"What's the point in telling you, when you'd never believe me?" - Napoleon Bonaparte

"You didn't tell Lara about Hope," Kyubey pointed out, following Marie into the bathroom. "Why is that?"

"I don't want to believe it's true."

"What's the point of not believing objective fact?"

"There's got to be something I'm missing. I don't know! Let's take it from the top. Did Hope Fearnley directly and intentionally kill Sonia Vu?"

"Yes."

"Did Sonia do anything malicious to Hope?"

"No."

"To anyone or anything Hope cared about?"

"No."

"Did Hope have reason to suspect she was going to?"

"Not to my knowledge."

Marie ran a hand through her hair and suppressed a groan. It came out as a whimper instead, which she liked even less.

She locked eyes with the girl in the mirror, the most stuck-up, vulgar, detestable person she had met in her life. The way she composed herself was so blatantly melodramatic. The way she tensed her knuckles when gripping the sink, the slight sneer of contempt on her features. The things about her that nobody noticed, the way her left shoulder naturally rested a few millimetres higher than her right, the way her hair was only ever grown to the top of her neck because going any further made it fray up at the ends (as it had already begun to do). The heterochromia too, of course, enough to make everyone stop and stare into an eye a deep crimson and the other its sapphire equal.

She was bitter because of her own. There was many a time she herself had been stopped on the street and complimented about it, but she always found that aspect of her appearance deeply startling. When strangers brought it up apropos of nothing, that was confirmation.

"Is that it, then? I can't trust anyone, can I?"

"I don't understand trust. Why is it that the same species that invented lying would also believe-"

"Piss off. Forget I even asked."

"Why does trusting magical girls matter so much to you? I thought you wanted nothing to do with them. Are you starting to come around on the idea of a contract?"

"No! Of course not. And I hope you don't genuinely think nagging me about it makes me want it more."

"And if I asked you less?"

"I hate you so much, man. Look, I'm only spending so much time around them because they're pastimes to me. They're just something to while away the hours with until I'm an adult, and I actually have some freedom in my life for once. Or they were, at least! But now I don't even have that!"

"Is this a sign that you're going to pick your self-destructive cries for attention back up again?"

"My what? Dude, what are you talking about?"

Marie would never have called them that. The passive-aggressive stunts of her adolescence were certainly intended to grab the attention of her parents, but she considered her own actions too subtle and clever to be harmful to anyone in any capacity. They worked, in the end, but never in the ways she intended. When her parents came home to a fifteen year old Marie drinking pinot noir her father had been saving for the following year out of her mother's fine china, prone to staining from such an affair, she was admitted to three days hospitalisation with mild alcohol poisoning, followed by a grounding for the following two weeks. Nobody had asked her why she had done it, which upset her more than anything else, because that was what she had done it for. In truth, her father offered her no emotional support, because his father had been much the same to him, and he believed it a key factor in who he was today.

He was right, in all the worst ways.

"This is the life," he might say of what he had become - but it was not life, the virulent apostasy Thomas Crawford roused to chronological truths beneath a veneer of passive aggression, a perverse contempt for the puppy-dog eagerness with which the avant garde, the new, the different dreamed to condescend, that the animation of his body had wound down past its halfway point before the world had so much as tasted his name. His days, transitory careening through jealous contempt for the fresher Crawfordian blood which had divided the attention of the most beautiful woman in the world, unshackled him from the lotus-flavoured mirage of fulfillment in her embrace to mask-off nights of carnal bouts in vampiric drive, a craving for the fresh-faced, the ignorant, the untainted, affirmations of his perpetual youth asserted in the heka of capital he'd never touched, bound wads of green and yellow, spoils of his Damoclean nobility. A rejection of the cries from the margins, of anything that would depose the dominance of his role as subjective, the self-made man, unbeknownst to the tied-and-straightened leash of a system feeding on his blindness to the role of harbinger, veil upkept with his own self obsession. The man as king, the family as kingdom to do with as he would, puppetry of its malleable-minded heiress a fine taxation procured for his rule. Dominion as axiom for a self-obsessed-knowing, self-obsessed-knowing for a self-obsessed-being, self-obsessed-being for a self-obsessed being.

