As Momo descended, the dancing lights of the land of the dead began to congeal. What once looked like a festival of fireflies transformed into a bustling metropolis. She came upon it like a skydiver, bounding from above, until she finally swooped to a stop overhead.

Spotting a familiar place, she laughed.

It was a nail salon. A cheap, gaudy one with a faded neon sign. It sat just a few yards away from Momo, floating in what could best be described as a soap bubble. These bubbles seemed to indicate portals to different replicant areas—levitating next to the nail salon bubble was an Irish cliffside, then a little Norwegian bakery, and so on, and so forth.

Gazing into each bubble was like looking through the glass of an elaborate snow globe. Inside each she could see people moving in slow motion, their languidly moving bodies mangled by the fish-eye lens effect of the orb. Very occasionally, a person would pop out of the bubble, float apathetically through the nothingness in between, and then land in another.

Momo remembered what Nyk said about these places, that “replicant areas are places in the Nether that look like other places. The Nether isn’t really a place at all, it’s just a collection of energy that has nowhere else to go. So when a lot of souls from the same place end up there, their combined memories tend to create a replicant area.”

So, by Nyk’s definition, the Nether was kind of like Los Angeles. She could find a Chinatown, a Little Saigon, a Little Tokyo, a Via Italia, a Koreatown, hell, there was probably even a Little Kalendale or a Nam’Dal copy in here for all the late criminals and venison-sellers. The idea of hunting down someone from her hometown and grilling them on what happened to her, or her car, for that matter, was extremely tempting.

Death Box first, she reminded herself, casting [Focus] and fluttering towards the nail salon. Finding out what happened to your food-poisoned corpse later.

As soon as she touched the bubble, she was completely engulfed. Jerked inside with the violent force of a Santa Ana wind. It was like falling through a television screen; everything that seemed distant and far away was suddenly painfully, viscerally present. The smells, the sounds, the colors. Even if this was only a dead man’s imitation, the streets certainly seemed alive; the maddening honking of horns, the clicking of heels and suitcases, the sputtering of jackhammers, the screaming men in bright orange construction vests. It was all there.

Suddenly affected by gravity, she collapsed onto the dirty sidewalk, hundreds of pedestrians storming her by. She grimaced, instantly remembering why she wanted to get off Earth in the first place. It was just so… much.

Not that this was really indicative of Earth, exactly. This was clearly a clone of Manhattan. There were some obvious differences between the earthly version and this one—namely, all the species of Alois and beyond were represented here, with more pigeon-heads and rat-people mucking about than actual pigeons and rats. There were even some races that Momo had never seen before, like green-skinned giants with eighteen eyeballs, human-looking children with fish skin.

Overwhelmed by the noise, even with the noise-canceling filter of [Focus], she shouldered her way into the nail salon. The door jingled, then flung behind her, taking several swings on its hinges before reaching equilibrium again. The cacophony of sound that was the city mellowed to a quiet, quickly replaced by a nondescript jazzy pop song sung in some nonsense language.

“You got an appointment?”

A pigeon-headed lady with nails as long as pencils skewered her with a look. She was standing behind a counter and absentmindedly opening and closing the cash register. A nametag on her white blouse indicated that she was called Bunny. Odd name for a pigeon, she thought, but Momo had seen weirder things in New York.

“No,” she said quickly, keen to get to her pressing questions. “Actually—”

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“Let me stop you there. We’re reservation only.”

Momo stared at her, bemused. Her train of thought came to an abrupt stop.

“What kind of nail salon is reservation only?” she accidentally voiced aloud.

Another strange thing about the Nether—it was hard to keep one’s thoughts in one’s head. They tended to bubble up like boiling water. Devola had explained this phenomenon to her once, a long time ago when Momo was only half-listening; allegedly, the barrier between the subconscious and conscious melted away in the afterlife. The premise seemed horrific to Momo, whose main source of anxiety in life was mixing up the two.

