Pale: 10.c - Interlude
Author: Wildbow

One After Another – 10.c | Pale

Chloe peered through the doorway, exploring one of the last areas of their new home.  A sunbeam shone through a crack in the ceiling, the shaft of light filtered through the dust that was heavy in the area.  The floor was tile that had once been speckled white, but now had heavy weather staining, mold, and plant life that might have been algae creeping across it, casting it in mottled green, yellow, and gray shades.  The part near where the sun touched had been bleached whiter, in a faint pattern that suggested the path the beam traveled as the days passed.

She hit the light switch, to be safe, saw the bulbs on the ceiling flicker, starting to figure out how to turn on again, and she flicked it off fast, before digging claws into the metal encasement around the switch and tearing it free of the wall.  Electricity coursed down her arm, and she gave her arm a fierce shake.

The shaft of sunlight was too dim for normal eyes to read by, but she still squinted and gave it a lot of room as she circled around it, passing lockers and a bench.  She’d avoided even walking past the door when it had been closer to noon, but now it was a feeble light.  It was bearable as long as she didn’t look directly at it.

The factory seemed to be being used as storage for the furniture and things of two other disused buildings nearby, machinery and things parked inside, and about two hundred chairs were stacked and piled near one another at the back, most of those two hundred chairs in some state of decay, hosting rat nests, or entangled with other debris.  It took up a full fifth of the livable area on the ground floor.  Back here, there was a kitchen without appliances, a room with fifty year old cots that had been left behind, wire rusted out and cloth devoured or torn apart for nesting material, only the frames and bits of wire sticking out, and there was this locker room.

A bunch of lockers, an adjoining bathroom, and showers.

She turned on a sink, put a claw under the tap, and recoiled at the bone-deep hurt that the cold water produced.

In her excursions, she’d picked up trash to move to other piles of trash for later clean-up.  They could ask for bags and start bagging things another time.  When she had the energy.  She’d also picked out the useful things, amassing a collection of tools on one table, and a collection of cleaning supplies on the other.

Now she added to that collection.  Half the steel wool in the cabinet by the sinks was pure rust now, but some was good.  Some even had old soap clinging to it like it was pre-soaked in the stuff.  Packaged like that.  It was a little thing, but it somehow made her happy.

There were old chemicals, like bleach, and some toiletries as old as she was.

If she could eat regularly then she could theoretically keep going for centuries.  She didn’t make much mess, not here, because she did her eating elsewhere, mostly, and they were going to look for a way to set up here permanently, using the practitioner girls to ward off attention and keep the people who owned this building from evicting them.  That was the plan.  General plan.  Nibble’s and Everyone’s plan.

Chloe’s plan was to make this space a home.  She turned her attention to one of the shower stalls.

She chewed on her bottom lip with teeth that had first become fangs, then subdivided into lesser teeth, years ago now.  She scrubbed one quarter of a broken tile with one chemical and a toothbrush, picked another chemical and the toothbrush for another, then moved on to steel wool and chemical number three, and finally the steel wool with the soap in it.

She carried the pieces of tile to the sink and gingerly washed them, making sure to remember which was which thing.

Steel wool with soap worked best.

Chloe set to work.  One stall, one arbitrary point on the wall as a starting point.  Everything from there forward, everything in and above the stall and on the stall walls, the floor, the drain… all marked out for cleaning.  She started on the areas where there was dead green stuff that had been either really stubborn, runty weed, or really ambitious algae, growing out of the cracks between tiles and the cracks in the tiles themselves.

She was fortunate she didn’t get tired anymore, exactly.  Not since becoming a ghoul.  She got numb if she was too repetitive and damaged her body, but she was strong and she was tenacious, and this was the right kind of mindless activity that worked for her right now.  If she’d eaten more she’d get bored and if she’d eaten less she’d be too feral.

She got a good chunk of the tiles to near-white again, rinsed them, then used her claws to scrape the most tenacious parts.  Each claw-tip was as hard as bone and sharp as a knife.  She rinsed again, then used the toothbrush to rub in some baking soda on the tenacious spots that were more stain than anything that could be scraped off.  She left the baking soda on.

Her arms weren’t moving as fast or with her usual strength, so she changed what she was doing to let them heal.  She practically skipped on her way out of the room, circling around the shaft of light in the center of the space.

Nibble was watching some show with a family living on a farm.  A little kid was crying and apologizing to the chicken she was eating.  He seemed half asleep, but that was okay.  They’d patrolled for a while and he had gotten walloped by a ghost.

“You’re active,” he remarked.

“I’m happy,” she told him.  She leaned over the back of the couch they’d moved into the space, then climbed over, collapsing on him.

He had long black hair that got in his face a lot.  She didn’t use her claws because they stunk of chemical, and instead rubbed her face awkwardly against his until it was mostly moved out of the way, then kissed him.  “I want to stay.”

“That’s the plan,” he said.  He twisted, then wrapped his legs around her waist.  “Coming here was good?”

“No, no, I don’t want distractions, not like this,” she told him.  He let her go as she squirmed.  “I want to keep working.  After.”

“Cleaning?” he asked.  “I can smell the chemicals.”

“Making it a home,” she told him.  “Sorting things out.”

“Do you want any help?” he asked.

She made a face, studying him.

“I mean, if you really want the help…”

“If you really, really, really want the help, I could muster up the strength…”

She smiled.  “I’m having fun.  You stay.  You heal.  I’m going to eat.  Want?”

“I keep thinking we’re going to run out of food and that we should conserve.  I get this kneejerk reaction, I keep starting off thinking no, save it for later.  In case we have another- if food gets scarcer.  But we’re okay?”

“Scary that we’re in a place where we can eat, isn’t it?  A lot of people and fleshy Others are dying,” he noted.

