I abandoned my body. I didn't want to watch it die. Someone had a potion handy, surely - except I didn't, and I was remembering that Calliope didn't either. Matlyn might... then again, she looked very bloody but unhurt so she'd possibly used at least one, and her sister had probably been roughed up so it was likely she'd used the other on her. Matlyn also had Growth and Enhancement, both of which could theoretically be used for healing, but I was certain she had specialized into plants.

Fuck.

Honestly, it didn't even matter. Matlyn was wriggling on the floor, Calliope was fighting two Sahrger, and a knife through the chest like that would kill me very, very quickly. They wouldn't have time to dig around for a potion and get it into me anyway. I was just completely screwed. So much for fate.

Actually, that was a silver lining of sorts. Take that, you manipulative bitch. You want to use me as your pawn? Too bad, I'm dead. Fuck you, fate.

Both minds were in Ematse, in my memory palace, and I had time cranked all the way up to prolong things. I wasn't sure what would happen when my body died, and I wasn't in a rush to find out. I wandered through the rooms, idly poking at things. I looked at the statues I'd made of the things from my vision, the multi-armed faceless one and the clockwork statue. I wouldn't ever figure out what was going on with them, or the creepy curled-up statue in my closet.

I'd never get to punch Bill in his stupid face for turning out to be yet another asshole who knew what I was and didn't tell me. I'd never get to see my airship all finished. I wouldn't figure out why those Earth memories cut out abruptly, or what the deal was with that gold brooch.

Wait.

I ran to the desk in the recreation of my room in Bill's house, and pulled the brooch out. The symbol on it looked damned familiar. It was a lot like the ones I'd seen in Poicelria's fortress and Brinkmar, and on those tiles here in the Temple of Convergence. How similar, though? I grabbed copies of the tiles out of a memory and laid them out, then moved the brooch from one to the next.

And there it was. The symbol on the brooch was for one of the planes. The brooch was a planar thingy, which meant... ah, fuck me. The memories were cutting out because when I'd recovered them I was focusing on the strange metaphysical direction Earth was in, but those memories weren't of Earth at all. I'd been going to other planes, or one other plane, anyway.

I could have always gotten those memories back, if I'd known to look for them. I ran into the hallway of the Long Haul Hotel, picking a door at random and willing it to be the right one. I knew what I needed. Knew where it had started. The smell of bleach wafted out, bleach and other chemicals mixing.

There I was, in a janitorial closet, banging on the door. Zoey and her fucking friends were holding it shut, and I was splashed all over with bleach, and the puddles were mixing with each other and giving off fumes. Chlorine gas, or something - ironically my chemistry textbook was out in the hallway, having recently been hurled at Zoey's face on reflex, but I knew the general rule of "don't mix bleach and fucking anything else".

My throat was burning. My eyes were watering. I was going to die. An then... the door gave way, and I collapsed into the hallway. I scrambled up, looking around for Zoey, but she wasn't there. Nobody was there. The door swung shut behind me, and I turned slowly as I tried to get my bearings. The hallway looked completely wrong.

It was still a school, but it was dark - the fluorescent lights were flickering but were the wrong shade, wrong type, wrong everything. The doors were different. The layout was different. I hurried over to a water fountain but it didn't work. I hurried on, too worried about the burning to think about anything else, and eventually came to a locker room - that should have been in another building entirely, but it was no stranger than anything else.

I turned on the shower and it worked, though the water smelled funny. I got rid of the bleach and other residue, but my shirt and jeans were in bad shape. I stripped them off, and pulled on some clothes that were laying nearby - an old school gym outfit, though something was wrong with it. The shirt said SCHOOL SCHOOL scHIGH SCHOOL where it should have had an actual name.

Skin still irritated and throat still raw, I began walking. The locker room led out into some sort of arena, and when I turned away from that down a side passage I ended up in long concrete hallways that looked like maintenance access halls. That led to what looked like an airport terminal, although the windows all just looked into more hallways. Nothing looked outside.

I didn't have time to watch further, not with my body dying. I knew what happened next. I made it home, either directly to Bill's house or close enough to walk. I left the gym outfit laying in the corner of my room - I'd seen it in one of the other memories, though it was just a melting lump at that point; ephemeral matter, degrading in the low-mana environment.

How many times had I used the brooch? Not many, probably. A dim memory tugged at me, something about a castle - on Earth, I'd been looking at it from a modern street with busses and stuff going by. And people... with Scottish accents, maybe? Not important right now.

I could look for where the memory cut off after I teleported away from Greg's vault, try to see what happened in-between then and the alley by Universal Servicing Systems when I burned Jake Ross and the Shattered Crown, but I suspected there was a significant gap between the two. Hours, maybe half a day. No time for that shit.

