"Your aunt rang me yesterday and she goes, 'have you seen the news?' and I say yes Vera of course I've seen the news, that's my child. And then she's like 'oh Natty I'm so, so sorry,' so I say 'what are you sorry for, she's not dead, I can tell you that much- don't go saying she's dead thank you kindly. ' And then she—and I still can't believe this—she goes, 'oh no, I mean because he killed that poor girl.' And- I'm there speechless, and she's carrying on like 'I know this wasn't your fault, honey, this doesn't reflect on your or Clive, he was always disturbed wasn't he' and so I go 'shut your mouth right there, first of all it's 'she' not 'he' now, and my child did not murder anybody.' And she- she's all 'oh are you still doing the trans thing even after all this' and I- I could not believe it, I mean, she's your aunt. Our own family! Really. I hung up the phone, is what I did. It's just- it's not on, thinking you would murder somebody, and to lay that on you when you're going through all this. That is of course, dear, you're sure you really didn't...?"

April rolled her eyes even further into the back of her skull, clutching the receiver tightly against her ear.

"No, mum, I didn't murder anyone."

"Good. Good! That's what I thought, I-"

There were muffled noises from down the line that April couldn't make out.

"-no, Clive, she says she definitely didn't murder anybody."

This was followed by more muffled noises, with the vague cadence of a man's voice. April listened for a few seconds, frowning into the battered plastic handset.

"What's he saying, mum?" she asked eventually.

"Your father says: 'good, because we were okay with the trans thing but not with you being a'- a what, dear?"

More muffled voices.

"A 'murder pervert'."

April scowled. "Great. Well, tell dad I'm definitely not a 'murder pervert'."

"Yes, yes dear, I will. Oh, and he wants me to ask again, are you definitely safe?"

She looked sideways through the plastic window of the phone booth, the view blurred from scratches, burn marks and other graffiti. She was still just barely able to make out Kroakli as an alarming collection of wet globules and spines crammed into the shadows beneath a neighbouring waste bin. She imagined it was grinning at her.

Turning back towards the receiver, she said, "yes, mum, I'm definitely safe. I- I'll be fine."

"It was such a relief to hear from you! Your father has been going mad with worry, for all he pretends- oh, yes you were, Clive, you've been pacing the halls ever since-" This was followed by more muffled noises, until, "-well, yes, but we all cope in our own ways."

She heard a faint clacking as her mother pressed the receiver more firmly against her cheek.

"I still don't understand why you can't just come home." A male voice chimed in in the background, more audible this time. "She should go to the police!" Her mother spoke again. "Your father thinks you should go to the police, dear."

"Yes, I heard." She pressed two fingers into her forehead, as if trying to burrow down into her brain. "I- I'm sorry, it's hard to explain. Just, everything is- a lot of things are happening right now, and I- I can't come home just yet. I need to-"

The faint male voice cut across her own. "Is she on the run?" A slight clicking. "Your father wants to know if you're on the run?"

"Tell dad no, I'm not on the run."

"Good, because fleeing custody only makes things harder on you in court, less likely to get sympathy from the judge, especially with murder-" "Your father says-"

"I didn't murder anybody!"

"Yes, yes dear, I know, you already said that."

"Look, I..." April shifted the phone to her other hand, the previous one wrapping around the dangling rubber cord connecting the receiver to the payphone apparatus. It was slightly sticky, and the whole booth looked like it hadn't been cleaned since April had been born. She had been shocked to find it was still in service.

"Mum, I'm sorry. I have to go. Things are crazy, and- and I might not be back for a little while."

"April-"

"Please, mum- I'm sorry. I have to do this. It's important, but also it's-" Hard to explain? Yeah, she'd been saying that one a lot recently. "-look. Just know that I'm safe and- and don't worry, and. Hopefully I'll be back soon. Don't let dad worry; don't you worry, okay? I'm fine and I'm safe and I definitely didn't murder anyone."

"What's she saying?" Her mother held the phone away from her ear for a while, and April was treated to half a minute of hushed, inaudible whispers.

Finally a voice echoed back over the line, this time the gruffer cadence of her father. "Now listen here, K- April. You need to come home right now—come to our place, I'll get the car—and then we need to go to the police and settle thi-"

April pressed her forehead into her palm, cutting him off as she spoke . "Dad, look- no, I'm sorry-" He continued to speak at her, the words becoming more insistent. She did her best to raise her own voice over them. "I- look, I have to- I have to go- no, I- I'm safe, okay? And- I love you and mum, and- no, I don't know. I- I'm sorry- bye, dad."

She stabbed the end call button and re-attached the handset to the box. It made an old-fashioned mechanical clunk as she set it down in the holder. She sighed, then yelped, jumping back, as Kroakli slid up the wall of the booth next to her, colour-matching itself to the dark plastic. April swore under her breath as it grew speaking slits in its flesh.

"Are you now finished in this?", it said, after she had recovered.

