I trace the hole in my chest with a hand and feel violated flesh. I remember Gillian scooping out Mary's body with her teeth. That's what it felt like. I can imagine Elle glutting herself on me, Elle, giving up, finally. One more thing to try, Elle. Can you feel, Elle? Can I make you feel, Elle? Am I just saving the men and women in these cities who you could have been taking away and breaking over your knee?

Nah, I think I called it the first time. Can't feel shit for shit. No wonder. I don't even think I can manage to feel sorry for her right now. That's fine. Everything's just about fine.

Do you know who you took to bed? Do you know who thwarted your plans, Elle, you stab-happy bitch? It's Kali, savior of humans. Kali, bearer of blows, Kali, taking everyone's shit for years and then some and then some and then some and then some. I have been violated by time, by half the group's teeth, by Elle's hands and her body. I have been broken in so many places that sometimes I'm just upset that there are no scars on my body. There's just this blazing sense of...

Oh hell.

I'm fucking death.

Red must've walked in at one point and seen my body. He's standing over to the side right now, watching me. Elle and I sneak out later, but this time Red hasn't called the meeting to talk about their plans for the house. It's driving Alex completely rabid. Can't feel bad for him either. Can't feel anything right now except for the dysphoric dizziness of where the holes were!

"Elle," Red says. "May we talk?"

Well, I have an idea. "Do you need her for something?" I ask Red, keeping the sharp upper edge to my voice best I can.

"Yes, I do," Red says.

Elle looks to me. Her eyes are heavy with disappointment, her lip pursed with a warning trembling on it, likely quivering like a snowflake on the tip of her beautiful tongue (which has been all over my body and never loved me once). "Do I need to talk to you?"

"Yes," Red repeats. "Do I need to-- are you two planning something? Look, I know that your relationship is destructive, and we're going to have an extensive conversation about it."

"We are?" I ask, curious.

"Yes," Red says. "We are."

"Are we really?" I ask. I look to Elle, confused. "You know, I just... I think you're using the wrong definition of destructive here."

"No, I'm really not," Red assures me, and he gives me this bitter, cold laugh, the likes of which almost makes me smile, because it sounds like he's slipping. That makes two of us, buddy.

"I just... would you like me to define destructive for you?" I ask. It's a trap and I'm fairly sure he knows it's a trap, but truthfully, it doesn't matter what he says next, because I don't care.

"Is this a--"

"If you insist," I say, voice curving into a hiss. Restart over this. Do it right now. I want something to hold onto, so I hold onto myself, like a tree so wide around and so straight up I have no business climbing it with my hands. My body bolts up, becoming a massive opening out of which comes the hellsnake I call myself, but it's relieving to be nothing but rage and emptiness.

Red's glasses tilt skew on his face. I slam Elle out of the way with my tail and then, knocking my tail the other way, take Dylan. I could take every worm in this room, but right now I am exercising creative constraint. I feel fire rim through my gut and blossom out into the world, bright blue and angry, and as it spills over the poor earth I feel myself wonder, for seconds, if my judgement is unwarranted.

Oh no. It's more than warranted. Red stares up at the flames, looking small and trapped and terrified, and I want to say, through the mouth that has too many teeth to form the kind of nuanced, polite conversation he makes his sorry living on, that if he wants to have a discussion about how I've been feeling for the last few months, this is it, buddy.

Buddy. Friend. Whatever words Alex would give. Where is he? Twerp shocked me by accident a few weeks ago. I notice the middle kids are all preparing to fight. Mary has her blades out. Damien's even in his Veritas, or approaching it, and I don't like the looks of his fires. Just kidding! They're pathetic. Doesn't mean I want to contend with them, though. I cover his fire with an outpouring of blue, and as a stronger emotion grips me like reins, knowing what I've done, I swing out of Veritas and into something faster, mobile. A hawk soars across the sky, leaving the burning forest behind.

The head-start I get is enough to plummet me into a distant stretch of woods, where I alternate forms a few dozen paranoid times, taking a river downstream in a fish form almost too big for the currents, before eventually stopping on the bank as a coppermouth. I curl hard as I can about myself, waiting to strike, feeling the scales of my own body.

How many of them are alive? Don't know. How long until he restarts? No idea whatsoever. This is the part where you're supposed to feel bad, because you're capable of it, unlike almost anyone else in the group. This is the part where you say to the world, I'm sorry I hurt you, and it's okay that you've hurt me over and over again. I'll lie down and take it. Don't have a leg to stand on.

