THE BLUE ROSE

EPILOGUE: TEAR ME APART

Up and out, around and down, beyond the boundaries of space and sanity, there are new paths now.

Chloe steps lightly onto polished wood that must once have rivalled the Blue Rose’s exquisite fittings, now reduced like so much else to a dust-blown ruin, splintered where roofbeams have fallen, scattered with the remnants of priceless heirlooms and beautiful things. Lottie and Nicci drop easily to the floor behind her, moving to positions on either side with barely a sound: an unselfconscious grin from Lottie and a cheeky pinch from Nicci, and both make something in the core of Chloe ache with joy at the confirmation that they’re safe, they’re free, they’re happy. And they have purpose now.

Chloe takes the lead, strutting ahead across what remains of a grand entrance hall, revelling in feeling powerful, sexy, filled to bursting with an inchoate potential. A chandelier lies like some dead, detumescent deep-sea curiosity, beneath a ragged hole to the upper floors through which the faintest twisting of the new sky can be seen. A pair of sweeping staircases lead around and upward, flanking a grandfather clock stoved in by a heavy impact and caked with dried blood, but Chloe has the sense that the girls’ objective lies further in. She crosses the space in a few quick strides, the sharp points of her heels clicking on hardwood parquet. Chloe isn’t wearing shoes; she isn’t wearing anything at all. None of the girls are, and she takes a moment without turning to appreciate the sinuous lines and generous curves of Lottie’s body as she sways fluidly in her wake. Like her sisters, Lottie’s proportions are quite different now, and substantially more practical than before, but Chloe notes with quiet amusement that she’s still the curviest of the three. Meanwhile Nicci, still petite and delicate, gets momentarily distracted poking at the fallen chandelier, and belatedly trots up with a handful of salvaged crystals, holding them up like earrings then instantly losing interest and tossing them away to jingle and clack on the broken floorboards.

Wandering the corridors and rooms of the rear half of the mansion, Chloe finds herself piecing together a narrative of the fate that befell the place when the world began to change. Here, in the ballroom, the mirrors have been covered or broken: streaks of blood, dry and flaky now, lead into empty frames on both sides of the room where luckless victims must have been pulled in, and deep gouges in the walls and floor speak of the thrashing of something sinuous and holy. She takes the time to uncover every intact mirror she passes with a private little smile, admiring herself in what now are purely mundane reflections; the One Above has left Its prison, and the nature of that prison, entirely behind. Nevertheless there’s a flickering like hummingbird wings around the edges of one of those mirrors, some facet of the new physics asserting itself, and as Chloe steps nearer in fleeting curiosity, something like a mass of thin, glutinous worms peels itself strand by strand from the reflected image, cohering quickly into a vaguely humanoid, hissing thing two or three times the size of a person. The world is reckoning with an overabundance of leftover mirror-fauna like this, and Chloe finds herself feeling surprisingly sorry for the poor confused thing, born of a nature its god was already in the process of shucking off, left metaphysically obsolete and dreaded, reviled and hunted by both the survivors of the world that was and the children of the new. For all its coiling attempts to sting, this orphan isn’t capable of threatening Chloe, and on a whim she moves toward it, holds out a hand to try to soothe its roiling mind where it hangs in the air above, appearing to her fresh eyes as a riot of purples and blues. The worm-mass thing makes a sound like a teakettle and bolts into the nearest intact mirror before she can touch it, and while some of her eyes can easily follow its clumsy progress below the skin of the world, she reminds herself she’s here for a reason, and it isn’t to make friends with every lonely halfway-thing struggling to find a place. Anyway, she can see Lottie trotting up at a leisurely jog, and Chloe does her the courtesy of turning to face her before she arrives.

“Chlo, Nicci says she can smell him back that way,” she says, although those aren’t the sounds her mouth makes. “I thought you’d want to be there to do the honours. Unless you’re busy making friends,” she adds with a smirk.

“It was all alone, poor thing,” Chloe says, giving the mirror one last experimental poke.

“Yeah, you know it had dissolved like nine people, babe,” Lottie says with a certainty borne of newfound insight. “Literally dissolved. Didn’t even need to eat; it was just a dickhead. Maybe not the best choice for a pet?”

“Guess not,” Chloe laughs. She flicks her eyes in a direction nowhere on the map, but that both of them immediately recognise as homeward. “Plus, we got enough strays to take care of, innit.“

“That’s mean,” Lottie reproaches her, with a grin. Chloe shrugs, still laughing, and, loose-limbed and easy in a way she’s still marvelling at her ability to be, follows her sister through water-stained sitting rooms and half-collapsed hallways to where their prey has gone to ground.

