"Something's going on," I say to Damien when we're out under the stars. The city turns around us, which makes me real dizzy, and I keep looking down the alleyway, because someone is so totally there. "This has definitely happened for, I'm just trying to remember when it happened."

Damien narrows his eyes. "I know what you mean. Are you sure it's not just the fear? We are kind of... breaking the rules right now, and that's a little terrifying."
"Fear?" I ask.

"Have you been listening to me at all?" he asks. "For the last few years?"

"Of course not," I say. I lean on him a little, because I'm not tired or anything, but when I get real dizzy, sometimes it's nice to have someone to help you up. "We should go back now."

"Uh huh," Damien says. "Been trying to tell you that since we left."

"I thought there might be one of those... openmickers around here. I thought we could go together, because I'm bored, and I love your voice," I tell him.

"You do?"

"Yeah," I pat his head. "Duh."
"It's so startling when you're actually nice to me," Damien confesses.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I ask him.

He shrugs.

"Can you sing me something on the way home?"

He starts humming, which sounds kind of like something a bird would sing, but birds don't have lips, so I guess it sounds like what birds would sing if they did. I try to keep up, but I really can't, which sucks, but I think I have to keep him around for something, and so maybe he can have one thing that I can't do. We fall asleep next to each other, but he's humming all the way until he closes his eyes, and a little after that.

He has the most beautiful eyelashes. They catch little bits of dust from the air, and I think to myself, wow, the world is too hard for you, and ours must be so much worse.

I wake up the next morning. "Elle!" I yell. Half the group turns back into people just 'cause I startled them, especially Gillian, who is glaring at me (ha ha!).

"What? She's right--" Damien starts. "Oh."

"Yeah we got charmspoke," I say, "This is the worst. Red? Red, I think Elle charmspoke us. She's also not here right now, unless she's that bug." There's a cockroach on one of the planks someone's propped up in the alley. I press a finger to it. It doesn't turn back, so I press it down until it pops.

"Mary," hisses Red.

Red's just been like that lately! It's like someone poured ants down his pants. Not that I would approve of that, but it would be really funny, because Red refuses to go pantless. He would suffer in silence, and Dylan would probably try to help... okay so maybe not recently.

Dylan leans against the wall. "Wonderful."

"She's what?" asks Kali. "Alright, are we gonna... wait for... her?"

Red shakes his head. "Probably skipped town by now."

"Then what?" asks Angel.

"I don't know why you're asking me," Red says. "I can't do anything about it."

"I-- you can always do something about it!" Angel yells. "You always just do something about it, no matter what the problem is, and you-- things work out!"

"I guess things aren't going to magically work out anymore," Red says, "That's unfortunate. We should keep walking."

"Where?" asks Gillian. "I mean... I agree with the assessment of our peer."

"Yeah, Gillian, whatever," I say, rolling my eyes. "If we don't have a leader anymore, I call leader, and I say we go into the woods. There's something up north of here, right?"

All of us turn north.

"You're not wrong..." Dylan starts. "I guess it's as good a direction to meander in as any, and we'll camp out just outside the area and wait for Elle to regret her decision and turn back around."

"She won't," Kali says, folding her arms.

"Did you two fight?" Dylan asks.

Kali shakes her head. "Oh, I wish, but no. This is entirely... what if she doesn't... I mean she definitely won't..." she runs her hands through her hair. "Oh hell, actions have consequences."

"Yeah, like if I push Damien, he'll hit a wall--" I say, my hand on Damien's shoulder.

"Don't," say Kali and Red in unison.

"Wow, is Red's power like... emotion stealing or something? Because I think he just took all of Kali's personality, and it's the worst thing that has happened, ever," I say. "That would be such a bad power! Ow! Sounds like exactly the kind of thing that you'd get though, Red, no offense."

"If I took offense to everything you said, Mary, I would have had some kind of full breakdown a long time ago," Red adjusts his glasses.

"So you're having it now instead?" I ask.

Red stands. "We're leaving."

"Thank goodness," Alex sighs.

The forest is big as it always is, but I think we've been here before. The land is beginning to mush together in such a way that it makes me a little sick just being there, and I keep kind of leaning against Damien, because I'm still super dizzy. I don't think I've really regretted sneaking out before. Should I regret things, ever? It really doesn't happen, because nothing bad happens afterwards, which is why it's totally dumb that I'm not allowed to just do what I want--

"You're really comfy," I tell Damien.

"You're uh, super affectionate," he says.

"I think it's Elle's fault," I inform him, trying to take one of my hands out of his hand, which kind of makes me regret, too. "Usually I'm not this nice to you."

"You're not. Does that have to be someone's fault? Can't you just... be nice?"

"This isn't nice. This is obtrusive," Gillian says. She's been there on the right the whole time, glaring at us, because Gillian is the worst, and everyone knows this.

"Elle makes you do weird things," I stop in the middle of the woods. There's not enough room for a good brawl. "There's only one way to settle this. Let's fight."

"We're going to keep walking," Red says.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because if we stay in one place too long, eventually we'll probably get found out or kill each other, so we're going to pretend that we're busy until we eventually run out of stamina anyways," Red says. "Any more stupid questions, Mary?"

Kali looks at Red like he just killed a baby, which would be even more weird for Red, but I mean, at least it would be interesting. Maybe I should be thinking of more productive things than babykilling for Red to do? Speaking of babies, I have a baby to slaughter, right now, except not really, because it's my baby, but okay, not actually my baby. "Damien. We're fighting now."

