When April awoke, the first thing she was aware of was the quiet.

It didn't get to last for long. She gasped, then cried out, her body jolting upright as she twisted around, eyes and brain searching, listening for the roar of the motor behind her, the teeth-chattering vibration of the bike between her thighs. Her right hand clapped against her left arm, which was still radiating a hot, sickly pain down into her hand and up to her shoulder. She was shocked for a moment to encounter a hard crust covering over the skin, then looked down to realise that it was the hardened scab of Kroakli's own flesh, still holding fast over its incision to keep the wound sealed. The surprise transmuted into a faint revulsion.

Where was Kroakli now?

She panted, trying to steady herself, looking around the room. She was lying on a bed, but it was wholly unfamiliar to her. She picked at its ugly burgundy covers, which had been sewn from a glossy, velvety material that might have looked pretty if it wasn't for the drab light and the musty, old-person-sweat smell that wafted up from it like dirty laundry at a retirement home.

The light was shining dimly through a pair of dishevelled looking brown curtains, and the dim glow confused April's brain for a moment, which was still mentally situated in the previous evening. It was… morning?

Morning! What happened- what had happened to-!?

"Kroakli!?"

April tried to shout, but her voice came out as a hoarse, airless whisper, her throat dry and cracked. She did her best to gulp down some saliva as she looked around the room. It was covered in a blue-green floral wallpaper which was surely at least two decades out of date, and in some places had peeled back from the walls, displaying some alarmingly deep cracks in the plaster. For a moment April was worried that she had been asleep for a whole lot longer than a single night, until she remembered that even newly constructed buildings weren't doing all that great in the "structural soundness" department recently, given all the earthquakes and other cataclysms.

"Kroakli!?" she tried again, looking towards the door. She managed to find her voice this time, and her exclamation was answered by faint noises from elsewhere in the building, a kind of odd thumping-tapping sound from the floor below her. This was followed by a faint scraping, like two pieces of dry parchment rubbing against each other, and then something thudded hard against the door to the room, making her jump.

There was a soft sucking sound, and blue fluid began bubbling up from the crack beneath the door, inflating haphazardly in tumorous balloon-like lumps of translucent flesh. Until recently, April would have been terrified out of her wits at the sight. As it was, she felt vaguely like she wanted to be sick again. She did her best to ward away the feeling; her most recent injuries had rattled her enough that the possibility definitely wasn't out of the question, and she decided she would prefer not to spew chunks all over whatever this room was.

Kroakli finished pulling itself out from under the door and stood up, sliding loosely towards her.

"April Pearce! You have not yet perished; this is truly a boon."

She nodded, non-committally. "What happened?"

"This world is ending, of course."

She flapped her hand in the creature's direction. "Yeah, yeah, I mean aside from that, like—did we get away?"

"We have not been rendered yet into insensate atom-bits, and your innards are not painted piecewise across the compacted bitumen of your world's vehicle trackways. Infer from this what you will."

April emitted a non-committal grunt, scrunched up her eyes, and let her body fall backwards onto the bed again. The adrenaline that had flooded her body upon waking seeped out of her like water pooling beneath a sack of wet clothes. Despite however long she had just spent in a state of protracted unconsciousness, she felt tired down to the bone.

When she opened her eyelids again she saw the gruesome form of Kroakli, leaning over the bed, poised above her like a crashing tidal wave frozen at the point of curling in on itself.

The creature's voice fluttered out of its gill slits. "…hhhhwwweelllll?"

She stared up at it blankly. "What?"

It flexed eagerly, the unholy array of ropey blue strands and phlegmy blobs studded with spins above her somehow managing to give the impression of a grin.

"Can we have perhaps some gratitude?"

There were a solid ten seconds of silence as April frowned up at the creature, nonplussed.

"...thank you?"

"There it issss…" Kroakli hissed. "We have saved your substance from its own self-severing now how many times… six, by our count, up from the five? It is hard even to fully consolidate the extent of our contribution, krr…"

April coughed, weakly. "Why the fuck do I keep owing my life to otherworldly creatures recently. Feels like-" she grunted, clearing her throat, "-probably a bad habit."

"Finally you are understanding!" Kroakli slithered up to the head of the bed and reconsolidated itself down into a more typical number of limbs. "How helpful we are. This is the essentialness of our pact."

"Right." April pressed two balled fists up to her face, wincing at the pain in her arm as she moved it. "Well, saviour, can you tell me where the fuck we even are?"

"It is an emptied dwelling. We deposited us here so your stolid flesh might make efforts to re-seal its many infirmities, insofar as it is able. Now the tracking beacon has been excised, they are hard pressed to follow us directly. We are free of their hunting, for now…"

"Okay, and where is this dwelling exactly?"

Kroakli hesitated. "...it is, still within your city- your London."

"Yeah, but that doesn't narrow it down much. Are we still in, like, Enfield, or-"

"Do not worry too much about this… Let your viscera reconstitute, and we shall carry on this inquiry with eagerness then."

There was another moment of silence as they both paused, until April broke it by rolling out of the bed with a low groan.

"April-"

"Shut it," she muttered, clambering to her feet and shoving her palm out towards the creature, which was standing to one side non-committally. In fact, almost… timidly?

April frowned. She staggered over to the dingy curtains and threw them open, letting in the light of a dimly overcast morning. That was her first impression, anyway, before she actually looked up into the sky, which probably would have been a clear blue were it not for the hanging clouds of smog, or for the criss-crossing black tears that laced through the air like inky contrails. They caught the light of the sun at their edges, warping it weirdly into glinting, reddish beads that threaded along the boundaries of the cracks.

