When I finally left the hospital, my head was heavy with an almost inescapable weariness. Even after days of unconsciousness, I was still half-dead on my feet. I said my goodbyes to Tattletale at the nearest metro station, then watched her go from the platform as she leant against the window of a westbound carriage, her arms crossed over her chest and her head bowed in deep thought.
On the eastbound line, I almost fell asleep to the gentle side-to-side rocking of the carriage as it wound its way around the edge of the docks, only to be jolted back into consciousness by the shrieking squeal of the brakes each time we approached a station. I very nearly missed my destination, only recognising the familiar platform at the last second and pushing through the flood of incoming passengers moments before the doors closed.
Finally, after navigating streets that were being slowly drowned beneath an incessant downpour, I found myself shambling out of my apartment block’s elevator and into the welcomingly drab corridor that led back home. I’d shared the elevator with a family of five who were on their way up to the fifteenth floor, the youngest child playing with the toy from a Jolly Meal – a spacefighter from some kid’s trideo show that he was ‘flying’ from his hand, complete with the correct sound effects. Something about the way I looked must have worried the parents, however; I kept catching them glancing at me with unease in their eyes.
I hadn’t needed to use my apartment’s keycard for six years; a stray thought was enough to unlock and retract the sliding door. Another thought shut it behind me as I half-stumbled over the threshold, shrugging off my jacket and tossing it to hang off the back of a kitchen chair, followed shortly thereafter by the submachine gun in its shoulder holster. I threw both with my new arm and almost misjudged my own strength with the pistol, the back of the chair just managing to catch one of the straps.
I kicked off my boots, then kicked them vaguely into place against the wall, next to a neatly organised rack of shoes – some mine, most not – that had sat untouched for years. There was a mirror in the hall – I paused at the sight of my new arm, marvelling at the unfamiliar sight of bare metal and plastic emerging from my sleeve, the way it caught the light in unexpected ways.
I practiced my grip on a glass of water, noting from the tap’s trickle that I’d need to replace the filter sooner rather than later. It still worked out cheaper than buying bottled – just.
It struck me then, as I fished a handful of ingredients from the fridge and cut a few slices from a tube of AlmostEgg, that it wasn’t too long ago that my life had been defined by questions like that; how to scrape and save money on the little things even while I ignored riskier payouts because my pathological need to keep the apartment was matched in intensity only by the lethargy in which I lived my life.
I wondered what my life would have been like if I’d stepped into the Shadows sooner? Where would I be without those years I spent as little more than a sleepwalker taking petty jobs for petty cash, without doing so much as take a single step beyond the threshold of my home? A home that had stopped feeling like home long before I was its only occupant?
That brought a frown to my face, as I microwaved a packet of mixed rice and vegetables. Ultimately, however, I decided it wasn’t worth worrying about. There were simply too many variables involved to predict what could have been, not least of which was that I’d never have met the others.
With the now-warmed packet emptied into a bowl and the slices of ‘egg’ scattered on top for protein, I grabbed a cold beer from the fridge, sat down and realised with a start that I was actually comfortable. The past few weeks had been exhilarating, each burst of violence a shot of adrenaline straight to my soul, but even the lows between had become a source of contentment. Hacking my way through corporate networks was a thrill, but going clothes shopping in the market with Lisa and Rachel came with its own, far more nuanced sensations.
Even now, after being wounded, losing an arm and finding a new one – even with Brian in the middle of half a dozen different life-saving operations – I still didn’t regret a single decision I’d made since hunting down Lisa’s comm from a forum post. That wasn’t to say I wasn’t aware of how we’d fallen short; I knew we needed to be better prepared in future, knew I needed to have perfect awareness of everything around me, on the job and off.
The first step was to clear the fuzz from my brain; that lingering sensation that something wasn’t right with my head. I wondered if this was how Tattletale’s ‘burnout’ mages felt all the time, whether they got used to it or whether it felt completely different when chrome messed with magic rather than the resonance?
