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I have work to do.

Allon’s been doing this far longer than I have. She’s discovered limitations and rules and not only taught them to me, but engineered the circumstances where I could witness those rules first-hand.

We traveled – our bodies in tow – to Nevada in 2009, and hitch-hiked to the nearest gas station. A desolate, solitary place staffed by a distrustful mule, she had me try to leave while inside the starion, and I couldn’t do it.

On the side of the building, where the toilets are, there hung a security camera. Within its field of view I couldn’t do it either, but one step to the right, beyond the camera’s range, it was easily manageable. I even brought a piece of a broken license-plate with me back to Élique.

She said that observation was the key, but I don’t think she understood it fully. She thinks of our different versions as different worlds, different realities. She thinks about causality and the observer effect.

She doesn’t think of them as stories.

That’s how we all experience the world. We observe so very little, filtered by the limits of our senses, our attention, our memory. And we learn very early on that you can also gain knowledge without observation. Things you’re told, taught, preached.

It’s not observation that limits what Allon and I can do, it’s plausibility. We can leave and take things from one world to another and we’re allowed to do that as long as nothing we do is too implausible to the occupants of either world.

If we want to do something far out, like disappearing in front of someone, we’re just not allowed to do that. It’s a powerful limitation, but when you stop thinking about observation and consider the issue of plausibility instead, you see new opportunities.

I have a few theories. They’ll have to wait, though. The first order of business is to check the obvious places.

I go to my room, latch the doors, and go to the beach. I don’t expect Allon to be there, but I have to check. I resist the relaxing effects of the sun and sea – gotta stay focused – and I notice a black speck on the horizon. It might be a ship, and a ship might have a lookout, and a lookout might have a spyglass with which he could see me.

I leave in a hurry, lest I get trapped there by the spyglass. The haste of it leaves me dizzy when I arrive, and the ground beneath me is anything but flat. I stumble down and flail, smacking my elbow hard against a wall before my feline instincts kick in and my paw latches on to a guard-rail. I’m on a spiral staircase. In the lighthouse.

I hadn’t meant to come here, but I hadn’t thought where I was going. It’s interesting that I should have unconsciously latched on to this place. It makes sense: it’s familiar, it’s isolated, and it’s mine. It’s where I experienced the lowest point in my life, where I first discovered I wasn’t alone, where I first killed a version of myself. It holds my grief, elation, guilt.

And it holds a framed picture of my parents’ prom. It’s right at my feet, on the stairs, the glass cracked but the colors no less vivid. Mitchell Kenna’s ghastly blue tuxedo, Doreen looking so young and skinny.

I carefully step down to pick it up, turning the frame over to shake the glass off the photo. When I lift it up I see something beneath it: my Participant ribbon for my first science fair. Strewn along the winding staircase, lit by pale, diffuse sunlight coming from above and the slits in the curved wall, are photos and certificates, keepsakes and broken glass.

I hurry down the stairs, resisting my curiosity at the mementoes and stagger to the floor. There, in the middle of the little room where my lighthouse-keeper experienced his last evening, lies a battered, torn, open cardboard box.

My box of memories. My anchor to the world of 2006. I wonder what would have happened if I’d opened that box to remind myself of my old life, before I went to John’s studio. Would I still have slipped out of my mind and into another world? Or would I have been reminded that there was more to that world, and my life in it, than what I’d experienced in that city. Whose name, goddammit, still escapes me.

I know it doesn’t help me find Allon, but I indulge in just a moment’s nostalgia. I pick up the box, ruined from its tumble down the stairs. I actually smile.

This bit of cardboard followed me through three of my most important stories. I don’t know any other world where I kept keepsakes of my youth except this one. It came to Élique with me, sneakily hiding in my closet and teasing me with the memories it held. I was too messed up at the time to appreciate it, but if cardboard can think, this is a cheeky little bugger.

I pushed it away without thinking where I was sending it, accidentally and carelessly sending it here to tumble down the stairs of an abandoned lighthouse. And here it waited for me, to playfully remind me once more that maybe I’m taking myself too seriously.

Reminding me that I was loved, in this version and all the others I know. That there was a time in my life that I didn’t fuck up. And that the same rules that prevent me from unmaking my many mistakes also protect the sanctity of my childhood. Simple and uneventful, with parents unrelated by blood but loving all the same. I will always have the Kennas, and Carrick, whatever it’s called in other versions. Nothing can take that away from me.

I bring the box to my snout and sniff at it. It’s been to so many places that were important to me, and maybe I can evoke those memories with lingering scents.

My eyes widen, I drop the box, and stagger back.

I smell cannonweed.

•

I know where I need to go. It’s on the fringes of what Allon said was possible, so it doesn’t come easy. I’m panting, still standing in the lighthouse. My body is a weight that keeps me from going where I need to go, but I know that I’ll need it, and I also know that it’s not impossible.

It’s like pushing a heavy boulder up a hill. If it’s too heavy it just won’t budge – like trying to leave when I stood in front of the gas station camera, it can’t be done. This can be done, it’s just resisting me. I can move the boulder, but I keep losing my footing, my momentum, and it rolls back.

I need to get to my apartment in 2006. I can’t be sure exactly when, only that it can’t be long after I left to go see John.

Allon said I couldn’t slip into the role of a version earlier in their lives than the last time I visited, and that’s true. I can’t become the Game of earlier in 2006, and I don’t want to risk becoming him later. But I’m not going to become him. He’s going to do his thing, and I, the Carrick-born jaguar, am going to sneak into his apartment while he’s gone.

This is some far-out shit, isn’t it? Crossing timelines, universes, tying knots in causality. But I know something Allon never figured out: those things are symptoms, not principles. They’re manifestations of the rules of a story, but there are more rules, and more flexible ones. They’re subservient to a greater principle, just as observation is subservient to plausibility.

That’s it! Of course I’m having a hard time making it into my apartment. I left the curtains open, there’s a clear line of sight to the street outside. I hold my paw up in front of my face, concentrate on my old bathroom, and slip away clutching the note I just wrote with the lighthouse-keeper’s quill.

•

If Allon pulling me to the beach was nauseating, pushing this hard into 2006, this close to my counterpart, is like a kick in the gut. I’m grateful that I focused on the bathroom and stumble to the toilet, hugging the throne as I spit, then heave dry. I really must eat something.

I rinse my muzzle under the tap, and notice the deodorant. Good, I need to mask my scent, but replacing the scent of cat with the scent of citrus isn’t going to aid me in my stealth. I rummage through my cabinet -- air freshener. That’ll do. I pinch my nose and spray my clothes; it’s always hard to smell your own scent, so I can only guess when it’s enough.

My apartment is empty, of course. The door is locked, but I unlock it for convenience. I take a look around, at the black table with the fold-out legs – no, no time for this. I open the closet and pull out the box, still pristine, just as I left it. I place it on the floor in front of the door, far enough that it won’t be pushed aside when it opens.

I may be here a while, and no one hiding-place is better than another, so my rumbling stomach decides that I should wait in the kitchen, leaving the door ajar just enough to see the box in front of the door. I close the curtains to the windows with my eyes closed; I don’t want to see what’s happening out there, and besides, if I have to leave I’ll need privacy.

After living in Élique for so long, even with the sojourns Allon and I liked to take to other realms, there’s something magical about peeling the wrapper of a muesli bar and chewing food that may be months old and safe to eat for months longer. Tasty, too.

And the fridge! That oasis of frigid delights, a treasure vault filled with – yes, oh yes – beer. Beer, goddammit! Allon and I always stayed away from alcohol when we traveled together, and I know I can’t have more than a sip just now.

I take a bottle and put the cool glass against my neck. It’s not exaclty cold right now; it’s autumn and this version of me turned down the thermostat before he left...

