Content Warnings
References to sexual assault
Internalised homophobia
Sexually derogatory language
Unreality
Dark-drowsing petals of deep dream peel open, blossoming wide with both inception and terminus — the moment I was made, born in the moment I died.
Blood-soaked shadows drown an abyss of shattered concrete. Agony shivers and shrieks in two shattered limbs. A scream sticks in my throat, suffocating in a sea of my own pain. Fast-fluttering fear batters itself blind against the cracking cage of my ribs. I am a memory wrought from trauma, a scrap of shuddering flesh, pinned between crushing weight so close and burning flame beyond. Alone in the crimson dark, gripped by worse than mortal terror.
Grimgrave lied; I’m dreaming again.
Back under the rubble, same place as ever, a fulcrum-point I cannot escape. No matter how old I get or how far I grow, no matter what ever-distant salvation I reach, no matter the utopia I build in my brain, this memory will fester in my heart forever. A hole in the world, through which everything good will drain out. I could live to be ninety, with grandchildren behind me, with England defeated and shattered at my heels, with my parents avenged and all Magical Girls cast low, with the wall of sleep rebuilt and reinforced, the Dream forever banished back behind our collective subconscious. And yet this memory would still weep pus in my soul.
But this dream is different. It has not restarted from the top, with my mother to my right and my father on my left, with the shouts and screams and sobs of those who were spared. I am denied even the cold comfort of my parents’ corpses amid the crazed voices of anonymous panic.
The dream has resumed where last night left off.
I am pinned in a narrow gap, entombed by collapsed concrete and broken rebar, soaked with my own blood, half-blinded by pain. The corpses are gone, the rescue effort has departed. Yet I am not alone.
A monster is digging toward me, metal hands tearing at the avalanche of rubble.
Red light boils like an ocean of blood, seeping through the gaps in my tomb. Hot breath pounds like a bellows, flooding my narrow refuge with the reek of scorched oil and burnt iron. Black metal scrapes on loose scree as concrete chunks are hurled aside; rebar squeals as the monster bends it back. Silence is pointless now, it knows where I am, my strangled whimpers turning to wild wailing and lost screams. I would rather die in the collapse than be rescued by that, because this rescue is death of more than mere flesh.
I try to squirm deeper, become one with the wreckage; perhaps that was my great mistake all along, the reason I have been consigned to ten years of lone purgatory. Octavia Carter should have died with her parents, six inches to the right, body smashed by debris.
But the lightest twitch invites unbearable pain, because I’m still anchored by the remains of my ruined arm and crushed leg, my throat threatened by a fist of jagged rebar inches from my jugular veins. Pain holds me back, because I don’t want to suffer. Fear keeps me here, because I don’t want to die.
The monster draws closer, almost upon me, grunting and heaving as it tears at the final few pieces of loose concrete, black iron fingers curling into my refuge of death. Red light blots across my thoughts. Air reeks of hot metal, burnt blood, oil and copper and iron.
Raise my left hand, make a fist, wish for claws. But in the dream I’m a child again, and my arm is so slender.
A final slab of concrete falls away, drowning my grave in hot breath and blood-light.
Wake up! Wake up! Somebody please, wake me up!
A figure looms in the gap; it is from her the light pours. Black light, red light, both in the same wavelength, a shade only seen in the worst of all dreams. She is a rippling infinity of red-black cloth, a field of rusted bloodstains beneath a dead and moonless night. Her dress is plated with black iron and burnt steel, shot through with thick veins of luminous blood. Her face is hidden behind a mask of matte-black, no mouth and no eyes, only a jagged fissure of crimson on the right, a vertical scar upon an empty void.
She reaches for me.
I scream and spit, slap and claw and hiss and bite, but she is made of imperishable metal and the tectonic fire of unquenchable rage. She ignores my tiny hand, wraps her arms around me like steel beams bending to the shape of my bones. She holds me tight, my head to her metal breast, exhausted torso cradled in her embrace. She’s so hot that my spilled blood cooks to a crisp, my clothes begin to blacken and smoulder, and the cold of close death retreats from my core. She forces vitality into my tiny, spent, fading body, more than I can take, more than I can use.
“No!” I scream when I realise what she is about to do. “No, no, don’t—”
With a pain I never knew in waking life, and a finality of which I was robbed by the clarity of scalpels and the fog of anaesthesia, in a welter of blood and bone and the audible ripping of my own ruined flesh.
The monster tears me free.
~~~~~~~
I wake with a cry, to shadows and chill.
Half-wrapped in a blanket, bones soaked with cold, gripping the stump of my right arm through the prosthetic socket. The pain was so real, worse than a memory; the fear still pounds in my chest, my heart racing itself toward death, skin slick-wet with freezing sweat.
“Uh … uhhhh … ” I can’t sob, panting too fast.
Moonlight shadows slide silent over the derelict bedroom in the abandoned house, a frost-rime of silver on the filthy window and bare floorboards. Did I really sleep so long that night has come round again?
Grimgrave lies still, a vague lump of ice-white, little valleys of darkness gathered in the folds of her clothes. She’s curled against the wall, breathing so softly I can’t hear a sound, sleeping with such enviable peace. Her hands are buried deep in the front pocket of her hoodie, her hood pulled so low that her face lies in deep shadow.
“You … you liar … ” I squeeze out a hiss, struggle to sit up. Reach out, grab her shoulder, shake her awake, to scream in her face. “I dreamed, you liar, you—”
Grimgrave slumps on the mattress, dead-limp and ice-cold. Inside her hood is a faceless well-shaft of shadows.
“ … what? No, this isn’t … this is … ”
Heavy footsteps break the dead silence.
Metallic boots stomp down the tiny corridor, shaking the floorboards, rattling the window, cracking the plaster inside the walls like dried-up old bones. Red-black light glows beneath the closed door, growing brighter and darker both at the same, an impossible shade beyond reality’s veil.
“ … no, no, it’s not real, it’s—”
The door explodes inward, frame shredded to splinters. A red-black monster crosses the threshold.
Pitch-dark mask turns to find mine, riven by a single note of searing red pain.
“No!”
~~~~~~~
I wake again, screaming in the void.
“Grim— Grimgrave!? Where— where are— you—”
The derelict room is black as a cave, the streetlights of Oxford all gone blind, the moon blotted out by something darker than a storm.
