Red takes Damien's singing box and breaks it over his knee. He turns to Kali, a bright, violent thing with glasses of winter ice. They are the one cool, collected thing about him, wood splinter gracing his knees, and they are enough and then some. "Burn the pieces."

Kali's mouth is wide open. She looks almost impressed as she nods her head vigorously

as she gives voice to Red's fire. Damien cries out several times, "No, no, you can't--" before stuttering into a brook, babbling nothing. He lowers his head to the grass and Kali raises her fire into a snake of flame before it dies. The world rumbles with hunger. Damien is on the ground, crying, and Dylan goes to his side.

Damien raises a hand to push him away but his hand melts against Dylan's shoulder. Dylan whispers something to him, helps him up, and dries his eyes. Damien gets up, head jolting to the side. He is trying to become his Veritas, but it won't come to him. He opens his mouth, words choking up his throat, and tilts his head again. I can hear the ghost bells coming off the antlers that aren't there. He jerks his head to the side, then moves like the ghost has him. Mary grabs him at the side. She looks up into Red's eyes with all her burning coals, and we are one fire now. It grabs each of us in turn, for our own reasons. Once we burned together, scoured forests, tore the stars out of the sky with our anger. Fire folds into fire, which would make us...

Then Kali is the fire, Red is the water, Damien is the sky. No. Whatever the incidence I can't think to name them. They are separate, and I am the beasts. We react and evolve through change.

It's so late, but the night has me. She holds me in her hands, and I remember being small. I was a child and a kitten, back when neither mattered, back when no one told me I had to be either... the first seconds. The water had me then, and when I came from the water, I came into the white sky. There were hundreds of suns over my head, whining lights, pale imitations.

The stars overhead tonight remind me of that endless day, a period of time which is without definition. It could have been seconds or lifetimes when I was a thing not yet conceived, rapidly switching between forms as I made my own body out of nothing.

Then the universe closed in on me. Out here, the sky is so big that everything beneath it is petty, the opposite of the rooms where there was nothing but the self under a glass, magnified until I took up everything. Every machine was for me. Every person existed for me. Still, I wasn't a self until I met her.

"My name is Ms. Grace," she said.

Then I had a name. I had her name for a while. Then she let me name myself, because we couldn't have two graces. I wanted to be graceful, like the cat. I just needed to be full of grace. Grace held my hands gently until they became hands. Grace showed me how to make a body. Grace told me what my forms were beautiful even when I couldn't do the colors. She yelled for a little but when everyone went away she brought in bacon and talked in a low quiet voice about our secret, how no one could know about how I was her and she was me.

"Okay," I said. That was one of my first words. I also told her that I loved her and that she was the whole world and that I got scared when she wasn't around because the room was just a bright light and I was sitting inside of the sun all day, being hot and cold and scared. I was water without her. Water doesn't have a shape. Water is devoured by all things.

Now I wish I could be water. We are pretending to be humans, but we are water. We are the sustenance of the world. They thought they created us, but we are everything given form. We were always there, and they thought they could place us in little cups and study us. They did not expect for the earth to reclaim us, but water runs to the lowest points. We ran, and are running, back to two seas. We are the seas.

I wish I did not love myself as a cloud. That one looks like a cat. There are no clouds out tonight but me, moving through the brush. All the rabbits run, afraid, and the coyotes will follow when they see the worst of my face. I am moving towards the end of the story. The story is coming up towards me, like a great wave on the ocean, welcoming home. There was the moment we disappeared and became ourselves, once we had forms, decided on them, and I remember all the yelling.

Broken glass.

Twisted bodies.

Kali. Dylan. The sun over the ocean.

They thought they knew what they made, but they didn't understand us until the second that we unmade them with our teeth. They were the pliers that bit off our cords and made us into a new thing, that thing that doesn't need people.

Oh, the building burned. I remember that from when we burned the house down. That was the smell. All the chemicals nature never bothered to name, though she held all, or most, within her stomach, split apart into components, sewn together... that was the smell. We were nature's vengeance. Were we?

I hope so. Ms. Grace told me all about the trees, and how she'd take me out, and we'd go see the trees together. I climb up into one and settle there, watching the sun come up. The owls call the sun back down, begging the night to keep with them, but she is determined. The face of a new day overwhelms the darkness, a day we can not face. Is it the day that sees the party split, no longer attached by sinew? No. We couldn't move on from them.

