"I have been waiting patiently," said Mr. Bucket. "Finally! I finally get to do it!"

Mr. Bucket took his cane and waved it in front of the three children's faces. He screwed the top off and yeetyooted it into the hole where the Stringed Shite Sorter lived. It was the same hole he had previously yeetyooted a baby into.

Underneath the cane's top was a big red button with words on it. He swung it in front of Mahuika.

"Mahuika! You have a voice! I think! Please vape and read what it says."

Mahuika vaped.

"The Great Glass Elevator," she said.

"Yes! Yes! Correct! Splendid, Mahuika!"

"I vape," said Mahuika.

Mr. Bucket pressed the button. The door to the Comparison Room opened, and in flew a glass elevator with double doors. It landed delicately in front of the children.

"Isn't it great, children? It is the Great Glass Elevator! Mr. Wonka himself created it. It is the most speedsparking elevator in the world! It can go almost anywhere! Up! Down! Left! Right! It uses invisible skyhooks! It can fly high in the air! Dig deep underground! Dive in the ocean! I remember one of you children loving the ocean. It might have been Chauncey."

"Slavery," said Tide in a quiet voice.

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "It can also take us to the slavery! Let's go."

"I don't want to go the Slavery Room," said Keerthi.

"Keerthi!" yelled Mr. Bucket, who forcefully ushered all the children into the Great Glass Elevator. "Do you really think I would have a Slavery Room?"

"Yes," said Keerthi. "You said you did."

"I did not!" exclaimed Mr. Bucket. "I would not be able to live with myself if I had a Slavery Room! It would not be nearly enough. I need many rooms for the slavery."

He pressed a button and closed the double doors to the Great Glass Elevator. "Let me see…"

Keerthi looked around the Great Glass Elevator. The walls and even the ceiling were covered with hundreds of rows of small black buttons, each with an accompanying label.

As Mr. Bucket searched for the button that would take them to a place she didn't want to go to, she looked for the button that might take her out of the factory.

Tide read some of them out loud, her voice lacking emotion. Keerthi realized she was trying to distract herself because she did not want to think about the slavery. She joined her.

"The Mourn Syrup Room," said Tide. "Delicious sweetener fresh from the funeral parlor."

"The Tinsulin Room," said Keerthi. "For diabetic robots."

"The Gutterscotch Room. Made from the tears of hopeless alcoholics."

"The Sackharine Room. Sugar-free castration machines."

"The Cigarette Candy Room. Cigarettes that look like candy. Discontinued."

"The Truegat Room. Nougat-based lie detection."

"The Super Laxative Room. A great place to relax."

"The Blood Sugar Room. Vampires with a sweet fang will savor the flavor."

"The Jelly Bean Room. Envy has never tasted better."

"The Jawbreaker Room. I do not believe in false advertising."

"The Vaping Room," said Mahuika. "Vapes." She vaped.

"Here we are!" said Mr. Bucket. "The Down Rooms."

He pressed the button. The double doors to the Great Glass Elevator closed, and the elevator pushed itself through the floor, flying down through further rooms at an unbelievable speed.

"This factory is large, children. When I first began working here it took Mr. Wonka three weeks to give me a proper showing of it all. If I were to show you every room in this factory now, with all the additions we have made since, it would take five years. This machine helps while traveling through it all! I can tell you are all curious about the adventures Mr. Wonka and I enjoyed together in this elevator."

"Slavery," whispered Keerthi.

"I will tell you! I will tell you! There is no need to beg me! After I won the contest, we went to go pick up my family. It was before I knew they were evil people. They were being bothersome, but we brought them along in this very elevator, and we all went into space!"

Tide raised her helmet up. Keerthi had never seen her stand straight, since her religion dictated that she maintain bad posture and always face sea level.

"We have been deep underground since the start of the tour," said Chetan. "She should have started looking up."

"Space," repeated Tide.

"Yes!" said Mr. Bucket. "We went to space. It was fun."