He’s not a version of me, is he? He’s the one that evolved into me. I left that body, but right now the version of me that’s probably lying in an MRI machine in a too-short hospital gown, that’s me, just a few months ago.

If only I could tell Allon about this! I don’t think this has occurred to her before, but what I’m doing right now is more than just slipping into another life. It’s amazing enough that I consider that oridnary now, but this, this is fucking time travel.

I know I can’t do anything to change what’s happening to me right now, outside in the city. I can’t stop myself from making it to Atelier 1417 in time to destroy John’s chances of getting his work into Ms Appleby’s gallery. I know that as sure as I know that I’m still not crazy.

I can’t do that because it would be implausible.

And I’m not here for John, not today. I’m here for her.

Just before I pop the cap off the bottle, holding it to my ear to hear that cool, refreshing hiss, the front door pushes open. I cradle the bottle, I can’t risk the glass clinking as I set it down. I crouch by the kitchen door and peer cautiously through the crack.

I smell her before I see her shadow casting over the box. Cannonweed. She hesitates before entering, weary of the unlocked door, but I made sure the note I left on the box is clearly visible. I see her arm extend down to pick it up, her traveling cloak pulling back enough to show her gleaming gold pelt.

•

Ally,

I know why you’re here. This is what you’re looking for. Leave it for me to find in Élique and make sure you’re watching when I find it.

You’ll see that I’m like you.

After sunset, you’ll find me in the alley behind the Westervale bakery. I won’t recognize you, I’ll put up a fight, but you’re quick and strong.

I can’t tell you more. I don’t need to tell you never to mention this note to me; I already know you’ll keep it secret. I think, maybe, you’ll even forget.

But I hope you don’t forget this. If the day comes when you return to this place, as yourself or as Allison, please leave me a sign, someplace where I’ll find it.

Your friend,

Game Kenna.

•

She leaves the note, and takes the box, and I forget about my beer. She doesn’t look around, doesn’t close the door, and when I don’t hear the stairs creaking, I wait a little longer to make sure she’s left this world.

Just as my younger self – my real self, I’m comfortable saying that now – is having his brain imaged, the younger Allon is now in Élique, planting the box in my closet and spying through my window to see what I do when I find it.

She accepted the note. I wouldn’t have, if I’d been in her place. I would have asked questions, I’d have looked around the apartment. I’d have demanded answers.

Maybe not, though. Like I said, we like to think we’re all rational and inquisitive, and as soon as we detect a hint of a problem we investigate. But we don’t. We don’t go to Tennessee to inspect a beached clipper from another reality, we don’t stop to investigate some schoolkids getting chased out of their bus by bats.

I might have done the exact thing this Allon did. Accept it and move on, rather than inviting new chaos and uncertainty. I know better than to wish I’d had that wisdom when I first started noticing the cracks in my world, in myself. I know better. I still wish it, all the same.

But if wishes were kisses I’d have terminal mononucleosis, wouldnt’t I.

I’ve taken the first step to finding my Allon, but it’s only the first step. I feel the urge to hurry, but I quell it. I know the urgency, but just because something’s urgent doesn’t mean I should hurry. I’ve just seen first-hand that time, for me and Allon, isn’t what it is to everyone else.

I’m in for a marathon, not a sprint. I take a sniff of the beer, the closest I’ll let myself get to it, pouring it out into the sink and dropping the bottle in the crate with the other empties. I’ve got to leave this place as I found it, in case the other version of me comes home, the one who plays out my life after John walks out.

The box. Crap, the box.

If there’s even the slightest chance that he – that I would come home after this shitty-ass day and look for the box that holds my fondest memories, and find it missing...

Okay, let’s do this right. The clock says that right now, in the hospital, I’m just putting my clothes back on and saying goodbye to the med students who thank me for exposing my brain to them. That gives me time.

I eat something cheap out of a plastic wrapper, and then something else. I don’t care what it is or if, technically, I should have nuked it first. It’s special, this pre-packaged food. It’s as essential to this world as fresh suckerfruit is to the world I stole this body from.

I use the toilet. God, toilet paper! I brush my teeth, with my own toothbrush, and floss. I trim my claws.

I take off my green jacket and my red shirt, my no-longer-new boots and breeches and take a shower. I try not to enjoy it too much, but God, it feels fantastic and I can’t resist it. My pelt’s a little thicker than it was in summer, but my kind don’t grow a thick winter coat so I’m soaked through in moments, and warm, so warm.

It’s the steam that I love the most. It fogs up the shower cubicle, surrounding me, caressing my lips and my eyes and warming my nose and sinuses.

No, it’s the shower gel I love the most! The citrussy froth revitalises me as I scrub every inch of me. My shoulders, my neck, my ears, my tail. Never in its life has this body been cleaner. It’s largely lived a healthier lifestyle than the one that’s rushing to John’s studio now; more active at least.

I towel down, but leave the evaporant of the shower gel to dry my fur on its own, walking naked into the kitchen to help myself to a few vitamin and mineral supplements. Can’t hurt, right?

The first thing I steal is a backpack, and stuff my Élique couture inside. It’s unwieldy to bring the boots, but I know better than to leave them behind. In the bedroom I scan my floordrobe – last week’s jeans, yesterday’s t-shirt, and a clean pair of socks and boxers.

And my sneakers! Good, that’s good. I’m glad my past self put on loafers to impress the curator, because these are some damn good sneakers.

Pulling the chair over to the wardrobe I fish through the upper shelves, what little winter clothes I’d thought to invest in when I turned over a new leaf and got this apartment. Ratty leather jackt that’s a little too figure-flattering to zip it up comfortably, but it’ll do.

Before I help myself to anything valuable worth carrying, I feel a little twinge of doubt and go to the desk, fishing the red envelope from the drawer. My parents had one just like it, containing all the crucial documentation for themselves and their household. If the house were ever on fire, that’s the one thing (other than me, of course) that they’d try to bring with them. I rifle through the files and, thank God, the home insurance for this building does cover burglary and my signature is up to date.

So I can safely rob the place without adding too much more despair to that Game’s life.

I’ve been to enough worlds to get a sense of what’s universally valuable. Nothing high-tech, nothing electric. The only gold and silver I ever owned were jewels and trinkets from the married men and women I used to make my living from, and I pawned those when I turned my back on them. A shame, that.

A Swiss knife. Thermal gloves. A bag of candy – you can laugh, but if you’d grown up in Carrick and had a Mars bar you’d kill or die to have another. Kill or die.

I’m being careless, but that’s the point. When my counterpart comes home he’ll find his place burgled. It’ll be a bummer, but it’ll fit exactly with the sort of day he’s been having. It’ll be plausible.

Best not tarry much longer. At a guess, I’ve just arrived at the atelier and Hipster Skunk derisively points me to John’s studio, and I have no idea what’s going to happen after that point. I grab another few items that might come in handy; a flashlight, extra batteries, the first aid kit from the kitchen. I think about taking a kitchen knife but I don’t have anywhere to put it where it won’t be obvious, or damage what’s in my backpack.

I loved this place. Seeing what I’ve done to it, I can’t help but feel a little sad, and I know it’ll be much worse for that younger Game when he comes home. I like to think that he’s strong enough to handle it, I hope so, but I can’t know. After all, when I was him, I fled to a lighthouse and killed myself.

I’ve done what I needed to. I can do no more. He’ll have to take care of himself, as all the other versions of me in all those universes are doing. It’s not as if I can leave him a note to apologize and cheer him up – the note! Shit, I nearly forgot that.

I snatch the crumpled parchment off the ground and stuff it in my backpack too, fastening its straps and hoisting it on my shoulder. It’s a good thing I thought of the note... A very good thing. That note wouldn’t have been a plausible thing for my younger self to find.

