Bubbles surrounded the islet. Bubbles bursting with chains, though never bursting themselves.
Zoe stood back to back with her clone. She hated the necessity of working together, but necessity was defined by its alternative: oblivion.
[Ding!]
[Have fun with my toys!]
The bubbles spun with featureless malice and shot chains at the pair. Long-linked bullets aimed at heart and brain.
Zoe whirred her chains into a shield. Her mind raced to keep the eleven lengths of ghostly metal from clashing. Dexterity strained to its limits as she controlled them, deflecting the attacking chains, shielding herself, and shielding her clone.
If one bubble destroyed her mirror-skinned clone, then she would lose all her attributes. It was easy to think like this — cold, greedy — when she didn’t have to look at the clone. Didn’t have to look at the face that mirrored hers, that reflected her own desperate and dirty visage, all her fears, imperfections, the horror of her true self —
A chain struck her shin and knocked her down onto her knee. Her focus slipped, and her chains entangled, becoming a weight dragging her in one direction.
“We have to move,” she hissed through the pain.
The clone nodded and helped Zoe to her feet. Why was it so helpful? What was its agenda after the ferocity of the worm?
Chains whirred.
No time to think. Zoe leaped from the islet toward a broken column that stood above the scummy water. Halfway through the air a chain yanked her back. She splashed down into the swamp.
Her clone hadn’t jumped.
Zoe screamed her frustration, mocking bubbles spewing from her mouth as she swam to the surface, and looked about. The chain slackened, and the mirror-skinned clone leaped now and made it to the column. Zoe snarled, but she supposed there was more to teamwork than stating the fact.
Chains shot down into the surrounding water. With quick bursting strokes, she swam toward the broken column. A bubble touched down nearby and bled a squirming thing of ink into the water. The jumbled silhouette raced toward Zoe, and she leaped from the water just in time.
She stood, dripping slime and murk, beside the perfectly clean mirror clone.
‘When I say jump,” Zoe growled. “We jump. Together, in the same direction, got it?”
That damned beatific smile was the only response. An expression like that didn’t belong on her face! But there was no time to get mad.
They had to run.
The column they stood on was one in a series. It seemed a city once stood here, and the crumbling remnants stuck up above the seeping water. The distances should have been too great — and Zoe rejected the idea of swimming between them — but if she was careful with her Might and Skein she could leap between them with ease.
The problem was coordinating with her clone.
[Ding!]
[Hop, hop, hop and hop along! Don’t be boring. Play!]
Chains flew toward them. Zoe pointed at a vine-covered column some fifty feet away.
“There,” she said. “Jump!”
She leaped, her hand grabbing her clone’s wrist. The mirrored skin was strange in her grip when it wasn’t repelling her, smooth, cold, but somehow inviting. There was a whole world trapped and distorted within the skin of her clone, and it was a world apart, a lonely place.
Was there loneliness in that simple smile?
They didn’t quite make the jump. Zoe landed on the broken pillar’s slanted top, but the clone fell short. Zoe kept her grip on the clone’s wrist, she dropped to her knees as the clone dangled. Such a weight was nothing with her enhanced attributes, but her boosted Might was ticking down.
She hauled the clone back up and they stood together on the narrow ledge as the emerald-hued bubbles floated around them, spinning, and spitting chains.
Zoe pointed at the nearest angled column in the mud, and they leaped. This time they made it, but the ancient masonry sagged toward the water.
[Ding!]
[Boo. You’re no fun.]
Zoe ignored the haunting, childlike voice. She gripped her clone’s hand, and they continued.
Sometimes coming up short, or overshooting, but Zoe found herself anticipating the length of the jump better — how natural does it feel to work with oneself? As they traveled through the swamp, leaping from crumbled pillar to dead tree to exposed statue on a muddy bank, they stopped pointing, stopped calling the jump, and worked as a team.
The sky dimmed, and a malodorous fog rose from the water, but the bubbles pursued, drifting on a wind that was not there.
###
Zoe balanced on a cracked arch held together by fat and glistening vines. Bubbles bobbed toward her, not in range to shoot chains, but close. Her chains floated about her, reaching, eager, but there was nothing to latch onto except the mirrored clone who stood beside her, pressed close and smiling.
They faced a choice.
The fog pressed about them. Rank and foul. She craved grave flower if only to block out her senses of smell and taste. A small pillar extended away to their left, vaguely toward the blue light, though they had not seen that guiding beacon for some time. The small pillar sat a foot above the water and was at the edge of their leaping distance. If they boosted Skein, they could make it, but the problem arose when they landed. With the thickening fog, they couldn’t see how far they could go on afterward.
The other choice was a tower. Seven stories tall. Crumbling even as they stood there. Fragments of ancient rock dripped into the slurping waters and splashed, the only sound besides their breathing. Many of the tower walls were collapsed and open, but it would provide more cover than the exposed columns and fragmented leaping points in the swamp.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Her legs burned. She knew she had the Might, the Vitality, but really, how much longer could she keep going? Her clone pointed at the tower.
“Let’s hole up until the fog clears,” she said with Zoe’s voice. “Continuing without seeing the beacon is foolish.”
Zoe gritted her teeth, but she didn’t want to disagree out of spite. Not when their lives were on the line. Although…
No.
She nodded, and they tensed, and leaped. Sailing through foul vapor and landing on a broken lip of stone that must have once been a dock. Their impact shot cracks through the platform and they scurried forward, into the dark halls of the tower.
###
Moth followed Zoe through the spiraling tower. Her hand along the wall of the hall as it climbed, mirrored palm brushing away moss and fungal growths, now and then she examined her hand, the shape visible in the reflected light through the holes in the exterior wall. These gaps provided a view of the thick mist and, occasionally, a passing bubble. Whenever those luminous orbs passed by, Moth and Zoe pressed themselves against the wall, and waited for it to pass. So far, they avoided detection.
