The Truck

The thing about dying, Jake Smith would later reflect, was that nobody warned you how stupid it would feel.

Not noble. Not cinematic. Stupid.

He had eleven seconds to live and he spent the first three of them thinking about a chicken sandwich.

It was a Tuesday in Manchester, the kind of grey afternoon where the sky couldn’t commit to raining and so just sort of loomed, damp and undecided, over the high street. Jake had a meal deal in one hand—chicken and bacon, the good one, the one that sold out by noon—and his phone in the other, and a head full of nothing in particular. Eighteen years old. A gap year stretching out in front of him like an unmade bed. The smell of wet pavement and diesel and someone’s vape pen, sickly-sweet blue raspberry, hung in the air.

He saw the truck before he understood it.

A delivery lorry, one of the big ones, taking the corner off Deansgate too fast—and there was a wet shimmer where its tyres met the road, a hydroplane skid, the back end swinging out like the tail of some enormous animal that had forgotten it had a body. Jake’s brain registered it in fragments. The horn. The smell of burnt rubber, suddenly, sharp and chemical at the back of his throat. The specific squeal of brakes that weren’t going to be enough.

And the family.

A woman with a pram. A little boy in a yellow raincoat, three or four years old, who had let go of his mum’s hand to chase a pigeon into the road, the way children do, with that absolute conviction that the world will simply wait for them.

The world was not going to wait.

Here is what Jake did not do: he did not have a noble thought. He did not think I must save them or this is what a good man does or anything that would look good carved into a headstone. What happened was simpler and dumber and, he’d later decide, more honest than any of that. His body moved before the rest of him had finished arriving. The meal deal hit the pavement. His feet found the road. And in the half-second of contact—his palms flat against the boy’s small back, shoving him clear, the boy’s raincoat squeaking under his hands, the surprised oof of breath—Jake’s last fully formed thought was, with great clarity:

Oh, this is going to hurt.

It did not, in the end, hurt for very long.

The truck took him at the hip and the world went white and silent and weightless. There was a sensation he had no word for—not pain exactly but interruption, like a song cut off mid-note, like a sentence with no—

---

He was somewhere else.

The first thing was the absence of cold. Jake had been cold his entire life and never noticed until it stopped. There had been Manchester drizzle in his collar and now there was nothing—a warmth that had no source, that came from everywhere, like floating in bathwater the exact temperature of his own blood.

He opened eyes he wasn’t sure he had.

White. Endless, soft, depthless white, the white of a page before anything’s written on it, of fog with the sun behind it. And standing in the middle of it—

“Oh thank goodness,” said the woman. “You’re not screaming. The screamers are exhausting.”

She was, Jake’s brain insisted, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and then immediately and frantically tried to remember a single detail about her and couldn’t. It was like trying to recall a dream while you were still in it. Her face wouldn’t hold. One moment she seemed his mother’s age, kind-eyed and tired; the next she was younger than him, the next she was something with too many planes to it, a face seen from several directions at once. Her hair moved like she was underwater. There was a clipboard.

There was, specifically, a clipboard, and this single mundane object did more to convince Jake he hadn’t simply gone mad than anything else could have.

“Am I dead,” he said. It didn’t come out as a question. His voice sounded strange to him—everything sounded strange, slightly delayed, like a video call with bad lag.

“Mm. Yes and no. Mostly yes. Let me—” She flipped a page, frowned. “Jacob Smith. Eighteen. Cause of death, vehicular—oh. Oh. You’re one of the truck ones.” She said it the way you’d say oh, you’re allergic to shellfish—a mild, professional sympathy. “We get so many of you. I don’t know what it is about trucks. Cosmic comedy, my sister says. She thinks it’s funny. She has a terrible sense of humour.”

“I’m sorry,” Jake said, because British people apologise reflexively even in the afterlife, “your sister?”

“There are several of us.” The woman waved a hand, and the gesture left a faint trail in the air, like a sparkler. “Reincarnation’s a big operation. You wouldn’t believe the throughput. Most souls get the standard package—shuffle, wash, sent back round with a fresh memory. Very efficient. Very boring.” She looked up at him, and for just a moment her unholdable face held, and her eyes were the colour of nothing he had words for, and she was looking at him with an attention that made the small hairs on his nonexistent arms stand up. “But every now and then one of you does something.”

“Does something.”

“You died running toward the truck, Jacob.” She tilted her head. “Do you know how rare that is? You had—” she checked the clipboard—“point-eight seconds to decide. People plan their whole lives to be brave and then freeze in point-eight seconds. You didn’t freeze. You didn’t even think about it. You just went.” She smiled, and it was not entirely a kind smile; there was something hungry in it, something delighted, the smile of a collector who’s found a good piece. “That kind of soul-weight registers. It rings a bell, all the way up. And I happened to be the one near enough to hear it.”

