1.07
An Imago of Rust and Crimson
Chapter 1.07
"Coffee? Hot chocolate? It's only powdered stuff, I'm sorry."
I shrugged. "Hot chocolate," I said, crossing my legs and tucking my hands up into my sleeves. I was sitting in Hannah's office, waiting as she fussed over a kettle on the side. She had come to my room fairly early this morning, asking to see me in her office.
"Anyway, I thought we could get some of the basic paperwork and set-up things that I meant to do last night done now, so I can introduce you to the other girls in Wilson at breakfast," she said. She poured hot water into a pair of chipped mugs she had spooned granules into. "Breakfast starts at eight, and goes on until half-nine. Aaand..." she tapped at the computer, "okay, no messages. Where was I? So, how are you feeling this morning, Taylor?" she asked, putting the cup in front of me on the desk.
I decided honesty was the best recourse. It gave me more room to lie later if I was open now. "Bunged up and sniffly, and kind of headachey," I said. "I think I must have caught a cold in the hospital."
"We'll have to stop by the pharmacy to get you something for that later," she said. "But apart from that you're not feeling too bad? Are you homesick?"
I considered. "I don't think so," I said. "I mean, I was in hospital for a while before this, and-"I trailed off. I did miss my room. I did miss my dad. And I certainly missed not being in sterile cold hospital environments. "I would like to be home," I admitted, "but I'm not sure if that's homesickness."
"That's only natural," she said, as she poured three sachets of sweetener into her drink. "Yes, I'm terrible," she said with a wry smile when she saw me looking. She was clearly inviting me to share in her self-depreciation, and I smiled back. "They say that sweetener exists for people who don't like coffee," she added. "Me, I think I just like sweet things. Don't follow my example. It's terrible for you."
I peeked into her mug. Yes, she had black coffee, in case the smell hadn't been enough. She looked exhausted under the too-thick makeup, I thought critically. I wasn't getting proper sleep because of nightmares, but she looked barely better than I felt.
Her fingers clacked away on her keyboard as I considered my options. I took a sip of the watery hot chocolate, and made sure to swallow it. I carefully put my cup down on the desk in front of me. If I was going to do this, I would have to make sure I didn't scream or act strangely. I couldn't let what I was about to see affect me, not in front of a person who could have them thinking I was completely gaga.
I closed my eyes and concentrated.
"Tired?" she asked, her voice shifting to an unnatural rasp mid-way through.
Eyes still shut, I inhaled. The room smelt of stifling warmth and bitterness and just a tinge of rust. It was a relief, compared to the stink of blood that normally filled my nostrils whenever I did this.
"A bit tired," I said, trying to keep my voice level. "I haven't been sleeping well since… that. The thing that happened."
I opened my eyes a crack, ready to shut my eyes again if I needed to.
In the Other Place, she looked worse. Her skin was corpse-grey. It was torn in places, revealing raw flesh, while the bits which remained had the soft, shrivelled texture of an apple left in the sun for too long. Some kind of bone spike protruded from her ribcage, around where the heart should be, and something like old dried blood or rust crusted that entire side of her chest. Dark, waxy tar seeped from both eyes. What little hair remained dangled from her scalp in straggly clumps. She looked tired and diseased, she looked like she'd died but forgotten to stop moving, but above all she looked old.
"Is there, uh, somewhere I could exercise here?" I asked, trying to fight back a sudden nausea. "It's just, I'm feeling really out of shape after spending so much time being ill."
How old was she really? If the monster-selves I saw in the Other Place were linked in some way to the real person, then why would she appear so old and dead? I mean, my dad had been replaced by a burning figure, and he'd certainly been furious, and the cop probably hadn't really cared in the first place so it made sense she was a hollow doll. But what did this mean for her? Or was I reading it wrong?
I needed to find out more.
I relaxed, and let the paint creep back over the walls, concealing the burn marks and the graffiti. It was with no small relief that I looked back at the not-ancient-and-dead face of Hannah. She'd said something, I realised. "I'm sorry, what was that?" I said.
