Gazing up into the evening dusk, April watched as the sky cracked open.

It started as a ring of light, carving out an empty, ovoid circle in the air above her, as if denoting an unpopulated set. It hung there smoothly at first, a perfect curve, glowing softly like a halo in a Christmas angel display, or the neon signage above a Soho nightclub. As she stared, the edges gradually frayed, accruing hairs that lifted around the outer edge as if it were statically charged, bristling, stretching outwards with a soft inductive whine.

The whine reached its climax as the potential broke, a thunderclap slapping across the hillside like the hand of God striking a spurned lover. What followed was reminiscent of lightning, too—a blazing tongue of forked fire lanced out from the circle in the sky, which seemed to be turning now, the hairline spurs bristling as they spun around its circumference. At first, April thought that the black line the lightning left behind in its wake was its negative after-image, tracing the path that the strand of light had taken through her vision. As it failed to fade, though, April realised with horror that she was looking at another crack in reality—her own reality, this time—manifest as a black shard of void that stretched off into the far distance.

The static whine peaked again, and another thunderbolt shot through the world, streaking off towards the horizon and arcing across the sky, heading towards where the city stood away in the distance. The jagged line of light split the scene apart, a twisting spark cast across the sunset like the offcast of molten iron struck by a hammer.

Another lanced out, then another, and another.

The man who had called himself the Sigmoid sighed, softly. "There it is."

"There what is!? Kk-rh-hhtt! What is happening!?"

April was still lying prone, dazed, in the damp grass. Kroakli spoke, and she saw it lean over her, reaching forward towards the gaunt man. Whenever the lightning flashed out above the creature, though, its flesh would shy away, rippling in reproach, the tears in reality shocking through its body in the same manner that clashing symbols might startle a bat. Perhaps thankfully, the inside of the glowing circle remained unblemished and untouched. They seemed safe inside of its boundary, the eye of the growing storm.

"This Projective is dying," said the man. "My control is fully lapsed, now; my omnipotence sundered, my omniscience broken, my intuition for this world's future fully slipping away. I remember broad movements, however, as I set them running. The pattern of this world will desynchronize and fissure, then, after this initial break, its structure will slowly decay, fading piece by piece until it passes away into nothing."

"What!?" screamed Kroakli, sounding both more and less human than it ever had. "Why do this!? Are we not all now trapped, caught within the plasm of this dying world?!"

"This was not a choice."

April moved her arms, mumbling something. Kroakli and the man looked down at her, coming to the realisation that she wasn't actually unconscious—or perhaps simply reminding them, because surely these two would know better than anyone the state of the world around them?

The man stepped closer to her. "What was that, April?"

"Me..." she whispered, staring up at him from the ground.

Kroakli leaned over too, its translucent blue flesh bizarrely loose and dishevelled, still quivering as the flashes lanced out over and above them all.

"April, we must leave-!"

"Was... was it because of me? Because I'm here? Because- because I didn't leave in time, I-" She gazed up into the dark eyes of the Sigmoid. They looked less like endless pits, now, and more like hardened obsidian shards. Cold, and lacking the spark of life.

Despite that, he still managed to look sorrowful as he locked his eyes with her own. For a moment, she almost thought she saw a tear.

"April, my child, this was never about you. It was me, always me, as it has ever been. As I said before, I'm dying. Slowly, piecewise, but dying. Before long every world I cultured will crack and decay. There is nothing you can do to halt it. Nothing I can do, even."

As if to underline the words, a bolt of shattered spacetime lanced out behind him as he spoke. The crack smashed into the ground across the other side of the field, but this only seemed to rebound and strengthen the tear. Four new bolts, each as catastrophic as the last, lanced up into the sky, leaving inky black trails in their wake. They didn't seem to have quite the same permanence as the cracks she had seen in the world of the tentacle beast—after less than a minute, the twisting trails began to fade, bleeding back into the transparent air. The havoc they wrought as they slashed through the surrounding countryside, however, was very real.

April sat up, staring after the fading streaks of shattered reality, then turned back to face the man, shouting above the noise they made, a shrieking clamour.

"But Tavistre told me-!"