"I'm not like that anymore, though. Are you going to call my younger self angry? Calling a mid-pubescent girl angry is like calling fire hot, or water wet, or your takes on my mental health pretentious and intrusive."

"I think you should calm down, Marie," Kyubey asserted back in the present.

"I'm not mad. Don't tell people that I got mad. I'm fine."

"How are you feeling, then?"

"Foetal."

"I don't understand what you mean by that."

"Like I'm still waiting for my life to begin! A couple weeks back, when I first met Hope, she asked me what my interests were. And you know what? I made a total fool out of myself. It turns out I don't have any."

"You have witch hunting."

"And? So do they."

Kyubey contemplated that for a silent moment. Then, "Is the problem that you don't feel special?"

"Am I supposed to?"

"Why are you asking me? I've never felt anything."

"Yeah, you're right! I mean how could you know anyway, right? You've been the most important figure on the planet for two million years, and me? What have I been?"

"Have I upset you, Marie?"

"Forget it! I'm worthless! Why are you still here?"

He was across her back now as she gripped the sides of the sink, a reaffirming paw on her shoulder. "There's no such thing."

"What?"

"The Concordance has scoured the entire observable universe for all its resources. Do you know how many useless living organisms we found in all that time? Zero. It turns out that from the self-replicating subspace proteins living in the tightest corners of the temporal web to the gas titans of the Tucana Galaxy whose endless thunderstorms form planetwide nervous systems, every single living thing, whether it knows as much or not, has limitless potential." He jumped off her back, and into the bathtub. "Everything can teach. Everything can make its world a better place. And everything can see a completely unique slice of the universe that nothing else can. I think recognising the value of this is one thing our two species have in common. And there are some Terrans who would very much like to get to know your slice better."

"I can't believe I'm getting a pep talk from you. I didn't even imagine you'd care about me."

"Of course I care about you! I've spent nine and a half million years trying to stop the universe from ending. Why would I do that if I didn't care about everyone in it?"

Marie sighed. "You're not exactly making me feel like a person with a life worth living. And your offers to turn me into another cog in your mindless violence machine don't help the point either. I'm just going through a tough time right now, okay? I'm not going to sell my soul to make it more bearable. Sadness and anger... they just happen sometimes. I'd do so much better to accept them and push through than become a doomed, undead warrior."

"And happiness? How often does that happen?"

Marie rolled her eyes. "And what would you know about happiness?"

"I think I'm good at giving off the illusion of it, when I need to. So not that much, really."

"Yeah. Exactly."

"By that metric, you'd make a good In-"

She strangled this body of his, and drowned it in the sink.

It was several weeks before she gathered the courage to talk to her friends in more than just passing again, but she found herself starting conversations with them more and more about nothing the less she came to stand being at home all the time. It was in early-mid February (only about four or five weeks from the end of her contractual eligibility and the end of Kyubey's begging for her to die for the universe, she counted) that Hope reached out with an offer to join her at the gym.

It was vaguely around the middle of town that she reunited with Hope, Danika, and Hope's friend Jane.

"G'day g'day g'day!" Hope greeted her, complete with firm pat on the back.

"Fearno! Good to see you! You too, Dani! And you, Jane-"

"Oh, I'm Audrey."

Arse, Marie thought to herself. Piss and shit.

Audrey continued, "Jane's the one who isn't devastatingly attractive."

Initial embarrassment aside, Marie slung her backpack across both shoulders. The quartet began in the direction Hope led, with an Incubator scampering along beside them.

"It's good to see Marie is getting some exercise now," he asserted, which was odd of him, because literally nobody asked his opinion. "If she can stay in better shape, she'll probably be able to make better-informed life choices. Then she can make a contract-"

"And tell you where you can shove it!" Marie finished for him. "I'm going to be honest with you guys. I'm really just doing this to get away from my family now and again."

"To be honest, I'm the same," Danika offered. "It's just suffocating, spending so much time at home. Lauren's parents drive me nuts sometimes."

Hope shook her head. "I dunno, I reckon you two should count your blessings. I had to work hard to build myself a family. You just got one handed to you at birth."

