Survivor’s Guilt.

  A leviathan of truth, shrouded in the murk of an ocean hidden beneath the world; a pelagic colossus more tremendous and terrible than any mere self-hatred or internalised loathing. A hundred feet in length, all scales and tendrils and a million hooked barbs, slathered with paralytic toxins; a hundred thousand tonnes of undeniable weight, displacing a pinprick worth of water from that great shadowed sea. It stared back at me from within Maisie’s aquarium, from within an eyeball into which I could have dived and lost myself, from behind a curtain of cracked glass, creaking and groaning under the pressure of an abyssal eternity.

  She was me, and I was her. This component of myself — forgotten, abandoned, drowned but not dead — had grown so vast down here in the rotten sump of my heart. Heather Abyssal, subjected to all the changes of deep-sea gigantism, biding her time, conserving her resources, brooding over her plans. Until this moment.

  She — I, me, myself — stared into the little steel room, unblinking and unmoving, with an eye the colour of both darkness and dawn.

  My voice was all but gone, I had to grope for the words.

  “But— I don’t— I don’t … ”

  Lonely Heather — the Other Me, sitting in huddle down on the floor, with tear-stained cheeks and grease-matted hair and trickles of blood seeping from between the clenched fingers of her right fist — said, “Don’t deny it.”

  “But—”

  “How can you deny it, Heather?!” she shrieked, suddenly shrill. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?! Don’t reject it now, it’s too late for that.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “It’s right there!” she screamed, going red in the face, glowing through her tears. “Look at the size of it! How can you pretend not to see it?! It’s so big, there’s nowhere left to hide it. And I’ve been in here alongside it, the whole time. You got to run around and have your fun little adventure, rescuing your friends, having sex with Raine, celebrating your victories, beating your trauma — and I’ve been in here, with the guilt! You wanted to see the inside of the Box, you wanted to win, you wanted to do this your way? Well here’s your reward! Don’t you dare turn away now. You don’t have the right.”

  Everybody else started talking all at once, trying to say things to Lonely Heather. Her outburst, her panic, her pain, it drew the instant and unconditional sympathy of my — our! — friends and companions and lovers. Raine spoke to her in a soft, safe, comforting, confident voice, the same voice she had always used on me in the past, the voice which told me everything was going to be okay, the same voice she had used on our very first meeting. Evelyn snapped my name, our name, trying to draw me back out of the pit of despair with the same hard-nosed care she always had used. Lozzie hopped forward, poncho fluttering, angling for a hug. Twil called out reassurances, asking if ‘I’ needed helping to my feet. Zheng said something about how even in two, the shaman speaks wisdom. Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight called me kitten. Even Jan spoke a few words of comfort, though she knew me so much less than any others present. Tenny’s distant fluttery trilling reached in from beyond the little steel room, full of care. The Saye Fox whined. Eileen took a step forward, still carrying me upon her back, as if she could scoop up this other me as well and carry her just the same. The Forest Knight somehow went ‘clank’, the closest he had ever come to vocalisation.

  Even the six Abyssal Heathers drifted forward, tentacles waving in the air.

  But all those efforts were in vain. Lonely Little Me screeched with pain and rejection.

  “Don’t touch me!” she shrieked, cringing away from Raine’s hands, flailing with one arm, cradling her bloody fist to her chest as if to protect the pointless little pebble within. “Don’t— don’t— you can’t— you can’t—”

  “Woah, woah,” Raine was saying, calming her like a wild animal. “Heather, Heather, easy, easy, it’s just me, it’s just us—”

  “She’s going to fucking hurt herself!” Evelyn shouted. “Somebody— Twil, Praem, restrain her, at least—”

  “I don’t think it is our place to do so,” said Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight, her measured tone somehow cutting through the chaos.

  I finally dragged my eyes downward from the Survivor’s Guilt. I looked down, focused on the Loneliest And Most Pitiful Part Of Myself.

  “But I’ve acknowledged my survivor’s guilt,” I said. “I’ve accepted it.”

  Lonely Heather stared back up at me, more exhausted than I had ever seen my own face in real life; she was me at my worst, at the end of my rope. The bags beneath her eyes, the twitching of her lips, the pasty pale, drained, bloodless complexion, the proof of borderline malnutrition in her shrunken frame and hollow cheeks. She was me, but done and over and ready to give up on life. Me but defeated. Me without friends or allies.

  The puddle beneath the cracked window was slowly approaching her backside, each droplet of water adding to the brackish stench. She clutched her pebble so tight that her fist shook.

  “More denial,” she said. “Really? I don’t have the energy left for this, Heather.”

  “I’m not denying anything,” I went on. “I truly mean it. I accepted the survivor’s guilt, long ago. I didn’t lock it away. I didn’t pretend it didn’t exist. I didn’t deny it, or suppress it, or forget about it. I’ve never forgotten about it, not once. Every night, every day, even when I’m feeling happy or fulfilled, it’s always there. It’s gotten easier to deal with, that’s true, but the hole it formed, the wound, whatever you want to call it … it’s never, ever, ever gone away. A year ago, when I first really acknowledged it, I spent weeks so torn up that I could barely think about anything else. Accepting that I left Maisie behind, that all this was real, that Wonderland, the Eye, all of it really happened?” I shook my head. “It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. The guilt never goes away.” I gestured from Eileen’s back, at the Leviathan of Guilt which floated just the other side of the fractured glass. “How can this be survivor’s guilt? Are you sure you’re not mistaken?”