“He’s hiding in there, the dumb dummy dumbface!!” Nicci giggles, indicating a heavy, locked door behind which Chloe can see the mansion’s huge, old-fashioned kitchen, where pots and pans are strewn all over the tiled floor, the huge cast-iron range has been crushed halfway into the wall, and every scrap of food appears to have been rooted out and taken by parties unknown. Chloe can detect the distinct odour of arrogance, privilege and fear now, but Nicci’s nose for these things tends to be the most acute.

“Anyone else with him?” she asks, as Nicci happily wraps an arm twice around her waist in greeting. She gives a big, theatrical sniff and shakes her head.

“No, just some pretty stinky bodies, and-“ she sniffs again “-yep, something’s totally been chewing on them. Gross, at least eat somebody fresh!!”

“Alright, that’s all I needed to hear,” Lottie says, easily lifting the heavy cabinet that’s been used to block the hallway. While she finds somewhere to lay that down gently without alerting their target, Chloe yanks the whole heavy door off its hinges with a tortured squeal of metal and tosses it carelessly over her shoulder, resulting in a deafening crash and the sound of panicked, receding footsteps.

“Chlo!” Lottie exclaims, as Nicci laughs riotously at the chaos.

“What? Come on, don’t try and tell me you don’t like a bit of a chase now and again,” Chloe replies. “This little twat’s given us such a runaround, I feel like we’ve earned ourselves some fun, right?”

“Maybe, but I’m blaming you when we’re still looking for the arsehole in two hours,” Lottie says, although she can’t quite keep the grin off her face.

-

In the end they find the man quickly enough, both thanks to the girls’ heightened senses and the fact he screams and starts firing a shotgun wildly in their direction from behind a crude barricade of shelves and boxes upon first catching sight of them coming through the door. He wings Chloe in the face with half a barrel of shot, which only serves to annoy her; she feels a surge of some nameless emotion ripple down her spine and into the heart of her, and wordlessly she untenses muscles she’d half-forgotten she’s been holding taut, letting drop the loose semblance of her old shape that she’s been maintaining, unfurling herself like an origami sculpture. The gaunt, filthy man emits a quavering shriek and fires again, then frantically starts trying to jam new shells into the gun with trembling hands, but by this time Chloe’s crossed the distance to him, all of her arms spread wide.

“Martin Caldwell,” Chloe says, making a conscious effort to speak in a register audible to his ears. The man looks more shocked at the accent coming out of her than anything else, which she finds faintly disappointing. “Martin Caldwell, of Caldwell, Brenner and Associates. Net worth, when that meant anything, approximately two billion. Not that it’s doing you much good now, you mucky little fucker. Now, did you or did you not engage the services of the Blue Rose facility to kidnap and surgically modify one James MacReady, in large part because your fiancée liked his dick better than yours and you couldn’t hack it?”

“What? I… no, I didn’t, I… wait, James? That can’t be you…?” he stammers, eyes saucer-wide in his gaunt face. He probably wasn’t a bad-looking guy at one point, but the time since reality assumed its new shape has been rough on a lot of people, especially those used to giving orders and smoothing over the consequences of their behaviour with money. The girls have been pursuing him all the way up from what used to be London, and he’s led them a merry dance, which in itself has clearly taken a further toll; what was obviously once a toned figure now looks wasted and half-starved, and he has crude bandages wrapped around various injuries, some of which are visibly teeming with novel parasites busy transmuting the man’s flesh into something else entirely.

“Aha, no, I’m not her, mate,” Chloe laughs. “Delilah, yours was called. She was in the class above ours. She was dead pretty. Got shot by a scared guard with an itchy trigger finger when the whole shitshow first started up, which was sad.”

“And… and that’s why you’re after me? To punish me? For that?” Caldwell stutters, still trying desperately to reload his shotgun. Chloe shrugs, a complicated gesture with her new anatomy, and looks pointedly at one then the other of her sisters, which doesn’t involve turning her head. Both have unfolded themselves in turn, and both are simultaneously akin to and wholly distinct from Chloe’s form in ways she finds utterly captivating, as she does her own.

“Not really,” she says, casually, as Nicci giggles, a sound which not terribly long ago would probably have given her nightmares. “But our Master’s got demands, don’t It, and we figured if we was going to give It anyone then it might as well be the cunts that put girls like us through the White Room, sent ‘em for punishment surgery, generally turned people into property, you know?”

“Think of us as a late delivery,” Lottie says, smiling nastily. “You ordered a girl from the Blue Rose, and now you’ve got one. We even threw in two more for free, to make up for the delay.”

“We didn’t come packed in a box like they used to, though!!” Nicci adds happily. “Which is kind of a shame, ‘cause Chlolo used to fancysize about that, like, a lot!!”

