THE BLUE ROSE

PART 4: WHAT YOU WANT

The lift rattles and jerks as if its winch might give out at any moment, but it grudgingly consents to ascend, past layers of pitch-black stone entirely unlike that of the cavern dock, where uncanny striations catch the light from the dim bulb and sparkle like cold, nameless constellations. Then, abruptly, outside of the lift is once again a concrete shaft, bringing the survivors level with the loading area they passed on the observation-cell corridor, where a red-tinted and sourceless light reveals glass-headed husks kneeling in a circle facing the corpulent torso-thing, grinding out a teeth-rattling chorus as the webwork of fleshy roots connecting them to it and it to the ground pulses in time. The transfigured victims pay their audience no heed, seemingly grown past the mindless violence of their rough rebirth, but that doesn’t stop Laurent and the girls from huddling at the back of the lift until the scene judders once more out of view.

Each floor the lift crests and grinds agonisingly by is home to a new tableau of horrors, and Chloe starts to wonder if they aren’t being staged in some fashion for the girls’ edification, although what the lesson might be eludes her entirely. Two of Margot’s classmates’ monstrous backward faces hiss angrily at Chloe and her sisters through the grating, their front-selves engaged in carefully arranging poor, dead Amelia and Virginia like broken dolls, positioned sitting splay-legged against the wall, empty eyes open in an accusatory stare. Another former wife-to-be simply stares balefully down at the lift’s occupants from the ceiling, both faces hard and spiteful. One floor up, or down or backwards or sideways, distant, peeled figures jerk and shiver at the end of an impossibly long, black corridor, silhouetted against a light that comes in heavy, viscous waves, and though the girls all dread that they’re about to recognise Sasha or Cecily, distance obscures the juddering dancers’ features entirely. Then there’s a sharp lurch into the dark between storeys that stretches out for far too long, and Chloe wonders if the struggling lift has slowed to a crawl, or if the space has expanded to accommodate the facility’s ongoing, groaning changes. Eventually, what is unmistakably the upper staff corridor lurches into view, separated from the lift by a heavy steel grate that Chloe knows for certain has never been there. The thing that was once Ms. Fields is right in the middle of the corridor, the same crazed starburst of arms, fingers, legs and teeth chained forever in living flesh, and the girls freeze in abject fear, desperately trying not to attract the muttering, twitching behemoth’s attention. It turns out to be unnecessary; Fields appears wholly lost inside whatever remains of her own mind, flopping around aimlessly, making waves in the slick mess of fluids that coats the floor and bellowing what seem to be random words from some delirious internal monologue. At the lift’s straining pace it takes long enough for the scene to disappear from view that Chloe’s terror and loathing begins an unwelcome metamorphosis into pity, and she’s relieved when the gaps in the grating show nothing but blank stone and she’s able to let herself breathe again.

“Look, mate, not being funny or nothing, but is there actually anything helpful you can tell us, in terms of stopping this or whatever?” Chloe asks Laurent, more to fill the yawning silence than out of an expectation of a meaningful answer, while the lift grinds its way past more dimly flickering, architecturally implausible dead space between floors. Lottie doesn’t seem to hear, leaning against the wall of the lift, wrapped up in her own thoughts, eyes closed and overfilled lips pursed in contemplation.

“Almost definitely not, I’m afraid” Laurent replies, mopping at his brow and shaking his head with every appearance of genuine remorse.

“I thought you said we was in uncharted territory,” Chloe says, swallowing hard. “That means there’s still a chance, don’t it? If we can get to her before, I dunno, whatever happens?”

“It isn’t completely impossible, I suppose,” the little man admits, dabbing at his forehead again and again even though his handkerchief is by now utterly saturated and filthy. “But you must understand, the metaphysical pressure being exerted upon the Vessel from inside the prison is unimaginable. To not just stop the process, but reverse it, to push the Flaw back into the Mirror… the sheer force of will required is impossible to fathom.”

“She can do it,” Chloe says, and her defiant certainty seems to encourage the others, at least a little. “I believe in her.”

-

Eventually there’s an end to the lift shaft, which the struggling mechanism achieves with a series of clanks and bangs that have the occupants hurrying to vacate in case the whole thing is about to plummet straight back down. This leaves them in a nondescript wood-panelled corridor of the kind that could be anywhere in the Blue Rose, featureless except for a pair of double doors at the end and matching no part of the girls’ remembered floorplan. These doors open to reveal, at an elevation that implies they’re multiple storeys higher than the roof should allow, the view of the facility’s grounds, and the carnage thereon. The few hundred metres of manicured lawn and rocky shoreline separating the facility from the sea have become a lurid vision of hell; a significantly larger group of survivors than Warner’s has erected a sort of defensive perimeter on the beach, crouched behind barricades made from cargo crates and piled-up garden furniture, and blood and bodies, not all of them entirely dead, litter every square metre of the landscape. The sea at their backs and the paucity of mirrors outside the building has clearly allowed the twenty or thirty remaining staff and guards to hang on, albeit barely; the twisted remains of a nightmare menagerie lie writhing on the lawn, torn apart by rifle fire and what must, judging by the great circular divots in the earth, have been hand grenades. The sky is roiling with twisted cloud and strange, rippling brightness, but the distance out to the horizon is as dark as midnight. There’s something wrong with the light; it’s as if a fundamental quality has been leached from it, leaving the whole scene pale and, if not colourless, then as if the colours have been replaced with substitutes from a spectrum the eye is maddeningly unable to properly perceive. The great expanse of open ocean is shimmering a weird, mottled grey, rougher by far than the girls have ever seen it, rising and falling in eerily geometric peaks and troughs, and Chloe wonders if it wasn’t a small mercy that the boats had all already been launched when they reached the dock.

As the girls and their fidgeting tag-along emerge onto a narrow, bare balcony, the survivors are still under attack: from out of the Rose’s unnaturally darkened interior spills a seemingly endless, howling stream of flesh and glass, a riot of muscle and bone and glinting sharpness that can only eventually overwhelm the barricades in spite of their defenders’ guns. The doorway the girls are staring aghast from is positioned incongruously high on the facility’s white stone wall, and as Chloe wrenches herself away from the carnage to look for a way toward either the roof or the ground, she’s struck by a wave of vertigo so powerful that she’s lucky Lottie grabs her around the waist before she can fall.

“Fuckin’ Christ!” she gasps; the others turn and make their own exclamations as they see it too. The Blue Rose has stretched, has multiplied, has (Lottie giggles hysterically as the word occurs to her) bloomed, and what towers before them is a sort of stepped ziggurat of impossible proportions, built from that same uncanny black stone, every inch inlaid with unsettling carvings whose inhuman figures seem to squirm and cavort in the colourless light. It stretches miles into the sky, its dimensions warped and dizzying to contemplate, simultaneously far too tall to possibly stand and many times too broad to fit on the island, but inarguably there nonetheless. A cold wind seems to howl half-heard promises down from its upper reaches, the clouds are knotting themselves into bizarre, convoluted spirals around its jagged angles, and it’s instantly, abundantly clear to all present that if the end of the world is going to begin anywhere, this is it.

“The great Machine wakes,” Laurent breathes, eyes wide, visibly overcome with awe. “The workings of the lock, the very place where the ancients of Vyrhc-Uhn shed blood and mind to seal the Flaw away. Even after all of this, to think I would keep my eyes long enough to see…”

“And what about Violet?” Chloe demands, physically shaking the little man out of his reverie. “Are you saying she’s up there?”

“Yes, ah, of… of course. Your friend - the Vessel - awaits at the pinnacle. If you really are determined to pursue some sort of confrontation, I’m afraid we shall have to climb,” Laurent responds eventually, blinking as if he’s been woken roughly from a dream.

The lowest tiers of the impossible ziggurat, where they emerge seamlessly from the white stone of the Rose’s walls like mould from a corpse, are just barely of a height the girls can clamber up, with some struggling and decidedly unladylike hoisting of legs; their inability to contemplate taking off their heels presents difficulties, Laurent’s lack of stature only multiplies them, and they’ve only made it up a handful of levels before an exhausted Lottie pauses and turns back to the island battlefield.

“Wait… hang on… does anyone else… hear that?” she pants, as Chloe and Nicci join her on the black stone ledge. Chloe can just about make out the sound Lottie’s talking about, and it’s one that conjures a sort of nostalgic shiver: a memory of panic and excitement and the promise of intense humiliation to come, the thrill of being paraded as the eager participant in her own degradation that she’s only perhaps ceasing now to want to be. With the familiar whump-whump of blades and the whine of engines, a helicopter is landing at the Blue Rose, and it’s bringing a cargo of VIPs to bear witness to the devastation.

-

There are two helicopters, in the end, and both are twin-rotor military machines at stark odds with the sleek executive models that usually ferry visitors to and from the island. The first takes position just off the shoreline, downforce from its blades whipping the water into a seething froth, and spits repeated bursts of fire from a gun mounted in its open side door; the mass of baying mirror-things jig and flail wildly before they fall. The ragged, wounded circle of survivors climb their makeshift barricades in joyous disbelief, waving guns and improvised clubs in the air as they cheer their salvation, and if what comes next seems inevitable from the girls’ vantage on the lower reaches of the nightmare ziggurat, then either perspective or desperate relief must have obscured the new arrivals’ intentions, because the tiny, distant figures of staff and guards seem genuinely surprised when the next bursts of gunfire are directed at them. Meanwhile the second chopper is disgorging its passengers into the bloody surf; dark-uniformed, grim-faced soldiers carrying compact, menacing weapons, who waste no time in establishing a perimeter, moving with a practised choreography and pausing only to place a single shot in the head, or nearest equivalent, of each felled monstrosity nearby. There’s a brief exchange of fire between these coldly efficient professionals and the last handful of wounded Blue Rose staff, but it’s clear the shell-shocked remnants stand no real chance, and after a few more fall the last handful break and make a panicked dash across the open, only to be cut down by shots from the helicopter or snatched by remnant horrors. With the threats neutralised, the beachhead has clearly been judged acceptably secure, for now a small group of civilians is helped down from the helicopter, their long robes and unsecured hair whipping maniacally in the wind. Laurent sucks in a sharp breath as the mercenaries start to advance, their paymasters safe at the centre of a tight formation, picking off leftover monstrosities and wounded guards with practised ease as they go.

“The absolute dogs!” Laurent exclaims, stubby pink fists clenched in a caricature of rage.

“That’s them, then? Your old friends, the ones who started all this? Who did all that awful stuff to Violet?” Lottie asks, shielding her eyes against the wind.

“Indeed it is,” Laurent hisses. “Come to claim their divine reward, the blinkered fools.”

“And those dresses are doing their figures no favours!!” Nicci adds derisively.

“So what I’m hearing is, we’d better get our arses in- oh, come on, what now?“ Chloe yells, but she’s drowned out midsentence by a sudden din from somewhere in the flickering sky: a roar like the rage of giants, a thundering boom, and a shrill, ominous whine that rises and rises in pitch while the girls try to keep their balance in the sudden downrush of hot, heavy air.

“Oh, shit,” Lottie breathes, as out of the twin vapour trails a small but rapidly growing object catches the light, falling inexorably toward the island like a guillotine blade. It shouldn’t be as visible as it is, given its size and the distance, but it’s as if something in the roiling, flickering sky is focusing intently on the sliver of metal; making a lens of the tortured air, magnifying the image of the plummeting bomb until it’s unnaturally pin-sharp even against the vast white-grey convolutions of cloud behind.

“Well, girls, it’s been a laugh, innit,” Chloe says, staring up and taking the hands of the desolate Lottie and worried-looking but uncomprehending Nicci with a resigned smile. Below, the hired soldiers and their cultist bosses are trying for the helicopter, but it’s clearly far too late; the bomb will hit before they make it another ten paces, then five, then-

A single, near-unbearable eruption of sound and pressure bellows long and low, like all the horns of the abyss sounding a grace note, and a palpable throb of something entirely unlike light pulses out from the distant peak of the impossible tower: the bomb, now barely feet from the ground, simply stops. It’s left hanging unsupported above the ruined lawn, vibrating and shimmering slightly but still entirely solid and real: a fat torpedo of a thing with stubby stabilising fins and an all-too-obvious detonator at its nose, mass murder in institutional grey and the insignia of the US military.

“Mortal hand cannot forestall the Emergence now,” Laurent intones quietly, although from the tremor in his voice Chloe suspects he wasn’t so certain a moment ago. Clearly having come to the same realisation, and hindered only briefly by some of their number falling prostrate in awe, the cultists and their escort are making their way up the island at a redoubled pace, and from the general readying of ropes and harnesses, their goal and their preparedness to reach it is clear. The unmistakable crack of a gunshot and answering burst of fragments from the surface of the ziggurat, though metres from its mark, makes Chloe withdraw her head at record speed.

“Hang the fuck on, are we in a race with these twats now?” she asks Laurent, craning her neck to take in the sheer inconceivable height of the structure before them.

“That might be a rather, ah, reductive way to phrase it, but if we harbour any hope whatsoever of an audience with the Vessel, however futile I still suspect that to be, I can certainly envision it being preferable that we reach the summit… well, first,” he stammers, shifting fretfully from foot to foot and mopping desperately at his brow.

“Fuck me, I miss when my biggest problem was walking in a straight line the morning after,” Chloe says, and wearily goes to help Lottie hoist her tits up the next step.

-

An embarrassingly small number of tiers later the girls are absolutely spent, arms and legs on fire, and Laurent is clearly wishing the lifestyle of the landed classes involved more cardio. The heads of the cult and their private army have disappeared into the thick, billowing mist which has risen to shroud the tower’s lower reaches, and Chloe has an inescapable sense that the girls are far higher up than they can possibly have climbed. It’s getting harder to breathe, the sporadic blasts of sound and pressure from the top of the ziggurat feel like they’re pounding holes in everybody’s heads, and she’s beginning to despair of getting even close to the top before it’s too late.

“I can’t do this!” Lottie gasps in agreement, raising shaking arms to grip the carvings and start toward the next step before she falters, falling to her knees and letting her head rest against the carved stone, chest rising and falling like the shifting of continents.

“It’s not fair!” Nicci erupts, stamping her foot and surprising everyone, not least to see that she still has the energy to shout. “After eveything we’ve been through, and all the weird contusing stuff that I didn’t really get, the prize just like, goes to whoever can climb some big dumb stinky steppy thing fatstest?!? That’s dumb!! And super super unfair, right!?! These shoes were made for being pretty, not like, exercise!! I think I would like to speak to somebody in charge, beclause this whole thing stinks!!!”

“I’m not completely sure where you got the idea there’s a prize, Nics,” Lottie mumbles into the stone, mostly for her own benefit.

“And I really dunno if we want to find out who the manager is, but- wait, hang on, what’s…?”

Without warning there comes another resounding blast of light and air and something that is and isn’t sound from the top of the nightmare structure, louder and more physical and somehow more fundamentally jarring than before. All three girls freeze where they’re variously standing and lying, and from her position near the edge, Chloe catches a brief glimpse of soldiers piling in around their charges just below, manoeuvring to form a human barricade bristling with guns.

“I think something might’ve heard you,” she says to Nicci, who at least has the good grace to look mortified. “It’s fine, we’re good, fuckin’ loving this, nice to get out in the fresh air, no need to trouble yourself!” she yells up the ziggurat, half-delirious from exhaustion and not entirely sure how serious she thinks she’s being. Laurent opens his mouth to interject, but before he can, the foreshocks of something urgent and existentially profound begin to shake the underlying structure of the stone, the air, the component atoms of the girls’ weary bodies and minds.

The wave hits as a wrenching, sick-making ripple beneath the skin of the world, a profound disconnection in the makeup of everything that’s wholly unlike any sensation Chloe’s felt before, even in the barrage of alien awfulness that has been the last couple of days. The surface of the ziggurat seems to lurch beneath Chloe’s heels, and she’s convinced for a nauseous moment that she’s already falling, that her last memory will be of whirling disorientation and gut-deep terror before the inevitable, terminal stop. But she’s falling upwards, and sideways, spiralling inward somehow, and before she can form another coherent thought, she’s gone.

