It wasn’t that she had a death wish of any sort, she told herself. It wasn’t like her life had been so hard that she still struggled with suicidal ideation. She retty stable on that t these days.

  And it wasn’t that Gresham articurly more safe to walk alone in than any pce else, either. Let alone a pce where one would deliberately go searg for a monster’s ir.

  But she did regurly go for walks on her own, during the daylight. Even into parks and trails, without even a dog. And a lot of local women did that. More than most other women admitted. And she was used to it. Nothing had happeo her, nor anyone she knew. Not while going for a walk.

  Yes, there were news reports and i letter stories about women assaulted by strange men while walking to the grocery store. All over. But violent crime had actually been going down try wide, and locally, for decades. And there had always been women walking alone, as they should be able to, ued.

  It was a matter of statistical likelihood as much as any safety protocols, whatever they were. Just like driving in a car without a wreck was. Like Synthia had pointed out.

  Though, of course, with the ining Presidential administration, it might actually start being dangerous. But Cassy refused to give into that particur fear m, even though it was relentless.

  Normally, she didn’t even think about it.

  The only reason she was thinking about it now was because she was, actually, searg for a monster’s ir. So there was a certain amount of self justification she had to gh to get there. And along the way, it dredged up the usual societal bullshit that kept women afraid and pt and, well, restricted.

  No, actually, telling herself she didn’t have a death wish was all about seeking out a monster. Obviously.

  Why the fuck would she be doing that, upon being presented with intensely ving proof that monsters, or spirits, or emanants, or whatever they were, were real? Why?

  Because Synthia was her friend. And her friend was experieng something weird, and had now disappeared, and that was deeply w.

  And because she needed more proof too, actually. A video of Synthia doing something strange and impossible could easily be faked. She needed something more. Something that no one could deny.

  And because…

  Well…

  Whenever she thought about any of this, she got feelings. Sensations in her heart and gut, and head, that drove her. Warm, eic, fizzy, swirly feelings.

  She wasirely sure what to make of those feelings, holy. But they were mostly the same feelings she got those rare times she’d met someone new who she’d really clicked with. Someone who invariably turned out to also be autistid who ended up being a best friend. Like the feelings she got that first year she met Synthia.

  It had been like she’d met Synthia all ain, and they were still clig, or clig eveer, despite how short and scary it was. How little actual iion they’d had in that time didn’t seem to factor into her feelings.

  She needed more.

  Or a resolution of some sort.

  And with Synthia suddenly going quiet for two weeks, and the rest of her life in upheaval, she found herself nht in front of Synthia’s lot.

  Looking at the narrow, winding little trail, somehow nearly rown even in Winter, being her with her own yearning, Cassy realized she was feeling acutely and intensely lonely.

  It felt like she could smell the whole world where she was standing. Which, of course, was a very silly thing to think, because she couldn’t smell the o from here, among other things. She didn’t even know what a desert smelled like. But it still gave her that impression. Where she stood was on the brink of a green space, and when she faced it she could smell the rotting duff, the ferns ales, and the bark of the trees. But she could also still smell the crete beh her feet, and the fumes of exhaust and rubber from cars, a hint of tobacco from a cigarette butt at her feet, discarded gum, the marks of civilization. She associated bird shit with the city, but that’s only because paved surfaces collected it so well.

  The noon January sun on cast stark shadows from the leaves of the foliage, the ground cover, and illumihe lot through the bare branches of the deciduous trees that were there. But the bushes and brambles betweerees were tall and thiough that she couldn’t see terribly far into the lot. A tall evergreen here and there shaded the deeper realms of the space, too.

  She could see how a cottage could be hidden in a clearing deep in there, maybe. But Synthia had said the cottage had been a struct she’d removed somehow. Like an illusion, or fairy gmor.

  What would she do if she did find Synthia in there? What would that be like?

  Would Synthia appear as she always did, wearing some bination of the eight or so articles of clothing she seemed to own? Her dirty blonde hair pulled ba that perpetually messy bun? A purse that had a phone in it?

  Did she need any of those things when she was home?

  Or was Synthia just a homeless person who’d been fired for losing her PO box or something like that? And maybe all the weird stuff she’d said and that Cassy had witnessed, had touched with her own fingers, had been a shared delusion.

  It felt like hints of madness, or childhood fantasy, to step onto that cruddy little path in hopes of finding out.

  But she desperately needed some fantasy, fic to be real, for some kind of proof that the mundane world of bills and workpce politics was the actual illusion, and maybe that the reality she’d made friends with a being that could remember when li had evolved meant something.

  So she did it.

  Her jeans and Uggs protected her legs a from the les and brambles that encroached on the u path. And she covered her hands with the sleeves of her puffy coat to push aside the higher branches and tendrils of bushes and vines. And she told herself that if she found a homeless encampment, she’d just back out respectfully. It shouldn’t be much of a problem.

  But there was .

  No clearing, no natural little alcove between trees, clear of brambles, no bran the path.

  Not even a piece of discarded underwear.

  The path kept going deeper, and she would have speime thinking about how much trouble she always had with making friends, or even knowing when someone was a friend, if she wasn’t preoccupied with the growing suspi that Synthia had lied.

