Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Light. A kind of light that hits the eye mercilessly, the light of conception, of the newborn who hangs onto the comfort of the darkness of the womb, but that white already filters through their eyelids with an opaque red.

Coldness. The coldness of the naked skin stepping out of the shower, frantically looking for their robe in the middle of December, forgetting for the nth time to hang it close to the bathtub. Goosebumps on the forearms, like an army of little people raising up from every epidermic cell to protest against the vile temperature.

Cotton mouth of when you fall asleep with your lips parted, a feeling that asks for a glass of water, or at least for saliva, for anything to swallow to wash it away.

Pounding head, the one at the temples and right between the eyes, the one of when you forgot to bring your glasses on the vacation and every day it gets worse, the one after you cry, adding insult to injury, the one after an exam, after a declaration, a confession.

One by one she feels those carnal states take life in her world, and the reader already knows something more than she does — that same “she” and “her”. But I’ll tell the reader something more, to facilitate the reading: she’ll find out later that her name is Calliope, through a metal target inside that gray jumpsuit she found herself wearing. She’ll find the name amongst a string of numbers, an alphanumeric code, and right after it new letters to compose “Burns”, either a fate, or a last name.

At the start of our story, Calliope becomes aware of possessing a body, a body that reacts to something that has happened before she could have conscience of it, a body immersed in a boundless nothing.

*

I wonder what’s the string of reactions one could have, finding themselves in a state of amnesia, in an endless tiled desert. One might scream like Calliope does, a loud and strong «Is there anyone? Hello?» charged with the fear that solitude evokes.

One might start walking, jogging, then running, again like Calliope does, before stopping after a second that is an hour that is back a second, without any light to project any shadows to tell, with her spleen asking for mercy.

As the time passes one loses their mind, it’s only natural, for a machine that has to grind new information, doomed to be caged in a lack of everything, will eventually grind itself.

I can’t give references of time, except for when Calliope sees a shadow, so far away that it could have easily been a dust particle on her iris, her reaction grazes insanity. She stops, she blinks, she rubs her eyes with her knuckles, she runs towards it with the desperation of the thirsty in the desert, then she stops, she fears, she collapses, she wonders if it’s a mirage, if it’s a trap, a danger.

She can’t recollect anything; in fact, Calliope becomes aware of her faculty of memory as time goes by, as the only thing she can recollect is all the different ways she’s incarnated her despair in that white endless room. But there’s a feeling, a shadow, maybe, of something from a past life, something screaming for caution and strategy.

She raises her eyes again, and the shadow’s gone.

*

We will go fast in this part, because it would be boring for us to render in time what Calliope goes through, in that timeless torture. And that’s the key word — entertainment, so we’ll skip to when that shadow reappears, and disappears, and reappears again, slowing down to the moment Calliope’s madness takes the best of her, and her solitude chooses against her best senses.

She runs, even if she doesn’t have a reason to, but she’s afraid she’ll lose sight of that shadow again if she even only blinks, so she chastises herself when she has to.

And she gets closer and that shadow becomes bigger, takes the shape of a body, of that same body Calliope has only seen from her neck down, on herself. But that body has something on top of it, a head, a face, hair — that image-less something Calliope has touched when her eye twitched or when her lips bled for biting them accidentally. And Calliope is still running, and that other person turns around, heavy and fast steps startling her, her eyes widen, and she runs as well.

«Wait!» escapes from Calliope’s throat, the same way she first uttered that “hello?” Her thoughts become progressively clearer, embodied in the shape of words and sentences, abandoning that primordial visual shape. «Wait, stop running!» And other warnings, other pleads, but that other person is slow, much shorter than Calliope, so it doesn’t take long for her to grab her bicep, to force her to stop, to make them both crash at the ground.

The girl turns around, eyes wide, pushing herself back with her palms on the floor. She looks scared, and Calliope learns the consistency of other bodies, the only previous one she experienced being the harness of that perennial floor; she learns empathy and projection and mutual recognition.

«Do you know where we are?» She has a feeling of what her own words mean, but Calliope feels more like it’s that language what’s speaking her, rather than the opposite; she looks at that girl’s confusion, wondering if she feels estranged by communication too.

«No. Do you?»

Words — sense wrapped in sounds, intention, referentiality, tone, serious eyes expecting an answer. It’s so fast Calliope almost doesn’t notice it, but there’s also that distinctive quality to her voice, crystal clear, high-pitched, and she wonders what her own voice sounds like, if her ears distort it inside her head.

She shakes her head, and the stranger doesn’t lose her gaze on her. Lips serried tightly, a firm line, eyes grave with caution. Calliope understands it — that same diffidence that’s kept her from reaching out.

In the presence of another person, a sense of time becomes more rigid, more scientific, less emotions-driven in Calliope. Not that indecipherable endless instant that’s been ever since she woke up, but a distention of actions, the rhythm of words, of decoding looks and body languages.

The woman is petite, and it looks like her array of characteristics is the opposite of hers. Calliope gets up, and that ghost of something of what she might have been, before this white desert, drives her to pragmatism. «Walking in the same direction might lead us somewhere.»

«I’ve tried doing it already.»

“Me too”, she thinks, and like that, she meets her inner voice.

*

I thought it’d be interesting taking a look at Juliette’s side of the story — to give the reader another name, that she’ll find out in the same fashion Calliope will. It’s a strange story, so some elements need to be anticipated, not to get ourselves as lost as these girls.

The past lives they come from were so different, truly opposites, so that everything that Calliope has experienced so far, Juliette has done it in a complementary way.

Her body manifested to her in a similar way: complaining about the light, the temperature, the drowsiness. But Juliette didn’t stand up abruptly, didn’t scream, didn’t run. She stood there, confused, almost projected outside of her skin, and touched her hands. Touched her legs, touched her shoulders, her forearms, her neck, the ends of her hair, her cheekbones.

She felt incredibly sad. A quiet desperation, the resignation of recognition, the phantom of something she might have known once upon a time taking the shape of her worst fear. She didn’t have a word for it, not yet, but we can guess what waking up in nothingness, alone, might mean.

But the worst part of it was the lack of something. Lack of other objects, lack of other people, lack of anything to constitute as a center of resistance, to rise against, to recognize oneself. In that same way you push the ground behind you to walk forward — being doomed to fluctuate groundlessly, instead.

So Juliette stood there for an indefinite amount of time, nostalgic for something she couldn’t remember, with a storm in her heart and no words to name it.

She eventually stood up, and it felt forever and it felt the second after, and she started walking. Simply walking, discovering a motion her body knew better than her mind, the memory of muscles that couldn’t be swept away. She walked and looked around, looked up, looked down, and the only things were herself, and the endless rhythmic repetitions of the tiles nooks.

She walked and walked and walked, sat down, traced the nooks with her fingers, counted them, jumped, laid down, rolled to the side, and walked again. And walked and walked and walked. And it almost looked like hearing something in the distance. Then silence. She spoke to herself, clapped her hands, stomped her feet, looked for ways not to get her ears asleep, not to get them tempted to give up on mirages, ground them in reality. Then she heard it again, then nothing. Distant steps, distant screams. Silence, sounds, silence, sounds.

Until the steps got progressively closer, and Juliette looked around, and she saw this body running towards her full speed, and she got scared, and ran away.

And then we know what happened.

*

So now Juliette is walking next to this girl, the only other thing other than her and this floor, if a background can be seen as such. It should be an epiphany, a revelation, but Juliette doesn’t trust herself, certainly doesn’t trust this other person, and most definitely doesn’t trust any of this is real. Doesn’t trust her own cognition of reality — doesn’t trust the notion of trust itself.

There is a palpable tension, like the residual memory of how cordiality should work; not in silence, not with hidden side glances, not with sighs and the build-up of frustration. But that tension is blunt by exhaustion. Time moves by with more order, boredom takes shape, and the floor never changes, but Juliette is always aware of herself in the way she couldn’t be before, when there wasn’t a pair of eyes to function as a mirror.

«Do you remember anything?»

«No. Do you?»

«No.»

And variations.

«Do you have any clues how we can get out of this?» And the implicit “what is there out of this? Is there anything out of this?” But neither of them dare ask it.

«No. Do you?»

«No.»

And variations.

*

Hungry, thirsty, tired and sore they sit down, at some point, lay down too when even the back starts complaining for the bent down position. Juliette caresses the tiles cracks like she used to before. She feels the girl’s eyes on her hands, which makes her move from a lazy motion to a focused act. And that’s how she notices: at the change of pressure, the tile moves a little, as if not well glued to the others.

The girl notices too, and it’s her who moves Juliette’s hand away and lifts the tile. There’s a little box, wrapped in a cloth, and the smell of food instantly hits Juliette’s nostrils.

It’s all done hastily: the girl moves the box out of the hole in the floor, in the space between them, unwraps it, throws the cloth nearby, reveals two pieces of bread and two plastic sacks of water. Takes one of each, leaves the rest there for Juliette, as they feast in peace.

She doesn’t even think it could be a mirage, a trap, doesn’t even stop to question why the hell there is freshly baked food inside a tile. Just dives in, eats, until her stomach is content again.

Sounds of appreciations fill the munching silence, and the noise of Juliette’s fear gets suspended for a few minutes.

It’s when the food and water is all gone that the girl raises the point, silently, through her action. She starts feeling the other tiles, looking for loose ones, and quickly Juliette follows her lead, but they all feel hermetically closed now. They widen their range of search, going in circles, expanding the radius, but it feels like a happy accident rather than a pattern. Eventually they come back to the hole in the ground, and sit around it.

«Maybe it was the only one,» Juliette offers pessimistically.

«This hellhole is infinite, we’ll find another one for sure. It’s too weird to be an isolated thing.»

They agree to leave the hole open and to walk in a straight line from it, so in the worst case scenario, they’ll come back to it.

*

It feels like hours and it feels like weeks and Calliope has had enough. She feels like she’s had enough ever since the first few minutes after she gained consciousness, and apparently, in lack of alternatives, her patience just progressively extends its capacity. This empty desert surely is a great gym for the soul.

She’s not sure how to feel about this girl. She always feels a bit… held back, dragging herself forward just to follow her, speaking at a lower volume than her, carrying those incredibly sad eyes. If Calliope would have had a choice, she definitely wouldn’t have chosen this travel partner.

Travel is a stretch for an infinite walk in an infinite empty room with occasional gifts underground. At every tile they kick the border, until they get progressively tired and only do it occasionally. Calliope puts more effort, and that’s again something she dislikes about that girl, but she keeps it to herself. They definitely don’t need to fight, in this situation.

Time passes and things feel clearer. It’s hard to explain, but Calliope feels like she regained her control of her language, control of the contemplation of possibilities, a certain attitude to strategy and pragmatism. “Regained”, with that prefix, testifying to her that they come from somewhere. Somewhere they can’t have conscious access, but something more intimate in them knows perfectly well.

«Do you think we’re dead?» The girl asks at some point. Calliope doesn’t reply straight away, taken aback. The girl looks ashamed of her question.

«The fact that you can ask that question is an answer.»

She doesn’t look convinced, but the hunger they felt just hours ago was the most vivid thing Calliope has ever felt. The aura of this girl feels off, and it looks more clear the more time passes by. With a decadent quality to her, an aestheticism of quietness and resignation, of decomposition coming to claim its victim — the relief of letting oneself go.

But Calliope doesn’t care that much. She’s just incredibly bored, incredibly upset by the feeling of being forced here, of being deprived of something she can’t remember, and if this girl is the only entertainment she has, then she’ll observe her. Observation is good in itself, more so if she has to learn what qualities this girl can offer to make them escape from here.

