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  With Jay’s help, I’ve got a list.

  Clinic, abandoned downtown building, suburbia construction, and the lumber mill. Saving the lumber mill for last- if there’s going to be a fucked up monster anywhere, it’s in the abandoned, apparently haunted, full-of-tetanus nightmare of old metal and broken dreams. It’s not all the locations we came up with, not by a long shot, but for the first stretch of our likely-to-kill-me explorations, it’ll do.

  Now, I know you might be wondering; Ilia! Why don’t you just call Leisha and her friend? She helped you, didn’t she? Chances are, they could help you again, give you the information you’re looking for!

  Fun story- you’re absolutely correct, metaphorical voice in my head. You have objectively measured properly what is most likely to happen. If I can find it in my heart to trust, to reach out, there is a non-zero chance that I end up allied with these people, that they have the answers I need. Bare minimum, they’ll have some answers for me, which is a fair bit more than I have now.

  But it requires trust.

  That’s not something I have a lot of. It never has been, and it’s in even shorter supply nowadays.

  Leisha came to my bar and threatened me, threatened my friend. And right after that? The “big guy” showed up.

  Correlation is not causation. It was my first day out of the house since I came back from the game, so maybe that was just the first chance everyone had to come and meet me, but that rings a little hollow. Leisha’s excuse, the minimum civility she expressed between subtle hints, searching jabs and outright threats, yeah, it tracks, but the creature? It wasn’t wild, wasn’t rabid. It had an intelligence to it, and it probably could have come through my window and pasted me at any time after it found out where I was, which, apparently, wasn’t that hard to do.

  And then? Right after, there she was, ready to clean up the mess.

  The idea that she was there to see what had happened isn’t unrealistic. Probably what I would do in her place, even.

  Doesn’t make it any less suspicious.

  Trust.

  Short supply.

  Now, some would argue that extending trust is most vital when none is present. They’re correct. Some might even say that gambling on the good of others, and trusting those in a community that you can engage with and are a part of, is quintessential to advancing and growing as a person and society. That is also correct.

  Earlier this week, someone fucking killed me. Before that, I got trapped in a meat-videogame where I could physically feel everything that happened to me as I experienced body dysmorphia and surgical, symbiotic modification on super-steroids. I believe I have more than earned the right to protect myself rather than do the right thing.

  I’m happy to extend that trust, and to take that gamble- once I know what my cards are. Once I know that losing the gamble won’t kill me again, won’t tear me apart, won’t turn me inside out or erase me like the family in that abandoned house.

  Frankly? I don’t think I’m unjustified in waiting until I have something I can use to overturn the table before I put my faith in strangers, in a strange world, after something that might be correlation and might be causation and might be coincidence fucking killed me.

  Jay’s gone. It’s night out. The time when, supposedly, the big guy would be able to find me again.

  Sarah walks past me, and gives me a weird look.

  “I’m putting it away. Promise.”

  She shrugs. “Ok! That’s fine. Working on a project?”

  I nod. “Yeah. Looking into the town’s history, I guess. Trying to make a map of places to visit, see if I can’t figure some things out.”

  “Like what?”

  I look at her and do my best impression of being genuinely calm and sort of bored with the whole thing, rather than my now-expected mix of anxious and angry. “Not really sure. Just some weird stuff I’ve noticed around town. You ever notice how there’s always a shitload of construction around town, but it never finishes?”

  “Hah! Yeah, that’s Hollow Springs. Ever since I was a kid, there’s always been some construction site up and running. Good for the town, I guess, but it’s still a hassle. Kind of annoying that they never fix the potholes even with all those half-empty buildings, huh?”

  “It’s definitely a lot more than any town I’ve lived in before. I kind of assumed it was just a big construction period, but apparently it’s always on? I’m checking out some of the places.”

  “Why?”

  I shrug.

  “Something to do.”

  She gives me a hell of a raised eyebrow, but then shrugs, grabbing some cheese sticks and a premade sandwich from the fridge. “Fair enough. Can’t be a fun time, spending most of the week at True Blue’s. Plus, it could be good to have a reason to get out of the house sometimes. You’ve seemed kind of down recently.”

  I can’t help but snort. “Yeah. A bit.”

  “Mmh. Anything I can do?”

  I look up, surprised at the offer. My first instinct is fear, then anger, then back to surprise. I force the first impression to quiet the fuck down- paranoia is all fine and good, until it starts hurting me.

  I don’t really know Sarah. I don’t really like Sarah. But… there’s a difference between someone being a part of your loneliness, and them being a bad person. I don’t think she’s a bad person, and the offer, as trite as it is…

  She didn’t have to offer.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “...No, that’s ok. Thank you, though. That… I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  And then, I shut my second instinct down as well, and actually think.

  “Actually… you work at the clinic, right?”

  She looks at me, then down at her scrubs, then back up at me. “Yeah, girl. Why? You ok?”

  I shake my head. “Maybe. I was thinking of coming in for a check-up over the weekend. You think it’s doable?”

  “Yeah, of course! You want me to schedule something?”

  “Sure. This Sunday, maybe? If it’s not too busy?”

  “Sure! I’ll check the schedule, let you know what times we have? Is it better in the afternoon or morning?”

  “Early afternoonish?”

  “Sure! I’ll let you know.”

  And with that, she’s out the door.

  Huh.

  That… might be the most words I’ve spoken to her since our first month together. Weird.

  I don’t really… want to talk more with her. I don’t think we mesh really well. But it was nice of her to offer, and I’m glad that I didn’t reject her out of turn.

  Even at my worst (which this isn’t, though it might be a side-step rather than an improvement), it’s nice to see myself remember things, keep the important stuff in mind.

