The Mimic didn’t even try to answer, which was very rude. I thought I’d asked a perfectly straightforward question.

  Don’t you agree?

  And what about you? Did you remember that I’m made of carbon fibre, or did you make the same mistake? Did you forget that I am not actually organic matter? (Excepting a few greasy fragments at the core of my chassis.) Did you mistake me for a sweet young thing, soft and pliable, lithe and flexible?

  Did you forget what I am?

  I never do.

  …

  Instead of answering my simple question, the Mimic opened her maw — yawning so wide it seemed her head would part in two and fall from her neck. I assumed she was about to bite my face with her cartoonishly sharp teeth, or spew a stream of bubbling mud from the back of her throat to blind me and burn my skin. Neither of those actions would have made much real difference (I can see without eyes, you see? I see you do), but at least that would have been amusing. I might even have counted it as an answer to my question. An incorrect one, but still an answer.

  I was wrong, though. The Mimic just screamed — a chitter-chatter gibber-jabber shock-shriek, oscillating up and down, ululating out into the dark margins between the giant trees, swallowed up by the forest.

  Nobody was coming to help her. She was Jenny no-mates, alone in the woods.

  We struggled over the knife, though she was the only one struggling. She kept trying to yank the knife back, her dozen feet cartwheeling on the leaves and loam, her other hands waving about, perfectly useless; she couldn’t seem to think of doing anything else with all those hands and feet and teeth. I tightened my grip on her wrist, keeping the point of the blade pinned to my chest.

  I could have pried the knife from her fingers, or used my free hand to claw at her face, or applied lateral pressure to snap her wrist, though nothing about the Mimic suggested that she possessed anything so pedestrian as ‘bones’.

  But I didn’t do any of that; the terror in her eyes was too sweet to end so soon. Moss-green. Sharp-edged. Beginning to leak tears. Cute.

  I pressed my face even closer to her own, leaning over the knife, the only thing which separated us. She stank of wet bark and fresh lichen and old, grey, dry mud; she belonged in an English Churchyard, lurking among ancient headstones. She tried to turn her head aside as I closed the gap, whipping her jaw back and forth to avoid my touch.

  Very cute.

  But before I could decide whether to apply either lips or teeth (and I’m still not sure which I wanted more in that red moment) the Mimic let go of the knife.

  Her wrist turned dry and crumbly as dead vines, then slipped from my grasp. She went flying, lost her footing, and landed heavily on the leaf-strewn loam. An ungainly chaos of arms and legs, squealing and sobbing, like three or four people all forced to occupy the same space by some metaphysical accident.

  I did not lose my footing, because I have superb balance. I did not catch the falling knife, though I did try. (‘Don’t try to catch a falling knife’ is financial advice, which I don’t need.)

  I crouched, retrieved the blade, and straightened up. The Mimic scrambled to her many feet, dirtied, wide-eyed, panting hard.

  “Did you forget that I’m made of carbon fibre?” I repeated.

  The Mimic screamed, turned around, and fled — a half-scuttle, half-gallop, off through the wide gaps between the titanic trees, waving her arms in the air.

  I hesitated.

  Bulletproof, stab-proof, reinforced with metal and magic and more — that’s me, Maisie Morell, a shell within a shell within a shell. There is something real, deep within, but you’ll never see it. Besides, it’s dead. And those shells are very difficult to penetrate. My body — my actual body, the real thing, beneath the mask, beneath the skin — is not completely impenetrable, but I’m not going to spell out how to crack me open; I’m sure I’d melt if you dropped me into a volcano, and you could put a bloody great hole in me with some kind of shaped charge, but anything short of that is just going to toss me around. (No organs, remember? Not real ones. No meat to mince with spalling, nothing for shock waves to shudder and shake.) ‘God-damn near could set off a bomb next you and you’d just walk out a bit singed,’ as the Good Doctor Martense had put it. ‘Don’t actually try that though,’ she had added when she’d seen the look on my face. ‘I trust my craft with my own life, but don’t test it, please. And it’ll hurt like a bitch. Never forget that, hey? You’re still a person, you still feel, you’re not a robot. All your fleshy exterior is unprotected, just as vulnerable as anybody else. If you want my advice, wear a bulletproof vest.’

  The Good Doctor was not as robust as I; she was, of course, the prototype, while I was mark 2.

  She was right, though. It did, indeed, hurt like a bitch.

  The knife point had penetrated a few millimetres of pneuma-somatic pseudo-flesh, right over where my heart should be. It had also torn a little hole in my tie-dye t-shirt, which completely ruined the already ruinous aesthetic of my outfit. A small patch of blood was soaking into the fabric.

