Carry On, Carry On (Worm)

Spoiler: Note

A quick summary of this mess, since I forgot to put it in.

The gist of it is this: Taylor finds herself somewhere new, somewhere she's never heard of and doesn't recognize in the least. Through networking with other people under shared adversity, learning the rules of this place and the changes they force her to undergo, refining her newfound powers of magic and music, and fighting off threats she is in no way equipped to face, she'll find her way home.

Once she gets back, home may not be ready for her.

A very important note: this isn't a crossover, because I neglected to include that detail and quite a few people rather understandably started getting confused, for very different reasons than they should've been. Taylor isn't in some toned-down, Earth-Bet-localized section of the Warp, or the Mansus, or the Nevernever. You may see inspiration from some of those and others, the Mansus especially, and I suppose a case could be made for how this whole adventure she's on could conceivably exist in a version of that universe with a different set of Histories, but I'm not directly adapting any of them.

This is me messing around with a few ideas I've scrapped for something I've been working on. I'm just having fun with the stuff I'll never use elsewhere.

Now, obviously it's a Worm fic, albeit pretty atypical, so I'm not divorcing from the main universe with Taylor as some stand-in for an SI in disguise (hopefully, at least. It remains to be seen whether I can actually write her, once the action and talking start). It's just going to take a while to get back to Bet, since I wanted to properly justify the changes Taylor will undergo before she gets back. Probably a stupid idea, but the context for the differences in personality will be pretty important later on, because they will be rather prominent. Think of it as two distinct parts: the story of how she survives away from home and claws her way back, then her story once she returns to Earth Bet. I'll get back to semi-familiar territory eventually, but it won't be anywhere near the beginning. Just a heads-up, if that doesn't interest you.

Also, there'll be songs popping up occasionally. Some, or most, I'm not sure, probably won't have existed in 2011. Those are just the songs I've decided to use for the story. This whole thing actually started because I wanted to give her music-based powers, and I couldn't figure out how to impart all the features I wanted without making her part of some ten-person-plus cluster trigger event. Contrived, so I turned to something even more contrived to fix it, as is my style.

I was still climbing the factory’s walls. I had been for a number of hours.

The steel-grey haze of fog all around me leered menacingly, mockingly screeching out a hag’s laughter whenever I lost my hold on the tentative holds set into the walls of this massive structure, playing a disjointed series of notes to me the rest of the time, something almost but not quite music. There was no ground down there that I could see, just an eternal fall into an endless abyss, clouded with fog in every direction, the wall I was on stretching out into infinity. If I started falling, I knew I’d never stop.

It was an ultimatum without words. Fall, or climb. Nobody could hold on forever. I needed to find the top, or I would die a slow, painful death by dehydration and exposure as I descended. Unless, of course, I managed to batter myself against the wall hard enough on my way down to bleed out. Difficult, and likely to be horrifically painful. I wouldn’t die immediately, and my final moments would be torture.

All told, there were better ways to die. No good ways, there never were, but ones that wouldn’t have me wishing it’d happened faster.

I reached for another hold with flayed fingers, my hand painting the slate walls a deep crimson as it passed over, my blood somehow soaking into the cement coating the building. My limbs were burning more than I’d ever thought possible, the pain building over time to be so intense I was almost tempted to throw myself over and get it over with.

Almost.

I wasn’t weakening. I couldn’t get weaker here, couldn’t tire. Instead, my muscles just absorbed pain over time, all the impossible labour taking its toll on me as seconds dragged into minutes, minutes into hours, and hopefully not hours into anything longer. I’d lose my mind if the pain got worse. I knew it would. I needed to get out of here soon.

My fingers tightened as they reached into a tiny crevice in the wall, almost totally undetectable. Only the past few hours of experience and repetition alerted me to its location, intuition bordering on a sixth sense born of a desire to stay alive, no matter how much more difficult that was than just giving in.

The cement cracked, splinters falling into the pit. I didn’t track their descent. I’d done that often enough to know that nothing would change. There was nothing down there. That scared me more than any of this. I wasn’t anywhere that made sense. Even Everest had a base.

Another chuckle sounded out of the fog behind me, massive, larger than me, the building, the cracks into which I stuck my fingers, the fog itself. The whole structure reverberated, throwing chunks of rock free, exposing the metal flesh beneath the brittle skin of this complex.

The laughter stopped as suddenly as it’d started, overtaken once more by a melody that seeped into my bones, changing too often for me to pin it down, too disordered even for chaos. I didn’t know why I considered it a rhythm at all, just that I did.

I concentrated on the faint sounds of machinery coming to me through the muffling mass of metallic skin and muscle coating the factory, trying to drown out the song.

There were mechanical whirs, gears turning on themselves and each other, the grind of metal against metal as plates slid in opposing directions. I heard a squeal, thinking for a second it was a person, before realizing it was too regular, the pitch unchanging. I couldn’t figure out what it was, only what it wasn’t.

My efforts were in vain. The song was there, ever-present, worming its way into my grey matter, a memetic parasite I couldn’t fight, not in any way that made sense to me. It just kept going, the notes always changing just enough through every circuit that I couldn’t divine a pattern in the playing, even though the repetition told me that there should have been one.

It was an irrational number in sound form, no sequences repeated. I hated it, the randomness that wasn’t quite random enough to be passed off as white noise, sounds appearing in sequence to have me thinking I’d get it this time around, before it threw me for a loop once more.

Please just shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

I wondered whether this was how Simurgh victims felt, her voice clawing its way into their hearts and souls, twisting their minds as she forced them to listen to a melody unending. I could understand the insanity from that ability alone, never mind the precognition and Tinker abilities.

My left leg burned with a fire that kindled in my muscles, searing the flesh to wax and charring my bones to cinders. I could still use it fine, but every movement was another flash of pain through all my surfaces, my mental strength diminishing at a rate of knots even as my physical strength remained unchanged.

I spied a large crack in the wall a fair distance away, up and to the right. It wasn’t the first, and likely wouldn’t be the last. They occasionally came into view as I moved from one endless stretch of wall to another, ever ascending. Some were just cracks in the masonry, large enough to appear from range, but not deep enough to do anything other than expose the metal that lay under a membrane of cement.

Others were fissures into the factory, breaches in its cell wall that gave me a clearer ear into the sounds the place produced, and even the occasional glimpse of movement, but nothing more substantial. Glints of metal, the heat and glow of forges barely noticed form afar off, the moans and warbles of creatures I couldn’t and didn’t want to see. None of them were normal or natural, I knew that. I didn’t need to know anything else.

I scrambled in the direction of the crack as best I could despite knowing it was futile, my arms and legs torturously pumping over tiny gaps in rock that barely worked as handholds and were almost useless as footholds. Each and every movement was agony, molten metal pumping through my veins, but I had to ignore it and soldier on. I could moan about the pain once this turned out to be another lost cause.

The fissure widened in my view as I approached at a snail’s pace, its outline developing into solidity entirely too slowly. The moments were stretching out to infinity, the shape crawling ever further away as I approached.

A foothold broke free as I stepped on it, and for a single moment of sheer blinding terror I was falling. My stomach leapt into my throat, my limbs seized up in panic, and my eyes widened as an image flashed through my mind of my corpse, days from now, still falling alongside this monolithic wall, forever surrounded by the cackles of unseen figures bigger than the world itself, the dull sounds of industry, and a song that would drive me insane even in death.

Oh God, please no. I can’t die now. I can’t! This wouldn’t mean anything if I did! Dad would lose his mind!

I thrust the fingers on my right hand deeper into their perch. I heard a snap, my vision flashed red, became hazy. I screamed, but I didn’t hear much of it. My voice was stolen by the fog, echoing faintly back at me from impossible surfaces that didn’t exist.

I shut my mouth, biting my tongue, breathing rapidly, fighting the urge to fish my hand out and check the damage. I’d fall if I did, render the pain meaningless. I just needed to keep going.

I pulled my hand out of the crack, biting down on my lip as lasers seared the skin off my arm, starting at the second knuckle of my ring finger. I tasted copper, my mouth wet with something other than saliva.

I jammed that hand into another crack, my vision going dark around the edges. I pulled my other out and pushed it into a crevice above me, to my right. My legs were soon to follow, my toes providing just enough grip to not send me plummeting.

My scream returned to me in the fog, not from my throat, modulated and pitch-shifted to sound like laughter. It made me furious, a serviceable distraction from the pain. I hated that something I couldn’t sense by any means was messing with me for what felt like the fun of it. That was the purview of a bully, and I didn’t need one here. Climbing up a sheer cement wall with no prior experience was difficult enough without someone trying to get into my head.

It gets worse, I’ll saw off my arms and legs. I can’t keep on. It hurts.

I got closer to the crevice in fractional increments, progress measured in inches instead of feet. The ache was deeper than my bones, replacing my organs one by one. Even muscles that didn’t have anything to do with physical exertion — my stomach, heart, intestines — were beginning to curl up in protest. I couldn’t tell if the moisture on my cheeks was more blood or fresh tears.

The fingers on my right hand tightened around the edge of the hole in the wall. I stifled another scream, not willing to give the fog any more of my voice. On instinct, I reached up with my other hand, almost losing my grip entirely as my feet came free. I swung in the open air, unsupported from below, acid eating away at the flesh in my arms.

I started pulling myself up, progress glacial. My legs scrabbled for purchase on the cement, frantic movements lancing burning cuts into my feet as they flailed. It was just one more affliction to add to the pile. My body felt like it was tearing itself apart around me even as I ascended to the edge of the hole micron by agonizing micron.

Occasionally my fingers would slip on the blood they were depositing, filling me with heart-stopping terror in the moment where my stomach lightened. Several times I looked down as I was struggling up, my head twisting at the exertion. I’d see the gaping maw of the abyss, cackling fog eager to consume me whole and let the remains rot.

Getting my chest over the edge took me several years and a few seconds all at the same time. My shredded fingers had left small streaks of red immediately before the entrance, my broken finger dragging across the cement crookedly. I managed to shimmy my way up the last little distance, bringing my legs up to rest on the cement in a heap.

I was on my chest, heaving gulps of air in a mix of utter exhaustion and mind-rending panic bleed-off. I didn’t know which was more prominent. I didn’t know much of anything in that moment. My mind was fatigued beyond reason, the pain, stress and exertion having drained me to empty in those long hours climbing the wall.

