Light footsteps on a dismal street. Devon was running at a mild jog but couldn’t keep this pace up forever.

”Thats correct, even with me focusing all your energy on maintaining this level of exertion, your body is untrained and unpracticed.”

She skirted to a stop, a wave of red sand flew in an arch and fell scattered some ten feet ahead.

”you can still walk, you didn’t need to stop completely”

”I need a second.” It was odd. Adam was trying his best to hide it, but she could feel her body screaming at her. Muscles that had never before worked this hard tensing and untensed wildly. A heartbeat as rapid fire as a landlord on eviction day. It was only when she focused on her legs did she realize that by all accounts she shouldn’t be standing.

The space Adam occupied in her head fidgeted. “I’m sorry. Previously, my wielders were used to this level of physical exercise.”

A very nice way to say she was embarrassingly out of shape.

Trying to assert herself in some way, she patted at her jeans, searching for money. “So, if we want to leave for Luminescia, there are usually ferries every few hours. I think the fare is-“ The familiar weight in her pocket was not there. She searched her other pocket to find only air.

”Ah crawl shit.”

”What is it?” Adam said, weirdly anxious.

”I left my money at the diner.” She said with a groan. Patting her pockets again even though it was fruitless. Fuck. She didn’t want to deal with her boss, there would be so much to explain, and then he’d make her work overtime to boot.

”Your boss is not a good person, is he Devon?”

She sighed, scratching her back and trying to orient herself. “Wow. Nothing gets past you.”

”I am in your brain and aware of all your base emotions and thoughts. You’re scared of him.”

She closed her eyes tight and grimaced, as if he could be crushed. Slowly he rosed in front of her, a dirty reflection of her miserable face.

”Devon.” Adam said flatly. “He should be scared of you.”

…

The diner was empty when they arrived. It was always open hypothetically, but in practice it was basically closed whenever Tread wasn’t there.

29 and 31’s food was still in their booth, half eaten and cold. Devon took both plates and dumped them in the trash. Old habits die hard. Judging from their screams, they hadn’t died easy.

She felt no sorrow from their deaths, only frustration that she hadn’t done it. She could feel Adam agreeing with her, a soft barely liminal pressure coiled around the back of her brain. This quickly shifted into something closer and heavier when the bathrooms doorknob turned.

They both knew who was on the other side.

”Remember what we talked about.”

She clutched Adam so tightly old wounds reopened.

Tread walked out from the bathroom glumly, wiping a substance it was best not to think about on his crusted yellow apron. He glanced up thoughtlessly and did a double take when he saw her. Despite everything a part of her was hoping he wouldn’t see her.

“Devon Near!” He said her name like a slur, his tongue getting tripped up on sharp consonants that didn’t exist. “What the fuck are you doing here, why aren’t you in the back?”

She quickly tilted her head down and walked towards the kitchen door. She was frightened, and she didn’t want him to see.

He slid into her path, his bulk an almost perfect silhouette for the doors oval frame.

“We’ve been empty since those two Numbers left, but that’s no excuse for you to vanish. Finally got a date or something, that the situation?”

”Devon, be calm. He’s no threat to you anymore. He is not a pleasant man, that is clear, but you’re stronger than him now. This can end peacefully if thats what you want.”

“It’s not.”

His pinprick eyes stared down, noticing the blood.

“Hey…” Tread said. “Your hands are bloody… why didn’t you clean that shit up?”

“I can make this easier for you, like we talked about.” Adam offered. Tread moved ever forward, his footsteps heavy, his breath foul. His presence permeated the space, making Devon feel lesser simply by being near him. “But this will be unprovoked, premeditated. It will feel different, and it will be hard to come to terms with.”

“You know what, I don’t care.” He chuckled to himself, the sound was like mud being cleared from his throat. “If you killed someone, join the club. Thats the human experience. I remember when I popped my cherry. Made me the man I am today. Just do it on your own time is all.” His hands reached out, bulbous and off white, like edible clay starting to mold. “We’re gonna get the dinner rush soon, you know that.” His voice lowered an octave. “So get in the back and finish your shift.”

She saw a woman doomed to misery. She saw death the slow long way. Her pulse went rapid fire.

”On your word.”

“Do it,” she yelled.

Power, cool and electric, sprouted from her brain stem and rushed through her body. Tread halted at the words, suddenly very concerned. She looked up at him, she knew her face must look bloodshot and manic, she was breathing like oxygen was going out of business. Adam was doing something to her body, even more intense than the stress test. Calibrating it, fixing it, breaking it, pushing it in line for one hell of a dry run. Everything she hated was being burned out.