  I was Outside, alone, and bleeding.

  I should have stayed where I was. A lost child, a little girl, misplaced among the supermarket shelves. But not that lost; Heather would be along any moment, sniffing her way down the trail left by the Mimic’s Leap. And there (here) she would find me, alone in the woods, flushed and happy, a little scraped, but none the worse for wear.

  That is what a sensible little girl would have done. But I was not little, nor sensible, nor was I yet done.

  I was also very angry with the Mimic — not because she had tried to stab me (perhaps because she had failed, which was interesting, but I didn’t have the time to interrogate that thought right then) — but because she had not been paying attention. Her broken promise was bad enough. All that guff about doing Heather’s story all over again, that had made me want to stab her, but it was sand in the wind compared with this singular offense.

  She hadn’t been paying attention to my part of the story. She had forgotten what I was made of. She hadn’t come for me at all.

  I made certain of my grip on the kitchen knife, tucked my tea towel into the waistband of my skirt, and wrapped my shawl around my neck like a scarf, so it wouldn’t go flying off.

  Then I chased the Mimic.

  My socks squelched in the leafy loam, but I flew unhindered, straight as an arrow, long skirt against my knees, shawl whipping out behind me, following the Mimic’s fleeing back as she banked and bent her path between the trees, trunks sailing by like ancient ships in a dark and leafy sea. She heard me coming, glanced over her shoulder with those tearful deep green eyes, and screamed again.

  “You said you wanted to make another story of me!” I shouted. “We’re making one now! Why are you running away?!”

  The Mimic redoubled her efforts, feet whirling, arms flailing, but all those legs gave her little speed over me; there are certain advantages to being able to forget the memory of your own lungs, even if only for every other breath.

  The Mimic’s flight was leading us toward the faint greyish light, off to the right of the spot where we’d arrived. The light brightened as we neared, washing the giant trunks with lead and ash. We would reach the light in moments, but I had gained almost within arm’s reach of the Mimic’s back. A few more paces and I would leap, bring her down, pin her to the soil, and then make her answer my question.

  The giant’s forest ended so suddenly — no shortening of trees, no undergrowth at the edge, just wham, open ground. The canopy dropped away behind us.

  Grass beneath, cliff ahead, glass plate of dark ocean beyond.

  And sky above.

  I wasn’t stupid enough to glance upward on reflex; unlike my sister, my every action does not invite disaster. But the horizon was so wide and so low on that obsidian sea that I couldn’t help it. There was the sky, dressed in a gown of cloud.

  Clouds protect us (well, they protect you) from the void. But clouds themselves come from below, like spider-silk woven by the earth into a suit of armour, or like chitin extruded from softly quivering flesh. The imperfections and details of that process write in a language that you can’t read, not unless you’ve spent the better part of your life observing the eddies and swirls and tiny currents in a fluid medium, tracking where every motion comes from, where the smallest change is produced, how each detail fades and dies, or mates and matches. Clouds are made from the invisible leeching of lake and ocean and river and stream, but also from the breath of billions and the dew on every blade of grass in the world. In a cloud you can read the sniffles of a child on the other side of a continent, or the tears of an abandoned lover you’ll never meet, or the blood spilled into a puddle of oil leaking from a car engine.

  But you can’t pick out those details. You get the whole picture, all at once. You get, namely, the world.

  I staggered and stumbled, almost lost my footing. I was struck dumb and blind for a heartbeat, just as I had been the first time I’d stepped outdoors in Sharrowford, to stare at the clouds. Back in Sharrowford I’d read the mood of the city — tired, old, comfortable. A stone settled into a hollow in a slowly rotting tree, placed there decades ago by a caring hand, now long passed away. That was Sharrowford, in the clouds. Simple enough.

  But this world was Outside, so what I got was—

  …

  —a line of castles like broken teeth on a ridge top overlooking the ocean—

  —whose feet are shod in offences and worse-than-sins which have not forgotten the drowning of half their number—

  —spindled hands leafing leaves of pressed metal and leering in their hundreds over each other’s shoulders to peer closer between the lines of what they’ve discovered—

  —the laughing face gnawing on the tattered remains of what it couldn’t digest but vomiting it back up over and over to chew and chew because it can’t keep it down but it wants to be special and part of the flow but it’s not suited to nourish on this fare—

  —those who stood apart and refused to be involved and peopled the fastnesses and forgotten caves and sent out their fingers to gather the remains and guard them closely—

  —laughter of children who wanted to play but weren’t children anymore and refused to accept that the play was over—

  —waves of oil breaking on shores of blood-soaked crystal—

  …

  —a vision.

