Despite having lived entirely withiime of humanity, it had never felt the need for its own had cultivated ionship with humanity that humans were sciously aware of. No one spoke to it.

  Which isn’t to say that it had not relied upon humanity, nor that it had failed to influence people. After all, it had maed specifically to feed on two things, other monsters and bureaucratic fri. And, of the two, bureaucratic fri was the growing industry.

  There was so much wasted energy in it, so much that could be siphoned off for food.

  And it didn’t have to lift a tendril to make it happen. Wherever there were humans with a stylus and a matrix on which to record the daily harvest, there was what ter became called red tape. It had spent a siderable amount of time w if it was the anguish of people caught up in it that was so fulfilling, but no. It didn’t feel that anguish, and when it was near someone feeling anguish over something else, it wasn’t fed. It was the gridlock of information itself that kept it fed.

  And then, with the boom of the i, it truly flourished. But just before that, it discovered aence of promise and turmoil.

  The reason it had started interfering with people in the first pce was really only that it could. Of course it could eh its food. Every being that ate could do that in some way, even if it was just to move row to where it was more plentiful. But it had lived long enough to learn to py with every tiny tidbit of information avaible to it, including that which was locked within the minds of the people around it.

  And it had found that if it set things to a certain order, and lined everyone and everything within its domain up in a particur way, it increased the inefficy of the system and geed even more food.

  It grew so quickly then. And that was only during the age of ialism, when it had also figured out how to travel.

  Usually, it had disguised itself as a small pnt on some bureaucrat’s desk or windowsill, spreading its true roots out through the underground infrastructure of reality itself, what some monsters called the Strands.

  At some point, around the time that humanity was expl the moon, it had several maions in several offices around the Uates, all ected by the Strands, and had been spread rather thin. It was its owwork of information, influeng the way the whole try worked. And occasionally, when another monster got too close, it would snap it up like a venus fly trap. But that had made it too vulnerable. Larger things began pruning it.

  It discovered a bit too te that it was not the only being doing this thing of maniputing the people around it for better food. There were others who also beed from its administrations, and they’d silently worked in cert. But there were those who had opposed it, had needed something that its methods stymied. They objected to its presence, and had begun a campaign of eradig it.

  So, rapidly being torn apart, it had retreated and searched desperately for a suitable hiding spot.

  One of the things that had started happening with arming and increasing frequency was that it was attacked irands. Those were the lo stretches of itself after all, but it had not known such a thing ossible until it was happening. So it withdrew to as small a space as it could, with one maion and one dimension of the Strands for itself, casting as small of a shadow upon the Foundation, or Source as others called it, as it could.

  But being too small like that made it ultimately vulnerable, able in one gulp, so it had to hide itself or run. And it did both, in alternation aedly, which didn’t give it enough time to feed.

  So it had starved and shrank even more.

  It wasn’t until about 1995, when the ercial restris on the new World Wide Web were removed, that it gained a new source of its nutrition, and ohat could feed it so long as it was near a modem. And that also opened up new possibilities as well. Because it could uand the information that geed its food.

  And it fually uood w.

  By maniputing the people and maes around it, it was able to reach out and start expl the world with a yer of prote, without leaving its hiding pce.

  And soon it had found a potential partner, a monster with a simir need, who would work with it again, and offered to protect it as it started to grow again.

  It only o find a way to move to Gresham, on, ale beh the gover building there.

  Which is what it then did.

  And it spent the couple of decades regaining the millions of years worth of slowly gained girth that it had lost.

  Only for me to then poke it a it, taking not only its energy but its memories and knowledge.

  I might have felt more remorse if all its work wasn’t now preserved within me, restituted before my own memories were done being rearranged and reassociated.

  I might have felt more remorse if I hadn’t for a little while felt like I was it, floating bewilderingly above its old hiding pce.

  And after that, I might have felt more remorse if it hadn’t been a teratovore i on attag aing me in the first pce.

  And in the process, I learned a couple of important things. It had had a partner who was not Felicity, who was still around. And it had not attacked me or worked against me because I was simply there, sg away the other emanants, but rather because I and Felicity had interfered with its sense of order.

  Which then led me to wonder, amidst fshbacks and other fusion still wrag my being, what exactly was it Felicity had been doing with me, and against me, from the beginning.

  If she hadn’t been in cahoots with Seedy, then why did she betray me and speak with such derision and dismissal when she did it?

  Could she have been w with Seedy’s partner?

  That seemed like the likely expnation.

  But then, I realized I wasn’t full of Felicity’s ret memories. For some reason, her schema of identity and story of her existence wasn’t ref in my psyche alongside Seedy’s and my own.

  I only had ss of her past and knowledge, and not enough to make any sort of sense of them.

  Which meant I haden her.

  Which meant…

  Cassy!

  Did I fail to save her?

  What happened?

  At this point, I remembered that I was still all eyes and could literally see everywhere. I just had to remember to pay attention to the photons.

  My trailing edge to the west, as the wind pushed me east, was still directly over where the battle had begun, and where I had left Cassy.

