It was the heat that woke Bran Davies his first night at the Institute. His mouth was dry, but his bed clothes were soaked with sweat. Less than six months earlier, when his family had first clambered off the Fairsky at Newcastle, the heat had been its own thrill. It was like all the Welsh summers he’d lived through in Dolgellau had been poorly staged recreations of the ones they put on down here.   

Now, though, he was getting sick of it. It was supposed to get cold at night, damn it. Why else would they have invented blankets?

Bran reached for the already drained glass on his bedside table. Dipping his fingertip into the thin skin of water still coating the bottom, he stirred up its past, feeling the cool wet rise over his knuckle.

The boy gulped down the new-old water greedily. He needed air—and to get rid of the first glass of water. He glanced around Wallaby dormitory. Nobody else seemed to be awake, and the only sounds were gentle breathing, the conversation of crickets, and the water-witch’s son’s quiet whimpers. For everyone else, the nightmares Bran had been warned of had either passed or not yet come. To his relief, moonlight had bleached the darkness from the dorm like a painting left in the sun. He had never coped well in the dark.     

When he wrenched himself from his hammock, Bran realized he wasn’t the only child out of bed. One of the hammocks was empty, and the door was ajar. He hoped this meant they had license to wander after bedtime. None of the teachers had said they didn’t. But then again, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent memory Bran had got it for breaking some unexplained, grown up rule.

His bladder left him no choice. He stepped out into the night.   

That business soon sorted, Bran took a moment to survey the New Human Institute. His new home, Dr. Lawrence had promised him.

It was funny, really, seeing it this way. Deserted, lit only by the cold, silvered light of a thousand distant, indifferent suns; their only competition the few lights still glowing in the windows of the great, manoral farmhouse and the cottage of that trembly science teacher.

Not even the same sky, he realized.

He was searching for the fabled Southern Cross when he heard the girl’s voice. “New boy?”

Bran startled, turning to find a girl standing behind him, a book held folded around her hand. She was a couple years older than him, blonde; he remembered her shooting him a smile a few times at dinner. It had helped, a little—made him feel more at home.

“Ah, yeah. You’re…”

“Artume,” she finished, frowning slightly. “Not Atrume, Artume.”

“Okay…”

She shook her head. “Sorry, sorry, lotta people get it wrong for some reason.”

The boy extended a hand. “I’m Bran.”

Artume laughed. “Don’t bother telling me your name. You’re not going to be using it long.”

“Oh, yeah, that. Not sure what I’m going to pick.”   

“We don’t get to pick.” The girl sat down in the grass. “Care to join me?”   

Bran took the suggestion. “Good book?” he asked. By the starlight, he could just make out its title: Children of the Atom. On its dust jacket, a boy and a girl stood huddled together with their backs to a baying, greyscale mob, their shadowed eyes empty of everything except hate and fear. The girl looked like she rather thought the boy ought to tear his attention away from whatever he was looking at and pay some mind to the crowd behind them.  

Artume glanced at the hardback as though she had forgotten she was holding it. “Hmm? Yeah, I guess. Lawrence told me to read it. Said it was ‘prophetic’.”

“What’s it about?”

“Buncha radioactive scientists have super-babies—boring ones, though, they’re all just really smart—and an old bloke gathers them all together at a special school because people don’t like them much.”

Bran snickered, raising a grin from Artume. “Yeah, I know, right? I think I liked More Than Human better. Least those kids had real powers.” She tilted her head. “You from England or something? You don’t sound Aussie.”

The boy scowled. “Wales.”

The girl’s smile brightened. “My grandmother was from Wales. Couldn’t sleep?”

“Too hot. What about you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t really sleep. Well, one night a week, but only a couple hours, tops. One of my powers, I think.”

“Isn’t that just insomnia?”

A giggle. “Maybe. Still, the grown-ups let me walk around at night when it’s warm.” She puffed out her chest. “Call me the night-watch. Want to see what else can I do?”

Bran nodded.

Beside Artume, the darkness pooled and thickened, flowing into itself like tar, until it had formed a ring of sorts, like a hole opening all the way to the centre of the Earth, lightless. Bran felt that if he dropped a coin into that abyss, he wouldn’t hear it hit the bottom; even if it had a bottom.

Artume plunged her hand into the rent, rifling through as if it was a purse, until she appeared to find whatever it was she was looking for. Some of the darkness came away as she pulled her hand out, spiralling and dispersing into the night air like unsettled fog. In her hand was a bottle of Coke, plated with frost.

“Lawrence says my power generates an other-dimensional pocket filled with a dense, non-refractive gas analogue that I manipulate via charged electromagnetic fields, accessible via localized temporal-spatial distortions.”

“…What does that even mean?”

“No one knows. What I do know is that this bottle’s been in there for weeks and it’s still frosty. Maybe time goes slower in the dark or something.” She offered the cool drink to her new acquaintance.

Bran took the bottle gratefully, pulling off the cap with his teeth, only to jerk back as the liquid within frothed out the neck and flooded his nostrils, Artume laughing as he sputtered. Clever girl. Clever, evil girl.

Dropping the Coke, the boy glared at her, before snatching the cap off the ground. The unopened glass bottle coalesced beneath it, and—giving it a good shake for luck’s sake—he shoved it Artume’s face and opened it.

“Gaaah!”    

Bran was already up and running by the time his new friend gave chase.

⬗

“It’s going to be alright, Metonymy,” Basil said, resting a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “It’s only Artume. You’re friends. You’ll do fine.”

Bran took a deep breath, and genuinely tried to believe what the older man was saying. But he knew, somewhere deep down inside, that he was going to mess it all up. Why did it have to be Artume? Why couldn’t it be Reverb, or Ex? Someone who didn’t give him the time of day, who he could be pathetic with and not have it matter. Why’d it have to be Artume? He liked Artume! Heck, a little bit of him had been hoping he’d get to do one with her and he hated that bit of him right now.

“Hey, Met,” Basil said. “I appreciate you replacing my clothes, but you don’t have to do it five times.” Metonymy flinched, suddenly aware of the leather shirts strewn around his feet. Had he been doing it again? Damn it.

“… Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” his teacher said, his voice low and gentle. “Listen. You just go in there, you listen to what she tells you, and you’ll be fine. You’re not gonna hurt her, and she won’t think any less of you when it’s done.”

“… She’ll tell me?” Bran asked. “W-what to do?”

“If you ask her to,” Basil murmured. “Let her take the reins. Makes it easier to stay friends afterwards, okay? Trust me. I’ve talked a lot of kids through this.”

“… T-thanks. Thanks, Basil.”

“Don’t mention it. Now, go on. You’ve got this, kiddo.”

He turned towards the door, and felt a leather clad hand slap him lightly on the back. He didn’t look back, couldn’t bring himself to. He opened the door and stepped inside, his heart thumping in his chest like a brass drum.

“Hey, Met.”

“H-hey Artu-” Oh, God. She was naked. Why was she naked already? Metonymy considered turning out the lights, but that would be unfair. Darkness hid nothing from Artume, and surely she had worse to look at. And the part of him he hated wanted to keep looking. The part that was a mammal and not a boy. Or maybe it was nothing but boy.

“Kept me waiting, pal,” The girl said, smiling across the bedroom at him, a trace of sadness tugging at her cheek. “… You okay?”

“I… I think so.” Oh God. Oh God. No. She was so pretty and this was so wrong and God, why was it so hot all of a sudden? He felt a heat rushing to his face, a tightness in his chest… and his pants.

“Ah, there we go” Artume sighed, glancing down, her smile growing melancholy as she saw. “… So, you do like me, huh?” She laughed half-heartedly. “It probably sounds silly, but I was almost hoping you wouldn’t, you know?”

“… I’m sorry.” He mumbled, looking down towards the floor, ashamed. “… Y-you’re my friend—big sister, really, but… You’re still… still pretty… I’m sorry.”

For the longest time, she didn’t answer; then, finally:

“Yeah,” she muttered bitterly. “I’m sorry, too. Take your pants off. Let’s just do this.”

He hesitated for a moment, then reached down and began fumbling with the button of his shorts. He felt like scum. Why had he wanted this? Why had he wanted anything like this, and why was the awful, traitorous little thing between his legs still so damn ready?

The shorts fell to the floor around his ankles, his underpants following a moment later. He looked up at her, gazing across at his crotch dispassionately, and, in the weakest voice he’d ever heard, asked:

“Are—are we still gonna be friends a-after?” He felt his voice crack a little towards the end, the last words coming out a little choked. “I… I wanna still be friends… Please?”

He wasn’t sure how he’d been expecting her to respond to that, really, but it certainly wasn’t with tears.

“… I hope so,” she whispered. “I-I really do.” She lifted an arm to her face, and wiped the tears away with her wrist. “Heh,” She laughed wetly. “I’ve made this awful already, haven’t I?”

Bran laughed too at that. He didn’t know what else to do. He felt something wet on his cheeks.

“… Well,” she smiled. “We should fix that. C’mere.” She extended her hands, beckoning.

