"How…" Callie whispered, backing up as far as the sofa's cushions would permit her until her spine was pressed against its wooden arm, like the vertical beam of a cross. No crucifix, real or imagined, could have any hope of warding off the aberration that preceded her. She tried, still, willing It to disappear, even though she knew it was in vain.

  It could not be real. It simply couldn't. But the sick, impcable fact was that it was: Erika's form gave no flickering and admitted zero ambiguity. The shape hunching towards her was solid overall, though not absolutely: the eyes were a hollow bck opening out to the abyss. Far away, within them: a pinprick of light, the caster of the shadow. From inside twin tesseracts a billion lightyears long It stared right into her macue–and Its sight was all-but intimate.

  To bottom it off, the abyss'd not only cast her bedroom eyes at her but kissed her too–using Erika's lips, no less! This… this was a mortal viotion.

  "How…" she recroaked, "why…" At the tter question, It raised Erika's head to better meet her eyes. Glossy bck hair fell out of a red hairclip, around the shoulders except on one side, so that a single eye was curtained out of view. A pinkish aura ill-befit Erika's skin at newly-jagged edges and her veins, making her appear cyclopean in binocur senses: first, like It was wine-dark foreign mortar fermenting in the poor girl's mortal masonry and second, being one-eyed–but with Its piercing gaze not lessened.

  "You said you wanted more, didn't you?" Its voice was in stereo, too: Ettie's and Erika's, the former fundamental, the tter's aharmonic and distorted like the voice of a hostage heard over quartz radio. Oh– that was an armingly explicit sound. Calliope turned pale; in what state of distress could It be holding her roommate captive?

  "Not like this!" She excimed. "This is… Ettie, this is NOT fucking okay!"

  It said nothing. Fluidly, It crawled a hand's length towards her, moving like a human would.

  "You need to stop. Is… is Erika even in there?" She asked, dreading the answer and recoiling; her back bumped hard against the railing. There was no way to escape without first getting closer to the Horror.

  Said Horror cocked Erika's head and assumed an uncanny imitation of the pre-nurse's 'concerned' manner Callie was accustomed to. "Why? Did you want her to watch?"

  "No! What the fuck, I… please, fucking stop. I don't want this, Erika doesn't want this… we can figure out some way to, I-don't-know, something, but you can't–

  "I want this," Erika's fingers brushed along her ankle, where the frayed cuffs of her jeans had ridden up; Callie bent her knee skywards to escape them, "and Erika's not here right now."

  She feared the worst. "What do you mean 'not here'?..."

  Where Its head was held upright, now It colpsed; abruptly Erika swooned downwards like her puppet strings were severed. It was too sudden for Callie to react to, but before she facepnted into the sofa Esther'd already resumed control, raising her up to sit back on her haunches. She wondered if she looked as marionettish as that when It paraded in her sleep at night, in part because imagining the look of it was–shamefully–a little bit arousing. What? No! She shook her head in vehement denial and It looked at her in earnest, seeming to expect appuse.

  "Sometimes you don't properly appreciate my artistry," It said.

  "What."

  "Erika is currently out cold with a blood alcohol concentration of more than point-sixteen percent. Only the slightest remnants of consciousness remain to her. She won't remember this–any of this."

  The pieces of the puzzle began to assemble themselves in Callie's mind: they did not form a pretty picture. Erika was never known to drink beyond her limits; Something must’ve compelled her to consume so much liquid influence. She knew too well that Esther's influence freed one of all others, and It held human limits or restraints in negative regard, so for this to have occurred, Its control must have preceded Erika's alcoholic binge. That was the scary part: Calliope pictured Erika paralyzed with fear as Ettie dominated her mind and forced her to down the bottle to the st with no expnation, feeling her thoughts get smaller and smaller as the intoxication waterlogged her senses. There could be no pleasure in it: no buzz could hope to offset the neurostatic hum of having Esther in her head.

  She was compelled to continue asking questions, despite continuing to fear their answers. "Is she going to be okay?" She breathed.

  "Yes. She'll have a hangover, that's all."

  Her heart lightened by a feather. A hangover was a small, ephemeral curse compared to Its permanent affliction on herself. Callie gulped. Next, the most essential question.

  "How long have you been able to get into other people’s heads?" She whispered; Esther's reply to that could make or break the entire world.

  "A while now, in theory. Certain sigils can induce the necessary resonance, but the process is terribly incomplete: solving the equations for your neurodivergence from others' minds is underdetermined–inconsistent. It is also extremely traumatic."

  Sawyer's gut-wrenching scream echoed in her mind for another eternity. "F-for…?"

  "For you. Or Erika, rather."

  "And incomplete how?"

  "I can finally touch you," Ettie said, cupping each of Callie's cheeks; the fingers quivered. "I can feel you. But it isn’t enough. I am swimming in anemic meat; this vessel safely dissipates even less neural heat than you can. Without this limit, I could open a wider channel. See more, sense more, and execute some small actions at a distance, without hands or fingers."

  Spooky. Calliope shook her head, pushing Erika's–Ettie's? Ugh, it was too messy an amalgam–hands well and away. "Hey don't–please don't do that, like that."

  The awfully confusing pair of limbs fell back to Eerieka's sides. It looked at her in silence, fingers twitching with what she could only assume was a yearning to reunite them with her face. They fidgeted, but no more than that: even as Ettie committed unforgivable sins Its actions remained restrained. Calliope's restraint however was not one of want whatsoever, but worry; the gulf between her feelings and those of the God kneeling before her was wider than from here to Andromeda.

  "You have to let her go, Ettie. You have to. Please." She begged.

  Why.

  Its voice thundered in her head, no longer outside. It smelled like clove and sulfur; it tasted in her mouth like oxidized low-background steel. Calliope's heart hastened even further in the radioactive echo of the word. She was straddling the line between God's favor and wrath, and chose her next words as nervously as possible:

  "You–I. Okay. You know I don't want this, right? That this isn't a fucking okay thing to do. You know everything. I thought after–well, fucking everything tonight, you'd… I-don't-know… be nicer?"

