I grabbed Tracy by the arm, eyes flicking up to her forehead where the circular protrusion poked further under the light of the moon. I felt the urge to run, not only away, but forever, to eat of the earth, to buck at my captors, to be free, to whinny at a black sky.

  Doc and Edgar shielded their eyes and pushed past us to the door.

  Wub-Wub-Wub.

  “Don’t look at it!” Doc shouted back as he kind of waddled through the doorway. “And get out!”

  But I couldn’t quite shield my eyes.

  Run. Buck. Eat. Drink. Run. Mount.

  And I caught Tracy’s eyes, emerald as the skyway, a slight smile curling, flushing her cheeks as the moon grew from her third eye. I felt a desire for her then that eviscerated all else—moon, shadow, tusk, mamilla, Abby, Shelly, Doc, Edgar, Aeld—gone.

  The curve of her temples, the small heart’s tip of her chin, the swell of her breasts, the bit of half naval peeking out with flat stomach and inward arcing lines like a half V diving into her jean shorts. She had a tattoo on her ankle, just above the lip of Chuck Taylor.

  Her nose was not broken, not bleeding, in fact, looked healed, and I leaned forward, kissing its slightly upturned tip, raised my right hand—my healed right hand; the Pink had healed us both—and stroked the horn growing from Tracy’s head.

  Wub-Wub-Wub.

  But Tracy’s cries of pleasure poked holes between pulses of the drone. I raised my left hand to the back of her head, twirling the end of a cornrow like a prayer bead.

  “Edgar!”

  “By the gods, but they’re weak.”

  “Swear by the gods all you want, but the alphate’s in their pockets!” Doc shouted.

  Edgar let fly some curse I didn’t catch. Tracy closed her eyes and I hastened my stroke. The horn was long as an outstretched hand now, and I felt the strong urge to be closer to Tracy, closer than skin. I wanted to share persons with her, outside of personality where consciousness waited for shape. Somewhere we would not be these creatures, nor any other.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I was making my own low moans now. Tracy pressed against me, my erection painful against tight denim. She rested her chin on my shoulder as I moved my hand over the ribbed surface of the horn.

  “What … what is that. Edgar, wait, I saw—”

  Something cut Doc off, and then Edgar was there, pulling us apart, holding all fingers up before our protesting, moon-calf faces, then touching the tops of our heads.

  It was like when he’d dug me out of the Pink and I had that brief memory of my basement and Simone and her dead baby Benny. And The Black Tongue Tape.

  Touching Edgar gave ne the feeling of being transported, the way the tape had, then the way looking at my wall had. The way travel will broaden a perspective, his touch took me away from the untethering of the moon—in the moon’s light I was no one, a wraith whose outside held coitus with every inside.

  And here, too, in his touch, I was no one, but no one with a choice. Edgar wrapped twine around my pointer finger, then Tracy’s. The moon’s hum soaked my insides.

  Wub-Wub-Wub.

  Edgar pulled my thumb to the twine on forefinger and rubbed the pad along the rough twist of fabric.

  Then Edgar snapped his hand downward, pulling the twine, making it bite into the crease below fingertip.

  “Ow, fuck!” I said.

  “Bitch ass motherfuck!” Tracy said.

  “Remember your pain,” Edgar said. “It is who you are. It is what you worship, and ties you tightest to the identity you have chosen.” I rubbed the cut. There was a sheen of blood like red plastic shimmering in the moon’s light.

  Andy. There was Andy, in the cut’s coil. Not an endless corridor of shifting walls, no, a person with a personality.

  Edgar left us, but by the time he turned around, we were ready to follow, Tracy avoiding the moon like Doc had. I cupped hands at my temples and came, c losing the door behind me. There was no sticker on the knob.

  “You didn’t have to cut them, Edgar,” Doc said.

  “And you think I had time for an illusion?” Edgar raised thin eyebrows, creasing the smooth brown skin of his forehead. He cut the air with a hand. “Pain is the quickest way back.”

  “Jesus fuck, Tracy, are you … uh, ok?” I said, wincing a little as I saw her horn for the first time in a lucid state. I looked away, remembering what I’d just been doing to that horn.

  “Fine,” she said, but she sounded vacant.

  “Are you—”

  “Said I’m fine, shit.”

  I raised my hands like Alright I’ll back off and turned to follow Edgar and Doc. I wanted to ask what they knew about the transformation Tracy was going through, why the anthropomorphized people in the emerald skyway were unresponsive while Tracy remained conscious. Maybe she had more to go? I waited to ask—Tracy had made it clear she didn’t wanna talk about it.

  Then I noticed the black, box TVs lining either side of the hallway, each one flashing the same washed-out 90’s colors, cracking out the same, otherworld audio of The Black Tongue Tape.