"Fuck!!"

A monochrome sky above, obscured by the cold towers of a greyed out concrete jungle. Sprawled pathetically on the ground among the filth and litter typically anticipated of a large city, lay a young man.

The streets were void, roads empty. The young man, blood caked across the side of his face, had no reason or motivation to get his ass off the middle of an intersection of a major crossing. If he had done this in the real world, Gacrux would have been the victim of a merciless series of hit and runs by now.

But what would dying again matter? Been there, done that.

"Fuck," A whisper this time. As if it was really, finally, sinking in.

He hoped his sister didn't see his body.

He hoped his death hadn't made the news. He thinks the tourist in front of him had been doing a livestream before he died. He thinks the moment his head blew open like a chunky fleshy egg might well have been caught live on camera.

If that were the case, his last words to his sister would've been a waste.

"Hahh, I can't believe this. The runner was waiting on me- I left the kids to deal with the cop on their own- fuck! Imai..."

All the people he'd left behind, left waiting for a check-in that was never going to come. The list was endless.

A glimpse at the last year of his life: Dropping out of school. Ageing out of the system. A shady job that kept him fed for a few days at a time. Street rats turned friends turned trusted crew. His half-sister, applying for a scholarship at a prestigious school. Cleaning up his shit so he didn't risk her chances at a better future. Ghosted ex-allies and desperate old enemies.

"For once in your life, you better stay off the internet until I get back, you hear me." His voice was all watery. Aggravating. "I went to all the trouble to make sure you weren't looking, you know? Could've called my crush and confessed with my dying breath but nooo."

A snapshot of the last minutes of his life: A busy pedestrian crossing. An unexpected warning text. A panicked phone call. A gunshot.

Gacrux rubbed at his face, inevitably smearing the blood worse, and clapped his cheeks. Smacks the soft sentimental feelings far away into the metaphorical stratosphere. That baggage might crash land one day but at least he can put off the re-entry for later. He had places to be, hell to climb out off.

Slowly he sat up and got to his feet.

Here's Gacrux's easy three-step guide to clawing your way back to the land of the living. Step one: Get up and walk.

As he picked a direction that would lead him to a train station, he inspected the stores and signs along the intersection. They seemed exactly as detailed as they should be. Stopping by a news stand, he could read the contents of one of the magazines perfectly fine. When he sliced his finger along the edge of the paper, the pain was just as stinging as it should be. Not a dream.

It had to be hell that Gacrux found himself in. Or his own personal brand of it. What other kind of afterlife could possibly be expected of scum of his standing? Plus, there was no other way to explain the awful stillness of this mirror-like reality where the streets were exactly as he remembered in life, but vacant like a practice sketch. Colourless and utterly devoid of life, but technically correct.

The intersection wasn't far from the station but arriving at the central plaza that lead to the underground metro system gave him pause. What had once been a bustling area crammed with crowds of warm bodies was now abandoned. At once, the silence rang loudly in his mind, as if to recreate the ambient noise he should have been hearing from a place like this.

No buskers, no street promoters, no sales staff, no patrolling cops, no loitering randos, not even the occasional influencer doing interviews.

"There's no one here." His voice echoed. If this was hell, then it was preposterously empty.

"Not quite," A stranger's voice from behind. Enter Virgil, he thinks.

A woman climbs up an escalator leading down to the underground metro. A weirdly familiar woman, actually. Cropped pepper streaked hair, lazy slouch, sweeping winter coat and a burnt out cigarette in her fingers that for a startling moment looked like talons as she flicks them over an ashcan. If it weren't for that and the deep gouging scar across one eye, he guesses he might have seen her at any number of shelters over the years. But no, he wouldn't forget a face like that.

"Are you aware that your face looks like particularly unappetising bolognese?" The woman declares as if hearing his thoughts. Her head tilts curiously down at him, taller by just a finger's width.

