Shadows prowled as far as the eye could see, scattering from lightning flashes before rushing back in. Even as high up as Taylor was, clung onto the side of the tallest cliff she could find, she couldn't make out anything but dark. An entire world made of murk.
She adjusted her grip, claws digging into the glassy stone slightly, and kept on looking, hoping for some proper sign of artificial light. But there was nothing: whatever had happened back at the Earth Bet portal hadn't ended up with her in the Earth Vet counterpart. The lack of anything substantial made that clear.
Gold suddenly flashed in the far off, the colour sharp and unhazed by distance. In an echo, the purple of dusk followed after, equally as crisp. Her breath caught as she kept her eyes fixed, wide-open for anything more substantial. It eased back into a normal rate as nothing further came.
She pressed herself back into the cliff, feet digging in so she didn't slip – it was a long way to the ground. Never much of a climber back before, her powers – some kind of brute package, she guessed – made it almost easy. A completely worthwhile exchange, in her opinion: insanity followed by certain death in return for being able to climb without training. Sign her and all her – ha – friends up today.
Tongue rolling round her cheek – her teeth were sharp, now, all incisors; what was wrong with powers – she considered her options. She had no idea where she was and no real way of finding where she was. Any other hopes she had rested on her not being what she was: a cape. For the first time in a rough year – it felt like longer – she had no idea what to do, no plans pre-made to carry out. No future left to think of.
Hanging from one arm, she turned and looked back out. Still Earth Vet. Looked down at the ground far, far below. It seemed to sway, almost – shift minutely in position. Would she survive falling that far, she wondered: brutes usually had some sort of durability to them, right? Maybe she'd be fine. She looked back up, examining the sky, each breath coming slightly faster than the one before, turning the idea over in her head. Then back down, fingers shaking.
Something moved.
Her head was up before she knew it, sight fixed on some ridge in the near-distance even though she couldn't have seen anything, shouldn't have – it was out of her vision, out of her peripherals, even. And yet, there was still movement: a five legged, spider-esque thing with a single, massive eye like a setting sun skittered towards her. It was looking straight at her – somehow, with some unused sense, she knew it.
An Ing.
Her free arm arced towards it, hand in a half-formed fist like she was grasping a motorcycle throttle that pointed downwards, fingers snapping up when the motion ended only for her claws to clitter off her palm. Cursing under her breath, she climbed down in an almost free-fall, hands and feet punching and kicking into the wall to slow her down when it was needed: to half-arrest the motion.
The Ing – a Warrior, she remembered – reared up as she went, then folded into itself and turned into a puddle of purest black. There wasn't much known about the residents of Vet, not much that could be known about them given their hostility, but she knew one thing for certain. They rarely hunted alone.
Hitting the ground, she took off, checking each shadow as she went. She held her right arm out oddly straight; it flicked up at the slightest shift in the dapples about her and didn't come back down again till she was sure there was no red.
Wherever she'd landed in Vet was a land made up of cracks – fissures formed the most of it, rising up to jagged, finger thin peaks between each crack. Up above, the bordering peaks cut the sky into a snake of vibrant purple that seemed to bleed colour into the sides. Down where she was running, closer to the bottom, things got stranger. Like a glacier's walls, they were an obsidian translucent; like amber, shadowy forms floated inside. A sign filled with garbled English that was almost legible near the surface. A drowning shop dummy's arm whose splaying fingers didn't quite breach through.
Still sprinting, she ran out of the gorge and into a central space: like a spiderweb fracture, more of the fissures ran out from it and turned it into a crossroads of glass canyons. The tips of each snaked down before flattening abruptly, making a bowl or amphitheatre out of the place. Only slowing down – she had no time to stop – she tried to pick a gorge that wasn't the obvious exit directly opposite her entry point. Pebbles and glinting chunks of the fragmented surface kicked up ahead of her as she got closer to the centre, and a part of her wished she had enough time to pause and find out what had happened here, as something clearly had, but time wasn't with her. She couldn't afford to linger. Deciding on a whim, she turned left, eyes fixed on one of the more narrow looking gullies.
Three strides towards it, and a shadow rose up from inside, thrust out of the earth. The dark swelled and morphed like playdough in the hand to the outline of an Ing Warrior. Feet kicking up stones, she skidded to a stop – pushed off back the way she came when it made no move towards her.
