Put your neck in, Red.

I want to ask Kali if I should start the day over. If not her, then perhaps Dylan. They're both around the fire with me, closer than any wayward flames, and in Dylan's case, perhaps closer than the thoughts the fire brings with it. Place your neck on the flames. Embrace the fire. Kiss your birthright. Can you feel the way she pulls your neck? Needing you, wanting you. As if you alone, of all the things in this world, were the tinder she desires to burn. Something dances maniacally, hopefully, and it demands of me.

Elle and Kali are making out again, in such a way that it is entirely carnal and still lacking any semblance of interpersonal passion. Elle drags Kali into the woods and she follows, need in her eyes. In her walk. In the way she grips Elle's arm, even. Everything. It hurts me in such a visceral way that it would make Dylan jealous. Maybe. Perhaps not. If there's anything I'm sure of in this world, it's his consistency, but even then, I've had my head at his teeth before. Not once was it a time I didn't deserve it.

My hand curls into a paw. I hadn't expected it to happen without first exerting tremendous effort, but there it is, trembling, a little part of me made animal, alien. I feel my breath catch, and then I bring that hand, deliberately, towards my neck. I begin to tear the filthy growth from me, but as I do, the paw folds back into fingers.

"Hey Red, can I see your..." Dylan leans in and I flick him off. "You caught me. I was just going to kiss your pretty little neck."

"Why, does it look a little barren to you?" I ask.

"No, it's just that I can barely see it from this angle." His voice recedes like water from a shoreline. He reaches again, and I slap it off. "Wow, someone's feisty tonight."

"No, it's just... please don't kiss my neck," I say.

"Would you prefer that I bite it?" Dylan offers, licking his lips. It's so incredibly silly even on his half-human face that I can't help but laugh, and he knows it. I withhold my mirth by placing that cursed hand over my mouth. "See, there you are. Come on. Let's make Kali and Elle jealous."

I shake my head. He leans for my arm. "Dylan? Please don't touch me." Throw yourself into the fire. He can't see your body if you burn it. No one will find the leaves. No one will know. No one will know that you're just like them, will they? Maybe worse. Maybe whatever's growing inside of you is the biggest monster of all.

"Oh," Dylan says. "Look, I'd come into the woods with you, and we could talk this out, but I'm watching the happy couple, Mimsy, Gillian, Mary, let alone Angel and the two girls, who we still don't know if we can trust... this is a lot, and I'm trying to do my best, but it's a steep learning curve."

"All of that at once?" I ask.

He swivels his head all the way around, like an owl, and reveals a set of unblinking eyes just below his messy hairline. One of them winks at me, and he turns his head back around. With a coy smile, he says, "I've got eyes in the back of my head." I can almost hear the flesh receding as he shifts back. It's hard to pretend it doesn't unnerve me when I'm sick as I am right now.

The fire crackles, spitting up embers. "You don't have to do my job for me."
"I do when you're barely doing your job. Ever since you came back from the dead... well, sometimes it's almost like you never came back. We haven't been involved once--"

"You know it's hard for me. I now I'm not good enough for you, and you know, if you really wanted to go be with someone else--" I don't know where this is all coming from. I start again. "You know it's difficult, with me being... how I am."

"Sometimes, I have no idea what you're referring to, Red. You can't just be vague and distant through whatever emotional peril we happen to be going through at the moment. You do know that, right? I want to be... you're just never vulnerable, and then, when you do let me see how much you're hurting, I realize that it's way too late for me to do anything. I hate that. I want to do everything."

I laugh. "You'd do a better job than I would. Haven't you noticed since I came back? All the things I let slip?"
He does not take the nervous laugh well. His face cracks into a lopsided smile, an imitation of a halfhearted reaction to a bad joke, like the kind we're currently stuck in. "Let slip? Everyone else does things. Maybe you don't react perfectly each time, but it's not like you can blame yourself."
"That's what a leader does. I wanted to be responsible."

"Maybe we could both lead the group. I thought.... okay, this is stupid, but I thought maybe that's how we are. Lately I'm beginning to believe I might just be your guard dog."

I put my hand directly in the fire and temporally snap it out. The words linger on the air in silence instead, and I say, "Tell Kali to put out the fire. I need to talk to Mimsy. You've noticed Mary and Gillian are coming to a head again?"

Dylan stands up. He turns into an elephant and stamps out the fire himself with one giant foot. He shifts back in seconds, his hand covered in ash, and flicks it off. The scent of smoke lingers in the air. "I'm sure you have it covered," he says.

I miss all the feat the fire offered. It's not as cold as it used to be out here, but it's chill, and the animals know it. River areas come most alive in the hot months of the year, and though the water still runs through the river, it's not enough. The few birds who've moved back in and the few animals who've woken back up hate the night's silence. There's a lack of insects. A lack of larger vertebrates, currently. Maybe there's just a lack.

It's growing, Red.

I don't want to restart. I don't want to think about living through the conversation again. That's why I let them drop, again and again, isn't it? The effort of living all these hours over and over again is--

"You need me," Mimsy pokes out of the bushes, in human form. Her hair is full of parts of branches she's picked up and several kinds of pricklers that will never come out of her white hair. "Accordingly, I am here. If you throw yourself into the river, right now, I will pick you up as the mother cat lifts the kitten by the scruff. If you throw yourself at them, I will have to concede and hide in the bushes. I can protect you from the earth, but we're not of the earth. We will give nothing back. Our bodies absorb everything, run off nothing, and will turn to dust. Do you know what you are?"