Angel didn't mean it. She was afraid of my teeth, because they were hers when she was small. She was so smart. All the people said so. That one, we made her to be smart. No you didn't. They pulled us out of something and they didn't know what it was, and we had powers they couldn't dream of. This one can regenerate limbs, this one contracts and twists space, this one is a monster, this one could shapeshift... no no. We were wrong. They can all do those last two.

We should have thanked them for giving us labels. Once we knew what we were, we could become ourselves, and when we were ourselves, we could leave. But now? We can't be ourselves around each other, and now we are trying to leave. Where to go? The dawn would happily guide us on different paths. The sun shines everywhere, in every world. What of the waters? Wherever there is water, there is life, and water is everywhere. We carry water in our fake bodies. All real bodies hold it in theirs.

I hear the sun rising to meet the birdsong. Birdsong! Someone is singing down there. I jump down to meet Damien, himself, the sun settled on four legs with his human arms clutching a new singing box. His fingers move up and down its strings, which makes the box swing high and low, like a bird in flight. He heralds the new day until he sees me in the brush, green eyes and fear.

"You'll tell him, won't you?" asks Damien. He moves the box forwards, and I see a thin tendril of hair stretch from his chest to it. "It's part of me now. It's a little hard to keep up, but he can't take it away from me, so... feel free to say whatever you want."

I pause.

Damien shifts the box. "Plus, look at all the instruments I can use now!"

A what.

"I don't know if you're listening, but you're definitely Mimsy," says Damien. "You know that it's okay, right? We're friends."

I don't have friends.

"You don't have to go, but, um... I could play you a song if you want?" Damien says.

I turn and run into the brush. I've heard enough, and it's been a whole sleepless night. I know that there is a point we can not go under, where hunger no longer stirs us, where sleep no longer drains our energy, and where thirst no longer drives us mad. There is a point up until which we can pretend to be afflicted organic matter, but once the threshhold is crossed, we remain afloat where any living thing would sink. There's only one way we go down.

Through each other.

I do not need to rest, but I am looking for someone. I bound to camp, where Red and Dylan are resting on a log, and I jump into Dylan's lap and curl up there. Dylan massages me behind the ears. "Told you she was fine."

"I wasn't worried," Red says. "Sometimes you have to let Mimsy wander."

"Or she'll bite someone?" asks Dylan.

"Or she'll bite someone," Red agrees. "So, you're sure Alex hasn't heard anything?"

Dylan shakes his head. "We're really going off that one news article. It seems like it's not the first time we've made the news, though. There've been reports of fires... incidents in a city... look, we're running out of the mouth of one fire and into another."

"I know," Red says. "This is my fault."

Dylan leans back. "You're literally impossible. You know that, right? When someone so much as stubs their toe, you apologize for them and the ground. You don't control the dumb things we do, and honestly, I still want to do this. We're always going to be running from something. We might as well run towards something, too."

"Mimsy," Red asks, and my fur bristles. "How much do you actually know?"

I shift back, legs spread out into Red's lap, so that I'm lying across both of them like a log stuck between two riverbanks. I can feel the beating of Dylan's heart as he brushes my hair, and I sense my own heart going faster and faster, my whole body alight with a faint white fear.

"I can't go back there," I say.

"To?" Red asks.

"To the place... where the information is." I try to parse it out to him as slowly as I can, my head hurting all the while. "She'll be there, waiting for me, and she says I shouldn't tell anyone."

"What if that information could help us, Mimsy?" Red asks.

Oh Red. You know that I know that drawing words out of my body is futile. I am a creature made of small stars and fishbones. "I don't want anyone to get hurt," I tell Red. "Angel got hurt. You got scared."

"Red, scared?" asks Dylan, his voice edged like a tooth.

"Very," Red says. It is a warning.

Dylan sits in one timeline. Red sits atop hundreds, looking down the delta at the lightning crack of futures that spread out before us, in the storm. I imagine the building above us, filled with all its white beehive rooms, the cells that make up the body of the thing that birthed us.

Will she be there if we go home?

(a/n: full disclaimer this is one of my least favorite chapters god i fuckin hate mim)