Katalepsis

Black ash lay draped in ragged blankets upon the charred and ruptured soil, smothering stubs of scorched brick and lumps of stunted ruin with a funeral veil of ageless soot and arid filth; yet all the dust in the world could not obscure the looping alien script upon every inch of broken wall and shattered arch. Dark mist drifted in choking sheets of diaphanous rot, shadows and shades coiling and flowing with umbral intent. Life scurried and stalked and slithered through the remnants of this dead place — malformed, malnourished, and maltreated shapes, neither ape nor canine nor anything that walked the million-million worlds of Outside, broken things with broken outlines, their forms smeared sideways across the surface of reality by generations of merciless examination. Bloated jellyfish-creatures grown vast and turgid bobbed and twisted in the shadow-rich air, floaters in the eye of a god.

The endless plain — a paradox both infinite and infinitely bounded — stretched away toward a terminus of broken teeth, a horizon of shattered mountain ranges cooked to brittle cinders, their shells of rock cracked open and their innards left to run like blood, allowed to cool and harden, and then cracked and burned again and again. Ancient watchers observed from just within that ring of mountains, behemoths and leviathans in their own right, creatures the size of skyscrapers or islands or continents, all of them kneeling or squatting or lying prostrate, all of them staring upward in mute, frozen, forever devotion.

Up and up and up, to a sky that was not a sky, to a firmament that stared back, to the ridged and wrinkled surface of the truth hanging above this cursed and ruined world.

Wonderland.

“Heathy!” Lozzie hissed, right next to our ear. She squeezed my hand extra hard, trying to snap me out of my wordless terror. “Heathy, it’s okay! It’s okay and good and it worked! Heathy! Breathe! Air goes in! Air goes out! Breathe!”

Among the million-million dimensions of Outside there are many worlds where human beings might survive for a time, places almost hospitable to earthly biology and the pressure needs of the mortal soul; perhaps homo sapiens — that endlessly adaptable species to which I still belonged, at least in spirit, if not in strict physicality — could learn to live in such a place, and with time become more Outsider than human. There are many more dimensions where no human could hope to remain whole and sane for more than a handful of minutes; there are uncounted worlds where no unprotected, unaltered mortal could endue at all — a human would be devoured, or fly apart, or crushed by the overwhelming weight of unreality. There are yet more dimensions beyond all human comprehension, where one would meet an end that words cannot capture. There is the abyss.

But Wonderland was different. The Eye’s domain was none of those.

Here, among the ruin both physical and spiritual, a human being might draw breath, walk upon solid soil, and think what thoughts the soul had need of. But the soul knew, just from the scent of the air and the colour of the ash, that this place was anathema. To overstay one’s welcome by even a second would invite an end worse than death.

“Heathy! Mmmmmm—open! Open! Open you mouth! Heathy, you’re— you’re gonna pass out! Breatheeeee!”

‘Wonderland’.

Why had Maisie and I chosen to call it that? Better to ask why not. It was the only reference point we’d had: a children’s story about getting whisked away to an impossible place. Calling it ‘Wonderland’ was an offense to poor Alice and all the imaginary inhabitants of that fictional playground. Sorry, Mad Hatter; apologies White Rabbit; my most sincere and deepest regrets, Red Queen. But it was the best Maisie and I could do. A child’s screaming, terror-soaked, desperate attempt to encapsulate something that could not be rendered in human language, let alone with the culture and concepts available to a pair of nine year old girls.

“Heathy! Mmm!”

Wonderland. In the previous year of my life I had visited this plane twice — once under duress, against my will, kidnapped by a servant or avatar or creation of the eye, and a second time under my own power, to burn a monster.

And now, there I was, a third time. Three, a lucky number. Three times, that’s the charm. Three and three and three make nine, minus two to get seven and that’s us, us Heathers, us—

Lozzie mashed her free hand against my face.

She rammed her fingers into my mouth and nose, into the areas which I had instinctively sealed up with a plate of bio-extruded pneuma-somatic steel. She slipped a fingernail into the narrow seam, wriggled half her hand past my lips, and then spread her fingers to force my mouth open.

“Blurgh—pleh-plah!”

I made the most ungraceful sound — which wasn’t really much of a concern right then — and spat her fingers back out. I peeled open the armour-plates of pneuma-somatic flesh I’d used to plug my vulnerable orifices; when had I even done that?

“Lozzie, what—”

“You weren’t breathing!” Lozzie hissed in my face, eyes blazing hard against the background of her pale cheeks. She kept her voice low and soft, then quickly looked left and right again, to make sure nothing was creeping up on us.

“Oh,” I whispered back as I realised what I’d done. “I’m sorry, I-I didn’t— didn’t mean— yes. I’m … I’m right on the verge of having a panic attack. I think. Maybe. I-I’m glad we’re doing this together.”

“Mmhmmmmm,” Lozzie grunted, bobbing her head, looking everywhere except upward.

Flakes of black ash fluttered downward through the sunless air; they settled in Lozzie’s wispy blonde hair.

Sunless? I’d never considered that implication before. If the Eye was all the sky, then where did the light come from?

Four tentacles quickly suggested we not think about that too hard. One holdout insisted it must be important. The sixth tentacle kept a mental note, to tell Evelyn, once we returned home.