April swore. They were taking much longer to fade that they had been the previous day, the dim mirage-like background gestalt of the fainter shadows only underlined by jagged, jet-black traces that had been left behind by a more recent storm.

Then, assuming she had seen the worst of it, she finally turned her eyes down towards the sleepy suburban street in front of her, took in the row of partially collapsed houses opposite, and felt her heart catch in her chest.

"Kroakli!?"

The creature seemed to sigh as it turned towards her.

"Kroakli, that's Charlie's house?" The statement was given with the intonation of a question, as if she didn't quite believe it.

"...yes. It was our next destination, so we completed the journey whilst you were insensate."

"The roof is collapsed!? Kroakli, half- half the building's collapsed!"

Kroakli clicked, hissed and hummed at itself. "The tremors struck here also."

"But- but Charlie? Trace?"

"You should leave these matters for after- April…"

She staggered away from the window and towards the doorway, still trying to find her feet, shoving the throbbing pain in her arm to the back of her mind with a sickening effort of will. She managed to reach the shabby looking wooden door, and leaned heavily on the brass door handle, half pressing on it and half supporting her weight. It clicked, and then the door groaned open as she staggered out onto the landing.

"April Pearce, perhaps rethink this hastiness." Kroakli was following her out, slipping along gingerly in her wake. "You remain unwell."

"Fuck you. Are they okay?"

She shuffled over to the wooden staircase, clutching at the bannister for support. She felt the knot in her stomach tighten as Kroakli failed to answer her.

She took the stairs as fast as she was able to, which was to say, slowly. Far too slowly. She used her good arm to keep a hold on the bannister for support, and tried to shake off some of her dizziness while commanding her feet to move her onto the next step. One foot, then the other, then repeat. Fifteen times, and then she was down in the hall of the unfamiliar house.

More slightly dirty curtains along one wall, she saw; dim light shone in through patterned frosted glass set into a front door that she had probably glanced past without a second thought every time she had paid a visit to Charlie in the house across the street. Feeling slightly steadier now that she was on firm ground, she tottered over to it and tried the lock. It twisted loosely in her hand from where Kroakli had presumably broken the mechanism. She threw the door to one side, stepping past as it thudded against the wall, denting the plaster through the old-fashioned wallpaper.

"April, really we must-"

"Shut UP!"

She was still wearing her boots, even despite how dirt-strewn and stained with grime they had become. Kroakli hadn't seen fit to change her out of the Committee's formal wear either. The bizarre tassels of her jacket fluttered as she staggered down the front steps, then made her way down the driveway in a determined, only-slightly-shaky stride.

Charlie's house lay ahead of her, beyond a several-metre span of cracked tarmac and pavement. The destruction that had raged through the city piecemeal had hit a slew adjacent buildings hard, and while the house she had just emerged from across the street had been merely shaken, Charlie's house—and those of his immediate neighbours—had lurched forward hard enough to disgorge a large proportion of their masonry down in front of themselves.

Half of the structure, consisting the front porch, ground floor bay window and what was probably the exterior of the upper floor bathroom were more or less intact, only marred where the building's brick fronting began to slump down in an increasingly lopsided manner as her eyes scanned to the right. It looked like the structure had suffered a monolateral stroke, then subsequently been hit by a wrecking ball that had taken out the entire right-side wall.

The knot in April's throat blossomed into a guttural noise that was half a sob, half a gasp as she approached the still-standing doorway. She reached out and tried the handle. It turned without a click, in a similar manner to the door she had just exited.

She turned around to look at Kroakli, who was hovering a few feet behind her.

"You've already been inside?!"

It grunted a wordless phlegmy rattle, its bulbous false head downcast. For a moment she wanted to scream at the horrible thing, but the fleeting impulse departed before she could make good on it. Instead she just felt numb, and she held that numbness close to her chest as she pulled open the doorway and stepped into the hall.

The hallway of Charlie's house was distorted like a fairground funhouse. She spotted the familiar signifiers that this was in fact her friend's dwelling; there was the scratched up wooden table by the door with the bowl where he kept his keys; the row of photos hung on one wall documenting a trip to Spain in years past with an on-again off-again sometimes boyfriend. They were all twisted askew, now. One had fallen to the floor and landed face down. The bowl had also toppled, and April spotted Charlie's preferred keyring ornament—a green, off-brand rubber alien—poking out from underneath its overturned rim.

Down the far end of the hall, past the doorway of the bathroom where she had washed the blood off of her hands after her first sojourn into another world, the ceiling twisted, warped, and collapsed into a pile of timbers and paint flecks. Her eyes traced the cracks in the plaster as they reached back down the wall towards her.

The whole place was probably still a hazard zone and an active collapse risk, but she didn't think she really cared. The door leading to the living room was still intact, light glinting from its mottled inlaid stained glasswork, and slightly ajar.

She stepped inside. They were both in there, and, of course, they were both dead.

Unlike Morgan, Charlie and Trace hadn't been granted even the particular fatal gravitas of being sliced in two by a literal break in reality. They had, instead, been given the far more mundane fate of being crushed by falling masonry. It felt like almost an insult, April thought; that the world itself was ending, only for her friends to have been killed by a mechanism that might have equally resulted from a workplace accident at a construction site. It was just too normal. If Charlie and Trace had deserved anything from their deaths, any appropriate homage to the way they had lived, then they certainly hadn't deserved normal.

The back wall of the living room had buckled during the earthquake that had felled the rest of the house, and it had brought down half of the ceiling with it. The corpses of Charlie and Trace, still sprawled across the sofa, had taken the full weight of the upper floor as it imploded under the pressure of gravity. Sticking out from the blood stained mess, she could see where a splintered timber beam had been driven directly through Trace's chest, as if she were a vampire that had been staked. Her head was lolling sideways, blank eyes staring vacantly, a line of desiccated blood running from her mouth down her chin. The empty stare was still framed by her eyeliner.