Admittedly this is my first rampage. Red will interrogate me all night now, and by all night, I mean for at least twenty nights. We have all eternity for me to be interesting to him, and that interest will spur him out of any emotional crisis he's having right now. I imagine his eyes, the way they glow with the light of the fire. The way his face falls when he realizes he's going to have to save us all again.

I want to be the thing that he rises up against.

I hope I've hurt him, because there was only ever one thing I could ever indent in this endless timepit of a world we've inhabited, a river that flows down with such crushing force that it carries logs and animals and broken bodies against their will down to some unknown future, and it was always just him.

Footsteps on the bank.

Confident? Very. Pensive? Mmmm. I know who it is before I'm lifted up out of the earth.

"Oh! Oh! Fouuuund you," Mary says. "Nice try. They're putting out your fires right now. I really thought you were more ingenuitive than that. I look up to you, Kali, but I guess you're just stupid and boring like everyone else. That's a big shame!"

I transform in her grip, her fingers releasing me as my flesh begins to burn. When I am human, standing before her, I am still glaring up at her, and I still bite. "You're going to take me back and have me answer for my crimes in front of Red, I assume?"

Mary grins. "I don't know. I think it would be more fun to kill you for what happened to Damien."

"He dead?" I ask.

Her eyes gleam with firelight, even though we're nowhere near the blaze. "Ha. Ha ha."

Oh, Mary. I liked you more when you were lying on the ground, dead. "I didn't kill Damien. I don't kill people," I say. "I burned a dead body once, probably did something to some whitejackets... that's about it."

Mary tilts her head. "What?"

"Oh. You're intrigued. You know, you're going to see Damien again very soon," I say. "When Red restarts the universe, any second now, he'll be right back."

"That's Red's power?" asks Mary. "Like in books?"

"That happens in books?"

"Anything happens in books, stupid. So I thought so, because, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm totally a genius, and then I thought nah, that's kind of stupid, I mean, if he was a time traveller, he probably wouldn't let half the dumb stuff happen that he lets happen, like the time he died, except for he did, so... do we die a lot? Do I die a lot?" Mary leans forwards. "You kill me often? Wait, who does. I want to give 'em something to remember me by in every single one of them! Timelines. What about time curls? Can you curl time? Knot it? Burn it?"

"This was a mistake," I mutter to myself, sitting down.

"What are you going to do?" Mary asks, scooching up to me until her face is practically in my hair. My whole body buzzes with irritation, but there are worse people who could have found me. Prodding my side like I'm some kind of common animal, she insists, "You've gotta do something."

"Besides what I just did... usually I do nothing. In fact, I suggest you do nothing as well. You can tell Red, right now, and he'll panic, and it'll all be over for me. I'll probably be cast out of the group, or something, or maybe he'll find some way to make my death look like an accident. It doesn't matter to me. The important thing is that I don't have to live anymore." I look up at the sky. "Fuck it. Ask me anything. You get three questions."

"But I won't remember the answers," Mary says. "You won't know either. Oh! Oh! Did you go on a rampage because you found out?"

"No, I've known since he started. I don't really know why I know and there's no way out of it which will make me suddenly stop knowing," I say, and sag forwards on the riverbanks.

"Cool!" Mary says. "Could I get to know?"

"No."

Mary frowns. "It shouldn't count as a question if you're going to give boring answers."

"It does, though. Last one, kid."

"Have you ever killed anyone before?" she asks. "What does it feel like?"
"That's two."

"They're the same question. If you know what killing someone feels like, then you had to have done it. So, actually, you're wrong, and just answer already." Mary pushes me again. I want to remove her hands by ripping her arms off, because I'm bad as she is, but I maintain civilized restraint for the good of the bit.

I steeple my hands and think through this.

"Not Red, but I got close. Dylan's safe, because I can't and won't take him on. Damien's... I've definitely never tried to kill Damien directly. He's like a puppy, he'll just sit there and smile and never put two and two together up until the very end."

Mary's eyes darken. "Me?"

"That's an entirely different question, but you know what? Sure. Yep. I don't kill you often, deliberately, but you die the most out of any of us, because you're our brave little protector. You protect us from cars, from wild animals, from just about anything..." I'm trying not to crack up. Protect us from cars. I've seen her painting the streets before. Protection is just about as far from what Mary could feasibly provide us as you can get. The numbness spreading through my body faster than the cold water helps me keep from laughing, besides, I don't know what I'd want to sound like when I laughed like this, surreal, deathless, stuck with a hole at the very core of my body that no one will be able to see unless I open my shirt.

