Thanksgiving came and went, and then, of course, it was December's mark–and even as the arrow of time continued on its unerring flight, the seasons covered and unbnketed the city with white snow indecisively, as the year prepared to turn over in its bed. In Calliope’s eyes, however, whiteness returned more permanently: her injury had at st healed. A fortunate occurrence… but time was still irregur–even if monotonic–in that she kept getting caught up in thick ambrous spots of it, such that there was no telling how much would pass between sundown and sunup; it could have been equally an instant or a million years.

  Calliope hadn't chanced to dream since October. She hardly missed them; waking life had repced the dream, or rather the nightmare, or rather the other way around, though it was tamer as of te. Part of that was probably because something improbable was happening: her and Esther were becoming friends.

  She looked forward to greeting It each morning, in the bathroom mirror or the seat at the kitchen table. It afforded her a small granule of privacy in cancelling appearances before she'd gotten dressed, so that she was almost able to forget the slight cranial tingling that ushered her daily return to the waking world. She finally was able to dispense with the whole sungsses-at-night vibe, too. Now, with only the irrelevant barrier of her normal lenses between Ettie and her eyes and the world, the st hadn't yet been ended. By all accounts, It was behaving well.

  It was behaving, well, like a friend would. Ettie was always there for her: at afternoon breakfast when Erika was out, at work to make the hours blur past, at night when she tossed and turned and eventually surrendered to let It help her sleep. Sure, she woke up with callouses on her fingers, bruises on her body in strange pces, and distant recollections of locales still stranger…but Ettie promised her that whatever It was getting up to in the night didn't involve violence or murder–so that was something. Calliope decided to begrudge her those nighttime excursions in exchange for the assistance It provided, and also for a reason she was loath to admit and buried deep: the thought of It possessing her in the night was kind of exciting. That she couldn't do anything to stop it was kind of… freeing.

  It was exciting, too… too exciting, actually. It was distracting having a friend possessed of such ethereal beauty and who never even acknowledged it. And it wasn't like how she thought about her other friends: Erika was short, adorable, and feisty; Annette's sense of cosmetics and fashion and art was unimpeachable; but Ettie? Ettie was exactly her type: giving mysterious gothic vibes, shaped like a goddess, and sharper than a ser-cutter. So dangerous it was hot, or so hot it was dangerous–or both. It was hard for her to just ignore all of that, even when reminding herself–repeatedly, like she was a broken record in which the diamond bit of Esther had engrooved–that all of It was a facade.

  She really, really tried. But on some cold Wednesday she found herself standing at the entrance to the New Engnd Aquarium, fighting hard not to lose too much moisture to mist exhaled into the winter air. Her coat was warm enough, at least, and offered some security when coupled with the evergreen scarf she'd wrapped around her neck like the world's fuzziest noose. Cozy… so no, she was shivering from nerves, not the cold, or at worst a mixture of the two.

  How could she not be nervous? It was hard not to see the day's excursion for what it was: a date–no, an outing between friends, writ rge.

  Something tugged on her sleeve; to her right was Ettie, in another jet-bck parka that looked falsely expensive and a beanie with a pom-pom on her head that reminded Callie of a third asterisk eye, sealed within charcoal fabric. She gestured without a word to the ticket counter. It caught her musing again. It usually did. It never commented with more than a smile.

  She approached it. "Hi, tickets for… er, just one, please," she said, remembering at the st moment. In exchange for a swipe of her debit card she received it. With the lesser rectangle in tow, they were free to move about the greater one.

  The entrance lobby was quieter and less crowded than she'd expected–probably there were some perks to visiting the aquarium during a work day. The fish, at least, didn't seem to care; she doubted even the smartest among them knew the meaning of a Wednesday, when the water all around them drowned the whirring of the workweek like any other sound. The pair of them wandered throughout, deeper into the building, while tanks of various aquatic whatsits fnked the walls on either side.

  "You should've asked for a senior discount." Ettie mused.

  "What? Oh, because you're old?" She returned. It grinned in reply; the gleaming whiteness of Its teeth drew her eyes first to themselves, then upwards…she caught herself and looked away before she got stuck doing that again. She hadn't agreed to visit the aquarium just for her only activity to consist of staring deep into Ettie's eyes. They were fathomless, beyond any enclosure of water, even that formed by the continents; surveying their sparkling depths was never a brief venture.

  "Yeah."

  "Well I don't think it applies if you're literally older than dirt." Calliope pretended to inspect a tank centered on a coral-pink anemone. Its tendrils waved zily in the water; a clownfish swam between them.

  "No? Pity… I'll make the money up to you, regardless."

  "You know you don't have to do that."

  The tank rattled, suddenly; Ettie had jabbed it with a finger. It startled her. "Hey!–"

  "You don't hate having me be in your debt, then?"

  In the gss she saw two visions: the anemone, of pale pink, and Ettie's false reflection overpping it, still pinker or still stranger. She disliked the shot of empathy she felt for the little clownfish darting all about the tank. Like it, she was always overwhelmed–but she had no refuge to retreat to. The only tentacles awaiting her were ink-dark and inhospitable.

  "No, I mean, I…A few bucks isn't gonna make up for all the shit you've put me through."

  Silence. The reflection stared at her; she didn't dare look to her left to find Its source. Never once did It express anger towards her–only slyness–but still: she worried if one day she'd find by chance a conjunction of words that would offend It.

  "You're always dwelling on something… don't you want to have a fun time?"

  Calliope broke away to examine her ces. The smooth concrete floor was broken up in pces by half-worn footprint stickers in primary colors, directing patrons on a circuit around all the exhibits. Huh. Her life was always on rails, now. But perhaps Ettie had a point; she would try and enjoy herself.

  "Sure, whatever. It's just a bunch of fish, anyway." She turned on her heel. Ettie followed behind.

