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Because it was the red stuff. The red stuff wanted you to, and Ellery made you, and here you are, doubled over blindly, scalding. The red stuff ate the sun, and coiled around it, and now that you've boiled off the red stuff the sun is boiling you. That's your best guess from the heat and the light screaming through the back of your eyes and the pain. Oh God! Shit! If you ever see Ellery again you are going to wring his stick neck so hard you'll use it to mop up spills. You are going to set him on fire. Your heart might actually be boiling alive, your blood hissing and clotting and tangling, its liquid elements accreting and fusing in you, making something iron-red, making something red and alive—
>[+1 SV: 1/???]
>[-2 ID: 10/14]
You are on your knees, coughing and moaning, eyes welded shut. You barely hear the yelling, and barely feel crowd-hands grabbing at you, pinning your arms back, like you're an active danger to anybody except yourself. You guess Us hasn't seen awesome sun powers before. Ha-ha. The worst may actually be passing: the new-birthed red stuff is resuming its protective circling. Thanks, red stuff. Thanks, God. You squinch your bad eye partly open, reasoning that it's probably tougher to ruin than your squishy good one.
It's difficult to see well with it, of course, hence "bad eye." Good thing everybody has decided to come way up close. You are being pinned by three or four different people, with a good dozen circled around to watch. The red steam hangs low over everything, obscuring their features— or maybe not. You open your good eye. Or maybe they're losing their features, their skin corroding, their faces growing wobbly and undefined and translucent. Their gripping fingers melding into flippers, then sagging into tendrils. Where the steam touches, the sky cracks and flakes away, and the ground quivers and rises to join the bodies of the silent not-people. Where the steam doesn't touch, all is well in the world.
You are within the steam, but it does nothing to you. You make Claudia real enough. The others are not people: ten feet in every direction, they are Us.
YOU.
They wobble when they speak but don't move their mouths. They don't really have mouths.
YOU ARE CHARLOTTE FAWKINS.
WE WERE TOLD THAT YOU WERE
PURGED OF YOUR INFECTION
COMPLETELY, AFTER YOU ALLOWED
IT TO CONSUME YOUR SENSES
AND BURST OUR FIRST DREAM
LIKE IT WAS MADE OF NO
MORE THAN SOAP-FILM.
YOU ARE BACK.
"Uhh," you say. "Yes!"
YOU ARE BACK AND YOU ARE
INFECTED. THERE ARE OPEN
ABCESSES IN YOUR INMOST
SELF. WE WERE LIED TO.
"I— I wouldn't say that—"
YOU HAVE COME BACK TO
DESTROY THE THING WE
HAVE OURSELVES REBUILT.
"No I haven't!" You squirm against your gooey restraints to no avail. "I think your ice party is really cool, or whatever, I don't know! I just got here! And I didn't even destroy your last one, Lucky did, and he just blew up the temple, you're the one who decided to scrap the whole thing—"
(3/4)
