“Are you still in school?”
“Uh, no.”
She puts her arm out for me to take. “So, you graduated?”
“I didn’t go to college…or finish high school,” I murmur as I place my hand on her forearm.
She pats me softly. “That doesn’t determine your worth.”
“I know,” I say, a little too defensively, and pink flares around my feet.
We both stare down at the leaking magic, like it’s trying to escape me.
She arches an eyebrow. “Lying is pretty obvious here.”
“What is this freaking floor made of?” I mumble.
“Magical lie-detector stuff,” she says with a shrug.
Light wraps around us in a blink, and the disembodied voice chimes, “Calculating trajectory, two, one, nine point zero, Legal Proceedings.”
The sucking sensation overtakes my body and then we’re levitating. The travel takes only a fraction of a second, leaving me disoriented again as I look at very different surroundings. There are green plants that sort of resemble trees, but they have a lot more noodly branches that move…
There are a lot more people—er, beings?—here, all of them a little wary of us as we walk toward the white edifice ahead. The architecture is basic, clean, and functional. I guess the weird trees make up for how bland it looks here. Very corporate.
Sylvia stops at a kiosk outside the building for directions, and then we’re walking through walls again. The inside of the building is just as bland as the outside. No art, no water fountains, no bathrooms…what the hell is this place?
Before I get the opportunity to ask, Sylvia is running down the hall into Apollo’s arms. He’s wearing more clothes than the last time I saw him—a black turtleneck and dark slacks. Then I realize his wings are nowhere to be seen. He must be a shape-shifter, too.
I stand beside them in a small alcove off the main hallway as they lavish one another with affection.
“You’re just in time,” Apollo says. “They’re sealing the room in a few minutes.”
He taps his foot, and aqua blue magic fires out from where he stands toward the wall. It lights up in a rectangular door shape, and then the wall disappears, revealing a bright coliseum.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of beings are gathered in the tiered circular space, speaking to one another avidly. The noise in the room is an oscillating hum of different kinds of chatter. Apollo leads the way in, and we stop just beyond the threshold.
A beam of white casts down around us, and then we’re in the stands. I grab on to the railing in front of me, trying to stop my head from spinning.
“You’ll get used to that,” Sylvia says.
“Better yet if this is the last time we need to come here,” Apollo says with a hand against his stomach.
A chime dings through the room, and quiet falls in the stands. An alien voice speaks next, but it’s quickly replaced by an English-speaking voice.
“The room is now sealed. Presiding adjudicator Kl3pk/rt—” I cringe at the sharpness of the untranslated name—“will now begin session 80:085:101.”
I yawn and press against my ears with my fingers. “That was something.”
Sylvia is doing the same. “Magic in the room isn’t perfect for everyone.”
Some being beside me grunts, its long trunk waggling side to side in a very chiding manner. I take that for a “shh” and close my mouth.
The next several minutes is Klepkurt—a spider-like creature with so many eyes, they must be able to seeeveryoneat once—speaks about rules and regulations, then covers the docket. There are twenty-eight parole hearings in this session, and Rhazan is last.
I glance around at the multitude of beings in the room. Do people just come to these for fun, or are there really this many of them invested in the outcomes of parole hearings? Or are some of them witnesses?
I don’t have to wait long for answers as the first person is light-beam abducted from the stands and placed at the bottom of the coliseum with the first parolee.
