“A Diver’s soul is both a ship to navigate the stormy seas, and a shield to defend yourself from the sharks that lurk beneath the waves. Be as wary as you are below as you are above.”

  -An excerpt from Your New Death

  Ash went back out into the hallway, his third bottle finally running dry as he held a book in his other hand. With both hands full he navigated the hallway littered with white doors until he found his way back into the bar, following the sounds of Abbey and Gray laughing and still sharing drinks.

  Gray spotted him first since he was still behind the counter and had a good view of the hallway. He gently lifted his can up to gesture towards him, and Abbey spun around, clearly much more drunk than when he was last here. “Ash!” She shouted out, one hand still clutched around a familiar bottle, “You’re back already, Forin kick you out?”

  “He gave me some homework,” he held the book up, “so I decided I should let him get back to his own work.” He made his way back over to the counter and placed the empty bottle down, right before a fuller one was slid over to him. He looked up at Gray still drinking from one of his cans as he grabbed the new full drink. “Wasn’t I supposed to buy you one of these?”

  “I’m adding them to the payback list, so drink up!”

  Ash didn’t pay the comment much attention as he twisted the cap, but asked a different question instead. “So it feels like the only person working at this ‘office’ is Forin in the back. What do you guys do all day?”

  “Normally this place is pretty abandoned, save for Vandal or Forin,” Gray responded, “we don’t have any official work right now, but Divers are free to patrol and handle situations as they see fit.”

  “Really? I kinda thought things were a little more official, with more red tape from the way you two were describing things.”

  “Nah!” Abbey piped up, waving another bottle in the air happily, “If we don’t have anything assigned we can do whatever we want!”

  “Broolhaven is a H rank city,” Gray mentioned, the rank being brought up for the second time today, “so we’re pretty lax on both protocol,” he swirled his now empty can around, “and unfortunately support.” He walked towards another spot behind the counter, a sink, as he quickly rinsed out the can he just emptied before placing it in a blue bin on the ground. “If you get to it in your homework you’ll find out that H is at the very bottom of the list.” Gray retrieved another can from the small fridge beside him as Ash studied the front of his book, noting the title, Your New Death.

  “When things get REALLY exciting though even Divers in our little dump get called out to other areas,” Abbey piped up.

  “I wouldn’t expect that to happen too often,” Gray looked over at Ash as he had another can firmly in his hands, “and we absolutely need to get some experience under your vest before you can even handle H rank problems.”

  “Oh yeah!” Abbey perked up again, “what was your stream like? Ya gotta tell me!” she turned towards Ash.

  “Abbey, you can’t just ask people that all of a sudden. What if it’s personal?”

  “Says you, you were already there so you got to see it all!” She hopped one stool over with a quick jump, getting closer to where Ash was sitting. “It must have been crazy if Vandal made you a Diver already.”

  Ash forced a smile as he took a drink, wishing this stuff would work a little faster. “Sorry to disappoint, but it was about as boring as I am.” Ash remembered that both Gray and Vandal had an interest in how big his stream seemed to be, but he still couldn’t place why it was so important. He looked back at the book on the counter, thinking that at least the path to an answer was somewhere inside of there.

  “Whaaat? Come on come on, you don’t have to hide it, just tell me!” Abbey pleaded, even looking towards Gray for backup.

  “Abbey, if he doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Just as Abbey was about to hop another stool two loud synchronous buzzers went off, making both her and Gray stop and put both of their drinks on the counter. Both of them dug into their back pockets, pulling out their phones as Ash could feel the tension in the room rising.

  “We’re calling the rest of your office orientation short,” Gray turned to Ash’s direction as he walked to the other edge of the counter to make his way out of the bar. “Abbey, you’re on the first plunge, got it?”

  “Aye!” She shouts out, hopping off her stool and giving him a quick salute.

  “What’s going on?” Ash asked as the two of them hurried towards another door on the other end of the bar. He stood up, one of his hands resting on the book on the counter. “You’re coming along for a little on the job training.” Gray told him as he opened the door and disappeared down a hall, with Abbey following closed behind. With the door open, Ash followed suit, leaving the book sitting on the counter next to his half finished bottle. The hallway past the open door only had one turn that led to a set of double doors with black curtains covering a set of windows, presumably to the outside.

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  When Gray opened one up, a small bell rang out above the doors as he stepped out into one of Broolhaven’s many cluttered alleyways. The door shut slowly behind the trio as they all left, with Gray ahead of the pack as he looked at his phone. “Guess we’re going to that noisy diner after all, that’s where Ren’s last ping was.” Before Ash could question it, they went on the move, ducking out of the alleyway onto a mostly quiet street.

  “I’ll go get started!” Abbey shouted before she took off in a sprint, leaving the other two behind as she darted down the street, blowing past a couple of people just walking on the sidewalk who struggled to get out of her way in time.

