“Wake up. Wake up.”

  “She’s really out of it.”

  “Yeah… Oh, I think she’s waking up.”

  “That’s good, I was getting a little scared.”

  “Wake up, babe! We got some stuff to discuss that’s pretty urgent.”

  Who in the hell is calling me babe?

  My tentacles slid loose from the twisted mass I had draped over my head and eyes. I was exhausted in a way I don’t think I’ve ever felt before. It took effort to move my hair, and the rest of my body felt like solid lead anchors holding me firmly in place on the ground. I slipped my tongue out of my mouth and immediately got it covered in sand.

  Eugh.

  I smell-tasted ocean brine, coarse sand, the strong scent of sealife and tidal waters, and in the background… hints of fetid urban decay. Deteriorating concrete, wet bricks, stagnant water, and rotting wood.

  My vision became unobstructed, and I saw Silver standing in a cute dress next to her. The imposter was clad in the sportswear I loved to wear.

  I was too fucking tired to fight with her right now, so I just growled at her instead.

  It didn’t sound particularly fearsome. Geriatric Apex vibes.

  The two of them were standing side-by-side, slightly turned toward one another, with me sticking out like the peak of an acute triangle. They were situated in front and a bit off to each side of my head, where I was ungainly sprawled on the beach with water lapping at my heels and tail. The ruin of old Brockton stood in the background.

  My prison.

  I wanted to growl at her-it again, but I wasn’t going to embarrass myself further by reproducing what I’d just done. If only I weren’t so tired. So a half-yawn, half-groan sound escaped my throat instead.

  “Are you… okay?” Silver asked. She was fidgeting with one thumb with her hands clasped over her abdomen. She looked… tense.

  I brought up my lower right arm and stuck my thumb up in her direction.

  Just peachy, princess.

  The Subjugator rolled her eyes and sighed, then looked over at Silver. “No, she isn’t, and she’s a terrible liar. You’re lucky to be doing as well as you are, although you have only her to thank for that.” She nodded at me.

  Thanks, bitch.

  It gave me a flat look and said “You’re welcome,” in the driest of tones.

  Not an ounce of privacy in prison-hell.

  My voice came out as a dry croak on the first attempt, but the second time around yielded results. “What do you want?” I figured it was obvious which of the two I was asking; it wasn’t likely that Silver wanted anything from me.

  The Warden looked over at Silver, then back to me. “We were just discussing that while we were waiting for you to wake up. I’m here to help, as I have been.”

  The fingers of my upper left hand dug into the sand as I clenched a fist in sheer outrage.

  “You… trapped me in this hell!”

  It facepalmed and groaned into its hands, then dragged them down its face like I was the problem here. When it was done, it gave me a long look, then took a cross-legged seat in the sand in front of me with its hands resting on its knees. Silver followed suit, choosing to adopt a kneeling sit instead.

  The Warden took a breath and let it out slowly. “As I have said many times now, despite what you might think, this place is not a prison, and you are not a prisoner here.”

  “For. Years!”

  My captor frowned at me. “I didn’t know about the time dilation effect, and when I did find out about it, I fixed it. And I remember telling you this, too.”

  I shifted my head to the side some to face Silver. “It lies. Nothing but lies.”

  She dropped her eyes to the beach between us, but didn’t respond otherwise.

  “I haven’t lied to you once, you’re just too stubborn and blinded by your hatred for me to realize it,” my tormentor said blandly.

  “I’d… rip you limb from limb… if I had the energy.” I let go of my fistful of sand and let my forearm relax with a huff that sent particles of sand flying.

  “I’m trying very hard to be patient with you right now, Morgan. I’d appreciate it if you could at least try and reciprocate it,” she said to me, then shot a purposeful glance over at Silver. “For her sake, if nothing else.”

  “I’ll be honest with both of you… I sort of don’t have a clue what’s going on at the moment,” Silver admitted.

  “May I?” the other one turned her eyes back to ask me.

  I flipped a tentacle in her direction. Let her waste her breath, and I could conserve my own and follow up after. The mimic turned to the pale imitation… although I didn’t really think of her as such anymore. My stance was still evolving.

  It pointed at me. “She is the original Morgan Rivera of the three of us.” Then it placed an open hand on its chest. “I came after, but a very long time before you.” It partially turned from Silver to glare at me and give me side-eye. “And I would appreciate it if you would stop misgendering me. I know you know that you’re doing it on purpose to piss me off, but it reflects worse on you than it does anything else.”

  I responded, not wanting to let that lie, so I addressed Silver, who looked totally clueless at the moment. “I refer to it as an it, not because I’m trying to misgender it, but because it isn’t a person. Unlike the two of us. Or will you lie to her about that? Go on, prove me right.”

  The tormentor looked over at Silver and nodded. “This is true. I am a simulacrum of her,” she dipped her head in my direction. “However, I am a perfect replica, so take that for what you will. She’s not particularly any more or less human than I am, currently.”

  “I still don’t really understand,” Silver sighed.

  “I was the first. She’s a copy of me. One who doesn’t feel like telling me a damn thing when asked, like who or why she is, and who kept me locked up in here for what felt like an eternity!”

  She-it licked her lips and shifted in the sand, rotating herself so she was facing both Silver and me more directly. “Also true,” she said, continuing, “and I previously told her, but I’ll repeat for your sake, there are things–many, or even most things you’d want to know–that I can’t talk about.” Her gaze shifted over to me. “And despite what you think, I did not put you here, and I did not trap you here. You're being here was the result of your body being destroyed.”