Grimgrave isn’t there, my hands can’t find her on the mattress, only a thin layer of concrete grit where her body should lie. High winds howl around the abandoned house, whipping tiles from the roof and slamming at the windows. My feet slip when I try to stand, the blanket snagging on my right leg and right arm, a nest of serpents dragging me down into the dark.
Red light creeps in at the edge of my vision, as if cast from some distant balefire.
“No, no no no, no, no!”
I look over my shoulder, because I am powerless to do anything else.
The monster is at the window, a hundred-foot titan of black steel and blood-light, peering through the glass with her eyeless, empty mask. Her light blots out everything, melts away all connections, until the derelict room is gone and I float free in a void of black-red infinity.
She smashes the memory of a wall and a floor, scoops me up in a giant metal hand, cups me like an insect, brings me to her face.
Pushes me through that vertical scar of dark red light.
~~~~~~~
I wake.
Panting for breath, tear tracks down my cheeks, coated in the viscous cold sweat of a very bad night. Another layer of falsity, another turn of the dream?
Reality makes itself known with logical details — a lingering fullness of food in my belly, the grey dapple of afternoon light in the room, the smell of dust and greasy food and unwashed hair; slight chill in my left toes, flush of heat in my head, strange pressure of soft warmth close on my right.
No blood-burning light, no thump of metal tread, no red-black monster.
I screw my eyes up hard to contain the tears, wipe them away on my left hand. “It’s not another dream,” I hiss. “You’re awake. It’s real, it’s real, it’s okay. It’s real. You’re awake. Real.”
Worst dream I’ve ever had. A nightmare to crown all. I will never sleep again, I will never know peace, not with that phantom haunting my mind.
But then I try to sit up, and discover something far worse than any nightmare.
Grimgrave is snuggled beside me, tucked snug beneath the shared blanket. The soft weight of her body lies lengthwise against mine, a warm curve to my cold side. The rise and fall of her chest, the gentle tickle of her breath on my neck. Her arms tucked to her chest, hands lost within the depths of her sleeves. Her fey little face, circled by the white of her hood, eyelids closed in absolute peace, lashes little dark curls against pale skin. She’s been using my shoulder as a pillow.
My face burns hot. Body won’t move. Voice choked out. All thoughts of the dream, all terror and madness, flee screaming before this violation.
Then I shove her off me, whipping my hand back as if plunged into flame. Grimgrave’s head thumps onto the mattress. She lets out a sleepy grumble as I scoot away and lurch to my feet. To my abject horror she reaches out with one hand, as if lonely in my absence. I stagger back, scowling at this somnambulant invader of my personal space.
Did she touch me in my sleep? Interfere with me somehow? I run hands over my own body, checking beneath my coat. Clothes are all in place. Lips are dry, no taste but my own. Between my legs I am neither sore nor damp.
Deep breaths, slow and full and clean. Grimgrave is insufferable and presumptuous in the extreme, but she didn’t do anything. She didn’t do that.
“Grimgrave.”
“Mmmmmmm?” she grumbles, eyes roving behind closed lids.
“Grimgrave. Wake up. Wake up.” I slap the edge of the bed. “Wake up!”
“Mmmmm … inna minute.”
“No, not in a minute. Now. Now!”
Grimgrave rolls onto her back, pawing at the blanket. She sits up like a vampire in an old black and white movie, her upper body rising rigid, trailed by the rich dark wave of her hair as her hood falls back. Eyes closed, mouth slack, she wavers once upright, stops moving again, then emits a soft snore.
“Don’t go back to sleep sitting up!” I snap. “Grimgrave!”
“Unnghhh.” She grumbles again, blinks her eyes to dozy slits, yawns wide like a cat showing her teeth, waving hands lost in over-large sleeves. She smacks her lips and directs a squint in my general direction, eyes still sodden with sleep. “Occyyyyyy, you’re up. Heyyyyyy youuu.”
Her hands grope for my hips; I slap her away. “Stop that! Don’t be obscene.”
“Ohhh,” she mumbles. “Soz, mmmm. Sleepy in the head. Gimme a sec.”
Grimgrave fumbles in the pile of food wrappers at the foot of the bed, the leavings of our stolen feast. She finds one of the water bottles and knocks back a deep swig.
Envy burns in my gut like banked ashes. She’s so warm, so comfy, so naturally embraced by sleep, so ready to snuggle back down without a care. Has she ever had a single nightmare in her whole life? A single bad night of anything less than blissful sleep? She doesn’t even look guilty about climbing in with me. Not the slightest hint of embarrassment or shame.
If only I could be so effortlessly free.
Of course I can. With Willow.
While Grimgrave yawns and stretches her arms above her head, I take the opportunity to fix my hair as best I can without a comb, raking it straight with my fingers. I find my shoes, get them back on my feet. I cross my arms, uncross them again. Stand tall, stand back. Huff and sigh and try to breathe deep. Dignity feels impossible; not only have I cried my soul raw in front of this woman, but now we’ve shared a bed, for whatever that means.
Grimgrave finally looks my way, wearing a half-awake grin. “Feelin’ better, yeah?”
“You lied.”
“Eh? What?”
“I had a dream,” I hiss, angrier than I mean to be. “Another dream like last night, just like the one back in Plato Base, exactly the same. It picked up where the previous one left off. You told me that wouldn’t happen. You said.”
Grimgrave squints, baffled as a dog presented with a plate of broccoli. I sigh and look aside, avoiding her stupid puppy-dog eyes. I’ve struck a dead end; Grimgrave is an awful little shit, but she’s borderline incapable of faking that degree of puzzlement.
“For serious?” she says.
“No, I’m making it up,” I snap. “Of course I’m serious!”
Grimgrave’s sleepy face lights up with a snort-giggle. “Heeeeey, listen to you, gettin’ all sarcy with me! You are feeling better, hey. Can see it right on your face.”
“Grimgrave.” I stamp my prosthetic foot on the bare floorboards. “Why did I have another dream? This is important!”
She shrugs, throws out her sleeve-shrouded arms so her hands pop free from the cuffs. “Fuck knows! Search me! It shouldn’t happen like that outside an overlap, I think? Signal might have a theory, but me? Pffffffft. Not a clue!”
