If either Artemis or Mary Margaret were sleeping, they would wake to the most stressful alarm clock: the wet ripping sound that announces Quibble’s trespassing. Mary Margaret considers whether she should ream him for walking right into what is effectively her bedroom; she’s been thinking a lot about boundaries and privacy, what the adults around her would be willing to sacrifice for it, and she’s gotten herself worked up. But she is also exhausted, and it is Quibble. Her train of thought halts when she hears the second sound. What can only be described as a keen wraps around the sound of his magic. High, too high to be anything but real grief. This second sound launches Artemis out of bed and brings her running with a baseball bat in hand.
Artemis has been half-dreaming of monsters. Hulking shadows that, when they get ahold of wrists and ankles, tear her and her coven apart, or else crack each witch’s jaw open wide and crawl inside their bodies, popping their bleeding eyeballs from their skulls and jerkily puppeting their still-full corpses. It has been a violent night behind her eyelids and she has not slept deeply. She felt, always, like those monsters lurked in the room with her, just out of sight behind her head. And then—
What could it hurt? I am not touching anything in physical reality after all. I send Artemis a dream in this toss-turn pseudo-sleep. The real monster, the real danger. I send her my vision of the witch spun into her own phone like an unraveling sweater. Unfolding. Unfold to kill.
When a Seer half-dreams of anything that rends, she grabs a baseball bat whether she is confident in its use or not.
She is convinced that something has come in Quibble’s place or on Quibble’s back or has possessed him, because that sound isn’t a sound she has heard Quibble make. But when she arrives with the bat raised high enough over her head to set the chandelier swinging, she sees that it is, indeed, Quibble, who sinks to the ground with his head in his hands.
Artemis doesn’t drop the bat. “Quibble, look at me?”
Quibble doesn’t respond, keeps making that horrible sound. Artemis wonders if this is part of my prophecy. If it were, if possession by a monster were part of it—it wouldn’t be the most twisted prophecy I ever gave. But it would rank high, and she would have even more cause to despise me.
“Quibble, look up at me or so help me Goddess, I will knock you out first and ask questions later.”
“What?” Quibble manages to ask through his wail. He does look up, mostly to see what on earth Artemis could be talking about. And Artemis looks deep into those eyes—red-rimmed, panicked, but undeniably human. The bat flops first to her side, then tumbles from her unclenched fist. She sits on the ground next to him just as someone knocks on the door.
All of them jump. Quibble’s eyes widen from a tear-soaked squint. “Don’t answer it,” he says. “Don’t you dare answer it—no!” He tries to stop Mary Margaret, who is already up. “Mary Margaret, don’t, we don’t know who it is.”
“We have a peephole,” she says, drier than a desert in July. Mary Margaret checks to make sure it’s not some kind of—she doesn’t know what—then unbolts the door while Quibble whimpers.
Wilder walks in, carrying a cat carrier filled with a mewling Lady Anastasia.
“A cat?” Artemis is exasperated. But one look at Wilder’s hollow face keeps her from continuing with “A fucking cat?” A lightly squealing Mary Margaret gets the Lady out of the carrier before Artemis’s attention is even fully back on Quibble.
It takes a lot for Quibble to tell them everything. Coaxing and questioning and, at one point, Mary Margaret even puts the Lady Anastasia in his lap. He absently pets her, but he remains shaking, shaken.
“Okay, okay,” Artemis says, somber and breathing deeply. Part of her had grown accustomed to Quibble’s money. “We need to get out. We clearly poked it in the eye.”
Wilder sighs, relieved they won’t have to make the argument.
“Quibs.” Artemis softens her voice again. “We have to go. You have to carry us. All of us. Through There. Can you do it?”
Quibble is hugging himself on the floor in the middle of the pink apartment, softly lit among the lamps and silk scarves, gasping for breath. “Gone,” he says. “All of it—all of it is gone. Jesus Christ, how can it all be gone?” But money is not all this is about. His past was resurrected, paraded before him, as a hologram of someone long dead, brought back without their knowledge or consent to dance and sing at the behest of a cruel master. The panic comes from nakedness, vulnerability, violation, each amplifying the other. A feedback loop that no amount of therapist-recommended exercises can break.
Wilder sits down next to him, Mary Margaret on the other side. Mary Margaret reaches out and holds his hand. Quibble registers distant surprise. Mostly Mary Margaret is usually a neutral house cat toward Quibble. Not clawing at him too much, but not exactly caring if he’s there.
Which is to say that Quibble doesn’t really understand Mary Margaret. Doesn’t understand the degree to which “fixture” means “family,” doesn’t understand she isn’t ever quite sure how to demonstrate “family.” She and Artemis share a language. They have in common a testing. Like putting one’s foot on half-frozen ice progressively harder or poking someone’s bruise over and over to see if she’ll leave. An acceptance that if she does leave, well. Better off anyway, to find that out now.
And then after the test is passed: they have also, in common, gentle insults all the way down. It is how Mary Margaret does family with other teens, queer ones, brown ones, trans ones. It is how she does family with Artemis. But Quibble is a soft man, gentle and steady, and Mary Margaret doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary to describe him back to himself, which is what she figures doing family means.
And sometimes. Sometimes she is wildly envious of him. Mary Margaret cannot imagine owning more than what is piled in the two bags, propped in the corner and sitting on the bathroom sink. And not only that—an eschewing. A desire to not be like him, either. Both are true at the same time, because feelings are like pentacle coins. Two sides, back-to-back, always. They are physical impossibilities of flouted mutual exclusivity. Complicated. And uncomplicated just a little by the current reality: Quibble and Mary Margaret now have the exact same amount of stuff. Whatever they are currently carrying, right here, right now, in this apartment. Mary Margaret knows what having nothing feels like. And so. She holds his hand. And in this moment, she feels the welling in her chest that means she is doing family.
Wilder also does family in their own way; they rub Quibble’s back. They know the feeling of the body dying when it is not. Doing family is newer to them, even, than it is to Mary Margaret. What little evidence of the action-feeling they have has lain fallow for more than a decade. But they can Feel it as they do it, like filling a jar and slowly trickling water onto the roots of a plant. Quibble’s shoulders continue to heave for minutes on minutes, and Wilder knows. Knows that each minute feels both like a year and a second for Quibble. But eventually his shoulders, his back, relax into their hand. His breathing slows to something like normal. His face isn’t wet. He hasn’t cried through it.
Artemis watches on. In fact, this is how she does family. The lookout, the planner, the protector. While everyone else crumbles, someone has to be the shelter. She Feels the expansion, the awareness, that means she is doing family, too, and it looks nearly cruel but it isn’t. Every role is necessary. It all counts.
She sits on the floor in front of Quibble and grabs both his knees. “You’re okay,” she murmurs. “You’re okay.” The background for all of it, this gentle crackle, warm and rushing. “You’re safe and you’re okay. Remember to breathe, Quibs, fill your whole stomach up. We need you back, we need to move. There you go. There you go.”
Finally, he is ready. He looks at the group with haunted eyes. “I can do it. I can get all of us through There. But”—he looks at Artemis, the leader—“where do we go?”
Artemis blinks slowly, like a sunning cat. An excellent question. One she knows she has the answer to, but she isn’t sure how she knows. There is a pull in her. At once, she closes her eyes and through the fingers still resting lightly on his knees, Quibble can feel the drawing of Power accompanying the intake of breath. “Pay attention,” she exhales. “Something amazing is about to happen.”
Instinctively he puts his feet and Feet on the ground and grows roots. Roots through the floor, through every apartment, all the rooms waking below them as the sun begins to strike the eastern side of the building, peeking over rooftops. He feels every shower turning on, every coffee maker popping to life, and the ground outside, even the pavement feels the morning as it buzzes. The metro’s rumble. The antennae on roofs carrying invisible signals. He, the plant, absorbs it all and funnels it to Artemis, who is grateful for two things—for the Power itself and to feel that Quibble, though certainly showing his cracks, is still himself. “Here is the amazing thing,” he says, the warble of tears still quavering in his throat.
She focuses on the hot coal of surety in her gut, and when she breathes Power in on it, the image flickers brighter. She knows it is a place she has not yet been, not yet seen. She knows there is a person there. She. Not they. But Artemis’s gaydar isn’t broken. She has that familiar feeling of a bright candle that smells like beeswax and sweet grass. This one, too, is family, somehow. Connected, somehow. And that is the way forward—to follow the Knowing. She Sees mountains. A thin white line against the dark of the unknown, tracing a stately range in the distance.
I can’t See anything at all, and I am furious. Is it to do with being human? Being close in the metaphorical sense? I try, frustrated, to flip through Visions upon Visions, to access the myriad Images and Sounds and Smells I normally can, and still: I cannot tell who is on the other end of this tin-can telephone line.
“The amazing thing has happened,” says Artemis.
“Fuck yeah,” everyone murmurs, as though they are saying “amen.”
“Could you follow it?” Quibble asks. “If we just—started? Could you get in front and lead the way?”
Artemis raises an eyebrow. “I don’t know—can I get in front of you? Is that allowed?”
“We’re—” Quibble takes a deep breath in, exhales with a whistle, his voice cracking on a high-pitched woo. “We’re going to find out.” Artemis goes to pack while Quibble stands up to stretch.
They don’t sit in a circle this time. They stand in a V formation, Artemis at the point, Mary Margaret with her backpack on and Wilder flanking, the Lady Anastasia’s carrier tight in their hands.
“Pay attention,” Quibble says. “Something amazing is about to happen.” He stands to the side, eyeing how large a hole he’ll have to rip. How much Power he thinks it will take, how much he can possibly take in. This is like holding one’s breath. Something one trains for; something that could cause death if calculated poorly. Keeping one’s air close while diving deep. Quibble breathes like an athlete, steady. He has no room for panic if he wants to hold his Power.
Somehow, the panic is literally leaving his body, as in being extracted, not the usual ebbing. He Feels Wilder pulling on it. To pull a sensation from a body isn’t part of Wilder’s natural skill set, and yet they pull the panic from him steadily, their Hand holding tension on the tide like a knitter pulling a wriggling string taut. Quibble smiles. “Did I know you could do that?” he asks.
“No. But neither did I.”
Quibble smiles. “There’s the next amazing thing.”
Wilder nods. It is more difficult than they thought, because where do they put that panic? They feel like they will liquefy the floor if they dump it down into the wood, or shatter any container in which they try to store it.
They know only one place that might hold it—their own body. And so they begin to shake with it as Quibble grows more steady, drawing Power up through the floor. And then he is sure the way an acrobat is sure before springing onto their hands. He pulls his open palms apart and rips, walking forward. A deep gash opens in the air, the familiar purple globules of whatever the planes are made of seeping out, popping like soap bubbles. At once, the quartet steps in. Wilder, panic-stricken and motion sick, hugs the carrier tight against their chest. They stride as though they will not throw up; they know they will absolutely throw up.
Quibble brings up the rear, shaping his Power into a huge, round boulder on which they all stand, a strange Ground. Wilder feels less like a kite pulled through tenuously. But they—and everyone—can sense the edge. Quibble most of all, for he’s taken the place that requires the most balance. He is tipping slightly backward as he steadies the ball, eyes to the sky, Here, an unsettling expanse of dark so bright it hurts his sinuses. “Okay, Artemis, go, start walking and I’ll—” Suddenly, something—someone?—swims into his view.
He is large and noseless, with two bugging eyes, faceted and strange. The many eyes consolidated now into two bulbous lenses. The body, an oil slick of Power and numbers: 101001 runs like blood in veins and coheres into a sticky mass. He is so big, like the witches are ants and he is a gargantuan, terrible boy looking down at them. Contemplating their meaningless existence. They see the thing I have been Seeing, his amorphous haze concretized because they are in the Space Between with their bodies.
hello, it projects. And this must be his understanding of what it means to be a gender, to be a man. He has constructed his body, too, and the men he is made of are horror-men. Terrorists in their communities, their families, their own lives. It is important to remember that’s what the Hex knows. That’s what he means when he says my pronouns are man. hello handsome, he continues. tell me how you are. It-he cracks a grotesque mouth-thing open, dripping with glooping, drooling strings of binary. hello: you, the hapless victims. It-he reaches an appendage (a tongue?) toward them and instinctively I reach out, try to shield them with my Hands. But I pull back. No. I might crush them. Or feed the Entity Power. Knowledge. Make it worse again.
Wilder scrabbles backward. They can barely breathe. It is a wonder their heart hasn’t simply stopped. The body isn’t built for Here. And yet. Here they are. Carrying more panic than they ever before have. Their feet begin to slip off the round Power and Artemis reaches out, catches their shirt. Their hands almost release the Lady Anastasia, but they wouldn’t ever do that.
“Quibble!” Artemis shouts over the wind, her own eyes widening as the wave of Hex climbs. Height of buildings. Height of tsunami. Wide and encompassing and the tongue is coming closer to Artemis. Everyone can see what happens as the gross appendage approaches: her fingers begin to lengthen, her skin begins to lift away from muscle, bone. She feels the joints in her knuckles, her wrists, on the verge of popping. “Quibble,” she shouts, afraid, “get us out of Here! Now!”
Absent panic, Quibble is made of fury. This is the fucking Hex on his whole life. Stolen his everything. Has made his past a zombie to eat his present. What he does is entirely instinct: he picks up the ball of his Power—their only floor!—as he screams, spit flying from his mouth. The other three witches whirl toward him as the ground disappears from under their feet. They can see all of Quibble’s teeth, his canines far more pointed than they ever noticed before. They can see down his raw-screaming throat.
Mary Margaret: a primal fear. Something deep in her that equates family with danger recoils. And she feels something slip from her Hands, something she hadn’t realized she was grasping desperately. She is sorrow now. She mourns something she will have to work very hard to get back.
Artemis is protection. She is mother, even as she tries to resist it. She is collected even as she begins to tumble through the expanse. “Quibble! Quibble, get it together!” She doesn’t know what will happen if they all fall through Here. She tries to swim as she swan-dives toward the screaming boy. She wants to grab his face, bring him back to himself. They all are falling now, Quibble included, and still he screams, hands balled into fists. Artemis breathes, blinks, tries to See a way out without him. She Sees only the strange press of live darkness. “Quibble, we’re Here! You’re dropping us!”
Wilder is fear, too, and filled to bursting. They explode. The panic they’d been holding releases and flings in all directions, a writhing sack of worms, and everyone shrieks as the panic gets on and in them. The Hex is hit and he halts the progression of his grotesque appendage, holds it up to his own strange eyes, examines it. Query for i. what do they mean?
Quibble finds his own panic back in him and snaps out of his rage to find himself falling with his family. His face softens instantly, horrified by his own actions and in the same bursting motion, he rips a hole below them. They fall. They fall.
They slam. Wind knocked out of them. A roof. Artemis’s roof. Blessed material reality. They gasp into the air, physical and winter-spring once more. Artemis recovers first. “Quick,” she says, still rasping. “Quick. Back inside. It can probably see us. Down the ladder. Through the window. Mary Margaret, can you unlock the window from outside?”
Mary Margaret nods, wordless. Fear still on her skin, clinging like pond slime.