  “Didn’t keep me here! Didn’t keep me here, she says!” I raised my voice because my anger was successfully overcoming my exhaustion, at least, enough to yell. “So I just magically get put here, dead but not. And she has the ability to get me out–I asked her, and she told me so! But she won’t. Refuses. If that’s not keeping me here against my will, then I don’t know what is!”

  Silver flinched at my outburst, sand spraying from my dismissive snort. I wasn’t sure if it was because of what I said, my shouting, or the sand itself. “Is that true?” she asked the other.

  The imposter nodded slowly. “Yes, it is. I could have just lied to her and told her I didn’t have the ability, but I chose to be honest with her in the hopes that she’d at least try and understand the situation and circumstances.”

  Silver furrowed her brow and asked, “But why? It…” she glanced around, at the rotting corpse of Brockton Bay in the background. “...It seems a bit cruel.”

  “Thank you. At least you get it,” I grumbled.

  The imposter had a pained look on its face. “A number of reasons, but I’ll go through them. First, and most importantly,” she gave me a pointed look “-is that although I had the ability to let her out of here, I wasn’t allowed to let her out. Secondly, there wasn’t any place to let her out into. There was no body for her to inhabit; what there was wasn’t suitable for her to inhabit until very recently, when you came into the picture. Finally, there are things outside of my control, where I’m just as much stuck by circumstance as you two are.”

  Silver rubbed her forehead with one hand and held her other up, palm facing outwards toward the imposter. “Wait, I have so, so many questions. What do you mean you had the ability, but not the permission? Permission from who?”

  It pursed its lips. “This is where things get frustrating, and it’s for all of us, me included. I can’t tell you. As I said before, there’s a large amount that I can’t talk about.”

  “But you know the answer?” Silver asked.

  It nodded.

  “Okay, so… glossing over that for now, you said there wasn’t a body, but then when there was… you still didn’t let her out? And like…” Silver frowned and looked out at the water behind me. “Where, or how, do I come into the picture? Why am I here? Did you… make me?”

  The imposter took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then she gestured at me. “While she was in here, she accidentally sponged up some things that she shouldn’t have. My ‘boss,’ for lack of a better way of describing them, wasn’t happy about it. You can think of it like… being very concerned about privacy and secrets, in a way. Morgan–through no fault or action of her own–set off some red flags of a sort, and well, my boss wasn’t happy about letting her back out, as was the original plan.”

  Silver didn’t react; she just continued staring off into the distance fairly impassively, or rather, with the same mild frown on her face she’d had before.

  The other continued. “There isn’t a very nice way of putting it, but I know we prefer the adhesive bandage be ripped straight off and not slowly peeled. I had a problem. There was a body that was ready and waiting, and it needed a person put in it. I can’t leave. She now couldn’t leave. Time was running out, and if something wasn’t done, well, then your body would have been basically declared brain-dead, and then everyone would be fucked. So I did what I could with the resources I have. I extracted as much of her as I could, trying to make sure none of those red flags would be present, and that’s how you came about.”

  The air was silent save for the soft sloshing of water and the sound of waves and foam on the sand. The silence stretched out from momentary to several minutes. Each of us was in our own form of solitude as we waited for Silver to respond. Most of this wasn’t news to me, although I didn’t know the why of Silver’s existence. I… I felt bad for her. I wasn’t sure how I’d personally take the news of being told I was the equivalent of a duct-tape patch job of a person.

  At long last, Silver brought a hand up to cover her mouth and coughed a few times, clearing her throat. Her voice was still a touch thick when she spoke. “Okay. Did you… have a plan? I have to assume there’s a reason why you called this meeting, here and now. Unless this was just, I don’t know, a convenient time?”

  The other rocked her head from side to side. “Yes and no, not really a plan, because that’d be very cunty and presumptuous of me. Giving you options is the phrase I’d use if I were to describe it.”

  “How very considerate of you to offer her options,” I growled at the other.

  “Will you stop blaming me for all your problems!?” She snapped back at me. “I don’t know how many times we have to do this same song and dance before you’ll either get it, or get the fuck over it!”

  “Get over it!?” I shouted back, and I felt burning hot anger rushing up my chest like heartburn from hell. It expanded until it filled my entire chest and upper half, and then it just… burst like a soap bubble. The heat blew straight out of me, leaving only hollowness and melancholy in its wake. My voice shrank, too, leaving me sounding as weak and powerless as I felt. “They… they…”

  I felt like I’d be tearing up heavily, had I possessed the ability.

  “...They left me behind. They’re all… living their lives, happy and successful, with good careers and all these stories of amazing and terrible things I missed that I’ll never be able to experience or relate to.”

  Silver stood up and draped her upper body over one side of my neck and shoulders, and she gave me a wimpy hug. It was probably the best that she could manage. I just sniffed and wallowed in my pain and misery.

  Being back had been fun; it had been great. There were so many things that I’d missed, seeing my friends and family, sleeping with my romantic interests. But underneath all of it, it hurt. Seeing a city I grew up in that I didn’t recognize anymore, reading about myself and my friends in the third person on wiki articles online. Seeing, knowing, feeling that the hole I’d left when I’d died had been filled, not fully, but any amount was… painful and hard to come to terms with. I was left feeling like I had to play catch-up with my own life, lost and confused.

  As lame as it was to admit, fighting Mr. Big and that associated parahuman drama had maybe been the highlight of my time back in Brockton. Because it was familiar: fighting for my life, and the lives of others, without any greater context, legacy, or burden. Doing what was right for the sake of it because it felt right, when so many other things felt wrong.

  The ever-present and oppressive guilt that I felt whenever I recognized that things didn’t feel right with me present. Like I was a fifth wheel on the cart. I was a shiny wheel, and I looked good, and everyone liked me…but I wasn’t necessary.