  Yes, I know, it sounds insane. No, I don’t expect you to understand. It was not a ‘hallucination’ and I shall not debase myself by calling it one; unlike Heather I don’t care whether anybody thinks I’m insane or not. I have visions when I look at the clouds, because clouds protect us from the truth. Accept it, or don’t. I refuse to justify myself. Ask, and you will get nothing.

  I shook my head and waved my knife; the vision ended.

  The Mimic was sprinting toward the cliff, perhaps two hundred feet away. I ran after her, but I didn’t try very hard. My vision had given her the lead she needed. I’d already lost.

  In the light, out from under the forest canopy, the Mimic was such a spindly thing, all limb and branch and moss on stone.

  She reached the edge of the cliff, leapt off, and plummeted out of sight. Her screams turned to triumphant cackles.

  I skidded to a halt about twenty feet from the precipice. It was a steep upward curve of pale rock; little risk of an accidental fall, but I wasn’t going to take my chances with a long way down. Terminal velocity is stronger than a knife.

  A leathery crack split the air. The Mimic whirled upward from below, lofted on a pair of massive bat-like wings.

  “Oh-ho-ho-ho!” she giggled down at me, hovering a good ten feet up and ten feet out. Each beat of her wings buffeted me with moss-scented wind, my shawl flapping out behind me. “What’s that, lich-girl? Can’t follow past the cliff-hanger? Haven’t learned to soar? Too bad! Looks like you’ll have to follow the proper steps, instead of skipping to the end like a naughty child! Page by page! Oh-ho-ho-ho!”

  I pulled back my hand, to throw the knife.

  The Mimic flinched in the air, which if you’ve never seen, is very funny. Her wings faltered; she fell about ten feet before they cupped the air again to catch her weight. I snorted, then lowered the knife. If I missed, I’d lose it over the side of the cliff.

  She hissed at me — “In proper sequence, little girl!” — then quickly winged away, rising higher, leaving the cliff behind. “Come see me in my bedroom, if you dare!”

  Her flight carried her out over the dark waters of the ocean, then to the left in a long, wide curve, following the line of the cliffs, back toward the land. She shouted several more insults, words swallowed on the wind.

  She dwindled in the sky, growing smaller and smaller, until she was a scraggly scribble against the clouds and the horizon.

  “Escaped,” I snapped. “Without escarpment. Huh! Without scrapes, either. Liar, liar, liar, back to your lair … ”

  It was not difficult to figure out where she was going.

  The Mimic — now a tiny dot occasionally wrinkled by the flap of her big leathery wings — was flying roughly parallel to the coast. And what an impossible coast it was, all cliffs, nothing but cliffs, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet past layers of pale rock and dark soil. Those cliffs went on forever until lost in horizon’s haze. The ocean at the foot of the cliffs was dark as volcanic glass, perfectly flat. No scent of salt, no seagulls wheeling, no waves lapping. No way that was water.

  The giant’s forest rose to my left, like a second step of cliffs, about two hundred feet back from the edge. The trunks creaked and groaned, deep and wholesome, leafy canopy rustling like static (perhaps to make up for the silence of that black, dead sea. I thanked the trees for that, at least they knew their job.)

  In the direction of the Mimic’s travel, the forest fell back to reveal a landscape of rising hills and craggly ridges, dotted with weird low bushes and things that were probably infant versions of the giant trees. The land rose up in slow waves, climbing toward a rocky headland jutting out over the sea. The angle made me realise that I must be standing at the bottom of a forested valley.

  And up on that rocky headland was the most insulting thing I could think of — a big layered slab of black stone, draped in frills of white masonry and petticoats of cobwebbed fog.

  A castle, spooky style.

  My fingers tightened on the kitchen knife. I made a very nasty expression, without anyone to see (though I am telling you, so does that count?)

  “Heather’s the one who likes castles,” I said. Then I shouted it: “Heather’s the one who likes castles!”

  The landscape of giants and black sea and eternal cliffs made for very satisfying echoes.

  “Turn around and come back turn around and come back come round and turn back turn round come back turns back around— tch!”

  I was breathing very hard, in and out like a bellowing bull. The anger was bad, but it stumbled on a grudging satisfaction, red-eyed rage guttering out. I tried to keep it sprinting, but it sat down and shrugged at me.

  I’d done it, hadn’t I?

  I’d had my own little adventure, my own story, out here, Outside, all by myself. I’d been kidnapped, gotten in a fight, won the fight, almost stolen a kiss, taken a minor wound, and chased my foe to the edge of the world. As if by magic, Maisie has her own story. A complete tale, ta-da!

