by Gina Damico
Lex donned a mock-apologetic face. “Yeah. Sorry about that. The table, please?”
“No! You’re very dangerous! I have to call my—”
Her eyes crossed as Lex crushed a vial of Amnesia under her nose. The girl blinked a few times, then grabbed some new menus in a daze and staggered to the Ferris wheel, which was moving just slowly enough for people to get on. The pod that the Croakers piled into looked just like a booth at any normal restaurant, except that it was enclosed in a sphere of steel and glass, and the table had an intercom with a large red button set into it.
The hostess now spoke with a flat voice and an absent stare. “How about some Yorick coffees to get you started.”
“Yorick coffee? Hells, yes!” Lex exclaimed. This was very exciting, as Lex had had neither a Yorick nor a coffee in quite some time, and never in the same drink, an oversight she could hardly believe she had made thus far. “Yoricks all around!”
The hostess grabbed a pot and sloshed a dark brown liquid into each of their waiting cups, which were nothing like the grungy mugs at Corpp’s back home. They too were shaped like skulls, but instead of consisting of a material that was uncannily similar to the bones of a human head, they were made of delicate, spotless porcelain and were so tiny that one had no choice but to lift a pinky when sipping.
“Ew,” Elysia said, wrinkling her nose after she took a sip. “So bitter.”
“Shhh,” Lex whispered, not wanting to ruin this precious moment with her two most favorite beverages on the planet. The familiar rush of elation shot through her as soon as the Yorick hit her tongue, and she nearly made a very inappropriate moaning noise—
But out of the corner of her eye she caught a barely there Driggs floating alongside the pod, his pale face pressed to the glass, pining for his beloved Yorick. “Yeah, it’s gross,” she said loudly to Elysia, sticking out her tongue in disgust and hoping that Driggs bought it.
“When you’re ready to order,” the hostess said, still in a flat zombie voice, “just push that button and order. At the top a waitress will bring your food and refill your drinks. Now I’d love to take a moment to tell you the specials. We have a triple waffle—”
“Actually, we’re good with just the drinks,” Lex said, pulling the door shut. “Thanks!”
The girl shrugged as the pod continued its ascent. “Aw, man,” Ferbus said, pouting. “Triple waffle something.”
Elysia was looking at Lex in awe. “Unreal. No one will expect us to have been able to board undetected, so no one will look for us in here. And we can get off at the top!”
“Lex!” Pip cried. “You’re a genius!”
Lex smiled at Uncle Mort. “I’m a genius.”
He rolled his eyes. Why did he look so annoyed? He’d specifically requested awesomeness. “Those Amnesia vials only last for fifteen minutes,” he said, “so if she’s struck by the urge to check up on her guests, we’re somewhat hosed. Plus, there’s still the small matter of evading the staff once we get up there, and where we run off to after that.”
“Actually, we’ll be one floor away from Executive,” Lex answered. When Uncle Mort looked displeased, she grinned. “You’re not the only one who can memorize schematics.”
Now he looked even more displeased.
Lex ignored him. She was elated to have some time to themselves, all for the purposes of plotting and scheming. Driggs poked his head in to listen as she grabbed a pen from her bag and drew a crude sketch of Necropolis on her place mat. “This is where we’ll get off. The border between Residential and Executive is right there.”
The intercom in the table crackled to life. Thinking a waiter was about to recite the specials, Lex reached over to switch it off—but a familiar voice came through instead. And it was obvious to everyone in the car that it was speaking through clenched, angry teeth. “Are—you—on—the—Ferris—wheel?”
“Hey, Skyla!” Lex felt positively giddy, riding high on both the success of her plan and the delectable Yoricks. “We are on the Ferris wheel. It’s really nice. Relaxing. Cozy.”
They could hear a loud, measured breath. “I trust that no one saw you?”
“No one who’ll remember.”
“Is Mort even there?”
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “I sort of gave Lex a little pep talk about leadership. She seems to have really taken it to heart.”
