Once Amber got up ahe room, after telling me she wao think about accepting my help, I spent some time talking to Felicity.

  “Wriggle for ‘yes’, and stay silent for any other answer,” I told her. And then I asked, “Are you physiologically OK?”

  She wriggled.

  I followed up with, “Are you unhappy with what I told Amber?”

  She wriggled again.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Then I tinued with a line of questioning to help myself uand what she was experieng. I also told her, in pieces, my own iions.

  Eventually, we came to an agreement that we should try to find a better way of internally unig with each other, and that I should return to my domain to do it in safety.

  Despite what I’d just doo Felix, I was not eager to travel through regur spacetime to do that.

  Fortunately, I was sitting on top of one of my pseudomains, which I could temporarily turn into a full domain. So I focused on doing that, making one of the et doors on the back of the bar the gateway to it. If you could open the door in the way that only a monster could, you could crawl into it.

  And then, so I did.

  This meant that I had two domains. Which was a little risky, but much less risky than waltzing back to Gresham via the MAX and attrag anything genuinely bigger thahat might notice my presence.

  I also kept my other pseudomains up, so that I could sense anyone walking the same path through the hallways that we’d taken, as a potential warning.

  Onside my new domain, I let go of my physical proje and verted it bato raw self, drawing inward so that I could foy own stru easier. This is a thing I have always doo go about adapting myself to new life situations, so I was very familiar with it.

  Normally, those adaptations took a long time and a lot of effort to enact. I guessed that was maybe because they were doh what I thought were thin energy reserves and a paucity of food around me. I had thought it was because those kinds of ges were just that hard.

  But then, just a little while ago, I’d adapted myself in seds to take something from Felix I hadn’t been able to take before.

  Which then horrified me anew, when I remembered it.

  I’d eaten a part of Felix.

  I’d turned myself into a teratovore.

  That I’d do with the goal of preserving a part of him, in a fit of remorse for killing him, didn’t make it aer.

  That he’d been trying to eat me and that I generally hated teratovores also didn’t help. Those were things I’d already known, and mitigated nothing, no matter how many times I might ree the facts.

  It didn’t feel like a just fate for already bad behavior, or any kind of weird human justification like that.

  I’d just broken a personal boundary with myself and I didn’t like it. I’d bee a thing I hated. And I’ve spent a very long time hating that thing, and an equally long time avoiding the temptation to bee it.

  Like, lohan anyone I likely knew could even imagine.

  I had trouble imagining it myself, really, and I could still touemories from that long ago.

  I could probably adapt myself to be able to imagi better, but I decided not to. Because it would just make it all feel worse.

  Did I even want to find out what my limits were just then? What would happen if I used up all of my energy doing so? Especially while not knowing if anyone else had already achieved what I had and already learned more than me about it?

  No.

  I o figure out what to do with Felicity, first.

  And then I o be as cautious as possible with expl myself and how I now affected my surroundings. And if I could get Felicity outside of myself again, maybe she could help me do that better.

  So I swam my locus of awareness closer to Felicity again, to see what I could see.

  And there she was.

  And there I saw our first problem.

  I had my old sense of self and my foothold in the monster realm, a dimension of the universal brane or something like that, to pare her against. I also could pare her to the size of the bar ba ventional spacetime, sort of, though that made slightly less sense from this perspective.

  The problem was that she had grown huge.

  She was still a little worm pared to my energy reserves. But I could fit my old sense of size inside of her many, many times over. I could fill her up with copies of my old self as if she was an o liner. And she was still growing.

  ly expoially. She’d stopped eatirically more the rger she got. She’d mahat much. She was keeping it to a bare minimum to support her size and plexity, but there was still some growth going on.

  That was not good.

  If I successfully excised her, she would be a whole new being than she was used to. She could still inhabit a human psyche without causing any notable disfort for her host, but her presen the monster realm would be much bigger than it once was, and make her more vulnerable to others who worked from that end.

  Not that she wouldn’t be able to see them ing and defend herself, but it would be a whole new experience for her. And if she didn’t learn fast enough, she could fall into traps I didn’t eve know about, because my presen the monster realm was even now fairly small somehow.

  I still didn’t uand how I worked that way. I had to be taking up spaewhere else. But where?