"No one has ever been to space," said Keerthi. "Don't lie to us."

"I am not lying! I was in space."

"Mr. Bucket," said Tide. "Do you think going to space is ethically wrong?"

"Do not be silly," said Mr. Bucket. "You are all smart riddle solvers! You know the secret of astronomy. Do not tell me that you do not!"

"I don't," said Keerthi. "Isn't astronomy bad?"

Keerthi knew that astronomy was wrong, even if she wished they wouldn't feed all the astronomers to an enormous crocodile. It wasn't too surprising to hear Mr. Bucket, who was a murdering clamming slaveowner, tell her that he approved of the practice.

"Not at all! Most astronomers were terrible people who deserved to be fed to the enormous crocodile, but they deserved to be fed to the enormous crocodile because the enormous crocodile ate them, not because they were astronomers. There is nothing wrong with astronomy. I am an astronomer myself! It is not bad."

Keerthi was finished with Mr. Bucket.

"Yes there is!" she exclaimed. "Astronomy is horrible! Evil! Despicable!"

"Why?" asked Mr. Bucket.

Keerthi frowned. She thought about it.

"Oh," said Chetan.

"I don't know," she said. "I mean, there's always-"

"You cannot say it is wrong then! It is foolish to say something is bad without having a good reason to! It will lead you to bad conclusions."

"The secret," said Tide. "You said there was a secret."

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "It has to do with the adventure we had in space with President Gilligrass! We saved everyone in the Space Hotel. After it was over, in order to keep everyone safe, the governments of the world all spoke with Mr. Wonka and decided that no one else would be allowed to leave the planet or even learn about space. The Space Hotel was destroyed, and all astronomers were put to death. This was only for the benefit of ordinary people! Normal citizens would be in danger if they knew. They would try and see it for themselves."

"See what?" asked Tide.

"The Vermicious Knids," said Mr. Bucket.

"The Vermicious Knids?"

"Yes, Keerthi. They are the most dreaded monsters in all of space, from the planet Vermes. Mr. Wonka and I only narrowly defeated them! They can travel more than three-hundred thousand miles per hour, millions of miles per day! They are carnivorous and eat everyone they find, other than different Vermicious Knids."

"Do they eat people?" asked Tide. Keerthi noticed that Tide was not talking as if Mr. Bucket were crazy.

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "They devoured people aboard the Space Hotel and gobbled up all the peaceful aliens who once lived in our solar system! The only reason they do not swoop up right now and chew us all down is because they would burn up in our atmosphere! Have you ever seen a shooting star? It is not a shooting star! It is a Vermicious Knid burning up after getting greedy and trying to reach us."

Tide sighed and brought her head back down. "Forget it, Keerthi. He's lying."

"I am not!" shouted Mr. Bucket.

"You are. If they were able to move hundreds of thousands of miles per hour through space and not burn up, they would not burn up in our atmosphere."

"Not to be rude," said Keerthi. "I believe you much more than him, but how do you know?"

"My dad is a physicist," she said. "It's physics."

"You are wrong," said Mr. Bucket. "You must be. He told me, he told me…"

He shook his head.

"Yes. You are wrong," said Mr. Bucket. "This is not important! We have almost reached the Down Rooms."

The elevator began to slow down and land.

"Chetan," said Keerthi. "I do not know what an atmosphere is, but he does not sound like he is lying."

"Ask him for Truegat," Chetan said.

"No," she said. "But… I am having trouble remembering."

"Remembering what?" asked Chetan.

"Vermicious," she said. "It means something, but I do not remember what."

"No," said Chetan. "It is a pretend word. People sometimes squashbunt pretend words in their sentences because they think it makes them sound smarter. It doesn't mean anything."

Keerthi knew Chetan was wrong. She had heard it before. There was no doubt in her mind. As the double doors to the Great Glass Elevator reopened, only one question was on her mind.

What did vermicious mean?

