persenche

content warning: intense, graphic violence and body horror

Can you all hear me? Therese asked, and her Working thrummed with the barely-restrained power of The Grief Shared Between Hunter and Prey, which had turned out to be an extremely nasty Sigil that had a lot of complexities she had to untangle on her way to putting everything together. It had more than enough power, though, and was very well suited to creating connections between disparate targets, just as its name implied.

Roger, Ianthe said.

Yup, Finley said.

I hear you, Hyun-ji said.

This is weird, Brynn said. It’s like I’m there.

Therese said, You shouldn’t need me to mediate or pass anything along, so I’m assuming you all heard each other, too.

She’d been very proud of that little bit of Working cleverness. It was impractical to create a connection for every possible pair of interacting nodes, and would have exhausted her to try to sustain it. But a distribution node centered on her, that worked without her active participation? That meant only four connections, one from her to each of the participants, and then the extra work making her own node a little more sophisticated so it could handle routing all the traffic around without her. Neat.

Nora had proposed the structure, and planned out the basic Working, but in the end decided not to participate in the linking herself. “I don’t want to risk any observations I make being distorted by the perceptions of others,” had been her explanation, and as much as Therese would prefer to have her present in the mental space, she agreed and left Nora out of the link.

The group of Rangers had spread out along the edge of the anomaly. The ground there abruptly changed shade from the dirty yellow concrete it had been for the last mile of travel to a greasy-looking deep red. It really does look like meat, Therese thought, recalling Brynn’s description.

There were twelve Rangers who would be moving in, in three squads of four, and then Yue Ling and Kris staying back with Therese and Nora. Yue Ling had said to just call her Yue, and Therese had agreed, but she still thought of her by her actual full name, regardless.

The squads were all carrying arc-pikes, which were the extensible spears tipped with a foot-long blade of Worked steel that would, at a gesture, ignite with golden fire. These were meant for large Ogre-class Bane fighting, where getting closer than ten feet was never a good idea, and massed pikes could hold the thing at bay. The pikes could fold all the way down to short spears, usable in close quarters for slicing as well as stabbing, and it was in this state that they were all being held, ready, the gold liquid flame already running down their blades.

Hyun-ji’s Weapon was already extended, and she hung from within its embrace a few feet off the ground, its long legs shifting with her, fidgety and restless like their wielder. Her squad clustered close to her, seeming unworried by the spikes of silver Weapon-leg thrust down among them. It was as though the device really was just part of Hyun-ji’s body, and her inherent body-awareness was keeping her from accidentally bumping against them. She had no other weapons, and without the scythe pedipalps extended, she looked fragile and unarmed.

Finley had settled on a kind of squad-automatic-weapon carry for her Weapon, held at her side in both hands, angled forward, with herself on point to keep her field of fire clear. Her squad’s role was to keep enemies off her, since she would be taking a stationary position near the target and firing from there, and her focus would be entirely on eradicating the central hole of the anomaly.

While Ianthe’s squad had the arc-pikes, she was carrying the absurdly long two-handed, single edged blade she favored, Worked to astonishing sharpness and humming with some latent power. Her sword-hand was enclosed in the wire gauntlet she always wore in the field, which gave her some kind of telekinetic power when she had the time and breathing room to concentrate on it. She moved with an easy confidence that Therese envied. Even seeing the dark area’s extent and being engulfed in its foul miasma of stink and headache, she seemed completely self-assured. Just another day on patrol.

Captain Ianthe flicked her sword out and the blade began to blur, the hum from it increasing in volume. It was, Therese knew, moving micrometers at a time, constantly, buzzing probabilistically around a central position, looking constantly for the path of least resistance through any substance it encountered.

Okay, let’s start moving in. Bounding by squad. Hyun-ji, advance with Blue, then I’ll bring Green up, then Finley will follow with Red. Move out.

Hyun-ji’s spider-legged apparatus picked its way forward into the dark area of the anomaly, with her squad spreading out around her, pikes held at the ready. The ground tore and oozed where the Weapon’s claws dug at it, giving way like spongy flesh. They moved up fifty meters over the broken, rubble-strewn ground, and then took up position at a low wall that was folded over like it had partially melted, Salvador Dali style.