-

An interminable length of time from a last memory she can’t seem to assemble, she’s waking from the familiar-unfamiliar soft cotton-wool smothering of a chemical sleep to the antiseptic blankness of the White Room, and she’s simultaneously thinking wait, how am I here again and oh god where is this what have they done to me. There’s a dizzying duality to all her thoughts and perceptions now, in fact: an ill-fitting overlay of past and future, the thrill of being subjected to an ordeal she remembers all too well merged imperfectly with a wash of utter terror that leaves her unsure whether this is a memory or a re-enactment or simply the present, whether the life she knows is nothing more than the fevered imagining of an over-medicated brain. Her body is at once distressingly muted in its proportions, the product of only a first round of surgeries, and something new and horrifyingly alien: heavy tits and bulbous ass send her staggering and wobbling when she tries to stand, and she’s reduced to kneeling as she sobs and begs in a voice that is and isn’t her own. She bangs on the walls with skinny, sedative-weak arms, screams and pleads for release or explanation, scrabbles desperately at the seamless join between glossy white plastic panels. Then, without warning, a man’s voice, synthesised and uninflected: “YOUR OLD LIFE IS OVER. THERE IS NO ESCAPE,” it announces, and the words simultaneously appear in red bold-face text on the wall. “YOU ARE NOT A PERSON. YOU ARE NOW PROPERTY. YOU EXIST FOR THE PLEASURE OF OTHERS. YOU WILL SUBMIT,” and finally, while Chloe’s two poorly tessellated selves are simultaneously reeling in horror and trembling at the knees in intense arousal, “REPEAT.”

After maybe fifteen seconds of silence a sharp buzzer sounds, and part of Chloe knows what’s coming next, but her past half screams and carries her lurching backwards onto her ass as the conductive floor tiles deliver a vicious shock to her bare feet. This is repeated twice more, and there’s nowhere to hide, no surface in the stark cube of her cell that isn’t rigged to deliver pain. “YOUR OLD LIFE IS OVER. THERE IS NO ESCAPE. YOU ARE NOT A PERSON. YOU ARE NOW PROPERTY. YOU EXIST FOR THE PLEASURE OF OTHERS. YOU WILL SUBMIT,” the disembodied voice demands, and although she knows it took her at least two more cycles of failure and discipline to finally break down and acquiesce, Chloe marshals the disparate versions of herself and, eyes submissively downcast, hands clasped behind her back, hating herself despite knowing this is what she was made to do; “My old life is over. There is no escape. I am not a person. I am now property. I exist for the pleasure of others,” she dutifully repeats, cock straining desperately against the confines of the cage she’s horrified-relieved to find clamped around her orchiectomied crotch. “I will submit.”

“AGAIN.”

As she mouths the words, aching with arousal and fury and fear, time seems to stutter and flow like mercury poured down the throat of an innocent. It’s what might be hours, days later, and now mirrored surfaces or reversed displays have been unveiled behind the transparent surface of the cell walls - mirrors, she thinks with an inchoate panic she can’t explain, but her memory-self is in ascendance and she’s overcome with a different kind of horror, at the inescapability of her unfamiliar reflection and the mutilation she’s been subjected to. A chime sounds, another panel slides seamlessly aside, and she chokes out a disgusted laugh for reasons her present-self can’t comprehend; behind is an enormous cock (I’ve had bigger, she thinks, in a wash of images and sensations that make her both retch and pant with lust and picture a dead man she hasn’t met yet), glossy and white to match the monotone decor. The synthesised voice of her tormentor drones something about sustenance and obedience, but she isn’t really paying attention to any of it: Chloe dimly remembers hellish hours of pointless resistance, of growing hunger, thirst, of sleep denied by shocks and light and noise, constant punishment and growing despair, and as she recalls it she tortuously re-experiences it all, compressed dizzyingly into seconds. But, at the same time, her present-day mind is fixated on a more real, more urgent need. Her lips greedily slide down the thick shaft, tongue savouring the taste of the new rubber, and she rocks back and forth on her heels like she hasn’t yet learned to do, taking the cock down to its base with little ‘unh’s and soft moans of pleasure, every reconfigured reward pathway in her brain lighting up as she kneels naked and exposed and serves her purpose. Overlaid, she recoils, retching up thin, acid vomit, and sobs in a crumpled heap, and she doesn’t know which is real.

Time skips again; it might be days later, and the wall-screens are alight with recordings of Chloe sucking at that same rubber dick, as seen from the perspective of countless hidden cameras. Silicone tits bounce up and down, hungry, inflated lips slurp desperately at the head, as she’s forced to work harder and harder for less and less reward. She’s wearing makeup now, inexpertly applied at a newly-revealed white vanity, another indignity she’s been tortured into inflicting on herself. In one of the videos playing on every inch of the walls, the cock retracts at the last second, spurting the thin, sticky gruel she’s been fed for god knows how many days all over her shocked face, leaving her to desperately scoop as much as she can into her mouth, cheeks burning with humiliation and shame. The still of her porn-star lips caught in a cartoonish ‘O’ of surprise, the slow-motion replay of the jet of fluid squirting into her eyes and dripping down her chin onto her ridiculous, unwanted tits, close-ups of her mouth and tongue hungrily slurping goo from her fingers and the floor; all these rapidly propagate to fill the room with a hundred different images of Chloe’s wide-eyed sex-doll face. Quivering with arousal now and hatred then, she knows-dreads and anticipates-rages at what’s coming next, as the wall-screens all shut off simultaneously, leaving her kneeling naked on the floor in total darkness. Then a single spotlight illuminates that same disgusting-delicious cock, now glistening wetly with lubricant, and two enormous words cast the room in a red glow as they’re simultaneously spoken and displayed: FUCK YOURSELF. Chloe screams and rants, gets shocked so many times she eventually passes out; she cries, shrieks for so long she thinks her lungs must flap loose like torn sails inside her chest, until something inside her breaks and, full of shame and self-loathing and utter defeat, she finally eases herself onto the hateful shaft with a sort of dull, detached revulsion. Simultaneously, she impales herself eagerly on the lubricated cock with a moan of pleasure and zero hesitation, both scenes somehow occupying the same stretch of time. Beyond the compulsive-joy-slash-awful-violation of thrusting against the dildo she dimly senses another shift, and suddenly she’s gripping handles that protrude from the floor, feet braced similarly, while a substantially bigger dick pounds her progressively faster and harder in the ass. No, this was way later, she remembers, and that she’ll be punished for letting go too soon, rewarded with food and some small amount of uninterrupted sleep the longer she endures. And it is, ultimately, something to be endured, with the uninvited misery of the past-self she’s fought to suppress screaming in her head, forcing her to face what these things were to the person she was before they rewired her brain, and with a burst of cold clarity like anaesthesia hitting her veins she realises that this is the climb.

“Silly Chloe,” Violet’s bell-clear voice says in her ear, as the fucking machine increases its pitch and violence and the walls begin to melt, “You of all people should know, anything can be a tower if you want it to be. Not far now. Not far to go…”

-

Lottie’s in a hell of her own making. Which isn’t to say she isn’t also in a hell very much of someone else’s making, but the specific torment she’s enduring could very easily have been avoided, and still she threw herself into it with a sort of self-annihilating abandon. Like, she angrily tells herself, she always does, and then wonders what she can possibly have meant by that, because this was the first time she’s seriously tried to escape, wasn’t it? And she almost made it, too, and she can’t believe how naive a thing that was to ever have thought.

She’s wearing punishment bondage, devised by the singularly perverted mind of Ms. Jezebelle, the girls’ fiendishly inventive instructor in fetish and depersonalisation. Beneath her already-uncomfortable, demeaning schoolgirl outfit, she’s locked by steel bands into a viciously tight longline corset in brutally heavy rubber, but that’s the least of it: attached via shoulder straps is a similarly stiff posture collar that forces her to keep her head perfectly level and shoulders painfully pushed back, presenting her bare tits through the holes she found seamlessly tailored into her clothes earlier that morning. (And have her breasts always seemed this small? She could swear she despised their ridiculous size and absurd, hideously awkward weight, the constant burning shame of the perverted joke her body has become, but today they seem positively manageable by comparison… to what?). Her nipples have been freshly pierced, a process achieved with no anaesthesia, no clothes and in front of the whole class, to the immense amusement of the wives and no few of Lottie’s fellow servants, and from the thick barbells now hang chains bearing cruel little weights, which swing back and forth as Lottie walks and drive her to maddening heights of pain and stimulation. And on the subject of walking, she’s been similarly locked into a truly brutal pair of ballet boots, making getting anywhere incredibly difficult and exhausting as she totters precariously around the polished hardwood floors of the Blue Rose, inevitably afforded zero consideration for her predicament and accumulating additional demerits with every lesson. But the truly nasty part is the replacement chastity cage, bigger and heavier and embarrassingly visible beneath her skirt, which she strongly suspects is being controlled remotely, because it seems to choose the absolute worst moments to activate.

“Now, which of you pointless sluts can tell me the three ways to most effectively convey submission in a domestic setting?” Ms. Fields asks. She’s dressed in an immaculate grey suit, and is stalking up and down the rows of straight-backed, tight-uniformed girls at their humiliating little school desks, their eyes locked on the board at the front of the class so as not to invite the cruel riding crop their teacher is cracking against desks and running lasciviously over the exposed thighs of her charges. A forest of extravagantly manicured hands reaches for the ceiling, and Fields leaves the girls holding them there for an agonisingly long time before she chooses. Lottie’s having trouble just staying in her seat, squirming uncomfortably from the constricting corset and posture collar, hands held at the limit of the hopelessly short chain clipped to the desk in front of her.

“Hmm… Margot,” Fields says, eventually.

“Yes, Miss! Thankyou, Miss! One, never express an opinion. Two, always agree with your Man. Three, always anticipate your Man’s desires,” Margot trills, the picture of prim obedience. Lottie doesn’t know the girl well yet; the two classes have only recently begun taking lessons together, but something about her insincere eagerness sets Lottie’s veneers on edge. Then, to Lottie’s abject horror, there’s a soft beep, and she tenses and bites her lower lip, wriggles and writhes in her seat, scrabbling at the floor with the blunt points of her ballet boots and straining against her wrist cuffs, wishing desperately this wasn’t happening now, trying harder than she’s ever tried to hold out against what’s going on beneath her skirt.

“Very good, Margot. I’m glad someone’s been listening,” Ms. Fields purrs, stroking the crop lightly across the back of the girl’s neck. “So, since we’ve all managed to absorb that, perhaps someone can tell me what the most important-“

And then, unthinkably, horrifyingly, Lottie interrupts Ms. Fields while she’s speaking. It isn’t by choice: in response to its helplessly squirming victim’s attempts to ignore it, the device clamped around her crotch has stepped its punishment up a level. Something powerfully electrical is happening in the vicinity of her prostate; a series of shuddering pulses so intense they make her buck and tremble and kick.

“Ohhh- oh, I’m…. aaaaaah, I’m a filthy gutter-slut, ah, ah, and I need to stick something in my hungry fuckholes right now!!” Lottie gasps; this is a script she’s been forced to memorise, minus the very real cries of sexual torment, while hanging from a spreader bar under the tender ministrations of Ms. Jezebelle and her ever-present pair of mute latex drones. Reciting the awful, humiliating words is the only way to prevent the punishment cage from immediately redoubling its assault on her privates, and she’s never been able to resist longer than a few seconds, even when - as now - the consequences for acquiescing are potentially so much worse.

“Well, well! What do we have here?” Ms. Fields says, a vicious smile tugging at the corners of her blood-red lips, as the class at large bursts into peals of laughter at Lottie’s predicament. “It seems like somebody thinks her dirty cravings are more important than my lesson. Is that right, Charlotte, hmm?”

“N… no, Miss! I’m sorry, Miss! I… ah… ah… I, please, Miss!” Lottie gasps.

“No playtime while class is in session, you useless slut. Even a stupid fuckdoll like you should know that by now,” Fields replies, her slight Mancunian twang creeping into her voice.

“Please, Miss, she needs both ends filled or it won’t stop, Miss!” Chloe chimes in, earning herself a vicious swat across the butt with Ms. Fields’ crop.

“How unfortunate for her,” Fields laughs, before snapping into a sharp register the girls have all come to fear. “Speak out of turn again and I’ll see you in my office after hours, Chloe, and I’ll make sure even you don’t enjoy it.”

At level three the orgasm the cruel little device wrenches from Lottie is multiple times as powerful as the previous ones, so intense that any pleasure in it is fully transmuted into bursting agony, and is accompanied by a sharp jab inside her cage which, in more lucid moments, she has come to suspect is a needle injecting some proprietary chemical brew straight into her genitals. She lets out a long, rising scream as her need progresses from desperate to all-consuming; she’s so horny she barely even registers sight or sound, and she grinds mindlessly against her desk, sending her pencils and the humiliating workbook flying. Ms. Fields is openly laughing at Lottie’s anguish now, and the other girls’ mocking titters grow louder and more cruel in reaction to the tacit approval.

“Now, since slutty little Lottie wants to be the centre of attention, I’m sure she can describe for us all the correct technique for-“

“Ohhhh! Oh god, oh no, aaaaah, please, please, Miss, I need it! Please fuck me! Please!” Lottie gasps, way past the point of feeling ashamed to beg.

Ms. Fields walks to her desk and, at an agonisingly leisurely pace, retrieves one of the extra-large dildos used for class demonstrations from a drawer. The girls haven’t progressed to actually taking these yet, and even in the throes of agonising sensory overload Lottie’s extravagantly overdone eyes widen in trepidation at the sight of the thing. Despite usually being all too happy to insert a variety of implements into every orifice her students have to offer, Ms. Fields dangles the enormous thing just out of reach of the girl’s over-plumped, straining lips.

“This? Is this what you want, Lottie? And how much do you want it, exactly?” she teases, letting Lottie’s puckered lips just barely kiss the tip of the enormous, stiff cock.

“Mghn… aaah! I’ll do… aaaaah… anything, Miss!” Lottie manages to stammer.

“What do you think, girls?” Fields asks the class sweetly, the question very clearly directed toward the half of the girls destined to be pampered wives. “What should slutty Lottie do in exchange for me allowing her to indulge her shameless cock addiction in my class?”

“She could clean Miss’s office every single night for a month!” Amelia volunteers, waving a French-tipped hand excitedly in the air.

“She should volunteer for every single practical demonstration in class!” calls Alice, in a rare moment of boldness primarily driven by wanting to stop Margot always volunteering her.

“What if she had to come to class naked, and we could write whatever we liked on her in lipstick and she wasn’t allowed to clean it off?” Tegan suggests, smirking cruelly at the thought.

“She could ask for her target look to be like, ten times as trashy!! And get some sexy tattoos!!” Nicci shouts out, clearly caught up in the moment to the detriment of sense or solidarity.

“Ooh, I’ve got one!” Margot giggles with a malicious glint in her eye. “What if she had to be Miss’s personal servant, and she’d wear a bell that Miss could trigger any time, and stupid Lottie would have to come running to shine her boots or carry her things! And she’d sleep in a cage at the bottom of Miss’ bed, so she’d always be available and she couldn’t be distracted by her cheap, skanky friends!”

“Margot, why you always gotta be such a fuckin’ gash?” Chloe snaps at her, frustrated and powerless to stop Lottie’s additional torments stacking up.

“Chloe! I warned you. My office, after class,” Fields says sternly, whacking her over the knuckles with the crop, which makes Chloe yelp and squirm in her seat, and not wholly from the pain.

“Yes, Miss,” she replies dutifully, failing to look all that remorseful.

“Well? What do you say, you shameless, horny little exhibitionist? Is all of that a fair trade for me letting you act like a rampant harlot in class?” Fields asks, obviously immensely amused.

“YES! Yes yes yes, please, yesss!” Lottie gasps, incapable of properly processing what she’s agreeing to, although it isn’t as if Ms. Fields couldn’t simply order her to do it all with or without her acquiescence.

“Stand up, then, you dirty skank.”

Lottie just about manages to stagger to her feet, panting and grinding against her desk. Ms. Fields walks around her moaning charge’s back and affixes the thick end of the dildo to the socket in her chair, much to the amusement of the girls nearby. She roughly yanks down the writhing girl’s dental-floss thong and unceremoniously sticks a pair of gloved, lube-covered fingers into her ass. Then, stalking around to face her drooling, shuddering victim again, Fields places that same hand lightly on Lottie’s breastbone and abruptly pushes her down firmly, sending the helpless girl pivoting at the cuffs chained to her wrists, sliding her butt back into her seat and impaling her on the extra-large rubber cock, which she gradually slides the rest of the way down with widening eyes and wordless gasps, until her ass cheeks are touching the chair and she’s taken it to the base.

