Chase’s voice seemed to come from every dark corner of the hazy forest, “Where to start? I want to learn all I can from the man who was my most precious benefactor.”
“My Goddess…” The Marquess called out quietly in my mind.
“She is busy right now and you are spent. There’s nothing more you can do. Besides, you need to have faith. What can humans do against divinity?”
Chase’s laughter drifted away.
Daria still hadn’t stirred. She looked deathly pale.
Come on. Move. I willed this reality to change, even as I was pinned by Cecily to the forest floor.
Neve knelt next to her, placing a trembling hand on her forehead. She looked at me and then up at Cecily.
“You’re a monster.”
Cecily’s hands clenched and unclenched. “Of course. I had to be, to ensure that the pain humanity inflicts on the undeserving could be stifled for good.”
“We’re undeserving!” Neve yelled, hugging Daria’s head. “It’s your pain. Not ours.”
Cecily stared at her.
“Were you two wed?”
Neve blinked back tears. “What?”
“Were you-”
I struggled to rise but the foot on my back felt as heavy as a mountain. Cecily ground it deeper as she shook her head. “Ugh. Nevermind. I slept for hundreds of years so why do I still feel so tired? There’s nothing to be done. Your love for her is strong, I can tell. But even that love, even my anger, it will all be extinguished along with the evil that lies at our cores. Don’t you all see how unbalanced the scales have become? Pain and more pain, all of it undeserving. It’s become so unbalanced that the only thing to do is give it a final shove and watch the scales fall and crash into a thousand pieces.”
She pointed up at the broken red Lacuna.
“The well is full. Drink.”
Daria’s eyes fluttered open.
Neve nodded to me.
I stretched out my hand and Daria caught it in hers. Her flesh melted into mine.
Imagine it. A body strong enough to match her. Ideal in every way.
I faltered. There were rooms in Nell’s Lacuna that I hadn’t opened, scared of what might emerge. What could I possibly mean by that? What is ideal?
Cecily noticed what was happening. Colour was returning to Daria’s face as we exchanged memories.
These bones crafted from every person I ever brushed against. This heart fluttering from every person who I heard speak. These eyes seeing the world anew every time a new person gave me their perspective. These memories… A lot of them are yours. But I’ve made them mine and I hold them dear.
There was the soft rasp of feet touching down on the forest floor around us. Flower-Heads stood in a circle, facing Cecily. I knew their names. Chrysanthemum, Orchid, Titan, Sundew, Centaurea, Phlox. They had heard me and decided to come.
A giant white flower bloomed on the surface of Nell’s Lacuna and I felt its feathery touch at my shoulder.
“Okay,” I said softly. “Let’s try one more time.”
The Flower-Heads rushed towards Cecily and she snarled and clawed at them. They bent around the blows, unravelling into fibers that snaked all around my limbs, sinking roots deep beneath my skin. They were changing me, altering my inner most parts. I let them Shape me into something that no longer adhered to human rules. Those rules were created by humans, but humans weren’t the ones who defined what I could be. And I would remain me, regardless of what happened.
The memories of Daria’s exclusion Shape allowed me to replicate the effect for a moment, sliding straight through Cecily’s foot.
Eyes emerged on my arms as I pushed myself upright. They blinked and turned into ears and mouths. “You got this,” AJ spoke through the mouths. So I ate those too. Memories of someone who had been there for each time I had changed and seen the same person at the core.
I tried on an old Shape.
It didn’t fit right anymore, but that was reassuring somehow.
Cecily radiated rage. Her living armour seethed, depicting people drowning in an ocean of boiling blood. Every time one of us stood up to her, she seemed to double down, as if our defiance only confirmed how deserving we were of extinction.
I seized Cecily. Locust Legs released the tension it had built around my calves and it was like someone had ripped away the background, replacing it with buildings that flew past us in a blur.
The main tendril of hair on the back of Cecily’s head rippled and she halted our momentum in an instant, a sudden change that would have killed a normal human on the spot. We hovered over the ruined city as the evening sun began to turn the colour of Cecily’s Lacuna.
She pried my grip off of her and then threw me. I hit a building, crashing through structural supports and office walls. Roots spilled out of me, shoring up the damage, creating a garden of hanging plants and moss-covered office computers, flower growing from broken screens. The building shifted for a moment before settling into this new form, still standing.
