Number 12 Barnslow Drive is more than a house.

What had once started life as an unassuming 19th century Victorian red brick was now much more than four walls and a roof, more than the sum of the spaces between upright surfaces and horizontal floors, more than the totality of rooms and hallways, of beds and seats and doors, of creaking boards and antique fixtures and clean porcelain in the bathroom, more than the glugging of the boiler and the echoes in the cellar, more than the scratching on window panes just beyond one’s sight, more than the tapping of radiators or fingernails behind the walls, more than the cocoon-like warmth of me and mine curled up in bed, more than the beloved books in Evelyn’s study or the satisfying click of the dials on the oven, more than the overgrown back garden and the cracked paving stones of the front path, and more than the generations’ worth of skin oil worked into the wood of the bannister.

I knew this in my gut, even if I touched the knowledge with only the lightest caress. It was a great comfort which we did not wish to curdle, not for any frivolity or idle curiosity; Number 12 Barnslow Drive had welcomed us in, wrapped us with layers of protection, and kept us safe. More importantly it had kept everyone else safe as well, everyone who required sanctuary deep within the bowels of this thing that had once been just another house.

Number 12 Barnslow Drive always had a shadowy nook or a hidden cranny, ready and waiting for any lost soul in need.

Which is why I was creeping down the upstairs hallway, wearing fresh socks and clean clothes, at almost 3 o’clock in the morning, in the dark, alone.

And I did have to do this alone. There was simply no other way. Anything else would have rendered me the lowest sort of coward.

At least this way I was using my powers for good — what a ridiculous cliché, but it was true. Here we were, seven tightly coiled squid-girls in one body, once again play-acting the octopus, sliding in perfect silence through the cold waters, in pursuit of our prey.

It was about two hours since Lozzie and I had teleported back to jolly old England, to Sharrowford, and home. Two hours since I had bidden goodbye and farewell and ‘see you again sometime’ to Taika; the abyssal flame-goat and I had shared another handshake, a mutual nod, an agreement not to change phone numbers, and then something akin to a hug — she had pulled me in close and clapped me on the back several times, without lingering long enough for anything to get awkward, or perhaps to avoid me grasping her with my tentacles. Hugging Taika was like embracing a furnace one had left on for too long, in direct sunlight, in the desert.

We had spent most of those two hours since arriving home being very contrite and apologetic, while Evelyn had a ‘proper go’ at us, as Raine put it — nothing new, nothing revelatory, but I had fully deserved the telling off. Evelyn was now finally tucked up safely in bed, hopefully asleep at last, though before retiring for the night she had ventured forth into the rear of the house long before me, with Praem at her side, leaving me with strict instructions not to follow. I understood that Evelyn had established her own private understanding with the very quarry I now hunted.

Raine and Zheng were still downstairs, drinking their way through a bottle of vodka together; Lozzie was with them, but presumably not drinking. The last I’d seen of her she was in Zheng’s lap, telling a very complicated story about a pair of squirrels and a magpie. Zheng had almost single-handedly undermined Evelyn’s earlier rant — she had taken the news of my foolish ‘mage’ confrontation with a huge roar of delight and set about ruffling my hair, like I was a small child who had passed her school exams. But I’d made no attempt to bask in that approval; I had done nothing worth approving of, not yet.

I was a little concerned about all the drinking, but Raine had promised me they would all be sleeping soon. She had said that I was to set off on my solo quest without further delay, and that she would not worry if I was not seen again that night.

Privately I thought she was a little bit too optimistic.

The upstairs hallway was very dark at that time of night, a tunnel of gently creaking floorboards and looming stretches of shadow-draped wall. The curtain over the one little window was wide open, showing a moonless night sky blanketed by thick cloud, the lunar light smothered behind layers of rain-gravid darkness. The heat of the late summer’s day still lingered, trapped by the cloud cover, but it was a dark warmth, the sort that made one feel cold on the inside even as one shunned extra layers of clothing. I’d showered, cleaned off the blood, and dressed again in socks, pajama bottoms, and a slit-sided t-shirt, to let my tentacles move freely.

We did not move freely, however. We were tucked around our own torso, solemn and sensible. Playtime this was not.

We passed Evee’s bedroom door; a faint night-light glowed beneath the crack at the bottom. We longed to abandon our quest and slip into bed with her, snuggle down and pretend nothing had happened, focused fully on how surprised she might be when she wakes. We passed our own bedroom door, wide open and inviting us into the dark. We passed the study, empty and quiet, full of books in which we might lose ourselves. We passed Lozzie’s door and heard the fluttery sound of gentle little Tenny snores — but we quailed inside at how disappointed in us Tenny might be in the morning. She had missed the return home, all the drama, all the excitement, but I had been informed that she had helped soothe away certain tears earlier in the evening. Tenny possessed a great deal of emotional intelligence. She was not likely to be impressed by auntie Heathy, not this time.

The end of the hallway turned left in a sort of L-shape. On the right was the door to Kimberly’s bedroom; we could hear the faint hum of her fancy computer, fans fighting the high ambient temperatures, but she was undoubtedly asleep at this time of night. What help could she offer us, anyway? This was not her problem, not her fight.

We ignored all temptations. We pushed deeper into colder, darker, unknown waters.

I rarely ventured this deep into the rear of the upper floor of the house — nobody did, except for Praem; there wasn’t much back there, just empty rooms, some of them used for storing old furniture. I’d scurried away here for privacy a couple of times previously, and happened upon rooms I’d never paid attention to before, as the house opened itself to my needs. We could only assume it had done the same for others.