The man who was the Sigmoid cut through her words. "Do not mistake the ignorant presumption of any self-styled authority for the truth. They have no insight into what is happening to me. If I have my way they will not know. They will come to their ends with hope in their hearts, and pass away in peace when their time comes. If they put blame for what happened here on you, it was out of that ignorance. They have been trying to reach you, by the way. I fastened the path to this projective against them, but that blockade will have fallen now. Be wary; they still believe you to be the source."

"But- but I was the source! It was all happening to me! Everything always happened around me! The- the things I was seeing, the things that were destroyed, it... it was always me!"

"Correct!" He looked up at the sky, eyes reflecting the bright trails spreading out across the disintegrating horizon. "But this world would have fallen into ruin a lot sooner, had I not chosen a binding vessel, a subject to act as my lashing for the decay."

"What?!"

"This is still all madness!" Kroakli stepped forward again, struggling to regain full control of its body while it weathered the continued assault against reality. Its substance was straining, taut tendons of contracting slime flesh standing out bizarrely from its usually uniformly gelatinous texture. It was managing to hold its human form, though, and had shunted its spines into a balled up fist, reminiscent of a brutal wrecking ball. It brandished it heavily at the Sigmoid, who regarded the weapon impassively.

"Dead thing! Hollow thing!" Kroakli was towering now, its body inflating into a crouched, limber giant as it continued to wave the spike-encrusted fist. "You stand here in the guise of a man, a puppet of flesh and bone, and claim we are all to be dust!? Kahh! And yet we can scent your mortal stench. This form! It does not have the frame or bearing of a god. You are but one of Its worms, sent crawling here!"

"It is more than true that I am not what I once was," he replied, conversationally, "but that has little to do with this body. I borrowed it; from a man on a Committee world, along with his other half, here."

He gestured at the red-faced Simian, which was crouched on the grass, staring at the sky. "Corpses walking!" it exclaimed, somewhat ominously.

"I am far enough gone from myself that conceiving a novel form here would have upset my balance. Can you imagine that, little Kroakli, who only just gained a mind of its own to think by? Imagine, not being able to shape your thoughts, lest your body die faster?" He balled a fist. "I will hold on until the very end of my reserves. I cannot save this projective, now, not without hastening my demise and that of the other worlds held within me. But don't mistake this pragmatism for apathy. It was for care of you all that I gave this world its warnings, even if little heard, and a way out, too, for some of what remains here..."

"A way out!? What 'way out'?" Kroakli cast around wildly, then shuddered, coming to a realization and rounding on April. "The girl! April, little world-jumper down to marrow, the purpose of your breaking has now been given its clarity. We are not done yet, and it is so by sake of your blessing of skill! But we must leave now!"

April stared at it, initially uncomprehending, still sitting crouched on the ground. Her trousers had ridden up a little, and the dampness of the wet grass was seeping into her bandage. It shocked her into greater awareness, and she shook her head, once, eyes focusing more clearly on Kroakli as it quivered in front of her.

"No- no, wait."

"Wait! And why would we wait, April Pearce, this-"

"I said wait!" She cut the creature off with a sharp word, and, miraculously, it silenced itself, staring at her in apparent apprehension. The point where its eyes should have been remaining fixed in space, while the rest of its body continued to roil from the storm is fragmenting reality. Peals of dark thunder played accompaniment to its convulsions.

The effect had spread to encompass the surrounding landscape as far as she could see, now. The bars of jagged light and the twisting black trails they left behind, slicing clean through the universe before slowly fading, had at first been limited to being offshoots of the circle of light above her, lancing out ever further afield as if something pulled taut was rebounding. They were striking more chaotically now, fragments streaking piecemeal through the earth and sky, like fault lines proliferating out from the shattering point of a broken window. In the far distance, hanging out in space beyond the London skyline, she was almost certain she saw one lance through the moon.

She locked eyes with the man who was the universe. "Tell me what you did to me."

He- It? Sighed again, looking down at her. "Very well."