“What- hey I- you’re not- calm down. Callmmmm the fuck down, you’re hyperventilating. Did I scare you? Are you scared of me? Why the fuck would that be?” Tread said, backing up into the kitchen. He frowned, “You don’t spread lies about me, do you? Trying to- to frame me for something unpleasant? Say I’m- I- I wouldn't hurt a floatrat! I was nice enough to hire you. I pay you, give you a purpose, and I’ve never laid a hand on you.”

Not fucking true.

“Not true at all.”

“Come on. Stop this-“ he waved his hands wildly, “this weird shit. All is forgiven, but you’re fired. I can’t- it’s ridiculous Devon, it’s unacceptable and not the first time you’ve pulled this sort of stunt. I’ll have you work till payday but thats it. You’ll get to work. You’ll get on the grill, you’ll get out of my sight, and in a week you’ll get your paycheck and- hey, hey, look at me.” He snapped his fingers, brushing against her nose. “Look at me when I’m talking, Devon!”

She closed her eyes. Adam opened them. Her pupils were now covered in scratches.

She moved faster than Tread could react.

(“Hey what are you-) A quick punch to the nose,

(“FUCK”) severing the spinal cord,

(“Krk”) putting a large gash into his head by way of Adam.

(“SKRCHH”) As the wound slowly drained, Devon carved out a small cut in the floor, the same size and shape as the gash. When Tread fell his wound corresponded with the cut, making it seem like he tripped and cracked his head clean open. An embarrassing, miserable death for an embarrassing miserable man. How clumsy of him.

Devon opened her eyes. She had felt and seen the whole thing and knew what awaited her when she looked down.

She still laughed, of course. He was a bad person and now he was dead, why wouldn’t she laugh? She felt fucking great.

But then she felt bad

and then she felt sick.

“That’s natural. It’s okay to feel disgust.” Adam intoned, vibrating at a calming frequency, “You reached out and acted destructively. Humans are meant to create, not destroy. You’ve killed three times and never did it feel good. You are reacting like a human should, Devon.”

She screamed once, a short gasp that was more like a burp, then fumbled for her bag full of orbits. There were less than she expected. With reluctance, she searched his cargo shorts for anything of value. He had a bag with 25 or so, better than nothing. She pressed a smeared handprint on the glass of the revolving door as she left. A parting gift.

.

.

.

“What was that?”

“That was me, channeling your body and it’s latent energy. You’ve experienced it before, but never for that long or to such a degree.”

“No, I mean… fuck, you were right that it was different but… fuck.”

They were anonymous in the busy evening crowd, the fish market was filled with the good joy of a wet season still in full swing. The terror that had gripped the Legacy had not trickled down to its subjects, or it had and shifted to joy from the prospect of a regime change.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

They passed no less than three people handing out leaflets, all claiming to be in conversation with Adam himself. Or as he was commonly known now, “Lemure’s End”.

A facsimile of Adam’s face, or the face of his last host, stared down at them from a LED screen they had to walk under, seeping into the market. News traveled fast when there was nothing else to go around.

She walked by some well to do women fighting over a jewel encrusted hat one had bought.

A woman from behind them all took out a Remark and cut the throat of the woman currently winning the tug of war. Scared and surprised by the escalation, the surviving women backed off, and the murderer took her prize, placing it on her head at a jaunty angle. Then she went back to her booth, and took it off so that it could be sold again, raising the price by three.

Devon could feel Adam shiver in her hand. “Was it like you thought it would be?”

She didn’t bother lying, of course she had entertained the thought.

“It was… well, complicated by you actually doing the deed, you know. I just watched it.”

One time she had come close to killing Tread, a year ago. She worked out how to do it and when. Even did a test run, culminating in her tapping him on the shoulder instead of a death blow. But the look he gave her, his beady bug eyes were devoid of any hatred, only curiosity. She stopped planning for his murder after that.

“It’s okay to be conflicted.”

She breathed in deeply before replying, feeling the part of her that was Adam approve of this didn’t temper her anger. “Is there any way I can turn you off, just for a moment?”

“I can try. If you give yourself a word, say, Disregard, I’ll make myself leave your mind until you want me to come back in. You can say, Return.”

“But will you actually leave?”

“No… I couldn’t leave your brain. Just think of it like me covering my ears.”

“Disregard,” she said, and thought immediately of how happy the death of her boss made her feel. She was partly lying to herself, she was conflicted, but she deserved to gloat. He was dead, she had killed him. She deserved to celebrate even if there was nothing heroic about how she had done it. It was her hands that held the knife, it was her face that was his last.

