The tight knot of April's subconscious slowly unwound itself under the pressure of sleep until her mind, compressed down, found itself squeezed into the tight confines of an uneasy dream.

A phone receiver was clutched in her left hand while her right pressed a frantic tapping rhythm into the brass digit keys of the payphone in front of her. She wasn't sure exactly how many buttons there were—they tended to drift away indistinctly at the corners of her vision—or, for that matter, what the curling symbols inscribed upon them indicated. Whether they were in fact numerals, or rather some more visceral representation of her desperate searching, seemed entirely open to debate.

Reaching the end of some indeterminate arcane sequence, her index finger stabbed the dial button. The receiver paused, twitched, coughed out a grating dial tone, then connected her through to a chorus of whispers that slithered down the line to linger just beneath the reach of her comprehension.

As she sliced her will deeper into the fragile image of the phone handset, pushing to excavate meaning in the same way one might extract the pit from a peach with a sharp knife, the sputtering noises rose upward in a crescendo of oily muttering that reached out from the cheap plastic and seeped into her brain. She had a brief, terrifying impression that what they were actually reciting was her name, spoken all together, all at once, before she pushed the voices off of her and slammed the handset down into its vacant slot.

In the manner of dreams, the payphone ceased to exist, leaving her stood in silent anxiety inside the empty shell of the plastic phone booth. Brightly coloured graffiti had been scratched into the dim interior, and jumped out at her with a surreal vibrancy that communicated more of a general emotional tone than any specific images. The inscribed graffiti glowed with the neon-on-black phosphorescence of Halloween decorations under a black light, or the cartoonish colours that jumped out from the walls of the dark room at a fairground fun-house.

It wasn't exactly unpleasant, but it was overwhelming in the way of a psychedelic trip, three hours in, one-too-many tabs slipped under April's tongue in a careless overestimation of her tolerance. She suddenly felt very claustrophobic, and pushed open the door, flinging it open to reveal the street outside and gasp for air, gulping down a breath that filled her dream body's dream lungs full to bursting.

Except, she saw, there was no street outside. The phone booth was perched upon a lopsided grey stone slab, sitting atop a hill of grey rubble that overlooked a blasted plain of displaced scree and urban ruin. The remnants of a river cut across the horizon, a crouching sliver of a thing multiple kilometres in breadth, that lapped shallowly within the basin of her dream like a puddle collected in a hollow of chipped concrete.

And scattered haphazardly across the hillside beneath her, tangled in loose piles amid the shattered stone and rebar, were the corpses.

She hadn't seen them at first—in the logic of the dream, her awareness of their presence preceded them coming into visual focus—because they were so entirely blended into the landscape beneath her that their human-approximate shapes were hard to pick out from the surrounding scree. A kind of stringy, dendritic plaque of blue-grey biological matter was coating them, adhering the bodies to the landscape like the gluey binding agent of a giant's papier-mâché.

It stretched out across the hillside, heaping together in globular nodules that were scabbed with a white callused crust, before deteriorating away at the edges into ropey blue strands. These bridged the larger mounds together into a fungal lattice-work, the shapes of the half-buried bodies and rubble peeking out through the ragged holes.

Phlegm licked at the empty eyes and gaping mouths of the gathered dead. A chorus of whispering was rising again, gathering in the peaks and troughs of the hillside, and she realised in her dreaming confluence of thought and reality that the voices in the phone had been the voices of these corpses all along; that the shabby plastic walls of the booth had not been caging her alongside them, but holding them away from without. The horror of this realisation crashed across her, and then took a manifest form within the echoing sound, and the chorus of the damned rising upward like a serpent uncoiling to meld into a single word:

"APRIL!"

She stumbled back, tripping over loose stones and displaced fragments of concrete. There were faces she knew among the dead. A hollow-eyed Charlie stared mournfully from beneath the wreckage of a rusted-over car, the blue plaque melding his lower body together with the dead metal as his torso reached out towards her with a half-skeletal hand. Trace and Morgan lay together, a tangle of limbs entwined in a lover's embrace, exposed skin a cold white that melted away into the mangled offal of the stump at Morgan's shoulder. Suffocating gobs of the blue-white flesh spilled piecemeal from their gaping eyes and mouths, binding their faces together as they sightlessly stared into each other's eye sockets, a parody of intimacy.

Michelle was worst of all.

There could be a certain beauty in death as well as life, April realised, and Michelle's body straddled the threshold between the two. The delicate curve of her back, the translucent membrane of her skin stretched taut over her shoulder blades, framed the porcelain white of her vertebrae, bare bone coexisting with dead skin in a paradoxical, macabre beauty. She was laid out on her stomach, and her face craned up towards April beseechingly from the ground. A white skull stared out from beneath her soft features; her brown eyes, delicately lidded, were framed by empty sockets, her grey lips frozen in place against a backdrop of tangled dental roots. Something fluid pooled on the ground below her chin in a clotted mess of red and white and black.

