Narrator 2: Here’s something that hasn’t happened yet. But it will.

Narrator 1: Imelda Goldfinch is standing at a door.

Narrator 3: Her hair is freshly curled, her abacus gleaming, her notary’s raiments formal and immaculate.

Narrator 2: Beyond the door, eagerly awaiting her, is pretty much the entire Upper Trust — the most Valorous and elite officers of the Un — assembled for a private audience of grave import.

Narrator 1: But on this side of the door, it’s just Imelda, and also… a monster.

Narrator 3: Imelda places a hand on the door and turns to the monster, beaming.

Narrator 2: (as Imelda) “Now,” she says, “let’s have a nice big smile!”’ And she opens the door.

[Transition.]

Now… we’re zipping back through time to something that IS happening right now, right this very second. Where were we?

Narrator 1 and Narrator 3: (in unison) Utterly doomed Midst.

Narrator 2: Oh, yes, that’s right —

Narrator 1: We’re back!

Narrator 2: — utterly doomed Midst —

Narrator 1: Yeah, it’s still pretty doomed!

[Crashing thunder, gusting wind.]

Narrator 2: — at pretty much the moment where we last saw it. Well, that’s not quite true.

Narrator 1: It’s a few hours later.

Narrator 2: Stationary Hill is not looking so hot at the moment.

Narrator 1: Garbage everywhere, flyers for the big sale of Midst strewn upon the streets, doors open, broken boxes, crates, carts,

Narrator 2: abacuses, Welcome-to-the-Trust pamphlets.

Narrator 1: It would be a nice place if it weren’t for the colossally vast, quietly howling and increasingly close, vast, terrifying, reality-gnawing tsunami of black fog ocean inbound rapidly.

Narrator 3: Oh, that!

Narrator 2: Oh, yeah.

Narrator 1: It is a spectacularly terrifying scene. Listening to this, it may not seem particularly terrifying, but with the power of your imagination, you too can become very upset.

Narrator 2: With our help.

Narrator 1: To stand here now, Midst feels so small, so insignificant. The looming, towering, incoming wall of fog. We keep telling you it’s closer than ever every time we see it, but now it’s really fuckin’ close!

Narrator 2: It feels so desolate. Where have all the people gone? They are nowhere to be seen.

Narrator 1: The shipyard is empty.

Narrator 2: As many people as COULD flee on the ships have already done so. But there were plenty more people left behind: people who weren’t able to escape. Where are they now?

Narrator 1: Distantly, from the top of the hill, there comes a voice.

Narrator 2: (faraway voice amplified by microphone) “Is there anyone left out there? If you can hear me, come to the post office!”

Narrator 1: A familiar voice.

Narrator 2: Let’s go see what that’s all about.

Narrator 1: Saskia, calling out with a Trust microphone: the very same one used by Imelda Goldfinch mere hours ago.

Narrator 2: (as Saskia, voice amplified) “If anyone can hear me, there are survivors at the post office. We are taking shelter in the caves beneath the post office. We have to close the doors in three minutes.”

Narrator 1: She’s standing outside the open doors to the post office, calling out. There is no response. There doesn’t seem to be anyone out there.

Narrator 2: She shields her eyes and peers out down the hill. She KNOWS there are people still out there: people that are going to be a lot worse off if they don’t come and find shelter with everyone else.

Narrator 1: Time is short. The tsunami is approaching.

Narrator 3: (unidentified voice) “Saskia, we’ve GOT to get inside, please!”

Narrator 2: A voice calls to her from behind. The kindly old Postmaster comes bursting out of the maintenance stairway behind the front desk of the post office.

Narrator 3: He’s got his hands gripped around Emmet’s upper arm because, remember, the Postmaster floats.

Narrator 1: Oh yeah, that’s a thing that he does because of the way that he is!

Narrator 2: Emmet is helping, keeping him grounded. Also, he’s come along as additional muscle in case they literally have to physically drag Saskia down the stairs. This is the second or third time she’s done this after being forbidden from coming upstairs again.

Narrator 1: (as the Postmaster) “We don’t have three minutes, Saskia! Three minutes AGO we said three minutes! We need to get underground NOW!”

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “But there are still people missing! I haven’t seen Tzila, I haven’t seen—”

Narrator 1: (Postmaster) “Tell ‘em to bang on the doors if they need to get in, but we need to get in NOW.”

Narrator 2: (as Emmet) “Not that we should really be opening the doors for people after the three-minute mark,” Emmet remarks, somewhat under his breath.

