Content Warnings

Mentions of suicide.

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A spear and a rope, lashed to a fragile wooden boat; a sharp flint head, knapped by small cunning hands, pierces the hide of a whale — but the whale is the ocean and the ocean is the whale, a living leviathan vaster than all the seas of earth, too large to turn inward to examine this tiny pinprick wound, too massive to comprehend the sting of stone on skin. The blubber is the water and the dermis is the waves; the muscles are currents, the blood is a thermocline, and the meaty darkness of internal organs becomes an abyss incarnate.

The spear snags in folds of flesh. The flint-sharp head is wedged in a tangle of thought, caught in a knotty twist of fractal mathematical perfection. Eyes proliferate across the whale’s hide; awareness grows where there was none before. Wounding and blood and torn meat forces attention outward.

The whale sees the spear, but it cannot know what the spear means. The spear is in my hands, rammed between the lids of a great Eye.

The whale and the ocean pull and buck and dive. The tiny wooden boat is sucked after the leviathan, speeding toward a lightness, spaceless, soundless nothing.

Pulling us down.

And down.

Down.

D

o

w

n

.

.

.

.

.

.

An ocean closes upon itself, like water compressed into a ball. Reality folds tighter and tighter, squeezing with pressure enough to compact a whole world into a pinprick of mass and time. Nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole, not even light, certainly not love.

But thought is faster than light. Hyperdimensional mathematics does not need time — only intent. Intent is timeless.

I had intent. Clear and clean and pure and bright.

But I could not fight an ocean, nor wrestle a whale.

Are we confusing you? Good. Does this poetic nonsense not help your comprehension? Then you begin to understand how it felt. Are you unmoored, missing your handholds in reality, lacking the familiar shape of words to lend meaning to space and time? Well then, welcome. That is what it was like, trapped in that single blink of non-time as the Eye attempted to negate the purpose of its own being. Human metaphor fails at the edge of a black hole; decent people do not contemplate what lies beyond the event horizon. Past that there is nothing that the human mind — the mortal mind, Earthly or Outsider or other — would recognise. Not even the King In Yellow, or Hringewindla, or Lozzie’s Star, or any of the weirder forms of sentience we had met in all the dimensions of Outside, would have grasped any insight into this collapse.

Perhaps not even the Eye itself understood what it was doing; it did not comprehend what lay beyond the moment of singularity toward which it was rushing.

Sort of like death.

The Eye was compacting itself and Wonderland — one and the same thing, in a way — past the point of no return, past the point at which nothing can escape the pull of gravity. Not physical gravity, but the gravity of pure observation. The weight of seeing and knowing. The mass of insight.

In that moment, as the singularity closed, as the Eye closed on itself, there was no such thing as time or space. Myself and my family, my friends — Raine, Evelyn, Twil, Praem, Lozzie, Zheng, Sevens, six Caterpillars and thirty Knights and a squid made of clay which lived in a bucket — were frozen in the act of turning toward the gateway back to Camelot.

There was no possible escape.

And I? Us? Seven Heathers?

We were all inside the Eye, clinging to the shivering boards of a tiny wooden boat as the whale dived toward crush depth.

This was not like being in the abyss. There was nothing here but an ending, a negation of everything that had been, Wonderland about to implode into nothing. The Eye was trying to stop observing, stop being itself, reject the underlying purpose and meaning of its own nature.

Why? To kill us?

To kill itself?

Because we were grit wedged against its surface and it didn’t know what to do?

I could not think, could not answer these philosophical questions — not because I was panicking, but because actual meat-based brain-powered thought was impossible. ‘I’ was abstracted beyond even the non-material core of my abyssal truth.

So it did not matter why.

I pulled and I fought without care for the damage I did. The Eye was trying to fold shut, but I had wedged a spear between the two halves of the lid, desperately levering to force it open with the fulcrum of a blood-soaked haft. My hands were slick with sweat and gore. My arms were torn and tattered from wounds I did not understand. I pulled and ripped at the innards of the giant with the point of the spear. I grew razor-sharp talons and sharp-edged claws. I sank glittering teeth and rending barbs into the endless sea of wrinkled skin. I sprayed acid and chewed up the flesh of reality, then spat it back out again mangled and melted and steaming. I became a living spear-point myself, wedging my entire being into the gap in the Eye to hold it open so it would not close forever with myself and my friends within.

But none of this was right. None of this could see victory, not against the weight of an ocean.

We widened our purpose. We gave up on metaphor.

Panic fell away. Sense fell away. Everything left us except intent.

We were in an ocean, and we were an ocean. The Eye was above us, scrunched up tight; we were within the Eye, standing upon the fragile cornea, ready to be swept away by the lids bearing down upon reality. We could not stop this process — not because the Eye was beyond us, not because it was too large, or too great, or too alien.

We could not stop this, because one cannot force observation.

One can force another to look upon the world, yes, but not to comprehend what is beheld.

The Eye was blinking. It would open again, vision cleared, to behold reality anew; the cessation of observation itself would wipe clean the slate of self and other. A cleared plate would await, empty of irritating grit.

We refused to go unobserved.

The Eye did not understand, did not comprehend, had no insight into human beings. So we held our arms aloft between the crashing halves of reality and unfurled everything we were made of — every memory, every experience, every fear and desire and intent. We would not be washed away by the ceasing of observation; we would pass through the blink, through the event horizon and out again, whole and complete and on display, unchanged by the act of being seen. The Eye could not ignore us, not blink us away like a speck of grit.

I’m here! Look at me! See me, observe me, even after you look again! Fuck you!

An apology for my foul language. A hiccup that was neither sound nor motion. Even beyond time and space, I was a very weird girl, I know.

Yellow tendrils grasped my hands.

A strange sensation in a place that was not a place and a time that was not time, but there was another there, working behind the scenes, deep in this ocean trench. A familiar soft touch joined my strength and weaved her own ways among the raw materials I had given. She worked to turn the dross I had spilled from my guts into a play worthy of a god. She wove and riddled and chiselled and chanted, imposing her own metaphors on this closing of the Eye.

But still reality folded up like a bubble.

I took everything I was, everything I had ever done, all the love and support of my friends — and Sevens’ hurried scribbling — and used myself like a pressurised wall of force, pushing outward, pushing back against the folding up of reality.

The blink met me.

And it burst.

Reality split asunder, like a sea parting down the middle. Eyelids rolled back, forced to awareness. Shining silver light burned bright and infinite. Air and open space. Time and being and—

And then reality crashed back upon us like the falling of a tidal wave, swallowing us all together.

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Hello! You might notice this chapter is much shorter than usual!

That’s because this is not the only chapter this week.

There is a second chapter today.

Go on.

Follow Heather.

(Seriously I’m doing a fun formatting trick by splitting this into two chapters! There’s another chapter this week, just click the regular next chapter button for more!)

Content Warnings

None this chapter.

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A marionette of meat and mockery walked across the infinite plain of Wonderland, from the mountain-blackened rim to the dusty ashen centre, making her inexorable way toward the conceptual walls of our foothold fortress of invisible magecraft.

The Lozzie-thing, the imitation, the Eye-puppet.

My hackles rose. My lips peeled back. My throat ached to squeeze out a low hiss of instinctive warning, despite the hopeful words I had spoken only moments earlier. A clearer view of our hopeful contact made me feel like a rash and hasty fool.

The Puppet — for I refused to continue thinking of it as anything like Lozzie — was an obscenity.

To suggest the Eye’s Puppet was an accurate imitation of my dear Lozzie was the gravest of insults — not only to Lozzie, but to every living human being, to all earthly vitality and animation, to the very principles of cellular life itself.

The Puppet was an outline of Lozzie, drawn by an alien god with no true comprehension of the purpose of the human form; the scribbled outline was filled in with a lack of enthusiasm for textures and surfaces and motions, or the reason any of those elements of reality mattered. It — she? I didn’t know — moved as if every muscle jerked and twitched at the end of dancing strings, her limbs and joints articulating in the wrong orders, in the wrong directions, at the wrong times. The face was rubbery, stretched thin like a melted plastic bag over a ball of rancid butter. The eyes were sunk deep into the mass of the face, pointing nowhere, the pupils a hazy suggestion of sight. The mouth was a jagged slash. The hair was stiff and sharp, like bleached steel wool.

It wore an imitation of Lozzie’s poncho — a grave-dirt suggestion of fluttering flesh, all in black and grey, as if made from the compacted ash of Wonderland through which it strode.

The Puppet broke all the rules of Wonderland, all the spacial paradoxes that my hyperdimensional mathematics and abyssal senses had just revealed; it scudded and skipped and juddered and jerked across the infinite plain, drawing closer to our fortress of sigil and plate with every step. Somehow this one being was freed from the constraints of paradoxical infinity, while the vast watching titans were forever trapped at the mountainous rim.

Those vast watchers lowed and howled as the Puppet outpaced their eternal torture, crying with voices louder than the crash of stellar nurseries yet softer than a dying whisper. Some of them pawed at the Puppet as she slipped beyond their reach. But she broke all the rules.

The Puppet brought to mind those animatronic machines sometimes used in nature documentaries — tiny baby gorillas or motorised crabs or fake mice, designed to get close to the ‘natives’ without rousing their suspicion. But this Puppet could only be designed for the very opposite purpose, to be a nightmare vision, meant to evoke every shudder of disgust and instinctive rejection that the mortal mind could muster.

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Not even Zheng, or Sevens, or Praem. All of us felt like rodents before a snake.

Then Twil shook herself from head to toe, snapped her wolfish teeth together twice, and barked.

“Fuuuuuuuuck! Fuck no!” she growled. Her fur bristled and her claws flexed. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. No! Absolutely fucking not! Nuuuuh-uh! No way. Screw this. Screw that thing!”

Twil’s colourful yet simple statement brought everyone else back from the brink.

“Fuck,” announced Praem, soft as a silver bell.

Zheng peeled her lips back in a silent growl — and retreated several steps, to everyone’s surprise. Zheng, a demon who was more than willing to fight buildings, was backing away from the still-distant approach of a figure she could have snapped with her little finger.

“Kitten,” said Seven-Shades-of-Shock-and-Awe. She groped for my hand. She was quivering. “What manner of mask do we behold?”

“Sevens?” I rasped — my throat was halfway to fully inhuman, provoked by our approaching visitor.

“No mask,” Sevens murmured. “No mask. And nothing beneath.”

Lozzie whispered: “Doesn’t look like me, really really not. Really not. Really not. Does it? Does it? Heathy? Please please please, Heathy.”

“No,” I croaked out. “No, Lozzie, nothing like you. Nothing at all.”

Evelyn stamped once with her walking stick, and raised her voice, “Hold! Everyone hold where you are! Don’t you dare rush that thing down, Twil!”

“Hahaha! What?!” Twil laughed like Evee was mad. She grabbed her own climbing harness and shook it with one hand. “I’m staying strapped the fuck right in, thank you very much! You couldn’t pay me to touch that— that— whatever the fuck that is!”

Evelyn tutted. “You’ve touched worse.”

Twil squinted at her. “Is that a joke? Are you trying to make a joke? Did I just hear that right?”

Lozzie chirped: “Evee joke.”

She did not sound very amused. But the effort worked. The frivolous words gave the rest of us more space to think.

Raine turned her head away and spat — clearing her mouth of bile which had climbed up her throat. Then she tucked her gun tight against her shoulder and took aim at the approaching figure. She was breathing slowly and steadily, turning pale as milk, with droplets of cold sweat beading on her forehead. But her hands were steady.

“I’ve got it sighted,” she said, flat and empty.

Evelyn snapped, “No! No shooting it!”

Twil boggled. “What? What not?! Fuck it up from a distance! Why else do we have the gun!? Get the Knights to do it with their big shiny crossbows! Or Big H, hey, can’t you like, teleport a rock onto it? Just stop it! Stop it reaching us!”

Evelyn said, “Nobody do any of those things.”

“Why!?”

“Because, my dear dog-brained moron, that might provoke a reaction, from that.” Evelyn pointed upward with one finger, at the closed lid of the Eye, hanging silent and dead, so far above all our heads.

Twil gulped. “Oh. Right. Okay. I guess.”

Raine flexed her hands on her gun. “Quick question,” she said. “Why can I see it so clearly?”

Evelyn rounded on her. “What? Raine, what are you talking about? Heather!” She pointed her walking stick at me. “Get your hands on the carapace plate, right now! We are leaving!”

Twil sighed with relief. “Oh, fuck yeah!”

Zheng rumbled: “We only just arrived. Running, wizard?”

Lozzie joined in, “Zhengy has a point! Big point! Good point! Heathy’s still all juicy, we can do lots more!”

I tried my best to un-knot my throat and sound approximately like a human being again: “Evee, did you hear what I said? I don’t like this thing either, but it might be a way to communicate with—”

“I don’t care!” Evelyn snapped. Her eyes blazed with inner fire. “Plan A has failed. As we expected. This is still within expectations, Heather. We leave, recover, feed you a truck worth of lemons and fish and whatever else you need, and then return for plan B.” She jerked her walking stick at my feet. “Hands on the plate, prepare to pull us out and back to Camelot. Right now.”

We put everything we had into straightening up, stretching out our tentacles, and shaking off the after-effects of brain-math.

I was still soaked through from enclosing myself inside my own custom eye-bubble-bag. My clothes were saturated with water, my face was stained with blood, and my throat tasted vaguely of vomit. But I slammed the control rods out of my bioreactor and let the heat flush through my abdomen and out through my flesh. Chromatophores awoke in my skin, strobing pale pink and glowing gold and verdant green. I opened my hands and widened my eyes and smiled with too many teeth.

“Evee,” we said, with a croaking, raspy, broken voice more angelic than mortal. “We still have strength enough for plan B. I can fish for Maisie inside the Eye. We can do it now, we can—”

“I insist,” Evelyn hissed.

She was not impressed by my abyssal angel act. She saw right through me.

We came within an inch of disobeying, of throwing all caution to the wind, of making an insistence of our own. Was this not the very opening we had been looking for? The Puppet was the Eye’s tool, so did it not stand to reason that this was a possible vector for true communication? Seven Heathers flexed and twisted for a moment, eager to push, push, push! We turned up our brightness, studded our tentacles with spikes and hooks, and began to twist our throat into something not even remotely human. Top-Right was insistent — here was our chance. Bottom-Left mewled and hid, a little scared of Evelyn’s rage. Middle-Left urged caution. We opened our mouth, about to speak, when—

Evelyn said, “Heather, please follow the plan.”

We faltered. “M-Maisie might not have time to—”

“We’ll come back tomorrow. I promise.” Evelyn held my gaze, unflinching. “And stop talking like that, I can barely understand all the scratching.”

Raine laughed softly. “I think it’s cute.”

Lozzie chirped. “It is cute!”

Evelyn tried once more. “Heather, for all the love I bear you, please.”

We unknotted our throat again. Resolve collapsed into faith and fidelity.

“R-right! Yes! Okay! S-sorry! Sorry!”

We fell back to our knees as quickly as we could, amid the burst remains of the eyeball-sack and the disgusting puddle of salty warm fluid. Like collapsing into a pool of one’s own vomit and tears. We quickly pressed both hands against the carapace plate and braced our combined hybrid mind on the cusp of the necessary hyperdimensional mathematics.

Ready to leave. Time to exit. Plan A had failed.

I would not put my friends at unnecessary risk. I would keep my promises, to myself and to Evelyn. Nobody was going to get left behind, or die. If we had to wait a couple of days for the next step, then so be it. This was easy compared to fishing within the infinite vastness of the Eye itself. I should have been grateful.

But I wasn’t. I was gritting my teeth, on the verge of tears.

We were so close. So close to Maisie.

And something awful was drawing closer to us.

Twil couldn’t tear her eyes away from the approaching Puppet. “Nah, nah, nah, Raine’s got a point. Evee, aren’t you seeing this? You’re not? Why can I see that thing in so much detail? It’s like a … what, like a mile away? Two miles? But I can see all the … the way the skin bunches up … ahh fuck.” She cringed.

Raine said, “Yeah. Same. Heather, any idea what we’re looking at here?”

They both had a good point. The Puppet, the vile imitation of Lozzie, was easily a mile or two away; each step was a violation of basic physics, bringing the thing toward us faster than should have been possible. But we could see every last detail, as if the thing was already right in our faces.

Seven-Shades-of-Shuddering-Terror whispered: “Front of the stage.”

Zheng growled. “It is inside our heads.”

“I-I-I,” I stammered, lost for an explanation. “I don’t know! It’s breaking all the rules of this place, like it’s … like it’s above the surface of the Eye and looking down at us? It peered over the eyelid— t-the mountains, I mean, so it was … outside of the Eye? I don’t know! I’m sorry!”

Twil snapped: “Hey hey, why don’t we pull the fuck out right now? What are we waiting for?! Heather, yo?”

Evelyn stamped once with her walking stick. “We can leave instantly, whenever we like, as long as Heather is ready. I see no reason not to confront this … thing … and see if we can indeed leverage it to our advantage.” She glanced down at me, crouched on the floor with my hands spread amid the cold salty goo. “Good enough for you, Heather?”

I nodded; Evelyn had gone grey-green and looked like she wanted to vomit. She was trying very hard to control her own disgust at the Puppet’s approach. “Thank you.”

“You pull us out on my mark,” she said through clenched teeth. “The moment something goes wrong. You don’t hesitate.”

“I promise,” I said. “I won’t hesitate.”

The Puppet — the insulting imitation of one of my closest friends — drew closer and closer still, feet tapping and dragging through the black ash of Wonderland’s gaze-cooked soil.

When she was perhaps a hundred meters from the edge of the plate, the ground shook.

I had never experienced an earthquake; England is not exactly a hotbed of seismic activity. The rather famous ‘Market Rasen’ earthquake of 2008 was much too far north to register down in my family home in Reading, and even if the shocks had reached that far, I was only a little girl then. For a moment I had no idea what was happening; I thought somebody or something had rammed into the carapace plate and jolted the floor beneath us, or perhaps one of the Caterpillars had started growling and rumbling and making the world seem to judder.

But it was the ground itself — the surface of Wonderland, the folded-up material of the Eye.

A great deep groaning ran through the ground beneath the plate, shaking everything and everyone from side to side for a moment.

Then it stopped, as quickly as it had started.

Twil shouted, “What the fuck was that!?”

“Earthquake,” Raine answered quickly. “Evee?”

“Eyequake, more like!” Twil spat. “Does that fucking mean something?” She glanced upward, at the still-closed lid of the Eye. “Are we still not getting out of here!?”

Evelyn had gone wide-eyed and even more pale than before. Her gaze darted left and right, then up at the Eye’s closed lid, then down at me.

I said, “I don’t feel any changes.”

Evelyn hissed: “What was that?”

I shrugged. “I’m sorry, Evee. I have no idea.”

Evelyn raised her voice. “All hold! Everyone hold! Heather, you be ready.”

“Ready,” I whispered.

The Puppet finished her journey. She seemed unmoved by the strange Eyequake. She stopped at the edge of the carapace plate, at the first wall of our many-layered fortress.

Framed by the hulking mass of our guardian Caterpillars and the impenetrable shield-wall of our escort Knights, the Puppet-thing looked so small and scrawny, a scrap of discarded flesh left to blanch and shrivel upon the waste of Wonderland. Height was about the only aspect which the Eye had gotten correct — the Puppet was about Lozzie’s size, petite and short and thin. All other aspects were wrong, artificial, or subtly off — the lack of knee joints in the exposed legs, the colour of the skin and hair, the way she stood, paused and unmoving like the frozen still of a movie reel.

When we’d first encountered this thing, so many months ago, it had taken a bullet from Raine’s handgun and a Knightly lance through the chest. If it still carried those wounds, it gave no hint of the damage. The black-and-grey poncho covered it from throat to mid-thigh.

She was quite distant from the core of the Invisus Oculus; she wasn’t even touching the edge of the plate itself. But my hackles rose as if she was inches from my face, as if some poison stinger was waving before my flesh, readying to plunge into my eyeballs and pump me full of toxin.

Everyone else had gone still, taut with tension. Raine was gritting her teeth. Twil kept growling softly, a hound held a bay. Zheng had backed up so far she was almost next to Evelyn. Lozzie had her hands over her mouth, eyes wide in pity or dismay. Sevens bowed her head. Praem just stared. Evelyn frowned as if examining a dead cow.

And I longed to let out a hiss from my warped and inhuman throat. My skin was flushed with warning colouration, my tentacles were plated with spikes and spines, my eyeballs were flickering pink and black and red.

We wanted to make this thing go away. Don’t touch me! Don’t touch my friends! Away! Go away!

We resisted that urge. It was instinct alone.

The Puppet looked down at the carapace plate — or at least it angled its head and eyeballs in imitation of a human being looking downward. The eyes were blank. The face was slack and empty.

Twil whispered, “The hell is it doing?”

“Hell is right,” Raine murmured.

Praem intoned, soft and subtle: “Observing.”

I tried to laugh, but squeaked instead.

Evelyn raised her voice, calm and clear: “Take aim.”

Lozzie chirped softly, as if repeating the order without words. Behind the shield wall, the arbalist Knights all levelled their crossbows in silence, aiming over the shoulders of their comrades. Every massive steel bolt pointed at the Puppet.

“Don’t!” I hissed.

Raine chuckled softly. “Bullets didn’t kill it last time. Doubt those will, either.”

Evelyn almost growled, “It is a precaution only. If that thing looks like it’s going to mess with any element of the Invisus Oculus, we may need to knock it back. Now, I want no itchy trigger fingers. Nobody fire without my say-so.”

Raine said, “Loose.”

Evelyn squinted. “What?”

“Archers. Arrows. ‘Fire’ is for guns, Evee,” Raine said. “With archers and arrows it’s ‘loose’.”

Evelyn hissed between her teeth. “I will loosen your fucking head, Raine! Concentrate.”

Twil tutted. “Yeah, yo? Eyes on the bitch thing. Cool?”

Raine had not taken her eyes off the Puppet, not even to smirk. She flexed both hands around the black metal of her firearm before settling them in place again. “Oh, I’m concentrating alright. Believe you me, Evee. Eyes on the target. Eyes on.”

Lozzie let out a soft whine. “Heathy. Heathy I really don’t like it … it’s not … it’s not me. Is this what Alex thought I was?”

She almost sobbed.

This mockery had been built from Alexander Lilburne’s memories and impressions of his sister — taken by the Eye as part of the foolish deal he had made in order to keep living, though the form of life he had attained was worse than death, a lingering spirit trapped in the space between worlds.

The Puppet was another one of his echoes, another one of Alexander’s choices, haunting us still. Haunting Lozzie most of all.

“I know, Lozzie. I know.” We reached out with one tentacle and wrapped it around Lozzie’s forearm. “It’s okay. The Eye doesn’t understand human beings. This was the best it could do. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything about your late brother. Try not to think about that right now.”

“Mm,” Lozzie whined.

“And she can’t do anything to us,” I said. “She can’t.”

Twil squinted. “What?! What do you mean, it can’t— look at it! Look at the thing!”

I forced myself to take a deep breath and stay calm. The revulsion was hard to control. Despite my best efforts my skin was flashing red and yellow and pink, strobing with warning colouration.

We said: “It only ever had one purpose. To find me and bring me back to Wonderland. It can do some basic hyperdimensional mathematics, or maybe it can only Slip. But it doesn’t … or didn’t, at least, do anything else.”

Evelyn ground out a question. “Then why is it still here?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It didn’t … it didn’t have the poncho, before.”

“Mmmmmmmm!” Lozzie made a sound. “Like it was trying to be me, more? More me? Me more?”

The Puppet looked up from the carapace plate again, as if it had lost interest. Deep-set, black-marked eyes pointed vaguely at us in the middle of the circle. It looked at the Caterpillars, then at the Knights, staring directly at the ropey black tentacles and the tips of the crossbow bolts.

Twil hissed, “It can’t fucking see us, can it? Evee, you said nothing can see us in here.”

“It can’t,” I said. “It’s just looking, not seeing.”

“Yes, it can’t,” Evelyn hurried to echo my words. “This is the same effect as we saw on human minds, and demons, and Heather. It can see, it can look right at us, but it can’t observe, can’t comprehend what it’s looking at.” She glanced at me. “Heather, do you have any ideas for communication? You’re the one who wanted us to stay. What’s your plan?”

I chewed on my lip. “We can’t exit the circle … ”

Twil said, “What’s it been doing out here this whole time? If it was only meant to mess with Heather. Why is it still here?”

Zheng rumbled: “Surviving. Discarded.”

“New outfit,” said Praem.

“Yes,” I agreed, my eyes widening with realisation. “It didn’t have the poncho, the first time. If the Eye hasn’t sent it to pick me up again, why keep adjusting it? Why try to make it more … sorry, but more ‘Lozzie-like’? If it’s just been left here to develop by itself, why do that?”

Several of us shared meaningful looks.

Twil shook her head. “You can’t be fucking serious, Big H. I know this is kinda your thing, but you can’t make friends with that.”

I huffed. “I’m not suggesting we make friends with it. I’m saying … I’m saying … ”

Before I could gather my thoughts, the Puppet straightened up — a grotesque imitation of a spine pulling itself erect — and began to pace along one edge of the carapace plate. Trainers like lumps of extruded flesh scuffed in the ashen soil of Wonderland, wading through thick banks of low-lying mist and clinging fog. Framed by the distant mountains — which I knew were actually the ridged and wrinkled lid of the Eye itself — the Puppet was like a pale revenant of wormy flesh, held at the door by nothing but faith.

She walked exactly twenty four paces to the left, then turned and took forty eight paces to the right, then turned again and took twenty four paces back to the middle. She walked like every muscle was being jabbed with electro-convulsive shock, her head twitching and ticking from side to side.

Twil groaned as if the sight made her sick. Zheng drooled like her body was trying to vomit. Evelyn squeezed her eyes shut. Raine kept her firearm trained on the Puppet.

Eventually the Puppet stopped in the same place as before, raised her jerking, plastic, rubbery face, and made eye contact with me.

“Welcome back?”

The voice was a scratching, screeching, off-key warble, like a note from a broken flute or the shattered song of a half-melted record player. Everyone flinched and winced, even Zheng, who growled and spat and waved a hand at the air like trying to brush away invisible cobwebs. Praem blinked three times. Raine grunted and struggled not to let her aim waver. The Knights lurched, then quickly regained their posture. Even the Caterpillars inched away from this terrible dissonance.

Before anybody could react, the ground shook.

A second Eyequake gripped Wonderland by the roots, stronger than the first, threatening to throw us flat. The carapace plate jerked from side to side. Praem caught Evee in both hands to stop her tumbling over. Lozzie clung to Sevens. Zheng caught herself and wrapped a fist in Twil’s clothes. Only the web of climbing rope and buckles kept us all together. The Knights held fast, and Raine’s aim stayed true, but the Caterpillars slid by several inches, losing their gargantuan footing.

The shaking stopped. Glances were shared, wide-eyed and confused. Breath came in panting gulps. Evee and I both looked up at the same time and saw the same thing.

The Eye had closed tighter.

The ridges of the lid, where the two halves met and formed mountain ranges of void-dark wrinkled flesh, were larger, taller, more pronounced than before. Like it was screwing itself up, fighting against an impulse or imperative to open and observe.

“What the fuuuuck,” Twil hissed; even she could see the proof. “What? What does that mean? What the hell is it doing?”

Raine said, calm and smooth: “What do you do if you get grit in your eye?”

Twil squinted. “What?! What!?”

“You scrunch up.”

Evelyn snapped: “It can’t see us!”

“Nope,” Raine said. “But I think it can feel us. Like a speck of grit. Heather?”

I couldn’t answer.

All my worst fears were coming true. The Eye was closing, forgoing observation, rejecting its own nature. Raine’s metaphor was sweet, but she was wrong. The Eye was not a representative being, it was literal. Observation was all it did.

What did this mean for Maisie?

If the Eye was changing, what did it mean for getting her out?

“What does an Eye observe when it’s closed?” I whispered.

“Heather!” Evelyn snapped. “We leave, right now! Do it!”

With tears running down my face, and horror in my heart, I kept my promise. I stayed a good girl.

Out—

Nope! chirped a nightmare.

A single finger of hyperdimensional mathematics pinned my equation in place.

It was so gentle, so brittle, so loose and light, that I could have brushed it aside and carried on without a care. But the threat, the implication of more to come, made me pull back.

I aborted the equation.

Spitting a glob of blood, I stood up, let go of the carapace plate, and gave up on retreat.

Evelyn boggled at me. “Heather! Heather, what are you doing?! I said we have to leave, now, we—”

“I tried,” I said.

“ … what?”

“I tried. There’s something in the way. I don’t think we have a choice.” I spoke while staring right back at the Lozzie-Thing, the Eye-Puppet, the Abandoned Doll.

“What?!”

Twil added, “Yeah, wait, what? Yo, hey?”

“Heather?” Raine hissed.

“Kitten?”

“Shaman. We are here. Are we not?”

I swallowed and found my throat had gone dry. “I think we’ve been put in check. Like in chess, I mean. I think we’ve been in check ever since I attracted her attention.”

I nodded at the Puppet — or to the Puppet.

Beyond the edge of the carapace plate, the Puppet tried to sway and bounce, just like Lozzie did, fluttering her poncho. The effect was grotesque, like a corpse pulled by ropes, made to dance a macabre jig.

“Speak plainly, Heather!” Evelyn snapped. “Now!”

“It’s not safe to do brain-math,” I said. “Not with her attention on us.”

“Her attention isn’t on us!” Evelyn huffed. “That’s the point! If she’s the Eye’s puppet and she could see us, then that—” she jerked a finger upward “—would be open! Not closing itself tighter!”

“That’s not what I mean,” I sighed. “Sorry, Evee, this is complicated.”

“Then explain. Quickly. If something is going wrong, then we need to pull out, through the gate, right now.”

I raised a hand to lower Evee’s temperature. “Wait, wait, Evee, I don’t think we’re in danger. The Eye is closing tighter, which might be bad, yes, but it’s not trying to look at us. Just let me … let me think. Back when we first ran into this thing, this Puppet, it could do a limited amount of hyperdimensional mathematics, just enough to Slip me out of reality and back to Wonderland. I’m concerned — to put it lightly — that if I tried to pull us all out right now, the Puppet may interrupt me, because it just tried to. It proved it could. Quietly. Without hurting me.”

Evelyn shut her mouth and nodded, once, sharply. “Then we need to leave through the gate.”

I shook my head. The Puppet was still staring at me, eyes fixed on mine. It couldn’t see through the Invisus Oculus, could not comprehend the light entering its eyes. But some part of it made automatic contact with me.

We said, “Think about it for a moment, Evee. And look at it. The Eye never sent it after me again. It’s been here the whole time. It’s been abandoned.”

Twil hissed, “It’s not a fucking lost puppy!”

Zheng rumbled, “The shaman knows what must be done. No matter how vile the peace.”

“No,” I said. “Fine. It’s not a lost puppy. But it’s … we can … we can let it in.”

“Heather,” Evee warned.

Twil let out a strangled laugh. “We’re not letting that thing in here, are we, we— shit!”

The Lozzie-Puppet was mounting the plate.

Zheng growled like a rumbling furnace. Raine took a slow, steadying breath. Sevens gulped. The Knights creaked against their footing, and even the Caterpillars shuddered.

The Puppet stepped up with one foot, then the other, in a herky-jerky, halting, jittery motion.

“Welcome,” said Praem.

The Puppet was still a good ten feet from the first trailing edges of the Invisus Oculus itself, but now she was up there, on our level. She looked toward us again, then tilted her head at the black ichor lines of the Invisus Oculus, then took another twitching step forward.

Evelyn opened her mouth to snap an order — probably ‘loose’, the signal for the Knights to fill the Puppet with steel bolts.

“Wait!” I said. “Wait, wait, wait, I’m serious!”

“Heather!”

“Okay, yes, it’s ugly and it’s weird and it’s making everyone’s skin crawl. But you know what else it is? It’s an abandoned tool! We have no idea how it thinks or feels. Does it think it’s a person? Maybe. I have no idea!”

Raine said, low and almost sorrowful: “This is no time for bleeding hearts. I’m sorry, Heather.”

“I’m not being merciful!” I yelped. “I’m saying it’s the best example — the only example — of how the Eye sees a human being!”

Raine and Evee shared a look. Twil let out a soft, whimpering, ‘oh fuck me’. Zheng straightened up and flexed her shoulders, as if limbering up to scoop the Puppet from her feet. Praem produced a lemon in one hand and passed it to me. Lozzie was crying softly.

The Puppet took another shivering, shaking step toward the Invisus Oculus.

“Besides,” I spoke quickly, in between rapid mouthfuls of lemon. “We’re going to have to deal with it one way or the other before we can proceed. Bullets didn’t kill it before, and if we return in a few days to run plan B, it’ll probably still be here, still interested in us. We have to deal with it if I’m going to go fishing.”

Twil squinted at me. “Fishing?”

“For Maisie!” I shook my head to clear my thoughts. “It’s a metaphor for how I’m going to interact with the Eye. But look! If I know what it thinks of a human being, that could help immensely! I’m proposing we snatch the puppet up. Drag her into the circle so I can examine her, and we can take her off the metaphorical playing board. Evee! Evee, right now, she’s a wild card, isn’t she? We need to remove her.”

Evelyn stared at me from within twin chips of ice. She grumbled through her teeth. “I still think we should withdraw.”

“We can’t,” I repeated, trying to keep my voice level. “She might intervene.”

“Through the gateway.”

“Look, Evee, one of the Caterpillars can do it, snatch her off her feet as she steps inside—”

Bwoop, one of the Caterpillars objected with a low-pitch thrum of engine-sound, just loud enough to make me flinch and flail my tentacles about.

“Okay!” I snapped. “I’ll do it myself! I’ve got eight arms. I’ll need muscle though. Zheng? Twil? Will you help me? Please!”

Twil grimaced. Zheng rolled her neck and cracked her knuckles.

“Shaman,” she acknowledged.

Raine hissed between her teeth, eyes and firearm both trained on the Puppet as it took another jerking, flickering step toward the outer lines of the Invisus Oculus. “You sure about this, Heather?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Then I trust your judgement,” Raine murmured.

Evelyn snapped: “And I don’t! This is unsafe. We go back—”

Zheng rumbled, “Not your decision, wizard. The shaman has spoken.”

Evelyn glared at Zheng. “Heather has special insight here, but she’s not an unquestioned leader, you gigantic living dildo, you—”

Zheng bared her teeth. Evelyn flinched, but Praem stepped forward, staring Zheng down — or up, as it were.

“Stop!” I snapped. “Stop, stop, right now, everyone. Evee’s right. I’m not a dictator. You’ve all heard my reasoning, so let’s hold a vote on it. I will … I will abide by the result. I promise.”

Twil gestured at the approaching Puppet with both of her clawed hands; the thing was only a few paces from the edge of the outer lines of the Invisus Oculus now. “Best vote damn fast, then!”

Evelyn raised her head and spoke to the Knights, loud and clear: “If that thing starts interfering with the lines of the circle, shoot it!” She glanced at me, eyebrows raised. “Heather?”

My chest scrunched up inside, but I nodded. “That’s fair enough. And, Evee?”

“What?!” she snapped at me. “We best vote, if we’re going to do this! Quickly! Twil is right about that, for once.”

“Hey!” Twil said.

“Evee,” I added quickly. “You have a veto.”

Evelyn paused as if frozen, staring at me without blinking. Then she nodded. “Understood.”

I turned to the others, raising one hand and two tentacles. “All in favour of my plan?”

Twil tutted. “Heather, we know there’s seven of you, but you don’t get seven votes. Come on.”

“Quite, kitten,” Sevens agreed.

We huffed. “Yes, I know. We get one vote. One collective vote.”

Praem opened her mouth and intoned, soft as a little silver bell: “Our guards and walls.”

“The Knights?” I said. “And the Caterpillars? Oh, uh, I … I suppose they could all sway the vote to whatever they liked, um … ”

Lozzie fluttered her poncho to get my attention. “Knights and Cattys take one vote together!” She raised a hand and pointed at the Forest Knight, standing behind us next to the gateway back to Camelot. With Maisie’s shrouded doll-body strapped to his front, he was still standing to immobile attention, his axe gripped in one hand. “Vote!”

The Forest Knight nodded once, blank helmet gliding down and up in perfect silence.

“Okay,” we said. “For real this time.” We raised our hand higher. “All in favour?”

Three hands went up with mine — Raine, Praem, and Zheng.

Evelyn grunted: “All against?”

Evelyn raised her own hand, joined by Twil, Sevens, and the Forest Knight.

Raine chuckled softly. “Four versus four. Classic tie, hey?”

Lozzie had not participated in the vote; her hands remained hidden beneath the pastel folds of her poncho. The poncho itself was limp and flat. She kept glancing back toward the shambling, pitiful, Puppet-thing as it inched closer on jerking legs. Lozzie’s eyes were carved into her face with a look of sorrow and pity.

“Lozzie?” I prompted, very gently. “Lozzie, you’re our deciding vote. What do you say? She … it … it was made in your image, after all. It’s only right that you … ”

Lozzie bit her lower lip. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. But then she nodded with sudden and terrible urgency.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. Bring her in, Heather. Let her inside. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay okay okay okaaaay—”

To my surprise, Sevens drew Lozzie into a hug; the embrace was awkward, hampered by the web of climbing ropes and the harnesses we all wore. But Lozzie hugged her back, tight and desperate.

Evelyn huffed, sharp and exasperated.

“Evee?” I said. “Your veto?”

Evelyn gritted her teeth, and snapped: “No veto. Do it, but do it quickly! If that thing touches the lines of the circle, it’s dead — or at least shot, you understand?”

“Yes! Yes, I have it! Thank you, Evee! Thank you!”

Getting into position was awkward and fiddly; I had to unclip many of the climbing ropes holding me in place, freeing myself from the web of security and protection that bound us all together. Zheng did the same but with much greater relish, casting most of her safety lines aside with a toss of one hand, then moving to my side to add her strength to my own. Twil grimaced and cringed, but she relented after a moment, shucking off all but one of her own safety-lines.

“Heather,” Evelyn said just before we stepped forward. “Heather, don’t you dare step outside the circle. Don’t you break your promise.”

We turned back to her and smiled. “Not a single hair. We all promise.”

My tentacles wiggled and waved. We loved Evee. We all meant it.

Beyond the circle, the Puppet wobbled closer. She reached the first of the outer lines of the Invisus Oculus — a curve of nonsense words, one of the stretches of mantra-like English which Evelyn had used to create the spell. The Puppet paused and jerked her head downward as if trying to read the words.

“Be ready!” Evelyn shouted at the Knights. “If it touches a single line, I want it shot clear off the plate!”

“Please,” I whispered. “Please please please.”

The Puppet lifted her foot. The Knights’ crossbows were steady as cold iron. The Puppet inched forward with the toes of one weird, melted trainer —

And stepped clear over the lines, onto an open patch of clear white carapace.

Several of my companions let out breaths they had not known they were holding. I shook myself from head to toe, then grabbed Zheng’s hand in one tentacle and Twil’s claw in another.

“Edge of the circle!” I hissed. “Let’s be ready!”

Zheng and Twil and I got into position, right at the border of the core of the Invisus Oculus, on the precipice of leaving the pupil. We were flanked on either side by two of the Caterpillars, like being at the bottom of a canyon of off-white carapace. The Knights were to our rear, and the rest of our friends just behind. Three of the Knights came forward, stowed their crossbows, and stood positioned as our back-up. All that chrome and power was very reassuring.

I stared down at the line of the pupil cut into the white carapace of the plate — a thick border of dried black ichor. One foot over that line would expose me to the full attention of the Eye. It was like standing on the edge of an ocean cliff, staring down — or up, in this case — into the unimaginable depths of dark and cold.

“Hold fast, shaman,” Zheng purred, to my left.

“Yeah, fucking hell, Big H. Cool it a bit?” Twil added from my right.

“Mm? O-oh!”

We had inched forward, perhaps subconsciously. We stepped back, very deliberately, and anchored ourselves to Twil with a tentacle.

The Puppet stepped closer, avoiding the black lines of the spell.

“It’s alright,” we murmured. “It’s going to be alright. She’s letting us catch her. I think.”

The Puppet stepped ever closer — forty feet away, then thirty, twenty, ten. She weaved her way deeper and deeper into the lines of the magic circle, as if wading into the flesh of the Eye itself. Twil growled and hissed and whined, like a wolf confronted with a predator which would not back down. Zheng went very quiet and still, tensed and ready. The Knights didn’t move at all, metal joints locked solid. Behind us, Evelyn stared up at the eye, her lips moving in a silent prayer, watching for the slightest quiver. Raine lowered her gun, robbed of a clear shot, then reached out and took Evelyn’s hand. Evee squeezed back. Lozzie scurried behind Sevens and Praem.

Evelyn muttered: “Be ready to retreat, if this doesn’t work.”

I said, “As soon as she steps across the circle. Just grab her. Hold her down.”

“Shaman,” Zheng hissed.

Twil tried to laugh. “Easier said than done. Fuck, my skin is crawling. I’d rather be forced to eat a handful of centipedes.”

“Just stay calm,” I squeaked. “Stay … stay calm.”

The Puppet was ten feet away, then five. All my senses rebelled, screaming at me not to touch this thing. The skin was fake as stretched rubber, the poncho was cold ash, the gait was like a dead thing walking.

“Not her fault,” I hissed to myself. “Not her fault.”

The Puppet paused at the edge of the pupil. She looked up, with tiny eyes like holes punched in rotten meat. She stared directly at me.

“ … the hell?” Twil hissed. “Is it … waiting?”

“Shaman,” Zheng prompted.

“I know,” I said. “I know.” I raised my voice a little. “If you’re still a tool of the Eye, and you step in here, we will kill you. But if you’re not … I promise not to hurt you.”

The Puppet stared and stared and stared and—

She jerked her whole body forward, and fell into the circle.

The Puppet offered no resistance. Zheng grabbed it like a sack of meat and hauled it upright, roaring with animal disgust as she touched the thing’s flesh, as the grey-ash poncho dragged across Zheng’s arms like broken glass. The Puppet flowed and deformed at all the wrong angles as Zheng pulled it fully into the circle, joints swaying in the wrong directions, flesh and clothes bulging in strange ways. Twil turned and coughed as she tried not to vomit. I backed up, hissing and spitting like the little squid hybrid I was.

“Take it!” Zheng roared. She shoved the limp puppet into the arms of the nearest Knight.

Evelyn shouted: “The Eye is shut! It’s shut! No reaction! It’s still shut. We’re good. Now get back here and get strapped back in, God damn you!”

We returned to the core of the pupil within seconds, among the rest of my friends, alongside the Forest Knight and the shining gateway back to Camelot. Twil strapped herself back to her place in the web of climbing rope, claws shaking, breathing hard. Zheng shook her own body like a wet dog trying to rid herself of stinking mud. I kept hissing under my breath, still plated and spiked and spined, my skin flowing with toxins and paralytics, ready to fight something that did not wish to fight.

The Puppet lay in the arms of one unlucky Knight. It was limp and loose, almost as if dead. But the eyes saw us and the lips pulled into an inhuman smile.

Everyone tried to recoil. Lozzie pointed at a spot on the floor, and the Knight stayed put. The Knight himself showed no fear or disgust — perhaps it was easy, when one’s flesh was protected by a shell of imperishable metal.

Evelyn snapped: “Alright, Heather. You have your prize. What now? Hm? Raine, calm her down, for pity’s sake.”

“I’m fine! I’m okay!” I hissed — and I was certain that I didn’t sound remotely human. The Puppet made the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, made my guts churn and my skin crawl, made me want to lash out with all my tentacles and rip that rubbery, plastic, fake face off whatever maggoty meat lay beneath.

But I was a good girl. I was not going to be violent for the sake of violence. I reeled in all those feelings, forced a deep breath down my throat, and stood up straight. Seven Heathers came together for one purpose.

Twil tutted, trying to laugh, trying to play this off with brute humour. “This is by far the weirdest shit we’ve ever tried to make friends with.”

“We’re not making friends with it,” I corrected her, harder than I had intended. “We’re investigating it. Let me—”

“InVEStiGAtingggggg.”

The Puppet’s voice was like a bucket of boiling blubber. Twil backed up and growled, snapping with her wolfish snout, flexing her claws. Lozzie let out a weird, strangled little sob; Sevens grabbed Lozzie and crushed Lozzie’s face to her chest, giving her somewhere to hide. Raine flinched, hands raising her gun before she caught herself. Evelyn turned white as a sheet, then clutched at Praem. Zheng just showed her teeth.

But I stepped forward, slipping my squid-skull mask on over my head, and pulling my yellow robes tight around my shoulders.

“Hello,” I said to the thing cradled in the Knight’s arms. “Do you remember me?”

The Puppet’s head went one way, then the other, scraping against the Knight’s armour in a parody of Lozzie’s mannerisms. The hair didn’t move properly, as if frozen in place. She flickered once, then twice, as if struggling to retain coherency.

“Back!” it jerked out.

“Yes,” I said slowly. I had to clutch the hostility tight in my heart. Every instinct, abyssal and otherwise, sang a chorus of destruction. We wanted to pull this thing to pieces, just because of what it was — because it was wrong. It was not meant to be. “I’m back, here in Wonderland. Like you were supposed to do. Do you understand that?”

“Welllllcome back,” it burbled. I felt vaguely sick. Behind me, Raine turned her head and spat bile.

“Heather,” Evelyn said. I could hear that she was trying to hold back a wave of nausea as well. “Whatever you’re doing, just get it over with.”

Without further preamble, I plunged both hands and all six tentacles into the oily sump at the base of my soul, and flicked a special value from zero to one.

We saw the world through abyssal senses. We defined the Puppet, the Lozzie-thing, this tool of the Eye. We observed it, in full.

Seen through the perfect clarity of hyperdimensional mathematics, the Puppet was a more wretched thing than its appearance would suggest. Even the most meagre of human beings — or any other non-human person — was a whirling vortex of meaning and definition and history and memory, a million million lines of equation spiralling outward into practical infinity. Almost incomprehensible, for the purposes of mortal understanding.

The Puppet was constructed from exactly thirteen lines of equation. A pebble was more complex than this mockery of life.

No wonder she was so simple and so revolting. The instinctive disgust did not come from a prejudice against what she was, but against what she lacked, against the crime of her creation and her creator. To willingly make something like this, to imbue it with thought and feeling and intent, and then to abandon it to this internal wreckage, this was a crime against creation.

All my urges to pull the thing to shreds faded to nothing.

The crime belonged to the Eye, not to the Puppet.

Thirteen lines of equation: six for physical form, six for a soul. We reached out with trembling fingers of thought, half-entertaining an idea of weaving more complexity into the gaps left by the Eye’s brutal genesis. No being deserved to exist like this. All she needed was a transplant, a few nudges here, a tweak and an edit there, and she would think, feel, operate like a real being, not this cruel jest at—

Thirteen lines of equation.

One line was not of her.

One line of the Puppet, one piece of her ragged and diminutive self, trailed upward, then ended as if severed. It was truncated like a cut umbilical cord. The last part of that line suggested much greater complexity, lurking just beyond the cut.

We crashed back into our body, back to our own senses, heaving for breath. We were bleeding lightly from our nose, but we didn’t care.

Only a split-second had passed for everybody else.

“She was abandoned,” I said out loud, croaking and rasping; I felt even less human than before. Something about staring into the face of this pitiful thing had pushed me to make myself even more colourful with chromatophores, plated with chitin and studded with barbs down my tentacles. I was a whirling ball of squid-girl, pulsing pink and red. “She was cut out of the Eye. And there’s a part of her that slots back into it.”

I rounded on Evee, my own eyes wide with something akin to hope.

“Heather?” Evelyn prompted. I wasn’t sure she could understand my words, my throat was so far gone.

“The difficulty was always that finding Maisie would be like searching for a needle in a haystack,” I said. “But if I know what a human being looks like to the Eye, that gives me somewhere to start. Somewhere to—”

A third Eyequake shook the ground of Wonderland — and this was the big one.

The earth rocked and swayed as if shoved by an angry giant. The carapace plate flexed and jerked, as if rammed from beneath, as if the hide of the world was trying to shake us off, flick us free, get rid of us before some terrible spasm. Everyone grabbed onto their harnesses and lines, or onto each other. The Puppet stayed limp, riding the sudden shock waves.

In the distance, the ring of mountains suddenly contracted, rushing inward, as if closing upon us. The great titans were swallowed under a trillion tonnes of black eyelid skin and wrinkled flesh.

And above us, in the sky, the sky itself, all the sky forever and ever — clenched shut. Hard and tight. Screwed up and scrunched inward.

“The gateway!” somebody shouted — probably Evelyn or Raine.

A panic of flesh and metal retreated toward the gateway, trying to outrun the folding up of reality itself, the contracting spheres of a collapsing dimension.

The Caterpillars seemed so small against the onrushing tidal wave, nothing more than grubs in dead flesh. The Knights were ants on a charred hide. Me and my friends, my family, my lovers, we weren’t even specks of grit. The Puppet was less than even that, a mote of forgotten moisture.

