As they walked toward the city ter, Synthia expined what she had in mind, “If you want to see what I’m going to do and what happens, I think that’d be fine. I won’t be offended if you run at any point, for any reason.” It looked like Synthia was gng down at Cassy’s feet periodically, for some reason. Like maybe she was trying to match her pace, but then she didn’t. “I’m going to go to city hall and stand just outside it for a little bit. A truly safe distance for you might be across the street, holy, but if the emanant I’m going to be taunting is a reasonable monster, it’ll just walk out the front door in the shape of a human. After that, it might get messy.”

  “What do you mean by ‘messy’?” Cassy asked, kind of afraid of the answer, and very much feeling like this was a role pying game, a LARP.

  “Well, I’m going to try to vihe thing I just want to talk,” I said. “I don’t think it knows that I have a bitey little Felicity inside me. And then I’m going to help Felicity bite it.” Synthia sed their surroundings yet again, and sighed. “It’s like the whole city is devoid of prey right now. None of the smaller affectivores, enthalpiphages, or teratovores. Nobody else. So the ces ering a feeding frenzy is going to be pretty low. I haven’t been paying attention tely, so it might have been this way for a while.”

  Cassy grimaced, ging at herself for pying along, “And what does that mean?”

  “her I nor the other thing have to hide what we are,” came the answer.

  But then a bigger person in a navy blue hoodie and gray sants came walking down the sidewalk toward them, eyes on the pavement, chewing on something that was stig out of their mouth. And Synthia fell silent as she watched them approach, but kept walking herself.

  As all three of them did their little passing-each-other dance, Synthia kept watg the other person’s feet. And then scowled directly at Cassy.

  Cassy felt another chill and stopped walking, taking a siep back.

  Synthia didn’t look predatory in any way, or even angry. But after everything they’d been talking about, and after feeling her hand ge shape and watg her sink into a storm drain, having Synthia scowl at her felt like a bad thing.

  “Cassy?” Synthia asked.

  “What’s going on?” Cassy asked back, turning her head to the side.

  “Would you be opposed to Felicity visiting you?” the monster asked. “It would be only briefly, to make sure you’re OK. You might not even notice it. But if you did, it would be like a dream person brushing you as they pass by in your mind. You could even talk to her if you wanted.”

  Cassy took aep bad asked, “Why does she o see if I’m OK?”

  “Have you had a lot of nightmares, like, ever?” came the total ck of answer.

  “Not… not really,” she said, cautiously.

  “Most humans have epialivores riding around in their heads. Especially people with PTSD and such. They feed on the emotions that nightmares cause,” Synthia expined. “But there are other emanants that ride in your subscious, too. And you’re… You’re moving the Strands.”

  She didn’t know what the Strands were, but she could put two and two together regarding what just happened, “And that uy didn’t?”

  “They did not, no.”

  “What are the Strands?”

  Synthia sighed, “The other twelve dimensions of the Universe, maybe. They’re very string-like to me, and to that other monster I met before I went into hiding, apparently. And, uh, really big and powerful moend to hide their bulk in them somehow.”

  “You’ve switched from saying ‘emanants’ back to saying ‘monsters’. Are y to scare me?”

  “No,” Synthia shook her head. “The opposite. I’m just not sure which word I like best. I’ve been using ‘monster’ for a couple hundred years now, so it’s habit.”

  “Some habit,” it seemed like she was trying to joke, even though she didn’t know why.

  “Look, we don’t really o worry about it, if it makes you unfortable. It’s probably nothing,” Synthia said, turning to walk toward city hall again. Then, over her shoulder, “It’s just that if you don’t have an emanant riding in your psyche, then there is something really weird about you as a human being, and I think we might both be curious as to what that might be, sidering what we were both just talking about.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just think about it. And if you have any questions, ask away,” Synthia said, almost in a whisper.

  And then they walked the rest of the way to Synthia’s destination without saying anything else.

  Cassy thought about texting Greg and Ayden about what she was doing, but they were both busy, and wouldn’t be able to help in a pinot really. And they’d think she was being foolish, really.

  Instead, she promised she’d run back to work, where there were people she knew, if anything really scary happened.

  It was far enough away that she couldn’t run the whole way, but maybe she wouldn’t have to.

  There were usually police bumming around city hall anyway. Not that they’d be the kind of ‘help’ anybody wanted.

  Watg the retionship irands between me and my target as I walked toward them told me a lot about how the Strands worked. Not in any way I could describe in nguage yet, but it helped me get an intuitive sense of the retionship betweerands and the physical world.

  Cassy’s Strand disturbance fading in and out of my awareness as she gged behind me also told me something. At least, whatever was going on with her was sistent, though. It never grew in strength beyond a certain subtle brushiion, and it faded proportioo her distance from me.

  Did I think for a sed that she could be or was being a monster, like she hoped? No. Not in the slightest bit. I retty sure she had a rider or two, someone just on the verge of being supraliminal. But probably not someone I’d have to worry about.

  Except that maybe she’d draw the attention of another Supraliminal. Like maybe Croc-face.

  I tried to keep my disfort about that idea from showing.

  If we could have had Felicity clear her out before we got to city hall, I would have felt better about it all. But I retty sure I could distract whatever came our way by simply being myself as bigly and loudly and obnoxiously as I could.

