Content Warnings
Unreality / gaslighting / institutionalisation (same as the previous chapters so far in this arc)
Dissociation
Drugging/forced drugging (brief mention)
“Heather? Heather, are you still listening to me? Or listening to ‘us’, I suppose. Or, wait, no, listening to yourself, to your own better judgement, that’s what I— hic! Ow. Ahhh, ow. Ahhh. Oh, I hate this. I hate this so much, it’s all so confusing and absurd. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is easy for me. I might be your better judgement, but I’m not some emotionless shell or a disembodied voice. I’m just as complete as you are, with a body and everything. And I’m … I’m in pain, too. And scared, and so, so, so very tired. I’m exhausted, Heather. Please, please, just listen to me, tell me you’re listening. You don’t even have to think about this. You don’t have to make the decision or accept the responsibility. All you have to do is let me bear the burden. Heather? Heather, do you understand what I’m saying? I know you’re still there. Heather? Please! We have to kill the Eye.”
That hateful little voice — my voice, with my pitch and tone, my vocabulary and phraseology, my habits of wording and tics of vernacular — whispered upward from the plastic grille in the hand-held radio, like a palmtop demon plucked from the bowels of my own personal hell.
My fist began to shake. The shiny black plastic of the radio creaked between my tightening fingers. The flicker and lurch of live footage whirled and leapt in the reflections on the plastic. A hundred views of Cygnet Asylum played out on the wall of monitors, compacted down to this tiny mocking echo.
“Heather?”
I had always struggled to hear the quality in my own voice, no matter how many times Raine called me ‘adorable’. On recordings I sounded scratchy, awkward, and herky-jerky hesitant. Reflected in the mirror of Sevens’ masks, I had found my own voice transformed by confidence, courage, and certainty — intensely irritating, fussily over-precise, and dripping with assured intellectual superiority. Listening to me was, to put it lightly, very annoying.
But despite all that I had never truly hated my own voice. Until now.
“Heather? Heather, please, say something. Don’t leave me talking to myself — haha! To myself, oh that’s absurd, I hate it. Talking to ‘dead air’, I should say. I can hear that the line is open, there’s static from the speaker. Don’t pretend you’ve taken your thumb off the button. You wouldn’t— I wouldn’t— we wouldn’t treat ourselves like that.”
The moment she spoke those words, my muscles twitched in denial; I started to lift my thumb from the broadcast button. This voice could not possibly belong to me. This was a lie, some kind of trick by whatever forces still held sway in Cygnet Hospital, working from the same tortured logic which had produced Horror and Evelyn’s Mother and had trapped Raine in a prison cell. This voice was nothing but the dream clawing at my heels. This was not me, this was a lie, and I would listen to no more of—
Praem reached out, held down my thumb, and prevented me from ending the call.
“Ahhh!” I gasped, filling my stilled lungs, like a drowning woman pawing at the surface of dark waters. I finally ripped my eyes away from the wall of monitors; I had not even realised I was being sucked down into that whirlpool of observation. Praem commanded my attention, reaching out from where she was tucked safely into the front of my yellow blanket.
Praem told me not to run away.
Run away from what?! That voice on the radio could not possibly be me. I would not, could not, would never—
You already did, Praem told me.
The voice on the radio was still speaking, hissing lies amid gentle static: “Heather? All right, all right, okay, I know this must be a terrible shock, this must be so confusing, and frightening, and you must want to think this over. But we do not have time for that, there’s no time for an ethical or philosophical discussion. There’s nobody in control of the dream now, nobody to give it direction, except me. And I’ve already thought about those questions, I’ve taken responsibility for it, and I can ‘show my working’ later, if you really need that. I’m pretty sure that’ll happen regardless, when we finish this, when we … agree. But we have to finish it first! We have to kill the Eye, we have to—”
“Shut up,” I snapped into the radio. “Stop talking.”
She — I — stopped.
I pulled another ragged breath down my throat, feeling like I was adrift, alone, in an endless sea beneath a terrible storm. My body was still wracked with pain — the spreading bruise deep in my guts throbbed hard with every frantic beat of my heart, while spots of blood began to blossom across the shin of my left pajama leg, the fruit of burst stitches. But those concerns felt so very far away. My body was a vessel and I was being drawn from it by hooks and snares.
Praem gripped my hand even tighter.
You’re here, she told me, and you have to argue with her. You have to win, not just deny.
I nodded, but it didn’t help.
Eileen was still by my side. She met my eyes when I looked up. She showed so much in her seemingly expressionless face — shock and surprise around those too-wide eyes, confusion and fear in the set of her mouth, wordless incomprehension in the way she tilted her head. A pinkly glowing gaze like sea-foam froth beneath the setting sun asked me an innocent question.
“No,” I mouthed. “No!”
Eileen nodded, but I felt so guilty. Was that voice really me?
The Twins, Zalu and Xiyu, peered at me with polite surprise. They waited with their hands resting on their guns. They had heard every word from the hand-held radio, but they offered no advice. How could they? This was my fight, within myself, with I and me and mine as the prize.
I turned back to the black plastic of the radio in my hand. The flicker-stutter from hundreds of screens lurked in my upper peripheral vision, a silent temptation calling to my sight. Cygnet Asylum’s revolution and fall played out in deep-sea blues and electric greens and whitewashed skies and dying sunrise.
But I kept my eyes fixed on Her — on the unit patch I held in my left hand, on Her insignia, on the ridiculous emblem of a faceless queen, crowned and haloed.
“Explain yourself,” I demanded. My voice shook, and I couldn’t help it. “How would killing Eileen free Maisie?”
A sharp-tongued tut made me flinch. “Not ‘Eileen’!” she snapped. “The Eye. The Eye! Call it what it is. Stop, please stop using her name— its name, I mean! Stop making this harder than it has to be. Look, Heather, just put Raine on, make this easier on all of us. Hand the radio to her, so I can talk to her directly. She can hear me right now, can’t she? Raine! Raine! Take the radio from her, Raine! Or just speak out loud! Raine, please! It’s me, it’s still me, I’m not a fake, it’s me!”
Aching need filled that voice. My voice, lost in a void, crying out for her beloved. Tears gathered in my own eyes. How could I doubt that pain?
Silence settled, filled with radio static.
Eventually the voice — the Other Heather — said, “Oh. Raine’s not there, is she?”
“I … I’m not … I’m not telling you anything,” I said, wiping the tears from my own eyes, reminding myself that this was some kind of trick. “Not until you explain to my satisfaction how killing Eileen would solve anything, let alone how that would free Maisie. I already know how to free Maisie. All we need to do is open the Box and break her prison. How would killing Eileen help with that?”
The Other Me let out a sad little sound, a pitiful attempt at a laugh. “Heather, what do you think the Box is?”