Hesitantly, the boy stepped forwards towards her, crossing the few short feet between them in just three or four strides. He found himself wishing he’d taken shorter steps. Then he was in front of her, and it was even harder not to look. Why’d she have to be so pretty?

“It’s okay, Met,” she whispered, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders. “It’s okay. Don’t be sad. Smile. You’re cute when you smile.” Then, she leaned in, and gave him a kiss.

It was confusing. All of it. What sort of cute did she mean? She was bigger than him. Why was he so sad, when was his body so excited? Why was he so excited? Her lips were so soft and warm. Why didn’t that help?

She pulled away, and gave him another smile, small and sad.

“Hey, wanna make a deal?” she asked.

“… What kinda deal?” He mumbled, forcing himself not to look away.

“… A way to stay friends, I think,” she replied. “You’re a boy. I’m a girl. We’ve both got… stuff. A-and… we both have… well, you’ve had dreams about girls, right?”

Bran nodded, a touch less ashamed. He’d had his first one a few months ago. Melusine. He wasn’t even original in his lust. He hadn’t been able to look Maelstrom in the eye for almost a week, and the boy had noticed; not that he wasn’t used to it.

“Well… what if we… we just explore?” Artume asked, her cheeks scarlet. “As friends. No judging.”

“… Promise?” He asked, not quite able to believe her.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “Honestly… I was… thinking of doing that with you anyway. Letting it be our thing, instead of theirs. I guess we lost that chance… But… you know… we could still make it ours?” She gave him another smile, shy and nervous; excited.

He’d have given anything to be able to believe it.

“… Okay.”

⬗

Metonymy sat waiting on Basilisk’s plastic wrapped bed, draped in a spare dressing gown, staring at the floor through the gap in his knees. Żywie was tending to Artume first, of course. Had to make sure that, well, he took. Metonymy was glad to be spared the possibility of a repeat performance, but that made him feel like even more of a monster.

He felt a gloved clad hand come to rest on his back, another holding a disposable cup in front of him, a wisp of steam rising from it. The boy didn’t move.

“Come on, boy,” Basil said, giving the boy a pat. “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think. You’re not the sort to hurt he—”

“It was awful,” Metonymy muttered, staring at the cup without raising a hand to it. “Not just for her. For me. I-I know she still likes me—and I still like her—but is it meant to be so… weird?” He glanced up at his teacher for a moment, saw the stony look in his eye, and quickly averted his gaze. “I mean, it felt… okay, I guess. But it was just so gross! Why is that supposed to be fun?”

Basilisk sighed. “First times are always a little disappointing, Met. And a lot of fun things kind of get spoiled when you make it into a job. You build this sort of thing up in your mind, and nothing’s going to live up to your expectations. Especially when you’re young.”

“Then why do we have to do it when we’re young?”

Before Basil could answer—if he even was going to answer—Lawrence stepped into the room, beaming proudly. He strode over and slapped Metonymy on the back “There’s the man of the hour!”

Funny, after all that, Metonymy felt younger than he had in years.

Despite the lack of reply, Lawrence kept going. “I have to say, you’re handling this with a lot more dignity than many others boys would, I expect.” He chuckled. “More than many have, in fact.” When Bran refused to look at him, he sighed. “Metonymy, you do understand the beauty of what we’re creating here, yes? Children who may grow to change the whole world some day. Can you imagine it, young man? A new human with Artume’s control of space, combined with your mastery over states and time? My boy, this is a great day. I think you’ll see that, when you meet your child.”

It was everything Bran could manage in that moment to sit still. He wondered, in the back of his mind, if he could push his power a little. Revert the old man to his own infancy. He pushed the thought from his mind.

“…Can you leave me alone, please?”

⬗

Artume, Metonymy, and Ēōs lay spread out under the evening stars, Artume mapping out the constellations for her younger sister. She’d performed this nighttime ritual many times over, to the point where Ēōs probably knew each constellation’s story better than the god who had placed it in the sky, but Artume still did it whenever the little girl asked—each time swearing it would be the last.

Personally, Metonymy always thought the matter of which stars connected which seemed fairly arbitrary. “You can make any shape you want with whatever stars you like,” he’d said more than a few times over the years. Oftentimes, he’d go on to prove his point by weaving the stars into absurd, vulgar arrangements: The Three Fleeing Idiots, or the Weeping Mealy, and almost every part of the human body.

At that point Ēōs, with her earnest brown eyes obscured by her sister’s golden hair, would glare at Metonymy and—without taking her reproachful gaze off the boy—tell her big sister to keep telling her about the real constellations.  

“…So Orion was this big old giant hunter that Linus’ auntie had a big crush on. Did you know that his name just means “piss” in Greek? No, really.”  

Ēōs did, in fact, know that, but she still giggled. “And he walked on water, didn’t he? Mealy got off so lucky…”

That first night at the Institute, when the chase had died down and Artume had mentioned having a sister at the Institute, Metonymy had incorrectly pictured twins. The five year age gap had taken him by surprise, though not so much as the fact that only Ēōs had been born with her powers.

“How’d you get yours?” he’d asked.

“There was a man.”

Metonymy had soon gotten used to that answer. Aside from a few outliers like Stratogale and Elsewhere, it was either that, or born blessed and cursing the dark. Dozens of books, all opened to the same page.

“So, Linus’ dad got jealous—gods are weird, don’t ask—so he sent this scorpion…”

Metonymy was pretty sure Artume didn’t hate him, not yet at least. Why would she still wake him up for this sorta thing if she did?

“Sheilah,” Ēōs rarely kept to the Namings after dark, “did Żywie tell you what the baby was going to be?”

In the dark, Sheilah blinked. It was still so easy to forget the married day had even happened. Her belly hadn’t started swelling, and the loathing for Metonymy she feared would rise in her had not come. She wasn’t even feeling sick yet. God knew she liked it that way.

But why shouldn’t Dawn be excited? She was going to be an auntie, and their friend was going to be the daddy. And one day, she would give the baby a cousin. Or a little brother or sister, she thought, remembering Stratogale.

“Yeah,” she said, “a boy.”

Dawn nuzzled against her side. “What do you think you’ll call it?”

Artume sighed. “We don’t get to pick.”

 

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

Mabel Henderson sat craned in the gentle shadow of her concealing copse of yarri and honeysuckle, drawing paper, crayons, and colour pencils spread out before her. She was scribbling away intensely, occasionally glancing up from her scratchings to study the grey breasted robin hopping around and spreading its wings photogenically in the dust. Its feathers had a painted sheen to them, and from certain angles appeared almost flat.

Mabel liked art. She liked looking at it, and she liked putting it to work for her. So when someone (she wanted to say Brit, or maybe Haunt was the culprit¹) had told her how funny it was that she of of all people couldn’t even draw a realistic stick-figure², she had taken it to heart. Why should she—Phantasmagoria herself—need rely on the imagination of others just to work her power?

And so, she had set herself to the task of learning how to draw, freeing herself from the yoke of artists and illustrators. Then, Mabel reasoned, she would be just shy of God Herself, and—more importantly—would open up a whole new world of staging opportunities for the Watercolours.

However, like a man who sits down and tries to teach himself himself Greek after growing up on The Odyssey, Mabel soon discovered that learning anything often ran counter to actually enjoying it. She couldn’t figure out how the people who did the covers of her pulps gave cityscapes of paint on flat paper such depth, or why her attempts to give her creations cheekbones always ended up looking like facial tumours, or why her birds ended up with far too much anatomy. She’d never realized how clumsy her fingers were.

Still, her father wouldn’t have given up, so neither would she.

Mabel had made some noise to Lawrence about hiring an art tutor, but the headmaster had shot down the idea.

“But why?” Mabel had whined. “You bring in all these teachers for Allie—”

Lawrence had given her a look.

“I mean, you get all these teachers for Myriad.”

A chuckle. “Phantasmagoria, Myriad only needs a single session with an expert to learn everything they have to teach her. I doubt you could manage that feat.” He had put a hand on her shoulder then. For a moment, she felt like her dad was talking to her. “If they kept coming back, my dear, they might notice something they wouldn’t understand.”     

With that disappointment under her belt, she then asked Basilisk for help, not that she had expected much technical insight from him. Pen and pencil hardly lasted long enough in his hands for anything like art. Still, the man had a way of making even admissions of ignorance seem insightful; plus, he could order her books.

Aside from that favour, her teacher did have one bit of practical advice:

“Draw from life, girl. That’s what everything I’ve ever read about art tells people to do to get good at it.”  

It seemed like a good idea to Mabel… at first. The problem she found was that life is often defined by movement. Other children, wallabies, and freshwater penguins alike wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to capture them into wax and oil. Stratogale wouldn’t even make her birds pose for her. It occurred to her that she could have started with trees, buildings, rocks or even the river, but that sounded boring.

It had all seemed hopeless, but then, an idea occurred to Mabel. She might not have the patience for drawing from life, but surely anyone who managed to get work as a professional artist did. It only followed that any of their work projected onto reality should count as life.