Sadly for Lottie, sitting there with her ass overfilled and her mouth gaping, one hole isn’t enough. The punishment hits level four, and she screams in a protracted combination of climax and agony as the cage physically constricts and delivers shock after shock to her overstimulated nerve endings. She pumps herself up and down on the dildo as best she can with her hands chained in front of her and her ballet boots unable to get purchase on the hardwood, desperately trying to discharge some of the unbearable level of whole-body torture. It’s in this state that Violet’s disembodied voice comes floating lightly into Lottie’s ear, curiously audible even as she writhes and groans.

“You have to take it, Lottie. You have to keep that defiance alive. This won’t break you. You’ll be with us soon. This is the climb, my darling.”

-

“Orders up, boys!” brays one of the men, an interminable whirl of flushed skin and expensive tailoring, glistening with sweat beneath a thick haze of alcohol, cocaine and bad nightclub lighting.

“I’m not boys, silly!!” Nicci giggles, twirling a few strands of her waist-length ponytail around an extravagantly manicured finger. She’s dressed to fit in with the group, assuming they ordered a thematically appropriate stripper: she’s wearing what might be the world’s least professional skirt suit, tiny jacket cut just above where her pert, round ass is emphasised by a scandalously tight pencil skirt, in a surprisingly conservative light grey that does nothing to diminish the effect. Her boobs are barely contained by a crisp, half-buttoned white shirt, and she’s even wearing a pair of purely cosmetic glasses. That she doesn’t remember putting any of this on isn’t much cause for concern; events regularly get ahead of Nicci, and the pink cloud she drifts through life within is far more comfortable and less upsetting than the world outside. Somewhere in the thoroughly paved-over remains of Nicci’s pre-Rose memory is the vaguest sense that this is a familiar setting, though, and she’s more than happy to be buoyed along by that.

“Fuck are you talking about, █████?” the nearest guy - well-built in a way that draws Nicci’s eye, muscles visibly taut beneath a pricey shirt - mumbles, frowning. The blank is a word she simply can’t hear, a sound her brain flatly refuses to process into meaning, although the deep discomfort the experience creates in her isn’t something she chooses to dwell on, preferring to let her mind go blank and return to the state of blissful semi-awareness that’s kept her alive this long.

An elbow jabs Nicci in the ribs from the other side, far from the sort of physical contact she was hoping for, and she wrinkles her perfect brow in annoyance. “What do you make of the talent in here tonight, mate?” a beery voice bellows in her ear, over-loud and entirely in the wrong register for speaking to an eager little hottie like her.

“Talent?? Oh!! I’ve got all kinds of talents, big boy!! Buy me another drink and maybe I’ll let you see a few!!” Nicci trills almost without conscious thought, flashing a well-practised flirty grin and wiggling her tits a tiny bit freer of her inadequate shirt.

“What the fuck?” the man snorts in outraged disbelief, which is hardly the reaction any number of role-played training sessions have led Nicci to expect in this situation.

“What’s wrong, big boy?! Don’t you like what you see!?” Nicci asks somewhat uncertainly, growing more off-balance and confused by the moment. The lights and noise are pounding inside her head, unearthing the bones of thoughts and memories she isn’t allowed to have any more, and she’s struck by a very un-Nicci-like desire to go and sit somewhere dark and quiet and try to get her head in order.

“Lads, has █████ been at the pills already? ‘Cause I think he needs a new dealer; he sounds completely off his head,” the man says loudly, addressing the table at large. All six men’s attention is turned to Nicci now, but what should be thrilling and tingly feels disconcerting and even threatening to her right now.

“Mate, seriously, you okay?” one of the men asks. “Have you been buying gear in the park again? You’re talking like, I dunno, a fucking girl or something.”

“Heehee, of course I’m a girl, silly!! Meet me in the bathroom and I’ll show you what a girl like me can do!!” Nicci giggles, spooling out the well-rehearsed script but desperately looking for an excuse to get away from the noise, the disbelieving stares, the fleeting snatches of memory she neither wants nor can seem to shove back into the pink cloud of bliss.

“This is getting into some gay shit now,” one of the men says, a scowl on his face and violence in his eyes.

“Is this your big coming out, then, █████?” asks another, his mouth grinning but his eyes hard and hostile. “Gonna be prancing around the office in a wig and a dress, telling everyone your pronouns, you fucking poof?”

“O… office?” is all Nicci can manage. Inside, her head is spinning like a carousel, a whirl of half-seen images and foreign thoughts, and with each repetition of that unhearable name, she feels she’s moving a step closer to some awful ledge from which there’ll be no coming back.

“Yeah, office. You know, the bullpen? Guys, did he seriously get hit on the head or something?” the first, deliciously muscled man is asking; his tone is a shade more sympathetic than the others’, and Nicci abruptly bursts into tears from confusion and desire and the programmed compulsion to imprint on any man who shows even the faintest interest.

“Your name’s █████, and you work at █████ ███████ with the rest of us lads, and you are a fucking man, you twat,” someone says, slow and patronising in a way that should turn Nicci on, but instead only makes her disorientation worse. She sits there helplessly, turning this way and that, so far out of her comfort zone she’s unable to come up with a response.

“█████? Anyone in there, bro? █████?”

“My name’s Nicci!! And I’m a cute dumb girly-girl who loves pink and glitter and great big cocks!! I’m not anybody else and the past is bad and yucky and I don’t want to be here!! If evvyone is gonna keep calling me silly names I can’t undlerstand and saying I’m a man then I am leaving, and you are all gonna begret you gave up your big shot at this hot little butt!!!” she erupts, finally pushed further than her fraying nerves and hammering head can bear. Nicci gets unsteadily to her feet, unaccustomedly wobbly on her towering heels, and summons her best ass-wiggling strut as she walks away from the men, their hysterical laughter and derogatory shouts, and that awful blacked-out name. The club is packed, and Nicci fixes her gaze on one tantalisingly glistening, open-shirted guy after another, drawn to the bulge of muscle, the musky odour of sweat and the promise of a rock-hard bulge in tight pants as a way to banish the horrible, discomfiting fragments of memory that won’t leave her alone. But despite her best efforts, her flirtiest airheaded chatter, her most suggestive poses, she’s rebuffed time and again, and sometimes angrily; she can’t explain it, has checked perky tits and tiny waist and long blonde hair obsessively in the floor-length mirrors scattered around the club, but everyone seems infected with the same terrible sickness, of seeing her as the man she desperately doesn’t want to acknowledge ever having been.

“So, where’d you say you worked again?”

“Oh!! I, uhhh…” stammers Nicci, to all appearances deep in thought, actually almost weak-kneed with relief that someone isn’t reacting with angry disgust. She’s at the bar, beside a tall, strong-jawed guy who looks somewhat the worse for drink, but who she can’t stop picturing herself riding like a rodeo girl nonetheless. “I don’t akterally know!! I live at a like, secret island prison school?? With lots of other hotties, which is the bestest, except, like, a lot of them are dead now!? There’s a scary monster coming out of all the mirrors and ervyone says the cute lil new girl Violet is kinda disponsable for it, which I don’t think can really be true but whatever I guess?? And me and Chlolo and Lottie-loo are climbing this super-big para… plura… squarey-steppy thing that goes all the way up into the sky, which is also kinda-sorta turnding into a mirror now!! That’s wild, right?? And eveything got all woozy and weird and I guess it made us go to a club?!? IDK I am like, super lost, but that’s okay ‘cause you’re here with me now and I don’t gotta think about stuff any more, you big, sexy hunky boy!!”

“What the fuck, bro, I ain’t into that shit! Christ, I just wanted to know if they was hiring, mate. You want to do that roleplay shit, I think you might be at the wrong club, know what I mean?”

“No!!! I really don’t!!!” Nicci exclaims, bursting once more into tears. “I’m not a man, and I never worked at L… at Le… at anywhere, and Matt and Jack and Wesley and… and I don’t know them, I don’t, because I’ve always been… I’ve…”

“Get it yet, Nicci?” whispers a familiar voice, so close she can feel the soft breath stirring the tiny hairs in her ear, yet when she turns there’s nobody but more achingly desirable men who refuse to see her for who and what she so obviously is. “This too is the climb.”

“Ummm, wait, what??” Nicci says, momentarily distracted from her breakdown, pouting with the tip of a nail to her lips in genuine perplexity.

“This is the climb,” Violet repeats, this time from Nicci’s other side, still frustratingly absent from view.

“A climb?? No it isn’t!? I’m like, at a club?!?” Nicci replies to thin air.

“No, I mean, metaphorically, this experience represents the climb,” says Violet, radiating the patience of an abyssal saint.

“Mettermorphicly what?? I’m not climbing!! I’m just sitting here, silly!?!”

“The climb, up the fractured ziggurat, to the summit and the Lens, where the Ultimate Truth shall emerge,” Violet supplies, a note of exasperation creeping in. “This is a… you might say, a representational analogue to the physical ascent. Assembled from your past, your trauma, your pain, and covalent with physical distance.”

“I like totally do not undlersand a word you just said. But I’m super glad you’re here, Vivi!!” Nicci gushes, feeling a lot better now Violet’s with her, even if she does insist on being invisible.

“Having to face your fear of remembering who you were, the horror he would have felt at what you’ve become, being forced out of your protective shell of obliviousness… in this place, at this time, confronting that pain equates to progress toward the top of the structure that used to be the Blue Rose. Is that any clearer?” Violet asks, voice decidedly strained now.

“Nope!! Anyway, I am so not climbing anything in these shoes, so forget that!! I think we should get out of here, because the guys are just the worst, honetsly!! So maybe let’s go hit up a party or something, ‘kay!? Just turn yourself vistible again and we’ll find us some boys who aren’t blind and can see a lil hottie when she’s standing right in front of them!!! Girls’ night, yaaayyy, wooo!!”

“No, Nicci, you’re missing the point of this,” Violet replies, sounding as if she’s speaking between clenched teeth. “You have to keep going. The way out is through. This is a sacrament, a holy trial of en-“

“I’m gonna keep going right out the door, because this place sucks!!” Nicci declares, deep-rooted trauma and potential for personal growth all but forgotten. “I wanna dance and have drinkies and meet hot guys with big sexy bulgies!! No more scary mirrors or nasty monsters and definably no climbing!! You know, I was getting all sad and thinky but you totally helped disdract me. Vivi!! Thanks, girlie!! You’re the bestest!!!”

“Nicci, no, seriously, I… I mean, you… I… oh, you know what? I give up,” sighs Violet, and then everything sort of melts.

-

“Oh god, what the hell?” Lottie gasps, sucking in desperate lungfuls of air like a drowning woman as cold, hard reality coalesces around her once again. She dimly registers Chloe lying on the black stone beside her, whole and unhurt but breathing similarly heavily, the huge swell of her tits rising and falling like a pair of bouncing basketballs.

“That was fuckin’… that was a lot,” she breathes, looking over at Lottie with obvious relief at finding her intact.

“Nicci, is Nicci okay?” Lottie asks, unable yet to stand but twisting around to look for her.

“I’m fine!! Vivi said I beat a test of willpowder and endurants through sheer permorfative stupidity and selected hearing, whatever that means!!” Nicci chirps, sounding significantly more perky than her sisters feel.

Lottie visibly releases a little tension, although there’s more than enough left to go around. “Where even are we?” she asks, sitting up and rubbing at her aching back, attempting to straighten the tattered remnants of her skimpy secretary outfit but only really emphasising how near to being naked she is. The others are no better off: Chloe’s tits are fully hanging out, although that’s no especially novel sight, and Nicci looks less like a cheerleader and more the loser of a fight with a bear, clinging to a single pom-pom and a few shreds of her top.

“I don’t think we’re in canvas any more, Pluto!!” Nicci exclaims, looking out on layers upon layers of swirling fog, within which ambiguous forms twist and writhe, breaching like whales and sinking dolefully back into the chthonic depths. It’s immediately clear to all three girls that they’re impossibly high up the structure now, even in the absence of a view of the ground, but how far remains to the pinnacle isn’t clear.

“What are you on about?” Chloe mumbles, climbing stiffly to her feet and rubbing at her neck. She feels like she’s been strapped to a gloryhole in a stress position for a full day, and she’d be the first to admit that’s a precise comparison.

Nicci shrugs and giggles. “It just seemed like the thing to say?!”

“I maybe have follow-up questions,” Lottie says, weakly, before flopping back down and lying there, staring off into space.

“So what the fuck are we meant to do now?” Chloe asks, craning her neck to look up at where the tiers of the irrational ziggurat disappear into the uncanny cloud cover. “I don’t feel like we got much chance of making it up there the normal way, so are we supposed to go back into fucked-up memory land, or what?”

“Oh god, can we not?” Lottie groans, with feeling.

“Come on, it wasn’t all bad,” Chloe says, running through her stretches the way she’s been taught, in anticipation of a strenuous Round Two.

“Speak for yourself,” Lottie mutters, as she sits up and high-altitude winds whip at her hair. “What was yours, anyway?”

“White Room. Would’ve been better without boring old past-me in there spoiling it with all that fear and disgust and stuff, but you know me, Lots - lock me up, stick a massive cock in me and run a few hundred volts through my bits, I’ll find a way to have a good time, innit.”

“There’s so much wrong with that statement, Chlo.”

“Girl, tell me about it. So what about yours?” Chloe asks her in return.

“Remember the first time I really tried to escape? The punishment device? With the… the timer, and the levels, and that stupid script I had to read out? Ms. Fields’ class?”

“Bitch I always wanted a go on that. Do you think Violet’ll let us swap if I ask dead nicely?”

“I think we should worry more about getting ourselves to the top before those cultists or whatever they are catch up with us,” Lottie says, crawling toward the edge and peering over.

“Speaking of culties, where’s Mister Laurent??” Nicci says, searching theatrically around the corner to the next empty expanse of black stone, checking behind Lottie’s tits, under what’s left of Chloe’s skirt, unsurprisingly turning up nothing.

“Still in there, I suppose,” Lottie says, waving a hand vaguely at the empty air in no particular direction, failing to demonstrate an overwhelming amount of concern for the man.

“Oi! Vi! We’re ready for another trip down memory lane, innit! It’s all the climb or whatever, we get it, so hit us, okay?” Chloe yells in the general direction of the top of the structure. The only response she gets is the continuing dull howl of the wind, the incomprehensible, tantalising murmurs from out of the fog, and the sound of Nicci fiddling with her increasingly threadbare pom-pom.

“Hey, uhh… girlies, do you hear that??” Nicci pipes up, wandering toward the black stone ledge with innocent abandon. Sounds are drifting up from somewhere below the trio now, dampened by the thick, chilly mist but unmistakable as human voices ranting, screaming, wailing in fury and anguish, shouting what could be warnings or threats. The loudest rises to a fever pitch of incoherent gibbering before a single gunshot rings out, then another, finally silencing the wailing voice at the second dull crack.

“Sounds like the competition ain’t having a great time of it,” Chloe says, with no small measure of satisfaction, even as the harrowing wails and sporadic gunfire recede back into the uncanny depths.

“We should get moving,” Lottie replies, hauling herself painfully to her feet and taking an already-weary couple of steps toward the twining, spindly carved figures cavorting on the face of the next tier.

“Seriously??” Nicci squeaks, dismayed at the prospect of physical effort.

Lottie shrugs expansively. “Maybe we’ve got to show willing? Or, I don’t know, perhaps the top’s closer than it looks? Because I’d be fine with that, seriously I would.”

“All I know is, after this my butt better look uh-may-zing or I am seriously like, making that conplaimt!!” Nicci declares stubbornly, and then all that remains is to climb.

-

“Do you ever have them, Harold?” he asks, as the warm fug of smoke-hazed firelight seems to coalesce out of liquid reflections and mist, and a moment later he doesn’t remember why he ever would have thought something like that.

“Have, mm, what?” Talbot asks, taking another sip of whiskey. Laurent shakes his head, trying to chase away bizarre visions of improbably proportioned captives and horrific events that he’s only read about in books.

“Doubts, man, doubts!” he exclaims, feeling inexplicably detached, as if he’s reading his own words from a script.

“Can’t say I do, old chap,” Talbot replies in a jovial, collegiate tone. His deep-lined, serious face contorts into what he probably thinks is a reassuring smile, although to Laurent it looks more like the man’s spotted half a caterpillar in his lunch. “Really, I try not to worry about such things. Morals and ethics and whatnot. All just so much hot air, eh? I daresay better minds than yours or mine have spent their lives contemplating what it all means, and where’d it get them?”

