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Michael was the first mark. She remembers it still, the hollow headache feeling of dehydration as she paced through twisting hallways for days, the broken glass scraping her skin when she finally broke through one of the mirrors. Michael marked her with madness and lies, but she is Michael now, and always has been, and never was before, and in many ways there never really was a Michael, anyway.
So he doesn’t really count.
So Jon was the first mark.
How would you describe it? he had asked Helen Richardson while she scratched away at her pointless map. Your experience, how would you summarize it? And then finally, when his gentle questioning couldn’t draw her mind from the impossible map she was trying to draw— Tell me how it got started .
And it all came spilling out of her. Her Statement. Her truth. The last time she was ever really able to tell the truth without having to twist it into a balloon-animal mockery of itself.
She couldn’t stop herself from talking, even when she wanted to stop and catch her breath, even when she wanted to stop and take a drink of water from the paper cup Sasha had given her. She relived her panic and misery in excruciating detail, and the Archivist watched her with hungry eyes, drinking it all in.
Jon believed Helen Richardson. He Saw her, Knew her, and then he thanked her for her time and she walked right back into Michael’s open mouth.
(Becoming Helen didn’t hurt as much as becoming Michael had. Maybe because Michael Shelley was marinated in betrayal, but Helen Richardson was basted in belief. She went down easier.)
Saving Jon’s life is the first thing Helen does after becoming Helen, and he has the nerve to look at her with fear in his eyes. It hurts, and it makes her mouth water. But even sweeter than his fear is his trust, fragile as it is. She opens up a door for him, and he follows her through.
Jared is the second mark, but it isn’t his face she sees when she remembers the attack. The Boneturner had taken her twisted form and twisted back, forcing every last ligament back into place where it’s supposed to be, taking her and mangling her to make her anatomically correct. Every tendon in its place, every bone muscled back to where it belongs. Being made to make sense.
She had screamed with not enough throats, and then Melanie King was there. Carving through meat and gristle with a fury, pulling the Boneturner away from his work. Melanie had sliced viciously at Jared, and then glanced backward to make sure Helen was okay. It’s her face that Helen remembers when she thinks about getting marked by the Flesh. Her protective rage, and the brightness in her eyes when she saw Helen unfurl her cramped bones and begin throwing open doors.
Melanie is the third mark.
Helen had developed a fondness for her when she first started camping out in the tunnels in a desperate attempt to avoid the scrutiny of the Eye and the cold static that follows Peter Lukas around. Something solidified between them after the Boneturner’s attack, like a coil of twisted barbed wire holding them to each other.
I get so angry , Melanie had confided in her. I’m afraid I’m going to hurt people.
And Helen, ever the problem-solver, had said, I’m not people. You could always hurt me .
(When the knife went in, cautious and careful at first and then vicious, brutal, Helen had reveled in the taste of Melanie’s fury. The turmoil within her, coming to a fine point with the clarity of the violence. More , she’d encouraged, clutching at Melanie’s jacket and then her hair, digging in with all her fingers.)
Good feelings don’t get to last. Before long, Jon takes Melanie away from the Slaughter and then Melanie takes herself away from the Institute, and Helen feels the loss like a missing lung.
This world is strange, constantly bouncing between mind-numbing dullness and incomprehensible overstimulation. She hates feeling confused, much preferring to be the one doing the confusing. Bodies are hard, and being honest is even harder. Melanie always managed to simplify things.
With her gone, Helen struggles. For all she taunts Jon and tells him to lean into his nature, to adapt— she finds it incredibly hard to adapt herself.
And then she finds the answer.
Curiosity takes her to Elias Bouchard’s old office. Hanging around the temple of the Ceaseless Watcher so much, it was only a matter of time before that restless need to Know started catching.
She pokes around. Peter Lukas is hardly ever here, and the office is still full of Elias’s files and tapes and trinkets. Even his laptop is still here. When she opens it up and sees her name on an open document— Poor Helen — she scrolls up to read the whole thing. Statement of Jonah Magnus regarding Jonathan Sims, the Archivist . It isn’t finished yet— a first draft— but the whole plan is laid out clearly enough.
