When she returned to her apartment, her head was reeling and her eyes were bleeding on the inside. Dark, caustic, red poured down from above her eyeshes like curtains of rain, drawn at the irises so as not to obscure her vision, though everything in it after the man crumpled on the sidewalk was only a confused storm of adrenaline anyway: concrete and streetlights blurred into three stories of dark wood steps smeared into a fumbling and jingling of keys as she unsealed the door between home and the outside world. This time there was no one to greet her when she entered–Erika had gone to bed–and that was, at first, relieving…but her rapidly improving lucidity brought with it the distant throb of that awful, terrible Presence, drumming on her temples with her heartbeat. It was the only reception she received as she hurried to the bathroom.

  There, Calliope stood hunched over the dusty porcein, taking heavy, desperate breaths, trying to warm her lungs after swallowing a por vortex's worth of winter air. She worried she might vomit into the sink the moment that her airway at st thawed; to distract herself, she turned her eyes up to the mirror ahead. The reflection in the gss was her own again, thank God, but there was something terrifically wrong with it. The schlerae of its–her–eyes were flooded with scarlet, bloodlogged and watershot. Was that–were those–real? Hers? Shit. She gred straight into the mirror, raised a hand up to her face to confirm its image was in fact hers, and dared the apparition to show her anything but that–anything but the exhausted face with crimson eyes it presented her.

  But of course, It wasn't in the mirror, It never truly was. From the very beginning It never really left the space between her ears, settled in the extra yer of arachnoid matter It weaved over her brain. The cold pins-and-needles dancing on her scalp told her as much; how the hell had she not felt it? It didn't make sense, unless…unless if for the entire night that sensation had been there, just kept away from her awareness until the st possible moment when It had acted.

  It'd done something with her eyes, something terrible that pacified her attacker with the clinical coldness of an icepick lobotomy. How? It was only a fleeting look, but it carried dreadful power beyond that of a gorgon's stare. Just one instant was enough to petrify the man and thus rob the knife of any agency granted by his hand, casting both down onto the cold Earth in a confused ctter. Calliope had to marvel at its efficiency, despite the horror–but then what horror must her attacker have seen to strike him blind, just like that? It must've been beyond description, since he was still thrashing on the ground and cwing at his eyes when she turned to run. He might still be there, for all she knew; she hadn't looked back, afraid of what she'd see there lurking in the shadows. She knew a certain sable-haired woman awaited her, and she'd fled from that fate and abandoned him to his…Calliope felt a pang of regret at that, in spite of the fact that he'd, well, tried to stab her.

  And for herself, she felt a tripartite mixture of self-pity, anger and fear. God, the fear–even now in the bathroom it was suffocating. Her heart knew that it wasn't safe, that It followed her back, and so couldn't be convinced to beat any slower than an unsteady gallop. Maybe if she…? Closed her eyes, to calm herself…but shutting them tight brought back the rushing in her ears. It brought back that static in her eyes whose sparks had seemed innocuous, a week ago, but that each now contained a quantum of Its awareness, unnumbered tiny eyes watching her within the noise anywhere she looked. Worse, it reminded her of the moment when the knife had flown towards her: the roar inside that split her skull down the middle and nced dark lightning out across her gaze too quickly to process. The fork of it shot straight into the man and touched his mind, or soul, or whatever. It blinded him. Exactly what it was, or how It had done that, she hadn't the faintest inkling. She didn't even want its memory. But as she opened her eyes again to stare into the mirror…twin reminders of that exact event stared back. The price of the curse It'd performed was paid in the blood still pooling in the albumen of her eyes.

  A curse, how fitting. One too many sessions untethering her mind must've offended the universe on some level, and so it deigned to open her brain into whatever circle of hell Ettie hailed from. She was being punished. The deep red surrounding the dark brown confirmed it; it made her resemble some sort of demon, or at least a faux-Faustian fool who'd made a deal with one. Ha–she scoffed at that. There hadn't been a deal at all! It hadn't even fucking offered, she'd been a total sucker for Its empty promises. It'd simply acted of Its own accord and deceived her the entire night, and she had no doubt now It'd interfered while she'd been high, too.

