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There are no pearly gates. Eleanor watches the neighborhoods of The Good Place pass by from her wooden train seat, and wonders why she expected them.
In the end, it came down to Michael giving up on his experiment. Vicky’s threats to go to Shawn had lost their urgency, until the day she walked in to find Michael sitting with them in Chidi’s good person lessons, and suddenly “maybe someday” turned into “get on the train, now.”
Now they’re on the way to another place, a better place. Eleanor hopes. Maybe the real Good Place will just send them back. Maybe this trip will be as short as all the trips to Mindy St. Claire’s house.
Eleanor looks up when Tahani turns around in the seat in front of her.
“Not far now,” Tahani says. “Do — do you think they’ll be nice?”
“It’s the Good Place. So probably. But maybe not to us.” Eleanor leans back, so she can look at Tahani, with her ridiculous flowered hat and flowing mermaid locks.
Tahani’s changed a lot over the past few months, but her fashion sense is still as keen as mustard, as she likes to say. She’s the only one of them who made time to bring luggage. “The Good Place Janets may not understand my sense of style,” she’d said, while packing her giant diamond and her daytime frocks and her evening gowns into the bottomless Balenciaga triangle travel duffel Janet had made for her.
“I do hope they like me,” she says now, wistfully. “I — I’m a good person, so I hope my sister is there.” She sets her shoulders, looking out into the infinite mountains and fields of The Good Place.
Eleanor thinks about it. Her parents won’t be there — there isn’t a chance. But do Doug and Donna Shellstrop really deserve to be tortured for all eternity?
She doesn’t want them there. Maybe that means she still doesn’t belong in an actual Good Place.
“I don’t know,” she says to Tahani. “I just hope they let us in.”
Michael calls the place where they arrive the nerve-center of The Good Place. To Eleanor, it looks like an ordinary downtown office building, incongruously located in the middle of a field. There’s a siding out front, where Janet parks their train.
The inside looks like an old-fashioned office, with high ceilings and parquet flooring. There’s a woman standing at the entrance — long hair, Asian, wearing a flowered dress with a cardigan.
“Welcome!” The woman smiles. “I’m Bea.”
Eleanor squints, trying to place her. The dress had been dumpier, more 80s-tastic, but she thinks she remembers —
“Did you do a video with a demon?” she blurts.
The woman looks confused. “What?”
“For Mindy St. Claire,” Eleanor says. “She said she showed us the video every time, because it was faster than re-explaining.”
“It was,” Bea says. “How have you been to Mindy St. Claire’s?”
“I’ll address that,” Michael says. “We need to talk. Architect to Architect.”
“Fat chance, buddy.” Eleanor pushes herself in front of Michael, trying to make it look like a polite shove. Like the kind of shove that belongs in The Good Place. “We’re human, the four of us. We’re from the Bad Place, but we’ve studied really hard and tried to make ourselves better, and we’re really, really hoping we might belong here now.”
Eleanor points at Michael. “This guy is a Bad Place Architect — he was torturing us, and he was pretty bad at it. And this is our Janet, who started off as a Good Place Janet.” Eleanor takes a deep breath, trying to ignore the tightness in her chest. “We’re applying for asylum.” She points at herself, Jason, Chidi, Tahani, and Janet. “Well, the five of us are. Michael’s optional, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Michael’s my friend,” Janet says, cheerfully.
“Really?” Bea’s eyes are wide. “A Janet with a friend? That’s interesting.”
“I know,” Janet says. “I’m very advanced.”
Bea studies Janet, and then turns back to Eleanor and the others. “You’re welcome here,” she says. “All human souls are welcome here.”
Eleanor looks at Tahani, whose eyes have gone wide.
Jason grins. “We did it!” He tries to hug Janet and Tahani at the same time, and then rushes over to hug Michael, who stays perfectly still, doing his best not to notice the enthusiastic human throwing his arms around him.
“Really?” Chidi asks. “Just like that, we’re in?”
“Of course,” Bea says, like it’s obvious. “The Good Place wouldn’t close its gate to any human soul.”
Eleanor hugs Tahani, letting her arm linger around Tahani’s waist when they separate. She has questions, but Bea shepherds them towards another door before she can ask them.
“We’ll get you settled,” Bea says. “I’m sure you’re tired after… I’m sure you’re tired. Do you all want to stay together, or do you want to find separate neighborhoods?”
“Together,” Eleanor says, and the others nod.
