AYEH Rewrite Chapters 1-3 (Patreon)

Author's Note

Hey, Everyone! As I mentioned in the last update, I'm doing a rewrite of Are You Even Human, and the first three chapters are... mostly the same, with only some very minor edits. You're probably okay to skip or skim them just enough to remember where the split is starting, but I'll be reposting them here for posterity. It'll probably be a bit before the AYEH rewrite catches up with where AYEH left off, and I'm sorry for that, but I promise it'll be worth the wait.

Chapter 1 - At Least We Still Have The Internet

I scowl at the glass door in front of me, but despite the righteous fury of my expression it stubbornly refuses to open itself. Normally this sort of thing wouldn’t really bother me, but this is the local Selective Service headquarters. A government building. Aren’t basic accessibility options like… the law?

Leaning heavily on my cane, I reach out and grasp the handle with my other hand, pulling on it with the limited strength available to me. Holy crap it is heavy. This thing is all glass and metal. I could… probably squeeze myself in there. Probably. But I’m not really in the mood to risk falling on my face today. I turn slightly backwards to call out to the massive van that’s waiting by the curb, doors all hanging open in a vain attempt to combat the unusually hot Chicago weather. I clear my throat.

“Um, Peter?” I call out, putting on my best and most innocent smile. “Could you get the door for me after all?”

The boy in the passenger’s seat snorts, stuffing his phone into his pocket as he twists to more-or-less fall out of the side of the car, landing easily and strolling up to me with a smug look on his face.

“Told you,” he brags. “It’s less of a bother if you just let me do it from the start, Jules.”

I chuckle apologetically, making a conscious effort to not get on his case about calling me by that stupid nickname. I like my full name. A long, beautiful name like Julietta is just the thing I need to distract from how hideous I am. ‘Jules’ makes me sound like the bench warmer for a boy’s little league team, which frankly quite oversells the athletic ability of a girl who can’t even open a pull door by herself.

“Sorry, Peter,” I say instead. “You’re right. I feel bad making you follow me everywhere, is all.”

“It’s fine,” he brushes off easily, holding open the door for me. “Seriously. Now do your best in there, okay?”

“I suppose I’ll try?” I answer hesitantly. I’m not really sure exactly how my best or my worst will make any difference, though, since I’m just here to sign up for the fucking draft. And I, for rather obvious reasons, will not be accepted into the military unless I am the literal last person left alive on Earth.

…Which I’m perfectly okay with. The person behind the front desk can’t help but stare at me as I slowly hobble inside and make my way towards the counter, but it’s fine. I’m used to it. Everyone stares, their eyes roving over my body without even an ounce of self-control. It’s not an outright leer, of course. More of a glance, then an awkward redirection of their gaze, then another look that they secretly hope is respectful this time, then a realization that it isn’t, and so on and so forth until they have accomplished what could have just been a straightforward stare if they had bothered to commit.

“Um, how can I help you, miss?” the man behind the counter asks.

“I turned eighteen today,” I answer, “so I am here to register for the draft.”

“Oh! Yes, of course,” he nods. “Driver’s li… er, identification?”

I suppress a sigh and pull out my passport. I have never once actually used the thing to pass a port or any other barrier between countries, but (correct guess, Mr. Front Desk Man, ten points for you) I cannot drive. A different government ID is therefore needed.

I hand it over to him and he looks it over, noting that today is indeed my birthday and the lumpy movie monster in the picture is indeed my face. A solid ten minutes of bureaucracy later, I am given leave to sit down and complete a fun little questionnaire about myself before a nurse pops in from the back and invites me to take a medical examination.

Or… well, she’s dressed like a nurse, but she looks more like an MMA champion. Her tan skin and military-cut hair are framed by a mountainous mass of muscles, the kind someone working ten hours a day as an underpaid health professional likely doesn’t have time for and definitely doesn’t need. Her nametag, which reads “Lance Corporal Erna Shuzen,” confirms that this isn’t her only day job—or at least it wasn’t. A nasty scar crawls up her right thumb, the whole hand stiff and subtly shaking even when not in use. Recent transfer, then.

“You’re… Julietta Monroe?” she double-checks, glancing at her clipboard.

“I am,” I nod.

“Medical papers?” she prompts. I pull them out of my handbag and pass them over to her without a word. There’s nothing quite as fun as getting all your private health information printed out in a big packet to hand over to the government. I try my best to not look too excited.

But I admit, I'm begrudgingly impressed when Lance Corporal Shuzen has the absolute balls to whistle after reading them for a bit.

“...Wow, quite a lot here,” she says, a smile on her face. “Limited mobility, limited flexibility, limited strength, limited stamina, bad eyesight, bad grip… you’ve got quite the collection!”

“Thank you?” I manage.

“Well, get in,” she says, jerking her thumb towards a small private room. “We’re gonna scrub you down and test all of it.”

“Um, what do you mean by ‘scrub me down?’” I ask, slowly making my way into the room as instructed. It looks like a pretty normal doctor’s office, at least. Nothing too weird.

“I mean I am going to physically scrub you with a mild solvent to see if all that crap on you is real or makeup,” she says.

…What.

“What?” I say.

She shrugs.

“Just protocol, hun, nothing personal. Draft dodgers get real creative when they want to. Hop up, you won’t have to strip or anything. Just an arm or two will do.”

Well. The ‘crap on me,’ as she puts it, is quite real. So… I guess I have no reason to object, beyond trivial things like respect and decency. I struggle onto the raised examination table and hold out an arm for her. She takes the arm I don’t offer. Huh.

“...Does this seriously happen that often?” I ask, letting her scrub at me. I hope she’s not scraping me up too hard; I can’t really feel it, so it's hard to know if she's injuring me.

“Well, with how wide we’re casting our net here you need a pretty specialized set of problems to get out of service,” the Lance Corporal answers. “So people have to fake… well, a lot of stuff.”

“Huh,” I manage.

“...Wow, this really isn’t coming off,” Lance Corporal Shuzen says, almost excitedly.

I… okay. I’ve never had this one happen before, I’ll admit. This is new. She gets points for that.

“That is because,” I say slowly, trying not to sound too condescending, “it’s real.”

“So it seems,” she nods, moving to my other arm. “Wow! This is just… it’s almost comical, you know? Your file is a little difficult to believe.”

“I don’t really know what to tell you,” I say, since there is truly no other polite and honest way to respond to that.

“Well, okay. It’s true, then? You lost all your skin in Denver? All of it?”

“I… yes,” I frown. “Pretty much. It was burned off by acid, apparently. I don’t really remember it well.”

“Well that’s probably good,” she laughs. “How’d you live through something like that?”

“Regenerator was at the field hospital. Which is why I have skin now, it’s just…”

“It’s all scars,” Lance Corporal Shuzen finishes for me. "Yeah. Because he makes you heal faster, not cleaner. I'm familiar."

She waves her own injured hand. I almost snap 'then why did you ask,' but I guess this was just all part of the test. To prove I'm actually what I say I am. I swallow my irritation as best I can, but it's difficult. Being accused of lying always rubs me the wrong way. The accusation just hits too close to the truth sometimes.

"Faster saves lives though," she continues, "especially when he's that fast."

I know this. I had all my skin burned off, plus a good chunk of stuff underneath it. I'm not a nurse, but I'm pretty confident most people don't survive that sort of thing. I am insanely lucky, not just that Regenerator was there but that he was close enough to actually have me in his effect radius. But I don't really want to talk about it—especially not with the rude woman rubbing my arms raw enough to likely cause me problems later—so I just shrug.

The subsequent tests aren't as long, but they do their best to be just as demeaning. The fitness tests seem mainly designed to get me to slip up (I technically do, in the sense that she has to catch me), the vision tests involve flashes of light to see if my one blind eye reacts in ways a working eye would (it does not, because it is blind) and the usual reflex hammer-to-the-knee stuff is largely waylaid because she can't actually find my patellar tendon under all the scar tissue (I don't blame her, there's a lot of it).

The good news is that most of my body can't really feel pain, so it's all just annoying and mildly demeaning more than anything.

"...So, um, I take it your hand has a similar story to mine?" I venture, trying to make this a bit less embarrassing by getting her to talk about herself instead of jabber about me.

"Well, I don't know how it compares to you, but yeah. Nearly lost the thumb trying to retake Nebraska. Can't hold a fucking gun anymore, so I work here now."

"Why not just retire?" I ask, honestly curious. "You, uh…"

Don't seem to have the disposition for a job like this? No, she might take offense to that. Are clearly too much of an asshole to be working as a nurse? Wait, that's worse.

"...Have certainly earned it?" I venture.

"Eh. I'm on the list for a prosthetic, and while I doubt I'll actually get one I've wanted to fight the good fight since I was a little girl. Not gonna quit now just because my actual fighting days are done. All these jobs are important, y'know? We might even get you in, despite all this. You need all kinds to keep an army working."

"Huh," I frown. "What inspired you to join the military in the first place?"

She looks at me like I'm crazy.

"Well, it's the apocalypse, innit?" she says, quirking her head. "Of course I want to fire lead up its ass."

Right. Of course. I guess I should have expected that.

By the end of this entire humiliating endeavor, I am left with a small card that proves I went and a polite assurance that I will be sent a message if I am selected for the draft, which I of course will not be because I can barely walk. Even if they need someone for a desk job, they're going to exhaust most of their options before they ask me because I can barely read either. I was homeschooled, like most people, but my foster parents aren't really the most dedicated to education and the fact that I am farsighted as heck no matter what attempts at corrective lenses I've been saddled with doesn't help either.

And yes, I'm farsighted and I have no depth perception. It is exactly as fun of a combination as it sounds.

"Jules, you made it back!" Peter waves at me as I stagger through the much-easier-to-operate push door that should still definitely just be an automatic. "You were in there for a while!"

"Yes, well, it turns out it's a lot harder to fail the draft than it is to get added to it," I answer, trying to inject some genuine humor into my tone. I probably succeed.

"You can fail?" Max asks worriedly from the back of the van, sticking his head out between the middle seat and the door so he can see me.

"I can fail," I correct. "You should be just fine, don't worry."

There was, after all, no IQ test.

"They're not shipping you out, then?" Andre asks. Of all my foster brothers, he is the one who cares about me the least. I've never held it against him; if anything, it makes him easier to deal with.

"Sorry kids, I'm afraid you're all stuck with me," I smirk, my grin only widening as the entire car immediately protests the label. I'm the oldest, but not by much. I just had my birthday first, is all.

"It sucks that you don't get to fight, though," Max sighs. The others in the car—including my foster dad at the wheel—nod in agreement. I nod along as well, a look of melancholy on my face while, internally, I remain as baffled by this general opinion as I have ever been.

