I was never so glad to feel pavement beneath my aching feet than when we finally cleared the edge of the industrial park. We fled into darkening twilight until we were well onto the streets of Brightcrest. The weathered brick structures of the old side of town offered refuge in the darkness as we tramped our way together between street lights and the occasional car passing by on its way to the suburbs, hiding in dark alleys, neither of us daring to stop. Scarlet had directed me most of the way despite my faster pace. She seemed to have a better head for stealth than I did. But eventually, I stopped at a large dumpster behind a bar with an old-fashioned hanging wooden sign proudly proclaiming itself 'O'reilly's' and an abandoned shell of a Chinese restaurant. "Hold up." I called, seeing Scarlet panting frantically, carrying her own terrifying burden in her arms while I held Coraline. "Hold up, let's stop. You're going to hurt yourself. And we need to check on Cora."

"The monster..." Scarlet warned, still sporting the confident, serious tone I hadn't seen in her the whole week we'd worked together before. It gave me the feeling she was hiding something. But that was for another time. She followed my instructions to stop despite her words. She was panting heavily, and definitely not used to sprinting for this long.

"If it follows us this far, it's already more than just our problem, anyway." I told her, leaning against the bar's red brick wall to rest. I readjusted Coraline in my arms. She was still unconscious, but clearly breathing. I took in a deep breath and tried to calm myself. The backs of Coraline's legs had been scraped up, and there was a bruise around her arm where the monster had dragged her, but she didn't seem seriously injured otherwise. She must have passed out in terror when she was attacked. Which was probably a good thing. I saw what that monster had done to the other monster, and I was sure none of us could have survived that. If Coraline had fought back, and I had no doubt she would try, it would have pulverized her.

I grunted and winced as I felt my sore ankle pulse with pain when I put weight on it. I really hoped I was wrong about my curse theory. It wasn't feeling any better than I was right after I was stung. But it did make me think about what had happened back in that terrifying room, where reality was quickly falling apart.

I'd stepped out in front of the creature, prepared to dodge if it looked like it was trying to lunge at me like it had with its sibling out in the hallway. But it didn't. In fact, it stopped right where it stood. It just waited, staring, for lack of a better term, at me, until Scarlet intervened. It had felt like an eternity, having a standoff with something far more powerful than I could ever dream to be. But it didn't attack me. What did that mean?

I glanced at the thing in Scarlet's arms. Was this that thing's doing? What did it do to me?

Glancing up at Scarlet, leaning against the opposite wall, exhausted fog in her eyes, I felt like she was going to pass out. But she still held tightly to the dripping, wriggling remains of the smaller monster she'd insisted on retrieving. "Why are you still carrying that thing around?" I asked.

She looked up at me, suddenly alert, and scowled. "Why do you think? It saved us. Didn't deserve to just be left there."

I let out a long sigh. "It's a dangerous alien monster, Scarlet. Who knows what it was really thinking? It's too dangerous. And we need to take Cora to a hospital. We can lie about what happened, but you can't carry that thing in there with us."

Her brow creased sharply. "It's one of us, Thomas. This thing saved our lives. It saved Coraline's life. And yours. It's probably the only reason that thing isn't still chasing us down through the city after this one injured it. It put its own life on the line for us. So no, I'm not leaving it in some alley to die alone in a place it doesn't understand."

I let out a huff. She wasn't completely wrong. We would've been screwed if not for that blob. But it was still an otherworldly monster that we couldn't account for in an already complicated situation. "It's not a pet, Scarlet."

"No, it's not. It's smarter than that. It's an ally, at the very least." She drew in a large breath, getting her second wind, and stood up straight, her serious expression reclaimed. "Let's go to Coraline's house."

I grimaced. We couldn't just ignore Coraline's affliction after all that. "What about Cora? She's not healthy like you or me. What if she's dying?" I asked. Then I flinched when I heard a quiet whimper. Coraline stirred in her sleep, then settled into my arms again, still unconscious. I readjusted her and winced at a spike of pain running through my ankle again.

Scarlet watched as closely as I did. "She looks fine. If she gets worse, we can call an ambulance to her house. That's more believable than hauling her into the ER on foot, and it gives me a chance to hide this thing somewhere safe."