  She retty sure that oher side of these woods was a secluded neighborhood of old houses. Unless it was a magical trail that would draw her deeper and deeper into an eldritch fairy nd of myth and collective sciousness, like in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. Which, of course, wasn’t what was happening. That sort of thing was as real as telekinesis.

  But Cassy kept a tiny kernel of hope that that was exactly what was happening.

  Right up until the path went around its st curve, and the ramshackle cul-de-sac of old stick-built houses she truly expected to be there became visible.

  Her heart sank, and she felt a weird relief surrounding a pit of disappoi in her gut.

  And she turned back.

  The ohing I couldn’t teach Felicity was how to ge what she ate. Which was OK, because oal was to ge how she ate, so she didn’t o either jump through another monster’s eyes or sneak up on them in the monster realm. She needed a new way to absorb another emanant, so that she could ambush Croc-fad get that missing piece of herself back.

  So we’d worked on that and came up with something.

  Without a corporeal body besides a given human host, it was impossible for her to injure, let alone e, another monster’s emanation.

  But what we discovered was that she could learn to ma her own mouth in my emanation, attached to a gullet that could sap aabolize the energies of another monster.

  It was discerting to me, and startling when she first did it. To look down and see a toothy orifice with a barbed tendril in it open of its own accord from my middle, I perceived it as a part of myself that I couldn’t trol. But there she was, and she could do her thing.

  This was the st of our adaptations that we thought we o move forward. And we’d achieved them all within a matter of days, rather than years or turies like I was used to.

  It turned out that being aware of how we both inhabited the Strands was the key.

  It’s hard to articute how or why that was the case, but seeing myself in full helped me to uand myself more pletely, and to see new ways that I could apply the principles of shapeshifting.

  That done, I put myself together and stepped out of my domain, and walked out into the world to stand on the sidewalk of my street.

  It was just past noon of some Winter day, and there were cars. I had myself wearing a wool peacoat over a thin gray hoodie, with pink earmuffs and gloves to match my purse. My sneakers were their usual pink as well. I had pants of some sort I didn’t really care about.

  And I took a moment to look at the Strands again, now that I was outside of my domain. I wao see if my perspective of them had ged, and to dis whether or not the masses of the material world reted to them at all in any way.

  I’m familiar with quantum and ological theories. I know that some mathematis and physicists have determihat it’s highly likely the universe has more than just the four dimensions of x, y, z, and time. That the other dimensions are maybe bundled up in the knot of a quark, or something smaller, or behind the equation of the universe itself. There’s a certain point where even stists have a hard time describing these things that they work out with numbers.

  Some people think that what we perceive as three dimensional space is just a holographic proje from a two dimensional brahe true surface of the universe.

  All of these theories really closely resemble what I perceive of the three realms of my owehe monster realm, the Strands, and physical reality. Or whatever I call them on any given day.

  And the Strands, to me, really do appear to be some kind of representation of those excess dimensions that make reality wht on paper. Or ic string. Or something. Sort of.

  But I have absolutely no idea if they’re the same thing, or something else ehat humanity has yet to be able to imagine or detect.

  The only way I could learn more was through my own experimentation.

  And I was about to tig the Strands as I made my physical maion take a walk around the city, to see if I could find the other local Supraliminal emanants that were supposedly here.

  I was about to take a step to the right when I heard the rustling of leaves and a voice behind me.

  “Oh!” excimed Cassy.

  The Strands had moved ever so subtly as she’d approached to within a couple yards of me.

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  A person who looked remarkably like Synthia, with Synthia’s coat and purse, stood on the sidewalk where she’d started. As if this person had just left the same path that Cassy had been expl.

  Cassy blurted out an overly clichéd, “Oh!” And the self scious for doing so.

  But Synthia turned around to see her and smiled.

  “Cassy!” Synthia greeted her. “How are you?”

  “Oh, I, uh,” Cassy stammered, and then remembered that this was Synthia and she could just dive right into the details. Synthia actually wao know. “It’s been bad. Weird. Lonely. Hayward split us up. We’re all w different shifts and sleeping at different times, and it’s harder to meet and talk. But we’re moving forward with the union thing already. Still, you haven’t been around, and it’s really not the same. I think I hate my housemates.”

  “Yeah,” her friend aowledged. “I’ve been w on stuff. Improving myself and trying to help Felicity.” She furrowed her brow and looked around a little bit, appearing to sider what she was saying. Then she brightened up aured up the street, Eastward. “I was about to go for a walk to do some experimenting! Want to go with me? We could catch each other up. I tell you what I’m doing. Do you have the time?”

  “Yeah, um,” Cassy sed guessed herself for a moment, a tiny voi her head trying to say something about stranger danger, but seeing Synthia again was such a relief. Something was real here. Her friend might be talking a little bit like the strange being she cimed to be, but she looked real enough. The sun illuminated her hair, earmuffs, and coat, casting the shadows of tree branches across her chest and face, just like it should. And she was to let Cassy into her world, whatever it was. “Sure!”

  As they took their first few steps up the street, Synthia looked over at her.

  “Were y to find my clearing?” Synthia asked.

  theInmara