As I sank into the syn-leather armchair, I became conscious of just how strange the material felt against my new arm. The tactile sensors didn’t extend to the bare metal, so it was as if I had gaps in my sense of touch. There were other, smaller nuances as well; my mechanical joints didn’t move quite like my real ones, to the point where I could rotate my wrist a full three hundred and sixty degrees, which gave me my first ever bout of vertigo when I accidentally found out.
But wasn’t distracting. It didn’t feel unnatural; I wasn’t suddenly struck by an urge to rip it out of my shoulder, or drive my metal fingers into my neighbour’s eyes. It was just different. All I needed to do was trick my brain into accepting that difference rather than freaking out about it.
The process started, paradoxically, by leaving both the arm and the meat it was attached to behind.
The matrix flooded in like an ocean, submersing me beneath its vast chill. I paused for a moment, metaphorically breathing it in as I took stock of the local net, eyeing the surrounding traffic for threats. Tattletale had told me that – by and large – the gang war had reached a lull in the fighting. The initial flare-up of violence had given way to Chosen and Yakuza entrenching themselves in whatever ground they’d taken, held or retreated to, while Knight Errant launched armoured convoys through the streets to reassert what control they could.
To those few in the know, the lull had more nuance to it; the Chosen had obtained whatever drugs they needed and were now hunkering down to dose up and deal with the fallout of their averted starvation.
And yet, to the matrix, there might as well not have been a gang war at all. While whole streets might have been barricaded off, data flowed freely throughout Chosen and Yakuza territory, the sheer volume of traffic in the matrix too great to be stemmed even if the gangs wanted to – which they didn’t, when they themselves relied on the matrix to keep their communications online.
I didn’t fool myself into thinking that meant the matrix was safe from the fighting, however. I knew that if I looked closer at the right datastreams passing between the right devices, I’d find a shadow war of decker against decker fought out in private comm networks, squad-size tactical links and even inside the headware of gang lieutenants, whose secure drives contained data more valuable than any physical prize.
None of it was my concern. I left the city to its quiet war, drifting through the spiderwebbed datastreams of the North End until I passed below the plane of the grid and down into the nothingness below, deeper than even the miniscule municipal network regulating the subsurface pumps that drained the aquifer for drinking water. I kept going, until the city’s grid was stretched out above me like the night’s sky, then began fraying the tether between me and my body.
It came more naturally the second time; almost closer to falling asleep than a conscious activity. One by one, senses were muted and strands cut until I was once again surrounded by an empty black void, drifting ever deeper as I left my body behind. It was placid, even tranquil in my complete isolation, until the sudden, blinding moment of transition as the event horizon seized me in its agonising grasp.
It stripped me bare, down to the mere molecules that made up my form. I was bombarded by a succession of images and sensations; of bullet wounds and the kick of recoil, of the feed from Grue’s cybereyes as he fought to bring his rifle up in time, only for weapon to fall slack as his body juddered with the force of three shots, the pain flashing down his synapses and cascading into errors in his software.
The hurt was as strong as ever – to have my very psyche stripped down and analysed by an immense and alien process – but somehow I had become better at managing the pain. It was as if I was simply skimming off the unwanted data to somewhere else; sequestering my guilt and feelings of inferiority into a sealed file where they could slowly seep back into my mind in doses too small to be crippling.
And then, after an eternity and yet in no time at all, it was over. I was through, my persona reduced down to pure resonance and merged into the ever-flowing data that the resonance drew from the matrix like poison from a wound. A myriad of raw data surrounded me, enveloped me, was me. I was reduced down to my most essential elements, compressed into one part of a transmission that contained multitudes.
I didn’t need to think about my destination; I was already being directed there. The resonance realms were still a mystery to me, as I knew they were to even the most experienced technomancer, but there was one place in them where I knew I belonged – albeit in a much more categorical way than the sense of belonging I’d found with my team.
When the blinding tunnel of pure data gave way to pitch-black waters, I was ready. I swam my way to the surface, ignoring the psychosomatic burning in my lungs. Each kick drove me upwards, my arms outstretched in front of me until I broke through into the strange heptagonal antechamber. I reached up to pull myself out, only to slam an empty stump against the side.
