The cats led the way.

  Or rather—the cats walked in the direction they intended to go, with their tails held high, and Piper followed, and if you wanted to call that “leading” you could, but the cats would neither confirm nor deny any such interpretation.

  Grim walked ahead of her, his cosmic form compressed back into something roughly cat-shaped, roughly cat-sized, the way a river can be contained in a garden hose if it really wants to be. Three other cats flanked him—the grey tabby with stars in its mouth, a calico whose patches shifted like weather patterns across a continent, and a tiny black kitten who was either very young or very old and seemed to find the distinction irrelevant.

  “So,” Piper said to Asher, who drifted alongside her like a translucent chaperone, “where exactly are we going?”

  “The Upper Reaches,” Asher said.

  “That sounds made up.”

  “Everything here sounds made up to human ears.”

  “Fair point.” Piper watched the calico cat’s patches shift from tortoiseshell to tuxedo to solid grey and back again. “And Sarah is there? In the Upper Reaches?”

  “She’s between lives at the moment. Resting.”

  “Between lives.” Piper let that sink in. “How many has she—”

  Asher waved a hand, and a file materialized in the air between them. Not the thick, heavy file of Piper’s 847 lives. This one was different—slimmer, but luminous. Each page seemed to glow from within, like stained glass held up to sunlight.

  “Sarah has lived fourteen lives since the one you shared,” Asher said.

  Piper’s stomach dropped. Fourteen lives. Sarah had lived fourteen entire lives in the time Piper had been sitting at a desk processing files and living one simulated reincarnation. Fourteen lifetimes of experience, growth, love, loss—all of it real, all of it chosen, while Piper was still in rehabilitation learning lessons she should have gotten right the first time.

  “Can I—” Piper reached for the file.

  Asher hesitated. Glanced at Grim, who flicked an ear. Permission granted, apparently.

  “You may see the overview,” Asher said. “The details are hers.”

  The overview was enough.

  Each life was a single page, glowing with its own particular light, and even the summaries made Piper’s throat ache.

  Sarah had been a midwife in rural Brazil who fought for trans women’s access to reproductive healthcare. A teacher in South Korea who created the country’s first support program for gender-nonconforming students. A civil rights lawyer in South Africa. A hospice chaplain in New Zealand who specialized in helping dying patients reconcile with estranged family members.

  Every single life, she had chosen to help others find what Piper had tried to take from her: the right to exist as themselves.

  And in every single life, she had earned points effortlessly—not because she was performing goodness, not because she was trying to level up, but because authenticity was her default. She didn’t have to learn it. She’d always had it. It was the one thing Piper had tried hardest to crush, and it had survived everything.

  “Thirty-two thousand points,” Piper read from the bottom of the last page. Her voice was very small. “She has thirty-two thousand points.”

  “Points she never checks,” Asher added quietly.

  Of course she didn’t. Of course Sarah didn’t check her points. Because Sarah had never needed a scoring system to tell her she was doing the right thing. She just knew—the way cats knew, the way the universe knew, the way everyone seemed to know except the people who needed rigid systems and categories and boxes to feel safe.

  People like Piper.

  She closed the file gently, as if it were something fragile, though she suspected it was stronger than anything she’d ever held.

  “She’s moved on, hasn’t she,” Piper said. It wasn’t a question. “From me. From what I did.”

  “Would you want her to still be carrying it?” Asher asked.

  Piper opened her mouth. Closed it. Thought about what she actually wanted—not what her guilt wanted, not what her need for absolution wanted, but what she genuinely, honestly wanted for the person she had hurt most.

  “No,” she said. “I’d want her to be free of it.”

  +500 points: Honesty, even when it costs you

  * * *

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  The Upper Reaches looked like a waiting room.

  Piper didn’t know what she’d expected. Clouds, maybe. Pillars of light. A celestial throne room. Some kind of visual confirmation that she’d arrived at the top of the cosmic hierarchy, that she’d earned access to the VIP lounge of the afterlife.

  Instead: a waiting room.

  But it was, she had to admit, a really nice waiting room.

  The chairs were the kind you actually wanted to sit in—not the plastic torture devices from doctor’s offices or the aggressively modern furniture from tech startup lobbies, but deep, soft chairs that seemed to know exactly how your body needed to be held. The lighting was warm without being dim. The temperature was perfect without being that eerie, too-perfect comfort of her afterlife apartment.

  There was a small table with tea. Piper picked up a cup and took a sip without thinking, then nearly dropped it.

  It tasted like Saturday mornings when she was nine, curled up on the couch while her mom made pancakes. It tasted like the first sip of coffee on a cold day. It tasted like the hot chocolate her dad used to make with real milk and too much whipped cream, the kind he’d hand her without a word when she came home from school looking like the world had chewed her up.

  It tasted like every single moment in her life when she had felt, however briefly, that everything was going to be okay.

  “That’s not fair,” she said to no one in particular, blinking hard.

