SPACETRAVEL's Serial Thing

Demetrius had seen stranger dreams than this one. It was only notable because in it, he had the body he was supposed to—little in the way of height, rounded around all the edges and with the small hands and feet he knew. Evenly proportioned everywhere, even more than most people he had ever seen. He was pretty nonplussed about it, as if he had always been that way, at least in here. What did please him was what he was wearing—rather than a random mass of anything that would cover him, a neat, pretty, pretty coat much like one of his father's. Sharp.

“Hey, kid?”

So, he was sitting inside a smallish bubble surrounded on all sides by other wavering ones, all with blurry figures inside who couldn't see him well, either. There was nothing to be afraid of.

“Demetrius London...?”

His name sounded unthreateningly from below, in a voice too vaguely familiar for Demetrius to ever have a chance at identifying. He lay down on the floor of his bubble and squinted as he looked down; the bubbles below distorted his view like great curved lenses. Two bubbles down, someone was lying down and looking up at him. Their face was just a little too blurred to make out, but—

“Hey, Demetrius—I have something to ask you!” The little they could see into each other's bubbles was good enough for this wiry terrier of a person.

Demetrius never refused to a do a favor for a dream. As frightening as they could be sometimes, they were his only chance to look at places outside of his little room. He needed them. “What is it?”

“Look down.”

“I see you.”

“No, wayyy down, past me. Bottom of the river. See all the little people running around down there, the nonliving ones?”

Yes, this could pass as a river. It would explain all the bubbles. Demetrius squinted harder. Yes, he saw them. Dots. “Nonliving...?”

“Secret from someone who's been here a while: down there is where pretty much everybody ends up when they die. I still haven't seen someone make it across the river, but I hear those who do find themselves pretty lonely bloody fast,” laughed the terrier. “I've been watching someone down there, this big dot...a white one, 'cause he's got hair like yours. Dunno if you can see him, but you see the big old hellfish chasing everyone around? My guy is the one running after them instead of away. So he kinda sticks out. Heh; I think he wants to be friends with them. Would you guess he's related to you?”

A smile quivered onto Demetrius's face. “I think you found my dad.”

“Great; I thought so. Just one more question—sorry—“

“Go ahead,” said Demetrius.

“If you ever see him again, could you tell him something for me?”

“What is it?”

“Yes,” said the terrier. Demetrius waited for more, but that was all.

“Yes? And...?”

“Just yes. Tell him I said yes.” The terrier smiled so widely that Demetrius could see it.

“Okay...”

“That's all. Now I've got to wake you up, if you don't mind me doing so,” said Lux II, who then pulled a half-mile wide satellite irradiator out of his back pocket and blasted Demetrius's bubble to smithereens.

Demetrius's eyes flickered open before Lux could take his lips away. Their eyes, real and substitute, were pointing right at each other.

“Hello,” said Demetrius in the softest voice Lux had ever heard, even compared to Demetrius himself though the earpiece. He was the first person not to take notice of Lux's eyes right away.

Lux recoiled. Fifty apologies raced to his mouth to get out and jammed; none made it. Demetrius smiled. “It's okay. That's my way of saying hello, too.”

Not even the air in Lux's lungs made it out of his mouth, because he all of a sudden was choking. On what, he had no clue; he had just kissed Demetrius, not swallowed his hair.

“Are you all right?”

Lux sank on his knees, the corners of his face turning the color of his eyes.

Demetrius reached for him, only just brushing Lux's twitching hair with a fingernail. “Theo?” He looked up at Miyagi, who had been slowly sidling out since Lux's mouth had met Demetrius's eyebrows. “Theo, help—“

Miyagi muttered, “The back switch.”

Demetrius just stared dumbly. He had been asleep when that was installed. In fact, this was the first second he noticed the machine around him. It felt crazy. he wasn't ready to touch a damn thing on it.

Miyagi could think of nothing else to do but sort of aimlessly shake Lux. Knowing how to do this right was for other people.

Lux only buckled harder, his feet trying to float out from under him. He couldn't feel them or his hands anymore. He forgot that his eyes were sightless balls of sealant and looked up helplessly at Demetrius.

Both Demetrius and Miyagi froze when they saw his face again. He had sort of coughed up something—sort of. A cluster of pale red flowers had emerged from Lux's throat and growing and opening over his face until they touched his blank eyes.

Demetrius could reach them, barely. He pulled them out one by one, wincing as each gave a sickening resistance before being uprooted. “I'm sorry—“ he exhaled with each one. They were growing in faster than he could pluck them...falling out quicker than his hands...just falling out, as if their season had ended. Demetrius stopped and let them die and drop on their own, giving Lux his mouth back without a trace of plant life. “Are...do you...do you feel better?”

Lux's answer was to start falling—no, not him; Miyagi had fainted with his hands on Lux's shoulders and was only taking the boy down with him by accident.

Lux gasped, ineffectively swatting at his shoulder. “Get off me—“

Demetrius was just able to snatch the front of Lux's shirt between two fingers and held him upright by it as Miyagi slid to a resting place on the floor. Then with a tiny pop, Lux fell anyway, leaving Demetrius holding a button.

The machine, Demetrius's legs, looked to be just about fully formed from what he could see, but not on. Demetrius still felt too foggy to remember how to activate them and turned an ashamed red as he could only watch his visitor untangle himself from Miyagi and stumble to his feet blind and with no help.

Lux croaked, still out of breath, “He's gone...”

“Yes,” said Demetrius, barely above a whisper. “Theo didn't mean to; he can't hear you. You gave him a fright there. I might ordinarily ask you to move him, but because it might wake him, not this time. If I were awake, I would have long ago tested this machine by hiding his uppers and forcing him to lie down. Please don't even touch—”

“No, someone else.”

“Who is that?”

Lux just shrugged as an answer, like it didn't matter if Demetrius ever knew. Demetrius's embarrassment dropped away when he read something else from that shrug—that Lux would have slapped away any offer of help composing himself.

“What is your name?” asked Demetrius. “You look a bit like someone I know, except for...a detail.”

“It's me, Lux.”

Demetrius paused, his face falling. The detail was the eyes. Lux was just far enough away from him to reach and touch them with one careful finger. He recognized the sealant—a younger Demetrius had spent nights covered in it after some surgeries. Sometimes, he had woke from procedures with a dry, swollen globule of it under his skin that he could feel straining against it, somewhere where something big enough inside had been cut. “It's your...”

“Please,” urged Lux, pushing Demetrius's hand away and putting out his own in a gesture begging Demetrius to please, please stop. By mistake, it hit Demetrius's face. “Please do me the biggest favor ever and do not remind me about my eyes. Ask no questions. They are why I could walk here in the open. They were what Iosethep recognized me by. I'm free; that's all it is.”

Demetrius gaped. Saying either “that's terrible” or “that's wonderful” would be equally rude, so he settled on, “You are...” He pushed the thought out of his mind that maybe all he had done for Lux would have been more effectively replaced by one order that Kenichi never let Lux outside without dark sunglasses.

Lux finished, “And if I think of them as anything more than that right now, I will curl up in a useless ball on the floor and freak the fuck out.”

“I will not.” Demetrius swallowed his questions and took Lux's hand down from his face. He gave it a sympathetic squeeze before letting it go. “I have been there myself. What is your emergency? At least, what happened to bring you all the way...here?”

Lux told him. “You would know better than I.”

Demetrius raised an eyebrow.

“I was just with Ginger. She doesn't know I'm here. She's coming this way because Nitya called the watch about her activities. She said she promised you she would do something if she knew you called them. Destroy something here. I don't know what.”

“I know what.” Demetrius nodded and told Lux where his father's remains were. “I'd show you...but she threatens to smash it, ceasing the preservation of the last bit he believed his life was encoded into...” He watched Lux's jaw drop. “To try and prevent me from calling her out...Lux...? Can you tell me one more thing...?”

“Yes?”

“Lux...how long have I been asleep?” Demetrius had gone from rosy to pale in three sentences flat.

“Not forever.” Not helpful. “Everyone was worried mainly because you wouldn't wake up for anything but my dumb flower shenanigans.”

The worry of everyone who knew him streamed in full into Demetrius's body, all at once. His breathing thinned. “Nitya didn't need any more pain...”

“If someone is responsible for that, it's me,” said Lux. “I know. I know, but come on.” He tugged at whatever pieces of Demetrius's wrappings he could find. “I can only hope that I distracted Ginger by pissing off her robot clonebitch. She's got to already be here—“ he pulled harder, guessing wrongly that Demetrius could move.

“Distract from...robot...?”

“It's okay—now—“

“Yes, I expected her.” Demetrius moved Lux's hand to an exposed strand of metal at his middle. “That is what I had Theo make these legs for.”

“He just said there was some machine,” said Lux, tracing the metal with his fingers and following it all around Demetrius. “Legs for what?”

“Without them, I cannot stand, let alone follow anyone downstairs,” said Demetrius as though explaining some dull mechanical detail of the spidery legs. He allowed Lux to circle of as much of the device as he pleased, but he also held his breath. Lux was also outlining the shape of his body; this was the blind way of seeing it for the first time. He was only forced to release a breath when one of Lux's hyperactive fingers, skipping from one metal spiral to another around Demetrius's middle, brushed past his black wrappings and his form beneath the steel. Lux had accidentally tickled him; a little air escaped Demetrius's lungs with a high sound that might have become a laugh if he did not bite down on his tongue hard.

“Sorry,” said Lux, but the tension had dropped from his face when he heard Demetrius's squeak. An embryonic, almost-smile replaced it. He followed the machine's tendrils back toward where he had started. “Is that...” he wondered, “is all of that you?”

Demetrius gathered himself instantly back into coolness. At least Lux hadn't hesitated to voice it. “Yes. I normally would explain the circumstances of my physical shape to you now, but if you say that there is a matter of urgency to attend to—“

Lux would have broken down laughing if he were able to see Demetrius's face when his own did the unimaginable and lit the fuck up, most definitely smiling now. “You are amazing,” Lux marveled.

“That...” Demetrius took too many seconds to form the rest of the sentence. “...that is a first.”

“I mean—Demetrius, where's Miyagi?”

“Lying right behind you—your foot is just an inch from his head. Careful you don't disturb—“

“Shit.” Lux quickly adjusted himself. “I'd already lost him.” He found Demetrius's face again and rose to it, beaming through the featureless, useless spheres in his eye sockets. “But it's impossible for me to lose you.”

Demetrius let it roll around in his brain for a moment to determine whether he should like it. Whether or not he should have, he liked it. He liked the way Lux had blanked his mind for a second there, too. Demetrius played with him back. “I like your practical eye, Lux.”

Demetrius could feel the gap open up in Lux's mind, and he felt it pass by just before Lux said, “Where?”

“It must be so much that it shuns being tied down by a where, that it can make its own home wherever circumstances require. If you want to remain in good spirits about it, I might say it has done a thorough job of making prehensile eyes of your hands, but don't you think we should move?”

Lux twisted his fingers a bit, then ran them over the metal once more, then one finger down the slope of Demetrius's nose without missing it once. All of a sudden, he could feel the sight in them. Demetrius had reminded him of his eyes, but he could hold out longer before going useless floorball. As long as he could find Demetrius's nose.

Demetrius watched Lux smile boldly through whatever pain had brought him here, and he felt his own smile poking through his. Not motile, he thought, but not ever lost. Blind, but not ever immobilized. He felt as though Lux's connection to him had always been face to face. “So,” he said, “will you look for me again at the flattish panel right back behind my neck? You might have to brush a few things away to find it.”

Lux found it in a minute. “I remember it. What about it? I don't see anything on it.” He would use sight words for whatever function he wanted.

“I would manipulate the machine myself, but I didn't expect to be figuratively absent for so much of its construction. Either my own controls have yet to be installed, or I need Theo to show them to me, who you have just kicked halfway across the floor—“

“Fuck—I'm sorry—“

“He still cannot hear you. I mean that he seems to finally have crashed. He is far away, lying inside of a bubble with walls miles thick that the vibration of a boy's spinning kick would hardly penetrate. I am not going to get any assistance from him, let alone signs of life, for many hours,” said Demetrius with a hint of affection for Miyagi, and a wickeder kind for Lux. Lux was so plainly spoken that it made Demetrius want to be as flowery as he could, just to tease. Maybe he was still feeling weird from having spent too many hours in dreams. “I am fortunately a paranoiac. I can conceive of several situations in which I might become incapable of utilizing my own controls if need be, most of them involving spontaneous somnolence.” And if he ever fell on his controls, he had insisted that lifting him back up be an effortless task for a single person, but this was much too awkward to speak of to Lux. “Trusted parties must be able to take command. You are the first, Lux, and for a while, you will be the only one. I daresay, an illustrious honor.”

“For a Langley.” The force that had made Lux unable to speak to Demetrius for so long flickered back, and Lux almost didn't want this.

