I wrapped my arms around Crawler, sinking my claws deep into the flesh and armor of his back, and used the grapple hold to anchor myself so I could rip and tear at his more vulnerable underside with my paws.

  His screeching and roaring was distorted by the mouthful of my shoulder he had, and I could feel his legion of teeth grinding on my bones. I reached up with one lower arm and hooked my claws into his heavy jaw and ripped at it. I wasn’t strong enough with my lower arms to be able to detach it, but I did successfully rip a chunk out of the middle section using my claws, which momentarily broke the bite-hold he had me in.

  Thick, black, gloopy blood sprayed over and coated several of my eyes, partially blinding me as I fought to reposition him underneath me. I was larger. I was stronger, and I had the advantage in this fight when it came to fighting like this.

  Blinded or not, I shifted onto his back, his stinger-tipped tentacles whipping and lashing at me, struggling to find purchase on my armored hide, but wriggling their way into battle-damaged areas to spray his venomous acid.

  I roared in agony; the caustic slurries he was spraying me with were doing what felt like horrific damage to my inner tissues. That was a problem for later.

  Wrapping my tail around his midsection, I grabbed under his mangled jaw with my upper arms and wrenched. His clawed hands came up to grab at my arms, the claws screeching off the hard armor with a sound that put my teeth on edge.

  In any other circumstance, I’d probably be really put off by it. At the moment, I had slightly bigger problems to deal with.

  Bands of muscle rippled and shifted throughout my arms and back as I heaved.

  Screeching turned into gurgles as flesh tore, and with a sudden lurch, I ripped his entire head off and threw it off to the side. His body went limp underneath me, but I knew better.

  Decapitation was only a minor annoyance and temporary setback for Crawler.

  Spitting out a mouthful of foul-tasting ichor, I shifted my position over his body, drew my right upper arm back, then punched it down through the stump of his neck. With my arm buried inside up to my elbow, I shifted and filtered my hands through his guts, fingers held wide and claws cutting and slicking as I searched for my target.

  There.

  A solid ball distinct enough in shape and feel from the rest of his innards, wrapped in what felt like connective tissues and dangling from where it was anchored to bony plates.

  With a sharp tug, I ripped it out of his chest and out of the ragged stump of his neck. With a flex of my forearm muscles, I squeezed down on it hard. I could crush stone with the strength of my upper arms; the ball of crystal never stood a chance. It cracked with a pop and was crushed into dust almost instantly.

  Once upon a time, these fights were bitter, life-and-death struggles. Sometimes taking hours or even days. Now they’re little more than a distraction from endless, grinding boredom.

  I took stock of myself. I was in rough shape, but truthfully? It wasn’t something life-threatening. Vicious wounds in the form of puncture and slash wounds. Some were bubbling and smoking from the chemical warfare Crawler was so fond of.

  It was painful. Extremely painful. Maybe even edging into the agony territory. But I didn’t mind. I welcomed it, if anything, as strange as that might sound.

  The pain was grounding. It was a reminder that the battle had occurred, that I had been victorious.

  It also reminded me that it was real and hadn’t been something that I’d imagined in a moment of lapsed vigilance.

  A swim sounds good right about now.

  I sent instructions to my ability and waited for my wings to finish regrowing. Winslow High School was little more than rubble around me, no beam intact and upright, no cinder block unbroken in the piled-up wreckage that served as a battle arena.

  It’d been like this for so long that I didn’t even remember what it looked like originally.

  Not really.

  I sat in silence while the dust that the fight had kicked up cleared out. The gray mass in the air probably wasn’t very good to be breathing in, but the forlorn, color-stripped shadows that it cast seemed oddly appropriate. When my wings were done growing, I gave them an experimental stretch, then took to the air.

  Rather than do my typical dive into the bay from higher up, I practically lowered myself in like I was sliding into a bathtub. Smashing into the surface of the ocean childishly was fun, like a big, blue cannonball, but I wasn’t in the mood at the moment and didn’t want to aggravate my wounds further.