Skyla made a grunting noise. “Well, tell her to be extra careful. I’m still in charge, but my second-in-command has gotten a promotion.”
“Let me guess,” Uncle Mort said. “The big guy we keep hitting over the head.”
“You got it. Norwood seems to have convinced Knell that two teams are better than one, so he recruited Boulder to head up a second squadron. Except that that I’m supposed to be Boulder’s commander, not Norwood, so there’s a little spot of mutiny for you.”
“On top of our own mutiny, currently in progress?” Uncle Mort said. “How rude of him.”
“Do any of you remember how Executive is configured?”
“I do!” Uncle Mort said in a teacher’s pet voice, raising his hand. When it became evident that he was the only one, he gave Lex a smug grin.
“Oh, come on,” she shot at him. “Like any of us expected to survive long enough to see the top floor.”
“Give us a refresher, Skyla,” Elysia said.
“In Executive, the main elevator shaft still shoots straight up the center of the building, but whereas Local and Residential are made up of normal, layered floors, the Executive sector consists of two distinct halves that twist up around each other, like the red and white stripes of a barber pole. One of those stripes contains the Executive headquarters—just your standard office, with cubicles and water coolers and everything—but the other half is a . . . special case.”
“She’s being modest,” Uncle Mort said. “It actually houses the singular reason Necropolis produces the most skilled Grims in the world—”
“Yorick coffee?” Lex asked.
He looked at her, then rubbed his temples. “No.”
Skyla jumped back in. “It’s a series of simulated situations that are designed to mimic the sort of extreme environments Grims might encounter on their shifts.”
“Kind of like basic training,” Uncle Mort added.
“My team and Boulder’s team are each controlling a different half of Executive,” Skyla said. “And I’m sorry to say that both options are less than ideal. On my side—the government office side—there are cameras not just on every floor, but in every room. And if Boulder and Norwood have their way, I’m sure the training modules will be charged up full blast. Not much I can do to stop that without looking suspicious.”
“So we’re screwed either way,” said Lex. “Gotcha. Is there anything we can do to maximize our chances?”
“Just get to the express elevators in the center. Once you do, the president will freak out and give me clearance to follow you up to her office. Then, I’ll—you know. Get this thing over with.” She sniffed. “Gotta go. Good luck.”
The intercom went silent. The Juniors nervously gulped the rest of their drinks, but Lex had already finished hers. She turned to Uncle Mort. “So . . . how is she going to get this thing over with? You said there’s only one thing on earth that can seal a portal. What is it? Duct tape?”
Uncle Mort snickered.
“Come on,” she pressed. “I know it’s something in your bag of tricks, so tell me. You said no more secrets, right?”
He nodded. “No more secrets.”
“Then what is it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Lex wished she hadn’t chugged her Yorick. It would have looked so nice dripping down the front of Uncle Mort’s hoodie.
“Trust me,” he said, ducking away from her hurled cup. “It’s better that you don’t know. It’s dangerous enough with just the mayors in the loop.”
A rustle of papers sounded. Bang looked up at them, then back at the pages of the Wrong Book for the
umpteenth time.
“Fine, Skyla will superglue the portal shut, or whatever,” said Ferbus. “But what are we supposed to do once we get up to the president’s office? Sit back and enjoy the view? Again?”
“No. You’ll be providing distraction,” said Uncle Mort. “Warding off the guards and the president while Skyla does her thing, because they’re not going to like it.”
“Punch the president,” Driggs said. “Got it.”
“Don’t punch the—” Uncle Mort started, then thought about it. “All right, if worse comes to worst, you have my permission to punch the president.”
Ferbus and Driggs bumped fists through the glass.
“Wait,” Lex said. “How are we supposed to ‘distract’ them?”
“Guns should do the trick,” Uncle Mort said.
“Real guns? Not Amnesia guns? But—”
“What?” Pip’s face had gone white at whatever it was Bang had just signed to him. He looked at his gaping companions, then back at Bang. “You’d better tell them.”