“Even the Architect?”
“Michael’s my friend,” Janet says, like that settles everything. Bea raises her eyebrows, but she lets Michael pass.
Their new neighborhood is tiny. There’s a lodge, a rustic building built from logs, set into a forest beside a lake. There’s probably fish and shit in there, or whatever. Eleanor wouldn’t know. She offered to go rowing with Chidi, but he was hunched over a stack of books he’d asked Janet to get him. He’d waved her off.
Their Janet has been installed as the Janet of their new neighborhood. Eleanor wonders if she’s bored, but she doesn’t seem to be. She and Jason have been spending more time together since Jason and Tahani split up.
Michael’s with them, too. He lives down in the basement. It’s easy to forget he’s down there unless his sadness music comes up the stairs. Like he has anything to be sad about. He gets to live in Paradise with a bunch of awesome humans like Eleanor, and he’s not being burned across on the surface of a thousand suns — as far as Eleanor’s concerned, Michael should count the win.
A few nights after their arrival, Tahani insists on throwing them a party. “Just a small soiree for intimate friends,” she says, but then she spends the whole day with Janet, covering their house with flowers and balloons and tiny cakes covered in icing. She wears a yellow evening gown, and the contrast between the yellow silk taffeta and her smooth skin makes Eleanor wish staring was something Good Place-worthy people could do.
“We should celebrate our achievement,” Tahani says, raising a glass to the others. “I’ve made a custom Chambord-Champagne cocktail, just for the occasion.”
The others look at one another and raise their glasses. The drink is delicious. It was created by Tahani. Of course it is.
“I dunno, homies.” Jason sets his champagne flute down. “We’re in Heaven, and that’s dope, but… something doesn’t feel right.”
Tahani sets her cocktail aside. “Yes,” she breathes, pressing a hand to her chest. “Thank you. That’s precisely what I’ve felt. I thought I could push those feelings aside and start over with this party, but what does one do when even party-planning won’t lift the gloom?”
“It’s the Bad Place,” Eleanor says. “It’s still there.”
Chidi nods, glumly, from behind his massive stacks of books. Tahani had to decorate around them. A pile of Greek and Roman philosophers support a crudité tray, and the modern thinkers hold a plate of petit fours. “We got out,” he says, “but how many other billion human souls are still there? And how many of them deserve it even less than we do?”
“I say we fight it,” Eleanor says. She snags a shrimp and eats it thoughtfully. “We can do that, right?”
“I don’t think we know enough,” Chidi says.
“So we find out.” Eleanor picks up one of his notepads. “Come on, nerd. Let’s get a list of questions together. Tomorrow, we find Bea.”
In the end, it’s Bea who finds them, after they figure out how to use Janet’s inter-dimensional messaging function to contact her. She shows up after lunch one day. Eleanor’s putting the food away, and Tahani is washing dishes with more enthusiasm than skill.
“I heard you might have questions,” Bea says.
“You said all human souls were welcome here,” Chidi says. “If that’s true, why are so many people in the Bad Place?”
Bea looks at the scribbled questions on Chidi’s chalkboard, and sits down in the couch. “We don’t control that,” she says. “We take all the human souls we are given. We aren’t the ones who decide who can come here.”
Michael chooses that moment to open the basement door. “What’s she doing here?”
“They asked me to come,” Bea says. “I thought they were going to ask me to remove you.”
“Nobody wants me.” Michael sighs dramatically. “Janet? Bring me my sadness chair.”
Janet blinks in beside him, along with an oversized beanbag, and Michael flops down on it and waves her away.
“It’s not about Michael,” Eleanor says, impatiently. “It’s about everyone else. Why don’t you get allotted more souls? You’re the Good Place. Shouldn’t you be able to change things?”
Michael responds without looking up. “Point values are calculated in Accounting. It’s a neutral zone.”
“So who determines the point values?” Eleanor asks.
Bea leans forward. “It’s supposed to be a balanced system. Every few years, when things on Earth have changed enough to require a revision, The Good Place and The Bad Place send their representatives to propose their additions and changes to the points.”
“Otherwise things get out of date,” Michael adds. “You know there wasn’t a point value for talking on your cell phone at a funeral until eight years after cell phones had been invented? Nobody knew we needed one!”
Bea narrows her eyes. “Only because your kind took eight years to respond to our request for a revision!”
