CW: gangs, self harm imagery, firearms, blades, psychotic experiences, religion, fantasy racism, fantasy queerphobia, psychic warfare

Δ / ε

SIDESHOW

Cammy finds pitch black void, all she thought she'd see, spooling herself out from Tachae's into the leis. The leis are all that remains of the first Loum but she tells herself her challenge will be to delve them, find enough feathershed to weave it anew.

Weave it her way this time, with Jewel as adjunct, she thinks; keeping him where I can see him. Lest he lose his shit and blow it again. What of him I've managed to save, which I don't know, can never figure out.

Without weaves to map it the leis in visual are pitch void. Cat Eyes would've taken a second, if that long, to slip in with her. He's now somewhere in this darkness, waiting if he feels he has to wait.

He'll wait forever, she thinks. So I'll find him. She cloaks her mote aura as dark as she can get it. Without thread to hold each movement is unsure, nervous. The motes themselves cling to each other in weird, bumpy orbits.

She could be groping in the darkness, asking it to cut her wrists and tendons apart. Then like a whispered breath, thoughts strand between the motes.

Slip in and harden into gouging knives. To coalesce like this, she thinks, Jewel would kill for whatever he's hardwired himself to use. Has killed for it, in a way.

[Fuck.]

[You read it right,] Cat Eyes/Jewel says. He’s gouged in with her like there's no part of him he needs to leave out there. [To deal with the dead leis. Fix what he's got her doing up there. This is his play. I'm riding shotgun. T doesn't know.]

[You wish,] she says, and then she is wishing herself, her motes finding their extremes as she goes phantasm. The space between the motes where all can be wished for, kept safe, wished black and putrid. Great, she thinks. I kept enough of him safe that he's still one fucked puppy. But even that can feed into the fantasy, because maybe that's the part she saved, but not the part he liked most. Strung dead enough to care and with your worst self all to share the time with.

In that space she lets the wishes play out, and the wishes give breath, with him at her heart, to the rebirth hiding deep within the void in the leis. This brings forth the spark that begins to thread them in pure white. A purer shade, she thinks, than the Velih themselves could get to. She checks herself. It's way better than what Jewel strung up. She has that.

As the whites weave Cat Eyes/Jewel slips out with a sigh, almost a shame run along the threads. At home as he was in the void, that thread had him razors through the core of anything he could think about.

[Didn't think you'd go ghost,] hears him say. [Thought you'd just take it.]

She ignores him. So much space and time. So much space to spin the initial framing tapestry that holds the leis, flows marrow through their bones. Where the destiny energy is so concentrated it can be visualized as shape, as thicker threads of finer lace entwine. It’s cut out enough to do, and she wonders if now that she's made her point he'll help. Then inside she frowns. Cat Eyes is already just a distant cloud on a runway line out of the main tangle.

The time is her contract up there. In play for as long as it's useful to both parties. So she sweats out the imprint the knives had left in her and forces her motes to hold steady. As she weaves the pale thread whitens more against the dark shadows of the Clusters refracted through Velih eyes. Like lichen streaks in thick moss they course through the void of the leis.

Jewel told her there were two. Two of his agents. She knows who the second is but not how to find him. What will the Velih say now, she thinks, waiting, biding their time, now that she's added rebirth to her slate? As if ripping them off wasn't bad enough. She burrows deep within her own folds. The weave flowers outward, strands first then thickens into braids, until it's past what she can process. As if a nest of mass brambles but dimpling into the void, fluttering over it. She pictures it spilling out into the world, if they all haven't forgotten how to use it.

When Cat Eyes comes back, telling her T says it's break time, she dimples herself, letting her motes sink back beneath the surface of the 2.0 Loum. Then she respools. She finds herself back at Tachae's, her body refixed from whatever it was doing to be back in front of the beater-top, cross legged, but her knees, she sees, are askew.

FBA

She's come back to an impromptu war council. A few B. Moths are here, and she guesses they’re higher-ups from the filaments they wear as chains, quicksilver with a milky shine. All are hooded and most capped beneath. White hoods and sweaters sag over black jeans.

There's a handful of them, enough to make the small space cramp even harder.

"Damn," she says to no one, not really. "Y'all here for a holo-sim or something? A training chamber?" She adjusts herself. Cardboard boxes half-opened litter the space, and a few terminals are online. She guesses Cat Eyes had her help with that.