  Lonely Little Heather began to sob and laugh, both at the same time, both emotions contained within the same breath. She smiled at me with bitter recrimination through a veil of cold tears.

  “You’re so— hic— stupid, Heather,” she whined. “You’re so determined to kill me, to forget all about me, that you’ll even deny—”

  “I’m not going to kill you!” I snapped, my temper frayed to breaking point. “Stop making this all about you! I need to know, how can that be survivor’s guilt? How can this be possible?”

  “—the evidence right in front of your own eyes!” she screamed. “It’s right in front of you! It’s right there! Look at it! Look at it and think!”

  “I am looking at it!” I screamed back. “Why won’t you explain!?”

  “Then you’re blind! You’re so fucking blind! You’ve always been so fucking blind!”

  “Just tell me what I’m looking at!”

  “Survivor’s guilt!” she screeched. “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck you, too!” I screamed right back at her. My face was burning with heat. Red darkness throbbed in my peripheral vision. I tried to think of a Shakespeare quote to hurl back into her face, but up close like this, the disgust was overpowering, and all my intellect crumbled to nothing. “Fuck you, Heather!” I screeched. “Fuck—”

  A blur of sharp steel sliced through the air between us.

  Raine’s machete, severing the very breath which carried our mirrored rage.

  Lonely Heather stuttered to a halt. My words swallowed themselves like a bile-scarred throat. We both blinked in shock.

  Raine had stood up and stepped to an equidistant point between myself and me, machete outstretched, chin up, eyes gone hard. She slowly looked back and forth between us, lingering on both us Heathers. She wore the most unsmiling expression I had ever seen on her face.

  “Stop,” said Raine, so very gently, first to Lonely Heather, then to me. “Stop. Stop it, Heather. You stop this, right now.”

  Lonely Heather sobbed, “But she won’t acknowledge—”

  I interrupted, “And she won’t tell—”

  “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” Raine said. She paused, then broke into a smile, for both us Heathers. “See? You ain’t the only one here who can quote a bunch of Shakespeare to make a point. This is my executive decision, Heather.”

  “Which Heather?” I asked. “Which one?”

  Raine added a frown to her grin. “I can’t see no difference between you,” she said. “To my eyes, you’re both just Heather. Lonely part, ruthless part, rude part, it’s all bullshit. You’re both the same. And I will protect you, Heather, against anything. Even against yourself. No more self-harm.”

  A great shuddering sigh came from my right — from Evee, down in her wheelchair, framed against the cold steel wall of the cold steel room, with Praem holding the handles of her wheelchair. I’d rarely seen Evee so pale and shaken. Her eyes flickered between us and us and us, staring at the giant eyeball beyond the glass with a tremor in her throat.

  “Thank you, Raine,” Evelyn said, tight and tense. “I think I speak for all of us when I say that this … this ‘inner conflict’ should be resolved as politely as possible. Please?”

  Twil cleared her throat. “Yeeeeeeah, let’s not provoke the giant Heather. Hey? Sounds like a plan?”

  “Yes,” Jan added in a tiny voice. “I concur.”

  Eileen said, “I agree also. Also, ow.”

  “Ah!” I loosened my grip when I realised what I’d been doing — digging my fingers into Eileen’s collarbone, gripping as hard as I could. “S-sorry. Sorry!”

  Raine lowered her machete. “Alright, Heather. It’s alright. Can you talk to yourself without being abusive, now?”

  Lonely Me just stared at the floor, defeated and dead. I stared down at her and tired not to feel disgusted.

  “I still need to understand,” I said. “How can that be survivor’s guilt?”

  Lonely Heather sniffed loudly, sniffing back her tears. “Will you believe me, if I explain? Or will you deny it again?”

  “If you tell the truth.”

  She laughed — a single hollow choking sound. “You hate me so much.”

  “I— I don’t,” I lied. “I don’t hate myself, I … just … it’s always been hard, looking in the mirror, and … and seeing … ”

  Lonely Heather raised her eyes. Her head of greasy, matted, mousey hair was framed by the vast eyeball behind the cracked glass. My words stuck in my throat.

  “Seeing Maisie,” she finished for me.

  “Well … well, yes.” I sighed. “My own face is a constant reminder of what we lost. How could it not be? We were — we are — identical twins.”

  “A reminder of what we lost,” echoed Lonely Me. “You’re so close.”

  “Just … just explain. Help me to understand.”

  “How can you understand?” she asked, her voice so full of bitter venom and tears. “You’re up there, lording it over me, carried on … on ‘her’ back. Being carried by the thing that did this to us. You’re surrounded by your friends. You’ve got all the support in the world, and I only have—”

  “You have it too, Heathy!” Lozzie chirped. “We’re all here for you, too! You’re Heather! You’re you! You you you!”

  Broken Heather stared at Lozzie for a moment, but then she looked down, her face collapsing into self-loathing and loss. “No, I don’t. All I have is myself. All I can rely on is myself. If you want to understand, then you need to come down to my level, Heather. Get off the Eye’s back. Come down here. On the floor. Where we belong.”

  “We do not ‘belong on the floor’,” I tutted. “You hate yourself too, listen to yourself.”

  Evelyn cleared her throat. “I do not think it is a good idea to set Heather down, in any case. She is still wounded, even if she’s not showing it, she … ”

  Evelyn trailed off as Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight put a finger to her own lips.