Raine, one fist buried in my clothes as she yanked me toward the gateway; Evelyn, bundled into Praem’s arms; Praem already turning, moving, sprinting; Twil grabbing Lozzie around the waist and throwing her — throwing! mercy, she was so brave — at the gate; Sevens, folding up and becoming a weight in my arms; Zheng, ripping herself from her bonds and making sure she would be last out, last behind her shaman; me, us, all seven of me, flailing and lashing in blind panic, as we realised a moment too late that we were out of time.

Speed and motion were no longer real.

This was not something that bodies and minds could outrun.

We had miscalculated beyond our wildest nightmares. We had assumed the worst possible outcome was the full awareness and attention of the Eye — searing, burning, melting through flesh and atoms and self — a nasty look, but ultimately possible to escape.

We had never considered the alternative, the opposite, because it seemed impossible.

The cessation of observation. The Eye turning inwards in ultimate desperation.

This was a black hole, wrought not in gravity and mass, but in hyperdimensional mathematics — a singularity of something other than mere matter. Observation was turned in upon itself, in despair and destruction.

None would reach the gateway in time, not even the Forest Knight, who was standing mere paces away from the safety of Camelot’s purple light — for there was no such thing as time, as the Eye closed. Time and space were about to become one property, contracted to a single point. Not even light could escape.

We had made a deadly mistake.

But I had sworn an oath, hadn’t I?

I had sworn that I would break reality before I left a single one of my friends behind, or before I accepted my own end, my own death, or Maisie’s final and total loss.

Reality would break before we did.

We had, however, a choice; could we still rip our way Out, like usual, through the membrane between worlds? Would the foolish Puppet stop us, unaware of the gravity of her actions? Would the Eye’s contraction trap us on this side of the membrane? There were too many variables, too many chances for something to go wrong. And we — all of us — were about to be compacted by the Outsider equivalent of a black hole of perception and observation.

Risk a return to our reality — or break this one on the stone of my mind?

No choice at all.

Moving at a speed that was no speed at all, in a blink of thought that was faster than neurons and nerves, with a determination which was not human, not mortal at all, but pure abyssal ruthlessness, we acted.

We unspooled that ‘fishing line’ with a Maisie-shaped socket at the end.

We grabbed that dangling equation — the Puppet’s broken umbilical.

We wrapped them together and made a spear of the two parts — a stick with a sharp rock tied to one end, the instrument with which clumsy apes had defied the cold void for longer than I could imagine. How fitting, how apt, how very, very, very silly.

We made a mental note, in that final moment, to tell Raine that she had gotten it wrong, all those many months ago; we were not going to poke the Eye with the largest broken bottle in the universe. We were going to poke it with a makeshift cosmic spear, like something made by a small child with too much interest in neolithic history, and unsupervised access to flint and string.

Flimsy, inexpert, good for only one thrust.

And rammed it upward we did — a lance of hyperdimensional equation and abyssal screaming and the will to peel open a black hole.

Between the lids of the Eye our improvised weapon slipped.

And struck.

An ocean.

Beneath.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Well then. That can’t be good. Absolutely not.

Don’t blink! You’ll crush reality into a ball of nothing. Or Heather will jam a spear into you to stop you from doing that.

Ahem. I would once again like to announce that there’s a bunch of new stuff over on the fanart page! Go take a look! From pixel-art Lozzies to amusing scribbles of Heather becoming an eyeball, and even a real-life physical soapstone coin to match the pair that Heather has, readers have been drawing and making some incredible stuff. I want to highlight like half a dozen different pictures, but I will restrain myself to pointing out this wonderful illustration of Lozzie in Camelot, by Cera! Thank you to everyone who makes fanart, it’s all so incredible.

If you want more Katalepsis right away, you can get it by:

Subscribing to the Patreon!

All Patrons get access to two chapters ahead! No matter what level you subscribe at! That’s about 20k words at the moment. The more support I get through Patreon, the more time I can dedicate to writing, and the less chances of having to slow down the story or get interrupted by other responsibilities. The generous and kind support of Patrons and readers is what makes all this possible in the first place! I wouldn’t be able to do this without all of you! Thank you so very much.

You can also:

Vote for Katalepsis on TopWebFiction!

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Thank you for reading! Thank you for being here and following my story, dear readers. As always, I could not do this without the support and patronage of so many people. Katalepsis is for you!

Next week, a spear and the Eye, a Heather and … a surprise? A surprise. Reality bends and flexes, bowing and breaking, on the cusp of a crack.

Content Warnings

Drowning
Insomnia
Vomiting

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Wonderland.

Consciousness tore asunder the veil of dreams and fell upon me in a great and terrible rush of bloody iron tang and the burning sting of bile coating my mouth and lips. Eyes crusted with dried crimson, head pounding and whirling with the echoes of pain, tentacles stiff and cramped with distributed effort, we hacked and coughed and spat.

For a long moment I didn’t understand what was happening. The last eighteen hours were a blur smeared across the inside of my red-hot skull. Was this another nightmare? Another anxiety dream? Had the Fractal failed and left me to plummet into a final, fatal lesson from the Eye?

But then I realised the ground between my splayed legs was white. One of my tentacles was wrapped around a familiar waist. And muffled voices were calling my name.

Hands touched me, brought me back.

I ripped my squid-skull mask off my head and spat out a gobbet of bloody mucus.

Wonderland.

The black ash, the broken hills, the burned-down stubs of ancient walls; the shifting mists of shadow-deep veil, the scurrying hints of stunted life, the silhouettes of silent giants against the horizon, staring upward in mute devotion.

But it was no horizon, no true sky, no hint of blue or grey, no depth of space, no glittering stars, no wide and hungry maw of the universe hanging open to swallow the world. No wisp of cloud, no wing of bird, no rustle of leaves caught in wind. No wind at all, no hint of rain, no turn of the firmament above mortal heads. No burning dawn, no gloaming dusk, no storm or sleet or hail or hint of shine. No sky, no freedom, no escape.

Only the Eye, ridged at the lid, like mountain ranges in pitch-dark seas of cold tar, squeezed tight in repose or sleep, unseeing and unknowing. Blinded to our presence.

“—shut!” I wheezed. “It’s shut! Shut!”

The Eye remained unopened. The Invisus Oculus had worked.

Evelyn’s voice cut through the blood-haze and the ringing in my head, clear and sharp, barking orders: “Raine, stop her looking up at it. Cover her eyes if you have to. Heather? Heather? Heather!”

Gentle hands bid me relax, coaxing my vision down and away from the Eye that was the sky and made the sky and filled the sky and—

Other hands pressed the nozzle of a sports bottle to my lips. I drank, sucking down greedy mouthfuls of lemon-flavoured energy drink, washing away the twin tastes of blood and sick. My bio-reactor throbbed and thrummed deep in my belly, replenishing me, filling me back up. I scrubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. I drank too fast and almost choked, then dribbled strings of bile when the bottle was removed.

Raine purred, right next to my ear: “Woah, Heather, slow down, slow down, take it slow.” Firm hands squeezed my shoulders. “Remember the plan? Here, here, sip some more water, there you go, that’s it. You did well, you did so well, well done, you did it. We’re here. It’s okay, everything’s gonna be okay. Just focus on getting your strength back up. I know you can do it. I love you, I believe in you, you can do this.”

I made a wordless sound, more animal than human. But I was coming back, rapidly.

Evelyn snapped, “Get some chocolate in her as soon as you can.”

“Lemons, my dear Evelyn,” said Seven-Shades-of-Suddenly-to-my-Left.

Evelyn huffed, sharp and hard. “Yes, one of the lemons, too. Get her up, Raine, get her on her feet. We need to work fast.”

Raine murmured, “I’m on it, give her a sec, okay?”

Twil’s voice cut through those nearest to me, twanging with nerves pulling taut: “Work fast? What do you mean, we need to work fast? This thing is holding, isn’t it? Don’t tell me there’s some fuckin’ secret time limit or some shit!”

Evelyn grunted: “There’s not—”

Zheng’s voice interrupted from even further out: “We are interlopers and invaders all. I agree with the wizard. Little wolf, beloved mate, get the shaman up as fast as you can. We must be quick, here. We are unwanted in this place.”

Raine pressed a wet towel into my hands and helped me wipe my face, but the tone in Zheng’s voice made me shiver and shake. I’d never heard her so cautious, so almost-afraid, not even when we had faced Ooran Juh.

What had I expected? She’d never been to Wonderland before.

Twil hissed between her teeth; I could tell they were sharp and canine, much more wolf than woman. “Great. Fuckin’ great. As if this wasn’t bad enough with— Lozz?”

“Shhhhhhhh, fuzzy,” Lozzie suddenly crooned. “Shhhhh. Strokies for fuzzy. Deep breath.”

“I-I’m fine.”

“Deep breaths now!”

“Okay, okay, fuck. Fine. Deep breaths it is.” Twil heaved several times. It didn’t sound helpful.

Evelyn spoke up again, loud and clear: “There is nothing to worry about. There is nothing to panic about. We are on schedule, the plan is holding. Just concentrate, keep your attention on what you’ve been told to, and do not look up.” Evelyn hissed as if she was struggling to breathe. “Do. Not. Look. Up.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Twil hissed.

Suddenly, like a tiny foghorn through a dense sea-mist: bwoop, went a Caterpillar.

Everyone stopped talking. Evee snapped: “Lozzie? Interpret. Quickly, please.”

I heard the rapid patter of light feet — Lozzie dancing forward across Caterpillar carapace. Then: “Mmmmmm, Cattys see things moving, but nothing toward us! Lots of things moving.”

Evelyn swore softly, but with words I refuse to repeat, though Top-Right approved. “How is there anything living in this place? How is that possible?”

Raine said, “Heather did warn us.”

“Still,” Evelyn said.

Twil spoke again, even more shaken than before. “Lots of fuckin’ weird shit. Weird, weird, weird shit. Fuck me, this is worse than the library. I don’t fucking like this. You know what, I’m with Evee too. Let’s get this over with. Heather? Hey, Big H? You good? Come on, squid girl, let’s fucking rock, let’s get this shit done, let’s fucking go!”

I finished wiping my face, stuffed the wet towel back into Raine’s hands, and then lurched to my feet.

My vision was clear, my head was light, my hands were steady.

This was no dream, no nightmare; the events of the last eighteen hours came rushing back as my mind clicked the pieces back into place. I was not alone and lost in the wastes of Wonderland, or abandoned beyond the walls of reality.

I was standing on the massive plate of Caterpillar carapace, in the core of the Invisus Oculus, at the centre of a fortress made of my friends.

All of us — all seven Heathers — craned to look up at the Eye.

“I’m here with all my friends,” we whispered. “Just as you told me to be. What now, Maisie? What do I do now?”

Evelyn grunted, “Stop looking up! For fuck’s sake!”

But Raine murmured: “Hold on, Evee, she’s alright. I think it’s necessary.”

“For her, maybe!” Evelyn spat. “Nobody else look up at it. Eyes down!”

“Down girl,” Praem intoned.

But nobody laughed.

The Slip from Camelot to Wonderland had gone off without a hitch — well, except for me passing out and choking up a wave of my own blood for several minutes, but that was well within expected parameters. We had prepared for that, both mentally and physically; Evelyn had factored it into her calculations for our arrival and her fail-safes for worst case scenarios. The scaled-up Invisus Oculus was the single largest object I had ever Slipped through the membrane between worlds, let alone to Wonderland. The massive plate of altered Caterpillar carapace alone would have stretched my brain-math far beyond any previous limits — but we also had passengers on the plate. Every single passenger mattered. Every single one had to arrive precisely where they needed to be, inside the protective core of the Invisus Oculus, shielded from the attention of the Eye.

And we’d achieved that, we seven Heathers, all lifting together, all as one. But we had screamed and bled and passed out, because my gosh was that a heavy load to lift.

Probably would have been lighter if we’d slept properly last night.

Despite all my emotional planning and preparation and the tireless work of my friends, I had spent the previous eighteen hours in a state of ever tightening anxiety; after the conversation with Lozzie and Tenny and Sevens on the previous evening, there had been simply nothing more to do, no more preparations to make, no more decisions to choose between.

Hurry up and wait. That was all. And I was exceedingly bad at it.

We had barely tasted dinner — Praem’s vegetable curry, rich with lentils and spices, thick as oatmeal and twice as filling, but wasted on our nervous stomach and jittery tongue. We had spent part of the evening with Raine and Evelyn, watching a cartoon I couldn’t recall properly, something about a failed demon and her magical girlfriend, in one ear and out my other.

That night had been a special kind of torture, both too slow and too fast all at once. Thoughts and fears had whirled around inside my head until I was gnawing on my fingers and clawing at the pillow. That’s one major disadvantage of having seven of us inside our shared nervous system — if we couldn’t banish our anxiety, we all got together in a big party and reinforced it until we were on the verge of tears.

Tears had come, after much tossing and turning and fretting and fidgeting. Nightmares had blossomed behind sleepless eyes. I needed to be in Wonderland right then, for this all to be over. I couldn’t take this waiting!

Raine had given up on passive support, pinned me to the bed, and fucked me until thinking was a luxury. “All shagged out”, as she put it.

Zheng had been present. So was Sevens. They held me afterward, so I could close my eyes at last.

That worked. I slept.

But that next morning was an equal blur of churning guts and shivering muscles. Breakfast went down — then came back up, discreetly, in the bathroom. Nothing to do with brain-math, just sheer anxiety and fear.

Sevens had seen, from behind the mirror. Sevens had helped, coaxing me back to the breakfast table. Praem had made more toast and jam, then eggs, then bacon. I kept those down, though I did not recall the taste.

Everyone drank a lot of coffee. Except Lozzie.

As the appointed hour had crept closer and closer, mortal fear had acted as a thresher on thought and feeling. Even with all six of my tentacles for internal support and my bioreactor running hot to keep me topped up and ready, I had submitted to the directions and hands and help of others. I dimly recalled hugging Tenny. Perhaps Kimberly wished us well. Was Jan there, waiting in the house, watching Tenny for us? Yes, she was, though I could not remember the words we shared, nor her final instructions on securing Maisie’s new doll-body. A phone call from — who? Raine had taken that. Evelyn hugged me, Evelyn hugged Praem, but nobody else saw. Zheng took Grinny aside; the demons shared words none else understood. 

Twil had cheered and whooped and carried Lozzie on her shoulders. Marmite had watched from behind Tenny’s legs. The tension had felt like it was eating a hole through my guts.

It wasn’t like in the movies, where time smears fast across a screen, where you can simply skip the waiting and jump to what matters. It all mattered, every moment of it, but inside we were screaming for release, for the rush of the confrontation, for the moment it all happened.

But nothing could bring it faster, nothing could speed up time.

Camelot had soaked up another hour of prep work, of getting everyone into the circle, in making sure everyone was strapped in, equipped, ready, that we were not leaving anybody or anything behind, that gateways were open and bowels were emptied, that humans were suitably prepared for what they were about to see, and assorted supernatural types were braced for the worst.

Lozzie had been on hand, in case something went wrong. Sevens was close, a distant third back-up.

And I had crouched down in the middle of the massive plate, upon which was scribed the scaled-up Invisus Oculus. I had placed my hands against the smooth white carapace, joined with all my tentacles, and sent us Out, Out, Out.

To Wonderland.

The vista of my nightmares stretched out in every direction, hemmed and bordered by that ring of blackened mountains at the extreme edge of an infinite plain — an impossible contradiction, but one that human eyes and human senses told was truth. In every direction lay the black ash and burned-out remains of Wonderland, a dimension seared clean by the unthinkable heat of a burning gaze, filled with darkness and mist and the smeared remains of things that scuttled sideways through the shadows.

Wonderland. Again.

No escape, not really, not ever, not for us. We always knew it would call us back eventually. A version of Heather had died here at nine years old, but she was still going, still drawing breath, after ten years of pretending to be alive. We cradled her tight in our secret heart, the undead child we had been, now tucked deep between six tentacles and a fortress of abyssal biology.

Wonderland — but this time we were far from alone.

We stood atop the plate of off-white Caterpillar carapace, larger than a football pitch, a physical fortress to match the one inside us.

It did not seem real. How could it be? It was as if an angel had descended into one of my childhood nightmares, to push back everything that beset me.

The outer edges of the plate were accompanied by some clumps of Camelot soil and Camelot grass, stray wanderers caught up by the hyperdimensional mechanics of the Slip; there were no worms or beetles or other unintended victims, for Camelot had none — yet. If there were any, I would have hurried to send them back. Even little insects and invertebrates did not deserve to be abandoned here.

Next came the intricate black curves and angles and mystical words of the Invisus Oculus itself, too large to read from inside the core of the protective magic circle, aimed upward at the sky-which-was-not-a-sky, staring back at the closed Eye with a pictorial imitation of itself.

And inside the core, inside the pupil of this false eye, stood my fortress.

Six Caterpillars lined the outer edge in a rough hexagon shape, turned side-on to face the wastes of Wonderland beyond; they formed a physical bulwark against assault, in case the wretched inhabitants of Wonderland should take it upon them to investigate this sudden invasion, or if the Eye had minions and followers we did not yet comprehend. All of the Caterpillars had extended slimy, gloopy, slick-looking tentacles from the tiny black ‘head’ structures they had at the very front of their massive armoured bodies; the black feelers waved like seaweed in ocean currents, as if tasting the air. I knew from prior explanation that they were giving themselves a few meters of extra height, for the best possible vantage point across the black ash beyond.

Despite their size and their formidable performance against other foes, I could feel the Caterpillars’ trepidation — like seeing a huge hunting dog shivering with hard-won courage. They held their ground, but they did not like it here in Wonderland.

Inward from the Caterpillars stood Lozzie’s Knights — not the entire Round Table, but only thirty of them, arrayed in a ring of outward-pointing protection. I had insisted, in the end, that we not bring every single Knight; if the worst came to pass, I would not risk the extinction of what they were becoming, out in Camelot. I would not spend their entire collective being.

Half the knights were armed with lances and tower shields, ready to form an interlocking phalanx in case we needed to retreat. The other half were armed with more advanced versions of the massive all-metal crossbows I’d seen some Knights carrying previously. Each arbalist carried several metal bolts, each bolt large enough to spear a charging rhino from mouth to tail.

Protected by the Caterpillars and the Knights, the very core of the Invisus Oculus was filled with the most vulnerable parts of our plan.

The gateway back to Camelot glowed with Camelot’s purple light, a huge archway of Caterpillar carapace standing tall, ready for our retreat if everything went horribly wrong; I tried not to look through at the hints of Camelot’s grassy hills and the castle beyond. Next to the gateway stood an additional two Knights: one of them was carrying Mister Squiddy’s bucket, our speculative back-up plan, though Mister Squiddy was silent and still, hiding in the bottom of his mess of clay; the other Knight was the Forest Knight, the one Knight I could still pick out with ease among all the others — he stood unmoving, resting the tip of his massive axe against the plate at his feet.

Maisie’s new body was strapped to his front with climbing rope, wrapped in a sheet and a protective layer of tarpaulin. The Forest Knight had the duty of protecting the vessel, should anything happen, and carrying it until Maisie needed her body.

Last but not least, gathered at the foot of the gateway, dwarfed by all this magecraft, were me and my friends.

Nobody was dealing well with Wonderland.

Zheng stood almost at the heels of the nearest Knights. She was staring out across the broken plains of Wonderland, through a gap between two of the Caterpillars. Shoulders hunched, head lowered, eyes narrowed, she was the very picture of a wary tiger, peering out from jungle bush at some never-before-seen predator. She was very still and very silent. She wasn’t even breathing.

Twil was halfway to werewolf, wrapped in wispy shards of spirit flesh, teeth bared and claws twitching, like a hound ready to bolt. She was trying to loom, to make herself appear taller; she had placed herself in front of both Lozzie and Evee, as if protecting them from the nightmare realm beyond — but it was Twil who needed Lozzie’s reassurance. Lozzie was at her side, petting Twil by rubbing her back, putting on a brave and stoic face. My sweet little Lozzie, she’d been here before, she knew what to expect. Her pentacolour poncho was pulled tight, gone limp and frail in the air of this blighted world.

Evelyn and Praem were right next to me. Evee was dressed in a long skirt and her big coat, a shawl and jumper beneath those, with her pockets laden down by notebooks and magical equipment. Her bone-wand was grasped tight in one fist. Her eyes darted left and right. She was shaking from head to toe, gone pale and grey in the face, leaning on Praem’s arm for support.

Praem was upright and untouchable, dressed in her maid uniform as always — but she was staring outward, eyes fixed beyond our little bubble of safety.

Raine and Sevens flanked me, close and protective. Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was wearing her Princess Mask, but for the first time ever she had her lilac umbrella open, shading her head and neck from an unfelt storm. Raine was dressed for war, in her motorcycle jacket, with the helmet dangling from her belt. She carried one of Edward’s stolen machine guns, strapped over her shoulder like a slick black beetle.

Raine helped me stand. I anchored myself to her with three tentacles.

We were all roped to each other, tied together with a precise web of climbing rope and safety lines, to make sure that nobody could be picked off alone or dragged beyond the circle. The harnesses were loose and comfortable, since we weren’t using them for actual climbing. Zheng had complained about being strapped in, but then relented when I had personally secured her. Praem had done something very odd and somehow managed to get the straps of her harness and the loops of her rope beneath her maid outfit, leaving her exterior uncreased, but nobody questioned that. The Knights were joined to an outer layer of the web as well, though with quick-release buckles in case they needed to do anything risky. Only the Caterpillars were not included, and not for lack of trying; they were simply too large.

Raine pressed an open chocolate bar into one of my hands and half a lemon into the other. She was pale and sweating, moisture matting her hair. “Here, chow time for you, Heather. Go on, eat. We gotta get you revved back up. Heather? Heather?”

But I was crying. The sobs came sudden and hard, just three of them.

Everyone turned to look at me — well, everyone except the Knights and the Caterpillars.

“Big H?”

“Heathy? What’s wrong? Wrong?”

“Shaman. Breathe the air.”

“She’s just overwhelmed. Give her a moment.”

“Catharsis,” Praem intoned.

Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight took my hand. Raine gripped my shoulder.

Wonderland. But not alone. I wasn’t certain that the others understood. The nightmare of my childhood, the cursed haunter of a thousand dreams, the great Eye which stuffed me full of knowledge beyond human comprehension. The bane of my life. The thing that took Maisie.

And here we were, standing beneath it, in perfect security and safety. Among friends.

Did Evelyn really appreciate the miracle she had wrought here? She had compared the scaled-up Invisus Oculus to a spacecraft or a submarine — but it really was like those things. This spell was like a starship. A bubble of security in the middle of one of the most dangerous places in all Outside. In the past we could never have pulled off something so perfect. But now we were all together, all working as one, all ready for the next step.

Evelyn was a genius in a way I had never truly appreciated before; with this, she had saved me on a level I hadn’t even known I’d needed.

The feeling was overwhelming. Sobs turned into a grin — not a human smile, but a thing of toothy malice, driven by abyssal instinct and pack-joy. I almost felt like capering, hopping around in a little circle and cackling to myself. I didn’t, of course; I stuffed my face with chocolate bar for the quick serotonin, then gutted the lemon in three quick bites, sucking down citrus juice, feeling my bio-reactor sing inside my guts, heating me up like a furnace.

I was dressed as practically as possible, in jeans and hoodie. My Yellow cloak hung from my shoulders, ready to protect against anything. My squid-skull mask stood poised at the end of one tentacle, ready to return to my head when I needed. Two stone coins weighed down my left pocket, as per Hringewindla’s request.

There was nothing else left to do. We were ready.

“Let’s find my sister,” I said. “Let’s find Maisie.”

Evelyn nodded to Raine. “Get her ready. Get her in position.” Then she turned to the others. “Check again! Zheng, tell me what you see out there. Lozzie, interpret from the Caterpillars. Report, now, please.”

Zheng rumbled, eyes fixed on the distant false horizon of broken mountains and watching giants. “The titans lower their gaze, wizard. They know something is here.”

“Wait, what!?” Twil spat.

I looked too, alarmed at those words. Several of our tentacles whirled “Zheng, pardon?”

Lozzie chirped in agreement. “The Catties see it too. Some of the big things out there are looking this way. Evee-weevey?”

Evelyn clenched her teeth, then quickly drew in a deep breath and forced it out again. “They can see the plate and the Oculus itself. That’s to be expected. They can’t see us inside. Hold for now. We’re fine.”

Twil muttered, “You sure about that?”

Evelyn pointed upward with one hand. “If we were visible then … then … then that would be open.”

Nobody looked up, except me. Twil started to raise her eyes, then hesitated and shook her head.

Evelyn went on. “It’s not curious unless there’s something to look at. The plate and the spell are inanimate, perhaps that— no, this is not the time for theorising.” She huffed, hard and sharp. “We have averted the gaze of the Eye. That is all which matters.”

Lozzie chirped softly: “Oh no!”

“What?” Evelyn demanded. “What? Lozzie, what is it?”

Lozzie did a big silly pout. “Gays averted! Oh no!”

Evelyn held her look for a split-second, then huffed like a steam engine. Lozzie forced out a giggle, but it felt hollow and fake. Twil tried to laugh as well, but she couldn’t even get halfway there.

“Thank you,” said Praem.

Evelyn held out one hand. “Praem, my binoculars, please, I need to see for myself.”

Twil was hissing: “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this—”

Evelyn snapped, “Hate what? Twil, stop looking out there, stop it.”

“I can’t— can’t help it,” Twil snapped back. She was staring out, past Zheng, past the Caterpillars. “It’s like it goes on forever, but then it stops. The plain just goes on forever, but then there’s those mountains. It’s not natural.”

“Of course it’s unnatural!” Evelyn said. She took her binoculars from Praem and pressed them to her eyes, peering outward for her. “It’s Outside. Stop looking if you can’t handle it.” But Evelyn gulped and froze as well, then lowered the binoculars and did not look again.

“It’s not right,” Twil repeated. “How can something be infinite and bounded at the same time? I feel like I’ve got fucking vertigo. Ugh. Oh fuck. How can— how can—”

“No looky-looks, fuzzy-wuzzy,” Lozzie crooned, trying to forcefully drag Twil’s head down, away from staring at the paradox of Wonderland.

“Yes!” Evelyn snapped, but her voice lack her usual fire and conviction. “Lozzie has the right idea. Stop looking. Your job is to act as backup and muscle, Twil, not bamboozle yourself with optical illusions.”

“But it’s not an illusion, it’s not, it’s not, it’s—”

Zheng rumbled: “Eyes down, laangren.”

Twil let out a sob. “I can’t.”

Praem intoned: “Vertigo.”

“Me … me too … ” Evelyn admitted softly. She squeezed her eyes shut. “What about—”

“Me three, oh delightful one,” said Sevens. She was going green in the face.

“Shit,” Evelyn hissed. “We can’t—”

“Look up,” said a gurgling voice.

“Heather!” Evelyn hissed. “Don’t make it worse, you—”

“I’m serious,” I repeated, realising that suggestion had come from my own lips. “Look up. It’s like having a visual anchor point. The Eye is the centre. Look up, Twil, look up! Look up!”

Twil looked up. So did Raine, to my surprise, because she trusted me so completely. Zheng hesitated, then did the same. Sevens followed. Then Praem. Finally Evelyn, though she only glanced.

Twil stopped panicking, but her eyes went wide and wet with tears. Raine looked like she was feeling nothing at all. Zheng growled, deep and low and bowel-shaking. Evelyn ducked her head. Sevens blinked rapidly.

“It’s a centre point,” I said. “A centre around which this whole dimension is organised. Or re-organised. Everything is sucked toward it. Defined by it. I just figured that out, from the way everyone is acting about the horizon. Like this is all just matter cupped in the wake of the Eye’s vision. Once you’ve got it fixed in your head, it’ll help.”

Raine murmured. “She’s right. The vertigo is going again.”

“You were suffering vertigo, Raine?” I asked.

Raine nodded. “Mmhmm. Trying not to show it.”

Twil whispered. “Is that … is that it? Up there, that … that’s the Eye?”

“Yes,” I whispered back, as if the great observer might overhear our words.

Zheng growled again. “I do not like being beneath the closed lid.”

“None of us do,” Evelyn hissed. She risked another quick glance upward as well, nothing more than a flicker of her eyes. She went stiff and still and stopped breathing for a moment, until Praem touched her hand.

Twil went on: “It’s the sky. It’s so … so big. It’s everything. Big H, you weren’t joking. It … I can’t stop … oh, oh God.” Twil sobbed, just once. “I feel so small. Why do I feel small?”

Lozzie reached up, placed her hands either side of Twil’s head, and physically dragged her field of vision back down to the mortal level. “Bad wolfie! Eyes on the road!” Then she darted forward and kissed the tip of Twil’s wolfish nose.

Twil gaped for a moment, then sniffed hard, and nodded, laughing with strange relief. “Right, Lozz. Right, right. Okay. I’m good, I’m good, sorry. I’m good. I’m good!”

Evelyn snapped: “Heather, are you ready? The longer we stay here the worse this is going to get.”

“I’m ready!” I announced.

I’d finished clearing the taste of vomit from my throat and wiping the worst of the blood from my face; with half my tentacles anchored around Raine and the other half around Sevens, I lowered myself into a sitting position, smoothed the warmth of the yellow cloak beneath my backside, and readied myself for the emotional gut-punch of the next step.

“Find haste, shaman,” Zheng rumbled. “The titans move.”

Evelyn snapped: “Praem, give me the binoculars again, I’ll be fine. You’re right here with me, aren’t you? I need to see this.”

“Zhengy is right! Right right!” Lozzie chirped. “Big ones are moving around!”

“Coming this way?” Raine asked. She unhooked the gun from her shoulder.

Twil saw that and snorted. “What you gonna do, pepper them with bee-stings? You see the size of that shit out there? One of them comes close, I’m running. Picking all of you up first, yeah, sure, but I’ll be out. No fucking way.”

Evelyn said, “We have the Caterpillars. Nothing is breaching the circle! Heather!”

“I’m starting!” I said.

The plan was straightforward enough. We produced two items from the front pocket of our pink hoodie. The first was Maisie’s t-shirt, the faded, strawberry-patterned, child’s t-shirt that she had sent me as a message, the plea from beyond which had begun this entire chain of events, the message in a bottle hand-delivered by an Outsider. I had kept it in a plastic sandwich bag for months now, carefully folded and cared for, to avoid anything contaminating the lingering proof of Maisie’s life. My hands shook as I extracted it from the bag and placed it across my thighs. The second item was the photograph that Taika had given to us — Maisie and I, side-by-side in a pub garden, haloed by the glorious sunset of another world.

We placed the photograph in the middle of the t-shirt. Then we pulled our squid-skull mask back on over our head.

“How long do I have?” I asked.

“As long as you need!” Evelyn snapped before anybody else could answer. “Nothing is getting in here! Start, Heather, start it now. Confirm if she’s here or not!”

We retracted our tentacles from Raine and Sevens, and coiled them into our own lap, touching the t-shirt and the photograph, running our senses over the objects, the physical link to Maisie. We closed our eyes, focused our senses inward, and withdrew inside our own body.

Evelyn’s miracle — the Invisus Oculus — had defeated the Eye’s curiosity, carved a little bubble of safety for us in Wonderland, and avoided the direct attention of the Eye’s many titanic worshippers and scurrying victims amid the ash and ruin. But it did not hold back the conditions of Wonderland itself, either physical or metaphysical. As I closed my eyes and concentrated in the split-second before the hyperdimensional mathematics, I felt the cold, dead air and the dense, black, cloying mist of Wonderland flow between my tentacles, opening voids between each strand of my hair, trying to push deeper, into my pores, into the gaps between the seven different refracted prism-angles of my self. We could sense the barren, empty soil beneath the plate of Caterpillar carapace — dry as bone, dead as sand. We felt the ring of cracked mountains folding in on us, like an optical illusion collapsing under the power of observation. We felt the watchers swaying and shifting, their immortal immobility interrupted by this strange inanimate interloper — large as continents, walking mountains, they took slow, silent steps across infinity.

Wonderland wanted to be seen, before I had even begun.

The dimension tugged at my mind. I had never spent long enough here to feel such a sensation before.

Without further delay, I plunged into the black oily sump of my soul, and wrenched a great whirring mass of the Eye’s machinery up and into the burning light. Eight hands made quick work of a complex equation, flying across the levers and gears of reality before they had time to burn through our skin and sear the meat beneath.

First I defined Maisie.

We built a memory of her in hyperdimensional mathematics, each of us seven Heathers contributing our own unique impressions and recollections. An equation to define this one girl, this one human being, made entirely of memory ghosts and phantasmal echoes. Her t-shirt and the photograph provided ninety percent of the parameters, spinning out their vital definitions into technical specifications: the girl in this photo, the girl who wore this shirt, the girl who penned the hidden words upon this fabric.

The remaining ten percent was me, Heather Morell. The shape of our body, the structure of our bones, the look of our face, the smell of our skin. All of it provided a reference point, a mirror of similar comparison, a socket for a key.

Defining Maisie was not the most difficult equation I had ever performed, but it was the most improvised; I had not seen my twin sister in over ten years. I had not beheld her with my eyes, or heard her voice with my ears, or touched the warmth of her flesh with a hand. She was memory and madness, she was a voice of starlight and photons in the depths of the abyss, she was the last glimmering remnant of sisterly love that I held in my chest.

We poured all that into the equation — and then we compared it to Wonderland.

That was the challenging part, the part I did not know if I could truly achieve. I had no reference point with which to locate my sister. If I was wrong, and she was not trapped within the Eye itself, then I had literally nowhere to start. How does one find a needle in a haystack? One uses a magnet, of course, and I had built the magnet, defined the magnet, worked over the magnet at the level of reality itself. But I still had to run it over every inch of the haystack. And I might miss.

I had to widen my scope, cast my senses like a net across all of Wonderland, to encompass this entire dimension within my own observation.

To observe. As the Eye does.

A human brain would have boiled and popped under such pressure. A skilled mage would have died screaming. But I was the Little Watcher, the adopted daughter of the Eye, and I had a great deal of brain to go around.

We shunted the difficulty of the task down into our tentacles, into that web of distributed neural matter which filled our pneuma-somatic limbs. We spread our net wide and opened our abyssal senses. We would see, as an eye sees.

And what did we see?

Wonderland was a bowl, drowned in a void.

That initial vision burned out a billion pneuma-somatic neurons. Pain flared inside all our tentacles, sharp and urgent, as cells died and turned to ash. Our bio-reactor flared into burning life, pumping us full of exotic chemicals and stem cells and replacement proteins. We speed-grew new neurons, shoring up our web of thought even as it crumbled and cracked. The pain was incredible, suspended in a single moment, frozen for now, banked for later. I would pay, and very soon, but not just yet.

Look harder, Heather. Look harder!

Wonderland was both infinite and bounded, just as Twil had said — but she didn’t know how right she was. The mountain range in the distance was the edge of the world. Cross one side on foot and the hapless wanderer would appear on the opposite side, returned to the ashen plain, the empty cup of a god’s hand. There was nothing but the plain and the mountains, over and around, back and forward, wrapped up into a ball within itself, forever and ever.

Out in reality, I must have been screaming, bleeding from nose and ears and eyes. No brain was made to comprehend this. Wonderland was broken in some manner that could only be revealed by true observation.

The Eye had observed so hard it had broken this world and compacted it into a new shape, a shape that defied comprehension.

One could walk forever in any direction and never reach those mountains, like trying to escape a black hole by walking toward the event horizon. The great watchers were not immobile; they had been walking toward the centre of the Eye’s attention forever, for an eternity, trapped in a kind of torment they could neither understand nor resist. They stared toward the object of their devotion, forever kept from observing it in return.

We were swept up in Wonderland’s logic. Our attention was being absorbed and captured by the perfect curvature of this dimensional wound. Another second — and another — and another. On and on, we could have stared forever, turning this bauble over in our mind’s eye until all was dust.

Was this why the Eye stared at this place? Was this why it was closed? Was this—

We were risking entrapment. Our instincts screamed keep looking! Keep staring! Keep watching!

But to do so would leave all our friends in danger, and leave Maisie to be destroyed.

We pulled back from the brink, back from instant self-redefinition as nothing more than a point of observation.

Perhaps that was why the Eye stared. It had no anchors to end the process, nobody else to cling to. No twin for a mirror.

We re-ran the equation, focused this time: Maisie and Wonderland, looking for a match. Ignore the context.

We pushed outward, across Wonderland, like a squid swimming through the mist-choked air.

My attention ranged across a million miles of broken brick and blasted earth, sifting dirt and ash and charred rubble. We swam past lurking twists of wretched flesh hiding in holes and gnawing on scraps that could no longer be called bones — the former inhabitants of this dimension, changed and cursed beyond all recognition, their forms and souls smeared by sheer force of observation. They shied away from the attention they felt, fleeing before me and slipping into the deepest cracks they could find. For I was just another observer, no matter how small.

We caressed the stubs of wall with our eyes, ran our senses over humps of burned earth, pushed our fingers through hanging veils of mist, sorting through the wreckage a trillion years. But there was nothing there, nothing left but the burned out remains of a crime so vast it could not be expressed in anything but an end.

We pushed out further, to the watchers around the rim, the great giants who had come to worship the Eye.

They felt my attention like a candle flame in the infinite darkness, like prisoners locked in a lightless cell for eternity. Continent-sized heads turned with geological slowness to regard my awareness speeding past. Paws like worlds and tongues like the unravelling arms of galaxies reached out to touch, to make contact, to worship this mote-like reflection of the great watcher in the sky.

Where these things had come from, I could not say. Their insides were more complex than any mortal or Outsider I had yet witnessed — vast churning matrices of hyperdimensional definition, like entire worlds compacted into titanic beings.

Perhaps that was what they were — worlds, dimensions, pulled into the Eye’s orbit by the sheer gravity of observation, crushed into singular beings. Black holes of soul-matter.

I left them behind, terrified by how they tracked the spreading awareness of my equation.

Finally, at the rim of the world, I met the mountains, broken and blackened and shattered and scorched.

They were no mountains.

The ring of broken hills that seemed to be the edge of this world, the rim of the cup, the precipice of an infinite void — they were ridged and wrinkled, fleshy and dark, thick as tar.

The mountains were the edges of the Eye’s great lid.

That made no sense. Even in the middle of a hyperdimensional equation, my mind reeled with the paradox.

Were we within the Eye, even now? But we were also looking up at it? Wonderland was an Eye, staring at itself? We were cupped within a great ring of dark lid, both observer and observed at once. The implication introduced an alien element to my equation, a figure the mathematics could not accommodate, a juddering, jarring wrongness.

Dim and distant, I felt my physical body double up and vomit, voiding our guts in a futile effort to reject this impossible curvature of time and space.

Reality was broken here. Whatever logic had once reigned in this dimension, the Eye’s observation had turned it inside out.

We were not supposed to be there.

I went to withdraw. We were done. We had not found Maisie, we had found only madness, a precipice into the dark. But just when I was about to rush back to my own limited awareness, something peered over the rim of those mountains and stared back at me.

A wan, elfin face, framed by wispy blonde hair. Familiar, but wrong, made of all the wrong angles and parts and connections.

I see you! it chirped.

We crashed back into our body, thrashing and flailing, kicking and writhing, coughing and—

“Uurk!”

I swallowed a lungful of warm salty fluid.

My eyes flew open — underwater, clouded by three feet of salt-thick fluid, by plates of semi-transparent flesh, tainted with coils of crimson blood and a floating cloud of brownish gunk. My blood, my vomit. Indistinct shapes and figures moved beyond a membrane of pale flesh. I lashed out with my tentacles, pushing in all directions, panicking, sucking down more water, drowning inside a sack of skin.

“Cut her out!” somebody shouted — Evee, her voice muffled behind flesh and fluid.

“It’s her own body! She grew it!” somebody else wailed. “What if she—”

Lozzie shouted: “She’s stuck!”

“On it,” said Raine.

Suddenly the view through the transparent goop and flesh cleared; people stepped back, giving Raine space to work. She towered over me, a dark figure in her motorcycle jacket, raising a long black claw.

Raine knelt quickly, grabbed a handful of the pale flesh, twisted it upward, and sliced it open with her combat knife.

The sack of flesh and fluid collapsed around me, like a burst water balloon hitting the concrete. I sat bolt upright, coughing and hacking, yanking my squid-skull helmet off again, vomiting salt water, purging my lungs with an unnatural flutter of abyssal biology. The plates of clear bone or chitin fell away, sliding off my lap and clattering to the floor.

I was soaked through, clothes saturated with salty water, bleeding from my eyes and nose, spitting up bile, all my tentacles seized up hard with the effort of the hyperdimensional equation.

Raine jammed her knife back into her belt and quickly wiped my hair out of my face, clearing my eyes and nostrils.

“Heather, Heather, look at me,” she purred. “Heather, breathe, breathe. Can you breathe? That’s it, just breathe, nice deep breaths.”

I was a good girl, so I did as I was told, breathing slowly in and out until my lungs remembered how to work.

Twil peered over Raine’s shoulder, wide-eyed and totally confused. “What the fuck was that, Big H? What the fuck were you doing?”

We croaked: “I don’t— don’t know— I— did I— did I grow all that? Around myself?”

“Yeah,” Raine said, grinning at me. “Spooked the hell out of me, Heather. Like you were cocooning yourself. The climbing ropes go right through the flesh sack, see?”

Evelyn poked at the remains of the weird flesh sack with her walking stick. “Aqueous humour.”

I looked up at her, still blinking blood and gunk out of my eyes. “P-pardon?”

“Aqueous humour,” she repeated. “The substance found inside the front of an eyeball. You were turning yourself into a giant eye, Heather. What happened? Quickly now.”

“Oh … ” I shrugged, drained beyond words. My hair was plastered to my skull and I was shaking all over. We wanted to sleep. The exhaustion was so total. “Makes sense. Had to … look. Big look. Everywhere.”

“The little watcher,” said Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight.

Praem planted a lemon in my hands. I tore into the skin with my teeth and sucked at the juice like a vampire at a neck.

“Maisie?” Evelyn snapped. “Did you see her?”

I shook my head, speaking between mouthfuls of lemon flesh. “She’s not here. Her body doesn’t exist here. Not physically.”

“Shit,” Evelyn swore. “That means … ”

“Means she’s likely up there,” Raine said, pointing upwards. “Onto plan B?”

“Yes,” Evelyn hissed. “But Heather, are you capable? You seem spent. There’s no shame and no problem in retreat for now. Better to regroup and—”

Bwoop.

Bwip.

Bweep.

Three Caterpillars let out tiny versions of their earth-shaking boop-alarms. They were all pointing in the same direction with their head-feelers.

Evelyn snapped, “Lozzie, interpret!”

But Lozzie was gaping, looking off in the same direction the Caterpillars were pointing.

“It’s … me,” she whispered. “It’s me!”

“Oh fuck,” Raine said. She straightened up, unslung her gun, and pulled the levers to make it go clack. “Not this thing again, no thank you.”

Zheng started to growl, peeling her lips back. The Knights at one side of the circle closed ranks, shields together, lances raised.

“What!?” Evelyn demanded, going red in the face. “What are you all talking about!? Clear answers, right now, somebody explain! If we need to leave, then we need to communicate!”

I lurched to my feet and caught myself on my tentacles. Sevens grabbed one arm to steady me, as Raine was too busy sighting down her gun at a fluttering blob, approaching us across the black ash and ruin of Wonderland.

“It’s the imitation Lozzie,” I murmured. “The one that kidnapped me. Months ago. She saw me looking. She looked back.”

Twil growled too. “Thought you iced this thing, Loz.”

“I did,” Lozzie whispered. “A Knight did.”

“Still alive, huh?” Twil flexed her claws.

“No,” I said, for I knew what I had seen. “It was never alive in the first place. But it’s not dead either.” I squinted at the pale blob, striding across Wonderland, bobbing with the fluttery motion of a jellyfish. “It’s something else.”

“We should leave, now,” Evelyn said, hard and matter-of-fact. “Plan A is a failure. We pull back, regroup, rest, return for plan B. Heather—”

“Evee.”

“Heather, no.”

“What if this is a way to communicate?” I said. “What if this is a way to communicate with the Eye?”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

She sees you! And she’s coming to say hello! Be careful she doesn’t ask you for a dance.

And so we discover the true shape of Wonderland. Paradoxical infinity, wrapped around on itself, from which there can be no escape, and into which there can be no true entry. Is the Eye observing itself? Trying to observe itself? Has it gotten turned around, or compacted under the sheer weight of its own awareness? Whichever is the case, a mote upon this Eye is approaching, to bid Heather welcome home.

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Next week, ash and dust and black mists, and a visit from a forgotten thing. Can it talk? Does it want to? Will the Eye acknowledge the exchange, or is there nothing to be exchanged?

Content Warnings

Vomiting
Bleeding

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

On the final day we did many things. None of them were rest.

In the morning, while still in bed, after Evelyn and I woke shoulder-to-shoulder and lips-to-neck, she said to me: “You have one job today, Heather. One purpose above all others, understand? Make yourself ready. Let Raine and me worry about the logistics and the practical details. You just concentrate on hyperdimensional mathematics.”

Raine laughed from the other side of the bed. “Prep the payload! Pack our cannon with powder and shot. Present arms. Five rounds rapid!”

Evelyn sighed and rolled her eyes. That expression made me want to kiss her brow. “She’s not a fucking warship, Raine. And you’re mixing your metaphors. And you, Raine, no horseplay today, no screwing about. Absolute focus.”

“Me?” Raine grinned. “I’m always on.”

Evelyn grumbled. “Yes, that’s usually the problem. Come on. No time for a lie in. We all have things to attend. One of you fetch my leg.”

First of all, I forced myself to stop thinking of it as ‘the final day’; it was merely a very busy Saturday, not the last full day of my mortal life. I would not die on the morrow, nor a year from then, nor five, nor ten years hence. I was not going to die before thirty, or forty, or even fifty years of age. I had tasted the sweetest fruit of all — a night sandwiched between people I loved — and all seven Heathers had sworn together that we would taste it again, over and over. We re-swore to ourselves that morning. We were going to live into our eighties, or nineties, or even beyond. We were not dying here. Nobody was.

Reality would break before we would surrender to any end.

Which was all well and good to swear in the middle of the night after an emotionally exhausting episode of passion, but it was a bit different when sitting at the breakfast table and eating soggy cereal. Domestic life has a way of making sworn oaths seem a bit silly.

Lemons helped. I chased my coffee with two.

Between myself and Raine and Evelyn, we had many things to square away and secure and double-check, if we were to have any hope of mounting the first expedition to Wonderland on the following Sunday morning. We did not want last-minute preparations to drag on past lunchtime and into the afternoon; we wanted everyone alert and well-rested, with empty bowels and fully caffeinated bloodstreams. We wanted no surprises, no interruptions, no stragglers.

Evelyn had a very specific way of phrasing this problem.

“Operations is a woefully neglected aspect of military action. Did you know that, Heather?” she said, then pointed her walking stick at Raine. “High-speed low-drag brain here thinks all you need is grit and a gun.”

Raine chuckled and waved a piece of toast. “Sure, what more could I want? Maybe a girl, too. The three G’s.”

Evelyn ground on: “In the real world, if you’re not all in the right place at the right time, you’ve already lost. Everyone wants to be a special forces murderer these days, or a general doing strategy in the tent, the kind that never gets mud on his boots. But if you’re not all at the starting line when you’re needed? You’re fucked. We’re going to be ready and prepped hours before the starting whistle.”

Raine perked up, a grin on her lips. “We’re gonna have a starting whistle?”

Evelyn snorted. “You wish.”

To that end, we were gathering our forces on Saturday, a full day in advance.

Twil was planning to stay the night. She arrived that afternoon, with a bag packed for an overnight stay and a hand-held video game console for some light entertainment in the meantime.

“You’re going to play Doom?,” I asked, trying to contain my grimace. “On the night before we venture out to some unspeakable hell dimension?”

Twil boggled at me. “You know what Doom is!? I thought you were like … well … you know.”

“I know what? Excuse me, Twil?”

“You know what I mean, Big H. Like … non-techno girl. Cottage-core. No video games.”

Evelyn sighed as if Twil had just stepped knee-deep into a puddle of stagnant mud. “That is not what ‘cottage-core’ means, Twil. Try being a little less internet-poisoned for one second of your life.”

Twil snorted. “Says you, Evee.”

“I know what Doom is, Twil,” I said. “And I don’t think it’s the best thing to be playing before Wonderland.”

“Naaaah.” Twil grinned. “Gets my blood pumping.”

Twil also brought her mother and her aunt with her for a brief but important visit. Christine Hopton, the High Priestess of the Brinkwood Church, had words of encouragement and kindness for us, but also extracted a promise that we would return her daughter safely.

“We swear on our sister, on Maisie. Everyone is coming home from this. Whatever it takes.”

Christine had unexpectedly offered me a hug. I’d taken it. “Good luck, dear,” she said.

Meanwhile, Twil’s aunt, Amanda Hopton, brought us messages from her mind-linked god, the kindly old Outsider cone-snail, Hringewindla.