This time I peered into the darkness, barely able to make out the row of doors. We lifted one tentacle and turned on the slow strobe of rainbow bioluminescence, just enough to light our way. The shadows eased back, all the way to the next elbow of the corridor, where the hallway turned to the right. I’d never been back there. Was that the way to the attic?

“Sevens?” I whispered into the gloom. “Sevens, are you there?”

No reply.

I crept deeper into the upstairs hallway.

Evelyn had made a point of refusing to tell me exactly where Sevens had hidden herself away — not out of petty sadism or a desire to subject me to some pointless, abstract punishment, but simply because Sevens herself had requested so.

Back down in the light and warmth of the kitchen, I had said: “If she doesn’t want to see me tonight, I’ll respect that. I think that’s the right thing to do? Yes? Or no? E-Evee?”

Evelyn had sighed and rubbed her face. “No comment. Heather, it’s between you and her. She gave me no message, no statement. You’re to do it yourself.”

Praem had intoned: “Be a good girl.”

“Right,” I had said. “Right. Okay. Right. Yes. I can do that.”

So there I was, being a good girl.

Each unknown door yielded with a gentle click of the handle, opening on dusty furniture, jumbled bed frames, boxes of junk, and more. I found the room I’d once used to sit and think in relative silence and solitude, with a window looking out over the side of the house. I found a room which contained nothing but a single upright plinth — not real stone, but a cardboard prop, which I tested by picking it up. Another room smelled of rust. Yet another was full of perfectly clean and never-used toilet fixtures — had this been intended as a second bathroom, once upon a time? Two doors were locked — but as I tested their handles, some deeper sense told me that Sevens was not shut away within.

When I reached the point where the hallway kinked to the right, I peered around the corner with one eye and one tentacle, like I was a teenager in a horror movie; but it wasn’t the darkness or the solitude or the bare wooden floorboards which scared me. Those things felt right and natural to me by then, a comfortable cove full of shadowy spots for clever little cephalopods to hide.

Only three doors waited in this most rearward portion of the house. The smallest one, on the right, led to the attic — a cramped portal with little magical symbols around the edge of the door frame. That was where the spider-servitors had originally lived. The other two doors were unremarkable. I tried the one on the left and found it locked. Then I reached for the handle of the last door, straight ahead.

My fingertips brushed the brass. My tentacle-light dimmed, forced down by the sudden weight of shadows. The darkness rushed in.

“Back off, squid-brains,” rasped a voice from hell, a serial killer made of rusty knives dipped in rotten blood, choking on a throat stuffed with grave dirt and maggots.

“Okay, okay!” I hissed, putting my hands up and trotting back several steps.

The darkness did not abate, but thickened further, until that final door was hidden behind a wall of shadows.

A mouth formed in the black, a Cheshire Cat maw full of gleaming dark teeth — but it wasn’t grinning. The mouth was turned down at the corners, dripping with tangible gloom, like glistening venom sizzling as it fell toward the floorboards in great dark ropes.

“Aym,” I said, and did my best to smile. “Good evening. Or, um, good morning, I suppose, by now. We’re all up a bit late tonight, aren’t we? That is entirely my fault, for which I apologise, by the way.”

I’d seen and fought and dealt with far worse than a wall of grinning shadow. This was practically cartoonish compared to the rest of that day so far, especially encountered in the rear of my own home, the safest place in the whole world, in the comfortable warm shadows of a late summer’s night.

But there was something about the shape of Aym’s mouth, or perhaps about the way she’d spoken, which made my tentacles quiver and my spine tingle, like a shark had strayed into my safe little bay.

Aym was very angry.

“Fuck off,” she hissed.

I sighed and lowered my hands. “I assume I’ve found Sevens, then. Is she in that room?”

“What part of ‘fuck off’ did you not comprehend?” said Aym’s disembodied mouth. The mouth slid upward, climbing the wall of shadows, as if Aym was unfolding herself from a squat or a crouch, until she towered over me, taller than Zheng, taller than anything.

I felt a distinct urge to unfold, pounce, and drag her out of the shadows. We twitched, flexing, ready to spring. We even started to justify it to ourselves, throwing the arguments back and forth down our tentacles. We wouldn’t hurt Aym, not really — but she was pretending to be bigger than she was, and we just wanted to see, just wanted to peel back the darkness and have a proper look, just wanted to have a sensible conversation. We weren’t going to violate Sevens’ privacy if she didn’t want it! We would just yank Aym out of the darkness because she was being so unreasonable and—

And that would be very inappropriate.

I smiled my very best good-girl smile — no, my good-cephalopod smile — and held onto all those resolutions; I didn’t pretend I hadn’t felt all that, I just told myself no.

We said: “I’m not going to go in there and talk to Sevens if she doesn’t want me to do that, Aym. But I would like to establish if she’s actually in there. You can just tell me, I don’t have to intrude. Is that okay?”

“Hmmm. Let me think.” Aym’s mouth pantomimed a thoughtful pout, then gritted its black teeth and hissed: “No!”

We nodded, with head and all six tentacles, all of us. “That does sort of confirm that she’s in there,” we said.

“Nope,” said Aym’s mouth. “Now why don’t you turn your fish-stink arse around three hundred and sixty degrees and walk away?”