April screamed without making a sound.

The heaped blue-grey matter was shifting now, pulling together in psychedelic whorls that overlaid themselves across her vision, a two-dimensional neural soup that didn't quite map to the reality of the dream, such as it was. More of the blue flesh forced itself from the face of her dead lover, bubbling up and outwards in ungainly clumps, until all at once the whole massive edifice pulled itself away from the hillside, flowing in upon itself and crunching together into an almost human form.

Suddenly it was Kroakli who was standing in front of her, the tear of its false mouth gaping wide with horror and shock, and it retched out, "run!", and she did, because the corpses were now moving, rising up from their mortal repose against the derelict hillside as though they were the gathered legions of Hades himself, reaching, groping, calling her name in vindictive accusation.

The door to the phone booth hung behind her, still propped slightly ajar. Without stopping to think, her body moving automatically in the manner that bodies did in dreams, she twisted herself around within the cloying unreality, yanked it aside, and threw herself across its threshold.

She pulled up short as the world around her vanished into a blazing halo of void. The door had opened upon a vast expanse of bright white emptiness, marred only by a solitary slash of dark night that had been torn diagonally across the sky in front of her, as if somebody had taken a meat cleaver to the universe. She stared up at it for a while, then dropped her eyes down, where they landed upon the only person who could even have attempted to live up to the decor.

The sallow-faced avatar of the Sigmoid was smiling softly as It peered at her out of the pits that were Its eyes, slight wrinkles spreading to the waxy, tealish ridges of skin that curled beneath them. They contributed something apish to the features of this man who had an otherwise almost withered thinness to build, a simple shirt and trousers draped loosely across a bony frame. The Simian companion—which wasn't a companion at all, really, but another part of his whole—clung to one arm like a lost child.

"Are you real?" she asked.

"Is anything?"

"This is a dream," she observed.

"Mine, or yours?"

April had to think about that.

"Both, I think."

He tilted his head, watching her with placid tranquillity.

"You should know by now that it doesn't really matter either way."

She frowned, putting a finger up to her temple to massage it, and then shaking her head, softly. The dream swirled around her, and threatened to pull her scant thoughts along with it, twisting their threads into knots that would unspool into the spotless nothing. She decided to lean into it, at least a little bit, letting her words flow out of her without conscious effort.

"It still matters to me."

"I know."

"Do you even know what I've lost?"

"I do."

She met Its gaze. It smiled at her sadly, like a father consoling his son after the death of the family dog.

"Please."

"I'm sorry."

The white hot anger that filled April then was enough to break through the spell of the dreamscape. It flushed out the fear that she had felt on that hilltop, the lingering whispers of the damned, even the molasses inertia of the dream, and compacted it all into a single, bright point of rage in front of her. In that moment she thought she saw a keyhole form out of the bright nothing, a hanging shape that was traced from fluid half-light in the air that quivered before the Sigmoid's chest.

Staring at it, April screamed, and began to charge. She crossed the gap in an instant and, hand reaching out, shattered the shape of this thing that wasn't truly a man into a thousand shards that scattered out into the void beneath the sundered sky.

She didn't even have time to enjoy it before she woke up.

*****

It was a hard awakening. April discovered, perhaps not fully unexpectedly, that sleeping curled up in the foetal position on hardwood floorboards, a threadbare carpet as her only cushioning, did not do wonders for her various joints and tendons. They screamed their complaints at her as she struggled to unlock her limbs, which had been contorted into a clutching rictus of stiffened muscle that simply did not want to relax.

As she wrestled to unwind the knots in her back, she had an abrupt flashback to the writhing corpses of her nightmare, the hard bone pressing through skin stretched paper-taut, bulbous joints locked in painful rigor mortis, and the ivory curve of Michelle's exposed spine as she craned upwards toward April, skeletal hand extended.

That got her up in a hurry. Her body loosened, clenched again in a brief spasm of horror, and-

-and then she was fine again. Everything could be fine, she realised, or at the very least not bad. The mantle of dull nothing that had settled across her shoulders the previous day swept over her again, and she tugged at mental fabric of it gratefully, wrapping the sensation shawl-like around her mind where it could snuff out the lingering fear and pain. She revelled in the dark serenity of not feeling, and surveyed what remained in the smothered aftermath. What she felt left within herself was a glow of soft anger, and the sharp, bright star of determination to act.

She shrugged back into her clothes—the formal leathers the Committee had given her were seeing a lot of use as of late—and flung the door open to the hallway of the old house.