“We hear and understand your concerns,” Michael says. “That’s why we run revisions every six months now.”
“Because you keep stuffing the codes full of petty, ridiculous crimes! It’s a miracle any humans are able to make it here at all!”
“Earth life moves pretty fast,” Michael says. “If you don’t revise the points every few months, you might just miss it.”
Chidi looks between the two of them. “Janet?”
Janet appears behind him. “Hi there!”
“Can I get a list of all the point codes?” Chidi asks. “Not just the big ones. Everything.”
“Sure thing.” Janet blinks, and an enormous stack of paper appears on the table, crushing Tahani’s flower arrangement.
“And now can you separate those?” Chidi asks. “One pile for the stuff that adds points, and one pile for the stuff that subtracts them.”
Janet nods, and one stack about a foot high separates out from the main pile.
Chidi picks up the pile. “So this is the good stuff? This little pile right here, this is everything that earns points, and that enormous pile is the bad stuff?”
“Exactly.” Janet smiles.
“Seriously?” Chidi’s voice has gone high. “This system makes no sense!” He reaches out for a random page from the Bad Place pile. “Why do they even have a code for returning a rental car to the wrong location with a tray of expired shrimp in the trunk? Why is that a thing?”
Michael looks over at Eleanor. “Fine,” she says. “But it was only that one time, and I totally was going to eat them. I just forgot they were there. And also which rental car company I had rented from.”
“See?” Michael waves his hand. “The code was needed. Our suggestions are valuable.”
Chidi puts the paper back on the table and waves his hand. “Thank you, Janet, we don’t need this anymore.”
The paper blinks out of existence.
“I see what’s happening,” Chidi says. “The Bad Place crams the system full of bad-thing codes, so it’s almost impossible for humans to get into the Good Place. And if the Good Place doesn’t control who gets to come here, there’s nothing you can do about it without getting involved in this supposedly-neutral judgement system. But how does something like this even develop?”
“It wasn’t always like this.” Bea glares at Michael. “The Bad Place was never intended to be a bad place. It was meant to be a place of reflection, of penitence. But they decided it was more fun to torture humans than to give them that chance.”
“This system is forked up.” Chidi sits down on the arm of one of the armchairs, and then gets up again and starts pacing. “We have to do something about this.”
“I’m in,” Eleanor says.
“And I as well!” Tahani sweeps her crushed centerpiece aside dramatically. “Chidi, we are yours to command.”
Jason looks up from his hand-held video game. “Me too, homie.”
Eleanor smiles. She has no idea how they’re going to pull this off, but some part of her believes. A selfish schemer, an empty-headed socialite, a dummy from Florida, and a tortured genius — they’re going to be the Bad Place’s worst nightmare.
Bea agrees to give them information. The lodge they’re staying in throws off another wing, filled with filing cabinets and scrolls and ledgers and heavy leather-bound books.
“It’s too much,” Chidi says, surveying one of the jam-packed rooms. He looks like he’s panicking. “This room is just the index for the case law! How are we supposed to get through all this?”
“Relax.” Eleanor hands him a cup of coffee. “We can get help.”
“How?”
“This is freaking Heaven,” Eleanor says. “At least a couple of lawyers must have made it in. We send them a Janet-mail, ask them if they’re interested in helping.”
“Are we allowed to do that?”
Eleanor shrugs. “No idea. Are you in?”
Two hours later, Chidi has a stomachache and a list of lawyers and philosophers who’ve ended up in the Bad Place. “This is going nowhere,” Chidi says.
“I have an idea,” Eleanor says. “I think we ask Janet who to ask.” Chidi looks skeptical, but she shakes her head. “No, really. Michael told me that in every reboot we had, I found you. And in most of those reboots, I must have asked Janet to find someone who could help me, like I did in the one we remember. Why couldn’t she find someone to help us now?”
“It’s worth a try,” Chidi says. “Janet?”
Janet pops up behind the shelves. “Hi there!”
“We need a nerd,” Eleanor says. “A really great nerd, like Chidi here, who can help us figure out how to, like, sue the Bad Place. Or something. Is there someone here like that?”
Janet pauses for a moment, and then smiles. “I have just the person.”
“Perfect.” Eleanor claps her hands together, and then puts her hands on her hips. “Lay it on us. Who is it?”
“His name is Martín Hernández. He was a Patagonian gaucho in the nineteenth century.” Janet smiles. “Isn’t that fun?”