“I think maybe we’re getting a bit sidetracked,” Chloe begins, but the object of the girls’ excursion has taken the opportunity to finally wrestle more ammunition into his gun, and unloads both barrels straight into her chest. The shells impacting with the rigid integument and luminous cilia of her torso feels more like a patter of itchy hailstones than anything, and the actual slugs are quickly absorbed into Chloe’s body, but the sickly-looking man takes the opportunity to hop over his makeshift barricade and scuttle away down a steep staircase into the cellar. Giggling with genuine joy, Nicci drops into a hunter’s crouch and follows, pulling herself down the narrow stairwell with a multitude of ropy appendages, her tucked-in feet never even touching the floor.

“You okay?” Lottie asks, moving up behind Chloe and gently stroking the whorls and complications of her new skin.

“Course I am, babes,” Chloe says, giving one of Lottie’s knots of fine, writhing sensory tendrils a cheeky tickle. “Take a bit more than that to bother me. I mean, I assume,” she adds, with a self-deprecating shrug, since none of the girls have actually encountered anything capable of doing them serious harm as yet.

“We should probably catch up with her before she gets too carried away,” Lottie says, indicating the entrance to the cellar. “I don’t want to find out what it looks like when God’s pissed off with us because we spent a fortnight chasing a sacrifice and brought back a bag of mincemeat.”

Chloe nods. “Don’t mean we can’t have a bit of a giggle first, though, right?” she says, taking one of Lottie’s hands and leading her, laughing, down the steps together.

What follows is an exhilarating hour of stalk-and-chase in the pitch-black maze of the cellars; from Lottie through Chloe to Nicci, each girl has a proportionally greater love of toying with her prey, but none can pretend they don’t feel immensely sexy and powerful when they’re lurking unseen in the dark, a living knot of unnaturally coiled muscle and hyper-receptive strange-matter skin, every atom singing a joyous hunter’s note only they can perceive. Eventually, though, Chloe decides it’s time to bring the game to an end, because it’s starting to seem like their weeping, hyperventilating victim might actually die of a heart attack in the near future.

“Think maybe we should get going?” she murmurs to Lottie, who’s lurking behind a wine rack and picking bits of flesh out from under her nails, apparently having already decided to leave most of the fun to Nicci.

“Suits me,” she says, and steps smoothly out into the middle of a dark passageway just as the filthy shape of the girls’ quarry rounds the corner, a maniacally cackling Nicci in leisurely pursuit. The largest of Lottie’s arms peels open along its length into multiple muscular, petallike segments, revealing a glisteningly red interior lined with tiny teeth. Like a vampire squid taking its prey, the whole thing snaps hungrily shut before the unfortunate Caldwell can so much as scream, leaving Lottie with a struggling, rubbery, man-sized sac hanging off one side of her body, which gradually diminishes in its thrashing until she’s merely carrying a suspiciously-shaped lump beneath the bloated skin.

“He’s okay in there, yeah?” Chloe asks, as she always does, because she can’t quite get over how fatal that looks.

“Eugh! Bleh! He’s fine, but he tastes horrible,” Lottie complains, spitting with her more conventional mouth, which appears not to help overmuch.

“Still gotta teach me to do that one of these days,” Chloe says, regarding one of her own right arms with a critical eye, as if it’s letting her down by not blossoming into a monstrous extra maw.

“Your body can figure it out, silly!!” Nicci announces, flushed a luminescent, nameless colour from the chase. “All you need is to-“ she wraps an arm around each of her sisters’ waists and pinches Chloe’s butt for good measure, “-give it lots and lots of chances to get ack… awkw… aqui… to get to know hers, like, really really well!!”

Chloe defers to the expertise of easily the most physically malleable of the trio, and takes the opportunity to arch herself against Lottie’s naked form, which results in her earlier arousal returning with interest, and from the physical signs only one of her sisters would likely recognise, Lottie’s, too.

“So, on that note: home, girls?” she asks, and with a dizzying twist of tortured logic and a vertiginous step outside the stuffy boundaries of the rational, the three girls drop through the floor and into the spaces between, their quiescent cargo barely twitching as they go.

-

The ruin of the Blue Rose seemed to Chloe a strange place for the girls to choose to live, in the whirling fever-heat of the days immediately after the One Above’s emergence, but she’s come around: it offers an unparalleled refuge from the noise and clamour of a world still recovering from its own birthing pains, is perfectly safe for residents without vulnerable flesh or physical needs, and is in any case the only home the three of them have ever truly known. The place looks half-melted now, caught in a state somewhere between vertiginous Escherian ziggurat and luxury island prison when God’s cage finally shattered and the ruined Machine disengaged once and for all. One side slumps like an elephant’s foot in the vague shape of a building, materials that should never have been capable of liquefying nevertheless run together and blended to form weird amalgams, bloated and sagging under its own weight, while the other rises hundreds of feet into the sky in a zig-zagging spire of thousands of narrow, squarish steps, diminished tenfold from its paradoxical glory but stable and still very visible at a distance. Little wonder no boats have attempted to land, even as great multitudes have fled the mainland in search of respite from the new, Chloe thinks; the place practically screams eldritch hot zone, the site of some cosmic disaster that has rendered it uninhabitable for generations to come. And that’s likely true, if you aren’t something like the girls have become: as Chloe pulls herself free from the glutinous baryonic strands of the paths beneath the world, she instantly feels what used to be grass rise to taste her feet with tiny, needle-sharp tongues seething with godborne micro-fauna, senses the infinitesimal particles of divine spoor that saturate the air settling in her eyes and on her tongue, seeking virgin cells to conquer and retask. Any of this would likely bring a particularly horrible end to a visitor still wearing their original flesh, but to the girls it only feels like home.