  They allowed the building to digest them. In the bowels of the aquarium, the house lights were all dimmed in favor of the real stars of the show: the gss tanks along walls lit from within, dispying all manner of sea creatures–and yes, fittingly, some sea stars. The rgest of them was in the form of a rge, central column, wider than a house and going up for at least four. Sharks with zy faces and fish in the manner of dinner-ptes all swam by, spiraling either up or down. How did they all live in harmony, she wondered, from her pce beside the column's base.

  "Haven't you been reading the text? They're kept well fed; there's no need for them to eat each other." Ettie said, from her left.

  She hadn't been, really–though she couldn't help but notice the way the letters on the pques on walls lingered in her vision when it crossed over them. The dark woman next to her was all smiles and wider-than-abnormal eyes; Callie could tell she was in her element. Always and ever It was seeking new information about the world to consume or catalog.

  Away from the nuclear pilr there was a special exhibit room. "Reservoir Life" was its title, and the whole setup–though temporary–looked extensive. Little damming dioramas and lightly interactive fixtures dithered about the center, while expnatory pques were affixed to the walls. Calliope found herself reading one:

  The Drowned Town:

  In the early 1900s it became clear that to meet the increasing municipal water needs of industrial Boston, a reservoir would have to be constructed. The former Miskatonic River valley was chosen as the site, but this presented a problem for pnners of the project: the small town of Prescott y within the valley's bounds.

  An evacuation of its citizens was ordered and completed rapidly, and several defunct mining ventition shafts were sealed, but the majority of buildings remained standing when the valley was flooded, on schedule, and became the Quabbin Reservoir.

  In the 2000s, researchers from the Miskatonic Institute of Science and Culture (which itself relocated from its site near the reservoir to its current location in Cambridge) and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute rediscovered these buildings, which have become diverse habitats for the reservoir's aquatic life.

  Below the blerb was a small gss tank filled with water and a dial on the side to adjust its level. Little pstic model buildings rested on the floor; she turned it, and watched the water cover them with miniature waves.

  A turnkey clicked within her brain. Her vision swam, the same as the water before her: something terrible had happened there. Something she knew, but didn't wish to, but already her mind was scrolling through the Necronomicon’s index in search of it. Images from vividest description fshed across her mind: families struck dead in their beds with aghast expressions for their death-masks; the seismograph readout of an unearthly roar; the pouring in of water to silence any horror that had happened there. The dreadful truth was there, right there, in the text; any second now, and the answer would breach through the surface–

  Something gripped her roughly by the neck and drew her out. Her mind was on dry nd again; It spun her round, and she looked down in a daze into Ettie's determined face.

  "Hey, come and look at this, then!"

  Calliope blinked a few times and then realized: it was Esther that'd grabbed her. Hands that burned with static were on both her forearms; she stumbled back out of their touch.

  "O-okay."

  Over in the corner was something…unique. A tall, domed tank of gss stood alone, rising up to above her head. Within it was possibly the ugliest thing she'd ever seen. Or so she assumed–the picture of it was all she had to go off of.

  Astrocdus basiliskos, the only freshwater basket star species, lived within. The image of it on the informational pque was quite grotesque: the core of it was like a hexagram, but arms expanded outwards at each corner, and more arms branched off of those, and on and on, creating something that resembled a nest of unwashed, peppery hair. But worse than that was the color, the contrast of it, the way the white dots speckled along nearly every inch of it resembled eyes. It was dazzling and horrifying–the thing was nasty.

  She was grateful that the image was all that she could see. The creature was nowhere to be found; it was (apparently) nocturnal. But still…it reminded her of something, or Someone, worse than whatever was buried at the bottom of the reservoir. Her eyes started to water.

  "I like this one," Ettie said, gesturing.

  "Of course you would. It's fucking gross."

  "It's hiding right now. See?" She pointed one thin finger to a crevice in the rock pilr that stood tall within the tank. Callie could just barely spot a bck-and-white mass nestled within. Eugh.

  "Cool. Wish you would, too." She jabbed back–but it was half in-jest, she couldn't be mad at Ettie when It had just got through with helping her. The basket star was a st-minute signal switch to keep her train of thought from derailing into a watery ravine by accident. It was only a coincidence that the thing inside the crevice resembled the nightmarish sliver of Its form she'd seen. Right?

  "We'll come back tonight, when it comes out to feed." Ettie said pinly; she'd already started to walk away.

  "Hey, wait up!" Calliope followed. She hoped It wasn't serious about returning: the aquarium sign said it closed at 5pm–not a time she considered to be night, even if winter stole the sun away almost an hour earlier than that.

  They made their way around the peripheral walls along the slow spiral ramp upwards, always with that central tank rising on their right. She found it amusing when a certain fish opened its mouth at passersby in a near-perfect 'O'; less amusing, however, when Ettie ughed and replicated the expression, contorting her face in a way no person could. She yelped in fear, but no one seemed to hear it. Its teasing of her was kept private…and it happened again, ter, while she stood staring at a floor-to-ceiling tank full of scattered pink fluorescent jellyfish: an electric prick in her arm, a vocalized "zap" in that acidic timbre, and a cry of pain from her lips that went unheard. She couldn't discern any meaning to the secret mischief that it manufactured.

  But secrecy ceased once they reached one particur exhibit. The design was kind of space-age-futuristic: two more domed tanks straddled the center of an alcove in the wall, joined by a gss tube a half-head-foot wide at eye-level. It was the home to an octopus, striped brown and white like a lionfish at the moment, but according to the pque it wouldn't remain so for long, and could change its color; the mimic octopus could even pretend to be other sea creatures! At the base of its mantle it had a pair of eyes raised on short stalks–it seemed almost like they were looking out at the small crowd. What did they all look like, she wondered, through the refractive index of the thick gss? Their beady bck was magnified by it, rger than life, staring back at her. Wait–why did looking at it hurt? Why–her sinuses stung as if she'd inhaled the seawater the thing was floating in.