"I said, yes, there's a small gym which backs onto an exercise yard," she repeated. "There's also exercise sessions held, which you can sign up for. Are you feeling already? You just went a bit… vague."
"I just zoned out," I said, adding, "I'm just a bit tired."
"Do you have any preference to the gender of your psychologist?" Her fingers hovered apprehensively over her keyboard.
I thought. "I don't think so," I said.
She looked relieved. "Right, I'll put you down for Dr. Vanderburg , then. He has more free slots, so you'll be able to see him more and at the same time each day." She cleared her throat. "I don't know if you know, but we try to keep our patients on a proper schedule here. Just leaving people alone in their rooms doesn't help them get better. Obviously it's not as rigid as school, but it's still healthy to have a structure to the day. Do you see what I mean?"
I nodded. "Yes." I had ended up very bored in hospital. I coughed. "Are there any arrangements to let me keep up with schoolwork?" I sighed, my hands unconsciously going to my wrists. "Of course, considering everything, I'm not sure this place would trust me with a pencil."
I had made sure to keep my eyes on her expression, and she did wince slightly at that. She hastened to reassure me that there were systems in place to help me keep up with my education. Then followed a short talk, all about how I was here 'to get better' and how they were here to help me. I'd heard it before. More useful was the fact that I got a timetable. And then it was off to breakfast.
Walking down the corridors behind Hannah, I think I might have spent almost as much time looking at the Other Place as I did at my actual surroundings. I now had two worlds to explore when I got used to this place, even if one was pretty horrifying. I was also eager to experiment – this was the first chance I'd had to get a look at different places through the lens of my power. As far as I could tell, the geography of the Other Place seemed to mostly match up with the normal world. Variations were rare but noticeable, like walls that had been oddly warped or doors that were an entirely different shape.
I saw a door hanging off its hinges, and wondered what would happen if I tried to walk through it. How would I interact with something that was empty space in the Other Place, but solid wood in the real world? If I'd tried to touch my dad while he was that angry fire-thing, would I have burned? I didn't have a chance to test any of these ponderings. Hannah walked briskly, and I was only wearing the plimsoll-like shoes they'd given me.
There were butterflies painted on the walls of the canteen. It only made things look even more like a junior school. In the Other Place, the butterflies were still there, but they glowed. Luminescent paint sat on the bare concrete walls like oil on water, shimmering like an insect's carapace or a petrol spill. What made them so different from everything else?
The room was about half-full. I could only tell this with difficulty, because a thick multi-coloured mist hung around head height. It kind of looked like a psychedelic take on a seedy Prohibition bar from a film. An old film, too – the colours were mostly washed out. They flared vibrantly every so often, but only briefly and only out of the corner of my eye. It was vaguely nauseating. I suppressed a shudder at the sight of the monstrous forms that swirled through the mist, and let my sight return to normalcy. In the real world, the entire room was painted like it was outside, with a blue ceiling and high green 'grass' on the walls. The butterflies weren't the only animals, either. There were ladybirds and regular birds and a large cat.
I didn't like the cat. He was smiling, which made him look unhealthily like the Cheshire cat. That was an association I didn't want. My Wonderland was already less pleasant than Alice's.
Still, a little bit of me couldn't help but feel cheered up by the sight of the colour in the Other Place. At least the butterflies didn't radiate cloying cold despair like the black-red oil in my room, or make me feel sick like the coloured fog. They were a bit hopeful, if only in a watery, thin, weak way.
She led me over to a table where four other girls were seated. They all looked to be within a few years of my age. Clearly Wilson was a place of troubled pubescent girls. Hannah gave me a brittle smile. "Well, I'd hoped to introduce you to everyone yesterday," she said, "but Chloe can't be with us right now. Hopefully, she'll be well enough to see people soon," she pushed on, "so I'll just introduce you to everyone else for now . Good morning."
"Morning," said a mousy-haired girl, toying with her bowl of cereal with a plastic spoon.
