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Let’s begin at the most logical place: the middle.
They tell you who you are. They tell you you have a life, outside this place. They tell you that you’ve done this before; you’ve escaped worse actually. They tell you that this isn’t normal, that the world has color and people and laughter and life. They tell you that you were adjusting well, that you were doing it, whatever that means. That you were remolding yourself out of the blank lump of clay that you once were.
Marina seems the most bothered by your memory loss. She stares at you when she thinks you aren’t looking, but her eyes are far away. When she explains the simulation, Acht seems to understand, but you don’t. You were a fighter, they tell you, not an engineer. You’re still a fighter. You don’t need memories to know how to use a splattershot or an octobrush; the same way you don’t need memory to speak Octarian. “Different parts of the brain,” Marina mumbles when Pearl asks about that. “I’m surprised she hasn’t spoken yet.”
You don’t have anything to say, really. First, you must absorb and recalibrate. The world is loud and bright, but you don’t have anything to compare it to, so you just watch, and you learn, and you wait until you can get your hands on your own palette. Marina promises that climbing the spire with it will help.
“C’mon Eight!” Pearl encourages when you fail, over and over again. “We got this! It was just bad luck!” And you can tell that she means it, somewhere inside. Inexplicably, her support makes you feel warm, which you take as a good sign. You trust your instincts, because they’re all you have left of whoever you were before.
At this point, there are three Eights: the octoling soldier, the Deepsea Metro escapee, and this new Eight. All three have put their heads down and pushed until they couldn’t anymore. All three have needed to escape. The Eight you are currently is blanketed on all sides by people the previous Eight knew but you don’t, but at least they make you feel safe when they smile. Maybe, hopefully, you’ll be able to become the person they remember again—or at least a close approximation. Being that Eight seems a lot nicer than the Eight you are now—which is a Nothing Eight.
But yes: the middle. The final locker pops open under your hand and the whole thing goes up in bright sparks. The palette, when it appears, is heavier than the others, though Pearl doesn’t seem fazed as she absorbs its code. When she zaps the Octoshot into existence, your hand fists around the grip without hesitation, familiar with the sensation even if your memory says that you’ve never seen it before. The bullets aren’t as heavy as they should be; the sound is all wrong, but that’s probably the spire’s doing.
Marina stands near the door as always, tapping away at her laptop. You always thought it was weird that she needed a laptop to hack from within the simulation, but it’s probably some sort of programming thing—or maybe it just makes her feel comfortable, having the laptop with her, even though it’s not real.
None of this is real, which is why the memory loss sucks so much. You’ve forgotten everything over something made up.
You turn off all hacks. Marina’s stare is worried, but she doesn’t say anything as she deactivates everything. You want to tell her that you’re starting to understand it a little: the color chips are memories, and you want to install as many as possible into your palette as you climb.
You want to remember, even if it kills you.
First run ends on floor seven. The chips click as you put them into the palette, but you feel nothing. You have to push harder, go higher, stop making stupid mistakes, triage threats better, stop getting distracted by Pearl and Marina’s flirting and Acht’s deadpan appeals for them to chill. You have to become one with the Octoshot, let it become an extension of yourself, or else you’ll never make it to the top. Your palette needs calibration, whatever that means, and you want it to have as many chips equipped as possible when that happens.
Next run ends on floor four. Too greedy for double attack damage chips. Bludgeoned by Marching Andante, which is a familiar feeling—and you can’t help but smile as you spawn back in at the bottom, because one of your first new memories is of the repeated sensation of being attacked. Fitting, for a former child soldier.
Third run makes it to floor fourteen. Fourth gets to twenty-two.
During the fifth, you manage a streak of five orange color chips. Right before the attempt dies at the hands of Smollusk, there’s a moment where everything slows down. The stingray is moving leisurely enough that you should be able to dodge it, but your vision is all red sparks from your popped armor. This try is cooked, you realize, even as Pearl yells at you to keep moving, but you decide to just let it go. The palette isn’t full anyway, so calibration might not work. And if that doesn’t work…
You’re not going to find out. The palette has to be full—and you need to let go for now.
So. You do.
There was a moment, you recall, as you stared down at what was left of the statue and Tartar’s plan, when you first felt the sun on your skin. All you could remember was the Deepsea Metro, but you knew there was something before that—but the sun was new-new. It was completely foreign, but also exactly what you’d been waiting for, somehow.