The boy in the yellow raincoat, Jake thought, with a lurch. “The kid—”

“Lives. Bruised elbow. He’ll forget your face by Christmas and grow up to be a moderately disappointing accountant, but he’ll live, which—” she shrugged, “—is rather the point of children. The woman with the pram named her next baby after you, for what it’s worth. Jacob. Spelled it wrong, though. Two b’s.”

A laugh came out of Jake that he didn’t expect, a single startled bark of it, and it surprised him that he still could. “Course she did.”

“You’re taking this well.”

“I’m in shock,” Jake said, with the calm of a man very much in shock. “I’ll fall apart later. Probably right after I work out what’s happening.” He looked around at the white. “Is this it, then? Is this—heaven? It’s a bit empty.”

“This is a waiting room.” The Goddess—he’d started thinking of her as that, the capital letter arriving uninvited—snapped the clipboard shut. “And no. You’re not getting the standard package. I told you, you rang a bell.” She began to walk, and the white moved with her, or she moved and the white stayed, Jake genuinely couldn’t tell, and he found himself walking too without having decided to. “I’m going to give you a gift. Most would call it a gift. Some of the ones I’ve sent would call it something a great deal less polite, but they’re not here to complain, so.”

“That’s not ominous at all.”

“I’m sending you somewhere interesting.” She said the word like it tasted good. “A world where what you are—that thing that made you run toward the truck—actually means something. Where the stuff a soul is made of isn’t just decoration. We call it the Immortal World.”

And as she said it, the white began to fill in.

It came like ink dropped into water, blooming. Jake saw—not with his eyes, he didn’t have eyes, but it didn’t seem to matter—a world, and then his understanding strained and snapped because it wasn’t a world, it was thousands of them. Land masses scattered across an ocean so vast the curve of it was wrong, an ocean that went on past where an ocean should stop, past the horizon and then past the next horizon, an endless dark-blue immensity dotted with continents like crumbs on a tablecloth that had no edge.

“The Neverending Sea,” the Goddess said, and there was something almost fond in it. “Every one of those is a continent. Each its own kingdoms, its own gods, its own rules. Some so weak a stiff breeze could end them. Some so strong that if you stood on their shores the weight of the power there would crush your soul flat as a coin under a boot.” She pointed, and Jake’s gaze was pulled, dragged like iron filings, down toward one continent in particular—green and gold and mountainous, threaded with rivers that glowed faintly, like veins with light in them. “You’re going there. Continent of Vaelen. Middling, as these things go. Strong enough to be interesting. Weak enough that you might survive your own ambition. Probably. For a while.”

“And what do I do there?”

“Cultivate.” She let the word hang. “Everything in the Immortal World runs on it. You take the energy that’s woven through everything—they call it qi, spirit, a hundred different names depending where you land—and you draw it into yourself, and you refine it, and you become more. Stronger. Longer-lived. There are nine tiers.” She held up a hand, fingers spreading. “The first few make you a superhuman. The middle ones make you a legend. And the last two—” she folded down all but two fingers, “—the eighth and the ninth. Those make you a god. Real ones. Like me. Some of the things you’ll meet in that world started exactly where you’re about to start.”

Jake’s mouth had gone dry, which was an interesting trick for a soul. “And I get to be one of these. A cultivator.”

The Goddess stopped walking.

She turned and looked at him, and there it was again, that attention, that weight, and now Jake understood it was the same weight she’d talked about—the gravity of something enormous bending toward something small.

“Here’s the thing,” she said, and her voice had changed, gone quieter, and somehow that was worse. “I’m not making you a body. I haven’t got the budget, the paperwork’s a nightmare, and frankly the warranty on freshly-built bodies is terrible. What I do—what I’m good at—is I find a body that’s just been vacated, and I move you in. Like a flat that’s just come empty.” She smiled, but it was thinner now. “And I have got a very interesting flat for you.”

“Why,” Jake said slowly, “do I get the feeling there’s a ‘but’ coming.”

“Several, actually.” She raised the clipboard again. “There’s a young man on Vaelen. Was. Eighteen, same as you—I do try to match the fit, it helps with the settling-in. Name of Kray Latze. Low-tier noble. Minor family, the sort that’s noble in the way a pond is a sea.” She read, and as she read the white around them began to shape itself into pictures, faint and silver, like memories projected on fog. “Born with a divine body. Do you understand what that means? You don’t, not yet, but you will—it’s a once-in-a-generation thing, a body so perfectly attuned to spirit that it should drink power like a sponge drinks water. Born with a high-tier spiritual root on top of it, which is the talent, the engine, the thing that decides how far and how fast you can climb. By rights this boy should have been a prodigy. A legend. Continents should have fought over him.”