  Then the color changed. The lionfish disguise was thrown away, and the octopus put on brighter raiment that looked a bit like vender. One arm was pced against the gss on the side nearest her. Its suckers stuck to it and spread apart.

  I can see you.

  "Yeah, no shit," she looked to her left, "you're right–oh." Ettie was gone from where she'd been beside her. She turned back: on the other side of the tank, filtered by yers of air and gss and water, there was a silhouette so dark it could only be hers. The octopus was in the way.

  Then It fucking waved a tentacle at her.

  "Oh. Shit, you meant. Okay, damn." Next to her, a child was pointing at the tank. "Do I look okay?" She asked, suddenly anxious.

  A fsh, and she saw herself through the cephalopod's eyes, all cd in colours she cked descriptions for, leering downwards with her quizzical expression distorted in the crystal. She barely resembled a person in those eyes–more so a lesser deity observing from on high.

  "How?" She asked, when the vision faded and the greater God before her spoke.

  Cephalopod forebrains are very suggestible, it seems.

  There was some humor in the reality that the first being besides her It possessed wasn't another human, but an animal with an alien mind, diverged by millions of years of evolution. Was she seriously so weird as to be closer to an octopus than her fellow homo sapiens? Or was it just dumb luck again?

  Pce your hand on the gss, Callie.

  "Why?" She no longer tried to keep her voice low. "What're you gonna do?"

  Just do it. Please.

  The st word was foreign, like hearing a cognate in another nguage and conjuring some assumed half-meaning. It had asked her, rather than just forcing it. Of course it could have been reverse psychology, but overall… the politeness inclined her to accept.

  She pced her palm against the gss, right where the octopus' arm was on the other side. It was cool and smooth and dead against her skin. The expected shattering did not occur.

  She knew what Ettie was seeing, even if she couldn't really process it. But what could she be thinking? Callie couldn't begin to comprehend it… but if there'd been a first transfer, logic said there could be others. Ettie would surely realize that; the aquarium could very well become the focal point for the apocalypse, then. Would the curtains for the world be pulled down indirectly by a tentacle as it invaded every hapless soul present one by one?

  So dramatic. Go and freshen up. I'll be here. Swimming.

  To prove Its point, the little bundle of limbs detached from the wall and jetted off to some cranny near the bottom. The shadow on the far side of the tank vanished, leaving her alone among the crowd. Beside her, the young boy was trying to convince his mother that the octopus had just waved–he'd seen it, he insisted. She wished him luck with that.

  The aquarium bathroom was bright, spotless, and–critically–empty. It would have been a mark on the pce's reputation if it were otherwise, she thought: a location so immersed in the element of water should maintain cleanliness wherever water was found, right? After she finished in the stall, Calliope washed her hands at the counter while avoiding her reflection's eyes as usual. She knew It would be watching her through them, even as it puppeted the octopus somewhere outside.

  She pressed on the push-door and saw her cataclysmic fears half-realized. Outside the bathroom the aquarium was dark and devoid of all bipedal life. In some of the tanks light still lingered, but only as nocturnal reds or blues or greens, never enough to see by. The whole scene was eerie and abyssal, like the primeval waters that preceded all creation–or might succeed it, shortly.

  It got worse: something cmmy grabbed her ankle where the cuff of her jeans had ridden up. She screamed, jumped away, and smmed her back against the bathroom door.

  "Ow!"

  Rex. It's only me.

  "E-Ettie?!" She breathed. There was nothing in front of her that she could see, no rosy eyes to taunt her or a figure she could envy. But below, when her eyes chanced downwards: the octopus from before coiled a tentacle around her leg. It was looking up at her; another arm held some kind of pstic cup.

  "Ettie…" she pinched the bridge of her nose, "why are you the octopus? Why is it dark? What the fuck is that? I–" The questions spilled forth, until she was out of breath–her heart was still beying up the chasm of fear It'd hurled her into.

  Vanil frozen yogurt?

  It held the cup up higher. She could see now what was in it: exactly that curious substance, with a pstic spoon stuck in it like a proverbial sword in stone.

  "You're so fucking weird. Sure… I guess." She took the cup, careful not to touch any part of the tentacle that held it. She succeeded, but it was futile, anyway: it raised up another and coiled around her left wrist. It felt cold and slimy, go figure: a perversion of holding hands.

  "Hey! What're you–"

  I'm ensuring that you don't trip and fall in the dark. Come.

  It led her through said darkness. In life, or light, the aquarium had been a maze; now with the footprint markers too dim to see on the dark floor, it was a watery byrinth she had no hope of navigating otherwise. All she could do was allow the grasping suckers to pull her onwards as if by a leash, while the silence was punctuated by the whir of filtering equipment and the wet wicking of the cephalopod's other arms rolling over the linoleum. It could've been taking her deep into the underworld for all she knew…until they rounded a corner with a small bench and floor-to-ceiling gss opposite it that dispyed an altogether alien exhibit: the Boston skyline, a starless void above polluted by the lights of the buildings below.

  Somehow she understood that It meant for her to sit. She obeyed; the froyo she'd awkwardly ferried in her other hand had just begun its melting. Assuming the time was correct (if the nocturnal scene outside from her was an accurate measure) she hadn't eaten anything in several hours. The cold vanil was therefore pleasant and sweet against her tongue.

  "Mm," she hummed. At her right side–still on the floor–the octopus turned a creamy white to match the yogurt. The absurdity of the situation wasn't lost on her; if she wasn't worried about being caught, she would've ughed. But then, there were cameras, weren't there, little bubbles in the ceiling to survey the ones rising through the tanks? One was visible from where she sat; surely it was watching; surely somebody was watching it. A doomsday clock was ticking the same as if she'd held her breath under the waves: she'd drown, eventually, or be caught, but by something with two arms and two legs.