"Understand that I am dying. It is a death from starvation, and it is an orderly death, played out in the gradual retreat of my soul from my body. What is left behind; my stellar engines, my kinetic mass sinks, the alveoles of my quantum projection matrix... they do not disappear all at once, but they do devolve. Control is ceded to my former subfunctions, who are lesser minds, greedy and without unity. What I created loses its guiding hand. Without it, they fall to ruin, to fade entirely with time. Do you understand this?"

She nodded. Kroakli growled.

"This projective—your world—should have begun to break down... days ago, by the measure of your time. It is a tad longer for the outside, though still short against my lifespan. I counted it down for you, in intervals of a million years-"

The Simian looked up at her, opening its mouth and baring tiny, sharp incisors. "Zero!"

The Sigmoid nodded. "Yes. And now here we are. I had hoped that it might be warning enough, for those like yourself who could listen. But it seems that in the concessions against clarity I made so as not to upset the balanced energy scales of your world's metabolism, I could not make myself heard in time. I am so sorry, April."

Kroakli rustled like it was about to speak again, but April held up a finger to silence it once more. She turned back towards the Sigmoid. "No, wait. You haven't told me yet. What did you do to me?"

The circle above their heads had by this point dilated to cover a far wider area, and its growing diameter seemed to signify an intensification of the reality storm. A jagged bolt of light, wider than the others so far, manifested in mid air accompanied by a sound that was almost like a scream. Unlike the previous bolts, it lingered in the air for several seconds, waves of light pulsing down its length into the far distance.

As April followed its path with her eyes, squinting against the glare as her eyes watered, she watched with numb shock as the narrow line of the beam pierced through one of the skyscrapers that nestled in loose clutches amid the city below. As she stood to gain a better vantage point, she realised that it was the one the press had prophetically nicknamed the Shard of Glass. It lived up to its name, now; even from this far distance she could see the glinting fragments of broken glass as the top of the building, nearly bisected by the jagged lightning blade and the crack in reality set down in its wake, sheared off and tumbled down into the metropolis below.

The Sigmoid—or, more accurately, It's sallow, gaunt-faced avatar—had ignored all of this, and it took April several seconds to realise that he had already begun speaking again. She quickly ran her mind backwards to pick up the words she had missed.

"I did not lie when I told you that returning here would not hasten this decay," he said, voice clipped, "and indeed it did not. In fact, had you remained outside the projective, it would have fallen apart all the sooner. This is because of the binding I made in last compact. April, when I interceded, I gave you a boon."

"What the fuck is a boon?" she said, still staring at the stump of metal and glass in the far distance, an inky black line now sprouting forth from its summit like an arrow indicating its location in a picture book.

"Boon," muttered Kroakli, "a gift, present, reward, surplus value bestowed..."

April laughed. "This- this is supposed to be a gift?"

She turned her eyes back towards the Sigmoid avatar, only to find that his own were already fixed upon her, so much so that they bore into her skull, his face stricken with an unnatural intensity. She took an involuntary step backwards.

"Absolutely," he said. "I gave you the gift of time. I took what marginal leeway for affecting change remained to me, and I lashed the unspooling of this dying world to your mind and body. The initial falterings of your reality were diverted to you and contained, such that the broader pattern might remain intact. A further week in your time before the true dying began, it would have been, had you not spent time away from here. Fifty billion cumulative days of sentient life, and then for you, a chance to escape the fall! The effect also imparted a facility for projective travel. A perfect compromise, I would think, and one elegantly efficient in its deployment. A stay of execution, and a chance to preserve yourself, alongside whatever of this world you might choose to bring! Although-"

It looked up at the circle above them in the sky, and paused. The ring had continued to expand, and now it stretched to a full hundred metres across, the originally subtle fuzziness at its outer edges having since gained a resemblance to whirling chainsaw blades, the light pulsing and twisting. As if in some small act of consolation, the pace at which the forking lines of light manifested was slowing, and the dark cracks left behind by their earlier kin continued to fade. April wondered with some small relief if this assault upon the cracked sky didn't have the permanency of the damage she had seen inflicted in that other world. The other devastations that had been wrought, though, did not share in that hopeful trend.

As the lightning cracks spreading outward from the halo slowed, they were supplanted by a sort of pulsing wave of force. It radiated out from the circle's perimeter, visible only in how it bent back the surrounding trees with gradually rising amplitude. The pulse of it became a sickening thrumming that seated itself deep in April's stomach, churning her bile as the peaks passed through her.