“I don’t know, but Eileen has offered to open it, willingly and gladly! What’s the point in killing—”
Murderous Little Me hissed with frustration, tears turning to bitter rage. “How can you even entertain that question? I should be the one asking you, Heather! How can you forgive her so easily?!”
“Because we don’t need to hate her anymore!” I said. “We don’t need to be afraid of her. She’s on my side now. There’s no point in this.”
The Other Heather snorted a derisive little laugh; I recognised so much in that laugh, because it wasn’t me at all. That was an Evee laugh, a habit I had picked up from her, a technique I had lifted from the mannerisms of one I adored and admired, pressing those habits into service to bolster my own lonely heart and besieged courage.
Whatever this thing was, it felt my fear, and it used my emotional crutches.
“Are you … okay?” I said into the radio.
“Not really,” she replied.
I took a deep breath, trying to suppress my self-pity. She sounded exactly like me at my most pathetic and defeated, so tired and worn down, like she’d given up on something essential to herself. The Voice on the Radio was me at my absolute worst, at the end of my rope, down at the bottom of a well.
“Listen,” I said, gently. “I’m not going to kill Eileen, or let you kill Eileen. Maybe we can—”
“The Eye!” she spat. “Stop treating her like a person, Heather, please. This is making everything so much more difficult. Do you think it’s easy for me to dehumanise her? Well, it’s not! I’m not you stripped of empathy or emotion, I still feel all of it, and I— I don’t want to do this, but this has to be done. We cannot afford to treat her like a person, like a—”
“She is a person!” I snapped back, surprising myself. “She’s our mother!”
“She’s not our real mother! Heather, that’s an absurd thought, and you know it. We both know it! That’s actually one point I’m pretty sure we agree on! We weren’t adopted, or made with secret Outsider material, or anything like that! We were kidnapped — brutally. Us and Maisie. That thing you’re standing next to, she’s not our mother, she—”
“Well what if I want her to be!?” I shouted.
A choke, a halt of breath, words lost deep in a closing throat. “T-that … she’s not … ”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sorry at all. “But you’ve staked out an indefensible position there. Does Praem not count as Evee’s daughter, just because they don’t share blood? How about Praem and us? Is Praem not family to me, because she’s not got my genes? How about Tenny and Lozzie? Or Tenny and us? Is Tenny part of our family, a daughter to us, or is she not allowed to be? Or Lozzie herself, can she not be a sister to me? Are we not allowed to choose that? Do you reject all of those, too?”
Lonely Heather did not reply for a long moment.
“I’m going to have to demand an answer,” I said.
“ … no, of course I don’t reject those.” She swallowed, hard and rough, then took a deep breath. When she spoke again, she had regained some of her confidence — a little bit of Raine crept into her voice, a rod of borrowed steel. “But this is different. You know this is different. We agree on that, too.”
“Who or what,” I said, “am I talking to, exactly?”
She sighed with an ill-tempered impatience I knew all too well, turning my stomach at my own worst qualities. “I just told you that we don’t have time for a philosophical debate over this, let alone a discussion of first principles. It must be obvious—”
“Okay then,” I said. “I’m going to assume you are my evil robot clone, and work from there.”
A tut and a sigh. “Oh yes, very obvious. Except for the small wrinkle that I’m neither evil, a robot, nor a clone.”
“Wow,” I said.
“ … w-what?” she stammered.
“We really do sound like Evelyn sometimes, don’t we?”
“I-I don’t see how that’s relevant right now,” she said. “I keep trying to tell you, we don’t have the time for this messing about and—”
“You have two choices,” I said slowly. “Either we talk, and you can attempt to convince me of your plans, or I can terminate this call right now and hunt you down. Your choice. After all, I did kill all your soldiers without Raine’s help. Do you want to guess how I did that?”
A pause, followed by a horribly awkward and sad little laugh. “Oh. Oh wow. I see what you meant.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“This is what it feels like,” she answered, voice forlorn and abandoned, “being on the receiving end of ourself. We always were so harsh with ourselves, I suppose.”
“How can you expect me not to be harsh when you’re telling me to stop thinking and start murdering?!” I snapped back.
“Because I’m right!” she shouted.
Her yell made the microphone peak.
We both paused in unison, both panting for breath, both scrambling for composure.
If this voice really was me, doubled or split or projected by the dream, then she must be thinking similar thoughts; even now she would be racing to think of how to gain the advantage. I had to keep her — me — off-balance, keep her talking, don’t give her room to think too much.
“If you’re me,” I said, “then you must know I’m not going to accept that on faith alone. Start talking. Who are you?”
Another sigh, resigned this time. “I already told you,” she said. “You created me, at the moment you decided to forgive Eileen—” She tutted. “I mean, the Eye.”
“But I didn’t,” I said. “I haven’t forgiven her. I decided to postpone the decision. We’re in the middle of a metaphysical and literal crisis, I can hardly stop to chew over that in the middle of all this.”
“So you agree,” she said. “We can’t stop to think. We need to act.”
“Ugh,” I grunted. “Don’t try to lead me in rhetorical circles, I know myself too well for that. I didn’t forgive Eileen.”
“You did,” said The Other Me. “You forgave her in your heart, and in this place that’s what really matters. I exist because you disagreed with yourself. You can’t just leave such intense internal contradictions unexamined in a dream like this, not when you’re the centre of it, or they’ll become literal. I’m the product of that genesis.”
My head whirled. I cast my mind back. Had I decided to forgive Eileen?
I had accepted her piggy-back up the stairs from the archives; I had lain my cheek on her shoulder and trusted my body to her care; I had slept in her arms like a child; I had accepted her story, the tale of her past, and that she could be more than pure observation; I had accepted that she had not meant to do any of this, and that she would help me now. But none of that meant forgiveness.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “I didn’t forgive her.”
“I know you did,” said Heather. “Because I’m you.”
“Yes, well,” I huffed. “And the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
The Other Me snorted. “And sometimes we are devils to ourselves when we will tempt the frailty of our powers. See, I can quote relevant Shakespeare passages at you, too. Is that the role you’re casting me in, now? The devil?”
“Why not?” I said. “You seem determined to act the part. You are rather ‘tormenting me with your bitter tongue’, as it were.”
“And that’s a misquotation,” she said. “I’m not an evil version of you, Heather. I’m a disagreement.”
I sighed and felt an unaccountable urge to rub my face; she — I! — was incredibly irritating when I wanted to be. “Okay, so … when I accepted Eileen in my heart, you popped into existence somewhere out there? And you were already in command of all these—” I glanced over my shoulder, at the corpses of the Empty Guards, the strange automatons which littered the floor of the Governor’s Office, still leaking pools of oil, felled so swiftly by Zalu and Xiyu. “These robot guards?”