*

It’s cold and at some points it feels like they get used to it, at some points it feels like it gets colder. The quiet noise of the girl’s teeth clattering walk with them, bones shaking bones, and a vein of pity or maybe annoyance takes the best of Calliope. She stops, takes a sideways step, places behind the girl, and closes her hands around her shoulders.

«What are you doing?»

«We produce heat. Warm up and we can resume walking.»

The girl stays there, still as stone, under her palms. It doesn’t look like it’s working, if anything the girl is shaking more, or perhaps that’s the added sense of vibration under Calliope’s skin. But they stay there for a while and there is a sacred silence, of exhaustion and exasperation and the extraction of their mutual solitude in that scenario. Taken out, placed between them, trapped where Calliope’s skin touches the girl’s.

And this close, because Calliope is an observer, she takes new details in. The softness of the fat layer around the triceps, the smell of a generic shampoo brand she can smell on herself too, the way the girl’s feet shift a little, as if standing up got suddenly awkward for her. But most importantly, she takes in the sewing of the jumpsuit, the sleeves stopping right at the shoulders, the corner of a label.

She doesn’t wait a second, doesn’t ask for permission, just takes the label out and gets her face closer to it, squints her eyes. There’s a code — that code we mentioned, the way they re-learn their names.

Calliope starts uttering it out, letter number letter number, the girl speaking over her, «What are you doing?» moving her arm, lifting to see what she’s been reading. Calliope looks for that same label on herself, feels it under her fingers, unable to move it in front of her eyes.

«It’s probably just the barcode,» The girl says, but it’s the only thing they have, and it looks like she realizes it too, because she takes Calliope’s label and starts reading it out loud too.

They don’t have paper and pen, don’t have pockets, don’t have anything resembling ink, not sand and a wooden stick, nothing at all. «Read only the odd numbers,» Calliope tries, and Juliette does, but they don’t sound like a succession. «Even numbers?» again nothing, «Vowels?» and «Consonants?»

«I’ll read all the letters,» Juliette says, and she reads them spelling once, twice, and tries putting them all together. «Calliope Burns?»

It clicks, almost embarrassingly, in a “of course it’s me, how could I forget?” kind of way. «That’s my name,» she says, and proceeds to read Juliette’s, and that’s how they learn that.

So “that girl” gets translated with the other’s name, in the reciprocal knowledge that they didn’t ask for it beforehand, completely disinterested in each other. It becomes a bit more personal, as personal as their shared amnesia can get them — but it does.

They try to spend some more time with the numbers, making all sorts of conjectures on them, like the number of tiles from the hole in the ground or the number of hours before someone will come and rescue them.

They get nowhere, and with the disquieting confirmation that there’s something behind all this, someone who knew their names and put them in those clothes, they resume their travel.

*

But we were saying, it gets personal. It gets personal when they give up on solving the number mystery, reassured by the fact that they’re carrying those numbers with them, and they call each other by their name. «We’re getting nowhere. Let’s go, Juliette.»

It’s a little thing, just a string of sounds associated with her identity, once upon a time, when different people with different voices used to call her, and she used to turn around. Now there’s only Calliope, with her distinctive speech, where words sound like kunai knives thrown at you, that you have to catch.

Her sense of time seems to adjust itself the more she spends it with Calliope, but the light never changes, and Juliette sleeps with her eyes hidden in the nook of her elbow. When she wakes up that place works its nausea on her senses, fed up with the sameness of everything. But there’s Calliope with her now, and she looks like she’s won a million battles before, so, maybe, they can get out of here — if an out even exists.

Chapter Text

The legacy of an inaccessible world has allowed Calliope to navigate the tile desert. They find new loose ones, with a timing that’s not lost on her. When their bodies become weak, too weak to keep walking, a lazy attempt at a kick, and a hole forming on the ground. It’s always the same, bread and sacks of water, always in couples, making them lose hope to find other people here.

She gets to learn something more about Juliette as the days go by — given that the intervals between their sleep breaks last that much, or that little. She learns that she twists her mouth every time she holds back something, that she likes to walk half a step behind her, that when they share their meals she waits for Calliope to unpack them first. She too is an observer, in a much different way than she is.

The disorientation of time references works as a repellent to hopelessness. There’s always the doubt that it’s been just a few days, that some more kilometers and they’ll get themselves at the end of that enormous room, in front of a wall, a door, something to tell them they won and they can get outside.

*

Juliette is great at breaking the ice. When Calliope keeps her focus on the target, as much as it drags her to the verge of insanity, Juliette warms up to her, or maybe realizes they’re probably going to spend a lot of time together, still — so she finds ways to keep themselves entertained.

«It’s called “contact”, you play it like this—»

«Why the hell are we playing games?»

Calliope regrets shutting her down eventually, just a day or two later, or an hour or two, or whatever two naps correspond to. She prompts it so pathetically, with a weak «so, what was that game you were talking about…» that she hates herself for it; and even more so after Juliette’s winning smile.

Her first smile, and albeit dull and effete, it doesn’t get lost in Calliope’s memory.

*

«Why the hell do you know so many word games?»

«I was a very bored kid.»

Juliette doesn’t register her words before they’re out of her mouth. She doesn’t know how she remembers those games: she starts explaining them, and as she does, she learns them with Calliope. But that admission is something else, is a little person inside her mouth speaking in her place.

Calliope looks confused, almost upset, and then sheepish. «You… remember?»

It feels weird not to, unnatural, and on the tip of Juliette’s tongue there’s a “you don’t?” But she doesn’t, doesn’t know where that sentence came from. So she says «Just that.»

*

Things get tense after that. As if they broke a silent pact, and Calliope knows she might be nonsensical right now, but nothing guarantees her that Juliette is on her side. Maybe it’s a social experiment, maybe her key to get out of here is through Juliette.

«How did you get here?» She asks first.

«I thought I told you I don’t remember, just like you.»

She asks at different times, not to sound too suspicious, but Juliette catches on nonetheless, after another «So how did we get here?»

«Are you testing me?»

«Excuse me?»

«You keep asking variations of the same question. Is your amnesia permanent or something?»

There is almost a hint of genuine concern, or maybe Calliope reads too much in the sweet face. This place would make anyone go insane, but especially someone deprived of memories to latch onto, to build any kind of hope, any kind of ideation for what’s to come. So Calliope tries not to make-believe something into Juliette’s tone and fixate on her old suspicion.

«Yes, because I want to get out of here.»

«What does it have to do with this obsession you have with that question?»

Because she doesn’t have any leads, except for labels they don’t understand and tiles they can’t predict. But what Calliope says instead is «it’s my business,» and turns around to put an end to the conversation.

But Juliette isn’t content with it, because she grabs her biceps and spins her back to herself.

«It isn’t, because I feel like you’re implying something here.»

«Your feelings don’t make it your business.»

They speak, properly improper this time, the thin veil of cordiality finally lacerated, and the glimpse of each other in the hidden mirror revealed from it.

But there’s no time to explore that, to explore what must have been a daily occurrence, but now feels a new and dangerous territory for them, the way a kid drops a plate and waits for reactions. There’s no time because a noise, loud and low, makes the tiles under feet tremble. A growl, animalesque, the first noise not produced by them, halting the fight to a stop.

Then a second one, and fear and disquietude fills them. They look at each other, take a tentative step back, and by the corner of their eyes they see two fast figures, in grays and browns, darting towards them at full speed.

Neither of them attempt to run, implicitly calculating their failure, and as Juliette crouches down and holds her head in her arms, Calliope lowers slowly and sounds out the ground, hoping to find anything to defend them with.

It’s seconds of tension, the shadows run until they get close, close enough to be seen distinctly as bizarre animal hybrids, that Calliope can’t name but knows something isn’t quite right. She glances at Juliette, but she still has her eyes closed, and the animals are now circling around them, dragging their claws with every step. Calliope isn’t sure what they’re waiting for, but she knows they don’t stand a chance.

She still examines the scene, hopes for a genial intuition to get themselves out of there, studies the animals. They have an evanescent kind of quality to their appearance, as if the edges of their bodies were constantly evaporating, and colorful reflexes emerging in between the gray and brown strokes, of purples and yellows, coming and going at the different angles of every step. Something suggests to Calliope that it’s not just an aesthetic observation, that there’s something important about how they look, that they can guess how bad it will hurt based on it. But before she can dwell into that, she feels a hand — Juliette’s, no other options — around her forearm, maybe looking for protection, in a silent call for help. And when Calliope raises her eyes from the hand to the animals, they’re gone.

«They’re gone,» she tells her, exactly. «It’s all finished.»

«How?»

That’s the umpteenth question Calliope can’t answer.

*

«What even were those?» is another question Juliette asks, when they’ve calmed down a bit. They sat down and drank some water from two plastic bags they found under a tile right between them. When they both stopped trembling, they agreed to start walking in the opposite direction of where the animals came from.

Juliette listens to Calliope’s explanation of what she saw, while she had her eyes closed. She doesn’t have a word for it either, but she agrees that something isn’t quite right. «Well, nothing is, but by this place’s standards, that’s the weirdest thing we had to face so far.»

«And somehow we came out of it in one piece.»

Calliope isn’t optimistic, that much she has understood about her, but Juliette is positive. Still shaken, but positive, especially after this encounter, in that way you feel invincible after solving problems.

«Maybe we have to keep everything in mind,» she offers. They walk and walk and walk and Juliette is tired of this endless room, but she’ll take this over dangerous encounters every time.

«How could you forget something like that?»

«Haven’t we forgotten everything else?»

The face Calliope makes then is one of distaste, and Juliette feels inexplicably sorry for what she said. She’s a pessimist, but she’s also confident in her capabilities — that’s two things Juliette has figured out about her. So seeing the concrete proof that her memory might fail her must be added salt to injury to what they just faced.

«Let’s make a deal then,» Juliette says, trying to fix her mood.

«Mh?»

«We’ll tell each other the story of this journey every evening, to make sure we don’t forget it, and miss important information that could get us outside.»

«Why evening and not morning?»

«You secure memories while sleeping.»

Calliope seems not to notice the new bit of information, and Juliette doesn’t question where that knowledge comes from either.

Then Juliette sticks her hand out, stopping in her tracks, waiting for Calliope’s. She stares at it, a bit distrusting despite the deal not having any downsides — until she takes it, and shakes it.

It’s formality, but it’s also the way her eyes are used to Calliope’s figure, her ears to her voice, but the palms of her hands linger, in this infinite sameness, for that new feeling.

*

Juliette’s sense of time gets better, it feels, as if the permanence in that place re-orientates her. Or maybe it’s Calliope’s presence who grounds her, the seconds paced by her breaths, the minutes by her considerations, the hours by her changes of directions. They’re alone, and yet Juliette can’t remember a single other person she’s met before, she can’t explain to herself how she even has that idea that other people might exist.

But there might be other animals, because there are other tiles and other hidden meals, an unpredictable sequence presenting in their times of need.

It’s always slightly cold, and Juliette doesn’t really get used to it, but they walk so much that the motion is enough to keep her warm. She walks half a step behind Calliope and she doesn’t notice until she points it out, a couple of days after the animals’ attack. «Now I can explain it — you’re using me as a flesh shelter.»

Juliette didn’t understand straight away, «What?» but Calliope kept going on, «This would mean you knew of them from the first day, but you did seem scared…»

«Is this the sign you’re going insane?»

And then Calliope told her, that it was her position, always half a step behind. Always leaving her the decision to where to go, to the pace, to the direction and the pauses.