My eyes shut despite the agony, darkness taking me.

 

Spoiler: Media

I forgot to add the song that comes up this chapter:

I wrenched my pajama shirt where I sat, trying to tear a strip off. Without the aid of my right hand, I only managed to awkwardly pull the fabric away from my skin, straining to create even the smallest rip in it. Eventually the exertion became too painful, and I dropped my arm back down to the ground, grimacing as I leaned into the wall behind me.

Can’t make an improvised splint. Can’t use my finger. Can’t see much from here.

My limbs had recovered a little, at least. Of course, being better than rock bottom didn’t mean much. Less plasma in my muscles, more fire in my arteries. I was in pain either way, just not enough to drive me mad.

Not that I was complaining. Anything that didn’t approach suicide-inducing levels of torture was fine by me. I liked not feeling as if every cell in my body was being pulled apart and stitched back together in time with the steps of their kinesins.

The fog was still shrieking its hell-song at me, but the laughter hadn’t returned since I’d woken up. It parroted my scream instead, pitch-shifted and modulated to sound at times like the haunting cry of an alien beast whose staple was a steady diet of me, at others the earthen rumble of tectonic plates as they split the ground beneath my feet open in a rictus grin. It liked experimentation, I’d noticed, and I’d given it a new toy.

Despite the constant racket, it wasn’t annoying or scaring me as much now. My life wasn’t in imminent danger. Long-term, definitely. I needed food and water. I needed to find shelter. I needed to figure out where on Earth I was, and how I’d get home.

I’m not in Brockton Bay. There’s no chance this is anywhere near home. We’d have noticed all this.

By the same token, I didn’t know anywhere this could’ve been. Never, in all the years I’d halfheartedly followed bits and pieces of the cape scene, had I heard about something like this. The fog, its screaming at least, matched a small portion of what the Simurgh was known for, and the building might’ve been space-warping Tinkertech of some kind, but I hadn’t seen her, and that wasn’t her MO. She was startlingly visible in every Endbringer confrontation where she featured. All the Endbringers were.

Of course, that didn’t mean that this wasn’t her handiwork, any more than it confirmed that it was. It would be a deviation from their pattern, but that wasn’t impossible, just highly improbable from what we knew about them. In their own ways, they were predictable, sticking to rigid combat principles and behaviors, even if that didn’t make them any easier to actually kill. Or to stop yourself from being killed.

My main issue was that there’d been no in-between, no transition that could conceivably explain my arrival here. It’s not like I’d woken up to a shriek, was lifted out of my bed, then flung through the air towards the factory wall — which I somehow knew was a factory with the same certainty that I knew my own name. I’d just found myself here when I regained consciousness, clinging to a wall with no indication as to how it’d happened. It left me with many questions, no answers, and a litany of speculative guesses, a garbage barge of conjecture and half-formulated nonsense that was drifting further from the isles of common sense the more attention I devoted to it.

It left me uncertain. I didn’t like that. Uncertainty was historically bad for me.

I clutched my right hand to my chest, my broken ring finger constantly weighing on my mind. I hissed through my teeth as I shifted fractionally, the bones protesting violently at being jostled. Added was the pain I felt from the rest of my unbroken fingers, missing portions of their skin from where I’d scraped it off on the wall, my toes peeled and blistered.

I tried to snort in false amusement, to take the edge off the worst of the anxiety, but the effort hurt. I’m having a good day.

I struggled to get my thoughts in order through the pain, now that I had the opportunity. I hadn’t had time to process anything at the beginning, back when I’d been climbing for my prolonged existence, but I had the remainder of my life available to me right now, however long that would last.

It didn’t help. Thinking about my situation was only useful if I had a frame of reference and some information to explain what the hell was going on, even if only vaguely. This was beyond vague. This felt like I was one of the Pevensie children, only I didn’t get to choose if I was going to hop in the wardrobe, and I didn’t have a warning for what was on the other side.

I shakily got to my feet, working not to vocalize the discomfort I felt as my muscles creaked and my joints ached. I needed to carry on. Staying here was tempting, but it would get me nowhere. The sooner I understood what was happening, the better.

I looked down the length of the crack I was in. It was about five times my height at the entrance, and thrice my width. It was jagged and irregular, the silvery metal having been sheared apart in places, melted in others. I didn’t know who or what might’ve done that, and I was okay with never finding out. Better they rip holes in walls than in me.

On an animal, it would’ve been a gash, a violent and messy laceration, weeping blood. I half expected it to do so anyway, despite knowing it couldn’t. Something about this place didn’t sit right with me. There was a chill seeping into my bones, spikes of ice crystallizing along my spine. I shuddered, though I didn’t know why.

I started walking forward, my feelings a jumble. I was glad to be leaving the fog and its abyss behind me, but I didn’t know what awaited me ahead. It could’ve been innocuous, true. Based on my entrance and luck, I wasn’t counting on it.

The gash went on for some distance. The light intensified as I descended further into its depths, shifting to a cold, deathly glow tinged with spots of rust and flecks of brilliant yellow, though the highlights vanished so fast that I couldn't tell if they were real or visual artefacts.

The fog fades off with distance, at least. That’s something. I don’t have to scream inside my own head to hear my thoughts.

That didn’t mean it was silent in the tunnel, just that the fog seemed to have no hold here, its voices completely inaudible. Instead, there was the dull clang of machinery reaching me through the twists of the tunnel, the outcrops and imperfections along every surface causing it to echo out into something akin to a chant. A faint wash of heat blew through periodically, the wind whispering as it flickered past me. I knew there was no speech there, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I caught the occasional word if I concentrated.

Name, it seemed to say. It was probably just auditory pareidolia, my mind attempting to dredge meaning out of randomness, grappling desperately for context. I wouldn’t find any. Not here. I’d have to work for it.

Eventually I saw the source of the light at the end of the tunnel. It wasn’t inviting.

The light was dead, a dull grey across the metal floors, reflecting harshly against the fractured walls around me as I rounded a kink in the shaft. It was pallid, as much as that can be claimed about what’s never been alive. It was difficult to explain, other than to say that it lacked soul. Whatever it was that caused an environment to feel like it wasn’t festering in its death throes, it was missing here.

I huffed, the action causing my ribs to play out notes of pain in a simple melody. I’ve never been so melodramatic about light before. I need to get my head together.

It was difficult, with the snatches of words carried on the wind. I kept hearing something close to my name. It put me in mind of a memory from years back, when ghosts lurked in the edges of my subconscious and all the nighttime monsters were real. Everything was dark, and I was under the covers, seeing phantom smiles in every shadow, jagged claws from every surface. My name was murmured by the floorboards as I shut my eyes, setting me to further panic.

Taylor, they used to say. Taylor.

I hated it. I hated being seven years old all over again, trying to get to sleep as I cried at the spectre of death, its malevolent form barely glimpsed behind wardrobe doors and the edges of furniture. What’s worse, this time around Mom was dead, and nobody would switch on the lights and tell me everything would be alright. Nobody had done that for a while.

I hesitantly drew level with the entrance to the tunnel I was in, the messy, jagged edges of its opening appearing in stark contrast to the clean cut lines of the machinery I could see in the room before me, so straight that it felt more like I was inhabiting a building design than a real structure. My legs dragged as I got closer, ready to bolt at the first sign of danger. I probably wouldn’t be very fast due to the lingering agony, but I could make an attempt, however feeble it may prove to be.

I stepped out onto the factory floor, the cold concrete chilling my soles.

For a few seconds, I had a hard time putting the images before me together into something that made sense. I raised my left hand to block out the worst of the blinding light above me, squinting through it to look at the room beyond.

I gasped when it clicked with me just what I was looking at. I stumbled backwards, vertigo overtaking me as my cerebellum reeled at the new perspective. I suddenly felt very small. Microscopic. Insignificant.

The room was vast, enormous, cavernous. It was the sum total of the world, stretching out past the horizon to disappear beyond my line of sight. That wasn’t close to describing how all-encompassing it felt in that moment, but my vocabulary failed me along with my mind’s internal ruler as I looked out. I wasn’t built to understand structures on this scale.

The too-bright, pure white lights miles above me didn’t make judging distances any easier. They looked further than the stars, yet far brighter.

The sky was grey, apart from the lights. That could be blamed on incomplete cloud cover, if I were willing to stretch my suspension of disbelief to its fullest. However, that didn’t explain the weave of straight lines that ran across my vision directly overhead, disappearing into invisibility even as my eyes tracked them into the distance, or whatever that strange bastardization of falloff distance was meant to be, the crude replacement horizon I saw before me. It didn’t account for the soft whisper of moving parts acting alongside each other in a choir of billions, a perpetual hiss that was at once almost silent, yet all-pervasive.

It certainly didn’t make sense when I cast my gaze to the left and right, seeing walls on either side, with doors set into them every few hundred yards, conveyor belts emerging from them. The belts were fine hairs compared to their surroundings, spanning the length of the room. The view stretched out into the far distance, after which everything disappeared from my view. Not that it cut off as it would under normal circumstances, vanishing over some perspective quirk of planetary curvature — I just couldn’t see that far. The resolution was too small for human eyes, objects running off into an infinite expanse.

There were easily hundreds of thousands of belts, if not millions, that I could see, an unbelievably large number carting goods from one end of the cavernous room to another. The belts seemed to be divided into groups, from the fraction that were easily observable from my position. A portion near me, upwards of fifty, held empty metal frames in the vague shape of a chest, others helmets, and still others what looked like weapons, guns of some sort. There were easily billions of them, lined up along the belts as goods along a production line fit for a continent. Maybe several.

There was a pattern to it. All of it, every item travelling along the threaded seams, was meant in some way for combat. I couldn’t find one household appliance, or something as simple as a curtain rod. Just guns, armor, bombs and worse.

Is this some kind of Tinker mass production line? None of this stuff looks like it was made in the modern day. I’m pretty sure those are meant to be rifles, from their shape, but I can’t see a hole where the bullet’s meant to exit.

I couldn’t arrive at anything close to an answer. I wasn’t a Tinker, that much was certain, just an average person trying to divine probable structure and function from things I didn’t understand.