Kroakli was hanging from the ceiling like a bulbous stalactite, its flesh melded to the stained plaster of the ceiling above the stairwell to support the ungainly inverted termite hill it had shaped itself into. The ugly mound cracked open an orifice of some sort as she regarded it in faint disgust, and the creature's voice echoed out in a rasping whisper.

"Hh- hhh... We have decided that we do not understand you, April Pearce. Not, at least, in fullness enough to quell our misgivings. Your mind-meat, the self-ness of your brain, its variability casts you a liability... This concerns us, and our concern should also be your own. Consider what it means for us and you, as we progress in our mutual closeness."

"I'm, sorry. Uh, really," April muttered awkwardly. "For, almost killing you. I didn't mean-"

The hanging mound shifted, and April took a step backwards as it detached itself from the ceiling, leaving a cracked stain behind where it had made contact. The mass plummeted to the floor and hit it with a loud smack, splashing outwards like a fallen raindrop before slowing to a frozen stillness and reversing, drawing back into itself. A rough head and torso, complete with arms, began pushing itself upwards from this mess as the creature stood.

"Do not be mistaken in thinking you would have success in this a second time. World-Traveller or otherwise, your meat is a dull instrument. We have taken precaution against its further sharpening. By rights we should have severed this partnership for your transgression, and, perhaps, severed your own mortal coil also, for sake of fullness?"

It had reached full height now, and refined its shape to something more readable. The blank-featured head stared up at her atop the landing.

"But you're not going to?"

"No. We are secure enough in our countermeasures that this compact may continue. It is still a partnership of necessity, krr... and, perhaps, a little sentimentality."

April squinted. "Sentimentality?"

The creature cracked a lolling grin, gelatinous flesh peeling down and away to open the gash in its head.

"Well, it is now consummated."

April closed her eyes, and shuddered, softly. She let herself stand there in silence for a few seconds, contemplating, before reopening them.

"How about we just both agree to never mention last night... ever again?"

The corners of the grin pulled back even further, almost splitting the head in two. "Agreed."

She dropped her eyes from the creature and started to descend the stairs, walking in a slow, contemplative manner as she let her hand slide across the varnished wood of the bannister. It squeaked beneath her touch, and she let the vibration travel down her arm into her core, grounding her a little. Rounding the corner at the bottom of the staircase, she hopped onto carpeted floor of the hall, where Kroakli was watching her expectantly.

"We're going out," she stated.

"Where is out, April Pearce?"

"We're going to leave this projective today."

Kroakli, never the most visibly emotive of beings, noticeably and dramatically relaxed, its flesh untensing so fully in a few places that it began to actively melt. It sucked the displaced matter back up into its body excitedly.

"Hh-! Gooood. Finally, you return us to a path that benefits the both our selves. There is nothing remaining for us here, and the danger grows with each moment."

"Well, almost. I have an errand to run first."

Kroakli's tightening body abruptly reversed course, starting to seep outward again in a dejected ooze. It threw its limbs backwards in an exaggerated gesture of exasperation. "What errand here could possibly-"

"An important one," interjected April with finality, cutting off the creaking voice before it could finish. She stepped over to the door and crouched down to lace up her boots, thoughtfully. "There's a mutual friend of ours I think I need to drop in on first," she continued eventually, sounding marginally less certain. Kroakli leaned over her with a mixture of curiosity and despair.

"We do not have any mutual friends. Why speak this way, in these senseless euphemisms?"

She didn't answer it, instead finishing up with her boots before straightening up, readjusting her jacket, and pushing the door open. She took a step forward, then hesitated, looking upwards with a sort of mild surprise that, perhaps more than anything else that morning, spoke to the unnatural torpidity of her emotions.

The sky was pulling apart like a woven rug that come undone at the edges. She had fallen asleep in the morning, and knew that it was now late afternoon—having glanced at a working clock in the old bedroom before stepping outside—the dim ambient light attesting the presence of the setting sun. But it was the dawning of a dying star, nestled behind a sickly red pall that should have heralded a fisherman's worst nightmare.

One of the reality storms seemed to have passed overhead while she slept, and it wasn't pretty. Dark black veins laced through the heavens like they had been injected with snake venom. The lines were so numerous that it took April a while to realize that they even were the same shadowy cracks she had seen before, thronging in such bloated numbers that they surpassed the quantity riddling the shattered husk of the world where she had watched Kroakli wear Michelle's face for the first time.

The cracks—they scarcely seemed to be fading at all now—were everywhere, spanning from horizon to horizon, from highest zenith to a nadir where they plunged into the ruins of the city like night taken root. April remembered watching the family computer's screensaver play as a kid, drawing three-dimensional latticeworks of piping that sprawled at random across the CRT display.

Those same shapes were writ large above her now; the sky itself had been transformed into a three-dimensional jungle gym of immense proportions, and while the light from above was not obscured completely, the cracks diffused at their fringes into a haze of distorted space that refracted white to deep crimson. It was this that was the source of the red glow that had fallen upon the broken rooftops, treating the city to its darkest morning since the pea-souper smogs of last century.

