Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hey, I’m- I’m sorry about him; he’s, he’s going through a lot- well, we all are, I suppose, but- hi, I guess.

Hi, I guess, the nice man had said, over the sounds of gunfire, through the acrid smoke and earthy, rotting smell. He’d been a civilian, and Trish hadn’t thought there were any civilians any more. But he hadn’t looked like an enemy. He’d looked kind, and oh, so very tired.

She’d tried to say hi, through parched lips and a cracked throat, because some dusty semblance of politeness, long ago buried, had told her it was the right thing to do. But on opening her eyes, she finds that the harsh and mangled greeting had been aimed at nothing but the empty air- the civilians had moved on long ago.

The boy- he’s nothing more than a boy, really, scraggly black curls and a blank, wounded expression- the boy next to her had heard, though.

“Hi,” he’d said, reedy voice just as cracked and unused as her own. “I'm Alexander.”

“Hey,” she says, and has to pause for a moment to remember her own name. “I'm Trish.”

And then they are sent up over the top and so it hardly matters anyway.

One of the men shooting at the terrifying, nameless enemy from the other side loses focus, for a moment, bemused.

Two of the formless opposition advance holding hands, like scared children.

-

Old Jean watches through her curtains as the two men pass by.

They don’t look like the right sort, certainly, faces uncovered like that- what are they thinking? To so brashly display that they alone are unmarked, unblemished, better. The disrespect of it boils her blood- her own son, about their age, would never dream of it, not in his childhood village, surrounded by elders and betters.

Of course, old Jean’s son moved away to live in the big city, and hasn’t written in such a long time. Probably for the best- she’s certain that the white mould over her knuckles, that bothers her arthritis so, could probably spread through any letter she wrote to whoever received it- she is, she knows, unclean. She wouldn’t wish that on Darren in a million years.

One of the men is looking all about, peeking through the curtains, nearly, and how dare he! For him- an outsider, she’s certain, for she doesn’t know his face, and Jean knows everybody in this village, or knew, anyway, before the unwashed masses begun pouring in- she ought to go out and scold him for his impertinence. Only he does look so clean, and Jillian says herself that it’s those who look the most innocent who bear the secret plague.

The other, though, has his sleeve over his face, and he is afraid, she can feel it in the air like a miasma, and that’s worse, somehow. The sacrilege of the idea itself, that their little village alone is a stain, a blight, a prison, that it spreads the hellish mould all around the rest of the world, and not the other way.

But the village council don’t like those kinds of thoughts, and it’s best not to invite their prying eyes, these days. The men walk on, and soon are out of sight.

… He had just looked so scared. The fear lingers in the air, and Jean realises that she, too, is scared. It’s not right, is all, she’s nearly certain. When an old woman like her is afflicted like she is, it’s not right to be shut up in the house for fear of discovery. It isn’t proper to be afraid. And there are children here! Surely the children at least should be moved where there is no fungus, and yet instead Jean’s seen them burnt on the green along with the rest.

Mr and Missus Baxter next door have a baby, too, nothing more than a wee bairn- it squeals so badly in the nighttimes that Jean has no doubt it feels the same itching pain as the rest of them, bless its little soul, and there’s the plague-mark on their door, clear as day! It just isn’t right. Not for the children.

… She’ll just nip over. It doesn’t do to be out of doors long, unless there’s a burning. But she’d found the other day that coconut oil on the edges of the rot slowed the spread, and she can’t bring herself to keep the secret of her infection when there’s a bairn just there. She doesn’t need to imagine the awful fear of losing a child; she’s seen enough in her day. And it’s not right: all this and then having to be afraid, too.

-

It isn’t that there’s no light, not exactly. Katie has been running towards it for such an eversuch long time.

She’d sworn Ollie had been right by her, couldn’t even remember his little hand leaving her grasp until her fingers closed on nothing, her mind overfull with awful, blind, panic. It’s not even that she can’t see him, is the thing, she can hear him, such a long way away, towards where the faintest promise of light lies. If she can only chase it and find him and see his dear little face, but where she is now there is nothing, only absolute darkness, a jagged stone floor she keeps tripping over, slicing her palms to ribbons.

It’s worse because he’s not the only thing she can hear. Sometimes, when she stands still too long, when she tries to rationalise, and retrace her steps, and when she cocks her head and only listens for his footsteps, then an awful grinding sound will scrape from above her, countless teeth being gnashed, and hot drool will splash onto her face, and drip onto the darkness of the ground like blood.

Katie doesn’t stand still very often.

But still, the appalling, enticing promise of light, so faint she isn’t sure it’s there at all; she is certain she could manage the awful dark without it.

“Ollie,” she calls, voice high and frantic, afraid of alerting the beast, “Ollie, please, I'm right here!”

Her mam had made her promise- her parents had trusted her- if she could only see the way the beast could see her, not in spite of the dark but because of it.

Her brother cries, this time from behind her, where the black is deepest, so dark and profound it ceases to be a mere absence of light and becomes something else entirely, an awful, impossible presence. She breathes in and it is shaky and ragged and even at this pause the monster made of darkness approaches, never-ceasing, and yet this choice she cannot fathom, to walk backwards, into the dark which will consume her-

A change in the quality of the sound, footsteps not light and childlike, impossibly far away, but heavy and deliberate, coming right towards her, just as the beast approaches from behind. Then a hand is in hers- a large hand, a hand she doesn’t recognise- and it is pulling her, Katie’s body going taught like a bow, and she stumbles along behind, mind swimming in fear and adrenaline. But the figure is in front of her, so it is silhouetted by the almost-light, and at its chest a smaller body is clutched-

“Ollie? Ollie, baby?”

“Katie?” her brother says, and the vibrant, ugly fear goes out of her like air from a balloon. The figure slows to a walk, the threat of long teeth and snapping jaw no longer quite so imminent.

“I- I think we’re okay for now- here, sweetheart, get down,” the figure says, in a woman’s voice.

“Who are you?” asks Katie, stubbornly, although her legs are trembling and her chest is full of ice.

“Christ,” the woman says, “how old are you? Look, I- I wanted to help. It’s less scary in the dark when you’re not alone.”

Oliver carefully reaches across her body from where the woman has put him down and grasps Katie’s other hand firmly. She still can’t see his face, either of their faces, but the wide-eyed terror she’s imagining is pretty similar to her own.

It’s just- the woman is right. It is less scary.

-

You’re laying on your back. Your legs are halfway through a grinder, what’s left of them, and from behind you you smell not just raw flesh and viscera, but the intoxicating scent of meat frying.

The hunger you experience makes you sicker than anything you have ever known.

The man at the grinder turns the crank a little further, except last time you were able to twist around and look, he had the head of a pig, scrabbling at the metal with trotters.

You scream anyway as you are pulverised.

In front of you, a man crouches. He’s East-Asian looking, wearing a white apron, splattered with blood. Maybe he’s the cook.