A subconscious reflex, a revelation that she keeps noticing now. Something in her screams that there’s a reason, in a place and time where nothing seems reasonable. Maybe a desire for an explanation, maybe the manifestation of a life of obedience she’s forgotten.

*

They dream, and those dreams don’t make any sense. There are a few nightmares: Juliette dreams of walls suddenly appearing at the horizon and progressively closing towards them, making them suffocate, smashing them against tiles that won’t save them this time. She doesn’t know what Calliope’s nightmares are, but something tells her that they’re related to the animals, because when she wakes up, in the middle of their designated — and still luminescent — night, she looks around, as if looking for them.

The more days that go by, the more their dreams aren’t related to that place. As if their brains got access to a little shrine, inaccessible to their awake mind. Juliette sees faces that evoke a sense of familiarity and a sense of danger, faces she wants to run from and run towards. She sees places, architectures, nature, colors and themes she hasn’t seen here yet. She wonders if it’s the same for her companion, but she doesn’t dare ask her.

*

«Today we walked. No hidden meals. No animals.» Calliope resumes. Juliette nods, «We walked, didn’t find anything… or anyone.» She repeats. She can tell Calliope feels weird doing that ritual, stupid even, but she knows it’s important — and she’s glad she sticks with it, and even prompts it.

They decide when the day ends and night starts based on their pace, when they walk so slow that it’s almost pointless to continue. They sit down, right where they are, lay on their backs, look at the whiteness above them, foggy at the edges, like a dense gas trapped in a dome. A ceiling they can’t see, much like walls that they can only imagine are caging them in that place.

«Walked and walked and walked,» Juliette murmurs, with her eyes cast upwards, «found nothing and nothing and nothing.»

«Don’t forget about nothing.»

«Right,» and it’s desolating, but she still smiles.

*

Calliope is growing restless. She’s patient and determined, or at least she feels like she’d be, out there — but her patience is wearing off.

Juliette is talking about some word patterns she’s been thinking about, those nights she couldn’t sleep, and Calliope couldn’t give less fucks. She just wants to get out. She just wants to know what out means, what it is, look at it, smell it, taste it, touch it, break it under her hands, smash it and recompose it. She wants to live it, to be surrounded by objects, alive beings, autonomous entities to know and learn and love.

But they can’t. They can’t and she kicks a tile and it doesn’t open. And Calliope falls to her knees and starts punching it, and her knuckles tint red, and at least it’s something. Something to leash out against, something to try, something that they can work for instead of waiting hopelessly. One hit and another and uneven munched nails scratching at the edge of the tile, and the next one, leveraging on the knee to push it backwards, up and down, to the sides, then even with teeth, trying with everything, the taste of iron in her mouth.

Until Juliette is holding her, keeping her still with her arms wrapped around hers from behind, holding her down in a fetal position, forcing her to calm down. What an oxymoron. She might have hit her, elbowed her trying to escape, but it’s a couple of minutes and she’s still being rocked, and she doesn’t have any voice left to scream.

That’s their first breakdown of many, and Calliope opens the ball, in a way that leaves her embarrassed after, until it’ll be Juliette’s first, and they’ll stop keeping count.

Calliope feels empty after, slightly shaking at the shoulders, and she doesn’t feel like walking, but it’s too soon to go to sleep. She hopes Juliette won’t let go abruptly and tell her to get to work, and she wonders where that fear comes from. But she doesn’t have time to speculate, because Juliette gasps and points at the tile Calliope was harassing just minutes ago — with her arm still around her, and the other appearing from her side.

She follows her gaze and the blood smeared on it shows little white lines, as if it couldn’t penetrate inside tiny engravings. It’s hard to read, especially with unfocused vision, but Juliette gets her face close to it, squints her eyes, and starts reading out numbers. «one eight zero seven, underscore mark, one nine three six, underscore mark,» she keeps reading, and Calliope’s brain is a little slow at the moment, but she picks it up straight away: «our labels have a letter every four digits.»

Juliette looks hesitant, but Calliope faces the other way to invite her to check. She reads it out, and they match. Then Calliope extends a hand to the tagged tile and colors the one next to it, to find it perfectly flat. And the one on top, on the bottom, to the side, diagonally, the ones adjacent to that. The only one exhibiting those numbers is the one Calliope fought against.

«A lucky coincidence,» Juliette says, as her face is the picture of distrust.

*

It’s a lot of numbers. They don’t extract the tile, so they sit next to it and try to memorize the numbers that exceed the ones on their labels. It takes them hours, exchanging questions back and forth, in a way that feels like the distant dream of a duty they used to have.

«What’s after one six four one?» Calliope asks, regaining her composure, her mind already set to a new mark with too much hurry, perhaps as a mechanism of some sorts.

«One nine four… three?»

«One nine four five! One nine four three is after one zero seven eight.»

«How the hell do you remember?»

«We’ll have to amplify our evening duty to doing this too.»

«Ugh this place is already torture Cal, no need to add to it.»

Juliette gets five questions right in a row, and that’s a good enough sign for them to resume their walk, almost a full day later.

They don’t speak of what happened, even though Calliope senses Juliette’s gloved hands — speaking a little less, subtly checking a little more.

*

They find a first aid kit in their next tile, a couple of minutes from the painted tile, and it’s so clear it can’t be a coincidence — but they don’t state it explicitly. Juliette grabs it, silently orders Calliope still, and works on the cuts. They bring the kit with them, and keep their eyes open for anything new.

*

«We should start counting the days,» Juliette suggests at some point, during a meal. «I already am keeping count. We’ve slept twenty three times.»

«That’s insane.»

«Given that our circadian rhythms still work the same.»

Juliette eyes her, but doesn’t question what they are, or how she knows. Sometimes she feels like she understands.

«Even if we slept twice a day, it would still be a lot of days.»

«It might even be that we’re sleeping once every two days.»

Juliette makes the sign of her head exploding, and Calliope twists her lips in a half-eaten smile.

*

It happens to her too. Calliope wakes up feeling disoriented, much earlier than when they’re used to waking up, and not from a nightmare. It’s muffled sounds before she gets it; she twists her eyes in her knuckles and blinks to see better, to see Juliette with an anguished expression, looking up at the nothingness.

«What’s up?» She asks, her voice scratching against the walls of sleep.

Juliette shakes her head a little, as if “no” could be an answer. There are silent tears falling to the sides of her eyes for the gravity, and a line of snot trailing down to her lips, in total carelessness.

It’s the picture of the Juliette of the first time they met, the girl Calliope would have gladly left behind. With switched off eyes, as if no one was home, or they were too tired to answer.

«What happened, Jules?» She asks again.

She bites her lips, in that ugly way, when you try to keep something inside. «I want to go home.»

Calliope doesn’t understand, but she comprehends the sentiment. She could answer that there’s no home, that she doesn’t know how they even have that concept, that she’s starting to believe something fucked up happened to them. But she just says, instead, «then we’ll keep looking for it.»

Juliette laughs bitterly, and shakes her head again. «I want to go away.»

«Yes, I hear you.»

«Not in that sense.»

And that’s how the conversation ends.

*

If Juliette had been concerned for her, after Calliope’s breakdown, she gets it now. How there is a new kind of gravity to every little thing, and it’s tiring and oppressive, powerless and exhausting. Calliope wishes Juliette would find a way home too, she wishes it for herself as well. She looks at themselves from twenty five days ago, and wonders how they got here.

Chapter Text

«What if… each tile has actually a little world in it, and inside every incision there is another miniature room exactly like this?»

«Please…» this is their new game now: Juliette has discarded the word games to integrate hermeneutics about their situation in fun ways. Well, “fun” depending on who you’re asking.

«Why not? Prove to me, scientifically, why it’s impossible.»

«It’s not impossible, it’s just unlikely and frankly kind of irrelevant to us.»

«How is it irrelevant? It could mean we are too inside a giant tile!»

Calliope rolls her eyes, clearly put to an angle. «Alright, conspiracy theorist. Still irrelevant. It turns this situation even more hopeless, if anything.»

There isn’t much surroundings to describe: everything is still, boringly, frustratingly, evenly, incredibly white. The kind of white you see first thing waking up in a hospital. The one that gives you a headache the first couple of days, before adjusting. So it’s only natural that their interest gets completely captured by one another. A bundle of uniqueness, a heap of heteronomy, a mass of alterity. When you think you got a detail here it is, transforming right in front of your eyes.

So Calliope suffered through Juliette’s weak attempts at getting them out of here, because she had to recognize that she was keeping her sane. And maybe, if she got in the right mood, she could give her some credit for being amusing.

«Okay then, listen to this one instead. What if… The room is somehow sentient, and it understands when we need something, so we only have to find a way to communicate to it that we want a way out.»

This is the first time that the weird coincidences are said out loud, so Calliope jumps at the occasion. «The first part isn’t half stupid… Just make it less sci-fi and more dystopic. We have labels with our names printed on them: it looks more like an artifact of a human, rather than a magic room.»

«So we’re working against an evil scientist of some sorts?»

«Perhaps.»

Juliette nods, as if they were talking about what to have for dinner — as if they had any choice in the matter.

*

They walk in silence after that. A minute, an hour, who can tell? There is something unspoken, something boiling under the surface. They just had a big revelation, something that should have been obvious, but that hit only now: they have no notion of normality, but somehow they just know none of this is natural.

And it pisses them off.

The first to crack, again, is Juliette. Of course, Calliope has figured out by now that she’s the strategic one, the cool one, the one who sees two steps ahead, while Juliette… She has her genius intuition, sporadically, but her soul is untameable, can’t follow schemes, is hard to keep at bay. She’s a romantic, in the nineteenth-century-esque way, while Calliope isn’t even an illuministic, because there’s a load of illogical passion to that: she’s rather a neo-positivist, in all its mathematical glory, with a measured and justified involvement of the spirit in her causes. Hence why she’ll be the one to lead the two of them out of here.

Juliette cracks with a laugh: a slow, crescent laugh, the one you emit right before hysteria; and right after it, she faces the ceiling, that perennial fog, and screams: «You’re having fun?»

«Juliette…» Calliope isn’t sure if this is cathartic, or if this will get them more in trouble. All she knows is that it’s not their smartest move yet.

She just keeps laughing, stops, swirls around, raises her arms to the sky, before launching in a monologue.

«Why are we here? Huh? For your entertainment, for a bigger purpose? In either case you should have asked us first! Where are our memories? Our freedom? We can only choose whether to walk right or left, and guess what, without landmarks it’s all the fucking same!»

«Juliette, can we please go?»

«Oh I’m not half finished. Aren’t you pissed? Don’t you want to know? Why us, why all this? We’ve been here more than a month. How are you just standing there? Are you cool with this?»

«Of course not, but you think this little scene is gonna help us?»

Juliette has a nervous energy to her, Calliope can tell by the way she bites her lips in that ugly way, when you want to rip them off, unload all your frustrations to your own skin. So she raises her hands in front of her; Juliette looks at her perplexed, arms crossed in defense.

«Hit me, c’mon,» she prompts.

«It’s not you I should hit.»

«But there’s no one else here except for us. Not physically, at least. So hit me, Jules.»

«I don’t want to hurt you,» is her last weak attempt, but Calliope’s amused eyes are enough to tell her she probably couldn’t even if she wanted to.

That’s enough of a challenge for her, so a dirty punch hits her opposite palm, then the other, and the other. Until she’s vented enough, and Calliope can walk next to her, and show her how to hit more clearly. Between «Like this» and «More extended, rotate your torso, leverage on the ball of your feet to get momentum»; under Calliope’s palms to straighten Juliette’s shoulders.