I blinked and thought about that for a moment. We traced a circle with one tentacle-tip. “That’s just a full circle. Do you mean you want me to walk backwards? I can’t moonwalk, by the way, I don’t have that kind of coordination or grace. And my socks don’t slide properly on these floorboards.”

Aym’s mouth twisted with a sigh. “No idea what she sees in you. You’re a twisted-up little mess of neuroses and needs, dirty little urges and unspeakable embarrassments. You’re no better than Flissy. She could spread her wings and soar and you’re here dragging her down where she can’t even breathe!”

My chest tightened. A lump formed in my throat. “I thought you sort of love Felicity, in your own way.” Then, before I could lose my courage: “You’re right, though, Aym.”

“Tssss! At least you can see it for yourself! So why not fuck off?”

I spread my hands, defenceless and empty; I’d folded away every last pneuma-somatic addition, except our own selves, our tentacles, us. “I want to apologise.”

Aym cackled, a sound like an entire rusted-out assembly line coughing to life. “Pfffffthahahaaa! Little Evelyn said that too. You think an apology is going to be enough for this? You’re going to crawl in there and tell her a sob story, the same old sob story, wah-wah-wah, I couldn’t help it, I’m so sorry for what I do, wah-wah-wah, please forgive me Sevens, please keep coddling me, wah-wah-wah.”

“I’m not going to cry,” I said.

“Pffft, as if. Isn’t that half your strategy, you—”

“I don’t deserve to cry. I’m not the one who’s been hurt.”

Aym’s mouth paused mid-word, then pouted down at me, as if she was considering my honesty. The mouth pulled into a sideways sneer. “Easy not to cry when you’re already all cried out, all exhausted and run down. Right?”

“If Sevens wishes it, then I will leave this until the morning, after I’ve slept, and my emotional reserves are refilled. And I still won’t cry, because I’m not the one who’s been hurt.”

Aym paused again. Her lips opened wide and she stuck out a massive, black, venom-dripping tongue, as if disgusted. “Urgh.”

“I mean it, Aym.”

Aym hissed. “You don’t even know what you’re apologising for, fish-head!”

“No, I’m pretty sure I do know.”

“Oh yeah?” Aym gurgled, like rusty nails hitting the surface of a boiling bog. “Try me. You going to list your emotional sins? Apologise for being a bad fiancée, a bad partner, a bad friend? Because you’re all that and more, but you don’t seem to get it, you don’t seem to change, you don’t treat her as anything but—”

“I have acted like my parents,” I said. “Like my mother.”

Aym stopped dead. The mouth closed and then vanished, the outline of lips and tongue sinking into the shadows, joining with the rest of the darkness.

I sighed. “Alright then. If that’s your answer, then … then I will turn around and go away.” My throat grew thick, but I had to respect this. “Please let Sevens know I was here, that I tried, and that I respect her … turning me away. I will try again in the morning, I … the morning, after waking up. Please, Aym, let her know … ”

Aym stepped out of the shadows.

It was like watching a pillar detach from the wall, like seeing a piece of architecture decide to relocate itself. This Aym was not the tiny sprite of lace and spite, but a column of shadow that reached from floor to ceiling, with waves of black rolling down her sides, misting out across the floor. We were in true darkness here, hidden away at the rear of the house, and working through the most difficult of regrets and shames. Aym’s true domain.

A pillar of darkness towered over me. Tendrils of lace-like flesh hung from inside a lightless hood. Aym had no face.

“You’ve come alone,” she said. Her voice was like two rusty knives dragged across each other, amused in the way a murderer might be before the killing blow.

I spread my arms and my tentacles too, resisting the urge to flare and strobe with threat display. “An apology is not an apology if it’s coerced. And I … I don’t want anybody else to see Sevens crying. I’m trying to spare her dignity.”

“Ha,” rasped the Aym-giant. “Too late for that.”

Aym suddenly bent in the middle, leaned over my head, and peered around the corner behind me, into the rest of the corridor. It was like being beneath the coils of a giant black snake, dripping with shadows and darkness. But then she straightened up and grunted.

“You really did come alone, squid-brains. Thought you might at least have the maid in tow. Or your bulldyke.”

“I have to do this by myself,” I sighed. “As much as I do anything by myself, with seven of us in here.” But I paused and looked Aym up and down, running all my senses along the strange pillar of darkness she was choosing to present.

Aym recoiled like a dark flame before the wind. “What?!” she hissed.

“Sorry!” I hurried to say. “I-I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious, I just … Aym, you went to the abyss too, didn’t you?”

The pillar of darkness coiled in on itself, shrinking slightly. “Ehhhhh?” she sneered.

“You mentioned it back when you and I had our first real talk. You went to the abyss. You returned. You went with … somebody else, who didn’t make it, is that correct?”

The Aym-pillar made a sound like she was sucking on her teeth. I had the distinct feeling of being squinted at.

“Aym,” I carried on. “I know you don’t like answering questions about yourself, but were you ever human?”

She rasped, like a rusty flywheel spinning in a pit of gravel. “You’re right, I don’t like answering questions about myself!”

“Okay, okay, I apologise. It’s just … today has been a day of revelations for me. I met another abyssal returnee, a human, like me. And then I realised just now, you’ve been here all along. Or, if not here, then at least nearby. And now I can’t help but wonder, what was the abyss like for you?”

Silence and shadow.

