Black Mirror

Chapter 12 - Cupid Carries A Gun

"I'm still alive, aren't I?" Ariel gives him a grin as he passes through the door.

I turn to Kensi and exchange smiles with her, then I do the same with Gabe. Except he doesn't smile. He's too tense. Harris bites his lip, then asks, "You okay?"

"I just..." Gabe takes Harris' hand. "I know we're not gonna get to see Alex, but I wish we could."

Alex. Oh man, did you have to remind me? Well, sure, we'll be in Hell for this mission, but still, Heaven will only be a stone's throw away. It'll only be too easy to detour over to the Bridge and pay Feathers a visit. After all, being dead mortals, we can do it invisibly and undetected now.

"I wanna see him too," I say, seeing Harris nod along with me. "But like you said, we can't. We're just gonna take that missing piece and go, yeah?"

Someone knocks on the doorjamb. It's Russell. "Guys! You want cookies or not? Red and green like Christmas, and it's not even Halloween yet!"

Harris tugs on Gabe's hand as some kind of gravitational sugar force draws him (along with the rest of us) into the Terminal. "Don't worry, Gabe. I wanna meet Alex too, you know."

"Did you talk him up for Harris like you did for me?" I ask Gabe in a stage whisper.

"Why wouldn't I?" Gabe doesn't even bother pretending to keep the conversation private. "We're each other's biggest champions, me and Alex."

On the other side of the Terminal door, Russell and Ariel (the latter lowering the Black Mirror onto a desk) stand next to Grace Muscat and her array of Christmas-colored cookies. "Sono squisiti, sì?" She pushes the plate towards us kids. "I got these special from Italy."

"She means she got them from Trader Joe's, and they had Italian packaging," Russell says. "Not that it makes them any less good."

Ariel looks down at his own half-eaten chocolate-drizzled cookie. "I never understood why the trip between universes cost so much blood sugar."

"Better that than an arm and a leg," I say, scarfing down a cherry macaroon whole. (Wait, aren't macaroons French? And aren't they usually coconut-flavored?)

"Literally or figuratively?" asks Kensi.

Harris can't keep his good cookie down, he's so busy laughing. Gabe isn't, because he still looks a tad bit more nervous than the rest of us. It's okay, I think. We'll find some way to let Alex know we're back.

You swear?

Yeah. Now that I've made this promise, I so very much don't want to break it.

Once we're all cookied up, Ariel picks up the Mirror again, and he and Russell take us to a door marked with the familiar crescent-armed triangular Hell symbol in red. "How do you know this is the right door?" I ask.

"The system usually automatically assigns the right door to whoever's looking for it," says Russell.

"Usually," Grace chimes in from across the chamber as she sticks her cleaned-off plate of cookies back into her desk. Does she have a Star Trek replicator in there somewhere? Or maybe a mini-oven? The Terminal's got some pretty advanced medical technology - how else were they able to fix up people like me and Kensi and Gabe and Harris after we died? But about the other kinds of technology, I'm not so sure.

Russell opens the door and invites us through with a flourish. On the other side is a dark, damp forest late at night, and there's tons of mud to go around right in front of us. Gabe growls as his feet, his pretty brand-spanking-new Converse (a gift from Harris, who'd noticed his old ones were, well, old), sink into a couple of inches of semisolid brown. (That came out sooooooo wrong.) "Do we always have to come out of the Terminal and step in mud?" he asks nobody in particular.