Before I begin recalling it, know that, unsurprisingly, the vote passes again.

We make it out a whole day before Red draws us in and asks, "Are we sure we all want to do this?"

Oh right. It doesn't just pass. It passes more definitively than before. Gillian, Red, and Dylan are the only dissenters, given that Angel sure as hell isn't voting. It's not like we even know what she'd vote for. She's been flickering in and out of human form all morning, carefully restrained by Dylan, who has a long string coming from his hand that wraps back to either a rope he's sort of got coming off his body or a cobra, for ironic purposes. Given that Red's hair was touched during the attack (woe is him), yeah, probably a cobra. Must be nice to have someone who would kill someone else for breathing on you.

Red paces. "Thank you, Dylan, as much as I appreciate your support... what are the rest of you doing, when we know for sure the whitejackets are on us now?"

"Going to figure out what they want from us so we don't spend the rest of our lives running from them like a bunch of scared animals?" I suggest.

"My operatives haven't changed," Elle says.

The others are barely listening. Gillian is twitching dangerously, Damien is pretending to strum a ukulele in the air and avoiding Red's gaze altogether, and Adaline is just swinging her legs, which doesn't really work when the ground is four inches from her butt and her legs are so long that onlookers could mistake her for a denim-coated tree. Trace is practicing her dark witchcraft the whole time, by that, I mean, she's doing this thing with her fingers where she pops them in and out of existence like she's trying to spook us. Nothing in the area changes. The others are essentially, as usual, irrelevant.

"Red, you might be leader, but the will of the people is unfortunately the will of the people. It's not like you can signal a recount," I say, rolling my eyes in his direction. I've put myself in for it now, really I have, but after the last count of fifty days or so my spite outweighs even my desperate urge to escape.

It should really be the other way around, shouldn't it? No wonder I've died so often recently. I can still hold the place where the ghost wounds are, courtesy of my last death (I don't want to think about it. I can't think about it) but if I grip them now, he might catch onto something obvious. Of course, this is Red we're talking about, so it's equally likely he'll continue to preach like nothing's wrong, but I'll tend to the panic later.

So. A few dozen restarts later, here we are, listening to the cavalcade of petty appeals.

"We're in mortal danger," he pleads.

As we always are.

"I need to go back, with or without you," Red says on the next loop.

Red, the only person who's going to come after you is Dylan.

"Mimsy. You know what lies ahead. Would you, with all the trauma you've endured, truly want to subject your groupmates to that?"

(Okay, wow, throwing Mimsy under the bus. Sacrificial cat, much?)

Finally, Red settles on, "We could all die out here."

Everyone looks at each other upon the mention of the last one, and Mary stands up on her lithe little limbs and addresses the group herself, her arms held behind her back in abject mockery of Red's own signature pose. When she looks at him, it is only with the most thinly condescending veneer of pretending to allow him authority. All the middle kids rouse, but don't move, ad even with my mediocre human vision, I can tell muscles are tensing beneath their clothing. "We could die right here, Red. We barely made it out from the whitejackets, like you said, right?" She looks to everyone, raising her hands. "Right?"

"Sure," Damien murmurs.

"Trace had it," Adaline says, hugging what I'm going to go out on a limb and assume is now her girlfriend. "She's so-o-o-o powerful!"

"Where are you going with this?" asks Gillian.

"What did you do about it?" asks Mary, eyeing Red directly. With her height, she almost towers over him, and though she's more limber than he is, it's an intimidating stature.

Man versus monster. Oh how I love this. "I did what I could," Red says, "I evaluated the situation, I planned, organized, and executed. I kept everyone from getting killed that night, just as I did every night, and if you'd rather prance about like headless chickens, Mary, you have my fullest blessing, but leave the others out of it."

Mary snarls and Gillian jumps up and kicks her over before she can make the fatal movement of going for Red's throat. Mary shifts twice, becoming some kind of bird, large as a falcon but with more of a dastardly gleam in its eyes and a crooked neck, and Gillian is the mongoose at her neck. They wrestle for a bit, long enough to invalidate whatever point Mary was trying to make, and when Mary shifts back, clutching her hand around her bloodied neck. We can all smell the injury. It reeks of defeat and poor decisions. Mary sits down, slumps over, and sniffs as she treats her own wound, attempting to close it.

