Maidens of the Fall

Entombed beneath the lonely lunar crags, while Nightmares batter English shores on Earth below, I await an unwanted visitor, alone.

Plato Base does not impose true isolation; I am merely the only magical girl left behind, because I am still an unfashioned creature, a walking cadaver half made-up, lacking full strength of arms, my brains addled by rot, transformation trapped in a knot of tension turning tight behind my sternum.

No, I am far from alone. I am surrounded by a hundred-strong passel of zoogs as they emerge from their hiding places in the domesticated corner, and it is primarily for their sake I do not bolt for my bedroom. Nerys herself — my Dream-Goddess patron — is awake and alert, a curious black-oil snout uptilted from within her plush animal bed, obsidian eyes watching the Nightmare’s progress on Signal’s screens, tracking across a map of England’s heart, leaping the London Wall to smother Oxford’s tender underside. Tissy remains unseen, unheard, unknown, but I try to keep faith that she is unmoved.

And then there’s Gregory the long-dead Moon Beast, a fellow corpse, still and silent in his glass tank of cloudy fluid. When I flirt with instant flight, he keeps me rooted.

I reread the final messages from Scarlet Edge. Weight settles on my chest. Left hand shakes so hard I can scarcely type.

OC: coming for me soon?

OC: when is soon???

OC: Scarlet

OC: FRANCESCA

OC: WHAT DO YOU MEAN

OC: WHEN IS SOON

Francesca Fairfax does not answer. She is offline, her name on Undernote flanked by a little grey circle. She is Scarlet Edge again, off to fight for King and Country, to cut down Nightmares with flaming sword.

Willow cannot reach Luna. Willow cannot breach Plato Base. Willow cannot touch me, not here.

A glance over one shoulder shows nothing but zoogs and the rainbow-walled shadows of the Big Room. Willow does not lounge in a seat, nor loom from a corridor-mouth; no familiar pair of soft brown eyes peers around a column or lurks beyond the half-lit circle cast by the red emergency light from Signal’s monitors.

Thoughts of calling Grimmy abort themselves before I reach for my phone. We never swapped numbers, never saw the need. Would the call even connect, from all the way up here, alone on the Lunar high ground so far from England?

I pick up the handgun, Grimgrave’s borrowed pistol.

Hold it awkwardly in my left, grip sweaty, shivering, unsure. Check the safety. Check it again. Should I flick it off? Keep it on? Should I point the gun? At what should I aim?

Zoogs brush against my ankles, roused and restless by the sudden departures of Grimgrave, Bright, and Signal. Others settle on the cushions, clamber up the sofas, take refuge inside the animal beds. A few watch Signal’s computer setup, little eyes following the rapid progress of the Nightmare, a black cloud creeping across England’s green face. None return to sleep, snouts flickering back and forth as they try to look everywhere. Have my own nerves struck true with their high-strung instincts? Or do they sense things a human cannot?

Rainstorm static washes against the roof of Plato Base in slow waves, heavy enough to drown out footsteps. My shoulder blades itch, the back of my head burns with imagined sight, as I turn and turn and turn again. Stillness is impossible, but running serves no purpose. A stout door between me and the world would do nothing to slow a Dreamer.

If Willow comes for me, I am helpless.

“Octavia?”

I jump from my skin, jerk the gun, swallow a scream.

But it’s only Nerys, rasping my name down in her animal bed. Half a dozen zoogs too close to my ankles scatter in sympathetic surprise, hissing and snapping, half at me, half at my phantasmal foes. Most of them stop and blink and peer back at me with bemused looks, but no laughter.

Nerys tilts her black-on-black head on one side, regards me with a shiny obsidian eye. “You are thinking like a zoog!” she rasps.

A huff helps. “Jittery and nervous and ready to bolt, you mean? Yes! This is the first time in several days I’ve been alone.” A lesser sigh, fill my lungs, feel my phantom limb clamped across my ribs. “Alright, I’m not completely alone, but you know what I mean. This is the first day I’ve been here in Plato Base with the absolute certain knowledge that Grimmy isn’t nearby. I’m the only magical girl here. I am — rather understandably, I should hope — worried about … about … ”

Her name sticks in my throat. Can’t keep my eyes on Nerys, have to keep glancing at the corridors, at the main entrance, at a point directly behind my own back.

“Aboutttttt?” Nerys rasps.

I shoot her a look fit to fell a god. “Willow.” A whisper. Louder: “Willow.”

Two dozen zoogs hiss in sympathy. I could almost sob.

Nerys tilts her head the other way, floppy ears wiggling, droplets of ghostly oil vanishing before they stain the floor. “No earthbound Dreamer would dare. She would have to shed whole chunks of herself just to be here, ha! She would be bleeding out with every step. I would like to see that, hnnnnghhhhhh … ”

“You don’t know Willow.” But then I am forced to sigh. “Oh, what am I saying, as if I ever really knew her. Nerys, I’m serious, what do we do if Willow shows up? What do I do?”

Nerys peels her lips back in a zoog-like grin, toothy and dripping and dark. “Think like a zoog.”

Another big huff. This one helps less. “You mean run away. Fine! I am not above running, not from her. But where?! Where could I go that she can’t follow? Even if I translocate, she … can … ”

A glance down at my almost-finished prosthetic arm douses my heart with icy water. Wrist still unattached, socket not yet in place. Almost finished is not finished. Forget transformation; without my right arm, I cannot translocate.

Nerys tilts her head back and forth, rasping low and rhythmic in her throat, a sound I haven’t heard from a zoog before. The others do not join in.

“What?” I demand. “What!? Nerys, what does that mean?”

“Octaviaaaaa,” she rasps. “Is there some special reason you are suddenly so afraid?”

She asks as if she already knows the answer. Perhaps she does. Nerys is a Dream-God; has she read the surface of my mind, seen my conversation with Scarlet Edge? If she has, would she tell Grimgrave, or Bright? Would she betray a confidence I never gave?

Would she sit idle as a predator creeps up behind one of her girls?

“Yes,” I say, gesture at Signal’s computer. “That’s the perfect opening, isn’t it? I’m alone. I think it’s possible that she might be coming.” Because Scarlet Edge told me. “This is an opportunity, an opening, you understand?” Francesca Fairfax tried to warn me. “A Nightmare has drawn everybody else away and … I need to … I need to get back to work.”