"You make it sound so easy," Marie smiled sadly. "I haven't regretted a single time I've been out with you guys instead of lounging around at home."

"I'll swap you," Hope smirked.

"Why the hell would you want to do that?"

Audrey shrugged. "I mean most of us don't really have much in the way of relatives we can go home to. You know Zoey? Her family's, like, mega-Catholic, and when she came out as gay, they sorta just put her on the streets then and there. Then she met this dork, age ten, who started calling her "auntie" all of a sudden, and I'm sure for her that wasn't the same, but it was family."

"And you call each other your family, even though you know you're going to lose one another all too soon?"

"It's not perfect, but it's not as bad as you're making it sound."

"See," Hope grinned, as if she were poised verily to purport the most headarse shit, "this is something I've been complaining about for yonks. Language is clunky and impractical. I don't think we should use it for communication. Ever. That's my most radical political conviction."

Marie needed a moment to figure out whether she was being serious or not, and then another to realise she couldn't. "What?"

"You know. 'Cause we've all got telepathy. Even 'umans like you can have it. Why don't we all just use that?"

"What's that got to do with the matter at hand?"

"The recontextualisation of the word 'auntie' to refer to certain words in some Aboriginal Australian languages because English doesn't have an exact counterpart, that new context was then, I think, misunderstood by ten year old me to be something slightly different, 'cause I was only spending a few months with most girls back then, tops, and ended up as the mishmash of confused dialects that you do see before your very eyes, and then Zoey understood that to mean something different again!"

"Socrates said language is a drug," Audrey laughed, "and I think Fearno's high as a kite."

"Well I wouldn't ask anyone to give their language up, of course! That's an important part of their identity! I just reckon its actual utility outside of cultural practices is not the best tool for the job."

"Easy for you to say, ay? You're not exactly from any one background."

"Look, if we all just stuck to telepathy we'd never mistranslate, we'd never misunderstand the meaning of anything, and we'd never get different definitions of the same word mixed up."

"She's serious," Audrey added as an aside to Marie and Danika. "When was sixteen, she went two months without saying a word at all."

"And I'd do it again!"

"I mean the whole thing is way too idealistic. You haven't considered the downside of phasing out language."

"What do you mean?"

"Having grown up speaking both English and Mandarin at home influenced the way my mind developed. You know? Being bilingual shapes the way you think. I reckon if you started bringing up kids without teaching them any languages, that'd probably have a negative psychological impact on them."

"Oh crud, fair point."

"Crud?" Marie interjected. "For a walking stereotype, you sure don't swear often."

"Oh, when I was twelve I swore like a sailor. It's something I'm trying to overcome now that I'm working with kids."

"You have a job?"

"All-ages assistant MMA instructor."

"Oh, of course you would."

"Is that a homophobic cliché?" Hope tried. "Do people think butch lesbians are good at MMA, or is it just the vibe I give off?"

"I keep forgetting you're a lesbian," Marie laughed. "In my head, you're just Hope Fearnley. That's like its own thing."

"Oh, good," Hope grinned. "I'd hate to be a gay caricature by accident. Then people could say what they want about me, and they'd be right. I mean it's all well and good when you're called some homophobic pejorative or other on the street, because you know that it's probably coming from a place that doesn't understand what being gay actually is. But if some bloke called out to me, 'Hey bitch! Why don't you go listen to some Kate Bush?' I don't know what I'd do then."

"I think I'd just go back to bed for the day," Audrey shrugged.

"Hey," Danika cut in. "I really hate to interrupt, but... is that Francis?"

Marie looked down the street to see Francis Marlowe emerging with a huff from what she only now recognised as Selene's pâtisserie. She looked up and down the road, caught sight of the four approaching girls, and stormed toward them.

"Which one of you dickheads suspected me of killing Phoebe?" she roared.

Hope and Marie shared a glance. It was Hope who spoke up.

"Let's say it was me. Why, has something come of it?"

Francis looked genuinely shocked for a second, but shock gave way to restrained bitterness. "I've heard about you, Fearnley. You had a bit of a reputation back in Juniperina. You're lucky I know better than to punch you right here and now."

"What's Juniperina?" Danika asked.

"It's nothing," Hope grumbled. "Don't worry about it."