And so Helen discovers the method by which she can adapt the world to better suit her needs.
Of course, she could just sit back and let things play out. Let Jonah Magnus play his chess game. Let Jon be used as a linchpin.
The thought makes something twinge within her, like squeaky hinges rattling somewhere in the depths of her self. If she manages to pull off what Jonah Magnus is attempting before he can do it, then she gets to hold all the power. She gets to decide the fate of the whole world, every twisting path and spiraling maze. She gets to distort everything how she sees fit, and rule from the seat of the Spiral rather than bending to the will of the Eye.
And Jon wouldn’t have to do it.
She thinks about putting him in a room within herself, a space carved out just for him, where he doesn’t have to live with the guilt or responsibility of ending the world.
So then. This ritual— becoming a conduit for the Fears. It requires the acquiring of marks, encounters. Thirteen in all, not counting the Spiral itself. And she’s already got three down.
She knows where to go for more. There is something in the tunnels, something trapped behind stone and cement that nudges at the corner of her consciousness like an undigested bit of food. She pokes at it sometimes, a seed stuck between her teeth.
Now, she goes further. She finds the place where the thing that isn’t Sasha James sits and waits, and she provokes it. “I know you,” she says, lavishing in its enraged response. To be known is the worst kind of insult to such a creature. “You brought me down to the Archives when I was Helen Richardson.”
The false Sasha snarls, teeth snapping. “I did wonder when you never came back out.”
“Why would I want to leave a place like this?” Helen says, rapping her knuckles on the wall. “My very own labyrinth.”
“Let me out,” the thing demands.
Helen smiles, putting herself right up close to the furious monster. “Why would I go and do a thing like that?”
Claws that might have once been fingernails dig into her shoulder. Helen cries out in a distorted static drone, and the thing that isn’t Sasha James gives her her fourth mark.
She read Jonah Magnus’s plan. She knows that Jon only has one more encounter before he’s primed and ready, and she’s playing catchup with him. Helen stays busy. She arranges afternoon tea with Annabelle Cane and allows herself to be puppetted around for the duration of their conversation. She tracks down Laura Popham and lets the woman drag her into the darkness— before Helen tosses her into the deepest, narrowest part of the tunnels and stays there with her just long enough to feel the pressing claustrophobia become overwhelming.
Harriet Fairchild is lovely. They bond over victims they’ve enjoyed and a shared love of vertigo before Harriet shoves her out of an airplane. The falling sensation is novel and terrifying, and it seems to take ages before she finally manages to open up a door in midair and collapse back inside herself.
She seeks out somebody touched by the Lightless Flame that she can devour, knowing they will set her hallways alight to free themselves. She finds an inspector for the transit police who smells of smoke and broken spirits, and she opens up a door for him. The fire burns through her from the inside out, and when she finally coughs out the inspector she feels utterly desolated, hollowed out completely.
It’s supposed to hurt. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier.
Still smoldering, Helen finds herself manifesting a door in the apartment of Georgie Barker. She’s not thinking clearly, her mind a tangle of charred hallways and smoke-stained memories, and she’s suddenly desperate to see Melanie again.
The bedroom smells of cat hair, and there’s a corkboard on the wall covered in pins and pictures and red string, making Georgie look like some sort of manic conspiracy theorist. (Helen might like to toy with that, toy with her, someday. She files the idea away for later.) Melanie is sitting on the edge of the bed. Her head jerks up in surprise when she hears the door open.
“Hi, sweetie,” Helen says, trying hard not to collapse at Melanie’s feet. “Something’s different about you. Did you get a haircut?”
“Very funny,” Melanie says from beneath her bandaged eye sockets. “What are you doing here, Helen?”
Helen doesn’t collapse but she does crouch, finding a space on the floor so she’s almost eye level with Melanie. (Or would be, if Melanie still had eyes.) “I can’t miss you?”