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  And now it was over.

  Heather would show up any moment. Then we’d be in the epilogue.

  I raised the kitchen knife to point at the dwindling dot of the Mimic. “I’m not done with you. Done as done is done and done. I’ll be back, I’ll be back here again, and I’ll do you—”

  The knife’s dull blade caught a yellow reflection.

  I lowered the knife and stared at the piece of yellow fabric around my wrist. Back again, so soft and gentle against my skin. A little piece of Heather, here to remind me that she could always find me. Never truly gone, just tucked out of sight.

  What would happen if I cut it off (the fabric, not my hand) and cast it into the black sea below? What would happen if I shed this connection with Heather? Would she fail to find me? Without this piece of her against my skin, would I be lost Outside? My only option then would be to follow my new friend on foot. No ending yet. All I had to do was hide, from Heather.

  I didn’t like thinking that thought.

  I wandered away from the edge of the cliff, back toward the giant’s forest, to wait for my twin sister to come pick me up.

  The shallow wound on my chest had stopped bleeding. The blood had begun to dry, sticking my tie-dye t-shirt to my left boob; I pulled the fabric away from the skin as best I could, but the t-shirt was probably done for. My mismatched socks were damp and muddy, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a good wash. I hopped from one foot to the other as I tugged them off. The grass felt nice on my bare feet, rough and cool. (Grass, Outside? Yes, and it was green, though a little too pale.)

  A passing fancy of perverse frustration bid me cast those socks off the cliff; which is a posh way of saying that I was still pissed off all to fuck and I wanted to hurl something around. But at least three different people would tell me off if I did that, for various reasons. The prospective treat of getting shouted at by Evelyn was almost enough to make me do it anyway, but in the end I just shoved the filthy socks into my skirt pocket. Then I took my phone out of the opposite pocket. No signal, of course, but there was Yuno, from Autumn Girls in Red Season, staring out from my wallpaper.

  “I don’t want to go home yet,” I told her. “I want to march up to that castle and throw it in the sea. I want to surprise the Mimic again. Surprise. Prise? Prise her out from under a rock, yes. I could do it. Heather would come with me. She wouldn’t say no. But … what do you think?”

  The anime girl did not answer, because she wasn’t real.

  I put her away again.

  At any moment I would hear Heather calling my name — crying out in panic, probably. I would reply the instant I heard anything, of course. I would never keep her waiting, keep her guessing, make her stew in fear. Or perhaps she would drop on me from above, a Leap right on target, a ball of tentacles and tears without warning. I tugged my tea towel out from my waistband and carefully wrapped the blade of the kitchen knife; didn’t want to hurt Heather if she materialised right on top of me, after all.

  A minute ticked by. Then another. I know because I counted the seconds.

  I listened to the creak of the giant trees. I looked for animals or insects, but found none. I kept glancing at the castle. Curling my toes in the spongy grass. Re-arranging my shawl. Watching the clouds.

  I almost did it — picked up my feet and started walking, that is. I wasn’t afraid in the slightest, because I knew Heather would find me.

  I was Outside, alone. All mine. For now.

  But then, after thirty four additional seconds past the second minute I had counted so far, a pair of figures coalesced from the shadows of the forest, creeping out from between the giant tree trunks.

  I raised my eyes and raised my face and felt myself do a little smile, the kind of smile I only showed to—

  “Heath—”

  My sister’s name died with the smile.

  It wasn’t Heather.

  It was Tenny — and Her.

  “Auntie Maze! Maze! Maze!” Tenny trilled as she burst from the trees and came running up to me, tentacles extended and whirling, dragging Her along by the hand. Tenny stopped close enough to touch me — then almost did, half a dozen tentacles bobbing forward. I must have made a face, because she hesitated at the last second. “Maze?! Maze?! Auntie Maisie, is it you?!”

  “It’s the real Maisie,” said Her. “It’s okay, Tenns. We’ve found her. She’s found.”

  “Auntie Maze? Are you okay? Okay?” Tenny was trying to look right into my eyes, bobbing her head back and forth, but I couldn’t give her that. She didn’t touch me though, which I appreciated. Tenny understood.

  But I didn’t.

  “Where’s Heather?” I said.

  “Brrrrrt!?”

  I’d never seen Tenny like this before. Heather had, which made me frustrated in a way I couldn’t deal with right then, not with what was suddenly happening, and what I was already deducing. Tenny was wide-eyed, white fur standing on end, every single tentacle extended, their tips snapping at the air, waving up and down, jabbing at nothing. She was vibrating — and no, that’s not a metaphor, it was a product of her unique biology.

