To keep Mary’s children happy and subdued, Milos made sure that the train would stop twice a day for several hours of playtime, and each day the games would eerily mimic the day before, down to the scores, the fights, and the things the kids shouted to one another. Each kid fell into his or her own personal pattern that was the same day after day—what Mary had called “perfectition”: the perfect repetition of a child’s perfect day. Milos figured the deeper the trenches of their personal ruts, the less Mary’s children would bother him.

Then there were times like this, where the train came to one dead end or another, and was stuck for days until they figured out a proper course of action.

Milos looked back to the church, and wondered what Mary would do . . . but he wouldn’t be getting advice from her anytime soon.

As he strode alongside the train, considering the situation, Jackin’ Jill came up to him. As always, her blond hair was wild and full of nettles, as if she had been attacked by a tumbleweed. Was it Milos’s imagination or were the nettles in her hair multiplying?

“If you’ve gotten us stuck again, then we should go skinjacking,” she said. As a skinjacker, she, like Milos, was much closer to life, and did not settle as easily into daily routines. But Milos knew Jill didn’t just want to go skinjacking. When she wanted to possess the living, she had a darker purpose in mind.

“Call it what it is,” said Milos. “You don’t want to go skinjacking. You want to go reaping, don’t you?”

“My last orders from Mary were very clear,” Jill said. “I won’t put everything on hold just because you’re a wimp.”

Milos turned on her sharply. He would never strike a girl, but Jill often brought him to the very edge of his temper. “What I did for Mary proves I am anything but a coward.”

“So why do you only let us reap once a week?”

“Because there needs to be limits!” Milos shouted.

“Mary’s vision has no limits, does it?” The fact that Jill could stay calm made him even angrier, but he resolved to calm himself down. Losing his temper gave her control, and he was the one in charge here. He had to remember that.

“The difference between you and me,” said Milos, “is that I reap because it is what Mary wants. But you do it because you enjoy it.”

Jill did not deny it. “In a perfect world,” she said, “shouldn’t we all enjoy our jobs?”

Milos agreed to lead the skinjackers on a reaping excursion that night, but under the strictest of rules. “We will take no more than we can carry, and I will choose where and when.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Jill said, caring only that she would get her chance to do her dirty work.