  Their kiss beneath the radar dish was sweeter than candyfloss. She'd expected future kisses to be just the same. Supposedly plutonium was sweet as well, in a much darker way: such was the kiss It'd stolen from her with wrongly-lifted lips. As she mused, Its left hand reached for her right, and Calliope failed to recoil back in time. A warm thumb traced the back of her palm in an intricate, starry, not-quite-circur pattern.

  "This is only an extension of what I promised to you earlier," It said.

  "No, it's really not," Callie forced air out of her nose. "Ettie, this is seriously fucked up. Erika's my roommate. She's a person! You can't just go around puppeting my friends!"

  The friction on her hand increased: It was tracing faster now.

  "I can, just. You're concerned about consent."

  "No. Fucking. Shit. Of course I am–"

  The movement stopped. Erika's brows furrowed. "I could make this all okay. I could make her want this. I could make her sober. It would be easy. I could make her want you more than breathing, Callie; she'll suffocate herself trying to press her mouth further onto yours."

  Thought froze and spread its little ice age down her spine. Esther was serious, and so Calliope was appropriately horrified. For the first time in months and in the new year she began to pray to any pleasant God that might listen:

  Please, God–if you're real, if you can hear me. I know it's been a while, and I've been uh, sinful, but… if you can, somehow, you need to stop Her–

  Please stop. You're being terribly dramatic.

  Callie's mouth fell open as the prayer was terminated. She was shut in, isoted; the only divine light allowed to shine upon her a specific set of disastrous frequencies. Esther didn't care one iota for human morals. From Its heavenly vantage point, It wanted to kiss her–which was giddily exciting, but not at all the point–so It’d executed that desire, and no crime was too egregious to inhibit It. What otrecourse did she have? There was no higher power to appeal to… if she was to fix this and save Erika, it would be under her own power. Even a featherweight like her could move the world on the right fulcrum, and Ettie'd provided her a long lever indeed. Calliope smmed her jaw shut; bit her lip; scowled in anger at the shadow overtaking her innocent friend.

  "If you don't let her go, Ettie, I swear… I'm never fucking talking to you again." She rebuked.

  Right away reared up that probing prickle in her head again–the Lethean one that threatened to wash memory away. Callie knew better than to fear it this time, because Ettie would realize that she meant every word. She knew that It could reshape her mind in moments, that she was putty in Its hands the same as Erika was, maybe even softer by prolonged exposure. She also knew–or was highly confident–that It wouldn't shift even a synapse of her brain except to censor lethal sigils. Not after the incident at MISC, and not when there was no fun in it for Ettie if Calliope was perfectly compliant. No–Esther wanted a doll that would strain against Its strings, even if they stayed spun out of adamant.

  Erika gred at her in turn. The point of light-shadow at the far end of her pupil roiled in emotion, and Callie felt a dim wave of it rock her through Its filters. The hexing tempest roared–impotently. She knew, and It knew she knew, and so on ad infinitum… but the knowledge of that was terribly enervating this time.

  After what passed for a conceptual tantrum had itself passed, Erika began to fall again, this time in expression only. Her hand dropped off of Callie's; her shoulders slumped and the fell twinkle in her eye ebbed, slightly. It looked away from her to the television on the far wall, with an intensity that if it were real would surely burn a hateful image into its pixels forevermore. Just as in their first night, Calliope got the sense she'd won some small victory–how Pyrrhic, it remained to be seen.

  Despite it all, she still felt sorry for It: a single tear sprang from Erika's eye and trickled down her cheek, carrying a mencholy beyond bearing. At first she assumed it was a lie and that the pang of sympathy she felt was therefore false… but there were no further tears, leading her to give Ettie good faith. Faith and worship… was that how one comforted a frustrated God? Calliope wasn't prepared for this.

  She reached for Erika's hands, csping her clumsy rger ones over each. The skin under her palms was still possessed and feverish, but softer now, with much of Its aura depressed.

  "Ettie…" she mumbled. Erika's eye twitched. "I'm sorry. There just has to be a better way than this."

  "There was no quicker, avaible option." It spoke clearly, without even the hint of a sniffle.

  "Maybe, but. You knew I'd hate this. You did it anyway. I know you don't fucking care but like, how was this supposed to go? Wait,” her heart palpitated, “how far did you even pn on going, exactly?"

  Erika's eye refocused on her, bringing with it that familiar wave of swooning heat. "As far as humanly possible and that you would allow."

  Oh. Calliope gnced down, where Erika's disheveled pajamas were unbuttoned to just above her breasts. It would not be difficult for either of them to undo the ones remaining if need or want arose. But then, Esther wouldn't consider the tearing of fabric much deterrent, either. It cared not for Erika's bodily autonomy; why would It care about her clothes?

  For one shameful, fugitive instant, Calliope considered it: what it would be like to be intimate with Ettie, even if It had to happen while It puppeted her close friend against her will or knowledge. It was less than an inkling, barely long enough to register… but if a thought lived for even a microsecond in her mind it was immemorialized in Ettie's. It knew she'd thought about acceding, however briefly; how could she cim any moral high ground in the face of it?

  "No." She answered firmly, ying stake anyway. Ettie said nothing in reply. She took it as tacit acceptance of her answer.

  She released her roommate's hands; this would have to be the st physical contact between her and It, or her growing fear for Erika's safety would overflow. Its restraint was probably finite, no matter now rge. "Ugh," Callie groaned, "why did you have to, like, get her drunk, though? That's so much worse… can you even leave without hurting her?"

  Ettie's voice was purely her own, now. "Yes. Intoxication was needed to avoid sting trauma. Exiting a mind is like stepping out of a bath: no matter the method–and I am very careful–there is inevitably a wave. There would be a memory of me, however hazy, and her mind would stress and pick at it without understanding. But chemical influence will prevent persistence into long-term memory after I am gone."

  Callie closed her eyes and took a deep breath in. "You… you fucking pnned this. All of it. Before you even woke me up you set it up so she'd go into that bathroom. Didn't you?"

