Nora and Allie were waiting on the platform outside the administrative offices, half-swallowed by a velvet couch with elaborate dark wood trim. Allie struggled out of it, brushing herself off, and came over to meet them, while Nora rose much more elegantly and waited for them to join her. “You’re staying, of course,” Allie said, and there was only the barest hint of a question.

Riley nodded, and Therese, a step behind him, said “It was an interesting interview. Lots of things to talk about later when we work out some procedural stuff.”

“Oh?” Nora’s eyes flicked to Therese, then back to Riley.

Allie interrupted. “We can’t wait, but in the meantime, Riley, shall we gather some basic supplies and get you downstairs to your new home?”

He shrugged. “I guess? I’m just going where I’m told to go at this point. I’m kind of lost. Like, mentally.”

“How long since you’ve slept?” The sudden sharp tone in Therese’s voice made it clear that she’d more or less forgotten that he’d crossed a swath of the City and climbed the entire Tower in the last day.

“I dunno. How long have I been here? Cause that–” he indicated the skylight roof of the Tower far overhead– “has been sunset-colored the whole time.”

“Oh shit, right, yeah.” Therese looked at Allie, who rummaged in her robe and pulled out a silver pocketwatch on a chain. This, she handed over to Riley, who took it gingerly.

“Keep it. You’d be given one anyway, as part of the basic supplies, along with robes and the like. It keeps Primary time regardless of whatever the sky is doing here.”

“And, uh, what is the sky doing here?” Riley looked up with a dubious expression on his face.

“That’s an excellent question and one I wish we could answer,” Nora said serenely. “It will eventually be night here, but how long until that happens is variable. The days and nights are not of equal length, and not of consistent length from one to the next.”

“That’s why we have the watches.” Allie nodded at the one in Riley’s hands. “It’s got a Working on it to keep Primary time, and that’s what we use here for schedules and things.”

He looked at the watch’s face. The hands stood at 11:19. Which meant nothing, of course, without having taken note of a starting point. “Do you–”

Therese answered him before he could finish the question. “PM. You made your portal a little over 10 hours ago. You’ve been here in the Tower for about two hours.”

Which is why he was so tired. That was a lot of running, climbing, chasing, panicking, and then a whole goddamn lot of stairs on top of it all.

Allie saw him sag, and took his arm by the elbow. “Let’s get you moving, and you can meet everyone in the morning.”

Therese put her hand on his shoulder. “Welcome aboard, Riley. I’m glad you made it. But, well–” She gave him a half-lidded look. “I’ve been up as long as you have, and I’ve been up and down those stairs three more times than you, so I’m going to get some cocoa and head to bed.” Nora started to say something, and Therese interrupted. “Yes, yes, after I write up my notes. Give me some credit.”

“Uh, yeah. Nice to meet you. I mean, again. Or for real. Or–” Riley was struggling for words.

“Yeah. You too.” She smiled. “Don’t worry; you’re not getting rid of me. The headmistress wants me to keep an eye on you. Magically speaking, I mean.”

Nora and Allie waved as Therese peeled away from their group to head off in search of snacks. Allie tugged. “Shall we?”

Moving slowly so as not to aggravate his hip — it was oddly much more painful to descend stairs than ascend them, he’d found — they went down two levels, to the common area of the Residences floor. This was less busy than it had been on their way up; given the hour, the other Novices had all filtered off to bed, and only a few small clusters of girls staked out positions around particularly comfortable groupings of sofas and armchairs.

Allie abruptly turned to Nora. “Could you take Riley to the Residence office? I’ll meet you there in a moment.” Nora nodded, and as Allie detached from their group, Riley saw her beeline for a girl sitting alone in a chair near the edge of the common area platform, holding a mug of some steaming liquid and looking big-eyed, lost, and drawn into herself, curled up almost fetal in the upholstery.

“Eve, I think? One of your teammates. Or teammates-to-be. She just agreed to join us. You’ll meet tomorrow.” Nora gently tugged at his sleeve, and Riley allowed himself to be pulled away, watching as Allie folded up onto an adjacent chair, her hand seeking out Eve’s and squeezing.

Jesus, I’m going to horrify that girl, aren’t I? She already looks like she’s barely hanging on. He considered the endless mind-curdling vault of space above them, and realized he was also barely hanging on.

The room Nora led him to was just inside the main hall of the Residence level, on the right. The spacious office was decorated in the same kind of early 20th century style as so much of the City and the Tower seemed to be. Wood paneling, warm metal fixtures blotched by tarnish and age, and a persistent smell of old papers like the stacks in the deepest parts of a very large, very old library. A long table of dark, rich wood ran along the wall to their left, and a heavy desk of the same dark wood dominated the center of the space directly ahead.

“Nora! I’ve been expecting you. Well, expecting Allie, to be honest. But–” She looked Riley over. “Expecting someone, at least. Everyone’s been talking about the new Novice.”

“Riley, this is Bella, a third year novice currently on duty in the Residences office.”

The young woman with the glossy black curls waved, having already risen from the swivel chair she’d been slouched in as they entered. “Isabella Campos, Academics. Well, at least, I will be. Next year.” She grinned and her face folded around the grin, expressive and mobile. “I’m guessing supplies and… uh, what’s up with rooms? I haven’t heard anything.”

Nora shrugged. “I don’t know. Let’s get supplies done and hopefully Allie knows something.”

Bella shrugged, said “É sobre isso,” and beckoned the pair to follow her through a side door. The frosted glass set in the door was marked with more incomprehensible ideographs, and the hall beyond was lined with similar doors with similar mystifying markings. Bella led them confidently to the first door on the left, opened it, and drew them inside.

Shelves lined the walls, and boxes filled the shelves, and there was a smell of age in the place. Sodium yellow lights blinked to life on the ornate ceiling over ten feet above, and sent strange shadows scurrying around the elaborately-sculpted moulding.

Bella looked Riley up and down. “I don’t suppose you know your size, do you?”

Riley looked baffled. “Size? Like, pants or shoes or…” The thought of this woman’s eyes traveling up and down his body, seeing him, was making his guts knot into an anxious twisting ache.

She sighed. “No, of course not. Let’s guess.” She pulled a box halfway out, took out a long dark brown robe, and held it up. “Maybe… Let’s go one size smaller, I think. You’re too skinny.”

Riley could feel himself shutting down under the scrutiny, withdrawing into a secure inner world. The familiar feeling of piloting his body remotely started to settle over him, and by the time the woman said ‘skinny’, he was already hearing everything as though from the end of a long dark tunnel.

