I have been back in the cities.

When the night is young I travel miles by starlight. The houses are as I left them. There is more green, but all of the house interiors are the same on this side of the world. Nothing really changes no matter where you go. The people are the same. They are vacant. I am vacant. We meet each other beneath porthlights, moths throwing themselves into the same ball of fire as always.

"Where are you from?" asks a man.

"Asia," I tell him. I asked Angel about this one. There are things that people expect of each other. If I lie through my teeth, they will fill in the rest with whatever they want to hear.

"That's not very specific," he asks.

"What's your interest in particulars?" I ask him.

I run long fingernails over his neck while he is asleep. He stirs, but the reaction would not be fast enough if I were to cut him. The bedsheets we are on smell of sweat. The air outside smells like smoke and intoxicants. I enter a bar and receive a free drink.

One of the women there has the same color to the face as Kali does. She is lacking the narrowing of the eyes and slight scowl that distinguishes Kali. She is also lighter than Kali and keeps her legs crossed like she is trying to ward something off. Her neck and ears glitter with gems.

I stare at her down the bar. The lighting shines dull amber above us. "Where are you from?"

She looks back. Her eyes are a dull brown. They match my own. "I get that a lot."

"I do as well."

Her apartment is small, but it smells better, and she does not fall asleep right away. We barely had to charmspeak each other to get her. When we are done, one of the humans' terrible machines whines outside. She lies on her back, staring up at her ceiling, and I notice the slope of the room. Her hair is a dark waterfall over her pillow.

"I don't know why I keep going to bars," she says, "There's really no other women in the town like me, but I had to move here for the sake of my job... I do accounting for a firm, they figured it would be better to have me here than anywhere else."

I nod like this is all pertinent information. The only thing more effective than speaking to people is listening to them. No charmspeak compares to the catharsis people receive from hearing their own voices.

"I think I was waiting for you," she says, her voice shallow and choked in her throat.

Now she reminds me of Kali.

When I get home, I can still feel the smooth grip of her arm on mine as she asks me to stay the night. Her fingers slipped. Kali is there in an identical position, but her eyes are blue and starlight flecked. Her irises slide down to me.

"Where were you?"

I pause and settle down. The ground is cold and the sky overhead is dark.

"Don't worry, it was rhetorical. I know where you were," Kali says. "I'm glad. Is that stupid? I'm glad you've been out, because that means you can't be around me." She laughs. Kali's laugh has always had a crack to the end of it. She forces it out of her throat. Sometimes I kiss her so she can not laugh, because the noise is grating.

"Couples like to be around each other," I argue.

"We haven't been a couple for a long time now. I just sit next to you, occasionally, because everyone else is depressing or boring. You're lucky that you're both, in a kind of moderation such that I think I can almost stomach either."

Kali is a hopeless romantic.

"This is the point where I say, 'I'm going to sleep a little further away from you from now on'. The part where I say, 'I still have dreams about you cutting my body open even though you never went that far'. Then I say, 'I'm afraid of you,' and you still don't answer, and it hurts, but I get over it, because all I've ever had to do is deal. Right?"

"You don't mind," I convince her, with charmspeak.

"It's okay," Kali says. "No, actually, it's not okay, but that's alright, too. It doesn't mean anything to me, and it doesn't have to mean anything to you, either."

"Good girl," I say. I reach for her breasts. The other girl had wilted at the touch.

Kali knocks my hand out of the air. "I'm immune to your charmspeak."

My face tenses. "You wish you weren't. It would make you a far more effective lover. As it stands you are a disappointment. I am allowing you to leave."

Kali smirks. "Someday you'll realize that no one can make you happy, and when you do, you'll regret the fact that we were never friends."

I remain silent. It is best to let her speak. She'll run herself out, as she does, and end up crying into my arms, as she does. I will pretend that she snot and spit and tears are not the most revolting thing I have ever encountered.

"You're too tired to kill me right now, but if you did, it would be permanent."

"Stop babbling."