The holes in the walls were not windows. Originally, by design, the builders cut this tower off from the world. A long winding floor that rose all seven stories to the top, no stairs for the slope was gradual, and no rooms. What purpose did it serve those who built this place?
Did the bubbles build this place?
She giggled at the thought, and her sister stopped at the sound. Back tense, muscles ready to fight, what a creature her sister was! No matter what happened she always got back up to fight, even when her legs were broken or her flesh devoured. Moth envied the fighting spirit that pulsed within that heart.
How many times had she curled up inside the worm and begged for it to stop? Well, not as many times as she would like to think, but certainly more than once. She wanted freedom — she wanted the truth of her existence to persist — but she didn’t want to hurt her sister.
Zoe turned on her, glaring at Moth’s appeasing smile, and stepped close.
“What’s funny?” she said.
“I just wondered who built this place.”
Moth stepped past, but Zoe pushed her up against a wall. Face to face, sisters, clones, halves of a whole. Zoe searched for something, but Moth didn’t know what, or if Zoe found it when she stepped back, her shoulders sagging.
“What are you?” Zoe asked.
Moth leaned against the ancient stone.
“I am Moth. Born of the worm, born of you, but I am not your daughter. Nobody’s daughter, just like you.”
Zoe’s gaze darted to her. Wide, fearful, before anger settled in.
“What do you know of me?”
“Every time you looked into a mirror, I looked back. Every time you wished to shed your skin and step anew, you imagined me walking away from the husk of your past. Every time you looked at your flaws, at your beauty, you looked through me to see the truth.”
Zoe leaned against the far wall, splotched with dark purple moss, and faced her across the empty hallway. Fingers of fog drifted through cracks in the stone. Moth matched Zoe’s relaxed stance, and Zoe sighed.
“We can’t both exist.”
Moth nodded.
“The system won’t allow it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
They stood in silence. Fog leaked in and grasped at their ankles. Climbed their shins. Foul smelling, but both ignored it as each watched the other.
“I don’t want to… kill you,” Moth said. “You didn’t ask for me to be born.”
Zoe chuckled. A small and sad sound that died in the cooling air.
“You didn’t ask to be born, how does that make it any more right?”
“I don’t want to die, do you?”
Zoe bared her teeth, scarred lips twisting, and her eyes flashed with the heat of battle.
“I will never die,” and she laughed again, before turning away to walk further. “Come, let's see what’s up here.”
They continued on. The chain between them hung slack and never grew taught.
###
They found a room at the top. Large, with a domed roof cracked down the center to show the pure black of a purgatory night. Veins of moss grew in esoteric patterns, glowing with soft green light, leaking spores that twinkled and flowed toward the ruptured opening in the ceiling. Dust on the floor showed there may have been furniture at one point, and rust spoke of equipment long corroded. How much time had this quiet place witnessed?
Zoe walked the exterior, the chain linking her to Moth in the center of the room. Round and round she circled the problem, but what could she do?
Toss a coin?
She wanted to laugh at the idea, but still searched her pockets. No, of course not, Anton had the coins. She hated herself for entertaining the idea. Did her life mean so little?
She sat against the curved stone wall, and Moth sat beside her. Silence crept out of the structure. The silence of eons. Silence of a decision that must be made, that should never be made… the shape of survival is a heavy, and awkward thing, no matter how quick and sharp it cuts through objections.
“It’s cold at night,” Moth said.
Zoe nodded absently and then glanced over.
“This is your first night, isn’t it?”
Moth smiled.
“It was always warm inside the worm. Always warm and dark, until the moments when you broke through… I thought the gilded skin… I thought it was armor, but now I think it was a cage. It kept us apart.”
Zoe looked over her naked, shivering clone, and beckoned her closer. She placed an arm around the cool skin, felt it stealing her warmth, and pulled her tight. The clone was stiff, resistant, before settling against her.
[Skein 95/117]
In the hours they climbed Zoe’s Skein had renewed, and she flexed it now.
[Skein 85/117]
[Vitality 20 (20)]
She boosted her Vitality, seized its many branches of use, and focused on her body heat. It flared dramatically, steam rising from her damp clothes, and her clone — Moth — snuggled closer, her shivering slowing and, finally, stopping.
“Maybe,” Zoe said. “Maybe it would have been better if we never met. If you never emerged from the worm.”
Moth looked up at her with wide, mirrored eyes.
“Do you think that?”
“I don’t know… I just don’t like this situation.”
“Maybe it will be better tomorrow? I’m sure we can think of something.”
Zoe nodded, but said nothing. Moth nestled against her, and the mirrored breathing slowed.
“What is happening to me?” Moth asked. “I’m so… slow…”
“You’re falling asleep,” Zoe stroked the mirrored hair. “Don’t worry, it’s natural.”
“Alright.”
Zoe held Moth, heat rising from her body, and her Skein ticked up. Soon, Moth’s breathing steadied. Zoe closed her eyes, but sleep would not come for her. She searched her heart, and hated herself, but followed the path she chose for herself in that graveyard so long — not so long — ago.
[Our Hearts Toll As One]
The technique enveloped Moth, passed through the mirrored skin, and sank into her heart. Wrapped around it and found no resistance. Her eyes squeezed shut, Zoe fed Skein into her technique.
Tears streaked down Zoe’s cheeks as her Skein plummeted, as Moth’s heartbeat raced towards zero. There was no resistance.
“I’m sorry,” Zoe said. “I’m sorry.”
Moth stirred, murmured something, and stilled. Zoe held her close, as the heat faded, and the chill of the night settled into her like stone.