Nicci skips ahead, leading the way across the deceptively tranquil-looking grounds, beneath which Chloe can sense strange, slow things moving in the dark soil, and through the drooping remains of the main entrance. In the final hours of the old world the chandeliers erupted into full bloom, spreading to cover the whole arched ceiling in glittering, fractal strands, a quietly rustling crystalline webwork through which a few of Chloe’s eyes idly turn to track secret, slow pulses of thought. The pillars still bear the doomsaying frescoes of old Vyrhc-Uhn, once ominous, now merely quaint; crustacean-insect-mummy figures prostrate before the One Above, figures hurling themselves into fires both metaphorical and literal, heroic depictions of the visitors from between the stars who lent them the means to seal away a god. The dire warnings are halfway grown over by the ubiquitous, aggressive fungus that seems to spontaneously manifest wherever the Lord’s attention has been directed, and Chloe finds a little amusement in the irony of that. Further into the dark, familiar labyrinth of decaying classrooms and half-collapsed dorms, the stuff is everywhere, climbing the walls in patterns reminiscent of sectioned brains and raising round, bulbous clots from ceiling and floor. Nicci, ahead, stops stock-still for a moment and cocks her head as the gauzy strands of fungus trailing against her skin whisper some secret message into her body, before laughing happily and continuing to play her private skipping game, dodging the patches and streaks of old, dried blood ground into the cracked lacquer.

Where the stairwell used to lead up from the classrooms to the teachers’ offices, where Ms. Fields became something tortured and hateful and Jessie died, a strange tree now grows through the floors and ceilings of the building, providing a shortcut down to the lowest levels of the old research labs. Fields’ corpse is here, partially wedded to the wall in the form of a grotesque, osseous husk, victim of Lottie’s vengeful fury in those first heady hours following the girls’ becoming. The tree, meanwhile, is not at all a tree, is in fact what the lashing amalgam of limbless experimental subjects became: a branching, twisting tower of sinew and bone and keratinous bark, shot through with gently pulsing veins and strands of outer matter mimicking neural tissue. Chloe originally expected to sense unspeakable anguish from the immobile, fleshy thing, but she was surprised to discover the tortured souls within had found genuine solace in planting their roots and dreaming long, slow dreams together. Not so the majority of the transfigured victims from the specimen cells, most of whom were even more desperate to die in their new forms than their old, and who the girls spent a couple of sombre days tracking down and releasing as painlessly as possible. Nevertheless the Blue Rose is home to a burgeoning population, some formerly human and some spontaneously borne of the convulsive tremors in the real that followed the prison’s final undoing; things many-legged and chattering scuttle from their lairs at the girls’ approach, some glaring balefully from jealous perches and some muttering words of beseechment and flattery in registers no human ear could detect. Chloe runs a hand gently along the tree’s hard casing as she passes, receiving a fleeting impression of the spiralling, peaceful meanderings of the coalescing gestalt within as it gradually becomes something new, which she looks forward to welcoming when it finally wakes.

She vaults easily down the dozen exposed levels of the facility, past dead generators and cold crematoria, broken water mains and secret archives. She lands lightly on the tips of toes and fingers, barely disturbing the torn-up concrete where the not-tree’s plastic roots have burrowed deep. Nicci follows with her usual gymnastic flair, bounding effortlessly from ledge to ledge on the fingers of two hands and finally cartwheeling to a standing position in front of Chloe with a cheeky grin. Lottie comes down more heavily, even if she still lands with ease, holding the bulbous sack of her arm above her to protect its contents from the fall and looking mildly put-upon.

There’s an altar at the Blue Rose, one so secret, so sacred and so deeply affected by the One Above’s fathomless gaze that for almost anyone to approach it would mean agonising change unto dissolution, an eruptive abandonment of form, the utter erasure of ego and flesh alike. The girls are made of sterner stuff, but even they feel the buffeting ripples in reality that wash out of the old neuroprogramming lab like pulses of heat and light and noise, a deafening symphony that bursts in their minds and sets their cells humming and singing in concert. The abandoned cells that once housed the forlorn victims of the Rose’s research are empty of anything but rubble and wreckage - even the supernal fungus can’t survive here - but none are surprised to see, lingering as usual at the threshold of their tolerance, forever barred from the inner mysteries by their own impatience and greed, Margot and her coterie.