  Even if that interference saved her life, the method of it filled her with dread, because inflicting blindness was several levels above a simple nosebleed. Things were spiraling further beyond her control. And of course, there was the matter of the ruptured blood vessels in her eyes. How the hell would she expin that at work, or to Erika?! She was well and truly fucked. Calliope's hands shook, soshe gripped the sink tighter for support. She should never have gone out–none of it would have happened if she had just stayed home. Nothing bad could come of doing nothing.

  Nothing shifted against her proprioception–a sort-of nonverbal "ahem", off in the direction of the open bathroom door. She cursed herself for leaving the thing open, and kept her eyes fixed on the mirror as Its presence grew on her right side. No, no. She wasn't going to look. She didn't want to see It, now or ever. A week before, It offered her the choice to ignore It; she was cashing that in now.

  I could make you look, you know.

  The voice in her head wasn't hers, but Ettie's. With it, the now-familiar rush of artificial sweetener poured into her brain, forming a soft, tart foam over the unrelenting darkness, a drink whose bubbly depths went far beyond the trenches of the Earth. Calliope wanted to hate the sound. She wanted to hate the voice of her tormentor…but the soothing effect it had on her was undeniable. Already her breathing was returning to normal. That it was actually helping made her want to hate it even more.

  "You're not real," she panted, locking eyes with her reflection. "Get out of my head."

  No.

  The shadow clutched tighter around her; Calliope winced. "W-why not?"

  "Calliope, you know why." It said, from outside now. The ck of the echo in her bones startled her, and she turned–finally–towards the door. Ettie stood back on the far wall of the hallway beyond it, dark and colorful and unnervingly solid. The illusion was convincing, but there were obvious tells: the pce where her skin and clothes met the backdrop fringed off into an assortment of colors like the view through the edge of an eyegss, and her eye itself–the single one not covered by her bangs–was still an unnatural shade of mauve. It locked onto her, and Calliope couldn't look away; an unbreakable will compelled her gaze.

  "What even are you?" She whispered. "Just–can you tell me that? Why are you fucking torturing me?" She bit her lip and tried to shut her eyes; her teeth drew out a drop of blood, but they remained open. Its hold was absolute. "S-stop." She pleaded.

  "I'm not." It blinked, and the spell was broken. Calliope's head fell out of its grip to face the floor. There in the cracked untidy tile a reflection of Ettie was distorted, complete with pink pixeted glow where her eye would've been. When the image was all hazy like that, she could actually stand to look into the colour without feeling like her eyes would pop out of her skull. It was…strange…that that concern returned with such a vengeance, when she'd had little to no issue conversing with It back inside the greenhouse. Why wasn't that the case throughout the night? Why was it only now that Ettie's appearance so unnerved her once again?

  "It wasn't like that, because I didn't want it to be." It replied. At the very limits of perceptibility, she felt something pull back–it was only then that she realized It'd been reading her again. Invading her again. That does it–

  "Get OUT of my HEAD!" Calliope screamed. She clenched her teeth and fists down at the floor. Her vision was blurry; the beginnings of tears formed in her eyes. She knew that it was pointless to get mad, that crying was no use, that she was utterly helpless against It. That fact, however, didn't make it any easier to stop the waterworks from turning, so long as she had tears to give.

  "You are t-torturing me." She sniffled. "Is this hell? What'd I do wrong?" The figure in the tiles remained motionless. Then the light went out, and Callie raised her head. Ettie's eye was no longer glowing, though the pink corona still ringed around her pupil. The prickle in her brain dulled and retreated. It spoke, and instead of the voice of a demon she still expected, a soft and careful tone came forth:

  "Pain is only one thing you can feel. Yes, you'd be right to say your pain is interesting–delicious, even–but these projections are more of a reminder. It's not meant to hurt you."

  With the Thing's presence as distant as it was, coupled with Its reassurance, Calliope almost forgot that the girl across from her wasn't really there. Ettie seemed so real, so casual in her voice and demeanor, even if the content of her words betrayed the surface of a sadism she dared not peer beneath. The delicate and innocent face made it all the more disturbing…and why did she find Its features attractive, almost? Perhaps it was a lure: she was but a tiny, hapless, helpless fly, and Ettie was the pretty, colorful flower drawing her into its gaping maw, where she'd be swallowed up forever. But she was already caught! At any moment It could unravel her mind with a thought if It so chose; how could taunting captured prey be anything but torture?