“You don’t have to answer that, of course,” I said. “Maybe you’ll feel comfortable doing so one day, and I would like to hear, but only if you do. And, okay, maybe you were never human in the first place. Maybe—”

Aym sighed. The air rolled with a wave of shadows, flowing like smoke across the floor. “You don’t ever stop, do you? I thought you came here to apologise to my Sevens.”

“I did,” I said, pulling my tentacles back in, tight and smart. “Sorry, I— I’m trying to be focused.”

Aym snorted. “Still not going to fuck off?”

“Is that what Sevens wants?”

Aym exhaled again. The pillar got a little smaller. She was now just as tall as Raine.

I continued: “From her mouth to my ears, is that what she said? Tell me the truth, and I will turn around and leave for now.”

Aym huffed. She continued to shrink until she was no taller than usual, a sprite in the darkness, though the door was still hidden in the shadows. “I’m not going anywhere, squid-brains. I’m not letting you be alone with her. You keep doing this. You keep hurting. The road to hell is paved with—”

“Intentions don’t matter,” I interrupted. “Only actions and their results.”

Aym stopped. She hissed one last time — and vanished.

The shadows cleared. The door was revealed, upright and sensibly shut. The brass handle gleamed black.

Aym hissed, as if from nowhere: “I’ll be watching. One wrong move … ”

I nodded. “Thank you. Honestly? I would expect nothing less. You care about her a lot.”

Aym clucked an invisible tongue. The black sheen on the handle slipped away and joined the shadows on the floor.

We — us seven very naughty and very contrite squid girls — stepped up to the door and knocked gently with the tip of one tentacle.

“Sevens?” we murmured, mouth almost touching the wood of the door. “Sevens, it’s us. It’s me. May I come in?”

Her answer was a soft and throaty gurgle, muffled as if below the bed covers.

“May I take that as a yes?” I asked.

Silence. A rustle of sheets in the stygian black.

Then, in a voice I’d never heard before, high and exhausted and somehow empty: “Enter if you wish.”

We grasped the door handle, turned until it clicked, and stepped inside.

We expected another half-empty, disused, dusty back room, perhaps with an old bed frame and a clean mattress, and Seven-Shades-of-Solitary-Sorrow sitting all sad and sallow beneath a single sheet. We expected a cave-like retreat, a hermit’s hideout, far from comfort and company, devoid of light and life. We expected withdrawal from the world, sanctuary in cold tears, a miserable shivering figure crouched in the dark.

Instead — yellow.

Gleaming gold of imagined sunlight, feather-soft blonde of brilliant butter, fluttering glow of honeyed fire; yellow churned and warmed and rippled and grew and waved and luxuriated from every surface.

For one dizzying second I thought I had stepped Outside; perhaps Evelyn and Sevens had worked together to play the ultimate deserved prank on me, and turned this bedroom door into a hidden gateway to the heart of the Palace in Carcosa, and I had just stepped over the threshold of some hidden boudoir that Sevens had never shown me before.

But then all our tentacles came up, our senses extended through the rest of our body, and we saw the details beneath the flaxen décor.

Yellow rugs lay on the floor, thick and fluffy like dandelion fronds and pineapple flesh — but the floorboards of Number 12 Barnslow Drive lay beneath; yellow sheets hung from the walls like tapestries, thin as sunlight and delicate as canary feathers — with the pale, ordinary, very un-yellow walls of the house behind them. Yellow light glowed from a trio of standing lamps, from soft LED bulbs dialled down for warmth and intimacy, but the lamps themselves were plain old plastic. Yellow curtains covered a window — looking out across the back garden — but blackest night peeked around the edges of the imitation sunlight. Bedspread, pillows, cushions, sheets, all a great mass of butterscotch soft, in lemon and corn and clean sand — but the bed frame itself was old wood, and had probably stood here for longer than any of us had known this house.

Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was sitting on the edge of the bed.

At least I assumed it was her; she was wearing a mask she had rarely shown me before.

A teenage girl, perhaps a couple of years younger than me, slim and slight inside a brown-green military uniform several sizes too large for her malnourished frame, stained with mud and blood and other, more unspeakable substances. Filthy blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, tied with a piece of dirty string. Her face was greasy and exhausted, freckles overwhelmed by the dark rings around her eyes.

The ‘Gunner’, as Heart had called her, the mask in which Sevens had shot her irritating sister through the chest. Only the eyes were different — solid balls of deep yellow, without human pupils or irises or whites. Pure Carcosan stared out from a human face.

Seven-Shades-of-Suffering-Soldier held a stubby handgun in her lap, a nasty little twist of black metal against her pale, bony hands.

“Sevens?” I said out loud.

The Gunner looked up at me, her gaze a pair of yellow pools into which I felt myself slipping; I was reminded, for the first time in quite a while, that Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was not a human being. She was not even pretending to be a human being. She was something alien, from Outside. Perhaps that gaze was intended to remind me.

Well, I wasn’t human either.

The Gunner said: “Were you born in a barn?”

“A-ah?”

“Shut the door.”

Her English was heavily accented, Eastern European or Russian. She spoke low and slow, as if we were huddled in a bunker or a trench somewhere beneath a freezing sky.

I stepped fully into the room, shut the door behind me, and then looked around again, taking in the incredible transformation of this dark little corner of the house.

Seven-Shades-of-Slow-and-Steady said: “Like what I’ve done with the place?”

