…

  …

  …

  Did you think I was exaggerating when I said that I would delay as long as possible? Did you think it was a figure of speech? Did you think I was bluffing?

  Does anything you have learned about me so far imply that I like to bluff?

  You’re lucky I’m saying anything at all.

  …

  ‘As long as possible’ means as long as possible.

  Come back next time.

  …

  Did you not hear me?

  …

  Fine. Fine!

  It’s fine. You’re not going to give me a choice, are you?

  If you’re still here, then I’m still here too — or there, rather, sitting by that fire, with Casma staring at the side of my face, waiting for an answer I sorely did not want to give.

  You could stop listening. That would work. Let me off the hook. Go elsewhere. Go reread my sister’s story instead.

  But then what would be the point of me telling this tale?

  Fine.

  …

  Our little fire was not flame enough to rekindle the underside of the clouds, no matter how well built and banked; Muadhnait knew how to stack the wood and stir the ash, but she was just an armoured nun — she couldn’t re-light the sun. I searched in vain for the open veins of the world all the same, squinting to catch a snatch of cloud. All I needed was a single sliver of iron grey to catalyse the process; the result would mean nothing, but the effect would be more than enough for my current purposes. A vision might last subjective hours, if I didn’t resist the echoes inside my empty skull. A moment or two might pass for my body, while my mind roamed the pattern of water vapour and wind. But the darkness had closed off the heavens as surely as the earth in every other direction; not even a passing wisp dared the fire.

  When in doubt, look up. I doubted, yet up showed only darkness.

  “Maisie?”

  I ignored Casma’s whisper—

  “I know you’re ignoring me.”

  —perhaps I could pretend I was having a vision anyway—

  “And I know you’re not having a vision.”

  —but I would have to unfocus my eyes to really sell it—

  “You don’t have that faraway look in your eyes. You’re still close.”

  —and I’d have to sit like that with my neck craned all the way back—

  “You’re going to hurt your neck. And not by necking.”

  —until Casma got bored and went back to bed—

  “But if you really are having a vision, then I’ll sit with you until it’s over.”

  The fire was more interesting than the darkness, though meaningless compared with clouds (certain parties might disagree, but she’s not here to bleat at me.) Flames danced. Orange tongues licked the air. Fresh logs blackened and burned, turning from ebony to charcoal. Smoke rose in an unbroken pale pillar; it smelled rich and sticky, like congealed sap and old leaves. How was that possible when the wood had been so dry? (I wanted to ask the trees, but the nearest one was back in the gulley on the other side of the tunnel through the wall.) The crackle and hiss of the fire was hardly a substitute for the creak and rustle of the giant’s forest, but it was better than nothing.

  “I’ll wait. Wai-a-a-aiting, wai-ayy-ting.”

  Muadhnait hadn’t moved a muscle since she’d laid down on one of the big logs. Or maybe she had; perhaps the Templar Nun spent all night twitching and shivering inside her armour. What would have happened if I’d knocked on her helmet? Would she have jerked awake? Slapped my hand aside? Or would my knuckles have sounded out an echo from an empty metal shell?

  Kimberly’s chest rose and fell with slow, steady, sleep-bound breaths. I wondered what her heartbeat would sound like. Could I press an ear to the back of her ribcage and hear her flutter inside?

  Tenny was sleeping soundly, wrapped up in the blanket she’d been sharing with Casma. Tiny trilling sounds tickled the edge of my hearing, if I concentrated.

  And Casma—

  “You’ve run out of things to look at,” Casma whispered. Then she smiled a surprisingly uncomplicated smile, and covered her mouth with the end of one sleeve. “Will you answer my question now? You can’t go on pretending not to have heard. I mean, not for ever and ever. It’s not viable, not unless you’re going to pretend you’ve been struck deaf. And even if you had been deafened, I could still read your—”

  “Question?”

  Casma repeated the question. (Which I didn’t need, but you might, so here you go. Don’t say I never do anything for you.)

