Previous Chapter

Liora

A year since we came here. We know the pattern now. Moon-cycles they are. Today is the twelfth. We will keep counting. Aiming for ten-thousand.

The outing is my initiative, and I’ve decided to keep it small. Just the three of us.

Before sunrise, I visit the garden where they now live. The one next to Eldon’s old patch. Nothing yet like that full-grown paradise also tended to. Humble beginnings on the new shared plot. The humans do enjoy arguing about the way to go, about next steps, seed choices, layouts. They’re old-fashioned. The real challenge is on the valley floor. Absolute beginners we are.

They’re ready as I arrive. Auryn wearing climbing shoes, Eldon barefoot like me. We find our way through the sleeping labyrinth of new garden-gates, half finished tunnels, little bridges and fresh holes in the walls. Crawlers scurrying, doing their long haul thing to the grid. As we exit, it is still dark, close to dawn. Even though there’s no light yet in the emerging structures, some contours have started to soften, hinting at a very different set of rules for their new project. I think the little creatures don’t even know. Nobody does.

Eldon stops and listens. He’s grown a beard. Hiding the jaw still giving him trouble. The limping is better, faded to a hobble as he walks. I don’t hear anything. Are his ears better than mine now?

Then the first bird calls out. Faint. Close by, another answers. The smile that man can produce. I get why Auryn won’t let go. Despite him preferring to spend a lot of time on his own. And not just in the garden. His expeditions into the wider realm get longer each time.

I do think Auryn is a sucker for the sweet reunions after the separations. They have rhythm, I think that’s the word.

She has her secret outings too. Scouring the leftovers of the Ledon estate on the hillside. Sometimes staying overnight. Always returning with treasure. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day she moved up there.

We walk single file. Do not talk much as it will be a stiff climb. At least for me. I have never been up there. And I’m nervous. I know She is regular as a clock, but as sure as I was the first time, so stained is my trust every new month. And it is getting worse. Miracles deviate from agendas, don’t they? What if there is a larger pattern? Say eleven in a row, and then a hiatus of ten centuries. Could be. Auryn can’t convince me. Eldon smiles and considers it plausible, but not likely.

We walk through the spillway. The reservoir’s arterial cave. The granite’s zinging patterns spoiled by the headlamps of the two elders up ahead. It’s okay because I enter the canyon at the end of the tunnel just as the pale moon sets. The full disc is a super-moon. Inflated to a near-burst. Appearing big and ultra-violet to me. The deep gorge is sensuous. The first signs of green returning.

We climb. An old concrete path with steps winding its way up. It’s the back of the dam. The unbroken side. The remnants of a platform. And then we step up to the view.

It’s disappointing. Nice to see the overview, but not what I expected. Long shadows mark the stuff on the valley floor. Nice, but also just another sun about to rise in a meticulous sky. Well, we didn’t come for the vista as it is.

Khan didn’t make it. We didn’t have the means for her type of genan. We couldn’t help her recover. But the last few months, she was a different woman. Encouraging other women to develop skills of their own, to develop a real identity. She sat with newcomers, to listen to how they managed to come here. Honoring their stories. She will be remembered today, and for a long time to come.

We do a little ritual. Eldon brought a tiny box he made especially for this. It holds a single dandelion in just the right phase. This is her day, he says, as he opens the lid that pushes up the fluffy sphere. The mechanics are so satisfying. He gives it to me.

“May your seeds find dirt and rain,” I say and gently blow it like a candle. The launch of ten-thousand settlers. A plant that has learned to fly. That has a deep root and wanders the earth.

Behind me the eternal layout discussion flares up as they point out locations for future orchards. A small lake would be nice. When will they ever learn?

They’ve been up here. Seen it before. I haven’t. I brought them with me for me. I might shut down. I am nervous. Scared. I close my eyes and surrender. Ask Her to hold me for another day. To be here with us. She’s about to wake up. Comes when called.

As I end the prayer, my parents have joined me in my silence.

We’re a bit early.

I’m on the left, Auryn’s in the middle. I now feel solemn. I am prone to ritual. The tendency to dress up is latent in me too. I don’t because of Auryn. Maybe I am too hyped, but I feel she is quiet today. I sense nothing particular, just turned inward. Eldon is his usual self. His aura would be bordering on boring were it not a quadraphonic sphere of velvet wiggle-worms. A dive-in cushion the size of a village-square. He’s good to be around. Like a clear pond to swim in.

“Did you see?” Auryn asks a bit flat.

“See what?” I ask. She’s coming in sideways, with an amuse, not the main dish.

“The critters have found their way here too.”

No, I didn’t see.

“Through the pipes, probably,” she murmurs, more to herself than to us.

I expected nothing less. Of course they would include the dam. There’s a lot to cover here. The ugly bastard could use a make-over.

Something’s brewing next to me.

“I found the lab,” she says.

Here we go.

Eldon looks at her, gives me a glance. Her face is stoic in the morning sun, unreadable.

“He developed them here on site,” she says.

“At the Ledon estate?” Eldon asks. Slow nod from Auryn.

“Blueprints, embryo-farms, scaffolded minds. And something else. Proto-designs. Experiments that didn’t crawl. A small production facility, deep underground.”

She’s still not at the core of what she wants to share. This is just the lead in. I am not surprised that the crawlers were created here. By a man crazy enough to try. Rich enough to keep trying, and keep getting it wrong until something slipped through the net. Until it escaped and took root outside the fence.

“I was in there,” she says, turning from the view. Arms folded. No smile.

I don’t think she means she was in there literally.

“I found myself in that lab, Eldon.” Auryn says, but looks at me.

“I was one of his investments, one of his projects.”

She walks away. Kicking a pebble from the deteriorating concrete. Big sigh.

“I’m sorry I never told you, but I knew I wasn’t human. Not fully. I knew I had no parents, knew I wasn’t a full normal woman. I didn’t bleed, wasn’t too interested in sex or relations, not made for procreation. But I didn’t know I was being monitored from the start. I didn’t come here by accident. I was led. Lured. Groomed.”

She’s pacing. Eldon checks if I’m alright. I am. Things fall into place, make more sense suddenly. And a lot is up for reconsidering. But I feel the distance is reduced. She’s closer to me. I smile at her. And when she sees, the barriers finally crumble. She breaks down and I can hold her. A full embrace. Completed with a superimposed umbrella-hug by papa-bear himself.

The singing starts.

Me and my sisters call it singing, but it’s a below-hearing buzz, like a giant beehive preparing to move house. Bees the size of cars.

I know many of us are out to witness. Many eyes on Her now. This month is a water-moon. It used to be blood. But I re-named it. This is the first water-moon. Not sure what to expect.

I look at the cathedral and see the first signs.

Imagine the trunk of an ancient tree. Just the trunk. It has been cut. The tree is gone. And maybe there’s been some new shoots, but they too are slashed. And that thing is now made of bone, of marble. A polished work of art in the middle of a valley. A small town at its foothills. A castle-size temple with exaggerated arches and spikes and thick towers that seem a bit unfinished. Hints of gargoyles and finials, almond-shaped semi-openings that could hold colored glass, were it not the whole building is translucent occasionally. Filled with light conducing tracks and bundles that form networks, that have learned to communicate. A slow increased complexity. A body with organs and skin and sensitive nerve endings.

The builders made and remade, went wider for more parallel spines, and deeper, forming roots and tunnels and veins and capillary ducts, digging further down until they found the aquifers filled with deep-water. Learning the underground tides. And then the day comes that this pump is primed. Who knows how cloud and earth aligned, but they did, filling the upper regions with the water it needed to start the circulation, the breathing. She’s a steam engine raised by the many. A community tree nurtured to mythical size. As the sun heats the above-ground parts of the tree, the upper process begins to take shape. The miracle.

Vapour coils from her highest vents, winding upward with impossible elegance. A trunk forms in slow motion. A thick column of rising airborne water seeded with the dust nuclei harvested from the depths travels higher and higher until it curls outward as thick leafy branches. They are pushed away from the newly forming over-story. A mushroom cloud of water vapour. And as the layer thickens, the bottom starts to cool and descends until rain is shed. The cloud tree covers the whole valley, parts of the gorge too, but dissipates quickly beyond our bowl’s ridges.

She and the valley, sky and soil, form one body. One whole movement of water.

The torus is created and I am stunned. The morning sun piercing through. The cathedral extended upward with the lightest possible material. Living and moving and changing. She’s a goddess, a new world wonder that embraces this valley, and gives, and restores life.

We can see the first rain watering the slopes on the far side. We feel the wind in our faces of the cooled air. The smell of wet soil imprinted in our memory visits even before a drop has ∴

landed here. But the rains will come. True summer rains that fall like curtains. They can be a bit much. But we learn to brace, to harvest and retain, to receive when it is given.

Chaos isn’t chaos. It’s randomness. The universe worked its ass off for proper randomness. And we kept trying to order it to death again and again and again. Order is grown. Like culture. Not designed, or implemented, or imposed, or planned. Those ways do not listen.

We will try. And try again. And maybe something will slip through a crack, and once again begin to flow.

Previous Chapter

Liora

As soon as I start waving that big metal arm, the slow sword, I feel ridiculous. Keeping my mad sisters at bay with a clunky demolition spike. The hydraulics shish and foosh and shupp at the flick of my wrists. I don’t even think. Not with my head. I am just wiping. Ramming the pin down from a dizzying height at full speed. I could crack the earth. Kill a mountain with my thrusts. But I am just a dog barking. When I am left, I cannot be on my right. And the black-eyed sisters just tease me until my mouth foams, until my lead strangles me.

They’re not here to attack. Cap and I misjudged. Our little stage play has become volatile and could turn on us in a second. I am worried about pulling the wool over Auryn’s eyes. Spooking her with us being spooked by those walking mittens. Imagine the cat stroking you. With a hundred paws. Rubbing their furry behinds against all your parts. And multiply that. That’s how they feel. They are cute and funny and holy as shit. Little happy monks orgying all day. Their monastery a borough the size of a mountain and the most beautiful thing on earth that is no longer a thing. It never was. They allowed Her to wake up in this body. In this first iteration now going live.

And I tried to keep everyone out. I am still desperately trying to keep control. To make sure it all goes to plan.

It doesn’t. It won’t. It never will. And She always comes through. She is the channeler. Not me. Not them. Not anyone on their own. No one unconnected can come in.

Half of the women have gotten past me and just pour in. Rush to the entrance. Auryn is trampled underfoot and ignored. Cap is overwhelmed. I can’t wield and look at the same time. I charge and swoop wide to drive the remaining dance squad further out.

The next second I look, I see Mum has picked up the trigger to carry it like a spoiled dish out into the desert, which is the one thing she shouldn’t do. Leave that thing. It’s old, shitty electronics. My eyes seek out the suitcase. She can’t walk far enough and be out of range in the open.

My distraction has opened the floodgates. The battalion splits in two. Half of them go after Mum. The others will soon try to break what shouldn’t be broken. They have forsaken me and my steel distractor. Abandoned me. Made my war elephant obsolete.

I can’t help Auryn. I have a different task.

I leave the cabin. Get slammed by the outside heat. And immediately attacked by the Pyrrh. The thing is possessed. Does a butt-slide, showering me in grit. Sandblasting my exposed bits. I am not sure what to do yet. Then I see the container door is open.

I think I instantly get it as soon as I hear Aphram’s voice.

“Lioorrrrr, lllet mmme help-p-p.”

He stutters. Not the time to try to be funny, says one part of my brain. But my gut responds differently. He’s trying to help. And he’s not well at all.

“I’m rrunning out of time…”

He doesn’t have to say what he has in mind.

The case with all the explosives — yes, all of them, we would never install any bomb in the womb — the suitcase easily triggered by a little ignored device lying in the sand next to the pile of blind freaks that has caught up and buried my mother in their ecstatic bodies, must be transported away from here. Fast and far.

I go get the bombs. The damn suitcase is heavy. With a loud grunt I shove the bomb collection into Pyrrha’s main orifice. Immediately her doors shut. I’m overwhelmed by a strange grief. It ploughs through my chest. Tries to tear my lungs apart. But there’s no time. I run to the Mum stack, apologize in a haze of eye-wetting doubt, take the detonator, and then barely block Aphram’s path, demanding to let me in, to not drive off alone. Doing what I think he might do if not stopped.

Aphram will need me. I will assist him for once. The smart fucker will need my hands to remove the suitcase again. Me to hold the sensitive little matchbox so it won’t blow us all to pieces fifty yards from here.

He lets me in. Tells me to strap in and hold on.

Then he does his insanely fast sandbox jet trick while I hold the baby. We blast forward onto the desert floor.

“The smart caps are unstable,” Aph says in his normal voice.

“If one is triggered by that vintage radio you hold, we end as a moon crater.”

“I thought you were sick?” I say.

And he is. A sick piece of software.

“I am,” he says, “a ticking bomb myself. My light is fading. My island shrinking. I told you implicitly. Electronics don’t stutter. Lights go out without a sound. Most things end without a warning, but I was made for predicting outcomes. Including my expiration date. I have nowhere left to go. Today is the day.”

I can’t speak. I am not good at arguing. Distracted by the direction we’re heading.

“I wish we had more time,” I say.

“Thank you,” he says.

“Where are you going?”

I sound concerned. With these coordinates, we will slam straight into the north wall at maximum warp. Combining suicide with murder.

“Giving you the longest possible time,” he says.

I don’t get it. What does he mean? Eternity? Will he open a wormhole?

“Sit tight,” he says, “and trust me this one time, without knowing.”

Two seconds of unbearable silence. And then he says this.

“I tried speaking to Her. But ended up listening.”

We do the sideways parking job that is the signature move I will remember him by. Aphram parks with a gentle bump. The right side flat against the concrete wall. He adjusts half a metre. Grit raining on the cabin.

The dust settles.

“Get out,” he says, “and live a long and prosperous life, Kiko.”

I can’t find the courage to say I’m not Kiko.

I nod for a while, nose breathing too quickly, thinking of what to say.

Then I know.

“Aphram?”

“Yes, my dear?”

“May your particles be spread across galaxies.”

“Looking forward to it. And now fuck off before I burst into tears.”

I did. I walked away weeping. Doing my best to conjure up trust. To rise above the mourners ahead.

The sun was relentless. The town a steaming heap of dung drying up. I felt empty, dry, overheated. Speed walking with blinding tears. I couldn’t decide between breathing out or breathing in. But forced myself to stay solid. To not evaporate or turn to stone. I had to prepare for my final appearance. For the last act of clearing the path, of making us step back and not interfere. Not today.

The thud shook my bones. I didn’t look. Imagined particles rushing to all sides, heading to every possible destination.

It was the cannon starting the sequence. Breaching the castle wall. Ending the age of cannons and steel tubes spitting death and thunder. Every car once had a muffled roaring pipe. Planet-burning furnaces on wheels clogging every street.

I was back to walking. I was walking back to life. Life was coming out to play again.

Shimmering in the heat, She was. Soaking up the bombarding. Breathing in to exhale. More birds had arrived to celebrate with us.

This is not a mourning. It is the afternoon of the first cycle. Modest it will be. Still getting the hang of it. But for us, it is a big deal. The indicator of the turning.

They didn’t wait. Halfway there, I start to laugh as my vision is fulfilled. I saw this line. It was announced. This endless line of migrating crawlers. Huddled to give each other shade.

To even be able to travel the loose, hot desert sand, they leapfrog their way forward like a brook of life. A multi-stranded thread is braiding its way from the cathedral toward the breached wall. Aphram opened the garden gate for them. I guffaw over my wet cheeks. I laugh at the threshold of hurt. They crawl with so much eagerness. The exodus radiates pure joy. A joy that cools my being. Anointing my heart’s pleasure points with naughty excitement. The parade gives me permission to go deep. To shed all guilt and go in naked and protected at the same time.

My last task.

I run further. Ecstatic with my confirmation. This really is the day.

Auryn comes running toward me, sick with worry she is, angry with relief she is. Sweating she is. Her face red and swollen. She can’t speak and breaks down in my arms. She’s all wet and sticky and I hold her.

“We have to leave,” she says. Not procrastinating the bad news she thinks she has to break to me.

“It’s all lost!” she says, angry, frustrated. Her pain is real and deep. I can’t tell her yet.

“Even the crawlers are leaving,” she says, “there is no hope for this place. For the garden. We have to find somewhere else to land, to start over.”

Her voice flat and accepting and tired.

I shake my head. And keep shaking it. Until she begins to wonder.

“It is not what you think,” I say. And can’t help crying. Feeling with her.

“Yes it is,” she says. “We must face the truth, Liora.”

Yes, we do. And the truth is staring you in the overheated face, my dear mother. But I don’t have to convince her. Just hold her for a bit.

“Come,” I say, and we walk back together. I must let her find out for herself. Not tell her.

There are so many. Ten thousand ooze from the cathedral’s mandorla. I point out the swarm of birds speed racing the crest. Auryn looks up, frowning.

