Katalepsis

There is something inside me.

As Steel smiled at my lower abdomen and refused to answer a simple question, every other thought was ejected from my head. Disgust, panic, revulsion, terror — I'm not even sure there's a word for that feeling. Violation? Defilement? Pollution? Corruption? Those aren't emotions, they're other things re-purposed into emotions. I was beyond the outer edge of the English language, because polite young women (which I am most fucking certainly not) leave such matters behind closed doors. And besides, wasn't I supposed to be immune to this kind of thing? Shouldn't you need real flesh to feel like you wanted to start tearing it off your bones?

My sister never understood what Steel was all about, so maybe you didn't either. They met twice, only briefly; the implications of Steel's special interest went so far over Heather's head that they may as well have been in orbit. Steel wasn't an enigma to me, she was just too far outside of Heather's familiar context. My sister doesn't read much science fiction or watch splatter movies.

But I do, so I knew just what Steel was into.

Suddenly it all added up — the dream I'd shared with Briar, her 'spear' through my guts, the golden glow so deep it felt like my own body heat magnified by sunlight and magma, and then the hooks and barbs digging at meat I didn't have.

There is something inside me.

My tie-dye t-shirt was stuck to my front with dried blood. I peeled it away, lifting it up; my hands weren't shaking (they weren't!) but it took me three goes to get the t-shirt clear of my belly. I tucked it under one armpit and shoved the waistband of my skirt down, to expose my abdomen.

Flat and smooth and pale. No bulge (not that kind either), no rapid-onset pregnancy, no writhing mass of flesh beneath my surface. Because how could there be? It wasn't real. Beneath my skin and a thin layer of something pretending to be fat, there was only a thick sheet of curved carbon fibre. No organs, no muscles, no meat, no life. Certainly no uterus. No medium in which anything could grow, parasite or fetus or otherwise.

I pressed my hand against my belly, feeling for — for what? A pulse? A throb? A kick?

Instead — a tugging.

There is something inside me.

Hooks of hot metal, pulling at tender flesh I didn't have. Barbs snagging on metaphors for intestines. It was subtle, almost gentle, like it was responding to the pressure of my palm, letting me know that it knew that I knew, and now we both know. But it was there, it was undeniably there, as if I'd given it permission to make itself known.

Golden light spilled from between my fingers, blotchy and dark, like honey mixed with tar, outlining the carbon fibre bones in my hand.

There was something inside me. Inside my body. Which was not me.

How had I been so stupid? How had I let this happen? How had I not realised what was being done to me?

Steel's lips parted with a wet click. She let out a sigh, too close to pleasure. When I looked up, she almost — almost! — flinched.

"Tell me what it is," I said — or I must have done, because I couldn't hear my own voice.

The smile flickered back to Steel's face, hungry and hot. She shook her head and shrugged with one shoulder. When she spoke, her clipped voice was rough with arousal. "I don't know yet," she said. "That's why I want to stay and find out. Whatever's happening, it's going to be soon."

And I …

…

I could leave this part out, couldn't I? You wouldn't know. None the wiser, kept in the dark, fed on shit. My little mushroom. I could skip this moment, gloss over the details, and tell you the part that makes sense, the part we'd all try to do — the panic, the desperation, the purge.

But if I skip this, I'd be lying. And I keep trying my best not to lie to you, whatever you think of me. Not for you, you understand? For me. So.

I almost accepted the thing in my belly.

I was just an empty doll, wasn't I? Fit to be filled with whatever anybody else decides. Maisie Morell was long gone, I was just some leftovers crammed into a very expensive and overcomplicated mannequin. My body was nothing but a cavity, and cavities exist to be filled. I, the actual I, the one speaking to you now, I was barely able to fill even a few inches of that void, tucked away in my little armoured box. By what right did I have to complain that a lodger had moved in? I wasn't using that spare room. It may as well go to somebody who needs it. Selfish to think otherwise, right? Getting so possessive over something you don't even own. Would the real Maisie have felt that way? Maisie from before? Maisie with all her memories? Perhaps she wouldn't have been so nasty and weird, not like me.

But even that was an excuse, the first layer of something I don't want to say, don't want to look at, would rather pretend had never been.

Remember, I'm not doing this for you.

I don't have a uterus. I have a cunt, and it works well enough (oh yes it does), but there's nothing deep inside. No womb, no eggs, just a gap. All that burned up with the rest of Maisie, too long ago to recover. I've never menstruated and I never will, and until that moment I didn't give a shit, hadn't thought about it once.

But then there was something alive and growing, in the place where my womb should be.

And I almost liked it.

…

…

My insides — the insides of the chassis built for Maisie Morell — are not just one big cavity. The space is honeycombed with bulkheads of carbon fibre and lightweight steel. The heaviest armour and most dense concentration of partitions is towards my core, inside my chest, where a few shards of greasy bone lie interred in a box of material science and magical trickery. My body is less like the Titanic before the iceberg, and more like one of my sister's favourite metaphors — a medieval Japanese castle, wrapped in layers of misdirection and fortification, with the seat of consciousness and self-hood and the soul held inviolate at the centre. And you better believe you'll get cut up with a bloody great big blade if you try to get in.

