Chapter Twenty-Two

Gina glanced at The One Who Follows, shuddering at the sight of him.

“I’m sorry your ma died,” she said. “I really am.”

He didn’t move, instead staring right through her with those glowing, yellow eyes of his. That mask—its blood-red pattern seemed to move, seemed to call to her. But she couldn’t care less about that right now.

“I’m sorry you never got to heal,” Gina continued. “But Callana isn’t doing anything wrong. She’s tried to do better, ever since she came here. Up there, she was just grazing, like a deer or something. She didn’t know, okay? She didn’t know.”

“I knew,” The One said, his voice booming into the night.

“Yeah? Well, look how many people you’ve killed by coming here!” She pointed to the street behind him. Distant skyscrapers had collapsed on themselves; the apartment across the street had fallen into the middle of the road, and cars had slammed into each other trying to avoid it, piling up into tangled heaps of scrap metal; and people were running left and right, scrambling to find their loved ones who’d been pinned under the fallen debris.

“Look what you’ve done!” Gina yelled. “At least that other guy didn’t kill anyone! But you? You’ve ruined this whole city, just so you could kill a girl who did something bad, what, two-hundred thousand years ago? She can’t even die! What are you trying to accomplish? She isn’t hurting anyone! Up until today, Callana was a waitress; she isn’t trying to ‘become God’ or whatever.”

“She ate a star not two days ago!”

“Big deal! There’re literally billions of them, and she’s agreed not to eat any more anyway! Who gives a shit?”

“You could not fathom the nature of these beasts,” The One said, his gravelly voice growing frantic. “An infinite swarm of maggots, consuming the rotting corpse of the Three Spheres, one galaxy at a time. They kill mindlessly, annihilating all in their path.”

“Then go out and fight the ones who are actually hurting people! Stop wasting your time here and go help if that’s what you want to do! Don’t sit here and spew ominous crap at me like I give a shit.” Gina couldn’t believe how eloquent she was managing to be, considering that every time she looked into this guy’s eyes, she wanted to slam her face against the ground in prostration, praise his terrible glory, and… for some reason, machine a perfect cube out of steel and offer it to him. She didn’t get that last one at all. “Or maybe fucking help the people you just murdered with your stupid earthquake!”

“T-they are mortals—”

“Oh, don’t give me that bullshit! People matter, asshole.”

 “I-I, well, I…”

Gina stood to her full height, hardly coming up to The One’s navel. Even as the universe itself shook in his presence, Gina felt only spite. “You ruined my walls, jerk! Least you could do is apologize.”

Cocking his head, The One stared back and forth, from the now-tiny Callana to the oddly terrifying frame of Gina. “Enough of this gaudy chatter,” he said. “As the Three Spheres—”

“Oh, stop talking all pretentious and uppity! I know you guys can speak normally; your buddy, the guy who came this morning? Yeah, he didn’t exactly speak in poetry. What, did you rehearse this whole speech ahead of time? ‘Three Spheres’ this, ‘Three Spheres’ that. Oh, scary. You’re basically just a human under there; I can see your frikkin’ hand. Just ’coz you’ve got spooky armor doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do whatever you want!”

“You do realize I could kill—”

“Yeah, yeah, you stabbed me—that hurt, by the way. But look at you! You look like you’re about to fall the fuck over. You aren’t gonna beat her—obviously, you’re gonna lose. And yeah, if you bring enough dumbasses over here, you’ll eventually get her, but again, that won’t do anything!”

“It would make everyone safer!”

“Oh. Oh, you’re gonna talk about safety? Is that what you’re gonna do?”

“Alright, alright, I get it.”

“No, I don’t think you do!” Gina shouted, wishing she had a few extra feet on her so she could stare this guy down properly. “I dunno what you’re doing to cause earthquakes like these, but you’d better stop. There’s probably gonna be a tsunami after this one. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

He scoffed and turned away, only to see the very devastation she was pointing out. So, he turned back to her, but avoided eye contact. “I don’t have to sit here and take this.”

“Oh, what? Are you gonna run off? Fly up into the night sky and leave everyone here to mourn their friends and families? Fuck off to your little empire in the stars?”

“Empire?” he said. “What empire? There are hardly twenty thousand of us left!”

“Oh, what, so—wait, really?”

“Yes! Obviously! They only sent one man to fight a cosmic abomination—did you really think we had numbers to spare?”

“Weren’t you guys, like, flying spaceships the size of planets?”

“Yes, and they’re woefully understaffed. We grow them—it’s not as if we have a billion hands welding the whole mess together in some hangar somewhere. There are so few of us… What do you expect me to do down here? I’m—I am sorry for the earthquake, but I don’t have the resources to repair all this.”

“Then why the fuck did you cause it in the first place?”

“I—well—you try warping space without causing a ripple sometimes!”

“Unbelievable.”

“No, what’s unbelievable is that you’re dallying about with a Wills-damn celestial maggot like it’s your best friend!”

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“Just fuck off, then,” Gina said. “Go LARP space-cops with your buddies, oh ‘One Who Follows.’ Bet your real name is dumb, too. Probably, like, Bob or something.”

“My name is not Bob.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what I’m calling you now.”

“This is so childish,” Bob said, his mask contorting through eternity, fractally boring through non-Euclidian space. “I’m done here.”

“Good!” Gina said as he turned around and climbed down the stairs. He reached into another dimension, his arm disappearing into thin air, then pulled a cloak into existence and slung it around his body, covering the bulk of his armor. Then, he wandered down the street, awkwardly shuffling around wailing passersby and stumbling on the curb.

“Asshole,” Gina said. She fumed for a few moments, up until the gravity of what she’d just done finally hit her.

Her legs gave out. She crumbled into a shivering mess on the walkway, hyperventilating. She’d been crying the whole time, she realized. Did that guy just make everybody cry wherever he went? He’d even made Callana cry—she was still sitting there in the doorway, bawling her eyes out and clutching her gut wound in agony. It must have hurt so much.

Gina shuffled over to her friend and enveloped her in a warm hug.

“Shh,” she said, stroking the back of Callana’s head—her hair kept billowing in that nonexistent breeze, and her ears were still pointy, though only a few inches long instead of a few feet. And her face looked like an odd blend of the giant woman she’d become and the diminutive girl she’d been.

“Are you okay?” Gina asked. “Does it hurt?”

Callana shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again, sniffling. She didn’t say a word.

“I’m so sorry this happened,” Gina whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Callana muttered something along the lines of, “iznotyerfault.” So, Gina hugged her twice as tight.

“No, it’s not my fault,” she said, “but it’s not your fault either.”

“It—i-it—it is,” Callana said.

“Hon, he hurt you,” she said, pointing to the gaping wound in Callana’s stomach.

“N-n—no, that was… there already,” she said.

“Oh.”

Callana nodded, clutching it. “I c-can’t make it go away.”

“You can’t heal it?”

Shaking her head, Callana squeezed a few more tears out of her eyes.

“You remember, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“But you don’t want to?”

“N-no.”

“It’s okay,” she said, snuggling closer and not caring when Callana’s blood started seeping into her shirt. “I’m here. It’ll be alright. You’re gonna be okay.”

“No,” Callana whispered. “No, no. No, I am not gonna be okay.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Callana shook her head.

“Will you… ever want to talk about it?”

She shook her head even harder.

Nodding, Gina shrugged. “I’ll be here if that ever changes. I’m here for you, Cal. I’m never gonna go away.”

They stayed like that for hours.

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