Nerys and a hundred zoogs all watch as I sit back at the table and force myself to put the gun down, though I keep it very close. Turn my eyes and my attention to my incomplete right arm. Take up my tools. Work faster.

No matter what happens, I need myself.

A minute, then two, then five slide by, with no Willow draping herself over my shoulders, no soft call of her voice from deep within Plato Base. Ten minutes creep past as I affix the old wrist-socket to the new components of my right forearm. Fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five as I wait for the adhesive to harden. Carbon fibre tape rasps as it unwinds from the roll, sticks hard as I apply it over the joints, hardens as I press into the seams, offcuts shed from my shaking fingertips as I fumble over each piece.

Plans called for the arm to rest, at least eight hours as I slept, to let the adhesives settle in, have the pieces grow to know each other. Then I could wake with soft eyes and a belly full of breakfast, look over the work to find anything I’d missed, structural flaws that might lead to the whole thing flying apart the first time I try to throw a punch.

But now there’s no time. I’ll use a whole roll of carbon fibre tape if I must, to keep the limb intact.

Half an hour dribbles away.

The lights in the Big Room ease upward toward lunar dawn, shadows thinning. A steaming mug of coffee appears at my left elbow, with no note from Tissy, and no reply when I call my thanks into the echoes. Caffeine sharpens the jitters, but I need it regardless, no sleep for the dead.

Perhaps I’m panicked over nothing. Maybe Scarlet’s warning was general, not specific, and I am being a fool.

Waiting for a strip of tape to adhere, I close Undernote at last, and am briefly greeted by a final sighting of that full-body selfie from Scarlet Edge. A stirring of residual libido suggests that I might slink off to my room with the laptop, to finish the job I started earlier. My eyes glue themselves to the makeshift collar around Francesca’s pale throat.

She is still, even in the depths of my suspended terror, breathtaking in a very specific way I cannot elucidate.

But the urge is easily dismissed. Even if I wasn’t racing to finish my arm, I wouldn’t want to be alone.

On Signal’s computer setup, four of the central monitors still display a map of the southeast of England, London’s pixelated corpse in the centre. The Nightmare itself is represented by an amorphous dark blob, with shaded periphery to indicate the margin of error for potentially impacted areas; black is far from the correct colour for a Nightmare, but I won’t criticise Signal for prioritising clarity over realism. The trailing tails of the Nightmare have entirely cleared the London Wall, the leading edge pushing deep inside the southeastern bulge of Oxford’s underbelly.

Signal wasn’t exaggerating, this one is both sizeable and swift. Thousands of people will be huddled in concrete bunkers by now, tucked away beneath tower blocks or rushing for the public shelters, to ride out the bow shock. Is my grandmother still alive down there, hurrying for a shelter? Part of me hopes so. The Trio will be fighting by now, but without their usual audience, no television cameras, no crowd of adoring public.

Is Scarlet locked in combat right now, duelling with some inconsequential Nightmare debris, or cutting bleeding chunks from the core of the thing? Is she hung over, head throbbing, or still drunk? Is she sore and tender between her legs because of what we did? Is she thinking of me?

Are Grimgrave, Bright, and Signal fighting as well — or merely staying out of the way, scavenging magical energy like carrion-eaters at a whalefall?

There’s something they don’t teach down in England, nor anywhere else in the waking world. It finally clicks.

Magical girls need Nightmares, or the girl-juice runs dry.

Nightmares are poorly understood, despite decades of boiling over from London’s unquiet grave. They’re hardly unknown elsewhere, the primary and ever-present threat of every Dreamland overlap, the chief duty of all magical girls. But in any given year England suffers more Nightmares than the entire rest of the world combined. The London Exclusion Zone breeds Nightmares with maddening irregularity and relentless frequency.

Officially accepted theories in England explain Nightmares as a kind of Dreamland weather, pressure systems of concentrated dream-stuff, blown in from places with which decent people need not concern themselves. The ‘debris’ carried by a Nightmare is no different to how a mundane storm might carry seagulls inland, or deposit a shower of confused frogs hundreds of miles from any body of water.

The vast and terrible things found in the core of a Nightmare are merely incidental.

Any images of them the public might have seen — captured on unsecured CCTV cameras or the phones of those unfortunate enough to be directly exposed — do not officially exist. The few caught on tape from the days before Dream Control are lost media, spirited away into the heart of the Dream Institute, never mentioned again. Those recorded in foreign parts are obvious fabrications, designed to undermine the stout resilience of simple British courage. If you are caught spreading such lies, Dream Control will have a quiet word.

When a Nightmare crosses the London Wall and the sirens wail, all you must do is get to a shelter and let it wash over you. Try not to scream too much or too loud. The fear isn’t real, the euphoria is fake, the blind terror and sweeping awe are both illusions. Your body still exists, it has not changed. You are awake and you are sane, no matter how the walls run like wax and human faces turn to leering demons. No matter the day-long hangover of formless hallucinations in your peripheral vision. Pay no attention to the whispers. Do not think about it.

Other theories, mostly from elsewhere, range from the absurd to the impossible — Nightmares might be the stray thoughts of sleeping Dream-Gods, the backwash from a Dreamland war beyond our comprehension, the intentional revenge of the human subconscious upon the waking world, punishment for a century of sin, and more. There is no explanation for Nightmares, nor why they have steadily increased in frequency since the turn of the millennium.

And now I wonder. Can a Nightmare be artificially induced? By a Dreamer, or a Dream-God? Has Willow done this on purpose?

As shaking fingers press carbon fibre tape against joint and seam, I realise how much of a fool I’ve been.

Scarlet Edge is a mere moron, but I’m far worse, I should have known better, should have exercised self-control. Undernote itself may be encrypted, but that’s hardly enough, not for the most watched woman in England. Dream Control, MI5, GCHQ, whatever shadowy agency ‘John Smith’ works for, somebody down there must be keeping an eye on England’s most important assets. Hidden cameras and microphones, screen-capture bugs, root-level access to her phone, and that’s not even counting what a good occultist could do, let alone a Lucid Dreamer.

I allowed libido to override better judgement. My conversation with Francesca Fairfax was far from private.

Dream Control cannot do anything to me up here on the moon, even if they could make sense of my location. But Willow? Has Willow called up a Nightmare, to clear out my protection?

“Nerys,” I say, still watching the progress of the Nightmare across the screens, left hand massaging the stump of my right arm, cramp creeping into my shoulder and neck. “Nerys?”