  “Do not forget,” murmured the Yellow Princess, “that we stand on a stage. The spotlight lies upon Heather. The scenery reflects the turmoil of her heart. This room, the aquarium, the glass, all of it is her insides. We are merely interjections in this conversation with herself. Do not attempt to dictate. The script will buck us off, if we dare to disrupt.”

  Evelyn hissed, “Yes, fine, but what about the giant fucking sea-monster?”

  “That is Heather, too.”

  Lonely Heather and I both glanced at my friends as they spoke, but then returned our gazes to each other, like magnetic fields pulled together.

  “Look,” I said. “Rather than me joining you down there, you should join me up here. Let … um … let Raine take your hand and lift you up.” I sighed, disgusted by the idea, but I had to try. “You don’t have to be down there.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Ah?”

  Lonely Me sighed. “Maybe we’re not so different after all. You think it, the same as I do. We belong on the floor. We don’t deserve to stand.”

  My turn to sigh. “I’m not going to pretend I like you. Just hearing your voice, it makes me angry, it makes me … want to … snap at you. But you’re me, fine, I accept that, or I’m trying to. And I’m pretty sure I won’t wallow in sadness, not when rescuing Maisie is so very close.”

  “You will.”

  I sighed again, temper fraying. “What does that mean?”

  Lonely Heather paused for a long, long moment. Then she sighed and closed her eyes. “I tried to stop this. I tried as hard as I could. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Heather. You’re getting what you asked for.”

  “Warn me about what? I can hardly take a warning seriously if you won’t explain!”

  Lonely Heather opened her eyes — suddenly calm and serene, desolate as stagnant water in a shell crater. “Do you remember what happened in Wonderland ten years ago, when we lost Maisie?”

  A fist of ice grabbed my heart. “I … o-of course I do. Of course I remember losing Maisie, I remember all of it, I wish I—”

  “Because I didn’t,” said Lonely Heather. “I did not remember all the details.”

  “But I do—”

  “No,” she said. “You remember the physical details. You remember crawling through that portal beneath our bed, as if our limbs were compelled. You remember the taste of ash, the smell of burnt stone, the sight of all those titans at the rim. You remember screaming, our screaming, Maisie’s screaming. You remember trying to turn back, and finding that the portal was suddenly a hundred miles away, like the landscape was playing a trick on us. You remember the monsters, the misshapen things in the ruins. You remember scrabbling around in the black, breaking our nails and bloodying our hands on the jagged, scorched rocks, desperate for somewhere to hide. You remember clinging together with Maisie, weeping, screaming for mum or dad to come find us. You remember the way we whispered to each other, trying to keep each other’s spirits up. You remember the things that drifted through the ruins, the things that came and went, the things we could not comprehend, not as small children lost beyond reality. And you remember the Eye. You remember as it began to open—”

  “Yes!” I snapped, shaking inside. I hiccuped once, so hard my throat hurt. “Yes, I— of course I remember that, of course I— why are you repeating all this—”

  “But you don’t remember how we escaped,” said Lonely, Bitter, Knowledgeable me. “I know that, because I didn’t remember it either. Not until I listened to her.”

  “ … to who?”

  “WE LEFT HER BEHIND.”

  The voice which answered my question was a nightmare from the deepest, darkest, blackest corner of illimitable eternity — low and slow, a rumbling murmur like a current creeping along an ocean trench. The little steel room shook with the vibration of that voice; little trickles of water pulsed out from the cracks in the glass, while the cracks themselves lengthened and widened, spider-webbing outward. Half my friends gasped; somebody screamed. Zheng started to growl, then stopped, cowed in a way I had never heard from her before. Twil tucked her tail between her legs and whined. Six Abyssal Heathers froze where they stood, tentacles stilled.

  Lonely Me closed her eyes, crying slow and silent tears.

  “Traitor,” hissed the voice of a drowned giant. “Weakling. Coward.”

  All the breath was gone from my lungs. My flesh was numb and empty. My thoughts were ash and rot.

  Survivor’s Guilt moved behind the glass — she swam upward, her eye vanishing beyond sight, replaced first by the sharp sweep of a jagged jaw, then metre after metre after metre of abyssal flesh, of night-dark scales and peach-fuzz fur, of lashing tendrils and tentacles by the thousand, trailing great membranes of inky darkness behind her. Her legs were a dozen, branching and strong, tipped by webbed flippers and claws as long as my own body.

  She swam upward, up beyond the little steel room. Then she returned from below, the glass wall framing her opposite eye.

  She stopped, hung in the water before us, and said: “Tell her.”

  Lonely Heather opened her eyes, still crying slow tears, and said, “We left her behind. We left Maisie behind.”

  “We—” I almost choked on the word. “We did, yes. I felt that too, I know that. But it wasn’t our fault. We were nine years old, we were a child, how can we blame … ”

  Lonely Heather raised her right hand, still clenched in a tight fist. Blood had dried between her fingers and upon her knuckles. She opened the fist with great difficulty, easing back fingers which had been squeezing tight for hours and hours. She winced and hissed at the pain, fingers trembling with effort. Raine moved forward to help, to cradle her, to offer comfort, but Lonely Heather hissed at her with frustrated spite.

  A trembling hand opened before me, palm up.

  And there lay the pebble, slick with my blood.

  “When … ” Lonely Heather started, voice raw. She swallowed and tried again. “When the Eye began to open, we and Maisie, we were clinging together, huddled in the burned out ruins of some ancient building. We said things to each other, but the words don’t matter now. What mattered was the idea.”

  My heart felt as if it had been dipped in ice. “The idea?”