“Can you hold this up in front of you?”

“Turn a little, let me see.”

“Okay, show me your feet.”

“I think we’ll skip the formal stuff for now.”

“Three changes, and five casual outfits should–”

“I’m sorry we don’t have anything more–”

“I don’t know if you’ll need–”

“–can’t really say without Allie–”

“–paper and implements–”

“–already have a watch–”

He drifted, aware of himself being moved from one place to another, aware of his arms filling with objects, bags, bundles, packages. Aware of carrying them from the supply rooms to the front room with the long table. He heard words around him, and sometimes had a sense of their meaning. The growing unreality was causing him to fall further and further out of alignment with his perception of the world around.

Allie brought him back to himself when she entered the room, bustling and busy, already gathering some of the things off the table. “Riley! Hey! Here, hand me that, you’re going to tip over.” She unburdened him of two of the larger packages that were teetering on top of the pile. “Bella! What are you doing back there, leaving Riley alone and about to fall over?”

Bella and Nora came back out of the back room holding packages and bags. “What? We were barely gone a minute, Allie. Just sorting out a few things. What’s wrong?”

Allie set the packages down on the table, and unburdened Riley of the rest of what he was holding. “Hey. Hey, Riley.” She touched his elbow. “Are you okay? No, you’re obviously not. Right.”

She waved at the bundles on the table. “Bella, can we just set this stuff aside for now, and I’ll come back in an hour and take it over myself? He’s crashing hard, and I want him in bed before he actually does fall over.”

Bella nodded. “Yes, yes of course. I didn’t realize. He must have had a hell of a day, huh?”

“That’s a good way of putting it. Nora, can you grab some sleeping clothes? Just whatever you all have picked out already. I’m sure it will be fine for tonight.”

Nora set her burdens down and picked up a bag. “I’ll follow you.”

Gently, Allie applied pressure to Riley’s elbow, and he followed her lead, his thoughts drifting and unmoored. This was, of course, all going to vanish when he woke up. That much was obvious by now. The whole thing had been very convincing at first, but the longer he’d been here, the more obviously a dream it had all become. This last bit, down a long dim corridor with the occasional rumble of thunder in the distance accompanying an ominous flicker of the lights, was so clearly staged like a gothic thriller that he wanted to giggle at the obviousness of it all.

It’s a dream. Of course it’s a dream.

Finally they turned down a smaller hall, and then stopped at a door. Allie let go of his elbow and he sagged against the door frame. She hadn’t been supporting him, not physically, but without her touch it was as though one more tether to the ground had been cut, and he drifted away a little bit more.

Beyond the door, which Allie unlocked with a large metal key of the kind Riley imagined an old-timey jailer would use, was a dark wood-paneled and stone-tiled room with dark shapes of furniture and the shadowy hulk of a hearth. Doors led off this central room, but he was no longer processing any of what he was seeing. Allie led him through one of them.

Beyond, a small room with a desk and a shelf and a chest of drawers and a bed. The smell of still air and dust. Shadow lit only by the slice of electric light flickering through the door.

In the gloom, Riley was vaguely aware of being helped into a robe or shirt or something. He was aware of being gently pushed against the bed, where he folded. He was aware of a blanket being pulled over him.

And after that it was all darkness and quiet, except the occasional disgruntled rumbling of far-off weather.

# # #

Riley hadn’t expected to go from the dream of the Tower directly into another dream, but no sooner had his eyes closed than he was opening them in a different place entirely. In the moment of transition, he found himself caught between certainty that he was waking into reality and that he was falling out of reality, simultaneously, a superposition of wakefulness and sleep.

His earlier certainty that he was walking through a dream world was crumbling before this obvious landscape of randomly-firing neurons and jumbled memories of the past day. The endless orange plain, dust and crumbling rock, ancient beyond imagining with a sullen orange sun in the sky: this was no real place, but a kind of mythical desolation, a visual representation of the deepest emotions of abandonment and loneliness imaginable.

In the center of the plain, the Tower.

The shape of the thing was impossible, just like its height and its interior. It was smooth and curved, but also a jumble of facets and prisms, and a construction of long monolithic planes and edges and abrupt corners, and an ellipsoid cylinder, and it was featureless but also elaborately encrusted with cupola-topped turrets and balconies and box windows.

He stopped trying to make sense of it.

There was something wrong with his balance, and he felt his knees starting to buckle and his body to sway. Abruptly, he was sitting in a chair, still facing the impossibility of the tower, watching winds lift scouring dust from the scorched plain into twisting orange spirals.

A feeling of presence filled him, and he waited; there was a sense like an indrawn breath before someone begins to speak.

you have arrived
we have been [calling] you

Riley heard the words, or understood the words, in his head; there was no sound. And, on reflection, there were no words, either, just the impressions of meaning. Sense of communication, impression of connection, ideas stabbing into his brain below the level of conscious thought or interpretation. As though the Presence was inscribing what it said directly into his short term memory.

He heard and understood the word ‘calling’, but that wasn’t what it meant. There were layers to it, strange twists and loops of meaning and intent. There was a sense of crying into a void, but there was also a sense of longing and need, and a sense of speaking into a phone, and a sense of magical summoning. It was like a blur of words all said simultaneously, each of them as intended as every other word in the blur.

“Who are you? What is this? What’s happening?”

we are the [tower] in the last [city] at the [end] of the universe

The avalanche of meaning threatened to overwhelm Riley. Too many words that meant too many inexplicable and even contradictory things. How could ‘end’ mean both itself and ‘beginning’? How could it convey death and life, stasis and change, all at the same moment in the same syntactic space?

this is a dream
we brought you here
waking is too [noisy]

“Why? Are you the voices I’ve been hearing? Are you why I ended up here?”

Riley was surprised by his ability to stay coherent in this dream; usually he’d have been sidetracked down a dream-spiral of random associations and free-form weirdness, but this was remarkably focused. In front of him, the winds sweeping the cracked wasteland gathered dust into themselves, tracking counterclockwise around the distant base of the Tower, obscuring it.

we foresee a need
we will need [you]

The layers that crashed into Riley’s mind instead of the word ‘you’ were too much. He could feel his awareness becoming unlinked from the dream, drifting out of focus, dream-vision doubling, the Tower multiplying in front of him like a kaleidoscope.

but we must first find [you]
you must first find [you]

He couldn’t escape. Each instance of the word was like a hammer-blow to his psyche, his identity swerving more and more erratically like he was oversteering in a desperate attempt to correct his course. You. You. You.

