"My what? Where am I?"

She holds out a very thin file folder in Bell's direction.

"Where am I? What happened?"

"Take the folder," she says sharply. "Go down the hall. Ask your annoying questions at someone who's paid to answer them."

Shell Bell takes the folder and steps tentatively into the hall.

"...Yes. Where am I? What happened? Where did all my magic go?"

"You're dead," she says gently.

"This is the afterlife," she explains. "It happens to everyone. But there's no going back, so people don't know about it until they get here."

"I - can I see anything that's going on with live people even if I can't communicate with them? Sherlock - Tony - my parents - they'll be devastated - my empire -"

"No, they're going to live forever, like I was, as soon as they find out what happened to me they'll patch the hole and it'll never happen again," Shell Bell says, burying her hands in her hair. "Sherlock still has magic, she won't let Tony die, she wouldn't let herself die while he's alive to miss her, she'll take care of my parents - if what you're saying is true I'm never going to see them again. My Sherlock."

"I'm sorry," she says sympathetically.

"How do you know what you know - that there's no communication, that I'm stuck? How is this known?"

"The rules. Who makes the rules?"

Shell Bell follows her, but she doesn't stop asking questions. "Who's the administration? How do they set rules? Why is my magic gone? What is this folder for?"

Well, it's clearly not going to get her anywhere with this person. "Can you tell me what this means?" Bell asks, showing the lady the first page of her file.

"Why will I be wanting this? My sentence for what? My sentence to what?" Bell asks, taking the card.

"Your sentence for everything bad you've ever done in your life," she says. "But if you visit the Crescent—that's the res code on the card—I'm sure you'll find someone to take it for you."

"...My sentence is 'nine o'clock'?"

"Nine hours," she says. "With Chainsaw. He's a torturer. ...I'm sure you'll find someone to take it at the Crescent."

"Yes," she says apologetically.

"But there are people who don't mind, as much, and they can - transfer the - sentences?"

"Yes," she repeats. "The people who volunteer to serve unfair sentences are called contractors."

"Okay. I am pretty sure this is unfair. Who's Diana - I mean, she's my judge, but - where did she come from, where do judges come from?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I am here because I died. Are you here because you died? Is Diana? How did you get your job? How did she? What about the torturers and contractors?"

"Everyone is here because they died," she says. "I got my job by applying at the Tower. So did Diana, but the requirements for judges are much stricter and I'm sure she had to wait a few centuries for her interview. Torturers are trained and certified at the Cross in caret null, and the Crescent has their own academy but it's not necessary to be certified as a contractor before taking someone's sentence. It's just easier for the sentenced and the volunteers to find each other that way."

"Yes," she says. "I'm sorry, I don't understand most of the codes... contractors tend to know them pretty well; you can ask at the Crescent, or look them up at the library, that's one caret one."

"Okay. How do I find these addresses? What else do I need to know?"

"You absolutely have to know your own res code," she says. "If you lose it, you might never find your way home again. We'll be at Tower Station in a minute; I'll show you how to work the maps."

Bell rereads her code a few times. It's not that long. She can break it up into chunks, repeat it aloud to herself, in case something happens to this paper. "Thank you," she adds.

"How much time do I have to find a contractor?"

"Between a week and a month," she says. "One week in the clear, and then three more where Chainsaw might or might not get around to you yet."

"Okay. What else do I need to know?"

"...I'm friendly," she says. "People at the Crescent are friendly, more or less. Librarians are friendly. Anyone else you meet might not be."

"...How does being unfriendly manifest?"

"Violence, usually."

"What do you do?" Bell tries.

"It's different above the cliffs."

"The cliffs?"

"And you live up there and it's less - violent? How do you come to live up there?"

"You don't 'live'," she corrects gently. "And you don't come to belong up there. You're either sent there first thing or you're not."

"Probably," she shrugs. "Safer than it'll be on your head."

"Okay. It's not like my empire is here anyway."