The numb sensation inside April's brain grew, embedding claw-like roots deep in her body. It began at her extremities, the detached feeling growing there like a static-filled balloon inflating within her fingers and hands. It engorged and expanded and distended, blanketing her body like cold water, filling up her arms and legs and pouring out into her chest like a broken dam. It flooded in until it had occupied her entire body, rising in a wailing tide of desolation to the crown of her head, and sat there trembling from its rising pressure, holding at an intangible boiling point for a full five seconds, until something inside her snapped.

Throughout the previous day—ever since the Sigmoid had broken the world—April had been dimly aware of the war raging inside her head. She was spectator to a conflict that had arisen between the hot panic that still doggedly followed her around, ready to pounce upon her the sight of blood, and that cold, detached void that the present disaster had brought with it, a nothingness of sensation that somehow scared her even more.

The battle between these two impulses had bubbled up in the evening before, and she had been feeling it play out in a messy simmer all the while, briefly spiking to the surface of her thought when she had seen the man crushed under the fallen building, and then when she had found Morgan dying, soon dead. It had bubbled and fizzed beneath her cranium while she and Kroakli had been running from the Committee, briefly re-emerging fully when Tavistre had confronted her.

In this moment, however, staring at the macerated corpses of the last friends in the world she might have been able to run to, she felt the numbness win out. It flooded over her entirely, suffocating the competing terror in an instant. She looked at the spatter of crimson blood streaking Trace's face and chest, and for the first time in her life, the sight of it made her feel nothing at all.

She turned back towards Kroakli.

"Can you save their minds?" Her voice was a hoarse hollow.

"We came here ourself before your waking, and ingested then that which we were able, hhhkrr… We grow our skill in this process, but they had decayed beyond the point of our past… projects. We retrieved many fragments of them, but the picture we hold is not as whole."

"Thank you anyway, Kroakli." April turned towards the door, her back to the corpses, and walked out into the hall. Kroakli stepped out of her way, its gelatinous frame quivering nervously.

"We understand that, for your kind, their perishing will be a difficult thing for the mind to digest. We realise this all the better, we think, now that we are the substance four such minds. Despite the little facility we have applied to obtaining exacting fidelity while replicating the tracks of... human emotion, the scope of your necessary feeling can be triangulated from our reference." It clicked. "We are sorry for this… tragedy. We hope, truly, that you are not compromised in your deciding our next movements, because we still must depart—must escape—this projective, yes?"

She stopped, turned and looked at it, then away again, walking back down the hallway towards the front porch.

"...oooorrr, or we can offer time for you to process, to integrate these new occurrences, before our departure, our ultimate leaving of this projective to its fate. …Yes?"

April swung the front door open and thumped deadly down the steps, then strode back across the shattered tarmac to the other side of the street. She left the door to Charlie's ruined house hanging open by its hinges. Kroakli slipped out after her, still talking.

"Consider it in this manner… Does death not come to all of us in our ultimate denouement? Our own kind is indefinitely replicable, but even these cells must meet their ends with certainty, in service to the propagation of our collective. This is the function of viscera, and the nature of existing that defines the visceral. Your kind is more fragile yet, and death must be a yet more imminent inevitability. They were only foreshortened in their demise by, at most, a few subjective decades, surely—and even then it cannot be known with certainty whether-"

"Shut up," muttered April, dully.

Kroakli shut up.

The door to the house she had awoken in, still standing tauntingly upright in its full two storeys, remained slightly ajar. April threw it open, stepped through onto the threshold, then closed it loosely behind her, the bolt of the shattered lock failing to click into place. Kroakli seeped through the crack between it and its frame as she continued up the stairs in the hall.

"Listen," it tried again, tentatively, voice a plaintive creak. "April, would it not be prescient to-"

She rounded the corner of the upstairs landing, disappearing from Kroakli's direct view. It continued speaking for a few seconds, feeling the rhythmic thrum of her body walking away down the upstairs hall, then paused, popped with an increasing irritation, and slid up the staircase in a chorus of soft slithering noises like somebody had tossed a wet book down a hill. Rebounding into itself at the top, it arrived just in time to see the door to the old bedroom slam shut, triggering a brief downpour of displaced plaster flecks from the crumbling ceiling.

Kroakli stilled itself for a moment, considering.

And then it threw itself forward, seizing the door handle with a grasping palp and throwing it aside, flooding into the room to stretch out its full elastic mass over the prone body of the girl where she had pooled herself, face down, in the center of the musty bed with its blood-coloured sheets.

It set its position in place by sinking several spines into the ceiling, pinning its form between the surface of it and the floor, then shuddered indignantly as speaking gills flared up on its underside like bristling cannons.

"ENOUGH, APRIL!"

She didn't move. That was fine, Kroakli mused, because it wasn't going to either.

"We are DONE, now, entertaining these idiosyncrasies of an impotent, pathetic, PREY THING! Krr-hah, April Pearce, perhaps we have indulged you too much thus far! Do not fall victim to the narcissism of your species, blood-sackling, and think yourself our better- nay, our mistress, as is your current pretence! You are speaking—or not speaking, as it may be—to a self, our self, the extent of which is beyond comprehension to the grey pulp that sits behind that brittle parietal! We could end you in an instant, and yet still we bend to your interest! We entertain the neuroses of your species, offer fair trade in kind for your one utility, sparingly metered- we let you decide even where next we would be guided! And for it we are insulted, shunned, ignored-"

April twisted on the bed, staring up at it, and her expression was a dull rictus set hard in ice. Kroakli's composite mind did register this, but pointedly ignored it.

