Katalepsis

Wonderland.

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

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

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

Hands touched me, brought me back.

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

Wonderland.

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

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

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

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

The Eye remained unopened. The Invisus Oculus had worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn grunted: “There’s not—”

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

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

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

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

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

“I-I’m fine.”

“Deep breaths now!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raine said, “Heather did warn us.”

“Still,” Evelyn said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Down girl,” Praem intoned.

But nobody laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That worked. I slept.

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

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

Everyone drank a lot of coffee. Except Lozzie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Wonderland.

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

Wonderland. Again.

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

Wonderland — but this time we were far from alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody was dealing well with Wonderland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Big H?”

“Heathy? What’s wrong? Wrong?”

“Shaman. Breathe the air.”

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

“Catharsis,” Praem intoned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait, what!?” Twil spat.

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

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

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

Twil muttered, “You sure about that?”

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

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

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

Lozzie chirped softly: “Oh no!”

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

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

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

“Thank you,” said Praem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zheng rumbled: “Eyes down, laangren.”

Twil let out a sob. “I can’t.”

Praem intoned: “Vertigo.”

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

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

“Shit,” Evelyn hissed. “We can’t—”

“Look up,” said a gurgling voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m ready!” I announced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m starting!” I said.

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

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

“How long do I have?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

First I defined Maisie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To observe. As the Eye does.

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

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

And what did we see?

Wonderland was a bowl, drowned in a void.

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

Look harder, Heather. Look harder!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were no mountains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We were not supposed to be there.

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

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

I see you! it chirped.

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

“Uurk!”

I swallowed a lungful of warm salty fluid.

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

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

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

Lozzie shouted: “She’s stuck!”

“On it,” said Raine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shit,” Evelyn swore. “That means … ”

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

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

Bwoop.

Bwip.

Bweep.

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

Evelyn snapped, “Lozzie, interpret!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Evee.”

“Heather, no.”

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