Page 121 of Grim

“I didn’t know—please—let me try again—”

“There’s still something in me—”

“I remember my daughter’s laugh—please don’t take it—don’t take it—”

Big D ignores their weak protestations and raises his hands in front of his face. Staring at the center of the room through the gap between his fingers, Big D grins as he slowly stretches his hands, and with a slow, parting motion, he pulls.

The ballroom floor groans. The chains writhe and flex like boa constrictors around each of the punished. The grey souls panic. One tries to flee, but the chain pulls taut and yanks them back with a bone-snapping force. Another begins to scream in nonsensical agony, but then the sound is swallowed whole by the chain’s grip around his spectral throat.

A fracture rips through the center of the marble like a scream splitting a mouth wide open, and then the ground yawns apart like an earthquake contained inside a snow globe. The room around the middle remains eerily still as the bottom of the floor opens to the void below. The space created beneath the chasm has no features, no curves, no discernible markings of any kind. It is white, long, and flat. It is depthless. It is endless.

One by one, the so-called Pathetics descend into that haunting mundanity, released from their interconnected metallic yokes. The furious struggling from moments before gives way to a disturbing calmness as the souls cross over to their final destination. They move to their ultimate end of their own accord, a final stab at their tattered dignity.

Rue can’t breathe beside me. She whispers, “Where are they going? Why isn’t there fire or volcanos or something?”

“This is worse. This is pure Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“The opposite of pleasure is not pain, Mayday. It’s boredom. Soul-crushing emptiness.”

I watch realization dawn behind her eyes as she takes in the final moments of this spiritual massacre. This mass exodus to the waiting room with no end.

And then the floor closes back up, neat and seamless. As though it never happened.

The chains that hovered above the hole crash to the floor as it slams shut, and the heavy metal ignites and disintegrates in a puff of fire, like so much flash paper.

Ash floats in the air like confetti. It lands on my coat sleeve. On Rue’s mask. On the hem of her dress. We both just stare at it, watching the memories fall like grey rain.

Big D claps a single sound that rattles. Those crystalline flecks in the air tinkling audibly.

Then, like puppets trained to mimicry, the rest of the room joins in. Polite, hollow, measured applause for the annihilation of those who couldn’t forget what they lost.

Rue doesn’t join them, and neither do I. The applause wanes slowly. A few scattered claps linger before even those fall quiet. I’m just beginning to believe it’s over—that Rue might be allowed to slip back into anonymity for the remainder of the evening—when Big D lifts his head.

His gaze, veiled behind his mask, turns in our direction with unsettling precision. The crowd parts instinctively as his voice slithers out above them, slow and theatrical.

“Well, mortal,” he calls, every syllable soaked in amusement and warning, “what did you think of our little ceremony?”

Rue stiffens beside me.

I don’t look at her—I don’t dare—but everything in my body screams the same thing,Tell him what he wants to hear. Keep your head down. For the love of everything, Rue, just keep your head down.

But I know better than to believe she will.

Rue Chamberlain doesn’t bow. She doesn’t flatter. She doesn’t shrink. Even now, her spine is straightening like a blade being drawn from its sheath.

And when she speaks, it’s not with tremble or deference. It’s with cold, cutting honesty.

“Cruel and unkind,” she says, voice even and deliberate. “With decidedly poor production values.”

A ripple of black spreads outward from where Big D stands. It curls across the marble as if it were oil seeking a flame. Then, from either side of him, the Sisters appear.

Fate tilts her head, birdlike and venomous. “What did she just say?”

There’s a lull. A single heartbeat of silence in which Rue could still possibly retreat, recant, and run.

She doesn’t.