You leaving you, for now

  The st two guepped over the corpses of their teammates towards the broken er office. One kicked in the door while the other stepped through the window frame. The girl was dead, but the guy was breathing softly, leaned back against a file et. Door-man put three rounds through the guy’s fad the window man reached down and opehe corpse’s closed fist. It was empty. He had time to look up at his panion before the PKP fshed owalk and both gunmen fell dead in a storm of drywall and gore.

  “They got him,” Lindsey sighed, gasping for air after her short sprint.

  “He’s gone by now.” EP already sounded like she was drifting away.

  “I hope so.”

  “See you back there.” The line clicked off. Liook her earbuds out and dropped them owalk. For the first time in what felt like years, she heard the real raw sound of the world, but now it was a world falling apart. The fire roared and cracked just behind her, and the whole half a mile of warehouse groaned and snapped and even dripped. Outside, sirens and shouts and engines blended into a uniform drone edy that rolled ghostlike through the broken bay doors and drifted down through the broken roof.

  She had taken the pills instead of the iion to give her time.

  Though struggling against the brain-crushing tunnel visiht on by the st gre, she mao shed her armor and ammo and ons into a pool of spent brass at her feet, and stomped towards the stairs, sending more shells and debris cttering down into the falsely illuminated darkness. She had a tour on one leg and quickclot on almost every bit of skin she could reach. It might burn, ter, she realized suddenly. That other her. Waking up somewhere, but not here. Would she remember? She had heard they didn’t, from those that believed they ti all. She hoped it was true, that she would take the memories with her. They were hers, after all.

  As she stepped shakily dowairs, impatient fire spreading behind her and water dripping down after her, she shook off her NVGs a her eyes adjust to the dim glowing light, half refracted spotlight gre, half firelight, and saw it all with her real eyes for the first time. They ached, too aced to seeing only softly glowing images of distah.

  Whe to the recyg door, she ripped off her coveralls and gloves and got down to just her underwear, boots, and tours.

  This is all I give you girl. The boots are a gift. Thank me ime you put on your socks without feeling any scar tissue.

  She limped out the bay door with her hands up, blinded by a spotlight, metal and brass and gss g under her boots, the fire r behihrowing waves of heat on her bare skin.

  The cops were yelling something, but she was already past the point of being able to uand. She slowly let herself down as boots marched towards her, casting long shadows on the t ramp.

  In her underwear was a note, written on the back of a receipt, stu ay bandage pouch, telling a story of being kidnapped and drugged and wrong pin numbers given. It was all she could do for her, and she passed out hoping it would be enough.

  Then there were two of her, one sinking into liquid thoughtless bess and another walking down a shifting hallway towards another world.

  ****

  EP killed the st drone feed and exhaled what felt like her st breath. Lindsey always tried to give her Self an out. Funny, sidering she cimed to believe the Hardworlds did after they left. A blessing and a curse, to see them all like this, from above. Her first mentor had warned her. They will fet you were watg and lie to your face about things you saw with your own eyes.

  She took her ear buds out ahem on the desk, then activated the meltdown on her phone and tossed it on the ground. She started the hard wipe and ged into the clothes she had dropped into almost two days ago. She took another deep breath and took three big swigs of vodka then spshed some all over her clothes. o the door, she pressed a circur button until it clicked five times like a gas starter. Four separate unseen fires ignited, and the room began to smell of burning pstic.

  She went out and shut the door behihere was an airgap between the offid the rest of the building, and it would burn down to ash and leave nothing but a bed spa the crete building around it. Gone, but not missed. If something grew in the space left behind, she was sure it would still smell of burning pstic. But would the walls remember? Would the hing know?

  Her fshlight swept the barren crete floor. The few remaining broken shelves watched her leave, impatient. The gapiy freezers on the wall with their old pstic smell were ready for her absence. She had disturbed them by ing here, kicked up old air and broken rightful silence, like a bomb dropped mistakenly in a forest. It loo heal what she had wounded. It pressed in around her, expellioug her while it did it. She almost cried. Maybe it was the liquor. Maybe it was all the dead friends.

  The lot was bright and dead. The lights kept on to disce vandalism and vagrants. Light defending the dark. The humming present guarding unerringly the still past. A young woman walking alone in a bad pce at a bad time of night, trying to save what she had borrowed, because it could never be returned.