Pearl and Marina were piled on top of each other, Pearl grunting and struggling to get free, and Agent Three was waking up. She blinked once, hard, and rubbed her head as the choppers turned toward the city, dragging your whole ragtag group away from the scene of the almost-apocalypse. In a way, you’re going to miss it. It was predictable, all the tests, but there was something deep in your chest that was blooming open as the buildings of Inkopolis grew closer.
“What hit me?” Agent Three groaned. She reached up to touch her burned, discolored eye, and hissed when she was met with sticky pain.
“Welcome back, Agent Three!” Captain Cuttlefish cried, making Pearl and Marina look up from their dogpile. “Do we have a hell of a story for you.”
Three grimaced, closing her eyes against the wind. “Same, I guess. I repeat: what hit me?”
“Prolly Agent Eight!” Pearl cried, clambering her way across the platform.
“You were kinda… trying to kill her,” Marina added. “I’m Marina by the way.”
“Oh shit! Introductions! I’m Pearl, AKA MC.Princess, AKA—”
As Pearl rattled off her spiel, Three finally peeled her eyes open again. She scanned across Pearl, Marina, and the captain, and, when she landed on you, you had to resist the urge to make yourself smaller. Her eye was swollen, skin stained green, and she looked like she’d just been plowed into by one of the metro trains.
But then, she grinned, wide and huge, as she took you in. “Guess we have you to thank,” she said, cutting right into Pearl’s long-winded introduction.
And she bowed her head, just enough to signal respect, and you bowed in return.
That was the beginning of it.
At first, you don’t mention the memory to the others. It’s probably a fluke, or a glitch, and, as you rematerialize back in the Square, it almost slips out of your grasp completely. One memory, that’s all you have, and it’s already foggy and incomplete. It’s a snapshot without context, and you can’t really make sense of it anyway, so it’s best just to leave it for now.
The next climb goes about the same. The palette is incomplete when you face Smollusk, but you give it your all regardless. When you’re bonked off the stage by a jelleton, you don’t take it personally.
The memories, when they come in the space between despawning and respawning, are quick: moving in with Agent Four (temporarily, Three said, just until you get on your feet, but it had turned out to be a permanent-to-date solution because you coexisted well together in that tiny one-bedroom with its stacked bunked beds and overfull drying rack), meeting Pearl twice a week to learn Inkling (and to teach her Octarian), your first splatfest, spent curled up under the covers of the top bunk as fireworks exploded above Inkopolis, the feeling of Pearl’s credit card sliding into your hand and the sound of Marina’s metered Octarian instructing you to purchase whatever you needed to start your new life, grocery shopping with Three for the first time, Captain Cuttlefish’s granddaughters’ voices making something ache in your chest the first time you met them, your second splatfest, standing in the middle of the Square and staring up at Pearl and Marina on stage, hand gripped tightly by Three’s.
And they almost disappear just as quickly. You try to cling to the sensory stuff—the lemony smell of Four’s apartment when you moved in, the greasy, salty fries that you shared with Pearl, the concussive boom of the fireworks that sent your heart racing, the sight of Marina’s back as she led you through the department store, the cool wetness of the freezer doors as you ran your fingers over them while Three explained how important garlic bread was, the ache, the little zip of energy that snaked up your arm every time Three tightened her fingers. You grasp tight to these small things, try to assign meaning to them, and force them to leverage their way back into your gray matter. These things are too important to forget, you tell yourself, and ignore the way you can’t stop thinking about Three’s smile when you asked what garlic was in broken Inkling.
You manage to hold onto what you can, and, as you climb again, you throw membucks at the vending machines, chucking chips into your palette that don’t synergize. It doesn’t matter. As they go in, the sense memories claw at the edges of your brain, and things start to click. Pearl and Marina glance sideways at each other, and suddenly you’re zoomed backward and there’s years of sideways looks, flipping past like a rolodex. “They should just kiss and get it over with,” Three said once, as you sat sideways on a large swing in the park, facing Three with your knees pulled into your chest. Her eye was healing nicely—without a single scar, discoloration almost completely gone—and she was sagged backward, arm thrown over the back of the swing so that her hand bumped into your shoulder. You tried not to focus too much on that.
“You should kiss and get it over with,” you parroted to Marina, a month later, standing near the Alpha spawn of what would eventually become the Bouncey Twins Shifty Station. Marina was dressed in bright neon, personalized hardhat pressed tight over her tentacles, and she was so engrossed in her squared off fingers, imagining where the bounce pads would eventually go, that at first she didn’t seem to compute that you said.