“My father,” said Demetrius, “would be very pleased.” It was too tasteless to be formed by a voice like Demetrius's—unless, Lux realized, it was true.

“How do I do it?” Lux asked. “There's nothing on it.”

“It is locked pictographically. On the surface of the plate,” Demetrius said, “use your finger to trace a pentagram.”

Lux gaped for a second before drawing the star on the metal nape of Demetrius's neck in one effortless sweep. “Holy fuck, you really are the mastermind they say you are. That would be like if I set the password for the entire Langley skyscraper's security system to be 'password'. Or 'one, two, three, four, five'. You sly dog.”

“I'll change it when I have the time and peace to think of something better—“ The feeling of tapping against him cut Demetrius off—Lux suddenly touching the metal and recoiling over and over.

“It attached something to my hand!” Lux blurted. “I can't find anything on me, but I feel it; it's wrapped around the bones in my fingers...”

“Like a spider caught your hand in its web?”

“Please tell me that's not it—“

“Only in feeling. It is only a remote field—blue men do nickname this kind Arachnea. But it doesn't hurt, does it?” Demetrius asked impishly.

“No,” said Lux. It would be all right even if it did hurt a bit, so long as there was no spider in it.

“You like it? It only feels like your hand is bound to many threads, which you can pull in any direction you'd like, and if everything is in place mechanically, I will follow you. I'll be the eyes...I'll tell you which ways to go to...to take me out of here.” Demetrius breathed deeply, trying to suck back any sign of tension over leaving the room he had been confined to for so long. “You stay back there and hang onto me.”

Lux unhesitantly draped his free arm around Demetrius's neck—Lux hoped it was. Lux did not feel the frame of any human body he knew under his arm. Nothing symmetrical or stationary, just an expanse for nothing but its own sake. “Does that hurt?”

Demetrius had involuntarily made an uncomfortable, squeezed sound when Lux let himself rest against him. “I will not lie; I am rather sensitive to external pressure sources where others are protected. But I will take a mild discomfort for this, even a bruise. Don't give it another thought—I won't. Now, you will put your hand on the plate to push me forward—slowly, now—” The room, with a flurry of soft clicking sounds, lurched toward Demetrius. “—until I tell you to pull me to our right, that doorway you came in through—still slower, please—suddenly dizzy—“

Lux rested his hand, stopping all together. “Demetrius?”

Demetrius had gone silent, staring at the wall, which had just stopped in its advance. It hadn't been dizziness. The clicking had been the sea of joints in his metal legs beginning to flow, and he had been moving, not the wall. Another, white noise-like sound that he had thought was his ears rushing stopped at the same time; it had been Lux dragging behind him, his little passenger. “No, I'm actually all right. Keep going.”

He didn't even feel Lux engage the plate again; the motion just began again, but at the slowest, gentlest crawl.

“How is that?” asked Lux.

“Nice,” said Demetrius distantly. “I'm sorry. I am only rather disoriented by this; it will pass. Remember that Theo has only just made this for me; I haven't...I have not moved in quite this...manner for several years. The walls flowing past my sight even at this rate is an unfamiliar sight. Vertigo.” His voice got quieter and quieter. He only noticed that his fingers were turning blue gripping Lux's wrist after he had taken hold of it. He didn't want to leave here alone. “Right, now, Lux. To your right...Lux. Lux, I haven't moved from this room in four years...”

Lux had never been told that. He had pieced together from Nitya, Kenichi and Lyon how Demetrius had protected the Langley skyscraper and the two lives in it from numbers of assailants he would never fully know and how he had twisted Iosethep and beyond—even Lux II's old staff—around his little finger to secure that protection. And how he had had the power to survey Lux's every move, too, but had looked over the murder between their families and let it go. Lux had never been told that Demetrius had done all of it from one spot in one musty little room in Section Eight.

Lux's shock made his hand twitch too hard to the right, and Demetrius's new legs proved their strength by throwing them both through the doorway and into the opposite wall on the stairwell with a crack of dented wood. The machine was not made to move that violently; Lux was unable to stop an off-balance Demetrius from sliding down the wall and onto the floor, leaving his incomplete legs to confusedly lash the air.

But Demetrius didn't mind. For the first time, falling was not the worst thing in the world. He only realized that he was laughing when he saw the bent wall behind his head and tried to apologize to Lux, but it would barely come out through the laughter.

“No,” panted Lux, kneeling beside Demetrius and trying to look over him for injuries, frustrated when his eyes didn't show him anything. “Never apologize to me. I'll tell them I did it; it's true. I'm sorry—are you hurt?” If him just holding onto Demetrius could hurt, how was Demetrius even alive now?

“I said I don't care about bruises—no—no, don't—don't you dare be sorry—Lux! Lux—oh, Lux, that was the most wonderful thing!”

Lux had once overheard Nitya calling Demetrius her little rose. The sound from Demetrius was like a rose's laugh—a sound that is not supposed to exist, but is beautiful anyway. He located Demetrius's head for himself again—his face was getting so warm. He generated heat for the whole building, didn't he?

“I couldn't have been happier to exit there any other way,” said Demetrius, breathing again.

Lux couldn't begin to explain why he had abused the arachnea controls like that, begin to express his shock at what he had realized, how much more the effort must have been worth than an ornery shrimp with murderer genes like him deserved, before Demetrius kept going in an uncontrolled flurry of words.

“When I was very young and my father was alive, and I looked just the same as any little child with white hair, I discovered that I could jump just as softly as I could walk, so when I would sneak down to the bar level, instead of walking down the stairs and making more frequent stepping noises, I'd jump down them them three at a time—it felt like that, what you just did. I'd even miss my step and fall at the bottom sometimes!”

When a word from Lux finally fit in, it wasn't what he had planned. Instead, what made it through was, “You should try an elevator shaft.”

“You mean the B-assisted...I always, always wanted to,” gushed Demetrius. “To float down for floors and floors like a piece of paper...whenever a repairman came for one of the little elevators downstairs, or whenever I saw them working on one in a really, really tall building, I'd try to steal his vest, but I never got away with it. They were always faster than Dad—wait, you mean you have?”

“All of our elevator staff left,” said Lux. “I feel less like a piece of paper than a bubble.” Demetrius squealed with delight. “You're so light when I'm carrying you that I can't help but imagine you if you were one!” His voice dimmed, his giddiness beginning to even out: “Of course I couldn't try for myself now, like I am. No vest in the world would...you'd need a bloody dirigible's worth of Carulean B to slow my fall.”

“I will make you a dirigible. Got to do something in return for you, not that just that would ever be enough—”

“Yes, it would,” said Demetrius.

“How do you get up when this happens?”

Demetrius went two times quieter. “I do not. That is one of the reasons for the installation of controls for a second party. I hope these legs are not missing more than their tilt sensors for this purpose...I wish you could see them.” His voice came back a bit, and kept going. “They're looking for a floor in the air. Oh gods,” he giggled, “they're just going like an overturned spider's. One of them keeps hitting my real foot, and it tickles like mad, and I think I am losing myself, Lux. Falling over usually makes me want to die. Maybe it's that you cannot see me...say something to bring me down, now. I don't care how horrible.”

Lux said defiantly, “No.”

“I'm going to explode, Lux.”

“Go ahead.”

Demetrius snorted in laughter, holding back much more. “Boom.”

“Okay: you're lying on top of my controls. I can't get my hand under there.”

“Oh, gods.”

“Wait, though—it's okay. Your machine, the way the metal wraps around you a bunch of times—yeah, it gives you this neat rounded frame. I'll just tip you up like the worst rocking chair ever and get to it; hang on.”

“You are only permitted to roll me down the stairs if descending them that fast becomes a matter of life or death,” said Demetrius with a titter now slightly more nervous than happy. “And only my life or death, not yours.”

“Don't give me ideas...no, I won't do anything to hurt you. Kidding.”

“As am I. Your life or death, too.” “But if I decided I wanted to take care of things downstairs alone,” Lux lowered his voice threateningly. “I could just rock you back to sleep again right here and now.” He tipped Demetrius gently back and forth a few times with his fingertips.

Demetrius covered his burning face with his hands the best he could—not well. But he was smiling so hard it burned his mouth. He wished he had the time to do something childish like pretend to nod off, feign speaking rude things about Lux in his sleep, and then open his eyes and grab Lux's ankle when he least expected it. The tightly wound dear archduke would jump so high that he would put another crack in the ceiling. “You wouldn't.”

“No, I wouldn't.” Lux very nearly tipped Demetrius all the way over with a single heave.

“Oh—careful—!” cried Demetrius, though he knew Lux wouldn't do it any other way. And he was going up as well as over...Lux's stumbling feet behind him, then fading. His legs found a floor and settled there...so dizzy.

“How is that?” said tiny Lux, who had taken five seconds to do it without eyes.

“Wow...that normally takes hours. I still hope I can be less cumbersome.”

“Fuck that—remember who I came from. If you don't look worse than my father did, it's not even registering up here. I like you. Where are the stairs?”

The cycle that had begun didn't stop, only escalated as Lux and Demetrius struggled down the stairs one at a time, the former following the latter's directions to find each one. They were at the very limits of the number of reasons to break down that each of them could hold, but they still had one more thing to do before they could rest. They rightly feared that if they allowed themselves for one second to stop laughing, they would melt into useless puddles of tears.

While they succeeded at forcing their tension just beneath the surface, they could not push it much further down. Their initial testing of each other with off-color compliments had been a warning that in moments, there would suddenly be nothing they couldn't say to each other.

Lux threw out increasingly cavalier guesses at why Demetrius's body was so locatable. “If I started removing rags from you, would there eventually just be a head left?”

“Such would irritate the High Grandmother Laundry Golem,” said Demetrius. “She travels without a sound. How do you expect to tell if Her Dirtiness isn't supervising me now from right behind you?”

“Would you go down to my size if I pricked you with a needle? I'll be gentle; I'm afraid of needles, myself...”'

“I must decline,” said Demetrius. He smiled because everything Lux said was a trap for himself, and he knew it. “It isn't personal; I just want to keep both of my eyes. They're the last two we have...imagine the clumsy destruction if we were to run out. I weigh a very condensed six hundred pounds, you know. Like a wrecking ball with a sense of justice. Tremble in fear.” Aside from Lux now, only Bones knew that. “Hold still. Just for a second. I heard something.”

Lux froze his hand, and they sat for a moment in silence, strung between two black stairs. Demetrius was so much more cautious than Lux, waiting out every little sound even if the likeliest source was themselves. Lux knew he had had a spasm in his hand that made Demetrius take a weird step; the brief grinding metal sound was themselves, and it stopped with them. Demetrius stayed quiet past the moment when it became obvious. It hadn't been the first time. Lux hoped his patience would hold. If he were alone, he would have moved forward even if the sound had been an irradiator charging, ready to deal with it when he saw it.

Would Demetrius, held like a deer in headlights by nothing at all, even notice if Lux slowly, slowly twisted himself so that he breathed right into Demetrius's ear...? No...? Oh, gods. Lux bit back laughter. He then whispered two words into Demetrius's ear: “Lead balloon.”

The stilts were torn from under Demetrius's stillness, and it folded into a heap of laughter and metallic creaking as he tried to double over more than his machine would let him. As they started again to move downward, Lux, just in case, muffled Demetrius's mouth with his free hand and watched Demetrius's face go nearly violet—

“What the fuck—?” Lux tore his hand away twice as fast as he had slapped it there. His hero had spit into it. It was whatever they could get away with.

“I have to give you directions, haven't I?” said Demetrius sweetly. He blushed—because of the myriad off-color details of living years in one spot, he had never before permitted himself to do anything gross on purpose. “Move a bit less forward on the next step...now. Yes. Keep doing the same, it's straight down from here...you should see your hand.” Lux's fouled hand still hung frozen in shock in front of Demetrius's face. “Just twitching there like you weren't the boy who woke me up with the the big puppy dog lick between my eyes.” Demetrius pat the hand like it belonged to a puppy dog. “You can wipe it on me; this is just a bunch of rags, really.”

“Gee, now I can't,” said Lux. He wiped his hand on his own sleeve. “You're so nice about everything. The weirdest things—bet you could bloody shoot someone and make them go out feeling loved. You must sneeze rose petals and fart perfume.”

“You would be surprised. It only looks that way to you because you're horrible.”

“Spend some time with Baron Lyon. He's highly contagious.”

“Everything I've ever known of you is so dour and serious—you gave me no warning that you would turn me into a giddy bag of jumping beans and yourself into the biggest tease in the world! I don't know how or what is wrong with me...”

“Don't know what's the matter with me, either,” said Lux. He was supposed to be rescuing Kenichi, not smiling.

“Are you secreting some drug? I ought to dump you downstairs in the maze, dastardly drug secretor.”