"Yeah. I called Trace as well. Told her sorry for hanging up earlier, and to- to say sorry to Charlie. And to go easy on him for... well, everything. I don't know what he'll say happened but, if it's anything close to the truth she'll probably think he's gone nuts, which, well. Can you blame her?"

She stared at the puddle of slime on the wall.

"Fuck, why am I even telling you all this. You're a blob. You don't know these people."

Kroakli crackled. "We do."

"What? How- oh. Right, yes. Of course you do."

They eyed each other, eyeball to undifferentiated sensory mass. Kroakli broke the silence.

"Krr. Do you wish for it to be discussed? The corpse-coldness of silence that lurks between you and us on this..."

"No. Although I would prefer it if you would stop talking about corpses. And blood. And-" April shivered, trying to force the images flashing behind her eyes to stop their flashing. In the nature of these things, it didn't really work. "-and any of that stuff, really."

"We remain sorry. We did not yet have a mind, or know the intimacies of your kind."

"I know. It doesn't make it better. What you were, or are, or... what you did, back then. I can't believe I'm still talking to you, somehow. That I've got used to you."

"It is best that you are used to our being. We do not intend to change this in any short timespan, yes."

"It feels more like I've got the fuckin', alien goo version of Stockholm Syndrome, but whatever. Are you ready to go?"

"Very. Let us depart this broken realm and carry the curse of your flesh to more deserving planes, krrr- such is the contorted violence of its substance."

"I'll take that as a yes?"

By way of answering more plainly, Kroakli detached itself from the wall of the phone booth, adhering itself to April's back. The sensation was similar to what she imagined it would feel like to wear a backpack full of water balloons, if the backpack itself was also attached to her with superglue.

"We hope you appreciate the depths of our restraint... our old self would seek rooting in your marrow most quickly, yes... past the dermal layers we now cling to. It is such a fragile threshold, the veil behind which your life-blood is cowering."

"If you keep saying shit like that I'll make you ride along in a plastic bag."

It clicked irritably. "Ghr--hh... let us be started then, and say no more of it."

April nodded to herself, calming her still-racing mind. She hated that, despite everything, it had still come to this, but...

She remembered the hole that had cracked into being straight through her wall, a hand-span across. Charlie, who had been standing right next to brickwork that had been carved out of reality with as much thought and effort as a butcher might excise and discard the gristle from a prime cut, or, perhaps, with as much ease as Kroakli would dispatch a morsel of its worm-like prey within the red forest. That could just as easily have been Charlie's head.

She had already been forced to see the interior of Charlie's brains once that week, and for as much as he had gotten up in her face, hit her, even, she still wasn't prepared to see her friend's skull splayed open once more, and for real this time, blood and loose grey globules of his frontal lobe splattered across her carpet.

April shuddered. The mental image of blood still sent chills through her limbs, her heart pounding, despite the intense bout exposure therapy that she had been inadvertently subjected to of late.

She still didn't know the exact cause of what had been done to her, be it by the gaunt man with his red-faced Simian or otherwise; why she seemed to be the nexus for all the strangeness, for the holes in reality, and for what the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee had called destabilization, travelling, fissuring. But what seemed clear was that this was happening around her, and that it was worse while she was here.

"I'm sorry, mum," April muttered under her breath. She didn't think she would be coming back any time soon.

"First, find a focus," said Kroakli, reciting the steps that it had previously explained to her. "Any item will suffice if it has a distinctness, a potential for an alignment with a projective identity."

The grimy pay-phone in front of her seemed as good as anything. April fixed her eyes on it, trying to avoid shifting her gaze from one spot, in the manner that one might attempt to induce an optical illusion, or see into a magic eye picture. Based on what she had seen and felt before, the latter was the most apt comparison, if woefully inadequate.

She wondered vaguely why the predatory creature on her back, which had only recently achieved sentience, knew how to do this, but quickly banished the question from her mind in pre-emptive preparation for the next step.

"Clear your mind," it said, thrumming against her back as it spoke. "Focus on nothing but the focus. It is your anchoring clarity... the rest of this projective blurs away, to elsewhere."

The surrounding interior of the phone booth started to grow hazy. There appeared now to be lines radiating out from the phone mechanism, rippling out in expanding echoes of its outline like it had been dropped into a pond that hung vertically in mid air. April felt the floating sensation she had felt before, an almost hypnotic focus that dropped her through and outside of reality.

"Then push forward," Kroakli continued. "Pry it apart and penetrate, as if sinking into fle-" the creature paused for a moment, considering. "As if... krr... as if putting teeth to... cake."

"No, that's- that's more distracting," April muttered, trying not to lose her focus. She managed to hold onto it, just barely. The dirty old payphone was unfolding now; she saw the patterns engraved in the plastic repeating, growing; somehow through and behind the layers of metal and polymer she saw transmission lines, circuits, silicon and the mechanism within the coin slot. They all slotted together into a new mechanism now, a unifying omega-mechanism that was a symmetric collage or mosaic or arcane design, growing and shifting and-

Much like the time she had been intercepted in her escape attempt from her quarantine cell, the unfolding process was marred by a sharp crack. This time though nothing struck her from above—instead, she was loosely aware of a slight shift in the ambient light she could see in her peripheral vision. She tried her best to ignore the interruption, continuing to stare into the unfolding pay phone.