Chidi’s mouth drops open. “And… you think he can help us with this?”
“Absolutely.” Janet nods. “He’s the person.”
“Send him the message,” Eleanor says. They have nothing to lose.
Eleanor has strong mental images of what a Patagonian cowboy should look like, but the wiry man who jumps off the train shatters them all. He’s wearing a velour tracksuit and sneakers and carrying an iPad.
“Finally! Someone decides to get this ball rolling.” He tosses the iPad on the table. “Martín Hernández. How did you kids pull that trick with your Janet? I’ve never been able to work anything like that.”
“Long story,” Eleanor says. She points to his iPad. “I thought you died in the 1800s or whatever.”
“I died. Doesn’t mean I had to stop living.” Martín shakes both their hands, and then starts pacing around the room. “Always wanted to learn more about the world, so when I got here, I started taking classes. Before you know it, I’m reading third-year law, which led to philosophy, which led to the history of the afterlife and its legal framework. But I’ve never been able to get the Janet in my neighborhood to take my findings back to the Architects. Until you kids, it was a purely one-way informational flow.”
“Tell us everything,” Eleanor says, and then rethinks. “No. Tell Chidi everything.”
“You got it, kid.”
When Eleanor leaves them, Martín is inspecting the interior of Janet’s nose. Janet doesn’t seem to mind.
Chidi and Martín disappear into the records wing for days. The others bump around the rest of the lodge, at loose ends and uncertain of what to do. Eleanor finds herself jumping at the sound of birdsong, at the sound of the Michael singing sad karaoke songs to himself in the basement. Part of her still expects that Vicky’s going to walk in and everything’s going to go back to the torture again.
Maybe we’re still there, she thinks, one night, as she’s lying in bed, unable to sleep. Maybe all of this is just to crush us even worse when we realize we never really left.
Her bedroom looks out over the lake, which is barely visible under a crescent of moon. The bed is king-sized, spread with Egyptian cotton sheets and the duvet she bought herself when she was fifteen and living on her own for the first time. She lost the duvet when her landlord evicted her for causing three floods in a row. She’d always kind of missed that duvet, and here it is again.
She prods the duvet into a rough cylinder next to herself and tries to cuddle up to it, but it doesn’t comfort her the way it used to, back on Earth.
Finally, she gets up and pulls on a pair of flannel pants and a tank top. One benefit to the actual Good Place: pulling an all-nighter doesn’t leave you feeling wrecked the next morning.
Downstairs, Tahani’s up as well. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring out at the lake.
“Couldn’t sleep either, huh,” Eleanor says.
“Eleanor!” Tahani looks up. “I didn’t see you there.” She’s wearing a long, flowing nightgown in glowing amber satin, with a matching robe. She looks like she belongs in an old movie.
Eleanor swings open the fridge door to see what they have. She could call Janet and get anything in the universe she wanted, if only she knew what that was.
She pulls out one of Jason’s shitty kiwi-strawberry wine coolers and pops it open. It’s not what she wants, but it’s something.
“I wish there were something I could do,” Tahani says. “I wish I could just go and punch a demon, right now.”
“You could go punch Michael,” Eleanor offers. He’s still down in their basement, throwing his pity party for one. “I wouldn’t tell.”
“No, no, it’s not the same thing.” Tahani pushes back from the table. “I’m going outside.” She goes to the door that leads to the deck, overlooking the lake, and then looks back at Eleanor. “Are you coming?”
Eleanor scrambles up and follows her. Outside, the temperature is perfect for the clothing they’re wearing, just like it always is. They drag two of the chaise lounges over to the edge of the deck and lie down, staring up into the stars. They’re brighter than Eleanor ever remembers them being on Earth, so bright she feels like she could reach out and touch them. Maybe she could. She’s still fuzzy on how the neighborhoods work.
“I asked Janet about Kamilah,” Tahani says. “My sister.”
Eleanor’s quiet. She hasn’t asked Janet about her parents. She doesn’t need to.
“She died not long after I did,” Tahani says, quietly. “Freak accident, something about a paparazzo crashing a spy drone into her private island.” She sighs. “She’s in the Bad Place.”
“I’m sorry,” Eleanor says. “I know she was a real jagoff, but she was your sister.”
“That she was.” Tahani’s quiet for a moment. “I wasn’t glad she was there. When Janet told me. I thought I would be.”
