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The Trans-Eternal Express leaves Neighborhood 12358W carrying four souls, a Janet, and an Architect gone rogue.
Michael doesn’t tell them why. He wakes them up once they’re already on the train and informs them that he’s now on the side of humanity. It doesn’t make sense to Tahani at first. Hasn’t Michael always been on their side? She can’t quite remember.
Memories start filtering in once they’ve left the neighborhood, in scraps and pieces and dreams. Tahani dreams of so many different soulmates, of pizza and frozen yoghurt, of giant shrimp flying through the sky. How much of it is true? What does true even mean?
Tahani looks over at Eleanor, who’s asleep on the hard seat of the train, head slumped against the window while they steam through an endless night of stars.
Perhaps Eleanor has the right idea. Tahani watches Eleanor’s chest rise and fall until she herself falls asleep.
When they arrive in The Good Place, there’s a great dithering of some of the nicest souls Tahani has ever met, all clucking over the refugees and cooperating to find them the best possible new home. In the end, the four of them go to a tiny house on a cliff by the sea, where an elderly woman lives alone, just below a lighthouse with a great sweeping beam. The sea crashes and breaks on the cliff at all hours, forming a background noise that alternately soothes and maddens Tahani.
Michael and their Janet are only there for the first day, for the turmoil and questions and all the rest, and then they’re gone, off to some higher celestial court while the four humans have to wait for them to return. “It might be a day or it might be fifty years,” Michael tells Tahani and Eleanor and Chidi, as he packs a bag with strange geometric objects, some of which light up and make noises as he talks. “These things are always hard to determine.”
“So — we get to stay here?” Chidi asks. “In this Good Place? For good?”
Michael shakes his head. “Just for now,” he says. “Or maybe it will be for good. Who could say?”
Tahani slips off, and curls herself into one of the lounge chairs on the tiny porch to watch the ocean and try not to think about it.
Tahani tries to find their new home charming, and then adorable, and then delightfully snug, and then gives up and flops down across the narrow bed in the room she’s sharing with Eleanor.
An Architect going rogue — it’s never happened before, according to Janet. Or their Janet, anyway.
It’s not like they were expected. Surely it’s enough that The Good Place has provided them with a safe refuge, while whatever fight Michael has started rages on around them.
Tahani thinks of her houses in The Good Place, each one grander than the last, and realizes that she doesn’t believe the shelter they’ve been given is enough. But she knows that she should.
Irma, their hostess, is a lovely woman, and Tahani feels like a worm, being so cramped and unhappy in the tiny room with twin beds that she’s sharing with Eleanor. She’s never seen a bed so small before. At night, her feet hang over the end.
“Not a bit of bother at all,” Irma tells Tahani, when Tahani offers to help with the cooking one evening. “I do enjoy having guests.”
Irma doesn’t have grand stories of saving people or inspiring a nation. She talks about her children, sometimes. Her husband, who Tahani and the rest haven’t met. He lives with Irma part of the year, and the other part of the year on a boat traveling the Trans-Eternal Sea, visiting other ports in the afterlife.
Irma seems — ordinary. Perhaps, apart from being in The Good Place, she is ordinary. Tahani can’t tell.
One afternoon, Irma brings them to an afternoon gathering.
“Everyone’s been so curious about you,” Irma tells them, her feet sure on the cliff path as they work their way to the town square. “I told them you needed a few days to find your footing here.”
When they arrive, it looks like the entire town is packed into the square. There’s long tables, with tea and scones and roasted corn and beer and barbecue and fish in peanut sauce, the comfort foods of a hundred nations.
Jason’s face lights up and he runs over to a Janet. “Baby! I thought you were with your dad!”
He tries to kiss her, but she leans back. “I believe you’re looking for a different Janet,” she says, friendly but blank. “I am Janet 11973E. You are married to Janet 12358W.”
She blinks out, leaving Jason standing alone in the field. Eleanor runs ahead to catch up to Jason.