She made it only another second before there was a second sharp crack. Louder this time, it was more of a staccato bang, accompanied by a series of smaller thumps. For a few moments, April standing there half-baffled, half still intent on the phone, it seemed like the noises were trailing off, but the sounds were followed by a chorus of light pops, growing in frequency and volume as if there were a minor hailstorm making its debut outside.

She felt Kroakli start to vibrate restlessly against her back, shifting itself as if to look around. She struggled to maintain her focus despite the sounds and its motion. As the creature started to speak, she scowled with irritation.

"April-"

There was a yet louder bang, and the world around her twisted as if it were an elastic band that had been pulled taut and released. She had a brief impression of frenetic motion as the phone booth around her seemed to burst open, then outward, a feeling that was contrasted immediately as a rushing pull jerked her inwards towards the phone that was the object of her focus.

If the previous times she had attempted the transit between worlds had been a gentle tipping forward down an infinitely deep hole, this time she was being yanked hard, face first into the very finite surface that was now in front of her. The beautifully symmetric unfolding of the payphone mechanism had stopped, and, alarmingly, reversed course. Its symmetry was shaken out of alignment, cracking apart, then folded back in on itself while drawing her in with it, submerging her before she had a chance to take a breath.

It happened so fast that she didn't have any time to process what had happened before the process was complete. She found herself floating in what felt like a vast, dark space, her body strangely numb and weightless. In the far-off background, she could hear a faint, subdued chorus of overlapping voices, speaking over each other in a discordant babble that defied interpretation or any semblance of meaningful order. Deeper beneath that still was a soft electric thrumming that came in stops and starts. April was reminded of the sound of a dial-up modem, the sound having been drummed into her hea when she was a small child.

She realised that her eyes were closed, started to open them, and was mildly alarmed when she discovered that she was unable to. She hung there for a moment, struggling to move her eyelids, until, with very little forewarning, shafts of light blasted through into her visual cortex with intensity enough that she feared some critical circuits might be fried. There was no transitional period of eyelids parting, just the sudden brightness, as if somebody had flipped an on switch. Even as she instinctively squinted, her vision wasn't obscured towards the top and bottom; her whole visual field merely dimmed.

As she started to become able to process the scene in front of her, she realised that she was looking back out of the phone booth, which, in turn, looked vaguely like a bomb had been set off inside it. The door was dangling from one hinge, leaning on the ground amid scattered fragments of its shattered plexiglass windows. The square roof panel of the phone booth had fallen into its interior, its thick plastic bulk lying heavily on the ground where April had been standing a few moments prior. All of this she could see from her new, strangely fixed vantage point, positioned low to the ground and with an eerie fish-eye breadth to her field of view.

She figured that she should probably be finding this fairly alarming, but the sensations she was experiencing were comfortingly tranquil. As she floated there, she realised that there was a voice speaking close to her head. Wondering how she had failed to notice it before, she made a conscious effort to interpret the words; they were muffled, even compressed, but the choice of phrasing alone made the speaker quite clear.

"-how quickly grows the breadth of the world-shaping your senses have opened themselves to. Such unbounded scope! It roots within your fragile cortex and holds firm, beyond the mundane unchanging of its medium, yes. A maddening contrast, krr... and yet beautiful all the more, for its limitation! A true lashing of blood and nerve-sinew to their own context, the delving of its world roots that bind the projection to the real! We would rejoice in this most greatly, but firstly, can you free yourself?"

"Huh?" said April, nonplussed. The sound burst out from her sharply, accompanied by what sounded like a flurry of static. What the hell was wrong with her?

"H-krhh! April Pearce, context-straddler of many guises. Can you extract yourself from the telephone? We would be appreciative of this."

"I-" April began to speak again, paused, tried to take a breath, then discovered that she couldn't. Startled, and actually beginning to panic now, she reflexively made an effort to push forward, coming up against something pressed close to her... skin? It was hard, but not entirely impermeable. Concentrating, she dangled for a few seconds in brief interstitial suspension, before suddenly with a sucking pop she fell free, tumbling hard onto the ground in front of the broken phone booth, her limbs flailing. She hit the floor, then rolled over, gazing up groggily.

As her vision cohered back upon reality again, she found herself staring up at the sculpture of melted plastic that had been the box of the phone booth. It looked similar, she thought, to when a character in a Looney Tunes cartoon blocked a gun barrel with their finger, causing the metal tube to peel back like a banana peel. The entire top half of the booth had been mangled, bent back as if struck by some massive dropped weight. The roof segment, as she had noticed before, had detached entirely, and the door had not just been dislodged, but a huge gash had been torn through one half of it as if struck by an invisible blade.