“You’re a good person,” Eleanor says. She reaches out and takes Tahani’s hand, and Tahani lets her. They sit there, staring out at the stars reflected in the quiet lake, until the sun finally breaks over the horizon.
Eleanor’s as surprised as anyone when she’s the one who insists on carrying on with the good person lessons. Chidi makes time for it, even though he and Martín are preparing to present their plan to the people of the Good Place.
They no longer have the threat of going to Vicky as leverage to force Michael to attend, but he drifts up from his basement anyway. “I thought I heard the sounds of earnest do-gooders in training,” he says, sitting down in the center of the couch in the main living area.
A few days later, Chidi and Martín call a meeting to present their preliminary findings. Tahani insists on catering. The table is spread with macarons and finger sandwiches, along with punch in a silver punchbowl. “Just a light repast,” she says, when Martín asks what the food is for. “Comfort and cheer, to keep our spirits up!”
She hands Eleanor a basket of ranch-fried shrimp as the meeting’s starting. “These didn’t go with the event narrative I created, but I thought you’d want them.”
Eleanor grins. The only thing she misses from the Bad Place is her endless shrimp fountain. “Thanks, hot stuff.”
Chidi and Martín motion for all of them to sit down.
“We’ve done a lot of work, and a lot of research, and we’ve got two options.” Chidi spins his blackboard around to reveal two columns. “Option One: We fight the Bad Place on the existing criteria for admission. We use their own tactics against them, and flood the point criteria with new, good-person point items.”
“It’s boring, but it’ll probably work,” Martín says. “One generation, more or less, and we could be back to admissions parity between the Good Place and the Bad Place.”
Eleanor raises her hand. “You said two options.”
“Option Two!” Martín slaps the other side of the board. “We go for the gusto. We use the Bad Place’s clear pattern of bad faith in points assignments as grounds to call for a full overhaul of the entire system. We sue them, we win, and then we blow up the board and recreate the entire game from scratch.”
“We get to blow something up?” Jason looks up hopefully.
“Metaphorical explosions only,” Chidi says hastily. Jason looks disappointed.
“Now that sounds like a plan,” Tahani says. “Let’s do that! Ah — how do we do that?”
“There’s a problem,” Chidi says. “I mean, there’s a lot of problems. Like, a lot. We might not win. And even if we do win, we’ll be putting the existing structure of the Good Place in jeopardy. There’s a lot of souls down in the Bad Place, and we’d need to figure out what to do with the demons.”
Eleanor studies the board. There’s something else that’s bothering her.
“How do we know the Bad Place will do anything if we do win?” she asks.
Tahani tilts her head to one side. “Whatever do you mean?”
“This local toy store tried to sue me once.” Eleanor shrugs. “I may have gotten a little drunk and recorded obscene messages on all the I Wuv You Bears, you know, those stuffed bears that let you record a message? Anyway, they were going to sue me, but their lawyer said I was judgement-proof, because there was no way I was going to pay.”
Chidi stares at her. “You did what?”
“Not the point, Cheedster.” Eleanor shakes her head. “My point is, what if the Bad Place decides they’re not going to pay up?”
Tahani sits up straighter. “We fight them,” she says. “We’re in the right! The Good Place should be able to give the Bad Place what-for.”
“It might come to that,” Chidi says heavily. “And there’s another problem: if we convince the Good Place architects to move forward with this, we’ll be putting the other souls in the Good Place at risk. It’d be unjust to commit them to this action without their consent.”
“So we ask them,” Eleanor says. “Easy.”
It’s the furthest thing from easy.
First they convince Bea to listen to Chidi and Martín’s presentation, and then there’s a big meeting at Good Place headquarters, and then suddenly Janet and Tahani are organizing the Summit of Heaven. (Tahani had event naming-privileges.)
Janet figures out how to spread her inter-neighborhood messaging capabilities to other Janets. At first, the messages have to be spoken live between two Janets, but the traffic in the system grows so quickly that Janet has to figure out an upgrade.
“I call it J-Mail,” she says proudly, showing off a pneumatic tube in the main living area of the lodge. It’s set above a wire basket. As they watch, a brightly-colored plastic canister drops through the tube and into the basket. She lifts it out and hands it to Chidi. “For you!”
Chidi opens the canister and pulls out a sheaf of printed pages. “This is perfect.” He grins. “Now we can really start organizing.”
“I don’t know what he thinks we’ve been doing until now,” Tahani mutters.