  Wait. Calliope pulled the spoon out of her mouth.

  "How're you even still alive right now? It's gotta breathe, right?" She asked the shambling thing. It blinked at her slowly in reply.

  As long as it doesn't dry out, it should be fine.

  No wonder it was so damp; her hand still felt the phantom cold. "What's even your pn, then? Someone's gonna find us, and think I'm stealing you or something… and no, you can't fucking ser them or whatever it is you do. I'll shut my eyes, I swear to–"

  Where do you think we're going? I'll take care of it.

  "Ohmygod, just go back to the fucking tank, and we can leave!" In anger, she punted the emptied yogurt cup towards the gss…but her hand wouldn't let it go.

  No.

  Under Its will her right hand lowered passed the cup off to one of Its arms. As the paper left her fingertips static rolled down them up her skin–and she had control again. She jerked it up and away.

  "Fucking–stop it! Ugh."

  With arming dexterity, the thing did something she could only describe as all but fingering the cup; it ran suckers along its walls until they were spotless.

  It tastes different. Interesting.

  "Uh, ew?" Calliope rolled her eyes, even if she couldn't help but be intrigued. Octopi weren't mammals; could they even digest dairy safely?

  I'm not eating it–just tasting.

  Get out of my head, she nearly said. In lieu of that, she stood up and dusted off her jeans. A nagging feeling told her they’d lingered in one pce too long–or was that just Ettie spurring her to move? Ugh…even her gut couldn't be trusted anymore, not when It controlled so much of what she ate; the froyo was a cold bezoar at the bottom of her stomach.

  It offered her an arm again, and they continued through the inky bckness hand-in-hand. Soon the dimly backlit tanks and colorful signage passed out of sight and were repced by smooth gray walls lined with a lonely stripe of paint mimicking a railing–they'd entered the section of the building meant only for staff. Esther's goal became clear: they stopped in front of a door marked with SECURITY on a pque and a keypad to the right of the door handle. The red indicator light told her it was locked.

  "Ettie!" She hissed, "We really shouldn't be here!"

  "Give me a moment." Its voice was real, external, once more.

  Her head turned left. Like in a horror movie the apparition flickered its way down the hallway, too fast for fear to manifest. It looked at her and smiled before examining the door. All the while, the octopus held onto her hand. It all seemed terribly theatrical.

  Then, curtains. A moment; she bcked out. Her eyes opened in time with an electronic click and the changing of red to green… and the humanoid Esther vanished to the void from whence she came.

  The octopus did not–it pulled her forwards. Calliope knew she had no choice but to reach for the door handle and pull it open; if she did not, It would do it for her. The st hope her brain upheld was that whatever was inside would be absent of life like everywhere else they'd been that night.

  Oops. Dash that. They were not alone: lit only by the light of an array of grayscale screens a figure slumped low into a desk chair. That it failed to move at the door's opening, or even at its closing, coupled with the slow rhythm of its breathing, told her that it must be asleep. Calliope crept forward to get a better look and only briefly noticed when the octopus detached Itself from her hand.

  The security guard was a stocky man in a gray-blue colred shirt, with a buzz-cut that was either brown or bck–she couldn't be sure in the eerie blueish light. He slumbered before a scene that reminded her of the Architect's room in the second Matrix movie, sorta: every one of the nine monitors showed a feed from a different camera throughout the aquarium. Every thirty seconds or so the view on one of them would change, showing that there were more than nine, ultimately. That they were all in the bck and white of infrared reminded her again of horror films; she feared seeing some awful monster lurking in the dark just out of focus. But then, the monster was in the same room as her, in the same mind as her, wasn't it? Where had it–

  She tore her eyes away from the sleeping guard and saw It atop the console, tentacles slithering over the caps of a keyboard. The octopus' pattern resembled moving polka dots, white-on-bck, in what she assumed was a projection of deep thought.

  "Ettie!" She hissed, "what're you doing?" She prayed that It would keep her silence and their fortune: waking up the night guard was the st thing she needed.

  I'm taking care of it.

  "...okay, but what're you–oh"

  One by one the screens above her all went dark, and the three of them were plunged into darkness. The only lights afterwards were the insubstantial ones of LEDs on the computer mouse and keyboard. Not enough to see by…but enough to light part of the desk-creature's mantle, making It look far rger than It was.

  "So, you erased the camera footage?"

  See? You're sharp… enough, anyway.

  Somehow in her head Its tone was pyful, praising, even. At least if she blushed in the dark no one would see it.

  "Thanks…" she mumbled. "How'd you know how to do that?"

  A soft, wet schlump, as the thing dropped to the floor.

  The password is his daughter's name.

  How It knew, she didn't want to. Callie tried to scream when the slimy appendage slid into her hand again… but unholy intervention stilled her vocal cords; It had a handle on her in more ways than one. She was gd when they left the pitch-darkness of the security room for the slightly brighter gray of the hallway beyond: she no longer had to worry about waking up the man.

  Oh, what was she worrying about, anyway? The little red lights within the bubble cameras had gone out, thanks to Esther–so no one could see them or even know they'd been there in the first pce. That she was alone in an aquarium at night with a mimic octopus possessed by something older than fucking time: that was just her new normal! It was like she'd been shunted off into a new reality, or fantasy, and still her mind clung to mundanity like a lifeline that'd severed, preventing her from enjoying herself. It'd fetched her vanil frozen yogurt for crying out loud. Callie… you're impossible, she thought.

  "What was that?" She thought she'd caught a ugh. Her head turned down, her eyes met that of the octopus, those twin dark voids… but It said nothing. They proceeded.