Lux gasped in sincere delight. “You guys have a maze for a floor?” His mind was already spinning up ways to navigate it by touch.

“I mean the expansive, featureless and empty storage floor.” Demetrius gave Lux a second to sigh in disappointment. “The single exit, a narrow elevator, is not against a wall. Might as well drop you into a paper bag without a navigator.” He giggled evilly.

“As if you are some master at paper bag escape artistry yourself,” said Lux. “If I put one over your head, wouldn't you be asleep before you could take it off?”

“Wrong,” declared Demetrius. “Londons don't work that way. You have to put us under a sunspot.”

“Aw, you're like cats.”

“Or shine a lightbulb in our eyes. We make terrible interrogation subjects.”

Lux realized something sad. “Oh, gods, you haven't actually seen a sunspot in a long time.” “I never saw them often even before,” said Demetrius. “With my nocturnal wiring, I never felt any longing. Maybe just missing the sight a little, and it is an undeniably unique kind of warmth.”

“If Theo doesn't finish your damn machine soon, I'll take you outside to sleep under one...hey, what does it feel like at the exact moment you fall asleep?” asked Lux, cooled down a bit. “Every night since I was very young, I've been trying to pinpoint the exact second, but I'm always just waiting, and then suddenly waking up and going 'bloody hell, I missed it.' But you must have caught onto it by now, being like you, right?”

“You may attempt to see for yourself. You may release the arachnea, Lux; we are at the basement floor.”

Lux let them stand still “Huh...?”

Demetrius took hold of Lux's arm as if it had been slipping from his shoulder, to reposition it, but discreetly neglected to let go. “Lux, I've caught onto the pulse of my spontaneous somnolence so finely in all my time alone that I know how to dial its number on another human being and transmit it—if I wish it, and you want to understand it. You are curious?”

“Yes...what do you mean?”

Demetrius pulled Lux's arm out straight in front of them. “Good, because I already have you. It's running up through your arm...you trust me, do you?”

“To be weird,” said Lux, but he liked going along with Demetrius's weirdness. “Of course, I do a lot.”

“Would you trust me if I said that I have made your arm a switch? That if I allow it to drop, you will sleep as suddenly as I do in an episode? That as long as you—“ Demetrius dropped the arm without warning. He shifted to holding both of Lux's hands instead, where they came over his shoulders, keeping Lux upright because he had just gone limp. The transmissibility had been a half lie; this was only a hypnosis trick. Before they walked into danger, it was time to give Lux a marker.

Demetrius heard no one outside the door, but he was nervous, too much to think up a unique tag for Lux. So he chose one he had used before, one which had been freed up by the death of the carrier. It was a silly and affectionate one, one he could not get away with giving just anybody.

“Very good, Lux,” he whispered. “I hope you were able to catch the second. I want to give you a gift for how good you've been.” Lux had been; Demetrius's voice had lowered in amazement. Someone like Lux should not have been this easy to mesmerize, but Demetrius had had a feeling...and it had been right. Lux really did trust him that much. You fool. Your eyes are missing because of how I failed you. Why, Lux? You're so much sillier than I knew. “You must trust me that I only have one of this gift, and that it is very special even if it is weird...it is that from now on, whenever I press the tip of your nose with my finger, you will meow.”

Demetrius had his eyes shut to hold in one tear forming in each. He could see himself at three years old, with Aubrey laid out flat on the upstairs floor, sleeping under the mercy of little Demetrius's button.

Ginger had just taught him how to hypnotize people and to place the markers in their heads, and Aubrey let him practice on him whenever he wanted to. The precious fool, giving a toddler full reign over his consciousness. Demetrius punished him for his senselessness, almost suffocating himself holding back laughter, barely able to speak as he gave his father the marker he now gave Lux with a lump in his throat.

He didn't feel bad for giving it away now. It was Lux; it was for him. Both the shame and the gift befit Lux.

A line of blue light came through the side of the door in front of Demetrius, bisecting Lux's face. Out there, the column of coolant was the only light. Demetrius had watched this light all the way down the stairs, silently thanking it for its patience as it watched him back. It meant the column was intact. Ginger said she would be down there so fast. He leaned as far forward as he could to peer through the little gap, moving slowly as he felt a wall scrape both sides of him. The stairwell's sides were in a slow state of collapse, the one part of the building Aubrey had remembered to maintain the very least. Its condition dated back to before the building's theft. This was a narrow spot; Demetrius moved through it slowly, afraid. If they had come down all this way just for the downstairs doorway to be too narrow for him, he would fall into a coma for fifty years, he knew it.

He looked up first—old habits from before his confinement were creeping back, one of them being to always look up when entering a room. Ginger had not had to teach him that. He had crawled downstairs once over the ceilings, totally unhidden but still missed as Aubrey, Deva and even Lucrezia walked up or down the staircase right under him. No one ever looked up, so he took the advantage of being the only one upon himself. Now, that happened to be just where to find Kenichi.

Kenichi. Demetrius couldn't breathe for a moment. What was he doing here? No one had warned him that she had Kenichi...however much of that was still Kenichi. Ginger had made him look monstrous—she had spilled shield material all over him and then injected its surface here and there with head-sized bubbles of carulean B until there were just enough to hold him up in the air, tethered to her by a string tied to his ankle. It was the sort of whimsical thing he would enjoy if he were awake and well. He wasn't. Ginger had rubbed the shield off of his head to show his face, which was a pure green turned teal by the column's glow. His eyes hung slightly open—they were featureless black and unseeing. Gravity pulled down his eyelids, but his mind was dormant in the dark. He smiled, but only at a dream.

Demetrius could hear his own heart. I did this to you.

And then, below, there was Ginger, a shadow facing into the column's soft glow with not an irradiator in her hand but something of a crowbar crossed with a robotic arm and ripped from its body, now held poised to break some glass. She looked much, much worse.

“Lux...” Demetrius whispered. “Wake up. Look.”

“Huh...?” Lux lifted his head. “It's all right; you can try your transmittance thing later. Look where?”

“Oh, gods, I'm sorry.” Demetrius had forgotten that Lux could no longer look through cracks in doors. “I mean it's her. She's out there; I see her...she has Kenichi.” His voice shook with horror and anger.

“Mm-hmm...” Lux could only squeak. “She's expecting you to try and stop her, She took him as a hostage to use against you. I would have told you, but I didn't want to shock you again when you were still waking up. I didn't want to lose you again. I can't get him back alone.”

“I must say that would be a regrettable move if used upon anyone else.” Demetrius had never let go of Lux's hands, which he held with a death grip that Lux had to break himself to get them moving again. He clicked the door open. “But with me, you were right. I feel better now...” His mind wavered a little bit in and out of fog as he struggled with his eyes, trying not to let them stick on Kenichi, but he could hold himself back. It was also easier with Lux repeatedly jostling him in place from behind. “...what are you doing? You don't need to do that to an arachnea.”

“This doorway is stupid,” said Lux. “I got you through yours just fine, but what is the fucking deal here?” He rammed his whole arm into the little plate in a heave, sharpening Demetrius's gasp.

“Oh...gods...” Demetrius did not move. He could not even lean back from where he had peered through the door. He did not fall into a fifty year coma, but he did want to die now. His eyes stayed on Ginger, freezing on her as if they just might freeze her in place with them.

Lux asked, “Is that hurting you?”

“Lux,” Demetrius whispered slowly, his heart beating in his inner ears. “Fuck the proper use of arachnea and any fear of hurting me. As hard as you can—quickly, please—she's standing right there, going to break it with a—thing—an arm—?” He raised his voice so that Ginger might here. He would pretend to be some mysterious presence in the shadows, one that could step out whenever it wanted. “I see you, Ginger. Let go of the string and turn around.”

Corvus did not let go of the arm or the string, but she did loosen her grip a bit, startled from something deep. She had not been preparing to swing, but somewhere far into her head. She looked around. “Demetrius...?”

Demetrius whispered to Lux again, who was now jumping up a few stairs over and over again just to throw himself down against Demetrius's back, “I am looking at she who was the closest thing to a mother to me, and she is doing something that I don't understand—ow—that I thought was ultimately unlike her—I would take a bloody waistcoat of bruises to speak to her again!”

Lux hesitated, almost tripping over his feet. “But—“

“I'd take massive internal bleeding to speak to my mother again—ow—! It's okay, Lux; that doesn't hurt at all.” Yes, it did. Demetrius bit his lip every time Lux hit to keep from crying out; it bled, and he tried to swallow all of the blood. Lux couldn't know; it didn't matter. “If you could see Kenichi—if you could see her—the arm, the...the...the...her whole body—I don't know what's happened to her—I don't know how—if this doesn't work, Lux, go get a fucking chainsaw and tear this doorway—aa!“

There was no need for power tools. Lux and Demetrius fell out into the bare room, razing any mystique Demetrius ever had as a voice.

Lux fell on top of Demetrius and had to untangle himself. Demetrius didn't help; he didn't move or make a sound when Lux tapped him on the head. His consciousness had given out. Something metal slipped under Lux's hand and clattered to the floor nearby; Lux thought it was Demetrius's machine. Shit; I broke it. He felt the chilly floor where he had heard the piece fall, listening for any sign of movement from Corvus, who gave none. There, a weird, lumpy metal piece shaped kind of like a tiny—it was a tiny irradiator.

(brb)

When he picked out the sound of Corvus's breathing—it was slow, horrified, coming through teeth—he leapt to his feet and pointed the irradiator at the sound as it charged. His eyes dully hurt when they tried to narrow, but the sealant got in the way. The drug was wearing off, but it wasn't so bad yet. “Don't come any closer to him.” Going by feel and memory, Lux set the gun's range to spread to make up for his sight. He would damage everything in the room if he shot and probably burn his own hand, but he would get her. “Not this one. Not Demetrius. I'm not afraid to tear up this whole room to get you if I hear you take one more step this way.”

Corvus finally spoke, softer than Lux had ever heard her or imagined that she could speak at all. “So that's...that's him?” She saw the eyeless boy guarding a pile of rags and metal limbs that was shaped nothing like even the most disfigured human might be. Her shock wouldn't let her believe it was breathing. ”I haven't seen him...I only want to know what happened to him.”

“He fell down some stairs, that's what the fuck happened!” roared Lux. “You will do exactly what I tell you, or I will discharge this motherfucker so many times you will wish you could die.”

“Is he sick? Is it REM...?” She hadn't seen any other ailment twist someone like that since she had invented REM in medieval times. It materialized anything one felt fear of while under its influence on their body, and it had only been meant for one king. She hadn't meant it to spread. But, medieval times. Medical knowledge had been hard to come by even for her.

“Gods, no. If it was, Kenichi and I would have it and be barfing spiders out of our ears. He can't explain to you right now. Now: you will tell me if Demetrius looks hurt.”

“Tell me how the hell I am supposed to tell.”

Lux's expression flared. “You think he doesn't bleed or something?” he snapped, then knelt and found Demetrius's head. He gently pulled it into sight. “Is his nose bleeding or anything?”

“No.” Lux would have heard an unspoken plea in Corvus's tone if his ears weren't ringing from fury. She had to touch Demetrius. The face had never changed. The little boy had kissed her goodnight every night she had spent here, even the first. His voice hadn't changed much, either, but it was different to see.

Lux held up one of Demetrius's dwarfed arms, and Corvus marveled at his childlike hand—one part of him that looked the same as it ever had. This was Demetrius. “Does it look broken?”

“Not that I can determine from back here,” Corvus said seriously. She wanted to know if he was okay, too. He hadn't fallen that hard—why was he unconscious? With his mouth moving slightly, barely forming words under his breath like he was just asleep and dreaming. She knelt to look him in the eyelids, the best she could with how the haywire Corvus Seven had compromised her body back underground. “Sweet one...?”

Corvus's stare opened Demetrius's eyes. He whispered blearily, not yet remembering anything that had transpired between them since she had physically left this place, “Mum...?”

She looked like she was straining against a magnetic attraction to keep that couple of feet away from him. Demetrius remembered, but did not make any connection—something had taken place while he was asleep, besides the gruesome obvious. He couldn't see the Ginger who had turned on him over the phone, not very well.

Then his view was bisected by Lux's feet as he stepped between them with his irradiator, following Corvus's voice.

Demetrius said, “Lux, put that down. You are not being very threatening.”

“Am I pointing it the right way?”

“Close enough, but aim has nothing to do with it—“

“She wants something from you. I don't know what, but I know I don't want two people to rescue—stay back!”

Lux couldn't see what Corvus looked like before him, and he couldn't see Demetrius's cringe at how unknowingly perverse he looked pointing the gun at her. Lux clearly expected that Corvus was looking as malevolent as always, did not expect her to be standing in front of him in a state of any vulnerability. “Lux, you are not being threatening at all.”

“What? AM I BEING LOUD ENOUGH?”