Cecily pursued, ripping up plants with the razor sharp tendrils that thrashed around her. I moved in a way that felt natural, like a dance I’d rehearsed a thousand times, and yet I matched her speed. I slipped through the tendrils and kicked her, sending her flying. She slammed into a crane, metal giving out instead of her resilient body.
“You think this changes anything?!” she spat. “I’ve lived so much longer than you. Your powers are fresh, unrefined, weak.”
She tore herself free and seized the crane, ripping off the top and swinging it at me. A tree formed from my arm with strong branches like fingers that closed around the crane, halting the attack.
I forced out a smile. “Can’t we just talk? I feel like your heart isn’t in this. I don’t think it ever was.”
She vanished from my sight, moving at thought-breaking speed.
A crack of sound splitting the air, and then I was grabbed from behind. She slammed me into the exterior of another skyscraper, dragging me across the windows, shredding my face in the broken glass.
I fell. Wind whistled past my ears and then flowers caught me as I slid to a stop.
Fragmented pieces of Cecily’s Lacuna orbited around the planetoid like it was a red Saturn. I knew what the inside looked like. Her memories had steeped into my mind and this whole time I just couldn’t bear the thought of her being alone. It looked like my heart wasn’t in this either.
Why am I like this? She hurt my friends. She’s a bad person.
“AJ,” I said through mangled lips, watching Cecily plummet towards me like a falling star. I felt AJ’s Shaped ear on my leg. “If Vanessa is around, can you tell her to start the last plan?”
“What is it?” AJ asked.
“She’ll know,” I barely got the words out before Cecily slammed into me. Pain lanced across my body and the road split open, broken ends rising into the air as we descended through pipes and wires and dirt.
Unexpectedly, we then fell into open air.
I saw escalators and colourful signs before Cecily drove my face into cracked tile. There was a wrenching pain as she hauled back on my arm. Tendons started to pop. Muscles snapped, fiber by fiber.
I released it, letting the arm go, sending a surprised Cecily crashing backwards into a display of frilly summer swimsuits.
We had fallen into an underground shopping center. There were multiple floors and large television screens hung from the pillars and over top of store entrances. The soft light streaming in from the hole in the ceiling gave the stores a strange ethereal feel. Although the rubble had jammed one of the escalators, the rest were still moving. Someone had kept this place alive through the apocalypse.
The torn strips of my face stitched themselves back together and as my lips reformed I smiled at Cecily as she emerged from the store display, scowling.
“Are you having fun?” I asked. “For whatever fucked-up reason, I always have, doing Shaping stuff. Even when I was getting chased by horrors beyond my comprehension, moving felt exhilarating. I guess I was getting happy hormones from the exercise.”
“Surely you can feel the difference in our strength? You know that there is only one outcome to our conflict,” Cecily said gravely. “Aren’t you terrified? Don’t you understand? I am your end.”
I showed her my hands. “Terrified? Look how much I’m shaking. But somehow it’s easier than ever for me to not get caught up by fear. I can see the good things more clearly. Like this brief moment where you stopped to talk to me.
Cecily bared her teeth. There were blood stains all over her hair. “Every time you open your mouth, I hear the most ridiculous things. Are you just here for entertainment? You’re a puppet show in a burning house, waiting for it to be consumed.”
“You really have some great metaphors. It’s like you really want me to understand you.”
Her eyes flashed. “If you understood, you would raze the earth with me.”
I swung my arms back and forth, letting out the tension. “We exchanged memories. I felt a little of what you went through. But I feel like you’re not doing the same thing for me.”
Cecily’s hair cracked like a whip, tearing a rend in an upper floor, sending sparks and loose wires flying.
“Why would I try to understand you?”
“You said that Nell’s pain was the reason you came back down to Earth. But I’m telling you, that isn’t all there is to her. I’m proof of that. And I know you’re holding on to all the awful things that happened to you, but I know there were good things too!”
Cecily’s hair curled around pillars which cracked under the pressure.
“Good? I had to marry that monster. My brother was mutilated and murdered. My friends were swept up in the mob. I was ostracized, I was treated as subhuman. Any fleeting good things you felt from my memories hardly matter when the result was such.”
My voice hitched. “Just because it wasn’t good right at the end, doesn’t mean that the good times aren’t worth treasuring. Especially when the ending hasn’t even happened yet.”