I look up, as if there’s something to see there, and a little smile plays around my lips. This story is still playing out. It’s still making corrections, navigating around my actions, but at the same time it nudges me just as much as anyone else.

This world let me invade it, grudgingly. It let me give the box to Allon and influence events in my past. It let me eat, and take a shower, and steal what I wanted. But it wouldn’t let me leave without taking the note with me.

It should be creepy, but it’s actually nice to know that something’s keeping an eye on me. We want the same things, this world and I. We want for things to go smoothly, to play out in new and interesting ways.

But I also want to find Allon, and so this world and I part ways.

•

I’m on the beach, freshly showered, in 2006 clothes with a backpack full of useful stuff and the first thing I do is panic.

There’s a tall ship in the water, far closer than when I saw it, drifting sideways toward me. Before I can see that it’s rudderless, its crew most likely fled, I react. It’s instinct.

The last time I saw it I was afraid it would stop me from leaving, that’s what flahses through my mind when I see it, and in my panic, I want it to go away.

So it’s gone.

Without thinking I push it away, anywhere, like I pushed away the box that the younger Allon is sneaking into a closet in Élique. It’s just gone, I don’t even know where.

Holy shit.

Maybe I sent it to Tennessee.

Is that what a clipper looks like? Clarissa’s friend Tom did say he’d heard the boat was found empty, without crew or cargo, and it did seem to be careening rather rudderlessly...

Whatever. It’s not important. Fuck, can you believe my life? I made a goddamn boat disappear with my brain, and it really isn’t important right now.

What’s important is the beach. It’s where I told Allon about John, and that I was too chicken to go back to 2006. If I know the lioness, and I most certainly do, then this is where she decided that she’d go there just to show me I was worrying about nothing.

If that’s where she went. All my hopes are pinned on it, because if she isn’t there, I don’t know where she went. And if I don’t know for sure that she went there I don’t know that I can risk going there myself, just to look for her. How would I even find her?

Oh.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Where’s my head? Her body was in Élique! She brought it back from the beach and then shifted out of it. If she went to 2006, that means she’d be be Allison there, John’s ex-girlfriend.

Why the hell didn’t I think of that before? I could have skipped all that shit with the box and just slipped into 2006 and looked up Allison Ley in the phonebook. Why didn’t that occur to me?

Maybe... maybe it didn’t occur to me for the same reason that the note did occur to me, when I was about to leave my apartment.

Allon just went there to find something to test whether I was like her, but would she have found the box if I hadn’t put it out for her? Unlikely, very unlikely.

So the story of my life wouldn’t let me skip that. It wouldn’t let me make that link, realize that her body couldn’t have gone to 2006, until after I’d made sure she found the box, so she could give it to me, so I could remember it, so I could make sure she found it...

I look up again, my eyes closed now. I am a master of my destiny, but I’m still Fate’s bitch when it comes down to it. And here I thought life was complicated before.

I feel the twinges of despair again, the mounting dread I felt the day Allon disappeared, rising to a crescendo when I saw she was no longer behind those lovely brown eyes. I resist it and it ebbs, not putting up a fight.

I open my eyes and look at my feet. At four rocks, each the size of a fist, laid out in a line. I hunker down, careful not to get sand in my sneakers, and inspect them.

There’s some sort of fabric under the left one, and I lift it up, there are two strips of black cloth. I pick one up and sniff at it, smelling a variety of herbs and – yes! Allon. These strips were torn from her cloak.

I lift the second and find it empty, the third as well, and the fourth covers another bunch of strips from her cloak. Six of them.

Two, zero, zero, six.

Nice thinking, Allon. A clear message for me that would have no meaning for anyone else. She was always clever like that.

I’d thought that knowing for certain where she went would give me confidence, but knowing what I need to do doens’t make it easier to do. I’m still terrified of going back there.

I don’t have any excuses. The fact that I don’t know when exactly Allon slipped into Allison in 2006 isn’t a big deal. She would have gone to a point after John walked out on me, she’s smart enough to figure out roughly when in the year that would have happened.

And in the months we’ve been travelling, on our little restday adventures, we’ve gotten pretty good at intuitively navigating toward one another. As long as we aim roughly at the same place, roughly at the same time, and concentrate on each other, we usually wind up arriving almost simultaneously.

Should I leave this body behind and slip into my younger self? No. Too unwieldy. I’d have to change my clothes, leave my body in Élique, and that’d take so much time I might lose my nerve. I guess there is such a thing as time pressure for people like us.

Besides, my youngerself is tormented with fresh grief. That’s not a mind I want to slip into; I have enough baggage of my own without fighting the seepage of his woes.

So this is it. I’ve got a body, clothes, supplies in my backpack, and half a plan. So I should just go.

Now.

Three, two, one.

Okay, I’m going now, for real. Now.

Counting down from ten, then.

Nine.

Eight.

Seven – fuck it –

•

It’s snowing. Flakes gently float down from the grey sky; there’s a white fluffy blanket over the streets and trees and cars. It’s beautiful.

I walk out of the alley where I arrived, into an empty street, grinning like an idiot. My relief is overwhelming, it becomes elation, revelry. I spread my arms and whirl on the street of the city I was so scared to return to for so long. It’s still here, and it’s so pretty.

I open my muzzle to catch a snowflake on my tongue. My eyes go wide. My stomach heaves, and I collapse on the ground, sending up a cloud of ash.

Not snow. Ash.

I pick myself up and shake myself down, coughing the dust from my lungs, trying to beat and scrub it from my clothes and pelt.

The city is quiet. There’s no ambient hum of traffic and business, no faint music spilling from a dozen shops, no arguments. There’s a deep bass sound from far away that fades quickly, and the fearful, angry barking of a dog a few blocks away, and that stops too.

No. I won’t let the despair overcome me. It clamors at the back of my mind, deminding to be let in. It’s so much stronger now, I have to fight so much harder to push it away. It was easier to make the clipper disappear.

I don’t care that the street is covered with ash, that the city seems dead. This is only one street. And it’s not my problem. Not my problem. It’s his. Let him deal with it. I have problems of my own.

I jog along the street until I find a payphone, its glass door stained with graffiti, but otherwise unharmed. There’s a phone book on a chain, a year old, but hopefully still accurate. John did say that he’d been dating Allison for two years and they hadn’t moved in together, so she should still be at the same address.

Levar, Levine, Lewis... Ley. That’s it. I glance out of the booth at a barely-legible street sign and think. It’s close. Allison’s home is close, two blocks up the street, then left at the plaza. The very edge of the skyscraper alley.

Christ, she lives in the same street Mrs Appleby lived. How fucked up is that?

I walk, briskly. I don’t look around. I refuse. I don’t want to see what’s happened to this city, what happened after I left. Seeing it can’t help me do what I need to do. Thinking about the odds of finding Allison waiting for me in her apartment amid an empty, ash-covered city won’t help me. Collapsing and puking my guts out won’t help me.

The second I look up and see what happened to the world I left behind, I won’t be able to fight the despair any more. I’ll be right back at the lighthouse in the blink of an eye, staining the rocks below with fresh blood.

I have to be like I was before I became aware. I have to walk through this world like it’s a dream, knowing where I am without really seeing it. Ignorant – no, not ignorant. It’s like I said before: what you know and what you don’t know shape your universe. As long as I don’t know what I did to this city, I can walk.

So I walk through a dream of an empty city, and ignore the familiar streets and corners, and fail to notice how different they are. I don’t know when I am; it can’t have been very long after John introduced me to Mrs. Appleby. Allon would have chosen to arrive pretty close to that, and I should have arrived pretty close to her.

I pass the plaza without seeing anything but ash. I look up, grudgingly, when I get to her street, to check the numbers on the buildings. 556, Ms Appleby lives in the penthouse. Across the street, two buildings down. 661, a taller building, a dozen floors. Allison Ley’s address is on the eleventh.