I don't like the metaphor very much, but my sister does, so I'm happy enough to use it.

The Good Doctor has provided me with a diagram of my innards — paper copy and digital too, just in case she's not around one day, and I find myself in need of an oil change. I hadn't bothered to learn all the ins and outs of my own guts. (Have you? Didn't think so.) All I really knew is that one little breach didn't matter. The real matter of me was too well-protected.

But now there was something inside the chassis. Inside my body.

Did it have sharp little diamond teeth, gnawing through grey layers of carbon fibre, worming upward from my guts, chewing at magic circles and steel plates? Was it writhing higher already? Was it breaking through the partitions, expanding to fill my innards? Was it pressing up against that armoured box in my chest? Was it melting through the outer layers?

Was it chewing on the shards of bone — on me?

Would I even know?

…

I ripped and tore at my belly, fingernails hooked, dragging bloody red rents across my stomach, trying to part the flesh and pull myself open. If I could have disembowelled myself with my bare hands, I would have done so, but I wasn't quite that strong, and my belly didn't present any obliging handholds. I gripped and raked and pulled, whirling on the spot, spitting out half-digested sentences. I felt like I was going to vomit, or shit myself, or start screaming and never stop. But I couldn't do any of those, because I had to get this thing

OUT

OF

ME

NOW

The thing inside me — Briar's parting gift, my unwanted passenger, the infection, the parasite, the THING IN MY GUTS — responded to my sudden frantic attempts at removal with a little tantrum of its own. The sensation of sweetly golden metal tugging at my innards increased tenfold, as if the mass was growing heavier, or the thing was rolling around in there, trying to wrap itself in a blanket of torn intestines. Any human being of flesh and blood would have crumpled to the floor in pain — because it was pain, it was so much pain — but it wasn't the kind of pain that my body was set up to care about.

I did scream then, long and loud. A scream in a pit.

If I'd been less upset, I would have laughed. This was better than having to think about being in prison.

Somebody grabbed my wrists and forced my hands away from my bleeding belly. Steel would have deserved the kicking and biting I delivered, but Muadhnait didn't; she recoiled from me as I went for her hands with my teeth and lashed out at her groin with my feet. Good thing she was armoured, because I would have punted her cunt right up into her chest.

"Miss Maisie, Miss Maisie, stop!" Muadhnait yelled. "Stop! You're hurting yourself! Stop!"

I did stop — panting, long hair glued to my face, teeth clenched hard, blood running from the welts in my abdomen. Muadhnait had meant well. She'd seen a crazy girl tearing at her own guts. She didn't understand, not until she held me still for a second and saw the golden glow pulsing out my abdomen, from a core of darker material like a sea-slug made of razor-blades and fish-hooks.

Muadhnait's face fell, from concern to terror. Quite the distance.

"It has to come out!" I screamed at her. "Come out, come out— outcome come— out, out! Out!"

Muadhnait was strong, but I was fighting like a greased weasel on meth, and the sight of the thing in my belly had shocked the strength out of her. I yanked on Muadhnait's grip so hard that she stumbled forward and had to let go lest she clatter to the floor. But her little intervention had given me a split-second to think, made me human again for just long enough to stop being an animal.

I whirled back to Steel. "I need my knife. My knife! The knife. The kitchen knife. You—"

(Did I actually say those words, or did I gesticulate and scream 'knife'? Probably the latter. We'll never know.)

Steel shook her head. She gestured upward, beyond the lip of the prison pit, at our 'Audience' — the pattern-faces which covered the ceiling, their eyes and lips and cheeks and brows made from the fall of shadow across the underside of stone. They were peering closer now, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, lips quirked with curiosity. Was this a story they'd never seen before? One that failed to match their expectations?

"I can't step onto the stage," said Steel, clipped and hard though her eyes were wide and her lips were parted. "Not that I would, if I could", she added in a murmur. "Once this has started, it must be seen to the end. Thank you, in advance, in case you don't make it. Thank you. I so rarely get any new material to work with."

Back to Muadhnait. She had her hands up, trying to placate me, perhaps glad that I had at least stopped tearing at my own underbelly.

"I need something sharp!" I screeched. "Sharp enough to cut. Cut me. Cut it out. Cut— cut— cut—"

Muadhnait was backing away from me, as if I was suggesting we slice her open. Don't blame her (and I won't say please), because I wasn't really speaking, I was gibbering, my words all running into each other, punctuated with 'cut! cut!' like a director with a disobedient set crew. My hands were curled into bloody claws. I was thinking that some piece of Muadhnait's armour might serve as a knife, worn down and sharpened against the wall, but that she was refusing; I was about to pounce on her and try to rip part of it free. Steel was purring behind me like some satisfied big cat watching from the edge of a jungle; she was lucky that my improvised blade was going to be too busy with other tasks, because I didn't care who her father was right then, I would have cut her throat. And down in my guts, our unwanted passenger was rocking and twisting and tearing up the insides that I didn't really possess, reminding me of the memories of flesh I'd burned up too long ago to know.

