The hand belonged to a blocky security guard, from whose grip Lem tried unsuccessfully to wriggle free. He was aware the mall goers were staring at the commotion, and the last thing he wanted was to cause his mom any embarrassment (their reputation was already sketchy) but how could he avoid being seen? He tried dropping the fast food bag to get rid of the necklace, but the guard wasn't buying it. "Turn around. Pick up the bag," the guard said, his voice booming as if through a megaphone. "And don't even think about running."

Lem did think about it, but a crackled burst of information from the guard's walkie-talkie convinced him otherwise. "Exits secured," it had informed him.

He turned and picked up the bag.

The guard eyed him with contempt, then grabbed him violently by the wrist and started dragging him like a sack of potatoes.

"Where we going?"

"To have a little meeting with Mr Getway, the mall's Chief of Security. He don't take kindly to thieves."

Lem felt paraded through the crowded mall, led like a child, looked down upon by passers-by, and too aware how drab and stretched-out his clothes looked in comparison to the guard's neatly pressed black uniform, before being finally led down a narrow corridor culminating in a wooden door bearing a single word: Security.

With his free hand, the guard knocked upon it three times.

There was a click.

—the door sprang open, and the guard pushed Lem inside:

The room was small and windowless, stuffed with hundreds of security monitors and infused with a history of cigarette smoke, in the midst of which stood a mahogany desk and behind that, almost drowning in his green leather armchair, sat a short, balding man with dark, narrowly set eyes, and an unfashionably long moustache. "Good afternoon," he said. "You must be the thief."

Lem coughed.

"The name's Getway. Chief Security Officer."

Lem didn't say anything.

"Come on now, have a seat and let's have a chat," said Getway.

But there wasn't another chair.

Getway laughed merrily—before his voice descended suddenly to a darker octave. "On the floor, you bloody delinquent!"

Lem sat cross-legged, scared but trying not to show it, blood coursing audibly through his body in a pronounced thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump...

"Now pass the bag over and let's see just what your filthy paws took," said Getway.

Lem passed it.

Because the bag was getting greasy, Getway wiped his hands after handling it, slid on a pair of fine leather gloves, then emptied the bag's contents neatly onto his desk.

"Hamburger. Fries. Pizza. Necklace," he said.

"I paid for the food."

Getway took a bite of the hamburger. "But not the necklace," he said, chewing. "And that's where we have a problem, you and me."

"I'm sorry," Lem said, "I—"

Getway spat the hamburger at him!

"No excuses!"

Lem noticed that a vein on Getways's forehead was beginning to bulge, and the ends of his moustache were starting to curl and uncurl.

"You stole and you'll suffer the consequences," Getway continued. "In my experience, and dare I say that experience has been extensive, anyone caught stealing for the first time is hardly a first-time thief. So why don't you look up at me from your place there on the floor, and tell me how I should deal with you."

"It was for a girl," Lem said. "And I'm sorry."

Thump-thump, thump-thump...

"Oh, for a girl—how romantic! How absolutely and quantifiably lovely. In that case, why don't I just apologize to you for taking up your precious time, and you can go on your way." He grabbed a fry in mock sensitivity, and chomped down on it in genuine anger. "You pissant. You less-than-zero."

A twitch had appeared on Getway's face, just below his right eye, and his bulging vein was pulsing, and his moustache ends were curling so much he grabbed one of them between his fingers to keep it still. All the while his face was fluctuating between a blood red and a sickly, bloodless pale.

"Mr Getway?" Lem asked with concern.

But Getway thundered on: "If only we had the right kind of government, we would cut off your hand! Oh, yes. Brutal but effective, and how absolutely and magnificently just. A lesson not only to you, but to all the other pissants out there in this cesspool of a world!"

Blood red.

Bloodless pale.

Blood red.

Bloodless pale.

At that moment, several things happened:

Getway's eyes popped out of his head, and rolled past where Lem was sitting on the floor. The doorknob melted off the office door. Lem felt a painful tightening, first of his chest but then of everything, just as Getway pushed himself—curling and uncurling moustache, twitching face and empty sockets—to his feet, and his entire lower jaw dropped to the floor, cracking the mahogany desk in half on the way down, and hideously elongating his mouth so that it was a natural width but a horrifically unnatural height.

For a few seconds, Lem sat there, clutching his chest and staring at what had become of the mall's Chief Security Officer.

Then there was a low churning sound, and Getway's mouth began to wobble and widen, first by a few centimeters, but soon by several feet, so that what had been his mouth was now a fleshy, human-sized hole through whose darkness, when he squinted, Lem could just about make out a—

No, impossible! Lem thought.

It couldn't be.

Yet it was: a landscape of dark mountains against a blue sky—

The office lights flickered.

As if shaken out of a trance, Lem crawled backwards toward the office door, twisted, got up, felt for where the doorknob used to be, and proceeded to bang on the door with his fists while screaming, "Help! In here! In the security office! Help! Anyone!"

Getway's eyeballs watched him from the office floor.

A whooshing replaced the churning, and Lem felt a breeze on his face, a trickle that soon grew into a rushing of air.

The air caught Lem's screams and returned them as reverberating echoes past his ears, into Getway's gaping mouth, into which the air was also pulling Lem himself—his arms flailing silently against the space between him and the office door—as he realized that there would be no salvation. Nobody could hear him. No one could help him. He thought of his mom, passed out on the couch, and his sister, waiting for the hamburger and fries she would never eat, and wondered if he would ever see either of them again.

His shoes squealed, sliding against the floor—

His hands found nothing to grasp—

The rushing air was deafening and all-powerful, unrelenting and undefiable.

He thought of death.

Of endings.

Getway's mouth was sucking him into itself and there was nothing he could do about it. But still he fought. Fought for every living moment in this world, for every future memory, until the wind had scraped the last remnants of hope from within his head, and on the inside he was blank and at peace, and his body felt light and untethered as it crossed the mysterious threshold of Getway's gargantuan mouth.