Relief flooded my body and my legs started to wobble.
“Gimme a sec,” I said, flopping unceremoniously onto a bench in the underground mall.
Cecily stopped walking. Her body was still see-through in places, but her innards no longer glowed with power, and she looked thinner and shorter.
“You okay?”
I huffed a laugh. “I’m just so relieved this is over. I was all out of plans.”
Cecily nervously prodded her scalp where her hair used to be.
I massaged my neck. “Do you have any questions? About anything?”
She looked around. “What… what do I do now?”
“Whatever you want.”
“That’s not…”
“Yeah, not helpful. Fair enough. You realize the irony of asking the person you were smashing through buildings a few minutes ago?”
She looked down, squeezing her elbow. “Yeah.”
I took a few more minutes to rest in silence, leaning my head back to watch the screens playing animal videos. Then I stood.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Cecily trailed silently behind me, avoiding eye contact.
I hoped she realized that I could have just left her here. She had lost her strength. Despite her strange appearance, she was an ordinary girl. I could have jumped out the hole in the ceiling and never looked back.
Who am I kidding? I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to do that.
“You’re starting back at square one,” I said aloud. “Drop all assumptions and be curious about everything. That’s the only way to ensure you learn how the world works now correctly.”
We picked our way through the underground mall, trying to find a way out as the light from the hole in the ceiling waned. Cecily remained quiet, listening.
“It helps that everyone will be learning how to rebuild from this catastrophe. So I guess the most important thing for you is to make friends. Good friends that will keep you safe.”
“No one will want to befriend me,” Cecily said.
“Perhaps.”
We came to a piece of rubble blocking off the escalator. Cecily hugged herself and waited for me to move it.
“I recently took up gardening,” I said. “I’m not very good at it, despite having a supernatural advantage…”
I shoved the rubble aside and dusted off my hands. The escalator stairs continued to jitter instead of smoothly rising upward on their track. But stairs were stairs. I started upwards.
“I’ve had to learn a lot. One of the things about gardening is that it’s healthy to prune. Cut off the dead and withered parts so that there’s room for new growth.”
Cecily wobbled on the unsteady stairs. I offered my hand. She hesitated and then accepted it, legs trembling from the effort.
“Build yourself back up,” I continued. “Settle your mind. Improve your strength. Find new hobbies to challenge and inspire you. Painting, perhaps, or dying clothes.”
Cecily’s fingers tightened around my hand as I said that.
“Find joy in new things and new people. With time your confidence will return and that will attract people. You’ll find friends. And someday this time will be a distant regret. It won’t ever go away, it’ll always be there in the back of your head that you did something bad. But you can’t keep looking at it. You gotta look forward.”
A few more sets of stairs and we stepped out into the city, squinting against the light of a setting sun that shone through a hole in a luxury apartment building. The forest I had Shaped into existence was nearby, like a park that had spilled out of the boundaries to invade the city. It was a little humorous that we had essentially created the aesthetic of an ancient abandoned civilization, complete with nature reclaiming the space, even though it had been half a year since the Lacunae had attacked Earth.
“Now that the anger is gone, I’m afraid,” Cecily said with a shiver. “Isn’t that awful? That I’m scared to fail and lose this chance. I shouldn’t even have gotten this chance. I don’t deserve it. So to have this fear is to spit in the faces of those I hurt and killed.”
Something in my sixth sense caught my attention. A creeping cold and numbing feeling.
“Welcome to the club,” I said wearily.
I stopped walking. Cecily turned back, looking confused.
“This is where we part ways. Good luck.”
“Oh…” Cecily said, fear evident on her face. “I thought we would have longer to talk.”
My hands shook as I stared at the darkness between the trees.
“Unfortunately not. It’s best that you stay clear of anyone that might recognize you without your armour. Try to find shelter outside the city, worry about each day as it comes.”
The intricate patterns along the bark of the trees weren’t familiar. They depicted the human body stretched apart, with inner anatomy exposed. There were stomachs full of spirals and lungs rimmed with pointed teeth. The forest wasn’t mine any longer.