“But we’re talking about a child, Harold,” Laurent protests. His forehead is sweating again, he can tell, and he dabs compulsively with his handkerchief, feeling for all the world like a specimen pinned beneath hot spotlights for study. Talbot’s piercing blue eyes drilling into him hardly help dispel the image, and he remembers too late that he never especially liked the man. “Surely you can’t-“

“Lot of children in the world, eh what? Not everyone’s life can be sunshine and rainbows. Especially not overseas, I daresay. What’s one more on the heap, in the bigger picture? Not like there won’t be more along to fill the space, mm?”

Laurent swallows his revulsion at that, says instead, “You’ve seen the effect that awful thing down there has had on him.”

“Steady on, Laurent. Lest you forget, that ‘awful thing down there’ gave you your peerage, among other trifles,” Talbot responds. Laurent feels the prickly heat of resentment flush his neck and ears, making him perspire all the more. It isn’t his fault his father fell on hard times, just as it isn’t his fault Talbot is taller, better-built, has kept his hair, has a face that brings to mind a politician rather than a jolly fishmonger. Next to him Laurent feels like a doughy imposter, some lesser god’s first try at a man, and being reminded he’s a charity case to boot is too much.

“Yes, and if I could I would give it all back in an instant!” he blurts, saying more in his anger than he’d intended. “Have you actually listened to Wilks’ sermons lately? He’s talking about the great cleansing! Rivers of fire and lakes of blood, the unmaking of the world! He says it’s imminent, Harold, and you really don’t find that cause for concern?”

“Oh do simmer down, man,” Talbot says, and now there’s a nasty glint in those cut-glass eyes. “They’ve been banging on about the end of days for donkey’s years, as well you know. It didn’t happen fifty years ago, or fifteen hundred. It certainly isn’t going to happen in our paltry lifetimes, whether or not old goggle-eyes has been at the cooking sherry. Kneel down and say your prayers, receive your damn reward and be content with your lot, Laurent, because there are plenty who’d happily take your place. Now, are you going to come and play your part like a good chap, or do I have to tell them you’ve decided to play silly buggers?”

“No, no,” Laurent sputters, dizzy with how close he’s come to a cliff-edge without realising it. “Don’t do that, Harold. I’ll participate. You’re right. Even if there were a way, I… you’re right.”

“That’s the spirit, old boy,” the amoral old fraud says, instantly back to insincere joviality, clapping Laurent on the shoulder as if they were friends, as both rise and shrug on their ritual vestments.

The group is already gathered in the wine cellar of Collingswood Manor when Laurent and Harold arrive, a fidgeting, muttering mass of figures cowled in red silk, each so easily recognisable by voice and posture and long association as to make a mockery of the pantomimed anonymity. And there, moaning weakly, freshly dragged from sleep and barely struggling beneath the cover placed over his head as the Book dictates, is the nascent Vessel: a boy of only sixteen, conceived at the confluence of stars and born beneath mirrors, thin-limbed and sickly and possessed of an unsettlingly knowing smile since these communions in the deep catacombs began.

Father Wilks receives the late arrivals with undisguised irritation, and bids the gurning shade of Mr Fitchley open the thrice-sealed door with an imperious wave of one liver-spotted hand. And so the procession descends, by a hidden staircase not featured on any architectural plan, past secret reliquaries and the dusty tombs of the believers who hacked these passageways from the limestone, long-dead and now mostly forgotten, and finally to the natural cave system below. These are rather more impressive than the rough-cut additions, a network of caverns and passages extending miles beneath the West Sussex countryside, bristling with stalactites and stalagmites in weird, spiralling shapes that curve inward toward some hidden point of gravity. It is here that long-ago tribesmen heard the discordant whispers promising glory from a chamber of naturally-occurring reflecting pools, and it is here that, centuries later, a grand silver-framed mirror was placed to afford those inconstant presences a more permanent dwelling-place. And it is here, now, that the Vessel-to-be is laid on the great stone, the lanterns lit, and the whispers roused with offerings of quicksilver and the blood of the two sacrifices, taken from the homeless population of the nearby market town and kept hobbled and suffering down here for a week. As the ritual cuts are made in the Vessel’s flesh and the tincture of sacred mercury administered, as the great pitted surface of the mirror begins to billow and bow from the pressure of the nameless thing within, Laurent sweats and trembles desperately beneath his cowl, finding it harder and harder to keep time with the monotone, droning chant.

“You might think I wouldn’t remember this, Mr Laurent, but I assure you I do,” a voice he instantly, unambiguously recognises as the Vessel’s despite its altered pitch whispers suddenly in Laurent’s ear, making him gasp and start so violently he loses his place in the hymn completely. Laurent’s present-self, no longer sublimated in the memory, clenches his fists and squeezes out a few bitter tears while his past-self tries to gather his wits before anybody notices.

“I’m so sorry. I should have stopped this. I shouldn’t have been so damned weak,” he murmurs, by way of a reply.

“I know, my dear. And truthfully, I’m glad you didn’t. But that isn’t the point of the climb, I’m afraid,” Violet murmurs, sounding genuinely sorry for him before she switches tracks to inappropriately cheerful. “And look! It’s your turn!”

Mad-eyed old Wilks is offering Laurent the ornate, black-bladed knife, as the thing inside the mirror shifts restlessly and murmurs in anticipation. It didn’t happen this way; I was never senior enough, Laurent wants to protest, but his hand is on the hilt, skin crawling at the touch of the cavorting, inhuman figures carved there, and the knife is cutting, blood welling, slicing and praying and begging for the touch of the abhorrent divine, the outer salvation to come, because all this horror is of his making, and this is the climb.

-

With a violent wrench and a sick-making plummet that doesn’t end, just twists and bucks and becomes a shrieking fall in another, nameless direction entirely, the world is pulled inside out through its own ephemeral substance and Chloe is dragged screaming with it. This is something new, and horrible beyond belief; Chloe isn’t her past self, isn’t even human, is nauseous with foreign sensation from limbs and organs she shouldn’t possess.

Eventually, though, unbidden, some kind of sense coalesces from the chaos: she is walking fathomless black-stone halls for the last time, surrounded by a nauseatingly tight press of others, of hard, segmented bodies and quivering, whip-thin feelers, of hairy, fleshy, squirming softness that both makes her want to vomit and comforts her all at once. There are so, so many; she isn’t seeing with eyes, isn’t even seeing by light in the ink-black depths of the cavern, but she has an inescapable sense that if she were, the teeming bodies would stretch as far as she could see. Delicate feet scratch at timeworn carvings, their meanings at once completely opaque and as familiar as the dextrous phalanges dangling from the upper protrusion that’s more a hand than a head. It’s with these that her host clicks and clatters a skin-crawling rhythm, joining a rattling chorus that’s both repulsive cacophony of stridulating insect noise and the most achingly sad melody she’s ever heard, a long, slow lament in a hundred thousand despairing voices, each distinct and beautiful and utterly doomed.

As the numberless masses wait in twitching, jostling anticipation, they’re jarred by a slow pulse in the earth, a deep tremor; a rumble felt more in thorax than in fluid-sacs, and an ominous flickering around the angles and dimensions of the great, dark, vaulted hall. Ten thousand sets of feelers stand rigid in inhuman alarm, and the crowd’s patient vigil threatens to become a stampede. A creature like a horribly attenuated starfish, all gnarled, bony joints and spiny skin, has ascended the vast dais at the end of the hall and is looking down on the teeming masses with an array of twitching sensory bumps. Something passes between it and the ranks of aliens, some language of scents and vibrations that even Chloe, riding the senses of one of the creatures, can’t begin to parse, but its words seem to calm the restless crowd somewhat, as expressed in puffs of sickly-sweet chemical stink and a frantic rustling and rattling of carapace plates.

One of a handful of the maggot-mantis-cave-fish things, distinguished by pale, full-body wrappings, emits an exclamation, although how Chloe’s host can detect it through the stinging alkaline fog she can’t say. Something insidious and fungal is trying to colonise the black-stone arches and delicate frescoes, although the frantic labour of creatures with bodies wedded to rigid, artificial frameworks is keeping it at bay with controlled bursts of negating absence. Then, at some unseen signal from the circle of wrapped figures working at the great, blank dais, the metal begins to hum and tremble, its surface vibrating at an incredible rate, like the skin of an impossibly taut drum. Silent and inscrutable, massed hundreds of thousands deep, the rows upon rows of bristling, pulsating bodies finally begin their slow, inexorable march forward, the front ranks shuffling closer to that ominous, shivering platform with every passing second.

The parasite’s faithful are here, Chloe senses with a sickly lurch of horror, beating at the great obsidian doors in an ecstasy of holy violence, held at bay only by a force Chloe can’t see or describe, but that her host apparently comprehends well enough; some sort of barrier which aggressively reasserts mundane reality, leaving the protean shapes of the attackers reduced and leaking strange matter where they contact it. But even she can see it won’t be enough: already the boundary seems to be receding in places, and from the frantic whine and uneven, faltering spin beginning to unbalance the great cylindrical pillars at the cavern’s edges, despite the frantic efforts of what must be technicians or sorcerers or priests, it doesn’t seem likely the protection will last.

There are no parting words, no eulogy, no grand speech: at an unspoken signal, the teeming bodies simply begin shuffling forward, keeping a measured, sombre pace, shells and feelers and soft underparts pressed together in a slow, click-rattling wave. The unimaginably complex mechanism around which these warrens were constructed stirs groaningly, abominably into life, and the first row of creatures steps delicately up to the dais alongside the foreign starfish-thing, and are simply gone; destroyed as completely as anything could ever be. The half-shattered defensive pillars disengage with a terminal, subsonic groan and an eruption of arcing, charged smoke, and without their protection the entire roof of the cavern instantly ablates away; trillions of tons of stone origami-folds upward into nothing more than glimmering dust, and there it is, glaring impossibly down with the weight of the infinite cosmos: the visage of an angry god, unthinkably here, against all the creatures’ assurances to the contrary, blazing with the horrifying ontological force of its hatred. Chloe’s mind recoils, refuses to interpret the signals coming from her proxy’s inhuman senses, and so she never sees the true face concealed within the forest of spindly, bony, miles-long appendages unfurling above. Neither does her host, thankfully, or the vast majority of gathered creatures, but the hideous, liquid transfiguration and agonising, thrashing end of those too slow or too enthralled to avert their receptors tells her more than she wanted to know.

The machine is roaring to wakefulness now, driving its spikes and filaments into the weft of reality, and the bellowing abhorrence above unmakes the sky in a spasm of rage as it finds itself blocked from penetrating any deeper. A hundred thousand desiccated insect-husk voices rise in a repulsive, beautiful chorus as, rank by rank, they step willingly up to the dais and are obliterated so fully that not even dust remains; as the terrible, righteous workings of the machine feed on the foundational disturbance of such a massed collapse of organisation into entropy, the severing of so many causal chains, of a sudden torrent of stranger and less comprehensible fuel for its furnace. The vast impossibility of the lens, born of forges beyond sense and meaning, spins against the grain of reason somewhere just beneath the real, focusing those inexorable forces on the blemish on the universe that is the raging god-parasite, and begins to pick apart the deep-woven inevitability, and thus inviolability, of its existence. The machine is designed to violate the fundamental nature of an ordered universe in such a way as to make the most utterly deranged logic hold true, at least for long enough that light can become a prison and a mirror can trap a god. And so, desolate and beyond hope of salvation, the long-ago inhabitants march willingly to their deaths. Volition matters, according to the fevered ravings masquerading as science that drive the device, and so when Chloe’s host reaches the edge of the dais, feels the substructural thrum of annihilation pulling at every atom of its body, it clicks out what might be a last few words, and steps forward into oblivion without a moment’s hesitation.

Chloe, mind battered by inhuman sensation and emotion, dimly expects that to be the end, but she’s surprised to find that consciousness goes on for a while, after a fashion. The machine wastes no part of its kindling: the fading informational echoes of Chloe’s host are taken, twisted, stitched into a gigalithine computational gestalt, put to work mapping and dictating the new properties of light. A vast necrotic intelligence comprised of the remains of the dead, gibbering and tearing at its own pathways, forever slipping into entropic noise and renewed by fresh annihilation; the only sort of consciousness that could ever bear the work. Her perspective broadens, then, to encompass the tens of caverns containing just as many desolate souls, marching forlorn and resolute to their own ends, feeding the purposeful atrocity of the machine. And the hated god-parasite finally, truly knows pain, wrenched in impossible directions by forces so anathematic as to be capable of touching its true substance, as it writhes and thrashes and screams across such cosmic wavelengths that whole handfuls of stars gutter and die - as the last stragglers, their rattling song quiet now, ascend their platforms to die - the deathless, inevitable structure of the deceiver succumbs to the new laws of physics, and shatters into endless, recursive reflections and is gone.

The machine, too, fractures, its workings wound so deeply into foundational contradiction and counterfactual truth that reality expels it into nonexistence like a thorn, unspooling into noise with what could almost be a fading sigh of relief. Only the lens remains, drifting inviolate just beyond the bounds of existence, a silent memorial to the passing of an age. The transfigured faithful are already dying, Chloe can see, and badly; their bodies unable to hold together in the sudden absence of their patron and wellspring. Their temples and altars will fall silent, will lie empty down the long aeons, eventually to crumble to dust, and less even than that. None will ever know the name of the species who gave all they were and might ever be to seal away the great enemy. And on a desolate, nitrogen-choked rock where, in the estimation of the departed, life could and will never come into being, each and every chance reflection in water or wind-polished stone will forever bear the faintest fragment of a raging, beckoning prisoner.

-

Chloe collapses like a broken doll and shudders violently, unable to recall how to control her limbs, as her battered consciousness re-anchors itself in the present. She’s alone on another interminable black-stone step of the endless ziggurat, higher and colder still but seemingly no closer to any kind of end, and the only reaction that makes any sense is total despair.

“Brr. Horrid creatures,” Violet’s disembodied voice drifts into her ear, with a verbal shudder that amply conveys her distaste. “I’m sorry you had to see that, truly. Do be aware it’s only their side of the story, of course,” she continues breezily, apparently oblivious to the fact her audience is convulsing uncontrollably as her brain tries to figure out how to manage nerves and muscles and organs. “If you ask me, it’s a bit rich to run around claiming you were deceived just because you’ve decided you don’t like the terms of the deal you made! A pact you entered into with eyes wide open, at that! Or sense-pits open, or whatever nasty thing, I suppose. And then to go off and build a deranged suicide machine that mutilates and imprisons the actual, literal god who was only ever trying to exalt you! Like I said, horrid. Oh, and hopelessly gullible on top: that starfish thingy at the head of the whole mess? It told them it was the last of its kind, a survivor of the previous victims of the big mean baddie, blah blah blah. Total nonsense; it was a remote proxy or an emissary, and whatever it represented, it did not go singing into that long night with its obedient little catspaws. No, the whole thing was a carefully calculated attack, and you’d better believe the Master is going to see about chasing that down once it’s free.”

“H… huh… haah…?” Chloe croaks, just about regaining some sort of conscious control of her vocal chords.

“Hmm? How? Oh, how long? Since all that happened?” Violet says, cheerfully choosing to misunderstand. “About four billion years, give or take,” she says lightly. “Long enough for us to go from a bunch of promising chemical precursors with big dreams to something capable of hearing the fractured Lord’s whispers, certainly. And then to actually get our act together and do what It was instructing us to, which was much less time but, I promise you, felt like it took a lot longer.”

“Mhfg,” Chloe replies, then flops from her side onto her back and concentrates solely on breathing for a while.

You are reading story The Blue Rose at novel35.com

“You’ve really done so, so well, Chloe,” Violet says, sweet and familiar in a way Chloe, exhausted and traumatised as she is, can’t help taking some measure of comfort in despite everything. “I can take you the rest of the way now, okay? Our little secret. You just rest a moment while the other guests catch up, and then we’ll get the party started, all right?”

Chloe silently considers how incredibly ominous that sounds, then tries to remember when in recent memory someone’s said anything to her that didn’t sound ominous and, drawing a blank, decides to pass out for a while.

-

Lottie’s confused; when the cold fog drew in around her and the others, she assumed they were bound for another trip down traumatic memory lane as a warped metaphor for ascending the otherworldly structure. So when the mists receded from her and Nicci to reveal yet another interminable step of the mind-melting ziggurat, with identical ledges stretching away into meaningless distance in both directions, she was left a little nonplussed. Chloe’s gone, and Lottie can only hope that where- and whenever she’s found herself is more hospitable, but she’s also quietly confident that the girl will find a way to enjoy herself regardless.