"That's probably not good," remarked April to nobody in particular.

"April, please." Kroakli's voice had transformed once again, taking on the plaintive, almost nervous tone saved for only its most dire entreatments. "Surely it can be seen plainly that this is all falling apart. There is not long, now, even; such scarce moments of suspended time until the death of this world and all in it remain, and scarcer moments yet for us to be leaving. Even the gap of time it takes for a charge to bridge your hanging synapses, building your pattern of action, or inaction, to make good on your commitment to us, even this smallest of your moments eats into the fading hours we have left. April, for the sake of both of our fleshes, we cannot dawdle here."

"Where's the bike?" asked April, ignoring it. She cast her eyes up and down the street, trying to avoid lingering on the half-collapsed frame of the building that still held what remained of Charlie and Trace's corpses. Her eyes made two passes across the neighbouring houses instead, squinting through the gloom, before she caught the faintly metallic glint of the vehicle where it had been leant up awkwardly against a pile of rubble. She began walking over to it.

"April, it is important that we-"

She spun around, and the flash of anger and grief that passed across her face was so potent, spoke so directly to the emotional core of the deconstructed fragment-approximation of a human mind inside Kroakli, that even it balked at the sight.

"Do you think I would be doing this, doing anything right now, if it wasn't important?"

The creature wavered, then recovered its resolve. "Krrrh- it may be important to your own self, your own wants and desires, but-"

"I don't 'want' any of this," she hissed, and then she made that expression again, that haunted, wounded animal look that lived behind her eyes, and Kroakli found itself silenced again as she spun back around and walked over to the bike, righting it, then twisting the keys that had remained lodged untouched in the ignition. The engine purred to life without a stutter, for all that it had been pushed to the edge of, and perhaps beyond, its mechanical limits the previous day. April thought that it was probably wise of it to work right, considering the sort of mood she was in.

Kroakli seemed to have suspended its attempts to dissuade her of her current course in favour of allowing her to get it over with as soon as possible, and so it slipped up onto her back without fuss. April was grateful for that. The silence of the dead evening paired with the steady drone of the bike between her thighs invoked an almost dreamlike monotony that she lost herself in, only roused occasionally when she was forced to dodge a crack the width of a family home that had driven itself clean through the surface of the road in front of her. Even that became rote, after a while.

The dream was still fresh in her mind, and so she started from there, working backwards, turning over the events of the past few days. The face of the Sigmoid in her nightmare, smiling sadly at her against a background of black on white, and then the shabby plastic frame of the phone booth, transplanted into her subconscious from her previous, more intimate encounter with it, when she had become lodged inside of its handset. That gave way to the blue false-face of Kroakli the previous evening, its features Michelle's, and then a grim procession of others that passed through her brain one by one, before it was just the blue creature again, hanging in mid-air, caught within the puncture in reality she had torn with her mind.

A terrible, terrible idea was beginning to crystallize at the fringes of April's brain. She let it hang there, glittering on the edges of conscious thought, as if turning her mind's eye on it directly would cause it to dissipate like so much smoke. It was the kind of idea that wouldn't bear being examined too closely—the kind of bad idea that, rather than face the light of rational consideration, could only come to fruition as collected loose instinct and unthinking impulse. She let it gestate there, out upon the outback of her mind, so that she might deploy it when the moment demanded.

That moment felt like it might be drawing close, now.

Kroakli suddenly stirred again, and for an irritated moment April thought that it was about to commence its previous tirade again. Instead, though, it buzzed a word of warning against the back of her skull. "Committee!"

April pulled up short, twisting the handlebars and smoothly performing three-quarters of a wide U-turn that took her onto a driveway in front of somebody's garage. Taking her hand off the throttle, she let the bike coast forward into a narrow alleyway that ran down the side of the garage towards the back garden, and braked in the shadowed space there, leaning the bike up against the brick wall as she crept forward to its edge. She peered out, leaning around the structure to see towards the road. A few buildings away the street opened up into a four-way junction, a second road running into the one they had been riding down and continuing on on its other side.

April hadn't encountered many other people since leaving the house where she had slept. She wasn't actually entirely sure where they had all gone; many people were dead, yes, either crushed under rubble or sliced apart, but surely that couldn't account for everybody who had lived in London. Nor could the scarce few ragged wanderers she had passed so far that day, either crouching in the rubble of fallen houses with haunted eyes, shuffling along clutching plastic bags full of looted groceries, or hurriedly towing blank-faced children behind them through the street.

She wondered vaguely if the government had ordered the city to be evacuated. She realised she hadn't so much as glanced at a newspaper in the past two days, and in all honesty, she wasn't sure that she particularly cared any more anyway.