“He wishes you ‘good hunting’. I … I think. Good hunting, godspeed, good luck. At least, those are the only ways I can render his feelings into words. I’m sorry for my pitiful attempts. And … and he wants you to carry his gift with you. In case you have need of it, out there where so few things have solid meaning.”

“His gift?” we’d asked, a little confused. “The stone coin he gave me?”

“The very one.”

“I don’t see what good it could be, but … I will. I promise.” I bowed my head. “Thank you, Amanda. And thank you, Hringewindla. Thank you for all your help. We’ll come see you again, when we get back. I’m sure Maisie will want to meet you.”

Zheng had been strictly forbidden from wandering off into the woods or ranging across the landscape with Grinny, no matter how much enjoyment the pair of demon-hosts were getting out of their countryside adventures. ‘Confined to quarters’, as Raine put it. We were concerned that Zheng would take the brief imposition poorly. She did not enjoy being ordered, even at the best of times, let alone when those orders involved constraints on her range of action — and she had taken very strongly to Grinny over the last two weeks. Grinny, the demon-host who inhabited the body of Edward Lilburne’s late wife, was stuck to Zheng like glue now. She was even dressed in Zheng’s spare clothes, great baggy jumpers and loose jeans.

“Want to go out!” she had bellowed in the kitchen. “Out out out!”

Raine had cheered at that. “At least she knows what she wants now. Well done, Zheng, you’ve got this girl thinking for herself.”

But Zheng had grinned with anticipation and pleasure. She knew what was coming, what was planned for the following morning, and she would miss it for nothing.

“We await the hunt, shaman,” she rumbled after she swept me off my feet. “After we crack the god apart, we have many tales to tell you, of things beyond the city.” And then, to Grinny: “Patience, little one. I will bring you more grand trophies. Today, we eat, and grow strong.”

Evelyn’s day was occupied with the last of the magical preparations out in Camelot; the scaled up version of the Invisus Oculus had to be perfect. She spent hours testing the thing, going over the lines and angles and the lettering of the words, making sure the Knights and the Cattys had missed nothing. We left the gateway in the magical workshop open for once, to limit additional trips back and forth, though Praem accompanied her all the same.

“Think of it like a spacecraft,” Evelyn told me. “Or perhaps a submersible. We are all getting in this thing, and it cannot have a single flaw, or our lives are forfeit. If it was just me … ”

“No,” Praem intoned.

“Ahem. Yes, well. If it was just me, I would probably have cut corners. But this is you, and Raine, and Praem, and Lozzie, and everybody. I will brook no errors, no time-saving short cuts. It will be perfect or we will not go at all.”

Evelyn attended to two further matters as well: she helped Lozzie go over the plan with the Knights and the Caterpillars, including the essential steps of watching out for the imitation-Lozzie the Eye might send against us again — and she supervised moving the clay-squid thing in the magical workshop into a fresh bucket of water and clay, with climbing ropes for handles. The bucket was to be carried by one of the Knights. Mister Squiddy was still an unsolved mystery, sent either from Maisie or from the Eye itself, but more likely the former; if we came up short with other methods of contact or interference, Mister Squiddy might serve as a backup plan.

Raine was on what she called ‘agitprop duty’.

Evelyn had sighed and looked like she wanted to punch Raine in the kidneys. “Do not call it that. Raine, just don’t. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Raine laughed. “What? I’m running interference, sending messages, getting the word out there. Doesn’t that make perfect sense? Right, Heather?”

“I’m not getting involved in this argument,” I said. “But … no, it doesn’t count.”

“Oh, you wound me, my squiddy girl.”

“Just. Get. On. With. It,” Evelyn ground out between clenched teeth.

Raine’s role that Saturday was to check up on everybody who was not joining us on the expedition to Wonderland — to either inform, deflect, mislead, invite, or simply make clear what was happening and where we were going to be. She called Amy Stack twenty four times (with one, singular, gruff response); she made sure Kimberly was safe and sound; she went to visit Badger and Sarika, simply to reassure both of our distant charges that there was nothing to be concerned about. She called Nicole for a terse, awkward, private chat. She made certain that everyone staying behind in the house knew what to do in an emergency.

Lozzie and I had a very special task that morning: we went to visit Natalie, the little girl I had saved from becoming part of Edward’s collateral damage. We kept it short and sweet, merely a little meeting in the Skeates’ back garden, to remind her we were still on her side.

We mentioned nothing of Wonderland.

A rumble of low-level activity continued all through the morning and afternoon and into early evening, matching the growl and grumble of anxiety growing in my guts. All I could do was remind myself of the oath I had made, no matter how silly it felt by the cold light of day and the context of so much practical preparation.

But there was one last step I could take, to ensure I had the strength to keep that oath.

Which was why, at five o’clock in the afternoon, I was seated on the floor in Lozzie’s bedroom, at the low table Tenny used for her laptop and her books and her games, getting myself soundly thrashed at chess.

“Brrrrt!” Tenny trilled as one of her silken black tentacles finished another move. She looked very satisfied on the other side of the chess board.

She was sat on the opposite side of the little table, which was currently cleared of everything except her favourite chess set — the hand-carved one which she’d received as a gift from Jan. Tenny was cross-legged and very comfortable, with her long leathery wing-cloak folded back over her shoulders, her tufts of white fur extra fluffy from a fresh bath, and her inky dark skin gleaming warmly in the lamplight. Her wiggly white antennae twitched as she played, but my level of skill did not merit the deep-thought indicator of her tentacles spinning in little circles. That display was reserved for real challenges, not for running rings around Auntie Heather.

“Rook takes kniiiight. Aunty Heathy move now!”

“Okay, okay,” we murmured, squinting at the board. “Thank you, Tenns. Okay. We’re going to try … we’re going to try that pawn there.” We pointed. “That one—”

“Beeeeee threeee,” Tenny supplied.

“Thank you. Pawn from B3 to B4.” We took a deep breath, flexed our aching tentacles, and concentrated on the narrow space between the chessboard positions. “Now … carefully … ”

Lozzie spoke up, from over on the bed: “Take your time, Heathy. Just go slow. Slow-slow, go-go.”

“I appreciate the thought,” we muttered, “but I don’t need to go slow. Speed is not the problem. Precision is the problem. And reaching out without physically touching, that’s … very challenging. If I can’t move small objects like this, this … ”

Seven-Shades-of-Subtle-Correction purred a reassurance: “Concentrate, kitten.”

Lozzie stage-whispered: “Can I be a kitten for you, too?”

“Sadly not, my sweet one,” Sevens replied. “But you may select any other name you so wish.”

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” went Lozzie. “Puppy?”

“A good choice,” Sevens replied.

I tutted. “You two are making it harder to concentrate on this.”

“Merely simulating battlefield conditions, no?” said Sevens. “Go ahead, Heather. You must not stall.”

“Pawn to B4 … ” I repeated — then scrunched up my concentration, reached through the air with a thought, and blinked the unfortunate little pawn Out and back again.

The pawn promptly crashed into two of Tenny’s pieces with a little wooden clatter, sending them careening across the board and threatening a full collapse of the current state of play. Tenny’s silken black tentacles whipped out from behind her shoulders and grabbed all the flying pieces with absolute precision, holding them in place before the dominoes could finish falling.

“Baaaaa!” she trilled. “Brrrrrr! Brrt-brrt-brrt. Auntie Heathy missed!”

“Oopsie!” Lozzie chirped. “Pawn to B6 instead! He’s a fast little guy!”

I sighed and drew a hand over my face. “Sorry, Tenns. Sorry. This is … let me try again. I can— I can make this work.”

Tenny’s tentacles quickly re-set the board, clacking all the pieces back down in their previous places. She puffed her cheeks out and shot me a big, wide-eyed, sceptical look.

“Sorry … ” I repeated.

Tenny expelled the air in her puffed-out cheeks with a big loud, “Brrrrrrt!” Then she quickly added: “Auntie Heathy stop-saying-sorry challenge!”

We blinked at her three times, then burst out laughing. “Oh— okay— okay, Tenny, okay. Um, point taken, that’s very kind of you, and very reasonable. Sorr—”

“Brrrt!!!” Tenny vibrated on the other side of the table, trilling so hard I worried it might injure her.

Apparently Marmite worried the same thing; the massive off-white spider-servitor had been clinging to the wall behind Tenny since we’d started the chess game, apparently content to watch quietly, trailing two of his own tentacles across the floor to hold Tenny around the waist, like a hound who needed to rest a paw against his master’s ankle. But at Tenny’s violent trill, Marmite came scuttling down off the wall and nosed his way under Tenny’s right arm, nuzzling at her side. Huge metal cone-shaped eyes swivelled upward at Tenny, as if checking on her health. Tenny delegated three tentacles to attend to her friend and pet, stroking Marmite’s fuzzy bristles and scratching the back of his head. But she didn’t cease pouting at me.

“Right, Tenns,” we said, a little awkwardly. “Right you are. No more saying sorry.”

“Pbrrrt,” Tenny trilled.

Seven-Shades-of-Sensible-Suggestion spoke up again, from over on the bed: “The dutiful daughter does have a point, kitten. You have done nothing but test and stretch the basics since you started. You have had more than enough warm-up.”

I sighed, flexed my tentacles outward again, and tried to shake off the stiffness; the pain of distributed brain-math ran down all of our additional limbs, quietly burning inside the neurons and nerves of our pneuma-somatic flesh, threatening our primary brain with the ghost of nausea and headaches.

A small price to pay to limber up. We had not done any serious brain-math in a while. We would not be found wanting on the morrow.

“Warming up is half the point,” we said gently, still staring at the chess-board and preparing to move a piece with brain-math once again. “Even if I do nothing else, this is important. Another five moves. Fifteen minutes. Then we can turn to the meat of this. I—”

“Pfffffffft!” Tenny trill-fluttered deep inside her chest. “Five?! Auntie Heathy … ”

I blinked up at Tenny. “W-what? Sorry? Pardon?”

Tenny blew out a big puff, then reached forward and clacked several pieces around the board in a rapid sequence of moves, my pieces as well as her own.

In three moves she had my King in checkmate, pinned by a Bishop, a Rook, and her Queen.

I gaped at the board for a second, then gathered myself, clearing my throat and huffing. “I … Tenny … you … you don’t know those were the moves I was going to make. That’s hardly fair.”

“Brrrt?” Tenny tilted her head to one side. She somehow managed to look both unimpressed, smug, doubtful, and pitying all at once. “Really? Really really?”

I tutted. “You sound just like your mother, sometimes.”

Tenny smiled, smug and pleased. “Compliment!”

Lozzie made a little squeal. “Awww, Tenns!”

I stumbled over my words. “Yes, well, of course. That’s not— not what I meant. I would never compare anybody to Lozzie as an insult, now would I? Really?”

Tenny did not let up, however. Nor would she be distracted from her purpose. She pointed at the board again. “Really, Auntie Heath? Different moves? Different moves?”

I sighed. “Well … probably not. Fine.”

“Game done,” Tenny announced. She narrowed one huge black eye at me, as if telling me she was wise to my tricks.

“Alright, alright.” I surrendered, leaned back, and gave in to the inevitable.

Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight said: “Are we to dine on the meat of the matter now, kitten?”

Sevens was seated on Lozzie’s bed, comfortably settled in a divot among the messy sheets and wildly disobedient pillows, with her long and elegant legs hanging over the edge and her be-stocking’d feet planted on the floor. She was wearing the mask of the Yellow Princess, starched and prim and very proper, with eyes like ice and hair cut ruler-straight. Sevens’ usual strictness was undermined completely by Lozzie, who was lying sideways with her head pillowed in Sevens’ lap, the rest of her wrapped up like a happy little bug in her pastel poncho.

Lozzie’s wispy blonde hair was draped all down Sevens’ skirt, but Sevens didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, she had spent the last twenty minutes petting Lozzie like a cat, combing out her hair, and generally showering her with casual physical affection. By the time I finally looked up from the chess board, Sevens was busy weaving Lozzie’s hair into a pair of long braids.

“The meat,” I echoed. “I’m not sure we should call it that.”

Sevens gave me a warning look.

“Fine, fine,” I relented. “Yes. I’m good and warmed up. So … ” I glanced at Tenny once again, who was now listening with that attentive innocence that only children could muster without effort. A lump formed in my throat. Perhaps I was making a mistake after all. “Lozzie, are you certain about this?”

“Mm?” Lozzie blinked. Her face was sideways in Sevens’ lap, which made the expression extra clueless. But then she glanced at Tenny too. She took my meaning. “Tenns knows what we’re doing. Don’t you, Tenns? You know, you know!”

Tenny nodded her fluffy head up and down. Several of her tentacles dipped and bobbed. Marmite’s metal cone-eyes followed the motion, like a cat watching a finger. “I know! I know!” Tenny insisted. “Going to get Maisie back. I want to meet Maisie too. Please?”

We took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Thank you, Tenns. Hopefully, yes, you can meet Maisie too, and soon. Okay, you can stay for this, but you have to promise me that if you start to feel uncomfortable, or scared, then you will speak up. Okay?”

“Mmmm-rrrr! Promise!”

Another deep breath down into our lungs. Why did this feel so much like a moment of no return? Because I was finally facing how little I knew? Or because I was finally reaching out for a specific kind of help?

Tenny must have seen my doubt, because she reached across the table and wrapped one of her tentacles around one of ours. A second black tentacle deposited a chess piece into our lap — the white queen. We stared at the white queen for a long moment, then picked it up. We turned the piece over with our fingers as we spoke.

“The people in this room — the three of you — represent the best possible advice I can get about the Eye itself. Lozzie, you have more experience Outside than anybody else. Sevens, you’re the daughter of the King in Yellow. I know, I know, neither of you have any direct knowledge, we’ve been over this before, but I need to talk this through, and not from the kind of practical angle that Raine or Evelyn might provide.”

Tenny tilted her head sideways as I spoke, then trilled a wordless sound of soft question. “Brrrt?”

We smiled at her. “And Tenny, you’re here because, well, I need somebody to poke holes in my assumptions. You have a very, very, very keen and unique mind. You understand mathematics in a way that others don’t, and that might help somehow, even though brain-math isn’t like actual maths. You’re probably the smartest person I’ve ever known. Now, yes, of course, that doesn’t mean you’re going to have any special insight, but it might help you spot something that nobody else has, not yet. And I want to include you. You’re not coming with us tomorrow, but you’re one of us. You’re part of our family.”

“Brrrrrr,” went Tenny. She seemed uncertain.

“Just listen to Aunty Heathy talk to your mum and Sevens,” we said. “And if something seems wrong, speak up, please.”

Tenny nodded. She squinted one eye shut, then the other; several of her tentacles stood up from her back, their tips twitching in deep thought. Marmite seemed to sense something was changing in the air. He coiled a single tentacle in Tenny’s lap, then went very still.

We took a deep breath and marshalled our thoughts.

“You all know the practical parts of the plan by now,” we said. “Once we’re in Wonderland and we know we’re secure, everyone else is going to watch the edge of the circle and guard me while I try to find Maisie.” I held up the white queen from Tenny’s chess board. “I’m going to define her, in the same way that I’ve defined Raine before, in order to locate her. I’ve got Maisie’s t-shirt as an anchor for that equation, and the photograph from Taika, as well as the shape of my own body to use as a reference. I’m relatively confident that I can ‘scan’ for her, if she’s out there, physically.”

Lozzie rose from Sevens’ lap; Sevens put the finishing touches on Lozzie’s twin braids. The braids bobbed when Lozzie nodded. “Yeah! Yeah, you and May-May share the same mirror, it should be quick and easy!”

I squinted. “I’m sorry, Lozzie — ‘May-May’?”

“Mmhmm!” Lozzie nodded again, very proud.

Sevens stroked the back of Lozzie’s braids. “A fine name.”

“We’ll have to ask her,” I sighed, struggling to find it amusing right then. “Anyway, if that works, if we find her physical form is out there somewhere, then we withdraw. Evelyn has plans to make one of the Caterpillars safe to traverse the surface of Wonderland via a different form of the Invisus Oculus. Once that’s ready, we go back in, ride a Catty, and pick up Maisie. Simple.”

“Catty steed, away!” Lozzie cheered.

Sevens was more sober. “It is never simple, kitten.”

We sighed. “Yes, Sevens, we know. Even if that all happens as planned, it won’t be simple. We don’t know what the Eye has out there, or what it can put in our path, even if it can’t see us. Picking up Maisie may be difficult, but it’s straightforward, but … but personally I doubt that we’ll be doing that.”

“Brrrrt?” went Tenny.

We spared her a guilty smile. I closed one fist around the white queen, engulfing her. “I strongly suspect that Maisie doesn’t have a physical body anymore. If she doesn’t, then there’s only one logical place she could be.”

“In the Eye,” Tenny trilled.

I blinked at her in surprise. How much had she overheard prior to this conversation? How much did she know? How much implied horror had we exposed to our poor Tenny?

Tenny puffed her cheeks out at me; she could tell how I was looking at her, like a child who needed protecting. “Aunty Heath,” she grumbled.

“S-sorry, Tenny, you just surprised me. You do know that your mother and I have tried to keep you sheltered from the worst of this, yes? Not because we think you’re childish, or because we disrespect you, but … we don’t want to frighten you.”

Tenny unpuffed her cheeks and narrowed her big dark eyes, with a strange little smile on her face. “Tenns does not scare easy.”

We laughed at that, gently, with more love than we had expected; had she picked that one up from Raine? “Okay, Tenny. Thank you. And yes, you’re right. I suspect Maisie is inside the eye. Not physically, I don’t think, but metaphysically, spiritually, somehow. Lozzie, what do you think about that? Do you think I could be right? Does it make sense?”

Lozzie tilted her head from side to side, slowly, as if thinking by sloshing her brain back and forth. Her new braids swayed with the rest of her. “Mmmmm. Maybe maybe? Not sure, Heathy, I dunno.”

“Thank you regardless, Lozzie,” we said. “So … so … ” I gathered myself by wrapping a trio of tentacles around my belly in a tight and secure self-hug, then I held up the white queen again. “We don’t have weapons on the Eye’s scale. And even if we did, fighting it might not help Maisie. A fight might not free her. It might even hurt her, in some metaphysical sense.”

Sevens spoke up. “I am in agreement with this, kitten.”

“Ah?”

Sevens gestured with one hand, fingers out, palm up, the very picture of aristocratic debate. “Think of my father, the King. How would one ‘fight’ my father? With sword and gun? No. He would write them out of the script.”

“Exactly,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. “The Eye, it observes, that’s all it does. Like your nature is narrative, plays and stories. The Eye’s nature is seeing. How would that affect fighting it? Do you have any ideas?”

Sevens allowed a delicate frown to crease her brow. Lozzie bit her lower lip. A moment of silence passed over the room.

Tenny trilled: “Hide and seek?”

I laughed softly, and not only from politeness. This was the other reason, the emotional reason, for having Tenny in the room with us. Her shoulders were light with far fewer cares. She knew she was loved and secure. We needed that reminder of what we were ‘fighting’ for.

Lozzie giggled too. “Tenns!”

“No,” said Seven-Shades-of-Suddenly-Sharp.

Tenny flinched, tentacles all a-whirl as she turned to look at Sevens. “Brrr?”

The Yellow Princess smiled — a rare look on her ice-cold, perfect face, thin and frosty, but genuine beyond any words. “My apologies. I did not mean to make you jump, dear Tenny. I mean to say that you, young Miss Tenny Lilburne, are more right than you may realise.”

“Brrrt? Prrrr?”

“Sevens?” I said. “What do you mean? You think the Eye will play hide and seek with us? You can’t be serious.”

Sevens-Shades-of-Supercilious-Simile gestured with both hands this time, spreading her fingers in a subtle shrug. “Imagine this for me, kitten. Lozzie and Tenny, too, if you will. A brigand surprises my father with a rapier, intent on murder. He has slipped past all my father’s guards and has come upon the King while his royal person is unarmed and unprotected. What happens to the villain?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Is this a serious question?”

“Yes, kitten.”

“He gets … well … I can say this in reality, can’t I? As long as we’re not Outside.” My tentacles bunched up and hesitated all the same. “He gets Hastur’d.”

“Hazzzturrrr,” Tenny echoed in her fluttery trill.

I winced and grimaced and tried to put my face in a tentacle; Lozzie looked amused, which I thought was completely inappropriate. How foolish we were being!

“Tenns,” I said quickly, “you must never say that word when we’re Outside. I-I shouldn’t have even said it then, I’m sorry, that was teaching you—”

Sevens cleared her throat gently. “Tenny is known.”

“Ah?”

“Special!” Lozzie chirped. She reached over and patted Sevens’ thigh, which would have made my eyes bulge in surprise under other circumstances. For now I filed that away.

Sevens tilted her head in acknowledgement. “She would be in little peril. Calm yourself, Heather.” Sevens turned to Tenny. “Best not to speak my father’s secret name, other than in most dire need. He knows my bride-to-be, your Aunt Heather, and would know you as her family. But his wrath is hard to aim, and harder still to guide. Do you understand, Tenny dear?”

Tenny nodded, wide-eyed and more serious than I’d ever seen her before.

“Good,” I added, feeling like we’d veered horribly off-course. “Um, Sevens, please, continue. You were saying?”

Seven-Shades-of-Protective-Auntie raised her chin. “My father would be unable to simply overpower this hypothetical assailant with brute strength or superior skill, no matter the mask he wore, for that is not within his nature. He would rewrite the script as each action and choice clove the directions and results of fate. The brigand would perhaps think himself victorious, but then trip and fall upon his own sword in his haste to slit my father’s throat. Or perhaps my father would appear to take many wounds, yet neither weaken nor slow from loss of blood and the trials of pain, until the villain is exhausted merely from delivering cuts and blows, and dies at the bare hands of an unarmed man. Or maybe the fool would appear successful, presented with the ‘corpse’ of the King, but then find himself trapped in a maze of corridors upon his attempt to flee the scene, a maze that would return him again and again to the putrefying body, until he is left with no choice but to slake his starvation on the regal meat of the King. With such poison in his belly he would … ”

Sevens trailed off and turned her eyes upon Tenny, who was listening with the rapt attention of a child exposed to her first horror film.

“Well,” Sevens added with another special smile for Tenny. “I am only speculating. My father’s methods and tastes are distinct. I am certain he would devise far more creative fates for such a fool.”

We nodded, with our head and every spare tentacle; we had terrible trouble imagining the King in Yellow in a physical fight, at least while wearing either of the masks we had met — the Kindly Prince or the ridiculous Banana General — but this was exactly the kind of insight we had been hoping for.

“I think I comprehend, Sevens,” we said. “Thank you.”

Sevens bowed her head.

“So, you think if I confront the Eye, it would … ”

Sevens shrugged with dainty shoulders beneath her starched blouse. “The great observer may do something incomprehensible, something outside the boundaries of how it is approached, just as the brigand with a knife would not comprehend the shape of my father’s response.”

“Hide and seek,” Tenny repeated.

We nodded. “Yes. Yes, I suppose it’s not impossible. I always thought of it as a staring contest, like I would have to look into the Eye and hold its gaze, but … hmm.” We sighed. “I suppose it could hide Maisie? I’ll have to identify her pattern, her soul, or whatever is left of her. I’ve done that before, I can do it again, in theory. It’s how I found Raine when she got kidnapped. It’s how I saved Sarika. It’s possible. But if the Eye hides her away on purpose … ”

I trailed off and shook my head; what would that even mean?

Sevens purred, “It will not be that simple, kitten. I do not know what form the exchange will take, but ‘hide and seek’ is only a metaphor.”

“But—”

Before I could mount another round of questions or deepen the conversation by plunging into a boggy mire of magical metaphysics and metaphor, a sneaky little silken tentacle snaked over my shoulder and plucked the white queen from my hands.

“T-Tenny!”

Tenny snatched up the queen and then held it in the air next to her face. She smiled with sudden twinkling mischief.

“Tenns,” Lozzie cooed. “Taking things without asking isn’t nice!”

Sevens made a soft ‘hmm’ sound, then said: “It is her chess set, however.”

But Tenny just smiled at me, dark lips curled upward in delight. She wiggled the white queen at the end of one tentacle, and said, “Maisie!”

My eyebrows shot upward; our Tenny had unique insight after all.

“Maisie?” I said.

Tenny nodded, very excited now. Her fluffy white antennae were twitching back and forth, her chest purring with a deep, fluttery trilling sound. “Maisie. Aunty Heathy, close your eyes.”

I did as I was told. I stopped looking. I even coiled up my tentacles.

A few seconds later, Tenny announced: “Open!”

I opened my eyes. Tenny’s hands and tentacles were both spread wide. Marmite had retreated a few paces toward the wall, as if before a confrontation between a pair of larger animals. The white queen chess piece was nowhere to be seen. Tenny grinned with childish enjoyment.

“Tenny?” we said.

Tenny’s eyes flashed with a playful challenge. “Find her!”

We spread our tentacles outward in a mirror of Tenny’s pose. We felt our lips curve with sudden and unbidden delight. We plunged our mind down, down, down into the sunken depths of our soul and pulled at the machinery of the Eye.

“Ready or not, here I come.”

And so Tenny and I played hide and seek.

The first attempt went terribly; we began by defining all of Tenny in hyperdimensional mathematics, unfolding our vision of her in all the infinite detail of any living being. The principle was straightforward enough, because Tenny was right in front of us; but we may as well have attempted to witness and catalogue every blade of grass and grain of soil on a continent of open prairie, or list and map every feather in a flock of flying birds as they wheeled and turned in the sky, or measure each ring of wood in each and every tree in a primordial forest. Tenny was an equation just as complex and dizzying as any human — but different in subtle ways, formed from long interleaved strands of meaning and muscle, like a rope of the soul — a billion-billion-numbered definition spiralling out into near-infinity, dragging the eyes deep into the labyrinthine depths.

We tried to locate the one piece that didn’t fit, the one element which was not Tenny, the chess piece, the white queen, the surrogate for Maisie inside the Eye.

We surfaced from that equation with a full-body wave of nausea, our tentacles cold and cramped and coiled, curling up to cradle our head and clench our eyes shut. We tasted blood and bile, but we kept our lunch down, choking and coughing.

It was not the difficulty of the brain-math which caused such reaction, but the complexity of that which we beheld.

“Heathy!?”

“Kitten, hold your—”

“Heath! Heath!”

“U-under your wing,” I croaked into my lap. “Left shoulder. Left shoulder, Tenny.”

Tenny produced the white queen and held it up. She was blinking in surprise that the effort had pained me so much. Panting with victory, I nodded to her. “One point to me.”

“Aunty Heathy?”

“Again. Please, Tenny. Again. Auntie Heathy is okay. Again.”

The second and third attempts went better — smoother, faster, with less pain and less nausea, less blood in the back of my throat and dripping from my nose. Sevens produced a wonderfully thick and absorbent handkerchief from somewhere, in softly glowing yellow, embroidered with lilies. Lozzie fetched a glass of water so I could sip in between the attempts to clear my throat, with a slice of lemon floating in the cool liquid. I located the chess piece buried in Tenny’s head hair, then hidden behind her backside. Each time she produced it with more confidence, flashing between her fingers and standing atop her silken palm. She knew she was helping now.

Then I started using my bioreactor, popping the control rods free, feeding additional energies into my core.

The fourth and fifth times I was faster, growing with confidence and power, more familiar with the fresh equations I had fashioned. By then I had formed an outcrop of the Eye’s machinery into a probe, a searchlight, a miniature little eye itself, suited for picking out that one object amid all of Tenny’s wide and whirling definition. Could I do the same thing for Maisie? Could I craft an imprint of her from memory and love, and then cast it into the Eye like a socket on a hook, to find her amid all that endless mass?

On the sixth attempt I went too far — my abyssal senses drank too much of Tenny’s definition before I found the queen. It was like force-feeding myself the entire British Library in the blink of an eye, too much information crammed into my skin, glowing and straining until my brain was ready to burst.

I blacked out for three seconds and came round slumped against the wall, cushioned by my own tentacles, with Lozzie tapping her fingertips to my cheeks and Tenny peering at me in alarm.

“She is quite alright,” Sevens announced from the bed. She didn’t seem too concerned. “Heather is not pushing herself too far, she is merely concentrating too hard. Sit up, kitten. That’s it. You are untouched.”

Lozzie helped me sit. My head felt thick with effort, my tentacles numb with hyperdimensional aftermath, like I’d spent hours threading needles over and over again until my fingers were numb.

Lozzie hugged me tight, poncho engulfing me for a moment. “Heathy, you can stop now! You can stop! You can do it! You’re doing it!”

“No,” I croaked, gently peeling Lozzie away from me. “I can’t, not yet. I can’t stop just yet. I’m not doing it all the way yet.” I looked up at Tenny and smiled for her. “Again. Tenny, again, please. Please.”

“All the way?”

“All the way,” I echoed. “Finding is not enough. I have to reel her in, too.”

On the seventh, eighth, and ninth attempts I refined the equation to narrow the amount of ‘Tenny’ I had to cover; that was easier, with less effort and less pain, like using a thinner piece of thread to loop through that hidden needle.

That was quicker. I yelped out the location of the white queen within half a second of Tenny announcing, “Ready!”

On the eleventh try I didn’t declare victory.

Instead, I reached out with hyperdimensional mathematics, with a filament of thought and intent, a fishing-line loaded with the definition of the chess piece. I cast it into ‘Tenny’, like hovering a hook over the surface of a vast lake of inky darkness. A hook and a void, a key and a lock, a harness awaiting the eagerly rescued.

The white queen leapt forth.

I skimmed the chess piece across the membrane, like a flat stone bouncing on the water’s surface; I used Camelot to slingshot the queen — my little Maisie-to-be — Out and then back.

Tenny flinched when she felt the sudden absence of the chess piece — and then gasped in delight when I raised my open palm. The white queen appeared in my hand, the token of Maisie’s rescue jumping forth into reality.

“Yaaaaay!” Tenny cheered. “Yaaaaaa! Aaaaa!”

Lozzie went, “Oooh!”

Seven-Shades-of-Celebration applauded softly. Even Marmite raised his forelegs, eager to join in the victory.

I doubled up and vomited.

I hadn’t done that in a while. We were lucky, however, as Sevens had the good foresight to provide us with a paper bag, though where she got it from we had no idea. She suddenly shoved it under my face as I folded up and voided my stomach. I could have kissed her for that, but I doubt she would have enjoyed my lips at that precise moment.

“Heathy … ” Lozzie sounded upset and worried as she rubbed my back.

Tenny’s enthusiasm was dulled as well. She let out little trills and purrs, soft with concern.

“Thank you,” we croaked as we straightened up. “Sorry about the … the upchucking. It’s the … the complexity of the task. Hunting through all that … that life. But.” We drew ourselves up and flexed our spine; we were shaken, but not exhausted. “The principle is sound. Hide and seek like this, it can be done.” We held out one tentacle toward Tenny. “It’s okay, Tenns, you did so well, well done. I think that’s enough.”

Tenny took my tentacle in one of her own. We held on tight.

“Helping,” Tenny trilled.

More clean, cold water, another slice of lemon, and a nice quiet sit was more than enough to recover my coherency and strength. The trilobe bioreactor purred away in my guts, pouring out heat and energy and topping me back up. Lozzie kept rubbing my back. Sevens went to sit by Tenny, then murmured softly to her, talking about responsibility and harm and how Aunty Heathy knew what she was doing.

I hoped she was right.

When that soft conversation fell away, I spoke up again.

“I can play hide and seek with the Eye,” I said. “At least once. This was proof of concept. It will hurt. It will push me to my limit. I may bleed, a lot. But I believe I can do it.”

Did I? I didn’t know, not for certain. Those words were simply what I needed to believe. Tenny was a billion-billion equations folded in on themselves like an infinite fractal; with great care and precision and specially-crafted hyperdimensional tools I could dip into that sea and find the one part which did not fit. But compared to the Eye, tracing Tenny’s being was like mapping the veins on a single fallen leaf. Performing the same trick with the Eye would be like trying to investigate a world-spanning forest to locate a single ailing magpie.

Sevens sighed softly. “It will be more complex than that, my beloved kitten. The response may take a form none of us here can comprehend.”

“The Eye is a great observer,” we said, thinking out loud. We pulled our knees to our chest. “A staring contest, or hide and seek, or … what’s that game? Red light green light? Stop and go? Or … ” We sighed. “Yes, Sevens, before you say it, we know what you’re going to say. All of these are only metaphors for something we won’t understand, not until we experience it directly.”

Sevens bobbed her head. Tenny chewed on her lower lip. We were getting a bit beyond her depth now.

“You can see anything in a mirror,” Lozzie murmured.

We put a hand on one of Lozzie’s hands, on our shoulder. Her advice was sweet, but Lozzie comprehended the world and Outside in a way we did not.

“There’s one question I haven’t answered yet,” we said. “If we can communicate with the Eye in some fashion, even if that communication is only via ‘hide-and-seek’, or metaphorical, metaphysical hide-and-seek, what should we say?”

“Give Maisie,” Tenny said instantly. We smiled and tried to laugh. At least that was honest.

Seven-Shades-of-Sure-Suggestion said: “Show it a play.”

We sighed. “Sevens.”

“I am serious, kitten. I know full well of my bias toward my chosen medium of expression, the nature that makes up my very being, but does it not make sense? The Eye is an observer, a viewpoint. How does one change the nature of a viewpoint? Make it into an audience. Show it something it has not seen before. Show it a play.”

We sighed again. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King,” I quoted, one of my favourites, but not right that moment. “Yes, Sevens, I get the feeling we’ve been over this before. But I don’t think that particular line of Shakespeare is helpful right now. I don’t think the Eye has a conscience. And it’s too big to catch.”

“We’re getting very metaphorical, kitten,” said Sevens.

“You too.”

“Ask it for help,” Lozzie said from behind us.

We twisted to look Lozzie in the face. She had a small, strange, shy little smile on her lips, so uncommon for her. She almost looked a little bashful.

“Lozzie? Are you feeling okay?”

“Mmhmm! Just ask it for help, Heathy. It’s what I did, when I was younger, when I met the star below the castle. I just asked.” Her smile wavered. “There was nothing else to do. No fighting. No struggling. Just surrender and asking.”

I chewed on my own lower lip. Ask the Eye for help? Lozzie’s experience was not like my own. Her shining star beneath the castle of the Sharrowford Cult was not the world-shattering attention of the Eye. I had not the heart to say that out loud, but she must have seen the doubt in my face, for her smile turned a little sad.

“Lozzie, I’m sorry, I just … ”

“Give Maisie,” Tenny repeated. “Give Maisie! Give Maisie! Give her back!”

For the first time I had ever witnessed, Tenny seemed genuinely angry.

We stared at her in shock. She nodded, more serious than I had ever witnessed her fluffy face and feathery antennae.

“Give Maisie,” she repeated.

“Perhaps you’re right, Tenns,” we said with a laugh. “Maybe that’s all we need. A demand, and determination.”

Tenny nodded. “Give Maisie.”

Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight placed her hand gently on Tenny’s arm; Tenny responded by wrapping a tentacle around her forearm in a tight little hug, creasing Sevens’ perfectly starched blouse. Sevens did not complain.

Sevens said: “It will not be like anything we have experienced. It will not be hide and seek. It will be the unknown.”

I raised my chin. “I’ve gotten very used to facing the unknown, this past year of my life. In fact, I’d say I’ve grown into somewhat of an expert on it, rather by necessity. Be prepared for the unknowable. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have made it past Raine and Evelyn.” We smiled. “Thank you, all three of you. I’m limbered up. I think I have the right tool, for hide and seek, or whatever comes next. I think I’m ready. Let’s go help make dinner.”

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Tenny is helping! Helping to construct a metaphysical fishing rod with a Maisie-shaped socket at one end??? Nobody ever said hyperdimensional mathematics made much sense when described with human terminology, but Heather is doing the best she can. And now she’s got a much more solid plan for her end of the process. Sort of. Maybe. In any case, she’s limbered up and ready to mess with reality, to poke her fingers into a great big Eye in the sky

No patreon link this week, since it’s the end of the month in a few days! If you really want to subscribe in the meantime, feel free to wait until the 1st of February. As always, there’s a few more things been uploaded to the fanart page, and the memes page too! I’m also going to take a moment to recommend something I normally don’t talk about much: erotica! Lunar Marked and Succubus Tail: The Under Side are two rather high-quality stories from a writer I happen to know personally, all about transformation fantasy, and … well … exactly what they say on the tin! If that’s your sort of thing, go check them out! If not, you can stay right here and eat dinner with Heather.

You can also:

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Next week, it’s time. Heather is ready. Once more beyond the breached walls of reality we go. Once more beneath the Eye, Out there, Outside.

Content Warnings

Discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation.
Discussion of death and fear of death.
Sex scene? Kinda? But not literally. This is the closest I have ever written to an actual sex scene in Katalepsis and I figure I should warn for it, but it’s not actually a sex scene.

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Evelyn’s bedroom was my favourite part of Number 12 Barnslow Drive.

How could that be true when so many other candidates vied for that top spot? What about my own bedroom, the space we shared with Raine — and, increasingly in those days, with Zheng? Had we not imprinted our overlapping tastes and desires on that room, from the divots in the pillows to the books on the desk, from the angle of the curtains to the play of friendly shadows across the ceiling? What about the bed, upon which Raine had wrung so many intimacies from my changing body with such endless tender touches? Was that not the room in which I could pick up a t-shirt from the floor and be certain it would smell of Raine’s skin and Raine’s sweat, and so soothe away all of my anxieties and fears and worries? What about the scent of Zheng lingering on the mattress, mingled with Raine’s body heat, mixed into a cocktail so intoxicating that I could not tell where one woman ended and the other began?

What of Sevens’ new bedroom — the yellow-veiled proof that she was asserting herself as more than a mask over a void, that she was claiming person-hood from the steps she took upon the stage? What about the room Lozzie and Tenny shared, a physical manifestation of sanctuary and unconditional support we had gifted to them both, an orphan and a foundling with no other home, welcomed into the heart of the house and the hearts of those within?

What about the kitchen, the core of the home, where so many conversations had unfolded, where Praem cooked with love and care for every one of us? What about Evelyn’s study, full of the muted peace and anticipatory quiet of all those treasured old books? What about the magical workshop, the hard-won prizes from months of toil, the evidence of our evolution from a group of confused students to the reality of Sharrowford’s new supernatural family?

All those were known to me, measured and accepted. We loved them all, of course.

But Evelyn’s bedroom was special because it was so unexpected — and more than a little exotic.

Back when I first met Evee, if I had been forced at knife-point to make an educated guess as to the state of her bedroom — her private space, the canvas of her self-expression — I would have predicted shadow and dust, naked practicality, slow bitterness unfolded across blank walls and thin bedsheets. I would have expected something sad and pitiful and half-dead, all self-denial and inward-pointing barbs of lethal poison.

But the real room was a window into a very different woman. Evelyn’s bedroom was so very girly, all pastel pink and lily lilac, full of frill and fluff and frivolity.

Evee’s bed itself was always piled with layers of pastel sheets and extra pillows, a den of comfort and retreat, suitable for any burrowing animal. The thick, warm, pale carpet was never suffered to gather dust in the corners or collect stray hairs along the skirting boards; Praem shouldered the duty of hoovering in those days, but I had been reliably informed that Raine used to handle all the vacuuming and cleaning, when she and Evee had lived alone, before I had entered the picture. Evelyn’s own efforts in housekeeping had often risked disaster or near-injury, which did not surprise me.

Her bedside table sported a pretty little porcelain lamp with a pretty little floral shade, like something from a century earlier. Her slender laptop sat on a desk in the corner, decorated with a series of brightly coloured anime stickers. The desk itself was surrounded by a nest of books and a ring of posters — yet more anime, some of which I had watched by then, alongside Evee herself.

Last but not least, Evelyn’s collection of plush animals and anime girl figurines stood sentinel upon her oaken chest of drawers.

I’d never seen her touch any of the plush animals, let alone pet them or hug them while she slept, but the plushies often appeared in different positions every time I saw them, as if they were regularly taken down and moved around when nobody was looking. I had come to recognise a specific pair of plushes which adjusted their positions most often — a rotund hedgehog with soft bristles, and a stylised ‘chibi’ anime girl with long blonde hair, yellow eyes, and an absurdly frilly dress: Evee’s favourites, I assumed, though I had never asked. 

It was in that bedroom, inside that secret bared heart like a fluttering organ of delicate pink flesh, that Evelyn sat down heavily on the edge of her bed, cast her walking stick against her bedside table with a clatter, and shot Raine and me a withering glare.

“Ummmm,” I said, wetting my lips with sudden worry. “Evee? I-I thought you were okay with this?”

Raine closed the bedroom door behind us with a soft click, shutting out the soporific shadows of the upstairs hallway. Evelyn’s bedroom was lit by a pair of lamps, leaving soft shade lurking in the corners and on the far side of the bed. The rest of the house was heavy with sleep, with the little sounds of creaking beams and the muffled buzz of night insects beyond the walls and windows. Raine was still carrying Evelyn’s book, which she placed gently on the bedside table. Evelyn watched the simple motion as if she was observing a dog eating its own vomit, her upper lip curling in disgust.

“E-Evee?” I tried again.

I had teleported us three from Camelot to the magical workshop only minutes earlier. Raine and I had left our shoes behind downstairs, but we were both still dressed for bed, Raine in her tank top and shorts, me in comfy pink pajamas a size too large for my petite frame, with my tentacles poking out through custom-cut side-slits. Evelyn suddenly seemed very overdressed, in jumper and skirt and several layers beneath.

Raine grinned at Evelyn and answered my question: “She’s fine with it, Heather. Don’t let the little miss grumpy act lead you astray. If she wasn’t down for this she’d be screaming bloody murder right about now. Wouldn’t you, Evee?”

“R-Raine,” I stammered a little, distinctly uncomfortable, curling my tentacles inward. “Don’t make it sound like we’re … forcing this. We’re not! We’re not. Are we?”

Evelyn harrumphed, but she didn’t say anything.

Raine just kept grinning. “She knows I’d never do anything she didn’t really want. Ain’t that right, Evee? Come on, you gotta pipe up sooner or later. I’m not letting you sit there all night without saying a word.”

Evelyn sighed sharply, squeezed her eyes shut, and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fine. Alright. Whatever. Get your kit off and do whatever you’re going to do, then. Let’s get this over with so I can get some bloody sleep.”

“E-Evee!” I squeaked, losing my battle with a blush. “I don’t think that’s what this is about! Really! We’re not going to … do that! Gosh! We’re not, right? Raine? Raine?!”

Raine laughed, ruffled my hair, and then walked over to the bed. She stopped before Evee, well within whacking range. Evee looked up, while Raine gazed downward.

Raine said: “Oh no, Evelyn. Nuh uh. You aren’t getting off that easy. Pun fully intended, by the way.”

“Raine!” I snapped, rousing myself to Evelyn’s defence — but neither of them reacted. 

I realised with shock that neither of them were listening to me. Whatever was unfolding now was held entirely in the few feet of empty air where their gazes met.

Evelyn rubbed her own right thigh, just above the knee, digging in with her thumb — into the flesh cradled by the rubber socket of her prosthetic leg.

“And what do you mean by that?” she asked Raine, her voice low and dangerous, her eyes dead flat, her face a pallid mask.

All my tentacles curled inward and tightened, as if we were watching a pair of sharks circle each other in the void; once they were done with each other, the winner would turn upon us, rend our flesh, and devour us whole. We shivered with a heady cocktail of anxiety, sexual anticipation, and fear of our friends falling out.

Raine answered: “That would be the easy way out for you, wouldn’t it, Evee? Clam up, close your gates, shelter behind your walls—”

“Get to the point,” Evelyn snapped.

“—watch me and Heather have a shag while you sit alone in the corner and pretend you’re not one of us. Then we all go to sleep and wake up tomorrow and pretend none of this happened, like nothing needs to change. You know what’ll happen if we do that? Any idea? No? Let me spell it out for you: one of us will die out there.” Raine never stopped grinning. “It’s always been your easy way out, Evee. And I’ve let you get away with it before. Not this time.”

Evelyn spluttered. She sounded as lost as I felt. “What the hell are you talking about, Raine? Where is this all coming from? Stop speaking in riddles!”

Raine stopped smiling. She crouched, squatting until she was level with Evelyn, then lower than her, so their positions were reversed, Evelyn looking down while Raine looked up. She said: “I made a mistake the last time you did this. Never again.”

Evelyn squinted and shook her head like Raine had gone mad. “Last time I did what?! Raine, what are you—”

“When you asked me to move out.”

Evelyn’s mouth jerked as if to argue back, but she slammed to a stop.

Raine went on, soft and low and gentle. “That summer before we met Heather. When you got uncomfortable, when you asked me to move out, and I did.” Raine shook her head and sighed. “I didn’t see it at the time, too much chivalry in my bones, but I should have said no. I should have refused. Should have stayed. Should have taken an executive decision. I abandoned my duty. Abandoned you.”

Evelyn stammered: “D-duty?! Raine, don’t be absurd, you’re not responsible for—”

“Yes, Evee, I am responsible for you.”

Raine interrupted without raising her voice. Something in her words or her tone overrode Evelyn in a way I’d never seen before, left Evelyn gaping and flapping, lost for words. Raine adjusted her pose, slipping onto one knee, one arm resting across her own thigh, head on the cusp of bowing in submission or fealty or regretful apology.

She carried on: “And I’ve never said sorry. I’ve never apologised for fucking up and leaving you here alone. You wanted me to move out, sure, right, you did. But when I left, you slipped into isolation and depression, and then you tried to kill yourself.”

Evelyn stared at Raine, face turning grey-pale, wide eyes filling with tears. I covered my mouth with one tentacle-tip, horrified; I stepped forward to comfort Evee, but Raine waved me back with a covert twitch of one finger.

I knew what Raine was referring to — the great unconfronted secret of my initiation to the supernatural.

When I had first met Evelyn and Raine, and rescued Evelyn from Outside, she had been experimenting with teleportation spells, despite knowing there was no way back. When I had achieved my first intentional Slip and retrieved Evelyn from the Stone-world, I had no way of knowing at the time that I had thwarted a semi-subconscious suicide attempt. Twil and I had discussed this months ago, when Twil’s own insight had revealed the truth to me. But Raine had not talked to Evelyn about this, not until now — she had not confronted the root of that act.

Evelyn eventually stammered: “I-I-I was never—”

“You were,” Raine said gently. “It’s okay, Evee, you don’t have to pretend. Nobody here is gonna judge you. Least of all me.”

Evelyn’s eyes scrunched up, tears running down her cheeks. Her face contorted, holding back a bitter sob.

“You were leaving me!” she said. “I-I can’t— I can’t— can’t live— I would have just died— I—”

“I was never leaving you,” Raine said. “I was never going anywhere. I never will.”

Evelyn squeezed her eyes shut. She sobbed, once, wet and raw.

“Evelyn Saye,” Raine said in a soft, slow, ritual murmur. “I am now, have always been, and always will be your right hand, your sword, your knight.”

Evelyn took a great shuddering breath. “You only—”

“Not because you need me. Not because you believe you would have died without me — which I reject, and refute. But because I choose to be here.”

Evelyn forced words through a muzzle of tears: “Not how knights work, you blithering idiot.”

“I love you too, Evee,” Raine said.

Evelyn sobbed once again, then reached out with shaking fingertips to touch Raine’s shoulder.

I could only stare in awe and wonder at these two people who I thought I knew inside and out; I had gotten this jealousy all backwards and upside down. Evelyn’s heart was a knot beyond my comprehension — beyond her comprehension too, I suspected.

Evelyn started to scrub at her eyes with one sleeve. Raine took a deep breath and straightened up. The ritual aura of the moment was passing away now the words had been recited and accepted. Raine glanced back at me and said: “Somebody needs a hug. You’re up.”

“Oh, fucking hell!” Evelyn spat from behind a thinning veil of tears. “I’m fucking fine! For fuck’s sake! Don’t fuss! Just let me be!”

We ignored that and hurried over to the bed, because of course we did. We quickly perched next to Evee, hovering around her with hands and tentacles, unsure where to touch. Top-Right just wanted to grab her shoulders and squeeze her hard to show her how much she was loved, but the other six Heathers shouted that suggestion down with good advice about not hurting Evee’s spine. Top-Right and the rest of us settled for coiling gently against the back of Evee’s neck. Very gently. Feather soft.

Evelyn wiped away the worst of her tears. “I’m fine. I am fine! I mean it, for pity’s sake!” She sniffed hard, taking hard little breaths. “I’m certainly not in danger of … that anymore, for fuck’s sake. I have plenty of things to live for. Praem chiefly among them.” She sighed heavily. “And, yes, you two as well. Fine. You’ve squeezed it out of me. Happy now?”

“Evee,” I ventured. “I’m happy if you’re happy. You know that, don’t you?”

Evelyn shot me a look like a kicked dog. I almost apologised.

Raine leaned backward, slipped out of her crouch, and sat down on the floor with a smile on her lips. I waited patiently for Evee to gather herself. She wiped her eyes and took several deep breaths, until she was almost back to her usual.

“Wanna get ready for bed?” Raine asked. “Heather and I already are. You gotta join us, Evee, all the way.”

