The Toll (Arc of a Scythe, #3)

by Neal Shusterman

The dead do not measure the passage of time. A minute, an hour, a century are all same to them. Nine million years could pass—one named for every species on Earth—and yet it would be no different from a single revolution around the sun. They do not feel the heat of flames, or the cold of space. They do not suffer the mourning of loved ones left behind, or carry the anger for all the things they had yet to do. They are not at peace, nor are they in turmoil. They are not anything but gone. Their next stop is infinity, and the mysteries that might wait there. The dead have nothing left to them but a silent faith in that unknowable infinity—even if theirs is a belief that nothing waits but an infinity of infinities. Because believing in nothing is still believing in something—and only by reaching eternity will anyone know the truth of it all. The deadish are very much like the dead, but with one exception: The deadish do not know infinity, which means they don’t have to concern themselves with what waits beyond. They have something the dead do not. They have a future. Or at least the hope of one.