Katalepsis

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.”