Won't stop her next time.

Dylan stands across the clearing, his arms folded neatly across each other, bearing his own scar from last night. "Red, are we done here?"

"This is a group meeting. We'll all decide when it's over. Red doesn't get to personally decide everything for us," I say, already getting to my feet. "You know, besides all the planning and executing, which might be his superpower. That doesn't make him anything less of an irregularity--"

Red restarts over the moment. Dylan says again, "Red, are we done here?"

I scowl out of my corner.

"Of course," Red interjects. "Thank you all for your input. I'm going to try to improve my leadership style so that I can be more in line with what all of you want and need, but this is a difficult process for me, as it is for all of us. Truthfully, I want answers as much as you do, but you'll have to excuse the caution with which I'm approaching our current situation. Mary, I know it seems like I might be... powerless, but believe it or not, I've been working on my shapeshifting. Perhaps sometime in the distant future I might even join you and Gillian for battle training?"

Mary perks up a little. "You're joking."

Red laughs. "I'm joking. If I do learn how to shift, it'll be a pale imitation of what you're doing. Both of you. All of you. But what happened at that farm is never happening again, and however you need me to learn to defend myself, I'll do it."

That was a risky, risky save-over you did there, buddy. Meeting could have done better. Red looks pale, even sickly, and it's a miracle and a half no one can sense his degrade the way I can as he continues downhill between each restart. Red works himself to death and back, and you can't heal on borrowed time.

Dylan and Red wander off to their little corner and Elle grabs my hand before I can wander after them to harass them. Her eyes are dark as the starless nights just outside the cities, with the thinnest blade of starlight shining through them. Her smile is too soft to be wicked, although I can see the sinister light of intent beneath them.

It thrills me. Somewhere deep in my stomach I feel a visceral emptiness only she can fill, and as she brings me aside to an open field, where only the distant song of returning birds (oh, you're so early, leave us alone) can be heard in the still, cool night air, and she plants a single kiss on my cheek.

"Elle," I whisper.

Elle is silent.

We find ourselves on the grass, bodies working in tandem, but when I come up for air, full of her, full of light, she grabs me back. "Kali."

The night spins around us. We're halfway through the same actions.

"The fuck," I whisper. I rise.

She grabs me back. "Kali."

We're back moments earlier. I can hear time thudding around me like a steady rain of knives, like something being beaten to death. I can taste blood in my poor mortal mouth, and it is so sharp and awful that it makes me want to kill something with my own hands just to block out the taste. She can sense my agitation, which is not my agitation, which is the feeling of any animal stuck in a cage, and it's such a sudden shift for her...

"Kali."

"Kali."

"Kali."

She grabs me back again. What the fuck is Red doing? I feel her hands up my side, clutching me from a dozen angles, and I wrest myself out. Elle rises, insectoid limbs assisting her climb as they crack out of her sides. "I didn't say we were done," she says.

"Just a moment," I promise. "I have to deal with something."

"Tell me," she says.

Oh, she knows I don't have to. I'd love to, but it's too dangerous. Could I? I want to believe that our intimacy is all kinds, but when I see the sheen of the moon in her eyes as she stands between Veritas and being, neck cracking as small black segmented limbs pull themselves out of her back, I don't trust her. Fear is a knot in my stomach. I shouldn't be feeling fear. I'm the most dangerous thing in our whole group. I am the second most dangerous Amalgam.

Maybe third.

Maybe fourth.

Elle darts forwards, and I take in a breath as a knife hits the tree behind me, at the edge of the field. My eyes dilate as she swings another as I run for it. This one just misses my breast, and my breathing grows more erratic. The stars overhead, those that there are, look dim and far away. "You have no business leaving," Elle says.

"I told you, it's just..." I trail off. Can't tell her. Can't speak. She'll pull it out of your mouth, you idiot, how did you not realize that you couldn't have intimacy, couldn't have anything... his fault... his fucking fault...

"I did not give you permission to leave," she says. "Kneel."