Evelyn emerged from the aftermath at last, and frowned at Raine. “What? I thought you were joking about that part. I assumed this was all a pretence to … I don’t know, re-swear your undying devotion.”

She tried to make a joke out of those last two words, but she couldn’t quite get there; her voice threatened to break.

I blinked at both of them. “I’m sorry?”

Raine laughed. “Not joking at all! Evee, Evee, Evee, you should know me better by now. We’re all gonna sleep together — actual sleep, mind you, not the other kind. But we’re not remotely done yet. Let’s get you all ready for bed, come on.”

Evee harrumphed and grumbled and tutted, but she submitted to the process all the same. Practical realities could not be ignored, so I accompanied her to the bathroom to brush her teeth, and Raine waited outside the door while Evee used the toilet — in imitational echo of how they used to be so inseparable, I assumed. When Evelyn returned to her bedroom she sat back down on the edge of the bed, hiked up her skirt without a care, and started removing her prosthetic leg.

But Raine murmured, “Let me. Please?”

With more familiarity than I had thought possible, Raine went about removing Evelyn’s prosthetic leg for her. Evelyn allowed this with a strange look of mingled discomfort and embarrassment on her face, but she didn’t say no, or turn away, or close her eyes. Raine gently rolled the sock and rubber socket down Evelyn’s stump, cradling the weight in one hand. When the mass of scar tissue was revealed, Raine neither averted her gaze nor lingered upon the old wound. She placed the leg to one side, standing up next to Evee’s bedside table. Then Raine reached forward and touched the waistband of Evee’s skirt, beneath the hem of her favourite white jumper.

Evelyn’s face creased with a warning frown. “Raine, I’m not fifteen years old anymore. My hands do work. I can dress myself for bed.”

“All those things are true,” Raine said. “But I’m not hearing a no.”

“R-Raine … ” I added, but neither of them paid me any attention. This was firmly not about me.

“Raine,” Evee squeezed through clenched teeth.

Raine wasn’t grinning, or smirking, or even smiling. “Say no and I’ll stop. Say no, Evee. Come on, say no.”

“Stop fucking with me,” Evelyn grunted.

Raine smirked, just a tiny bit. “If I was fucking with you, you’d know it. Say no and I’ll stop.”

Evelyn swallowed hard, opened her mouth, and whispered: “Continue.”

Raine helped Evee into her pajamas — a pair of comfortable pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved t-shirt about three sizes too large for her. I turned away for most of that, though there was nothing even remotely sexual about the exchange. Theirs was a love of devotion and service, not an intrusion on my own. I gave them privacy even though I was right there. It seemed only natural.

Once Evee was wrapped in her pajamas she got settled in the centre of her bed, with the blankets drawn up to her waist and her back propped up on a cliff-face of pillows. She seemed to me like a cosy little princess, surrounded by her ramparts of lilac and pink. But for once the gates were unbarred and unguarded, a pass was opened through those mountains, into the den of the spider, the nest built deep inside a crumbling castle of the heart.

Raine crawled in first and sat down on the bed a little distance from Evee. I followed next, keeping my tentacles mostly to myself and settling down on Evelyn’s opposite side, close enough to touch but not so close as to crowd her. The ramparts of pillows and cushions surrounded us on all sides, a tidal wave of comfort ready to carry us off to sleep whether we liked it or not.

Evelyn sighed at me, then at Raine, then at herself. I couldn’t help a giggle. She just looked so snuggly, yet she sighed with such gusto.

She shook her head. “I cannot believe we’re really doing this.”

Raine smirked with a teasing glint in her eyes. She ran one hand through her rich, dark hair, showing off the flex of her biceps and a hint of stomach muscle beneath the hem of her tank-top. My eyes were drawn like magnets, but Evee didn’t care. Raine said: “Want me to call Twil for you? Need your girl-toy to really get it on?”

Evelyn’s eyes flashed with real anger. “Do not drag her into this.”

Raine raised her hands. “Joking, joking! Evee, Evee, hey, like I said, this is just us three tonight. Nobody else.”

Evelyn huffed. “What more is there to even discuss, Raine? You’re fine with me kissing Heather. I might even do it again! Who cares? Yes, we’re all on each other’s side. We all agree, what’s to—”

“Ahem,” I said out loud, raising one hand and one tentacle, being a good girl. “Actually, I have a question?”

“See?” Raine gestured at me. “She has a question.”

Evelyn sighed at Raine with a most dim and disappointed look, but then she turned a difficult smile on me. “Yes, Heather?”

“What is actually going on between you and Twil? I mean, um, if you don’t mind answering. You don’t have to, of course.” I quickly lowered my voice as if somebody might overhear, then added, “And the answer won’t go beyond this room or this night. I promise.”

Evelyn sighed very heavily and stared at the sheets gathered around her legs; her left was thin and withered, the wasted muscles obvious even through the sheets, while her right leg terminated in the stump of her thigh. She was silent for a long moment before speaking. Raine and I shared a glance, as if trying to figure out which way this might go.

“I don’t know,” Evelyn drawled. “Nothing I’ve not told you before, Heather. We were involved, then we weren’t, then we were, then we weren’t, then we were again. Frankly, I don’t suspect I’ll ever know. I hope she meets somebody nice when she comes to university in Sharrowford. She does not need me, that’s the bottom line.”

I reached out and closed my fingers very gently over Evee’s hand. “Thank you for answering, Evee. And … I’m sure Twil does need you, even if it’s not in that sort of way.”

Evee grunted a hollow laugh. “Not much of a bloody answer, was it?”

“We need you,” said Raine.

Evelyn looked up with a frown.

Raine shrugged. “It’s the truth. It’s why we’re having this little chat. We three, we all need each other. And we gotta work this shit out.”

“What ‘shit’, Raine?” Evelyn asked with an exhausted sigh, her hundredth of the night. “What sort of nonsense are you trying to force, here? We’re reconciled, fine, good. You are my shield, ‘o shining knight.” She scoffed, blushing more than I had expected. “What else is there to mend?”

Raine wet her lips and seemed like she was about to say something, but then, a rarity — she faltered. She couldn’t find the words. She hesitated, closed her mouth, and shrugged.

“There’s a rift, Evee,” she said eventually. “I can just feel it. Can’t you?”

I spoke up with a little sigh: “It’s because of me.”

“Hey, Heather,” Raine said, smiling with that infinite confidence she kept cradled in her heart just for me. She reached across the gap and allowed one of my tentacles to wind about her wrist and forearm. “No, no, love, it’s not your fault. Don’t think that. Never think that.”

Evelyn snapped, quick and hard, suddenly so much more focused: “Yes. Yes, absolutely, I agree with Raine.” She swallowed hard. “Heather, I was the one who kissed you, not the other way around. Do not for one second believe yourself guilty of my transgressions—”

Raine butted back in with a finger-gun pointed at Evelyn: “Hey, no, Evee, you didn’t transgress against shit. We had a deal. You and me, Evee, we always had a deal.” Raine laughed softly. “What, did you think I was joking? You know me better than that.”

Evelyn rolled her eyes and let out a sigh like an industrial furnace. “We were teenagers, Raine! We were teenagers shot through with more hormones than red blood cells! I had a demon in my head! We were trapped, in mortal peril! I think that voids any such ‘deal’.”

“That doesn’t make me an oath-breaker. I made you an oath.”

“I was dying!”

Raine just nodded. “And I meant it. Even if you lived. Which, you know, you did. Yay. Well done.”

Evelyn slapped her free hand against the bedsheets. “Oh, you are ridiculous, Raine.”

“Ahem,” I said out loud. “Deal?”

Raine glanced at me with a naughty smirk on her lips. “I’ve told you about this before. Haven’t I, Heather?”

My turn to sigh. “Sort of. I do recall this came up once before. You promised Evee that you’d share any future girlfriends with her. Is that correct?”

Raine cracked a grin and nodded, as if this was something to be mightily proud of. “That’s my girl. Yup. A little while after we first met, we made a promise that if I ever got a hot girlfriend, we can share.”

Evelyn snorted. “I seem to recall you expressed it in significantly more carnal terms.”

Raine raised her eyebrows to Evelyn, in perfect innocence.

Evelyn held her gaze and deadpanned: “‘What’s mine is yours. My kills are yours. What I fuck, you can fuck. If I get some cunt, you can have it too.’”

A blush rolled up my cheeks and a tingle shot down all my tentacles — not at Evelyn’s recitation of Raine’s words, but at the way they were staring at each other with almost animalistic intensity, half-challenge half-sexual, but more than either.

Raine shrugged. “I refined it later.”

Evelyn tutted. “Besides, Heather has a say too, doesn’t she? She’s not a trophy for passing about, or your meat to hand off to who you want.”

Raine pulled a face like Evee was being a fool, smug and silly all at once. “Evee, she loves you too.”

I cleared my throat. “I … I do, yes.”

Raine gestured toward me. “So, what do you say, Heather?”

“I … I say … ” I huffed. “I say that I’m hardly a ‘hot girlfriend’. Tch! I’m a scrawny little weirdo with tentacles, seven semi-independent versions of myself, and the instincts of a badly behaved squid hybrid. I’m officially ‘scrungly’, last I checked.”

Raine and Evelyn shared a sudden, concerned glance. Evelyn cleared her throat and said: “Heather, who taught you that word?”

“I saw it on the internet,” we said. “On a video about cuttlefish.”

Raine laughed. “My scrungly beauty.”

“Look,” we went on, all six tentacles joining in now, “this rift between you two, even if it’s healed, it was because of me.” We held up a tentacle quickly, before Raine could refute this or Evelyn could snap a denial. “No, it was. I’m not saying it was ‘my fault’ or that I did anything wrong, but it was because of me. You two were a pair. Not a perfect pair, fair enough, and I didn’t know that I was intruding, but … but when I first met you both, I assumed you might be a couple.”

Evelyn scoffed. Raine nodded and muttered ‘fair enough’.

“And I butted in,” I said.

Raine sighed gently. “Heather, no you didn’t. I was shirking my duty.”

Evelyn said, “And I was pushing her away. Heather, you didn’t break anything.”

“No,” I said gently — and found my heart was racing, pounding against my ribs like a bird trying to get out. Our tentacles were going numb and hyper-sensitive, both at the same time. We knew what I was planning, and it was something I’d done before, and something I’d done a million times, so why was I nervous, why now? Because it mattered more than ever before? “Perhaps not. Perhaps I only contributed. Or perhaps I didn’t contribute at all, only catalysed. But it happened all the same, and I can fix that break with new flesh.”

Before either Raine or Evelyn could mount a defence, I did something I should have done a long time ago, though I had not known it was needed.

I bridged the gap.

I crawled across the bed on hands and knees and tentacles, right up to Raine. I only stopped when I was almost in her lap. The look on my face stilled her tongue — no more questions. Two tentacles wrapped around her neck, holding her close and steady. She didn’t resist, but gave herself to the logic of our joining bodies. She let out a surprisingly nervous flutter of breath as I reared up before her, as I parted my lips and wet them with a flicker of pink tongue. Shining brown eyes and soft chestnut hair and muscles beneath her warm skin — all waited for me to descend.

But then I glanced over at Evelyn and made eye contact. I made sure she was watching, not looking away.

Evelyn stared at us like she didn’t understand what we were doing, like she was witnessing some alien mating ritual.

I kissed Raine on the lips, deep and hard, the way we kissed when we made love. I drank up her softness and inhaled her scent and tasted her tongue in my mouth. We closed our eyes. We forgot the world beyond our body. All seven Heathers thought about nothing else except Raine’s warm, wet mouth sliding against our own.

We ended the kiss with a wet pop of parting lips. Raine was flushed and panting. Wordlessly, before either participant or observer could recover, we crawled out of Raine’s lap and over to Evelyn.

With Evelyn we practised infinitely more gentleness; we did not put pressure on her lap or against the back of her neck. We cradled her between three tentacles, barely touching for fear of hurting her spine or her hips. Her eyes were wide with shock and incomprehension, twin pools of deepest blue in the lamplight. Her face was red and blushing, framed by her waterfall of blonde hair.

But before we could complete the motion, Evelyn reached out. She grabbed one tentacle, harder than any touch I was applying to her body. She squeezed with strange need, as if trying to drag me closer.

I obeyed. I kissed Evelyn, deep and hard, no different to how I had kissed Raine. This time she was soft and giving, slippery and yielding. She moaned into my mouth, which surprised us both.

We parted with another wordless pop of slick and sliding lips.

I was panting, my vision all hazy and thick, my skin tingling, my tentacles tight and tense. Evelyn was flushed. Raine was grinning. By then we were no longer verbal — us Heathers, all seven of us retreated into the language of touch and taste.

But Evee and Raine were still plenty verbal. Raine muttered something like ‘go again, have her again’, but Evelyn said ‘you next, give me a sec.’

Evelyn passed me back to Raine. We kissed again, but this time I wasn’t in control; Raine held me in place and drank me down, pushed me to the bed and filled my mouth with herself, until I was a writhing, whining mess. Then Raine passed me to Evelyn and the cycle repeated a second time; Evelyn was more hesitant, watching Raine over my shoulder as if for approval, but I wrapped her in caresses and took her into my mouth. She was fluttery-soft and more gentle than I’d expected. Then I was passed back to Raine for a third, then Evee for a fourth, then perhaps a fifth, then I lost count. Sense overtook time, kissing meant more than words, as I carried the taste of Evelyn and Raine back and forth.

We didn’t talk about what we were doing. We didn’t stop to debate the meaning or the intent or what happened next. We just kissed, passing me back and forth, a limp ball of squid-limbs and panting need.

I’d never been any good at kissing, but we had learned from the best. Patient study makes grand results in all things, especially in flesh.

Eventually I lay on my back, spread out on the bed, suspended between the two reference points of the person I had become.

Over the bridge of my body, Raine and Evelyn stared at each other. Raine glanced at Evee’s lips. Evelyn snorted.

“Nope,” said Raine, cracking a grin.

“Absolutely not,” Evelyn agreed, sighing with relief, still flushed all over.

“No way.”

“No thank you. Though I appreciate the thought.”

“Same,” Raine said. “We never made a good couple.”

“We never were one.”

“But we can be a trio.”

Evelyn snorted. “We already are. What’s the saying? Triangle is the strongest shape?”

“Damn right,” Raine said. “Basic geometry. We’ve got nothing but triangles in this house.”

Evelyn nodded. “Then that is what we shall be.”

Raine extended a hand, palm up. Evelyn hesitated, blushing harder, then responded by placing her own hand within Raine’s gentle grip — her maimed hand, with the missing fingers and chunk of palm gone forever. Raine lowered her lips and kissed Evelyn on the knuckles. Evelyn looked frozen for a long moment, but then she leaned forward and kissed Raine on the forehead, quickly and gently.

They parted, one with a blush and the other with a grin.

Evee muttered through her blush: “As long as I’m the one who cucks.”

Raine grinned all the harder. “Is that right? With our squid?”

“Our angel,” Evelyn ground out.

“Our something, alright. Shall we get her settled?”

“Yes, please,” Evelyn said quickly. “I can’t get her up by myself. Here, help her under the covers, she looks about ready to pass out.”

I think I mewled, or perhaps whined, or maybe even purred.

Raine and Evee helped me into bed; I was a big floppy mess by then, pawing and nuzzling and completely non-verbal, making noises more like a small scrungly animal, neither human being nor abyssal hybrid; at any other moment in life I would have been mortified to witness myself in such a state, but right then I loved myself more than I ever had before. I was a writhing nest of seven squid girls, tentacles all moving over each other and snuggling tight, stealing little skin-kiss touches from both of my most beloved.

Raine got me to snuggle down under the covers of Evee’s bed, warm and enclosing, heavy with blankets, with my head cradled by the cliff-face of pillows, cuddled up right next to Evee. My face was inches from her hip.

We assumed that Raine was going to join the bed on Evee’s opposite side, so Evelyn would be between us — but Raine slipped beneath the covers behind me, sitting up like Evelyn was, so that I was the filling in a lesbian cephalopod sandwich.

That made so much more sense. I was the bridge and the answer and the catalyst, the angel come to heal the wounds and patch the leaks and mend that which was broken.

We purred, more with our diaphragm than our throat. Evelyn jumped slightly. Raine laughed.

“Look, like this,” Raine murmured. “Touch her like this.”

Raine showed Evee how to pet me, like I was a stray they’d brought in from the cold; she reached down beneath the covers to rub my belly until my purring intensified, then ran her fingers through my hair and across my scalp, kneading the back of my neck and pressing her thumbs into the knotted muscles of my shoulders. Evelyn joined in, hesitant at first, then with growing confidence; I could tell the difference between their touches with my eyes squinted shut — Raine’s was strong but gentle, while Evee’s was rough and earnest.

We touched them in return. We wound a tentacle around Raine’s arm, and brushed Evelyn’s thigh with a tentacle-tip. When Evelyn did not flinch or shy away, we pressed with more intimacy, sliding ourselves down her slender thigh until we reached the tender, vulnerable flesh of her amputation scar. We cupped her stump with infinite gentleness.

Evelyn sighed in a way we’d never heard her sigh before — with release.

For a long time we lay there, insensate, floppy, exhausted, and happy. Evelyn and Raine sat either side of us and spoke in low murmurs, talking of all manner of inconsequential things. We felt a dull twinge in the tip of one tentacle — the one wrapped around Evee’s leg — aching to grow a bio-steel needle and spread the blessing of our abyssal biology beyond the bounds of our own body; but it was only a dull twinge, with no great rush or urgency, perhaps a promise for the future.

Future?

What future?

This was the first time we had snuggled with both Raine and Evelyn. Would it also be the last?

“—won’t be enough time to get all those things done tomorrow,” Evelyn was saying to Raine in a low whisper, while her fingers rubbed at the back of my neck. “We have to prioritise. Forget anything not directly related to safety and security, but make sure everyone not coming with us knows where we’re going to be. Jan won’t need reminding, but Nicole might. Kimberly is to be kept away from all this, she doesn’t deserve the bother.”

Raine answered with a question, “Badger? Sarika?”

Evelyn sucked on her teeth for a moment. “No, absolutely not. I don’t want Mister Hobbes interfering again. The last thing we need is wild-cards and rogue elements who might step into this. Speaking of which, as soon as we arrive there, the first order of business is to locate the imitation version of Lozzie, the one that the Eye sent against us before. You remember that thing?”

Raine chuckled softly. “How could I forget? Shot it, didn’t I?”

“Mm,” Evelyn grunted. “If it’s still alive out there, we don’t want it stepping into the circle and interfering with anything. Heather should be able to … Heather? Heather? What are you … ?”

Raine squeezed my shoulder suddenly. “Hey, hey, Heather? Love, what’s wrong? Heather?”

Tears broke over me in a great and terrible wave.

Once I surrendered to the crying, I simply could not stop. Wracking sobs shook my body and wrung salt water from my eyes. I struggled into a sitting position as if fighting for air, panting and gulping, pulling my knees to my chest, curling up tight, bunching my fists in my own hair to hold back a wail. We had to wrap our tentacles tight around our own belly just to stop from lashing the air.

“Heather! Heather, we’re both right here! Heather!”

“Hey, hey, love, slow down, look at me—”

“What’s wrong—”

“It’s just us—”

“Heather—”

“We—”

“I don’t want to die!” I wailed.

With the truth expelled like a wave of rotten vomit, my sobbing subsided into mere panting. I was shaking all over, covered in cold flash sweat.

Evelyn sighed sharply, but she spoke with surprising tenderness: “Heather, we’ve been over this. You are not going to die. You, me, Raine, and everyone else is coming back in one piece. You—”

I shook my head. “Evee— Evee, you don’t— you don’t get it.”

Raine spoke with the whipcrack of command in her voice: “Nobody is leaving you behind, Heather.”

But for once even Raine’s confidence was not enough. I sniffed hard and shook my head again, frantic with inner panic. “May— maybe. But I’m so scared.” A dry sob threatened in the back of my throat. “I’m so scared. I’m terrified.”

Raine put her arm around my shoulders. “We’re all with you, Heather. We’re all going into this together.”

“Mm,” Evelyn grunted. “There’s nothing to be—”

“Afraid of?” I finished her sentence before she could. My eyes were bulging, with my fear. “Of course there’s things to be afraid of! I’m terrified, I’ve been terrified for ten years! I’ve been bottling it up, keeping a lid on this, as I take on more and more responsibility, but— but now we’re going to Wonderland, and I’m going to stare up into the Eye. And I have to reach out and put my hands inside it, and pull Maisie back out, and … ”

Words failed me. We trailed off.

“We don’t know that for certain, Heather,” Evelyn sighed. “She could be—”

“She is inside the Eye,” we said. “Metaphysically, spiritually, whatever. She’s in there. I have to pull her out, with hyperdimensional mathematics. You’ll all be at my side, yes, of course you will. But the final movement? That’s all down to me. And … and I might fail, and … and I don’t want to die.” My face collapsed into tears once again, my eyes filled with moisture, a sob tearing my throat apart. “I don’t want to lose— all this— everything— everyone— I don’t want this to be the last time I— hic touch you. I don’t— I want to feel this— hic—”

Raine squeezed me hard; we clung to her like a rock amid the storm, though we could not hear her words over the turmoil inside.

Evelyn pulled her stump free from our tentacles and slid out of bed. We heard the distinctive sound of her walking stick against the floorboard, the tap-tap-tap of the rubber tip, followed by the difficult grunt of Evelyn standing up on her one flesh-and-bone leg. We braced ourselves for a lecture, for Evelyn’s silver tongue and cutting words to bludgeon our fears into submission. We knew she would mean well; she would only be trying to help, but those fears would grow in the dark, like a mycelial mat infesting our secret heart, until they were strong enough to turn us all to rot.

But to our surprise, Evelyn said nothing. Tap-tap-tap went her walking stick, away from the bed, then tap-tap-tap back again.

“Here,” Evelyn grunted.

We felt a shower of gentle impacts against our lap, followed by Evelyn slipping back into bed and reaching out for one of our tentacles. Confused and curious, we opened our eyes and wiped away the tears.

Evee’s plushies had come to visit.

A tumbled collection of mismatched soft animals and ‘chibi’ anime girls lay in my lap: a pastel rainbow dragon, a miniature seal with a jolly expression, a pair of extra-fluffy rabbits, a green-and-white plant thing which I’m pretty sure was a Pokemon, and many, many, many more. Evelyn had simply grabbed as many as she could with one arm, then flung them onto the bed.

Pure surprise stopped my tears. We gaped at the strange assemblage. Evelyn reached over, selected the hedgehog — one of her favourites, as I had predicted — and ‘walked’ it up my arm and across my shoulder, until the small plush fellow could nuzzle the side of my neck.

She kept a perfectly deadpan expression until the moment I made eye contact. Then she blushed lightly and cleared her throat.

“Evee?”

“Just … just accept it, Heather. Just hug them, for God’s sake.”

I let out a half-laugh, half-sob, and then did as I was told; I gathered Evelyn’s plush animals into my arms and hugged them tight, with both arms and most of our tentacles. We kissed one of them at random, nuzzling the flank of a plush pink dinosaur. Our tentacles burrowed and snuggled amid the mass of comfort.

Raine parted her lips with a wet click, and said: “Evee, you mind if I talk about how it was with us?”

Evelyn snorted softly. “You mean with my mother?”

I looked up in surprise and blinked the remaining tears out of my eyes. Raine was stone-cold sober and serious, almost more than I’d ever seen her before. Evelyn looked darkly amused. I felt suddenly pinned between them, flanked both above and below the bedsheets.

“Yeah,” Raine said. “About your mother.”

Evelyn sighed. “Fine. Go ahead. I suppose it’s relevant.”

Raine nodded a thank you, then looked down at me and smiled through a very difficult frown. “Heather, both Evee and I have been here before.”

“Oh … ”

Raine’s smile widened, full of warm understanding. “We faced the same question, before we slew Evee’s mother. We had a choice, but it wasn’t much of one. For days, or weeks really, we tried to figure out how to run away without getting caught. But we couldn’t make the pieces fit, we couldn’t avoid all of those servants and guards—”

“Fucking zombies,” Evelyn grunted.

“Mm. And even if we could have gotten out of that house and onto the road, Evee was in no state to travel. We didn’t have a proper prosthetic for her. She was malnourished, messed up—”

“And you were even worse, Raine,” Evelyn snorted. “The police would have mistaken you for a child abandoned in the woods and raised by wolves.”

Raine chuckled softly at a dark memory. “Yeah, right, there was that, too. Even if we got clear, even if we could dodge Loretta and her minions, what then?” Raine clucked her tongue and shrugged. “We would be what? A pair of teenage girls, on the run, avoiding the authorities for years and years and years. No money. Nowhere to stay. No connections. I’d lost all my old connections in London by that point. No more anarchist commune for me. Maybe if I’d still known that lot, they could have helped, but without that … ” Raine sighed. “Couldn’t be done. So we had to fight.”

I nodded. “I have to fight, too. Maisie, I won’t leave her, I won’t.”

Raine stroked the back of my head. “Yeah. Maybe if we pulled out all the stops, we could protect you from the Eye forever, whatever it sends eventually. But that would mean no Maisie. It was the same with us. Fight was the only option. And we weren’t certain we would win.”

Evelyn grunted. “Finally you admit it, Raine. Ha! You were nothing but confidence, back then.”

Raine shot Evee a grin. “I never doubted you for a second, Evee. And I don’t doubt Heather, either.” Raine looked back down to me, then leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. “But we both know how it feels. It’s scary, damn right it is. No sense lying or holding that back.”

I nodded slowly. “But … but running isn’t an option. I won’t leave Maisie behind.”

Raine nodded along with me. “Running was never an option. Some things are worth killing for, but others are worth dying to attempt. I don’t want you to die either, Heather. I want to wrap you up in cotton wool and keep you safe, for the rest of your life. But I’ve come to accept that if you don’t attempt this, if you don’t try to rescue your sister, then that would be a kind of death, too.”

To my surprise, Evelyn let out a shuddering breath, almost on the verge of tears. Raine reached over and touched her shoulder gently. I wrapped my tentacle back around her thigh.

“That’s how Evee and I resolved the question, back when we faced this same feeling,” Raine went on. “We could die alone, separated, on our knees, slowly, or always looking over our shoulders in lifelong fear and paranoia — or we could take the chance of fighting for something better. We fought, and we got something better. And we’ll do the same alongside you, all over again. Evee?”

“Without even the shadow of doubt,” Evelyn said.

For a long moment, nobody spoke; I lay against my most beloved and felt the fear undergo a metamorphosis, hardening and cooling into new-forged resolve.

“I love you both,” we murmured.

“Love you too, Heather.”

With wordless agreement all three of us slid down into bed, emotionally and physically exhausted. Evelyn slipped into my arms and between my tentacles, cradled in a cage of cushioned flesh, the recipient of the most gentle embrace I could construct; Raine snuggled against my back, the big spoon to my little, her lips on my neck, her legs intertwined with mine. One of her hands wandered further, to find Evee’s and interlace their fingers across my hip.

We fell asleep together, us three, us seven plus two, nine and nine and nine again.

And not for the last time. We swore that to ourselves as we sank down into merciful and dreamless oblivion. This would not be the final time. If the Eye would not give us Maisie in peace and understanding, we would take her back by force.

And if the Eye would not let us go?

We would break reality itself upon the wheel of hyperdimensional mathematics. We would crack the world asunder with a hammer of thought, just to be here once again, between Evelyn and Raine.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

The trio, together, as they always were. Heather, Raine, Evelyn. And so they come full circle. Very snug.

Arc 23 continues! I know, I know, we’ve been doing some heavy emotional stuff for a while, Katalepsis has been in one of those more ‘lesbian soap opera’ phases rather than cosmic horror or urban fantasy phases; for those readers who love that, I hope you’re enjoying it! For those who are hankering for Wonderland and the Eye, don’t worry, we’re well on our way, with perhaps a little more investigation of certain celestial mechanics first. Heather is ready now, in almost every way possible.

In the meantime, fumo Praem on a roomba. (By Melsa Hvarei!)

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Next week, Heather has the determination to survive, but does she know where to look? Where to apply her unique skills? Perhaps she needs some special input.

Content Warnings

References to infidelity (comedic)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Nobody panicked when Evelyn went missing for the fifth time that week, because by then we knew exactly where she’d gone.

She’d taken Lozzie and Praem with her too; she could hardly have done otherwise.

“To Camelot?” Raine asked.

Raine’s face and form were half sunken in the shadows of the magical workshop, her warm skin pressed against mine as we braced for the inevitable. She smelled freshly showered, with just a hint of summer sweat clinging to her back. The night hung in great sheets around our shoulders. The rest of the house was preparing to sleep. I did my best to concentrate. This was no time for getting distracted and creeping upstairs.

“To Camelot,” I sighed.

“But it’s such a silly place,” Raine said.

I gave her a ‘nasty’ look — or at least as nasty as I could manage.

She kept a straight face, and asked: “Wanna take anybody else along?”

Another sigh, deeper and harder and with more feeling than I had expected. “I’m not waking Tenny or calling Twil because Evee won’t go to bed at a sensible time. No, Raine, let’s just go fetch her. Here, hold on tight.” I squeezed Raine harder.

“Don’t have to tell me twice, love.” Raine leaned close and kissed me on the forehead, hot and hard in the secret darkness. “All aboard the Heather express. Choo choo.”

“Arms and legs inside the ride at all times,” I deadpanned, tutted, and then got it over with.

Out.

Camelot soothed the senses from the first moment one arrived upon the quiet plains of that spent dimension: the soft, velvety, yellowish grass cushioning one’s feet; the warm cinnamon wind caressing one’s face and teasing at the loose strands of one’s hair, filling one’s nose with the scent of sweetness and spice; the purple light spilling from the spirals and whorls in the glittering dark sky, tinting everywhere one cared to look; the smooth curve of horizon in every direction, as if the world melted into a distant haze of endless possibility. Even the air itself was gentle upon human lungs, neither too dry nor too moist, sliding down one’s throat with barely a flicker of thought.

Planes and dimensions and worlds do not have opposites — Outside is not the opposite of earth, nor is earth the reverse side of the abyss; the spiralling fractal of reality is not orderly and simple, with one side and the other balanced in cosmic harmony, endlessly producing outcomes in accordance with the proper order of all things. The universe is not shaped like a ring or a tabernacle or four elephants balanced on the back of a turtle.

And it is not, as the old saying goes, ‘turtles all the way down’. Nobody wants to go all the way down. It’s very dark and very cold down there.

But, with my reservations as to cosmological metaphors made clear: Camelot was as close to Wonderland’s opposite as I dared to imagine.

This impression was not solely a product of the pleasant and hospitable conditions, suitable for longer periods of human inhabitation. Neither was this feeling produced by the rosy spectacles of my own positive emotional attachment — this was, after all, the first place Lozzie and I had truly talked to each other, and the first dimension which had suggested that Outside could be more than a source of alien nightmares. Nor was this feeling caused by the additions constructed by Lozzie’s spiritual children — the great castle and the curtain walls, almost finished now, built by the Knights and the Caterpillars as they unfolded a new type of civilization, out here beyond the walls of reality and the interference of Homo sapiens.

No, the sense of peace and tranquillity and safety was not born of those elements, but had existed prior to them all. The taste of the air and the warmth of the wind told even unaugmented human beings that nothing lived here anymore, that things had happened here once, a very long time ago, but those things were done with now. This was a quiet place of soft shadows and unheard echoes. Camelot was safe because it was over.

Until we had arrived, of course. Now it was all getting very loud again.

Camelot’s elemental comfort helped Raine retain both her footing and the contents of her stomach, as she and I arrived at our usual spot, our trainers scuffing the grass as we landed.

“Oooof. Ooooh. Okaaay, yeeeeah,” Raine groaned briefly, hands on her knees, bent forward. She took several deep breaths, eyes screwed up tight. “Ohhhh, never quite get used to that. No offense, Heather, love. It’s just a rough ride.”

“Take as long as you need, Raine,” I said. “No offense taken.”

I finished unravelling two tentacles from around her waist; we could have achieved the Slip with nothing more than holding hands, but over the last three days I’d started taking every opportunity I could to touch and hug and embrace Raine, even moreso than usual. She and I were hardly shy about physical affection — sometimes it felt like our bodies belonged more to each other than they did to ourselves. I knew every crease of muscle and line of sunken vein and growth-spurt stretch-mark upon Raine’s body, and she knew things about me that even I didn’t. But I’d always refrained from clinging to her in front of others, even when buffeted by the cacophony of insistence from our tentacles. It was always so difficult to pinpoint the line between skinship and sensuality, between comfort and sex, and the last thing I wanted to do was neck with her in front of Evee, or grab her bum when Tenny could see.

We had done neither of those things over the last few days, of course, but I didn’t care who saw me touching and cuddling her anymore.

It was more important to get as much of that in as possible, before the expedition. Before—

I tidied those thoughts away. We simply did not have time.

Raine straightened up and shot me a wink, her own post-Slip nausea and disorientation already passing, almost as fast as mine. She wrapped an arm around my shoulders — instantly mirrored by three of our tentacles — and made a show of shading her eyes with her other hand. She peered out from our vantage point, like we were explorers in a desert.

She did look the part, with a light sheen of sweat in her chestnut hair, her half-exposed body rippling with toned muscle, pressed right up against me. Not for the first time that evening I cursed the fact we weren’t upstairs in bed.

“And here we have the summer habitat of the Evelynus Say—so,” Raine said, putting on a fake nature documentary voice. “A timid and retiring creature, she prefers dark holes and hidden nooks, all the better to stuff with emotional nuts and traumatic berries for winter, where they will not be discovered and raided by her natural predators.” Raine broke off, flashed me a grin, and wiggled her eyebrows. “That’s you and me, Heather.”

“Tch,” I tutted. “I wouldn’t call Evee ‘timid’ or ‘retiring’. And we’re not predators! I’m worried about her.”

Raine grinned, slowly, achingly, the grin spreading from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat materialising inches from my cheek. I was struck by the most bizarre desire to poke my tongue out and lick her teeth. I resisted. For now.

“Raine,” I sighed. “What is it?”

“Worried she’s not gonna kiss you again.”

It was not a question. Raine followed up by mashing her lips against my cheek in a big, loud kiss of her own, a comedy ‘mwaaaaah!’

“Raine!” I squeaked, putting up a half-hearted attempt to wriggle free. “No, that’s not— you know that’s not— I’m worried! She’s been avoiding me for days!”

Raine laughed, then sighed and cast her eyes out across Camelot. “Yeeeeeeah, I know, I know. Evelyn’s done gotten all squirrelly again.”

“Again?” I asked — but Raine raised her free hand and pointed.

“There’s our Evee,” she announced. “Right where she should be. Told you so, Heather. Nothing to worry about.”

An involuntary sigh of relief passed through me when I followed the direction of Raine’s finger. I had, of course, no rational doubts that Evelyn would be found right where she was meant to be. Praem and Lozzie’s simultaneous absence from Number 12 Barnslow Drive confirmed the rather mundane reality. But nameless fears and childhood horrors lurked in the pit of my heart all the same. I did not like it when one of my closest and most beloved people could not be located.

The quiet plain of Camelot looked much the same as it always did, with gently rolling hills spread out in every direction beneath the whorled purple skies. Raine and I had materialised in the usual spot, upon a low hill inside what would one day be the curtain walls of Camelot Castle.

The castle keep itself had extended further upward since my last visit, but the crenelation was not yet quite complete. Pale sandstone walls stretched upward toward the sky, punctuated by ornamentation made of bone-white Caterpillar carapace; three stories were finished, with a fourth floor underway, more squat and cramped than those beneath. A series of rooftops were beginning to take shape, some peaked, others flat, mostly formed from yet more Caterpillar carapace. I spotted little walkways and balconies, exposed staircases sweeping around towers, and a hint of some kind of dome right in the middle.

The ‘gardens’ around the base of the castle had begun to develop actual vegetation at last, interspersed between the open squares and little paths and grand promenades. Last time I had visited the only visible plant life larger than the grass had been a row of strawberry bushes transplanted from earth, a little scraggly beneath the alien light; those bushes had now exploded with unearthly colour of their own, their leaves a deep emerald green, their branches studded with blossoms in fuchsia and ochre. The mutating strawberry bushes were joined by a riot of other plants, though in much earlier stages of growth — drooping bell-hooded flowers in deepest blues and yellows, long wispy grasses like clusters of upright spears in dun and walnut and oak, and bamboo-esque copses of upward-straining fingers in pale orange.

None of those were from earth. Perhaps the Caterpillars had brought back seeds from the ancient, deserted city, the same place they’d gotten all the stone.

On the opposite side of the castle stood the beginnings of an orchard, with each tiny little tree planted in a cleared circle of soil. The trees were unregimented, without order or line to their arrangement, at least not to human eyes. I hoped some of them were lemon trees.

We ached to abandon all responsibility and go explore that castle and the grounds right then. But that’s not where Evee was.

Beyond the keep and the grounds, the curtain wall was still taking shape. Large sections of it were yet to be raised, while others stood quietly unfinished, their great hide-and-rope cranes lying still for the moment, waiting for the delivery of yet more blocks of sandy masonry.

Past the walls, the plains were bisected by the Caterpillar-beaten road to what I thought of as the east, a pathway of notably flattened grass which led off toward the ancient city, little more than a suggestion of dun-brown hump on the horizon. To one side of that ‘road’ stood Edward Lilburne’s ex-House, smartly repaired, still wearing its bizarre mushroom-cap of building materials. The house had not gone anywhere, not yet. Lozzie assured me it was quite content for the moment to watch the Knights at work. Perhaps it was developing a love for castles.

On the other side of the road — far, far on the other side, a good clear two hundred meters away from Camelot Castle, as a last and hopefully unnecessary safety measure — lay the unfinished pieces of Camelot’s latest project, a project for us, wrought in our name.

The airlock gateway, and the Invisus Oculus, the two components of the coming expedition to Wonderland.

Neither of those were very complex. In fact they were both very simple, but they were also very, very, very big.

The airlock was nothing more than an enlarged version of Evelyn’s interdimensional gateway spell. The gateway mandala itself was painted upon a gigantic sheet of Caterpillar carapace, with a ‘doorway’ outline in the middle large enough for an aircraft hanger, and a pair of horizontal bars against the ground to keep it steady. The huge sheet of carapace had been created from the armour sections of multiple Caterpillars, somehow bent flat and melted together at the seams. When I’d asked how that had been achieved, Lozzie had grinned like an absolute madwoman and Evelyn had wrinkled her nose; apparently the process had been very smelly and extremely loud. The Caterpillars in question had enjoyed it immensely, like a pack of golden retrievers with explicit permission to play in a big muddy pond.

The airlock was surrounded by an as-yet incomplete version of the Invisus Oculus, cut directly into the soil. A twin to the carapace-gateway stood on the grass a little way off — that was the other end of the airlock, the one we’d be taking with us.

A pair of stark white doorways to nowhere, glittering against Camelot’s hills beneath the purple light.

The gateway mandala itself was incomplete, not yet activated. When the final strokes of the spell were put in place, the gate would lead to Wonderland. Hopefully the gateway would never need to be opened. It was an emergency exit, large enough for the Caterpillars themselves, in case the worst should come to pass.

Evelyn had already admitted she had no idea if the Invisus Oculus cut into the soil would work to keep the Eye at bay, but the theory made sense — if nobody could see the gateway in the middle of the Invisus Oculus, that would give the Knights and Caterpillars precious seconds to simply destroy the exit. It was far from perfect, but a leaky old life-raft was better than the freezing sea.

The airlock was only intended for use if everything else failed — if Lozzie and I were both incapacitated, if the Invisus Oculus was breached, if the Eye was opening above all heads to pull us apart atom by atom.

We pushed those thoughts down. No time for that now. The gateway was a precaution. That was all.

The airlock served another function as well — it was proof of concept. Evelyn had called it a ‘materials test’, to see on what scale the Caterpillars could work.

The main event was now under construction, a little distant from the pair of inactive gateways.

A rectangular field of smooth white lay flat against Camelot’s yellowish grass, in the middle of a dip between two hills, a blank intrusion upon the peace and tranquillity, scrawled upon in strokes as thick as my waist.

The Invisus Oculus — the real one, scaled up — was slowly taking shape upon a massive plate of Caterpillar carapace.

Evelyn and Lozzie had begun preparations weeks ago, as soon as Evelyn had the idea; Lozzie had approached the Cattys for their permission and cooperation, and they had all gladly started syncing up their ‘shed cycles’, as Lozzie put it. The fruit of their enthusiasm and efforts and engineering was a flat plate of material, two hundred meters long by one hundred and fifty meters wide, lighter and stronger and more durable than any metal, earthly or Outsider. The Invisus Oculus stretched from edge to edge. When finished, the space inside the pupil would easily accommodate half a dozen Caterpillars, twenty to thirty knights, one end of the airlock, all my friends and companions, and the payload — me.

“Larger than a football pitch!” Raine had cheered, when we’d first seen the plate in its as-yet incomplete state, a couple of days ago.

That didn’t mean much to me. All I saw was the Eye, gigantic and baleful, being drawn upon Camelot’s largest canvas.

The Knights themselves were swarming all over the plate right then, accompanied by three Caterpillars around the edges. The Knights were cutting into the plate with their weapons, scoring deep marks along a set of guidelines they had already laid down, following Evelyn’s diagrams and instructions. The Caterpillars provided a sticky, black, tar-like substance from their head-feelers, pressing the ‘ink’ into the grooves cut by the Knights. Evelyn had assured me that the substance would work even better than bull’s blood, when it came to the empowering of magical designs.

“Blood is one thing. This is another. Don’t ask what it is, Heather, because I’m not going to be the one to explain. Ask Lozzie. Better yet, don’t ask at all.”

The work was painstaking and slow, even for the Knights. Accuracy was essential, down to the last millimetre, lest this vast, scaled-up version of the Invisus Oculus fail when teleported to Wonderland. A human work crew could have completed it, of course, but spread over a much larger time-scale, with much greater risk of mistakes or failures, and with a greater requirement for supervision.

All the Knights needed was their gestalt culture-mind — and a little encouragement from Lozzie.

At that moment, as Raine and I peered down from the hill inside the curtain walls, we spotted Lozzie perched high up on the back of a Caterpillar, her pentacolour poncho swaying as she rocked back and forth. She was singing softly, her voice floating outward over Camelot’s rolling hills, a ghostly and alien refrain of haunting beauty.

Nearer to hand, down by the edge of the huge bone-white plate, set up on the grass as if for a picnic, was a trio of plastic garden chairs.

The rear of a very familiar blonde head was poking over the back of one chair. The unmistakable outline of a maid dress stood nearby, topped with a very similar shade of blonde.

Evee, watching the work, with Praem keeping her company.

“See her?” Raine asked. “In the chair?”

“Yes! Yes, indeed, right.” I sighed a second time, more with irritation than relief, my tentacles flexing and flaring, as if we needed to squeeze something until it cracked. “Oh, I do wish Evee would tell us when she’s coming out here. And I hope she didn’t walk all that way by herself. Her hips will get sore! She’ll get tired!”

“Naaaah,” Raine replied, then kissed me on the cheek again. “She’s got Praem with her, see?”

I grumbled and tutted. “Yes, yes, I can see that perfectly well.”

“Heather,” Raine said, suddenly serious. “She knows what she’s doing. Our Evee isn’t gonna put herself in danger. She’s got Praem, she’s got Lozzie, she’s surrounded by an army down there. What’s wrong, really?”

“I’m nervous about people vanishing to dimensions beyond our reality,” I said. “Even when it’s safe. For what I hope are rather obvious reasons. And I’d rather she was home.”

Raine pulled an oddly pained smile. “Me too, Heather.”

I raised an eyebrow at Raine. “So. Squirrelly. Again?”

Raine blinked at me. “Ah?”

“You said Evee is getting squirrelly, ‘again’. But I don’t think you’ve ever used that word for her before, at least not in conversation with me. When’s the last time she got ‘squirrelly’?”

“Ahhhhh,” Raine said. She considered the rear of Evelyn’s head for a moment, all the way across the plains of Camelot, then spoke with soft affection, her voice lulled into a purr by the gentle wind. “So, way back when, just after Evee and I put her mother in the ground, she and I got really close for a while. We were close anyway, you know? Sleeping in the same bed, eating every meal together, holding hands all the time. She would wake up with nightmares and turn to me for comfort. That kind of thing. Towards the end of it, the last few weeks before we did in her mother, we were inseparable, we never went anywhere alone.”

“Literally? Or figuratively?”

Raine tore her eyes away from Evee and shot me a grin. “Literally. And hey, there was nothing wrong with that. Yes, I’ve been in the room while Evelyn used the toilet, and yes, I turned my back. That’s what it took to keep us both alive.”

“T-then I’m glad you did,” I said. I went up on tiptoes and kissed Raine on the cheek. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insinuate anything else.”

Raine snorted. “It’s alright, Heather. Never told you that before, have I? Hey, two girls watching each other on the toilet, you tend to make certain assumptions. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was survival. Couldn’t leave her alone, not without risk. Anyway, it got more intense just after her mother died, for a couple of weeks. But then she distanced herself a bit, all at once. Never said a word about it.” Raine nodded down at the distant blob of blonde amid Camelot’s purple light. “And she acted a tiny bit like this. Squirrelly.”

We sighed. “That’s a very imprecise word, Raine. But … thank you, for sharing that. Do you think she’s feeling like she got too close to me, somehow?”

“You mean after you two made out?”

I rolled my eyes and fought back a small blush. “It wasn’t ‘making out’, it was one kiss! Not even any tongue.”

“We’ll have to fix that, then,” Raine said, sounding dead serious.

“Raine!” I spluttered. “This is a serious question!”

Raine didn’t stop smirking. She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Wanna go ask her?”

I boggled at my beloved Raine, at the sheer casual confidence in her voice and cupped inside those warm brown eyes. “You can’t be serious! We can’t just go up to her and ask her … ask her … oh, oh dear, oh, gosh, I suppose we can. Can’t we?”

Raine pulled away from me a couple of paces, then turned and offered her hand with a little flourish and a half-bow, as if we were prospective dancing partners at a ball, not an abyssal squid-girl and her deeply involved girlfriend, currently beyond the walls of reality, talking about going up to our mutual mage and asking her if she wanted to snog me again.

“Raine … ”

“My lady,” Raine said.

I spluttered. “Do not call me that! Oh my gosh! Lozzie has educated me in some internet memes, thank you. I’m not completely clueless.”

Raine laughed and straightened up. “Naaaaah. I’d have to shorten the phrase, and also get a fedora to tip, if I was gonna do that. Seriously, Heather.” She offered me her hand again, with less of a flourish this time. “Come on, let’s go talk to our grumpy little squirrel, see if she wants to play nice.”

We coiled our tentacles inward and considered the merits of a hasty retreat — but that would leave Raine out here with Evelyn anyway, and then a conversation would happen without my input or presence, which might be even worse for both of my closest, oldest, most beloved friends.

I sighed, accepted Raine’s hand in my own, and walked down the hill.

Evelyn had indeed been avoiding me for the last couple of days, that truth was undeniable, though at first her behaviour had been hard to detect, and even harder to decode. She neither ignored me completely nor turned a cold shoulder to my words; in fact we’d had several long conversations in the kitchen, about our strategy for Wonderland, about what to expect when we arrived, about how she and the others would protect me while I probed with brain-math. We’d even talked about Zheng and Grinny’s trips to the woods and what they might be doing out there. We’d discussed Lozzie’s gigantic incoming inheritance and how best to protect her against the sorts of mundane predation that might happen, and how on earth we were going to help Tenny go to college. We’d talked about bacon, and Praem’s shoes, and a manga Evelyn wanted me to read. Evelyn was her usual gruff, grumpy, but oddly vulnerable self, at least in my presence.

But she had avoided being alone with me, under any and all circumstances. She did not have to try particularly hard; Number 12 Barnslow Drive was no longer the echoing shell it had been when I had first moved in. These days it bustled with life. It was easy for Evee to always find herself busy, always be alongside somebody else, or turn out her bedroom lights early and pretend to be sleeping.

I was not blameless either; I had taken Jan’s advice to heart and so I was spending as much time as I could with Raine, with Lozzie, with Tenny, sleeping curled up in Zheng’s lap one morning and the next night in Sevens’ bed. Raine and I had gotten ‘intimate’ half a dozen times in the last forty eight hours. I’d petted Marmite in Lozzie’s bedroom and attempted a mostly one-sided conversation with Praem about her taste in maid dresses. I had a long talk with Twil about university, a long nap with Lozzie in her bed, and a long losing session of chess against Tenny. I was taking great gulping mouthfuls of life, while I still had it before me.

But Evee was avoiding me. And now I wasn’t the only one who thought that was odd.

Raine and I strolled down the hill inside the curtain walls and turned toward what would one day be the front gate of Camelot Castle; even in their incomplete state, the walls towered over us as we passed between the massive sandy-coloured blocks and out into the open country beyond. I waved two tentacles at the former Lilburne House, a lazy greeting to mask my racing heartbeat. The House did not wave back, but I felt a distant throb of acknowledgement, like a slightly stronger breeze upon one’s face.