"Yes. My world was - badly managed. I fixed it. I made myself a crown. It seemed like the thing to do." She frowns, still looking at the crown in her hands. "...I think the president of the somewhat-better-managed part of the world that I had not included in said empire took exception and assassinated me."

"I try. How are these places assigned?" Bell asks, looking around, assessing, seeking a place to tuck away her crown.

"Mostly at random. You can move to an empty place, or swap residences with someone else, if you're authorized for a place that size; how much space you start out with depends on how much you're mourned, but it's possible to transfer space between accounts, or merge if you want to move in with someone."

"...Does it look to you like I have been mourned much? I don't have a scale for this, I don't know if I should be assuming that Tony didn't like me all that much after all or that Sherlock shut down completely instead of feeling anything... poor Sherlock, my Sherlock - Do people who aren't from my world count, assuming they find out about my death? Do I have to be mourned on a personal level or should I be learning things about how good an empress I was for people who never met me?"

"I - not absolutely certain. I don't think she'd leave Tony alone. But it's not impossible that I'm wrong, or that Coin killed her too even though she wouldn't know she'd need to and there'd be fallout all over a populated area and Sherlock would most likely have noticed a nuke in Three or the palace. Then - then Tony would probably have died as well, they were both in the house - we'd all be here - Can I find out? If I go back to the Tower and look for them, or is there a book of names - if she's here then - why do you ask? Does this place look - suggestive of that?" Shell Bell glances around the nice, well-designed furniture, the pretty rugs and the wallpaper. It doesn't exactly scream Sherlock is dead to her, but she's not an expert. She goes up to the bed - everything but the bathroom's squished into one room, kitchenette and bed and empty bookshelf and dresser, but it's arranged to allow walking paths between everything. She puts her crown in the drawer of the nightstand and sits on the bedspread.

"You can't find out who's in the queue," she says. "But there's a complete directory of Downsiders in the library, and you can search by name and time of death, and narrow results by universe of origin... you can probably find her if she's already here." She gestures around at the tiny, beautiful apartment. "This kind of thing, a very small place with very nice decor, usually means you weren't mourned very much but you were mourned very intensely. I usually don't see cases this extreme, but when I do, the mourner tends to show up as a suicide."

"...I don't know," says the guide. "It would explain your apartment, but... I've never heard of magic that could do that."

"I'm sorry," says the guide.

"All of the questions. What else do you think I ought to know before I so much as make a trip to the library? What won't I find in the library that you can tell me? Will everyone speak English, or appear to?"

"English has been the common language here for a while, but that might change, and if it stays changed for long enough you'll have to learn the new one," she shrugs. "Judges can imprint languages on people, and they give everyone the most commonly spoken language at their time of arrival, unless they already have it."

"Okay," says Bell. "Anything else?"

She thinks, then shakes her head.

"Thank you very much for all your help."

"I - just died, yes," says Shell Bell. "My guide said I would be able to find a - a contractor here."

"Yep!" says the friendly woman, hopping off the desk. "What's your number?"

She recites it from memory, although she does glance at her file to confirm that she got it right. She did.

She nods at the folder Bell is carrying. "That your papers? Lemme see."

Bell hands them over. "My guide couldn't tell me what anything after the first page meant. Can you?"

"...I put a city on the moon?" Bell offers. "I didn't, like, evict anyone from their actual home, I just - moved the homes. It was the best thing to do - the culture was utterly toxic."

"Uh, it's nice to meet you, Eights. Keep what?"

"The name. It sounds just fine for Downside."

"I usually went by Shell Bell." Pause. "So if I'm understanding you correctly you personally are going to take my, er, sentence, which is largely for putting the Capitol on the moon? ...I am glad that this doesn't seem to bother you."

"Yep," Eights says cheerfully. "Nobody else would touch it, Chainsaw's nasty. But I happen to like him."

Sunnily: "You're welcome."

"Whose idea was it to punish - things done in life -" (Shell Bell does not consider putting the Capitol on the moon a crime) "with torture? Do you know?"