  “Then, Lozzie?” I added. “Or Sevens? Who did you tell? Who brought you?”

  “Nobody,” said Her. “We were just suddenly here, in the woods. Tenny was sick but I was okay. We heard a lot of shouting and screaming. We followed the shouting and screaming. Then we found you. But not the other you? Was there another you? Now here we are. But where is here?”

  “Auntie Maze? Maze?!” Tenny said. “Where where where where? Where where? Mmmmmmmmmmm—”

  “Maisie,” said the other one. “Tenny is having a panic. I think it’s because of the big open skies. I don’t know what to do.”

  I looked at Her — at Her left shoulder.

  …

  We can’t go on like this, can we?

  If I’m going to tell the rest of this tale without making up a ton of bullshit, then I’m going to have to use her name. She is part of this, even if right then I wished she was upside down with her head in a toilet (which is a horribly juvenile thing to think about a literal child who was no threat to me and no intrusion on my life, at fault for nothing except being created.)

  But once this barrier is passed, I can never go back. Not even if I try, which I won’t, and I will introduce anybody who does try to something much worse than a kitchen knife.

  I can refuse to say her name as long as possible. I can refuse to acknowledge her presence. But I can’t reverse the decision. I’m not low enough to disrespect her choice by calling her other names, or stripping it from her, or pretending she never had it. That would make her sad, for a start, and then she would garner even more sympathy and ease, wouldn’t she?

  Alright. I do this under duress. And not for you.

  For her.

  …

  I looked at Casma’s left shoulder.

  You were expecting a pun, weren’t you? But this apple has fallen further from her mother’s tree than anybody expected, excepting her appearance — pink eyes, blonde hair, light brown skin. Casma chose her own name, and that is the only reason I am showing this much respect. It’s based on the word for ‘eye’ in Old Persian, though modified slightly. Heather’s memories tell me that she got the notion from a certain Yellow Fool, and I’m sure he’s smug as a cream-fed cat about that influence on both her story and mine (but no, this is not permission to comment, you old goat. Keep out of it or I will bite parts of you clean off.)

  Casma was wearing a white knitted jumper, a pink skirt the same shade as her eyes, and matching white tights. So very put together, and even less suited for this Outing than I was; the soles of her tights were already filthy with mud.

  “Hold her hand,” I said. “Don’t let go.”

  Then I looked at Tenny’s eyes, which was a bit easier than usual because she wasn’t looking at me anymore. Her eyes were big and black and staring far past me, at the wide open skies, the wide open space, the horizon, the sea, the world. Her mouth hung open. Her tentacles had frozen. The iridescent cloak of her wings started to twitch, as if animated by the vibration of her body.

  Agoraphilia.

  I don’t even think that’s a thing, not in the way I mean it, but it’s what Tenny was feeling.

  Tenny did not get to go outdoors very often. Born with wings and the power of flight and an urge to use all of it, but one glimpse of her over Sharrowford would cause a mass panic, no matter how many normie brains edited the sight of her into something else. The first real child of the polycule lived her life indoors, confined to Barnslow. Happy enough, but still limited, like a bird in a cage. All that was about to change in the next couple of months; Lozzie had been trying to acclimate her to going outdoors, in disguise, prepped for the next stage of her life.

  But this place was too much, all at once. Too wide, too open, too tempting.

  “Tenny,” I said. “If you fly here you’ll get lost and you’ll never see home again.”

  Tenny blinked hard, shivered like a leaf, and dragged her eyes back down to my face. I averted my gaze, looked at one of her tentacles instead. She stopped vibrating and let out a sad, wet flutter. “Uhhhhbbb … uh … ”

  “We’re Outside,” I said. “Don’t fly.”

  Casma murmured, “I’m here, Tenns. Holding on tight. Holding your hand. Holding.” She turned it into a little song: “Ho-oo-ol-ding, ho-old-ding.”

  Casma’s voice was a bit of a paradox. She sounded like one of those girls who had been trained in elocution, during a time period where young girls were trained in things like elocution, but she spoke it all with a light Sharrowford accent, as if her mother had grown up in the North of England. Soft and airy, as if she was a ghost from elsewhere.

  Tenny made another wordless, wet trill. My heart did a horrible thing in my chest (not literally, because there’s no pumping meat inside my breast, but the feeling was the same.) I ignored it.

  “Can you go home?” I said.

  Casma looked right at me. I wanted to swear at her, but I just looked further away. “My mother should come get us,” she said.