Why was quickly evident: there were three more blocking up other exits behind her, two in the one she'd just run out of and its neighbour, and a third hanging oddly from another exit's cliff-wall like a spider. A fifth slipped into being as she turned her attention towards a passageway, as if her just thinking to chance that one was enough to bring it out.
Breaths steady yet deep, she considered her options. They weren't moving forwards, weren't straying from the exits. Why was obvious – to keep her here and stop her from leaving – but the following why after that was less so. Why not just attack her now, why wait? She was, stupid powers aside, defenceless and she had no technology on her for them to possess. She couldn't figure out what they were waiting for.
In the end, it didn't matter: they wanted to hold her here, and she didn't want to be held. A hard enough problem without needing to complicate it further. She put the why aside and took the first and most obvious potential solution.
Flowing downwards, she scooped up a weighty looking, glass-like stone and tried to pick a target. The one that was hanging off the wall in the hopes she knocked it off, or the newly arrived sixth who left only one way out unguarded (though she doubted that would last if she moved towards it) and hope she could take advantage of its unpreparedness?
She briefly eyed a seventh that had appeared alongside the first at some point behind her back, the two doubling up on guarding one of the gullies – Why? Was there something they didn't want her getting to down there? Help or a nest (if Ing even had nests)? Should she try that one on the sheer principle of them trying not to let her down it, or make it look like she was going to, then take another when the rest committed to preventing her?
The options swirled round in her head, each potentially viable – and if she'd had enough time to try them all, she would've. But choosing fast was better than choosing either. Decision made – the one on the wall – she discarded an idea to miss deliberately to test them: either they wouldn't care, in which case she'd have gained nothing but lost time, or they would, and it would've been better to have hit one. She threw as hard as she could, and was briefly hopeful as her new body's strength helped shoot it out far faster.
It was meaningless all the same: three silver pennies flashed in the air; a ray of pure light blazed from each and turned the projectile to dust. She swore internally; she had no idea they could do that, hand't factored it in. And now the bizarre ceasefire was at risk.
Holding a breath, legs tense and ready to rush one of them, any of them, to force a way out the instant they charged towards her, she waited. But aside from a few screams – one rearing up like a bucking horse – they continued to just watch her, giving no reaction to her failed attack. Some shifted from side to side, black limbs scratching at the ground. Dusk-red eyes glittered under the lightning.
She'd almost released some tension until she realised that, at some point in the moment, the final gap had been closed. Ten Ing now stood guardian in eight exits – a hoop with her held in the middle. She was trapped: every exit blocked. No way out.
She paused, thoughts suddenly clicking into place.
Who said those were the only exits?
Before she could probably process it, and let slip some body language or sign to betray the insight, she was racing, legs pushing off the ground harder and harder till she was bounding more than running, flying a dead sprint at a pair of neighbouring exits that were only guarded by one Ing a piece. They screeched as she came at them, reared up, legs scuttling.
She half-climbed, half-vaulted up the ridge in the middle, her useless climbing powers at last given a productive outlet. The claws on her feet dug in to the wall as much as the ones on her hands, anchoring her on the increasingly thinning pass – and even still, she was held up as much by momentum as by grip. But held her up it did, letting her race past all three of the chittering Ing, overtake them through an unconsidered ninth exit: the sloping down ridges that bounded each exit.
A good way along the ridge, when the Ing were far behind her, she slipped over to one side chosen at random and allowed herself to fall. Despite her earlier considerations, hitting the ground only managed to wind her: hold her for a single second till she ran on as before.
The new year was certainly that: new. Novel. Distinct. Different. A thousand synonyms to say 'It has changed' – and hallelujah for that.
Ok, maybe not changed as such – if anything, nothing had changed, but that also meant it hadn't got worse. People still made snide comments about my hair when I got too close (I comb it every night, actually) or my choice of clothes (it's winter – you're meant to wear baggy) or whatever, but I wasn't being ambushed or sought out for them to make them. It was more like growling, really: 'Go away, loser. Grr. We don't want you here. Rrgh.' Not really… malicious, as such? More just by habit, I think.
So, yeah, people weren't being nicer or talking to me more, but they weren't not talking to me either. C'mon. It's better than nothing, right? And I mean, it got better after the first couple of weeks – the same sludge of rumour that I thought everyone would buy into sort of just evaporated away. People started finding better things to do than trying to pick on me.