  The cold water rushed over me, and a few moments later, I came to rest on the bottom of the bay. The sand and muck squished under my bulk and formed a comfortable nest to relax in. The cold, dirty seawater filled my chest, and I could feel the stress of ever-present vigilance ebbing out of my system in the depths.

  Sleep took me.

  I woke up some amount of time later feeling refreshed and intact.

  While I’d been out, I’d dreamt of my friends. I was overdue to visit them, and my subconscious was most likely giving me a gentle reminder of that fact.

  I swam out of the bay and prowled on all fours over to the dockyards area.

  I’d cleared out a bunch of the rubble and collapsed warehouses and made a fairly large, wide-open space… some time back.

  Time was hard. More than hard, it was also deeply annoying.

  I’d given up trying to keep track of time a while ago. Tracking it was like rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it come tumbling right back down; it was an endless, pointless task that would surely drive a person insane. It had probably been a really long time ago, come to think of it.

  I didn’t want to think about it, though. That was entirely the point. Thinking about it made me mad because I had no control over it, and not having control wasn’t good for my psyche.

  No matter.

  Using the cleared-out space formerly occupied by warehouses, I’d collected various chunks of steel and had quite painstakingly shaped them into the figures of my friends.

  That too had been quite some time ago. I’d had to start doing regular maintenance on them, replacing some pieces where the rust had made them brittle, and anointing the rest with motor oil I’d salvaged into plastic drums.

  There was Taylor, whose figure was composed of twisted strands of rebar that I’d lacquered in black paint. Tall, dark, and thin, she was easily recognizable among the rest of the figures.

  Melody was also in a dark color, with her arms outstretched, and had a somewhat crude-looking geodesic dome erected around her.

  Flechette had a big metal crossbow in her hands.

  Amy was kneeling next to a figure with a spiky crown on its head.

  I wasn’t super happy with the way that Glory Girl had come out. I couldn’t find any white or gold paint when I went about making the figures. So the number one big identifier of who she was was the headpiece.

  If only I had the idea to make them earlier, before the decay had gotten so bad.

  Bitch was riding on a brutish, quadrupedal dog-figure, along with the other members of the Undersiders.

  The Protectorate had its own section, as did the Wards.

  I was relating the story of how the battle with Crawler went to my friends. Taylor made a snarky crack about how Winslow had never looked better than when the dust had settled. Vicky admonished her for joking about the destruction.

  My attention was pulled away from my socializing by… something. I wasn’t sure what it was, or even if there was anything at all at first. It was very subtle, but it was persistent and nagging at the back of my awareness. Any time I was awake, I tried to be as aware of my surroundings as possible. It might have been a bit of a bad habit I’d picked up at some point, but the hypervigilance helped keep me straight and level from day to day.

  There was a good reason for it. Sometimes my mind would play tricks on me, and without paying close attention, it could be hard to tell what was real and what wasn’t.

  Not being able to differentiate between the two wasn’t a good thing. Even I knew that. Lessons from another time and place, vaguely remembered.

  In the event that it wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me, then sometimes it’d be the warden of this hell, up to some mischief or another. It rarely visited, almost never announced itself, and would change things. I’d have to try and figure out what had changed after the fact.

  I narrowed down what was bothering me after a few moments of concentration.

  It was a taste-scent.

  The air was mostly still today, but occasionally a breeze would wash in from the ocean and shift things about.

  It’s... there it is again.

  This place, this purgatory, was a graveyard. A place filled with only the dead, with a single exception. Nothing real lived here. So when I picked up a floral scent among the smell of dirty seawater, rotting timber, rusting steel, and musty brick and concrete, it stood out.

  I decided to investigate. Quietly, and carefully.

  With my camouflage up, I snuck along, following my sense of smell-taste. It was dangerous to try to move on buildings. Of the ones still mostly intact and standing, nearly all of them were fairly unstable at this point. So I stuck to the streets, which required that I move more slowly than I would have otherwise.