"It's a juvenile detention centre," Kyubey explained.

"Fearno! You went to prison?!"

"Not by choice," Hope scoffed, then added in a telepathic aside to Marie, "you know, I expected a harsher reaction from you. I'm glad you're taking this well."

Marie didn't have the heart to explain why she wasn't surprised. It was like something her mum would say. That she wasn't surprised to discover such-and-so, she was just ashamed.

She left Francis and Hope to offer one another a few blunt, monosyllabic insults, and for the former to leave. If she could do anything else right now, she was too buzzed to even want to.

"I hope this doesn't change your view of me all that much," Hope tried, defeated. "She makes me sound like a real piece of work, but I never picked a fight in there or nothing. I don't start fights, I haven't the heart."

But she killed Sonia.

Marie spoke up, eager to change the topic and worried to spend too much time away from the point: "Do..."

The other three, plus Incubator, stared at her.

"Do you think Selene's alright? The girl who works here?"

"Oh, fu

The inside of the shop was surprisingly clean, given the state its staff member was in. Her face and neck had been repeatedly lightly scratched, and she looked to be in the process of regenerating an eye.

"Selene!" Marie ran to her.

"Deckard's friend? What are you doing here?"

"Jesus H. Shit, did Francis do this to you?"

Selene let out a feeble laugh. "Gosh, you swear like Marquess Macquarie. I guess that makes sense." Her eye finished healing, and she moved her hand away and blinked out a few droplets of blood. "Don't worry about me, it's just Attendant stuff. Nothing you guys should worry about."

"I'm going to worry about it anyway. What's going on?"

"Marlowe is acting like I'm withholding information about Deckard's death. I'm not, though! I swear I'm not!"

"Do you have anyone you could tell about this?"

"No!" Selene winced. "I mean, no. There's nobody I can talk to without... it's better I keep this to myself. I can handle it. And I know it's going to all be over when you solve the case, right?"

"Uh-"

"How's that going, by the way?" she wondered absentmindedly, running her hands down her face. Plant matter moved according to her will, holding her face together like stitches.

"Um... great! It's going really well! We should have this all wrapped up in no time, don't you worry."

Selene looked a mite flustered. "Oh, that's great! I'm so glad someone as smart as you is on the case."

"Hahaha, you flatter me! Hang on, I'm keeping some friends outside waiting. I should probably get going now."

"Of course, of course! I shouldn't keep you, then. See you around?"

"Yeah! See you around!"

Marie slammed the storefront door behind her on her way out.

"I can never go in there again."

"So!" Hope announced. "This is the gym me and Audrey have been taking Dani to for a little while now. Every Monday and Wednesday morning, in fact."

"Damn, you're way more active than I ever was, back when I was even doing any sport."

"Ah well, you know! If you keep your body healthy, you keep your mind healthy. Every day, I do a bit of low-level exercise, walk down to the river and back. And then, three times a week, I do something a little more full-on. Monday and Wednesday I'm here, Friday evenings I'm teaching MMA."

"They've got some kind of boxing ring thing back there, could you teach me?" Marie smirked, half in jest.

"I could show you something simple, I reckon. A punch, maybe."

"Wait, for real? I was kidding."

"You don't want to learn a punch?"

"No! Of course I do-"

"Superb! Audrey, Dazza, gi's a hand showing Marie the ropes."

"What, so you can put her on them?"

"Wh-? Oh! That's good, that's very clever."

Marie followed her mentor up into the ring, Danika and Audrey watching from the sidelines and making a bit of a show of cheering them on. Hope removed her shirt and tossed it aside, the collar whipping up her hair on its way off, the arc of her back ascending as she drew upright from throwing it on the floor, her skin and the fading depth to the tattoos that covered her entire torso shining bare under the fluorescent lights, the two long scars running just beneath her chest... it was enough to give Marie pause for a moment that had never passed her before.

But it was okay, because she wasn't gay.

"Hang on," she snapped back into reality at once, "you're allowed to be shirtless here?"

"Yeah, sure! See these scars? Double mastectomy. There's nothing people think needs covering up after that. Did it myself, actually. Looked up some tutorials online. Honestly, it doesn't hurt if you're quick."