“May I tell him?” Demetrius didn't give Corvus a chance to speak before saying, “Lux, I do not not know what you are trying to say. But you are still pointing a miniature irradiator at someone standing alive with a metal tentacle the size of you going all the way through their ribcage and coming out the other side.”

Lux's hands weakened, and he noticed the smell of blood for the first time, thick in the air, lots of it. He went totally off guard.

Corvus took that second to effortlessly knock him and the irradiator aside. She then fell beside Demetrius and embraced his familiar head. It was all she had wanted to do to him. “Ginger...” Demetrius had looked up and down her enough times to determine that she should not have been able to speak or to stand the way she was. The thing through her chest was the arm of a metal Cthulhu, smashing right into where the heart was supposed to be and with a greater diameter than several hearts. She still breathed, though it was physically impossible that she had lungs left. The arm exited through her back; she stood, knelt and hugged him as though she still had that part of her spinal column which she clearly didn't. It couldn't be explained away by cyborg parts like Lucrezias. The stuff the arm had cut through had no metal about it. “What happened to you...?”

She leaned back from him, but kept one hand on the top of his head. He let her keep it there. She said, “That's what I wanted to ask you.”

“Who? What attacked you? I know of nothing with a limb like that—”

“A really, really bad clone that eats machines.”

Corvus had known that something had happened to Corvus Seven when, just as she was smuggling Kenichi through the seventh district, every computer on her person lost power at once. She designed all of her machines to only charge themselves remotely from her own sources and never share themselves with the city power grid, so she knew something had happened back underground. The possibilities for that something were Lux and Corvus Seven, and one of them had a special gift for devouring technology.

But she expected, when she flipped through the secret door to her catacombs, to see something she had seen before—the clone down below, maybe having sucked in just a few machines. Instead, walking into the cavern was walking into Corvus Seven's entrails. The walls and the ceiling were coated in the jagged silver and rust of the ripped up pieces of every machine that had once been on the ground. Here and there, the masses had punched dark holes in the ceiling and pulled in wires and pipes from the ninth district utilities above. The floor of the catacombs itself was beyond hope. A sea had filled it—one of bones and sharpened steel points. It had currents lapping around the walls, though longer than a sea's and with a twist in them that suggested a mind of their own. Corvus Seven was in there somewhere. Someone had done the equivalent of making her cry.

The only objects exempt from the crushing tides were Aubrey’s decorated skulls, which now were coated in silver—each time one fell, a lick of the sea momentarily splashed up and caught it, then gently pulled it under unharmed. Even like this, Corvus Seven could discern that those had a unique value to her guardian. It was this that gave Corvus a moment’s hope that somewhere in there, she still could listen.

“Corvus!” she yelled into the eddies. “Will you cut this out? I’m here!”

The undulating cavern didn’t slow its destruction or even speed up, just sucked some large pipeline or another through the ceiling. It was long, tearing through nearly the cavern’s diameter, and it was threaded into all the rest before Corvus could identify what purpose it had served the city. A machine above the ceiling roared from the damage. Whatever it was, it would soon follow.

Corvus shouted reassurances and curses into the pit until she could no longer pretend kindness. Corvus Seven had passed the point of being consoled. She remembered something she had read about multiple-generation clones back when she was still convinced that she could keep this one alive: that they were time bombs, often sent ticking by their own desire to explode. The fatalistic remark was easier to believe now.

Corvus turned back toward the door, unable to unclench her teeth to yell anymore. Fine. You wanted it to end this way.

It wasn't the first time she had lost a long-term dwelling. On average, it happened every couple of centuries—it was never as a great loss anymore as it was the first few times, but this time came close. Second only to the Langleys, she had spent more time on the simulated Iosethep than she had ever bothered to give another creation. Even if the computers were still intact, they could never be freed from this mess unless Corvus wanted to be entrapped in it forever along with them, and even then, Corvus Seven enjoyed blending together their functions and files into useless things. Finding another home would be extra trouble this time as well if the watch succeeded at meddling.

The last thing she did before taking a step toward the door was turn one last time and fire her irradiator into the center of the mess below. She knew it wouldn't do a damn thing; she only wanted to leave that broken clone something more than her dumb stare before turning around and letting all she had ruined go.

She then reached up and took the obliviously floating Kenichi by the ankle and immediately failed to walk out with him.

Demetrius could only believe any story she gave, looking at an injury that defied all of his reason but was very real nonetheless. Fortunately, she didn't feel like lying right now. “How are you still alive?”

“Oh, that...” Corvus said to Demetrius, briefly glancing down at Corvus Seven's tendril. “Just don't look at it. It's already working its way out.” He didn't know what she was, but with it in front of him like that, lying would be useless now. He was intelligent; he could figure out on his own that she was some kind of swerve off the normal course of human genetics—something else, just like himself. “What happened to you? Why do you look like that? And all the legs—“

“You, Mother,” said Demetrius. He had figured it out on his own. “Your DNA. Every time someone new sees me, I have to tell them the story you're asking for.”

“What, baby...?” She stroked his hair.

His voice chilled. “You do not get to hear it.” His words froze her hand, which he removed from his head now. “You had many chances. I've been waiting for you with it on the tip of my tongue. I was. Now, please pick up whatever is that clone part you were going to break the tank with and get it over with.” Demetrius closed his eyes. He didn't want to watch. “Break it and give back Kenichi—no, Lux. You won't find him there.”

Lux had gotten up and begun running back and forth across the room until he hit the walls on either side, allowing no square foot of floor to be searched for Kenichi. “Kenichi! Where are you? Can you hear me—you woke up in the dark once already! Kenichi, we need you!”

“Rest, Lux. I have this handled. Just stand back from the column.”

Corvus just asked, “Can I help you up?”

“To do so requires the input of a password, and I would rather stay down here than trust you with it.” He only got a second to feel how much of a burn she didn't know it was—no, I would rather continue to endure the most humiliating thing I know than accept your help, Mum. “Mum...? What are you—“ She had taken the loops of his machine and was dragging him upright anyway, her alone. With no lungs. “Mum.” He looked her in the eyes, both of them standing.

“It didn't ask for one.”

“Did you know that if you had a child, his body wouldn't come out like you? Even if you never told him who you were? Did dad know I was yours?”

“No,” said Corvus, “because I knew he would someday crack and tell you even if he promised not to. I didn't want you to have to share the pain coming when I outlived you.”

Demetrius closed his eyes. “Now, whatever is the reason for you acting so different, please just break it,” he hissed. The corners of his eyes strained. He wished he could close his ears; he didn't want to hear the glass. “I understand the choice you intended to present to me, but I'm not having the trouble with it that you supposed. Kenichi is the one still alive.”

Lux stopped moving. “You can't be serious.”

Demetrius asked, “Do you want Kenichi back? It's our one chance.”

“Take him,” said Corvus, and offered Kenichi's string to Demetrius.

Demetrius touched it with just his fingertips for a moment, looking like he could pass out again at any second. His eyes stayed on the column.

Corvus insisted, “It's him. I didn't have time to make a bloody decoy or anything. Take him,” she repeated. “I'm here to bring him back to you.”

Demetrius raised his other hand to just grab it now with both hands at once, but was held back by the tipping of his machine as Lux found him and climbed up his side.

“No,” said Lux. He handed the irradiator back to Demetrius. “If you fucking insist on not saving both of them, I'll get him. It could be a trap. Where is he?”

Demetrius answered, “Up above your head. She has encased him in B-filled shield.”

“We have to be quiet,” Lux exhaled, paling. “He's probably not going to wake up, but if he does...gods, he'll be scared up there...” He probed the air with his hands, looking for any part of Kenichi. “Shit, the glass breaking. He'll hear. Or if it splashes him—fucking coolant—Kenichi, it's okay, we've got you...”

Kenichi wouldn’t move from his spot on the catacombs' ceiling when Corvus tried to drag him out.. She looked up—the silver masses had dripped through the stone ceiling above him and formed a mold-like blob that had already attached to him and begun to pull him in. Wires, thin but not enough to let Corvus break them when she pulled at Kenichi, had spread over every globe of shield material like a network of grey veins. Corvus wrapped her arms around both of Kenichi's ankles at once and pulled him downward. Without him and without a place to hide, there was nothing between her and the watch.

The shield material wasn't soap bubbles; it deformed like rubber between Corvus's arms and Corvus Seven's tendrils, but eventually, with a sharp tug from Corvus, its thin surfaces gave way. One bubble popped moments before the rest, leaving its wires to squirm free without anything left in reach to grip. Then the rest all seemed to go at once in a cascade of flying wires and a Kenichi heavy with solid shield material slipping into Corvus's arms. He stopped, though, halfway to the floor of the little ledge he had looked down from when he had first been welcomed into the catacombs. Something still held him up, though the bubbles were gone—some extra wires they had obscured. Kenichi hung upright from them, legs meeting the ground almost at a kneel. They were fixed to the side of his head, some through crinkled and unsanitary immersive electrodes, disappearing through his skin and into his skull. A few curled back out through his face, around his left eye, then burrowed in again through his ear. To pry him away from these would tear his head open, and he let her know.

The wires looked so delicate; Corvus took hold of his arms and gave him one more pull in hopes that they might break.

“Stop!”

How long had his eyes been open? Where she had rubbed off the shield material to expose his face, he was sickly with shock, and his nose was oily from frightened sweat. He looked like he might have woken up while he was in the air; something had really spooked him. His third eyelid shimmered, warning that tears might have breached it if she had pulled any harder. She let go of him.

“That hurt...” His mouth moved along with the sound, and the sound was him. It was a scratchy version of his voice, slightly broken up, pieced together from clips of his real voice that the simulation had collected from all over Iosethep.

Impossible.

Demetrius blocked Lux's hand when it drew too close to the string. “We don't want you touching a trap, either.”

“He has scars all over his hands for digging through every kind of trap for me; I can handle one...”

Suddenly, Corvus's hands flew out of the dark and with a snap, forced both Demetrius's and Lux's hands around the string at the same time. “It's not a trap, damn it!” she cried. She was right. Nothing happened. Lux and Demetrius looked at each other, then at her. “I said, I'm here to bring him back to you,” Corvus repeated, not letting go of them. Both boys felt her hands shaking around theirs. “I'm not threatening you with him anymore. I didn't come to destroy the last piece of Aubrey, so stop telling me to!” cried Corvus, out of breath from speaking too long without saying what she truly had to. She brushed Kenichi's string delicately with her finger, which Demetrius brushed away.

Lux was confused and exasperated. “But you told me that was what you were doing with him. Can we stop fucking talking about him and let him down already?” he demanded. “If he wakes up up there, he's not going to understand when I tell him not to worry. Thanks for that, bitch—“

Demetrius put his hand on Lux's arm.

Corvus said, “I can change my mind. Or if I don't, he can.”

The Iosethep simulation, buried and twisted within Corvus Seven, had mistaken Kenichi for his sim and detected that he was missing some data inside of his head: Kenichi Zimmer was supposed to have a verbal function. So, as it would have done for the digital Kenichi, it had come and filled in the missing space. When he had to say something now, words formed—proper functioning restored. His voice had been recreated choppily out of sound clips, those being in low supply because with the recent lockdown of the Langley skyscraper, recordings of him were scarce. But it would do.

He asked blearily, “Where are we?”

He raised a hand to where the wires emerged from his eye socket and, without visible fear, traced and probed around them with his fingers. Not to pull them out, but only to feel them. It was exactly what Aubrey would do; Corvus couldn’t hold back an answer. “These are the catacombs—mine. Do you remember?”

“Yes—!” He did. Corvus had shown him, in his last seconds in her immersive, what Corvus Seven could do. Hit by the memory’s terror, he threw himself against the wires and toward her—she backed away, nearly off the ledge and into the tossing sea. Holding fast to the ceiling, they yanked him back before he could reach her. He couldn't break them, either. They jerked the breath out of him; he panted, sweating even worse. His head hurt, and for some reason, something in his middle hurt, too. In response to his resistance, more wires dripped from above and fell behind his head, where they entered somewhere in his neck that made his knees buckle.

The nanobots in his head surrendered to the tremendous invader, and he became more of Kenichi Prime with each wire.

Hanging from the growth on the ceiling again, he looked up at Corvus and through her eyes. He tipped his head when he spoke again, like a puppy. “You made the Langleys…” he exhaled. “Just you…?”

“You’re delirious,” Corvus snapped back. “The computer woke you up artificially. There are pieces of metal sticking out of the vital parts of your head; it’s isn’t working right.” “But I know…” He did. It was the privilege of every non-aware sim, the knowledge used to arm them when necessary—a secret worth collapsing their own city around a single person to keep. Kenichi strained again against the wires, not noticing when the pain poured two streams of tears down his cheeks. Every time he went limp again, the fury with which he tried to tear them rested with him. There was only the flimsiest imitation of hate in his eyes; more than anything they just questioned. “I also know why you did.”