"Consider returning the set of your so thinly wrapped bones to their initial impulse; fear of us, or at the very least, appropriate respect. Perhaps then we might command your attention when we speak sense in face of your insanity! The world is dying, April, as you are well aware, and there is nothing left here for either of us, as you are also so aware! So cease this pitiful inaction, bridge the divide to some elsewhere- any elsewhere, where we both might persist! You know well now the method of Travelling, and so all we ask is for your fulfilment of our compact by making good your pledge to us!"

April's eyes flicked sideways, just briefly, as if she was mulling over whether to order nuggets or fries at a fast food chain she was profoundly tired of. They held there for a bare second before refocusing on Kroakli.

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

"Nah. Actually, I think I'll just lie here and die like everyone else's been doing."

Kroakli's entire corpus shuddered with incoherent frustration and rage, a litany of keening rasps and chirps of its shifting flesh expressing raw emotion in a manner that human vocal cords could only have dreamt of. It braced itself harder against the ceiling, letting a fresh quiver of bared spines slide out of its central mass towards the bored looking girl lounging beneath it, an instinctive threat display which she proceeded to entirely ignore.

"Ghru- krkuh- ko- kooh- ooh! So, now then, you decide to succumb to an impulse of the lowliest prey, to face your demise without even an attempt at fleeing!? Pathetic thing! We thought this indignity did not become even your self, but again you prove ever unworthy of our better judgement. Know that we would willingly leave you here to embrace this newfound infatuation with suicide, were we not trapped in here alongside your decaying form!"

It leaned closer in to her, the hanging curtain of its blue flesh bulging down, constrained by ropey strands that held the taut gel-flesh intact. She watched it impassively.

"All my friends are already dead, Kroakli."

It spat out a sound in an unpleasant clicking schlorp of its tightening blowholes.

"And whose fault is this!? It was not our responsibility to be their minder. Consider then who here has failed, and which of us should bear the resulting weight of recompense for their killing-"

A flash of anger passed across April's blank face, alighting her in a warm flush that progressed, as fast as breathing, into a hot, clammy shifting of something intangible at the back of her brain. She reached out with her attention, and it was easy, so incredibly easy, to pull the bridge out of nothing and shunt it into the object of her focus. The speed with which she pried reality apart belied the labour of mind that had accompanied her previous efforts, and, with two invisible hands gripping as tight as an iron vice, sunk her mental fingers deeply into the quivering body of the creature above her and tore the hole in reality directly through the center of its body.

Kroakli screamed.

She shouldn't have been able to hurt it, really; it was a thing that one was not supposed to be able to hurt. Its malleable substance should have parted like water, flowing outward and around the break in its current form to reconstitute into something blue, pointy, and extremely pissed off. That is what the outcome would have been if this were any regular hole, punched out or torn through a flesh that needed not concern itself with conventional notions of "insides" versus "out".

This was not any regular hole.

By making the orgoane the focus for her Travelling, she had torn through something far more fundamental to its being than any mere physical topology. Kroakli was unfolding in her vision, blossoming in eerie blue fractals into a bridgehead that had rooted itself not in the creature's body, but in the projective's fundamental concept-representation of its existence. April wasn't entirely sure if the transformation it was undergoing in front of her, the tunnel she was excavating through the creature's ontology, was actually physically real, or whether this was just the mental representation her brain chose for the indescribable process of joining realities. Either way, it didn't seem to be responding well to the substance of its self being repurposed en masse into a dimensional bridge.

Kroakli had been fixed in the air, its center mass held tight by the grip of the thing it was being transformed into. The outer edges still flailed, and April suddenly realized that she could feel the outline of the creature as it twisted; every individual, fantastic cell caught up in the process she was orchestrating with her brain.

It tried to divide, shedding parts of itself to break free, and she caught at those too, plucking them out of the air and freezing them back into the artifice she was spinning, giving the same attention to the pulsing tendrils that tried and failed to reach for her, drawing near only to find themselves pulled back into the expanding pattern. The amalgamation didn't exactly destroy the flesh, but she could hold it, isolate, it, disrupt the mechanism of the tiny water balloons that were its individual cell bodies until they stuttered, one by one, and died.

She realised that she could kill all of it, if she wanted to.

For a moment, she really thought about doing it.

She didn't.

Instead, still holding the creature in place, she loosened her grip on a posterior lobe which, she could now feel, was trying to inflate into a new vocal organ, its previous slit-mouths having been already incorporated into the dimensional bridgehead. The bulge of flesh expanded, reorganized its constituents, and she heard Kroakli literally gasp.

"----April...." The voice came out as a quiet, high pitched whine.

"You want to blame me?" April hissed. "Don't think I've forgotten who killed Michelle."

"We... did not then know..."

"And don't you dare- don't you fucking dare imply- This is not my fucking fault. None of this is my fucking fault!"

"...would apologize... truly for..."

"I don't need to put up with your shit. I'm not sure I ever want to have to put up with it again."

The limbs Kroakli still held free spasmed. "...would not... do not... krrkreh-... demise...!"

She stared up at it, splayed out horribly in a dissection tableau of dizzying blue flesh, flecked with suspended biological debris now arranged in a pattern as beautiful as its constituents were grotesque. She tightened her mental grip ever so slightly. Kroakli made a sound that approximated a sort of wet "plep".

"I am not your prey."

Kroakli trembled, then shuddered, and then the gill slits across that tumorous posterior lobe exploded in a shrieking wail of noise that just barely cohered into words.

"Don't kill us-! Not us-!"

