Who am I?

Cold. So cold. Wind. Air, breath, breathe, breathing. I'm breathing.

I'm.

Exhale inhale, exhale inhale. Rolling over my skin, hairs standing up. Goosebumps. Skin. Organ. Soft protective tissue. Flesh. Organic. Pliable. Skin over me.

Me.

Muscle, bone, nerves. Systems on top of systems. Cogs in imperfect harmony. Vessel for blood. Oxygen. Electrical signals.

Breathe.

Eyes blinking. See the world. Present. Now. Decay, death. Death, dying, die, death, I can die.

I.

Tears. Ducts. Expression of intense emotion. Emotion. Love hatred compassion anger rage forgiveness euphoria denial happiness fear-

Fear. Fear is good. Fear is survival.

Every good moment is offset by the bad.

Latch onto fear, horror, terror. Mouth flooding with spit. Mouth. Food, water, sustenance, eat, survival. Talk, communicate, scream, whisper. Whisper, afraid.

Breathe.

Hard. Harder. Harder to breathe. Windpipe, trachea, systems on top of systems. Lungs, in out in out.

Breathe.

Can't. Gasping. Choking. Trachea closing—not responding?

Systems on top of systems and when one system fails the rest topple like dominos.

Air. Oxygen. Pumping blood. Red blood cells—haemoglobin. Heart. Cycles blood, deoxygenated and oxygenated. The body.

My body.

Needs air. No. Oxygen. Oxygen. Sustenance—food but not food, more than food. Why. Why oxygen. Why cycle it. Can't

breathe.

Vision, death, decay, dying. Smaller, fuzzier, condensing to a pinpoint. Don't show me death. Mouth tastes like… taste. Eyes drooping. Pain, panic. Panic. Panic attack. Why panic—hold onto the fear, terror, horror. It's good, it's survival.

Why? Why is this good?

Let me breathe.

Hands—my hands—scratch at my throat. Automatic. Defence mechanism. Automatic? Systems on top of systems. Solving the problem. Trying to. Automatic.

Nerves. Electrical signals. Nervous system. Oxygen. More than sustenance. Shard? No. Brain-

Asphalt against my back. Stars in my eyes.

Brain.

Human.

Choking. No air. No oxygen, no sustenance. Starve the brain.

Death.

"Hey!"

Face. A blur. Woman. Muddy watercolour, then clarity.

Joanna Miller 43 born in Oxford worked in construction for twenty years faced discrimination still succeeded proud of it met Harry Carlyle fifteen years ago married both kept their last names had three kids all living in Milwaukee dual citizenship between the UK and US always loved collecting old timepieces never told anyone except Harry and her children went to Madison to see her father-in-law she killed him when

I

Me

Her

came-

"Help."

Darkness swallows me whole.

Warmth.

Blooming, caressing warmth. It singes my tongue, makes me wince.

"It's a bit hot, but you need it."

A stick with a shallow basin at the end of it pushes through my lips. Spoon. More warmth. I swallow it down greedily.

"Not too quickly, your stomach won't appreciate it as much."

It's a steamy liquid layered over chunks of pliable softness. More flesh.

"Take your time." Another spoonful. The flavour takes over my mouth.

There's another warmth. External. It crackles and makes the inside of my eyelids glow a dim orange-red. Fire. Campfire.

"I'm sorry about the rags you're in. Only things I had spare, and you had nothing when I found you."

I open my eyes a fraction. Broken window, a passageway to the stars. Fire. Joanna Miller 43 born in-

I groan and squeeze my eyes closed.

"Hey, hey." Her hands clasp my shoulders and she rubs a thumb over a collarbone. Soothing. "What's wrong?"

I make a humming noise, vocal cords firing up in conscious effort. "I'm a…" My voice is rough. Unused. "I need a blindfold."

"What's wrong?" she repeats.

"I'm a parahuman." Her soothing thumb freezes. "I can't open my eyes. Hurts too much."

"Para," she says under her breath. She stands without finishing the word.

When she comes back she's wrapping cloth over my eyes. She ties it at the back and rips the excess off like a lawnmower firing up. Lawnmower? Joanna.