  “I think you know how I feel,” Silver whispered to me. I squeezed her shoulders and hugged her back with a few tentacles.

  The other’s shoulders slumped, too. She let out a soft sigh. “I wish we could have gotten you back faster. There were ways, but they came with problems–big ones. I wanted you to be able to come back and not have to worry about the potential for major issues down the road. Physical, emotional, neurological. It wasn’t quick or easy finding something, a technology that was compatible that wouldn’t cause other, bigger issues, either.”

  “I thought Dragon revived me?” I asked her after a beat.

  “Oh, she did. She absolutely did. But where do you think she got the technology to do so from? Not that she couldn’t have gotten her hands on other tech, with the resources and access that she has, but it was still faster and better, with what I provided her.”

  “You never told me,” I grouched.

  “You never asked, and were too busy throwing cars and buildings at me,” she replied with a teasing smirk on her lips.

  “You’re still a bitch,” I protested.

  “Yeah, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

  I groaned. She might have hit me with a checkmate on that one.

  I lay there in the momentary quiet, basking in the hot, direct sunlight. Silver continued to lie on top of me. I was probably cool to the touch for her and felt good in the muggy summer heat. Eventually, I mused, “I don’t want to be here. I hate this place. But…” I sighed. “I don’t really know if I want to go back, either. It seems like everyone was doing well without me. I couldn’t even rescue those people; they probably all died in the end, after I left. After I got my ass kicked, abandoned them, and then shot out of the sky. I don’t know if I can go back and face being Apex, having failed in multiple places and ways to save so many people.”

  Silver dropped her head, resting her cheek on the back of my neck. She felt warm. I wasn’t expecting her to respond, but she spoke next. “I feel… sort of similarly, I guess. There are people I barely know, and it feels weird, because they know me, but it’s one-sided, and I have these weird feelings cropping up all the time.”

  The other nodded seriously. “That’s her, you’re feeling. You two are connected in more ways than you might think, and things… leak, essentially.” She finger-combed her hair, gathered it behind her neck, then tied it into a loose knot. Something I remembered doing so many times myself, when I needed it out of my way, and hairbands were proving to be elusive. She gave me an ambivalent, or maybe more of a neutral, look.

  “I know it sucks, and that you feel like you don’t belong, and that it’s painful.” The muscles in her jaw flexed, and her face hardened in a way I certainly recognized. “You’re just going to have to suck that shit up and deal with it, babe. The people you care about need you there, and there’s no two ways about it. Things are happening, as they always are, and trust me when I tell you that you would never forgive yourself if you weren’t there to give it your all when shit hits the fan. And it’s going to. People are going to die. You being there and helping them is the only thing that can help prevent some of that, because if you give up now, you’re forfeiting your rights to do anything about it.”

  She gestured around at the ruin behind her. “You can’t do shit here, other than be a passive observer. I know we’re not that kind of person.”

  “I’m so tired,” I mumbled.

  “Because you’re barely alive, out there,” she waved a hand at the ocean behind me. “They’re looking for you, but I wouldn’t say your chances of being found are too great, unless you do something about it. Your physical state here is a reflection of your state out there. Your brain is on life support, and so you feel it here, since you’re reconnected now.”

  “Does it ever get better?” I asked her, although, truthfully, I was asking myself as much as I was asking her.

  “What’s Jessica say?”

  My chest rumbled with a throaty groan. “Only if we make it better.”

  Silver lifted her head from my neck and asked the other, asking, “You said there were options?”

  That got another slow nod out of her. “Yes. I’ve thought about it a lot, and did a fair amount of research, and I see two paths you two could take.” She held her hands up, separated by a few inches, and with her palms parallel and facing one another. “You can go back the way you were when you came here. You two keep doing your thing and work things out to where you’re bouncing back and forth, sharing time, whatever you want to call it. That’s the easy path, but there are problems.”

  “What sorts of problems?” Silver asked.

  “Well, besides the obvious of there being two of you and one physical body, it’s not great for our mental well-being, with the issues we already have. This affects her more than it does you.” She pointed at me. “As you’ve probably noticed, she’s not okay in the way she claims. She spent…” She pursed her lips for a moment. “...Longer than I’d like to try and define stuck here. Extended isolation isn’t good for people, especially not us. I tried to provide her with some level of stimulation, even though I know it was severely lacking. My hands were tied, I’m not able to really make much in the way of changes to all of this,” she waved her hand around in the air vaguely.

  I grunted but didn’t have much else to add. That summed it up fairly well.

  Silver cleared her throat and asked, “And the other option?”

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The other brought her hands together, fingers interweaving, and formed a ball shape with both hands. “I call this the kintsugi approach. I send you both back… basically merged and reintegrated. The thing is…” she separated her hands and crossed her arms, and was holding steady eye contact with Silver, from what I could tell. “Your respective individual experiences more or less will represent your percentage of the makeup, and well, the original Morgan has the most experience of you two, by a very large margin.”

  Silver was as still as a statue. “So… I stop existing, or at least, most of me, and she continues onwards?” She placed a palm on my neck.

  The other shook her head slowly. “No, you’re thinking about this incorrectly. You are her. She is you. You are the same person, even if it might not feel like it.”

  “Did you leave a hole in me when you took her out?” I asked the other.

  She shook her head at that, too. “No, she’s a duplicate with some parts selectively missing. You’re not missing anything.”

  Huh.

  “Wouldn’t that mean she’s still dying, in effect?” I asked after I thought about things for a few moments.