She started with animals, partly because she had the vague idea that you had to start with naked people, and she couldn’t find any pictures of those she wanted to make real.   

Mabel stood up from her work, studying her drawing. She thought it was an improvement over her previous efforts with the robin, but in her mind, there was only one true test of quality.

She focused on the pulses beneath her skin. They were always there: skeins of nameless pressure wrapped around her veins. Invisible spheres—that’s what it felt like, at least—slipped out from under her fingernails. She pushed them down into the drawing, like she was working air bubbles out of an IV line, letting them burst when they sank into the paper.

Mabel had never quite figured out how to describe the feeling of bringing an image to life. It was breathing into it and pulling it through all at once, like giving a drowning man mouth-to-mouth while hoisting them onto the boat. It always made Mabel feel warm. She liked to think it had something to do with her father. Better that than fire.

Her robin appeared beside its inspiration, sending it twittering frantically into the branches.

The bird was deformed, its creator’s attempt at perspective having cursed it with one wing much shorter than the other, and two supernumerary talons on its left foot. It turned its head in profile to look at its creator, a plea for oblivion in both black eyes.

Mabel tore up her drawing, blinking back tears of frustration, angry grawlixes flashing above her head. That was the other reason she hadn’t started with human subjects. At least animals didn’t yell at her when she got them wrong.

Even then, it was a small comfort. There was a unique frustration to Mabel’s workaround. A real bird was careless in its perfection; a fine drawing was proof that someone, somewhere was much better at art than her.  

“Whatcha doing, Phantasma?”

Mabel turned to find Myriad standing behind her, clothes over her shoulder, the blue in her eyes and water-darkened hair tell-tale signs of an adventure with David. She looked away sharply. It wasn’t the first time Mabel had seen the other girl in such a state, but context is everything. “Allie, your clothes?”

“Oh, sorry.” There was a low hiss, followed immediately by a thunderclap. When Mabel looked back, the other girl was dry and dressed, her hair damp and frizzy. She repeated her question. “So, what were you doing?’

Some powers make people so lazy. “Nothing much, just drawing practise.”

Myriad smiled. “So you can make whatever you want? Neat…” She looked around at nothing in particular, before blurting out “…Did David walk through here?” She knew he had, of course, but it was what you asked.

David had indeed passed Mabel, tears frozen to his cheeks even as steam rose off his skin. That wasn’t a new sight for his friend. What had been new was how he hadn’t answered her when she asked what was wrong. David had never hesitated to share his many hurts with the girl before.

At least, not till lately.

Mabel nodded. “Yeah. Didn’t say anything, though.”

“Okay.” She sat down beside Mabel’s pile of rejected drawings; the ones that had only offended her enough to be crumpled, instead of shredded. She smoothed one of the paper carcasses flat again. “This one’s pretty good,” she lied kindly.

Mabel sat down beside her, trying to make it look like she believed the compliment. “Thanks. Were you and David in the river?”

Myriad’s face brightened. “Yep! We had a pirate battle! Then we turned the boats into the monsters!” She giggled. “I melted his turtle. Underwater.”

Lately, it had dawned on Mabel that there were really two kinds of supers in the world. There were the ones like herself, or Arn, or even Billy: simple doers of extra-things. Special, maybe, but in the same way Elvis Presley or Anne Bancroft were special.

Then there were supers like the Barthes, and maybe the Flying Man. The ones who lived differently from everyone else. The ones who got to do things lesser supers like her never would. The ones who didn’t need to be scared of the things she was.

“Uh huh.”

“Maelstrom ever take you under the water?”

Mabel shook her head. “He tried once, in a bubble. I almost drowned.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright.” Until now, it had been.

“Mabel?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve known about the married days a while, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“Since I asked Żywie why the big girls were getting so fat.”

At least you weren’t too wrapped up in yourself to notice, a low, bitter voice in the back of Mabel’s head whispered.

Myriad frowned. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

Mabel suddenly felt very hot. “I-I thought about it. It’s just—I like you guys. I didn’t want you to get freaked out. Does Billy even know where babies come from?”

Myriad shook her head.

Mabel let out a half-laugh. “You’re the one explaining that to him, not me.”

“…It feels weird, don’t you think?” Myriad asked. “Just… knowing that’s… gonna happen, someday.”

“I guess so,” Mabel replied. “But is it that different from out there? Only weirdos don’t have kids when they grow up.”

“Lawrence doesn’t have any kids.”

“Not that we know about.”

Myriad giggled. “He has us.”

Mabel didn’t seem to see the humour. “He didn’t have to make us.”

“…Do you think it hurts?”

Mabel remembered the blood pooled between her mother’s legs. “…Your power has weird gaps, Allie.”

“Not that. The part that comes before.”

Mabel gave her a disgusted look. “Eww. I don’t wanna think about that!”

Myriad sighed. “Well, me neither. But it’s still there, isn’t it? It’s still gon-”

“I’m learning to draw!” Mabel overrode her loudly, almost angrily. “That’s what I’m doing today. I’m learning to draw so I can make my powers better and so that I don’t have to think about the gross, stupid grown up stuff we’re gonna have to do when we’re big! No! It’s not good. No, it’s not fair! It stinks! But it’s gonna happen, so stop making people miserable by bringing it up, stupid!”

Myriad opened her mouth, then closed it again. There wasn’t anything to say to that. It wasn’t as if she could say Mabel was thinking about it wrong, but there was something about the timbre of her song in that moment, something very sad.

“Is there other stuff that’s… just too sad for you to think about?”

Mabel didn’t answer that. Not with words, at least. Myriad didn’t even see the slap coming. All she knew was that a few moments later her cheeks were smarting, and Mabel was stomping off back to the Institute.

⬗

Haunt lazily flicked shillings through the east wall of the barn, peering through the solid timber as they landed in the hay. He had picked up the habit in the hope of either refining his power, or maybe just pinging one of the Watercolours in the side of the head. He’d stopped doing it while they were inside after a long lesson from Żywie on the physiological effects of a coin lodged in the brain, but it was still a good way to a warm, floating boredom.

“You really should give these a try,” Growltiger said from the patch of clover he was lying in, a thin hardback covering his face.

“Read what?” asked Haunt, as if he didn’t already know.

Billy missed the sarcasm. “The Famous Five!” He jumped to his feet, pausing only to gently place his book on the ground like it was his own newborn child. “They’re great! They go on adventures and solve mysteries, and-”

“And eat scones,” Haunt interjected, deadpan. “And frolic, and play around for ever and ever in a world where even the poor people are happy and the baddies never do more than tie them up.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?” Billy asked, sounding a little defensive.

“Tiger,” Haunt sighed. “Remember how we were attacked by a supervillain? Think he would’ve just tied us up?”

Growltiger thought on this for a moment, before: “… Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I think he’d only have tied us up. Didn’t you think it was kinda weird how none of us got really hurt? We were fighting a supervillain.”

“Look,” Haunt groaned. “My point is, they’re silly. They’re kid books, and that’s fine, because you’re a kid. But they aren’t like real life.”

There was silence between them for a long while after that.

“… And what’s wrong with that?” Billy asked, his voice shaky. “What’s wrong with wanting to read about a world where everything’s nice and safe and okay?”

“…. Fine. Name one book, and I’ll read it, even though it’s gonna be crap.” Haunt finally deigned to look around at the other boy, waiting for him to give his single, stupid book recommendation.

Growltiger grinned, picking up his book off the grass. “That one! Five Go Off in a Caravan!” He handed it to Haunt. “It has circuses!”

Haunt looked down at the book’s bright, delicately etched cover, before making, a show of flicking to a random page. “You have to admit these books are corny, Growly. All that food! No wonder they’re always going on bloody adventures, otherwise they’d crush their bikes under them.”

Billy looked dejected. “Mabel likes them.”

Haunt groaned. “Why does it matter so much that I like this stuff? You read what you like—I don’t care.”

“… Can I ask you something?” Billy was staring at the ground, his lower lip trembling slightly.

Haunt sighed, bracing himself. “Fine.”

“How—” Billy swallowed. “When the other kids say things about you being…”

“A boong?” Haunt offered.

“Y-yeah,” the boy opened his mouth to elaborate, then closed it again. He did this twice.

“What?” Haunt asked with suppressed irritation.

“… Why does being different hurt?” The boy mumbled, breathing in a short, sharp breath through his nose that Haunt recognized all too well as a sniffle. “I thought the others would stop once I got my name, but they keep doing it! Even the ones who let me play with them call me stuff all the time.”

Haunt rolled his eyes, reaching down between his feet to toy with a stray root. “It just does, Bill. Always has, always will.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

Haunt sat him down. “Look, when someone acts like a dickhead at you, you don’t let them think it bothers you.”

“I don’t!” Billy cried. “I laugh at all their jokes, and that just makes them make more!”

“No,” set Haunt. “You don’t laugh with them. That’s more obvious than crying. You have to make them think it doesn’t bother you at all. Then you throw something back at them.”