I stood, deliberating. I didn’t know whether to proceed or go back. On the one hand, I knew there was nothing behind me, just a winding tunnel through a hole in a wall that led to an abyss. Not much use going there, unless my plan was to wait out death by dehydration.

On the other hand, I had no idea who was running this. Presumably, they wouldn’t like me being around their stuff; there was a chance they’d kill me as soon as they knew about me. I didn’t delude myself — there were some awful people out there, people who’d murder me without a second thought, simply because it was the most convenient option in the moment. I couldn’t know that whoever was responsible for this was any better than Lung or Jack Slash.

Two options. One ended in certain death by slow degradation over a period of days, the other probable death by weapon, torture or worse. Neither was good.

That said, I thought, reaching a decision, one is preferable to the other. I’ll take a chance of life over death by resignation.

I stepped forward, carefully ducking under the first belt in my way, hearing an almost silent whirr from within as it carted its goods. I proceeded slowly through the area, aiming for a tiny door I could see on the adjacent wall to my left. There was nothing special about it was far as I could tell, just that it was closer than the others. It looked minuscule compared to the titanic environment around it. The sheer scale of this place made me feel tiny, an ant in a world of titans, except the homeowners hadn’t returned yet. I hoped they never did.

I made sure not to move too fast, just in case there were defensive measures in place I couldn’t see: monomolecular wires strung out in the air, high-powered matter disintegration streams beamed between surfaces, kinetically-charged patches of space between the machinery, any other physics-defying thing a determined parahuman could dream up to slice me into so much fresh meat. I couldn’t see anything that suggested active weaponry, but this place was an unknown. If it was Tinker-made, as I suspected, it could have anything.

That said, in all honesty, I didn’t think I’d actually manage to see or feel a security measure kick in before it killed me. The slow pace was more for my own peace of mind. I needed to be able to think clearly once I got to the door, not have thoughts muddled and frantic from panic. I’d already been through one life or death situation since coming here, and it had been my introduction to this place. I didn’t want to feel like I was in another, especially if I wasn’t. I would be totally useless for a while after if I lost my nerve running from shadows.

Further from the walls, the floor was vibrating. My bones were rattling in concert with the machinery around me, despite the total level of noise being no louder than a casual conversation. It was the footsteps of a colossus, compressed in time to repeat faster than my mind could track. It was murder on my finger. I couldn’t do much more than clutch it to my chest and will the motion away, ineffective as that was.

I was relieved when I arrived at the door.

I approached it with caution, tried to scrutinize it for anything that looked out of place. The problem was, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Maybe some kind of lump, discolouration, or unusual attachment. I didn’t find anything like that, just a metallic silver door with some scratches in the frame. It didn’t make me feel any more secure. It could eviscerate me just as easily without the visual identifiers, if it’d been made to do so by a parahuman.

I nudged it lightly with my shoulder, pressing my elbow to the handle. I had a hard time depressing it enough to open it without using my blood-striped fingers, but I managed.

It swung open without so much as a creak, silently pivoting on its hinges to rest against the wall. The hallway beyond was miles long, starkly lit, inky shadows of wooden crates, cardboard boxes and miscellaneous debris cast across lifeless grey walls, the ceiling a far saner distance up of approximately four times my height. I could hear echoes of activity coming from further down, a rhythmic clank of machinery amid whispers I was half-sure I was imagining from stress, heavy and dreadful.

The other end was a pinprick of light, so small it resembled a vanishing point sketch in Art class, instead of anything that existed in real space. Its colours changed from white to red over the course of seconds, the resulting lightshow playing out over the walls, turning them from concrete to brimstone.

A pathway to Hell, just for me, some unfriendly corner of my mind supplied.

My mouth was dry.

I shuffled down the hallway with trepidation, leery of every passing shadow and inert crate. Everything screamed danger to my hindbrain, but I didn’t have another recourse. If I tried every door in this complex, I’d probably die of exposure before I was halfway through, provided whoever was operating here didn’t get to me first. I needed to commit to something until I had more information, otherwise I’d never get any.

The peals of metallic impact rang off the walls louder with every step, emerging from that point of light in the distance. I’d heard industrial noises before, on TV and occasionally along the docks, what little industry there still was desperately clinging to the last vestiges of life. Those had been loud, unpleasant sounds, even through the filter of audio levelling and cinder block walls. This, though, was something else.

It wasn’t that the sounds were loud. They were pretty quiet, all told, largely thanks to the distance. It was more that their tone was suggestive of something entirely too big, like the cavernous room I’d been in a scant few minutes ago. If my ears weren’t deceiving me (the steadily increasing clarity of the ethereal whispers cast doubt on that), things here were universally built larger than they should’ve been. The conveyor room was seeming less like an exception and more like a rule.

My eyes darted around, twitching to the source of every phantom noise in this colossal factory. Maybe I could get my hands on a weapon of some kind, like the ones I’d seen on the conveyor belt back in the other room. Anything to keep me from feeling so vulnerable.

I hadn’t dared to take anything they may have missed, though. If I was discovered here due to theft, I’d only have myself to blame.

I noticed an open doorway on my right. It was still far to the other end of the corridor — I hadn’t gotten much closer to reaching that end, despite walking for what must’ve been at least fifteen minutes. I didn’t even look to have made any headway, from the distances I could judge.

I peeked in through the door’s opening instead of continuing, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

There was a mountainous heap of trash inside the room; it dwarfed some of the peaks that existed in the semi-untamed lands around Brockton Bay. It was piled up higher against the far wall, many miles away, tapering to nothing on my end. I eyeballed the item closest to me, lying less than a foot away from my bare feet.

It was some sort of gauntlet, metallic silver with a matte blue finish over the wrist and back of the hand, extending down the arm. It was missing fingers, the ring and index gone. It didn’t have any visible joints that I could see, looking solid and unsegmented in its construction. It was tarnished and broken, the metal rusted and discoloured in patches.

I cautiously prodded at it with a toe. It slid over the ground a few inches, the sound a faint scraping of metal against metal, its temperature against my skin chilling. Yet, as it moved, it deformed in a way metals didn’t, as if it had somehow been hybridized, altered to combine the best properties of metal and cloth. A rattle started up when it moved, stopped moments after.

I looked out over the rest of the pile, seeing more of the same: armor, weapons and trinkets laid out on the ground in a haphazard, random arrangement of broken tools and missing parts. A dumping ground.

There’s so much here. I could walk for hours and not reach the other side. Where is this? Underground? A complex like this would show up on satellite imagery, for sure.

I heard something behind me, faintly, a sound that grew apart from the others as I listened. It wasn’t a clank, more a thud. It was rhythmic, alternating in sets of two, the pitch slightly off every second beat.

Almost like…

My eyes widened. I darted into the room as quietly as possible, terrified of meeting whoever was approaching. I tried to find a patch of the trash that didn’t look in danger of collapsing when I touched it, something that would adequately hide me.

I scurried behind an outcrop of melted blasters and vehicular segments, the mass twisted and warped together into a wax statue of painful contortion. I crouched down, wincing as my fingers scraped the ground, barely managing to suppress a whimper at the bolt that shot up my right arm. I bit down on my other palm, breathing in deeply as I tried to focus the pain elsewhere.

The footsteps emerged inside the room, just a few yards away. I tried to hold my breath, but it wasn’t viable. My heart was beating too fast, my lungs pressed into double duty as my fingers insistently burned. I settled for short, silent gasps around the skin of my hand, shifting into a tense rhythm at triple speed.

The figure carried on, deeper into the room, approaching my location. I let go of my hand with my mouth, moved my left arm slowly, being careful not to settle on anything too roughly, lest I jostle something out of place for my potential killer to hear.

I needed a weapon. I would settle for almost anything at this point, as long as it stopped me feeling so helpless. I didn’t want to die without at least trying to fight back, but I knew I was likely too weak to emerge victorious on my own. My gaunt frame and lack of exercise had always worked against me; here, they may be the death of me.

The worst were the whispers that I was now almost totally sure were only in my head. Snatches of commands and barked orders nestled among the white noise, growing more distinct as the figure approached, volume increasing in time with its steps. They filled my head with gout, bloating some thoughts as others fell away, wretched and diseased. Thinking became harder in bursts. I shook my head to clear it, but it didn’t do much. A note of panic sounded out at the realization that my mind was being tampered with, but I was finding it difficult to hear among the white noise.

Your name, the whispers demanded, clearer now. Mine.

My left hand found a long object, curved into a smooth finish on one side, lined with thin rods on the other. Strings? They depressed under my fingers. I didn’t look at it, just clutched it tighter, tried to ignore the flare that enveloped my arm at the pressure.

Stupid as it was, that hold was a comfort to me. The encroaching whispers were quieted a bit — not completely, but enough to stop them from slowing my thoughts further. I grasped it as tightly as I could with my weakened offhand, like a woman clinging to a solitary buoy in the open ocean. I was tempted to drag it over to me. I wasn’t stupid enough to try, knowing full well that it would likely make enough of a racket to draw attention to me, but that knowledge didn’t get rid of the desire. I needed security.

The footsteps stopped just on the other side of the amalgamation I was behind. I tensed, my breath hitching.

They know I’m here. I need to get the first blow in, run while they’re distracted. There’s no chance I’d win in a one-on-one fight, not in this condition. Evade, escape, do my best to get out of here and avoid notice.

I heard breaths let out, on the other side of the barrier. I heard creaking metal, shuddering plates, the tension of strength acting against itself. I smelled rot, my nose wrinkling as I waited for the inevitable to show its face and make a play for my life. The whispers were almost growing fainter by the second, an out-of-place, jovial melody underpinning their decline. I would’ve laughed at the ridiculousness of it, if I weren’t terrified for my life.

We were born in the valley of the dead and wicked, that our father’s father found, and it’s where we laid him down.

A crash.

I pivoted backwards, my right arm coming up to block my face. My heart skipped a beat, making up for its lapse by thundering thrice as wildly, the drums of my pulse beating behind my ears. My left arm hoisted the object. It swung freely through the air, somehow managing to avoid clipping anything as it came around to stand between myself and the enemy.

Except, there was no enemy. The amalgamation was still there, still as tortured as it’d been when I’d come in, not having moved a fraction of an inch, as far as I could tell.