“It’s okay, buddy,” she says, patting him on the shoulder. “Your Janet and Michael are out there somewhere fighting for us. We just have to wait.”
Jason looks longingly after the other Janet.
“She’s an AI, and she’s not even the right one,” Tahani snaps, catching up with them. “You do know that, right?”
“Yeah, but… she looks like her,” Jason said. “I’m so lonely here. Heaven is like, super-lonely.”
Eleanor and Chidi exchange glances, and then Eleanor pats Jason on the shoulder. “I bet she’d get some of those trench wings you like if you asked,” Eleanor says.
“Hey, really?” Jason’s face lights up. “Wrong Janet?”
The Janet pops up in front of them. “Here.”
“Can you get me some wings? The good ones.”
A brightly-colored fast food box appears in the Janet’s hands. “Janet 12358W told me that your favorite wings were from Stupid Nick’s Wing Trench,” the Janet says, handing them over.
Jason smiles. “Thanks, Other Janet!” He looks up to the sky and kisses his fingers before flinging his arm out. “Thanks, baby!”
The Janet smiles and blinks out, and Jason takes his wings over to one of the long tables set up along the edges of the field.
People have started arriving. They’re carrying food and flowers and tablecloths. It’s all disorganized — what people wanted to bring, no organization, just chaos.
Eleanor and Chidi get up to go help put things on tables. Tahani stays, watching Jason eat his wings. It’s a surprisingly delicate process, the way he breaks apart the bones to get all possible pieces of edible material, and yet also amazingly gross. Tahani’s dear friend David Attenborough once described watching a swarm of carnivorous insects consume the corpse of a wildebeast. Tahani wonders if it could possibly have been as disgusting as watching Jason Mendoza eat wings.
His face is covered in sauce before he’s done. “Janet always wipes my face for me,” he informs Tahani.
“I’m not wiping your face for you.” Tahani wrinkles her nose. “Disgusting.”
“Delicious,” Jason says, as he tears into another wing.
Tahani watches the people of the Good Place setting up their party, waiting for some sort of theme to emerge. But it seems the party’s nothing but a gathering of people who want to spend time together, and who have very different ideas of what that means. Irma keeps bringing people around to meet them.
In Michael’s Good Place, Tahani always knew how to start a conversation. Everyone around them talked about their good deeds on Earth, about how many children they’d saved, about what amazing people they’d been. Sure, those people were all fake, but they were the type of fake Tahani knew how to talk to.
Here — nobody talks about how they ended up here, about what they believed or how they lived their lives. Instead, they share food. Talk about their families. Someone tries to get Tahani to play a game involving shoving a Frisbee into a wastebasket, which seems like the kind of thing that would have delighted Michael.
Eleanor brings Jason a wet napkin and then pulls him over to join some guys who are starting some sort of game where they have to carry an egg down a length of field without using their hands. They look ridiculous. Chidi’s over with a group of people cooking something on a campstove, talking more animatedly than Tahani’s ever seen him, hands waving as he tells them something Tahani can’t hear.
Tahani sits, a beautiful woman in a flowered dress, all alone.
Tahani’s sprawled across her bed, on her stomach, her face propped up on a pillow so she can look out the window. The sea goes off into infinity, into other afterlives, and none of them have a true home for Tahani.
“What’s wrong?” Eleanor asks, from the doorway.
Tahani remembers a time when Eleanor wouldn’t have noticed something was wrong, much less asked and risked opening herself up to hearing about it.
“Nothing,” she says. She stuffs another pillow under her chin.
“Obviously it’s not nothing,” Eleanor says. “Come on. What is it?”
“I’m not a good person,” Tahani says. “I never was. I don’t deserve to be here.”
Eleanor sits down on the side of Tahani’s bed. The mattress dips under her weight.
“Do you remember the reboot where Michael made us soulmates?” she asks.