“Like a rock?”

“No, not like—jokes, Tiger! Mean as you can make them. You remember when Abalone saw you coming out of the toilets?”

“Yeah?” Billy answered, wondering where the older boy was going with this. “He said I was supposed to use the litter-box.”

“Little shit,” Haunt said, with no particular venom. There was something Billy found thrilling about the other boy’s swearing. “Right, next time he says something stupid like that, you say something about him pissing the bed.”

“…Why?”

“Because he does.”

“No, I mean, why do I need to be nasty back?”

“Because they’ll never leave you alone if they think you’re soft.”

Billy thought about this. “But they still make jokes about you. And Basil sometimes, too. And Mealy—”

“Mealy is his own thing, Bill. And I didn’t say they would stop, because they won’t. Not forever. Sometimes, maybe, after a long time, they might forget you’re different long enough to let you be their friend.”

Growltiger collapsed back onto the grass, eyes cast down between his knees. “Is that really the best we get?”

“Fraid so, mate.”

“What are we talking about?” Myriad said, her wireframe form floating up from the earth like a spirit from Hades.

Haunt startled, jumping backwards. “Jesus—is that what it’s like on the other side of that?”

Billy giggled. “Yup.”

The pair watched as the girl’s features were sketched in. She tried to smile. “Guess so. Um, you two seen Maelstrom or Phantasma?”

Haunt frowned thoughtfully, finding his composure again. “Well, it’s been a couple years, so I figure I’ve seen those two a few times, yeah.”

Billy laughed as Myriad rolled her eyes. “I saw Mealy pacing around the garden,” he chimed in. “He was muttering a lot, and a bunch of the pumpkins exploded.” Earnestly, he added “Someone should remind him about pants.”

“I haven’t seen Phantasma since breakfast,” said Haunt. “I did see a dragon skulking around the bush ‘bout an hour ago—a very ugly dragon.”

“She’s learning how to draw,” explained Myriad. “Don’t be mean.”

Haunt hummed, whether in agreement or not Myriad couldn’t tell.

She tapped her foot a few times. “Ah, Haunt.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re eleven, right?”

Haunt shrugged. “Last time I checked. Żywie says I don’t get any older while I’m a ghost, so maybe knock a month or two off. Why?”

Myriad whistled slightly. “So, it can’t be long before your first married day?”

The boy’s lip twitched. “That’s still years away, Miri.” He was actually making eye contact with her.

“Not that many,” she replied. “Two or three, maybe.”

Haunt reminded himself that two or three years ago, Myriad was in kindergarten. “Why are you asking about married days anyway?”

“It’s just… it’s weird to think about, you know?” Her words started to run together. “And Mabel said it wasn’t fair and that it stinks and stuff and—”

Haunt threw a hand up, silently cursing God for making little kids. “I get it, I get it. What exactly do you want me to tell ya, Miri?”

Myriad lowered her head. “That it’s worth it? That it’s not that weird? And if it is, what do we do about it?”

Haunt patted the ground beside him. “Come sit down, Miri.”

“…I can stand.”

Haunt grinned. It never suited him. “Aww, come on, you need to be comfortable for this.”

“She—Miri should stand if she wants to.”

“Aww, don’t be silly, Bill. This is a historic moment. We’re gonna teach Myriad a lesson.”

Myriad was starting to see why Haunt had wanted to be part of The Tempest. With some trepidation, she sat down beside the boys.

Haunt leaned forward, his hands folded. “Hey, Miri, mind telling us what year Captain Cook landed at my great–great-whatever granddad’s back garden?”

“1770.”

“Nice, round number, innit? Can ya tell Billy here where the famous Tom Long lived before he came to the Institute?”

“…That Talos?”

Haunt’s bluster popped like a balloon. “Well, I guess we know what your power thinks isn’t worth knowing, huh.”

“Oh. Sorry… Tom?”

“It’s alright, Myriad,” Tom said. He sounded like he meant it. “Wandering, by the way. Wandering Mission. And no, that ain’t a containment centre. Not for demis, at least.”

A few disparate facts came together in Myriad’s head. “That’s one of the places they send half-caste kids, isn’t it?”

Haunt nodded. “Yep. To be honest, the freak-finders aren’t a new thing. They just started going after white kids sometimes.”      

“What does that have to do with married days?”

Tom tried not to let himself get angry at the girl. Edward Taylor knew what he was like when he got mad. “What I’m saying, Miri, is that I got taken off my parents and put in some awful kid-jail, just like you did.”

“Why’d they do that?” Billy asked. “Couldn’t they look after you?”

At least that distracted Tom from Myriad. He sighed. “Nah, Billy, they could. Dad was a”—it was only then that Haunt realized he couldn’t name his father’s profession—“boilerman.” That seemed like a plausible enough guess. It would explain the old fella’s overalls. “Never that much money around the house, but me and my brothers and sisters never starved or anything.”

“So why’d they take you?”

“Oh, lots of reasons. Not the nicest place, Wandering. The Christian Brothers weren’t very big on things likes maths, but they’d flog ya good if you didn’t act white enough. I mean, I was lucky, sort of. Dad was pretty Anglo, really, but some kids I knew there could barely English! And if you were a girl…” He shook his head. “No, not very nice. Do you two want to know what the secret of the world is? Grown ups, especially poms like Lawrence—”

“Lawrence is Australian,” Myriad pointed out.

“Yeah, but he wishes he was a pom.” Although, maybe an Aussie trying to be a Brit is better than a bunch of Brits coming over and saying they’re the real Aussies. “Point is, they always want something from you, or want to change you, or who knows what else. And you know what? As far as grown ups-in-charge go, Lawrence isn’t that bad. Yeah, he’s a weirdo who wants us to give him babies, but his tucker’s good, the company’s alright, and at least he likes us. More than I can say for the Christian Brothers. I mean, no one takes us away to do stuff to at night and sometimes we go months without anyone getting thrashed.” He stretched out in the grass, eyes closed like he was one moment of quiet away from a long, summer nap. “Way I see it, that ain’t a bad deal for a bit of lying back and thinking of Kuranda.”

Myriad looked at him. Even with his eyes shut, Haunt could tell his summation of the situation hadn’t satisfied her. That was the nice thing about X-ray vision. “That’s how you get through life, childlers,” he said. “You hitch yourself to the least awful bossman you can find, and hope he doesn’t bother you too much till you die.”

“That really what you think?” asked Myriad. “About the married days and all?”

“I don’t think about them that much,” Haunt lied. “Why don’t you go bug one of the big girls about it? They’re the ones dealing with this crap.”

“Fine, I will.”

As the girl huffed off towards the farmhouse, Haunt’s mind wandered down an old but ill-loved path. It was overgrown with thorns that bit at his ankles, but steep enough that the only way he could avoid tumbling head over heel was to keep walking.

Lawrence often said that, one day, every child alive would be posthuman. His predictions about such a world were close to open fantasy:

“Imagine it, children,” he had begged them one pitiless winter night, when the whole Institute (much smaller then) had taken their supper clustered around the parlour fire. “Everyone with a purpose, something they are uniquely born to. Generations of doctors like our Żywie, mending flesh with a touch; children like little Maelstrom pulling forests out from under the Sahara.”

Żywie and Maelstrom both shrank into the corner of their shared couch—Żywie perhaps because of her barrenness, and Maelstrom because that was just his way.

“Um, Laurie,” Britomart, not even six then, had interrupted. “What happens if one of the doctor kids want to be a firefighter?”

It was a good question, Haunt had thought, but there was another that dug at him. Lawrence never talked about the world between the one they lived in and the one he dreamed of. The one where supers ruled, but their predecessors were not yet a memory.

Tom could imagine it. The few, dwindling naturals—if that word still even made sense—herded onto the poorest country, the lands the supermen could find no better use for. For their own good, of course. Far kinder than forcing them to navigate a world that had no use for them. Maybe, in their kindness, the supermen would leave them labour they couldn’t bother themselves with. And when a lucky child among them manifested powers, they would of course be taken to be raised with their own kind. They would forget their parents soon enough; better a moment of grief than a life wasted among a dying race.

The consistency of history was almost a comfort to Thomas Long—he didn’t know what he’d do if things actually improved.

“Tom?”

“Yeah, Bill?”

“Who do you think I’ll have a married day with?”

“…Dunno, mate.” Awful choice of words. “Maybe Brit?”

He didn’t know who was served worse by that lie.

⬗

Ex-Nihilo lay on a bed of spider-silk, woven between the branches of the tallest trees she could find, a glass staircase spiraling around one of its trunks. It had taken her a while to figure out how to coax her protoplasm into adopting its substance, but like most everything else, it was still just a few chemicals in a line. She had fretted about huntsmen or even redbacks and funnel-webs smelling out the hammock and claiming it as a squat, but so far none had come. Maybe they knew a knock-off when they saw it.  

Hanging the thing up was more of a chore, but Gwydion had provided Ex-Nihilo one of his weird platforms. That boy had been doing everything in his power to please her and her sisters, ever since his first married day, and every kindness made them hate him a little more.