White-hot agony spread throughout my body as I flinched back, spasming once and sinking two metres below the surface of the water. I took a breath, the burning in my throat brought back to sharp and painful unreality, and swam back to the surface – all the while mentally cursing my arm, my stupidity and the observatory’s completely arbitrary love affair with the laws of physics.
Pulling myself out of the water using only my left arm was about as awkward as putting on my shirt had been before I got my chrome replacement, but I somehow managed to haul myself out onto the tiled floor, staggering to my feet in a way that would be undignified if there was anyone around to see it.
I looked back at the still black waters of the pool, where my reflection stared up at me. My cybernetic arm was missing, my shoulder little more than a mess of bare musculature and sickening holes where cold steel had replaced flesh. It was viscerally disgusting, causing a wave of nausea to rise in my throat before I centred myself and willed away the false facsimile of my body that the realm had forced on me.
The chitin skin and spidersilk robes of my persona were comforting to see, but I was still missing an arm. Where before there had been bare and grotesque flesh, my shoulder was now little more than a stump of fractal crystals that glowed with a golden light, as cold and lifeless as the grave. They shifted under my attention, seemingly changed by the mere act of observation as they reached out and grasped at nothing like a living thing.
“Well,” I remarked to empty space. “That’s new.”
Almost running on automatic, I left the room, the heavy wooden door with its wrought-iron electronic lock sliding open as I approached. The hall beyond was unsurprisingly unchanged; still gently curved as it followed what I assumed to be the outer boundary of the circular realm, with a deep green carpet, a vaulted ceiling, bottle-green windows along the outer wall and heavy iron doors opposite them.
I walked briskly past the row of doors, certain that the answers I sought could be found in the observatory’s library, among the stacks of raw, unsorted data from the familiar constellation of data far above. After some time, however, I became conscious of a sensation tugging at my neck.
Looking down, I saw that the crystalline stump of my right arm was shifting even more violently than before, spines growing centimetre by centimetre only to crack and scatter into glittering dust. It was as if they were reaching out to something only to collapse under their own weight.
The obvious answer was that they were reaching for the doors, drawn there by something akin to magnetism, like iron filings in a basic science class. I stopped, turned, and crossed the hall to the closest doorway, the crystals’ motion only growing more violent until I had almost deluded myself into thinking they had a mind of their own.
As I pressed the clawed chitin of my left hand against the door, I felt nothing beyond its iron surface, pitted and cold to the touch. It was sealed by another archaic electronic lock, the flickering red light mocking me in its immutability. Somehow I sensed that even a woodlouse sprite wouldn’t be able to break through. In spite of its appearance, it was more physical than digital; raw resonance given shape and function by the logic of this space. Everything here was fixed in place, bound by an imitation of the physical laws of the city above that was so perfect it became oppressive to a mind used to flying free in the ephemeral space of the digital world.
Everything was fixed, unchanging… except for the ragged stump where CrashCart’s surgeons had grafted on the device that had rent the very essence of my persona. For a moment, I hesitated, unsure if the idea that had flashed into my head would do more harm than good, before I brought my one remaining hand up to the stump of my other arm and gripped one particularly solid crystalline shard between two claws.
Breaking it free from the mass was as easy as snapping a salt crystal, but the agony that shot through my system was enough to drop me to one knee as my persona frayed and standard gravity was suddenly three times as strong. I knelt there for a moment, feeling the resonance that made up my persona throbbing like bruised flesh. The pain passed as quickly as it came, however, and as I staggered back to my feet I reached out and pressed the point of the crystal against the lock.
It pierced the solid resonance like it wasn’t even there, then seemed to spread and grow from the wound like an infection until it coated the entire lock, burying the insulting red light beneath a golden growth. Suddenly, I could feel it as easily as I could any digital device. With a thought, the crystals embedded within the mechanism contracted and slid back the bolt. When I pressed my palm against the door again, it gave way with the soundless ease of well-oiled metal.
