The death of Alice Shepherd wasn’t really a bad one. Not because the circumstances surrounding her extinction were anything less than gruesome, but because she was so surprised to find it actually happening that she forgot to be alarmed. It was, in fact, oddly pleasant, and certainly an improvement on what had come immediately before it.

She was also surprised life carried on. She woke up (that was her first clue) with tunnel vision, staring towards a distant dot of blinding light.

FLASH! The dot exploded, filling her vision and leaving her in a never-ending sea of whiteness. The light was like crisp, clear champagne, and she drank from it until it filled her whole being. All was love.

She couldn’t for the death of her remember any of the fears, split-second decisions and hesitations that had previously been the foundation for who she was, but she indisputably still knew she was. She also knew something else too, something darker, but as soon as she tried to isolate it in her mind it shrank into her subconscious with a puff. It was like trying to remember a dream— and it was still there somewhere, a sillage, like a faint scent of burning.

Someone spoke. A voice (which she presumed must belong to some sort of angel, given the circumstances), cut through the silence, surpris- ingly matter-of-factly, but with the merest trace of expectation as it said, “Right then. Welcome. Before we start, do you have any immediate questions?”

The divine rumble sighed a bored sort of sigh before it cleared its throat and said: “Always the same question and I’m afraid I can’t answer it. It’s classified. The only one with access to that information is you.”

“But that doesn’t help me!” exclaimed the dead woman on the shore of eternal whiteness. “I can’t remember anything! Who am I? What is this?”

Papers rustled. “I’m afraid all it says here is that you’re Alice.”

Alice sat up and looked around, squinting into the bright canvas all around her, trying to discern where the speaker was. “I feel strange. I can’t remember how I’m supposed to feel, but I feel…wonderful, actually!”

“Yes, that’ll be the Seraphic Light. It’s predominantly what you’re made of now. The smallest particle of you consists of energy vibrating at a predetermined speed. Multiply that burst of energy by the billions and trillions of particles that you are. You are the sum of all that energy, and the sum of all the space between the energy, and at the center of it is your soul. If that’s too complicated, just think of yourself as pure energy. Or pizzazz, if you will… Anything else?”

Alice frowned and stared at her hands as she turned them over in the whiteness. They still looked pretty solid to her. “So my body is made of light now?”

The angel hesitated. “There, ah, wasn’t much left of the physical body, to be honest, after what you did to it. That thing you’ve got there is actually your resid- ual self-image. Let’s see…twenty-five-ish, chocolate brown hair, green eyes, ears that stick out a little too much…”

“Hey!”

“Yep, it says here it’s pretty much the same body as the last one you had. Take better care of it this time round.”

“Why can’t I remember anything?” Alice said, knotting her brow like a gnarled root as she bit her tongue trying to figure out why she knew she fancied a strong drink, but didn’t know the name of any cocktails.

“That’ll be a quality of the Seraphic Light. It helps you forget the specifics of your past so you can focus on your rest and recuperation. There are flecks of Light on Earth too, which helps people forget the inevitability of Death. Personally I take that as an affront to my character. In fact when the Arch Angels put that in place I told them straight to their angelic little faces it was downright rude, and—”

“This is all so magic…” she whispered. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of what may or may not have been air, feeling the so-called Seraphic Light enter her pizzazz body in an eruption of tingling pleasure.

“No, not ‘magic.’ Magic is only performed by humans. Although this is fairly similar. It’s ‘miraculous’ actually. Mind you, you won’t see much of miracles where you’re going, they’re illegal. Can you believe that? Ridiculous arrangement if you ask me. Oh, sorry, that’s not for me to say. Not my area. Death is my area. Fewer arguments, but alas, more paperwork.”

Alice screwed up her face; the smell of smoke tickled her nose. “I’m definitely dead then?”

“Very much so. Or I wouldn’t be here. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say you have certainly ceased to be as you were.”

The freshly deceased Alice shrugged, having nothing palpable in her memory to compare death with. She swung her arms about for a little while until a sudden foreboding made her freeze.

“Oh, god, is this Heaven or Hell?”
“Neither. It’s nothing.”
Alice looked around. Although the whiteness looked a lot like nothing,

she had the distinct feeling it was something.
“Well then,” rumbled the voice in her head. “You’d better be on your way.” “Where am I going?”
“Let’s see.” Papers rustled. “Ah, yes! You’re heading on up! Sensible choice.” “What… did I choose?”
The voice sighed . “It says here you made a subconscious choice early on in

your life to dedicate your soul to the Light and do good. So you’ll be ascending all the way up to Os, with a stopover in Eadar lasting…” papers rustled again “…fifty-eight years. Just a short stop then!”

“Fifty-eight years? But you said I’m only twenty-five-ish!”

“Precisely! You must have been a fairly decent sort of girl. You’ll be filled in when you get there of course. As a brief intro though: you’ll find yourself working, like everyone else, to help the guardian angels watch over the living. Eventually, when you’re ready, you’ll move on. Interesting system, you have to admit, though not one of which I’m particularly a fan—” The angel stopped. “But, you know. If it’s what you people want…I really shouldn’t talk out of turn.”

Soon after that exchange, Alice found herself clutching a few pages of paper with a description of something written in a language she didn’t understand in ink that seemed to shimmer and float half an inch above the pages. She’d be bringing these to some stop-off place called Eadar before one day carrying on to somewhere else. Os, was it? Her senses began to engage, and that scent of smoke was no longer the only thing she could smell. Light was moving past her, around her, coming together to form matter under her feet. At once she was standing on the edge of the never- ending whiteness, the distant cry of a seagull pierced the silence, and the air was full of sounds: waves splashing, steel creaking, chains clanking, and the grunts of burly workers heaving heavy things onto loading cranes. In front of her loomed the immense steel hull of a ferry, stinking of sea.

Her stomach flipped. The whiteness melted away and she stared out over crystal blue waters and equally blue sky, the blueness separated only by a translucent breath of mist. Waves sparkled like diamonds in Light more brilliant than she’d ever known. With a giant bellow, the ferry let out a tremor. A wave of energy grew as it rumbled through the air space in the horn and belched out like a deep tuba, the bass sound traveling through Alice’s new body as easily as if she was the mist itself. A tingle of excitement spread to the tips of her fingers. She was going to distant lands!

And so the ferry brought her to the great purgatorial world of Eadar, like it does for approximately 148,000 other people every day, when it’s not traveling in the opposite direction.