“Good day, blessed ones,” Margot’s two faces say in unison, and as ever Chloe inspects her open book of a mind for any sign of secret resentment, which she’d be almost relieved to see, but finds only sincere reverence and admiration.

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“Hey, Margot, how’s it going?” Chloe says, feeling uncomfortable and trying fruitlessly to have a relatively normal interaction. The former wives-in-training are firmly beneath the trio in the hierarchy of servants to the cosmic divine; physically weaker and less able to casually shrug off injury, less physiologically malleable by far, and crucially, much less primed to hear and comprehend the chorus of outer secrets and ancient lore that swells and crescendos in the girls’ heads, and as a result are almost pathetically desperate to please. Chloe has been discomfited by their deference from the start: it reminds her far too much of the abusive power dynamics that defined all of their former lives, and while she tells herself - not untruthfully - that she doesn’t want to bring harmful social constructs into the bright new world, she also instinctively recoils from anything that casts her in Warner’s old role, or reminds her of him at all. Lottie feels similarly, and acknowledges the line of bifurcated handmaidens with a cursory nod, which they seem tragically grateful to receive. Nicci, on the other hand, finds her former tormentors’ subservience absolutely hilarious, and delights in giving them pointless, demeaning and tedious tasks however much the other two wish she wouldn’t.

“Naughty naughty, I didn’t see a curtsey, ladies!! What did we talk about?!” she demands, as a couple of the smaller girls literally shiver in trepidation. Nicci constantly seems to forget how much bigger and more powerful the three of them are than Margot’s clique, especially when they aren’t folded in on themselves to mimic their old shapes. All eight of the naked, prayer-daubed bodies to survive the Blue Rose’s descent bob a simultaneous, crisp curtsey of the kind the girls used to perform fifty of per day, and Nicci claps her hands with glee.

“Sorry, blessed Nicci, we shall endeavour to do better,” Margot says, ever the suck-up even now, and Nicci looks satisfied until, seemingly outside of Margot’s conscious control, her monstrous other-self swings their shared head around and intones, “Serve and serving undeserving blessed by luck and circumstance we we we were first in faith and now we serve and strive and spit.” Nicci spins around, expression thunderous but clearly, at least to anyone who knows her as well as Chloe and Lottie do, utterly delighted.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, Margot!! Could you maybe repeat yourself, if you would!?” she asks sweetly, both literally and figuratively dripping venom with her words. Margot, who’s managed to clamp two hands over her traitorous second mouth, swallows hard.

“Ah, I’m, that is, I-“ she stammers, while her other-self clearly tries to say something else unhelpful. Her new senses have reassured Chloe that both of them are Margot, and neither is, at least in her entirety; exactly what traits and tendencies the two faces represent seems to shift with the girl’s mood, but there’s visibly one core mind at work, even if neither half can influence the other except during the rare moments they’re in concord. It seems like an exhausting way to live, and makes her doubly glad she and her sisters weren’t as desperately eager to pledge themselves to a quasi-coherent fragment of God.

“Silence!!” Nicci booms, spoiling the effect slightly by breaking down into giggles. “For this impu… inpa… for this rudeness, I sentrence you to… stand on your heads and quack like ducks! For a week!”

Chloe rolls half her eyes and Lottie struggles not to laugh as the line of picture-perfect nightmares gamely clamber upside-down and fill the holy emptiness of the antechamber with a cacophony of quacking. She can see the strands in their heads that she or her sisters might pull to compel obedience, and can see that Nicci isn’t touching them: the erstwhile clique’s compliance is entirely by choice, borne of a genuine, burning desire to prove themselves in the eyes of God and Its favoured daughters. They’ll probably actually keep at it for a week if nobody stops them - she’s seen them do more ridiculous things, and for longer, especially on the not-so-rare occasions that Nicci’s told them to keep at something until she returned and then just forgotten.

Lottie lets the display go on for a minute or so, hefting her swollen arm with visibly diminishing patience, before she says “Alright, well done, now fuck off somewhere else,” and either she very slightly outranks Nicci in the ex-wives’ eyes or they just really, really want her to, because they hurry to comply.

“Hey!! No fair!!” Nicci protests, turning with an exaggerated pout.

“Nics, we’re literally keeping God waiting,” Lottie points out, inclining her head toward the thrumming door to the holiest of holies, source of the actinic waves of not-light that would obliterate less exalted bodies where they stand.

“I’m sure It agrees with me!! Rudeness must not be toremated! Tomorrowated! Tolom…” she goes on, but she trots along with the other two contentedly enough while she does it. There’s another bare hallway beyond the furthest point Margot’s coterie can stand, where the throbbing beat of the One Above’s focus is so strong that the walls and floor ripple like water, and past that there’s an unassuming door. Chloe clasps her sisters’ free hands in as many of her own as can reach, takes a deep breath purely out of habit, and pushes it open.