  There were magazines, too. She picked one up out of habit—the lifelong, bone-deep habit of picking up a magazine in a waiting room even though you have no intention of reading it—and found that it was actually interesting. An article about the migration patterns of interdimensional butterflies. A profile of a soul who’d been reincarnated as a redwood tree and had no regrets. A recipe for comfort food that adjusted itself based on what you needed to be comforted about.

  She put the magazine down.

  She couldn’t focus. Not because her brain was scattered—the afterlife had fixed that, the ADHD quieted into something manageable—but because the weight of what was about to happen sat on her chest like a cat. Which was ironic, given that an actual cat was sitting on her lap.

  Grim had jumped up the moment she sat down, circling once, twice, three times before settling into a position that said I am here and I am not leaving and if you need to fall apart, I will hold the space for that.

  He didn’t purr. That felt significant. Like even Grim knew that this wasn’t a moment for comfort. This was a moment for simply being present.

  Piper stared at the tea in her hands. It had gone cold, though it still tasted like childhood when she sipped it. Could tea be cold and still taste like warmth? Apparently. Apparently the afterlife operated on emotional logic rather than thermal dynamics.

  She tried to rehearse what she would say.

  Sarah, I’m sorry. No. Too simple. Too much like a greeting card.

  Sarah, I’ve lived 847 lives and failed this lesson every single time, and I need you to know that I finally— No. That made it about Piper’s journey. Sarah didn’t need to hear about Piper’s journey.

  Sarah, I was wrong. Closer. But not enough.

  Sarah, you were always right, and I was always wrong, and everything I did to you— No. Too self-flagellating. Sarah didn’t need Piper’s guilt. Guilt was just another way of centering yourself in someone else’s pain.

  Sarah—

  She gave up. There were no right words. There never had been. That was probably the point.

  The cats who’d led her here were arranged around the room in various states of cosmic repose. The grey tabby had claimed the highest shelf—because of course it had—and was observing Piper with the same patient, unreadable expression it had worn in the grand chamber. The calico was asleep on a stack of magazines, its patches still shifting even in dreams. The tiny black kitten was batting at a mote of light that might have been a dust particle or might have been a baby universe. Hard to tell, in the Upper Reaches.

  Asher stood by the door. Waiting. Not rushing her.

  Nobody rushed her.

  That was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in 847 lives—just letting her sit with it. Letting the fear and the grief and the hope and the shame all coexist in her chest without trying to fix any of it. Letting her be a mess in a nice chair with cold tea and a warm cat.

  She didn’t know how long she sat there. Time was meaningless, and for once, she was grateful for it.

  Grim’s weight on her lap was steady. His fur—or whatever cosmic substance passed for fur at this level of existence—was soft under her fingers. She stroked him absently, and he allowed it with the magnanimity of a being who had witnessed the birth and death of galaxies and had decided that yes, this particular soul’s clumsy affection was acceptable.

  She thought about all the times she hadn’t petted him. All the times he’d sat near her—on her desk, on her couch, at the foot of her bed—and she’d been too busy, too distracted, too wrapped up in whatever she thought was important to just reach out and touch him.

  She wasn’t going to make that mistake now.

  So she sat, and she stroked a cosmic cat, and she waited for her sister with nothing rehearsed and nothing prepared and nothing to offer except the raw, unscripted truth of a soul who had finally stopped pretending she had it all figured out.

  The silence was warm. Grim’s breathing was slow and even. Somewhere, the tiny black kitten sneezed—a sound that briefly disrupted two adjacent dimensions.

  Then the door opened.

  And Sarah walked in.

  She was radiant. Not in a glowing-angel way—not in a way that suggested performance or divine special effects or any of the dramatic flourishes the afterlife was apparently capable of. Radiant in a way that was quieter than all of that. Radiant in the way of a person who knows exactly who they are and has known for a very long time and no longer needs anyone else to confirm it.

  She looked like Sarah. The Sarah Piper remembered from the wedding invitation, from the photos she’d refused to look at, from the life she’d refused to be part of. But also different—layered, somehow, with the weight of fourteen additional lifetimes of being completely, unapologetically herself.

  She saw Piper.

  She paused.

  “Piper.”

  Not warm. Not cold. Just acknowledgment. The way you’d say the name of someone you used to know. Someone from a long time ago. Someone who mattered once, in one life, and then didn’t.

  Grim lifted his head from Piper’s lap. Looked at Sarah. Looked at Piper.

  Settled back down.

  This is yours now, the gesture said. I’ve brought you this far. The rest is up to you.

  Piper set down her cold tea. Stood up on legs that shouldn’t have been shaking—she didn’t have a real body, there was no physiological reason for trembling—but shook anyway, because some things transcend biology.

  She opened her mouth.

  All her rehearsals fell away. All the carefully constructed apologies, the eloquent speeches, the 847 lives’ worth of things she’d wanted to say. Gone. Like papers knocked off a desk by a cosmic cat.

  All that was left was the truth.