All of this was to say that the faint hum of another vehicle echoing from the left-hand turn of the junction was distinctly out of place. April crouched silently next to the poised shape of Kroakli, waiting.

The Committeeman—or woman? Or person?—who eventually came into view was not Tavistre, but they were wearing one of the bulky metal suits. The form and style was near identical to his armour, except this one had being embellished with additional marks; a stripe of black across one arm, a pair of red triangles that adorned either side of the helmet. April wasn't sure if they indicated anything specific, or if they were just decoration. What interested her more—only faintly, but that was still saying something—was the fact they too were riding a bike.

The Committee bike was a sleek brushed-steel grey, and it was all sharp angles and swept-back curves in a similar style to that of the suits. The bare metal had a kind of retro charm to it, but still struck April as faintly absurd, like it had been pulled out of a 1960s vision of the future. She clicked her tongue softly, and Kroakli reached out a silent palp to press against her arm, warning her against making any further noise.

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

The rider pulled to a stop in the middle of the junction, and got off, standing the bike and turning about in a slow circle, peering down both roads in each direction in turn, as if searching for something. They inspected the way April had been heading first, then turned about 180 degrees to look back along the street April was hiding on, while she jerked back her head in a brief moment of fear. She held rigid against the side of the garage until Kroakli nudged her again, then slowly lowered herself back forward, just in time to see that the Committee agent was once again mounting their bike. They paused briefly, and then pulled away, continuing in the direction they had been going before.

April opened her mouth to speak, but Kroakli frantically clapped a tendril across her lips, silencing her. She waited there, holding still, for a full 30 seconds before the creature loosened its grip, and she let herself relax.

"I don't think they could have heard us, or even known that there was anyone to be listening for," she muttered, still whispering despite herself. "You got the tracker out of me, remember?" April patted her sleeve, beneath which still-smarting wound, sealed surprisingly effectively by the pad of the orgoane's congealed flesh, sat upon her inner elbow.

"Tracker is gone, yes, it is excised from your body, untangled from amid the sinews," Kroakli hissed back, "but their sensing capability remains... capable, and they are hunting for signs of us. Be grateful this was a cursory surveying only, peh... a more directed scan would have turned up our traces."

"They're still looking for us?" said April, glancing up at the dying sky. "Surely they have, you know, other things on their minds right now?!"

"What else would they be doing, krrh? They yet believe we are to blame for this world's dying. It is a misapprehension of belief, yes, but their truth. Revel now, April Pearce, in being the one who has more information than the other. It is delicious advantage to hold, yes?"

"It's fucking frustrating is what it is." She tip-toed out from behind the garage wall, then, seeing the coast was clear, doubled back to grab the bike and wheel it forward. "When I didn't know what was happening I felt dumb, but at least I thought that, like, someone out there probably did. Now it seems like I'm the only one with sense, and it's not like I can really do anything right now. Not unless I... well."

She glanced back towards the road down which the Committee agent had disappeared.

"I thought that they, of anyone, would at least recognize what the fuck is going on, but no. Once again they've decided that instead of understanding their shortcomings and reflecting on them, they're going to take the easier route and just blame me."

"What a burden it is, to be the being with most fullness of knowledge about its own reality."

"Oh, because I'm sure you know so much about that."

"We do." Kroakli tilted itself towards her as she clambered back astride the bike. "Although, a piece of knowledge we still do not possess is that of where we are going. By all reason it would be swiftest Travelling from this projective that you might manifest, but it seems that this is not the path that has been chosen..."

April grunted under her breath, and started the engine again.

It didn't take long for Kroakli's question to be answered, although if she was fully honest with herself, April had never had a specific destination in mind. She could probably have stayed in the run down house across the road from the corpses of her friends, and nothing she was going to do would have gone any worse or better. If there was one thing that she was sure of, though, it was that staying there any longer would have ground into the shattered pieces of her like pestle upon mortar.

Besides, she had a vague inclination that she wanted to be somewhere higher up before she end of things. Somewhere with more elevation, so that she could look out over the city, or what was left of it. That had felt like the right thing to do to her, and so she followed the instinct easily, without thought. She had stopped operating on anything more than instinct days ago.

There were plenty of tall buildings in London, and this was still true even despite the sizeable percentage that had fallen down over the past few days. April however found herself drawn towards her ultimate destination like a moth to a flame, helped along by how her mental autopilot knew how to take her here when she was out late drinking, or returning from a midnight shift. It was easy to let go, let her subconscious take over and find the route on its own.

She applied the brakes, slowing the bike to a crawl outside of her own apartment building, being mildly relieved to see that it was still standing and mostly undamaged. It certainly wasn't the tallest structure in the city, or even in her immediate neighbourhood, but the roof access at twelve storeys up would act as as good of a lookout spot as any, and she couldn't quite resist the cyclical symbolism of coming here now. It felt good—or at least, right—to be going home, even if neither it nor anywhere else might ever feel like home to her again.