He startles, suddenly remembering the dried blood and assorted gore that came with being shot in the head. He was lucky that he woke up seemingly fine despite the blood because the shooter had pretty shoddy aim even at such close range, the bullet entering through the side of his cheek instead of straight through the brain dome like the bastard probably intended. It would've been infinitely worse if he woke up with his jaw hanging off his face and bone fragments in his eyeballs. Huh. Maybe this wasn't hell.

Wiping at his face, he can't help but snap back like a gag reflex, "Still prettier than yours."

Damnit. Great idea, antagonising the first person he's met since dying. God, angels, satan, if this was some kind of denizen of the afterlife, a judge of the dead or some such, he would definitely be in hot water right now.

The woman, for the most part, seemed to find him a little amusing at least. She snorts and shakes her head but doesn't reply, choosing instead to observe silently as he tried in vain to rub the tacky mess with his fingers.

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He glares at the judgement in her eyes and gives up. "Do I know you from somewhere?"

He thinks he imagined the disappointed slump of her shoulders as she shrugs and turns on her heel. "Ah, drats. Can't blame you for forgetting. Typical pretty boy behaviour." Before he could even think about what that meant, she starts towards the intersection where he came from.

"Hey! Wh-" Who are you? Where am I? How do I leave? A wheel of questions spins in his mind. Only one lucky winner gets an all expense paid trip to reality. One way only, naturally.

"How did you end up back here again, anyway? It was really hard letting you go the first time, you know. It messed me up real bad, I cried all day," the woman drawls. Something told him she wasn't being entirely dishonest though. She glances over her shoulder, lingering over the blood and locking eyes for just long enough to say, "Died again did you?" Before turning back and walking on.

"Oh..." This vague bitch.

Here were two facts of life, unsolicited, irrefutable: Young children were one of the most vulnerable members of society, easily taken advantage of, or worse. Orphaned bastard children without a single adult invested in their well-being even more so.

Unrelated, here were two words commonly used to described Gacrux, from the circumstances of his birth all the way up to the moment he got kicked out of school for suspected gang activities: 'less fortunate'.

"Welcome back to the Mneme," Amice calls like an afterthought a distance away, in the tone of a woman who once brought him back from the brink of death when he could still count his age on two hands and was going to do so again.

That's right. This wasn't his first rodeo.

He hung his head angled up at the sky and sighed deep and exasperated. Yeah, he hadn't known the weirdo for very long the first time round but it was ridiculous, the things the human mind forgets in the face of the more pressing day-to-day.

Here's an easy riddle: What did Gacrux's tenth and eighteenth birthday have in common?

"I could've sworn you got out of here when I was ten," he calls out, trailing after his once-companion reluctantly.

That finally gets the woman to stop in her tracks. Spins a full one eighty.

"I got out? There's a version of me outside? I did it?" He backs up a little as she marches right up to his face, her singular blue eye wide like the moon.

"Version of you?" Is what he gets stuck on. The woman pouts at him. Okay, who knew puppy dog eyes apparently worked even with just the one eye. "I--Yes. Someone said you paid my hospital bills and all the physical therapy too. Saved me twice with that."

She frowns. "But you didn't recognise me. Have we never met outside of here?"

He shook his head no. He would've remembered her easier if he ever saw that big fuck off scar. Whatever happened there must have occured after he last saw her eight years ago. Her frown deepens.

Gacrux examines the pieces of the puzzle he knows: When he'd first died at ten (his heart had stopped for a full three minutes, the paramedic had said), he fell into an empty world and met a stranger. Whatever happened, happened and whether it had been a figment of his imagination at the height of delirium or not, he had never been sure. Until the woman had done something to push them out of the Mneme and back to the land of the living.

There was a blank in his memory from the trauma, he knew. It couldn't possibly have been as easy or cut and dry as he remembers. He'd eventually taken the whole thing as a fantasy.