As the outward pressure waves pressed the wind into a frenzy, the air chasing itself out of the field in all directions, more air from above was sucked down through the centre of the ring to fill the void remaining behind, giving April the bizarre impression that somebody had turned on a giant fan in the sky, directing a strong breeze down at her. The intensity of the gale increased as the circle widened further. It was doing something strange to the clouds where it tugged at them, and the previous scattered accumulations were now becoming knotted together into something far more ominous above her.

The Sigmoid finally spoke again.

"The lashing is nearly undone. You saw hints of it these past days, as I did what little I could to hold it firm. I tried to give nudges where I was able, threading my control of this body past the rigours of entropic balance. I saved you from misadventure… threefold, by my count. A good number, and one I hoped might be put to better use. But now there is no holding back what has been started. If you wanted to take a part of this world before making your leave, things may be too far gone to save much of it."

April felt sick, looking up at the man who was so casually telling her she had failed, while he gazed out solemnly, without seeming much to care, towards the horizon. "But- Why did you choose me? Why me? Of course I was going to fucking- to fuck up! It's me! Fucking up is all I've ever done, and now it's the whole damn world! Why!"

He looked down at her and smiled, softly, but declined to say any more.

The widening of the circle and the decreased frequency of the lightning cracks lancing out from its edge had allowed Kroakli to stabilise its body somewhat. It stepped up beside April now, standing fully tall for the first time since the cataclysm around them had commenced. For once, none of its attention seemed to be focused on her—it was gazing intently at the Sigmoid's man-shaped avatar.

"You talk as if you have no power in this," it said, voice a croaking groan.

The Sigmoid looked up into the sky. "None of us have any real power, in the end," he said, wistfully.

Kroakli took a fluid step forward. "Yes you fucking do," it spat, slightly startling April, who hadn't realised that the creature had been taught to swear. Kroakli twisted its false head towards her. "Do not mistake the fronting periosteum of the creature's words for their marrow. It acts as if It has no control, but It is control. It is the Sigmoid. It is all that is, and It shapes this universe as It sees fit. We know this, khrrr! Our mind and body shares not in Its scope but makes likewise such rigid mechanism. We govern our universe of self, as Its self governs Its built realities."

"As I told you, I am dying. As I do, my facility for such self control slips."

"Assume for a moment we accept this. We also then accept that you choose when and how you are to die! By your admission it is a planned retreat of your senses. A procession of decay plotted with the cold instinct of the carrion thing It is, gnawing at the edges as It retreats away, fleeing the maw of Its own folly. We can always scent prey, and this is reeking of its leavings. It has merely decided that this world is next to fall, so Its own demise might be slowed."

"I-" April was starting to have trouble following what was happening. The entire world was alight with light and noise, and for as much as their circle of calm was being spared the worst of what was being inflicted outside of it, her head was still spinning. She glanced at the Sigmoid's avatar, her dizzied shock glinting in her eyes. He turned to meet them.

"It is true that I cede my territories per the demands of energy that would need be committed to maintain them, so that what does remain might last for longer."

Stolen novel; please report.

"How much, prey?" hissed Kroakli, "how much time has our sacrifice bought for your empire of worms?"

"If you leave this world promptly, you will be spared its fate. For now."

Kroakli leaned forward, looming over the thing that was not a man. The little monkey on the ground tilted its head to look up at it, impassively. "For now, perhaps!" Kroakli spat, "but still—speak!"

"The energy saved by terminating this projective now has slowed the overall decay of my body by approximately 7.365 seconds."

"What?" whispered April. "But that's nothing."

"Is it? Do you know how many souls reside within my corpus, their patterns painted within the projective strata? Uncountably many beings in uncountably many constructed worlds. My processing is very efficient. Sentient minds number beyond ten to the sixteenth power. Who are you, to dictate the cumulative value of their few seconds of further life?"

"A lung sucking span of such few seconds for you, outside your pulsing mind-shell, in the real," said Kroakli, "but the elapsed time inside would be instantaneous to even the reckoning of our own cells, despite our quickness and their sharpest attunement."