She watches with fascination as Melanie grips her hands into fists and release them, as she chews on her bottom lip. Helen finds herself longing to take that lip between her own teeth and bite down, hard. She finds herself wanting to sweep Melanie’s bangs out of her face and hold her as gently as her warped hands will allow.
“I’m sorry I didn’t come and say goodbye to you before I… before I quit the Institute,” Melanie says finally. “But you and I, we’re not… we’re not good together? You know? And I’m trying to make healthier choices.”
“Swapping in salads. Taking the stairs. Sure,” Helen mumbles.
“It’s not like it’s all on you,” Melanie says, leaning forward a little. She reaches one searching hand out to find Helen’s shoulder. Her hand is warm, and her grip is sure. Somewhere inside of the thing that Helen is, an elevator drops too fast. “I was… I was so angry, and violent. I know I hurt you, and I… I’m sorry, Helen. If you can’t forgive me I—”
“I forgive you,” Helen says quickly, like tripping down stairs. She surges forward to grip Melanie’s other hand.
“Right, okay, well,” Melanie says. “Be that as it may. You and I… it’s a bad idea. And I think I still need space. Maybe… maybe for good.” She twists her mouth as if she’s going to cry, and Helen wonders if she did any damage to her tear ducts when she jammed the awl in.
It makes her think of pain.
Pain is something to work with.
She places sharp fingernails against Melanie’s shoulder, then her neck. She watches with fascination as Melanie’s whole body tenses up. “Stop that,” Melanie says firmly.
“You used to like it when we played rough.”
“It’s not like that anymore,” Melanie says. “ I’m not like that anymore.”
“But I miss you,” Helen says. She feels confused, and she hates it.
Melanie removes her warm, solid hand from Helen’s shoulder and places it on her wrist, pulling her hands away from its gnarled grasp around Melanie’s throat. “Miss me all you like. That doesn’t mean you get to just show up and—”
The door swings open— the real one, not the one Helen came through. Georgie Barker stands there, backlit by the illumination from the living room. Her eyes are narrowed, and her voice is quiet and dangerous. “Get away from her.”
“Georgie, it’s fine,” Melanie says, pushing herself out of Helen’s reach. “She was just leaving.”
Helen stands up, feeling completely unbalanced. Did she mess it up? She needed to see Melanie. She needed Melanie to hurt her, or she needed to hurt Melanie, or something. Her mind twists in on itself like a mangled Mobius strip.
“I got hurt,” she says, the words sluggish and strange coming out. The sense memory of flames dances across her skin. She looks wildly from Georgie to Melanie. “I miss you. I got hurt. I didn’t know where to go.”
“I don’t care where you go,” Georgie says, striding across the room to meet her. “Just get out.”
The body she maintains for appearances is taller than Georgie Barker. And yet, somehow, right now Helen feels as though she’s looking up at Georgie. Like the fear-starved podcaster is peering down at her from the top of a deep well. She tastes death like cigarettes in her mouth, as if the smoke that tinges her peeling wallpaper is not from the sudden blaze of the Desolation but the gradual and inevitable crawl of the End.
Georgie stares at her, through her. She tilts her head slightly. And when she says, in a harsh whisper, “ You’re already dead ,” Helen can feel it.
She feels Helen Richardson being ripped apart and stitched back together all wrong, her wants and needs and hopes and hates all distorted beyond recognition. She feels her own lack of Self like a piercing wound, eviscerating her. There is nothing left. There is no one. Nothing.
(She never felt so alive as when Melanie was cutting into her, and now she knows she will never feel it again. Helen Richardson already died, and the thing left beyond is not quite alive enough to ever truly dread or embrace Death. She will just keep slinking through impossible corridors until somebody cares enough to End her for good.)
Georgie is the tenth mark.
Helen confronts the Corruption in the form of a man who has lived alone for a very long time— and yet never truly been by himself. It’s unpleasant.
She can still feel the roaches crawling through her, finding nooks and crannies within her hallways to settle in. It’s disorienting, the way they scatter and swarm, and she can’t help but feel that any moment she might open her mouth and feel them crawl up her throat. She’s still trying to shake off the creeping panic when Jon knocks on her door.