  Under Its direction they ended up near where they began, in the reservoir exhibit. This time the little diorama occupied no space in her psyche, being too dark to see. But in the corner, true to Ettie's earlier word, the awful majesty of It was visible in miniature: the basket star was awake… and feeding.

  It floated in the center of the tank, a star affixed to the heavens. Like a star, too, its arms reached out, winding sor prominences whose patterns rippled outwards the same as lightwaves or neutrino osciltions. Every one of them branched once, twice, then further, until the smallest were beyond her awareness, but not its: some tiny morsel must have brushed against that fractal grip, since one arm was coiling back inwards to bring it to its mouth. The thing reminded her of a living spider's web, only immersed in a wet vacuum where it could freely move; at least most spiders couldn't fly. But it could, through the water… and It could, through her mind, or the space between her mind and the next.

  Don't you think it's beautiful?

  "Er…"

  It has a kind of elegance to it.

  "What's elegant about eating everything–ah!" A spark–a shock–across her brow. "Sorry."

  Is that all you think of me?

  Truthfully, it wasn't. Her feelings about Ettie weren't as simple as that, even if she did think Its appetite creeped over the border of excessive. But how to say it–how to think it–before it pried into her mind?

  "No," she said quickly. "You've got a sense of humor, too." A twisted one, though; she smiled down at it.

  "Hey! What the hell are you doing?" Croaked a new voice from the dark.

  If Calliope were able, she would've leapt out of her skin. Fear froze her in pce, though…but then, why were her muscles moving; her arms cradling the octopus like a baby in its caul; her legs sprinting her through twists and turns on a course only It knew?

  A click, a distant chirp. "Hey, got an intruder here, you read me?" Nothing… then the frantic pattering of boots on flooring as she was pursued. Walls, floors, tanks of various things flew by in a blur of disrupted evolution, from the Cambrian to the Anthropocene, until It threw her against the shoulder of the gss doors that were the entrance and she burst into a nighttime atmosphere, modern and gcial.

  It wasn't snowing, but there was snow, and the silence of the ndscape so covered was deeper than the grave. Esther's hold over her released and she bent over hands-on-knees to catch her breath; the octopus nded on the pavement with a spt. Callie heard the rushing of blood within her veins, felt the sharp pain of inhaling air far too cold to satisfy…saw the bulbous cephalopod's eyes watching her.

  "The fuck–haa… was that?" She gasped.

  Behind her, the door opened with a creak.

  "Freeze! Pce your hands on your head and turn around, slowly!" Shouted the gruff, male voice. She started to obey, raising her hands. She turned her legs, and some sort of dial: heat grew within her eyes… a ser warming up.

  "Ettie! Wait, no!"

  The barrel of a gun; a gunshot, but not his, or hers, either. Calliope shut her eyes as quickly as she could, and hoped that it was quick enough: the final afterimage contained the guard from earlier in a wide stance, pointing a pistol at her–and his eyes, she thought, were brown. Shit.

  Doubly shit–because she'd lost her footing on the icy concrete. She fell back and her skull impacted it with a dull crack barely cushioned by her hands. Good thing she'd raised them.

  Outside was still the eerie quiet of a world frozen in time. Inside her head was quiet too…and that was perhaps the most unnerving thing. Yes, her skull hurt something terrible, and her hands felt little better, but she didn't seem to be bleeding, at least.

  There was a literal weight atop her chest. Calliope sat up, and saw: the mimic octopus was on top of her, one tentacle at each of her wrists and another snaked up to her neck. And it wasn't moving–not even the eyes on stalks that stared straight into her soul without seeing.

  It was dead.

  Ahead of her, another human body y, but it hadn't woken or sat up yet. The guard was incapacitated. There were no sirens or arms.

  She was alone. Calliope searched her mind for Esther's presence, at first in the manner of a daily routine but then frantically, desperately, tearing into wrinkled corners of thought that risked upsetting the memories that It had covered up… but she found nothing. It was gone.

  "Ettie?" She stood up, prying the octopus' corpse off of her and trying not to vomit. There was no answer.

  "It's not funny! Quit fucking around!" She yelled. The snow absorbed the sound, and gave no answer still.

  It was actually gone, not a trick or an illusion. Before, Callie would've given anything for that; now all she felt was the beginnings of a deep mencholy, and a host of worries returned to besiege her. The chief among them? She was the only living soul next to an octopus that was definitely dead and a man that was indefinitely so. There was no longer an Esther to save her from the consequences–she should go.

  So she ran away towards home, away from the rime-covered gss and the corpse of the thing that–before she pushed it off–had been desperately embracing her.

  ﹡﹡﹡

  I wish this coffee would swallow me, instead, Peridot thought, clutching the thermos in both hands like it was radioactive–it did leak waste heat in a simir fashion, after all. Or, if the scalding liquid swirling within didn't find her appetizing, she hoped it would ingest instead whoever it was that'd first suggested the idea of a nine a.m meeting. To put it lightly: she was not a morning person. And today, her coffee was bcker than the depths of space in a trillion years, after the Milky Way had long since ceased to shine, when there would be no mornings again, ever.

  The elevator doors slid open. In augmented reality, a small green arrow conjured in the center of her vision to direct her onwards. She dismissed it with a gesture. She already knew where she was going.

  The wide tip of her low heels made a rhythmic cck against the linoleum, falsely marbled in mimicry of far-fancier decor. Dot always found the meeting room level to resemble a hotel with its gaudy wallpaper and stuffy stillness–all it was missing was some ugly carpet from the 70s, and it would be Poroid-perfect. The cause of that feeling was probably that the wing hadn't been renovated in at least that long, since it cked the forethoughtout designs of modern office space: It was byrinthine, but no Minotaur y at its heart, unless you counted sprawling Agency bureaucracy as a comparable monster, like she sometimes did.