The front door is open, the lobby is empty. Neither surprise me; this is a dream, after all. Drifts of ash follw me as I enter and forget to shut the door behind me; I stain the red carpet with white footprints.

No light but the grey haze through the windows. No power for the elevator. I fish in my backpack for my flashlight and take the dark, quiet stairs.

I hear nothing but my footsteps and my tight, gasping breaths. Even the creepy drip-drip-drip of water on concrete would be a comfort, but there’s nothing.

It’s as if this world is angry that I won’t acknowledge it. If you won’t look at me, you can go fuck yourself. Fine. Be that way.

As I get higher, I smell the ash. It’s funny, but I didn’t notice it before... No, I suppose that isn’t very funny. The air smells dank and old and musty, like the Sayer’s scroll cabinet or the Writ’s sanctum.

My legs burn from the climb, but it feels distant, like the dog I heard barking when I arrived. I aim my flashlight at every door I pass until I see one marked 11, and push my way through before I can worry about what’s on the other side.

A hallway. Just a hallway. Same cheap red nylon carpet as the lobby, same wannabe wooden fixtures on the otherwise bare blue walls, same unlit lamps overhead.

Most of the doors are open, and I ignore them, trying to hurry past before I can see what’s inside, ignoring the drifts of white piled outside each of them.

I can’t ignore 11G. Allison Ley. This door is open too. I wonder if that makes it worse or better.

She’s not there. Of course she isn’t. Since I tasted the ash I knew she wouldn’t be. But when I push open that door and step into the Ley residence and see, I feel like I’m walking along a busy sunlit street with a brand new iPod and see a handsome dog eating an apple.

Breathless.

It’s as white as the street outside. Ash is everywhere. On her bed, in her bathtub, clustered around the hooves of the little herd of porcelain unicorns on her dresser. And the light, that deathly pale light, it’s everywhere.

The wall is gone. The layer of brick and mortar protecting Allison Ley’s cozy living room, with the divan and the poofs and the signed Pulp Fiction poster hanging in a frame, it’s gone. Beyond the snow-covered poofs and divan I see the city in all its hollow, horrifying glory.

White husks of buildings, covered in ash so soft it makes them look like sandstone sculptures. The merest touch would scrape their surface off, they look so fragile.

On the roof of the building across I see an airplane, a triple-decker with a broken propeller, the canvas wings hanging in tatters, its wheels pointing up at the grey, featureless sky.

There’s a dying fire, a few blocks away. It looks tiny, a little orange-black smudge right on the edge of the crater.

The crater.

I wish it were black. I wish I couldn’t see the burnt-out steel skeletons that once were homes and schools, the ragged piles of masonry and rubble that once were churches and hospitals. I wish I couldn’t see it.

I let the despair in. There’s no point in resisting it, I need it. It creeps in gently, guiltily, like a teenager sneaking home after curfew. I barely feel it; the sight of this devastation fills me so completely that my mind has only a few lonely corners for the anguish to settle in.

Brave, foolish sailors from cultures across the world, all through its history, set out to see the end of the world. Century after century, continent upon continent. Alexander marched his patchwork army across the known world in his quest to find it.

They only had to wait.

To wait for a boy called Game to be born, and grow up, and do this.

I can’t feel my body. I can’t imagine moving, or turning, or walking back down the stairs. I can’t imagine leaving this body and finding another world to destroy.

Allon was wrong. She was wrong to cross my path in Carrick and draw me from my fall off the lighthouse, wrong to befriend me, wrong to convince me I was good. Wrong, most of all, to come into this nightmare.

My backpack falls from my shoulder, sending up a little white cloud. My flashlight hangs in my paw, casting no meaningful light on the city.

The city. At last, at the end, I know its name.

This city is Blood.

•

“We got a live one!”

I don’t hear the drone approaching from the east, I don’t see the cloud of ash that’s whipped into a frenzy as they approach. Even as they hover before me and see the light of my dying flashlight, I don’t see them. I don’t hear them.

Not the whirring rotors, not the gruesome radiation masks, not the uniforms and insignias. I don’t hear them shouting through their bullhorn. I don’t hear the soldiers argue with the pilot, and I don’t see the helicopter rise up out of view.

I see the rope, though, when it falls in front of my view of the crater, and then a second. I hear the whirring as one of them rappels down the wire. I feel the anger and impatience, covering relief and concern just as their frightened young faces are covered with grotesque masks that make them look like demons from a trench war.

Arms and rope surround me, and I feel light, and drift away. Up, up into the waiting arms of another angry soldier who pulls a syringe from a plastic wrapper and jabs it into my neck before grabbing the rope hanging over the chopper’s edge and haulting up his squadmate.

“A thank you would be nice,” they say, voices muffled to genderless drones by the radiation filters. I’m too numb even to think how far from grateful I am, or to feel how tightly they strap my safety harness, or the sting of the liquid they spray into my eyes, my nose, my mouth.

No, I am grateful. The very smallest parts of me, that feel the full measure of the horror before me, those parts are grateful when the helicopter turns and rises, and the dead white city with its dead dark crater fall away into meaningless grey.

•

“Subject is male, early twenties, panthera onca on superficial inspection,” says the soldier who strapped me in. A woman, now I pay attention to her distorted voice. She plugged a wire from her radio into the mouthpiece of her horrifying protective mask. “Found unprotected inside contamination zone, less than one click from crater’s edge, retrieved from elevated position. Subject is unresponsive, otherwise asymptomatic, clothes largely unsoiled. Please advise.”

I can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but I see her nodding. “Roger that,” she says and unplugs her radio. “Sir, we are not authorized to approach the camp at this time. You will be deposited in the field below; a decontamination team will retrieve you and administer the care you require.”

She pulls me forward and detaches my harness from the seat, locking it behind my back and attaching a carabiner to a metal ring at the back of my neck. The carabiner clicks securely. I feel like a lion cub in its mother’s tender jaws as she carefully eases my limp, unprotesting body out of the roaring chopper’s side. I descend, like Lucifer, and land with a thump. I roll onto the ground, on my side. The rope coils around me and the chopper pulls away.

I move for the first time since I saw the crater. The grass smells innocent and I rub my contaminated cheek against it. A leafless dandelion tickles my nose, and maybe I laugh, I don’t know, I can’t feel it. I dig my fingers into the earth.

I feel life seeping into me, but it’s a slow trickle. I feel the subtle rumbling of the earth beneath me, and then the monstrous growl of a rough, cruel engine. The truck circles me, spraying mud against my face. Before it even skids to a halt two figures in bright orange, formless hazmat suits leap out with black gloves and boots and large, darkened faceplates.

I hear the whine of a Geiger counter rising in pitch as they rush toward me, pull my leather jacket roughly off me and turn me over onto my back to rip off my shirt. If they speak, I can’t hear it. I haven’t been stripped so thoroughly and so quickly since John...

John.

John lived in that city.

The thought sends a shock through my body, but the black-gloved hands that render me naked and strong and determined. They hoist me to my feet, naked in the sun, grass and mud clinging to my body, while another figure hops out of the back of the canvas-covered army truck carrying a large fire extinguisher, by the looks of it. Am I on fire?

The two holding my arms shift their grip, clutching my wrists in their armpits. One claps a hand over my eyes, the other over my muzzle and the third sprays me with the extinguisher’s white foam. It splashes against my chest, and it’s cold, so cold.

The foam is thick and cloying and they’re unrelenting in their dedication to painting me fully. I feel ridiculous. They turn me around to have my back sprayed, lifting my tail to hose me down under there too, and then they set about scrubbing the suds deep into my fur.