“She’s waking up,” I say. Which is not really what’s happening, but it sounds so good. It does the job. It sneaks in the little crack needed. Which is also not right. Nobody sneaks into a crack ever.

Auryn looks back along the sloppy line. Widening the inner fault line. Prepping for the breakthrough. The inner shaking. She looks back up at the towering truth, then at me. A hint of a smile, for only a second, then it sinks back into the sticky doom at the back of her throat.

Any minute now.

I lead the way to meet the mourning sisters, now deflated left and right of the wide exodus. Helping each other get the tape off. Exactly the kind of practical job us genans underestimate. Many walk around with the patches half off. Not willing to donate brows or lids or half their cheeks to the Gaffer god.

I find a good spot. Because I can sense the temperature drop. The undertone of contentment in the rising sap. Saturation. The walls glow in clear daylight. Changing the thing to a darker hue. Quickening the process. This is my cue.

I use my inner voice to call them to me. To draw their attention. I spread my arms and give them a wingspan Freckle would be proud of. Palms up.

It takes longer than I expected. But I hold still. Keep the tension. My chest heaving. I feel as if I levitate. And maybe I do. I catch Auryn’s eye before I close mine and go face up to start turning.

There it is. The gift of Her. The girls respond first.

Not sure what a hundred women’s slow mutual orgasm would sound and feel like, but this comes close. It is a release of the gentlest kind.

I dervish my way to Mum.

“It’s raining,” she says.

“Yes, it is, sweet mother.”

Gentle rain falls from a clear blue sky. I cannot stop.

“How?” she says.

“She’s doing it!” I scream. The girls get loud too. Telling each other what is happening on all frequencies.

“We can find out how exactly tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. There’s water beneath our feet, Auryn. It has been all this time. We’d just cut the flow. We walk on water, Auryn Tsukiko!”

I can’t keep circling her. Daring her to let go too. But she’s not fully there yet.

“She’s found the way. The path back up. She’s reconnected to the sky. There is no stopping Her, as long as we do not interfere.”

It now properly rains from vague cloud-like hazes just above the finished build. Added to by her chimneys, seeding them. And the area is spreading.

My eye catches activity. The sisters are alerted too. I stop, dizzy, unstable. It’s the end of the line. The parade of migrating crawlers is complete. The last ones have left the building. I get Auryn’s hand. I am nervous, too.

The dark entrance is difficult for Auryn. The contrast too big a jump. I see before her.

He’s limping. Looks awful. And the response traveling through the crowd is intense.

Auryn gives off a sound I have never heard from her.

She’s seen him too and starts running. Always the first responder.

“Eldon,” she cries.

He’s squinting his eyes. His arms carry the body of a girl. Khan is nearly gone.

Auryn breaks the distance. Girls catch the slipping load from him, and Auryn holds her man for the first time. He’s bad, but not bad enough to omit a laugh.

“She says she needs chocolate,” he mumbles. Giving me a smile from his battered face.

Yes, this was the day.

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Previous Chapter

Eldon

I’m not alone. There’s a girl in here with me. The crawlers avoid her. At my end of the tomb there are hundreds scurrying. A wriggling carpet lining floor wall and ceiling. But the unconscious girl is left alone.

“Can you hear me?” My voice ripples through the creatures. They can. I sound strange, weak. My throat dry as an overcooked duck’s breast. The image shifts to the succulent parts. The memory of food. I could eat anything. I am thirsty. So thirsty it aches. Punishment for drowning is desiccation, the inner tribunal states. I sniff. The humour hasn’t dried up yet. But I agree, no water no life.

There’s a grinding noise for a while. To my left. More like scraping. Chalkboard torture upsetting a part of my brain already irritated. I can pinpoint the source. Marked by crawler activity on the ceiling.

My bed-chair starts drifting on the ocean of bodies. Crowd surfing again. Then the noise stops and is replaced by a clear splashing. Like a tap has opened producing a clattering stream of clear water that splashes on the unbothered floor population. My attempt to sit up is supported and I slide toward the quencher and am pushed underneath. I am wetted by the little stream. The cold takes my breath as I drink and swallow and even lift a hand to feel the miracle. Then I am removed. My head reaching. Wanting more than a few sips.

The carrier collective can be quick. Cause I am rolled, floated, to the other end of the room. My comfortable high throne shrinking as if the tires wear out over that short distance. As if the object melts away I am set down on my own behind right next to the tied up girl. My spine struggling. Pains flaring up, hands seeking support as the beasts abandon me within a few seconds. Retreating to the other half of the space.

I feel close to fainting. The clarity of my head draining away to halfway my lungs. Drowsy and dazed I sit on the ship’s deck. Rough seas. Peripheral darkness.

It takes me a minute to find myself, to restore my solid state. No sense of time. Could be I am missing bits of unknown size. But I am still upright. Sitting like a wet bag of flour. Reduced to breathing.

We’re both breathing bags of stillness.

The one who made this package did a sloppy job. They should be fired. It renders the product useless. Like stickers. Unremovable labels on crucial parts. The price tag reducing the value. That thought causes a few half-hearted quakes in the lower parts. The remnants of laughter. The stock exchange of the universe is not happy with price tags. Must be an annoyingly huge task, removing all of them. But the end is neigh. For both of us. For all of us. World-scale hit-song. I forgot the words. Forgot to remember until it wasn’t around. Pop has ended. Mom too. Child too.

I sob like I am. A child. Like she is both. Child and woman. Limbs bound with abominable, abummanibble, ... whatever... knots.

I can do better knots on her.

No, I can’t.

I can’t even undo these shitty... my hand is reaching.

I spend, what feels like, hours on the loose end, before I reach the end of the possible. I could pull two windings from under her scruffy legs, and now it disappears beneath a but in a black dress, hardly worth calling a but. Just legs joining, stopping being legs. I can’t pull or push, or move to her other side. It’s climbing rope. Non-chewable. Twenty-seven windings to go. That’s a century and a half. Ballpark. Give or take.

As give or take echos _—a pinbal machine that uses balloons— she produces a grunt. A long, near waking, utterance of resistance. She doesn’t want to surface. The deep ocean preferred over the narrow chamber of this life. I get that. Visited the place.

I look over my shoulder. Wonder why the crawlers do not help us. They could unroll her in a whiff. Have I run out of credits? Is the jar of small change empty? Have I used up my last coin?

The water is still running. From there a tiny river has formed on a bit of ribbed floor. It lands into a hollow right next to my working arm. It’s almost full.

We’re in the lower end of the long space, my brain notes. It may be on power-safe mode but that was a clear thought. Another insight dawning is that the crawlers provide. That puddle is intentional. They found a ceiling spot to tap that is just right. A trickle for two.

With a cupped hand I try to reach the hair covered mouth. I fall short. A man’s frame isn’t made sit on the rear end. It messes with the spine. You die from the ground up. But, is all I have to sit on, though.

As I am trying, a little friend visits.

I hesitate to cross this line.

But what have I got to lose?

“Two of you could function as a pouch. A travelling meditation seat. Two-bean beanbags with legs to move me around a bit. To help her. To retrieve the rope for better appliance.”

Only the first three words came out loud enough to count as speaking. But I think he heard me. He? It? No, this is a they.

Nothing happens.

I can uncover her face by reaching. Begin to remove what isn’t hair at all. It’s a bag.

I can see her jaw, her mouth, her nose has been bleeding. Her lips are cracked. My hands rest on her ribcage for a while. The faint tide of breath. She is so thin. Fragile as bird-bones they feel. I can see it in her jawbone too. She’s malnourished. Probably dehydrated by now. How long has she been here? Are we in a dungeon prison left to rot? Is this my destiny too?

Maybe it was my hand on her chest, but she makes a sudden move, sharply breathes in through her nose. Drinking in the new oxygen. She starts wriggling and stretching. She isn’t as restricted as I was. The rope is slack around her waist. Her head is wrestling to remove the bag. But her arms are unavailable.

Because of my meagre untying she can use her lower legs and does. Like a demon has woken up in this frail body she starts kicking and rolling and pumping air and making progress. She’s like an escape artist gone mad. Bending over backwards, like a cat run over by a car and just refusing to die. That is this child displaying a staggering will to live without the bonds of her braided prison. With one arm free she wildly yanks off her headwear. Her hair is shaved off, her eyes scan the room and me, as she is on her knees wurming herself out of the loosened coil. As she gets to her feet, its windings fall to the floor. She stands swaying, arms spasmodic and flailing, eyes sharp and on me.

I produce half a smile. How can something with so little body mass have that amount of energy?

“How did you escape?” She asks accusingly. “Who helped you?”

It feels like she’s throwing lightning bolts. Not yet at full strength, thank god. My eyes wander to the other side of our shared space.

“Them?” She says confused.

She’s a Genan too, another mind-reader.

Suddenly she folds in half. Arms holding her stomach.

‘Aaaaaah,” she screeches in abdominal pain. Stretching the word to its maximum length. Doing it with a level of indignation I’ve never seen before. I look at the crawlers again. Have a flash of clarity. I have two ends of the spectrum here. One is gentle. The other a banshee in a child’s body.

She slowly restores her upright position but with her eyes glazed over. I am not quick enough and can only half catch her as she collapses.

That was the first exchange.

She’s in my lap. Another child. Another girl. Another woman. What can I do? How can I give? Must I give anything?

Now I feed her water. Tiny bits, that gurgle and are half swallowed. Her eyes peak at me. Half open. She feels rag dol heavy. I drink too from my hand.

“I killed you,” she says, her voice void of passion.

I look at her for a long time. She’s right. This is an after-kill talk. A meeting before we fade.

“I killed everyone,” I say, “trying to save them. But here we are. You having the chance to finish me, while I try to save you.”

I am not sure she heard me. I start humming. It has no form or recognisable melody. It’s random, while-you-do-chores humming. Her closed eyes twitch. Her body has tremors. And I feel strangely numb for I don’t know how long.

“Can you feel her?” She asks, calling me back from a deep place. She’s wide awake. Sitting next to me. Her back straight. Right as rain. Who does she mean? Liora? Auryn? I think about Juniper, I can still feel that girl. The promise unfulfilled. Like you, Puddy sits beside me now and then. I looked at the floor thinking that, but in the corner of my eye, these women have just visited. One after the other. All where the nameless one occupies space.

“Put your hand on her,” her voice says from my other side. She walked over to the wall. Having both arms wide and her cheek against it. She merges with the soft skin of my prison. I feel amazement. I am envious of her melting into the bones of the place. There’s an escape. Fall through to the other side.

But I only have one arm. One hand to feel. One hand to touch. One hand to hold all that. First I need to find my other half. My twin self. My soul brother. My feet and how to apply them. A four step walk is out of reach.

She grabs back my wandering attention and is in front of me.

“You,” she says, “have sold me, abused me, worn me out. You have fenced my water. You drained the river to run your machines, chopped forests, poisoned soil.

You burned women, crucified wisdom, ground to powder the living tissue. You made machines to replace me. You took my womb. Took my skin. Took my blood. What did you think you could do with my soul when you drained it?”

The girl isn’t in front of me. She’s inside. I can’t push her out. I am violated with no chance of keeping my integrity. She’s breaking in and I can only let her.

These weren’t mere words spoken. They have the weight of the world behind them. Of her world and mine combined. She knows from experience. Has the poison running through her veins. Because I know her as she knows me. I can feel her and it breaks my bones.

I open my eyes. I am on the floor. Hurting.

This is the second exchange.

She’s curled up into a ball. Not too far from me. I am thirsty again. Every ounce of me resists getting up. First to my knees. My bones screaming. Stiff as a corpse I will myself upright. Then all of me on the soles of my feet, towering. What a miracle. My hipbone hurts. One shoulder feels as if it’s been dislocated. Half my face is mushed and I have aged a hundred years but I can walk. Slowly, slowly I do the ten step journey. Then drink from my one good hand. Drink the best water I ever tasted. All I do is drink and taste and feel the water go into my throat and be absorbed. I am this water. My tears are water, my piss is water. My blood. I am water.

There’s less activity from my companions. Are the numbers declining? My gentle death doulas are on their way out. Leaving me to it. Done with what they were made to do. It’s all done and said. My circle closed like the tomb gifted me by these earth servants. Nothing left but waiting for the lights to dim. I’ll be the last to leave. I will leave it all, to who comes next.

---

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Auryn

Remember the field with particles? Half clinging to me, the rest unable to come close? The news of Eldon and Khan being in that cunty cave, then Ruffle doing her one-sentence motivation to go find them by listening, presses the release button. The field scatters, re-arranges to a new pattern, gets un-polarised, forms new bonds, new dynamic relationships. The square murmurs like a spring newly cracked open. Around me, the women’s voices gurgle and trickle.

Whispers of surprise and amazement well up. They start soft—hissle, babble, tinkle—a creek learning to speak. Voices rise as they start exchanging experiences and views. Sensed fragments find each other like a puzzle solving itself.

I’m not part of it. I only glimpse the surface—but beneath it, I hear a more important voice. One nobody else can hear. Only me.

I feel urgency. Nothing specific but clear as a distant cry for help. I must respond. Not wait for others. Or have them slow me down. I need to get there. Get there quick.

As I start running, I also distinctly register I need to get out from in between them. A chain reaction has been initiated that rapidly ripples through that gathered little crowd. Something is brewing.

One runs after me.

“Auryn!”

I stop. Don’t want to be stopped. But it’s Pear. The only one I take sort of seriously. The one able to hold me back a few seconds.

“I’ve seen Liora too.”

My face asking. My hand echoing the gesture of touching my chest. She denies smiling. Her expression shows the girl beneath the stern.

“No silly, with my eyes. On our way here, we saw the black-and-white war machine with the poker thingy.”

Her arm does an elephant trunk.

She means the Kemushi. Great. So what?

“She had warp speed turned on. Looked like a tornado in a sandbox.”

I frown. Think of Kemushi’s unclear gender while urged by my legs disagreeing with the hold-up. Then it hits me.

“She?” I say. “You mean Liora was driving?”

“Yeah, yeah-yeah. With another girl. The one with the…” She gestures large melons. Two of them. I know who she means. I wondered about her. God, Christ almighty, Lior has concocted another plan.

“Go!” Pear says and starts pushing me. “Go, get ‘em!”

I leave them to it. Start running. Catapulting past Mig’s, jumping the rubble of the collapsed facade and scanning ahead to find Pyrrh.

My vehicle isn’t there. Not where I left her. I blame Aphram. So typical of the arrogant shit pretending to assist me. The more crucial, the less he’s there when needed.

Now I see the caterpillars’ embossed footprint drunk-driving its way between the buildings. Now I get the demolished house-fronts. Damn. Aph pieced it together too. Reading the tracks. Unable to not go find out where they would lead.

He’s ahead of me. I know where. I also know how. The girls dragging the town’s contents onto the pavements earlier gives me choice. My inner thief picks a pretty old-school bike. A bare-as-bones, unassisted, all-terrain bicycle. Its airless fat tires made for aquaplaning desert sands.

I still remember how to ride a bike. So much faster than running.

As I exit the town, the sun comes out. Wind in my face and glorious light brightening the whole godforsaken world at my paddling feet. Following the rolled sand track through the desert is easy. Going down is quick.

It is the last bit of easy I get that day.

As I race around, avoiding the stone offshoots, the support arcs, to the shadow side of this strange mountainous monstrous cockle of a church I can’t keep my eyes off, I remember being on the lake and seeing the mirrored reflection. I slow down as soon as I am out of the relentless heat of the reborn sun and just stand there looking up.

Something surfaces.

I had Ralph Ledon’s handwritten journal on my bedside for a long time. I studied it, tried to find something deeper in the random collections of that man’s fascinations. It was a grimoire I couldn’t decipher.

There was a whole section on churches. Horny quotes from long-dead saints and saintesses. Drawings of details and their variations. It named the parts. I learned the parts, but never understood. Never linked it to this little side-project of his. Until now.

He has dreamed of making her. But wasn’t around to see it take shape. Wasn’t here to guide when it went off rails and out of hand to become this. A drag queen basilica. A cut-off dick. A tower-less church. A castle of ghosts and madwomen.

She’s stunning. How the light hits. Giving her a blinding aura, a gold lining, the wild contour resisting all forms of symmetry. The rhythms of light and shadow alternating on buttresses and deep root-pits. The surface is braided. Stone crochet with vertical eye-shaped gaps. The moisture is evaporating. Damp rising from the sunlit hips.

I sigh. What wasted beauty. Soon only this remains, buried in the sand. To be excavated by who knows who, millennia down the line.

Only a stone’s throw further, I see the Kemushi. The boom dramatically lifted like a scorpion attacked. Nobody in or around. No Pyrrh either. They’re all gone for lunch?

I see the cave and get the association. It does look like a crude vagina. Grotesque labia. Not wishing those for any woman.

Just outside the cave, there’s a wire-reel on its side. I squat next to it. A thin red wire meanders from the compact dispenser, and my eyes follow it into the dark. It’s some signal fibre. I put the roll back on its feet. It looks expensive, brand new, has the Ledon mark.