[you] must awaken
[you] cannot stay asleep

“Stop,” she croaked, barely able to form words under the assault. “Stop.”

riley is not enough. the [tree] will destroy you. you must stop being riley. you must become [riley].

At the word ‘tree’ Riley’s mind filled with the shattered fractal lightning pattern that she’d seen over and over now, the ever-shifting multidimensional explosion of fire in branching pathways. And the overlapping meanings said ‘tree’ but also ‘angel’ and ‘fracture’ and ‘lightning’ and, most alarmingly, ‘fate’.

But that was nothing compared to the impact of that final ‘Riley’.

She clutched at her head, pulling her legs up into the chair, hiding behind her knees as she tipped slowly over into one of the armrests. “No. No, I’m not. I’m not that. I can’t be that.”

you are [riley]
you cannot hide from [her] forever

“Stop. Please. Anything. Not that. Please don’t do this to me.” Her voice was low and almost inaudible, and the wind’s shriek was climbing, turning everything into a dust-colored blur and filling the air with a noise like a siren, but the voice in her head didn’t need sound to hear what she said.

we are not doing this to you
the [tower] is not causing this
[you] are the cause of [you]

“I don’t want this!” Riley’s voice rose to a shriek, the dry and bitter air clawing at her throat, trying to rend her vocal cords. “I never wanted this!”

[you] did. [you] do.

She felt walls in her mind shuddering under each impact, great chunks of impregnable masonry calving off to slide into rubble at their base, the whole structure precarious and fragile. She did not want to look behind those walls. She did not want to see what was hidden inside that vault. She had locked those gates long ago and could not stand the thought of what might be revealed beyond them.

From somewhere deep inside her, a voice, rough and masculine, angry, slurring. “Stop fucking crying–”

“No!” She opened that final vowel, let it turn into a scream of terror and despair.

you must. the [tree] will kill you otherwise. the [tree] will [erase] you. you must become [riley].

“NOOOO–”

# # #

Riley woke up in a tangle of sheets and unfamiliar clothes, sick with sweat, gasping. The faintest spark of light glowed in a fixture on the top of some kind of table or desk? He couldn’t remember anything about the layout of the room he found himself in, and even without the terrifying nightmare, he’d have been disoriented by the gloom and the unfamiliar surroundings.

The bed was narrow and the sheets smelled like dusty neglect, like still musty air left closed off for years. It wasn’t uncomfortable but any mattress was a challenge for him, and the throb in his side was a reminder of the exertions of the previous day.

Which actually happened, didn’t it? The thought was horrifying but inescapable. As the last trailing strands of the nightmare slipped away from him, taking the terror and self-loathing with them, his previous day’s conviction that it was, in fact, all a dream seemed absurd. The dream was bizarre and transient and incomprehensible. This? This was just awkward and uncomfortable. And he needed to pee.

As he rose, the light on the desk flared brighter, and he was able to see the shape of the room and its contents. The light itself was one of those little fire globes he’d seen the Rangers using out in the City, and as the room slowly brightened the globe rose towards the ceiling.

The room was longer than it was wide, with a single door on one short wall, and the bed in the corner opposite the door. Shelves lined the wall over the bed, three high, empty; in the short wall opposite the door, a curtain covered what looked like a window. On the long wall opposite the bed was a chest of drawers, with more shelves above it, and in the corner next to it, a desk and an uncomfortable-looking swivel chair. All the furniture was of dark wood, with an oily sheen that looked like recent dusting. He turned back towards the short wall with the door, and adjacent to the door he saw a wardrobe standing in the corner at the foot of the bed, ajar, empty.

Bed, wardrobe, desk, chair, dresser, shelves, window. “Welcome to the Hilton,” he muttered to himself. Wondering at what sort of view the window might offer, he pushed aside the curtains to reveal a blank wall, just a window-shaped alcove that held nothing but a flat panel of stone. “Nice. Imagine whatever scene you like, kids.”

This was about the time he looked down at himself in the gradually brightening room and realized he was wearing what unaccountably appeared to be a dress. His vision went grey as he considered all the ways he might have ended up in a different set of clothes than the ones he arrived in. Not that he cared about the clothes, but he did very much care if someone had undressed him in the night.

The thought froze him in place, his eyes distant and unfocused, his awareness drifting free from his body, for several long minutes. He might have stayed longer, but the sounds of movement — scuffing and thumping and industriousness — came from outside the door of the room, and snapped him back to awareness.

He tried not to think about the fabric sliding freely against his bare skin and underwear, the long skirts of the nightgown catching around his ankles. He could block those sensations out if he focused on the sounds from the next room.

He took a long, deep breath and opened the door.

“Oh! Good, you’re awake already.” Allie was just standing up from a crouch on the far side of the common area, a dustpan in one hand and a little broom in the other. Near the door that led, Riley recalled, back into the hallway, another woman with olive skin and glossy black hair was unpacking a box of fabrics — linens, perhaps, or clothing? He tried to remember her name. Something Disney.

“Riley? I wanted to apologize for last night.” She spoke with an accent he knew but couldn’t place. Bella. That’s right, her name was Bella. “I didn’t realize how exhausted you were or how overwhelming that all would be. We were all so excited that I just forgot how much you’d already been through.”

She’d stepped towards him and offered her hand, which he took; she squeezed it briefly and then turned back towards the boxes. “You might want to take your own things into your room? Just to make a little more room for all the cleaning and organizing we still have to do.” She gestured at a stack of bags and boxes right at his feet, just outside the door of his room.

“All of this? What the — oof — what the hell is it all?”

“Mostly clothing and school supplies,” Allie said from where she’d returned to sweeping, near the hearth. The room was dominated by the hearth, the entire wall opposite the main door being given over to the stone structure with its broad slab mantle and elaborately worked black iron grating. Around it were a sofa and two armchairs, and another pair of armchairs sat a little ways back, nearer to the far corners of the room, away from the hearth. The center of the room was dominated by a thick, dark, circular rug. Directly over its center was a hanging light fixture — dark — and in the corners of the room floating fire-globes drifted in small random ambient patterns, circling and bobbing a little.

In each wall to the left and right of the hearth were two doors, one of which — the first door from the entrance on the left wall — Riley had just come out of. Each of these had a heavy wrought iron handle and a plain unadorned brass plate bolted to its center, at eye level. “Touch it,” Bella said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The plaque. Touch it.”

He hesitantly reached up, pressed his fingertips against the cold metal. They tingled as though there was a current in the metal, just enough to raise the hairs on the back of his hand, and then as he watched the name ‘Riley’ appeared across the surface, at first as though in black ink, and then as the ink coalesced into sharp lines, the lines sunk into the metal, etching themselves.