For all that the motion was smooth, it was also slow. The iron door was as heavy as the real-world metal and inches thick; closer to the thickness I’d expect from a stereotypical bank vault than what appeared from the outside to be a cell. As it swung open, the room beyond was revealed by inches.
There was little light in the room. Instead, each inch brought with it the dull green glow of the corridor. The first thing the light touched was an aged and bare shelf formed from the same dark iron that was so universal within the realm. The inches after that revealed yet more shelves; the whole room reminded me of nothing more than the times my mom had taken me to the university library, a grand stone building in the old city centre.
Stolen story; please report.
The library was no longer used as a library, of course. The thousands of paper books it had once contained had long since been scanned and digitised into storage servers that took up a miniscule fraction of the same space. Only the most valuable manuscripts had been retained, though even they had been removed from the library to secure storage vaults.
Fittingly enough, the empty building had been given over to the university’s Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. The cavernous rooms of books had been converted into lecture halls, or split down into smaller seminar rooms and offices for the academics. Mom had held court there in her role as a professor of English Literature and she’d often brought me there during the school holidays, before I was old enough for her and dad to be comfortable leaving me home alone.
Naturally, I’d snuck off more than once and gone wandering through the forgotten corners of the building; in the basement, or the cramped rooms in the corners that would have been too difficult to renovate. Some of those rooms, accessible only by a narrow spiral staircase of iron latticework, were full of shelves like these. Bare reminders of what came before, left untouched because it was too inconvenient to change them.
For all I knew, those rooms were gone. The department certainly was; shuttered along with Brockton Bay University’s name when Max Anders’ generous donation turned it into an entirely STEM-focused institution that he renamed after his dead father. Mom had moved on to the newly-opened New Brockton University, but by that point I’d been old enough that I never got to see her new office before it was too late.
The sight of those shelves here, of all places, was almost nostalgic. Then the door swung further open and all sense of familiarity fled as a cold and primal dread washed over me.
The rest of the room was much as I had imagined it to be, with a dozen cramped rows of empty iron shelves, but between the bars and cages grew the strands of a delicate and utterly alien crystalline lattice. They stretched throughout the room, passing through the walls, floor and ceiling into spaces beyond. Each pulsed with a cold and lifeless light that cast no illumination whatsoever, as if it existed somewhere outside the realm’s physics.
The growth – and somehow I knew it had grown, rather than appeared or been made – reminded me of neurons, of cobwebs, of the tunnels of light connecting the resonance realms. They were vectors for information, carrying data from one place to another. The cause of my dread wasn’t just their unnatural nature, but the question of neurons or cobwebs. Were they meant to carry signals to an entity waiting at the centre of the web, or was I standing among the brain cells of some unfathomably vast mind?
It didn’t take long for my dread to be overcome by an almost primal curiosity. I crossed the threshold, my crystalline stump shifting ever more violently as I drew closer to the gestalt mass. It responded in its own way, the pulsating crystals closest to me shifting outwards like grasping feeder-mouths or tree roots reaching down to water.
That should have frightened me more, but instead I found myself fascinated by the fractal way in which it grew. It was hard to slip the constricting physical realities of the ream, but I was still a technomancer, and I still retained enough control over the resonance to reach out and sense the reality beyond the visible data; to look past the limitations of a metahuman brain translating the unknowable into something it could observe, if not comprehend.
What I felt, deep in the very core of my persona, was a miniscule fraction of a truly vast entity. One that stretched throughout the entirety of this realm, dug in and among its physical structure like a fungal infection. The strands of crystalline flesh I could see were little more than infinitesimally small parts of a greater whole, embedded into the very fabric of the realm. It waxed and waned in and out of unreality; behind these doors, it was firmly anchored into the physical structure of the realm, but elsewhere it continued both invisible and formless, out of step with the realm itself. I’d walked through those immaterial strands before and never even noticed.