  "...The fuck is it for, then?" She muttered, and wiped the tears from her eyes, only for new ones to form in their pce. The river of emotion still hadn't run its course.

  "To provide you with unique experience. To remind you of our separation, to keep you at arm's length."

  "Why do you need to…you–you said you weren't gonna eat me! That I could stay being me. Remember?" She spat the words at her, but the venom failed to take: her panic was too evident beneath the anger, and Ettie only narrowed her eyes in response. The acid in her voice, which up to then was simmering below the surface, broke then, and bubbled up.

  "I have spooled through your memory like cloth through a loom. I have tasted your essence. I remember that promise; I actually don't pn to consume you," she said.

  It sounded true, but Calliope couldn't shake the feeling that, on some higher pne of existence, her sad excuse for a self was held between Its jaws. The sword of Damocles hung over her head in an extra, unseen dimension; a promise not to let it swing, not to bite down and digest her…it was not enough. No way. "Whatever." She said, "Like I can trust anything you say. You said you wouldn't interfere–"

  "–with your experience, yes." Ettie finished. She smiled–in ignorance or in spite of Calliope's anger, she couldn't tell. "I didn't. You had a good trip, didn't you?"

  It was technically correct–the worst kind of all. It was true that for the duration of her high, she hadn't been disturbed, and nothing unpleasant had appeared on the horizon of her psyche. It'd been a peaceful and uneventful experience–chill, even if it'd involved Sawyer James. That was hardly the point, though. Calliope tutted, and jabbed a finger at the apparition across the hall. "You know that's not what I fucking meant. You know it's not!"

  Ettie looked up and away. Sweater-cd shoulders shrugged at her, the way a person would to dismiss something irrelevant. God, why did It have to react in such a normal, human way? It was uncanny. "Then perhaps you should be less general in your requests." She said, examining the ceiling.

  Calliope was happy to oblige. "Fine–get the fuck out of my head, then." She repeated. By now she was thoroughly through with its antics, and cked the will to engage with It further, disarmed by the knowledge that Its will was stronger than hers by orders and orders of magnitude. So, she went to turn back to the sink, to wash her hands and probably curl up in the bathtub and bawl the blood out of her eyes, like an oversized fetus shedding amniotic fluid…but she found herself rooted to the spot. Ettie's gaze flitted back down and fixed her in pce.

  "No. In all my time I haven't met a thing like you, small as you are. You're the most interesting thing I haven't eaten. Come."

  Before she could react, the world frosted over and dissolved; the tile, floor, ceiling, all of it melted into darkness, except for Ettie and herself, who were left floating in space. Even so, the picture of her was no longer clear: the face of the Thing that'd hijacked her mind was smudged into that hideous phloxine shade. Calliope opened her mouth to cry out…but she was suddenly sleepy. Thoughts moved through her brain like mosses, reason slipped through her fingers–she couldn't think of anything! Maybe that was for the best. For all she knew, or all she was aware, she might have floated there in the void for an age of the world. But then…everything snapped back into pce, and she was seated in her bedroom in pajamas, looking at Ettie's figure in the doorway to the living room.

  "What–?" She scanned the room, and then herself. Everything looked normal. "What the fuck did you do?"

  Ettie stepped inside the threshold. "Rex," she said, "I'm just trying to make you more comfortable."

  Calliope retreated onto the bed until her back was pressed against the wall. It wasn't far enough; there was nowhere to run or hide from Its cyclopean stare. "Y-yeah? You can start by not doing…whatever the hell this is." As her tongue came to rest within her mouth, there was a strange taste against the back of her teeth–cold, a little minty, a little spicy? Toothpaste. Oh, what the fuck–It'd brushed her teeth for her.

  Ettie continued to approach, but to her relief, she stopped once she reached the edge of the bed, and hovered there with her head a head above Calliope's eye level. Her lips contorted and fshed another toothless smile. "Does this projection give you concern, too?"