This wasn’t the first time you’ve had this conversation, you and Marina, but it was the first time that she seemed to take it in stride. Her response, after a sigh, was a simple: “You first.”
“What?”
“You and Three. Pearl’s going crazy waiting for one of you to make a move.”
Marina was a lot more serious in Octarian, especially when Pearl wasn’t around. Something about the puny inkling smoothed down Marina’s edges, disarmed her in a way that never really stuck when Pearl wasn’t nearby. Octoling edge wasn’t a curse that was solely yours, and it was a relief. There were more octolings around now, but Marina had always been the closest and the one that you looked for pieces of yourself in.
“There’s nothing going on between me and Three—”
Marina’s giggle was high pitched and sweet. She was so sweet—and it was clear exactly why Pearl fell for her as hard as she did, even if the both of them were dancing around it. “Okay,” Marina snorted. “C’mon. Let’s go mark where the bounce pads should go.”
Now, Pearl and Marina glance sideways at each other, and one of Pearl’s drone-eyebrows raises in response to something that Acht said. You’ve completely missed the conversation up to now, but that’s okay. “My splat bombs are works of art,” Pearl says, and her eyebrows wiggle in Marina’s direction again. It’s almost funny, how much she relies on those eyebrows—and it’s no wonder why Marina programmed them in. “Everyone knows I never waste a full gauge. Riiiight Rina?” The last comes out as a sweet little purr as Pearl sails over and makes herself nice and cozy against Marina’s side.
“The same way you never waste your ink tank. Riiiight Pearlie?” Marina coos in response, wrapping her arm right around the drone before she can squawk and rip away in indignation. “Forgive me,” Marina continues quickly, pulling Pearl up to her face so she can nuzzle her nose into the cold metal between those eyebrows. “You’re just so cute like this! It’s hard not to tease you…!”
Pearl sighs, put upon. “Fiiiine.” And she allows herself to be snuggled even more.
“Eight…” Acht groans. “I know you can’t remember, but I just have to reiterate: there’s no way they’re always like this, right?”
Usually, you would just stare steadfast ahead—mostly because you aren’t sure if they’ve always been like this. But, this time, you do know. You can’t help it: you smile.
“No way…” Acht is the definition of octoling bluntness and monotone, much more than Marina, maybe even more than you yourself, but, in that moment, their eyes widen and their voice, usually so flat, widens into something almost shocked.
“They’ve been like this,” you say, finding your voice for the first time in hours. It’s strange, to hear it coming out of your mouth and not just in your memories, but it also feels right.
“Eight!” Pearl cries. She zips away from Marina and sparks around your head in a frenzied, excited circle, like a bouncing, energetic fairy. “You’re back!” She plows straight into your stomach in her excitement, knocking you flat onto your back, and laughs out a happy whoops! as you struggle to breathe again.
“Not all the way,” you groan. “I mostly just remember that you two need to get a room.”
A dark blue tipped, brown hand offers itself to you, and you allow Marina to tow you up. “Welcome back. Sorry about Pearl.” She giggles, and it’s just as sweet as you remember.
You remember—and that’s a start, isn’t it?
“I’m going to be gone for a while,” Three said, standing in the doorway of the apartment you shared with Four. She’s wearing the glowing headphones that you haven’t seen since the fleet of choppers let you off at the Houzuki mansion, which can only mean one thing.
“You can’t be serious.”
Three grinned, rueful, and shrugged. “I’ve been promoted.”
You didn’t know what that could possibly mean, but you didn’t know how to ask. Luckily, Three knew exactly how to read your frustration, and she chuckled.
“Captain Three, baby! I’m the boss now!”
You wanted to be happy for her, but it was just another gut punch after the month you’ve been having. Pearl and Marina were leaving on tour; now Three was going who knew where for who knew how long. “Cool!” You tried to sound peppy. “That’s great!”
It was the octoling edge that did you in. Despite the fact that you couldn’t really remember the octoling fighter you used to be, she haunted your every move and betrayed you in your most vulnerable moments. Your voice was strained, just there, with a downturn into a militaristic flatness, so small that someone unfamiliar with you wouldn’t have noticed it.
Three, however, was very familiar with you.
Her smile fell, just there at the corners, and she stepped closer. “Hey… I thought you were going on tour with Pearl and Marina.”