At that moment, the television screens all around the underground mall flickered on. Many displayed incorrect colours and the sounds from each screen weren’t quite synced, but they all played the same video.
I huffed out a laugh. “Oh! She actually did it!”
On the screens, a cat played with a piece of paper on a counter top. Eventually it played too close to the edge and its back legs slipped off. Its eyes grew wide and its ears pulled back in an expression of shock moments before it fell from view. The video immediately switched to the next clip, a different cat looking spooked, all fluffed up as it tried to intimidate its own reflection in the mirror, scaring itself further in the process.
Cecily’s eyes were fixated on the screens. “What is this?”
I watched her out of the corner of my eye. “Well, if I’m gonna die again, I just want to have some agency this time. If we have to fight, at least I get to watch some cute cats.”
Cecily was quiet and still. The pillars had stopped cracking from her squeezing.
“While I can’t give it a glowing review,” I murmured, “the internet is nice sometimes.”
She didn’t respond. The patterns on her armour had grown less defined, no longer clear images of war and suffering.
“I get that we as humans may not have stopped hurting each other, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t made some changes. Women have a lot more control over their bodies and lives, compared to the times you grew up in. You wouldn’t have had to marry the Marquess to have rights today. We’re not all equal, far from it, but it’s getting closer. Rich people still rule the world, but I think this whole Lacunae thing may have upset that balance.”
Cecily tore her eyes away from the videos, dumbstruck. “Lacunae thing? Do you comprehend how many people I’ve killed?”
I sat down on the floor, crossed my legs and stretched my arms over my head. I sighed. “It’s horrific,” I agreed. “To be honest, I don’t really have a good way of comprehending it. I’m not here to forgive you for any of that. In fact, if you’d killed Daria I probably wouldn’t have tried talking to you. If you ever did want forgiveness, then that’s a journey you’d have to take on your own. I’m not going to shoulder it. But as long as you’re like this? Not fucking up the whole Earth? We can talk.”
Cecily looked back to the screens, where a bird was driving a miniature car.
“This world is so different from the one I knew…”
There was a flicker in her brow.
“Your friends, those two women…”
“The one you nearly killed? Yeah, they’re together.”
“That’s normal?”
“I think so. Not everyone agrees. That sure hasn’t changed haha. But they wouldn’t be ostracized for it. They have community, people that accept and support them.”
Cecily’s eyes flicked to the floor. “And you… Your memories confuse me. You were not always a woman?”
I laughed genuinely. “Ouch. Well, yeah, it’s confusing to me too. But with everything you’ve seen from Shaping, is it that strange?”
Cecily crossed her arms, which somehow wasn’t that threatening despite her frightening appearance. “Shaping is magic.”
I shrugged. “Magic that stems from us, humans. I don’t see how anything that stems from Shaping could be anything but an extension of humanity, a progression of it.”
“Do people accept you?”
I smiled. “Yeah. More than I ever would have thought.”
She looked around, her expression shifting each second. I knew how she felt.
I dusted off my legs and stood. “The way I see it, these are your options: You could kill everyone. Then you’ll be all alone until you go mad or die. If you die, well, that still doesn’t turn back time. You won’t get back what you’ve lost. You certainly wouldn’t atone for anything. If you suffer, we’ve just added to the well. The only option left then is to change.”
Fear flashed in her eyes. “Change?”
I spread my arms to the side, including the one I’d just grown back. “Look at me. It’s possible. Nell taught me how. It’s already within you. You just need to give it time to grow. Nurture it with the right people, the right experiences. That’s all that separates you from me.”
Cecily raised a hand, curling it into a fist in front of her face. She squeezed it so hard I heard her bones creaking.
“If I let this go, I’m afraid that there will be nothing left. I’ll just disappear into dust. Gone forever.”
I held out my hand, giving Cecily a smile big enough that it hurt my cheeks. “I’ll remember you. No matter what happens. So! Would you like to start over? Wouldn’t you like to find out? What the new you is like?”
Cecily stared at my hand. I knew the memories that were running through her head. Stories that had bad endings. The weight on the scale was impossible. Too many bads for the good to outweigh and yet…
Cecily’s warm hand, rough from all it took to get there, was placed into mine.
She matched my smile with her own, hesitant and hopeful, as her hair detached from her head and hung loose around the mall, shining like a waterfall from the hole in the roof. The final thread cut.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d like that.”