“So, what have you guys been up to?”

“Remy,” Orae growled as they flipped one of the chimera corpses over with a grunt of effort, “do you really think now is the time for this conversation?” They crouched, and with another exhalation, flipped it in the same direction, moving it in the most cumbersome example of barrel-rolling Zarah had ever seen.

“Sure, why not!” Remy, by contrast, was carting the corpses two at a time, one slung casually over each shoulder. “We’re all here, this doesn’t take much concentration, there’s nobody else around – it’s perfect!”

“…I hate-” Orae grunted, “-that you have a point.”

In the end, there had been about three dozen of the chimeras – all mostly with the same hybridisation of flesh and ghostlight, although the individual manner and appearance was slightly different for each one.

Putting them down had been unpleasant, to say the least, but Zarah had found Orae’s suggestion to think of it as putting them out of their misery helpful. With three of them, and Remy’s bizarre indestructibility, it hadn’t been much trouble at all – it had almost been easier than convincing Remy to put his shirt back on afterwards. He’d taken it off when Zarah had mentioned the seemingly-acidic saliva, which was understandable considering their plan had basically consisted of ‘let the chimeras use Remy as a chew toy while Zarah and Orae picked them off’ .

Less understandable was his insistence on keeping it off afterwards, and his repeated insistence that there was “just a sort of tits-out energy” was entirely unhelpful. Orae had eventually been successful by threatening to rub the shirt in question through all of the corpses unless he clothed himself; they’d had to suffer through five minutes of moaning about being victimised until his attention span ran out, but Zarah was starting to learn to tune him out anyway.

She set down the corpse she was carrying on top of the pile of others, planted her hands on her lower back and stretched out with a grunt. Thankfully, whatever had been done to the animals (pigs, it seemed fairly likely by this point), it had significantly reduced the amount of bodily fluids leaking out of them. They still bled, but it was thick and viscous, closer in colour to… cherries, or wine, or something. According to Kihri, it indicated an extreme lack of oxygen.

“So, Z!” Remy said, dropping his two corpses next to hers with a meaty thud. “Do anything fun recently?”

“Nope.”

“Okay! Do anything not fun?”

Zarah brushed off her hands on her pants, and glanced at him. “Well, I killed a lot of pig monsters. And also Kihri is making me learn language lessons. I prefer the pigs.”

Remy nodded. “Great recap. Loving it. Anything to add, Kihri?”

And that was still extremely weird.

Objectively, it was a good thing that Remy unquestioningly accepted Kihri’s existence. Just having someone else for her to talk to, who didn’t question it, was a relief. Obviously it was.

But after eight years of being the only one who did, it felt weird. Uncomfortable.

To Zarah, at least.

“Oh ho ho, do I ever,” Kihri said, swooping down with a grin. “First of all, what little miss boring here forget to mention is that she’s been out running around on rooftops in that stupid raincoat looking for shit like this.”

“Kihri,” Zarah growled. “.” Now that she’d agreed to take improving her Brechtin more seriously, Kihri had gotten more lenient about speaking in it all the time, on both their parts.

“,” Kihri shot back. “.”

Maybe that was part of why it felt so weird. Remy might have believed in Kihri’s existence, but Zarah still had to pass on anything she said, and it made her feel like she was being… replaced? She didn’t know what it made her feel (when did she ever?) but it definitely wasn’t pleasant, and it definitely wasn’t fair to Kihri.

Pushing all those feelings back into their box, she repeated Kihri’s words out loud, making an effort to imitate her tone and cadence. At first, the two of them had conspired to have her put a finger on her nose whenever she was speaking ‘for’ her sister, but she’d stood her ground on that one. Because it was stupid.

Personally, she thought that it would’ve been evident enough from the difference in their speech patterns, but in the end they’d compromised on just holding up a single finger – seeing as Zarah didn’t speak with her hands the same way Kihri did, it was fairly distinct.

“Really?” Remy asked, perking up. “That’s cool! Why didn’t you invite us? We could have made a thing out of it, hang-out time with the buds!”

“There are-” Orae grunted as they finally reached the pile, “-so many things that I hate about that sentence that I don’t even know where to start.”

