I DID NOT KILL HIM.

#

It must be a lie. Everything about the notion is absurd.

The entire surreal diorama is absurd, actually. There shouldn’t be skeletons clutching dollars and other snatches of whatever they could offer, there shouldn’t be Megajoule’s suit here in this abandoned PK facility, and there shouldn’t be people worshiping Carnality at all.

“It can’t be true,” Silent says.

“There’s a big fucking hole in it.” Saw Off says, pointing out the gaping wound in the costume’s chest. Whatever blow did that, it would have gone right through his heart.

“Do we really think it beyond the Vanguard to lie about his death?” Epione asks. Her question chills any further conversation. “After everything they’ve done?”

“I mean… if it is true, and I’m not saying it is… wouldn’t this be a smoking gun?” Silent asks.

“I believe it could be true,” Epione answers. She tilts her head forward, like a scholar deep in thought. “Proving it’s true is another matter.”

It flies in the face of the story we’ve all been told for four years. We were told Carnality unleashed hell upon Houston and Galveston. Megajoule went to stop her, along with every available cape in the area, and then he died. I’ve read the stories enough, seen the documentaries on the screens at Thanh’s restaurant. “There are eye witness accounts. Every single cape that fought with him, fought Carnality.”

“That’s why this is crazy. I’m not saying the Vanguard wouldn’t lie about it, but every single cape that was there? Someone would have cracked, spoiled it, by now,” Silent says.

Epione steeples her hands in front of her mask’s lips. She lowers them like she’s swinging a blade. “You’d be surprised just how many people can keep a secret together.” With that, she walks away, further into the building.

“Wait, Ep,” Silent says, chasing after her. “We’re not staying here, right? This is fucked!”

“This is Pandahead’s pick up point,” she says. “But from what I can see, he and his agents don’t use it as a base of any kind. We should be safe to sleep here.”

The two of them leave me, Mateo, and Saw Off with the costume.

“Why doesn’t the Vanguard have his costume?” Mateo asks, looking up at me.

I stammer, cold, far away from here. Like I’m being swallowed by my own body.

“I bet they just couldn’t get it when the Null Domain opened,” Saw Off answers. She turns and asks me: “What do you make of this?”

I’m scared to make anything of it at all. It is so far outside the pale of what I imagined. “I think I just want to go to sleep.” I turn from the only physical remnant of Megajoule on this planet besides me to find a nice hole to crawl into. I want to disappear, to dissolve slowly into nothing. The existential dread of seeing what amounts to his second skin, draped on a wall like a flag, is too much for me to bear.

There are dorms a few doors down from the makeshift altar. I find a bunk that looks reasonably clean and lay down in it. It’s not comfortable. My head presses against the cubicle wall and my legs have to be bent for me to fit at all.

Without thinking or feeling, I exist there, still falling into my own body. I don’t know how long I stay like that, but it’s well past when Silent gives up the fight, when the others go to sleep, and only when Mateo sits down on the edge of the bed next to me do I become aware again.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I can’t answer that. I shrug.

“Is it about you-know-who? I can’t imagine-”

I shush him and shake my head. Silent can hear everything. “We can’t talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Mateo nods with a little sigh, the kind Paul used to give me when he wanted to talk and knew I wouldn’t. It’s a strange sigh to hear from a teenager. But he just pats my shoulder again and slips into the bunk above mine.

The murmur of voices eventually quiets, and while I stay awake long after the others, even I have to sleep eventually.

#

THEY ARE SO AFRAID OF ME. JUST LIKE THEY ARE AFRAID OF YOU.

#

quiet hours. the disappearance of standard thoughts. the parking lot lights drone and i hold my hand out and wriggle my fingers.

I slide out of the bunk and stand up, see the other sleeping forms - all of them accounted for. Mateo sleeps in the bunk above mine. He is not exactly naked but not exactly clothed, either. An indistinct form, covered in kaleidoscope skin, no features to mark him as Mateo other than the greasy hair I know. He tosses and turns in his sleep, and when his body turns upright to look at the ceiling, I step back in alarm.

