"You're better than this."

I tried my hardest to ignore the soft voice from down by my feet. I was feeling like absolute shit and honestly wasn't in the mood for company.

The small room was filled with the smell of vomit and . . . other liquid things. While that wasn't exactly ideal in terms of my personal living situation, the bonus was that, in my vast experience, most people didn't tend to want to hang around too long if I simply denied their existence for long enough.

"No matter how bad things feel right now, tomorrow can be better."

Well, I apparently had the Spirit of Fortune Cookie Wisdom visiting with me today. Wasn't that a delight? I turned my head to spit out some sort of accumulated fluid from my mouth. Then, reconsidering, I swallowed it down. Saved me having to get up to find a glass of water.

The body was efficient like that.

I felt movement, and then whoever was with me was sitting by my side, and a cool hand rested on my forehead.

I'm not going to lie. It felt nice.

"Why do you do this to yourself, lovely?"

Now, that felt kind of a low blow. At worst, I could be considered tangentially responsible for my current plight.

"When I called yesterday afternoon, you promised you weren't going out."

Hang on a minute.

I half-cracked an eye open. The sun shone through my bedroom curtains, perfectly illuminating the complete chaos of my life. Cups, plates and piles of clothes were stacked on every available - and those manifestly unavailable - surface. The smell of rotting food and spoilt milk added beautifully to the aroma.

I seemed to be only half-dressed, which was momentarily a worry. Bad things happened to shitty people, after all. But then I remembered this was actually the outfit I had gone out in. So, that was kind of a good news, bad news thing. Presumably, I had been in such a state even the most predatory of souls had not been able to bring themself to do any more than stick me in a taxi.

"Are you listening, lovely?"

"Fuck off, Zizzie. I'm not in the mood."

In my memory, it was at this point my sister sighed, slipped ten quid into my hand and let herself out.

"No, not this time. We need to talk."

In surprise, I opened my eyes and looked up at her. There was a firm note to the voice that was quite alien. Elizabeth - my four-year-old self had been unable to pronounce the name when she was born, and the nickname had stuck - looked as she always did, like a photo of me under the ministrations of intensive Instagram filters.

Funnily enough, I'd never been able to bring myself to be jealous of her. She was just too nice. If there had been just one moment when we were growing up where she'd acted superior - a single example of screwing me over so she could get ahead - I'd have been all over that as an excuse for some epic sibling chicanery.

But no. There'd been nothing. Zizzie had shared. She'd included. She'd rejected every opportunity my parents gave her to leave me floundering in her wake. And that attitude had carried on when she'd joined me at school. If you wanted to be her friend - and, my word, didn't everyone? - then they needed to be mine, too.

I'd fucking hated it.

I remember feeling such an extraordinary kinship with Elizabeth Bennett when I first read 'Pride and Prejudice'. How could you ever find a space to function when you had a kind, friendly, optimistic, and beautiful Jane living in the same house? Well, preach, sister. I feel you. But you still could have done better than Darcy.

I'd developed a whole stream of coping strategies for all the dicks and bitches in the world. I could give as good as I got in any situation, except when someone took me as they found me.

A therapist had said they felt the root of my problems was that I had never felt unconditional positive regard from anyone in my life.

I'd nodded fiercely - yeah, fuck all those guys who let me down! - whilst all the time trying to keep Zizzie's open, calm, understanding face out of my mind.

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"This isn't how it happened."

"No," Zizzie took one of my hands in hers, "it isn't."

"So, you're not really here?"

"No, I'm afraid not."

The image of my bedroom shifted, and I was back in my prison cell.

There was simply no way to judge how long it had been since my techniques had been ripped out of my mind. I figured at least a few weeks had passed with me being in too much pain to do anything else but whimper and scream, but since coming out the other side of that, I had utterly lost track of the days.

I'd thought of keeping an old-fashioned tally chart scratched into the wall to keep some measure of time, but when the day restarted, it was wiped away. Of course, it was.

Cycling my Qi was absolute agony with the enormous gaps that had been torn in my foundation, but I'd done my best to stick at it.

What else was there to do?

I'd even tried to put in place some of the lessons Merlin had nagged and nagged at me to try out to maximise my efficiency, but I'd never had the time to roll out. Now I had nothing but.