“The beginning?” Zarah suggested despite herself.

Orae gave a little sour grin. “Then, no, you airheaded sack of naivety, it is not ‘cool’. Vyas didn’t invite us because she knew it was a stupid thing to be doing, and for the last time, we are not. Buds.”

“Aww,” Remy grinned. “You know you love us.”

Zarah had received the first group text from Remy two days after they’d parted ways, and since then he’d not missed a single one, sending multiple messages per day to herself and Orae (despite the fact that, as it quickly became clear, the two of them were still living in the same space, and could easily talk in person).

Zarah had absolutely no intention of replying, except for the fact that the messages were addressed to Kihri as often as they were to her. And Kihri, of course, had no compunctions against answering – she’d practically leapt at the offer of friendship, leaving Zarah to act as the typist for every one of her inane texts about television programs, novels, and practically every other subject on the planet.

Orae had, as of yet, not responded to a single message.

They also, despite their ceaseless complaining and grousing on the few occasions the three (four) of them had met in person, hadn’t actually forced Remy to find his own accommodations. Zarah wasn’t sure why not, considering they seemed actively repulsed by his very presence, but she’d just chalked it up to another one of those complicated social things that always went over her head.

“Not only do I not love you,” Orae snapped, providing a prime example right on cue, “I don’t even like you. At least Vyas is tolerable, insanity aside.”

Oh, and they still believed Kihri to be nothing but a trauma-fueled figment of Zarah’s imagination.

Just for that comment, Zarah decided to step in. “Why do you not kick him out, then?”

Orae scowled at her, mumbled something incoherent, and stalked away.

“Ha! Nice, Z!” Remy raised one hand, and Zarah couldn’t help but raise her own and clap them softly together with a slight smile.

Even with their back turned, Orae’s scoff was still easily audible.

They made their way back to the tracks, near where Lucel patiently ‘guarded’ their escape route. (To Zarah, it seemed fairly obvious that Orae had just wanted to keep their dog away from the carnage, but she was starting to learn that it was just easier to let things like that go by unquestioned). Despite their clothes being of significantly finer quality than Remy or Zarah’s, they had shown a complete lack of interest in preserving them. Their dark red shirt was spotted and splotched with blood and fluids, the cuffs practically soaked through due to them having not even bothered to roll up the sleeves. Removing the jacket seemed to be purely a concession to mobility, and not one they were particularly happy about.

They dropped down off the edge of the platform, and a second later, another chimera corpse came flying up over the edge, accompanied by a loud grunt of effort and a happy whuff from Lucel.

“Are there many left?” Remy called out as Orae clambered back up.

“Why don’t you- find out,” they huffed, getting to their feet, “instead of standing around with a finger up your asses!”

Kihri zipped up to the ceiling, peering over the lip of the platform. “Only three,” she said, which Zarah passed on to Remy.

“Okay, sweet!” He clapped, excited. “I’ll get those, then. Zarah, you should go and have a poke around! See if anything jumps out.”

“Sure,” she said with a shrug. “Kihri?”

“Actually, you know what?” she asked. “I actually think I’m going to keep helping with the manual labour.”

“,” Zarah said snippily.

Kihri merely blew a raspberry in response.

Judging by the design, the subway station had been constructed three or four decades ago, and had never seen active use or even been completed. The tracks probably connected to in-use ones at some point, but no trains ran past the platform. The exits must have been connected to the surface at some point, but after a few meters of stairs, they had been bricked up. The fire stairs had been removed entirely, and when Zarah had cast a light up to the top, they’d just barely been able to spot a similarly-sealed doorway at the top.

Back down on the platform itself, ticket counters and offices sat fully constructed but empty of their animating force or any of the features necessary to actually function. The only future remaining was the kind that was built into the structure or bolted down, and although the doors had locks, they were all missing their glass, which made the whole thing a bit moot.

It was in one of these abandoned rooms that Metzin had established her makeshift laboratory.