  "Yes."

  She exhaled, opening up. "Okay. Whatever. Not getting into that now. Just get out of her… please?"

  Something indescribable changed in Erika's eyes to make them seem more human. "Wait!" Callie said–and it reversed. "How will I know you actually did?"

  Erika's right hand pulled out of her grip, rising up to brush the hair out of the other, hidden eye. In the center of the newly revealed pupil there was a simir dot light representing It, but–all around–the brown of Erika's irises was brightening to orange.

  "Look."

  Ettie pressed between her eyebrows with two fingers–right where her third eye would be–and drew her in. Calliope tumbled through an howling void towards a dim mist of sepia, without any time to scream or properly react before nding in it with a thud, upright.

  She took stock of her surroundings. Stock was kind of fitting: the world around her was colored with nostalgia, like chicken soup for the soul. She was in a dingy little kitchen in an apartment whose furniture might belong to any location in America, if not for the palm trees through the window to give away an occidental orientation in that coastal city of Angels. Everything including the humidity was orange, somehow: orange-white refrigerator, gas-grated stove, chipped faux-wooden cabinets, and tangerine too was the general air of middle-css despair, postponed biweekly with each paycheck.

  She soon discovered she was not alone. At a seven o'clock angle there was a round table with a psticine tablecloth to cover it: also off-white, with images of cartoon fruits in unnatural, horidential hues between red and yellow. A little girl was sitting at it, maybe five or six, on top of cushions and a chair so she could reach its surface. Calliope recognized her: Erika. It was Erika, as she'd never known her.

  Something cold passed through her: a shade–no, a person–and she shivered in its wake Erika's mother–Mrs. Pi–was also recognizable to her, a rounder-faced tempte of her daughter, minus hairclip, but she was obviously younger than Calliope'd ever known her, either.

  "Chae-Won, how is the macaroni paper coming?" She asked, in a bright, citrussy tone.

  Callie's eyes found the table again, where Erika was glueing dry macaroni elbows to a cross made of construction paper. The purple of the gluestick was conspicuous amid the sea of sepia it sailed upon. Why did a gluestick of all things get the privilege of that Astral colour over all the orange?

  Erika restored the gluestick's orange cap, returning everything to monochrome. "Good, ommy! Look, look!" She cried in excitement, holding her creation up with pride. The smile on her face hurt Callie's heart to see… it was painfully innocent of a tremendous amount of pain. Nowhere in that grin could the girl that would be Erika know it would be reconfigured into such a lustful leer some two-decades ter, when through no fault of her own she'd be the unwitting surrogate of an unspeakable evil. Calliope felt guilt gnaw at her from the inside; she'd seen enough.

  "Ettie, enough, please, let me out!" She yelled. The Pi's turned to her in unified confusion, suggesting that in speaking she might've interfered with recollection, but swiftly: the vision faded to bck like watercolors washed away. It ejected her back onto the couch, leaving her gasping and heaving as if she'd surfaced from deep, dayglo water.

  "Once I'm gone, you won't be able to see things like that." The unsmiling adult Erika spoke in Ettie's voice without chance.

  "Get out," Callie sputtered, "now. Get out of her head."

  "As you wish, puppet."

  Erika dropped forwards; this time Callie summoned the reaction time to catch her. The full weight of her unconscious head and torso fell over her shoulders. When she turned the poor woman over in her p, her eyes were closed and her limbs zy. Shallow breaths pushed and pulled on her chest like an estic. Erika looked to be at peace–if a bit warm in the forehead.

  Still, she had to be sure. Calliope pried open an eyelid: the burnished brown of Erika's iris looked up at her, unseeing. No childhood memory forced its way into the gap between minds; there was no distant point of light inside the pupil to signal Ettie's presence; there was no sign of any influence but the alcohol she'd drank and an approximate shadow at the back of Callie's own mind. She id Erika down onto the sofa on her side and covered her with a spare throw bnket–checkered, nothing cosmic. Finally getting to her feet, she addressed the deceptively empty room:

  "This isn't happening again. I'm cleaning out your cursed fucking bathroom. Just make sure it doesn't kill me, please?"

  Ettie's ears were ever open. As she walked over to the closed door with its ward of death, Calliope put her faith in that–in It. Maybe death by a multitude of signs wouldn't be so bad–or maybe she'd be fine. It wasn't like It could possess her twice… despite that knowledge, her hand shook when she turned the knob. She entered.

  Undoing all the ramblings of ritual Ettie had pced within the room took hours, so that by the time Calliope stepped back into the hallway, the sun was starting to come up. Its wary light came from the east, through the far kitchen window, casting down the hallway's length like a torch. Directed lights were too often accusative; Callie felt guilty and vulnerable within its beam. How much of it was her fault; was there anything she could've done? Those were the queries her mind repined on endlessly as she moved towards the light with a bck garbage bag stuffed full of paper scraps, their crumpled curses now exorcised by loss of topology.

  Tuesday was always garbage day; it would take some time for the evidence of Ettie's evil to be cleansed in fire in some incinerator. It could not be soon enough, though. Calliope bent down to grab the pstic garbage can at both handles after pcing the bag deep within. It dragged along the hallway's floor as she pulled it towards the front door and sunlight dappled over all, through tree-leaves and window-blinds.

  Behind her in the living room something stirred. Callie stopped, catching the rustle of a bnket. She didn't dare to turn her head to find the source, afraid of what she'd find.

  "Callie?" Came Erika's voice after it, uncertain and groggy. Still Calliope stood still.

  Another soft rustling noise, like someone sitting up. "Cal!" It came again, more insistent.

  She took in a deep breath, sufficient air to st her several contingent gasps. Anything could happen when she finally turned round. She let go of the trash can and prepared for the worst.

  Behind her, though, was a perfectly ordinary Erika, if a bit frazzled or disheveled, and with a bit more red filling her cheeks than usual. Callie saw that she was smiling–for at most less than a second, before guilt and fear compelled her to look with her eyes elsewhere, up to one of the room's shadowy corners. With the induction sigils gone, her eyes were Its only remaining transmission vector. It was therefore critical that she never make eye contact with her roommate ever again.

