I walk down one of the winding, shaded paths running through the Weald, alone but for the occasional bike racing past me, guided by the nostalgic ache in my chest that’s still never gone away. It leads me to a point on the trail where a bridge passes over a wide, shallow creek. There, I descend the steps to the water’s edge, roll back my sleeves, and reach in. I know where it is before I see it: a soggy mass of paper still roughly held together by its binding.
The last stray copy of How to Be the World. All the rest are recovered, destroyed, or maybe just lost to me, buried too deep in some sealed chamber to feel in the gaping hole where Aulunla was ripped out of me. I rifle through my bag, wrap the book in rags, and hug the dripping bundle to my chest.
How did it even get here? No one used this copy, not in any way that counts. It doesn’t feel like anything but a distant echo of Aulunla… like light from a dead star. I can’t help but imagine how it played out: someone plucked it out of a library, sat down to give it a look on the bench overhead, and… then what? If they thought it was creepy, they could’ve given it to a Keeper. Which would’ve been worse for me, yeah, but at least it would feel better than the idea of some idiot with no imagination stumbling across the last traces of my dead friend and finding it simply boring. Not frightening, not dangerous, just an insane child’s scribblings inexplicably put to print. Something so offensively meaningless that they’d rather hurl it into a river and forget they ever saw it than try to make sense of it.
Whatever. They don’t matter. It doesn’t matter how it got here. It’s not like any of this is going to make a difference. Why do I still bother? How desperate and stupid must I have been to believe Ciaran when he started talking about gathering Aulunla’s remains and sewing it back together, good as new?
Not yet. The arrangement is missing a piece. A stolen keystone.
The architect’s speech has grown less grating and distant over our partnership. It’s still never felt as close as Aulunla did.
“Yeah. Fine. I get it.” If Aulunla is anywhere, it’s in the Keeper who murdered it. If there’s any hope for this ridiculous plan, it’d start with killing her, ripping its heart out of her guts, and hoping it’s in a state to be put back together.
Only no one I asked had any idea who that girl was or how to find her. I should’ve thrown the plan out and done everything I could to kill her during the Embrace. I shouldn’t have trusted that disgusting creature Plague Girl dragged along like trash on her shoe to accomplish anything. She’d have known, but according to Ciaran, she was very insistent that Plague Girl was hers and no one else’s.
And then she went and got herself killed. I’d had a chance, I wasted it, and all I can do now is hope another one falls into my lap. Aisling must know, but she obviously wouldn’t tell.
…Maybe someone else does?
I tuck the book under my arm, retrieve my phone, and check my notifications. There’s still a flood of messages coming through every time I leave the Wound. I ignore the ones from my family, and Aisling seems to have given up on those long pleas to come home and talk this all out, but there’s three new ones from Lucan. No words there, only the Daily Beetle. At some point, he got into the habit of sending me exactly one cute beetle picture every night. The images haven’t stopped coming even now, as if nothing had changed. I smile despite myself at the shot of a milkweed beetle peeking through a hole in a half-eaten leaf.
I’d thank him for it, but the moment Ash heard that I’d talked to anyone in the club, she’d whip them into a frenzy trying to get anything else out of me. No point in stressing them all out.
Instead, I sit by the creek, leaning into the shade of a big tree, and look out through the Sea at the rest of the world, tabbing through Flow’s channels on magic and Keepers and Harbingers. As far as I can tell, the only public-facing signs of our group’s existence are the missing persons reports on me, Sorcha, and a few of the others. Still no Ciaran, which is interesting if that’s his real name. Ash will absolutely have briefed Lighthouse on everything she knows, though. It’s hard to say how much that encompasses without knowing if she’s burning questions on this, but she knows enough. If people aren’t actively hunting us, they will be soon.
What’s Ciaran’s plan for when that happens, anyway? To my eyes, all the group’s been doing is plucking a handful of outcasts from the city while Mairtin and I scavenge Aulunla’s dregs and hope it gets us somewhere. The Harbinger’s towers aren’t making it any higher before they collapse. If the whole city declares war on us before it “opens the sky,” we’ll lose, and it won’t be close.