And just then, when everything was about to get exponentially shittier, the criminal returned to the scene of her crime.

A split-second before I would have leapt at Muadhnait, a figure walked straight through the left-hand wall of the pit, striding through the black stone as if it wasn't there. Long white dress, bare feet poking out beneath, hair a cascade of solar fire, eyes wide pools of nuclear radiation dancing across dark water.

Our Lady of the Forded Briar had deigned to join us.

Light poured from her, thin and white like the flames from burning metal, washing the black stones of the pit with a coat of sharp grey, as if their surfaces had been abraded away. The pattern-faces in the ceiling were forced to ease back — not a full retreat, just a little reshuffling of the seating arrangements in the audience, as if some minor royal had arrived halfway through the performance, to watch the choicest scene from the best spot in the house. Briar was carrying a book in both hands, a gigantic tome bound in dark green leather, with pages so thin they were like spider silk. She was reading as she walked through the wall, not paying us the slightest bit of attention.

(Showy bitch. Made you look!)

This time I wasn't the only one who could see her. Her light picked out every metal scratch and speck of dirt on Muadhnait's armour. Muadhnait turned to her, wide-eyed with true religious awe, dropping to her knees, mouth agape. I guess that's what you do when you meet your goddess, though I wouldn't recommend it with this particular one. She won't show you any favour.

Briar stopped, lifting her nose from her book, as if she had just realised this pit was occupied. Her smile was like the arc of a solar flare. Ugly and hot and dangerous.

"Now now," she purred at me. "We don't want you to actually hurt yourself, do we?"

I was too angry for proper speech, though I might have made some sounds. Who knows? I didn't. You'll have to ask Briar. (Good luck with that.)

Briar smiled wider, like a yawning star. She closed the cover of the huge tome. I caught the title, embossed on the front cover in glossy black.

Katalepsis.

"Quite a tale," said Briar, in a tone so polite it was rancid with disgust. "A bit too long, gets woolly in the middle. I did enjoy the ending, though there's so little of you in there. So little of you to learn about in the first place. Your sister's work, is that correct?"

"What did you put inside me?" I hissed through clenched teeth, tasting blood. One hand was still on my stomach, gripping hard, feeling the contents shift and shiver.

Briar laughed — a sound like the crashing of a stellar nursery. "I? You're the one who put it there, don't—"

She cut off with a sudden narrow-eyed frown, glowing eyes darting into the shadows, to where Steel was still watching.

"Ignore me," said Steel. "Carry on."

But Briar minded very much. She lowered the book and made it vanish inside her dress, then pursed her lips as if Steel was an unexpected sour note in her salad. "And what exactly are you? Another wandering mote, crossed the great wilderness to offer me another tool?"

"Negative," said Steel. "Just an observer, ma'am."

Briar sneered. "More audience! More of you is the last thing I want. You better not intend on staying—"

"Hey," I said, and I didn't need to raise my voice. "Hey. You. Bitch. Cunt. You're here to talk to me, not to her. Talk away or I'll talk for both of us, with teeth. Now. Now!"

Briar dismissed Steel and returned to me with a smile. "Cunt? Now we're being rude to each other? Oh, woe is me, and here I thought you were for real."

"You've … " I wanted to be sick. "Impregnated me with something. What is it?"

Briar rolled her eyes. "Oh, don't be silly. You don't have the necessary equipment for that particular biological outcome of our tryst. Come now, you know that as well I do, unless you've suddenly forgotten the particulars of your own fascinating physiology."

I ground my teeth, hard enough to squeak. "Then you ovipositied something in me. Deposited. Planted. Hid. I don't care what word makes most sense, because I'll make less sense, you—"

"I did nothing of the sort," Briar said. With a wave of her arm she was suddenly holding her spear. The tip was still missing, sliced off during our shared dream. She lowered the severed end to her own mouth and kissed it briefly, flame-bright lips lingering over the ragged stump. "You were the one who cut the tip off. You were the one who left it lodged inside you. Don't blame me for your own haste."

"You stuck me with it!"

Briar looked aside, suddenly playing the blushing maiden. "And you asked for it. Come now, my lovely little Outsider. Our encounter was entirely consensual. You were into it all the way."

…

Our Lady of the Forded Briar was being an absolute bitch, and I wanted to choke her on the haft of her own spear, but she wasn't wrong.

I had enjoyed that dream. I had enjoyed it in the moment, and I had basked in the aftermath. I had challenged her with my little knife, and when she'd speared me in the belly and a nest of intestines had spilled forth, I had felt such satisfaction. I had gloried in cutting off the tip of her spear, never once thinking about how it was still inside me. When I had woken up, I had felt aglow.

I'd looked for her in the hills and the trees, in the curves of the landscape. I'd wanted more than a one-night stand, hadn't I?