  “Mm.” Lonely me nodded. “We had an idea. See, when you’re trapped beneath the Eye, being taken apart piece by piece, burned out atom by atom, you can still think. You can still plan. Thoughts take eternities, but they do happen. So, we and Maisie, we had this idea. How do you get an Eye to close?”

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  I stared at that blood-slick pebble on her — my — palm.

  “A speck of grit,” I whispered.

  Lonely Heather nodded. She swallowed, dry and hard. “A speck of grit. A grain of sand. It’s enough to make an eyeball blink, isn’t it? I think we … Maisie and us, I mean, I think we got it from a cartoon, some children’s show we can’t recall now. Maybe something we’d seen a couple of weeks or months before. Sand in the eyes. A speck of grit against the cornea. But here’s the rub — one of us had to become that speck of grit.”

  “Never,” I hissed. “I would never. I would never have sacrificed Maisie just to get away. That’s a lie! That has to be a lie!”

  “You didn’t,” said Lonely Heather. She was crying freely now — not sobbing, just red-eyed and wet-cheeked, tears rolling down her face to drip from her chin. “We didn’t. Of course we didn’t. We couldn’t have lived with that. No, we came up with the idea together, we and Maisie. And you — us — we were going to do it, to let Maisie get away. We were going to make ourselves into that speck of grit, so the Eye would blink, and Maisie could get away.”

  The memory began to come back, leaking in like poison at the edges of my consciousness. I started to shake, clinging to Eileen’s shoulders with all my fading strength. I felt a wave of terrible nausea. I felt hot and cold both at once. My chest ached like my heart would burst.

  “But we—”

  “We were so scared,” said Lonely Heather. “We were terrified. Who wouldn’t be? We were nine years old. We didn’t know— we didn’t want to— didn’t want to—”

  “To die,” I said, filling in where this other part of me could not. “We didn’t want to die. But then—”

  “We hesitated,” she said. “Just for a split second. We would have done it in the next.”

  “But then, Maisie—”

  “—went—”

  “—first.”

  “WE FAILED HER,” murmured that great and terrible beast, that hidden truth, Survivor’s Guilt. “COWARD. WEAKLING. TRAITOR.”

  The knowledge was like ice covering all my organs. I felt my innards slow, my brain darken, my eyes fill with tears, my throat close up.

  Part of me wanted to die. Perhaps it had already.

  I must have muttered ‘put me down’, because a moment later Eileen did exactly that. She squatted at my command, lowering me until my feet touched the floor. I let go of her, staggering free from the grip of my surrogate mother. The Praem Plushie was still tucked inside my yellow blanket, so I plucked her free and pressed her into Eileen’s hands, ignoring all protests to the contrary. My friends reached out to touch me as I lurched forward, hands brushing my arms and flanks and ribs; even the Abyssal Heathers joined in, allowing contact at last, giving me a taste of the recombination I had desired so much.

  But I felt nothing. I deserved none of those touches, none of that support, none of that love. I felt empty and pointless. The creaking pain in my ribs was gone, because the Survivor’s Guilt was right here now, right in front of me. What need did it have to burst free, when I had finally acknowledged it? The pain in my leg returned, overwhelming the final dregs of morphine in my bloodstream. My gut, my head, my whole body was a bruise, a mirror of my soul.

  I collapsed to my knees, facing my Lonely Self, so barely two feet separated us from each other.

  “That’s how we got away,” she was saying. “Maisie sacrificed herself for us. She bought our life, bought us ten years of grace, by spending her own. And we didn’t ask her. We didn’t push her. We didn’t betray—”

  “YES WE DID.”

  Survivor’s Guilt blotted out all thought, shaking the little steel room with her bubbling murmur, louder than any sound on Earth. Lonely Heather winced and quivered, as if beneath the fist of a giant. I gasped in shock, looking up at that one huge eyeball which filled the spider-webbed glass wall.

  My words felt like dust. “Why could I never remember this before now?”

  “Because,” said Lonely Heather. “We locked it away. We buried it deep. Because it’s so very small.” She gestured with her bloodied palm, cradling the pebble in her wounded flesh. “Such a small detail, isn’t it? Just one tiny detail of how we got away and Maisie did not. Half the screaming, when we returned, that very night she was taken, it was about that knowledge, the knowledge that Maisie flung herself into the Eye, for us.”

  I shook my head, barely able to see through the tears. “How? How could I ever forget such a—”

  “The treatment,” said Lonely Me. “The doctors and the nurses. The drugs, even if they didn’t work. The therapy, the hospitals. Cygnet.” Her voice dripped with venom as she spoke the name of this place. “The treatment worked, Heather, even if it was for the wrong things. It ‘healed’ us, by letting us lock the guilt away.”

  Behind Lonely Heather, the Guilt shifted in her vast tank of water.

  “But it grew,” she hissed. “Down here in the dark. When this dream was woven, it joined Maisie in the prison, in the Box, because that’s where it knows it should be. Punished and imprisoned, alongside our twin.”

  A hot, wet, ragged sob seized my throat. “This is … this is what it feels like? When somebody sacrifices themselves for you?”

  “Yes.” She sobbed too. “Yes. We left her behind.”

  “I don’t— I don’t want this! I never would have asked her for this, I never—”

  “WE LEFT HER BEHIND.”

  I clamped my eyes shut and fought the tears; there had to be something onto which I could grasp. “But— no, wait, no, no. We didn’t do anything! We didn’t push her, you said it yourself, it was just a moment of hesitation.”