In the absence of any specific directions, and with significant additional difficulty created by Nicci making it abundantly clear that she really doesn’t want to, Lottie’s resigned herself to climbing. Hauling the sheer weight of her J-cups and comparably-sized ass up the unyielding stone, scrabbling for purchase in the heels she’s by now spending most of her time seething at her conditioned inability to remove, putting in much of the effort to heave Nicci up despite the girl’s petite build making it much easier for her, she’s utterly exhausted and nursing some dangerous thoughts about shoving her sister-in-captivity off the edge and telling Chloe she tripped. They’ve made it a total of three tiers higher, and rising above them could easily be three thousand more. All that’s holding off despair and surrender is the insistent sound echoing up the cold stone from below; a tortured groaning and loud, wet slap and squelch interspersed with occasional high-pitched, wordless screams of fury, which is unpleasantly familiar, definitely growing closer and which Lottie can’t imagine signifies anything good.

She has to admit the sounds have tailed off in what feels like the last hour, which Nicci’s taken as explicit encouragement to step up her complaining to what Lottie desperately hopes is its maximum level, but she isn’t letting her guard down quite yet; at the pace the pair have been climbing, she can’t see how they could possibly have outpaced whatever protean horror is below them, so in the absence of the unseen thing having slipped on its own exudations and fallen off - which seems like implausibly good luck considering the girls’ recent track record - she can only assume their pursuer is trying to trick them into complacency. Nicci, meanwhile, is on hands and knees by the edge, heedlessly craning her neck over the side, because Lottie left her unattended for more than twenty seconds.

“Lottie-loo, I’m tiiiiiired!! I don’t wanna climb any more big dumb stairs!! I’m pretty sure the scary noises were just like, the pipes?? Or a weather balloom!?! And anyway, they’ve stopped now!! So there’s no reason we can’t just like, have a little restie and maybe a snack!! Right??”

“Nics, no, get away from there, we’ve really got to keep-“ Lottie begins, but with a lurch of horror she sees a thick tubule of flesh questing tentatively over the lip of the step, and she scrambles to her feet and pulls a shrieking Nicci so sharply away from the edge that she falls on her butt, wishing fervently she wasn’t cursed to always be so right about everything.

The stubby appendage’s owner hauls itself partway up to meet the girls with a heaving peristaltic spasm, surprisingly quickly considering its obvious size, and Lottie instinctively moves to shield Nicci with her body before she realises she’s alone, the thick clot of mist that’s claimed the girl already dissipating into clammy wisps behind her. Lottie doesn’t have time to dwell on the separation; she whirls around, pulled by the mocking weight of her breasts, feeling all the more vulnerable for having nobody to protect. She half-expects to be rushed, to be subjected to explosive violence or worse before she can even react, but the thing seems content now it has a foothold to pull itself up more gradually, revealing a body that’s hideous even by local standards, while simultaneously almost sad: a great lumpen, fleshy mass multiple times Lottie’s size, appearing at first glance nothing more than an undifferentiated sack of wrinkly skin, hair and hundreds upon hundreds of jostling, subcutaneous lumps, like a shambling teratoma writ huge. But, as it flops and flexes itself fully onto the ledge, Lottie realises there’s a human face buried amid the bulges, like the queen of some unimaginably horrible midsummer, snarling and straining with the effort of moving its massive body, which she idenfities too late and with a retching laugh as composed mainly of testicles. Ma’am, erstwhile head of the Blue Rose, has finally, truly claimed her trophies.

“Well, I guess that answers where those went!” Lottie laughs, lost somewhere between shock and a full-blown nervous breakdown.

“You! Girl! Don’t just stand there! Attend! Assist me, at once!” Ma’am’s voice snaps, mushy and distorted from her transfiguration but no less commanding for it. To her horror, Lottie actually moves a half-step forward before she checks herself and comes to a disgusted halt, but Ma’am seems oblivious, instead dragging the shapeless scrotal bulk of her new body toward the next step by some complex process of internal flexing, and beginning the laborious business of hauling herself up via a kind of extruded, sluglike foot. Given that this is the woman ultimately responsible for every cruelty, humiliation and mutilation visited on the Blue Rose’s captives, Lottie’s desire to see her plummet into the hazy abyss is a powerful thing, but the physical danger Ma’am’s sheer size and weight poses, and her visceral revulsion at the thought of getting any closer to all those folds of hairy, lumpen skin, keeps her merely standing and staring, aghast.

“Foolish, foolish! I told you! I warned you!” Ma’am yells at nobody Lottie can see, her apparent lucidity revealed as a small island in a fathomless, roiling sea. “I was… I am, I must, I will, moth to a flame I come, oh Lord I suffer… oh, oh, what is this? The work, the work, what has become of me? I’m not myself; I’m changed, I don’t… don’t recognise, I, I, I… What am I now, oh God, oh God, oh my God I will be with you soon!”

Lottie reconsiders her position, because if there’s one person in the world who definitely should not be at Ground Zero for the emergence of some kind of nightmare god, it’s the arch-sadist in charge of the Blue Rose. After what feels like an eternity of struggling against her compulsions, and in the absence of any other ideas that don’t seem likely to end with her suffocated beneath an ocean of testes, she wincingly removes a five-inch stiletto and sends it winging off the wrinkled flesh surrounding the monstrosity’s face, with an accuracy that mildly surprises her. Unfortunately this doesn’t lead to the startled loss of grip she’d hoped for, and instead results in the former matriarch abandoning her efforts to climb in order to make a sudden, menacing lurch in Lottie’s direction.

“No no NO no!” Ma’am shrieks, flopping another body-length closer as Lottie hurriedly removes her other shoe, marshalling all her remaining willpower to overcome the programmed reluctance striving to freeze every muscle. “This place is mine! The girl is mine! You are mine! All of this, all of it, mine, mine mine! You will NOT take this from me! I alone shall stand before the Lord, and oh, it shall reward me! It shall raise me up, return me to… to my… please, please, this is more than I can bear…”

The other shoe bounces uselessly off of Ma’am’s rippling, squelching flank and spins away into misty oblivion, leaving Lottie hopping from foot to foot in profound, conditioned discomfort, with no option but to back frantically away around the corner, glancing behind her every couple of steps to ensure the treacherous, inconstant structure isn’t about to shift and drop her down a hole. She silently curses the width of the platform at this height, looking up to try to estimate whether she can make it up to the next tier before she’s caught and concluding that it isn’t likely. Just as she ducks around the next ninety-degree turn, Ma’am’s great squelching sack of a body close at her heels, there comes another blaring explosion of sound and force from the top of the ziggurat, sending her staggering, and this time it’s the most welcome sound Lottie could possibly have heard.

“About time, Violet!” she calls out to no-one in particular, feeling by now moderately deranged. “Wonderful! Sorry I said I didn’t want to; I’m actually really into it! What degradation are we reliving this time? Torture? Questionably consensual sex? Better than getting smothered by testicles, let’s go!” she shouts, as the screaming, fleshy mass of Ma’am gathers itself, ready to launch forward and engulf her, and reality starts to crinkle and singe at the edges like burning celluloid. “Come on! Hit me! I’m ready for the climb! Come on, do it!”

-

She’s standing straight-backed in a lavishly but blandly-furnished conference room of some kind, in a beige-heavy style that’s very obviously a few decades shy of the present, and from the intense, unfamiliar relief she feels at having legs once more, and the decidedly unremarkable size of her breasts and butt, she slowly comes to realise this isn’t a jaunt into her own history. Something of Ma’am must have gotten dragged into the same chthonic vortex as her, and she can only hope and pray the two will be disentangled once reality reasserts itself.

“So, to be clear, you’re proposing that the target audience exclusively be composed of fabulously wealthy perverts?” says one of the men sitting around the conference table, wearing double-breasted business suits and wide, genuinely migraine-inducing ties, focused entirely on Lottie and the slide she’s displaying on the pull-down screen behind her. She herself is stick-thin, toned to within an inch of her life by mechanical, rigorous exercise, angular and obsessively, tightly controlled in every part of her life. She’s wearing an immaculately-tailored Eighties power suit in grey houndstooth, giant shoulder pads and knee-length skirt over an extravagant pussy-bow blouse and upswept, sculptured hair, and even though to the Lottie part of her mind the getup feels more like a costume than some of the outfits in the girls’ expansive wardrobes, she’s Ma’am enough that it makes her feel strong, commanding, unflappable along with it.

“I’ve done my research,” she says, in a voice that’s decades younger and significantly less sharp but instantly recognisable as Ma’am’s. “The demand easily meets our requirements. And the need for secrecy, the drive for constant improvement; all of it fits the model perfectly.”

“But you’re intending to only work with male subjects?” another, older man objects. “Wouldn’t the demand for actual women be substantially greater? Especially once the initial research is done, and obedience can be guaranteed? I’d have thought wives, daughters, mistresses…”

“Certainly,” Ma’am-slash-Lottie replies smoothly. “However, throughput will always be a limitation. What use is demand if we are unable to meet it? And consider the taboo factor: the social circles in which many of our potential clients move would barely bat an eye at the notion of breaking a woman to serve, but possessing a beautiful, willing sexual servant who was once a male rival or subordinate? I assure you, they will all want it, but they will go to any lengths in order to hide that shameful desire. And therein lies our protection, and our lever.”

“And the staff?” yet another ruddy face in an oversized suit inquires.

Lottie feels the younger Ma’am slide frictionlessly into a later section of her meticulously-rehearsed pitch. “As outlined in the proposal, they do constitute a potential risk surface during early operation. And as you have no doubt read, a watertight plan is in place to prevent leaks for the duration.”

“You mean quietly bumping them off whenever they have a breakdown or develop a conscience?”

“Perish the thought,” Ma’am replies, with a polished and wholly humourless smile. “The research wing will always need new subjects, after all. And again, this will be a strictly temporary measure: once the technology is proven and stable, we intend to transition to an indefinite, conditioning-based model with all haste.”

“The poor bastards spend every year believing it’s their first?” the same man scoffs, although a couple of the others look slightly uncomfortable at the idea.

“In a general sense, yes, although in practice the details of each staff member’s biography will be tailored to ensure consistency. Based on our projections I have every confidence that a largely permanent on-site staff can be maintained with minimal turnover from the mainland.” Ma’am concludes, a confident smile still pasted on her lips, mind a terrifyingly regimented steel trap into which, she senses, the tableful of investors have willingly placed their collective foot.

With one of the increasingly familiar liquid stutters in time, it’s instantly later; the pitch is over, and the future facility head and her invisible passenger are sitting in a cocktail bar, listening to vague, tinkly music under dimmed lights and indulging in a solitary drink in order to celebrate their success. A man, who Lottie immediately recognises as one of the younger members of her host’s earlier audience, and who Ma’am herself clearly knows, slides into the seat next to her with no introduction and a glass already in his hand. He’s American, sharp-suited, tanned and toned in a very period-appropriate way, and Lottie has the singularly unwelcome experience of feeling her kidnapper’s tightly buttoned-down arousal from inside her body.

“So tell me, Marguerite, what’s your real game here?” he says smoothly, once the greetings and some somewhat pro-forma flirting are out of the way.

“My real game?” Ma’am - Marguerite, as Lottie will never be able to think of her - replies with a wry smile.

“Oh, come on. I’m very familiar with your… proclivities, and I’m sure you’ll have a whale of a time indulging them. But I know you far too well to believe you’d start an enterprise on this scale just to get your rocks off mutilating a bunch of unlucky young men. Especially if what I’ve heard about the things that go on in the basement of Victory House is true; you really can do all that at home. No, you have some grand scheme in that devious mind of yours, and I’d very much like to know what it is.”

“Because you want in, Charles?” she says, quirking an eyebrow like a soap opera villainess.

“Or because I want to be prepared when it blows up around your ears. Then I’d want in,” the man - Charles - replies, smirking at her over his glass.

“Well, I think I’ve already made it perfectly clear,” she replies with a mock sincerity that turns Lottie’s stomach. “A secure island location, a permanent and loyal staff, providing some of the world’s richest individuals with a product only we can supply, at a price we name? A product we constantly seek to improve, via proprietary research and development? It’s a perpetual money machine.”

“So it’s about the technology,” Charles says, locking eyes with her, his blue to her steel-grey.

“Very perceptive. Do you know, the CIA researched mental modification for decades with no meaningful progress? The KGB for even longer. Not to mention the Chinese, the Koreans, the British. And those are just the programs you’ve heard about. After only six years, my private laboratories have demonstrated results that would, I assure you, astound and terrify in equal measure. But it’s early days yet, and the work needs money, and time, but most of all it needs security. You understand, if even a whisper of the existence of successful neural reprogramming were to get out, there would be no agency or government on Earth that would hesitate to throw absolutely all of its resources at the responsible party?”

“To take it, or destroy it? No, that’s a stupid question: both,” he rebukes himself, with a self-deprecating smile.

“Quite. So while, yes, we will be supplying our billionaire patrons with wonderfully pliable, subservient feminised playthings, we will be refining and perfecting the work my researchers have started. And while it certainly doesn’t take full neurocognitive rewiring to make a man curtsey and simper and submit-“

“-you speak from experience, I’m sure-“

“Ahem,” Marguerite says, the corner of her mouth quirking. “Our clients will be all too eager for every advancement we can offer in remaking their most despised and secretly lusted-after targets to their precise specifications. In the physical sense, also; the biomedical research we intend to conduct in the interest of delivering more aesthetically pleasing, custom-order products is not to be discounted.”

“But the real purpose is this mind control stuff. And with your ‘products’ out in the wild sucking dicks and serving drinks, what’s to protect you from the black helicopters coming after you regardless?”

“Again, our clients will protect us, Charles. That, ultimately, is the point of the whole endeavour. As I told your friends upstairs, there is a select group of quite incredibly rich people to whom this service will be both irresistible and unthinkably shameful. We will be the sole holders of our client list, on- and off-site, and by the very nature of our business - by the simple fact we will have unfettered access to the minds of subjects the clients personally know, without which we would be unable to do our work - no level of proxy contact or obfuscation will keep us from identifying who we are dealing with. In order to keep that information secure, to prevent any dead man’s switches we might have from activating, and not least to ensure future access to our services, I am confident in those people leveraging contacts and connections our colleagues in their boardroom can only dream about. And don’t forget, it doesn’t have to last forever,” she adds, deadly serious now.

“Just long enough to perfect your, what did you call it, neurocognitive rewiring, right? And what happens then, Marguerite?” he asks her, leaning in and lowering his voice.

“Then we get to write our own cheque, Charles. Then we get anything and everything we might conceivably desire. Can you begin to imagine the value of even one politician or CEO with their priorities and loyalties covertly and reliably reconfigured? There is quite literally nothing in the world we couldn’t ask in trade for that. Presuming, of course, we don’t opt to make use of it ourselves.”

“Ah, Marguerite, now we’re talking!” Charles says, a dangerous grin spreading across his features, displaying almost luminously white teeth. And something about that moment, about the infinite possibilities stretching out ahead, the grand plans, the excitement, the sexual charge of the moment and of what’s inevitably to come, causes the scene to stutter and skip in abject rejection, revulsion, denial; to decohere into streamers of image and sensation which flow away like glinting mercury into nothingness. Lottie’s drifting, now, in a space more emotional than physical, where the twinned consciousnesses slide across one another like oil on water. Stretching into the distance in a grim procession, she sees the ranks upon ranks of abused, violated and, increasingly as time goes on, neurally rewired victims, shaped into obedient, submissive young women in body and mind, kneeling and sucking and crying out in pain and, ultimately, serving the most malignant manifestations of power. There are so many, and she realises the dismay she’s feeling at the sheer quantity of human suffering isn’t solely her own, that Ma’am feels something similar for entirely different reasons.

“You didn’t expect it to take this long, did you?” Lottie asks, in a plunge-pool rush of freezing cold clarity. “You waited and waited, and yes, you kept yourself amused, but you had to watch yourself get old. And the technology just wasn’t quite good enough to risk it all. Or was it? Maybe it was, and you were just too scared to leave the comfortable little playpen you’d built. This technology would change the world, and you were so afraid of that, afraid you were too weak to navigate the storm you’d create and come out on top. God, I knew you were evil but I didn’t know you were this pathetic.”

“Silence, product,” Ma’am’s hoarse rasp snaps, from the past and present alike. “What would you know of it? I was cautious, I was prudent! How could I risk it all? And then, oh, then it took… it took so long, then it was too late, too late, and I, I, I…”

“You hated yourself so much by the end, didn’t you?” Lottie crows, triumphant and vicious and right. “All your dreams of power and wealth, all the things you planned to do, they were a younger woman’s dreams, weren’t they? You despise what age has made of you so badly that you genuinely can’t see the point any more. There’s nobody you love, nobody to save, nobody to do it for. So you just squat here, getting crueller and more hateful with every passing year, telling yourself you’re still perfecting the process, that your glory is still ahead, but really you’ve given up.”