“Not exactly. I had to make those.”
“And you worked that quickly?” I almost laughed. If Trigger-Happy Heather could manufacture robot soldiers in what little time she’d had since I’d accepted Eileen, I may as well surrender right away.
She sighed. I could practically feel her sagging with exhaustion. “I wish it had been that simple, Heather. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”
“I’m sorry?”
“While you’ve been running around Cygnet Hospital, having all those lovely little adventures with Raine and Evee and— and— and all the rest—”
Her words drowned in silent sobs. She was no better at suppressing her pain than I was.
“ … Heather?” I said.
A big sniff blasted up from the radio, followed by a frantic rustle of fabric — the sound of a sleeve raked across tear-streaked eyes. When she spoke again, her composure was a brittle iron surface, borrowed from Raine but lacking all warmth.
“While you were running around the hospital with everybody else, I stayed focused on the reason we came here. You got distracted. I went straight for Maisie.”
“ … excuse me?” I said. “You mean to say you’ve been here the whole time, since the dream started?”
Another sigh, even more exhausted than the first. “Objectively, no. But subjectively, yes.”
“ … but—”
“Look, Heather, I can’t wrap my head around it any better than you can. I’m no smarter or more well-educated than you are. We’re in a dream, remember? I’m sure Lozzie could explain it, but I can’t. All I know is that I exist. I didn’t exist until you forgave Eilee— the Eye!” She huffed. “The Eye. But I existed retroactively, because you were always going to forgive the Eye.”
I glanced down at Praem, tucked snug in the front of my yellow blanket, but she could offer no answers to this paradox. Tidying this dream was beyond even her maidly powers. Eileen met my eyes when I looked up, but she just shrugged; the Eye was not primarily a dreamer by nature. Zalu and Xiyu both nodded with sagely wisdom, as if this was all very simple and straightforward.
I turned back to the radio. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Retroactive Heather actually laughed, though without much mirth. “Don’t complain to me, I don’t determine the nature of dreams. I’m sure we can ask Lozzie about it later, when this is all over.”
“No, I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that a piece of me would decide to act like this.”
“Really?” she asked. She sounded so tired.
I decided to lie: “I mean, I still don’t entirely believe that you’re a piece of me. Like you said, this is a dream, so you could be anything. For a start, what’s with the robot guards? I don’t know the first thing about robots.”
A little sigh from the radio. “Neither do I, obviously. I needed some … ‘minions’, ones that don’t matter if they die. Those robots don’t have brains or feelings or anything. But they work, don’t they? I based them on the Knights. It was all I had to hand.”
I tutted and rolled my eyes; that did sound like something I might do. I’d always hated the idea of putting the real Knights in harm’s way, of spending their lives like chess pieces, even when they put themselves at my disposal.
“Fair enough,” I admitted. “But what’s with this absurd insignia?” I raised the unit patch in my left hand, as if she could see it, and ran my eyes up and down the faceless head, crowned in white and haloed in red, alone on a field of black. “Did you invent this?”
“Doesn’t it make sense to you?” she asked — with actual worry in her voice.
“Explain it to me.”
She tutted. “You’re being needlessly cruel.”
“Says the part of me which is trying to convince me to commit murder. Is that the person who you want Maisie to see, when she’s freed? Heather the murderer?”
Murderous Me simmered in silence for a moment, then said, voice dripping with scorn and bitterness: “We’ve murdered before, Heather. You’re a murderer.”
“Yes, in situations where it was necessary to defend ourselves or our friends. What are we defending ourselves from here?”
“The Eye,” she growled through clenched teeth.
“Well,” I said, trying to make myself sound easy and unconcerned. “Eileen is standing right next to me, right now, and I don’t feel any particular need to defend myself from her.” I glanced up at Eileen, deep into those eyes like dusk tangled in a blanket of clouds. “Eileen, are you dangerous?”
“I am precarious,” she said.
I almost laughed. “That has about three different meanings in this situation.”
“Three! Delightful.”
Heather the Harsh squawked from the radio. “Stop that! I don’t want to hear her voice!”
“Yes, it’s a lot more difficult to contemplate murdering a person when you’re forced to treat them properly, isn’t it?” I said, making no effort to hide the scorn. “She carried me. Carried us! She’s not dangerous to me, to you, to any of our friends, or to Maisie, not anymore, before you say—”
“Have you even glanced out of the window?!” snapped Vigilant Heather. “The Eye, it’s open! How can you look up at that thing and not be afraid?”
“Because she’s not doing any damage. Nothing is on fire, or melting away, or being reduced to atoms.”
“Tch!” the Other Me tutted, as if I’d scored a point against her.
“Now come on,” I said, warming to this casual taunting. “Answer the original question. Explain this insignia to me. Why the crown and the halo?”
Mortified Me almost growled. “Does it seriously not make sense to you?”
“I want to hear you spell it out,” I said. “You made it, you deserve to own it. Go on. Say it.”
I had no idea where this vindictive, sarcastic, dominant confidence was coming from. I never treated anybody like this — I would never have dared, even as a game, even with explicit permission and request I would have struggled to provoke and goad like this, knowing that my target was squirming with discomfort and embarrassment. But when the opponent was all my own worst qualities? I got nasty.
Crowned and Haloed Heather cleared her throat, in an effort to regain her dignity. “It’s us, of course. The crown is inherited from Sevens. The halo is because we’re an angel. The symbolism is obvious.”
“And the faceless head?”
“The crown and the halo are the only personal identifiers we need.”
I snorted.
“Don’t— don’t laugh, you— it— it’s cool!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “it’s what? Could you repeat that?”
“It’s cool,” she said, pronouncing the word with great care; I made a resolution to extricate the word ‘cool’ from all my future vocabulary. “Don’t deny it!” she went on. “You agree, Heather. We have the same aesthetic tastes, we’re not mirror-world opposites or something. The faceless visage is very mysterious and imposing. The crown and the halo, that’s power.”
I sighed, pretending to be unimpressed; in truth I saw what she was getting at, what she had tried to express in this silly little symbol. That I agreed was worrying and more than a little upsetting. It proved that those thoughts had been mine all along, that the capacity for this cruelty and display of power was not a trick, it was me.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “It’s all very edgy, well done.”
Edgy Heather let out a little huff. “We’re good at ‘edgy’! We should let ourselves be ‘edgy’ more often. It works.”
My turn to huff. “Is that what this is to you? Trying to kill Eileen is ‘edgy’? It’s no surprise you’ve already failed, if that’s how you’re approaching this.”
“I’ve failed, really?”