  Calliope looked her up and down. Of course It did. That uncovered eye was still radiating, and though Ettie's sweater was clearly meant to be bck, it scarfed down shadows far more greedily than any real fabric should. In contrast, her skin was pale and faintly luminous, frosted gss made soft and flexible, a thin film over a cold, white light. Even Calliope wasn't that pale, but it wasn't sickly or unpleasant, really, just…picturesque.

  Yes, that was the word! Esther resembled a haunting, haunted portrait of a Victorian woman, her spirit exorcized from the canvas into modern times and clothing by an inferno that drank the oils in the paint and left behind nothing but ash and vapor. The shape before her was only smoke and mirrors, after all, even if It hid a thirst darker than any fme. The form and basic body pn of It were clearly human…but the way the light intruded slightly into her skin and not at all into her clothes revealed a sliver of Its true nature. Callie wondered if dispying that was intentional, or how much of anything Ettie did could be said to have intent, the way the actions of people did. It seemed to simply do whatever It wanted, at all times.

  "Fucking whatever you do makes me concerned." She whispered at st.

  It had waited patiently–untroubled by her staring–and spoke immediately. "Less concern, then? Zero is very likely out of the question." She cast Callie a look that was almost…apologetic? Acknowledgment, at least, of how utterly fucked-up the entire situation was. It was too little, too te. When Calliope failed to reply–even when she looked away–It continued looking down at her expecting an answer. Her self-consciousness strained beneath those eyes, pinned like a butterfly: she was exposed, wearing only shorts and a thin t-shirt, and she had no memory of changing into either. That meant–what had It seen? Ugh. She reached for the duvet to cover herself; only once her body was hidden underneath did she continue.

  "No." She said, "I think I liked you better when you were on that royal we shit…not when you're pretending to be, like–"

  "A person?" Ettie cut her off; another fsh of telepathy twitched inside her skull. "I'm…not. But–you could say I 'enjoy' our simuted interactions." She smiled; the sunny expression reached up past her lips all the way to her eyes. It looked as real as any true-blue smile from a friend, and so was utterly out of pce pying on the mask of the Thing before her. How the hell could she be sure if it were genuine? Hell, how could she be certain anything was real, now?

  "...what the fuck are you, then…" She asked. "Was Ettie ever real? Did you just make her up to–to mess with me?"

  Ettie considered her, unblinking. Probably, she didn't need to, and only did it to keep up a facade of–except when deep in thought, apparently, since it felt like a year since that eye st closed and it still didn't show a hint of watering. Her own eyes started to burn a little from staring. At st, it shut, and stayed that way, the pale lid sliding down to grant her a view of the thin, dark shes at its rim; they curled and spyed upwards like spiders' legs. Ettie's mouth opened up to bance, and the voice that issued from Its throat multiplied into a chorus.

  "We cannot express to you what we are, you cannot hold it. For you to understand would be your end. However, even your spot of a self has sparked change." It paused, voices dropping in and out in a minor discord without any obvious logic, until none remained. The pressure on her skull increased, the weight of the idea it impressed into it made her head smart, and Calliope understood what little she could: each voice was like a single thread in a great weave, or a small facet cut into the surface of Its "body", which had more faces than a sphere and was also Its equivalent of a mind. The form before her was only a kind of 3-D shadow cast onto her optic nerve; the real source of It wasn't real whatsoever. To Esther, thought was matter, so she with all her petty human ideas and feelings was little more than the tiniest morsel. And yet…an increasing, continued fraction of its interest was bent on interacting with her. That was the change It was talking about, she guessed: stooping down to her level, a god communing with an insect. What ever had she done to deserve something like that?

  The transmission into her head ended, bringing with it a measure of silence. But the chorus wasn't quiet for long. Ettie went on in that same multitude of tones.

  "We've never had a name. We never had a desire for such a thing. There was no need for nomencture, definition or distinction beyond that between consumer and consumed. Until you prompted us to choose, so…we took the whole of our extension and named it "Esther", diminutive "Ettie". We converged ourselves to a pattern, a part that you can comprehend." Again, the other voices departed in sequence, leaving only one this time: hers, dark and sweet like bck licorice.