Lozzie and I had arrived in Wonderland moments earlier, hand in hand — a serious understatement, as I also had two tentacles wrapped around her slender waist, a third tentacle bunched in the fabric of her poncho, and we were quite literally strapped to each other. Both of us were wearing climbing harnesses, Lozzie’s tucked beneath her usual outer layer of poncho, mine bunched uncomfortably under my thighs and groin, despite Raine’s efforts to make this as comfortable as possible. Four separate lengths of reinforced climbing rope and a pair of braided steel cables linked our two harnesses together. Raine and Evelyn had taken no risks when it came to the safety measures for this final test.

We were also both anchored to the Invisus Oculus, beneath our feet.

Four additional steel cables led from the climbing harnesses to a quartet of holes in the corners of the massive piece of canvas; the holes were reinforced with metal rings to avoid tearing the material — another safety measure, thanks to Raine’s thinking. I had two tentacles pressed to the painted canvas itself, to aid in brain-math teleportation, but even without my be-tentacled touch there was no way for me to accidentally leave the Invisus Oculus behind. Lozzie and I could not even have stepped out of the magic circle without intentionally undoing half a dozen clasps and buckles. Even if one of us went stark raving bonkers at that exact second and decided to throw ourselves upon the mercy of the Eye, the straps and bindings would give the other the split-second we needed to Slip back home.

But neither of us were going to do that.

We stood in the centre of the pupil of the Invisus Oculus, protected and hidden inside a false eye made of ink and blood and Evelyn’s ingenuity. The canvas rested directly on the blackened and burned soil of Wonderland. The false eye stared upward at the sky, at the real thing, the genuine article, hanging in the void above our heads.

To my surprise Lozzie was not handling this well; I’d rarely seen her unsettled like this, wild-eyed and animalistic, not since we’d rescued her from captivity almost a year ago. Her gaze darted back and forth from ruined walls to drifts of black ash. Her poncho was pulled tight around her slender body, the colours muted amid the drifting mists. Her wispy blonde hair was limp, flat, and still.

She was like a little chromatic jellyfish trying to go unnoticed in hostile waters. She’d never feared Wonderland before, not when she’d saved me. Why was this time so different?

Perhaps because I had reacted like a spooked octopus the moment we’d arrived.

It took me a few more breaths to realise what I’d done — I had extruded and deployed and unfurled and sprouted half a dozen protective measures, plated myself in abyssal biology, and wrapped my vulnerable mortal core of true flesh in a web of nullification. My eyeballs were behind three layers of light-filtering membranes, my throat was plugged with a fan of fluttering filters, and my skin tingled with the dark toxins of abyssal chemistry. Yet even through all that I could still smell the air of Wonderland, the reek of carbonised flesh and burned steel on my tongue.

“Sorry,” I rasped. “I … I’m not … this is all my nightmares, Lozzie. All my nightmares at once.”

She squeezed my hand again. “I know! But they’re sleeping! Shhh-shhh-shhhhhhhhh.”

That hardly mattered.

I had visited Wonderland in my nightmares so many times; I’d been there in the flesh twice in the last year; we had gazed upon the ruined landscape once, via the dubious ‘safety’ of Evelyn’s scrying window, almost a year ago then. But none of those times — not the dreams, not the kidnapping, not the remote viewing — had given me the opportunity to observe what this place was really like.

I had not looked upon Wonderland in such detail since I was a child.

Lozzie, myself, and the canvas which contained the Invisus Oculus had arrived in the same spot as on all those previous occasions — the very same place that the imitation-Lozzie had dragged me when she’d forced me back to Wonderland all those months ago, the same spit of ground where Lozzie and I had stood when we’d pulled the Edward-ball to Wonderland to subject him to the gaze of the Eye, the same spot where Evelyn’s scrying window had materialised. Three times was too many for coincidence, but I didn’t know why; perhaps this was the spot where I had fled from Wonderland a decade earlier, or perhaps it was the dead centre of the eye’s gaze.

Or maybe this plane of reality was broken, and this exact spot was all that really existed. Whichever case was the truth, I filed that observation away for later, to share with Evelyn. It might be important. But we could not chew on it then.

Nearby, beyond the border of the Invisus Oculus and the naked edge of the canvas, lay a few scraps of evidence that we had been here before.

A rough ring of crisped and blackened flesh had disturbed the ashes. It reminded me of the carbonised residue left on the metal of a barbecue grill if, for example, one forgets about an unfortunate sausage. Those burned fragments were all which remained of the Edward-ball, what little scraps of flesh had fallen from his form when I had hoisted him up before the Eye. Luckily those fragments were still and cold, and very very dead.

A little closer to the canvas stood the pitiful remains of a pair of chrome boots, made of Outsider star metal, melted down to the middle of the shins. A little black gunk was baked into a hard crust inside the boots. The soles had deformed under incredible heat and stuck to the ground. Shapeless puddles of long-cooled metal lay nearby, marred by blackened patches of charred flesh.

That was one of Lozzie’s Knights — the Knight who had protected us from the Eye, when Lozzie had come to rescue me from this hell, before I had even known what the Knights were. We dared not reach out beyond the Invisus Oculus, but we made a mental note that when all this was over, we would retrieve what was left of this Knight, return it to the castle in Camelot, and give it whatever burial the rest of the Round Table decreed. We would do it personally, with our own bare hands. It was the least we owed a dead hero.

