Vision snapped back into focus; the view hung sideways. The workshop floor, debris, a hand splayed in front of him. He lay there like a lump—what body part had broken? Shoulders? Spine? Or just the arm, snapped in half? He felt the impossibility of movement, still snarled in plastic cables. The room around him looked like the aftermath of a car accident: broken machines and debris everywhere, in disarray. He didn’t know how long he had been lying there, or if he could trust his senses to function correctly. Then Reshy’s lumpy, misshaped head loomed into his vision, right in front of his eyes.

“Well, that worked! Kinda. You’re more or less intact.”

“What the fuck?!” Joe struggled, managing to shift the heaviest bulk of tangled cords. “You might have warned me if you were going to do something like that.” At least he could move, despite having lost an arm. He dragged the rest of his puppet-like body up, limping. Something was wrong with his right ankle—he gasped as the foot at the end of that leg detached itself.

“I was pretty sure I’d be able to get you free,” said Reshy. “If you’d listened and helped me instead of making a fuss, then the cables might’ve released you without taking off an arm and a foot! Now we’ll have to fix you up.”

Joe was reeling, disoriented. His foot had come off, and he’d instinctively reacted as if it had been severed, but there was no pain in this artificial body. Very little sensation at all, in fact; he groped around on the floor for the foot, aware of pressure and shape but not much else in the way of tactile input.

His awareness of his limbs was all wrong, strange. They were short, slender, and jointed like a fancy wooden toy or puppet. His arms kept knocking into the hard and sizable forms of the doll’s molded breasts. Thank God I don’t have any sensation there, he thought, or this would be much weirder.

Reshy clambered on top of the missing foot, waving. “If you’re anything like the rest of the puppets I’ve seen come through here, you should be able to just… snap it back in? Doesn’t look like anything’s smashed or torn, just disconnected…” Her bouncy little voice sounded uncertain.

“How long have you been here, anyway? And what happened to those puppets? Were they… like me?” As Reshy climbed down, Joe took the foot and peered at it. Upon inspection, it was a frightfully complex mechanical limb. The foot was fashioned of some wood-like substance, with some plastic parts and metal joints that let it flex and move, connected on the inside by little strings. He had absolutely no idea how something like this could work. Just magic, he thought. The easy, terrible answer was always “it’s magic.”

“I think this place was an assembly lab or workshop of at some point. Now it looks like a dumping ground for everything broken; or maybe spare parts storage for whoever was trying to repair these devices and dolls.” Reshy clambered over the tangle of wires. “Aha. Your arm’s over here. But maybe put that foot on first, so you can walk.”

Peering at the foot, Joe could see what looked like a primary connection… but how was it supposed to stay on? He slotted the ankle of his leg into the foot’s connector and watched in horrified fascination as a series of tiny wires pulled the leg into position, automatically locking it into the foot. He watched it happen—and then stared with an open mouth as the foot snapped itself back in place. A sharp sensation shot through his ankle, like he’d stepped on a thorn, or felt the prickles of a limb that had fallen asleep. Then it was gone. He flexed the foot; it moved as Joe would expect, though maybe a little unnaturally, or like a fancy action toy.

“It hasn’t deposited anyone down here in a while,” Reshy said, trying to tug the arm free with little success. “Took me by surprise when it stuck you in that body… but I guess maybe all the other choices got used up, housing other souls?”

Joe tested the foot by walking over to Reshy, then picked up the fallen arm with the other. What a bizarre situation, he thought. If I was really holding my own arm, I’d be screaming. But everything feels… detached. He could control the body just by moving normally, but the way the puppet responded was odd, awkward, as if his body responded to his will with some kind of delayed reaction.

Joe jerked around hesitantly for a moment, feeling like a child. He didn’t understand how he was supposed to walk—once willed into motion, the body continued moving almost of its own accord, like a marionette pulled by gravity against its strings. Then he allowed himself to relax and let the motion of the body take him; if he just let the body do its thing in response to his urging, it wasn’t so bad.

Joe shook off his distraction and peered at Reshy. “You’re answering questions with more questions. Where did the others go? Why were you surprised? And what happened to that tablet you were next to earlier? It was on, showing something.”

The folds of the bag-like head crinkled into a crease, making Reshy look annoyed, or perhaps suspicious. “You sure ask a lot of questions. The tablet is out of power and locked. But I’ve gleaned everything I could from it.”

“Information, huh? Why don’t you let me look at it?” Joe held the shoulder of the detached arm up to the side of his torso, and gasped slightly as the sharp tug of the mechanism locking into place, wires snaking through the joint, gave him control over a second arm.