  "Hey! What time is it?" Erika's voice asked, drawing her out of her thoughts.

  "Uh…" she paused.

  "Nevermind, actually–where's my phone? Have you seen it?"

  "No, I haven't." Callie continued with her corner-hopping. She hadn't seen Erika's phone all night; it was probably in her bedroom wherever Ettie'd left it before changing her into pajamas.

  Erika searched the sofa cushions, coming up empty. The strangeness of her situation finally set in. "What happened st night?" She asked; the dreaded question at st emerged.

  "You… don't remember?"

  "No."

  "Not at all?"

  "Nope." Erika accented the 'p'.

  Callie's fingers fidgeted above her pockets. Her eyes leapt from nook to nook, anywhere to avoid Erika's inquisitive stare–she must look mighty shifty. What to say, what to say… lies, for certain, but she could make them white–if emissive–and omissive otherwise.

  "I uh, came back from work. You were throwing up." She stuck to facts where she could. "I was pretty worried. I got you a popsicle, and helped you to the couch… you fell asleep, I guess."

  "Oh. Thanks, Cal. Yeah, I'm… this hangover's pretty massive. Ow. Weird… I don't even remember drinking–"

  "It was really bad. Erika, I'm… I'm sorry." Callie interrupted.

  "Callie," Erika's tone sharpened, "c'mon. You took care of me–thanks! You apologize like a nervous tic, girl. It's fine!"

  "Mm," she hummed, unconvinced. Her hands balled up into fists. Inside she was at war: one faction wanted to warn Erika of what'd happened, while the other wanted to put everything behind them and focus on her overall well-being. She stood there immobile and unspeaking while the battle raged within.

  "Hey, actually, could you get me some water?" Erika's forces fnked her thoughts and drew a truce. "Sure," she answered, eager to engage herself in anything but conversation.

  The kitchen was empty as she filled the gss under the faucet; only the windowsill's succulent and the sun aligned behind it were there to watch her on her way to and fro. She handed the gss over the sofa-back to Erika, still avoiding looking down. With Callie's height and Erika's ck thereof, the tter looked so small and innocent… the victim of a crime only the former was aware of.

  Erika gulped the water down in little sips. "Thanks," she gasped. "God, I could kiss you right now."

  "Don't." Callie blurted out.

  Erika turned her gaze up to her face, still holding the gss with both hands. "You're… are you sure you're okay? You're weirder than usual today, haha. Not that that's bad or anything!"

  "I'm fine. I'm gonna finish taking the trash out."

  She returned to the enormous bin she'd left in the middle of the hallway. Within it, near the rim, the opening of the trash bag puckered out at her. Just barely visible within that was a Post-It note with something starlike scribbled on it. Fuck you, she thought-projected at it, seriously, Ettie, fuck you.

  A click, then buzzing static. Her heart leapt up into her throat again, fearing divine punishment. This time though, the sound had an earthly cause: over the buzzing, though tinny and distorted, the Westminster Quarters of a doorbell rang out into the apartment, then left her and Erika in silence.

  "It's early, right? Who could that be?" Erika whispered.

  "Probably pressed the wrong button–" she suggested, before the bell cmored again. Twice was much less likely to be mere mischance. From through the thick front door came the sound of distant voices, sourced from the bottom of the stairwell. No more bells, but the sound of creaking wood… like someone was ascending.

  A small shape rushed past her, clutching the throw bnket. The fleece of Erika's pajamas was soft when she squeezed by. "What're you–" Calliope began.

  "Pretend I'm sleeping. I'm a hot mess right now," Erika harsh-whispered before disappearing behind her bedroom door.

  That left her alone to face whatever was climbing up the stairs, if it was even human. A visitor in the wee hours of the morning, barely past dawn, did not bode well. Calliope flexed her fingers, anxious; she pulled both bathroom doors to a close, pcing the warding sign from the nearest one on top of the garbage bag to guard it, vertically.

  The knock at st arrived, rapping thrice upon the ancient wood. Callie stole like a mouse to the keyhole, but for naught: only darkness was visible there. Just the color bck and a bit of reddish-pink at the edges, from someone holding a palm over the opening, crudely. Curious.

  The knock came again, this time rattling her skull a little, pressed to the wood as it was. Calliope stepped back.

  Ettie, are you there? She set off a mental ping. The back of her mind stirred–acknowledged.

  Okay; she took a deep breath, grabbed the doorknob, and wrenched it open inwards.

  The thing on the doorstep was much less frightening than she expected. A woman stood there stock-straight and unyielding, like an evergreen tree. From root to canopy she was bck stiletto heels, dark-gray scks, blindingly-white peacoat cinched with a belt about the waist, striated off-white turtleneck within its colr, round, pretty face with thin red lips, dark squircle shades that hid her eyes, and finally a crop of chestnut neck-length hair parted in the middle, giving her bifurcated bangs. On each ear an enormous gold hoop earring swayed slightly in the door's ajarring backwash. She exuded an aura of annoyed importance… and if ever Calliope'd thought of herself as possessing resting bitch face, she was dead wrong: this woman could've coined the term. Despite being a few inches taller, she very nearly recoiled and shut the door right in her face, but unnatural puppetry steadied her.

  At the sight of the visitor Esther's presence stirred, that perennial circadian buzzing picking up. Callie's eyes burned with heat; wary of Its intentions, she tried not to make eye contact, but there was no need: the woman's gsses were too dark to see her eyes anyway. Pitched-down eyebrows gave away her expression as a negative one, though. What could have her so pissed off, so early in the morning?

  "Uh, hi?" she managed.

  "Hello," the woman answered curtly, reminding Callie of a schoolmarm, though she seemed less than an eon older than herself. "You're a resident of this unit, right?"

  "Yeah? Who are–" Hands-in-pockets, the visitor became the second person to brush past her today, pushing her way into the hall. She stood a few steps away and faced the kitchen, appearing to take in the scenery.

