Chapter Twelve

Callana was dead.

The realization had struck her shortly after she woke up, her mind inundating her with a sense of horrific clarity all at once. As she curled up beside the Gina, feeling the blue satin against her all-too-human skin, she’d wondered why she’d been so willing to adapt to this strange society, when by all rights, these humans should have seemed barely relevant to her. In a reasonable state of mind, she might have sat on the ocean floor, napping until the threat left. No—in a reasonable state of mind, she wouldn’t have shrunken herself at all. The moments of her battle with the Angry Things felt oddly hazy, especially considering that she had the ability to see the past perfectly. And yet, as the battle raged on, her memory became fuzzier and fuzzier, until suddenly, she wasn’t big anymore. She distantly recalled Willing her mass into a non-gravitational singularity, but… where was that mass now?

It was…

It was gone.

She probed around herself, legions of invisible tentacles inspecting the many folds of reality she’d warped around herself to compress herself into this form, and all she could find were small pockets of dead space full of the Essence of the Void. Nothing else.

Callana slinked out of bed, into the living room, and out the front door. There, she stood and leaned against the railing of the third-floor walkway, gazing out into the bright lights of Eston as they twinkled below the two brilliant, green planetary rings hanging above.

As she traced her steps back into her cosmic arrival to this planet, things started clicking into place. While she hadn’t thought so in the moment, the fact that her pursuers couldn’t find her body, which had dwindled back into the center of her old mass, didn’t make much sense. If they could follow her between realities, surely they could chase her back to the core of her being. It wasn’t that far, only a few billion light years from the edges of her flesh. And yet, they didn’t. Then, that feeling came back. She suddenly remembered that tiredness, that odd, alien lethargy she had felt in the moments prior to shrinking herself.

She’d died in that moment, hadn’t she?

All her old mass had collapsed on itself, whipping spacetime into a froth and spelling the end for millions of star systems. Only this little piece of her had wriggled free. This little… thing called Callana. Her breath began to quiver. She hadn’t even noticed her true body die. Her consciousness had simply gone on uninterrupted—after all, death wasn’t truly the end for a divine being, was it? Or… pseudo-divine. Callana had never been truly divine. Even before her death at the hands of the Angry Things, she was merely a tiny shard of something greater that had died long, long ago.

She blinked.

What? A piece of something… no, she—that didn’t make sense. Callana had only died once, right? Yes, that was right. The Angry Things had killed her, and that was that. Nothing resembling death had ever happened prior to that. She was alive when she crawled the cosmos, consuming galaxies. Right? Right?

Her head ached as things she definitely wasn’t supposed to remember started bearing down on her. She gripped the metal guard rail, gritting her teeth.

Why couldn’t she remember anything? Why wouldn’t she let herself? What was so terrifying that she had to hide it away behind walls upon walls, each of her brains fighting each other, denying access, refusing to let her know what was going on, who she was?

One day, would she forget her time in the stars? Would she wander the earth forever, thinking that she was and always had been just another human being, waiting tables and thinking strange things about the Gina? Was this what Hell looked like for a god?

No.

It wasn’t Hell. It was just… not-death. If anything, Callana was a ghost. If her hunch was correct, she was, in fact, the ghost of a ghost. At one point, she’d been a very large, very troublesome ghost. Now, she was a small ghost. A ghost of what, of whom, she had no clue. And it didn’t seem as though her own mind—the jerk that it was—would let her know, either.

“Callana?” the Gina’s voice said from behind her. The door had cracked open, revealing one of the Gina’s dark, almost pitch-black eyes.

Callana didn’t say anything. She just gave a tepid half-smile and continued staring off. Some people in the alley across the street had started bickering in the dark, so she watched them for a while.

“Are you okay, Cal?” the Gina said, opening the door and slipping out, still clad in her pink bunny onesie.

Shaking her head, Callana avoided eye contact as long as she could.

“You’ve seemed off for a while,” the Gina said.

“Yes! I am off,” Callana said. “It is probably because I am dead.”

“Uh…”

“I realized it a few minutes ago, actually. It is a strange thing, being dead.”

The Gina blinked idly for a while, probably dissecting what Callana had said.

“I think I am dead because I think the Angry Things killed me,” she said, hoping that would clarify the issue.

“What—did they… I’m sorry, I don’t really understand.”

“It is hard to explain,” Callana said, slumping her shoulders. “But I do not think I am as strong or… as smart as I was before I got small. And I do not think I am the same kind of Callana as I was before, and I cannot find my big parts, and I think that is because they died, and I am all that is left of myself. My brains are not cooperating, and I do not think that was the first time I died, either, because I think… I do not know what I think.”