“Thank you for being so enlightening. You’re such a font of knowledge.” I huff. “This … this isn’t going to happen every time I sleep, is it? Until I learn how to transform? Or … or … ”
Until the monster in my nightmares eats me alive.
Grimgrave pulls a grimace, thoughts too deep for her tiny mind. “Mmmmm. I don’t think so? S’not how it happened with me, at least!”
“You think so,” I echo. “Thank you for such inspiring confidence.”
Grimgrave laughs again, enjoying my scolding a little too much. “All spiky now you’ve slept it off, huh? Yeah, that’s our Occy, you’re so back!”
“Oh, shut up,” I hiss.
“Never!” Grimgrave cheers. “Hey, hey hey, you sure it was like, a special dream? Not just like a regular nightmare or something?”
“I … ” Sigh again, turn away, my ire cooling with rational embarrassment. “I don’t know. I … I suppose we are in east Oxford. Dreams are always worse out here, unless you live in a tower. Maybe it was just … just a dream.”
It’s never just a dream, certainly not one so strange. But I tell myself it might have been. The alternative is too much to face right now.
“Don’t worry so much about it, hey?” Grimgrave says.
“All right. Maybe it was just a regular nightmare. Then again, I’m not surprised I slept poorly. You have a lot to explain, such as … why … ”
Words stick in my throat; if I don’t ask, maybe we can both pretend it didn’t happen.
Grimgrave kicks the blanket back and springs to her feet, stomping into her shoes. She slaps her own cheeks, windmills both arms, touches her toes, then bounces back up like a jack-in-the-box. Green eyes brighten with inner light. If she had a tail it would be wagging. I take a wary step back as she turns to me, beaming like a radioactive sunrise.
“Why what? Occy? What is it, yeah? Huh?”
“Why … why, exactly … ” I fold my arms over my chest, to keep her out. “Why did you get under the blanket with me? What were you trying to do?”
Grimgrave stares for a second, blank with incomprehension — then bursts into a full-faced snort-giggle.
“I’m serious!” I snap. “You were … touching me! You … ”
“You don’t fuckin’ remember?” Grimgrave flaps her sleeves. “You told me to, dumb arse!”
“ … what? No, I would never. Don’t you lie, you—”
“You were drunk, duh! I was drunk too! We were both shit-faced backwards and ready to sleep it off. But like, you more than me, you know? You grabbed me and dragged me in too, you fuckin’ did it yourself, Occy! Don’t blame the jester for shit you do to yourself, yo.”
Cold sweat breaks out on my face. A tremor starts in both hands. My throat tries to close up. “No. No, no, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t have done that.”
Grimgrave rolls her eyes. “Keep telling yourself that, suuuuure. That’s totally gonna work.”
My right hand drifts to my throat, fighting a strange urge to tighten my fingers. Grimgrave isn’t lying, it’s not in her face. I feel sullied and wrong, like I’ve done something I can’t ever take back. I dragged her in with me? Why?
“I … you shouldn’t … you could have said no. You could have … ”
Grimgrave shrugs. “You said you were cold. Plus, hey, fuck that, I wanted to sleep too.”
“You … ” I wet my lips, re-kindle my fires. This isn’t my fault. “You could have done so without violating my personal space!”
“Awwwwwwww come on!” she whines. “I barely touched you—”
“Your head was on my shoulder!”
Grimgrave laughs, like this is all some big joke. “You make a good pillow!”
I slap my upper right arm. “Carbon fibre prosthetic doesn’t make a good pillow!”
“Says you.”
I glare daggers, but she won’t stop grinning. “You violated my trust.”
“What!? I was fuckin’ sleepy! And you pulled me in!”
“Rampant perverts. All of you. You said you weren’t trying to … to … seduce me. And then you do this … this … ”
“Ehhhhhhhh?” Grimgrave tilts her head sideways, long waterfall of brown hair sliding from her back. “Occy, Occy, yo, hey. There’s nothing sexual about a little snuggle.” She starts to grin, that maniac light brightening behind her emerald eyes. When she speaks again her voice is pulled taut with dangerous pleasure. “Or maybe there is, to you? Maybe you wanted to jill yourself raw, dry-hump my leg, while you sniff my—”
“Stop! Stop it!”
“Orrrrrr?”
I simply glare, because there is no ‘or’, not in the face of this undignified sport.
Grimgrave shrugs; her smirk dials down to human-normal. “At least you’ve got your energy back, hey? Fuck yeah, girl! We ready to rock, or what?”
I draw breath to snap at her again, but then I realise that Grimgrave is right.
The exhaustion I’d felt in the wake of the poison is all gone, replaced with a thin layer of regular wear and tear. My spine straightens with ease, my lungs fill without issue, and my head is tolerably clear. I take an experimental step, walk over to the wall, then back again. Rotate my shoulders. Roll my neck. True, I don’t exactly feel ‘well-rested’, still a little fogged from the temporal interruption of a nap, weighed down by lingering exhaustion, but I’m ready to do what matters. Magical girl regenerative powers are quite incredible.
“We really are like batteries,” I murmur, looking down at my gloved hands.
“Eh?”
“Nothing. Just something the occultist said. The woman I met in the graveyard.”
No hangover either, despite pouring vodka down my throat. The memory of that taste leaves a sour note in my gut, and the memory of how I acted brings a brief blush to my cheeks. Alcohol made me a petulant child, grumpy and short-tempered. If Grimgrave is telling the truth — and horribly enough I am forced to accept that she probably is — then it also made me unfaithful, a borderline slut, with no self-control.
But the cold slug is gone. No trace of it in the back of my mind, coiled around my spine, oozing into my hind-brain. What was that? A part of me? Some intrusive thought I’ve never faced before? Some kind of magical monitor slipped in by Signal? Whatever it was, it’s been drowned or burned away by the booze, or at the very least forced into restorative hibernation.
Good. No need to ever drink alcohol again.
“Why am I not hungover?” I ask. “Is that a magical girl thing?”
Grimgrave shrugs. “Eh, not really? Maybe you’re kind of a heavyweight, you know? Plus I kept you hydrated. That’s me, always looking out for you, Occy!”
“ … thank you.”
She grins, fifty percent power; I brace for the worst. “Next time you drink, I’ll remember to steal you a hug pillow, so you can hump that instead of the nearest warm girl!”