“Mmmmmm?” Her little black snout swings round in the animal bed. “Mm?”

“What are Dreamers, really?”

Nerys blinks several times, black lids sliding over shiny orbs. Nearby zoogs perk up as well.

“They’re you,” Nerys rasps. “They’ve always been you. Humans.”

A few zoogs hiss-chatter with laughter. Some echo Nerys — “humans! humans! haaaa!”

“Tch,” I tut. “Now isn’t the time for cryptic answers, Nerys, you— oh, fuck me, it probably is the time for cryptic answers.” I throw up my hand and let out a huge sigh, guts roiling with anxiety. “You can tell I’m asking a stupid question. I can’t even articulate what I really mean to ask. I’m so … so fucking afraid. I hate this, I hate feeling like this. Hate it. Hate that she’s done this to me. I hate that Willow can still make me afraid. I’m on the moon, further from England than I’ve ever been, and … and still she’s in my head. She always will be.”

The zoog-chatter trails off. A few of them creep closer to me, reaching out with their little curled paws.

“You thought it wasn’t a serious answer?” Nerys says, voice crackly with amusement. “You’d be wrong, as you humans so often and so delightfully are. It’s a dead serious answer, I wouldn’t lie to one of you girls. Dreamers are just you humans. Humans gone a little further in one direction, yes, but still humans.”

“That doesn’t really answer anything. What direction?”

“Dreamer.”

A roll of my eyes. “If Dreamer is one direction, what’s the other?”

“Dead.” Nerys laughs again. The other zoogs don’t, dipping their heads.

“Alright then, Dream-God,” I say. “If you won’t give me proper answers, I guess I’ll have to ask Signal when she gets back. How long do you think—”

My phone goes off, ringing, vibrating, buzzing against the table; I almost leap out of my seat, heart in my throat, then grit my teeth with embarrassment and humiliation. The zoogs flinch far worse, half of them scattering, claws skittering against the concrete, before they realise it’s just a machine.

Surprise ebbs. The phone keeps ringing. Fear creeps back. I don’t recognise the number. Dare not touch the phone.

“Nerys,” I whisper, heart in my throat. “Can Dreamers hijack telephone conversations?”

“Hrrrrrmmmmmrmmmm.” Nerys just rasps, low and hostile.

Ring, ring, ring. Ring, ring, ring.

The phone echoes off into the depths of the Big Room, on and on and on.

Twenty seconds, thirty seconds, a full minute, long past when it should have cut to voicemail.

My phantom limb clenches so hard that the muscles in my stump feel as if they might peel themselves from my bones. I grip the stump, squeeze to distract the nerve endings.

The ringing stops. The phone goes still. No voicemail.

Haze-wash of rain-drops against the concrete roof. My own quivering breath. Silence.

“You don’t think that was her?” I whisper. Nerys doesn’t reply. “Oh. Oh, I suppose it could have been … ” Scarlet Edge? How would she have my number? “Grimgrave? Or Signal? Do they need me? Do they … oh fuck.” I grip my face in my left hand, try to take deep breaths. “Okay, okay, it was nothing, it was nothing. Just sit tight. Just sit tight. The others will be back soon. Sit tight. Sit.”

“They always are,” Nerys offers. “Always are, Octavia.”

“Right. Of course.”

A nod, another deep breath, and I reach for my right arm again. All that’s left is to lock the wrist into the socket, insert the battery into the slot, and then reinforce the new forearm segments with all the carbon fibre tape I can spare. It won’t be pretty and smooth and human, not like the plain white outer shell I’ve worn for ten years. My WestEuro Bionics XMR Model 4 is well and truly modified far beyond even an outline of the original design. But it will be mine, and I will be complete, no matter how rough and ugly and strange others may think me.

A ghost of migraine pain flutters behind the slit of my right eye, seeps down the ragged line of my scar, pulls at the corner of my mouth, forces a twitch in my part-paralysed muscles.

A voice whispers in my ear.

“This isn’t what you wanted to do with your life.”

A scream and a lurch. Up on my feet, chair hurled aside, clattering on concrete. Claw for the gun, fingers too numb. Solid weight in my left hand, Grimgrave’s absurd pink pistol, for which I am endlessly, wordlessly, impossibly thankful. Finger on the trigger. Safety off.

Nobody’s there.

Silence. Rainstorm static. Echoes of my own feet.

I jerk the gun left and right, at the tables bathed in the red light from Signal’s computer setup, over the little kitchen area and Gregory’s glass tank, across the shadows in the mouth of the corridor to the bedrooms.

Every inch of my skin is caked in frozen flash-sweat, t-shirt stuck to my back. A hundred zoogs are up on their paws, claws clutching concrete, tails held high, hisses trapped in throats.

Nerys rasps my name. “Octavia?”

Can’t answer. Can’t breathe.

“Octavia?”

“Shhhhh!” I hiss, eyes tracking from column to column, searching for a glint of toxic golden light.

Her voice, the one voice I have learned to love across a decade of dreams, but subtly different, as if turning strange after lingering too long. A soft, slow, sinuous slither, from a thousand nights of darkness shared, shadows pressing in, her forehead to mine, her thoughts in me. Her breath against my cheek, a tickle of warmth against the bell of my ear, a hint of rotten halitosis beneath sweet strawberry scent.

Nothing. Nobody.

Gun feels like solid lead in my left hand, palm sweat-slick, fingers frozen. Panting so hard through my nose, almost hyperventilating.

“I’m hearing things,” I whisper, and don’t believe a word. “Hallucinating. Please please please please, I’m hearing things, I’m—”

“You were going to be an engineer,” Willow purrs in my right ear.

Scream, stumble, spin, wave the gun to ward off a ghost.

Nothing but Signal’s screens, red light flowing across the floor like a pool of diluted blood. Breathing so hard my head feels light. Open my lips, but her name sticks in my throat, dry as old dust.

“Nerys?” I hiss instead. “Nerys?”

Nerys clambers out of her basket, pads out onto the bare concrete beyond the rugs and clutter. Still wounded and scabbed, she’s slow moving and awkward, dragging her long black rat-like tail behind. The mass of zoogs drift with her as if pulled by distant magnetic force. Some huddle at her rear, others clamber up onto the high ground of the sofa-backs. Twitching noses rise into the air, sniffing and snuffling. A wave passes through the gathered mass of little furry bodies. Hackles rise. Fur bristles. Lips peel back to show pointed teeth. Little eyes go wide with sudden shivering terror and determined defiance.