  “Why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t.”

  Casma did something absurdly complicated with her face, as if to make up for her simple smile a moment before. (Does she do this on purpose? Take a guess.) Her expression said that she knew I was lying, but that it was not polite to point that out — but additionally, by way of paradox, that she was making the expression in order to point out my lie without taking responsibility for calling me a liar. And that she was doing it on purpose, because she wanted to.

  (Do not let Casma fool you. She is not her mother in miniature. She is far smarter than that.)

  “Sorry,” Casma whispered.

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “It sounded like you did. Sounds like you do? Do you like the sound of that?”

  “I don’t.”

  Casma said nothing. Besieged me with silence.

  “Because … ” I whispered. Then I closed my eyes, so I could tread without falling to either side of this treacherous path. “Because you’ve done nothing wrong. Because you’re a child and you don’t deserve an adult’s hate. Because I have no reason to hate you.”

  Casma shifted her skirt against the log on which we sat. I pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders. My knife was in my lap, wrapped in the tea towel. The fire flickered on the other side of my eyelids. Snappetty, crackle-crack, popopopopop pop pop—

  “That’s the opposite of an answer,” Casma eventually whispered. “Which is really clever. I’m really impressed. Really really! You answered the opposite question, instead of the one I asked. I know opposites are good ways to understand things, but in this case the opposite is the opposite of the truth. Mm. I think that makes good sense. What do you think, Maisie?”

  I opened my eyes and looked down at Casma’s knee, beneath the pink fabric of her skirt. But the skirt was the same colour as her eyes, so I looked at her elbow instead.

  Casma wanted the same thing that you want, (don’t bother trying to deny it, it’s too late for that, no wriggling out now) — for her and I to have a heart-to-heart in this lull between perils, to whisper and giggle about our feelings, to while away this strange Outsider night together, and then greet the dawn perhaps not as friends, but at least a few paces on the road to that destination. Just like we were meant to. Like we’d been set up to do. Like everybody and everything in the universe was peering over our shoulders and salivating for us to start. The actual answer to the question of why I hated her was irrelevant (and I did not hate her. I did not. I did not.) It was a catalyst to fill dead time with meaning. Stories have plenty of dead time beyond the margin of the page, but most of them leave it out of the telling; it’s rarely fun to recount every time your glorious heroine took a bath or brushed her teeth or cleaned her dirty feet (and my feet were filthy after all that walking.) Even King Arthur must have taken a few roadside shits on the path to the grail.

  And I am not going to let you watch me shit.

  My sister would have given in. No, worse — she would have been the one in Casma’s place, giving everybody what they want, without even knowing it, before they know themselves enough to ask. You should know that well enough, she did it for you plenty of times. (The heart-to-hearts, not the shitting.)

  How many times must I repeat myself?

  I am not my sister.

  I am not her.

  I am not—

  “This isn’t a sleepover whispering session between soft-hearted opposite ends of the heart-liver-spleen spectrum. We’re not schoolgirls girling it out over hot chocolate and pillows, pillowed in pillowy bedrooms and kicking our legs about. We’re not trapped in a web of social relationships that we have to navigate through with nothing but friendship and flowers and fresh feeling flesh fiend— tsss!”

  I had to clench my teeth and shake my head and hiss. (And no, my hissing does not sound anything like that of my sister. Put your teeth together and expel air; that’s what I sound like.) I was worried it might wake the others, but I felt like my tongue would explode if I kept going.

  “Okay,” Casma whispered. “How would you prefer to spend this downtime?”

  I stood up.

  I balled up the blanket and placed it on the log.

  I settled my shawl over my shoulders so that it would not slip off, looping one end around my neck like a scarf.

  I unwrapped my kitchen knife and tucked the tea towel into the waistband of my skirt; I considered handing it to Casma (because I didn’t hate her), but I figured I better hang onto it, because I might not be coming back this way.

  I took a step away from the fire.