"The point still stands," he said. "I prolong the lives of all, through maximal balance of entropic flows. It is a zero sum game that has long since been maximally optimised."

April looked at it, eyes cold, face flushed. "But you could stop this, if you wanted?"

"I could, for a time. The fissuring already underway would be hard repair fully. Much of the load-bearing substrate is already fragmented, and the remaining alveolar matrix could not support the full pattern. But with a skilled hand, some of this world could be restored, for a time."

"And will you do that?"

"No."

Now April's whole body was cold. She looked at him, at It, at the thing that was her universe, still smiling sadly.

"Give me my life back."

"I cannot."

"You can. Stop this. Bring it all back!"

"No, April."

"You-!"

She took a step forwards, reaching out a hand towards him. He took a step backwards, still smiling sadly, and faded out of sight, in the same manner that the "ghosts" had done before, leaving the projective envelope. Only the Simian was left behind. It looked up at her and, red eyes gleaming with twin halos reflected from above, squawked two parting words.

"So sorry!"

Then it faded away, too.

April let out a scream of frustration. The outburst was undercut somewhat by another thunderclap, and the echo of her voice was torn away from her by the continually intensifying gale that was sucked down from above. Some of the trees on the outskirts of the field had been torn out from their roots—the leaves of those remaining danced wildly like a bridesmaid having a hen night out on the town. Kroakli let out its own burst of frustration, a chorus of pops and clicking static, then turned back towards her, its body pulsing with trapped energy.

"Its puppet has fled from this plane. We felt it going; it was like a worm burrowing out of sight beneath flesh."

April slumped over, her hands grasping her thighs to keep steady, her face staring down into the wet grass and mud.

"Fuck..." she wheezed, at nobody in particular.

The earth lurched.

A fresh blast of force had been shunted out from the perimeter of the whirling halo in the sky, and slammed down into the ground beneath it and surrounding the perimeter which now encompassed most of the green space they were in, as well as part of the road April had ridden in on. April had never been in an earthquake before, and she wasn't sure if this was quite what that would feel like—it was as though some enraged giant was slamming its fist against the earth, trying to punch a fresh crater into the suburban fringe. Either way, the result was the same: patches of exposed soil she could see beneath the grass were starting to crack and vibrate as the entire landscape reverberated from the terrible force. She staggered, struggling to keep her feet.

"Okay," shouted Kroakli above the noise, sounding uncharacteristically on-edge for a creature that wasn't capable of producing adrenaline, "okay, we asked our questions, yes. Now we make good on our promised escape, flee this projective while it crumbles, find new paths to make for ourselves in less sullied worlds."

"Fuck no," said April, clamping her hands to her head to block the surrounding noise. Kroakli rounded on her in almost comical bafflement, but was rendered unable to follow through with words as a horrific grinding chirr hit them both from above, blotting out all other sound.

Once, April had seen a viral Youtube video of an industrial flywheel that had experienced a catastrophic failure of its brakes. The huge metal wheel had spun out of control, vibrating wildly, reaching some absurdly excessive RPM before shattering into two halves and punching twin craters in the wall and ceiling of the room it had been housed in. The sound she was hearing now reminded her of the noise the wheel had made shortly before the break, the enraged buzzing of an overcharged wasp magnified to the size of the city.

Above her, the formerly smooth circle of light was fragmenting, splitting apart into innumerable slightly thinner rings that spun about each other, wobbling wildly at slightly different inclinations. As the buzzing shriek grew louder, they precessed increasingly far out of alignment, until what she was looking at was not so much a ring but a sphere made up of whirling, intersecting circles, with April and Kroakli standing near its centre. For a brief instant she was surrounded by a golden bubble of light, a perfect, radiant sphere that made her feel as though she were standing in the centre of the sun.

And then the bubble burst.

In the flood of light and sound that followed, April found herself back on her knees, tipping forward until her face was pressed down into the wet grass and earth. As her head was pressed into the soil, she could feel its vibrations judder through her, rattling her brain in her skull. She vaguely considered that it was good fortune her hands had already been clamped over her ears, because the wall of sound that hit her was, she was pretty sure, the sort of thing that ruptured ear drums. Even muffled, it still hit her like a grenade, and for the briefest fraction of a second everything was pain, just pain, the outside world replaced with a dizzying maelstrom of chaos and torrential noise.