-

“Hello, you beautiful things! It’s so good to see you back! Did you have a nice trip?” Violet gushes, running forward to embrace Chloe and the others in turn, making every atom and fibre of each girl’s being dance in convulsive ecstasy. Violet - or the Speaker, as she’s known by the crowds she regularly sermonises to in the cities - looks deceptively human, like a poised, pristine version of the new-made girl the trio met in those final days at the Blue Rose. Like speaks to like, though, and Violet’s touch inspires such overwhelming rapture in Chloe’s reconstructed cells that she has to actively concentrate to retain her discreteness, to resist melting joyfully into her maker’s great singularity and losing herself forever. Violet seems aware that the effort is exhausting, as she draws back with an air of faint regret and smiles, inviting the girls to speak.

“Yeah, it was good, thanks, Vi,” Chloe says easily, letting herself forget for the moment that a literal deity to whom space, time and sanity are fragile playthings rides piggyback on the petite young woman’s every thought. That Violet is still very much herself came as something of a surprise, and a relief; if Chloe expected anything when she watched the girl’s body reform out of the air, it was for the one-time Vessel’s mind to have been blown away like a leaf in a hurricane by the sheer power of the entity moving through her. The thought that the terrible, unknowable thing behind Violet’s eyes is merely doing a very good impression of its former emissary has occurred to Chloe, but in the absence of any way to verify that, she’d much rather believe in the less horrible possibility.

“Let’s take a look at what you’ve brought us, shall we?” Violet asks. Lottie obligingly hefts her huge, bloated arm and lays it carefully against the altar. This was once the stainless-steel operating table where the Blue Rose’s researchers vivisected living brains in order to refine the conditioning process, and the prototype neuroprogramming rig still lurks beside it like a metal-and-plastic cadaver, spilling wires and circuit boards from its gut, although what it would impart if someone turned it on now is a mystery (and one Chloe intends to explore, when a suitably deserving subject presents themselves). To ordinary eyes that’s what the altar still is, although ordinary eyes would erupt into vermiform abundance just from gazing upon it: there’s a recursive reordering of the structure of the metal that starts at the atomic scale, continues into the subatomic and far beyond, a thesis written in the deepest fundaments of matter that twists the laws of space and energy into a lunatic knot. The segments of Lottie’s monstrous arm peel back with a wet slurp, revealing the unfortunate Martin Caldwell, marked at the places where the hollow teeth within have tapped his bloodstream, injecting a cocktail of substances to keep the prey alive in chemical stasis. Peristalsis expels the man’s groggy, writhing form onto the altar’s surface - Chloe always marvels that the sacrifices don’t burst into black flame or melt, but the One Above likes its morsels intact, and Its will shields them until it doesn’t - and Lottie draws back her arm, flexing her fingers, glad to be relieved of the burden.

“Is this one from the list, Lottie?” Violet asks, although there’s no way she doesn’t already know. Lottie nods; Violet runs a tender hand above the man’s softly keening body, staying just a hair’s breadth short of actually touching him. “Margot and her ladies did well with that,” she murmurs. “It took them ever so long; those little carbon atoms are so fiddly, and the energies of the Emergence really scattered them all over. I should reward them. I wonder what they’d like?”

“Bigger boobies! Like way bigger!” Nicci blurts. Lottie pinches the bridge of her nose, looking physically pained.

“I think maybe ask them?” Chloe ventures.

“Mmm,” Violet says, undecided, and Lottie’s visibly about to intervene when the Speaker snaps her fingers and announces brightly, “Anyway, let’s get to it, shall we? The Master is very eager.”

There’s a long, infrasonic note, like some deep, abyssal orchestra tuning up, and a profound sharpening around the altar; a metaphysical lensing, objects becoming somehow more real than real, as the One Above focuses Its obliterating attentions on the gift laid before It. Caldwell is conscious now, and already shrieking from the altar’s touch as the god’s merciless gaze slips like a scalpel between the strands of his being. As if he were an orange being peeled, the man’s skin floats away in a single long, spiralling streamer, blood and fluids carried along in the form of quivering zero-gravity globules. Muscle fibres separate, bones pull smoothly free only to themselves become peeled to the marrow, and even when all the myriad parts of him are hanging in the air like an exploded diagram, still Caldwell screams and wails as he’s literally studied to death. It occurs to Chloe that she might once have been upset by what she’s witnessing, and if not her then certainly Lottie and Nicci, but all three now find themselves only fascinated: drawn to the otherworldly radiance of the spectacle like bees to a flower. The One Above doesn’t relent, keeps stripping each part into tinier and tinier slivers, sectioning bone and brain and separating the components in the eyes, until finally It seems to have satisfied Its cold, alien curiosity and the wet remnants drop, to spatter across altar and old equipment and girls alike, barely even identifiable as human remains. Violet casually flicks her fingers and the mess dissolves like ash blown away in the wind, and she turns to face the girls, face alight in a wide grin.