I blush and scowl; Grimgrave cackles, eyes alight with maniac glee.
“There won’t be another time,” I hiss.
“Sure thing!”
I have to look away, else I’m going to slap her, and I don’t want to do that. Despite her mocking words and preference for obscenity, Grimgrave has helped me many times over. I owe her that, if nothing else.
Beyond the window heavy clouds shift and shiver in the sky, a grey seascape glazed with thin rain. “What time is it?” I ask. “Do we know?”
“Time for a slash!”
Grimgrave and I take turns to use the toilet in the derelict bathroom; there’s no water in the bowl, and nowhere to wash one’s hands, but it’s better than squat-pissing in a corner. To my immense relief, Grimgrave refrains from making any jokes about this particular subject, busying herself with tidying up after our nap. She makes the food wrappers vanish inside her hoodie, hands me one of the water bottles, and folds up the blanket, leaving it on the bare mattress.
“Aren’t we taking it with us?” I ask. “Can’t you fit it in your … dimensional pouch, wherever it is you hide things?”
“Naaaaah,” Grimgrave replies. “Doesn’t work for everything. Plus, hey, maybe some poor sod’ll find it. Homeless need it more than us, right?”
We estimate the answer to my original question, since I can’t turn on my phone to check, and Grimgrave claims she never carries a phone down here in England. The unnatural fog has finished sinking into the earth, revealing the tiled rooftops and broken faces of east end Oxford terraces, the whole city damp and dripping like a shipwreck hauled from the sea. Mundane English weather has rumbled back in, rain burbling and sputtering from the bloated clouds above, never quite breaking into the true release of a storm.
Mid-afternoon, we decide, based on the light and how long the nap felt.
Grimgrave scoops up the dead zoog wrapped in plastic bags, makes that vanish too. I try not to think about the poor thing. I concentrate on the view from the window, watching for watchers out in the street.
A dark blur hops from a distant rooftop, ghosting down a drainpipe, across a low wall, blurred by the haze of thin rain.
“We’re still being hunted,” I say. “As soon as we step back out there, it’ll be those cats or the police, one or the other. What are we going to do once we reach the hospital? What am I even doing?”
I tut at myself, feeling a strange absence where my determination had formerly burned so bright.
“Getting cold feet, yo?” Grimgrave says.
“No. Not at all, it’s just … ”
Willow has to be rescued; I want to rescue Willow. She is the only thing which matters; I must return to her side. Once I’m there, with her, back in the place I am supposed to be, then everything will make sense, everything will be better, everything will be right.
Isn’t that thought a little insane?
My desire to rescue Willow from the clutches of Dream Control is no less than it was prior to the nap and the alcohol and the crying, but something in the last few hours has sobered me up, metaphorically speaking. Was it the poison? My grandmother’s betrayal? Grimgrave’s arms around my shaking body? Or the vodka, killing some irrational part of me?
Whatever the cause, I wonder at myself now, questioning why I skipped over every practicality of rescuing Willow. Simply finding her isn’t enough. Being at her side is meaningless. I need to get her out of that hospital. In one piece. Translocation can achieve that, fine. But then what? Where will I take her? Where will we go? Why did I dive into this without thinking it through?
That’s not like me. None of this is like me.
“Occy?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say. “It’s like … like I’ve jumped in without thinking. I should have a plan. I should have made a plan, and contingencies, and back-up plans, and worst-case scenarios, and all of it. What if the hospital is crawling with DC agents? What if Willow is really badly injured and can’t be moved? Where will I take her? Will she be safe in Plato Base? Will Dream Control have a trap for us? I … I don’t … I don’t know why I just … I didn’t think. What the hell is wrong with me? Why didn’t I think?”
“‘Cos you love her, right?”
Grimgrave isn’t mocking, no hint of a grin.
Swallow. Shrug. Shake my head. “She’s my best friend, of course I love her.”
I’m sure everything will make sense. Of course it will.
When I see Willow.
“Let’s get there first, hey?” says Grimgrave. “Take a peek at the hospital, see what’s up. Then ram that bitch all the way through!”
I shoot her a glare, ducking back from the window. “And then what? What if Dream Control have the hospital locked down, surrounded by agents, by cordons of police? What then?”
Grimgrave cracks a nasty grin. “Then we go in like a fucking battering ram! Boo-yah!”
“Great.” I decide to break that bridge when we come to it. “How do we get there? Winter claimed she was somehow protecting me from the police, but she’s moved on, the fog is gone. We can’t rely on that now.”
Grimgave shrugs. “Rely on me, then.”
I look her up and down — her mud-spattered white leggings, matching white skirt, massive white hoodie like a bright flag in the grey light. “I told you back in the graveyard. You stand out like a snowflake in a coal chute.”
She snorts. “And I told you too, Occy! Nobody sees shit they don’t wanna see!” She spreads her arms out wide. “And ain’t nobody wanna fuckin’ see me!”
“Are you serious? You have some way of going unseen?”
Grimgrave nods, shakes out her messy hair. “Sure! There’s a knack to it, like. Can’t do it transformed, but like this, it’s cool, we can go wherever we want! I mean, like, mostly. Walk up and take a copper’s hat? Nah, he’s gonna notice. Not like I’m invisible or some shit. Just don’t get seen, and you won’t be seen. Onion-style!”
My mind crawls back to yesterday morning. “In the crowd. The bombing. That’s how you did it, nobody was looking at you.”
“Uh huh!” Grimgrave beams with self-satisfied pride.
“I saw you, though. Why was I the only one?”
“I’unno,” Grimgrave grunts. “It’s not perfect, like I said. Maybe you were destined to become one of us.”
“Don’t. I don’t like that thought.”
Grimgrave shrugs. I try to read the subtleties of her expression, to see the lie in her eyes, the truth that she picked me on purpose. But it’s not there, because Grimgrave is the most unsubtle person I’ve ever known.
I sigh. “All right then, how do I do it? How do I ‘go unseen’?”
“Ehhhhh.” She pulls a face. “It ain’t something you can teach, more like something you feel.” She makes a stupid gesture with her hands, sliding them forward across an invisible turntable.
“Let me guess. I won’t be able to ‘feel’ it until I transform?”
