The Hall of Judgment didn’t look like a courtroom. It looked like a factory designed by a madman who hated color.

  As I followed Hades through the obsidian gates, the scale of the pce hit me. It was a cavern so vast that the ceiling was lost in a swirling vortex of grey souls—a literal river of ghosts flowing toward a massive, automated scale in the center. There were no demons with pitchforks, only rows of skeletal scribes in tattered robes, their quills scratching endlessly against parchment made of dried skin.

  The sound was the worst part—a low, constant hum of a billion whispers, the collective "Why?" of every person who had ever died. It pressed against my eardrums, trying to find a way into my head, trying to convince me that I was just another entry in a dusty ledger.

  "It’s efficient, isn't it?" Hades said, his voice echoing with a hollow, metallic ring. He didn't look back at me. He walked with the heavy, slumped shoulders of a man who had seen the end of the movie a million times and just wanted the credits to roll. "No bias. No mercy. Just the Law of the Weight. If your soul is heavier than a feather of truth, you go down. If it's lighter, you go... well, nowhere special."

  "Where is he?" I demanded. My voice cut through the humming like a bde.

  I felt the power in my chest surging. The gold veins in my arms were beginning to leak a faint, warm light that made the nearby scribes hiss and recoil. To them, I was a sun standing in a tomb, a living contradiction to the grey silence of the dead.

  Hades stopped in front of a massive, rusted lever that stood near the central scale. It was covered in thick yers of dust and cobwebs, a relic of a time when a God actually sat on the throne. He looked at it with profound disgust.

  "I haven't pulled this in three centuries," Hades muttered. "The Law does it for me now. It’s cleaner that way. Less... personal."

  "Pull it," I said, stepping closer. The air around me started to vibrate, the pressure of the Mediator’s presence threatening to crush the stone floor. "Find Leo. Now."

  Hades turned, his tired eyes narrowing. "You have a lot of nerve, little spark. You come into my house, humiliate my Collector, and tell me to go back to work? Do you know how many kings I’ve watched beg for a single drop of water? Do you know how many gods I’ve buried?"

  "I don't care about your resume, Hades," I said. I let the raw authority of the Mediator bleed into my words, making the very walls of the Hall tremble. "I am the reason you have a floor to stand on. I am the reason there is a 'Down' for souls to go. Now, find him, or I will decide that this Hall no longer exists."

  The silence that followed was absolute. Even the humming of the ghosts stopped.

  Hades stared at me. He saw the way the shadows fled from my feet. He saw that I wasn't just a "ghost"—I was a hole in the universe that the Law couldn't fill. A slow, grim smile touched his lips—the first sign of life I’d seen on his face.

  "Fine," Hades whispered. "Let’s see if the machine can handle a wrench like you."

  He gripped the rusted lever. His muscles, corded like ancient tree roots, flexed. With a violent, bone-grinding screech, he smmed the lever down.

  The Great Scale groaned. The gears of the Underworld, frozen for centuries, began to turn with the sound of a thousand tectonic ptes shifting. Dust rained from the ceiling. The scribes screamed as their parchments burst into fmes, unable to record the sudden shift in reality.

  "Search!" Hades roared, his voice regaining the thunder of a True King. "Search for the soul of Leo! Find the one tethered to the Error!"

  A massive screen of smoky gss erupted in front of us. Images fshed by at light-speed—faces of the dead, thousands per second. Then, it stopped.

  A single image remained: Leo.

  He was sitting in a dark, cramped cell in the "Hollows"—the basement of the Underworld reserved for those whose souls were too broken to be weighed. He looked smaller than I remembered. He was clutching his knees, staring at a wall of cold stone, his eyes vacant and grey.

  "He’s in the Hollows," Hades said, his excitement fading back into pity. "The Law put him there because it couldn't find a 'value' for his life. To the machine, he’s just... waste."

  "Waste?" The heat in my throat had nothing to do with fire. It was the heat of an ancient rage.

  I reached out and touched the smoky gss. I didn't break it. I simply willed the "Distance" between the Hall and the Hollows to be zero. Existence didn't care about geometry.

  The gss shattered. The wall behind it dissolved into mist, and the cold, damp air of the cell rushed into the Hall.

  "Leo!" I shouted.

  The boy in the cell flinched. He slowly turned his head, his grey eyes meeting mine. But there was no recognition. No light. No spark of the partner who had stood by me in the hills.

  "Who are you?" he whispered, his voice sounding like dry leaves. "Are you the one who brings the sleep?"

  Hades stepped up beside me, his keys jingling like a funeral march. "I told you, boy. The Underworld takes your 'Why.' He doesn't know you. To him, you’re just another shadow in the dark."

  I looked at Leo, then at the King of the Dead. I felt the gold in my veins reach a boiling point.

  "Then I guess I’ll just have to give his 'Why' back to him," I said. "Along with a reason for you to stay awake, Hades."