Still, it was a rare escape from the frantic joy of younger children, and slight relief from the first blows of summer. Ex-Nihilo had never much enjoyed the warm months, and the child inside her seemed to agree. It was like it was sweating inside her. She was a great, bloated whale, struggling through a syrupy, kettle-hot sea.

“Ex?”

The voice came from below her: high pitched, but slightly husky, too. Ex-Nihilo always thought it sounded like it was recovering from a coughing jag. “Myriad?”

The little girl’s voice was laced with wonder. “Is that you up there?”

“Who else would it be?”

“…Shelob?”

Myriad almost felt the teenage scowl wafting down from above her. “Ha. Ha.”

“Was only joking. Do ya mind if I come up and take a look?”

Ah, so this was it, Lana thought. The small ones had found her refuge already. Soon enough the hordes would be using it as a trampoline, or worse. Probably break their necks doing it, and then who would they blame? But if she told Myriad to buzz off, then no doubt she’d go and whine to Basil, or Laurie, and then she’d get told off for not behaving in the proper sisterly spirit.

“We all have a role to play in shaping the children, Ex-Nihilo,” Lawrence would say.

And some of us got double-cast. “Sure, I guess.”

She heard a thump, and the leaves above her rattled. A moment later, she saw Myriad scuttling up one of the anchor trees, her back against the bark, facing forward. She grinned, clearly proud of herself.

Lana couldn’t help but be impressed, but she also couldn’t help but feel unsettled by the sight. The child looked… insectile. Then again, surely insects would rather be able to see their legs when they climbed? “…There were stairs, you know.”

“More fun this way.” She launched herself from the tree trunk, landing beside Ex-Nihilo and sending the hammock swaying in the air for a few shuddering seconds.

The older girl gripped the silk tight. She found herself thinking back to the dead mother from The Secret Garden. At least with Żywie around, the kid wouldn’t be a hunchback³. Thankfully, as her perhaps too cursory research had suggested it would, the cloth held true. “Jesus, Miri.”

Myriad stretched out, looking up through the leafy canopy to the blue, unblemished sky above. She thought it was like what a crowded marina would look like from underwater, each leaf drifting around like the shadows of boats at anchor. “How long until your baby comes?”

Ex-Nihilo shrugged. “Couple of months.”

Myriad stared at the older girl’s belly. All that, from a couple of cells. An entire life—from beginning to end—from just that lump of flesh. “What’s it feel like?”

Ex-Nihilo looked at the little girl. If she had known in advance what Myriad was going to ask, she probably would have called her a mongrel and thrown her off the hammock, without a care whether or not she found a song or whatever that might cushion the impact. But as it was, all she saw was her own past: a gap on the canvas where the old image hadn’t quite been painted over yet. Herself, back when she and her sisters’ biggest concern was whether they’d go swimming that day; herself, back when Linus might as well have been a strangely shaped girl. Herself, back when she had wondered what Melusine’s baby would look like. Before the joy of curiosity had been ruined by the answer.

“They say it changes everything, sex,” Lana said. “As soon as they tell us what it even is, it’s all about how special it is, and how having it too early or too late or with the wrong bloke will ruin everything. But it didn’t change me.” She figured if there was any child she could be frank with, it was Myriad. “I mean, it was weird and sticky, and I’ve had a better time with my own fingers, but I didn’t feel anymore grown up or dirty or anything, least once I had a shower. And Linus was good about it.”

Better than Gwydion, at least. That awful, nervous mix of fear and shame and excitement. And he was so small.

“So it’s not so bad?”

Lana didn’t answer immediately. “What does change you? Being a mother. I don’t know if we’re ‘mums’, but we are mothers. You spend nearly a year with this kid growing inside you. There’s this heat. You feel it all the time, even when you’re asleep, really. Żywie told me once that having a baby changed the way your DNA worked a little, and I believe her. And even once it’s out, the kid’s still part you. Just this little piece of yourself that you’ll never get back, that’ll be walking around doing things even after you’re dead. And you hope it will be, because you love it. Babies are like drugs, Myriad. Every chemical in your body forces you to love them. It was weeks before I could even look at Spitfire without getting my blouse wet with milk.”

Myriad squirmed a little. “That doesn’t sound—”

“And you can hate them, too, right along with the love.”

“…Why?”

“Because they’re how they keep us where they want us.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Men? God? Just Lawrence? I don’t know. But I can’t leave Spitfire, and nobody out there’s going to want to take in some little slut with weird powers and a baby that starts fires when he sneezes, so I guess I’m stuck here until him and the kid inside me are all grown up!”

Myriad had no response to that, except to take hold of Lana Firrens’ hand. It was shaking.

The two children stayed up there for quite some time.

⬗

Alberto crouched under the obstacle course’s metal slide, sand and the rubber of his thongs rubbing his feet raw, his daughter clinging happily to his side. He would have put an arm under her, but she seemed content levitating. The baby looked up at her father with large, sloe-blown eyes, crying “Gah!” before burying her face in his shirt.

The psychic smiled. He had to admit, even when she wasn’t blasting all nine of his senses, there was something about Ophelia’s presence that pleased him. Maybe it was just the brainwashing chemicals that prevented cavemen from clubbing the shrieking little shits that ate all their food to death, but he was glad she… glad she was, he supposed.

Shame this wasn’t a pleasure walk.

Allison had let go of Eliza’s song, the lights of her thoughts popping back into Alberto’s view the moment she had done so, dancing on the edge of his vision like afterimages. This was good. Now he had an idea of where she was and what she was thinking, and it didn’t seem like he was on her thoughts much.

On the other hand, now the girl had gone and turned herself into what he was sure Eliza’s old masters would have called the ubermensch, and he still had no hold on the girl’s mind. If she took on the witch’s powers again, who knew when he’d get another chance to sink his hooks in? And what might she find out in the meantime?

Still, he had plans. Two, to be exact. Plan one was to try and touch Allison before she decided to tweak her immune system to eat colds better or something. If he didn’t get to her in time for that, plan two was to have Ophelia clap, hope it made her let go of the song, and hope he himself recovered his wits before she did.

God, he hoped she was content with her biology.

Near as he could tell, she had spent the last hour and a bit playing and commiserating with Ex-Nihilo, blowing bubbles in the air that dried into gold and silver. It was all very sweet, he was sure.

He watched as the two girls stepped out from the treeline, like witches returning from a sabbat. The younger child hugged the older, trying her best to avoid the baby-bump, before they went off their separate ways.

Good, that should make things easier.

Once he was certain Myriad was out of sight of Ex-Nihilo, Alberto started walking towards the girl, his daughter floating in tow. There was no way she didn’t know they were there, but he hoped she would just assume he was sleeping off some of the Lamb’s Blood he kept for especially dreary afternoons. “Brainiac!” he called out, in his own non-branded form of cheerfulness.

The girl turned to look at the man. “Tiresias?” She spotted the flying baby. “Ophelia?”

The toddler laughed with her father. “How’d you guess? So, I hear you’ve been going around asking questions about the married days.”

Myriad kicked up some dirt, muttering “Yeah. I just want it to make sense. To sound okay.”

Tiresias looked thoughtful. “Hmm. Who’ve you asked so far?”

“Um,” Myriad wasn’t sure how seriously Tiresias took the names, so she erred on the side of Lawrence, “Phantasmagoria, Ex-Nihilo, and Haunt. Growltiger was there, too, but I wasn’t really asking him.”

“That’s a good cross-section, I suppose. Would you like a father’s perspective on the whole business?”

Myriad nodded. “That would be good.”

“My advice? Stop stirring up shit, Allison.”

“…What?”

Tiresias threw his arms up like he was holding up the sky. “Girl, did you think all this was free? That Mad Laurie pulled all you children out of the shitholes they had you in because he was just so bloody nice? That he feeds and clothes you and tolerates your endless fuckin’ dramas out of the kindness of his heart?”

“Ye-yes,” Myriad stuttered. “He said so.”  

A long, hoarse cackle, dangerously close to turning into a hiccup, cross-harmonized with an uncomprehending, joyous giggle. “Remember what Haunt told you, Allison? About grownups always wanting something from you?”

“How did you—”

“Don’t be slow, I know everything that goes on here. And he was being too kind. Nobody does anything if they aren’t going to get anything out of it.”  

“That’s not true!” Myriad protested. “People donate to charities and stuff.”

Tiresias smiled, coldly. “Charity is tax-deductible, dear. And all the worst millionaires and robber-barons give money to the poor, or build them schools and hospitals. Makes them feel better at night about being most of the reason they have so little to begin with. More importantly, it helps other people forget that, too. ”

Myriad still looked dubious. “What does Lawrence get out of us?”

He laughed again. “Why, that’s an easy one!” He grabbed Ophelia, spinning the child much to her delight. “Babies, love!” He let go of his daughter, letting her bob in the air like it was water, before gesturing to the empty air next to him. “Stratogale! Physical wonder!” He pointed at himself. “Tiresias! Mental marvel!” The psychic wagged Ophelia’s cheek fondly. “He’s like a little kid, isn’t he? Bashing blocks together to see what happens!”

