It's actually almost funny how easy it is to get around the 'security'. I guess it would be funnier if we weren't trespassing and my heart wasn't pulsing so fast that I think I might be violently sick any second now. Gillian, leering down the hall, has my shoulder; Dylan has my back; and Mary is grinning like mad and practically jumping up and down in the hallways that don't belong to us in a place that was honestly never should have come to.

"Damien! Damien!" Mary says, sliding back. "Oh-h-h wow. This is crazy. Wow wow wow."

"Don't yell so loudly," Dylan says, distracted. "We're trying to be stealthy, here."

I follow his gaze down ahead of us. There's a kitchen not too far off in the distance, and all of our stomachs pang with a need for human food, probably simultaneously. I don't think I need it until we're in the kitchen, at the fruit bowl on the counter... no one is here right now, thankfully, in fact the house is almost entirely empty. Ghost town. I take a peach and bite in, almost crying as the sensation of sweetness wraps soft fingers around my face, quieting my fears. I want to write a song to this peach, right now, in its honor, and guilt and warmth flood my body simultaneously. Dylan, in contrast, is ripping a long strip of meat with white-and-red lines through it, kind of like that fabric people hang up outside of their houses. It's chewy, but he's holding it away from him, trying to rip it apart.

"Lemme try," Mary says, grabbing her own strip. She exclaims, "Mmm!" as she holds it up, excited, and Dylan snorts through his nose.

"What happened to being quiet?" I ask.

Dylan shrugs. He sips the meat in and gestures us forwards with one hand, heading back up the stairs. From a distance, I can hear people speaking, and when someone passes all three of us are flies on the wall. The look of the man who goes by is troubled, and a woman follows him, older than Kali or Elle but still with a youth about her face, not to mention a bunch of dust.

"No, I heard something too," she says, concerned, and I feel my heart stop in my chest.

Well. We tried.

Dylan becomes a gecko and crawls into another room, where he turns back against a wall-- Mary and I follow suit, but by now I think I'm going to collapse just from the stress this is putting on my pulse. The people come thundering up the stairs and Mary zips through the halls in the form of a bird (with me behind, and Dylan, who leers at both of us before following), sliding into a secluded side room adorned in yellows. There are papers everywhere, huge windows, and a deafening silence that permeates the room like the presence of a man who is currently elsewhere.

"What do humans even do here?" whispers Dylan.

"Hold their dead trees," Mary replies.

Dylan rolls his eyes. "Look. We should really, really find Damien... other Damien... soon, because this place is getting on every single nerve in my body."

Mary leers at the pile of dead tree matter. "You're not much fun, Dylan. Let's go back to the place with the string meat. I like that place."

Dylan shakes his head. "Damien, do you think you can feel where the other Damien is? The way we can half-sense where the others are?"

I close my eyes and try to feel for the other Damien, but I'm groping around in the dark. I could tell you that Dylan and Mary are right here, but that's redundant. I shake my head to Dylan, who nods and flicks his eyes towards the stairs. They're massive and white, like those in a public building, and I feel like I'm violating something beautiful when I put my hand on the handle. Mary turns into a cat and scampers up, uncaring, and Dylan seizes up about halfway up before transforming into a gecko and sticking to the inside of the bannister.

Both of them are gone. I stare up the woman, breathless, and pretend that I am a human child who belongs to the estate. I straighten up my shoulders, then slacken them, and attempt to look like I belong here. I don't know how to do that, really, so it doesn't go over well.

"Damien, shouldn't you be practicing?"

Oh no she's angry shoot what do I do-- "I'm on my way to my room," I lie.

"Oh, was it you grabbing a snack earlier? It's not like you to be messing around in the kitchen at this hour... well. Be careful, won't you? We noticed some awful tricky behavior on the monitors earlier. We think it might be..." she pauses. I don't know what this woman wants with me. There's so much concern in her eyes that I swear I must be bleeding.

"Careful? In this house?" I ask. "We bought all that junk for a reason, right?"

Wow. Doesn't even sound like me. I try to fake a smile, which is really wearing out my mouth, but she gives me a quick, affectionate pat, and I feel a sensation of emptiness creep through my body-- like there was something I've always been missing that I've needed, this whole time, and never known it. I recognize in the single pat the affection that keeps mother birds bound to their nests, and yeah... that has to be my mom. I try to close my mouth and watch her pass me up the stairs... Mary has to be somewhere up there... right. Not my house. Breaking in.

I take a deep breath and extend a finger, so that Dylan can crawl onto my shoulder. Mary is also a gecko, at the top of the steps, and she looks up at me with snide pride in her lizard face.

"Safe to walk around like this, I guess," I say. "Going to my 'room'."

Mary tilts her head.

I lift mine. There's a sound, like peaches (sugary), coming from down the hallway. "Hear that?"

She nods, and I deposit her in my pocket. She peeks out, and I carry two lizards down the halls of my house, following the noise. My breath catches every time I hit another wooden board, which mumbles even though their covered in the fuzzy carpets people seem to be so attached to, and I pause at a door. There's a brass knob, reflecting back my hand, and light seeps out from under the door. I close my eyes, feeling Dylan's reassuring tail-pat around the neck.

"Okay."

I inhale. I exhale.

"This is fine."

Mary bites my side.

"Okay! Okay! I am opening the door right now. Calm down," I say. Closing my eyes as far shut as I can handle, I swing open the doors.

