
I kissed her and all I could think about was that she felt like home. And then I thought that I shouldn’t have kissed her. Regret trickled over me until she kissed me back, pulling me closer, tighter, as if she would never let me go. For a moment, we fit together like puzzle pieces.
Her grip on me loosened and she pulled away. She looked at me, desperately searching for something, and I almost stepped back from the intensity in her eyes.
“I remember,” she whispered. I wanted to ask her what she remembered, but she had a faraway look in her eyes. She called me a name, but it was not the one I had used as a reaper. It was not the name she knew me by, but the name felt right. She said, “I missed you,” before she leaned to kiss me again.
It was the second kiss that sealed our fate.
The weather was getting warmer, but the temperature offered me no solace. The angels had given me winter to adjust to the memories that now occupied my brain. I was still their puppet, guiding souls to the afterlife, but now I had the memories of nine lifetimes.
There had been no time to grieve, not when the fragments of memories surfaced and I was forced to relive them. I remembered every sweet moment that had made my heart race, and every painful memory that left a bitter taste in my mouth. The angels did not care that I suffered, and I know this because the angels had assigned me a new reaper. They left him with me to guide, the same way I was left to my mentor.
With all of the memories that swirled in my brain, it was a struggle to remember that old man. Not every old reaper was tasked to guide the new ones. I had chalked it up to experience, but now I realized it was a part of the torment we faced. How awful it must be to mold the young reapers into hollow shells when you know why this was their fate.
This new reaper was young. He looked no older than fifteen, younger than most reapers I had encountered. I wondered if it was a mistake that he was like me. The boy seemed like he was full of life, his laughter so bright that it was almost contagious.
“Call me Robin,” he told me when we discussed the names he would use in the documents I taught him how to forge. There was a certainty in his look, a determined tone to his voce when he said, “My name is Robin.”
It must have been that moment when I realized he was going to be a special kind of reaper. At that time, I hadn’t decided if that was a good thing.
Robin was curious. His questions at first had been easy to answer. It was my job to teach him how to be a reaper. I answered his questions because I had been doing this long enough to know the answers. But then he started asking questions I did not know how to answer.
“Do you know why we are here?” he asked me one day. It was just us as I taught him how to make humans forget. He thought the angels didn’t know, didn’t see, but they did.
“That is not the kind of question you should be asking,” I told him. I wanted to tell him yes, yes, I do know, but I could not say it out loud.
He didn’t let go of the topic. “Have you never been curious?”
Of course, I had, but I did not tell him this.
“The angels have told you what you need to know,” I say, echoing words that my mentor had said to me. Words that his mentor must have told him, too. “Everything else is irrelevant.”
He thought this over, and I felt sorry for this child. I tried to imagine the circumstances that must have led to his presence here. There is no room for me to judge him and his decisions.
Before we went back to the task at hand, he looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “Do you miss your life?”
Do you miss your life? Even years later, when I no longer had to train him, when the angels assigned me another one, I still thought about that question.
Did I miss my human life? Did I long for human life, but I did not think I missed the one I ended.
With the number of new reapers to guide, I had grown weary of this job. There were still souls to reap, for humans would die all the time, but the birth of new reapers was what weighed on me. Each time, I imagined what their lives must have been like. Sometimes, I compared my last life to the ones I had made up for them in my head. Sometimes, I wondered if I could forgive myself for my own decisions.
I could not.
When I saw Robin again, it was when he showed up at my rented apartment unit unannounced.
I was caught off guard but I welcomed him. We chatted over coffee. Despite the memories of Alina that I tried to avoid, I still found myself frequenting coffee shops in my spare time. The familiar aroma offered me comfort on the days I remembered her more clearly.
“I need your help,” he told me as he sat across the table. It had been years, though not yet a decade, but we still looked the same. I wondered what the humans saw. Maybe a pair of siblings—a sister and her much younger brother, passing the time before they had to return home. I wondered if they saw the desperation in his posture, the way he looked over his shoulder like someone was watching. I wondered if they could tell that I was struggling to mask my worry.
After years of training new reapers, I thought I still cared.
I tried not to be accusing, but I could not beat around the bush, “What did you do?”
“There is this human,” he told me, and I flinched when the memory of Alina forced its way to the surface. He noticed, and he didn’t say more because he thought he knew what I would say.
“Do not get close to the humans,” I told him too many times for him to forget. That was the one rule that I taught my reapers. My mentor had not warned me, so I must warn them.
But I could see hope in his eyes. He had never stopped thinking about his past life, and now he thought this was his chance to remember.
I told him, “The angels will come for you.”
“When they do, will you help me?”
I did not know how to answer. The life of a reaper was a life lived alone. We bore the consequences of our actions.
When he realized I had no answer for him, he stood up from his seat.
“I met another reaper last month. Said he knew you. He told me that mentors were reapers who have defied the angels.” I didn’t like the disappointment in his eyes. The look haunted me when he left. “He said that all they were waiting for was forgiveness.”
“I could not ask for forgiveness.” No one could forgive me for what I had done.
I had known the day would come, but I had not expected it to take so long.
When the angels came for him, I testified as witness. It reminded me of my trial, and I wondered if this is how it went down. That time had been a blur. Had there been a trial when the angels knew everything? Reapers and angels gathered in the courtroom, watching and evaluating the words of the witnesses. Were there this many people to watch my trial? I only remembered the pain as they removed whatever barriers blocked memories.
It was excruciating, like the sensation of an ice pick chipping away the frozen parts of my brain. The only comparison I could make was the endless burning before my life as a reaper. It all happened here in this courtroom. I had vowed then that I would never put myself in the position where I would set foot here again. But here I was.
I didn’t see Robin throughout the process. It was then that I realized that they hadn’t brought him in yet. This was the investigation. They already knew the truth. The only thing left was to decide the punishment.
He was not here, but I did notice someone else. It was my mentor—the old man who had trained me.
But he was different. Or I was different. Rather than the mentor who kept me at arm’s length, who would not hear the questions I had posed, I saw the man who let me fulfill a dead boy’s wish. When he spotted me, our eyes met and I realized the emotions in his eyes.
He waited for me to walk over, and when I reached him, he smiled. I asked how he had been because it had been too long since our parting. He asked me about the child I had mentored, and if I understood now the way of the angels. I told him I did not. I asked him if he was okay.
“Better than before,” he said, though I saw the sadness in his eyes. “Immortality gives you time to reflect.”
I shook my head at that. “It punishes you with your guilt.”
He tried to smile. It was a weak attempt, so he just sighed. “The angels do not punish us,” he told me. “We do this to ourselves.”
I had no time to dissect his words before we were called back into the courtroom for the sentencing. I lost track of my mentor in the crowd, and I was soon distracted when I saw Robin being led to the center of the room.
He looked weary, but not out of grief. Anger. Although I had tried to keep up with news about him, I knew little of what had happened to him. When I had last saw him, I had thought we were the same. He would be as devastated as I was. But his pain was different.
When asked for his defense, he asked for his memories. It was a solemn audience, but the silence was heavier when he said, “I want to know.” It is better not to know, I thought. “I want to know. So that I could make amends.”
I hear it then. The words of my mentor. We do this to ourselves.