The silver pictures showed a baby. And then they showed—Jake flinched—a man’s hand, adult and hard, and a sound that wasn’t sound, a wrongness, and the baby screaming.

“His uncle crippled him,” the Goddess said flatly. “When he was an infant. There’s a thing in that world called meridians—channels in the body that power flows through, the pipes to the engine, if you like. Sever them young enough and they never heal. The uncle did it deliberately. Family inheritance, family pride, an arrogant man who couldn’t stand the idea of a nephew outshining his own children.” Her jaw did something complicated. “So the boy grew up with the most beautiful engine anyone had seen in a hundred years and no way to turn it on. A divine body that couldn’t cultivate. A spiritual root that did nothing but ache. Everyone in his life looked at him and saw waste. A failure. The cripple of the Latze family.” A pause. “Even his betrothed. There was a marriage promise—arranged when they were children, the way these things go. The girl’s family withdrew it three weeks ago. Publicly. In front of the whole clan. Because who marries into ruin?”

Jake found he was clenching jaws he didn’t have. “That’s—” He stopped. He’d been about to say not fair, and it sounded so childish in his head that he swallowed it. But he felt it anyway, hot and sudden, an anger on behalf of a boy he’d never met. “What happened to him? You said the body just came empty.”

The Goddess’s expression gentled, and that was the worst yet.

“He killed himself trying,” she said. “Not on purpose. He never gave up, you understand—that’s the part that rings, that’s why I’m here, the two of you actually have rather a lot in common. He couldn’t cultivate, so he trained his body the slow way, the mortal way. Iron weights. Mountain runs. Beatings he gave himself with his own discipline, day after day after day, trying to drag a crippled vessel up a mountain meant for gods. Trying to be something with the one path nobody could take from him.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Three nights ago his weak heart finally gave out under the strain. He died alone in a training yard at dawn, with frost on the ground and no one watching, eighteen years old, and his last thought—” she opened her eyes, and they were wet, or seemed to be, “—his last thought was that he was sorry. That he hadn’t been enough.”

The white was very quiet.

“So here is my offer, Jacob Smith.” The Goddess straightened, and the grief folded away behind her like a curtain, and she was professional again, but gentler than before. “I put you in that body. You get the divine body. You get the high-tier root. You get the talent of a hundred-year prodigy.” She let it land. “And you get the broken meridians. The crippled engine. The whole continent thinking you’re worthless. A name that’s a punchline. An uncle who maimed you and a clan that despises you and a girl who threw you over in front of everyone you know.” Her unholdable smile returned, sharp at the edges. “I won’t lie to you and call it an easy life. I’m offering you a hard one. But you ran toward a truck, Jacob. I don’t think you’re afraid of hard.”

Jake stood—floated—in the white, and turned it over.

The honest, cowardly part of him wanted to ask if there was a different flat. Something with working pipes. A nice quiet life as a baker’s son in a town where nobody had ever heard of meridians. He could already feel the weight of the life she was describing, the loneliness of it, the sheer uphill misery.

But there was another part. The part that had moved before he did, in Manchester, in the half-second before the truck. The part that had heard his uncle crippled him and gone tight and hot and certain.

He thought about a boy he’d never met, training alone in the frost, dying with an apology on his lips. I’m sorry. I wasn’t enough.

And something in Jake Smith refused it. Refused it down to whatever the soul used instead of bones.

No, he thought. You were enough. They just didn’t have eyes to see it. And you’re not going to die alone and apologising. Not on my watch.

“The talent’s real,” Jake said. His voice came out steadier than he felt. “The body. The root. All of that. That part’s not broken.”

“Not broken,” the Goddess agreed, watching him very closely now. “Buried. There’s a difference, though it won’t feel like one for a long while.”

“And the meridians. Can they be fixed? Ever?”

A slow smile, and this one reached whatever she used for eyes. “Now you’re asking the right questions. The Immortal World is very, very large, Jacob. There are pills that resurrect the dead. Beasts whose blood rewrites flesh. Techniques old enough to have been forgotten by the gods who wrote them.” She spread her hands. “Can it be fixed? Almost certainly. Easily? Absolutely not. It’ll be the hardest thing anyone on that continent has ever done. Most would call it impossible. They’d be mostly right.” She tilted her head. “Is that a yes?”

Jake took a breath he didn’t need.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s a yes. Put me in.”

“Just like that?”

“I ran toward the truck, didn’t I?” Jake found, to his own surprise, that he was grinning—the slightly mad, gallows grin of a man committing to something enormous and stupid. “Apparently I don’t do the sensible thing. Why start now?”