Aubrey being dead, Kenichi was the only mortal alive to know.

Corvus forced every thought of Aubrey from her mind for the millionth time. Enraged at Corvus Seven for unleashing her program’s foundations, she screamed down to what was left of the clone again. “Let go of him—it will shut him up, damn you! I need him back!” Behind her, Kenichi discovered what was jabbing his stomach every time he moved too far. It wasn’t fused to his skin; it was his.

When Corvus turned back around, he already was free—he had done it himself. With the folding sword he had found still tucked into his uniform, he had sliced through the wires that had risen from his head, rendering himself voiceless again. The ends of them now fell disconnected over his face and shoulders. Now he just stood there, facing her with the weapon.

Corvus took her hands from Lux's and Demetrius's and raised the small metal arm to Kenichi's height. With its jagged edges, she cut through the shield bubbles one at a time, finally freeing him. He sank to the floor slowly, lying on the last few like they were a spotty bed.

“She put him down,” said Demetrius to Lux. “His head is right by your feet. Careful—“ he warned when Lux immediately dropped to the floor and took Kenichi's head in his arms.

“He looks like he's been—“

She had left it in his coat. Corvus had been too flustered to check him for shit like swords when she had taken him captive, the same sharp immortal who had engineered a thousand years of a family to her parameters and then pulled the first string to unravel it all in a moment of rage at Lux II. I’ve officially lost my touch. But still—she grinned at Kenichi fearlessly, not taking one step back. “If you know everything, you know that will never work on me. Try if you want to see.” She spread her arms, inviting him to.

He leapt forward ready to strike, but not at her. He went right over her arm and dove off the ledge, into Corvus Seven’s heart. When a wave rose to pull him out of the air like one of the skulls, she briefly saw his mouth open in surprised pain and his limbs tangle. And down he went.

Lux looked up at Corvus with teeth bared. “Something new is going on with his skin. Explain these patches.”

Corvus said nothing, biting her lip. Her eyes were closed.

Demetrius answered, “Not the work of bots. It looks like burns—I said be careful with him. It looks like what got Ginger, the clone, as she says, contacted him as well.” His voice thinned. The smell of burnt hair rising from Kenichi itched in his nose, and Lux didn't see the singed red hair breaking off of Kenichi's head in clumps and adhering to his arms.

Lux hugged him tighter. I did this to you. “You're going to be all right,” he spoke into Kenichi's hair, seeming unaffected by the smell. “You will. I'm going to make sure, like you did for me. I'm going to get your voice back, too—this bitch knows Oceanic Prime, and if I can't make her give it back, Demetrius will. He's not what you think; he's awesome. He'll do it—“

“Do not touch his hands.” Demetrius couldn't keep his eyes on those. They were the worst—he tried to remember if there was such a thing as a fourth degree burn. His need to touch Kenichi, even if he wasn't conscious enough to be comforted, rose to a physical pain through his body. He moved a foot as if it would matter if it reached Kenichi's arm. “Seriously, do not. You don't want to know, and neither does he. I'm going to call in Bones—my cousin, a doctor—right now. Leave them to her. Just trust me—“

Corvus didn’t leave the catacombs, only continued to look down at where Kenichi had disappeared. Suicide didn’t sound like that boy to her. But she had pushed him far…that far?

Nope—her feeling was right. His head rose to the surface again, dragging one arm after it. She couldn’t miss it; it was the one speck of orange in the steel tide. Hundreds of Corvus Seven’s various fingers came up with him, flowing out of his skin. They bore under it and pulled him downwards again by his bones. Struggling to keep his head in the air, he looked all around the cavern, through the surface and around the walls as though he was looking for something. Every time he sifted through the aimless machine around him, he winced when something new pierced him. He didn’t want to be down there. He just had to find something.

He vanished below again, spinning the currents above him as he went. They never calmed from the splash; his ripples only spread, sending the entire sea twirling.

What the fuck are you doing? Corvus ran for the stairs, listening to the sounds of squirming metal from below become louder and louder. She still needed the idiot, and she wouldn’t lose her life if she joined him. By now, she considered dragging him out of there no matter how many wires, needles and tubes she had to tear out of him. At the base of the stairs, she braced herself for the remains of her machines to pour out of the doors like so many toys in a child’s closet when she opened them. She kicked them open, and it was everything she expected.

The wave poured out in one great tendril, but again, Corvus Seven ignored her. Instead of opening to seize her, the tendril stabbed through her chest like she wasn’t there. Its flow pinned her to the stairs, and she could only watch as the clone showed her face to Kenichi.

Her likeness spanned the cavern, the final rotation of the waves Kenichi had stirred up. The skeletons of every lamp and bulb that Corvus had ever used to light the expanse floated to the surface in two great clusters that made Corvus Seven’s eyes. Wide currents from deep below swelled upward into her forehead and cheeks. Wires from every immersive, the entire twentieth century’s computers, every medical machine Corvus had, and some stolen from the sewers and underground lines above, formed her hair. The very center sunk into a vortex shaped as a screaming mouth.

The source of pain lay between the spotlight eyes, held up by her forehead’s updraft. Kenichi had his sword in the forehead as far as it would go, past the hilt and halfway up its handle. Any further, and there wouldn’t be enough left in the open for his one hand to hold in place. He lay on top of his other arm, spread indiscriminately around the sword and glowing with the electricity it drew from below, getting struck by lightning in slow motion and in every color. He couldn’t get up, or even unclench his hand from the sword as it burned him, not even if he tried.

Corvus had watched Kenichi a few times through the simulation, and he was true to the images. He was no better at hiding his pain than he was at hiding his delight. When something, like a red irradiator in a door, injured him, he screamed. When something startled him, he jumped feet into the air. When he felt worried, it was never long until he cried. He would always get the job done, but with a sore throat and red eyes. Killing Corvus Seven, his eyes were screwed shut and his face twisted in a scream that made no sound because his vocal cords were as paralyzed as his hand. Every few seconds, he shifted ineffectually, twitching, as if the electricity was a blanket and there was a direction to slide out from under it. He didn’t know he was doing it.

If Corvus had been nearer to him, she would have seen the isolated patch of bleeding human skin where the sword went in.

Demetrius lifted his hand to turn on his earpiece; he forgot how to trigger it with other way. But Corvus took hold of his wrist when it was only halfway there. “Why...?” breathed Demetrius.

And then the shapes all fell back into the depths at once. The face collapsed, dragging Kenichi under with its details. All currents in the catacombs dropped and went still. The arm bisecting Corvus broke off of its origin as though its circulation had been cut off. Corvus Seven had succeeded at extinguishing herself.

Lux answered for him. He had stopped murmuring into Kenichi suddenly and looked up again. He asked, “Why isn't Kenichi breathing?”

Corvus tried to give the arm in her chest a twist—it was too big of an injury to hurt—until she tried to move it. She bent around it, holding back a scream. It wouldn’t come out at her will, only its own. She stood up with it dragging behind her half walked, half crawled through the doors at last. Moving clumsily around the arm, she dug through the tangled remains of her catacombs for any piece that was left of Kenichi.

No one answered Lux.

“Oh my gods,” he said after a silence that was much too long, and during which he failed to find a heartbeat on Kenichi's neck. “You and your STUPID bots!” He struck at Corvus, but missed and fell on top of Kenichi.

“Lux...!” gasped Demetrius without making any sound.

“You're just bringing him to us, are you?” Lux accused Corvus through his teeth. “Then why did you go through the damn trouble to program your bots to make him look like he's dead? If you can fool us, then maybe you could fool the watch, is that right? Once he's off the public records, you can get away with making anything you want of him to turn him against my family—I get it. And I'm not believing this for one fucking second!” She'd made Kenichi so cold. Lux held him close, curling around his shoulders and head to warm him. He took off his jacket, too, and spread it over Kenichi. It was torn full of holes by now and nearly useless, but only nearly.

“What I told you,” said Corvus, “ I am only returning him to you—he couldn't be left to rest down there. Not in his enemy's old dwelling. Not somewhere out of the sunlight. That is all I bring him to you for—all the ruses are over.”

“Bullshit.”

“Don't assume anything about a plot you never even learned the purpose of. For nearing a thousand years, your ancestors have terrorized your country because of my conditioning. It was too much effort not to have a goal in mind—shouldn't you know?”

“You're right,” said Lux. “I don't know why. Why would anyone create us on purpose? Do you have a lie for it?”

“What would you do with your time if you were never going to die?” Corvus asked.

“Anything but breed a bunch of wretched people to fuck things up!”

“Here's your reason: if they couldn't fuck up a city or a country, they would never get under the skin of the one I truly meant them to scare. I'm stuck on a planet of flies with lifespans that feel like a couple of seconds because Death was too afraid to let me into his house, and you bet your feeble life it can drive one crazy enough to occupy their time this way.

“You just need a moment more to think about it. The worst part of living forever isn't the boredom or the waiting for giant robot tentacles to work their way out of your vital organs. It's watching a planet of people turn into one of flies. Everyone disappears when you are just beginning to love them, after what seems like less time every time. Eventually, it's too little time to let you love them at all. Just tell me if you could have come up with another way to overcome that than mine: as a Langley heir, you are a miserably failed product of my attempt to produce another wicked trickster. One more person so repulsive to Death that he would throw them back like he did to me—back and into my arms. I just wanted a companion, so I tried to make my own.

“Tried, only for one bloody fly to unravel everything I'd done after I'd put centuries into the project.

“Nearly twenty years ago, I was clinging to Iosethep's sixth, eighth and ninth districts for employment in order to be near the Langley skyscraper and keep watch on the promising Langley who was growing up inside, something that couldn't be done directly from my permanent hole in the catacombs. I became a housekeeper in Section Eight so that I could monitor your father with my own eyes.

“The problem with breeding problems into a bloodline is how easily they can become a source of weakness—often, the exact vices I was responsible for in a Langley were exactly those that rendered them no match for Death, hopeless candidates. Lux II did have his weaknesses— such as being an impulsive moron. But he also had a chance. He was born with a full set of teeth, and the first thing he did was bite the doctor's hand and not let go. No one could pry that infant off until they shot him up with sedatives. And that was how he kept living. Nothing ever tamed him; everything I or anyone else threw at him just made him badder.

“One of my first tests of my electronic simulation of Iosethep was to create a copy of Lux II's sim and edit its centuries-documented qualities to eliminate my corruptions while leaving his indomitable energy. I then placed this version in a new timeline and sped it up to see what he could have done to the future of a world without me. He still wasn't a saint, but freed from me, he charmed back the southern empire and stretched it over continents before my eyes. Back in real life, I realized my line had spit out a poisoned Alexander.

“For the first time, I had had to consider protecting myself from my creation. From what I knew of myself, if he was the one Death would reject, centuries would give him more subtlety and a broader access to human understanding, but at the moment, he was an animal. While his age still numbered in the single digits, I wasn't fucking touching that.

“He was fifteen when he wrenched the archduke title from your grandfather, followed by several years of gloating before he actually killed the poor sod. His little brother was much brighter than he was, but he drove Vox to become pathetic, the worst candidate I'd ever bred. If anyone could figure out how to torture an immortal, it was a juvenile Lux II.

“So I didn't employ myself in his skyscraper to watch him, only nearby in the neighboring district. Near enough to spy, but not close enough for him to detect me as a match for him.

“It had been years since the last time I had worked for someone, and I was out of practice in dealing with anyone inclined to meddle. Using my simulation, I sought out someone who would let me clean their home and then be all right with fucking off and leaving me to my own work. I looked in the eighth district first because it was the one that bored me the least, though I was aware that it was not the best place to find the unassuming type I wanted. And I certainly didn't expect a nightclub owner rooming with two women and from a family who looked and acted like their ancestors had bred with spooks to fit the bill.

“The first time I looked at Aubrey through the simulation wasn't because I thought he had a chance. It was because I had heard that his relationship with the Chapals was completely platonic, and I didn't believe it for a second. It caught me off guard when I found no validation for my cynicism, not even in their history. The story I'd found too stupid to believe was true—the girls truly had been just a couple of homeless armed thieves Aubrey had offered a room on the night they'd broken in. He'd offered them a room as they held him at gunpoint. Now they treated him like their quiet sibling, but that in no way subtracted from the stupendous metaphorical bullet he had thrown himself at and missed. I'd been around for two thousand years and had never once seen anyone over the age of five before with a self-protection instinct so retarded.

“Aside from that, his art supplies carried in them a magical link to his brain: whatever they touched, he would forget to clean.

“He was mine. I called him up and offered him the friendliest rate I would accept.

“He hadn't been looking for me, either. He barely had the time to see me the evening we met—my work was upstairs, and he had a moderate bomb threat to attend to down below. All I knew was that it ended in kisses for the perpetrator and had nothing to do with the half box of tissues he went through for his bleeding nose when he first spoke to me—asked my name, what brought me to his singular district, if he could help me with anything (silly ass), and if I knew how to stop the bleeding. He'd broken his nose a few weeks back, and it wasn't all the way healed yet—would start spewing like that at the slightest tap, you know? I never found out how he had aggravated the injury that night.