There were obviously no lights still functioning, and so Zarah flared her blacklight as she stepped inside, pulling the collar of her sweatshirt up over her nose to help with the smell. The blood was mostly old and thoroughly dried out – but not that old, either. She was no expert, but with the amount of time the stains indicated, it was entirely possible that this had been the site Metzin had been using when they’d found the one underneath the power station in the park. It certainly gave the impression of being abandoned in a hurry – while there were no more ghostlight tools lying around (and Zarah had no idea how to feel about that), it seemed like a few folders and other materials had been overlooked and left behind. At the very least, they’d found torn and faded papers as part of a makeshift nest, text too faded and smudged to be readable.

“You take that side,” Kihri said, zipping over to the right-hand end of the room. “I’ll do this end.”

Zarah nodded. “Can you see?”

“Mm…” Kihri dipped out of sight for a moment. “Lil’ brighter?”

Zarah obliged her, and got a thumbs-up in response.

Her end of the room was closer to the train tracks, and actually had a window facing out towards them – not just a window, she realised as she got closer, but an actual ticket counter as well. The entire partition was sealed over with a corrugated metal shutter, but it would have faced outwards towards the tracks under normal circumstances.

Desks and cabinets were built into the structure of the room, and Zarah crouched down and started searching through them, pulling drawers entirely free and snapping locks where necessary. Most of them were entirely empty, with a few scraps of miscellaneous paper here and there, but one actually contained an old, clunky measuring tape that she assumed had been left there by a builder.

A quick second pass didn’t reveal any hidden compartments (not that she’d been expecting any), and so she turned to the filing cabinets placed along the next wall. Some were locked, which gave her a little glimmer of hope for a moment, but when she tore them open, they were empty anyway. Why they’d been locked, she couldn’t picture-

-until she did the same thing to a drawer that seemed exactly the same as the others, only to find papers inside.

She contained her excitement as she pulled them out – they could have been left behind by the builders.

“Kihri,” she called out as she pulled the file folders out, lugging the entire lot over to the table. “Found something, maybe.”

In a blur of motion, Kihri was at her side as she dumped her find out onto the faded linoleum. “What does ‘maybe’ mean in this context?”

“ maybe.” She started pulling pages out of folders and spreading them out, text facing upwards. She didn’t even bother trying to read them – that was Kihri’s job. Her sister floated horizontally above the table, one eyes on her chin as she scanned the documents Zarah set out.

“Okay, some of these are definitely unrelated. But. I’m seeing a lot of different stuff here all mixed together with no real organisation, so I’m thinking…” Zarah paused, waiting for her to finish the thought, but Kihri gestured her on. “Keep going for now. Might be nothing.”

After another two minutes of separating papers and spreading them out, Zarah was starting to think that this was going to be another dead-end after all.

“Freeze.”

Or maybe not.

“Which?” Zarah asked, obligingly frozen as Kihri dipped closer in towards the pages she’d just set out.

“These two.” She tapped a single piece of paper, with some kind of letterhead at the top.

“Only one there.” Even as she said it, though, Zarah could see the edges of a second piece of paper, ever-so-slightly out of alignment with the first page. “Or- hm.”

“Yeah, it’s like I know what I’m talking about or something.”

After a bit of fiddling, Zarah managed to separate the two pages. The page underneath was slightly smudged – it seemed like the ink hadn’t set properly, and had stuck the two together. It was mostly illegible, but bore no page numbers or official headers like the other documents.

“Okay…” Kihri hummed as Zarah held it up to the light for her to examine. “The seventh attempt… yielded? Then… couple lines down, secondary enclosure… I think this says ‘exsanguinate’?”

“Not construction papers then?”

“Not unless they were adding blood to the concrete, nope. That’s what exsanguination means, by the way – ‘ex’ is out of or away, ‘sanguine’ is a reddish brown colour that used to refer to blood specifically-”

“This is something?” Zarah interrupted, cutting off the explanation.

“This is something,” Kihri confirmed, not seeming all that bothered by the interruption. It was a good sign – she was generally at her most amenable when something had her attention or interest. “At the very least, I’m fairly certain it means that there’s some of Metzin’s stuff in here, and she was using miscellaneous scrap documents to hide them amidst. God knows why, it must’ve been a pain in the ass, and if someone’s already found this place then it’s not like the gig isn’t already up.”