“Suppose we never went in much for subtlety,” he says, in a cruel, unpractised voice.

“What?” you say. You feel like you shouldn’t be able to say much of anything. The crank is turned on the grinder again so you scream, but when you finish screaming he’s still there, kneeling, staining his jeans on the blood-splattered factory floor.

He rolls his eyes. “I don’t know what I thought I wanted with this. It’s not- it’s just- urgh. It clearly doesn’t want me anymore anyway.”

You think you try and say what again before you remember you don’t have legs below the knee and start screaming.

“Stop screaming,” he says, irritated. “You can scream because you’re afraid but don’t scream because it hurts. They aren’t even that good at simulating pain. It makes too much sense for them.”

You think about what he’s saying for a moment and realise your legs don’t even hurt that much until you remember they’re being ground into mince, so you try to stop remembering it.

“They don’t have the first clue what they’re doing,” the man says. “They only understand humans through the lens of fear, but now they’re having to deal with all of us- all of you, I should say. They aren’t good at it. I don’t think they can be.”

You take his proffered hand and pull yourself to your feet. You feel like at one point there was a compelling reason for not doing that.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” you say.

“Yes,” he says, and smiles for the first time. “But humans still make sense. Sure, you don’t eat, or sleep, or die, but your consciousnesses are still made from biological supercomputers. I don’t think they could ever stop you from making sense. It’s why it isn’t going to work.”

You tell him your name.

He shakes your hand. “Tom,” he says, and then makes a face, and then says, “Nah, yeah, the anglicised version is fine.”

When you reach the next room, a woman is lying face down, her legs being fed into a giant meat grinder. A bacon smell permeates the air, and she is weeping.

“Buck up,” you tell her, kneeling at her head. “They aren’t that good at simulating pain.”

-

Nausea flows over Christos in a physical wave, a particular shade of blue he doesn’t think he’s ever seen before, and he brings his hands to his eyes to scratch it away but his fingers have twisted in on themselves, spiralling endlessly. He sobs, endlessly, curled in the foetal position, only curling in any way is basically asking for trouble, and so he forces himself to straighten, lie rigid on the undulating ground, and when he finally is sick the things in there, where food hasn’t gone for ever such a long time, are twisting and undulating too.

Calm, quiet hands clasp his face, and they are still there when he puts his hands up to them, and he can smell the clean scent of human skin, and hear a warm, empathetic hushing, and when he opens his screwed-shut eyes the hands are connected to arms are connected to a man with a kind face, crouched over him, eyes shadowed with concern.

Christos doesn’t see any people in this place, or at least, when he does see them, he never feels them or hears them at the same time, in fact, he’d begun to give up on anything so coherent happening ever again. The people he does see tend to find much more interesting forms to inhabit before long.

But this man, here, looks like only a man, he has summer-blue eyes behind circular, wire-rimmed spectacles, a pale, young face, and long, wavy blond hair that spills over his shoulder in a braid. Christos realises he is crying when the man wipes the tears away.

“Hush,” he says, “I know, I know, it’s hard. It’s going to get easier, yeah?” A flicker of something like irony passes over his face. “The human brain is a malleable thing. It can always adjust; it can always get used to things. Yeah? Isn’t that incredible?”

It is true. The simultaneous lies his senses are telling him would once have split his mind down the middle, and now he struggles to a sitting position to listen to the kind man.

“It’s- I'm not saying it’s possible to keep your mind straight, in here- I should know,” and here, he gives a weird little laugh, not quite like anything Christos has heard before. “But maybe it doesn’t matter if it bends a little? If you’re coping? Things are insane, but- they can’t just keep getting more insane. They’re already there. And it’s not so scary, if you think about it that way.”

Christos gives the nice man a little smile, and the man beams back. “You should find the others, you know. It’s… it’s always nicer to have others. You’ll be much less afraid like that.”

He looks inconceivably sad and goes away, then, and absolutely nothing makes sense again, but Christos thinks through it, with the current instead of against it. He gets to his knees and begins to crawl.

-

The first time Jon and Martin visit the Panopticon is horrible. Spiders blanket the walls and floor and they can’t find Jonah Magnus anywhere; they can only hear him laughing.

-

The eight of them sit in a circle, in the drawing room of the gorgeous country house, and each of them with a knife to their neighbour’s back. The decadent lace curtains are drawn and the body, beloved of all of them, lies cold and dead on the floor, in the centre of the circle, as in some ways it has always lain. Each of them conceals a blade or a gun on their person, entirely for self-defence, naturally; one of them is lying.

One of them put the body there. But the detective inspector should be arriving any day now, to examine the crime scene and the clues and the corpse, and tell them all who the liar is, so life may resume as usual at the country house, and friendly embraces may occur without the fear of a knife at your back, or else the fear of your own knife, held exactly to the spine, being detected.

Elizabeth had thought that the two men who had stopped by had been the inspectors, but perhaps not- the softer one had seemed so awfully scared, after all, even after he had accepted the invitation for dinner, flinching every time they questioned him, every time they conversed, civilly, about the body on the floor in the other room and who had put it there. He had excused himself halfway through, although Elizabeth couldn’t see why. Certainly, it had been suspicious.

The other man, though- he’d looked about so keenly, a sense of sight and knowing about him that she had been ready to trust absolutely- although, of course, she is not nearly so naïve. After all, could the two men not have, easily, themselves snuck into the drawing room that fateful night? The glass in the window was shattered, after all, and while they seemed newcomers to the layout of the manor and its mystery, you can never trust appearances. She had responded to her new fear by clutching the knife concealed in her belt whenever they were around; they’d left quite quickly after that.

But now they are gone she is admitting it is perhaps preposterous that they could have committed such a grievous act. No, the murderer lingers within these walls, choosing its next target, fingering its knife.

And so they sit in the drawing room, and each watch the other exactly until the sun rises, for they could hardly trust the locks of their bedrooms when the murderer has full run of the manor, and may have had so for many years. Each knows only themselves to be safe and sane and innocent, and only arranged this way, an Ouroboros of deceit and knife-sharp betrayal, are they at least certain that their murderer will be caught, their death avenged, if it should so come to that.

Elizabeth’s cousin shakes under the promise of her blade. A couple of minutes later, her mother shakes into a sob, her own knife clattering to the ground as she buries her head in her hands.

“I- I'm sorry,” she says, broken and ragged, and Elizabeth’s uncle takes his pistol from her back to aim at her mother, so Elizabeth puts her knife to his throat. “I'm sorry,” her mother continues, broken, “I can’t go on like this, I just can’t. I don’t think any of you did it, and I don’t know how you could think that I did. This is insane. This is all insane!”

“Convenient thing to say, Florence,” Elizabeth’s father says, shaking like a leaf in high winds.