He’s a wreck. She longs to bring him inside, to smooth his hair, to lock him away. A roach scuttles over her carpeted floor, like a tickle at the back of her brain. “You said before you knew the tunnels, right?” he begs. “I need to know what’s in there. I-it’s important. Martin… I need to know .”
Somewhere within her, a door opens and a chill reaches inward, staining her with cold, reaching fingers. Of course it’s about Martin.
Helen isn’t the paranoid mastermind that Jonah Magnus is, but she could figure out the final steps in his plan pretty easily. Peter Lukas comes to the Institute and seduces Martin to the Lonely. Martin goes past the point of no return. Jon brings him back anyway. And that’s how Jonah planned for Jon to receive his final mark.
Because Jon will march into the Buried for Daisy and throw himself into the Lonely for Martin, but he would never go down a hallway for Helen.
(She knows what Michael knew. She remembers what Michael saw, the day that Helen Richardson was lost forever. I am simply collecting what is mine, Archivist , he’d said.
Let her go! Jon had yelled. Get her back here! And he had thrown himself at Michael in a fury— but he hadn’t offered to go and fetch poor Helen Richardson. He hadn’t demanded entry to the hallways. He hadn’t gone after her.)
Now Martin is in trouble, and Jon needs to know how to save him.
“That’s a shame,” she tells him with forced cheerfulness, “because I’m afraid I’m not going to tell you!”
He screams at her. When he tries to compel her, she slices at him with sharpened fingers. “Can you take me there?” he pants. “To the center?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she says, because even as much as she’s merged and melded with the tunnels, there are parts of them that remain elusive to her. “But I’m not inclined to risk it.”
He curses at her, and she tries to hurt him back by reminding him of his true nature. Bitterness bleeds into need. “Just tell me what’s going on,” he says finally. “ Please .”
And it’s like a mirror image of the day they met— when she was still Helen Richardson, and he was still Jonathan Sims. She’d been so desperate for answers, for someone to believe her. And he had peered out from his own haze of paranoia and Seen her.
No. She will not let him risk losing himself in the Lonely, and she won’t let him become Jonah Magnus’s conduit.
She laughs at him, and it sounds like the scraping of knives even to her own ears. “Bad things, Archivist,” she says. “Really bad things.” Then she shuts the door in his face.
Deep within Helen’s hallways, hidden enough that none of her victims will ever see, there is a woman in a mirror.
She haunts these halls like a ghost, not always visible, not always talkative. Helen can remember being her. Helen can remember devouring her. And now, heartsick and indecisive and bitter, she consults Helen Richardson for advice. “I can’t let Jonathan be marked by the Lonely.”
Helen Richardson looks out at her from behind dark glass. “You can’t stop him,” she says. “Not when it comes to Martin.”
“No, I know, but…” Helen sighs. She considers how Jon was desperate enough to come to her for help, but in her own desperation she’s got no one to turn to other than her own warped reflection. It infuriates her, the depths she has already gone to to protect Jon from Jonah Magnus’s machinations. The depths she will still go to. What has he even done to deserve her devotion, besides Look at her?
She feels lonely. And she realizes what she needs to do.
“Hello, Martin.”
“What… ? Why are you here, Helen?”
He’s so confused to see her, and that confusion is delicious. She wants so badly to leave him wondering. “Thought you might need to see a friendly face.”
“And you thought that was you ?”
“Ouch.” She sits down on the beach beside him, stretching her legs out and hearing too many joints pop as she does. A comfortable layer of fog surrounds them both, thick like steam out of sewer grates. “Jon is looking for you,” she informs him. “I’ve come to take you home.”
Martin stares out at the water, his eyes clouded. “Jon can keep looking,” he says. “I’m staying here. This is… right. This is where I should be.”
He’s really too convincing. Helen finds herself agreeing with him, and wanting to stay here on this beach. Her grand plans all seem so small and far away now. What was it she wanted? To twist the world into a shape that made sense to her? This empty beach makes enough sense— no truths, no lies, no friendships, no feelings. Just Lonely.