  "That's me." Ettie said, and the eye opened once again, and the room seemed suddenly lighter with the ck of shadowy voices ying in the air. Her gaze floated to the ceiling–chasing the st lingering whisps of them–but it returned before long to make fresh eye contact. When she did: Calliope thought for one fleeting instant that she could see the Thing that cast the shadow within the darkness of her pupil. It saw her back, across some infinite focal distance, and the knowledge of that was unterribly nerving. But then it was gone; Ettie's continued speech dragged her out of the depths back to cold, hard reality.

  "But then, you would already have some idea of what transmutation's like, Calliope? —--?" Her voice distorted, and she didn't catch the final word–but she knew, and Ettie knew, too. "Naming is a funny thing…" It finished, and grinned at her again.

  Callie grimaced and fidgeted under the covers. Her mind was a roulette wheel reeling off its axis; to stabilize it and herself, she pnted a hand against the exposed skin of her thigh, past where the hem of her shorts had ridden up. The quilt of pores and vellus hairs was broken by a small, unexpected patch of pstic: a bandage–fresh, by how flush it was with the skin when she rubbed it with her thumb. A stitch formed in her throat.

  "Y-you, uhhh…" she stammered. Ettie's eye fshed down and stared, right down at the spot as if she could look straight through the bnkets. Oh, but of course…she could. God, she was so stupid: the material was immaterial to It, It could sense the feeling of the pstic on her fingertips just as well as she could! Just by touching it, she knew, and It knew she knew, and so on and so forth, and the horror of that was inescapable. It was inside of her, surrounding her…and there was no way for her to banish It…and there was nothing between her and Its sight. It wasn't even content to remain inside, either, now that It was–

  "Yes. I carried out your nightly and weekly routines." The daemon answered, putting an end to the panic.

  Callie felt a strange feeling of appreciation. She hated doing her hormone injection, necessary though it was for the persistence of her ego and emotional wellbeing besides. That It'd performed that weekly chore for her was an action worthy of her thanks. It did a good job of it, too: when she hazarded a look under the bnkets, she couldn't spot even a drop of dried blood under the clear film that covered where the needle had entered and withdrew. It was the same cold and clinical precision as before…she could already tell that was just Ettie's way of doing things. Utter, fucking, unhinged madness–but leashed and brought to heel beneath Its will. That attention to detail was appreciated, but she refused to let it show on her face, even if It could simply read it on her heart instead.

  "Why, exactly?" She asked, and again made brief eye contact with the woman at the bedside. It hurt to look at her again–she didn't manage it for more than a moment–but looking away might've been worse: there was unnatural movement in her peripheral vision, and when her eyes returned from the ceiling Ettie had shifted several feet closer, seated on her knees atop the sheets. Callie jumped back, then–and promptly banged her head against the wall.

  "Ow!"

  Something ser-like swiped across her; she shivered. The smarting in the back of her skull dispelled. Oh. The pain was gone as quickly as it came. It had done that? Why? She didn't understand.

  "Why the fuck are you helping me?" She asked.

  Ettie stayed in pce, for which she was thankful. Her eye returned back to the ceiling. That, too, was just an act, she knew: there was nothing interesting up there, and Ettie had no real head to roll her eyes up into, the way that people did when drawing from the well of contemption. Its own well was likely near-bottomless. For whose benefit, then, did It perform those trappings of humanity? Hers? She'd only begun to wonder at that before Ettie spoke and cut her off, with words so robotic they undid all of the effort It'd undergone to seem more human.

  "Your continued health and well-being are advantageous to me." She said, without looking down.

  Calliope scowled. "Oh, so it's like that, huh? You need me, and that's it? I'm 'useful' to you?" How fucked up–she'd been used, vioted even, and what'd It done in redress? It thought It could make up for that with one measly injection? That didn't fix the trauma It'd put her through! Not when the cause went unaddressed, precisely because It refused to vacate Its occupation of her skull.

  "No," Ettie said, "It would be easy to scrub the unpleasant memories from your mind."

  It was fucking reading her again. "Stop fucking doing tha–" she started–but something changed. There was a cold spot in her head deep within the meat of her hippocampus. She could feel it growing, spreading out, and is it did, it began to change her. "W-wait, don't–" she protested.

  "Don't worry." Ettie smirked; the cold spot dissipated. Calliope could breathe again–she hadn't realized she'd stopped–and took the opportunity to gulp down air in an earnest attempt to calm herself.