“We hear nothing,” Nerys rasps. “But the stench … hate, hate, hate!”

“Nerys,” I try to say, can’t get the word out, throat closing up. “Nerys. I c-can’t— I can’t see her again. I can’t— I’ll go— I’ll go mad. I— I—” I raise my voice, shout past the shaking pistol. “I don’t want to see you! I don’t want to see you! Go away!”

Silence.

Raindrops.

Nothing here but me and the zoogs.

On Signal’s monitors the black cloud of a nightmare swallows half of Oxford. A hundred low hisses rise from a hundred zoog throats; several start to back away, low to the floor, pressing their bodies close to each other. A few zoogs cluster at my heels, as if I could protect them from a Dreamer. Drenched in frozen sweat, I wish I could grab my jumper and pull it back on, but I dare not obscure my vision for a single heartbeat, let alone lower the pistol.

Worse than afraid, I am humiliated. Where is all my anger? To what corner of my soul has my righteous rage fled?

Corpses don’t feel brave, of course. Corpses are for eating.

I try to call out, but it comes as a whimper.

“ … Willow?”

“Don’t you want to go home?” she whispers on my right.

Point the gun, stab the air with the muzzle, but I’m aiming at nothing, blank concrete. She is simply not there. She never was.

“Go away,” I whine. “Leave— leave me alone, Willow. N-no, I don’t, I don’t want to hear this, I can’t— I don’t—”

“You were going to spend the rest of your life with me,” she whispers on my left.

Spin the other way, aim into the overlapping shadows. No Willow.

“We can still do that,” she murmurs. “We can still go home, Octavia. We can go home together. You and I, the way we were before, the way I made it, just for you. Isn’t that what you want?”

Guilty relief claws me open as a dry sob, forces tears of raw terror into my eyes. If I see her I will go insane, I will lose myself, I will do anything she says. My left hand shakes so hard, I can’t aim straight. And I seem to have taken my finger off the trigger. Can’t do it, can’t shoot her. I loved her for too long, loved an illusion she put in my head, but my heart wants that illusion back more than anything. Can’t do it, not when she whispers in my ear about home, about what I wanted for ten years, about putting everything back the way it should be.

A whine forces itself between my clenched teeth. In my secret heart I had thought I was growing strong, but I am weaker than ever.

I am ready to come at her slightest call.

Sharp points tug at my left ankle. A zoog, little claws clinging to the hem of my pajama bottoms, fellows and friends pressed close, peering past me into the shadows, frothing at the mouth with fear.

That sight forces something sideways inside my chest, pushes the whimper back down, straightens my spine.

“ … she … ” Swallow hard, find my voice. “She doesn’t want you,” I tell them. “Nerys. Nerys! All of you, she doesn’t want you. She’s after me. You should run. Run, now, run—”

Zoog hissing drowns out my plea; they are not going anywhere, will not leave me behind. The one on my left ankle tightens its grip.

All I can do is pant for breath, tears trickling down my cheeks, caught in my scar. Eyes to the table, to my arm, my salvation. “I … I have to finish my arm, I have to—” But I can’t put the gun down. “Nerys, I have to finish my arm. Before she—”

Willow whispers from right behind my head.

“I can make a new arm for you,” she says. “Flesh and blood. Iron and fire. Starshine and moonlight. Whatever you wish, I can make it happen, I can— ahhh!”

Willow’s whisper cuts out with a gasp.

A bolt of slinking storm-stained grey surges out from behind one of the nearest columns, a flash of leaden lightning silent and gleaming, low-slung and leaping, arcing through my peripheral vision almost too fast to follow, too swift to swing the pistol round in time.

A cat, grown huge.

Grey as the ones I met down in Oxford, but the size of a Siberian tiger, eyes like chips of burned-out stars, teeth a hot and dripping silver, claws like kitchen knives clad in chrome, body flickering and shuddering, the metaphysical breakdown of a dream-thing forced close to the surface of the waking world.

A living blade aimed for my unguarded throat, too swift for me to shoot.

Three dozen zoogs happen to block the way, too slow to flee as the dream-cat scythes into them. Cruel claws swat zoogs aside, rake bloody rents in grey furry flanks, open bellies and ribcages in squealing splatters of bright crimson and squirming purple. Silver teeth snap shut on spines, break necks, sever paws, send zoogs scrambling and screeching in a deafening chorus of fear and rage. But the glowing dead-star eyes stay fixed on me. The zoogs just happened to be in the way, slow to part, a moment’s pause before the kill.

A moment bought in which to run. The other zoogs are already doing so — turning tails, diving for cover, a wave of retreat passing through them, parting them from their fellows, sending them in every direction, leaving even Nerys to fend for herself.

Think like a zoog.

Run away, perhaps live another day. Be small and vulnerable and forever hunted. Tossed aside, not even as food, a speed-bump on the road to some greater goal.

Think like a zoog. Run. Crawl. Cower.

They did not intend to do so, but half a dozen zoogs have died in the blink of an eye, so that I might live.

Think like a zoog?

Alchemy fires inside my heart, an engine more powerful than biochemical fear, transmutes terror into a cocktail more potent than courage. Think like a zoog. Bare your teeth. Bite down.

I step forward, raise the gun.

The ripple of zoogs turns like a single organism, a cornered animal, from many to one. My forward step drags the whole mass with me, no hesitation or indecision. They see me and they follow in a tidal crash, swarming past my ankles, smashing into the dream-cat, knocking it off balance with sheer numbers. Dozens of tiny claws dig into feline ankles and tendons, ripping little wounds in thick flesh, gouging and tearing and raking and digging. Zoogs scale the cat’s pelt, jaws clamping shut around shoulders and throat and neck and belly and hamstrings. One goes for an eye. Another rips and tears at an ear. The air is a chaos of hissing and rasping and squeals of pain. The dream-cat swipes left and right, jaws snapping shut, killing three more zoogs in the time it takes me to step close and press the muzzle of Grimgrave’s pistol to its forehead.