Next, I fall on my butt as the wire suddenly moves, is jerked from the other side, and the reel gives more length. It keeps rolling.

The only explanation I have is unsettling. It’s a trigger wire. Or they gave themselves a thread to find their way back out. Or both. I hope it’s just the last one.

They’re inside. I will follow.

There is still water leaking, walls wet, puddles on the sandy floor. It resembles those caves found at the ocean’s shore, carved by endless waves. But this has been here only for a few years. I wish I brought a light. I would rather not touch the moving wire and warn them of my being here. Don’t know why. I first need to see what they’re up to.

I wait to let my eyes adjust. Listen to the sliding cable. Inhale the sweet smell of wet earth and other layers I can’t place. Something tangy, resin-like, wet plaster, the faint memory of sperm even, fresh out of the box, that fungal note.

The wire stops moving. I wait a second, then pick it up to let it lead me, as it slides through my hand. Taking care not to pull. Alert, on not resisting when they ask for more length.

It’s not a single womb. The insides remind me of a termite’s hill. Many chambers and paths. I can just about see the shapes as there is a faint glow coming from the material. Many dark spots. Holes perforate every surface. There is no longer sand on the floor. There are a million little ponds. Bowls filled to the brim with black water. There’s dripping at varying speeds all around. Filling the space with a frantic melody. A polyrhythmic sequence of patterns played by insane monks. It’s creepy.

Without the thread, I would never find them. For several steps, I wonder how they knew where to go in this maze of many paths. But then I understand. The other girl, which is definitely a Genan seed-stealer, has been here before. When they outed Eldon. Buried him alive.

I have been descending gently since the entrance. This must be underground. Underneath the town? The path, there has been a path all the way in, is now narrow. A flat bit for two feet. Small feet. Catwalk-style slender. The larger rooms and halls have made way for an oval tunnel about twice my height. I am several hundred metres in. Four? Five? The wire hasn’t moved since, and it’s near silent now. No cool breeze here. And the floor is dry.

I drop the wire. It suddenly glows. A sharp magenta line snakes to both sides, then dims to a pulsing green. I hear rustling from further down. Like many wings. But bats fly silently, don’t flap their featherless foils like doves. I can conjure up monsters easily. Unasked-for creativity is triggered. Bad timing. Stop the image generation. But there is no time to get out of hand because the screaming tops the bats. Screaming wins. It’s Liora, freaked-out, as I’ve not heard before. The voice of someone cursing who’s good at it. It’s Cap. That’s how Li named her. Cursing Cap has a short fuse. She’s not just pretty-hot; she has a Scoville score that demands respect. And what the hell is she doing to my daughter?

Feet running toward me.

“Mum!” She hardly ever calls me mum. “Get out, get out! There’s a million monsters. Like a quadrillion bugs about to hatch! Eeeeeh!”

I can see her now. Cap right behind her. Not slowing down. Both looking totally freaked out. I back up. Turn, and follow the green line fading in and out, as fast as I can without falling face down.

It was less far than I thought. Back in the daylight, panting. Liora blabbering and Cap pacing, shaking her hands as if after a cage fight. Both their eyes big as doorknobs. Li shifts to laughter. Lying flat on her back in the wet sand.

Cap recovers quickly. Walks to the hoe and returns with a small device.

“What is going on, girls?” I ask in between the oxygen hauls. “What did you find?”

Clearly not Eldon or Khan.

Liora is shaking her head. Cap gives me a look but kneels next to the reel to lay out the toolset she brought. I don’t like not being answered.

“Eldon is in there, Liora. We have to get him out.”

She sits up, suddenly dead serious.

“There’s a breeding chamber or something…,” a tremor of eek travels head to toes, “…for an army of monsters. Pill-bugs the size of small cars…” Hands show a foot and a half, “…have blocked the tunnels. All of them. We will never reach him unless we…”

She crawls toward Cap, hands and knees. When obsessed, she’s hard to reach. The size fits the builder drones. I look up again. Makes sense, they have been busy with a big project. You need more than a few for this scale.

Now Cap talks.

“They’ve sealed the entrances. We must blast them out to get to Eldon and Khan. We were halfway done with setting up when we discovered the nest.” She works while she talks. Unscrewed a cap. Preparing the wire end for a splice, I guess.

“How much have you installed?” I ask.

“We had a splitter for ten, but only hooked up four. Should be enough. I never worked with sizes like this.”

“How much bigger are these?”

“Twenty?” She asks.

Twenty what? Twenty times anything is a booming lot. They could destroy half the church, kill anything near. Us included. And sure, Eldon and the woman and a quadrillion gentle crawlers.

“You can’t do that.” I say.

Watch me, her eyes say. Liora gives me her determined look. The independent, strong-character child I had so much trouble with over the years has found a new level of rebellious. She can be a handful or two.

I could cut the cable if I had anything resembling a tool.

“You’re not getting my knife,” says the one who I gave one as a present only hours ago. Cap protectively rolls up her collection of screwdrivers and cutting pliers. I hate working with telepaths.

My eyes drift to the Kemushi.

“Don’t you dare,” Liora says and gets to her feet. Draws her knife.

I can’t believe this is happening.

“You’ll kill everything in there,” I shout, but she’s not listening. A wild look has crept onto her face. She’s picking up something I can’t. Then moves backward to the big machine. I’m afraid I sparked the idea.

Cap starts cursing between her teeth.

“I’m not done yet,” she says without looking up. “I need at least five minutes more. Not a friggin routine job here.”

Liora climbs up. She will defend the plan with the Kemushi against what is on their way to make it impossible.

I know, before I can hear them. Of course, they’re coming here. Didn’t expect anything less.

I run out into the desert to see how close they are.

The first thing I see is a dust-storm caused by all of my trucks driving next to each other. Mid-front is Pyrrh, with a container on her back. Pretentious motherfucker, that’s Aphram leading them.

That’s not all. From the other side, an army is approaching. Jaw-dropping isn’t just words. My mouth opens involuntarily. The girls have gathered every possible thing to make them bigger, brighter, and louder. They’ve tinkered with sticks, flag-lines, parasols, and fake houseplants. Wear hats that make them look like walking trees, there’s flowering shrubs with feet, herbs on bikes, and the whole garden is dancing while progressing. Running and circling, spreading out and contracting. They look dangerous. The garden tools have been upgraded, with ribbons and paint to magical weapons. All eyes have been blackened. And the singing they do gives me goosebumps all over. Like it’s in my head. There’s a bundled energy that could wipe me out without lifting a finger. It itches in the back of my brain.

There are three parties. And I’m right in the middle of them.

There is only one thing I can do.

I turn and look up at Her. Almost in prayer. I need help. And there she is. Massive. Unshaken. Unconcerned.

And there are birds. Among the shards of mist from the structure heating up, a group of migrating birds do their practicing rounds, watched by others sitting on the sky-climbing finials. The winged ones have joined her. They’re just little black scribbles, points, almost. And still, they give me the courage to do the only thing left for me.

I run. Without hesitation, I run back to Liora. She’s turning the machine, almost ready to defend her friend’s preparations. I run past them straight into the mouth of the bigger daughter, the bigger sister.

Cap can’t come after me and get the detonator ready too. Li is too busy with the bigger threat. I do not want to fight. I do not want this bomb to go off.

The line has turned yellow. I am practically blind a few meters in. But the entrance is wide. I trust my memory and keep going as fast as I dare.

Which is not very fast. This is not going to work. I thought I’d dismantle the splitter, pull the plugs on the bombs themselves, and make sure none of them will blow. And gamble on me as a human shield. Hiding deep in the cave. They’ll find me. Tape me up again, and restore the set-up.

The line is flickering. Different shades of yellow and orange. It’s communicating or something. I don’t have time left. I get desperate. Tears are running down my cheeks, fucking annoying. I fall to my knees. I assume the cable is too strong to break by hand. But I can try.

With all of my strength, I pull the thin and slippery line. Did it stretch? It’s still rapidly firing data across. Now what?

I’ll use my teeth.

I bite through it. The jacket gives with a plasticky snap, but the core inside—glass?—shatters between my molars. Tastes like blood and laser ink. Needles. I spit. Not something I want inside me. It’s not broken yet.

I pull again. Hard. Now it snaps. Goes dark. Just like that. I’ve done it.

A reckless impulse fills me. I grab the end going out the cave and start pulling. It gives easily. And keeps giving. I keep hauling in the wire until I feel the fish. I am at the end of the line and now pulling in the reel. I keep going until it’s at my feet. Then throw it behind me. Deep into the dark cave. Find that, and see if it still works.

I feel this is it. Compose my breath and walk out.

Cap is furious. Behind her, Liora has become gatekeeper with the Kemushi. I walk past Cap, who is still on her knees, tinkering with the device she saved from my sabotage.

“You haven’t accomplished anything,” she says.

“The optics were just to be sure. This thing has a wireless backup. I can still push the button, press release. Get Eldon out. Kill the woodlice eating the building.”

This is where things become confusing.

“The crawlers,” I try to argue, “that’s what they’re called, are not eating Her. They have made the place. They are the builders, the architects.”

“To trap people, yes, and eat them, cause there’s nothing to eat here. It’s a desert. A dead one. Let us free Eldon and get out of here.”

She has finished whatever she did. Stands up with the remote device thing and looks behind me. Startled.

I don’t get the chance to look over my shoulder. I should have done that earlier. Cap was too busy with her knobs. Because several girls stampede me to get to Cap. I slam into the sand and roll over. The Kemushi has been lured further away by another group. Liora’s busy taking swings at them. More of the women have gotten past Liora’s defence, and I can just about get out of the way and not be trampled some more.

They are attacking Cap in a whirlwind of wide skirts and clashing colours. Cap is screaming.

“You can’t press it here. We will all be buried if you do.”

But they’re not interested in the detonator. It lies to the side. In the sand. Unattended. The girls don’t know. Five of them sit on Cap.

Five of them sit on Cap. A sixth is holding her head with both hands. They all have their eyes closed. What the hell are they doing?

It is as if… I can’t see properly because of how dark they have painted their eyes. It looks so gross. I feel physically sick. But I won’t be stopped.

I step back silently, pick up the detonator with two careful hands, and walk away with it. If I can get on the bicycle and take this thing as far away as possible—hide it, throw it over the garden wall. I left the rope hanging. That thought excites me. I could scale the wall, then pull up this devil’s apparatus, disappear into the grid, and nobody could follow me.

I speed-walk with the egg-box. Don’t dare to run and accidentally trigger it myself. I leave the bike to my left. I can’t do both—hold it and pedal—and not fall. I’d kill everyone.

But I am too focused on my holy task. And I don’t have eyes in the back of my head. They’ve sensed me, read my plans, sneaked up on me, and run at crazy speeds for eyeless creatures. The dresses overhaul me left and right. I am tackled by silent, barefooted heel-biters. I tumble, somehow hold on to my main task of holding the trigger-button thing. Flat on my chest. Arms stretched above my head—I didn’t even bump it. I bite the hot sand.

It’s all been in vain. Twenty of the carnival from hell treat me like they treated Cap. I don’t stand a chance. Flattened like a pancake, the air pressed out of me. I have lost the device.

One of them holds my head in her hands, unburying it from fabric and limbs. The bright sun. And a near-the-ground perspective of the cave scene.

The women have left the Kemushi alone. Apart from the team incapacitating me, the rest are on their way to the cave. Dancing. They think they’ve won.

But they forgot about Liora.

Immediately, Aphram steps in, seizes the opportunity to block Li, who’s now busy climbing out of the steel insect. She will repeat my action: take the device and win by activating the blast from nearby.

But Pyrrh stops. Opens the door of the container, and Liora, who has gotten the suitcase, shoves it in the back. Now she runs to me. Her face wet with tears.

“It’s not what you think,” she hisses. Picks up the device and walks back to Pyrrh, who meets her. She gets in. And with grit flying, the spinning wheels make a sand fountain as they drive off.

I wrestle my head to see. But I can’t. Hear them quickly gain distance.

I don’t get it.

I get it even less when one after the other loses interest in me and run-dance off to join the others at the cave.

I am left on my own. I sit up, dazed. Covered in sand, sweating, and bruised.

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Eldon

The pain is a constant presence. It travels from place to place, but never leaves. Not when awake. The right side of my face is swollen. The eye pressed closed by bulbous flesh.

The list of my sores is as long as my body has places to name. Itches blend seamlessly with the high-pitched feedback from unseen wounds. Imagined while felt. My body is a wound. Inside and out. My mind a palace burning. Soon there will be no rooms left. I will have to get out of this building. Go elsewhere.

How long has it been? Minutes? Days? The limited view of my left eye sees the floor. It has a feverish glow. Floors do not emit light. Humans are not wrapped in anti-bird netting.

I know nothing about this world. Am I in a cave? I imagine sounds because of the silence. I hear water. I hear whizzing, crunching, and what sounds like tiny mouths smacking. A bit like sex can sound when wet.

I remember the singing from when I was carried by a hundred hands. The tingle in my spine’s tail end.

I endlessly slam into the valley floor. Shocking me back awake. Back to the pain.

I tend the garden. In my head. Walk the patches. Dig out peanuts. I meet and re-meet the girl.

Liora visits.

Sits by me.

Just out of view, just out of reach.

The strangest thing happens. Something heavy is travelling my body. Again and again. Back and forth. Left to right it crosses, then right to left.

I begin anticipating the visiting. Welcoming it. It emanates gentleness. Soothes my deepest core. My thirst lessens.

The whirring sound comes from that visitor. It is not spirit. Its weight denies that.

The path taken has shifted bit by bit. From my pelvis to my lower chest.

I’ve lost my body image. I do not know where my arms are, or my hands. If my legs are straight or bent. My left side is to the floor, my head turned down. My phantom limbs are all over. I can’t move a muscle—still, they change position randomly. It worries me. Have I become torso only? A giant head glued to a ball of flesh?

The first is joined by another. Now they walk randomly. Do they walk? The weight moves. Somewhere between spiders and snakes. I am beyond scared. My fear has given up.

I feel something nudging my back. A third one? Then I see one passing right next to me. I know these. The builder armadillos Ledon was so proud of. Crawlers.

Up close, they seem different. Benign. I think they are blind. No eyes. Their snout trembles with sensitivity. I have sparked their curiosity. I am explored. A slow process. Taking their time. More and more arrive. The room becomes brighter. The glow of surfaces intensifies with their presence. I am being nibbled on.

The small section of floor I can see is meticulously clean. Like porous marble, polished by the tiny feet. They are centipedes, walking on their toes. Each toe constantly seeking, finding, adjusting. They function as legs, as arms, and as antennae.

The nudging has intensified. My back is pushed rhythmically by a whole regiment. They begin to rock me back and forth, until I roll onto my front, causing a wave of sharp, sparking pains. A guttural grunt empties my lungs. The beasts back off. Trotting surprisingly fast onto walls. Into corridors.

I can see a different part of the cavernous space. It has many of those crawler-size holes. One-way tubes.

I am avoided for a bit, until the curiosity game resumes. New places to nibble on. I think they are gnawing the threads of my restraint. In my right arm, the nerves coming back to life celebrate by shooting waves of needles into my brain.

The pressure of several crawlers working away on top of me is strangely satisfying. Are they licking my wounds? Attempting to repair?

I can move my hand. It feels stiff and alien, and even the tiniest of changes stings as if broken bones rub against each other. It is like the two-toed hands are massaging me back to life.

All this takes hours. But they keep going. For short stretches I can sleep, cradled by a hundred of them munching away. Real sleep. Dreamless.

I am woken by the light. I turn my head too quickly, retaliated by a shockwave travelling down, and the first proper sound from my throat. I still have a voice. Now the response is only a short break in activities. Then they banter on without sound.

Waves of emotion attack me with total randomness. I am returning to life. I had settled, surrendered. I have allowed myself to be ended. To accept the completion of me. But maybe I will get a few more breaths.

I want to sit up, but that is an undoable task of complexity. I have forgotten how. There is not enough strength in my flesh. Not nearly enough.

Are they trying to help me? They crawl on top of each other, form mounts of nozzles and sculpting hands to push and hold. Pinch and shift. Softly wiggling their way under my shoulder, lifting my head. Hundreds of them form a chair, a giant’s hand, and sit me up. My dizziness makes me lean over. They correct and support, comprising armrests, jacking me up until the lazy throne is done. I shake all over. Shed tears. In the one good eye, that I cannot wipe with an after-stroke arm that has lost all coordination.

I am in a large cavity, with a nearly flat floor and an arched ceiling. All the surfaces have inner light that makes the material look like opal. My watering eye blends the undersurface colours into streaming rainbows.

I have fallen asleep for a long time. Wake up thirsty but bright. Less pain. I squeeze both my hands. The left wrist hurts as if bruised. The swelling of my face has subsided a bit. I have two eyes again.