“Why- why don’t we sit in a circle without the weapons?” Elizabeth tries. “Then we will still know. In fact, it will be better, because our hands will not cramp.”

And so, until dawn, they watch each other empty handed, and even talk, a little. Elizabeth had forgotten how she loved all of them so dearly.

It is a little better than it was.

-

The heat and the pain are everywhere. The girl with the fiery hair asks, “what are you afraid of?”

“What,” he says, choking on the smoky air, “what does it look like I'm afraid of?”

She looks at him disapprovingly. “You can’t think that you’re going to die here. Please. I know how dying burns.”

He doesn’t know if he’s going to die. Thinking about what the fire is taking from him wrenches a sob from his dry, cracked lips. More of the ceiling caves in. “I- my family-”

“Better,” the girl with the fiery hair says. “But they’re not dying. Nothing ends here. Nothing is getting worse. All pain can be managed, and pain isn’t even real any more. There’s no soul to any of it.”

“It feels real,” he says, through gritted teeth, fire spreading up his leg, the heat cooking his flesh. He can hear screaming pitched above the harsh crackle.

She scoffs like he’s not worth her time, which, it’s not like she’s helping, although the fire doesn’t seem to touch her, where she stands at the centre of it. “No, it doesn’t. Pain is a chemical response to our survival being threatened. Here,” and she grins, an ugly thing splitting a pretty face, “oh, we’ll threaten everything else about you. But not your survival, sweetheart. You know it, too; you’re getting used to the new truth of the universe, believe it or not.”

She reaches out with a hand so hot it melts through the core of him; she cups her heart in her fingers and she’s right. It doesn’t hurt at all.

“Let’s try again,” she says, and drags him by the heart into the fire with her, it licks at his ankles and up his legs and into his chest but does not burn. “What are you afraid for? What do you possibly have to lose?”

-

Air smooths over the delicate flesh of Manon’s face like sandpaper, she plummets through it like a broken, flightless thing, forged in time and terminal velocity to fall with unique efficiency, dropping through the world so fast she is certain she rends it apart either side of her. The adrenaline comes thick and fast, the excess lost in her tears which stream upwards from her and are vanished forever. She hopes one day they fall as rain.

Lightning chases her through the endless sky and she is reborn in an infinity; she has not felt fear for an unknowable expanse of time and she laughs as she splits the heavens.

-

The town Sofiya grew up in is much sharper than it used to be.

Now every window is broken for ease of escape, ugly shards patterning the floor, even the natural beauty of a shattered thing denied to them, existing merely as a sharp reminder of the ruination of all that is familiar, underfoot. The sky seems to loom a lot closer than it ever used to, hemming them in, a town brimming over with caged, feral beasts.

Sofiya prefers to hide, a rabbit in its burrow. She understands this marks her out as prey in a world with only one other option, but could not stomach seeking out the chase, a-hunting through a familiar wasteland. She will wait until someone scents her; she will have plenty of energy stored up to run, then.

When it comes, she hopes she does not recognise the rending jaws that tear at her throat. Is it foolish to prey for a mercy when mercy is an unfamiliar word, now, in her mouth?

When the chase leads past the only smashed window she can see through, from here, the chasers, as they blur past, have awful, twisted forms, legs too long that bend in too many places, skin so tight and sallow that in many places she could swear the bone is poking through. Jaws snapping and drooling, the teeth inside no longer recognisable as anything a human could grow.

Sofiya doesn’t know if she looks like that. She hasn’t uncurled from her burrow in such a long time; she doesn’t dare move a muscle even now.

But when a hand comes down, firm, between her shoulderblades, she propels herself to a feet at an angle that seems entirely unnatural, and the growl emitting from her throat isn’t a sound a human throat should be able to make.

The woman’s hand that hadn’t pressed down on her vulnerable back is holding a gun, and it doesn’t tremor. Sofiya is very scared, but not, any more, of the chase. She is caught. It is over.

The hand not holding the gun moves to a pocket, plucks out a worn scrap of paper. It is easier to focus on the individual parts of this woman who will be the end of her, the sensible trousers and worn trainers, the parka, shredded in places, scorched in others. The red hijab- you could use it for bullfighting, Sofiya thinks, and wonders, absently, whether that would work on the crazed beasts outside. Whether it would work on her. And then the woman’s face, stony, tired, lined, grimy. Human. When she opens her mouth to say,

“Have you seen this woman?”

her teeth are plain and flat and normal. Sofiya focuses on the picture, clearly taken from grainy CCTV. This woman- this is a form she recognises, the disjointed, elongated legs, the protruding bone, the alien, aerodynamic construction.

“They all look like this,” she says, barely a whisper. It is still recognisable as her voice, oddly enough. “I think that I look like this.”

The woman rolls her eyes. “Well, yeah, kinda. Come on, the face. She should have come through here, and you’ve got a good vantage point.”

Sofiya squints. It’s true. This woman had come through here, hunting Sofiya’s old primary school teacher down the main street, a bloody, streamlined mess of frantic running and darting eyes, while she herself had been unnaturally still, given off an aura of threat that permeated the cold stone walls and shattered glass and turned her blood to ice. She points mutely in the direction that awful, predator feeling had gone, and the woman gives her a smile.

It’s half-grimace, business-like, but… Sofiya hasn’t seen a smile in a long time, is all.

“You’re hunting her,” she says, as the woman turns back towards the stairwell. “Why don’t you- why aren’t you-”

The woman smiles again as Sofiya cuts herself off. “I'm not a hunter,” she says. “I just need to find one.”

“Why?” Why would you ever chase but because of the chase? Why would you ever be the predator save to escape being prey?

The woman looks at the photograph. “Because I made a promise. Because I still love her, probably. Isn’t that enough?”

Isn’t that enough, Sofiya? Isn’t it?

When the woman leaves, she crosses to the fractured window and looks out at the low, close night sky.

Maybe she’ll join the chase. Just for a little. Just to find the people she loves, in case they’re hiding, too.

-

Noah is going to die.

Noah is holding on, so, so tight, every muscle and nerve and tendon straining about his fingertips, which grip the knife-sharp cliff edge, which crumbles, slightly, beneath the force of his desire to live. To keep breathing, bleeding, holding on.

He looks down, sometimes, usually when adjusting his grip. It’s not the fall that’s scaring him, particularly, it isn’t even that high. It’s the snapped neck and shattered skull at the end of it. It is the cessation. It is his lifeblood sinking away into the unforgiving earth. It is the blunt, brutal slap of impact, and it is being cut away from it before he can even begin to feel the pain he has earnt.

This time, when he looks down, his fingers burning, his entire body burning, there is an old woman standing there.

He can see her quite clearly- it really isn’t that great of a drop, just great enough that he knows it’ll do him in. And his glasses are still on his nose, by some miracle. She is quite considerably old, lined all over, her hair a shock of white, her right hand creased around a silver cane. She wears a frumpy blazer jacket, spectacles on a beaded string around her neck, and a white blouse and a long, green skirt which obscures her shoes from where he’s hanging.