Tahani nods. Shawn had cut Michael’s budget for demons to play extras, and he’d been forced to make them soulmates again. He’d flipped the pairings around — Tahani with Eleanor, Chidi with Jianyu.
The memory of meeting Eleanor that first time — it’s one of the strongest memories Tahani has, from any of the loops. The surprise at meeting a woman, which wasn’t what Tahani had expected at all, although when she looked at Eleanor’s messy hair and crooked smile — maybe it made sense. A little.
And then Eleanor hugging her, sitting her down, and then — You’re a good person, right, Tahani? Like, you wouldn’t ever do anything to betray me. The shock of learning that her soulmate wasn’t supposed to be there.
“You didn’t betray me,” Eleanor says, now. “You didn’t tell Michael anything about me. Not even when I made a magical hurricane park itself right over our house.”
Tahani laughs, in spite of herself. “That was a really great house,” she says.
Eleanor smiles. “It was.”
“It had the orangery,” Tahani says. “None of the other houses had an orangery.”
“Screw the oranges,” Eleanor says. “It had a hot tub.”
“Sauna,” Tahani says, and Eleanor grins, because the argument over whether to call the whirlpool bath by the pool a hot tub or a sauna was one of their running fights, one they had over and over again until the night when they fell into the pool together and came up, fully clothed, laughing, and then Eleanor leaned in and kissed Tahani, hard, and everything felt like it made sense.
“I think that might be my favorite one,” Eleanor says, quietly, almost a whisper, and Tahani reaches out and takes Eleanor’s hand before she can tell herself not to. That the two of them — they’re not like that here. Eleanor’s worked hard, made herself into a good person, and Tahani’s still the hot fraud Eleanor thought she was the first time through.
“It’s okay,” Eleanor says. “You’re a good person. You always were. You guys — you were my example, Tahani. Without you, we wouldn’t be here at all.” She takes a breath. “I wouldn’t be here.”
Tahani sniffles and sits up. “Really?”
Eleanor squeezes Tahani’s hand. “Promise.”
When Tahani offers to help Irma, Irma always says no. So Tahani stops asking and just starts pitching in instead, the way Eleanor and Chidi do.
She’s never cleaned anything before, but helping Irma clean her tiny home from top to bottom is strangely enjoyable, even if Tahani does catch Irma asking Janet 11973E spruce up the bits Tahani worked on afterward. Wiping and scrubbing and tearing down curtains to wash them.
“It’s quite fun, really,” Tahani says, afterwards, while she’s wiping up the kitchen after cooking their lunch. She’s never cleaned a kitchen before, not really. On Earth her family always had a chef who’d clean up after Tahani’s scone baking, and in The Good Place Janet always sorted it eventually.
Irma smiles. She’s looking younger these days, her face unlined, her back straight, her hair a shade of brassy gold instead of the faded silver-gilt it was when the four of them moved in. “It’s about the time together,” she says. “And the anticipation.” She looks off towards the sea, an expression of longing on her face.
Tahani brushes the crumbs from the table into her hand and drops them in the bin. “You must miss him,” she says tentatively. “Your husband.”
“Miss him all the time he’s gone, and wish he were at sea all the time he’s here.” Irma laughs. “No, not really. But it worked for us on Earth; no reason to change things now, is there?” She starts drying the dishes in the drainer.
“Are you two soulmates?” Tahani says it before she can stop herself.
“Soulmates?” Irma sets down a plate. “Can’t rightly say. We’re happy together, in our way, and I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it?”
Tahani sits down. “It always seemed to,” she says. “When — when we were in the Bad Place. Every time Michael rebooted us, he told us someone else was our soulmate. And it always seemed to matter quite a bit, no matter who it was.”
“Seems silly to me,” Irma says. “There’s a lot of souls in this universe, Tahani. If you find one you can get on with, you hold on to them.”
The day Irma’s husband sails back into port, she stands tall and strong, young again in body the way she always seemed at heart. There’s a celebration down in the town, everyone bringing food and games. There’s music and dancing long into the night, after the stars have come out and Irma and her husband have retired into their house at the top of the cliff, beneath the great shining light of the lighthouse.