  I crept closer, and the smell grew stronger in my mouth.

  I saw a–

  Pausing, I deliberately turned all my eyes away from it, counted to ten, then looked back in that direction.

  There was a girl. A pale girl. Someone who bore a strong resemblance to a me that had ceased to exist a long, long time ago.

  Silver hair, snowy skin, blue eyes that looked washed out–nearly grayscale.

  She looked like a vision of a Morgan that’d been dipped in bleach, or something.

  Not color safe, cold water only, delicate cycle.

  I approached even more slowly and carefully.

  She seemed like she was lost, which wasn’t at all what I would have expected. At first, I thought it might be the Warden of this place playing another trick, another game. Or worse, that it was my fraying sanity once again checking to see if I was still paying attention. But as I stalked and observed, my doubt in either of those two things being the case grew.

  This maybe-figment-of-my-imagination seemed confused and lost in a way that my prior assumptions would not have.

  Stolen story; please report.

  I watched her tilt her head back and close her eyes, her face turned upward toward the sun. Then she spread her arms.

  I crept closer. I still wasn’t sure if she was real, but I was determined to find out.

  My chest vibrated as I spoke. “You shouldn’t have come here, Pale Imitation. But because you have, I have found you.” She didn’t move from her arms-spread pose.

  I picked her up in my right upper hand, and I could feel her trembling in my grip. There was nothing to this girl but a pitiful covering of skin over bones. She reminded me of my friends in more ways than one.

  If this is another dream, it’s a very realistic one. She’s shaking like she’s scared half to death.

  She reminded me of my tormentor, and I had the urge to terrorize this pale thing in my hand. I didn’t think it was her, but the urge persisted over the weak protests of my rational mind.

  “Open your eyes, don’t you want to see your nightmare?”

  I’d turned her so she was facing me, and her eyelids fluttered open. Her eyes grew as wide as dinner plates as she took in my visage. Her eyes reminded me of someone, but I was having a hard time putting a name to the memory.

  Oh, right. Director Piggot. I can’t believe I forgot her.

  “Boo,” I teased her, and gave her a light shake in my hand. She didn’t respond, past her continued trembling.

  There was a near-silent pop, and I spun an eye around behind me to see it.

  The one I loathed.

  The tormentor.

  “Leave her alone,” it said in a tone that rankled my nerves.

  “Or what, Subjugator?” I taunted it, the one I hated. “Will you take away what rightfully belongs to me, like you’ve taken everything else?”

  It sighed at me. It actually sighed at me, like I was the one being bothersome here. Like this wasn’t a space that I’d been relegated to, which was now being invaded by not one, but two unwelcome guests.

  The thought made my blood boil in my veins.

  “We don’t have time for this back-and-forth. I told you we’d speak again as soon as I had time to sit and properly talk. Don’t involve her.”

  Wait, what?

  I glanced at the girl in my hand. This… Was this a real person? And not some offshoot of the Subjugator itself?

  I felt suddenly confused; I still wasn’t entirely certain what was going on here.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t involve her when she comes knocking on my door!?” I gave the pale one a light shake in my hand for emphasis. My anger was directed at the creature that wore my skin around like a cheap disguise. The me-that-wasn’t.

  She brought her hand up, fingers poised to snap them. I opened my mouth to say something, and a moment later, I was falling upside-down. I crashed into and straight through a building’s rooftop. With the screech of metal and crashing roar of crumbling concrete, the building came crashing down all around me.

  Gnashing my jaw in rage at being tossed away like a piece of trash, I screamed out: “You’re not the only one with tricks, Subjugator!”

  That thing infuriated me like nothing else. We’d interacted in the past, and it was always tricks, games, or lies.

  It had appeared, seemingly randomly, one day, a long, long time ago. It had been apologetic then and had told me that it was going to try to make up for how bad things had been.

  What did it do? It introduced fish into the previously empty ocean, and mostly mindless things for me to fight against.

  Enemies from the past, brought back to life, but only a shallow simulacrum of their former selves. They didn’t really speak much and didn’t interact outside of being hostile and attacking on sight.

