“You have to take the right left to get to it,” I told Cassy as we walked, side by side, a snowy Mount Hood visible on the horizon in front of us, a little to our left. “And if you’re not an emanant, you won’t see it. And some emanants still ’t.”

  “Oh,” she said, barely loud enough to hear over the traffic.

  “We must have just missed each other in there,” I mused. “I maybe could have opehe way for you if you’d texted me, but I’ve been very preoccupied. There are things I’ve learned about myself that could be very useful.”

  I wasn’t just saying things willy-nilly for a rea from her. Not anymore. I couldn’t feel her emotions anymore, which was discerting but a deliberate choiy part. So I was using my vast knowledge of human psychology, and the experience of our friendship, to try to mend the rift between us.

  I’d decided to talk about my world and life like it was a muhing, the same kind of thing as her housemates’ questionable ing and food handling decisions, and her worries about unianizing. And I was using the same tones I did when we used to talk about our lives before.

  But I was keeping the references and expnations simple, assuming she already knew what I was talking about. To make it easy for her to accept it.

  “I think I lost track of time, and I’m really sorry I did that,” I told her.

  “Oh, well. I do that too, sometimes,” she said, hands in pockets, looking down at the sidewalk. After a handful of paces, she looked over at me, a crease between her brows, “Of course. I guess it gets worse as you get older? That’s what my grandma says.”

  I chuckled and smiled over at her, “I guess you could say that. I’m a bit past the point of thinking about aging and ‘getting older’, though. And I trol how I perceive time. I’m pretty good at it. When I’m not hyperfocused, at least.”

  “Right, right.”

  “I told you all I’d keep you updated, let you in on my, uh, life,” I said. “And I didn’t do that. So I’m sorry. The offer is still open, though. But it might be better not to do it over text messaging now that I think of it. I still sider you three to be my friends, if you still want to be. We just have to be a little more careful, I think.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I said a few things there,” I pointed out. “Why’s what?”

  “All of it?” she bli me. “But definitely, why careful?”

  I gestured grandly at the city to our left and behind us, “There’s someone, or a couple of someones, out there keeping an eye on me and what I do. And they’re at least as good as I am at puter shenanigans. And they fucked up Hayward Grocery because of me.” I gestured at the house we were ing up to, and tinued, “I think they’re maniputing the locals for some reason, too, keeping things in their sense of order. It starts sounding like crazy spiracy theory shit when I start to expin it. But, then, so does everything else about me, holy.”

  Cassy stopped, so I did too. She turoward me, arms at her sides, looking slightly upward at my face. Her expression was unreadable, rexed except for that crease of . And her jaw slowly widened, her lips def i of remaining closed to the st moment before she spoke, “Is it a good idea to be your friend?”

  I tried to make an expression that she could uand, twisting up my lips in a sembnce of thought, and raising an eyebrow. I said, “It depends on your definition of ‘good’. Safe? Probably not, holy. You will probably be safer if you keep your distance from me. But I don’t think you’re in particur danger. I don’t think there are any actual people eaters in town, unless Croc-face double dips somehow. Which isn’t without prece. But affectivores like me get fug maniputive, and really disrupt people’s lives. And I think I’d e across as maniputive if I told you I thought your life is already being disrupted and still will be even if you walk away from me. But…”

  “But what?”

  “You might find it cool to still be friends with me?” I shrugged and sched up my whole face. “I never actually lied to yreg or Ayden, aside from omission. Or jokes. Jokes kind of involve lies sometimes. Like the whole T-rex husband thing. But I think it’s pretty obvious I don’t have one, because T-rexes aren’t alive today.”

  We were walking again.

  “T-rex husband thing?” she asked, scowling in fusion.

  “Oh, you weren’t there,” I remembered. “It was a thing I told Ayden, to annoy him, a him know I was totally teasing about the other stuff I’d said. The true stuff.”

  “True stuff?”