The brief distraction from his situation ends and he closes his eyes and breathes in, tight and shaky, and his heart might be beating out of his chest. Couldn’t she have appeared from above him?

“Let go,” she calls. Her voice is clipped and curled around with age, quite posh, with no hint of a regional accent.

“Are you going to catch me,” he asks, more like a gasp than a sentence, really, high-pitched and afraid. He thinks the wind will snatch it away before she can hear but then she scoffs.

“Does it look like I'm going to catch you, honestly,” she says, irritated, gesturing with her cane, “do you even know how old I am? Just let go, for heaven’s sake.”

“I’ll die if I do that,” he says, in his opinion, rather reasonably. The wind knocks him suddenly, severely, his cramped fingers nearly coming loose from the edge, and he begins praying to a god he’s never believed in.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” the woman says, which is a bit much, in his opinion. “Do you even know how long you’ve been up there for? At least a month. I’ve been coming and going around here for weeks and you haven’t moved.”

“Yes,” Noah grits out, “because if I move, I'm going to die.”

“Stop it,” she says, forcefully, “Goodness sake. Why haven’t you died of thirst, then?” She wrinkles her nose, then, he thinks. “You’re certainly sweating enough, look at the state of you. You should have fainted and fallen off weeks ago. Does that make any kind of sense to you?”

“No,” he says, petulantly, because she’s right, and it doesn’t.

“Well then,” she says, “what is there to be afraid of? Now get down here and I’ll take you to the others.”

-

The second time Jon and Martin visit the Panopticon, after another tour of the new horrors of the world yields nothing, Jonah Magnus is waiting for them in the auditorium. He stands at the top of the stairs, silhouetted by the green-glass eye that watches from behind him.

He’s wearing his old body, looking much like it must have done upon his death, and not nearly two-hundred years after the fact. Martin clutches Jon’s hand tighter, and Jon does the same in return. They are not remotely scared, not after all they have seen, only angry.

“Sorry for the prior, um, lack of reception, as it were,” the old, unfamiliar man says. “I didn’t much feel like talking- and I certainly didn’t need you to talk to me, goodness, empty threats do get so boring after a while. Besides, I’ve been skimming them off the tops of your heads as you come up with them, and they’re all dreadfully uninspired.”

“What do you want, Jonah,” Martin says, flatly.

“Well,” he says, spreading his hands, and looking at them- almost fondly, really, like you’d look at a kid as you were sticking their drawing to the fridge. It would have been enough to make Jon’s blood boil, once upon a time, but his heart has long been filled past capacity of hate for Jonah Magnus. “It’s just- I don’t mean to be rude, but I'm sort of at a loss- are you two, you know, doing something?”

Martin blinks at him. “What? Couldn’t you- you can’t just see what we’re doing?”

Jonah waves a hand. “Oh, I do, literally all the time- I see everyone important all the time, it really is vastly entertaining. But I just haven’t been able to pick up on anything in particular that’s causing this- it is very cute, if you are doing it, I must say.”

Jon says, flatly, “What are you talking about.” Jonah looks delighted- Jon doesn’t really talk these days, except to Martin. The two of them haven’t found any of the others, yet, and it is endlessly satisfying, watching them stumble blindly around his new world.

“Well, I, ah- it’s sort of hard to describe. It’s a change on such a miniscule level, you see, really nothing at all- I suppose that’s why I thought it was you, ha. No, um, it’s like the quality of the fear- not all over, just in fits and starts around the world- is changing. The people in their little- neighbourhoods, shall we call them, and be civil about it- they’re all sort of clumping together. It’s- I mean I imagine the Desolation is thrilled about it, these people building something that can be taken away. But I'm sure you’re as aware as I am that all the, ah, cannon fodder- they aren’t dying or living, not properly. They aren’t supposed to be changing, either.”

“Good,” says Martin, his heart not really in it. “I hope they all stop being afraid and team up to fuck you over. How do we change the world back?”

“Oh, I’ve missed you, Martin,” says Jonah, wiping his eye. “No, ah, that was all, I'm afraid. Unless you’re here to stay?” He eyes Jon eagerly, and although Jon rarely lets anything show on his face, these days, the look of disgust he aims up the stairs is delightful.

“Fuck you,” says Martin, and pulls Jon out the doors as the walls begin to open up eyes around them.

-

It is so, so hard to breathe.

Manuel is curled in on himself as tight as he can get, hands desperately cupped in front of his nose and mouth to save any air, even just a little, although he’s hyperventilating so badly he’s certain that what little there is has no oxygen left, none at all. And even now the crushing weight of the earth around him pushes his hands ever closer to his face; soon the two will be pressed together, his airflow blocked by his own selfsame flesh.

Maybe one day they will dig up his body and laugh at the position. Poor bastard. But probably not. Probably he will stay down here in the dark and the dirt and the choking on infinity, for the rest of time. Probably there is no up to be dug from, only a whole universe of cloying earth.

A slicing noise, like hard metal through packed sand. Perhaps there are worse things than the encroachment of dark pressure into every pore, every line on his silently screaming face. Perhaps what is worse are the things down here with him, the grave-worms and the old bones, the people buried even longer than he has been, even deeper, lungs packed with tar, just looking for anything softer than the unyielding earth, even his resisting and terrified body, soft and giving as it is.

The slicing again, much closer, and he wastes his precious air to scream. He just wants to spend his last breath in sunlight, to feel anything on his bare skin but the awful and obdurate pressure, bearing down from all sides-

And then the force on his hands lessens a little, and he pushes them back, increasing the space for precious air, and his abject relief is almost instantly overwhelmed by the fact that things now, once again, may get worse. That the context of the respite is all the more terrible.

But with his next breath, not only murky air but dim light spill onto his face, and he recognises the slicing, now all around him, as shovels, and someone shouts something with lungs that are not awfully clogged with earth.

Strong hands close around him, and it is pressure, yes, but it’s the best comfort he’s ever known.

And he is p

                     u

                               l

                                      l

                                              e

                                                   d

                                                             into the air and light.

When he comes back to himself from the weeping and breathing and thanking the same, big hands are around his wrists, not holding but simply touching, communing, you are okay, you are not alone.

He is not on the surface but in a dug-out burrow, one which maybe would be uncomfortably small for the number of people in it had he not just experienced what he had. Phone torches are dotted around for light, and people are digging at several points, using shovels or their bare hands. Several tunnels branch off, long enough that he can’t see where they go.

“I was in there forever,” he says, very far away. The man who the hands belong to is smiling sadly, nodding, and takes off his scarf for Manuel to wipe the muddy tears off of his cheeks with.

“Hey, now,” he says, in a voice that is unused to kindness. “It’s alright.”