  Brain-dead, like video game characters set to kill on sight.

  It was at least something to do to occupy my time. Insulting, but better than the nothing from before. I got to practice fighting a little, although the challenge that most of them presented was mediocre at best.

  Time passed. Things returned to a routine I was familiar with, one without strange interlopers.

  I searched the city high and low. I found no other traces of the girl, or of the subjugator, for that matter.

  Until one day, something strange happened.

  I was lounging on the beach, lying in the sun and sand, enjoying a mostly cloudless, sunny afternoon. The surf was lapping at my forearms and tail, the contrast of the cool water contrasting wonderfully with the radiant warmth of the sunlight on my hide.

  There was weather here, now. It hadn’t always been like this. For a good long while, it’d been a situation where the sun rose and set, every day identical to the one that came before it. The introduction of climate and weather variety was one of the improvements promised to me. So there was weather, and seasons too, although they were somewhat erratic and inconsistent. Lasting too long, or not long enough, being unseasonably warm or cold for the supposed season they were supposed to represent.

  I had to very reluctantly admit that it was an improvement over the endless monotony and sameness of what had come before the change.

  I was lying there on the beach and soaking up sunlight when the weather started to change, very quickly. There wasn’t anything natural about this place, but even as strange as it could be at times, this stood out to me. Clouds rolled in, the day became overcast, and the temperature dropped rapidly. I thought it might start storming with such a quick change in the weather, but it remained silent save for the sound of the ocean.

  It started raining. A sprinkle at first, then it intensified into a steady shower.

  The rain felt nice to me, and the temperature shift didn’t bother me in the slightest.

  What bothered me was that while I’d been pondering over the sudden shift in the weather, a bizarre ripple in the air had formed not too far down the beach from where I was. It wasn’t clearly defined, and there was a more centralized elliptical shape where the heat wave or mirage effect was stronger, surrounded by a weaker ripple effect.

  A scent was carried through the air, and I smelt that floral scent once again.

  The scent of her. The pale one. Familiar in a way, and not, at the same time.

  I heard something. The tentacles on my head wriggled and shifted in place, trying to adapt to the new sound and filter out the background sound of the surf.

  Sniffling. Crying. The scent-taste of teardrops.

  I rose up on all fours and approached warily. Circling around the strange ripple in the air, trying to get a better grasp of the anomaly.

  It was a three-dimensional thing. Sort of. Egglike in shape, or maybe more like a sphere that’d been stretched vertically. Small, maybe not much more than the size of a person, which, comparatively, was tiny. It hovered off the sand by a foot or two.

  Things were leaking from it. Sensations–a touch, a scent, a feeling. A trembling vibration in the background of all of it.

  My numerous eyes scanned every rooftop, every nook, and every cranny within my visual range–which was vast. I took my time.

  The creature had never laid traps for me in the past, but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t do so in the future. This could certainly be a trap. A new form of cruel entertainment for it, perhaps.

  The thing was, the Warden had a certain… vibe about them. I likened it to a salty flavor. This lacked that odd salinity.

  I reached out one claw-tipped upper hand towards the ripple.

  I pulled my finger back suddenly when it encountered what felt like body-temperature water. I looked at it. Nothing, as I would have expected. It didn’t seem to react to my touch, either.

  I reached out again, and this time, when I encountered the surface of the thing, I dipped my finger in a little deeper, exploring the information that was being fed back to me by my exploratory digit.

  There was a sudden pulling sensation. I tried to draw my hand back, but it was stuck in place. I pulled harder, my paws and other hand sinking into the sand, but it had me quite securely. There was a momentary tug, then I was yanked into an anomaly too small for my massive frame. It felt like space was warping around me as I passed through.

  I was… extremely disoriented for a moment. Discombobulated. I was sitting with my head on my arms, and my butt on a curb.

  I felt a sensation I thought I’d forgotten.

  I was cold. Shivering, even.