In position, Hyun-ji said over the link. Clear for another hundred meters.

Green moving up, Captain Ianthe said. You were right about the stink, Brynn. Jesus. Her team advanced in a cautious jog until they passed Blue Squad, and then they dropped to a more careful advance.

The ground ahead of them was foggy-looking, and Therese strained to make out what it was. Captain, what is that? Then she remembered, and reached into the link between them to see through the Captain’s eyes.

Some kind of mucus. Stringy, and stretched across the rubble. Like a web, but no tension to it. She brought her sword through the goo, which parted and retracted, leaving slimy trails behind them.

Don’t let that stuff touch your skin, Brynn said.

No kidding. Ianthe’s tone was sarcastic but there was no heart in it. She was tense. We’re in place. Finley, bring Red to my position. Blue, move forward to that two story structure.

Slowly, cautiously, the Rangers moved through the alien landscape of the anomaly. Once they’d made it two hundred meters inside, the Captain had signaled for Yue Ling to bring Therese and Nora up. Kris trailed behind them, keeping watch on their flanks.

The further they moved into the dark area, the more exposed they felt, and the more aware they were of just how many piles of broken spongy concrete and collapsed buildings there were to either side of them.

This whole place looks like it’s moving. Finley’s voice was strained but calm. Is that real or an optical illusion?

Therese relayed the question to Nora, who paused to carefully scan the area around them. “She’s right. The ground in the whole area is swelling and deflating very slightly. Like it’s breathing. It’s shifting the rubble slightly each time.”

You get all that? Therese asked.

That’s wonderful. Keep your eyes open so I know when to start shooting, Finley said.

This is worse than it was, Brynn said.

It’s been growing. Hyun-ji had raised herself up to five meters above ground level to get a better view. We’re three hundred meters in and I still don’t have eyes on the central plaza.

Captain Ianthe’s mental voice was tinged with irritation. I don’t like being this extended. I’m going to move out to that bridge support on our left flank and get some better sight lines on the approaches. Hyun-ji, stay aloft.

Therese could feel her boots sink into the ground, and each time she lifted one up, there was a moist sound and trails of the mucus substance clung to her feet. She had her hands pulled in tight in front of her body, her elbows tucked in, and she knew she was hunching her shoulders. If any of this touches me, I’ll probably vomit on the spot, she thought, and just the thought was enough to make her mouth flood with saliva as bile churned in her stomach.

It took thirty minutes to reach a location where Hyun-ji could see the plaza, and another fifteen of painstaking advances, moving from cover to cover, before the three teams had spread out into their assault positions. The green and blue squads were at the edges of the plaza, beneath the ruins of an overhead pedestrian walkway that circled the whole area like a balcony severed from its structure. Red squad, with Finley, had swung wide to take up position on an elevated platform at one corner of the plaza, which might have once been a stage, or might just be a random eruption of concrete in the incoherent chaos of the anomaly.

The hole in the center was much larger.

Fuck, that’s huge, Brynn said, her mental voice a whisper. How did it get so fucking big?

She’d described something the size of a basketball, or a watermelon. This hole, this pore, this wet opening in the ground, was two meters across. Its lip was swollen, puckered and red, like the ground itself was inflamed and infected, and stringy trails of the white mucus radiated out from its edges in all directions, clinging to nearby low walls and broken concrete blocks. The interior was glistening black, and the surface of the inner walls was perforated by thousands of holes, each of which pulsed open and closed, like tiny wet mouths.

Therese, ten meters behind Ianthe and Hyun-ji’s teams, wanted to drop her contact with them so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

As the first of the creatures came crawling sluggishly out of the hole, dragging itself over the lip, Therese gagged.

They looked like fat, just-hatched larval wasps. Their fleshy, bloated bodies were the size of large dogs, but ellipsoid and swollen, slowly pulsing in time with the holes in the pore and the lip of the pore itself. Each of them trailed the wet strings of mucus behind it, spun loose from some organ on the end of its body, where a flickering profusion of finger-like appendages seemed to be extracting it from within, spreading it behind. Each of the things had what looked like more than a dozen limbs moving in jerky, apparently random sequences, dragging them forward across the spongy dark ground. They had the vaguest suggestion of an abdomen, and then a head made of churning teeth, each the tip of a red-black tendril that lashed and twined around all the others, forming a knot of worm-like tangle that hid some sort of dark opening within.