He jerked his hand back as though the plate had become white-hot. “How did–” he started to say, and then shook his head. “Magic. Magic school. Right.”

Bella grinned. “You’ll find the handle will only open for you now, as well. Except in emergencies, or if you give someone permission to enter.”

His brows dipped slightly in thought. “How does it know if I’ve given someone permission?”

“You just say it out loud. You know, ‘Come in’, or whatever. Like if they knock?”

“I guess that’s pretty obvious. How literal is it? Like, is this based on intent, or sound, or–”

Bella giggled a little. “Nem imagino. I mean, technically it’s Tower studies and technically that’s my department, or it will be next year, but most of what the Tower does is pretty mysterious to me. I bet there’s a paper on it in the Archives somewhere.”

He returned his gaze to the plaque, which now was engraved and looked like it had been manufactured with his name already inscribed. The door swung open easily at his touch.

At the top of the pile of packages were obvious academic supplies: notebooks, pens, reams of paper, and all the back to school things he found somehow irresistible in the aisles of Target despite never particularly needing any of them. He wondered if he could convince anyone to bring him Elmer’s Glue and some blunt-tipped scissors, but decided against asking. All of these things went directly into the drawers of the desk. The pale wooden case containing bamboo brushes, a shallow flat stone and a stick of black gunk seemed likely to belong in the desk as well, along with the rolls of some kind of stiff, thick paper.

One small bag contained what seemed to be thumb sized quartz prisms, and he set that on the dresser, unsure what to make of it. Another held a jumble of metal rods about the length of his hand; this too, he put on the dresser.

Three books went onto the shelf near the desk: The Goetia of Stars, The Index Overview, and Analytic Geometry of Workings. All three had the rough look of small print runs from a vanity press — not print-on-demand, but something you’d pay real money to commission. The text inside was indifferently typeset, and the diagrams had the hand-drawn quality of amateur illustration.

He flipped through the Goetia; each two-page spread was a strange symbol, the component parts of the symbol — curves, lines, hooks, twists — and an ominous-sounding name. She Who Walks Unseen. The Loss of Love’s First Bloom. Sorrows in Unexpected Seasons. And then paragraph after paragraph of dense text, which read to Riley like one of the books that purport to explain all the symbolism of the Tarot.

He let the pages slip through his fingers, like a flipbook animation. Christ, if this was the Tarot, it was a tarot of hundreds and hundreds of Arcana. He had a grim thought, and after finding the last page (The Herald of the End, pages 572 and 573), he flipped back to the beginning to find the first page and the table of contents. Sure enough: ‘Volume One’.

The Index looked like a single-volume encyclopedia — titles of articles and then a brief paragraph for each. It too claimed to be Volume One. The last book, Analytic Geometry, seemed promising, since every page was covered in what looked like mathematical notation, but of a form he hadn’t seen before, with symbols and operators he didn’t recognize. Some of the diagrams looked like vector fields, which was interesting but also incomprehensible to him, and he hoped he wasn’t expected to have more math than he did. Then again, if there were academic requirements, he supposed they’d have brought those up earlier in the process, right?

After that came the clothes. As he unfolded each item, his sense that reality itself was somehow disjointed and he was no longer properly connected to it began to grow. None of it was men’s clothes.

It wasn’t particularly feminine either, to be sure, but all the affordances were clearly not meant for men. The basic design was a dress, cinched at the waist, with drawstrings and a square-cut neckline. The button-down shirts were all buttoned on the wrong side. The socks were all above-knee, and the shoes were tapered slippers, not quite coming to a point, with a strap across the top of the foot.

There wasn’t lace, there were no frills, but it was unmistakably meant for the comfort of young women. He stood there, holding the final pieces he’d withdrawn from their carefully-folded stack — panties, plain white cotton — and felt his vision darkening.

Before he could collapse, Allie was at his side, catching him and supporting him. “I’ve already asked for more carefully-tailored clothing to be made,” she said in a low voice that didn’t carry past the door of his room. “It will be a few days, and then we’ll swap out for these things. This is just the standard Novice arrival set.”

He didn’t trust himself to say anything in reply, so he just nodded.

“Let me help get these put away, all right?” He hated how much care there was in her voice, how much concern. It was as if she thought she was talking to a person who felt things and was capable of its own caring in response. It was as if she thought he was human. He shuddered, and her grip on his arm tightened slightly, reassuring.

If he were capable of crying, he might have, right at that moment, but he wasn’t, so instead he let himself be silently moved to the bed and seated. Allie started gathering the disgorged contents of the laundry, moving it efficiently into drawers and onto hangars.

“You needed changes of clothing for introductions, is all. I argued to hold off until we could find something suitable for you, but one of the girls in your cadre has been waiting nearly a month to begin, and that’s about as long as the Headmistress likes to hold people back before we just say ‘fuck it’ and get underway. So, priority was given to getting things moving. I’m sorry.”

“It’s… No, it’s fine.” He found his voice after a false start. “It’s fine. It’s just clothing. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t actually care. It was just a surprise.”

Allie gave him a searching look, which he carefully avoided meeting, and then sighed a little. “Okay, Riley. We can leave it there for now. And the new clothes will be ready in a few days. We have to manufacture them, because–”

He cut in. “Hyun-ji explained. About things falling apart.”

She blinked once in surprise, though he wasn’t sure why. “Right. Yeah, the entropy gets everything we don’t make. The clothes you arrived in are already starting to show thinning of the fibers, and probably only have a day’s worth of wear before they start to unravel. And, well. They were kind of filthy.” She wrinkled her nose, an impossibly cute expression, and he smiled a little, involuntarily.

“Anyway, there’s also two more sets of bedsheets, which I keep in the bottom drawer of my wardrobe so I’m just going to put yours there, too. Okay? And you can get more pillows if you need them; just go out and see whoever’s working the Academics front office. Bella, if it’s late at night; she’s on evenings right now.”

“I heard my name!” she called from the common room. “Also I’m doing all this work and I’m all alone out here and it’s a lot, Allie!”

Allie laughed. “I’d better get back out there and get things tidied up. We’re moving the cadre in after lunch. Which you’ll be doing with us, so you should get dressed. As, as best you’re able.”

He felt a bit like he’d been thrown in the ocean and told there was a life preserver somewhere nearby, and that he should swim around until he found it, but he retained the presence of mind to ask the question that had been burning in him for the past twenty minutes.

“Uh. Where’s the bathroom? I, um.”