  Beyond the sudden shift in perspective, sensations, and perceptions, there was something else. There was an other present. I could feel them, but only as a vague, barely-defined sensation in my head. They were shivering at a similar frequency to me, but phase-shifted. Out of sync. The sensation was most pronounced by feeling where those vibrations conflicted with one another.

  It wasn’t right. Close, but not correct. Imprecise.

  The vibrations were irritating, so I tried to concentrate on minimizing them. Shifting myself around so that things lined up better, each peak and each valley growing closer to one another. Things were smoothing out. But it needed more; it still wasn’t quite right. There was bumping and jostling.

  I tried once again, and this time, it was like the mental equivalent of holding your arms out and falling backwards to make a snow angel, except I fell into an already-existing outline, one that I fit into perfectly.

  Momentary confusion surged around me, but it settled down almost immediately, then was gone, leaving only a faint murmur in the background.

  I didn’t feel cold now. I was cold.

  I swallowed, working unfamiliar muscles in the process. It felt strange, and a little gross to me, but I’d make do. I scrunched up muscles I shouldn’t have, in a face that wasn’t mine. The world went dark, as eyelids I didn’t possess were squeezed shut, blocking out the blurry, poor view of the world. Not around me, but only in front of me.

  I could feel my gorge rise in my throat, and I slowed my breathing to fight off the sudden urge to vomit.

  When I felt like I wasn’t about to hurl, I opened my eyes and dropped down to my lap.

  Mushy, clawless fingers shifted to where a small bag was squirreled away from wandering eyes. They were cold, clumsy, half-numb as I fumbled with the zipper on the bag.

  There was a phone I didn’t recognize inside. Not a make or a model I recognized, or one even remotely like what I was used to. Not the convenient folding designs I knew that protected the sensitive controls and display. Instead, this was like some… slab of metal and glass, and it seemed like the only thing it was designed to do was break when dropped.

  I didn’t know how to operate this thing. Where were the buttons? It had too few, and other than making the screen light up with a background image when pressed, they didn’t seem to really do anything.

  I didn’t know what to do with it, but she did. The other. I had the impression of exhaustion and grief from her, and that she might be drifting off to sleep, or snoozing, or something of the sort. I ran my mental fingertips through her memories, flicking through them like I might a stack of study cards for an upcoming test.

  There, using the phone…thing.

  I let memories of the body that wasn’t mine run. The phone unlocked with a gesture of cold fingertips, and I pulled up the phone’s map application. There was a list of locations near my current location to choose from, a list of recent searches, and helpful bookmarked locations.

  There.

  I tapped the destination I had in mind, and the map zoomed in and oriented itself, showing my position in the city and the directions I needed to follow to get to my destination.

  I zipped the bag shut, pulled it over one shoulder, and started moving.

  I had to rely on the memory of the other to move around. I didn’t recognize these strange dimensions, weak and ineffectual senses, or the awkward gait of trying to navigate around without a proper counterbalance. I swore I was going to fall on my face, but managed not to.

  The sensations of her body were unsettling and vaguely nauseating. Everything was so… soft. Soft and weak. It was a miracle that she didn’t just tip over or randomly break trying to accomplish anything.

  This body felt useless in a way that made me want to mentally grind my teeth. Weak, frail, defenseless, and maybe even worse… weaponless. I remembered fighting with fists and feet, but it was so long ago, and so rotten from disuse that I doubted that it would serve any purpose at all.

  Furthermore, I was convinced that actually trying to strike something, or someone, would just result in this pathetic body causing itself far more harm than anything else.

  On the subject of the other, I could feel her in my head?

  Her head? Our head?

  She was sad, depressed, and wounded. A broken thing, limping around on all fours metaphorically. She didn’t resist when I pulled her onto my lap and held her.

  She wanted to be held. She wanted to give up, to curl up and die on some dirty street. Conflicting feelings, but ones united by threads of overwhelming negativity. I pet her as you might a fuzzy animal on your lap.

  She seemed pleased enough with the treatment. And that someone else was handling things.