Stupid as it sounds, at first I thought my mom did something, somehow. Like I said, stupid, but… things only got better after I took her flute into school with me, so at the time, it kinda seemed like a sign. I mean, there's been weirder things with all the stuff capes get up to – ghosts shouldn't be that out of the ordinary in a world like this, right?
Yeah, I couldn't convince me either, but hope's a funny thing. And for the first three weeks – when I was avoiding people and things were gradually get better – that's pretty much what I believed, even if I knew, rationally, that it couldn't possibly be the case. 'New year, new me' was off to a better start than I'd hoped.
The school day had ended and the hallways were packed with people. Luckily, I'd spent enough time avoiding people round Winslow that I knew a shortcut. Well, you ended up walking longer and through a bunch of barely used corridors, up and down a story twice needlessly, but there were less people because of it, so you'd usually get there quicker. Which did make it a shortcut even if it was, in length, longer.
Of course, that meant it only managed to be a shortcut if there was nothing else there to take up time. I was nearly at a gap between different buildings that I was fairly sure got regular use as a smoking area, if the butts on the ground and the acrid taste to the air were any hint, when I heard voices.
"Anyone could have seen it coming, to be honest. It's just how her kind are." It was a man's voice – or more probably a teenage guy's voice – light and loud like he was used to being heard. "But I get it. Really, I do. The way they've set everything up makes it hard for people to see the truth nowa–"
"Really?" A girl, her voice flat and lifeless. "You called me out here, for this?"
I hesitated as I tried to figure out whether to turn back and waste all the time spent getting here, barge on through (it wasn't that tight a gap) or just wait. The conversation, only half-registering to me, carried on as I decided.
"Look. It's clear to anyone with half a brain that your pet gorilla's slipped the leash. You can moon after her all you want, but loyalty, respect – they don't understand these things like proper people. She's going to turn on you."
"No, she isn't. And even if she did, I could handle it. I'm not weak."
"I'm not saying you are."
"Yes you are. I don't need your help, and I won't ever need it. Because I've been through worse than she can do, and I've come out stronger for it."
There was a soft thump, followed by footsteps. I perked up, hoping they were leaving and taking the choice of what to do away from me.
"Fine." I think that was the guy leaving: his voice sounded further away. "I'll ask again after the time comes. When you really see what she is."
It took a moment before I realised a second set of footsteps were coming towards me. Then I managed to waste whatever time I had left to react dithering, and as she rounded the corner, I came face to face with Emma.
She was scowling, glaring at the ground. Her expression smoothed out a bit as she caught sight of me, before doubling down on it and notching a V into her forehead.
"What. The. Hell. Are you following me?"
"I… No?" I shuffled in place. "This is the way I usually come. It's my route back. I go through here every day."
Emma's top lip pulled up, revealing a line of perfect white teeth. She took an exaggerated look around the alley, at all the trash on the ground and the red and yellow shocks of graffiti that someone had clearly started and then given up on.
"You know what, I buy that. This is exactly the sort of place I'd expect to find you hanging around in." Arms folded, she gave me a look over. "You even managed to dress the part. Tell me, did you have to work hard on looking like a druggy or does it just come natural?"
I pulled at the hem of my grey hoodie, still a bit lost as to how I'd gone from heading home to meeting Emma of all people for the first time after winter break. "That wasn't a very nice thing to say," I managed, and immediately regretted it.
"Oh my God." Emma had a hand held out to me, palm up, as if I was being put on display for some imaginary audience. "Are you for fucking real?"
"You shouldn't swear."
Why?
Why, out of everything that could have come out, were those the words that did?
"Wow." Emma had big eyes and expressive lips – a pretty face – so when every inch of it was screaming disdain down to the pours, you could really feel it. With a little scoff, she pushed past me. "You are such a fucking geek, Taylor. God, I don't know how I was ever friends with someone as pathetic as you."
"I ask myself the same question." The words slipped out, uncontrolled, for a third time. But for the first, they weren't ones I regretted.
I caught Emma halting out of the corner of my eyes, saw her left hand bunch up into a fist. Time seemed to swell and stretch – lingering as if under expectation – till she flattened her hand and left as abruptly as she came.