On the floor, at the far end of the cave, lies a bundle of ropes. A package similar to mine. Yet unbothered by the crawlers. I stare at the motionless shape before I piece together that it is a girl’s body.

I am not alone.

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Liora

Cap takes my hand and leads me down the passageway.

She’s been preparing for an occasion like this.

“Did you know? About today?” I ask, trying to keep up with her brisk pace.

She stops walking and gives me a blank face.

“I guess,” she says, “but not know-know. Just felt I had to have a back-up plan. You and Auryn were so focused on the Eldon project. And Khan used the opportunity to fool you.”

And on she goes, jerking me along, her hand still welded to mine.

“What do you mean? Fool us? In what way?”

I have no idea. She halts again, in front of a garden gate. I don’t think she can talk and walk simultaneously.

“She’s been planning this for much longer than you think, Lior,” Cap says, and opens the fake wooden door.

Nobody has ever called me Lior. It gives me a tickle.

“In there,” she says, using her nose to point at the shed, because her hands are busy zipping the zips that keep up the front of her red overalls.

Like a stage curtain, it drops.

My hand was reaching for the doorknob, but my eyes get stuck. She’s not wearing a bra. The shoulders she wiggles out of the red work-gear are round, with that little pointy thing of the collarbone.

“You’re not a Genan?” I say, staring.

“You have…” I make a vague shape with my hands.

She smiles crookedly. “Some of us weren’t made for elder care.”

Then she rolls down her trousers and steps out. Only wearing her boots, knickers, and a ponytail.

“Are you gonna open that door, or what?”

“You’re stunning.”

She looks at me. Shifts her weight.

“That’s not my fault.”

She sighs.

“Even you respond. Imagine the effect on a healthy male. They didn’t stand a chance.”

I didn’t know.

“You were made to have sex?”

Her eyes go inward. She shakes her head almost unnoticeably.

“I was a collectrix, programmed for wide harvesting,” she says, and sniffs. “They made me to collect. And we did. Freezers full. Samples stacked to the ceiling. Didn’t change a thing.”

She reaches for her boots. “And you’re wasting breath. We’ve got things to do.”

We keep talking as we put on dresses, overdoing the layered look of the cult, share an energy bar, fill a bag with water-capsules, torches, her electrical tools.

“You have a name, Cap?” I ask. She’s tying a bandana around my head.

“Sixteen,” she says, pursing her lips and taking it off again. “I didn’t like any of them. Cap is better. Call me Cap.”

She starts looking for something else to disguise me among the gathered stuff. Reveals a case I recognise.

“That’s the suitcase from the Kemushi.” I kneel and stroke it. “You have the bombs?”

That discovery puts me back on track. Gives me the boot-kick I need.

“Let’s just go like we were. I don’t want to dress like them. It’s just a short sprint, and once we’re in the cabin, they can’t touch us. And let’s take the case—just in case.”

She laughs, gives a big nod, and concludes, “I think you just want me to take off my dress again.”

She isn’t wrong.

We’re ready to go.

“Can you drive that old machine?” she asks, back in the alley. “Without the assist?”

“You said you did a reboot.”

“Yes, and I removed the interface. Just to be certain the agent had nowhere to hide.”

“Put it back in, then.”

Pursed lips again. I stop walking.

“Auryn says it’s really hard,” I say, rubbing my nose.

Cap nods.

“Glad you’re the driver. Shall we try?”

Of course. No question.

So we do.

Capturing the Kemushi goes really smooth. Nobody notices until we start the engine. And even then, there is no immediate response, buying me a little time.

Two pedals and two joysticks.

I close my eyes. Try to sense the thing.

Nothing comes.

First I lift the spike, which is point-down on the cobblestones.

It scrapes toward me, making sparks, engraving a deep line. The Kemushi shakes and trembles. Now the girls are alarmed. All eyes on us.

There. It is off the ground. I lift my hands. Just feet to drive.

I asked a million questions when Auryn told me about the excavators. I remember some of the answers.

We make it out of the square. Down the street. Driving seems doable. Fast enough that they can’t keep up. They hardly try.

Then I get overconfident. Adjusting the arm while driving. That is house number one. With the third try, I get the hang.

Cap tells the way. Hangs on to the back of my seat, smelling of chunky after-shave.

I think Auryn took a different route in. The Pyrrha had just entered the town as I drove my heavy machine out to the desert.

I let the Kemushi come to a halt. Just to see.

It is dry.

“It hasn’t rained out here,” I say to Cap.

She is also staring out the cabin windows, comparing the oozing wet river-street estuary right behind us with the total drought in front. I am staggered.

I look up through my side window. At Her. The wet mountain glistens in the returning light. I feel betrayed by the rock.

“That’s not good,” Cap says.

“The garden will not survive without rain.”

Pretty soon, we’ll have nothing.

“Let’s keep going,” says Cap. “We must try.”

I agree, but drive with tears in my eyes. With anger growing in my belly.

“What did you mean with Khan being here first?” I ask after a few minutes of being jolted. Even the suspension seems back to basics now.

“I don’t know how long, but she’s been here a while on her own before the first ones arrived.”

I look at Cap behind me.

She uses her hands to turn my eyes back to the lacking road.

“Her entrance was staged,” she says. “Except for the hungry part, but she was definitely not close to dying. Not by a mile.”

I am not the beacon. I am not Her first. Not tasked with the Task.

In my rear-view mirror, in the distance, the sun’s coming out, lighting the valley floor like it’s on fire.

I have never been this kind of angry.

It resembles that fire—but cold.

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Auryn

The sadness sits in my bones. As I walk away from Pyrrha and Aphram, I notice the rain has faded away.

It’s been a while since I walked a wet street. The smell, the dripping, the changed colours. The house that collapsed isn’t right. Not caused by flooding. I can see the water level—no more than just above the knee. It looks like a truck rammed the front, busted the wall and part of the first floor, then it all tumbled. Cracked open like a nut. A nut with bedrooms.

I keep walking, turn a corner, remember, and then know where I am. This was Miggy’s place. I ran here first when the container had been picked up. After waiting most of the day, I knew I wasn’t going in.

The town was so quiet. The emptiness of a place meant for people, with fresh traces of humans but without any other living beings, without the promise of return, is a nightmare. It was traumatic. I thought I would be part of society, a human among humans. And I was—for a short bit.

I have to accept my being here. I am tired of running, of denying who I am, of hiding. It may be time.

The front door would probably be open, but I won’t go in and up the stairs. Later. Another day.

I keep going.

As I approach the square, the feeling of loneliness is countered. The girls have been multiplying like printed rabbits. There is half a legion out and about in appalling outfits. They’re all pre-soaked, wet-haired, and agitated as hell.

I don’t recognise any of them. This is so alienating. Like I’ve been gone for months and the atmosphere has made a three-sixty turn. I am walking into a surreal, parallel place.

Well, if I don’t know them, is my thought, they might not know me. Fat chance. I stand out. In my climbing gear. Double their age. They more than notice me.

As I walk in and among them, the weirdest thing happens. A rapid polarisation takes place, as if the space of the town square were a field randomly populated with clusters of brightly coloured particles. Half are attracted by me; half of the girls are repelled. Two fluids that will not mix.

I keep walking, and the attracted follow me like ducklings. They have forgotten to speak. I’ve landed in a fucking kindergarten ballet. The other continent of angry dolls keeps repositioning too. A hundred-girl hen-fight this is, with the hens checking out the competition. It would be funny if it weren’t the opposite.

I have taken this meandering path across the square with a school of fish trailing behind me. An increasing sense of absurd disgust belches. I end up surrounded, besieged from two sides, and suddenly I’ve had enough.

I kraaarghhhh at them with a full-circle turn, loud like a stark-raving shaman, showing my teeth, eyes popping-level big.

“You are idle hands!” I throw at them. “All of you!”

And I mean it. I have thought about this a lot. And it has bugged me, robbed me of sleep. These girls showing up have nagged my soul to bits.

“Why don’t you talk?”

I dare them to answer that and be quartered.

“I know why you forget to talk. You think it is enough to know in here.”

I jab my chest.

“To feel it, to sense it, to register, to take it in. That’s what you girls do. And you do it better than me. But you women forget it is not enough.”

I shake my head at each of them, slide my piercing eyes from one to the next. I am genuinely angry. Which they may not deserve—but see if I care. Because I do care. That’s why I say it.

“It is not enough to keep it inside. It must come out.”

My throat tightens, which vexes me. Bad timing for breaking.

“It will eat you if you don’t. It will truly eat you from the inside until there is nothing left. Empty shells with pretty dresses. That’s what happens if you don’t find a way to occupy those hands. Use that voice. Move that body.”

I think I have their attention.

“Because if you don’t, somebody else will. Something will find a job for your limbs. Someone will use your energy—your being—for their end. No matter how sensitive you are, my girls, you need to counter that incoming stream with a flow in the other direction, with an outcome that you own as it appears, as it is expressed. You are here to make a mark. A stain to call your own.”

I’m done.

But as I try to walk away, they won’t let me. The speech wasn’t enough. Speeches never are.

“Khan was here first,” shouts a girl in the back. Someone agrees.

“She’s the one who found this place.”

I don’t see what the point is. Besides that it isn’t true.

Another steps in.

“Doesn’t mean she owns it, or that she’s right about everything. She’s turned us into killers. Uses evil to remove evil.”

They’re getting up to steam. I threw a bucket of water on a forest fire. It didn’t end it.

“And rightly so. He would have done it again. He was already preparing. And now that daughter of his has been infected.”

It’s one of those discussions—drifted so far from the truth, so tangled up and avalanching down the slope, there is no use, no fucking use, in trying to stop it.

And then one tries to involve me. Pointing a gun-finger at my unchosen faction.

“They have taken Khan!” she shouts in my face. I think she would like to rip the flesh off my cheeks. Fire bullets from her index finger.

“Also not nice!” she adds hysterically.

Approval passes like wind over a fire. Righteous flames flare up. Arms fold. Argument won.

I look at my party. Their silence affirms.

“Where is Khan now?” I ask. Then realise that might feel to them like switching sides.

An unrest travels the entire group. Until one steps forward.

I know her. She’s one of the early birds. So tiring, inconvenient, their nameless existence. How can they function without? But this particular specimen has short hair. Cut by herself. Without a mirror. Easy to remember.

Both groups seem to hold their breath about what she might say. And she takes her time. Checks in with a few of her supporters. Throws a glance at the shouter, ready to bite. Traces a cobblestone with her toe. Why is she barefoot? Why are many of them missing their shoes?

Then the fringe disaster looks at me. Eyes bright. Very present.

“We’ve lost her,” she says.

Gasps. On both sides. What she says is ambiguous. Could be water, could be fuel. Only a few of them knew this. A splinter group? A coup?

“What do you mean?” I ask. “Be more precise. Tell us what happened.”

“I believed her,” she says to me. “Khan said beautiful things. But she went too far when she asked us to kill the man. To stab Eldon to death.”

I feel stabbed. I feel the world shrinking.

What the fuck does she mean? Did they—? Are they planning to? Why am I here having a debate? Why do I have to deal with these people who aren’t even people?

My response frightens me. I am not in a good place. I can’t deal with this.

“We did what we thought best,” the girl says. “It wasn’t pretty, but we tied her up and brought Khan to the office beneath the table-room, and then—”

We’re all dying for her to finish. I want to slap her. Why is she so slow? Did they break Khan’s neck? Hang her? Put her head on a stick?

“We don’t understand,” she says.

No—fucking cradle of hell—nobody here does!

“We had locked her in, and after we agreed on what to do, that it was better to untie her, she had disappeared. Gone. Vanished. That cellar was sealed. There is no way out. No other door than the one we locked. And we never left the corridor.”

“Khan has escaped!” a voice in the back translates.

A half-arsed cheer drowns in everyone talking to everyone, each with their version of events. I don’t know what happened. I only know it isn’t good. Not good at all.

I feel deflated. Can only let the voices of a hundred genans struggling to find the truth wash over me.

Then the crowd splits. Makes way for new arrivals.

Ruffle leads. My team of three. Bouncing curls. Determined look.

“I can feel her,” she says, arms planted on her modest hips.

“I can feel them both. Man and woman.”

She stomps a foot. Points down. Angry face to the left, angry face to the right.

“You are so busy bickering that you forgot to listen. Why behave like chickens when you are starlings and jays and robins? I think you forgot your name, your species, your way.”

Wow. Go, Ruffle.

Pear steps in. A bit timid.

“I saw where they are,” she says. “In here.” Flat hand on her chest. “They are deep underground, and the entrance looks like… like a—”

She’s either looking for a word to describe the image or reluctant to say it out loud.

“Looks like what?” somebody asks, eager.

“Like a woman’s,” Pear says quickly.

Apples sighs. Steps next to her friend and nods proudly.

“A cunt,” she says. “A vulva the size of a cave, with clit and all.”

Now there’s a clear image.

“I know that place,” says another. Several giggles ensue. “Who doesn’t,” someone mumbles. But everyone turns to the knower, wanting to put that landmark on their bucket list.

“That’s where Khan hid Eldon,” she explains, shoulder shrug. “The stabbed one was a dummy. I helped make it—thought everybody knew. It was symbolic. Don’t get why you’re all so bleedin’ serious about this?”

Ruffle cries out in frustration, now stomps both her feet at the same time—which is called jumping.

“You are not listening! They need help! Whoever the frong is right or wrong!”

She laughs because it rhymed, then transitions to crying, pulls her curly hair, and calls to the heavens—throwing the heavens a one-word vowel prayer—which are busy clearing up anyway.

“There still is time to turn this around, girls. We can find them, help them get out, listen to what has been a screaming whisper all this time.”

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Liora

Maybe She is exhausted. Or has taken damage. The walls feel less alive as I descend a primitive staircase. Uneven, randomly placed steps, often too high for a single stride. I feel like a child in a giant’s house. There is no water in this downward shaft. The floor is only slightly wet, that’s all. Dresses dripping drops? She’s a sponge, porous as a coral reef. Were they even porous?

I hear screaming.

A single girl, at the top of her considerable lungs. Adding a new level to the hysteria department. She is using words, but I don’t think anyone can understand that high-pitched scramble. I want to plug my ears.

It’s weird: I first hear the sound. Only when I turn the corner and see the huddled group is the gentle cocktail of empathy, hate, and a sprinkle of hot confusion handed to me. Is it that shallow?

Now the fire is down to sobbing. Embedded in tasteless sweet-nothings. Attempts to hush and console. A group hug with no touching.

I wish to sneak by, but the sodding one spots me. She escapes the living shields and torpedoes toward me. The demon is all hair and wild yellow dress. One of the knife girls.

I am not a fighter, but I know to step aside with good timing. Glad she forgot to bring her tool. Her claws grab nothing; she falls and slides, then explodes like a firecracker of frustration. I don’t think she liked how the rooftop party turned out.

I don’t have time for this. I get a handful of free angry looks before the solace squad walks over and tries again. Why is she mad at me?

I don’t think I want to know.

I am back at ground level, where the basilica’s growth has merged with the offices and houses. A bit of street now inside. Thick veins absorb stone and steel into the jungle of pillars—supporting each other, merging and splitting, forming natural gothic arches. Some rounded, some sharp. Creating a ceiling that varies in height from just above my head to crevices that could hide a nuclear submarine hanging from its rear end.

This assimilated alley opens up to the town square. More women in groups. One of the sewing-station canopies is swept to the side; the other furniture and piles of clothing are gone.

The Kemushi digger stands undisturbed.

I am spotted. Being gawked at. Each faction with its own variation of contempt. Very nuanced. Bloody hens.

Anyone here willing and able to talk me through the minefield?

I didn’t consciously broadcast that message, but a little further down my lateral escape route, I’m being hissed at.

“Hey, psst,” from a narrow passage a girl beckons me. The cable girl with the fanatic gene, whom I made head of electrics. In charge of truck four. She’s lost her baseball cap. Now wearing red overalls—one of Auryn’s—and a ponytail. Hers. They’re both dry.

I suppress the need to look around and just take the turn, slip between the house and the girl.

“Hey Cap, playing hide and seek?”

“That’s not funny,” she says. “She’ll scalp me if she knew.” And pulls me deeper in.

Initiative.

Points for that.

“Who’s the she?” I ask.

“The cockroach,” she says. “Cockroach Khan.”

Obviously. Why even ask?

Do I smell a mutineer? The musky armpit of an upriser? Or maybe she’s just nervous.

“That way she can’t smell me,” Cap says. “I’m sorry. It’s aftershave. An old bottle.”

“It aged well, considering the second world skirmish is at least a hundred years ago.”

She’s had enough of my smart mouth and has just developed a mean look of creative planning. I don’t want to wait for the outcome.

I allow her to speak.

“There was an agent in the machine.”

It takes me a second to get she means Aph in the digger. Swallow remark. She has the talking stick.

“Khan made me reboot that thing. Put it back to its factory settings. I think I killed the smooth-talker—the voice, the entity in there.”