What was left standing was even further degraded. The substance of the walls had been neatly pierced through by hundreds of small holes and pittings, leaving the thing looking like it had passed through an active war zone, bullets flying. As she sat back up, April saw that the effect had even impacted the surface of the concrete pavement surrounding the booth. Little chips had been cored out of the cast stone in a radiating pattern, their density growing less dense as it progressed away from where she had been standing.

Finally, she looked up at the payphone itself, receiver dangling off the line. The internals of the machine had been brutally disgorged, as if something had burst out from within.

"Ah," said Kroakli, who had collected itself on the ground beside her, "welcome back."

"W..." she stuttered, panting slightly from having the wind knocked out of her, "what w… was I inside the phone!?"

"We felt something of this, yes... The travelling was cut short prior to departure from this realm. Your pattern was pulled through, halted, and merged back into the device. We felt you in there, squirming life-shapes amid its dead atoms. We did not know this was a possibility. Congratulations discovering this new seeking."

"I- but- that's not what I-" April cast around, staring at the broken phone booth. "Kroakli, we're supposed to be leaving."

"Kh-rr... Yes, our aim was not met with this attempt, clearly."

"Did something go wrong? What went wrong?"

The creature clicked softly, as if in deliberation. "There is found a less spiriting truth. It is a bad omen for our departure." It pooled itself next to her, trying to keep a low profile.

"Can you- can you be a little more specific?" April put a hand to her scalp. Her head—and to a lesser extent, her entire body—was spinning with a sort of sick dizziness that had wrapped its way around her spinal column and a major portion of her frontal lobe.

"We sense the projective quanta directly. It is one of the superiorities of our kind, almost the foremost of our unique advantages, that we may see beyond this obfuscating reality and into the meat of its mechanism. Through such sensing we may feel a shard of events as the Sigmoid might, from the adjacent outside. The travelling—we felt it happen this manner—was cut through by its disintegrating world-strata. The sundered focus then scooped up your unmoored self, and blended its substance pattern within and into its own self—until you pushed back through, outwards, to re-cohere your self within this reality. Kahr-rumm..."

"What?"

It clicked again, irritably this time.

"The phone box broke, and cut us both off, before we could leave the projective."

"Yes, but-" she gestured at the shattered phone booth, "but why did it break!?"

"Therein lies the crux of the bad omen."

April stared at it expectantly. The creature regarded her, then almost sighed. It was an uncharacteristically human gesture, and she wondered if it had inherited it from... From the circumstances of its birth, that I really don't want to think about again right about now.

Kroakli spoke up again, answering her unstated question. "You rely too fully on our insight... but this perhaps is to be expected. The price of partnership to a meat-thatchling, to an unsensing prey. But we shall comply, as we must."

April rolled her eyes in exaggerated fashion, making sure the creature could see her. She wasn't sure if it mattered particularly whether it had a line of sight, given that it didn't even have anything that could be construed as eyes, but she wanted to be extra certain it couldn't miss the gesture. Kroakli, for its part, continued without any visible reaction.

"The breaking of this world... it is not of your self, but lies about it, in the hanging substance of the projective. We can feel the decaying structure, the rotting of the substrate we rest upon. The reality grows yet fragile where you step. A threshold has been passed, perhaps, where your broken flesh, wielded for utility, frays at the world, as it twists around the bridgehead of your travelling. It is an elegant acceleration of the world-decay, a delicious unspooling, but for your purposes and our own... it is unhelpful for us."

"So, I can't leave without- without this shit happening?" April stabbed a finger towards the mangled phone booth and pitted concrete.

"So it seems."

"Then... what the fuck am I supposed to do?"

It considered for a moment. "Perhaps push through this dissolution. We can shelter the weaknesses of your flesh, yes, make of ourself a most potent shielding. We might tear us from this world even despite the tendon-slicing made of it in our departure. If we hold the form of your focus, and your attention is also held- yes, we can prevent the bridgehead rebounding, as it did here."

"But- we would still leave a crater in the middle of the city!? That's- that's not even an option, I-"

Kroakli made a low sound, half a groan, half something that was almost a growl.

"Our remaining here is not an acceptable outcome, little April world-steppling. You must know this. The frayed reality that has made an anchor of your bones, bending so you might Travel through and beyond it, this is the founding of our union. Regardless, we know you too wish to be leaving..."

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Not if I'm going to..." she shook her head once, violently, as if to clear it. "Fuck you. I don't care about what you want."

"You would be best to, April Pearce. This partnership is by our discretion, as is our cooperation, and you have responsibility for our being in this world..."

This time it was she who growled under her breath. Was that a threat? She got to her feet and took a few steps away from both Kroakli and the phone booth, looking around.

The little pedestrianised side-road she had found the phone booth on was mostly empty. She had looked deliberately for somewhere in which she wouldn't have to be worried about members of the public reacting poorly to spotting wanted potential murderer April Pearce, or her pet alien atrocity, for that matter. The street, thankfully, still seemed to be entirely clear of ordinary people.