Allie looked him up and down, finally registering the slightly anxious shifting of weight from one foot to the other. “Oh. Oh! Yes, right, just past the hearth, there’s a door in the back wall, sorry!” She stepped deliberately out of his way to let him scurry past, push through the door into the blinding white light of tile and mirror beyond, and tug it closed behind him.

# # #

After a shower he felt better able to face the clothing situation, and in the end it wasn’t all that bad. He flinched at the underwear but under his clothing it just felt like… underwear. Which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, but whatever fear was crawling around in his guts was pretty fucking far from rational. The shirt was just a shirt, and the dress was… well, the dress was unexpected but not, once he had it on, all that noticeable. It was just a plainer, browner variant of the Adept robes everyone he’d seen was wearing, so it’s not as though he’d particularly stand out.

What an odd idea. If he wanted to not be seen, he’d do better to wear a dress than pants.

With no idea what to do next, or where he was meant to go, he picked up the Goetia again and began to read.

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when the door to the common room banged open, inasmuch as a heavy door on ancient hinges could ‘bang’, and an unfamiliar voice called. “Hey, new guy! Come on, I’m hungry and I want lunch and I can’t have it until I fetch you, okay?”

He scrambled to his feet from the sprawling position he’d adopted on the bed while he was reading, feeling his heart rate shoot up and his breath get shallow with the jumpscare panic. Tossing the book on the bed, he pushed open his door and remembered just as it swung open that he was wearing a dress.

The girl in the common room was East Asian, shorter than him but not by much, and had an absolutely exasperated look on her face. One hip cocked, arms folded. If she tapped her foot now, she’d be a caricature of impatience. She looked him up and down, though with her obvious annoyance he couldn’t read her reaction to his arrival.

“Shoes.”

He looked blankly at her, uncomprehending.

“Shoes. You have to wear shoes. The constructs in the dining hall get annoyed if you don’t wear shoes.”

He hadn’t realized he wasn’t wearing them. “I– yes, uh, one sec, I’m–”

She rolled her eyes. “Come on.”

He found the slippers, pulled them on, and realized he wasn’t wearing socks. Whatever. It’s fine, he decided. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care, as he came back out with his ankles bare and peeking from below the hem of his robe.

“You’re American,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. She had an accent he couldn’t place. English by way of the south of England, maybe?

“Yeah, I’m from Seattle.”

“Mm.” She paused. “Himari.”

“Where’s–”

“No, it’s my name. Himari Sasaki.”

He recognized it as Japanese, and started to ask, “Should I call you–”

“No.” She was walking briskly now, and he was stumbling to keep up. “Unless you speak Japanese, which I’m guessing you don’t, it would be pretty bizarre to use Japanese honorifics and shit, right? Kind of patronizing, honestly. And anyway, I grew up in Cambridge.” She paused, shot a glance across at him. “England. Not Massachusetts.”

He just nodded mutely, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the flood of information and the sheer aggression of Himari’s personality.

They walked in silence for a minute, down the long hall of the Residence wing towards the common area, and then Himari said, “You got us private rooms.”

He couldn’t tell what she thought about that, whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. He wasn’t sure himself; he felt himself as an intruder again, a stranger, out of place. “I– yeah. Sorry?”

“Nah, it’s fucking fabulous. I’ve been stuck in a dorm room with the others for almost a month and I can’t wait to stretch out. Are the rooms big?”

He shrugged. “What’s big? There’s a bed and a desk and a dresser and a wardrobe.” He couldn’t remember if any of those were different in British English or not, but he figured the meaning would be clear enough.

“Perfect. So sick of sharing closet space. I mean it’s fine, they’re fine, our cadre is great.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “I just got used to my own space, you know?”

Riley, who had lived in a large rambling house since he was a child, nodded, unsure what to say.

“Anyway, yeah, thanks for that. And for getting Academics’ asses in gear to get us started. I’ve been bored as hell and they won’t let me go out and poke around out in the City.” She glanced over at him again. “Only boy in the place, huh?”

Before he could think of what to say to that, they turned into an archway off the hall, within sight of the central Tower shaft but before the actual common area, and into the dining hall. The room wasn’t loud, but conversations still paused for the briefest moment as they entered. Riley, already running almost entirely on automatic, barely had a chance to register embarrassment and humiliation before Himari nearly dragged him over to a table.

“This is Riley. Riley, this is Suliat, and this is Eve.”

Suliat was Black, with medium-length hair tied tightly back in a bun, and eyes like pools of ink. She smiled broadly, gesturing to one of the free seats. “Go on, sit down. We’re not going to bite you. Well…” She gave a long exaggerated look to Himari. “I’m not going to, anyway.” Her accent was at once familiar and strange, lilting and melodic.

Eve, who Riley had seen with Allie the previous day, waved tentatively at him. She didn’t meet his eyes, which saved him the trouble of avoiding meeting hers. She was as pale as Suliat was dark, with scatterings of freckles and flushed capillaries across her cheeks. If a person could convey ‘trembling’ without actually shaking, that’s what she was doing.

“Sit. I’m hungry and I’m going to go bug one of the constructs for food.” Himari was making hurry-up gestures at him, so he pulled out a chair and sank into it.

“Uh. Hi. I’m Riley.”

# # #

Himari returned only a few minutes later, and not long thereafter trays of food began to drift over to their table, forcing Riley to once again remember: right, magical school.

“Celestial constructs. They’re basically little bits of magic made to do all the menial labor around here, I guess.” Himari shrugged. “Seems good to me. Beats having to do all the grunt work ourselves.”

Riley hadn’t done much more than sit in silence with the others; Suliat was clearly eager to interrogate him, but seemed hesitant to do so without Himari present. So they sat in awkward silence until their fourth returned.

“So! Riley!” Suliat’s voice was bright and enthusiastic. “Where are you from?” The rise-and-fall melodic sound of her voice was so fascinating that he paused an entire beat before he realized that had been a question, and directed at him.

“Uh, oh! Right, um, I’m from Seattle. Uh, in the US.”

“Doesn’t it rain there, like all the time?” Himari asked.

“Not really? I mean it rains a lot of the time but it’s not hard rain, like it’s not torrential or anything. Just drizzling. Most people don’t even bother with umbrellas.” He considers. “It’s cold a lot of the time, I guess. Or chilly. I don’t know, it all just felt normal to me?”

“I don’t think I could handle it,” Suliat said. “I’m from Lagos and it is always warm there. Even in the middle of the rainy season it’s still warm, and the rain is a relief. I hate being cold.” She shivered dramatically to emphasize her point.