  I reached out using familiar muscles, into the dusty and cobweb-laden parts of her brain, and I woke up the part of her that felt more like me than the rest of it.

  A push here, a tug there. A somewhat-sleepy, but deeply, intimately, familiar sensation of the ocean.

  A twisting sensation in my chest, and warmth started to fill me from the inside out. Heat oozed out to the surface until there were wispy ribbons of steam rising from my body as the water on my skin evaporated.

  Better?

  She agreed, and the agreement came with the impression of bone-deep exhaustion.

  Get some sleep. We can talk when you wake up.

  A silent affirmation was followed by relative stillness.

  As I moved through the streets, I kept looking around everywhere I went. This was a place that was familiar in the superficial sense, but nearly as different as it was similar. A city I sort of knew in the structural sense, but one that confused me whenever I looked past the surface level. Things that weren’t what I remembered from so long ago.

  It was entirely possible that my memory was the problem. I’d have to look into that, but later. Other things took priority at the moment.

  Arriving at my destination, I extended my phone to a black box next to a steel door. The box’s status light went from red to green, and it beeped twice. I pulled the door open to a warm, well-lit hallway.

  My sneakers squeaked on the floor as I walked down it, leaving a trail of water behind. I thumbed the elevator call button and waited. When it arrived, I stepped inside and tapped my phone once again on a box next to the touchscreen to select a floor.

  The doors shut, and I felt the motion. While it moved upwards in the building, I looked at my reflection.

  Pale. Scrawny. Human. Weak.

  But it was more than that. Things I learned while leafing through recent memories. Things I knew without having to think about it, things I could feel were true.

  This body wasn’t just weak, it was sick.

  No, that wasn’t quite the right word for it. I wasn’t sure what to call it. Twisted in strange ways to minimize larger issues. Issues that she’d been told couldn’t be fixed, or at least, not easily. Issues that would bring her pitiful existence to a short and miserable end. A form of corruption, half incidental, half intentional, entirely lethal. An unbalanced equation, a formula that didn’t quite work, a problem that grew increasingly larger with every passing day. Remedial patches put over structural issues that sort of worked, but only in the short-term.

  There were issues, but they all stemmed from one central point.

  Me.

  I was the problem. My self that was relayed to her through the object in her chest.

  The aperture.

  A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through my brain, from the top of my neck straight through the middle of my forehead, and I stumbled a moment. I had to steady myself with a palm planted against the side of the elevator.

  What the fuck was that!?

  I let out a low croak as the stabbing, tearing sensation in my head faded, leaving me more confused than anything in its wake.

  What did they call it? Cee-something. Core. The core.

  I knew it as something else. I avoided mentally voicing the other name for it. The correct name. I didn’t need to feel like I was getting a jackhammer run through the back of my skull again.

  I slowly opened my eyes and righted myself.

  Back to the original point of that train of thought…

  I wasn’t sure of a lot of things at the moment, but there were a handful of things I knew were true and real, and the rest I’d have to experiment and test out to determine their validity at a later date, when the time permitted.

  This body, and the girl who normally occupied it, were weak. Useless in a way that made me want to scream. I could change that. Very easily, in fact.

  They were also dying. Information, in the form of a thousand thousand different reasons and details, burst in my head like fireworks, with a crash and boom sensation, followed by crackling sounds and flashing lights, never quite reaching the surface from which they originated before they burned out.

  In the space between the shapes that were formed in my head by this information, I could make out details. The things were too bright and too painful to look at, like someone shining a too-bright flashlight directly into your eyes, but there, in the afterimages that were burned in, you could sort of make out some bits and pieces.

  There was a… misalignment. Something was supposed to be pointing in one direction, but it was cocked off to one side. It was not only fixable, but it would also be extremely easy to do so. With only a thought and a mental push, I could initiate a protocol that would fix the alignment issue.

  Using the same method, I could do virtually anything I wanted with this body, for that matter. I could rebuild it from the molecular level into nearly any shape or form. I could make it a tool or a weapon, or a hundred different things–all at the same time.