“Naaaah, I don’t think so. It’s more like, you ever wanted to be not noticed? Like, for the whole world to stop looking at you, forget that you’re there? It’s like that, you gotta harness that. Right?”
I shake my head. “Maybe I’m not a magical girl at all, then, because I have no idea how to channel any of those feelings into … ‘magic’.”
“Something you gotta try out for yourself, hey!”
“And if it doesn’t work?” I hiss. “If I step out there in front of a police officer and get identified?”
“We can translocate out, or I can go pound-town on some cops!”
“That,” I say, “does not get us to Willow.”
Grimgrave bites her lower lip, squints up her eyes, tilting her chin back, a pose of challenging thought. “I reckon I can make it work for you too. If you hold my hand the whole way, like.”
Grimgrave wiggles pale fingers out from inside her left sleeve, then offers me her hand.
My heart skips a beat, not a pleasant feeling. My left palm goes clammy, my throat clams up, a blush rising to my cheeks.
“You … you want me to … hold your hand, all the way across Oxford?”
“Mmhmm!” Grimgrave nods. “Probs it’ll work!”
Her slender fingers twitch for me to take them. Her palm looks so soft, a smooth expanse of velvet skin.
Willow and I don’t hold hands in public, no matter how much she insists it doesn’t matter. Two girls walking arm-in-arm are bound to attract stares, the exact kind of attention that gets logged in some anonymous camera, crumbs of evidence for a Health and Hygiene file, eventually growing so heavy that the authorities have no choice but to confine you to an I&O cell. Willow and I have touched hands in private more times than I can count, so many more than I can remember. We have lain on our backs with our fingers entwined for what feels like eternity.
But to hold hands out in the open?
I don’t want to do that with Grimgrave; I want to do it with Willow. And I’ve already been unfaithful, sleeping snuggled up with another woman.
“‘Probably’ isn’t good enough,” I hiss, clear my throat. “No. No. We’ll find some other way. What are our options?”
Grimgrave shrugs, lets her hand drop. “Could go down to the ghouls, but … naaaaah.”
“What do you mean? How would ghouls help?”
“We could take their tunnels, down and then up again, get as close to the hospital as we can. But nah, forget it, it’s a shit idea. Too scary, like. Plus, they won’t like you. Takes time for ‘em to trust. Days, weeks, you know?”
“All right, what else? Can you translocate us close to the hospital?”
“Nah, never been there!”
“I have. Does that help?”
Grimgrave pulls a toothy grimace. “You’re topped up, sure, but one translocate and you’ll be knackered again. Bad plan! Plus if the Trio bitches are close, they’ll feel us turning up. As soon as we show, they’ll be right on us. Nah, we gotta swoose in mundane like.”
“Fine. No walking, no flying, no ghouls. We can’t take the tube, either, there’s cameras everywhere. And I don’t even know where the nearest station is.”
Grimgrave nods slow. “Difficult shit, difficult shit, hmmm … ”
“Why isn’t Nerys here? She would be able to help. Or does she not care about me either?”
Grimgrave looks pained. “Hey! Drop that shit, Occy! Nerys cares a lot, you know? She can’t come herself, she’d get noticed real quick. She’s probably pulling strings for us right now, you just wait and see.”
“You really do trust her completely, don’t you?”
“Fuckin’ right I do. Saved my life.”
“She saved mine too,” I murmur. “All right. What other options do we have? Anything at all.”
Grimgrave shrugs. “Steal a car?”
In what is rapidly feeling like a previous life, I would have been aghast at that suggestion. Shoplifting a little food and an emergency blanket is one thing, but stealing a car? Depriving some random person I’ve never met of their personal vehicle? I’ve been such a good girl all my life, colouring inside the lines, doing mostly what I’m told, at least wherever I can be seen. But getting to Willow is more important than my obedient mask.
“Can you drive?” I ask.
“Nah.” Grimgrave smirks. “Shit, how hard can it be?”
I sigh, pinch the bridge of my nose. “You probably still have alcohol in your bloodstream, too. Forget it.”
“We don’t have to get there safe! We just have to get there!”
“And what if we hit a roadblock?” I ask. “I saw one earlier, manned by regular police, with Section Special waiting nearby. If we reach a roadblock they’ll spot us instantly.”
“You could hide in the boot, while I drive?” Grimgrave starts laughing, like this is the funniest thing she’s heard all day. “Shit, yeah! Like a kidnapping, but in reverse! You hide in the boot, I’ll slide on through!”
Grimgrave doesn’t falter when I glare at her. “No.”
“But it’ll be fuckin’ hilarious! We can drive right up to those DC cunts and you can spring out like a spike trap and punch their heads off!”
“The authorities are looking for you too, Grimgrave. They had you on camera. Does your ‘going unseen’ trick work if you’re driving a car?”
A shrug. “Never tested before. First time for everything!”
“No. Not this time. Not with Willow on the line.”
“Aww, come onnnnnn.”
“No!”
Grimgrave goes quiet, doing a big grumpy pout, but her eyes keep on grinning, like she just can’t stop. I tighten my arms over my chest, take a deep breath, stare out the window. The distant buzz of a drone tickles at the edge of my hearing. Every method of transport is too dangerous. Everything except the one I don’t want.
Grimgrave sees my resolve crumple. She breaks into a maniac grin, fifty, sixty, seventy percent power. Green eyes dance with deep-set fires, blotting out the grey pall of a dreary English afternoon.
She knows she’s got me; I know I’m trapped.
Grimgrave sticks out her hand again.
“Then, walk?” She tilts her head to the side, a puppy with her own leash in her mouth. “Walk walk?”
“ … I’m not like you,” I hiss.
Grimgrave’s grin widens further, a smirking imp who has me wriggling on her hook. “Whaaaaat? Not like what, hey—”
“You know what I mean.”
Grimgrave giggles through tight-grinning teeth. “Whatever, we’re friends now, right? Fuck, Occy, come on! Let’s go save your girl! Come on. Take my hand? Walkies?”
I say a silent apology, because I’m so weak.
Anything for Willow.
~~~~~~~
Grimgrave and I cross Oxford on foot, holding hands the whole way.