Had she wanted to see Melanie again? She’s already felt that connection slip through her hands. At least here, it doesn’t hurt quite so much. Had she wanted to protect Jon?
Jon.
If she stays here and does nothing, Jon will come looking for Martin.
(Not for her. Of course not for her. She imagines, for a moment, what he might do if he stormed into the Lonely to rescue Martin and found her sitting beside him. Would he bring them both out? Would he be able to save two lost souls at once?)
(Would he even try?)
She has to get Martin out of here.
“You might feel like this is where you belong,” she says, “but it isn’t. You’ve been lied to.”
“Now you’re telling me about lies?” he says, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” she says sharply. “I’m made of them. They make sense to me. Martin, you do not belong here.”
“Heh,” he says softly. “Heard that one before.”
“Goddammit, you idiot,” she hisses, digging her nails into the sand. “You’re not for the Lonely. You— you are so full of life . You’re so loved . How can you be so stupid and stubborn as to throw it all away?”
“Loved,” Martin repeats, looking as though he doesn’t believe it in the slightest.
Helen sighs. “Isn’t it enough that I’m here, and I consider you a friend?”
“No.”
Of course not. Helen huffs, watching her breath come out in a cloud of vapor. “Jon is going to try and come after you,” she says. “And it’s going to kill him.”
That finally gets a rise out of Martin. “No… no, he can’t die,” Martin says, harsh reality cutting through the gentleness of the Lonely. “If he dies, it… it was all for nothing.”
“Then you’d better come with me.”
(It’s funny, that Helen and Martin both manage to claw their way out of the Lonely for Jon. That he’s the reason Martin finally forces himself to full awareness, and the reason Helen can’t just give up. They would both do just about anything for Jonathan Sims. But only one of them ever gets rewarded for their affection.)
Once Helen checks with Basira to make sure that Jon and Martin are safe in Scotland, she goes hunting down her final mark.
The Lonely still clings to her, errant fog creeping through her hallways and leaving condensation smeared across her mirrors. She’s starting to feel like a Halloween maze— walk through the haunted house! Face your fears, be they spiders or fires or solitude!
She finds Daisy Tonner and Julia Montauk in the tunnels beneath the city, stalking each other. Predator versus predator. Helen doesn’t interfere enough to change anything, to sway the chase one way or the other.
Just enough to get herself hurt.
Bleeding from several ragged wounds, she drags herself through a doorway and collapses against one wall of herself. That’s all of them now. Fourteen Fears embedded in what once was flesh. She feels her heart pounding, feels drywall cracking.
In this position, so far from where she started, she feels more like Helen Richardson than she has in a very long time.
She waits for the real wounds on her fake body to scab over. She considers going back to Georgie Barker’s apartment— maybe to warn Melanie about what she’s planning, maybe just to spirit her away. But the idea of facing Georgie’s fury and Melanie’s dismissive healthy growth and boundaries therapy-talk makes her feel like she’s swallowed something unpleasant.
She could go to the safehouse in Scotland and check in on Jon and Martin. But the idea of seeing them all snuggled up in front of a fire, holding hands and looking at each other with big wet eyes while she stands in a doorway like some solicitor— no, she doesn’t want to do that, either.
So that’s it. She’s going to end the world, and she has nobody to tell.
“I’m ready now,” she says to Helen Richardson in the mirror. “I’m going to do it.”
(What does it say about her that even her own shadow seems bored of her?)
When she first stumbled upon Jonah Magnus’s mass ritual invocation, Helen had memorized it and made a few of her own alterations. And now she is ready. She is marked. She is prepared.
You who twist and turn and lead wanderers astray , she speaks, feeling the words reverberate through every snaking corridor. You who consume and distort and thrive on falsehood. You who steal away sense and drive bright minds to madness.
Come to us in your wholeness.
Come to us in your perfection.
Bring all that is fear and all that is terror and all that is the awful dread that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and watches and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and hunts and rips and bleeds and dies!
Come to us.
(It is, after all, just another door to be opened.)