  “Oh!” Casma whispered. “Is it already time for all that?”

  Beyond the fire and the big dark logs lay a murky margin of shadow and shade, stretching itself out across the grass. Heat and light dropped away behind me; it was colder beyond the fire than I had expected, though I didn’t shake or shiver, because I didn’t need to. The crackle and hiss of the fire vanished as well, and I didn’t like that part. The grass was still soft beneath my feet, but each step robbed it of more colour, until I trod on grey, then black, then the edge of the void.

  True darkness lay only a few feet beyond the ring of salt, concealing Nothing.

  I stepped over the line.

  Behind me, Casma hissed, “That might be a bad idea. A small one. Just a tad.”

  “Yolo,” I whispered.

  “Twice, actually.”

  Outside the ring of salt, at the very edge of the fire’s light, I stopped with my toes on the precipice of night. If I took another step, I would fall into an abyss more Total and more Empty than anything my sister has ever crammed into one of her overloaded metaphors. The entire universe was behind me, compressed into the island of light around our little flame. Beyond was Nothing, Total, Empty.

  Then I discovered I was wrong.

  The darkness did hold a pattern after all — it throbbed and pulsed like the blood vessels inside my eyeballs, a black sea churned by silent, invisible currents, filled with the ghostly dark spots of floaters and after-images. Solidity rose from formless chaos — a carpet of coal-black blades, empty shells like burned-out caves, a brow of obsidian, a crown of onyx.

  It was the ruined village, right where I’d left it. A corpse doesn’t get up and move, after all. Stone cottages, grassy square, big cliff, wall on top.

  Almost disappointing, isn’t it? My void, no different to Heather’s abyss — you think it’s empty, and then it turns out to be just another landscape.

  But I wasn’t disappointed, because I wasn’t alone out there.

  (Just like I’m not alone here.)

  The ruined village was full of things which had not been there when the sun had set. Rag-draped nymphs with bodies like knives lounged against the walls of the stone cottages. Shaggy men with clubs of bone and skulls for faces squatted in the long grass. Black-shelled insects like dredged-up pelagic crabs perched on the cliff-side, turning stalk-bead eyes toward the little fire. Masses of cobweb drifted through the air, forming faces from hollows and holes. In the cliff-gap where we had entered the village, a line of little girls dressed like ornate dolls stood holding hands, their faces blank ovals in the night. A ring of shrivelled corpses sat between the cottages opposite, bending over a bundle of sticks, as if clinging to the warmth of a dead fire. Dark lumps undulated in the upper windows of the biggest cottage. Leaner shapes scuttled and skittered across the top of the cliff, snapping at each other. A huge face peered over the lip of that high wall, bald and eyeless, with great tufts of dark hair sprouting from the ears.

  Only the distant plane of the obsidian sea was untouched — and the old statue which Muadhnait had prayed to.

  The air was full of whispers.

  “—little one, so pretty—”

  “—round and round and round I swim the sea and round and round and round—”

  “—a keeper, but only if you like them spiced and hot enough to burn you inside and out—”

  “—do you see a way through the thicket, thicketer? Do you want to guide me out? I can make it sweet as honey—”

  “—harder! Make it harder—”

  “—reeks of iron and blood and cold places—”

  “—the one with the wings, pull them off and watch it scream—”

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  “—the walker has too many tricks—”

  I held my naked kitchen knife in one fist. I waited for these sprites to stop talking and take action.

  Seconds became a minute. One minute became two. Two was three. And so on.

  I do not have that much patience.

  “Cowards,” I said.

  Don’t you dare call me a fool for calling to the night; it would have been far more foolish to stick my knife into Casma. Isn’t this what you wanted — a fuck or a fight? You would just as happily have watched me fuck Kimberly, but you’ll settle for this, (as if I’m going to give you a choice.) You think I’m stupid for stepping beyond the light and over the salt. And maybe you’re right. But don’t pretend it isn’t what you wanted. Don’t pretend you aren’t licking your lips (because I can hear you doing it.)