Why would anyone want to go fight extradimensional horrors to death? Like seriously, I get that we have to. When aliens start pouring in from cracks in the universe and killing everyone they find you can't just ignore that. A military response is needed. Fine. But why would you want to be part of that military? Why would you want to subject yourself to that horror? I've been in an incursion, and a flying, acid-spitting bug monster removed all my skin, and I am not exactly in a hurry to go back to that sort of thing! Do people actually look at the commercials and propaganda and recruiter videos and genuinely get excited for them?

It makes sense that fighting to save the world is an obligation. But as an aspiration? I don't understand it at all.

"Well, go ahead and get in, Julietta," my foster father calls out. "We've still got to go home and have your birthday party!"

"Home?" I ask. "Aren't we picking up Emily first?"

"Eh, sorry, Julietta," he shrugs. "She texted to say something about her girlfriend dragging her out of town. She's apparently not going to make it."

What? Okay, screw that. I pull my phone out of my handbag and slowly tap away at it so I can call the one kind-of-sibling I have that I actually like. I have one of those oversized models for old people, with the huge buttons and the big text so I can actually use it and read the letters and numbers and whatnot, but I still much prefer calls to texts. Plus, they're harder for Emily to ignore, even with her asshole girlfriend pressuring her.

"Um, hello?" she squeaks in answer, picking up on the third ring.

"Emily!" I whine. "Are you really not coming to my birthday party?"

"J-Julietta!" she stammers. "I'm so sorry, it's just that I thought… you know, we were going to, um…"

"Hey, is that your sister?" a muffled voice says in the background. "Put her on speaker."

"U-um, okay," Emily says, and soon I hear the fuzzy buzz of background sound getting amplified.

"Jules!" Emily's girlfriend greets me. "Hey, happy birthday! How's it going?"

"Well, Lia, it would be going better if Emily was attending my party," I say flatly.

"Ah, geez, I'm sorry," Lia sighs. "It's just, y'know, Emily really wanted to go to this place in Chesterton today, so we made plans, and just… gosh, I'm sorry. We both completely forgot."

That's a lie. I know that's a lie. There's no way in hell Emily forgot my birthday. She's better at remembering my birthday than I am. But I just say nothing. Calling her on the lie would derail the conversation, letting Lia focus on the minutiae of who is and isn't responsible to satisfy her obsessive need to save face. If I just don't give her that opportunity, it keeps her on the backfoot, and her narcissistic need to seem kind and reasonable will lead her to offer a concession instead.

"...I'm sure we can swing by for a little bit, though," she offers after barely a few seconds. "I drive fast. We won't miss the reservations if we just say hi."

"Thank you, Lia," I say, forcing a smile on my face to make my voice sound more honestly happy. "I'd really appreciate that."

"Please don't drive too fast," Emily whines, though Lia doesn't even answer and Emily doesn't act like she expected one. It will be slightly harder than usual to not try and strangle that rich bitch when I see her, but fortunately my arms are very weak so I can usually just remind myself it wouldn't work anyway.

We exchange a few more pleasantries and hang up. Talking to Lia always makes me feel dirty. I've tried to get Emily to see that she's an abusive, narcissistic bitch (without quite using those words) but she just doesn't want to listen, and that means I'm stuck constantly having to step in to make things less awful for her.

Is getting her to delay her date so she can come to my birthday party an entirely selfless motivation? No, of course not. But Emily planned most of my birthday party. I know for a fact she wants to be there, at least for a while. But she just lets Lia walk all over her and do basically anything she wants. It's sickening. I wish I could do more, but the only other thing that would help is if Emily just dumped Lia's ass.

Of course, Emily insists that they love each other. No matter how miserable she seems.

I groan and lean back in the seat as the old van chugs to life and sets off down the road. I probably shouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing on my own damn birthday, but it's whatever. This isn't the first time I've had to play emotional manager for my so-called 'family' today, and it won't be the last.

I'm used to it.

"...So, I hear there will be a moonfall over Florida in a couple days," my foster father says, awkwardly trying to change the subject as I put away my phone.

"Do the aliens have Florida?" Max asks.

Yes, obviously the aliens have Florida. They have every single coastline and Florida is a peninsula, you stupid brick. …Is what I'm thinking, but of course I don't say that. Max is kind of a living human brick, though: short, stocky, and constantly a strange red hue due to being baked in the sun. Oh, and dumber than a box of rocks.

"They do, but the Russians are finally playing nice with their spaceport, so we should be able to launch a group into low orbit to intercept," Peter says. Peter has always been my favorite foster brother, mainly because his mission to annoy everyone he ever meets seems to specifically exclude me. It's probably pity, but he's never made it feel like pity, presumably because he exudes a constant aura of aloof apathy that makes it difficult to imagine he's capable of feeling any emotion other than schadenfreude. Perhaps he is simply content soaking up the constant misery I passively exude by existing.

But anyway, he's pretty cool. He's also, apparently, the hottest member of our little faux family according to the limited selection of girls I know outside said family, but a combination of getting most of my body replaced with insensate scar tissue and the resulting surgeries required to open back all the parts of me that sealed up very wrong means I do not have functioning versions of any of the organs responsible for sexual attraction, except probably the brain. So naturally, I have no idea what any of them are talking about. He's got short, naturally spiky blonde hair, he's… tall? I guess? And he has the face of an utter bastard. If that's the recipe for hotness, I'm happy to be obligatorily ace.

"They might not even be contested," Andre says. "The aliens are oddly unpredictable in how they react to moonfalls. A lot of the time, they don't even try to fight over them, or they fight in a way that indicates they're just trying to hold their territory and nothing else. They may not understand their significance, or even be sapient."

"They've gotta be sapient," I grunt, getting into the conversation despite myself. "They're too good at tactics and coordination."

"Ants are good at tactics and coordination," Andre counters. "We have a lot of evidence to indicate these might just be very large eusocial hives."

I sigh, not really wanting to argue further. As long as I drop the subject, Andre will assume that means he won the argument and be very pleased with himself. He's the middle brother in age, height, and maturity, with dark skin and perpetually messy long hair that's so unkempt it constantly gets on our foster mother's nerves. He just sort of doesn't seem to care, though; if you don't engage with Andre, Andre rarely engages for long with you, and that's often a blessing.

"Wait, can we back up a second?" Max asks. "Russia has a spaceport?"

…Of course, if you don't stop engaging with him, Andre won't stop either.

"Russia has a lot of things," Andre shrugs. "They're holding territory surprisingly well."

"Even aliens fall to the classic blunders!" Peter grins. "Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

Andre scowls, because Peter just quoted The Princess Bride, a pre-invasion movie in which there is a character played by a man named Andre who is portrayed as, shall we say, less than excellently intellectual. This offends our Andre, as he apparently holds all Andres to a very high standard, even while they happen to be professionally pretending to be someone with a completely different name. Peter knows this, of course, which is why he quoted The Princess Bride in the first place. …That and because it's a pretty funny movie. Pre-invasion movies are great.

"Why do we even call them aliens, anyway?" Max asks, once again valiantly yet vainly attempting to expand his scope of knowledge. "They're not from space, right? So they aren't really aliens."

"...Yes, they are?" Andre blinks. "The word 'alien' doesn't mean 'from space,' it just means 'foreigner.' Like, if someone came down from Canada, they'd technically be an alien."

"Woah, dude!" Peter gasps. "Not cool! You can't call Canadians aliens, that's racist as hell!"

"Wh… no, I'm not… obviously I wouldn't call them that, I—"

"You just did!" Peter accuses, his tone appalled but his face grinning ear-to-ear. "That's fucked up, man!"

"N-no, I was just explaining that at the time the term was coined it had a completely different meaning, so—"

"Every pre-invasion movie I've ever seen has the aliens from space," Max says. "Wouldn't that have been the meaning 'at the time?'"

"Yeah, I think you're just trying to get us to use slurs, Andre," Peter accuses.

"Andre's right," our foster dad butts in. "Three decades ago we would call people who entered the country without the right paperwork 'illegal aliens,' for example."

There's a pause.

"Well, everyone knows that old people are racist, so I think we can all agree this proves my point," Peter says happily, and the car erupts into further argument. I try, for once, to tune it out. I shouldn't have to mediate stupid stuff like this on my birthday, so I look out the window instead, scowling at the Chicago skyline. It's not pretty, but it's definitely impressive. The towering structures looming over Lake Michigan are quite the testament to human achievement. They never fail to make me feel small.

It's scary to think about the fact that this place was busy, once.

I'm told there used to be a time when Chicago was clogged to the brim with people, the roads full of practically-parked cars too overstuffed to actually move down the street. Every room in every floor of every building was supposedly used for some business or apartment or whatever. I can't imagine what that many people in one place would look like, since it's all pretty empty now.

There are other cars on the road with us, sure, but at least sixty percent of the property in the city is vacant. Entire neighborhoods might have only one or two houses with people that actually live in them. More than anything, I think that's what drives home to me that we are losing. Despite our supposed air superiority, despite our technological advantage, despite the literal superheroes we have now… we're losing.

The fact is, when people turn eighteen they go off to war, and most of them don't come back.

To be fair, it's not always because they die. The American government has been full-on state-of-emergency military-ruled totalitarianism for longer than I've been alive (as has basically every country on the planet, to be fair, with some handling the transition better than others). This means that a lot of essential industry has been deprivatized, be that food production or weapons development or medical technology or whatever, so a lot of people end up getting 'drafted' into the 'military' and then work on a farm with the rank of Private First Class for the next twelve years. It's a little fucky, but the end result is that basically everyone eighteen and older has their job assigned by the government until their mandatory service period runs out. I will almost certainly be one of the few exceptions, since I am completely dependent on others to live, but hey, maybe they'll stick me in a cold call center for propaganda or something. If there's one thing I'm actually good at, it's talking.

…But it's my birthday, and I really don't want to. I pull out my phone again, stick my earphones in, and turn on the book I've been listening to. It sucks that humanity will probably go extinct in my lifetime, but at least we still have the internet. People wrote so many good stories before the war.

I like stories. They're a lot happier than reality.

"I'm telling you, that's how the word was used!" Andre practically shouts, my earbuds no longer sufficient to stave off the ever-growing argument. "It doesn't just mean 'from space!'"

"I've never seen that!" Max snaps. "We watch movies about this all the time, and I've never seen that!"

"You're both right!" I butt in before I can stop myself. "Yes, the common usage was obviously about space, but we thought they were from space! Because of the moon?"

I point at the sky, where the offending celestial object is currently visible in the daylight.

"We assumed they were from space for like, twenty years or something," I continue. "And it's not like anyone can ask them what their names are, and the scientific term is dumb, so we still just call them aliens. That's it. Stop arguing about it."

There's a silent, awkward pause, my foster family quietly shocked by the loud interjection. I cringe internally, not having meant to sound that angry. I'm usually much better at controlling my tone.

"...Oh," Max mumbles. "That makes sense. Sorry, Julietta."

"Sorry, Julietta," Andre parrots.

Ugh, they probably think I'm grumpy because I won't be drafted rather than because they were loudly arguing about stupid shit.

"It's fine," I wave them off, even though it kind of isn't. "Sorry for raising my voice."