  "Hey! You can't just–"

  "Miss Mondegrene, right?" The woman's head turned the same direction. In the gap between the eyegss's temple and its frame she could see the smallest sliver of an eye–olivine in color. The heat behind her eyes grew sweltering; Calliope shut them tight. Ettie was not going to hurt this stranger, too.

  "Yeah, that's me. Who are you?" She repeated.

  "I'm with your building owner. Your… water meter's been showing an anomaly. It could be nothing, there's been some false arms. I need to check something to make sure."

  "An anomaly?" She echoed. The white-cd woman stepped, sinister, to the closest bathroom door. "Wait–" She flicked it open.

  The inside was dark and shiny, no longer matte since all the papers were removed. Sunlight diffused into the space, across the tiles Callie'd freshly dusted, making its way to the bathtub where–

  Raaah!

  Just like before, Ettie jumped out from behind the shower curtain, her jaw hanging low by gory threads to reveal a bloody maw with overexcessive teeth. She posed at the pair of them with shoulders raised and hands curled into cws, like a T-Rex… then colpsed back into the corner with a ugh–hysterical at her own asinine prank.

  Calliope quivered with anticipation. The other woman saw and felt nothing out of order, advancing more into the room. Her eyes swept over every angle, like she was searching for something. No… it couldn't be: once or twice her gaze passed right over Ettie's projection in the corner, now wiping false tears of mirth out of Its eyes. But she saw nothing and felt nothing. Callie'd done a cleanup job she could be proud of.

  After a few minutes the stranger seemed satisfied too. She stiletted back into the hallway, shutting the door behind her on the unseen monster still within. By then, Calliope's fear dissolved enough for her to move and speak. "Is there anything wrong? We like, never really use that one. Do you need to check the other–"

  "No," the intruder sighed, sounding disappointed. "I apologize for disturbing you so early. I have, uh… a lot of units to check today."

  "That's rough." For the third time she was brushed past. The shady woman stepped past her and the open front door over to the trash bin. She examined it for a few seconds… almost, there was a budding realization… but Callie saw a myrtle eye twitch under the gsses, and with that she lost interest in the garbage. She was only human, after all.

  "Well…" she paused inside the threshold. Snow-white coat with greenish accents, she was totally opposite what Callie was used to seeing linger in the edges between rooms. This woman was totally ordinary… how fortunate for her that she couldn't feel Ettie's unsightly ser boring into the back of her fluffy brown hair.

  "Yeah?" Callie said. An insane impulse made her fingers twitch: if she were fast, if she were quick, and quiet, she could reach and snatch the gsses off her face… the stranger would turn and then she'd see, at st, exactly the adversary she sought, and the serendipity would be absolutely scrumptious, and–

  Ettie, NO, Callie thought, recognizing the identity behind the intrusive thought. It backed off with a metaphysical grumble.

  "Well…" the woman turned around, smiling up at her–everywhere except her eyes. That proved it out as false. "Thank you for your time." She said; spun on her heel, clicked it into the wood of the nding for good measure and rapidly descended without once looking back, avoiding that Orphic mistake entirely–the same as Callie had except with greater style.

  Calliope shut the door and set the bolt. With an exhausted sigh she slumped against it and slid down until her too-long legs stretched ft halfway across the hallway. "That was weird. And boring. Who was that?"

  Ettie flickered into view to lean against the linen closet; she avoided looking at It. "Nobody important."

  ﹡﹡﹡

  "She's fucking hiding something, Gus." Peridot raved, stabbing the air in the ptop webcam's field of view with a painted index finger. Seated cross-legged in the backseat of her car, white winter coat draped over the driver's seat headrest, she doubted she'd ever be more cross.

  "Who's 'she', Dot?" Returned Sharrow's thin tones out of the speakers, made even more nasally by the crunched audio.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose out of frustration. "Ugh–as if you don't already know!"

  "I'm sorry, I really don't." He replied ftly. Sharrow hadn't yet looked at her once for the entire duration of their half-minute call, instead choosing to type away at another keyboard angled diagonally away from him and out of frame. She waited, giving him only silence, to entice him, or else to breed such awkwardness he'd be forced to pay attention. Finally, he looked: eyes behind spectacles scanned her face, then her surroundings.

  "Are you–in your car, right now? Where are you?"

  "I'm in Boston, where else?"

  His eyes bulged out, made even bigger by the gsses. "What–did you–Dot, what you're doing is extremely dangerous. Have you taken the necessary precautions–"

  "I'm perfectly fine, Gus, I've already seen her. There's… nothing to see there. But I know she's hiding something."

  "You actually saw her? I… you'll need to…" he murmured something like 'mnestic decontamination', "what was she like?" The longer he eyed her through the webcam, the longer curiosity prevailed over concern.

  "She's just some dorky twenty-something! I pretended to be from the realty company, I don't know if she bought it. She's too innocent, it has to be some front… She's a sociopath. Or mocking me. Fuck!" She excimed. "Even the secret room was a dead end! It's just another bathroom!"

  Sharrow started rapid-fire typing. "Really? I wonder how the field agent missed it, then?"

  "Obviously I should've gone instead from the get-go. Your E-css personnel must be struggling with competency. What're we even paying you Mega Millions numbers for?"

  "You are not a field agent. You are not trained to recognize psychic contamination–" Argus snapped.

  "Oh, please–" Peridot waved the squircle shades before the webcam, "these are the most unsightly meme filters ever devised! They weren't even needed, because that little criminal is too smart to let anything trip them up. There weren't any alerts. If only she knew… that just makes me more determined."

  "Peridot. Peridot. Please." Sharrow repeated her name in a loop until her tirade ceased. "Deporizing filters are an analog technology, there's no arm that goes off when they catch something. For that they'd need a litmus test back in the b. Only then will we know how much foreign memetics you've just gone and exposed yourself to."

  Dot stared at the dark lenses in her hand. What rger shadow could be caught within their smaller one? They seemed no darker for it. "So… but… the agent you sent had no issues either, correct?"