“Go eat.  Chow down.  I don’t need any.”  He sat up a bit to kiss her.  “I like that you’re more yourself, lately.”

She got up off him, then went to the deep freezer.  A young lady’s arm, burned fingertips.  She used raw strength to tear the limb at the elbow, rending flesh cold enough to have ice crystals in it, and tossed the hand and forearm back in, clamping it in her teeth before washing her claws.  She dried them carefully with a paper towel, inadvertently shredding it in the process.

She tore off a bit, leaned over Nibble, and dropped it from her mouth into his.  He caught it.  She wiped her claws again with the remnants of paper towel.

She needed clean claws and careful attention as she went to her bags, moving the more ragged and bloodstained clothing aside to get to deeper layers she hadn’t touched in a while.  Her claws had little offshoot-hooks and jutting spikes near the knuckle that caught on things if she wasn’t careful, so she took her time, holding her head back and to the side so she wouldn’t drip little bits of frozen meat onto her nicer clothes.

Nibble was kind and good and funny when he let his guard down, which seemed to be a thing that was rarer and rarer, but he did have his downsides, and one of those downsides was that every time she wore one of these two rompers she liked, short sleeved, short legged, one piece, buttons down the front, floral pattern, he’d drop an idle comment about how he didn’t ‘get’ certain fashion.

But she liked it.  It was comfortable and it made her think of sunnier days.  She hadn’t pulled it out in a long time because, she’d realized a little bit ago, she was saving it for a day that everything was good and she could go out in the sun again.

That wouldn’t be this summer.  Or next summer, or any summer in the next two hundred years, if she made it that long.  All of the ghouls Chloe knew of who’d become strong had started out okay and only headed up from there.  Coming back from where she was to get strong enough to enjoy a summer day without having to grit her teeth?

That ventured into points in the future where she couldn’t even imagine what things would look like.  The way some of the stuff on television and the radio talked about it, she wasn’t sure there would be enjoyable summers in a few centuries.

This little bit of cloth would be dust by then.

Meat thawed slowly in her mouth and she gnawed at it as she sorted out her things.  She got the romper, a hanger, and then various toiletries she hadn’t used in a while, some music, and some posters.

Eating helped her to replenish her strength.  She entered the bathroom, circled around the murderous little beam of light, and hung up the romper in the stall next to the one she was cleaning, so it would hang down and wouldn’t touch any gross walls.  She rinsed off the baking soda.  She grunted approvingly around the meat, set up her music and put up her posters.  One of a band in Greenland, more because of the lengthy black beach than the band, and one of four kids in Africa all lined up, wearing t-shirts for a death metal band along with woven grass skirts.

She’d wanted to go so badly.  To hit every continent, to start.  Then to visit other, select areas.  Another Chloe of another era, operating by other rules.  Now one of the best things that had happened to her in the last two years was that she had one place to call her own and she could stop traveling.

She got those posters put up on the wall, then set to scrubbing.  She didn’t put the music on.

What were easily decades of grime, weather staining, mold, and exposure were scoured away to reveal the white tile.  One tile after another, each tile about as wide across as her splayed claw, each one a painstaking process of removing the crud from around it, then minutes of scrubbing followed by scraping with the edges of claws.  She had to use her claws and her strength to grind the hardened baking soda into powder again, after which she made a paste out of the baking soda and water and applied it where the tile had stained more.

She ran out of the steel wool with soap in it and onto regular steel wool, but as much as that slowed her down a bit, she was working out a process.

She finished chewing the flesh off the arm.  The bone landed on the heap of used cleaning supplies.

Drain scrubbed, taps, curtain rod with no rod.

One stall cleaned.  One corner of this world that gleamed because of her, that looked like it once had.  She backed away to take it in.

Light flared, refracted, and spat sparks, the dim shaft of light more like a laser than anything as it cut and burned her.

She screeched, pulling away, free claw going to her shoulder where she’d walked too near the light.  She was wearing a ratty t-shirt and that had absorbed a lot of it, but light shone through cloth and it had shone through to her.

Flesh was rough, frayed, and dead beneath her claw, and there was a seam open where the body portion met the sleeve, and light had shone clean through there.  It welled with thick, sludge-y blood, and there was a hole big enough for her to fit her entire pinky-claw into.

“Chloe!?” Nibble called out.  “Where are you!?”

“I’m alright!  Stupid light!  Stay!”

“We’ll patch up holes in the window coverings later, okay!?”

She tore the ratty, bleach-stained t-shirt off, because it was easier than taking it off with the non-retractable claws, and investigated the wound.

If it had been a five hundred year process to get to a place where she could go out in sunlight, hurting herself and needing to spend energy on healing this would make it five hundred and four days, maybe.

Dark, angry, and depressed thoughts chased their way over the surface of her brain, while deeper parts of her brain were at odds with the coldness of her stomach, one thing tethered to the other, reminding her that she could devour and eat and gulp down life that way, and it would make every one of those things better.  It would lighten the darkness and quiet the anger, it would ease the depression and it would speed the healing.

Her claw dropped from her shoulder.  A claw-edge that could sever tendons scraped the side of her breast, and the skin wasn’t supple, nor did the claw cut it.  Her skin was tougher than it should be, and it got worse as a searching claw tested the skin and moved from front to back.  Her ribs, as she pressed the claw against skin, weren’t smooth forms anymore.  Beneath the skin, they were five or six-sided, with hard, sharp, distinct edges, and they forked and bent like they wanted to be lightning bolts, some digging deep into and around organs.  Some of those forks jutted from the rigid, cold skin of the side and back of her upper body like hooks and branches of bone.  Her spine was the worst of it, but she couldn’t easily reach her spine to track that.  It gave her a bit of a permanent slouch and she knew it was very easy to have that keep happening.  She pulled hair back and into place with a movement of her claw, to let the brown hair drape over and catch on what was back there.  The trembling, light-injured limb was almost too weak to reach back awkwardly and move the hair at the same time.