“You new here or something?” Bunny scolded her, opening the register again; it made a maddening ka-ching sound each time. “You need a reservation. And to get a reservation, you need to be a real big wig, I’m talking mega money. We don’t just do anyone’s nails, you got it? This place serves goddesses. Nah, that ain’t even true—we serve the goddess. One and only. So unless you’re Morgana in a wig and a trench coat, we don’t want your business.”

Momo took it all back. The Nether really nailed New York. It had only been five minutes, and she already felt both stupid and poor.

“Actually,” Momo started, and Bunny immediately gave her a look that said if you don’t turn around I’m going to beat you with a broom, but she continued regardless. “That’s exactly who I’m looking for. Morgana. My name’s Momo, I work for her, I guess. She’s like my boss. Or my boss’s boss. Actually, if you’ve seen Valerica, she’d do fine, also.”

At the mention of Valerica, every head in the salon turned to her.

Bunny spoke lowly. “What did you say?”

“...Valerica?” Momo said, suddenly feeling like the woman’s name was some kind of slur.

Hushed whispers overtook both the patrons and the nail artists.

“Get out,” Bunny insisted, reaching for the broom. “I’m warning you, if you bring up that name again,”—she winced, as if it was genuinely paining her—“I’m going to whack you all the way back to Nether Brushwick. Get out!”

Momo waved her hands in front of her face, trying and failing to explain, but eventually she gave up; they thrust her back into the streets. She fell to the sidewalk just outside the store, holding her knees and looking out at the wide street in front of her—at expensive red cars and lizard people and yellow buses—with a single thought racing around her mind.

What the hell did Valerica do this time?

Either way, she didn’t have much time to dwell on it. If the people of the Nether were going to be of no help—she had to consult her second best option.

She brought her bracelet to her mouth, and tapped the side of it three times as Zephyra had taught her. Faint elevator music played. Then, after about half a minute, an expectantly annoyed voice picked up on the other end.

“Hello?” Azrael said gruffly. “This is a bad time.”

“Hi, sorry, it’s just—”

He abruptly cut her off.

“Ah, see, I told you. It’s only my delivery guy,” he said. It sounded like he had suddenly pressed the phone to his chest, muffling it, and there was a weird performative lilt to his voice. “Just a moment, Sera. You really do need to learn some patience.”

A heartbeat-stopping chill ran down Momo’s spine.

Sera?

Had Azrael turned against Morgana too? No. That was stupid. He had been helping Momo at every turn, and Sera knew that. If she was there, it only meant trouble.

“Has … delivery man … her?” the other voice—presumably Sera—said loudly, but her voice cut out at parts. The static noise in the transmission was loud, louder than it was before. Momo guessed that it was probably the interference of being in one of these replicant areas.

“What would the Pizza Hut delivery man, of all people, know about our dear runaway Momo?” Azrael laughed. “Do you think he’d find her in his stash of pepperoni?”

“He’d know more than you … evidently, you useless, unkillable piece of …”

Momo’s cheeks reddened.

“Sorry, darling,” Azrael whispered into the receiver. Something in his tone—in the soft, sneaky way he said it—made it immediately clear that it was her he was speaking to. “But I don’t think I want pizza anymore. Lost my appetite. Why don’t you drop it off with my dear friend Valerica? She’ll be in Shibuya somewhere, I’m sure. Dancing her heart out.”

Momo heard a scream on the other end just as the line went cold.

“Shibuya?” Momo whispered.

A taxi whooshed by, then a police car. As Momo sat in a daze with her newfound information, she failed to notice the lights in the surrounding buildings go dark. Police sirens came one after another—a typical sound for New York, so she paid them no mind—but Momo eventually became alarmed as she noticed that they were encroaching around her. An entire circle of blue and white vehicles had encircled the nail salon.

Confused, she turned to face the muggy window of the salon. Inside, she could see the faces of the nail artists staring straight back at her. Bunny was gesticulating at her wildly, mouthing that’s her or something like that, but more derogatory.

A man with no face—just a void, swirling and nocturne—stepped out of the vehicle. He lifted a radio to his nonexistent mouth, and spoke.

“We’ve got a code V.”