His audience grimaced.

Tiresias frowned. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You think I wanted to screw Sadie? She’s a kid! And there’s a perfectly good woman around…”

“…Wait, you and Melusine…”

He shrugged. “We were young. And bored. Still are, sometimes. But me and Stratogale? No joy in it. Just biology and friction.” Alberto saw an opportunity. “I don’t see why there even needs to be sex. You’d think Eliza could just turn whatever cells inside you she liked into seed”—a smile—“a whole school of Madonnas.”

“I guess…”

“Me? I reckon Lawrence prefers it physical. I’m sure he thinks it promotes communal bonds or something, but the old man would’ve been brought up on that Greek myth crap, Zeus laying with Leda and all that⁴. The man half-thinks we’re gods, why not have us act like it?”

“But-but is it right?”  

The man sighed. “Look, married days are crap, if you let yourself think about them that way, but they’re what needs to happen for that old pervert to get his wonder-babies. And that’s why he keeps you here. Why he keeps all of us. That’s why you’re allowed to play with your little puddle of a friend, and go to class, and not be scared, lonely and bored every minute of every day. Yeah, it’s disgusting, and Tim Valour would burn this place to the ground and salt the earth if he ever found out what was going on here. We’re all studs and broodmares, but that’s a small price to pay for what we’re getting. The old man’s a creep, but he’s given you a shred of your life back.” Before Myriad could react (which was saying something, after her personal renovations)  Tiresias was whispering in her ear. “So stop being so fucking precocious and asking questions that piss everyone off.”

Alberto straightened, beckoning Ophelia to him. “You’re eight years old, Allie. Just enjoy being hairless and only bleeding when someone pricks you as long as you can.”

As he walked away, the telepath felt the summer heat on the little girl’s face, and the grass beneath her bare feet, while her apprehension and disgust washed over him like floodwaters over parched, cracked ground.

Just for fun, he flexed her fingers. It was a small thing, nothing she wouldn’t have done herself, but it still filled him with relief.

He was safe.

He had to say, it felt good being Allison, at least physically. Maybe, someday, he’d finagle a way of getting her to give him a tune up, too.

He felt other things, too. Like the rage and betrayal that bubbled and flowed from David into Eliza’s twisted plants, till they burst from it. Maybe he had that boy wrong.

And as for the Eliza’s little secret, now, at last, he had leverage.

---

^{1. It was Haunt.↩}

^{2. Haunt was of course joking, but there is actually a species native to the Magellanic Clouds, largely made of tubes of neon, that to human eyes resemble stick-figures—Mabel’s didn’t look like them, either.↩}

^{3. He wasn’t a hunchback in the book, either, but nevermind that.↩}

^{4. A common historical misconception.↩}

Previous Chapter                                                                                                           Next Chapter

“It’s not that different, is it?”

Elsewhere and Myriad lay in the loose hay that carpeted the barn loft, the missing planks in the ceiling striping their faces in light and shadow. They had spent much of their time alone together since their final initiation into the mysteries of the Institute.

Well, final thus far.

“My mum was only seventeen when she married Dad,” Elsewhere continued. “Wasn’t that long before Drew was born.”

Myriad was surprised Elsewhere had brought up his parents. Since joining the ranks of the abandoned, he had been steadfastly pretending that he was an orphan. “But they were married,” she said. “And nearly the same age.”

“Linus and the big girls are the same age,” her friend pointed out.

“Gwydion isn’t.”

“He’s what, fourteen? That’s nearly grown up.”

“Is it?”

“Well, Lawrence said it was.”

Silence.

“It’s Metonymy and Artume’s married day this weekend,” Myriad said. “Lawrence is going to announce it Friday.”

“Married day” was an emerging euphemism at the New Human Institute. It’s what they called the times the older children were paired off to produce offspring.

“I do wish it hadn’t caught on like it has,” Lawrence had confided to her. “Marriage is an artifact of my kind, Myriad. I should hope your race works out more sensible ways of giving order to love.”  

“How do you know that?” asked Elsewhere.

Myriad shrugged. “He told me.” 

“…Do you think you and me are going to have a married day?” Elsewhere asked. “You know, when we’re big?”

Myriad felt queasy. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t as though they were related. And Elsewhere was her friend. Would she rather it be with a boy she didn’t like as much?

Of course, chances were that was in her future, too. “Yeah. Probably.”

For a little while, the barn made more noise than either child.

“I’m sorry,” said Elsewhere.

“For what?”

“…I don’t know.”

She rolled over closer to the boy, squeezing his hand. “We’re still little. We won’t have to think about that for years if we don’t want.”

“Yeah.”

Myriad got to her feet, making her way to the edge of the loft. “I’m going outside. You coming?”

“Nah.”

For reasons not even Myriad could understand, Elsewhere’s answer came as a relief. With a few notes of Britomart’s song, she leapt to the ground and ventured out into the new New Human Institute.

In the days since AU’s attack, Lawrence had tried to marshal the students into restoring the Institute’s pastoral character. Their cooperation had been half-hearted at best. Many of the children, as it turned out, preferred the Post-Golden Age¹ landscape—with its all new scars and curiosities. Down by the water gold nuggets were now as common as riverstone; trenches dug by ice and fire were already seeing service as forts and battlements; and of course, AU’s battle dead still held a silent watch. The students had taken to naming them like hedges: Ol’ Scatterclaws, G-Rex, and a whole host of others².

She wandered through a game of tag, Abalone shouting a greeting as he ran past after Ēōs.

The destruction had given the children an unspoken licence to make their own alterations, too. Veltha had cut tunnels beneath the school, so that her fellow students could play in her dark underworld. Britomart and Talos had uprooted enough trees to construct a palisade, from which Windshear ruled as a bloody queen. In an unprecedented spate of cooperation, Ex-Nihilo and Growltiger had erected castles of limestone and emerald all throughout the grounds. As the girl watched, Tiresias plummeted from one of their roundels, and had to be carried to the sick-bay, over his woozy protests that he could just walk it off. Everywhere Myriad looked, the world was changing with its children.

Unlike a lot of young girls, Myriad had never fantasized much about motherhood. Involved too much babies for her taste. However, she had assumed she would one day be a mother. It was just how things went for girls, unless you wanted to be someone’s sad auntie.

She wondered what having a baby would feel like. Would she be able to hear its song from within her? Once it was born, would she be able to copy it, or the other way around? Would it even have her powers, or one of the many she had dipped her toes in?

Would it have her eyes, or David’s?

Not now. Not yet.   

As she walked, she played Żywie’s song, pushing through the unwelcome memories that came with the ghostly piano chords. She had tried to assume the healer’s powers a few times again since the Quiet Room. Not so much for any actual healing—she had Maelstrom and Talos’ songs for that— but rather to puzzle out the unease the woman’s abilities inspired in her. It couldn’t just be the piano, could it? Or that note? Surely she wasn’t that big of a wimp? The experiments hadn’t gone well. In truth, she hadn’t managed to hold onto her teacher’s tune for more than a few seconds before losing her nerve. This time, though, she was surprised to find the revulsion wasn’t there.

Well, if she had the song, why not dance to it?

Żywie had been busy. The woman had come up with a plethora of biological refinements, and she had used herself as a testbed for all them. And now, Myriad decided, it was time for her to share.  

Charles Darwin never uttered or put to paper the words “survival of the fittest”³, for the simple reason they aren’t true. Despite what generations of pulp writers might have told people, natural selection does not strive towards any higher plane; it only blindly prunes the inadequate. This is why human beings start to fall apart after less than a hundred years, while somewhere in the ocean drifts a brainless jellyfish older than that entire species.

If you want a truly exceptional creature, that takes craftsmanship.

Myriad smiled to herself. The changes she set in motion would take time, unless she wanted to starve to death on her feet. She would have to keep Żywie’s song playing for days—even in her sleep—but after all was said and done, she would be a little less baseline.

She ate like a horse that evening.

⬗

Alberto Moretti sung his way softly through Kookaburra Dormitory⁴, making the rounds. His ten phantom limbs lay asleep on either side of him, waiting for the psychic to renew his mark on them. As he passed each hammock, he laid a hand on its occupants, his fingerprint seeping into the children’s minds. Their dreams played in his head: wild collages of fear and fantasy, both hazier and more real than the waking world.

“Fran, mum and dad, Fran, forgot to put on pants to breakfast, known Kadath… Eliza?” The esper looked back up the row at Haunt. “Really?” Alberto continued his recitation. “Flying Man, spider-house—” He stopped, index finger resting on Britomart’s forehead. He looked down at the girl and grinned. “Maelstrom! You kept that well hidden, kid.”

It was an easy evening for the rounds; it was the one night of the week when Artume actually slept. It was a nightmare having to sneak around her all the time, and God knew that this would be a bad week to let things slip. Well, bad for Lawrence at least.