Manuel hiccoughs. “Where- what-”

The man pulls back a little. “We’re trying to dig our way out. Save as many as we can, and we’ll come back for the rest.”

Manuel blinks. “I didn’t think there was an out,” he says.

The man smirks. “Not with that attitude. It’s- complicated.” His face twists, considering, and Manuel takes a moment to study him. His hair is long, dyed black, with grown-out mousy roots. He’s covered in tattoos- simple eye motifs on each of his knuckles, his wrists, the base of his neck. “There is no out, not to the real Buried. That’s only made out of fear. But the Buried is in the real world now, with all of us, and we’re pretty good at fear, yeah, but we’re good at a lot of other things, too. Compassion. Hope. Logic. The truth of it is… compromising, I suppose. And it doesn’t make any sense for there to not be an out, not in the real world.”

“I don’t… okay?” Manuel says. A lot of the words he’s saying shouldn’t mean anything, but considering what’s happening now, can sort of be figured out from context. “Thank you,” he says, because that’s the important part.

“No bother,” the man says, and gives Manuel a real smile. He sinks back against the wall of the cavern, ignoring the way it’s trying to suck him in. “God, you know, I really thought the whole dying twice thing would excuse me from this shitshow, but guess not, huh. What can you do?”

“I'm sorry,” Manuel says. He’s pretty sure that’s not usual. He doesn’t think he died at all before he came here. He thinks things were just normal.

“Eh,” the man covered in eyes says, “I'm over it. If it had to be any of them, I guess the Buried is fine. Better than the Corruption, like,” he says, making a disgusted face. “Guess without Gertrude they couldn’t be held back anymore. Was bound to happen. But it’s… not actually as bad as I’d thought?” He makes a considering face. “I thought we’d all just be… y’know, helpless in our own factory farms. But helping people is still important. It’s more important.”

“Well thank you,” Manuel says, “for, um, for helping me.”

-

At the base of the Panopticon, a facsimile of London.

It is not quite so bad as it once was- people come out of their houses, now, and those who don’t at least open their curtains, no longer quite so paralyzingly afraid of what encroaching gaze may enter with the light. Children, young enough to escape the brunt of the meaning of the world around them, playing on the pavements, and to focus on the laughter and shouts is for a moment to focus a little less on the encompassing gaze of the Watcher.

It helps. Talking to your neighbours helps, even if you’re still convinced that they know every one of your filthiest secrets, condemn you behind closed doors when the lights are out. Talking to family… well, it’s a work in progress, for Abigail, she’s not quite up to it yet, but she’s been texting her brother, Mattias, and it’s… good. The ease of company without scrutiny that can only be obtained these days from far, far away. It’s nice. She’s missed it.

Not that her phone camera isn’t watching her every move, of course, not that she isn’t catalogued and archived and Known, her secrets kept neatly, in an itemized list, waiting and ready in case she ever chose to step out of line.

In the good moments, when the children are laughing, when the smell of frying food wafts from a neighbour’s open window, when a text pings from her brother, sometimes Abigail thinks that perhaps being known is not the end of the world. That everybody has secrets, and that some of them might even be as bad as hers. That if they simply took the step of choosing not to care, to know and share and not to judge in turn…

Well, those are dangerous thoughts, and they must cease for the simple, near-certain fact that something, somewhere is probably recording and cataloguing those, too. But in the best, brightest moments, she thinks soon. Sometime soon. Things will keep getting better. She won’t have to be afraid any more.

Abigail sits in a park, under the dappled shade of a willow tree, still covered up despite the warmth of the sunshine. Some old habits die hard, and it helps her to feel less observed, smothers the eyes creeping over her skin. Other people are in the park, too, but not so many have the confidence that it’s crowded, and she inhabits a happy medium: largely unseen, but not quite alone.

Two new men walk through the park, hands clasped, looking around with fear and wonder. Abigail has heard that things are worse outside of London, or at the very least oh, so different. She knows people are beginning to travel for the first time since the Watcher’s eyes opened up in the sky, unblinking, and the stories that filter in are near beyond belief, except for the fact that everybody in London chooses to be very meticulous with the truth, these days. The men, as they walk towards her, bring an overwhelming feeling of sight, of knowledge, and Abigail burns to run, but she is trying so hard, to be normal, to be happy, and so she lifts a hand and waves.

The skinny man with the salt-and-pepper hair physically flinches, as though courtesy is a foreign body. The other man smiles back at her, and returns her wave, and they are both so nonthreatening in that instant that Abigail feels pride well up inside her, she has done it, she has functioned normally, like how she would have, fear and watching be damned.

And then the second man jogs up to her, expression happy and open, and she starts hyperventilating a little. No, this is fine, actually, this is great. She can do this.

“Hiya,” he says, “I'm Martin! How- um, how are you?”

She makes herself return the smile and is certain it must come out as a grimace. “Hi. I'm Abigail. Not- um, not bad, considering.”

He looks so thrilled, she can’t even be angry at him for putting her through this, although his gaze settled on her face prickles and burns.

“Good, that’s- um, yeah, we figured, because we’ve done our fair share of travelling-” he jerks his thumb over his shoulder at where his partner is standing on the path, looking partly bemused and partly apologetic- “that’s Jon, by the way- yeah, and this- London I mean- it’s the most normal place we’ve seen so far! I mean, the first time we came, it was awful, I felt so seen, and the fears aren’t even supposed to affect us? But now it’s- it’s better!”

Another rush of pride. Even if she doesn’t really understand what he’s saying. But it is better. She nods. “I- it’s hard. I’m less afraid when I sort of- go on as normal, I suppose, but then ignoring it is scary too, and- I don’t know. It gets easier. I don’t understand a lot of what’s going on, but I think it’s surprising what humans can adapt to?”

Martin’s eyes are shining. “That’s just it! Jon thinks I'm being too optimistic, but I just think- I don’t think you can be afraid of something if you live it every day of your life? And we’re seeing that quicker, in places like this, with the watching, or, like, I think we passed a Dark encampment that was doing okay? But, long-term- humans can get used to anything. Even disease, or- or fire. So long as we have each other.” His expression momentarily dims.

Abigail swallows a couple of times in quick succession. “I- yeah. I think, um, ‘Jon’ wants you.”

Martin turns around to see Jon making a cringing expression. “Right, right, sorry, you’re probably so uncomfortable right now- but, um, great work!”

He jogs back over to his partner, who is rolling his eyes. They exchange a few words, and Martin mouths thanks over at her, bright-eyed and happy. She waves at him again, bemused and a little tired, and watches them walk away.

-

“- and I told you talking to them would help- didn’t I say? And you were all, no, Martin, I am simply here to bear witness to their unholy terror, Martin-”

“-Yes, yes, alright, but I do not sound like that-”

“Do so, and this is good! This is so good! Jon, it doesn’t matter if we can’t fix the world. It’s like- Jonah, and, and the Entities, they just think about humans through the context of fear production, of how to make us afraid. But we’re more than that. And they can’t cope!”