"You barely even did that," Peter notes with a smirk, but I don't respond and neither does anyone else. We finish the trip back home in silence, giving me a welcome reprieve with my book.

Our home is… decently sized. Property is apparently a lot cheaper than it used to be, despite how much less territory we have to actually put stuff on. My foster parents also just get a lot of money from the government for housing orphans; there's always a surplus, so people who have children or raise children tend to get paid a lot for it. The government is trying really hard to get more people to make babies, but… well. I don't see why you'd want to bring a child into a world that doesn't have much time left.

Though I suppose if you listen to the propaganda—and most people seem to—the war is starting to turn around. Personally, of course, I remain skeptical.

The point is, our three-story townhouse isn't exactly the height of luxury, but it's pretty big, even with seven people living in it. Peter helps me out of the car once we park, and I hobble the rest of the way inside on my own. I head to my room on the ground floor to sit back down and take my shoes off, hopefully scoring a few quiet minutes alone before the party starts. I don't really like birthday parties, but it's important that I have one and it's important that it goes well. It'll make everyone else really happy, especially Emily and my foster mother.

Gosh. This is really it, huh? I'm eighteen. It's the day I'm supposed to leave home, join the military, and help save the world, but as everyone probably expected, that won't be happening. I'll just remain here, a problem in the pockets of my foster parents that happens to get them a little more government funding. I do my best to be as useful as possible, of course; I've been handed off between homes too many times to assume this is guaranteed to be my last one, even now that I'm an adult. So I help them manage the others, even though the 'kids' should all be more than old enough to manage themselves. I work a call center job whenever I have the energy to, which is unfortunately not often. But more than anything, I do what I can to ensure people are happy.

If they associate seeing me with becoming happy, I figure they probably won't throw me away.

So! Birthday party. I take a deep breath, rest my legs for as long as I dare, and stand back up, hobbling into the dining room where my foster mother is putting the finishing touches on everything.

"Hey Mom," I greet her, because she likes being called mom. "Is there anything I can help with?"

"What?" she asks. "Oh, Julietta, no, it's your birthday! Sit down, sit down. I just need those useless… PETER! ANDRE! YOU BOYS BETTER NOT BE SLACKING!"

"We're coming!" Andre yells back from upstairs.

"DON'T SHOUT AT ME, JUST GET YOUR ASSES HERE!" my foster mother roars. I do my best to visibly not react. "Right, so, did your SSS visit go well?"

"It was mostly physical tests," I tell her, which I figure is answer enough.

"Ah," she says, which… yep. "Well, don't you worry about that, darling. Your father and I already told you that you're welcome to stay, and that will always be true."

"Thanks, Mom," I say, and I mean it. I need somewhere to stay, after all. Despite everything, I don't want to be alone. Even if it was an option, I wouldn't want to be alone.

The boys come downstairs and my foster mother starts loudly ordering them around, but the bickering is light enough and the four of them are busy enough that I judge it safe to put my earphones in and continue listening to my book. Normally I wouldn't do this unless I was in the car or alone, but it's my birthday and I think they'll forgive a little self-indulgence.

I sit back, close my eyes, and let myself enjoy what little time I'll have until my party starts. I figure I have a solid fifteen minutes until Emily and Lia show up, and that's the effective minimum. Sure enough, my guess is pretty spot-on, and I pause the book to check just in time to see the two of them walk inside.

Lia walks in first, smug and proud as she holds the door open for Emily. She has black hair, dark skin, and long, fake, blue fingernails colored to compliment her light purple spaghetti-strap top and white short-shorts. She's pretty toned, but nowhere approaching buff; just the kind of body a person has when they go on a run every morning to keep in shape. Expensive bracelets and earrings flash jarringly in the light, and I suspect quite a few other piercings hide underneath her clothes.

Behind her, Emily seems like Lia's total opposite: pale skin, blonde hair, and the hunched, timid posture of a person expecting the room to somehow attack her. However, on a second look it's clear that Emily puts nearly as much effort into her appearance as Lia does, if not more. Detailed, intricate braids loop beautifully through her hair to keep it at shoulder length, though I know it falls nearly down to the small of her back after she unbraids and washes it. While she's unadorned by jewelry and wearing a much more modest outfit than her girlfriend, Emily's clothing is no less professionally made, and it is both taken care of and worn pristinely.

I hate to admit it, but seeing the two of them always makes me jealous. Downright envious even, in Lia's case. It's petty of me, but beauty is something I will simply never have, and both of them wear it effortlessly. Still, I shove those thoughts away, put on a big smile, and slowly stand up to hold one arm out to my foster sister.

"Emily!" I greet her happily. "You made it!"

"Y-yeah, I…" she stammers, though she freezes for a moment when she stares at me, looking shocked. Oh shoot, is there something on my face? She quickly rallies though, and walks up to accept my one-armed hug.

"I'm glad I could make it!" she says with a lot more confidence than before. "Sorry, it just… it totally slipped my mind. I hope you can forgive me."

I glare at Lia, who smirks at me. Bitch.

"It's completely fine," I assure Emily. "I'm just glad you're here. Looking forward to the party?"

"Y-yeah, haha," she agrees, clinging to me a little tighter than usual. Hmm. Something's up with her.

"Emily!" my foster mother shouts from another room. "Come here, help me with the thing!"

"C-coming!" Emily agrees, breaking out of the hug and rushing away, leaving me with Lia. Hmm. Well, no sense playing dumb.

"What happened," I demand, watching Emily go.

"Don't ask me, Jules," Lia shrugs. "I was hoping you knew."

I blink, turning to look at her directly. That's not exactly our usual script.

"What?" I ask.

"You heard me," she frowns. "Something's wrong. I think she did actually forget your birthday."

"Bullshit," I hiss.

Lia raises her hands in surrender. Again, that's not a Lia thing to do. It's not how she manipulates people. She looks… actually concerned.

"I'm not fuckin' with you this time, Jules," she insists. "Something is up. What happened last night?"

Well that's not a good question. I frown, thinking back. Nothing happened last night. Nothing weird, anyway. It would be just like Lia to be the cause of the problem and not be able to see that, too. But it's because she can't see it that there's no benefit to pointing it out.

"...I'll talk to her," I sigh.

"Thanks, Jules," Lia grins. "I can always count on you."

Ugh. Like I want to hear that from you. I just smile and nod, though. Well, this will give me something to focus on during the party, at least.

It doesn't take long for my foster mother to order me to the dining room table, after which a burning cake with eighteen candles is walked into the room to that ever-classic and ever-irritating tune. Peter, as he does for every birthday, goes extra ham with it, belting out the entire happy birthday song in a deep, operatic baritone. He's actually an extremely talented singer. It's annoying.

"Make a wish!" my foster mother orders like some demonic, cake-obsessed genie. I spend a few seconds pretending to think of one, and then blow out the candles.

"What do you wish for?" my foster mother presses.

"You know that's a secret," I tell her, giving her a coy smile and wagging my finger. She pretends to look put out. We've done this for the past three years, and I haven't actually made any wishes. That's okay though, because she likes it. That's really the point of all of my birthdays.

Hours pass and presents open, some of which are actually, genuinely good. My foster mother gives me more of the thick socks I like, Peter gives me a pimp cane (which I will never use, but is very funny), and Emily gives me an audiobook that I've never heard before but actually seems interesting. More importantly, she seems to relax more and more as the party continues, and is talking and smiling normally by the time everything starts coming to a close and my foster mother sends my foster father out to pick up dinner. I finally get my chance to talk with Emily in private when I find her out on the front porch, staring at what's left of the moon as the sun slowly starts to set.

"Hey," I greet her, sitting down on the bench next to her. "You doing okay?"

"W-what?" she jolts, turning to me with a startled expression. A single laugh manages to make it out of my nose before I stop myself. With the way my cane clonks on the wooden floor, I'm not exactly stealthy, but Emily somehow manages to find herself consistently snuck up on regardless. It never fails to make me smile.

"You seemed out of it today," I tell her. "Lia and I both thought so. I just wanted to check in and see what was up."

"...Lia thought so?" Emily says hesitantly, unconsciously playing with her braids. "Sorry. I didn't mean to worry you two. It's nothing, really."

"It's hard to believe it's nothing," I press gently. But not, apparently, gently enough. Emily glances away, something almost like bitterness passing over her face for a moment.

"Can I not, occasionally, simply appear something other than happy?" she asks. "It irritates you too, doesn't it?"

My mind freezes. What is she—

I don't get to finish that thought. No thoughts, in that moment, get to finish. They are all simply cut in twain. We feel it, in that moment. The whole city feels it. But Emily and I, staring out at the sunset, get to see it, too.

I've experienced something like this before. Back when I was small, back when I was more than scar tissue and bitterness. This time, it is not at all the same, but I still recognize it instantly. How could I not? What else could be happening?

There are now two skies.

This is not, I feel the need to clarify, because a sky has been added. There is not a new, additional sky that has been grown or superimposed or inserted alongside the first. The sky is how it always was and always has been, but now it is two instead of one. It has been divided, split, sundered, and unequivocally made into two parts that I can no longer conceive as a single concept. At first, nothing actually separates them; it is simply a fact that the sky is no longer one, and I know this before I can actually see the crack with my dull, struggling eye.

But then I see the crack get wider, and the incursion alarm starts to blare.

What a shame, I think to myself. I really didn't want to die.

Chapter 2 - I Want Lasers

It's an odd feeling, to know for the second time that you're definitely going to die.

The first time was pretty straightforward. Mom and Dad—my real mom and dad—they spent the entire time we were fleeing reassuring me that we would be okay. That I would be okay. Now I realize they were mostly just reassuring themselves, but I was a child and at the time I believed them. Up until the moment when the acid chewed through them, of course, leaving nothing but a caustic sludge.

They tried to shield me with their bodies, and they did, it… technically worked. I lived, barely. You'd think something like that would be pretty traumatic, but… honestly, I feel like I've always handled it pretty well. I don't remember my parents all that clearly anyway. It was, of course, agonizing beyond compare, but one of the nice things about an experience that's agonizing beyond compare is that it makes you go into shock, and memories of events that happen while you're in shock tend to get pretty muddled. So, y'know, it was pretty awful at the time but in retrospect it's just… a thing that I lived through. Somehow.

This time, though, I don't think I'll be that lucky. I've read the statistics on incursion survival, and 'being close enough to see the scar' leaves me at single digits. And let me tell you: I am not the ninetieth percentile on anything good. It requires someone truly special or truly lucky to make it out in my situation, and, y'know, it also helps if you can fucking run away.

But I can't. Not again. No superhero is going to just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Lightning doesn't strike twice. I'm going to die, for real this time. Which sucks, because despite everything I really don't want to.

The crack in the sky opens wider, and I see something moving on the other side of it. Something aches behind my eyes, but I ignore it.

"Emily!" Lia shouts, bursting out of the front door. Heh, she's so distressed that her hair is actually a little messed up. "Oh thank fuck, there you are! Come on, we gotta go!"