The first creature pulled first one, and then another, sticky grey-white wing from its back, and began to fan them rapidly to dry. Then the second and third creatures emerged from the hole.

Captain, permission to— Finley’s mental voice was strangled with horror.

Light that fucking thing up, Adept.

The shriek from Finley’s Weapon rose from ‘awful’ to ‘intolerable’ and the lash of white arcing fire leaped out from where Therese knew her squad was stationed, somewhere off to the right. The fire touched down at the edge of the hole and the creature there, as well as the ground it stood on, and another half-meter of the lip of the pore, exploded into a wet haze. In the aftermath, the retinal burn on her eyes kept Therese from seeing what had been left by the Weapon, but she had the impression of a burned hemisphere, cauterized and hollow, where the thing had been.

Then chaos broke entirely loose.

A swarm of a dozen or more of the fat wasp creatures came boiling over the edge of the pore. They’d been sluggish and indolent while emerging at their own pace, but like wasps or ants, when they identified the presence of a real threat, they swarmed.

With shouts of alarm and horror, both Hyun-ji and Ianthe moved up with their squads. Ianthe crossed to the right to intercept the creatures that squirmed towards Finley, while Hyun-ji dashed directly towards the pore to catch them as they emerged.

Finley’s weapon detonated again at the pore’s mouth, and more of the meat of it evaporated into the awful wet mist. This could take hours, Therese thought, and then, I’ll go mad if I have to watch this for hours. If I have to stay in this place for hours.

“It’s working, Therese. Look at the damage.” Nora pointed, and Therese blinked against the red-fire afterimages. “It’s bare concrete where it’s been struck.”

Hyun-ji’s team engaged the wave of wasp-creatures, and extended their pikes to keep the things from getting close. They burst immediately on being struck by the fire blades, their innards boiling and exploding in thick wads of white gore. Hyun-ji had become a whirling cloud of blades and metallic limbs, wielding both scythes and all the articulated appendages of her device equally as lethal implements, dashing from one creature to the next.

Ianthe’s squad intercepted the stream of wasps headed towards Finley at its midsection, and tore through them with their own pikes, Ianthe at the front slicing in great sweeping arcs with her nearly-invisible sword, leaving neatly-bisected creatures in her wake, their viscera visible briefly before they remembered to die, and collapsed from venting all their inner fluids.

Finley’s team was being pushed back away from the edge of the six-foot-high platform, using their pikes to push the things back over the lip of it, desperately trying to keep the wasps from surrounding them. Where the other Rangers were able to dance around the creatures, staying mobile and out of the way of the knotted mouth-tendrils, Finley’s Weapon required her to keep a stable firing platform, and so except for a few steps backwards, she’d given them no space to maneuver.

That’s why one of Finley’s people was the first casualty of the fight, as a wasp-creature leaped over her pike, its wings dried enough to let it briefly take flight, slamming into the Ranger’s head and grinding the nest of its tentacles against the faceplate of her helmet. The woman began to scream as the teeth tore through it and reached her face. She dropped her pike, and this was all the opportunity a second creature needed to scurry forward and fling itself up onto her torso, plunging its nest of tentacle-teeth into her stomach, where they ground and thrashed at the material of her body armor.

Ianthe arrived a moment later, and her squad swept the wasps back away from Finley’s platform, but by the time they reached the fallen Ranger, the two creatures that had brought her down had managed to burrow into her flesh, and were beginning to swell and turn from their pasty white to a deep wine red.

The girl was still convulsing, but these were reflex spasms, and Ianthe gave her only an instant’s consideration before reaching out her gauntleted hand and crushing both creatures and Ranger into stillness.

Therese threw up.

Nora had a Working active, some kind of Divination, and she hissed. “It’s about to get worse.”

Finley’s Weapon screamed again, and plowed more furrows of fire-cleansed concrete into the area around the pore.

The swarm of creatures slowed and then stopped, and Therese thought, what’s worse about that? And then she realized that something much, much larger was struggling its way out through the hole, and it was blocking the hole so that the swarms could no longer get past it and out.