But they aren’t quite there yet, at least. There’s no news about the Keepers who ambushed me during the Embrace. All I find in checking is that Shona Tiernan died last week. It wasn’t us – she ran into something else, a “fungal infestation beneath the earth,” that killed her and promptly vanished. Too bad for her. She always seemed alright.
Eventually, though, I do find Plague Girl.
In between stuff about Shona, there’s a scattering of trending posts about “Ill Wind Liadain,” and the pictures attached to some of them are definitely her. They’re all of her in a little booth somewhere, alone or uncomfortably posing with one other person at a time. With that square of fabric masking her face, there’s hardly a hint of a smile to be seen, only eyes that seem to shift from dread to exhaustion the longer the whole farce continues. I follow those back to a PR statement, announcing an event where people could go to have her… suck “health” out of them, whatever that means.
And they did. Lots of them. And then filled Flow with stupid stuff about how cute she was.
Safety not guaranteed, no fortune in your fortune telling, girl really knows how to sell herself. What an icon.
her tarot stuff convinced me not to confess to my crush (it woulda been a disaster anyway, 10/10 would suffer for again)
Gonna start hitting the gym again so she gets superpowers when she eats me! ᕦ(ò_ó)ᕤ
Imagine if I’d tried anything like this with Aulunla. It’s not like I would’ve been asking for sacrifices. We never wanted to hurt anyone until we had no other option. We wanted people who understood, who wanted to be part of our work. Those would’ve been better in every way. But still, no one would’ve showed up. No one would say shit like that about us. At best, if I posted on the Midnight Zone, the Monad might’ve locked it, covered it in disclaimers, and left it up like that so she could keep saying she was all about freedom of information. And then Keepers would’ve hunted us down, murdered Aulunla, and thrown me into the Sanctuary anyway.
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s out again, in public, alone save for her weird fans. We can work with this. Looking over the original announcement, the chancel where it’s happening isn’t even far away from here. She’ll be there…
…This morning. The event ended two hours ago. No indication of when or if there’ll be a next time.
I clench my teeth, rip up a handful of grass at the roots, and slowly spread my fingers, letting it fall blade by blade and blow into the water in the breeze.
There’ll be other chances. Will there? Will they come fast enough? Does it even matter or am I just clinging to the last vague scrap of hope that Aulunla isn’t dead, that Ciaran and his Harbinger will eventually have the power to wave their hands and fix everything somehow?
When I reach into my pocket and set a hand on Aulunla’s apple, a patch of its skin has gone soft and wrinkly.
Damn it. Damn her. Damn everyone who won’t leave us just one dark, quiet corner for ourselves.
I stand and throw my arm out with a snarl. My shadow stretches out and out, rises into a solid shape, and tears the curtain of existence away, opening a rough hole in the air just wide enough for me to climb through. I dive in and soar away from the world, out into the shapeless dark beyond.
~~~
The shock of primal terror that once accompanied slithering through the marble maze around Ciaran’s Wound has faded to an annoying lurch in my stomach.
On the other side, there’s no bizarrely cheerful welcoming committee, no party in the ruins feasting on junk food, no sounds of conversation anywhere in earshot. The Wound feels as empty as it did when Ciaran first drew me in, only even he’s nowhere to be found.
“Hellooo?” Something about this world’s pitch-black sky makes it feel like a giant cavern, like a hollow space my voice should be echoing through, but there’s no answer.
Finally, maybe a minute later, Dalha’s voice shouts back: “Isobel? Over here!”
I follow the sound through the smiling wreckage, toward the debris of the Harbinger’s newest collapsed tower. Dalha’s waiting there, standing just outside its most intact entrance.
“There you are. Thank the…” Dalha trails off, smirking as if at a joke. “Well. I’m glad you’re back safe. I don’t know if we could take any more setbacks right now.”
“More? What happened?”
“I’m not sure what happened, if anything, but…” Dalha puts a hand to her temple and sighs. “Ciaran’s, mm. Having a moment.”
“A moment. What does that mean? What kind of moment?” I ask.
“If you want to try and get it out of him, please be my guest.” Dalha takes a step back, gesturing to the crumbling archway.