Long term behavioral modification was a funny old game. When Bertie had first decided he wasn’t above it after all, he had had the psychic take a rather heavy handed approach to things— some of the kids he’d practically turned into little robots. But the thing about the human mind is that if you meddle with too many parts too often, you start to see knock-on effects. Try to make Windshear wash her hands consistently, and you wake up one morning to find the girl crying as she scrubs her skin off.

He paused again when he reached Maelstrom, snuggled up with Tigger and Mabel.

Hmm… not tonight.  

Allison was sleeping alone that night. Good idea, Alberto thought. Might as well enjoy it while she could. He pinched a toe.

He couldn’t get any traction on her. It was like her skin was made of teflon. He focused on the little girl. There was nothing. No dreams, no lights sparking inside her head; nothing. If it weren’t for the steady rise and fall of her chest and the REM twitching of her eyes beneath their lids, the psychic would have thought she was dead. He had never seen such an impenetrable mind since—

That spill he took on Castle Greystone. That kraut bitch.

Alberto started hyperventilating. The girl had taken on Eliza’s song again. Why? What possible interest could flesh witchery have for an eight year old girl? Did she remember that morning after Chen came home? Or anything else? If she did, who had she told?

If Eliza knew, he was done for. If Fran knew, he would wish he was.

He felt the child’s forehead, hoping he was wrong, hoping he would find even a little purchase on Allison’s mind. Still, he found nothing. If anything, the girl felt feverish, though she seemed quite content.

It suddenly occurred to Alberto that he couldn’t remember Eliza ever coming down with so much as a cold.

He ran out of the dormitory, praying to a God he wished he didn’t believe in, a God he knew would never listen to him of all people. He remembered Allison remembering that evil Finnish gypsy’s note. The lines he knew she hadn’t read out for her cohort:

PS: Beware the one who holds the wires taut.

For months, Alberto had assumed that was him. Desperate for reassurance, he plunged into the storm of futures, and was relieved by what he saw. The Institute would be finished by Christmas, but he’d seen that coming since New Year’s. More importantly, in all but the most improbable tommorows—now that the Institute had weathered Chen—he persisted. The school might die, but the road stretched out long before him.

Alberto’s pace slowed to a walk as he forced himself to take a few long, grateful breaths. He started heading back towards the farmhouse. He had missed a few kids in his panic, but that didn’t worry him too greatly. Where he slacked off, he had full faith the bullshit Bertie had filled the children’s heads with would make up the difference.

He would be glad to be rid of this place.

⬗

Myriad woke up happy that Thursday morning. She’d never been a very loud smiler, but today she was. She actually sung in the showers, which got her a few loofahs lobbed into her stall. As she had done for the last three days, she dug into breakfast like a bear cub on the first day of Spring.

“You gearing up for a growth spurt?” Mrs Gillespie asked. Her tone was bemused, but she was a little concerned. Myriad wouldn’t have have been first of her girls to develop an unhealthy relationship with food after having things explained to her, although the usual tact was to starve themselves.

Myriad swallowed her mouthful of egg and bacon in one painful looking gulp. She beamed at the teacher, “Nah, that’s not till next year.”

Myriad was not joking. She managed to pocket a knife as everyone got up to head to class, shooting Maelstrom a knowing look that only got confusion in return.

Tiresias locked himself in his room. Nobody noticed.

The school day passed for Myriad in a blur of impatience and anticipation as she was passed from teacher to teacher, gophering stationery and textbooks and cups of tea from one end of the house to the other.

Once, when she was fetching the Institute’s copy of The Mystery of the Cathedrals⁵ from the library, she dropped Żywie’s song for Melusine’s. She went icy—just for a moment, like a photonegative flash—before picking up the healer’s tune again.

She smiled.

After what felt like a whole school week, Myriad was released from her duties. She ran out into the afternoon sun, following Maelstrom’s song down to the river. A set of green and blue shorts and T-shirt lay neatly folded on the bank. David’s song radiated from the river’s depths like the last orchestra in Atlantis, all glass harmonica and whalebone whistles.

Myriad took hold of it, then evaporated out of her clothes, her kit falling to the ground with an uncharacteristically weighty thud. She recondensed some ways out above the river, twisted in the air, and dropped into the water with a joyous splash.

She simply floated at first, unbothered by the chill river currents. Then she kicked downwards, air escaping out of the sides of her mouth in a plume of bubbles as she plunged, mermaid-like, past the point where bright, glassy green gave way to murky marine blue. She could have liquified, become one with the river itself. She had done it before with David, and it was always uniquely freeing, but right now, Myriad wanted to feel the cool, muted gravity of the water; to churn it with her feet and hear its quiet roar in her ears.

She flew over planes of river weeds, rippling sideways like grass in the wind, punctuated by broken bottles, lost shoes, and drowned toys. A pirate ship in miniature lay half-buried in the silt, its exposed prow long ago given up to moss and rot; fossilisation in reverse. David had shown it to Myriad the first time she had ventured underwater. When Linus and the oldest girls had been small, he told her, they had built the thing over a summer for the sole purpose of sinking it, just so they could say that the river had a sunken ship in it.

The boy was sitting in the middle of the riverbed. It was deep enough there to drown a careless child, but not so deep you couldn’t see the sun scattering across the surface.

Myriad gave her friend a small wave as she approached, nervous. They hadn’t really had a chance to talk alone since AU’s attack. It felt different now. David smiled as he caught sight of her, and she settled down next to him, sending up a small, silent explosion of dust and sand. He laced his fingers in hers, and they let the light rain down on them, shattered into yellows and greens, dappling their skin like they were sitting beneath a stained glass ceiling.

They sat together in companionable silence—not that they had much of a choice in the matter. Little silvered fish flitted in and out of sight.  

Myriad suddenly found herself hesitating. She didn’t know why. It was good news she had for him. Still, she didn’t want to surface quite yet, to have to crack and scrape her thoughts trying to shove them into words.

And then there was the all other stuff.

No. No thinking about weird, confusing things right now. Now was fun time. That was what time with David was meant for.

Then the idea struck, and she grinned. Why did the best ideas take so long to turn up?

She gave the boy’s hand a squeeze before letting go, kicking off from the riverbed. David had just enough time to look up questioningly at her, when he saw the pirate ship wrench itself from its unkempt grave, its struggles echoing and burbling through the water. It rose to meet Myriad’s bare feet just as the last of her ice-spun piratical accoutrements crystallized around her. She raised her newly made, translucent sword, and barked silent orders to an imaginary crew.  

David giggled, before melting away like a dream.

A few fathoms from Myriad’s revenant vessel, a phantasmal clipper manifested, its many sails fanning out like fins and dragonfly wings in the water. The body of the craft was long and thin, almost serpentine in its dimensions, with a suspiciously familiar looking young mermaid as its figurehead.

Myriad suddenly wished David’s powers came with a tail. She frowned at her own figurehead, the begrudging compromise between a unicorn and a dragon. A growling, boyish tiger grew over it.

The ghost of a proud Royal Navy captain appeared on the clipper’s deck, resplendent in the memory of his dress uniform. Unlike the pirate queen, this seaman had the loyalty of a full crew of spectral sailors.

The clipper’s cannons bombarded the diminutive galleon, a dozen tailless comets slamming into its hull, sending wood splinters sinking to the bottom of the river like pine needles.

Myriad lowered her sword sharply, imagining her grizzled sea-dogs returning fire. Which they did.

The cannonballs struck their target true, shattering David’s ship like a glass model. Myriad was cheering to herself when she saw the boat mend itself, like time flowing backwards.

A cannonball struck Myriad’s mast, sending it and her rotting, tattered sail floating off into the green.

Purely out of habit, she huffed. It was her own fault, she knew. Using a wooden boat for this was like picking black in chess. Down here, David was Jumpcut, Growltiger, Mabel and Elsewhere all in one.

But then, so was Myriad.

A pillar of ice grew from her ship’s wound, sprouting a sail that slipped in and out of visibility as the boat cut through the water, ramming into HMAS Triton.

And so it went. Every blow David inflicted on the NAS⁶ Anne Bonny, Myriad patched with ice: the ship of Theseus in real time. The old boat died in inches, surrendering to its own ghost.

And as the ships fought on, they forgot their shape, mutating as they regenerated. They became leviathans and giants, mountains and swords. For one brief, glorious moment, they were a whale and a squid, but neither child took note.

Eventually, Myriad bored of this distance combat, and swung across to David’s sea-turtle on a glittering rope⁷.  

Whatever changes his vessel had undergone, David’s own playing piece still looked the same. The officer and gentleman lunged at the little girl, and a frantic bout of sword-clashing ensued, the two fighters clinging tight to the turtle’s shell as Myriad’s box jellyfish ensnared her in its tentacles.