"Samantha, Leah, Emily, Kirsty. This is Taylor," Hannah said, gesturing toward each of the girls in turn and then me. "She'll be in room five for a while. She just arrived yesterday evening."
"So where's Chloe?" one of them – Leah – asked. Too thin. That was my first thought. And my second, if you count 'anorexic' as being the same thought dressed up in more complicated words. Leah was pale, large-eyed, and looked like she could have been pretty if she wasn't doing her best to impersonate a twig.
"She's, uh, not going to be around for a while," Hannah said awkwardly. "She's going back to the hospital."
There was a painful silence. "But she'd seemed better," Samantha said, playing with one lank mousy brown lock with a finger. I noticed the fact that she was wearing similar wrist bands to me, and I noticed her noticing mine. "She said she was feeling better on the new meds."
"She'd had… she has bad reactions to some of that stuff," Emily said. She looked… well, there wasn't anything obviously wrong with her. "That just sucks. Shit. Is she going to be…"
Hannah bit her lip. "They think she'll pull through," she said. She sounded slightly guarded to me.
I'd been trying to hold off from paying too much attention to Kirsty, because she was a mess. There were puffy red scars on her hands and face – ones much deeper than mine. The ones on my face were just slightly pink, and the doctors had said that they'd fade. Hers – I thought someone had taken a knife to her, cutting deep into her cheeks and around the edge of her mouth, and they looked old enough that they were as good as they were going to get. She was shrinking away from me, and from what I could read of her expression she was staring at my hands and face. There was almost certainly a story there, and just as certainly I probably didn't want to know it. Hannah seemed to have noticed the way Kirsty was acting too, because she cleared her throat.
"But yes!" she said, with false brightness. "Everyone, Taylor. Taylor, everyone."
"Hi," I said awkwardly. I'd never been very good with first impressions, or any kind of impressions, really, and this was more difficult than most. How was I meant to talk to them? 'So, how are you crazy? Me, I get traumatic flashbacks and tried to kill myself when I got locked in a locker'. Wonderful conversational ice-breaker, I don't think.
"I hear voices when I don't take my meds," Emily said, rolling her eyes. "I'll let the others introduce themselves."
I worked my jaw silently before settling on an appropriate reply. "Um.".
"I would slap you if I wouldn't get in trouble for that," Samantha hissed at her. "Idiot. Call me Sam," she told me. "I mean that." She massaged the back of her neck. "Look what you did," she told Emily. "I was going to ask her about… like, what bands she likes and you've just gone and weirded her out."
"I don't really like bands," I said without thinking. That produced some smiles.
"Get used to being bored here, then," Leah advised. "If you get to like the radio stations the TVs pick up, it makes stuff much easier."
They looked middle-class, I noted to myself wryly. I wasn't entirely surprised. I'd picked up enough from my dad to guess that we couldn't have afforded to send me to a place like this if it wasn't for my school graciously footing the bill. We weren't exactly poor, but this place wouldn't be cheap, and only one person in the house was earning any money. The other girls here probably had more in common with Emma or Madison than me. That wasn't exactly fair to them, but I wasn't feeling too fair-minded right now.
I bit my lip, and mentally shook myself. No. I shouldn't think like that. Urgh, this was the most honest attempt at a normal conversation with a girl my age I'd had in months. I shouldn't go into this expecting them to target me. They had more than enough problems of their own. They were more likely to be the victims of girls like Emma and Sophia than part of their fanclub.
My eyes drifted over to Kirsty and those horrifying scars. She still hadn't said a word.
Did I want to know?
I concentrated, and shifted my senses to the Other Place. I really wished I hadn't. If Leah was too thin in reality, in the Other Place she was even worse. She had no eyes, no ears, nothing but a mouth which took up all the space where her face should be. Her skin was shockingly pale, stretched drum-tight over visible stick-bones and a stomach that bulged grotesquely. Her skull was monstrously oversized, and wobbled precariously on a neck as thin as a Coke bottle, like some terrifying bobblehead doll.
