The ramp was lowered, and Mary stepped from the airship to the earth, keeping the grace of her stride even as her feet sank almost to her ankles in the living world with each step.

But as she got closer to the tree, she saw that something was terribly, terribly wrong. The net had been taken down, and there was no Afterlight inside. All that remained was the empty popcorn tub on the ground—the bait she had left, just as her brother used to—but while the McGill offered his captives slavery, Mary offered them freedom. Or at least her definition of it. But there was no Afterlight in the net to receive her gift today.

“Musta gotten out,” Speedo said as he came up behind her.

Mary shook her head. “No one gets out of these nets.”

And then a scent came to her from the tree. It was a sweet, heady aroma that filled her with a rich blend of love, swirled with loathing.

The aroma was coming from a brown handprint on the trunk of the tree. A handprint left there to mock her.

“Is that dried blood?” Speedo asked.

“No,” she told him, maintaining her poise in spite of the fury that raged within her. “It’s chocolate.”

CHAPTER 3
Audience with an Ogre

It was an old steam engine, forged and destroyed in the nineteenth century, but so well-loved by its conductor that it earned a place in Everlost. Of course it could travel only on tracks that no longer existed. Such were the inconveniences of life after life.

A kid with hands much too large for his body, and with a cigarette that never went out dangling from his lip, had freed the boy from Mary’s net. Now he gripped the kid’s arm a little too hard as he moved him through fields and woods toward the waiting train.

“Whose train is it?” The boy asked in a panic, “What’s gonna happen to me?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” said the kid with big hands, “or I’ll send you down soon as look at you, I swear I will.” Then he pushed the boy up the steps and into a parlor car.

The smell hit him right away.

“Oh, no! No!”