"It matters because it's awful - you're doing a good, good thing but you shouldn't have to - and it ought to stop and whoever or whatever set it up would be a good place to start figuring out how to un-set-it-up," says Shell Bell.

"Good idea," says Eights. "Don't try it. The judges get mean about that kinda thing."

"...And they'd slap another sentence on me?"

"Yep," she says. "That's how it works. They can't directly sentence you for poking your nose into their business, but they can sentence you for a lot of things, and they can find out everything you've ever done just by looking at you. So annoying them is a bad idea."

"Is it harder to get a contractor for that later? I mean, this isn't the kind of thing I'd ask someone to do for me causally, but you seem pretty - chipper. And from the size of this place I have the impression that if I did manage to unfuck the system it'd be a big deal."

"Does the library have a list of things they can sentence me for, so I can work on being a tricky target if I do annoy someone who abuses their power?"

"Probably," says Eights. "It'll take you a few years to get to know it, though."

"That long a list?"

She nods.

"Okay. I guess I have a project, now. Which is good since I'm pretty sure I'm never going to see my loved ones again. Gotta keep busy." She takes a deep breath and lets it out. "Does anything - formal happen, regarding the sentence transfer thing, or is that done?"

"I go put it into my computer," shrugs Eights. "You can watch that part if it helps, but it's pretty boring."

"I'm curious to have a look at the system. I haven't done this a million times," Shell Bell points out.

"Straightforward," Shell Bell says. "I don't understand why this is even allowed. Why combine something so sadistic with this - I hesitate to call it a loophole, but this - flexibility?"

"Beats me," shrugs Eights. "That's just how it is."

"For - 'forever'?" Shell Bell says. "And people don't die again here, I was told, so if it's been that way forever, some people who are still around must have been around - forever. Do any such people have known locations?"

"Nope," says Eights.

"Of course not. This place is the most perverse fusion of convenient and cruel."

"...Y'know," says Eights, "I'm gonna remember that line. That's a good one."

"Guides're usually a little spotty," she says. "Don't forget your res code, don't annoy judges, don't annoy torturers—the Crescent can help you if the judges give you a sentence you don't want; we can't help you if a torturer decides to grab you off the street and play with you a little."

"...They do that a lot?"

"Sometimes," she says, shrugging. "Not that often—there aren't that many torturers—but yeah. Sometimes."

"What are the best ways to avoid them?"

"Don't hang out anywhere too popular, or anywhere you know is somebody's stomping grounds," she suggests. "Spend a lot of time in the library. Nobody fucks with a librarian."

"...Why does nobody fuck with a librarian, and how does one acquire that designation? Can you tell me if there are any 'stomping grounds' in my neighborhood, especially between my apartment and the transit station?"

"I don't know your neighborhood," she says, shaking her head. "If you want to be a librarian, try the library. Won't help you at home, though."

"So people only don't fuck with librarians in the library?"

"That's about the size of it," she agrees.

"Why, what happens if someone does?"

"People just... don't," she says, shrugging.

"...Because mind control? Because cultural taboo? Because the librarians all back each other up and several of them know martial arts? Because magical impossibility?"

"Cultural taboo's probably closest."

"Okay." She closes her eyes. "What else don't I know that I'll need to find out to get along here? You're being so helpful - immensely helpful - and of course my natural response is to get as much information out of you as I can."

"How long?"

"Coming up on fifteen thousand years."

"That is a very long time," says Shell Bell.

"Yep," says Eights.

"Do you even remember anything about being alive?"

"I know I had a boyfriend and I cheated on him," she says, "'cause that's what I was sentenced for."

"...What all's in my file besides putting people on the moon?"

"Uh..." She thinks back. "Did you fake your death? I think I remember something about that."

"Yeah, I couldn't otherwise get out of my home district safely. I stole a canoe and left a note telling my parents I was attempting to go someplace nobody could actually get to and actually walked to the next town and stowed away on a train."

"That must've sucked," she says sympathetically.

"As soon as it was safe I told them I was alive," she says. "They were upset, but they're okay now. Or at least they are if my guess about why my apartment looks the way it does is correct."

"...Okay," says Eights.

"Sorry, I can't always tell the difference between people being interested in what I have to say and just being polite."

"Oh. I have a very small and very nicely decorated apartment. I think my girlfriend brought me back to life after I died and it worked, sort of, just - forked me, one there and one here, instead of getting me out of here. I'm going to check for her in the library directory, though, in case it's what the guide said it looked like, a suicide. But if I'm right my parents are never going to know that I died, because there'll be a live one of me, and I sure wouldn't tell them."

"...Sure sucks for you," she says reflectively.

"Yeah." Pause. "I wonder if doors to Milliways ever happen, here."

"Wouldn't blame ya," she says.

"You stayed. I guess the obvious disadvantage of here does not apply to you."

Shell Bell wraps her arms around herself. "Thank you again," she says quietly. "I think I'll go to the library now."

"Bye," says Eights.

"I need to know how to operate here. Safely, insofar as that's possible. I want to know about the administration, although I'm told asking won't get me far. I'm also interested if my guide was mistaken when she told me there's no way to observe or communicate with the living."

"My loved ones are in all likelihood never going to depart," Shell Bell says. "Although I would like to look them up, in case I am wrong. Dead things, what does that mean, what makes a thing dead?"

"Broken, destroyed, whatever," he says with a shrug. "This building existed in some live world somewhere before it showed up here, and then it burned down or got demolished. Every book in the stacks came from a live world and got thrown out or spoiled or burned."

"Would things magically banished from existence appear here? What determines where they appear? And how do I look up my girlfriend to see if she's died?"

"If it stopped existing, then yep," he says. "Things appear where it makes sense. Food in your fridge or your kitchen cupboards, shampoo in your shower, books in the library. New buildings out at the edges of the old ones. If you want the directory, the computers are over there—" he points down a hallway.

"...What determines whose kitchen or shower or whatever a given disappeared or destroyed thing goes to?"

"It's pretty much random."

"Pretty much?"

"You tend to get higher quality items in bigger houses," he says. "But it's not a rule, just a tendency."

"Okay. Is there some kind of - lost and found, where you can put things that appear that you don't need and get things that appear that you do need? Or - how does currency work here? I've heard money referred to but I don't know anything beyond that about how it works in this world."

"'Money' is a misnomer," he says. "If you're talking about your res account. That holds the maximum allowable square footage of your residence, and you can transfer some of it out, but people usually don't. Mostly they barter. Individually."

"Okay. Are there - markets of some kind, then?

"Nothing really organized," he says, shaking his head.

"Do most people figure out the computer system pretty quick? And I hear you can sort by world - how are worlds designated?"

"By number," he says. "One through seventy-two, I think. It was seventy-one a while ago."

"Can you tell me what world I'm from? And if I want to look up someone from a world not my own, is there a way to check if that world's represented and find out its number?"

"You can tell which world somebody's from if you know their res code. That's about it."

"I can search without narrowing down the worlds, right? And -" She rattles off her own res code, because that's the world she'll need to find Sherlock from if Sherlock's here. If Sherlock ever comes here.

"Thanks. How do you become a librarian?"

"Right now," he says, "you don't. Hang around, wait, get to know the place. Maybe we'll find a use for you."

They're not that difficult. Old, slow, but not difficult.

It has her name, the time of her death in her world, her world number, and her res code.

No record.

...She doesn't think 1895 sounds like when it was when she met any of the Holmeses, she thinks it was some post-2000 time in their worlds, but that's still something. An alt probably. She looks around for writing implements.

Nope.

Coriolanus Snow exists, and died when he died. He's in ^1.

"Oh, people usually don't show up in any kind of reasonable order," he shrugs. "If you died before someone else, they're as likely to show up before you as the other way around. And of course if they went Upside they won't be in the directory at all."

"Upside? Is that the place above the cliffs? What makes some people go there and not others?"

"Upside, Downside," he says, gesturing the appropriate elevations. "The judges sort you."

"Based on what?"

"Your life," he says. "If you're beyond reproach, you go Upside. If you're not bad enough for a sentence, but still kind of sketchy, you go ^2. If you've done something the judges think is really bad, they give you a sentence and put you in ^1."

"...What are the approximate proportions here?"

"We can't be sure, because we can't go Upside and check. But it looks like there's no way they could have even half as many people up there as down here."

Shell Bell nods. "Can you tell me how to navigate the stacks?" she asks. "And do the computers do anything besides look up dead people?"

"The computers look up books," he says. "And technically they'll give you directions, too, but mostly it's not worth it to track one down yourself. Every so often, someone gets lost and we run into them a few decades later."

"So I use the computer to see what books there are to be had, and then I ask one of you to fetch it?"

"Yep," says the librarian.

"How does lending work?"

"Doesn't, mostly," he says. "Losing or damaging a library book is a sentencable crime whether you meant to or not, so most people don't want to risk it."

"Ah, I see." She sighs. "Thank you very much."

He shrugs.

Yeah, Shell Bell wasn't holding out for anyone that close. "Hi," she says. "I don't think you know me or anyone like me, but before I died earlier today I knew - several people with your name or a variant, and I wanted to see if you were an alt of them. I think you might be. I'm Shell Bell."

"And I," he says, "am Strat."

"Nickname you picked up here?" she asks. "That's not the name I found you by."

"You will find that almost no one uses the same name here that they did in life," he says. "I am no exception."

"Okay. It would've been weird calling you by my girlfriend's name anyway," says Shell Bell. "Can I be your friend? All my loved ones are immortal."

"I would love some tea."

"Come in, then."

In she comes. "This has been the weirdest day of my - existence," she says, correcting from 'life' at the last moment. "And it's competing with the day I received supreme magical power and declared myself the Empress of Atlantis. I liked that one better."

"I'd imagine you would," he agrees.

"All my magic is gone now. I keep tripping and I can't fly and my memory's slippery and I can't make any wishcoins."

"I've never met anyone here with magic," says Strat.

"The place probably strips it from anyone who's got it as they come in, I guess. My world didn't have magic to begin with. I got it from an alt of me from somewhere else."

"That might explain why it didn't last," he says.

"You think? Maybe. I hope my other alts are cleverer about their defenses than I was. I walked right into a nuclear explosion. I was probably atomized instantly, I don't remember it hurting or anything." She sighs. "And then, I'm not sure but my best guess is that my girlfriend resurrected me, and there's a live copy of me walking around back home and they don't even know I need to be gotten. Because I have a very small, very nicely furnished apartment, and my girlfriend wasn't there when I looked her up so she's probably not a mournful suicide like my guide thought."

"She could just as easily be delayed," says Strat. "I'm told that happens. In the several thousand years since my death, I have yet to find anyone I knew in life."

"It's possible. But I don't think she'd leave her twin brother alone, especially since there's a very good chance she could pull off the resurrection and it's something she'd certainly try."

"You'd know better than I would," he says with a shrug, and puts the kettle on.

"It's basically good news. Means my empire's fine and my girlfriend and her brother aren't devastated. My parents'll probably never find out. And even if I had a much bigger place suggesting that much more mourning happened, distributed amongst at least four people and not cut off instantly when she resurrected me - I still wouldn't expect to see them again. They have no reason to believe this place exists and try to follow me here. They'd still be immortal." Pause. "Can you remember anything about being alive? I badly miss my perfect recall, I need to get some paper and write everything down..."

"I am a little lucky, in that respect," he says. "There are books about me in the library. They don't get everything right, but - enough."

"Biographies or something? Were you famous?"

"Moderately."

"I wonder if there are any biographies about me. This place seems at least as temporally twisted as Milliways, so maybe I can see what's going to be written about me even though I only just died, I'm pretty sure being an Empress makes me famous enough to warrant at least one book even if my guess about resurrection is wrong and I have an extremely brief tenure."

"There may very well be."

"I will look for that next time I'm at the library. What were you famous for?"

"Trivial things."

Shell Bell takes that as him not wanting to talk about it. "What do you do with yourself now, then?"

"Contractor," he says. "Was the address not a clue?"

"I'm new," Shell Bell reminds him, "and don't have perfect recall anymore. But that shouldn't surprise me, I guess, given how I knew to look you up."

"...I beg your pardon?"

"I told you I met alts of yours. Including my girlfriend. I bet she'd become a contractor, if she were here."

"Yes," he sighs, "I expect she would. For future reference, anyone with a ^0 code is a contractor or a torturer or both."

"Some people are both?"

"Well, one person."

"Who?"

"Tea," agrees Shell Bell, and she wraps both hands around her teacup and sips. She hasn't actually eaten or drunk anything since she arrived. Usually she'd have noticed earlier than this, but it's not yet to the point where it can bother her. She did grow up in a District. "I don't have the - the capacity to be a contractor but I think it's a really good thing you do," she adds. "I would be very unhappy sometime in the next month if it weren't for Eights."

"Many people would be very unhappy if it weren't for Eights," he agrees. "Which, ultimately, is why we do it."

"I have the impression that my sentence was unusually severe, too."

"What was it?"

"Nine hours with someone called Chainsaw," she says. "I put a city on the moon and apparently this counts as kidnapping the way things are counted around here."

"Yes," he says. "That is unusually severe."

"It was a large city. I guess no one was checking to see if I had any better options, though."

"Judges are not frequently concerned with extenuating circumstances."

"So I suppose I'd have gotten off very light if I'd gone on harvesting clams for a living and did nothing whatever about the crushing dictatorship that killed a couple dozen teenagers annually." She sighs.

"Let no one deceive you into thinking anything about this place is fair."

"No one has tried to convince me that it is, but if they start, I'll bear that in mind. You mentioned that that Dice character's not into politics? To what extent is there politics to be interested in, here?"

"There largely isn't, of any kind you would be familiar with. 'Power struggles between torturers' would be a more accurate term."

"Eights warned me about going on people's turf. So it amounts to - turf wars, I guess? Maybe jockeying for the support of various cohorts of friends?"

"Less geographical, more hierarchical."

"What is the best way to stay far away from that while it happens?"

"You mostly don't have to worry about stumbling into it," he says. "Unless you become a torturer. Which I assume you are not going to do."

"I can't think of anything less likely than for me to decide to hurt unwilling victims as an occupation."

"Yes," he says. "Hence, you will mostly not need to worry. Most of the scuffling takes place via control challenge, which is not hazardous to bystanders."

"Control challenge?"

"...Has no one mentioned torturer's control?"

"No, and it sounds like this may have been a very serious omission, please explain."

"It's mainly to stop sentences from struggling inconveniently, I think. Torturers can control someone else's body as though it were their own, overriding the original owner. Contractors are immune; no one else is. A control challenge is what happens when one torturer tries to establish control on another; some combination of effort, experience, and willpower lets one of the two win, not always the one who started it."

He shrugs.

"I think that might be the worst thing I have heard about this place. Unjust justice system, sure, violent types picking on random people in the streets, sure, those things are par for the course of places I or alts of me don't personally run as far as I can tell, but handing out body-control superpowers to people whose job title is 'torturer' - when we can't even die again and expect a time limit on that basis if nothing else - fuck." She chews her lip. "How much contracting do you have to do to get contractor's immunity - how does it compare with the rate of senseless violence on ordinary denizens? It's probably not a good tradeoff, but maybe my guess is off?"

"You only need to voluntarily take a sentence once," he says. "But you do need to voluntarily take a sentence. If you quit in the middle—or try to—it doesn't count, you receive no immunity, and the torturer has to go find the person you are supposed to be covering for and administer the sentence to them. Some of them find that annoying."

"Eugh." Shell Bell finishes her tea. "I think I'll try not-attracting-attention, first, and if I fail at it at least I'll get information about where that falls on the scale between difficult and utterly impossible, for me." She shudders. "I wish my girlfriend were here. Well. No. I wish she'd managed to resurrect me without splitting me. But if I start from the assumption that I have to be here I wish she were too and I hate that I wish it but I do."

"Good luck," he murmurs.

"Thanks. May I have another cup of tea?"

"Certainly."

"Thanks." Sip, think, sip, think. "How does the inability to die again interact with other stuff? Do I need to sleep, again? I assume if I don't eat I'll get hungrier and hungrier until I reset or whatever it's called."

"Torch," he supplies. "It's called torching. And yes, you can starve into it. I don't actually know if you can get there from lack of sleep, but I don't recommend trying."

"Torching. Okay. I really liked not needing to sleep. It's not the first thing I'd wish back if I got a pile of wishcoins, though," sighs Shell Bell. "That'd be the memory. I need to get a stack of notebooks and something to write with to substitute. It's probably too much to hope for that someone will trade me for a recorder like the one I had."

"I have a spare pen," Strat offers.

"I would love a spare pen."

He fetches her his spare pen.

She pockets it. "Thanks very much. I guess I can put the really important stuff on the back and in the margins of my sentence papers until I accumulate enough junk I don't need in my apartment to trade for paper. How convenient that I was such a prolific 'kidnapper', I have three whole pages to work with."

"A city on the moon, you said?"

"Oh yes. A big city. Millions of people. Utterly toxic culture. I magicked them all up and then sorted through them and let some of them move back to the Earth."

"Well done."

"Thanks." She sips at her tea. It's really rather good. "I think I was a good empress. I was at least better than the previous dictator. But Coin never nuked him. I guess it was harder to trick him into an isolated location and she didn't want all the fallout near where she lives. If she still lives. My girlfriend may have killed her with her bare hands after finding out what she did."

"Violent, is she?" he inquires with a slight smile.

"My girlfriend? She had to be. The aforementioned toxic culture involved seizing a couple dozen teenagers from poorer parts of the country every year and putting them on a TV show in an arena that only one of them got to leave alive. She left alive. It was the shortest Games in history."

"...Yes," he says, "I imagine it would have been."

"Three of the other contestants did die before she got to them, but - yeah. Very brief affair. It's entirely likely that Coin didn't long survive assassinating me. But maybe Sherlock prioritized resurrecting me first and my live copy just put her on the moon. I'm a softy like that."

He smiles again.

"Not as much of a softy as Sherlock's brother, though. People were allowed to put in appeals for people I'd put up there and most of them didn't submit any. He put in, like, four. He's a sweetie. I miss him too." She peers into her tea. "So, I've been told there's no way of communicating with the living - but I was also told there was no way to check up on them, whereas you've given me hope that if I go back to the library I can find books on myself and find out what happens after the unfortunate assassination. So maybe you have contradictory information for the other discouraging thing I've been told too."

"I imagine having a series of books published about your life is not common enough for most people to think of it when asked if there is a way to check up on the living, which there otherwise isn't. And I did mention the books are not entirely accurate. For one thing, in the books, I survived my trip off the edge of a cliff."

"I find it reasonably likely that my books will report that I survived my nuking," Shell Bell points out. "I don't even think this will be a journalistic error as far as it goes, given my hypothesis about my apartment. Also, I showed up wearing my crown, if anybody is famous enough to warrant biographies the crown would be a hint, wouldn't it?"

"And yet," he says, shrugging.

"So you don't know any mechanism of communication that goes the other way. Unless I find a door to Milliways, which to hear Eights tell it could easily be a thousand years in coming."

"Correct."

"D'you know Milliways?"

"Oh, yes. I've been there once or twice. Not recently."

"You came back here. I wouldn't, not without at least recovering my magic and being sure I could leave whenever I wanted - then I'd come back and try to accomplish something, but I wouldn't without. Why'd you come back?"

He shrugs. "I suppose I don't consider myself wholly useless here."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean - of course you're accomplishing something here. I mean do you not miss where you came from? Or didn't you at the not-recent occasion when you found the door?"

"I do, a little. But there is no opportunity to go back."

"If I found Milliways and my door insisted on opening to here instead of to where I was when I was alive, I'd wait for one of my alts or their friends or my girlfriend or her brother or - anyone I knew. And I would expect this to eventually lead to me going home, or at least somewhere nicer than here even if ultimately it was deemed too awkward to have two Empresses of Atlantis with only one Atlantis to go around. What do you mean, no opportunity?"

"Neither I nor anyone I know found Milliways while I was alive. I would certainly have remembered it. So I don't hold out much hope that they will if I hang around long enough."

"Fair enough. There's six of me that we know of who've been to Milliways. We have a shared room, there."

"I don't believe I've heard of anyone with so many duplicates."

"You've got lots, too," Shell Bell says. "Not as many, but plenty. We didn't work out a nicknaming system for your template so they'll be hard to enumerate now that I don't have a perfect memory anymore, but we'd collectively encountered four of you, not counting, well, you. And a number of me came with a different template; we called that template 'Whistles' and we know of five of those."

"Quite the circus, all together."

"Oh, yes. As of the last time I checked I think I was the only Bell who'd met all five of the others. I think Juliet's met more of you than I have, though. I can't remember exactly... but I think so. So it was never exactly group photo time. But it was fun."

Shell Bell waits.

"Okay. Thanks for the tea and conversation and invaluable warnings," says Shell Bell, swallowing the last of her beverage and getting up.

"Anytime."

"D'you want my res code?" Shell Bell asks as they head out of his place.

"May as well. Got a pen?" he jokes.

She giggles, and writes her code down on a corner of a file page and tears it off - very carefully; she might take a while to find more paper - and hands it over.

He reads it, then steps back inside to put it down. Things tucked in one's pockets are not safe during contracts.

She can move her eyes, yes, and she can talk. Whoever is puppeting her doesn't seem inclined to make themselves known, though. She walks down the unfamiliar street, and whoever it is follows along behind.

"I'm not interesting," Shell Bell squeaks. "I'm - I'm not a fun toy. I don't have anything to recommend me."

"Are you sure?" a soft voice inquires from behind her. "You might just be saying that. How do I know, until I try?"

"I'm a terrible liar," Shell Bell whimpers. "I'm a complete wimp, it'll be no challenge to get me to scream, I don't scream interestingly either, please please please just let me go -"

"You can't win this, you know," the voice says in friendly tones. "You think you want to be boring, but I think you want to do whatever makes me happy. Let's see who's right."

"Why me?"

Lightly, carelessly: "You were there."

"Please. Please let me go. I just - I - anything - I can't - please -"

"Shhhhh."

Shell Bell sits up, slowly, hands out ahead of her in case the lid is right there to hit her head on. "Please let me go," she whispers hoarsely. "Please."

Maybe she will be allowed a long bath. It'll probably be more comfortable than trying anything else. (She does look in the cabinets after starting the water running to cover the sound. Just in case there's something useful.)

Bell tucks her feet under herself and leans on the wing of the chair. "What do you want?" she murmurs.

"Well, isn't that a question," says the voice. "The truth is, I'm very lonely."

"You would have looked at me," says the voice. It sounds very sad. "People say they won't, sometimes. But I don't believe them anymore."

"You could've closed my eyes and I would've been freaked out but you could've explained, you could've blindfolded me and had a moment to take my eyelids again if I turned out to insist on it," Shell Bell says. "You didn't have to put me in a box to get me not to look at you."

"Is that so?" the voice murmurs. "But you could just be saying that too."

"I am not making up the fact that if you blindfolded me you'd be able to reassume control of my body before I could get the blindfold off. I'm not fast, or sneaky, or anything else I'd need to be to win a contest like that."

"Hmmmm," says the voice, and then falls quiet.

"I just don't like it."

"What are you going to do with me?"

"Keep you for a while," the voice says unconcernedly. "Until I let you go."