I could also see what happened when Zoey and I were being chased by Coelestis agents, but I knew that one already. She died, I got away. The end. Although... well, that couldn't be the whole story. What else was I supposed to be doing? I glanced, morbidly, back at my body - time was crawling, but the knife was still there in my chest and my eyes were wide open staring at the ceiling.

Calliope was still fighting one of the Sahrger, the other having been stabbed through the eye with an iron spike, and Matlyn was slumped over me - legs still tied together - with her hands around the knife like she was trying to stop the bleeding or getting ready to pull it out. Neither of those things would help at all, and I didn't see any sign of a healing potion. To be sure, since divination seemed to be working for the moment, I dug through Matlyn's pockets. Nada. There were two empty vials, and no potions. It probably would have been too late anyway.

Okay. Fine. I'd see more of my lost memories before I finished dying. Whatever.

Zoey and I ran through room after room, with the Coelestis agents close behind. She had her phone out, and turned the flashlight on just by shaking it - I always disabled shit like that - so we could somewhat see as we ran. We'd ended up in some sort of apartment building hallway, or a dorm, or something. We ran through a door at random and I pulled Zoey with me into a wardrobe, covering her light.

The Coelestis guys were still in the hallway - multiple doors had been hanging open, so they wouldn't know which one we'd gone through. "Fuck," one said, "I think we've lost her."

"I've got a lock with my badge," the other said. "We can follow Theseus protocol. Synch your badge to mine, in case we get separated."

There was a pause. "Okay, done. If you have a lock, let's get moving."

"It's... not precise. She's close, I think, but this place is fucking with me."

As they tried another door, I quietly opened the wardrobe and the two of us ducked into another room. We went faster and faster, being less worried about being heard and more focused on just putting distance between us and the agents. After a little while, we stopped to rest in what appeared to be a shopping mall - most of the stores were empty, but some had signs like OOOOORDS and were filled with piles of old vinyl records.

"What the fuck is going on?" Zoey asked, finally giving in to the panic. "What did you do to me, goat licker? You were doing drugs, and - was it acid? Did you get acid on me, and I absorbed it into my skin, and...."

"No. Fuck, of all the people that could find out about this you're the absolute worst. God, I hate you so much. Well, congratulations, magic is real. If you tell anyone, those guys will come after you and lock you in a tiny cell somewhere. And if they don't, I'll kill you myself."

She just sneered at me, totally unintimidated. "Oh fuck off, hoe. Ugh. Seriously where are we, if this is real it's... is this all under the school? Like, they buried a whole... no... that doesn't make sense."

"I told you, it's magic. I don't know how it works, exactly. It's some fucked up mirror dimension, and anything you take out of here like... melts, after a while. But you can come out anywhere you want, through any door, and I'm going to travel the world. I just need to figure out how to use it more consistently, it seems like I can only get it to work like once a day but it's not... I don't know, there might be rules I don't understand."

"And those guys, with the guns, they want you to show them how you do it or something?"

"It's this brooch," I said, hiking up my shirt to show it off where it hung from a belt loop. "It magically comes back to me if I try to walk away from it, too, so don't even think about trying to take it."

"Ugh, as if I want any of your crazy 'magic' jewelry. Gross. I just want to get out of here."

I nodded, looking around. "I think... I think if you just imagine the room you want to find, really picture it, you can get there eventually. That's what seemed to work before. But you shouldn't go alone. Some woman made of wood came out of a wall and tried to grab me before, I don't know what other kinds of monsters might be here."

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Bullshit."

I rolled my eyes. "Okay, Zoey. It's bullshit. You caught me. Go off on your own, there are no monsters and this isn't a magical mirror dimension, it's just a secret closed-off wing of the high school that's bigger than the whole school and has no windows anywhere."

"Fuck you, are you trying to get me killed?"

"You're the one that just - ugh - yes, Jesus, I would love if that happened. You're miserable to me, all the time. You tried to murder me with bleach. You call me 'goat licker', which doesn't even make sense, and you're... just... you're a shitty person. I want to be a shitty person, it would be so much easier. I used to be a shitty person. I cut off other girls' hair while they were sleeping in the group home, and I started fires, and I took a shit on one kid's pillow even though she was nice to me and offered me some of her candy. And then I stole the candy and ate it, while she was crying about the shit on her pillow.

"I've hurt people, physically hurt them, and enjoyed it. I'm a fucking monster, even my mom said so. But you? You? Zoey, you make me want to be a motherfucking saint just so we'll have less in common. You're such an obnoxious piece of shit that I'm ready to join a convent and be a nun for the rest of my life. Bill has been trying to get me to be nicer to people, and I've been giving it a shot, but honestly I think you're my biggest motivation now. You've got raw sewage for a personality, if this is even close to what I used to be like I'm actually ashamed for the first time.

