I am not 100% satisfied with this, but I suspect I could revise it for weeks and not be satisfied.

"The headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."

To Walk in Shadow
(Worm/Chronicles of Amber)
by P.H Wise

1.4 - Pareidolia

Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Chronicles of Amber is by Roger Zelazny. I own neither. Please support the official release.

Once the initial shock of our arrival in this strangely same place wore off, the recriminations began. It's one of the stranger human needs: more than food, more than shelter, more than friendship or intimacy or love, people need somebody to blame.

Grue turned his head to look at Tattletale. I couldn't see his eyes through his skull mask, but he was probably glaring. "Okay," he said, making a visible effort to be calm. "What the hell, Tattletale?"

She looked at him. When she didn't say anything, he took a single step forward. "You said we were safe," Grue hissed at her. "You said we didn't have to worry about moving our hideout for another week at least."

"I made an educated guess," she answered. "I was wrong. Sue me."

"An educated guess," Grue echoed. "God damn it, Tattletale! We all could have died! We WOULD have died if that bomb hadn't malfunctioned at the last second!"

Tattletale opened her mouth, then she winced and put a hand to her forehead. "Not a malfunction," she said. "The bomb would have killed us. She sent us here, instead." She indicated me.

I blinked. "What?"

"Is that another educated guess?" Grue asked.

"I didn't send us here," I said, and the words sounded hollow.

Regent eyed me, and my eyes went briefly to his black ring. "So it's her fault, then," he said.

Wait. My fault? "It's my fault we're all still alive?" I asked.

"Best educated guess based on the relevant data," Tattletale said. "She's the X-factor." Tattletale smirked at me. "Thanks for saving all our lives, S," she said, "even if you did it by accident."

"I'm pretty sure I didn't do that," I said. If I'd done it I had no idea how I'd done it, but now that she'd said it I wasn't sure at all, and denying it just felt like lying.

"So where are we?" Grue asked. He didn't sound happy, but the conversation had been successfully derailed from the subject of whose fault it was.

"Brockton Bay," Tattletale said.

"You know what I meant," Grue said.

Tattletale nodded. "I can't say for sure yet. Maybe an alternate universe, one closer to us than Earth Aleph. Maybe the future. Maybe both."

"Fuck," Regent said, and Grue nodded in agreement.

"How do we get home?" Grue asked. He looked at me. "If you brought us here, can you send us back?"

I felt very put on the spot, and I shook my head. "Even if I believe you that I brought us here, I have no idea how I did it." The image of the Pattern from my dreams seemed to blaze in the darkness behind my eyes when I blinked. "So unless one of you knows how to teach me to either time travel or walk between worlds, we need to find another way back."

"We?" Tattletale asked. I was pretty sure she knew where this was going and just wanted me to say it out loud.

I sighed. "I know I'm a hero and you're villains, but we aren't enemies, and if I'm the only one who can take us back…" I let the words trail off for a few heartbeats. "It wouldn't be right to just leave you all stranded here," I concluded. "I'm not joining your gang, but until we get home, truce."

"Truce," Grue agreed, and Tattletale and Regent echoed him a second later.

"Bitch?" Grue asked.

"Fine," Bitch said.

And that was how I found common cause with the Undersiders.

After some discussion we split up to see what each of us could learn about our present situation with a plan to meet back here in the morning. I collected the briefcase they'd given me from where it was floating in the water nearby, and I went home.

Maybe the others had some kind of plan to find out what was going on in the city, but all I could think was that if I'd traveled in time, then as far as Dad knew, I'd just disappeared. And even though I knew that would hurt him more than anything, maybe even more than when Mom died, I felt strangely ambivalent about it. Yes, I wanted to see him and make sure he was okay, and yet…

No. I needed to check on him at the very least. We might not have had the best relationship these days, but I didn't want him to think I was dead. I just didn't want to have to talk to him was all.

As I ruminated I made my way through flooded streets, getting a better view of the city as I went.