And when they’re too tired to continue, they leave with a joke. «So when we face them, we’ll know what to do.»  

*

The way Calliope cracks is much different: Juliette sees all her combative focus in it. She becomes more sensitive, more intolerant to little glitches, hyper aware of the slightest chances, now that she has a sentient entity to attribute them to. She checks the tiles after they find their meals, looks around as if searching for the proof they’re being watched, makes sudden movements as if to confuse whoever’s on the other side. Her sanity slips away much more elegantly than Juliette’s, with much less passion and vigor, under the false pretense of utility.

Their differences haunt them, and in the points of contrast it gets them apart, in the point of complementarity it gets them out of everything. Juliette isn’t sure what her reputation is, in Calliope’s eyes. All she knows is that they’re both essential, in their radically different ways to face that white hell.

Calliope goes like that for a whole day, starting from a couple of hours after their fighting lesson, as if her realization had been delayed.

Juliette clears her throat, and Calliope turns around a bit too quickly. She drags her shoe, producing a squeaky sound, and she sees Calliope’s shoulders go still and tense. She trips, almost falls against her, and the way Calliope grabs her biceps is a bit too strong for it to be just to steady her.

But her anxiety is justified, and Juliette has no idea how to comfort her. They find their tile, have their meal, and decide to nap shortly after. The no-pillow talk is short and dry, and Juliette’s eyes go heavy and fluctuate back open from time to time, only to find her companion still awake, still sitting up, head falling down and catching herself.

«Cal,» she calls her, and the lights are always the same, but filtered by the thinness of her sleepy eyes, it could almost look like dawn.

«Go back to sleep» is her immediate response, voice clear of who’s been awake with their thoughts for hours now.

«You too then» is her childish answer, which doesn’t even get her a response. So she drags herself closer in that half meter separating them; she raises a hand blindly, looking for an extension of Calliope’s body to drag to a lying position. She grabs a shoulder, which gets shaken away. Juliette settles for sleeping there, their reciprocal body heat fighting against the chillness of that place. It’s only until much later, close to when she’d naturally wake up, that she becomes aware of a light wind grazing her neck and tender flesh adjacent to her arm. Bare skin and goosebumps, with all the cordiality of simple contact, and the paradoxical distance of not intertwining bodies with each other, in the way the flesh has its own mind and doesn’t wait for the judgment of the mind. So Juliette doesn’t complain if that morning they take things extra slow, or if she feels caged there with a supernatural gravity.

*

Things settle well for them, by the parameters they have since they first woke up in that desert. They have something to do now, as they build their own little routine: they walk and eat and look for tiles like they used to, they narrate to each other their uneventful days and recite all the string of numbers back and forth, to keep faith to their deal. But they also share theories, they shout insults to the sky like they were prayers, they train and they sleep, with their bodies slowly slipping towards each other, as if the tiles they lay on were covered in some buttery wax and they were magnets with no attrition.

This lasts five days. Calliope warms up to Juliette’s jokes, and Juliette starts to learn how to find humor in her one-liners. The sun and the moon, truly, in all the romantic scope of their mutual unawareness, in all the dramatic tragedy of such a destiny.

*

It’s on the sixth day from their last communal breakdown, on the morning after their thirty seventh nap, that their little bubble of normalcy bursts out from an outside needle.

«So these three guys hide in the oldest’s house, because he’s the only one with a bunker, and they wait for the bombs to come. Then… uh how was it… it knocks on the door?»

«The bomb knocks on the door?»

«And it gets burned in the chimney.»

«I’m pretty sure it’d explode. Are you sure it was a bomb?»

«What else could it be? Also even if it explodes they’re already in the bunker, so it has a happy ending in the end.»

«Well, let me tell you, they used to tell you pretty fucked up stories growing up—»

It’s out of nowhere, and it’s so different to how they’ve seen it portrayed before, if they only could remember, in movies. It’s not with dust rising up and the ground splitting unevenly around them, not with a loud growl of earthquake, with disorder and chaos. But it is with confusion and fear, even if their environment moves in calculated and tidy motions.

While Calliope is still talking, a square of a five meters side gets divided all around them, drawn in neon lights on the pavement, at the correspondence of tiles divisions. The line of tiles outside disappear underneath it, leaving a black hole surrounding them for a split second, right before never-ending walls rise up, and continue raising, up and up until they disappear swallowed by the ceiling-fog. All around them are four arches.

*

If this place allowed them any standards of normalcy, that would be the peak of its limit. Being thrown around, passive to the changes of the environment around them, being put there without their consent to begin with — if Calliope and Juliette had any memories of the real world, that would look like its mold.

If they weren’t so shaken they’d spend a few moments to ask themselves what their position in the change meant: pure coincidence or a pre-planned execution? Did they press a particular button-tile, or did they just barely survive from being swallowed by the ground? But there is no time to ask such a question for who’s holding the pavement with their nails scratching on its surface, trying to anchor themselves for eternity to it. Sitting down, pushed by a double gravity, with eyes big as ever — «What the actual fuck?» is Calliope’s break-of-silence. Juliette is still panting, joining silently in the sentiment of absurdity. If they shift towards each other a little, if Calliope extends her hand to help her stand up and Juliette holds it for minutes after, they tell themselves that it’s just to steady them. If Juliette checks for any injuries and Calliope lets her, the warmth in her heart is all residual fear, she says.

When they’re ready — where ready they’ll never be, just less incapacitated to continue — they look around, spin in circle, and look at each other.

«Which way?» Calliope asks, raising a hand towards the same-looking arches.

Of course Juliette has no idea, but in lack of strategy, in lack of logical hems to hold onto, what’s left is only chaos. So she starts walking into a random corridor, Calliope following in tow.

*

«So we are in a… labyrinth now?»

«Looks like it, yes.»

Absurdly enough, the walls don’t make them feel claustrophobic: after a month in complete absence of them, abandoned to the immensity of empty spatiality all around them, the constrictions are a welcome chance. A different kind of fear, smaller, more focused on the unknown behind the turn, where their vision is blocked by the corner of the walls; the fear of never escaping, of being blocked there, but with something to lean against, rather than pushed to the ground by the gravity of abandonment. If they were to rot there, at least they’d be hidden with dignity, and those walls would rot with them.

So they walk with a slight tension on their shoulders for the novelty of this new space, and with a sprint to their steps for the feeling that maybe it’s a good sign, an improvement, something that will bring them closer to an exit. As if the space wasn’t getting more complicated for no reason. So the matter was understanding which one.

«Now?» Calliope keeps asking, wherever crossroads presented themselves, as if Juliette knew anything more than she did.

She’d think Calliope is still nurturing some doubts about her knowing more than she was letting her on, maybe knowing subconsciously a way out of that place. But Juliette feels hopeful in her regards, feels like they made some progress, some trauma bonding. So she discards the thought and follows a brighter one: that maybe Calliope needs to delegate responsibilities for a bit, until the shock of the change has faded.

Still, Juliette lets her know, «you know I’m just choosing randomly yes?»

«You’re following your guts?»

«Yes…»

«Then that’s good enough for me.»

*

New habits substitute old ones: instead of wandering aimlessly without directions now they follow the constrictions of the corridors, walk fast and steady rather than with hopeless and dragged feet, stop only for brief moments in front of crossroads only to wait for Juliette’s decision. Tiles open before them now, instead of having to inspect them, having the radius narrowed to the few that compose the width of the corridor.

They go like that for days, sleep leaning against vertical tiles, find some sort of safety in restrictions.

«I say this time we go… last one was left, before was right, two turns ago it was left again—»

«So let’s go right and keep the leitmotif.»

«I was about to say, let’s go left again so we won’t be predictable in our kidnapper’s eyes.»

They are to the point where those sorts of jokes only make them smile, smiles that conceal the sadness of who’s too tired to get angry over and over again. Strong emotions fall flat when they’re shouted in the void, when there aren’t ears to legitimize them, and you’re left there alone to feel like an idiot.

«Alright, let’s go left then chief.»

*

There’s some superstition working its magic even to the strictest of scientists: you can imagine then what kind of hold it can have on a mind who has to make up its own food, secluded in the space of the Self, and nothing else.

Juliette keeps worrying her lips in her teeth, in that ugly way one does when they’d rather bite their bad emotions down. One single turn in a different path than the one they absentmindedly happened to fall into, the last couple of days: two left in a row, and now everything feels different to her. Different space of the tiles, different diameter of the corridor, different distance from crossroad to crossroad. As if they fell in a cheap imitation of the true path, the right one, the one that would bring them outside of this — outside where? The unanswerable question.

«Cal…» She starts, and she already knows how her companion is: too little patience and no time to regret a thing. A disgust for insecurities, a passion for precision.

«What is it?» She answers distractedly, maybe expecting another one of her usual jokes that will dig a little deeper each time, until her taste for humor will match Juliette’s.

But it’s nothing like that: Juliette takes a deep breath and prepares herself to feel Calliope’s disappointment in her.

«What is it, Jules?» She asks again, receiving no answer.

«I think I messed up.»

«There is literally nothing you can do here, how could you have possibly messed up?»

«That double left turn— I think I messed that up, Cal.»

«Please,» Is her exasperated answer. «Is this another breakdown? A nervous obsession? Do what you need, cry in a corner and tell me when you’re ready to resume.»

She’d be pissed at her coldness, especially after the closeness that situation should force them into — but the anxiety in Juliette’s brain takes too much space to let any other conflict take place. «I mean it.»

«Okay. Call me when you’re done.»

«You’re not listening—»

«I am, that’s the problem. You obviously need some rest, we can sleep earlier tonight and we’ll resume doing one left one right from here, if it makes you feel more tranquil.»

«It’s not that, haven’t you noticed the changes?»

Calliope’s eyes are almost comical, silently telling Juliette to shut up before ridiculing herself further. «The changes? Here?»

«Yes. Everything was regular before, now— it’s almost ruined at the edges, you see? Look at how long the corridor is here, it’s much shorter than the last one! Look at how wide it is, it’s at least half a tile smaller, the tiles are smaller! It’s all shrinked and distorted!»

«Did you inhale something? It can’t be something we ate, or I’d be hallucinating too.»

«Trust me for a second, it’s not a hallucination. Try paying attention now, and let’s go back to where we took two lefts and fix it.»

«You think you can remember where we took them? Look around here, even in the remote absurd possibility you’re right there’s no way we can find the exact same turn. They all look the same here, we’d only risk worsening it. Besides, what could go more wrong than this?»

Juliette is reminded of the hologram-animals, but doesn’t speak of them.

… She also wonders if it could be possible this isn’t their first time doing this, if their memories have been swiped away again during another labyrinth, and again, and again, and again.

But she saves that option for another day, maybe when Calliope won’t be looking at her like she needs professional help.

Chapter Text

Desires: dense absences. A Lacanian definition, one of the least academic ones, leaning further into existentialism — a crystal clear blade to cut through its essence. Dense absence. The lack-of, the protruding-towards, the reason behind any human action at all. Calliope screamed and rose up to her feet and ran, her essentiality so vivid, her desire so entangled with her life that she didn’t have to process it, when she first woke up in this hell. Juliette stood there, suffocated by the density of that absence, by the scarcity of desires once they’re conceptualized and twisted and turned, and ripped far away from primordiality.