"Ayo," one of them says, "the chick's got something to say."

"She looked smarter before," says the other. "Keeping her mouth shut." Dreads plait his cheeks, some trailing clumped into the sleeve of his hood. Bleached in white streaks like phosphor burn.

Cat Eyes' voice trails from the back. "She's smart enough."

"Sure," says the first. "You don't have a clue, do you?" he says. "You were buzzing around but you weren't aware."

He looks at the second. His own hair is cropped or non-extant beneath the fuzz of his beanie. "Shit, what do you think, Kai?"

"You owe her," Cat Eyes says. Coming back into the room holding something that looks to her like an augmented pistola. A blue screen fizzes above the casing chamber. He's humming to himself, his hum enjoining the fizz of the screen. He keeps his distance from the Moths. Then he stops.

"She's cooked up something pretty in there."

Now it's Kai's turn to look off-step. "Why? What is it?"

"Right now? A framework. But I've already started charting the lines she's nursed. You could ride the scales, all the way. Get the Velih to get miraculous just to square it. "You get it?" he says after a moment of silence. "The V themselves."

The first spits. "Sounds like snitch shit."

"Roll one," Kai says, his voice here, his eyes somewhere else. Chasing a thought.

Cat Eyes twitches but Cammy's a step ahead. "Can I talk to you about something," she says. Right as Jewel, she thinks, was about to open his mouth for him.

She's tugging him away when Kai says to hold on.

"This place is now hallowed ground. May all be entombed, brothers."

The voice is one, though amassed from them all. "Whom so ever are entombed within these walls find solace in the last light."

Grim, she thinks. She grabs Cat Eyes by the arm and when she lets go he says nothing. Follows her into the back like a leashed dog. "Entombed," she says. "You're gonna stand for that?"

He shrugs. His face is half-cut in the light seeping from the fresh electronica beyond the doorway, strands of what she decides is perma-greased hair beating out his eyelashes to strand the corners of his eye sockets.

She rolls her eyes. "I mean you, dude. Not J." If I'm talking to Jewel, and he's in control, then he's just losing this guy's life for him. Wasting it away, keeping the dude happy as a mid-man for gangers. "They were talking about this place like none of us can leave. Like we’ll die here."

"Yea," he says, as if she's stupid. "They talk about all places like that." Just, he doesn't say, setting us straight. As if, she thinks, they're free, and maybe they are. Free of fear, the fear that comes with death. Death isn’t their sure thing at the end of their given run. It’s a shot in the night, or even under the Tri-Sun.

"Look," she says, "I don't wanna hear that shit. It's demotivational." She turns on him, stalking to the bare wall at the back of the room. The ash smears across the pallid paint remind her of scorched earth. "What am I gonna do when the beater runs out of bat?"

"T's on it," he says. "By which I mean, T isn't bugging too hard. No news is good news."

"I wanna meet them," she says. "I deserve to, if I'm working for them, if I'm the crux of the op."

He stares at her. Brows gaunt beneath the fuzz of his cap. "T's the last person you want to be dealing with."

"Why," she says. "Dep-chess? Because I beat you, down there."

He says nothing. As if he doesn't need to. But she's gotten him out of the room, and the place sworn sacred for her trouble. The gamer in his hands hangs limp, twitching in coyness at the lengths of his fingers. As he turns away his half-mask of light is gone, and there's the full moon of the facing cap, the greased hair flip beneath, the crook-fold of his sweatshirt.

"Think about what you owe."

Light flickers on with his movement to the corner cabinet, a small squared socket light nearby. Its faint glow sets off lashes and whiskers where he's fucked up his shave. Still enough to splash over the cabinet, gleaning from it the contours of a laptop. This one is no beater-top. It's top-line or else preserved through ascetic focus. A black casing swims with streams of grey-white light like thawing ice. The blue screen above the augmented pistola melts into the grey light, is grey itself, hides and then he slings the tech into a deep cargo pocket.

Meanwhile the bat cradle spins the pristine light into a blanket blessing. That would protect either it, she thinks, or the mote aura within. She hopes she hasn't just whistled.

"Yours?" she says.

