Ileene shrieked. “No! No!!” In this nowhere, her voice was everywhere.

It was like something fell out of my hand. Time came to a standstill, and then started tick-tocking its way forward once more—but this time, for real.

I was back in my body; it was still being guided by my doppelgenneth, only now, all of my selves stared Ileene face to face.

She wept, broken and defeated. She whispered: “What was that?”

A transorbital lobotomy, I thought-said.

Instead of miming the procedure with my body’s hands, I focused and conjured up a recording of the procedure that I’d watched in medical school. It filled a space in the ghost-room—a space in the palace my mind was becoming. We watched it together, peering into the void with a sense beyond sight.

Andalon, you should look away, I warned.

Even now, it still horrified me.

Within the gray void, the orbitoclast rose up to the head.

That’s an orbitoclast. It’s basically a modified ice pick. A lobotomy works by sticking the tip of the orbitoclast into the space in between the patient’s skull and the top of one of their eyeballs. The bone is pretty thin there.

The orbitoclast in the footage did as I said.

A hand brought a mallet into view.

Using a mallet to hammer onto the back of the orbitoclast, you can shatter your way through.

In the image, the mallet struck. My body wasn’t seeing the image with its eyes, but still, it flinched.

The key part is to twist the instrument, sweeping it out. This severs connections in the prefrontal cortex. That’s the part of your brain that makes you who you are. Your personality, your hopes, your dreams, your will to live; it’s all there, in a couple cubic inches’ worth of brainstuff. It’s the closest thing science has to a concept of a soul.”

As my doppelgenneth, with my body, I grabbed a coughing, crying child and lifted him up from his dead mother’s lap from where she sat in Ward E’s reception area. Her corpse was still warm, and the toddler in my arms and the waiting patients sitting by her side were all too sick to notice.

I rushed him into Nurse Kaylin’s outstretched arms.

Within, I continued my explanation, speaking to the ghost as she stared into the unseen gray, as if through a doorway.

I bet you’re wondering: why? Like many questions, the answer is sad and simple. By cutting up the prefrontal cortex in this way, you cut away a chunk of the patient’s soul, destroying enough of it to make the patient compliant and anodyne. It’s not the most exact science, though. Sometimes the patient seems barely changed—just… calmer, maybe a little slower. Those are the lucky ones. On the other hand, most lobotomized patients become kind of like friendly zombies. They walk and talk, maybe even ask you about the weather. But… whatever Light they had, it’s gone. Who they were is no more. A lot of the people who got sent to Prelatory concentration camps met with that fate. And, until recently, it wasn’t uncommon to see it done to violent or dangerous criminals, as a way to keep them from harming themselves or anyone else.

I played for Ileene’s ghost case studies I’d seen, a few of which I’d even had the misfortune of living through.

However, you, Ileene, managed to hit the unlucky jackpot. Sometimes, as was the case in your lobotomy… sometimes the damage done is quite severe. They can eat, moan. Sometimes they cry or yelp when they feel pain. Other times… they don’t. They don’t speak anymore; they just drool. But they’re gone. A vegetable takes their place.”

“That… it can’t be real,” she said, softly—awed. “But… it’s my memory. I felt it. It was like… living that moment… a second time through.”

She kept like that, for a moment: silent, her hand frozen against her head.

“Eyvan…”

And then, I showed her my memory of her body. Of her parents, carting her around in a wheelchair.

Ileene’s face contorted in pain. Pain of the soul. Tears flowed down her cheeks.

I felt your pain with you, Ileene, I said. Eyvan was there. He was the reason you couldn’t fight back. He could have rescued you. He could have defended you.

“No… no…” she shuddered.

My body shuddered along with her. My voice cracked.

Is that what you do when you love someone? Drown them in pain, and then stand by, doing nothing?

Then she cried—ugly crying. She was wracked with sobs. The Dove robe —her white habit—shook with her.

I still had more to say, but I didn’t. Unlike Eyvan and the other cultists, I actually was trying to help her. And that meant I could only push so far.

Suisei’s words echoed in my mind: find what is wrong, and learn not to do it.

Yes, that was right.