“Lagos is in Nigeria, right?” Riley took a stab based on vague recollections.

“Oh, not bad for an American!” She seemed genuinely pleased. “Yes, though I was brought here from Baltimore. Johns Hopkins. I was studying International Relations and honestly? It was so completely boring.” She laughed a little. “Really my father’s idea, not mine.”

Himari leaned back in her chair, turned to Eve. “Come on, we’re all here now, you have no excuse. What’s your situation?”

Eve let her eyes flick up just briefly before she started talking. “I’m from Ireland. I was at Trinity in Dublin when I was… recruited. I didn’t really have a plan or anything. I was just a freshman.”

Himari paused, then said, “What do you figure they do if we don’t all speak English? I mean they can’t just be recruiting their sailor soldiers from the Anglosphere, right?”

“Sailor soldiers?” Suliat asked.

“You know, Sailor Moon?” Himari said, with the are you stupid tone in her voice.

“That’s a cartoon, right? From America?” Suliat’s face was a study in innocent curiosity.

Himari hissed. “No, you absolute cretin, it’s from Japan.” She swore in what Riley assumed was Japanese. “Magical girls. Fighting magical monsters and stuff. How do you not have this context?”

Suliat shrugged. “I just didn’t watch much American television.” Riley was pretty sure this was intended to provoke Himari, and it worked.

After the food arrived on floating trays — pasta with some sort of sauce and little bits of green and brown in it, delicious — they were all quiet for a bit as they ate.

“I think…” Riley started hesitantly. “You were all in college, right? Uh, university. Whatever.” Nods from the others. “I think that means I’m the youngest one here. I’m only just 18.”

Himari volunteered, “I’m 20.”

“19,” said Suliat. After a moment, and a pointed look from Himari, Eve volunteered, “18. But only for another month.”

“Do you think you’ll go back and get a degree?” Suliat asked Riley.

“I uh.” He looked briefly down at his lap. “I don’t know. I didn’t really have plans.”

“For school?” Suliat asked.

“For anything.”

“Okay, fuck it, I gotta know,” Himari cut in abruptly. “You’re seriously the only boy in this whole place. Doesn’t that fuck with you? Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

“Himari, that doesn’t seem entirely appropriate–”

“No, I think it totally is. I mean, not that I’m complaining about getting a private room, because Eve snores–” This revelation caused Eve to turn red and look down, letting her hair fall in front of her face to hide it– “but we’re the only people here who have a boy in our little circle of special friends and I just want to know why, like what’s up?”

“I don’t–” Riley started, but Suliat beat him to it.

“Why would he know anything? He arrived just yesterday, Himari. Do you think he’s gotten some intensive coursework in the magical world and all its properties since yesterday?” She frowned. “You’ve been here a month. What have you learned that would explain it? After all, you’ve had the most chance for secret coursework of all of us.”

“No, it’s okay.” Riley finally managed. “I’m– I don’t know. The Headmistress said I could learn magic, that I had the ‘talent’, whatever that means. I don’t know why I’m an exception.”

Of course you do, he felt himself starting to think. Fragments of his nightmare began to surface in his mind, and he closed his eyes, crushing them back down into forgetful oblivion.

“Well, it’s not like we were here to have slumber parties and braid each others’ hair anyway, I guess. I don’t even know what kinds of girly bonding rituals they have at magical boarding school.”

Suliat smirked. “I wouldn’t let you near my hair. You’d just make a mess and it would hurt the whole time.”

The others looked up at something behind Riley, and before he could turn to see what it was, he felt a hand on his shoulder and an electric jolt of presence.

“Heya,” Therese said. “Do you feel better this morning? I heard you were wrecked last night.”

He recovered his composure as quickly as he could manage, and nodded. “Thanks. Just… too much everything, you know?” His skin was crawling with the nearness of her, goosebumps rising across his arm and chest.

“Did you…” She trailed off, thinking. “Did you have any dreams?”

The question was so careful, so studiously innocent, that Riley immediately knew that Therese knew he’d had a nightmare. How she knew, he couldn’t imagine, but she did. The idea of her seeing his dreams made him go cold, his stomach dropping, his breath quickening.

“N-no, nothing I remember. I don’t usually.” He cleared his throat. “Remember dreams, I mean.”

She squeezed his shoulder gently. “Well, if you have any that you remember and that seem meaningful, let me know. It’s part of what Divination does, although I’m crap at dream interpretation.”

Himari snorted. “Prophetic dreams?”

Therese looked up at her. “Why yes, Novice Sasaki. Prophetic dreams. You live inside a sapient magical construct. It has effects on your mind. It influences you. And sometimes, that means prophetic dreams.” The tone of a lesson being delivered was unmistakable, and Suliat was trying to suppress a smile. Even Eve’s mouth was twitching slightly at the corners.

Himari’s mouth snapped shut into a thin line, and she didn’t offer any more comments on the topic. Riley was grateful for the interruption, because it had given him time to collect himself. “Okay. But like I said, I never remember dreams.” This was true, but he could feel the creeping edges of the nightmare threatening to wake his memory fully, and he needed to prevent that at all costs. He didn’t know why, he didn’t know what the nightmare had contained, but he needed to keep it from surfacing into his conscious thoughts.

She let his shoulder go, and he fought the urge to sigh with relief. Whatever this electric feeling was, it was intolerable. It scrambled his senses.

“I’ve got to go back to work, but I just wanted to stop by and check in on you. Let me know if…” She paused and Riley suspected she was quickly trying to inventory what kinds of help she could realistically provide. “If you need to talk to someone.”

He nodded, mutely, pretty sure his voice would crack in some revealing way if he said anything.

After Therese had gone, Himari was clearly looking for some way to find fault with her, and this kept her silent and frowning for a while, giving Suliat the opportunity to seize control of the conversation.

“I don’t know how much you’d be willing to share, but… all of us were recruited very conventionally. Rangers arriving to offer us exciting opportunities, whisked away to a magical Tower. You know. Routine.” The grin in her voice was matched by the one on her face, and Riley realized that she was extraordinarily beautiful. “But we heard rumors about all the excitement of your arrival and, well. We’re curious!”

Himari rolled her eyes. “Come on, Suli. Own up to it. You’re curious. Don’t put this on me and Eve.” The prodding seemed good-natured, and Riley had the impression that the extra week or two of time the two of them had spent together already had brought them closer than the rest of the cadre.

“All right, yes, yes. I’m curious. Can you tell us about it?”

Riley shrugged. “Nobody said I couldn’t, so I guess so. I mean, it’s not like it’s traumatic or anything. Except the part with the Banes.”