W

The Great Glass Elevator opened. Mr. Bucket and the children walked out. The air tasted like electricity. Keerthi heard a faint humming.

It was the brightest night there ever was. Millions of colored stars swam together in the sky. She did not pretend she could even estimate how many there were.

Keerthi realized that she had been looking up. She forced herself to keep her eyes close to the ground, still wanting to avoid unnecessary astronomy until she had time to think about it further.

"What are stars anyway?" she asked Chetan.

"Space tags," said Chetan.

The floor was boundless metal, and the stars shone brightly on the only attraction she could see. They were standing at the base of a tremendous chocolate tower.

A second guilty peek confirmed that the stars were moving. They were slowly being pulled towards a spot above the tower's peak.

"We're back to this," said Keerthi. "Like in the VIP Room. No ceiling, no walls."

"No," said Mr. Bucket. "The VIP Room is one small room that is designed to seem bigger than it is. The Down Rooms are many rooms stapled together in a way that makes them feel like they are only one. Down Tower itself is inside of thousands of different rooms, and it has hundreds of rooms inside of it. The four of us are standing inside of ten different rooms right now."

Keerthi sighed.

"Do not worry about architecture," said Mr. Bucket. "We are here for the slavery! Let's go inside."

W

The bottom floor of the Down Room was a sturdy pier, shaped like an oval with bridges connecting it to the entrance and staircases, floating in brown liquid. Clear pipes as large as pillars sucked up the liquid and carried it to the ceiling.

"Is this where you mix the chocolate?" asked Keerthi.

"No," said Mr. Bucket. "Chocolate begins in the Cocoa Room, where I grow and harvest cocoa fruit."

"I read online that you buy your cocoa from Africa and South America, and have it imported to you," said Keerthi.

"I do," said Mr. Bucket. "I buy 95% of cocoa beans that are grown outside of my factory. But I burn all that cocoa and grow my own instead, since my slavery tastes better. If I did not buy it all, people would figure out that I grow my own beans and try to sneak in to discover my methods. After I grow them my beans are removed from the fruit and brought to the Fermentation Room, where they sit until they are ready. They are then cleaned, roasted, and made into cocoa liquor and cocoa butter. It is mixed all together in the Hurricane Room, which is much more efficient than the waterfalls Mr. Wonka once used, then it is brought here so the slavery can be added."

"You could make it without the slavery," said Keerthi.

Mr. Bucket shook his head. "It wouldn't be chocolate."

He took a bite from his cane. With his tongues.

"The Olmec people," he said while lick-chewing. "They were the first to discover cocoa. I do not know much about them, since archaeological evidence is sparse. They had tools which they used to crack open cocoa fruits and drink cocoa from. This means that they had slavery."

"No it does not," said Keerthi. "They might have grown it themselves."

"The Mayans adopted much of Olmec culture, including chocolate. Chocolate was significant in their society and often traded as a currency. Ek Chuaj, the Mayan merchant deity and patron of cocoa, was honored in ceremonies held by cocoa farmers. This would not have been possible without the slavery."

"Yes it would have," said Keerthi.

He took another bite.

"Leave the factory," said Chetan.

"The Aztecs came next, and cocoa started spreading all over once the Europeans boated over. Cocoa was sent all over the globe and made with new kinds of slavery, which produced many delicious chocolates. The Belgians, before Mr. Wonka, were the most famous chocolate makers in all of history. This is because of how much slavery they produced. King Leopold II helped them become world leaders in chocolate with this. He was an evil man but an excellent chocolatier."

"Mr. Bucket," said Tide. "Do you think he was evil because of the unspeakable atrocities he committed, or because he eventually died?"

He laughed.

"You are insane," said Keerthi. "Slavery is-"

Mr. Bucket slammed the end of his cane against the floor, making Keerthi freeze in place. Once she had stopped he pulled it back up and pointed it to the liquid around the pier.

"Keerthi," he said. "What is that?"

"Chocolate."

"Wrong!" he screamed. "It is worthless."

