“You’re going to need this.” Amy handed Albert a small case that looked like a case for reading glasses.

Upon opening it, Albert was almost surprised to find actual glasses.

“What are these for? Do they let me know when someone is lying or something? Or do I get that desk that Death has?”

“They let you see half-deads. The spirits of people that linger after their body fails.” Amy let out a deep sigh after her explanation, as if finally accepting that she was doing this. “It can be a little disorienting if you don’t wear them right.”

Albert unfolded the glasses and rested them on his nose. There was a faint green tint to the glass, and it almost made it a little easier to see in the dark. He didn’t quite understand what could be so disorienting until he he moved his head to look around. The small bit he could see to the side of the glasses wasn’t moving at the same rate that everything else through the glasses was; it was like there was some sort of visual delay to the normal world.

Fearing what might happen if he actually walked around with the glasses on, Albert pushed the frame closer to his face to minimize his peripheral view. Amy let out a huff of a laugh at the action and carried on.

“Now what do you see?”

Albert took a closer look down the space outside his apartment building, moving his head very slowly to limit any visual distractions and take in everything around him. The parking spaces in front of the apartments were packed for the night, the communal dumpster was stuffed, there were a few cars passing the complex on the nearby street. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

“Seems normal to me. Just green?”

“Alright, let’s move to a less familiar space then.” Amy pulled Albert by the arm up the battered sidewalk towards the nearest main street.

“Why am I looking for something off? I thought you were going to find a target?”

“I only have the one pair of glasses. I have some contacts, but they only last for about three hours and you’ll need the glasses for the arbitration. So, you spot something off, I’ll put on my contacts, and then we’ll go from there.”

“What am I looking for? How off does a half-dead look?”

“Well, here’s a good opportunity for a demonstration. There’s some roadkill over there, see if you can spot the animal's spirit.”

Amy had brought Albert to a stop on the sidewalk and indicated to a spot across the street he couldn’t see very clearly. There was an obvious lump on the road, and not too far away from it there was a yellow tinted cat staring at him with that reflective glare in its eyes.

“I see a yellow cat. Is that it?”

“Probably. Color tints are usually giveaways. Yellow is a common tint with those glasses, but sometimes you get a red or blue. Weird behavior is another giveaway. What’s the cat doing?”

“It’s just… staring at me.”

Albert waved his hand from left to right, but the cat didn’t move an inch.

“I guess that’s gonna be a hard one to judge. Cat’s are already weird. But I don’t see it, so you’ve definitely spotted something. Just try not to attract too much attention from half-deads, some of them are unpleasant to deal with. Particularly animals. They can’t hurt you, but sometimes they just follow you until they dissipate.”

“What’s so bad about that?” Albert gave the yellow cat one last fleeting glance before letting Amy pull him further along the sidewalk.

“Some of them get smarter after they die. Some of them start to look more like a corpse the longer they linger. Some of them linger for days…” Amy paused to look around her, almost as if she were paranoid. “I once had a crow follow me for two weeks. I could take the glasses off, but I could hear it the whole time.”

Albert turned his head to look at the cat again, but it was gone.

“How does that work? I’ll need to hear what the half-dead is saying, right?”

“For you, as long as you keep the glasses on and you can see them talking, you’ll hear them. It’s like a weird consciousness thing where you fill in the gaps of your experience. I can just hear them all the time.”

“What makes you so special…”

“Shut up. What do you see now?” Amy pulled Albert to another stop, now in front of a strip mall.

Albert was familiar with the location. It wasn’t exactly a respectable location to shop, but there was a convenient grocery store. Everything else changed out every ear or two. Nail salons, small restaurants, hobby shops, pawn shops. Sometimes the store spaces just sat empty, like the one small corner space that used to be a P.O. box site that did some shipping too; that one had been empty for nearly ten years.

Just inside one of the empty storefronts, Albert could see something that definitely struck him as off. There was a man standing confused in the empty store, he had a blue tint to him and he was staring directly at Albert.

“There’s a man in that empty store, he’s blue tinted and he’s looking directly at me.” Albert had turned to Amy, trying his very best to look casual and avoid suspicion from the half-dead man.

