Katalepsis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn tutted. “You’ve touched worse.”

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

Lozzie chirped: “Evee joke.”

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

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

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

Evelyn snapped, “No! No shooting it!”

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

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

“Why!?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I insist,” Evelyn hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lozzie chirped. “It is cute!”

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

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

“R-right! Yes! Okay! S-sorry! Sorry!”

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

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

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

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

We were so close. So close to Maisie.

And something awful was drawing closer to us.

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

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

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

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

Zheng growled. “It is inside our heads.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it stopped, as quickly as it had started.

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

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

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

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

I said, “I don’t feel any changes.”

Evelyn hissed: “What was that?”

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

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

“Ready,” I whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We resisted that urge. It was instinct alone.

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

Twil whispered, “The hell is it doing?”

“Hell is right,” Raine murmured.

Praem intoned, soft and subtle: “Observing.”

I tried to laugh, but squeaked instead.

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

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

“Don’t!” I hissed.

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

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

Raine said, “Loose.”

Evelyn squinted. “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

She almost sobbed.

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

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

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

“Mm,” Lozzie whined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zheng rumbled: “Surviving. Discarded.”

“New outfit,” said Praem.

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

Several of us shared meaningful looks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Welcome back?”

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

Before anybody could react, the ground shook.

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

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

The Eye had closed tighter.

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

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

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

Twil squinted. “What?! What!?”

“You scrunch up.”

Evelyn snapped: “It can’t see us!”

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

I couldn’t answer.

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

What did this mean for Maisie?

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

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

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

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

Out—

Nope! chirped a nightmare.

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

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

I aborted the equation.

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

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

“I tried,” I said.

“ … what?”

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

“What?!”

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

“Heather?” Raine hissed.

“Kitten?”

“Shaman. We are here. Are we not?”

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

I nodded at the Puppet — or to the Puppet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Heather,” Evee warned.

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

The Lozzie-Puppet was mounting the plate.

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

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

“Welcome,” said Praem.

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

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

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

“Heather!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twil squinted at me. “Fishing?”

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

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

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

“Through the gateway.”

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

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

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

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

“Shaman,” she acknowledged.

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

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Then I trust your judgement,” Raine murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey!” Twil said.

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

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

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

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

“Quite, kitten,” Sevens agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn grunted: “All against?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn huffed, sharp and exasperated.

“Evee?” I said. “Your veto?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mm? O-oh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shaman,” Zheng hissed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shaman,” Zheng prompted.

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

The Puppet stared and stared and stared and—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“InVEStiGAtingggggg.”

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

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

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

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

“Back!” it jerked out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirteen lines of equation.

One line was not of her.

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

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

Only a split-second had passed for everybody else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed and motion were no longer real.

This was not something that bodies and minds could outrun.

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

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

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

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

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

We had made a deadly mistake.

But I had sworn an oath, hadn’t I?

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

Reality would break before we did.

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

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

No choice at all.

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

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

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

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

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

Flimsy, inexpert, good for only one thrust.

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

Between the lids of the Eye our improvised weapon slipped.

And struck.

An ocean.

Beneath.