Raine must have felt my palm getting clammy. She whispered: “Hey, Heather, hey. It’s gonna be fine. It’s just our Evee, right?”

“Right,” we squeaked. “Um.”

The walk to the edge of the carapace plate was not far, but it felt like miles. My legs went numb with anticipation; two tentacles slid down my own thighs and calves to help me keep going, bracing me against the short, brisk little walk.

Raine and I approached the trio of plastic garden chairs from behind; they made such an incongruous sight in the middle of Camelot’s unearthly velvet grass and omnipresent purple light, a little slice of English domesticity air-dropped into an alien dimension. A little way ahead of the impromptu picnic site lay the rounded edge of the carapace plate, with Knights striding back and forth, slopping great masses of black Caterpillar goop all over the place. Evelyn had positioned herself far enough back that the noise was a comfortable background murmur.

Evee herself did not look up as we drew near — but Praem turned her head. She was stationed a few feet to Evee’s left, as if close to hand for a private conversation.

Dressed in her usual immaculate maid dress, hair pinned up in a messy bun at the back of her head, milk white eyes burning with clarity beneath Camelot’s purple sky, Praem gave Raine and me a blank and unreadable look.

Only then did Evelyn raise her head and glance over her shoulder. Her soft blue eyes caught us, froze in mild surprise, and then crumpled with a frown. She sighed.

Praem intoned: “You are discovered.”

Evelyn grumbled. “Yes, yes, I suppose I bloody well am.” She greeted us with a grumpy huff as we stopped next to the trio of chairs. “Raine, Heather. Hello.”

Raine purred with a teasing grin. “Evee, Evee, Evee. Couldn’t you try to look a little less like we’ve turned up to shit in your cheerios?”

Evelyn rolled her eyes. Despite her sudden grumpy exterior, she looked exceptionally comfortable. She was wearing her favourite loose cream-coloured ribbed jumper, a long pale orange skirt, and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and draped over her knees. She had augmented the unforgiving plastic of the garden chair with a pair of cushions, one of them firmly beneath her buttocks. She had a book open in her lap — the complete works of Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian and all that — and a drink bottle standing on the next chair over, full of what I assumed was lukewarm, milky, heavily sugared, decaf tea. Her walking stick stood propped against the other chair. If I had discovered her like this under any other circumstances, I would have surrendered to the urge to cuddle up with her. Several of us almost did, tentacles uncoiling toward her like pleading arms.

“Yes, Evee,” I said instead. “We don’t mean to interrupt. We just … hi. Yes. Hello.”

Evelyn cleared her throat. “Yes, hello Heather. I’m always happy to see you.” She sighed, and to my surprise, glanced up at Lozzie, sitting on the distant Caterpillar she was using as a mount. Lozzie’s singing echoed out over the quiet plains of Camelot, but her eyes were closed. Evelyn looked back to us. “Alright, what are you two doing here?” She looked us both up and down. “And why are you dressed in your pajamas?”

Evee had a point. Raine was wearing shorts and a tank-top, showing a lot of skin. I was wrapped up snug in pink pajamas, ready for bed. We both had our trainers on, but that was the only concession to technically being out of doors.

Praem answered for us: “It is pajama time.”

“Yes!” I agreed. “Because it’s bed time! It’s eleven thirty at night!”

Evelyn snorted. “Not here, it isn’t.” She gestured at the glittering purple whorls in the sky, without looking up. “As far as I can tell this place does not experience night.”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhh,” Raine purred. “So that’s your ploy?”

Evelyn frowned and started to say something, but I interrupted, to avoid the core of this conversation. “Evee, you do need to sleep. You need rest. You’re not invincible.”

Evelyn harrumphed and frowned at me. She gestured toward the massive carapace plate and the Knights, hard at work before us. “They don’t get a break, why should I? They’re not slaves, Heather. The least I can do is supervise properly.”

Raine put both hands on her hips. She made a great theatrical show of turning on the spot, nodding slowly, sucking on her teeth, and generally looking like a manager at a building site who had no idea what was happening. “Yuuuuuup,” she said slowly. “Yup. Looks like some class-A supervisoring you be doing there, Evelyn.” She raised her eyebrows at the book in Evee’s lap. “Which is your favourite Conan story, then? The one where he kills the wizard, or the one where he kills the wizard? Or, let me guess — the one where he kills the wizard?”

Evelyn hissed through her teeth and slapped the book shut. “The stories are much more subtle than that! And not every single one is about killing wizards. You are a literary philistine, Raine. I don’t know how Heather puts up with it.”

“She’s not … ” I protested, feeling rather weak. What was Raine doing?

Raine just grinned. “Yeah, but lots of those stories are about killing wizards, you can’t deny that. You trying to get on Zheng’s good side?”

“No,” Evelyn grunted. “Raine, what are you playing at?”

Raine shrugged and looked around. “I dunno, I’d say we’ve got room for pretty much anything out here.”

“Evee,” I said, very gently, as if dealing with a very spicy kitty with claws already extended. “The Knights don’t seem to need breaks. And if they did, then I would want them to take breaks. I don’t understand why you’re … why … well.”

We faltered under Evelyn’s withering gaze. She did not enjoy this line of questioning. Giving up on courage for now, we turned and waved to a few of the nearby knights, up on the raised platform of the carapace. A trio paused in their work and waved back to us, which was both very sweet and a bit surprising.

Evelyn sighed. “Go on, Heather. Finish the thought.”

She almost managed to make it sound like ‘sorry’.

“W-well,” I said. “I just … you’re Outside! You have Lozzie here, yes, and that’s good, but … even in Camelot, isn’t it putting stress and strain on you?”

Evelyn stared at me, trying to look dead-eyed and calm, but I could see the breaking point floating to the surface of her mind. “Heather. Everywhere puts stress and strain on me.”

“O-oh. Well. Maybe that’s even more reason to sleep?”

Raine tilted her head back with a grin and said: “Evee’s got it so bad that she would rather spend an evening out here than risk this very conversation. Ain’t that right, Evee?”

Evelyn’s gaze flash-hardened to iron and flint. She glared at Raine. “Don’t mock me.”

But Raine just clucked her tongue. “Got yourself in a right pickle here, haven’t you, Evee? You can’t run away from this one. I mean, sure, you could actually.” She nodded down at Evelyn’s walking stick, propped against one of the other chairs. “You could pick that up and go ask Lozzie to take you home. Or you could ask Heather here. Couldn’t she, Heather? You’d take her home, right? Straight to her bedroom? Just the two of you, alone at last.”

Raine grinned at me. Evee had a point — I wasn’t sure what kind of game Raine was playing here, but it was better than my proposed strategy of timidly pussyfooting around the main subject.

We nodded, with head and tentacles too. “Of course. Right away. Evee, do you want to go home?”

Evelyn sighed and squeezed her eyes shut. “No, Heather, that’s not the problem here.”

Raine made a show of surprise, raising her eyebrows in a pantomime of shock. “There’s a problem here? Well blow me down with a feather and—”

“Raine!” Evelyn snapped. “Drop the bullshit, for pity’s sake. You were never any good at subtlety, not even as a joke. Stick to the sledgehammer approach, hm? At least you’re skilled at breaking things. Gonna get down to it, get started? Go on, start swinging.”

To my surprise — and Evee’s visible concern — Raine actually stopped. She rocked back on her heels, wet her lips, and grinned like the Cheshire Cat once again.

“Soooooooo,” Raine said. “I hear you’re cucking me?”

Evelyn huffed like a broken steam engine climbing a mountain, rolled her eyes, and threw her hands in the air. “Don’t call it that!”

“R-Raine?!” I squeaked, tentacles flailing wildly, then curling toward me as I was overtaken by the desire to hide inside a ball. Top-Right suggested we slap both of them. Bottom-Left wanted to egg Raine on. Three others demanded we turn around and run. Middle-Right reached toward Raine’s mouth, as if to stop her up. “E-Evee? I don’t— um— oh— er—”

Raine spread her hands in a teasing apology. “Hey, no judgement, no kink-shaming, whatever floats your boat, whatever you need me to call it—”

Evelyn ground words out through her teeth: “Not. In. Front. Of. Praem.”

Raine glanced at Praem and raised her eyebrows. Praem just stared back, milk-white eyes blank and impassive.

Evelyn let out a shuddering sigh of relief, as if she had neatly dodged a bullet. She swallowed, and said, “Right. Yes. Not in front of Praem. We can talk about this later, or in the morning, or—”

Praem intoned: “Lozzie requires my assistance.”

Praem turned smartly on one booted heel, skirts swishing around her legs, and strode off toward Lozzie without a backward glance. Evee watched her go with open-mouthed helplessness.

Raine said, “That woman is a genius. You know that, right? Evee? Your daughter is a fucking grade-A genius. Love her.”

“Urrrghhh,” Evelyn grumbled like a strange creature found beside the road, baring teeth at passing cars. She ran a hand over her face, then grabbed the book in her lap, and looked as if she was briefly considering hurling it at Raine. The volume was rather heavy, with a thick hardback cover, so it might do some damage.

“Evee!” I squeaked. “Evee, please, we just— I just— want to— I … I … I miss you.”

Evelyn blinked at me, blind-sided. She lowered the book, let out a slow sigh, and said: “Fine. For you, then, Heather. Say your fucking piece, Raine. Get this over with.”

“Evee,” I repeated. “You’ve been avoiding me for two days. And I’m pretty sure Raine isn’t angry with you or anything. I don’t … I don’t understand … ”

We had no idea what to say. We trailed off, tentacles going limp, almost mewling in our throat. Evee looked away, ashamed or embarrassed.

“So,” Raine said, as if utterly unmoved by all this. “You’re having a great time cucking me—”

My turn to snap: “Raine! Please, Evee is trying her best! The last thing I want to see is you two falling out. I thought you were okay with this?”

Raine turned to me with a look I had rarely seen on her face before — a sharp and knowing smile, surprisingly stern and hard. She put a hand on my shoulder.

“Heather.”

The gentle command in Raine’s voice went through me like a lightning bolt. I stiffened. “Y-yes?”

“Evee and I aren’t falling out. This is just how we’ve always been.” She nodded toward Evelyn, still sitting in her plastic garden chair, face pointed firmly away from us. “You know what this woman is to me?”

I blinked. “I … think so?”

“My best friend,” Raine said. “I’ve killed for her. I would die for her if I had to. Which is why I can say this kind of stuff to her.”

An incandescent blush began to creep up the side of Evelyn’s face.

Raine looked over at Evee. “You hear that, you old curmudgeon? You heard those words?”

Evelyn swallowed hard, and said: “My ears function perfectly well.”

Raine shot me a grin, then let go and stepped over to Evelyn’s chair. Evee had nowhere to go, but she continued looking away, off at the horizon and the purple whorls in the sky. The Knights up on the carapace plate continued their work, as if this drama was not unfolding right in front of them.

Raine knelt down in front of the chair. “Hey there, sad girl. Yeah, you. I’m talking to you.”

Evelyn whipped around and met Raine’s eyes. She was on the verge of tears I didn’t understand, forced through embarrassment and burning cheeks and deep self-conscious pain. Those words Raine had just spoken, they almost seemed rote, as if she had said them before. Whatever they meant, they tugged at Evelyn’s heart.

“What,” Evelyn ground out.

“I love you,” Raine said. “I love you just as much as I love Heather. You know that.”

Evelyn tried to bark with laughter, but it came out weak and wet. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and scrubbed furiously at her eyes. “You and I never would have made a good couple, Raine. We would have killed each other within a month. No, a week. And you were never my type.”

Raine raised two fingers. “There’s more types of love than sticking two of these up a cunt. You know that too.”

“Love is more than eros.”

Raine and Evee both looked up at me. Only then did I realise that I’d said those words — all seven of us had, through my mouth. Zheng’s words, reflected back through me.

“Well put,” said Raine. She turned back to Evee. “So, hey, sad girl. I do love you.”

Evelyn looked down. Her blushing was messy, overheated, and painful, not dainty little points of rose-red in one’s cheeks. But I thought it was beautiful.

Raine smiled, and said: “Hey, Evee, you don’t have to say it back or nothing, it’s—”

Evelyn reached out and put a hand on Raine’s shoulder. She did not look up. “Raine?”

“Yes?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Raine broke into a grin. “Yes ma’am. We better? Remember where you stand, now?”

“By you.” Evelyn grumbled low in her throat, withdrew her hand, and raised her eyes back to Raine’s face. “Maybe I don’t want to share everything with you, though. We’ve already shared more than enough, like we always bloody did. Maybe I don’t want your cast-off.”

I realised, with a little bristle of offended dignity, that she meant me.

“H-hey!” I squeaked. “Evee, I’m nobody’s cast-off!”

Evelyn winced, hard and awkward. “Oh for pity’s sake, that’s not what I meant! Not like that! Heather, no! I’m … sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” I said softly, still bristling. My tentacles felt tense and stiff.

Evelyn sighed. Raine said: “She’s got a point. She’s right here, Evee. Nobody’s cast her off, sure as hell not me. She’s neither leftovers nor damaged goods. She’s Heather.”

“Yes, I can see that!” Evelyn huffed. “Look, I can’t deal with this right now! What’s to even talk about? You don’t mind that I kissed her, and I don’t want to talk about it. What more is there to say, Raine?”

We stepped forward, tentacles in a halo around our core of true flesh. “Evee, you’ve been avoiding me for days. I can’t take that, not right now.”

Evelyn fixed me with a stony glare. “More like you don’t need to be dealing with that! And neither do I. Both of us need to be focused on our tasks, not dwelling on this … this … ” She huffed and rubbed her eyes. All the puff seemed to go out of her. “Oh, this is my bloody fault. I should never have bloody well kissed you. What the fuck was I thinking?”

Raine suggested: “‘Cor blimey, that girl needs my tongue down her throat.’”

Evelyn gave Raine a look that could have frozen a bonfire solid.

I jumped in quickly: “A-actually I rather enjoyed it! B-but, Evee, you can’t just do that and then not expect me to think about it.”

“Forget it,” she whined, hiding behind a hand. “Please.”

My turn to sigh. “Evee, that wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. Even if you hadn’t kissed me, I would still want to spend time with you, right now. Today! Tonight! It’s two days until we go to Wonderland, and I want to spend some of that time with you, before … ”

Evelyn emerged from behind her hand and slowly raised her gaze to mine. “Before what?”

She made it sound like I had said something terribly offensive.

“Evee,” I said with equal slowness. “I might not be coming back—”

“You! Will!” Evelyn shouted.

All her tears and embarrassment transformed to rage, fuel for the fires, an instant switch.

Raine rocked back, away from Evee. Up on the carapace plate, several of the nearest Knights paused in their work for a moment. Lozzie’s singing cut out briefly, then resumed. Down by the base of the Caterpillar on which Lozzie rode, Praem turned to look back at us.

I just gaped. “Um … ”

“You are not going to die,” Evelyn said. “You are not going to get stuck out there. You are not going to lose your body, or your mind, or your soul, or any other component. You are coming back, Heather, and it will be in one piece.” She flung an arm outward at the great work before us, the vast plate of Caterpillar carapace and the airlock gateways and the scaled-up version of the Invisus Oculus. “Why do you think I’m doing all this? Why do you think I’m taking every precaution I know, and several I have only recently invented? You are coming back whole and sane, Heather. I swear to whatever gods exist out here that if you don’t, I will turn the entire rest of my life into a machine for murdering the Eye. Do you understand?”

I swallowed. My head felt numb. We flexed our tentacles in and out, unsure where to put ourselves. A few tears rolled down my cheeks. “Yes. But—”

“There are no ‘buts’!” Evelyn shouted again. “There are no buts, or ifs, or maybes. I will fight God, so fucking help me. You are not going to die.”

Silence descended for one awkward moment, broken only by the ghostly tones of Lozzie’s song and the soft clicking of Knight boots up on the carapace plate.

Raine cleared her throat and thumbed at Evee. “Yeah. What she said.”

I scrubbed tears out of my eyes. “Even if that’s true—”

“It is true,” Evelyn grunted. “Heather, you have no conception of the sort of monster I will become in order to make this work.”

“O-okay. Okay, let me just … sorry, this is a lot.”

Evelyn said: “You have nothing to apologise for.”

“So, um.” I gathered myself. “It’s true, alright, okay. And … and that doesn’t change the fact that I would like to spend some more time with you. Tonight. Tomorrow morning. Tomorrow?”

“Tonight sounds good,” Raine mused. “How about the three of us?”

Evelyn frowned suddenly, hard and pinched. “What are you two planning?”

“P-planning?” I stammered. “Nothing, I swear!”

But Raine grinned, wide and toothy. She straightened up and gestured at me. “Heather? Nothing. She’s not got the guile for this, not when she’s not gone maximum squid, anyway. But me? Well. I might have an idea or two.”

Raine offered both hands to Evelyn, in a strange configuration I’d never seen her use before — palms up and to the sides, as if expecting Evelyn to leap out of her chair and fall into Raine’s embrace. Evelyn couldn’t have made that lurch even if she’d wanted.

Evelyn looked doubtful too. She said: “Raine. I told you. She’s not going to die.”

Raine shrugged. “Sure she ain’t. But we’ve not worked this out yet, Evee. You and me and Heather, out there, we’re gonna need to have each other’s backs. For real. Just like you and I did, back in the day, with your mother. Same thing. Same way. Same absolute trust.”

Evelyn swallowed and hesitated. She glanced at Raine’s hands.

Raine said: “I mean it. You wanna make this a solid guarantee? You wanna make sure you and I have got the strength to bring her home again? Evee, you and I, we gotta mend this.”

Evelyn looked almost nervous. She wet her lips and said, “Raine, I’m not comfortable—”

“No sex,” Raine said. “Nothing you don’t want. Just you and me, like old times. But with Heather, too.”

I frowned. “Raine, what are you talking about?”

Raine shot me a wink. “You and me and Evee, Heather. We’ll spend the night in her bedroom, just the three of us. Zheng’s out with the Grinster, Twil’s not coming over until the morning, and Sevens is sleeping soundly in our bed. So it’ll be just us three.”

My eyes went wide. “You don’t mean—”

Raine shook her head. “Love is more than eros, right?”

Evelyn gritted her teeth, glanced between Raine’s outstretched arms, and said: “You still remember how to do this without giving me an injury? Really? You really expect me to believe that? It’s been years, Raine.”

Raine answered, “I’ll never forget, long as I live. I will never drop you, Evelyn.”

Evelyn carefully removed her book from her lap and placed it on the nearby chair. Her hands were shaking. Then she lifted her arms and reached forward, with an expression like a woman going to the gallows.

“Do it,” she grunted.

And then Raine did something I had never thought possible before — she pulled Evelyn to her feet.

The technique looked awkward and difficult, and must have required a great deal of upper body strength and core muscle control; Evelyn leaned forward while Raine ducked and slipped her arms around Evelyn’s back, but somehow without putting any pressure on Evelyn’s delicate, kinked, painful spine. Evelyn held on while Raine pulled upward and stepped back in the same motion. Evee’s feet left the ground for a split second, but Raine was solid as a rock. Then Evelyn was on her own feet, unsteady and red in the face, but not in a single lick of pain. Raine quickly pressed Evee’s walking stick into her waiting hand. Evelyn was panting softly, shaking all over with something more than adrenaline, gazing at Raine in numb shock.

“No pain?” Raine asked.

Evelyn shook her head and blew out a sigh. “Well done. You still have it, I suppose.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “But what did I just witness?”

Raine grinned with triumph. Evelyn sighed and rolled her eyes — but she was the one who answered, her voice strangely soft and vulnerable. “Raine learned how to do that when we first met. Before I had a proper prosthetic. The first couple of years, I was … weak.”

Raine shook her head. “You were never weak, Evee.”

Evelyn snorted in disbelief, but she didn’t argue. “Alright then. Alright. Fine. Are we seriously doing this? I can’t believe this nonsense, Raine, we’re not fourteen years old anymore, we’re not little girls giggling in bed together.”

“We never giggled,” Raine shot back.

“Ummmmmmmmmmmm,” I said. “May I just clarify, what exactly are we talking about doing?”

Raine grinned, just for me. “The three of us, in Evee’s bed, overnight. Close as can be. And we need to figure out a couple of things, about kissing and cucking.”

Evelyn gritted her teeth and shot Raine a look like she wanted to run her through with a sword. “I will hit you with my walking stick. I will. I will leave a bruise, Raine.”

“Love it when you threaten me,” Raine chuckled. She turned away from both Evelyn and me, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted toward Lozzie and Praem: “Taking Evee home for now! Praem, you going with Lozzie?”

Lozzie’s singing cut out briefly. She was quite far away, perched on the back of a Catty, but I saw her eyes blink open in mild surprise. She waved to us with a corner of poncho.

Down on the ground in front of the Caterpillar, Praem raised a thumb up high.

For a moment neither Evelyn nor Raine were looking at me, but both turned toward Praem and Lozzie, halfway down the length of the massive carapace plate. I had both of them in profile: Raine tall and toned against the yellowish hillsides, her deep chestnut hair yummy enough to bite into, her skin warm and soft in the cinnamon wind — and Evelyn, comfortable and plush, wrapped in her layers, her blue eyes aching to be kissed, her blonde hair in a mess down her back.

For the first time in many months I felt like the spare wheel. Raine and Evelyn had shared an experience I would never fully understand, could never be a part of — unless I could somehow go back in time. I thought I knew everything about them, but this evening alone I had seen yet another new angle of their shared past.

But then Evelyn glanced away from Praem, huffing to herself. She looked at me and awkwardly stuck out an arm, waiting for something. I boggled at her.

“Well?” she demanded, then gestured with a jerk of her arm. “Take it, then!”

“O-oh!” I reached out with a hand — and a tentacle — and took Evelyn’s hand in mine, wrapping the tentacle around her forearm, very gently.

Raine turned back to us too. She did not ask for permission, she just reached down and scooped my other hand into hers, interlacing our fingers. I slipped a tentacle around her waist, almost instinctive.

“You ready?” Raine asked both me and Evee.

Evelyn sighed and looked away. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. And don’t leave my book behind.”

Raine laughed, picked up Evelyn’s book and tucked it under her armpit, then nodded to me. “Heather?”

“Ready for what?” I asked. My heart was going far too fast. There was nothing unusual about this. We had always been a trio, hadn’t we?

“Re-affirmation,” Raine said with a smirk. “Maybe with a little extra spice. Take us home, Heather. Take us to bed.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Evelyn has had a specific problem since literally the start of the story, and the name of that problem is Heather. Wait, no, the name of Evelyn’s problem is Evelyn! Or … Raine???

You know what, I don’t thank Evee herself actually knows. But Raine sure does. And Raine also knows that you can’t face the final boss of your RPG without resolving the fundamental relationship that binds the protagonists to each other, that’s just asking for disaster, game over, or reset (or a bad ending? Oh dear.) So here she goes, taking executive decisions again, dragging Heather along after her. Let’s hope she knows what she’s doing. Evelyn can get very spicy, after all. And it’s only a day until the expedition …

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Next week, it’s bed time. Together. Though perhaps not for sleeping. 

Content Warnings

Mention of suicide/suicidal ideation

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Black ash lay draped in ragged blankets upon the charred and ruptured soil, smothering stubs of scorched brick and lumps of stunted ruin with a funeral veil of ageless soot and arid filth; yet all the dust in the world could not obscure the looping alien script upon every inch of broken wall and shattered arch. Dark mist drifted in choking sheets of diaphanous rot, shadows and shades coiling and flowing with umbral intent. Life scurried and stalked and slithered through the remnants of this dead place — malformed, malnourished, and maltreated shapes, neither ape nor canine nor anything that walked the million-million worlds of Outside, broken things with broken outlines, their forms smeared sideways across the surface of reality by generations of merciless examination. Bloated jellyfish-creatures grown vast and turgid bobbed and twisted in the shadow-rich air, floaters in the eye of a god.

The endless plain — a paradox both infinite and infinitely bounded — stretched away toward a terminus of broken teeth, a horizon of shattered mountain ranges cooked to brittle cinders, their shells of rock cracked open and their innards left to run like blood, allowed to cool and harden, and then cracked and burned again and again. Ancient watchers observed from just within that ring of mountains, behemoths and leviathans in their own right, creatures the size of skyscrapers or islands or continents, all of them kneeling or squatting or lying prostrate, all of them staring upward in mute, frozen, forever devotion.

Up and up and up, to a sky that was not a sky, to a firmament that stared back, to the ridged and wrinkled surface of the truth hanging above this cursed and ruined world.

Wonderland.

“Heathy!” Lozzie hissed, right next to our ear. She squeezed my hand extra hard, trying to snap me out of my wordless terror. “Heathy, it’s okay! It’s okay and good and it worked! Heathy! Breathe! Air goes in! Air goes out! Breathe!”

Among the million-million dimensions of Outside there are many worlds where human beings might survive for a time, places almost hospitable to earthly biology and the pressure needs of the mortal soul; perhaps homo sapiens — that endlessly adaptable species to which I still belonged, at least in spirit, if not in strict physicality — could learn to live in such a place, and with time become more Outsider than human. There are many more dimensions where no human could hope to remain whole and sane for more than a handful of minutes; there are uncounted worlds where no unprotected, unaltered mortal could endue at all — a human would be devoured, or fly apart, or crushed by the overwhelming weight of unreality. There are yet more dimensions beyond all human comprehension, where one would meet an end that words cannot capture. There is the abyss.

But Wonderland was different. The Eye’s domain was none of those.

Here, among the ruin both physical and spiritual, a human being might draw breath, walk upon solid soil, and think what thoughts the soul had need of. But the soul knew, just from the scent of the air and the colour of the ash, that this place was anathema. To overstay one’s welcome by even a second would invite an end worse than death.

“Heathy! Mmmmmm—open! Open! Open you mouth! Heathy, you’re— you’re gonna pass out! Breatheeeee!”

‘Wonderland’.

Why had Maisie and I chosen to call it that? Better to ask why not. It was the only reference point we’d had: a children’s story about getting whisked away to an impossible place. Calling it ‘Wonderland’ was an offense to poor Alice and all the imaginary inhabitants of that fictional playground. Sorry, Mad Hatter; apologies White Rabbit; my most sincere and deepest regrets, Red Queen. But it was the best Maisie and I could do. A child’s screaming, terror-soaked, desperate attempt to encapsulate something that could not be rendered in human language, let alone with the culture and concepts available to a pair of nine year old girls.

“Heathy! Mmm!”

Wonderland. In the previous year of my life I had visited this plane twice — once under duress, against my will, kidnapped by a servant or avatar or creation of the eye, and a second time under my own power, to burn a monster.

And now, there I was, a third time. Three, a lucky number. Three times, that’s the charm. Three and three and three make nine, minus two to get seven and that’s us, us Heathers, us—

Lozzie mashed her free hand against my face.

She rammed her fingers into my mouth and nose, into the areas which I had instinctively sealed up with a plate of bio-extruded pneuma-somatic steel. She slipped a fingernail into the narrow seam, wriggled half her hand past my lips, and then spread her fingers to force my mouth open.

“Blurgh—pleh-plah!”

I made the most ungraceful sound — which wasn’t really much of a concern right then — and spat her fingers back out. I peeled open the armour-plates of pneuma-somatic flesh I’d used to plug my vulnerable orifices; when had I even done that?

“Lozzie, what—”

“You weren’t breathing!” Lozzie hissed in my face, eyes blazing hard against the background of her pale cheeks. She kept her voice low and soft, then quickly looked left and right again, to make sure nothing was creeping up on us.

“Oh,” I whispered back as I realised what I’d done. “I’m sorry, I-I didn’t— didn’t mean— yes. I’m … I’m right on the verge of having a panic attack. I think. Maybe. I-I’m glad we’re doing this together.”

“Mmhmmmmm,” Lozzie grunted, bobbing her head, looking everywhere except upward.

Flakes of black ash fluttered downward through the sunless air; they settled in Lozzie’s wispy blonde hair.

Sunless? I’d never considered that implication before. If the Eye was all the sky, then where did the light come from?

Four tentacles quickly suggested we not think about that too hard. One holdout insisted it must be important. The sixth tentacle kept a mental note, to tell Evelyn, once we returned home.

Lozzie and I had arrived in Wonderland moments earlier, hand in hand — a serious understatement, as I also had two tentacles wrapped around her slender waist, a third tentacle bunched in the fabric of her poncho, and we were quite literally strapped to each other. Both of us were wearing climbing harnesses, Lozzie’s tucked beneath her usual outer layer of poncho, mine bunched uncomfortably under my thighs and groin, despite Raine’s efforts to make this as comfortable as possible. Four separate lengths of reinforced climbing rope and a pair of braided steel cables linked our two harnesses together. Raine and Evelyn had taken no risks when it came to the safety measures for this final test.

We were also both anchored to the Invisus Oculus, beneath our feet.

Four additional steel cables led from the climbing harnesses to a quartet of holes in the corners of the massive piece of canvas; the holes were reinforced with metal rings to avoid tearing the material — another safety measure, thanks to Raine’s thinking. I had two tentacles pressed to the painted canvas itself, to aid in brain-math teleportation, but even without my be-tentacled touch there was no way for me to accidentally leave the Invisus Oculus behind. Lozzie and I could not even have stepped out of the magic circle without intentionally undoing half a dozen clasps and buckles. Even if one of us went stark raving bonkers at that exact second and decided to throw ourselves upon the mercy of the Eye, the straps and bindings would give the other the split-second we needed to Slip back home.

But neither of us were going to do that.

We stood in the centre of the pupil of the Invisus Oculus, protected and hidden inside a false eye made of ink and blood and Evelyn’s ingenuity. The canvas rested directly on the blackened and burned soil of Wonderland. The false eye stared upward at the sky, at the real thing, the genuine article, hanging in the void above our heads.

To my surprise Lozzie was not handling this well; I’d rarely seen her unsettled like this, wild-eyed and animalistic, not since we’d rescued her from captivity almost a year ago. Her gaze darted back and forth from ruined walls to drifts of black ash. Her poncho was pulled tight around her slender body, the colours muted amid the drifting mists. Her wispy blonde hair was limp, flat, and still.

She was like a little chromatic jellyfish trying to go unnoticed in hostile waters. She’d never feared Wonderland before, not when she’d saved me. Why was this time so different?

Perhaps because I had reacted like a spooked octopus the moment we’d arrived.

It took me a few more breaths to realise what I’d done — I had extruded and deployed and unfurled and sprouted half a dozen protective measures, plated myself in abyssal biology, and wrapped my vulnerable mortal core of true flesh in a web of nullification. My eyeballs were behind three layers of light-filtering membranes, my throat was plugged with a fan of fluttering filters, and my skin tingled with the dark toxins of abyssal chemistry. Yet even through all that I could still smell the air of Wonderland, the reek of carbonised flesh and burned steel on my tongue.

“Sorry,” I rasped. “I … I’m not … this is all my nightmares, Lozzie. All my nightmares at once.”

She squeezed my hand again. “I know! But they’re sleeping! Shhh-shhh-shhhhhhhhh.”

That hardly mattered.

I had visited Wonderland in my nightmares so many times; I’d been there in the flesh twice in the last year; we had gazed upon the ruined landscape once, via the dubious ‘safety’ of Evelyn’s scrying window, almost a year ago then. But none of those times — not the dreams, not the kidnapping, not the remote viewing — had given me the opportunity to observe what this place was really like.

I had not looked upon Wonderland in such detail since I was a child.

Lozzie, myself, and the canvas which contained the Invisus Oculus had arrived in the same spot as on all those previous occasions — the very same place that the imitation-Lozzie had dragged me when she’d forced me back to Wonderland all those months ago, the same spit of ground where Lozzie and I had stood when we’d pulled the Edward-ball to Wonderland to subject him to the gaze of the Eye, the same spot where Evelyn’s scrying window had materialised. Three times was too many for coincidence, but I didn’t know why; perhaps this was the spot where I had fled from Wonderland a decade earlier, or perhaps it was the dead centre of the eye’s gaze.

Or maybe this plane of reality was broken, and this exact spot was all that really existed. Whichever case was the truth, I filed that observation away for later, to share with Evelyn. It might be important. But we could not chew on it then.

Nearby, beyond the border of the Invisus Oculus and the naked edge of the canvas, lay a few scraps of evidence that we had been here before.

A rough ring of crisped and blackened flesh had disturbed the ashes. It reminded me of the carbonised residue left on the metal of a barbecue grill if, for example, one forgets about an unfortunate sausage. Those burned fragments were all which remained of the Edward-ball, what little scraps of flesh had fallen from his form when I had hoisted him up before the Eye. Luckily those fragments were still and cold, and very very dead.

A little closer to the canvas stood the pitiful remains of a pair of chrome boots, made of Outsider star metal, melted down to the middle of the shins. A little black gunk was baked into a hard crust inside the boots. The soles had deformed under incredible heat and stuck to the ground. Shapeless puddles of long-cooled metal lay nearby, marred by blackened patches of charred flesh.

That was one of Lozzie’s Knights — the Knight who had protected us from the Eye, when Lozzie had come to rescue me from this hell, before I had even known what the Knights were. We dared not reach out beyond the Invisus Oculus, but we made a mental note that when all this was over, we would retrieve what was left of this Knight, return it to the castle in Camelot, and give it whatever burial the rest of the Round Table decreed. We would do it personally, with our own bare hands. It was the least we owed a dead hero.

And finally, on the opposite side to the Knight’s melted boots, a long scrape had marked the black ash. The impact-mark terminated in a little crater, a shallow depression in the soil.

That was where the Eye’s imitation-Lozzie had fallen, when the Knight had rammed a lance through its chest and flung it away.

The imitation Lozzie was nowhere to be seen. No corpse lay decayed upon the earth, nor preserved by unnatural forces; there was no dried blood or sticky residue on the soil. We could not recall seeing her the previous time, when we had been fighting the Ed-ball, but we’d not been paying much attention back then.

Beyond this scant evidence of human activity lay only the ruins, marching off across the endless plain, toward the ring of broken mountains, the worshipping watchers, and the horizon beyond.

But that was not a horizon.

“Aversion therapy?” I hiccuped, trying to laugh. The ropes that bound Lozzie and I to each other creaked — I was pulling on one of them with a tentacle. “N-no thanks.”

Lozzie whispered: “Time to go hooooooome! The test is a success! Success success! Woohoo! Time to go? Go go go!”

Lozzie was right, even if we’d not confirmed it yet.

Neither of us had looked up.

Back on earth, in Sharrowford, within the comforting walls of Number 12 Barnslow Drive, tucked away deep in the magical workshop, everyone was waiting for us to return home. The unique properties of the Invisus Oculus presented some odd logistical challenges; as soon as Lozzie and I had stepped inside the pupil all strapped up and ready, everyone else had promptly forgotten we were there. Our assembled support had been unable to see Lozzie sticking her tongue out and voicing some truly blush-inducing compliments about Raine’s tummy. I wasn’t sure if those observations about Raine’s “virgin-eater cheese-grater” and “pussy-rubdown washboard” were actually genuine or just Lozzie’s attempt to take the edge off my fear, though I strongly suspected the latter.

We had spent the last couple of days subjecting the Invisus Oculus to every test we could imagine, short of putting it in the middle of a busy street and getting one of us hit by a car. Almost everybody in the house took a turn in the funny forgetting circle, just for the novelty — though Tenny had disliked it deeply and Zheng had refused to go anywhere near it. We’d done all sorts of serious tests, including having me search for Raine with brain-math while she was only a few feet away and I’d forgotten where she was; that hadn’t worked either, much to Evelyn’s relief.

During all these tests we had discovered the only way to circumvent the circle was to write down instructions to oneself first, before the subject entered the Invisus Oculus; even written reminders were highly unreliable — they didn’t break the spell’s effect or allow anybody to remember or see anything, they simply allowed the note-taker a chance to believe something they had written in their own handwriting.

Raine almost always believed her notes, and mine even more so. Evelyn almost never trusted anything.

So, the last thing we’d seen before we had teleported to Wonderland was Raine and Evelyn looking very confused, both of them frowning at the notes they’d written in their own handwriting, explaining to them what was going on and where I was. Unlike Evelyn’s little trick two days ago, nobody in the house would be comforted by the subconscious knowledge that I was safe and sound. Lozzie and I were missing, in danger, on a time limit. Everyone would feel that.

I whispered back to Lozzie: “Not yet. Don’t take us home yet.”

Lozzie peered at me with wide eyes, balanced on the edge of real fear. “Heathy?”

I took a lemon out of my pocket; Praem had given one to me before I’d stepped into the circle. I hadn’t been sure why — it wasn’t as if we were planning on stopping in Wonderland long enough for a light picnic — but now I understood. I needed the courage. I tore into the lemon with tentacle and teeth, stuffing the rind back into my pocket lest it break the circle of the Invisus Oculus, and jamming the soft yellow flesh into my mouth. I chewed and swallowed quickly, barely tasting the lemon, shaking all over.

Then, with more willpower than I knew I possessed, I looked up.

The sky was not a sky, but a vast darkness from horizon to horizon, ridged and humped and creased in the middle, at the place where two eyelids met. Those creases were deeper than any ocean trench, those ridges taller than mountain ranges, those lids vast as worlds.

The lid did not shudder, nor twitch, nor part. No crack of shining darkness stared down upon the land. The architect and artist of my nightmares, my teacher in the secrets of reality, my adoptive parent from Outside, was asleep, in repose, unaware.

The Eye was shut.

“It worked,” I breathed, my voice quivering like a lead in the wind. I was shaking all over, but we squeezed the words out. “It can’t see us. Doesn’t know we’re here. Lozzie. Lozzie. It works. I can’t— um— it— wow.”

“Yes! Yes yes!” Lozzie hissed back. “Yes, it worked! It worked! Evee-weevey is gonna be happy and satisfied and smug and silly and somebody needs to cuddle with her, yes! So let’s go! Heathy, let’s go back!”

But we only whispered: “Maisie’s up there.”

Lozzie said nothing, but I could hear her breathing at my side, just a touch too rough with fear.

We seven Heathers flirted with a brief madness.

We knew in our heart of hearts, deep down in the resonance of our sevenfold soul, that Maisie was not out there somewhere amid the black ash and blasted ruin of this world; her body was not coiled up in a coffin or bricked up beneath a floor; we would not find her hooked into some kind of life-support machine, or placed upon a throne of obsidian and tended by a court of shadows; we would not discover her shade adrift on the ethereal winds nor stumble across her still-inhabited corpse on an altar in the wastes of Wonderland.

She was up there, with the Eye — inside it, or in its clutches, or trapped just behind the lid, or buried deep in the jelly. The specifics did not matter.

She was up there. All I had to do was reach out.

Why not do it right then?

Everyone else was safe at home, tucked away behind the walls of reality, unreachable by the sleeping god in the sky — all except Lozzie, but she could teleport herself back to Sharrowford in complete safety. Why not reach out with a pressure-bubble of brain-math right then, ram it through the Eye’s lid and into the cornea beneath? Why not reach out for my twin, my sister, right then? It was the same thing I was going to do eventually, wasn’t it? But this way everyone else would be safe, everyone else would be untouchable, and only I would be placed at risk. Forget the others, the Knights, the Caterpillars; forget Evelyn’s magical plans and Raine’s moral support; forget Zheng and Twil ready to haul my limp body back through a gateway; forget Lozzie here as emergency escape; forget Sevens prepared to weave some last-minute fiction to stave off my death. Forget the plan, do it now, do it raw, do it before we could second guess ourselves.

We came within a hair’s breadth of leaping.

But we had promised. We had promised to stop acting like this, stop leaping before we looked, stop leaving our beloved out of the loop. And if we tried and failed, alone and unsupported, the others wouldn’t even have a corpse to mourn.

We took a deep breath, let it out very slowly, and won the argument within ourselves.

We lowered our gaze from the closed lid of the Eye.

“Okay, Lozzie,” we rasped. “Test successful. Evee will be really happy, that’s right. Let’s head back. You do it, please. I’m … feeling strained.”

Lozzie’s hand tightened on mine. She broke into a secretive little smile, all mischievous now that I had pulled back from the precipice. Maybe she could tell.

“Okay, Heathy!”

I glanced up at the Eye one more time, at the closed lid. “Almost there, Maisie,” I whispered. “I promise. Wait for us.”

“Mm? Heathy?” Lozzie tilted her head at me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

And with a wink and a shuffle and cluck of her tongue, Lozzie did just that. Wonderland blinked shut, Outside the walls of reality.

==

“Evee kissed me a few days ago.”

Jan looked up from the table in the magical workshop, from where we had laid out her very special and very large delivery. She stared at me in wide-eyed silence, her previous explanation forgotten. Eventually I tore my eyes away from the life-sized, colourless, inanimate version of myself lying on the table, and met Jan’s bewildered gaze.

Jan said: “What.”

I cleared my throat and gestured at the Invisus Oculus with a tentacle: the canvas was laid out neatly at the far end of the room, alongside the harnesses Lozzie and I had used yesterday morning, just in front of the gateway mandala on the back wall of the workshop.

“In the middle of the Invisus Oculus,” we said. “Right here, in the workshop. It was during the first time we tested it. She kissed me, right in front of Raine. But Raine couldn’t see, because of the invisibility and the forgetting and everything.” I sighed and shook my head. “It was all a bit odd. I don’t know what to make of it.”

Jan said nothing. Her eyes were dangerously wide and jewel-like, with the look of a small prey animal who had been confronted by a lethal predator and then anticlimactically booped on the nose, uncertain if she should run, play dead, or boop right back.

I cleared my throat again and shuffled my feet. “Um. It’s just … I … ”

Jan found her voice. “Heather, why are you telling me this?”

“Well … I just … I’m not sure, I—”

Jan gestured at herself and almost laughed, caught between hysteria and bewilderment — then pointed at the door to the magical workshop, firmly closed for once. Everyone else had been politely asked to wait outside, seeing as Jan’s delivery did technically involve me being very naked, or at least my surrogate lying there with not a stitch of clothing on its body. Half the people waiting out there in the kitchen did see me naked pretty regularly, but the experience of unwrapping this strange package was deeply alienating enough without Raine cracking jokes and Evelyn averting her gaze.

Jan said, “Is this the real reason you wanted everyone else to wait? Did you fake your modesty just to get me alone?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean—”

Jan threw her hands up and said: “This is like calling a plumber in to do some work on your pipes and you start trauma-dumping! Should I be charging you rates for my services as an agony aunt?! A couples’ therapist? What else?”

We started to blush, mortified at the misunderstanding. “Oh, it’s not trauma, Jan, no. I rather enjoyed it, actually. Evee’s not any good at kissing, but … ”

Jan boggled at me like I’d produced a live fish from inside my underwear and was trying to hand it to her. She gestured at the other me — the me on the table — and said: “Heather, can we please focus on the reason I’m here?”

The reason Jan was here was the life-size replica of my body, lying on the cleared tabletop of the magical workshop, surrounded by the unwrapped leather bag and the mass of packing peanuts in which it had been transported.

Maisie’s new vessel.

The empty vessel did not in fact look anything like me, not beyond an exact copy of my proportions; it had my height from toes to skull, my narrow width of hip, my scrawny breadth of rib, my gangly arms and my short legs and the awkward curve of my spine. But all of that, every smooth limb and every doll-like joint, every rotating socket, all of it was cast in colourless grey carbon fibre. Unfleshed and empty, naked and skinless — but the vessel did not look like a human skeleton, not like a remnant of a person after their body had rotted away. It was like a doll, waiting for a soul.

It looked like it might sit up and start talking at any moment.

The vessel lacked a face; the skull was a blank void of grey-on-grey carbon fibre, with rough pits for eyes and a toothless jaw attached to the underside — another exact copy of my bone structure. How exactly Jan had achieved that from the pictures she’d taken of me, I wasn’t sure, but she had worked a miracle. The chest was not formed from individual ribs, as with a human being, but from a set of interlocking plates, fastened and bolted and slotted together, to create a sealed casket for Maisie’s soul. The waist was not reduced to a mere spine, but formed from a set of ring-structures to give the vessel much greater rigidity than a real skeleton without muscle to hold it together.

The spine itself was a wonder of magical engineering. It lacked the traditional vertebrae of a human chordate spine, replacing them with flexible armoured rings. Jan had explained that this would solve many of the nerve-protection issues she had suffered in her own early days.

One of my first questions when Jan had unwrapped the thing was: “What about the breasts? I know I’m small, but I’m not that flat. I do have … something.”

Jan had snorted, grabbed her own chest, and replied, “Don’t know about you, Heather, but I don’t have bones in my tits. Soft tissues are going to be Maisie’s responsibility, pneuma-somatic. Just like me.”

The only major difference to my body plan was the lack of tentacles. We had no idea what Maisie might require or want when she returned. She was not an abyssal squid, after all, not like me.

I tried not to think about that, about what that meant.

The whole thing weighed much less than expected — even I could lift it with relative ease, without the aid of my tentacles — but it was also much heavier than the visible parts suggested, considering it was mostly made from carbon fibre.

According to Jan the majority of that hidden weight was inside the chest and head. The skull was stuffed with specialised magic circles in little spheres and boxes, designed to ease Maisie back into a human sensory set-up as easily as possible, avoiding the issues Jan had experienced with blindness and deafness, during the first period of inhabitation of her new body. The sealed box of the chest cavity was heavily armoured on the inside, with both bulletproof and stab proof layers, a sphere of magic circles, and a special three-dimensional structure of Jan’s own devising, a many-sided shape carved from artificially grown crystal. That was the real secret of this empty vessel — a core for Maisie’s soul to settle into, like a handful of captured silt.

The exterior of the vessel was oddly alienating, like recognising oneself in a medical scan or an x-ray picture. The designs I’d seen in Jan’s notebook had seemed miraculous, and so was the result. But it was me. It was Maisie. And it was not yet alive.

I shrugged at Jan’s request that we return to the subject, smiling awkwardly. “What’s more to say? You’ve done incredibly well, Jan, as far as I can tell. And Evee’s ready to pay you, and … ”

Jan sighed as I trailed off. She screwed her eyes shut with growing irritation, and said: “You can pay me when you all come back safely from Wonderland.” Then she tutted. “Tch! I wish you’d called it something else. I had a soft spot for Alice in Wonderland, growing up. Especially the movie, the old animated one. Now it’s all tied up with this unspeakable horror you’re going to go throw yourself at. Bloody hell.”

Jan herself looked a little rumpled, which reminded me of how Evelyn sometimes looked after working on a long magical project without a proper break. Jan’s shiny black hair was uncombed and unwashed, all a-mess atop her head. She was wearing pink jogging bottoms, massive boots on her feet, and a dark blue ribbed sweater which looked like it had washed up from the North Sea thirty years ago, several sizes too large for her, with the sleeves cut off halfway down. The doll-like joints of her elbows and hands were clearly visible, as she was making no effort to hide them. When she’d arrived she’d also been wearing a pair of massive leather gloves — not the fashionable kind, but the working-with-dangerously-hot-substances kind — and carrying a cordless electric drill; she’d not been expecting our offer of ‘transport’ from her home workshop to take the form of Lozzie doing a teleport, so here she was, fresh from the proverbial forge.

July had looked entirely unruffled, tall and wide-eyed and athletic as ever, like she’d been doing nothing but exercising while Jan was working. She was out in the kitchen with the others, for now, probably pestering Zheng.

We cleared our throat again and gestured helplessly with several tentacles. “Um. Sorry. Are you … are you sure you don’t want paying now?”

Jan fixed me with a tired, greasy, very-done look. “It would be a bad omen to demand payment now.”

“Well,” I said. “We might not—”

Jan raised both hands and clapped them together in front of my face, like the jaws of a crocodile. “Shut!”

“I— Ja—”

“Shut! Stop! No! Don’t say it. You’ll bloody well jinx it.”

“But we might not—”

“Stop! Heather, just stop, oh my God.” Jan huffed. “You’re taking Lozzie out there with you, she’s an integral part of your plan, yes? So don’t say it, don’t tempt fate. I’m doing something I never, ever, ever do, on principle, in order to avoid tempting fate — I’m deferring payment for a job!” She huffed again and rubbed at her eyes. “Technically what I’m doing is not counting the job as over until your twin sister is safely inside this.” She tapped the vessel with a single pale knuckle. “Call it professional after-care, yes? I’m not just delivering a weapons system and then buggering off while you blow yourself up with it, I’m here to operate the damn thing if need be. So there.”

I glanced at the vessel again, then back at Jan. “‘Weapons system’?”

Jan sighed. “A figure of speech. Closest thing I could think of. You understand what I mean.”

“You’re not insinuating that you want to come to Wonderland with us?”

Jan boggled at me again, but less so than before. “Absolutely not! I’ll die! What else can I contribute, anyway?! No thank you.” She nudged the body again. “But you’ll have to take this with you, out there, yourself. Well, strapped to one of those Knights, I expect, but you get the point. I’ve already explained all of this to you, Heather, what are you … ” Jan trailed off and sighed again. She examined my face slowly, then blinked even slower, and resigned herself to something, deep inside. Then she sighed as if her soul was leaving her body. “Okay. Okay, Heather. You win.”

“I … I win what?”

Jan opened a hand toward the Invisus Oculus, on its canvas medium at the far end of the room. “You kissed Evelyn inside the secret invisibility sphere. Fine. What about it?”