There was a lull for a moment, the sound of an intake of breath, a mutter that sounded something like, “Need replacements.”

The next portion of the song played out in the quiet, so clearly I almost believed it was audible. I hoped with all I had that it wasn’t.

We were born in the shadow of the crimes of our fathers. Blood was our inheritance. No, we did not ask for this.

The footsteps started up again, growing fainter as the single line of the chorus was sung, its lyrics ill-fitting to the situation. They crossed the threshold of the door out of the room, then started inching away, slowly disappearing from my hearing. They didn’t return after a few seconds’ wait, the stillness my uneasy companion as I listened for the clatter of the other shoe dropping.

The next verse started up, and I worked to smother it. It shrank from my attention easily, fading into the background, allowing me easy focus. It was far preferable to whatever those whispers had been.

I waited ten seconds, then thirty. A minute, then ten. Time crawled along like an inattentive mollusc as I stayed crouched, my legs beginning to ache again from the awkward position. The clangs sounded in their rhythm, the arcane tongue of cogs and gears grinding in unison reaching me through the quiet. Through it all, the song in my mind played on, purging the whispers and clearing my mind one cheer-stained note at a time, the influence of whatever had been obstructing my thoughts before almost entirely absent.

Eventually, my resolve crumbled. I can’t just sit here forever. I’ll go mad. Another thought strolled through in the time it took me to inhale. Maybe I already am. Ethereal whispers weren’t things people normally heard playing in their minds. True, that was gone now, but I wasn’t sure if the melody that’d supplanted them was any better, psychologically. Were you any less mad if a song you’d never heard before chased the hisses out of your grey matter? That sounded like exchanging one insanity for another.

Then again, at least one seemed less detrimental. I’d take the sound of music over voices that drowned out my thoughts until I became an inert mass on an overfilled junkyard floor. The image wasn’t one I wanted to contemplate.

I shook my head, shelved those thoughts.

That’s not the most pressing matter right now. I can worry about all that later, provided I live long enough for mental changes to become a concern.

I looked at the item in my grasp for the first time as I got up, preparing to round the amalgamation and see what’d been dropped off.

I was confused for a moment, then for several moments after that. It was out of place in this factory, an object of surprising mundanity sitting amongst all the armaments.

I was holding a guitar. I’d never held one before, but I wasn’t so stupid I couldn’t recognize its shape. I’m sure most five-year-olds knew what a guitar looked like, at the very least.

I was grasping the neck with my fingers laid over its strings. The headstock was a triangle of varnished and treated wood, shimmering brown fibers catching the light in a manner most pleasing, no small feat in this dead place.

The neck was black, reflective frets running perpendicular to its length. The strings were metal, silver twine wrapped around itself like the keratin in hair enlarged to naked visibility.

The body was odd, on an otherwise normal instrument. Red, crescent moons fanning out above and below the bridge and tailpiece, tapering down to join in the center. It resembled a battleaxe, edges sharp as knives and just as foreboding, speakers built into the middle of each blade, curving with their edges. It didn’t have a soundhole.

Presumably that was a workable design for a guitar, but not one I was familiar with. Its shape seemed unwieldy.

I eyed it warily, as if it were a cobra weighing up the merits of committing to an attack. The song in my mind calmed to another close, the instruments dying down before they started up again, the lyrics looping back to the first verse.

Is the music coming from this thing? I wondered. It only started up when I touched it.

If so, this thing had direct access to my head. That brought up some concerns. I knew those whispers had come from the thing in the room with me, before. I would almost be willing to bet my life on that fact. They seemed to be a constant backing track for this place, as far as I could tell, but when it had neared they’d come to the fore, shunting my own thoughts further to the back of the pack. Some kind of Master influence, as far as I could determine, and not one I ever wanted to suffer again. It distressed me, not being in control of my own brain. It was about the only control I felt I had, nowadays.

The guitar had stopped that. I didn’t know how; some kind of preventive Tinker function, maybe, or perhaps it was an object imbued with some exotic power-cancelling ability by another parahuman with that specific ability. Whatever it was, the song it had on loop in my mind was preventing the Master ability from affecting me. Aside from how odd it was to have thoughts in my head that I knew weren’t my own, it didn’t seem to be doing anything else.

Key word being seem.

I weighed up the pros and cons of keeping the guitar. At least as a force multiplier, it was useful. I needed the reach and extra mass it would afford me in a fight, should it come down to that. If it was doing something more to me, it was currently worlds better than the slowing of my mental processes I’d been going through before. If that same parahuman attempted to subvert me later, it could have a possible utility as a mental safeguard, at least to that one specific manipulation.

That made the decision easier. I’d take all the safety I could get. Consequences would have to wait until I was able to worry about them.

In the end, I took it with me. I needed it more than I needed to worry about maybes and what-ifs. If it was doing something to my head, maybe I’d live long enough to worry about it. Maybe, by that point, I wouldn’t be able to.

I shifted my attention back to the task at hand, edging around the barrier I’d hidden behind, straining to see what was there without putting myself in harm’s way.

I hoped with all I had that it wasn’t something dangerous. If I was fortunate, it would be benign. If Lady Luck decided I was an attractive enough prospect to keep alive, it would even be helpful.

I moved enough to see the door once more. The newly dumped objects came into view, and any thoughts of my luck improving were abandoned.

There were several suits of armor laying on the floor, sections malformed, smashed, melted. One had a hole through its chest, larger than the helmet. Another was missing an entire half of its lower section, the left side sheared away, the remaining pieces reduced to blue tinsel. I could even see one that’d been twisted completely out of shape, as if it was a play dough model that’d been manhandled by an overly enthusiastic two-year-old

One thing they had in common was rust and degradation, their age showing through the chipped paint and mangled livery. None of them were moving. All of them were occupied.

There were bones inside the suits, in varying states of disrepair. Some were so close to powder that any difference was purely academic, others taken apart in ways that implied horrific things for the people to whom they used to belong. There were insects gathered around the joints of one, though they were lethargic when they weren’t simply dead. Everything was dry, not a hint of moisture clinging to any of the skeletal remains.

They smelled awful despite their dehydration, even from where I was standing. I had to fight to keep my gorge down. I began thinking at double time, panic lending my thoughts speed in exchange for reduced clarity.

They’re dead. Someone killed them. I might be next.

They looked old as dirt, but the smell suggested something more recent. If this kind of thing was still happening, I needed to get out of here. The hole in the breastplate strongly suggested a parahuman willing to kill, confirmed that there was at least one killer here. I didn’t want to die, not like that.

My grip tightened on the guitar’s neck.

I needed to find the nearest exit and leave, as soon as possible. Maybe a map to go along with it, if this place was far from home. Should I be able to find someone willing to help me, that would be even better.

The bottom line was that I couldn’t remain here. Getting out had always been the plan, of course, but now the risks of not doing so were apparent, laying on the floor before me, bones picked clean, flesh stripped in its entirety. I could only hope this was the distant aftermath, and not what they’d been forced to suffer through.

I could only hope the same wouldn’t happen to me.

I walked away from the remains, my eyes trained firmly on the door. I didn’t want to look at them any more than was strictly necessary. Ghoulish though they were, I wouldn’t find answers to any of my most important questions staring at them, just the urge to vomit from the smell.

I listened intently as I approached the doorframe, on the lookout for anything that didn’t mesh with the sounds of industrial machinery and ambient rumbling. I didn’t manage to hear anything before I got to the door. That fact failed to halt the churning restlessness in my gut.

I poked my head out, looking down both sides of the corridor.

My heart stopped.

There was someone there, off to my right, no more than a half dozen yards away. She was watching me.

She just stood there, brows furrowed in an expression of malice. Her skin was a few shades darker than mine, a healthy tan to match her chestnut hair. Her clothing wasn’t much more appropriate than what I had on, a faded, ripped pair of pyjama pants and a shirt with bedroom slippers. Her ensemble might’ve been blue, once upon a time, but it’d since faded to a dull grey, splattered with stripes of black and brown. She was slightly shorter than me, but her face was a little older. Late teens, maybe, or early adulthood.

None of that was what had shocked me. I was alarmed at finding someone else here, given they could call for others, but that fact alone wouldn’t bring me to a stop. It was the discrepancy about her, the thing that didn’t fit, that had me staring when I could’ve been running, should’ve been running.

She’s a parahuman. There’s no mistaking that.

Her head was mangled by lines of razor wire. Strips disappeared under her skin in sections, some boring into the flesh of her cheeks, others vanishing beneath the bone, all undulating slowly to a beat I couldn’t hear. Her clothes moved at the behest of something beneath, doubtless more of the same, the shapes snakelike in motion and profile.

Her eyes flicked to the guitar I was holding, and a section unwound from her forehead, ringing her skull in a macabre parody of a tiara.

The wire coiled around itself, the point it produced weaving from side to side in a manner reminiscent of a cobra. It didn’t have eyes, but I got the impression it was staring at me, analyzing what it saw.

The girl opened her mouth, and I saw more wire in there, among her teeth, in her gums, through her tongue. It moved as she did, a work of twisted, painful dentistry.

Definitely a parahuman. Not one I want to be anywhere near.

I turned, hoping I could outrun her. The wire that bit into my right arm in the next moment stopped that thought before it could be anything more than a half-realized desire. It dug into my skin, drawing red lines that trickled down. I was too surprised to register the pain, too full of adrenaline to acknowledge my broken finger, even as it was mangled further.

I fell, landing on my bottom, my arm extended towards her, still held in the wire. She approached me, crossing the small distance between us to tower over me. Her expression was contemptuous, malevolent. She looked at the guitar again, then back to me. Her gaze turned, if possible, even darker than it was already.

“I’m going to ask you a question, and I expect a very good answer.” Her accent was some flavour of British. Distantly, that surprised me. Part of my mind wondered if I was even further out than I’d anticipated. The other parts had mostly shut down, coming face to face with someone who could likely kill me easily without lifting a finger.

She leaned in, and I tried to shift backwards, even as her wire kept me in place. The steel in her mouth rattled dangerously when next she opened it, just before she spoke. “What were you thinking, coming to our section?”