Don't get me wrong, the isolation had driven me absolutely out of my gourd - witness the manifestation of my darling sister - but I'd spent most of my adult life in various addled states, so I imagine the impact of all this was significantly less than on someone who started off in a better mental state.

Who knew being batshit crazy would turn out to be my superpower?

"You need to stop thinking about yourself in such a negative way."

"Sure, Ghost Zizzie. Lay your wisdom on me. I'm down for it."

It was a bit of a surprise when she slapped me.

"Stop it," she hissed.

The physical impact of the blow was pretty insignificant. Regardless of what had been done to my techniques, I still had the body of a cultivator of no little power. Zizzie'd have needed a sledgehammer to have as much as make me blink.

My shock was more that my sister had never so much as said 'boo' to a goose in her whole life. She'd once cried for an entire morning after realising she'd shut a fly in her doll's house overnight, and it had been away from its family until she released it. She'd been thirteen.

Thus, the idea she'd just straight up clocked me one - all the time gritting her teeth in a rictus of fury - was a bit beyond my lived experience.

"No one is coming to save you."

I shrugged at that. "Sorry to break it to you, Z, but that's been the story of my whole life."

Zizzie shook her head, her face returning to its standard overflowing compassion mask. "No, it isn't. No matter what you did, what you took or what you needed, there was always someone in the wings waiting to sort it out for you. Did you know Dad paid your rent for years?"

"Did he fuck!"

"He did. Why else do you think you were never evicted?"

I knew exactly what Bryan, my previous landlord, had been getting in lieu of his monthly rent. So, Zizzie's news came as a bit of a blow. In more than one way, if you get what I'm saying.

"Jace watched out for you, even after you broke up with him. He went as far as to open an account with the local cab firm to ensure you got home from whatever place you passed out in."

The image of a kind, bearded face behind the wheel of a car swam into my vision. "Mr Khan?"

"You think it was a coincidence the same guy picked you up, night after night. And he never wanted paying?"

To be honest, I'd never really thought about it. That was the beautiful thing about being solipsistic. You didn't need to worry about others.

"And how do you think you kept getting all those job offers? You must have known someone was pulling strings. How many times do you reckon someone can be fired before they get blacklisted!"

Zizzie worked in recruitment. I'd guessed she must have had the odd word, but the way she was saying it was like she was my own personal employment consultant.

"Just fuck off, Z. Being on my own is how I like it. I can take care of myself."

The second slap had more welly in it, and I saw stars. Good for you, Zizzie.

"No, you can't. You've never been able to. You make this big song and dance about being independent and not wanting anything to do with anyone, but you've never been able to achieve anything off your own back. Even here, where the whole world is literally set up to allow you to work and graft and to grow into something extraordinary, you still have needed it all put on a plate for you."

"Don't hold back, Zizzie; say what you really think."

And then my sister's face blurred just slightly, and I realised I was talking to a simulacrum of myself.

"You need to understand unless you get up off your arse, this is it," said Tough Love Me. "This is where you will stay until you go completely off your rocker." It was obviously disconcerting to hear that advice from yourself. "No one is coming to save you. No one even is really missing you yet. For them, you've barely been missing a few hours. You can't just do as you always do: wallow in your own shit and wait for someone to come along and clean it up. That's not going to happen this time."

"Good talk. Cheery. Proper Invictus stuff."

"You're smart. You're capable. You're tougher than you know. And the world needs you to step up." The face blurred again, and it was back to Zizzie. "If you don't get out of here, my timeline doesn't exist. I need your help, lovely. It's Big Girl Pants time."

My eyes filled with tears.

That was what we used to say to each other when something truly shitty had happened, but we needed to step up. It was the phrase we used every time Mum went awol for weeks on end. It was what I told her when that massive cock, David Johnson, broke her heart. And it was what she said to me after I lost the baby.

Is this a fucking prison?

I blinked, clearing my eyes of tears, and as quickly as she had appeared, Zizzie was gone.

With a pulse, I blasted Qi around my channels and pulled it to the surface of my skin, burning off what felt like decades of grime instantly.

Fucking hell, love. Calm down. There's no sense getting all hyped up about it. Someone put you here. Someone will come and . . .

"Nope. Not this time."

What the fuck are you talking about?

"I'll explain as we go. But we're not hanging around here for a minute longer than we need to. Now, just how hot can your flame become?"

Oh, baby. Thought you'd never ask.