With the unnatural fog banished and the storm brooding overhead, the city feels drowsy and slow-thick as old oil, as if our little shared nap has extended beyond our bodies, seeping into the streets and lanes, coating the concrete towers, flowing sluggish down the main roads and across roundabouts and the redoubts of railway stations. We stick to residential streets and back roads, avoiding the occasional clusters of well-attended shops, keeping one eye ahead for police, the other behind for the grey wisp of catlike pursuit.
Of the former we spot plenty, stirred up like a hive. Police cars dash past on ineffable errands, delivering confused-looking uniforms to random street corners. Officers frown into their radios, conducting miserable arguments with distant dispatchers, losing their temper with half-arrested bystanders. The red-streaked van of a firearms unit has got itself stuck in a cul-de-sac pothole, the officers jumbled out and sitting on the curb as they wait for a tow. Section Special in visors and black body armour seem listless and without orders, exhausted after being dragged from place to place across Oxford’s rucked and riven hide. Roadblocks lie abandoned, hastily reassembled elsewhere, half-complete and unattended. A lone police officer stands in the middle of a small park, alone and immobile, like a lost duck in the rain.
Plenty of them look right at us. A few catch, eyes snagging on the strange pair we make. But something unseen guides them away every time.
Grimgrave’s touch of magic works just as she said; it better do, with her clammy little hand gripping mine so tight.
“This isn’t like before,” I hiss when we pause on the corner of Merton and South, watching a dozen police officers hurry past, as if responding to a riot. “When I was trying to get home, and I ran into police, they were all in one place, like they were searching for somebody. Me, I suppose. But this is … weird. Like they’re confused. All over the place.”
“Fucking pigs don’t know if they’re coming or going!” Grimgrave snorts.
“I don’t trust this. Something’s wrong.”
“Fuck it, Occy, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth!”
Of the mysterious grey cats we spy only a few scraps of shed fur. Sinuous shadows stalk down adjacent alleyways once or twice, pausing to stare our way with eyes like glinting lanterns. But those could be legitimate strays, mundane as any other, and they don’t linger long enough for us to find out.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that we are being watched, that this is all part of some grand scheme, invisible to those caught between the closing jaws.
Grimgrave and I cannot turn back now. We press on, South and East, toward the reflection of London’s corpse on the grey-clad horizon, our hoods up against the occasional stutter of rain.
Grimgrave’s hand is a little smaller than mine. Delicate, thin-boned, as if I could crush her fingers with a twitch of my prosthetic grip. She insists on that, walking on my right, telling a convenient lie that she’d rather keep her own right hand free; I can’t feel her warmth or the texture of her palm, not through the glove, not with the carbon fibre of my right hand. But I imagine I can. And imagination is more than enough to set my heart churning.
Nobody looks at us, nobody stares, because we do not wish to be perceived. Two young women walk hand in hand, and not a soul can see us. There’s no way we could pass for a young couple — a man and a woman, I mean — not between my long skirt and our relative heights, even with my face hidden inside my coat’s hood.
We are unmistakable, undeniable. Two young women displaying too much affection, unwilling to let the other go for even a second.
Of course, we aren’t that, not really. I wouldn’t want anybody to think so, not even a random passer-by who I’ll never see again. The only person whose hand I wish to hold is Willow’s, to hold up in front of the whole world.
Grimgrave’s palm is small and neat. Her body heat so near in the cold drizzle of rain, only the barrier of our clothes between us. My heart sits in my throat, silent with confusion.
I don’t like this. I don’t.
Crossing Oxford takes an hour, maybe two. Impossible to tell without our phones, as if we stride through the slippery time of a dream. Grimgrave carries my sports bag over her opposite shoulder, insisting that I don’t have as much energy as it seems I might do.
“Save it in case you gotta run, yeah?” she whispers. “Can’t translocate on dregs!”
I tighten my hand in hers; she’s not leaving me behind now.
Oxford Holton Hospital is not the most salubrious of the city’s medical establishments, it is merely the furthest to the east. A rain-swept old prefab from the early days of the London refugee crisis, since added to and built upon in layers of concrete and brick and structural steel, a Frankensteined slab of grey surfaces and brown glass, towering over the rotten houses, squatting between the true towers, an accreted rock amid a vast moat of concrete car park and dying hedgerows, a titan holding out against the glow of London’s far-off noxious skies.
Grimgrave and I stop well beyond the car park, loitering next to a petrol station, side-eyeing the hospital entrance; we are undoubtedly being captured on half a dozen cameras, but we’ll be away, one way or another, before that can matter.
“This has to be bait,” I whisper inside my hood. “This doesn’t make sense.”
Oxford Holton looks no different to usual. Cars fill the tarmac, people arriving and departing. A few figures loiter beneath the entrance overhang, filling their lungs with fresh air or sucking on vapes. An ambulance is pulling to the A&E entrance, hospital staff rushing to assist. Lights in the windows. A normal day.
“Yeaaaaah, shit,” Grimgrave hisses. “Shouldn’t DC be all over the place? Siggy said they were, like. That’s the front way in, yeah?”
“Yes. You’ve never been here before, you said?”
“Yeah. Not from Oxford, duh.”
“Ah. Right.”
Rain swirls and spirals, caught by gusts of listless wind, sneaking damp fingers beneath my hood. I start to shake inside my clothes, from cold or tension or something far worse.
Willow is so close, but this is so clearly a trap. I want to be by her side, but to carry on ahead is the action of a suicidal fool.
Isn’t it? Why can’t I approach this with a clear mind and rational thought? Why can’t I be sensible when it comes to her?
“Go or not?” Grimgrave is hissing. “Shit, it’s so obviously a fuckin’ trap.” She laughs, low and dark. “But shit, we came this far, and you didn’t have a plan anyway. Fuck it, in through the front. Double-fist style, right down their throats!”
“Stop it,” I snap. “No, we can’t do that. That doesn’t get us to Willow.”
“But we’re goin’ in, right? We’re goin’ in?”
Grimgrave looks up at me, green emeralds of her eyes shining with anticipation, shaded by the white curve of her hood, grown damp in the drizzle. She wants this as much as I, though for very different reasons.
“I … I can’t turn back now,” I force myself to say. For Willow. “I came here for her. I’m … I’m not leaving without her … ”
Grimgrave cracks a grin. “I’d like to meet this girl of yours.”
I shoot her a sharp look. “Why?”
A shrug. “‘Cos you’re so devoted? Shit, I’m curious is all! She must be a big deal, right?”