  “Yes,” said Desolate And Empty Me. “That was all it took, less than a second of hesitation.”

  “By a nine year old girl!” I almost screamed. “I was — we were a child! Nine! We couldn’t have— we can’t blame ourselves for that! We can’t! It doesn’t make any sense, it’s irrational, it’s—”

  THUMP.

  Survivor’s Guilt shook the little steel room. The cracks in the glass spread wider. Little trickles of water gushed forth. My words choked off.

  “That’s why they call it survivor’s guilt,” said Lonely Heather. “It doesn’t have to be rational. We survived, but did we really deserve to? Why us, and not Maisie? Why did we deserve to survive, when she didn’t? Did we hesitate because our desire to live was more powerful than our love for our sister? Would we do it differently, if we could turn back time and—”

  “Yes!” I yelled. “Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times, yes! If I had to do it all again, I would do it differently, I would take her place, I would, I would!”

  Lonely Heather managed to smile, a tiny broken flutter through her mask of tears. “That just gives it more power. We left her behind, Heather. We left her behind. We left her behind!”

  Survivor’s Guilt pressed the orbit of her eye against the glass. Tiny cracking sounds filled the room. Water seeped and squeezed from the network of fractures.

  “Yes,” I said, “we did. But now we’re here to rescue her.”

  Lonely Me smiled all the harder. “You’re still clinging to that?”

  I shook my head. “We don’t deserve this,” I hissed. “We don’t. We can’t keep hurting ourself over it. That doesn’t get us any closer to Maisie. It doesn’t. We are here for one reason. To bring her home.”

  Lonely Me, Desolate Me, Abandoned Me, she started to sob and wail, wracked by all the guilt I had kept locked up for so very long.

  I fought one of the greatest battles of my life, compressed into a single moment — I stared into the face I found so vile and wretched, so ugly and full of hate, my own face, twisted by guilt and anger and the darkest of my own impulses.

  All I was doing was looking into a mirror.

  I reached out with one hand, to her, to touch—

  Survivor’s Guilt thrashed and raged behind the glass, shaking the little steel room like a cork in a storm. The floor and walls vibrated with the leviathan’s fury, shuddering and drumming beneath the giant’s fists.

  The rage went on and on. Just when I thought this was it, this was the end, and she would shatter the glass asunder, she began to subside. The shaking trailed off. Survivor’s Guilt pressed her eye back to the glass, bulging with anger.

  All my friends stayed silent, frozen in shock.

  Lonely Heather hissed, “Don’t touch me!”

  “But— why—”

  “Because there is somebody here who should feel guilty, somebody who deserves all of this.” Lonely Heather raised her free hand and pointed past my shoulder. “Her.”

  I did not need to glance over my shoulder to know that Lonely Heather was pointing at Eileen. But I looked anyway, behind myself, into the pink dawn-glow of Eileen’s gaze.

  Eileen said: “I did not know this was here. I could not see inside this part of myself. Something was hiding! I did not know. I am sorry, Heather.”

  “You see?” I asked, turning back to Lonely Heather. “How can she—”

  “She was responsible for all this in the first place!” Lonely Heather spat at me. “She did this! She dragged us to Wonderland, she kidnapped us, she—”

  “That’s not true,” I said, shaking my head, surprised by my own calm. “We know that’s not true. A person did this, a human being, a mage we’ve never even met. You were there, you heard Taika’s story just as well as I did. A human mage did this. By accident, by chance, without knowing what was happening. It could have happened to any other pair of twins, not us and Maisie. Luck of the draw. Random chance. Eileen didn’t even know what was happening, she wasn’t capable of understanding, let alone doing anything differently. She never intended any of this. She never intended anything! That doesn’t mean the damage wasn’t real, but … all this was a mistake. You know that as well as I do. Stop lying to yourself.”

  Lonely Heather opened her mouth as if to continue the argument, then closed her mouth and fell silent.

  “See?” I pressed on, feeling a surge of confidence. Maybe there really was another way out of this internal war. “You know she wasn’t truly to blame. You know she’s not some evil cackling villain. You can’t keep up that fiction when she’s standing right there, helping me, helping you, helping to rescue Maisie!”

  Lonely Me raised her eyes — hollow, empty, defeated. “You’re right. You’re more right than you understand, she did not intend any of this. But you won’t like the place that leads us.”

  “Then tell me!”

  Lonely Heather raised the pebble again. “What does a speck of grit become, trapped inside soft tissue?”

  “I— I don’t follow—”

  “Sealed off from everything else, locked away from the world, wrapped in layers of protection. The Eye doesn’t keep people trapped, Heather. It never even understood concepts like that, I know that full well, yes. And … Eileen, up there, do you think she has the ruthlessness to keep a person imprisoned, to deny them freedom, to make the world forget all about them?” Lonely Heather shook her head. “No. That wasn’t her. That was all Maisie. She made herself into grit.”

  I raised my eyes to the interior of the little steel room — the Box, the walls, the high-tech prison. Maisie was at the core, trapped within so many layers of metal and liquid and concrete and brick.

  “ … a pearl,” I whispered.

  Lonely Me nodded, “A pearl, formed around a spec of grit. In reality it was not a physical process, of course, it was metaphysical. Her soul was grit. The pearl is metaphysics. The Box was just the best possible metaphor for it. A place within the Eye, full of things that it could not expel, dangers, toxins, irritants. And that’s what Maisie made herself into, something the Eye could not expel. Something it had to encase. Maisie did that, for us.”