April's eyes met its anguished flailing, and the world seemed to freeze around her. Something buzzed in her ears, and she barely even registered that she had let the creature go. It fell to the floor with a wet thud, barely making contact before its newly loosed form rebounded away from her like a coiled spring in panicked... in panicked fear of her. She was only hollowly aware as it exploded out across the surface of the wall, partially pulling itself behind the old wooden wardrobe to obscure a part of itself from her line of sight, but this was rendered largely unnecessary as her eyes were suddenly filled with water, and she couldn't see it very well. Hot, fat tears fell from her eyes, spattering the sheets beneath her.

"I... I can't!" April sobbed at the cowering alien thing that was pooling across the other side of the room. "I can't- I can't kill you."

"You- keh- kh-heh- you could have. You could have killed us, April."

"I- I couldn't, you're-" she sniffed loudly, burying her face amid splayed fingers as the tears that had suddenly flooded her face poured down her cheeks and dripped through her nasal cavity. "You're all I even have now, and-"

Kroakli made a low thrumming sound that failed to progress into any sort of legible speech.

"-and, and you've got them inside you. All that's left."

"Ah."

A small part of Kroakli's concealed form seeped out from behind the wardrobe, drawing together into a more coherent shape. Its body language, communicated in the ebbs and flows of its pulsing flesh, remained cautious, but it did not entirely flee.

"Yes, that is true," it hissed.

"Can you-" April hiccuped weakly, looking up timidly at the slowly reforming creature from her hollow on the bed, her wet eyes those of a very small, very lost child. "Can you show me them?"

Kroakli tilted a nodule of flesh that seemed to be slowly becoming its head. "What?"

April sniffed. "Can... can you show me them? Their faces, their- their voices... I know you can, you- you did it with Michelle."

Kroakli regarded her. "And you hated it, then."

"I- please. It's different this time."

"You could still kill us, April."

April gulped. "I won't, I- I promise. Please, just-"

Kroakli pulled itself up further, still keeping a part of its body out of view, even as it regrew a human's torso, legs and arms. "We will need to take increased precaution from now onward, to ensure you do not do this thing again."

"I-"

"We would, by right, flee for what you almost just achieved. For the possibility of its repetition. That, or else mete out a firmer vengeance. Know that we stay, and stay our response in kind, only from necessity, and our judgement that your action just now was a... lapse."

She extended a shaking hand out across the room towards it, grasping softly at the air.

"Please."

Kroakli detached a pad of flesh from the end of the limb that had become its palm, and stuck the resulting calcified scab to the wall behind the wardrobe, a dormant piece of insurance against any attack upon its main body. Straightening, it retrieved the freshly grown hand, pulled itself up into a human's full height, and turned its loosely-featured face towards April's own.

Then those features began to shift.

The flesh bubbled, warped, and then suddenly pulled flat, like the outer layer had been sucked down over a mould by a vacuum forming machine. What remained was a simulacrum of Charlie's face in pale, glossy blue, initially a loose, smooth-lined approximation as if in plastic, but which was gradually refined, the impression deepening with details down to the microscopic level so that she could first first pick out twin nostrils, then the curve and creases of lips, and finally pores.

For a second or two the reproduction looked like an extremely detailed but rigid wax sculpture, frozen in an unmoving neutral expression. As Kroakli concentrated, however, strings of muscle and tendon differentiated themselves underneath the outer crust of skin, and after a moment of slithering, the face came alive, eyes twitching in experimental animation, the mouth opening in slight, wordless exhalation.

This much achieved, it redirected its efforts to the rest of the body, which seemed to take less work. The rough-hewn hands and amorphous feet cohered into textured human palms and fingers, the feet growing out into what appeared to be a pair of office loafers. A button-up shirt and trousers emerged out of the legs and torso, stiffened briefly, then fell loose. The blue hue remained.

"Shall we attempt colour?" it asked, in Charlie's voice. Ignoring the azure translucence, the lips moved in almost exactly the right way. April noticed just a little too much adhesion as they parted, but that was the only flaw. When the creature made the motion for a second time, the error didn't repeat.

She realized she'd been holding her breath, and let it out, slowly.

"Show me Trace," she muttered.

The not-Charlie tilted its head, paused for a second, then exploded into a rough sea of scattering waves. The peaks and troughs played across the loose shape of its body, running in chaotic, flowing patterns as mass redistributed and compressed. It happened all at once, in such mesmerising complexity that April didn't even notice as its height shrunk slightly and its limbs slimmed. It held itself like that, its skin oscillating, for a good five seconds, before the rough seas pulled back, collapsing all at once into tightly bound calmness, and-

-and there stood Trace.

She grinned at April, softly. It had taken the creature less than half the time needed for the first transformation, and yet this replica was just as perfectly formed, if not more so. April felt that if she had leant closer, she could have picked out the fuzz of faint hair ghosting Trace's face and lower arms. Only if it was visible rendered in the blue-on-blue, of course—but even that was no longer so much of an obstacle. The creature had started modulate more than just the texture of its skin, and rather than a uniform toothpaste-toned gelatine, its outer shell had shifted to become fully opaque, and the varying features could be picked out in a whole cast of shades, from deep navy to a pearly noon day sky. She could almost believe that she was looking at a real person, albeit one dressed all in blue, her skin intricately painted likewise in pastel inks and blush.

April had taken a step forward without realizing. She peered at the apparition in front of her as she might have at a ghost, or a pristine artefact from her childhood, stolen out of its time and deposited here in front of her in this grotty bedroom at the end of the world.

"Morgan?" she whispered.

The figure in front of her changed again.