I had enjoyed our little thing, no matter how little.

But she'd had another agenda.

…

"I did not give you permission to plant something in my belly," I hissed. "No permission, no allowance. What I allowed was a spearing, once, one time, one only, one- tch!" I had to cut my words between my own clenched teeth, or I was going to lose control and fly at her with my hands, and I couldn't afford that. I needed answers. Or one specific answer, on how to get her leftovers out of my chassis.

Briar sighed and waved her hand through the empty space where her spear tip once stood. "I didn't. It's the tip. How many times? I had no control of the situation."

"Doesn't feel like a spear tip. Feels alive. And moving. Why?"

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Briar shrugged. She wasn't smiling anymore, just looking at me like I'd made some obvious mistake on an easy assignment. "Because it's stuck. It is adapting to the environment in which it has found itself. Think of it like a little piece of me, left behind by accident. And now it's trying to recreate the whole of me, because a part cannot exist without the whole."

"Inside me," I hissed.

"Yes. Inside you. Congratulations."

The golden glow was seeping through my fingers with greater intensity now, spilling across the tiled floor. The light had begun to churn, great globs and bubbles shifting and bobbing as the thing inside me rolled and rocked.

Without real flesh, the pain was an echo, but it was a very loud one.

"How do I get it out?" I demanded.

Our Lady of the Forded Briar considered me for a moment; I considered making her consider my teeth around one of her eyeballs, but then she spoke on.

"I've been locked in a stalemate for such a very long time," she said, gesturing upward at the Audience, the pattern-faces pressing in from the shadows on the ceiling. They were peering closer now, though most of them looked quietly baffled. "Such a long time, indeed, that I'm willing to go to almost any lengths to break that stalemate. You are that length, though … " She trailed off with a little giggle. "I've got more length than you, haven't I?"

I was not amused. Her joke was stillborn. She cleared her throat and waved the remains away.

"Anyway. You are a most useful doll, Maisie Morell," she said. "You're an outside force — pardon the pun — applying pressures where others cannot, unbounded by the rules of the narrative. And so, yes, I planned to use you. If you had only let me stick you once, then I wouldn't have left anything behind in you but the vague memory of my shape in your … flesh?" She traced the outline of her missing spear tip with one hand. Teasing bitch. "I would have used you, yes, I don't deny it, I'm not shy. I would have thrown you at their pet witch, finally inflicted some real change around here. Then we could have tidied up the fairies and their messes. And you could have done it, too, because you're not bound by the rules. Because whichever one of them brought you here did something decidedly unorthodox. I still haven't figured that part out."

Briar paused to think, as if by speaking the words she had given herself an idea.

Mave? The Mimic? Had she caused all of this? Had she meant to? Stupidity, malice, or a secret third option? No time for intrigue, my guts were full of evil bitch and I needed to get her out of me.

"Anyway," Briar said again. She liked that word and I hated it. "No use worrying about that now. Point being, with my help, you would have won. Stalemate broken, me on top. Me in charge, free to tell my own tale."

She gestured with one slow and lazy hand — but did not bother to look — at Muadhnait.

"What?" Muadhnait croaked. "Me?"

Briar blinked in surprise, smile freezing solid, as if a small woodland creature had come right up to her and asked for twenty quid to buy a packet of fags. She turned her eyes on Muadhnait, which made Muadhnait shrink back, squinting as if before a roaring bonfire.

"Oh, you beautiful thing," Briar purred. She reached out with one hand and cupped Muadhnait's cheek, stroking her like just another doll. "Look at you. So far off your tracks, so distant from what I'd laid down for you. But still going. Still here, even if bent out of all shape."

Briar withdrew her hand. Muadhnait gasped as if plunged into cold water.

"But, no," Briar said. "Not you specifically, my child. I mean all of you. All the humans who followed me through when I saved your great-great-great-great grandparents from their own foolishness. I took one of their number as my first vessel, and I took them through the wilds between the worlds, and now … " Briar sighed with great pleasure. "They, you, you are all my tale, my stories, and I have been so stymied in the telling for far too long." She tutted. "You shouldn't be in that armour. You shouldn't even have a sister. You were meant to be a weaver, and die of the plague at seventeen, beautiful and perfect forever. Two men were to weep over you, and then fight a duel for your corpse. Both of them would die of their wounds. But none of it happened!" Briar's blissful reverie broke. She stamped her foot. "Do you see? You were meant to be a component in a beautiful thing. Now you're just dirty and broken."

Muadhnait gaped at her. " … wha … what?"

"Not that I'm not grateful to you," Briar went on. "You and all of yours, you've kept my tale alive, and that's kept me alive. 'Our Lady of the Forded Briar.' Did you know, I can't even remember the original name of this vessel, let alone the first one?" She giggled, like a woman who'd had a spot too much to drink. "And soon enough I'll be free to carry on with you all, the way I should have."

Muadhnait was busy having an existential and religious crisis, but I couldn't be kind. I was still having a very physical crisis, so I interrupted.