"I can't tell if I'm supposed to say 'ew' or 'ow'."

"You're meant to say, 'oh golly, Fearno! You're so talented! That must've been tricky!'"

"I'm going with 'ew', I think. What's with the tattoos, though?"

"They're all arcane... circuits, you could call them. The 'uman body's not naturally equipped to conduct magic very efficiently, so some of us take it on ourselves to upgrade our bodies with certain magical functionalities. These tats? Purely functional. They're all I Ching patterns or apotropaic sigils or astrological charts or Icelandic magic wards, all that lovely stuff. Some people go way more hardcore with their augmentation. Like full-on custom built prosthetics and body mods and stuff. Heaps better than what I've got, but not really a common practice, what with how little time we get to master new skills."

"What are body mods? Like, body modifications?"

"Spot-on. Trying to regrow and reshape your body to be better at whatever you need it to, really. I heard of a few girls from a dozen different countries who were trying to work together to see if they could grow a second, cyborg brain in their spines. Supposedly, having two brains would make them act as a buffer to keep one another in check or something. I don't know. I sorta skim-read the article. It was really bloody long."

"That's gross."

"Not everything unusual is gross, you know! You can always count on a 'uman to get all frugal about the things they do to their body, ay?"

"What do you expect? I have to live inside this thing."

"Oh, come off it, mate. I'm just messing with you. I'm just pulling your tit. So you want to learn how to fight?"

Marie blinked, nodded twice.

"Righto. Throw a punch at me, I'll rate it."

"What, out of ten or something?"

"If you'd like."

Without hesitation, Marie threw a fist at Hope's midsection. Hope caught her wrist. "I see, right! That's a three out of ten from me. Girls?"

"That sounds about right," Danika offered, having almost no idea.

"I'd have said one and a half," Audrey countered. "Good speed, dangerously weak form."

"Oh, come on, Audrey!" Hope rolled her eyes and let go. "I wasn't gonna be so harsh to a first-timer."

Marie clenched her teeth. In little over a month, she'd be eighteen, and in all that time, she'd never learned anything as basic as punching right.

"First problem's your fist." Audrey held up her own in demonstration. You've got your fingers wrapped around your thumb, see? Your thumb should be on the outside of your fingers. Otherwise, it's gonna absorb the force of the blow and break."

Marie nodded and did as explained, then held her fist back up for approval. She got it in a few curt nods.

"Next is your posture," Hope offered. "You should have one foot about two short paces in front of the other and one short pace to the side. Then have your back foot facing slightly out. Bend the knees ever so slightly too. Yeah, yeah! Like that! See, this way you're not gonna get bowled over backward by the counterforce of whatever it is you're hitting. You know, every action has an equ-"

"Right. I know Newton's laws."

"Nifty! Well, that's all martial arts are, really: physics. Well, classical physics if you're 'uman. Your fistfights involve significantly fewer death lasers."

"Also!" Audrey enthusiastically appended. "Keep your fists to your chest. It's equidistant to your head and your waist, so you can basically protect everything but your legs as quickly as possible. Then, when you wanna punch, you pull your fist back to your waist like so. See how I turn my wrist so my palm's turned up like this? This makes it easier to put the force in from my shoulder. The further up my arm I swing from, the more leverage I have. More leverage means more momentum. Hey Fearno, this position has a name in Tae Kwon Do, yeah?"

"Yeah, preparing a blow like this is called chambering. Only takes a fraction of a second, so it's not like you're leaving yourself defenceless or anything. Now let me walk you through the main types of punches..."

Back at the base of the Citadel, Danika bid farewell to the rest of the group and headed home. On a motorcycle, apparently? Marie hadn't anticipated that she could ride.

In through the front door, Hope began to thumb through a mountain of letters and paper scraps on the kitchen bench, through the pantry, on top of the fridge.

"Are you looking for something?" Marie tried.

"Hang on, I'm just- Oi! Auntie!"

"Yeah darl?" Zoey called from the lounge without turning to look.

"Where've you put the grief seeds? I'm dusking a little, haven't used one since Sunday."

"They're in the tray with all the pencils and stuff!"

"I thought we moved them."