Thankfully, it didn't last long. Whatever protection had spared the interior of the glowing circle that had grown out from around her—because it was her, she realised, that this storm had been loosed from, the Sigmoid's lashing coming apart from her body—had still been in effect during this last blinding display. The shell of light expanded out around her, inflating lopsidedly, then splitting, and finally fading away, the slow decay of a nuclear fireball in a vacuum. She was left lying, crouched and shaking in the equally shaken mud, perched smack in the middle of an island of relatively untouched dirt and soil, roughly 200 metres across.

She sat up, head spinning, dark after-images pasted across her vision. Her ears were ringing, and they throbbed with a dull ache that she was sure could not be healthy. As she looked around, struggling to refocus her eyes upon the world around her, she finally caught sight of Kroakli—or, at least, of part of it.

Whatever overwhelming stimulus this fresh assault on reality had shunted down the throat of the sixth sense the creature was normally so boastful of, its humanoid form had almost entirely disintegrated. Kroakli had fallen to the ground as an undifferentiated mass of phlegm-like blobs of slime, looking like somebody had crashed a truck full of toothpaste on the motorway. Some parts of its body were completely disconnected from one another: there were two main clumps, a couple of satellite blobs, and a few of its spines which had fallen randomly to the ground in the manner of a carcass picked clean.

April watched as the clumps quivered daintily, then began to drag themselves across the ground like a family of very lumpy slugs. They met in the middle, finding each other by some unseen means, and bubbled upon contact, merging back into one single mass. The outer fringes of the reconsolidated clump dragged those loose spines inward, slurping them up into the pile. Kroakli quivered like that for a moment, then its human shape jumped up again out of its own flesh, body knitting together and spines slotting in place like it had fastened a zipper up across its non-existent pectorals. It coughed wetly, then spoke.

"Kh- hrrh! Such madness, madness and chaos the like of which we little conceived in our newly hatched thought-nestings." It stepped closer to April, waving erratically at the sky with one loosely cohered limb. "The projective tears itself apart, and indeed we shriek with the beautiful agony of its destruction, our cells disgorging themselves to the terrible sound, the banging upon its quanta like a bone club striking this world's skull. Much of it hangs in tatters, now. We should offer congratulations, April of the deafened flesh, for weathering this storm none the wiser—but now we must make to be departing. Haste!"

It took a step forward, as if making to stride through a doorway, before remembering that its pre-eminent modus operandi for Travel was standing behind it, staring at its back, listlessly. It turned around and looked back at April expectantly.

"Well?"

She glanced up at where its eyes were not. "I'm not going anywhere."

"What!?"

Kroakli slithered closer, not so much taking a step as gliding forward, its legs interpolating position fluidly like an animated smear-frame.

"Pah! Were we not brought here for that very purpose, April, thick-of-skull-and-mind!? Do not mistake this last conflagration as the end to all that which threatens us here. The projective will only continue to decay! The dead world we passed through before had some semblance of stasis at least, but while this one persists in spilling its guts outwards upon us, it may truly expire before long! Krr, it may be quickness of dying even we might respect!"

Indeed, across the horizon April could see faint flashes of white and yellow light, the eerie glow of the jagged bolts of light and the cracks they scored through empty space, that apparently were still fizzling into existence across the surface of... the whole planet, she supposed? Maybe even beyond that. The flashes were joined by the steady, scattered glowing of dim reddish-orange light situated beneath rising pillars of black smoke. It seemed like a few things had caught on fire in the chaos.

The clouds, disturbed by the earlier air current, were still being twisted into unusual knots, and the rising smoke was mingling with them to create a slowly blackening pall of smog. Black-grey traceries of the crack lines from before criss-crossed above her, in various stages of fading away into that murky background. Were the more recent cracks fading more slowly than the oldest ones? She shuddered at what that might imply.

"It's the end of the world," she muttered to herself.