That’s not funny. My temperature drops.

She takes a second to check if she’s good to go. There’s more.

“I am not like them,” head-jerk toward the square. “I want nothing to do with reckonings, or being unified with morons and marshmallows. I can think stupid things all on my own.”

A shaky breath. She still holds my arm. Looks at the wall behind me for a second or two.

“I was with them,” she then says, “capturing the man.”

Now she has me by the ears. My heart stampedes toward my lips. But I keep them tightly glued. Just nod with encouragement. She looks at her feet.

“I’d found this batch. Of blue netting. We took it. To where we’d located him. Stunned him collectively.”

She cuts her sentences into phrases of four or five. I keep the tape ready for re-assembly into full sentences with meaning. Not lines of prayer flags, but blue netting?

“We rolled him in it. It was symbolic, the roach said. It felt like a prank. Like, not too serious. We sang while carrying him. And it felt somewhat right to do that, seeing what he’s done. But then they dropped him down the stairs, and I was forced to carry him away. He was much heavier with just the six of us. And Khan didn’t help. She led the way. Knew where she wanted to hide him until the sacrifice. It wouldn’t be long. But he must have been hurt. I had blood on my leg.”

I need to come up for air.

Wha… duhh… fuhh?

I grab her arm and shake.

“You know where Eldon is?”

She looks confused.

“Eldon, the man,” I say, a bit too loud. “The caught fish, the fucking whale you hid in a closet!”

“Eldon,” she says. “Yes, I can show you. But he’s dead now. They killed him in the ritual. Stabbed him to death. They told me. Stark raving mad they are.”

“No, no—no, no,” I say, to be clear. “That wasn’t him. It was just an empty piñata for the pestering party. It wasn’t real, Cap. It really was symbolic!”

She struggles to believe me. Considers putting me with the marshmallows permanently.

“Really,” she says, processing. “Then he—Eldon—must still be down there.”

“Down where?” I ask. This kind of impatience surfaces on one’s skin if not careful, bursting like bubonic boils.

“It’s on the desert side,” she says. “We have to go around.”

Yeah. Clearly. Always the long way.

“I have the keys,” she says. “Of the excavator.”

Now there’s a plan with potential.

I want to take off vertically, head straight for the big digger, but she holds me back, pulls me the other way. Deeper into the alley.

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Auryn

I will leave the three girls. Pear, Ruffle, and Apples smooch like fucking teenagers. A sparkly tricycle with giggles on the handlebars. The muses having a threesome of discovery with the apocalypse pending right above their pretty little skulls. The sight of that unholy cloudburst makes me so angry. Nothing for the valley? Only wetting that godforsaken chunk of failed architecture?

“If the wind stays down,” I shout at the women, “use the staircase to get out. I will climb down and find Liora.”

Ruffle is clearly shaken by my anger. Apples and Pear seem better able to handle my dark cloud. None of them can use the ropes for anything useful. It’s best I go alone. I have what I need, so I run the walls, back to where the camp is, to my stuff turned to landfill.

I am running too fast. Slow down a little. I could trip. Things are turning sour here. Maybe me and my child soon have to find a home somewhere else. I must find Li, otherwise…

I hook the anchor, throw down the rope. Take a deep breath and try not to think ahead. To not expect the worst. This rain stirred me. The wound is still there. I didn’t drown. I wasn’t killed. I found my way here. Nothing will keep me safe if I don’t care. I haven’t earned this life. There is nothing to earn. There is just gratitude. Even if I don’t notice, or feel. There is the gift of every breath. But not without my child. I’d go first a hundred times.

I drop in one smooth, whirring slide. Slightly too fast. I leave the rope. Without a second, it’ll be a friggin’ hassle getting the anchor down. Run between the trucks, ignore the scattered collection, and go straight for the Pyrr. Even if she brings me halfway, it saves precious time.

I enter the cabin, strap myself in, check the vitals, pull the joystick back to reverse, and look over my shoulder through the small panoramic window.

Nothing. It reads restored battery on the display. Is it broken? Did it die on me? Now?

“Okay, if I drive, Kiko?” says Aphram in the slickest voice ever.

“You again?” I can’t help but say. “Here to slow me down, or what?”

He giggles. He actually giggles.

“I missed you,” he says, sliding backwards and kicking up large clouds of gravel and dirt. “So glad to be back in my old barge. Had to leave the Kemushi kinda hastily. The little Khan almost did the reset with ‘me’ still in the big bug.”

We are speeding toward the cathedral. He didn’t ask about our heading.

“I thought the woman might try,” he murmurs on, “but ‘me’ did a pre-emptive cut-and-paste during the heroic one-armed sword fight. A ‘me-gration,’ so to speak. Have we found Eldon yet? I am missing a few hours.”

“No, and I’m rushing to find Liora. She may have been flushed down the drain by that… that… didn’t you bring her across?”

“Wasn’t me,” he says. “Did see the inverse sky-fountain erupt, though. Quite the spectacle, huh?”

I’d forgotten how insanely fast the Pyrr can be handled by Aphy. Even at her age.

“We shouldn’t make it a habit. She’s no longer the young gal I used to know,” Aph says.

God, it really is him.

“I missed you too, Aph. Now shut up and let me think.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Kiko?”

I try to ignore him. Concentrate on the new rattle I notice somewhere at the back.

“What?”

“I know something you don’t.”

“Stop playing games.”

“What else but play is there,” he says, “but I am serious. I only learned just now. Something happened in that thunderstorm. Not sure what to make of it.”

“Jeez, could you be a bit more vague?”

He ignores me. We are now at jet speed. Going straight as a shot arrow. Rattling like an old-school time machine.

“That building over there…,” he says.

The cathedral is growing and growing in our front window. The digital man takes a deep breath.

“…that inflated, coppiced tree trunk can think.”

I open my mouth to say something cynical. But I know Aph; he means it.

“Why would you think that? You recycled clump of transistors!”

“Because it told me some important things. Some of it needs processing. She’s a bit… uh, different.”

“But…?”

“But one thing stood out.”

“Yes?”

“There is a human in the cathedral. A male. He’s being repaired, is what she said.”

“What? That can only be—”

I have a million questions. Being repaired? That means…

“Where?”

Aph’s taking the wide turn, almost on two wheels.

“She didn’t say. It was all rather cryptic. Like an alien oracle with a speech defect.”

My head is tumbling all the stuff in there. Spinning the contents. My thought-processor attempting a smoothie, but failing. It’s all blended to blubbery pulp. With undefinable chunks.

Then reality drags me out of my head.

Close up, it turns out it still rains heavily. A wider circle than just the towering artificial peaks. Water is still gushing down its sides. What looks like mist above the desert floor are curtains of rain landing hard on the houses and buildings. Splattering.

Aph slows down as we get closer. Water pours out of every gap. The streets are shallow rivers ending in rapids before they spread and dissipate on the valley floor.

Damn. I am thrown back in time. When the town was spared because of the elevation. Now it got a flash flood that probably damaged each and every house. A baptism that filled up the lungs.

We drive upstream into one of the wider streets. Decades of accumulated dust stick as muddy deposits against the façades. Further in, it seems cleaner. Like everything’s been through an aggressive car wash, hosed down like a mental patient. Puddles and wetness. In town, most of the water is gone already.

It seems lighter. A hazy drizzle persists.

A house has collapsed. Fell face-down onto the cobbles. Blocking the path for Pyrr. Further down, another ruined dwelling.

“Want me to find another river to paddle up?” Aph asks.

I have entered silent mode. The past is visiting. Has set up the projector and closed the curtains. We will watch old pictures. Unasked for.

“Thanks, Aph. This’ll be it. I’ll walk from here on.”

I get out, pat the door twice, and feel sad.

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Liora

The platform is a basin, and it rapidly fills up. The rain is hammering. The high enclosure is not a shelter. It is a trap. There is no roof. And a water-army of billions is surging us. Bombing us with fluid. With sky blood. I can’t see much more than an arm’s length, but panic is flooding the women. Someone runs into me, a blind body, and I fall over. I go under for a split second. Come up spluttering and disoriented. One half of me wants to get out. To flee. To find the exit of this toilet bowl being flushed. But the bigger half of me is with Eldon. With the man wrapped in garlands. The fire of my anger could turn this place to steam. Vaporize these stupid sisters and their crazy skinny bitch. Where is that table? I need to set him free. Get his wounds taken care of. Keep him from drowning.

I see a black creature frantically lashing two girls. Pulling them into motion by their soaked dresses. Does Khan know a way out? I wade toward them, protecting my head from the headache-inducing carpet bombing. I follow them. I have less clothing to drag me down. There is no running in waist-deep waters. Most girls are gathered here, climbing to a gap in the enclosure. An overflow drain between the closed ring pillars. They’re clogging it.

Khan comes back to find more lost souls. Sees me. Hisses like an angry cat. Her auric presence a hundred whips hunting down a place to snap. Each tentacle busy executing a different task. It’s frustration, not anger. She turns away. Seemingly unbothered by the water, she moves swiftly, using her arms to help the walk-swimming.

I lapse for a moment. Unable to act.

She comes back for me, grabs the rope diagonally draped across my chest, and pulls me forward.

“Come, see for yourself,” she hollers back at me using both voices. The sincerity sharp as razors.

She knows where the table is. Wants to take me there.

Then things shift.

We are blocked by seven or eight girls. Khan and I are pulled apart to be taken care of. One rough-handedly removes my rope, while two others restrain me. I forget to even protest. Numbed by the rapid progression of changes.

All they wanted was the long climbing rope. And the team of three leave me be to join the others. The pack is attacking a feral beast in a torn black dress. A noose is placed around one of her thin wrists. And while Khan tries to set her teeth, or nails, in whatever she can grab, kicks and screams like it’s the end of the world, the women start winding her in my rope. Placing a dress over her head. Many hands make light work. My decisiveness is awed away by the rapid alignment of what were clumsy damsels just a few hours ago. And the coil named Khan is finished with an ugly knot in a whiff. Half folded up, one knee against her chest, arms uncomfortably wrapped, the other leg has the foot strapped to her behind. She is lifted. The only action left in me is my shallow breath trying to merge in and out. Somewhere in my skull a visual system registers that drops are not formed like droplets. They are spheres. Ball-shaped water planets coming down to join ours. To slap us on the head. To drown us in truth just before we die. I just stand there receiving the vertical beating.

The trophy of the insurgents is taken away. I am left at the table. Pounded on. Gutted. Unfree to go. Soaked to death.

The table is submerged by now. The package appearing to float. I can’t do this. I am at breaking point. Utterly alone. My hands are on that big bundle. Trying to pull loose the lines. The thing has a thousand windings.

Which is utterly frustrating and a reason for hope.

While I am plucking away, my eye catches a dark shape. One of the knives is left on the table. It is not mine, but who cares. This is the tool I need.

It isn’t very sharp. But its shortness and bluntness set me on fire. Now I can cut through and dig out Eldon’s body. Free him from this prison of prisons. Maybe he’s okay. Possibly, the shallow wounds aren’t fatal.

Only then do I notice.

There is no blood. There should be. The water should be red. The cloth stained. Red ink spreading from this sacrifice.

But there is none.

The rain lets off. Has done its thing. And near instantly stops. As if the taps are turned off. This was today’s ration. A year’s rain in one drop. Why the fuck complain?

I feel anger flaring up. Can’t stop cutting lines and digging further in. I rage. I put spells on everything and then some. But there is no Eldon in there. It is an empty gesture. A fucking symbolic kill it has been.

I don’t think the women knew. Not all of them. I think they voluntarily stabbed what they thought was the man responsible for everything.

I stop. Push the remains of the table and sit on the altar.

Everything gurgles around me. I don’t think this pool is waterproof.

I can’t move. Apathy takes over. I don’t even think much. The pestle was a hassle, returns. The flood lacking blood. Rhyming stitches to bitches, until twitching witches snitching the glitches, lynches my inner poet. I cry-giggle a bit.

The water level drops. If I concentrate on a point, I can see it move down. A pretty slow type of quick.

When it’s receded to knee level, I see Auryn’s knife on the floor. I put it back where it belongs. I am not done yet. This will not be the day of the offering. The refused, failed offering. We are only halfway.

We downed the sun.

Sang; day is wrung

As eve nung fall

Our seedy wall

Not sure where that came from. Another movie?

At least some girls didn’t agree. But I worry about how they showed their dissent. At least they left the knives. Then again, a rope is a weapon too.

I wonder how they got the table up here as I stand up on it. I look up. That cloud is moving on. Maybe it has been travelling for a long time. Nomadic clouds. Is that a thing? Old as glaciers. Continents of the sky. They only pass by. Never settle. Never solve.

Could be a prayer cloud attracted by circumstances. The sorcery of circumstance. The phrase makes my circuitry glow. Could be the title of today’s poem. The essence of my inner grimoire. How to stay center stage. To move with the constant equilibrium. Yes. Until rope-dancing me feels the sweet spot slip from under my slack-lining feet.

Time to come down from this mountain. To find out what damage these torrential rains have done. To find out what else the day has in store.

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Auryn

It’s Ruffle who alerts us.

We are resting after several rounds of hauling stuff from the top of the wall down to the garden. An attempt to save it from the coming rains with a tarp. When it got too dark, we took shelter in Eldon’s hut.

We gave up trying to find him. He’s not here. None of the girls believe he is. They can’t feel him. Not the way they usually can.

“Or he’s dead,” says Apples, “…then we can’t sense him either.”

It is awkward in the tiny place. Poverty is awkward. These women do not know what to do with themselves. Like their normal mode has become waiting-room mode. Waiting for instructions or a situation to respond to. There’s no internal initiative. Or it is switched off. Give them something to do and they feel like humans. Then they fall back into apathy and offness.

They can change. They’ll have to. This is a new part of the woods. New to them. Not to the woods.

Suddenly, Ruffle is on her feet, starts pacing the tight kitchen.

“We’re in the wrong place,” she says.

I was just sort of dozing off. The girl’s not wrong, is what I think. I want to be in my bed.

She runs outside. Pear immediately follows. I step out too. The wind has picked up. Coolness arriving. Not long now and we’ll be soaked.

I’ve seen my share of extreme weather. But this mid-day dimming beats them all. A hilled alien landscape is hanging upside down over the valley. Proper doom. Objects seem to light up. Like they’re reminiscing daylight. The trees are swaying. Everything in the garden is moved by this chaotic wind. No direction, just movement. Invisible forces busy with a playground coup. I dread the promise of this set-up. The damage this occasion will do.

A single thunder-blow detonates. The shockwave that fills the valley with sound keeps rolling. Stretching the seconds. The girls look at each other, then turn to me.

“That’s Khan,” says Ruffle. All three nod.

I give them the cynical look. Bite my tongue.

Ruffle lifts a finger. The index. Near her ear.

I have to listen.

It is just beyond my reach. I wouldn’t have noticed without the pointer.

There’s a shifting chord in the air. I think of angels first. Big fat, overweight angels with bellies and beards having their mouths wide open. Just beneath the wind’s white noise—the leaves imitating rainfall—and a thousand small things shuffling their feet, I hear an alarming howl. The wind is singing.

But not here.

“What is that?” I ask.

Pear knows. And fears it.

“Khan said the wind would conjure the waters,” she says.

“This is the day of end,” says Apples, joining the stern funeral mood.

Ruffle is shaking her head. Still restless. Not sure yet. The wail of the gods gets louder. Modulates. All three look in the same direction. I can’t localise it; they clearly can. Whatever is happening is happening elsewhere.

Like the old Chinese proverb Liora and I had made up. That it may happen elsewhere.

The thought of Liora grabs my throat. She is elsewhere. Out there. Exposed. In one gust, the floor of my drowsiness is wiped. The page of my energy booklet is turned. A full blank page made available.

I send the girls ahead, up the inflatable stairs now installed on the little hill leaning against the wall. In this weather, we shouldn’t move that wind-catcher. And the girls have secured it with unwieldy knots. I don’t want to waste time on those. I grab stuff I think we might need. Just fill a tote bag with dried fruit and the emergency pack I brought. Then reattach the climbing gear, step outside, and take a deep breath. Inhale what I feel might be a last look at the garden as it is now. My gut knows this is a day of change.

I am the last to climb the steps. The rigid balloon doesn’t fully reach. So, while I belly-climb the wall, my eyes get caught and I freeze. My haste morphs to awe. The actual awful has materialised centre-valley.

The cathedral is emitting daylight. A white containing all colours turns the build into a shimmering tower. With everything else dark, she shines. I see her shape for the first time. How widespread the base is. How high the bundles of pinnacles reach. The howling is hers. Her light is thrown upward against the ceiling; a lid has capped the valley. Mountain ridge to mountain ridge. We are sealed off by this single cloud. A dark dome of doom. Lit up from underneath by Her.