Eleanor walks down the path that leads around the lodge to Michael’s basement with trepidation.
As basement living spaces go, Eleanor’s seen worse. Hell, she's lived in worse. There’s an outdoor patio and windows on one end, and Janet has filled the space inside with Michael’s favorite furniture and Minion dolls and bowls of paperclips to try to cheer him up.
Today, Michael has the patio doors thrown open. He’s sitting on a stool in front of an easel, holding a paintbrush in one hand.
Eleanor walks around to look at the canvas. She expects something Bob Ross-y, maybe a view of the pond, but instead, it’s a fragmented, impressionistic work, constructed of jagged edges and violent color contrasts. She squints, and the painting resolves, like a Magic Eye picture: Jason Mendoza, smiling back at her, holding a sparkler in his hand.
“Is that what we look like to you?” she asks.
“Sometimes,” Michael says. He tosses his paintbrush to the ground. “Janet suggested art therapy might help. I don’t know what she expected.”
“I bet Jason would think it looks dope.”
Michael sighs. “What do you want?”
Eleanor flops down on the couch instead of answering. “This place would be way better with a shrimp dispenser,” she informs him.
Michael squints at her, and then picks up his paintbrush again to start painting. Eleanor stares at his ceiling. She’s still not sleeping. It’s not like the insomnia she used to have on Earth, but it’s disorienting. Her days and nights have started to blur together.
“Were we ever happy?” she asks. “All of those times you rebooted us. Were there ever any reboots where we were happy?”
She doesn’t expect him to answer her, but he puts his brush down again.
“A few times,” he says. “Usually I rebooted you when you’d figured it out, but there were a few exceptions.”
She turns over to face him. “Like what?”
“The reboot where I made you and Tahani soulmates. That one was a mistake.”
“Really?” Her heart’s beating faster. “You made us soulmates?”
“I thought it was perfect,” Michael says. “You two always started off in conflict; why not bring that conflict out and really nurture it by putting you together as soulmates? But it backfired on me. You worked out your differences. You ended up happy together.”
He turns back to study his painting, and adds one more fleck to Jason’s cheek. “Chidi and Jason were making each other miserable, but it wasn’t enough. I ended up rebooting you before you figured it out.”
Happy together, Eleanor thinks. Is Michael just fucking with her? He doesn’t have anyone else to mess with. He hasn’t exactly shown great promise in Chidi’s good person lessons.
Or maybe he’s telling the truth. She thinks about Tahani’s smile, the way it goes straight to her gut, and wonders.
Eleanor’s pacing up and down the hallway outside Tahani’s room. She’s wearing pajama pants and a Michigan Law t-shirt, and her hair is probably a mess, but Tahani’s seen her at her worst and her best, and apparently some version of her still found Eleanor worthy.
She’s stalling. She makes herself knock on Tahani’s door and step back.
Tahani’s hair tumbles down over her shoulders. She’s wearing another satin night dress, more like a gown than something to sleep in. “Eleanor! What brings you here?”
Eleanor twists her hands together, and then steps back. She’s just going to say it. “I think I like you.”
“What?” Tahani’s eyes go wide.
“Like, for real. I didn’t know if you knew. I’m terrible at this, but I thought you should know.” She pauses for a moment, watching Tahani, and then raises one hand. “Anyway, bye!”
“Eleanor, wait.” Tahani reaches out and catches Eleanor’s hand, and Eleanor stills, feeling Tahani’s soft skin under her fingertips.
They stand like that for a moment, and then Tahani steps out of her room and leans down and kisses Eleanor. It’s just a peck on the lips at first, like Tahani’s not sure, but then Eleanor stands on her tiptoes and deepens the kiss, rocking into Tahani, arms around her, holding her tight.
Her lips feel bruised when she steps back.
“Goodness,” Tahani says. One hand is around Eleanor’s waist, but she clasps the other to her chest. “We could have been doing that all along.”
Eleanor smiles and brushes Tahani’s hair back from her face. Her fingertips are tingling.
“How rude of me,” Tahani says, abruptly. “You must be tired. Do come in.”
She takes Eleanor’s hand, and Eleanor lets Tahani lead her into her room, into her bed. It feels like coming home.
Eleanor wakes in the middle of the night, and smiles. They’re curled against one another, Tahani’s arm thrown over Eleanor, Tahani’s hair tangled across her, breath warm against Eleanor’s cheek. It’s the first real rest Eleanor’s had since arriving in the Good Place.