Lots of stuff was wrong.  Baggy shirts and sweaters were the rule, now.

Memories of a rustic church darted through her brain, and if the angry, depressed, dark thoughts were like snarling hounds bounding over hills, then the memory of the church was the horse-mounted hunter with the rifle and horn, following after.  The dogs of dark thinking were harrying, harassed her, and kept her anxious and moving desperately, they nipped and hurt, but the hunter was near-certain to obliterate her, if he could get his way.

She avoided the thoughts of the church in the same way she would avoid a hunter in real life.  She retreated to safe hiding places, moved carefully and with focus, and she retreated to fight, flight, and freeze.  Freeze was first; she made herself stop hissing and growling with every breath, then stopped breathing altogether.

Then she set about doing the final push, to take her mind off of it.  Fight, in its way.

She was aware that flight was something that slipped away from her awareness as she got hungry and hurt.  It was a really good option, but she couldn’t see where it was supposed to be, in this moment.  How did she run from cleaning?

Anger helped her to scrub the last bits, to get in the corners, and she took apart the shower head to give it a thorough scrub, inside and out.  Rotted-out rubber and things poured out with each rinse.  It took so long that she started to think it would keep disintegrating from the inside until it came apart in her claws.

She screwed it back on.  No rubber seal, but it would do.

She cleaned a rod, then went looking for and found a towel in their stuff, hanging it up.  Scented candles… she didn’t love the light the candles gave off, and had tried using them before, spray painting the outside of the jars the candles were in to limit the light, but even that had been obnoxious.  Now she set them around the corner, in another stall, and reached around the corner, fumbling, until they lit up.  The light of the candle flared, bright and searing, reaching for her, in a way only she could really sense.  She snatched her claw back.  One more perched on a stall divider, high enough up that the light touched the ceiling, not her.  The label and a bit of the spray paint on the glass had rubbed off inside her bag over the last year.

The brightness of the life in a rat as it scurried across the far end of the bathroom distracted her.  She followed it with a turn of her head and cataract-pale eyes, then turned back to her project.

The control for the shower was a single rod that got pushed into the wall.  She reached by and tested it, and water hissed out into the stall.  Matthew had come by and figured out the power and water.  Ken had apparently helped to hook up and smooth out the arrangement with the town.  Bills and things would get lost in the way.

She caught the water in a bucket and sloshed the walls to rinse the walls of the last remaining bits of soap and crud.

The rod was timed, factory employee showers with five or so minutes, and after the time ended it popped back out and the water reduced down to a trickle, then stopped.

Chloe disrobed, setting clothes down on cleaned, dry tile.  The scents filled the space, and if she kept her head turned a certain way and didn’t breathe so she couldn’t smell the rest of it, the section of the bathroom she’d cleaned was what she could imagine it was all like. She arranged the personal hygiene products on the floor of the shower.  Shampoos, soaps, conditioners.  Some were bottles left behind after the factory closure, but she put them there anyway, because a shower cluttered with an unreasonably large number of products felt familiar and right.

She put the music on, and turned up the volume.  Europop.  Nibble hated this stuff, but this was for her.  She stepped under, then shoved the rod into the wall.

The water sprayed out, and even though it was a bit above room temperature, she froze.  Strength bled out of her, her thoughts were numbed and were blasted away in concordance with the spray, and dark thoughts stole across her brain, followed by the image of the church.

Her mind was filled with her recollections about the inquisition-style gathering of her and her traveling companions, the group of them lashed to crosses with barbed wire.

Cuts and gouges opened up in the backs of Chloe’s arms, around her neck, and in her calves and shins.  As if the wounds had always been there, and the water washed away the pretending.

Voices cried out, angry, a mob, a fifty-something woman spat in Chloe’s face, and she could remember grimacing, mouth being pressed shut so it wouldn’t drip into her mouth.  The woman had some of the spit on her chin and it had been mucus-y, with black in it.

Her head hung.  The water felt colder than Death, now.

One of them -she couldn’t remember the names of the people who had ruined her life- was freed.  Dropped to his knees in the middle of the mob, in front of the rest of them.  Someone tossed a small knife to the ground in front of him.

Cut three of them or we’ll cut all five of you.

The cut opened up in Chloe’s chest.  First one, small and short, and then another as a grizzled man had taken her ‘friend’s’ hand that held the knife and made him make it deep enough to matter, and to punish for not going deep enough the first time.

It hadn’t happened right away, but as they’d been made to lash out at each other, the group had started picking her every time.

Had she been that bad a person?  A bad friend?  She didn’t even have the memories to dig through.  Only the broad strokes and bad stuff.  Was it that she’d been most hurt and they thought it was best to concentrate the hurt to better the chances of the rest of them?  Or had there been something deep-seated?  Was one really better than the other?

When they’d been asked to name who was to blame for ‘the insult’, the people she’d been traveling with had all picked her.  Her, to leave behind with the mob, bound by one wrist to the crude cross.

One girl with one eye swollen shut looking back from the door, mouth moving to say something Chloe couldn’t hear over the shouts.

If the dark thoughts were hunting dogs that preceded the arrival of the hunter, then this was a big dog, dark as anything, promising that a matching hunter would arrive.

Chloe collapsed beneath the pouring water, and it was a hard collapse.

She couldn’t freeze anymore, couldn’t succumb, but fight-

The humanity, already nearly washed away, dropped out of her with a thud heavier than the collapse.  Then Death loomed, big and angry and demanding.