Samantha – Sam – looked more human, but her skin was split into patches of burned body and frozen flesh, greying ash falling from iced-over eye sockets. Even as I watched, the ice spread, creeping out from her slashed-open wrists. Emily twisted and thrashed when I wasn't looking at her. Her flesh crept and crawled in a way that reminded me of the locker and left me feeling sick. I thought I could hear whispers there, too.
It turns out I didn't want to know about Kirsty. I didn't want to know that of all the people in the room, she looked almost exactly the same in the Other Place. The same pale, flinching expression of worry about everyone and everything. The same livid scars. Only one thing had changed about her, and that was how her white pyjama top was stained with blood. They spelt out three words, stacked on top of each other.
It was just as well I'd drilled that into myself before looking into the Other Place. It was becoming my mantra, these days. I screwed my eyes shut again, thinking of nothing at all, and reminded myself that I was sane. When I looked around the table again, the world had joined me.
I really wished I had some nice clean Thinker power which just told me what I wanted to know without having to see these things. Were there any other parahumans who had powers like this? I would need to see if I could get internet access here. I needed to learn more about how powers worked, and see how other people used them.
Hannah tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you want to go and get some cereal? I just need to have a few words with Emily."
I drifted off towards the table where the little boxes of cereal and the milk were laid out, with a bulky woman watching over them. I was trying my best to avoid thinking of what I'd seen. I didn't want to slip into the Other Place again. I just needed some time. Time to think. But at least they'd tried to talk with me. And I was going to try to talk back. I wasn't going to run and hide. Hah. This was almost a fresh start, in a way. At least I'd be believed if anyone did bully me. And I'd be out of here fairly soon, so I just had to be pleasant enough.
A sudden thought struck me, as I was pouring out the milk, and I shivered. I hadn't really checked, had I?
What did I look like in the Other Place?
Chapter 1.07
"Coffee? Hot chocolate? It's only powdered stuff, I'm sorry."
I shrugged. "Hot chocolate," I said, crossing my legs and tucking my hands up into my sleeves. I was sitting in Hannah's office, waiting as she fussed over a kettle on the side. She had come to my room fairly early this morning, asking to see me in her office.
"Anyway, I thought we could get some of the basic paperwork and set-up things that I meant to do last night done now, so I can introduce you to the other girls in Wilson at breakfast," she said. She poured hot water into a pair of chipped mugs she had spooned granules into. "Breakfast starts at eight, and goes on until half-nine. Aaand..." she tapped at the computer, "okay, no messages. Where was I? So, how are you feeling this morning, Taylor?" she asked, putting the cup in front of me on the desk.
I decided honesty was the best recourse. It gave me more room to lie later if I was open now. "Bunged up and sniffly, and kind of headachey," I said. "I think I must have caught a cold in the hospital."
"We'll have to stop by the pharmacy to get you something for that later," she said. "But apart from that you're not feeling too bad? Are you homesick?"
I considered. "I don't think so," I said. "I mean, I was in hospital for a while before this, and-"I trailed off. I did miss my room. I did miss my dad. And I certainly missed not being in sterile cold hospital environments. "I would like to be home," I admitted, "but I'm not sure if that's homesickness."
"That's only natural," she said, as she poured three sachets of sweetener into her drink. "Yes, I'm terrible," she said with a wry smile when she saw me looking. She was clearly inviting me to share in her self-depreciation, and I smiled back. "They say that sweetener exists for people who don't like coffee," she added. "Me, I think I just like sweet things. Don't follow my example. It's terrible for you."
I peeked into her mug. Yes, she had black coffee, in case the smell hadn't been enough. She looked exhausted under the too-thick makeup, I thought critically. I wasn't getting proper sleep because of nightmares, but she looked barely better than I felt.
Her fingers clacked away on her keyboard as I considered my options. I took a sip of the watery hot chocolate, and made sure to swallow it. I carefully put my cup down on the desk in front of me. If I was going to do this, I would have to make sure I didn't scream or act strangely. I couldn't let what I was about to see affect me, not in front of a person who could have them thinking I was completely gaga.