"I'm Red," I say.

"Because you decided to be Red. You made this shape out of nothing, clung to it, inhabit it." Mimsy's eyes widen. "You're the clay, and the river."

I look at the river. Usually, I can almost guess where Mimsy is going with these things, but not tonight. The river is a burbling, torrid mess, and I don't want to think of it because I'll start thinking of excuses. I sigh, "I can't change it, so I didn't choose anything."

"You can't change it because you are attached to it. You love it so much that you fear losing it," Mimsy tells me.

"Dylan loves the way he looks." Counterargument.

"Dylan is confident his shape and mind will be there when he goes back to retrieve them, so he will go anywhere he so desires." Countercounterargument. Thank you, Mimsy, you are officially worse than Kali, who is in a clearly abusive relationship for reasons that I can't glean or prevent. Unlike Kali, there is no smugness in Mimsy's face, only a watery curiosity. By now she's up next to my face.

"I'm not here to ask about this tonight."
"I came to you."

"I wanted to ask about Mary and Gillian." My family has become a chore. Maybe it was earlier. Maybe I was just better at lying to myself. Maybe I'm really, truly, falling apart. Maybe the plants will devour me, and whatever I become won't care about them all.

Mimsy touches my face with her hands and licks the salt water off my face. I drag her off, too, because her hands are uncomfortably close to my neck. "Mimsy. No."

"I like you the best," Mimsy says. "You make me so, so, sad though."
"Please just tell me about Mary and Gillian."

"Do you want to hear about Mary and Gillian."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"They're my group and I love them more than anything."

"Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"Enough to die a thousand times?"

"Dying is the most selfish thing I could possibly do, Mim."

I have broken through the enigma that is Mimsy. She draws back from me, still licking the saltwater from her lips (Mimsy, please, stop), and holds my whole face in her green eyes. Her pupils dilate, which I can only see because of the moonlight framing her face, and she seems to glow as she says, "A tree grows two ways, but it is still a tree. A ring of mushrooms in the forest is a beast with many faces and one heart, split among as many bodies as it likes. Someone divides a worm in half with their teeth, and that is two worms, who will grow the hearts they lack from the other."

"They're... the same person," I say, somewhat less poetically.

"If you were to make a weapon, you'd want it to be unafraid of whatever it faced," Mimsy says, but it's hardly her voice. I can hear someone much older speaking through her, and she's parroting the words. "But then, it would be unafraid of you, so you'd need it to be completely obedient. Now, given both of these mental aptitudes, you'd also want your supersoldier to be able to regenerate from any major injuries, and they're tweaking its waveform for infinite redundancy. It's a hydra. Infinite regeneration, Mimsy. Do you understand? That's who they are making next to you."
"Yes," I say. I don't know how to make her continue. "Yes."

"Oh, they definitely weren't happy about that, but we were all defective," Mimsy says. "I wasn't, but the only thing I needed to do was exist. Not hard. I exist."

"You remember," I breathe. Tell me what they thought of me. Tell me there were adults who knew me, who were supposed to grow me into something worthwhile. Tell me there was something worth staying for, or better yet, something worth abandoning. Focus on the group, you coward, you cur. "How do I stop them?"

"Fire," Mimsy says.

My mind races through ways Kali could possibly help the situation. "How much do you know?" I ask.

"Enough to break the group apart," Mimsy tells me.

"Is that a metaphor?" I ask.

She shakes her head.

"And you won't?"

"Grace wouldn't like it."

"You're not going to tell us who Grace is, are you?"

"You'll meet her. She's back on the coast," Mimsy says. "She's my family, and I would die for her. She made me. I am the arm of Ms. Grace. A clipping of her hair with fingers and teeth. As the winds give voice to the trees, which are silent, she gives onto me a body, and a form. You all made yourselves, but I barely got made, only carved out of a human, like most babies."
I pause, stroking her head. She leans into it."Do you know anything else about me? About..."

"Leaves. You won't like it." Mimsy tilts up, so that I can see her ornery eyes even as my hands slacken around her hair.

"Of course I won't. Can you tell me?"

"Shouldn't."

"Mimsy," I say, my hands shaking, reaching, needing answers, someone to blame, I need some way out of this mess and it's right in front of me, wide eyed, mocking me. My arm shakes. She knows what she's doing to me. "I need to know."

Mimsy's face falls. She hits my head with her side, and then backs out of my grip, accusatorily. Her frown deepens as she hisses, "Your Veritas is coming for you, Red."

I restart. I need to get fire. I ask Kali. Restart again. I prick some of the leaves off. Restart again. Tell Dylan. Restart again. I exhaust myself that night, and when I hear the screaming, I consider going to sleep. No. They're not going to let me sleep, so I'll be up dealing with the aftermath no matter what I do. Is that a good enough reason to save Mary or Gillian's life? Insomnia?

I'm a bad person, I think, as I rise from the long riverbank grasses. I'm the worst person in the entire world, the biggest monster out of all the amalgamates of sinew and false form in this group, and now everything I hate about myself is going to spill out of my body.

The thing under my flesh, which knows me, already knows that I can't help but go for them. The monster may be the thing that cares more than anything, and it might be the thing that is incapable of caring. I don't know which could possibly be worse.