“That was so fucking COOL!!” Her voice shook the vent. “Did you see that? How I was like; oh, it’s the one on the right.”

  ”Yes. I saw.” Adam said.

  ”And then you were like, bam! Straight through his fucking head! Like a flesh seeking missile.” She laughed. Which turned into a cough. Due to all the dust.

  Which then turned into her spitting out blood, due to all the fighting.

  ”Internal bleeding. You’re healed now, more or less. But be aware the taste of copper in your mouth will persist.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t mind the taste.”

  They were deep in the Drum’s skin. What these tunnels were originally was unclear to Devon. It was a vent of some kind, usually. Every so often the path would terminate in a rusty fan scraping the sides of the corroded steel. But that didn't matter, ‘cause now it was an escape route! She took any move or turn she didn’t know in stride, recalibrating the path in her brain and being relieved when she once again found something she remembered.

  As they went the walls smoothed out and got wider until Devon could walk upright without any issue.

  ”What is this place exactly?”

  “Good question! I don’t know!” The passage now was brighter than the outside despite lacking a visible light source. The stonework here was smooth marble. It felt like a doctor’s waiting room, but a lot cleaner. She had no memory of this place, which was strange because she remembered using the hole that led here countless times.

  Eh, maybe the architecture had shifted, no biggie.

  ”When I awoke, this world was already ancient. I know of a pilgrimage. I know that there were words screamed into the sky. I know that the WyrmLords came down in huge ships.”

  He was sounding like her father.

  “What part?”

  Oh she didn’t like that at all.

  ”There’s gotta be limits to, uh, what you can hear in my brain. A girls gotta have privacy after all.

  ”Understood. I am not trying to read your mind. You have thoughts so loud that I can’t help but notice them.”

  That joyous feeling that nothing could go wrong was still there, but it was tempered by exhaustion, like a dream-dust high that had already peaked and was now on that smooth bitter comedown.

  She came to a ladder made out of bone, affixed to colorful purple and blue marble. She climbed it two bars at a time, the end of it was far above, vanishing into the horizon. “Why can’t I do the same for you?”

  Adam took his time to answer. “I am in you. It’s not the other way around.”

  Well that made her feel good. A parasite in her brain, some freak aberration of a Remark she still didn’t trust. Not fully at least.

  He bought up her father again through the use of a memory. He wouldn’t just drop it, huh?

  “He was big on figuring out the history of the world. And I guess GutWorth as well.” She shrugged, not sure how much she should say, or if it even mattered. “I don’t really care. About history, I mean. Didn’t then, didn’t now.”

  ”But isn’t it strange?” Adam suddenly buzzed free from her back pocket and hovered next to her as she climbed. “Look at you now, you’re climbing a ladder made of bone contained within a massive prison of steel, so huge is this place that it has it’s own atmosphere.”

  At that moment one of the many small clouds floated by, it’s shadow crossed over Devon’s face.

  Did you know that to get here I traversed a plain of floating cubes that scraped the sky? I saw hordes of people, naked as if they were just born, falling in the thousands.”

  They called that place the birthing grounds. And here was Adam was acting like this was news. Hah.

  “I don’t have time to think about that.” She said, her voice now echoing. This place had its own light source, a massive lightbulb affixed at the corner of the massive room, a sort of proxy sun. The bone ladder was wrung with lights that were redundant at best. “Besides, I know everything there is to know about this world.”

  ”Really.” Adam said, sounding amused. “Aren’t I lucky. Tell me, what is this world?”

  “Putting me on the spot here but okay. Anyway, the place we originally came from.” She made the shape of a circle with her hands, just like how her dad would (Adam adjusted her feet so she didn’t fall). “The place was spherical, and rested atop a vast sea.” Adam floated besides her, the tip of his body bobbing up and down in an imitation of nodding. “We left in a ship that was the same shape, and dived deep deep deep beneath the waves! And then Remarks came out because people fought a lot. The Grand Council created them. And there was this guy called the Man with the Permanent Sneer. Maybe a guy? Dad thought he was a metaphor at the time and not an actual person.”

