Tag you're Dead

The Girl Who Stole Death

Mara Vale dies on a Tuesday.

The stairwell smells like bleach and rusted rainwater. Someone has taped a crooked motivational poster to the wall—KEEP GOING—its corners curling like dead leaves. The fluorescent light above her flickers, stuttering between existence and oblivion.

Mara thinks, dimly, that she should have taken the elevator.

Her foot slips on the wet concrete. Her shoulder slams into the railing. The pain blooms white-hot and then—nothing. Not fading. Not darkness.

Nothing snaps.

Her heart stops beating at 2:17 p.m.

The world does not end.

Instead, it peels open.

Mara is standing.

She is certain of this, though she cannot feel her feet. There is no floor. No ceiling. Just an endless black expanse, thick and heavy, like the inside of a closed eye.

In front of her stands a door.

It does not belong here. The door is wrong—too solid, too real. It is made of pale wood streaked with veins like bone marrow. Symbols are carved into its surface: circles broken by slashes, eyes sewn shut, tally marks that go on forever.

The handle is iron.

It drips.

Something behind the door breathes.

Not lungs—time. A slow, grinding inhale, like continents shifting.

Mara knows what this place is.

Not because anyone tells her. Not because of memory. The knowledge is pressed directly into her thoughts, stamped there with cold authority.

This is the threshold.

This is where everything that dies is counted.

And the door—

The door is Death.

She should be afraid.

Instead, she is angry.

Her hands curl into fists. Her heart—wherever it is—aches with the unfairness of it. She had a test tomorrow. She hadn’t called her sister back. She never learned how to drive.

“I don’t accept this,” Mara says, her voice echoing too loudly.

The breathing behind the door pauses.

Something notices her.

The handle gleams.

Mara steps forward.

The universe tightens.

Rules snap into place all around her—ancient, absolute. Mortals do not touch the door. Mortals do not open it. Mortals do not take.

Mara wraps her fingers around the iron handle anyway.

It is freezing. It burns. Frost crawls up her arm, threading into her veins, and for one terrible second she understands every death that has ever happened—every scream, every silence, every unfinished sentence.

The door yanks itself open.

What’s inside is not a skeleton. Not a god. Not a cloaked figure with a scythe.

It is a vast, writhing mass of shadows and screaming names, bound together by chains of light and time. Faces emerge and vanish. Hands reach. Mouths beg.

And at its center—

A core.

A beating, impossible thing.

Death screams.

It is not a sound meant for human ears. It shatters the dark like glass. The scream says no, says thief, says this is not yours.

Mara doesn’t mean to grab it.

She does anyway.

Her fingers close around the core.

The chains snap.

The screaming cuts off mid-wail, replaced by a sudden, horrifying silence.

The door slams shut.

The blackness implodes.

Mara Vale wakes up screaming in a hospital stairwell, lungs dragging air like it’s being stolen back from her.

Her heart restarts at 2:21 p.m.

Four minutes dead.

Four minutes too long.