  A monster–or no, just a little imp–of a different sort leapt out at her when she rounded the corner. She paused just in time; power-walking at a breakneck pace around it was Argus Sharrow: shaggy-haired with just the beginnings of taupe curls, small, thin, cradling a ptop under his arm, and with a violet dress shirt under his bzer that betrayed his eccentricity. His quirkiness bordered on unprofessionality in the Agency's wider ecosystem, but it befitted the department he headed rather nicely. Sharrow was an Anomalous Operation in his own right–one that'd nearly collided with her.

  "Oh! Dot! Sorry, didn't see you there!" He chirped, without even stopping.

  "Morning, Argus." She murmured, then paused for a beat. "Oh, wait!" She rushed to catch up to him. "Hey, aren't we in G3B? That's back this way."

  Sharrow's hair–nearing shoulder-length–fluttered as he came to a stop. "Oh? Oh." He turned back; bck and beady eyes sparked whimsy at her through the crystal of his spectacles.

  "Ah, you're right! Thank you!" He turned on his heel and passed her once again. Dot couldn't help but roll her eyes at his receding back. Stars above, Sharrow was so scatterbrained, his brain might've been just a loose collection of points in empty space. She followed them, so as to connect the dots.

  They entered the meeting room together. Sharrow plodded onwards towards the opposing long side of the dark wood-grain conference table. The space was unremarkable; what was surprising was that the lights in the room were off. She had to fumble for the switch beside the door to summon them.

  "What the–is it seriously just us today? In-person, I mean."

  Sharrow had already set his ptop down and was pecking at the keys like an indecisive woodpecker. "I guess so… everyone else is remoting in."

  "Ugh, I should've just done that." She could only roll her eyes further at the revetion that most of the other meeting participants appeared to prefer not to appear. She usually attended the monthly review sessions in person, since it just seemed more professional: sitting lonely in a room while a decade of members only existed on her screen as circur, monogrammed monoliths, made it difficult for her to fully focus. Something about the ck of physical mass in close proximity sucked all the gravity of the session from her mind; her notes would be subpar today.

  But there some perks too: she took a seat at the head of the conference table with Sharrow just to her left. Nobody who cked physical presence could tell where she was allowed to sit, nor could they call on her if she seemed not to pay attention; she could escape surveilnce for a moment. That was good; she was sure one topic would come up which she hoped to avoid or remain silent through; it'd be all the easier if she just stayed on mute. And stly, the final benefit was that she'd always known Sharrow to attend the meetings in person, too, and she had a sensitive favor to ask of him.

  Peridot sighed. The face reflected in her ptop's screen was tired; the circles below her eyes looked to have been revolving there since before the pnets had settled into their current orbits. Fuck was she not a morning person.

  A little "bloop" emerged from the computer's tinny sound card, signaling that the meeting was about to begin. Before she clicked into it, she gnced over at Argus, who paused–for a second anyway–before returning to whatever typing task clearly occupied the bulk of his mind. He seemed always to be working, even if not always on the task at hand.

  "Good morning, folks", Undersecretary Stern sounded off. Scattered replies from the other participants came in to say the same. Peridot watched the little icons trickle in: the other nine department heads followed by a representative from Purchases and Requisitions. She bit her lip in anxiety at that.

  "I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. Let's get right into it. First order of business: AO reported that the Geolocator is currently down, and requests additional resources to address the issue. I cannot stress enough the importance of this service; all in favor of allocating funds to restore its operation please say 'aye'."

  Five voices, including hers, responded in kind, and that was enough: the motion passed.

  For a moment she'd thought she was a goner. Surely Sharrow must've known who it was that st ran a query against the Geolocator and sent it on the fritz? She couldn't tell if he was just covering for her, since his social madaptation made it difficult to predict how he'd react. It was impossible to phrase the question in a subtle way such that he'd get what she was asking and respond with equal tact; she'd have to spell it out, and that would prove embarrassing. But...she would at least make an attempt, after the call, anyway.

  "Excuse me" said Vera Horak, whose icon lit up, "do we know what the Geolocator was running when it went down?"

  "Ahem," Sharrow stopped typing immediately and spoke–so he was paying attention. "No, I'm afraid it's not; the log wasn't written to. It's also possible that the failure wasn't caused by the query, but in transting it into machine code. The compiler could've made an error."

  "I see, thanks."

  "Great. Argus, if you can get that up and running then, ASAP." Stern continued.

  "Yes, of course! No worries!"

  "Excellent. Anyway, folks, we've got a lot of items to get through today, so let's keep the non-financial questions to a minimum. Thanks."

  Peridot breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn't, in fact fucked yet, at least not to the degree she'd expect if anyone knew she was the one that accidentally bricked one of the cornerstones in the temple of Order the Agency maintained. Being able to determine where a computation had occurred was an intelligence gold mine for them…one in which she'd somehow caused a catastrophic cave-in. She only hoped that Sharrow could dig it out, now that he'd been given the resources.

  The items went on and on and on: the ALMA Research Group out in Arizona requested several million dolrs for a new genomics program (ayed); the head of postal security asked that they expand the snail mail searching service to overseas American territories (nayed, deemed extraneous); Vera Horak reported on the success of the stage one caffeine patch trials, and requested additional funding (ayed); many a project was rejected, but still more were approved. Peridot knew, of course, that the Agency had deep pockets…but they seemed to be humongous gateways to another world whose mantle swelled with that most valuable of substances: the almighty dolr. The money being thrown around still shocked her–still made her feel small–especially beneath the grid array of names onscreen that all lit up when their owner spoke in favor or denial.

  She herself had nothing to report, and told them so with her silence. Cryptocurrency fraud was on a downturn tely, even if the cryptocurrency anomaly she'd become fixated on remained unexpined. But she knew what the answer would be if she requested funding to delve deeper into just a blip of data; she needed something more ironcd to avoid a painfully embarrassing "nay".