  “Your mother doesn’t know you’re here,” I replied. “Can you get back home? Can you Leap?”

  “I don’t know how … ”

  I sighed.

  Casma looked hurt, in a complicated way. She was very good at looking complicated, but less good at getting herself home.

  Tenny let out another trilling sound. “Cassy, can you call your mum?”

  “I don’t think I can do that either. I’m sorry. Oops.”

  “Brrrt. Auntie Maze, you’ve got blood on you.”

  “Just a scratch,” I said.

  Casma said, “Maisie. Is that a kitchen knife? Wrapped in a tea towel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … it … is?”

  “I meant to ask, why do you have it? What’s it for?”

  I managed to look into Casma’s eyes for a moment, mostly to irritate both of us. Bright soft pink, like living coral.

  “For knifing,” I said.

  Tenny made a much louder sound, tentacles wiggling about again. “Brrrrrrrrt! Auntie Maisie, how do we go back? What happened? What was the other you? What’s happened?!”

  I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth.

  Normally I enjoyed Tenny’s company. I did not enjoy having knowledge of Casma, let alone her presence. But I would not have insulted either of them, neither to their faces, nor behind their backs. I did not wish to hurt them with harsh words. I certainly was not going to turn around and sprint in the opposite direction from what were now a pair of lost children — though Tenny’s status as a child is up for debate, considering her educational attainment and rapid maturity. A lost child and a lost adult teenager, then.

  I did not want to tell them about the Mimic. That would make her partly theirs, no longer just mine.

  I had been prepared for Heather to arrive and take me home. I would have accepted Lozzie or Sevens, or some kind of inevitable emergency rescue party, because that would be the end of this little story, the end of my story, Maisie Morell’s brief adventure.

  But now Tenny and Casma were here, and Heather wasn’t. Which meant they were part of my story now, whether I wanted it or not.

  And I hadn’t forgotten the Mimic’s interest in Casma.

  If I opened my mouth, I was going to say something horribly rude.

  Luckily enough, somebody else turned up just in time to save me, with the power of absurdity and adult responsibility.

  “Heeeey! Hey! Tenny! Tenny! M-Maisie!?”

  The shout came from my left — the opposite direction to the Mimic’s flight and the irritating castle up on the ridge. I turned to find a familiar face had just crested a small rise nearby.

  Kimberly.

  You know her. Kimberly Kemp. She’s got a special place in Heather’s memories. She used to be a cultist. Now she’s a florist. Imagine that.

  Kimberly picked up her feet and sprinted down the hillside toward us, as fast as her legs could carry her. Any faster and she would lose her footing and go tumbling down the hill like at one of those cheese rolling events where people break their limbs for fun. Which was bad, because none of us were set up for fixing broken bones.

  Luckily for everybody, Kimberly made it down in one piece. She staggered to a halt in front of us, wheezing for breath, then doubled up and put her hands on her knees. She even vomited a little bit, though it was just a string of bile, nothing left in her stomach.

  “Kimmy! Kimmy?” Tenny was trilling again. “What what what how? How?!”

  “Kimberly as well,” said Casma. “Oh dear.”

  Kimberly was the only one of us with anything on her feet, which instantly made her better prepared for being Suddenly Outside. She was wearing boot-style slippers, pajama bottoms printed with fanciful galaxy-like swirls, and a t-shirt with a cartoon of a diminutive witch wearing a gigantic hat.

  “Kimberly,” I said. “Can you get home?”

  Kimberly reared back up almost as quickly as she’d sprinted down the hill. “W-what? What? I-I don’t— where even are we?! How did we even get here? I heard Tenny making noises so I came in this direction, but what— what—”

  Wild-eyed with terror, complexion like rotten oats, strands of auburn hair stuck to her forehead with sweat.

  Kimberly also had a particular and unmistakable scent about her, which told me she’d been interrupted in the middle of something. But I wasn’t going to mention that in front of Casma and Tenny. I tucked it away for later.

  Cute.

  Some fools think Kimberly is like Heather, just without tentacles and confidence, but this is wrong. Kimberly is a coward who knows she is a coward and has spent a great deal of time and energy learning how to do brave things. Kimberly knows a lot about cartoons and anime; she’s more online than anybody else in Barnslow house, myself included. Kimberly abhors violence. Kimberly is cringe.

  I didn’t usually get to see much of Kimberly. She was mostly confined to Heather’s memories, though she was not of Heather’s polycule, merely adjacent to it.

  I looked Kimberly in the eyes, because it was actually quite easy to look Kimberly in the eyes. “We’re Outside. Can you get us home?”