Smug confidence suddenly returned to her voice, low and nasty and just as vindictive as me; I glanced up at Eileen in concern, then around, behind myself, to where the Twins stood ready with their hands on their guns. They looked to the window of the office, and glanced at the makeshift barricade against the broken door, ready for sudden surprises. But nothing happened.
“Heather,” the other me was already saying, “who do you think started the jailbreak in the aquariums?”
At mention of my other six selves, still trapped in the Box, my eyes nearly jumped upward to the wall of flickering monitors — but Praem held me back. I kept my lips carefully shut for a moment, cautious not to let my relief show in my words; the Other Me was not talking about an additional plot to kill Eileen, but about her previous victories.
If she was so set on killing Eileen, why no plan B?
“I’m sorry, pardon?” I said eventually.
“Hm!” a smug little noise came from the radio; I almost cringed, unaware I was capable of sounding so full of myself. “That’s right, that was me. I freed the other six of us. I did it by remote, with this big console full of buttons and … hm, I suppose you don’t need to know that part.”
My stomach dropped; this could be a disaster. If she recombined with the other six of us first, what would happen to me?
“Are they with you now?” I said.
A big sigh. “No. I can’t reach them myself. But that’s not the point, Heather. While you’ve been running around and having your wonderful little adventures, I’ve been fighting, all this time. For Maisie.” Her voice grew thick again, throat closing up, tears threatening her eyes; if she’d been in front of me I would have reached out and tried to hug her, no matter what sins she’d convinced herself she must commit. “I’ve been fighting all by myself. All this time. While you’ve been achieving self-actualisation for the Outsider nightmare which imprisoned Maisie in the first place, I’ve been breaking us free!”
“I’ve been breaking us free, too!” I said. “I’ve been liberating the others! Raine, and Evee, and Lozzie, and everyone!”
“Who do you think matters more,” she said, dead-voiced and dead tired. “Us, or them?”
“It’s not a binary choice! What are you even saying? We’d be dead without Raine and Evee, without all of the others, a dozen times over! You know that!”
“Maybe so,” she said, grudgingly.
“And Lozzie’s started a revolution out there! We’re snatching control of the asylum, right now.”
“From whom?” she murmured, as if it didn’t matter one bit.
“ … sorry?”
“Who do you think you’re taking control from?” she asked, voice faded and slumped. I could almost see her sagging with exhaustion, my exhaustion. I heard the creak of a chair, like an office chair, followed by a grunt of pain, as if she had strained her back or could barely stand up. “And how does that help Maisie?”
“Once we have control, we can open the Box.”
“Can you? Can you really? Without me?”
“ … is that a threat?” I asked. “Is that where you are? Are you inside the Box? You must be, if you started the aquarium breakout. If you’re inside, you can let us in! We can free Maisie together, can’t we?”
Bad Mean Evil Me sighed again. “We all wish it was that simple. Besides, Lozzie’s revolution doesn’t matter now.”
A chill went through me at the certainty in her words. “What? Why not?”
“I’m sorry, Heather, I didn’t want it to be this way either. If there was some easier method, I would … I would take it too, and there would be no disagreement between us. But there isn’t an easier route, so it’s going to be hard, and you won’t accept that, so that’s why I have to exist. That’s why I have to do this, for Maisie.” She took a great, shuddering sigh. “There is no other way. Lozzie’s revolution is going to fail.”
“You can’t say that until it’s over, until it’s—”
“She and the others are all losing. Go on, take a look for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Take a look, Heather.”
My eyes involuntarily flickered upward, risking the monitors once again in mad panic. But I caught myself at the brink, pulled myself back, and screwed my eyes shut.
Had my Other, Evil, Murderous Self just attempted a little trick?
The wall of monitors — the Eye’s obsessive observational power represented in plastic and steel and glass — was a constant temptation flickering and buzzing in my peripheral vision. Previously I had been able to endure it and pull my eyes away again without external intervention. But now, dissociated from my own body like I was floating beyond the leg wound and the gut bruise, I had become susceptible to that seductive whisper, that promise of all-knowing, all-seeing, do-nothing power.
But what if Other Heather wasn’t lying? What if the others really were in trouble? I had to look, I had to know, I had to help, I had to—
A gentle hand touched my shoulder.
My eyes flew open. I looked up and around to find Eileen staring back down at me, bug-eyed with determination and promise.
“Neither of us is alone,” she said.
I blinked several times, then nodded, slowly at first, then with growing confidence. She was right. Eileen patted my shoulder. She would be my anchor, lest I dive too deep, for she knew exactly what it felt like.
Praem offered additional help. She reached out from within my yellow blanket, raising a check-list. That way I would not get distracted. She told me to be a good girl, stick to my list, do my errands, then come straight home.
“Thank you,” I said out loud. “Both of you, thank you, I—”
Evil Heather’s voice squawked from the radio: “Pardon? What are you trying to say? I can’t—”
“Not you,” I told her. “Shut up.”
And so, with anchors and guidance aplenty, I raised my eyes once more to the wall of monitors and screens and camera feeds, and opened wide.
Hundreds of views yawned like the opening mouth of a great chasm of sight, from wall to wall, from desktop to ceiling, looming over me as if pressing itself against my very eyeballs, drowning my optic nerve with information; each little truth stood shoulder-to-shoulder with eight more, each one cupped in curved glass or smeared behind clear plastic or flickering or jerking across static-washed liquid crystal. I sank back into the throne of metal and plastic; my vision broadened, my mind expanded, my self-hood shrunk down to a quivering nub of desensitized flesh. For one dizzying moment I saw it all, every corner of Cygnet Asylum from the meanest hospital corridor to the echoing vaults of hidden operating rooms, from filthy prison cells with their patina of dirt to vast torture chambers of medical barbarism, from the separate blades of grass on the lawn to the sway and rustle of tree leaves beneath the dying dawn. I counted and catalogued and collated, and I understood nothing.
Eileen squeezed my shoulder. Praem tapped the list.
I narrowed my focus.
Lozzie’s revolution was spilling through the hospital corridors, like a tide already racing beyond the high-water mark, the waves not quite yet over-topping a seawall. Dozens of girls had banded together in well-organised groups, little phalanxes of protection moving through the hospital, making for their pre-arranged targets with makeshift weapons and shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity: here was a shield-wall of broken tables, bristling with lances made from snapped table legs, a hedgehog which threw back a thick rush of horrible nurse-things again and again, while the more vulnerable patients sheltered in a knot of rooms to the rear; there — a bottleneck ambush point where girls lay in wait with heavy spanners stolen from some boiler room, smashing the brains from any mutant nurse-monster which dared shamble through; elsewhere again, inside a head office — some space I’d never seen — with the doors blocked and barricaded, as a team of patients ransacked the records and paperwork, shoving handfuls into shredders and tearing it to confetti, while helpless nurses with hands like melting ash and faces full of holes wailed and beat on the walls; over there, a mob of girls raced down a corridor, fleeing the pursuit of dozens of shambling nurse-creatures; back over here a wave of violence overwhelmed some hidden room, girls setting about themselves with half-bricks and frying pans, scattering the monsters and freeing one of their own number who had been tied to a table, her flesh pierced by syringes, her eyes rolled back into her head with drugged sleep.