  (And then I saw.)

  A giggle went up from the ruined village.

  It was more wind than words, a shadow that rushed across the grass and danced through the gaps between the stones of the cottages. The giggle grew and grew and grew, until I was certain that the others must be scrambling to their feet behind me; any moment I would hear the spanning of a crossbow, Tenny’s alarmed trill, Kimberly screaming — or I would have, if the giggle had not grown to a gale of laughter, a howling voice from a ten thousand throats, bearing down out of the dark.

  Here was the secret message hidden in the patterns of the void, the final meaning at the centre of the Total Empty into which I had peered.

  A giggling darkness pulled itself together a few paces from my feet.

  Black tongues lashed the air, as if poking out from within a tiny hole in the dark. Nighted teeth were born from layers of shadow, coupling with themselves to breed new maws sprouting across reality’s skin. A hundred clawed feet raked the grass, throwing up clods of earth and showers of dying worms. A thousand arms reached out from the centre of nothingness. A million hands groped the night air.

  A tugging started in my chest, as if plucking at organs I didn’t have. An odd creaking sound made my limbs vibrate.

  I raised my knife.

  Meaning had arrived, and I was going to cut it out—

  “Maisie,” Casma whispered — right into my ear.

  I turned and looked into eyes like sunrise. Casma was right at my shoulder. She had followed me beyond the circle of salt.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” I said.

  “Yo-low,” she whispered. “Like you said.”

  The others were still fast asleep around the fire. The creaking and splintering noise had subsided — as had the howling giggles. When I turned and looked for my foe (where did you go?) there was nothing there but the night. No sprites or fairies, no trace of bugbears and bogeymen. There was no whirling mass of tongues and teeth, no hundred paws, no thousand arms. The green and the cottages and the cliff and the wall all seemed to be fading back into the black.

  “Not you,” I whispered to Casma. “Back to the fire.”

  I took her hand (I didn’t want to, and it cost me dearly), turned around, and led her over the circle of salt, between the massive logs, back to the fireside.

  Casma sat down. After an annoying moment, I sat down too. We both stared at the fire for a bit. Casma fed it some logs. I wrapped my knife back up and put my blanket over my legs again.

  Eventually Casma whispered. “Kimberly did ask you not to—”

  “I know.”

  “I know why you—”

  “I know.”

  “It doesn’t mean you’re a fool—”

  “I know.”

  Silence again. I wished it lasted longer.

  Casma whispered, “I won’t ask you again, then. I don’t hate you, Maisie. I don’t have any reason to. Though I suppose people hate for all sorts of reasons, or what they think are reasons, even if reason isn’t a part of—”

  “I’m jealous of you.”

  Silence. Pop-crackle of firewood. Hissssss-snap-pop. Mmmmmmm. Maybe that was enough. Was that a giggle I heard on the edge of my hearing?

  (Was it? You tell me. You would know.)

  “Because I’m too pretty?” Casma asked.

  I turned my head and looked right into Casma’s eyes, though I had nothing to say. She made my eyes water. I hoped I made hers sting.

  “That was a joke,” she said. “Was it a good one?”

  “No.” I looked back at the fire.

  “Oh well. Poo to that.”

  Another long silence took the reins of the night, sinking back into the crackles of the fire. Cracketty-crack-pop-hisssss. I willed Casma to give up (on me) and go back to bed, but she couldn’t hear my thoughts, and she didn’t go anywhere. I started to count the seconds — one, two, three — a hundred and eight, a hundred and nine — three hundred—

  “You get to be a blank slate,” I whispered. “Blanked the moment you were slated. You got the chance to be entirely new, renewed the moment you were newly made. Heather tells me you don’t remember being anything before you were completed. You don’t remember being a puppet shaped like Lozzie. That was like the womb for you. No memories until you were remembered whole. Is that right?”