Myriad could barely keep apace, small as she was, with the captain’s flurry strikes and parries. She soon gave up on that, letting the blue fade from her eyes and the ice float off her skin, instead reaching for the songs drifting down from the world above. David watched, at first confused, then with an enraptured giggle, as a deep crimson phoenix rocketed from the girl’s hand. Blue tipped wings cast dancing, glimmering shadows all across their submarine battlefield and tinted the gloom with the bright, vibrant orange of fresh flame. The bird let out a soundless screech and streaked over the turtle, a shower of discarded feathers melting through its shell like Greek fire.

As he picked his way through the remains of the older students’ boat below, David grinned at the sheer novelty of underwater fire. It reminded him of his mother’s stories from the war. He focused his efforts on healing his turtle, deciding to just hold things together until Myriad ran out of air and called upon his power again. Four minutes later, the turtle was gone, and his friend still hadn’t swapped back.

Myriad saved the captain for last, waiting until the turtle had subsided back into the flow of the river before turning her firebird’s fury on its passenger. David was only half focused, too busy trying to figure out how Myriad was staying under so long without a breath to put up much of a fight, and thus the final battle between bird and swordsman was short lived. The phoenix smote its foe, the beating of its wings blowing the patch of silt where it stood into glass.

David was applauding when the two of them surfaced. “That was brilliant!” he shouted. “You, and the boats, and… and…” He hugged his friend. “Such a good idea.”

Myriad relaxed. She didn’t know what she had been worried about. David was going to love this.

The boy let go of her. “You held your breath a long time down there… right? That was a long time for people who aren’t me or Mum?”

She laughed. “Yeah, it was. Hey, got something to show you.”

“What is it?”

Myriad grinned as the blue returned to her eyes, and a rogue wave swept them both back towards the shore. Myriad waded excitedly out the water, David and a thin sliver of ice trailing behind her.

She ran up to her fallen clothes, fishing a piece of scrap paper from one of her short pockets. From where David stood, it appeared to be covered on either side with small, many-coloured shapes, with little notations he couldn’t discern next to each of them. The girl held the paper out like a matador’s muleta, whistled, and the ice-dart zoomed past David’s head, piercing the page and pinning it to a tree.

David golf clapped. Myriad’s eyes went hazel again. “That wasn’t what I was going to show you.” She pulled the knife from her other pocket.

David threw up his hands, stepping backwards. “Okay, okay! Sorry!”

Myriad realised how she looked, and lowered the knife. “Not for you,” she said, still smiling. “Well, sorta.” She handed David the knife, before backing away a few paces and putting her hands behind her back. “Throw it at me.”

David dropped the knife. “No!”

“Aww, come on, pretty please?” She darted over to her friend, plucking the knife of the ground and forcing it back into his hand in one fluid movement. David barely registered the motion. “You’ll probably miss anyway!”

David’s tone was offended as much it was pained. “And what if I don’t?”  

Myriad shrugged. “Then I’ll go icey, or bronze.”

“You might bleed to death before you change!”

She giggled again. “Since when were you so good at throwing knives? And people only die from getting stabbed right away in stories, ‘less it’s in the brain.”    

David fretted with the breakfast knife, scrapping it across his forearms.

“…You’re not going to hit me in the brain, David.” She dug her feet deeper into the dirt, closing her eyes. “I’m gonna stand here till you throw that knife at me.”

They stood in silence for a while, the quiet hiss of the river occasionally drowned out by the shrill cries of birds and children. David shuffled his feet, hoping the world would end right there and then, or that Ophelia would choose that moment to clap. Neither came to pass, not that he would have been able to tell them apart. Every once in a while, Myriad furtively opened an eye to check if her friend was any closer to throwing the bloody knife.

David screamed, hurling the knife gracelessly at the girl.

Myriad’s hand whipped in front of her face. She heard David let out a small gasp. She opened her eyes, confirming what the feel of smooth wood against her fingers already told her. She held the knife handle less than an inch from her nose, the blade pointed at her reluctant attacker. She laughed. “It worked!”

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” David asked, impressed. “The circus?”

“Nope!” She jumped backwards, springing off the tree where she had nailed her scrap of paper and landing on her feet behind David. “Didn’t get that from the circus, either.”

David whistled. “Who then? Was that Brit? Why weren’t you glowing?”

In lieu of an answer, Myriad led the boy by the hand over to the tree, tearing the paper roughly from its spike and handing it eagerly to her friend.

Much to David’s surprise, being able to read the diversely scribed lines of text next to the shapes only made their meaning less clear. Next to a blue triangle: “pain numbing”. A red shield: “heart rate”. A diamond split halfway between violet and sky-blue: “hysterical strength”

There were dozens upon dozens of others: “sleepy-time,” “stay-awake…”

“…Ovulation?” David asked, frowning.

“Girl-bleeding,” Myriad explained, unnecessarily. “That’s for later.”

“What is this for, Miri? Are you making up a board game or something?”

The girl bit her lip conspiratorially. “They’re ‘biofeedback triggers. They’re like…” If Myriad had been born maybe a decade or two later, the comparison to cheat codes would have been obvious. “It’s like I’ve laid down telephone lines inside me. The pictures, they’re like buttons, but imaginary—but real, too. They’re like shortcuts. All the stuff your body does without you thinking about it? You’re heart beating, breathing… other stuff? If I think about the right buttons hard enough, I can control those things. You ever hear those stories about mummies lifting cars off their kids? Not supers or anything, just normal people like Lawrence. They can do stuff like that because they’re too scared to care that it’ll break them.” She clenched her free hand into a fist and slammed it into the tree, leaving a shallow, splintery indentation in its wood. She quickly went clear and back before David realised how many bones she had broken with that stunt. “I can do stuff like that whenever I want now! And it doesn’t matter because now I heal so much better. Watch!”

Myriad calmly and unhesitatingly cut a gash along her palm. The knife was hardly more than a slightly serrated butter-spreader, so she had to dig a little into her flesh, but she had nothing if not conviction.

She found herself in David’s arms, the knife pressed uncomfortably between their chests. “Don’t,” he said, his voice choked with revulsion and what Myriad could have sworn was shame. Anger, too, but not at her. “I know it sounds scary, but it’s a long time away… we’ll be good, alright?” David hoped they were still wet enough that the tears weren’t obvious.

Myriad wrapped her arms around him, her blood staining his shoulder blade like okra. “It’s not that, David.” She backed out of the hug, the knife falling onto the dry mud, and held out her opened, slashed palm. “Look,” she said, “really look.”

David did look. The bleeding had stopped, and although it wasn’t a minute old, the wound was already scabbing over.

“It’ll be all better in ten minutes—no scar. I mean, I don’t really have scars since I met you, but still.” She hugged herself, grinning. “I feel so good, David. It’s—it’s like I was covered in mud before and I’ve just gotten out of the bath. Everything’s so clear now, my eyes, my ears, everything. I feel like I could run and run and run for hours and not get tired.”

“That good?”

“Better.” She wiggled her toes. “I could grow a tail, you know. Like a real mermaid. Scales are easy.

“Really?”

She giggled. “Yep. Gills, too. Not that I need them with you around.” She stepped in close to David, squeezing his hand. “We could walk back into the river, right now. Just swim until we get to the sea,” she whispered. “How have you not been in the ocean?”

That last remark had come in to her mind as a joke, in honesty, but by the time it had reached her mouth, she meant it.

“We could go find whales. I want to hear their songs. We wouldn’t have to worry about people, or being alone, or married days. It could just be us and the whales.”

For just a moment, David thought he was going to turn around and run into the water. The River Avon would carry him and Allison to Swan River, and then out to sea. He would know saltwater for the first time, and forget the taste of air. Maybe they would find his grandfather, and he would know what it was like to love someone else without it hurting.

Instead, he asked “How? How did you do all this? Whose power?”

“Żywie,” Myriad answered conspiratorially, a glint in her eyes like she was letting slip a friend’s secret crush. “She can do herself!”

“…What?” David said, his tone and expression flat.

“Żywie’s powers work on herself. No clue why she doesn’t tell people. Maybe she doesn’t want everyone bugging her for extra powers, I don’t—where are you going?” Myriad said as the boy stormed (or maybe gusted) off.

“All really neat, Miri,” David said as he marched back towards the Institute, his voice a little too controlled, even as his song ran discordant. “See you at dinner?”

“…Yeah, sure… I think it’s potato salad tonight.”

“Nice.”

Myriad knew better than to follow. She sat down against the trunk her long-suffering test tree, and wondered what exactly she had told her friend.   

---

^{1. Almost everyone agreed that the period after the Golden Age was in many ways preferable to the Golden Age itself, thus making it unique in the accounting of time.↩}

^{2. A Whole Host of Others was very popular. ↩}

^{3. That dubious honour goes to philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer. People who use the aphorism in all sincerity are likely unaware of his fondness for trade unions and self-identification as a radical feminist.↩}

^{4. Sister of the Wallaby and Lorikeet dormitories. ↩}

^{5. A well regarded textbook on modern architecture.↩}

^{6. Nova Australian Ship. As much as Myriad tried to forget what the witch had show her, that could-be city park still found its way into her dreams.↩}

^{7. It was connected to the same anchor point as Tarzan’s vines.↩}

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