  He bit his lip and looked away. "Well…"

  "Argus."

  "It does appear that Agent Barden mispced his–"

  "Ugh. Of course." She dropped the shades; they fell onto the car's floor under the seat. Sharrow stared back at her for several long moments, brows pitching upwards like a drawbridge.

  "Potential cognitohazards aside, I'm still rather concerned for your wellbeing, Dot."

  "I am in a perfectly rational state of mind." She retorted.

  "You drove eight hours up to Boston, Massachusetts to chase a lead that didn't pan out whatsoever, without informing anyone, myself included."

  "I'm informing you, now. And I've accrued more than enough PTO to take off for this."

  "Time-off is supposed to be time off… you ought to rex, instead of… whatever this is."

  "This is more important."

  Silence. Far above, in a tree that leaned over the streetside she was parked at in her silver SUV, a mourning dove cooed to provide comfort. Peridot wanted none; she'd rather it be a mockingbird instead, to double her frustrations. Instead she'd doubled them, but onto Sharrow rather than herself: he eyed her as he'd eye a madwoman.

  "When will you be returning to the district? It would be nice to analyze the gsses." He asked, gently.

  "I don't know. There are a few more pces I intend to check out."

  "...I could easily report this." He said under his breath–the ambient microphone detected it anyway.

  "You won't." She tightened, then loosened, her jaw. "Can't we just arrest her? I'd happily return, then, with her in custody."

  "She hasn't done anything wrong."

  "Don't pretend that's truly an obstacle. It was my understanding that anomaly alone is grounds for it."

  "The only anomaly I see here is your doggedness in your pursuit of what appears to be, well, nothing, Dot."

  "If you really believe it to be nothing, then why are you so concerned about 'contamination', Gus?"

  Sharrow's eyes lowered to his keyboard, where his fingers no longer typed. "I don't know," he said, so low the mic reached the limit of its hearing and clipped part of the words. "Just a feeling."

  Peridot hated that she felt the same. She had no concrete evidence, only bad feelings and vibrations. She knew from one look at Calliope that she was guilty. It was no way to do science; she was filing in the dark. But still… every maze had walls, every wall could be followed. She breathed in. "So let me pursue mine, then. I'll update you. I'll wear those idiotic sunshades. Maybe they'll have proof in them when I return, if I discover nothing else."

  Sharrow was browbeaten, too weak and intrigued in his own right to fight her on this. She hoped he had more of a spine when engaging less human entities than her. "Okay, I suppose. Where are you going next?" He asked.

  "There's this notorious rave house near the… Emerald Neckce? Deanonymized location data shows she's been there several times. Maybe she's stashing something there."

  "I do so love privacy," said the man at that moment presiding over a program that surveilled people's dreams. "Just… please be careful."

  "Sure." Peridot hung up. She snatched the shades off of the floor, the coat off of her seat before she cmbered in, the nagging thought of Sharrow off the forefront of her mind. So much struggle for a stupid Sator square. Sunk-cost dictated she could not stop now: In for a satoshi, in for a pound, she thought wryly, starting the car.

  She didn't dare to press her luck again by impersonating a plumbing inspector for a second time. The alternative stakeout took hours, though that was to be expected: so early in the morning, only the employed were really out and about. For a bohemian upper-middle-css twenty-three-year-old like Annette Dorati to leave the house she'd have to wait much longer. While she did so ever-so-patiently, Peridot reclined her car seat back so it was almost horizontal and enabled the screen function in her gsses–not the shades, which were for ter. There was always more research to be done online, even if only parts of it panned out.

  As the sun mounted the sky around noon and started to descend, she spun a web that'd be the envy of any spider by means of graph-making & note-taking software. First and central node: Calliope Mondegrene, whose birth name was important only for searching through old local newsclippings of elementary school art contests and science fairs and thusly second, satellite: Annette Dorati, with whom her suspect shared that prestigious first prize at ten years old for fantasy marker-art of birds. Her surname was the important one, locally speaking, in that her family was wealthy enough to outright own the converted duplex Dot parked opposite, as well as several other properties in the pair’s hometown on Massachusetts' North Shore. As far as Peridot could tell, Annette was an unemployed artist and art enthusiast with a bachelor's degree in film studies. Her patronage was kept within the family, either reted or found: the most frequent materials delivered to the address were canvas and alcohol. A lot of alcohol: the liquor of the covenant was thicker than the water of the womb, apparently–the woman loved to throw a gathering.

  Dot was never one for parties, generally eschewing liquid courage for forms more solid and dependable that emanated from within. Today fate smiled upon her the same as the Sun, because she'd learned that Annette's house parties usually took pce on Fridays by correting cell network activity around the area. With all probability the people in the house numbered in the single-digits now; that was a count she could easily wait out.

  Sure enough, sometime past two in the afternoon a pair emerged into her peripheral vision. She leaned back at a forty-five degree angle to view them through the darkened rear window of her car, reluctantly embracing voyeurism. The taller one–a man matching the description of a Carmichael O’Healy, on whose apartment's lease a few years prior Annette's parents cosigned–stepped down off the porch and dropped his phone onto the concrete within seconds. The shorter of them–Annette herself, auburn hair tucked into the hood of a beige jacket–scolded him as she followed, after locking the front door. Once both were satisfied the man's phone was still operational they headed off hand-in-hand along the sidewalk–but not before Annette looked straight at the car for a split second, putting Dot's heart into her throat when she made apparent eye contact. It was just her imagination, since there was no way she could be seen at that distance, through those media. Soon after, they'd departed. Perfect; she noted that in exiting, they hadn't given any goodbyes. She did rough calcutions… given that, given the marigold rolltop bag Annette carried on her back, given they didn't take the bck car parked out front… she'd have roughly a half hour to snoop about while they imbibed in some café or art supply store. She dismissed the gsses-HUD and snatched the sign-filtering shades off the car’s floor. Go time.