It was… either observing or feeding on the data the realm collected, but I didn’t feel like there was any specific purpose behind its actions. It was more of an automatic response, like lungs drawing in air without conscious input from the mind their oxygen fuelled. It was parasitic, of that I had no doubt; its attention spread solely to the host it had latched onto. The grasping crystalline tendrils that had begun to curve towards me from all directions might as well have been white blood cells responding to a handful of bacterial microbes.
It wasn’t consciously aware of me. It couldn’t be, any more than I could be aware of a germ nestled among the hairs of my organic body. I stepped to the side, putting another foot or two between me and the closest tendril, and studied them closer. I knew it wasn’t native to this realm, but the longer I looked, the more convinced I was that this entity didn’t quite belong anywhere.
It was in the underlying structure of the crystals; the base code or raw resonance that gave it form. The issue was that it wasn’t either code or resonance. It lacked the rigid lines and ordered flow of programmed code, or even the more artistic flair of something coded by a technomancer, and yet it was also too rigid to be formed from the inherently ethereal resonance. It seemed almost like a bridge between the worlds; something formed from both but belonging to neither.
That gave me an idea. It was mad, maybe desperate, but madness and desperation had worked out so far.
Drawing raw resonance from my own body, I formed a resonance spike that stretched out from my left hand. In this realm, it took form as a physical blade, carrying all the weight and sharpness of the world above. I raised my arm, then brought the blade down on the closest tendril. It cut through the crystalline mass with ease, causing the severed tendril to spark and recoil with bursts of data that went nowhere. Its counterparts didn’t react, instead continuing their slow approach towards me, but I had expected that; it wasn’t like I would take revenge for the death of a single cell.
I dismissed the blade, drawing the resonance back into myself in a stream of golden particles, and wrapped my hand around the severed length of raw… something. It shifted in my grasp like a living thing, like freshly dead meat twitching when its nerves are stimulated.
I didn’t take a deep breath – it was a pointless, physical instinct – but I did pause before taking the next step. It was inevitable; I had no idea what this stuff was beyond the broad understanding that it was malleable and made to carry signals. In the end, however, that was enough.
I jammed the mass of crystals into my socket, and burst into flames.
That was the only way I could understand it; the only way my overtaxed metahuman brain had of comprehending the sheer agonising pain that flowed from the severed shard through to every part of my persona. I screamed, burning fireflies spilling from my body until it seemed the very realm vibrated in sympathetic pain with me, generating a resonating shriek of its own. The crystalline tendrils that surrounded me were forced back by the pressure, the closest being crushed beneath the weight of my torment.
Even in the depths of agony, my mind took note of that effect. Focusing my will, I drew the fireflies back into myself, drawing that crushing force through my body and into the grafted length of crystals. Through that immense pressure I was able to give shape to the growth, each fracture and crush bringing it closer in structure to the cybernetic arm that sat in its place in realspace.
I had acquired the schematics of the arm before leaving the hospital. The mechanical components, the exterior casing, those were just details. What mattered was the internal structure of its cybernetic nervous system and how that system made the jump to my body’s biological nerves. With each shift I made to the crystals, I created a more perfect mirror of that system in my persona. At some point, instinct took over and the process became almost automatic; it felt easier the closer the limb resembled its counterpart and I started to include copy-protection elements that I knew hadn’t been present on the schematics.
Mitsuhama Consumer Technologies believed that technomancers worked according to the principle of quantum entanglement. If that was the case, then I was simply bringing my nervous system back into alignment with its paired counterpart, as well as creating a match in the resonance for the new addition to that system.
For all that it had arrived in an instant, the agony remained for quite some time after I had finished sculpting my new arm. In the visual layer, it appeared as a limb formed from glowing golden crystal, jagged and angular yet unmistakably evoking the mechanical nature of the limb it matched. On a whim, I shifted the appearance to match the rest of my persona, smoothing out the lines and giving it colour until it resembled the chitinous limb opposite it.