She grabs Emily's wrist in a panic, yanking her to her feet, but Emily pulls away.

"Wait!" she insists. "We have to bring Julietta! Help me carry her to your car!"

Huh? Me? What good am I going to?

"We don't have time for this shit, Emily!" Lia snaps. "We have to go. Now!"

For once I kind of agree with her; I don't like Lia, but she's trying to save Emily and I won't be able to do anything but slow them down.

"We. Are. Taking. Julietta!" Emily insists anyway, and my heart cracks a bit.

Lia seems startled at Emily's sudden fury, and she glances back and forth between my foster sister and me for a moment before groaning and reaching down to grab my ankles.

"I got her feet, come on!" Lia barks, and a relieved Emily grabs my armpits. As selfish as it is, I can't bring myself to argue, so I just let the pair of them start dragging me towards Emily's car, leaving my cane behind.

While she doesn't have much of my respect in the first place, Lia certainly doesn't lose any for being reluctant to bring me along. Her car is a tiny, sporty little two-door thing with nowhere near enough space to take our entire foster family, so exiting with the one member of it she actually cares about and leaving the rest of us has a certain practicality to it. And I, in particular, am just not really worth the effort of saving. Still, they toss me into the passenger seat and, my entire body shaking, I manage to struggle a seatbelt on as Emily hops into the back behind me.

"Wait!" Peter calls out as Lia starts the engine, he and Andre rushing out of the house. "Waitwaitwaitwaitwait!"

"Not more of this shit!" Lia growls, but she doesn't drive off. Hmm. Did I misjudge her, or is she just anticipating that Emily will throw another fit? …Honestly, I'm not sure if Emily would throw a fit for Peter and Andre, so who knows.

"Dad has the van, and I am not staying here and waiting for him with Mom," Peter insists. "Take us with you!"

"Me too!" Max yelps, rushing out of the house behind them. "Me too, me too!"

"My car doesn't fit six fucking people!" Lia growls as Peter and Andre leap past me into the backseat. "The back isn't even supposed to fit three!"

"Pop the trunk!" Peter says, leaping past me and claiming the backseat with Emily. "Hop in if you wanna come, Max!"

"Are you crazy!?" Max asks, and then the sky bleeds flesh.

It starts with the Leviathans, as it so often does. We do not know why. The enormous, thick-skinned snakes, each larger than a building, are clearly adapted for an aquatic environment. They are the largest and heaviest of the enemy, little more than a long, finned tube with enough power to crush entire skyscrapers to smithereens. They are great serpents of death, cascading down from the sky like living rivers.

It's a devastatingly simple foe, but for whatever reason they're almost always too large, too unwieldy to slither properly on land. They pour out of the incursion scar like an oil spill, obliterating enormous swaths of the city and its suburbs in seconds. Many of them likely die on impact, too, but if there are any survivors they'll doubtlessly infect Lake Michigan and turn this entire section of the continent into enemy territory. Still, the thought of them always chills me, and the sight of them is worse. Such massive beasts must require an enormous amount of resources, right? So why are they so often wasted, left to simply die from the fall?

The shockwave of their impact hits us seconds after we see them land, and Max decides his objections to riding in the trunk are relatively trivial after all. He jumps inside and shuts the hatch the moment Lia slams on the gas.

Step one to surviving an incursion is pretty fucking obvious, all things considered: get as far away from the scar as humanly possible. Not just because they're where the enemy comes from (though that's a pretty good reason all on its own), it's also just because incursion scars themselves are weird. This time, the separation of the sky is the scar, but they often look different. In Denver, for example, I don't remember the sky being shorn into two, but rather… changed. Like someone took a picture of it and touched it up in Photoshop until it shined as some impossibly perfected ideal of the horizon. Incursion scars are almost all different, though I've heard their effects repeat occasionally.

…I think you're also supposed to not look directly at them, but I can't peel my eyes away. It hurts, I'll grant that, but what am I going to do in these last moments, but look? I need to see what's coming next. We were lucky when the scar didn't appear directly overhead, but the falling of the Leviathans is only the start. Next comes the real horror.

The Wasps.

They pour out from the ever-growing scar, its influence widening as clouds rush away from it, like even the very atmosphere wants to flee its presence. Long, spindly legs like mayflies, attached to a headless torso and held up by giant, buzzing wings. I may be a bit biased against them, since this is the same sort of creature that burned all my skin off, but personally I think they're the worst.

Lia hits a bump in the road, jolting me out of my thoughts. She's swearing constantly to herself, her eyes locked on the road as she shoots down neighborhood streets at upwards of seventy miles an hour and accelerating. It's a bit terrifying, but any slower and we'd likely be overtaken by the alien air force, and I do have to admit I don't want to have my skin burned off twice, no matter how briefly the second time would last.

My heart jumps up into my throat and I grip the door handle with all the limited strength I have as Lia screeches around a turn, the wheels on my side of the car briefly leaving the ground before slamming back down. Right. Right, okay. I'm not currently dying. I'm actually being rescued from potential death, in a manner that has some non-zero chance of success. I should probably stop with the doom and gloom brain and try to do something helpful.

My eye roams back to the scar. I can handle a bit of a headache if it means we have a better idea of what's coming after us. The Wasps are already spreading out in a circular pattern, freakishly coordinated as they sweep the city to kill everything that didn't get crushed by a Leviathan. And no, the irony of the creatures that gave me my scars emerging from something called a 'scar' is not lost on me. I guess the aliens couldn't stop at merely giving one to the world.

The scar continues to widen, the division of sky and sky breaking the two ever further apart. My head throbs harder, but I ignore it. It's just pain, and my body hardly feels that anymore. From within, more monsters emerge, but the more I stare the more it feels like something else is emerging with them. I don't know where the impression comes from; it's certainly nothing I can see, and yet I can't shake the thought regardless. Something is emptying into this world, and it approaches us far faster than the aliens.

I brace for an impact I'm not sure how I know will come, and the gentlest of breezes washes over me. A curious touch, a light and hesitant squeeze. I jolt and look around at the others in the car, but none of them seem to notice.

And then I black out.

"Juli—oka—seizure!"

Flashes of consciousness blink in and out around me. My body thrashes, held in place only by the seatbelt. Through it all, as my eyes flutter and my mind breaks, pain blooming brighter in my skull while blood trickles down my nose, I feel something. A presence. An interest. Something I invited by accident.

And whatever it is, it's killing me.

It's hard not to know that. I swear I can feel my brain leaking from my ears. And that kind of sucks, because I don't want to die. I don't. Honestly. It's just that… I've been dying since I was a child, you know? It's a miracle my body works at all, but it has never worked well and every day I expect it to finally give out on me. Every step I take, I anticipate finally stumbling, collapsing, and losing everything. Falling apart like a doll with her strings cut. It's always just a matter of time. It's hardly startling now that the time has come.

I wonder if there's a life after death. I hope it's relaxing.

Pot--tially, my head throbs. PossIBly. PoSs…

…Huh? Well, yeah, it might be. But I doubt it. Any afterlife I go to would, at the very least due to my presence, contain people. And people… exhaust me. Sometimes it's in a good way; I can't function on my own, after all, so I have always relied on others, and it can feel really good to be able to do that. Overall, though? Despite all the help I need, it seems like everyone else has to rely on me. Because no one knows how to have a basic conversation with each other, no one knows how to communicate like a goddamn adult.

Com--NicAte, my agony repeats. YEs.

A rush of experiences I have no context for, like faded memories of smells, overwhelm my body. My arm seizes and cracks into the side of the door. I think I hear something break, but I don't feel it. That's my life, though. That's my body. My complete fucking shitstain of a body. It's fine, of course. I'm used to it. I might need help sometimes, but I'm capable. I know how to manage my lack of touch and smell and taste. I know how to look for the signs of injury I can't feel. I know how to handle myself, and it grates when people think I can't. It grates even more when they're right. I want to be like everyone else. I want to have that infinite potential of just being able to run. To function in this stupid, oppressive world that doesn't give two shits about me.

LiKe. Every, my breath catches. Have. EVERY.

I… are those words? I'm pretty sure that's not normal seizure stuff. I vaguely feel the pressure as someone in the backseat grips their arms around my head, pulling me as firmly as possible into the headrest to prevent me from getting a brain injury. Thanks, whoever you are.

JOY, my dopamine sings. APPREciaTION!

I seize again, the presence in my head blasting unfettered excitement through my nervous system. Yeah, okay, that's definitely not normal. But it's so hard to focus on, it's so hard to focus on anything for… for some reason.

"She's—! Hold h—et us killed!"

Right, yeah, the seizure. I hope I'm not making it difficult for Lia to drive. Emily's in her car too, after all. I hope she's safe.

SafE, my brain screams.

Yes, seizure-induced-hallucination-slash-possible-eldritch-alien! Safe. The thing I've never been. Not safe from monsters, not safe from abusive households, not safe from myself. Can you believe that this dysfunctional mess of a foster family is the best one I've ever had? I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't want to die. I'm just a little too prone to it.

AGREEMENT, my ears rupture.

I feel myself seize again, and then my sense of balance—one of the few I still have—goes absolutely haywire. My body is tossed randomly around by more than its own muscles as I realize the car has started to roll. Oh, fantastic. This will definitely help me not die. Thanks, freaky hallucination.

JOY, my muscles tear.

…And you don't understand sarcasm. Phenomenal.

NeW ANd wonDERFUL, my mind weeps.

I'll regret my next questions as soon as I ask them, I suspect. This conversation has not exactly been delicate on my brain, but it's mostly just pain. And the thing with pain is that it doesn't matter to me. It never has. So fuck it, here goes: who are you, anyway? Why are you here? And what do you want?

The presence answers immediately, a curse and a law and a declaration of all three answers in one.

WHAT IF, my everything becomes, and my eyes open to blood on the ground. Or is that the ceiling?

Oh. It's both. The car is upside-down, and I'm still stuck in the chair by the seatbelt. If I had any hair it would be cascading down around my face, but since I don't it's the blood on my many head wounds that drips down over my eyes instead.

I'm in pain, which is notable because it generally means I have a serious internal injury. Broken bones, torn muscles, damaged organs, things like that are all my body is capable of feeling. So even though any degree of pain I happen to experience means something is very bad, I've never really been debilitated by it all that much. I guess I don't need to worry, though; the blood loss, seizure, concussion, and probable stroke have all got me covered on the debilitation front instead. Every thought feels like it's being pulled through gelatin and popping out stuck to all the wrong things.

I hear the unbuckling, clonking, and shuffling of everyone else freeing themselves from their seats, but I don't even think to try. My body and mind are unresponsive, but I still instinctively turn my head towards the sounds, ignoring the sharp pain in my neck as I do so. Andre, Emily, and Peter scrabble out between the front seats, rushing free of the car through the driver's side. Emily runs around the front of the car to my door, while Andre and Peter head for the back. I don't see Lia, but I hear her swearing somewhere nearby.