They use their fingers first, and it’s been years since I enjoyed such a thorough massage. They’re fast and determined, pushing the foal onto my face, getting as close to my lips and eyes and nose as they can. Their fingers are shameless, going between my legs and under my tail. I feel my skin tingle.

The ‘fireman’ throws his extinguisher back into the truck and as my scrubbed, white-spattered body is dragged over to its rear he emerges again with a firehose. Am I on fire? Seriously, I want to know. They seem to think so.

The hose hurts, it’s so forceful. The foam is blasted from my chest and the fingers return, as keen to rinse the suds out of my fur as they were, a moment ago, to work it into every pore. I’m soaked to the skin, and I know I should shiver, but I don’t.

Dripping wet in late autumn’s chill I’m pulled into an army truck by masked figures in red, and driven with all haste to Camp Curie.

The first of the figures in red to release the zipper around their massive faceplate, is a woman, a tigress. She’s handsome – not beautiful, but commanding of respect. She pulls the tinted plastic back like a hood, letting it hang off her back, and under her red vinyl outfit she wears an army shirt. She fishes into her suit and pulls out a small notebook and pen, hastily scrawling.

“Sir, I’m Sergeant Hastings. We have administered emergency decontamination because you were exposed to a hazardous environment. Can you tell me how to came to be in the city?”

I actually consider answering here honestly, for a few moments.

She reaches out and takes my hand. “Sir. Your exposure was substantial. Medical attention will be given to you but resources are limited. You should not expect to survive. Do you understand me?”

I understood that as soon as I saw the crater.

“We will take care of you, sir. Telephone communications are not available at this time, but you will be given a pencil and paper to write letters. All efforts will be made to see that these are delivered, even if you only know a name or partial address. If you’re able to write in English, Spanish, Mandarin or Arabic you may also write down any religious concerns regarding your demains, in the event that you don’t survive.”

She sounds like she’s given this speech a hundred times, but she still manages to sound like she cares. I’m impressed with the government’s response to this calamity. What can you do for thousands of people who are going to die, and soon? You give them pencils and paper and promise to deliver their letters.

I see fleeting glimpses of the camp through the gaps in the canvas cover of the truck as we ride in. Flashes of camo green and soldiers walking. I hear voices, but there’s no panic, just weariness. Tired people, long past the shock and urgency of a first response, now keeping their emotions at bay by clinging to their training and professionalism.

The truck’s brakes squeal and the rear flaps are opened. The tigress, still holding my hands, helps me to my feet and guides me out of the truck, where a grizzled bear with dog-tags dangling over an Army Reserve t-shirt and a spry young buck in a camo uniform and cap await me.

“Eyes intact?” asks the bear.

The tigress nods, hopping from the truck and pulling me along, helping me to my feet as I stumble. The buck has a heavy brown blanket and wraps it around me, and I feel just how cold I am. The bear strides forward, pulling a black device from his belt. He holds it up to my face and there’s a flash, then a second, then his scarred face is illuminated by the glow of the screen.

“Fucking christ, this guy’s already been processed. I’ve got him listed in gen-pop. What the fuck were you thinking?” he barks at me, flecks of spit hitting my whiskers. “Deaf, is he? Fucking Christ, another goddamn runner...”

The tigress squeezes my shoulder. “These men will take care of you. I need to go,” she says, stepping up to the bear to whisper into his ear, gives him the first page torn from her notebook, and climbs back into the truck. I admire her. And the people who pulled me from Allison’s apartment. Not for taking care of me, that’s pointless, but for trying. As the truck rolls away I try to imagine what they’re going to do, how long they’ve been working without rest to rescue, protect and comfort the victims of my arrogance.

“You were wone of the lucky ones, you dumb sonofabitch – what the fuck were you thinking?” I feel the bear’s anger, but it’s laced with sadness. He’s a father, I know it. His anger is that of a parent whose child suffered harm from their own decisions. “It’s your own goddamn life. I’m not dealing with this shit,” he says, pushing the paper from the tigress’ notebook and the scanner device into the buck’s paw. “I’m heading to the gate; the DEA’s bringing in another supply and I’m not gonna let half of it get lost again. Take him to the ghost ward.”

The younger soldier looks briefly horrified. “Sir...”

“Private,” the bear says softly, staring the buck down. “Ghost ward. K section. Now.”

The buck snaps a quick salute and takes me by the shoulders, guiding me deeper into the camp.

Green tents, some with lights inside them. Two soldiers sitting on a crate, leaning their heads against one another to catch a few minutes’ sleep. Helicopters soaring overhead, occasionally a truck or jeep rumbling past us over the muddy lane.

I walk in a daze, but the longer I walk the more aware I become of just how massive this place is. We pass tents that are more like warehouses, tall structures covered in stitched-together tarps, big enough to play a football game with a decent audience. The buck won’t look at me. He seems scared to touch me. The blanket does nothing to warm me.

He talks to me. Unlike the tigress he can’t convince me he cares, but I don’t mind. He needs to be professional, to execute his training, because to feel the true meaning of this massive, sprawling emergency care camp would cripple him.

He tells me this place is officially designated Emergency Casualty Base Kilo, but it’s informally known as Camp Curie. Built in response to the catastrophic numbers of victims and staffed by medical volunteers from across the country. He rambles quite a bit, sharing his personal theory that the government was Johnny-on-the-spot to quell the public’s distrust because of its failure to respond appropriately to Hurricane Katrina, and you know how politicians are, right? Always covering their own ass. Talking seems to calm him.

My feet are muddy and freezing when we stop at a warehouse-sized tent. A white cloth hangs outside with K-M painted on it in green, fluttering in the chilly breeze like a lonely flag. He waits outside with me, shuffling his feet, breathing hard and deep. I can feel how badly he dreads going in there, and I know what he means.

There’s a palpable misery radiating from the tent’s dark opening, waves of it rolling out like a fog. No screaming, no wailing, just a murmur of hushed voices and a certainty of death.

The buck in his neat army shirt and his smart army cap startles when I touch his shoulder. I nod to him and squeeze, and pull my blanket from his grip. He lets go, so grateful, and hands me the scanner and the paper, turning and leaving without a word.

I look at the scanner. It shows an image of my eye with key markers highlighted, and my name, and my terrible passport photo. I look like a sneaky drug dealer on the tiny screen of the scanner. My name is printed in bold, with the names of my parents written below. There’s something so comforting about seeing those names so close to my own.

“Walking ghost,” that’s what the talkative buck called me. He explained to me what it meant, at least insofar as he understood it. He kept talking about Seaberts and I didn’t correct him, even though I remembered enough from Mr Woo’s physics class in high school to know he meant Sieverts.

They had no way to know that I’d only been in the city for a few hours, that I had just appeared there, without first traveling into it, but there was no point in informing them. I’d been breathing the air, inhaling the crumbled ashes.

Even if I’d only absorbed a tenth of the dose of radiation they estimated, I’m still a walking ghost.

Clutching my blanket, I walk into Ghost Ward.

•

Hell, it seems, is as quiet as a library. Endless rows of cheap cots, and I mean endless. They disappear into the shadows far away to either side of me, and stretch into the distance.

Quiet.

But the stench.

Death and blood and excrement, sour vomit and sweat, and the tang of disinfectants bravely, futilely trying to impose a semblance of hygiene on this horror. I know that in my dazed state I’m only registering a minute fraction of what my nose detects, but I still reel with the stink of it.

A doctor approaches, a mink dressed in blue scrubs and a blue face-mask and a blue cap, and she takes the scanner and the scrap of paper, sighing as she reads both. “Right this way, mister Kenna. We’re short on beds, but I’ll try to find you something warmer to wear.” Her accent is Indian. I’ve always found that a soothing lilt.