  Adam considered this. There was an audible hmmm in her brain. Strangely charming.

  “We knew him as The Contrarian. And he was a man.”

  She was surprised that she was interested. “What was he like?”

  Another pause, long enough for her to reach the top of the ladder and exit the chamber. “I don’t know, he was long dead.”

  She groaned. Never any answers, not really. So why kill yourself trying to find out?

  It was selfish, was what it was. Downright selfish.

  The bone ladder didn’t end, it stopped. Cut off between rungs it terminated in a small triangle carved into the marble, just big enough for Devon to fit into. Behind them was a animalistic scream quickly muffled by the walls and growing distance.

  Now they were in a cavern. Organic looking, and in a way it was, but take a closer look at the rock like walls and it becomes clear this was a massive hollowed out fatberg. All the waste from GutWorth and countless other settlements in the Drum accumulated here. She liked this place, because of-

  Oh yeah! Alex! She hadn’t told him about Alex!

  ”Alex?”

  “I want you to meet someone!” She ran through the yellow corridors, bumping up against outcroppings of petrified grease and garbage. Usually her eyes would water from the smell, but apparently this place was bad enough that Adam was shutting down her sense of smell as a courtesy.

  They rounded corner after corner until, finally-

  ”There he is!”

  In a large slice of the fatberg, poking out from the cut, was an angel. It was everything you’d expect from an angel; the wings, the massive size, the rib cage like a burdenbeast, and the seven fingered hands. Its skull had a protrusion like a halo, it did not have eyeholes, but the wide open grin took up so much space there was simply no room. It had died or been killed as it was holding out a hand, which always made Devon sad to think about.

  An intricate mural had been carved out of the fatberg surrounding it, showing a crowd of thousands looking up at the angel, and below that two panels showing contradictory scene. One in which the angel is worshipped, and one in which the angel is hanged.

  She heard Adam stutter, then breathe heavily, like he was out of breath.

  ”Pretty cool, huh?” She took a candle from one of the alcoves and lit it with her finger. “I come down here… well, it’s been a while. You know, with work and everything I haven’t been able to get down here in years.” She turned to face Alex. “Sorry about that, buddy. I’m sure it gets boring here.”

  Alex didn’t say anything.

  “Incredible… this is a relic… this is holy.”

  “Hey, that's how they talked about you!” She sat down, taking a second to just thank Grand that she was alive (and could kill her enemies? Definitely some logistics to figure out but all signs pointed to yes. She was very strong now). “My dad never knew about this.” She answered, even though Adam hadn’t asked. “He thought the angels were made up so that Morgan and his men could have the… mad date of heaven?”

  ”Mandate of heaven.”

  “Yeah, whatever that is.” She curled her small toothpick legs into herself, her nose nuzzled between her jeans. “The way dad would talk about history was so… so fucking sad. A never ending series of injustices and tragedies without any real moral. Or, well, none that people actually took to heart. He told me that GutWorth would become a nightmare, and he was right. He kept predicting worse and worse conditions weeks before they happened. I don’t know why we never left when things started getting bad.”

  She looked up at the angel, there were a series of scratches on its skull that sort of looked like “Alex”, hence the name (but it also could have been “Apex”, or “Pilex”, or even just scratches with no greater meaning).

  She clapped her hands. “So, putting an end to violence. How are we gonna do that?”

  ”I have made a promise to the one I love that I will destroy the Grand Council.”

  She pictured the words coming from Alex. It made the conversation easier.

  “And what will that do?”

  ”It would be an end to violence.”

  She nodded. Good idea mister skeleton. “Yeah but like, where do we start?”

  The skeleton didn’t answer.

  Adam the Remark rose up in front of her, rotating like a prized item in a shop display.