Inside, I come face to face with myself. He-- I-- we-- are at a massive black box which sings like my instruments, although it does it in a far more dignified way. Every hit of the keys feels precise, as if generating all of this energy were a practicable, knowable thing, and the box he's doing it on reminds me of a large horse, making he-- me-- the human rider. When he looks up, panic crosses his expression for a quick second, like how clouds cross the sky when the wind is so strong that you can barely walk into it. As soon as you notice them, they're halfway gone. He-- okay. We are going with he-- settles himself, takes a black box like Alex's, and begins typing.

"You're not afraid?" I ask from the doorway. I can feel Mary rustling around in my pocket.

"I've been practicing," he says. Now that I'm looking closer, I can see that his hand is shaking. "I imagined you coming here, again and again, ever since I was... well, I guess they made me at five, or something. I don't exactly age quite right, I kind of have to force myself into it? I keep trying to explain it to people, but they don't really get it... except you."

"Oh," I say.

He nods, lifting up the box. It's my YouTube channel. "This is you, right?"

"It's me," I say, reaching out to take the phone. "Haven't opened this in a long time."

"I've gotten into so much legal trouble for this," he says, shaking his head. "Damien! Did you open this channel?" His voice sounds kind of like the woman's. He laughs. "Imagine, your identity gets taken by a shapeshifter, and all he does is open up a YouTube account. I get asked in public if I'm you, instead of the other way around sometimes... I mean, it's funny, but I also worry about you sometimes."

"What are we?" I ask.

"We were both clones of the same person," he says.

"Clones?"

"Copies. Like... if you had two of the same thing, at the same time."

"You can copy people?"

"Well, we were kind of a special case. A kid died of cancer, and the company that made us wanted private donors for genetic material, so... I think some of the others were also experiments? One of them was probably a military thing, at least, I think, but it's not like they tell me anything. They're trying to distance their son from that as far as they can. Anyways, the military one was seven, later seven-eight, is that ringing any bells?"

I half expect Mary to yell 'that's me' and burst out of my pocket, but instead, when I take a finger in there to draw her out, she bites my finger. "Uh, yeah," I say. "She's kind of in my pocket right now."

"There's more of you?" he asks.

I glance upwards. "I... don't know if I should answer that. We're all probably going to die if we get caught, soo..."

"Are they..." he pauses. "They're not all clones, are they?"

"I don't think most of us are really human at all," I pause. The screen is taunting me out of the corner of my eye. Months ago, when the phone first got broken, I might've been excited just to have YouTube back, but in this room, right now, I feel kind of hollow just seeing it. "I don't even know if I am. Can I put in the password to my YouTube account real quick?"

"Why?" he asks, handing it over. "Are you planning a crossover episode? You kind of started ghosting the world. They haven't seen you in months."

"I made a decision," I say, typing it in. "or I guess a decision was kind of made for me. Here. You know how to delete a YouTube account, right?"

Damien looks up at me. "Seriously?"

I nod.

"I always admired your music. They made me to sing, too, but I kind of blew my voice out after that high note. You stress me enough, guess I'm just... not all that durable? Bad work. Copy of a copy."

"Can you shapeshift?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Shoot, can you?"

"Um, yeah... but I guess you're really not like us. I don't know how they made you, then."

"Isn't that the question on all of our minds," he says. "You're going to be leaving."

"Oh yeah."

"Never coming back."

"Never."

"No way of contacting you?"

"Red wouldn't let me! Not in a thousand years."

"Red?"

"Our leader. It's so weird talking to another version of me who doesn't know... I guess you'd like Red, because I like Red, and you're me."

"Am I really, do you think?" he asks.

I nod. "It's not just the voice. It's kind of like... the expressions, the mannerisms, everything? I guess for a second I was thinking that maybe you'd be different, and then this would be fine, but..." I pause again. He's watching me so intently. I know this has to be how I stare at people, which is a new experience all its own. "We'll try to lay low. I don't want to cause trouble for you."

"I'm pretty sure that as long as you all exist, I'm under a thousand different kinds of scrutiny," he says. "I haven't ever left the house. Lived here my whole life, y'know, because... I'm not really supposed to exist. DNA evidence keeps returning weird negatives. It would be pretty cool if I'd gotten shapeshifting out of the deal, because apparently that's a thing, but nope."

There are footsteps in the distance. "Do you want to play a duet together?" I ask him, desperately.

He looks towards the door. His eyes slide into focus, pupils dilating smaller. "You're about to be in trouble."

Dylan emerges and rushes to the window, unlocking it with a crude thrust. "Like heck we are. Damien. Time to go. Scoot."

Mary jumps out into human form, brandishing her swords, and looks up the other Damien with a look that's either very hungry or terribly disappointed.

All the composure the poor man had been holding up to this point is gone. "Oh," Damien says. "I hadn't... prepared for this bit." He laughs, nervously, in a way that is so familiar that it's almost painful, and then his eyes roll up and he hits the piano with his head. My own heart starts accelerating and I move forwards to help him up, but Mary gives me the look and I just lean him against his piano.

"Are you sure we can't bring him with us?" I ask.

"We do not need two Damiens," Dylan insists. "There's your visit. We went all the way across the country for this."

We really did, didn't we? The black box is still looking up at me, its hollow eyes beckoning as I look down at the still-unpressed delete button. Gently, I erase my account from existence, and with a sigh, I hop onto the window in the form of a sparrow.

By the time his mother enters the room and sees him there, guesses that anything unusual at all has happened, I'm already gone with the wind, a kind of long-held hope falling like a stray feather down to the earth.