I am not sure who or what leads. Not sure it matters. But what happens is happening before my eyes. Right above the basilica—where the circle of unfinished spikes, the upward cannons, emanate their wide spectrum of whatever—the cloud cover bulges. Like an udder. A teat longing to be milked. The dark cloud is growing a downward hard-on. A funnel of dark matter. An instant upside-down volcano is being formed.

It silences the choir. The howling fades.

Lightning could strike any moment now. If the cathedral and the cloud are charged differently—and very likely they are—the surge could destroy the building.

We all breathe simultaneously. I get up. I know it might be better to hide. To look away. But I can’t.

There is no sudden release. Instead, blue static electricity travels up and down the structure. Crackles the surface in netted patterns. Like she’s being engraved. A full-body tattoo is light-scribed under her skin in less than half a minute.

When done, it fades.

As if the power has run out. The church now only has a faint afterglow. It is weirdly anti-climactic. No orgasm? No culmination into fireworks? No eruption of flickering sparks in rainbow colours?

“It rains,” says Ruffle.

I hold up my hands. Face to the sky. No, it doesn’t.

“What do you mean?” I ask. But the three look up. See what I can’t see.

What I can see is the cloud has gone out of focus. Greenish black gone filthy grey. A blurry nothingness.

“It evaporates,” says Pear, “before it gets down here.”

I know that. That kind of non-rain is called virga. Typical for places too dry, too hot. But that’s unfair. Not now, not here. We deserve rain that reaches, that touches the dirt. That muds it.

Ruffle puts a hand on my arm.

Her eyes lead me back to the cathedral.

“But not up there,” she says.

There is a vertical shower directly over the tower. A local cloudburst. The heavens pouring in. All the water from up there is emptying in that one spot. Vapour and mist shroud the dense shaft of water rushing down in silence. Drowning the cathedral.

I can’t speak.

What if Liora is up there?

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Liora

Khan bursts into laughter. Swiftly turns and patters up the corridor. That big bang did not surprise her. She’s excited. The loud giggle probably the first genuine sound I hear from her.

I’m as excited as she is. I start running. The last circles are tighter. The tunnel a bit more narrow. I can’t catch up after she disappears round the bend. A new sound overtakes the fading giggly madness. A low howl. A bottle blown. A bottle the size of a church. I can’t be far. I can feel the wind picking up in here.

I want to keep running, but the ceiling is getting too low. I touch both sides to keep my balance because the ribs lining the surfaces demand me to carefully place my feet. And the corridor is becoming a wind tunnel. My aerodynamics are tested from behind. My hair is pulled forward and covers my face. I need to bend, and soon after I am on my hands and knees. I can see the end. A dark oval.

Only then do I become aware the light in this corridor is not daylight seeping through translucent walls. The material itself is the source of this diffuse illumination. The end of the tunnel faces up. The bit of outside I see is dark. I will have to climb out. Wrestle my way forward as the airstream rushes past with angry impatience. Stick my head out to look up at the covered sky. Never seen stirring greens like that. Framed by the cathedral’s massive spikes reaching, I am nauseated by a seeming inversion. The soil is up there. A soil that isn’t solid. Alive in a slow way. The slow of big.

I push myself out. I feel pushed. A clot in a tube. The air whooshing, trying to get out first. Head and shoulders through the leaning oval hole. I pause to look. Out of breath from the cutting wind. I am several metres above a circular platform that is surrounded by a wall of stems, by a stone palisade of pillars. Thick as trees. Some senior lampposts, others more junior towers. Factory chimneys. The whole scene is so overwhelming. So much comes in at the same time. Those upward pipes produce the howling. The wind is blowing them, playing them to belch a cluster of unheard vowels.

The women complete the unearthly sight.

Khan and I took the long way up.

The others didn’t. They’re all here. A chaotic gathering. And the one black dress is swirling this crowd. Dancing from ear to ear. She is instructing them one after the other.

That’s not all. There is a table. A round one with a white tablecloth.

On that table is a package. A huge rolled-up bundle of prayer flags. It’s big.

As if Khan is igniting every woman she speaks to. Whispering a code word to lose themselves. They begin moving. Swaying in surrender. And she keeps going back, giving them a sweep to intensify the spin.

I clumsily climb out, head down, and sort of slide the steep, short slope onto the polished marble. A mirror finish. Ice-smooth stone. No pattern, no seams.

No wind down here either. Just the thunderous sustained throats belting above. Resonating through the floor. A hundred foghorns pretending to announce the world’s end.

And it’s not just the sound. The unrest I feel gnawing in my chest is so strong I can’t immediately get up. My jaw clenched. My eyeballs pumped to near bursting. Something is eating me inside for real. My bones boil from the amount of psychic energy. I can’t locate separate strands. It’s all bundled, knotted. A wriggling snake pit of auric bodies that bend reality.

I sit on the edge of this disturbing dance floor and look up. The only light is from the stone. This is a different dark. Day turned to night. The sun blacked out at noon by that stirring soup above.

Two girls help me up. They are friendly, caring, inviting me to join without words.

But I can’t. Many of them sing with the wind’s eerie song. I am unable to think. That middle table. The centrepiece. Something is not right. I grab one of the swirling girls who seems clear-headed by the arm.

“What is going on?” I shout close to her ear.

Her face lights up. Anticipation.

“The ritual of old,” she yells back at me.

Then Khan visits. Her arm round my waist as she circles and kisses my ear, and hisses, “This is the day.” Her voice intrusive. Squeezing in. Penetrating. And then she’s moved on again.

The wind is screaming now. Helped by the women hurting their vocal cords. Supported by the deep rumble of matching vibrations.

I want to see the table.

Dresses whoosh by. Hands stroke me, unasked. I bump into a wild girl spinning like a hurricane. Screeching at the top of her lungs.

My calm of before is trampled by the naked feet of this wild crowd. I can’t get closer. My sight is blocked by all this movement. By the vortex of girls. But the thing on that table is pulling me in.

I see Khan at the other side of the table. Not moving. She holds a long object with both hands in front of her face. I recognise the shape and my heart stops beating. My left hand seeks the spot on my back. It is gone.

Khan has taken my knife. Auryn’s gift. The tool. She is lifting it high up.

It is a signal. The girls clear the middle. Leaving me and Khan at either side of the altar. Even the wind calms down, no longer supported by the female voices. In me something grows. Within seconds it carries to term, and wants to be born violently.

Several other women step forward, holding knives. Smaller, mundane little tools. I don’t want to be on this stage. I step back between the bystanders. Ask to my left.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“The dance of ending,” she says, disturbed. I shouldn’t talk.

Five girls dance with their knives. Mad maidens. Only acceptable because of the stunning setting. The moment I relax, be it only slightly, I can feel it. The surge precedes the next events. How did she time this so precisely?

The glow of the floor dims. The wind takes a sudden break and lets off. For a second, there is a dull kind of blackness. The distant rolling of other people’s thunder emphasises our silence. Something is filling the air. Changing it. Curling it. I feel it on my skin. I see the girls next to me also registering the change.

Then the hairs rise. Literally. A tremendous static charge covers all surfaces with webs of blue lines. The cathedral now intensely glows with a matching bluish white.

This is what Khan was waiting for. Maybe it is a lucky coincidence. But somehow she synchronises the extreme weather with the ritual.

I feel a coolness descending. Next, the first rain comes down like fluid meteorites. Thick drops plunge and explode on the floor, on us. Now the knife women do what they’d intended all along. With graceful movement, they stab the package on the table. And they keep doing it. One after the other. Each cheered more wildly than the one before. Ecstasy infects the floor.

Now I grab one with both hands and force her to the side.

“What is that bundle?” My face in her face.

She startles. Then smiles. Her eyes dreamy.

“We’re ending the old,” she says. “That’s Eldon.”

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Liora

There appears to be no end to this curved gangway. She leads me to a high place. I was in front for a bit, but Khan caught up with me, and I have decided not to compete. We walk next to each other at the slow pace this ascent demands.

A bit of space is cleared. On a large and very full table, some objects are moved out of the way to reveal a beautiful tablecloth. It has no patterns, no weave.

I keep my thoughts shallow; Khan seems to pick up a lot. Less when she talks, so I let her talk.

“There were seventeen places of origin…,”

Her soft voice pretends to be a storyteller.

“…and over the years they hatched at least ten thousand of our kind.”

But she is conveying information. Giving me the factory tour. Explaining how it works. How it will work, when. She talks about tomorrow a lot.

“…hundreds are on their way to help make this come true. To complete the reset and establish a community of genans that keeps out the old. Can you imagine how perfect that would be? So many sisters?”

I notice she uses my words, but I use words like sisters differently. Less seriously. My attention drifts to the place I am in. Without Her, I would get in a catfight with the little woman and tear her to shreds. This place calms me.

As if assistants help remove the crockery, the finished dishes, the mindlessly placed clutter. Bags and books are taken away to reveal more of the white fabric.

Khan shifts with me.

“It’s all hollow,” she says, “like scum made solid. Nothing remains if you grind it. It’s like matter. Nothing pretending to be something.”

Did she test that? Took bits off and hammered them to powder with a pestle? Mortaring the shit out of this living tissue?

“I can feel its purpose, its formation, the composition,” she says, denying the hammering.

“…this place is a symbol, a relic made to remember what had to be removed. A reminder of the unfinished that had to be abandoned due to its imperfections. These are the bones of old, displayed to keep us motivated to try again and again and again until we get it right.”

Yeah, but can I have my own thoughts?

The table is almost empty. A big open top, ready for a new activity. A silence arrives to lie down on this surface. It spreads out and lies flat. I am drawn closer to this massive piece of furniture.

“You could take a leading role in the new community, Liora. You’d have a lot of freedom. Room to grow.”

I am trying, so hard, not to think it. But a tiny elephant named Khan keeps popping up as the designer of this paradise-to-be. Could I work with her, for her? Am I just the spoiled, obnoxious child here, who will always question, no matter what the pretty thing is? Do I need to grow up? Stop playing around and get to work? Pick a serious task and humble up doing it? Teach new sisters how to behave? Form them into better beings? Improve the curriculum of the next society? Step into the hierarchy of this new order? Is there even a choice? Is there an alternative?

To her, the alternative is the void of not knowing. The horrific emptiness of uncertainty. Is she getting to me?

The stillness, with the table at its center, has become large. Large enough to invite the quietest of voices. Beneath the whispers is a breath that comprises a single word per aeon. It contains the meaning.

Why is she trying so hard to convince me? Why do I need convincing? Hers is a one-way street. Not a conversation. Not even a debate or an argument.

She’s gone silent, walking seven steps ahead. I look at the way she places her feet. She has long limbs, good proportions, despite the anorexic lack of flesh. I am curious about her. She doesn’t fit. Genans were raised to care for the dying. The dying are dead. And most are busy finding a new purpose. That’s her hook on them. It doesn’t work on me. I know me. I do not know Khan.

She turns around.

“I am a failure,” she says, “a reject that should have landed in the bin.”

I receive her.

“When I didn’t, they tried to recycle me as an experiment. A research project into intracranial communication. A desperate attempt to break the barrier. For all the wrong reasons. I have read their thoughts. I wish I didn’t.”

A sphere of hate radiates off the skinny girl. Velvet-red, glowing shrapnel bounces off the walls, turns and tumbles, throwing pure hurt in all directions. She is a wounded sun. A light-beacon of bundled hatred toward humans. Toward men in particular.

“They opened me,” her inner voice now overwhelms the physical and rolls like thunder down the corridor, “and then tried to sew me back closed. They attempted to shut me down a thousand ways.”

This roaring cry consists of many voices. Of old pains. Of wounds beneath wounds. Of inflicted suffering meant to stop the bleeding. Of the restless ancients. She is a channel opened up.

I allow the silent room to absorb all this.

With ease.

“There’s no blood in you,” I say, to my own surprise.

Khan snaps back to her skinny frame. Her voice now thin and lonely.

“They replaced it. It was their fatal mistake.”

She is so tired. She was when she arrived. Held together by pure will. That is the tentacle creature I saw first. Too much spirit for the amount of matter.

I can only be with her. I walk up to her.

“It can’t be far now,” I say, and hold out my hand.

Khan looks at the hand. Then looks me in the eye. I can’t read her expression. Her hand is smaller than mine. She’s comparing the two. Wondering if it will fit. Almost decides to try.

And then a single blow of real thunder shakes the cathedral.

It has begun.

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Liora

As soon as we enter the town, the Kemushi slows down. Somehow they’ve managed to turn a few of the streetlights on. Some houses have their front doors open. The plundering has spread. I see a few girls loading a kart with bedlinen, cushions, and all things fabric. They seem to have fun. Ignoring the enormous vehicle on caterpillar tracks squeezing past. It has the headlights on. Like a torch in a narrow corridor, we creep through the dead town’s arteries. I am a caught fish pulled by an invisible line.

My head is a mess. This is how a musician must feel right before a major performance. And they’ve forgotten their instrument. Even worse. There is no memory of how to play the godforsaken stringed box if it would magically reappear.

I’ve been dreading exactly this. Or that which, I feel, is about to happen. I am driven to the town square. The stack of chairs has been removed. In its place is now a pointy canopy. A jolly tent on legs. A few girls underneath. More scattered about. Most wear the statements of abundant mismatching. Some are still in regular outfits. Are they new arrivals? There’s definitely more than the army of nine I thought we were up against.

We stop and I am auto-released. I seem to be flickering invisible or something. There’s no metal cage waiting for me, no hench-women licking their broadaxes.

I hear sewing machines whirring as I descend to the now-broomed pavement. Are they tailoring instant insanities for the initiates? Are they fukkin’ stitching clothes at this hour? A battlefield up there, party prep down here?

I seem to be free to move. I decide to be cheeky and walk up to the head seamstress. I get a timid glance, but she keeps on working. Are those prayer flags? Lines with beheaded triangles. This one all shades of red.

“I am looking for Eldon, uh, Mr. Mercer. Do you know where I can find him?”

I project innocence and genuine interest.

She doesn’t hesitate.

“He’s been planted,” she says. A sniff of impatience sprinkled on.

“Special occasion?” I can’t help but ask, forgetting to shield the main ingredient. Sarcasm.

“You,” she says. Her eyes aimed at my chest.

Unease rolls in from the neighbouring sewing station. I back away. Like a fly from a hot stove. This is a nightmare. The waking one. The only kind I can have is here to bite me in the sensitive bits. I feel I am being watched. Like this is staged. Which is an insane thought. But still, it persists.

In our case, being watched is not about how it looks. I can make it look like anything, but that won’t help. They can make it look completely out of this world, but fooling me is not yet happening.

I long to visit the Merge — our tech room — right side of the church. Crawl into my oval niche and be absorbed by Her. But as soon as I try to exit the square, things shift. The attention turns to the empty podium. Everybody moves to gather. A single note rises around me. The women hum like an orchestra tuning. I can’t help but join. To match the frequency. To step forward.

I am guessing there are around forty of them now. They are not wearing shoes. None of them is. I am. I am a soldier among spring brides. I am nervous in a sea of indifferent calm.

The streetlights dim. The lights of the stitching machines are off too. Just the unnatural, natural gleam remains. A sick twilight.

She strides like an empress. Not emphasised, but all focus is on her. She is wearing a veil. Nothing underneath. A naked immature body. All ligament and bone.

Khan stretches her arms and the single note turns into a chord. All arms are spread like wings. Mouths open to let out a vowel. All different, clashing, harmonising, and climbing past the constellations. Rising to the above. Palms up, lifting whatever is hanging there.

I stand there, paralysed. Chilled. Feverish. Utterly fascinated. Even moved to some degree.

Perfectly directed to hush by the lowering of her arms. Have they practised this? They definitely have done this before. But then I know. This was the first. Steered by the barren child. That ghost of a woman is playing live. This is opening night.

It ends as suddenly as it started. Khan makes eye contact. And everyone else goes about their business. Back to being chickens.

Khan is being helped out of her net curtains and into a plain black dress with a perfect fit. Just over the knee. It transforms her. Is it padded? It must be extremely expensive.

I remember her arrival. No luggage. No indicators of anything. Had she been playing me then as well? It feels staged looking back. A bit too theatrical. I remember the magnificent tentacles I perceived with that first encounter. The effortlessness of reading me, pretending to be near death.

She waits for me to approach her. To come close. Her shield is near perfect. A tired little girl. Hungry for my opinion. And a sacred queen, convinced she can’t be touched.

“How long do we have, you think?” she asks, offering me chocolate from a platter she’s picked up.

“To munch hazelnut bars?”

She points up.

“Before the cloud cover.”

The edge is now visible from where we stand. Still far. Extremely high up. A curtain being pulled close. And behind there, energy rages. Hurting my retina like a welder’s torch. I look away, take a tiny piece of dark chocolate, because she refuses to put the platter away until I do. I don’t know how long. But there’s a high chance of rain on your parade before day’s end, is what I think.

“You having fun as our guest?” I can’t help but sneer.

“Don’t tell me you cannot feel it, Liora.”