 

Spoiler: Note

I was ready to put this thing up almost a week ago. I started worrying it wasn't good enough, so I kept it for a time longer, making adjustments all the while. It's probably far too long thanks to its ballooning length, but I'm not sure precisely how I'd correct that, given that the whole thing reads weaker to me when I get rid of anything that's currently there. Brevity is definitely one of my weaknesses.

Also, thanks for the comments and reactions. Sorry for not replying to any. I'm not exaggerating when I say that it takes me a few minutes to build up the courage to even look at what's been said in the places I've posted this thing, and that's after two weeks of silence. I'm not making excuses, because I know I should've been quicker with everything, just explaining. I'll try to get better at that. It's why I'm posting this thing in the first place.

Also also, I forgot that this place doesn't have a summary thing at the top. Sorry about that. I'll post one of those here and in the first post, from another forum, where I made the same mistake twice despite the existence of those summary posts.

The gist of it is this: Taylor finds herself somewhere new, somewhere she's never heard of and doesn't recognize in the least. Through networking with other people under shared adversity, learning the rules of this place and the changes they force her to undergo, refining her newfound powers of magic and music, and fighting off threats she is in no way equipped to face, she'll find her way home.

Once she gets back, home may not be ready for her.

A very important note: this isn't a crossover, because I neglected to include that detail and quite a few people rather understandably started getting confused, for very different reasons than they should've been. Taylor isn't in some toned-down, Earth-Bet-localized section of the Warp, or the Mansus, or the Nevernever. You may see inspiration from some of those and others, the Mansus especially, and I suppose a case could be made for how this whole adventure she's on could conceivably exist in a version of that universe with a different set of Histories, but I'm not directly adapting any of them.

This is me messing around with a few ideas I've scrapped for something I've been working on. I'm just having fun with the stuff I'll never use elsewhere.

Now, obviously it's a Worm fic, albeit pretty atypical, so I'm not divorcing from the main universe with Taylor as some stand-in for an SI in disguise (hopefully, at least. It remains to be seen whether I can actually write her, once the action and talking start). It's just going to take a while to get back to Bet, since I wanted to properly justify the changes Taylor will undergo before she gets back. Probably a stupid idea, but the context for the differences in personality will be pretty important later on, because they will be rather prominent. Think of it as two distinct parts: the story of how she survives away from home and claws her way back, then her story once she returns to Earth Bet. I'll get back to semi-familiar territory eventually, but it won't be anywhere near the beginning. Just a heads-up, if that doesn't interest you.

Also, there'll be songs popping up occasionally. Some, or most, I'm not sure, probably won't have existed in 2011. Those are just the songs I've decided to use for the story. This whole thing actually started because I wanted to give her music-based powers, and I couldn't figure out how to impart all the features I wanted without making her part of some ten-person-plus cluster trigger event. Contrived, so I turned to something even more contrived to fix it, as is my style.

Here's the song that's referenced later in the chapter, if you're curious.

The question took a while to register, my head feeling light. I must’ve taken a little too long to process it, because the wire tightened around my arm, slicing just a little deeper, the blood trickling just that little bit faster. I could’ve sworn the thing hissed at me as it dug in. If I weren’t already on the ground, I would’ve fallen to my knees from the feeling of my flesh being ground away in ragged strips, little by little. As it was, I was barely able to hear my squeal over the pain, barely able to see anything through the teary-eyed mist that covered everything, reducing my surroundings to a blur even with my glasses on.

Did I go to bed with them? I couldn’t remember. Strange, what I fixated on.

“Well? I’m waiting.” Despite her bared teeth, something that could charitably be called a smile, there was little amusement in her tone. I wished I could’ve seen that as a positive thing, but I didn’t find any of this desirable.

I tried to think of something I could give as an answer, with so little understanding of the situation, but it became more difficult the longer I delayed. The wire around my arm was a constant reminder of my predicament. It undulated slightly, like a living thing, like some kind of hell-snake purpose-built for torture, ratcheting the suffering up a little more every second, robbing me of a little more of my conscious mind in fragments as it retreated into itself to internalize the agony.

I shook my head, bit the index finger of my other hand until I tasted blood, trying my hardest to keep hold of the majority of my awareness.

She’s just looking for an excuse to hurt you further, Taylor. She’s just a bully. Don’t give her that excuse.

I continued to bite down, doing my best to draw on the feelings I felt every weekday, the ones that followed me into the weekend, the ones that had stayed over summer vacation, that had hounded me throughout the winter break, that had been present ever since I got back from that summer camp. They usually came together to create a cocktail, not of hope, not even close, but of quiet determination to just keep going, to see this through, even with life weighing down on me from every side, even when I had no possible recourse, even when the people around me didn’t care or remained oblivious.

This, too, shall pass, as the saying went. I lived my life by that motto, even if I didn’t mean to, held on until the storm blew over and the rock I clung to could be a comfort for a few minutes, until the rain started up again. I held these feelings tight everyday, refusing to let them go. They were the motivation I used to remain impassive, to refuse reaction at school, and now here.

Well, them and a simple, depressing truth: no matter how bad you think things are now, they can always get worse. Everyday was a conscious effort to stop the situation from escalating, to keep my tormentors from wanting to hurt me any more than they already did. I just needed to do the same here, give her the answers she was looking for, and hope she didn’t rip several new orifices into me for the fun of it.

The problem, of course, was the one I’d been battling for the past several hours: I had no context. I had no idea of anything that’d happened since the moment I’d woken up on that wall. I couldn’t fool her, couldn’t conceal information, couldn’t hide anything to ingratiate myself to her, because I didn’t know which parts would be best to hide. Everything looked equally screwed-up, from my perspective.

I could only give what I knew, which was a pathetically small amount, and was liable to piss her off if she decided I wasn’t telling her enough.

“I’m…” I had to stop, gasping when a wave of pain rolled through my arm, the wire having touched something it really shouldn’t have. When I started again, blinking the tears out of my eyes, my voice was shaky, barely coherent. “I’m l-lost. I’m not fr-from here.”

She rolled her eyes. “Right, and I’m a total idiot. Cole or Vesh or whoever would just let you walk out.” Despite her obvious irritation, the wire simply continued lazily undulating, not tightening as I expected. I was unbelievably grateful for that, even as I anticipated it changing at any moment.

“I’m n-not lying!” I insisted, hating how pathetic I sounded, stuttering from agony and fear. “I j-just got here through a h-hole in the wall. You’re the first—” I cut off as the wire flexed, suppressing the urge to vomit.

“See, maybe you could’ve fooled me if you’d given me something less asinine. That, though, was the stupidest thing you could’ve said.” She crouched, lowering herself until our faces were barely a handspan apart. I tried to retreat, but I found no slack in her steel.

I could smell the iron in her breath. I could see my reflection in her brown eyes, hair dishevelled, skin blood-stained where I’d wiped my face with my hands, wet with perspiration where it wasn’t red. This close, I could hear the clack of the blades in her wires as the serrated edges dragged over her teeth and through her flesh, like worms through soil.

“Nobody ever comes through those gashes. It’s a one-way journey. If you got in from there, I’d be talking to a corpse right now, if that, and I’m not seeing much rot. So, I’ll ask something a bit more pointed, and it would be in your best interest to answer truthfully this time: who sent you? I need a name. Your section leader, specifically, so we know who to kill in your place.”

I inhaled in fits, having narrowly missed disgorging the contents of my stomach, though that was still a very real and present danger. I was feeling totally off-kilter. I couldn’t tell if the steadily lowering temperature was real, or if it was all in my head. I didn’t know if it mattered.

‘So we know who to kill in your place.’ She’s going to kill me. I don’t have any names to give.

I hadn’t come this far just to die. The stutter largely died away as my priorities shifted to ensuring my survival from moment to moment. “I’m telling the truth! I don’t know anyone here. You’re the f-first person I’ve seen since I showed up. Look at my hands!” I clumsily shifted the guitar to the crook of my elbow, showing her my bloodied, raw palm, the skin of my fingertips long since carved away by the rough concrete and jagged edges of the wall. “They’re still cut up from climbing. I was out there f-for hours, and I only managed to get in here because I got lucky enough to find a hole. I was halfway to jumping off seconds before that.”

“And I told you that that’s not possible. I’ve been here for years, and not one person’s come back once we lose sight of them.” Any humour she may have had was gone, her tone grim. “We’ve tried hundreds of times, in hundreds of configurations, with hundreds of failures to show for it. If that was a way out, believe me, we would’ve used it already.”

I ignored her comments about looking for an exit. I didn’t like the implications. “You’re twisting my words. I’m not s-saying it’s a way out. I’m saying that’s how I came in. I was asleep seconds before I got here, in bed, at home.”

She didn’t say anything for several seconds. Even her tendrils were almost completely still, their movements small and lethargic. “You came up a chute, but not ours. There’s no other way in here. There’s nothing out there — we know that. You’re either an idiot or a liar, thinking I’d believe what you’ve given me. I’m leaning towards a combination of both, heavy on the former. So, give me a name, any name, and I’ll let you go. Stall again, and I’ll start cutting things off until I can’t tell the screams from the answers.”

I stilled, my breathing rocking me, but little else in the way of a reaction. She’s not listening to me. I’m not getting out of this intact.

I tried to come up with anything I could do, say, even think that would have a better outcome than the worst possible one. I drew a blank.

I need a name. Even if it’s just to stall, I need at least one.

An idea came to me, a suicidally stupid one, and I almost dismissed it out of hand, because it wouldn’t do much to help me in this moment. Then I remembered my predicament, and decided the possibility of failure was better than not trying anything. At least if I died because of a botched attempt at trickery, I wouldn’t have died without doing something. Most likely, I was dead either way.

My voice was unusually steady when I spoke. I was too scared to quake. My muscles were coiled like springs. My body was still, steadier than it was in everyday life. It needed to be, should the worst come about, even though it wouldn’t have done any good.

“Alright. You want a name?”

She nodded. “I would love one.”

I started talking, haltingly rambling my way through sentences to keep the panic at bay, the idea tumbling from my lips as it took form in my head. “F-fine. How about we do this: I give you th-three names at a time, and we’ll see if you know them. I’m… unfamiliar with the people h-here and I don’t know who you’d recognize, so I’m thinking scattershot’s best. This way, if we find a name you kn-know, you’ll be able to tell your people who sent me. I’ll even give you e-extra information on them, whatever I can recall, if you kn-know their names.”