  “About dinosaur behavior. I’d said I learned something ‘the other day’, meaning sixty-seven million years ago. Of course.” I smirked at her. “You knoishy-washy that phrase is.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Never met him.”

  “Please stop,” she muttered.

  “OK.”

  “I like it when we joke and banter and all that,” Cass slowly expio me. “But, I miss it. A lot. I don’t get it these days. And when we slip into it, I feel like how I used to feel around you. Instead of how I felt when I saw…”

  “Ah, yes,” I aowledged. I retty sure she was talking about my little melting into the grating trick. I’d been deliberately trying to scare her. “I remember those emotions from you. Yes. But I could only guess at what was triggering them. A pretty good guess, I think.”

  “Was that real?” she asked. “I’ve rewatched our video a few times, but I still ’t my mind around it. Were y to scare us, to push us away?”

  I took in a deep breath, notig how the Strands kept vibrating ever so subtly with each of Cassy’s steps. I wondered if every human did that, but I didn’t see anybody else around that we were likely to ast soon. Just cars zipping by. And the cars weren’t causing anything, but they weren’t necessarily close enough.

  Also, there were no signs of other emanants. was like they had all fled the neighborhood while Felicity and I had been rebuilding ourselves in my domain.

  I noticed a missing stoplight and found myself frowning up at it. The mounting beam was there. The other stoplight on the beam was still there, indig whether to ght or not. But the stoplight for the turn ne was missing.

  Really.

  “There was another Monster present,” I reminded her. “A pretty big ooo, even if it turned out to be a scaredy cat. I wanted you to be safe. But also, kinda, yeah? I want to make sure you know what yetting into by hanging around me, and that you know I will always work to protect your autonomy, to live your life on your terms.”

  “It wasn’t very friendly of you,” Cassy grumbled.

  “You’ve told me that you prefer it when people are ho and upfront,” I reminded her. “I was, and am, trying to do that. So you know what’s up.”

  “I guess that doesn’t work very well when I’m just a twenty-something autistic girl, and you’re older than shit,” she said.

  “I really am,” I told her, with all the hoy of the Earth itself. “I really fug am, aren’t I?”

  “You’re the ohat knows.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “And that is the problem, isn’t it? If I lose track of time again and a tury passes by, we’ll never see each ain.”

  Cassy hiccuped and rubbed her nose, and I regretted losing my ability to read her emotions. I wanted every st one she felt, so I could be a better friend while she was still alive. But I sort of imagined I could feel what she was feeling. The process of loss, a kind of sorrow.

  But then she said, “It’s a power differential thing, too.”

  “Also way too true.”

  We kept walking, though. And I looked around some more, squinting and feeling around irands. Gresham felt spooky ay, like a town that did despite how much of it I could still see with my eyes.

  I started to say, “I want to walk toward the city –”

  “I wish I was a monster like you,” Cassy interrupted me. “I hate people so much.”

  I studied her, and she looked back at me. My imaginatioed me with the feeling of longing, to belong, to be part of something.

  “Assuming you really are a monster,” she said.

  “I don’t think I bite you and turn you into one,” I sighed. “And I don’t know if those kinds of myths are based on a real emanant who . I don’t think it works like that, anyway. More likely, if they eve, they deliver another emanant into your system, your psyche, and it takes over. Maybe someone’s figured out how ter the creation of an emanant in a human. But I don’t think a lifeform bee an emanant.”

  “What about Fafnir?” she asked. “He was a dwarf who became a dragon from sitting on gold for too long. Also, like, there are so many myths about how a dead person bee a monster if they aren’t buried right.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But, if they are real, were those people really transformed into emanants, or did emanants ma from the remains of their lives? Cassy, we are fually different things. We naturally exist in such separate substrates of reality that it takes a lot of effort for us to share this space.” I waved my hand in front of me and then poked it with the finger of my other hand, “This isn’t made of matter. It acts like it most of the time. I use it to push against matter.” I poked her shoulder. “But there are no atoms in here. rons. No quarks. I’m something different.”