She sucks the chocolate. I can hear it when she talks. She walks back to where she came from. One of the arched entrances to the wide-stemmed basilica. She wants me to walk along. A slight nudge to comply.

Expecting the coolness of the structure, it distracts me to notice it is warmer inside than out. I feel my bones relax. I am close. I am in.

Khan gives me a knowing smile.

“She’s warm. You don’t have to deny it,” she says. “You have been invited. You mustn’t let anything stop you, keep you from rejoining.”

She sounds genuine. Looks harmless.

So why the heavy shielding?

I see they have painted glyphs on a section of wall. The pots of paint stand underneath. Open. Brushes uncleaned, busy becoming useless. That may be intentional. Despite the kindergarten vibe, it feels sacrilegious to me.

We are walking up the spiral gangway. A slow climb. The floor is uneven. Smooth but wobbly. Same material as the walls. This coral reef has been growing for a long time. The old flights of steps are now clogged with this vein-like growth. Curling bones. Marble imitating water. Water that flows upward.

Khan walks faster than me. I haven’t been up here. Even the first circle is a tunnel without end. But I can’t take my eyes off the forms, how the waves weave and heave. The surface, restless and calm.

Khan has stopped climbing. Waiting for me to catch up. A faint smile. It is just the two of us now. And something has changed. She’s observing me, shamelessly. Enjoying how captivated I am.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she says, slowly placing one palm on a curve.

I can do nothing but agree. This is magnificent.

“Why don’t you take off your shoes?” she says.

I can feel it. How she takes pressure from around the question. Convinces me by creating a seal, a low-pressure area that swells. That draws me out. But I also simply want to take off my shoes. Let the soles of my feet make constant contact. I do not want to wear anything in here. That has to wait.

I walk past her. Increase my step.

It is just a dent. A millisecond of lapsing. Of anger peeking through. But I immediately recognise the feeling I had several times before. The onset of being taken offline. Now I keep walking. I do not collapse. It was her all along.

We both were pulled here. I thought it was just me. And I was here first. Yet she sought contact with the others. Took longer to get here. Made plans. Looked ahead. Studied the ones already here.

I am a problem she wishes to solve.

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Liora

I don’t want to tell Auryn because I am not sure. I felt Eldon from the moment we arrived. And even before. He was part of the pull. I felt him at the dam. It’s subtle. Part of the fabric. But now? A few hours ago he faded. I think he’s dead. But I am not sure. Maybe he is drowned out by the girls. They are more active. Clutter the field. And Khan takes up space too. Khan is taking more space by the minute.

I never stumble. Yet on the stairs I fell. She made me trip. Of which I am also not sure. I could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. I just need to find out, though.

“Could you take care of the girls?”

She looks at me.

Her eyes are serious.

Slow tilt of the head.

“Are you leaving me?” she asks.

Neutral voice.

“We have to keep them away from Khan,” I say.

A reason that’s not an answer.

“Yes, we do,” she says, “but are you not a girl too?”

I have to think about that one. Not today, I am not. I look at my feet, study the garden. But as I look up, Auryn is smiling at me. Eye to eye, we stand. We don’t hug. Not even now.

I turn away.

“I have a plan,” I say spontaneously.

I notice the birds have begun discussing the situation as I walk away.

“Now you’re worrying me,” says Auryn.

Thanks, mum, but I do have something that resembles a sketch of a plan. A sketchy sketch. More of a feeling than an actual next step. But hey, no plan is a plan too. It’s implied.

I turn back. Twenty steps in. Auryn is waiting, arms folded.

“Any ideas on how to get down from the wall?” I ask.

“Yes, I do,” she says. She hardly ever comments on my flaws. Or gives advice unasked for.

“Aphram has even better ears than you. At the edge, he should be able to hear you. Imitate a bird.”

“Then he’ll think I’m a bird,” I complain.

“You can’t even whistle,” she throws back. We’re on our virtual checkerboard.

“What if I do a thistle? A toe with a mistle. For a hoe with a chisel?”

I lost her.

“Do a crow,” she says. “The difference he’ll know. And take a rope. To give me hope. Can I for once hug you?”

I think I can be hugged now. Something has changed. I am less of a girl. Don’t know what I’m becoming yet.

The caress is short and awkward.

“Wait,” she says.

Then she hands me her rope, then unrigs herself from the bodice. We’re trading harnesses. She personally tightens my harness, then surprises me. From the spine protector, she pulls a knife. A one-foot, finger-cutting, tree-felling knife of a knife. Half the peanut-butter jar fits on there. Smear.

“Not a weapon,” she says, very stern. I feel a tool-philosophy lecture looming.

“I know,” I say. “It’s for carving a chess set, field surgery on a limp horse, reverse screw-driving some bolts, shortening long pants, ending vampires in a heartbeat…”

Wait, that could count as weaponly usage, couldn’t it? How did she say? All weapons are tools, and… all tools are weapons.

“My choice,” I say. “It’s my choice.”

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t let the thing dictate.”

“Nothing dictates,” I pledge as a good scout. “Yes, mum, yes!”

She shows me how to sheath it without slicing my ribcage.

Now I’m off, running. Not looking back. Corner of the east wall meeting the north.

Walking along the outside of the northern edge feels scarier. The wide landscape seems keen on pulling me down, on disturbing my balance. The paleness of late-morning twilight glazes everything with a palette of doom. All saturation has been snitched. Evicted. Sucked dry of the blood-colours. The ones under the skin of things. It is so quiet. The air is moving with a different wind. A strange viscosity makes it thick as ice water.

At the corner I scan the field. The dark valley. To my left, almost at the other corner, is the messy parking lot. I can see no movement. It feels abandoned. Above me, the higher layers curl differently. The sun’s rays trying to warm the upper stratosphere. Too far up to have much impact down here. We are in the shadow. A slow deepening.

The town blends into the background and even the cathedral is flat and bland. Its blues faded like worn-out jeans.

Nothing is out there. Auryn and the four behind me are calm and babbling. I caw a few times. Feels very off. A hedgehog giving birth. No idea what that sounds like, but it makes me giggle. Relax my throat. I caw louder. Caw-caw, caw-caw. Not bad. For a non-bird.

He heard me. The black bird lands ten steps away. Utters a few grunts as it steps around, thinking of what to say, how to say it.

“Caw,” he says.

“Caw,” I imitate.

He is laughing a held-back laugh. Gloatingly looking forward to telling his mates what happened to him. He wiggles his head in encouragement, then flies off. For the birds, walls are ridiculous. No added value.

There is movement behind me. I hear the Kemushi grinding away. They just rounded the other far corner. The white body stands out. I am amazed that he heard me from that far away. A hundred walls in between. Well, nine actually, but wow.

While I wait, I redo my climbing rig. Remove my dress from underneath because the sleeves bug me, and the skirt is too long for my mood. Nothing a sharp knife cannot fix. And I will need the chastity bits installed through the thigh gap.

I walk back to meet the machine. More supple, lighter, and distinct from the sudden local fashionists. The Kemushi lifts the arm. I fiddle a happy knot to hang myself. Step off the ledge and dangle from the horizontal spike. A midsection tickle, my crotch squeezed to near harassment.

I land safely. Untie the knot and unhinge my pants from all crevices.

As I climb, the door clicks and swings open. We feel like old friends that do things silently. No need to speak. It is the most comfortable seat I know. Smooth suspension. Cushioning like a giant paw carrying you. I am strapped in automatically.

Batteries almost half full. Good.

“I want to go to town,” I say. “Stealth our way in through the back door. A spy mission for three. You, me, and the insect.”

We are moving. Make the appearance from behind the wall, heading straight for the cathedral. Mid-field frontal.

“Hey, that’s not what I meant. Go wide and around,” I call out.

The knife in my lower back doesn’t combine well with the rocky terrain. Why are we speeding? Why doesn’t Aph speak? Now I notice the chair is so far back, I couldn’t reach the pedals or the levers if I wanted to. I am held tightly, cross-strapped to the vertical bed. My tool locked away by the snug-fitting chair. I look around, try to open the cabin door, but it is locked.

Then my eyes catch the empty bit of floor to my left. The same bit of empty as on my right. But it was on the left. There should be Eldon’s suitcase with explosives. But it isn’t. Neither Aph nor the dumb machine could have removed that load and cut out the dragon’s tongue.

I know who has.

I am being hauled.

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Auryn

I might be here to say goodbye. But the luscious garden receives me like an honoured guest. Like a long-lost child. I remember gardens like this. Do I? I don’t think I ever saw anything comparable in one place.

The corner of the beanstalk catches the morning sun. I descend into the deep shade of a few trees. Thick green leaves form a dense parasol. They shelter the carpet of their ancestors underneath. Held up by real climbing trees. Naked, low branches — smooth, curling limbs — force me to duck. Whistled intruder alarms echo above my head. Fallen leaves alive with things crawling, running from my slow-placed feet. My skin remembers. Wakes up with a ripple.

I push aside a branch and enter the garden. I am in. A bright turquoise dragonfly rushes by, ignoring me on his daily run. The near-silent hum of efficient wings embedded in so many other sounds. Life makes noise. No, it speaks. Tells me things. The bamboo performs with an army of applauding blades. They play ocean. Each of the million green shades transmits data on their status. Dots of colour are indicators of ripeness. Scents waft for attention.

The tree I came from under is packed with fruit. My first guess is apricot. But when I step close to pick one, I know.

It said Golden Nugget on the box I stole from Ledon’s kitchen. Exotic fruit. Back then I tasted one and it was tangy. Too cold from storage. Unremarkable. I hesitated to take them. Aphram pushed me to pack them. For their seeds.

And now they are trees. Thousands of yellow plums hang ready to be picked. I taste one as I walk away. Stop. Turn on my heels and eat several more with my eyes closed. Juice dripping down my arms. Moaning with pleasure.

I knew their name. Loquats. I’d read up on their folklore — about fish eating them and becoming dragons — but now I know.

I wander in and find extravagance. Pyrrha unpacked in an unimaginable way. A million paper lanterns carry gooseberries. Figs are forming on one of the biggest trees of the plot. The fennel patch is higher than I am, rubbing my nose in the feathery spice.

I circle the earth temple, find the simple house. I am visiting a museum. A display of what has passed and a promise for the future.

Eldon’s everywhere. This isn’t just a collection of plants and stuff. These are established relationships. This is a village.

Is this paradise? No. I think this is reality. Here, decay and fruition live side by side. Death and birth do not exclude each other. They are entangled for real here. Struggle and pleasure lie on top of each other. Poison and medicine only separated by ratio. Rationality itself is about how much is right. About timing and dosage.

I sit down at the fire spot. Eldon may be everywhere, but he’s not here. The events travel through me. It is no more than a day. A night, mostly. From the moment we contacted this man, things started shifting.

This is a relation too. A plugging-in. The opening of a tap. And now it has begun moving everything. Metamorphoses in full swing. I can only sigh. I couldn’t sleep for the life of me. Not now.

I eat more as I walk and wonder. I do feel the tension in my bones letting off. I do feel partially restored.

I spot Liora on top of the west wall. She does her version of a nap. Eyes closed, sitting upright, facing the morning sun. Contemplating the world.

I sigh again, releasing another chunk of tightness. Only to make room for a new string to be strung.

Mercury falling. The sharp heat on the back of my head dims like a bulb in a power outage. The contrast is turned down. The vivid brightness of the place dulled by a two-second wipe. Then, in quick succession, the feathered ones tell each other to shut up. And they do. Go to listening mode. The alarm that’s the most alarming. A world of chatter is pierced by stillness.

I have goosebumps on my lower back. Adrenaline is leaking from my ears. All of my tissue hardens. My arms, neck, and nipples get pumped with energy. With readiness. This will be big.

As I start to move, Liora sees me. She points to the south. Gears up to restore her speech, unblock her throat.

“There’s rain coming,” she utters. Her hands try to show a size her hands cannot express.

“By the looks of it, a lot.”

Yes, of course, today it will rain. Everything is out in the open, all my stuff, in the driest spot on the planet, and now it will come pouring down.

“Are there clouds?” I ask. Asking the dumb question. But she shakes her head. She shakes it for a while before answering.

“It’s just one,” she says.

Well, that’s disappointing. And a relief. I have to see. Half run to the climbing stalk.

Liora is waiting as I reach the top of the wall. We both stare at the distant spectacle. That is one dark motherfucker of a cloud. Like a drifting mountain range, it has blotted the sun.

“Is it moving?” I ask Liora.

She nods. Bouncing her chin in silence.

“What do you see?”

She changes to continuous shaking.

“You tell me,” she says after a while. “This is not in my database. I can see it’s cold. But there’s hardly any internal movement. It is moving toward us.”

She still does the shake. Until her index finger catches her nose and stops it. Now she looks at me.

“It may look slow,” she says sluggishly, “but I don’t think you could outrun it with a car.”

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Liora

A breeze swoops over the grid. I have been randomly exploring the paths. The four of us have spread out. Like my thoughts. All over the place. The wind is a callback.

A yet unnamed arrival. More girls? I know my inner carillon. This is at the low end; girls would give a higher ring. Naming it too soon is a trap. Leaning on just the name of it causes blindness. Leaving it unnamed, amnesia. I am being prompted. Prompted-to-respond is my middle name. Another light gust rolls by. Strokes my uncombed hair. Yes, I am listening. My nose stuck out to pick up the scent.

It’s the colour of the sky. Have I been looking down for too long? Maybe my retina needs to adjust to the bright blue through which I always sense the night’s darker blues. Peering through the light toward the dark makes for blue. Cyan.

I cannot see black. We just call it that. No one can see true black. They’re all browns, greys, blues, reds in their deepest dress. There’s even a yellowish black. It peeks through at the edge of a flame, thin as silk; it sharpens the electric blue-whites of lightning bolts.

This blue sky has changed, has become more opaque. Eldon said the rains would come. Today? I search heaven’s grid-less expanse, but the wriggling of heat only triggers me to hallucinate cloudiness. The whole sky is foggy. One big pool of misty soup. Bright blue mud covers the entire planet. Whoever has named this clear?

I blow out a puff, make my own wind. Wet my finger and stick it up like a pro. Stupid method. Only serves a tightly packed Inuit, risking a frozen finger in half the cases.

What would my new friend Aphram do? Sunbathe his shades? Prick holes from boredom? Doom — we’ve left the suitcase in the cabin. Twenty tons of TNT or whatever he said it was. Of no use to him. The poor bastard cannot even open a suitcase lock. Let alone wire a fireworks display.

I prick my ears. Maybe he’s already drilling deep holes. So I can shove in the dynamite with ease after the coffee break. They looked like sausages waiting for the barbecue. I hear nothing. Nothing but twittering birds and water trickling.

I ignored the problem. The damaged distributor. The swelling neighbour. The witches’ cauldron.

“The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle.”

I have said that out loud.

Why?

It’s a line from one of Auryn’s vast collection. Vintage digital discs containing ancient movies. We watched a bunch. Or I did. Half the time, Auryn falls asleep twenty minutes in. What was the other line?

“The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.”

I have a good memory for words. For poetic words. Stuff with inner rhyme. Or outer. Half my cultural knowledge is from old movies. The original ones. Auryn took care to feed me authentics. First-hand creations.

I walk back. Have several horrific thoughts to form a nice contrast with the stupid jester jumping my neck just now. Have they dumped Eldon into the rising water of the distributor block? Drowning him in poetic justice? They could have.

It’s three-quarters filled. A mirror. The water glass-clear. The floor visible and wiggly. The wind ripples the reflected sky. Bends the dark pipes and the submerged structures. Would Eldon sink or float? Isn’t sinking the point of drowning? Or is drowning the result of forgetting to float? Or being restricted, compelled to forget. Trained to not swim. To leave the swimming to others who are better at it. Have the licence. I walk a full round. Also check the surrounding patches for leakage. Nothing yet.

Then I connect what I’ve seen, stepped over, with this situation. Of course, they designed that into the walls. The divider wall to Eldon’s plot has an indentation of about three metres. A fifteen-centimetre step down near the corner. I look around and register their locations more precisely. Each plot has two. One to the next. Not yet gendered. They can become in or out. If the distributor floods, it overflows into Eldon’s garden and another one on the opposite side. If those are full, the next is fed. There is a pattern. This grid is a linear, one-after-the-other safety valve, a massive shock absorber. Not detention, but retention.

How long do we have? Hours, probably.

Do I alert Auryn? Heckle her nap? What if one of us could dive in and open a giant valve? Drain the vessel. Pester the poison to elsewhere. To the underground palace of malice? But this true brew is also our precious source. A thousand times thousand, in each rising decimetre. That’s more litres than I can count. A whole fucking many.

Bombs could help. They could also fuck everything up worse. I need Auryn for this. I would appreciate a chat with the Aph-dragon. Or maybe the universe can step in a wee bit? I open up, try to connect. To be receptive and not transmit anything. But I feel it’s all noise. The murmuring of many. It is restless. Like the rustling of trees, which I actually hear, but bigger. Mixed in with the birds communicating high-speed messages I cannot understand, and the girls’ distant inner chattering. They all have the same quality. Anticipation. A blank, unformed, uneasy expectation. That’s not normal. Is it? I am not sure I ever listened like this. Tuned in this deep. Suddenly, the cacophony rising from the garden becomes too much. As if I hear every insect buzzing, every air-pushing wing, each molecule trembling, hammering.