Other people dreamed of light at the end of the tunnel, he just happened to dream of empty cities and a stranger with sharp talons and way too many eyes and- What was important at the time was that he'd lived to see another day. So he'd put it at the back of his mind and moved on like a sane member of society.

And now he was back. Because he was dead again.

He studies the woman again, dusting off old theories about his childhood experience. Memories of this place were so spotty, he couldn't tell fact from fiction. He couldn't tell if she had aged or not. Maybe this was another fantasy? A logical continuation of his childhood method of coping with death.

The woman took a moment to collect herself, closing her eye and putting away the wild energy she charged at him with. When she looks at him again, she is once again the distant, airy stranger that had walked out of the metro.

"I doubt you remember much but you seem to know who I am at least," she says like a question.

He must have made a face because she sighed and turned around again. "Not even that, huh."

"Sorry. We met the first time I ended up here, right? I was only ever assured you were real because of the hospital. I wanted to find you in real life, even if it's only to thank you for the money. Not just anyone can pay off a complete stranger's bills. Let alone a child's."

"But how would a newly orphaned kid go about tracking me down? Nah, don't worry about it. You had a lot going on I'm sure. You can call me Amice, in case you forgot that too."

He hadn't. Amice Pacia, the woman who once simply introduced herself as a traveller. Who hadn't looked nearly as human as she did now, when she'd met him for the very first time.

"Who are you really, lady?" They walk towards the intersection like this, Gacrux trailing a step behind spinning his wheel of questions and spitting them out just to see the answers she'd give. At the very least, he could figure out how well she lied.

"What do you think?" She asks with seemingly genuine curiosity.

"If this is the afterlife, I figure you'd be god. Or the boatman. Maybe a demon." Can't possibly be an angel. Do angels smoke? He was rewarded with a bark of laughter for his efforts.

"Sad to say, I can't answer the really important questions when your memory is this spotty. We're in the Mneme. A labyrinthine realm that reflects all memories. Everything you see here is a reproduction of yours, mine and the collective memory bank of humanity. I myself am a figment of memory left behind by the real Amice, a hundred years into her captivity."

"Captivity?" The explanation about the Mneme was familiar but there was a lot to unpack in that last bit.

"This realm was uniquely created to ensnare and imprison travellers such as myself. Though I have unfortunately been the sole occupant until you came along," her deadpan tone was betrayed by an enthusiastic wave of her fingers. He tracked them closely, half expecting to see bird-like claws instead of blunt nails.

"Uhuh. Did you figure that before or after I left?" If her words held any weight, then what a sad realisation to have. The idea that this woman had been left wandering this lonely place by herself for so long while he'd gone about the rest of his life none the wiser was daunting.

"Well, I had to try and make contact like I promised after you left. How else would I have-" She shuts her mouth so fast he hears her teeth click. Sees her tense up to the ears as they walked.

Suspicious. He'd start feeling like a parrot if he kept regurgitating her words back at her and he also had better things to ask but he weakly tried to lighten the mood with, "Did you find the fountain of youth too while you were in here?"

He couldn't see her face but he got the feeling she was raising a judgemental eyebrow. Fine, so it wasn't as reassuring as he thought. Who was she to judge?

"Let's just say any attempts to end my life hadn't succeeded even before all of this."

"Alright, oh all knowing one, do you happen to know why I'm back here again?"

A flippant shrug. Great. Translation: even if she did, she wasn't sharing jack all. Which was fair, since he was doing the same. But since this world was influenced by memory, "Are you trying to avoid manipulating my memory of things by sticking to objective facts?"

"As precocious as ever, I see."

That explained the vagueness and deflection. He would have to recall what happened eight years ago for himself somehow. Didn't make it less annoying though. He was curious about the 'hundred years' bit too but he learned his lesson on insensitivity. After all, this was a woman who had seemed shocked at the idea that a version of herself had escaped her prison at all. Could a memory feel jealous of its real self, he wonders. A question for another time.

For now, he followed the woman cautiously.