  “And this is why the world forgot her? All this time? This is why?”

  “She edited reality. Not the Eye. And she did it for us.”

  “And—”

  “And Survivor’s Guilt has joined her, because that’s where we should be. It should always have been us, not her. That’s where we should be. In the Box. Forgotten.”

  I shook my head. “No. No. We can free her now! That’s what I’m trying to tell you! We’ve already won, we—”

  THUMP went the leviathan behind the glass.

  Lonely Heather just stared at me, framed against the giant eyeball of Survivor’s Guilt.

  “Eileen still has to die,” she said.

  I almost laughed; instead I hiccuped. “But why?”

  Lonely Heather’s mask of tears cracked; she pulled a sad smile, trembling with agony and loss.

  “This is what I was trying to protect you from, Heather,” she said. “I wanted to make it so that you would never have to learn about the survivor’s guilt. I was going to kill Eileen, take all the responsibility upon myself, accept all the blame, the hatred, the scorn, the rejection. Maisie would be freed! And you could blame me, you could heap your recrimination upon me. You could kill me, imprison me, forget all about me, it wouldn’t have mattered-”

  “You matter! I matter!”

  “—and her?” Lonely Heather gestured over her shoulder, at the eyeball on the other side of the glass. “She would have been satisfied with that, with Eileen’s death. How do you think she feels about Eileen?! Hmm?! How do you think she feels about our new surrogate mother? You think she believes we deserve that happiness? Of course we don’t!”

  “Eileen has nothing to do with it! Why would killing her free Maisie?”

  “If she dies, the Survivor’s Guilt, it … it would change. It would become something else. And then it would be on our side.”

  “Revenge?”

  “Probably.” Lonely Heather shrugged. “All I know is that we need it, we need her. We need every part of ourselves. We need it’s help, to free Maisie.”

  I glanced at the glass, at the darkly beautiful leviathan in the vast tank of water. “Why? Can’t we just crack open the Box now? We’re here, we’ve won! Nobody has to die, there’s no need for revenge, there’s no need for any of this!”

  Lonely Me shook her head. “The Box — the pearl — it’s so much deeper than what you can see here. Oceans of water, endless seas stretching down into an abyss. She told me about it, you see. The Survivor’s Guilt, she told me all about it, those fathomless black depths that go down forever. We could crack open this glass and it would take decades for the water to empty. It would drown the dream, and all of us with it.” Lonely Heather finally looked over her shoulder, at the dark eye behind the glass. “She is the only thing which can dive that deep and survive. She is the only part of us who can make it and live. And she wants revenge.”

  I shook my head, numb and distant. “Then the only thing keeping Maisie imprisoned now is—”

  “Us.” Lonely Heather turned back to me, eyes like used up coals. “Yes. You, actually. You have to kill Eileen. You have to take revenge. You have to give up that connection, that contact, that happiness. Because we don’t deserve it.”

  “Deserving has nothing to do with it!” I hissed. “I won’t kill—”

  “You will. We’re both ruthless, Heather. We’re all ruthless. You thought that was just me. To be fair, I thought it was just me, too. But I was so very wrong. She’s ruthless, too, and she wants revenge. You’re ruthless as well, and you want to rescue Maisie. All I wanted to do was protect you, but I’ve failed. Do you want to know the real difference between you and I?”

  “No, no—”

  “You still think you can be a hero. I know that we can’t.”

  All around me, the dream seemed to slow down, to go grey and cold and empty. The dream reflected my insides. And now I was hollow.

  “Survivor’s Guilt has to be placated. Revenge is the only way. Revenge, or our death. And our death won’t bring Maisie back.”

  Lonely Me was right. This dream did not have a happy ending, because I wasn’t a hero.

  I was nothing.

  I was dead.

  A terrible cold certainty came over me.

  With a neck made of rusty wire and eyes made of dead stars, I turned and looked over my shoulder, at Eileen.

  She said nothing in return. My surrogate mother, the mother I always wanted, she just held my gaze — without judgement, without accusation, without fear.

  All my friends looked on, and nobody said a word, because this was not their dream. Mouths stopped up by the inevitable script, morality and better angels held back by the logic of a dream.

  Six Abyssal Heathers unsheathed their claws, moving to flank Eileen from both sides. Void-dark eyes narrowed. Toothy jaws opened with soft hissing.

  I was no hero.

  I was a traitor, a coward, and a weakling. The part of me which thought I could be a hero was dead now, and all the parts of me were finally in agreement.

  I would do anything to rescue Maisie. I had promised myself that, long ago. And if that meant accepting the guilt for a murder, then I would become any kind of monster, any kind of traitor, any kind of evil. This way we would share the guilt together, forever. This way, Lonely Me would see where her philosophy ended. This way the Survivor’s Guilt would have to watch it happen. This way they would know that I was right all along, I was right, I was nothing, and we would all roil in our ugliness together and hate ourselves for the rest of our short and pitiful—

  Eileen opened her mouth, clutching the Praem Plushie to her chest.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Whatever you choose, it’s okay, Heather. But please, when the dream is over, if I am gone, please love yourself.”

  I vomited.

  Not much — just a string of sticky bile laced with a bit of blood. But I hacked and coughed and heaved and spluttered, as if I had just burst from the surface of a sea of filth. I sucked down deep breaths of clean air, even if it reeked of brackish waters and the stench of rotten guilt.

  The Six Abyssal Heathers paused. They felt the change, too.

  I turned back to Lonely Heather, with drool hanging from my lips and the taste of vomit in my mouth.