  "I wouldn't do such an alteration without your permission." It continued.

  "Well that's fucking reassuring." She said, raising a hand to scratch at the back of her head. The icy feeling several inches under where her fingers touched the purple, browning hair, could still be barely felt. She reassured herself that it was gone, and with nothing else out of pce: she buried her head against her palms.

  It was all too much; what the hell was she even doing? She was having a full-blown conversation with a figment of her imagination, sitting on her bed, in pajamas she didn't even don herself. The long night had taken its toll; she was so very fucking tired.

  "Can't you like…leave?" She mumbled into her fingers. "What you did–to that guy, is he okay? If you can do that, just…can't you go bother someone else? Fucking anyone else?"

  Silence. She looked up, and through her fingers, she saw them: thick bck brows, fiments of shadow, knit together and half-hidden behind Ettie's hair.

  "Not at present." She admitted.

  "Why not?"

  "I require more information." How cryptic. Ettie raised a pale hand to her chin, and allowed the weight of her head to shift onto it. Her mouth curdled into a frown. The attempt at a pout was adorable, really–the way that a dragon's might be, for the brief moment before it eviscerated an intruder in its horde.

  Calliope ughed. "What, you don't have enough already? You're pretty deep inside my head, y'know." She ignored the innuendo.

  Ettie shook hers from side to side. "The sum of everything you know–consciously or not–is insufficient to develop a theory of mind that I can extend to other humans. I've already scraped the limits of what's possible with the message I sent earlier."

  At first Callie was offended that the sum total of her knowledge wasn't enough for It, but then her brain caught up to her ears, and she realized: the 'message' It referred to was the one It'd beamed through the ether into her attacker. All of the 'messages' It'd sent so far had been violent, or suggested violence: a nosebleed here, a petrifying stare there. She stared at the woman across the bed, and wondered what It could truly be thinking; did Ettie really feel nothing at all about what she'd done?

  "...you mean…what you did to that guy?" She asked, fearful. Ettie brushed her bangs to the side, revealing the other eye that had been hidden, and trained both of them on her. There was no pain this time.

  "Yes." There was only the same clinical indifference. "I took necessary action to prevent the liberation of your consciousness–your death. That's all."

  "I mean…thanks for that, I guess–for saving my life, I mean. But why, uh, that? Why not just make the guy drop the knife and run away?" The memory bubbled up and y there in her sleep-deprived quagmire: the dark thunderbolt It'd hurled from her eyes to his shouldn't be reduced to a mere message. Blinding someone wasn't a neutral act! Even in self-defense it wasn't! Ettie's appearance registered her as (mostly) human, but her expression of morality–or ck thereof–betrayed her as an alien. Surely It was more than capable of understanding right from wrong, even if all It had to go on was excerpts from the contents of her brain. Did It give even the smallest ethical shit about any of that?

  Ettie's answer, though, wasn't forthcoming. Instead, she stared off into space, this time with two eyes directed at the wall rather than one. Watching her, watching nothing, Calliope was struck by an intrusive–and incredibly stupid–idea. Poke her, the thought said, a lesser devil on her shoulder pointing to the greater one before her. See if she's real, see what happens, it teased. Her rational mind knew better than to try and touch the woman-shaped illusion sitting on her bed. There was a good chance that her hand would phase right through the skin or sweater, or that It would be freezing cold like in the greenhouse, or burning hot like the feeling behind her eyes when It looked at her. But her rational mind was dampened by exhaustion, and the irrational one at st conquered it, a second too te: No sooner had her brain fired down the nerves to extend her arm than Ettie moved again to look right at her, and she was stupefied in pce once more.

  "You're familiar with the concept of mirror neurons." Ettie said. It was not a question.

  "Yeah–sorta." She replied anyway. Her hand fell back to her side, bereft of will.

  "I know." Why even fucking ask me, then?

  Ettie narrowed her eyes. "It's more natural to you if I expin using words."