He pressed a button on his cane. The handle became a ladle. He walked over to the pier and filled it before giving it to Keerthi.

"Take a drink," said Mr. Bucket. "Do not worry. You are too thin to get stuck in the pipes."

"I'm worried that you will poison me," said Keerthi.

"I will not! Do not worry. It is much more afraid of you than you are of it."

Keerthi did not take a drink. Mr. Bucket shook his head.

"Tide," said Mr. Bucket. "Keerthi is paranoid. I do not know why. Will you drink in her place?"

"No."

Mr. Bucket frowned.

"Mahuika, will you take a drink?"

"I vape," said Mahuika.

"Thank you," said Mr. Bucket. As she opened her mouth to vape, he poured in some of the liquid, and it naturally sunk down her throat.

"I vape," said Mahuika.

"As you can see, she is vaping! Nothing happened. I only want you to have a taste."

Keerthi took the ladle from Mr. Bucket and took a bitty sip. She spit it out.

"What's wrong with it?" screamed Tide.

"It's awful!" Keerthi replied. "It tastes like frogskin and rotten fish! Like cockroaches and slime wanglers!"

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "This is what chocolate tastes like before the slavery has been added. It is so bad that the Law of Sexdecuplentomy does not apply to it. Not even the sixteen percent will enjoy it without the slavery."

"You are lying," said Keerthi. "This has no sugar in it! I would have tasted it!"

"No," said Mr. Bucket. "I added sugar, but the natural flavor of cocoa without added slavery overpowers it. You could mix a single cocoa bean into a bowl of sugar, but if you forgot to add slavery, it would suddenly taste worse than rotten mouse guts."

"I know it isn't uncommon for people to eat plain cocoa beans," said Tide. "They say it has health benefits. They wouldn't do it if it tasted like that."

"Slavery can be added at anytime! The companies you can buy those from use traditional methods and add slavery during the growing process instead of at the end like I do. Those cocoa beans have not been fermented and roasted and sugared, but they certainly have slavery in them."

"Even if that was true," said Tide. "You could find a way to make chocolate without slavery."

"Chocolate without slavery? Chocolate without slavery? No," said Mr. Bucket. "That is like saying you could have the ocean without water! Children! There were people like you around before I had my monopoly! Little companies in the Netherlands that tried to go around making 'slavery-free chocolate'. They all went out of business because nobody wanted to buy it! It is not chocolate without the slavery! Chocolate is slavery!"

"If it is," said Keerthi. "I don't want it anymore. I don't care what you think. It's wrong. This is all wrong."

Mr. Bucket took a bite from his cane.

"You can have your morality, or you can have your chocolate. I cannot tell you which one to choose. I can only tell you which one tastes better."

"Let's go on," said Tide. "I don't want to be here."

"I agree," said Chetan.

W

Aside from the chocolate pipes connecting the floor to the ceiling, the next room of the Down Tower had nothing in it.

"Take it all in, children!" said Mr. Bucket. "Every room from here until the roof is designed like this. This room is actually nineteen rooms. Tide is standing in seven of them. I must have all these rooms inside rooms to store them all."

"Store what?" asked Keerthi. "It's empty. Like you."

"Stop it," said Chetan. "Don't antagonize him."

"I am not empty," said Mr. Bucket. "I am filled with bones! Blood!"

"Peanut brittle," said Keerthi.

"Root beer," said Tide.

"This room is not empty either," said Mr. Bucket. "It is filled with matter!"

"I don't see any matter," said Tide.

"It is there! It is subatomic!" he shouted. "It is physics, Tide. You said your father was a physicist, so I am confident you will know! What is it that everything in the universe is made up from?"

"Atoms," she said.

"Yes!" he said. "Atoms! What is it that atoms are made up of? Each of you say one of them."

"Protons," said Keerthi.

"Neutrons," said Tide.

"I vape," said Mahuika.