“And what if I decide I don’t like your suggestion?”

I did my best to shrug with only one shoulder free, to affect an air lacking in fear despite my mind screaming at me to be anywhere else. “You could kill me, but you’ve been th-threatening to do that and more. It’s not like you can make me any deader than dead.” I seriously hoped I hadn’t come across as too flippant.

She looked away, weighing up her options for a moment. The blood running down my arm had built into spikes, hardening into conic, saw-toothed scabs that grew off my skin like stalactites. Fresh blood poured out all the time, the wounds not clotting in part due to their size, in part due to their constant agitation.

“Okay,” she said eventually, smiling slightly, a hint of cheer coming back. “I’ll play along.”

I nodded jerkily. “Alright. Here’s the f-first three: Piggot, Christener, Griffin.” The last names of our local PRT director, Brockton Bay’s mayor, and the former president who’d founded the PRT and Protectorate as US peacekeeping organizations, respectively.

She shook her head, though she seemed satisfied that I was finally giving her something, even if it wasn’t usable. “Don’t recognize them.”

Probably not Brockton Bay, then. Let’s try a little further. “Next th-three, then. Legend, Alexandria, Eidolon.”

She frowned. “Did one of your section mates actually pick ‘Legend’ as a name? Isn’t that a smidge arrogant?” I didn’t say anything in reply, whether from the terms of our deal or a growing fear, I wasn’t sure. She seemed confused for a second, then huffed in amusement as her mistake dawned on her. “Fair enough. Go on.”

I nodded, an icy seed growing at the base of my gut. I needed more clarification to confirm it. “Leviathan, Behemoth, Ziz.”

She looked up, frowning. “Do I know a Ziz? I feel like that’s close to something. Zez? Zin? Zule?” She shook her head. “Nah, thought maybe, but I guess not. It’ll come to me later, always does. Keep going.”

I wanted to shake my head, to deny what I was hearing. She’s just messing with you. But I didn’t feel it. “Okay. America, Europe, Earth.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know many people.” There was a smile playing on her lips, but I couldn’t read its intent.

That seemed to me like confirmation. No, more than that. A conviction. Her denial shifted my reality ever so slightly, despite the casualness with which she spoke. Every word she said provided a little more sustenance to the seed, setting it ever closer to its germination.

My answer was distracted, empty, something I said only because my mind was too occupied to filter my words. “I don’t. I seem to be pretty unpopular.”

“Could’ve fooled me. I don’t know any of these names. I’m guessing your section relegates the newbies to dealing with the grunts and toughs, rather than anyone of import.”

I nodded absently, the seed having bloomed into a deep, foreboding root of dread that grew out through my nerves, burrowing through my spine. I didn’t reply to her side of the conversation, simply saying, “You don’t know Earth, do you? You don’t recognize the name.”

She rolled her eyes, the wires in my arm increasing the pace of her movements at her irritation. Her reply was sarcastic in the extreme “Oh no, you caught me. I was trying so hard to hide that.” Her insincere tone dropped off. “No, I don’t know who Earth is. So, next three, I guess.”

I shook my head slowly, my gaze resting on the floor. I couldn’t catch the lie. She sounded completely honest, in that single statement.

No, I don’t know who Earth is.

I spoke, a stream of consciousness in miniature that all came back to one point. “It’s not just that. You don’t know who Alexandria is. You don’t know America. And you admit that you didn’t recognize the name ‘Earth,’ which is just amazing.” Something that might’ve been a giggle crawled up my throat, except there was no humour in it. It was realization. I’d stepped right off a ledge, somehow, through no decision of my own, and I didn’t have anything that could stop the freefall besides the ground far below.

If this means what I’m afraid it means, I’m a long way from home. Further, maybe, if the embargoes and treaties are upheld as absolutely as they claim. Probably, nobody even knows I left yet. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know where to look. And, if they somehow pinpointed my location against all odds, they wouldn’t come looking for me.

I hope I’m wrong. I’d even pray to be wrong, if I thought anyone would hear me.

Oblivious to my thoughts, she frowned, her wires tightening around my arm once again. “Yes, I think we’ve established that. Let’s get back to it.”

I ignored her. It was getting easier. It was too much, too fast, not enough time to process. I talked through each of the points as I arrived at them, my brain working in concert with my mouth. “I’m going to die in a place where nobody knows who I am, where weapons that definitely aren’t normal are produced en masse for a purpose I don’t know, where the one person I’ve met has a metaphorical gun to my head for information I don’t hold, and doesn’t know what Earth is. Earth, my own bloody planet.” I’d meant to swear there, but the words weren’t coming very easily. “The implications aren’t good no matter how I look at them. Dad won’t ever know what happened to me, most likely. It’ll kill him.”

More tightening of the wire. More pain. More vocalizations of annoyance as the metaphorical screws dug in a little deeper, as she said something to me that I didn’t quite catch. My mind wasn’t here right now, though I couldn’t have told you where, precisely, it was. The thoughts in my head were running together too quickly, my fatigue too great for them to stick anywhere that I could hear them clearly. They were bleeding into each other, beginning to sound slightly like they had on that wall.

I couldn’t do that again. Not so soon, not right after I’d escaped and felt a little like things might get marginally better. My time on that wall was worse than anything I’d ever felt in my short life. I felt selfish and awful to even think it, but, in the moment, everything I’d been feeling had hurt worse than Mom’s death. Worse than the phone call we got, when they had to tell Dad about the body they’d found, worse than the period of mourning after. I’d never felt so abjectly hopeless, like the only thing I could do, the only course of action available to me, was to survive, to keep climbing even as I fell apart little by little, in a more visceral way than mourning. I couldn’t do that again.

And, yet, here I was, my head back on the wall all over again, less than a day after I’d escaped that hell. Here I was, falling into those same patterns of thinking, barely keeping my wits about me through the agony, except now I wouldn’t even survive the outcome. All that work, for this.

I don’t have what she wants. I’m dead. I didn’t panic. I didn’t. Instead, I started feeling frustrated. That, no matter how I look at it, was the oddest part. I knew I was dead, according to her stipulations. I couldn’t make myself useful, and she’d made it plainly obvious that she would kill me if she didn’t like my answers. Instead, my thoughts gained a kind of clarity, a deer laying injured before a lion, not struggling, yet wanting to survive even as its death looms. It knows its time is up. It’s just waiting.

I’m going to die in this factory, aren’t I?

Probably. Unless you can see some options.

None. Just the guitar. I might get one good swing in, but that won’t do much good in my state. I’ll only make her angry, and then this’ll hurt more.

Then yeah, you’re going to die.

I know. I climbed that bloody wall for nothing.

Maybe it was just the fact that I didn’t have much to worry about anymore. It would probably hurt before the end, but I’d be too deceased to care.

I started trying to stand up, struggling my way to a crouch. The pain was still there, but it didn’t seem to be happening to me, as if I were feeling it in a dream, as if I were watching someone else in this situation and imagining myself in their place, trying to empathize my way to hurting. The songs played softly in the background, a quiet chorus to back my actions.

Down they fell like the children of Eden. Down they fell like the tower, as the land relinquished her ghost.

None of this felt real. I really was putting in effort to make it plain to myself, to come to terms with the fact that there wasn’t an easy escape or simple explanation for where I found myself, for the conversation I was having. I tried my hardest to convince myself that it wasn’t all just some twisted joke. It was harder than it should’ve been.

I looked at my arm, at the streaks of blood still running down, at her wires being primed to take me apart piece by piece. I wondered how long I’d been bleeding. Throughout the whole conversation, certainly, but I didn’t know how long we’d been talking. I hadn’t arrived with a watch.

She started slicing in earnest, yet another attempt at intimidation, making good on a promise of violence, but my sentences ran over the sensations even as the wires started grinding into bone, grounding me enough to force each syllable out as it arrived. I grit my teeth, my words coming out more as snarls than speech. From anger or pain or some kind of distraught combination of the two, I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying. I just had to produce words, make myself heard. That was the most important thing right now.

“You know what’s just so great about all this?” I asked. My words caused her to hesitate, the pressure relieved somewhat as she waited for what I had to say, perhaps in the belief that I’d have something useful for her. “I held onto the v-vain hope throughout the past year and a bit, the past two and change since Mom died, that m-maybe things would get better once it was all over, that without Emma and her s-sycophants to hound me I’d finally be able to make something of myself. That I’d go off to university, or a local c-community college, more likely, and learn how to be okay again.”

I leaned my weight onto the guitar, shuffling to a crouch as I kept talking. I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was saying, just that I was too tired and out of it to care much about the consequences. “Now, I guess that’s not in the cards. I always th-thought it’d be a random mugging, or cape collateral damage, or maybe an Endbringer attack just when th-things were starting to look up. Something truly pathetic, so other people could pass it off as unimportant, a l-life lived as a s-statistic, same as it’s always been. Maybe even a car crash, if we’re going for something really cruel.”

I wasn’t paying attention to her, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t trying to grind into me anymore. The wires didn’t hurt as much. Either she was listening, or I’d fooled myself into thinking she was. Nerve damage, maybe. I guess there was only so much punishment they could take before they stopped working.

“And, what really sells this for me is how s-stupid my death’s going to be. You’re going to kill me because you think I’m lying, even though every single thing I’ve said has been the t-truth. So, for the benefit of making sure the truth sticks around after I’m gone, I’ll repeat what I’ve been saying since you f-first started demanding answers I couldn’t give.”

I looked up at her face then. I at least wanted her to look me in the eyes before she gutted me, or ripped my throat out, or whatever else she was planning to do to me in the end. Her expression was more unsure than I thought it should’ve been, for her conviction earlier. Not that it mattered much.

“I’ve only been here for less than an hour since I regained consciousness. Before that, I scaled the wall outside for hours, maybe more, tore up my hands and feet. My muscles still feel like I took a soak in napalm. You’re the first person I’ve met here. I don’t know any of the people from any of the other sections or gangs or militias or organizations or whatever they are, because I haven’t been anywhere near them. I don’t even know why I’m here, just that I arrived immediately after waking up, clinging to the wall. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. You want more? So do I.”

