Level 48’s sun was a gradient of red bleeding into yellow, like a bruise healing in reverse. It hung at a permanent angle of almost yet never setting, always giving enough light to read by and never enough to burn. The pristine sand was practically untouched by the rot of the deeper Backrooms, and the lukewarm ocean gently rolled against the shore in a rhythm resembling breath. Luxury façades lined the shore: hotels with air-conditioning that hummed a note too close to a held breath, houses furnished as if a catalog had dreamed them and then forgotten the occupants.
“Environmental survey,” Kat said aloud, but the words rang hollow. She held a clipboard, yet hadn’t written anything after being there for nearly an hour. Its presence did little to maintain the professional facade she was here under, especially when the rest of her current attire told a completely different story; a white sundress hiked to the thigh, sand in the creases of both knees.
A. River sat with hir knees drawn up on the woven beach towel beside her, pink-blonde hair salted beneath a cheap straw hat (that ze would never usually wear) tilted against the gradient sun. The red leather coat was gone, and in its place was pale yellow linen, a slit to the thigh, sand already in the hem. Ze flicked a bottle cap into the foam and watched it fail to drown.
Eden G. had abandoned the kimono for something floral, her short pink hair pushed back with a folded scarf. She had been naming the languars that would not come down from the treeline, speaking to them as equals. A notebook lay open in her lap, blank thus far save for a single gray petal taped to the page.
Gavriel wore a researcher’s idea of a swimsuit under an unbuttoned work shirt, and had not once taken off her boots.
The pretense was an M.E.G. investigation of Level 48 — habitability survey, flora, fauna, the Veroka Farmers, the function of the sunset. But thus far, no one had written a word that would survive peer review. The Aquila chips spent on the excursion would be filed under unaccounted assets. The truth of the matter was that they had come here to feel alive, if only for a short time.
Twenty feet up the beach, Eden crouched with a slice of veroka fruit held out toward a qarrot sidling closer. Her sundress had sand up to the hip from where she’d fallen over trying to sign at a languar. “Mhm. Survey. Sure. Put me down as ‘fauna, cooperative.’”
“You’re not fauna.”
“Debatable.”
Gavriel waded no farther than the shallows with her boots on, collecting veroka fruit in her upturned hat.
River watched fondly from afar. “She reorganized my entire filing taxonomy last week, unprompted…but correctly. I’ve decided she’s basically my daughter now.”
“You can’t adopt a grown woman,” Kat said.
“Watch me. I’m an excellent mother. I feed her and everything. I even fed her just last week.”
Gavriel laughed from down the beach, boots dripping, hat full of grey fruit, and the three of them laughed with her.
…
Down at the waterline, River had rolled hir dress up to the knee and was teaching Gavriel how to skip a stone — badly, with the total unearned authority of someone who could not do it either. Gavriel held a notebook in her off hand while she threw. She took notes on everything, including this.
“Flat,” River said. “Flat, low, and you snap the wrist. Look, look at me. I’m about to be incredible.”
The stone hit the water and disappeared with an unceremonious ploop.
“Well, that was one skip,” River said.
“That was zero skips,” Gavriel corrected smugly.
River flopped down onto the sand beside her, groaning with mock exasperation, and pointed at Kat with a wet hand. “Kat, are you seeing how she talks to me? We raise this child from nothing—”
“She was only hired this March.”
“—from nothing, we give her our—” River lost the thread of the joke ze was building and abandoned it, laughing. “Our only daughter. Our legacy. And she’s mocking me!”
“You’re only five years older than me,” said Gavriel.
“Six. And you’ll never be as tall.” River playfully tussled Gavriel’s hair. “Come sit, kid. The ocean might be fake, but vitamin D is union-mandated.” Ze paused, noting Gavriel’s seemingly confused expression. “…We’re the union, obviously.”
Eden smiled softly. “Ze’s not wrong, Gabby. You’ve still got that academic look.” She pat the empty plot of sand between them. “Come on. No reports today. Just… this. I think we’ve earned it.”
Kat sat in the shallows and watched Eden build a structurally impossible “load-bearing crab” out of shells. Eden’s smile was a perfect constant in an unstable world. Beside her, River moved with a grace that defied the physics of the liminal. Together, the three of them were a trinity of unburdened souls.