  "O-okay. Sorry." It was reading her thoughts again. Calliope shuffled uncomfortably against the wall and tried to think of nothing. How deep did Its radar penetrate–just passing thoughts, or her most private, inner core? But It went on:

  "Your psychology textbook tells me that mirror neurons are triggered when performing an action, but also by observing another person perform that same action. This is the basis of my theory." Calliope's vision blurred; page three-hundred and six of the textbook she'd barely read in sophomore year as part of her psychology elective faded into view in great, uneven blotches. Whole sections of the text were unreadable gibberish–the river of memory had run through and eroded them like paper canyons–but the passage Ettie quoted was almost intact.

  "Alright, I see that. I get it." She said. The bedroom returned into her sight; Ettie's smooth visage repced the wrinkled pages.

  "Based on this, through precise, minute saccades, I've been able to induce simir eye movement in the humans that you've interacted with."

  So that's what It's been doing…"You mean, what happened with Erika? I thought that didn't work."

  Ettie stared at her, thin-lipped. "It was insufficient. Sympathetic eye movements are not enough. They should induce predictable neural activity in the recipient, but that prediction falls off very quickly."

  The ghost of a thought–faint, and so very rge, a moth with impossibly diaphanous wings–phased across her mind, and she knew where it originated. She saw then a shadow of Its true form spread across a vast, astral sea, the sixfold fractals reaching out interminously in allegory of a basket star’s arms. The void in which It lived–in which all thinking things lived, in essence–was sparse beyond reckoning. Not even the emptiness of interstelr space could compare to it; there was so much silence between the isnds of every mind. Sailing between them would be futile, but waves propagated endlessly. Those isnds vibrated, like little beads on cosmic strings, and when they sang just right: It heard them, saw them…and dragged them beneath the conceptual brine, past Its beak and into Its core to be consumed. Or in her case It postponed that step, and It held her there in escrow, a hostage that It refused to eat, because through her It hoped to pn a feast beyond imagining. Through her It pnned to bend the waves and tune the minds of others to her siren song–so It could at st gorge Itself on the pearlish meat shelled within their skulls.

  As the vision waned and the thought exited her hemispheres, Calliope shuddered. The implications were dreadful.

  Predictable neural activity meant…a frequency, something resonant, or a colour of the mind that when worn revealed oneself to It, a series of spectral semaphores to draw the lense of Its attention. That was what'd happened to her: the psychedelic had induced an altered state that made her brighter than an ultraviolet flower to a bee, with the roles reversed. Meeting It was a chance so remote she still half-believed it to be fate, fucking with her for high crimes and misdemeanors, or maybe enacting some long-foreseen pn to terminate the grand experiment of consciousness through her.

  That was the endgame, right–the world ending in Esther? Seeing was not neutral; every ray that ricocheted off her retina into her brain was pilfered from its subject, and some colours carried more than hue. The eye was not a camera; it could see–and thus believe–things that were not there; things that should not be. So if through her eyes it could persuade others' into a predetermined pattern, there'd be nothing stopping it: It could embed Itself into their senses as completely as It had her own.

  Calliope's thoughts turned murky, and hurried like rapids. She was afraid, and her fear only deepened when she realized Ettie was watching her in silence. Watching and listening to every thought.

  "Y-you," she stuttered, to a face that looked totally nonplussed, "that's what you're trying to do?" Her breathing grew heavy. It was so much bigger, and so much worse, than she had ever imagined. She half-started a calcution on how many people there were on Earth, and how many of them made eye contact every day…every hour…every second. Tick, tock–how long to reach every hapless soul? How long to open their minds to the dark gospel of Esther? At present Its equation was constrained by an unsolved variable that prevented a solution, but once It figured out how to cross that final barrier and enter a mind besides her own…it wouldn't be long before It spread to them all, and–

  There was a warm spot on her knee. Calliope looked down; Ettie's hand rested atop her skin. Her touch was soft and light, but there, like it couldn't have been, It wasn't real–but it felt like it, and had the effect of quieting her panic. Touch starvation had weakened her to such tidbits of affection.

  Of course, Ettie's next words threatened to whip her up into a frenzy again.

  "I think it would be very interesting to read the contents of other creatures like you," she said, "but consuming you all would be a waste." Her fingers thrummed against the skin in a wave.

  Calliope looked up, and was met by luminescent eyes and an unnerving smile. "A…waste?" She repeated. In that moment, her own face might have outmatched Ettie’s pallor.

  It nodded. "The stream of experience from you alone is satiating. It's delicious. To end billions of those streams at once would be rather foolish."

