Chapter 20. “The Final Basket: when light is free admission”

The entire capital graveyard begins to vomit as Leah's ultimate dunk rips through space. Compressed planets erupted from the gilded basket, and the ashes of the slums coalesced into billions of arrows that were shot at the shrine of the Marcus family.

"Fair Tears fuel depletion!" Knox's mycelial right hand plunged into the console as Elena's fluorescent code exploded across the screen, "Initiate Plan B - pave the free throw line with my ashes."

Marcus stood at the top of the temple, the gilded cross of old Marcus extending from his spine, with Raine's mechanical heart embedded in the criss-cross, "Kneel, you leaky-basket bastards!" He whipped out his bible chains and wrapped them around Leah's leap engine, "You've got the right leg bones for a new basket."

Leah suddenly ripped open her left chest and slammed Lucas' heart basketball into the ground. The moment the embryo exploded, Rayne's seeder leapt out of the black hole singularity, the grass seed wrapped in Rose's flaming code, burning the words of her mother's final judgment on the temple floor:

"RH-not the blood type, but the sound of the wind as the guillotine's guillotine falls."

Elena's mycelium bursts out of Knox and wraps itself around Marcus' gilded cross. The network of mycelium surfaces all the tragedies of the parallel universes - five-year-old Marcus mending baskets with pieces of iron at the orphanage, only to have his fingers stomped on by old Marcus's beaters.

"No! These figures are faked!" Marcus scratches and cracks his own cheeks, revealing the same burn scars as Leah - it wasn't even the Marcus family's seed that Raine carried off in the fire that year.

Leah's left leg engine suddenly overloads, burning the last of its fair tears. She grabbed the crossbar of the gilded cross and leapt at the basket in her mother's firebombing pose: "This shot, for all the tampered birth certificates out there!"

The basket tilted forty-five degrees of its own accord to catch Leah's ashes and glory. The Marcus family's gilded temple began to melt away, revealing its core - a secret childhood base pieced together with plastic baskets and fried Oreo wrappers.

"Game over." Before the referee AI's Elena mycelium dissipated, it carved new rules into the temple's wreckage:

"All baskets must be leaky so that the grassy flavor can circulate forever."

As the Basket Breaker sailed off into deep space with its compressed black hole, Leah caressed the scar on her left breast - where two hearts beat: one belonged to Lucas, the other to herself, who had been mending baskets in a junkyard when she was five years old.

And at the end of the universe, Raine's seeder was sprinkling ashes grass seeds onto the newborn planet.

Ross's code flickered faintly on the blades of grass:

"Basketball doesn't lie, but we can choose the shape of the basket."

The children's laughter pierces the vacuum.

Their baskets will always leak.

But the wind smells of light.