“Okay, hold on.” Amy retrieved a contact lens case from her jacket pocket and began to untwist the lid carefully.

The man in the store wasn’t looking away and when Albert chanced a glance at him, the man noticed. There was a short period of silence before the man stepped through the exterior wall of the store and out towards where Amy and Albert were standing at the edge of the parking lot. The passage through the wall caused a brief moment of confusion for the man, but he quickly got over it and began to shout.

“Hey, kid, you can see me! What’s going on?”

“Ugh, you looked. Didn’t you.” Amy groaned, halfway through getting the first contact onto her eye. “Well, who needs depth perception.”

Amy blinked her eye quickly a couple times before shutting the unlensed one hard. It made her look cartoonish, but Albert figured it was probably to help avoid that same displacement that happened with the glasses. With a quick movement, the lens case was stowed back into a pocket and Amy rushed the half-dead man.

Albert wasn’t sure what she was going to do at first. She had said that a half-dead couldn’t hurt someone, but after a quick jab from Amy it was clear that that wasn’t a two way street. The half-dead man reeled back from the punch as it landed at his gut. Amy didn’t give him a chance to recover either, as she delivered an onslaught of punches to the man’s torso and face. Just as she had pushed him back towards the wall he’d walked through, she began to fish through her pockets with her left hand. The man made a lunge at her, seeing no other option but to fight, but merely impacted against her and slid off like she was a concrete wall. Albert knew the feeling.

There was a strange mix of pity, horror, and relief as Amy removed something from her pocket and struck at the man with her left hand. Just as the hit landed, he vanished completely.

“That wasn’t so bad.” Amy rolled her shoulders back like she’d just finished stretching.

“What happened? Where’d he go?”

“He’s been taken to an arbitration space. I figured it would be easier for you that way. Less chance of them trying to make a run for it. And it gives me some time to run over what you’ll have to do.”

Amy looked around the parking lot and at the sight of a car pulling through the far end she nodded for Albert to follow her away from where they had stopped. A short walk around to the loading dock area of the strip mall and Amy carried on.

“I’ve got some pre-written contracts, partially filled with Death's name and approval and with spaces you’ll need to sign as the arbitrator.” Amy had pulled her backpack around her body and begun fishing out items. First a tan file-folder with several sheets of paper, then a bottle of ink, and a few more paper scraps. Albert could see a few other things in the backpack as well; namely a large brown box that might have been a shoebox, as well as several other folders and binders, but what worried him the most was a rather large knife handle that looked like the kind of thing hunting enthusiasts toted around to show people they liked hunting.

“You’ll want to read through those first. You’ll have to use a pre-written one, so that will limit your options for negotiation, but they’re pretty broad.” Amy handed the file folder to Albert and carried on. “And there are a few rules you’ll need to follow.”

“Okay, like what?”

“It’s not like you’re following human laws here, so you can throw any sort of lawyery ideas out right now. You’re arbitrating with the laws of nature and what you and Death are personally capable of. You can threaten him as much as you want, heck you could even take a few more swings at him… though he might dissipate early if you do much more of that. But you can’t lie. Death’s arbitration desk does that sort of thing for him, but you’ll just have a spare room. If you lie or misrepresent the nature of the contract, you won’t be able to get the contract to stick.”

“Slow down, this is a lot.”

“Okay. You’re right. And you’ve got a little time. Just read through those for a bit.”

Albert opened the folder and flipped through the pages held inside it by a clipboard-like clip at the top. Most of them were labeled at the top with general topics like revenge, but others had less straightforward labels like no condition, debt of dispute, and with prejudice. Rather than read through all of them, Albert stopped on the ones that didn’t make sense based on the title and read through the conditions outlined in them. Thankfully most of them were quite short and simple.

“Amy, this one says that the arbitrator agrees to terminate target affiliate individual. That means kills someone. Right? That’s an assassination contract?”

“Yeah, but you can sub-contract me if you would rather not. I’m already a full-time employee so I don’t get a cut out of the contract for it either.”

Albert took a step back at how cavalier Amy was being about murder.