And finally, on the opposite side to the Knight’s melted boots, a long scrape had marked the black ash. The impact-mark terminated in a little crater, a shallow depression in the soil.

That was where the Eye’s imitation-Lozzie had fallen, when the Knight had rammed a lance through its chest and flung it away.

The imitation Lozzie was nowhere to be seen. No corpse lay decayed upon the earth, nor preserved by unnatural forces; there was no dried blood or sticky residue on the soil. We could not recall seeing her the previous time, when we had been fighting the Ed-ball, but we’d not been paying much attention back then.

Beyond this scant evidence of human activity lay only the ruins, marching off across the endless plain, toward the ring of broken mountains, the worshipping watchers, and the horizon beyond.

But that was not a horizon.

“Aversion therapy?” I hiccuped, trying to laugh. The ropes that bound Lozzie and I to each other creaked — I was pulling on one of them with a tentacle. “N-no thanks.”

Lozzie whispered: “Time to go hooooooome! The test is a success! Success success! Woohoo! Time to go? Go go go!”

Lozzie was right, even if we’d not confirmed it yet.

Neither of us had looked up.

Back on earth, in Sharrowford, within the comforting walls of Number 12 Barnslow Drive, tucked away deep in the magical workshop, everyone was waiting for us to return home. The unique properties of the Invisus Oculus presented some odd logistical challenges; as soon as Lozzie and I had stepped inside the pupil all strapped up and ready, everyone else had promptly forgotten we were there. Our assembled support had been unable to see Lozzie sticking her tongue out and voicing some truly blush-inducing compliments about Raine’s tummy. I wasn’t sure if those observations about Raine’s “virgin-eater cheese-grater” and “pussy-rubdown washboard” were actually genuine or just Lozzie’s attempt to take the edge off my fear, though I strongly suspected the latter.

We had spent the last couple of days subjecting the Invisus Oculus to every test we could imagine, short of putting it in the middle of a busy street and getting one of us hit by a car. Almost everybody in the house took a turn in the funny forgetting circle, just for the novelty — though Tenny had disliked it deeply and Zheng had refused to go anywhere near it. We’d done all sorts of serious tests, including having me search for Raine with brain-math while she was only a few feet away and I’d forgotten where she was; that hadn’t worked either, much to Evelyn’s relief.

During all these tests we had discovered the only way to circumvent the circle was to write down instructions to oneself first, before the subject entered the Invisus Oculus; even written reminders were highly unreliable — they didn’t break the spell’s effect or allow anybody to remember or see anything, they simply allowed the note-taker a chance to believe something they had written in their own handwriting.

Raine almost always believed her notes, and mine even more so. Evelyn almost never trusted anything.

So, the last thing we’d seen before we had teleported to Wonderland was Raine and Evelyn looking very confused, both of them frowning at the notes they’d written in their own handwriting, explaining to them what was going on and where I was. Unlike Evelyn’s little trick two days ago, nobody in the house would be comforted by the subconscious knowledge that I was safe and sound. Lozzie and I were missing, in danger, on a time limit. Everyone would feel that.

I whispered back to Lozzie: “Not yet. Don’t take us home yet.”

Lozzie peered at me with wide eyes, balanced on the edge of real fear. “Heathy?”

I took a lemon out of my pocket; Praem had given one to me before I’d stepped into the circle. I hadn’t been sure why — it wasn’t as if we were planning on stopping in Wonderland long enough for a light picnic — but now I understood. I needed the courage. I tore into the lemon with tentacle and teeth, stuffing the rind back into my pocket lest it break the circle of the Invisus Oculus, and jamming the soft yellow flesh into my mouth. I chewed and swallowed quickly, barely tasting the lemon, shaking all over.

Then, with more willpower than I knew I possessed, I looked up.

The sky was not a sky, but a vast darkness from horizon to horizon, ridged and humped and creased in the middle, at the place where two eyelids met. Those creases were deeper than any ocean trench, those ridges taller than mountain ranges, those lids vast as worlds.

The lid did not shudder, nor twitch, nor part. No crack of shining darkness stared down upon the land. The architect and artist of my nightmares, my teacher in the secrets of reality, my adoptive parent from Outside, was asleep, in repose, unaware.

The Eye was shut.

“It worked,” I breathed, my voice quivering like a lead in the wind. I was shaking all over, but we squeezed the words out. “It can’t see us. Doesn’t know we’re here. Lozzie. Lozzie. It works. I can’t— um— it— wow.”

“Yes! Yes yes!” Lozzie hissed back. “Yes, it worked! It worked! Evee-weevey is gonna be happy and satisfied and smug and silly and somebody needs to cuddle with her, yes! So let’s go! Heathy, let’s go back!”

But we only whispered: “Maisie’s up there.”

Lozzie said nothing, but I could hear her breathing at my side, just a touch too rough with fear.

We seven Heathers flirted with a brief madness.

We knew in our heart of hearts, deep down in the resonance of our sevenfold soul, that Maisie was not out there somewhere amid the black ash and blasted ruin of this world; her body was not coiled up in a coffin or bricked up beneath a floor; we would not find her hooked into some kind of life-support machine, or placed upon a throne of obsidian and tended by a court of shadows; we would not discover her shade adrift on the ethereal winds nor stumble across her still-inhabited corpse on an altar in the wastes of Wonderland.