Dense absences around them as they walk though the corridors, and Juliette tries to slow her heartbeat, fails to nap under Calliope’s command, and follows her companion through her own mistake. Dense absence as Calliope feels alone in that journey, as if Juliette’s sanity finally slipped away from her frail fingers, and now she’s carrying a corpse around with her. And she feeds her and reassures her, she takes care of her and keeps her close in their fake night-times; she gets impatient and ignores her, leaves her there and comes back to pick her up corridors later. Juliette’s density suffocated her, and now Calliope has to adjust to the free-falling into its absence.

But it doesn’t last forever, because it’s a dense absence when symbols start to appear at the top of arches.

«What are those…» Calliope murmurs to herself the first time she notices: she squints her eyes and gets closer, raises to the tip of her toes and holds onto the frame not to lose equilibrium.

«Juliette, come take a look,» she says then, when her vision distinguishes geometrical lines. «Juliette? Look here!»

«You went crazy too…?» Is her weak answer, as she keeps facing the wall, keeps looking for whatever details she saw, while Calliope didn’t believe in her — given that those weren’t hallucinations, and given that Calliope’s present ones aren’t either.

«What? No, those are real, come look!»

«Oh no, at least one of us has to stay sane Cal.»

«We don’t have time for that, I said come look at it? It’s symbols! A circle and a straight line, which one do we take?»

That’s enough to spike her curiosity, and she drags her feet towards her friend. «If I see it too it doesn’t mean it’s real.»

«It very much does. It means it’s not only in my head.»

«Still not proof.»

«Then it doesn’t need to be real. It just needs to be intersubjective, and effective to lead us out of here.»

Their persistent hope of that phantomatic “out”, coming and going, walking with them as a third companion casts its shadow onto that decision too: Juliette holds onto Calliope’s shoulder and stretches her neck to look at said symbols.

«Holy shit you’re right.»

Calliope feels a little bit of hope spike up her heart, as if she could see a thread to catch to push Juliette back to her. She lets her inspect the symbols a bit more, with her face a bit too close, a bit too hysterical, but noticing them it’s already good enough for her.

«So, which one?» Calliope knows letting Juliette make a decision like that after their recent disaster isn’t a good choice, but she needs it, egotistically, needs to feel like she isn’t alone in this journey like the past few days. Maybe it’s stupid, but maybe she missed her, even when she’s been walking right next to her.

And at her question Juliette jumps back down and points at the circle, enthusiastic. «This way.»

*

Circle, line, line, triangle! Triangle, triangle, square, square, square, square… Juliette is following a secret pattern: number of angles, or single isolatable points. One in the shape of the zero, then two, three times three, four times for four; she’s frantic and her head spins, but Calliope is following her and her figure at the corner of her eyes steady her.

It’s the right pattern — «Three doors now,» Calliope observes out loud, as Juliette examines the new room they’re in. With no shapes on top of the doors, but rather small incisions.

It’s different, and any difference is celebrated as an eternal victory there, in that desert of sameness. If she was to make an emotional jump, Juliette would almost say she’s starting to forget the first month spent walking around with absolutely nothing around them.

But abandonment is traumatic — and that kind of abandonment, the betrayal of the world and the things that populate it, might be the worst one of them all. The one that robs you of every anchor you can use against yourself or others, robs you of victimism and any other slim pathetic way to shape your revenge. De-realization, nihilism — one’d rather die.

But they survived! Because they had walls, and then they had incisions, and now they have choices! Three doors, «three, Cal! Three!» Juliette shouts and jumps and turns around and throws her hands around her neck, and it’s crazy and insane but she feels Calliope’s hands lean against the curve of her back, in that close and familiar way she hasn’t felt for the past few days, where her mind kidnapped her from her friend.

And “friend”, that word that has popped up again in her mind, presents again. Companion, travel buddy, only other person alive in that eternal desolation — could she really use any other word, if not Friend?

But back to the three doors. On the first one there’s a fork, on the second one there’s a knife, on the third one there’s a pillow. Juliette steps down and offers her own hands joint as a stool for Calliope to step and take a look, but she moves them away instead and just leans against the door-frame. Independent and more importantly taller, Juliette just takes a step back and lets her ponder their decision.

The corridors look longer from here, and nothing stops them from coming back and inspecting the other rooms — «Are you most hungry, scared or sleepy?» Calliope then asks.

«You think the symbols mean what’s inside?»

«Might be. That, or the opposite, if we really are against a sadist. Maybe in the fork corridor we won’t receive any food anymore.»

«Then I say let’s choose the safest option.»

And so they do, in a passive game-theory knowledge they ponder pros and cons of each case. If the symbols stay for what there is then the best option would be definitely knives, just in case they were to meet something dangerous; second place food and third place a comfortable place to sleep. If it was the other way around, the safest option would be the cushion, second one knife and third one food.

«We don’t actually know what the knife stands for. We’ll find something to use to protect us, or something we need protection from?» Calliope points out, at some point during Juliette’s speculation.

«I just assumed it’d follow the same logic as the fork.»

«…Which we don’t know. We might also just find a fork, and not food.»

As they debate on the semiotic triangle, a sliding sound surrounds them, and they turn instantly towards the source: they see a completion of the walls fall from the top of the arches, as if filling the room from its holes, trapping them inside.

If the circumstances were different, they’d say some comedic line, like “you gotta be kidding me” with eyelids low in an exasperated manner — instead Calliope grabs Juliette’s wrist and rushes both of them to run through the closest door.

On the other side they pant and catch their breath, one bent forwards with palms on her knees and the other leaning with her shoulder blades against the now closed door. It’s a second of recollection before they raise their eyes, and a long empty corridor awaits them.

«What room was this again?» Juliette asks, holding her shoulders in her hands.

«The one in the middle,» Calliope just answers.

*

Asceticism, the sickest of drugs. Casting your eyes away from that dense absence that follows you everywhere, that composes you — the desires that make up your matrix. Train yourself to deny one desire, train to deny two, until you develop a distaste for the activity of desiring itself. And then you’re no longer human, and an abyss flows between you and your objects.

That’s how they stand in front of that infinite corridor. As if torn in two, ripped away from their little victories, forced back to square one. Where are they? Three doors, so little to remember, and too stupid to double check. Even if they knew, could it be useful? Juliette just wishes to know. Wants to. Needs to. Have some stability, finally.

And they walk and they go so slowly, reciprocally acknowledging that they might be little mice, trapped in a young boy’s science fair project.

But they drag their feet to a little room, round, that has another corridor at the other end of it. And in the middle stands a little pedestal, one they walk towards very carefully. Calliope takes a step forward first, extends her arm a little higher to keep Juliette a bit more far away, just in case.

Two knives. The realization washes over them: they accidentally chose what looked like the most dangerous option, and still got lucky. Juliette feels her heartbeat quickening with euphoric relief, and takes one more step forward, clashing her body against Calliope’s raised arm.

«Wait,» is her admonition, «what are they for? Will something happen if we grab them?»

«Let’s just take them, Indiana Jones!»

Juliette walks past her, Calliope tries to grab her from the back of her collar one last time, but she already has her hands on the knives. She turns around, extends one to Calliope with a victorious smile, and holds her very tightly.

Maybe it’s a stupid feeling, but Calliope feels safer already just by holding it in her hand: she raises and pretends to stab something in the air, she moves around and secures it in the space between her skin and her clothes, where her collarbone is, with the blade turned outwards from her throat.

«We got lucky,» she shortly says, and walks with a quicker step towards the corridor, anxious to get out of there.

*

It’s a little object they own, no, a little object they conquered. They owned those clothes but they weren’t given them: they just woke up like that, now almost two months ago. The food they were given was gone as quickly as their lips laid on it. So these knives are their first little property, something useful and personal and little and hand-sized. Something for both of them, something to feel safe with. The sparkle of an ambiguous desire to use it, test it, feel the extension of their bodies inside of that blade.

The abyss between them and the world of things get cut like that, violently, with a little toy.

They walk the corridor and find another room: here there is a badly cut stone, dented and irregular. They pick it up just in case, and hold it in the space of the other half-sleeve. They walk and the other room has a simple pointed wooden stick, and Juliette insists on carrying it too, «just in case.»

«Now you’re simply being greedy. What could we possibly need it for? We need to travel light.»

«Maybe we’ll be lucky and find a backpack then,» Juliette simply winks in answer, and holds both the sticks stubbornly in her hands.

*

Potential and kinetic energy, one can only fall from an altitude: and that’s exactly what their motivation does, after rounds of collections, only to find themselves in front of a closed wall.

«Okay… what now?» Juliette asks, tightening her grip on the wooden sticks, as if afraid someone would jump out of somewhere to steal them from her.

«You tell me, chief. Now we march back and hope to choose the right door.»

«Wait, maybe there’s a hidden button or something,» Juliette mutters to herself, before tapping the non-pointed ends of her sticks to all available surfaces. Calliope waits for her with an unimpressed expression, refusing to collaborate.

It’s with a defeated sigh that Juliette spins on her feet and starts walking back, one step behind her companion, the weight of their little conquests feeling a bit more like a curse than a blessing.

*

They reach the antechamber they found themselves before, with the symbols on the three arches; Juliette looks relieved by it, and Calliope keeps it to herself that they only had to walk a straight line with no turns, so it would have been technically impossible for them to get lost.

Second door is chosen by the shorter girl, even despite Juliette’s «if you have to complain after then you choose this time Cal!»

Assuming a consistent logic between symbols and corridors, they opt for the first one, the fork.

Calliope’s stomach rumbles loudly when it’s been a little longer than usual since they found their tile, and a disquieting presumption upsets her hunger even more.

«There is the concrete possibility we won’t eat for the whole length of the corridor,» she points out, in the most neutral way possible not to be accused of complaining.

Juliette sees through her, and quietly sighs to herself, «we just need to be patient. And even if it were the case, maybe this corridor will be shorter than the last one. Or maybe the evil scientist will take pity on us.» But her last joke doesn’t make Calliope laugh.

*

They do get to a pedestal eventually, right when it starts to feel like their intestines are starting to eat themselves from the inside: they both run towards it, very ready to inhale anything they’ll find.

The first thing is a simple pair of fruits, two peaches to be precise. Nothing like the bread they’ve eaten so far: sugary, watery, juicy velvet fruits that tear softly under their teeth as soon as they bite down vehemently.

There’s a bit of a sugar rush, a cocky smile on Juliette’s face as if to say “I told you so, you should always trust my instinct”, and with that they leave for the next chamber. When Juliette carries the seeds with them, instead of discarding them there, Calliope doesn’t comment.

The second pedestal features a steak, a knife and a pair of forks. Their instincts doesn’t let any conceptual construct wonder two seconds where it comes from, doesn’t come near the different kind of violence that has happened behind it, much different than the tree which freely lets its fruits fall to the ground as a propagation technique. After they’re done, and the predator in them has been lazily satisfied, Juliette picks up all the utensils they’ve used. Next up is an egg, seed salad, unleavened flat bread, devouring every kind of food they find themselves in front of, almost too quick to notice the differences.

By the end of the corridor a wall closes up in front of them, and they turn about-face, stomachs full and hearts upset with that feeling of being trapped there.

*

«Cal?»

«Yes?»

«What if the third corridor is closed too?»

Calliope has wondered about it, ever since the first one actually. She knows Juliette needs reassurances, but they also need a plan. «Worst case scenario we’ll go back and try all the other corridors we discarded before getting here.»

Juliette just nods, doesn’t emit a sound, and keeps walking with her head down. Calliope wonders if she’s still thinking about the double left-turn, obsessing over something she hasn’t shared yet, or if she’s simply tired and needs to keep her mind empty.

So it’s Calliope’s turn to share a thought that’s been devouring her from the inside, throughout this last corridor. «What meaning could it possibly have, to feed us and to block any way to get out?» Why give hope and a bit of comfort just to rip it away again — what kind of sadism is that?