“Oh. Um. Uh.” Our tentacles coiled inward, as if trying to protect us. Jan eyed us uneasily.

“Get on with it before I change my mind,” Jan almost snapped. “You’re getting a freebie here. Maybe I really should take up a new career unravelling the romantic entanglements of clueless young things like yourself. Huh!”

“Well, actually,” I corrected slowly. “She kissed me, not the other way around. She took charge.”

“Great,” Jan deadpanned. “And? Why are you telling me this? Why do you need to get this off your chest?”

We hesitated, looking away, coiling our tentacles up tighter. They creaked.

Jan sighed. “Why not tell Raine?”

“I did!” we squeaked. “She cheered!”

“What,” Jan deadpanned again, slightly more panicked than before. “Oh no.”

“Specifically she said ‘good for Evee’. She asked me if I enjoyed it. She asked if I was worried about her feeling jealous, and she said don’t worry. She wasn’t jealous. It was— it was totally unlike the previous times this sort of thing happened! It wasn’t like she didn’t care, it was like she was happy about it! And then we had sex, three times, but that’s beside the point, because we often do that, but I don’t—”

Jan snapped her fingers three times to stop me. I blinked in surprise and tailed off. She said: “So why not tell another one of your many girlfriends about this? Surely there is somebody better suited for this than me.”

We shrugged, feeling intensely awkward. “I … I’m not … I don’t feel like I have anybody else to tell.”

“You have a polycule!”

Thump thump went a gentle knock on the workshop door. Raine’s voice called out through the wood: “You two okay in there?”

“Yes!” I called back. “We’re just talking. We’re fine, Raine! Please don’t worry!”

“Okaaaay,” Raine called back. I heard her steps recede from the door again.

Jan grumbled under her breath, shooting me a rather nasty look. “Oh, yes, just fine, just peachy, don’t worry about me, not like I’m trapped in here with a squid with romantic issues.” She huffed and spoke up again. “Heather, you do realise that I am the last person you want to ask for romantic advice, yes? I am a fifty three year old virgin — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I suspect you have a touch more experience than me.”

We met Jan’s eyes head-on. All our tentacles swivelled to point at her too, with every scrap of our attention. We just stared for a moment, to let her see.

Jan frowned. “Ah,” she said. “You’re not blushing.”

“Because I’m not asking for romantic advice,” I said. “I’m … I can’t deal with this … this normality. Evelyn kissed me, like we have all the time in the world to go through whatever she needs. Raine treats it like a healthy development, and maybe it is, but … we’re running out of time. Everyone is acting so normal. Tenny’s playing chess, Lozzie’s Slipping Outside now and again. Zheng and Grinny are … I don’t know, but Grinny’s put on muscle. And we went to Wonderland yesterday. Did Lozzie tell you that? We were there and we looked up at the Eye. And it felt almost … routine! Normal! I can’t. I just can’t, Jan. We’re about to step out there and try to snatch Maisie from a living god and everyone is acting so normal!”

Jan’s exasperation had fled her face. She regarded me now with a light and gentle frown, a serious look inside her eyes. She ran her tongue along her teeth, behind the pale shield of her lips.

“Sorry,” I blurted out. “I haven’t been able to say this to any of the others. They’re all coming with me, after all. They’re all trying their best. I just don’t know what to say. We might all be dead by this time next week.”

Jan nodded slowly. “You’ve set the date for the expedition?”

“This Sunday. Five days from now. Evee says that’s all the time she needs to complete the airlock out in Camelot, assuming the Knights and Caterpillars work as fast as Lozzie said they will.” I shrugged. “And they are, mostly. So, Sunday it is.”

Jan took a deep breath, let out a long sigh, and then cast around the magical workshop. Her eyes alighted on the lumpy old sofa beneath the spider-servitors, but then she dismissed that with a frown. Instead she grabbed one of the many chairs around the table, dragged it outward, and sat down. She gestured for me to do the same. I pulled out a chair with my tentacles and sat opposite.

Jan just stared at me for a moment, turning something over inside her head. I sat politely, hands and tentacles folded.

Eventually she smacked her lips, as if her decision was made. “Heather, I want to tell you about something, but I need to know that you won’t tell Lozzie.”

A field of red flags blossomed inside my head and heart. “Ummmmm.”

Jan huffed, rolled her eyes, and leaned back in her chair. “Yes, Heather, I’m about to tell you that I’m actually wanted by the International Criminal Court, for crimes against humanity, and I’m only in this body to avoid spending the rest of my life locked in a cell in the Hague.”

I tutted. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

“Oh, I think I do!” Jan tutted right back at us. “Heather, I wouldn’t ask you to keep a secret from Lozzie if it was something bad about me. Frankly, if you did, then I wouldn’t trust you around her. Look, I just want to talk about part of my own past, about things that happened to me, but I don’t want you to talk to Lozzie about it, because it’s … it’s not your place to talk about my past. It’s mine. It’s not a dark secret or an unforgiven sin. It’s just war.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Okay. I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” she sighed, then added: “Sorry. It’s just that sometimes you’re such a kid. You all are. You don’t understand war. You won’t, unless you’ve experienced it.” Jan blew out a long breath. She looked down at one of her own hands, making and unmaking a fist. I watched the doll-joints move. Would Maisie be like that one day? Jan said, “How much history did you study in school? What do they teach you these days, World War One at all?”

“A little,” I said, frowning. “I don’t really think our situation is remotely comparable. Though I was always better with the poetry than the actual history, the trenches and mud and all that.” I quoted from memory: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.”

Jan barked with sudden and surprised laugher. “Alright, you old boomer. You know more than most!”

I clicked my tongue. “You’re the boomer, Jan, literally. Last I checked I’m generation zed? Is that what it’s called now? And there’s nothing old or fuddy-duddy about loving poetry!” We bristled, almost angry for real. “You take that back.”

Jan cleared her throat. “Alright, alright, I retract that bit, but only that bit. Right then. So. You know what all those poor bastard Tommies did in the trenches, before they went over the top?”

I shrugged.

“They joked,” Jan said. “They laughed. They shared cigarettes and a bit of food, and they did what they could to stay human. People used to call it ‘gallows humour’, like the jokes the condemned man makes while the executioner is sharpening the axe. But it’s just human nature. We gotta keep laughing, or we’ll start crying.” Jan swallowed and took stock for a second, as if steeling herself, then moved from the general to the specific. “I went to war. The conflict I told you about, the mage conflict, you recall that?”

I nodded. “I’ve picked up bits and pieces. That was decades ago now, yes?”

“Mm,” Jan grunted. “We didn’t call it a war, back then. Some did, some didn’t. But it was a war, whatever name it was given. There were two sides, and nobody was gonna stop fighting until it was done. People got hurt, some people died. Some of those people died because of me. One side lost … ”

She trailed off for a moment. I asked, softly as I could: “Which side were you on?”

“The winning one,” she said. “But nobody won in the end.”

“And what were the sides? What was it about?”

Jan frowned at me, surfacing from her memories. “That’s hard to explain. All wars have two explanations, the simple one and the complex one. The first is rarely true and the second rarely satisfies. It was about a lot of things.”

Taika’s words floated up from my memory. “‘Homunculus War’,” I said out loud. “Is that correct?”

Jan’s eyes went wide. She stared at me like she’d seen a ghost — and not a friendly one. In that name she saw the sort of spectre which had knives for teeth and blood pouring from the eye sockets. She swallowed hard.

“S-sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“How do you know that?” she demanded, not urgent but almost offended.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I … heard that name from somebody else. Another mage.”

Jan snorted. “Joseph King? No, no, I don’t want to know. And I’m not joking. I don’t want to know what you know. Drop it.”

“Okay. Sorry, Jan. I respect that. Sorry.”

Jan sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’d rather not talk about that part, Heather. Look, the point is, even when things got really bad, we didn’t stop being human, or stop joking around, or stop laughing.” She thumbed toward the door of the magical workshop. “Not quite like your weird and wonderful polycule out there, but close enough.”

“I … I see.”

Jan shrugged. “Even the worst nights, the parts where it got really bad … ” Jan wet her lips with a flicker of pink tongue, smiled, and slipped into the attitude of a storyteller. “One night, when it was almost over, and it looked like it was going to go against us, me and four … ” She paused and frowned. “No, me and five others, actually, we were hold up inside this house, surrounded. This was northern France, in the dead of winter, and it was cold as fuck. Snow on the ground. Not a scrap of green anywhere. This was before modern cell phones, right? So we were really cut off. Phone lines were gone. The house was surrounded by … I guess you’d call them demon-hosts, like July or Zheng, but not as sophisticated. And we were fucked.” Jan grinned. “We were exhausted, we’d been in a sort of magical duel earlier in the day — too complicated to explain now, but we’d lost, basically. Nobody was capable of doing shit. I was seeing double. Lothaire was delirious. We were probably all gonna die when dawn broke. One of us — this older lady called Enisa — she had a broken leg. Mundane broken leg, because you know, hey, magical bullshit doesn’t stop you from stepping in a rabbit hole in the dark while running from zombies, and fucking up your shin. It was dark, and cold, and we were surrounded by monsters. We lit all the fireplaces in that old house, but we knew the moment we stepped beyond that light, we were all gonna get eaten alive.”

“Well, you obviously didn’t,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t be here telling me the story.”

Jan snorted. “For a literature student, you can be surprisingly unromantic sometimes, Heather.”

I shrugged. “Just … trying to stay grounded.”

Jan sighed. “Alright. Well. Do you know what we did, that night?”

I shook my head.

“We stopped watching the windows, got out a pack of cards, and got really, really, really drunk.” Jan broke into a grin. “I lost three thousand Francs that I did not possess. Yannic and Melitta finally broke their weird on-off love-hate thing they’d had going on for months and fucked like rabbits in the next room over. We all heard them, too! Melitta made noises like a horse, it was amazing. And then they had a baby nine months later. I only met the kid once, when he was a baby, but I wonder if he knows where he was conceived.” Jan laughed, clearly enjoying this. “We wheeled Enisa out the front door so she could personally throw an empty wine bottle at the demons waiting in the long grass. I pissed in another bottle and followed it up with that.”

“Ew,” I said.

“Fuck you!” Jan laughed. “One of the best moments of my life, that night. But what matters is that it got us through.”

“It did? How?”

Jan spread her arms. “Still alive, aren’t I? Said you yourself! See, we were terrified. The mage who’d sent the demons — fucking monster by the name of Stane Ratko, who is very dead by now, I believe — he didn’t actually have the power to take us. He was counting on us freaking out and leaving the house, trying to make a break for it, or turning on each other. But we didn’t.” Jan slapped her knee. “We played cards, threw our piss like monkeys, and fucked. Well.” Jan cleared her throat. “Some of us fucked. Not me. And in the morning we tore through those demons like a hot knife in the gut, with proper magic and proper confidence.”

“The phrase is ‘like a hot knife through butter’.”

“Not right then it wasn’t. Also we had some guns, not a knife, but that’s beside the point.” Jan spread her hands again. “Heather, I’m saying that acting like that is normal, and it’s good. You’re about to go to war. Maybe a very different kind of war, but it’s still a war. Your friends, your lovers, Evee, Raine, whatever, they’re probably feeling exactly the same way you are. Scared and awkward. You shouldn’t need to tell me this. You should be with them, telling them you love them, and maybe doing some other stuff.”

I sighed. “We have enough sex as it is.”

Jan shot me a withering look. “You know that’s not what I mean by ‘other stuff’. Not entirely, anyway.”

We cleared our throat. “I … I know. I think I understand, Jan. Thank you. I’ll go make an effort. I’ll start right now, even.”

Jan held up a hand. “We ain’t done yet.”

I blinked at her. “We’re not?”

Jan’s amusement slipped away, leaving something stark and sharp behind in her face. She seemed to steel herself once again. “Heather, the other thing you said, that worries me much more. This advice is less universally applicable, but I think I might be the only one who can give it.”

I shook my head, bewildered. “Other thing?”

Jan hesitated, then said: “You said going to Wonderland felt too normal.”

“Oh. Um. I suppose I did.”

Jan sighed and nodded. “Right. ‘Cos you’re all jumped up on that jay-are-pee-gee protagonist juice. Heading off to fight god for the fate of the world and all that.”

“What does that even mean?” My turn to huff. “And it’s not for the fate of the world, it’s for the fate of my twin sister. I think I understand the stakes perfectly well, thank you.”

Jan winced and held up a hand again, her fingers showing the clear lines of her doll-joints. “It means you’ve got it into your head that things have to go down a certain kind of way. Gravitas and pomp. Drama. Meaning.”

We frowned. “I don’t care about gravitas or drama. Whatever it takes to get Maisie home, that’s all that matters.”

Jan sighed and ran a hand over her face. She leaned back in her chair and looked at me like a problem she did not have the solution for. She suddenly looked exactly as old as she really was, and more than a little tired with me.

“Jan,” I said gently. “I appreciate the offer of advice, but I don’t think this is relevant to—”

“I had my own death all planned out,” Jan said.

We stopped in surprise.

Jan shrugged. “I don’t mean like, actual suicide. I mean that I knew I had to die, even if only for a second or two, to get into this body.” She raised one hand and wiggled her fingers. “And that was scary, you know? Yeah, yeah, I’m a big scary mage, infinite cosmic power, whatever. But that’s scary even for one of us. So I tried to control it, I had this big plan. I was going to throw a hell of a party, visit Paris for a week, then clean my whole home from top to bottom. I was gonna do the ritual at dawn, daybreak, on my birthday. I even knew the clothes I was gonna wear — all white, in robes, like I was a fucking offering or something.” Jan snorted. “I was such a fool. And you know how it actually went down?”

“Not like that?” I ventured

Jan smiled a very grim smile. “Shot three times, in the back, after an hour long fight. Dirty, exhausted, and alone. All my pretty little plans came to nothing. But, I did it anyway. I put myself in the right place.” She tapped the centre of her sternum. “You know what the lesson is?”

“No,” I said with a sigh. “I’m sorry for what you went through, Jan, but I don’t see why you have to keep phrasing these points as questions.”

“The lesson,” Jan said, with more patience than I’d expected, “is that even when things don’t go down how you expect, you have to follow them down. Even if you don’t get the catharsis you need, in your case. Even if you miss all the cues and ruin all the meaning. I don’t know what’s going to happen out there, Heather. Neither do you, not really. But keep your eyes on the prize. Rescue your sister. That’s all that matters, right?”

I was about to argue back again — but Jan was right.

Wonderland had felt almost normal, upon return. But it didn’t matter how Wonderland felt. The only thing which mattered was Maisie.

I nodded slowly, and tried to smile. “I think I get it. I’ll try. Thank you, Jan.”

Jan smiled back, though less confident than me. She got up and rolled the tension out of her delicate shoulders. “Right, if you’re quite done, Heather, I’m gonna go talk to Evelyn about payment.”

“I thought you said—”

“Yeah,” Jan replied with a smirk. “Payment once you all get back. I’m not asking for it in advance, I’m not tempting fate here. I’m counting on you all coming home. Plus one. Am I right, or am I right?”

My smile felt brittle. “I hope you’re right.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Wonderland unveiled, in all its ruined glory; I believe this marks the first time Heather has been able to describe the landscape without the rather pressing issue of the Eye’s attention. Raises some questions, doesn’t it? And how do you like the failsafes, keeping Heather strapped in and strapped to Lozzie so she doesn’t go wandering off? Good thing none of that was needed in the end. Let’s hope Jan’s advice is good too; Heather needs to stay true to her friends and lovers, right here on the cusp of the nightmare.

And hey, welcome back! Thanks for waiting, dear readers, thank you very much for your patience over the little Christmas break. Happy near year, too! For anybody who is not subscribed to the patreon, and doesn’t read my other story, I wrote a little new year’s post, here! There’s nothing special within, nothing secret or important, just a thank you and some plans for the future! Meanwhile, arc 23 pushes onward, as Heather and her family continue the last days of preparation for the greatest expedition attempted thus far.

If you want more Katalepsis right away, you can get it by:

Subscribing to the Patreon!

All Patrons get access to two chapters ahead! No matter what level you subscribe at! That’s about 20k words at the moment. The more support I get through Patreon, the more time I can dedicate to writing, and the less chances of having to slow down the story or get interrupted by other responsibilities. The generous and kind support of Patrons and readers is what makes all this possible in the first place! I wouldn’t be able to do this without all of you! Thank you so very much.

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Next week, Heather’s going to put some of Jan’s advice into action, and hopefully have a very important little talk with Evee. After all, time is running short; too many things risk being forever left unsaid.

Content Warnings

Gaslighting/memory alteration
Cuckolding/cheating (kind of, this a very edge case, but I figure I should warn for it anyway)

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Five days later — five days after the tearful reconciliation with my parents, after the long-awaited confrontation and humbling conversation with Taika, after my apology to Sevens in her new and very yellow bedroom, and after my resolution to stop justifying my own impulsive excesses — on Saturday the 10th of August, a grey and cloudy Sharrowford afternoon, just after lunchtime, Evelyn went missing.

At first, nobody realised it had happened.

Evelyn had spent almost every spare hour of that week firmly planted in her magical workshop, cross-referencing her notes, poring over her dusty tomes, scribbling and sketching and scribing — working tirelessly on the ‘Invisus Oculus’, her “greatest invention”, her “magnum opus”, or “the spit in my mother’s rotten face that I could never summon from my own mouth, ha!” She used those exact words, at least once, while I was assigned to making-sure-Evee-eats-food-and-drinks-water duty. Evelyn had grudgingly accepted such help from a rotating roster of myself, Praem, and Raine, with Lozzie and Tenny playing a side-role whenever they felt like it; Tenny was especially useful for accurate accounts of how many calories Evelyn had consumed on any given day, and at offering hugs to everyone involved. Grinny tagged along with Tenny whenever Zheng wasn’t taking her out to the woods to do whatever they were doing out there; I did not have the additional energy to inquire as to these woodland jaunts, but Grinny seemed to be enjoying the process, whatever it entailed.

All this looking after Evee was no great hardship. She was, after all, doing this for me.

The Invisus Oculus had first taken shape in a series of notebooks, drawn and redrawn in Evelyn’s hand over and over; the magical symbol had then jumped to dozens of large sheets of sketch paper, constructed with painstaking use of rulers, protractors, compasses, and several different kinds of pencil, each one painstakingly sharpened, swapped out, swapped back in, and re-sharpened as needed. The process looked more like Evelyn was doing geometry in a school maths lesson, not constructing never-before-attempted magical machinery from scratch. She spent hour after hour bent-backed over that table, hands bracing the angles and curves of creation, only looking up when one of us approached with a sandwich or a cup of tea or to inform our busy little mage that it was almost midnight and time to go to bed. Even then she scowled and huffed and often required Praem to physically peel her out of the chair.

By the end of Wednesday night the big table in the workshop was swamped with loose sheets, each of them containing a separate element of the magic circle to-be. Evelyn had not retired to bed until past one in the morning, and then only when Praem and I had joined forces to drag her upstairs, get her prosthetic leg off, and tuck her beneath her bedsheets.

On Thursday morning Evelyn had surprised us all by eating the largest breakfast we’d ever seen her put away. She just kept going.

Zheng had growled: “Eating for two, wizard?”

I’d sputtered. “Zheng! Don’t even joke about that! G-goodness.”

But Evelyn had barked with laughter. “Yes, in fact.”

Raine let out a mock cheer and asked who the sperm donor was. My eyes had bulged out of my head. “E-Evee?!”

Evelyn had merely grinned and then slapped the table to indicate she wanted another round of bacon and eggs. “I am gravid with magecraft. Pregnant with genius. Round and taut with knowledge. You better watch out, Zheng. Even you might be impressed by the awfullest liveliness I am to birth.”

Zheng had snorted and left the kitchen. I’d struggled not to blush. Evelyn barely noticed, too focused on the next step.

After that rather colourful breakfast Evelyn had Praem clear the workshop floor. Every piece of furniture was shoved back against the walls, all the loose books and esoteric detritus was cleared away, and all the old pieces of canvas with magical circles were rolled up and stacked neatly next to the gateway mandala. Praem even made a rousing attempt to shoo the spider-servitors out of the room, but they stayed happily coiled in their ceiling corner. Evelyn declared out loud that they were allowed to stay, as they were good guardians who had served her well; both of them wiggled their weird tentacle-spikes at that, but didn’t respond further.

When the room was prepared and the floor vacuumed, Evelyn had Praem unroll a wide piece of canvas on the floor, ready to accept the first version of the completed Invisus Oculus.

“Nobody has ever done this before, remember,” Evelyn had said to me. I’d been standing in the doorway, drawn by the inescapable obligation of watching somebody do something entirely for my benefit; I was also drawn by Evee’s strange bearing, by the odd new look that had crept into her shoulders and the tilt of her chin over the previous few days. She had her hair swept back in a loose ponytail, the nape of her neck exposed. “A spell to hide from even the gaze of an Outsider god. This will be the greatest work I have ever attempted. And if I get it wrong, the greatest mess I’ll ever make.” She’d forced a snort of laughter.

“Can it … can it go wrong?” I’d asked.

“The spell? Certainly. Everything I’ve done might be totally incorrect. That’s why we’re going to test it. And the process of constructing it? Even more so. I have measured and measured and measured, Heather, but I might still have gotten it wrong. Yet there is no way to tell but by doing.”

Evelyn had a concoction carefully picked out — two parts liquid charcoal to one part bull’s blood; the latter was acquired entirely above-board, through a local Sharrowford butcher, an older gentleman who was far too sweet and far too serious to ask why exactly a woman in a full maid uniform was purchasing a food-grade bucket worth of cow blood. We provided the bucket, of course. The butcher called Praem ‘young lady’ and wished her luck with the Black Pudding she must be cooking, because so few young people enjoyed such foods these days.

“The blood’s probably not necessary,” Evelyn had grumbled. “But we’re going belt and suspenders on this one. Belt, suspenders, and fucking rope, for all I care. This is your safety, Heather. This is your shield from the Eye. I am not skimping on anything. I’d use my own blood if I could produce enough of it.”

Final construction of the Invisus Oculus had taken all of Thursday, most of Friday, and several hours of Saturday morning. The bull’s blood had to be kept refrigerated and used only in small quantities, which made the logistics even more confusing. The medium was applied via brushes, the lines measured and traced with exacting accuracy. Praem worked mostly under direction, I offered to help, but Evelyn did a surprising amount of the application herself, with a brush tied to the end of a stick, so she didn’t have to bend over, or — heavens forbid — get down on her knees.

For my part, I let Evelyn work. The magic circle was not the only matter I was concerned with during that week.

Once on Tuesday and once again on Wednesday I had travelled — via bus, not teleport — to Jan’s hotel room, so that she could get me naked and take pictures of me from nearly every possible angle. Raine made a huge joke out of that, insinuating that she was going to ask Jan for all the pictures. But she didn’t, and she respected the fact I wanted to do that alone; there was a strange alienation to having my body catalogued for the sake of building a replacement for Maisie’s physical form.

Alienation, but also pride.

Evelyn didn’t have much direct help with the magical matters. The brief informal coven of mages had dispersed for now: Kimberly was working during the week and Evelyn insisted on not disrupting her chance at something approaching a ‘normal’ life again; Jan was busy working on the other major component of our plan, having vanished to her own ‘workshop’ after our strange photography sessions; and Felicity had finally returned home to her mysterious manor house up in Cumbria, taking Aym with her. Sevens had been up to visit, once, for one night, but had been sworn to even more mysterious secrecy; I had spent half the nights of the last week sleeping with Sevens, in her new bedroom, kissing her awake, and the other half of the nights in my usual place with Raine and Zheng.

I had toyed with the idea of sneaking into Evelyn’s bed once or twice. She was working so hard, she deserved the comfort and companionship. But she was also sleeping like a rock. And not talking to me about anything other than the work.

Evelyn had put the finishing touches on the Invisus Oculus that very morning. She’d paused for lunch without anybody’s prompting, which was a strange surprise. After that she had ushered Raine and me into the workshop to observe her handiwork, alongside Praem.

And then she’d vanished.

I didn’t see when it happened, because I was too busy staring at the quiet, unassuming miracle she had crafted.

The Invisus Oculus was not much to look at. To an untrained eye it would seem little different to any other vaguely new-agey ‘magical’ symbol, albeit drawn on a large scale, about twelve feet in diameter, upon a piece of flexible canvas, with a very strange ink that shone like blood in the artificial light.

To somebody who had seen plenty of magical circles, however, there was something odd about this one.

It was constructed of three primary enclosures — enclosures, not circles, because the outermost layer was shaped like an eye. A pair of more traditional circles formed an iris and pupil for the twelve-foot eye-symbol. Evelyn had warned me about this, that the resulting shape of the Invisus Oculus may upset me, that the shape was necessary to achieve the effect of true observational invisibility, that the eye-shape had nothing to do with the capital-E Eye which the design would soon be used against. But standing there just inside the doorway of the magical workshop, a shiver went through my guts and down my tentacles.

“Oh,” I said, reaching out and groping for Raine’s hand next to me. “Oh. Um. Er. That’s … that’s weird.”

Raine took it better than I did. She squeezed my hand and chuckled softly. “You can say that again.”

“I didn’t expect it to look so … so … so much like that. It really is the Eye. Goodness me. Um. W-what does that mean?””

Raine made a thoughtful noise. “You know what they say, Heather. Fight fire with fire.”

I tutted and huffed, trying to play off the bizarre coincidence. “I always thought that saying was very silly. Adding fire to fire just makes a bigger fire.”

The all-too-familiar eye-shape was the most unsettling thing about the Invisus Oculus, but it was not the most incongruous element. The two inner circles and the lines of the eye-enclosure were encrusted with magical symbols, as one would expect, to actually perform the effect of the mage’s desire upon the fabric of reality. Most of them meant nothing to me — strange twists of angle and curve that hurt the eyes if one lingered on them for too long. They were accompanied by delicately flowing sections of text in Arabic, Ancient Greek, and Latin — but also, most bizarrely of all, in English.

One curve of text read: ‘rejectrejectrejectrejectrejectrejectreject’ with no spaces between the words. Another one had the phrase: ‘I cannot see you so you cannot see me’ printed backwards and coiled around a symbol which made me feel vaguely sick. The phrase ‘these are not the droids you’re looking for’ was folded delicately between two lines of perfect Ancient Greek. Raine pointed out that last one and had a good laugh over it, but it made no sense to me. She just patted me on the head.

“The English just makes it so much weirder,” I hissed. “I don’t care where it comes from or what it means. It seems … wrong, somehow. Do you think this is because it’s a new spell? Never been done before? Evee is the first to try this, and she speaks English as her first language, so … maybe?”

Raine ruffled my hair again, running her fingertips across my scalp to help calm me down. “Stands to reason,” she said. “We could just ask Evee, you know?” She glanced across the Invisus Oculus again and then spoke to Praem, who was standing a bit closer to the canvas, staring down at the completed work. “Where is Evee, anyway? Praem?”

Praem looked up from the circle and met Raine’s eyes. Milk-white orbs burned with sudden clarity beneath the artificial lights in the magical workshop. Praem turned on the spot, maid dress spinning as she realigned herself away from the circle and toward us, as if she was dismissing something behind her.

Something was wrong, out of place. A creeping sensation crawled up all our tentacles. “Praem?” I said.

Praem intoned: “Where indeed.”

“You don’t know?” Raine asked.

Praem just stared.

Raine frowned and clucked her tongue. “I thought Evee was with you, Praem. Did you put her to bed, for a nap?” Raine laughed softly. “Our Evee needs a nap, no doubt. Deserves it, after all this work.”

“Mm,” I grunted in agreement.

But I frowned down at the circle, then up at Praem; nameless instinct brought all our tentacles upward, tips pointing back at the unsettling eye-shape on the piece of canvas. We spread outward, getting more range, more vision, more reference points from which to construct an image of the magical workshop. But there was nothing visually incorrect, no hole in the wall weeping pus, no shadow-person standing in a corner, no creepy words written on the table in blood. Just Praem, Raine, us, and the Invisus Oculus.

Evelyn wasn’t here.

I murmured: “Didn’t she … didn’t she go out? With … with … Zheng and Grinny? They’re not in right now. She must be.”

Raine turned an odd frown toward me. “Evee, alone with a pair of demons? Nah, Heather, I think you got things mixed up a bit, love.”

“Well, I … I could have sworn she was … she’s not here, that’s for certain.”

Before I could finish the thought, Praem clicked across the magical workshop, slipped past Raine and me with a rustle of maid skirts, and marched smartly through the kitchen and into the front room. Raine and I shared a confused glance, then followed. By the time we caught up with her, Praem was clicking up the stairs, a maid on a mission.

Wordlessly and without anybody’s decision, Praem led a search for her missing mother.

Evelyn was not napping in her bedroom, working at her desk, or reading in the study — though she never read in the study, at least not by herself. She had not fallen asleep on the toilet, nor was she taking a bath. She was not hidden in my bedroom, or Sevens’ bedroom, or Lozzie’s bedroom. She was not under any of the beds, or invading Kimberly’s bedroom, or anywhere else in the house that Praem checked. Her prosthetic leg was gone, implying it was firmly attached to her body. Her walking stick was also missing, as were her favourite comfy cream-white jumper and one of the long skirts she liked to wear indoors.

At first the whole process seemed a little overblown. Evelyn was not actually missing, we just didn’t know where she was. Praem wasn’t acting panicked, just a little confused, like Evelyn had forgotten to mention she was about to do something very specific in a secluded part of the house.

But as we searched and did not find, the whole incident began to remind me of the very first time I had set foot in Number 12 Barnslow Drive, when Evelyn had magicked herself Outside, when the house had been full of echoes and unseen threats, a darkly beautiful yet very creepy place I had not yet come to know.

Our sudden, unplanned search attracted attention: Tenny had been doing some kind of special chess on her laptop, supervised by Sevens, and both of them joined us in the corridor. Lozzie was apparently out, probably visiting Jan.

“Brrrrrt!” Tenny trilled at me as we stood in the upstairs corridor. “Auntie Heathy! Lost Auntie Evee!”

Tenny was still rather unimpressed with me for my antics on Monday; she was far too mature not to understand that I had made everybody worry for my safety by rushing off to fight a mage, and she’d also witnessed Sevens crying her eyes out over my behaviour. As Praem marched off down into the darkness at the far end of the corridor, Tenny put her silken black hands on her fluffy white hips, made all her tentacles go still and stiff, and pouted at me. Behind her, Marmite the giant pneuma-somatic spider-spirit was peering around the edge of the bedroom door, like a nervous dog whose human family was about to have a fight; all his steel-coloured, cone-shaped eyes were pointed at Tenny, watching her for the correct social cues.

I winced and tried to look contrite. “Tenny, it wasn’t me. I swear, I didn’t lose Evee. I thought she went out. Really!”

“Brrrrrrrr!”

Sevens came to my rescue, her blood-goblin mask peeking around my side, her arms wrapped around my hips from behind. “Not Heather’s fault, Tennnnnnnns. Gurrrrk-Evee’s probably hiding. Didn’t say anything about going out though? She’s been letting me know, this last week, where she is.”

I looked down in surprise, peering back at Seven’s face. “She has? Evee has?”

Sevens nodded, black eyes flashing in the grey light pouring through the upstairs window. “Been telling me to talk to her, if I have a problem.”

“Oh. Gosh.” A spike of guilt wormed at my heart. “Evee did that?”

“Mmmmhmmmrrrmrrr!” Tenny made a proud noise and tilted her chin upward. “Auntie Evee responsible!”

I winced. “And I’m not responsible, Tenny?”

Tenny squinted her eyes almost shut. “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, Auntie Heathy is responsible too. Not your fault!”

Raine struggled not to laugh all the way through that conversation, carefully turning her head to one side to avoid Tenny seeing the giggles.

None of us were particularly worried by the fact we couldn’t find Evee anywhere — except Praem, who seemed only mildly concerned — which, in itself, made me worried. Why was I so unconcerned? I had no idea where one of my best friends was, a woman who was, after all, physically vulnerable, with a prosthetic leg, a walking cane, and the attention of any rival mages who might try to muscle in on Sharrowford.

Sevens waited for Raine to control her silent giggles, then reached up and tugged on her sleeve. “Where is Evee, then? Raine?”

Raine shrugged. “Maybe she’s with Lozzie? “Tenns, did Lozzie say anything much? Was she taking Evee Outside, to check on the Cattys and that part of the plan? She’s got to get that whole airlock doodad going, right?”

Tenny’s tentacles wiggled in little circles, always a sure sign she was thinking hard. “Mmmmmmm-no? No no. Lozz-mums went to see Jans. Kissing!” Tenny pulled a big, silly grin.

Sevens gurgled. “Ohhhhh!”

“Ha ha!” Tenny said to Sevens. “Wanna see?”

Sevens nodded up and down, suddenly rather excited. “Mmhmm!”

Tenny pulled a big grin. Several of her tentacles did silly little looping motions. “Tooooo baaaaaaaad.”

Sevens pouted. Tenny giggled.

I tutted. “Now’s really not the time, I think.”

“Chess match!” Sevens demanded. “If I win, you tell me where Lozzie and Jan have gone!”

Tenny made a shrewd squinty face of careful thinking, always amusing with her huge black eyes and her satin-smooth skin. All her tentacles went into overdrive, twirling and spinning. She fluttered and trilled, then said: “If I wiiiiin — you show me the spooky house!”

Sevens sighed, or tried to sigh; with the Blood Goblin mask, a sigh sounded like a handful of stones falling down the inside of a grease-lined drainpipe. “Can’t do that. Aym says no. Fliss says no. Your mum says no!”

“Blaaaaaah!” Tenny flapped her wings, like a person flapping a cloak in a fit of pique.

We cleared our throat gently. “Tenny, we all love you very much. Please don’t try to do dangerous things behind anybody’s backs. Okay?”

“Brrrt!” Tenny trilled at me, a little frown on her face. “Auntie Heathy should do as Auntie Heathy says!”

I winced. “I’m … I’m trying my best, Tenny.”

Tenny’s frown collapsed into a pout, and then into a sad face. She gave me a hug suddenly, arms and tentacles going all over our back. We returned the hug, almost laughing. “Tenns?”

“Sorry, Auntie Heathy,” she bleated as she let go.

“It’s okay, Tenns. I deserve a little reminder now and again. We all have to work hard to be good to each other.”

Raine said, “Be excellent to each other. You old enough for that movie, Tenny?”

Tenny trilled softly and shrugged, curious but lost.

Sevens unwound her arms from around my hips and stepped out from behind me. “Wanna chess game anyway? Friendly?”

“Mmmmm,” Tenny nodded. Sevens took her hand and the pair of them stepped back inside Lozzie’s bedroom. Marmite scuttled out of the way to let them past, then climbed up the wall and onto the ceiling, presumably to watch the chess game.

Praem returned from the rear of the upstairs corridor; she marched straight past myself and Raine, pausing just long enough to turn her milk-white eyes upon the pair of us. She looked as expressionless as always, but there was something piercing about her gaze as she strode past, a wordless disapproval of this developing situation, as if she did not approve of us standing around and chatting while Evelyn was nowhere to be found.

Then she was gone, clicking past us and descending the stairs at a rapid pace.

A strange feeling crept over me — over us.

We — us seven squid girls — were starting to disagree with each other. Three of our tentacles formed a brief coalition of concern and worry: what if Evelyn was in trouble? Wasn’t it important that we couldn’t find her? Why was everyone else so calm? Why were we so calm? Top-Right was particularly insistent — we should be Slipping right now, skimming across the membrane and checking every place Evelyn might be.

The other four of us kept a calm hand on our actions. After all, nobody else was panicking. Nobody else was acting out of the ordinary. If we went flying off the handle now, wouldn’t that be in direct violation of the promise we’d made, to be less impulsive, to listen to others more?

And we had listened to Evelyn. We had listened. She had said—

What had she said?

We could not recall.

“Raine,” I said slowly, a strange feeling creeping over me as I watched Praem’s messy blonde bun drop out of sight, descending the stairs. “Why aren’t we concerned about where Evee’s gone?”

“Hm?” Raine glanced at me. She’d been peering into Lozzie’s bedroom with fond smile, watching as Tenny was setting up the chess pieces at incredibly high speed, using all her tentacles. “Evee? What’s to worry about? She’s with Kimberly, right?”

I blinked at Raine. “Kimberly’s at work. She works this Saturday. Why would Evee be there?”

“For flowers, wasn’t it?” Raine paused, turned to me properly, and frowned hard. “Wait a sec. She’s not with Zheng. She’s not with Kim. She’s not with Lozzie.”

“Exactly.” My tentacles bunched up, as if expecting an attack. “Raine, there was a time that you tracked Evelyn’s position so closely that you always wanted to know where she was. For her own safety. Why aren’t we worried?”

My heart caught in my throat. The lack of worry itself was getting strange. I felt like my mind kept slipping off the question. My tentacles kept grasping the reality and then letting it go again, as if none of us Heathers could manage this by ourselves.

Raine’s frown loosened up. She shrugged. “Praem takes such good care of her these days. You know, I don’t say it often enough, Heather, but Praem is an absolute legend. She loves Evee very much. We owe that girl more than we can ever repay, right?”

Raine’s easy smile sent a shiver down my spine. “Raine, that’s true, but you’re changing the subject. You keep ignoring it too. This is happening to both of us.”

Raine glanced at the stairs. “Evee’s around here somewhere. She’s probably down in the kitchen.”

“Raine!” I snapped. I heard Tenny and Sevens pause their low conversation in Lozzie’s bedroom, so I continued in a hiss. “Raine. Evelyn is missing. Take this seriously. Look at my face and take this seriously. Please.”

Raine squinted, as if she wasn’t quite sure. Her big brown eyes seemed to brood in the shadows of the corridor for a moment.

“Heather, I’ll ask this just once,” she said. “And I will believe you utterly, even over my own gut feelings. Are you joking, or not?”

I almost laughed. “I don’t … I don’t know, I’m not sure, I—”

“Make a decision and I will follow,” Raine said. I could have kissed her. I almost did.

“Evee’s missing,” I said — though I almost didn’t believe it myself. “Take it seriously.”

Raine nodded; the transformation in her attitude was instant, like a shift running through all her muscles. Suddenly she seemed taller, ready to move, ready to do anything.

She said: “I’ll call Zheng first. If Evee’s not with her, we’ll start round the others. Any of them don’t answer, you get ready to do your reality-shuffle fun-time teleport dance. You have my absolute and full support. If somebody doesn’t answer, you jump, and take me with you. One sec, I’m gonna grab my gun.”

“Thank you, Raine. I love you.”

“Love you too, squid girl.”

Raine moved with a purpose. She was in and out of our bedroom in five seconds, tucking her handgun into the waistband of her pajama bottoms. Downstairs she stamped into her shoes and then swept into the kitchen and grabbed her mobile phone. I stuck close, ready for the worst. Praem was busy vanishing down into the cellar, her neat little shoes echoing on the wooden steps.

Raine dialled Zheng.

I meant to stay close, but something — some unspeakable, wordless urge — drew me away. I was less than five paces from Raine, standing in the kitchen, waiting for Zheng to answer, when I stepped into the magical workshop.

The Invisus Oculus stared back at me from the floor.

Behind me, Raine spoke into the phone: “Zheng, it’s me. Hey, big girl. Yeah, you too. Look, is Evee— nah, it’s fine, no emergency, not yet. Just need to check—”

But I wasn’t listening.

The magical workshop felt like such a secluded place, separated from the kitchen of Number 12 Barnslow Drive by only a thin wooden door, about two inches thick. Yet in here, with the curtains closed over the bay windows, with the electric lights burning like bunched candles in the ceiling, with the table cleared and pushed back, with the floor covered by a baleful canvas wearing the blank gaze of a caged god, the room felt like a religious space, an altar to something one should not touch — but abandoned and empty.

We stepped deeper. The gateway mandala at the back of the room lay blank and empty, with the gateway to Camelot closed for now. Evelyn’s magical notes on the table were tidied away neatly. The spider-servitors in the corner over the old sofa were sitting comfortably, tucked against the junction between wall and ceiling, their long stingers folded back at rest. We waved to them with a tentacle; one of them waved back, lazy and slow. Completely relaxed. No scent of a threat.

Raine called to us: “Evee’s not with Zheng! I’m gonna try Kim next.”

“Sure … ” I murmured.

We stared into the eye.

We brought all seven of us to bear.

All seven, all looking, all staring, not seeing.

Top-Right was certain we were onto something. Bottom-Left said Evelyn meant us to understand this as a clue. Middle-Right coiled around our waist, certain that she did not want to look into the circle. Slowly, we came to a consensus; there was nothing there. Nothing to see. Nothing worth observing.

We almost turned away, ready to follow the sound of Raine’s voice once again.

But then we felt that impulse, that mischievous urge to push beyond what was allowed or what was sensible, the very thing that Taika had warned us about, the very element of ourselves that we kept justifying.

We held back just long enough to say: “Raine? Raine, I’m going to step into the Invisus Oculus. Is that okay?”

Raine called back from the kitchen, “To check for Evee? Sure! Do it! Good idea!”

Permission! Good girl! Good girls! We were being good. We coiled about ourselves with the knowledge that we had done this right, for once, even if we were being very silly. Of course, if Evee was in there, she would be right there, we would see her, so she wasn’t. But this was wonderful practice.

We stepped onto the canvas, careful not to touch any of the lines. We stepped right over the edge of the eye-symbol, past the jumble of magical words and esoteric shapes, past the line of the iris, and into the pupil.

“Ha!” Evelyn barked. “Took you long enough.”

“E-Evee?!” I spluttered. “What— how—”

Evelyn was sitting on a chair in the dead centre of the Invisus Oculus. She had a cushion beneath her backside, her walking stick resting against one thigh, a nice comfortable shawl over her shoulders, and a book open in her lap — Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals, which I think she intended as a clever little joke. She did not look lost or missing, not one little bit; in fact she looked very comfy and cosy. If I had found her like this under any other circumstances then I would have been overcome with the urge to join her.

And she was grinning like I’d never seen before, smug and satisfied in her triumph.

“It works!” she said. She slapped the book shut and let out a low chuckle. “Don’t look so surprised, Heather. I did warn you!”

“You— what!? Evee, everyone is worried about you! I was worried about you! How were you … you were right here, you … ”

We glanced around the magical workshop again, expecting to see some kind of semi-transparent forcefield effect which had been hiding Evelyn from the rest of the room, but there was nothing except empty air and the lines of the Invisus Oculus itself. We even stuck several tentacles back and forth over the line, to see if we could feel anything. Nothing but air.

Evelyn was saying: “Oh, nobody’s really worried about me, don’t get all—”

“I was! Raine is! Evee!”

Evelyn huffed, some of her triumph rubbing off with embarrassment. “I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating sense, for pity’s sake. Tch.” She tutted and then added in a low voice, almost speaking to the floor: “Of course you care about me, Heather. I’m not disputing that.” She cleared her throat and took up her walking stick in one hand, preparing to stand. “I mean everyone knew subconsciously that I was right here, even if they couldn’t access the information. I’m betting you had to push yourself pretty hard to come look for me, yes?”

I tutted and huffed a little myself, uncertain if I should be impressed with the fruits of Evelyn’s work or horrified that she was treating this enforced forgetting so casually. “Evee, I was getting genuinely worried, I—”

Evelyn stamped once with her walking stick, expression stiffening. “Heather, this isn’t an idle question, this is important testing.”

We blinked at her. “Ah?”

She sighed. “You are the closest thing we have to the Eye, Heather. If the Invisus Oculus doesn’t work on you then it’s failed at the very first hurdle. I explained all this to you before I went in, but … well.” She cleared her throat. “The fact you don’t recall is actually a very good sign that it’s all working as it should.”

“I … I sort of recall?” I frowned, dredging my memories; there it was, like a silt-covered rock I’d missed amid the murk. “It’s coming back to me, now that I’m standing in here with you.”

“Good,” Evelyn said. “Now, be honest with me, don’t pull your punches, I’m not going to be offended, I did set this up on purpose, after all. You had to push yourself to recall me, yes? Correct? Is that right?”

“Oh. Well. I suppose so. Yes. Yes I did. And it only worked because Raine was there to reinforce me.”

“And you couldn’t see me at all, not even a little bit, from beyond the circle?”

“Not at all.”

I swallowed with growing discomfort. Something about this whole situation did not sit right with me, and it wasn’t Evelyn’s behaviour. Behind us in the kitchen I could hear Raine talking down the phone, checking with Kimberly that she had not seen Evee all day; I turned to step out of the circle and let her know that Evelyn was right here, safe and sound.

“Wait!” Evelyn snapped. “Don’t. Not yet. The test is still going.”

“Evee!” I whirled back to her. “Praem is marching up and down the house, worried sick about where you are! She’s genuinely worried!”

Evelyn pulled a difficult face, grumbling low in her throat. “Yes, yes, I’ll have to apologise to Praem. She was part of the test, too, you understand? You all were. I told you that I was going to step in here, just before I did. I even made sure you were listening, I repeated it twice, and I instructed Praem specifically not to panic. She’s worried, but not panicking, is that correct?”

“I … well … yes. Yes, I think.”

Evelyn breathed a sigh of relief, and then smiled again. All her theories were coming true. “What does it feel like?” she demanded. “What did you think? About me not being there.”

I grumbled, but tried my best to answer: “Well … I … I kept rationalising it. I assumed that you’d gone out or something.” We shrugged. “I kept thinking maybe you were elsewhere, maybe with Zheng, or maybe with Lozzie, but not here, not in the house, certainly not right here in the magical workshop, right where we … left … you?”

“But you knew something was wrong? And then you acted on that?”

I bit my bottom lip, trying to piece together the last thirty minutes; my thoughts were all jumbled up, even when we pulled ourselves together and turned every tentacle-neuron toward the task of memory. We recalled standing in the magical workshop with Evelyn — then standing in the magical workshop without her. She must have stepped into the circle, but the loop of our memory was disrupted. We vaguely recalled her words about stepping inside, which was the source of our strange lack of panic, but the details were fuzzy and indistinct.

“To be honest, Evee? I was getting worried by the fact I wasn’t worried. It was becoming weird.”

Evelyn snorted softly. “Recursive concern. And that drove you in here, eventually?”

“Mmhmm. Sort of. That and cephalopod mischief. I don’t think Raine would have stepped in here, not by herself, not by—”

Raine called from the kitchen: “Evee’s not with Kim, either! Gonna see if I can raise Lozzie, if not, then Jan!”

I called back: “Okay, Raine!” Then I said, “Oh, oh, Evee, she can’t hear me, can she?”

“Not at all.” Evelyn sighed. “Leave her for a moment. The test continues. Did this work on Sevens? Have you seen her?”

“Uh, um, yes. She didn’t know where you were, either. Same with Tenny. She was worried, too! She blamed it on me, at first.”

Evelyn almost purred with satisfaction. “Good. Now, as for your ‘cephalopod mischief’, well, let’s hope the Eye isn’t going to descend to ground level, grow legs, and step inside.”

I grimaced. “Evee, don’t even joke about that. It sent that bizarre copy of Lozzie once, remember?”

Evelyn grunted, an evil sort of smile playing across her lips. “That’s what the real Lozzie’s Knights and Caterpillars are for, yes? To keep the Eye’s potential minions off us.” The smile widened. “I think I can count this first test as a grand success. The Invisus Oculus works on humans, demons, Outsiders, other-non-human Earthlings — by which I mean Tenny — and on you, Heather, the closest thing we have to the Eye.”

“W-well, that’s … that’s good … ”

Evelyn stood up with a pained grunt, favouring her walking stick over her prosthetic legs. The last two days of hard work had taken a toll on her body. I not-so-covertly moved three tentacles into position to catch her, in case she took a sudden tumble. Evelyn eyed the tentacles and sighed, her triumph turning sour.

She snapped, “Don’t sound too bloody happy about it, Heather.”

“I’m sorry!” I blurted out. “I-I am happy about it, and thank you for doing so much work, it’s— yes, it’s amazing that it works. Congratulations. Well done. You did it, Evee! I’m just … I’m … well, I—”

“Spit it out.”

I huffed, squared my shoulders, and gestured with half my tentacles at the triple-layered magic-circle eye-design in which we stood, sequestered and hidden away from the rest of the world, from the sight of any being which attempted to observe us.

“Evee, you’ve created a magical design that looks like the Eye, and makes people forget about whatever is standing inside it.”

“Mmhmm,” Evelyn grunted. Her soft blue puppy-dog eyes held my gaze, unwavering, satisfied, very happy with herself. “That I have.”

“Do I have to spell this out? That’s like—”

“Like Maisie,” she finished for me, then sighed. “Heather, I’m not insensible to the implications.”

I heaved out a huge breath and nodded along. “Right, yes, exactly. It looks like the Eye and it makes people forget about what’s inside it. Exactly like what happened to Maisie — well, sort of. I didn’t forget about you completely. But we still don’t really understand how the Eye made everyone forget her. This is … this is not what I was expecting. This is practically a miniature revelation, and … I don’t like it.”