  “No, the opposite. You both would continue to live, just as a single whole. Where you have some cracks, she’ll be there to help fill in the gaps. I know, not a great metaphor, I’m trying to avoid making it more confusing. We had cracks in us before; you definitely got both more cracks and deeper cracks in you from your time being here.”

  I studied the beach below my head. “Maybe,” I admitted more than a little reluctantly.

  “I’ll do it,” Silver announced, unprompted by anyone.

  “Don’t-” I started to protest, but she pulled her palm back and returned it to my neck in the form of a light punch.

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you’re not my boss. I’ll make my own decisions, thank you very much.” Silver was firm and more insistent than I think I’d heard her be.

  The other’s lips tightened, and her facial expression darkened. “You can’t just agree to it in a one-sided manner. You have to both be on board, or it won’t work.”

  I didn’t know if I could be okay with that, was the thing. The thought of her giving her life, or independence, or whatever the fuck, made me uncomfortable. I voiced my concern, albeit weakly. “I don’t know if I’m okay with that, though.”

  “You tried to protect me from our captors, and when we were falling, even though it meant you’d get smacked into the water harder, or at least, you thought so at the time,” Silver said. “You didn’t even think about it, you just did it.”

  “Well… yeah. It’s just the right thing to do; it wasn’t your fight, you were basically an innocent bystander.”

  “Yeah, right. Exactly. So isn’t me doing that for you precisely the same thing?”

  “It doesn’t feel the same,” I griped back at her.

  The other remained silent, but Silver did not. “You’re just saying that because you want to hurl yourself in front of the speeding car, and you don’t feel comfortable with the idea of someone else wanting to do that for you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “God, you’re–we’re so fucking stupid it’s actually painful. It’s the same damn thing! You’re just caught up in your feelings.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Resentment at the fact washed over me. No, not wrong. She was right. I was caught up in my feelings and treating her like a kid sister, or something, not like an equal, or a teammate. I wanted to protect her, but I wasn’t extending her the rights and privileges to do the same in turn.

  I was the asshole here, and it stung.

  “What do we have to do?” Silver asked the other.

  “Nothing. Not really. I’m going to do a little mind-fuckery. Both of you are going to get to watch the highlights reel of your life to get you synced up, and that’s that, more or less.”

  Silver climbed up my side and straddled my neck the way that Taylor used to. “Alright. Do it whenever you’re ready,” she told the other. They dropped their eyes down to my own.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  Silver leaned forward and rested her full body on the back of my neck and head. I played with her hair with my tentacles. We were there one moment, and gone the next. Instead of on the beach, we were in my memory, as clear as day, as if we were there, reliving and experiencing it directly in the moment.

  Swimming lessons. The birthday that Melody and I got into a fight because we’d accidentally opened each other’s presents. The time I tripped and face-planted on my way to home base playing softball. Sleepovers at the Dallons and watching scary, R-rated movies secretly in the middle of the night. My trigger event, and all the horror and misery that entailed. Getting powers, joining the Wards, and feeling like I was on top of the world. My time with the team, getting shot by the ABB, and then my ‘graduation.’ Deciding to become independent. Losing my humanity, then realizing that I was happier without it.

  Meeting Taylor. Brockton Strong and the firestation. The Protectorate, appearing before Congress, flying giant glowing gay pride wings in front of the media. The Chosen, then the Nine. What felt like an eternity of being here, in my latest personal hell. Waking up in a vat and being certain I was freezing to death. Dragon, nursing me back to health. My first night with Amy and Taylor, then Melody being rotten as fuck to me.

  I drifted off, losing consciousness as my exhaustion finally conquered my meagre resistance.

  I awoke some time later, feeling like I hadn’t had nearly enough sleep. Drowsy and lethargic, I wanted to go back to sleep for longer.

  The problem was that I couldn’t fall back asleep, because every nerve in my body was telling me that I’d been thrown off a building, run over by a city bus, and they might have stopped afterwards to back it up and run me over a few more times for good measure, and just out of pure spite.

  Everything hurt, and what didn’t hurt was highly suspect and more than a little telling in the vacuous lack of sensation. I drew a slow breath. It was hard because it felt like someone was standing on my chest while I tried to inhale. No… not quite. I felt the weight settle back in place when I exhaled. I couldn’t see anything; it was pitch black, and I couldn’t hear anything other than a ridiculously slow heartbeat.

  I was getting some sensation from my… tongue and… left hand?

  Yeah.

  It was muted in the case of my left hand, vague, more of a suggestion of sensations than the sensations themselves directly. Like I was replaying a recording on loop, or something. I flexed my hand. It felt crunchy and gritty around the joints. It wasn’t moving smoothly at all, but it was moving. Progress.

  I felt around with it. It was immobilized below the wrist, from what I could tell. Patting my hand around, it felt like slimy things, mud and sand. Some things bumped into my hand and seemed to scatter when I started groping around.

  I’d been dreaming about something. What was it? Thinking was hard; it was like my head was filled with grease-packed cottonballs. I had to do something. My friends, or someone else, needed me. It was important; I couldn’t go back to sleep. I had to help myself get out of this mess. That much I knew for certain. Nobody was going to help me, so I had to help myself. I wasn’t sure on the why of it, but I was sure of the pressing need to act.

  So I did.

  Bit by bit, I worked to shift my left arm; it was stubborn and took entirely way too much effort to do, but slowly, I was getting mobility back. Some tentacles helped, too. Ah, that’s what it was. I was buried. Had I died? Again? Did they think I was dead and they’d had a funeral for me?

  Here lies Morgan Rivera, occasional hero, and full-time stupid bitch.

