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Then the Boss’s body tightens up as though in a seizure of his own. Fingers stiffening and splaying outward. Jaw creaking as it extends wide, wider, widest. Eyes rolling back.

The floor shudders. Dust falls from a light fixture.

A black shape rises from below. Swirls around him, a tornado of ink and shadow – tentacles, worms, fingers, whirling around and around–

Then entering his wide-open mouth. Squirming like snakes. His cheeks bulging. His abdomen distending like a starving child’s belly.

Thirty seconds of this. Then a minute. Then five.

The last of the shadows – a flicking tail – gulp down and are gone.

The Boss eyes go all black: an oil spill. Then clear again.

Brown irises are now crystalline blue.

The Boss makes a sound like: Guhhhhh.

Then: another whipcord of lightning. The world lights up. Goes dark.

Burnsy falls on his ass. Yelps as he does. Skelly’s already on the ground. Curled up in a ball. Holding her throat.

The soul cage glows. Faint light. Slow pulse. It makes a sound, too, a sound you can’t hear so much as feel. Like a television left on in the other room with the volume down, just a faint white-noise whine.

The ghost of Casimir Zoladski is gone. Trapped inside the cage.

“It’s… done,” he says. Then he shivers. He babbles, he can’t help it: “I do this all the time but – never gets easier. The death. How they die. They’re trapped in there. Replaying that moment. As they… march on. Restlessly shambling through the Shallows, through the Tangle, all the way toward… well, toward the end, I guess. Toward whatever waits in the Expanse.”

Skelly sits up. Stares at the soul cage vibrating.

“He killed his own grandson.”

“Yeah. Fuck.”

“Wh… why? What happened?”

“Some kind of summoning. I told Mookie that’s what it might be. But it ain’t in the kid. It’s in him. In the Boss. Bound in his… skin. Or maybe it’s wearing him like a fucking jumpsuit. I don’t know. But it’s something from the deep. From in the Tangle. Or maybe from all the way down.”

Now she’s really shivering. “You ever been… all the way down?”