Rali rode the elevator of stars back down—or maybe up—with Uchiko in silence.

  Sushi poked her head out of his pocket. “Is Sushi and Rali going to Grady now?”

  “No.” He wondered if he looked as stunned as he sounded.

  “But Rali said!” She swam up to shout in his face, lost her bearings, and grabbed onto his hair and cheek to steady herself. “Rali said if Sushi didn’t crunch sparkle rocks, then Sushi and Rali go save Grady! Sushi didn’t crunch! Sushi didn’t!”

  Uchiko let out a huff. “It’s not possible, you dense little piscine. The Grand Reaper’s methods were irreproachable. There was nothing we could appeal.”

  The Dark Reaper had already had the preliminary paperwork on hand.

  “It’s all right here,” he’d told them, producing a file. He had leaned over the paper and read, “When confronted, Grady Hake refused to give up his life peacefully. Reapers on the scene attempted to take it by force. There was a struggle. Several Reapers were injured. To avoid immortal casualties, the Grand Reaper had to seal the aberrant Death cultivator in the hell dimension.”

  Uchiko had made a fuss, of course, but in the end, after scouring the file herself, she had agreed that their cause was hopeless.

  Now, Rali supposed, they were leaving Xing Sishen. Where they went from here, he couldn’t say.

  “Kest will be devastated.” Rali’s heart ached for his twin. “Maybe I should try to find her. See if I can help her through this. She really loved him.”

  Uchiko wasn’t listening. She sighed in disgust and fell back against an elevator wall Rali couldn’t discern, crossing her arms.

  “I may as well turn in my resignation. Without Grady Hake, I’ll never be able to redeem myself from disciplinary action and return to active duty anyway.”

  “Where,” Sushi said loudly and slowly, as if she were talking to a pair of morons. “Is. Grady? How. Sushi. Gets. To. Him?”

  “We don’t know, Sushi,” Rali said. “That’s the thing. If the hell dimension were a place that could be found, we would go there. But no one knows where it is. Or even if it is a ‘where’ in the sense that you can arrive there. And if this whole thing is an illusion anyway—”

  “No!” Sushi snapped, yanking his hair so he had to look her in the mismatched brown and blue eyes. “No ‘everything is illusions’ now, Rali! Sushi wants Grady!”

  “Even the Grand Reaper doesn’t know how to get into the hell dimension,” Uchiko joined in. “Because of his station, he holds the authority to seal the worst offenders within, but it would be foolish to give anyone a map to a dimension meant to remain sealed for eternity. That’s just asking someone to steal the knowledge and break any number of demons and evildoers out.”

  The elevator rumbled to a stop and dinged. Uchiko led the way out.

  Rali followed her down the starry corridors. Sushi still clung to a hank of his hair, swimming alongside his face like a child holding a grownup’s hand and trying to keep pace with their longer strides.

  Getting back to Kest was the answer. If none of this was an illusion—and he was less sure than ever after that whopper of a revelation that the friend he’d thought he would save was already sealed eternally beyond help—then his twin needed him.

  He and Kest had learned when their mom died that there wasn’t any real “getting through” the loss of someone you loved. You went on with life when and how you could, and eventually you realized you were surviving without them. There were no medals on the other side, nothing gained except a different tinge to the memories you had of them. In one of the great mysteries of life, grief wasn’t easier with someone beside you, but it was certainly harder alone.

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  Outside, Rali bowed to the put-out looking Pale Reaper.

  “Thank you for your help, gracious Uchiko. Will you show us the way back to the shuttle? I would like to meditate on the transport. Perhaps while we wait for Jim-nang to return I can come up with a plan for how best to locate my twin.”

  In a flash of purple and white scales and fins, Sushi let out a frustrated hmmph and swam between them.

  “Sushi not waits. Sushi finds Grady with Lost Mirror.”

  Closing her mismatched eyes, Sushi inhaled deeply, then grunted as if she were lifting the city of Xing Sishen with just her flowing pectoral fins.

  The air rippled above her dorsal fin, like an invisible fan spreading open. Colors filled in the trembling space, painting a strange yet plush room in tans, browns, and whites yellowing with age. As the image sharpened, a chair and a couch wavered into view.

  A white-haired elderly human sat in the chair, socked feet up on an attached but slightly askew footrest. He lay back, mouth open, sunken chest over a pot belly rising and falling in time with his sinus-shaking snores. Pale light from an unseen source flickered over him, as if he’d fallen asleep watching a projector wall.

  “Sushi…” Rali began.

  The little fish shook her head, panting, and grunted again.

  In the image, a scaly, purple and white beauty with mismatched eyes, narrow shoulders, and wide hips that blended seamlessly into a scaly, flowing tailfin swam into the room. Gently, she shook the old man awake.

  He snorted and sat up, his footrest banging down with a metallic twang of springs and locks.

  “What in tarnation, Grady? How many times do I hafta tell you not to…”

  The sight of the mermaid caused him to trail off. He scrubbed a hand over his whiskery face and groaned.

  “Of all the fool dreams,” he muttered. “This ray gun Buck Rodgers stuff again.”

  “Gramps, come with Sushi to find Grady,” the mermaid said.

  The old man shook his head. “This isn’t real, honey. Grady’s gone where he can’t never come back. That ain’t how it works. One of these days I’ll go to him, but he can’t come back. It’s a one-way ride, get me?” He sighed. “Oh, course ya don’t. You’re a dream.”

  Smiling as if she hadn’t understood anything he’d said and it wouldn’t have changed anything if she had, the mermaid offered him one purple-and-white hand.

  The old man stared at it for a few seconds. He slapped out a rhythm on his thighs.

  “Well, what the hell.” He grabbed her hand and scooted to the front of the worn recliner. “Help me up, sweetheart.”

  Both of them grunted and strained, but finally they got the old man up. He squinted around the faded and stained carpeted floor, then finding what he was looking for shoved his socked feet into a pair of worn slippers.

  “All right, where we going? Mars? Neptune? Into the twenty-fifth century?”

  “Xing Sishen.”

  “Must be.” The old man shrugged. “Lead the way.”

  In the air in front of Rali, Sushi’s tiny body trembled. The little fish panted with exhaustion, her gripper-covered tongue hanging out like an overheated dog.

  Rali watched through eyes that felt like they were bulging out of his head as the mermaid swam backward to the edge of the image. It looked so much like she was about to back out into the real world with them that Rali took an instinctive step back to make room.

  But the mermaid began to disappear a little at a time. Her tail, her shoulders, her head.

  Just her hands were left, holding the old man’s. Pulling him forward. Forward. Forward.

  Gnarled human hands darkened with age and scarred with long years of manual labor poked out of the image. Then slack-skinned but still muscled arms in a white pocket t-shirt followed by a sunken chest and round belly.

  “How are you doing that?” Uchiko demanded, her mirror eyes wild as they darted from the little fish to the elderly three-dimensional human emerging from the entirely two-dimensional image.

  A headful of thinning white hair and liver spots came next.

  “Stop that this instant!” Uchiko shouted at Sushi. “Put him back!”

  “Whoa!” the old man yelped when his flannel pajamaed legs came fully into the real world.

  The image of that strange sitting room disappeared the second the old man’s worn slippers slapped down on the invisible starry surface of Xing Sishen’s street.

  He wobbled, clearly disoriented.

  Rali lurched forward and caught the honored elder’s arm to steady him.

  “Sushi, what did you do?” Rali whispered through a suddenly dry throat.

  “Gramps is Grady’s Lost Mirror,” Sushi wheezed. “Gramps helps Sushi find Grady.”

  Then the exhausted little fish slumped to the ground, unconscious.

  e