The Goddess laughed, a real one, delighted and ringing, and the white shivered around them. “Oh, you’ll do nicely. You’ll either be one of the great ones or you’ll be a very entertaining smear, and from where I’m standing it’s genuinely too close to call.” She raised the clipboard one final time, and a light kindled at its tip, bright as a struck match. “One more thing. The body remembers him. Kray. You’ll have his memories, sitting in there with yours—his life, his face, his pain. Some people fight it. Try to be only themselves, shove the dead boy down. It tears them apart, usually.” Her eyes found his. “My advice? Don’t fight it. Let him in. You ran for a stranger once. This one’s going to be you.”

The light grew. It filled the white, swallowed it, became everything, and the warmth that had no source turned to heat, turned to pressure, and Jake felt himself being—not pushed, not pulled—poured, like water finding the shape of a new glass—

“Good luck, Jacob Smith,” the Goddess said, from somewhere very far away and growing further. “Try to live long enough to thank me. Most don’t.”

And then there was frost.

---

He came back into himself face-down on cold stone, and the first thing—before the pain, before the memory, before anything—the first thing was the smell.

Iron and old sweat and pine resin and something mineral underneath it all, the smell of dawn on a mountain. His cheek was pressed against frost-rimed flagstones and his breath bloomed white in front of his face and everything hurt, everything, a deep full-body ache like he’d been beaten with hammers and then left out overnight, which—the memory arrived, unbidden, sliding in alongside his own like a second voice in his head—was exactly what had happened. He had trained until his body broke. He had—Kray had—

And then the two of them came together.

It wasn’t a collision. It was more like two photographs laid over each other until they made one picture with depth. Jake Smith, eighteen, Manchester, chicken sandwiches and a gap year and a truck. Kray Latze, eighteen, Vaelen, iron weights and frozen dawns and a girl named—the name surfaced with a sting—Mei Lirran, who’d looked at him across a courtyard full of people and let her father say the words that unmade their promise, who hadn’t met his eyes, not once, not even at the end.

Hello, Jake thought, into the dark of his own skull, half-mad and not really expecting an answer. I’m—I think I’m you, now. Or you’re me. We’ll work it out.

There was no answer in words. But something in the body eased—a knot he hadn’t known was clenched, some grief-locked muscle deep in the chest, loosening by a fraction. As though the boy who’d died apologising had heard, somewhere, that he didn’t have to be sorry anymore. That someone had come who wouldn’t lie down. Who wouldn’t be enough was a thing they were going to fix.

Revenge, the body seemed to whisper, in a voice that was both Kray’s and now his own. He crippled us. They threw us away. We were never the failure—they were just too small to see.

Yeah, Jake thought back, and felt the grin start again, frost cracking off his lips. Yeah. We’re going to get strong. Properly, terrifyingly strong. And then we’re going to have some very pointed conversations with some very specific people.

He got his hands under him. They were Kray’s hands—younger-looking than his own, longer-fingered, scarred across the knuckles from a thousand training sessions—and they shook with cold and exhaustion as he pushed. The world tilted. He got one knee up. Then the other.

He was in a training yard, he saw now, lifting his head. A square of frost-silvered stone walled by dark timber, the eaves carved with curling dragons in a style he half-recognised through Kray’s eyes—Latze family yard, the old one, the one nobody uses anymore because nobody comes to watch the cripple. Beyond the walls, mountains. Real mountains, vast and green and impossible, their peaks lost in cloud, and threaded between them, faint in the grey dawn light, rivers that glowed—actually glowed, a soft cold luminescence, qi made visible, spirit running through the land like the world’s own blood.

It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, more beautiful even than the Goddess’s unholdable face, because it was real and it was his and somewhere in it was the path up nine tiers to godhood, and somewhere along that path, he was absolutely certain, was the thing that would fix what a cruel man had broken eighteen years ago.

A bell rang, somewhere distant in the compound. Voices, faint. The household waking. Soon someone would come—a servant, maybe, sent to clear away the body of the failure son who’d finally trained himself to death in the night. They would find him kneeling instead of dead, and they would not know that the boy they’d written off was gone, and someone new and stubborn and hungry had moved into his place.

Kray Latze knelt in the frost as the sun broke over the mountains, and breathed, and felt the ache of a hundred broken things inside him, and smiled.

“Right then,” he said aloud, and his voice was Kray’s voice, rough from disuse and cold, but the words came out in the easy cadence of a Manchester lad with nothing left to lose. “Let’s see what’s broken. And then—”

He looked up at the glowing rivers, the cloud-wreathed peaks, the whole vast impossible world unrolling itself toward an endless sea.

“—let’s see what it takes to fix it.”

The frost melted slowly off the stone where his breath fell, and the day began.