Kat smiled. Perhaps, she believed, eternity could be this simple. That love could be a static state.
On the clipboard, Kat wrote:
conditions: acceptable
And then underneath it, in small letters, she wrote the thing she never said out loud to any of the three of them, which was—
The horizon glitched. The sound of the surf cut out, replaced by a low, bitcrushed hum. Kat’s smile faltered.
The lukewarm water began to boil geometrically. The waves flattened into a grid of alternating black and white stripes. Then the ocean stood up, from horizon to shore, holding its shape the way a breath is held. And out of it came a woman walking on the surface as if surface were her own invention that she could revoke. Silver hair flowed past her hips, moonlight dipped in paint at the ends — pink, orange, a green like new leaves. A garland across her forehead. A dress ruined with color, stains of pink and gold climbing a slit skirt as if the color itself were a rising tide. Gold at her arms and throat and thighs. A scarf of something thinner than air drifted off her forearms and pointed landward. Toward the beach. Toward Kat.
She occupied the space closer and closer to the shore with every dropped frame of reality, her white robes trailing behind her like the wake of a comet. Nothing in the world moved except the woman and the small wrinkle of water breaking against her ankles. Her eyes found Kat’s. They were eyes that contained the birth and death of stars. The sun began to fracture. The sky cracked like a dropped mirror.
The hotels behind the beach forgot their windows. One by one, the glass became the same red-yellow as the sun.
dance with me, darling. i miss you.
The Muse was not as the old songs had promised. The sky behind her bisected into a perfect tear, polygons spilling out of the sunset like teeth.
Kat turned to Eden and River, panic seizing her throat. But they were already unraveling. Their skin flaked away into polygonal shards, their faces dissolving into blank slates upon which deceiving smiles were carved.
“Eden! River!” Kat screamed, reaching for them. Her fingers passed through empty hexadecimal code.
The sun, which had been setting forever, and had never once in all eternity finished setting… touched the horizon, and went down.
Dark.
Kat’s eyes snapped open.
The ceiling of her quarters in Base Alpha was the same ceiling it had always been: concrete, a century old in places, patched with drywall that didn’t match. The hum of a database terminal replaced the ocean breeze.
She was sweating, her heart hammering against her ribs.
They are gone. They are gone. They are gone.
The photograph on the desk was still wet at one corner, as if it had been pulled from that same ocean. Three women in sundresses, standing on the shores of Level 48. A fourth figure at the edge of the frame had been eaten by grain and pink noise. The glass over the photo was cracked in a pattern that looked almost like a crown.
There is no dawn in Level 1, so the M.E.G. simulates one with timers, and the timers had not yet decided it was morning. Yet somewhere below her, the market was already loud. Beyond the door, Citizen Sector River continued its usual activities throughout its muraled corridors; its gyms, its pets, its stubborn impersonation of a town that had never seen a sky.
She sat in the dark for eleven minutes. Then she got dressed and went to find her brother.
In his office in the warehouse annex, Justin was at the standing desk with three requisition forms fanned out before him. A mug of tea rested somewhere beside his elbow, keeping some unconscious pat of him on edge by reminding him to not accidentally knock it over.
Kat entered with a food tray held in her hands, putting it down on top of the requisitions.
“Those are—”
“Eat them, then.”
He glanced between Kat and the tray, before relenting as he nibbled and gnawed on the food, knowing that it would be easier than the conversation which he could already tell was coming.
She let him get halfway through before she said it. “I think they’re still alive.”
Justin slowly set the fork down, trying (and failing) to prevent an expression of judgemental doubt from forming on his face.
“Not— alive like alive.” She was already retreating and hated it. “Alive like…present. Like there’s something out there that’s still made of them. The database has at least eleven separate incident reports of a four-armed figure pulling wanderers out of danger in Level 5, 71, 283. All signed, witnessed, and corroborated. And I feel them. In my dreams, in the data streams River used to manage. They aren’t dead, they’re stuck—”
“Whatever that is, that isn’t the same thing as a person.” He aligned his mug with the edge of the desk. “Kat. We’ve analyzed the reports out of Level 404. We know what happened to Gavriel. We know what happened to Eden and River. Whatever divine gestalt they’re part of now, all we have left of them are the glitched artifacts and the memorial noise in the Archive Wing.”