"You are all correct," said Mr. Bucket. "I am proud! It is no surprise, with all the riddles you have solved to be here."

"Mahuika is not correct," said Tide. "The answer was electrons."

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "But I do not care about electrons, which Mahuika correctly guessed! They have nothing to do with chocolate production. They are such tiny morsels that they have no impact on the taste! Not like neutrons and protons, which together make up almost the entire mass of an atom. Another name for neutrons and protons are nucleons. What are nucleons made of?"

"Quarks," said Tide.

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "Quarks! Quarks all have strong tastes, which is why different kinds of quarks are called flavors. Quarks come in six different flavors! There is up, down, top, bottom, strange, and charm."

"Stop lying to us," said Keerthi. "We aren't going to believe your nonsense. Obviously real scientists wouldn't name subatomic particles after random silly words like that."

Tide walked over to Keerthi and whispered into her ear.

Keerthi frowned. "Are you sure?"

Tide nodded.

"I am as honest as the man who invented dry cleaning!" said Mr. Bucket. "Those are the six quarks! When we see matter, it is only made of up and down quarks. All of the others are too embarrassed to show up because of how much they weigh. You can only make them appear with special machines, but they disappear quickly. They taste spicy and insecure. All the nucleons we interact with are only from up and down quarks. A proton is made up of one down quark and two up quarks, and a neutron is made up of one up quark and two down quarks."

"If you are interested in learning more about quarks, you can leave the factory," said Chetan.

"Up quarks taste horrible, as you have experienced, and down quarks taste delicious! They balance out together when they combine to be nucleons, which balance out more when they combine to be atoms, but by themselves they are strong! This is where cocoa becomes important. The matter that creates cocoa is not regular matter. I only have theories as to the reason why, but cocoa is made of what I have dubbed Wonkamatter. The Wonkanucleons, Wonkaprotons and Wonkaneutrons, are different from normal nucleons. A Wonkaproton has three up quarks and zero down quarks, and a Wonkaneutron has three down quarks and zero up quarks. Together they would balance out to form normal atoms that taste normal, since there is still an equal number of ups and downs, but natural cocoa is almost completely made of Wonkaprotons, which only have ups and taste repulsive. There is one more difference still!"

"This isn't physics," said Tide. "This isn't anything."

"Let me finish! Wonkaprotons and Wonkaneutrons can switch states! If they are each exposed to the proper stimulus, a Wonkaproton can become a Wonkaneutron, where all the up quarks become down quarks, and a Wonkaneutron can become a Wonkaproton, where the opposite will happen. If Wonkaneutrons are exposed to the presence of antler necro-neutrinos, which are found only in dead deer, they will become Wonkaprotons and the cocoa will taste even worse. But when Wonkaprotons are exposed to thrall muons, which are produced by slaves, they become Wonkaneutrons! When enough of the Wonkamatter making up the cocoa becomes Wonkaneutrons, the chocolate becomes delicious!"

"No," said Tide. "No."

"Yes," said Mr. Bucket. "It is easy to understand. Murdering deer makes Wonkanucleons fill up with happiness and taste worse than snozzcumbers. Slavery makes Wonkanucleons feel down, which turns them scrumptious. It's common sense."

"Leave the factory," said Chetan.

W

Mr. Bucket guided the children into the Down Tower's lift, which began at the second floor of the tower and went all the way to the top.

"It is not great, it is not glass, and it is not an elevator," said Mr. Bucket. "It is a lift. It only goes up and down. This wasn't me trying to be clever by having it be in the Down Tower. It is a tall structure and an ordinary lift was the most convenient option. It would take an athlete two hours to make it to the roof without using this lift."

Mr. Bucket pressed the button that ordered the lift to go to the highest floor.

The elevator did not start moving.

"Mr. Bucket," said Tide. "It isn't working."

"Yes," he said. "It is not."

"Can you make it work?" asked Keerthi.

"No," he said. "It has been broken since I built it. I am not good at building lifts that only go in two directions."