  I could fix things. I could fix her.

  The lights alongside the elevator doors lit up in sequence as the floors ticked past in silence.

  I was still staring at my reflection in the doors, and in that reflection, I saw a pale girl with a too-large rictus grin on her face.

  I finally, finally, had something I could use against the Subjugator.

  After an eternity of suffering, at long last. I knew it cared about this girl, but not why she cared.

  For whatever reason, it wouldn’t help her out, and she was going to die because of it. And I could stop that from happening if I wanted to. This gave me something I’d needed for a very, very long time.

  Leverage.

  And I wanted answers and justice for what’d been done to me.

  But that could wait. There were more important things to take care of at the moment. For now, I knew what I wanted. I dropped the idea into the sea in my head, and it responded. A subtle tingle spread throughout my body, so faint that I’d not have noticed it if I hadn’t initiated it myself.

  I stuck a finger in the levee to block the leak. I didn’t fix the root cause of the leak, but I did apply a quick fix. A quick and temporary fix. Should I find myself stuck back in purgatory hell once again with no escape, I’d have a way out. I wasn’t sure how any of this worked, but I knew how people worked. Even fake people operated on some basic rules.

  The elevator chimed, and the doors opened. I stepped out with the strange, rectangular phone in one hand. With a tap and a beep, I opened the door and stepped into the penthouse.

  Taylor looked up from a tablet she was using. Amy was stretched across the sofa with her head in Taylor’s lap and watching something playing on a huge wall screen. I stood there in my wet clothing, droplets of water dripping on the floor.

  I saw many things in their faces, but concern was the most evident.

  I shut the door, locked my phone, stuck it in the bag, and hung it on a coatrack by the entrance. My shoes were left next to the door with the rest.

  Amy got up off the sofa and returned with a towel. She held it out to me, but I just stood there motionless and studied her face.

  Her brows drew together. “Morgan? Are you okay?”

  I declined to answer and stepped closer to her, looking up into her eyes. One step, then two, until my front was pressed into hers. She let out a squeak as my wet dress came into contact with her shirt and immediately soaked it through.

  One hand slipped behind her neck, the other found exposed skin on her lower back where her shirt had ridden up, and I pulled her in until our lips met.

  She startled at the initial contact, but she practically melted into me after a moment.

  We stood like that for what felt like a very long time, lips locked and tongues wrestling. She made several throaty mumbling sounds around the kiss, but I didn’t relent.

  This was something I desperately needed, more than I needed literally anything else in the world.

  For so long, I’d been tenaciously clinging on by what felt like a handful of individual threads. Holding on for a future in which the people I loved weren’t memories represented by pieces of metal frozen in place. An attempt to remember a life that felt increasingly distant.

  Right here, right now, there was a living, breathing person I could hear, taste, touch, and feel.

  She wasn’t entirely as I remembered her, but she was close enough that it didn’t matter.

  When we finally separated, her pupils were dilated, and she was breathing heavily.

  A pair of hands came to rest on my shoulders and gave them a soft squeeze. Taylor’s voice came from behind and above me. “I’d say she seems alright at the moment. Shall we get you out of these wet clothes?” Her fingers trailed from my shoulders over to the nape of my neck, then the zipper at the back of my dress, where they lingered.

  “Mhm,” I agreed.

  The three of us found our way to the master bedroom within moments.

  As I stripped out of my wet clothing, I glanced out the windows at the cityscape.

  I saw a self that wasn’t reflected in the glass, wearing athletic wear in the form of a tank top and shorts, and a long, braided ponytail. She was smirking at me as I peeled the dress off and let it fall to the floor with a wet splat.

  She mouthed something, I think it might have been enjoy yourself, but I wasn’t sure. Then she made the thumb and pinky hand gesture of holding a telephone to her ear, then she pointed at me.

  I ignored whatever it was that she was trying to convey for now. I had a warm bed and only two things on my mind at the moment.