Himari became suddenly very, very attentive. “There were Banes? Seriously, like real ones?” The tone of her voice was not, Riley noted, one of horror. She was excited. He realized that Himari was probably already imagining herself as a Ranger. Whereas he… what was he imagining?

You’ve been here less than two days, Riley Hawkins. Cut yourself some slack.

“Uh, yeah. Banes. Well, Ianthe — sorry, Captain Ianthe — said they were small ones. They were maybe the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”

red topography, red open mouth of a windshield, red collapsed car roof, red dripping into brake lights, red–

He shut his eyes firmly, opened them wide.

“What were they like? I mean, I read in the Index that Banes are named after European fairy tale monsters, but the survey article was very vague.” Suliat had leaned forward just as Himari had. Riley had gotten distracted by the music of her diction and had to drag himself back to her question.

“I don’t know how to describe them. They were like… I dunno.” He went quiet for a moment, thinking, holding up a finger to indicate he was looking for words. “Like crabs, I think. Like ten foot tall crabs. Except they were also kinda like snails? Slimy and oozing. And um, they were machines. Like one of them had a leg that was made of pistons or something?”

Himari opened her mouth to say something, but Riley spoke again, cutting her off inadvertently. “And they were hairy. In places. Mostly like crab shells but then kinda like gorillas. And they were twitching.” He looked up. “Have you seen The Thing, the horror movie from like 1980?”

Himari nodded; Suliat looked blank. Eve, however, surprised him. “I love that movie,” she said, low and quiet. “It’s a classic. Maybe Carpenter’s best.”

“Right?” Riley smiled, tried to mentally bookmark that conversation branch for later — was Eve into horror movies? It seemed out of character for what he’d seen of her so far, but it’s not like a half hour of conversation for which she’d mostly been silent was a reasonable guide to her character. “Anyway, they were twitching like that. Like constant motion. Parts unfolding into other parts, tendrils pulling loose and writhing around. The Captain cut off a limb from one of them and it grew legs like a centipede and tried to crawl off.”

Eve was rapt. Suliat had a look on her face like she was regretting the curry she’d been eating. Himari leaped to the important stuff, though: “So how did the Rangers kill them?”

Riley summarized the battle as best he could, given how little he’d actually understood of what he’d been seeing, and he could tell that he’d only whetted Himari’s appetite for Ranger tactics and weapons. She wanted to know every little detail about the firesnake Finley had used, and tried to get him to elaborate on how it had moved. He finally had to say, “I dunno, just weird, okay? I’m not an expert on weird snakes made of fire. It was just freaky.”

With prompting from Suliat, he returned to the start of his day, his trip to the park, his opening the Portal, and the whole messy chase scene.

“All the shaking from yesterday, all that was because of what you tried to do with gravity?” Suliat looked confused. “How could it have reached all the way here?”

Himari said, “It didn’t. The shaking was the Tower. It gets angry if someone messes around with reality too much. Guess ‘reversing gravity’ counted as being too much.”

Eve looked alarmed. Riley nodded at Himari, and said “That’s what the Headmistress said. Well, and everyone else. Apparently I got lucky, because I guess sometimes people just vanish when they do things like that? Like the Tower just erases them.”

Suliat had a thoughtful look on her face. “I wonder how we’ll know if we’re doing ‘too much’.”

“We’re supposed to police each other, apparently.” Riley shrugged. “It’s why they put us into these cadres. We’re supposed to keep each other safe while we practice. I have no idea what that means.”

Himari was about to offer an opinion but Eve interrupted, a rare enough event that everyone let her do it. “How… how did you actually do the Working?”

Riley shook his head. “No fucking clue. The whole thing is a blank in my memory. I remember something called the ‘keeper’ talking to me, but not what it said. And then I was on the ground ten stories below where i started, with the Rangers jumping down after me like, uh. Ninjas.” He caught himself about to say ‘lesbian ninjas’, but realizing he had no idea what the orientations of his teammates were, he edited himself at the last moment to avoid making a possibly-in-poor-taste joke.

Eve’s forehead had a little furrow across it; not a frown, not exactly, but a look of intense concentration. A thinking line, a worry line. “It’s just… they keep saying ‘call a Sigil’ and ‘break a Sigil’ but nobody ever says what that means. What it’s like. I mean…” She looked up at the rest of them. “What if it hurts? What if it’s awful?”

“I watched Therese do it, during the interview with the Headmistress.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Adept Therese. Anyway, it didn’t seem to bother her. She just closed her eyes, whispered something, and then…”

The pause fell in a natural silence in the dining hall’s murmur of noise, and he wondered how to explain what being attached to Therese by a telltale was like. It was disturbingly intimate, which seemed likely to freak Eve out, but how much of that was whatever had passed between them, before, six months ago?

“Then it was like I could tell she was there. I could have pointed to her with my eyes closed. And I could sort of tell how she was feeling? And it wasn’t… bad. I don’t think it was painful.”

Eve didn’t really look all that reassured, but Suliat wanted to go over the details of Therese’s Working more closely, so Riley tried to answer her questions as best he could from a position of almost total ignorance. He was still explaining how no, he hadn’t heard what she’d whispered, and no, he didn’t think he could figure it out if he just concentrated really hard, when they realized the dining hall had been gradually emptying out, and the celestial constructs — shimmers like a heat-haze in the air, with a handful of light sparks slowly orbiting in a chaotic pattern within — were all idle, waiting to reclaim their long-since-empty dishes.

“Uh. You all wanna go see the rooms?”

Suliat’s eyes brightened and her little frown of concentration turned into a huge beaming smile. “Right! We get to move our stuff this afternoon! Oh goodness, I am so ready for a room of my own.” She looked around at the others sheepishly. “Not that you’re not both lovely, but–”

Himari waved a hand to cut her off. “Nah, same. Let’s go pick our rooms and then we can go get our things.”

# # #

After lunch, despite Riley’s assurances he hadn’t dreamed anything, Therese couldn’t stop thinking about the bizarre experience of the night before.

She’d ended up so distracted that she couldn’t focus on meditation enough to reach the calm, passive submission of the divinatory mind-state. The Diviner had finally, exasperated, told her to take the rest of the day off and get herself sorted before returning to work.

The night before.

The dream still clung to her like the taste of bile in her mouth.

She’d been dreaming, and she had practiced lucid dreaming for years, ever since the Diviner had put the idea in her head. She knew how to bring herself up through the layers of awareness that would give her conscious control over the dream, let her explore and find where the various symbols and imagery were coming from, interrogate them and dismiss them.