He has no face.

There is only a gaping hole where his face should be. An infinite abyss.

Steps trembling, I go to another sleeper - I think Saw Off - and find she also has no face. Just like Mateo, she is gaseous; she has a body of colors, not of flesh. Silent and Epione, the same. Like humans made of molten glass with emptiness in their heads.

I flee back to my bunk, thinking this is a nightmare, and find my own body, curled in on itself like I’m in great pain. And just like the others, I have no face.

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No amount of willing myself to wake up wakes me up. I try to push at my sleeping body’s shoulder and my fingers slip through, touching nothing.

A phantom crosses the corner of my eye, pulling my attention to the bathroom doors near the back of the building. It may be Megajoule, trying to speak with me in private. I follow, looking for his advice, or his torture, whichever he chooses to dispense.

Opening the bathroom door, I find that the pristine toilets that had been here in the waking world have been replaced with a dingy, disgusting space. Mounds of muck and blood swallow the corners of the bathroom, streaks of brown liquid turns the mirrors useless, and piles of toilet paper, filled with piss and shit and blood, clog the urinals. I step in and, despite being a dream-ghost myself, feel the grime coating the tiles beneath my feet, penetrating my skin, worming into my nose and mouth.

But at the back of the bathroom, where I expect there to be a wall, the dream persists as a hallway that twists and writhes like a living snake, and down that hall is a woman, pacing back and forth, stabbing the air with her hands. She is pale, albino white with just the slightest hint of pink in her cheeks, and she wears a long dress that drags along the ground, coating the tail in dark red. She doesn’t look anything like the painting, but to my surprise, I recognize her.

Carnality.

I follow her, walking down the hall that turns at an impossible angle, that continues to move even as I walk through it.

Her voice hunts me down, strides to me and meets me even as I journey down the dream logic to her. It is a forward, tinny voice, resonating primarily in the nostrils, just behind the front teeth. The voice of a predator that thinks with the edge of its face, that lives at the far horizon of its vision.

“They built me. They made me. They needed an enemy, they needed an opponent. They needed to put a mask on their fears. They built me, they made me so hungry. They built this hunger, they built this hunger, they built this hunger.”

It is a drill of a voice. Forcing its way into me. Blood spills out of my ears in its wake, as if she calls it to her.

“They built this hunger, Gabe, they built it. They built me, they built you. They made you, they’ll bury you, they’ll forget.”

“How do you know my name?” I ask, coming close enough to talk to her.

She looks like she’s carved from pure marble. Tiny red irises wrap around gigantic pupils, her eyes far too large to be human. She grimaces at me, exposing a mouth full of knives rather than teeth.

Her grimace becomes a wide mouthed howl, and she shrieks instead of answering me. She flees further into the dream, and I chase her, despite my terror. Somehow, she knows me. I need to know how.

“Do not come close to me!” she cries. “The hunger is not gone! I can not stomach another of you!”

Her words hit like bullets and I crumple, dropping to my knees. “I’m not the first Gabe you’ve met?” Not the first Gabe she’s hurt, if she’s telling the truth.

“They built us, they built us, they built us.” Her common refrain, receding from me. But I must know, I must know what she means, and so I rise to chase her again. I follow her voice through miles of blood soaked tunnels, past rooms clogged with human waste, whether bone or shit it doesn’t matter.

I meet a wall of lumpy, pearlescent flesh. Her voices comes muted from the other side and so I push, feeling it curdle around my fingers, and still I push.

“They made me a monster,” she cries from beyond it.

I push.

Then, I am in a tower, THE tower, the tower that smiles, the tower built of bodies. I can feel all of them, a million beating hearts and breathing lungs mortaring the walls. All disembodied from the spark of souls, the fire of Affect, only flesh now.