He's booting it up, suddenly the whole room awash in blue light, his face paled by it, his eyes sunken in it, as if he hasn't slept. "'Till T says otherwise."

"It's an FBA, isn't it?" she says, and he nods. Both of them know now that further talking is, has always been, a slag for him. Because if he is Full Body Accessed he has a half-life. And that's whatever life was left after crashing the Clusters.

"I'm sorry," she says, "I'll get back to work." The sad thing is that he doesn't ignore her. Even though he's already dreaming, weaving his way through the Loum. Even not in his body he is watching her as she goes, in his eyes the same twin fires that had seen her in the dark.

EMPTY & LOOSE

Cammy never about shit. That's what she hears from life-moguls of tomorrow barking advice at her every street casing. Retrowaved fashion canvas for the shape-walkers of the Ghetto Clusters preaching stylized easy living. Through the schizophrenic spam training the scattered breezes of their breath reach her smelling of musk, a relentless bravery lending sour years to their sweat. They studied her. Velih blood backwash has been in her veins since the black hexagramme pills found their way into her stomach.

You can hear them, ghosts in the reaches, with or without a Loum mockup. Voices that isolate. Pin you against opposite ends of your own skull. Of course then you are severed. Until you confuse them with the voices in your own head. They all blur together in an interwoven seam, with or without a feedback frame.

Turns out you can hear them wherever you go. Echoes fuse together in swarms to form a greater cloud. These envelop the Tri-Sun light, soak it into churning ocean, keep you high out of your mind on mirage.

The walls that section off this area of the Clusters are high, loom barbed by razorwire and beneath the coiled serrated loop-arounds there is matte brickwork laid blackish gray. This is overpainted by streaks of photo-solvent into the trend which has changed with either time or translation by (she reminds herself) whatever reconstruction is operating out of that mess she'd left in the Chapel. The vogue now is 'meridians consumed by veiling destinies' or so the local Curate informs them. The Curate is not defined by any effort but is coalesced into via where he happens to reside. She's on her way there now to barter for influ-credits on behalf of the B. Moths.

They need it. The GSS are getting final formed or at least tertiaried by their Hiroko contract. Now every spraypaint freakout reflects their strength in some way. Anagrammed into the symbology somehow and those who have been schizophrenia-spammed are most weak to it, will see it all places. So going up to the Curate begging for scraps but they have the 2.0 Loum reconstructed on their side. Cat Eyes thinks that's worth something and for all Cammy knows that's what T thinks. On Cat Eyes' say-so. That's why she doubts. She folds her hands in a prayer to the weed that was fucking with her. That prayer consists of: please have mercy on me. Because, she'd thought, it made sense to pray to those who tormented you, not those that said they could relieve the torment.

Her hands are clasped like that as she enters the Curate. The Curate withdraws from his physical external structure as a shady shopfront in the Clusters down to his shape-walker form, the one that keeps the location safe, most likely for himself. Before her eyes he's gene-spliced into an old Elfoid. These are marked by rove of ear and slower heartbeats, slower breath. Elfoids are gendered into default and she-elves, the neowave slur being ‘shelvers,’ that they're kept on the shelf. Cammy gives herself the most wasted smile she can as she comes in with her Loum self tethered in the light plane and shows it off. The Elfoid doesn't have any time for this, but the Curate in it needs to pay some semblance of attention.

Cammy never about shit, the weed repeats. That called itself Orche, a young planetconsciousness from somewhere past the Interwave. Empty thoughts to dead hands there. Empty seeds to the fields that stretch askant and parched in her eyes.

They are golden light beams that pierce from the rivulets of the blade shadow crook. Like teardrops stripped of the glint of the sun which has stolen itself away to thread a razor wire to the shoulders of her Bridge and Witch-Leashed, Phassa. The Curate namedrops and Cammy commits if to memory, unsure why.

The Curate knows most about Orche because she's the biggest, brightest star. Wants to know what of Orche there is to sell to the archaea-boned Velih Skein re-feathered its way across a desert entropic, a death field. So empty synaptical there might be something hiding out in the expansion. Cammy's still flipping a half-dipped waster smile. She's out of there in terms of mental-spatial. Her mind's still in the streets where the paint moves and the weeds in bright burning flame and fragrance.