“They are my heart,” Kat snapped, the professional facade slipping.
“And you are my family,” Justin replied evenly, his tone firm but devoid of malice. “River went looking for something that was looking back. Eden went after River. That’s two. I’m not doing three. I’m not putting a third name on the wall in Sector River and then having to walk past it every day for the rest of my life. I will not stand in a sector named after hir and explain to eight thousand civilians why an S will have to be added at the end.”
“I’m not asking you for permission, nor to sign off on anything.”
“No,” he said. “You never do.” He looked at her with a vexed, concerned expression. “So I’m asking, as your brother — please, just let this go. I won’t lose you to delusion the way we’ve already lost them. The M.E.G. needs you here… I need you here.” A beat of silence stretched between them, before Justin added one last comment. “Whatever you’re about to do — don’t make me find out from a missing-persons flag. Talk to me. Or don’t. But eat something yourself. You look like I do, and I’m no role model.”
There was a thing that Kat remembered without remembering. Some time ago, she had gone up onto the roof of Base Beta with a knife in her pocket before coming down again, and between those two facts was a hole; something that had spoken to her while the wind held still. She could not recall a face, a name, a single feature
All that she had left of the experience was a single sentence spoken to her, lodged in her memory like a splinter:
All I ask of you is that you not throw away everything that you have built, as I once did. There is a good reason that I am forgotten. Do not waste your life, too.
She had promised herself she would listen. She had promised to be strong.
She thought about that sentence in the elevator down to the evidence archive. She thought about it while her clearance card opened a door that only the Oversight Council could open. She thought about it standing in front of Locker 44-C, where a confiscated batch of Strange Pills had sat untouched for years because nobody had wanted to be the one to file the disposal form.
The bottle was labeled in a lab tech’s careful hand: EVIDENCE — OBJ. 44 — DO NOT CONSUME. Kat had approved that entry. River had built the database that held it. There was an ouroboros in there somewhere, feeding on itself, and she was too tired to find its head.
The capsules were translucent. The gel inside them held little beads of color suspended in it like something pressed in amber — gelatin and pulverized fossil-flower, Gudang’s old medicine — and they were objectively beautiful.
Kat took nine capsules, because six was what had killed Gavriel and she didn’t have the courage to attempt this twice. Then she went back up to her office, and she wrote Justin — this is mine, not yours. Don’t sign anything. on a sheet of headed paper.
That sentence echoed in her memory once more. Do not throw away everything that you have built, as I once did.
“Shut up,” Kat said aloud, as if he could hear her (though he probably did).
I’m sorry, Justin. I just need to know for sure.
Then she swallowed them dry.
The nostalgia came like a tide: a kitchen she had never owned, morning light through a window that had never existed, three mugs — hers the chipped blue one — River’s laugh in the next room, Eden’s hand arriving warm on the back of her neck. Memories arrived fully furnished, seconds old, decades deep. She let it carry her.
Then the seams showed. The world began to clip. The walls of Base Alpha stuttered and peeled backward, revealing a bleeding underlayer of wireframes and static. Her throat burned with sulfur and artificial strawberry. Her heartbeat became a drumbeat in a language she almost understood.
And she fell upward, through a tunnel of screaming static, through the layers of the web, until the monochromatic nightmare of heaven claimed her.
Level 404 was black and white and flickering, a plane arguing with itself about whether to exist. The ground was a checkered pattern of stripes that shifted underfoot like the teeth of a predator.
Kat came down onto it on her hands and knees, retching, and what came out of her hit the ground and rendered as a low-polygon shape before soaking in. Spheres drifted at middle distance with galaxies swirling in them, like ornaments on a tree that had been abandoned mid-decoration. Great grainy rectangular masses stood around like furniture in an abandoned house.
And there was soil. A long bank of dark, rich, crumbling earth, cutting across the polygons, and things growing in it. Thousands of years of people who had been kept alive here and were finally, mercifully, allowed to become ground.
Further ahead was a picket fence, surrounding a small house with the light on.
Sitting on the fence, one leg drawn up, was a young man — pastel, gold-edged, iridescent. A golden corset-like structure wrapped his abdomen, glitch-fabric clipping through his own untextured limbs. His left forearm was a flat shell where flesh should be, and it flickered back into skin while she watched, and then out again. A cat lay asleep across his lap.