“ … right. Fine. Of course.” I nod at the hospital’s front entrance. “We can’t go in the front. We need to get as close as we can to Willow before they notice us. We should take a back door or a side-entrance, the hospital has plenty of those. But … tch.” I tut. “Searching for Willow means we’ll probably run into whatever cordon they’ve put up to catch me. We need to know where she is. Patient records or … their computers? Or … ” Grimgrave’s grin widens in my peripheral vision, a Cheshire Cat glowing in the shadows. “What?” I hiss. “What is it now?”
Grimgrave sticks her hand inside her hoodie and pulls out a folded slip of paper. “Bullied this out of Siggy. You’re welcome.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“She felt bad about the whole abandoning-you-to-fucking-die thing, so I bullied it out of her. Here. Go on, take it!”
I take the paper and unfold it with one hand. Neat handwriting, block-printed with perfect regularity. ‘Floor 4, room 86.’
My body almost gets the better of me, twitches toward Grimgrave; I catch myself before she notices, but not before I realise I was about to give her another hug. Unfaithful, loose woman, useless and impulsive; I pull myself up sharp, remind myself why I’m here.
“Why?” I croak, swallowing mortified confusion. “Why do this for me?”
“I keep telling you, Occy, and you ain’t hearing it! ‘Cos you’re one of us. Us, bitch. Us.”
Blink my eyes as hard as I can. No time for tears.
“Thank you. I … yes. Thank you.” I slip the paper into my pocket, though I am not likely to forget the room number.
“And I’m not gonna let you fuckin’ die in there, okay?” Grimgrave growls. “It’s a trap, sure. Shit, they’ll probably be on us the moment we’re inside. Trio’s probably lurking on the roof or something.”
“A-a side entrance,” I stammer. “It has to be a side entrance.”
“Right, right!” Grimgrave hisses. The words spill out of her at top speed, can’t keep them inside. “You hold onto my hand, stay unseen long as we can, get real close, as far as we can make it, right? Then like, the moment we get spotted or something, I’ll transform, blast through to your girl, and the three of us all translocate out before the Trio arrives. If I grab your girl and you get left behind, I’ll bug out with her, and you follow on your own. If we get split up, meet back up at Plato Base. Got it? Sneak inside, then a smash and grab, fast as we can! Right, right?!”
Grimgrave’s grin is too wide, too bright, too alight with pre-battle foreplay. She’s spoiling for a fight, vibrating with need. She won’t go for Willow, she’ll go toe-to-toe with the Trio the moment they appear.
I cannot trust her judgement, though she is the best ally I’ve ever had.
Except Willow. Of course.
Deep breath. A fist around my racing heart. A nod, and we’re away. “Right. Good plan. Let’s go.”
Getting to a side-entrance presents little challenge. Across the rain-slick tarmac of the car park, around the left side of the hospital’s main building, and up a flight of concrete steps, we find a door labelled ‘staff only’, watched over by a pair of security cameras. Even with our hoods up there’s no way to avoid the machine’s all-seeing eyes, but in a few minutes that won’t matter anymore, and nobody’s watching the feeds right now. The door has a card reader and a magnetic seal; Grimgrave ignores the former and breaks the latter with a single, sharp tug.
We slip inside. Dry, cold, antiseptic gloom, lit by the stutter of fluorescent light-strips. A corridor in off-white and worn lino stretches off around dull corners. Voices chatter in a locker room to the right, not DC, just nurses or doctors or other mundane people.
Somebody calls out, “Tracey, is that you?”
Grimgrave pokes me in the side, hustles me off to the left, through a propped-open door, into the echoing vault of a concrete stairwell. We patter upward, moving as fast as we dare; Grimgrave could outpace me with ease, but she stays anchored to my right hand, true to her word.
Two nurses emerge from an upper floor, give us a glance, their eyes sliding off even as my heart threatens to stop. Grimgrave grins like the mad little pixie she is, dragging me onward and upward, giggling between clenched teeth. It happens again, a Doctor bursting from a stairwell entrance and striding right past us. He doesn’t spare us a second look. We’re not even here.
I almost feel like laughing. To be invisible, at long last.
The stairwell ends in a plain plastic door. Top floor. Fourth floor.
Grimgrave puts a finger to her lips, creeps up to the door, presses her ear to the surface. After a moment she shrugs, yanks the handle down, throws the door wide. I brace for the worst, a face full of Section Special firearm, already dragging Grimgrave back on tottering feet, a scratchy giggle caught behind her grinning lips.
Nothing. Nobody.
Beyond the doorway stretches a plain off-white corridor. Medical machines tick and tock, telling biological time in the distance, like rows of hidden clocks. Feet shuffle and papers rustle and soft voices mutter from far-away rooms. Throats cough and beds creak. A television or two burble and natter into the silence.
Grimgrave pulls me through. I’m caked in cold sweat, certain we’re about to be stopped.
“Woah, what the fuuuuck?” Grimgrave hisses.
A pair of sub-machine guns lie just inside the door, left on the floor, complete with shoulder straps. Behind each gun stands a pair of black boots.
“What?” I murmur, then quickly glance around, but there’s nobody to see us. A nurse station just down the corridor is unmanned. The nearest rooms seem empty, their patients elsewhere.
Grimgrave squats down and sticks a hand inside one of the boots. I wrinkle my nose in disgust, but she turns and hisses before I can complain. “They’re still warm! What the fuck? Occy, what the fuck!?”
My mouth goes dry. “This … this isn’t natural. And there’s nobody here. I hear voices, but there’s nobody here.”
Grimgrave bounces to her feet, grin all gone, replaced by gritted teeth. “Dream-shit! Occy, it’s dream-shit!”
“In the middle of Oxford? A— a dreamer, here!? Now!?”
“Shit, maybe!”
But there’s only one thing which matters. Of course.
“We have to get to Willow,” I hiss. “I have to get her out of here.”
Grimgrave nods. Tightens her grip on my hand. Pulls me on when my feet won’t move.
The rest of the fourth floor is no less wrong; the boots and guns of Section Special officers sit at every corner and junction, abandoned as if their owners have been spirited away. No doctors, no nurses, not a single wandering patient, as if the whole floor has been hollowed out and replaced with this empty illusion. The sounds of sighs and coughs and hospital machines are always around the next corner, always out of sight. We pass a whole Dream Control checkpoint, complete with a metal detector and body scanner, unmanned and empty, a cup of coffee still steaming on on a little side desk.