"If it's broken, why did you take us inside of it?" asked Tide.

"It may be down, but it is uplifting."

W

Mr. Bucket and the three children were not athletes. With breaks, it took them five hours. He would not allow them to leave the Down Tower and use the Great Glass Elevator because it might hurt the feelings of the broken lift, which he said was not sentient.

The climb was arduous. Keerthi realized she had been awake for over a full day. She had never gone that long without sleeping. Chetan kept her awake by giving her good advice.

"Leave the factory," said Chetan.

"No," said Keerthi.

The chocolate pipes on the floor before the roof all met up in the middle of the room to form one giant pipe leading to the roof. Once on the roof, it extended up for about twenty meters and abruptly ended. Excluding the tube to nowhere and the stars, there was nothing else Keerthi could see on the top of the building.

The humming was louder than it had been on the ground.

"The chocolate," said Keerthi. "How are you pumping an uninterrupted supply of liquid into a pipe with a clear end?"

"I am not," said Mr. Bucket. "That is not an end. There is a hole in there like the hole that I put inside your computers. The chocolate is being transported all over the factory through that hole, to be made into bars and cakes and everything else I use it for."

"But what about the slavery?" asked Keerthi. "You didn't mix it with anything. You only pumped it through the Down Tower and pumped it back out."

"The pipes are porous. Not poorous like Chintzy was; they are economically secure, but they have little holes in them. The holes are too small for the chocolate to pass through, but they are big enough for the thrall muons to pass through, and I have stored those thrall muons in every floor in the Down Tower."

"And those thrall muons?" asked Tide. "You said you get them from slavery. Where's the slavery? Is it a trick, like with the leaves?"

Mr. Bucket smiled and reached for the stars. Keerthi in her exhaustion had not noticed how close they were.

In his hands, it was no bigger than an orange. He twisted it in the middle, and it made a clicking noise and went dark, separating into two halves. He allowed them to fall from his hands and hit the floor.

It was ugly and wore no clothes, much smaller than a mouse. It resembled a hybrid between a person and a severed finger, a little white cylinder of flesh with eyes, limbs, and hair.

It blinked, it breathed, and it whimpered at the four giants lording above it.

"They are human, in a way," said Mr. Bucket. "This is the pencil variation. There are six-thousand variations. Each is designed differently! Some of them look like noses, or geckos, or bones. They all have limbs and at least two senses, and one of them is always sight. They need to be able to see themselves."

"No," whispered Keerthi. "Is it…"

"Intelligent?" said Mr. Bucket. He laughed. "Very! It is smarter than all of you. Consider them to be CHOCOR-0. They spend their entire lives in those star-rooms, all alone. Only my voice is with them. For the ones who are deaf I provide Wonkabraille. I have a recording that tells them that they are my child, and they are a baby being transported from a place far away back home in a tiny capsule because of an emergency. I tell them that I love them, which is a lie, and that they need to learn everything they can about earth before they arrive. They spend the first ten years of their lives learning on a screen and being told that I love them and can't wait to see them, and then I turn on the light."

No one asked what the light was.

"The light," said Mr. Bucket. "It is always pressing down on them. It isn't real light. It is painful. If they do not constantly push against it, it burns their skin worse than any fire can. But it isn't hot. It is my own special Wonkasuffering and it is hard to describe. None of you have ever felt anything like it. I invented it."

"Keerthi," said Chetan.

"For one day, the light burns them. They learn that if they do not keep pushing it will kill them, and they always, because of the person I have taught them to be, do not give up. They are fighters! Then I turn off the light. It goes off and the pain ends. My recording comes on. It is my voice again. It tells them that I lied and that I own a chocolate factory and have no children. I show them a picture of what a real human looks like, and I show them a mirror. I tell them they only exist because their suffering produces thrall muons, which make chocolate tasty. They know what chocolate is but have never tasted it. The light turns on again. I tell them that if they live to be forty, I will set them free, and then I never speak to them again. The lights never stop."