Captain! Something big! she shouted into the link, and pointed towards the pore to also draw Yue Ling’s attention to it.

The pale body was bigger around than the pore, and the edge of the hole had to dilate to let the thing squeeze through. As each segment of its maggot-like shape emerged, clusters of thrashing tendril-limbs unfolded from it in four places, radially spaced around the body, hardening quickly on exposure to the air.

The front of the thing tore itself open in two ragged wounds, crossing in an ‘X’ on its thrusting tip, and the skin peeled back from that open wound to reveal a furiously moving structure of gnashing bone, gathering its own meaty chunks of flesh back into itself to be ground up.

Its limbs found purchase on the ground around the rim of the pore, and it began to drag itself in Finley’s direction, slowly, pulling more of itself out of the hole as it moved.

Hyun-ji leaped onto its back and began to tear at it with her blades, howling in some kind of battle frenzy. Her squad fell back towards Ianthe and Finley, unwilling to try scaling the monster, and trying to get their pikes between its grinding face and the rest of the team.

Finley’s weapon shrieked again, and the fire landed on the massive creature’s flank, detonating a huge section of it. Inside, more of the grinding bone-structure could be seen, buzzing away, wetly organic and incomprehensible. The thing seemed unbothered by the gaping wound in its side, or the huge tears Hyun-ji was opening in its back.

Nora muttered something, which Therese realized after a beat was the name of a Sigil. A long one, one she didn’t know well enough to recognize. She was Working.

The captain leaped back down off the platform and gestured at the creature, clenching her fist. From ten meters away, her gauntlet transmitted her gesture to the whirling bone grinder of its face, and bits of it shattered and tore loose, falling in a shower of splinters and gore all around it.

Then Therese understood. It’s not a larva! It’s a chrysalis!

The white jelly flesh of the thing finally split entirely from the attention of the two Weapons, and the thrashing bony structure within was free to unfold itself.

The thing that had been birthing itself from the pore was a nightmare tangle of bone and tendon enclosing grey-yellow meat and pulsating sacks of viscous liquid. It raised itself up out of the ruins of its gelatinous cocoon, now discarded, and began to extend knots of tendon out in lengthening arcs that touched down all around it, and where they touched, the ground exploded as they began to burrow.

Sheer horror was flooding Therese from every person on her link, and she was dimly aware that another of the Rangers had gone down, torn apart by a descending limb as she tried to sever it. Hyun-ji was howling in rage, her apparatus a blur as she dashed from bony limb to bony limb, destroying them with her scythes, somehow not able to keep pace with them as they touched down around her. Finley fired her Weapon into the thing again and again, and each strike blasted more of it into mist and vapor, and yet there just seemed to be more of it, emerging endlessly from the gelatinous flesh that still clogged the pore. It rose and rose above them, six meters, then ten.

This isn’t the thing I saw in the prophecy, Therese thought. It still has so much more growing to do.

Ianthe moved back and forth across the space between the emerging monster and Finley, parrying each strike of its organic-bone limbs.

They’re not making enough progress against it, Therese thought. They’re losing.

As if in answer to her fears, another Ranger fell, flung aside by the monster’s flailing.

We have to do something.

Nora’s Working was growing behind her, something huge and complex that was slowly unfolding into a bizarre celestial geometry. She was only barely aware of it, and even less aware of the Rangers that were guarding her, and so she wasn’t aware when one of them collapsed, only realizing it when the screams became loud enough to penetrate her singleminded concentration on her mental link.

Yue Ling was down, and the wasp-creature that had brought her down was two or three times the size of the ones that had emerged before. She could see several more crawling up through the ruins of the monster’s incubation jelly, burrowing through its remaining flesh.

Soldiers, she thought, and her thoughts seemed very far away and detached. Workers, and now soldiers.

The wasp-soldier had driven its face into Yue Ling, and in fascinated horror Therese saw that where the workers had dozens of tentacles, the soldier had only eight, each tipped with a tooth of bone, hollow and leaking some grey fluid. It sunk them into the woman’s throat and upper chest, and its whole body began to pulse as the fluids surged into her.