It’s possible to hear Jon’s smile in his voice, a soft, tender thing. “It certainly seems that way. The solution is- exacerbated, I suppose, when people come together- is that fair?”

“That- that must be it, yeah. Do you remember, actually, in all the statements- how many times was it communities tortured? I mean, there was that thing with John Amherst, but he was killing them, so they could hardly act as a community. And that town in America- but that was a ritual, and it wasn’t a constant, undeniable thing like what’s happening now is.”

“Right. So it’s not just human nature, it’s- human instinct to help others? Is that fair? And we’d expect the fears to adapt, but maybe it’s just not something they’re capable of. Maybe when we pulled them into this world we immortalised them, in the- the instant of their becoming- it’s why there’s been nothing from the Extinction, even though the world- it ended.”

“Right,” says Martin, warm and energised, and then, “right,” he says, a second later, dull.

“Martin-”

“No, it’s- you know what it is.”

“I know everything, love.”

“Nah, you don’t. But-”

“The Lonely.”

“Yeah. I mean- how do we fix that?”

“Hey, hey. It’s- you’re alright.”

“Sorry, sorry, I really am past it, I am-”

“Hush, you’re okay, you’re okay. I love you. We’ll figure it out. Yeah?”

“… yeah, okay. I love you too.”

“…”

“Don’t say it.”

“… I know.”

“I'm breaking up with you.”

-

“Why aren’t you afraid?” the woman asks Jane.

They are as in Egypt. The plagues wash over them, stinking tides of rot and filth and crawling things.

Are they not terror themselves? Is it not beautiful?

The chosen acolytes of dirt and decay are huddled, clustered, on an island in a foetid lake, and each morning a new, foul blessing is rained upon them, crawling sickly from its depths.

The woman holds on to Jane’s wrist, where she stands and watches the water. She has honey-blonde hair, and the circles under her eyes are dark and pronounced. “Why aren’t you afraid?”

“Why should I be afraid?” Jane replies. It is a novelty, having her voice be hers alone, and she cannot quite remember why. “They have always been there, the squirming things. They will outlive us and everything that comes after us.”

“Yes,” says the woman, with something in her voice that might be a smile. “That’s scary.”

“No, it isn’t,” says Jane. “It is inevitable. It always has been. Only in this world, there is no illusion of any other sort of end. I have given up on railing against the inevitable.”

“What do you do if you don’t rail against it?” asks the woman.

“I understand that it loves me,” Jane says. “That it has always loved me. That it will love me when I am dead and sunk into the belly of this lake. It will love my mottled skin and my soft insides and the jelly of my eyes, and I will be beloved when its squirming babies burst from inside me. Only now, here, it doesn’t have to kill me. I will only be consumed.”

The woman is silent. Jane wonders if she’s more scared. That used to be something that Jane could detect, something she cared about.

“That sounds like the kind of love that hurts.”

“What love doesn’t?” Jane asks her, and she doesn’t say anything else, after that.

They walk into the stinking lake together, hand in hand.

-

“Isn’t this fun?” asks Lian’s radio. “Aren’t you having fun? Don’t we have fun together? Take your next right, my sweetheart, my darling. You’re doing so well.”

Lian makes a broken, wretched noise, as her hands twist the steering wheel right without her permission, not even able to scream properly through the smile her mouth is locked into. The voice is taking her to the beachfront, she’s sure of it, it will have her drive her car along the boardwalk and down the pier and into the icy, unforgiving ocean, and will not let her stop smiling even as she drowns.

Tears pour down her face and the radio croons, “That’s it, just lovely, and keep on here, there’s a dear. You are so good at this, you know that?”

It’s a twisted, mocking parody of the words Lian’s mother had given her, a year ago, after she’d passed her driving test the second time around and given her her first lift to work. Or around a year ago, anyway, time isn’t really working any more, since the eyes opened up in the sky and the spiders crawled into the glove compartment. Her mother will still be at the kitchen table at home, where Lian had left her, shaking and sobbing, legs locked to the floor, a black widow dancing on the back of her hand.

With everything she has, all the anger the vision brings, she pries one hand off the wheel. Makes a clumsy grab for the radio dial, thinks she’s got the volume, but the voice distorts slightly as it says, “oh, no, lovely, none of that,” and she realises she’s got the frequency dial. She twists, desperately, but there’s nothing else on.

“Never anything decent on,” Lian’s dad grunts, fiddling with the dial, Lian safe and secure in the back seat, a million billion years ago. In the present Lian feels her hand pulling back despite her permission and screams through gritted teeth and then the scuttling, sugar-sweet voice cuts out and is replaced by another woman, rougher, with worse audio, and real, and all of a sudden Lian’s foot is slamming on the breaks and her face is crumpling and she weeps, properly, putting her head into her hands.

She comes back to herself in waves, the race of her heart gradually slowing to a more manageable pounding. The other lady is still talking.

“And I’ve got a few contacts up north that say the Buried mudlands actually tend to spread once people start being rescued from them, so it’s better to get a big operation sorted, really go in all at once, and for goodness’ sake, if you can find any avatars, get them to help, because their techniques for finding the victims are a lot better than ours. Melanie, what do we say about Buried danger zones?”

“Go somewhere else?” another voice says, dry. “Go somewhere else but not if it’s Manchester, because we’ve got a lot of people saying the Buried owns most of Manchester too. It’s actually pretty okay, if you’re not claustrophobic, better than a lot of alternatives, apparently, but honestly that could just never be me?”

“Alright,” the first voice says, fond, “but, like, practical advice, babe? For our first-time listeners.”

An audible eye-roll. “Okay- if you’re experiencing any spaces seeming a little more enclosed than they should be, or any dirt that’s getting a little too friendly- that’s textbook Buried. It manifests more insidiously, too, but regardless the same sort of tips should help. Mark! Your! Location! Turn on your phone torch and lie it face-down on the ground, or, even better, download the 14 app, for which we have our lovely friend Tessa to thank, and send out a distress signal with the Buried specified- we’ll get people to you! Put an item of clothing over your head once- if- you’re unable to move. Don’t hyperventilate. No matter how long you’re trapped, you’ll eventually be found. Don’t worry if you don’t even have the time to take those precautions- it’s going to be okay.”

“Right, thanks Melanie. We should say that the Spiral attack on the 14 app we were experiencing last week has been fixed, we’ve recovered all data, and we’re actually in a much better place should it ever happen again. As usual, any newbies- hi! What we’re saying won’t make a lot of sense to you, but we do terminology at the start and end of every broadcast, so hang in there, yeah? We’re officially here the same time every day, but it tends to, uh, vary?”

“Georgie sleeps in,” the other woman, Melanie, says. Lian finds herself laughing, tear-tracks drying on her cheeks.

