OK, so here's where we're at. Think of this as the "Previously on the Mortal Masquerade" bit. Imagine reading this in that voice they always use, if it helps.

Previously on the Mortal Masquerade... well, it's actually a little complicated. I met my love and my soulmate, and we started play-killing each other over and over, then we found this awesome club where I ended up working with a cute tech guy who it turned out used to wear my skirt home from school so I didn't have to. We found out we'd all actually died and it was horrible, but then we undied or something and this guy who ran the club was not-God-or-the-Devil-but-something-else and...

Look, if you want to know just read the first book. I go through a car crusher in it, twice.

I am Lexie, a gender non-conforming horror geek, a dreamer with a deathwish. I get play-killed a lot as part of my job.

Maise is my lover, my other half. She is a fashion and cosplay queen, a roleplay genius who can blow your mind with sexual psychology.

Chris is like our kid sister, even though he's the same age as us. He's a tech wiz harbouring a glam princess.

We're all together in some kind of afterlife scenario centred around The Mortal Masquerade, a secret club where members roleplay as masked avatars to take part in spectacular mock deathplays. We go to a lot of trouble to make these deathplays as intense and realistic as possible while in fact being safe, or at least survivable. Since we're all dead already this might seem strange, but it makes sense in a perverse way that we'll come to later. We are watched over by Uncle Morbid, who we knew as a movie SFX guy but who it turns out is one of the custodians of this plane of existence.

When I left you at the end of the first book, Maise had surprised me with a replica of my old school uniform. I knew what she had in mind – our first kiss had been after school in an empty foundation shaft at a building site and we'd both had recurring dreams recounting that kiss, only in the dreams the shaft was filling with cement around us. This was partly inspired by the French film Jeux D'Enfants (Love Me If You Dare, to give it its English title), which climaxed with the two protagonists enjoying a final kiss as they were buried together in just such a foundation shaft.

This is something we're actually equipped to recreate at the Mortal Masquerade – we have a large industrial concrete mixer that dispenses a special formula of cement that sets around you but doesn't fuck you up like real cement would (drowning aside). It's sort of like a gritty, sloppy plaster of Paris and really does look like something old movie gangsters would use to get their victims sleeping with the fishes. I'd seen Maise buried in the stuff the first time she'd shown me film of the Masquerade, what with that and the simultaneous dreams I'd always known we'd end up under that cement mixer eventually. There were discreet breathing tubes hanging in the tank that you were meant to put in your mouth just before being covered over, because once the cement set you were stuck there until they broke you out.

"If you hadn't guessed, this is a bit more than just a regular deathplay," said Uncle Morbid when he showed me the tank set up beneath the concrete mixer in hangar 2, built to the exact specifications I remembered from that day long ago on the building site at Lampew Meadows. "You can see it as your Awareness Initiation, a new beginning, the moment when you and Maise will remember the lives you lived before and commit to your time together now. As for who chose this scenario, call it a joint decision between the two of you and the universe."

We set up the scene as a special event for a weekday afternoon, inviting a select group of friends to witness and support us. Of course Chris would be there – as he was a part of the original incident that led to our first kiss we decided he should also dress in his old school uniform. At the time I'd often traded my school skirt, which I hated, for his trousers on the way home. Though we hadn't switched on that particular occasion, I decided to wear the trousers for this scene and give him my grey pleated skirt – he always looked more comfortable in girls' uniform anyway. Then we realised that even though he hadn't been in the chamber for our original kiss or subsequent dreams, he was such a part of our life together that we couldn't dress him up and leave him out, so we asked for him to join us in the tank to be buried with us. The idea we settled on was for Chris to sit on the floor of the tank with Maise and I stood behind him. That way, he would be covered over by the time the cement reached our waists, leaving us to have our kiss together as the tank filled up the rest of the way.