Narrator 1: No, there don’t seem to be any people left — if they were going to come, they probably would have come by now. Saskia has been yelling for a while.

Narrator 3: And even three minutes seems to be stretching it.

Narrator 1: They’re out of time.

Narrator 2: Saskia huffs a sigh. [Saskia:] “Fine, okay, you’re right.” She lowers the microphone, slams the post office front door shut, and begins to retreat with Emmet and the Postmaster.

Narrator 1: The Postmaster guiding the way rapidly back behind the counter of the post office, throwing open the doorway again, the stairs descending down into the stony depths below the ground.

Narrator 2: Saskia rubs her face. [Saskia:] “I just can’t bear the thought of anyone left out there. What if right after we lock the post office, someone comes banging on the door wanting to be let in and we can’t—”

[loud knocking on metal door]

Narrator 3: Suddenly, there’s someone banging on the door.

Narrator 1: (Postmaster) “Ahhh, shit!” the Postmaster yells.

Narrator 2: Saskia is already running.

Narrator 1: (Postmaster) “Sas— ahh, god.”

Narrator 3: (muffled voice from outside) “Hello?” [knocking continues urgently]

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “I’m coming, I’m coming!” Saskia is already halfway across the post office, flinging the doors open.

Narrator 1: (Postmaster) “Get ‘em down quick. We’re going down, Saskia.”

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “You are not a second too late, get in—” The words freeze in her throat.

Narrator 3: It’s him. Standing outside the door of the post office is a man in a suit of armor. Silver. A cape, dusty, half-hanging off of one shoulder. He has this haunted, distracted, deflated, almost wet, tear-stained sort of look.

Narrator 2: Shell-shocked. Thousand-yard stare.

Narrator 3: Saskia opens the door, and he tries to focus on her, and she realizes who he is.

Narrator 2: The welcoming, relieved smile drops from her face instantly.

Narrator 3: Phineas Thatch is not welcome here.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “What are YOU still doing on Midst? I thought you would have left with the rest of them.”

Narrator 1: The tearror is looming. Wind is starting to pick up. The ground is beginning to shake.

Narrator 2: Saskia closes the door slightly, speaking to Phineas through a narrow crack. [Saskia:] “You are not coming in here. You are not welcome with these people.”

Narrator 1: The post office shelves begin vibrating.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Surely I don’t need to explain why.”

Narrator 3: (as Phineas) “Of course not,” Phineas says.

Narrator 2: Oh god, he is a mess.

Narrator 3: (Phineas) “I understand, I— I only wanted… to help. C-Can I help? Is there ANYTHING I can do? I’m sorry.”

Narrator 2: Saskia is about to simply slam the door on him. But then she has a better idea. [Saskia:] “You want to help, huh?”

Narrator 1: He nods.

Narrator 3: (Phineas) “It’s…my job.”

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “Cable communication into the Fold isn’t working anymore after the blast destroyed the equipment. But if we could send someone in person…”

Narrator 1: He doesn’t get it.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “There is help on Sequester. It’s the next-nearest islet down in the Fold. You go there, you find the Mothers, and you tell them Midst needs their help.”

Narrator 1: Phineas stares blankly at her, confused.

Narrator 3: It’s like she’s speaking in code. [Phineas:] “The Mothers? But I… I don’t have a ship.”

Narrator 1: There’s no time for this.

Narrator 2: Saskia looks up at the tower—

Narrator 1: —the post office tower—

Narrator 2: —with its long interisletary cable stretching off into the Fold, away, in the OTHER direction from the incoming tearror tsunami.

Narrator 1: Saskia turns back to Phineas.

Narrator 2: (Saskia) “There is one way left off the islet. You see the tower? You see the cable? There’s a mail car connected to that cable that will take you down into the Fold to another islet where you can get help.”

Narrator 3: (Phineas) “Is there anyone else… that… should come too? Do YOU need to escape?”

Narrator 2: The fact is, there’s a very good reason that the desperate people left on Midst have not used this one single escape route.

Narrator 1: A VERY good reason.

Narrator 2: But Saskia doesn’t have really the time or the inclination to explain all that to Phineas right now. So all she says is, [Saskia:] “No. If you really want to help, go get help. We don’t have time.”

Narrator 1: (Postmaster) “Saskia, we gotta hurry!”

Narrator 3: And though this exchange was brief and brisk, Saskia has put a light back inside of Phineas.

Narrator 1: He wants to help. Maybe he CAN help.

Narrator 2: He has something to do, a task, an assignment.