But this dream was different. First, it started out lucid. No effort required; she was fully conscious and in control of herself. Second, she had no control over the dream, which was deeply troubling.

When an external force intruded on her dreams — typically a Sigil that she’d encountered during a divination session, eager to press its identity onto hers, offering all kinds of scenarios structured around the principle that defined its weird abstract existence — she would corral it, give it a little play area in her subconscious, let it do its thing while she carefully rearranged the furniture to ensure it didn’t break anything. Sigils were intractable dream-presences, but they weren’t in control of anything but their own existential definitions. They were guests.

In this dream, it was Therese who felt like the guest. She couldn’t manipulate the dream around her; she tried little things, like stilling the breeze to keep the dust out of her eyes, and nothing happened. Even her own clothes and sense of self were not under her control. She was entirely an observer, able to move about but not to touch or act on anything.

The dream was about the Tower.

It loomed like a monolith in the center of her vision, blacking out the orange sky and enfolding her in the shadow of its physicality. Wind caught dust around its barren base, no City hiding the enormity of its footprint in the world, just empty cracked earth being scoured by the swirling dust-devil breezes.

This place was the Tower, and in a flash of insight she realized this was how the Tower understood itself. This single monolith on a dead world. She was struck by how lonely this felt.

This thought was followed immediately by an overwhelming Presence in her mind, pressing her identity flat with the sheer bulk of its psychic volume.

we are [alone]
that is our [nature]
but we are [grateful] for your concern

The fucking Tower was talking to her.

now, watch and listen

She felt her dream-self’s eyes being drawn to a bluff behind her, as far from where she stood as she was from the Tower, the three of them — Tower, bluff, and Diviner — forming an equilateral triangle a hundred meters across.

Atop the bluff was a human figure. It was standing defiantly in the wind, and it was shouting.

She was shouting. That was the figure of a girl.

Therese strained to hear, but the noise of the winds was too much. She watched as the girl staggered, crumpling to the ground, pulling her knees up.

Lightning began to strike the Tower, from out of an oil-slick cloud that poured up from its peak, spreading out in every direction, slowly beginning to revolve as the winds high above started to tear at its edges.

The lightning was white fire and every bit of it curved into the shapes of Sigils.

The girl on the clifftop was shrieking, and it was loud enough that Therese could, at last, make out the anguished, tearing words that were ripping her throat apart trying to get out.

“I don’t want this! I never wanted this!”

The lightning crashed over and over, each strike crawling down the length of the Tower like fire-spiders, grounding in the wasteland at the base.

The girl’s voice had snapped into a kind of whistling keening, and Therese could hear the rending of her throat as she screamed, “Nooooooo–”

In that moment Therese knew the girl. It was Riley.

Then a crash of lightning that swelled out from the Tower and washed over Therese, arcs of it leaping from the structure into her body, thrashing her in hot convulsions. Her vision was white and her eyes were searing with the intensity of it.

In the contradictory silence caused by the complete overwhelming of all her senses, Therese found she could hear the Tower again.

[they] are coming
you must help [riley]
[they] are nearly here

Whatever concept was contained within the word-image ‘they’ was too much. “No,” she tried to croak, but she made no sound, moved no muscle in her throat. ‘They’ were the worst thing she had ever imagined, far worse than anything she’d ever seen on her celestial explorations. Far worse than any Bane she’d seen or heard described. Far worse than any horror of the Primary and its litany of monstrous people and monstrous events.

Whatever ‘they’ meant, it was going to drive her completely mad if she didn’t escape. Now.

She thrashed in the Tower’s inexorable grip.

“You’re killing me,” she tried to say.

help [riley]

Then she was released back into her own mind, convulsing, flinging herself out of bed in a wet knot of bedsheets, landing in a heap on the rug and the hard stone floor, crying and trying to hold back the bile that was clawing at her throat.

–they–

And then she vomited everything she’d eaten that evening, and continued dry heaving for endless black time afterwards.

# # #

It’s getting harder for you to keep this secret from yourself, isn’t it? You’ve absolutely figured it out by now, and you’re just in denial because once you accept it, you might have to do something about it, and if you let yourself start thinking about that, it’s all terror and excitement and panic and desire.

This thing you’re feeling right now is called depersonalization. It’s why you sometimes imagine yourself piloting your body around the world, rather than inhabiting it. It’s a retreat from pain, but it’s also a retreat from responsibility. The things you do, it isn’t really you doing them. The things that happen to you, aren’t really happening to you.

You’ve become a playing piece on a board. You’ve become an avatar in a game. You’ve become a character, rather than a person. You find yourself wondering ‘what would Riley do?’ because you honestly don’t know until you think about it. Like Riley’s a perspective you have to don like a costume. Like Riley isn’t real at all.

Which, of course, he isn’t.

None of this is really a surprise to you, is it?

Because as much as you’ve become skilled at repressing the memories in which you know who you are, it’s simply not possible to do that to the memories of the Tower, and the memories of what it said.

“You,” it said, and that was like a fault line opening up beneath the edifice of your mind, because it said so many more things than just the second person pronoun. “Riley,” it said, and you felt every single defensive lie you’ve told yourself, about yourself, shiver and crack, because your name in the voice of the Tower was comprehensive. Like a therapist you’ve known your entire life, piercing through your bullshit, sweeping it all aside to confront you with the totality of who you are.

Because then it said “her”, and that left you in ruins.

How can these dreams be so much more real than your actual thoughts? How can they so easily lodge themselves in your memory? Being able to exile unwanted memories from your awareness has been one of your most successful survival skills, and you rely on it to block out —

Well. We don’t have to go down that road just yet, do we?

The real terror doesn’t come from having to see yourself, though. You can always run; you can always tell yourself more lies. That’s a habituated rut you can climb back into easily and comfortably. No, the real terror is them.

Himari. Eve. Suliat.

Fucking Therese.

They’re going to find out who you are, and you aren’t going to be able to stop it. Already you’re slipping, letting them past your defenses, letting yourself start to think of them as people instead of scenery.

Himari’s relentless, enthusiastic curiosity. Suliat’s calm and kindness and care. Eve’s fragility and unexpected depths.

Therese’s electrical snap inside your mind.

Anyone who makes it inside here where you and I have these little talks, they’re dangerous. They could hurt us, really hurt us, where it matters and where it could do real damage.

You’re desperately shoring up the ‘Riley’ concept, even as they’re finding every new breach and pathway inside.

And once they’re inside, you know what they’ll find, right?

They’ll find me.