She lashed out, snarling, inarticulate, scratching at tile.  Flesh, arm- she clawed at that and then dug claws in to tear deeper.  She bit, and felt meat and bone beneath her teeth.  In thoughts that flashed through her mind, she tore into and devoured the people who had left her with the mob.  She’d found them again.  A body was atop her, shoving her, grabbing at her.  She cut the boy who had cut her, then cut deeper-  She raked with toe-claws, twisted-

The water leeched strength out of her arm.  Her other arm was weak from the sunlight.  Her movements were limited by nearby floor and wall.  She lost the struggle, had only the bite.

“Chloe!”  Her name, barked out.

She clenched teeth, biting deeper into flesh, then released.

She stopped fighting Nibble.

The two of them lay there, crammed in the back of the shower stall, water spraying out over and past them.  She lay where the wall met the floor, beneath the tap, and he was atop her, hugging, holding her down, his clothes getting wet.

She felt like she had to explain.

Water splashed and streamed down around them.  They lay in the water that hadn’t made it into the drain.  A bit of it was pooling between her and the wall.

“I missed showers,” she said, and it sounded so small compared to the depth of what she’d felt.

“Running water, Chloe.  No running water.”

In the back of her mind, she wondered if she’d known deep down that this counted.  If she’d avoided getting her hands under the stream while filling the bucket or using the sink.  She’d quashed that almost-thought with the hope that if she could work hard enough, if she could change this space, if she could make it her, then maybe it would help her feel life and humanity instead of rinsing those things down the drain.

“It’s okay.  What you should be sorry for-”

“Sorry I hurt you, too,” She hurried to say, and it was hard to get the air into her lungs to say it, but she felt like it was important to beat him to the punch.

“It’s okay.  No, Chloe, this music choice is awful.”

She smiled, then laughed, and clutched him tighter, burying her face in the side of his neck that she hadn’t just mauled.  The peppy French blasted through the bathroom.

They didn’t really move.  She was too weak and he was, she assumed, waiting until the stream of the shower died down.  Five minutes, roughly.

“I miss being clean.  Standing in the rain doesn’t-”

He adjusted his posture, then cupped hands in the stream, catching the water.  He released the water, to pour down onto her arm.  Then he sorted out the bottles she’d placed at the base of the shower.  Some had been knocked over.

“Peach or spring breeze?  For soap.”

“Peach,” she told him.

He began washing her arm, ginger with the dents and gouges that had appeared in it as the water had washed the living, human-like aspects away.  That would take time to recover.  How much longer, added onto those five hundred years?

“Gentle or hard scrub?”

She’d thought they were waiting for the water to stop, but when it stopped, Nibble reached up and put it back on, avoiding the direct stream, catching what he could- she remembered how putting her hands under the stream of the water from the sink was numbing and hard, but Nibble didn’t complain, or he wasn’t so far gone that it hurt him like it hurt her.

He adjusted her posture and she buried her face in his wet pants leg as he cleaned the other side of her.  The stream of water stopped, and he turned it back on.  Catching the water necessary with his hands, rinsing out one nearly empty bottle and clawing it open.  A vessel to catch more water to pour over her to rinse.

He didn’t comment on the music again, and she closed her eyes, listening and letting herself get clean.

“Kids watermelon no-tears shampoo or Luxurelle extra body?”

“I think I was a bad person,” she told him, as he combed shampoo through her hair with claw-tipped fingers.  “That’d be why I’m like this.  I probably deserved it.”

“Who knows?” he asked.  “Hard to imagine you doing stuff bad enough to deserve this and not being able to remember it.  I like the you of today.”

“Even when I do something like this?”

“Would we ever be together if we were human?”

“Who knows?  I’d hope so.”

The gentle touch was hypnotic, a process like being lulled to sleep, except there were regular moments that jarred her awake, like when he cleaned around the parts of her ribs that extended past skin.  It made her think of sleeping in, the alarm clock going off, being put on snooze, dozing off, only to repeat the process.  Alarm, snooze, doze, alarm, snooze, doze.

He lifted her up, carried her out, and then set her down in a standing position.  She took one end of the towel and he took the other, and it wasn’t a great way of efficiently doing it, but they still dried her body first, then her hair.  Counterproductive.  Water dribbled down from her hair to parts of her she’d already dried.  He brushed and combed it after they’d dried it.

Then their bed.  New or secondhand but serviceable, already torn up because of the various bits of bone and claw that gouged fabric.  Nibble draped a sheet over her, and moved her damp hair aside, laying it out across the bed to the right of her pillow.  That too wasn’t the best way to do things, but she was in no position to complain.  Already consciousness slipped away.

The music had been set up beside the bed, and europop played softly as she lifted her head.  She took in the room and she could see it as a space painted in monocolored life and death, instead of a space of multicolored light and dark.  She had idly wondered, once, if she saw the microbial life, and if that indicated the life of a space, letting her see where the textures of the wall were, the cracks where moisture and mold settled in.

It had been tidied- a big tidy, and it had been cleaned.  It wasn’t quite the thorough clean that she had done, but she could tell by how little life there was on the walls.  Cots without mattresses or anything to hold mattresses up had been moved out, boxes shifted, and other boxes stacked up to serve as makeshift tables and things.  One stack of boxes was arranged to put the music player beside the head of the bed.  Another had paper towels laid out on a baking sheet, and a dismembered limb sat there, thawing.

It almost looked like the beginnings of a bedroom, now.

She was still feeble, and wavered some as she stood.

“Nibble!” she called out.

“Downstairs!” he called back.  “We have company!”

She wrapped the black sheet around herself and walked over to the stairwell, peeking.