  My level of awareness came up as I worked, as did my heart rate. I was beyond exhausted, in some twilight phase where it sort of seemed like I was partially asleep. Things had a dreamlike quality, not that I could really tell what was going on all that well.

  At last, I felt like there was only a shallow amount of crap left on top of my head and upper body, so I reached out as far as I could with my left hand and arm, and tried to pull myself out. My hand was sliding around in slick, slippery muck, and strands of slime kept getting caught up in the mix, further lowering traction. I puffed with effort through my tongue. The cold, salty water felt good in my chest. I thought I should probably feel like I was freezing cold, but at the same time, I didn’t have the energy in me to actually do anything about being cold.

  I formed a clawed scoop with my hand and dug it into the muck, then tried again to pull myself out. My arm quivered with the strain, the muscles burning now on top of all the other agonizing sensations, like pins-and-needles, stinging, and throbbing aches. I strained as hard as I could, and my tentacles slid in the muck behind me to try to assist in giving me a little push.

  A sliver of motion. Wicked suction pulling and trying to drag me right back into the special place that fit me perfectly before. I screamed, which just involved straining my throat and gushing water slightly more energetically than normal breathing. I broke free! And I could feel weight slipping and sliding off my back as I shifted my grip to a new temporary hand-hold, and dragged my stubborn ass a few inches forward once again.

  And again.

  And again.

  There was an incline I could feel. I headed uphill. Of course, I had to go uphill, which was the direction that required the most energy and effort climb. No, no easy path for Morgan.

  Bit by bit, I moved along, out of the slime and muck and into sandier and siltier waters. The water above me grew shades brighter, from nearly pitch black to just really damn dark. It was progress. I felt things come and check me out as I labored. Some of them nibbled on me, and I swatted at them with a tentacle. It wouldn’t do to get eaten after all of that work, and I didn’t have it in me to actually catch whatever it was and try to eat it.

  Progress was slow. I was having to drag myself along; I had pretty much zero buoyancy to work with. Dead weight, essentially. I tried to query my power after it took me entirely too long to think of it. It sort of bubbled and splashed in an oceanic equivalent of a lazy shrug. No help was to be found there. My neck didn’t want to move, nor did my legs or right arm. I was pretty sure I had a neck; I wasn’t so sure about possessing the rest. My arm had been little more than a leaking, boneless skin-and-meat-tube attached to my side when I’d fled before. Possibly it was there and just useless, there and dead meat, or just gone entirely.

  That was a problem for future Morgan. One thing at a time. I had a really damn long hill to crawl up. I was dragging the left side of my face and head along the bottom of the bay, and it hurt like hell. Like rubbing salty sand into an open wound each time I moved. My tongue was flopped over my shoulder, and I was still breathing through it like a fucked-up snorkel. It and my left hand had been the only parts of me that hadn’t been buried. It was no wonder that nobody had found me yet. Not that the bay was really all that friendly to search and rescue teams in the first place. The water was very dark and dirty in a ‘nutrient-rich’ way, or so we’d been taught. If you weren’t at surface level, your chances of being found were pretty much zero, unless you had something that would show up on radar easily with you.

  I got lost in my thoughts, thinking about high school biology classes. The water grew brighter, then bluer. I could hear the surf above me and then see the sun as it progressively grew shallower. With my head cocked to the side on my shoulder, I could only see anything out of my right eye, and things were red-tinged and very blurry.

  Reach, dig, pull. Rest, pull, reach. Don’t forget to breathe.

  I felt the sun on my skin as the waves started to wash over and around me. It felt good. Like victory was in sight for this war of attrition. It also sorta burned, too, that wasn’t so great, but it only took a couple of points off the otherwise high rating I was giving it.

  I heard waves, I heard annoying-ass gulls screeching and cawing. My hand dug into what I thought was dry sand. Or drier, maybe. I half-coughed, half-heaved splurts of water up and out of my chest and out of my tongue.

  New species of playful porpoise discovered in Atlantic shallows.

  Another handful of sand and I was half a foot closer to dry land. I heard voices out of my right ear, but I couldn’t really see anything because of how my head was oriented. Seaweed or algae on my shoulder and back, and part of the sky.

  A voice, a young girl’s, or maybe a young boy. It was hard to tell, my head was still all… fucky.

  Something sharp and pointy poked my back and ribs several times. I couldn’t really talk with my tongue shifted the way it was and hanging out of my mouth. I also… wasn’t entirely sure I had a jaw at the moment. I didn’t know if it was because it was shifted into some other alien configuration and all warped and/or blue, or if I didn’t possess one.

  I tried to concentrate on the babbling voice.

  “...ew, it stinks!”

  Hey, hey. Cut me a break. It’s been a rough…night.

  “Leave that alone, baby, and come over here,” a woman, distant.

  “Mom! Mom! Look! I found a turtle!”

  “That thing is dead and washed up on the shore. Leave it alone, someone will come and clean it up soon.”

  “No! It’s not dead! It’s moving its claw around, look!”

  An exasperated sigh and the slapping of flip-flops approaching. I pulled my hand out of the sand and tried to waggle my fingers in a friendly wave. I was having trouble getting my hand to raise higher than parallel with the beach.

  “See! It’s a turtle, and it’s friendly! Can I keep it?!”

  “That- what is that? Let me see your stick, honey.”

  Poking returned, at my cheek, this time.

  Ow, fuck, watch the face, lady!

  A slimy frond of seaweed was pulled up and off my lower face, neck, and shoulder.

  Hey, no, put that back, it feels better than the sunlight!

  Then the screaming started, and the seaweed slapped back down over my face, covering my head back in blessed shade, but also obscuring my face at the same time.