"I moved 'em back."

"Fair doogs," Hope shrugged, and helped herself to a nearly-empty seed.

"And can you use one of the full ones first, so we can throw it out?"

"Oop! Bit late for that, Auntie."

"Oh, no fuss! If you've used one, you've used one!"

"Righto," Hope rubbed her hands together. "Who was that philosopher I was telling you about?"

"You mean just now?"

"Yeah. Wasn't Judith Butler, was it?"

"It was Hana... Hara... something."

"Donna Haraway!"

"That's it!"

"Right, yeah! All that trans'uman stuff I was saying earlier, she's a big pioneer in the theoretical side of things. I think I've got a copy of the Cyborg Manifesto in my bedroom. Lemme find it."

Marie followed Hope into her bedroom, which was no less a mess than it was last time. She set her bag down and sat on the bed. Hope scanned through the bookcase, and stood up empty-handed.

"Looks like it's not here," she conceded. "I'll just check if anyone else's borrowed it. Make yourself comfy, meanwhile."

Marie laid back on the bed. "Come on, Fearno. You don't need to go to all the trouble for me."

"Nah, I reckon you'd love it! Seriously, I'll be right back."

Hope left the room. After a few seconds, Marie decided to have a look for it herself. It could be anywhere in this mess.

It wasn't in the piles of random stuff strewn about the room.

It wasn't behind the bookcase.

It wasn't under the bed. But - hang on, something else was.

Marie reached under the bed and pulled out...

a handgun.

Hope Fearnley owned a handgun. Hope Fearnley was a criminal. A killer. And she had a gun lying under her bed. What was Marie supposed to do now? Before, she could pretend that none of it was true, but here was the physical object itself, in the palm of her hand. It was too heavy to be a fake, too. She'd heard before that real guns were so much heavier than prop guns.

She hid the weapon away in her bag. She needed to show someone.

NAPOLEON AND THE PYRAMID

There goes an urban legend that the last words of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821) concerned the frightening things he had witnessed in the Great Pyramid of Giza. "What's the point in telling you," the legend supposes he uttered in his dying breath, "when you'd never believe me?"

This story is magnificently romantic and melodramatic, and caps off the life of one of the most influential men in his corner of the world in such a humbling, fantastical way. Of course, it is just that - fantasy. Napoleon's final words weren't some cut-short story of an ancient curse, and he never even entered the Great Pyramid during his Egyptian campaign.

It happened in an ancient gold forge instead.

There stood a forge in what has since become Cairo, far closer to the resting places of its kings than the forges in Upper Egypt, where the golden jewellery worn by deceased nobility was crafted. After his conquest of the region, Napoleon became intrigued by the site - what secrets did the finest goldsmiths in history have? He had to know, but for some uncertain reason, he was hesitant to find out himself.

He approached the forge with six others in tow - five of his own men, and one captured Cairene rebel.

"What is this place?" he asked the rebel.

The rebel said nothing.

"Ibrahim will not save you now. Mourad will not save you now. You will answer me, or I will-"

The rebel spoke. Arabic, of course. The man beside him translated, "He doesn't know."

"What do you mean, he doesn't know?"

"He says, 'we don't go in there'."

The emperor was taken aback by this. To have such a monument to ancient wealth and ingenuity on your own soil, and to leave it untouched was the mark of fragile, weak-minded men. No wonder his own army could crush them. No, surely he alone was greater than them all, for he had the courage and the will to venture within by himself. All at once, he dismissed the frustration and weariness worn upon his brow, and he laughed. Without another word, he turned and marched into the forge.

Fifteen minutes later he staggered out, hardly breathing, mouth agape, face pallid. He looked at each of his men, one by one.

"Make no record of this. Destroy the building. Seal whatever entrance remains," was all he managed, before collapsing onto the street.

"I told him we don't go in there," the rebel shrugged.

Twenty-three years later, as he laid dying, he spoke to the men by his side. "What's the point in telling you," he said, "when you'd never believe me?"

"Please, your majesty! Tell us!" someone was heard to say. "What did you see?"

He paused before answering, but answered nonetheless: "I saw how small our universe really is. And I saw something far bigger trying to get in."