Narrator 3: God, he loves those. Phineas looks Saskia in the face. [Phineas:] “I’ll do it. I’ll help. Yes, ma’am.”

Narrator 2: Saskia nods tersely at him, and slams the door in his face.

Narrator 3: And like that, Phineas is off like a shot, sprinting across the intervening space toward the tower,

Narrator 2: for the faster he moves, the less he can ponder.

Narrator 1: The ground beneath his feet is beginning to rumble. The tower, incredibly tall, stretching off high into the sky above the post office, is beginning to bend and sway.

[Metallic creaking and echoing.]

Narrator 2: There’s a terrible strange-smelling breeze that’s starting to gust ever more strongly through the streets, like that wind that comes before summer storms.

Narrator 1: Parked at the base of the tower, at ground level, is a mail car.

Narrator 2: A simple, boxcar-like container for storing packages. That’s it. NOT meant for human passengers.

Narrator 3: As Phineas pelts toward it at full speed, the wind, with its sickly sweetness, turns colder, and then warmer.

Narrator 2: And then spicier?

Narrator 3: Oh god. The light is beginning to refract in unusual ways.

Narrator 1: He spares a quick glance over his shoulder and oh god, he probably shouldn’t have done that, Jesus Christ, the tearror is unimaginable. It is a vast, terrifying, writhing blackness, billowing across the ocean towards Midst.

Narrator 2: With everything that’s been going on in Phineas’s life recently, like in the last few hours, he hasn’t really had time for animalistic, primal fear, but he’s feeling it now.

Narrator 1: And his fear increases just a little bit more when, very suddenly, the mail car, parked as described at the base of the tower, thumps, clanks, and then begins to elevator up the tower, away from him,

Narrator 3: ratcheting upwards along a track, ascending to the cable itself,

Narrator 2: machinery shuddering to life, activated by someone other than him.

Narrator 1: Did Saskia do this? What’s going on?

Narrator 2: Well, he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he DOES know that that compartment, that car that is rapidly ascending above his head, is, as described by Saskia, the last remaining way to get off Midst.

Narrator 1: Does he have time to turn around? Maybe he should go back to the post office. No, no, he doesn’t have time.

Narrator 2: He knows he doesn’t have a second to hesitate. In fact, this moment he spent hesitating could already have spelled his doom.

Narrator 3: Oh fuck, oh shit.

Narrator 2: He quickly assesses the situation, his tactical training kicking into automatic gear. He sees that there is a ladder spanning the tower.

Narrator 3: And he hurls himself upon it, trying to haul his arms over and above his head through his freakishly gargantuan armor—

Narrator 2: —his stupid video game armor—

Narrator 3: —and he starts to climb the shit out of that ladder.

Narrator 1: The mail cart is clattering away, rising steadily above his head, still out of reach, going higher and higher up the tower,

Narrator 2: slightly outpacing him. This is an impossible task. Only someone who spent all their free time doing—

Narrator 1: Doing isometric workouts?

Narrator 2: Doing compulsive chin ups—

Narrator 1: Pumping iron in his crummy apartment?

Narrator 2: Only someone like that would even have the slightest chance of catching up to this mechanized car.

Narrator 1: Phineas Thatch IS the man,

Narrator 3: and there he goes, spidering up that ladder as fast as his freakin’ legs will carry him,

Narrator 2: sweating inside his heavy armor, awkwardly managing his mace at the same time.

Narrator 1: The mail car above his head clanks to a stop at the very pinnacle of the tower, bending and swaying in the inbound breeze.

Narrator 2: More mechanical clanking from above as the car engages with the cable and prepares to launch.

Narrator 1: It’s right there, it’s above his head. He’s going hand over hand up this ladder, he’s so high in the air right now.

Narrator 2: Shit shit shit.

Narrator 1: He can see the landscape of Midst stretching out beneath him, fading into the hazy distance, he can see way too fucking much right now and it’s mind-melting.

Narrator 3: Phineas extends one gauntleted hand,

Narrator 2: dry flecks of blood still on the knuckles,

Narrator 3: to try and make purchase on the door of the mail car,

Narrator 1: just ONE millisecond too late,

Narrator 2: just as it slides away.

[Mechanical whirring fades away into the distance.]

Narrator 1: The car launches down the cable.

Narrator 3: He feels his stomach drop from inside of him.

Narrator 2: He’s too late. He MISSED it.