"I don't have to stop doing anything," Kali says, and she rolls a little further away. I wait all night for her to offer herself back up into my arms, narcissistically, and she remains where she is, tilted off to the side.

***

Three nights later we sleep in the alley as stray dogs, while Red paces himself to death. When he stops I stand up, kicking his body on the way out. When he cringes in his sleep, I see the vines twist around him. The light from passing cars illuminates where the skin has become bone.

Pathetic halfling creature. We have spent years waiting for him to make a decision, and now his body is making the decision for him.

I writhe under myself. I need something worth doing tonight.

The streets are yellow. I walk them alone, fabricated hat across my face, face hidden behind another face. It has bigger eyes, a smaller nose, an expression that beckons, or so I hope. The first words that are spoken between people when they meet are never spoken. I keep a scarf around my neck. Nothing is coming for my neck.

I lift the scarf. It is red as the lipstick on the first girl I ever kissed.

Two people are walking through the streets, hand in hand. The girl leads the man through the streets, laughing, and they enter a store. My face tenses. The street is too sweet for its own good. It covers the human scents of car and garbage, but only just.

Bells ring as I enter the store behind them, holding distance. It's a narrow store with some of the cold treat humans are so fond of... ice cream. That would be it. I situate myself at the corner of the room. The two of them are still talking. Her eyes are warm. His eyes are warmer. They are talking about something inconsequential but they are speaking so loudly.

The person at the register has his eyes lowered. He serves them ice cream. Overhead, a fan swings around and around, each blade like a knife. The two of them settle down, eating side by side, and I feel myself longing for the bars. The air smells like wine and something rotten. Everyone in there is hungry.

I am starving.

I am not capable of being hungry. When humans do not eat enough, they die. I am not capable of death.

I stand at the counter. I recognize a woman there. She is not someone I have met before. I just recognize her. I don't know how I ended up here. We watch each other for long enough to take in every curve of each other's body.

"Do you need something?" asks the woman.

"Be happy," I tell her, forcing so much charmspeak into it that I can feel it reaching out of me in the form of thousands of hands. I do not want from this person but yet I demand their joy and that is possibly the thing that I am missing, which I will not ever understand. "Be anything, but please go and be happy. Tomorrow. The rest of your life."

She nods. The vagueness of this suggestion ripples through her. She looks down at her drink. It is dark as blood. She stands up and pushes it across the table, the scraping noise familiar.

She begins to cry. A few tears leak down her face.

I stand outside. The cars pass back and forth. Their lights flash in familiar patterns. My hair billows out around me and I want to breathe in the exhaust smoke. I stick to the side of the building, which begins to tear up with the rain from a passing shower.

A car screams past into the night. I fleetingly recognize the driver. I look at myself over my shoulder.

The woman is human.

Mary's voice breaks the silence. "Ha! Told ya, told ya—"

I remove myself from the wall. "What do you want?" I ask.

"We realized you were gone!"

Damien nods. I barely notice he is there, in the dark.

"Are you going to turn me in?" I ask.

"Damien, are we going to turn her in?" asks Mary. "We're communicating. You wouldn't understand, because you've never really been in a relationship, you've just kind of been on top of one, but..."

I think I was just in one. It is giving. That's the problem. A relationship is not a mutual taking but a mutual free giving. I have nothing in me to give. But this voice...

"I'm leaving," I tell them.

"Why?" asks Damien.

"There is no one at present who can stop me," I respond. "Why have you not left?"

Damien grabs Mary's hand. I can hear the sliding of fingers that I can not see, and this sound, too, is a knife sharpening. "I don't know," admits Damien. "I don't really think that I can leave."

"You will return, and you will not follow or know you have seen me," I say, "but you are convinced I will do good, and you will care for each other a little more."

"I would have done that anyways," Mary argues. "Except maybe... except..." Her eyes fog over with certainty and she points in my direction.

I can still taste blood on my mouth from the last time I kissed Kali. An emptiness stills me and the thing underneath me, which is finally silent. I watch them for longer than is necessary. They can not reach out to drag me from the veils of time.

I do the first kind thing I have ever done: I disappear.