The bodies on the beds remind me of my glimpse of the opium den. They’re almost all unconscious, looking so peaceful despite pale lips and sunken eyes, or bandaged, bleeding lesions. One or two are awake, scribbling with pencils on paper with trembling fingers despite their obvious agony.

The doctor notices me looking. “Some elected to forego pain management so they could write their letters,” she says softly. “I think that’s very brave, don’t you, mister Kenna?”

A clipboard falls to the floor, and it’s so quiet that the doctor and I both look at the male nurse who dropped it. He’s wearing lighter scrubs than the doctor, his face mask is white, like a painter’s. “Did you say Kenna? Game Kenna?” I study his face, and for a second I think I recognize him, but in my memory he’s a corpse on a battlefield in a bloody red sergeant’s coat, crushed under a dead horse. I don’t know him in this world.

“Stan, now’s not the time,” the doctor says, but the nurse, a ram, persists.

“K section is out of cots, you know that, and if he were symptomatic, we’d know it. Let me take him.”

The doctor looks at me, but I show no signs of caring either way, and I can see she’s not in the mood to argue. Once again, the scanner and the scrap of paper change hands, and the ram leads me away.

I feel like a flask of whiskey snuck into the prom, being passed around, taken and abandoned over and over, led by the hand by people who care about me only for a little while before they turn their attention to the thousands of other priorities that weigh on this massive camp.

Whatever he said to me, whatever he explained, even if I heard it, I forget it and him when he brings me to a bed and my numbness wears off in an instant.

“Allon,” I whisper.

I shouldn’t be able to recognize her. What lies on that cot in L section is barely recognizable as a lioness, let alone a woman, let alone my only friend. There are no eyes, only bloody bandages, and she’s thin, so very thin. But I know it’s her. I’d know her in any body, of any age, in any world, and here lie the burned, irradiated remnants of the only person in the universe who can understand me.

“Game,” she says, her voice sounding so clear it shocks me. A voice so steady shouldn’t be able to come from such a ruined body. “It’s you, isn’t it? Really you, I mean.”

Her hand is bandaged into a mitten, but I hold it anyway. “Allon, I... I was looking for you. You didn’t come back. I didn’t know where you’d gone. I left you the box.”

Every word I say sounds pathetic, more selfish and infantile than the last. “I couldn’t make it back, Game,” she says, and her concern for me makes me sick. “They were taking care of Allison when I arrived, and I was so confused, it hurt so much, I couldn’t even think about leaving. By the time they took the pain away...” Blindly, she gestures at the plastic bag suspended over her bed, feeding a clear fluid into her arm through a plastic tube.

“Morphine,” I whisper.

She nods. “Opiates are pretty groovy, but they do limit your travel options.”

I feel my heart beating. It’s been racing this whole time, I can feel how tired the muscle is, how tight my chest. My fingers tremble; I’m freezing. “Ally, I’m so sorry. This is my fault.”

“Honey, no. You can’t know that. And either way, you tried to warn me. Twice,” she says, and I can hear a smile in her voice that her marred face can’t deliver. “That was good thinking, putting the box out for me to find. I’d forgotten all about that until you told me about John on the beach. It’s like... like I wasn’t allowed to remember until right then. Has that happened to you?”

I touch her arm, where the plastic tube from the drip disappears under the bandages, and lean close to her ear. “I can cut the flow,” I hiss under my breath.

“Don’t, honey, don’t. I’d be dead before it was out of my system anyway, and I don’t... it was bad, Game, it was so bad,” she says, starting to sob, then cough, then calming. “They’re running out of morphine. I heard that the DEA is bringing in a supply of confiscated heroin; they’re gonna let folks choose whether to go without painkillers or accept H as a substitue. Party time, huh?”

“You asked for me. The nurse said you asked for me.”

She nods, again. “I left you the message on the beach, with the cloth from my cloak. Not as clever as your trick with the box, but still. So when I woke up here, I knew you’d follow. Game, did they explain why they brought you here?”

“They did, but I didn’t listen.”

“Typical,” she snorts. “They brought you to Ghost Ward because you’re a ‘walking ghost’. It’s a stage of radiation sickness. You were in the city, weren’t you? You breathed the air,” she sighs. “Your body is dying and doesn’t know it yet. You need to go.”

“Ally, I can’t leave you. Not like this.”

She shakes her head. “I’m already gone. I’m not in any pain, and once they start doling out the heroine, even if it’s just medically responsible pussy-ass doses, I’m gonna have a nice time. Seriously; they started me out in the burn ward before they classified me as a ghost. Those guys in burn ward? They wish they had it as good as me. But you, Game, you have to go,” she hisses. “Before they hook you up with a drip, before you’re trapped too. Do you know if your body from this world survived?”

“No, I... wait,” I say, brightening. Gen-pop, that’s what the grizzled bear had said. “General population. I he’s there – I’m there. Is that here on the camp?”

“See? You’re not so unlucky after all. If your body’s in gen-pop then he’s not injured and he’s not sick. Now, before you go,” she says, pausing to cough, the fresh blood flecking her lips indistinguishable from the oozing wounds. “It’s really important.”

I press close to her. The blanket falls from my shoulders, my damp pelt exposed to the cool air, but I don’t care. “Anything, Ally.”

She smacks me blindly in the mouth, and I stagger back. She hit me hard. The nurse, Stan the ram, looks up from his patient but I wave to him that I’m okay, and pick up my blanket. “Ally, I deserved that. I should never–“

“Keep talking like that and I’ll hit you again, pussy. What I need you to do for me is this: stop fucking whining. Seriously. I’m telling you this now not just because of all the shit you’ve whined about, about how you brought this onto the world and got me trapped in it, but also for all the bullshit you’re going to be thinking of after you leave here. Like that body of yours, that you brought from Élique. He could have been a tailor, getting his jollies in that nice raccoon’s bed once or twice a month. Instead you brought him here to be irradiated by particles he never even knew existed.”

Her words cut deep. I cluch at my chest, guilt’s icy fingers gripping my heart, but she shakes her head. “This is exactly what I mean. I need you to stop it. Not just because it’s annoying as fuck, not just because you’re my friend and I want you to feel better. But because we can’t live like this, none of us. If you spend your life blaming yourself you’ll never learn.

“And you need to learn, Game. You’ve figured out stuff I never imagined. The thing with the box – fucking time travel? Jesus Christ! Can you imagine what else is out there? What else you can do?”

I can feel my whole body shaking. What she’s asking me is impossible. My guilt is all I have left. Do you understand that? It’s all there is in me. She’s right, I don’t know for sure that I broke this world, but even if I didn’t I’m still a murderer. I killed the poor Carrick-born cobbler whose body I inhabit, I killed the light-house keeper. I killed marriages. I killed John’s dreams–

“John.”

She bumps my shoulder with her bandaged fist. “Now you’re getting it, dipshit. He’s out there, Game. I know it. Allison feels it. She loves him as much as you do, so do us both a favor and make sure he’s okay, yeah? Leave this body with me. I’ll talk to him, I’ll make sure he doens’t wig out, and I’ll make sure they give him the good shit to knock him right the fuck out.”

She’s right. She’s always right. When I leave, a tailor from Élique will be left here in Camp Curie, next to her bed, in a world he can’t comprehend, dying from a sickness that no-one can explain to him. And if I cling to my guilt, so greedily, I’ll stay in this body and die here so he doesn’t have to experience it.

But that will fix nothing. It won’t save him, it won’t mend the damage to this world and it sure as hell won’t help John. All it’ll do is assuage some of my precious guilt, and isn’t that the height of selfishness?

The nurse approaches, making his way between the cots, a fresh blanket over his arm and a new bag of saline solution in the other. “Don’t say goodbye, honey. I know we won’t see each other again, but I don’t want to hear the words. You’ll kill my buzz if you say them. Just go, before they hook you up and you’re stuck here with me. Got it? Go.”