  Ironcd… iron was famously toxic to the so-called "fair folk", after all; who better for her to talk with to acquire what she needed than the man who dealt with fairy tales and ghost stories, as much as she chagrined them? Sharrow, more than anything else, was the reason she'd attended the meeting in person: he often proved as elusive as the subjects of his research. His working hours were odd, his eating habits odder, and–though this was anecdata–he even slept in his office on occasion. It wasn't a simple task to find him alone where they could talk, privately.

  So, Peridot caught him on the way out, after the meeting had ended and left the pair of them to watch in silence as the other members all disappeared back into the corporate ether.

  "Hey! Gus–real quick."

  "What's up, Dot?" Already he had risen from the table and closed his ptop underneath one arm. His face showed her no animosity, not even the slightest sign that he knew she'd cut a rge chunk of work out for him.

  "I–I was the one who crashed the Geolocator. Sorry." She hated to brandish the knife so brazenly, but subtlety wasn't Sharrow's art; she'd gone right for the throat.

  Trimmed and fluffy eyebrows the color of dark chocote raised so high on Sharrow's forehead they must have touched the hairline hidden beneath his bangs. "Oh. Well, that's… what was the query you were running? That hasn't happened since–"

  "Since we did the destructive tests, yeah. Oops."

  A few years back, Sharrow had executed a test of the Geolocator's abilities: a series of small single-purpose chips were manufactured and used to generate a random number, then destroyed–utterly, down to the st atom, via a particle collider's beam. When the query for the random numbers' origin was input to the machine: it immediately crashed, demonstrating that its referent had to still physically exist in some capacity–or at least setting an upper bound on the maximum number of pieces it could exist as, in the billions.

  Sharrow intended to narrow that number further by proposing a Banach-Tarsky-inspired transformation: via another anomalous device, a single nanochip would be infinitesimally dis-and-reassembled into two. The theory was that this would also cause a crash, since the two objects would be identical, or at least have indistinguishable quantum states–the no-cloning theorem went out the window once magical bullshit was involved. But that project had died in development, anyway; Sharrow couldn't secure the funding. Now, he was eyeing her with the same twinkling curiosity he'd had when he proposed it.

  "Please, tell me more," he insisted.

  "Okay…but I need your word, Gus, that this will stay between us."

  "I–" his eyes darted around the empty meeting room. "Only if it isn't serious."

  Peridot sighed. "Fine." For now, anyway; if she had to, she was sure she could intimidate Sharrow into silence.

  "Well, go on then." He sat back down in the same seat. She mirrored him, again at the head of the table. How odd that she should occupy a pce of such importance for a mystery initiated by a thing so small and hidden as a Bitcoin transaction.

  She expined the situation: the mysterious Latin hashes, the suspect named Calliope Mondegrene, and the kicker: the wallet address was scried correctly, but when she passed the first of the hashes to the Geolocator program, it had immediately errored out to a 2000s-style Blue Screen of Death.

  "So it wasn't the compiler that failed?" Sharrow asked, incredulity vibrating his tone.

  "No–at least, I don't think so. That stage worked; it was actually resolving the location that failed."

  "Dot, the only failures to date were either computations whose origins had been destroyed down to the subatomic level, natural mathematical constants, and calcutions carried out on deep space probes. But this number must have had a terrestrial source?"

  "I can't see how any of those cases would apply here, yes. Unless there's more to this woman than I can find, and she's bsted all her tech to bits with a particle beam cannon. Which wouldn't make any sense, since it'd cost more than all the BTC she mined, anyway."

  "Hm," he leaned in to her ptop screen, "she doesn't look very anomalous. But then, they don't always…I do like her choice of hair color."

  Of course he would say that; his purple shirt was the most colorful surface in the room.

  "So, what do you think? Can you send someone to check her out, see 'what curse ails ye' or whatever, and find out what's going on?"

  He turned; light caught in his gsses, and in the frames she saw the purple-haired suspect reflected off of her computer's screen. "I can." He said; her spirits raised. "But what would be the justification?"

  "Er…"

  "I can understand why you wouldn't want to get authorization to smoke this rabbit hole from CFAM's end… but I'll need a reason for investigation–to present in the event of an audit."

  Dot wanted to grumble, but resisted the urge. For a man whose oeuvre consorted with shadowy forces and creatures she had no desire to ever know, Sharrow sure wanted to do things "aboveboard".

  "Just say there was a tip she's building anomalous computers; that should be fine."

  "Are there anomalous computers, Dot?"

  "Well, she sure as fuck didn't mine bitcoin on her ptop, which is the only relevant computing device she owns! What else could it be?"

  "What else indeed…" he brought a delicate hand up to his chin, then turned back towards the screen.

  "So, will you do it?" She stared into the eyes of Calliope's headshot alongside him.

  "Yes, sure, whatever," he waved his hand, "but, say, as an aside, Dot–do you know the story of the hunt for Pnet Nine?"

  "The discovery of Pluto? Eh, never liked it…wasn't very pressed when they demoted it to dwarf pnet, either."

  "No, Pluto was Pnet X." Sharrow turned to face her; his eyes were full of sparkling stars denser than through any telescope. "Pnet Nine is something else entirely."

  "Oh. Right." Duh–damnit–maybe she was losing her grip? Or maybe she just needed sleep. She tried not to beat herself up; it was only logical that the former ninth pnet would've been associated with that number and not ten.

  "Pnet Nine is a theoretical pnet of several-times-Earth mass orbiting beyond the Kuiper Belt, whose gravitational influence could expin the eccentricities of Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects' orbits. If it exists–and there is an if–it would be an unseen giant, too dim to see conventionally. It might even be a primordial bck hole, a leftover tear from when the early universe's wrinkles were still ironing out."

  "Or dark matter. Or something like that, right?" She asked.