Crooked Rook was standing in the middle of the factory area, wearing her full regalia, with light armor, the rack at her back with the birdcage, the paneled skirt with rigid, shingle-like panels overlapping, the belts, the various decorations.  She held the old woman mask in front of her face like a courtesan might hold a fan, covering the mouth.

Nibble was sitting on the arm of the couch.  Wearing pyjama pants he’d rolled up to turn into shorts, a t-shirt, and a beanie hat.  With his hands not in plain sight, the only things that made him look unusual were the fact he looked very comfortable in the dark, and his eyes were a cataract-laced white that didn’t disappear into darkness like other things of similar lightness would.

Chloe relaxed.  Somehow being around Rook while wearing only a sheet wasn’t the sort of thing that made her self conscious in the same way being around… just about anyone else in Kennet might.  Nibble excepted.

It was hard to say why.  Because she was a woman, too?  Because she seemed to take the monstrous aspect of them in stride?  Because of Rook’s calm demeanor, and the sense that it felt like Rook was upright enough that she wouldn’t intrude without warning and then make a big deal about someone not being dressed properly?

Chloe walked down a few more stairs, then sat, looking through the railing.  She made eye contact with Nibble.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Better.  I like what you did with the room.”

He smiled.  “Did you eat?”

“I’m going out on patrol.  Our guest is updating me on what she saw when she went out with John.  You should stay and rest.  And eat.”

Guilt welled.  He was putting in so much effort and she was falling to pieces.

“I want to come,” she announced.

“Are you strong enough?”

Nibble frowned, glancing at Rook, as if she had input.

“You know the line between the two is blurry.  If you get hurt, you go feral fast,” Nibble said.

He nodded, arms folded, clearly thinking.  He looked at Rook again.

“Do you want my input?” Rook asked.  “You know Chloe far better than I.”

“I do, and I have zero idea what to do.  I’ve never been very decisive.”

“Then bring her.  We’re stronger together.  It’s better if she gets violent and saves the two of you than her being absent, if we lose you, Nibble.”

“We fight against enemies that subvert, corrupt, and enslave.  Oblivion is the least of the things we worry about.  Being turned against former friends, emptied out and occupied by hostile Others, or changed in ways we do not want are the worst ends.  Many of us live for very short times and should not have to waste or misuse the time they have.  Others of us, like you two and me, live for very long times, and the methods our worst enemies use prolong our existences while making them worse than meaningless.  Sometimes they force us to the very opposite of the meanings we’d seek if left alone.”

Chloe gripped the railing tighter.

Rook sure said a lot of things that sounded very right, that Chloe didn’t want to be true.

“Fight accordingly,” Rook told them.  “Plan accordingly.”

Nibble, arms folded, was very quiet.  “Kill?”

“The best fight is one that doesn’t occur.  The second best fight is one where the outcome is decided in your favor before anything happens.  The worst is one where we have no choice but to fight and the outcome is decided against us.”

“And where are we?” Chloe asked.  “Right now?”

“A decade behind and catching up.  I don’t know if we’ll catch up before things all come together, but I do think we can be poised to be fine in the wake of things if we play our cards right and keep our opponents from subverting, corrupting, or enslaving any of us, and if we’re truly lucky, they may make mistakes and we can steal victory.  A slim chance, but one I’m keeping a keen eye out for.”

“And who’s we?” Nibble asked.

“Yet to be fully decided.  Give it until the end of Summer, Others will entrench and I’ll give you a firmer answer about who is on our side.  We have to see how much they listen to other sides, first.  For the time being, you two should stay well and stay alert.”

“Speaking of decisions, Chloe, Rook and I were talking about what happened.  Sorry, I should have asked before saying.  There are apparently options.”

“Few Others are entirely one thing or another,” Rook told Chloe.  “Goblins born to one area may be more vicious than goblins elsewhere, if that area has hosted enough viciousness.  The Ruins may taint one area and its Others, and traces of Echoes may infect spirits.  In another area, spirits may empower elementals.”

“What am I?” Chloe asked.  “In the parts that aren’t ghoul?”

“I would have to study you to know.  They would be small parts, but meaningful.  What I was telling Nibble was that we could give you something, set it deep in the core of your being, and change the rules you operate by.”

“I wouldn’t be a ghoul anymore?”

“That may be impossible to revert or take away.  You’re intelligent and complex by nature, you have a Self and that Self is multifaceted.  Tearing something like that away would risk destroying you.  But…”

Rook reached to her belt and drew out a sprig of branch with magenta-red cherry blossoms on it.  “An injection of Spirit?  Attunement to nature?  The drawbacks of being a ghoul would be lessened.”

“That’s good,” Nibble said.  He looked at Chloe.  “It’s good, right?”

“I’d be able to bathe?”

“Given time, far sooner than you would otherwise.  You’d be more beautiful, I suspect.  More comfortable, less hungry.”

Nibble looked so pleased.

“What would I lose?” Chloe asked.

“Some presence, some permanence, some ability to make meaningful changes to the material world.  Taste, depth of touch, the ability to see clearly to the horizon before the fog of spirit obscured your vision.”

“That’s not great, but I like that there are answers,” Nibble said.

Rook looked across the room at Chloe, who looked through the railing, thinking of Greenland, Africa, and other places that eluded naming.  She’d lost some of that information along the way.  She only remembered the first two because of the posters.

“No?” Rook asked her.

Nibble looked at Chloe with surprise.

“I want to be able to keep looking out at the horizon.  Even if it’s always in the dark.”

Nibble’s expression became more neutral, then shifted to concern.

“I know I’m a burden, I’m struggling, and you have to help me too often, Nib, but I- I need that.”

“You’re not a- I don’t mind helping, Chloe, I don’t mind if you’re a bit of a burden sometimes.  I mean, I worry, I do, but it’s-”

He stopped.  She stopped.

