“No need to look like someone died—cheer up, kid! I’m about to offer you the deal of a lifetime. Not that you can actually refuse, but still.”

Andrew jumped on the table, and his shape began to shift. Artisans were not strictly bound by Otherworld regulations; most of them followed the rules simply because they had no practical reason to do otherwise. Andrew, on the other side, would take every single controversial liberty he could just for the sake of it. He metamorphosed as he pleased, and right now he pulled his favorite stunt: he suddenly shrank from adult to child for dramatic effect. The tall, lanky angel-like man deflated into a small boy with freckled cheeks and curly blonde hair. He kept his silvery pearl robes the same size though, to look as ridiculous as he could. He loved threatening others under that guise.

“Just like your lot before you, you’re not the brightest bird in the flock, boy,” he declared with a sardonic smile that contrasted with his rosy child cheeks in a frankly creepy manner. “But even you know that souls don’t talk or hold hands or are gently persuaded to stop holding hands, and souls most certainly don’t hurl insults at Artisans to their fucking faces.”

Kid Andrew jumped down and started to walk playfully in circles around me and the clearly annoyed Gabriel, chattering with his ear-splitting juvenile voice, like a parrot high in sugar.

“This is no ordinary soul, Ankou. This one’s sentient. This one’s aware. It’s aware! Do you even know how rare this is? Oh, if Aita knew about your friend here, he would be already selling tickets for a deluxe hellfire exploding extravaganza in the Central Piazza. Damn, does that guy love fireworks! Can’t blame him, though. It is quite a sight.”

I finally found my voice and covered Gabrielle with both arms in a panicky state of anxiety. The small soul almost disappeared under my long, black claws.

“Please, oh, please don’t!” I pleaded. “Don’t tell him, please, you can’t let Lord Aita have him—”

“Let Aita have him?” interrupted Andrew, amused. “No way in Heaven or Hell. This is new. This is mine. Listen to my terms, kid.”

Andrew grew back to his adult shape and even surpassed his original height in a second. His eyes were suddenly at the same height as mine, and I was over 6.8 feet in my Otherworld form.

“This is what we’re gonna do,” he explained. “I’m gonna let you keep an eye on your pet only because I intend to do so too. I have an interest in the study of anomalies, and I suspect this fellow here will be a source of…great erudition, to say so, for both of us. Unfortunately, I can’t leave this damn Otherworld of ours without disintegrating, so you’re gonna document the development of this soul during the rest of his lives, and report back to me. I wanna know every detail. Every tiny weird thing he does or says, I hear about it.”

Before I was able to muster a single sound, Andrew imploded back into a kid and climbed on the table. He sat there, smiling and waving his legs.

“In return,” he continued, “you’ll be able to do…well, whatever it is you want to do with your little friend. I won’t report it to Aita or Ishtar, and I will give you your privacy, though I highly recommend you start going out more. You really look like you need companions a bit more jolly than dead folk these days. You’re about to go mad, am I right?” he added, with a knowingly smirk. “Take this as a chance to keep your job for a little longer.”

I hesitated. I didn’t trust Andrew, but then neither did anyone in the Otherworld. Given the circumstances, his offer was quite generous. It would keep Gabriel safe and buy me more time to understand why on Earth he was so different from all the others. By now, that mystery had become an urgency within me, an interest, a curiosity that felt like a knot in my chest.

“I accept your conditions, Andrew,” I said, solemnly.

“Of course you do, it’s not like you have any other options—”

“And thank you.”

I was so sincerely relieved that Andrew couldn’t help but chuckle. He toned down his effervescence and went back to his usual collected facade.

“Don’t mention it.” He smiled a real smile for the first time. “Now, reincarnation, right? Let’s get down to business.”

Andrew dug for a bit into the depths of the prodigious mess on his working table and unburied an enormous register book. He opened it with some effort and started rummaging through the pages.

“Okay, Ankou, soul code, please.”

If you thought your fingerprints or dentures were your very unique form of identification, you were wrong. Each soul has a code imprinted in it. It’s not made of numbers or letters or any symbols or keys known to men. Much like snowflakes, the codification of your soul is a threaded puzzle of spiritual pulses unique only to your essence and impossible to pronounce in any human dialect.

So, for the sake of narration, let’s imagine that I opened my mouth and shrieked the strangest sound you can possibly fathom. It’s the best I can do for you, I’m afraid.

Andrew went through the endless register with swift fingers until he spotted the code.

“Yup, here it is. Let’s see—great! There’s a nice opening here, I’ll book it right away.”

He scribbled a symbol with a ragged quill pen. A faint glow glimmered for a few seconds on Gabriel’s blind eyes. He scrubbed his eyelids vigorously.

“Done. Well, Ankou, our pal here is scheduled to make his grand return in about 405 years from now. Yay!”

I was livid. Gabriel, on the other hand, seemed unphased by the revelation. He was too busy playing with my feathers to care.

“Four hundred years?! That’s—that’s an eternity!” I blurted, getting closer to the book to check the dates myself. “Isn’t there an available date before that?”

“You kiddin’? Humans are multiplying like rabbits, you of all people should know that. There’s more and more of them coming and going all the time, we have our hands full. Oh, come on, don’t be such a crybaby,” said Andrew, trying not to laugh at my frankly pouting smug. “Think about it, 400 years is nothing really. Actually, it’s a blessing in disguise. You’ll have enough time to get ready.”

“Get ready? For what?”

Andrew glanced at Gabriel, who was tolerating that insane conversation with ease. He was absently checking the environment with his blurred eyes, probably lost in the outlandish multicolored devices hanging from the ceiling. Andrew’s workshop was a clustered mess of whimsical objects in all colors and shapes that would be quite the show even for a pair of semi-functional eyes.

“I’ll leave the interpretation of that one to you, hummingbird. I’ve done more than my share already,” answered Andrew, making an effort to hide a smile. “Now, we need to put this guy to sleep until his time comes. He’s been around long enough; someone’s bound to notice. Besides, he must be exhausted.”

He was right. Souls don’t have much autonomy once they lose the connection with their bodies, so to preserve them from any harm they were stored in stasis storage units until their reincarnation time arrived. There was nothing special about those units; they were nothing more than narrow glass boxes piled one on top of the other in huge warehouses. I deposited souls every day, but somehow the idea of leaving Gabriel there made me anxious. He was, after all, extraordinary. What if he woke up from stasis and found himself trapped in a glass coffin and surrounded by thousands of inanimate fellows? He’d be terrified.

Andrew picked up on my consternation, hesitated for a moment, and then sighed.

“Oh, what the hell. You know, kid, I have a stasis unit in one of my personal storage rooms upstairs. Maybe it would be best to keep our little experiment here, you know? I could keep an eye on him while he vegetates, take notes…science shit like that.”

He turned, with a very meaningful expression.

“And you could visit now and then.”

I was flabbergasted.