  Relief…

  The screeching and screaming disappeared into the distance. I was content to just rest and try to recover some energy after my epic trek across the ocean floor. It might have only been a few hundred feet, but when your locomotion is a couple of inches at a time at most, it felt like I’d run a marathon or climbed a mountain.

  It was probably safe to sleep now. Someone found me, people would turn up, sooner or later. My eye drifted shut.

  I got woken up and drifted back off several times, each time feeling rather annoyed, because sleep was all I wanted right now, and it was fleeting.

  “Dispatch, we have additional human remains on the shoreline. Possible match to the Jane Doe from earlier this week.”

  “Copy additional remains…”

  Hey, hello, check for a pulse at least? What the hell, man!

  “...notifying Search and Rescue and the detective bureau.”

  “My turtle’s not dead!” The child’s voice again.

  “Ma’am, I have to secure this scene. Please escort your child back at least twenty paces while I get some tape put up.”

  I reached forward, raising my arm, then dropped it back onto the beach with a thump.

  “That body just moved!” The person, who I assumed was a cop, half-shouted.

  “See!”

  “Holy shit!” half-muttered under the breath.

  Rapid-fire radio chatter back-and-forth…

  The next time I awoke, there were sirens and a lot of activity.

  “Parahuman Response, we’ll take it from here. Yes, this is who we’ve been looking for. You said she moved?”

  I curled my four fingers to hold a sideways thumbs-up. Twisting my arm was hard, gritty, and stubborn. I put more effort into it, and it felt like my elbow popped free. My thumb came up as proudly as I could loft it.

  Look at me, I’m just peachy. I’ll take my PRT-issue drip coffee and partially stale doughnut now, please. Make that a double.

  Someone cleared their throat. Someone else spoke in a low tone. “This job never fails to deliver, does it?”

  That got a snort out of the first person. I coughed a spurt of water over my back. Breathing air was so, so much easier than breathing water. I felt like I might even get a leg up in the energy attrition war at some point at this rate.

  “Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  “Okay, on three. One, two, three, lift!”

  I was pretty sure someone had attempted to put an oxygen mask on me and had given up, because I could feel a vaguely cup-shaped weight pressing on my back over the end of my tongue. The air was both cold and extremely dry. I was being jostled around on a sheet of plastic, or something. People were carrying me, and I was rocking side-to-side.

  More napping.

  “...in and out of consciousness. Gave the response team a thumbs up, but hasn’t responded to other stimuli since.”

  “Hang on,” a familiar voice.

  Someone’s fingers pressed into my side, and a woman gasped.

  “You’re not equipped to handle this here,” the same voice again.

  “There are better facilities in Boston, and the really high-end stuff is in New York. We could see about getting a mover–” Another woman, also familiar.

  “No, that’s absurd. We’re not even a mile away, and if we don’t have it on-site, we have the means of rapidly fabricating it with our facilities.”

  “I’m inclined to believe you, but chain of custody–”

  “I don’t care! She’s barely alive, and worse, in agony! I know her family personally, I know what they’d want, and what she’d want! Or would you rather run the risk of her dying in your custody?” The speaker’s voice was tight and overly loud in my ears.

  The other woman spoke, lowering her voice. “Okay, listen–listen. I agree with you, but we’ve got procedures for a reason. I’ll let you take her, but I want to be perfectly clear here. If anything happens, it’s going to be out of our hands, and you’ll have to assume full liability. We can retroactively do the paperwork later, but I need a verbal confirmation now, at the very least.”

  “Fine, fine! I don’t care about liability. Let’s get this over with. Time’s wasting, I don’t want to be here a moment longer than needed. Get her wrapped up for an airlift, I’m having my sister take her over directly…”

  I slept for longer the next time. I think it was because at some point, the pain and misery level was lowered from an eleven on the ten-point scale down to a solid eight and a half. Someone was talking to me.

  “Morgan, can you hear me?”

  Rotating my forearm for another thumbs-up made me reconsider my previous pain scale evaluation. I left it rotated in place, but let my thumb fall over the top of my fist.

  “We’re going to give you a special bath. It’s to help you with recovering, or let’s say, preparing to recover from some of the damage. Which is… extensive.”

  An indistinct silhouette moved over top of me, I could tell because they were shadowing my eye from a blazingly bright white light that felt like someone stabbing my optic nerve with a hot poker. The figure had on scrubs and surgical sorts of gear from what I could tell, mostly obscured by baby-blue on white. They weren’t alone. There was one other, in a similar getup, who wasn’t speaking.

  I lifted my thumb again.

  “It’s going to be intense. Very painful. I’m going to do what I can to block the nerves, but I can’t block everything because–well, it’s not important. I’m going to do as much as I can. Is that okay?”

  Another thumbs-up.

  They touched my side again, and the pain rating dropped dramatically. “I’m going to be here with you, through all of it. Sharing the sensation, because I need to feel what you feel to make this as expedient as possible. The faster we’re done here, the faster we can get you actually recovering.”

  I signalled my understanding once again.

  They remained in contact with me when it started up. I was being sprayed with a pressure washer loaded with napalm. A wide, thin band of incinerating heat carefully working from my bottom up. I choked and gurgled.

  “I’m here. I’m here. I know, I feel it too. She’ll be done as soon as we can. We’ve got to get you cleaned up.”

  Worst shower of my entire life.

  It was a small mercy that my upper parts went by faster than my lower parts, requiring fewer passes of the flamethrower before whoever it was was satisfied.

  The other woman was with me the entire time. Talking to me, whispering. Crying. I couldn’t keep track of it, couldn’t concentrate through the sensations overloading my brain, but it did bring me some comfort, knowing that I wasn’t alone.