The first shot kills. Ribbons of mundane brain matter and glowing loops of silver-grey dream-stuff explode from the rear of the dream-cat’s skull. Zoogs scramble clear as it staggers, strings cut, then goes down with a slap of flesh on concrete. The second and third shots make sure it’s dead, pulp the brain. The rest of the magazine makes the corpse jerk and twitch, opening bloody holes in ribs and guts. When the gun goes ‘click’ and the slide locks back, I keep yanking on the trigger until I realise bullets aren’t coming out anymore. Then I raise my prosthetic foot and stamp on the ruined skull. Once, twice, three times, until I almost lose my balance.

A pool of grey-red blood spreads outward from the massive feline corpse.

Dead zoogs lie crumpled and bloody. One has been bisected by feline jaws, intestines spewed on the floor. Injured zoogs smear crimson streaks on the concrete, hissing and squealing. Living zoogs screech and chatter, clutching at my ankles, biting at the dead thing, helplessly pushing at the corpses of their friends.

I stagger sideways, slip in the blood and spent bullet casings all over the floor. Don’t know where to turn. Don’t know—

A second streak of lightning grey explodes from the opposite side of the domesticated corner, an identical grey-silver cat grown massive, leaping one of the sofas. I scream and raise the gun, pull the trigger on an empty chamber.

The cat crouches, pounces, sails through the air in a silent arc, aimed at my throat.

Nerys reaches past me. Nerys the Dream-God.

The Big Room blinks out like smoke beneath a black sun, replaced by the oily dark sea and carrion carpet of Nerys’ true domain, where a million zoogs swarm and feast around her ankles. A goddess taller than mountains catches the tiny dream-cat in a fist of black flesh, then raises the creature up and up and up, toward her face, eyes and lips twisted with divine rage.

Nerys rasps. The air shudders in the grip of a hurricane: “In my house?!”

The dream-cat looks terrified for one final second, then Nerys bites off its head. She lets the decapitated corpse tumble to the carrion-sea below, where a thousand zoogs swarm over the fresh meat.

Then the goddess and the dark sea are both gone.

Nerys the zoog lurches sideways, held up only by the press of her bodyguards. Her mouth is smeared with blood. Of the second cat-corpse, there is no sign.

At least a dozen zoogs lie dead or dying. A dozen more badly wounded. Perhaps twice that with light injuries. Pools and smears of blood, gore matted in fur and all over the rugs, jaws hinged wide with squeals of pain and outrage and confusion, uninjured zoogs trying to nudge their friends back to their feet, lapping at their wounds, or hanging back with wide-eyed child-like fear.

“Uhh … uhhhh … ” Words have deserted me. “Nerys … me-medical … uh— f-f-first aid! First aid kit! Have we got— I don’t— Nerys?” But Nerys looks punch-drunk, dazed. “I don’t— no— no no no no— Tissy!” I raise my head, shout louder than I have in my whole life. “Tissy! Tiss—”

Willow.

Framed between a pair of pillars, against mottled shadow beyond. Dressed like an inverted orchid in the full flush of spring — long peach-pink skirt, thick cream-green jumper, shiny black shoes showing a sliver of dark tights. She has tied a matching pink neckerchief around her throat, teased it and starched it until the ends stand up like a ribbon looped in a bow. Long brown hair, recently cut and styled, a subtle wave as it falls about her shoulders, held back from high forehead by a pink headband.

She has painted herself with makeup, curled her lashes and shadowed her lids, blushed her cheeks and reddened her lips. She never needed makeup in the dreams she fed me, always untouched by artifice. But makeup cannot fully conceal the dark rings around her eyes, the sallow texture of her skin.

Golden heat-haze shimmers from her like a full-body halo, a toxic corona leeching dream-waste into the air, boiling off in Luna’s atmosphere. Her outline flickers and twitches, an imperfect projection from the underside of reality.

She wears an expression of wide-eyed horror, one fluttering hand half-way to her mouth.

I point the pistol, forget I’m empty, pump the trigger.

Willow flinches. And that is among the greatest things I have ever witnessed.

“Oh, Octavia,” Willow says, voice breaking with false regret, shaking her head with stately sorrow. “I did not intend for this. I did not, I had no idea, I—”

I roar at the top of my lungs and hurl the empty gun at her face. She shrieks and ducks. The firearm bounces off the floor.

“Octavia!” She straightens, hands raised, as if I would ever let her surrender. “Octavia, I didn’t mean for this to happen, not like this, not—”

“Liar!” I scream. Any fear I felt before has been quenched in zoog blood, transmuted into more rage than my body can contain. “Liar! You—”

“Octavia, please!” Willow cries out, wild-eyed, desperate. “My private matters have been interfered with! I am as angry as you, please, you must believe. I did not intend this, I did not. I thought I was alone. This was supposed to be just you and I, Octavia! I-I-I have been betrayed, I have been betrayed by those I trusted, please, please—”

“Make it right!” I bellow.

Willow blinks, dumbfounded.

“Make. It. Right.” I hiss, gesture at the zoogs, the dead and the dying, violated intestines and voided gore. “You’re a Dreamer, aren’t you? Put them back together. Heal them. Make it right. Now!”

Willow looks at the zoogs with vague confusion, then raises her eyes back to my face.

She need not use words; I see the sentiment behind her flesh, because though the ten long years of our love was a dream-bound lie, her expressions are engraved forever on the throne of my memories, and I know her better than she will ever comprehend.

She is thinking: ‘But they’re only zoogs?’

Her lips move. Starts to speak the words. Because she has never truly known me, never had to account for anybody but herself.

Until this moment I was content, for a given and terrible value of ‘content’, to perhaps simply never have to see Willow again, to do my best to spend the rest of my life forgetting her, to die sooner or later in the ebb and flow of a revolution that will never take, and go to my cold, lonely grave with only fading memories of her face.

Now I want to kill her.

Anger — not clean and clear, not the healthy flush of release, not anything akin to what I felt with Scarlet Edge — boils up inside, fills me to bursting, corrodes whatever fleshy remnant is left of my heart and lungs and guts, mushing my organs into a soup, white-hot and lethal, potent as rocket fuel. A black and blinding rage closes down over my vision. A fury the likes of which I had never considered possible. Blood vessels on my face will burst. My throat will tear. My intestines will writhe forth and strangle Willow to death of their own accord. If I am struck down, I will rise again and pull her limbs off. If she cages me, I will melt the bars and pour molten steel into her eyes. If she speaks I will devour her tongue.

“Make it right.” My voice is a volcanic hiss, pressure pounding deep down in my chest, a piston in place of my heart. “Make it right. Make it right.”