The patients — the very same girls who I had spent the last two dream-days alongside, all dressed in Cygnet-issue patient pajamas or what old and worn personal clothes they had been allowed — were scoring so many little victories, more than I could count without deviating too far from my list.
Among them, dotted here and there like black-wreathed rocks deep in the tide, were Lozzie’s beloved Knights. Their true chivalry had not remained suppressed for long — each one appeared to have torn off the emblem of the impaled tentacles, fighting now without flag or banner. And fight they did, though their shiny black submachine guns did not appear to work; they had been reduced to using the firearms like clubs. Still, their strength told well. Wherever one stood, the patients tended to hold firm; whenever two or three came together, they were putting the nurses to greater rout.
My Lonely Counterpart’s ‘robot guards’ were in evidence too — but they were not helping. Several dozen of the Empty Guards were clustered around the internal entrances to the Box, those absurd high-security vault doors deep inside the hospital.
Their guns worked all too well. Around each vault door lay a ring of dead nurse-monsters, the Empty Guards untouched. But they weren’t firing on the patients, on the girls, only upon the nurses. But they weren’t sallying forth to help, either.
“Why aren’t you helping?” I hissed under my breath. “Why not help them?”
The Other Me answered: “I can’t risk that.”
Despite their many little victories, the patients and the Knights needed help. For they were vastly outnumbered.
Nurses swarmed and flowed over almost every part of the hospital now — shambling out of dark corners, bursting from locked rooms, crawling from beneath beds. They had not readopted their daytime guise of human faces, even though the orange sunrise was fading into a clear, bright, crisp-cold day; each nurse was still a unique monster of sagging grey rot and protruding bone spikes, of dripping acid tentacles and grasping strangler’s hands, of eyeless faces and blinded maws and jagged teeth and lolling tongues, all barely contained inside those whitely starched uniforms. They were armed with an equal cacophony of weapons — man-catcher poles, plastic wrist cuffs, dripping syringes, ropes and gags and spit hoods and the gleam of surgical tools.
The nightmare had followed the patient body out into the daylight, and the sun had not banished it to memory. They were more like zombies than nurses now, shambling on without greater direction, forced to keep imposing the empty will of the institution.
The revolution was mobile, for now — staying ahead of the nurses where they could, picking off or ambushing smaller numbers where opportunity presented itself, trying not to get bogged down defending static positions. Lozzie had organized them well.
But they were outnumbered twenty or thirty to one. The nurses kept coming, as if from nowhere. Eventually the patients would tire.
Already a dozen little failures were unfolding, cracks in the revolutionary front: a team of girls cornered in a dead end, with no way out except through the press of a hundred nurses; a minor ring-leader snatched from the front of a shield-wall, dragged off and wrapped in a straitjacket, quickly gagged and drugged; an exit blocked by weight of nurse bodies, girls with no way to go but back into the dark; a phalanx shattered, the survivors pursued by grasping hands as they fled, all going in opposite directions, alone.
“No, no,” I hissed, “stick together, stick together!”
The Other Me said, “It wouldn’t help them anyway.”
Praem tapped the list. My sight whirled on, looking for my friends.
Lozzie — there she was, leading a gang of seven others, poncho fluttering in some dark place far beneath the floors. Her companions were well armed, with kitchen knives and a steel baseball bat and little shields made of broken cupboard doors studded with nails. They were on some secret mission in the bowels of the hospital, stopping at regular intervals at junctions of water pipes and electrical boxes. But more and more nurses were shambling from the shadows, cutting off their escape routes, driving them away from their hidden targets.
Raine and Zheng had joined the revolution too. Raine stood atop a table in some ransacked operating theatre, at the head of a wild mob of girls, duelling with some lumbering nurse-monster. Her moment of victory was caught on the screens — her machete flashing through the monster’s neck, like slaying a vampire. Her bare foot kicked the creature off the table, crashing down into a shambling mass of others like itself, smashing them back with sheer body weight. Raine raised her machete; the mob cheered, then surged forward.
Zheng was nearby, still diminutive, still smaller than she should have been, trapped in an insulting parody of her own body. She was half naked, covered in blood from head to toe, eyes wild and teeth stained with gore, beating a nurse to death with it’s own severed arm.
Raine called out a war cry; Zheng raised her grisly club and howled a reply.
At least they were having fun — though they were surrounded in all directions by yet more nurses. The pair of them could dish out a staggering amount of violence, especially backed up by the other patients, but even those two would tire given enough time.
Evee and Twil had avoided the worst of the fighting; for a moment my heart soared with hope, but then I realised where they were. The pair of them were barricaded together inside a room of bright lights and stainless steel tables, with trays of bone saws and rows of cadaver-cubicles — a morgue. Evee’s mother’s corpse lay on a main autopsy table, still intact, stripped naked, gone grey as if dead for days.
Twil was dishevelled and frantic, wolfish tail tucked between her legs, canine ears gone flat with fear. She was busy piling stuff in front of the door, dragging tables to block the way in, all while casting wild glances back over her shoulder. Evelyn sat white-faced and frozen in her wheelchair — staring at the rattling, banging, bulging little hatches over the refrigerated corpse-drawers, and the way her mother’s body was beginning to twitch.
Praem hesitated, down in the front of my yellow blanket. Her own mother was still trapped in a horror story.
But then she tapped the list again. We could not pause, not yet and not here.
Next came Praem herself — or Night Praem. She was sweeping upward from the prison levels at long last, bursting through the bars of a gate and slamming through a blockage of nurses like a whirlwind of black lace and oil stains.
She was followed by a gaggle of Knights, battered and bruised, their security guard armour loose here and damaged there, but all of them intact and upright. Praem swept onward and the nurses surged back in; for a moment it seemed the Knights would be overwhelmed, but then a tide of prisoners followed Praem through the breach, wild-eyed girls and bloodstained women, not unlike Raine when I had first found her down there. Praem had used her time down in the prisons well. She had freed all those inside.
The liberated prisoners hacked into the nurses with makeshift shivs and lengths of iron pipes and bare fists. For a moment I almost cheered — surely this would overtop the sheer number of nurses out there in the hospital?
But they faced a living wall of institutional violence. This prison riot would not grow the flood beyond the defences. Not yet, not quite.