Which I won't.

Mary nods. Her eyes flit back my way, inquisitive peepers that they are, and she asks, "But how does it feel?"

"Terrible. You regret dying when you die. You regret killing when you kill. It is the most empty feeling in the entire world to end life."

Mary nods again, this time more vigorously. "Sorry, Kali."

We both look up at each other. She hits her head on the riverbank, propelled by my foot, and as she struggles to transform up I press her under the water. She tries to slide into fish form and I dig my fingers into her gills, becoming hawk talons. She thrashes, moving into hawk form to meet my challenge, but she's cold and her bravado is outpacing her body at this point. She ends a mess of feathers on the bank, neck torn, halfway between fish, hawk, and girl. Her skin is still half scaled, and her arms are extended into wings, but the rest is child, curled about herself, face a deep blue from the oxygen she wouldn't get.

I breathe heavily.

Red's on the bank. I can smell smoke in the distance. He brings the forest with him. Dark marks cover his skin, burns, I figure, and I know from the look on his eyes that I've had quite the run at the group. That's what happens when the quiet ones go to war, I guess.

Am I quiet?

Maybe just... allowing. Maybe it's time to put a stop to that.

"What are you doing, Kali?" asks Red.

"I'm vicious, bloodhungry, out of control, et cetera. You should... probably just kill me," I say, with all the enthusiasm with which one can announce their own impending doom.

Red looks at me, aghast, and I realize he's still trying to feel something for the victims, for me, simultaneously, and holding both of us in high regard is probably blowing his mind. He even clutches his head to display as much, tears tracing down his cheeks and taking the ash with it, and he falls down to his feet, beginning to sob.

"You can fix this, can't you?" I ask, because, somehow, I've fallen back into being the victim. That means being stuck in this pit forever, with him, hitting my head against the wall, because the only person here with a semblance of human benevolence who isn't either subservient or a literal child is also the one who will likely never hold a real conversation with me.

Red reaches out to me, his hands shaking. I look up at him, like really? You're doing this now? Where are your sympathies at the moment, even?

"Don't touch me," I say, curtly.

"This is my fault," he says.

I take off my jacket, toss it to the ground, where it stops existing. I pull up my shirt and reveal a massive hole in my stomach, just where I thought it would be. It looks like I really can't get Elle out of my head, out of my side, well, there goes the rest. I feel the pain flood me, beautiful, clean, pure, and I know deep in my heart that I should have died of bloodloss already, had I been human. Now there's a conviction. It rests upon the stone of fact. This should have broken me, and somehow I am still standing here, ruining other lives.

It's not even cathartic, because, unlike the other sorry excuses for living beings, I know that I am bringing destruction. I can't do anything fullheartedly with the burden of morality weighing on me. I'll never know what I'm fully capable of.

Red takes his coat off and reveals a tangled, grieving mess of vines. It is, in his current opinion, the first time he's ever showed it to me, but by my count, which is really our count, it's been eight times, potentially nine.

I step forwards, tenatively plucking a vine, and burn another beneath my fingers. I can feel him shuddering, sense his vitality in every leaf. They crumple beneath my touch. I can trace them all the way back to where they start. "Huh," I say. "Red, what are you becoming?"
"Hopefully, nothing as bad as you," he says, but that's hollow, too. "I'm really lonely, Kali."

I look up at him. "Dylan not cutting it?"

He grimaces.

"Skin's paling up too," I say, running a finger down the side of his neck, which leaves a chalky residue on my fingers. "You know, you could just let it take you, and everything would be more or less fine."

He shakes his head. "Opposite of fine."

"I'd say your funeral, but I get the feeling you already know that," I tell him. I blow the dust from my fingers. "You know, you're demonstrating a remarkable lack of sentiment right now."

"You can't make yourself feel anything either," he says, "But I've watched you. I know have more balance, more tact, than most of the group. Yet somehow you've come to this?"

"I know. No one in the group's ever taken anyone else in the group's life before," I say, watching him flinch. Ahaha. Red. "I just... I suppose she killed whatever inhibition I had, and then all there was left to do was, well..."

"That's a bad conclusion to reach," he argues.

"The worst," I say.

"Are you... are you sorry? Can you feel sorry?"

"You're looking for another person here, aren't you, Red? Someone you can empathize with, relate to, maybe even someone you can save."

He folds his arms. I can sense the nerves I've touched. They practically glitter in the heat of the burning world.

"Good luck," I say.

He wants more answers, but he doesn't get some, so we call it a draw and wash it over in gold paint.