“One evening, some months later, I was watching him draw, and I saw him slowly, over a matter of hours, grow anxious in front of me. Eventually, he ceased working on his main piece and shifted to making nervous doodles on scraps.

“Often, I knew by now, nothing but his drawing would stress him out tremendously. He had implored me once that if I ever saw him becoming agitated while drawing, not to think it had anything to do with me—he simply hated all of his work before it was finished. So I took my coat from the back of my chair when the sun began to rise and stood to leave, unworried by anything but that I wouldn’t make it home before falling asleep.

“I only sleep in utmost privacy, generally, and I had never, ever before allowed myself to fall asleep at Aubrey’s. Sure, of course we had gone to bed together a few times by then, but only to spend all day sitting up silently or feigning sleep, each with our own reason to remain awake, until it got to be three in the afternoon and we finally burst out laughing in amusement at one another's persistence. His reason was that he had nightmares that he would often wake from screaming, and he didn’t want to startle me. Mine, I said, was dreams, too. Just dreams.

“I meant what happened to me in my absence of them. To be banned from the afterworld includes when one sleeps, as it is where we briefly visit to dream. Everyone but me. When I sleep, my exclusion becomes most visible.

“When I was just about to the door, he stopped me. It hadn’t been his drawing troubling him. He said, ‘Wait—‘

“It took him a moment to gather his words and speak any more than that, but when he did, he spoke as gently as always, keeping his nervous twitch confined to his hands.

“‘There is something going on,’ he said, ‘that I owe it to you to warn you about. A…circumstance has arisen here that is out of—far—entirely—out of bounds of what you applied here to do.’

“I was warned. It was only when he was most worried or upset that he started speaking this formally, this measured—this much unlike himself. I imagined that there was perhaps some kind of persistent terrorist threat he had discovered—being the nicest put together place in Section Eight, his building had always been its denizens’ favorite place to try and wreck.

“I sat back down as he took out a piece of paper he hadn’t been drawing on.

“He said, voice getting quieter with every word, ‘I must give you the option to resign if you do not want to be here in such…conditions…I know this isn’t the official document. I lost it— but Magnus will hopefully take this.’

“This paper was a triangular scrap torn out of a sketchbook, bearing the handwritten words ‘I would like to resign my post’ and a sloping line for my signature. He slid it across the table to me with two fingers that barely touched it.

“I told him to back the fuck up—what was I potentially leaving over?

“He said it too quietly for me to understand. I could only make out that it was short, just a couple of words. I told him to repeat it.

“He did: ‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’

“As seriously as he was taking it, he still didn’t know the true magnitude of what he was asking me to do: to turn away and stay committed to my plan to create a lover with a lifespan like my own or to play with fire that could burn that plan.

“The look on his face as he held his breath wasn’t businesslike in the slightest. He looked like he could explode at any second. It just begged me to push him over the edge. Mocking the delicacy with which he had given me the paper, I pushed it back to him with one pinky finger, without signing.

“But it wasn’t quite a “yes” yet. This wasn’t time yet for a straight answer. To know if he really could love a monster, it had to be known if he could handle what I had in place of dreams.

“‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I, too have a circumstance.’ One that totally crossed out of the reasonable bounds of what he was applying for as a lover. Mine, though, could only be seen, not told. I would sleep in his bed that night—literally sleep this time. That would be his test. If he could handle what he was to see when I fell asleep, that would be his signature of acceptance.

“Only a bottle and a half of pills and the belief that I could probably knock all memory of what he was to see out of his head if he reacted poorly to it let me fall asleep that morning.

“You see—unable to make it to the bubbles of Death’s river to dream, my consciousness only gets halfway out, getting stuck in my shadow instead to wait for my body to awake. What I had never let him see before was my shadow, as I lay in bed, getting up and pacing the room waiting for the daylight to end. I never remember what my soul does in there, as is often the case with legitimate dreams, but when I awoke the next evening, I got an idea of it.

“I opened my eyes to Aubrey kneeling on the floor where my shadow had just reattached itself to my body, looking disappointed. He smiled when he noticed me awake. ‘She went away,’ he said. ‘Can you bring her back next time? We’ve been making up a sign language so she can speak to me.’

“Now that he had seen that, he could only believe me when I told him of my full situation. And I did, because I knew he would accept it. I loved him back.

“He promised me that he would make sure there would be no reason for me to prey on the Langleys any longer. Not long after he confessed to me, he brimmed with every technological means more accessible than M6 documents to extend his life to match mine. He promised me that even if there was nothing perfectly reliable in the world, he would try anything. I’d loved flies before, but never one with the will and the chance to promise this. He was the first to live in a time where it was even a distant technological possibility that one could join me. This made him unlike any who had died on me before.

“He found his way when he met the Fates by following a rumor from Baron Hans Lyon's overlarge mouth. An exchange was made: if he protected them from the M6 they had stolen from, they would one day permit his consciousness to join them in digital form before his death. He figured that this way, he could escape decay by transferring between mechanical bodies like Lucrezia's as each wore out. The Fates estimated that he would survive a few centuries of regular transfers, quite enough time for the world to come up with something that would last him even longer.

“The column of coolant was his second, less certain choice, in case death came early and suddenly.

“I knew he meant it when he killed his first M6. He was in shock—he said he'd never killed before.

“If I hadn't begun to believe him, I would not have destroyed my model child Lux II in a rage when he killed Aubrey. The damage control for that rash move would never end. Everything would begin from there to fall apart.

“Not immediately—I soon succeeded at banishing Aubrey from my heart, even to the point of being able to let him die in my simulation of Iosethep. And Lux II's son appeared to be heading for the family's regularly scheduled madness. But my renewed commitment to the plan was so great that I soon took pity on my fallen star. When I took Lux II away to end his torture, his dumb staff finally decided they'd had enough of the bloodline I'd created and left. Left, leaving just one with the boy—Kenichi, who became a threat to all I had made of little Lux. Another hole to patch up. If his influence continued, Death would one day be more inclined to hug Lux than to banish him. Kenichi had to go.

“Demetrius fortunately played straight into my hands with Kenichi, but then...then this shit. What you see in front of you. Kenichi finally goes, but not in the way I'd planned:

One mound of pipes in the catacombs continued to stir even after Corvus stopped her search to rest—was Corvus Seven back to full power, beginning to stir it up again? No. Orange and the smell of melted hair—Kenichi had found her first. He surfaced, dragging himself to his feet in front of her; his legs were nearly useless. Most of Corvus Seven’s appendages had released him, leaving puncture wounds, but the deepest hung on. Around them, burns made a patchwork of his skin. His arms wouldn’t do anything. He needed them, but could not move them; they stayed locked around a paper-wrapped bundle clutched to his chest. His hands would never hold the thing, either. Having been attached to the sword that killed Corvus Seven, they were burned all the way through his palms, two holes.

The little package was what he had lay on top of as he had stabbed Corvus Seven, and it was what he had confronted her to look for. He couldn’t offer it to Corvus properly without moving his arms—instead, he just leaned toward her with it and shook it a bit, imploring her to take it. He’d rescued it for her.

Corvus twisted the object out from his grip, tearing some of the paper and leaving it behind. His bones had clamped over it so tightly, but he appeared to want her to remove it. Please, take it.

The contents spilled out through the hole she had torn, smallest first. A tied black string with Aubrey’s bottle tied on fell and bounced off of a slab of an old immersive’s exterior, and then the corner of a photograph. Corvus pulled it the rest of the way out—it was still of Aubrey and still really, really bad.

She looked up at him, awed and devastated at once, only able to whisper “Thank you.”

Kenichi ceased to move, falling forward into her. How much blood did he have left? It drained from as many apertures as would have bled on Aubrey the night he died if he had been left in one piece long enough for Corvus to hold him one last time.

That was how Corvus held Kenichi—her medical equipment was shredded, her communication devices were buried and knotted. It was all she could do for him. She cradled his head in her arms and tried to hold him still against her when waves of convulsions began that locked his legs and his face just like his arms. His swollen hands felt a little bit like Aubrey's. She kissed the peak of Kenichi's hairline whenever the shivering slowed, even though it tasted just like it smelled. Kenichi's hair was just a bit longer than Aubrey's had been, and so many times less tidy. Kenichi's skin was freezing, the way Aubrey felt under her hands whenever he had woke from being stunned. Kenichi hadn't brought Aubrey back to life, but had raised him a little above death—he was all over. He was definitely there. Maybe he had spoken, when Kenichi accepted Corvus's coat and her arms for warmth, telling little Kenichi that his love Ginger didn't want to hurt him anymore. “Thank you, sweetie.”

Her tears wet his hair, and he didn't notice. He didn't even notice when she dispensed a striped spider onto his arm to kill his pain.

“I love you, I love you, I love you...”

“Do you know me to have the humility to even make that shit up? Do you know me to be simple enough to conceive of someone doing something so stupid? He died to stop me. He couldn't kill me, so he instead disallowed me to forget...” Corvus backed away from Lux, into the column. She leaned against it the way Nitya did, as if Aubrey was all the way there. “Do something nice with his body, child. And do something to make sure your descendants know who saved them from me, because I give the fuck up,” she said, slightly muffled by her own hair and sleeves pressed against the unharmed glass. “I still love him.”

Lux had shut up, but he had never loosened his hold on Kenichi. Fallen back against Demetrius's cage of metal legs, he had taken Kenichi with him, burying his eyes in his friend's hair and not moving, barely even to breathe. He had wrapped his coat all the way around Kenichi's shoulders and held it there. Demetrius was trapped in the air, unable to either approach his mother or drop to touch those on the floor. His eyes were the biggest they had ever been and locked on Corvus, on a face that had looked for Corvus's whole story like the shooting pains from his youth had just returned.

After a moment, Corvus lifted her head but kept resting her hands on the column. She couldn't leave it until the watch pried her off; Aubrey had left his promise to her in it, and it made the cold material feel a little bit like him. “And of course, you, too are a cause. You and you. Look at you. Just listen to you two together—don't think sound doesn't travel in this building when it's vacant. You just met a moment ago, and already I could hear what I'd been trying in vain to manufacture for myself for a thousand years. I'd physically ruined Lux II before he could produce more than one heir, and of course that heir likes boys. I wasn't going to get another genetic successor anyway...” She turned back to the column and spoke softly to it. “...it's as if you'd written all of this yourself, from wherever you are, silly.” She spoke again to Lux and Demetrius: “When the watch arrives, they can have me. I can't breed immortal terrors from prison, but I can spend the time waiting for someone. Tell them I electrocuted Kenichi, and I'll confess to it. No sentence they can give me will feel like more than an hour to me.”

Aubrey had never showed her any fear of the distant consequences of immortality. She had warned him about having to stand on the earth as the sun finally burned it up—he'd just said she would need someone to shield her from the fumes. She'd warned him about floating isolated in space once the planet was consumed—he said that if his soul was uploaded into a puff of sapient space mist, he would form a cloud around her so she could breathe him. When the universe collapses, I told you we'd spend the rest of time crushed into a singularity, and what did you think of that? You got all bloody excited trying to imagine what singularity sex would be like. You couldn't wait to try it, you sweet fool. I didn't believe you, but fine—let's see, my love. Let's see if you'd really enjoy it.

“No,” said Lux. He lifted his head, revealing dry eyelids and not a tear on his face, but Demetrius still gasped and mouthed his name again upon seeing his face. All of the fury and the force with which he had attacked Corvus had drained from it. He looked grey in the blue light, as though all of his blood had gone, too—all drained to futilely give to Kenichi, and half the years of his life. His skin had begun to itch from the shield material on Kenichi, but he didn't care. When he spoke, half of his voice was gone, too. “You know Oceanic Prime,” he said in a tone like the shade of his face. “Baron Lyon is outside. He needs you to leave with him and not the watch. Not the watch yet. The wall my father trapped the Fates behind was locked with Oceanic Prime. They're still in there. The baron has been trying to free them. He needs your help. If you do it, the watch might shorten your sentence by order of a corrupt archduke.”

Corvus nodded under the noise of a screaming saw sounding from above, louder as it tore through the ceiling.

Before anyone could move, a man-sized, circular piece of ceiling fell and clattered on the floor between Corvus and Lux. The room flared with red light interrupted by the shadows of three watchmen dropping through the hole and the irradiators in their hands.

When the light and Demetrius's eyes cleared, Corvus had fallen senseless from the column with three new wounds, three clean holes in the head.

“It's the watch,” said one of the masked watchmen when he noticed the blind boy. Lux hadn't been startled, though. He hadn't even flinched at the irradiator blasts, just stared forward. “Is everyone all right?”