Praem tapped the list. My sight whirled outward, beyond the walls.
Seven Shades of Sunlight stood astride some distant hospital rooftop, lit from behind by the last rays of the dying dawn-light and spotlighted from above by a single beam of silver-glint Eye-light. She looked as if she was playing out a scene from some absurd fantasy novel, still dressed for war in gleaming armour and cracking golden cloak, twirling on her very impractical platform shoes. She was surrounded on all sides by a sea of monsters, nurses who had chased her to the highest point she could reach. Her flaming sword sang in spark-trailing arcs, parting bodies left and right. Her lips moved in a silent chant. Her golden armour caught the turn of the sunlight.
Very dramatic, drawing off such great numbers. But Sevens had nowhere left to run.
My sight whirled still further afield, over the lip of the roof and out over the ground of Cygnet Asylum. Green lawns were speckled with morning dew. The woodland swayed in the breeze. I searched for the final three items on Praem’s list — the Fox, the Caterpillars, and the Forest Knight. Would I find them in a losing battle as well, outnumbered and overwhelmed, surrounded and trapped?
The grounds of Cygnet Asylum opened wide, jumping and flickering on a hundred monitor views.
Praem blinked. Eileen made a little ‘oooh’ sound. Zalu and Xiyu peered over my shoulders.
A gargantuan black moth towered over the hospital grounds, locked in a pitched battle with an entire armoured division of Empty Guards.
A hillside of rippling muscle lay beneath smooth sable flesh, furred and resplendent with whorls of white, topped by a pair of fluttering, buzzing, dream-blur wings, the colour of oil on water lit by volcanic fire. Tentacles as thick as tunnel boring machines reached out from beneath the wings, waving mouth-tip openings in the air, each large enough to swallow a bus. Fluffy white antenna twitched and shivered above a massive head — a head I would know anywhere, recognisable despite the insectoid snout and the gigantic black eyeballs and the dreamlike warping of familiar features. The mouth was curled with childlike amusement, more cat-like than moth-like, open wide in a deafening war cry of—
“Prrrrrrrrrrrrrfffffffffttttt!”
We — me, Eileen, Praem, and the Twins — all jumped. That sound did not come from the monitors; it reached through the walls, from far away, on the other side of the asylum.
“Tenny!?” I spluttered out loud. “How did— what— I—”
She was beautiful, of course, exactly as she had been in the previous dream where she had attempted this feat of kaiju-inspired glory.
Armoured vehicles skidded and slewed about her six massive stalk-like legs — little green jeeps and cartoonish mono-colour tanks, all tearing up the lawns and ruining the flowerbeds with their tracks and wheels. They fired weighted nets at her legs from wide-mouthed cannons, pumped clouds of glowing soporific gas up toward her face, and tried to launch grappling lines over the bulk of her body, presumably to bring her down. Tiny blue projectiles like foam darts spewed from the mouths of machine guns, pattering off Tenny’s hide in great clouds, matched by larger rocket-esque foam munitions from the tanks.
Tenny reared up and bucked off any attempt to stop her wild rampage; the foam ‘bullets’ did nothing, the nets barely slowed her down, but the sheer press of machines was forcing her to advance very slowly. Her tentacles plucked armoured vehicles from the ground and tossed them about like the plastic toys they were modelled after. Tiny figures — more Empty Guards, sent by the Other Me — tumbled from tank hatches and fled from beneath Tenny’s smashing feet and trilling mouth and buzzing wings.
The Caterpillars were there too, all six which had accompanied us to Wonderland. They were not quite fully grown again yet; each one looked about the size of a horse rather than a barn. They were taking shelter behind Tenny’s bulk, sometimes darting forward to aid her when they could, chasing down clusters of empty guards, ramming tanks and flipping them over, alerting Tenny to any concentration of forces bringing up heavy weapons.
And in the middle-distance, blocked by lines of artillery pieces shooting nets and rubber bullets, walled off by blocks of tanks and trenches full of Empty Guards and barbed wire, stood the blocky grey monolith of the Maximum Security Containment Facility, the Box.
Tenny was trying to break it open.
“Oh,” said Eileen. “A moth. She must have followed the light.”
One of the Twins said: “The battlefield is no place for a teenager.”
“An insect, though?” asked the other.
“A teenage insect.”
“True, sister.”
“Is she one of yours, Ma’am?”
“Tenny!” I cried again, the spell of the monitors completely broken. “How is she even here?! And you!” I raised the radio back to my lips. “I cannot believe this behaviour! Suggesting murder was one thing — and still completely unacceptable, I would like to make clear — but this is absolutely obscene! I have completely lost my temper with you!”
“Heather,” the voice — my voice, which I had never hated so much — crackled back from the radio speaker. “Heather, calm down, please, you don’t—”
“You’re shooting at Tenny!”
“I’m not—”
“Those are your robot soldiers out there! And you’ve given them tanks and guns and you are shooting at our Tenny!” I punctured my outrage by slapping at my thigh with her stupid insignia, turning it over so I could slap her face on my leg.
“She’s the one who introduced the kaiju genre,” the other me protested, “I’m just trying to—”
“You are shooting at Tenny! There is no excuse for this!”
“With non-lethal weapons!” she shouted back, temper lost. “That’s the terminology, as Raine would say. Non-lethal weapons. Nets, sleeping gas, foam darts! As far as she’s concerned, she’s having a lovely time! Heather, please. I’m not ‘evil’, I wouldn’t hurt Tenny either, not in a million years.”
“You’re shooting at her! I can’t make this any more plain, you are shooting at Tenny!”
I almost laughed, eyes glued to the screens as another little plastic-toy tank trundled forward and shot a big blue foam rocket at Tenny’s flank. The rocket bounced off, almost harmlessly, but Tenny rocked as if hit by a boulder. Her big cat-face smile swung through the air until she faced the little tank. A tentacle whipped out, picked up the offender, and shook it from side to side until pieces of the machine started to fall off.
“You would do the same!” the Other Me said. “She’s going to get herself hurt, she’s not even supposed to be here. We would both stop her if she was going to hurt herself.”
“Not by shooting at her!”
The Other Me huffed, as if she couldn’t believe my lack of comprehension.
“How did she even get here?” I said, not talking to Myself.
The monitors provided an answer, observation obeying intention; a cluster of a dozen views whirled in close, jumping and lurching forward as if seen from drone-mounted cameras, zooming in on Tenny’s gargantuan white-furred back.
A tiny figure was riding atop Tenny’s dream-form self, right in the middle of her back, clutching a tuft of fur with one armoured gauntlet, cradling a familiar vulpine shape in the other arm.
For a moment I thought it was the Forest Knight; the scale of Tenny’s body confused all else. But then the view lurched closer again, framing the figure in close-up.