Kat flinched, drawing her modified firearm in a single fluid motion.
He did not react to it at all. He looked at her with brown eyes that held a gaze of patient, unblinking interest.
“You are not Aleksi,” he finally said softly, in a voice devoid of breath.
“…No.”
“That is statistically consistent. Nobody is.” He glanced away for a moment. “You’re late for the funeral.”
“Where are they?” Kat’s voice came out in pieces. “Where is River? Where is Eden?”
they are not here. there is only me.
The voice came from everywhere at once, a melodic bitcrushed harmony that forced Kat to her knees. Above her, the sky fractured, and she descended without descending — was simply nearer. Four eyes opening in sequence. Four arms settling. A rose-quartz wrist, a shoulder the blue of a swimming pool at night, pastel marble shedding slow polygons like ash.
She is Chiasmus, the Dearly Whole. She who is four pasts and one future.
Her bare feet touched the shifting geometric floor without sound. She stopped a body’s length away and did not, Kat noticed, come any closer than that. Deliberately. The way you stand back from someone with a fresh wound.
Kat stared up into the face of the deity. She looked for Eden’s soft jawline. She looked for River’s piercing green eyes. She found nothing but the cold, absolute perfection of a Pillar’s avatar.
“Katherine,” she said — and the god-voice was gone; this one was only a voice. Kat’s throat closed. “—Kat.” She paused for perhaps a quarter-second, and in that quarter-second something moved behind the face. “Ze called you Kat. Both of them did.” The bottom pair of the four eyes drifted into a half-lidded state. “I know that you take your coffee with too much sugar and lie about it. I know the noise you make when you’re about to cry and won’t. I know what your hands feel like, and I know it from two directions at once, which is—” she stopped. “That is not a useful sentence. I’m sorry.”
“Then it’s you.” Kat’s voice came out wrong. “River. Eden. It’s—”
“No. Aelita River died in Level 404 in a merge ze knowingly initiated to seal something worse. Eden Gardenhigh died here too, in pieces, over a longer time, and I would spare you the details even if you ordered me to give them.” Chiasmus tilted her head. Behind her, the boy on the fence had gone still, listening attentively. “What stood up afterward had four names in it and none of them could hold a thought for more than a minute. Ka’rot took that mess apart and made one thing out of it that could survive being conscious.”
“But you remember them. You remember me.”
“I only remember them the way one remembers a childhood home. Every room. Every stair that creaked. But I am living in a different house now, Katherine. I did not ask to be the house. Here I am anyway.” The four eyes blinked in unsynchronized sequence. “I remember loving you, but I do not love you. Those are different verbs, and I will not blur them for your comfort. You flew here on nine capsules of a drug that blurs verbs for a living, and look what it did to Gavriel.”
Kat’s head came up. “Don’t—”
“You’ve met him.” One marble hand turned, indicating the boy sitting atop the fence. “That’s all I could salvage of her, and even then some corners had to be cut. He mostly sits. He does nothing, with total commitment. He waters the beds. I sometimes let him talk to people when they come around, just as I am doing so now. Because I am trying very hard to be the kind of thing that says yes.”
Kat looked at Delta. A shell. A photocopy of a ghost, built out of the rotting data of someone she had once cared for. He raised the grey arm at her, politely, in something like a wave.
Kat returned her gaze to Chiasmus. “Then say yes to me.”
“To what?”
“Give them back.” The Overseer persona shattered entirely; her voice cracked down the middle. “I came to bring them home. Please. Give them back to me.”
“Home is a concept for those who still possess boundaries. And I cannot unweave the tapestry to hand you back the individual threads; to do so would destroy the masterpiece.” Chiasmus’ marble skin glowed a soft, sickly neon-pink as she spoke. “They loved you deeply. I remember this love. It is archived within my subgradients. It is a beautiful, mathematical truth, and it is finished. They shed the mortal coil. They transcended the suffering of the labyrinth. I am the avatar of Art. I am the synthesis. That is not a comfort I can make any smaller for you.”
And it was only then that Kat finally understood exactly what she had truly come to ask for, and what it would cost.
