(Did you expect me to carry on as I was before...)

I was Hannah Westmoreland. I was 17 years of age, born on the 12th of August 2050, a high school senior. I was told that was an auspicious date, exactly ten years after the Condor Raid or the world initialisation of psychic power, about a year after the fourth rank 13 incident failed to materialise. I never figured out why that mattered, but auspiciously I turned out to be naturally gifted with rank 7 extrasensory perception, the highest rank a person can hold and remain human.

Or something like that. As I grew up, I figured out that psychic power and humanity were incompatible. I was raised around a daughter of psychic researchers who was also rank 7 - probably naturally as well, they expected me to care, I didn't - and convinced that psychic power was absolutely immanent to humanity, that the ability to bend reality with our minds would have made itself obvious in some form no matter what. Couldn't have been more different than me. We had the same accursed dreams of strange landscapes, processes, conversations, some translatable, some not, but she always seemed so better able to bear them than I was.

Her parents were more willing to make her bear them, too. Maybe they hated her? I certainly did. It wasn't like my parents liked me too. They expected me to raise myself, so I did, poorly. Now I'm nearly an adult! Poorly. At least my beloved clique will support me with undying fervour, right?

Ehe.

But anyway, sometimes I would see her and I would have to talk to her, it would be impolite not to, and she'd clearly have been crying for a ridiculous amount of time, maybe over nothing, maybe over those things we have to pretend belong in this world with a smile on our face and a cheer in our step, and I wouldn't want to, but I'd have to, and she'd stare at her laptop for a while because I don't think she liked me or indeed anything human very much either and play some video game that I didn't really understand and couldn't really follow and say weird things to provoke me.

"My dad told me to ask why you got sooo many friends the moment you entered middle school but I still have nobody."

Because your personality sucks, I would think, but I would reply "I don't know?"

"It's a shame that they're all worse than you, right?"

"Are we supposed to be better because we're better espers."

"Ahaha, maybe? But you're supposed to be better than everyone because you're so bright and I'm so dark."

"What does that mean."

"Mirrors don't give off any light, Hannah."

(I think this was just before my first conversation with Tamara. And Tamara had said, later, the moon was a giant disk. Carmen and I, like the sun and the moon? But what of Earth?)

"Well, your eyes are pretty red. Don't they glow in the dark."

"No? Why would they. I'm an albino."

"You have black hair."

"And you have blonde."

Deflect, reflect, "I was thinking of dying it platinum this weekend-"

But she had no feminine hobbies, if hobbies at all, and said "do as you please but face the consequences for it. Have you ever done anything of purpose?"

And I replied "no, purpose is cruel, history is cruel, I don't know a lot about it but I know it won't ever end well for me. I just want to have fun with my friends!" Fun with my friends, something which she didn't know and would never know because she didn't have any because she couldn't pretend to be normal for a fucking second.

"Ah, that's cute."

"Cute..?"

"You're cute."

That was the first time she faced me, then. Fake grin, wide eyes. I turned to the screen and the screen said YOU DIED, my fate if I lost focus for a second.

"I try to be."

"You really do. I don't understand you."

"I don't understand you either..."

"I don't really understand me either. I don't even think I really exist. If you walk too deeply through the world of thought, everything's fake, you know? Or rather, everything can be rewritten, overwritten, nobody matters except whoever's relevant to you but also they don't matter either, because as long as you can think and interact with them you're changing them, and isn't changing someone anyone with sentience's way of showing that they care about someone else, and..." and she took a deep breath, and I didn't follow, or maybe I followed and I disagreed with her, like people had individual personalities and that was meaningful (let's pretend meaning wasn't a curse!) and they shouldn't be violated but talking to them wasn't violating them but you'd be damned if Carmen ever ever let you get a word in, "...and-and-and like less philosophically I don't feel real, like I've been here for a quarter of the past few weeks, and it's not even like visionary stuff 'cause obviously I don't see or read things in the same way as you, and I haven't eaten since yesterday morning and-and-and..."

I went out of the study room to a snack box in the kitchen, fetched a packet of chips, gave them to her. She opened the bag and started chewing and retched immediately, and I just felt dismayed and I went down and I had to catch her as she dribbled empty sick into my perfectly good clothes, and then she laughed.

And she was at her cutest when she was filthy? No-no-no-no, I don't think like that, first thing I'm straight, next thing I'm normal-

"Cute. You're so cute and kind and bright and caring."

"I don't care about you at all," a blatant lie, her brittle, pallid, short body in my arms, her warmth (the heart is like a furnace) even despite her low body temperature, not even her squirming but a pathetic jerk.

"Really," she said.

Stand strong. "Yes."

"Nobody ever pays attention to me," she whispered.

Grasp. Her little self-starving hands rose up around my neck. The flesh was weak, the mind a portal, she had the strength if she wished for it, I had the weakness if she wished for it, and she had let herself rot, and a rotting corpse dragged me to Hades. Reel and the world became fainter, I don't even think I resisted, I didn't care but I cared, I hated her absolutely and there was no saving Carmen and I would just carry on, except I could and I grew weaker head blue vision blurry and it wasn't even like this was an uncommon result this was in the parameters the elder Brackashes said that if their daughter succumbed to animalism it'd have to be battered out of her but it wasn't even like the stupid thing I didn't care about had ever been treated like a person by them and she let me go and she let me go and she let me go and she hugged me back.

"I wish you cared about the things I did." (The future Veritas student could see the truth, and didn't say I wish you cared about the things I said.) "Perfectly, unpretentiously, obediently. I want freedom to actually exist..."

"There's freedom in unimportance," I said, continuing to talk, coldly, imperfectly, pretending.

"No, there isn't. I wish you always chose correctly. I wish everyone did. I wish you chose to give all of your light to me, your..." life, all of you, this idiot asking for devotion akin to love.

"I'll err as much as I want, and it'll never matter."

"Yes, it will. Everything you do matters. In general, especially to me." You're mine, she mouthed.

(Okay, well, she didn't do that, but I'm a psychic.)

"Not true..."

"Deny it then, but history, philosophy, science and maths exist, psychic power exists. If you want happiness, humanity or reprieve they all must be studied absolutely, you must make progress on them, you must win your position, and if you fail, it, they, I will do whatever desired to you. If you lacked the power to avoid afflictions we wouldn't be so similiar, you wouldn't be here..."

"You should eat."

"Can't."

Luckily, I saw her less and less, but I continued to hate her so, obsessively, always an unresolved problem. And I knew she was always reading me like a book, like she had nobody more interesting to care about, like I wouldn't do the same thing if my ability was vision instead of light or she wasn't simply a better, more skilled, somehow even more talented esper than I was.

And like it or not we were somehow tied together forever, even if it garroted one or both of us, even if it was only ever for the worse, even if...

I roused from my sleep, threw my pillow off my bed, stamped on it. My floor had collected a little bit of dust, so I shook the pillow, but what about my skin...

A weak mask covering the organs, the lungs, the guts, the heart.