“It was what you said back at the museum, Mort,” she signed. “That the true origin of the Grimsphere is unknown because no one left any artifacts or records. But based on what I’ve been reading, that doesn’t seem right. I don’t think the true history of Grims faded into obscurity just because they were really good at keeping secrets.”
The others exchanged glances. “What do you mean?” said Ferbus. “You think all the Grims who existed before Grotton simply disappeared? Or were killed?”
“No,” she signed. “I don’t think there were any Grims before Grotton at all.”
13
“Okay, nobody panic,” said Uncle Mort. “But Bang appears to have lost her mind.”
“Hear her out!” Pip said. “Or I guess hear me out. Through her. Go ahead, Bang.”
She started signing so fast, even Pip struggled to keep up with translating. “So like I said, Grotton did a lot of experiments, was sort of a mad scientist. But his day job was as a blacksmith. He bragged that he made the sharpest blades in all of merry old England. One day he took out the sharpest one he’d ever made and swooped it around through the air, and—I know this sounds psycho, but he makes it seem as though he discovered the ether.”
Ferbus shook his head. “So the guy inadvertently created a scythe? That doesn’t mean he was the first one to do it. Maybe he just joined up with the current Grims after he discovered what he was.”
“That’s what I thought,” Bang continued, “but then he goes on to describe swirling through the ether, freezing time, landing at a target . . .” She paused for a moment to flip over a page. “Everything is here: Killing and Culling, crude versions of vessels, using jellyfish. It even sounds like he opened up the portals himself, constructing these big circular blades or something . . . I can’t get the full picture, since his notes are so dense and hard to get through. But they’re painstaking, and—” She picked through the pages. “I mean, his excitement is palpable. He honestly makes it seem like he was discovering all of this for the very first time, like no one had ever done it before. Like he invented the Grimsphere.”
Uncle Mort was rubbing his eyes. “You’re right, Bang,” he said. “It does sound psycho.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Look, he even trained others—he called them his students. And they called themselves reapers. They operated a lot like a Grimsphere society does today—with more primitive methods, but the idea is the same.” She held up the papers. “I don’t have the rest, obviously, but you can sort of tell where it’s heading—Grotton starts to get it in his head that he can play God, so he does. Experiments with Crashing, Damning, Annihilating . . .”
The Juniors looked to Uncle Mort, but he was shaking his head. “This is all well and good and would make one hell of an HBO miniseries,” he said, “but there’s just one problem: There were a lot of people who lived and died before Grotton came along. And we know they got to the Afterlife somehow—King Tut is proof enough of that. How do you propose they got there?”
“Ask Dora,” Ferbus said. “She was probably around at the time.”
“Go suck an egg!” she shot back.
“Maybe they arrived naturally,” said Lex, thinking. “Without human assistance.”
Uncle Mort had the frustrated look of a person trying to reason with a herd of cats. “Okay. Let’s just assume, for one incredibly ludicrous minute, that all this is true. That before Grotton ‘invented the Grimsphere,’ people just died and automatically went to the Afterlife. Then Grotton arrives and, what, overhauls the entire system? Single-handedly?”
“Why not?” said Driggs. “He single-handedly destroyed the Afterlife, pretty much.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Lex was frenetically trying to organize her thoughts. “Wait, maybe it does,” she jumped in. “Think about it. What if people died and went to the Afterlife all by themselves for, like, millennia, but then Grotton tears such a big hole in the fabric of existence that it breaks the system. It no longer works the way it’s supposed to, can’t function on its own.” She tried to think of a suitable metaphor. “Like—like—”
“Like when you touch a baby bird,” said Ferbus, “and then the mother bird rejects it and you have to raise it yourself?”
Elysia put her head in her hands.
“Uh, sure,” said Lex. “So the humans intervene, do what they can to keep it going while they figure out how to fix what they broke. But they can’t. The more they tinker with it, the more responsibility they have to take on to ensure that the process of death is running smoothly, on and on, until it depends on Grims entirely!”