“I was invited,” was the answer, as it’d been for the past two weeks. What went unsaid: I haven’t said yes yet. Time was ticking, but Pearl and Marina were still wrapped so tightly around each other that you weren’t sure if you wanted to be the third wheel tagalong for months on end. You had smaller dreams: you, Three, turf war in the afternoons, trips out to Splatsville to watch the fireworks during splatfests, grocery trips and shared swings in the park with your legs thrown across her lap. Not that Three knew any of this, of course.
Pearl and Marina were waiting for a definitive answer though, and Three knew that.
“You’re not going?”
You shrugged and glanced down at the floor. You didn’t know what to do. Pearl and Marina were your best friends, but Three had become something else entirely. It was different from what Pearl and Marina had, quieter, subdued, perfect—and wholly unexpected, but it seemed to be an evolving tradition that every octoling that poked their head out of the underground fell hard and fast for the first inkling that they happened upon.
That wasn’t such a bad thing, really.
“Eight…” Three stepped closer still, and your back bumped into the door. She grabbed your hands, and her eyes were so big this close. “I have to do this. We found something in the crater… What if Octavio—”
She cut herself off and flinched, as if you knew who Octavio was. It was Marina who started slightly when she heard his name, not you. “I understand,” you whispered, a complete lie, and squeezed her hands. “I’ll go on tour. It’s fine.”
Three’s smile was a little sad as she let go of your hands, nodding in acceptance of your lies. She wasn’t fooled, but there was nothing she could do about it. “I’ll text you,” she rushed out as she turned to leave. “You got one of those new sea-cumber phones, right? I’m one phone call away.”
“Sure,” you said to her retreating back.
You couldn’t blame the forgotten octoling fighter when your voice cracked.
Three paused, shoulders tight, and, for a small, terrifying moment, you were sure that she was going to be mad. This was good for both of you—growth, branching out, whatever they wanted to call it—and you were letting your feelings get in the way. You couldn’t hold each other back, but—
Three whirled around. Her face was twisted into something desperate and worried, and, you realized with a jolt, she wasn’t angry; she was concerned. She marched forward, up the stoop, and didn’t stop. Her arms came up and swept you into a tight hug. It was a desperate embrace, and you didn’t hesitate to squeeze back. “Three…? Are you okay?”
“Fuck it,” she breathed as her hands came up to cup your face. For a moment, everything froze as she pulled you close, fingers soft on your jaw, giving you the chance to back away. You didn’t though and felt everything inside you break open as you helped her close the distance. The kiss was red hot and electric all at once, desperate after years of closeness, and, somehow, Three’s hands ended up splayed under your shirt, against the skin of your sensitive stomach, and that was red hot too.
“Sorry,” Three rasped when you broke apart, staring right into your eyes, extracting her hands with obvious care. “I don’t— That was— Sorry…”
“Shut up,” you rumbled, and dragged her back in, desperately scrabbling for the doorknob as you went. The door fell open under your hand, and you tumbled, laughing together, onto the couch.
In the end, Smollusk puts up a good fight, but your palette is full and you miss Three so much it makes the octoling soldier inside stand up and rage. You barely listen as Pearl, Marina, and Acht chatter away with Smollusk, and, eventually, gratefully, you feel your body go up into golden light, and you’re ready.
The memories don’t filter in like before. You aren’t aware of them appearing at all. You just rematerialize in the bleached Square and you’re you again. You remember it all: the Deepsea Metro, the final fight against Tartar, the first year learning the city, learning Inkling, trying to communicate with Three with a shared vocabulary of broken Inkling (you) and Octarian (Three), how easy it was even then, the years after, helping Marina with Shifty Stations even though you weren’t an engineer, the Final Fest, Marina’s ecstatic explanation about how Pearl kissed her the morning after the Final Fest, bringing them full circle, the stress of planning the tour, walking the streets with Three, fingers barely brushing, late nights in the park, listening to the cicadas and watching the fireflies as you shared a sundae the size of your head, listlessly listening to Three explain what she knew about Octarian society, listlessly listening to Marina explain everything about Octarian society, the eighteen-year gap in your memory that’ll probably never be filled again, coming to terms with that—because you’ve already got enough to fill all eighteen-years plus some.
Marina clearly wants to ask if your time pre-Metro is back. That’s what she designed this simulation for, after all. “It’s going to unite memories with lost, sanitized octolings!” she giggled over a year ago, as she was briefing the engineers that would eventually (accidentally) corrupt the AI enough to cause all this. You were the first test subject, both because Marina wanted to help but also because you weren’t sanitized, at least not all the way, so it should’ve been easier to dredge your memories out of the memcake sludge that Marina had hidden somewhere in the code of the sim.