She saw a man fighting in some sort of facsimile of Remark combat, him and his opponents using animatronic insects who fought with weapons that were nary a sliver. So beguiled was she at the one man’s combatant that she didn’t realize that her foot had stepped on the other. This one’s controller, a youth with a broken nose (wait, was that Norman?) charged clumsily at her. She dodged and the young man bumped into a butcher, wrapped in his wares like an effigy to sacrifice. The butcher went at the man's throat. Devon didn’t bother to watch it transpire.

“Return,” she said. Adam made a sound like he had been holding his breath.

“That was far harder than I expected.”

“Oh.” Devon said. “I’m- sorry?”

They passed a wild grinning man, or perhaps woman, being shoved out of a bar. Taking a swig from a bottle, they lit and tossed it at the bar, alighting the establishment in flames to oohs and awws.

“Please don’t apologize,” Adam said quickly. “I am the guest here, you should not apologize for having boundaries. It’s welcome, it wasn’t the case with my last host.”

The crowd around them applauded and showered them with coins as the flames triumphed. Delighted, the arsonist hoisted the money up and walked confidently to the burning bar before stopping at the entrance, realizing their mistake. With a sheepish grin, they turned to leave, but the crowd had cornered them. There was no escaping. With a reluctant sigh, tears sizzling from the flames, they walked into the bar. Their hand, raised as if to order, charred first. Everyone cheered.

“What was he like?” Devon asked, happy to change the subject (and distract herself from the impromptu immolation)

“A terrible man, or so he claimed. I don’t know if I agree. I think he only did as much evil as was common in his world, but he had a heightened radar for it, and thus, he felt far worse than men deserving of such guilt. Chaucher Someone, that was his name. But he…” There was an abrupt pause. “… He died early on, so I had the task of puppeteering his corpse longer than I personally knew him. Something I did for far too long.”

She considered this as they came across a back alley. Without knowing if it was a shortcut, she went down it.

In the alleyway, lit by a light source she couldn’t see, was a woman appraising a pile of bodies. Besides her was a woman who, Devon assumed, was responsible.

This second woman was beating them into a fine slurry, making it harder to distinguish the bodies individually outside of hue and size. Every so often, the woman watching would sprinkle a fine mist on the other. This act emboldened her violence, making her mash faster and faster. It was pointless, quite clearly; corpses could not be made corpses any further than they already were.

Devon sneaked past them quietly, switching into a dead sprint once she was out of the alleyway and back to the relative safety of the main way.

They had come to the main dock, which had expanded itself in the years since Devon had last been. New planks branching off of old ones, offshoots either outgrowing their mother slats or being forgotten until the only visitors were the tide. The only ships docked were fishing trawlers, small private boats held by salt of the earth captains Devon had no interest in trying to coerce. With a sigh she sat down on the edge, feeling lightened by the glow from the passenger ship that would take them to Luminescia, and then outside of the Drum, and from there, and from there…

“You’ve never left, have you?”

Not without lack of trying. “I thought if I played my cards right, I’d be trusted enough to leave town on dust runs. From there, I don’t know. Cut my hair, change my name, try things out South. I hear it’s better. Do you know anything about Luminescia?”

The City That Welcomes. They could see its bright neon lights from the other side of the river. You couldn’t see individual buildings, just the warm glow of it.

“What we can see of it now is the extent of my knowledge. The demise of the Grand is our objective, we must locate them first, the only way to do that is to explore.”

“Where have you been so far?” She asked.

“Too little, even though I have been doing this far too long. I’ve been through the vast night and made it to the home of those who speak in silence. I found myself in tunnels that opened up to secondaries skies where squabbling cities dueled like people. I have braved the contradictory colonies of Saint Casca and sought a city called Arch that curved around all this worlds virtue, but all I found were stories. I lived in a massive room that was itself an empire, then miles and miles of purple beige and towering white blocks that called out to me in voices I knew, urging me to join them inside. And before all of that, I was in a completely different context. With a woman who looks, or looked, very much like yourself.

The Capacity he mentioned, back at the hotel. Devon was not excited to learn more. “I think the boat should be here soon.”

“What are the odds of that, do you think?” It was a harmless question, but it made her neck hairs bristle.

She shifted in her spot, looking down at the sea and seeing her own reflection mime her words. “It seems like a safe bet. The red flare is on, that means it will be docking shortly.” They were alone here, even the sounds of a busy night in the city felt muted. “I’m not sure why no one else is here.”

There were only a few solitary fishermen who may as well have been statues. One in a massive overcoat cast a line, and then was cleanly pulled into the water moments later by a very strong tug. None of the other fishermen seemed to care.