We couldn't do it as a deathplay at the Masquerade for a number of reasons; one was that we would be doing this as ourselves rather than under masked avatars (made up characters to be killed off in deathplays), also we would be wearing our old school uniforms and the Mortal Masquerade had a rule against anything resembling child avatars. It also wasn't a deathplay in the usual sense for reasons that would become clear – though we didn't know going in, Uncle Morbid had one more lesson in store for us.

Chris and I usually worked in the office in the mornings, but were given the whole day to prepare, filling the concrete mixer with the ingredients of Uncle Morbid's special cement recipe. Maise arrived just before noon and we all went off together to have lunch and get changed.

We returned to find a small crowd gathering in hangar 2. We were delighted to see Debs, who had made the dresses for Maise and I at my Masquerade debut, and whose villainous avatar Aunt Betsy had been a fearsome and thrilling antagonist for all of us. She said that seeing us in school uniforms made her think of us like her children, and this our graduation.

Uncle Morbid was making the final preparations with Scott, the lead technician. And with them was someone else who I was not expecting to see.

Susan ran the admin office at Morior and was supposedly my boss, although mostly I reported to Uncle Morbid in my real work helping to prepare deathplays for the Masquerade. Susan was, to all appearances, a completely normal office manager apparently unaware of the true nature of what we did here. Before we realised this was an afterlife scenario I'd found this amusing, but once I learned the truth I began wondering what she was doing here at all. I'd met many others like her when I'd been temping in the city before Maise and I found each other, but they occupied a world I had no connection to besides the dull temp jobs I'd had to do pre-Morior. Knowing what I did now, that this was a place where people would find themselves and come to terms with moving on from the mortal plane after dying, she seemed as out of place at Morior as I had been in the vanilla corporate world.

"Hello Lexie, hello Chris," said Susan. "I bet you thought I never came down here."

I confirmed that this was true.

"Well I do," she said, "but only for special occasions. Like getting to bury two of my employees in concrete, along with your friend there."

Well, this was an interesting development. Not only was she not as oblivious as we'd thought, it turned out she'd been harbouring a bit of a sadistic streak... actually, that part wasn't surprising.

Uncle Morbid addressed those present:

"Today we're going to level up three deserving spirits," he began. "Chris has been on our technical team for just under a year and has done sterling work at the Mortal Masquerade both when serving as an angel and under a very performative avatar. Maise is another of our star spirits, whose creative costuming has elevated many a deathplay. And lately they were joined by our most recent angel Lexie, who has proven herself as a fearless and intelligent test subject for whatever crazy deathplay ideas we throw at her. The three of them were close friends from childhood, Maise and Lexie a devoted couple from the occasion of their first kiss, which inspired the scene we will be playing out today."

He went on to explain the significance of the cement chamber. Allow me to take over:

Maise, Chris and I used to meet up after school in Lampew Meadows, an area of wasteland which was being developed into new housing. On one of the building sites a tower block was being plotted out, including foundation shafts lined with rebar waiting to be filled with concrete. One day, Maise and I hid in one of these to tease Chris and shared our first kiss there as we huddled together. Years later we all viewed the movie Love Me If You Dare, which climaxed with the protagonists kissing in a similar shaft as the cement filled up over them. Both memories combined to form the scenario we were now carrying out.

We took up our positions in the tank beneath the huge concrete mixer, which was gently turning ready to fill the chamber with cement. We formed a neat tableaux in the chamber, with Chris sat cross legged on the floor and Maise and I stood just behind him holding hands. Maise had gone to a much posher school than the one Chris and I attended, so her uniform was more expensive – navy jumper, tartan skirt, charcoal blazer – while we had basic grey jumpers and school ties.

Looking out at the small audience of familiar faces I noticed one I didn't recognise, stood next to Debs and Uncle Morbid. It was a man in his early twenties with short bleached dreadlocks, linen trousers and a loose shirt like an artist. He was obviously known to Uncle Morbid and the fact that he was attending this ceremony meant he had to be known and trusted in Masquerade circles, but I could not place him at all. I might have seen him under a mask without knowing – it took me a while to get to know new people anyway – but he would have had to have kept his distance for me not to sense any familiarity at all. I wondered who he was.