She doesn’t ask though. She allows Pearl to sucker herself to her side, places a lazy arm around her shoulders, and a tentacle lands on top of Pearl’s head, curling nicely around her small, pointed ear, and she just watches. Eight smiles at her, exhausted, and stretches herself tall and long, finally feeling comfortable in her own skin for the first time in a long time. Suddenly, she’s no longer you, the object-vessel that everyone wanted to become who they remembered, and she’s Eight again.
“I’m not lost,” Eight says, an answer to the unasked question. “I don’t think I ever was. I’ll catch you guys later.”
Marina’s smile is wide, and she pulls Pearl tighter into her side, causing her to squeak a little, but doesn’t answer past that. Pearl cheers after Eight, and Acht leans around the doorway of the tower and gives a simple, two-fingered salute.
Back in the real world, Eight pulls the helmet off just in time to see Pearl and Marina blink themselves awake, slumped over the table and hands touching as they rise. The Square is as lively as it’s always been, but Eight doesn’t stop, just heads straight for home. The door is still locked and Four is nowhere to be found, but that’s normal these days. She falls face first into bed and sleeps for at least sixteen hours.
When she wakes, it’s to a trilling phone. She tries to shift to reach her nightstand, but then realizes there’s something banded around her middle, a rough, callused hand pressed against her hearts, and she almost panics. The octoling warrior rears up, but then Three’s warm voice hums out from behind her.
“Mornin’,” Three says, muzzy, and Eight turns just in time to see her crane toward the window, where the orange-pink light of sunset is just filtering through the curtains, “or, I guess, evenin’.”
“What’re you doing—”
Three presses her face into the back of Eight’s head and breathes in deeply. It’s a familiar ritual, and Eight feels herself relax. “Pearl told me everything.”
“Everything?”
Three nods. “Uh huh. We should make you some flashcards, just in case it happens again. You forgot about me? Really?”
It’s a tease, but it makes Eight itchy and uncomfortable. She wiggles free of Three’s arm and wrestles out of the bed but doesn’t make it much further than that because Three is faster.
“Hey,” Three says, gentle, as she catches Eight’s hand, drawing all her forward momentum to a halt. “I’m sorry. I shoulda figured you’d be touchy. Do you wanna talk about it?”
Eight’s face feels hot and tight, and that’s exactly the moment when she realizes she’s going to cry. She shakes her head, because she really doesn’t want to talk about it, not yet at least. She’s been shattered and shaken to pieces and needs to be put back together again, not talk about it.
“Okay,” Three breathes, “okay. Do you want to come back to bed?”
It’s an invitation for whatever she needs: cuddles, or love making, or a soft, whispering recollection and review of everything that she could’ve forgotten of the last six years, or complete silence, or maybe even space. She feels sideswiped as she watches Three, still kneeling on the twin mattress, stooped over under the top bunk, practically begging Eight to let her take care of her in whatever way she needs.
“I—” She’s overwhelmed and really needs to brush her teeth, she decides, and says so. Three nods and lets her go.
In the bathroom, Eight stares at herself in the mirror as she swirls the toothbrush between her teeth and recognizes everything she sees there, puffy, red eyes and all. That’s a relief, and she rinses her mouth with definitive sloshes; she can see Three watching her through the cracked door, face contorted into something unfamiliar and serious.
When she emerges, Three looks up, expression clearing into a sweet, supportive smile. Eight feels her stomach bottom out, because it’s so different from Three’s usual jokey nonchalance, and she realizes that she desperately wants that again. She wants to feel normal again, not like she’s reaching through sludge to grasp what used to be.
She has her memories back, but they don’t feel like hers, not yet.
“You okay?” Three asks as she approaches.
“Something that helped me remember,” Eight says as she draws Three out of bed, “was grabbing onto solid things. Sensory things. When I thought about your hands on my back, it stuck.”
One of the straps of Three’s tank top has fallen slightly, revealing the wide expanse of her shoulder, and Eight can’t help but linger there. Three grins when she sees that, and carefully reaches over to tug it back up. “Yeah? Think I can help with that?”
Eight nods and yanks her eyes up and away. She can’t get caught up staring at the long span of Three’s neck right now. “Wanna go to the park?”
Three’s face lights up, and she smacks a loud, wet kiss right on Eight’s palm. “I thought you’d never ask.”
Eight laughs, and, for the first time in a while, it feels real.