She was up there, with the Eye — inside it, or in its clutches, or trapped just behind the lid, or buried deep in the jelly. The specifics did not matter.

She was up there. All I had to do was reach out.

Why not do it right then?

Everyone else was safe at home, tucked away behind the walls of reality, unreachable by the sleeping god in the sky — all except Lozzie, but she could teleport herself back to Sharrowford in complete safety. Why not reach out with a pressure-bubble of brain-math right then, ram it through the Eye’s lid and into the cornea beneath? Why not reach out for my twin, my sister, right then? It was the same thing I was going to do eventually, wasn’t it? But this way everyone else would be safe, everyone else would be untouchable, and only I would be placed at risk. Forget the others, the Knights, the Caterpillars; forget Evelyn’s magical plans and Raine’s moral support; forget Zheng and Twil ready to haul my limp body back through a gateway; forget Lozzie here as emergency escape; forget Sevens prepared to weave some last-minute fiction to stave off my death. Forget the plan, do it now, do it raw, do it before we could second guess ourselves.

We came within a hair’s breadth of leaping.

But we had promised. We had promised to stop acting like this, stop leaping before we looked, stop leaving our beloved out of the loop. And if we tried and failed, alone and unsupported, the others wouldn’t even have a corpse to mourn.

We took a deep breath, let it out very slowly, and won the argument within ourselves.

We lowered our gaze from the closed lid of the Eye.

“Okay, Lozzie,” we rasped. “Test successful. Evee will be really happy, that’s right. Let’s head back. You do it, please. I’m … feeling strained.”

Lozzie’s hand tightened on mine. She broke into a secretive little smile, all mischievous now that I had pulled back from the precipice. Maybe she could tell.

“Okay, Heathy!”

I glanced up at the Eye one more time, at the closed lid. “Almost there, Maisie,” I whispered. “I promise. Wait for us.”

“Mm? Heathy?” Lozzie tilted her head at me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

And with a wink and a shuffle and cluck of her tongue, Lozzie did just that. Wonderland blinked shut, Outside the walls of reality.

==

“Evee kissed me a few days ago.”

Jan looked up from the table in the magical workshop, from where we had laid out her very special and very large delivery. She stared at me in wide-eyed silence, her previous explanation forgotten. Eventually I tore my eyes away from the life-sized, colourless, inanimate version of myself lying on the table, and met Jan’s bewildered gaze.

Jan said: “What.”

I cleared my throat and gestured at the Invisus Oculus with a tentacle: the canvas was laid out neatly at the far end of the room, alongside the harnesses Lozzie and I had used yesterday morning, just in front of the gateway mandala on the back wall of the workshop.

“In the middle of the Invisus Oculus,” we said. “Right here, in the workshop. It was during the first time we tested it. She kissed me, right in front of Raine. But Raine couldn’t see, because of the invisibility and the forgetting and everything.” I sighed and shook my head. “It was all a bit odd. I don’t know what to make of it.”

Jan said nothing. Her eyes were dangerously wide and jewel-like, with the look of a small prey animal who had been confronted by a lethal predator and then anticlimactically booped on the nose, uncertain if she should run, play dead, or boop right back.

I cleared my throat again and shuffled my feet. “Um. It’s just … I … ”

Jan found her voice. “Heather, why are you telling me this?”

“Well … I just … I’m not sure, I—”

Jan gestured at herself and almost laughed, caught between hysteria and bewilderment — then pointed at the door to the magical workshop, firmly closed for once. Everyone else had been politely asked to wait outside, seeing as Jan’s delivery did technically involve me being very naked, or at least my surrogate lying there with not a stitch of clothing on its body. Half the people waiting out there in the kitchen did see me naked pretty regularly, but the experience of unwrapping this strange package was deeply alienating enough without Raine cracking jokes and Evelyn averting her gaze.

Jan said, “Is this the real reason you wanted everyone else to wait? Did you fake your modesty just to get me alone?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean—”

Jan threw her hands up and said: “This is like calling a plumber in to do some work on your pipes and you start trauma-dumping! Should I be charging you rates for my services as an agony aunt?! A couples’ therapist? What else?”

We started to blush, mortified at the misunderstanding. “Oh, it’s not trauma, Jan, no. I rather enjoyed it, actually. Evee’s not any good at kissing, but … ”

Jan boggled at me like I’d produced a live fish from inside my underwear and was trying to hand it to her. She gestured at the other me — the me on the table — and said: “Heather, can we please focus on the reason I’m here?”

The reason Jan was here was the life-size replica of my body, lying on the cleared tabletop of the magical workshop, surrounded by the unwrapped leather bag and the mass of packing peanuts in which it had been transported.

Maisie’s new vessel.

The empty vessel did not in fact look anything like me, not beyond an exact copy of my proportions; it had my height from toes to skull, my narrow width of hip, my scrawny breadth of rib, my gangly arms and my short legs and the awkward curve of my spine. But all of that, every smooth limb and every doll-like joint, every rotating socket, all of it was cast in colourless grey carbon fibre. Unfleshed and empty, naked and skinless — but the vessel did not look like a human skeleton, not like a remnant of a person after their body had rotted away. It was like a doll, waiting for a soul.

It looked like it might sit up and start talking at any moment.