Demetrius gave the tiniest nod, but his lips were squeezed too tightly to let him speak.

“We apologize on behalf of the city,” another watchman went on. “After the reported monster in the skyscraper failed to show itself for so long, we were beginning to doubt its existence, but then we picked up that biological anomaly under the building and followed it to you.” He gestured to Corvus. “Are you sure you are fine?” he asked Demetrius. “We got a strange reading from you, too.”

“Who is this?” The third watchman had knelt, noticing Kenichi. “Is he—“

Lux spoke: “Go away.”

Whether the watchmen were or were not going to obey Lux before Demetrius drew his own irradiator and stunned them all, they would never know. Lux heard Demetrius start breathing again, heavily. They now looked over five still bodies.

Lux gently set down Kenichi, leaving his jacket, then slowly and quietly slid up Demetrius's side, gaping at the fallen watchmen. “That is the biggest felony.”

Demetrius stared, too, having only just noticed what he had done. “I have a limit. I have a damn limit, too.”

Lux approached Corvus and knelt beside her. “She'll be back up in a second.” He grabbed her arm to shake her, but instead froze. Demetrius watched him bend over her and look more closely, moving his hands around the vital signs for several minutes and speaking her name in her ear. Finally, he turned to Demetrius again. He said blankly, “They killed her. She's staying dead...Death took her back.”

“If he believes her...” breathed Demetrius. “...she must have really...Kenichi died so...”

“Do we break the column ourselves, or do we put her in there with them?”

“I don't know,” trembled Demetrius. Aubrey waking one day in the future to find no one there, or the last piece of him destroyed with Demetrius's own hand. It would take a long time before he could entertain either image for long enough to decide which was worse. “ Don't ask me now. Lux. I'm sorry. I am truly snapping. If I could get out of here, I would, but I can't leave without you. Lux, what are those spots on your face?”

“It's the shield. I'll be fine—“

“If you walk straight ahead across the room, you'll find the door. Leave this floor if you don't want to see something ugly.” Lux didn't have a second to get up before Demetrius burst into tears.

Lux stood and stepped forward, but following Demetrius's crying, not looking for a door. “I'm not going anywhere,” he said. He found Demetrius's face—it was burning up—and left his hand there.

“I mean it. Run,” Demetrius sobbed into Lux's palm. The touch only swelled the lump in his throat. “I stunned th...those watchmen. That is...is a felony. You said. Three times more watch are coming. The proper name for me is fugitive.”

“Rude fuckers will have to deal with me, then,” said Lux.

But Demetrius wasn't done. “I killed Ginger, too—my story led them to kill her. I planted unauthorized artifices in and tore up your house—the Langley skyscraper, the place people always look at. I cost your innocent former staff all sorts of travel money for the purpose of something that wouldn't work. I wasted electricity in the watch's biological scanners. I promised I would help protect you from Desmerais, but I wasn't even awake. I blinded you. I used my dad's old money to pay for Kenichi's augments.” Kenichi's name trembled in Demetrius's throat long after he spoke it. It strangled his voice. “I killed him. Lux, go.” He looked down as far as he could to look at Kenichi, moving his face from under Lux's hand. “I am a very dangerous person. I was a cancer to Iosethep. They have to excise me. Get out of here before something happens. You are the next logical...”

Lux drew back from Demetrius's head with a snap, breathing through his teeth. The color had returned to his face in the brightest shade. “Oh, no. No.” His hands fell to Demetrius's shoulders. If he had gripped them any tighter, he would have cut off Demetrius's breath. “Why does everyone I like talk about themselves that way? You will stop right there, Demetrius London.”

“I understand that something must be released, but that pinches.”

“I'm sorry—” Lux loosened his grip and rubbed each of the spots he had grabbed too hard, but he then left his hands ther,e laying all of his weight on them. “I can't take that...I can't...Kenichi thought he was some kind of useless fool. It gave me the worst headaches...holy shit. How could go for so long without noticing that the voice in their head isn't theirs or some god's, but some complete bastard like my dad's? I don't know how I put up with it! I did, I guess, but you—no. No, no, no, my gods! I can't take another word...” Lux's grip slowly began to tighten again, and a pale pink line of fluid formed at the bottom edge of each of his replacement eyes. “Both of us could have been killed no more than a day after we were abandoned without you. I don't care if you follow the city or the skyscraper's rules, I don't care ever—you saved Kenichi while you could. And me. I guess we know now what's going to happen when each of us dies, but I still hope I can reincarnate because I owe you a metric shitton of lives. We'll never even know how many—how would we find out exactly how many killers your watch line kept away from us that month? Without ever hurting anyone—do you hear me?” Lux gave Demetrius a gentle shake. “Without. So you were fooled by Ginger's shitty augments dealer alter ego who, oh yeah, raised you and knew everything about you and everything about the city and was a legitimate fucking demigod with a thousand years' practice at manipulating people. If I have the energy left to blame anyone, it's her, not the sweet little London who is, oh fucking yeah, shut in a single room the size of my bathroom! No one ever told me about that. I couldn't speak to you all those times because I didn't think some Langley like me deserved all your work, but I still had no idea. Listen—anyone who expects you to control a whole city perfectly from that little space is an asshole. Please don't. I know you're not an asshole. You are falling off the edge way at the other end of the asshole-to-non-asshole scale. Yes, you should have asked for more mobile help, but you cared too much, didn't you? Look at my family—do you really expect yourself to know who we could trust? I don't even. Kenichi was on security—if you should have known, he really should have known, but are we blaming him here?” Lux paused to breathe, slumping over Demetrius's frame in exhaustion. His voice had become scratchy, and the mix of tears and leftover blood now dripped from every corner of his eyelids. “You talk like you committed premeditated murder. Arguing with Ginger and handling her threats on behalf of your professed victim and staying there for him even after he started hating you doesn't sound like you wanted it to happen...is not a cancer to me...” he panted, “...until you exhausted yourself into the fucking sleep of death...all from one tiny awful room where I could barely breathe...spent four years in there and still had more wits than everyone else about you...I couldn't have. I wouldn't have been around to help at all. Give me just one year, tops, of never moving or seeing anything but such a shut up room, and I'll kill myself.”

Demetrius raised one hand and lay it on one of Lux's. It was as warm as his face, but dry. He could nearly, but not quite reach his face to clean off his own tears. That was what he had meant by ugly. “Lux, you need to breathe.”

Lux went much too quiet.

Demetrius placed the tips of his fingers on Lux's chest and felt little motion. “You're not doing it...go on...there you are, Lux.”

“You say my name a lot,” Lux said between deep breaths. Demetrius allowed him one small gasp as he held back an explosion. Demetrius reminded him in this way of how he himself had in one moment repeated Kenichi's name every other word because holy shit—that was a long way to fall, and you're alive, and my gods you're so damn silly.

“I like your name.” A smile flickered briefly on Demetrius.

And I just like your name, too. Kenichi Zimmer. It sounds like you.

Demetrius gave Lux and himself a few more breaths before adding, “You were confined to one building for a very long time, and you lived by looking ever closer at it. I only had to do the same inside my head. One finds their ways to leave a place without moving.”

“What are you, Demetrius London?” Lux stared at Demetrius through his sealant eyes with something deeper that lay behind them. The diluted blood Lux cried landed in the silver of Demetrius's machine for the first time, clearer and more diluted now. “What are you, an angel?”

It elicited another wave of tears from Demetrius, who opened his mouth to release more than one big sob of “Oh, Lux...!” but failed. He squeezed Lux's hand hard enough to feel its thin bones. Kenichi blurred out of his eyes behind an overflow of pooling tears; he could only make out the column's blue light and some shaky silhouette where Lux faced him. “Stop...”

“No,” said Lux. He could no longer feel his arms stretched against Demetrius's warmth. They buckled, and he navigated to the back of Demetrius to hang his arms around him like he had on the stairs.

Demetrius leaned into Lux a bit. It felt like Lux fit there.

Lux hugged Demetrius with his head as well as his arms. “No, I won't stop, not until I know you'll never say those awful things about yourself again. Don't—I'll die. I'll blow up into a million crazy little fucking pieces. Please.”

Demetrius finally whispered, “You don't know something.”

“I know enough—“

“I could have been less single-minded. You might have both survived...”

Lux planted his face in Demetrius's coils. “Get back to me about that when someone invents time travel...”

“You have to know. I owe it to you, and to Kenichi most of all, but I never...” Demetrius's sniffled madly, trying to hold off his nose running. He wouldn't be able to do anything about that, either. “My gods, sorry. I'm not well configured for blowing my nose or anything...”

“Here.”

“Lux, that is your sleeve.”

“We've already established my shirt as a receptacle for your facial secretions.”

“Oh, no, no...I draw the line there.” Demetrius's voice tipped off balance for a second; he struggled to keep the pitch constant. “I had to say...working with Kenichi, I allowed myself to be clouded by...highly compromising feelings toward your guardian. I'm so sorry, Lux.” He spoke faster, feeling pressure building in his eyes and throat. “He was...he was just...so...”

Lux lifted his head to look in Demetrius's eyes again. “Precious? Perfectly silly? Warmest thing since the sun? Didn't you just want to go 'that's it!' kick the door down, fly him to the quietest place in the world where no one would ever hurt him again and love him until the past was smaller than you...?”

“To spend an entire night just touching his hair,” Demetrius wondered. He shook his head. “No bloody way...you...”

“Me, too.”

“Lux, don't go. Forget I told you to go. You come here, now. I'll stun the whole rest of the watch if they want to take one of us away. If they storm in and you're not done...”

“Or you, we take them like your dad and Ginger.”

Demetrius pulled Lux close to him again, guiding Lux's head down to rest on him as the archduke lost the last shred of control over his eyes. Demetrius's went at the same time.

“Going to get blood all over you...oh, gods, my eyes! They're ruined...they're messing up your shit...I can't see where they're leaking...I can't stop...” Demetrius's many wrappings muffled Lux's words.

“Told you they're just rags. There's enough for two.”

Lux didn't leave Demetrius, ever.

END

And that's how I guess it turned out.

But wait. What is that?

WEIRD SEQUEL HOOK? :\

Corvus Seven had absorbed her progenitor's simulation of Iosethep one wire at a time, to draw out how delicious it was. In her consumption, she had crossed and tangled all of those wires, never to be undone again. Even now, with the clone at the center of the mechanical tangle dead, the simulation was fused too deep inside to ever be extricated and certainly to ever be changed back into an accurate representation of Iosethep. Or, for that matter, the physical earth as we know it at all.

Tied up with every other machine in in the catacombs, and a few under Section Eight, the simulation's accuracy had been infected by the imaginations of Corvus and the dark district. In short, the whole thing was like the inside of Lyon Prime's house now.

The sky had been ripped away first, alerting Lyon Prime to the fact that something was fucking with his world from the outside. It had torn away like wet paper to reveal the blackness of nodespace, with the rainbow of dendral nodes and the spidery lines they traveled on taking the place of the stars. At one time, Lyon Prime could have done something about it, but Corvus had never given his administrative powers back. He sat back and watched, unbothered—whatever happened next, it would be all her fault.

Plenty did.

Next, the simulation's mostly uniform recording of time broke down as Corvus's old saved timelines and projections were cobbled into the main just like the program was absorbed into Corvus Seven's body. Hundreds of chronological columns, large and thin, in every degree of darkness, daylight or cloudiness shot into the sky all over the city—Lyon Prime watched through his many screens. The wall of a column containing some archived future sliced through his basement, right through the left side of his face—he didn't notice until he reached up to scratch his ear and felt half a mop of arid grey hair that wasn't on the other side of his head. One also caught Amanda, who was upstairs asleep. Passing through her bed, it transformed her into a sleeping baby girl. Lyon Prime sighed in relief—she was at least comfortable.

Elsewhere, feline hive minds had become the official building material of the fourth district, and there was no sound in the third district anymore; everyone in it now spoke through text inside speech bubbles.

Lyon Prime was glad that he had no visible augments, because everywhere, on everyone, they became Corvus Seven-themed. False eyes took the form of her angry eyes, robotic hands and arms sprouted medical supplies through their fingertips, nanobots ate hosts' vocal cords and in place of speech, directed flexible limbs and antennae to spell out everything the wearers wanted to speak. And worse.

Upstairs, the telephone rang—in a series of beeps, like a good, non-antique telephone should.

Lyon Prime hoped that wherever he was, Lux Prime was indoors, because greasy black clouds were forming around the tallest buildings and had begun to ran shield material, gluing everything below to each other and to the puddles of slime that formed.

The telephone rang again.

Corvus's multitude of experiments with Aubrey sims took their toll, too. His artistry didn't just encrust the inside of his own building anymore, but all of Section Eight, growing out of its home like a dark organic being with lots of skulls.

“Baron Lyon, is that you?”