I closed my eyes and concentrated.
"Tired?" she asked, her voice shifting to an unnatural rasp mid-way through.
Eyes still shut, I inhaled. The room smelt of stifling warmth and bitterness and just a tinge of rust. It was a relief, compared to the stink of blood that normally filled my nostrils whenever I did this.
"A bit tired," I said, trying to keep my voice level. "I haven't been sleeping well since… that. The thing that happened."
I opened my eyes a crack, ready to shut my eyes again if I needed to.
In the Other Place, she looked worse. Her skin was corpse-grey. It was torn in places, revealing raw flesh, while the bits which remained had the soft, shrivelled texture of an apple left in the sun for too long. Some kind of bone spike protruded from her ribcage, around where the heart should be, and something like old dried blood or rust crusted that entire side of her chest. Dark, waxy tar seeped from both eyes. What little hair remained dangled from her scalp in straggly clumps. She looked tired and diseased, she looked like she'd died but forgotten to stop moving, but above all she looked old.
"Is there, uh, somewhere I could exercise here?" I asked, trying to fight back a sudden nausea. "It's just, I'm feeling really out of shape after spending so much time being ill."
How old was she really? If the monster-selves I saw in the Other Place were linked in some way to the real person, then why would she appear so old and dead? I mean, my dad had been replaced by a burning figure, and he'd certainly been furious, and the cop probably hadn't really cared in the first place so it made sense she was a hollow doll. But what did this mean for her? Or was I reading it wrong?
I needed to find out more.
I relaxed, and let the paint creep back over the walls, concealing the burn marks and the graffiti. It was with no small relief that I looked back at the not-ancient-and-dead face of Hannah. She'd said something, I realised. "I'm sorry, what was that?" I said.
"I said, yes, there's a small gym which backs onto an exercise yard," she repeated. "There's also exercise sessions held, which you can sign up for. Are you feeling already? You just went a bit… vague."
"I just zoned out," I said, adding, "I'm just a bit tired."
"Do you have any preference to the gender of your psychologist?" Her fingers hovered apprehensively over her keyboard.
I thought. "I don't think so," I said.
She looked relieved. "Right, I'll put you down for Dr. Vanderburg , then. He has more free slots, so you'll be able to see him more and at the same time each day." She cleared her throat. "I don't know if you know, but we try to keep our patients on a proper schedule here. Just leaving people alone in their rooms doesn't help them get better. Obviously it's not as rigid as school, but it's still healthy to have a structure to the day. Do you see what I mean?"
I nodded. "Yes." I had ended up very bored in hospital. I coughed. "Are there any arrangements to let me keep up with schoolwork?" I sighed, my hands unconsciously going to my wrists. "Of course, considering everything, I'm not sure this place would trust me with a pencil."
I had made sure to keep my eyes on her expression, and she did wince slightly at that. She hastened to reassure me that there were systems in place to help me keep up with my education. Then followed a short talk, all about how I was here 'to get better' and how they were here to help me. I'd heard it before. More useful was the fact that I got a timetable. And then it was off to breakfast.
Walking down the corridors behind Hannah, I think I might have spent almost as much time looking at the Other Place as I did at my actual surroundings. I now had two worlds to explore when I got used to this place, even if one was pretty horrifying. I was also eager to experiment – this was the first chance I'd had to get a look at different places through the lens of my power. As far as I could tell, the geography of the Other Place seemed to mostly match up with the normal world. Variations were rare but noticeable, like walls that had been oddly warped or doors that were an entirely different shape.
I saw a door hanging off its hinges, and wondered what would happen if I tried to walk through it. How would I interact with something that was empty space in the Other Place, but solid wood in the real world? If I'd tried to touch my dad while he was that angry fire-thing, would I have burned? I didn't have a chance to test any of these ponderings. Hannah walked briskly, and I was only wearing the plimsoll-like shoes they'd given me.