She keeps listening, although the host is right- it doesn’t mean a lot. And then she- Georgie- says “Right- final item for today, ladies and theydies. We’re still experiencing a flow of immigration from Brighton, which, as far as we can tell, is the Web stronghold. We don’t know at what point the Web will notice, or if they have already, and they’re manipulating yet more people into staying. So: if you’re planning on leaving- stay subtle. Don’t talk about it too much, don’t pack, just get out on the road and start moving. I’ll end the episode with a list of safe addresses in London, although it’ll be a tricky journey, and I'm sure there’ll be havens closer to you than us.”

The pre-recorded terminology guide and intro at the end of the episode clear a lot up for Lian, but she doesn’t need to hear about the Web. The instant the name was mentioned, certainty crystallised in her blood, the sound of spiders scuttling, honey-sweet, in her ears. After the radio show shuts off, the only sound in her car is static. She sits in its comforting buzz and thinks.

Eventually she puts the car back into gear. She’s getting her parents and she’s getting out of here. Eyes on the road.

-

Tatsuki gasps and clings and watches the wicked flames paint the burning sky and laughs.

He’d not meant to be in the warehouse for so long. Fleeing from the fire as he was, he’d just wanted to get his bag in order, call his sister, check she was okay. Running from the Desolation with the people you love is folly, everybody knows that; it always finds a way to take everything away, even if nobody ever dies here, not really. Alone, he should’ve been safer, but weariness he hasn’t felt for weeks had overtaken. He’d fallen asleep and barely woken until the flames were close enough to lick at his clothes.

The exit is obscured, obviously, the exit is obscured. Once that would have meant making a run for it, condemning himself to charred flesh and awful injuries until something else finishes him off, or else dying and being reborn in eternal flame and agony until the Desolation had bled him dry of fear. Now, he’d shot off a signal on the new app on his phone and crossed his fingers as the flames drew nearer, banging on a section of corrugated metal wall so they’d know where was safe.

Apparently, he isn’t the only 14 operative in this zone- his saviour had sawn open the wall not ten minutes later. Now the man is laughing, adrenaline-drunk, same as Tatsuki, admiring the way the fire crackles and devours against the open night sky. They each haven’t let go of the other’s hand and Tatsuki’s beginning to think this night might end with him pressed up against hot metal, if he’s lucky.

The man who’d answered his call is tall, with dark, close-cropped hair, a trail of unusual scars leading from his forehead down beneath his white vest top, bare-armed despite the chill of the night.

“I owe you one,” Tatsuki says, presses just a little tongue against the teeth of his thankful smile. The resulting quirk of the eyebrow makes him shiver.

“All in a day’s work, right?” the man says, nodding at him. “App said you were a first responder too.”

“D’aww, it’s nothing,” Tatsuki says. “You’d think I’d know better, really. You’re… from around here?”

They both know what he means. While it’s easy enough to break free of your personal little hellzone for a new flavour, nowadays, if you know the tricks, nobody ever quite loses the energy of their original home, the one they were trapped within when the sky blinked open that very first time.

“Sure,” the man says, flame throwing the fine angles of his face into stark relief. “It’s not so bad, the fire. Everybody says it’d be their last choice, but… I don’t know. At least you always know where you stand, here.”

“Mm,” Tatsuki says. “No, I'm jealous. I got the Stranger, first time around. Eurgh. All skin and false faces.”

The man grins, savage, opens his mouth to speak, and then freezes, his eyes landing on something behind Tatsuki. The bravado empties, all of a sudden, and he just looks tired, pressing himself into the doorway of the warehouse so he can’t be spotted from the street.

Tatsuki turns, and sees two men. They aren’t the only people out, the flash-fires always draw a crowd, usually arsonists and people looking to help in roundabout equal measure. But most of the people who live in Desolation are a specific sort, willing to put up with the devastation for a largely simple life, or else actively drawn to it. These men- they’re travellers, the sort he’s heard about but never seen. Not many people have the gift, and they’re usually Hunters, people touched by fear before it had consumed the whole world. No distorted bodies here, though, just two men walking through the carnage.

Once they pass, he turns back to his saviour, the adrenaline dispelled. “You know them?”

The man snorts. “Let’s say… in a past life.”

Ah. He’s one of those. As far as Georgie Barker and her team have been able to figure, anyone scarred deep enough by the Entities, efficient enough at producing fear, has an even more complicated relationship with survival than the rest of them. A lot of the time that means people who used to be avatars, and you can spot them from a mile off, but sometimes they’re just… people.

“I'm not stupid, you know,” Tatsuki says. “Why’re you avoiding them? I'm sure they’d be happy to see you back.”

The man looks straight at him, and Tatsuki feels oddly searched. “Mm,” he says, “probably. Maybe I don’t think I owe them that. Or anything.”

“Call me an idiot,” he says, and pulls out his phone, pointing at it, “but did you not put your contact details on a public database?”

The man smirks. “Coming up with a fake identity really isn’t as hard as you think it is.”

“Huh,” he says. “Well. It’s only my real name, but you can call me Tatsuki. If you like.”

The man laughs, a ragged, drained thing. “Tim,” he says, “you can call me Tim.”

Tatsuki doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

Later, when he’s walking alone again, away from Desolation and towards the Eye compound, where he’d told his sister they should meet, he remembers his friend Danny, back with the Stranger, the first time, who’d been looking for a man named Tim. A brother, he’d said. Ah, too late now.

He sure hopes they’d found each other.

-

A lot has changed since Katie was lost and alone, running scared in the dark, but she thinks her absolute favourite new thing is the campfire.

It’s hard work; the adults say the Dark doesn’t let much that’ll burn anywhere near them. The Dark is very, very different from the dark, even Ollie knows that, and he’s only little. Still, even the kids learn fast around here. There’s not much other choice.

The campfire really hardly burns, although they all chip in to help it along, and the real light it produces only stretches a few scant inches from its wavering flames into the inky black. But it’s enough. Katie can see Ollie’s face again, wavering and ghostly, and recognises everyone else in their little camp by sight, even if it takes her a second. The fire’s plenty bright to keep the dark beasts at bay.

Tonight they have two guests at the campfire, who introduce themselves as Jon and Martin, and are here with Important Information. They tell the adults about a radio station to listen to, and do something to the phones of everyone at the camp who’s old enough to have a phone. The nice lady had told Katie and Oliver that, since they didn’t have phones of their own, they would just have to stick with her always, when they weren’t at camp, so that she could signal for help if anything happened.

Katie’s nice lady has stuck with them ever since the start, has been with them through finding the first other people, maybe a week after they’d found each other, until where they are now, nearly forty of them tucked together against the deep black dark. In the new and fragile light, Katie can see that whenever she asks the nice lady about her name, her face goes all crumply, kind of, so she’s learnt to stop doing it. It’s just sort of normal now. Katie’s parents still haven’t turned up, but the nice lady says not to worry, that they’ve got to be somewhere, that Katie’s got all the time in the world to find them.

