Jandru walked through the unfamiliar corridors, knowing exactly where he was going and hating every second of it. There was simply something flat wrong about knowing your way around a place you'd never been to before.

He arrived at the room where he knew the AI interface to be located, and stared at the big green button that dominated the command console. He contemplated walking away, but that would accomplish nothing.

He’d come here to confront VINE. So he took a step forward and pressed the button.

A girl entered the room, wearing a pink backpack, her long hair flowing around her almost as though she were underwater.

Then Kia Arnold walked in behind her. At the sight of the infamous burglar, Jandru relaxed fractionally. If Kia had survived insertion, they might still be on track.

"Kia, what have you learned?" he asked.

She frowned uncertainly, as though unsure why he was speaking to her.

“Kia isn’t quite prepared to speak with you right now, Mr. Harolski,” the girl said. Her voice disturbed Jandru for no reason he could discern.

“And who are you?”

“Ivy.” She looked incredibly smug as she said it, but Jandru didn’t have time for children’s games.

“What’s happened to Kia?”

“Nothing, yet. She’s still trying to figure out who she’s meant to be.”

Jandru stepped closer to his one-time partner in crime and waved a hand in front of her face. She blinked slowly, turned to watch his hand with a slight frown, but didn’t tell him off for being strange.

The Kia he knew would have slapped his hand away with a “What are you playing at, Mr. Harolski?” while fixing him with the judgmental glower that never failed to leave an impression.

This Kia stared absently, then pulled a glass lizard statuette from her pocket and started petting it.

“Kia, wake up!”

She startled, clutching the lizard closer, and watched him fearfully.

This was not Kia Arnold. This had to be a fake, something VINE had created to mess with him. If not … he didn’t want to consider the implications.

"She's not fake," Ivy said. "But she wants to grow up."

Jandru narrowed his eyes at the child. Unlike everyone else he'd met so far, looking at her provided no automatic information database in his mind. When he looked at Mara, he'd known instantly that they were longtime rivals and she wanted to see him put in his place; when he looked at Kralmer he'd known him to be loyal and dependable, if a bit unconventional.

But this girl? He had nothing. Knew nothing, saw nothing, intuited nothing. She was a blank, might as well not exist.

"Who are you?" Jandru asked.

"Ivy," the girl repeated, unhelpfully.

Jandru shook his head and stepped closer to Kia. She recoiled, holding the lizard closer as though afraid he’d try to take it from her.

“Kia,” he said firmly, “I’m going to need your verification pass-code please.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Alpha necronomicon seventeen lard, Mr. Harolski," Kia reeled off automatically, in her usual brisk tones, then frowned as though confused by her own words. "Lard?"

“Report,” Jandru snapped, before she could slip back into whatever fugue state had overtaken her.

Kia handed over a map, covered in childish scrawls. A tree, a house, a lumpy circle, and a tangled spiral descending into darkness. “Best I’ve determined, we’re in the steel fortress here,” she pointed to the poorly-rendered house. “Surrounded by flat metal plains for an indeterminate distance.”

Jandru recognized the dark spiral intuitively, knew it was him. His. The place he’d begun, before everything got weird.

Everything was still weird.

“My forest is here,” Kia continued, pointing to the tree. Then her tone lost its focus and she smiled sadly. “My forest is dying,” she said, her voice soft and wholly unlike herself.

It’s not the only thing, Jandru thought irritably, but aloud he asked with outward confidence, “Kia, what else have you seen?”

She’d been here for close to a month real-time, far longer in cycle time.

Kia hummed quietly, stroking her lizard figurine as though it were alive, and didn’t answer.

“Where is VINE?" Jandru pressed.

Kia gave no indication of hearing.

“VINE is everywhere, Mr. Harolski,” Ivy answered.

Jandru turned to the child instead.

Ivy stood watching with only a look of mild curiosity on her face.

“Did you draw this?” He shook the childish map in her face.

“I made it.”

“This is me?” he pointed to the dark spiral.

“For now.”

“What are these other places?”

She smiled secretively. "I could tell you, but it would be more fun if you figured it out for yourself."

"Are you a real person, or a manifestation?"

"Nope!" She grinned.

Jandru exhaled slowly, trying to center himself. Everything had been spinning helplessly out of control ever since he arrived here. He felt constantly off-kilter, events following each other by no logic he could discern.

"She's going to do very well," Ivy said, watching Kia. "She's not actually broken, just twisted sideways. She'll make a very good mother once she gets over herself."

Jandru laughed in sheer shock. If there was one thing Kia Arnold was not likely to undertake, it was parenting.

She'd always made her disdain for standard and mundane existence perfectly clear. She would make her mark on the world and heavens help anyone who got in her way. Working her way up from simple burglaries and the occasional purse-snatching to the kind of grand heists that people wrote legends about, Kia was already well on her way to infamy. Why would she ever give that up to settle down?

Looking at her now, Jandru didn't see any flicker of that vibrant burglar left in her face. She had a look of childish petulance about her, an adolescent defiance at best. But in her eyes Jandru saw apathy instead of certainty. Outside in the real world, she’d been confident, full of herself and her destiny, unwavering in chasing what she aspired to become.

This Kia had been emptied out, hollowed to be refilled by VINE.

Jandru’s hand slowly tightened into a fist. It was a chilling reminder of what he had to look forward to if his plans failed.

Kia had volunteered for this, agreed to the insane undertaking at his personal request. He'd leveraged their mutual respect to convince her.

And it had killed her.

"Are you still in there, Kia?" he asked softly. "Is there any part of you left? Do you even remember Belgrade?"

"Of course. I've been there several times."

"But do you remember it?" Jandru pushed. “The White Palace heist? Where you made your grand entrance?”

Kia stared into the distance, her hands falling still. "I ... I’m not sure.”

“Let’s play a little game, then,” Jandru said, feeling desperate. “If you were going to steal—”

"I would never steal." Kia said automatically, then frowned. "Or would I?"

"Just pretend. If you were going to steal something incredibly valuable from someone very important, how to go about doing it?"

"Something valuable? That doesn't tell me anything.” Her voice gained strength as she warmed to her subject. “The way you steal a painting is a lot different from the way you steal a chalice. And stealing from museums is vastly different than stealing from a collector. You'll need to be more specific, Mr. Harolski."

Jandru exhaled in slow relief. So she was still in there. Kia wasn't dead. Not quite. Not yet.

He rushed on before she could lapse back into dead mode. "I need your report. What's been happening? What have you learned?”

"The whole scenario is different than we've been led to believe. We've only ever received reports on the second half. Everything that I've experienced so far is in the first half. No one remembers the first half."

"It's so much easier to build a house on a flat plane, don't you agree?" said Ivy. "Like this. You wouldn’t try to build this fortress on a mountaintop or in a forest without clearing the land first. Would you?"

Jandru felt a chill. "VINE? Is that you?"

Ivy clapped and smiled. "It did take you an unreasonably long time to work that out. But, then again, it was a very clever deception. Don't you think?"

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