Uncle Mort scratched his scar, thinking.
“But what does any of this have to do with anything?” Ferbus said. “So Grotton broke the world, and now it’s our job to maintain it. We raised the frickin’ bird ourselves, and it’s big and strong and has, I don’t know, really majestic feathers. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” Bang signed, “is that our options aren’t as limited as we thought.”
“Exactly!” said Driggs, his eyes animated. “Because if all this is true, it means we can permanently fix the Afterlife!”
Lex looked back and forth between the two of them. “How’s that?”
“What harms the Afterlife?” Driggs said. “Human intervention. Even if we seal the portals and reset the Afterlife, Grims still interact with the business of death every day—and like you said, there is always the possibility that someone will commit more violations. Damning or ghosting, or even something as simple as attacking a nontarget, like Lex always tried to do.”
“Thanks for that,” she said.
“So it seems to me,” he continued, “that the only way to ensure that nothing will ever again harm the Afterlife is to get rid of that interaction altogether. If Bang really has read these pages right, and if Lex’s theory turns out to be true, then it’s possible for souls to get to the Afterlife the same way they had for thousands of years before Grotton interfered: naturally, without us Grims acting as middlemen. If you remove Grims from the equation, the Grimsphere ceases to exist, and then there’s no way for anyone to harm the Afterlife anymore.”
Uncle Mort stared at him. He might as well have said that all they needed to do was suck the oceans dry using only crazy straws. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You are proposing that we—and correct me if I’m wrong—somehow dismantle the Grimsphere?”
“Yeah!” said Driggs, his transparent face flushed with excitement. “Although I have no idea how to do it. And it would pretty much destroy our careers and society and everything we hold dear. That would suck.”
But something had resonated with Uncle Mort, because he was making his diabolical-scheming face and running his finger up and down his scar. “It would suck. But if that’s what it takes for the Afterlife to last forever . . .” He shook his head. “That’s all assuming that any of this is true, which we can’t confirm until we get Grott
on and the Wrong Book back. And even when we do, I certainly am not aware of any ways to—I don’t know, unGrim the Grimsphere.”
“Well, we might want to hold that thought anyway,” Elysia said, “because we’re almost at the top.”
It was as if she’d blared it through a bullhorn, the way it startled everyone out of their brainstorming. They’d been so wrapped up in hypotheticals, they forgot they were in the middle of a manhunt.
“Okay, hang a left when you get out,” Lex said, pointing through the window of the pod. “Those potted trees look like decent hiding places. Duck behind them until all of us are out, then we can break into the apartment on the other side of the hallway.”
As soon as the pod reached the apex of the wheel, a waiter opened the door and wiggled a Yorick coffeepot at them. “Top you folks off?” he asked with a goofy smile, one that dissolved as soon as he caught a good look at their faces.
But Lex was ready with another vial. She pinched it into the guy’s nose, tucked the wad of cash into his pocket, and patted him on the back as they took off. “No, thanks,” she told the waiter. “All pepped up.”
“And ready to punch the president!” Driggs added.
Uncle Mort sighed. “You don’t have to announce it.”
There weren’t many other people around the Ferris wheel exit—just a handful of restaurant employees, most of whom were too busy making triple waffle somethings to notice what had happened to their poor coworker. Uncle Mort made a beeline for the trees, and the rest of the group followed him. Lex stayed right on his heels as he rounded the corner, approached the trees—
And staggered back, almost falling to the floor. “Run!” he shouted.
Potted trees, as it turned out, didn’t just make good hiding places for fugitives. They did a pretty decent job of concealing a dozen armed guards, too.
***
For some odd reason, Lex focused on the carpet. It was so plush and thick that it perfectly preserved the slashes, divots, and swirls that her friends’ shoes left behind as they ran. The marks spread out before her, green marks crosshatching like grass in a windblown, peaceful field.