I stood in front of the open door, the filth of cruelty and despair wafting past me as I wrestled with paralytic doubt. I lifted one hand and looked at the appendage that would be at home in a Hollywood horror flick. Or perhaps a horror anime would be more apropos. The thought of my brother seeing me like this was more frightening than losing my memories.

  I don’t know what I went through to bring about these changes, but danger always made me reach for more. The first time I had used these powers, nearly nine years ago, it had taken me months to figure out how to put the tentacles away… but I’m a different man now.

  At first, I had assumed my blackening skin was a result of overexposure to the Limbs of the Other Side. Now I had a different theory. I still think the LotOS contributed, but now I’m thinking they were just accelerating a process that had begun the second I had accepted these powers. If that were true, the skin, transformations—maybe even the lack of bodily sensations such as hunger and pain—were part of the same power, or magic, or eldritch hoo-doo that my tentacles came from. That being the case, I should have control over it like I do my tentacles.

  I focused, tracing the various powers within myself, starting at my tentacles as I was most familiar with them. Even when I had been a part of the coven in college, I had never really done any magic myself. I mostly checked the others' work and shrugged, because none of us knew what we were doing. I consider that circle I had done in a panic to keep the Doorman at bay the first spell I had ever truly done on my own.

  The flood of information and power that entered me when I had made the deal with the Orphan had been strangely muted in my memories, as if something had put a firewall between them and my mind. Now, examining them for the first time in… hell, this might be my first time actually confronting those memories. I’ve spoken about them, and thought about them with Alice’s help… but I’ve never actually taken the time to sack up and LOOK at them. I always handled the memories like a hot pan after I’d been burned one too many times.

  Now I knew what I had actually gotten from the Orphan, however. I hadn’t just gotten some knowledge and a few shadowy tools. I had gotten a sliver of some unbelievably powerful version of myself from a higher reality. A sliver that had the knowledge of thousands, maybe millions of years of magic craft.

  I used the mental discipline Alice had spent the last year teaching me to examine those memories again. I let the trauma hit me. I let it batter me around. I let it in and ravaged what little calm and poise I still had. I noticed with a detached interest that I had begun to weep. I acknowledged the fact and set it aside. There was something in that moment with the Orphan that was hiding something from me, and I felt that I’d never truly have agency over these weird powers until I knew what it was.

  So, I mentally walked through the layers of sadness, self-recrimination, sorrow, fear, anger, and whatever negative emotion until I got to that moment where the Orphan conducted our trade… and for the first time, I finally understood what had happened.

  The human mind is surprisingly resilient. There are some people out there who have undergone so much hardship, that I am constantly amazed they aren’t in a catatonic state. But no matter how strong your mind is—and I have never held mine in particularly high regard—a twenty-year-old mind being crammed with millions of years of knowledge would not survive.

  Apparently, the Orphan realized what was happening instantly. It saw my mind shatter, and must have thought that wasn’t part of the deal because it quickly reached out and took the shattered pieces of my mind and placed it back together… or at least that’s what I assumed was happening in my memories. Obviously, the memories around the obliteration of my ability to reason and recall aren’t reliable, and I have a feeling the only reason I could remember any of this is because the Orphan wanted me to. A new wave of mental anguish flooded me, realizing that my mind had been an instant away from death.

  The Orphan deals in fairness. If you aren’t able to get value from its trade, it will do its utmost to rectify. And that’s what it did. It remade my mind, let just enough knowledge from the sliver to leak through to give me the tools to survive if I had the mettle, and then sealed the sliver away in my mind. But to make sure I’d one day have the option to fully receive the benefit of the trade, it crafted the seal with a flaw. A leak.

  Was this why I had been such a wreck? Why I cut myself off from everyone and everything? Not only did I have to deal with losing my only friends, but I, in effect, died. After being stuffed with enough knowledge to make what my life experience up to that point be insignificant…

  I shook my head violently. I could sort through the emotional ramifications of this later. I now had the clue I needed. Whenever I’m in danger, must instinctively reach for more power, more otherworldly knowledge to give myself more of an edge. I didn’t notice it on the boat because I had been wearing the LotOS pretty much constantly, and by the time I did notice it was too late to change course. Now the changes are progressing, and with each brush with death the changes get more pronounced.

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  The leak must be getting worse.

  I took a deep breath, ignoring the stench as I centered myself. I took hold of the technique I used to manipulate my tentacles and started to apply it to the rest of my body. It didn’t work, but I hadn’t expected it to. My tentacles were additions, something spawned from who knows where, while my body was something being altered. I kept searching, my mind feeling like I was reaching into an unfamiliar bag trying to find an item I only had vague knowledge of. I got the impression my silent passenger was watching with mild interest; like when a toddler starts to draw better than expected.