  I’m scared, and liable to make more decisions that hurt me or other people soon. It feels like a victory, however small, to have ignored my lesser instincts and not snapped out at her. And yeah, in theory, it’s nice to have an in for the clinic that I wasn’t expecting.

  Small victories.

  I finish packing up the journals, the map, the newspaper clipping, and take my laptop with me back upstairs. Back to the cave, my lair, my den.

  Back to the flesh.

  The grenades. The… puppet.

  And the glove.

  I did promise I’d come back to that, didn’t I?

  What was that I was saying earlier? Don’t gamble unless you know the hand? Unless you can overturn the table in the first place?

  The glove. Glove. Capital G, at least in my head.

  The horrors of being in a body that isn’t me is something I’m familiar with. Even still, it was so much worse in the game. So much to deal with, overwhelmingly alien and wrong, and always changing.

  I don’t mind the loss of ADAPTATION. EVOLUTION and CANALIZATION, both, in theory, rather useful- and in practice, worthless to me. I’m not trying to adapt to things in that same way, where I lose control, or keep myself as I am, necessarily, and I still don’t know how EVOLUTION even works outside of the context of the game.

  I’m not entirely partial to my body- but losing it? Having it shift and change, beyond my control? Nightmare fuel.

  But… that doesn’t mean I don’t mind modifications.

  The Glove is step one in that.

  In a strategy game, there’s always one easily-neglected and permanently necessary resource: the research tree. You research, and it unlocks new buildings. Unlock new buildings, build more stuff, build more stuff, get more resources, and then circle back again, and research more things.

  I don’t have the time or the leeway to build blindly. I only have so many resources to work with. So I need to start doing the research earlier than I’d like.

  My arm twitches as I think of it.

  Ripples of damage. The topography of ruin, held together and remolded until it’s only barely noticeable.

  Living proof of the supernatural. A limb that should not be. A body, torn to ruin, remade and held together by something I don’t understand, something which followed me out of the dark and the unknown.

  It’s not where my power comes from, I know that much. It didn’t guide me through building my little constructs, it didn’t show me the cracks in the world that I can pull from, but it healed me, and is holding me together well beyond what should be possible. There is power there, if I am willing to push.

  I have to be. My other choice is to gamble alone, blind, and with more than my own life on the line.

  I have to be.

  I unwrap the Glove.

  It smells, unsurprisingly, of raw meat. Sharp, like steak in the moments before it hits the grill. I’m not sure how or why, but it’s been a few days since I built it, and it’s only just begun to leak. Bright red instead of grey, despite its time outside of refrigeration, despite how closely I’ve wrapped it. It looks like something from out of a fantasy book, or from the gallery of some unhinged, avant-garde artist- a misshapen fist, twice the size of my own hand, poorly shaped and bound together like trussed ham for the oven.

  It’s… well. In practical, literal terms, I can’t deny what it is; horrendous. It’s a joke, a nightmare thing, half-malformed, half-mutated, all joke, a facsimile of something real made out of ignorance and desperation and just a hint of actual thought.

  In personal terms? Holding it?

  It doesn’t feel horrendous. It doesn’t feel like a joke, or at least not one meant to be laughed at.

  It feels… alive.

  It doesn’t move. It does not beat as a heart, or twitch at my touch, or exist as more than what I have made of it, in my own stunted, ignorant way. But it is alive. Like a grenade is alive, as you pull the pin and it becomes something new. Like something falling is alive, that moment before physics exerts a deeper touch, and the inevitable occurs: impact, and transformation.

  It feels dangerous.

  It feels mine.

  Slowly, I bring my hand up to the hollow, gaping side of it, and push.

  It’s intimate in a way that disturbs me, but also feels right, like there’s no other way it could be. I had to bind it tightly to force it to keep shape, and to unmake it now would be to forgo all of whatever it is I’ve made. In theory, all I need to do is touch, command, pull the pins and watch things explode, but not for this. This is predicated on connection. Transformation.

  It feels wet, and warmer than it has any right to be.

  And then my fingers have found their place, and spread outward into them, and the first step is done.

  I take in a deep breath.

  I exhale.

  I reach deep into the idea of my arm, down to the twitching thing that holds it together, and tug.

  A muscle that doesn’t exist and which I did not know was tensed comes loose, and I begin to BLEED.

  The arm comes apart like a wet mass, blood spurting out of held-together veins and falling out of severed chunks of flesh, but it’s not the same as it was. The days held in place have forced at least some healing onto it, and it doesn’t collapse entirely, the core of it remaining semi-connected.

  There is a moment, like the instant after you hit your toe on a table, where I don’t feel any pain. What arrives first is the surety that pain will come, that it is on its way, tingling across and through nerve endings that aren’t quite so fast as light or thought.

  And then the Glove comes alive.

  As if waiting for this moment, predatory, hungry, it drinks in my blood, the meat that makes up its matter squirming and wriggling such as to open up the places where I wove it together to better imbibe. As if a series of eels or fat, crimson maggots, it squirms in place, painting itself scarlet- and then digging further, down into the flesh, through the gaps in my arm where my Symbiont holds me together.

  For an instant, I glimpse a single blood cell, as large as a grain of rice, wiggling amidst the threads… and then I know I am hallucinating, because I see it wave at me. With something almost like a hand.

  The Glove slips inside me, anchoring itself in my wounds and drinking deep, until the tips of its fingers are dripping crimson onto the floor.

  And then it clenches.

  I don’t remember the rest. That’s when it started hurting.

  I did not need to try not to scream. Before I could remember how to breathe again, everything went black.

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