  I blacked out as soon as the procedure was finished. I wasn’t sure if I passed out or if I was put under. Either way, it was blessed relief.

  The next time I woke up, I felt like a pincushion, but despite that, I did feel better. Much better. I had some non-zero level of energy. Not enough to actually do anything, mind you, but it was more than what it was before, where moving my wrist was a laborious task. I could feel tubes jammed into me. The familiar sensations of cool liquids, tingly liquids, and some burning liquids flowing into my veins.

  There was also one rammed down my freaking throat. A real big one, at that. An uncomfortable stretching sensation in the esophagus. At least I could still breathe through my tongue around it, fuck.

  “Morgan?”

  I gurgled.

  “Don’t try to talk.”

  I gurgled an apology reflexively. It didn’t feel good.

  Stupid.

  “So the plan here is that your best way of recovering is to try and use your power to do it. I want you to try to do that first, and if that doesn’t work, or if you can’t do it, then I’m going to use my power. It’ll be slower, and we’ll probably have to break it up into a few sessions, but either way, we’re going to get you back to as good as new, okay?”

  My arm was resting against my side, and I was lying face down with my head and tubing running to my right. My arm twitched. I really didn’t want to try to move it to do a thumbs up.

  “Um… Wag your tongue if you understand?”

  Bluh. Woof woof, bark. I waggled the tip.

  “We’ve got some extremely dense nutrients here, available, through this.” She tapped on the fat tube coming out of my face. “I can turn it on, very slowly, and you can try your power, if you want? One wag for yes, two for no.”

  Yes.

  “Okay. We’re going to go very slowly and monitor things closely so we don’t have any accidents. You can try when you want, okay?”

  Yes.

  I felt a minor twitch and a barely-perceptible vibration that was momentarily transmitted through the tube. I queried my power.

  Can you repair things?

  Again, I was given a sort of non-committal and ambiguous response. I felt coolness transmitted through the tube pressed against my tongue, and a few moments later, it was like I was drinking a mostly-melted milkshake.

  My power stirred and splashed in a more energetic manner.

  Is that a yes?

  I had the sensation of wind and mist on my face. A squall was coming in off the water.

  Okay. Make me whole again… please.

  A heat started to bloom and grow in my chest, up against the conflicting sensation of cool pressure in my stomach. The sensation of fullness went away nearly immediately, and it was like the flow had reversed, pulling instead of being pushed.

  The woman, Amy, I think, gestured with her hand. Her other hand was firmly on my ribs. Monitoring.

  The flow increased. The storm in my head approached at a rapid clip. Bit by bit, both rose in intensity. It grew and grew, until I felt like I was being thrown around in the heaving swells of a hurricane or nor’easter. Simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. A sensation I longed for.

  My power was more than happy to deliver everything I wanted, and more.

  Fierce itching sprouted up around where the IV tubes were situated, and seconds later, I felt them pushing out and being rejected by my body. My breathing picked up, my chest now heaving with the activity I felt. My skin felt damp, then slimy, and Amy’s hand pulled back.

  “Quick, quick! Help me move her off here– over there. Yes! Just freaking do it, I’ll explain after!”

  I was lifted up by the sheet underneath me, transported to the side, and gently let down onto a cold, hard surface. The floor? Pretty sure it was the floor. Amy held the tube in my mouth and brought it along with me for the ride, which was good. I was really hungry.

  I understood not long after why she’d taken me from my comfy, warm bed. The slimy feeling on my skin was… exactly that. Gross, mucousy slime, and it sloughed off me and pooled around me, but only so far, as it seemed to be drying and damming itself up. Soon afterwards, it rose up to the level of my mid-face. I stretched and flopped my tongue out and over the side of the gelatinous dam to keep from sucking any of the goop up.

  It passed over my head, deafening me to the sounds of the outside world, save for the muffled sounds of murmuring voices over the mechanical sound of medical equipment. It grew darker, and I grew weightless, until I lifted off the surface of the hard tiles beneath me. That was nice.

  My breathing stayed fairly active, and my energy levels were dropping, but better than they had been. My protein shake was a lifeline in the darkness, but the torpor overtook me eventually.

  As I was drifting off to what I hoped was a restful sleep this time, I belatedly realized that despite all the activity, excitement, and strangers over however long all of this had taken, I felt… alone. Mentally. But not in a bad way. A little part of me missed Silver’s chatter and occasionally conflicting feelings, but I felt better overall. Less fragile in ways that I didn’t really fully understand than I had been before.

  I slept. I dreamed. Some flights of fantasy. Some old memories in the form of tormenting nightmares. Some of the strange lucid dreams I’d had ever since awakening. I dreamed of her, too. She was busy. Very busy, always doing multiple things, all the time, and without a break, for what felt like a very, very long time. I felt bad for her, for the very first time. She claimed to be me, but also wasn’t, but in my dreams, I felt like we were in very similar and relatable situations. Doing different things, but important things, each in our own area. I think she smiled at me and gave me a side-hug. I half remembered protesting, but returning it with the realizations still fresh in my mind.

  There were other dreams, too. Wildly original, some dark and menacing, some less so, but still off-putting in ways that were hard to put into words. A barren landscape of intermixed red and green shiny and glowing rocks, experiencing some kind of truly cataclysmic-level earthquakes. Ones so powerful that you could see the shockwaves rippling and tearing through the terrain. The shockwaves originated from off in the distance, with the barest hint of a shallow curve detectable from my bird’s eye perspective.