"Yes!" said Kroakli, slipping even closer. "Quite literal, the truth in this, April Pearce. So we must insist that we be leaving it, before it decides to end itself fully!"

The creature slipped a few spines down to the end of its arm, and brandished them at April, in the same way it had after they had first escaped from Tavistre to the dead world. It seemed like so long ago, now.

April scoffed, the same as she had back then.

"You're not going to hurt me. Come on, you didn't follow me this far, piggybacking on me between worlds, just to kill me now."

"Torture, maybe? We have ways of exacting our will beyond mere feasting. Our facility to pick flesh from bone while the prey remains living-"

"Sure, try it. And then try getting me to jump projectives while you're doing it. I'm sure that having my arm gnawed off would do wonders for my state of zen-like focus."

Kroakli dropped its arm down, and spat, wetly. It was a very human gesture that she imagined it had inherited from its memory of a human brain. The humanity of the action was only slightly undercut when the glob of its own flesh, that it had expelled onto the ground in lieu of spit, began crawling across the grass to merge back into its foot.

"Then explain," it said, imitation voice authentically tense, "why we would remain here any longer!"

"Well, I mean for one thing, I don't even know if I even can Travel any more now that whatever the Sigmoid did to me has apparently run out."

If Kroakli could have gone pale, it would have in that moment. Instead it froze solid, and then whipped out an arm, slapping the end of its limb—too undifferentiated to really call a hand, in that moment—against April's. For a moment, bizarrely, they stood there holding hands, until April jerked hers back from the touch of the wet slime flesh. Kroakli, meanwhile, had relaxed, its body slipping back into its usual fluidity.

"Your cells still have the breaking. We reached in and felt of them, and their sharp rejection of our own attunement is intact. The... destabilization, as it was called, was not undone. It is a more conventional affliction now, it is true, and the make-up of your flesh is less magnetic to this world's decay. But you should be able to travel between projective realities, as before. Your marrow remains turned to this purpose in perpetuity."

"Good to know," she said, wiping her hand off on her trousers, "and I guess that means you'll still be sticking around, then, huh? Still need that free ride?"

"Regrettably," Kroakli burbled, sullenly.

"Great. Then you can come with me now, back to the bike." She began to walk back the way she had come from, treading lightly on the cracked surface of the muddy field. There were no large fissures, but the vibration had disturbed the wet earth just enough to render it slightly unsteady underfoot.

Kroakli trailed after her. "But why!?"

"We're going to ride back into town," she said, marching forward through the wet grass, "round up as many people as we can, starting with my friends, and jump them out. Give them to the Committee, whatever. Do something."

Kroakli let out an exasperated groan, jogging loosely to keep up with April's long strides. "Sure, yes, this is most certainly not madness, instinct-barren April. Evacuate an entire universe! Yes, this is possible and sane, most definitely good planning, to dash our lives against the teeth of this dying world for sake of prey-things that cannot save themselves."

"First swearing, now sarcasm? When did you start learning so fast?"

"We have been self-educating all the while, but especially since you made this new commitment to derangement! Perhaps we shall have to do the thinking enough for both of us, krrr."

"Well you can go do that, as long as I don't have to hear it."

"Your failure to heed the intake of your senses is predictable, but that does not render wrongness in our sentiment. You know we speak truly in this."

She rounded on it. "Look. Look, listen to me, okay? And look around you. This is fucked!"

"Yes, which is why-"

"No, listen! Just listen. I have spent the past week running from one fucked thing after another. Every time I try to do something to help, I only manage to make it all worse! I'm tired of being told that things are my fault. That fucking bastard, lecturing me for wasting his fucking 'gift'. Well, I'm not running any more, hear me? Now, I just about know what's going on for once, even if what's going on is the end of the fucking world. Maybe I can actually try to get ahead of the bullshit this time, preferably before it takes away everything in my life I still give a damn shit about."

There was a brief pause, as April turned back around and continued to stomp towards the treeline. Kroakli slipped after her.