“Uh. Yes, very. I had no idea this room was even back here, you never mentioned it before. I’m sorry I didn’t ask, Sevens.”

“It wasn’t,” she said.

I blinked at her. “Ah?”

“It wasn’t back here,” she explained, slowly and carefully. There was something dead about her voice, some essential quality drained from her tone, by shell-shock or combat fatigue or years of grinding stress. She stared at me with those all-yellow eyeballs, peering out of a face I barely knew. “Well, the room itself was here. But all the furnishings, they are new, or newly arranged, as of this very evening.”

“Oh. Wow. Fast work, my gosh.” I reached out and brushed one of the hanging sheets with a tentacle-tip. “Are they real?”

The Gunner nodded. “Aym suggested that I should have a bedroom. Evelyn offered in grace and gratitude. She provided some small funds for furnishing. Felicity did some shopping. I gather this was difficult, past ten in the evening on a Monday night. However, the house provided most of the materials. We poked around the other rooms. This is the fruit of a scavenger’s haul.”

“It looks great, though!” I said, and I genuinely meant it. “It’s very … yellow.”

Seven-Shades-of-Shooter sighed and looked down at the pistol in her hands. “Perhaps ‘yellow’ is an identity too.”

I took a pair of cautious steps toward the bed, eyeing the pistol in Sevens’ lap; the gun didn’t look anything like Raine’s weapon — this pistol was older, scuffed and scratched, with much of the black finish worn away from the edges of the metal. It seemed huge in the Gunner’s tiny, delicate hands. I realised the cuffs of her uniform were tied to her wrists with lengths of string, to stop them flapping about.

“Is that real?” I said. “The gun, I mean?”

Sevens looked up at me, but she did not reply.

I sighed gently. “I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t send a rather specific statement. But it’s a statement you’re entitled to make, if that’s what you want. I just want to make sure I’m not misreading—”

“Am I real?” said Seven-Shades-of-Solipsism.

“Of course you’re—”

In one swift motion, Seven-Shades-of-Shellshocked-Spite raised her pistol, did something complicated to the mechanism — removing the safety and pulling back the slide to chamber a round, as Raine later explained to me — aimed at my centre of mass, and pulled the trigger.

Bang!

I’d had just enough warning to whip all my tentacles in front of my torso and head, speed-growing armoured plates down their collective front. I flinched and bit my tongue, and—

Felt no impact. No bullet. Not even a tickle.

I peeked out from behind my wall of tentacles; Seven-Shades-of-Sadistic-Sport was not laughing, not even smiling. A tiny curl of steam rose from the barrel of her gun, as if that had been a very real bullet.

I winced and whispered: “That’s probably going to bring the whole house running.”

“No,” said Sevens.

I cocked my ear, but Sevens was right. No rush of panicked feet sounded down the upstairs corridor, no chairs shoved away from the table down in the kitchen, no Tenny trilling and fluttering in alarm.

“ … good soundproofing?” I asked.

Sevens gestured with the pistol. “For your ears only, Heather.”

We lowered our protective cage of tentacles, reabsorbed several millimetres of steel-laced chitin armour, and let out a huge sigh. I was sweating, on my face and down my back and under my armpits.

“Well, I can’t say I didn’t deserve that,” I said.

The Gunner’s expression finally showed something other than dead-eyed exhaustion. She frowned at me. “You didn’t seriously think I was going to shoot you? You don’t think you deserve shooting, no?”

“No! No, oh Sevens, no. I mean I deserved a little scare. I’ve scared and upset you. Doing the same to me in return is—”

“Highly unhealthy,” the Gunner said. “Hardly the basis for a relationship of mutual respect.”

“Yes, but—”

“Take the gun from me, Heather,” said Seven-Shades-of-Storm-and-Strife. She pointed the weapon again. “Or the next bullet might be real.”

I resisted the urge to put my hands on my hips, or huff, or sigh, or cross all my tentacles. I stared into the barrel of a gun which I knew was not real, held by a woman who I knew would not hurt me, and felt — almost — no fear.

“Sevens, I’m not going to do that. Like you said, it’s an unhealthy way to conduct a relationship. If you want me to leave the room, if you want to drive me off with fake gunshots, then I will leave, I will respect that. I’m not taking that gun from you.”

“Why not?” the Gunner said.

“Because it’s your gun.” I shrugged with one shoulder.

Seven-Shades-of-Shaded-Sight slowly lowered her pistol. She put the safety back on, and put the gun back in her lap.

I smiled, as best I could. “May I approach you?”

She shrugged, limp and lifeless. “Do whatever you want.”

I resisted another sigh. “The whole point of this is that I shouldn’t just do whatever I want. I should take into account the feelings and needs of my partners, of you. So, if you don’t want me to approach you, if you don’t want me to sit on that bed, then I won’t. I’ll stand here and we can talk like this.”

Sevens stared at the wall, her yellow eyes unreadable orbs, like reflected sunlight on gold, brilliant but empty. “Come closer. Don’t sit down.”

“Thank you.”

I walked up to the bed and stopped a few paces short of Sevens, beyond arm’s reach but within tentacle range; several of us wanted to reach out and touch her, but we joined together to stop the internal debate. Sevens looked up at me again — then finally sighed, as if the edges of the mask were peeling away.

“So,” I said. “What does this mask mean — the ‘Gunner’? No, wait, that was a silly question. I can see it, it’s right out in the open. It means you’re exhausted, emotionally exhausted. Is that right?”