“The hunger is still with me, even now, even though I have no stomach,” Carnality says, her voice resounding through the tower. I look up to see her body, a titan’s body, a giant marble statue, with many bite marks torn from her muscles. She is tangled up in cherry veins, dangling from them like a corpse from a telephone wire. Her eyes weep blood down onto me.

“How do you know me?” I ask. “Have you hurt my brothers?”

“I hurt any Gabe they would give me, any coal to feed the furnace of hunger in me,” she says, still weeping. “I would eat you now if I could, I would mash you in my mouth and pick your skin from my teeth with your bones. They made me this way.”

It’s so clear in my memory - my brothers being shoved into a room with her, a big cavernous room, a room where they could test strengths and powers and when that Gabe died, they shrugged and moved on to another.

The little girl made of marble that Pandahead brought to the lab.

Why couldn’t I remember it before this?

“I remember seeing you, deep in those metal rooms, and while they made more of you they made me more of what I was," she says.

“Did you kill Megajoule?”

She thrashes against her restraints, reaches her mouth down, trying to snap me up, then curses at herself for trying. Her scarlet tears wash over me, through me.

“No,” she moans in agony. “No. I killed someone pretending to be him. But that man couldn’t die, he couldn’t stay down, even when I held his heart in my hands and ate it in front of him, he would only laugh and stand up again and show me the new heart he was growing.”

Now I question whether any of this is real, whether I am speaking with Carnality or just dreaming, but the Affect is a strange beast. Both can be true and I have had many true dreams in my life.

“I tried to save him,” she croons. “I glutted on you, Gabe, and I had enough, even I knew, monster that I am, that it had to end.”

The tower trembles around us and the walls begin to tumble down. The million bodies in the mortar melt. It starts to fall.

“How did you try to save him?” I ask, frantically, desperate for an answer that will make any sense.

“I helped break our cage,” she says.

#

AND THE ONLY GABE LEFT CAME TUMBLING OUT.

#

I barely manage to restrain a yelp as I truly wake. I sit up, almost hit my head on Mateo’s bunk above me, and reach for my face beneath my mask.

It’s there. My body is normal again. I am… real… again.

I’ve had dreams like that before - the one where I woke up in the bunker being a prime example - but never that long or vivid. Did I truly talk with Carnality? Or was that just a really fucked up stressful nightmare?

Everyone else is still asleep. My kinetic sense only gives me the gentle rhythm of resting hearts, five in total. They breathe slow, shallow breaths.

I stand up as quietly as I can. I need to get outside, away from this bed. The air in here is stale, and even though I’m sure it’s also sterile, I can still feel the stench of the dream in my nostrils. I exit through the main doors, careful not to make much noise.

The night - I think it is still night if the deep crimson sky is anything to go by - greets me quietly. The parking lot is almost peaceful. I sit down on the curb of the restaurant’s sidewalk.

“Do you think it’s true?” I ask the devil on my shoulder.

“I don’t know,” Megajoule answers, materializing next to me. Usually he comes to me haughty, head held high, but he sees what I see, he knows what I know, and he appears with his knees hugged to his chest, sitting on the curb like me. He is just as rattled as I am by the dream. “We know they made you a weapon. We know they would do anything to hold onto their power.”

“She said they… built her.” I shake my head, unsure of why that rattles me.

Megajoule looks at me, really stares me down. His eyes, which should be blue like mine but are instead that sickly shade of green, run me through. “And that would be unusual how? They built you, too.”

“I kind of hoped-”

“That you were special?”

“That I was the end of it. That I was the only one who suffered.”

Megajoule scoffs and stands up, back to his usual self. He dismisses the entire idea with a sharp wave of his hand. “Please, you’re not the world’s martyr.”

“I just don’t want someone to suffer the way I did.” It’s not just Carnality, or me, it’s that there might have been others we don’t know about. Many others. The fact that Lilac (or whatever is left of it) helped develop the PK dampener with someone inside of it, means there must have been other experiments.

“She’s a monster,” Megajoule says.

“Am I?”

“You’re a weapon.”

“What’s the difference?” I ask.

But he’s gone, as usual.