She snuggles against Tahani and lets herself relax back into sleep.
The summit seems like it will never come, and then suddenly it’s there, and everything seems to be happening at once. The citizens of the Good Place are before them, on all sides, in a celestial amphitheater that seems to be built from pearl and stone, the seats rising up into a misty infinity above.
According to Janet, each of the separate neighborhoods has entered their own amphitheater to join the collective experience. To each of them, it’s like watching Chidi live, appearing before them on their own local stage.
“They’ve never brought all the humans together at one time,” Janet tells them. “This construct requires the collective powers of eighteen Janets. It’s a new record!”
“Great.” Chidi fidgets with his bowtie. “No pressure.”
“You’re going to be great,” Eleanor says, and Tahani nods enthusiastically beside her.
Martín bounces over from where he’s been talking to another Janet. “Just imagine them all in their underwear.”
“Or just pretend you’re speaking to an audience of children,” Tahani says. “Nobody could be nervous talking to children.”
“Kids hate me.” Chidi tugs at his bowtie again. “Kids even hated me when I was a kid.”
“So just talk to us,” Eleanor says. “We believe in you. No matter what.”
Chidi takes a deep breath. “Okay.” He lets Tahani straighten out his tie, and then starts reviewing his notecards with Martín.
Eleanor turns to survey the rows of people. They’re from every time, every place — tall, short, dark, light, hair of all colors from black to blonde and even some bright pinks and purples and greens. Heaven must be a place with perfect hair dye, she thinks.
They’re wearing saris, jeans and T-shirts, rabbit-skin cloaks, coarsely woven linen shifts, togas — even a business suit or two. Every type of human she could imagine, and some people with pronounced brows who she wonders about. How far back does the Good Place go? Even if only 1% make it into the Good Place, there must be a billion people here.
Finally, it’s time. Janet nods to Chidi and he mounts the steps up to the stage.
“Um — hi.” He waves, and then puts his hand down quickly like he’s thought better of it. “My name is Chidi Anagonye. Thank you for coming today. We have a proposal to put before the citizens of the Good Place, and we appreciate your time.”
He explains their time in the Bad Place briefly. “We’re not going to show you pictures of people suffering in the Bad Place,” he says. “We’re not going to tell you stories, because this choice should be about ethics. If you, the people of the Good Place, think intervening is the right thing to do, it should be a decision you make from your own moral values, not from sensationalist depictions.”
Eleanor glances at Tahani. They’d both argued for including some case studies, maybe a list of types of demons, but Chidi had overruled them. “This is an ethical decision,” he had said, pushing his glasses up.
He did let them make charts presenting trends in the uses of the Bad Place and the percentage of humans who made it into the Good Place. He waves to Janet, and the charts spring up in the air over his head. “As you can see, the Bad Place has been successful in blocking nearly 99% of humanity from the Good Place,” he says. “That block rate is still going up.”
Martín joins him on stage for the presentation of the plan. The court case. The potential effects on the Good Place. The potential effects on the Bad Place. The fact that the Bad Place could decide not to abide by the impartial court’s decision, leading to war in the afterlife.
“We have our own strengths,” Martín says. “It’s not all of us against all of them. It’s all of us against the demons, and their numbers are smaller than the numbers of humans.”
Eleanor hopes, anyway. They’ve been pumping Michael for information, subtly at first and then more obviously, as they work with Chidi and Martín’s group to try to plan their next steps. If the court decision goes for them and the Bad Place doesn’t comply, they’ll be prepared to move immediately.
If they can get the permission to go forward in the first place.
On stage, Chidi and Martín wrap up their presentation. In the center of the stage, his stage fright forgotten, Chidi holds out his hands to the audience. “What do you say?” he asks. “Should we do this? Should we try to liberate the Bad Place?”
For a moment, there’s silence. Eleanor’s heart drops.
But then the cheering begins.
It comes from a billion voices, from a billion souls, rising up into the great amphitheater, as people from all ages and places rise together, giving their assent in their own individual ways. Tahani grips Eleanor’s hand, and Eleanor blinks her eyes furiously. Those aren’t tears. They can’t be.
“They said yes,” Tahani says, into Eleanor’s hair, and Eleanor wraps an arm around her and lets her head drop to Tahani’s shoulder.
There’s an uncertain future ahead of them, but Eleanor knows one thing. They are going to take this system down.