"Hey, Julietta," Emily says, her voice full of adrenaline and horror and the need to project a calm, even tone that people get when talking to someone who isn't all there. "Hey, I'm gonna get you out of there, okay? Are you awake? Can you talk to me?"

"Emily," I say, because that's her name.

"Yep, that's me," she says, the words ping-ponging around the inside of my skull. I smile. Yeah, that's Emily. "You're gonna be okay. We're both gonna be okay."

Peter pops open the trunk, and Andre vomits as Max's battered corpse tumbles out onto the ground. Up above, the sky buzzes with Wasps, hovering low to the ground as they expand outwards in an ever-growing spiral, wiping the Earth clean of human life. They travel together in startlingly large groups, rather than the unorganized swarms I remember from last time. Fuck, I hope the aliens aren't getting smarter.

"I don't think we are," I admit.

"Yeah, not since you fucking made me crash the car!" Lia shouts.

Oh. There she is. Lia storms up behind Emily as she fiddles with my seatbelt, fury and blood on her face. Does she think the car crash was my fault…? But she was driving. Although… I was having a seizure. Maybe I kept smacking her in the face or something. Is that how seizures work?

"Calm down and help me get her free, Lia," Emily says evenly.

"Calm down? Calm down!? I told you to leave the bitch, Emily! Now we're fucking dead because of her epileptic ass, and you think I'm going to waste time escorting her again? We need to start running. Now."

"No, we need to free her and take her with us, because she doesn't have epilepsy," Emily snaps. "She has powers. Julietta just became our only chance at getting out of here alive."

"What the fuck?" Lia asks. "How do you—"

Emily just holds up my hand, and for some reason that shuts Lia up. I can't really see it. I don't entirely want to. I just feel tired and loopy and in pain. I definitely don't feel powerful. I just want to rest.

"Okay," Lia hisses, kneeling down to help Emily get me free. "Okay, does this actually help, though? Can she fight monsters?"

"It's not really about fighting the monsters," Emily insists. "Look, just… trust me?"

"Nope, I don't think I will," Peter says, backing away from the rest of us. "Fuck this."

The lopsided grin that's always on his face looks a little strained as he stares at Max's body. Then, he turns and sprints away. Emily's eyes narrow, but she doesn't say anything. She just lets him run. We all do, even knowing he almost certainly won't make it alone. We probably won't make it either, so why bother? Andre, meanwhile, seems to not notice any of this is happening. He's still staring at what's left of Max.

It isn't pretty, honestly. The car was moving fast when it started to roll, and trapped in the trunk like he was, Max never stood a chance. It's a hollow feeling, staring at what was once a person, but I'm mostly just concerned that I don't feel anything beyond that. I suppose I never liked Max much, and the gore doesn't really impact me, but still… nothing? Hopefully I'm a good enough person to cry about it later, but I suppose I'm still pretty concussed.

Speaking of, I nearly hit my head again as Emily finally frees me from the seatbelt, she and Lia barely catching me as I fall. They drag me clear of the car, my head lolling painfully in Andre's direction as he continues to hyperventilate.

"Come on, Julietta," Emily encourages. "Get up."

I groan and try to do just that, but the overwhelming wave of nausea I get from trying forces me to squeeze my eyes shut and stay still.

"...Can't," I tell her.

"Shit," Lia hisses. "Shit, shit, shit. This is our one chance to get out alive?"

"Yes," Emily insists. "We'll need her if an Angel or Queen emerges. Come on, grab her legs, we'll carry her. Andre!"

He twitches at the sound of his name, staring blankly in our direction.

"Come on," Emily says. "Help us if you can. We need to make at least another mile in the next half-hour or so, and that'll be tough if we have to carry Julietta the whole way."

"Then we should leave her behind," Lia hisses.

"Do you wanna run off on your own away from the person with superpowers, Lia? Do you think you can outrun a Behemoth?"

Lia groans, but she does ultimately lean down to pick me up by the ankles. Emily shouts at Andre a bunch and soon enough he starts to follow us as well. I'm still feeling… out of it. But there is one little detail that I think might be the problem.

"...I do not feel like I have powers," I croak.

"Oh, great," Lia grunts. "And you know what that feels like, do you?"

"I… should?" I manage. "Because… if I have powers, then I should feel like I have… power. Or something. Right?"

I loll my head from side to side, which hurts and makes me nauseous again, but it's kind of hard to care.

"Julietta, you just stared at a tear in reality until every hole on your face started bleeding and instead of dying you just started… not bleeding anymore," Emily says. "I'm pretty sure that means powers."

"...Oh," I blink. "Maybe people should look at weird tears in reality more often."

"No they shouldn't, because it kills people," Lia grunts. "I get a splitting headache just glancing at the thing. I have no idea how you managed to stare."

"Pain doesn't really hurt, when you think about it," I mumble. "What are my powers?"

"How should I know? Something about healing, maybe?" Emily answers. "It shouldn't matter. Just rest, okay? We need you to be functional."

It shouldn't matter? Why wouldn't it matter? What does Emily know about powers? Can I even afford to worry about this while my brain feels like it's been hit by a train?

"...Okay, I'll rest," I sigh, and close my eyes. I'm still not sure any of this is happening, but it's just so hard to think. I should just trust Emily until my brain starts working again. Everything is so weird right now, so surreal. We just crawled out of a car crash on the side of the road, the apocalypse is escalating behind us, but more than anything our surroundings are just… quiet. We're deep inside an urban sprawl, one of the many neighborhoods with hardly anyone alive, and everyone who was here has already evacuated. Occasionally, I hear a car zoom by, but they're too far away to help us and likely just as unable to hold everyone in our group as Lia's car was.

Doom hasn't caught up with us yet. …But it will.

Still, my ravaged body desperately craves sleep, so even though I'm being yanked around by the armpits and ankles my head only seems to get fuzzier. It's nice to have my eyes closed, crisis and all. One of the nice things about being nearly insensate is that it's not too difficult to get comfortable for sleep. Normally I'd have a sense of balance that might mess with my ability to rest while being carried around like an oversized potato sack at a farmer's market, but the concussion is really pulling some work on my inner ear and making everything just feel equally awful. It's not difficult to sleep while everything just feels generically awful. I'm used to that.

The more I doze off, though, the stranger my ride seems to become. In my exhausted haze, I start to feel a strange tingle around my ankles, one that I can't really recognize until I wonder if that's what touching somebody feels like. Then it clicks for me; I'm dreaming. I've dreamed about the senses I used to have before, after all. I don't remember how to touch or taste or smell, but I definitely used to be able to do those things, so some part of my brain must still feel like it knows how.

Yet the more I think about it, the more detailed the feeling becomes, beyond any dream I can remember. At first it's just a tingle, but soon I can make out the sensation of each of Lia's fingers, the way they close around my skin, the pressure of her nails as they dig into my ankles, the angle of her fingers as they bend how hands are supposed to bend, the interconnected tapestry of her muscles, woven together like fine cloth to provide the needed force to move. Every crease in her palm is worn there from how the skin bends whenever her hand scrunches. So, too, are the lines in her wrist formed, out of sight and out of mind because who thinks about that sort of thing, the way every cell of her epidermis slowly but surely works its way into little ruts over time, as the body adapts and grows and learns what parts of itself will and will not be folded. These details aren't just part of her DNA, aren't mere facets of the programming her body was constructed on (and isn't that just fascinating all by itself) but instead emergent consequences of how that programming reacts to stimuli and trauma and wear and tear, and when all those things build on each other over and over and over the end result is far more than even the tens of millions of—

"Julietta!" Emily whispers into my ear. I flinch. I blink. Wait, were my eyes open?

"What—" I try to say, but she slaps a hand over my mouth.

"You were hyperventilating," she says. "It was getting loud. We really need you to be quiet right now."

I blink some more, looking around. I'm… not being carried anymore. I'm sitting on the ground, inside a small office building. The lights are off, and it's not quiet outside anymore. There's too much buzzing.

"Oh," I whisper.

"I think they've mostly passed for now, but we need to stay hidden until the military clears them out," Emily whispers. "We should have a brief window of safety between the Air Force showing up and any Angels emerging."

I take a slow, deep breath, nodding while my mind races. I'm feeling… a little more clear-headed now, and I really want to know what's up with Emily. She's not normally so… assertive. It's almost like I'm talking to a different person.

"How do you know this?" I ask quietly.

She shrugs.

"I don't want to die," she says. "And this sort of thing is always a risk, so I made sure I'd know what to do if it happened. That's all."

I frown, not exactly buying it. Emily has been citing military response time statistics. That's not exactly a normal level of investment into emergency procedures, but I guess it's not secret knowledge either. Emily's not the sort of person to do anything halfway. She's very meticulous about anything she sets her mind to. Still… I kind of expected her to be the kind of person who collapses into a sobbing wreck during crises like these, not someone who turns into a hyper-competent commando lady.

Not that I'm complaining, especially after she saved my life. It's just… weird.

My thoughts are torn away from such musings by the screaming sound of fighter jets flying overhead, finally heralding the arrival of help. Andre picks me up by the armpits this time, Lia still on my ankles as Emily signals us all to rush out of the building we've been hiding in and continue down the road. I glance up at the sky, seeing the horrid Wasps swarm upwards towards the aerial invaders. I can't help but note that these Wasps look different from the ones I remember, with only four limbs that each end in such sharp, rigid blades that I wonder how the monsters could even stand on them. Maybe they don't, and they just fly forever until they die.

Dying is definitely what they start to do, at least. Four F-22s shriek towards the incursion scar, flanking not a lead plane, but a bright, glowing woman. She's a blinding white streak in the sky, only identifiable as a person because everyone recognizes Agnus Dei. Phosphorous streaks of machine gun fire complement searing laser blasts as her strike squad pierces through enemy territory like an arrow. Missiles erupt from the planes as the squadron opens fire on the incursion scar itself, attacking the hole in the world with the rage of our entire planet at their backs. I watch, awed, as the missiles seem to slip into the scar, attacking the hard-to-discern shapes beyond it.

I realize, belatedly, that I probably shouldn't be staring into it at all, but doing so doesn't hurt my head anymore. I'm not really sure what that means.

The squadron banks away from the scar and takes another pass at the Wasps, raining down lead and light with unmatched lethality. I don't know how fast Agnus Dei can fly, but I do know she's leading a squad of fighter jets that outspeed Wasps by two orders of magnitude. While Wasp acid can eat through whatever jets are made of, it requires a very lucky alien or a very bad pilot to actually risk getting hit by them. I watch in awe as mere minutes pass before the skies are clear of monsters.

These are the moments they show you in those propaganda videos. These are the triumphant victories we get drip-fed to keep up hope, to allow morale to stay high enough that people keep signing up for war. And I'll give them this: the skies truly are mankind's domain. Though nature may have never intended us to fly, no one matches us at it. Giant winged monsters are scary, sure, but they aren't supersonic warhead-armed death machines. But that begs the question, doesn't it? If our air superiority is so absolute, why do we only have one squadron up there in the sky? Where's the entire rest of the Air Force?

