The Host's Judgement

11. The Physics of the Verdict

The stopwatch above us kept its electric blue glow, pouring a cold, sickly light over Diana's silhouette. She was still standing on the edge of the polished marble, but the facade of the ruthless criminal lawyer the cynical, untouchable woman I had seen hours earlier at the dinner table was melting away second by second.

Her eyes were fixed on the plaque bearing her name, which was now steadily moving away, sliding to the right with a muffled hydraulic sound. The gap between the edge and the acrylic DIANA was growing. And fear paralyzed her.

It was a subtle but terrible change. Her long fingers, adorned with expensive rings, dug into the gray fabric of her tailored pants. Even from two plaques away, I could see the line of her jaw trembling. She swallowed hard repeatedly, her Adam’s apple rising and falling erratically. Diana’s breathing became short and noisy, a sharp gasp that betrayed a biological panic no intellectual mind could fake.

“I can’t… the distance is changing…” she stammered. The corners of her mouth were white and dry.

Cold sweat began to bead on her forehead, causing the perfect strands of her chanel haircut to stick to her temples. She tried to adjust her prescription glasses with her index finger a nervous courtroom tic but her hand shook so badly she nearly dropped them. Her eyes scanned the empty pit, inevitably descending to the basement where Hugo lay in a dark pool. She saw what gravity did to those who miscalculated. She saw the pool of blood.

“Diana! The time!” Daniela’s voice rose, hysterical.

[ 00:18 ]

The countdown seemed to hammer inside the lawyer’s head. Diana looked down at her own feet. She was wearing black stiletto heels elegant, but completely useless in this hell. In a snap of desperation, she bent down, her shaky hands struggling with the buckles. She ripped the shoes off violently and threw them backward onto the marble. Her thin nylon stockings now touched the cold, slippery floor.

She took two steps back, groping the air with her hands as if searching for an invisible handrail. Her chest heaved in a frantic rhythm. Diana’s panic was palpable; it was the fear of a woman who had always controlled other people’s lives through laws and documents, now discovering that the Host operated under a brutal physics that accepted no bribes.

“Hayes…” she called out. Her voice, once a razor blade, was now a frayed, trembling thread, begging for an anchor. “The structure… it’s going to swing. You need to secure the ropes! Please!”

“Jump, Diana!” I shouted back, feeling the urgency tear at my throat. I wrapped the rough hemp around my forearms, digging my boots into my acrylic and throwing all my body weight backward. The cuts on my palms reopened, hot blood gluing my skin to the rope.

Marcus watched everything from the first plaque, amused by the collapse of the woman who had probably saved him from some lawsuit before.

“Go on, defender of criminals! Let’s see if your silver tongue helps you against gravity. Or are you going to freeze at the verdict?”

[ 00:08 ]

Diana closed her eyes for a single second, her lashes trembling. When she opened them, there was no more rationality only the pure instinct of a cornered animal that would rather leap into the dark than be caught by the mechanism.

She ran. Her bare feet slipped slightly on the marble, robbing her of some momentum. She launched herself into the void with her arms outstretched, fingers spread, clawing at the darkness.

The impact against the moving plaque was horrible. Diana’s body slammed sideways into the acrylic. The dry crack of her knees hitting the plaque echoed through the pit. Her balance vanished instantly. The bridge whipped violently to the left, and the lawyer’s body swung out over the void.

I was thrown forward, my boots skidding on my own acrylic as the hemp cable tore through my jacket, burning the skin of my arms as I fought to hold the jolt.

Diana let out a choked scream as her glasses slipped from her face, falling straight down into the abyss and vanishing into the deep darkness below. By pure reflex, she managed to hook her right arm around the main cable of the bridge, left hanging. Her bare feet kicked at the air, four stories above the ground.

“Hayes…” she gasped, her face pressed against the edge of the acrylic, eyes half-closed and bloodshot with terror, unable to see clearly without her lenses. “The plaque… look at the plaque!”

Under the weight of Diana’s diagonal and awkward impact, a sinister, sharp sound echoed from her structure. Crack.

A deep white line began to cut through the high-density acrylic right down the middle, splitting the name DIANA in two. It was one of the sabotaged plaques. It was crumbling from the inside out.

[ 00:03 ]

“It’s breaking!” Gabriel shouted from the edge, his voice shrill.

“Pull me up!” Diana stretched her left hand toward me, her fingers trembling and sweaty, begging for contact. “Pull me onto your plaque or I’m going to fall!”

The acrylic beneath her body cracked again, the fracture branching out like a deadly spiderweb.

If I reached out to pull her onto my platform, the combined weight of both of us could shatter the HAYES plaque but if I did nothing, Diana would plummet before my eyes.