This was no suit of Outsider armour; this little knight wore traditional plate mail, with interlocking joints and overlapping sheaths. A coat of arms flapped on a tabard down the front, but the red dragon was snapped back and forth by the bucking motion of Tenny’s body beneath. The helmet was unmistakable, though I had only seen it once before — shaped like the head of a goat, with metal horns and wide-set eyes above the dark slit of a visor. At least she wasn’t carrying her sword this time; this dream had nothing to do with that, after all. She had the Saye Fox — Laurissa Saye — curled up in one arm.
As the view bobbed close, the goat-head helmet snapped up and looked straight at the monitor-view, as if it was a real camera, buzzing around on a drone above Tenny’s back.
She reached up with one gauntleted hand and raised her visor; terrified eyes stared directly into the camera.
It was Jan.
“Heather?!” she shouted; I couldn’t hear her words, but somehow the shape of her lips made perfect sense. “Heather, is that you?! I’m going to assume it’s you! I am not supposed to fucking be here! I do not want to be here! How do we end this dream?! And where the hell is Lozzie?!”
“I— I— how did you even—”
Jan nodded down at the vast bulk of Tenny beneath her. “You’ve been two whole days and I couldn’t stop her anymore! She insisted we nap and then I woke up here, on her back!”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh dear. Um. Look, Jan, I think it’s almost over! Keep hold of that Fox, okay, just keep hold of her for—”
Something beneath Tenny fired another shot. Jan almost lost her grip on the tuft of fur; the view went whirling off across the trees.
Praem tapped the list.
We were done, all except for the Forest Knight and Maisie’s new doll-body, neither of which we had yet found.
I lowered my eyes from the wall of monitors and slumped backward into the observation throne, panting with exertion and shock and confusion. Sweat was running down my forehead and sticking my clothes to my skin. My left shin was on fire, pajama leg stained with a ragged line of blood; my guts quivered with every unsteady heartbeat, the bruise like a fist in my stomach.
But none of that mattered. I raised the hand-held radio.
“You need to stop this,” I said. “Right now.”
“I knew this would happen,” hissed Heather With No Head. “I knew this would go rotten, I shouldn’t have even let you speak, I should have never replied. Why do I do this to myself? Why do we always do this to ourself? Why—”
“Shut up. Stop all this.”
“Never,” she said. “Never ever ever. I will do anything, make any sacrifice, break any taboo, all to free Maisie.”
“So would I!” I said. “But how is any of this helping free Maisie? You’re shooting at Tenny when she’s trying to break into the Box. You’re not using your robot soldiers to help Lozzie’s revolution. How can you not see the damage you’re doing? How can you not want to help everyone else?”
“Because the only conflict left is between us.”
“ … I’m sorry?”
She sighed, as if explaining was tiring her out; good, I thought, make it as hard as possible for her to concentrate. “The Eye is no longer the Governor,” she said. “Sevens has stopped directing. The only forces left to control the dream are me and you.”
“You and I, you mean.”
Another little sigh. “I’m too tired for proper grammar.”
“You must be really worn out, then,” I said, unable to keep the scorn from my voice. “And where care lodges, sleep will never lie?”
“Stop it. Just stop. I’m so tired I can barely think.”
“Good,” I snapped. “Besides, your statement made no sense. If it’s just you and I, what about the nurses?”
A rough swallow. “A-and I am helping!” she said — voice going tight and tense. She was concealing something, and doing a terrible job of it; she’d avoided answering the question about the nurses. I knew my own tactics all too well. Something about the nurses, about that question, had rattled her.
“By hurting Tenny?” I pressed, pretending I hadn’t noticed.
“I’m the only one really helping!” she spat. “And I don’t care how much of a bad girl I have to be!”
“Is that what this is?” I asked. “You’re my ‘Bad Girl’ thoughts? Does that make me Good Girl Heather?”
“It makes you Easy Heather,” she said, voice brimming over with bitterness. “Taking the easy way out. Giving up on Maisie.”
“I haven’t given up on her for one second,” I said, and I knew I was right. “You’re the one who’s given up on everybody else. And I swore never to do that, don’t you remember?”
“You can’t deny me,” she said. “I’m just you. These thoughts, these feelings, these methods, these are all things that you’re not willing to acknowledge, but you know they’ll work, deep down you know it’s the only way. So that’s why I’m here.”
“To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man,” I quoted at her. “Or woman, in this case. Is that really what you believe? I don’t think so. I think you’re lying to me, and lying to yourself, because it’s what I would do. We promised to change.”
“ … w-what?” she stammered. “What are you talking about now?”
“After the incident with Taika. Or don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember Taika. What are you—”
I laughed, so hard it hurt my stomach, so real it made me light-headed. I rocked back in the observation throne and almost banged my head, adding to my wounds. Eileen said my name. Praem tried to stop me. Even the Twins stepped forward and both said “Ma’am?”
But I ignored all of that, and spoke into the radio, squinting my eyes through the pain.
“You’re not ‘Bad Girl’ me at all,” I said. “You’re not Ruthless Heather, or Taking-the-Hard-Road Heather, or even the me that didn’t want to forgive Eileen. You’re none of those things. You don’t even understand what you are.”
“Then what am I?” she asked, defiant and sulky, but oh so very brittle.
“You’re me but afraid and lonely. You think you’re being ruthless, but you’re just isolated.”
A long pause. A squeak of breath, of a sentence abandoned. Eventually: “I’m not, I—”
“You leapt into this alone,” I said. “When we promised — I promised — that we wouldn’t do this kind of thing anymore. We promised everybody, Raine and Evee and everyone else. And you’ve broken that promise, and I know why you’ve done it, because you’re alone and afraid.”
“I did it to save everybody!” she screamed back, voice making the radio peak.
“No,” I said. “You’re doing this to save only yourself.”
A muffled sob, the drag of a sleeve across a face, that sound I knew all too well; I knew equally well that I had not broken her, not yet. She was right about us in one respect — we were very resilient, more so than we allowed ourselves to believe most of the time. She had her mind set on a course of action and had decided to martyr herself to it, and if I knew myself half as well as my friends did, I trusted she would not step off that path without a good hard shove.
For the first time in my life, I had to pull myself back from the brink.
“Heather,” I said, saying my own name. “Heather, I’m so sorry you’ve been all alone. But you don’t have to be, not anymore. You don’t have to—”
“Fuck you!” she — I — screamed into the microphone, in a tantrum I would never have expected from myself. The swearing shocked me, left me speechless, as she ranted on. “Shut up! Stop it! I know exactly what you’re trying to do! And I’m not going to fall for it! We are going to free Maisie, and that’s final! You cannot convince me otherwise!”