Uncle Morbid gave the signal and Susan, in position up by the mixer, pulled the lever to release the cement flow.

The cement flowed down the back of the chamber behind us and we felt it rising up over our feet. Chris looked up at us excitedly as the rising tide flooded in between his crossed legs, his hands pushing down his skirt as it was covered. He was waist deep as the cement rose to our calves, chest deep as it reached our knees. We placed our hands on his shoulders and watched as the cement rose up over his chest, his shoulders and up towards his chin. He bit on the dangling breathing tube and gave us a last smile as the cement closed over his face, burying him completely.

We were now waist deep ourselves. Maise's skirt had floated up with the rising cement, so she took a moment to push it down beneath the surface. We could already feel the cement begin to thicken as the chamber filled, so we carefully turned to face each other while we could, hugging together as the cement climbed up to our chests. We came together and kissed passionately as the cement rose up past our chests and shoulders, seeping into our shirt collars with cold grittiness. Our mouths were interlocked as the cement rose past our chins, over our noses, eyes and ears. I felt the gritty feeling of the cement seeping through my hair and covering over my head. The cement was becoming stiffer and harder by the second – soon we were completely locked still, kissing and embracing in a solid block of Uncle Morbid's special cement.

It was then that I realised we'd forgotten something important – I hadn't grabbed the breathing tube before being buried completely, neither had Maise as far as I was aware.

I didn't know how long we'd be able to hold our breath, but it was probably longer than it would take them to break us out.

Shit.

It was hard to measure time in our cement tomb, but a fair while passed in which I quite clearly did not suffocate. Nor did Maise – we couldn't communicate, but I could feel her warm body rising and falling against mine. Chris had got to his breathing tube in time, but I was starting to realise it was actually just a prop.

Well, of course it was. We were already dead. It's strange that I'd never realised it until now.

I felt the movement of our cement block being loaded on to a dolly and wheeled away. Then came the percussive vibrations of the block being hammered and split from outside. Gradually it crumbled away around us, releasing us from the concrete encasement into the waiting arms of Uncle Morbid, Scott and Susan. We helped Chris up and out and sat down on a bench to catch a breath, our uniforms caked solid with dried cement.

"You forgot the breathing tubes, didn't you?" said Uncle Morbid.

"Yes. Yes we did," said Maise. "Turns out we didn't actually need them, though, because we're already dead."

"That's right," he confirmed. "So you're probably wondering why we have them at all?"

I knew why.

"The breathing tubes are a symbol of choosing life," I said. "We know what it's like to die for real and it sucked, so we make it a game with a barely plausible survival mechanism."

Uncle Morbid beamed.

"Absolutely correct, yet again," he said. "The real secret of the Mortal Masquerade is that our deathplays aren't actually deathplays at all, they are lifeplays. We simulate the moment of ultimate intensity that comes with playful death games, then cross our fingers, get back up and do it all again. We do it on our own terms, with controlled conditions, and make them as spectacular and creatively fulfilling as possible. We can play a bit more loosely here than in the mortal world – to be honest, those silly little breathing tubes would have been useless anyway if you'd actually needed them, and don't get me started on that whole car crusher thing – but the intention and effort to not actually die is what counts."

The bit about the car crusher was referring to a scenario Chris had chosen for a swansong deathplay (our name for spectacular mock executions to kill off avatars). He wanted to be crushed in a hydraulic car crusher, so they came up with a way to sort-of-plausibly survive it and used me as a guinea pig.

"There is one more piece of information I can now reveal about the universe," Uncle Morbid continued, suddenly serious. "This place is not the ultimate destination, but exists on a plane in between the mortal world and wherever you end up ultimately. I told you before that you are here for as long as you want to be, and you are – specifically you are here for as long as you keep choosing life, because life truly without end is meaningless. If and when you ever decide it is your time to pass on, true and final death is yours for the simple price of sincere, willful desire. But I really hope none of you will be leaving us anytime soon."

He leaned forward and smiled.

"I have so much for you to do here."