I stayed there, crouched, staring at her. I’d said my piece. I wished my final words could’ve been more… memorable, I guess. They didn’t feel special, the way I’d said them. They didn’t feel like anything at all. The song played to completion in the background, its words soft and haunting. It seemed to be communicating the certainty of what I felt right then. It wasn’t comforting, but it was something to hold onto, so I did.

It was a pale white horse with a crooked smile, and I knew it was my time.

It was the raging storm of a foreign war, and a face I’d seen before.

We were frozen that way, the passage of time marked only by the steady drip of blood down my arm, the only signs of life the occasional blink from either of us, the slow waves moving along her razor wire, the almost silent rasp of our breathing echoing through the hallway. She wore a frown, but I couldn’t find any anger in it. If anything, it was searching, doubtful, confused. I didn’t know what to make of it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to try.

She gave in first, her confusion plain. “We are still talking about the factory, right? Because I don’t recognize any of these names either, and the sentiment’s changed.”

“No. You’re still talking about the factory. I’m talking about home, which is where I was just a few hours ago. Maybe. Everything’s perpetual twilight outside and I don’t have a watch on me, so I couldn’t tell.”

“You can’t tell the time?” This, more than anything, seemed to pique her curiosity. I couldn’t fathom why.

“No, I can’t tell the time. I need something to do that for me.”

She fell silent again. The doubt had grown, become prominent to overtake anything else I might’ve seen her feeling. She licked her lips in thought, a wire trailing behind her tongue before both disappeared back into her mouth.

When next she spoke, her tone was completely different, the edge gone. “You’re serious. You’re not lying to me.” They weren’t questions.

I didn’t feel any relief. I should have, with those words, but I just felt weary and frustrated from the ordeal, confused at the sudden arrival at an opaque conclusion, taking me at my word. It felt too easy. That didn’t mean that I would reject it, though. I nodded.

She stared for a moment more, then inhaled deeply, sighed. She placed a hand over her eyes, just holding them closed. She suddenly seemed rather tired. Her wires wound around my arm, slicing it even further into ribbons of detached flesh.

Or, that should have been the case. Instead, where the wires sliced across lacerations they’d already cut deeply into my skin and meager fat, my tissues knitted themselves back together. Ribbons of exposed muscle and bone were closed over, deposition of material into a canyon. Blood ran out of my wounds even faster, rivulets tracking across my skin in excess of what I should’ve been capable of producing, staining my clothing, running onto the ground in quantities that would’ve been worrying in another context, still were in this one.

I was suddenly far less secure in this situation, with how it’d taken such a swift turn away from what I’d expected. I didn’t know how to react, so I didn’t. I knew of Panacea’s healing, that others were capable, but I’d never experienced it firsthand, much less from someone who’d been attacking me only seconds before.

Her wires retracted back into her body, sinking below the skin in her stomach, chest and arms, some bits staying behind to stick around and swim through her flesh, tissue parting before their advance as it closed up behind, miniature sea monsters in an ocean of meat. Her expression, when she removed her hand from her face to look at me, was pensive. She remained silent.

I did too. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but this was unexpected and more than a little frightening. I looked down and wiggled my fingers. They were slightly stiff, but otherwise fine. My broken finger was whole again, my arm back to pristine condition. There were no lingering marks, no discolouration, not even a hint of a scar left. It felt oddly empty, like there should’ve been something left behind to mark the experience, for all the pain I had to go through.

She broke the silence. “I may have misjudged the situation, in my haste.” I looked up to see her watching me. It was cryptic. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “If I did, I’m sorry. What you’re saying is unprecedented, as far as what I know, but I suppose rules are made to be broken. For that tenuous reason, and that reason alone, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

She idly drummed the fingers of her right hand against her hip. “There are conditions to that, though. You’ll be coming with me, under my supervision. If you so much as twitch in a way I don’t like, I’ll cut your throat wide open.” She pointed to my guitar. “Touch that to do anything other than hold it, and I will slice you into segments so fine they’ll still be finding new pieces a century from now. Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“Good. You can walk, right?”

Another nod.

“Alright. We’ll proceed down this hallway.” She pointed in the direction I’d been walking before I took a trip to the dump. “Follow close behind me, don’t lose sight of me, don’t look any Pseuds in the eye, and if I run, you run. I doubt we’ll encounter anything we don’t want to see as we go, but there’s always a chance, so be on your guard. And, again,” she said, turning back to me, “don’t touch that guitar except to carry it. I wasn’t joking about what I said. I’ll make your death as torturous as I can if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

I nodded a third time.

“Good. I’ll be gracious and warn you not to run before we get going. I’ve extended a courtesy to you. Spurn me, and you will not live long enough to appreciate the consequences.”

Seemingly satisfied, she started down the tunnel, then stopped almost immediately, only a foot or so from her previous position. She turned back to me, muttering, “Can’t believe I almost forgot the most important thing.” She paused, sorting through her words. “Alright. If you plan to live past the end of this week, this is vital to remember. Dying by blunt force trauma, corruption, rapid aging, parasitism, blades, whatever your fancy, it’s all here. But there’s one thing you absolutely must hold as near to yourself as possible, as closely as your own self-awareness, if you can.”

She paused again. I felt it was for effect this time. “Don’t tell me or anyone else your name under any circumstances. Don’t say it out loud, even in private. Don’t whisper it, don’t write it down, don’t so much as allude to it. Don’t even think about it, if you can avoid that. If anyone finds out what it is, through any means, they have a guillotine hanging over your head that they can drop whenever they like. It’s best to kill them as soon as you can, sooner if possible. You understand?”

I frowned. “Why?”

She sighed, seeming put upon. “I don’t have the patience for it. They’ll explain it at base, provided they believe you. Just know that airing your name here is something you’ll regret for the rest of eternity, in the moments of lucidity that might be afforded to you, so don’t do that. Use a pseudonym — everyone here does. Give some thought to it as we walk.”

She didn’t wait for my reply this time, setting off at a brisk pace down the hall. The thought of trying to run surfaced for a moment, but I tore it up and threw it out before it ever managed to take hold. Her wires, what I’d seen of them, would be more than enough to reach me no matter how far I retreated, and she was in far better shape for running. I would just have to listen to her until I had an opportunity to do otherwise, since she seemed far less likely to kill me right now. Why, I didn’t know, but you wouldn’t catch me complaining about not being dismembered.

I had to scramble to keep up, though I made sure to stay a fair distance from her, more for my peace of mind than any legitimate belief that distance granted safety. I was still wary. I didn’t know what sort of person she was, especially given how suddenly she’d recanted on her decision to harm me after I’d just started coming to terms with my mortality.

Unpredictability made me nervous. I liked knowing where I stood, even if it was unpleasant. Patterns breaking usually portend something worse, and sudden swings to the positive are a warm up for something worse later on down the line. I just had to wait for the other shoe to drop. I couldn’t do much else for now.

I kept my left hand on the neck of the guitar, away from the strings and anything else that would make her twitchy, my right at my side. We walked down the hall, its end a distant spark of hellish light that we always approached, but could never reach.



It took us several hours, through various seemingly random twists and detours that made less sense as we went on. There were times we’d backtrack through sections, only to find that the pathways we encountered were not the ones we’d left behind. Others, collections of surfaces that seemed to operate as barriers until you actually looked at them from a certain angle, the image snapping into stark relief as a hallway or door, a mind-bending exercise that hurt to think about, frustrating me to no end.

As we went on, I noticed that I was seeing snatches of other people in the halls occasionally, rounding corners as they drew level with my line of sight, or entering rooms a split second before I was able to direct my gaze toward them. As we walked, I tried to dismiss them as visual artefacts from the boredom of the uniform hallways, my brain spinning images from discoloured patches and the occasional pile of debris.

I didn’t fully believe that, but I never got a clear look at them. They flitted at the edges of my vision, never in focus. I gave up after a while, finding the exercise to be a waste of time. Besides, Razorgirl — she hadn’t given me a name, so that was her label in my mind — hadn’t reacted to them at all. She obviously had more experience with this place than me. I just had to trust that, if she wasn’t reacting, there wasn’t anything to concern myself with just yet.

Either that, or she didn’t care if I died, so long as she was fine. Probably that, honestly. I couldn’t imagine she was here without some kind of protection against most of the hazards she would find here. Even as a transient, she was probably prepared. If I was following the implications of our conversation correctly, she was something a little more permanent than a transient.

Following her wasn’t easy. I liked trusting her far less than I probably should have. I felt I was justified; she had ripped my arm to tatters of hanging flesh just a short while ago, then started asking questions. It was reasonable to expect that that treatment would lead to some measure of distrust, if not outright hatred. I felt I was doing better than most, in that regard.

I still stayed a respectable distance from her. Just because I needed to follow, didn’t mean I had to do so close enough to make killing me easy.

At what seemed to me like an arbitrary four-way juncture, she stopped, forcing me to halt a short distance behind her. She turned to each of the three possible pathways in turn, pointing at them before dismissing them for the next. Eventually she turned around completely, proceeding back down the way we’d been going. I wasn’t even surprised at this point, just following as she left me behind. It was better than staying behind — based on what I’d seen so far, I doubted I’d ever get out of this maze again.

She drew up next to a seven foot wide concavity in the wall, then turned and disappeared around its corner. I did the same, finding a door before us. It was an immense thing, easily wide enough to fit an oil tanker, and tall enough to rival the length of one, stretching up at least a mile.

I looked back. The passage through which we’d entered was nowhere near wide or tall enough to fit this, and it didn’t widen as it approached the door. I tracked my eyes along one of its sides, finding that it was always close to me from that side, no more than three feet away. If I tracked the same wall back starting from the door, it was several hundred feet away at the minimum, and continued in that fashion until it reached the opening through which we’d entered, its corner far in the distance.

It was confusing in the extreme, but I suppose parahuman-made things often were. I would ask questions later, when the mechanics of this place were my most pressing concern. For now, I needed to focus on finding out about my immediate situation, and a possible solution.

Razorgirl knocked on the door in a rhythm that almost, but not quite, matched up with the shanty-type melody of a song like Drunken Sailor. It rang out in our little recess, a hollow, deep vibration that was almost too low for the ear. The echoes came back to us seconds apart, sounding out from hallways and passages far off, a series of resonant booms that sounded like thunder’s gentler cousin.