“I can’t!” Willow says, spreading hands as if I am being unreasonable. “Octavia, please, I would if I could, but—”

“You’re a Dreamer, aren’t you?”

Willow wets her lips with a darting pink tongue; how many times has the dream of that tongue slipped into my mouth, counted my teeth. She tries to smile, but she can’t quite get it right, doesn’t match my memories.

“I am so very far from home,” she says, voice dipping toward a break. Her words leak toxic golden gasses into the air. She flutters dark lashes, as if on the verge of tears. “Even standing here is a struggle, standing before you. I may as well be naked and exposed, but I am glad to do so, because I no longer make any effort to conceal myself from you. I am tortured, yes, but I embrace it. If this pain is the price of putting things right between us … ” She trails off with a delicate sigh, too much of a performance. “I did promise I would never leave you, my Octavia, and I will not break that—”

“Shut up,” I snap. “Stop talking.”

Petulant irritation mars her perfect mask. She sighs. “Oh, Octavia. This was not supposed to be this way. My approach has been ruined. Believe me, I am far more furious than you—”

“Tissy!” I bellow again, howling into the echoes of the Big Room. “Tissy!”

Willow rolls her eyes, starts to cross her arms over her chest, forces herself to halt. “Octavia—”

“Shut up!” I roar at her. “Tissy! Tiss—”

“Allow me, my sweet,” Willow purrs, soft and easy and gentle again, a perverse pleasure on her lips. “I may not be able to set all to rights up here, but I will spend freely of myself, if it matters so much to you.”

Willow flicks the fingers of her right hand, an impetuous gesture with which to summon a tardy servant.

Reality stutter-steps six inches sideways, then snaps back with a judder of displaced air, as if some cosmic force had attempted to shift the whole of Plato Base in a newly invented cardinal direction. Willow gasps, winces, staggers back one delicate step, brow furrowed with shock and outrage; her corona of toxic golden glow flares and sputters like a punctured fuel tank. Zoogs rasp and screech. My eyes water, buffeted by noxious fumes.

“Wh-what—” Willow stammers.

Deep blue light explodes at the far end of the Big Room, writhing and coiling over the walls and ceiling in a chaos of cobalt and azure, like radioactive fires filtered through a mile of seawater. A chaotic fluting assaults the air, an entire wind instrument section submerged in boiling glue, gurgling with outrage.

“Tissy?” I shout. Then at Willow: “What have you done?!”

Zoog claws snag on the rear of my right pajama leg, scrambling upward, drawing a little blood as they dig through my t-shirt and climb to my left shoulder. Nerys, dripping phantasmal black ooze down my front, anchors herself by wrapping her tail around my upper arm.

“Not your world, bitch-fuck stink-cunt!” she rasps at Willow. “The moon isn’t yours, human! Fuck away off!”

Willow frowns at Nerys, eyes tight and lip curled with open disgust. She glances at the radioactive blue aurora at the far end of the Big Room, bewildered by the response when she tried to rewrite reality. Doesn’t understand. Too used to getting her way.

“Tissy!” I shout again. “The zoogs need help!”

“She can’t,” Nerys rasps. “Tissy can’t approach the dream-bitch.”

“Willow!” I shout. “Leave!”

Willow collects herself. Draws herself up. Straightens her spine and raises her chin — my mannerism, my gesture, my mind reeling — and composes her face.

“I shan’t,” she says, voice shaking with emotion. “I am doing this for you, Octavia. You are still mine, and I promised I would not leave you behind. I wanted to do this right, and it has all gone wrong, but I shall not squander it for the sake of a few dead rodents—”

The nearest object usable as a weapon happens to be the scissors with which I’ve been cutting the carbon fibre tape. I grab them, hold them up, grit my teeth so hard the enamel creaks.

“—which were not even my fault!” Willow’s voice rises in credible panic, then sighs and huffs, as if dealing with a child toward whom she must show patience. “Octavia, be realistic, you are not going to stab me with a pair of scissors. You are not like that, you are a gentle and kind and sensitive girl—”

My aim has improved. Willow shrieks, hops aside, trailing golden toxins from heels and hem. The scissors almost plug her in the gut, glance off her waist, clatter to the concrete. Nerys rides the recoil of my throw, little claws digging deep into the flesh of my left shoulder, hissing at the top of her tiny lungs, leader of a chorus as the zoogs screech in sympathetic anger. Can barely feel the pain. Doesn’t matter.

“I don’t want to see you, Willow!” I roar. “Go away! Leave, now—”

“You blocked my number!” she shrieks back, composure crumbling, tears dragging mascara down her cheeks. “What was I supposed to do, Octavia?! Let these freaks and animals take you—”

“Leaaaaaave!” I roar, drown her out, fill the Big Room with my voice, until my throat is raw and my lungs are empty and my face is hot as molten iron.

Willow straightens up, forcing deep breaths into her shaking body, blinking to clear crocodile tears from her lying eyes, smoothing her skirt over her thighs. She tries to wipe her cheeks, ruins her makeup further, not used to wearing any. Feet together, hands clasped, spine straight. Just a woman, a human being, crumpled and small and breakable; what was I ever afraid of? What do I have to fear? I will break her bones upon my gears.

“I wanted to make this nice,” she says, half-crying, voice hollow. “I wanted it all to be right, all just so. But it’s been ruined. Absolutely ruined. Don’t mistake my attitude for carelessness, please, please do not. I have never cared about anything as much as I do in this moment. I know this may be my one and only chance to save you—”

Nerys rasps, for my ears only: “Octavia! Draw her away! Draw her off! Tissy can help if you draw her off.”

But I can’t look away from those brown eyes, full of tears, stained with black. Once warm, now cold as winter mud. Infinite depths, saturated with filth.

“—and I am failing,” Willow carries on, voice breaking. She sniffs back more tears. “The same as I have failed everything else in life that I truly cared about. This?” She gestures at the slain dream-cat, surrounded by dead and dying zoogs. “This is nothing to me. And it should be nothing to you! I can take that pain away, I can make it all better, you know that. But! But, if it matters so much to you, then yes, this will be addressed. The responsible party will be spoken to. I promise, Octavia. I promise. Do you … do you still believe my promises?”

“No,” I spit.

Willow bites her lips, tries not to weep. My rage is unmoved by deception.