What it was not clear of were ghosts. A small circle of them had gathered around her, presumably to watch the chaos, and were staring at her, and especially at Kroakli, in the centre of the ring they formed. World-travellers, she reminded herself, 'de-synced from the projective envelope,' or whatever it was that Tullis had said.

They still had the feel of ghosts, though, in the manner that had first lead her to classify them as such. It was something about their unusual shapes, their slight desaturation, and the absolute silence with which they stood there, even as they shuffled from side-to-side every so often. One of them had a Simian companion, and it hopped up onto its Sapien's shoulder without so much as making a sound. She guessed she must not be tuned into whatever audio channel was meant to accompany their visual manifestation.

"Hi. Would you all please fuck off?" she asked, before realising that she didn't know if the figures could hear her, either. That question was answered when one of the less human figures—a ten-foot tall stooping creature, hoisting broad antlers and unusually stubby, geometrically pointed legs—took a step back, apparently affronted, and walked away into nothing. A couple of their fellows followed suit, but the majority remained, ignoring her words and instead staring at her curiously. April turned away, scowling, back towards Kroakli.

"Perhaps," it said, "if you are concerned for these surroundings, you might seek to make our departure away from them?"

She looked around at the surrounding suburb, still packed densely enough with buildings to make it clear that this was a chunk of Greater London rather than an equivalent town beyond the border. She hated to hand it to the creature, but...

"You're right. Fuck, I need to get out of the city anyway. This just keeps getting worse, doesn't it? If I can't escape to another reality just yet I should at least get away from other people."

"Out of the city?" Kroakli made a series of stuttering pops and clicks. "We ingested memories of the boundaries of your city. Would this not be a sluggish undertaking, at the pace of your limb-stepping, bipedally-bound April? The ponderous pulsing of your muscle sprigs in locomotion leaves much to be desired for the speed of our leavings..."

April thought for a moment, making a brief lap of the destroyed phone booth. She arrived back beside Kroakli, who had concealed itself beneath the bin again, and, after checking around for onlookers, gestured for it to flow back up onto her back, where it could blend in against her black jacket. It slid into place, thrumming softly, and then spoke up behind her ear.

"Well?"

"Whoever said," April replied, "that I would be walking?"

*****

"Hey, who- April!! Where the hell-?! ...what the fuck are you wearing?"

"Hey, Fabian." She looked down at herself, still wearing in the dark, leather-adjacent formal outfit that hung down by her legs as loose strips. It was like, she considered, that she had put on a coat that had been partially fed through a document shredder below the waist. "Good to see you too. I'm starting a new fashion trend."

"What, is it like, convict chic? 'Outfits for people who're wanted for fucking murder'?"

The smile dropped off of April's face. "Fabe- Do you seriously think I killed anyone?"

"Well- well no, I mean, it seems unlikely? You're like, terrified of blood, right? So..."

The scowl April had been giving him loosened somewhat. "Thank you."

"But still, what the fuck? What the fuck happened, and how are you- How did you even know where I live?"

"I hate to admit it, but I've stared at the contact sheet on the wall at Sporks for long enough that I have the whole thing memorised."

"Course you have. Course you do..." Fabian glanced around nervously. April was pretty painfully aware that she was putting a lot on a man who she hadn't even known well enough to hang out with outside of work, but then desperate times did call for desperate measures.

She crossed her arms and looked up at him, waiting patiently while he paced back and forth in his doorway. Pulling her arms up hoisted her sleeves a little, inadvertently putting on display the tightly wrapped bandages, still spiral-wrapped around her forearms. She hadn't had a chance to remove them since the quarantine. Fabian saw them and swore silently, taking a few steps towards her. She held up a hand to stop him.

"Please- don't come too close."

"What? Why? What the fuck April, are you hurt? Sick?"

"It's-" and this time she was the one to shift uncomfortably. "It's, uh, it's not safe."

"Not safe? But why..." he stared at her. "April are you saying... I thought you said you didn't-"

"No, no, it's not that I'm dangerous, Fabe, it's- Well, I mean, it sort of is?" He stared at her, nonplussed and cautiously wary. "Look, it's-" It's complicated? She rolled her eyes at herself, but said it anyway. "It's, like, complicated. Look, anyway, I'm not here about that. I need to borrow your bike."

His eyes widened with renewed alarm. "You- wait, you what? Why do you need my bike?"

"Have to get somewhere pretty fast, don't have anyone else to ask."

"No way. No way, man- you want to take my bike with on the run? I don't want to go to jail, and besides, it's like… That thing is like... I love that fucking bike! It's like my motorized child!"

"Your sixty horsepower oil-guzzling baby?"

"Don't fucking joke- hey, you crashed the last one, okay? That was just last weekend! Don't think I've forgotten. No way."

"That really, actually, was not my fault. And I can make it worth your while!"

"How could you possibly make it worth my while? Look- hey, I care about you, you know that. I'm sorry that all this shit is going down, and I won't like, tell anyone-"

"Yeah, please, don't."

"I won't! But, shit, I can't let your have my bike, April."

She swore at herself internally. Guess it's time to bring out the big guns...