  “Do you want it to be true?” Casma whispered back. “Would it be easier if it was a lie?”

  I moved my kitchen knife from one position on my lap to another, still wrapped in the tea towel. Then I moved it back. I tapped the handle with my fingertips.

  “A blank slate. You get to experience all your own experiences for the first time, without an overlay, without pre-existing context, without anybody else muscling in on what should be yours. Everybody’s forgiven you, because there was nothing to forgive in the first place. You have made friends quickly, quickened by the rest, and they’re all your own. You have a loving mother. My parents can’t even keep my existence as a fixed point in their minds, not without checking their notes. I don’t have anything which wasn’t Heather’s first. So, yes, I am jealous of you.”

  “Envious.”

  “What?”

  “You’re envious of me,” said Casma. “Jealousy is when you’re afraid somebody is going to take something that belongs to you, or should belong to you, or might belong to you in the future. Envy is when you want what somebody else has. You envy me. That’s what you mean.”

  “Right.”

  Silence. Worse this time, because I’d spoken at length and Casma hadn’t.

  “I envy Tenny as well,” I whispered eventually. “She’s about to start college. About to go out there into the world under her own steam, full steam ahead. You and her are going to publish on steam. Right or wrong? Wrong or right?”

  “If the disguise works.”

  “It will. And that’s beside the point. I don’t have that. I don’t think I can have that. I envy Tenny. I envy my sister. I envy Raine, Evelyn, Kimberly, Zheng. Sevens. Twil. Pick a name from the list of everybody you and I know or even those we don’t know we know, and I envy them. But I envy you most of all, because you got newly made, and I got remade, but you get to be a blank slate, and I don’t. It’s not your fault, and I didn’t want to say it out loud, because you don’t deserve this, because you’re just a child.”

  Casma didn’t say anything. Her face did something fiendishly complicated in my peripheral vision, but I didn’t want to know what was going on over there.

  “And you didn’t need to pull me back into the light, earlier,” I added. “I’m fine.”

  “You might have broken. You were creaking.”

  “I can’t be broken,” I whispered. “I’m made of carbon fibre.”

  “Hmmmm. Perhaps that is true, but we won’t know until we test, and testing can result in a negative, and that would be bad, because you would get hurt. And I don’t want you to get hurt, Maisie. I care about you a lot. Even if we’re not friends, I think of you as a—”

  “You are not my sister.”

  Casma didn’t even pause to react. “We are what we pretend to be.”

  I moved my head just enough to see her face at the edge of the world. She was neither smiling nor doing anything else; an attempt to placate me? It didn’t work, because blankly expressionless Casma was just as complicated as any other sort of Casma.

  “Heather’s words,” I said. “Did you read them, too?”

  “Mmhmm. Of course.”

  “Then you know I don’t need another sister. I have a sister and I love her. You and I are not related in any way, shape, form, method, type, truce, trip— tch!” I tutted, screwed my eyes tight, and shook my head.

  Casma waited, which for once was not entirely unwelcome. By the time I unscrewed my eyes, my vision was blurred. I stared at the fire, waiting for the flames to clean my lenses.

  “Okay,” Casma whispered eventually — which was a lie (but not a dirty lie, because Casma is not capable of those.)

  I must have sighed, or twitched, or perhaps tightened my knuckles around my knife, because Casma made a tiny tutting sound.

  “What now?” I hissed.

  “It wasn’t a lie, Maisie,” she whispered. “I said ‘okay’. That doesn’t mean I agree with you. It’s just okay. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh-kay.”

  “ … ”

  “That’s not a word,” Casma whispered. “You can’t whisper it.”

  I sighed. “Since when did you get so bold and confrontational? Boldly confident. Confronting and boldly going.”

  “Since we’re alone at night outdoors beneath the lack of stars, far from home and lost among the worlds beyond the veil. If Tenny was awake and you were not then I would have a whisper with Tenns instead. If Kimberly was unable to sleep for fear of the dark then I would chat with her. If Muadhnait was sitting up, I would attempt to learn more about our strange guide. Wouldn’t you?”