The vessel lacked a face; the skull was a blank void of grey-on-grey carbon fibre, with rough pits for eyes and a toothless jaw attached to the underside — another exact copy of my bone structure. How exactly Jan had achieved that from the pictures she’d taken of me, I wasn’t sure, but she had worked a miracle. The chest was not formed from individual ribs, as with a human being, but from a set of interlocking plates, fastened and bolted and slotted together, to create a sealed casket for Maisie’s soul. The waist was not reduced to a mere spine, but formed from a set of ring-structures to give the vessel much greater rigidity than a real skeleton without muscle to hold it together.

The spine itself was a wonder of magical engineering. It lacked the traditional vertebrae of a human chordate spine, replacing them with flexible armoured rings. Jan had explained that this would solve many of the nerve-protection issues she had suffered in her own early days.

One of my first questions when Jan had unwrapped the thing was: “What about the breasts? I know I’m small, but I’m not that flat. I do have … something.”

Jan had snorted, grabbed her own chest, and replied, “Don’t know about you, Heather, but I don’t have bones in my tits. Soft tissues are going to be Maisie’s responsibility, pneuma-somatic. Just like me.”

The only major difference to my body plan was the lack of tentacles. We had no idea what Maisie might require or want when she returned. She was not an abyssal squid, after all, not like me.

I tried not to think about that, about what that meant.

The whole thing weighed much less than expected — even I could lift it with relative ease, without the aid of my tentacles — but it was also much heavier than the visible parts suggested, considering it was mostly made from carbon fibre.

According to Jan the majority of that hidden weight was inside the chest and head. The skull was stuffed with specialised magic circles in little spheres and boxes, designed to ease Maisie back into a human sensory set-up as easily as possible, avoiding the issues Jan had experienced with blindness and deafness, during the first period of inhabitation of her new body. The sealed box of the chest cavity was heavily armoured on the inside, with both bulletproof and stab proof layers, a sphere of magic circles, and a special three-dimensional structure of Jan’s own devising, a many-sided shape carved from artificially grown crystal. That was the real secret of this empty vessel — a core for Maisie’s soul to settle into, like a handful of captured silt.

The exterior of the vessel was oddly alienating, like recognising oneself in a medical scan or an x-ray picture. The designs I’d seen in Jan’s notebook had seemed miraculous, and so was the result. But it was me. It was Maisie. And it was not yet alive.

I shrugged at Jan’s request that we return to the subject, smiling awkwardly. “What’s more to say? You’ve done incredibly well, Jan, as far as I can tell. And Evee’s ready to pay you, and … ”

Jan sighed as I trailed off. She screwed her eyes shut with growing irritation, and said: “You can pay me when you all come back safely from Wonderland.” Then she tutted. “Tch! I wish you’d called it something else. I had a soft spot for Alice in Wonderland, growing up. Especially the movie, the old animated one. Now it’s all tied up with this unspeakable horror you’re going to go throw yourself at. Bloody hell.”

Jan herself looked a little rumpled, which reminded me of how Evelyn sometimes looked after working on a long magical project without a proper break. Jan’s shiny black hair was uncombed and unwashed, all a-mess atop her head. She was wearing pink jogging bottoms, massive boots on her feet, and a dark blue ribbed sweater which looked like it had washed up from the North Sea thirty years ago, several sizes too large for her, with the sleeves cut off halfway down. The doll-like joints of her elbows and hands were clearly visible, as she was making no effort to hide them. When she’d arrived she’d also been wearing a pair of massive leather gloves — not the fashionable kind, but the working-with-dangerously-hot-substances kind — and carrying a cordless electric drill; she’d not been expecting our offer of ‘transport’ from her home workshop to take the form of Lozzie doing a teleport, so here she was, fresh from the proverbial forge.

July had looked entirely unruffled, tall and wide-eyed and athletic as ever, like she’d been doing nothing but exercising while Jan was working. She was out in the kitchen with the others, for now, probably pestering Zheng.

We cleared our throat again and gestured helplessly with several tentacles. “Um. Sorry. Are you … are you sure you don’t want paying now?”

Jan fixed me with a tired, greasy, very-done look. “It would be a bad omen to demand payment now.”

“Well,” I said. “We might not—”

Jan raised both hands and clapped them together in front of my face, like the jaws of a crocodile. “Shut!”

“I— Ja—”

“Shut! Stop! No! Don’t say it. You’ll bloody well jinx it.”

“But we might not—”

“Stop! Heather, just stop, oh my God.” Jan huffed. “You’re taking Lozzie out there with you, she’s an integral part of your plan, yes? So don’t say it, don’t tempt fate. I’m doing something I never, ever, ever do, on principle, in order to avoid tempting fate — I’m deferring payment for a job!” She huffed again and rubbed at her eyes. “Technically what I’m doing is not counting the job as over until your twin sister is safely inside this.” She tapped the vessel with a single pale knuckle. “Call it professional after-care, yes? I’m not just delivering a weapons system and then buggering off while you blow yourself up with it, I’m here to operate the damn thing if need be. So there.”

I glanced at the vessel again, then back at Jan. “‘Weapons system’?”

Jan sighed. “A figure of speech. Closest thing I could think of. You understand what I mean.”

“You’re not insinuating that you want to come to Wonderland with us?”