I clenched my teeth. This was a bad idea. We were already in some deep shit. We didn't need to make things harder by harboring a monster of our own. But Scarlet was being uncharacteristically bullheaded, and making a schism between us now would be an even bigger disaster. I gave a deep, frustrated sigh. "Fine. We go to Cora's house. You better be right on this."

She nodded, and we began to walk a more leisurely pace through the shadowed back alleys of the city, plotting our course through twisting unlit side streets until the buildings thinned out and forced us to the sidewalk. We had to slow our pace, both for the sake of Scarlet's stamina and my increasingly aching foot. We would just have to hope that no cop cars would pull by to spot the large man carrying an unconscious woman through the street before we reached the house we'd spent the last week combing through. It made for a much more ideal place to meet up for this than returning to the dorm halls, with its student body that was no doubt just as active now as it was midday.

As we walked down the sidewalk, I eyed the creature in Scarlet's arms suspiciously, taking note that the streetlights above failed to reflect off of its body. It was like a moving hole in the universe, now somehow less malevolent than the one it had maimed or the hole that it had emerged from, but just as unsettling. "What do you see in that thing, anyway? How did you calm it down like that? It's like you can talk with it."

"Don't think it understands me, no. Not my words anyway." Scarlet muttered. She slowed her pace, looking down into her arms. "It just reminds me of... someone. You wouldn't understand."

I narrowed my brow. "I'm not as much an idiot as people seem to think I am, Scarlet. You're talking about yourself, aren't you? You see yourself in that thing? And you've been acting so weird since I caught up with you and found you under that thing. Did something happen? Did it do something to you? Is it influencing you?"

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She let out a frustrated grumble and started to walk faster again. "Let's just get to the house."

I guessed it could wait until we took the unconscious woman and the alien monster out of the public eye. "Fine. But you better tell me what's going on once we're there."

"I'll explain what I mean. I won't promise more than that." She stayed silent, pushing herself forward. Thankfully, no cops drove by while we were limping up to the old house.

An old low stone fence, reinforced and punctuated with iron filigree sometime within the last couple of decades surrounded the property. The ground was filled with native grasses and shrubs rather than the typical manicured lawns that most of the surrounding properties and distant suburbs displayed proudly. A row of what must have been fruit trees lay bare at the side of the house, shedding their leaves early for the season. They and the gardens surrounding them had likely been largely uncared for since Coraline's grandmother passed, as evidenced by the weeds growing in the turned dirt and the slightly overgrown land to the sides of the paved walkway between the sidewalk and the door. Despite the early signs of peeling beige paint across the house's panelling and shutters, the house had a certain charm to it that I couldn't help but admire every time I approached the large raised porch surrounding the door.

Scarlet approached the door and pulled the handle, giving a frustrated sigh. "Real tired of locked doors right now." She looked back to me, then stepped aside and set the monstrous remains down on a wooden bench , the mass wriggling in protest as it broke away from Scarlet's arms. "Pockets." She said, approaching me and rummaging around at Coraline's waist. She found the keys in her pants after I lifted her a little higher to give her room, and in another moment, she'd retrieved her gruesome charge and we were inside, back to safety.

The inside was far more welcoming than the exterior. We'd just spent the last week making sure of that, after all. At its core, the building was old, rough varnished wood from floor to ceiling, carefully accentuated with area rugs, framed landscapes and photos, and tasteful modern light fixtures. Stepping inside was like walking into a much more warm and welcoming world than the newly vulnerable city we'd just left behind. Perhaps thinking of it as a portal to another dimension wasn't the wisest comparison at the moment, though.

I walked to the sitting room next to the entryway and carefully laid Coraline out across a couch, crouching down and feeling her forehead. No fever. That was good. I carefully removed the straps of her bag from around her shoulders and pulled it to my side. The book within would be far too precious to just leave under her resting body if we were going to reverse what we'd done. I watched Scarlet sit down in an armchair next to the door, cradling the wriggling black mass in her arms like an especially unwieldy infant. She stared down at it, her brow furrowed. She seemed to be inspecting it for something. Injuries, probably. But it was impossible to discern what exactly a wound looked like in the mass. I stood back up and approached Scarlet, folding my arms. "Okay, Scarlet, we're off the street. Now what is happening here?"

Her gaze drifted to the side, and her jaw clenched. She was hesitating. She groaned quietly, took a deep breath, and then seemed to compose herself. Her expression softened, and when she opened her mouth, her voice was much less harsh, like she'd returned to her usual demeanor, but now with a melancholic tone. "Thomas, do you believe someone is more a product of their birth or of the environment in which they were raised?"