“Me neither,” Evelyn admitted, casting her own gaze down at her creation. “I am satisfied with the result of the work, of course. The practical applications for us are perfect. As long as nobody uses it to rob any banks. But … mm, the shape of the Invisus Oculus, it’s not something I chose, Heather. You understand that, yes? All I’ve done here is follow principles, ones I’ve derived from all my research. The best form those principles produce is this shape.” She tapped her walking stick on the canvas upon which we stood. “Which is worrying, certainly. But it gives us a certain kind of insight, does it not? A real clue, as to why nobody remembers your sister. She is, in a way, enfolded within the real Eye.”

I groaned. “An Eye can’t observe itself, not without a mirror? So nobody can observe Maisie, so … ” I trailed off and shrugged, feeling emotionally exhausted. “I’m sorry, Evee. I don’t know how to piece this together, not yet.”

“No rush, Heather,” she said. Evelyn shifted her weight heavily, leaning on her walking stick; she suddenly looked exhausted. I very gently placed a tentacle against her shoulder, conforming to the shape of her body, supporting her. “We have almost a week of additional work ahead of us,” she continued. “More testing here, then scaling up out in Camelot. Building the bloody airlock system to get those Caterpillars through, all that. Not to mention the first live test, mm?”

I felt rather overwhelmed. “Live test?”

Evelyn squinted at me. “Yes, Heather. You or Lozzie, or preferably both of you, for safety and redundancy, taking this out to Wonderland.” She nodded downward at the canvas. “We’re not scaling it up until it’s confirmed to work on the real thing. You only have to do it for a few seconds.”

“O-oh, right. Yes. Of course. Evee, I’m a little overwhelmed by all this, by you … vanishing!”

Evelyn smiled. Despite the energy of her success, she looked drained; the bags beneath her eyes were worse than usual. Her long blonde hair caught the dim light in the magical workshop. She smelled faintly of sweat and sleep, warm and cosy and in need of a good nap. To my great surprise she leaned into the support of my tentacle against her shoulder.

“You need a rest, Evee,” we said.

She huffed out a laugh and shook her head. “There are many, many stages of setting up between this and the real thing, Heather,” she said with surprising gentleness. “Don’t worry. You won’t be doing this alone. Not without me and—”

As if summoned by the premonition of her name, Raine stepped through the kitchen door and into the magical workshop; she was lowering her mobile phone from her ear as she crossed the threshold.

Raine started to say: “Evee’s not with Jan and Lozz, either. I guess she must be … Heather?”

Raine stopped, looked left and right, and then frowned at my apparent absence. I could almost see the thoughts turning over in her head, trying to retrace the steps she’d seen me taken, trying to reconcile reality and memory. She ran a hand through her hair, raking it back across her scalp; with her other hand she casually tossed her phone in the air, spinning it end over end, and then caught it again without looking.

“Bloody show-off,” Evelyn grumbled.

“She’s not showing off to anybody!” I whispered, as if we were a pair of little girls playing hide-and-seek, and Raine was right outside our hiding spot. Yet I felt compelled to defend my lover’s honour. “Raine’s just like that, even when nobody’s watching.”

“Showing off to the universe itself, then,” Evelyn said.

Raine looked right at us, as if she’d heard our words. She made eye contact with me — not a fleeting moment of brushing gazes, but prolonged, conscious, intentional contact. Her frown never wavered.

“Raine?” I murmured. “Oh. Oh, that is spooky. I don’t like this.”

“Spooky?” Evelyn chuckled. “Miraculous, more like.”

Raine finally looked away again, puffed out a big sigh, and glanced over her shoulder. “Praem!” she yelled. “You got Heather down in the cellar with you?”

A reply floated back, like the tolling of a tiny, muffled bell — not from the cellar, but from beyond the back door. Praem was probably checking in the long grass for any sign of Evee. “No Heather,” she intoned.

I hissed to Evee: “This is getting terribly weird, I’m stepping back out. Come on, Evee, we have to end this now. This is getting odd.”

But Evelyn said, firmly yet gently: “Wait.”

Raine turned back and stared right at us again, seeing but not observing. Looking but not comprehending. I waved a tentacle and watched her follow the motion with her eyes, but she didn’t acknowledge it in any conscious fashion.

I hissed: “Is this another test?”

Evelyn glanced at me, then glanced at Raine, then back at me again. She was breathing too hard, a little flushed in the cheeks. Was she enjoying this? I’d never known her to revel in cheeky mischief, but maybe she just so rarely had the chance. Her eyes flicked down my face, then back up again.

She muttered, “You could call it that.”

She was almost shaking.

“Evee? Are you okay—”

Evelyn reached for my face and cupped my chin with one hand — her maimed hand, with the missing digits and the absent chunk of palm. Her fingers were so soft — but less than gentle; she pressed hard enough to hold me in place, to leave no question that I was to be a good girl and stay still. I was so shocked that I didn’t resist, didn’t even flinch, just allowed her to pin me.

“Evee—” I managed to squeak.

And then, in full view of Raine’s unseeing eyes, Evelyn bobbed her head forward and planted a kiss on my immobilised lips.

The kiss was rough and clumsy; Evelyn simply mashed her mouth against mine, without any elegance of sliding lips and slipping tongues, without the slightest hint of experience or forethought. We nearly clacked teeth through our lips, a most uncomfortable sensation. Evee didn’t even close her eyes — her eyelids were fixed open by a cocktail of haste, mortified embarrassment, and commitment to her action, no matter how foolish. Desperate, awkward, hard — but full of force and need. She kissed me like she was trying to drink me up, or bite off a piece of my face. She tasted of peanut butter sandwiches and lukewarm tea.

Evelyn broke the kiss as quickly as she had begun, jerking back and letting go of my chin, as if surprised by herself. She slammed her full weight back to her walking stick, so hard that she almost slipped; I had to catch her with my tentacles, in a gentle web of pale flesh. She was flushed in the cheeks and panting hard by the time she righted herself once again.

I could only stare and stammer. “E-E-Evee— y-you— I didn’t— d-did you want—”

Raine was turning away from the secret within the circle, none the wiser to the kiss Evelyn and I had just shared.

“Did I want?” Evelyn said, blushing hard. She tried to smile, but she was unsteady. “Yes, I did. And I got.” She cleared her throat, settled her shawl on her shoulders, grasped her walking stick in a firm hand, and swung herself toward the edge of the circle. “Let’s go talk to Raine about the test. I think it’s time to lay out the next steps.”

“Evee, what about that kiss?!”

Evelyn glanced back at me. She tried to wear the mask of stern control, but her gaze flicked to my lips again with an unconscious flutter.

“Evee—”

“Share if you want. Tell her if you wish.” Evelyn shrugged, her shoulders uneven, her old pain settling back on her spine. “Not like it’s a first time for either of us.”

Then she turned away and stepped over the edge of the circle, breaking our sordid seclusion, leaving me alone, inside the pupil of this imitation Eye.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

do you know where your wife is? if your response to this question is UNCONCERN or INDIFFERENCE, then your wife is probably IN THE INVISUS OCULUS WITH EVELYN “WIFESTEALER” SAYE

(The above summary of the chapter is reproduced from the discord, with permission, by the reader ‘ray’. Thank you!)

Normally Heather is the one who needs spraying with a bottle of cold water prior to dangerous events, to get her to turn the horny off for five seconds, but this time it’s Evee. What is she playing at?! Aren’t we all meant to be going Outside, to Wonderland, very soon? Well, maybe that’s why she did it. Or maybe it was essential testing. Testing, yeah, right. Absolutely. Yeah. Hey, at least Sevens and Heather are doing better!

No patreon link this week! It’s not the end of the month yet, but as per the pre-chapter note, the next chapter will not be until the 6th of January. Feel free to wait if you really want to subscribe! I never like taking unwanted breaks or skipping posts, but unfortunately this is unavoidable seasonal disruption. I’ll still be working, still be writing every day! But conditions will not allow for a proper edit. So! Back to normal in the new year! Thanks for all your support, regardless. I’ll keep doing my best.

Meanwhile, you can still:

Vote for Katalepsis on TopWebFiction!

This helps a lot! Many readers still find the story through TWF, which still surprises me. It only takes a couple of clicks to vote!

And thank you! Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter, dear readers, and thanks for being here. I couldn’t do this without all of you, your support and comments and readership. Thank you!

Next chapter, is Heather going to ‘solve’ this unexpected kiss from Evee, or keep her eyes focused on the practical applications of being invisible? Or why not both?! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, dear readers! I hope yours is a good one, whatever you’re up to, and I will see you on the other side!

Content Warnings

Biting flesh
Drinking blood

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Number 12 Barnslow Drive is more than a house.

What had once started life as an unassuming 19th century Victorian red brick was now much more than four walls and a roof, more than the sum of the spaces between upright surfaces and horizontal floors, more than the totality of rooms and hallways, of beds and seats and doors, of creaking boards and antique fixtures and clean porcelain in the bathroom, more than the glugging of the boiler and the echoes in the cellar, more than the scratching on window panes just beyond one’s sight, more than the tapping of radiators or fingernails behind the walls, more than the cocoon-like warmth of me and mine curled up in bed, more than the beloved books in Evelyn’s study or the satisfying click of the dials on the oven, more than the overgrown back garden and the cracked paving stones of the front path, and more than the generations’ worth of skin oil worked into the wood of the bannister.

I knew this in my gut, even if I touched the knowledge with only the lightest caress. It was a great comfort which we did not wish to curdle, not for any frivolity or idle curiosity; Number 12 Barnslow Drive had welcomed us in, wrapped us with layers of protection, and kept us safe. More importantly it had kept everyone else safe as well, everyone who required sanctuary deep within the bowels of this thing that had once been just another house.

Number 12 Barnslow Drive always had a shadowy nook or a hidden cranny, ready and waiting for any lost soul in need.

Which is why I was creeping down the upstairs hallway, wearing fresh socks and clean clothes, at almost 3 o’clock in the morning, in the dark, alone.

And I did have to do this alone. There was simply no other way. Anything else would have rendered me the lowest sort of coward.

At least this way I was using my powers for good — what a ridiculous cliché, but it was true. Here we were, seven tightly coiled squid-girls in one body, once again play-acting the octopus, sliding in perfect silence through the cold waters, in pursuit of our prey.

It was about two hours since Lozzie and I had teleported back to jolly old England, to Sharrowford, and home. Two hours since I had bidden goodbye and farewell and ‘see you again sometime’ to Taika; the abyssal flame-goat and I had shared another handshake, a mutual nod, an agreement not to change phone numbers, and then something akin to a hug — she had pulled me in close and clapped me on the back several times, without lingering long enough for anything to get awkward, or perhaps to avoid me grasping her with my tentacles. Hugging Taika was like embracing a furnace one had left on for too long, in direct sunlight, in the desert.

We had spent most of those two hours since arriving home being very contrite and apologetic, while Evelyn had a ‘proper go’ at us, as Raine put it — nothing new, nothing revelatory, but I had fully deserved the telling off. Evelyn was now finally tucked up safely in bed, hopefully asleep at last, though before retiring for the night she had ventured forth into the rear of the house long before me, with Praem at her side, leaving me with strict instructions not to follow. I understood that Evelyn had established her own private understanding with the very quarry I now hunted.

Raine and Zheng were still downstairs, drinking their way through a bottle of vodka together; Lozzie was with them, but presumably not drinking. The last I’d seen of her she was in Zheng’s lap, telling a very complicated story about a pair of squirrels and a magpie. Zheng had almost single-handedly undermined Evelyn’s earlier rant — she had taken the news of my foolish ‘mage’ confrontation with a huge roar of delight and set about ruffling my hair, like I was a small child who had passed her school exams. But I’d made no attempt to bask in that approval; I had done nothing worth approving of, not yet.

I was a little concerned about all the drinking, but Raine had promised me they would all be sleeping soon. She had said that I was to set off on my solo quest without further delay, and that she would not worry if I was not seen again that night.

Privately I thought she was a little bit too optimistic.

The upstairs hallway was very dark at that time of night, a tunnel of gently creaking floorboards and looming stretches of shadow-draped wall. The curtain over the one little window was wide open, showing a moonless night sky blanketed by thick cloud, the lunar light smothered behind layers of rain-gravid darkness. The heat of the late summer’s day still lingered, trapped by the cloud cover, but it was a dark warmth, the sort that made one feel cold on the inside even as one shunned extra layers of clothing. I’d showered, cleaned off the blood, and dressed again in socks, pajama bottoms, and a slit-sided t-shirt, to let my tentacles move freely.

We did not move freely, however. We were tucked around our own torso, solemn and sensible. Playtime this was not.

We passed Evee’s bedroom door; a faint night-light glowed beneath the crack at the bottom. We longed to abandon our quest and slip into bed with her, snuggle down and pretend nothing had happened, focused fully on how surprised she might be when she wakes. We passed our own bedroom door, wide open and inviting us into the dark. We passed the study, empty and quiet, full of books in which we might lose ourselves. We passed Lozzie’s door and heard the fluttery sound of gentle little Tenny snores — but we quailed inside at how disappointed in us Tenny might be in the morning. She had missed the return home, all the drama, all the excitement, but I had been informed that she had helped soothe away certain tears earlier in the evening. Tenny possessed a great deal of emotional intelligence. She was not likely to be impressed by auntie Heathy, not this time.

The end of the hallway turned left in a sort of L-shape. On the right was the door to Kimberly’s bedroom; we could hear the faint hum of her fancy computer, fans fighting the high ambient temperatures, but she was undoubtedly asleep at this time of night. What help could she offer us, anyway? This was not her problem, not her fight.

We ignored all temptations. We pushed deeper into colder, darker, unknown waters.

I rarely ventured this deep into the rear of the upper floor of the house — nobody did, except for Praem; there wasn’t much back there, just empty rooms, some of them used for storing old furniture. I’d scurried away here for privacy a couple of times previously, and happened upon rooms I’d never paid attention to before, as the house opened itself to my needs. We could only assume it had done the same for others.

This time I peered into the darkness, barely able to make out the row of doors. We lifted one tentacle and turned on the slow strobe of rainbow bioluminescence, just enough to light our way. The shadows eased back, all the way to the next elbow of the corridor, where the hallway turned to the right. I’d never been back there. Was that the way to the attic?

“Sevens?” I whispered into the gloom. “Sevens, are you there?”

No reply.

I crept deeper into the upstairs hallway.

Evelyn had made a point of refusing to tell me exactly where Sevens had hidden herself away — not out of petty sadism or a desire to subject me to some pointless, abstract punishment, but simply because Sevens herself had requested so.

Back down in the light and warmth of the kitchen, I had said: “If she doesn’t want to see me tonight, I’ll respect that. I think that’s the right thing to do? Yes? Or no? E-Evee?”

Evelyn had sighed and rubbed her face. “No comment. Heather, it’s between you and her. She gave me no message, no statement. You’re to do it yourself.”

Praem had intoned: “Be a good girl.”

“Right,” I had said. “Right. Okay. Right. Yes. I can do that.”

So there I was, being a good girl.

Each unknown door yielded with a gentle click of the handle, opening on dusty furniture, jumbled bed frames, boxes of junk, and more. I found the room I’d once used to sit and think in relative silence and solitude, with a window looking out over the side of the house. I found a room which contained nothing but a single upright plinth — not real stone, but a cardboard prop, which I tested by picking it up. Another room smelled of rust. Yet another was full of perfectly clean and never-used toilet fixtures — had this been intended as a second bathroom, once upon a time? Two doors were locked — but as I tested their handles, some deeper sense told me that Sevens was not shut away within.

When I reached the point where the hallway kinked to the right, I peered around the corner with one eye and one tentacle, like I was a teenager in a horror movie; but it wasn’t the darkness or the solitude or the bare wooden floorboards which scared me. Those things felt right and natural to me by then, a comfortable cove full of shadowy spots for clever little cephalopods to hide.

Only three doors waited in this most rearward portion of the house. The smallest one, on the right, led to the attic — a cramped portal with little magical symbols around the edge of the door frame. That was where the spider-servitors had originally lived. The other two doors were unremarkable. I tried the one on the left and found it locked. Then I reached for the handle of the last door, straight ahead.

My fingertips brushed the brass. My tentacle-light dimmed, forced down by the sudden weight of shadows. The darkness rushed in.

“Back off, squid-brains,” rasped a voice from hell, a serial killer made of rusty knives dipped in rotten blood, choking on a throat stuffed with grave dirt and maggots.

“Okay, okay!” I hissed, putting my hands up and trotting back several steps.

The darkness did not abate, but thickened further, until that final door was hidden behind a wall of shadows.

A mouth formed in the black, a Cheshire Cat maw full of gleaming dark teeth — but it wasn’t grinning. The mouth was turned down at the corners, dripping with tangible gloom, like glistening venom sizzling as it fell toward the floorboards in great dark ropes.

“Aym,” I said, and did my best to smile. “Good evening. Or, um, good morning, I suppose, by now. We’re all up a bit late tonight, aren’t we? That is entirely my fault, for which I apologise, by the way.”

I’d seen and fought and dealt with far worse than a wall of grinning shadow. This was practically cartoonish compared to the rest of that day so far, especially encountered in the rear of my own home, the safest place in the whole world, in the comfortable warm shadows of a late summer’s night.

But there was something about the shape of Aym’s mouth, or perhaps about the way she’d spoken, which made my tentacles quiver and my spine tingle, like a shark had strayed into my safe little bay.

Aym was very angry.

“Fuck off,” she hissed.

I sighed and lowered my hands. “I assume I’ve found Sevens, then. Is she in that room?”

“What part of ‘fuck off’ did you not comprehend?” said Aym’s disembodied mouth. The mouth slid upward, climbing the wall of shadows, as if Aym was unfolding herself from a squat or a crouch, until she towered over me, taller than Zheng, taller than anything.

I felt a distinct urge to unfold, pounce, and drag her out of the shadows. We twitched, flexing, ready to spring. We even started to justify it to ourselves, throwing the arguments back and forth down our tentacles. We wouldn’t hurt Aym, not really — but she was pretending to be bigger than she was, and we just wanted to see, just wanted to peel back the darkness and have a proper look, just wanted to have a sensible conversation. We weren’t going to violate Sevens’ privacy if she didn’t want it! We would just yank Aym out of the darkness because she was being so unreasonable and—

And that would be very inappropriate.

I smiled my very best good-girl smile — no, my good-cephalopod smile — and held onto all those resolutions; I didn’t pretend I hadn’t felt all that, I just told myself no.

We said: “I’m not going to go in there and talk to Sevens if she doesn’t want me to do that, Aym. But I would like to establish if she’s actually in there. You can just tell me, I don’t have to intrude. Is that okay?”

“Hmmm. Let me think.” Aym’s mouth pantomimed a thoughtful pout, then gritted its black teeth and hissed: “No!”

We nodded, with head and all six tentacles, all of us. “That does sort of confirm that she’s in there,” we said.

“Nope,” said Aym’s mouth. “Now why don’t you turn your fish-stink arse around three hundred and sixty degrees and walk away?”

I blinked and thought about that for a moment. We traced a circle with one tentacle-tip. “That’s just a full circle. Do you mean you want me to walk backwards? I can’t moonwalk, by the way, I don’t have that kind of coordination or grace. And my socks don’t slide properly on these floorboards.”

Aym’s mouth twisted with a sigh. “No idea what she sees in you. You’re a twisted-up little mess of neuroses and needs, dirty little urges and unspeakable embarrassments. You’re no better than Flissy. She could spread her wings and soar and you’re here dragging her down where she can’t even breathe!”

My chest tightened. A lump formed in my throat. “I thought you sort of love Felicity, in your own way.” Then, before I could lose my courage: “You’re right, though, Aym.”

“Tssss! At least you can see it for yourself! So why not fuck off?”

I spread my hands, defenceless and empty; I’d folded away every last pneuma-somatic addition, except our own selves, our tentacles, us. “I want to apologise.”

Aym cackled, a sound like an entire rusted-out assembly line coughing to life. “Pfffffthahahaaa! Little Evelyn said that too. You think an apology is going to be enough for this? You’re going to crawl in there and tell her a sob story, the same old sob story, wah-wah-wah, I couldn’t help it, I’m so sorry for what I do, wah-wah-wah, please forgive me Sevens, please keep coddling me, wah-wah-wah.”

“I’m not going to cry,” I said.

“Pffft, as if. Isn’t that half your strategy, you—”

“I don’t deserve to cry. I’m not the one who’s been hurt.”

Aym’s mouth paused mid-word, then pouted down at me, as if she was considering my honesty. The mouth pulled into a sideways sneer. “Easy not to cry when you’re already all cried out, all exhausted and run down. Right?”

“If Sevens wishes it, then I will leave this until the morning, after I’ve slept, and my emotional reserves are refilled. And I still won’t cry, because I’m not the one who’s been hurt.”

Aym paused again. Her lips opened wide and she stuck out a massive, black, venom-dripping tongue, as if disgusted. “Urgh.”

“I mean it, Aym.”

Aym hissed. “You don’t even know what you’re apologising for, fish-head!”

“No, I’m pretty sure I do know.”

“Oh yeah?” Aym gurgled, like rusty nails hitting the surface of a boiling bog. “Try me. You going to list your emotional sins? Apologise for being a bad fiancée, a bad partner, a bad friend? Because you’re all that and more, but you don’t seem to get it, you don’t seem to change, you don’t treat her as anything but—”

“I have acted like my parents,” I said. “Like my mother.”

Aym stopped dead. The mouth closed and then vanished, the outline of lips and tongue sinking into the shadows, joining with the rest of the darkness.

I sighed. “Alright then. If that’s your answer, then … then I will turn around and go away.” My throat grew thick, but I had to respect this. “Please let Sevens know I was here, that I tried, and that I respect her … turning me away. I will try again in the morning, I … the morning, after waking up. Please, Aym, let her know … ”

Aym stepped out of the shadows.

It was like watching a pillar detach from the wall, like seeing a piece of architecture decide to relocate itself. This Aym was not the tiny sprite of lace and spite, but a column of shadow that reached from floor to ceiling, with waves of black rolling down her sides, misting out across the floor. We were in true darkness here, hidden away at the rear of the house, and working through the most difficult of regrets and shames. Aym’s true domain.

A pillar of darkness towered over me. Tendrils of lace-like flesh hung from inside a lightless hood. Aym had no face.

“You’ve come alone,” she said. Her voice was like two rusty knives dragged across each other, amused in the way a murderer might be before the killing blow.

I spread my arms and my tentacles too, resisting the urge to flare and strobe with threat display. “An apology is not an apology if it’s coerced. And I … I don’t want anybody else to see Sevens crying. I’m trying to spare her dignity.”

“Ha,” rasped the Aym-giant. “Too late for that.”

Aym suddenly bent in the middle, leaned over my head, and peered around the corner behind me, into the rest of the corridor. It was like being beneath the coils of a giant black snake, dripping with shadows and darkness. But then she straightened up and grunted.

“You really did come alone, squid-brains. Thought you might at least have the maid in tow. Or your bulldyke.”

“I have to do this by myself,” I sighed. “As much as I do anything by myself, with seven of us in here.” But I paused and looked Aym up and down, running all my senses along the strange pillar of darkness she was choosing to present.

Aym recoiled like a dark flame before the wind. “What?!” she hissed.

“Sorry!” I hurried to say. “I-I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious, I just … Aym, you went to the abyss too, didn’t you?”

The pillar of darkness coiled in on itself, shrinking slightly. “Ehhhhh?” she sneered.

“You mentioned it back when you and I had our first real talk. You went to the abyss. You returned. You went with … somebody else, who didn’t make it, is that correct?”

The Aym-pillar made a sound like she was sucking on her teeth. I had the distinct feeling of being squinted at.

“Aym,” I carried on. “I know you don’t like answering questions about yourself, but were you ever human?”

She rasped, like a rusty flywheel spinning in a pit of gravel. “You’re right, I don’t like answering questions about myself!”

“Okay, okay, I apologise. It’s just … today has been a day of revelations for me. I met another abyssal returnee, a human, like me. And then I realised just now, you’ve been here all along. Or, if not here, then at least nearby. And now I can’t help but wonder, what was the abyss like for you?”

Silence and shadow.

“You don’t have to answer that, of course,” I said. “Maybe you’ll feel comfortable doing so one day, and I would like to hear, but only if you do. And, okay, maybe you were never human in the first place. Maybe—”

Aym sighed. The air rolled with a wave of shadows, flowing like smoke across the floor. “You don’t ever stop, do you? I thought you came here to apologise to my Sevens.”

“I did,” I said, pulling my tentacles back in, tight and smart. “Sorry, I— I’m trying to be focused.”

Aym snorted. “Still not going to fuck off?”

“Is that what Sevens wants?”

Aym exhaled again. The pillar got a little smaller. She was now just as tall as Raine.

I continued: “From her mouth to my ears, is that what she said? Tell me the truth, and I will turn around and leave for now.”

Aym huffed. She continued to shrink until she was no taller than usual, a sprite in the darkness, though the door was still hidden in the shadows. “I’m not going anywhere, squid-brains. I’m not letting you be alone with her. You keep doing this. You keep hurting. The road to hell is paved with—”

“Intentions don’t matter,” I interrupted. “Only actions and their results.”

Aym stopped. She hissed one last time — and vanished.

The shadows cleared. The door was revealed, upright and sensibly shut. The brass handle gleamed black.

Aym hissed, as if from nowhere: “I’ll be watching. One wrong move … ”

I nodded. “Thank you. Honestly? I would expect nothing less. You care about her a lot.”

Aym clucked an invisible tongue. The black sheen on the handle slipped away and joined the shadows on the floor.

We — us seven very naughty and very contrite squid girls — stepped up to the door and knocked gently with the tip of one tentacle.

“Sevens?” we murmured, mouth almost touching the wood of the door. “Sevens, it’s us. It’s me. May I come in?”

Her answer was a soft and throaty gurgle, muffled as if below the bed covers.

“May I take that as a yes?” I asked.

Silence. A rustle of sheets in the stygian black.

Then, in a voice I’d never heard before, high and exhausted and somehow empty: “Enter if you wish.”

We grasped the door handle, turned until it clicked, and stepped inside.

We expected another half-empty, disused, dusty back room, perhaps with an old bed frame and a clean mattress, and Seven-Shades-of-Solitary-Sorrow sitting all sad and sallow beneath a single sheet. We expected a cave-like retreat, a hermit’s hideout, far from comfort and company, devoid of light and life. We expected withdrawal from the world, sanctuary in cold tears, a miserable shivering figure crouched in the dark.

Instead — yellow.

Gleaming gold of imagined sunlight, feather-soft blonde of brilliant butter, fluttering glow of honeyed fire; yellow churned and warmed and rippled and grew and waved and luxuriated from every surface.

For one dizzying second I thought I had stepped Outside; perhaps Evelyn and Sevens had worked together to play the ultimate deserved prank on me, and turned this bedroom door into a hidden gateway to the heart of the Palace in Carcosa, and I had just stepped over the threshold of some hidden boudoir that Sevens had never shown me before.

But then all our tentacles came up, our senses extended through the rest of our body, and we saw the details beneath the flaxen décor.

Yellow rugs lay on the floor, thick and fluffy like dandelion fronds and pineapple flesh — but the floorboards of Number 12 Barnslow Drive lay beneath; yellow sheets hung from the walls like tapestries, thin as sunlight and delicate as canary feathers — with the pale, ordinary, very un-yellow walls of the house behind them. Yellow light glowed from a trio of standing lamps, from soft LED bulbs dialled down for warmth and intimacy, but the lamps themselves were plain old plastic. Yellow curtains covered a window — looking out across the back garden — but blackest night peeked around the edges of the imitation sunlight. Bedspread, pillows, cushions, sheets, all a great mass of butterscotch soft, in lemon and corn and clean sand — but the bed frame itself was old wood, and had probably stood here for longer than any of us had known this house.

Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was sitting on the edge of the bed.

At least I assumed it was her; she was wearing a mask she had rarely shown me before.

A teenage girl, perhaps a couple of years younger than me, slim and slight inside a brown-green military uniform several sizes too large for her malnourished frame, stained with mud and blood and other, more unspeakable substances. Filthy blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, tied with a piece of dirty string. Her face was greasy and exhausted, freckles overwhelmed by the dark rings around her eyes.

The ‘Gunner’, as Heart had called her, the mask in which Sevens had shot her irritating sister through the chest. Only the eyes were different — solid balls of deep yellow, without human pupils or irises or whites. Pure Carcosan stared out from a human face.

Seven-Shades-of-Suffering-Soldier held a stubby handgun in her lap, a nasty little twist of black metal against her pale, bony hands.

“Sevens?” I said out loud.

The Gunner looked up at me, her gaze a pair of yellow pools into which I felt myself slipping; I was reminded, for the first time in quite a while, that Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was not a human being. She was not even pretending to be a human being. She was something alien, from Outside. Perhaps that gaze was intended to remind me.

Well, I wasn’t human either.

The Gunner said: “Were you born in a barn?”

“A-ah?”

“Shut the door.”

Her English was heavily accented, Eastern European or Russian. She spoke low and slow, as if we were huddled in a bunker or a trench somewhere beneath a freezing sky.

I stepped fully into the room, shut the door behind me, and then looked around again, taking in the incredible transformation of this dark little corner of the house.

Seven-Shades-of-Slow-and-Steady said: “Like what I’ve done with the place?”

“Uh. Yes, very. I had no idea this room was even back here, you never mentioned it before. I’m sorry I didn’t ask, Sevens.”

“It wasn’t,” she said.

I blinked at her. “Ah?”

“It wasn’t back here,” she explained, slowly and carefully. There was something dead about her voice, some essential quality drained from her tone, by shell-shock or combat fatigue or years of grinding stress. She stared at me with those all-yellow eyeballs, peering out of a face I barely knew. “Well, the room itself was here. But all the furnishings, they are new, or newly arranged, as of this very evening.”

“Oh. Wow. Fast work, my gosh.” I reached out and brushed one of the hanging sheets with a tentacle-tip. “Are they real?”

The Gunner nodded. “Aym suggested that I should have a bedroom. Evelyn offered in grace and gratitude. She provided some small funds for furnishing. Felicity did some shopping. I gather this was difficult, past ten in the evening on a Monday night. However, the house provided most of the materials. We poked around the other rooms. This is the fruit of a scavenger’s haul.”

“It looks great, though!” I said, and I genuinely meant it. “It’s very … yellow.”

Seven-Shades-of-Shooter sighed and looked down at the pistol in her hands. “Perhaps ‘yellow’ is an identity too.”

I took a pair of cautious steps toward the bed, eyeing the pistol in Sevens’ lap; the gun didn’t look anything like Raine’s weapon — this pistol was older, scuffed and scratched, with much of the black finish worn away from the edges of the metal. It seemed huge in the Gunner’s tiny, delicate hands. I realised the cuffs of her uniform were tied to her wrists with lengths of string, to stop them flapping about.

“Is that real?” I said. “The gun, I mean?”

Sevens looked up at me, but she did not reply.

I sighed gently. “I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t send a rather specific statement. But it’s a statement you’re entitled to make, if that’s what you want. I just want to make sure I’m not misreading—”

“Am I real?” said Seven-Shades-of-Solipsism.

“Of course you’re—”

In one swift motion, Seven-Shades-of-Shellshocked-Spite raised her pistol, did something complicated to the mechanism — removing the safety and pulling back the slide to chamber a round, as Raine later explained to me — aimed at my centre of mass, and pulled the trigger.

Bang!

I’d had just enough warning to whip all my tentacles in front of my torso and head, speed-growing armoured plates down their collective front. I flinched and bit my tongue, and—

Felt no impact. No bullet. Not even a tickle.

I peeked out from behind my wall of tentacles; Seven-Shades-of-Sadistic-Sport was not laughing, not even smiling. A tiny curl of steam rose from the barrel of her gun, as if that had been a very real bullet.

I winced and whispered: “That’s probably going to bring the whole house running.”

“No,” said Sevens.

I cocked my ear, but Sevens was right. No rush of panicked feet sounded down the upstairs corridor, no chairs shoved away from the table down in the kitchen, no Tenny trilling and fluttering in alarm.

“ … good soundproofing?” I asked.

Sevens gestured with the pistol. “For your ears only, Heather.”

We lowered our protective cage of tentacles, reabsorbed several millimetres of steel-laced chitin armour, and let out a huge sigh. I was sweating, on my face and down my back and under my armpits.

“Well, I can’t say I didn’t deserve that,” I said.

The Gunner’s expression finally showed something other than dead-eyed exhaustion. She frowned at me. “You didn’t seriously think I was going to shoot you? You don’t think you deserve shooting, no?”

“No! No, oh Sevens, no. I mean I deserved a little scare. I’ve scared and upset you. Doing the same to me in return is—”

“Highly unhealthy,” the Gunner said. “Hardly the basis for a relationship of mutual respect.”

“Yes, but—”

“Take the gun from me, Heather,” said Seven-Shades-of-Storm-and-Strife. She pointed the weapon again. “Or the next bullet might be real.”

I resisted the urge to put my hands on my hips, or huff, or sigh, or cross all my tentacles. I stared into the barrel of a gun which I knew was not real, held by a woman who I knew would not hurt me, and felt — almost — no fear.

“Sevens, I’m not going to do that. Like you said, it’s an unhealthy way to conduct a relationship. If you want me to leave the room, if you want to drive me off with fake gunshots, then I will leave, I will respect that. I’m not taking that gun from you.”

“Why not?” the Gunner said.

“Because it’s your gun.” I shrugged with one shoulder.

Seven-Shades-of-Shaded-Sight slowly lowered her pistol. She put the safety back on, and put the gun back in her lap.

I smiled, as best I could. “May I approach you?”

She shrugged, limp and lifeless. “Do whatever you want.”

I resisted another sigh. “The whole point of this is that I shouldn’t just do whatever I want. I should take into account the feelings and needs of my partners, of you. So, if you don’t want me to approach you, if you don’t want me to sit on that bed, then I won’t. I’ll stand here and we can talk like this.”

Sevens stared at the wall, her yellow eyes unreadable orbs, like reflected sunlight on gold, brilliant but empty. “Come closer. Don’t sit down.”

“Thank you.”

I walked up to the bed and stopped a few paces short of Sevens, beyond arm’s reach but within tentacle range; several of us wanted to reach out and touch her, but we joined together to stop the internal debate. Sevens looked up at me again — then finally sighed, as if the edges of the mask were peeling away.

“So,” I said. “What does this mask mean — the ‘Gunner’? No, wait, that was a silly question. I can see it, it’s right out in the open. It means you’re exhausted, emotionally exhausted. Is that right?”

“Deadened,” said Sevens.

I winced.

She smiled — ever so thin and pale, and the smile did not reach the corners of her eyes. There was something sadistic and bleak about that smile. “I have two masks more melancholy than this, but neither of those are human. One is much larger than this room and this house. It would not fit.”

I blinked in surprise. “I’m sorry?”

Sevens shrugged again. Her greenish uniform was much too large for her, shoulders moving beneath the fabric. “Even very large things can be lesbians.”

“Oh. Oh, well, of course, yes.” I swallowed and realised my heart was going too fast. My hands prickled with sweat. My tentacles rumbled in gentle disagreement — none of us entertained the thought of turning around and retreating, but some of us debated over drawing out the conversation longer, over trying to make Sevens smile before we got down to the meat of the situation, before we opened our chest and bared our guts to her. But we were here for a very specific reason. Sevens had let us in, and now we stood before her. There was nothing else for it but to show some real courage, for once in our life. “Sevens,” we said. “You probably already guessed this, but I — we, all seven of me, of us — I want to apologise—”

“I know,” she said, then shrugged. “I know.”

“Good. Then, first I want to explain why, I want to tell you what I was told, about me, about how I think, about where I’ve gone wrong, I—”

“I know that too,” she said, then she sighed, eyes and face sagging with greater exhaustion. “I was watching.”

I blinked several times. “You … you were? You mean, with Taika?”

Sevens nodded.

“But … you were also here, sorting this room out?”

Sevens shrugged. “I can be in more than one place at the same time. You and I are bound, remember?”

“Oh. Well. O-of course. So, you heard everything, about my nature, and self-justification, and—”

“All of it,” she said, soft and clipped. “I was watching and listening to you, at a great distance. My love. I know what you’ve been through. I know what you heard. You need not put it into words. I trust the roots of your apology. I trust you are genuine.”

“Oh, but—”

“There is no need for words.”

Now I finally did huff, and puff, and put my hands on my hips. “Sevens.”

Her turn to blink at me, surprised but placid and accepting, with nothing beneath those deadened eyes. “Yes?”

“Sevens, that defeats the point of me making an apology. You can’t just peer behind the curtain and write it all off. That just justifies everything I did! You have to expect me to do better!”

Sevens just stared, yellow and tired. She said: “Do I?”

Oh. Oh, ow. Ouch. But she was right. I winced, hard and painful, a terrible squeezing inside my chest. But she was right.

“Sevens, I mean that you have a right to expect me to do better.” I folded my tentacles inward, drawing all seven of us together, trying to think as clearly as I could. I’d practised these words in front of the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, and they still didn’t seem right, coming out as a jumbled-up mess, but I had to say them regardless, even if they were not perfect. “You’re not my therapist, Sevens. I can’t rely on you to fix my broken thinking this time. You’re my fiancée! Or at least my girlfriend. And I’m not treating you right.” I forced the words out, plucking myself apart as I went: “You came with me to talk to my parents, you gave me unquestioning support during one of the most difficult conversations of my life. You’ve done nothing but support me, help me, drag me out of the dark. Not just this time, but multiple times! And I’ve taken that for granted. In the park back there, when I was raring to confront Taika, all you wanted me to do was slow down, get the others, and not put myself in danger. And then I said I would wait for Lozzie, and I didn’t. I used you, then told you that I didn’t value your feelings or input. You were there when I needed you, and then I shoved you out of the way when you weren’t wanted.”

“We made a compromise.”

“No!” I said. “We didn’t! I just decided that you couldn’t stop me! And you know what, you couldn’t! Nobody could!” I extended my tentacles out to either side. “This, all of this, everything I’ve become, not just in the physical but in the spiritual as well, the mastery of brain-math, it’s … it’s power! And I’m misusing it! If you heard what Taika said, then you heard all of it. It doesn’t matter what good intentions I have, it doesn’t matter how I justify these things with reference to what I’ve become inside. All that matters is action, and results. My actions hurt you. I don’t mean to do all this — but I did anyway. And that … that makes me a little bit like my mother. Like how my mother treated me. The damage is real, no matter the intent.”

Sevens just stared, unreadable, tired beyond words.

My heart clenched inside my chest. Was I failing? Was this the end of Sevens and I? If so, then I had to continue doing the right thing.

“I’ve fucked up,” I said. “Pardon my language, but I feel it’s the only suitable word. Not just this time, but previous times. I feel like I take you for granted, maybe because you’re not human, not even biological. Maybe because you appear and disappear, maybe because you seem so wise, and yet so abstract. None of that is an excuse. I’m sorry. And … and I can’t promise I’ll never do this again. I keep doing this. Taika made that clear. Hopefully this was a wake-up call. I can only promise that I’m going to try to be more aware of myself. I’m sorry for how I’ve been treating you, Sevens.”

Sevens stared, nothing behind her eyes.

I took one last deep breath. My guts were churning. “Y-you don’t have to respond to any of that right now. You don’t have to accept the apology. You—”

“Am I your fiancée?” Sevens said — voice cracking around the edges. “Or am I just a mistake who threw herself onto the stage, to be devoured by the ravenous audience?”

“Oh, Sevens, oh, no, no, you’re so much more than—”

She sobbed, only once — and then the Gunner was gone, replaced with a much more familiar mask.

Seven-Shades-of-Sanguine-Sprite was sitting on the edge of the bed, right where the Gunner had sat. Her bony knees were drawn up to her scrawny chest, her slender arms wrapped around her bare shins, so tiny and delicate, like she might shatter at a touch. Her black-and-red eyes were full of tears, shining in a face gone pale and greasy with sweat and stress. Her lips were parted, wobbling and uneven, showing her rows of needle-teeth inside her mouth. She was wearing her usual — a black tank-top and a pair of black shorts; but draped over her shoulders, tucked in around her legs, and cupping the soft curve of her chin, was the golden yellow robe that she had gifted me, as protection from the Eye, as an unspoken promise, as a piece of her heart.

“S-sorry I mimed shooting you,” she mumbled, sniffing to hold back the tears. “Guuuuur-lurk.”

“Sevens, oh, Sevens, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay.” My tentacles hovered, uncertain what to do. “Should I … may I sit down? May I—”

Sevens made a throaty grumble and held out her arms toward me.

We joined her on the bed. We sat next to her and let her climb into our lap, sprawled across us more like a pet than a person. She hung onto a tentacle and chewed at the flesh, pinching with her teeth but not breaking the surface. I kissed her cheeks, wiping away her tears with a corner of my sleeve. She bonked her head on our chest, like a cat requesting petting — and that is exactly what she was doing, asking me to stroke her long dark hair. A yellow comb sat on the nearby bedside table, so we scooped that up and set about combing her hair out, getting rid of all the little uneven tangles. She wriggled and wiggled and nuzzled our sides, she grabbed tentacles and tucked them around her middle, she purred and gurgled and made weird little throaty noises like a clogged-up drainpipe.

This wordless skinship went on for ten or fifteen minutes. There was nothing sexual about it — or maybe there was, maybe my definition of ‘sexual’ had become too limited. It felt more like a pair of animals rolling around in a dog bed than a couple engaging in foreplay. At one point Sevens ended up on her tummy, with my tentacles rubbing her back. A minute later she was sprawled across my belly, rolling her hips against the bed. A minute later again, we were holding hands, side by side.

Eventually she settled in one spot, sitting in my lap and facing forward, so we were both looking in the same direction. I had half my tentacles wrapped around her, holding her gently but tightly. The gauzy, floaty, yellow robe was half-draped over me in return.

“Heather?” she said, gurgling at the shadows at the far end of the room. I wondered if Aym was over there, watching in silence.

“Mm?”

“Do you love me?”

Rather than answering on reflex, I took a moment to really think about the question, about what it meant. Sevens twisted in my lap and looked up at me, red-on-black eyes clear and clean, burning quietly against her pale skin. She didn’t seem impatient, or confused, or worried. She just wanted the truth.

“Yes,” we said eventually, staring at the same shadows on the wall. “I do love you. I’ve told you that before, and it was the truth. I think love comes very easily to me. Which is perhaps a problem.”

“Mm,” she rasped. “Love you, too.”

“But,” we added slowly. “I also barely know you, partly because you barely know yourself.”

“We don’t spend a lot of — gluurrrk — time together.”

We smiled down at Sevens, feeling guilty but hopeful. “Yes, you’re right, and I’m sorry for that, too. You and I, we dived into this really quickly. We basically had no romantic relationship beforehand, and then you accidentally on-purpose proposed to marry me.”

“Sorrrrrry,” Sevens rasped.

“No, no, it’s just … Sevens, I am kind of a mess. A big mess. And you’ve been dealing with that mess, rather than focusing on yourself. Except with Aym, maybe. Which is good, mind you.”

“You don’t have to apologise againnnnnn, Heather.”

“Maybe not. But it’s important to me, to express what I’m apologising for.” I sighed. “There’s more than a little bit of cephalopod in me. Always was, long before I went to the abyss. Getting me to do something I don’t want to do, or getting me to hold back when I want something, it’s … difficult. I keep leaping off at high speed, convinced my own ideas are always correct, to go fight things, or poke things. Have you seen that youtube video with the little toy boat stuffed with crab meat, in the top of an octopus’ aquarium? And it focuses so completely on getting that meat out, like that’s the only thing in the world?”

Sevens shook her head.

“Well, you get the idea. And that octopus is me. That’s what I’m like, sometimes. And this time, yes, Taika was not dangerous in the way you were worried about, I didn’t get hurt, and so on, but if I rely on that outcome, it just encourages me to keep justifying this stuff, this behaviour, every time.”

Sevens puffed out her cheeks. She didn’t want to say yes, Heather, you’ve been acting so very badly, but she did not disagree.

“My point is,” I went on, “I’ve apologised before, but I’ve not truly changed my attitude. Sevens, it’s not your responsibility to make me change. It’s mine. Fixing me is not your responsibility. You — you are your responsibility, Sevens. And maybe you and I can be together, and be good for each other, but … but maybe you should try to do some things for yourself, too.”

“Mm?”

“I mean, things that don’t use me as a reference point,” we said, wiggling our tentacles. “Friends that aren’t mutual. Things that aren’t all about me. It’s … I think it’s hard to have a proper relationship with somebody who you’re relying on completely for a self-reference point.” I sighed and rubbed my face with three tentacles. “Ahhh, I’m mangling this. I wish I was like Raine, wish I could just explain this easily, without making a huge mess of it all the time.”

Sevens leaned up and kissed the back of my hand. “Makes sense. Mmhmm.”

I smiled down at her — and gently wrapped a tentacle around her neck, holding her lightly. She gurgled through her teeth, soft and gentle.

“More importantly, Sevens, I want you to know yourself, because I want to know you. You proposed to me, but I’ve given you so little. I think it’s time we did something very specific.”

Sevens went wide-eyed and started to blush. “A-ah? Ah!”

I reached up with one hand, tugged down on the collar of my t-shirt, and tilted my head to the side. “Bite me.”

Sevens’ mouth hinged open, showing off her rows of razor-sharp, needle-like teeth. She looked about ready to drool. “Heatherrrrr … we can’t!”

“Why not?” I asked, my own breath coming harder than I had expected. “Will it do any real damage? Will it leave a mark on my soul? Will I turn into a vampire too? That would be a novel way of defeating the Eye, at least, make myself invisible in mirrors.”

“No,” Sevens gurgled. “Uuuurk-none of those things. I’m not a real vampire anyway, am I?”

“Then it’s just for fun,” I said.

My heart was beating so much faster than I’d expected. Oh dear.

Sevens was panting now, ragged and rough, her big red-and-black eyes glued to my pale throat. She gulped. “Fun … ”

“And that’s what you and I haven’t had enough of,” I said. “Just you and me, alone together, having fun.” I tilted my head further. “Come on, Sevens. Do you want to do it?”

“ … you might— might die.”

“Ah?” I blinked and straightened up. “I thought you said it wouldn’t do any real damage?”

“Nnnnnnno,” she rasped, pulling a difficult little face. “Not from this.” She made her needle-teeth go clack-clack. “From the Eye. Within a week or two. You might be gone.”

“Ah.” I took a deep breath, counted to ten, crammed all those thoughts down into a compacted ball as hard as I could, and then let the breath out again. I pulled my collar down a second time, and tilted my head to the side. “I might be, yes. So that’s all the more reason to have this, together, while we can.”

Sevens turned all the way around in my lap, until she was facing me. She was shaking, quivering with breathy excitement. She put her little hands on my shoulders — shivering, clammy — and went up onto her knees, so she was leaning over me. Her golden yellow robe fell across the front of my body. Her lips parted with a wet click, showing her teeth again, sharp and pointed. She leaned down until her lips brushed the edge of my neck, my throat, her warm breath tickling my skin.

“ … are … urrrrrr—are you … Heather, are you sure?”

I closed my eyes, shaking all over. All our tentacles were gripping tight, squeezing Sevens like a bag of blood herself. “Bite me, Sevens. Bite me for fun. Show me what you like to do.”

Sevens nuzzled close, opened her maw, and bit down.

Like the bullet from the Gunner’s pistol, the Blood Goblin’s teeth were just another stage prop, just another piece of costume, like a paper crown on a mummer’s brow. But props and fakes and pretend can still look and feel very real, when one wishes them to do so. We are, after all, what we pretend to be.

I felt two rows of razor-sharp teeth puncture my throat and sink into my veins. I gasped, eyes rolling into the back of my head with a strange mixture of pain and pleasure, of being entered and violated by something that loved me. Sevens clamped her mouth over the ‘wound’, and then started to suck; we felt mouthfuls of blood leaving our body, sluicing across her tongue and sliding down her throat, bobbing as she drank.

My little leech did not stay attached for long, just enough for a good few mouthfuls. Her lips popped free with a slurp, her teeth withdrew with a feeling like bone rasping through flesh, and her tongue lapped across my throat, as if licking the wound shut.

She rocked back in my lap, her lips stained with traces of blood, eyes hazy and cloudy, cheeks flushed bright red.

We clapped a hand to our throat, and found — nothing. No wound, no hole, no blood.

“A play,” Sevens gurgled. “Guuuurlk!”

Panting, flushed in our cheeks, strobing bright down the length of all our tentacles, we replied: “A good play. Well done. Come here, Sevens.”

A few minutes later we were beneath the bed covers together, snuggled down deep, wrapped inside the cocoon of Sevens’ yellow robes. Sevens was the little spoon, tucked against my front, while I took the larger role, arms and tentacles wrapped around her from behind.

“Sleep here tonight?” she gurgled, her mouth hidden below the covers. “Please?”

“Mmhmm,” I grunted back, half-mumbling into the pillow. “Everyone knows. Just us? Or is Aym about?”

We both waited for a moment, as if the shadows might reply; perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I saw a grudging sneer in the darkness at the foot of the bed.