"How. Do. I. Get. It. Out."

Briar turned to me with a wistful smile. "I don't think you do. Not unless you've got a very good surgeon." She smiled wider, nuclear fires twinkling in her eyes. "It was never my intention to discard this vessel so soon." She glanced down at herself, holding out her arms, examining her own flesh; tiny cracks of white light spider-webbed across her skin, sealing and reopening as she moved. "It's been good to me, a most dignified and grand form. But now you are going to fill up with … well, me!" She giggled. "This didn't have to happen, you know? But you've been so impossible to direct. You refused to play your role, either for me or for the fairies. Either way you would have continued to be … whatever you are. But you've been impossible, you've gone your own way, totally off any script at all."

To seemingly everyone's surprise, Steel spoke up.

"That's the way any good story should be," she said. "Ma'am."

Briar's amusement shrivelled up and died when she looked at Steel. "I don't need a member of the audience to critique my work. Whoever and whatever you are—"

"Less of a hack than you."

Briar looked ready to spit. Her voice dropped, sharp as a dagger. "I thought you were here to watch."

Steel nodded at me. "Her. Not you. She's authorial. You're just production."

"Elitist," Briar hissed.

"Yes," said Steel.

"Shut up!" I screeched. "You! How do I get it out? Answer. Or … "

Or what, Maisie no-knife? Or what?

Briar smiled; I didn't.

"Don't worry, though," Briar went on. She cleared her throat and forced a twinkle back into the nuclear fires of her eyes. "I'm still going to break the stalemate, and you're still going to be my crowbar. Now that I've read your sister's story, I've got a pretty good notion of what makes her tick. When you're all gone, she'll show up to find you. I'll find a way to let her in, write a role for her, something like that. First she will be consumed by grief." Briar's smile turned smug. She gestured upward, at our Audience. "They're not very good with grief. They refuse to let anybody go, so they don't have to process the aftermath, the absence, the story without a beloved face. Grief's no fun, after all. That'll throw them off for a little while. They certainly won't want to peer too closely at your sister and I, as I wear your face and she realises you're all gone. And then? Revenge. They like revenge. It's a good, juicy, standard movement for them. And that's where I come in. I'll put a fresh impression through your sister's guts, this time without a knife to muck up my plans. I will use her rage and her revenge as a fulcrum for breaking my stalemate."

I didn't have an eloquent moral rebuttal. I wasn't my sister, though I must have lost control of my face; a moment after she finished her little soliloquy, Briar burst out laughing.

"Oh dear, oh dear," she said through her laughter. "You really should not have come here, little Outsider. You can't even imagine how many of you I've burnt through." She spread her arms, gauzy dress hanging from her limbs like waves of white fire. "You'll just be my next. I suppose this one was getting old, anyway. A couple of thousand years and they do start to wear out. See?" Briar lifted her chin, stretching the flesh of her throat; bright golden light seeped through the cracks in her surface, like the humanoid body was just a shell over some solar engine. "But you'll be fresh and new. A little short, a little flat. But you'll do. I'll trade up from you in a century or so. Maybe one of your sister's lovers."

My face did something else. I wasn't quite sure what. Briar forced her laughter down and waggled a finger at me.

"Don't be silly now," she said. "You can't touch me." She gestured at the pattern-faces again. "I may have willingly rejected the lofty dissociation of that rabble up there, but I haven't descended all the way down to the grit and grime beneath your feet. You can't even lay a finger on—"

Passing through Briar's body was like drowning in a hologram made of radioactive fog; I felt the material of her go down my throat and set the surface of my skin tingling like pins and needles. I'd aimed a punch for her gut, put my entire weight behind it, swung for her spine. My fist passed straight through, all mist and fog. I crashed against the wall behind her, as if I'd tried to fight a ghost. She burst into squealing giggles.

Had to try, didn't I?

I careened off the wall and staggered away, clutching at my belly. Golden light was spilling between my fingers, jerking up and down the black walls with every step. Briar's spore was roiling inside me now, churning like a gut infection — except there was nothing to vomit up, try as I might. Briar was laughing, Steel was watching with parted lips and shining eyes, and Muadhnait was down on her knees, crying silent tears with an open, gormless mouth as she gazed up at her cunt of a goddess.

Without a knife, I was reduced to my fingers, but they wouldn't work fast enough; there was no way I could tear at my guts quick enough to get Briar's little passenger out of me before it — before it what? Before it gnawed its way up and through the partitions inside my body, before it found the little shards of me buried in my heart and ate them? Before it licked away the dried, flaking fragments of real blood, baked into a hard crust of sticky carbon, stuck to bits of bone, the only real thing about me?

Before it replaced me?

If Briar replaced me with herself, would she sleep curled up next to my sister?

I lurched toward the far side of the pit, where the handful of non-human skeletons littered the floor. Perhaps I could break a bone against a wall, make a sharp edge, use it to dig? But none of the bones were the right shape, rounded off by age and time, worn down by air and darkness. I smashed one against the wall of the pit with all my strength, but it was hard as rock, so all I got was a dull pain jarring up my arm.