Guilt gripped Chloe, and she gripped the railing tighter in her claws.

“I should have talked it out with Chloe first before raising the topic,” Rook said.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t intend to toy with your hopes.”

“I’ll go get ready for patrol,” Chloe said, holding the sheet as she stood.

She left them behind, and they resumed talking.  She didn’t try and listen, because there were too many words that could be said that would cut deep, but she did hear Rook’s words, emphatic.  “Be careful.”

She returned to her room, and found where her bag had been unpacked, things laid out over the top of a table.  She unwrapped the sheet from around herself, and there was a tearing sound, a pulling at her side.

A warning as she started to get dressed.  She smelled nice, even though her nose could smell the chemical parts of the shampoo and soap beneath the fruitier aromas, and she felt the need to dress nice.  She skipped the romper, aiming for something with a bit more coverage, and then fumbled with the bra before abandoning the task.  Too weak, too difficult, too nervous.  Muscle memory wasn’t there.

It all felt so much further out of reach.

When Nibble entered, one and a half songs later, she was sitting off to the side, gulping down mouthfuls of the arm.  Building her strength.

He helped her dress, and that guilt welled up again, quiet and pervasive.

“What did you talk about?” she asked.

“You.  Me.  Kennet.  Things have been bad the past few days.  Especially today.  People are on high alert.  Edith got an escort to Matthew so she could travel back home with him.”

Nibble shook his head.  “Don’t know.”

“I’m glad I’m coming then.  Remember you don’t have to fight.”

“We were brought in mostly because we can fight.”

“We didn’t swear that.  Let them think it.  We came here to survive.”

When Nibble was silent, she turned around.  He looked lost in thought.

“Yes?” she asked.  “Survive first.”

He nodded, reached down, and zipped up and buttoned her jeans for her, before doing up her belt.

She thought about it.  He walked over, touching the chain.

When she was in a bad state, sometimes they’d shackle her wrist or leg, then attach the other end to Nibble’s wrist.  To keep her from hurting anyone.  It slowed them down and made some things harder, but…

“Shoes?” he asked.  He didn’t press.

She shook her head, reached for the limb, and tore off a chunk too big to eat in one bite.

She went barefoot.  Down the stairs.  She stowed the arm in the freezer while Nibble opened the way for them to get out.  The front door was chained shut, but they had another hole they could slip out of.  They’d pushed a rusty old forklift close to the wall to hide any view of the hole that someone on the street could find.  A pallet was jammed into the ‘v’ where forklift met wall at an angle, and that pallet easily got jammed on the wheel well and the little step that let the driver climb in.

A balance had to be struck. If they got truly feral, the both of them, it’d be good if they couldn’t easily get out.  Then others could step in.  Her and Nibble, bent and snarling, bone having grown out of flesh, then flesh growing out over that bone, until they were hunched and bestial.

They ventured out into Kennet, Saturday evening.

Venturing closer to the residential area where Matthew and Edith lived meant there were more trees, which meant more birds and small wildlife.  There were mice near trash cans, spiders, and there were more humans.  Compared to the lesser creatures, the humans boomed with vibrant life.

They stayed out of the way, crossing the street before anyone could get too close.  It was nice, in the dark and with a breeze blowing.  Hot, but the heat reached to the core of her and made her feel less cold and dark inside.

Getting out of the city was important, because they weren’t like Lis, Cig, or Ken.  They couldn’t blend in, and they couldn’t use their best talents in the middle of the city.

They strayed out toward the highway, then the trees, walking north toward Bowdler.

In amid the trees were a number of cabins, and some were occupied.  There was a couple in a screened-in porch, booming with life in a very rhythmic way.  She smiled, and drew closer to Nibble.  He kissed her when she looked up at his face.

Further down, a family of coyotes were living in the area next to a shed.  Pups bounded this way and that, all going still as they sensed something from Nibble and Chloe.  Retreating.

She could smell the life of them, the milk on their muzzles, and she could see the coyote-shaped blooms of what looked like a yellow-white glow to her eyes, but wasn’t light.

They passed a family that was walking their dogs along one of the nature trails, carrying a flashlight, even though not everyone who was out did.  Dad, mom, teen daughter, dogs.  Chloe stuck to wading in foliage so they wouldn’t see her feet, closing her eyes a bit as she smiled, so they wouldn’t see the glow.  Innocents usually didn’t.

“Hi,” the mother said.

“Hi,” Nibble replied.

The flashlight passed Chloe’s face and she shielded her eyes.  She would have thrown herself back, but Nibble held her in place.

Chloe thought of her family.  She’d gone home, once.  A long while back.  She’d stood outside, looked in, and she hadn’t had the guts to go in and see them.  So she’d written a note.  She hadn’t had the guts then either, when it came to sending that.

Then she’d left, telling herself over and over again that she should write something, so they wouldn’t worry, or something… and every time she thought of heading in the direction of home, she’d chickened out, then invariably traveled further from home.

Now she couldn’t remember the address, or the faces, and she had even less idea of what to say.

She could tell Nibble, get Nibble to help her dig through older things she’d kept, and see what they could divine.  Or they could research it, look up missing persons.  Her family deserved that.

She didn’t have the courage.

Maybe… maybe the things that made people not connect the dots when it came to Others would help?  Keep them clear?  Help them get over it?

It was a dark line of thinking that chased its way across her brain.

A man approached on the path, and Nibble led the two of them on a different course, so they wouldn’t walk too close to him.  He didn’t look like a guy out for a hike, but to Chloe, he didn’t look like much.  He didn’t boom with Life, and what Life he did have was dark gray against the evening backdrop.  He drew on a cigarette, and a thread of blackness snaked its way in through his lower face and upper chest.