  There were things, crawling and skittering things, things that made my skin itch. Strange mixes of geometric and insectile shapes in black, brown, gray, silver, and red. Spindly limbs skittering around as they climbed all over one another and scurried about into dark recesses. They cast strange shadows whenever they were exposed to a light source. Shadows that were warped, twisted, and utterly nonsensical in ways that made your head hurt to think about. They scared me, and they made me angry because of my irrational fear.

  There were three mountains in a roughly triangular formation around a fourth, central mountain. All of them were capped in snow and had treacherous-looking exposed faces and sharp peaks. The sun was setting, and the central mountain was casting a long shadow over the feral wilderness. Except… something was strange, and didn’t make sense. Three of the four shadows being cast weren’t in the same shape or in the same scale as the peaks they originated from. It was cold, and desolate, and deeply foreboding.

  Others flashed by and passed through me, but didn’t linger for long enough for me to grasp. I was left feeling unsettled and perturbed in the way that nonsensical nightmares leave you feeling in their wake.

  Sometimes I stirred to a barely-conscious state of still-mostly-asleep, only coming up far enough to reorient myself to a more comfortable arrangement. Sensations were returning with each of these brief bouts between dreaming and dreamless sleep. Arms, legs, tentacles, tail, and wings, stirring and twitching in place. A warmth that radiated out from my center and was reflected back, and a bottomless hunger satisfied only partially by continually nursing on my feeding tube.

  I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was growing, significantly so. Taking up progressively more and more space, in the tight and comforting embrace of another. I had to curl up at some point, bringing my knees up and tucking my head over them, with my tail looping up and over my shoulder. My arms, wings, and tail all slithered and curled around my sides in a way that trapped my body heat and maximized comfort. At some point, my rapid breathing had cooled off to a more stately pace, aided by far larger and more capable and capacious lungs.

  I was brimming with a low, simmering boil of energy. Steaming and bubbling, but not quite fully there yet. Things grew tight around me.

  Tight, and then tighter still. What had been an embrace turned into a squeeze. It was still perfectly contoured to my tightly-bundled shape, but was steadily lessening in comfort value.

  At some point, my egg timer must have gone off, because I started to stir and come up to a higher state of wakefulness. My milkshake had run dry, I was feeling decidedly cramped, and I wanted to actually move and stretch more than anything. I could hear as well as feel the steady, rhythmic thrum of my heartbeat. It was loud inside of… wherever here was. I could feel a faint echo of it on the surface of my skin, too.

  My senses told me that I was in an awkward position, with my butt up in the air and my head between my knees, resting on the floor. It was hard, but so was my head, so there wasn’t any real problem there, but it wasn’t the best sensation on my neck. I felt sore and stiff, still sleepy, but in a waking-up way, and hungry. My stomach growled loudly enough that I was pretty sure the neighbors would hear it. I wanted up and out. Enough of this.

  I squirmed, trying to find a space or an angle to move in, to get leverage or stretch out into. It was nowhere to be found. A muffled beeping had turned into a steady, insistent chiming at some point. I tried to move my arms and my tail, but they were trapped; all I could do was shift them around my sides and back.

  Then my claustrophobia reared its ugly head. I wanted out, right now. I struggled and squirmed more, and I had a little luck moving my head upwards and forwards. I pushed harder, and there was a lot of resistance, but stretching, too. I had an ounce of free space below my neck now that wasn’t there before. I pushed even harder, and it felt like I was trying to pull on a shirt three sizes too small.

  Something shifted, and I felt a bit of slack. I squirmed more to try to find a position to use more than just my neck muscles, but it was elusive. Another shift, and I capitalized on it.

  And then, all of a sudden, there was a wet, squelching, and tearing sound, a gush, and I had forward momentum! Bright lights that made me want to squint, and I was carried forward by a wave of what felt like pure yuck, unfurling as I went, my muscles and nerves singing in delight at finally being able to extend. I slid across a white tile floor at a decent clip until the tip of my face smacked into the same white tile on a wall with a terrific thud and crack!

  That sent a fairly unpleasant shock through my skull and straight into my spinal column. What a way to wake up. There was a beep and the rattle of a door handle being yanked on behind me, followed by another wet gush. I could see Amy splash in, a shorter blonde-haired woman hot on her heels, both of them half-dressed in scrubs, with scrub pants and lab coats on. The two of them were struggling to wade through shin-deep, viscous, clear egg white and booger-snot slurry that had filled the room. Remaining upright and not falling into the mess was difficult for them as it was draining out of the double doorway and into the hallway. I saw drains on the floor, but they couldn’t hope to keep up with this level of nasty mess.

  I pushed off the wall, then put my hands and paws underneath me. It was absurdly slick, but I was used to absurdly slick. I was tempted to sink my claws into the ceramic to stabilize myself, but my arms and legs quivering a bit as long-dormant stabilizer muscles woke up and got to work felt good. Plus, I didn’t want to trash the place. This… operating theater?

  Previously behind me, and now in front of me as I circled to face it, and the two new arrivals, was what I’d been inside: A gigantic gray-green dome that was now partially deflated and collapsed, covered in webs of bulging, pitch-black arteries. A rubbery, equally black twisted and coiled rope that looked like it was the size of a vacuum cleaner hose extended out from the dome to the floor between my legs, where it terminated in frayed, meaty strands of connective tissue.

  I craned my head and looked over my back. There was a red and black patch of skin that was slowly being covered by winding fibers and blue scales where you’d expect a person’s kidneys to be on their lower back.

  “Morgan! Are you… okay?” Amy’s golden eyes were searching my face from halfway across the room.

  Oh, how I’ve missed being able to actually see properly.

  “Better than okay,” I rumbled, my voice reverberating off the hard walls and swallowing up all the sound in the space. “I. Am. Apex!”