“NO! I am, I have, I… it cannot all have been for nothing! I can change it, I can mend it! It is not too late! It is not! It cannot, will not, must not, not, no…”

Abruptly, stretched to breaking by its subject’s mental dissolution and abject rejection, the whole thing unravels into smoke and pain, because however much Ma’am might despise herself, it’s nothing compared to what Lottie feels for her, and their two minds cannot possibly continue to inhabit the same space. She finds herself roughly deposited back on the cold black stone of the ziggurat, and to her surprise and cold, needling dread, she realises she’s at the summit.

-

There are no black-stone tiers reaching up into the geometric, mirror-bright sky in front of Lottie. She’s standing on a broad, flat slab, lit by strange flickers and flashes from a gathering storm of light high above, the tattered remnants of her clothing whipped by strange, inconstant winds. There’s a soft, achingly familiar groan from behind her, and instantly Lottie’s at Chloe’s side, cradling the girl’s head and murmuring her relief as she gradually comes back to awareness and haltingly finds her feet.

“So, this is it, yeah?” Chloe murmurs. Lottie nods and takes her arm across her shoulders, helps her up, and the pair of them stand there, bruised and bleeding and with hair and makeup ruined, waiting together for the next thing to happen. The spatial aberrance of the tower is surmounted by a featureless disc of some gunmetal-grey, weirdly striated metal, perhaps fifty metres in diameter, which Chloe urgently pulls Lottie back from in a shock of recognition. In the centre is something that resembles an ornate chair or empty throne, high-backed and red-grey and strangely soft at its edges. Lottie’s brain itches and her eyes sting when she tries to focus on the intricate, organic patterns covering every inch of the thing, but in glancing at the object she can’t shake the feeling that it’s quivering and twitching very slightly, as if trying hopelessly to move.

“Good old Mister Fitchley,” Violet says, appearing right behind Chloe and Lottie with a spring in her step and a smile in her voice, leaning her head cheekily in between the two of theirs to share their view. “Don’t get the wrong idea; he was thrilled to serve a purpose, although sadly he’s nowhere near as efficacious as I’d hoped. He wasn’t exactly a real person, as I’m sure he told you.”

“Efficacious as what, Violet?” Lottie asks, turning to face her in horror. Violet herself is radiant; her lithe, slender body is completely naked, and inbetween the complex, spiralling sigils painted neatly on her flesh in something tarry and black, her skin is pulsing out a sickly-pale light that casts no shadows and feels like it bruises the eye. She favours the pair of girls with a warm, welcoming smile, as if they’re lifelong friends she hasn’t seen in years.

“Oh, he’s a sort of extemporised interface and control surface for the Machine,” Violet replies breezily. “You’ll recognise the principle from your little jaunt into antiquity, Chloe, if not the exact form. It’s what it’s all about, really,” she continues. “You see, after that nasty old engine sealed the One True Master away, it was meant to unmake itself completely. So nobody could ever reverse the process, you see? But - oops! - you can’t use an eraser to erase itself, because the moment it starts deleting itself it loses its ability to delete things. It’s a bit of a paradox, really! So the real core of the mechanism - all the trillions of subjective miles of schrodingerian extaweave, the reality shunts and ontological turbines and all the rest - are still sitting there, dormant, sunk way under the surface of the real. The conniving little scuttlers must have hoped it wouldn’t matter, that without the control systems nobody could ever find it or use it. But they underestimated the Master’s sheer, grand will, you see. Eventually, over the tortuous ages, some of the fractured pieces of the One Above were able to aggregate, to claw back a degree of awareness, even as the ephemeral nature of reflections tore them apart over and over again. And they learned to whisper through the mirrors, and eventually found servants willing and able to listen.”

“The cult,” Lottie says, flatly.

“The cult! The dear Brethren have been with us for a long, long time, in one form or another,” Violet agrees, beaming. “Longer than they know. And their current incarnation certainly isn’t the first to come within spitting distance of success, although obviously they’re the first to actually manage it. If somewhat in spite of their best efforts,” she adds with a bell-clear giggle, as if she’s sharing a juicy nugget of gossip. “What they needed was someone extremely receptive to the Master’s whispers, and somewhat… neurologically malleable, let’s say. And you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they did to try to achieve that! Eugenics, ritual mutilation, chemical and surgical intervention… much of it pointless, all of it horrid, but now and then it did manage to throw up someone suitable, if perhaps as much by luck as design. Someone, ahem, like me! And once they realised I was a candidate, they’d come at night once a year, and drag me down to the caves under Collingswood Manor, where they’d perform all sorts of nasty procedures to open my mind to the shard of the True God residing in the mirror there, which they’d managed to nurture and keep stable through a frankly distressing two-century program of constant vigil and human sacrifice. And it worked, sort of; slowly, over time, the fragment burned the basic control structures for the Machine into my brain, along with a refinement of the bits that allowed It to speak directly to me. I didn’t remember a thing, of course - as far as I was concerned, I was a sickly toff with severe motor control and speech delay issues, and a terribly unfortunate tendency to have a nasty seizure and injure myself in some quite unusual ways at about the same time every year. Amazing the things you won’t question when they’re all you know, isn’t it, girls?”, she finishes sweetly, then stands silent for a moment as if her signal has been interrupted, smiling motionless with her head tilted slightly to one side.

“Where’s Nicci, Violet? She’d better be okay,” Chloe demands in a low voice, having gathered herself enough to try to sound threatening but mostly coming across hoarse and afraid.

“Oh! I knew I was forgetting someone!” Violet laughs, clicking instantly back into motion and circling the girls with a hip-wiggling sway, as a high-pitched stream of consciousness coalesces from the empty air, its originator seemingly oblivious to her change of circumstances.

“And another thing I don’t get is, okay, like you keep saying this is a climb but I’m preeeeetty sure I’m walking!! And now I’m at the top!! So, like, I don’t see how this was really climbing, Vivi!? Because I have done like, no climbing, and now I’m here!! So I don’t really unberstand why you keep saying the climb?? Wouldn’t it be better to say the walk where sometimes people act super weird and Vivi conplains at you a lot for not really getting it and then you’re at the top?!?”

“You’re at the top because nothing in the vast, cold forever could make you grasp what you needed to do before the heat death of the universe, Nicci,” Violet says, patting Nicci on the head with an air of fond exasperation. “I made it through a subjective hour and twenty minutes, which I’m personally quite proud of, before I couldn’t take it any more and just brought you up here myself. Which is maybe a little naughty, but I never did actually get the conditioning, did I?”

“Oh, hey, girlies!! What’s up??” Nicci bubbles, throwing her arms gleefully around her sisters, each of whom weakly returns the gesture.

“Glad you’re alive, Nics,” Chloe murmurs, averting the watchful gaze she’s keeping fixed on Violet for a moment to kiss Nicci on the temple. She snaps almost instantly back to full alert when she hears a wracking gasp, and the shimmering air disgorges another body: Laurent, looking very much the worse for wear. His face is covered in sweat, scratched bloody down one side, and his yellow-stained shirt is shredded as if he’s been mauled by an animal.

“Oh, yes, this one was in there too,” Violet adds, as an afterthought. “Honestly, he was doing terribly; he’d probably have been stuck reliving his most awful moments forever. But you three seem sort of attached to him for whatever reason, so here you are.”

“I saw… I felt… I was…” Laurent pants, gulping at the air like a dying fish. One of his hands is trembling uncontrollably, and Chloe can’t help noticing the fingers on it look to have been broken in multiple places, as she and Nicci gingerly help the little man to stand and haltingly take a position beside the three girls, although his gaze remains glassy and remote.

The clouds are coalescing into vast skyborne mirrors now, glinting and glittering in a frenzy of hard, angled complexity from horizon to horizon, reflections reflecting reflections’ reflections into a maddeningly tantalising infinity. Looking up into the shifting, flickering storm, unable to stop her eyes trying to track the flashes of light darting from mirror to mirror like synapses firing, Chloe feels overcome by the temptation to lose herself among the countless recursive images of her own body and face, to fall and fall forever in a narcissistic eternity of self, a blissful nothingness of auto-adoration and annihilation. She’s only jarred from her slide into oblivion by the sudden, sickening intrusion of the great machine’s ravenous aura, as recognised from her sojourn into the distant past, and finds herself dizzy and nauseous and embodied back in her own weary, battered skin with a distinct sense of disappointment.

“Anyway,” Violet continues, looking amused. “Now we’re all present and accounted for, let’s continue. Mr. Laurent and his former pals had gotten to the point of having a potential Vessel before, but the poor children had always died, or gone persistently unresponsive, or grown out of their resonance with the fragment of the One Above and expired horribly while being force-fed poison, or whatever. Not me, though: I was made of marginally sterner stuff, as it turns out. Eventually my brain adapted, and my body thrived! I even learned to walk and talk and use the toilet again, although between you and me it did take a minute. That’s when the cult started getting very, very excited, because they figured it was only a matter of time until all the ancient circuitry gouged into my brain turned on, woke the Machine and freed God, and they’d been waiting a long, long time to welcome It back into the world.”

“Then how did Laurent end up sending you to the Rose?” Lottie asks, fascinated despite herself.

“Ah. Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? You see, they were all waiting for their moment of glory, but as time dragged on they had to face the fact that it just wasn’t working, and nobody could figure out why,” Violet replies, beaming at Lottie for providing her such a smooth segue.

“What?” Laurent exclaims, physically shaking off the remnant effects of his traumatic jaunt into memory, like a small, sweaty dog drying itself. “No, wait, the Emergence was imminent! It was all proceeding as foretold! Everyone was certain!“

“Oh, they told people it was, and most of them even believed it,” Violet says offhandedly. “But in private, the leadership was panicking, because everything had gone exactly the way they’d been told it should, and still nothing was happening. Half of them were terrified they’d done something wrong, and the other half were certain they hadn’t, but that just made them start to question their faith in the whole business. Frankly, it was all months from falling apart: schisms, defections, backstabbings, you can imagine the sort of thing, I’m sure. It had happened before. And then you came along.”

“But… no, I was stopping it! I-“ Laurent stammers.

“You came along, dear Mr Laurent,” Violet repeats, with obvious relish, “And with all the best, most noble intentions in the world, you packed me off to the one place on Earth where there was a technology that could reach into my head and give all those dormant structures a little wakeup jolt! And why did you pick that particular course of action, I wonder? You didn’t try to have me killed, or destroy the altar, or sabotage the rituals. You sent me here. Why was that, exactly?”

“What…? Because the Vessel had to be a man, or so we… it was the only way!” Laurent sputters, looking like the whole world is collapsing around him.

“Was it, though? Or do you have a mirror in your bedroom, Mr Laurent? Near where you sleep, perhaps? Do you brush your teeth staring into your reflection in the medicine cabinet? Check your fancy little tie in the dressing room before you leave the house? No, I can’t imagine where you could possibly have gotten the idea to send me to the Blue Rose.”

“No…” breathes Laurent, sinking to his knees, head hung low in absolute defeat.

“On behalf of the once and imminent True Lord of Reality, I thank you, Mr Laurent, truly,” Violet says, with a wide smile and a little bow, while Laurent’s shoulders shake. “On the other hand,” she continues, expression fixed in what looks increasingly like a rictus, “you did send me to be sliced up, tortured and nonconsensually fucked, so,” she clicks her tongue, “you know.”

Violet snaps her fingers and, with a long, awful, gurgling shriek and a sequence of wet, gristly sounds Chloe desperately hopes never to hear the likes of again, Laurent’s body is drawn horrifyingly in on itself, quite literally inverting as organs and bones breach from the bulging hump of his back while limbs strain and snap and, along with folds of loose, torn skin and finally his still-screaming face, are sucked crackling and squelching into the wet, red interior of him. Chloe and Lottie shrink back, horrified, before they even fully register what’s happening, dragging the characteristically late-to-the-party Nicci with them, keeping a respectable distance between themselves and the struggling, moaning mound of flesh that was Laurent, powerless to help and wary of what it might become. Before the osseous scaffolding of his new, roughly rectangular shape has finished erecting itself and filling with hardening meat, Chloe nauseously spies the resemblance to Violet’s horrible throne. And indeed, when Violet picks the awful, steaming thing up with an unnatural lightness and places it almost reverentially on top of its sibling, the two knit together in a brief flurry of stubby, thumblike extrusions which emerge, entwine and pull tight, leaving the flesh-seat taller, grander, higher-backed and more visibly struggling to free itself from the hell of its reconfigured existence.

“Lovely,” Violet says, with utter sincerity, while Lottie dry-heaves, Nicci blinks in confusion and Chloe just stares, wordless and aghast. “Neural tissue, you see. Dear old Mr. Fitchley didn’t have much that still qualified as really real, and I needed a bit more to manage some of the fiddlier instructions for the Machine. Honestly, what we’re doing with it is still very crude - a couple of brains can’t properly approximate all those quasi-organic metacognition drivers no matter how you rewire them - but hey, when you’re trying to break something, a sledgehammer really is all you need. And on that note, you might want to look up, right… about… now.”

With another titanic blast of not-quite-sound, pressure and rippling unlight from the mirror-sky above, making the girls cower and cling to each other against the sheer force of it, the Lens descends into the real. The charnel throne struggles and moans with renewed vigour as the substance of the air directly above it twists and cracks, a line extending what must be a mile or more upwards, and at the terminal point something vast breaches smoothly through the riot of light and reflection. Chloe recognises it immediately, by implication more than by sight, as the strangest and most terrible of the ancient creatures’ machineries; something only half-understood and profoundly feared, the product of abominable sciences gifted by their mysterious - and if Violet is to be believed, duplicitous - benefactors, forged in the heat of anathematic fires, beneath the light of stars that never were. To the naked eye, the Lens looks at present like a perfectly black disc, but a black containing a whole new rainbow, rippling in a million concentric rings like a fathomless pit; a kaleidoscope riot of absence that is nevertheless clearly distinguishable as the spectrum of some other, infinitely more terrible universe. As the girls stare upwards, transfixed, a beaming Violet taps a foot against the metal of the dais and, in perfect time, the Lens seems to bloom with mirror-perfect liquid mercury, rapidly spreading from a point directly beneath the throne to fill the whole city-broad, subsonically thrumming enormity of the thing with just as many pulsing, variegated shades of reflectivity. Before this process is even complete, that vast, perfectly smooth surface, in which the girls can now clearly see inverted images of themselves, and the dais, and the whole black-stone peak of the ziggurat bursting from the corpse of the Blue Rose, starts to bulge and warp with a deep, ominous groan.

“Why are you telling us all this, Violet?” Chloe says, taking the apocalyptic events clearly progressing above as urgent motivation to state her case, deliberately not wondering where Violet would have gotten her neural tissue if Laurent hadn’t been with them. “We came up here to convince you to stop this, not for a history lesson, yeah? So just stop! Please! Whatever they raised you to believe, whatever you’re feeling now, you still got a choice! I know this sounds mad coming from me, but you don’t gotta do anything you don’t want to! I get that now. We’re on your side, babe. Come back to us, okay?”

“Oh, Chloe, you’re so sweet!” Violet exclaims, her easy laughter ringing out eerily from everywhere around the girls, clear and light and without the slightest hint of mockery. “And sincere, too; I can see it in your mind. It’s so nice of you all to worry about me, but I promise you, this is my decision. And if you only knew what I know, you’d want this too!”

“We know enough. The things we seen back there in the Rose,” Chloe demands, shooting Lottie a sidelong look to admonish her failure to join in, “How Cecily and Sasha died, and Jessie and the rest - how can you think anyone would ever want a world like that?”

Violet fully laughs out loud now, before catching herself and covering her mouth with a delicate hand. “Sorry, sorry! But sweetie, it isn’t like that at all! All of that nasty stuff, it’s just ripples from the prison,” she says, visibly composing herself. “A falsehood seared into the weft of spacetime is a pretty formidable thing, after all. Between the foreshocks from such a major metacausal event and the fragments of the One Above starting to wake without yet cohering into a whole, regrettable things have certainly been happening, no question! It’s terribly sad, but that isn’t the Master’s nature; It’s a god of opportunity, of potential, and yes, of change, absolutely, but change for the better! This isn’t about destruction; the True Lord isn’t coming to end the world, but to create something wonderful and new! Oh, also,” she adds, holding a finger up as if the thought has just struck her, “Sasha and Cecily aren’t dead, you know, Chloe. I don’t know why you thought they were, but they’re very much alive!”