I retreated, backing up quickly, trying to think on my feet. Perhaps she couldn’t be broken in that sense, perhaps that was why she existed.
She said she was Ruthless Heather, and would not be diverted from her Ruthless course of action; but I knew the truth now. She was Lonely Heather, wallowing in her old suffering. She was the me that doubted the last year of my life was even real. She was the me who doubted Maisie could be saved at all. She was Doubt, and Retreat, and cold solace in pain.
How to get through to that? Use Raine, of course, but I was not Raine.
“Alright, alright,” I said quickly, scrambling for anything to say. “Look, can’t we at least get together and help each other?”
“I don’t need your help,” she said, sulky and gloomy. My stomach turned. Did I ever truly sound like that?
I sighed and took a gamble. “Then why are you still on the line?”
No reply, but the hiss-crackle of the radio connection did not cease.
My gamble had paid off. Eileen and the Twins seemed to sense this, waiting with held breath and stilled tongues.
I knew exactly why this lonely and wretched version of myself was still on the line. She was still there for the same reason I had held on for so long in the lonely weeks and months before I had met Raine, the same reason I had been such an easy catch, the same reason I’d clung so hard to what I’d found.
Despite her supposed better judgement, she wanted a way out.
“Maybe … ” I said, very gently, sliding the knife between her shoulder blades with every word. “Maybe if you explain the practicalities of your plan to me, we can come to some kind of compromise. How does that sound? You don’t even have to start with why Eileen needs to die. Start with the smaller pieces. Why did you have your robot guards retrieve Horror’s severed head?”
Bad Girl Heather sighed heavily. “Isn’t that part obvious?”
“Not really, no.”
“To protect you,” she said. “To protect us. To correct what you’ve been doing, carrying her around and letting the process just carry on, without taking control.”
“What process?” I asked.
Another big sigh. “She’s part of me. Of you. Us. Whichever. She represents all those negative experiences while growing up. Every visit to the real Cygnet Hospital. Every upsetting interaction with a nurse. Every time we were told to suppress, to pretend Maisie isn’t real, to be ‘normal’ and ‘safe’ and ‘sane’, and so on. She’s a single point of dream representation for all the nurses. I hate her.”
“So do I,” I admitted. “And the nurses are pretty scary, too.”
“They really are. I’m … I’m terrified of them.”
“Mmhmm,” I purred, as sympathetic as I could make myself sound. “I don’t blame you. But that still doesn’t answer the question. What are you trying to do with Horror’s head?”
“I already told you,” she said. “You and I are the only forces left to control the dream. The nurses are ours, so if I get hold of Horror’s head I can protect us, by taking control of—”
She stopped dead.
I grinned in triumph. “Sorry, you were saying?”
“You … ” Her voice shook with anger and betrayal. “You just led me in a circle, just to get that out of me!”
“Whoever is in control of Horror’s head can control the nurses,” I said. “That’s interesting. I’m not sure how I’ll make use of it, but it’s interesting.”
“It’s not as simple or direct as that!” she spat.
“So, what do I do, hold up the head and shout orders at the nurses?”
She — I, me, my past, my loneliest and most bitter moments, all those times when I assumed I would be dead by thirty or going grey in a mental institution, when I assumed I would never find companionship, or understanding, let alone love, all the ten long years of repression and self-control, all the ‘Bad Girl’ feelings which had turned to solid black rot down in my heart — screamed, inarticulate with rage.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I am trying to protect you!” she shouted.
“And failing,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm and controlled. “Actually you’re the reason I got even more hurt, throwing myself off the chair to stop your robots shooting Eileen. And I’ve figured you out, now. You don’t actually want to kill Eileen, do you?”
“W-what? What are you—”
“You weren’t looking for her, you were looking for me, and Horror. Protection via control. That’s what you’re all about. You’re not even really looking out for Maisie—”
“I am!” she screamed. “How can you say that?! How can you—”
“Because you’re the part of me which doesn’t think we can do it. You’re the part of me that wants to hide in a shell.”
“I’m— I’m not— I—” she was almost sobbing. I had her.
I pitched my voice as gentle as I could, folding away all the internal recrimination, all the arguments, all the old bitterness.
“Let me protect you instead,” I said. “Where are you?”
“I don’t— don’t need— don’t need your protection.”
The question was a mere formality. I knew exactly where she was. She was in the Box.
I raised my eyes to the wall of monitors, one last time.
And then I found myself.
There I was — she was — hunched up all tight and tense on a little steel chair, in a little steel room, before a little steel desk. Dark machines stood all around her, quiet and cold, blinking with chill light and empty displays. A row of Empty Guards waited for orders by a big steel door; another row stood at the opposite end of the space, before a glass wall of jagged shadows and shifting shapes and a vast darkness beyond.
She — Lonely Heather — was curled up, almost as if she was trying to grow a shell on her back, curled around the lifeline of the hand-held radio. She wore Cygnet Hospital pajamas, just like me. She looked rumpled and bruised and so very, very tired, exhaustion dragging at her bones.
I could not see her face, because she was wearing something I’d been looking for all this time — my Outsider squid-skull mask, my shell, my refuge.
“You’re all alone,” I said.
“I’m not,” she whimpered. “I’m not—”
“I’m not being metaphorical,” I said. “I know you’re all alone.”
“ … how do you know that?”
“Because I see you clearly, now. Hello there, me.”
Heather really doesn’t like herself, does she? And that’s very dangerous in a dream, where self-loathing can build guns and muster soldiers and send them out to hunt oneself down.
Jan’s not having a very good time either; this isn’t even any of her responsibility! At least Tenny is having fun. And L A R G E.
Speaking of largeness, this happens to be the longest Katalepsis chapter in quite a while, well over 10k words. I knew some very large chunks would be hitting in the final few motions of arc 24, but I didn’t expect them quite this early. Or … is it early? I’m not actually sure. Behind the scenes, I’m giving Heather all the narrative space she needs; to cut anything short during this final main arc would be criminal of me, so I’m letting Heather and Heather (and Heather x6 more???) dictate the terms of narrative flow. As of the time of writing this, we’re probably going to 35 chapters, maaaaybe 36. We’ll see. I cannot imagine it would be longer than that though. Things are getting out of hand! Much like Tenny. Hooray!
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This helps a lot! Many readers still find the story through TWF, which still surprises me! Voting only takes a couple of clicks!
And thank you, dear readers! I know I say this every week, but I mean it – I could not write Katalepsis without all of you, the readers and audience! Katalepsis is for you! Thanks for reading!
Next chapter, Heather has Herself pinned, dialed-in, with a perfect read on her own rotten heart. Or does she? If that Heather is Lonely, then what’s this Heather?
Katalepsis 