This time it took a yet briefer instant for the shape to coalesce. Morgan was perfect, of course; every strand of hair was picked out in an exquisite reproduction, falling in soft lines around her twin hoop earrings, glinting iridescently like actual metal. It was tangibly real.

Even the colours were starting to break away from their pale sapphire monochrome; what emerged had a faded, pastel quality, as if she was looking at a sun bleached photograph, or somebody underwater, their saturation leached away by the marine hues. But she could still make out the black denim of her jeans, the red of her shirt, that burnished brown leather jacket-

It was what she had been wearing when she died.

April's eyes snapped up to Morgan's left arm, just in time to see the missing limb explode in flailing blue viscera out of the stump that she had failed even to notice until then. The unformed flesh twisted, then seized into position, and April could see bones harden, wrap themselves in sinew, veins and fat, before a layer of dappled pinkish skin rolled over the new anatomical addition, masking the cobalt tissue beneath.

"Our apology," Kroakli said to April, who had jumped, "we had been... working from an incomplete template. The limb had to be improvised."

"That's... fine," said April, catching her breath. The spell had been broken for a moment, but the sound of Morgan's voice, a perfect replica of her faintly Northern accent, pulled April right back in. She relaxed her own rigid limbs, and reversed the instinctive motion she had taken, stepping back towards the figure in front of her. She stopped about a half foot away from its- her?- face, examining the delicately rendered features as they flushed with a deepening colour, like ink spilled across blotting paper.

"Michelle?" she breathed.

Morgan's face looked at her. "Are you sure?" it whispered in response.

"Yes. I'm sure."

The last transition took less than a moment, and the face that emerged from it was rendered in full, vivid colour. April stared into the eyes of the dead woman she had maybe loved, reconstructed in heartbreaking detail by the creature that had both killed, and, almost, saved her. The form was exact, but it still lacked full animation, a dull placidity haunting the eyes of this person who was not really quite there. It was a mask that, when she had first seen it crudely rendered rendered, standing overlooking the valley of the vivisected leviathan cocooned in its own muck, had inspired her to cave in its face with a rock.

This time she leaned in, huffed out a breath, and kissed it.

Kroakli held in place, a little limply, but didn't stop her. The lips were too cold, a lukewarm softness that April remembered from the last time she had touched the creature's flesh, but she parted them with her tongue anyway. Inside, she found that teeth and its own tongue had obediently formed themselves, slick with the wetness of something that probably wasn't actually saliva. She held there for a second, and when she pulled back, the eyes she was staring into projected an emotion that was more quizzical than anything else.

"Really?", Kroakli said.

April's hand jumped to her mouth, as if to admonish her own lips for what they'd done.

"S- sorry, I, I didn't mean-"

"We don't object," said Michelle's voice, the sudden teasing depth of it a sharp contrast to the creature's typical rasping crackle, "but are merely surprised. Krr..." The trill was vocalized upon the dead woman's lips as a deep throat-clearing grumble down in her chest. "It is truly unbounded, the insatiability of your kind when it comes to such... indulgences. Or perhaps this quality is unique to your own biology?" It considered for a moment, rolling concepts and stolen memories around inside wherever its mind was located like sucking candy below the tongue. "No. No, upon examination, it seems that you are all like this."

"I just... I just wanted to remember. To... to-" April stammered.

"If it is remembrance you want, then take it," Michelle- Kroakli? Michelle? -said. "We have no qualms. It is nothing to us, besides amusing, and... unanticipated. Although we should perhaps have anticipated better, should we not?"

April stepped closer again. "I..." she trailed off, then tried again, her eyes lidded into an unfocused semi-clarity. "Don't... don't tell me it's nothing, Shellie, don't..." She reached up to the pale face and cupped it, gently. The skin temperature was still off; warmer than the room's stale cold but not hot enough for the blush it now pantomimed. The texture, though, was just right. She could forget the rest, she decided. The mouth parted, and across the narrow space between them she could see every perfect detail.

"We do hope that you are still at least aware that we are not in truth-"

Before they could finish their motion, April head leant forward and kissed the lips again, silencing the words. The thing in the shape of another woman held her there for a moment, letting their faces press against one another, April's tongue flicking against the soft, too-cold flesh. They embraced like that for a full ten seconds, before, horribly, she felt the other face start to pull away, the tell-tale intake of breath as Michelle's prepared to launch into another litany of words that were not hers, words that would spoil that perfect illusion as their strange touch passed across her familiar smile.

April chased the breath instead, pressing herself deeper into the retreating lips until she met them again, greeting them with a renewed intensity between which she found just enough space to mutter the occasional "no!" or "please!" or "not yet!". She willed with all her being to just lose herself in the pure visceral reality of that embrace, to push away the outside world and focus on nothing but the feel of her, her texture, her taste.

The warmth of April's intensity heated the face of her partner in turn, and for a glorious moment there was nothing at all to tell her that this wasn't real, nothing that could stop her from believing the evidence her senses were bringing her of this fantastic reality. So she did let herself, because it wasn't as if she didn't want to believe. She allowed herself to fall down into the fantasy that the past few days had been nothing but an idle nightmare; that she might have just been back in Michelle's flat, enjoying the comfort of her body, and with nothing more in the world to trouble her than a bike crash and a lack of employment making pizzas the next morning. She didn't care. She had never really liked making pizzas anyway.

She held herself in that bliss so long that when she finally pulled away, finally looked back into the blank, too-still face that she had been kissing, its eyes as wide open as they were vacant, the despair that welled up from the void of her chest emerged in a crying wail.

"Michelle-!"

She pressed her desperate face into the body in front of her, burying herself in the hem of its dress, where her tears stubbornly failed to stain the fabric.

She could almost feel the change as it happened.