  ”We start by leaving, what’s the nearest town to here?”

  She told him about FleshBright. He recoiled in her brain, she pictured him as an animal arching its back at a perceived threat. That was a cool metaphor for her to come up with off the cuff. She usually didn't think stuff like that.

  Whatever the problem was he didn’t answer, or even hint. He stewed in his clearly bad feelings for thirty minutes. Not saying anything as the stucco became raw metal, then a plastic slide, then what looked like a beige waiting room, complete with a still well furnished desk and chairs, but disassembled thanks to the massive bloody hole in the middle of the room.

  “You said that was a circus earlier?”

  “That's what my dad told me.”

  The hole was lined with something grody and purple, she remembered the hole but not the room. She slid down while trying to ignore the pungent stench of Grand knows what, convincing herself as soon as it was out of the sight that it was simply a conceptual misunderstanding of a space that was rotting.

  Rooms that were well maintained made her nervous.

  ”I don’t think it was a circus. I think I know what it was.”

  “Great, that's really interesting.” She had to go on her back for this next part. But this was good, she remembered this. She followed the arrows and scratches that were outlined with brown and purple bruises. The bruises all that much bigger from last time.

  ”Back in the days of the Wyrm Lords, when using Remarks was the domain of the crusader, not yet repentant, instead of the murderer, who, by their nature, never will be. There was a band of entrepreneurs who capitalized on an untapped need, and paved the way for a century of evil.”

  “I just realized something, I don’t care!” Her hand finally found the false wall. “It was a circus to me. It was fun, I never saw anyone die there so sorry but your theory of it being yet another evil thing I need to be sad about is wrong.” There were bodies there, one in a machine she thought of as a swing, pierced through the piping, but there were bodies everywhere. As a child she had yet to understand the connection between violence and death. Sometimes she would prick her finger for fun, and not understand why her dad would rush for the bandaids.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  The wall opened with a creak. The color of warm oranges and the scent of boat bark. Someone was making tea.

  ”We’re not alone.”

  She knew that. It wasn’t expected, and any reason couldn’t be good. “It’s okay, word couldn’t have traveled that fast.”

  Her feet hit the floorboards with a far too loud thud. The walls were exactly what she remembered, adorned with fishing lures and plastic trophies. The bright red of the wall bled into the warm blue of the kitchen, where the smell was coming from.

  ”What is this place?”

  She thought this next part, in case anyone was in range to hear. “Memorial house for a fisherman. When he died, the town turned it into an all purpose meeting space. Unless I was misremembering that, and it was actually a site for ritual sacrifices!”

  A large shadow cut across a wall of generic still life paintings. She heard faint music.

  ”Is it still used?”

  ”No.” She wiped her hand free of cobwebs and grime. “No it’s not.”

  She poked her head out. No, she wasn’t gonna risk her whole head, she poked a single eye out.

  It was a kitchen, or a room recently converted into a kitchen. A tall figure dressed as a maid was stirring a pot of boiling water. There was a broken radio that was somehow playing music, and the maid tapped in time to the familiar melody.

  ”Devon.”

  ”Yeah, I know.”

  She steadied her arm and readied Adam.

  ”Hey!” Devon yelled, “I know who you fucking are! Turn around and maybe we won’t kill you!”

  The maid turned round. It was 51. They had on a smarmy grin, but Devon’s lack of reaction dampened their mood, and they stirred the pot of water bitterly.

  ”Blame yourself for being so late. I’ve had almost an hour to myself here, and I have used that time efficiently and confidently. Look, I’m so settled, I even hired a maid.” They motioned to their outfit, and winked like it was some sort of inside joke.

  “I don’t care.” She said. Adam shifted her body this way and that, making micro adjustments she was only slightly aware of. “You saw what I could do against Kyrie. Get out of the way and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “This is a golden opportunity, and it would be stupid for me to let it slide.” They motioned to a series of buckets arranged as a pyramid, the steam wafting from them creating a mushroom cloud of condensation. “I made boiling pie for you.”