I twitch, but don't move. This is the point where I should rebuke her, fully, but she's beautiful in the moonlight, even though I know that she wants to rip me apart. Of my own volition, I slowly get down, feeling the charmspeak like a dense, heavy collection of spiderwebs that I could rip through if I wasn't otherwise bound.

Elle runs a newly formed knife along the side of my head, caressing it with the metal. "I've never had anything that has been mine for this long. This is the love they spoke of. It is. It is something new to us both." She is down on my level. "Kali, if I left you, no one would love you. You are going to do what I want from now on."

I bite my lip and nod. I think it's fear turning my head right now, but I can't even tell if that's the case. Maybe I'm not immune to charmspeak. Maybe I'm not immune to anything. Is everything I've been given just another part of an intricate, cruel curse? I wouldn't be surprised if it were. Here, with the moonlight and starlight glinting off her dull blades, I feel cursed as much as I do blessed.

This is my kingdom.

"Hold your arm out."

I obey.

"Interesting," she says. The foliage grows red beneath us. Her fingers are soft in my hand. "You bleed."

---

I wake up in the morning alone. I was sleeping as a snake in a tree over our campsite, taking a small, native-filled form as we do during times of high alert. Red hadn't explicitly ordered for that transformation, but when I pulled bird form earlier, all my wingtips were cut. Of course, this is about as ominous of a warning as you can get, but at the time I was more annoyed than anything. It's not as if snakeskin doesn't fit me better anyways. I'm comfortable close to the ground like the slippery, vile, venom-filled thing I am.

When I drop to the ground, stirring the leaves as I reclaim my shape, I find myself face-to-back with Red, who is sitting alone with his hands pulled up until they imitate the roof at a house. He leans into them, squinting into the distance as I pull around, and I see that his flesh is marred in a few distinct places. They're distinct, clearly-not-made-by-the-whitejacket marrings.

Poor kid. Can't even heal.

I raise my own arm, which is still cut neatly across, but I notice a distant rash of fear and bite my tongue, drawing my jacket sleeve over it as the jacket folds into being around my flesh. There's just enough distance between it and myself in places that it knows, as I know, that it's not quite a part of me. I shuffle it closer to my neck, giving me a flared white lion's mane. "Tough night?" I ask.

Red looks down at his half-exposed arms (you idiot, your hands are cut up too), and he stammers, pulling the cloth over them, "I fell through a briar patch while trying to use the bathroom--"

"No you didn't," I inform him. I lean against the tree. "It's okay. I've been thinking about things too."

Red nods. "Everything has just been so.... poorly managed. It feels like one catastrophe after another, and I can't for the life of me sort it all out!" He splays his hands outwards to convey his frustration. I imitate his earlier nod, trying to look sympathetic (how was my face supposed to twist), and he says, "So, erm, I'm a time traveller."

I have to force my eyes to widen. "A what?"

"I can rewind time at will," he says, "And I was responsible for... look. The important thing is I need someone to talk to right now. Can you just sit down and let me explain everything?"

I don't want to give him even something so pathetically simple, but this is one of the situations where I don't have much of a choice. I sit down by his side and curl myself over my knees, staring out at the dry, cold morning before us. "Just start talking," I say.

Red goes over the histories he doesn't know I was a part of, the thousands of times he's run himself up on the rocks, the worst of times, the best of times, everything. He gushes worse than he might have ever gushed before, and I'm so numb from last night that I let him to speak. My innards are all made of glass. I know the floor will fall out from us, but it doesn't matter right now, beause we're both wasting breath, anyways. Someone has to wake up. I couldn't have been up that early. Red continues, almost giddy with the relief of being able to speak, "I can't believe that massive beacon was a prerequisite for the mission! I must've tried a dozen times over to rescue them before, but they don't come out into the open and we just probe around in the dark."
"Wow, Red, you're so intelligent," I say, my voice venomously sweet. When Red looks shocked (he opens his mouth a little when he's confused or startled), I clarify, "That's my Dylan imitation."

Red laughs. "See, this is why I like telling you the most. You're almost never that angry."

I nod. "I wouldn't remember, would I?"

Red shakes his head.