“It makes me think of bookends, Devon. And that means something.”

She stopped responding. Glancing back over to where the fisherman was caught, she saw a different fisherman in his place, soaking wet, and looking amorphous, like an abstract sketch of the first. She didn’t think much of it.

“I’m sorry, did I offend you? Or was I too oblique? What I mean is… well, do you still have books? Was that metaphor clear? Your tech level here seems… contradictory, I’m sorry, not a criticism, that's the only word for it. Where I’m from it was far more-“

“I want you to stop talking about her, please.”

In the recesses of her mind she could feel Adam’s consciousness retreat. When he talked again it was much softer.

“Outside of appearance, I don’t consider you anything like her.”

She laughed, “Well, that’s great. I’m gonna spend the next eternity worrying what it means that I’ve stolen someones face.” She pointed at it for the benefit of no one. “And I was just coming to like it, too!”

The boat was close enough to make out details of the trawler, it wasn’t the passenger ship she was familiar with. It had been made from the hollow out shell of a dammedcrustaceon, a good 60 feet from one end to another. Figures stood on the bow, watching, their silhouettes marked red by the flare above them. She checked on the orbits in her pocket, wondering how much was worth a passable bribe.

“Is it not common knowledge that the shifting waters-“

“There’s a difference.” She was standing up now, needing room for motion as she worked through anger. “Between knowing something, and living through it.” She threw Adam up in the air, he clattered to the ground. An attempt had been made to catch him.

“Fuck.”

She bent down to pick him up.

There was the sound of metal swinging through air, and then a boot was crushing her hand.

A voice filtered through oil. “To leave?”

Her fingers grazed the remark under the heavy gravity of the boot. She could feel Adam moving itself in an attempt to get out from under it, but he was as stuck as she.

”Was your plan really just to leave?”

“It’s the woman we saw in the hotel, Devon.” Adam said. “The Lemure agent.”

“There’s… too fucking many of you guys,” Devon said through gritted teeth. She was too angry to be scared. 37, Hailien, had a reputation for a good reason. And before today Devon had thought she was half way decent.

Hailien did not answer. She had taken on Devon’s vigil from before and was staring at the ship. The glare of the red light emblazoned on her face meant it was close. Devon’s vision was limited, and was only able to glance up, no more.

“That was a question.” Boot pressed down harder, Devon winced, she could handle the pain, but that didn’t mean she liked it. “Did you plan on leaving using that ship?” She pointed her Remark towards the light.

“Yes.”

“I want to not fucking die! So yes! I want to leave!” She had gotten a finger on top of Adam now, and was slowly inching her finger towards the tip of the boot, her hope being that she could create enough lift with her wrist to pull her hand out with Adam in hand.

And then? Stab her, let Adam’s honed instincts take over and make the world a little safer for them, and everyone else.

Silence. “That’s probably the smartest choice. Yes.”

With an animal ferocity enhanced by Adam, Devon pulled her hand out, remark included. She jumped, a good seven feet, high enough to have her knees hover over the amused metal face of 37.

She pounced on the neck. Her arms sliding around to the back, ignoring for now the cracks in her own as her body contorted and voiced disapproval with pain mostly muffled. Her weight wasn’t enough to throw her larger opponent to the ground, but her reflexes were faster. She turned around and held Adam to 37s bulging throat.

“Okay, I don’t plan to kill you, but I am gonna stay on you for as long as I can, with this Remark on your throat until I feel safe enough to take it off. First, we’re gonna get on that-” Her well thought out speech died.

She could see the ship clearly now. She understood why 37 did not struggle.

The ship was docked, and on the gangway was a woman Devon recognized. How could she not? It was the mayor of Gutworth, one of the Constants. She heard her voice every morning, Yucian Vast.

The woman was dressed in the fur of albino crywolves, a strange and beautiful sight. Behind her men and women in slick raincoats lined the ship, each with their Remark out, held high like torches.

Yucian walked up to the two of them, hiding a smile behind a silk soft hand. “Marvelous darling, let’s do lunch sometime.” She said to 37, her voice soaked with derision.

She reached for Adam. Adam bit back. The cut open her palm and was about to do more before 37 turned around and put her hands on Devon’s throat.

“That’s not very sporting, from both of you.” Yucian wagged a finger and grabbed hold of Adam, who offered no resistance. “Come, let’s get you on that boat. First class Devon, you’ll want to see how the other half lives.”

As they walked to the boat, 37 holding Devon aloft like she was last weeks trash, whispered something.

“You interest me. Do you think you could kill a constant? Blink twice for yes.”

Her range of motion was limited, but she blinked twice.