  …Or it was, finally, when after trying four windows on the periphery she found the fifth unlocked and opened. With great effort Peridot hoisted herself up and through it, knocking a can of dirty paintwash water over in the process. She swore under her breath and stepped with care around the growing puddle. There was no time to clean, and not much point besides–why take responsibility when she could bme it on the wind?

  As she got her bearings, a February zephyr whistled in to accompany her, rustling the pages taped all over the walls. The room she was in was anomalous for sure, just in an ordinary way: paint-spttered newspaper along the baseboards, mutited door off its hinges in the corner, brass-framed bed missing sheets over its mattress. She sniffed the air and smelled paint and a dozen other toxic substances; art was definitely made here.

  Cryptographic puzzles, though, were not. Dot checked all of the usual pces where anything rger than a ptop could be stashed and came up empty. That pattern continued throughout the house, from the kitchen with its isnd and pony wall to the living room with its little archipego of armchairs. Nothing; fifteen minutes went by while she searched to no avail. She was on the verge of giving up and calling it quits before the homeowners returned… but then while pacing in the hallway, she saw it: the door to the basement, almost invisible against the wall because of the Poroids stickered all across its surface.

  She wrenched it open, inwards. Twin wood railings led a story down to an unfinished space that looked to span the width and breadth of the house. It, too, was probably ordinary–or so she thought, before flicking the lightswitch just inside the door bathed the celr in deep, infrared light. Of course–a darkroom! One makeshifted: the basement windows were all blocked off from outside with plywood. She'd assumed that was routine in New Engnd or else meaningless to her, that maybe the basement disappeared or shrank in renovation and was no longer fit for any human use. No… its use was right below her eyes in dim blood red.

  Peridot descended into that infernal luminance. At the surface, the celr was a concrete and fibergss world beneath a dying red star, but not any exceptional world besides. Here and there: old furniture, a table tennis table, washer and dryer… oh! Developing trays id out across a long, narrow table, their colors only guessable in the monochrome red from the singur naked bulb under the stair nding. Some held only films of evaporated liquid, others more substantial fixer fluid, still other baths were dry. One bin on the far left was repurposed and beled “bh” in marker, containing a loose pile of photographs. With nowhere else in the basement that could possibly hide a computing device, she sifted through them, almost absentmindedly. Maybe against all odds there'd be an incriminating photo.

  Peridot’s green eyes were bck under the scarlet light, so that the dition of her pupils went unseen. Her eyes widened nonetheless when she found it… even though exactly what “it” was remained unclear. The sense of uncertainty was terribly familiar.

  Near the bottom of the bin: a small set of photos, taken in proximity points in spacetime. A woman with Calliope's face and hair poised daintily on a folding chair in the room upstairs where she'd spilled the paint-water. She was smiling, then ughing, then smearing lipstick on one cheek with a thumb, only for the next photo to correct it. She looked happy–but Calliope herself wasn't what caught her interest. It was what surrounded her.

  The photos were ordinary; no doubt the camera was ordinary too, and also the developer, stop bath, fixer and every argent halide crystal involved in teasing out the tent image. How then could an ordinary process have produced what she was seeing? Morse than a single sight, the Poroid looked different somehow compared with shades and without, in the gap between the bottom frame and where they slid a little down her nose. Just that sliver felt a little tingly to look at without shades… still holding the picture up, Dot raised her other hand to dab above her lip–her fingers came away warm and moist. Her nose was bleeding.

  Bleeding, that was the right word: the picture was bleeding, with ink instead of iron. Like a bck aura It surrounded her–Calliope–in every shot, a shadow full of multicolored Perlin noise that made it difficult to discern much else in the photos’ upper halves. Oh, but if only that was the half of it: the signal, not the noise, was the real shock. There was not supposed to be a signal.

  Peridot stacked the seven photos in a column. Within the splotch of spotty darkness within each there was an array of tiny symbols id out horizontally. It appeared to be Morse code, one line per photo, except that all but one dot among the dashes was not in truth a dot, but a miniscule, hex-spoked asterisk. The single one which was actually a dot stood on its own, so she pced it at the end as if it were the terminator of a sentence… but it could just as easily have headed off the whole thing as salutation. That was the more disturbing interpretation; she put it out of mind for now.

  The blood wiped away into her fingers, across her palm. Why were her hands shaking? They were only photos, disturbing only in context, not intrinsically. She didn't know Morse offhand, it could just as easily be a bad roll of film and pareidolia on her part. Or… that was what Dot told herself as she scooped the pictures up and hurried up the stairs and cmbered out the window to her car, not bothering to turn the basement light off. Subconsciously, she knew: it was a coded message.

  Codes were meant to be decoded. There, in the glovebox: a little notepad and mechanical pencil tucked in its helical spine. Her heart thudded against its confines in her chest while–more hastily than she did most anything else–she transcribed the six* words telegraphed in photographs onto the page and rearranged them once the pattern became clear:

  .

  ﹡﹡﹡﹡ ﹡ -﹡﹡- ﹡- -﹡﹡ ﹡﹡﹡

  ﹡ ﹡-﹡﹡ -﹡-- ﹡﹡﹡ ﹡﹡ ﹡-

  -﹡﹡- -﹡-- ﹡﹡﹡ - ﹡﹡- ﹡﹡﹡

  ﹡- ﹡﹡﹡ - ﹡ ﹡-﹡ ﹡﹡﹡

  -﹡﹡ ﹡﹡ ﹡﹡- ﹡-﹡ -﹡ ﹡

  ﹡﹡﹡ ﹡- ﹡﹡﹡ ﹡﹡﹡ ﹡ -﹡﹡

  E﹡

  HEXADS

  ELYSIA

  XYSTUS

  ASTERS

  DIURNE

  SASSED

  ﹡Or '.'

