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WHEN YOU GET to the Food Hall, you eat and you drink.

You’re starving by the time you arrive, so you pretty much stuff your face with everything.

Pomegranate pips. Mushroom caps. Blood-red wine.

Soda pop. Cinnabuns. Spicy Girl rolls.

This thing you had once on vacation with your parents, at a bed-and-breakfast that hasn’t been there for a decade. This other thing you couldn’t have eaten while you were alive, even if you wanted to, because the restaurant that makes it won’t open for years.

That’s the cool thing about the Food Hall. It serves, like, everything. Anything. Whatever you want. Whatever you feel. It’s full of coffee shops and grocery stores and restaurants. There’s bodegas and clam bakes and a whole island of cheese. Imagined places to hit up for imaginary meals. Carbon copies of your favorites from the Living world.

It’s endless. All-you-can-eat. Edible Eden, basically.

And it’s all there to feed you because that’s the whole reason the Food Hall exists—to nourish the spirits of the Afterlife. To help us get full so we can move On to our next lives.

Some spirits are satisfied by a single bite of a particular dish, or a sip of just the right drink. Others take longer to feel full—days in the Hall, or weeks. Months of eating. Some even need years to digest—each meal a way to work through the life they just lived, the memories they need to process, every bite a step closer to fulfillment.

Sooner or later, most spirits get to board the glittering trains departing the Food Hall and move On.

But some of us don’t.

Some of us can’t feel full no matter what we eat.

There’s a Hunger inside that won’t be tamed. Our Living put it there.

See, when we died? Their grief was bottomless. So vast and deep it swallowed them whole. They couldn’t process our loss; they couldn’t let us go. They held on so tight that it held us back. Kept us here. Made us Hungry.

That’s the uncool thing—like, deeply uncool—about the Food Hall. If our Living don’t move on, then neither can we.

We get stuck.

Destined to spend all eternity eating Snickers that won’t satisfy.