"...Shit," Emily swears, and it's still so weird to hear her swear. "Even the military thinks we're going to die. Julietta, are you ready?"

"For what, exactly?" I ask. "I'm feeling a bit more lucid, if that's what you mean."

"Yeah," she sighs. "Okay. You're going to need to protect us."

"How?"

"Yeah, how?" Andre gasps. "This is… this is impossible. Didn't you say you saw Behemoths touching down? We're going to get overrun."

"I don't know!" Emily snaps. "We're just going to stay close, and you're… you're going to figure it out, alright?"

Oh. Okay, no pressure I guess.

"O-okay, just… help me stand up, then," I stammer, taking deep breaths to try and get my brain working again. "If somebody acts as a cane for me I can probably hobble a little faster than this. And… I guess I should get some blood flowing."

"You had blood flowing," Lia snorts.

"...In the right places, I mean," I correct. "Um. Am I really not bleeding anymore? I can't actually tell."

"You're dry as a bone," Emily sighs. "Alright, get her on her feet, I'll be her support."

Geez. That's… a little wild to think about. Powers, huh? Shit, I'm going to have to join the military if we survive this after all. Andre and Lia set me down, helping me to get an arm around Emily's shoulder. Now that I'm finally not trussed up like a dead pig, I can briefly pat myself down to check if… uh.

I try to give myself a once-over, but Lia beats me to it, her hand shooting in out of nowhere and brushing my face exactly where I was going to do it. It can only be Lia's hand, with her horribly smooth skin and disgustingly perfect nails. It feels weird, which is particularly strange in that it feels like anything at all. And it's even more strange when I notice that Lia isn't standing anywhere close enough to touch me.

I'm touching me.

I flex my fingers, and Lia's immaculate digits obey. The hand is also, quite clearly, attached to my ratty-ass arm and not hers. But from the wrist down, there are no scars. No burns. No numbness. Indescribable sensations jolt through every inch of skin, and I have no way to know if they're completely random or just based on stimuli I simply don't remember how to identify. I flex the fingers, slowly, watching them move at my command without shaking, without catching on the hundreds of little problems that would normally prevent me from making a fist. Lia's hand is mine. It works. It's… fixed.

…I hate it.

How do I change it back? I don't know how I changed it in the first place. But it's constantly scratching at my attention, like someone following me around and playing the world's worst music. This is my power? My motherfucking superpower is to have the basic functional capabilities of Lia? Fuck off, eldritch sugar daddy. I don't want this shit, I want lasers!

As if on cue, lasers streak overhead as Agnus Dei launches more death beams out of her hands, because her powers are cool and useful and relevant to the current wartime situation. She's basically Superwoman and nothing short of an Angel can even cause her to blink. I, meanwhile, can look like a girl I hate and heal from concussions slightly faster. …Okay, well, realistically the second one there might actually be useful again soon. But I hope it won't be!

"Quit staring at yourself and walk, Jules!" Lia snaps. "Come on Emily, we need to move!"

"Y-yeah," Andre agrees. God, he's so out of it. I mentally mark him as a panic risk if we run into a beastie.  Which... yeah. This is a crisis situation. I can worry about my superpowers later. Like in a couple minutes, when I die because of how useless they are.

With Emily supporting me, we stagger forward at a bit quicker of a pace than before, hurrying away from the scar as best we can. The rumbles and cracks of the aerial battle behind us almost distract from the screaming sensation of my new hand, but I do my best to ignore both and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It wouldn't do to trip and slow everyone down even more.

About fifteen minutes of fleeing pass, and though we're making decent distance it's not becoming any less stressful. There are still Behemoths back there somewhere, trying to track us down and crush us into paste. We can hear the occasional thunder of one of them knocking over a building, and they only seem to be getting closer.

"Okay, I need a break," Emily pants. "Swap with me, Lia."

"Fine," Lia grumbles, grabbing my other arm and letting me lean on her so Emily can step away. My foster sister glances between us, worry on her face as she takes in how ragged we are.

"...Thank you for sticking with me, Lia," she says quietly. "I know you didn't want to."

"Uh-huh," Lia grunts. "Well, you owe me when we get out of here."

"Yeah," Emily smiles, a flash of worry on her face. Fuck, I hate whatever that implies. Can't deal with it now, though. "Andre? You okay?"

"A-as okay as I can be, I guess," he mumbles.

"That's good. Stick as close as you can to Julietta, okay? The only way we're getting out of this is together."

"Right," Andre nods. "Yeah."

Emily frowns, probably thinking exactly the same thing I am: still a flight risk. Andre is always prone to trusting himself over everyone else, even at the worst times. If we had time we might be able to talk him out of it, but we don't. It's going to be a disaster if something unexpected happens, and that's basically guaranteed. The question is, what's it going to be? An alien jumping into the middle of the street? A stray shot from the good guys getting a little too close? A car barreling out of nowhere to run us over?

We all feel it as the skies rip again, like someone took the sound of tearing metal and turned it into a physical force. What was two becomes four, as the long tear in reality becomes an X-shaped break. A second cut, further dividing the first. And then it happens again. And again. Something cuts into the world over and over and over and it just won't stop. I can't help but stare transfixed at the wound in the sky, watching it open deeper and deeper, revealing more and more of whatever lies beyond. It's so hard to make out. I see planets, I think, or maybe moons. Spheres in brilliant and fantastical colors, hovering in the sky beyond the sky. It's so colorful and bright, an almost cheerful beauty that feels so sick and wrong given the current circumstances. Something on the other side calls to me, a light tug as if I was buoyant underwater. But then a slithering figure fills the cracks and blocks my view, rendering it impossible to focus on anything else.

The Leviathans are, generally, the largest beasts that the aliens field in battle. But there is one thing bigger, that they hold in reserve. It does not see battle, not technically, because its arrival means they have already won.

A Queen.

It looks like a hundred thousand building-sized cells, constantly bulging and growing and dividing in mitosis-like separations, its slick, slimy flesh in nonstop motion. The giant, perpetually-splitting orbs rise to the surface, split in half, and then get quickly overtaken by their rapidly growing fellows, and all the while the whole of the monster still maintains something almost like a cohesive shape. Masses of the cells group together to form tendril-like limbs, which themselves split at the ends and grow into two new tendrils over and over until they're too small and short to be called tendrils anymore at all, returning to the main, cohesive mass. It is an abomination against biology, a wound on physics itself, and yet still it moves, slithering ever-defiantly towards our world.

It is a horror all on its own, but as is always the case with these aliens the horror does not stop at this incursion. Each Queen looks completely different, a totally unique spite against reality. We don't have any idea why, because even after thirty years we know basically nothing about any of these genocidal monsters. But despite their differences, it's impossible to mistake a Queen because of the simple fact that they are the size of an entire city. They're so large that the incursion scar needs over an hour to finally grow large enough to let them squeeze into our world. But once they do, that's it. That's the point of no return. Either the Queen is destroyed before it can take root, or the whole region is lost.

Because just like the paragons of humanity, a Queen and all her Angels have superpowers.

"Fuck," Andre hisses. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"Stay right where you are!" Emily snaps. "Everyone grab onto Julietta!"

A half-dozen warheads shriek off the fighter jets towards the slowly-emerging Queen, but a single tentacle presses through the cracks in the world. In the very same instant, they all explode prematurely, looking for a split second like they had all been cut.

"We need to run," Andre insists. "We need to run right now!"

"No," I shake my head. "We need to get to an open area and brace ourselves for the shockwave of that thing touching down."

Agnus Dei fires a blinding blast of white light, and this time I know I'm not imagining it. The shot, the blast of light, is cleaved in half. It does nothing, and the Queen continues to emerge.

"...Jules is right," Lia agrees. "A few seconds of running won't help, we need to make sure nothing's going to collapse on us. Or under us, or… fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

We start to move, Emily dragging us out into the middle of the street as we hope to god that we aren't over a sinkhole or about to be jumped by a Behemoth. The Queen's ever-shifting tendril continues to extend into the world, and the more it does the more tendrils it becomes, splitting and splitting and splitting and splitting even as it grows. More of the monster follows, reaching down towards the ground at speeds that my brain struggles to parse at the massive scales involved.

And then, it drops. Agnus Dei shoots at the Queen a few more times, but her whole squadron turns and flies away before it hits the ground. Not even humanity's strongest can take on a Queen alone. Lia, Emily, Andre, and I all huddle up together, bracing low to the ground. Then the Queen hits the earth, taking the fall almost gracefully compared to the Leviathans, despite the enormous difference in size. But we can see the shockwave as it comes towards us, so we cover our heads and pray.

We luck out. Or maybe we just happened to pick a good spot. While the quake collapses buildings all around us, shaking and shattering what feels like the entire planet, the road holds with only a collection of cracks in the pavement. Slowly, with shuddering breaths, we unfold ourselves from the ground to take in the devastation around us. The entire neighborhood is splinters and shattered stone.

Out in the distance, the Queen looms, having caused all this devastation not even with her incredible power, but simply with her bulk. But she does have power. I can feel it, somehow. In the air around me, there is a pressure. A presence. Her grip envelops me, testing and squeezing and trying to cut. To kill. Always waiting, always furious that I am not in enough pieces.

"Okay," Andre breathes. "Okay, now we run."

"Andre, no—" Emily tries to insist, but he cuts her off.

"Fuck you guys!" he snaps, his breaths coming faster and more panicked. "Did you see that? What more are you waiting for? We need to go. Now!"

But we can't. I feel it pressing at me. And not just me, but the others too. I grab Andre by the wrist as he tries to let go of my hand. Emily holds the other, and Lia supports my shoulder. Everyone is touching me, and somehow that lets me feel the invisible cutting pressure trying to pierce into them, too.

"Andre, she's right," I press, "I'm pretty sure that we're in danger."

"I fucking know that we're in danger!" he says. "Which is why I'm tired of waiting for your slow a—"

He doesn't get to finish his sentence, because in that moment he breaks out of my grip. And the moment he stops touching me, he becomes a flow of red.

Some gruesome part of me wants to count the cuts, but they all seem to happen at once, turning what was once a boy into an oozing pile of cloth and cubed meat faster than any of us can blink. We don't scream. We don't cry or gasp or vomit. It's too fast for any of those reactions, sudden to the point that it seems impossible that it could have ever happened at all. We simply stare in shock, as someone we've lived with for years is killed so brutally that they become unrecognizable as having ever been human.

Emily, to my surprise, is the one that recovers first.

"...So. We're making sure not to let go of Julietta, right Lia?" she says, inflection utterly absent from her voice.

"Yeah," Lia says quietly. "Agreed."

We keep our vomit in our throats, and walk away.

Chapter 3 - Why Do I Know That

How many people have to die before I finally get my shit together?