“Lovely, truly,” she says, dabbing at her lip as if she’s just finished a meal. “It’s very happy with your service, girls, I must say. Very happy indeed. Did you know our dear departed Mr. Caldwell was a serial sexual abuser? And that he killed another boy at boarding school and nobody ever found out? So many nasty little secrets to tease out, so much to learn!”

“Violet, if it’s not, you know, impertinent or whatever: toward what?” Lottie asks, coiling and uncoiling her abdominal mouthparts the way she does when she’s tense. “Why does it want these terrible people?”

Violet laughs, waving a hand to defuse the moment. “You can ask me anything, sweetie, you don’t need to be nervous! No, it’s…” she looks upward, as if consulting the higher power she’s plugged directly into. “It’s a bit complicated, and bear in mind I’m filtering great big thoughts through my tiny little mind here, but it boils down to this: It’s identifying traits, humours, flavours in humanity. It wants to intimately know the worst we can be. Know it from the inside, as it were.”

“Right, but what for?” Lottie asks, emboldened.

“Okay, well, you know the One Above intends to elevate humanity, yes?” Violet says, as Lottie and the others nod. “Patronage, protection and a gradual move toward a more resilient, adaptable form more compatible with our Lord’s nature, and better-suited to thrive in a frankly very hostile universe teeming with all sorts of nasties; keeping the unique characteristics of our species as intact as possible because variation is strength, all that sort of thing. Well, this is an integral part of that - it’s not quite as simple as spotting characteristics It wants to chop out, because there are aspects of even these horrible people that are irreducibly human, you know? It wants to, how should I put this… metabolise the most malignant products of the world we had before. Metabolise and transform those qualities into something more constructive, via a pseudo-biological, metacomputational internal process I can’t even begin to describe in words without sounding like an absolute lunatic. Since It is so very far above our little scratchings around in the dirt, your sterling efforts in providing It such wonderfully unpleasant material to dismantle and digest are incredibly helpful. It loves us,” Violet says, beaming with sincerity, “and It wants us to grow strong and beautiful in Its shadow. It has so much to teach us: you’ll see so many more wonders, in time.”

Chloe feels, rationally, like she should doubt Violet’s words; that the unconditional love and genuine desire for human betterment allegedly flowing from the being an ancient civilisation committed mass suicide to seal away is maybe something best met with skepticism. But everything the Speaker is saying resonates so profoundly with her body and mind, feels so completely in tune with the sense she has of the One Above’s intent via her own connection to It, that she simply can’t take her doubts seriously. Lottie clearly feels similarly, looking genuinely satisfied and content, and Chloe would be willing to accept anything to see her that way. For her part, Nicci appears to be conducting an impromptu puppet show with a bunch of abandoned surgical instruments as the characters, so presumably she’s happy enough too.

“So what next, boss lady?” Chloe asks Violet, who gives her an exaggerated frown that can’t entirely hide her amusement, because she hates being called that and Chloe knows it.

“Well, as I said, the True Master is very pleased with your service,” she says. “More sacrifices are always welcome, of course, but there’s really no hurry. Why not do a little travelling? There are fascinating things happening inside some of the luxury hotels in New York; they’ve grown these sort of enormous cocoons, and the wealthy patrons trapped inside are… well, I won’t spoil it. Oh, or this might be up your street: there’s a little place at a university in the Home Counties, like a sort of socially-conscious Blue Rose, turning boys into girls for their own betterment and so on. Well, they went into lockdown when the One Above manifested, and you won’t believe some of the wonderful new things that have been emerging down there in the basement. Or you could swing by Madrid, Abuja, Manchester, any big cities, really: we’re making real progress toward a better, kinder world. The power’s back on, after a fashion; we’re distributing food and organising housing, and the congregations would positively lose their minds to host God’s most beloved daughters. Or even just find a beach somewhere and put your feet up, if you like! The world is full of wonders, and you’ve got all the time in the world to experience it, my lovelies.”

“Thankyou, Vivi!! We’re totes gonna do that stuff!!” Nicci chirps, planting a careless kiss on Violet’s cheek then frowning in consternation as she fights to dissuade her lips from crawling off and starting their own independent existence. Lottie displays a little more forbearance, and brushes the Speaker’s arm with a trailing finger. “We’ll see you soon, Vi,” she says. “Anything you need, just call for us, okay?”

Chloe follows the others to the threshold, feeling the thrumming, all-encompassing presence of her god marginally recede.

“Violet?” she asks, turning to where the girl is standing, smiling brightly, alone by the altar.

“Yes, Chloe?”