She pulled into the little car parking annex that abutted the ground floor of the concrete structure. Residents of the building kept their vehicles parked here, which didn't include April because she didn't actually own a car—a reasonable choice, she had felt, given how ubiquitous public transport was. That was probably no longer the case given that the city was mostly destroyed, but by that same logic, she felt that it was probably little late for her to be getting into automobile ownership right now either. Several of the parking spaces had been emptied, so she swung Fabian's co-opted bike into one, flipped out the kickstand, and dismounted.

Kroakli hopped down to the ground, and stood again, tilting itself up towards the building before twisting back towards April in a gesture of apparent misgivings. It hummed and clicked to itself, spooling up to say something that she imagined would be disparaging, but seemed to change its mind at the last moment when it saw the flat look she was giving it. She was grateful for that. She felt like she had heard enough senseless chatter already in her life to fill up all possible universes, whether simulated and real. Of course it took the end of the world to finally get some peace and quiet in this fucking city. April almost grinned to herself at that, the brief emotion landing halfway between humour and nausea.

The glass door leading to the ground-level foyer had been locked, and April realized that the last time she had left her apartment, she hadn't had her keys. They were probably at... Michelle's place? It didn't matter. She reached down to grasp a stray brick lying by the side of road, one of many that had accumulated there recently, and lobbed it through the glass, promptly dissolving it into a spiderweb of cracks. She reached for a second brick with which she could knock away some of the shards that remained clinging loosely from the frame, then stepped gingerly over the threshold, heading towards the stairs.

Kroakli started to say something again, interrupting her quiet. April was about to reach out and hush it, irritatedly, before her brain registered the words.

"We are being followed, khhrr..."

She twisted around, peering out through the broken door frame, then hissed back.

"I don't see anyone."

"You would not. They are not the kind to be seen, or to be plied by other meat-senses. But we can sense them, approaching along the path we followed previously. There are three, and they are encased in metal."

"More Committee? Fuck."

"The same, we might assume," clicked Kroakli, tilting its body towards her. "Perhaps the subject of our last encounter was not as unknowing as they feigned. Our trail-leavings were scented, and they now bring reinforcements to bolster their hunting of us. We should make our flesh scarce before they approach this structure."

April dithered slightly, then headed for the stairs again, stepping with bolstered purpose.

"This won't take long."

"Must it take time at all? Kah, if you wish to retrieve items from your dwelling, then-"

"No," said April, hiking her leg up onto the first step, "no, there's nothing here that I want any more."

"Then what, pray tell, is the purpose of our being here?" It hissed as it slid up the stairs beside her, its feet and legs dissolving into a single mass that rippled over the steps while its upper body remained unchanged.

"I need to have some parting words, I think."

"With the mutual friend, which we do not have?"

"Yes."

"Ghurhh..."

The creature grumbled, but consented to follow her lead. Inside the building, not much seemed to have changed, except that it was eerily dark. There wasn't any power to light the fluorescent bulbs embedded in the ceiling any more. Now that she thought about it, she wasn't sure that she had seen any working electricity in the city that morning, period. The remaining inhabitants had been plunged into a blackout of another kind, alongside that which had been painted across the sky.

She wondered how many of them were still alive. The hospitals would be abandoned, and God knew, there would be a need for them. Besides, even just counting those who hadn't already been injured, had the water supply been knocked out alongside the power?

She rounded the landing of the third floor, stared at the broken wooden door that was the entrance to her flat, then continued on upwards.

It was too big, too enormous to fully comprehend, all that had happened to the world while she had been consumed in her own personal tragedies. Honestly, those tragedies had felt plenty big enough; already too much for one person to take without breaking. She wasn't sure she hadn't already broken. How could she even think about the millions- billions? -of other lives that had been cut short? How many more would be meeting their unceremonious ending as the sky shredded itself into pieces above them, fracturing apart as surely as the glass door downstairs had from the impact of her thrown brick.

The whole fucking world.

She was sick of it. Enough was enough.

They rounded the stairwell onto the landing of the ninth floor.

"They are close," hissed Kroakli, as they hurried towards the next flight of stairs. "Krr... They are making an approach to the entryway, so we will have need to depart from this building directly. Be prepared to find a focus for your Travelling and take us away with haste once whatever fools errand you have concocted is complete, or otherwise when they commence their assault, whichever of the two arrives sooner..."

"I'll find a focus, don't worry," muttered April, jumping up the stairs two at a time as she reached the tenth floor and kept going.

Not long now.