  ”I don’t know what-“

  ”It’s a joke. Everything is a joke with you so it is a joke with me. And it’s not meant for you, even. I’m not talking to you anymore, Devon,” They walked forward, their eyes skewed and unfocused, taking a second to absentmindedly crank the stovetop by five notches. “I don’t like you. And I know you well enough to know that your… dark passenger… your fellow traveler… if they have any sense at all, has grown tired of your utter insistence that everyone other than you sucks eggs.”

  ”I mean they fucking do!!!” She yelled, not expecting herself to get this angry. And this was with Adam’s mood stabilizers. “And Adam here agrees, wait?”

  He said nothing.

  “Yeah, thats right!” She said. “And now we shall go!”

  But what of Morgan? Save that for later. He’d die, but more power would make his death all the more worthwhile. And she had nothing but time now, she knew that with grim certainty. Grand knew where that certainty came from.

  It did not come from Adam, probably. He had suddenly made it clear with his reactive ambience that he was not comfortable with this conversation.

  She gave the game away with darting eyes and a twitch of her mouth.

  “Hah! You have no patience for subtlety. Adam is a miracle worker, I don’t say that likely, but it cannot fix a child.” They craned their neck forward, bending their back with a shudder. “Adam, hello? Is that your name now? Or was it always? I am a simpleton in this regard, so excuse my ignorance.”

  Adam remained silent.

  “You know, I’m not sure what I expected. Maybe you’d take her over, kill her ego and have some real fun, like enact some morality plays, or make her into a fetish object. Then you could enter me, I give you permission.” They brought the FourLovers to Devon’s throat, it pulsed sluggishly. “It’s not like you can talk on your own, but maybe there’s another way you could show me you’re there.”

  They held out a hand.

  Adam slipped from her fingers. She muttered curses and struggled for him, but 51 blocked her with the sharp end of their scythe.

  ”Ah! No sudden moves. Your friends sold you out by the way.” 51 said, clutching Adam in their hand and hiding him like a magic trick. “there was no conflict, no interrogation. If your life wasn’t ending in seconds, I would suggest you get better friends.” They sniffed. Immediately following was a laugh so sudden Devon misread it as a cough.

  She didn’t respond. A door to the left opened a crack. The face of Tremble (and maybe one or two more) peered out, which answered that mystery, if you wanted to call it that.

  51 noticed, and raised Adam as if to throw him. The door slammed shut.

  ”What the fuck are you doing?” She thought.

  ”I must ask for your patience. Hold tight and we will survive this.”

  “I wonder what he was like in his man disguise, that interests me, especially the name, a part of the lore I’ve never heard before.” 51 motioned to the shard of glass. “Adam Kadmon, that's a very very ancient name. No one’s supposed to know that name, or what it means.” The sides of their mouth curled in on themselves. “Not even me.”

  She tensed up. What did you say to that? Adam didn’t know either, his presence in her head suddenly getting very fuzzy.

  They brought Adam to their face, admiring their own reflection. “I assume it could be mass produced, even replicated, because what are the odds you would stumble upon our very own red heifer? A backwater like this doesn’t even get the runoff of the end times. Why, maybe the world has already ended, and this is a belated way of showing it. No, no, something even stranger is going on here. We are witness to the only real Miracle. A body hopping Remark. The world is ending, and thank Grand it is.”

  She could kill them. She would have. But her body had frozen up.

  This wasn’t nerves. She was well past nerves. Friendly conductor Adam controlled this train now, remember? And whatever he was planning required her complete compliance.

  ”What the fuck.” She said.