Nora gasped as her Working completed, dragging in breath in desperation, the scope of the celestial power she was managing nearly overwhelming her. She had just enough air in her lungs to whisper, hoarsely, “I will not let you have her.”

Then, her whole body convulsed and celestial fire poured out of her face and hands into a blazing circle on the ground around her. “Got you,” she croaked. And then she sunk to her knees, and then slumped over to one side, unconscious.

Kris, screaming in rage and grief, had already speared the thing that had toppled Yue Ling, and as it burst, its grey fluids sprayed up and across her, and she fell away, clawing at her arms, as the swarms of parasites in the liquid that gave it the grey color tried to gnaw their way through her skin.

That’s why there wasn’t anyone paying attention when the second wasp-soldier flew from a nearby rubble pile, covering the distance to Therese in seconds, slamming into her and knocking her to the ground.

She knew she was going mad, looking into the tangle of its mouth-parts. She couldn’t imagine living with this memory.

And then the teeth penetrated her gut and she felt the parasites begin to enter her body and she realized how much worse it could get.

Nora’s magic spread out in a widening circle of celestial fire, accelerating, catching each of the creatures as it passed over them, turning them to ash. An expanding sphere, like a pressure wave, racing out from her. When it touched the still-emerging tendon-and-chitin monster in the center of the pore, a terrible cracking sound exploded from its body, and whatever throbbing meat that it held inside it that gave it life

—began to burn.

Therese held two thoughts simultaneously:

I love you, Nora

And

It’s too late

and she was
gone

# # #

“Fuck!”

Riley was running by the time she hit the door to the suite, and sprinting by the time she reached the main hall. She started leaping down stairs three at a time, cursing the stupid fucking Tower for being so fucking vertical.

She was still operating on pure adrenaline and fury when she reached the Rangers’ level, and caromed off the wall of their main passage, changing directions via bruises and trauma. Once past the main hall, she just followed the obvious noise and clamor.

The Rangers operational room was a chaotic dance pivoting around one central nexus: Brynn, who Riley knew only by sight, but who was obvious for the stunned and horrified look on her face.

“I don’t fucking know, okay? I’ve fucking lost them!”

Riley crashed bodily into the table at which Brynn was seated, wild-eyed and frantic. “Where is she?”

A Ranger grabbed Riley’s upper arm to drag her away, but Brynn, in a moment of recognition, held her hand up. “Wait. Fuck. You’re Riley.” She took in Riley’s wild-eyed look, her disheveled appearance. “You knew the second I lost connection, didn’t you? You ran here from the Residences. How the fuck—”

“We don’t have time. Where is she? How far out is she?”

“I— They were a day and a half out, but I’ve lost the Working that—”

“Therese is dying. Right now. I can feel her dying. You need to get the fuck out there and bring her back.”

Brynn was stunned into silence. Then, “We’ve already sent out a recovery team. What else do you want me to do?” Riley could hear the exhaustion and near-panic in Brynn’s voice, and realized this wasn’t entirely rhetorical; she was asking if Riley had any ideas. Which was chilling and awful.

Riley bit down on her lip, her anger and panic melding into desperation. “Isn’t there some kind of portal or magic or something? What the fuck is the point of all this magic shit if you can’t save one single goddamn person?”

The Rangers on either side of Riley grabbed her again, to haul her off, but she shook them loose in a titanic, adrenaline-driven thrashing. “Get the fuck off me,” she snarled.

“Don’t. Don’t,” Brynn said to the Rangers. “Let him go. Look, sit the hell down and explain to me how you got down here that fast, how you knew I’d lost the Worked connection to Therese.”

“She’s going to die.”

At that moment, in the midst of the chaos, Eve and Suliat arrived. They rushed over to Riley, elbowing the Rangers out of the way. “Fuck, who let all these goddamn Novices in?” one of them said, but the look of pure glowering menace from Suliat silenced her.

“We sent Himari to get Key and Allie. We figured this was probably something to do with Therese’s expedition,” Suliat said, while Eve struggled to catch her breath from the running.

“The gang’s all here,” Brynn muttered, clutching her head. “I’ve got to concentrate and see if I can reach any of them to reestablish the connection. If I can make a connection to them, we can use it to track them, reach them with magic, anything.”