Nothing too unusual.  Some people weren’t vibrant.

“I don’t suppose I could get directions?” the man asked.

“We’re fairly new to the area, so we don’t really know anything too specific!” Nibble called back.

“You probably know more than me.  Can you take a look at my map, help a guy out?”

Nibble ignored the guy.  Chloe gripped his arm, and they stepped off the path.

From a crouching position, she and Nibble watched, to be safe.  The clothing was one oddity, too nice for a hike in tall grass at the base of the hill.  The high-pressure request was another weirdness.  So they studied the man, tracking him as he carried on down the path.

“Your Life-sight is better than mine,” Nibble said.  “He carrying anything?”

“Bag,” she noted.  But there was nothing at the belt or in the pockets that had even a stir of Life or will of its own.  Practitioners tended to carry a lot of that stuff.

Nibble spoke, voice quiet in the dark.  “Rook thinks that dangerous Others here are making their moves.  That we might be one of those moves.”

“Picked for a reason, that isn’t totally innocent.”

“What would that be, for us?”

“I don’t know.  I’m trying to think about it in terms of… if they’re not convincing us to do something specific, is it pushing us to do something in a secret way?  Or manipulating us, or using something about us?  If we were more like some of the stronger ghouls Faith talked about, and made things more Death-oriented around us, that’d be one thing.”

“I’m… not feral, right now, not as stupid as I sometimes am,” she remarked.  “But I’m not getting this.  Ways they can use us without asking us to do something?”

“Sending me into a hungry rage?  Both of us?”

“Hm.  Maybe it’s worth checking what they’re providing to us, for food.  Like… ghoul equivalent of empty calories?  We think we’re full until we’re ravenous?”

“Why would they want that, though?”

“I don’t know.  But it’s worth thinking about, as a just-in-case.”

The man with the map and cigarette stopped some other people, got directions, and began walking with more purpose.

She tracked him with her life-senses as he walked away, then tracked the people he’d stopped.  Nothing suspicious.

They moved on, walking a bit up the hill.

“Want to watch a movie when we’re done?” he asked.

She’d hoped to listen to an audiobook while she was still sharp from having eaten well, but he’d done a lot for her today.  There was probably stuff he wanted.

She wished it didn’t feel like a big part of it came from a place of guilt.

Again, she steered Nibble, claw gripping his arm, pushing at first, then pulling.

They stuck to deeper shadow, moving faster than a human might normally.  Chasing that impression she was picking up.

Ghouls were creatures of Death, and many ghosts were as well.  There were symbiotic relationships in some ghoul clusters with the ghosts of their areas.  Being around a ghoul could sustain an ghost well past its usual expiration, and the ghosts could themselves deter innocents from the ghoul’s hunting ground.

Nibble wasn’t so great at that part of things.  Chloe had a better sense of the things, and felt more comfortable around them.  As last night’s issue with the ghost tearing into him had proven.

At the edge of a clearing, she could smell salt in the air.  But the ghosts weren’t torn up like they would be if salt had been thrown at them.  That left them in tatters, their edges frayed and disintegrating.  These ones were dim.

Like energy had been sucked out of them.  Whatever had come after them had drunk from them or made them weaker.  Temperature turned down, volume turned down, more insubstantial.  Weaker, dumber.  Less.

She understood that, on a deeper level.  What it meant to be Less, to plunge into the depths of being Other.

“Salt,” Nibble observed.

“Rook called them Echoes.  Said it’s more accurate.”

She nodded, but her attention was elsewhere.

She chased the smell of the salt, pulling away from Nibble.

At the treeline.  A solid, thin line.

Reaching across it felt like putting her claw beneath the running tapwater.  Crossing it personally would mean much the same thing as standing in that shower had.

“Hemming in the echoes before hurting them?” Nibble asked,

Not hurt.  Lessening.  Making them dumb.  They milled now, faint, vague, blurry, and they were veering away from the salt.

They would have been better at moving away from it if they’d been sharper and more.

“What?” Nibble asked.

The salt line continued.  Down toward the trail.  Thin but consistent.

Walling them in.  The ghosts- echoes, were all bait.

She searched out with her life-sense, reached past small animals, birds, and insect life, past amphibians, reptiles, and the dull glow of the plants around them, of weeds and grass.

She pressed, hard, drawing on reserves she wasn’t sure she had, to sense further.  On a good day, following a good hunt for a deer or something, she could carry that strength forward, using it to hunt more, hunt better, sense further.

She sensed as far as she could.  Past the point where that hiking man should have walked to.

And animals were fleeing something that gave off nothing to her senses.

The salt line broke, inconsistent where an overhanging log blocked the pour.

She turned, tugging on Nibble.

Nibble, in response, hauled back on her arm, pulling her away.

They fell, and because they’d moved up to the base of the hill the ski slopes were on, they tumbled a few feet down that slope.

She picked herself up, aware of how weak she was right now.

They retraced steps, investigating, keeping a wary eye out.

She looked, and she saw the faint impression of a small bell, tied to a tree branch.

“Trap,” he said, pointing down at the ground below the bell.

In amid dry leaves and foliage, a bit of metal stuck out.

Further up the slope, emerging from the trees at the same place they’d stepped out into this clearing, the man who’d asked for directions approached the ghosts.  Echoes.

He was Lifeless to her eyes.  Something about him or something on him was blocking that sense.  But he didn’t give off the impression of a practitioner.

She stopped breathing, drew close to the ground, and went very still.  Nibble did the same.

The man finished his cigarette, put his bag down, and then pulled out a case.  He popped it open.  Ghosts stirred near him, almost like they were curious.

Something in the bag on the ground was leeching at them.  Their lower legs disappeared first, fading out instead of tearing and disintegrating.  The rest of them followed soon after.  The man didn’t even spare them a glance.