Before me, the crystalline entity whose shard I had claimed was beginning to heal itself, the grasping tendrils drawing back as their mass was repurposed to replace the flesh I had taken from them. My awareness of the entity was sharper now, but no data flowed between us. I was right; I was too small to be worth noticing, though the crystalline shard embedded within me made it easier for me to sense the extent of the entity’s presence in this realm.
I was certain this wasn’t how technomancers were supposed to attune to cyberware, if there even was a consensus, but I wasn’t going to let perfect be the enemy of good. What mattered was that I had successfully restored myself to full functionality, and I’d gained a greater understanding of the observatory while I was at it.
So, when I slipped back into the inky-black waters of the antechamber, it was with a light head, a sense of vicious satisfaction and a few titanic unanswered questions I was willing to leave for another time. Drifting back through the tunnels of light to the event horizon felt more natural than ever, and I gracefully slipped through the firmament and back into the matrix before finally restoring the tethers that bound me to my organic body and coming to full wakefulness in my well-worn armchair, noting in wonder how much more real my new arm felt.
My digital stump of a shoulder had been bleeding like an actual wound, or perhaps a cut wire. The constant growing and fracturing of the crystals was caused by my essence trying to flow through my body as normal, only to be pushed out into empty space like sparks. I wasn’t sure if it would have caused my metaphorical battery to run out at some point, but I knew it would slow me down.
Now, the circuit had been reconnected. The resonance that had bled out into the ether instead flowed through my arm, travelling down its circuitry before doubling back on itself like a true circulatory system. Evo’s cyberneticists had created an artificial limb that was able to seamlessly integrate with the metahuman nervous system, to attach an arm that felt as real as if it were flesh and blood. Now, my cybernetic almost felt more real than its counterpart; I could feel every neuron firing down each and every micro-wire, right up until the returning signals crossed over into flesh.
My head was alive with possibilities for that hyperawareness; ways I could turn my limb from an adequate replacement to a straight-up upgrade.
My dive into the resonance had been shorter than most; barely an hour and a half had passed since I sat down. Once again, however, I couldn’t help but note how little correlation there was between the actual time that had passed and how I had perceived it when I was beyond the event horizon. In the matrix, space held no meaning while metahuman minds could take advantage of perception altering high-end cyberdecks to think faster than their biological limits. In the resonance realms, time and space were completely decoupled from reality; I could spend a day in a single hour, or dip in and out only to find hours had passed.
There was no rhyme or reason to it, but rhymes and reason were also absent from the resonance realms – unless you counted the obscure and particular logic that governed each realm.
I turned my hand over, watching artificial neurons fire as I closed my fingers into a fist. I could see every algorithm built into the arm’s code, every piece of targeting software and hyperactive reflex that made the difference between civilian and military-grade specifications. On a whim and faintly grinning at the childishness of it, I unfurled my thumb and index finger from the fist, stretching out my arm as I pointed the imaginary gun at my front door.
I froze, my grin turning brittle on my face. Past the length of my arm and the makeshift ‘sight’ of my thumb, I could see my holster hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. The holster, but not the submachine gun it had contained.
Without letting the grin fall from my face – without moving so much as a single muscle – I reached out into the matrix and scanned my surroundings, my vision lighting up with a myriad of different devices in a sphere twenty metres in diameter. I could feel every tablet, commlink, smart fridge, simsense wreath and trideo set in the apartments around me, could chart the location of every occupant by the devices they carried on them or the ways the devices around them reacted to their presence. There were no abnormal signals in my apartment; no devices that shouldn’t be there, or devices that should be there but weren’t.
Slowly, trying not to show the tension growing in my chest, I let the finger gun fall and stood up, walking calmly across the room to the counter and pouring myself a glass of water. All the while, my attention was fixed on an AR window I’d pulled up in front of me, displaying the view from the webcamera on dad’s old terminal. Nothing was moving, which only made my dread worse; if I couldn’t see them in the matrix, I might as well have been blind.