Brockton Bay wasn't entirely without power. The Docks were dark, but the Protectorate Rig out in the Bay seemed to have some lights running, there were a few scattered lights downtown, enough to show part of the skyline, and there was a glow like distant lights coming from the other side of Captain's Hill. People were few and far between, and those that I did see moved with a certain furtiveness that brought a gnawing worry into my heart when I saw it. There was no sign of PRT or police presence until I left the floodwaters behind just a few blocks away from my house.

There was a police car crashed into a telephone pole, the front end of the vehicle crumpled around it, and all the windows were broken. No one was inside, but the front seat was stained with dried blood. None of the street lights were working. They had all been broken. All the windows of all the houses I could see were broken.

My brow furrowed at the sight. Had the windows back at the Undersiders' headquarters been broken, too? Now that I thought about it, I believe they had been.

My gnawing worry flowered into a pervasive dread, and I walked on, hoping that what I suspected was wrong. A short time later, I rounded the corner of the last block and caught sight of home.

It was a two story house in what had been a middle-class neighborhood back when Brockton Bay had more of a middle-class. Between Mom's salary as a college professor and Dad's as head of hiring for the Dockworkers Association, we'd been comfortable, then. Not so much anymore. The house had some water damage, but less than most places. The windows were broken, but someone had covered them over with strips of now-shredded duct tape. Shards of glass clung to the tape strips like dewdrops on the petals of an ugly silver flower.

I went in, taking care to skip over the rotted middle step up to the porch.

The bottom floor looked like it had been hit by a glass tornado. All the windows shared the same condition as what I'd seen from the outside. The sliding glass door that led into the backyard hadn't been contained in tape as well as the rest. The television, the microwave, the oven door, all covered in tattered tape. The pictures that had decorated the walls were missing. The food in the fridge was spoiled or on its way there.

I went upstairs through shards of glass and a dry red-brown trail and found Dad's room empty, his bed soaked in blood.

A few discarded glass shards littered the torn sheets. The blood was most of the way towards dry, only still wet where it had pooled. This was days old, and there was no death smell. Whatever had happened here was over and done, but that didn't help my nerves.

My room was empty, and my backpack had been left sitting in the closet; there were stains on it that I didn't recognize and a faint fruit juice smell. Some of my clothes were missing from my closet, but I found something more normal to wear.

I gathered up my costume plus several changes of clothes and underwear and packed them into the backpack along with soap and other essentials, though the first aid kit Dad kept under the sink was missing. Then I took a few hundred dollars from the briefcase, stowed the briefcase underneath my bed, put the backpack down by the front door, and continued my search of the house.

The basement was full of spiders. Black widows, mostly. Spider silk was everywhere. Outlines in the dust showed that someone had hastily removed several pieces of furniture that I couldn't account for. Here and there I found strips of a strange grey cloth.

In the coal chute, I found a costume made from the same material with chitinous armored panels. It took several attempts to free it without disturbing a large black widow that had built a nest there, but when I held it in my hands, I saw that it was perfectly sized for me.

I'd never made anything like this, and the sight of the costume - was it made of silk? - more than anything convinced me that this was not the future, or at least not the future of my world. I was looking at the work of some other Taylor Hebert's hand, and I shuddered.

I took the costume and packed it away in the backpack with the rest of my supplies. It was well made - a huge improvement over my own attempts at one - and I told myself that it wasn't theft if Taylor Hebert was the one who had made it, and I could always give it back if the other me came looking for it.

It was almost too dark to see when I left the house. The city was dark, but the light of the gibbous moon allowed me to see my way well enough. The idea of sleeping in that other Taylor's glass-shredded house did not appeal, with Dad's bed soaked in blood and nothing but my own growing anxiety for company; I set out for Captain's Hill, where I had seen the glow of lights.

Two dark blocks later, a shattered street light flickered to life, fitful at first, then more strongly. It cast a pool of yellow-white illumination the size of a street intersection, and as I passed into it, the borders of the night beyond its glow went black as pitch. I couldn't see the stars, and though the street light was broken and no filament burned to give light, a light hung there nonetheless.