The Gina leaned up against the rail beside Callana, looking pensive. “You think you’re just a part of the old you?”

“Yes! I think the Angry Things killed me. Mostly killed me. Death is not the same for me as it is for the humans.”

“I doubt it would be,” the Gina said staring up at the smoggy sky. “And you say they’re still out there looking for you?”

“No. They are not looking for me,” Callana admitted. “They do not need to look for me, because I am already dead. I think any one of the small ones could kill this little piece of me if they wanted to. But they do not need to. Because I am small, and I cannot… do some of the things I used to be able to.”

“Like what?”

Callana shrugged. “Get bigger, change big parts of reality, think bigger.”

“Think bigger?”

“I do not think the old me would have felt bad for eating people. I do not think the old me thought the same was as the me I am now.”

“You know, you don’t have to be dead to change, right?”

“I know. It has been easier for little me, but I do think big me would have… probably made some progress by now. But I did not get the chance to change, because I died.”

“Ah. That sucks.”

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“Yes.”

“What made you think about all this?” the Gina asked, turning around and leaning backwards against the railing.

Callana sighed. “A lot of the things we have been talking about. The things I did wrong, the… the things about re-lation-ships.”

The Gina cocked her head, much the same as Callana often did. “What about them?”

Shaking her head, Callana did her best to change the subject. “Something died and turned into the big me that ate stars. Then, the big me died and turned into little me, who eats bottles. What would I turn into if I died again?”

“I dunno if I like where this is going, Cal,” the Gina said.

“I do not want to die,” Callana said. “I like what I am now. I think… I think I like small me better than I liked big me. And I do not know what I was before that, so I think maybe this is the best me I have been.”

“Huh. Well, I think you’re the best you, too.”

“Thank you,” Callana said, her heart skipping a beat for a moment. She beat down the strange feelings welling inside and started fidgeting with her hands. “But it would be nicer to have more power.”

The Gina cocked an eyebrow.

“I can do a lot of things,” Callana said, “but I do not think I can change this world much. The Nard has been telling me a lot of the things wrong with this country, and you told me about the loving the same gender issue, and… I do not think I can help much. I cannot change people’s minds or the laws of physics or anything anymore. Minds are too complicated for me, and physics… I do not have the power anymore, now that I think about it.”

“Well, I don’t have the power to change the laws of physics either,” the Gina said, shrugging. “I guess that’s just a part of being human.”

“I am not a human.”

“No, but you’re… actually pretty close.”

“That is what worries me.”

“You’re worried about being human?”

“I might be the best me I have been, but… I do not like that I am so far from what I once was. That con-tra-dicts, but… the feeling is there.”

“Oh, trust me, I know all about conflicting feelings.”

“Oh. Yes. Well. I do not know much.”

“Well, then let the master fill you in. It’s called dialectics, hon, and it’s all the rage in therapy these days.”

Callana cocked her head.

“My folks put me through a few therapists before my da got sick. I was having a hard time, so they diagnosed me with… something called BPD—which I don’t actually think I have, but, you know, it’s still on my insurance records. Anyway, all the therapists did was talk about DBT—Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. It’s about recognizing two things that seem to contradict, but which exist at the same time. You take those two ideas, mush ’em together, accept both at the same time, and you arrive at something close to the truth. Synthesis.”

“That makes sense.”

“Uh—I mean, yeah, I guess it makes sense, but it’s complicated, and there’s a lot of nuances, so it can be pretty hard to grasp.”

It seemed easy enough to Callana, but perhaps that was just one of those things that came more easily to her than to normal humans.

“I wish my brains would tell me who I was,” Callana said.

“I mean,” the Gina said, “probably just a bigger version of yourself. Probably ate whole universes instead of galaxies, or whatnot.”

Callana shook her head. “No. I was not like that. I was… important.” For some reason, that word stuck in her mind—important—as though it was something that she had been called many, many times. But that didn’t make sense, because she had never spoken to a soul before coming to Earth.

Right?

“I do not want to make the business anymore,” Callana admitted, instinctively changing the subject. She stared off into the parking lot again. “But I want to make the money for the rent. I do not think the Ron likes me, and I do not like the part about talking to people and asking for their orders.”

The Gina raised her eyebrows. “Welcome to the club.”

“What club?”

“The… club of not liking being a waitress. It’s a pretty big club.”

Callana thinned her eyes, trying to work out what that meant. “Thank you for welcoming me into the club. I think I will enjoy not liking being a waitress with you.”

“No prob. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll look for a better job for you.” She winked at Callana, turned around, and slunk back inside, her hips swaying as she disappeared into the darkness.

What strange behavior. Why did that make Callana want to do the kissing with her so much?

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