“,” Zarah speculated. “.”

Kihri made a face. “Ugh. That would be just like her, huh. Anyway, keep sorting, gopher! Yip yip!”

“ leave, right? .”

“…yip yip, please?”

Zarah sighed, and yip yip-ed.

Their continued efforts revealed a few more smudged pages, stuck to others in a similar manner to the first one. Whatever method had been used to print them, it was clearly a faulty one. Kihri got a few more words from each, but nothing that added up to a complete picture or coherent sentence. Just more of the pseudo-clinical, cold language, the same as the other notes of hers they’d found. The same way she spoke, as well.

The fifth page they found, however, was entirely intact.

“Don’t,” Kihri said as Zarah leant over to try and read it, inserting herself into Zarah’s eyeline in front of the page. “Seriously, don’t.”

“Why?” Zarah asked, suspicious.

“It’s not- I’m not hiding anything from you, I promise. I just… you’ve seen enough, y’know? We don’t both need to see it all, as long as one of us has, and… you’ve seen enough.”

“”

“.”

Silently, Zarah reached over and flipped the page face-down. “….”

“Welcome.” And then, because even when being kind she was still fundamentally Kihri; “Gotta look out for my baby sister.”

Zarah scoffed. “Shut up. Two hours, baby, nothing.”

“Two hours is two hours, lil’ sis.”

“.”

“Actually, wait,” Kihri said as Zarah went to place the next one, “go back, flip it back over.”

“Do I look, not do I look, which is it?” Zarah muttered as she did so.

“Don’t look, asshole, I just need to check something.” Kihri spent a few seconds hovered above the page, humming quietly to herself, then darted over to the filing cabinets, scanning their fronts.

“Light?” she asked, and Zarah walked closer. “Ta. I’m thinking… hm.” She stopped in front of one of the empty drawers that Zarah had already opened. “Come here, I need you to check this one.”

Zarah gestured at the open, empty compartment. “Already did check.”

“Yeah, but do it proper this time. Get, y’know elbow-deep? Reach down back, check the sides?”

It was a bit of an awkward angle to get her arm in past the extended drawer, so Zarah just ripped it free and tossed it to one side, ignoring the disapproving look from Kihri.

There was nothing at the back of the now-empty compartment, nothing on the side or under the remains of the slide mechanism, or in the space above where the drawer sat-

Her hand brushed against something, and she jerked it back, banging her elbow on the edge of the cabinet.

She swore, shaking out the pins and needles while Kihri laughed, and reached back in, feeling around until she found the paper she’d touched. It was a long cylinder, tucked diagonally into the empty space above the drawer, and it took a bit of finagling to get it out without crumpling or tearing it. Zarah stood, slipping off the rubber bands that held it rolled up, and walked back over to the table with Kihri hovering eagerly over her shoulder, where she unfurled it to reveal a map of Kaila.

Zarah ripped a few handfuls of concrete out of the floor and placed them on each corner, holding the map back from rolling itself back up the way it clearly wanted to, then bent over the table, taking in what they were seeing. Kihri hovered opposite her, elbows propped up on nothing.

It seemed to have originated as a digital mapping service – there were no details or depth, just blocks of greys and greens with simple, printed labels. Red circles dotted the map, each about the size of a coin and labelled with a variety of symbols. At first glance, there wasn’t any sort of pattern to their placement, save that none were placed too close to any others – Zarah almost thought she could eyeball the minimum distance, if she were so inclined.

“Ooh ho ho,” Kihri cackled, clapping her hands together soundlessly. “Oh, Yanis, baby, you fucked up! You fucked up real good!”

While Kihri gloated, Zarah traced lines between the different circles, trying to spot any connection between the different symbols. “”

“This – and this is just speculation, mind you – this looks like a map of all the locations she was using for her experiments.”

Zarah blinked. “…wow.”

“Wow indeed. Look, there.” Zarah followed the line of her finger to one of the circles. “Based on the tunnels we had to move through to get here, I’m guessing that this is where we are right now.”

Zarah tried to map it out in her head. She hadn’t been paying as much attention as Kihri to their movements through the subway tunnels – or any attention at all – but the circle did seem to not quite line up with any of the individual buildings. “She has this many?”

