Page 42 of A Match Made in Hell
She ignores my perfectly legitimate question and taps the next clipboard. ‘You’re supposed to be working.’
My hands tremble as I reach for it. The body I’m assessing is a girl, barely older than me. A rose is tattooed on the inside of her forearm, but the red is tinged blue now, like the rest of her skin. The paper is blank. Nausea rises in my throat when I realise what I’m going to have to do, every instinct I have trying to stop me from placing a finger to her skin – as soon as I do, a rushof something hot and powerful flows through me. I get a brief glimpse of a life that’s not mine: a hand strumming a guitar, feet pounding a racetrack, a test paper being plucked from a filing cabinet in the dead of night.
It lasts barely more than a few seconds, but when I glance at the clipboard, the paper’s full. It doesn’t tell me how she died though. Whether it was a mistake. How many things she’s going to miss out on now she’s here.
I don’t want to subject her to this.
Studying the sheet of paper intently, I try to find words such asgoodandperfectanddeserving of peace. They’re notably absent. Should I send her to Elysium anyway? The Sorter’s not watching. My hand hovers over the lever.
Push it up. All I have to do is push it up, and I won’t feel any guilt.
Unless this is part of the task. Maybe if I sort somebody wrong, I won’t make it to the end. I can’t fuck this up. The text in front of me may as well be written in neon lights:liar . . . fraud . . . cheat.
Fuck’s sake. I close my eyes, turn the lever to the right, and hope she doesn’t hate this place as much as I do. Everything sounds too loud: my breathing, my feet scuffing the floor, the sound of the chute opening. The way her body thuds as it drops. I bite my lip, refusing to cry in front of the Sorter.
The next one is marginally easier. And the next. On and on I go, hating myself every second, but I turn that lever to the right time and time again. Nobody here is good. Maybe Elysium is a myth. Perfection is impossible; the very nature of humanity is to do what we want and screw the consequences.
For me, that consequence was death. I ram the next lever so hard it rattles.
Ahead of me, the Sorter is practically chipper as she condemns people to this place, whistling a jaunty tune andflicking her tail.
‘How did you get this job, anyway?’ I ask, desperate to take my mind off the task at hand. ‘Did you appear at the dawn of time and start sorting?’
‘Not exactly.’ She grins at her clipboard, revealing a set of pointed incisors, and shoves the lever down. My blood runs cold despite the heat blasting from the chute when it opens, black smoke pluming within. The body sizzles as it descends.
I can’t stop my eyes welling with tears this time. Wiping them away in violent strokes, I mutter, ‘I cannot wait to get out of this place.’
‘Hm,’ the Sorter hums. Sending someone to Tartarus has given her a bounce in her step, making the clop of her hooves sound like a vigorous tap-dance. ‘You’re welcome, by the way.’
‘For what, you letting it slip about the tasks?’
‘Maybe I didn’t let it slip. Maybe it was my good deed for the century.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Yeah, you’re all heart.’
‘Well, now,thatwould be difficult,’ she muses. ‘We demons don’t have hearts.’
‘You don’t?’ I blink. My next question follows almost immediately, like I’d snatch the answer from her mouth if I could. ‘Does Sath?’
What if he’s as heartless as the rest of them? The thought stings, and I’m not sure why.
The Sorter smiles. ‘You sound worried. Afraid those sad eyes of his are just for show?’
I shove the lever on my next corpse with barely a glance at the paperwork. ‘Of course I’m not worried.’ I add a shrug for good measure.‘He seems almost human compared to the rest of you, but he has to be in charge for a reason, right? I was curious, that’s all.’
‘If I were you, I’d spend a little less time being curious aboutSath and a little more time focusing on passing these tasks.’
‘Because you care so much about me getting to leave this place.’
‘I care as much as he does,’ she says sweetly.
My fists clench. Riddles upon riddles upon lies. Sath doesn’t care about me leaving, not really, he just wants his concession when I pass – whatever it is. I can’t see any way their visions could be aligned – Sath says he wants Asphodel to be safe, whereas the Sorter is friends with Aric who wants to tear this place apart.
My stomach twists. Unless Sath is lying to me. Unless he is a demon, soulless and empty inside, and he’s only pretending to worry about the humans here because he knows I want him to. I thought it the day I met him: he’s temptation itself. What if he’s moulded himself into someone good and decent because he’s realised that’s what will temptme?
We work the next few hours in silence. I have more questions, about a million of them, but I can’t trust the answers she’ll give. Besides, as time passes, I’m struggling to remember what they were. My eyelids droop. My wrist aches from the endless shoving of levers. I want to stop.
I don’t. The lights dim for hours before flickering back to life, like day has turned to night and back again. I have no idea. I move on autopilot, ignoring the way my feet burn. I go on and on until my legs buckle, struggling to hold my weight a moment longer, sending me flying towards the next slab. My knee knocks the edge, sending a blinding pain into my already throbbing head. I shove the lever to the right without reading the clipboard. It’s always the same.