Jan boggled at me again, but less so than before. “Absolutely not! I’ll die! What else can I contribute, anyway?! No thank you.” She nudged the body again. “But you’ll have to take this with you, out there, yourself. Well, strapped to one of those Knights, I expect, but you get the point. I’ve already explained all of this to you, Heather, what are you … ” Jan trailed off and sighed again. She examined my face slowly, then blinked even slower, and resigned herself to something, deep inside. Then she sighed as if her soul was leaving her body. “Okay. Okay, Heather. You win.”

“I … I win what?”

Jan opened a hand toward the Invisus Oculus, on its canvas medium at the far end of the room. “You kissed Evelyn inside the secret invisibility sphere. Fine. What about it?”

“Oh. Um. Uh.” Our tentacles coiled inward, as if trying to protect us. Jan eyed us uneasily.

“Get on with it before I change my mind,” Jan almost snapped. “You’re getting a freebie here. Maybe I really should take up a new career unravelling the romantic entanglements of clueless young things like yourself. Huh!”

“Well, actually,” I corrected slowly. “She kissed me, not the other way around. She took charge.”

“Great,” Jan deadpanned. “And? Why are you telling me this? Why do you need to get this off your chest?”

We hesitated, looking away, coiling our tentacles up tighter. They creaked.

Jan sighed. “Why not tell Raine?”

“I did!” we squeaked. “She cheered!”

“What,” Jan deadpanned again, slightly more panicked than before. “Oh no.”

“Specifically she said ‘good for Evee’. She asked me if I enjoyed it. She asked if I was worried about her feeling jealous, and she said don’t worry. She wasn’t jealous. It was— it was totally unlike the previous times this sort of thing happened! It wasn’t like she didn’t care, it was like she was happy about it! And then we had sex, three times, but that’s beside the point, because we often do that, but I don’t—”

Jan snapped her fingers three times to stop me. I blinked in surprise and tailed off. She said: “So why not tell another one of your many girlfriends about this? Surely there is somebody better suited for this than me.”

We shrugged, feeling intensely awkward. “I … I’m not … I don’t feel like I have anybody else to tell.”

“You have a polycule!”

Thump thump went a gentle knock on the workshop door. Raine’s voice called out through the wood: “You two okay in there?”

“Yes!” I called back. “We’re just talking. We’re fine, Raine! Please don’t worry!”

“Okaaaay,” Raine called back. I heard her steps recede from the door again.

Jan grumbled under her breath, shooting me a rather nasty look. “Oh, yes, just fine, just peachy, don’t worry about me, not like I’m trapped in here with a squid with romantic issues.” She huffed and spoke up again. “Heather, you do realise that I am the last person you want to ask for romantic advice, yes? I am a fifty three year old virgin — not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I suspect you have a touch more experience than me.”

We met Jan’s eyes head-on. All our tentacles swivelled to point at her too, with every scrap of our attention. We just stared for a moment, to let her see.

Jan frowned. “Ah,” she said. “You’re not blushing.”

“Because I’m not asking for romantic advice,” I said. “I’m … I can’t deal with this … this normality. Evelyn kissed me, like we have all the time in the world to go through whatever she needs. Raine treats it like a healthy development, and maybe it is, but … we’re running out of time. Everyone is acting so normal. Tenny’s playing chess, Lozzie’s Slipping Outside now and again. Zheng and Grinny are … I don’t know, but Grinny’s put on muscle. And we went to Wonderland yesterday. Did Lozzie tell you that? We were there and we looked up at the Eye. And it felt almost … routine! Normal! I can’t. I just can’t, Jan. We’re about to step out there and try to snatch Maisie from a living god and everyone is acting so normal!”

Jan’s exasperation had fled her face. She regarded me now with a light and gentle frown, a serious look inside her eyes. She ran her tongue along her teeth, behind the pale shield of her lips.

“Sorry,” I blurted out. “I haven’t been able to say this to any of the others. They’re all coming with me, after all. They’re all trying their best. I just don’t know what to say. We might all be dead by this time next week.”

Jan nodded slowly. “You’ve set the date for the expedition?”

“This Sunday. Five days from now. Evee says that’s all the time she needs to complete the airlock out in Camelot, assuming the Knights and Caterpillars work as fast as Lozzie said they will.” I shrugged. “And they are, mostly. So, Sunday it is.”

Jan took a deep breath, let out a long sigh, and then cast around the magical workshop. Her eyes alighted on the lumpy old sofa beneath the spider-servitors, but then she dismissed that with a frown. Instead she grabbed one of the many chairs around the table, dragged it outward, and sat down. She gestured for me to do the same. I pulled out a chair with my tentacles and sat opposite.

Jan just stared at me for a moment, turning something over inside her head. I sat politely, hands and tentacles folded.

Eventually she smacked her lips, as if her decision was made. “Heather, I want to tell you about something, but I need to know that you won’t tell Lozzie.”

A field of red flags blossomed inside my head and heart. “Ummmmm.”

Jan huffed, rolled her eyes, and leaned back in her chair. “Yes, Heather, I’m about to tell you that I’m actually wanted by the International Criminal Court, for crimes against humanity, and I’m only in this body to avoid spending the rest of my life locked in a cell in the Hague.”