There were butterflies painted on the walls of the canteen. It only made things look even more like a junior school. In the Other Place, the butterflies were still there, but they glowed. Luminescent paint sat on the bare concrete walls like oil on water, shimmering like an insect's carapace or a petrol spill. What made them so different from everything else?
The room was about half-full. I could only tell this with difficulty, because a thick multi-coloured mist hung around head height. It kind of looked like a psychedelic take on a seedy Prohibition bar from a film. An old film, too – the colours were mostly washed out. They flared vibrantly every so often, but only briefly and only out of the corner of my eye. It was vaguely nauseating. I suppressed a shudder at the sight of the monstrous forms that swirled through the mist, and let my sight return to normalcy. In the real world, the entire room was painted like it was outside, with a blue ceiling and high green 'grass' on the walls. The butterflies weren't the only animals, either. There were ladybirds and regular birds and a large cat.
I didn't like the cat. He was smiling, which made him look unhealthily like the Cheshire cat. That was an association I didn't want. My Wonderland was already less pleasant than Alice's.
Still, a little bit of me couldn't help but feel cheered up by the sight of the colour in the Other Place. At least the butterflies didn't radiate cloying cold despair like the black-red oil in my room, or make me feel sick like the coloured fog. They were a bit hopeful, if only in a watery, thin, weak way.
She led me over to a table where four other girls were seated. They all looked to be within a few years of my age. Clearly Wilson was a place of troubled pubescent girls. Hannah gave me a brittle smile. "Well, I'd hoped to introduce you to everyone yesterday," she said, "but Chloe can't be with us right now. Hopefully, she'll be well enough to see people soon," she pushed on, "so I'll just introduce you to everyone else for now . Good morning."
"Morning," said a mousy-haired girl, toying with her bowl of cereal with a plastic spoon.
"Samantha, Leah, Emily, Kirsty. This is Taylor," Hannah said, gesturing toward each of the girls in turn and then me. "She'll be in room five for a while. She just arrived yesterday evening."
"So where's Chloe?" one of them – Leah – asked. Too thin. That was my first thought. And my second, if you count 'anorexic' as being the same thought dressed up in more complicated words. Leah was pale, large-eyed, and looked like she could have been pretty if she wasn't doing her best to impersonate a twig.
"She's, uh, not going to be around for a while," Hannah said awkwardly. "She's going back to the hospital."
There was a painful silence. "But she'd seemed better," Samantha said, playing with one lank mousy brown lock with a finger. I noticed the fact that she was wearing similar wrist bands to me, and I noticed her noticing mine. "She said she was feeling better on the new meds."
"She'd had… she has bad reactions to some of that stuff," Emily said. She looked… well, there wasn't anything obviously wrong with her. "That just sucks. Shit. Is she going to be…"
Hannah bit her lip. "They think she'll pull through," she said. She sounded slightly guarded to me.
I'd been trying to hold off from paying too much attention to Kirsty, because she was a mess. There were puffy red scars on her hands and face – ones much deeper than mine. The ones on my face were just slightly pink, and the doctors had said that they'd fade. Hers – I thought someone had taken a knife to her, cutting deep into her cheeks and around the edge of her mouth, and they looked old enough that they were as good as they were going to get. She was shrinking away from me, and from what I could read of her expression she was staring at my hands and face. There was almost certainly a story there, and just as certainly I probably didn't want to know it. Hannah seemed to have noticed the way Kirsty was acting too, because she cleared her throat.
"But yes!" she said, with false brightness. "Everyone, Taylor. Taylor, everyone."
"Hi," I said awkwardly. I'd never been very good with first impressions, or any kind of impressions, really, and this was more difficult than most. How was I meant to talk to them? 'So, how are you crazy? Me, I get traumatic flashbacks and tried to kill myself when I got locked in a locker'. Wonderful conversational ice-breaker, I don't think.
"I hear voices when I don't take my meds," Emily said, rolling her eyes. "I'll let the others introduce themselves."
I worked my jaw silently before settling on an appropriate reply. "Um.".