  When I focused there, I could see Cassy struggling to stand up, her phone in the hand of an otherwise limp right arm.

  And a memory bubbled up from inside me of a moment with my struggle with Felicity when we shared enough of each other’s memories that we knew our iions, and that was when we agreed to stop eating each other and work to try to reverse the process. But we were already such a fettied mess, it’s amazing and unbelievable that we’d been able to do it at all. And in the end, it had taken me a yet unknown period of time to pull myself back together.

  And I still didn’t know what had ended up happening to Cassy, or why she’d reacted the way she had when Felicity tried to use her as a host.

  I hoped that more of my decision to retreat from Felicity would surface, give me some clue.

  I could only now see Cassy’s vessel trying tht itself with weakened and protesting muscles, and Greg and Ayden running to her aid.

  “Cass! Hey, Cassy!” Ayden’s voice came to her through mental echoes of voices she couldn’t identify. And periodically, it seemed like everything fshed with a different colored light, only she couldn’t remember if it had really happened afterward. She thought it was her migraine, what was left of it. Like, her brain itself was strobing with rave gels. But Ayden’s voice was as crete as the sidewalk she’d just stood up and stumbled on, “Hey, Cassy! Are you OK?”

  She was so exposed where she found herself. Behind her was a huge wn with a tiny house in the middle of it, and no trees except those lining the back of the lot. In front of her were twht bound nes of a four erial. And while there were cars stopped in the road oher side of her, the space was free between her and city hall, where there was a huge hole in the ground, torn through ndsg and pavement like so much paper.

  And there was nothing to sit on or lean on.

  But suddenly there was an Ayden grabbing her shoulders as she swayed, and she looked up at his face.

  He tried to look in her eyes, despite how much she’d told him that made her unfortable, and she turned her face away quickly, g them.

  “Yep, that’s you!” he cheered through a smile she could hear.

  “Ah, you’re alive,” she heard Greg breathe a few steps behind Ayden.

  She tried to talk, putting a hand on Ayden’s sy but strong little arm, “Eyrgh…”

  “ you walk?” Ayden asked.

  She nodded, even though she wasn’t really certain she could. All she wao do was lie in a bathtub full of epsom salts and steamy water, and then go down the drain with the water and just disappear from the world. And in order to get there from here, she’d have to walk, despite how her legs felt.

  “We’ll help, e. The truck’s aways away, so we’ll take the MAX if it’s running. That’s not far. There are behere.”

  She didn’t care who was talking, it sounded like a good idea. In two stops, the MAX would get them close to Hayward Grocery, at least.

  But then Ayden took one side, putting her arm around his shoulders, and Greg went to the other, and their differen height made it all lopsided and wrong, and she felt herself ugh with nervousness and overstimution.

  “No, arm under my shoulders, Sweetie,” Greg said. “I got you, but don’t reach like that. It won’t work.”

  And arranged like that, it did work. She was able to blink her eyes open again as they went. It felt like she didn’t really heir help walking, but it was still help she felt. It did make it easier. It helped her remain steady, and allowed her to build strength by w her muscles without putting much weight on them. But she kept her gaze down on the ground, so as not to actally look any one in the face, and suddenly they were at a crosswalk.

  “We don’t even have to worry about the light,” Ayden said.

  Greg rumbled from her left, “I wonder if the MAX is even running this far after all… that.”

  “Yeah, the cloud is still there, too.”

  “If it takes too loing here, I’ll try to go get my truck.”

  “Good deal. Maybe do that sooner, and we’ll text you if the MAX es?”

  Greg grunted, and then said, “We’ll see.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t,” Cassy heard herself say. “Don’t fight. There was a big fight already. Don’t like it. Too much.”

  “Ah, of course not. We weren’t really fighting,” Ayden said.

  “Yeah, no,” Greg added.

  And then they were already across the street.

  Cassy’s stomach ched up and she wao vomit and run at the same time. She buckled against Greg and struggled to keep her feet, groaning, while her right hand ched Ayden’s beautiful loud shirt.

  “Woah, hold on!” Greg growled amiably, and stiffened up to add his strength to hers and keep her steady.

  But she wao gh him, and her body wouldn’t stop pushing.

  “I think we’re too close to the…” Ayden started to say. “Over there. We gotta go that way, anyway, away from it, to get to the MAX, let’s just let her lead us there.”

  “Of course.”

  It was the hole. She had to get away from the hole, because it would e her. e her until there was nothi and all her memories would belong to it.

  But they’d reoriehemselves toward the MAX and were heading away. And her friends were proteg her.

  She’d be safe.

  She’d be safe.

  She’d be safe.

  As I watched, I remembered more of what I could do and what I wao know, and so I looked more closely.

  I checked the realm of monsters and the Strands to see how Felicity was doing, assuming she’d hid herself in Cassy like she’d inteo do.

  And I found nothing.

  Nothing except that subtle waver irands that Cassy seemed to cause as she moved.

  Only, I shouldn’t have been able to see it from that far away.

  theInmara