Scythe Does Matter by Gina X. Grant

ground. I stuffed it in my shirt pocket with its mate.
    Next, Amber pointed straight ahead. “Kirsty, I’m giving you checkpoint delta. It’s the farthest away, but the straightest route. You should get there in about forty-five minutes, time willing. By then, Kali and I will have looped back and hit the remaining checkpoints. We should all arrive back in this clearing in about two hours. Or thereabouts, time being irrelevant.”
    I knew what she meant. What could you do? Given the way things were, we might get back before we left. I drew a deep, unnecessary breath and was about to charge farther into the forest when I heard a weird tearing noise.
    Like fabric giving way. Where had I heard that before? “Did you hear that?”
    “Hear what? We don’t have time for this. Are you going or what, Kirsty?”
    “Right. Right.” And off I went.
    As I raced down a well-worn path toward checkpoint delta, I opened channel D and yelled, “Can you hear me now?”
    “Roger that,” Amber responded.
    “Who’s Roger?” Kali asked. “Is he dating Beth?” Sometimes even the most up-to-date immortal missed cultural references. “I’m there. Er, here. Time must have folded in on itself, ’cause I’ve only been running about ten minutes.”
    I checked my hellphone. The digital readout differed from Kali’s by thirty-five minutes.
    “Anyway,” Kali continued, “I’m at checkpoint alpha, but I can’t find any feathers or whiskers or fur here. There’s just a cord hanging from a branch that may have . . . Wait! What the skeg?”
    “What?” Amber and I said in unison.
    Kali lapsed into a language I didn’t recognize. Blue smoke drifted from my phone. “There’s a nice little carving in the tree. It says ‘Rod was here.’ Damn. He grabbed all of the . . . seagull feathers. There’s a small piece left on the ground that must have torn off when he yanked them down. He’s probably going to share them with Horace and let everybody else fail. Son of a skeg!”
    I heard Amber sniffling over the sound of Kali’s swearing. If Amber flunked out without a chance to take the course over, she’d be permanently separated from her friends. Much as I believed she would be better off without them, it wasn’t my place to tell her that. And besides, we were a team. We’d pull each other through. Each of us had something to offer that the others didn’t, and that made us stronger.
    “No, wait!” I said, the lightbulb coming on over my head. No, not literally. “Rod isn’t going to share the tokens. He’s going to trade them! We all will. Amber. Kali. Pull yourselves together and get to the next location. Grab all the tokens you find there, not just enough for us. We’ll trade for the rest. And keep an eye out for the crystal skull. That’ll be our ace in the whole shebang.”
    “More orders from mere mortals.” Kali sighed. “I remember a time when humans begged and prostrated themselves to us gods. There were offerings. Sacrifices.”
    “Grow up, Kali,” I snapped, worrying just a little about the range of her powers. But I was the next best thing to dead already, and my backless earrings now resided in my pocket, so what else could she do to me? “That skull is the ultimate trading card. As long as we all pass, who cares about being head of the class?”
    The silence was telling, but after a long pause, the begrudging responses of “right” and “yeah, okay” let me know I’d chosen my friends wisely. Perhaps figuring out I was a lousy judge of character had been the first step toward learning how to be better at it.
    “Okay, I’m signing off and continuing toward my first checkpoint. Amber, give Kali her new marching orders. And guys? Hurry the skeg up!”
    I sprinted along the path, confident (mostly) that Amber would give me a shout if I strayed too far off course.
    Nearly an hour later, Amber’s voice squawked over the phones. “I’m almost there. When I find the hyena skin or whatever, I’m