“But … ” she tries to say. “But right now, please, in this one chance, I need you to listen to me. I can make everything alright, Octavia. Everything is going to be alright, if you will only consent to listen—”

A piston drives my right leg forward, a step like a jackhammer. My lungs draw breath, forge-fire beneath bellows. My blood is molten metal, my heart is a divine engine.

My right arm pulls back, fist clenched to strike Willow’s head clean from her shoulders—

Phantom pain almost fells me.

Because I don’t currently possess a right arm, only the bodily memory of muscle and bone. My stump twitches, pulls back nothing, phantom limb clenched tight over my belly and chest. My prosthetic still lies on the table, incomplete. Hand, battery, main body, not yet joined. I am still a corpse, a cadaver in so many pieces, subject to whatever indignities Willow dreams of inflicting.

Pain dilutes the purity of rage. Fear seeps in through a crack, undermines anger, taints the flame.

Through bitter tears and gritted teeth, I stare at Willow, trapped by her eyes.

A pinprick of cold mucus germinates in the back of my head.

The zoogs can sense the change, like animals scenting a storm. They start to peel off, creeping back from Willow, retreating from my sides, leaving their dead and wounded behind. Hackles raise and tails go tall. Nerys hisses in my ear — run, run, Octavia, run! — but I refuse. Square my shoulders, show my teeth. The moment I turn tail and run, the moment fear is greater than anger, Willow wins. And then I will never run again.

Willow sees the fear, sees her victory. Her tears vanish as if they never were. Her expression softens, simpers, slides toward ease, a fluttering of curled lashes, a warmth and acceptance I recall all too well from a decade of dreams. Her golden corona deepens, darkens, swallows the light, so that I am staring down into an infinite black pit with Willow at the bottom. My feet skid, my balance wobbles, on the precipice of infinity. The air fills with a sound like the silence between the stars.

“There you are,” Willow purrs, smiles for me. “My Octavia. My sweet little thing.”

Cold spreads from the rear of my skull, oil-slick and slimy. A sob tries to tear upward through anger and fear both. My left hand claws at the back of my neck, the base of my skull, trying to dig out that unfurling pinprick of clammy cold.

“W-what— what did you just put in my head!?”

“Oh, Octavia,” Willow murmurs, smiling with pleasure. “You are just as I remember you, just like when we first met. Do you remember that day? I do, and I will never forget it. I hold it close to my heart, turn it over sometimes and look at it anew. You were so wounded, so alone. You needed me then, and you still need me now, you’ve merely lost your way. Let me take you home.”

She stretches out a hand, suddenly close, suddenly six feet away when she was fifteen or twenty distant. Her scent fills me up, strawberries and lavender and clean linen and fresh-cut grass and chocolate and fresh tea and the innards of a dead sheep rotting in the sun for three days.

I stumble back, flinch away from that hand. Anger stutters and gutters, threatens to go out entirely; cold petals spread and smother my thoughts.

“You put another parasite in me!” I spit. “You— you put something—”

“I gift you truth,” Willow says. “The truth to see that I am the only thing you have ever truly needed.” Another step forward, her fingers trembling for my face. “Please, Octavia, if only you would listen—”

“I’m a magical girl now!” I hiss through clenched teeth. “I can hurt you, Willow. I can kill you.”

Willow giggles, light as air, nasty and sharp at the edge. “Doubtful. You love me, don’t you? You would never raise your hand to me. I’m your Willow, your perfect fantasy. Why would you ever hit me? You’re not that kind of girl—”

“I— am—”

“Besides,” she says with a suddenly bored sigh, “you can’t even transform. I’ve made sure of that.” Her eyes slide to my almost-finished arm down on the table, nose wrinkling with disgust. “I should have known you would work fast. You always have, whenever I’ve been foolish enough to take my eyes off you. Always tinker, tinker, tinker, hand covered in oil, brain full of machine thought. I do not … disapprove. But your talents are wasted on this, are they not? I was trying to tell you earlier, I know you always wanted to be an engineer—”

“Wasted on what? On freeing myself?” I claw at the back of my head; I’ll dig through my flesh if I have to.

Willow’s goes sour-faced, suddenly unimpressed. She looks at Nerys on my shoulder, earns herself a zoog hiss, wet and raspy.

“You were not ‘freed’, Octavia,” Willow says with difficult patience, as if forcing herself to explain elementary principles to a slow child. “You were corrupted and stolen, by this stinking thief.”

“Fuck off, cunt-bitch dog-sick-stink fuck-fuck!” Nerys snaps, then rasps in my ear: “Octavia, run, run!”

Willow’s eyes will not release me. She is a reeking pit, a putrescent wound in the surface of the waking world, an infinity of star-smeared rot, a human form blurred by universal decay.

Best I can manage is another half-step back. Grope for my arm. I need to insert the battery, attach the hand, wrap the whole thing tight with carbon fibre tape, then pray it doesn’t explode when I land a punch.

But now it’s too late. Willow’s eyes catalyse the cold slime in the back of my head, urge it to grow. Zoogs are bleeding out on the floor at my feet but I cannot see them. If only I’d worked faster, started a day earlier. If only I was not a corpse and a cripple. If only I were not so weak.

“And now look at where you find yourself.” Willow’s eyes rove across the Big Room, though I can no longer see it. “What an ugly place. Hiding away on the moon, surrounded by deluded whores and filthy animals. I can smell that clown too, the place reeks of her. It hurts me, Octavia, that you would give so much of yourself to a thing like her, after she wounded me so surely. Do you listen to her? Does she fill your head with lies—”

“She’s twice what you’ll ever—”

“You deserve better,” Willow cuts me off. “You are too sweet to waste on fruitless perversity.” Her hands reach for my face again. “Shhhh-shhh-shhh,” she hushes me when I try to snap back, and I find my words choked off. “Shhhh, it’s okay. You can be my good girl again, Octavia. You have not strayed so far that I will not take you back. You are still my good girl.”