“Deadened,” said Sevens.

I winced.

She smiled — ever so thin and pale, and the smile did not reach the corners of her eyes. There was something sadistic and bleak about that smile. “I have two masks more melancholy than this, but neither of those are human. One is much larger than this room and this house. It would not fit.”

I blinked in surprise. “I’m sorry?”

Sevens shrugged again. Her greenish uniform was much too large for her, shoulders moving beneath the fabric. “Even very large things can be lesbians.”

“Oh. Oh, well, of course, yes.” I swallowed and realised my heart was going too fast. My hands prickled with sweat. My tentacles rumbled in gentle disagreement — none of us entertained the thought of turning around and retreating, but some of us debated over drawing out the conversation longer, over trying to make Sevens smile before we got down to the meat of the situation, before we opened our chest and bared our guts to her. But we were here for a very specific reason. Sevens had let us in, and now we stood before her. There was nothing else for it but to show some real courage, for once in our life. “Sevens,” we said. “You probably already guessed this, but I — we, all seven of me, of us — I want to apologise—”

“I know,” she said, then shrugged. “I know.”

“Good. Then, first I want to explain why, I want to tell you what I was told, about me, about how I think, about where I’ve gone wrong, I—”

“I know that too,” she said, then she sighed, eyes and face sagging with greater exhaustion. “I was watching.”

I blinked several times. “You … you were? You mean, with Taika?”

Sevens nodded.

“But … you were also here, sorting this room out?”

Sevens shrugged. “I can be in more than one place at the same time. You and I are bound, remember?”

“Oh. Well. O-of course. So, you heard everything, about my nature, and self-justification, and—”

“All of it,” she said, soft and clipped. “I was watching and listening to you, at a great distance. My love. I know what you’ve been through. I know what you heard. You need not put it into words. I trust the roots of your apology. I trust you are genuine.”

“Oh, but—”

“There is no need for words.”

Now I finally did huff, and puff, and put my hands on my hips. “Sevens.”

Her turn to blink at me, surprised but placid and accepting, with nothing beneath those deadened eyes. “Yes?”

“Sevens, that defeats the point of me making an apology. You can’t just peer behind the curtain and write it all off. That just justifies everything I did! You have to expect me to do better!”

Sevens just stared, yellow and tired. She said: “Do I?”

Oh. Oh, ow. Ouch. But she was right. I winced, hard and painful, a terrible squeezing inside my chest. But she was right.

“Sevens, I mean that you have a right to expect me to do better.” I folded my tentacles inward, drawing all seven of us together, trying to think as clearly as I could. I’d practised these words in front of the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, and they still didn’t seem right, coming out as a jumbled-up mess, but I had to say them regardless, even if they were not perfect. “You’re not my therapist, Sevens. I can’t rely on you to fix my broken thinking this time. You’re my fiancée! Or at least my girlfriend. And I’m not treating you right.” I forced the words out, plucking myself apart as I went: “You came with me to talk to my parents, you gave me unquestioning support during one of the most difficult conversations of my life. You’ve done nothing but support me, help me, drag me out of the dark. Not just this time, but multiple times! And I’ve taken that for granted. In the park back there, when I was raring to confront Taika, all you wanted me to do was slow down, get the others, and not put myself in danger. And then I said I would wait for Lozzie, and I didn’t. I used you, then told you that I didn’t value your feelings or input. You were there when I needed you, and then I shoved you out of the way when you weren’t wanted.”

“We made a compromise.”

“No!” I said. “We didn’t! I just decided that you couldn’t stop me! And you know what, you couldn’t! Nobody could!” I extended my tentacles out to either side. “This, all of this, everything I’ve become, not just in the physical but in the spiritual as well, the mastery of brain-math, it’s … it’s power! And I’m misusing it! If you heard what Taika said, then you heard all of it. It doesn’t matter what good intentions I have, it doesn’t matter how I justify these things with reference to what I’ve become inside. All that matters is action, and results. My actions hurt you. I don’t mean to do all this — but I did anyway. And that … that makes me a little bit like my mother. Like how my mother treated me. The damage is real, no matter the intent.”

Sevens just stared, unreadable, tired beyond words.

My heart clenched inside my chest. Was I failing? Was this the end of Sevens and I? If so, then I had to continue doing the right thing.

“I’ve fucked up,” I said. “Pardon my language, but I feel it’s the only suitable word. Not just this time, but previous times. I feel like I take you for granted, maybe because you’re not human, not even biological. Maybe because you appear and disappear, maybe because you seem so wise, and yet so abstract. None of that is an excuse. I’m sorry. And … and I can’t promise I’ll never do this again. I keep doing this. Taika made that clear. Hopefully this was a wake-up call. I can only promise that I’m going to try to be more aware of myself. I’m sorry for how I’ve been treating you, Sevens.”

Sevens stared, nothing behind her eyes.

I took one last deep breath. My guts were churning. “Y-you don’t have to respond to any of that right now. You don’t have to accept the apology. You—”

“Am I your fiancée?” Sevens said — voice cracking around the edges. “Or am I just a mistake who threw herself onto the stage, to be devoured by the ravenous audience?”

“Oh, Sevens, oh, no, no, you’re so much more than—”

She sobbed, only once — and then the Gunner was gone, replaced with a much more familiar mask.