“…are you happy?” Chloe asks. She’s unable to entirely say why, but she’s filled with a nagging concern for her friend, even after recent events have wholly transformed their relationship, their bodies and their minds, and the world itself. “Only it’s like, you never leave this room, not really, and the way you make it sound like your will ain’t really your own, I just… I dunno.”

“Oh, Chloe, you’re so sweet to worry about me,” Violet replies, with feeling. “I’m happy, I really am! I can see everywhere and everything I choose; I know so much, more than I can ever hope to sort through, and every bit of it is secret and magical and strange. And I’m never lonely; there’s a mind bigger than the stars working through me, and it’s so vast and complex and it’s always here with me, and it really does care. I used to think what the cult wanted for me was death, or endless servitude at best, and maybe if their messed-up idea of it had been real, it would have been, but this is different: I’m happy, Chloe, and you don’t have to feel even a tiny bit guilty when you leave and I’m still here. I promise.”

“Thanks, Vi,” Chloe says, and darts back for a quick hug, which leaves the substance of her body jittery and impressionable but is entirely worth it. “Later, babes,” she calls, and with a wave she’s gone and the door’s swinging closed, leaving Violet standing, smiling, alone in the darkness.

-

The girls’ room, such as it is, used to be part of the Blue Rose’s water filtration system; a tall concrete well on the north-facing side of the facility, dry now the pipes have ruptured and the pumps are little more than burned-out wreckage. They went back to their old dorm at first, mostly out of habit, but even if the chaos and the partial collapse of conventional physics hadn’t left it in rather a sorry state, there were simply too many memories of the sisters they lost bound up in those walls. Here, there’s a ragged hole that goes all the way up through the floors above, which lets in the comforting strange-hued glow of the sky and the bracing sea air, and a hundred strains of renascent flora have sprung up on every available surface, making the floor soft and yielding and giving off puffs of fragrant spores and a comforting, constant susurrus. To the girls’ new eyes it’s beautiful, and as a result is at least partially tended by some of the more servile creatures lurking in the depths of the Rose, although Nicci’s tendency to hunt them when she’s bored means it’s more wild than not. Chloe and Lottie have strung thick, heavy netting taken from the docks from one wall to another like hammocks, and to bodies entirely untroubled by the elements it’s the height of luxury. Nicci’s made a nest, up where radial support beams join a central column to the concrete walls, and lined it with the girls’ old pink blankets, found in bulk in one of the surviving storerooms. She’s lounging up there, dangling hooked limbs like a dozing cat.

“So, sluts, what d’you think?” Chloe asks, lying twisted around in her rough hammock, head and a couple of arms hanging upside-down over the side. “Any of them destinations Violet said sound good?”

“Somewhere I can hunt!!” Nicci calls down from above.

“A few places are still kind of a shitshow,” Lottie tells her, eyes shut and sounding slightly distant, as if her vision is directed elsewhere. “If we look around a bit I’m sure we’ll find ten different survivalist losers and wannabe warlords driving around like they’re in Mad fucking Max. And failing that, I’ll bet we can find a nice juicy billionaire bunker. There have to be some left. You love cracking a fresh one of those.”

“Works for me!!” Nicci says, excitedly. “I like when they try to bribe me and I get to be the one to tell them money doesn’t egsits any more!!”

“What about you, Chlo?” Lottie asks. “Anywhere on Earth. No limits. What’s your pick?”

“I dunno,” Chloe replies, a little abruptly. “Wherever. I’m not fussed.”

Suddenly overcome with such a surplus of emotion that she can’t stay still, she swings her lithe shape effortlessly out of her hammock and, pulling herself up to the great, ragged breach with two long, flexible limbs, she sits there on the broken outer wall of the Blue Rose, swinging her legs in the evening breeze. The ocean is sparkling with the uncanny, variegated new colours of sunset, and she’s so suffused with happiness that she doesn’t know what to do with it all. Her God lazily pulses in the distance, trailing Its unimaginably long, bony phalanges through the upper atmosphere and into space, blanketing the world beneath the cold majesty of Its divine attentions, and she lets herself be drawn in for a second, savouring the approval of that most commanding of all possible Masters, and her proper place submitting completely to Its authority. She’s so caught up in the moment that only belatedly does she notice Lottie and then Nicci clambering up on either side, wordlessly bracketing her with the comforting, unearthly radiance of their bodies. One of Nicci’s more delicate hands wanders to Chloe’s crotch, and her own fingers playfully start to explore the other girls’ sensitive parts in turn.

“I’m really not bothered where we go, as long as it’s with you,” she says to both of them, resting her head on Lottie’s shoulder and squeezing tight around Nicci’s waist, watching night claim the ocean, lost in wondering how the end of the world gave her everything she’s ever wanted. And if Nicci almost spoils the moment by suddenly coughing a six-inch bone spike out toward the sea, precisely skewering a passing seagull, they watch the bird’s ragged corpse drop into the waves together, and that’s a good moment too.

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