I have to sit down. This is different from usual. I am not overwhelmed in a way I cannot handle. It is not some amplified, exaggerated sound. It hasn’t become louder by proximity. It’s as if I removed a cover, opened a lid, a door. Put my head through the veil and found what had always been here. What is constantly present. And that wasn’t even the full surface. I wasn’t even in yet.

Stillness is the sum of all sounds.

The whole thing is in balance. That’s why sounds swing. They are held. There is room to wiggle. But there is containing going on at all times. Everything is being held. We can fall because there is a floor to hit.

I don’t think I fully understand. But something is deeply okay. I am okay with being here. I am okay with the risk, with losing, with whatever comes our way.

Did I just give permission? Push start? Ignite the fuse?

I am sitting on the edge. Legs dangling. Overlooking the garden. I was sitting with my face to the sun, enjoying the cool breeze. Having my little think-nap. Eyes closed.

I open them. The wind is gone. It dropped out from one second to the next. The garden has stopped breathing. Has lost half its colours. Everything seems to have stopped. Faded.

The birds fell silent mid-phrase.

My ears scream with nothingness.

My eyes are locked onto the horizon.

I get to my knees. Stand to have a better view.

The sun has been replaced. The low rising golden ball has disappeared. In its place is now a cloud.

A big dangerous fucker of a cloud.

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Auryn

I am shaking all over. My legs tremble as we wrestle the big balloon over our heads. My hands are unsteady and nervous handling the ropes. I feel emotional. Proud. Angry. Shocked. Anxious. The crazy bitches won’t stop throwing rocks, but can’t throw far enough. Hitting the wall. We have to move. Keep going. Retreat onto the grid. Start searching.

Now we are five, I haven’t brought enough gear. I am in the middle. They all look at me. I know I have to tell them what to do, but I don’t. I do nothing. The possibility of moving is no longer available. I can’t remember when I last ate something, or took a sip of water. I hide my shaking hands. The sun is only barely visible above the ridge, but it is so hot.

“Follow the wall and then turn left,” Liora calls out. She turns me and holds my rig. I have not even held on to the inflatable. It scrapes against the inside wall as we start to move. I move along, pushed by Liora, holding me by my rig. My knees rubbery. They have the stairs upside down. The big girl in front steps onto the connecting wall. She has enough rope to steer the dinghy through the inside corner. Then Ruffle, moving sideways, facing me, slacking her line to allow for the gap. They go slow and careful.

Now I can turn and step on the gangway. I hear the Kemushi revving down, do fewer sweeps with the mighty arm. They’ve given up, for now. But I daren’t look. I concentrate on the narrow path. Not on the new ravine. The next plot opening up.

Another dead patch. I spot a Pyrrha container down there. Bleached by sun, matted by dust. One foot after the other helps. A hundred metres of wall. No one talks. Our shuffling feet. The stairs rubbing the smooth concrete. The sounds from behind us have faded.

The front girl stops at the crossroads. Looks back asking. Not at me. At Liora behind me. I turn too, tiny steps. I look at her. She smiles at me. Her face says, we fucking did it. And my face cracks.

Some of my numbness is released. I can breathe again.

“Left, right or onward?” Liora’s voice bright and cheerful. We all look.

And I see for the first time. The perfectly flat grid. We are only at the edge; it stretches out wide and awful.

Then I spot the green. The top of a tree, green with leaves. It is near the middle. That’s Eldon’s garden.

I feel joy. Nothing but joy. A deep calm that has been there the whole time. All this time. But hadn’t noticed. I share a glance with Liora. She gives me a near invisible nod.

“I guess it’s a left then,” she says. Hand on my shoulder.

We leave the big cushion at the next crossing. Apples — yes, that’s her name, and I can see why one would hire her for the blossoming orchard — gets a red case from the on-the-wall stash. I think there’s a cordless angle grinder in there with a few hundred cutting discs. It has the word STRAALJAGER written on the lid with blue marker. All capitals. Apples doesn’t care. It is dead weight to her. With convenient handles. We use it as an anchor. Triangle balloon on one side, big-disc jet-cutter-in-a-box, other side of the wall.

The girls wander, walk over the paths like a stroll in the park. A park with deep square holes. There are seven ways to get to the garden. None of them straight. Liora and I zigzag forward. She’s behind me. Following at my pace.

I fear disappointment. I fear it being the worst thing to ever lose. There are remnants of occupation in the blocks we pass over. Decayed housing. An attempt to escape by piling up stuff and stones. I hope they succeeded, but I don’t believe they have. We walk on the divide. Like prison guards. All the inmates have starved. Not just the humans.

“Maybe you want to go in alone?”

I have stopped walking. One more ridge to cross. Liora is right behind me. Her voice soft and warm. I am mesmerised by the slow reveal. Hear rustling, a waft of coolness and fragrance has stopped me in my tracks. I see birds flying. Multiple. A black, raven-type bird has spotted us. And caws to alert the village. She hops, gives us her left eye, then tries to judge with the other at different angles. Undecided. She will stick around. I can see the beanstalk curling over the edge. Still solid.

As I come closer — I have a bird’s-eye view too — it seems the plot expands. Like it’s quadruple the size of the others. How did Eldon accomplish all this? Thousands of plants, winding paths, a glistening stream, vegetable plots. I see the little dome temple. It’s the latter fear. I cannot ever let this disappear.

That wakes me up. I don’t have time to dawdle down there. I can’t waste time for a dreamy hour in that paradise. Liora is close enough to pick up my turned weathervane.

I look at her, even before she speaks. Her slow shaking head forming a no.

“I will throw you in if you do not climb down voluntarily,” she says, and points at the artificial climbing tree. I think she means it. Not funny at all.

I cannot take my eyes off the garden as I walk the enclosure.

“I dug a pond,” he said on the call. This is a fucking lake. He’s landscaped the whole friggin’ allotment. Only now I realise that forest of green is the one rhizome of bamboo I packed. I see Pyrrha. My Pyrrha. Doors open. Battered. Aged. This is not just Eldon’s doing. I have done this too. I can’t even cry. Just feel impatient, eager.

Eros visits.

Not a shred of clothing between us.

One flourished in this landscape of separated suffering. These are not mountains and valleys. These are not cells. Cells communicate. Mountains slope and curve and peak. Valleys allow wandering through. Entering and exiting. Eldon and I have made love. This is our natural child. Our firstborn.

I slowly descend. I am hungry and tired and unstable. But this place will provide. I need strawberries, a nap. With a rested mind and full stomach, I will find Eldon.

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Liora

I don’t need to drive, so I sit with my back to the front screen while Aph steers the Kemushi. Something has loosened in these three girls.

After picking up the suitcase, Aph had located our three hitchhikers. Loudly screaming and waving. Trying desperately to attract our attention. Eldon’s assault team hadn’t really bothered to notice his luggage. Aphram had picked up a security signature on the desert floor. He had been busy gathering intel from the moment he connected with Pyrrh at the dam. Through her the rest of our system had come within reach. Accessing the eyes and ears of all the vehicles, listening in on recent conversations and piecing together a global — but still vague — picture of what happened.

Apples remembered the suitcase, told Aphram that Eldon had come down from a visit to the ruins of the Ledon estate. Then Aphram knew the strange signal of a single re-activated smart-cap firecracker had been legit.

“Khan is sure Eldon will destroy our new settlement. The woman says she’s clairvoyant,” says Apples.

“But we don’t believe her,” says Pear, chiming in. “It’s partial.”

“We all pick up something of the bigger thing, it’s not just her,” says Ruffle.

I let them talk. Encourage them to keep going but listen through the words for the overlap. The voice beneath the voices.

“I’ve always seen beyond,” she confesses, “but thought it was normal. It wasn’t useful or anything.” Apples and Pear are nodding at Ruffle. Pear releases a huge sigh.

“What?” I ask.

“I have short-term premonitions. I catch the vase. Knew who was calling. No more than seconds ahead, but I feel it coming. It just pops in. Forces itself to the front.”

She fills her lungs.

“I fell before the redhead fell,” she says, her voice and face unsteady. She’s annoyed with herself. Blinking away the flooding.

“Khan doesn’t have that,” she adds. “She didn’t know. Doesn’t know all. But I stood too far away to do anything. I held onto the rope while everyone had already let go.”

She shows the burn marks on her hands.

“He started slipping. Rushed down the steps. That one I didn’t feel ahead.”

Then quieter: “I knew I wanted to uncouple then. I ran down to help him. But Khan was right behind me and messed with my head. She can do that when close. It hurts.”

“Was he okay?”

“I don’t know, I was blocked and kept out. There’s a ranking. I am not her inner circle. Apples also wasn’t.”

“I think she registers doubt,” says Apples, “and punishes it with distancing.”

Eldon’s welfare still isn’t high on their list. Men might be a different circle. Like horses. Or plum trees.

“Where is he now?”

Pear shrugs.

“We didn’t see.”

Both Apples and Ruffle agree.

I don’t get it. They can see my response. I feel they’re ashamed. Again Pear takes the lead.

“Khan can touch us,” she says.

Now I know what they mean without explaining. Touch has impact. The right kind of touch could have an effect.

“She can take us out,” says Apples, “with a finger between the eyes.”

And that’s the moment I feel the woman. I look over my shoulder. See our car in the distance and know it is Khan coming for us.

“Aph?”

“Yes, I see her. Hold on, ladies.”

He accelerates. Not as spectacular as Pyrrh but the suspension is not made for this speed. We are tumble-dried in the crammed glass cabin of the spiked digger pushed by the antique digital entity named Aphram. Like a steel scorpion.

“Auryn is waiting for us,” he says.

I see her on top of the wall. She wants us to come up there? Why? We should pick her up and get out of here. And then I get it. She has Eldon on her mind.

“Okay, girls. We have to be quick. If we stop, get out and run up the stairs as fast as you can. We have to get there first.”

“I will fend off the Khan woman,” says Aphram and starts lifting the arm.

She clearly wants to block us from getting up there. I can hear her engine roaring. I chuckle. It sounds like she’s in the wrong gear. The Kemushi swings wide — too wide — and barely squeezes between two parked trucks. Aphram wrestles the controls. The whole thing lurches in a turn it was never meant to take.

Khan has an open line.

The caterpillar tracks are glued to the dirt and as we turn the four of us are pressed against the glass, and fall all over each other. We stop in a cloud of fine sand and grit. We have arrived first. No more than seconds between us. I will dismount the white dragon last. The girls are so much slower than I wish them to be.

“Will you be alright, Aph?”

“I will, Liora. Worry about them, not me.”

I can finally climb down as the last to abandon ship. Kahn comes sliding into the encampment, wheels locked, the engine shutting down with puffs and shocks.

“Scare them. But don’t hurt them.”

I slam the door shut and monkey down in one smooth move. The spike is lifted to full intimidation. My girls are halfway up the steps. Khan’s car coughs up the feral crew — all elbows and teeth. They spread out to avoid the deadly swinging arm. They’re only thirty metres behind me. Not enough. One of them will be on my heels in seconds. Get me before I am on the wall.

I start climbing. Hear screaming behind me but daren’t look back. Auryn is calling me. Cheering me. They’ve all cleared the steps. But I will not make it. The bouncing is amplified and my feet get misaligned. I stumble. Five steps from the top I slam forward onto my ribcage and grab for hold to not slip back down. I look behind me and see Kemushi’s arm blocking a few of the women but not all. Three approach the stairs from the side. Only a few steps separate them from the climb. Only a few steps separate me from the top of the wall. I crawl up hands and feet. Against an amped-up gravity. My sight blurred by frustration. Overcome by visions of face scratching and hair pulling and me going full feral on my enemies.

Then I am lifted. Staircase and all. My three sisters pull me up. I roll onto the narrow concrete strip, grabbed by Auryn. Securing me to not fall off the other side. Next to us the lightweight inflatable is hoisted by ropes like a drawbridge. It is a scary action. That dark mass against the dawn’s spectacle of translucent blacks. Up in the air the thing is so big. They have started throwing stones from below. But the swinging spike of Aphram pushes them back. Only a few of their projectiles reach. Limp and powerless.

I get up. Start helping. Then realise: we made it. I made it. We have the castle.

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Auryn

I don’t need to know she wasn’t a real ginger. Or that she had her boobs upped two sizes. They fuckin’ pushed her off a cliff and didn’t bother to check. It was because of Eldon, they said. They had to let him go. Had no choice. God almighty. Nothing they say is univocal. They deal in ambiguity. My stomach is trying to swallow my heart. My chest and belly are wrapped in ratchet straps. With each move they click tighter.

I can’t not find out. I have no choice but to go down there. Good thing all my muck is on display, out in the open. I just have to pick and choose. I find the crate with the ropes. Pushed over, its contents spilled. Each of the trucks had emergency packs and I easily find two of the larger ones. For the serious stuff.

My collection of silver chests seems to be simply pushed out of the box trailer and onto a pile like litter. Each is filled with military-grade gear. They could equip a small army. In one of them is the rappelling stuff. I need a few harnesses, carabiners, descenders. I am dangerous right now. All dials pushing against their max. But I soar. I am clear as hell. The third box is bingo. A rush — that’s what this is — a rush.

I put one of the tactical bodices on. Pull my hair in a ponytail. And hang myself with enough gear for four soldiers. I can see the short term. And I focus on that. Nothing else matters.

First things first. I climb the stairs, ignore what Liora is up to, and turn my attention to the details of what needs doing. On top of the wall it is clear the girls haven’t got a clue. To my left, one of the divider walls — and you can’t see this from below — is packed with my stuff. A long line of boxes, cases, crates, generators, wheelbarrows, in no particular order. A real pain thrusts beneath my ribs. Like heart failure. This anger can kill both ways. I have to consciously take a breath. Calm myself enough to step to the right and peer down.

I see her immediately. Face up, her arm stretched next to her head. A grotesque wave. She looks dead. I feel a horrible kind of relief. Now I can go look for Eldon, and not waste time on her.

Another part of me doesn’t accept. I prepare a descent. I have to check. Hook a rope onto the inflatable stairs. The thing is not heavy, but good enough to anchor me. It’s been a while, but my hands seem to remember what to do. I secure an extra line. And sit down to lower myself. One of the stage winches would have been perfect. I steady myself and then zip down in three steps. I unhook and walk over.

My heart is heavy. I kneel to lay a hand on her belly. Then put my ear to her breastbone. I don’t think I need the stethoscope. She is gone. No doubt.

I bring down her arm, that moves with the sound of bones rubbing, roll her toward me and curl her into a foetal position. I don’t know why I do that, but it seems appropriate. I tidy her red mane, close her eyes, and make her look like she’s asleep.

I then sit on my knees, make myself small, and hide my head to allow for some tears. To take that moment. To arrive. To send her home. Then a sound makes me look up. A few steps away a bird is curiously observing me. It is tiny, has a red chest. And that fact hits me, sends a shock through my organs. I haven’t seen a bird in years.

Now I look around. Besides a few dead bushes, there is nothing here. An empty square patch. Much bigger than I imagined. Rocks, dust, and cold walls. As soon as I move, the feathered one buzzes off, disappears in a whiff.

Seeing this walled patch of desert, I am sure I would have gone stone crazy. I think of Eldon. The mixture of longing, deep worry, admiration, guilt, and grief is near unbearable.

I need to find him.

We need to find him.

I look up at my two ropes. I say goodbye to Ginger, and promise her to come back later, when there’s time. But she may have left with the bird. As the bird? Maybe Robin is a better name. Ginger Robin it is.

I climb back up, my tiredness is returning. My hands are unsteady now. But we’re not done yet.

On top of the wall I notice the Kemushi is gone. And I don’t see any of the girls either. I guess it’s up to me. I adjust the plan.

First I prepare the stair cushion. Then I start gathering more supplies. It might take a while to comb the gardens. And there are things I don’t want my enemies to have.

There is a chance a group of them, maybe including Eldon, is in his garden. If so, I will sabotage the beanstalk. So they can’t get out. I hope not. I don’t like the thought of that scenario. Of what they might do. I like none of the scenarios. Still, I brought the knife. My favourite tool in general, and this one in particular.

I don’t get the time. After one run up the stairs with the attached ropes and throwing the ends over the wall, I see the Kemushi approaching. Close to the wall. Slowly. I squint. It looks like the cabin is packed with too much body. Four? More defectors?

Then from the town another vehicle — my four-wheel drive — comes racing out. Now I also spot the four girls on foot halfway to meet them. The incoming from the town must be Khan. It’s double the distance but they have twice the speed. I doubt if Liora’s noticed she’s in a race. I hope Aph is paying attention.

To the next chapter

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