«What meaning are you looking for?»

Juliette’s answer, so simple and so effective, turns Calliope’s stomach upside-down. The evil scientist is an image they’re feeding thanks to its simplicity, to have a common enemy to fight, a clear distinction, something anthropomorphic they can channel their anger towards. But they genuinely don’t have one shred of evidence to think so: just convenience.

So Juliette’s question is legitimate, the best one she could give her, a moment of lucidity emerged amongst her most recent obsessions. Calliope misses her lightheaded — even just as a facade — attempts at joking from the beginning; when the reality of their situation hadn’t dug inside of them that radically yet, and they still had something inside of them to appeal to, to fight.

*

Juliette squeezes Calliope’s shoulder upon entering the third corridor: it’s a little thing, but the latter feels the hold lingering there, her fingers holding encouragingly, the contact of someone who isn’t nauseated yet from their constant, unescapable company.

The first chamber they find features a pile of hay on the ground. Calliope notices Juliette blinking repeatedly, walking up close to walls, tracing her fingers on their surface and bringing them up to her eyes. Neither of them comments on it yet — when Calliope looks at her questioningly, Juliette simply shakes her head and brings her attention back to that makeshift bed.

«It actually looks less comfortable than the ground,» Calliope comments, hands on her hips and eyes cast downwards disapprovingly.

Juliette huffs a laugh, «right. I wonder if we can make something else out of it, then.»

«You’re obsessed.»

The walk through the next corridor is hilarious: Juliette with her arms full, trying to carry way too many items in her small capacity, and Calliope stubbornly refusing to help, and mocking her all the way through it.

Juliette has to drop everything she has for three times in a row before Calliope sighs and makes her a sign to stop. «Maybe you can interlace the hay in a way that makes you carry stuff inside of it.»

«You know, that’s actually not a bad idea.»

«Why do you sound surprised…?»

Juliette sits down and starts the process: knots some strands with each other, crosses them like a fishnet, fastens it — and what she gets, several minutes later, is the worst looking half-bag Calliope has ever seen. Not that she remembers any of the previous ones, she just knows deep down in her heart that it has to be the worst one yet.

But it kind of does the job: it’s not closed to the sides so Juliette has to carry it from its angles, but it contains all the stuff she’s been continuously dropping with much more efficiency than her hands.

«Good job,» Calliope comments sarcastically.

Juliette winks back at her, swinging the backpack behind her shoulder.

*

Throughout the walk from the hay to the next chamber, Calliope feels a sort of pressure behind her eyes; or better, she feels a persistent headache she got used to, throughout the months, as if it had been alleviated a tiny bit just to announce its presence back to her, in a sadistic gift. She notices Juliette behaving weirdly too, but keeps her mouth shut until the next room.

There they find a queen size mattress, right at the center, with a wooden frame all around it, rising up a little above their heads, supporting a little see-through curtain to surround the bed. Juliette is sure she hasn’t seen it before, she can’t open any little box in her memory and collocate it in time and space — but there’s something it’s evoking in her, something safe and familiar and dreamy. She feels like an illegitimate princess, expatriated from her kingdom.

But there’s a perception that’s been lingering in her mind ever since they started that corridor: something she tried to keep to herself until it would have disappeared on its own, not to appear hysterical in Calliope’s eyes. But it hasn’t got any better, so now she just has to ask: «has it gotten darker?»

«Mh?» Calliope walks distracted around the room, looking for how to snatch the wooden poles from the bed-frame and make weapons from it.

«Doesn’t it look like it got a little bit darker?»

«What did?»

«Like, generally? Everything?»

Calliope makes a show to look around, before listing out: «white walls: check, white floor: check, white indistinct ceiling: check.»

«I’m not saying it changed color—»

«You said it got darker.»

«Yes, like the sun was setting.»

«This beautiful sun, right Jules. Look at the landscape! The shadows! Oh, Mother Nature is so beautiful isn’t she?»

Juliette rolls her eyes, «pretend I never said anything.»

«Oh no please keep me updated on your visions. But know you’re probably just tired. Your eyes are turning into night-mode, and your brain just registered a real bed for the first time since…»

«Since the last time you saw the sun setting,» Juliette highlights, but when was it? That big empirical fallacy, that neon-light key to get out of there, just out of reach still.

There’s always a moment of silence, an instant to re-stabilize themselves after giving attention to the holes in their memories — and then, just like that, they’re gone. With a sigh Calliope falls on her back onto the mattress, and lets out a content grunt. «This is my back singing.»

Juliette laughs and joins her, her weight making Calliope’s body jump a little at the wave. «It sings better than you do for sure.»

«Excuse me? I’m positive I’ve never sung in front of you. Not even after your solicitations.»

«That’s exactly why I say it. If you were a good singer you wouldn’t be ashamed to join me, when we walk.»

«It’s not shame, it’s self-respect.»

«Mh-mh… what about we let loose instead? It’s not like there’s anyone else watching.» It’s a silly comment, an innocent one, riding the wave of the few lighthearted moments they get to share. Juliette loves it when they’re like this, when that familiar something that made her feel like a princess, moments ago, comes back full force in a laugh. As if they were friends on a road trip, commenting on what they see, fighting against the thoughts of the school starting again, or something equally silly, and equally disastrous in their little lives. But what they fight against now is a crumbling world, where items are presented unlinked from their needs, from those dense absences, from desires and environments; on pedestals, chronologically disposed one after the other, with no end outside of their progress.

So Juliette’s silly comment drags something between them forcefully: something that doesn’t need a clear conceptual memory, not an idea nor a nomination, but rather something lived so primordially, something akin to shame, that just needs to be felt in order to be real.

Calliope looks at her with wide eyes, like someone who’s in front of a revelation, and Juliette feels seen in a way one does if naked, in a garden.

From the initial shock they had, robbed of everything one naturally has, when starting existence, they’ve been given back little rights, little concessions, in the form of little revolutions. A direction to walk into — walls; a link to objects — property. Getting used to wanting, wanting that little thing that now can be seen and picked up and twisted into different uses. That’s the first step into that dense absence, into the much more complex desire, into launching yourself towards something you ache to possess, to dissolve yourself into. So Juliette lets Calliope watch her like that, and looks at her in the same way in return, in that vague confusion of someone who knows they should know what that’s about.

Juliette follows the column of Calliope’s throat rise and fall, gulping down saliva, and she wonders if it’s nervous salivation, or if it’s the kind that comes from foretasting. She isn’t food — but her body is speaking to her, even if her ears have forgotten that language. Her heart pounds in her rib-cage and it feels like Calliope told her a lie: she isn’t tired, she doesn’t want to sleep. She wants to stay there, in that unknown land, and take another little step forward, see what happens.

The mattress on her back seems like slowly swallowing her, sucking her in like quick-sands, and her muscles melt against the sensation. It’s a sharp contrast: between total body relaxation, and an emotional alert; like the sweet colors of carnivorous plants, like the promise of intimacy before the praying mantis takes your head off.

Calliope is laying next to her, as they face each other, and Juliette traces her contours with her gaze. The cheekbone that isn’t pressed against the mattress, revealed by the hair pushed behind her ear; the jawline, sharp and rising for the lying angle, smoothing down towards the neck — which is there, exposed, asking to take a closer look. The collarbones right next to it, that Juliette tries to shape under the clothes, that move slightly with every breath. Calliope’s lips, slightly glossed, slightly parted. The eyes she avoids, that she knows are on her too, tracing her own observation. Out of shame Juliette keeps her gaze everywhere else, looking for details, for the time she never took observing her even after so many nights sleeping next to each other. Even if she doesn’t look at them now she knows she’ll find that fierce look, combative and dignified, worthy of respect. Suggestive eyes, that she hopes she’ll get to bend one day. Maybe see in a different shape — maybe sweet, compassionate, tranquil.

When Juliette finds the courage to look at Calliope back in her eyes, she doesn’t find the beginning of those qualities: she finds turbulence, focus, amusement — maybe fear. «Having fun?» She asks, and Juliette almost answers “just let me look at you”. But Calliope isn’t an object, not a work of art despite what a careless poet might say: she’s much more, a person, a companion, someone who’s kept her in check ever since they met each other. And if Juliette’s desire to see her in another form, to see her give her sweeter attention — for whatever reason — stays just that, just a desire, then she’ll be content like this. Because she can’t say she isn’t grateful for her friend, despite the hell they’ve been put in.

They end the night in that tense, reciprocal acknowledgement: Juliette tries to sleep, has to turn her back to Calliope not to be rapt in awakeness. Behind her eyes images flash in repetitions, too quick to make any sense of it, but her heart gallops and her skin tingles in their points of contact.

*

Calliope wakes up in a bad mood. Mornings have been the best part of their days, for her: strangely optimistic, as if something in her told her that that was the day they’d get out of there. Even when it never was. She knows that it’s not the same for Juliette: she wakes up badly, violently reminded of where they are, in sharp contrast with her dreams of freedom.

Today it seems like they switched: she sees Juliette waking up right after her, stretching with a content smile, probably well-rested after sleeping in that bed. On the other hand, she woke up with a bad feeling sitting on her chest, like a gloomy foreshadow, like a weird melancholy, a regret or a suppressed acknowledgement.

Whatever it is, Juliette catches right on it, because before they can even greet each other, Calliope feels Juliette’s hand on her forearm. «Everything ‘kay?» she slurs a little, mouth kneaded with sleep. Calliope is already sitting up, palms behind her to support her, and from this angle Juliette is looking up at her. With eyes as big as the first time they met, when she was scared and looking for someone, anyone, to get her out of here. Calliope wonders if she’d be so desperate for anyone else, or if she’d choose her specifically now. But it’s a stupid thought, one she doesn’t need and one she can’t confirm — so she banishes it out of her mind as soon as it’s formed.

«We should start walking,» Calliope says like every other morning, where her good mood compensates Juliette’s resistance to start the day. But today she hears herself and she winces, she wishes they could just stay there like that, like last night, playful and joking and looking and brushing against each other. On the verge of something she doesn’t know, something that calls for her jump, something that feels as exhilarating as it feels scary.

But Calliope’s caution has kept both of them alive so long, so she’ll hold onto that role.

*

They walk and the reverse-headache in Calliope’s forehead gets stronger, and Juliette walks with her eyes squinted, as if she had the sun directly into her eyes.

But there’s something Calliope can’t ignore: the walls and the floor look like they’re painted a pale shade of gray, getting darker the longer they walk.

«Jules…»

«Yes?»

«Uh, maybe we should walk back.»

«You’re saying I was right, perhaps?»

Calliope rolls her eyes, because even in times like these, Juliette still manages to be insufferable like that. «Yes, whatever. It’s getting darker, we can’t walk without seeing.»

«Maybe it’ll stop.»

«What if it stays as dark as we get to, everywhere?»

«What do you mean?»

«I mean we don’t know if it’s linked to space or time. If it’s the former we just need to walk back, but if it’s the latter, we need to find a way to reverse the process.»

«Can’t we light a fire with the hay and the wood?»

They probably can’t, but it’s enough solution for the moment to keep Calliope content. At least it reminds her that they have weapons, albeit rudimentary ones, in case something attacks her while in the dark. It’s not ideal, but if it truly isn’t related to space, then there’s nothing they can do.

*

It gets dark the way it does after the sun sets, but there’s still its refraction in the atmosphere. Calliope looks at Juliette, a wrinkle between her eyebrows and head tilted downwards not to trip on her shoes, and she can’t help but stare for a second. Her heart feels content for a second, as if feeding off the image, and she wonders if it’s the different lightning painting her more beautifully.