  51 smiled warmly, “my thoughts exactly, though I do not swear, it is against my gentle disposition.” They looked her up and down, observing her like a work of art. “What does it feel like? There’s a few schools of thoughts, let me list them, and you can just nod when I hit on something. Does it feel like a waterfall that is always getting stronger? Or like there’s an eye inside your head, staring at your brain? Those two specifically, they fight for dominance in my cerebellum. Oh, alone that is a third option! Perhaps that's what it’s like. Are you at odds?”

  It felt like a waterlogged corpse had washed up in her empty skull, now serving in place of a brain knocked loose.

  The thought was so specific yet she didn’t think it was her.

  ”It’s been like… three hours so I can’t say anything specific.”

  51 tilted their head and smiled, confused. “I’ll give you time to think about it. Both of you.” They rotated Adam around in their hand. “Marvelous, marvelous. Did you see the way it landed on my hand, like a flutterfly? It recognizes strength, it recognizes a bad deal, and we will spend as long as it takes to reverse your terrible decision. The boiling pies will count the time. It will be very humiliating.”

  They pulled up a chair next to the stove, and stared at Devon, as if if they tried hard enough they would somehow see Adam within her. And, like, maybe they could. She didn’t know how this worked.

  ”There are seventy three different ways you could kill them.” Adam said, breaking his silence. “That's assuming you have the strength and skill necessary to utilize those opportunities.”

  Oh thank grand, he did have a plan.

  ”… Okay. How many options do we-“

  ”One. I have been doing nothing but running simulations. If you move or try anything aggressive you die. Their power dwarfs our current combined strength. I apologize for restricting your movement but they would have killed you. Look at their hands”

  The claw that wasn’t gripped to Adam was deep into the FourLovers. Their pointer finger shoved into a particularly ripe piece of purple meat.

  ”Their Remark is linked to yours now. That represents your heart. They will stop it. It will kill both you and them, and I think they’re willing to do it.”

  Her pupils didn’t shift, but the boiling pot at the edge of her vision came into focus.

  “Look at the timer.”

  There were ten seconds left.

  “Now look at me.”

  Adam clumsily slipped free of 51’s grip, and floated to the pot.

  51 followed like a floatrat to light. ”Oh, you understand? You want me to christen you? I was hoping! They said that Death herself was baptized like this, so great was her strength that she felt nothing as the boiling pots poured down for hours. She went on to meditate for days in waterfalls of burning lava. You know I met her once? She crushed a man with her barehands and all I could do was scream. Yet she saw me and did not kill me. What does it mean to be spared by Death herself? I have spent years on this. I have nothing. I believe that you could teach me.”

  “I have enough trust in you to understand what to do here.”

  She stood up slowly. 51 registered it with a slow blink but they were too engaged by Adam. He floated above the pot, doing slow circles and seeming to bring the broil up in temperature.

  “Yes, I see now. This is your courtship ritual. You are preparing me for- transport? Is that the correct verbiage?”

  They brought their hand out, hanging above the steam. They bit their lip, and for a second, Devon felt sorry for them.

  The stovetop went off with a scream. There was a mere moment where 51 was distracted. Their finger jerked out from the biological kill switch, but their hand stayed over the stove. Devon jumped up, gripped her hands tightly over 51’s flawless right wrist, and shoved the limb into a pot that was currently 350 degrees.

  This was different than the stove. She did not expect a pain so hateful, but she could handle it still.

  With their free limb, thrashing about, 51 floundered. Desperate for purchase on Devon’s hand. Adam zipped in and made it fair by pinning their hand to the counter.

  She pulled her hands out from the water, finding that it hurt even more than when she was in. She covered 51’s eyes and shared the pain. She worked on the eyes, fighting through the pain through a combination of Adam’s panacea, her own ludicrous threshold, and a spite that she fucking cherished right now. Her hands functioned as a branding iron on the eyes, burning them to a crisp in moments. Moments because this was a transition point, this revealed itself to her within the heat of combat.

  The pot was still hot, and she felt the rest of 51’s head must have been jealous that the eyes were getting so much attention.