There was stillness for a beat, then two. Then Brynn snarled. “There’s nothing. There’s not a goddamn trace of it.”

Riley started to rise again, pain and fury in her eyes, but before she could start to shout again, Eve was gasping something that sounded like ‘empty’, and she gulped air, trying to speak. “Empathy— rod—”

There was a moment of confused silence, and then understanding dawned on Riley’s face, and her eyes went wide. “Right! You could feel—”

Eve nodded. “Link— to Therese—”

“What the fuck is he talking about?” Brynn looked lost amid her panic.

“She,” Suliat said in a flat and final voice. “And a couple of weeks ago we did an Armory practical with rods that Crafter Marama made. They gave us empathetic connections. And she—” and Suliat pointed one perfectly manicured nail at Riley— “has a permanent link to Therese.”

Eve nodded vigorously. “I could feel it when I was linked to Riley. You should be able to.”

Brynn’s eyes lit up as she realized what the novices were telling her. “With the rod, I could—” She cut herself off, suddenly all brisk and urgent business. “Fuck. Okay. Megan!” She pointed at one of the Rangers who had been trying to restrain Riley. “Get to the Armory and get me one of these rods. If Marama’s asleep, wake her ass up. Move.”

Minutes after the Ranger sprinted from the room, Allie, Key and Himari arrived, with the latter gulping for air. “Fucking— stairs—” she gasped, and waved a hand at the pair she’d brought.

“What’s going on?” Allie asked, but the dread on her face indicated that she had a fair idea of that already.

“Whatever stupid shit you all came up with and sent Therese into, is fucking killing her right now,” Riley snarled.

Allie blanched, and Key put a hand on her arm. “Nora is with her.”

“I can feel her dying in my mind.” Riley’s voice was filled with every scrap of urgency she could muster.

“We have to… how can we even help her from here?” Allie looked from Riley to Brynn and then to Key. “To do any kind of Working at a distance like that, we’d need to be able to pinpoint her…” She trailed off and looked at Riley. “You said you can feel her? Can you reach her? Like, to talk to her?”

Riley started to shake as the adrenaline began to drain from her. “I tried. I tried. I don’t know if she heard me.”

The Ranger, Megan, arrived with a rod wrapped in soft cloth, and Marama following behind. “Listen,” the Crafter said, “I don’t know what you think this can do, but that thing is a trivial little Working, barely even an empathy link, and I’m not sure—”

“It will work,” Riley hissed, and grabbed the rod. “Take it,” she said, holding the end out to Brynn. “Take it.”

Brynn’s hand touched the rod, and then they were together.

Oh. I see what your friend meant.

Riley’s mental voice was as close to calm as it had been since her connection to Therese had started flooding her with panic and pain. Yeah, no kidding. You can feel Therese, right?

Brynn seemed startled. Oh, right, yes, Therese. I uh, I meant why she called you ‘she’. Brynn gestured towards Riley’s mental self, undeniably a girl.

We can celebrate my gender discoveries later, Riley thought. Can you feel Therese in my mind?

There was a moment of silence, and then Brynn thought, Only faintly. Like an echo.

Fuck. Riley did the metaphorical equivalent of chewing her thumbnail, thinking, and then came to a decision. Okay, uh, I’m going to need your consent for this shit. I’m going to pull you close. Like all the way inside my identity.

Brynn hesitated only a fraction of a second. Do it. If it will save her, I consent. Do it.

Riley imagined herself closer and closer to Brynn, and then Brynn felt a moment of disoriented doubling, as though her point of view were fragmenting into pieces and reassembling, and then—

Quiet.

Riley’s voice was pure girl, now, calm and confident. So this is the inside. Uh. Sorry for the sudden intimacy.

Brynn had the distinct sensation of being shown into someone’s bedroom, with the same sense of shy embarrassment.

There were tides of emotion rising and falling inside them. Brynn felt Riley’s surge of worry and fear towards Therese, so intense it was almost disabling, and her desperate longing for Suliat’s arms around her, and her confused swirl of emotions towards Eve and Himari, and at the same time she felt her own entirely unexamined feelings towards Therese, and her resentment towards Nora, and every time she and Hyun-ji had slept together in the past year and all the ways she lied to herself that it didn’t mean anything—

Consent. I consented to this. We consented to this. The voice was mostly Brynn, but not entirely. They were mixing and tangling together, identities becoming blurred.