I tutted. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

“Oh, I think I do!” Jan tutted right back at us. “Heather, I wouldn’t ask you to keep a secret from Lozzie if it was something bad about me. Frankly, if you did, then I wouldn’t trust you around her. Look, I just want to talk about part of my own past, about things that happened to me, but I don’t want you to talk to Lozzie about it, because it’s … it’s not your place to talk about my past. It’s mine. It’s not a dark secret or an unforgiven sin. It’s just war.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Okay. I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” she sighed, then added: “Sorry. It’s just that sometimes you’re such a kid. You all are. You don’t understand war. You won’t, unless you’ve experienced it.” Jan blew out a long breath. She looked down at one of her own hands, making and unmaking a fist. I watched the doll-joints move. Would Maisie be like that one day? Jan said, “How much history did you study in school? What do they teach you these days, World War One at all?”

“A little,” I said, frowning. “I don’t really think our situation is remotely comparable. Though I was always better with the poetry than the actual history, the trenches and mud and all that.” I quoted from memory: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest, To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.”

Jan barked with sudden and surprised laugher. “Alright, you old boomer. You know more than most!”

I clicked my tongue. “You’re the boomer, Jan, literally. Last I checked I’m generation zed? Is that what it’s called now? And there’s nothing old or fuddy-duddy about loving poetry!” We bristled, almost angry for real. “You take that back.”

Jan cleared her throat. “Alright, alright, I retract that bit, but only that bit. Right then. So. You know what all those poor bastard Tommies did in the trenches, before they went over the top?”

I shrugged.

“They joked,” Jan said. “They laughed. They shared cigarettes and a bit of food, and they did what they could to stay human. People used to call it ‘gallows humour’, like the jokes the condemned man makes while the executioner is sharpening the axe. But it’s just human nature. We gotta keep laughing, or we’ll start crying.” Jan swallowed and took stock for a second, as if steeling herself, then moved from the general to the specific. “I went to war. The conflict I told you about, the mage conflict, you recall that?”

I nodded. “I’ve picked up bits and pieces. That was decades ago now, yes?”

“Mm,” Jan grunted. “We didn’t call it a war, back then. Some did, some didn’t. But it was a war, whatever name it was given. There were two sides, and nobody was gonna stop fighting until it was done. People got hurt, some people died. Some of those people died because of me. One side lost … ”

She trailed off for a moment. I asked, softly as I could: “Which side were you on?”

“The winning one,” she said. “But nobody won in the end.”

“And what were the sides? What was it about?”

Jan frowned at me, surfacing from her memories. “That’s hard to explain. All wars have two explanations, the simple one and the complex one. The first is rarely true and the second rarely satisfies. It was about a lot of things.”

Taika’s words floated up from my memory. “‘Homunculus War’,” I said out loud. “Is that correct?”

Jan’s eyes went wide. She stared at me like she’d seen a ghost — and not a friendly one. In that name she saw the sort of spectre which had knives for teeth and blood pouring from the eye sockets. She swallowed hard.

“S-sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“How do you know that?” she demanded, not urgent but almost offended.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I … heard that name from somebody else. Another mage.”

Jan snorted. “Joseph King? No, no, I don’t want to know. And I’m not joking. I don’t want to know what you know. Drop it.”

“Okay. Sorry, Jan. I respect that. Sorry.”

Jan sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I’d rather not talk about that part, Heather. Look, the point is, even when things got really bad, we didn’t stop being human, or stop joking around, or stop laughing.” She thumbed toward the door of the magical workshop. “Not quite like your weird and wonderful polycule out there, but close enough.”

“I … I see.”

Jan shrugged. “Even the worst nights, the parts where it got really bad … ” Jan wet her lips with a flicker of pink tongue, smiled, and slipped into the attitude of a storyteller. “One night, when it was almost over, and it looked like it was going to go against us, me and four … ” She paused and frowned. “No, me and five others, actually, we were hold up inside this house, surrounded. This was northern France, in the dead of winter, and it was cold as fuck. Snow on the ground. Not a scrap of green anywhere. This was before modern cell phones, right? So we were really cut off. Phone lines were gone. The house was surrounded by … I guess you’d call them demon-hosts, like July or Zheng, but not as sophisticated. And we were fucked.” Jan grinned. “We were exhausted, we’d been in a sort of magical duel earlier in the day — too complicated to explain now, but we’d lost, basically. Nobody was capable of doing shit. I was seeing double. Lothaire was delirious. We were probably all gonna die when dawn broke. One of us — this older lady called Enisa — she had a broken leg. Mundane broken leg, because you know, hey, magical bullshit doesn’t stop you from stepping in a rabbit hole in the dark while running from zombies, and fucking up your shin. It was dark, and cold, and we were surrounded by monsters. We lit all the fireplaces in that old house, but we knew the moment we stepped beyond that light, we were all gonna get eaten alive.”

“Well, you obviously didn’t,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t be here telling me the story.”

Jan snorted. “For a literature student, you can be surprisingly unromantic sometimes, Heather.”

I shrugged. “Just … trying to stay grounded.”

Jan sighed. “Alright. Well. Do you know what we did, that night?”

I shook my head.

“We stopped watching the windows, got out a pack of cards, and got really, really, really drunk.” Jan broke into a grin. “I lost three thousand Francs that I did not possess. Yannic and Melitta finally broke their weird on-off love-hate thing they’d had going on for months and fucked like rabbits in the next room over. We all heard them, too! Melitta made noises like a horse, it was amazing. And then they had a baby nine months later. I only met the kid once, when he was a baby, but I wonder if he knows where he was conceived.” Jan laughed, clearly enjoying this. “We wheeled Enisa out the front door so she could personally throw an empty wine bottle at the demons waiting in the long grass. I pissed in another bottle and followed it up with that.”