A crashing noise echoed from somewhere at the far end of the workshop, behind a row of shelves. Joe’s head swiveled in alarm; the neck of this body moved flexibly and with a wide range, but not inhumanly far.

“That’s why!” snapped Reshy. “I can’t trust you either, not without some leverage. I need you to carry me with those long limbs of yours, and you need what I know. Fair trade. We both need to get out of here before that thing notices we’re loose.”

Joe wanted to snarl, but the most he felt the body do in response was bare its wooden teeth. Lumbering steps echoed through the long, cluttered space, hard to track from sound alone. “Fine,” he snapped. “Where to?”

“The other way, you big dummy! Hallway from the corner—there’s a maintenance access halfway down.”

***

They fled the workshop—Joe picked up Reshy and the little doll clung to the big puppet’s shoulder, the bouncy little voice guiding him with instructions. Joe certainly didn’t feel long-legged or big; the best he could manage was a steady lope, with distances and heights making him aware he was smaller.

Some kind of noise echoed behind them: a grinding crash from the workshop. “What the fuck is that thing?” Joe growled as best he could in his unfamiliar voice, high-pitched and monotone.

“You saw it too,” Reshy squeaked. “It’s a Chaos Demon. A force of pure evil, torturing people for insane reasons, pulling out souls for experiments.” Joe shuddered and felt the body clatter slightly. They’d rounded the corner and gained some distance down the hallway; he saw the maintenance hatch that Reshy had mentioned. It was disturbingly small; could even this smaller body squeeze through such an opening?

The noises grew louder and closer, accelerating towards them. Unable to resist a look, Joe glanced over his shoulder—the doll’s slim wooden shoulder. He glimpsed something huge and misshapen as it slid around the first bend in the hallway. Sounds like metal plates being torn and smashed together accompanied the movement.

Joe jolted back in fright, dropping to the floor and scrabbling backwards towards the small panel near the floor.

“Get it open, get inside! It’s too big to follow us!” Reshy screamed in his ear.

Joe tried to ignore how little sense any of this made, but finally grabbed hold of one edge of the little panel with two hands, pulled with all the puppet’s strength, which was greater than he’d expected, and then slid to one side when the hatch fell away from him with a clang. It revealed a dark hole barely large enough for a person to fit through. They didn’t have a choice if they were going to get away. He crawled on his elbows into the darkness; even the doll body’s slim shoulders were wide enough that Reshy fell off, yelping. Once in the tiny space, he could reach out just far enough to grasp the little sack person in one hand, pulling her along with him.

A din and clamor echoed behind them—wet, thudding footsteps and the crashing of metal. A shadow obscured the light from the hallway as Joe wriggled deeper and lower, squeezing through the crawlspace with difficulty, not trusting the limbs of this body or the joints of its knees or elbows. Finally, he managed it: he was under a grate in the floor of what looked like a long, narrow utility room; a tangle of pipes and assorted garbage filled the entire space, which was even more disused and filthy than the workshop they’d left.

Joe pushed up on the grate and found that it moved easily; there was some slack, so he lifted the hinged metal panel free of the ground and peered cautiously around the room as he climbed up into it, kicking aside debris of waterlogged cardboard and rotting wood.

There was another hatch in the ceiling above them, but much larger, and high up. No other exits presented themselves; the room lacked windows, doors, or even lights. “I can see pretty well in the dark,” he noticed aloud.

“Yes.” Reshy was picking herself up and brushing off her burlap surfaces, having hopped out of Joe’s hand. “That body has a lot of… capabilities. Which we might need soon, if—”

Joe held up one delicately articulated hand. He’d caught the impression of movement in the far corner of the room. Something had shifted slightly, silently. As they watched, something like a human-shaped black lump gradually emerged, crawling from between two stacks of empty wooden crates. It resembled half a torso, with bent limbs and a jaw that hung loosely. “He-help,” it gasped.

“Oh shit,” muttered Reshy. “This is where the rest of them got dumped. The test subjects it discarded.”

“Test subjects? You mean…” Joe stared at the grotesque form, trying to decide what was most horrifying: its appearance, its gurgling speech, somehow formed without a working jaw, or that it might be someone like him, a human trapped in a strange new body.

He abruptly recalled the reason he was here in the first place—the missing girl. “Who are you? What’s your name?” he called. “Are you—” but then the thing spoke again.

“Help—he-he-help. Help me. Help me. He-help me. It, it, it, it took, it took—help me!” A screech emerged from the thing’s mouth, either an agonized wail or the sound of misaligned moving parts scraping, or some unholy fusion of both. Joe winced, then swiveled the doll’s eyes around: another movement unsettled the debris at the room’s edges.