  Yes. “No.” Then: “You’re actually enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  Casma smiled. The smile made her eyes crinkle. “Yes.”

  I stared across a corner of the fire, at Kimberly’s back, rising and falling beneath the thin blanket. Perhaps I could end this farce of a conversation by going over there and slipping down inside Kimberly’s arms. She would make a wonderful big spoon to my little fork, if only I could get—

  “You’d rather be having this kind of midnight chat with Kimberly though, wouldn’t you?” Casma whispered.

  I said nothing. Casma’s smile changed. I didn’t look too closely.

  “Maisie? Wouldn’t you rather be having—”

  “I’m not going to talk about that.”

  “You said the same thing about hating me, and we talked about that in the end.”

  “I’m not going to talk to you about this, because you’re a child. It’s different. Differentiate.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  For what felt like the hundredth time that night, I turned to look at Casma’s eyes, which made her blink. I blinked too, several times, before looking back at the fire. “Your age is measured in weeks,” I whispered. “And even that’s pretty weak. What are you at now? Six, seven?”

  “Ten weeks old, tomorrow.” Casma stretched her legs out beneath her coral skirt. “But that doesn’t mean much. I’m not a human being.”

  “But you are being human.”

  “A ten week old human being would be a swaddled ball of snotty flesh and poopy nappies,” she whispered back. “I think you have to accept that different standards apply to me.”

  “I don’t have to accept anything.”

  “Neither do I, then. And I’m not a child.”

  “Then why do you look like you’re about fourteen years old?”

  “Because I’m young,” Casma said — and she sounded surprised. “Oh. There. You win. Well done.”

  “Good.”

  “Does this mean you aren’t going to tell me how you feel about Kimberly?”

  “It does mean that. Means that still. Will mean that in the morning.”

  Casma fiddled with the hem of her skirt. “You like her, don’t you?”

  I’ll tell you about Kimberly.

  You’ve probably already figured out the basics (and if you haven’t then you’re not paying attention.) I’ve not been subtle or quiet about it. I’ve been shoving it in your face, because the alternative is to face front, to what really happened, and stop pretending that any other outcome was ever possible. I’m not carrying a torch, so what’s the point in pretending?

  I wanted Kimberly.

  Not because she was cute (though she was, and still is, and deserves to know it,) but simply because she was there.

  She was available (she wasn’t), she was the only other adult present (she wasn’t), and she was trapped and alone and lost Outside (she wasn’t.)

  She was my little treat to myself. (No, she wasn’t.)

  …

  My sister chose to open her story with the day she met Raine, because Raine was a catalyst whose entrance changed everything. Raine led to Barnslow House and Evelyn, which in turn led to magic and Outside and Praem, then to the Eye, then to everything else in sequence; that sequence eventually came to rest, at the very end, upon me. Whatever else my sister may be, she chose the right moment to open her tale.

  But that’s a lie.

  She could have begun earlier — with her and I in Wonderland, with the moment I saved her, with the years of doctors and hospitals and that cursed fucking place she calls Cygnet. Can you imagine how different that would be? What if her tale had opened on a Leap, without context, without the experience of years, just slamming your head through the membrane without preamble? That would have been more accurate to the experience. She could have done it like that, but she chose not to. Do you know why?

  You do know. Come on. It’s not that hard.

  My sister opened on Raine, because Raine opened her. My sister chose Raine for her first words to you, because Raine is a red-hot hot-rod of lesbian lust, and we all know it. Because Heather gets quivery and short of breath about Raine. Because Raine is her rock, upon which she is regularly bent.

  What do you think my story starts with? Do you think I’m going to have a happy ending with Kimberly?

  I couldn’t even convince myself of that; why would I bother trying to convince you?