There was still one way. It was the only way, it had always been the only way, and it was the way that River had taken and Eden had taken and Anemoi and Gaius and Gudang before them: to stop. To put down the body and the name and the sixty thousand small stupid particularities of being Katherine Rivers, and go in, and be held forever inside a mind that was made of the people she loved — as a theorem is held inside a proof. Present. Perfectly preserved. Not looking out of anything ever again. They would be together. There would be no one left to enjoy it.
“You can,” Chiasmus said, reading Kat’s mind. “I will neither invite nor refuse you. The decision is not mine to make, because it would be me deciding what your life is for, and I have two sets of memories detailing exactly how much you hate that.”
And still Kat felt the pull. It would be so easy. To simply close her eyes, let the digital rot consume her flesh, and wake up in that Level 48 dream, holding Eden’s hand, listening to River’s laugh. No more Overseer duties. No more survival. Just the endless, warm stupor of assimilation. To win the war against pain by surrendering the war against death.
If she stayed here, she became nothing. A mathematical concept.
If she went back, she went back alone. Forever.
She thought about Justin, who forgot to eat, hunched over a standing desk carrying the weight of thousands of lives. She thought about eight thousand people asleep in the walls of Level 1, and the intake queue at the Entrance Checkpoint, and the woman in Sector Zephyr last week who had no-clipped in through a supermarket freezer and would not stop apologizing to everyone she met. She thought about the third name that would go on the wall, and the fourth, and the fifth, and about who exactly she imagined was going to hold the whole rotten beautiful machine of it together while she was busy being a mathematical object stranded in somebody else’s paradise.
Do not throw away everything you have built.
“No,” Kat said. The word cost her everything. Her chest heaved as she forced herself to stand, her legs shaking under the weight of her grief. “Not today.”
“You choose the labyrinth. You choose the pain.” Chiasmus’ statement, despite its wording, held no judgement. It was merely an objective observation.
“I choose mine.” Kat wiped her eyes, her jaw setting into a rigid line. “My love for them was real because we were real. Because we were flawed, and scared, and fighting to survive. I won’t let you turn that into a — a museum exhibit. I would rather be alone and broken than whole and hollow.”
“That is a defensible position.”
“I have people who need me. I am an Overseer. I have a purpose, and until that purpose is fulfilled, I cannot rest.” She looked up at the beautiful, terrible amalgamation of the goddess with the woman and person she had loved. “But I promise you. One day. When it’s done — when there’s someone better than me in the chair, when the queue is short, when Justin has somebody else to make him eat, when the M.E.G. no longer needs me to carry the sky — I’m coming back here, and I’m going to finish this. But not today, and not like this.”
Chiasmus watched her in silence. For a brief, singular microsecond, Kat swore she saw River’s smirk and Eden’s soft gaze flicker across the marble face.
“That’s the right answer,” Chiasmus finally spoke. “I hoped it would be. I couldn’t tell you that beforehand.” She stepped closer, finally, and took Kat’s hand with a hand like sun-warmed stone, and pressed something into it. “When you come, I will remember you. We will wait for you, Katherine. The dream is patient.” The four eyes closed, one after another. “Go home, Kat. You’re overdosing, and I am not in the business of pulling people apart anymore. Delta — open the way.”
From the fence, without getting up, the boy raised his glitching arm.
A god-ray of pastel light pierced the monochrome sky and struck Kat squarely in the chest.
She came up in Base Alpha’s infirmary nineteen hours later with a tube in her arm and her brother asleep sitting up in a plastic chair, still holding the sheet of headed paper he had refused to sign, crumpled to nothing in his fist.
She felt utterly alone. The ache in her chest was immense, a gravitational singularity that threatened to crush her lungs.
But it was hers. Her grief. Her love. Unassimilated.
Her other hand was closed. Inside it, warm, entirely real, entirely impossible, was a flat grey skipping stone with wet sand still on one face.
Later — after the cold water on her face, after the tube came out, after she had gone back down to the evidence archive and filed the disposal form on Locker 44-C herself, in her own name, because somebody finally had to — Kat strapped her modified rifle across her back and unlocked the heavy iron door.
The corridors of Base Alpha awaited. The murals, the gyms, the pets, the intake queue. The surviving wanderers needed their Overseer, and there was a world that needed her precisely because she knew what it meant to lose everything.
She would carry the weight of her lost loves not as an anchor to drag her into the void, but as the foundation upon which she would build a better world for the living.
In her pocket, warm as a held hand, the stone went with her.