SIX MINUTES AND TWENTY-FOUR SECONDS AFTER THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

Oliver Sallow's first thought post-mortem is that God's feet are kind of tiny.

At least, he thinks that it's God. Hopes so. He wills his foggy brain to conjure up memories that would suggest someone else has reason to come for him, but comes up empty. At the tender age of eighteen, he hasn't actually had that many opportunities to sin excessively, some minor blasphemy aside. He hasn't stolen. He hasn't cheated. He hasn't killed—which is, in fact, the sole reason he's here now, sprawled flat on chilly concrete, squinting dizzily at the pair of shoes planted in front of him.

"Hey, you," says God. "Can you hear me?"

Oliver makes a noise that he thinks sounds affirmative. He blinks a few times to bring the shoes more into focus. They're Doc Martens, the low ones with a little buckle. Mary Janes, he thinks they're called. Not like the stompy boots that he wears.

Wait. Boot, singular. His left foot is suspiciously cold.

"Oh, fuck me," he groans.

"No, thank you," says God, rather pleasantly. She walks out of Oliver's limited field of vision and then returns to set the wayward shoe down in front of him. "There. Do you think you can sit?"

In lieu of a response, Oliver presses a hand against the asphalt and pushes himself up. It's slow, painstaking business—too fast, and his vision starts to darken again, flimmering with all the static of an old TV. He manages, though, and ends up sitting somewhat upright, elbows braced on his knees as he takes in the frame towering above him.

God is a curvy white girl who looks not much older than him. Aside from her Mary Janes, she's wearing a cropped top with pink and green stripes and a pair of distressed mum jeans. Her hair is bleached an unnatural white, reaching just past her chin. None of this matters—Oliver just needs to catalogue what he's seeing so he can make sense of why the fuck he's seeing anything at all.

Letting his head loll back, he squints up at her and says: "I didn't know God shopped at Primark."

"These are thrifted!" comes the vaguely offended response. "Also, I'm not God. If He exists, I think He has better things to do. No offense."

Oliver shrugs as if to say Fair enough.

"My name is Dana. I'm here to initiate you into our program."

Closing his eyes, Oliver shakes his head. None of this makes any sense. He must've fallen asleep in the library again. Any moment now, he's going to wake up surrounded by Brontës and Whitmans and drive home to have dinner with Gabby and Daniel. He just needs to—

"I know you're probably confused." Dana's voice takes on a gentler tone. "You died. You can't see your physical body right now; I didn't want you to have to witness it, although I can show it to you if you feel it would bring you closure. If not, it will reappear once we are gone."

When Oliver doesn't react, she slowly sinks to the ground next to him, cross-legged like him. Her knee presses against his. "Oliver. Can you open your eyes?"

Startled by the sound of his name, Oliver complies. Now that Dana doesn't fill his entire vision, he can see what's been hidden behind her. Lucretia—beautiful, invincible Lucretia—is wrapped around a tree, her metal frame glinting in the sickly yellow light of the nearby streetlamp. He waits for a physical reaction—for his stomach to lurch or his heartbeat to trip—but there's nothing. He can't say he particularly enjoys the sudden stillness in his chest.

"I'm really dead, aren't I," he whispers.

"Yes," Dana confirms.

Oliver sucks in a deep, unnecessary breath, hands moving to brush his hair behind his ears. His helmet has ended up at the side of the road, several feet away from where he woke up.

Next to it sits a cat. The cat. James Bailey's cat. The goddamn cat that appeared on the gloomy road out of nowhere, making him swerve so as not to hit her and end up crashing into a tree. Feeling his gaze on her, the nine-lives-bastard has the audacity to hiss at him.

Oliver's voice comes out near-hysterical as he says, "I can't believe I did all of this to save her. What a stupid fucking way to die."

"Hey now." Dana frowns. "It's not just her fault. The roads are slippery today. Plus, from what I read in your file, you can't actually see very well. Isn't that right?"

"Well, yeah, I wear..." He breaks off.

Contacts. He forgot to put in his goddamn contacts. He took them out in the library earlier intending to exchange them for his glasses, but then he forgot. His vision isn't terrible enough for him to notice any significant difference—just bad enough to not make out the shadow darting into the twilit street until he was seconds away from running it over.

It's very on brand, honestly. He almost laughs when he remembers Finn constantly scolding him for not wearing his glasses. Then he remembers that he will never be scolded by him again because a) they broke up and b) he's dead. This makes him want to laugh significantly less.

"I'm going to ask you a few questions now," Dana says. She's still speaking in that soft tone; like Oliver's a wounded animal she doesn't want to spook. "They're a formality, really—I already know most of these things from your file. This is just to see how much you can remember. All right?"

Oliver gives another shrug. A pop quiz for the dead. Sure, why not. This whole thing can't get any more absurd than it already is.

"First question. How old are you?"

"Eighteen." The word tastes bitter on his tongue. He's a teenage tragedy. The concept sounds cooler in theory than it feels in practice.

"Where did you live?"

Past tense. Feeling Dana's brown eyes on him, Oliver busies himself with cramming his foot back into his Doc Marten, fingers trembling slightly as he sets about re-doing the laces. There's a chill that seems to come all the way from his bones. He's unsure whether it's shock or his anaemia or just a side-effect of having kicked it. "23 Green Lane, Blissby. Surrey, UK."

Just a few streets away from where he's sitting now. It's a familiar route. He's driven it thousands of times.

"Good," says Dana. "Can you name the members of your family?"

"I don't have one," Oliver tonelessly says. His boot is finally laced up. He drops his hands into his lap.

There's a beat of silence before Dana asks: "How would you like another year here?"

Immediately, Oliver's head snaps around. "You mean, you can bring me back?"