  Kimberly stopped babbling.

  “Outside?” she echoed.

  “Mmhmm. Out and out. Outside. You know. Outside.”

  Kimberly looked like she wanted to shit herself. I wondered if that was actually a thing which really happened, in real life. Do terrified people shit themselves? If they do, then Kimberly came very close.

  Her eyes jumped from me, to Tenny, to Casma, and back again. She tried to swallow; that looked like it hurt.

  “N-no,” she said. “No, I-I can’t. I can’t build a gateway from nothing, no, I don’t— I don’t …” Her eyes widened. “Maisie, is that blood? A-are you hurt?”

  “Justly scratched. Ignore it.”

  Kimberly drew a shaking hand over her face. “T-Tenny, Cass, are you both—”

  “We are intact,” said Casma. “Unhurt. Unscrap-ed. I am attempting some humour. Is it working?”

  “Brrrrrt,” went Tenny.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Kimberly said, three times in a row, holding up both hands like she was trying to hold back the dawn. “What— what’s going on, how— how did this—”

  “It’s everyone who was inside Barnslow house,” I said. “Except Sevens.”

  “What? S-sorry, Maisie, what?”

  “The Mimic,” I said, then paused and closed my eyes tightly, so I could better concentrate on the words, because I didn’t want to say them. Kimberly was trying to be a responsible adult, and I needed to give her what she needed, to get the others back home. “The thing that brought me here, it must have brought all of us, somehow. I touched it’s hand. Then I was here. Maybe it did us all at once.”

  Keeping the words simple made my face hurt. I opened my eyes again and worked my jaw up and down.

  Kimberly looked like she wanted to put her whole fist into her mouth. Her eyes were very wide, pupils tiny. “You mean nobody knows we’re here? Nobody?”

  “Sevens might.”

  “Then … then where is she?”

  “I don’t know. Know unknowing. It’s Sevens, who knows? And you can’t get us out? I know you helped Evelyn build the gateway to Camelot. Can’t you weigh us back with a gate, or are we waylaid?”

  “Oh,” Casma murmured. “Clever. Better than mine.”

  Kimberly put both hands in her hair and looked like she wanted to start pulling clumps of it off her scalp. “Not from scratch! Not with no resources except twigs and grass! I— how did this even happen?! No, no, I’m sorry, I can’t get us back, I don’t— Casma, Casma, what about—”

  “Mother does not know where I am. Apparently.”

  “Brrrrt,” went Tenny. “Lozz-mums neither … ”

  “Then,” I said, “we’re stuck.”

  I should have been terrified, shouldn’t I?

  We were, to all appearances, actually stuck Outside. Heather would have been inconsolable in this position, and I wouldn’t have blamed her, not after ten years of having these wonders imposed against her will; how could I, when she had endured all that time, for my sake? But she doesn’t understand, she cannot comprehend, because to her it is the nightmare and horror of being abandoned, alone, beyond the reach of anything one has ever known or loved.

  For me it meant the tale had not yet ended.

  I had some unwanted secondaries with me (Kimberly less so than the others, and what a risky temptation that was), but it was still my story. The Mimic was wrong. I was going to go up there and pull her castle down by the roots and dig her out of the grave-dirt below. Her interest in Casma would avail her nothing. She was mine to use, still.

  The others were starting to panic.

  Kimberly’s eyes were rolling across the landscape, the giant trees, and out to sea, bulging in fear. Tenny was emitting a low hum — not a purr, but something more dangerous. Casma looked dour, in a complicated way.

  So I added: “Until Heather notices I’m missing. Or Lozzie. Or Sevens. Or anybody else.”

  That seemed to help somewhat. Kimberly swallowed and nodded, muttering to herself, “Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.” Tenny went brrrt again. Casma just looked at me too much.

  I kept the other part to myself. What was the other part, you ask? You’ve already seen it. (Do pay attention.)

  “Maisie?” said Casma. “Please don’t.”

  I looked at her again, mostly in surprise. Eyes too pink, too soft, too bright. I looked at the shoulder of her jumper instead. “Don’t what?”

  “Hold stuff back. Please?”

  “Wait, what?” Kimberly said. Her brief relief relieved itself of her face. “What’s being held back? What? Maisie?”

  I sighed again. Casma looked complicated and hurt. Again.