The question caught me off guard. I didn't expect her to jump immediately into philosophy. "Uhh... some combination of both, I would assume." I mumbled, softening my stance as I pondered what she was getting at. "Are you saying you think you can raise this thing?"

She looked distracted as she continued. She looked tired. Almost sad. "And do you think that someone born in terrible circumstances, cursed to be drastically different from others... predisposed to terrible things... can they still learn to fit in and be a good person despite what they started as?"

I blinked. Oh. This was very personal to her. This was a deep, fundamental part of her beliefs, before we'd even met this strange creature. It wasn't influencing her, but it had slotted directly into what was already important to her. I didn't understand what exactly she was drawing this comparison from, though. Did she believe herself to be some kind of inherently evil person? Was there something wrong with her?

I let out a deep breath. A question for another time. This was about the monster. "Do you think this thing's like that? It's some kind of... awful, evil thing, but if you raise it right, you can make it good?"

She shook her head, continuing in a melancholic tone, "No. I can't. That's not how it works. I can't make it be anything. Only it can make itself anything, because no one else can understand exactly what's happening to it or what it needs. How it thinks. But I can give it the tools and the support it needs to learn. And once it understands better, I can treat it fairly and help it want to make itself better with that knowledge."

We stayed silent for some time while I tried to process what that meant. I sat down across from her and watched the disgusting black mass in her arms. She was projecting. A lot. But she really believed that this thing could help us. And maybe she was right. If that other thing was still alive, or if there were more of those things coming out of that hole in the world, this thing might help us hold them off in a way none of us could, until we could figure out how to fix whatever we'd broken.

Could this profoundly alien thing really learn to be... human? Is that what she was suggesting? This whole thing was so far out of all our leagues. And as much as I wanted to keep things simple, so we didn't overcomplicate an already fathomless problem, that might be our only chance at this juncture. We had to get an edge, even if there was just a chance. That hole was only getting worse when we left, and I doubted it was going to stop.

I let out an exasperated grunt, letting myself fall back against the soft chair, and letting myself slump down. "Fine. I guess we don't have a choice now, anyway. We'll just have to... figure out how to make sure this thing isn't some kind of psycho." I looked up and saw Scarlet staring at me, a scolding intensity in her eyes. "Hmm?" I sat up again. Did I say something wrong?

"Nothing." She muttered bitterly, returning her gaze to the creature in her lap, but her leer didn't diminish. I'd definitely said something wrong. She ran a hand gently over it, and it quivered slightly before settling into the shape of her lap as if it was relaxing into her. It had almost felt like it was... purring earlier. Did it think it was some kind of animal?

"So... will it just heal over time?" I wondered aloud. "Or do we have to do something?"

Scarlet stopped, becoming pensive. "I hadn't thought of that. What if it doesn't have natural healing capabilities like carbon-based life does?"

"I suppose we'll have to wait and see." I sighed, glancing over to Coraline. "We have to wait for her to wake up, anyway. I don't know if you know how to translate Sanskrit, but I don't know the first thing about linguistics."

"Me neither. Coraline's the only one who can read it, and she's probably the only one who can cast the spell. I don't think we qualify as 'witches'. That's what her grandmother referred to it as, right? Witchcraft?" I nodded while she continued petting the creature, getting little silent shivers from it in return. She stopped suddenly, letting out a quiet "Hmm. It got smarter and more physical over time, and it responds strongly to touch. Before it touched you, it was shapeless. It was probably also thoughtless."

"And it put something in my leg when it touched me." I seethed, narrowing my eyes to it and stretching out the aching tendons of my leg. "Still feels really weird."

Scarlet shrugged. "Maybe. I'm not certain yet. But focus. It suddenly became drastically more physical and smarter when it first touched you, and it became smarter and more complacent when it touched me. But that didn't keep happening after the first time we touched it."

I nodded slowly. I hadn't put that together myself, but it made sense. Physical contact with us was changing it, and the first 'dose' was stronger. "What are you suggesting?"

"I wonder if we could jumpstart its healing by exposing it to someone new." She pondered aloud.

I blinked slowly, and in unison, Scarlet and I turned to look at the unconscious Coraline. It had never touched her.