  …

  I liked Kimberly, I liked her a lot. I knew that I shouldn’t, and that absolutely nothing was ever going to come out of the situation I had constructed. She had a decade on me, she was not interested, and she was already embroiled at the centre of a love triangle. (And no, I’m not going to tell you about it, because that’s her business. Besides, it makes me feel sick.)

  Kimberly had her long-distance situationship; she might not even be living at Barnslow House much longer, if she situationed any harder. And what was her type? Grizzled dykes with dark pasts and complex emotional problems. Ex cops with lingering guilt. Tall dark mysterious butches with histories of substance abuse. Older than her, ragged around the edges, in need of a ‘good woman’. The type who would break down and cry behind closed doors, after years of stoic silence. Eye-bags and illegal firearms. Twitches and regret.

  I was not Kimberly’s type. Whatever this was, it was going nowhere (outside of my head).

  But I still wanted to kiss her, if only I could get a bit more stupid.

  “It’s okay,” Casma whispered. “I understand.”

  “I doubt that.”

  We stared at the fire. I stared up at the clouds, which I still couldn’t see, then out at the darkness, which had resumed being Total. Casma opened her mouth to say something else, something which undoubtedly would have annoyed me. But then Muadhnait sat up.

  The armoured nun sat straight up all in one go, like a vampire rising from within her coffin. Her armour scraped and clinked, but not enough to wake Tenny or Kimberly. She swung her armoured legs over the side of the big log and pointed her visor slit at the fire. She reached for the nearest pile of wood, took a log, and pushed it into the flames, stirring the ashes around; she repeated that three times, then just sat and watched, waiting for the flames to take.

  “Hello, Muadhnait,” Casma whispered.

  I thought she might flinch, but the armoured nun had probably seen us peripheral. Her gauntlets rose. She signed, “Hello. You should both get some sleep. We must walk again tomorrow. And it is not good to risk overhearing things in the night.

  “We figured that part out,” I muttered. “Partly figured. Figures.”

  That made Muadhnait turn her helmet to look at me. The flames failed to catch whatever contours lay beyond her visor slit. Darkness within, darkness without.

  I stared. She stared. She signed, “Thank you for tending the fire.”

  “You’re welcome,” Casma whispered back. “Are you sleeping well?”

  Muadhnait hesitated. “I am trying my best.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thank you. I must return to sleep now.”

  Muadhnait swung her legs back onto the log, then lay down flat, and for all I could tell, passed out instantly.

  Casma whispered, “I’m going to take her advice. I hope you can too, Maisie. Thank you for having this little heart-to-heart. Sleep well.”

  At least she didn’t try to hug me.

  Casma finally slipped off the log and tiptoed back over to Tenny. She lifted the edge of the blanket and slid down inside, snuggling in deep. She placed her head on Tenny’s shoulder. Pink eyes closed; no more little sunrises. Within a few minutes she was fast asleep. Muadhnait showed no sign of motion. Tenny breathed slowly and softly. Kimberly was facing away.

  I stood up and walked back toward the darkness, though I didn’t step over the ring of salt. (I’m avoidant, not suicidal.)

  The night was empty. Not Empty, just boring old nothing there. If I squinted very hard, I could make out a vertical line — perhaps the wall of one of the cottages.

  “I could take you,” I whispered to the darkness. “If I wanted to.”

  It giggled.

  Back by the fire, I wrapped myself in the borrowed blanket and lay down on the ground, with my backside and back against the log, shawl folded up for a pillow. Wood and grass and soil had been warmed by the fire’s heat. I tried to keep my eyes open as long as I could. Then I fell asleep.

  Or at least I assumed so.

  …

  I had a dream that night.

  If my sister had ever bothered to record her more mundane dreams, then you would be burdened with far fewer expectations than you are now. Her dreams were not mere dreams, but Dreams. Over the border of sleep with open eyes, in a very stupid place I never want to visit. Perhaps I should apologise to Lozzie for that, but her medicine is my poison, and I prefer dreams like this one.

  In the dream, I was standing in the ruined village.