“I don’t, really. But we need to figure something out anyway, so… fine. Do you have any more for me to go on?”
“Here’s what I know. Parra, one of the newer boys, went out yesterday. Said he wanted to go talk to a friend, thought he’d be a good fit for our group. He never came back. Ciaran went to look for him late last night, came back alone, and he’s been more or less dead to the world since.”
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“So what, then? Did some Keeper grab him? Did he just quit?”
Dalha only shrugs.
“Fine. Here I go.” I duck through the doorway, shimmy through a too-thin, mostly-horizontal passage, and step out into a wide, mostly-enclosed chamber lit only by glowing stone faces. At the far end, Ciaran sits slumped on the ground, leaning listlessly against a big tangled rock. Two of the Harbinger’s great shadow-hands stretch down through the ceiling to cradle him, and most of his followers are gathered close by, some watching him uncomfortably and some in quiet conversations with each other. Mairtin crawls along the walls, muttering inaudibly to himself.
“Hey, Isobel.” Oh, there’s Sorcha, perched on the half-intact stairs in the corner. She still talks like a person, voice as soft and mousey as ever, but since she put on a mask perfectly matching Mairtin’s, her body’s been growing more hazy and indistinct by the day. Not in the same way as Mairtin, who’s always looked to Isobel like one of the distended statues the ground here is made of pulled itself out and started talking one day… no, beyond her mask, it’s hard to look at Sorcha and see anything clearly. She’s a thing of too many too-long appendages draped in clothlike shadows, all reaching out from the never-moving silhouette of a balled-up girl in a big sweater. Sometimes she slithers through those limbs as if she’s pouring her liquid self into them, sometimes they carry her around like spider legs, and sometimes she just pops up, with no signs of when she got there or how she moved.
Whatever. Good for her. “Hi. Ciaran, we need to talk.”
Ciaran only stares down at the ground, meeting an empty-eyed mask’s gaze.
I cross the room to stand over him. A few of the faces I step on let out strained, breathless sighs at the impact. “In private,” I say, holding out the still-damp book. “About this. This is the last one, and it’s not going to help. It’s not enough. I have an idea, but there’s… details we need to sort out.”
“Yeah. Makes sense. Why would anything we’re doing work?” Ciaran says tonelessly. No one moves to leave. He doesn’t move at all.
I sigh, tuck the book into my bag, and kneel to level with him. “Look, whatever happened with Parra, you’ve always said you don’t want anyone who doesn’t want to be here. What’s the big deal if some kid left?”
“He didn’t leave. He’s gone,” Ciaran says. “Fell into a hole. An abscess. A moldy maw filled with worms.”
…Another Harbinger. Maybe the same one that killed Shona, from the sound of it. “Shit. And I suppose however this happened, you can’t go get him back.”
Ciaran chuckles weakly. “No. No, if you’d seen it, you’d understand. If you’d felt it, you’d understand how…” He pulls his legs up and wraps his arms around them. “There’s nothing we could do to it. I don’t know what anyone could do to it. Despite everything, we’re still… we’re so very small. Weak. Worthless.”
He slumps forward, burying his face in his knees. “It saw us, before we left. Something without eyes looked out of that pit, saw us, and all it saw was prey. We didn’t leave, we ran screaming. I prayed, I don’t know why, I don’t know to who, I just prayed it wouldn’t follow us. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I never have. This is wrong. This entire thing has always been wrong. None of you should be here. Return to the stars, yeah… the stars are filled with bigger, scarier things than we’ll ever be.”
no no nO NO, the world screams without speaking.
“Don’t you dare,” I say.
Ciaran glances up, eyes dull behind his teary-faced mask. “Huh?”
“You’re seriously going to lie down and give up and take us all with you just because, what, because copying Aulunla’s homework hasn’t gotten you where you want to go? What was your plan before I showed up? Did you even have one?”
Sorcha squirms into view in the corner of my eye, wrapping around him defensively.
“I guess we did, yeah,” Ciaran says, paying her no mind. “But we were obviously on the wrong track, since you made it further than we ever have by accident.”
“What do you mean by accident?”