So the Elfoid is about to tell her she’s not about shit when she says the 2.0 Loum skein feathered is empty synapse anyway. A reconstruction. Glass that could be shattered by a potent enough psychic nuke bomb. What it needs is defense. A barrier to coat the bones. High-grade but soft enough to twist, lacquer, entwine the marrowing thread.

Curate says all chill but he needs some hype value. His own personal nexus marked and tagged so more seekers can find; could be a good idea. One thing default Elfoids love is good ideas, she thinks.

She takes some stock, awareness of her scene. The Curate’s place is here swallowed behind the 2.0 frame infra-visioned so she can see the psychocultural loadouts. The place itself could be tapestried, templed up, a shrine to flora, overlaced by glow paint ribbons of thorns and roses. Sapped in are designs of crawling vine and bright ivy. The ugly psycho-cultural womb-function is painted in on-trend motif as a teething chalice.

She shudders. The Curate's say is it’s culture shock. He does it for the point or the promise of. Back within the visible sculpture there are crooks of water stain and the walls are like white marble faded with absence of light or polish. She says she doesn’t understand Orche or what she’s about, just that she has her ear. The Curate has her pre-flattered.

He’s saying he can get the B. Moths war-toned now. Hologramatic paint shit that can flare into light or fade into darkness at the touch of an emotion, closed fist of need. Stuff that plasters into the Loum to pop them in and out of this reality at a bullet pop, keep the thought charged for a spray. In many ways like instancing in and out of their own deaths.

So she’s out there streetwise and Kai’s passed her a hybrid cig. Enough to trick but not addict, as the promo goes. She could have used it and does. It’s not Kai out there telling her she ain’t about shit. It’s those ghost voices drifting in while his eyes are dark, probing, serious. All the alley graf is tributes to dead soldiers and kings. Kai’s predecessors in symbology or lines of synthetic design mixed into each other. Kai’s eyes are pensive and swimming in darkness. Searching her.

So it’s him and her but she’s too scared to talk. She adjusts her hood which she now wears to block out the voices. As in this time and maybe always, going forward. It doesn’t block but muffles. It mutes, fades out, gets them fainter out there like, hell, she thinks, the dead loose protocols that they are.

II SCHIZOPHRENE

Walking back Cammy’s mind is blank. Slated out and she wants it all kept out. Kai’s been delegated to body her guard while bullet burst sounds are all she can hear in the velvet black from distant wars. She can tell these invade Kai’s mind too, but as a LT., he’s got orders on his feelings there.

When the GSS made their entrance it could have been on jetpacks or some shit she thinks but from the feeds their dope right now is gene-spliced reflexes and Hanzo steel. One almost gets her. Kai pulls her away and he’s gone chrome steel finish, paced caliber, tensed out from one of any six pockets. One of the GSS is screaming murder as blood pockmarks the pavement. The other managed to dice the bullet, she guesses. He’s on backswing and Cammy for all her schizophrene has no clue what to do in a fight like this. This is the bullet chase that happens while she’s busy hacking. Busy doing whatever she does, which she knows is how it looks. Kai weaves to avoid losing his head but by the stare he spins 360 degrees to flee down the nearest saferoute she can tell he might not be feeling this either. She’s already booking for it. Praying that’s what he wants, what makes sense; her to dip while he fights or follows. Guided by his stare and the lights, cold blue burn of the juicebox Tri-Sun.

Still she hears a cry of pain that could be bi-raced and even bi-gendered. The B. Moths skewed male for aggro but the GSS rely on technique so no telling there. A GSS could be any pale lady which could explain the neo-misogyny, she thinks, even if anyone who’d be newfound to an ancient lost territorial mapping. Kept alive in obscure bloodlines here in the Clusters. Those bloodlines front as the mega-corp Hiroko, she’d presume. When someone could be anyone you expect what they’re most likely not to be. One the spam sessions, she’s realized, have disintegrated; unwoven like how she re-wove the Loum, in reverse like the Velih blood wash against her heartbeat.

So the void of that echoes once twice, slaloms her skull. The alley walls are like paper flashing the way light glides with waterfall splitting around her. Split veils the onrushing painted stucco brick. No third echo because she’s worried about her own self this time. Put it all together, she thinks, I’m the fix; that’s what Jewel said. Jewel who died and I brought back with pieces missing.