“Yep. Wait… nope. Might just be… potential sites, actually. Hm.”

“?”

Kihri sighed. “…not sure. Probably the latter, but it’s not like I can really tell, is it?”

“…sorry.”

“Mm.” She waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter much now, anyway. Logically, though, I can’t see her actually managing to keep up all of these at the same time, so either it’s a map of past ones, potential future ones, or some combination…” She trailed off, chewing on her lip. “Okay, wait. This,” she said, reaching down and tapping one of the circles, control precise enough that her finger didn’t intersect with the map in the slightest, “this is the substation.”

Sure enough, the circle was in the middle of a small patch of green on the map.

“So between the two of these… we can assume that one of these two symbols,” and she pointed to two of the small shapes next to both circles, “has something to do with the type of experiments she was running. Human tests there, animals here…”

“Human tests?” Zarah turned to find Orae stepping into the room, Remy just behind them. “The power station you found?”

Zarah nodded. “?”

“Hm? Oh yeah, sure.”

She gave a quick explanation of what they’d found, which Zarah repeated, then tacked on to the end; “and what happened with you?”

Orae’s shirt was still smoldering in places, random tracks of singed and burned fabric traced up their sleeves and across their torso. The smell was powerful enough to override the strange, sharp scent of the chimera blood, winding up into Zarah’s nostrils and refusing to leave.

“Oh, that’s great news!” Remy said cheerily. “Turns out that spit stuff is… flammable? Inflammable? Whichever one means it catches on fire.”

Zarah connected the dots. “And they tried to have a smoke.”

Remy grinned. “And they tried to have a smoke,” he confirmed.

“Oh, yes,” Orae muttered with a scowl, “laugh it up, arseholes. Not like I was set on fire or anything.”

“Hey,” Zarah pointed out. “Shirt was already ruined.”

“…is that supposed to make me feel better?”

She smirked. “No. Just funny.”

“You know I’m all about the banter normally,” Kihri said distractedly, “but I need your hands, Z. Think I’ve almost got something here.”

As the others gathered around, she directed Zarah to start taking notes on the back of one of the scrap papers, assembling a list of the different symbols on the map.

“Can’t keep track of them all in my head,” she murmured absently in explanation. “Would be better if I had a computer, some maps…”

“Hey, quick question,” Remy said.

“Don’t distract me,” Kihri said (via Zarah).

“Really quick?”

“Auclair,” Orae snapped, “if you just asked we’d be done by now.”

“Both of you shut up,” Kihri snapped.

“Good point, Orae!” Remy continued, undeterred. “Why, exactly, can’t we just take the map with us and do this later?”

“Because,” Kihri snapped without looking in his direction, but then slowly came to a stop. “Because… I hadn’t… thought of that?”

Zarah sighed, rubbing her forehead.

“You know,” Orae observed, “it really is insufferable that he’s actually right sometimes. Means I can’t actually justify just ignoring him entirely.”

“You’re wel~come,” Remy trilled, sugar-sweet.

“Yes or no?” Zarah asked Kihri, who was still staring down at the map, hands pressed together in front of her mouth.

“…can you pretend I had some really good reason for not doing that?” Kihri asked in response.

“?”

“The love and adoration of your dear sister, who you care for so very much?”

Zarah couldn’t help but smirk slightly. “.”

“I hate you.”

“.”

“…One hour.”

“One hour?”

“…one hour, guaranteed, of absolute silence, that you can call in whenever we’re not in active danger.”

Zarah turned to the others. “She was not doing that because she had to… Kihri, slow down. No, slow down, I cannot keep up with the explanation. You normally talk slower and you know it-” She threw up her hands in frustration. “Just say ?”

Kihri looked at her, with an expression that looked an awful like shock. “…yeah, that’ll do.”

Zarah turned back to the others, a ‘what can you do’ expression on her face, which they accepted completely without suspicion

“…that’s fucking scary,” Kihri muttered. “You’re fucking scary.”

“,” Zarah shot back, “.”

“God, you’re so annoying when you’re right.”