As he put together a rifle.

“He’s distracted, go,” Nibble whispered, barely audible.

They went.  Slow at first, then faster.

Nibble picked up a branch, glanced back to make sure the coast was clear, then jabbed it at the salt line, disturbing a two foot length of it.

He hissed, growling, and dropped the branch, hand curling up.

“Y’k?” she asked, a gasp of two consonants as she tried to both be quiet and articulate, succeeding only in the first thing.

“Should have eaten more,” he said, clutching his hand to his chest.  “This way.”

They crossed the lightly forested slope, using a copse of trees to keep out of sight as they made the crossing.  The man was on his way down the slope, rifle held but not aimed.  Nothing he did suggested he had any idea where they were.

He dropped to a crouch by the disturbed portion, then stepped into the trees, following or checking their supposed route.

They kept running, putting more distance between themselves and him.

“We ask, we get help,” Nibble whispered.  “Deal with him somehow.”

Down toward the trail, into thicker trees.

A glint of silver caught Chloe’s eye.  A small bell on a branch they’d passed by, jarred but making no sound.

The gunshot didn’t sound like guns she’d heard before.  Soft, almost, even if it was still loud, and rounded at the edges. The sound didn’t carry like it should.

He didn’t have perfect aim.  The shot hit something hard about fifteen feet to their left.  But that was still scarily close.

They kept running, heading back toward civilization, staying a few paces away from the trail.

Another bell, she saw it and pulled Nibble away from it.

They made it five more paces before there was another bell that she couldn’t see, jarred and ringing without a sound.  She jerked Nibble closer to her, keeping the thickest trees between them and the source of the gunfire.

The gunshot sounded, the shot hitting the trees.  Someone on the trail turned around, looking surprised.

They were faster, probably faster at a run than he was.  A benefit of being a ghoul, and one she was glad for.  Her clawed toes sank into soil and wood without discrimination, finding grip to propel her forward into her next step.  Rough branches and tree bark scraped at her and her tough skin resisted it.

They bumped into another bell, and she hauled on Nibble’s arm in anticipation of the coming shot.

“He still hears, I think,” Nibble said.  “He’ll follow.  Move slower.  Keep an eye out.”

She slowed, eyes peeled.  She lived in darkness now, and it was at the time of night now where the sun had set but the very last gasp of sunlight still gave the sky a dark blue-purple tint, instead of the starry black it would have at night.  She could see the shapes, and she could look for the bells.

Nibble held his phone to his ear, finger to his lips.

But there was no conversation.  No message.  She could hear well enough to hear if someone was talking on the other end.

Nibble switched to sending a text.

“Who?” she whispered.

“Matthew and Edith.  For reinforcements.”

“They didn’t answer the phone, so I texted.”

Her nostrils flared.  There were more tatters.  She steered Nibble a little, and they circled around another bell, so they wouldn’t trigger it.

She knew, though, that by slowing down, they were losing ground in another way.  They might not give away their precise location, but he seemed to know how to track.

Tatters and smoke, she elaborated.

Tatters and smoke and blood.

“It might be his hideout,” she whispered.  “Be quiet, be careful.  He might have colleagues.”

If it was, it wasn’t belled, not that she could see.

A cabin, surrounded with smoke smells that had settled into the earth.  A light was on inside.  It wasn’t the most accessible or obvious cabin, set in the trees, a bit away from the hiking trails, with enough gaps in the trees that the people staying within could look out on Bowdler.

They stuck to the darkness in the trees, and she held her breath, drew all Life and energy she could into herself, shutting off some levels of thinking to become a stalking observer.  All of these things flowed out of key points in her, different degrees and types of Life and Self visible and obvious when they came from the peak of the head, throat, heart, gut, or groin, or any of the other spots.  She thought of it as going quiet.

In this, when she was a little more feral and a little more Ghoul, she could take the lead.

Four people inside.  She could sense the Life in them.

Were they sandwiched between a hunter and his comrades?

Or the enemies within Kennet, who were making their subtle maneuvers, that Rook had talked about?

The four people stepped outside, onto the screened-in porch.

The two practitioners, Lucy, Avery, Snowdrop, and a fourth girl she didn’t recognize, with messy blond hair that looked like it had been tightly braided and then left with that waviness that came with braiding.

They turned the light off in the cabin, and then the one with messy blond hair and the limp turned on a flashlight.  The other three girls went without.

“I know you were too hungry to pay attention,” Nibble whispered, so close his nose touched her ear.  “But I liked them okay.”

She nodded, watching them.  Snowdrop turned, looking her way, and she closed her eyes, to hide the white of them in the darkness.

The man with the gun was still after them.  A practitioner without tricks, a witch hunter who knew some practice-ish tricks, or an Other.

“You’d have to go,” she whispered.  “I shouldn’t show myself to the innocent.”

“She’s not that innocent anymore,” he murmured.

Snowdrop glanced back again.

“Stay close, stay safe,” Nibble told her.  Then he stepped forward, approaching the girls, clearing his throat.  Scaring the daylights out of two.

She didn’t hear the words, but his tone was serious, a warning, informing them.

Chloe lingered, watching the exchange, ready to act if they tried to hurt him.

And she lingered, because that man was out there, and he was willing to shoot Nibble.

Once she was sure they weren’t going to attack him, Chloe fell back a bit more, alert and careful.  Her eyes scanned the trees, because she could see the man with regular eyes, even if the Life-sight didn’t work, and she could see well in the dark.

The balance between Nibble and her was skewed.  He did so much for her.  Chloe could at least do this for him.  She followed after Nibble and the group of girls, but she didn’t stay close, and if it came down to it, she’d protect them before she stayed safe.