Steel had to help. She was the only one capable. I picked up another bone, a nice big club, and decided I was going to try to kill her. Either Steel would step from the sidelines and help me, or I would beat her brains out.

But when I turned back around, I found our little tableau was still growing.

A huge spidery shape was crouched up on the lip of the pit, peering down at us from the same position that the fairies had taken when they'd come to have a gander at me in all my insensate glory. Twice the size of a human being, made of pale wood and perfect joints, topped by an elongated neck and an oval-shaped head, studded with a thousand painted eyes.

It was the Pale Doll, the one I'd cut free on our way to the castle. It still had my initial carved into its chest, a big messy 'M'. The pale greenish light from the room beyond the pit formed a dim halo around the Doll's body.

It was looking right at me. How did I know that, with all those eyes pointing in every direction? Don't ask. You wouldn't understand.

"Get my knife!" I screeched at it, both hands out, dropping the bone club. "Knife! Get my knife! Get it! Knife!"

Or something like that. I'm certain I said the word 'knife' more than once, but the rest was babble. In this, I will admit, I am sometimes all too similar to my beloved sister, even if my throat isn't quite as much of a biological mess.

The Pale Doll scuttled back, out of sight.

Briar cocked her head at the thing as it scurried away. Steel glanced up, but only for a moment, unwilling to take her eyes off my abdomen, afraid she was going to miss the climax of the show.

The Doll crawled back into view, dragging a lumpy bundle of stuff wrapped up in a dirty sheet. It rolled the bundle over the lip of the pit and let it fall, where it landed with a clatter of metal and wood against stone. I was across the pit as quick as I could go, stumbling and hissing at the pain tearing around inside my abdomen. The bundle was all of our stuff — Muadhnait's sword belt, her crossbow, her pack. My kitchen knife had slithered free and clattered across the tiles. I grabbed it, fell to my knees, hiked up my t-shirt again, and got down to work.

…

Did it hurt, cutting my own belly open?

Why, yes. Of course it fucking did.

I would (and do) forgive you for assuming it didn't. I keep telling you that I'm not made of real flesh, just hopes and dreams and fairy dust, that my body is an illusion wrapped around a shell, neither of which are me. What should it matter if you cut the doll open and start taking her apart? She doesn't care, she's just a doll, her parts do not belong to her. If you want to reconfigure her, go ahead. She can't feel it anyway. She might even enjoy the experience.

I assumed the same. The layer of pneuma-somatic flesh over my carbon fibre chassis is not very thick — enough to simulate skin and fat, but that's all. How much can it really hurt to slice through skin and fat, especially when it wasn't really mine?

That assumption saved me. If I had known how much it would hurt, I might have been slower with the blade.

…

The edge of the kitchen knife went in easy, smooth, quick. (Bless you for keeping it sharp, Praem, because a blunt one would have sucked.) The blade cut straight through all my lies and touched the truth beneath with a little click of metal on carbon fibre, hard and solid, shaking more than I'd expected. I dragged it sideways, right to left, then downward, scraping the tip against the under-layer beneath my skin. Blood was spilling all over my hands, down my skirt, onto the black tiles of the floor; less than an actual human being would spill, because there was nothing truly behind the facade, no great gout of crimson life to gush from my organs. When I reached the bottom of the horizontal cut, I was making a sound I'd never heard anybody make before, not even Heather. It was not a good sound.

Don't try this at home. You're not made like I am. Even if you're a doll. (Especially if you're a doll.)

Finally I cut from left to right, making three sides of a rectangle. I wasn't going to do the final upward cut, (even then I was dimly aware I would need to be put back together again.) The knife tumbled from my hands and clattered on the stone, droplets of blood spraying from the blade. Golden light pushed from the incision, as if trying to help me, trying to open me from the inside, turning the crimson pool all around me to a glittering sunset. I dug my fingernails into the edge of the flap I'd made, and peeled it back, peeled me open. That part didn't hurt, because it wasn't flesh parting from flesh, just a lie sloughing away from the truth.

A rectangle of naked carbon fibre, framed by the bloody edges of what for a human being would be a mortal wound. My chassis should have been a plain, dull, matte grey, but golden light glowed from inside my abdomen, spilling out of me in a molten wave.

In the core of that golden light — exactly where my womb would have been, if I was made of meat — something dark and hot was roiling and rolling, a golden colour so saturated that it was blackened with its own intensity.

I lurched to my feet again. Wasn't done yet. Briar was shouting something at Muadhnait, but the knightly nun was staring at me in shock. Steel was watching with tears in her eyes, lips parted, all her military discipline discarded for whatever sick shit she was getting out of this.

The bones at the other end of the pit were no good for cutting, but there were a few fist-sized chunks that would do for the next step in doll self-surgery. I picked up a rounded lump that had probably been a vertebrae, got a good tight grip on it, and slammed it into the carbon fibre of my abdomen.