She thinks that that’s what the woman is talking about with Jon and Martin now, actually, about how to find people that are missing. She’s also reaffirming what all the adults already suspected, that nobody is dying, any more, and nobody is being born. Except from if someone was already pregnant before the change, Martin says, smiling, the Entities weren’t quite that cruel, although it’s probably for some horrible secret reason. Jon says aging is working quite oddly, too, and they’re still trying to learn about that one. Somebody called Georgie is doing a lot of important work, apparently. He’s looking at the woman really intensely, like he’s trying to figure something out.

When Jon and Martin go off to one side to set up their little tent the nice lady puts her head in her hands. Katie goes and sits on the ground next to her and hugs one of her legs, and Ollie hugs the other, and when she lifts her head to wrap her arms around them her face is wet with tears. They reflect the meagre firelight.

“They don’t know me,” she says. Katie squeezes tighter.

“You… knew them?” she asks. She just wants the lady to stop crying.

“I think maybe I did,” she says, voice thick with tears. “I- I remember them so clearly, but when I think about me it’s just wrong, all wrong-”

“Sorry,” says Katie, after a bit. The woman smiles at her, wet and tearstained.

“No, don’t you worry about it, sweetheart. It- it’s going to be okay.”

Katie holds onto her leg tight, reaches out with her other hand to hold Ollie’s, and shuts her eyes. It’s a nice privilege that this changes the view, now, just a little.

-

The third time Jon and Martin visit the Panopticon is somewhat different.

It’s just- it’s not that they’d forgotten about it. But they’ve been busy, out in the world, gathering intel, helping people. The tide of suffering in this new world is so inconceivably enormous and yet it feels like they’re making real strides against it, day by day. Georgie is fantastic, fearless as ever, really building something from the rubble. It’s something like having a purpose again, only, for the first time in his life, Jon knows exactly where he stands.

The six of them had been out, sprawled on the grass in a loose circle, talking about the biggest problem. Martin had fixed tea in a thermos, and all though all food and drink remains a constant, low-level threat, this stuff seems to be holding out alright. Not to speak too soon. Although it is less likely that the Stranger or the Spiral will get to it, here; London remains an Eye stronghold.

(It’s just that that doesn’t mean as much any more as Jonah Magnus might have once thought it did.)

“But people are getting out,” Basira is saying. “If people are breaking free despite the lack of meaningful human contact, I mean, when lack of meaningful human contact is sort of the whole point- maybe our whole hypothesis is wrong?”

“But what we have makes sense,” Melanie says, pouring tea into her teacup with unnerving accuracy, considering the dark sunglasses she wears. “You want to substitute the idea that, okay, paraphrasing, the Entities are incapable of understanding humanity on any level other than fear, with what, exactly? The Entities have always been kind of shite and now they’re just dropping the ball?”

Daisy snorts.

Jon clicks his tongue. “But the original issue isn’t solved. People are escaping the Lonely- we haven’t even dared to send operatives in, yet, we know it’s not anything organised. It’s like it was at the start, for the other fears, only in every other case, overcoming them relied on… connection. On coming together.”

Martin squeezes his hand and tries not to let his face look too I was right all along.

“Have we heard anything from any of the escapees?” he asks, reasonably.

Georgie shakes her head. “They’re still recovering. My people are of the opinion that sustained questioning, especially relating to their traumatic event, would overwhelm them. We’re doing our best to track down friends and family now.”

Daisy opens her mouth to speak, and it stays there, disbelieving, as every eye in the watchful sky blinks, just for a moment.

“Um,” Martin says.

“No,” says Basira, “yeah, I saw it too.”

“What?” asks Melanie, irritated.

Daisy guffaws. “Well this can’t be good news for the old bastard.”

Jon glances towards the Panopticon. It’s easy to forget, these days, ever-present but a lot less imposing than it maybe once was. “Unless it’s a trap, and he just wants an audience.”

“What,” asks Melanie, grinding her teeth, “is a trap?”

Georgie pats her leg. “Watcher blinked, babe. Even if it is a trap, what could he possibly do?”

Melanie pauses, letting the information sink in, a cruel smile cutting across her face. It doesn’t disturb Jon the way it once did. “Hmm. I’d like to find out.”

It’s not hard to get to the Panopticon. In some ways, it is where all roads lead, which has been making London traffic even more unbearable than usual.

This time, they walk in together, the six of them, hand in hand.

The second they’re through the door a knife is pressed, savage, to Jon’s throat, the second after that Daisy lunges at Jonah, pinning him to the far wall. It’s a rare excuse for her to use her Hunt-warped body to its full extent, and Jon hopes Jonah is currently understanding exactly what that means. Hopes he’s scared. He rubs the already-healed mark on his throat absently.

“You are doing this,” Jonah hisses, windpipe constricted by Daisy’s hand, “tell me how you’re doing it.”

“Oh, Jonah,” Basira croons. “You’d like for there to be an easy answer, wouldn’t you? Gosh, if the Eye could see you now.”

From inside, the Panopticon is a mess, walls cracked, plaster peeling. Jonah is a mess, too, looking a lot more like the two-hundred-year-old variety of corpse.

“The fear is going,” he spits, frantic “how is it going? I can’t even see-”

“’King of a ruined world,’ huh,” murmurs Martin. “We can let the girls deal with this one. It’s okay.”

Jon flashes him a grateful smile. He loves him. He loves him. He has all the time in the world to say it, and nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all.

They leave behind the old corpse, and walk, hand in hand, into the air and sunlight.

-

+1

Luis is alone. Luis has been alone his whole life. He doesn’t even exist; the universe moves on around him; he is forgotten, unloved, despised-

“Oh, piss off,” echoes a voice from above him.

It doesn’t really sound like a proper human voice, but he has been alone for so many countless millennia that it is almost too much to handle anyway. From where he is curled into the tightest ball he can manage, arms wrapped tight around himself, he raises his head. It is so unbearably cold here.

The voice is coming from a man standing in front of him, expression distinctly unimpressed. He looks up at the sky, hands thrown up like Luis’ presence is an indignity. “Another one, really? It’s called the Lonely. You would think I could be- oh, I don’t know! Alone!”

“I'm sorry,” Luis murmurs. His own voice grates in his hearing, foreign and rusty. The man quits scowling at the sky to scowl down at him, instead. He’s old, with silvered hair, a long, black coat swirling around him.

“Oh, well,” the man says, eyes rolling, “if you’re sorry. Jesus.” All of a sudden there are cold hands on Luis’ ribs and then he’s being lifted, up, up, flung over the man’s shoulder like a child.

“You know what,” the man grits out, “fine. Fine! I’ll just put him with the others.”

-

fin.