The door remained inert for a few moments, immovable as the Earth itself. Then, with slowness comparable to that of the minute hand on a clock, it began to open. An infinitesimal gap appeared, widened. The sound it produced was worse than nails on a chalkboard. It was an orchestra of chalkboards, each being assaulted with everything from screws to steak knives.

My grip on the guitar tightened, my legs tensing in preparation for a quick getaway. Failing that, a confrontation.

Nothing happened. The gap grew to something that could comfortably fit a person after several minutes. Razorgirl slipped through without looking back, one of her wires unfurling from her back to gesture for me to follow.

Despite her backhanded invitation, I hesitated. There probably wasn’t any way out once I was in, even with my condition marginally improved. I deliberated with myself for a moment, unable and unwilling to decide immediately.

Last chance to back out. There’s no guarantee there’s anything but death in there.

There’s no guarantee of life out here, either. I’ve seen evidence of that.

She tried to kill you.

She spared me.

That makes it okay? That stands as evidence that her intentions are suddenly noble, that she won’t turn on you later? That she wasn’t planning to do so from the first moment she ‘relented’? That her group, which she apparently has, won’t do the same if they find you inconvenient?

No, but I don’t have many options. She found me not even an hour after I’d started sneaking around, and now I’m a known quantity to her. If I try to bolt now, how do you think she’ll take it? She took my very existence here as evidence that I’m working for a rival faction. She’s giving me a chance. If I leave now, I’ll cement the lie in her mind, and she’ll just off me next time she sees me, along with whoever she tells about me.

You could hide. You could scurry around like a rat, like you have been for the past year. You could survive. It would be humiliating, but you’re well accustomed to that.

I hated how cruel my internal monologue sounded, but I couldn’t disagree with its tone. I hadn’t done much to warrant respect from anyone in the past year. Not even from myself.

That didn’t mean I agreed with the points raised.

No. There are others. If someone less charitable than her finds me, I likely won’t even have the chance to talk. Hell, depending on their powers, I may not have time to see them. If I can ingratiate myself to them — Not likely, if my track record was any indication — then I may even find some allies.

You don’t know that they wouldn’t want you to do unsavoury things. The Empire assaults minorities for their initiation. ABB kidnaps and enslaves people, kills the rest. Merchants addict people, not by choice. What do you think these people will want you to do to prove loyalty or solidarity, if they’re willing to kill you on the merest suspicion that you’re not one of them?

I sighed as I stepped forward, sidling into a position that would allow the guitar to enter at an easy angle. I’ll confront that if I ever get to it. For now, this is better than dying. I don’t even have any food or water, and I can’t see any signs of either. I won’t last three days even without people trying to kill me. This, in this moment, is my best shot, with the information I have.

I edged through the gap, entirely too aware of how thick the door was, how solidly it had been constructed. If someone decided I needed to die right now, they could just close the thing on me, and I’d be squashed like a bug. Better, they could just mostly close it, enough to squeeze me, break my ribs, drive my breath out, tear into my softer tissues, but not enough to kill me right away. It frightened me, how easy it would be. I fought not to scramble for the other end, squeezing through with the guitar at my side.

Razorgirl was there, watching me, devoid of expression. She merely inclined her head down our current passage, then set off. I took in my surroundings as I followed her, feeling less sure of this path as we continued.

The walls were scrawled with messages that increased as we went on, written in drab tones of brown and dull red, edging over into black. They looked ancient. Each was missing some of its context, but I could guess at the meanings. Even for an outsider looking in, certain things translated rather well into the speech of a concerned Brocktonite.

Pseud over at Forheeve’s Juncture giving me hassles. Price negotiation for removal.

Edgemite infestation at Weapons Fab 3. 7 slabs to clear them out.

Gren, Section Eight, stole my shirt. Three slabs for his head.

Starving. Need assistance for plate shaping. Will share half of slabs received.

Son, Guil, turned. Five slabs to put him down.

I shook my head. There were many more, mixed in with filth and graffiti, and most of them painted a similar picture. Transformation, murder, creatures whose names I didn’t know. I was feeling very lost, even as I tied each back to things I knew existed.

Cape powers, gang action, tinker creations. Nothing too unusual, objectively speaking. Except, here, it seems there’s just more, if it’s displayed so prominently, and there isn’t much effort put into hiding it. Maybe nobody uses masks here. Razorgirl certainly isn’t trying to hide her face.

She rounded a corner, into a room. I followed.

I stopped, again jolted slightly. I was doing better, not completely caught off guard, but it was still a shock to the system to see the sheer size of this place.

The only reason I could tell there was even a ceiling and walls here was due to the sharp lighting differences I saw in the sky, many miles off in the distance, where the surfaces joined at right angles. The lights here were more reasonable in luminosity than they’d been in the conveyor room. I could look up without feeling like I was blinded, at the very least.

That was what I saw above. Looking down, I blinked.

I don’t know what I’d expected to see, but I wasn’t sure it was a lake. The water was murky, slightly brown, an unhealthy colour. I doubted it was potable. The lake started just after a drop off a few feet before me, a plane that covered most of the observable area of the massive room. I couldn’t see its edges, no matter how much I searched. That wasn’t because it was endless, though it certainly felt that way. Rather, it was because of the objects that obscured my view of its borders.

On the lake, there were boats. Many boats. A, to me, unreasonably large number of them, minute from my position. I could only make out their barest details from here, though I could at least gauge their sizes. They ranged from what looked like cruise liners and bigger, to small dinghies that were only barely visible from my position. Some were painted, but only in areas. Grey and silver was the dominant colour scheme, leaving some outlines rather indistinct as the tones of some boats bled into others. I couldn’t make claims with anything approaching certainty, but it didn’t seem like there was any wood in their construction.

There were a few that stood out, hulking beasts that towered over the rest in the distance, oaks that nestled blades of grass in their shadows. They seemed synonymous with skyscrapers back home, dangerously swaying megastructures perched out over the water, reaching into this false sky. I may not have known much about engineering, but I was sure something that tall shouldn’t have remained upright. Either they were larger under the water, or there was land there that was obscured by the vessels crowded around the base.

Everything I saw was floating a distance away, far from the small improvised pier on which we were standing. It made sense to me that they would be so far, with the threat of parahuman invasion looming. The strategy would fall apart in the presence of fliers, but there wasn’t a one size fits all solution to parahumans, just defences that worked better on the whole, and proximity was most definitely something to avoid when dealing with most capes, at least from what I knew.

I was able to see some movement even from here, people reduced to ants by the distance. Well, most of them were ants. Some were large, easily eclipsing the boats around them, rising as giants above their fellows. I couldn’t make out many of their features beyond their size, but that didn’t matter. At least there was confirmation of other parahumans now. It wasn’t a fact that gave me a feeling of safety, quite the opposite, but I was happy to go in forewarned.

I noticed a boat motoring steadily over towards us through the distance. It took several minutes to approach, leaving me to awkwardly stand around, trying not to be obvious about the distance I was giving my current companion. She was humming a jaunty tune, absently looking out over the water, her wires moving in small waves to the melody. I didn’t recognize it.

The boat finally reached us, silently stopping just before it collided with the jagged, broken metal walkway. It was of a decent construction for what I assumed to be an ameteur project, a metal canopy placed over a flat deck to create a small sheltered section, a couch positioned several feet away from the little overhang. Looking at it, I could see blankets under the roof, along with a few toys and other knickknacks. Something like a room, then. This boat looked like it might have been a home, unmanned as it seemed to be at the moment. There was no steering mechanism that I could make out, nor an engine.

Razorgirl hopped on, not seeming even slightly put out by how the deck swayed under her feet as she boarded. She turned to me, extending a hand. I looked at it for a moment, then back at her. She nodded, beckoning with her outstretched arm. The wires threaded through her skin rattled slightly, but didn’t do anything else.

This just keeps getting better. Escape’s no longer about running. I’d have to hijack a boat to get back, and I don’t know how to make it go, assuming I even can.

I breathed in deeply, psyching myself up, then took her hand. The wires retreated from my fingers, snaking up her arm, a fact for which I was most grateful. If she never touched me with those things again, it would be too soon. I boarded slowly, testing the boat’s stability with every move as I inched my way on. It rocked slightly at the addition of my weight, but it didn’t tip over.

Eventually I was more on than off, and took the final step, pushing off the shore to stand fully on the deck. Razorgirl took a moment to make sure I was on correctly, providing an anchor to the boat’s bobbing, before letting go of my hand, moving over to her small alcove. She stopped just before it, sliding her slippers off, setting them next to the tangled sheets. She turned back to me, barefoot, and gestured out to the water, in some vague direction away from the shore.

“Well,” she said, rather suddenly, “I’d hoped to make this a little more dramatic, but the admins and such have all the flash, so I guess I’ll have to do until we reach them.”

Her hard expression didn’t change, not really, but she somehow managed to inject at least some friendliness into her statements all the same. “Welcome to Section Eleven, Bastards of the Deep. We’ve got lots of water here, rather rancid, and lots of people who are slightly less so. Try not to fall in, please. We may be fishing scraps out weeks from now, given how breakable you are. Also, if the reflections start talking, try to read the context. Some are friendly, some not so much. Pick them out, one from the other.”

I was still trying to decide if that was meant to be her idea of a joke when she continued. “And, I suppose it’s not really something to celebrate, but welcome to Kulvek. Try to enjoy it here, for however long you survive.” Her expression darkened, minutely. “It’s all you can do, really. This is now your world and your grave. You, just like everyone else who’s ever fallen through into this place, will never leave. As long as you live, this is your limbo.”

She inclined her head to me slightly, her expression nowhere near solemn enough for what she’d just told me. “If you’re accepted, they’ll bring you in. Since it’s a rather atypical situation, I think I’ll give it a crack until they’ve passed judgement, get an early greeting in to our newest maybe-addition. It’ll be the first time, too, for me at least.”

She gave me a small smile, something I felt was insincere, something that had me feeling extremely awkward, both in light of the massive bombshells that’d been dropped on me in a scant few hours, and the torture she’d heaped on me throughout a significant portion of that. Her next words didn’t do much for my peace of mind, either, despite whatever warmth they might have been intended to hold. Probably not much, given how sardonic they sounded.

“Welcome home, however long you last.”