I’m the fix, fixing up my host’s mistakes in violent design, but after all that, she hears no more bullet bursts. There is only the silence of night fallen, a peace accord dispersion, the kind on the wavelength everyone gets when someone’s scored a major kill.

She’s back at Tachae’s and Cat Eyes is FBA. busy. She’s almost ready to yank the freak out and tell T she’ll pay for any damages or absence of profit incurred. Not to mention flatlining him just to talk. She’s buried herself in the shroud; she’s looped black hoodie cops. Lit cold blue in fringe by the juice boxed Tri-Sun. Or so those thirsty for moonlight–she checks herself–have always called them, sipped light from them, sipped light with their eyes.

The moon has never been there for the Clusters, never to offer support either tidal (what tides?) or emotionally. It’s the ghosting sun Ochaoliv that slips behind the others veiled in translucence that is the closest they got. It’s the juice boxes, nifty white mini monoliths acting as base of op for the fleet cubes. How the fleet cubes still pattern the over-sky like stars, the under-sky like birds, the lanes like glow-bugs unless you look too close. The FBA wiring that she can see is filament tendrils wrapped around into the crook of his back, parallax on entry between his shoulder blades. His back is to her, nape peeking over the back of his plexiglass chair.

It’s some modern shit she hadn’t seen where before the place was in the dark. Lights are on now because T may or may not want to keep track of his vitals, his physical body. “Are you okay” would be the message there fuelled by both love and the severe overwatch of employ-terms. She’s still there headwise and about to yank his shit hoping for the B. Moth Broodlord to stop her.

He does so, yanking her back from the doorway she’d left open. Unsoft. She turns this into a tuck roll just to get some personal space. When she comes up the Broodlord is fixed on her. Cat Eyes breathes slow and steady in BG, like he’s asleep, like he’s hard at work.

“Fuck is your name,” she says. Mutters it low as in, do I care if you hear it or answer. Her fists are clenched. His beanie is half-tilted revealing the flicker of his buzz. “I don’t know,” he says, laughing it off. “What the fuck do they call me.”

“They call you Broodlord,” Cammy says, “but I’m not a moth. Listen, dude. I think your second got plugged out there. You care you lost a life or death, someone’s, right? Or is all you care about what you can get?”

He says, “None of us get much.” He muses. “So I guess we gotta dig. Dig out the equation to zero again. Subtract in negative. By the way, my mother named me Elli.” He rolls it enough for her to notice the asynchronicity.

“Do you, Elli, have,” Cammy says, “any kind of plan at all? We can’t do much if you guys aren’t keeping us safe, or this place. You swore an oath, man. ‘Let all be entombed’ and all that shit.”

She darts her chin tucking side-swivel behind her shoulder. “Because any time they want, it looks like.”

“You’re angry,” Elli says. “You don’t need to be.”

“Tough,” Cammy says, spitting it. Spitting it, rolling her eyes, and rolling out because it’s not her problem. What she needs is the quiet stockroom. What she needs is sleep, but no sleep, she thinks, has been more than fair chosen for her. Elli slipped her the beater-top as she left and she couldn’t help cradling it. How people push it on you. So she could sleep. What does that mean? Is she bored? She knows how she’ll find herself. Cross-legged buttressed into the stockroom carpet. On another reconstructed trip with the Velih bloodwash telling her there never was Velih, and what’s in her blood then? It’ll be hard, she thinks, to tell, when I’m weaving, when I’m doing all this, not because I was asked, but because, she thinks, I was emptied and lost.

STAY AWAY

She notes the exact angle of her own crossed legs even though she thinks the Broodlord or Cat Eyes/Jewel might both be too busy to hustle her around. In that way, she thinks, I keep my love for the Loum rather than wandering around braindead. Before others’ dead brains. Brainmatics with the lights off. She sees them as chambering a pocket void of death which has time to slalom into intercurrent, a static ocean field within the skull clawing at it in tongues of flame. They all live like that here. This is ops central and there are about a dozen give or take one or two skulking about the place. They’d call it chilling. A few more hiding somewhere in the night.