The stiff marionette she had been pressing herself against abruptly relaxed, its shoulders losing their stiff tension and unknotting themselves as two arms wound about her back, trailing gently down to her sides. The hands that grasped her waist and held her in place there, parting their bodies just slightly, moving with a subtle softness, their gestures intimate in a way that froze her in place with their familiarity.

The voice that spoke from those perfect lips was no more or less of a perfect recollection of the original now than it had been just a few brief moments before. But this time, as it spoke—"hey, April? I'm here."—the fluid cadence of the words was so immediately, joltingly recognizable to her that a chill had been running down April's spine before she even had time to register that they had been punctuated with singular pronouns.

She looked up, shocked, into the eyes in front of her. They were suddenly, brilliantly, alive.

This time she didn't have to make herself believe. She was already all the way there.

"I missed you," she found herself sobbing, in between frantic kisses, and "are you real? You're... really real?"

Michelle was answering her, too, stealing the breaths from April's own lips as they clutched at each others bodies. "So did I, so much," she heard, spoken in an anguished passion, "I'm real, Apes. I'm as real as you want me to be." That last part almost made her pause, but she let herself forget her qualms quickly. Almost insensate to the world outside of themselves, April realised belatedly that Michelle had pulled them towards the foot of the bed, and took the opportunity to push her down onto it. The other woman sprawled out across the sheets, her limbs draping atop the dusty colours in a way that managed to give the musty old things their own artful mystique.

April dived for the top button of Michelle's dress like a drowned woman swimming upwards for air. Michelle raised her hand, gently, to stop her.

"Let me."

There was something strange about the way she took off the dress. It was present in how the buttons seemed to slide too smoothly through the holes in the fabric as her lover teased at them with one careless hand; how the dress peeled back too easily from her skin in one motion, parting with the skin in a faint ripple of neon blue as the two surfaces detached. She felt there was something odd about how, once the dress had been discarded beneath them on the bedsheets, April somehow lost track of where it had gone, the sunny yellow garment seeming to disappear in those short moments it was obscured by Michelle's supine form.

April stubbornly failed to pay attention to any of this, with the single-minded determination achieved only by the truly desperate. Besides, it wasn't as if she didn't have other things in front her to readily flood her mind. This incarnation of Michelle had apparently forgotten to put on any underclothes beneath her sundress, and for a while April found that every angstrom of her attention could be occupied in tracing the curve of her breasts with her gaze, the unbuttoning dress delicately uncovering more of their hidden topology.

April's eyes drank it all in, and drank, and drank more, and then that still wasn't enough, so she pressed her lips against them instead, her tongue toying with the hard edges of her nipples, tracing the texture while listening to the sounds Michelle made in response to her gentle suction. It was a rich and lush tapestry, and she pulled it into herself eagerly.

She almost didn't notice that the clasp of her own leggings had been undone until a hand slid along her naked hip, tracing around the base of her dick, then up to her tip. This time it was April's turn to gasp.

"You're so wet," Michelle observed. April nodded in eager agreement; she was so wet.

Michelle trailed a bridge of moisture from April's quivering body down towards her own stomach, then running the fingers over to her crotch, where they flickered briefly around her exposed clit.

"Ditto," she grinned.

April, who was in a bit of a daze, said, "like... the Pokémon?"

The briefest flash of incomprehension passed across Michelle's face, followed by an even shorter pause in her fluid motions, her body and expression freezing for a minute instant like a video buffering. The moment was over before April could even fully register it, and then Michelle was back.

"I mean I want you to fuck me," she said, parting herself with a pair of fingers.

April didn't really need to be told twice. She fell upon the form beneath her like she was collapsing onto bed after a twelve hour shift at the Sporks prep station. Michelle's body welcomed her, and the skin was cool and hard, and the temperature was right this time, and she kissed it and clutched at it and moaned like a lost animal caught out in the rain. She pressed her hips down as far as she was able, and felt their bodies kiss together like the last two pieces of a puzzle.

If it was a little too perfect—if their bodies fit together slightly too snugly, April's dick sliding inside with a single smooth motion that they had never quite managed to achieve when Michelle was alive—April either didn't notice or didn't allow herself to care. She submerged herself into the soft warmth, and it felt like stepping into a warm bubble-bath. If, that is, you were to into the bubble bath dick-first, and the shape and size of the bath was roughly the same as that of a woman's vagina.

Someone was muttering in time with April's thrusts, and it took her a few seconds to realize that it was in fact her own mouth, mumbling something to the tune of; "Iloveyou Iloveyou Iloveyou-". She silenced herself reflexively, but then Michelle replied, "I love you too, April," and she couldn't stop herself from sobbing out a messy cocktail of her relief and joy.

When she had recovered herself a little, she reached for words again, and what came out this time was a whispered, perhaps slightly-too-earnest, "I'm sorry."

Michelle wiggled beneath her, chuckling faintly. "What are you sorry for, babe? I'm right here."

April was going to reply to that, but before she was able to she realised that she needed to cum very badly, and the rhythmic motion of their hips driving into her building pleasure resulted in her only being able to vocalize a series of high-pitched gasps and whines. Michelle laughed again, and gripped her tighter, nails clawing at April's back. The pain didn't bother her. Her mind had already been halfway demolished, and it felt like this, whatever this was, was a step towards taking her all the way there.

Her body decided to detach itself from reality. As the sensation between her legs built, pulsing over her lower abdomen and flooding her like breaking waves, everything else began to gradually fade away, until she was left amid on a soft sea, sinking and melting into the rolling skin beneath her. She felt herself getting close, and, as if she had been waiting for the moment to match her, the sound of Michelle's breathing grew sharper, faster, more ragged.