Slam, slam, slam. Slam, slam, slam. And so on.

Do you want me to record them all? I can't. I gave up counting at twenty four strikes.

Problem was, I'm built to resist exactly this kind of thing, and I'm built exceptionally well. Cracking, breaking, shattering, that kind of damage. Being blown up or beaten up, all that kind of bother. All these possibilities were prepared for. The Good Doctor Martense in all her wisdom and grace had not prepared for a situation where I would be trying to dig to my own core. Pin me down and go at me with some drills and saws, and maybe you'd have a decent chance, (but you wouldn't get me there in the first place), but trying to crack my outer layers with a piece of old bone? It could be done, in theory. But not at this angle. Not by me. Not with the time I had before that glowing light in my gut filled in and blotted out whatever I had become.

And I was—

…

Fuck you. Alright?

I was crying. I was crying and screaming, because somewhere in the middle of all this I had decided I wanted to keep becoming.

Maisie Morell was dead, but I was here. I was a slut and a problem. I was a doll with my hands on my own strings. And I didn't want to go.

…

Muadhnait was up on her feet, approaching me. I made some sound at her, something too Heather-like for me to repeat. I wasn't really hearing words then, just intentions in the pattern of voices, tone and emotion and all that other stuff for which words are just set dressing. Briar was shouting at Muadhnait to stop me from cracking myself open. But Muadhnait wasn't listening to either of us. Muadhnait was smarter than anybody else present. Muadhnait was my very own knightly nun.

She held out some kind of climbing tool — a hand-held pick with a heavy head and a sharp point. Must have grabbed it from her pack. Quick thinking.

I tried to take it from her, but she just pushed me down, handled me like a lamb going in for shearing. My hands were so slick with blood that she had no trouble at all stopping me from getting the tool off her. She ignored the confused flailing blows I rained against her shoulders and arms.

I stopped fighting back when I realised what she was was doing, raising that little climbing pick in one metal gauntlet.

Briar's spear-tip spore-seed was like a spiked ball in my gut now, fighting its own fight to be left alone, like it knew what we were doing and was trying to stop us. A human being would have passed out, I think. Vomited. Screamed. Anything to make it stop.

Muadhnait hit me a dozen times before I felt the first crack, a vibration in the centre of my chassis. When I scrambled to rip the pick from her gauntlet a second time, she let me have it.

Another three strikes on my abdomen and a long fissure formed in the carbon fibre plate. Another two and the crack spread, spider-webbing outward, golden light breaking through from behind, the sun through storm clouds. One more hit and pieces of my chassis started flaking off.

I dug with the climbing tool, then with my fingers, snapping and breaking off little slivers of myself. Once I had a gap wide enough for my wrist, I wriggled my right hand inside myself, and closed it around a fistful of boiling thorns.

My uninvited passenger didn't want to disembark. It clung to my insides like a squid made of chewing gum and fish-hooks, lodged in deep, a late sleeper. But I'm bigger and stronger and I've got opposable thumbs, so I won, tearing it out of the hole in my guts and hauling it into the air. The thing I pulled from my abdominal cavity was like a dark golden maggot, about the size and shape of an overdeveloped sweet potato. It was covered in swirls of sharp little barbs, trailing lines of sticky golden flesh studded with spikes and hooks, still trying to dig into my palm and snagging on my clothes. It writhed and flexed in my grip, eyeless and mouthless, radiating that golden light like a little piece of alien star. Freed from behind carbon fibre and the memory of flesh, the golden light was so bright that it burned after-images into every surface, turning Muadhnait's armour into a suit of bronze. Muadhnait herself staggered to her feet and backed away, shielding her eyes with one arm, gagging at either sensory overload or pure disgust. It was so bright that the air around the maggot seemed to cook. A human being would have been blinded, but my eyes aren't real either, so I took a good long look at the thing Briar had put inside me.

This was her, wasn't it? Briar. Our Lady of the fucking lie. An offshoot of the truth behind her fake flesh.

I dropped the golden maggot on the ground — shaking hooks out of my skin — and smashed it with a chunk of bone. It burst like an overripe fruit. Golden mucus and glowing slime exploded into a steaming puddle.

The maggot went still. The light faded. Gold turned to ashen grey.

Suddenly the pit felt very dark. Only the cold greenish light from beyond the lip was left. After the sunlight roar of Briar's maggot, the darkness seemed almost like a friend.

I wanted to sit down, lie down, look at tits on my phone, and not get up for a while, but that wasn't an option. Briar was glaring at me like I'd just ruined her dinner party, but she had no idea; I was about to shit on her table and fling it at the guests. I groped at my abdomen, pressing loose pieces of carbon fibre back into place — (me! me! me! every piece a piece of me!) — then folding the big meaty flap of fat and skin over the top. I fumbled for a moment, no idea how to help myself; this situation had not exactly come up in my favourite anime shows. The tea towel with the little maids was in my hands, so I pressed it to my belly. Good little maids did their best to soak up the blood, but I couldn't wrap the ends around my waist or hips. And my right hand was torn and bleeding from the thorns and hooks on the golden maggot. I was a mess.