  “I’m no hero,” I croaked. “But I know what I am.”

  “You can’t!” she hissed. “You can’t resist the Survivor’s Guilt. Look at how big she is. Look how she’s grown. If she won’t help us rescue Maisie, we can’t do it alone! If she breaks free, she’ll kill us all, long before we have any hope of reaching the centre of the aquarium. The water will drown us all, the dream itself will drown. You can’t deny this, Heather. You can’t!”

  “I trust Maisie,” I said. “I trust Maisie.”

  Lonely Me blinked. So did the Survivor’s Guilt, with a giant eyelid behind the glass.

  “W-what?” Lonely Heather stammered. “I don’t—”

  “Maisie told me to bring my friends,” I said, wiping the spittle from my lips on my sleeve. “And I have done exactly that. For a very long time, I didn’t know what difference that would make. I didn’t know why she told me to do that. But now, I think I understand. I think she knew this would happen, this splitting of ourselves. She knew that I would feel survivor’s guilt. She knew it would grow. And she gave me the weapon to fight it.”

  Lonely Me shook her head. “What does that have to do with—”

  “I hate you,” I said — without any hate. “When I look at your face, I feel disgust, and anger, and loathing. You’re so … irritating, and misguided, and … and just plain stupid. But also you’re me. I hate myself. I loathe what we did, leaving Maisie behind, even if it wasn’t our fault, even if we were nine, even if no rational person would ever blame us. And that’s the result.” I pointed at the glass wall, at the Survivor’s Guilt. “But … but … ” I stared to tear up again. “How can I hate myself, when I see the way Raine looks at you?”

  I glanced up at Raine. She was frozen as if afraid to speak.

  “How can I hate you?” I repeated, back to Myself again. “When I saw the way every one of my friends rushed to your aid? Evelyn was worried by the tone in your voice over the radio. Lozzie thought you might be hurt. Twil acted like she did when we first met, walking into some dark, terrible place which had nothing to do with her, just to see if you needed help. Zheng, Sevens, Tenny. Even Jan, and we barely know her, by comparison. The Knights. The Cattys. All of them! Even Evee’s grandmother, a fox with the brain of a mage! So many people, all bent toward helping me — helping you, us.”

  Lonely Heather’s voice shook. “Where are you going with this?”

  My turn to smile. To smile at my own face, which I hated, because it was Maisie’s face, the face of the sister I felt I had betrayed.

  “You and I, we’re not actually any different. The self-loathing, the self-sacrifice — I see that now. Maybe I had to come here and see it, to understand. Maybe that was the only way. You and I are the same. We deserve the same things.”

  “No,” she hissed. “No, don’t—”

  “We do not deserve to be alone anymore. We do not deserve to face this alone. We do not deserve—”

  “We deserve to rot!” she screamed at me, all those tears and that loathing curdling into boiling rage. “We deserve to watch Eileen die, by our hands! We deserve—”

  “Stop,” I said.

  And She stopped. Something in my voice stopped up all my self-hatred, if only for a moment.

  “I want to throttle you,” I said, and I meant it. Even as I spoke the words, I felt my hands twitch with the desire to wrap them around my own throat and squeeze as hard as I could. “I want to give you what you’ve asked for. Revenge. I want you to see what it would feel like, what it would do to you. I want to rub your nose in it. I want to hurt you, by hurting myself.”

  “Then—”

  “But none of that helps Maisie!” I shouted in my own face. “None of this will free her! You think going to war with myself will free our sister?! You think revenge is strong enough to swim down to the bottom of an ocean?!”

  THUMP

  The little steel room shook all around us. Survivor’s Guilt slammed against the glass, spreading the cracks wider, forcing little pulses of water through the hairline fractures. Lonely Me screamed.

  But I staggered to my feet.

  A dozen hands reached out to steady me, from all directions. My legs wanted to give out, my belly was on fire, and I was shivering like a leaf. But my friends held me up. They sustained me, where I could not sustain myself.

  SLAM—SLAM—SLAM

  “And you!” I roared the glass, unable to hear my own voice over the banging and crashing. “You can shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  The slamming trailed off. Survivor’s Guilt eased away from the glass, so I could see the rim of her other gigantic eye, her face — my face! — sinking into the murk.

  “You’re wrong,” I hissed at her — at myself. “I know I can prove you wrong. But you don’t want to let me. You’ll use violence before you listen to my words.”

  Lonely Me, still huddled down on the floor, shook her head. “Heather, Heather, stop. Just stop. All this is hopeless. You’re hopeless, you’re a lie, we’re filth, what can we possibly—”

  “I may not be a hero,” I admitted, “but that doesn’t matter. One of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned, and it’s still true.”

  “ … wait, what—”

  “We are what we pretend to be. And I am going to pretend that I am capable of love.”

  Lonely Heather scrambled to her feet, eyes wide with fear, trying to back away. She slipped in the puddle of cold water spreading out at the base of the glass wall, almost losing her footing as she staggered back from me.

  “No!” she snapped. “No, you can’t, you can’t—”

  Gently, I pulled free of my friends’ hands; six sets of tentacles took their place, six Abyssal Heathers holding me up at last, their will combined with mine, our minds as one.

  I took a lurching step toward the Lonely, Sad, Hateful part of me.

  “I’m going to do it,” I said. “And you can’t stop me.”

  “No!” she wailed. She glanced back at the Survivor’s Guilt inside the tank. “She’ll get free! Heather, she’ll get free! She’ll kill us all! We can’t!”