The last inhabited floor was the eleventh, which, combined with the previous ten and the ground level, totalled twelve full floors of flats. The stairwell nominally ended here, although a nondescript door marked with a "fire exit" sign, no longer glowing with its customary green light, lead to a short flight of bare metal steps that ascended to the secret thirteenth level, otherwise known as the roof.

April pushed through the first door, pounded up stairs, then leaned against the metal bar across the door labelled "EMERGENCY EXIT—OPENING THIS DOOR WILL SOUND THE FIRE ALARM". It sprung open, the alarm disappointingly failing to sound due to the lack of power, and suddenly she was standing on the roof, teetering in front of the metal fire escape that clung to the outside of the building.

April ignored it, turning away from the edge and towards the rooftop's centre. She hopped over a short concrete wall surmounted by a metal railing, then clambered on top of a squat metal air conditioning unit that was embedded in the structure a few steps further beyond it. She tested the metal grille with her feet to make sure that it was steady, found that it was, and straightened up.

She could see everything.

The sky hung over the dying city like a gaping red maw. It spewed clumps of black thread that had been strung through buildings and landscape alike, the heavens and earth conjoined together in the masterwork of some monstrous seamstress. There were fires in the distance, but the twisting cracks that shot through the city were dense enough now that she couldn't see the light of them clearly, the red-orange glow of smoke bent towards a deeper red by their fraying edges.

Buildings had collapsed like so many sandcastles. Whether this was from the first round of earthquake tremors, or if the bolts of blazing yellow light—the reality storms were fizzing on the horizon even now, birthing fresh inky lines—had sliced through the foundations like they had at Morgan's apartment building, she couldn't say from this distance.

What she could say was that it was all absolutely fucked up.

"April...!" wheezed Kroakli, the hoarse voice taking on a nasal whine as it vocalized its nervousness, "they are inside the building, beginning to make the climb. They will ascend in less than five of your minutes, perhaps fewer even that that..."

"Don't worry," she said, looking down at the creature. "It's almost over." Then she turned to the horizon, tilted her head towards the sky, and shouted, "hey! Hey, SIGMOID!"

The sound echoed faintly into the distance, stifled by the cloying weight of the choked air. There was no response. Kroakli tilted its head, questioningly.

April tried again. "SIGMOID! I know you can hear me!" She turned around, scanning across the horizon. "The world's not gone yet, so you're still here, you can still hear us, and you owe me. You're killing my home, my whole fucking universe, and out of everyone you could have picked, you decided to put the burden of that on me, so you owe me one last piece of your fucking time so I can ask you some fucking questions! Come on, I know you can spare it, you sanctimonious ass, crusty old, motherfucker of a shitty fucking god! Come on out here!"

There was a brief pause in which nothing happened.

And then an empty volume of air a few feet away from her twisted softly, filling out with diffuse shade, like a fine mist that darkened quickly into a thick smoke. A loose shape was drawn out, the rough form of a human silhouette, with an amorphous lump protruding at one shoulder. There was the faintest of hissing sounds, the noise of a soft breeze over an open field, or a leak from a pressurized container. The rough shape started to refine itself, shedding layers of the indistinct mist to reveal sharper, harder edges, like a statue being hewn out of marble. At the same time the smoky substance of the thing darkened too, thickening to the consistency of a liquid, then gel, then a dark solid.

Colour was the last part of its form to appear, laying itself down in strips across the blank canvas of the man that had manifested into existence. The enclosing ribbons of hue obscured his face briefly, but then they fastened into place, and all at once he was immediately there, standing next to April on the air conditioner. The lump at his shoulder had resolved into the crouched form of the monkey Simian, one hand caught in the fabric of his shirt, the other pressed gently against his neck. The blue-tinged ridges of raised tissue framed cheeks below the familiar night-dark eyes of the man-who-was-not-a-man, and his smile was the same soft, sad expression from her dream.

"April," he- no, It, April reminded herself -said, shaking Its head slightly. "I know what you intend to ask of me, but the answer will be the same as it was the last time. I'm so sorry, but there is nothing I can do."

Kroakli had briefly frozen at the sight of the Sigmoid's avatar, but now slid up onto the metal podium of the deactivated AC unit. It reformed back into its humanoid shape and stood just behind April's right shoulder, but didn't speak.

"Do you?" asked April, "do you know what I want? Have you been busy reading my mind?"

"It would not be reading your mind, April, and in fact if anything it would be me reading mine, but..." It glanced between April and Kroakli, then made an expression like It had been wanting to grin, but had made an effort not to. "...but, for the record, no. I have already ceded my direct influence upon the shaping of the pattern of this projective. My insight into this world is limited, now. I cannot grasp its future or even its present, and my control over its progression is, well... practically non-existent. This will remain the case unless I were to reach out and assert my control once more, which, as I have explained previously, I cannot."