That thought echoes in my mind, over and over, as we leave Andre's corpse behind. Funny how it takes a second foster brother turning into a mangled pile of meat for the shock of the first to actually start wearing off. Odds are that Peter is dead too, now that I think about it. I've never liked my so-called brothers, I'll admit, but I didn't hate them either. It was just always my job to herd them like the cats they are, being the only level-headed and mature member of our fake little family who could actually speak up for herself.

And I failed to do that. I failed to do much of anything, staying quiet and forcing Emily, of all people, to take charge. And I like Emily, but even with her sudden, strange confidence she doesn't know how to manage people like I do. As usual, she has the plan. She knows what needs to be done. But I'm the one who has to get people to actually be sensible, and I failed at that when I was needed most.

No more. I refuse. I take a deep breath, and another, and then turn to Lia. She's holding my right hand, with Emily keeping a deathgrip on my left. The pressure that killed Andre still dances across my skin, looking for a way inside, but it hasn't found anything yet and there's nothing I can do but hope that will continue. What I can do is manage people.

Lia is our next flight risk. Obviously. Emily is the one who proposed this 'use my powers to prevent dying' strategy in the first place, so she's not going anywhere. And while Lia saw what happens if she lets go of me, she's still panicking. It's obvious from the bob of her Adam's apple, the twitching of her eyes, and the sheen of sweat on her skin. Her thoughts are going a mile a minute, and in situations like this, that could be really, really bad.

I'm panicking too, of course. At least, I think I am. My body is shaking, screaming at me to move faster, but more than anything I just feel numb. …Which is ironic, since my right hand is experiencing physical sensation for the first time I can actually remember, and I do not like it.

I'm not sure if Lia realizes she's currently holding an exact replica of her own hand, but if she doesn't I'm definitely not going to point it out to her.

"Lia, slower breaths," I say instead.

"Oh, now you're talkative, huh?" she snaps at me. Because she's scared, and she reacts to fear by appearing to be angry, like a cat puffing up its body and hissing at a dog. (I really like cats, because they're absolute dumbasses and therefore perfect metaphors for people.) I want to tell her to shut her ass up and do what I say, because literally everyone knows that hyperventilation is bad and slow breaths help a person calm down and I shouldn't need to fucking justify reminding her to take care of herself in a crisis. But Lia is self-centered to the point of fragility, and what I want to tell her won't actually make her do what I need her to do.

"Emily is keeping calm," I tell her instead, even though that's probably a lie. Emily appears calm, though, and as long as I make it a competition Lia will compete.

"Fuck off," Lia snaps at me. "How could anyone be calm right now?"

But she starts breathing slower and stops twitching her eyeballs around like a frightened rabbit, and that's all I need. I squeeze her hand a little tighter, trying to ignore the sensation of feeling crawling further up my arm, the flesh visibly twisting and smoothing and turning itself into a copy of her arm, down to the last hair follicle.

I know this because I can feel them, somehow. Something in the back of my head crawls through Lia's stupidly perfect body the same way that pressure keeps trying to burrow into me and rip me apart. It teases away at what she is and what she's made of, showing me every little detail of every little cell in a way that I get, I understand, except I don't because whenever I try to focus on the details they slip away from my aching head like blood from a wound.

I feel like I'm looking at a tapestry the size of a castle, hanging from high in the sky. I can gaze at it from a distance and see the artwork of her body, but if I step closer to examine the threads the context is lost. I can feel the way her tendons link bicep to bone, but the deeper I focus the more that bone slips away from my mind, the infinite complexity of the tendon consuming my focus until it's not even a tendon anymore, just a single thread of the tapestry that I mindlessly follow along the weave, any idea of the greater picture rendered incomprehensible.

I hate it. I want this feeling to stop. It picks at my mind, making it harder for my already-struggling brain to focus. More and more of my arm turns soft and dark and damnably smooth, confusing sensation after confusing sensation eternally clawing at me, needing to be understood. One of them, I'm sure, has to be warmth. I can't remember feeling temperature, which has always been a problem for me because I can't sweat. Cold isn't too bad; I know I need to put on more clothes when I start to shiver. But heat has always been dangerous for me, as I never know when it's too hot out until I start to feel nauseous and dizzy.

But now, as we power walk (or in my case, power limp) through the dead streets of the Chicago suburbs, I can feel my arm telling me something is wrong. The sun beats down from the ever-more-cloudless sky, and it has a presence on my skin. An uncomfortable film of liquid starts secreting itself in response, and that thing in my head—my power, I suppose—gleefully tells me far more than I ever wanted to know of sweat-vomiting pores and the way my body now produces the salty liquid on command.

It's distracting. Too distracting. I need to focus, to be better than this. Lia is starting to look worse again, her thoughts no doubt spiraling in the silence. I need to distract her, too.

"Where were you two going to go on your date?" I ask.

"Is now really the fucking time to be indulging your siscon shit, Jules?" Lia hisses.

"Humor me," I scowl, refusing to rise to the bait.

"Shouldn't we be staying quiet?" Lia counters. "Because, y'know, there are giant monsters hunting us?"

"It should be fine," Emily says quietly. "I don't think it'll make a big difference on whether or not they find us. We're kind of walking out in the open."

We don't have much choice but to walk out in the open. Everything other than the street is mostly rubble from the earthquake, so there isn't a lot of cover. Lia looks around and sighs, silently conceding the point.

"...We were going to some cheese-tasting place out of town," she says. "Emily gets super weird about cheese. But like, in a really cute way. I was looking forward to it."

"I don't get weird," Emily protests. "Cheese is just neat. It's all so fundamentally similar, yet there are a million different ways to make it and it creates a million different complex flavors. The amount of subtlety in the art is cool. Like, even a master usually only knows how to make a select few styles of cheese, though obviously they make them really well and they are just so good."

"What's your favorite cheese?" I ask, leaning on her a bit as I struggle over an uneven part of the road. In the back of my mind, something starts crawling over Lia's legs.

"Oh my god, Raclette du Valais," Emily sighs. "It has a whole dish named after it where you heat up a big wheel of it until it starts to melt, scrape off just the liquid bits, and drizzle them all over potatoes and other stuff and it's so good."

I nod along. People don't often talk to me about food since, y'know, I can't actually taste stuff, but it's exactly the distraction we need right now. We just need to keep moving, keep walking so we have as long as possible before the monsters overtake us. If we're lucky, we'll reach the defensive lines of the military before they catch us. Unfortunately, I'm here, so 'lucky' is quite a ways beyond us.

We can see our supposed saviors out there in the distance. Helicopters, mostly, flying around the edge of some invisible line in the sand that the commanders have drawn. We can't see any of the ground troops, but the presence of those flying protectors should mean that the rest of our forces are gathering underneath them, ready to defend the dwindling territory we have left. We make it to them, and we make it to safety.

Naturally, they are a lot farther away than I'd like. Hours away, at least. But the less we think about that, the more likely we are to keep a level head long enough to make it there.

I feel myself getting winded, my ravaged body struggling with more walking than it's used to doing in a day, let alone an hour. Focusing on Emily helps, and I can feel the muscles in Lia's face pull her lips into a smile as her girlfriend jabbers on. It's kind of sweet how it seems to genuinely relax her, making me question my assumptions about their relationship in ways that cause my gut to churn and boil.

But now is not the time for whatever that emotion is, so I firmly shut it down. I keep my eyes glued to the ground, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and doing my best to not think about how it's a little easier not to trip with every step I take.

I can't help but chuckle. I'm turning into Lia. God, I hate her. My mirth can't last, though.

We hear the Behemoth before we can see it, but it's not long after that we can see one stepping over the piles of rubble behind us. The Behemoth is like a massively upscaled version of the Wasps: four limbs, each tipped with a long blade rather than a foot, and no head. A long, flat tail like an eel's—or a Leviathan's—flicks back and forth behind them, skimming just above the surface of the ground without ever touching it. Whatever sensory organs these beasts have are integrated somewhere into the thick skin of their torso and thighs, and though I see collections of holes that could be ears or breathing vents or acid-launchers or something even worse, I have no true idea how it might be tracking us.

Most Behemoths tend to be compared to elephants, with thick, blunt limbs and huge bodies that crush everything that opposes them. Yet this hive's Behemoths seem to be thinner and sharper than the ones I've seen pictures of online, more like a headless giraffe with their gangly legs and top-heavy frame. Of course, giraffes don't look quite so goofy up close. When an animal with legs taller than your body gets near enough to almost touch, the difference in scale isn't so much seen as it is felt. Every step of the massive monster cleaves into the ground, leaving a thin hole whenever it lifts a leg.

It is, thankfully, still very far away. Emily pulls us off in what seems like a random direction, but a plan I don't understand is better than no plan at all, so I follow her lead. She starts to speed up, and I immediately panic about falling, but to my utter surprise my legs catch me when I stumble. I can feel them now, rubbing up against my pants, twitching and tingling and sweating as we move. My lungs feel clearer, the pinches and kinks in my torso gone as more and more wretched, overwhelming feeling spreads through my body.

"...What the fuck?" Lia hisses, and I see she's staring at my face. Without even thinking about it, I feel myself mirror her expression exactly, testing the same electrical impulses and ensuring they get the same results. Her breath catches, and she looks away. I swallow nervously, and do the same. What the fuck was that?

Feeling is spreading through my whole body now, and Emily clearly wants to go faster so on a whim I try to run. I stumble almost immediately, not knowing the right steps, but I catch my balance again. A stumble no longer guarantees a fall. I feel giddy. I feel ill. Hair spills from my scalp and tickles my neck, and I nearly fall again as the sensation makes me spasm.

The feeling is spreading to more than just my skin. Everything is different and off, my blind eye snapping into functionality and instantly fixing the blurs in my vision. My left arm starts to change, dramatically faster than the glacial pace my right took, the flesh rippling into place in seconds rather than the better part of an hour. My bones are tingling, a sensation of change dancing up my spine towards my skull, towards my brain. Throughout it all, the Behemoth gets closer, but I honestly think my power is scarier.

Not my brain, I beg. You can't do that. That's ME. Even if nobody else cares about that, I do. Yet I know it's already changing. My balance, my vision, my hearing, the way every step I take is closer to a run than the last… that's all in the brain. Neural pathways are rewriting themselves, twisting into functionalities and habits that I didn't have before, so they have to be coming from the same place the rest of me is. Her.

I could die before the monster even gets here, my corpse running around thinking someone else's thoughts.

Is it crazy to be scared of this? Maybe. I don't know how powers work. But I've always thought the person I am is nothing but a collection of biology and chemicals stitched together, so if my power changes that biology, an alteration of personhood naturally follows, doesn't it? So I can't let it do that. I can't allow myself to be someone else that completely. Whatever my power is doing to make me like her, to give me all the damn effortless beauty I've always envied, it needs to stop inside the skull. You're my goddamn power, so you listen to me, okay?