  Gray, sensing Ash’s potential confusion, took it upon himself to explain as they kept on the move. “Divers are all connected to the same system, and when we’re out on patrol we regularly check in.” Gray held up his phone and give it a small wave, though Ash couldn’t completely make out what was on screen. He saw a dark gray background with several different scrolling menus and buttons, with one currently highlighted in red with what looked like a timer slowly counting up.

  “Electronics don’t work inside of the soul sea, but if you set up a timer with the system before you enter you can send out a ping to all nearby Divers, kind of like a SOS, if the timer runs out before you cross back over.”

  “Is he okay?” Ash felt like they should pick up their pace a bit.

  “Ren?” Gray smiled at the question “Besides Forin and Vandal, he’s been working out of Broolhaven the longest, so I doubt he’s having too much trouble.” They turned another corner which put the Gatsby diner in sight, but there was no sign of anyone around it, not even the waitress that typically yelled at passersby from the window. “Individual soul streams aren’t always simple though, so it’s easy to lose track of time investigating. If we’re lucky, this’ll just count as a way to get you some easy experience before you start the job for real.”

  As Ash and Gray neared the diner, Gray put up a hand as he stopped in his tracks. “Hold on, something’s not right.” Ash stopped behind him, carefully looking around the street, but he couldn’t spot anything out of the ordinary. The diner was one of the more appealing buildings on the street with a rounded pill shape, and hot red roof that was easy to see from either end of the sidewalk stretch. Ash didn’t really notice anything else, there weren’t even any cars on the street today. “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t want to take this street so we wouldn’t get flagged down by the diner, but it’s eerily quiet right now. Something just doesn’t feel right.” Ash didn’t feel like anything was out of the ordinary, but as he took a look down the street, and back behind them he didn’t see a soul in sight. “Abbey said she was scouting, right? Where’d she go?”

  At the same time, both Gray and Ash felt a full body chill wash over them and glue their feet to the spot they stood. Ash felt his stomach drop far enough to feel like it was pulling him down to the ground while a sudden ringing in his ears made him shut his eyes tight. His hands instantly went over his ears as it felt like something was trying to drill its way out of his skull from the inside. His senses dulled one by one before he left in complete silence, in an oppressive void that threatened to snuff out what little feeling he had left.

  In a snap, the feelings cleared, and he was himself again. He was shaken, felt sick to his stomach, but at the very least he could feel his stomach again. His eyes opened with his vision blurred as his surroundings slowly came into focus while he struggled to stay upright. He stumbled over his own legs for a moment as he leaned onto a nearby building for support, and his palm connected with the wall beside him his hand felt unnaturally hot.

  There on the back of his hand was the mark he saw before, the red, nine pointed star. He stared at his hand for a few seconds as the last murky edges of his vision cleared, and then called out. “Gray, my mark showed up again!” But as he looked around, Gray was nowhere in sight, and stranger still, Broolhaven’s blue skies were suddenly blood red.

  Ash found himself standing on the same street he was before, but most of the surrounding buildings had disappeared, replaced with nothing but a dark, almost glossy void with frayed edges that ate into their visible surroundings. Even the building Ash had his hand on was barely a building at all, but part of a wall sticking out of that same ink like void. It was as if the slice of the city he was in was under the sky’s red spotlight to keep the darkness from completely consuming it.

  “This has to be a soul stream,” he said to himself as he went back to staring at the mark on his hand braced against the bricks beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, the dark space chewing into the wall inched ever slightly forward, making him pull his hand away reflexively.

  Ash looked down the street to his right, and before it ended unceremoniously in the same darkness, the Gatsby diner with its red roof was still easily in sight. Without anywhere else to go that wasn’t cloaked in encroaching ink, it made his destination clear. It was only a few paces to the diner’s steps from here, and as he approached he was hoping that his other coworkers were already inside.

  As he got closer he noticed that the sides of the diner were surrounded by the same ink-like substance, and he didn’t feel like staying out here any longer to see if it would move like the last patch did. At the back of his mind, he felt like he had seen something like this void before, and as he quickly remembered where, he pushed the thought away. He didn’t want to think about his apartment in the soul sea, not right now.

  He hurried up the diner’s steps, praying that it wasn’t closed. The door was unlocked as he grabbed the handle, and he didn’t waste any time throwing it open and shutting it behind him. He breathed a small sigh of relief, feeling like he had a little more breathing room inside of a building than out on the open street. However, when he looked around the inside of the Gatsby’s diner, he realized he had a different problem.

  In nearly every direction, as far as his eyes could see, there was no end to the walls of the diner. He had been “forced” into Gatsby’s a couple of times, and at best the diner could seat 20 people, even if he’d never seen more than four people in there at one time. The Gatsby’s he was in right now could probably seat every hungry resident in Broolhaven and then some as he saw booths and tables littered across what felt like an endlessly large expanse, like a desert that served free refills of the city’s most mediocre coffee.

  Ash’s first thought was that remembering table numbers would be a nightmare working here, but his second thought was, “Holy shit…”