“If you’re done?” Orae asked icily. “Can we take it or not?”

“We can,” Zarah confirmed.

“Bloody fantastic.” They stalked past her and started pulling off the weights so they could roll up the map. “Let’s get out of this fucking pit, then. If I spend much longer in these clothes I’m going to get a skin condition.”

“The corpses,” Zarah pointed out. “Can we just leave them?”

“We absolutely bloody can.”

Zarah sighed, rolling her eyes. “No, fine. Should we?”

“We absolutely-”

“We will not,” Zarah cut them off flatly. “No negotiation.”

“Right, because you have authority here. Oh, wait.”

Remy clapped a hand down on Orae’s shoulder, making them flinch. “I could throw you through a wall, if it’d help?” he offered, completely sincere. “Y’know, so you have an excuse.”

“Zarah,” Kihri said, “would you high-five him for me?”

Zarah ignored her.

“Fine,” Orae snapped, shaking Remy’s hand off. “What do you suggest we do, then? Dig a hole in the concrete and bury them?”

That’s… not actually that bad an idea. “Open to suggestions,” she said instead of voicing the thought. Save that as a Plan B.

Remy looked down at the singed portions of Orae’s clothing, and his face lit up.

“What?” they asked, glancing down. “Do I- oh. Oh no. Absolutely not.”

“Everyone,” Remy announced, “I have come up with a brilliant plan, that will absolutely not backfire or go wrong in any way whatsoever.”

“Great choice of words there,” Kihri noted. “You know, because. Fire.”

“For all we know,” Orae said, “they might combust and collapse this entire structure!”

“Honestly,” Kihri said, “that sounds pretty ideal? Bury all this shit for good.”

Zarah definitely agreed with that.

“Oh? The part where we’re buried under here too? Is that part ideal as well?”

“So we set a trail. Like gunpowder in an old cartoon, yknow? Set it off, book it down the tunnel, easy peasy.”

“Cartoons,” Orae said flatly. “Our plan is based on cartoons, now.”

“Cartoons are based on reality you- and I am not repeating that word.”

“I’m being silenced!”

“Vyas,” Orae said to Zarah, “your plan is idiotic.”

“Not my plan,” Zarah said.

“Up here, asshole,” Kihri snapped at the same time.

Orae very clearly rolled their eyes behind their glasses. “Fine. Your imaginary dead sister’s plan is idiotic. Happy?”

“Zarah, kick them in the shin for me.”

“Not kicking any person for you.”

“Damn right you’re not,” Orae snapped. “I’ll rip your fucking throat out, you little-”, at the same time as Kihri started yelling something about ‘shoving their little baby feet so far up their own ass that they’d kick their own teeth in’-

Zarah’s phone buzzed.

The argument cut out, both parties turning to look at her.

Her phone buzzed again.

“You’re actually getting signal down here?” Remy asked as she pulled it out of her pocket and checked the ID.

“Apparently.” She held up one finger as she lifted the phone to her ear. “Mm?”

“Zarah, hi,” Mrs. B’s voice came through. “Is this a bad time?”

She looked at the scene in front of her; at Orae’s singed clothing and Remy’s gore-splattered hands. “I can talk,” she said.

“Oh, good,” Mrs. B. replied, unaware of Orae rolling their eyes. “It’s really not important, but I just thought I’d check – is it peanuts or walnuts you don’t like?”

“Ah- walnuts? But it is not- a worry.”

A sigh of relief came through the phone’s speaker. “Thank goodness. I put peanuts in the rice, and then I couldn’t remember which one it was.”

An odd, fluttery warmth passed through Zarah’s chest. The idea that she’d remembered, and cared enough to check, despite it not being important…

It was an unfamiliar feeling, but not necessarily an uncomfortable one.

“Is this going to take much longer?” Orae demanded. “We’ve wasted enough time down here already.”

Zarah clapped one hand around the phone, a little too late. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. B. said. “Didn’t realise you had company.”

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “Not company. Just… people.”

“People people.”

“Mm-hm. Well, if those people-people like, I made plenty of extra.”

An ugly snort slipped out before Zarah could stop herself. “Absolutely no.”