  It was still night, but ordinary night, just dark, instead of Dark. Everything else was as it had been — the ancient wall, the tumbledown cottages, the grass, the headland, the frozen obsidian sea beyond the cliffs. The fire had burned down to cold ash. The others around the fire were indistinct lumps, like things are in dreams when they’re too complex for memory.

  The only thing different was the statue on the edge of the headland, the one Muadhnait had prayed to.

  The statue had been restored — moss and lichen washed away, pitted surfaces filled with fresh stone, gleaming like marble. Her missing arm was returned to her, the stony skin supple as the real thing; the hand clutched the haft of something akin to a spear, as a toy sword is akin to a turbine blade. Her shield was no longer pitted and broken, replaced with a solid slab of mirror-polished steel. Her hair was the colour of sunlight in a storm.

  Our Lady of the Forded Briar was looking right at me.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  She stepped from the plinth and walked toward me. She wasn’t human — twenty feet tall, eyes like nuclear fires. A corona like butterfly wings unfolded from her back; their light made my skin hurt. Hot air washed over me, scented with burnt metal and molten iron. I felt blood running down my cheeks.

  The kitchen knife had followed me into the dream; I held it up.

  “I can cut the head off your spear.”

  “It’s not a spear,” she said. But she stopped beyond its reach. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Her voice was like crashing waves of liquid rock.

  “I go where I want,” I said.

  “Liar.”

  “Is this a dream? Am I having a vision? Are you real?”

  “Are you?”

  “Answer the question.” I waggled my knife.

  “If you woke, I would be there. You are the one who would fade.”

  I felt certain she was the Mimic, come to poke and prod at me in my dreams. I pointed at her with the knife and took a step forward.

  She levelled her spear.

  “I told you,” I said. “I’ll cut the head off that spear.”

  “It’s not a spear.”

  “Is it you, you slut?”

  Our Lady of the Forded Briar smiled with grim amusement; her smile was like the breath of a forge. “Nobody has ever called me that before. Perhaps you are real, though your flesh is only a seeming. What are you doing here?”

  “Dreaming, apparently.”

  “You know what I mean. What are you doing here?”

  “Making a story.”

  “Making a mess, more like. You have one of my children with you. She better get a happy ending in your story, else I’ll be very angry.”

  “Do I look like I’m afraid of your anger?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Then she bent down. Her twenty feet of height seemed to become fifty, or a hundred, or more, in the way that things do in dreams when they move in two directions at once. She bent down to eye level as if examining me very closely.

  “You are not supposed to be here—”

  I pulled the knife back, to stab her in the eye.

  “—but I will make use of you, unwilling instrument.”

  Before I could thrust my blade forward, she straightened back up. She jabbed her spear through my gut and out my back; I bled real blood and spilled real guts, great masses of intestine boiling from my bowels.

  Which didn’t hurt. Because I don’t have any of that.

  I cut the head off her spear, sawing through the shaft with my kitchen knife. She looked surprised, then laughed; her laughter was the beating of the sun.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “It’s not a spear.”

  …

  Then I woke up.

  It was morning. The others were stirring. Dawn was like streaks of blood and ragged petals in the sky. The village was still there, regurgitated from the darkness.

  But the statue on the headland — of Our Lady of the Forded Briar — was gone, absconded in the night.

  Knife, one; spear, nil.

  Come at me again, bitch.

  Maisie is just dead-set on fucking with every possible local she can find in this dimension, isn't she? Nun-knights, nighttime goblins, the metaphysical concept of darkness itself, and now even a local goddess. What's next, is Maisie going to fight the sun?

  Maisie is more ... difficult, than she herself suspects, I think? Casma seems to have a way with her, though, which may help. Or maybe she'll just make Maisie worse! Hooray!

  Toxic', (by Cera!) this piece directly illustrates one of Maisie's most defining character moments thus far, to put it lightly. She is a little toxic, don't you think?

  spear not a spear?