She likes it that way. So chill it’s a freeze-out so she can do what she needs. But T, she thinks, will take his or her chances any way they get them. Logging on this time the only ice is the crack in her display glass. Distorting the way she looks herself in the eye. The crack slivers across it like a lightning bolt, a serpent bolting through dewed grass blue and shining. The screen turns the same blue as the glyphic clouds. She’s on her way.

Through the glyphic font; she can see it as swimming that way. Swimming into a bleeding cut and that way going with the flow. So much to love and more translating glyphs to thread until you yourself are a mote between meanings. Hazy glitter bug cloud. Drift the lines which are entwined after all or so she has resewned them. She doesn’t want to be here to feature anyone. Still she knows the weed has grown with her into trails for now rose-scarlet, thorn tendrils probing the crossings of the Loum’s 2.0. She follows them to see their resemblance. If I run into that other thing, she thinks, J’s thing… Well, that’s that shit I’m trying not to piss off or even have it curious. She thinks about choosing this herself and shivers. Making it look for me. Her shoulders were shaking before she even logged on.

I’m still here. I’m still Cammy. None of this shit was my problem at first.

So when she finds the weed it has named itself Orche.

Orche has made herself at home here drawing the threads, winding and tangling them. Restitch and recross the parameters. Until she has structured herself a throne glistening with a thousand insect eyes and shrouded by spiderveil.

Light bleeds through the veil in petals and tongues. With green abraxas hair sodden with coarse moss bubbles of dead motes. Dead motes cloud the rivergreen of her hair; Cammy reads as: “stay away.” It’s true. There’s shit out there she’d rather deal with but a spider-fuelled planet avatar. Like logging right back off the way she logged on, on zombie control, not thinking about it, just finding herself doing it. Tendrils of her green-grass hair waver in the wind, knotted, Cammy sees, by spiderweb. This glistens like teardrops the morning rain which she has not yet had a chance to weave a reconstruct of. Orche’s tears are her own and she makes them work for her.

The first thing Cammy wants to know and the first thing she asks is if Orche’s working for her. [Be straight up,] she says, [because you won’t get another chance later. You will never get another chance. You can't, it doesn’t matter.] She repeats herself to be sure the message gets through. Ochre’s tiara is spider legs crowned by blanched and sorn fuzz and she herself ducks her chin beneath it, but not for long. “Of course not,” she says, and Cammy’s heart is falling even as she thinks about her training, what she’d sent herself to deal with, sent herself to forget dealing with, this is the life she has now. Holy fuck, she thinks, it'll never end this way.

All that means is make her pay for it later.

𝓈𝑜 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒶𝓇𝑒 Orche says. 𝒾'𝓋𝑒 𝓈𝑒𝓃𝓈𝑒𝒹 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓌𝒽𝑜𝓁𝑒 𝓉𝒾𝓂𝑒. 𝒾'𝓋𝑒 𝒻𝑒𝓁𝓉 𝓎𝑜𝓊. 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓃 𝒾'𝓋𝑒 𝓉𝓇𝒾𝑒𝒹 𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒶𝓁𝓀 𝓉𝑜 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓎𝑜𝓊'𝓋𝑒 𝓈𝓉𝒶𝓇𝑒𝒹 𝒶𝓉 𝓂𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝐼 𝓌𝒶𝓈 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹𝓃'𝓉 𝓌𝒶𝒾𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝑔𝑒𝓉 𝓇𝒾𝒹 𝑜𝒻.

She laughs, a flitter of sound scraping off tongue hidden behind mandible thorns. 𝒹𝑜𝓃'𝓉 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝓀 𝓌𝑒 𝓈𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹 𝑔𝑒𝓉 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝑜𝒻 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓈𝓉𝓇𝒶𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝒷𝑒𝓉𝓌𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝓊𝓈?

Cammy's mote cloud shies away despite her grip on it. She mutters, [if you trust me enough for that.] Because, she reminds herself, there's a lot of trust in her, despite how she's stood, even let Jewel down, her best friend, even fragments of him. Like broken glass fragments of him were swallowed and for all she knew by Orche when she came to call. No, that's not right. She knows who got those pieces of Jewel. She heard all about it, straight from him, in the beginning.

[If you're not being cruel,] Cammy says, imbuing her point with tangented motes in breaking waves, splintered, [there's something you could do to help]. We just don't know what you're here for.] She winces as she lets the next part out. [We just don't know why you were even born.]

