I don’t eat anything. Even though my stomach grumbles, I know the food set out before us will do little to sate my hunger. There’s only one thing I crave, and human flesh is decidedly not on the menu. I keep my hands tucked away on my lap, chewing on my tongue in lieu of anything substantial. It would be like filling up on water. Enough to stop the stomach cramps and stave off starvation, but there would be no satisfaction in it.
Kelai watches me with a twinkle in her eyes. “You have questions,” she says.
“Not really,” I reply. “Just waiting for something to go terribly wrong.”
“Goodness, my younger brothers must have done a number on you poor things.” She leans back slightly, observing us with a graceful tilt of her head. “There’s no need to fear. I’m nowhere near as spiteful as my siblings.”
“You could be lying,” Sonam points out.
“True, but if I wanted to harm any of you, I would have done it already.”
“Why feed us?” Wen asks. “I thought this was the Court of Hunger.”
“Precisely,” Kelai says with a giggle. “I was tasked to oversee this place, but no one said I couldn’t reinterpret the trial I set forth.”
A scrumptious meal, the lovely scenery, a warm welcome, and easy conversation. All the elements of the perfectly safe and normal. And yet tension seizes my neck and shoulders, my jaw grinding my molars into a paste. Something’s bound to go wrong. It has to. How else can I explain the unease churning deep within my gut? When things are too good to be true, I find that they are, in fact, just that.
“Are you really a star?” Wen asks around a mouthful. “I thought Houyi killed all of you—”
Sooah shoves her elbow into his rib, pinning him with a glare.
Kelai merely giggles. “It’s alright, my dear. Yes, it’s true the archer shot us down, but it takes more than an arrow to kill us.”
“Is it even possible?” I mutter. “To kill a god.”
“You sound keen to try.” And then, after a moment, she says, “Where there’s a will, as they say—though I have never witnessed such a feat.”
Kelai studies me carefully. I feel her loneliness then. It washes off of her in a cold trickle, barely contained behind a crumbling dam of control. “What can I do to convince you to trust me?” she asks.
It’s Sooah who answers, gesturing elaborately with both hands. I instinctively look to Sonam, who translates, “She wants to know what courts lie ahead. What challenges can we expect to face?”
“Well, next is the Court of Dreams—”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Wen mumbles.
“—where souls are tested against their heart’s own paradise. To wake and see the truth that all is not as it could be leaves the soul shattered beyond repair.”
“You spoke too early,” I tell Wen with a bitter huff.
“And then?” Sonam prompts.
“Then comes the Court of Despair, which will test your resolve.”
“In what way?”
“Ineveryway,” she replies vaguely. “And then there’s the Court of Fear where most souls are haunted by their biggest regrets, the Court of Blades—”
Wen swallows thickly. “Blades?”
“Oh, yes. I hear that one’s a fun one. You must find your courage and tread over a path made of knives that carve your feet down to the bone. And then comes the sea of maggots of the Court ofRot, the Court of Beasts containing the venom of the world’s most vicious creatures, and finally the Court of Fire, which I feel is self-explanatory. Once you’ve made it through, you’ll find yourself at the Gates of Hell located at the very center.”
Kelai’s chipper tone has done little to soften the silence that follows. As determined as I am to escape Hell, there’s no way all four of us are going to make it out alive at this rate. A soul doesn’t have as much to worry about since they’re already dead. But what about us?
Sooah signs something else, and Sonam translates. “She wants to know if there’s a faster way out. A shortcut, perhaps. I don’t know how we’ll fare with all these courts standing in our way.”
The goddess’s face brightens. “Oh, but of course! I could probably draw you a map.”
I squint at her. This is wrong. Something about the star goddess doesn’t sit well with me. “You’re willing to give it to us? Just like that?”