Damien shifts into Veritas, slowly and gently, like how he makes his instruments out of his arms. I shift right into my Veritas, and I'm suddenly thrilled. "Come on," Damien says, "Don't you think this is a little silly?"

It's super silly, which is why we should be doing it, right now! I swing in to tip him over with a pole I have, which is like a sword but less likely to kill people. He jumps out of the way, surprisingly athletic, and then he catches the next pole in his hands.

"I told you that practice would pay off!"

"I don't really feel like getting hurt today," he says.

"Well, I don't really feel like--" I look up, head spinning, towards the kids up front. "I don't think I can be here any longer, like this." I jerk the stick down, and ram it into his chest. I didn't mean for it to be too heavy, but he almost falls over right there, which sucks! Come on, Damien, you have to be a little tougher than that.

Damien clutches the area where his human-ish body shifts into more deer-ish. Fire flares on all of the crooked holes in his antlers. "Alright, I just... we're doing this for fun, right? Because I don't actually want to hurt you."

"It's practice," I say.

"Practice for what?" he says.

"The end," I respond.

Damien dodges another swing of the pole. The fires move with him, and the next time I go for him, a blue fire burns the pole right up to my hand, so that there's molten metal on the ground and my hand burns. I flick the fire off, but the pain's real and super sudden. "There's no end, Mary, you can hear them up there talking about it."

I swing forwards with my other hand, and he kind of canters out of the way. "Your Veritas is terrible for fighting."

"I'm not a fighter. I never wanted to be a fighter," he says.

"It's all I can do," I yell back at him. "And they don't even need or want fighters! What's the point of walking forever, waiting to die--" I swing the stick and hit his side, hard. He falls over, and I hear one of his antlers crack. "Get up, Damien!"

Fire spreads across the ground in a thousand different colors. The air fills with noise, and Damien lies on the ground. Gillian is trying to put out fires with her claws. Alex is kind of helping, but mainly they're just glassy eyed and watching, because if you thought Elle was bad, you don't know Damien.

Damien is everything. I can hear songs in the fire, voices calling out for a thousand things they do not have or understand, and they wail higher and higher, needing, needing, needing, wanting, the fire spreading as it looks for a way to get out. I withdraw the other pole and stand defenseless in the center of the blaze, looking down at his body as the fire spreads up trees, surging towards any living thing it can touch.

Kali looks back. She's not going to stop us until everything's burned but us. I can hear animals panicking in their burrows, and I can hear the air shaking. I hear fractured bits of songs, so many lyrics that there's nothing there but music, and it gets under all the clothing and metal of my Veritas armor and burrows into my skin. I can hear the fire in my head.

That's the feeling. I fall down to his side. My body shakes.

"I love you so much," I say, tears spilling down my face. "And I hate you. I hate that you have anything else in this world besides fighting, I hate that you're not a fighter, I hate that there's another way out, but there is, there's something, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!"

Damien looks out of his wide-set prey eyes. His head lifts, although he's still plastered against the ground, the fires fading as he shifts back, legs receding back until he's curled up and small, bleeding out of the side of his head. "I can't leave either, Mary."

He looks up at the smoke now rising from the area. We breathe it in, together, because the smoke can't hurt us. Nothing in the whole world can, except for maybe each other.

"Did I hurt anyone?" he asks.

I can still feel it vibrating in my mind. I shake my head. "Probably a few birds. We can eat them later. Right, Gillian?"

Gillian is stomping a blackened patch of grass. "You two would be in trouble if there were someone to admonish you," she warns us. "No more battles or I will break your neck, Mary."

Wow! Cool!

"That's awful," Damien says.

"It's okay, at least you don't hurt anyone on purpose," I say. "I mean, because I do, and that makes it worse... right? You were trying to... what was it that you did to me when I was fighting Gillian?"

"I wanted you to feel something," he says.

"It was awful," I say. "Never do it again."

He nods.

"But... that's what you feel like all the time?"

"Not all the time," Damien warns. "Plus, you can't really be brave if you're not afraid of anything. It might be ridiculous, but at the very least, it makes me..."

Gillian inclines her head forwards. "Forest fire. Humans jump on that. Come along now or things will get messy. Understood?"

I look up at the smoke dissipating into the air. No matter what we break, we're not going to make much of an impact... everything will grow back, so I guess it really is just us, making impacts on each other until we shape each other into something worth being, or maybe not something worth being, but probably something, anything.

"Damien, can we go? Gillian?" I ask. "And if I do something dumb in the future, or if I say something, can you... stop me?"

"We've been trying," Gillian says.

"I think Elle charmspoke me into this," I tell them both.

"Oh definitely," Alex says. "Hi. Can I get in on this?"

"No," I say.

Alex just breathes out for a long time, which is kind of funny, but also, dude, calm down or something.

We catch up with the big kids and the little kids, or most of them, and everyone is looking up at an old ruined building. We know where we are. There's a road that goes out here. We walked down that road. Actually we ran. I'm pretty sure this place was on fire. It's been brought down to rubble, now, but you kind of know that something was there at some point. We can feel it like light on our faces.

"Is that why we came back here?" I ask.

"Yes," Red says. "We just didn't know that."

I look up at the building. "Are you afraid?" I ask Damien.

"Yes, but other things, too, I guess," he pauses. "What's there for you, if you can't be afraid?"

"A memory," I say.

I wish I knew how scared I should be of this place, but really, it was never the place that was so dangerous.