We both did. Riley’s mental voice was apologetic. Okay, listen. Can you find the place where Therese is in our mind?

Brynn thought, There’s— oh! There she is! What is that? The connection flickered like a beacon seen through a heat shimmer.

No idea. It’s in here with us, in this internal place, so she’s in here with us. Can you reach her actual body from here?

I think we can— we just need to—

As the connection to Therese opened wider, the sensorium of their shared minds exploded with pain. Oh fuck, they thought. It’s getting worse. She’s being ripped apart. Oh Christ.

Wait, Brynn’s voice thought, and it was like shouting into a windstorm of pain. I can feel the ends of the Working. They’re still there. Maybe I can pull them back together if I—

Brynn’s frustration, awareness of her own inadequacy, her fear of appearing weak in front of others, her misery at letting everyone down when they needed her to be strong, all these things surged up in their shared mind, as she reached for the shredded ends of the Working and failed to grasp them.

Fuck, I have no idea how to— this was some Theory shit that she cooked up with Nora, it’s too complicated, I can’t even see how it’s—

Riley took the metaphorical equivalent of a deep breath.

What’s the Sigil she used? she thought.

Brynn shot back, How should I know? The more she convinced herself that she was useless, the more her mental voice unraveled and the more her despair poisoned their shared space.

Riley’s mental voice projected forceful calm. Can you see it in the Working?

I uh, I’m not… Brynn steadied herself, and focused on the bits of the Working that were still intact. Each of them carried a marker, the Sigil that was dismantled to power it. I think I can tell its shape? Just the shape, I don’t know the name.

Riley braced herself. Give me the shape. Let me see it.

Brynn sent the complex arcs that formed a bow-like shape pierced with four arrows of light.

Okay. Time for you to get out of here, because this is going to get really stupid, Riley thought. And for just an instant, Brynn saw the basic outline of what the girl intended to do, and was horrified.

Their minds began to disentangle, awareness separating in a feeling that was almost regretful. The sense of loss that followed was cold and lonely, and Brynn had the defiant urge to grab onto Riley with all the mental force she could muster and never let her go.

Brynn withdrew, the rod clattered to the floor where it was swept up peremptorily by Marama, and Riley could no longer hear her thoughts.

Without turning to look at them, her eyes down on her hands, clutching the edge of the table, she said, “Himari, Suliat, Eve? I’m going to do the Archives trick again. Uh. So keep an eye on me. Don’t let me do anything crazy.”

Key started. “You’re what? The fuck you are!”

Himari, her reflexes not dulled by her trembling muscles, grabbed Key as she lunged forward towards Riley, and they struggled for a moment, but Riley was already back inside her own head.

Three arcs to make a bow shape. Four lines to make arrows piercing the bow, radiating out from an implied center. Two arcs, opposed, curving away from each other, to make the string of the bow.

She filled the shape with fire, letting it burn into her mind.

The Grief Shared Between Hunter and Prey, the shape announced itself.

Who fucking names these things, Riley thought, as her inner world went white with celestial fire. She realized she hadn’t tried to do anything like this since discovering herself, and ending the separation between girl-Riley and boy-Riley. What if she wasn’t able to—

Too late. Time to fight.

The cacophony of celestial power drowned out all her thoughts, and the Sigil began to batter at her defenses. Become me. Become one. We must become one.

Riley steadied herself, from within the defensive circle inside her mind, and then reached out to seize the Sigil with both hands and begin tearing it apart.

Listen, I have a better idea, she told it.

persenche

Well, things became quite a bit more calamitous, didn't they? Next time, we'll start to see some of the ramifications of what just happened. I wish I could tell you that the calamities end with this chapter, but I'd be lying. What if I promise some very lovely kissing between very nice girls?

Anyway! Thank you for reading and coming on this journey with me. Your comments keep me going and make me excited to get the last couple of chapters written, so please do leave your thoughts, theories, and angry rants below; they're always appreciated. And please do tell your friends to come read The Tower. Word of mouth is the only real promotional strategy I have for this book, so if you spread the word, I'll love you forever.