"I would slap you if I wouldn't get in trouble for that," Samantha hissed at her. "Idiot. Call me Sam," she told me. "I mean that." She massaged the back of her neck. "Look what you did," she told Emily. "I was going to ask her about… like, what bands she likes and you've just gone and weirded her out."
"I don't really like bands," I said without thinking. That produced some smiles.
"Get used to being bored here, then," Leah advised. "If you get to like the radio stations the TVs pick up, it makes stuff much easier."
They looked middle-class, I noted to myself wryly. I wasn't entirely surprised. I'd picked up enough from my dad to guess that we couldn't have afforded to send me to a place like this if it wasn't for my school graciously footing the bill. We weren't exactly poor, but this place wouldn't be cheap, and only one person in the house was earning any money. The other girls here probably had more in common with Emma or Madison than me. That wasn't exactly fair to them, but I wasn't feeling too fair-minded right now.
I bit my lip, and mentally shook myself. No. I shouldn't think like that. Urgh, this was the most honest attempt at a normal conversation with a girl my age I'd had in months. I shouldn't go into this expecting them to target me. They had more than enough problems of their own. They were more likely to be the victims of girls like Emma and Sophia than part of their fanclub.
My eyes drifted over to Kirsty and those horrifying scars. She still hadn't said a word.
Did I want to know?
I concentrated, and shifted my senses to the Other Place. I really wished I hadn't. If Leah was too thin in reality, in the Other Place she was even worse. She had no eyes, no ears, nothing but a mouth which took up all the space where her face should be. Her skin was shockingly pale, stretched drum-tight over visible stick-bones and a stomach that bulged grotesquely. Her skull was monstrously oversized, and wobbled precariously on a neck as thin as a Coke bottle, like some terrifying bobblehead doll.
Samantha – Sam – looked more human, but her skin was split into patches of burned body and frozen flesh, greying ash falling from iced-over eye sockets. Even as I watched, the ice spread, creeping out from her slashed-open wrists. Emily twisted and thrashed when I wasn't looking at her. Her flesh crept and crawled in a way that reminded me of the locker and left me feeling sick. I thought I could hear whispers there, too.
It turns out I didn't want to know about Kirsty. I didn't want to know that of all the people in the room, she looked almost exactly the same in the Other Place. The same pale, flinching expression of worry about everyone and everything. The same livid scars. Only one thing had changed about her, and that was how her white pyjama top was stained with blood. They spelt out three words, stacked on top of each other.
S IX
S IX
S IX
Wow, I thought to myself in numbed shock. It's a good job you're not crazy, Taylor Hebert. A crazy person would freak out over someone who looked pretty normal in a freaky madness vision and had the Number of the Beast glaring out from her top. A crazy person would start pointing her finger at the girl sitting across from her and screaming about the Antichrist. A crazy person would start babbling. But that would be crazy. And so you won't do that, will you? Because you're not crazy.S IX
S IX
It was just as well I'd drilled that into myself before looking into the Other Place. It was becoming my mantra, these days. I screwed my eyes shut again, thinking of nothing at all, and reminded myself that I was sane. When I looked around the table again, the world had joined me.
I really wished I had some nice clean Thinker power which just told me what I wanted to know without having to see these things. Were there any other parahumans who had powers like this? I would need to see if I could get internet access here. I needed to learn more about how powers worked, and see how other people used them.
Hannah tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you want to go and get some cereal? I just need to have a few words with Emily."
I drifted off towards the table where the little boxes of cereal and the milk were laid out, with a bulky woman watching over them. I was trying my best to avoid thinking of what I'd seen. I didn't want to slip into the Other Place again. I just needed some time. Time to think. But at least they'd tried to talk with me. And I was going to try to talk back. I wasn't going to run and hide. Hah. This was almost a fresh start, in a way. At least I'd be believed if anyone did bully me. And I'd be out of here fairly soon, so I just had to be pleasant enough.
A sudden thought struck me, as I was pouring out the milk, and I shivered. I hadn't really checked, had I?
What did I look like in the Other Place?
Last edited:
