At the same time Rico breaks up with Artemis:
If Quibble hadn’t destroyed his own phone, he would notice now a moment where it ceases to work. And if that were the case, he would have more forewarning than I have. As it is, I stand back. I see a swirling dark with many bright blinking eyes misting into Here, the Space Between. The cloud gathers on the periphery, a haunting fog.
I have left the coffee shop and I will not return until this is over. Even in a relatively disconnected place, the Hex can see me. Can find my body. Each time I kick back in my seat, add milk, take a sip, each time I stop my Watching and turn back to myself, I can See him there, watching me in return. And I know better now than to think myself uninteresting to him. So I have left.
Quibble cannot see the same and he believes himself to be safe. He earnestly believes if he makes all the right decisions, the morally correct ones, everything will turn out okay. Not engaging with the Hex is good and right and just; he assumes that his life will turn out in good and right and just ways. I don’t need to be able to See into the future to know that it will not go the way he plans.
He sleeps a restless sleep. I keep an Eye on him, worried in a way I find curious. I Watch his resting face, slackened in the dark, interrupted again and again by tensing of the eyebrows, a purse of the mouth. And then he is awake and staring at the ceiling. In the morning, he will go back to Artemis’s. Perhaps even before she’s up. And then they will make a plan. Make a plan to end this thing, to vanquish it. This imagining allows him some minutes more with his eyes closed as he drifts, on the surface of slumber. Then he wakes again. Repeats.
He wakes for keeps to a knock on the door. It is morning—later than he’d wanted to be up, but not late enough that a knock on the door is appropriate. He stumbles around and pulls his pants over his boxers, hopping up and down as he runs through a calming exercise. He wonders if he will ever be rid of his anxiety, ever find a way to exist outside the framework of perpetual mental health maintenance (I do not need my Power to know that no one ever does).
It had been like this. Back then. He’d been old enough to be home by himself. Exactly like—No. He reassures himself as he locates a shirt—literally any shirt—that once one’s parents are dead, rarely does it happen a second time. He smirks. Only people with dead parents find those jokes funny, and even then only a special subset of those people. He generally keeps these jokes to himself; he’s seen Artemis’s stricken look a few too many times before she crams it down, wipes it away, laughs a too-boisterous laugh.
He finally gets to the door, groggy, and wrenches it open. Three beefy men in black polo shirts with red logos that say We Move You on the breast pocket stand before him. One has a clipboard. “Hi, we’re the movers that Ms. Colleen McKormick ordered for her things. She mentioned there was a house sitter here—don’t worry, she already took care of the tip for us.”
At the sound of the name he thought he’d buried long ago, he feels like he will vomit. “Movers?” he says, confused. “Movers where?” Legally, Colleen McKormick no longer exists. How did that person order movers?
“If she didn’t tell you, we certainly can’t.” The movers shuffle past him. The two without the clipboard begin assembling boxes at breakneck speed.
Quibble blinks dumbly. As they begin discussing how to pack his barware, if they have enough paper to wrap the glasses just right or if they might need to go pick up some more, he snaps into some kind of action. “Wait, stop. No. I’m Colleen McKormick.”
All three of them halt and look directly at him. Quibble realizes how big they all are. He’s tall, but they’re large. And there are three of them. He’d been about to explain, to say “or at least I was.” But then he witnesses himself: he witnesses the balding head, the facial hair he has not yet shaved off today, the flat chest with near-invisible scars (the best surgeon money could buy). He’d never really had consequences for outing himself before. He swallows his tongue. He doesn’t say it, doesn’t say, “I’m trans.”
“Yeah right, pal,” one of the movers says. “Look, if she didn’t tell you your house-sitting gig ended today, take that up with her.”
Quibble’s mouth is dry and tastes like the roiling of his empty stomach. “Sure,” he says. He retreats into the master bedroom. He feels like he knows what’s going on, and the knowledge doesn’t comfort him. He is terrified.
For the first time since the Hex began in earnest, he turns on his computer. He notices that his mail client has an additional Gmail plugged in—Colleen McKormick’s old email. Quibble’s old email. As old as it is, it’s full of new correspondence: movers, bank password reset notifications, his co-op board, Realtors—
Quibble whimpers. He hugs his arms to his stomach, thinking if maybe he squeezes himself tight enough, he might hold himself together. The movers are talking in the other room and then they are not; surely they are thinking something—that he’s some homeless boyfriend the eccentric Colleen is dumping, the kind of contactless breakup only a very rich person can pull off. He tries to sign into his bank accounts. The username or password is not recognized.
Quibble closes the bedroom door before he has his meltdown. He sits on the floor rocking back and forth, flapping his hands, trying any kind of movement to still his racing heart. He feels particulated, atomized, his steadiness broken entirely apart by two warring forces—that he has absolutely no material resource, nothing he cannot immediately stuff into a backpack and carry out of here, no money and no apartment by the looks of it. His parents’ apartment. Their things in the closet. All of it, all of it gone.
And also the sensation of being digitally detransitioned. He hadn’t known it was something that could be done. He hadn’t expected it. He’d changed his name, his gender marker, but it was so easy for this thing to use the old name, the deadname, to bring it back to life and animate it and make it haunt. Everyone was so quick to believe in this ghost. Maybe didn’t even wonder. And when the eccentric McKormick heir asks you to do something, gives you cash instantly for it—of course.
When he feels like he can get himself up, Quibble opens his text messages on his laptop. And there it is, what he is already expecting, the incomprehensible number:
:)