"We understand your sentimentality, yes. We get hints of this ourselves, imbibed from the mind we stole. But this is at the stake of both of our existences, and there is no telling that you are not already too late-"

April fumed, turning around again. "I am not too late! Listen right here, buddy, I am not! Don't try to pretend you understand, either. You're no better than a talking animal. All you care about is food and your own survival—you wouldn't understand empathy if it slapped you across the face with a wet fish! Don't think that I've forgotten where you fucking came from, either!"

She stared at the creature, waiting for it to speak again, but no words came. Kroakli stood there silently, watching her, even shrinking itself back somewhat to cut a slightly less imposing figure. She gritted her teeth at it, then turned around again, passing through the line of trees and undergrowth that lined the road, then walking out through the gate they had entered through. Kroakli pulled itself through near silently behind her.

"Fuck," she said, surveying what lay on the other side.

The good news was that the bike was still in one piece. It had fallen over, yes; the paint had been scraped up quite badly down the side where it had been bounced across the tarmac by the shaking earth. That was fine, though. She didn't need it to look as pretty as it had before—sorry, Fabian—she just needed it to go.

No, it wasn't the bike that was the problem. Starting just across the other side of the road and cutting diagonally through it in both directions, tracing a wide and lazy arc through the ground, was the threshold where the sphere of light had intersected with the ground during its final explosive denouement. She could tell this because the flat, relatively undisturbed ground abruptly ended, supplanted by a muddy ditch at least three metres deep, the bottom of it pitted with churned mud and chunks of excavated rock.

It looked like a first world war era trench, or possibly poorly dug drainage channel, except that instead of carving out a shallow gulley the expanding wave of force had instead excavated a wide cove, which receded along a gradual pitted slope gently upwards into the middle distance. The sheltered interior of the sphere had been spared the wroth of the wave of force, but this meant that the ground they were standing on had been made into a literal raised island in the centre the crater it had left behind.

"At least the bike's still here," she said, righting it awkwardly and steadying it, "but we'll have to drop it down there and then wheel it back out."

The bike, now toppled onto its side but nonetheless still roughly where she had left it, had been leaning only a few metres away from the edge of the newly raised island of earth. The stretch of remaining road it was sitting on was tucked just barely inside the arc of the circle, drawing a shallow tangent that was rudely curtailed by the sudden edge. The bike in turn had been that close to being consigned to the same fate—that was to say, pulped—as the mud and trees of the surrounding fields, as well as any unlucky vehicles or buildings that had also found themselves nearby.

April didn't dare to think about how many people had probably died in what had just happened. An image flashed through her memory of the skyscraper falling in the distance, its top half sheared clean off. Just how severe of an apocalypse was she looking at, here? Was she kidding herself for thinking anyone could still be alive? Thunder rumbled in the distance, and she was forcibly reminded that this wasn't over, yet, that the cracks were still worming their way through sky and earth alike off away in the distance. The sound of it set a score to the rising fear in her stomach.

She rolled the bike over to the edge of the short cliff that fell down into the muddy trench. Stopping at the precipice, she looked back. Kroakli was still standing by the fence posts, managing somehow to look slightly forlorn.

"Are you coming?"

"It would be in our interest to."

"So that's a yes...?"

"We would like to think there is potential for this, but it is dependent upon the cadence of our partnership. Can you continue to tolerate our… continuation?"

It tilted its head at her; April frowned at it. "I think it's a little late to be worrying about that at this point, honestly."

The creature remained silent.

April rolled her eyes. "Come over here, Kroakli."

Kroakli took a short step forward, paused, then collapsed down into an amorphous blob. It skated across the tarmac over to where April was standing, before inflating back into something that was reminiscent of a person.

"We bring our self here to you, carrying upon it the raw form we rendered anew, meat and blood from the bones of our older self, reshaped again. This new self has mind enough to find function in cooperation, even to make compact, and the compact we have made we shall stick by. It is a rare prize, the freedom you have given us, unleashing us from the projective bonds, and needed ever the more, so it seems.¨ Kroakli stretched itself upwards, taking in the dark clouds, sun almost fully set now, but lit from underneath by the faint flashes of light in the distance. ¨If you insist on remaining in this world for now, we will follow you through it until we are forced astray, April Pearce."

"Good," she said, turning back towards the bike, "now help me lift this down."