It hesitated for a second, studying April's face.

"But I don't need to be able to read your thoughts, April. Even if I didn't already know you well enough to hazard a guess—which I do, excepting the past 24 of your hours—there is only one thing you could be wanting right now, and I cannot grant it. I have explained that there is simply too much at stake for it to be possible that this world might be saved. It has to be allowed to die. We must all come to terms with that fact, and the fact that, ultimately, it will be true eventually of anything that has the fortune to exist. Is death at a life's end not a part of that life's definition? Would it not be a meaningless concept otherwise? It is the only way things can be, April, not by my choice, but by the necessity of our reality. It is hard lesson to learn—heavens know, it was hard enough for me—but that is what entropy is, after all. Do you understand, April? I'm sorry if you can't right now, but..."

The long tired stopped again as it stared at April, pleadingly. The impossibly black eyes met hers. April wondered how much of Its emoting was a function of the body It had co-opted, or if It was specifically puppeteering these expressions in order to communicate with her more convincingly. She didn't fool herself that this shard of the universe-sized thing she was speaking to had come by these emotions naturally.

It seemed to have given up on waiting for her to respond, and continued, "listen. I have not been directly monitoring the decay now that I have relinquished the burden of my control, but I can tell you that there is not long left. Your ability to transition between projective layers remains to you, yes? This segmentation, this alveole, it will not all be sacrificed quite yet. There are decades—centuries, even—of subjective time remaining before the complete expiry of your adjacent layers, and many millions of them are compatible with your form. You need not stay here to die, April. If you need more time, then you can take it. Take your, um..."

The Sigmoid glanced at Kroakli.

"...your friend, with you too, and then you can both be done with this. It is not a pleasant sight to dwell on, I would think."

April waited a few seconds to be sure that It was done before she spoke.

"You're wrong. You got it wrong."

It looked at her quizzically. "Got.. what, wrong? I'm afraid that there really, truly is nothing that can be done-"

"Not that. About why I called you here. I didn't want to ask you to save the world, I- I know you won't do that."

It met her eyes sharply, then nodded once. "Then I am glad that you've made peace with things. Thank you, April. It is best for all of us." It glanced down at the floor, then out towards the mess of a horizon, before turning back to April. "But, then, what did you wish to ask of me? I cannot affect much here, as you know, but if you desire information, I will do what I can to answer. It is the least I can do."

Kroakli shifted slightly, and buzzed against April's side. "They are three floors below, and ascending. We must finish this."

April nodded at it, then turned to the Sigmoid's avatar. "I do have one question."

"Please, ask freely."

She stared at It, and her voice cracked just a little as she spoke again. "Why me? You never told me why, out of everyone in the world, you picked me, why- why you chose my life to fuck up before you ended the world-"

"To help preserve this world," It cut in, "and to grant what was needed to preserve yourselves, if only in part. It's an out, April—for the time being at least, and I'm sure many here would have given more than you did for a chance at that."

"Sure. Thanks I guess, whatever." April curled her fingers into a fist. "But still, why me?"

It spread Its arms, palms outstretched. The Simian removed its paw from Its neck, and gripped the fabric beneath it with both hands, holding on with a tight grasp.

"You really want to know the reason? I'm afraid it won't much impress you, believe me."

April rolled her eyes. "Tell me."

"Luck, April. Chance." It gave her a tight grin. "I selected my subject through pure, random chance, the decision made at the quantum level, from a candidate pool consisting the entire sentient population of this projective. It seemed the most appropriate way. If there's one thing that I've always had going for me, April, it has been the luck of the draw, even if it wasn't quite enough to save me in the end. I owe everything I am to chance, and so I occasionally like to give back."

April squinted at it. "That's it? Totally random, you just- picked me out of a hat?"

"Yes. I'm sorry, April, if you were looking for something more profound than that. But perhaps, at least, you can find solace in this being the work of fate, rather than the burden of any grand design or plot to interrupt the life you were living."

April chewed on her lip, thoughtfully. "Good to know, I guess." She looked down at her shoes, then past them to the metal grille of the AC unit beneath her, the dull steel reflecting the dim red light of the sky into an eerie rust-glow. The faint shadow of the unmoving fan blades lurked beneath.

April looked back up.

"You know, there's a thing about good luck. You know what it is?"

The Sigmoid grinned at her, humouringly. "Please, tell me."

"Sooner or later, it always fucking runs out, doesn't it?"

And then, reaching out with her mind, pulling her entire being together with a monumental effort into a consolidated laser beam of directed attention, she seized at the body of this puppet-creature that the mind of the Sigmoid had tied itself to. Her frantic brain sunk claws into the surface of its skin, twisting it with groaning, wrenching force into a focus for her travelling, and tore open a hole in reality that skewered the shallow pattern of it right through its paper-thin heart.