A voice spoke in the darkness, slow and melodious, every syllable given delicate, deliberate care. "Pardon me, young lady," it said, "but you seem familiar to me. Have we met?"

Something moved in the dark, and I saw a brief flash of animal eyes regarding me, gathering and reflecting the light.

I felt something cold moving down my spine. "Who's there?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon," said the voice. I thought it sounded male, but there was no certainty. The figure in the dark moved forward, and as it came forward it seemed to diminish until a tiny black kitten padded out into the light. His paws and ears were tipped with ivory-white, his eyes were an almost luminous green, and his tail swished lazily behind him as he spoke. "I am called Pyewacket, young lady. Might I have the honor of knowing your name in turn?"

I tried not to stare. "Ca… call me 'S,'" I said after once again failing to think of a suitable cape name, and being unwilling to give my real name to random talking kittens I happen to meet at night, no matter how adorable.

"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Ess," Pyewacket said, making a courtly little gesture with his right-front paw. "Tell me, how does this evening find you?"

"Um," I said, "I'm good." A moment passed before I thought to say anything else. "How are you?" I asked.

The kitten smiled, and it showed more pointed teeth than I was comfortable with, and his shadow seemed larger than it should have been. "Oh, capital," he answered, drawing out the space between the two words as he gave them voice.

"So," I said, "how can I help you?"

"By indulging my curiosity," Pyewacket said. "I am a curious cat by nature, so imagine my interest when I happened to observe you and your friends come here out of Shadow. T'was a most unusual occurrence, and I would know which of you was responsible for the event."

Confusion stopped my tongue for a time. "I don't know what you mean," I said.

"There's no need to be coy, my dear," Pyewacket said, and he began to prowl a slow, large circle around me, keeping to the edge of illumination cast by the lamp post. "I know you aren't a native. I saw you cross over through Shadow. Your passage is what drew my attention in the first place. Was it you? You have the right scent, at least."

This didn't seem like a conversation that was headed anywhere good. A dozen possible replies went through my mind, and then, "Can you help me get home?" seemed to all but leap from my tongue, and I regretted the words almost as soon as I said them.

The kitten's shadow turned its head to regard me as the real kitten stopped his circling, sat, and began to lick his paw. His long tail swished in the lamp-light. "Why would you need my help with such a task?" he asked.

The words seemed to tumble out of my mouth before I could stop them. "Because I don't know how we got here or how to leave," I said.

"There exists a possibility of your safe return," Pyewacket said. "Therefore, you will return safely to your native Shadow."

My eyes narrowed. No words came forth almost without my choosing to speak them this time. Was this creature a Master, or did I just make bad decisions when faced with the creepy-cute? "That doesn't make any sense," I said.

"No?" the kitten asked, and even that one word was melodious and lovely. "It will. Good evening, Ms. Ess. Perhaps we shall meet again some night."

He was gone before I could answer. He stepped out of the lamp-light, and he was gone.

I stared at the place where he had vanished for a long moment, running over our conversation in my mind before I asked aloud, "What the hell was that?"

The night didn't answer, but the street light - had it been a lamp post a moment ago? - went out, the moon and stars returned, and perhaps that was answer enough. I went on as if in a dream, and the memory of my encounter with Pyewacket seemed to waver several times; each time, I grit my teeth and clung to the memory until it grew solid again, and each time the effort was exhausting.

In time I came to the park on Captain's Hill. There was a refugee shelter here, and I could hear the droning buzz of the generators before I saw the lights. I kept moving as I stepped into the floodlights. Someone shouted. Then a hand fell on my shoulder.

The memory of Pyewacket wavered again, began to fade. I clenched my teeth and set myself against it, and some distant part of me recognized that this was very bad.

Someone was speaking to me. There were people, and most of them were hurt, most covered in bandages.

A woman with a kindly if tired smile gave me water, which I drank thirstily. She led me to an open cot, and I slid off my over-full backpack and shoved it underneath. Then I sank down into it without taking off my shoes, closed my eyes, and went away for a few hours.