Momo turned backwards to face her crew, dread dripping off her features. “The mark,” she cried out. “It wasn’t me.”

She furiously grasped for the box in her pocket, her fingers trembling. She could hear the horror before she could see it—hundreds of souls calling out in agony, singing a chorus of death and destruction. The matchbox had finally found its match.

Luckily, Momo had a plan. A last-ditch effort of a plan, but it was all that remained.

Leaving no time for goodbyes, she raised her unoccupied hand, hovering it right above Jarva’s ashes. The ruinous sky above her roared, as if Sera herself was cackling with sadistic joy. Momo briefly wondered if this was still part of Kyros’s plan. Did he know Sera would sacrifice his subject? Had their entire battle been a ploy? Were he and Sera still working together, their hands intertwined around some devious conclusion?

Momo’s mind buzzed with overwhelming, nauseating contradictions. The box pulsed in her hand like a heartbeat. Intuition told her there were only several seconds left until combustion.

“[Rift Hands – Create Portal]”

She clawed into the air, ripping into the ether. It created a tear in reality; a six inch raggedy fissure which, once made, started to rapidly expand from its edges. She took a millisecond to regard what lay on the other side: a milky, infinite blackness, like the one she had floated in a few times before, awaiting Morgana’s summons.

The skill wasn’t specific about what was on the other end. Momo was quite confident the ability was meant to be used like a trash disposal—to fling enemies and waste into. She had thought of just throwing the Wraith Box in there and being done with it, but she couldn’t; she had made a promise to herself. She wouldn’t just give up on these trapped souls.

She hugged the cube to her chest, and dove forward.

—

Time worked differently in the Nether.

It was a fact Momo had learned in her brief stint with Morgana, and a principal she was betting her life on. Seeing as she was still all in one piece, and not stuck swimming amongst a feral school of soul chains, the principal had held true.

She carefully peeled her cupped hands from her chest to reveal the box: stuck in stasis, paralyzed in a moment of time. She could still feel the faint hum of energy coming from its center, but the once hyperactive chemical reaction had slowed to a manageable crawl.

Relieved, she looked around. As it turned out, there was not much to look at. Her surroundings were the color of death herself, black and purple and silvery, with the consistency of frothing milk. Momo was simply the latte art floating at the top of the fizzy glass. She got the sense that everything important lay beneath her, unseen.

“Valerica was wrong,” she whispered to herself, hearing her voice come back in echoes. The realization hit her like a wall of bricks; it was quite astounding.

Momo had not been counting on just one principal, but two—that Valerica’s assumption, that the device couldn’t transit to the Nether without detonating, had been incorrect. Unlike Sera, Valerica held very little knowledge about soul chain metaphysics; it wasn't like Momo knew much more—she probably couldn’t have even spelled metaphysics with a gun to her head—but after her chat with Lione, the inconsistency became quite obvious.

Valerica had thought any strong force would be enough to make the device go kaboom. But the fact was that this mark—the specific activating soul chain, which turned out to be Jarva himself—was the only thing that could cause the Wraith Box to activate. And once it was activated, as Lione explained, there was no further activating it; it simply set events into motion.

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Momo hadn’t been one hundred percent certain that this was true, which is why she hadn’t tried it before, but the science of it was quite obvious now. Soul chains were designed explicitly to be able to pass through to the Nether. It was the very use of them. In the same way that Nyk had carried the device to Alois on that fateful day, Momo had simply returned it.

(She had returned it in an altered, far more alarming state—surely—but what mattered was it was no longer a threat to her city, her friends, her queendom.)

Unfortunately, Momo didn’t have time to bask in the astounding moment that this was: that she had actually trusted her own intuition over Valerica’s. There was still, after all, a death box to dismantle. She wasn’t so stupid as to try doing that alone, though; since she had already made it to the Nether, it was worth tracking down Morgana, Valerica, really truly anyone, first. Momo had gained self-confidence, sure, but not enough to try and reverse engineer a nuclear bomb without a supervisor.

Of course, there was the matter of finding them.

Stuck with nothing but the endless darkness, a silly idea came to Momo to try. “[Eyes of the Nether Demon],” she murmured, and watched as, almost instantly, the space came alight. White streamers of light danced around her vision, floating loosely and then finally congealing into shapes.

She laughed.

Of course.

As she suspected, she was in a dump.

Several rotting banana peels floated next to her face. The front half of a Toyota, with an eroding New Jersey license plate, was levitating a yard in front of her. That looks like my old Yaris, she thought, although the car was in such bad shape it was hard to tell. She tilted her head down, and saw an expanse of faint, glowing lights far, far below her, blinking like fireflies. The quality of everything was very fuzzy, like gazing into the watery surface of the ocean at midnight.

When she squinted, it didn’t really get better, or worse. But when she closed her eyes completely, a much weirder thing happened—everything came into crystal focus. It was as if her human eyes had been acting like cataracts to her real vision.

“That’s so creepy.”

With her eyes closed tight, she hovered over to the Toyota. It was a gray Yaris, the same color and make as her own, but with several long scratches along the doors. She knew that the chances it was actually hers were ridiculously slim, and that this wasn’t a good time by any means, but she had gone on for so long without a trace of Earth, without a hint of her past life; it was impossible for her to just look away.

I’ll humor myself for just a second.

When she tugged at the handle, the door peeled right off its hinges, revealing a beat-up seat cushion, four packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes, a plastic hula girl figurine on the dashboard, and a whole stack of neglected parking tickets stuffed in the passenger compartment.

She took in a shaky breath. She had never smoked, and she certainly didn’t own any hula girl figurines, but the parking tickets…

Pushing her hand roughly into the compartment, she extracted a handful of them, smoothing one out on her palm. It was a ticket for fifty dollars. Illegal parking on private campus property. She had received a countless number of these during her time in Albany. She had been too embarrassed to ask her parents for more money—enough to cover the yearly parking spot—so she had instead parked illegally in various places around campus, never the same one twice.

“It’s a miracle I wasn’t arrested,” she mumbled.

She found, miraculously, that the keys were still in the ignition. If she had any remaining doubts about this car belonging to her, the keychain cleared them entirely; it was a small shrink plastic dumpling. “For my Momo dumpling,” her dad had said, laughing at his own pun. “Get it?”

She clenched it hard in her hands.

You can roll up in a ball and cry later. Not now.

She removed the keychain from the ignition and left the rest of the car alone. She had plenty of questions—who had taken the car after she died, what kind of accident had they gotten in, was it serious, who in her family would ever buy Lucky Strikes, what was her Yaris doing floating around the Nether—but she stuffed them all down, promising herself she’d get to them eventually, after she’d done what she needed to do.

She stuffed her keychain in her pouch next to Valerica’s gifted Nether Nectar. Then, tucking in her wings and fixing her eyes towards the shimmering lights, she began to soar downwards.