  Still, whe to city hall, I told her I really thought she should wait across the street. And to, just for safety sake, stay away from the storm drain. “Don’t hang out on the er, OK?”

  She nodded glumly, and then blinked and said more firmly, “OK.”

  Really, she robably safer here than out on her own anywhere else iy, I realized. I might o tell her why she should let Felicity in, now that I thought about it. After doing this other thing, unfortunately.

  The street I crossed was four nes with a wide divider, and it was the city hall MAX station that was directly in front of me. I gnced back to see what Cassy was doing, and saw that she was holding ba the other side of the sidewalk she was on, holding her elbow and watg.

  I waved, and then turo city hall, or the Gresham City Civiter.

  As I walked down that sidewalk, I saw that Cassy ag me.

  I could have just turned into the walkway and gone inside. No one would have stopped me. But if I was going to have a nasty frontation, I wa to be outside where people could run away.

  I noticed that my maion of a human body was shaking in a natural lookiion to fear aement. I let it keep doing that as I took a few steps past the turn off for the front doors, and then crossed the hedgy ndsg to get to the side of the building. I chose a spot where there was a vertical stretch of crete wall between the windows, and walked up to put my hand on the side of the building.

  Not a necessary gesture, really, but theatrics are useful sometimes in maniputing human behavior. I felt like I wanted people who saw me to think I was doing something weird. In the Pacifiorthwest, that usually made people go the long way around you aheir distance.

  A security or police officer might e up and ask me what I was doing, but at this point I felt like they were plicit in all of this. And besides, that officer might actually end up being my quarry in disguise.

  I’d been in this building a couple of times in the past month. Whatever it was that was u had to know of me and probably Felicity as well. Especially if it could sehe Strands, which I retty sure it was more practiced at than I was.

  I then shifted my focus to the monster realm and poked the bear, so to speak.

  It was the politest way of saying, “I want to talk,” when you weren’t fag each other in the physical world.

  Cassy worked her lips and swayed as she watched Synthia just stand there, hand on the building, looking down at the foundation of it. And, for a while, nothing happened.

  Even though Synthia had described what should happe, Cassy didn’t know what to expect. Her own mind told her it would either be something spectacur and horrifying, like in a movie, or a police officer would just e up to her friend and maybe arrest her for being weird with a gover building.

  But then she felt the ground rumble like ahquake, and she panicked a little.

  Before she even thought about it, she had her cell pho and had started rec what Synthia was doing. And, then, she decided to add a little voice over.

  Which was maybe a bad idea, because if she shared this then it ossible someone could trace it to her. But, she wasn’t sure what the meta data was on her file anyway, nor how to ge it. And maybe Synthia could take care of all of that.

  “Hi. Uh, hello, so, um,” she fumbled with her words for a moment. “Across the street is someone I know. And, uh, she says she’s trying to talk to something that lives under city hall. And the ground just shook. So I’m rec this in case something weirder happens. This is in Gresham, on, by the way. Where that monster was chasing people. This is reted. This is because of that. Um, I’ll expin in a bit.”

  And that’s when the ground underh Synthia just opened up like a mouth.

  Synthia spped her other palm up against the wall and just hung there, her hands having slid about a foot further down from where she’d started. Her legs swayed and kicked, and started to ge.

  From her feet moving up, clothes and all, they started to bulge and bee blobby. They turned bd amorphous. And though the ge was slower than Cassy expected for a shapeshifter, thanks to Hollywood ventions, it was still fast enough.

  Something that looked like an animated tree root covered in thorns reached up to itself around Synthia, but only got as far as what used to be her legs and passed right through them, like an octopus arm swiping through ink in water.

  Synthia’s lower half blurred and billowed, thinning out to the point where Cassy could see the building’s foundations through her. Theracted and gealed around the rest of herself, which was also ging to bee this floating blob of liquid bess.

  And Synthia started shouting.

  Holding her hands as steady as she could, Cassy zoomed in with her phoo see if she could get a better view of it through the s. Unfortunately, of course, it did not amplify Synthia’s words, so she couldn’t make them out.

  “How do I prove these aren’t special effects?” Cassy asked the phone. “Monsters are real. They are so very real. I’m looking at this with my own eyes and I ’t even believe it. How do I prove these aren’t special effects? Is anyone else seeing this?” It was weird to hear herself uttering these clichéd words, just like she’d expect to hear in an analog horror movie. ema verité. “Um.”

  Just then a passing car smmed on its breaks and swerved to a panicked halt, allowing itself to ride up on the sidewalk to avoid blog the nes, while other drivers hoheir horns at it.

  Another car going the other way did something simir moments afterward.

  “Well, OK, that!” Cassy hissed. “This is… It’s ohirteen on January fifth, and you check to see if there were any film crews w at city hall today, because I don’t think anybody’s got as for stunts right now!” She’d already moved the camera to track the cars, but she tried to get a steadier bead on eae, as the rest of traffic came to a halt around them. “Lucky there was no wreck,” she added.

  Then she aimed the camera on Synthia again.

  But the monster – her emanant friend? – had entirely bee an unduting, floating mass of ink that was growing in size at an arming rate while something started to climb out of the mouth in the grouh her.

  theInmara