Lyon Prime didn't answer; the voice had caught him mid-drink.

Last of all, when the sword pierced the head of Corvus Seven, the skin designs of the sims in a great swath of North Iosethep bled from her and were lost. There was no getting them back—everyone up there now looked like the same faceless, green humanoid sprite, wandering deaf, dumb and blind. The Ring District, being on the periphery, lost the most: all human brain data, leaving behind only bodies that were intent on filling the void by staggering into the inner districts and feasting on the grey matter of the living. No, Alexander Oros was not in the Ring District when this happened. He was walking just inside of it, on a tour of the city with his new friend from the hospital when the living dead started closing in. Fortunately, at the suggestion of his rougher pal, he had earlier that day replaced his busted shield heating weapon with a Corvus Seven-themed chainsaw. Even this elicited no more from the impassive Lyon Prime than a folder full of screenshots.

Corvus's wrecked sanctum was the only place he didn't watch. He had turned off that screen a while ago—the Kenichi sim's files had all gone corrupt at once. Lyon Prime had given the problem a quick look—they had all tried to combine into one, glued together by a load of medical data that had nothing to do with the simulation. It was too big of a mess to even do anything flashy. The entire network of catacombs in the underground layer froze, forbidding him from zooming in any closer. What had once been Corvus's dwelling had become a splotch of icy green glow among the cobblestones, untouchable.

“Mister Lyon, are you all right, if I may ask?”

He finally turned around, if only to get whoever it was out of his basement, but then he stopped wanting to. He smiled for the first time since Corvus had surgically removed his powers, and not even his usual sardonic grin. He smiled like an innocent boy reunited with a special friend.

“You...!” he gasped, and jumped from his seat to embrace the shadowed and beautiful Miss Aubrey.

“I know...” She seemed not to know why she was here, but she gave him a tiny smile back.

“What the fuck?”

“Hon, get over here and let me me show you what the fuck,” said Lyon Prime, dragging her over to the screens by the wrist. “Something is making the simulation get all batshit insane. It's falling apart—look over here, at Section Eight.” He pointed. “It's your stuff! Exactly how that district should be. And look—there's Oros. In the best fight ever.” When Aubrey looked worried rather than impressed, Lyon Prime showed her Amanda. “Past Amanda,” he said. “Love her?”

“Oh, yes...” Aubrey touched Amanda's screen with one gentle fingernail. “She's so sweet...”

“If she stays that way for long, you can can make a new impression on her, but I dunno how the program can survive this. We're all doomed—go outside and play with some cat buildings, if you want, or go for a swim in District Two. Go shank some zombies with Oros if you're worried about him. Seriously, you two would make the sickest team ever; I wanna see it. Do anything. It doesn't matter.” Lyon Prime turned and kissed his friend on the cheek.

Aubrey playfully pushed Lyon Prime away, challenging him to come back. “Scoundrel.” She got him back by leaning toward him to watch the screens, into just the position that would let her breathe into his ear until he was maneuvering his hands all over his face to hide the blushing best. Then she saw one over there that caught her interest sincerely. “That one doesn't even look like our city.”

She didn't have to point; it was plain to Lyon Prime which it was.

The image was the interior of the Langley skyscraper, but without any of the eeriness. Rather than red and obsidian, the atrium the screen looked down on was furnished with red and gold. A design spanned the floor, a map of the world laid out in crimson marble with select states all around the southern hemisphere and a few in the north painted over in solid gold, including the Langleys' own.

Standing on that floor, with his feet on the Antarctic Ocean, one person in black lipstick looked up at the camera, still.

“I christen him Lux Two Prime,” said Lyon Prime. “Don't care if there's one of him running around in our Iosethep technically entitled to the name. This is the slick one.”

It was a very new version of Lux II to them. Lux Two Prime's clothes followed his home's theme, gold instead of black—he still didn't look like he could possibly breathe in them. Unlike the original, whose head had been brimming with chewed wires, this one's only visible augment was a pair of tidy porcelain fangs just visible over his lip. His hair, rather than looking like he had stuck his finger in a light socket, was slicked back tidily. The greatest difference, though, was that he appeared calm. Not ready to pounce, not angry or cruel. He still had the original's fire, but it sat contained in him rather than swinging about breaking everything.

He did not cover his eyes with anything, and they were fixed on the camera, as if he was looking curiously back at Aubrey as she looked at him.

Without ever breaking that eye contact, he moved over to the nearest column, the one the camera was mounted on, and set his foot up on its base. He stopped and stared for a few seconds more, then began to climb the column.

“Hello there,” said Lyon Prime. “Someone doesn't want to be watched?”

When Lux Two Prime reached the top, eclipsing most of the floor's deign with his face now in Lyon Prime's and Aubrey's view, he held on extra tight with one arm, then freed his other hand to draw an irradiator, which he pointed at the camera set on red. Lyon Prime said, “Guess not. Bye-bye.”

Aubrey smiled and waved to Lux Two Prime even though he couldn't see her. Except he could. The irradiator's read beam didn't come to hit a lens; it shattered Lyon Prime's screen and, passing through it and into the basement, found its mark between Aubrey's eyes. She swayed in place for a second, eyes wide beside the clean and nearly bloodless hole, before falling to the floor. She had died on contact.

Lyon Prime stood—that was the most he could move at first. “Why her?” he mouthed, staring unblinking through the skyscraper-deep hole in his monitor and into Lux Two Prime's quite physically present face. “Why did it have to be THE ONE WHO CAN'T GET A FUCKING BREAK FROM BEING MURDERED ALL THE TIME?” He thrust in his fist, breaking a wider hole in the screen, and dragged Lux Two Prime halfway into the basement by his hair. “EVERY DAMN TIME SHE TURNS AROUND—bang! Poof. Stab. Whatever! WHY?” He readied his other fist to knock Lux Two Prime all the way back down to the hard floor, but he had already forgotten something.

Lux Two Prime just pointed the irradiator at him. Nothing cruel had crept onto his face yet, but a tension had. His hand with the irradiator wobbled slightly, and his knuckles were straining white and red. He hadn't liked what he had just done, and his eyes begged Lyon Prime not to make him do it again. Did he even know why he had shot Aubrey? He didn't look all that sure. It hadn't been like him.

Lyon Prime backed off, and Lux Two Prime squeezed the rest of the way out of the monitor, stepping out onto the basement floor with the irradiator still keeping the other at bay. He knelt beside Aubrey.

Lux Prime cried, “Oh, please no—“

But all Lux Two Prime did was put his irradiator away and gently close her eyes with two of his fingers. He then stood and put one finger of his free hand to his lips, shushing Lyon Prime. It was another great difference between him and the original Lux II—he hadn't said a single word yet.

Lyon Prime didn't risk speaking again, even as Lux Two Prime climbed back onto his desk and stood on it, facing the monitors. What are you doing here?

Lux Two Prime lifted one of his feet and wedged it between two monitors. For a second time, he paused for a moment to look up through a portal to another world. Then, once more, he started climbing, this time more easily, using each monitor as a hand or foothold. Confusion paralyzed Lyon Prime. What would Aubrey do here? Maybe it wasn't the greatest idea to ask himself. Oh, yeah—destroy him.

Lux Two Prime had mostly disappeared through the Hole; only one ankle remained in the basement. That was the one Lyon Prime leapt up and lunged for—but never touched. He was blown back first by the quick blast from Lux Two Prime's irradiator—blue. He would get back up, but not until Lux Two Prime was far away.

Lux Two Prime dropped his irradiator, giving it to Lyon Prime, before continuing to climb. He went faster than before and faster with every foot he ascended—gravity was lifting as Iosethep became more distant and the heavens surrounded him. When the lit rectangle below that marked Lyon Prime's basement had shrunk to a point, he could feel that if he lost his grip, he would never know solid ground again.

He didn't know how long he had been climbing—the expanse above never changed to mark days or hours. He had gone far enough for something new to become visible in the star clusters and galaxies that could be seen through the Hole. The straight threads connecting them all, coming in every color. He hung onto the monitors on the edge of nodespace, not space space, and for this Lux II, his body was intact and under his full command.

No longer was his form constrained by the recorded data in the simulation. He was no longer contained by any program—the sky was as literally as ever the limit. So, he paused to grow hooked, golden claws on the tips of his feet and his fingers, to let him grip the monitors more surely. There; that was better. He went on, even faster.

He passed by one big, grey and dusty node that had looked like a moon when it had been distant. It meant little to him for now; he was concentrating on staying alive.

When the air that bled from the simulation thinned too much to breathe any longer, his grip on the monitors temporarily tightened as new organs grew around his lungs to renew the air he had left in them. It felt like knives, and the last thing to leave his mouth and nose before two keratin-plated tubes grew out of his collar and fused themselves over them was a spray of blood. He took a full breath and sped up.

The atmospheric pressure went away with the air, too—as he climbed, he ignored the itching sting of the hard scales he willed out of and over his skin to hold himself together. They were the color of his hair, and the organic lenses that formed bubbles over his eyes had the thinnest golden veins.

He sustained himself through the pain by imagining what delight Aubrey—his own timeline's sweet Aubrey London— would react with if he could see his friend now. The tubes would have been his favorite thing.

Temperatures fell. While maneuvering between several threads that crossed closely around the tower of monitors, Lux Two Prime did his best to bear the necessary stabs of the feathers sprouting from his new exoskeleton wherever he felt stung the most by the cold. Not everywhere, of course. That would look stupid.

Iosethep was finite, so the monitors displaying its every corner also were. Lux Two Prime didn't remember until he reached up for another and at last felt nothing there. He pulled himself onto the tops of the top monitors and stood there, holding himself in place with the talons on his toes. Everything else floated—the looser filaments of his feathers, his arms, and his hair, which had come mostly unglued by now from his scalp.

Along a red thread that passed closely by his face, a small red node traveled past. He touched it as it went; it felt like plastic.

It was one of a mass of billions. The monitors stopped near the tightly packed center of nodespace now, a star cluster. Wherever Lux Two Prime looked, he could see enough nodes to represent every city in the world, none of them tied to him. He could also see his own hands. Something lit this place, and it cast his body in the shade of its icy green light.

He noticed that he had a shadow, and it fell to his left. It also was becoming sharper around the edges. He looked the other way for the source of the light—it was coming his way, whatever it was.

He waited to catch his breath, hesitating before doing anything. This was not the end; he wasn't going to climb back down because someone was here first. He had reached the top of the monitors with one more card to play—he had never been the type to tolerate a dead end. That one last thing was just going to hurt like hell.

The shape he saw wasn't round, like a node, but tall , like another person. Two thin filaments dropped from the figure's head and fell in a wave—they stretched and fell at least as deep as the monitors. Lux Two Prime couldn't see the end of them when he looked down. As it came closer, he recognized a cloak on the person—hard to see because it was almost invisible, reflecting the nodes around them. The filaments were its hood, the tip of which split in two and fell forever.

Then the face came into view. Lux Two Prime gaped dumbly. This Kenichi Zimmer was nothing like the near invisible underling Kenichi in his own world. This one had a little of someone else in him, sharing half of his ice-green face with him. That half of his face looked like someone had peeled the skin off a sloppy exoskeletal head. Cobbled together, barely sealed metal with loops of wire and pointy things poking through every crack. His hair, all of it, was black—Kenichi's was supposed to be orange.

The rest of his face was Kenichi, however, and it wasn't a veneer stretched over more metal. It smiled as only an intact human face could at Lux Two Prime. A hello smile. "I was just waiting for you," beamed Kenichi Prime.

Lux Two Prime panicked. They hadn't made an appointment.

He drew his irradiator and then, quickly, did his thing. He imagined up one last feature with an awful ripping of flesh and scales over his shoulders—to hold back screams that the original Lux II would certainly have let loose, he bit his tongue until it filled his mouth with blood. His legs trembled; he couldn't feel them, nothing but the rending behind his head. His feet stayed clamped to the edge of the last monitors, however he did it.

One more membrane on his back swelled and split, and they emerged. Each wing measured three times his height, and the feathers at their tips stretched them even longer.

Fuck letting them rest or letting the blood dry from the joints; he could stretch them for the first time as he kicked off from the monitor stack and flew toward Kenichi Prime. And they would steer him just fine in airless space because, damn it, he wanted them to. It was the whole world's dendral network he was loose in now, and he was too powerful not to do whatever he wished.

Kenichi Prime didn't retreat. He only watched Lux Two Prime in amusement as the emperor, with wings buzzing, shot toward him like a bullet. If this was his way of saying hello, he needed a reply in his own language.

I'm not sure when another volume will start up. I don't have that much to say about it. The only sure thing is that it's time to rest. Thanks to all who stuck with this, and I hope you enjoyed it.

Whoa, it's done? Congratulations.

Gonna archive binge over winter break.

Download link is also finalized (???????????).

Gonna start over after I DL it.