“Ew,” I said.

“Fuck you!” Jan laughed. “One of the best moments of my life, that night. But what matters is that it got us through.”

“It did? How?”

Jan spread her arms. “Still alive, aren’t I? Said you yourself! See, we were terrified. The mage who’d sent the demons — fucking monster by the name of Stane Ratko, who is very dead by now, I believe — he didn’t actually have the power to take us. He was counting on us freaking out and leaving the house, trying to make a break for it, or turning on each other. But we didn’t.” Jan slapped her knee. “We played cards, threw our piss like monkeys, and fucked. Well.” Jan cleared her throat. “Some of us fucked. Not me. And in the morning we tore through those demons like a hot knife in the gut, with proper magic and proper confidence.”

“The phrase is ‘like a hot knife through butter’.”

“Not right then it wasn’t. Also we had some guns, not a knife, but that’s beside the point.” Jan spread her hands again. “Heather, I’m saying that acting like that is normal, and it’s good. You’re about to go to war. Maybe a very different kind of war, but it’s still a war. Your friends, your lovers, Evee, Raine, whatever, they’re probably feeling exactly the same way you are. Scared and awkward. You shouldn’t need to tell me this. You should be with them, telling them you love them, and maybe doing some other stuff.”

I sighed. “We have enough sex as it is.”

Jan shot me a withering look. “You know that’s not what I mean by ‘other stuff’. Not entirely, anyway.”

We cleared our throat. “I … I know. I think I understand, Jan. Thank you. I’ll go make an effort. I’ll start right now, even.”

Jan held up a hand. “We ain’t done yet.”

I blinked at her. “We’re not?”

Jan’s amusement slipped away, leaving something stark and sharp behind in her face. She seemed to steel herself once again. “Heather, the other thing you said, that worries me much more. This advice is less universally applicable, but I think I might be the only one who can give it.”

I shook my head, bewildered. “Other thing?”

Jan hesitated, then said: “You said going to Wonderland felt too normal.”

“Oh. Um. I suppose I did.”

Jan sighed and nodded. “Right. ‘Cos you’re all jumped up on that jay-are-pee-gee protagonist juice. Heading off to fight god for the fate of the world and all that.”

“What does that even mean?” My turn to huff. “And it’s not for the fate of the world, it’s for the fate of my twin sister. I think I understand the stakes perfectly well, thank you.”

Jan winced and held up a hand again, her fingers showing the clear lines of her doll-joints. “It means you’ve got it into your head that things have to go down a certain kind of way. Gravitas and pomp. Drama. Meaning.”

We frowned. “I don’t care about gravitas or drama. Whatever it takes to get Maisie home, that’s all that matters.”

Jan sighed and ran a hand over her face. She leaned back in her chair and looked at me like a problem she did not have the solution for. She suddenly looked exactly as old as she really was, and more than a little tired with me.

“Jan,” I said gently. “I appreciate the offer of advice, but I don’t think this is relevant to—”

“I had my own death all planned out,” Jan said.

We stopped in surprise.

Jan shrugged. “I don’t mean like, actual suicide. I mean that I knew I had to die, even if only for a second or two, to get into this body.” She raised one hand and wiggled her fingers. “And that was scary, you know? Yeah, yeah, I’m a big scary mage, infinite cosmic power, whatever. But that’s scary even for one of us. So I tried to control it, I had this big plan. I was going to throw a hell of a party, visit Paris for a week, then clean my whole home from top to bottom. I was gonna do the ritual at dawn, daybreak, on my birthday. I even knew the clothes I was gonna wear — all white, in robes, like I was a fucking offering or something.” Jan snorted. “I was such a fool. And you know how it actually went down?”

“Not like that?” I ventured

Jan smiled a very grim smile. “Shot three times, in the back, after an hour long fight. Dirty, exhausted, and alone. All my pretty little plans came to nothing. But, I did it anyway. I put myself in the right place.” She tapped the centre of her sternum. “You know what the lesson is?”

“No,” I said with a sigh. “I’m sorry for what you went through, Jan, but I don’t see why you have to keep phrasing these points as questions.”

“The lesson,” Jan said, with more patience than I’d expected, “is that even when things don’t go down how you expect, you have to follow them down. Even if you don’t get the catharsis you need, in your case. Even if you miss all the cues and ruin all the meaning. I don’t know what’s going to happen out there, Heather. Neither do you, not really. But keep your eyes on the prize. Rescue your sister. That’s all that matters, right?”

I was about to argue back again — but Jan was right.

Wonderland had felt almost normal, upon return. But it didn’t matter how Wonderland felt. The only thing which mattered was Maisie.

I nodded slowly, and tried to smile. “I think I get it. I’ll try. Thank you, Jan.”

Jan smiled back, though less confident than me. She got up and rolled the tension out of her delicate shoulders. “Right, if you’re quite done, Heather, I’m gonna go talk to Evelyn about payment.”

“I thought you said—”

“Yeah,” Jan replied with a smirk. “Payment once you all get back. I’m not asking for it in advance, I’m not tempting fate here. I’m counting on you all coming home. Plus one. Am I right, or am I right?”

My smile felt brittle. “I hope you’re right.”