But Calliope has no parameters here to confront her looks, no chances to develop a taste, so she just sticks to stealing sideways glances like bites off a forbidden fruit.

*

It gets too dark, so dark they choose to walk back, but the walls keep getting progressively darker, careless of their direction.

«We’re doomed,» Juliette exhales, holding onto Calliope’s hand — they really are, and yet, unexplainably, the feel of Juliette’s hands in hers steadies her. Calliope feels like she has to find a solution more than she already does: out of duty and something else, out of necessity and something else.  

And it’s from that Something Else that takes momentum her intuition.

She pats the wall, finds it hard and unfaltering against her hand. She looks up, follows it right where it disappears in the now dark fog above their heads. It’s impossible but they don’t have any other choices, do they? So she grabs the wooden sticks Juliette had been carrying around for two days and sticks them full-force in the walls.

The instant right before the collision it looks like a hole forms right there, of the perfect diameter, to swallow and hold the wooden stick in position, as if programmed to create grabbing points.

Calliope looks back behind her shoulder, victorious smile on her open lips. «How good are you at climbing?»

Chapter Text

It’s surprisingly easy, so easy it’s almost infuriating: because it means that they haven’t hacked the system yet, that the “system”, or whatever that place can be called, still predicts their next move. But they keep climbing, sticking their wooden sticks in the wall, each time a few centimeters higher, holding themselves up with their arms.

Their adrenaline wears off quick enough: perhaps under that easiness, perhaps because they know they haven’t reached the end yet, and that there will be something else to face after. Perhaps simple lack of resistance. Juliette is the first to complain, and Calliope hears under her huffs and grunts taking the shape of pleas. «Do you see the end?» She asks, but Calliope hasn’t looked up in a while, knowing it will only discourage her.

«Yeah.»

«Are you sure?» 

«Keep climbing Jules.»

«Ugh, that means you’re lying. Can we take a break at least?»

«In a minute.»

*

They take their break when Calliope hears Juliette gasping, after nearly losing her grasp.

«Okay, break time.» She waits for her to get to her height, looking around to figure out how to rest.

«We should have grabbed more sticks, to make little chairs,» Juliette considers, uselessly.

«Maybe two are enough.» Calliope takes one stick out of the wall and keeps herself up with one arm, as she tries to impale the wall transversely.

«Cal! Are you out of your mind? You can’t fall from up here, we got too high. You’ll die.»

“Maybe it would be better” she almost says, before wincing at her own thoughts. Spending too much time with someone like her polluted her mind, apparently — or maybe it’s just that place. She’s so unbelievably tired, even her vital flame is flicking. So Calliope glances down once, and keeps her head like that, with her forehead against the wall and her temples against her shoulders. Her swinging feet are at the bottom of her vision, and down, meters and meters down she can make out the faint obscurity of the pavement.

She considers it — just a couple of seconds of free falling, and no more waking up on the floor, no more walking aimlessly for hours, no more quests and symbols and hysteria.

«Cal?»

No more, no more, sweet words, no more… But as her fingers get lazy on the wooden stick, she feels Juliette’s hand closing on hers. Her eyes trail up lazily, and she looks so worried, as if they were true, actual friends.

If she falls, no more of Juliette.

Calliope traps a sigh down at the bottom of her lungs and straightens her shoulders: it’s the kind of sadness you can’t speak about, not until it’s gone cold. «You were right Jules, it was a crazy idea. Now we have to climb down and it will take hours.» She admits, humiliated.

«No, wait. I was thinking— if we figure out why the stick get through and we don’t, maybe we can trespass the walls.»

«It’s just more pointy.»

«But the wall accepts it before it hits the wall. It must be something else.»

«Maybe the wall is just scared of getting hurt.»

Juliette huffs a laugh, too sweet to be born out of something more than sympathy. «We should try other objects, but up here we don’t have a thing.»

Calliope inspects the both of them for anything: no hair clips or hair ties, no bracelets, no rings, no necklaces, no jewelry, no belts… «Shoes?»

«Can we afford losing them, in case?»

«Shoelaces then.»

*

Juliette holds the plastic tip of her shoelace between the fingers of her free hand, as her body swings disquietingly for the momentum. She hits the wall full-force, and the tip gets through until the point where it meets her fingers.

«It must be a vegetarian then,» Calliope jokes, but the words bounce in Juliette’s head.

«You might be actually right.»

«C’mon…»

«Maybe it doesn’t like us because we’re made of flesh— maybe it only accepts what’s made to be here. We are intruders and it’s rejecting us, or something like that.»

«In lack of better theories, sure. How does this help us? It only means we’re doomed to stay here all dangly.»

«Unless…» Juliette feels the responsibility to get them out of here: it’s not unknown to her the kind of eyes Calliope was showing earlier. A dangerous sign, something she didn’t think someone like her could be affected by. A tickling bomb for those who aren’t used to them, and even more so to those who are so vital, so energetic, so full of life that their identity is wholly entangled with all that. So Juliette has to get them out of there before it’s too late, now that they might have found a way out of that scheme.

«Unless…» she repeats, hoping for an epiphany — think, think Juliette! Now would be a great time to have a great revelation, a moment of genius, but her mind is full with worrying about that lack of ideas, and she can’t think of anything else but to think.

«If only we were shoelaces too…» Calliope talks to herself.

Juliette widens her eyes at that, «Cal? You’re a genius.»

«Are you being sarcastic?»

«No, really, you’re a genius! We’ll make the wall think we’re props too. These clothes must count, right?»

*

They’re impossibly tired, their shoulders burn, their hands are cold for lack of circulation, their feet shake with fear of height and the ghosts in their minds only feed on that exhaustion with bad suggestions.

But they make it: they turn the other way, back against the wall, and hit it full force. A sort of basin forms around them, a chair-like hole, and they feel their muscles sinking against it for tension-relief.

«We don’t have hoodies though,» Calliope points out. Juliette shows her: unzips the front of her jumpsuit, smiles at the flicker of her eyes, and stretches the fabric higher, so it covers her hair.

«We can make it, Cal.»

And they do.

It’s a weird sensation, passing through a wall, and its density inside feels like a jelly trapped in two thin layers of hard surface. They make it to the other side, and they don’t have to climb down: perfectly in line with a pavement, they just place their feet to the ground and find themselves standing up.

But they don’t have time to rejoice their victory, to check on the other one or to comment on the dis-level of height. Because in front of them a sea of people walk in all directions.

*

Calliope can’t believe it: other people, just like them, walking in front of them — a lot of them! She throws the wooden sticks to the ground and launches herself towards them at a fast pace: «hello?» she calls, but gets ignored, «hello? Can you hear me?» and «excuse me?» she turns around, looks around,raises her hand and tries to grab a shoulder — but it flickers in front of her eyes in little white squares before recomposing.

Calliope stops, disoriented, in that swim of lights. Mere lights, mere projections — holograms at best, hallucinations at worst. Some of them walk through her, and she feels nothing: just little squares of light surpassing her dense skin. Are they real? She can only know with — where’s Juliette? A different kind of bewilderment takes place in her heart: plain in sight, the pain of having been robbed of something real by the swim of those mental projections.

She turns around hectically, frantically, calling for her name: «Juliette? Jules!» again and again, but she has to close her eyes when those pale lights move against her; and she gets spinned by none other than her susceptibility, loses direction, feels stupid for it.

She stops and looks around with her pounding heart and a vague resignation: she looks at still faces, plastered expressions, moving in lines with no directions. Much like they used to — much like they were doomed to. With the difference that Juliette and her fought, and their faces colored of all things: of pain and pity, of amusement and acceptance, of fear and frustration, of lust and longing. So no, she rejects it: they’re nothing like those images. They could be, they could become, but they aren’t; and Calliope caressed the thought of it just then, and feels so disgusted for losing herself.

A profound loneliness takes her, in that sea of faceless automata. Her hand raises again, and against her concrete fingers little squares of light fragment in all directions. Her heart trembles at the sight — when are they leaving?

She keeps her hands like that, like when you’re little and play blindman’s bluff, looking for anything to collide against. But she’s taken by behind, two hands closing around her shoulders, and like that she knows she’s not lost.

«Are you crazy? Walking right in this chaos? What were you thinking, Cal?»

It almost feels like they switched places, and Calliope abandons to the feeling. «Let’s get out of here, Jules.»

*

«Hello, excuse me, do you know how to get out of here?» Juliette keeps trying and it would almost be adorable if it wasn’t the sign of delusion: they’re at the margins of the holograms crowd and she’s trying to interview those who come close to them.

«They’re just images Jules, it’s not worth it.»

«Maybe there’s a sort of password… The numbers in our tags? The symbols in the labyrinth?»

«Where do you even take those ideas from,» Calliope mumbles to herself, as she follows Juliette’s hand gesture and spins around to let her look at the numbers. «I thought we were supposed to learn them by heart,» she reminds her, but Juliette only laughs. «Can we get an insanity pass? I’m sorry teacher, I couldn’t do my homework due to being trapped in this…»

«Months here and we still don’t know what to call it, huh?»

Juliette starts reading the numbers on the label of Calliope’s clothes; as soon as the last number is pronounced, the holograms stop and turn to point all in the same direction.

Juliette takes Calliope’s hand, before walking in the middle of that sea of lights again, following the little squares that make up for their fingers. Amongst them, the pavement — infinite, monotonous, never-changing, pedant — finally broke its sameness into a hole. A hole just as big as them, a little over one meter as diameter, inclined in the fashion of slides.

«It looks like a trap of some sorts,» Calliope says immediately, closing her hand more firmly around Juliette’s and tugging her a bit towards herself.

«Aren’t we already in a big trap? Might as well try and change things. It worked for the wall.»

«It almost didn’t.»

«But it did.»

They look in each other’s eyes, as fragments of lights walk all over them, against them, merging them as if trespassing their bodies. And they stand still, firm, amongst all that: just looking and deciding silently, fierce and pleading eyes, bodies leaning in opposite directions.

Until the hole seems less menacing than that white desert, and Calliope just gives up, and follows her down the tunnel.

*

It feels infinite. Juliette wonders if she led the two of them to yet another irreparable mistake, if they’ll get even more miserable, if she’s responsible for Calliope’s sadness, if she should have taken it into account in an opposite way to how she did: not with urgency but with patience.

It’s infinite, an impossibly long narrow black tube, so dark, so different to what they’ve been used to for how long they’ve been there, that is how long they remember anything at all. Not even those last few days in a semi-shadow, never they’ve been immersed in this imperscrutable darkness. It’s so weird, so interesting, how Juliette can’t tell whether she has her eyes open or not.

Infinite but Juliette keeps Calliope’s hand throughout the whole thing, walking one in front of the other, and despite how uncomfortable it is to move like that, neither of them let go, not even to scratch their noses.

And then a little change of intensity, gray walls, warm-colored ends, and Juliette feels her heart pounding in her chest.

«Do you smell the grass, Cal?»

*

The multitude of things should be a shock to us, and yet we adapt, and take one little thing at a time to analyze — subjects, objects — in the sea of “others” which are never that, entities with their own dignities that get simply discarded — backgrounds.

Always immersed in selective blindness, our lack of wonder is both a blessing and a curse — over-stimulation, apathy. So, when Calliope climbs out of that tunnel, it is a shock. Because they’ve stayed in a void that forced them to converge all their focus to the smallest details, constantly. So Calliope holds onto Juliette’s hand, something familiar, something attention-worthy, to shut out the rest and reintroduce it back in small doses. First it’s the light infiltrating while they’re still walking. Then it’s that pungent smell of green, even before Juliette’s question.