“Oh come on. Don’t act like it’s a horrible thing. People die all the time. Half of them get turned into spirtual gasoline for a contractor like Death anyway. And yeah, it’s sad, but if it’s a person's last wish then I don’t mind. Usually those contracts only get used to kill the person that killed the contractee, anyway. So it’s usually justified.”

“Usually?”

“Well, there’s definitely psychopaths. Sometimes people make ridiculous kill requests too, just because they think it isn’t going to happen. They usually don’t have a termination deadline either, so it can just be a hair short of the person's natural lifespan.”

“You’re sugar coating this.” Albert was still put off by the concept that he might be agreeing to have someone murdered, but it might end up being that or his own death. And that gave him pause. And after that pause, he began to question himself further for even entertaining the thought.

“Yeah. But like I said, you don’t have to use that contract. There’s usually a better option. You’d be surprised what dead people are willing to give for a reassurance or just information. Heck, living people make stupid agreements all the time whenever they agree to a service's terms and agreements without reading them.”

“Yeah, but not murder.”

“Just pick five and try to go for those. Most people go for a parting farewell, revenge, cash, or one of the other material trade options.”

Albert flipped to one that said material trade. It was fairly short and there were plenty of blank spaces where adjustments could be made. Namely, there was a particular option set off by a check box with a dollar sign and a blank space.

“Is there a limit to how much money I can promise to the guy?”

“Money usually only pays out for delayed collection contracts or for next of kin. And he can’t spend the money anymore. But if he has next of kin, I got ten grand I can give you for that. Anything else has to come from you.”

“Okay… I guess that’s a lot. Do I get more for a second contract?”

“No.”

“Okay, that’s not that great, but I guess I just need the first one and we see where we can go from there?”

“Assuming he’s okay selling his soul for money.”

“What do I do if I have to alter one of these?”

“Don’t.”

“But what if he only agrees to one if I add or remove a certain condition?”

“Then you’re going to have to use the personal agreement contract. That’s the last on in there.”

Albert flipped to the last page. It was blank.

“It’s blank.”

“Yeah, that means you have the full force of responsibility for any agreements. You write it, you carry it out. No help. I mean, you can request to sub-contract me, but that also involves more paperwork and you will have to compensate me for that sort of thing.”

Albert took a deep breath and leaned back against the brick wall of the loading dock. It was overwhelming, but Amy seemed to be more invested in helping now than she was before. And for some reason, that helped. Even though Amy admitted she would be willing to murder someone, and had implied that it wasn’t anything new to her, her help still meant a lot. He felt like she was there to protect him rather than hurt him, or even work against him in any way. Albert had been worried about that, that whoever Death would send—if he sent anyone at all—would be working to subtly undermine Albert and mess with his contract somehow. He didn’t think Death was that petty, but it wasn’t impossible.

“Okay, I think I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Are you sure? You won’t get any do overs if you mess up.”

“Yeah. I’m ready. I’ve been through arbitration with Death, how bad could some random guy be?” Albert took a deep breath and pushed himself away from the wall.

“He could be a lot worse, usually the contractor or arbitrator gets the worst of the stress. But hey, you’ve got this.”

Albert regretted taking a positive attitude immediately. It seemed to upset Amy.

“Sorry. I’m just trying to pump myself up.”

“Don’t. This is going to suck. Let that sink in now. This is going to suck and you’re going to struggle. Say it.”

“This is going to suck and I am going to struggle.” Albert repeated the words and felt oddly better.

“Okay.” Amy held out a feather quill that looked somewhat like the one Death had given him to sign his own contract. “When you take this out of my hand, you’ll be taken to the arbitration room. And you’re going to be there until one of three things happen; he signs a valid contract, he dissipates, or you break the pen.”

“What happens if I break the pen?”

“Don’t. It ends the arbitration, but it’s messy in so many ways.” Amy shook her head, clearly not wanting to explain further. “Just don’t break the pen.”

“Okay. Don’t break the pen. It’s going to suck. Struggle.”

“That’s it.” Amy patted Albert on the back and shoved the pen into his hands.

All over again, Albert’s world went black.