Narrator 1: The cosmic magnitude of what Phineas Thatch sees is almost beyond comprehension. The towering altitude, the careening horizon, the sheer terrifying black-hole nightmare vortex. Void. Gnawing. Closer. Phineas feels profoundly alone, meaningless, insignificant, less than nothing. You know this feeling. You’ve felt it before yourself. Hopefully not recently. And hopefully not often.

Narrator 3: Phineas Thatch is at the top of a tower, at the highest point of an utterly doomed islet, about to be consumed by complete and total reality-bending devastation. This day… this day is not going well for him.

Narrator 2: Trapped between a rock and a hard place, where the rock is an incomprehensible natural disaster of unprecedented magnitude, and the hard place is his only means of escape.

[Phineas’s musical theme begins.]

Narrator 1: There it goes.

Narrator 2: Or really, his only means of finding purpose, which kind of ranks higher than escape in Phineas’s mind, which is a little fucked up — we’ll get into that later.

Narrator 3: There it goes, zipping down the line.

Narrator 2: No, failure is not an option. He has already failed a LOT today. He can’t fail again.

Narrator 1: And you know, let’s look at the situation the way Phineas is looking at it right now. There’s a cable leading from exactly where he is right now, straight to that mail car.

Narrator 2: He can work with that.

Narrator 1: Hmmm! What could he possibly do with that to achieve his objectives, you might ask?

Narrator 3: And Phineas does it.

Narrator 2: Cue heroic music.

[Heroic music happens.]

Narrator 2: With a strong, graceful swing of his arm, Phineas hauls his mace up and over the huge, thick interisletary cable above his head, grasping both ends of it, careful to avoid the sharp mica.

Narrator 3: This is not an ergonomic zipline, no purpose-made tool. This is a dead pull-up with improvised equipment, an awkward above-the-head bear hug, arms inches from this frayed, prickly, thickly-woven bunch of cables and wires, and he kicks off, coasting down along the cable,

Narrator 1: picking up speed rapidly,

Narrator 2: and solid ground drops away from underneath his feet. But he doesn’t really experience vertigo. He’s ziplined in way scarier, well, HIGHER circumstances than this.

Narrator 1: As you may recall.

Narrator 3: In many ways, though, this IS the scariest zipline he’s ever had to go on. The Fold ocean stretching out interminably ahead of him.

Narrator 2: Beneath his feet, where he’s used to seeing a sparkling white void, instead there’s just a reflective obsidian sheet,

Narrator 3: and both he and the mail car are hurtling toward that glassy, darkly reflective surface— the Mediun.

Narrator 2: The mail car is picking up speed, but for now, for a few precious seconds Phineas actually has more momentum than it. He’s gaining on it.

Narrator 1: The cable stretches from the top of the tower directly into the flat opaque surface of the Fold, into the black fog ocean, to the leeward, downcurrent side of the islet of Midst, opposite the incoming tearror — the perfect angle for escape.

Narrator 3: Leading to help.

Narrator 2: And more importantly, to some kind of purpose for Phineas. The Mediun is fast approaching,

Narrator 1: and Phineas is fast approaching the cablecar. Above his head the handle of the mace is throwing sparks, flashes of light, as he whizzes down the line.

Narrator 2: He starts to pull his knees up, getting his body ready for a quick, abrupt landing.

Narrator 1: The flat Mediun of the Fold is just ahead.

Narrator 2: He really wants to be on the relatively solid ground of the mail car before he plunges through that impenetrable glassy sheet. He lets go of one end of the mace, swings it back down to his side, falls through thin air for a heart-wrenching moment — and lands solidly on the roof of the mail car

Narrator 3: —just as the entire mail car, Phineas included, plunges into the Fold.

[Abrupt silence. Rhythmic mechanical clanking gradually fades in.]

Narrator 1: Sudden, total, enveloping blackness.

Narrator 3: Like night, but different. Like space, but starless.

Narrator 2: He is nearly knocked breathless by the utter darkness, the only light coming from the sharp blue-white glow of the mica on his mace.

Narrator 1: And just ahead, one dimly-blinking lamp on the very prow of the mail cart as it rattles, speeding down the cable, deeper and deeper into darker and darker depths.

Narrator 3: Phineas is in the Fold now, eyes adjusting desperately as he gropes around for a second before finding the handle of a door. A hatch.

Narrator 2: He fumbles for it, pulls it open, drops down into a dark interior surrounded by piles of cargo, packages, crates, all dimly outlined in the glow of his mace.

Narrator 1: And outlined just beside his head, a hand in a red glove cocks a gun.

Narrator 2: (unidentified voice) “Today’s just not your day, is it, kid?”

Narrator 1: says Lark.