"Not exactly. But we can offer you another twelve months in this state." She gestures vaguely at him. "Not quite dead, not quite alive. You'd be an In-Betweener working for Operation HALO."

Oliver stares blankly at her. "Ah."

"We're an organization of intermediaries, run under the supervision of Angels," Dana goes on, unfazed. "We recruit people like you—souls who have passed too young—and give them the chance to spend another year on earth to come to terms with their situation."

Oliver laughs. The sound is a sharp-edged thing that echoes around the empty road. "Angels. Sure."

"Yes," Dana simply says. "In turn, you will be assigned a human to help navigate their life. They're other teenagers who are going through what we call critical phases—a period in their life where they require some additional support."

"So I'd be like...what, a guardian angel?"

"Kind of, but without any celestial status. Plus, you'd do more guiding than guarding. Your task would be not so much the securing of their physical safety—although that is also part of it—and more their mental and emotional well-being."

Squeezing his eyes shut, Oliver massages his temples with his thumbs. "Let me get this straight. You're offering me a one-year contract to play shrink for some kid, and in turn you don't banish me to... whatever comes next?"

"You're not just going to play shrink," Dana says. "You will actually receive some training. Workshops on emotional regulation strategies, coping methods, some techniques used in Cognitive Behavioural Therap—"

Oliver cuts her off. "Why?"

"Because," Dana says, ever patient, "It helps prevent more kids like you from meeting an early end. Nothing looks worse than the early passing of teenagers, you know? Messed-up stuff like that really shakes the foundations of people's belief."

"Can't the powers that be just..." he snaps his fingers. "Bring me back for good then?"

"The powers that be," Dana snorts, "Are Susan. Susan is the head of Human Affairs. And Susan has not once granted anyone a second shot at life, ever."

Oliver can't help it—he senses the opportunity for a joke and clings to it like it's a life raft. "Does Susan not have any pronouns?"

"No. That would imply that Susan is a person, or a being comparable to one."

"Of course."

"I know it's a lot to take in," Dana says. Her hand comes up to fidget with one of the pink beads braided into her hair. "I remember how confused I was when I got this whole spiel from my mentor."

"You also died?"

"Two years and seven months ago," she confirms.

Oliver isn't the best at Maths, but something isn't adding up. "I thought it was only one year."

"It usually is. But they make exceptions. Those who manage to help the most assignees get their contracts renewed for another twelve months." She turns to face him fully, her expression intent. Oliver understands then: Dana is not just reciting a script. She believes in this. Whatever this actually is. "If you do your job well, you get to work as a recruiter for other In-Betweeners. You get to stay."

"Right. So... it's either be indoctrinated into a celestial pyramid scheme or die for good."

"Sure, if you want to be cynical about it."

Oliver takes a deep breath. For someone who has built a great deal of his appearance on the concept of death, he isn't too thrilled now that he's staring it in the eye. "Can I at least know who I'll be assigned before I accept?"

Dana reaches into the back pocket of her jeans and pulls out a neatly-folded document. She hesitates for a second before she hands it to him.

If his heart were still pumping, Oliver knows that this would be when it would skip a beat. At first, he thinks it's a hallucination, some kind of trick of the eye induced by wishful thinking. But he blinks, one two three times, and the letters don't change.

On the paper, printed in cold ink, is the name of his ex-boyfriend.

He looks up at Dana, disbelieving. "You're joking."

"Susan assigned him to you," she carefully says. "According to Susan, your death will be what unravels him. Therefore, it makes sense that you be the one to help him put himself back together."

"Before I then leave again?"

Dana nods. Softly, she says, "Yes."

They lapse back into silence. James's cat, apparently bored of the scene, finally slinks back into the shadows. Oliver presses a hand to his heart and finds it utterly still.

"Will he be able to see me?" he asks.

"Yes. Him, but no one else."

"Will... will we be able to talk?"

"It's a requirement for your work together," Dana says. With the night settling over the road, Oliver can't read her expression.

His eyes drift down to the familiar syllables on the paper. Finn O'Connell. It's been months since they've had an actual conversation. Oliver always naively assumed there would come a moment: a day when he would leave Blissby and they would see each other one last time and speak about everything that happened. A clearing the air. A catharsis.

Now he's sitting opposite his mangled motorcycle, his body waiting to be found, and all the words he's planned out still live inside him. If he goes now, they go with him.

To be or not to be, his inner Bard murmurs. Oliver (like most people, he thinks is fair to assume) has only ever known one of the two options. An hour ago, he was stressing over a Psych essay he was going to hand in tomorrow. This morning, he was looking up places to travel after A-Levels. Even though his body says the opposite, he knows that, at his core, he is still undeniably, violently alive.

In the end, it's not much of a choice at all. "I'll do it."

Dana smiles, soft and a little sad, and reaches out a hand.

They're a few miles away from the nearest crossroad, but Oliver can't shake the idea that he's selling his soul as he places his palm in hers, the paper with Finn's name on it clutched in his other hand like a talisman. He feels like he's stepping across some threshold; like he's standing on a stage seconds before the curtains rise for the first scene of his afterlife. He feels ill-prepared for the part, but he supposes it's at least appropriately theatrical for the existence he's led so far.

"Welcome," Dana says into the misty November night, "To Operation HALO."

Thus begins Oliver Sallow's encore.

***************************

hello hello! welcome to the first chapter!

i am. so unbelievably excited to finally share this story with you. what are your thoughts!! how are you liking oliver? any thoughts on the overall vibe so far? let me know everything! <3

as always, every chapter will be accompanied by a little soundtrack, and this week's song is GOLDWING by billie eilish! when i first started plotting this book i literally had a whole montage in my mind of oliver agreeing to the deal and then going through his training, all set to this song 👀

that is all from me today! i will see you all next friday for our first meeting with finn 🥰