Sevens snuggled in closer, her head just beneath my chin. “Heather? Heatherrrrr? Can I be your kitten, instead?”

I blinked with surprise — not because the request made no sense, but because it made so much sense. Like a missing puzzle piece.

“Of course, kitten,” I said, wrapping my tentacles around Sevens’ wrists and waist. “You can be whatever you want.”

And so Sevens and I drifted off to sleep together, hidden away in a secret room in the rear of Number 12 Barnslow Drive. My present to her, to whatever she wanted to be. My present before the Eye.

Because Sevens was right. I had suppressed my reaction, my gut-churning fear, my anxiety of the inevitable; I clung hard to the promise I had made to my parents — that I would bring Maisie home, that I would not fail — and to the promise of Taika herself — that we were not alone, not the sole abyssal wanderer returned to reality.

But still, Sevens had a point. Within two weeks, I might not be here at all.

I would rescue my sister, whatever it took.

But I might not be coming back from Wonderland.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Chomp!

Some time ago, back when the story had not been running for very long, I said in an off-hand comment that no vampires would appear in Katalepsis, as I am far too obsessed with them to keep such themes under control, and they are best kept contained to the dedicated vampire-themed story I will write one day; I have failed that particular mission spectacularly, I think.

So! Last chapter of arc 22! Heather puts Taika’s advice into action, makes a serious apology, and commits to doing better. But she’s not got long, has she? Wonderland looms, the Eye watches all beneath its gaze, and Evelyn only has to finish one little magic circle, and then it’s time to mount an expedition, to the one place that Heather fears and desires more than anything. Arc 23, the next arc, is currently planned to be the final arc of Katalepsis Book One! It’s likely to be quite long indeed, not counting any epilogue material. So! Here we go. To the black ash and howling wastes, to the Eye, and Maisie.

If you want more Katalepsis right away, you can get it by:

Subscribing to the Patreon!

All Patrons get access to two chapters ahead! No matter what level you subscribe at! That’s about 20k words at the moment. The more support I get through Patreon, the more time I can dedicate to writing, and the less chances of having to slow down the story or get interrupted by other responsibilities. The generous and kind support of Patrons and readers is what makes all this possible in the first place! I wouldn’t be able to do this without all of you! Thank you so very much.

You can also:

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And thank you! As always, dear readers, thank you for reading Katalepsis! I’m always so happy that so many people enjoy my writing, I hope you’re having a great time with it, and I’ll see you next chapter!

Next week, it’s time for final preparations and testing, to hide from that there great big eyeball in the sky.

Content Warnings

Discussion of child murder/the death of children.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Taika’s words licked across the gap of dawn-drenched air like tongues of flame, rising from the molten pool of her throat like steam from hot iron plunged into oil-thick water; she rolled her exposed pale shoulders against the ruined white leather sofa, leaning back and showing off her abdominal muscles, legs crossed, arms outstretched to either side, her limbs like burning logs falling away from the centre of a fire, to uncork the secret heat within; her orange eyes with their strange goat-like pupils crinkled at the corners with sadistic amusement. A smirk played on her lips, a punctuation mark to her dark admission.

In the days and weeks after I had returned from Wonderland, Taika had watched me — a nine year old girl, alone, bereaved, and lost, going mad with the revelation of an eldritch truth I could not comprehend — and she did not do this to see if I needed her help, or guidance, or rescue, but to find out if she needed to murder me before I could grow up into something else.

Taika’s smirk dared us to respond. Smug and teasing and all-knowing. Taunting us with the murder uncommitted.

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” I snapped.

Taika blinked.

I sighed a huge, unimpressed, and very irritated sigh, rolling my eyes and crossing my human arms. “I get enough of that from the likes of Zheng, or Badger, or the cultists I apparently keep saving from a fate worse than death. No!” Taika opened her mouth to clarify her words, but I ran right over her and kept talking. “I am not a god — squid-based or eyeball-shaped or any other form of deity or sub-deity, thank you very much. And I’m not going to grow into one, either. The very last thing I need is somebody … like me—” I gestured at Taika with an up-and-down nod, “—calling me that.”

Taika stopped lounging and straightened up. Her smug smirk was gone. “Hey, calamari, I meant—”

“You should bloody well know better!” I interrupted, my temper well and truly lost. “Pardon my language, I’m sorry for swearing, but if you have genuinely been through a similar experience to me, down in the abyss, then you know what it feels like. You know the alienation and dissociation and the … the … body troubles! So I will thank you to not call me a god, jokingly or otherwise.”

I huffed, shrugged my shoulders with my arms still folded, and glared one of my best glares at Taika — which was especially squinty right then because I was exhausted in all three different ways it was possible to be exhausted, had blood around my eyes, and wanted to lie down.

Taika glanced at Raine on my right and Evee on my left. Raine just smirked in imitation of Taika. Evelyn snorted and muttered, “Don’t look at me, goat. You’re the one who offended her.”

Lozzie made her eyes big and covered her mouth with the hem of her poncho, as if she was witnessing a developing scandal. She bobbed from foot to foot behind me, a little bit overstimulated.

Over by the kitchen area, Praem intoned, soft and bell-like: “Correct terminology: angel.”

I winced and screwed my eyes shut. “Praem, I am sorry, but let’s not get into that taxonomical discussion in front of Taika. Please?”

“She can be your angel or your devil,” Praem intoned. “You have no choice in this matter.”

Evelyn grumbled and put her face in one hand. Raine laughed and provided a small round of applause. Lozzie went, “Ooooh! Devil Heathy! What evil will she do!?”

Praem said: “Crimes.”

Taika cleared her throat and smiled as if in great pain.

Raine smirked back at her and said: “Serves you right for trying to get all edgy there.”

Raine had a point. Between us we had succeeded in totally undermining Taika’s dramatic moment, which was probably a good thing. I wasn’t sure why she’d admitted to planning the murder of a helpless nine-year-old girl, but something about her smug glee and the need to provoke us had rubbed me the wrong way. There was something desperate and untrue about the way she’d said that, like we were sitting in a confessional booth and she was trying to shock the priest into denying her absolution.

“Suppose it does,” Taika said, smiling much less now. “For the record, the ‘squid-god’ bit was just a lucky guess, not a cold read. Just one of my little Lovecraft jokes, you know?”

Evelyn snorted with open derision. “Better not to invoke the excretable gentleman from Providence too often. Is this a habit of yours? Or do you believe all his rambling as truth?”

Taika grimaced. “Nah, no. Fuck. Just … just … ” She trailed off and turned her eyes toward the huge bank of windows along the rear wall of the apartment, gazing out at the dawn sunlight, bright and yellow now, drenching the city below in blue-sky illumination.

Raine took the bait; I let her have it, mostly because I was vastly out of my depth talking about this kind of thing.

Raine said: “Taika, hey, lemme ask a thing, okay? Would you really have killed a child? You would have killed nine-year-old Heather, if she’d come back wrong?”

Taika’s smug smirk flickered back onto her lips, like dry kindling touched by sparks. Her goat-like eyes lingered on Raine for a moment. But she didn’t answer.

Raine smirked back. “Yeeeeeeeah,” she said. “You would have done. You would.”

Evelyn hissed through her teeth with genuine disgust. “No better than a mage. No better than all the rest of us.”

Taika snorted. “What, did you think I was noble? Altruistic? You think I did all that shit, running around after Dole, reading the notes on ‘Mister Telescope’, tracking all those twins, because I wanted to save the world or something? Reality isn’t a DnD campaign. That is what you thought, right?”

Raine shrugged; her own smirk had turned dangerous. I felt like I was watching two predators stalk each other around a jungle clearing. Not an unfamiliar feeling when it came to Raine. I rather liked it most of the time, but here I was out of my depth.

“Did cross my mind,” Raine said. “S’what I’d probably do.”

Taika smirked wider. “But you’d have another reason for doing it, bulldog. I don’t even know you, but everybody’s got their own reasons, buried deep or otherwise.”

Raine shook her head. “Nah. I’d do it anyway.”

“Wait,” I spoke up — this conversation was rapidly getting away from me. “Taika, why did you do it, then? Why did you do all that?”

Taika focused on me again. “Glad you asked, calamari. There’s a lesson you’re missing, right here. One I thought you’d already reached on your own. I gave you all the pieces. Wasn’t meaning to. Just thought you got it. But maybe you don’t.”

Taika reached down and picked up the crushed can she’d tossed onto the sofa earlier; the metal was still marked with little blackened fingerprints from where she’d heated it previously. She held up the ragged disc of aluminium, caged between her fingers and pressed against her palm, and then made it glow red-hot. She held it pointed toward me, like showing off a medal.

“Fire,” she said — and her voice burbled like a river of molten rock. “You know what fire does?”

I glanced at Raine, but she shrugged. Evelyn said nothing. Lozzie backed away, vaguely curious but sensing something was wrong. My tentacles stirred from their post-workout exhaustion, made curious by the scent of a riddle, by a veiled question which was not what it seemed. Cephalopod curiosity brought reality into focus, as if Taika had just presented us with a toy boat stuffed with fresh lemons.

“Fire … burns?” I said.

Taika shook her head. “Other things burn. Fire is the burning, the process. No, calamari. Fire — fire cleanses. Fire makes things clean. It burns away the dirt. Fire is better than sunlight, soap, bleach, elbow grease. Better than anything. And that — that’s what I am.”

She squeezed the red-hot aluminium can with her fingers. The metal started to deform under pressure.

“Show off,” Raine muttered.

“Raine, wait,” I said, with all our senses glued to Taika. Our tentacles were raised now, bobbing up and down in thought, their tips twirling and twitching. “Taika, do you mean that’s what you became, down in your version of the abyss?”

Taika nodded slowly, squeezing that can tighter and tighter as she spoke. “The pits. But no, you’re not quite right. Long before I went down into the pits for the first time, before I was consumed by fire and reborn from fire, I was a sort of vigilante.” She laughed softly. “Gentle word, that, ‘vigilante’. Bomb-throwing mad-woman, more like. Arsonist, burner, ‘Leveller’ — isn’t that your English word for it? These days they’d probably call me a ‘terrorist’.” She nodded toward the wall of penthouse windows, looking out across the city, Chengdu, thousands of miles from England, in the heart of China. “This lot certainly would, if the official authorities knew who and what I really am. But they don’t, and they don’t care. As long as I don’t go burning down anything important.” She squeezed the aluminium can almost into a ball. “But, when I went down into the pits, the fire below the world, I lived. I resurfaced. And you have to get it through your head, calamari, when one of us comes back from down there, we don’t come back changed, we don’t become anything new. We just come back as more of ourselves.”

I nodded. “I sort of … figured that out. I think?”

“Mm,” Taika grunted, narrowing her eyes. “Not sure you did, not all the way. Fire burns, so I burn. It’s just my nature, setting things on fire and cleaning them out. You were so shocked earlier when I said I would happily burn a few old grimoires. But that’s just what I am. That’s how I solve problems. I burn things. I cast them into the flames.” She laughed, a little more uncomfortable than before. “Does all sound a bit fascist, right? But here’s the thing about fire — it doesn’t have an ideology. It consumes the good and the bad, the flesh and the metal, the innocent and the guilty, all alike. Fire doesn’t care. Fire itself is always clean, and it cleans all it touches. So that’s what I do.”

I sighed. “This is a very long-winded way of explaining why you were willing to murder a nine year old girl. You don’t have to make excuses, you do know that? If you want me to forgive you, I will.”

Taika shook her head with an indulgent smile. “Nah, you’re still not picking up what I’m putting down, Heather. Yeah, that was why I followed Dole’s notes in the end, sure. I thought there might be a monster at the end of the nightmare. Something that would need burning, good kindling for the flame. That’s why I watched you, why I checked up on you. That Eye, that watching sensation, if it was trying to crawl into our reality through a little girl … ”

Taika trailed off, no longer smiling. She gulped.

Raine finished: “You would have burned her.”

“Yuuuup,” said Taika. “And part of me would have enjoyed it. Part of me wouldn’t have, of course. I’m not human anymore, but I’m still a person in here. Nobody can burn a child and survive untouched.”

Evelyn snorted. “What is the point of pantomiming your guilt for us, Miss Goat?”

Raine agreed with a little laugh. “Yeah, we’ve let you cook with this, but I don’t see where you’re heading.”

Lozzie, now on the other side of the room with Praem, said, “Maybe we could talk about something else … ”

Taika ignored all that. She had eyes only for me — burning, goatish, quiet eyes of mutual recognition.

“Do … do you want my forgiveness?” I said. “Or—”

Taika sighed. “No, calamari. I’m trying to tell you that you’re the same.”

We squint-frowned at her, tentacles going stiff. “That doesn’t sound accurate. I’m sorry, I know this means a lot to you, but I’ve never contemplated murdering a child. In fact, we’ve—”

“Again, not what I mean, calamari. You’re not paying attention.” Taika squeezed her hand shut, finally crushing the can into a molten ball. She opened her fingers and turned off her heat, holding the lump of metal on her upturned palm, watching it cool slowly in the warm sunlight. “You’re making all the same mistakes I did. Well, not quite the same, you’re not doing as much arson, but we’ve got the same root cause. You’re not fire, not like I am. You keep calling the pits ‘the abyss’, so I guess I can’t even imagine what you felt. I’m not quite sure what your deal is, but … ” She eyed us, running her eyes up and down our smooth, pale length. We coiled around ourselves in sudden self-conscious embarrassment. “Hunting, hiding, like a squid?” she asked. “Bursting into my apartment without warning? There’s a predator’s urge in you. And you pissed your friends off, too, running off all alone to follow that predatory urge.” She chuckled softly. “I did pick up on that, earlier. I’m not deaf.”

To my left, Evelyn bristled, straightening her spine and squaring her shoulders. “That is between us and Heather, thank you very much. It’s a family matter, nothing to do with you.”

But I was struck mute for a moment, staring at Taika.

Taika tossed the little aluminium ball into the air and caught it again. “‘Fraid not, English rose. Your little calamari is just like me.” Taika turned her attention back to me again. “She came back from the underworld, reborn as more of herself. And I can take a pretty good guess how she ended up right here. Calamari, you had that business card I gave your father, right?”

“Y-yes,” I stammered.

“You saw that card and jumped right at me, didn’t you? Went off half-cocked. And I’ll bet you justified it to yourself—”

“N-no, how are you—”

“—by saying ‘this is just what I am’, ‘this is my nature’, ‘I can’t deny my nature, so I gotta do it, even if it’s the stupid thing’.” Taika glanced at Evee. “And it was the stupid thing to do, right?”

Evelyn glared at Taika, teeth clenched hard. But then she nodded.

We were all the way alert now, and arguing with ourselves, very badly, tentacles bobbing back and forth. Top-Right did not like this, she said it was nonsense, we were right in the first place, we were always right. Middle-Right coiled up in shame, mewling that Taika was correct, that we’d justified everything with nonsense, that we were selfish and awful. Middle-Left wanted to cry, to hide away and run from this. Bottom-Left snapped and snarled and hissed and raged. Bottom-Right coiled around Middle-Left, kept her from hiding.

A raging storm inside my shared mind. I started to pant, to panic. I had to shut this down, quickly, now!

“H-h-how do you understand all that?” I stammered out loud. “No, you just got that from overhearing the conversation earlier. That was a lucky guess, that—”

“Predatory hunting isn’t all you’ve got though,” Taika went on, smooth and hot, like clean flame from a gas fire. “You want to be spiky and scary and toxic, you like hiding in the dark.” She nodded to my friends, even to Lozzie and Praem. “And you’ve got friends. Pack instinct, something like that. That keeps you from being a monster. Means you weren’t a monster in the first place. Dunno what that is. Nesting, protective, something like that, something I haven’t got either. Where would you be without friends — or what did you call them, ‘found family’?”

Evelyn spoke before I could. “This is rude at best and invasive at—”

“Dead,” I blurted out — we all did, all of us in agreement. “Dead. I’d be dead.”

I sniffed hard, feeling tears threaten in my eyes. Evelyn frowned at me. Raine put her arm back around my waist.

Evelyn snapped: “Heather—”

“No, no, Evee,” I said. “She’s … she’s … ”

Right? Wrong? Offensive? We had justified everything and anything by referencing what we were! A clever little cephalopod — who did not have to do the difficult thing of going home and dragging her friends into this, who did not have to treat Sevens like a real partner, with real feelings, but just told her to shove off into the dark and let us squirm and writhe and hurt ourselves.

“Hey, English rose,” Taika said to Evee. “You were mad as hell with your octopus girl earlier, right? For running off alone without telling anybody? For breaking promises? For making … who was it, ‘Sevens’ cry? But this is a pattern with her, right?”

Evelyn ground her teeth.

“It is,” I squeaked.

“Yes, fine,” Evelyn crunched out. “She has a habit of going off alone, emotionally and literally. Breaking promises with good intentions. Treating others like … ” Evelyn hissed. “Why am I telling you this? Heather, why am I telling her this? We came here for information about the Eye, not for a group therapy session.”

“Because I’ve got insight,” Taika purred.

“Because she’s right,” I murmured. We all pulled in tight, tentacles bunched up hard. “She’s right, I’ve always been justifying things to myself this way, I … I’ve become so skilled at reinforcing my own bad ideas.”

Taika said: “Where would you be without your friends, calamari — if you didn’t wind up dead?”

I shook my head, lost inside the question.

Taika sighed. “You’d be some post-human nightmare, far, far, far gone beyond the edge, preying on whoever or whatever you can, justifying it in all sorts of ways. And then somebody like me, or something bigger than you, or something you can’t even comprehend, would come along and burn you up.”

I was panting too hard, feeling the sweat prickle on my back and forehead and under my armpits. I made one last attempt to justify myself: “I … when I broke into your apartment, I was … I was convinced you knew something, that I needed to … ”

Taika shrugged. “Doesn’t matter the reason you had, calamari. You’re following your nature, same as me when I came back as fire. But none of it is alien. It’s just us. It’s just whoever we were before, just more true. And if you keep using it to justify things you know are wrong, you’ll ruin yourself.” Taika smiled — not the smirk, but melancholy, a cold camp-fire burned down to ashes in the misty morning. “I’m telling you this ‘cos I’ve been there too. I justified burning a lot of shit that I shouldn’t, literally and metaphorically. I pushed everyone away, burned all the bridges, fucked everything up. And I always, always, always had good reasons. I’m sure you’ve got good reasons too, for every one of your hunts, for every time you ignore your friends, for every time you hurt them.” She sighed. “This is what I’ve been trying to explain: the reason I would have killed a nine-year-old girl, burned up her corpse, and thrown the ashes into the sea? Same reason your friends here were so angry with you. Same reason you burst into my apartment with a half-cocked plan you tried to back down from. Same reason you saw that damn business card and went off like you did, and told yourself the whole way that it was a good idea. Am I right, or am I wrong?”

My throat was blocked by a lump. My chest was tight, my palms were sweating, my eyes stinging with something more than pain.

“Yes,” I murmured. “You’re right.”

It felt different coming from somebody like Taika — from somebody like myself, who’d been down there in the abyss and knew how it felt to come back to the world in the wrong body, inhabiting the wrong space, filled with urges to do things that were not quite human. It was all so easy to justify anything with reference to that alienation and dissociation.

To justify my tentacles? That was joyous. To justify hissing and spitting, or attacking those who would hurt my friends? That was acceptable, perhaps even laudable, maybe even genuinely good.

But this?

I ignored my own promises, broke my own rules, did stupid things because I convinced myself it was the correct move — and this, this break-in and confrontation, it was the last straw upon the camel’s back. This all could have gone so much worse if Taika had not been who and what she was. I might be dead, because I had not gone to my friends.

Raine had been so afraid for me that she’d shot first and asked questions later. Evelyn had been furious enough to shout in my face, terrified for my safety. And Sevens? I’d made Sevens cry, because I had ignored her pleas to look after myself, to not leap before looking, to seek help from my pack.

“Heather? Heather, hey, love?” Raine said. She squeezed my middle. “Heather, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” I croaked. But I didn’t cry, though I had to wipe my eyes on my sleeve. The faint sheen of tears came away with flakes of blood dissolving in the moisture. Crying now would be self-indulgent. I wasn’t the one hurt here, I was the one who’d done the hurting. “It’s not okay, Raine. Evee … I … I … ”

Evelyn was cringing. She didn’t want to hear, but I started to say it anyway.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Heather!” she snapped. “Save it—”

“I’m sorry. I apologise. I don’t know if I can fix myself, if I can be better, I—”

“Save. It,” Evelyn repeated.

“Wh-why? But—”

Evelyn huffed out a long-suffering sigh. “Because I have not finished scolding you yet. I have not finished with you. You don’t get to apologise now. Your apology is not accepted, not before I’m done. The only reason I held back is because we are thousands of miles away from home and you’re having a crisis. And we’re in front of this!” She gestured at Taika with her walking stick.

“Gee, thanks,” Taika muttered.

“But … when we get home?” I asked.

Evelyn huffed again, then nodded. “When we get home, Heather.”

I nodded, then did something I could almost not face doing. I turned to look at Raine. Three tentacles went first, then the other three, then the rest of me.

Oh, she was smiling, of course. That made it even harder.

“Raine,” I said gently. “Are you disappointed with me?”

Raine opened her mouth to lie, so smoothly and so easily, but then she caught the look in my eyes, paused, and pulled a sort of grinning wince. “I just wish you’d stop putting yourself through this.”

A terrible lump formed in my throat. I nodded. “O-okay. Understood.”

“Hey, Heather, I love you,” she said.

“I love you too, Raine,” I murmured.

“Huh,” Evelyn grunted.

Then we looked up at Lozzie. She just bit her lower lip and wobbled her head from side to side. That was all the answer I needed.

Praem said: “Bad Heathers go in the naughty bucket.”

That made me almost laugh, just enough to stop me from dissolving into morose moping.

“Alright!” Evelyn threw up one hand, her other clutching her walking stick too hard. “Alright, fine, that’s quite enough. Why in front of her?” Evelyn gestured at Taika again. “And why now? Why, after all the times we’ve … huh!”

Because Taika understood.

My parents were not responsible for what had happened to me; I’d learned that only hours ago, that my mother was desperate for the truth once presented with even the smallest crack. Taika was not responsible for the Eye; she’d been doing her best to avert the situation, whatever her motives, whatever her flaws. Even this ‘Darren Dole’ she’d known was not responsible — just another foolish mage playing with powers beyond his limit, a man used up by the Eye, trying to do good in some unrelated situation. Mages, parents, doctors, everyone — none of them did this to me. They did other things, but they were not responsible for my actions.

The thing that had crawled back out of the abyss, wearing my face, inhabiting my flesh, speaking in my voice? That was all me. The decisions were all mine.

Heather Morell had made Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight cry, because Heather Morell kept acting like a shit.

Pardon my language.

“Because this is like Natalie’s parents all over again,” I said out loud, for Evelyn’s benefit.

Evelyn squinted at me. “Heather. What?”

I sighed and tried to explain. “When Natalie was taken Outside, I justified what I did to her parents on the basis of what was best for Natalie. And maybe I was right about that part. Maybe she won’t grow up like me, confused and afraid. But even if the result was right, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was bitter and angry, I tortured a pair of people, like surrogates for my parents. And today, when I went to see my parents for real, I thought I’d gotten past that. But I hadn’t.”

Evelyn just frowned.

“I didn’t lash out at my parents — well, not much,” I sighed. “But then I lashed out at Taika here, at the version of her I’d built in my head, at what I imagined she might be. And I lashed out at Sevens. I ignored her requests. All of it. I went squid-brained and I told myself I was doing the right thing. But I wasn’t. And Taika understands that. Because she and I are the same.”

Taika watched me as I spoke. When I finished, she nodded slowly.

“You’re doing a hell of a lot better than I did, calamari,” she said. “I burnt up a whole fucking marriage before I wised up. Feel a kind of responsibility toward you, you know?”

We sighed. “Thank you, but the last thing we need is another surrogate mother figure. The Eye is one too many.”

Taika smirked — but then I cut her off, surprising even myself.

“You did have a responsibility to me, though,” I said. “And you shirked it.”

Taika raised her fire-red eyebrows. Raine suppressed a smile — perhaps she could sense where I was going with this. Evelyn frowned at me and said, “Heather?”

“It’s alright, Evee,” I said, without taking my eyes from Taika. “I’m very calm and very sensible right now, I promise. You may insist if you wish, and I will listen.” Partly to show Evelyn that I was serious, and partly to reinforce the emotional steps I was taking, I concentrated briefly on folding away the straggling remains of my abyssal transformation: I cleared my throat until all I had was a regular set of human vocal cords; I blinked my eyes hard until I had only one set of lids; I switched off all my chromatophores — well, almost all, I did allow myself a little indulgence; I made sure my tail bone was not a spike and my skin was not armoured and my muscles were soft and buttery and Heather-small. Last but not least I ensured my tentacles were smooth, rather than studded with the afterthoughts of barbs and hooks and spikes.

But then I turned the brightness up; I made us pink and orange, electric blue and neon green.

I even took the time to rub the dried blood away from my eyes. I would be presentable and polite, sensible and serious, and I would do right by the people either side of me.

“You could have told me the truth, Taika,” I said. “When I was a child. You could have told me what I was, what happened to me, that Maisie was real.”

Taika chuckled softly and shook her head. “I told you, calamari, I don’t stay in one place for long. I can’t—”

“Then you could have come back!” I snapped, allowing a little sliver of my temper to roam free. “When I was a teenager, or years later. You could have spared me years — years! — in and out of mental hospitals, just by telling me the truth. But you didn’t.”

Taika’s smile turned almost mocking. “You’re just lashing out at me because I’ve told you off for bad behaviour.”

“Actually, yes!” I said, getting a bit more shrill than I’d intended — that was more like it. That felt right. Our tentacles wiggled, joining in. “I am. You’re correct. And I’m lashing out in the way I’m supposed to. With words, instead of hissing at you — which I still reserve the right to do, mind you. I’m saying this now, politely, properly — but angrily! So I can get it out of my system. So my friends can be assured that I’m not going to teleport myself halfway across the world to have another tantrum at you, ever again.”

I paused to take a deep breath, expecting this to erupt into an argument. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that, but I was ready to keep my cool. Or at least that’s what I told myself. If the worst came to the worst, I would let Raine and Evee do the talking.

But Taika just waited, eyebrows raised. Evelyn stayed quiet too, watching me with growing curiosity.

I pushed on: “We ran into a situation very much like my own, some months back. I mentioned it just now. A little girl by the name of Natalie was taken Outside by a mage. We rescued her, and then I forcibly introduced her parents to magic, to the supernatural, so that they would never make the same mistake of denying their child’s experiences. And … and in retrospect, I believe I made the wrong decision. I went about it incorrectly. But you!” I pointed a tentacle at Taika. “You did the opposite. You checked I wasn’t going to devour the world, and then you never came back to tell me the truth!”

“I couldn’t do—”

“No, Taika, you could have done!” I huffed and scowled as best I could, channelling Evelyn. I crossed my arms and all six tentacles. “Unless you’ve got some esoteric reason you haven’t explained yet? You haven’t? No? Taika, I’m not the slightest bit angry at you for ‘failing’ to save Maisie and me. That wasn’t your fault. But I’m mad at you for never coming back. You had a responsibility, and you shirked it.”

For the first time in a very long while, I felt like a good girl again.

Seven good girls, all sharing one neural layout inside one body. Not a good girl in the way my mother had always defined and reinforced, normal and quiet and polite, with good-girl thoughts and good-girl shoes — but a good girl, because I’d been polite and sensible, but still shown that I was very angry.

A first step. It would have to do for now.

Taika smirked again, chuckling more to herself than anybody else in the room. Evelyn said nothing, but watched me with what I guessed was grudging acceptance. Raine rubbed my back. Lozzie just smiled and finally returned to whispering at Taika’s handle-less black blades, all lined up on the big table.

Taika shrugged. “Fair enough, calamari. Never said I was a good mentor figure.”

I nodded, a little stiff, but it felt right. “Thank you.”

Then Taika said: “You want that photograph now?”

“ … yes,” I almost whispered. “Please.”

Taika stood up from her comfortable position on the sofa, tossed the now-cold ball of aluminium onto the ruins of her coffee table, and ran both hands through her fire-red hair. She glanced around the wrecked main room of her apartment for a second, hands on her hips. “Photo’s with all the others, of all the other kids, somewhere in my big box of notes, but that’s back in my office, back there.” She jerked a thumb at the corridor, the one which led off toward the other rooms of the apartment. “Do you trust me enough now to let me go walking around my own place without hurling yourself at me?”

I sighed, pantomiming irritation to hide the nervous flutter in my chest. “Of course.”

Raine stood up too, her hand trailing across my back as she rose. “Mind if I go with you?” she asked Taika. “Just to see. Never seen an apartment in China before. Never seen one this flashy anywhere.”

Taika shot her a nasty smirk. Raine grinned back.

“As long as you don’t try to shoot me, bulldog,” said Taika.

Raine grinned wider, produced her handgun from somewhere inside her waistband, made sure the safety was on, and then tossed it on the sofa next to me. “I’m serious. Just wanna see.”

“Raine,” I tutted — but I relented. She was, after all, genuinely just curious.

Maybe about Taika, but that still counted.

Taika nodded toward the kitchen. “If you lot are staying for much longer, I could do with some breakfast. Liquid breakfast is nice, but I need some solid food. What is it, the middle of the night for you five?”

“Breakfast!” Lozzie cheered.

Raine and Evelyn shared a glance. Evelyn rolled her eyes and said, “Nearly midnight by now, I would guess.”

“Bed time snack,” said Praem.

Lozzie threw her hands in the air, poncho going everywhere. “Breakfast!”

“Breakfast!” Raine joined in.

“Oh, fine,” Evelyn huffed. “Heather?”

“Hm? Sorry? Me? Pardon?”

Evelyn said, “Are you alright with this? You’re the one who’s been out all day, dealing with a dozen types of bullshit. Mostly of your own making, but still.”

Taika said: “Bit o’ greasy food will do you a world of good. Come on, calamari. I promise no seafood.”

“Oh, um, okay then,” I said. “Let’s … lets stay and eat, just for a bit.”

“Breakfast!” Lozzie cheered again.

The impromptu gathering — of abyssal returnees, mages and their daughters, fluffy Outsider girls, and Raine — briefly dissolved in several different directions. Taika gave Praem some instructions to get the air fryer going, though Praem didn’t seem to need them, pre-empting everything Taika said. Lozzie joined her in the kitchen — with, oddly enough, one of those black blades in tow, floating behind Lozzie like a curious puppy. Taika eyed that with a touch of concern, but then seemed to dismiss it as not worth worrying about. Taika then led the way into the rear of her apartment with Raine in tow. Evelyn sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose while I waited on the sofa, my heart going too fast, my throat going dry, my hands going clammy.

“Heather,” Evelyn said quickly as soon as Taika was out of sight. “Did she see the Fractal?”

“Um … ”

“The Fractal. On your arm?”

“Oh, um, no.” I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Good.” Evelyn nodded. “Keep it that way.”

“Why?”

Evelyn tutted. “Just for safety.” She turned her eyes away and started at the floor, then carried on, slow and awkward: “I am proud of you for expressing your frustration with Taika properly. That was good. But you’re still … ”

I let her trail off before I interrupted.

“I know,” we said. “She was right, Evee. She was right about me. If I don’t respect the concerns and worries of my closest, like you, or Raine, or Sevens, then I’m just hurting you. I can’t keep justifying everything by insisting that it’s the way I am. Just like Taika. It was different, coming from her.”

Evelyn looked up, held my gaze for a moment, then nodded. “Good.”

I let out a big sigh. My hands were shaking. “Now, I do have to put that thought into action though, I can’t just … say … ”

We trailed off as Taika and Raine re-emerged from the corridor.

Taika was carrying a photograph in one hand, the image turned toward her chest. Everyone else went quiet as Taika walked right up to me and then held the photograph out, image side down.

It was an old-style physical photograph, probably taken on an analogue camera, printed on that slightly stiffened glossy paper which seemed like a relic from another era. I had vague memories that when Maisie and I had been young, my father had a fondness for those single-use, disposable cameras. They’d already been going out of style, but he’d retained the desire long past the point of practicality. A flash of memory blossomed down the length of our tentacles — I recalled my father holding one of those little cameras, black plastic wrapped in bright yellow marketing stickers, holding it up to his eye, his face painted orange by the sunset.

Silently, I thanked my father for his little eccentricities. Without those silly cheap cameras this photograph would not exist.

“Take it, calamari,” Taika purred.

I hadn’t moved my fingers an inch. My palms were damp with sweat. My heart was going too fast. I couldn’t breathe.

Raine stepped behind the sofa and put both hands on my shoulders. Evelyn touched her fingertips to one of my tentacles, soft and gentle and distant.

We reached out with two human hands and the tip of one tentacle, to accept the photograph. We took it with a quivering grip, then turned it over and stared into the past.

The photograph was exactly as my father had described, an impressive display of both his amateur skill and his love for the subjects of the picture: a salmon-and-apricot sunset sky was framed in the upper part of the photo, peering over the ivy-encrusted brick wall at the rear of the Rose and Thistle pub, perhaps a few minutes before the light gave way to dusk; the pub garden was visible on either end of the picture, the grass thick and green and healthy, just the right side of unkempt, dotted with little wooden bench-tables, some still littered with empty beer glasses and the remains of proper gastropub food; and in the middle stood two little girls, cupped between grass and sky, smiling at the camera with the joyous abandon that only happy children can achieve.

The girl on the left was dressed in a pink puffer jacket, with a long white skirt, and a pair of ugg boots on her feet. The girl on the right was wearing a dark orange coat, stripy jogging bottoms, and pink trainers. They were sharing a scarf with a long pink-blue zig-zag pattern all the way down the length. The girl on the left had wrapped a portion of the scarf around the neck of the girl on the right.

Our parents always did like to dress us differently, despite the fact that we shared the same pool of clothes — an ultimately futile attempt to stop us twins getting up to the ultimate mischief of pretending to be each other.

Because the clothes were the only difference.

Both girls had the same face, the same small neat mouth, the same awkward nose, the same puppy-fat in the cheeks, the same eyes which seemed to shade from brown to grey-green as the sunset passed overhead. They had the same mousy brown hair, thin and delicate, cut in the same style with the same straight fringe. It was hard to tell beneath the puffer jacket and the coat, but they shared the same build as well, the same propensity for petite physique in later life, the same height and weight and length of limbs.

They even shared the same toothy gap — both smiles were missing the left central incisor.

I remembered that. Maisie and I had both felt our left central incisor baby teeth getting loose at the same time, ready to fall out soon. She had lost hers first, but only by about a day; we’d felt collectively distraught by the strange new incongruity between our bodies. Maisie had forgone the reward of putting her tooth underneath her pillow, forfeited the prize of a shiny clean pound coin — I found out many years later that dad had saved them up from work, fresh from the mint, so to a little girl they might seem brand new from some fairy-forge. Instead she hid the tooth in her pocket all day, and then at night I wiggled and worried at my own loose tooth while she watched, until it finally popped free from my gums. The next morning we had proudly presented mum with a tooth each.

This photograph had been taken a few days later.

My vision blurred with tears. A few droplets ran down my cheeks and dripped into my lap. Some of them hit the photograph. I wiped them away with a shaking hand.

“Heather,” Raine murmured.

“Give her a second,” Evelyn hissed. “Let her … just let her.”

I had not seen Maisie’s face in over ten years — yet I saw her face, that face, every single day, every time I looked in the mirror. We had not changed so much since nine years old. We’d grown up — no, I’d grown up. Had Maisie? Had she aged, or was she paused in time at nine years old?

A sob threatened to claw its way up my throat. I let it free, but I only needed the one.

“I can’t tell the difference,” I said. My voice was a low whine. “I can’t— I don’t know— I don’t know which one is me and which one is Maisie. I don’t remember … don’t remember the clothes I was wearing. I can’t tell the difference.”

Raine squeezed my shoulders. Evelyn reached out and took my knee, awkward but genuine. Lozzie peered over from behind and touched one of my tentacles. Taika had withdrawn a few paces.

“Maybe I was Maisie all along,” I said, then hiccuped and shook my head. “No, sorry. That was … that was a bad joke. We … we used to pretend to swap places all the time, but … but … ”

From somewhere behind me, Praem softly intoned: “Twins.”

I nodded, staring at the photograph. “We looked the same. We always did. Do … do you think she’ll look like that ever again? I don’t even know if she has a body.”

“We’re going to bring her home,” somebody said.

I wasn’t sure who. It didn’t matter.

I sobbed again, and twice was finally enough. I wiped away the tears in my eyes, took a deep breath, and looked up at Taika; her habitual smirk was gone for the moment, retreated out of respect.

“Thank you, Taika,” I said. “May I keep this?”

Taika raised her eyebrows in surprise. “It’s yours.”

After that we broke for breakfast. Or second dinner, or a midnight snack, or “manual jet-lag pig-out” as Raine put it, though none of us had ever been on a plane or experienced actual jet-lag — with the exception of Taika, as we discovered when she declared that whatever we were experiencing, it was not jet-lag, because once we were done here we all got to return to our own beds on our rainy, cold, benighted isle.

“I quite like my rainy, cold, benighted isle, thank you very much,” I told her, and that was the truth.

I was, however, not much good for anything else, certainly not for helping prepare breakfast; I was worn out both physically and emotionally in almost every way possible, with limbs like jelly, a head stuffed full of lead, and a great desire to sit down for rather a long time. I ended up giving the photograph of Maisie and I to Evelyn, for safekeeping until we got home. Evelyn always had lots of pockets and nice places to stash things, and we trusted her with that part of our heart. She muttered something about making copies of the image, just in case, and also dug out her mobile phone again, to send more text messages home.

Praem took charge in the rather battered kitchen, assisted by Lozzie flitting about like a helper fairy, and Taika providing the information on where things actually were. The huge air fryer hummed to life like a small engine, far louder than I had expected it to be.

“That’s not an air fryer,” Evelyn grumbled. “It’s so large it’s just a convection oven.”

Taika smirked at that, just as hard as if Evelyn had misquoted some esoteric magical secret. “Wrong again, English rose. Wrong again. I can see you clearly have not eaten air fried food.”

“Huh,” Evelyn grunted. “Alright then. Impress me, goat.”

Raine helped by organising the chairs around the massive table, and quietly shuffling away the two that I had damaged beyond likely repair. Taika cleared away the weird suitcase with the electronic innards — which had surprised me by surviving the fight, clearly a lot heavier than it looked and probably covertly armoured. She also made her dozen black blades leap into the air to open up the space on the table.

Evelyn watched with naked discomfort as the blades swirled across the room and settled against the wall of windows instead, standing on their points.

One blade, however, did not join her sisters, but stayed hovering around Lozzie’s back, exactly like a puppy unwilling to part from a new friend.

Taika put her hands on her hips and cocked her head at Lozzie. “Okay, now, that’s not funny anymore. How are you doing that?”

Lozzie hid a toothy giggle behind one hand.

Taika sighed. “I’m serious. They’ve acted funny before, and it’s not always safe. Please?”

Lozzie chirped: “I just told her she was pretty!” Lozzie glanced at the blade. “You are!”

Evelyn sighed, then glanced at me for help. “Is this some pneuma-somatic element I can’t see? Is Lozzie talking to an invisible six-foot goat? I have my modified glasses somewhere here, but I don’t feel like digging them out. I’d rather not see the local Chengdu wildlife all over the walls.”

“Ummmmm,” I said. “Um. No, actually. It’s just … it’s just a big knife. And there’s no wildlife this high. I suspect Taika and I scared them all off.”

The blade did not respond in any fashion, at least none that I could discern, not even a little wobble-nod of appreciation. Somehow all this made perfect sense to Taika.

“Well,” she said to Lozzie. “Just put her back with the others before you leave, alright?”

“Mmhmm!” Lozzie nodded happily.

Shortly thereafter we all ended up around the massive wooden table, clustered at one end, with far too much food for either breakfast or a midnight snack. Taika had all sorts of Chinese breakfast foods I’d never seen before — frozen dumplings heated in the air fryer, bowls of cold noodles, pancakes filled with egg — along with more recognisable fare like toast and a couple of grilled sausages. Lozzie joined right in with her, as did Raine, perfectly willing to eat breakfast at midnight. Evelyn opted for a bit of personal restraint, not due to any distaste for the food, but simply because her body clock couldn’t take it; but Praem made sure her buns were buttered and her toast dripping with jam. Praem had also performed some kind of freezer-scrounging miracle on my behalf, and summoned up a piece of fish drenched in lemon, which I promptly demolished.

Praem joined us last. Nobody asked where she found the frozen strawberries.

Taika ate a lot, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, like a fire chewing through varying densities of wood. I used a knife and fork to eat, but my tentacles haloed outward around us as we sat. Taika and I watched each other across the table, until she winked and made me feel sheepish.

Conversation was sporadic at first. The situation was far too bizarre for even Raine to pretend normality. Breaking bread in the weirdest of ways, halfway across the world, in a place none of us had ever been before. It didn’t quite seem real, like the walls might fall away at any moment to reveal a sound stage covered in green screens.

But as plates were emptied and bellies were filled, Taika grew talkative.

“Well well well,” she purred, leaning back in her chair, finished eating for now. “If I knew you island monkeys could be this civilized, I would have invited you earlier.”

Evelyn snorted. She flicked a fingernail against her glass of water. “No you wouldn’t.”

Raine thumbed at the bank of windows. “Chengdu, huh? How’d you end up in China?”

“Long story,” Taika said. “Try to shoot me a couple more times and maybe I’ll tell you it.”

Praem intoned: “No firearms at the table.”

I was finishing the last of my lemony fish — certainly the most extravagant midnight snack I’d ever had — when I felt the question coming. Taika was stretching her legs and casting her eyes over the group. Evelyn was finished, Lozzie was watching attentively, and Raine was slowing down as she chewed a mouthful of what I thought was a spicy dumpling. The tension which had dissipated so neatly was reforming in the sun-filled gap between Taika and myself.

Raine — bless her and keep her safe, whoever and whatever is listening — headed it off before Taika could take charge.

Raine said: “You wanna ask about our game plan, don’t you?”

Taika raised her fire-red eyebrows. “Game plan?”

Raine grinned. “Don’t play coy. Our game plan for Wonderland. For rescuing Heather’s twin.”

“Ohhhh,” Taika purred. Her eyelids drooped, heavy and slow. She leaned back as if far too full of food. “Nah. I’m good, thanks.”

Raine, Evelyn, and I all shared a surprised look. But Lozzie nodded sagely, and Praem simply continued to chew her strawberries.

Taika chuckled softly. “Don’t get me wrong, I hope you make it. Hope you all get back in one piece and rescue your sister. But the less time I spend thinking about the Beyond, the better.”

Raine pulled a sort of silly upside-down smile. “You know what, fair enough. Coward once, coward twice, hey?”

Taika smirked back at her. “I don’t rise to that kind of bait, bulldog. I’ve been around too long for that.”

“You … you don’t want to perhaps offer your help?” I asked — then felt very silly as I finished saying it. “Though I suppose you don’t have much of a reason to.”

Taika shrugged. “Is the Eye flammable?”

Evelyn shot back instantly: “Literally or philosophically?”

Taika didn’t miss a beat. “Either.”

“Probably not,” I muttered. “Eyes do tend to be wet.”

“There’s that,” Taika said. “Look, I really do hope you get your sister back, Heather. But I like being alive, and I like not being out in the Beyond. I can’t really offer you any useful advice about a great big staring contest, no more than I already have. I can’t help you there. That’s not my domain.”

I nodded along. “A staring contest. That is the basic plan.”

“Really?”

“Sort of,” I murmured.

Evelyn snorted. “You sure you don’t want to come help us set fire to an entire Outside dimension?”

Taika shook her head. “Besides, that would require me to come back to England first, right? No thanks, no way. I’m happy at this end of the world. Or at least in the general vicinity.”

Raine said, with a twinkle in her eye: “Not even for that ex-wife you mentioned?”

Taika puffed out a big breath which smelled of coal-smoke. “That specific bridge is burnt to the waterline. The bank has been scooped out with an industrial digger. The roads have been torn up, planted over, and turned into a forest.”

“Oof,” said Raine. “That bad, hey?”

“My fault,” said Taika.

Lozzie giggled behind one hand. “Heart-breaker!”

Taika winced. “It wasn’t like that. Hell, why am I telling this to a bunch of kids?”

Praem intoned: “We are very trustworthy.”

I placed my knife and fork down on the wooden table with a little clack, and said: “Actually, Taika, I think you do have some remaining advice for us. I have a couple of questions for you.”

That got Taika’s attention. Perhaps it was the formal tone in my voice. She sat up a little and leaned her elbows on the table. “Fire away, calamari.”

“Were you ever dysphoric?”

I wiggled my tentacles to illustrate my point, but Taika just frowned. “Hm?”

“When you came back from … ‘the pits’, as you keep calling the abyss.”

“Oh!” Taika suddenly lit up, smiling at me with strange recognition, like she finally understood something that had been in front of her this whole time. “You mean when I was just plain old me, back in my body after the first trip down. Not a twenty foot tall goat woman with fire in my eyes.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I … it’s been … kind of a big deal, for me.”

“With those tentacles? I can imagine.” She laughed, in a different way to before, like a comfy little blaze in an old fireplace. She almost looked like she wanted to reach across the table and take my hand. “You’ve had it worse than I did, kid. Hell, even when I grew horns it wasn’t that bad.”

Lozzie went wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “You had horns?!”

Taika grinned, loving the attention. She winked at Lozzie, then mimed a pair of horns on her head with both hands. “Oh yeah. Big, black, curly horns. Can still do it, but I just don’t feel like it as much these days. Once, I actually used them to head-butt somebody. Wouldn’t recommend it, human neck isn’t set up for much of that.” She laughed. “Seriously. Can you believe my hair used to be brown? Ha! Can’t even imagine it now.”

“Horns! Horns! Horns!” Lozzie cheered.

Taika spoke about it so casually. So easily.

And that was one of the most comforting things I’ve ever heard from anybody. In more ways than the obvious, I was not alone.

Taika and I were not friends or allies; she was so distant from me, from us, from England, Sharrowford, everything, that I could barely imagine the shape of her life. But I understood this one thing, this bond we shared over what we were, and how it made us feel.

Pushing on, I asked: “Have you ever met anybody else like us?”

Taika’s amusement faded a little. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and clucked her tongue — a sound like a branch cracking in the flames. “Twice, calamari.” She paused, perhaps trying to decide how much to say, but my face must have lit up with curious need. Not the only ones! Not just us! Taika grumbled a little, then went on: “The first one, he was a long time ago, and he’s long gone. He went Beyond, by choice, and never came back. Haven’t seen him in almost thirty years, if he’s even still alive.” She sighed heavily. “His name was Isaac Reed, and he was … weirder than either of us. Reality was more difficult for him. He couldn’t stay here, not forever. He needed to be elsewhere.”

“What was he?” Raine asked.

Taika shrugged. “I have no fucking idea.”

I asked: “And the second?”

Taika squinted harder. “The other one I’m not at liberty to disclose. They’re around, but we’re not in regular contact, and I’ll have to ask first, see if they’re up for meeting you sometime, or if they’d rather not know you. No offense, calamari, but you’re still an unknown.”

“No offense taken,” I said, and meant it. “Thank you, Taika.”

Taika sighed a big sigh, her breath the crackle of a camp-fire, with the smell of burning iron and a red-hot tin roof. “Heather, listen. You understand there’s no community here, right? There’s nothing like that. There’s just a handful of us things washed up from the shores of hell. Or maybe hell spat us out, too hard to digest. I’ve never quite decided which version of the metaphor I like best.”

“Community can be built,” I answered without hesitation.

Taika frowned, about to say something to the contrary, but Raine burst into a blazing grin, Evelyn harrumphed, and Lozzie banged on the table. Praem just said: “Must be.”

Taika raised a hand in surrender. “Fine, fine. If you make it back from Wonderland, I’ll see about introducing you to the other survivor from hell’s shores. How does that sound?”

I raised a tentacle and held it out across the table.

Taika seemed surprised, but then she took me in her hand — which was hot like a fresh coal, but didn’t burn what it touched — and shook me by the tentacle.

“Good luck, calamari,” she said.

“Thank you, goat-girl,” I replied, then forced myself to smile past the nervous anxiety in my chest. “I’m going to go take your advice now.”

“Oh? Yeah? Which part?”

I withdrew my tentacles and wrapped them around myself, gripping the chair, steadying my racing heart, and said: “I’m going to go stop burning down my relationships.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Good resolution, Heather. Now, let’s see if she can actually put it into action.

Advice always hits different when it comes from somebody just like yourself, right? Heather’s lacked a true mentor figure this whole time, somebody who can smack her down when she’s being terrible, identify and describe her faults, and not get sidetracked by their own feelings of affection for her. Taika gives a shit, but she’s too old and too experienced to take any shit, if you know what I mean. A wake up call for our little squid, at the eleventh hour, right before she and her companions finally step out to Wonderland? Let’s hope.

After all, next chapter is the last of arc 22!

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Next week, Heather’s got some apologies to make, mostly to a certain Yellow Princess.