Yes, she smells it: the grass, the dew, fresh air, humid wood, fire, sugary fruits, salt and sand. Her eyes close at the exit, then open back and thin down the excess of light; vibrant greens of leaves framing the opening to a natural landscape. The sea, a wooden shelter, a bonfire, people talking in distance, some waving at them, making a sign to join them, enthusiastic and happy as if they knew.

Juliette’s hand squeezes hers, and she turns behind her shoulder: «We… we made it.» It sounds impossible, unbelievable, perhaps she’s checking if it’s an illusion, if Calliope sees it too.

So she lets Juliette’s hand go and take her in her arms instead. «Yes, yes we did.»

They’ve been close to each other all this time, but it feels like only now Calliope can distantly tell what Juliette’s skin smells like — here in this plethora of other smells, and what inflection her voice takes, here amongst all these different overlapping sounds, and how soft she feels under her bare arms, here when her feet are standing on soft and warm sand, and her hair is moved by the breeze.

*

«How did you guys find out?»

It took them a couple of hours to take everything in: how everything seemed so full, so crowded, how in every little nook there was a flower or a thread of grass, a nest or dry leaves, sand and mud.

The other people took them in with the joy of separated family members, reunited for the holidays. With such sharp contrast from the holograms they left behind, that that one alone felt like a revelation to them.

They sat around the bonfire as the sun — the sun! — went down and the sky turned red; with pieces of meat on a stick and ice cold beverages with an acid taste and pungent smell that spread a warm feeling to the chest.

«Additive color theory: why make everything so monochrome, and why white of all colors? There was something off…» «Intrusive memories.» «Glitches and clues,» and other answers rose as they shared the little stories of how they came out of that… place.

«So what was it? What… happened to us?» Juliette asked, instead of answering the question when all eyes posed on them.

«Nobody knows, but there are stories,» one of them answered. With ears perked up, Juliette and Calliope listened to them. Some thought they’d been kidnapped, some others that they were part of an experiment. The strangest one they heard was this: they would have been made there, with a purpose, for other people’s entertainment — and once used up, they’d be thrown in that empty cage, which supposedly was the engines under the creation of said product.

*

Going to sleep is an entirely different matter: not out of boredom, not to symbolically close an empty day, but out of exhaustion. As a reward for their escape, witnessing the sun going to sleep with them and the dark night rise as celestial bed sheets, Juliette lays on the mattress, as Calliope moves objects around, as if they came with anything other than themselves and their exhaustion.

She picks up a wooden pencil-carrier, shaped as a pencil at the end, that reminds Juliette of the wooden sticks they used to climb just days ago. Then it’s a moment, a flash, the feeling of something like that behind Calliope’s back, held tight in her fist, emerging from her belt. Juliette blinks, looks around again, and they’re still in that little wooden house, amongst many others. There is still the sound of waves breaking at the shore, there is still the smell of sea salt.

«It feels like going from nomads to sedentary, doesn’t it?» Calliope comments, with that raspiness at the back of her throat, like someone who’s used to scream — war screams, another flashback, and Juliette has to shake her head to get the sound out of her mind.

«Jules?»

«Yes, sedentary.» She says, looking down at the folds of the sheets next to her body. In her peripheral vision she can see Calliope’s knees leaning slightly onto the side of the mattress, as if considering finally joining her to sleep. «Tomorrow we’ll start cultivating and farming.» 

Calliope laughs a little, with a diffident note to it. «You sound up in the clouds.»

«Now that we have the actual sky above our heads,» she jokes, «how could I not?»

«I only hope you don’t miss that awful place, or anything like it.»

«Impossible.»

«Good.» And with that, the mattress shifts towards Calliope’s weight, and Juliette is torn away from those weird flashbacks with the violence of a pillow on her face.

«What was it for?!»

«You don’t have the sky on your head now, come back here with me!»

*

Waking up is strange — not a slight, unmotivated optimism, mixed with the misplaced hope they’d finally get somewhere that day, and not the temptation of paralysis, to just give up, to never stand up again just to walk. No: waking up is good that day, and Calliope doesn’t even notice she’s smiling when she regains consciousness from her sleep.

Weird dreams she had: something pointy under her fingers, something white, something wet — humidity of a mouth, teeth, sharp teeth sinking on the skin of her finger, blood emerging from the punctuation. A pantry room, dark colors, opaque industrial music in the background. A petite figure under her hands, a slim waist, someone short, someone who smelled just like —

«Jules?» she calls her, and there’s an agitation to her brows, before she makes a slight opening to her vision. Blurred, linear, impossibly bright — and then there is a mass of ash hair to the pillow next to hers, and a hand right in front of Juliette’s face, like the legacy of someone who used to suck their thumb as a kid.

Calliope smiles and moves the hand a bit lower, to take a good look of her face. She moves her hair behind her shoulder, and caresses out the wrinkle between her brows, maybe the sign of a nightmare. Then that pointy feeling comes back to her mind, and just to make sure, she lifts the side of her lip — just to check. Calliope doesn’t remember Juliette to have such sharp canines, and her heart skips a bit. She wonders how did her subconscious know it, or if it’s just a coincidence. If she has symmetrical ones or if there’s a story behind that one, maybe cutting it out when falling as a child, so that now it almost looks like a fang.

She moves her finger away and lets her friend rest. Then she contemplates that word again: friends. It feels like they did things backwards. Because now she’d trust this girl with her life, after what they had to face, somehow destined to have their lives intertwined like that. But also there is something so different now that they’re out of danger, as if something new was about to be discovered about them.

Like how Calliope couldn’t tear her eyes away from her — much smaller than how Juliette looked for her body in the night. They might have built something strong with no foundations, and that something moves autonomously, and leaves space for the seed of a new vibrant thing. For love is strong, and infatuation is frail: one blossoms in adversities, and one takes a safe environment to sprout.

*

They get used to the routine: they truly end up planting and farming and fishing, and they specialize in different little tasks: intertwining roots to make baskets, craving wood to make recipients, levigating stones, mixing mud and sand for constructions. Sometimes Juliette finds herself spying Calliope’s work on the shore and gets so jealous seeing her so amicable with their neighbors, she who was so closed in herself at the beginning, she who Juliette is still unsure whether she’s been warmed up enough to herself.

They all eat together, every meal, like a communal checking on each other — perhaps a heritage from where they all came from. Juliette looks at the ending of the tube from time to time, wondering if someone else is joining them. She has nightmares that for whatever reason they decide to climb back up, and the tunnel just disappears, or that it starts sucking everything on the shore, vacuum-cleaning them back in that hell.

They’ve been there for so long now: Calliope keeps count, Juliette doesn’t, but she’s pretty sure it’s been as long as they’ve been in the white desert. If they escaped around the second month, it must be two months that they’ve been in this new village. So Juliette takes a random day to celebrate, and wanders in the forest to pick some fruits after her cooking duty that afternoon.

The two of them have never been appointed to that sort of task: only things that can be done in the proximity of the village, so Juliette notices straight on how new that feels. How warmer the air is there, almost dense, almost hard to breathe. How the leaves get bigger the more she moves inward, looking almost fake, almost made of plastic. She walks for some time, aware of the time, knowing that she’d be looked for if she didn’t come back in a couple of hours. But she feels dragged inward, almost hypnotized by a sense of adventure, a sense of freedom. They escaped from the white desert, so why does it almost feel like they were trapped in the village now? She makes it a note to herself to talk to Calliope about it. Thinking about her has that immediate effect of reassurance, so she regains her pace and keeps walking. But she doesn’t see any fruit trees; she wonders where their neighbors pick them from. Maybe she should have asked them where to go.

Juliette walks and walks until her vision starts playing tricks on her: it looks like the edges of the forest tremble and shake, as if a slight breeze was moving an illusion of some sorts. Juliette opens her hand instinctively, looking for Calliope. An immense fear spreads in her chest, like hot liquid, and she turns on her heels and runs back to the village.

When she comes back she gets surrounded by the neighbors, telling her how preoccupied they were, how she shouldn’t wander alone. Juliette looks above their heads, trying to find Calliope, who’s walking towards them with a confused expression.

«Leave us» she commands, in an authoritative tone she hasn’t earned yet on the island — but they do so, and the two of them are left alone in front of their door.

Calliope can’t ask “what happened” that Juliette is already in her arms, and the reason feels so stupid, but she needs this second of steadiness before being scolded by her as well. She already pictures it, Calliope showering them with questions on what she was thinking, that she should be careful, and so on.

But instead she just holds her there, with her arms around her back. She leans in and whispers: «you’ve noticed it too?»

*

They walk in their little house, past the architrave that Calliope always taps when walking past it, as if mocking Juliette for her height.

«What do you mean?» Juliette asks, but Calliope stops her: «tell me what upset you before, first.»

So Juliette tells her all about the forest, doubting herself, saying that maybe she was just tired, or it was still the delusions from the place they escaped from.

«I see,» Calliope starts, sharing back the weird sensations their neighbors gave her. «I’ve asked questions, and they’re all so vague. I don’t believe they haven’t kept count of the days. If they really escaped and they aren’t lying, it could mean that they’ve been here so long they forgot what happened, and that first bonfire night is simply a rehearsed speech that has lost its meaning to them.»

«Does it mean… we’re trapped again?»

“At least we’re together”, Calliope almost tells her, but she doubts it can reassure her. «It might, we don’t know. But we have improved from before. And if you ever want to find another place, we can make it.» She feels like they can make everything, get everywhere, that they’re weak alone but unstoppable together — but again, she keeps it to herself.

Juliette simply nods, a clouded heart that could be read through her eyes.

*

«Why were you in the forest to begin with?» Calliope asks later, once they’re in the privacy of their house; hours after the dinner, where everyone acted like nothing ever happened.

Juliette smiles to herself, knowing that Calliope will surely get mad at her for something so little. «I wanted to pick up something for you. We’ve been here longer than we’ve been there, right?»

«We passed that achievement weeks ago.»

«And you haven’t told me?!»

Calliope burst out laughing, «you’re telling me that you risked all that to pick a fruit for a wrong anniversary?»

«Shut up!»

In a prettier cage, out of an uglier cage, just like they used to joke when they were immersed in nothingness, they find freedom like that: in the alterity of each other, in that same alterity that wounds and the same that heals.

Juliette voices a thought she’s had recently, the product of that one night in the labyrinth on that mattress, and the flashback she’s having at night — where it feels like they came from a past life they shared, where their bodies knew each other before their hearts did. So she says, «I wasn’t able to pick anything for you, but you’re in debt for not telling me what day it was… so we should think of a way to make up to each other.»

It’s vague, so vague that there’s no way Calliope could have picked it without contextual assistance, especially given that they never talked about it: so it might be Juliette looking at her like that, or how they’re sitting close on the mattress, but it takes one second for her to piece it together. And, almost as if on autopilot, almost out of muscle memory, she finds herself leaning in, and melting skin to skin.

So familiar — being taken care of, that they almost feel like they never started that nightmare, like they never left that “out” they’re still seeking. As if that “out” was still preserved in the form of a little fragment, kept in the body of the other.

*

When Calliope wakes up the next morning, so full of energy that her heart might explode, she doesn’t find a sense in wanting to escape. It’s not a place she’s been looking for, she thinks — and now that she’s finally home, she could follow Juliette everywhere she wants to be.

When she walks out of their little house, she taps on the architrave as usual, and she pretends not to feel the cravings of their codes in it, under her fingers.