“Hang on, what? How?” Chloe gasps, suspecting trickery, not quite daring yet to hope.

“Oh, did you think they got, you know, got in the staff room, when nasty Mr. Warner locked them in?” Violet laughs. “No, no, they ended up diving through one of the mirrors; they’ve been on a whole wild, harrowing journey of survival against desperate odds since then! I’ve been keeping an eye on them: it’s really helped pass the time while I waited for totality to begin. That Cecily is quite the terror when she’s backed into a corner, as it turns out, and Sasha’s awfully practical in a pinch. They’re a bit banged up, but they’re really fine, I promise; they’re on a hijacked helicopter heading West, with Ms Malynovskaya - don’t worry, she’s not doing any horrible protocol stuff, she’s really trying to recover who she was before the conditioning - and a handful of other survivors. Inspiring stuff; I hope they make it, truly. I’m rooting for them.”

“Thank fuck,” Chloe breathes, feeling the knot of grief inside her body loosen slightly. “But that don’t change nothing, Vi; you still need to stop all this before it gets worse! The sky’s going wrong, there’s weird stuff happening all over the world, they tried to fuckin’ nuke the Rose! How do you not see this is a terrible thing you’re doing?”

“Honestly, I think it’s- oh?” Violet interrupts herself, suddenly whirling around like a predator that’s scented prey. “Hold that thought a second, darling, it seems we’ve another guest!”

“GIRLS!!!” bellows a wet, glottal voice from the opposite side of the platform. Lottie in particular tenses and turns to face the noise, heart dropping into a deep pit that’s suddenly reopened in her stomach.

“Shit me, is that Ma’am?” Chloe gasps, watching in stunned horror as the lumpen silhouette looms tall against the mirror-flickering sky. “Is that who was banging about and moaning downstairs all them times? Fucking Christ, I’d have ran twice as fast if I’d known. What happened to her?”

“Gross gross gross!! She’s all covered in tespi… testrycl… tasty… balls!!!” Nicci exclaims, flapping her hands in disgust, as the lurching, sacklike shape heaves itself across the great dais, past the quivering control throne and straight toward Violet with a desperate, furious vigour.

“You, girl! Attend!” Ma’am’s sunken, boggle-eyed face bellows at Violet, who is regarding the whole sequence of events with a sort of detached amusement, inspecting her faintly luminous nails as if the oncoming fleshy behemoth is barely worth her attention. “You are still my possession, and you will obey me!”

“Well! It doesn’t sound like I have much choice, then, does it?” Violet says brightly, stepping lightly in front of the grotesque figure of her former captor-in-chief. There’s such a palpable aura of menace around the girl’s petite, naked form that Chloe can’t believe Ma’am doesn’t slam to a halt and prostrate herself on the spot, but the transfigured woman is apparently so full of assumed superiority that she barely flinches under Violet’s steady, epochal gaze.

“I have made the ascent, and I hereby claim my rightful reward,” Ma’am declares boldly, in that ruin of a voice. “I demand that my… oh god, my b… my body be restored to b… beauty, and youth, and all the power and privilege due me be bestowed! Right away, product! I said NOW!!”

Before Violet, who looks briefly stunned by the sheer unalloyed entitlement on display, can respond, there’s a burst of gunfire and a sharp yell from the other side of the summit. The bullets slap into the swollen mass of Ma’am’s body with little more consequence than a brief splash of sickly, reeking fluid and a flash of fury on the old woman’s subsumed face, but the shout and the subsequent barrage of glottal imprecations brings Violet’s head snapping sharply around, a look of absolute focus narrowing her eyes. The Vessel’s body lifts effortlessly from the metal surface of the dais and swivels on the tips of her toes to face a group of three bloodied, harrowed-looking cultists, accompanied by a pair of grievously wounded mercenaries, presumably the only members of their party to survive the climb.

“How DARE you ignore me, girl? I will be made WHOLE!” Ma’am bellows, red in the face at the sheer affront of being sidelined in favour of a more promising show.

“Oh, do shut up, you rotten old monster,” Violet says without even bothering to face the heaving atrocity. “Did you really, honestly believe you were in with a chance here? You couldn’t even muster the strength of mind to keep your shape! What makes you think any god would want the likes of you in Its service? You’re flopping around demanding this and that, with no thought whatsoever as to the nature of the relationship between supplicant and Divine. Completely ridiculous. No, it’s time you went away, Lady Marguerite Wolstone, and good bloody riddance.”

“Defiance! Disobedience! I was, I am… I am owed this! I have been patient! I have waited-“ Ma’am begins, but that’s all she manages, because at the dismissive flick of Violet’s fingers she simply becomes unmade: every tender, red part of her peels away to form an exploded diagram of a monster, revealing the awful violence already done to her physiology by the mirror-prison’s mindless ripples of change. The front half of her skull and an elongated spinal cord are all that remains of the woman’s original, human skeleton, with a bloated brain bristling with fine, hairlike strands lifted free to pulse and drip atop a constellation of hundreds of yellowish testicles, thick bands of muscle and great wobbling fluid-filled bladders. Then every neatly separated piece just abruptly loses whatever property is holding it together, and the head of the facility becomes nothing more than a broad, wet smear in deep red and sickly off-white, the wave of gory spatter half-coating the dais but bending to avoid Violet’s naked back entirely. Lottie makes a sort of satisfied ‘hmph’ noise, and all Chloe can think is about time.

“Yes! Yes! These are the wages of sacrilege!” a stony-faced cultist in lacerated robes proclaims approvingly. “All of you defile this sacred place with your presence! Throw your whore bodies from the summit, and pray our Lord deems that penance enough to grant you the mercy of death!”

Violet bursts out in riotous laughter at this, causing the lead cultist to glance behind at his peers in obvious consternation.

“Wonderful delivery, Harold! What passion!” she says, as an older woman and younger man step forward to form some kind of unholy triumvirate, expressions severe. “I do think you’ve got some funny ideas about what the Eternal Master actually wants, but I have to applaud your spirit, truly.”

“Is that you, Anthony? What the hell did they do to you?” the younger man blurts at the sight of Violet’s naked body, breasts and penis and delicate hips glowing with that inner light, earning him censorious glares from the other two.

“Nothing compared to what you lovely people did to me, Glenn,” Violet says lightly, but with a decidedly menacing smile. “And I’ll thank you to use my proper name, which is Violet. Conduit to the Final Truth, Opener of the Way, Vessel to the One Who Stands Above, you know the rest.”

“Most holy Vessel,” the first cultist begins, ignoring her words but bowing low in apparent supplication, voice cracking with exhaustion from whatever agonies they endured during the climb. The other two intone a low, droning chant, hands locked into strange, asymmetrical sigils in the air. “By the words whispered across the black abyss I bind you. Akhur an-shqyk uhgr vhy, you shall serve your Master above and we, your masters below, and when the great Flaw emerges we shall sit at Its right hand and preside above the world’s rebirth. Iqhun usq inma a, our faith shall be your chains, our devotion your bridle. Now bring forth our Lord, that we may bask in Its midnight radiance forevermore!”

At the man’s words Violet goes as rigid as if she’d touched a live wire, and sinks stiffly to her knees, face utterly empty of expression. Chloe’s heart freezes: Violet as the perky, terrifying mouthpiece of whatever nightmare god is about to come bursting into reality is bad enough, but Violet in thrall to a bunch of aristocratic zealots can only be worse. The elderly potentate shuffles forward, a triumphant smirk on his face, but it’s short-lived; before he’s advanced more than a couple of steps, Violet regains her feet in an eerily boneless motion, circling smoothly around the cultists on the tip of a toe as if skating, considering the three of them while she giggles in earnest amusement.

“Joking, obviously,” she laughs, as the cultists back away in confusion and fear. “Although I have to admit, that bridle part sounded a little hot, don’t you think, Chloe? What was that, anyway, ancient Iqh-vyhn? Phonetic Kinspeak? I mean, you mangled it pretty badly, but even if you hadn’t, what in the world made you believe it would make me obey you? It’s not magic words! You wouldn’t believe how much yammering the smelly little scuttlers did back in the day, and I can’t say any of it was especially compelling.”

“He isn’t obeying,” the one Violet addressed as Glenn says to his fellows, clearly on the very edge of panic. “Why isn’t he obeying? Did they… did this place do something to his brain?”

“She isn’t obeying, you rude little man,” Violet snaps, floating higher and sounding for the first time actually annoyed. “And no, they didn’t do anything to my brain, really; there just wasn’t time. This is exactly how it was always going to go. You never had control over me; you just believed centuries’ worth of absolute horse manure telling you that you did.”

“The Lord, slumbering beneath the vast sea of unmaking… It promised us!” the female cultist croaks, raising veiny hands as if to ward off an imminent assault from the naked girl currently studying her and her peers like a particularly ugly insect she’s found on the bathroom floor.

“You know, I really don’t think It did,” Violet giggles, instantly back to her light, breezy affect. “I think your grandaddies’ grandaddies made very limited contact with a fragment of the True Master, and crudely synthesised an exceptionally silly religion from the bits and pieces of truth they received. Along, inevitably, with a bunch of stuff that’s more about the nature of the prison and its horrid little creators than the god you claim to revere. Or is the product of overactive imaginations and inbreeding, if we’re being perfectly honest. It’s kind of funny when you think about it.”

“Do not dare patronise us! We were the ones to break the Lord’s shackles! The impending glory is ours and ours alone!” the woman snaps, looking as if she’s on the verge of striking Violet, which Chloe intuits would be a singularly bad idea. It seems she does too, because she visibly holds herself in check just in time.

“Yes, Hortense, all right; credit where credit’s due and all that, you did get there eventually, I suppose,” Violet sighs. “It took you far too many generations and too many absolutely hopeless attempts, but you finally managed to stop worshipping mirrors and follow simple instructions just about well enough, and that earns you a little goodwill. You’re wrong, though: the glory belongs to the One Above, and the triumph, and time, and space, and thought and reason. Everything belongs to It, and thou shalt not place thyself above It. Look! Look above you! Look up and tremble! It’s almost time!”

High above, the vast unblinking eye of the Lens has bulged and distorted so far out of true that it more resembles some frenzied animal struggling to escape a sack; a riot of swelling and contraction, a reflective map of impossible peaks and valleys in constant, maddening flux. A piercing whine has been steadily rising in the background, more physical than audible and so insidious and penetrating that the girls feel it resonating in their bones and skulls, sparking strange standing waves in the silicone sacs of their breast implants and the transplanted fatty tissue of their asses.

“Anyway,” says Violet, clapping her hands, businesslike again before the backdrop of this mind-melting visual, auditory and cognitive assault, and eerily comprehensible above the din. “The simple fact is, I’m not wholly convinced any of you are quite what the One Above is looking for in a supplicant, you know?”

“What do you mean? We’ve been faithful! We’ve given our whole lives to Its service!” Charles pipes up, shouting over the noise in plummy tones of upper-class outrage.

“Well, yes, in a sense I suppose that’s true, minus the aforementioned bit about spending half your time praying to the prison rather than the prisoner,” Violet says equivocally. “And it isn’t as if you were hurting for mortal pleasures on the side, was it? That’s the problem; I don’t think a single one of you knows what submission or service actually even is. Maybe it’s not your fault - it’s your class, your lifestyle, the questionable assumptions mater and pater passed down - but really, what you call devotion has only ever been a grab for personal elevation. You don’t love the Master; you don’t revel in abasement before Its power, and you’ll never abandon ego and your petty delusions of independent will. You only want to see the world overturned so you can declare yourselves kings and queens of the next one. Down all those generations, all those failed Vessels, that’s all it’s been… it’s sad, really, but there you go.”

Before any of the cultists can protest, Violet snaps her fingers, so perfectly timed to coincide with an arcing flare of sizzling light from the maelstrom above that it isn’t clear which precipitated the other. The zealots and their guards are pressed hard against the stone surface of the dais, the air knocked out of them by the weight of that invisible force, as Violet steps lightly between their groaning figures, still regarding them with the same curious detachment.

“Also,” she says, lightly, “You took a terrified child and tortured him - cut him with knives, fed him poison, opened his mind to something he didn’t and couldn’t comprehend - and it’s only by chance that he grew up to be the beautiful, well-adjusted and independent young lady who stands before you now. No wonder you thought you’d need to bind me with incoherent doggerel from a dead tongue, because there was no way in hell I was going to see the lot of you raised to glory. Pass!”

The unseen pressure increases so sharply that there’s no obvious transitional state between groaning cultist and burst balloon, just a multiplicity of crunches and a sudden overabundance of wet, bloody matter, through which ropy veins rapidly spread from the throne, rooting the thing deeper into the surface of the dais. Violet pokes an indistinct, slushy mass with her toe, makes an expression of distaste, then appears to forget about the erstwhile believers’ existence entirely and trots back to the trembling girls, all three of who shrink away in terror, none daring to take their eyes off the Vessel.

“Oh, now, you don’t need to be afraid of me, sweeties!” she says, darting forward inhumanly fast to take Nicci and Chloe by one hand each, her radiant skin and steel-hawser grip leaving them with a prickly brightness seeping up their wrists and arms. Unwilling to leave her sisters, Lottie doesn’t back off any further, but she does pull both girls a step or two away as soon as Violet releases their hands. “They were horrid people,” Violet declares, “trying to exploit this epochal wonder for their own selfish ends. But you three, from the moment we met you’ve been nothing but lovely to me! And such potential; you certainly know what service means. You know the joy, the release to be found on your knees, owning your inferiority, in begging your Master for instruction, purpose and will to supplant your own. You might actually know that better than anyone in the whole world. Also, let me say,” she adds with an air of sharing a secret, “I’m terribly impressed at your strength of mind, girls. To have remained whole and uninfiltrated while travelling through the heart of the storm! Margot and her ladies didn’t manage it; they jumped at the first half-formed invitation to service, pledged themselves to a coalescent fragment of the Lord in a way that was… less than ideal, let’s say, and got themselves a bit messed up, didn’t they? Then there’s Ms. Fields, and horrible old Ma’am, and all the rest; victims of their own failure to hear and heed the Lord’s true voice among the echoes and the noise. But not you! You walked through the maelstrom and you didn’t succumb. All the more points in your favour.”

“Because we’d start thinking about dick every time something was about to get in,“ Chloe says, sounding as dismissive as she dares.

“I mean, I wouldn’t have guessed that’d be the most effective defence either, but here we are!” Violet replies happily.

“But, I mean, it wasn’t us, was it? It was just the-“

“The brainwashing? Even if it was, who cares? You said it yourself, after Mr. Warner got his just desserts: you have the mind you have, and that’s one which seems to be exceptionally able to filter the Master’s true voice from the shrieks and gibbering of the abyss. If that’s because you were conditioned to have constant, intrusive thoughts about penises, well, all the better! And, actually, that brings me rather neatly to my point. You see, everything I’ve laid out here means the three of you are quite incredibly interesting to a deity which is looking for… well, servants, I suppose, but in a very exalted, senior sort of way,” she says, exuding genuine enthusiasm and altruistic intent as hard as she possibly can. “It really is the best offer you’re going to get this side of the bleak maelstrom of flesh, I can promise you that!”

“We ain’t here to serve it, Violet, we’re here to get you to stop!” Chloe yells, in abject disbelief that Violet still isn’t listening when the world seems primed to end at any moment.

“Chloe, darling, I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Violet says, shifting to a slightly more sober register. “The Machine is waking. Reality bleeds. The inexorable process has begun. Nothing can stop this now.”

“No, Laurent said you could!” Chloe insists, feeling the thread of hope slipping through her fingers. “You just gotta believe you can, Vi! Fight it! You have to want to!”

“But that’s rather the problem, isn’t it, sweetie? I don’t!” replies Violet. “This is a good thing, a beautiful thing, and I really hope I still have time to convince you of that. I just think you’re primed to misunderstand the situation, that’s all, and I completely see why: I mean, scary cosmic deity about to tear its way back into existence, a trio of plucky survivors overcoming terrible odds to reach the focal point just in time, one absolute vision of a girl who’s obviously possessed or something, and needs to be begged to remember who she is and then cracked over the head with a handy stiletto just in time, so she can go ‘I… forgive… you… uuugh,’” Violet croaks, play-acting a theatrical death. “It’s practically the monomyth, isn’t it? We’ve all been conditioned to see strange, new things as threatening, and surrender to a greater power as shameful. Even your time at the Blue Rose couldn’t entirely erase that. So, I can understand how you’ve framed stopping this as being heroic and me and the One Above as the villains. But the point is, it just isn’t true!”