  Sharrow started to pick at his hair, eyes to the ceiling, lost in thought. "Yes, like dark matter… anyway, I bring this up because I've been working on a simir theory to solve a longstanding problem in the noosphere."

  Peridot was of no mind to hear out the man's Jungian nonsense. "Argus, I really don't see how this is relevant–"

  The picking stopped. "I promise that it is. I'm getting there."

  "Okay."

  "...okay. So… the noosphere. The collective unconscious. The Dreaming, the Silver Quay, a little understood Fairy-world where thoughts drift about in an abstract sea, and matter is a distant myth."

  "A pce I have no interest at all in visiting." She added.

  "Yes, well…" he smiled, "not that we could visit it, anyway. Only in dreams can we see even a little; humanity occupies just a small isnd. Every thought, every worry, every idea that our minds can conceive of is on that ndmass… but that doesn't mean that it's the only one."

  "Yeah, yeah. Next you'll tell me about the g–"

  "There are gods, too; when people bump up against them they become prophets, or else go insane. Lesser ones that dwell near dreams–the oneiroi–and greater, less explicable ones that we are more well-off for not dwelling anywhere in our vicinity. There are things that can be known that we should never want to know, since our mental ecosystem is–more and more as time advances–devoid of natural predators. We're soft creatures, inside and out."

  All the more reason to stay on humanity's isnd of stability, she thought.

  "Because, out in the bulk there are strange patterns. Because of various… sleep studies… we know that there are whole regions of noospace locally less dense than their neighbors. They're deserts of the irreal, anoxic waters, and–and this is my theory, now–the graveyards of some kind of extinction event that left them barren. Like a meteor… or some kind of scavenger, maybe a creature that filter-feeds within the water column…"

  "What kind of creature eats ideas?"

  "Another idea?" His eyebrow raised. "We're made of meat and we eat meat; why not?"

  "...fair. But please, Gus, get on with it."

  "Almost there! Anyway, yes… there are whole swathes of noospace affected in this way, even some within our Local Group. Something must have left those scars, and evidence points to a single near-omnipresent cause, but Its nature is still unknown. We know of It only through Its influence. That's why I mentioned Pnet Nine as an analogy: It could be a bck hole of thought, like dark matter lurking invisible in every psyche, slowly eating little tidbits here and there without us noticing. But if It exists It would be impossibly rge and complex–rger than deities' demesnes of thought during antiquity. Big enough to complete a task like your vanity Bitcoin hash near-instantly. Maybe even advanced enough to communicate–to have a sense of consciousness, even. I think, anyway."

  Only because of Sharrow's status as a colleague did she refrain from rolling her eyes; they stayed fixed in a gre instead. As always, he'd suggested something so far-fetched it was literally outside the observable universe. From that same outer pce came a primordial annoyance–the one she always got when dealing with this nonsense.

  "So… hold on. Not sure I heard you right, so I'll make sure. You're saying that this twenty-something woman is communicating with this Thing–that you admit you don't even know exists–and having It mine a few thousand dolrs worth of Bitcoin? As a prank? Come on, Gus."

  "It's only a theory, Dr. Depore."

  "We fit the theory to the world! Not the other way around!"

  "Yes, well," he looked off to the side and smiled, "my department must do things backwards sometimes, by design."

  "Ugh." She scoffed. Sharrow's eyes flit back to her.

  "Sometimes the thing that seems fitting is fitting, Dot–Nature has a sense of humor, or at least of Providence. She attended MISC, you know what's held there…not to mention the Institute's whole history with the Prescott Roar and the Reservoir. So she's got proximity to Strangeness, and in my experience that leads to intimacy more often than not."

  "Pareidolia. You need to get your gsses checked, Gus. There has to be something else, there's no way that I've–"

  "Stumbled upon what could be the ultimate discovery of anomalous research in history? No, probably not… but the improbable has a way of happening anyway."

  He reached to the arms of his gsses, pulling them off, then rubbed the lenses with a small cloth produced from his front pocket. Peridot had little else to say to him; in her frustration, all she could do was confirm that he wasn't all theory, and at least some practice.

  "So, you'll–" she began.

  "Yes. I'll have someone see to Ms. Mondegrene." He returned the gsses to his face–somehow they were still smudged. "Thank you so much for the extra work."

  "I–" her hands twitched. "Sorry, Gus, I didn't mean–breaking the Geolocator wasn't my intention."

  Already he had scooped his ptop up again and headed for the door. Once in the threshold he looked back: a smile in his mouth and a fey twinkle in his eye offered humor but little insight. "That wasn't sarcasm! I find this all rather exciting. Have a good day, Dot."

  Then he left her. Peridot was left to ponder all he’d said and try not to dismiss it outright. Why did Sharrow's theory make her angry to the point of wanting to hit something? She'd have to install a punching bag in her apartment–something, anything to physicalize the puzzle she was solving. Oh, that was it: she hated how terribly unphysical it all was. Hate, hate; hate: if the word hate were engraved… Normal cybercriminals left evidence or motive, even if just in digital form. They didn't leave cryptic messages to taunt her within the blockchain itself! Or, if they did, it was always an amateur attempt that made Kryptos in Langley look sophisticated. It was NatSA custom for cryptanalysts to solve that sculpture for themselves, and she too had passed that gauntlet. How now could she not figure out a stupid sator square?

  She scowled into the eyes of the lic-haired woman on her screen. Was there any chance at all that Sharrow was right, and those eyes hid an answer beyond fantasy? No, no. His Pnet Nine, his hidden star–It wasn't real, It cked flesh and blood and substance. It was therefore irrelevant.

  Magic is dying, may it rest in peace, she thought. Peridot flicked the switch to return the room to darkness and departed. She would not embrace Sharrow's theory; she would smother it instead.

  gremnoire