“Just how it looks, is all. It made a pretty big impact for something so small. I don’t know how, and I guess you don’t know how, since it did it all while it was holding back for your sake. Keeping all the blood on its hands.”
I lunge at Ciaran, shaking him by the shoulders. His eyes widen, but he doesn’t resist at all. “Like you would know! What are you doing but sitting around here waiting for someone else to tell you how to fix the world? What was all that about ‘accepting a new god’ for if neither of you even know what you’re doing?” I snarl.
A storm of twisted limbs and solid shadows crashes into me. The chamber whirls around me as it tosses me halfway across the room, then presses down, slamming me to the ground with a sudden crushing impact.
Slowly, to yelps of shock and panic, my blurred vision stabilizes. Mairtin and Sorcha loom over me – him straddling me, cold hands on warped limbs holding me down, pushing me by the head into the floor beneath, where stone lips kiss my cheeks. Most of Sorcha’s shadow-mass has spread into a cramped cage around us, but not all. Dark tendrils wrap painfully tight around my legs. Both of their masks leer down at me, twisted in fury.
I try to push away, to kick back, to do anything, but I’m helplessly pinned. Even my shadows don’t answer my call – not that they were ever really mine.
“Do whatever,” I wheeze. “You can’t help me. It’s never coming back. I don’t care what happens now.”
What? What am I saying? Of course I do. I’m terrified. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be ripped out of myself and left here for dead, just another empty, smiling statue for the endless mass of bodies. There’s no sense in lying about any of that when Ciaran can look inside me and see it.
But it doesn’t even matter what I want. There’s nothing I can do.
“Get away from her,” Ciaran orders.
Sorcha’s eye-holes narrow and her scowl shrinks, shifting from a mask of rage to confusion. “You heard her. We don’t need her. Why would we want someone here who’s never cared about anyone but herself?”
“I said leave her alone.” He raises his voice for the first time today, if only by a little.
Sorcha and Mairtin glance at each other uncertainly, then start to pull away, leaving me splayed limp on the ground. As he withdraws, Mairtin leans down and hisses into my ear: “I don’t care what he says. If you make this any worse, if you hurt him any more, I will rip off your head and pour you out through your neck and feed your insides to our god.”
“You know I can hear you, right? Cut it out,” Ciaran insists with a tired sigh. “No one’s doing that thing, Isobel. I just want to know.” He crouches next to me, offering me a hand.
I take it, dizzy and bruised all over and maybe concussed, and let him pull me up. The Wound keeps spinning, slowly. “…Know what?” I ask.
“What you think is missing here. What Aulunla did that we haven’t. Sure, you didn’t make it, but you’re the closest thing we have to an expert in rising free from this wretched old world. So tell me. What’s wrong with us?”
His mask’s expression is blank, and for once, I can’t see his face behind it. It has none of its surreal transparency, and behind the gaps that make up its eyes and mouth there’s nothing but blackness. All eyes are on me, from Mairtin and Sorcha’s glares to the wide-eyed stares of terrified recruits scattered around the edge of the room.
I’m not sure what happens next if they don’t like my answer. Which is really bad, since… honestly, I didn’t completely understand what Aulunla and I were doing, by the end. Everything felt like what I was meant to do, a necessary part of writing a beautiful new world just for us, but the way I worked through its rituals and how I arrived at any given step was just a matter of working out what felt right. I knew without knowing how that everything was very nearly in the right place, that there was a way through if I could only make the last pieces fit, that it would have worked if I’d only found the perfect path through the maze of thought I’d built myself.
“What it was trying to do when it died… I think it’s about being the most you you can be. Finding something only you can do, maybe something only you can understand at all, and pushing it to its absolute limit. Using anything someone else did as an example is a dead end. You can’t reverse-engineer the path it took to get there because you’re not it, and there is no path.”
Oh, Ash would hate that. I can’t help but cough out a laugh.
“So, you know what you were planning better than I do, but whatever you were thinking wasn’t enough, or maybe you just weren’t doing enough of it. I know I’m right, since you wouldn’t be trying to piece our ideas back together your way if it had. Stop that. Do what you can do better. Expand on it. If you don’t know what only you can do, figure that out first, or everything you try will just be one more tower that falls apart halfway through.”