Tahani’s on the dance floor, an uneven, wobbling wooden surface that seems structurally unsound for the number of townsfolk dancing. She’s never seen half the dances, but she tries to follow, stepping through a complicated folk dance and trying to follow along when the music shifts into a genre she’s heard called “funk.”
“Come on,” Eleanor says, from behind her, when Tahani’s just about ready to drop. “Let’s go down to the water.”
They stumble down the stone steps together. Someone’s started a bonfire, and the smell of woodsmoke mingles with the salt from the ocean as they walk along the beach.
The stars are impossibly bright above them, pinpricks of shining light against the black.
“What do you think is out there?” Eleanor asks. Her voice is quiet against the shushing noise of the waves, the distant music and laugher from town.
Tahani stares up at the stars, and then turns to look at Eleanor. “Buggered if I know,” she says, and lets herself fall down on the sand.
They lie quietly, at first, and then Tahani turns toward Eleanor just as Eleanor sits up.
Eleanor doesn’t say anything. She’s still, for a moment, and then she leans down and kisses Tahani.
She pulls back almost immediately. Tahani sits up, following Eleanor, leaning in close, hand at the nape of her neck, just below her hair. It’s been so long since they’ve done this, so long since Michael woke them up and told them they were soulmates, and some part of Tahani believed.
Tahani runs her other hand down Eleanor’s side and Eleanor shivers and leans back in, her breath hot and sweet against Tahani’s skin.
“We’re doing this?” Eleanor asks, her voice a whisper against the shushing of the waves. She’s an outline of darkness against the stars, a welcome weight on Tahani’s heart. This woman Tahani never really forgot about, no matter how many times Michael tried.
“We never should have stopped,” Tahani says, and she leans back in, pulling them both down onto the hard-packed sand. Eleanor’s lips are soft, their movements slow against Tahani’s as they open up to one another.
When they get back to their room, their two twin beds have been replaced by a king-sized bed that barely fits in the room.
Also, for a cozy, adorable cottage by the sea, the soundproofing is pretty good.
Irma and her husband go up into the mountains for a few weeks, to visit one of their children who lives there, in another village. Tahani and Eleanor and Chidi and Jason find themselves developing new routines.
Sometimes people come from other parts of the village to see them. Sometimes Tahani has a couple of their neighbors in, for tea, and Eleanor pretends to be Margaret from Margaret and Dierdre, which always makes Tahani laugh far more than is technically proper, even at an informal home gathering. And Tahani finds she doesn’t care.
Jason mostly stays to himself, in a room off the main floor of the house.
“Normally I forget about things really fast,” he says one morning, over scones that Tahani and Eleanor baked together. “But Janet’s been gone for, like, forever, and I still haven’t forgotten about her.”
Tahani and Eleanor exchange a look over his head. “I know, buddy,” Eleanor says. She pats his shoulder.
Two villagers, Suleiman and Franco, ask Chidi to hear and settle one of their long-running disputes. Tahani’s vague on the details — something about a goat and a view and the question of whether a rosebush someone grew from scratch and a rosebush zapped back into health by Janet 11973E after being munched on by a goat are functionally, ethically, or morally the same rosebush.
Tahani and Eleanor go to the hearing, which is held in the town hall, a plain room in one of the buildings off the town square which seems to grow large enough to hold whoever enters. Tahani only vaguely follows the argument, but in the end, the two disputing parties seem happy enough with the decision reached.
Chidi’s practically skipping as they walk back to the cliff house. “Did you see that?” he asks. He’s grinning. “I made a decision! That was me!”
Eleanor grins back at him. “It was awesome, Chidi. You did great.”
Tahani suspects it’s more that Chidi kept asking questions until the opposing parties decide to settle their differences in self-defense, but she smiles too.