Resh grabbed onto the calf of Joe’s body, letting out an exasperated sigh. “You don’t understand! These things are lost in body and soul. We can’t help them.” Figures emerged, sporting an array of body parts that were hideous and pitiful in equal measure: an oversized, smiling head caved in at one eye, a collection of legs wired together. Another seemed to have no arms, just a flap of skin stretched across a metal frame with a mouth in the middle, and a single leg protruding from a shapeless wooden torso.

“They’re like us…” Joe began. “Trapped here, stuck inside these broken bodies…”

“No!” Reshy insisted, watching a loose arm scuttle like a crippled crab towards them across the floor. “We stand a chance.” As if they’d heard her funny little voice, all the shambling things stopped—stared, those which had eyes—directly at Reshy.

Joe noticed the glint in Reshy’s head again, something poking out from inside.

“The key,” a thing with six arms and half a face moaned. “Give it to me.” Reshy was climbing doggedly towards Joe’s intricately jointed knee, grabbing onto wires and cables.

As she did so, another thing scuttled forward: a creature like an enormous centipede, crawling on many thin spindly limbs; its long snapping tail trailed behind it along the ground, but its head was that of a beautiful man with fine hair that spilled over his shoulders. It extended two slender hands towards Joe as the six-armed creature wailed again. “We need the key! I can take it… Reshy…”

Joe clambered up on a chair, trying not to dislodge Reshy, then onto a plywood crate. Below them, more figures joined the centipede-thing and the six-armed creature—some humanoid, some misshapen, some almost featureless lumps of black and purple flesh. The horde of grotesque beings clustered around like beggars around a food stall. Some reached for him; others struggled against each other in their eagerness.

One bulky form had separated from the rest: a giant vaguely resembling a huge, strangely flattened, fleshy body with four thick legs like tree trunks. It flailed, and Joe felt the impact rattle the crate he stood on.

“You’re going to have to jump!” Reshy was waving her blobby little arms. “Up there!”

“Miss, please… don’t listen to her…” came the moan of the six-armed creature, jabbering with half a mouth. Joe looked up. A long pipe extending from one wall, a tangle of netting, a broken piece of an access stairway. There was a way up—but he could barely control this body enough to walk normally.

“I can’t—” he began. “This body, it’s so clunky, and—” Despair welled up inside. He would fall. Those things would seize his body—the broken and discarded form that had once been people like him. He too would break apart.

Reshy was saying something, pulling something out of herself. “I was going to save this for later, but it seems like later’s caught up with us.” The centipede-man was crawling onto the chair, its perfect face inhumanly placid and silent, staring with brilliant blue eyes.

Reshy held something that looked like a memory stick—dark blue plastic with a metal prong covered with fine tracery.

“What are you—” Joe began, but then Reshy leaped for the edge of the doll body’s stretchy leotard, and swung the stick towards his thigh. There was a small dark rectangle he hadn’t noticed before, near the seam where thigh met pelvis: a data port? Reshy slammed the memory stick in.

“Nooo!” howled a voice from below, lost in the hubbub of malformed bodies shifting and shaking.

Something strange appeared in Joe’s field of vision, apparently fed to him by whatever magical system or software operated the doll body.

::: SYNCHRONY SOULWARE INVOKED

::: …ALIGNING …ALIGNING

─ SYNC LEVEL :: 1

─ MOTOR CONTROL :: 67%

─ SENSORIUM :: 87.5%

─ PROPRIOCEPTION :: 45%

─ DYSPH.OVERRIDE :: 10%

─ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ :: 5%

─ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ :: 0%

─ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ :: 0%

─ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ :: 0%

─ ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ :: 0%

What the fuck? Joe thought. It was the only reasonable response to his vision filling with incomprehensible percentages. A pincered hand swiped at his feet. Reshy was yelling. Something ached for a moment at his hip, followed by a sensation like a joint popping.

“How the hell does this help us?” Joe yelled in an aggravated monotone.

“Turn the dial!!” Reshy shrieked. The centipede, by far the most agile of the forlorn test subjects, was getting closer all the time. Joe lashed out with one foot, aiming a muay thai shin kick at the thing’s face with a combination of deliberation and instinct born of long training—but the move lacked all finesse and went wide.

“It’s right at your hip!” Reshy was clutching at the bunched fabric at his body’s waist. Joe reached down and felt at his hip, the place that had ached a moment before, and found something round. It fit the doll hand’s grip exactly. He turned it one notch, and it clicked.