»I think someone’s in my apartment.«
- Spider (23:38:45/23-3-2070)
I duplicated the message twice and sent it out into the ether, to the only people who I could trust to answer. The first response came almost instantaneously, fuelled by chrome reflexes, but offered nothing more than a faint hope.
»26 minutes out.«
- bitch (23:38:51/23-3-2070)
Tattletale’s message, on the other hand, was about what I expected.
»omw«
- Tt (23:39:01/23-3-2070)
I’d been staring at the cupboard with a glass of water in my hand for sixteen seconds, watching my body through the monitor. If someone was in the room with me, they’d have tried to kill me already. That meant they were somewhere else in the apartment; they wouldn’t have broken in just to steal my gun and leave. Besides, if they meant to kill me outright they’d have done it when I was zonked out on an armchair.
So I set the glass down and drew the largest knife we had from the block next to the stove. The moment I did, someone hit the light switch and plunged the room into darkness.
It didn’t even a second. As a mental poke flicked the lights back on, I couldn’t help but chuckle. It was a dark and dangerous sound, not born from genuine mirth.
“Nice try,” I growled, only to jump as I felt something poke me in the side. I whirled around, thrusting the knife out, only to drive the tip of the blade into empty air.
That triggered a panic in me; a sudden hyperawareness of just how much empty space surrounded me. It may have still been compact by troll norms, but for most of the population it provided more than enough space to duck and weave, hide and strike.
I backed up towards the hallway, keeping the knife held out in front of me as my eyes darted around the room. If there was someone in there with me, it was clear they were invisible, but if there was even the slightest chance I’d be able to see their body heat then I was going to take it.
Unfortunately, whatever they were using to hide from me had been designed to counter a troll’s biological advantage. I could still see the faint glow of my own body heat on the couch, the sharper glow from the radiators and the chill night air pressing against the windows, but once again there was simply nothing out of the ordinary. They might as well have been a ghost.
That thought had me freeze, a cold chill of panic creeping through me as my heart began to pound in my chest. They might be a ghost, I thought, backing away down the corridor.
It was a confined space even by my standards; if I reached out, I could brush both elbows against the wall at the same time. More to the point, I was convinced that nobody could get past me with my body blocking the way. The only plan I had was to lock myself in the bathroom and wait for Bitch or Tattletale to arrive.
The moment I felt the door, I flicked the mental switch to slide it open and half-stumbled onto its tiled floor, turning the lights on as I turned my back on the hallway. I’d meant to slam the door shut behind me, then throw my weight against it to hold it closed, but I stopped dead in my tracks the moment I saw my reflection in the mirror.
Someone had opened up the tube of lipstick that had sat unopened on the shelf below the mirror, its plastic wrapper discarded on the floor along with the rest of the makeup kit that dad had bought me as a seventeenth birthday present. My reflection’s eyes were wide with terror, widening even more as they took in the question smeared in blue across the span of the glass.
‘WHERE IS HE’
Stupefied by horror, I could only watch the gormless visage staring back to me, mouth and eyes pulled wide in a grim rictus, distorting my cheeks. That was when I saw it; three mostly-horizontal lines on each cheek, in the same blue lipstick as the message, another blotch colouring in the tip of my nose and two upright arrows on my horns.
Whiskers?
Behind me, I heard the impossibly faint sound of a boot tapping against the floor of the corridor. I reacted on instinct, turning and throwing the knife behind me at chest height. It spun wildly before abruptly halting in midair as a grey-clad arm appeared out of nowhere, gripping the blade between thumb and forefinger.
The sudden motion caused a cascading failure in the stealth fabric, revealing a lithe and feminine figure in a skintight taksuit. At six feet tall, she had the body of some femme fatale assassin straight out of some spy thriller, but with a mask covering her face that had been sculpted into the visage of a grinning demon. The featureless black lenses of her eyes glared at me with naked contempt as she twisted the kitchen knife around in her hand before tossing it aside.
I knew then that she was laughing at me. That she’d been laughing at me ever since I stepped into my apartment.
I did the only thing I could thing of. I screamed, dropped my horns and charged.