“You kept me— like a pet,” I hiss, spittle foaming through clenched teeth. “You’re the one— in my— head—”

“I kept you safe,” she says. “I kept both of us safe. Octavia, I am not trying to control you, I just don’t want you to change yourself in a way that you can’t take back, in a way that will end with you dead. Is that so hard to understand? Is that so bad that you must resent me?” She eases closer, so that I smell the reek of her breath like hot petrol and spoiled meat. “You haven’t taken that final step, not yet. You aren’t one of them until you transform. You still have the name you were … born with, not yet replaced with a self-serving lie.” Her hands cup my cheeks, a thumb running down my scar; her skin is like swamp-water meat, cold as ice, burning away my thoughts. “We can start over, just you and I. We can live in a little cottage with a vegetable garden, cook from scratch and grow herbs and keep a cat. We can get to know each other, all over again, from the start. And this time I won’t … I won’t pretend a thing.” Great tendrils of slug-slime cold extend deep into my brain, reaching down my spine, coiling for my heart, snuffing out fire and flame and dousing molten metal, softening me back into rotten flesh. “Everything that has happened to you, I can make it all go away, all go back to how it was before. I have the power and authority to make it happen. Please.” I want to go home. “Please, Octavia.” Tears run down my cheeks. “Come home. Come back to me. Come back to England—”

“Acting like— like I don’t remember— the things you said— in that hospital room?”

Willow blinks with genuine shock, confused, wrong-footed. Because she’s a Dreamer, she has never had to account for her own prior actions. They melt into lost memories, so that I may never resent.

“I … I didn’t mean what I said before,” she says. “It’ll be different this time. I’ll be different. You’ll see that soon, Octavia. Now, it’s time to come home.”

My eyes flutter shut. The fight goes out of me. Molten metal begins to set and harden and cool. Engines gutter to a stop.

Because I do want to go home.

Willow has my best interests at heart. Willow knows best. Willow is best.

“Kiss me, then,” I whisper, so soft I can barely speak. Open my eyes by a bleary, bleeding crack. “Kiss me.”

And then.

Willow Hesitates.

Anger blazes high, an inferno hot enough to crisp and cook the tendrils of the parasite she’s put inside my head, send it squealing back from my heart and lungs, back into the rear of my brain. I roar in her face at the top of my voice, make her flinch and recoil, because she never really loved me, never hugged me or kissed me, never wanted my fingers up inside her cunt, my lips between her legs. And if I go with her now, I will never have her. I will never have Grimgrave, or Scarlet Edge, or Burning Bright, or even myself. I will never be free, I will never be me. Octavia Carter will be resurrected, but something else will walk in my skin.

With all my strength and a twist of my spine, I hook my left arm into the back of the chair — the one I knocked down in my panic — then bring it up and over my head and smash it downward into Willow’s face.

Willow crumples with a shriek, head snapped aside, hair covering her face like a veil, the chair flying after to clatter on concrete, smoking and blackened from where it breached her toxic golden corona. My left shoulder, elbow, and wrist all scream in unison, tendons and cartilage wrenched past their limits, pain blotted by adrenaline; my hand and forearm tingle with the unpleasant touch of raw dream-stuff bleeding from Willow’s body. I stagger forward, catch my balance, lurch for the table.

“Run, run, run!” Nerys is screeching in my ear.

Not without the rest of myself.

The battery for my prosthetic arm slams home with a thunk. The hand, my own right hand, slips into the pocket of my pajama bottoms, followed by my phone. I grab the roll of carbon fibre tape and grip it between my teeth, then cradle my prosthetic arm in the crook of my left. No hands for my laptop.

Willow gutters and flickers on the floor like a shattered lantern spreading oil on the concrete. Streamers of toxic light bleed from a graze on her scalp, a cut on her face, a burst lip. The perfection of her clothes is ruined and rumpled. She sweeps her hair aside with a hand, reveals a face twisted with wounded pride and disgusted outrage, eyes burning like holes punched in a star, ringed with crusts of rotten black.

She jerks and glitches like a skipping video tape, from her back to her side, up to a kneeling crouch, halfway to her feet.

“I wanted to do this right, Octavia!” she sobs and wails, tearing at her own cheeks, opening rents running with tarry star-stuff, golden and steaming. “I gave you what you wanted, what you always wanted from me, and you spat in my face!”

Cold slime stirs in my head, reaching for my thoughts again.

Run! But where? Does it matter? Anywhere but here, and then at least a dozen more zoogs will live, once Tissy can tend to them. Outdoors there is no cover beneath the pounding rain. My bedroom offers no shelter, neither do any of the others. Plato Base itself is a maze, dark and tangled, but Willow is a Dreamer, walls mean nothing to her, darkness even less. All I need is a few minutes to finish my arm.

Gregory the dead Moon Beast catches my eye, from deep inside his cloudy tank of tainted formaldehyde, peering through a forest of tentacles.

He tells me that the corridor to his left is my best chance. Be fast, earth thing.

I pick up my feet, Nerys still clutching my shoulder, and break into a sprint. My right leg pounds like a piston, a prosthetic miracle, propelling me faster than I’ve moved in all the years since I lost my original; my left struggles to catch me on the opposite stride, and the prosthetic socket jars my hips like a sledgehammer. I shoot past the end of the domesticated corner, straight past Gregory’s tank.

Willow cries out with petulant frustration, my name mangled by toxic weeping.

I skid into the corridor-mouth, into the shadows and concrete angles of Plato Base. Radioactive blue flickers past in the Big Room behind — Tissy moving toward the injured zoogs.

“Octavia!” Willow screeches, her voice not human anymore, the voice of a stellar furnace collapsing on itself. “Octavia! Please, please just listen to me! Please!”

She is barely more than fifteen feet behind, and she is a Dreamer. She will catch me in seconds, make me look into her eyes, blot out my thoughts—

“Octavi-ahhh!”

A crash of breaking glass and a gush of heavy fluid stretches Willow’s cry into a wail of surprise. A noise like a hundred beached octopi warbles and splatters from the Big Room.

Gregory, a dead thing, bursting from his tank?

No time to stop and turn to look. If a fellow corpse has found the vitality to help me flee, then I will dedicate a monument to Gregory the Moon Beast. I will carve his name into the moon. I will blaze it down at Earth in letters a hundred feet high. I will cut it into Willow’s gut and make her chant it with her death rattle.

But she is not done, not yet.

“Octavia!”

Willow screeches, wet and waterlogged, far from halted, but growing distant as I plunge headlong into the concrete corridors.

A hidden corner, a few moments, and my arm will be complete. And then translocation, or transformation, and Willow will not stop me.

“You will always be mine!” her sobs chase me down into the dark. “Octavia! Octavia, please! I promised I would never leave you! Octavia, Octavia!”

Plato Base swallows me up.