  Another lurching step. I spread my arms, trying to feel like a swift and graceful predator again; my Abyssal Selves held my wrists aloft, lending me their strength.

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  Behind Lonely Me, a giant webbed hand rose to the glass, each finger tipped with a massive black claw. Survivor’s Guilt pressed her paw against the wall and started to push. Cracking sounds filled the room. The glass, so many feet thick, began to bulge.

  “Everyone will drown! The dream will drown!” Lonely Me wailed. She tried to back up again, but there was nothing behind her but the buckling glass. She flinched from that contact, then whirled to face me, a cornered animal before the flood.

  “No,” I said. “No, they won’t.” Then I swung my head from side to side, taking in all the others in the little steel room. “Um, everyone needs to be ready to run away? Okay?”

  That warning seemed to reanimate my friends, as if the stage spotlight had finally widened beyond myself and I.

  Raine shouted: “We’re ready, Heather! You do it! You do what you gotta do!”

  “You best know what you’re fucking doing!” Evelyn snapped as Praem scooped her up out of the wheelchair and into a princess carry. Twil ducked in and grabbed the chair itself.

  “Do it, Shaman,” Zheng rumbled. “We can outrun any guilt.”

  “Yip-yap!” went the Saye Fox.

  Lozzie whooped. Jan stayed silent. Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight merely lifted her umbrella tip from the floor, ready to move.

  Eileen said: “I am ready to carry you, as I always was.”

  Lonely Me was trying to cram herself against the glass, as if I held a poisoned dagger to her throat. She was panting, covered in sweat, cringing away from me. “No. No, no, we don’t deserve—”

  “I should have done this a long time ago. I’m so sorry.”

  “No!”

  I pounced.

  That was how it felt, at least — a pounce, a leap through the air, landing on my prey with outstretched claws and snapping jaws. In truth what I did was lurch forward, supported by the tentacles of my Abyssal Selves, to blunder face-first into Lonely Little Me.

  I caught Myself in a hug.

  She — I! Me! — wailed as we bumped into the cracking glass together and slid down to the floor. We landed all tangled up in the cold, wet, brackish puddle of water. She pushed and shoved and writhed and bucked, wriggling like a weasel trying to escape my grasp. She smeared blood on my face and chin as she slapped and clawed in desperation. She fought with all the same determination I always did, and she fought well.

  But I held on tight, squeezing her with all the might I had left to muster.

  “Get off!” she wailed through her choking sobs. “Get off! Get off me! Get off!”

  “Never,” I growled into her shoulder. “Never!”

  We rolled through the widening puddle; above us, the glass buckled inward, cracking and splitting, spilling cold water into the little steel room. I was so bruised, so wounded, so tired that each impact felt like the end of the world, blacking me out for micro-seconds of unconsciousness. But the six Abyssal Heathers forced me to keep going, to keep my word, to keep myself within my embrace.

  Eventually Lonely Heather gave up and gave out, her struggles trailing off. Sobbing and broken, pinned beneath my fading strength, her arms finally clawed at my back — a kind of hug.

  “You can’t—” she sobbed, so very ugly with tears and blood and spite on her face. “You can’t mean this. You can’t. You can’t. Not with all the guilt, all the—”

  I kissed her — the worst kiss I had ever participated in. I mashed my lips against her own, rough and hard and desperate. I tasted blood. Our teeth clacked. She moaned into my mouth with pain and tears and a horrid wet sob, clutching at my back with fingernails like claws.

  When I pulled away, she was weeping.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “No.”

  “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you—”

  “Stop it,” she sobbed, all her power drained away. She clung to my shoulders like a frightened child, whining and keening. She sobbed into my shoulder, biting at my collarbone. She blubbed and burbled and tried to say all sorts of words, none of them with much sense.

  “I love you,” I repeated.

  “I … I … l-love you too,” she finally squeezed out. “But—”

  Survivor’s Guilt reared away from the glass wall of the final aquarium. A titanic hand drew back through the murk. Webbed fingers closed up tight. Claws bit into her own palm, wounds trailing vast streamers of crimson blood through the water. She made a fist.

  “She won’t let us love ourselves,” said Lonely Heather. “She won’t.”

  Survivor’s Guilt threw a punch at the glass wall. Thousands of gallons of water parted before her fist. The onrushing pressure sent a spider web of cracks spreading across every inch of the glass, finally reaching the edges of the wall. Water burst forth in streams and spouts. The glass crackled and popped and screamed with tension, bulging outward, ready to burst.

  The fist landed. The glass exploded.

  Heather herself did not say better, up there in the chapter. This moment has been a hell of a long time coming, with foreshadowing laid down since chapter 1.1. We're finally here! Hooray! And so is Heather's Guilt.

  final chapter of arc 24. You've got two more chapters of Bedlam Boundary yet - but, but but but! That's not the end of Katalepsis Book One, not just yet. There's an epilogue lined up too, with maybe a surprise lurking within. I'm looking forward to it, and I hope you are, too!

  two chapters ahead! No matter what level you subscribe at! That's about 20k words at the moment. The more support I get through Patreon, the more time I can dedicate to writing, and the less chances of having to slow down the story or get interrupted by other responsibilities. The generous and kind support of Patrons and readers is what makes all this possible in the first place! I wouldn't be able to do this without all of you! Thank you all so very much!

  Heather (and Heather???) faces her Guilt. But how could such a leviathan be conquered? With the power of ... we'll see!