"Hey, Fabian. You said you wanted to see an alien, right?"

He squinted at her, face uncomprehending as he parsed the non-sequitur. "What?"

"When we last saw each other, you said you wanted to see an alien so you would have an alien story. Right? Do you still want to see an alien?"

"April-"

"Come on, answer the question, Fabe."

"I mean, yeah, I guess? But-"

"Would you lend me your bike if I could show you an alien?"

He was seriously frowning at her now. "Hey, Apes, are you, like, feeling okay?"

"I'm great. Real fucking great," she lied. "Anyway. Kroakli? If you please?"

The orgoane slipped down from her back, where it had been laminating the back surface of her jacket like she had been wearing a second, slightly lumpier jacket. The creature appeared to be growing more adept at colour camouflage, an adaptation that, apparently, was relatively non-useful in its home environment, where visual sensing was not the norm, but which it was taking to very fast in its interactions with creatures with eyes. Her perception of its increasing skill seemed to bear out as its sudden appearance caused Fabian to yelp with surprise.

Kroakli landed on concrete of Fabian's driveway, splashing down and then rebounding up elastically, propelling itself upwards with the reshaping of its lower body. It stretched out with a limber fluidity, quickly pulling itself into its preferred humanoid shape, arms pulling themselves out of the main body and the lower trunk bifurcating into two legs ending in stump-feet.

This time, though, Kroakli had chosen to stretch up into an intimidatingly tall posture, its oval head with its softly sculpted hints of human facial contours hanging almost eight feet above the ground. Its spines slid into place around its blobby heart, but a few of them bristled about its shoulders and along the sides of its forearms arms for good measure. It turned towards Fabian, who had gone stark white.

"Hello!" grinned Kroakli.

Fabian yelped out a scream that wouldn't have been out of place coming from a confused and wounded dog. It was loud enough that April twisted, looking around in mild alarm to see if it had drawn any attention. Thankfully, the street remained deserted.

"What is that?!" he stuttered, staring up at Kroakli in a way that reminded her of how Charlie had reacted to the creature a few hours earlier. She felt vaguely disappointed for some reason, but then given how many sharp pointed barbs and softly pulsing blue lobes the creature was currently brandishing, she felt she probably couldn't blame either of them for being a little freaked out.

"This is Kroakli, who is an alien. Well, I mean… I guess you're an alien?" She looked up at the towering creature.

"We are not a child of memory, but are of an adjacent layer, krr... the world that birthed us had a differing history and form. It is perhaps suitably foreign to you for us to bear this labelling, when given it by the nest-bound hatchlings of your own home."

"Hear that? It's a, uh, a child of an adjacent layer. Good enough, right?" She thrust both hands out towards Kroakli as if presenting an avant-garde piece of artwork she had painted. "Alien!"

Fabian was leaning against his door frame, trembling as he stared up at Kroakli's non-face. He made a strangled sound before remembering how to speak with words. "Hh- April-! What does- what does it want from us?"

She smiled. "It wants," she said, looking over at the wooden fence gate that lead down the side of Fabian's house to his backyard, "to ask you if I could please borrow your bike."

*****

The engine purred, then roared, as April turn off from a side-street and then gunned the throttle along an open stretch of road. As she clenched her legs against the sides of the vehicle, the wounds that she had accrued there ached, dully. She was honestly surprised that the pain wasn't worse. Perhaps there had been some healing agent in the bandages the Committee had provided her with, or maybe it was just her own mind and body that had become numb to the pain.

It helped that Fabian's bike was a comparatively gentle ride. It ran far more smoothly than the bike she had stolen from Sporks and then subsequently wrecked, and this alongside an engine purr that would have matched an enthusiast's dream. Not that April was a gearhead herself, really. As she sped down the road, a pall of vague guilt hung over her.

"I wish I hadn't had to do that." She had a helmet on, and her words were muffled even before the noise of the engine was taken into account, but she trusted that Kroakli, clinging to her back, would probably have some way of detecting the subtle vibrations of her speech. This trust was validated when it slapped a tendril against the back of her head, transmitting its own vibrations through her helmet and into her skull, so that she could hear.

"What is it that you wish you had not done, April Pearce?"

"Using you to scare him into giving me the bike, of course."

"It suited our purposes."

She paused for a moment. "Yeah, but-"

It cut her off. "But consider this also. Was it not your own self that said, he was wanting of his own accord to encounter something of our ilk?"

"Yeah, but, I don't think he had really thought too much about what that would mean. It's like, a thing people say? That they want to meet aliens? I'm not sure how many of them actually mean it. I'm pretty sure most people would freak the fuck out if they saw a real alien."

"Irrelevant. The responsibility is still his in this. And the vehicle was then given willingly in fair exchange."

"Yeah, but-"

"Let us speak no more on your reservations and be pleased with the marrow of our attainment. Are we not on the way to our goal?"