“Vi, the sky is coming apart and you got a throne made out of two inside-out guys and we’ve spent the last couple of days watching everyone we know get eaten and burned to ash and ripped limb from fuckin’ limb. What do you think you’re possibly gonna say to make us go ‘yeah, we was wrong, this sounds mint, let’s do it’?” Chloe says.

“Aha, well, maybe I’m not the one to ask,” Violet says with a self-satisfied smirk, padding around the huddled trio of girls with a predatory glint in her eye, “In fact, one of you already has! Isn’t that right, Lottie, you sly little minx? What made you see sense, my darling, hmm?”

Lottie fidgets and shuffles under a trio of stares; one accusatory, one friendly and open and potentially containing that of an entity older than time, and one utterly vacant. “…It’s true,” she eventually admits, looking like she’d quite like to duck behind the obscuring bulk of her breasts and stay there. At Violet’s eager beckoning, she moves silently over to stand beside the naked, radiant Vessel, who gently takes her hand while she fidgets uncomfortably.

“Lottie, you fuckin’ snake!” Chloe explodes a second later, snapping into maximum reality-TV throwdown mode for want of a better way to respond. “I can’t believe you’d betray us like this! And, I mean, like, humanity and shit too! I thought we was friends!”

“I’m not as protected by the conditioning as you two are!” Lottie cries. “You don’t know what it was like, seeing you constantly in danger of… of dying, or worse, and hearing the whispers telling me it could keep us all safe, if I just let it in! And, I mean, it worked, didn’t it? We survived when we had absolutely no right to; we walked through hell in six-inch heels, and we’re still here! That has to count for something!”

“Jesus, I’m such a fuckin’ mug for not seeing it,” Chloe hisses, still visibly seething. “When’d you do it, anyway?”

“Remember when Ms. Fields had us cornered in the staff corridor? After Jessie…” Lottie’s voice catches, and she visibly swallows a sob, “It told me It could save us. And, I mean, It did, right?”

“Not Jessie! And not Lily, Marcie, Tamara and Felicia, who, let’s not forget, Violet fuckin’ killed herself!” Chloe yells, pointing an accusatory finger at the Vessel.

“I didn’t mean to! I wasn’t in control yet!” Violet interjects, and she’s either sincerely sorry or she’s doing a very good impression of it, although it doesn’t show on her face for more than a couple of seconds before she’s back to her usual serene affect. “And their sacrifice, unfortunate as it was, made the world’s salvation possible. Their names won’t be forgotten.”

“Margot’s lot didn’t touch us, the fucked-up things in the basement ignored us all and went for Warner… the door to the docks! You just happening to find the exact files about the contingency thing! Your chastity cage came off! Pissing hell, I should have realised. That is so muggy, Lots! I can’t believe you done this! You never thought maybe me and Nics would rather you didn’t sell your fuckin’ soul? Like, maybe we’d rather have taken our chances and not had you damned to suck monster cocks in hell or whatever? Oh, no, Lottie always knows best, just ‘cause she’s got the biggest bit of her old mind left. That don’t make you smarter than us, darling, it just makes you think you are, you snakey bitch!” Chloe yells, tears freely streaming down her face, smearing her ruined makeup all the worse.

“That isn’t the only reason, is it, Lottie?” Violet says quietly, nodding at Lottie by way of encouragement.

“No. It’s not,” Lottie says, hesitantly but gaining confidence as she goes. “I’ve kind of… sensed a lot of what Violet’s saying, over the last couple of days. I agree with her, Chlo. With It, I suppose. This world… it’s rotten, fucked-up beyond saving. If this really is a chance to start fresh, even if it’s, you know, a big change… it has to be worth it. It’s a way to finally get everyone free of the kind of people who ran this place; who did all this to us. Maybe the only way. And I think you see it, too, Chlo.”

“Well said, sweetie,” Violet murmurs, squeezing Lottie’s hand.

“You’re talking about the end of the world, you absolute mug!” Chloe shouts back, in incandescent disbelief. “I been there, you know, Lots. Back when they locked it away. I seen the last bunch of people this thing convinced it was gonna help ‘em, and they was turned into stuff out of your worst nightmares, innit! They got so desperate they all killed ‘emselves just to make sure it couldn’t do it to anyone else! It don’t help anyone; it just makes monsters, Lottie!”

“I’d have thought you of all people would understand that only the changed really have the perspective to judge change,” Violet says, sounding a touch disappointed in her, which Chloe finds herself irrationally hurt by. “If I could go back and show the person you were two years ago who you are today, he’d be horrified beyond belief. He’d have fought, begged, done anything to avoid that fate. You adore your new self; are you really unwilling to entertain the possibility that they did, too?

“I mean, I get what you’re saying, but they was all teeth and spiky bits and too many arms and shit. That’s a bit different to getting massive tits and a killer bum, right?” Chloe protests, some of the wind leaving her sails.

Violet shrugs. “Beauty standards do vary.”

“Chloe, listen,” Lottie cuts in desperately, sensing the argument is at risk of coming off the rails. “The world’s run by the rich and the cruel and the power-hungry, and it’s too entrenched to ever change, right? Generational wealth, influence, all that stuff; it’s only getting worse, and I don’t believe it’s fixable any more. Not by normal means. You remember how terrible the breaking and discipline was? Put your hand down, Chloe, I know you got off on it, but it was still bad - well, the whole fucking planet is one big Blue Rose, where we’re trained to serve the whims of wealth and power on pain of punishment. It’s the same thing! And just like the Rose, you can’t escape it, and nobody on the inside could ever break the system. It won’t end unless something ends it, and what’s coming is big enough to put a stake through the heart of this rotten system when nothing else can!”

“At the price of wrecking the world, Lottie!” Chloe yells, feeling like she’s the only remotely sane person left on top of this miles-high, physics-defying ziggurat.

“And what’s worth saving about a world that sent all of us to the White Room?” Lottie shouts back, fists clenched, resolute and righteous. “Behind all the bullshit they told us - and then we started telling ourselves - there’s one truth, Chlo - we were sex slaves, brain-fucked to pantomime consent when really we were being raped! And the people who did that to us, and who paid them to do it, are the people in charge of everything!”

“Okay,” Nicci pipes up, with the air of someone delivering a grand thesis, “So, I am the first to agmit that maybe I’m not totally getting this, but aren’t like, a lot of nice people gonna die too?? Like hot guys?? And pretty girls and cute babies and puppies and stuff?! And isn’t that, like, bad, maybe?!?”

“It’s unfortunate, but yes, there will be a cost,” Violet admits, clearly making an effort to look sombre, however sincere her feelings may or may not be. “The Machine runs on lives, and while undoing its awful work requires far fewer than the original atrocity consumed, I won’t lie and say it will be bloodless. I can promise you that the One Above and I have strived to make that number as low as it can possibly be, though: neither of us has any desire to see unnecessary loss. Truly.”

“And what happens if we say no, Violet?” Chloe asks darkly. “Do we become some of those acceptable losses?”

“Of course not!” Violet exclaims, to all appearances genuinely taken aback. “If, after we’ve all said our piece, you really, truly don’t want to be a part of this moment of wonder, I’ll take you and Nicci back to the mainland and you’ll be free to make your own way in the world to come. Both of you have been hurt enough; I’d never do anything to compound that, I swear.”

“So a pat on the arse and a good luck to your mates, everyone else gets to pray they’re not one of the unlucky ones,” Chloe spits at both Violet and Lottie.

“And I wish it wasn’t going to happen that way, but then that’ll be it,” Lottie pleads. “Every day, how many people starve, die of disease, in wars, on the street? How many are tortured like we were? How many live in misery and fear from poverty and abuse and violence? It says the world won’t be like that, afterwards. It says we can be free!”

“And that makes mass murder okay, does it? Jesus fuck, Lottie!” Chloe blurts.

Lottie’s fully crying now, in frustration and guilt and anger; “It’s not okay, Chloe! I know that! It’s awful, it’s unforgivable, but it’s the only way!”

“Especially,” Violet adds, jumping on the opening with a slightly unseemly enthusiasm, “If the right people are positioned to help mediate the Immaculate Truth’s interactions with Its human subjects.”

“Wait, you think we’d be able to what, call the shots? For a god, or whatever this thing’s supposed to be? Don’t that sound a bit optimistic to you, Lots?” Chloe snorts derisively, as the rising wind whips at her extensions and the tattered remains of her filthy, torn stewardess costume.

“You wouldn’t be calling any shots,” Violet laughs, high and clear and unselfconscious. “But you must understand, the Master’s perspective is so, so far removed from ours. It will most certainly look to Its most favoured servants to provide… context, let’s say. It has grand plans for humanity, wonderful plans, but the exact path that process follows - the subjectivities of the world in the medium term - some amount of influence might be exerted. For better or worse.”

“So we could make it a nice world?! And like, not full of blood and teeth and stuff!?” Nicci asks, wide-eyed.

“Blood and teeth can be pretty useful,” Violet replies levelly, being extremely reasonable. “And I can’t promise your own point of view on what’s nice might not evolve a little. But isn’t that just life? Our experiences shape us, in greater or lesser measure. Love, loss, the conditioning chair, willing service to the rightful lord of all creation. All I can promise is that your choices will be your own, sweetie.”

“It’s… no, it’s still no, Violet,” Chloe says, although her resolve is wavering as her mind struggles to absorb the enormity of what Lottie’s telling her, which she can’t pretend isn’t making some amount of sense, although how much of that is the exhaustion, disorientation and terror, she can’t say. “Are you forgetting that me and Nicci was happy here? All this stuff about power and control and shit, you gotta know some of us are better off on our knees! We was made to serve drinks and suck cock, and I know that ain’t you, Lottie, but it is me and Nics!”

“That’s right!!” Nicci adds vehemently, swivelling like a weathervane to match the last person to speak.

“You didn’t feel that way when you killed Mr Warner, Chloe.” Lottie responds, fists balled at her sides, tears still running down her face at her sisters’ intransigence.

“Prick lied to me. Made out he was King Shit and turned out to be nothing but a wind-up toy, innit. It wasn’t any big thing about being independent or whatever. I’m still me, ain’t I?” Chloe snaps.

“But that’s precisely your problem, Chloe!,” Violet shouts, unnaturally audible above the raging madness of the storm, which, impossibly, is growing louder and brighter still. “You’re you, and that means always feeling unfulfilled! They made you a creature of endless want, which is why nothing’s ever really satisfied you! You killed Warner because you realised he wasn’t enough for you, and you were right, because they made you too well! There’ll never be a cock big enough, a man strong enough, an act of submission total enough for you! Until now, Chloe! Here is a master so powerful, so dominant, a surrender so complete that acquiescing will require you to offer up every part of you there could ever be. Tell me, deep down, that isn’t what you’ve always craved! That feeling, when you’re on your knees and you know that whatever you’re told, you’ll do it, and and you’ll revel in being controlled; you can live in that feeling, Chloe, free from the inadequacy of men and bound to the will of a Lord that will never, ever let you down. I dare you to tell me you don’t want that! If doing it for the world isn’t enough, then do it for you!! It’s now or never, Chloe!! What do you say??”

“I don’t know!” Chloe screams, tears streaming from her eyes and away into the bright, deafening chaos all around. “God, I can’t… I don’t fuckin’ know! Nics, what the hell do we do?”

“Don’t ask me!!! I’m super bad at having opninions!!” Nicci cries. “I’ll do what you do; I trust you and stuff!! But, like, what Vivi and Lottie-loo said didn’t sound bad perzackly!! Maybe I’m midsummerstanding, but it sounds kind of okay?! Like, maybe it’s worth a try?!?”

“Chloe, Nics, you know what I think, but this is your decision! I just want you to know I love you both, whatever you choose!” Lottie screams above the apocalyptic fury that’s everywhere now, threatening to pick them up and drag them into its whirling maw, and then it’s beginning, and there’s no more time for anything.

“I fuckin’ love you too!!” Chloe yells, but her words are whipped away into the storm along with thought, and sense, and light and meaning. A grating, grinding shriek of such volume and physical force that Chloe can’t believe it doesn’t tear her body apart blares from the great lens hanging like a stormcloud over the dais, as the whole bulging, straining enormity of that affront against reality snaps instantly back into its perfectly flat original configuration. This looms balefully above, seeming now to contain some terrible energy concentrated so strongly that the lens can barely hold it, rippling inward in concentric rings of riotous, nameless colours and vibrating at a terrifying pitch, emitting a rising screech that seems to correspond to the lifting of loose stones, bits of debris and chunks of discarded cultist into the whirling, scything air.

“Well, that’s time, I’m afraid!” Violet announces, sounding neither regretful nor concerned, despite what might be a sad smile that flickers across her delicate features for a moment and is gone. She walks at an unhurried pace to the bone-and-sinew throne, almost lost against the raging madness of the sky, and finally, genteelly sits, legs crossed, arms laid carefully level on the rests. “The next time you’re asked, it won’t be me asking, and the time for prevarication will most definitely be over. Whatever you decide, It’s been lovely, girls, truly. Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a moment. Tell me I said hello!”

Violet’s head jerks back and her hands tense clawlike against the arms of the groaning, twitching throne, and with a sound like tearing meat and a shriek so piercing and weirdly-modulated that no human throat could ever have produced or survived it, she simply explodes into a jagged, branching webwork of light; a towering tree of interconnected, searing lines like a disembodied nervous system stretched to bridge an impossible distance, linking throne to glowering, strobing lens across a mile of tortured air.

“Vivi, nooo!!” Nicci cries, her voice whipped away by the hurricane winds, as the brain-bending imposition of the structure their friend has become hangs there before the girls, impossible to look directly at for more than a second or two, crackling and pulsing from the dais up to its gigantic sky-borne companion.

And then, without further fanfare, it happens: time seems to stutter and snap, one moment and the next melting together into a single frozen, fleeting eternity, all existence bending inward toward this single moment of fracture. The lens warps and flexes in ten billion infinitesimal ways, finally finding its alignment, and for one perfect, blasphemous moment every mirror in the world reflects every other mirror, images plunging inward into an endless. recursive abyss of twisted reflection that instantly, irrevocably destroys the minds of the unlucky two per cent of the planet’s population who happened to be looking at too acute an angle. Chloe, Lottie and Nicci cling desperately to one another, battered by unsolicited images delivered direct to their overstressed brains by proximity to the great synaptic branchwork that used to be Violet. They watch buildings topple, great swathes of city and country alike swept away by uncontrolled eruptions of screaming, frozen nothingness, by tidal waves of needle-sharp light, by annihilatory waves of change and remaking. Millions die, and millions more, but more still see the cataclysm bend to spare them, watch their surroundings obliterated while they remain whole and untouched. And, still quiet for now but steadily growing in intensity as the perfect moment of alignment stretches and the trillion flecks of discorporate god begin to mesh, all three girls hear a voice that isn’t a voice whispering that this is a small price for an eternity of glory to come.

When the lens finally discharges, it blasts out a flare of unlight that obliterates the reflective sky, reveals behind it a roiling abyss burning with hypnotic new colours that neither fade nor abate. All three girls tremble and shake as one while they’re assailed by visions of the same riotous depths yawning above Seoul and Shenzhen, Marseilles and Berlin, and everywhere people walking glassy-eyed into the streets, minds temporarily overcome with the same low, wordless song of awe. Another four per cent of humanity spontaneously explodes into glistening newness, mewling and thrashing as they reckon with their redrawn horizons. And above, the final truth coalesces; thousands of miles long, parting clouds and churning the seas with the imposition of Its physical aspect into the world, made up of a sanity-defying, endless recursion of structures like bony limbs clutching one another to form a flexile lattice, so intricate and dense with infectious knowledge that to stare at it too close is to be drawn in forever. One end of the impossible leechlike vastness of God plunges into the earth, ten million fat, pulsing tubules as broad as skyscrapers squirming deep beneath the crust, while the other spreads itself wide; the limbs of an unthinkably vast, desiccated, many-jointed tree spread like fingers, claiming a full quarter of the planet beneath Its grasping shadow.

And at the pinnacle of the holy monument that marks the end of an age when humanity could imagine itself master of its own destiny, holding tight to one another where the living throne is nothing more than a congealing puddle and the lightning-bright webwork of Violet has already begun to fade into lingering echoes of light, the three survivors of the Blue Rose tremble before the gaze of the outer divine. It speaks one absolute, obliterating word, searing through every atom of their being; a command, and a choice.

And in the end, there is only one word they were made to say.

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