  And while Felicity was inside of me, in my energy reserves, she was in that space. However dangerous that space might be, she was at least protected by yers and yers of my own bulk. And ‘bulk’ is really not the word for anything in a non-corporeal dimension like that, or whatever it was, but it remains the best analog I’ve got for mortal yreaders. She had mathematical padding, and that padding was me. And once she no longer had that padding, she was more vulnerable than I was, I figured.

  Because I’d apparently existed in that way for hundreds of millions of years without attack or injury.

  I was deeply afraid to do anything new, even though that had already happened.

  So, I thought at Felicity, not at all expeg her to hear me, “You’re huge.”

  She wriggled.

  Shit. What?

  “ you uand me?” I asked.

  She wriggled again.

  “Try talking to me like you would one of your headmates,” I instructed.

  And she did, and I felt and uood her voice to ask, “What did you do to me, Synthia?”

  So, that solved, we had a better versation.

  I expio her that I had put her in my energy reserves, to keep her from eating my memetic structures, and to keep her from starving. And then that I had had to deal with some things before helping her out.

  She told me that I likely could uand her now because I was finally paying attention to her. That, at least, that’s how things worked in a human psyche. And she accused me of being too much like a lifeform, from eating their emotions for too long.

  We may have devolved into some mutual recriminations for a little while after that.

  And then, after I finally expio her her situation as I was able to see it (as well as a bit of my own), she still insisted on bei free. Which I erfectly willing to do, so long as she agreed to it.

  I also agreed to try to teach her how to adapt herself to a figuration like mine, even though I didn’t uand my own figuration at all. If she could store her energy reserves the way I did, we both figured she could be retively as safe as she was before. Or close to it. Maybe safer, because she’d have those reserves.

  I did sort of wonder how much of her bulk was what she’d stored up over her millions of years of existence. But, I didn’t have any sort of a metrieasure that, aher did she.

  Anyway, whatever I learned, I would try to pass on. And iurn, she agreed to help me assess my own presen both the monster realm and the realm of life, so I could shore up my defenses better.

  So my step was to portion off the bit of myself surrounding her like an egg and expel it pletely, so she could safely finish ing it and essentially hatch. And I wa entirely outside of my domain, so that there was no more e between it and myself.

  But, infuriatingly, that didn’t work.

  “Have you tried this before?” she asked.

  “No. Of course not,” I replied. “I’ve never had anyone inside me before. It’s unpreted. I’ve never even heard of this problem.”

  “Well, you are really reclusive.”

  “All monsters are reclusive.”

  “You’re reclusive for an affectivore,” she said.

  “You’re using my vocabury?” I prodded her.

  “Let’s stay on topic. So, you’ve never had a reason to, I don’t know, bud a part of yourself, even without another monster in it?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Never,” she said. “I just thought with how a you are, you might have had it e up.”

  “You might be surprised by just how stati affectivore be,” I said. “Even over eons.”

  “Maybe.”

  “This kind of reminds me of something life did once,” I said.

  “It did it just once?”

  “No, of course not. But it did do it for the first time, I’m sure. I wasn’t there.”

  “Synthia.”

  “You know how humans figured out that cells have anelles, and then figured out what anelles were made of?” I rambled.

  “Get me the fuck out of you!” she thought-shouted at me.

  “I ’t,” I told her.

  And then, to prove it, I geried again, tellio pay attention. I also paid attention, as close as I could, to see what was going on.

  I was able to extend something we’ll call a pseudopod, with her in it, into the physical realm of life, behind the bar of the small dance hall my domain was in. And since she didn’t take up any physical spa that realm at all, it didn’t have to be a very big pseudopod. Not physically. I made it the size, shape, texture, and color of a chi’s egg, for shits and giggles.

  But I was not able to detach myself from it, because it was me. I could not divide myself into two pieces. There was hod by which I could figure out how to do that. I just couldn’t make that part of myself not me.

  It might have been severed from me if the right teratovore came along and ate the egg. Kind of like how Felicity lost a part of herself when Croc-face ate one of her hosts. But I couldn’t do it to myself. I just didn’t have the means.

  And then, when I tried to push on Felicity and sever her e to me, to stop her feeding and expel her, I had the same problem.

  Either it was because there was a stant stream of me feeding into her that she was also incapable of severing, or it went deeper than that.

  And I expihat to her, and begged her to stop feeding on me.

  And she said a single word in response.

  “Fuck.”

  theInmara