Fuck, I really hope that's how it works. It's so weird even having a power. I have to accept that, considering that it's the only thing keeping any of us alive (how the fuck is it doing that, by the way!? Seems kind of important, yet also completely unrelated to the fact that I'm becoming a rich bitch clone.) but conceptualizing myself that way is… it just doesn't quite fit what feels like me. But I guess none of me fits as 'me' right now. I'll have to get used to that. …And running from a scary monster doesn't seem like the time to philosophize about the nature of the self anyway.

The crashing noises get louder and louder behind us, indicating that our pursuit approaches. I try to speed up some more and stumble again, Lia yanking me back to my feet so we can keep moving. I nod thanks at her, but she avoids looking at me. I guess I don't blame her.

I'm pretty sure my changes are done. I can feel both of us, and we're identical. …Other than the brain, thankfully. I'm genuinely not sure how much of that has changed, and I don't actually want to know if answering that question is an option. Fuck, what am I even doing? What is this? Every inch of my skin is screaming at me, every breath of air is filled with sensation, even opening my mouth shoves an excess of way too much into my mind. None of it is bad in a vacuum, it's not unpleasant in and of itself, but there's so much of it and it won't stop because it's my body, it's just like this now and I don't know how to make it go away!

All I feel is Lia. Lia, Lia, Lia, every fucking inch of Lia has been branded into my brain with a burning iron. It's so overwhelming that I can barely even focus on the thundering footsteps of the Behemoth until they're close enough to make us stumble.

And that's pretty damn close.

Emily has been leading us through narrow patches of rubble, weaving between the remains of houses just barely far enough apart to give us a clear path through but still close enough together to force the monster to climb over unstable ground. I have no idea how she's picking the path so well, but every turn she takes has been buying us precious seconds to make more distance. Of course, the beast has still, inevitably, caught up. It… its legs are pretty long.

I, uh. Earlier, I thought something about my power being scarier than the monster. This close to the thing, I'd like to revise my opinion. It's huge, with thick gray skin armoring its bulbous torso. Each leg is over seven feet long, the bottom four feet composed entirely of a giant sapphire-blue blade, glossy and shimmering with cloudy patterns of white throughout. They'd be beautiful if not for the mortal danger or the fact that they're already stained with extremely worrying quantities of blood.

The upper part of the leg is a thick pillar of muscle, connecting to the ovular main body by a shoulder bone embedded too deep within layers of skin and what I think is subdermal armor for me to actually make out anything that might be a skeleton. This close, I can see long, whisker-like hairs on the monster's belly, along with rows of what are definitely breathing vents (the way they flex to let airflow in and out is impossible to confuse for the contractions of liquid-favoring pores wait why do I know that) and a collection of what look like fist-sized black marbles imbedded around the creature's body are doubtlessly its eyes. Worst of all, however, is the monster's overwhelming stench, a hundred smells all at once that claw at the inside of my nose in ways that I'm sure I'd have pithy metaphors for if I was capable of recognizing any scents at all, ever.

"Eyes forward!" Emily shrieks at me. "Focus on keeping your balance!"

Oh shit, right! The panic and the running and the mortal danger! I stumble a little as my brain reminds itself that it needs to be terrified, but Emily and Lia both catch me by an armpit and keep me on my feet.

"No falling, Jules!" Lia hisses. "We're all getting out of here, okay?"

God, I want to believe her.

"Do we have a plan?" I ask her, and holy fuck that's not my voice, that's not what my voice sounds like, what the fuck was that!?

"I dunno, I was kinda hoping you'd shoot lasers at it!" Lia shouts.

"Yeah, me too!" I snap. But no, instead I have freaky clone powers!

"Left!" Emily shouts, and she yanks Lia and me towards her moments before a leg crashes down into the ground next to us.

"Emily, where are we going?" I ask. God damn it I sound so weird now. Is this what Lia hears her voice as whenever she speaks?

"I don't know!" she shrieks. "I'm just trying to keep us alive in the next five seconds, okay? I don't have anything long-term!"

We scamper around like rats, zig-zagging to use the monster's huge size against it as much as possible, but this is a losing battle and we all know it. We're going to die here. There's no real point in running, beyond that fact that it ups the chance of being rescued from less than one percent to still less than one percent, but maybe with an extra digit after the period. The thundering footsteps of the Behemoth hound our every move, snapping through rubble and swatting aside fences like blades of grass. Throughout it all, the monster makes no other noise. Its stomps and slashes might be loud, but it does not roar or bellow or call for its fellows. It remains eerily silent the entire time, its body angled so one of its many pitch-black eyes always points our way.

It's only a matter of time, and I'm ultimately the one that fucks it up. The beast cuts us off, leaping in front of us, and I trip trying to change direction. Lia and Emily can only save my clumsy ass so many times before I fall on it, so they topple down with me as I fall directly onto it. I wince as pain shoots up my tailbone, my body deviating from its template as an involuntary crack forms in the bone. It hurts, but pain is easier to ignore than the constant feeling all over my skin so I don't really care. I don't have time to care anyway.

The Behemoth is on us.

We try to coordinate ourselves back to our feet, but the best we can manage is a faulty leap backwards, avoiding the first blow but tumbling into an even worse tangle of limbs than when we started.

"Sorry," Emily mutters.

"Huh?" I say, and she shoves me directly into the monster's next attack.

The four-foot-long crystal blade that acts as this thing's leg pierces through my stomach in the span of a heartbeat, embedding itself in the ground behind me. It hurts—holy shit it hurts—but the experience of simply being in contact with it at all is somehow worse. The pain, I can manage, but that new little something in the back of my head, excitedly seeking all it can, it's just…

…A crystalline structure, not technically organic but formed from organic processes, its lattice grown molecule by molecule within the cells (units? Fragments? Divisions.) at the underside of the knee. (They aren't cells, they're nothing like cells, cells are what Lia's are called.) I can feel myself hyperventilating, blood gushing from my torso as the blade extracts itself back out of the gaping wound but I grab it, I can't let it escape me, I have to finish. The blade is fundamentally simplistic, and after decoding the way the crystallization divisions ensure and maintain its specific shape over the course of its growth, I can move on above to the rest of the leg. I was right about the thickness of the skin and the subdermal armor, but the muscle is nothing like I expected: sturdy, hollow bone-equivalents filled with dense liquid form a hydraulic movement system, collections of pressure-containers deep inside the ovoid body where a puncture would be less likely to end up risking an entire leg.

I laugh, blood dribbling down my chin as I continue hugging tight against the weapon that just ran me through. There's more to this, a lot more. The internal body and digestive system are nothing like Lia's, just a small hole near the top of the body, devoid of teeth or even much in the way of an esophagus, dropping directly into an intestinal-equivalent without anything like a stomach to break it down. It can't eat, not on its own. Whatever this is, it needs to be fed.

"Julietta!" Emily barks. I blink, nearly losing my grip on the blade, as slick as it is with my blood. Oh fuck, I'm bleeding everywhere and I'm clutching a giant monster leg and I need to kill it I know the best place to kill it.

I collapse, my arm twitching as it doubles in mass in nearly a second. Braced against the ground I extend it upwards, crystalline structures surging into place at obscene speeds, growing and elongating and sharpening and piercing directly into the core of the Behemoth. It rears back in pain, and though it still doesn't cry out (because it can't, it has no vocal systems) the monster is obviously wounded. I can feel, after all, exactly how wounded it is, a new configuration of its skin and organs marking themselves in my memory.

I missed the hydraulic pressure chambers, though. I'd better stab it again.

I pull my arm back (its arm? Whatever, it's mine now.) and flex the newly-grown piston in my chest as hard as it will go. My arm fires forward like a rocket, stabbing upwards and piercing through the first layer of the monster's armor. Still not enough. I take a deep breath (shallow, inefficient, oxygen low, had to remove a lung for space, expanding torso) and strike again, the Behemoth stumbling as I twitch and grow. My stomach protests as the acids inside it dry up, the lining withering away as my belly stitches itself back together bigger, stronger, different, cells and divisions competing for real estate in the free country of my flesh. Taller, bigger, more of my limbs growing into monstrosities, I roar the last roar I'm able to as my second lung finishes reconfiguring into nothing, and tackle the behemoth to the ground.

It stabs me back, but who cares about pain, deviations from the template can be remade anyway, I just need to pierce through. With my enormous weight behind the blow, I finally, finally cut past all the layers of armor and into the pressure tanks.

Organic fluid blasts out of the wound like a geyser, launching my arm clear back out of the Behemoth's chest and ripping into a full complement of other organs. It's dead in seconds, and as I stumble backwards from the force of the explosion, my transformation finally completes.

I wish I could still scream.

It hits me all at once. Omnidirectional vision, a sense of vibrations that both is and is not hearing, a proprioception that is impossible and nonsensical because a person cannot be that tall, but worst of all is the agonizing, devastating, eruption of smell.

I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it, it's nothing but cacophonous gobbledygook, it's just nonsense and chaos and it's too much but it needs my attention right now, but it's always right now, it won't stop and I can't… I can't I can't I can't!

"Stop!" something shouts. "Julietta, stop! W-whatever you're doing right now, it's bad!"

The more I try to focus, the more everything becomes smell. It is smell, right? How could I even know, I don't… that's not something that's in my life. It's one of the hundreds of fucking things that everyone knows everything about but will never be part of my life! And yet here we are. I can't stop trying to figure it out, it's everything right now, and though the impossible complexity of it makes me want to scream, some of it is… it's starting to feel like…

No. Wait. What's happening to my brain?

I shrink even faster than I grew, my body shriveling up and collapsing back into humanity. My bladed limbs seem to dissolve into nothing as my skin thins, my pistons depressurize, and my eyes vanish just in time for a head to start growing in with a new pair. I fall from one being to another, hitting the ground and collapsing to my knees, naked and vomiting.

My skin is dark, and smooth, and no more mine than it was when I was a monster. I know it's a stupid idea, I know Lia's body is better for escaping a monstrous apocalypse-scape, but I try to will myself to turn back into my real body anyway.

Nothing happens. I don't know how.

"Julietta?" Emily says, her hand grabbing my shoulder. "Julietta, we need to go. Now."

"I…" a cough steals whatever words I was going to say, if there even were any.

"Julietta, I know this is a lot, I know this is hard for you, but there are more coming. We have to go."

"Okay," I agree, staggering to my feet. "Okay. Where's—"

I spot what's left of Lia before I can finish the question, a bloody array of meat scattered out across the ground. She must have died falling away from me, her grip broken by Emily's shove or my transformation or… any number of other things.

"What happened?" I ask, breathless.

"I don't know," Emily says, trying to pull me into a run. "She let go."

I stare at her, feeling her hand on my shoulder. Because I have feeling now. And… it wasn't there before, was it?

"Didn't you?" I ask.

"No, I was holding your leg," she says. "The crystal part. Now let's go."

A stomp in the distance punctuates her urgency, so I nod and follow. She's right, we have to go. We have to get out of here.

Other mysteries can wait until later.