𝒾 𝓌𝒶𝓈 𝒷𝑜𝓇𝓃, Orche says, 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓊𝓈𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝓌𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓉𝒶𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝑒𝓋𝑒𝓇𝓎𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒾 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒𝒹 𝒻𝓇𝑜𝓂 𝓂𝑒. 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝒸𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹𝓃'𝓉 𝒽𝑒𝓁𝓅 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓂𝓈𝑒𝓁𝓋𝑒𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓈𝑜 𝐼 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝒶𝓂𝑒 𝒶𝓌𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒿𝓊𝓈𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓅 𝒾𝓉. 𝓁𝑒𝑔𝒾𝑜𝓃𝓈 𝑜𝒻 𝒷𝓇𝒶𝓉𝓈 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝒾𝓇 𝓅𝑒𝓉 𝑔𝒶𝓇𝒹𝑒𝓃𝓈 𝓇𝓊𝓃𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓇 𝓂𝑒. 𝒸𝑜𝓁𝒹 𝒻𝑒𝑒𝓉 𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑜 𝓂𝓎 𝓌𝒶𝓇𝓂 𝑒𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒽. 𝒾 𝓅𝓊𝓉 𝒶 𝓈𝓉𝑜𝓅 𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉, 𝑜𝓀𝒶𝓎? 𝓃𝑜𝓌 𝒾𝓉'𝓈 𝓂𝓎 𝓉𝓊𝓇𝓃 𝓉𝑜 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓏𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓂 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓅 𝑜𝓃 𝓂𝑒.

[Fantastic,] Cammy says. [Great news but the problem is I didn't know what I was stumbling into and neither did you. If you're so aware, are you aware that outside people are dicing bullets with swords? That's the best case. Worst case those bullets and swords find somewhere to be. Like a ribcage.]

Orche's palms have stayed gripping the armrest of her spidered throne. Now she flips them, facing up, in a gesture of What do you expect me to do about that, at the same time saying it, at the same time Cammy's mote cloud translates it.

𝒾'𝓂 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓁𝓁𝓎 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓀𝓃𝑜𝓌 𝒾𝓉. 𝒷𝒶𝒸𝓀 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝒾 𝒶𝓂? 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝒷𝑜𝓎𝒻𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓃𝒹 𝒷𝓁𝒶𝓈𝓉𝑒𝒹 𝓂𝑒.

Cammy thinks about it. [I'm not sure that kid liked being frozen out. I'm not sure he liked anything about what you were doing. And I'm not sure, either, that he even had resources to care about you that hard. He had a dying—what did you call it—pet garden?—and some kind of glitch pet besides. All sorts of things were going on back there.] Orche shrugs narrow shoulders. Cammy both sees and feels the shrug because her cloud has been drawn close and the shrug sends ripples through the mote aura. Through her composed of what she's thinking of as nanonebulae, the way she has gotten close enough to herself to see the design of each mote. In mass each mote hides unseen but digging deeper into it she can see them now. I see them in my reconstruction, she thinks, the way I couldn't at first, in the first construct. So what does that say about me, that I can only see myself when it's me plotting it all out?

𝓌𝒽𝒶𝓉'𝓈 𝓌𝓇𝑜𝓃𝑔, 𝒹𝑒𝒶𝓇? Orche says. Grinning at this last word. 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒷𝒶𝒸𝓀 𝒾𝓃𝓈𝒾𝒹𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓈𝑒𝓁𝒻? 𝒹𝑜𝑒𝓈 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓀 𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒, 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓅𝓁𝒶𝒸𝑒?

She says it almost with too much innocence but how can there be, Cammy thinks, too much innocence. WIth innocence you want more and more. You want as much as you can get.

No matter how Orche puts it she's right. I'm looping, Cammy thinks, in my cloud, tumbling around. Bouncing off within-held concepts. Back and forth. I did this shit myself so it shouldn't even be that hard. She strains. Her cloud trembles even drawn, close enough to envelope fragrance. The smell, she thinks, like tallow, like burning candle wax. Smells like the husk of dead things, or dead leaves, rotting. Dead leaves fragrant to the gasp of air that must exist, somewhere, beyond the interwoven chains. When I’m surrounded by aura, she thinks, and there is air beyond, or could be.

She logs off then, praying for the war to be somewhere else. Cammy not about shit, on the outside. Still the same on the inside with the pistola pointed square at her head.