  She made it to the street just as dawn was starting to break. A soft suburb with basketball goals mounted in the ground and fondant wns hugging chalk-smooth sidewalks. Pink and yellow breathed over paper roofs, and windows blinked back streetlight refles sleepily. She y down in the alley, a streak of mosslike grass between pnes of stained wood the color of sandwich bread, and took the pills with the st of the vodka.

  A m dove tested the depth of the houses with its voice. The girl in the grass dreamed of birds roosting in a burning building. Though she screamed and ran, waving her arms, she couldn’t get them to fly away, and they all burogether.

  ****

  The office was empty and quiet, but demons of fire and shadow with fshlight eyes pressed in on the window. Metal began to scrape metal outside and Gradie khe warehouse was folding in on itself, f a jaw of broken-girder teeth, wet with jet fuel saliva. It would soohe offid digest him in a stomach made of cellophane and sloshing with Propofol that stretched out in the parking lot like a trash bag bloated with rancid juices.

  He took a deep breath and squeezed the . The metal was soft as silver and hummed like a mild electric current.

  I did it. It’s over.

  He stood up and walked his mind through the steps to get out of the Dreamworlds. Michael had told him he would have to do it himself this time, aried like hell to remember every sihing he had learned from EP ae and all the other journeys.

  Make a path. Create distance.

  He turned his back to the windoulled a filing et off the wall like it was made of Styrofoam and found a door behind it lit up ile white light. He pushed past it and shut it behind him. The hallway beyond was made of apartment walls and smelled of pan asian take-out. The blue-grey lights wavered like tear-filled eyes. He knew he was far away from the world he had left and turned around to prove it to himself.

  The hallway stretched bailes and curved up, disappearing behind its ceiling. The voice that had waited silently under his mind for the past two days, threatening to speak, was go was a brief feeling of loneliness. He thahat other him, for whatever part he had pyed in the final victory, but there was no one around to hear. He was the only him in this hallway.

  The sound and smell of raironger as he walked towards a door at the end of the hall. Whe to it, he heard the storm beating on its other side in heavy drops. It sounded like being inside a car while it went through the wash. Water leaked in uhe door and moved past his feet like liquid mirrss. He knew everything behind him was flooding, sinking, that it would all join the dripping nightmare hallways he had seen with Celeste, and something else he couldn’t remember, in that world beh the world. Those tunnels and hatches that ected every abandoned building ay home in every dream he had ever had, and maybe even the dreams of every other him.

  He shoved out into the grey shower and smmed the door behind him. It shattered from the force, leaving him with no way back.

  Good.

  The woods were familiar. At first gnce, he had thought he was in a rai, but as he stomped ahead, he saw it was the type of raw brush that might be left between two housing divisions bae, rowing unchecked behind an apartment plex. Shouldn’t it be a rai if that was what he was expeg? Was his own mind defying him?

  “Wele back,” Kra said in his mind, and he almost sobbed. Her voice felt warm and pared to the cold of the rain, and the sensation of hearing her in his head was pletely Otherworld, and he realized how much his Spirit had missed it.

  “I trust you have your mask on,” she said gently. He summoned his mirror mask and pulled it over his face.

  “Where am I?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s a forest.”

  “Then it’s a forest. The Otherworld made it for you. You decide which forest it is, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a forest on the Allworld, south of the big suburbs. If you push through those bushes, you should find yourself at the edge of it.”

  He moved a wing of greenery out of his way and stepped onto t. There was a big fountain in front of him, the bottom glittering with bright pehere was no rain here, and the copper shined in the sun. Oher end of a big t court, a mall repeated itself. Like a thousand different malls fused together. People walked in and out, flew up through the skylights, parked crafts on the roof. He had made it.

  “I’ve got the .” He held it in his hand a gre in the sun. For a momehought about turning it into a penny and throwing it into the fountain.

  “Good. Meet us at the office.” The sensation of her presence left his mily.

  He flew up through the blue sky till it turned bd tore around the curve of the massive pulsing phe memories of his days in the Hardworld slipped from his mind like raindrops off a windshield. He tried to catch them, but it was hopeless. It was all little more than a fading dream. Lucy would have to make do.

  Are you kind to your self? ime, its not easy seeing them die. episode, A kiss goodbye.