He laughed.

"They never give up," he said. "And when they turn forty, they are successfully incinerated, so I know they deserved it all. This one here is thirty-nine. The thrall muons they have produced are stored in the Down Tower until they can be used. This method produces the most thrall muons, since it makes the most Wonkanucleons feel down."

"How many." Keerthi didn't need question marks anymore.

"Each star will make about seven-hundred thrall muons, which is enough for one cocoa bean. It takes five-hundred beans to make one pound of chocolate. I produce ten billion pounds of chocolate every year."

"Keerthi," said Chetan. "Please."

Keerthi looked at the stars. "I'm tired."

Mr. Bucket chuckled and pulled something out of his coat. "If you are tired you should have told me earlier! I have delicious VIP WonkaCoffee gum with me which will wake you right up. Would you like a piece? It is buzzerberry flavored!"

"I am not that kind of tired," said Keerthi.

Tide took a piece and opened the small hatch to her helmet so she could chew it.

"Tide," said Keerthi. "He is going to give the factory to whoever stays the longest. If you get it, you'll stop this?"

Mr. Bucket puckered his lips together as if holding back a laugh. "Contest? Me? Giving out a factory to a suitable heir? I have not the slightest idea what you are discussing, children!"

She nodded. "No question."

"I know," said Keerthi. "I just wanted to hear you say it." She turned to look at Mahuika.

"You too? I know you the least, but I don't think you are bad. You never said a bad word about anybody. You would stop it too?"

"I vape," said Mahuika.

Keerthi looked at Mahuika. She vaped.

"You would," said Keerthi. "I can tell. You are…"

She did not finish the sentence.

"I am your friend," Keerthi said.

She looked at Mr. Bucket. "I want to go home. You said I could have one item at any time if I was willing to leave immediately and the item was reasonable. I want the machine that powers the stars."

"You cannot have it," said Mr. Bucket. "It is an unreasonable request."

"You already knew he was going to say that," said Chetan.

"I want the stars," she said.

"Unreasonable."

"The people inside the stars."

"Unreasonable." He smiled with the tongues and lowered his head to give her a good view. "You can have one."

She picked up the creature on the floor. It trembled in her hands.

"For that," he said. "You want to stop for that?"

"Yes."

He shrugged. He took off his hat and pulled something out of it. It was a small remote with a single button.

"This," said Mr. Bucket. "If you use this device, it will safely bring you back to the entrance of the factory. A flying chocolate unicorn will come and let you ride it to the surface."

Keerthi looked at Tide and Mahuika. "I'm sorry. I feel bad about leaving it all to you to deal with, but I can't do it anymore."

"It's okay," said Tide. "We are close to the end anyway. This way one less person needs to get hurt, and it all finishes faster. It was nice to meet you. We should hang out when this is over. As friends. We can go sailing."

"I vape," said Mahuika.

Keerthi smiled, waved goodbye, and pressed the button. No unicorn came. Instead she collapsed on the floor. The creature she was holding was flung out of her hands and off the side of the tower.

"You said it would bring her back safely!" screamed Tide.

"If she used it, yes! You do not use the Chocolate Unicorn Calling Machine by pressing it! All she had to do was hold it while clicking her heels together three times! This was clearly explained in the hidden contract I was eating while you all were signing the contract in the Contract Room."

"Oh my god," said Tide. "Oh my god."

"You mean Ocean," said Mr. Bucket. "Remember?"

"Fix her!" said Tide. "She's having a seizure!"

"Of course she is," said Mr. Bucket. "It is hard not to when you press the Sugary Seizure Button."

"Stop it," Tide said. "Make it stop! She's in pain!"

"Keerthi's fatal flaw," said Mr. Bucket. "It was the seizures! She must have been a secret seizure addict. She could not hold back her demons. How sad."

He smiled. Keerthi wished she hadn't solved her puzzle.

"Or maybe she just pressed the wrong buttons."

The floor rose over her vision.