She nodded, vaguely, as she adjusted the throttle. The bike was gunning it down narrower streets now, the suburbs blending into a borderline rural landscape as she skated past scrubby trees on both sides of the road. The trip to see Fabian had taken her out west, and so as she headed back north and away from the city, she had been pulled along a diagonal bearing north-west along the path of the motorways. She had passed through Edgware and then kept going, until she finally started seeing enough open fields to slow down and pull off onto the side streets.

It was in front of one of those open fields that she finally slowed Fabian's bike to a stop, leaning it up against a gatepost that stood sentinel out in front of some sort of wild public parkland or common. She snapped out the kickstand, then realised that she didn't have any chain or cable to secure the bike with. She was starting to wonder how much that kind of thing really mattered to her at this point, but felt guilty all the same.

"Sorry, Fabian," she whispered to herself, as she left the bike as it was and walked out into the field, Kroakli slipping down to walk beside her.

As they entered the open space, she distantly caught sight of a man walking his dog on a leash down by the treeline across on the other side. The man spotted both her and Kroakli before she could motion for the creature to hide, and seemed to freeze in place. She heard the faint echo of the dog, yipping wildly across the field, before the man turned around and walked very fast into the trees. April frowned after him.

"Is this now suitably depopulated for your preference?" Kroakli burbled, apparently also gazing after the man and his dog.

"Fuck, I hope so. As long as there isn't anyone or, I guess, any buildings within a hundred feet or so- I don't think the damage at the phone booth reached any further than that, right?"

Kroakli murmured what sounded like assent. There had been a few more close calls on the ride over. Small glitches in reality manifesting in their wake, similar faults to those that she'd been witness to in her own apartment. A chunk of tarmac had at one point vanished out of the road in front of her as if the tarmac was chocolate mousse attacked with a spoon. The disappearance had drawn the attention of a small crowd of confused looking Traveller ghosts, and forced her to swerve violently to avoid the newly excavated pothole. So far, though, she had yet to see any of these events occur beyond a radius of a few dozen feet or so from where she was standing. The epicentre of the strangeness remained firmly bonded to her, specifically.

She hated that, despite everything, it seemed she was still the problem after all.

She sighed as she approached the centre of the field, standing amid a lumpy profusion of wild grasses. There was a vantage point back down onto the cityscape from here, and she paused for a moment, watching the faint sparkle of evening sunlight glinting off of London's slanted skyscrapers down in the valley of the Thames, radiant like distant fairy lights.

Something clenched in her chest, and she pressed her closed fist against it, drawing a pained breath under the weight of what that view now meant. She didn't know when she would see it again. She didn't know if she could see it again.

Damaged. Broken. Cracked through beyond repair, so much so that she was stuck like this, her life a splinter cast out from the society that had raised her.

"I don't know if I'll ever be back," she choked, eyes tearing up.

Kroakli stood next to her, body stretched tall, its false head also pointing back towards the city, but the creature didn't say anything. April let the silence hang there for a moment, then turned towards it, staring at the point in space where its eyes should have been.

"But I can't- I can't risk it, you know? Whatever this is, it's happening to me. Tavistre was right. I have to just- to stay away, until-"

She paused, looking down at the ground in front of her. She let the silence hang for another moment meditatively, then opened her mouth, taking another breath to speak again.

That was when the other voice spoke up behind her.

"It won't work, April, and I'm sorry for that."

It was a male voice; reedy, almost hoarse, and suddenly abruptly there, hanging in the air behind her like a lingering revenant. April jumped, spinning around, but that was nothing compared to Kroakli's reaction. The creature squealed, and practically exploded into a pulpy mess of glistening blue flesh and flailing shards. April had a feeling that the type of being Kroakli was was very much not used to being taken by surprise. In fact, she had a strong suspicion that it wasn't normally even possible to surprise it it.

The gaunt man with the blue-tinged cheeks didn't seem to particularly care. He stood there, rigid, and uncomfortably close, as if he had been there the entire time they'd been standing there. Maybe he had—April shivered at the thought. His Simian, the first she had ever seen, was clinging to his arm and looking up at her with a solemn expression, its crimson eyes opened wide. They faintly reflected the horizon and the outline the city skyline, the lonely view off in the distance that she had been contemplating a moment before.

Her own reaction was not quite as fast as Kroakli's, but it was almost as instinctive. She slammed her hand out hard, striking the strange man in the centre of his chest, right above his sternum. It was a shock when her palm thudded against a surface that felt like solid, unmoving rock, the skin underneath his loose shirt failing to yield even a slightest amount of give. Startled but trying not to lose her momentum, April clawed at him instead, tugging at the fabric of the shirt and balling it up in her fist as she yanked herself closer to him. He watched her as she attacked him, impassively.

"You!" she shouted, her gaze darting between his dark eyes and the monkey's red ones. Kroakli made a sound too, but it was less anything reminiscent of human speech and more a dark, animal growl, the crackling malice of an enraged rattlesnake.

"You did this!"

The man stared down at her. "For my many sins, yes. I did try to forewarn, but you are not the only one who is breaking, April. My brokenness has been such that I only recently mustered again the intent to form speech, and with so little time left, too."