"And I only threw that book at your stupid fucking face because you hit me with a spitwad and I threw what I was holding on reflex, but I'm glad it happened. I'm glad your face got smashed. I tried to warn you about the guy with the gun, and I tried to warn you about shit here, and I'm done. I did my part, my due diligence, whatever. My hands are clean. Get out of my sight, and get eaten or shot or lost forever. I don't care. I don't know what your problem is, but I know what my problem is - and it's you. So by all means, remove yourself from my life."

I started walking, and Zoey shuffled along behind me. Since this wasn't Earth I could actually use divination on the memory, and I could see that her expression kept alternating between angry or indignant, and some sort of puppy-dog sad face. God. It was only a few years ago, but we looked so young.

"How did you get a magic amulet?" she asked.

I sighed. "I stole it. And I should probably give it back, but..."

"Fuck that," Zoey said, surprising me. "What, like you're just going to hand something like that over? To who, those assholes with the guns? This place is creepy as fuck, I want to get out of here, but you love this nerdy shit. Of course you're going to keep it. Fuck whoever you stole it from, I bet they, like, have magic that cures cancer and they're not telling anyone."

That was a legitimately good point. Did Greg - or, god, Bill - have healing magic they weren't sharing? Surely, with all the charity shit if Bill had access to healing magic he'd be using it, right? It was possible Bill knew about magic stuff but wasn't allowed access to it.

"Thanks, I guess. Okay, let's start aiming for home. If we want to stick together, we can aim for somewhere we both know. School, maybe, since they'll be gone now. We could just go back to in-school suspension and pretend this didn't happen."

She looked at me like I was crazy. "I can't go back to school after this!"

"It's not like you can explain it to anyone."

"I'll just say I ditched. God. You're so... ugh. Let's just - shit! Shit!"

Zoey ran, taking the light with her, and I followed as a gunshot rang out. They'd found us, somehow. The rooms changed around us as we ran, looking more and more decrepit and ancient. Was it a byproduct of Zoey's fear? Something subconscious in me, thinking about the abandoned places I always ran away to to hide from people? Either way, we were soon surrounded by rotten, sagging beams and crumbling plaster. For a moment we appeared to have gotten ahead of our pursuers, and Zoey stopped dead in the middle of a room. Old furniture was piled in the corner like a snowdrift, and paint was curling and flaking from the walls.

"What's that..." she said, and started walking towards a doorway slowly. I looked past her and there, sitting on the floor in an otherwise empty room, was a huge softly glowing blue crystal. Zoey stepped into the room and I followed, wary but curious. As my foot came down on the floorboards I felt them flex, like they weren't properly supported.

"Zoey, I think... that's a bad idea."

She took another step forward as I took one back, and the floor tilted and opened up to swallow her - folding like one of those cootie catchers the other girls used to make. There was a void underneath, a gaping hole in the endless series of rooms, and something was waiting there for its dinner. The whole room was hanging precariously over the cavernous space with virtually no support on the sides of it. The floor, in pieces, had been supported by something under us, something that was now twisting around, extending, reaching.

It wasn't a spider, because spiders couldn't get to be the size of a car and didn't look like they had been cobbled together out of leftover construction materials. But it certainly had the feel of a spider, with long legs and a cluster of glistening eyes. The glowing blue crystal was attached to it, dangling from the not-spider on a stalk in front of its mouth, like a lure. It had been stuck up through the place in the center of the false floor, the spot Zoey had slid towards as the flimsy planks were peeled away.

I had managed - barely - to grab the doorframe, and Zoey was clinging to one of the bits of floor as it was rotated around by the monster. Any second it would orient things correctly and chomp her down. I pulled myself up and turned, maybe to run, maybe to look for something I could extend to Zoey, maybe just because there was nowhere else to go, and found myself looking at the Coelestis agents as they turned the corner and raised their guns.

Giant spider construct, or bullets to the face?

I turned back and leapt, landing hard on the same chunk of flooring that Zoey was on; it tipped and lurched, and the whole thing fell from the spider's grasp only to be caught on a web below. I almost tumbled off, but managed to flop forward where I could snag the edge and stay, spread eagled, next to Zoey. I carefully stood as the spider attacked - and was shot by - the Coelestis agents and grabbed at the cracked laths of the nearest wall. With a clumsy punch I got an arm through, slicing the back of my hand on the jagged wood. I grabbed at the edges and pulled, breaking more and more away with surprising ease. When I could grab the edges more securely I held on and kicked, widening the hole, and stepped through.

"Wait!" Zoey yelled, still laying down and holding onto the edges of the section of floor for dear life. She was crying, and clearly petrified with fear. I hesitated. The shots had stopped, and the spider had turned back down to us. The smart move was to run for it, leave Zoey where she was. I hated her. She'd been nothing but awful to me. I could have died, in that janitorial closet. The world would be a better place without her in it. And I imagined explaining all that to Bill, pictured his face falling. My mom's face flashed into my mind as well, but hers was smug. Vindicated.