  “Maisie!?” Kimberly said. “Maisie, what are you not telling us?! Maisie, we are trapped Outside, if there’s something—”

  “The Mimic did not seem overly concerned nor concerned about overtures, when I told her that Heather would be along shortly or short to be along. My immanent rescue did not seem to worry her, nor was she worried by immanentised un-rescue. Which means one of two things, maybe more, because two is not enough — either the Mimic has a plan for when Heather arrives, or she has a way of stopping or delaying Heather’s arrival. The fact that Sevens was watching the house and yet has not turned up to retrieve us implies the latter is true. Latterly true. Lateral.” I tutted. “Tch! Ugh.”

  Everybody looked at me. I looked at the giant trees. Kimberly made a keening sound between her teeth. Tenny went ‘buuurugggh’. Casma looked sadly complicated.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Finely done. Finely chopped. It just means we need to go deal with the Mimic. Then Heather can come pick us up.”

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck!” Kimberly said. She gestured helplessly at Tenny and Casma. “I-I’m sorry, I’m sorry for swearing, I just— I can’t— I can’t get you three kids out of this, I— fuck, fuck— oh, shit!”

  She suddenly whirled round, glancing back up at the hillside she had sprinted down.

  Something was coming up the far side of the hill, going clank-clank-clank.

  Kimberly whirled back, even more panicked than before; I was concerned she might be about to have a heart attack. “I forgot to say! I was being followed! When I arrived! Something was following me.”

  I looked right into her eyes. “You forgot to say you were being followed?”

  “I was panicked, okay?!” Kimberly tried to usher the three of us back toward the giant’s forest. “And it was far away, I thought I’d outrun it. Quick, behind a tree, behind a—”

  “Too late,” I said.

  A figure crested the rise. A silhouette against the leaden sky.

  Human-shaped — two arms, two legs, presumably a head, all bulked out and smoothed off and rounded down by the perfectly fitted curves of a suit of armour. Dark grey metal, darker than the skies, though details were hard to pick out against the clouds. Two swords at the belt, one on either hip. A pack on the back, pouches at the waist. No neck; the gorget of the armour was a massive ring of metal, and the helmet was like a dome.

  I shan’t call it a knight — or a Knight, for those of you who’ve been paying attention — because it wasn’t.

  The figure stared at us through a visor-slit no wider than my thumb. Or at least it stared in our general direction. Hard to tell with a walking tin can.

  Then it hauled a contraption off its back, all wood and metal and hinges and twine. It braced the contraption against a thigh; the other hand yanked a lever, practised, fast, even in all that armour. Mechanisms went click-clunk-click. Very satisfying sounds. Noises I could sleep to.

  Two hands raised the crossbow. Pointed it down the hill, at us.

  Tenny let out a sound of alarm. Casma just said, “Oh dear.”

  Kimberly stepped in front of us. Arms wide, head high, eyes even wider, facing toward our would-be assailant. Blocking the shot, protecting the kiddies.

  Very noble. Very brave. Very responsible.

  But not very cute.

  The figure in the armour pointing a crossbow at four young women (does Kimberly count as young? She seems young, even if she’s in her thirties. I have thus decreed, Kimberly is now young. You’re welcome, Kim,) didn’t loose the bolt.

  I stepped in front of Kimberly and looked up at the armoured figure.

  “Maisie!” Kimberly hissed. “What are you doing?! Run, back into the woods! You can’t—”

  “Shut up, Kim,” I said. “You’re too soft. I’m bulletproof.”

  Kimberly shut up.

  I unwrapped my tea towel and took out my kitchen knife. The armoured figure didn’t react, but I saw a little tremor in the arms.

  Kimberly whispered: “Maisie, why do you have a knife?”

  “For this.”

  doll-girl need? Well, some privacy, perhaps. Maisie doesn't seem too happy to have company. But she'll draw a knife in their defense anyway? Her twin would be proud.

  Maisie like that?)

  Maisie is ripping and tearing all my plans to pieces, veering off in wild directions I did not expect, and making a right dog's dinner of the outlines. Of course, I can't stop her. I'm not made of carbon fibre, and that knife is plenty sharp. But the arc is shaping up nicely and I'm fully expecting this one to go very long. After all, I'm not brave enough to wrestle the narrative out of Maisie's jaws.

  this absolutely incredible rendition of Evelyn, from all the way back in the very first arc, by Carterwjessup (who also happens to be the artist who drew the front cover for my other serial, Necroepilogos!) Then we have '' - a certain werewolf curled up on a certain bed which is not her own, (by Cera!) I love the plushies in that one! Then we have another picture by Cera, a non-canon interpretation of everybody's favourite moth-puppy: ! Thank you all! I know I say this every time I link/repost fanart, but it's just incredible and deeply flattering to see!

  Maisie, because she'd get offended if I didn't.)