Cecily looked in the same direction. “I feel it too,” she whispered. “Or rather, I feel everything but that space. It’s like a bottomless hole.”
Everything seemed to lean towards the forest, like light itself was bending inwards towards some unseen mouth.
“Do you need help?”
I pulled my eyes away from the forest. “You can’t help. And you don’t want to, either.”
“Yes,” Cecily admitted. “It frightens me more than anything.”
It has to be me. I hate that.
“Go,” I said. “Forget about me. Become someone new.”
Cecily backed away, shaking her head. “I won’t forget. I’ll hold these memories of yours for safekeeping. You know, even after all the utter garbage fed to me by the Marquess, I never thought of myself as a deity. I never knew the God he loved so much. I could have slept a thousand years, there was no mercy waiting for me in the heavens. It was here, with you.”
She blinked back tears. “I hope to find that mercy in other people too. And maybe, one day, a long time in the future, I’ll know what love is.”
She turned and walked away. I watched her pick her way through the ruins, suddenly looking so small against a backdrop of the buildings that had survived her wrath.
A black butterfly fluttered into my vision. I stuck out my finger to let it land. A cloud of butterflies came from my surroundings, coalescing into a pillar to become Kay’s human form.
“If I can convince you-” I started.
Kay held up her hand. “You don’t need to. AJ and I were watching. I’m happy it didn’t turn out like how everyone expected.”
“Can you make sure she stays safe?”
“Yeah. I’ll get her in touch with some people that won’t ask questions. She deserves the chance to try again. Just like us, huh?”
Kay’s eyes moved with the purple iridescence of her wings. “I won’t tell you to be careful. Instead, I’ll ask you to be selfish. For Nell, for yourself, and for me.”
With that said, Kay dispersed into a kaleidoscope of dark colours and followed after Cecily.
I watched her go and then started towards the forest.
Every step closer felt like I was pushing a scalpel into my brain, inch by inch, the coldness seeped in. My eyes Shaped, adjusting to the meagre light beneath the canopy of twisted branches.
I could feel the red Lacuna in the skies above, no longer pulsating. Instead, it was like a pitcher of water, pouring down into the forest, being sucked away by something at its center where the rage in all its boundless bloodlust disappeared into a black pit.
There were images on the trees: brain pierced with dozens of keys, a pair of wings plucked clean of feathers, a surgeon’s scalpel cutting deep into a snake that was swallowing its own tail.
I flinched as I walked past a tree to find a motionless figure on the other side. It was a woman. She’d lost an arm in the battle, her stump still oozing with blood, and yet she just stood there, staring at the tree without blinking, swaying where she stood like she barely cared to remain upright.
Further in, more figures appeared in the dark. A spawn of Cecily’s stared at the mural on the trees, stock still as its long and spiked arms spooled on the ground. There were more people that had survived everything up to this point, yet now were locked in a trance.
I could feel the void affecting me too. I had to rely on Nell’s Lacuna to provide a steady stream of emotion I could rely on to push forward. It hurt, each wave of sadness and loss strained my heart, but at least I could keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Up ahead there was a dense copse of trees that curved into each other, forming a kiln of blackened wood, surrounded by dozens of motionless silhouettes of people standing in the dark. My heartbeat felt erratic, sputtering and speeding along to a chaotic, meaningless beat.
Sadness mixed with fear and became almost as paralyzing a cocktail as the apathy.
I entered the kiln and my ears were assaulted by a horrible sound of sucking.
It was like a grown man was just learning how to drink and was inhaling fluid without swallowing.
My eyes adjusted to the dark.
A man was on his hands and knees, sucking greedily at a black stain on the floor. His tongue dragged along the dirt, collecting what little drops remained.
Then he leaned back and sighed contentedly, before rising and turning to face me.
For a moment, I wasn’t sure who was in control.
But the eyes gave it away. He wiped away a trickle of black sludge that leaked from his nose.
Chase grinned in the dark.