Seven-Shades-of-Sanguine-Sprite was sitting on the edge of the bed, right where the Gunner had sat. Her bony knees were drawn up to her scrawny chest, her slender arms wrapped around her bare shins, so tiny and delicate, like she might shatter at a touch. Her black-and-red eyes were full of tears, shining in a face gone pale and greasy with sweat and stress. Her lips were parted, wobbling and uneven, showing her rows of needle-teeth inside her mouth. She was wearing her usual — a black tank-top and a pair of black shorts; but draped over her shoulders, tucked in around her legs, and cupping the soft curve of her chin, was the golden yellow robe that she had gifted me, as protection from the Eye, as an unspoken promise, as a piece of her heart.

“S-sorry I mimed shooting you,” she mumbled, sniffing to hold back the tears. “Guuuuur-lurk.”

“Sevens, oh, Sevens, no, no, it’s okay. It’s okay.” My tentacles hovered, uncertain what to do. “Should I … may I sit down? May I—”

Sevens made a throaty grumble and held out her arms toward me.

We joined her on the bed. We sat next to her and let her climb into our lap, sprawled across us more like a pet than a person. She hung onto a tentacle and chewed at the flesh, pinching with her teeth but not breaking the surface. I kissed her cheeks, wiping away her tears with a corner of my sleeve. She bonked her head on our chest, like a cat requesting petting — and that is exactly what she was doing, asking me to stroke her long dark hair. A yellow comb sat on the nearby bedside table, so we scooped that up and set about combing her hair out, getting rid of all the little uneven tangles. She wriggled and wiggled and nuzzled our sides, she grabbed tentacles and tucked them around her middle, she purred and gurgled and made weird little throaty noises like a clogged-up drainpipe.

This wordless skinship went on for ten or fifteen minutes. There was nothing sexual about it — or maybe there was, maybe my definition of ‘sexual’ had become too limited. It felt more like a pair of animals rolling around in a dog bed than a couple engaging in foreplay. At one point Sevens ended up on her tummy, with my tentacles rubbing her back. A minute later she was sprawled across my belly, rolling her hips against the bed. A minute later again, we were holding hands, side by side.

Eventually she settled in one spot, sitting in my lap and facing forward, so we were both looking in the same direction. I had half my tentacles wrapped around her, holding her gently but tightly. The gauzy, floaty, yellow robe was half-draped over me in return.

“Heather?” she said, gurgling at the shadows at the far end of the room. I wondered if Aym was over there, watching in silence.

“Mm?”

“Do you love me?”

Rather than answering on reflex, I took a moment to really think about the question, about what it meant. Sevens twisted in my lap and looked up at me, red-on-black eyes clear and clean, burning quietly against her pale skin. She didn’t seem impatient, or confused, or worried. She just wanted the truth.

“Yes,” we said eventually, staring at the same shadows on the wall. “I do love you. I’ve told you that before, and it was the truth. I think love comes very easily to me. Which is perhaps a problem.”

“Mm,” she rasped. “Love you, too.”

“But,” we added slowly. “I also barely know you, partly because you barely know yourself.”

“We don’t spend a lot of — gluurrrk — time together.”

We smiled down at Sevens, feeling guilty but hopeful. “Yes, you’re right, and I’m sorry for that, too. You and I, we dived into this really quickly. We basically had no romantic relationship beforehand, and then you accidentally on-purpose proposed to marry me.”

“Sorrrrrry,” Sevens rasped.

“No, no, it’s just … Sevens, I am kind of a mess. A big mess. And you’ve been dealing with that mess, rather than focusing on yourself. Except with Aym, maybe. Which is good, mind you.”

“You don’t have to apologise againnnnnn, Heather.”

“Maybe not. But it’s important to me, to express what I’m apologising for.” I sighed. “There’s more than a little bit of cephalopod in me. Always was, long before I went to the abyss. Getting me to do something I don’t want to do, or getting me to hold back when I want something, it’s … difficult. I keep leaping off at high speed, convinced my own ideas are always correct, to go fight things, or poke things. Have you seen that youtube video with the little toy boat stuffed with crab meat, in the top of an octopus’ aquarium? And it focuses so completely on getting that meat out, like that’s the only thing in the world?”

Sevens shook her head.

“Well, you get the idea. And that octopus is me. That’s what I’m like, sometimes. And this time, yes, Taika was not dangerous in the way you were worried about, I didn’t get hurt, and so on, but if I rely on that outcome, it just encourages me to keep justifying this stuff, this behaviour, every time.”

Sevens puffed out her cheeks. She didn’t want to say yes, Heather, you’ve been acting so very badly, but she did not disagree.

“My point is,” I went on, “I’ve apologised before, but I’ve not truly changed my attitude. Sevens, it’s not your responsibility to make me change. It’s mine. Fixing me is not your responsibility. You — you are your responsibility, Sevens. And maybe you and I can be together, and be good for each other, but … but maybe you should try to do some things for yourself, too.”

“Mm?”

“I mean, things that don’t use me as a reference point,” we said, wiggling our tentacles. “Friends that aren’t mutual. Things that aren’t all about me. It’s … I think it’s hard to have a proper relationship with somebody who you’re relying on completely for a self-reference point.” I sighed and rubbed my face with three tentacles. “Ahhh, I’m mangling this. I wish I was like Raine, wish I could just explain this easily, without making a huge mess of it all the time.”

Sevens leaned up and kissed the back of my hand. “Makes sense. Mmhmm.”