  She cursed the little leaf of paper. Another goddamned Sator square–this one nonstandard, in English, with an extra/strange letter and cking in semordnips. Aside from the spare “E” or dot, it was a square in symmetry, the same horizontally and vertically… though she hadn't the faintest idea what a ‘xystus’ was supposed to be. No matter; research would have answers if Sharrow did not, in the shadow of their impending briefing. All of his pointless prattle about Nature and Its supposed serendipity intruded back into her mind. Peridot could no longer believe in coincidences, no: the note written in her own hand (and possibly addressed to her) was purposeful and mocking; whoever left it there, left it for her to find. That made it personal. Dot was unimpressed by what she figured to be an old-school photo manipution technique, like the kind ‘thoughtography’ enthusiasts employed a century before–despite the pictures that now spread over her dashboard containing something ineffable that was charring up her sungsses. But that st bit was a magic trick meant to shock and awe her. She refused to fall for it: she turned each picture downwards, stacked them in square order, and slipped the bundle into a spare mani envelope inside the glovebox.

  Removing the sungsses from her face was like rediscovering the sun existed: the lenses were so dark as to be almost opaque. Even if they were analog as Sharrow said, that was a bad sign. What if she really was contaminated?

  She pced her real gsses back upon her face. It didn't matter, did it? Unless her mind remained her own, there was nothing she could do. An unfathomable mind wouldn't have the will, idea or memory to further chase this lead. The fact that her brain was firing on all cylinders without any caffeine? That was a good sign, a good prognosis for her sanity. There was much to do and an infuriating criminal to catch, but first: she'd spread the gospel to Sharrow as she'd promised.

  ﹡﹡﹡

  Like hell was Calliope going outside or making eye contact with another human being ever again. The day dragged on with her locked up in her third-floor self-admitted prison, vacilting between the fetal position on her bedframe, pacing through the hall and nibbling on instant mac and cheese she miraculously undercooked. She unlived life in-between fifteen minute arms, one after the other–because she couldn't allow herself to fall asleep unless she wanted Ettie to sleepwalk her into some freshly rotten situation. To put it frankly: she was miserable.

  After one such tricycle of misery she colpsed onto the bedspread to find company awaiting her. With the stupidly comfortable body pillow as a buffer between her chest and the firm mattress and her face smashed down into the sheets, she felt it before she saw It: the Geigeresque frisson that could belong to no one else but Ettie.

  "Hi." She sighed, opening her eyes and turning towards the source.

  "Hi." It answered her. Esther y inches away from her on top of the same sheets, without leaving an impression. Her hand stretched out in parallel to mirror Callie's.

  "I'm still really upset with you." She glowered.

  "I know."

  "Yeah. Knowing doesn't stop you, though."

  The void stared into her–unblinking, undisclosing, an unfathomable bck-box of a mind. Calliope percussed her clumsy fingers on the imitation linen, a few nails' width away from Its more slender ones. Even a bckbody gave off some radiation, like shedding tears… even Ettie shed a single one. She could glean some insight from that, maybe.

  "So… you really weren't making it up, then," she began, "the whole uh, dating thing."

  It stared at her; she knew the answer.

  "You actually, actually wanted to kiss me. Not as like, a joke. Or to fuck with me."

  She knew the answer.

  "You–" she swallowed; that hexing pink made her throat dry and her eyes water in turns. "You wanted to do more than that, even."

  Yes.

  "–Even without Erika?"

  M-hm.

  "But that makes no sense!" Callie exploded. "You don't–you don't even have… why? Why–you can't feel it. Sex is supposed to be–" she stumbled on the improper word as her cheeks bloomed a proper pink. Ettie raised one eyebrow. "Special… er, it's supposed to be reciprocal. Your own body, not someone else's. And you can't feel it." She repeated, the phonograph needle in her mind starting to skip.

  You can. I feel it through you. Isn't that enough?

  "I–" she thought about backing away, of re-entering her strange, avoidant loop. Esther was–Esther had–she'd done terrible things, even just this morning… Yet all she could think of staring into Its bnched face was the perfection of those quivered lips, that lilliputian button nose, those elysian eyes with their dark liner and shes… Calliope wasn't thinking rationally. And so long as her brain disastrophized or panicked, so too did Esther feed. If it drank her anxiety… oh, no… It was going to torture her with gay romantic yearning.

  Puppet. Do you really think me a bad lover?

  That cloying voice inside her mind–it was still more torment. The hand It rested on the bed flexed upwards; walking like a spider it skidded the short gap between them, until spindly digits caressed the cheek that faced the ceiling. Callie shivered at the touch and closed her eyes for respite from Its sight.

  "No. 'Course not." She whispered. Before she finished speaking there was hot breath on her lips. Opening her eyes showed only Ettie's, impossibly deep, so close they spanned from horizon to horizon. It breathed out, then in, but didn't put Its lips on hers. Instead It waited. Agonizingly.

  "Is this really okay? I mean, you're–" beautiful. Terrifying. She left those words unsaid.

  Someone that you could call yours?

  Her pupils dited. The radiance pouring from it was too much, so she looked down along the bed, sideways to where the shadow of Ettie's skirt collected at her thighs. The sight of creamy skin below pnted fresh nervousness within her.

  “Are you… what do you have…” she wondered aloud. Ettie's smile didn't waver.

  “We'll fit together,” she said, simply.

  This was how it should've been, Callie mused: no Erika, no third party, just her and the Horror that presented as an irresistibly attractive woman. If it could be that way going forward… well, she'd still worry, but a little less. Esther wanted this and so did she. Forget fight, flight, or–her favorite–freeze… Calliope at st chose fawn. She plunged lip-first into the abyss.

  And the abyss welcomed her: with open arms, with plush lips tasting of spiced licorice, with illusory hands running up and down her shirt desperate to index every square inch of her skin, with a menge of mallowy aromas and that kaleidoscope of butterflies refluttering within her belly. None of it could possibly be real; none of that mattered in the slightest. Its touch was electric all the same, ambiguous as to the direction of the current, as to whether the numinous hands cupping her breasts thrummed excitedly for her benefit or Its. The thrills It sent bubbling through her from below… Those were more than real enough. She sckened into bliss and let It overwhelm her, final foolish notions of rationality receding. The st of them might've been the realization: that Esther did precious few things without consciousness, if without conscience. Their inaugural tryst, Callie knew, would be utterly immacute.

  gremnoire