Therapy was a tool to help people understand what had gone wrong within themselves. It could not remake a person, nor should it have ever sought to do so. You could force a person to change, you could brainwash it into them, but that wasn’t true growth. Growth came from acknowledging one’s failings and striving to be better and do better. And that, that could only come from within. Like any good Lassedile, I liked to think that the ends did not justify the means. And to that end, I saw no point in taking measures to help someone if it meant only pain at the end. I would show them the truth as best as I understood it. I could give them guidance, should they ask for it. But what they did with the information I gave them ultimately fell to them.

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The frisbee was on their side of the field.

My instincts were to quietly walk up to her and hold her hand, or hug her, or give her shoulders to cry on, but… I held back. If anything, I was a bit worried what would happen if I tried and ended up screwing up.

Instead, I watched and waited, and, to my relief, the tempest within her began to retreat. Her thoughts were open to me. I knew them all, though I tried not to pry unless absolutely necessary. This was one of those occasions. The pain was still there swirling in the depths within herself that her blue eyes’ blinks only hinted at, but… it had quieted. At least for now.

I pulled my awareness away from hers, not wanting to intrude any more than I had to.

Her sobs had calmed into deep, unsteady breaths.

“You…” she sniffled, “you said my child died. Can you show me what happened?”

What a question to ask…

Andalon’s voice sounded through my thoughts. “I don’t want to see it again, Mr. Genneth. That poor lil’ guy. So sad.”

And I agreed with her.

I turned my mental face toward Ileene. “I think I could,” I said, but I shook my head. “But… I’m not sure you’d understand. There’s… so much more going on right now than you know. And… even if you did, I’m worried it would only bring you more pain. You’ve been through enough already.”

I was starting to sound like Dr. Horosha.

I laughed, sad and tired. You know, I kinda wish it was as simple as ‘it’s demons!’, I said, sighing in mind and body. But, outside of stories, monsters are rarely that simple.

Ileene’s spirit put on a caustic smile. “Your concern is touching, but…” her voice trailed off as she lifted her head in a stifled sob. “There’s a difference. I didn’t consent to be lobotomized. But this? This, I want. I need it. I need to know. I want to see my baby.”

Look away Andalon, I know you don’t want to see this.

I held out my mind’s hand, and, hesitantly, Ileene grabbed it, and then, I focused on the memory: that hideous thing, slithering out from its mother’s corpse, darting through our legs as it flailed across the floor. The scene played out before us in photorealistic detail in a holographic theater in the space behind my eyes. I felt every detail as if I was living it all over again. Every splish, every splash. Every yell. Every gut-wrenching horror. Every clank of metal. Every frightened twinge.

Ileene’s screams shook me out of focus, abruptly cutting off the memory. She shattered all over again. The ghost in front of me clutched at her face as she sobbed.

She moaned. “My poor baby. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never meant for… that… to happen to you. I would have stopped it, if I could have. I’m so sorry.”

My doppelgenneth was walking me down an isolated hallway, so I took the opportunity to step back into the driver’s seat, and then stand off to the side, darting into a vending machine niche. The machines were completely empty. Not even crumbs remained.

The ghost looked up to me, devastated and heartbroken. I reached out, offering my hand. She grabbed it and squeezed tightly, even though I barely sensed her ghostly touch as her fingers phased through mine..

“To think…” she whispered, “I thought I could have been a mother…” Inhaling sharply, Ileene looked up to me.

“Tell me, doctor. Why is this happening? Why all these horrors?”

Her words made me pause. It was strange. After all this time, and all that I’d learned, I hadn’t given any thought to why the fungus—the Darkness—was doing what it was doing.

Andalon… do you know?

“No, Mr. Genneth,” her voice said.

“I know people who are trying to fight it,” I said. “I’d like to think I’m one of them. The fungus wants to send us all to Hell, and that’s reason enough to want to fight it. But… why it wants that? I don’t know. Not even Andalon knows.”

“Does anyone know anything at all?” Ileene asked, lost and afraid.

“I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that question,” I said, in a forlorn attempt at humor.