“Ally,” I say, stroking her arm as I drop the anchor of my guilt and loosen my grip on my body. “I’m so glad I had you as a friend.”

She doesn’t answer, she just waits for me to leave. I think of John, and drift away.

•

The estate is on fire.

Stone shouldn’t burn so brightly and eagerly. There were tapestries on the walls, drapes on the windows, rugs on the stone floors, but all that is fire, now. I am small and the fire is magnificent. It races up the walls around me, rains down from the ceiling.

My first sensation, if you can believe it, is relief. It was mighty cold at Camp Curie, and as I stand here in my night-gown I’m warmed through so pleasantly, and then further, and, okay, now it’s starting to get uncomfortable.

I also can’t breathe.

The smoke stings my nostrils, coats my tongue in soot, it burns in my eyes. And the roar, the howling of the fire, it surrounds me completely.

I should be confused, and then horrified at the sight of John’s family estate burning. I should blame myself, assuming I’m responsible, and fall to my knees and wail.

Like a fucking pussy.

I feel strength in me. In my muscles, in my mind. It’s hotter than the flames, fiercer. This is Allon’s gift to me. To forbid me my self-pity. I don’t know whether this fire is my fault, or how, and none of it matters. All that matters is that I’m going to save John.

I didn’t feel him in Camp Curie. My body didn’t belong there, my mind was a stranger to that world. But here, in his estate, in the body of the Game Kenna who stole into his chamber in the quiet of the night to share love and passion in the dark, I feel him.

To my back are unburned windows, and beyond them the gardens, and beyond that the lake. I need only leap, and I’ll be safe. Hell, I could just slip out of this body and go to the other one in Camp Curie’s general population. This isn’t my John...

Except that he is. And so is Jonathan, and Jonas, and Jakopol, they all are. Just as I am Game Kenna, every one. The Wisconsin boy, the lieutenant, the opium addict, the walking ghost, the corpse on the gurney and the smear on the rocks.

And the fireman. In another world he’s in the station with his teammates, talking about Dolly Parton’s boobs, listening to the Mamas And The Papas on the radio. I don’t disturb him, I don’t need to. His memories are my memories. His skills are mine.

My nightgown is too light, but it has its uses. I tear it off me, literally tear it. I rush to the basin by the window and soak a folded strip, tying it over my muzzle against the smoke. It won’t protect my eyes, but I’ll just have to bear the sting.

I pull an unburned curtain from the window, yanking with all Allon’s strength, sending the curtainrod tumbling to the floor. The cloth is heavy and long enough to drape around me twice, I pull it over my head like a cowl. My feet are bare, but the stone floor is still cool.

I run to the burning doors and through the wall of fire.

Where I was numb when I was carried into Camp Curie, not a whisper of sensation escapes me as I rush through the inferno. My whiskers would have curled and melted from the heat if I hadn’t covered my snout with a wet cloth, and my lungs would have turned to tar as well. Even if I crawled on all fours I wouldn’t be able to see through the thick smoke, but I don’t need to.

I know John’s estate, every flagstone, every corner. In the months since his father’s passing and the escalation of his responsibilities as overseer of his family’s interests we’ve had to sneak around with the cunning of thieves to steal precious moments for kisses and whispers, and very occasionally a little more.

I know the servants are safe, or they should be, at least. The fire hadn’t reached the servant quarters when I looked out the window and they would surely have woken by now. John’s cousin Marie returned to London with her entourage just this afternoon, I needn’t worry for her safety. There should be no-one in the estate proper except for me, and John, and...

Cavendish. John’s oldest friend, the half-reformed gambler, the weasel with the mercury spine. I’ve known him as Kevin in another world, and Gavin in another. I skid on the stone floors, just at the door to his room. Flames lick at the walls all around me; all I see of his door is a dark gap in the yellow glob, but I know he’s there, and I won’t abandon him.

The door handles are hot to the touch, and if it weren’t for the strips of my night-gown wrapped around my hands I would have burned them. I use the curtainrod I carry as a crowbar, heaving until the handle springs from its mechanism, and throw my weight against the doors to swing them inward.

The air isn’t clear in Cavendish’s chamber, but at least I can see with my red, stinging eyes. Smoke pours in from behind me, rising to pool against the ceiling. “Kevin!” I call out, my voice a hoarse croak. “Cavendish!”

I hear a groan from his bed. Two wine bottles lie on the floor and threaten to trip me up as I hurry to the bed. He’s alive, the weasel, but unconscious. Drink and smoke have addled his mind and I must get him out immediately or he’ll suffocate, so says the fireman, and I trust his experience.

The fireman’s mind warns against opening Cavandish’s windows, allowing more oxygen in to fuel the flames, but he sees no alternatives either. The panes swing open, cool air rushes in and the blazing fire roars gratefully, greedily behind me, inhaling it and taking as much strength from it as I do.

The weasel is light, thank god, his flexible body made to easily slip over my shoulder. As the fire charges into the room, consuming his dresser, his vain portraits, and the bed where he entertained so many ladies of questionable character, I leap with him from the window and onto the grass below.

We tumble together, down the hill, my curtain falling away from me. The cool grass is as mercial and innocent as when I was lowered from the helicopter, but I take no time to enjoy it. When I have my footing I pick up the coughing weasel, his nightgown a mess of green and brown grass and ud stains, and lay him down flat at the bed of the lake, cupping water in my hands and splashing his face until he awakes, coughing and sputtering.

“Game?” he asks, bloodshot eyes blinking, anger glowing behind them. “How dare you. How dare you,” he snarls, feebly trying to swing his arm up at me.

I don’t know what he means. This body’s memories are a jumble, and so dim – Im clinging to the fireman’s mind too firmly. His skills are more useful than knowing what Cavendish is accusing me of, than knowing why I found myself in my nightgown in a burning estate.

“I have to save John.” That’s the truth of it. That’s all that matters and all I tell Cavendish before I leave him to cough and writhe in the mud by the lake, running back up the hill to the brick and mortar walls of John’s estate.

Flames leap out of Cavendish’s window, their heat so vicious I can’t even get close enough to pick my curtain up off the floor. I’m naked, but for the cloth wrapped around my hands and my muzzle. I wish I’d taken Cavendish’s boots, I’ll need their protection once I’m inside the estate again. First, though, I’ll need to climb, and the boots wouldn’t have helped.

It isn’t often that you get to do something other than running that your race, on the mysterious path of evolution, was put on this Earth to do. But when I scratch my claws over the rough masonry and hoist myself up the brick wall of the estate, ignoring the flames leaping ouf of shattered windows, I feel a billion years of preparationa nd exercise thrumming through every muscle.

I climb along the wall as steadily as I can walk, ignoring the fear of the drop, the growing heat of the bricks I grasp, and the hazardous groaning of the walls, threatening soon to collapse. I climb, like my forebears amid the branches.

The fireman’s mind is quiet. He has no more to offer me but prayers, and I leave him to play poker with his teammates, their crumpled old cards bearing pictures of ladies in postures and states of undress that would scandalize even Cavendish’s morals.

There’s a flash of sparks from the room overhead and in an instant I leap to the side, out of the way of the hail of burning soot and wood, feeling the fluttering remnants burn my pelt. I ignore it, continuing my ascent.

Flames leap out of the window I’m aiming for, though not as fiercely as some others. It’s unsafe, even if I’d had the curtain wrapped around me, but that window leads to John’s chambers, and I must go.

My fingers don’t hesitate. They draw me closer to the edge, my body tensing up like a coil being drawn taut, ready to spring. I don’t know what’s beyond the window; for all I know the whole room is on fire and I’ll hurl myself into an oven.