I smiled down at her — and gently wrapped a tentacle around her neck, holding her lightly. She gurgled through her teeth, soft and gentle.

“More importantly, Sevens, I want you to know yourself, because I want to know you. You proposed to me, but I’ve given you so little. I think it’s time we did something very specific.”

Sevens went wide-eyed and started to blush. “A-ah? Ah!”

I reached up with one hand, tugged down on the collar of my t-shirt, and tilted my head to the side. “Bite me.”

Sevens’ mouth hinged open, showing off her rows of razor-sharp, needle-like teeth. She looked about ready to drool. “Heatherrrrr … we can’t!”

“Why not?” I asked, my own breath coming harder than I had expected. “Will it do any real damage? Will it leave a mark on my soul? Will I turn into a vampire too? That would be a novel way of defeating the Eye, at least, make myself invisible in mirrors.”

“No,” Sevens gurgled. “Uuuurk-none of those things. I’m not a real vampire anyway, am I?”

“Then it’s just for fun,” I said.

My heart was beating so much faster than I’d expected. Oh dear.

Sevens was panting now, ragged and rough, her big red-and-black eyes glued to my pale throat. She gulped. “Fun … ”

“And that’s what you and I haven’t had enough of,” I said. “Just you and me, alone together, having fun.” I tilted my head further. “Come on, Sevens. Do you want to do it?”

“ … you might— might die.”

“Ah?” I blinked and straightened up. “I thought you said it wouldn’t do any real damage?”

“Nnnnnnno,” she rasped, pulling a difficult little face. “Not from this.” She made her needle-teeth go clack-clack. “From the Eye. Within a week or two. You might be gone.”

“Ah.” I took a deep breath, counted to ten, crammed all those thoughts down into a compacted ball as hard as I could, and then let the breath out again. I pulled my collar down a second time, and tilted my head to the side. “I might be, yes. So that’s all the more reason to have this, together, while we can.”

Sevens turned all the way around in my lap, until she was facing me. She was shaking, quivering with breathy excitement. She put her little hands on my shoulders — shivering, clammy — and went up onto her knees, so she was leaning over me. Her golden yellow robe fell across the front of my body. Her lips parted with a wet click, showing her teeth again, sharp and pointed. She leaned down until her lips brushed the edge of my neck, my throat, her warm breath tickling my skin.

“ … are … urrrrrr—are you … Heather, are you sure?”

I closed my eyes, shaking all over. All our tentacles were gripping tight, squeezing Sevens like a bag of blood herself. “Bite me, Sevens. Bite me for fun. Show me what you like to do.”

Sevens nuzzled close, opened her maw, and bit down.

Like the bullet from the Gunner’s pistol, the Blood Goblin’s teeth were just another stage prop, just another piece of costume, like a paper crown on a mummer’s brow. But props and fakes and pretend can still look and feel very real, when one wishes them to do so. We are, after all, what we pretend to be.

I felt two rows of razor-sharp teeth puncture my throat and sink into my veins. I gasped, eyes rolling into the back of my head with a strange mixture of pain and pleasure, of being entered and violated by something that loved me. Sevens clamped her mouth over the ‘wound’, and then started to suck; we felt mouthfuls of blood leaving our body, sluicing across her tongue and sliding down her throat, bobbing as she drank.

My little leech did not stay attached for long, just enough for a good few mouthfuls. Her lips popped free with a slurp, her teeth withdrew with a feeling like bone rasping through flesh, and her tongue lapped across my throat, as if licking the wound shut.

She rocked back in my lap, her lips stained with traces of blood, eyes hazy and cloudy, cheeks flushed bright red.

We clapped a hand to our throat, and found — nothing. No wound, no hole, no blood.

“A play,” Sevens gurgled. “Guuuurlk!”

Panting, flushed in our cheeks, strobing bright down the length of all our tentacles, we replied: “A good play. Well done. Come here, Sevens.”

A few minutes later we were beneath the bed covers together, snuggled down deep, wrapped inside the cocoon of Sevens’ yellow robes. Sevens was the little spoon, tucked against my front, while I took the larger role, arms and tentacles wrapped around her from behind.

“Sleep here tonight?” she gurgled, her mouth hidden below the covers. “Please?”

“Mmhmm,” I grunted back, half-mumbling into the pillow. “Everyone knows. Just us? Or is Aym about?”

We both waited for a moment, as if the shadows might reply; perhaps it was only my imagination, but I thought I saw a grudging sneer in the darkness at the foot of the bed.

Sevens snuggled in closer, her head just beneath my chin. “Heather? Heatherrrrr? Can I be your kitten, instead?”

I blinked with surprise — not because the request made no sense, but because it made so much sense. Like a missing puzzle piece.

“Of course, kitten,” I said, wrapping my tentacles around Sevens’ wrists and waist. “You can be whatever you want.”

And so Sevens and I drifted off to sleep together, hidden away in a secret room in the rear of Number 12 Barnslow Drive. My present to her, to whatever she wanted to be. My present before the Eye.

Because Sevens was right. I had suppressed my reaction, my gut-churning fear, my anxiety of the inevitable; I clung hard to the promise I had made to my parents — that I would bring Maisie home, that I would not fail — and to the promise of Taika herself — that we were not alone, not the sole abyssal wanderer returned to reality.

But still, Sevens had a point. Within two weeks, I might not be here at all.

I would rescue my sister, whatever it took.

But I might not be coming back from Wonderland.