Some horrible combination of conscience and spite kept me from running, but the spider shifted targets and lunged for me - its glowing lure casting blue light across the hollowed-out and decayed pit as it launched forward. There was a beam next to where I'd broken through, jagged end not attached to the ceiling, and I stepped back and kicked it hoping I could make the wall collapse inwards on the creature. Instead, only the beam broke through.

The spider-thing impaled itself.

It wasn't a killing blow, not by a long shot, but it made the thing recoil. Zoey was dangling now, the floor she'd been on gone, caught in the web that hung loose by the hole I'd created now that the spider had made a mess of things. I leaned down and grabbed her hand and pulled her up, but she was still stuck to the web and it was catching on the walls. She wasn't going to be able to get away before the spider recovered.

Trying to buy some time, I kicked the beam again - the spider had been trying to pull itself free, but when I kicked the whole thing shifted and the monster screeched as it slipped and fell backwards, tumbling out of sight and crashing down to a lower level. As it did, the web pulled tight and yanked Zoey back through the hole, leaving her barely hanging on and screaming for her life. At the same time, a hand clamped down on my shoulder.

I hadn't been looking the right direction - originally or through divination - to see how, but the agents had gotten down to the lower level and behind me. I threw an elbow but there wasn't any real force behind it; my current self was embarrassed at the clumsy maneuver, now that I could kick people's asses reliably. Well. When they didn't murder me with a knife to the heart.

As I was restrained, the other agent went over to the makeshift doorway and looked at Zoey, still struggling to not fall into the blackness of the spider's nest. He turned back with a smirk, like he was about to make some snarky comment about her plight, and she managed to stretch forward and snag the corner of his jacket before falling backwards. The agent almost went ass over teakettle right away, but barely caught himself at the edge as his jacket ripped and pulled away.

I heard Zoey scream as she fell, then a thud, and then some more screaming and the sounds of the spider thing moving. After that, a horrible crunch - and the screams ended abruptly. I used the distraction to stomp down on the foot of the agent holding me and then, as he lifted it away, hooked it with my own leg and went into dead weight mode. He collapsed with me, cursing, but kept his hold on me. And then his partner screamed, as the spider came out of the depths to spear him with a jagged leg that looked like it was made from wooden planks... with claws at the end, and little hairs, and... ugh.

The agent on me tried to go to his aid, and I clamped my legs around him so he couldn't get up. He backhanded me, and then - when he saw it was too late to do anything about the other guy - pinned me by my neck. "You little shit," he said, "I was going to shoot you, but now I'm glad I ran out of bullets attacking that monster. You know what I get to do to you now? I'm going to take you down into the basement, down into the vault, and I'm going to watch as the Director puts you in a tank like a medical specimen."

He reached down as I struggled, and pulled the brooch off my jeans. He shoved it in his pocket, and then managed to wrench his legs out from mine. "Okay, kid. We're going to get out of here, together, and if you cooperate I won't have to "

And then I stabbed him in the face with a huge rusty nail.

I scooted back as he recoiled, kicked him in the chest, and scrambled to my feet. I was out through a door an instant later, and hurrying down a hallway. I didn't have a light, but there was just enough of an odd glow that I could find doors, as if there was some reflected moonlight from a place I couldn't quite locate. Once I'd made a couple of turns and the scenery was shifting back towards something less dark and scary I paused and got my phone out and turned on the flashlight. I put his Coelestis pin into my pocket, getting blood from the nail attack all over it in the process, and then flipped through his wallet - I'd snagged both while we were struggling.

I kept the cash, obviously, and but there was almost nothing else in there except... a business card. For the self-storage place. "Okay," I said to myself, "so I... I go back to school, act like nothing happened. Stick around long enough that they don't think Zoey and I left at the same time. Don't think that I... that I killed her, or something. And then I leave, and I... I start planning for how to deal with these motherfuckers." I patted my pockets, and pulled out the brooch that had, yet again, come back to me.

I stepped out of the memory. That had answered most of my questions. I was pretty sure I went back to Nusos later in the day once I'd made an appearance at school, for some reason, but it didn't feel important. I'd learned what I needed to. How Zoey died, how I figured out where the vault was, where the Coelestis pin had come from. It would have to be enough. There was no time to learn anything else; surely, I would be dead any moment. Unless I was already dead, and hadn't noticed?

I cautiously re-opened sensation to my body, and... it hurt, but just in the overall way that I would have expected from being in fights and digging in the sun and all the other bullshit I'd dealt with over the course of the day. My chest, my heart, was fine. Huh.

I returned to my body and opened my eyes, and found myself on the ground with my head in Matlyn's lap. "Hey," I said, "why am I not dead?"

She smiled, looking relieved that I was awake. "I don't know," she replied, "why was your heart made out of plant matter?"

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