The monkey opened its mouth, and squawked out a single word in an unsettling, just-slightly-inhuman manner. "One!"

The man's eyes flicked down, solemnly. "Yes. Unfortunately it is so."

"Stop-" April cast around, wildly. "Whatever you're doing- whatever you did to me, you- you bastard- make it stop! You hear me!? You-"

The whole situation felt like it had been thrown off-kilter. April struggled to forge ahead, because this was, after all, her chance. She had him right here, right now, in front of her. This was the man who had admitted to breaking her. She wanted to take the initiative to demand answers, to demand that he fix this, but…

But it was hard, almost impossibly hard, to stand in front of this person. Now that he was so close, she could sense a gradient that he was steeped in, a deep well of sorrow and dark gravitas that shone from his body like an inverse sun, forcing her away even as he stood there, unmoving. With an effort of will, she forced herself to stand her ground.

The man reached out with both hands, and placed them gently on her shoulders. Despite the light touch, they seemed to hold a draining weight and an uncanny inertia. She looked up at his face, met his eyes—and immediately regretted doing so. They locked in place with her own, sucking her attention down the twin black holes that sat below his brow. April felt the breath being sucked out of her, too.

"I'm sorry," said the man, and it was a genuine sorrow, the truest sorrow she had ever known. It stole her tongue, and she was unable to object, gazing up at his face as he continued to speak into her.

"I know it is hard to accept," he said, "but this is truly the best I could have done. I didn't wish for any of this, but, at the very least…" He looked down at the ground, then back up at April. "At least I could preserve this world, for a little while. I could give you that, as my last gift to you. Before-"

There was a faint rumbling in the background. April wondered if it was going to rain. Next to her, in her peripheral vision, she was aware that Kroakli was convulsing. Its body rippled and recycled parts of itself repeatedly, limbs pulling into being and then distorting, collapsing backwards as if it was fighting against a rushing tide.

"-before the inevitable," finished the man. The monkey chirped up in its eerie echo. "In-evitable!"

Kroakli snarled, hissed, and its voice exploded into a crackle of fizzing clicks and pops. A few of them blended together into words that April could understand.

"What are you?"

The man glanced over at it, and this time it was Kroakli who was frozen rigid, its fluid body undergoing an instantaneous state change into a viscous solid.

"I am very little, now, set against what I once was," he said. "I was everything, once. They called me the cosmos engine, the dreamer of worlds, the- well. It doesn't matter. You speak to just a fragment of all that, now, I'm afraid."

Kroakli coughed, then choked, then wheezed out a series of guttural guffaws that only after several seconds was April able to correctly interpret as laughter. She managed to tear her eyes away from the man's face for long enough to look over at the creature.

"Kroakli, what...?"

Kroakli wheezed again, half chuckling as it spoke. "It is saying it is the Sigmoid. But this is madness! The Sigmoid is the world, and this is a man."

"Madness, is it?" he said, turning back towards April. "Maybe. But then so are so many things in the end. At the base of it all, perhaps the universe is just a pit of unending insanity. Even I couldn't have dreamed that up, I don't think."

He sighed, then looked at her.

Then he looked at her.

Looked into her eyes.

Looked-

Nothing changed, exactly. She knew, objectively, that what she was seeing now, with her eyes, was the same as what she had been seeing a moment before—the slightly creepy, gaunt face of a black-eyed man with blue raised markings around his cheeks. He looked mundane, almost ordinary, even, were it not for those markings—what April would have until very recently assumed was a bizarre skin condition or tattoo.

Behind her mind, though, something insane enough to match his words was unfolding. If she had to compare it to anything, it would be the times she had Travelled—her mind unfocusing until both it and the thing she was looking into deconstructed themselves, a tunnel being bored through reality, pulling her out and through. This was more than that, though. She couldn't see anything, but she could feel it all, and what she felt bled outwards, outside the bounds of comprehension that the inside of her head could contain.

It was white, what she felt. What she knew. A bright void that shone with the brilliance of all the stars in the universe. Black lines threaded their way through it, and at their centre was the man, staring back at her. Except it wasn't a man—it was... Something. Something horrifying, and bulbous, and shot through with dark lines that were pulsing softly with their sickly light. The white void warped around it, but it seemed caught within it in turn, gently disintegrating away at the edges.

It had eyes, somehow, amid the light and dark, and it looked into her brain. So many eyes and all of them saw her. It was beautiful. It was the most disgusting thing she had ever seen. It was orgasmic. It was the torture of a thousand agonies.

April's legs went weak, and she collapsed to the ground. Lying there amid the damp grass, a darkness creeping in around the edges of her vision, she looked up at the blue sky, and saw Kroakli standing was there, sharp icicles of its flesh curving backwards away from its body—away from the man—as if it were trying to withstand a blizzard. She listened to it, as it spoke.

"It's you."

"It is," said the man, forlornly, "and I'm sorry for that. This may be the last time I will be able to show you such a perspective. After all, I'm dying."