I wonder if the pain of burning will so overwhelm me that I won’t be able to leave this body. When Allon awoke in the City she was burned by a nuclear blast and couldn’t think to seek safety in another world until she was chemically shackled to Allison’s decaying flesh.

I leap, and burn, and land.

I roll, but the searing-hot floor does nothing to cool the smouldering patches where the flames licked my bare, gleaming pelt. The smoke is so thick I can’t tell if I still have my eyes, but for the pale yellow glow of fire.

Pain is everywhere. Everywhere. I hurt in places I didn’t know existed, and yet I stand. I’d like to claim it was bravery and determination, it’d sound so heroic. I let my grip on this body slide just a little bit, pull just a little farther away, and the agony diminishes, fading a little.

My body moves strangely now. It’s not mine, I’m not inside it. It’s more like... like I’m a pupetteer. I can see the melted fur, the angry, white-and-black flesh exposed where I was lashed by the fire in the windowsill. I see steam curl around me.

Steam. Not smoke. Fresh, pine-scented steam, a scent so sweet it clashes violently with the smell of smoke and annihilation. A tendril of white steam whips around me and I turn, blinking through the black-yellow haze, following with my nose as much as my eyes.

I know where I am. I know where everything should be. That pillar of white and red used to be John’s bed, where I first lay with him in the dark, exploring his body and sharing mine with him so creatively. There, aflame, is his dresser and beside it his cabinet. All the furnishings I remember in my mind’s eye are marked with roaring, blazing fire. Everything that was John’s... except John himself.

I refuse to imagine him on the bed, charred to a cinder. I refuse to imagine he locked himself in the cabinet, now long suffocated from smoke inhalation. I refuse to imagine him slumped next to his dresser, having quaffed the tiny bottles of tonics and remedies to poison himself quickly and spare himself the pain of burning.

A door. That’s where the faint steam is coming from. A black gap amid the plumes of fire that even now cook the flesh on my bones. My whiskers are curled, my eyes are dry, my tongue is swollen and dry. I feel my clows within my fingertips, melting. But there’s a door, the wood unburned, and steam rises from it.

“John!” I yell, the sound barely more than a squeak, coming from my parched throat. I charge at the door and burst through, and what I see fills me with pride.

John stands naked on the copper bathtub, his nightgown draped over the metal edge to keep his feet from burning, hammering at the bricks around the single, small, high window. Two bricks have already given way, his fingers are bloody from gripping the cast-iron ladle so fiercely as he bashes against the bricks.

He hasn’t heard the door bursting inward, the fire’s mighty ruckus masked it fully. He pauses, breathless, and turns to dip the ladle in yesterday’s bathtub water, then flings it at me.

It feels good; I can actually hear a little hiss as the water splashes on my body, soothing some of the burns, if only for an instant.

I shouldn’t have underestimated him. All this time I thought of him as a helpless creature, useless and defenseless but for my protection, but look at him. He hasn’t the benefit of my abilities, he doesn’t have other minds to draw on and he can’t escape this fire simply by going to another world, and if needed another body.

But when he awoke, my John, that handsome, clever dog, he locked himself in his bathroom, tossing ladles of water onto the door to cool it just enough, to keep it from burning just enough, to buy him the time he needed to make an exit.

“Game!”

It’s been so long since I laid eyes on him, any version of him. All this time I’d been driven more by the idea of him, the notion of him, than my love for him. John had become just a name, a principle. His name wrapped up all my guilt, all my hope, but in all this time I’d forgotten what it was like to see him.

Even with that look of revulsion in his eyes when he looks at me. I don’t know if it’s because of something I did to him in this life or whether my injuries make me even more grotesque than Allison, and it doesn’t matter because even behind the fright in his eyes, I see something, something I haven’t let myself hope for a very long time.

No matter what I did to him, no matter what I look like, he still loves me. Even if it’s only a glimmer, even if it’s not enough for forgiveness or trust or friendship, it’s still there.

And it’s worth fighting for.

Behind me, the roof collapses. A cloud of white-red cinders blaze at my back, blasting into the bathroom to incinerate us both.

It starts with me. I feel it eating my back, my beautiful pelt, my strong muscles, exposing my spine and singing my nerves. The rolling cloud of fire is cruel and greedy, angry that I saved Cavendish from it, offended that I’d intrude to save John as well. The flames attack with the vengeance of a twice-burgled father finding another interloper in his home.

I let the blast at my back push me forward, and find my feet. I run – I charge toward John, on the very cusp of the all-consuming wave of heat, commanding my body to one last feat. I vault over the bath and slam into him, and I feel him, I feel him, in my arms again. He’s all I can think about. His body, his kiss, and the love we shared on a moonlit lake.

Never have I loved the water so much.

The bathroom, the estate, they’re just gone in an instant and instead I’m drowning in cool, soothing water, and I’m content to. The coldness on my wounds is a balm and even the burning in my lungs is easier to bear than the glowing soot and ash I breathed. The sinking... It’s so restful.

A hand on my burned wrist, squeezing so hard, and I’m drawn back up. Into the air, stinging my wet burns, and then onto the bank of the lake where mud and grass scrub by ruined flesh.

Life is pain. Isn’t that the truth of it? Even these last moments, and they’re certainly my last, are ache and agony. We’re born screaming, and as we grow our bodies accrue the evidence of each fresh hurt, and we carry them forever. What justice is there in that? In wearing on your face the scars of past pain, but none of the joy? If there was justice in the world our bodies would be marked by each laugh, each climax, but it isn’t so.

But by the sinners, it’s so worth it.

My eyes can’t open, my ears are burned off. I smell nothing and taste only blood and soot and muck. But I don’t pull back from this dying body, not yet. I cling to it and the screaming torment because amid that symphony of pain there’s one sensation I won’t withdraw from, that makes it all worthwile.

John’s holding my hand, cradling me on his lap.

He speaks to me, I can hear the muffled pulse that I know to be a voice, his voice. Even if I could make out the words I couldn’t answer. My breath is ragged, my lungs and throat burned raw.

I wonder if he’s asking me how we escaped. One moment we laid eyes on each other, then I grabbed him as a fireball engulfed me. I protected his body with mine, and a moment later we splashed in the lake outside.

Maybe he tells me he loves me, or maybe... I find myself hoping that the fire is somehow my fault and that he’s whispering his forgiveness. It’s selfish, I know, but I’m dying, so that’s allowed.

I drift away. Not willingly, I’m still too selfish for that. I kick and scratch and claw at the force pulling me from this body. I want to stay just a little longer, to bear the pain and feel his touch for another second.

My vision clears and I see myself lying in his arms as I once saw myself lying on the gurney, and feel nothing. I hear the anguished screaming below me, where John cradles my ruined body in the glow of his burning home.

A figure approaches, limping along the shoreline of the lake where I once rowed with John under the moon – Cavendish, limping to embrace his friend.

If I could feel, I would feel pride. Whatever I did wrong in this world, I did something right. I don’t know that I’ve ever done that before. Not something this important. Not in full knowledge of the consequences.

We act, so often, out of fear and selfishness. It’s only natural. I mean that in the clearest sense: it’s nature, where almost all is driven by fear and hunger. The word we give to such acts, when we commit them, is ‘mistake’. No-one can undo them, not even me, for all my power.

We can only face the consequences and do all we can, with all the love we harbor, do better. Not to fix what we broke, some things can’t be mended. But we can learn, and do better.

That’s what I did today, and that’s why I’d feel proud, looking down at myself, if I could feel. John holding my body, Cavendish consoling him, and both of them alive. Alive.

I’ve changed so many stories, destroyed so much, but this world will continue with my beloved John and his friend Cavendish in it. It’s miraculous. And I did it.

I feel – not emotion, not that – I feel lighter. I feel more complete, as if another piece of me has fallen into its slot.

I feel lighter.

Lighter.