I blink. I can sense a second set of eyelids swishing across the membrane of my eyes, translucent. I must've forgotten to turn those off. Shame. "This isn't personal, then. Give me something of yours. Give me something real."

He gulps. "Why should I, if you'll forget it? You don't strike me as being so unreasonable, Kali."

I give him a wry smirk. "Unreasonable as giving you deepest secrets to someone you hardly trust? You know as well as I do that both our rationalities are regularly compromised. If you're really benevolent, if there's really no reason for you to be afraid, I want a show of good faith. I want your confidence for a few minutes if you're going to deny it to us for the rest of our lives."

Red hesitates. "I'm sorry in advance." He pulls down the side of his trenchcoat to reveal skin that has swollen up an apt red color, with black sprouts beginning to weave themselves out of the flesh of his neck.

A wonderful sense of shock rips through my body as I put a hand up to his neck, feeling up the little black sprouts there. They're real as can be, their texture between flesh and plant, and when I pluck one out, Red flinches. A red welt is left behind, similar to dozens of others up and down his neck, most of which already have sprouts growing back out of them. Life finds a way, I suppose. "This has been going on how long?"

"Since the Dylan incident."

"Oh, there are thousands of Dylan incidents," I purr. "Was this during one of the beacon battles? Did you run away into the woods or something?"

"You don't have to put it that way," Red suggests, grabbing his collar back up so it covers the sprouts. "Is that 'personal' enough?"

I nod. "It'll do."

He shuffles up his collar. The others are beginning to awake, and his eyes flick from tree to tree from behind the protection of his glasses. He raises a hand. "Nice speaking to you," he whispers.

"I wish I could say it was mutual," I say, falling back to the early morning. Red sits alone, pensive, in the brush, and the 'forest', if you can call the plains' meager offerings that, rustle with a dry hunger. "Tough night?"

Red's eyes are sad. He really thinks he's lost a friend and a confidante, here. Little does he know that I'll keep all his secrets. Isn't he lucky? Immediately turning to lie, eagerly, to me, he says with the utmost insincere sadness, "Kali, you need to stop being around Elle. She's not good for you."

I nod. "I appreciate that you've made yourself an authority in my relationships, Red. It's very considerate of you."

Red's expression draws back into a grimace, like he's taken a small blast of flame to his remarkably punchable face. "Kali, just a few seconds ago you seemed like you might want to have a sincere conversation."

Would you, Red?

"Felt like a lot longer," I say. "'Pologies. Sometimes it feels like there's a year between when you start talking and when you stop talking."

"Kali, can you be serious for just a moment?"

"I'm offended that you think I'm not."

"I'm just trying to work out where this came from?" He pauses. "Is this still about Dylan?"

I didn't expect that one. By that, I don't mean it's out of left field. I mean that Red should know better than swing for such a low, backhanded blow, but then again, if I've learned anything about Red, it's that he generally just says whatever will get him what he wants. Worse, he thinks it's the morally right thing to say, instead of the appropriate thing to say in the circumstances to better those circumstances. "I never had any romantic interest in Dylan," I tell him. "You're just overprotective because you think you're going to lose him at any moment."

"You're being unfair to me, Kali," Red warns. "I don't half appreciate it."

"Well, I fully don't appreciate you, and I'm not making a big fucking deal about it," I say. "What do you have against Elle and I?"

"Raise your hand," Red says.

I hold my hand down. It's so rigid that I couldn't move it for him if I wanted to. Red takes my hand, eyes fixed upon mine, and with a tenderness that belies the forcefulness with which he takes our fates in his enterprising fingers, he rolls down the sleeve to reveal a long gash. "I'm not stupid, and I don't do what I do by being lucky."

I smack him across his face, displacing his glasses. Purple fire alights in my hand a second too late, and I shake with intention to kill. It takes all my conscious might to restrain my offended Veritas, storming in my stomach. "This is still none of your business."

"I wish you could trust me, Kali. That's all." I want to rip his sleeve off. I want to roll his collar down. I want to tell him everything. I want to make him hurt. Instead, I watch him stumble around on the ground for a second before grabbing his glasses and affixing them to his smug, holier-than-thou face, and then he walks away like this he's made me a reasonable request.