  I used the failed experience to broaden my search, my technique. I didn’t let my growing frustration or impatience influence my methodology. I kept at it, a strange detachment from my surroundings overcoming me. I had the feeling that time was and was not passing around me as I worked.

  Then I felt my hands shift.

  THERE!

  I focused on what I had stumbled on, and suddenly the knowledge was just there. Everything that was happening to my body. The reason why I had stopped feeling hunger, my black skin, the change in my hands… all here. I couldn’t make sense of it. I could sense a logic behind everything, but that logic was so foreign to human thought that I felt a sort of mental hemorrhage the more I tried to make sense of it. I shoved aside my desire for sense and just accepted the knowledge for now, coming away with an instinctual competence that I couldn’t explain. Like how to make your ears wiggle.

  When I opened my eyes, my hands were back to the way they were when I had entered this place. I had a new layer of sweat covering me, I felt bloated and nauseous from all the food I had crammed into myself, and most of all I felt like I was about to collapse.

  Maybe turning off the thing that was keeping all my discomfort at bay was a bad idea.

  Still, with knowledge came power. Not just power in the sense of might, but the power to solve the problems I had been facing. With another thought, the tentacles on my back shimmered and faded out of sight. Most of my skin was still ink-black, but at least I didn’t look like a monster from a shitty anime. I just look like a guy with a nearly complete full-body tattoo and some big ass nails.

  Before I could hesitate further, I stepped into the prison.

  I was taking my third step when the smell grew unbearable. I began to dry heave, barely keeping my food down. I had to retreat outside and drop my bindle to the ground, breathing deeply the “fresh” air with my hands on my knees to get my stomach under control. I had heard somewhere that forcing yourself to smile when you’re feeling pukie helps, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it with all the human misery behind me. Instead, I undid my bindle. I had made it from a big T-shirt I had found in one of the boxes, and now I pulled it over my head and down until the collar was resting on my nose. The collar was elastic and small enough I didn’t need to further adjust it, I just bunched the rest of the shirt on my shoulders and around my neck and I had a shitty mask.

  It was already helping. The musty smell of the T-shirt soon replaced the smell of waste. I debated soaking the shirt in a can of LaCroix for another layer of anti-smell, but I didn’t want to have to fight for air through soaked cloth. Before I could delay further, I growled and went back through the doors.

  I had called the room a prison before, but that was... very wrong. A “prison” brings to mind certain ideas and imagery. Even the shittiest prisons in the world allowed a person room to stand. Calling this place a concentration camp was closer to the mark, but still didn’t fully convey just how horrible these people were being treated.

  I remember seeing a fast food documentary while I was in college, where they were showing where chicken nuggets come from. The horrible conditions in which the chickens were kept, in rows and rows, so tightly packed together that they were literally shitting on each other, and that shit would fall off and hit the ones below in a waterfall of filth. Most of the chickens would never see sunlight.

  It was much the same here. Cages just tall enough for a man my height to sit if he hunched, and long enough that I could lay down if I curled into a ball, stacked three high. The floors of the cages were the same material as the walls, a thick wire mesh. As I examined the closest person, I noted idly that he was dead, and that his body was covered in sores from not being able to move. The next person I examined was alive, barely. She was so thin I could count her ribs and see her heartbeat in her throat, her sides covered in sores like the first. Hers, however, were weeping a pink puss on the corpse below her. The person above her was much the same, but the angle was such that I couldn’t tell if they were alive.

  I realized I had stopped moving. The smell was making it through the shirt, but it wasn’t affecting me like it had before. Helpless rage was boiling up through my stomach into my chest. I wanted to get these people out of the cages, to start helping them toward the exit, where hopefully the Elysium squad was still holding out. But mostly I wanted to find those responsible and rrrrrend them with my claws.

  The sudden violent impulse startled me out of my rage. My mind shook, cascading back and forth like a pinball before I recognized the source; by accepting the knowledge of the sliver, I had internalized some of it. And that version of me, that millions of years old off-brand Cthulhu… I get the impression he isn’t the nicest person.

  “Fuck a duck,” I muttered, resuming my walk through the misery.

  I couldn’t help these people. I was here to get one person, the only family I felt I owed anything to. The blood stick told me he was ahead—and now that I was focusing on it, the signal was much better. Had my transformation deadened the signal? The thought shot a bolt through me. The implication was frightening.

  I shook the thought away. I needed to save Conner. In coming to save Conner, I had already helped these people in the best way I could. The authorities knew about this base now. We had decimated their forces. It was only a matter of time before help would arrive.

  Hating myself for my justifications, I pressed onward.