Ciaran frowns. His mask grows a little more hazy, a little less solid. He stands there, silent but constantly twitching and fidgeting, for what feels like a very, very long time. I can’t bring myself to move, and I don’t think the others would let me leave if I could.
Finally, he grins, wide and wild. “Hey. Isobel. What would you and Aulunla have done if another Harbinger got in your way?”
I blink. “I mean… avoid it if we couldn’t handle it. Kill it and find a use for it if we could.”
“Exactly. That’s what they all do. That’s what that thing was doing when it took Parra. Catching another Harbinger, taking a big nasty bite out of everything around it in the act. The city. The world. Not us! We’ve never killed anyone! We aren’t some ravening beast – ah, no offense, Isobel, I get how it is – but a family in the act of building itself! A place for everyone with nowhere else to go and no idea what they want to be!”
Ciaran throws his arms wide, and in unison, his Harbinger’s spectral claws reach out and tear the chamber’s wall away, sending a few people scurrying to the sides.
“Everyone! Human or Harbinger or anything else beneath the stars! We’ve been thinking too small. I love all of you. Of course I do. But how many Harbingers do you think are adrift in this world, lost and alone? How many more would rejoice if we offered them something new, something better, something above the ceaseless eat-or-die nightmare they were all born into? We can save them too! We can save EVERYONE who accepts us! And all of us, all of us together can save Parra! Save everyone that thing has taken! We’ll build the foundations of our world with one sacrifice and only one: a nightmare fallen from the sky, a horror that will die so all of us can live!”
The Wound falls silent again. Ciaran strides out to stand beneath the sky, as if he doesn’t even care how his flock will respond to this. As if he already knows.
And sure enough, within seconds, Mairtin claps and cheers, his whoops coming out in eerie hisses. A few people join in, the first beats of hesitant applause quickly bursting into wild celebration. Sorcha only smiles. Dalha peeks around the now-open wall from outside, glances over the room, and shoots me a curious look. I stumble to my feet and respond with a slow, uncertain thumbs-up.
It could work. If he can get something like Seryana to work with him, there really might be something to this. There’s even something poetic about it – saving the city from the same rampaging monster that just ate a beloved Keeper would make the point I wanted people to understand much better than I ever managed to.
But it doesn’t change anything for me.
“Hey. Ciaran.” I say. “Great plan, really, but… it isn’t what I came to talk about.”
Ciaran grins, rubbing the back of his head through his hood. “Oh yeah. Sorry. What was that again?”
“What I was trying to tell you before all this was that we aren’t going to get Aulunla back by scrounging up a handful of relics we tossed out into the world. Too much of it is gone. We need the Keeper who killed it, and I don’t know how to find her unless she pops her head out in a place we can reach her again.”
“Ah. I was starting to think it might come to that, yeah. No problem, though! I know where she lives. I even have a pretty good idea of how her magic works.”
I can only stare blankly at him. “What? How? From the… whatever, why didn’t you say anything? We could’ve done something with that!”
Ciaran smirks, tapping the side of his head with one finger. “Her stalker didn’t want to tell us, but she was wearing part of us when she died, remember? Not enough that losing it hurt, but enough that we could peek through her eyes without asking. We saw pretty much everything she did on the night she died, including the part where she followed Plague Girl home and made a mess of her place.”
I fold my arms and narrow my eyes at him expectantly.
“Ah, yeah, and I guess I didn’t mention it ‘cause she lives in the regional hospital. On the hospice floor. Would’ve felt weird about raiding somewhere like that if there was anything else we could do, y’know?”
“…Oh.” I wince. “Yeah, that’s…”
The day is close at hand. It will come back and you will be whole. All of us will.
Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Whatever tragic backstory doesn’t change what she did. Or what I have to do.
“But you know what? You’re right! Us and her and everyone, we’re all in this to win. We owe it to all of you not to hold back over something like that.”
Ciaran leans in, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. Behind his mask, he looks the happiest I’ve ever seen him.
“So let’s get you what you need.”