She closed her eyes, bit down her lip and let herself feel, and when she came it was a bright star fired sparks across the empty night. She felt Michelle buck beneath her in tandem, pulling April closer, and then they both collapsed, her brain fuzzy, frantically pulling for air. Heat cascaded out around her crotch, and the gentle sensation of floating remained as she let herself curl forward into it, a blanket of wetness and warmth beneath her. It was soft, and visceral, and real, and...

April opened her eyes. Michelle's face hung beneath her own, smiling up at her, eyes crinkling at the edges. April followed the contour of her chin down to her delicate neck, across her exposed breasts, and then, propping herself up on the palms of her hands, she flicked her eyes down to Michelle's navel, and froze there for several long seconds of sheer incomprehension.

Just below the belly button, the too-smooth skin of Michelle's stomach parted, neatly separating like the opening stroke of an autopsy, to reveal the peeled back folds of shockingly cobalt-blue flesh that had shaped themselves beneath it. Layers of the translucent orgoane substrate, unknowable biological detritus held in suspension within it, had been drawn together like the petals of a flower, splaying outward from where April's hips were nestled like the pearl at the heart of a vivisected clam.

Michelle no longer had legs, but instead her feet were attached at extreme angles to the outermost edge of a ridge of swollen blue matter, which had fitted itself around April's penis as if it were an oversized fleshlight with the upper half of a woman attached. At the center of the folded petal shapes, below where her dick was still embedded, quivering like an arrow in a bullseye, she could faintly make out a cloudy trail of something white. It was gently diffusing outwards amongst the other entrapped matter, and she was pretty sure that was she what she was looking at was her own cum.

April leapt backwards away from the bizarre thing like a cat out of a cold bath, landing heavily on the heels of her feet a few steps from the bed, then staggering yet further backwards to lean against the wall, staring with wide eyes.

"Was that too much?" rasped Kroakli, sounding wryly amused, "you did seem to be enjoying it."

April had clapped a hand to her chest, as if she could suppress the pounding of her heart beneath the skin. Her mind was a field of white noise.

"You're-" something caught in her throat, and she gulped, swallowing. "You're not her," she completed in a hoarse whisper.

Michelle's remaining features melted away into toothpaste-blue slime, and the bizarre dick-fellating organ dissolved too, the anatomical weirdness melting away then re-coalescing into the minimalist approximation of the human form that Kroakli favoured. It sat up on the bed, propping its blobby head up atop two glove-like hands.

"Of course we are not her," it grumbled, in a tone of voice that managed to approximate an eye-roll. "Krrr. We would have hope that you should know this already, feeble-minded April, lest your fraying neurons have forgotten yet the distinction between a flesh that is living and one that is decayed?"

It wasn't quite fraying yet, but April's mind had gone numb again. Her lungs were heaving too fast, the breaths she drew in too shallow. She stared at the place on the bed where Michelle had been, and where Kroakli had, for a second time now, emerged out of her lover's prone body.

"I...", she stammered.

Kroakli paused, apparently considering her. "It was too much, it seems. We apologise, but in full fairness, you did request it of us..." It tilted the faceless head. "If it is comforting, there was some truth in the mask that we conjured," it clicked. "It was drawn from that which we ingested of the real Michelle Gardener, yes- her biology, her physiology, her mind, kh- hrr... Some instinct and thought-shaping that could be retrieved, from these we resurrected ghosts of her departed flesh to be used in our act of performance. We may too have massaged these details, for your pleasure... But was this not the exercise?"

"It wasn't- it wasn't her. You're not her!" April hadn't really meant to shout. She could feel the tears welling at the corners of her eyes again, and then they fell, three hard droplets that splashed down wetly against her still-naked chest.

Kroakli was staring at her—or making a pointed performance of doing so—with curiosity. It studied her face, picked up its shoulders, and then, in an approximation that wasn't nearly as impressive as it might have been, given the transformations it had undertaken over the past few minutes, pantomimed a sigh.

"Humans," it announced to the air, as if that was all that needed to be said. "For as many of your minds as we might incorporate into our strata, store within the archives of our selves, it remains stubbornly confounding to anticipate the details of your responses. First an unprompted attempt against our very existence—and do not think we have forgotten this, April Pearce—and then, in apology, in appeasement, we obey the whims of your desire, only for this to end once more in your dismay. Know that it was your own action that wrought this... Excuse our carelessness if we took you at your word. We will attempt this better the next time, ghk-hrr..."

April pressed a knuckle against her forehead. The tears had stopped as quickly as they had come, and she felt instead a dry hardness seeping into her from the corners of her eyes, reaching up behind her skull and into her brain. She let herself calcify as she stood there, until her mind was a hard, polished ball of obsidian, and at its core like a black hole's singularity sat the waiting embrace of her personal dark void, dilating once more so it might swallow her whole.

She looked up at the creature perched upon the foot of the bed.

"Please leave," she asked, in a soft whisper.

It pantomimed the sighing motion again, and picked itself up, slipping out the doorway without even bothering to attempt another word. A soft pad of flesh, zipping across the wall like a very fast slug, shot out from behind the wardrobe to chase it into the upstairs hall.

On her own now, April hung there, a mottled calcite statue stood frozen in place against the wall of the old bedroom, and remained still for somewhere between two minutes and eternity. After that indeterminate foreverness of that dead time, her legs started to get tired, followed in short order by her brain, and so she let herself collapse, naked, to the threadbare carpet, curl up into a tight ball, and—without so much as glancing at the bed a few feet away from her, or any regard for the fact that it was still morning—let her body carry her back towards sleep.

She managed one last stuttering thought before she passed away into unconscious oblivion.

"No fucking more of this."