Muadhnait appeared beside me with a length of bandage — taken from her pack? She wrapped it around me and used it to hold the tea towel in place. As soon as my belly was not going to flop open, I pulled myself away from Muadhnait and staggered back over to where I'd dropped the kitchen knife.

Words started to come back, probably because I was going to need some of my own in a minute.

"—insolent little piece of stage furniture!" Briar was spitting. "I was elevating you, giving you something you could never find by yourself. I've read your story, do you understand? I know how empty you are, how there's nothing left of you, almost no memories at all! And you reject it?! You reject me!? You're as bad as those philistines up there, never letting go, never letting the next chapter start! You are a leftover from a story that ended, you—"

She went on and on like that as I went for my knife. Got it in my right fist, which hurt, but I didn't care. Straightened up. Caught Steel's steely eye.

I expected Steel to be disappointed in a different sort of way, but she wasn't. She looked intrigued, stroking her chin, nodding along — not with Briar, but at me, as if I'd made some solid point in an obscure debate.

"Interesting answer," she murmured. "Not what I would have chosen if it had been one of mine, but … interesting, and … "

Steel trailed off and blinked. Probably at the way I was smiling.

I turned the smile on Briar, and raised my knife. Muadhnait hesitated, because I was pointing a weapon at her goddess, even if her goddess was a disgusting maggot embedded in divine flesh.

Briar ended her tirade. She sighed and put her hands on her hips. "I already told you, you cannot touch me—"

"Don't want to touch you," I said. My voice was a dry gurgle. "You're not even my type. You're ugly as shit. What the hell was I thinking?"

Briar rolled her eyes. "I'm not down on your level. I'm still above the floor of the story, even if I'm no longer up there with my former compatriots. You—"

"You're not the only one," I said. "One of the only, but not just."

Briar squinted. It was like being peered at by a quasar, but she wasn't quite the same as only a few minutes earlier. She didn't emit any light, her illumination failed to light up any surfaces. Her nuclear fires were all internal now, unable to chase away a single shadow. The maggot had been her core, deposited in new flesh with a new and golden light. Smashing it hadn't killed her (too easy, of course), but it had forced her back to the beginning of her bizarre metaphysical self-propagation process.

"You descended from the Audience, up there, fine," I croaked. "But—"

Briar tossed her hair. "I was the only one with the courage to descend!" She sneered up at the pattern-faces as she said it. They swirled and spat with something close to hate, or at least a sister to spite.

"No," I said. "Wrong."

Briar turned her sneer on me. "You presume to—"

"I don't think you're the only one. There's another one like you, another ex-watcher playing god, godling, godshit, whatever."

Briar winkled her nose. "Don't be silly. I'm the only force here working against—"

"It's not working against anything. But it's been following me since I arrived, trying to bait me into a fight. Fighting, that's all it wants. That's why it's different. Differentiated. You're just like them up there," I jerked my knife at the ceiling, at the pattern-faces. "Trying to rewrite a story. Story yourself up. Up yours. But the other thing following me, it doesn't give a fuck about narrative. Just wants a fight. It'll fuck up the narrative for a fight. It's tried twice already. Let's go for a hat trick."

"What are you—"

I looked up, at the Pale Doll, at the one I'd freed.

"Lights up there," I called. "Can you put them out? Out them for me? Put out the lights."

The Pale Doll's head twitched back and forth, painted eyes whirling. Then it scuttled off, away from the lip of the pit, off where I couldn't see. I crossed my fingers, hoping it had understood, hoping it knew that I still saw myself in it.

There was a crash of breaking glass; the sickly greenish light dimmed by a sixth, or maybe a fifth.

Briar's eyes widened with comprehension. "You're bringing that … that hack into this!? No! No, absolutely not, I—"

Another crash. The light around us dimmed. The shadows grew deeper, full of grey and brown and the voluptuous temptation of black. Muadhnait ran for her sword belt, scrambling to free her weapon. Steel took a discrete step back.

"Also," I said to Briar. "Pretty sure you can't leave. This was you reproducing, or something. And you're stuck down in it. Stuck in the mud. Or else you would have fled. Right?"

The lights went out, shadows choked the pit. It wasn't total darkness — a thin grey illumination still penetrated from somewhere high beyond the lip, perhaps the starlight from a single window.

But it was dark enough for the fight scene my friend wanted so badly.

A pinprick of absolute nothingness formed in the air in the centre of the pit, like the shadows had condensed around a speck of dust. It was thick and juicy, dripping like ripe fruit, good enough to sink your teeth into, for a mouthful of coal dust and rot.

Briar was shouting something predictable — stop, stop! Muadhnait had her cold iron sword in both hands, back toward me, as if she could defend us from what I'd started. I'm not sure if Steel was still watching, because I wasn't looking away from this.

And then the darkness giggled.

(Hehe!)