  She shoved the head into the pot, giving them the promised baptism. Her hands fell in too, but that couldn’t be helped. She held them in as their body thrashed about.

  51 gripped onto the pot and threw it off the stove. Devon jumped back, her hands up to the elbow were singed to the third degree. Then second, then first.

  She stared at her arms, transfixed. It didn’t even hurt anymore.

  ”That was extremely risky. I’m not sure why, but your pain receptors are already very numb in your appendages when it comes to heat. That’s lucky.”

  “I put my hand over the stove a lot.” She said.

  He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his vibrations that he was concerned.

  51 laid on the floor, smoke rising from their head like a burning pyre, their pose suggesting that for all intents and purposes they were fucking dead. Yet they still held the FourLovers in their hand.

  The hand twitched.

  They sprung up screaming. Raw nerves exposed. Face red and skinless. No makeup left, obviously. Just all the stuff usually hidden by skin. It was weird to see their teeth and gums like that. It was really awful actually. The endorphins made it worse.

  “Kill them.”

  “What?” She didn’t even want to get close to them, let alone attack. “I- I think they’re already-“

  “DEAD?” With unfortunate grace, 51 jammed their hand into the FourLovers and pulled back a clump of flesh. With a disturbing glee they shoved it onto their face, where it lengthened and grew until it served as a sort of covering. “OH, NOT UNTIL SHE GIVES ME PERMISSION.”

  WHAM. They gripped the counter. So tight it made the linoleum crack. “Baptisms… aren’t supposed… to HURT.”

  “They’ve sacrificed their bodily sync with yours to keep themselves alive. We are no longer dealing with a dead man’s switch. You can kill them. You must kill them.”

  Great plan. Yeah. She was still- fuck, it was like all of a sudden the enormity of all of this had hit her. Why weren’t they dead? That should have killed them!

  “It didn’t.” Adam’s voice cut through her internal monologue, surprisingly stern, “They’re far stronger than the other one, I’m so very sorry but you’ll have to get used to it.”

  “The two of you are TALKING?” 51 screamed like a siren. The part of FourLovers that was attached to their head covered everything above the jaw, leaving their head a smooth pink layer of skin. “That’s inconsiderate! Remember, there’s one person in this conversation that CAN’T LISTEN.” They lunged across the room, cleaving the overhead fan at the peak of their jump and decimating half a dozen floor tiles where they landed.

  The fridge was cut in half. A second ago Devon had been standing there, and now (the fridge fell apart a beat later, like its destruction was something it had to intuit) she wasn’t.

  “I moved you. I’m sorry.”

  He was apologizing for saving her life.

  “It’s fine, don't worry about IT!” She yelped and dodged sideways as the tip of the FourLovers was thrown across the room. 51 pulled it back with deft hands as they chuckled miserably. The handle of the scythe had stretched out and taken a rope like form, with the end attached to their face like an overgrown umbilical cord.

  They raked their fingers raw on the mask, clawing away bits of it and showing that the flesh underneath had yet to heal. “Secrets, secrets, secrets. Do you hate me that MUCH? What is he SAYING Devon, TELL ME!”

  She racked Adam back, her calves bulged, 51 had positioned themselves right in front of a hallway, on the other end was an open window, the sheets fluttered lazily.

  ”Ask him yourself!”

  She threw Adam at them with strength that took her by surprise. Adam was in her brain, focusing her attention on that open window and so she ran while Adam was still in flight, throwing herself at the gangly fuck and fighting and clawing like a rapid animal. They stumbled backwards. Their hand would raise the FourLovers only to be distracted by Adam, demanding their attention.

  She gripped their bald head and started chowing down on the flesh of their Remark. It tasted like oil dipped in calluses.

  “That is uncalled for!!” They screamed, backpedaling wildly until they tripped on the window sill-

  -and the two took a very very long tumble down into the Drum.