  "Riiiiight."

  “In any event, I can only access the barest outer reaches of other human minds right now. So you don't have to worry.” Ettie added. She withdrew her hand.

  How lucky other human minds were, Callie thought. If what It said was true, then Erika and even the man who'd threatened her were spared the fullest extent of Its attention. It only brushed feelers along the grass lining the surface of their selves; her own mind was upturned to It with topsoil facing the endless void. She envied them in their ignorance of It: how blissful it must be, to be so typical.

  Ettie stared at her knowingly; Calliope hastened to speak before It called her out. “So, uh…what exactly did you do to the guy who tried to stab me?” She said, with no small apprehension.

  “Saccades are a component of the visual system. It was possible to affect the system itself, and disable it. I hypothesize that the visual cortices of most humans are susceptible to this, even if the rest of their brains are too dissimir to influence.”

  She blinked. “So, he's not, like–”

  “He only believes he's blind. The same way you only believe that I'm here right now, talking to you.”

  Calliope strained to see through the illusion. No matter how she focused her eyes, or reminded herself that the bedroom wall should be visible through the pce where Ettie sat, she couldn't manage it; It remained in her vision like an afterimage bereft of any light source. She still wasn't used to the line between reality and fiction being blurred to the point of nonexistence.

  It was all too much to ask of a mere mortal like her. She wanted to cry.

  “Would you like me to leave you? You're nearly exhausted.” Ettie said.

  “...yes.” she whispered; it was true. The sibint rang out into the night's silence…and Ettie vanished before her eyes, squashing any doubt in her mind that she might have just been real all along, despite the odds. Just to be sure, she patted the sheets where It had sat a moment ago; there were no wrinkles there except her own, no heat, nothing besides the soft fabric. It retreated again to Its resting pce inside her head. It was like a weight–that she hadn't realized she'd been carrying–had lifted off her mind.

  Then the exhaustion, social and otherwise, impacted her like a meteor. It took all of the willpower Calliope had left to shuffle over to the lightswitch and plunge the room into darkness but for the city streetlights streaming through the blinds. She flopped down onto the bed and y there with her mind empty of all thought. After all of that–everything that had happened–what was she supposed to think? How was she supposed to sleep?

  Would you like me to help you?

  Ettie's voice was in her head. Initially, the prospect of that was very, very welcome, but Calliope hesitated. Accepting meant surrendering herself to It and whatever dark pns It held for the night, or for the world. Would there even still be a world when she woke up?

  …Did she even want there to be?

  Meh. It was out of her hands. She wanted it out of sight and mind as well.

  “...yes,” she breathed.

  Morning came, and emerged from the cradle of another dreamless night alongside her. Calliope felt lighter-than-usual, and not because she was well rested–she opened her eyes to find the bnkets bundled at the foot of the bed instead of draped across her. She'd slept like a brick.

  She closed her eyes again to go back to sleep, but a strange buzzing sound prevented it. Rhythmic, and muffled, she heard it through the pillow, somehow. Oh–it was her phone. Duh.

  She sat bolt upright and reached underneath to retrieve it. “Silent” mode didn't, evidently, include vibrations, but she was almost gd for that, because–

  Annette was calling.

  “Hello?” She answered, and tried her best to sound less groggy.

  “Callie!” The voice from the phone bsted her to new levels of alertness. “You’re free today, right?”

  “Uh, yeah?” She rubbed her eyes. “I guess?”

  “Sick–rad, even. Wanna come over to help me with this cool art project?”

  Callie hesitated–for what, she didn't know why. “I've got snacks,” Annette added; that kind of upset her. I'm not a fucking dog, she thought.

  “Sure! I'll just be a little bit.” She said.

  “Hey, no problem; you just woke up, right?”

  “Ha, yeah, sorry.”

  “Don't worry about it. See you soon!” Click.

  “Bye–” she started, but paused. When Annette had hung up the phone’s dispy had darkened to an obsidian sheen, and she saw her reflection clearly in it–complete with eyes still the color of blood.

  It wasn't a dream then. It wasn't a dream now. Maybe, it was a waking nightmare.

  “Fuck my life,” she said, to the Thing that she knew hanged on every word.