Ileene shook her head. “No, no… you don’t need to sugarcoat it.” She wept like a broken-hearted nun. “It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” Ileene dipped her head in dejection. Her auburn hair cloistered around her face like sprigs of weeping willow, poking out from beneath her robe’s shawl. “The faith is a lie, the Innocents were a lie, the faith is a lie… I’m a lie…”

She looked straight ahead, her face pale as snow.

“And worse… I’m a poor lie. I’m roadkill. I died because I dreamed to fly. I’m a failure.”

She was crashing—spiraling.

I tried to intervene, but she cut me off.

Ileene released her spectral grip on my hand. “Look at me!” She pointed at her heart. “All that conviction, and I still amounted to nothing. Does conviction even count for anything? Or does it not matter, because it was all a lie?—I’m…” she shook her head, “this isn’t a radiant Paradise. Or was I only fooling myself into thinking that I’d truly believed it? Or, maybe the Innocents were right, and I just fell short?—like mother, like daughter.”

She stepped back, half-phasing into the wall behind her. She melted into the plastic flowers. “How can I ever have any convictions if I can’t tell what’s True and what isn’t?”

“Ileene—”

“—No!” she shook her head. It was like the wall was a pool, and she, hapless and drowning. “My grandfather was right! I really am worthless. I’m a failure. There’s no hiding it here. Not from you. You see me for who I truly am. You know all” Her gaze bore into mine like diamond dust drill-bits. “I played the game of life, and took all the wrong turns, and was too stupid to realize it until I was already dead.”

“No! You’re not a failure, Ileene,” I said. “Life isn’t a game to be won or lost.”

Ileene sneered, lurching forward, out of the wall. “The way you say that, it sounds like you almost believe it.” She nodded and wept. “Life is a game, Dr. Howle. We’re playing it against ourselves.”

Grandfather?

“Your grandfather said that to you?”

Swiftly rifling through her memories led me to a foulness I could barely describe.

“Oh God…” I muttered.

Even after decades of working with patients recovering from the repercussions of abusive family members, cases like Ileene’s never failed to tangle my heartstrings.

She smiled with self-hate. “And now, my parents are dead. Dead because of me.” She stared me in the eyes. “I thought I was part of something greater than myself, but now…” She looked away.

“Ileene… it’s not selfish to want answers, or personal fulfillment. And, not only that, let me tell you…” I gulped. My throat was dry. “I think that fulfillment is anchored by our deepest feelings. We don’t get to choose what moves us, just like we don’t get to choose what makes us feel that we’re worth more than the flesh we’re printed on. It’s a double-edged sword. It hurts when we fall short of our hopes and self-expectations, and yet… once you figure them out, once you find what drives you…” I clenched my human hand, “as long as you can keep them in your memory, no one can ever take your compass from you.”

“What good is that for?”

I told her what my sister would have told her; what Dana had told me.

“Feelings are concrete and steel. You need an earthquake to shake them. But truth? Truth is sand.” My words turned quiet. “And the winds often blow in unexpected directions.” I cleared my throat, trying not to cry. “Ileene, I believe that our beliefs matter because of the depths of our reactions. It’s passion that makes our beliefs precious, not truth. What we don’t know is an abyss, vast and terrifying, but… feelings? Our feelings are clear; clear as a cloudless sky.” I made the Bond-sign and then put my hand on my heart. “As long as you have heart and memory, no one can take your beliefs from you.”

She stared at me—or, rather, through me—her jaw slightly ajar.

“If what I know isn’t true, then it doesn’t mean anything. It’s meaningless. It’s not special. It has no value.”

“Ileene,” I shook my head, “take it from a mushy-brained agnostic like myself. Beliefs are easily changed, feelings… not so much.” I smiled sadly.

An ache built up in my head, forcing me to squint. Ileene’s form flickered before my eyes, like static on a screen.

“I thought my mother was the failure,” she said. “Mom failed to find anything in the life of a suburban housewife worth living for. She failed to stand up to all the hate-mongers in her life, so she decided to make me her do-over project. And she did, and I let her, and so I’m a failure.” She laughed. “I’m not even real; I’m a failed rebellion packaged into human form. It’s all a sham, nothing but a sham.”

And then she was gone.