Once or twice I think I spy the red-black of glowing blood-light, creeping from beneath a door, edging around a corner. Always gone when I turn my head to look, lost as Grimgrave pulls me onward.
All in my head. Of course.
“Grimgrave. Grimmy,” I hiss, my voice trembling. “Something very bad is happening here. Promise me—”
“We’ll get your girl out!” Grimgrave whispers back as she pulls me onward. “I promise! Promise!”
Count off the door numbers, accelerating upward. Around one final corner, she should be right there. Willow is so close, the only thing that matters, and then away from this waking dream, away from the nightmare at my heels, away, away, away.
Grimgrave skids to a halt. I scramble to a stop, steadying myself against her shoulder.
This branch of the main corridor contains the final few rooms on the fourth floor. Intensive care. Burn unit. Isolation wards. Exactly where I should expect to find Willow. Rooms eighty through ninety. And there’s 86, ahead on the right, the door quite sensibly shut.
Three young women are sat on a short bench just beyond. They look up as we arrive. Right at us.
One is small and mousy and slender, hair the colour of a bad morning, a pale slip of a girl dressed for cold weather. The second is blonde and severe, eyes slitted like daggers, arms folded over a lace-trimmed blouse, a bruise on her mouth so much like a poorly-aimed kiss. The third is dressed smart in a suit, dark skin tight around tired eyes, hair in thick braids against her skull.
A split-second of pressure mounts in my head, a pin-prick migraine behind my scar. It recedes in frustration, like an incomplete sneeze.
I’ve never seen these three women before.
The one in the middle, the bruise-lipped blonde, shoots to her feet. Her eyes blaze with a flash of deep red, mouth opening as if to shout in my face. But then the first girl, the mousy young thing, grabs her by the wrist, shakes her head, hisses a silent and sullen ‘no’.
The one in the suit clears her throat. “Best not,” she says. “Sit down.”
Grimgrave’s hand tightens on mine.
“They can see us!?” I whisper.
“Uh, maybe!”
The blonde one sits back down, reluctant and slow, her friend dragging at her arm with more hope than strength. She takes deep breaths through her nose, lips pursed tight, arms crossed over her chest. Shakes off the other girl. Rubs at her mouth, as if pained by the bruise.
Her eyes won’t leave mine, glaring like murder; I can’t help a strange feeling, that I’ve seen her face somewhere before.
The other two can see us just as well. The mousy one sniffs, eyes wet with melancholy. The smart-dressed woman lets out a deep sigh, unimpressed and exasperated.
“Who the fuck are you three?” Grimgrave spits. “Hey, hey!”
The blonde girl looks away, lips curled in disgust. The mousy one seems deeply uncomfortable, shoulders drawing inward.
The smart suited one rolls her eyes, and says, “Nobody. And look, we’re not stopping you. Go right ahead.”
“Can’t believe we’re doing this,” whispers the mousy one. “It’s wrong. You both know it’s wrong.”
The blonde one says nothing, sublime in the silence of her wounded dignity.
Grimgrave takes a step back, pulling me with her. She doesn’t have to say a word, I know this is wrong. Reality has been fractured, scattered and broken. If this isn’t a trap, then it’s something far worse. The spider-web core of a mature Dreamer, bending truth to obsessive will. Despite every cell screaming my need for Willow, I follow Grimgrave’s halting retreat, edging away from the trio on the bench, away from the door, away from my—
“Octavia?”
A voice like a bell. Sunshine and sugar. Clarity and purpose.
She’s calling for me, from inside that little room.
I let go of Grimgrave’s hand and take three steps forward. Grimgrave fumbles for my fingers, but I pull them beyond her range. There’s only one thing that matters now, and it’s in that hospital room, waiting for me, all alone.
Grimgrave trips and staggers at my heels, as if pushing through thick-clotted air.
“Occy!” she hisses. “Shit, hey, no, wait! What are you doing?! This ain’t right, it’s fucked up—”
She gets hold of my wrist, but I flick her away, turn around and hiss in her wide-eyed face.
“I don’t want her to see you! I don’t want her to see you with me. I’ve been unfaithful to her, with you, but no. No more. I don’t need that now. I’m sorry. Sorry … ”
Burning with shame, I turn back around, as Grimgrave’s face collapses with hurt. But Willow is more important; Willow is everything. Willow is just beyond this final door. We have only been parted for a day and a half, but it feels like so much longer.
I walk to room number eighty-six, my tread light as an airborne feather, my heart singing with pride. Soon I will be returned to the place I belong, at her beloved and beneficent side.
The trio of unknown women watch me, the blonde’s face twisted with jealous spite. Grimgrave calls out from my rear, but I’m already beyond the help of her voice.
The door yields like gossamer, melting to nothing. I step across the threshold and the way seals behind. A private place, for two alone, nothing more.
A plain and simple hospital room, a big window on Oxford’s slow rain, some flowers in a vase, a muted television.
And her. There she is. Propped up in the bed. Awaiting my arrival.
My everything.
My Willow.
There she is. Right where you were supposed to find her. Well done, Octavia, you can stop worrying now. Stop thinking so much. Willow will make it all better.
Ahem. Anyway! A lot of things happened in this chapter! Anything I can say down here would either be spoilers or laden down with far too much metatextual knowledge, so I’ll just have to let the chapter stand all by itself, as always.
As for the rest of the arc, there’s two chapters left! We’re almost at the climax, the end of the beginning, the moment this extended opening crashes to a conclusion. One that may or may not involve Willow. We’ll see. And so will Octavia.
Meanwhile, if you want more Maidens right away, you can:
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Right now my patrons have access to three chapters ahead! For the moment I’m going to try to keep it as three; in the future I hope to push this out to more.
And thank you, dear readers! Thank you so much for being here and enjoying the story! Maidens of the Fall is going so much better than I ever dared hope it would, and we’ve still only just begun, only scratched the surface of the setting, and Octavia, and all the other magical girls (and others!) that are yet to come. Thank you for all your support, and for having fun reading!
Next chapter, Willow, Willow, Willow. What does Octavia see, lying in that hospital bed? Willow. Of course.