The last thing William saw was a golf cart.
Not a car or a truck. Not anything with the common decency to be intimidating.
A golf cart driven by a man in his seventies who had, for reasons that would never be fully explained, taken it off the golf course, through a gate, across a parking lot, and directly onto the pedestrian walkway outside Greenfield Mall at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.
William had been standing there eating a convenience store sandwich.
He had not even finished it.
In the half-second before impact, he registered three things: the cart, the small boy who had run ahead of his mother directly into its path while chasing a balloon, and the distance between himself and the boy, which was just short enough to be tempting.
William was not a hero. He had never described himself as a hero. He was a thirty-one year old man with average looks, a series of jobs that had never quite worked out, and a documented history of things going wrong around him for no statistical reason.
But the boy was right there.
So he moved.
He got the kid out of the way. Shoved him sideways, clean and clear, the balloon drifting up into the afternoon sky completely unaware of the drama happening beneath it.
William did not get himself out of the way.
The golf cart struck him at its maximum speed of nineteen kilometers per hour, which under normal circumstances would not be fatal, except that William stumbled backward from the impact directly into an open drainage ditch that the mall maintenance crew had been meaning to cover for three weeks and simply had not gotten around to.
He hit the bottom headfirst.
His last conscious thought was: of course.
His last unconscious thought, half a second later, was nothing at all.
He woke up standing.
This was already wrong. He had not been standing when he died. He had been very much horizontal, at the bottom of a drainage ditch, in what he imagined was an undignified position.
But now he was standing, perfectly upright, completely intact, in the middle of what appeared to be absolutely nothing.
Not darkness. Not light. The space around him was the color of the sky thirty seconds before a storm — that particular grey-gold suspension where everything holds its breath.
It went on forever in every direction. The ground beneath his feet was solid and invisible, like standing on the concept of a floor rather than an actual one.
William stood in it for a moment.
He checked himself over. He was still on his jeans and gray jacket with the convenience store sandwich still in his hand, half-eaten, which felt deeply unfair. He took a bite and it tasted normal.
"Huh," he said.
His voice came out fine leaving him stunned once again.
"Okay," he said, to no one in particular.
"Dead."
He had always suspected he would not spiral when he died. Thirty-one years of consistent, low-grade, relentless bad luck had done something to his relationship with catastrophe — smoothed the sharp edges off it. Plans fell apart. Things went wrong. You adapted and you moved forward because the alternative was lying down on the floor and the floor was usually also wet somehow.
He was dead. It was unfortunate. He had apparently died saving a child with a golf cart, which was either noble or embarrassing depending on how you looked at it.
He filed it under both and started walking.
The desk appeared after about ten minutes.
It was enormous buried under stacks of paper so tall they bent at the top. An inkwell the size of a cooking pot sat beside a quill that was writing on its own, scratching steadily through some invisible document. Behind it sat a figure in grey robes with the expression of a man who had been doing paperwork since before the invention of paperwork and had long since achieved a state of transcendent administrative despair.
He did not look up.
"Name," he said.
"William Park."
The quill scratched. Several pages flipped themselves. A ledger the size of a dining table opened, scanned itself, and snapped shut. The figure made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite a hum and finally looked up.
His eyes were the same grey-gold as everything else here. His face was the face of someone very old pretending to be merely middle-aged.
"William Park," he said. "Thirty-one. Cause of death: golf cart, drainage ditch, blunt force." He paused. "The golf cart is noted as extenuating circumstances."
"Appreciate that," said William.
"You are in the Undrift." The figure folded his hands. "The transit space between lives. Your soul will be processed, assessed, and assigned based on your karma accumulation." He said this the way a man recites something he has said forty million times. "Do you have questions."
It was not phrased as a question.
"Just one," William said. "What happens now?"
The figure opened his mouth.
Something very small and very fast hit him in the side of the head.
It was a shoe.
A single small shoe, the kind worn by someone with very small feet, had flown in from somewhere in the infinite grey distance and connected with the side of the administrator's head with startling accuracy. He did not flinch. He simply reached up, removed it from where it had lodged against his ear, set it on the desk beside the inkwell, and said, without looking up:
"She is here."
"Who—" William started.
"I HAVE BEEN WAITING."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. It was high-pitched. It was extremely irritated. It had the particular quality of someone who was absolutely certain they were the most important person in any room and was personally offended that this room did not have walls.
William turned around.
Standing approximately five feet behind him, hands on her hips, silver hair absolutely everywhere, was a girl who looked to be about eleven years old and radiated the specific energy of someone who was actually several thousand years old and deeply tired of being underestimated about it.
She was wearing robes that probably cost more than his entire apartment. Her violet eyes were fixed on him with an expression that was equal parts assessment, irritation, and something that, if he had to name it, he might have called interest.
She pointed at him.
"You," she said. "You're mine."
William looked behind himself. There was nothing there.
He looked back at her. "Me?"
"Obviously you." She strode forward, closing the distance between them in about four steps, and stopped directly in front of him. She came up to his chest. She tilted her head back to look up at him and somehow managed to make this seem like she was looking down.
"I am Luxara," she announced. "Goddess of Lust. Patron of Longing, Desire, and the Wanting Heart. Fourth seat on the Divine Council. Winner of the Most Creative Domain award three centuries running, which they discontinued specifically because I kept winning it."
She waited.
"William Park," he said. "Uh. No awards."
Luxara stared at him.
Then, to his bewilderment, she smiled — small and sharp, like she had just confirmed something she already suspected. "I know who you are," she said. "I have been watching your karma accumulate for fifteen years and waiting for you to die at a statistically convenient moment." She paused. "The golf cart was not what I had in mind but I work with what I have."
The administrator cleared his throat. "The soul is registered for standard processing. If a patron claim is being filed—"
"Filed, sealed, notarized, and frankly you should have seen it coming." Luxara did not look away from William. "He is my patron soul. His karma is mine to allocate. I will be handling his reincarnation personally."
"The form requires—"
She produced a document from somewhere in her robes and dropped it on his desk without looking at it. He looked at it. He looked at her. He made the sound again — the not-quite-sigh, not-quite-hum — and stamped it.
Luxara grabbed William's wrist. Her hand was very small. Her grip was absolutely not.
"Come," she said. "We have things to discuss."
"We're just—" He stumbled after her as she walked. "Where are we going?"
"The Assessment Hall. You need to meet some people before I take you." She said take you the way someone might say claim a prize.
"Before you take me where?"
She glanced up at him over her shoulder. Something flickered in her violet eyes — genuine, warm, gone in an instant — before the mask of complete divine authority slammed back into place.
"Somewhere better," she said simply.
And she dragged him forward into the grey.