It’s good. It’s amazingly good. On Earth, Tahani never could have imagined being as happy as she is, here in this little house by the sea, sharing a tiny room with Eleanor Shellstrop.
She doesn’t want Michael to come back. Not ever.
Michael comes back, after a year and a day.
They find out when Janet pops into the kitchen of Irma’s house and kisses Jason, and then pops back out again.
Jason’s grin is the biggest smile Tahani’s ever seen him wear. “She’s back! My wife is back!”
Eleanor and Tahani exchange a glance. They’ve avoided talking about what happens now. About where Michael might take them.
“That’s great, buddy,” Eleanor says to Jason, but she’s not smiling.
Chidi comes in. “What’s going on?” he asks, looking over to where Jason’s trying to crack open a bottle of olive oil in celebration, like it’s champagne.
“Michael’s back,” Eleanor says. “Or Janet’s back, anyway.”
“Oh!” Chidi sits down, and then immediately stands back up again. “Oh dear. We’d better go find him.”
They all follow Jason out the door and down the pathway to the town center. “I don’t want to go back,” Eleanor says, under her breath, just loud enough for Tahani to hear. “I don’t want to lose you. Not again.”
Tahani’s stomach is churning, but hearing that — she reaches out and takes Eleanor’s hand.
They finally find Michael in the first place they should have looked: the train station, where they first arrived in The Good Place. He’s sorting through his bags, while Janet stands beside him and takes notes.
He looks up when he sees them.
“You four,” he growls.
Tahani takes a step back. She’s spent so much time with Michael — she has so many memories of Michael the Architect, Michael the good father she never had. Michael who cared about trying Saltines and brunch banter. So memories of Michael, interested in humanity, interested in her, Tahani.
She doesn’t have many memories of Michael like this, angry and honest.
“So… how’s it going?” Eleanor asks. She’s got her head tilted. She’s hanging back a little. “How was Shawn?”
“Do me and Janet get to go back to Earth?” Jason asks. He grins at Janet. “We could be alive again, baby!”
Janet smiles. “That is literally impossible. I am not alive, and you are dead.”
Michael waves his hand at Jason. “No, you get to stay here.” He looks unhappy.
“Just Jason?” Eleanor asks. “Or —”
“All of you,” Michael says, like it’s a failure. “Everyone but me.”
Tahani feels hope blossoming in her chest. “Really?”
“What does that mean?” Chidi asks, at the same time.
“Shawn commended me on my innovative thinking,” Michael says, and Tahani would have expected him to be happy about that, but it doesn’t look like he is. “It was previously unanticipated that humans could grow and change in the afterlife. He’s sending me back to The Bad Place.”
“Wait,” Chidi says. “Shawn commended you, but he sent you to the Bad Place? What’s going on, Michael?”
“He’s put me in charge.” Michael sighs. “Apparently we’re going to try providing enrichment and ethical learning opportunities to the rest of the damned souls, to see if any others are capable of change or if it’s just you four losers.”
“But we get to stay here,” Eleanor says. “All five of us? Even Janet?”
Michael glares up at them. “Yes.”
Tahani gasps, and then hugs Eleanor. “We get to stay,” she whispers into Eleanor’s hair.
There’s so many things she’s been frightened to do, like applying to the Town Council for planning permissions to build their own house. Tahani has the perfect place in mind, down the shore a bit from Irma’s, where they can still visit and go into town and have friends over and entertain and spend time together, just the two of them. And maybe she’ll have an orange tree in the yard. They have two Janets now. Anything is possible.
“We’re getting a hot tub,” Eleanor whispers into Tahani’s ear before she lets go, and Tahani smiles so hard, it feels like her face might crack open.
They hug Chidi. They try to hug Jason, but he and Janet are doing some weird half-kissing, half-groping thing that Tahani doesn’t want to look too closely at.
Eleanor hugs her again, and Tahani decides that she believes it. They're really staying here, in the Good Place.
Tahani’s with Eleanor. Tahani’s home.