  “What about souls, though?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  She snorted an explosive sigh, “Poop.”

  My mental model of her personality was really strong. It was almost as if I’d felt that bst of disappoi for real.

  I hit the crosswalk button and turo head deeper into town, where there’d be more people and maybe a Supraliminal emanant or two. “You experience a whole lot of things I’ll never get to experience. From the way you shit, to your dreams, and sense of self. It’s all alien and different. It’s part of why I like to befriend lifeforms.”

  Halfway across the street, she asked, “Do you ever want to be human?”

  I had promised not to lie, “No.”

  “People are shit.”

  I reframed that, “People be really shitty, yes.”

  “No!” she nearly shouted at me. “I mean, people, human beings are literally made of shit. Animals are. All life is. We are what we eat, all the the food , and the smallest life eats shit. To live, we have to eat other living things, and somewhere along the line, one of those things ate shit. We’re shit. And I hate it! Being alive sucks!”

  “That’s –” I started to say as we were stepping up onto the sidewalk on the er, looking toward city hall. But I was suddenly distracted by something looming below me.

  All it took was stepping that much closer. By crossing the street, I came into view of at least one of my adversaries, I think.

  It wasn’t really bigger than me, actually, it just felt that way from my current perspective, looking into the Strands from the physical realm. It also took up more spa one of the Strands that I wasn’t occupying much myself, so it was teically bigger in that dire. This made it harder to pare to the rest of myself. But I estimated that if I squeezed myself into that Strand, I could cast a shadow over it, so to speak.

  Could I or Felicity take a bite out of it from the Strands? I didn’t know. Not from where I was standing. her of us had figured out how that worked yet.

  “What were you gonna say?” Cassy asked.

  “If you stick with me, you’ll get a ce to see how it’s even more like that with us emanants,” I said. “I’ve spent most of my existence, all of it really, learning how not to be eaten. But there’s always a new lesson around the er.”

  “But you’re almost as old as the Earth itself!”

  “Not even close. The Cryogenian is te, te Precambrian, Cassy. There were at least four billion years of enthalpiphages before me. And most of us don’t survive a millennium. I think I’m a bit of an outlier.”

  She gestured at a passing car like it was evidence of something, “And I’ll be lucky to live awenty years! Especially the way the gover is going, ign climate ge and turning all fascist!”

  As we tinued walking, I was quickly able tute where the other Supraliminal was. Especially after bobbing my head a couple times like a bearded dragon. The big old monster was currently sitting just below the basement of city hall.

  “Look. Cassy. Whether we remain friends or not, do you want help with that?” I asked. “Do you want to live longer and have a happier life?”

  When Synthia asked her that question, Cassy thought about the versation they’d just had and all the tas her mind had raced through while listening to her. She tried to weigh all of that against the frustrations of her own life.

  Her other optiht now, was to walk home and go to sleep during the day, to get enough sleep for her graveyard shift. To try to sleep while Derrick pyed Call of Duty in the room o hers with his subwoofer and shouting at his ‘friends’. Or she could go to a Starbucks and sit blearily over a bunch of sugar and caffeine, alone.

  “Yes,” she said, kind of angry that she had to even admit it. “Of course I want a better life. That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  She didn’t think anyone, not even Synthia, had the power to make it happen. She was just venting to someone who she’d thought of as a friend, out of habit. Someone who’d suddenly bee different.

  “Done,” Synthia said. “I ’t promise results, who knows what the world will throw at you or me, but I give you my alliand prote. Greg and Ayden have the same. Friendship or not.”

  Cassy felt a chill gh her body. Which was dumb, because what Synthia just said sounded like it came from a freaking Disney movie. But clearly part of her believed it all anyway.

  “What does that even mean?” she felt herself asking.

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out,” Synthia was staring off in the distance, slightly to the left of the dire they were walking. “But, in the meantime, I’m about to go see if maybe Felicity eat an aircraft carrier.”

  “A what?”

  “Well, it’s about the size of one. I think.”

  theInmara