"That better?"

I open my eyes. Nothing. I blink once, thrice, seven times, and the world stays shrouded in darkness. "Thank you."

She puts a hand on my shoulder again. "No sweat off my back."

"Can I have more..." The word. What's the word? "Can I have more food please?"

A few seconds later the warmth singes my tongue again. I don't wince this time. "You need it," Joanna says. "You're thin as a rail, and if you don't have hypothermia thank your lucky stars."

I swallow another mouthful. "Lucky stars?"

"Just a saying, dear."

"Okay."

Air—oxygen—flows into my nose, into the systems on top of systems and my heart pumps the blood. It's automatic, but at the same time comforting. In and out, in and out. It's simple and small—addictive? No. Necessary.

Joanna rustles in her seat. The bowl of food slides onto something next to me. Her feet—her boots—make heavy thuds on the floorboards. She goes to the window. The darkness is calming—a restriction of information, a stripping of a sense. The world only exists in my ears, my nose, my skin. Something in my head bubbles underneath the surface. Something volatile and unchained—sight transforms it into eager rage. The darkness keeps it asleep.

"What do you see out there?" I don't know where the question comes from. Did one of the immeasurable and untouchable recesses in my mind rear its head for a moment and take control? I'm okay with it. Should I be?

Joanna's silence stretches, and I wonder if I said the wrong thing.

"Death," she says.

"Anything else?"

Please say yes.

She scoffs. "I haven't heard or seen an animal in two months. Haven't seen another person that wasn't trying to kill me or wasn't a corpse already. This city's a tomb."

"Then why help me?"

"Because you needed it."

Even in the heart of the abyss, hope still clings to life.

"I do see something else, though," Joanna says. "Random chance."

"What do you mean?"

She sighs. "It's like a natural disaster. One moment the world's fine and you're eating cheesecake and talking about architecture. The next you're waking up with glass in your hands, and…

"I don't know. No one here deserved this. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it. People lose themselves, and their friends. Their family. I don't even hate the Simurgh." My breath hitches in my throat. She doesn't notice. "It's insane, right? I don't hate her, because she's not a person. It would be the same as hating a whirlwind, or a tsunami. What's the point? You just have to weather it, hope you'll be okay, try and pick up the pieces afterwards if you are. And I couldn't fight it. No one could. We're just people. Dead, dying, and unlucky. That's what's out there. That's all that's out there. A heaping of shitty luck."

She sniffs. Tears? An expression of intense emotion.

"Sorry," she says, and the word's shaky and soft. "Haven't talked to anyone in months."

I smile. "Don't be."

She laughs. A single, mirthless laugh. "Thanks."

Not a person. The same thing as hating a natural disaster. That's what She is. What She was. That's not me. It can't be me. I'm a person. I have a brain and a heart. I have a circulatory system that pumps blood to transport oxygen and nutrients and hormones. I have organs that fit together to make the vessel work. I'm systems on top of systems. I'm a complex biological creation millions of years in the making, not a natural disaster. That isn't me, it can't be me.

She's not me.

I'm not Her.

"Hey, can you hear me?" I'm shaking. No, Joanna's shaking me. "Thought I'd lost you there for a second."

"I'm fine. I'm fine."

"You sure, dear?"

I cough, nod my head. Non-verbal communication. That I'm familiar with.

Joanna rubs up and down my arm. She mutters assurances under her breath. It's nice. "You said you were a parahuman."

I nod again.

"I don't know a lot about how people's powers work. As much as anybody else, really, but if you can't see normally because of yours, are you sure there isn't another way?"

"Another way?"

"To see. Being blind here, of all places, you'd be…" She doesn't finish her thought. Whatever word could have come next doesn't hurt me—the future's shrouded in an unassailable shadow. I'm blind in more ways than one.

But maybe there's merit to what Joanna says. The flash flood of the past is part of me as it was a part of Her, but She could parse it, compartmentalise and use it. I can't handle it. I'm the atom to Her mote of dust.

I reach out, not with hands or fingers, but with my mind. It makes something in the back of my skull pulse and expand, like an encroaching pustule bubbling on an infected wound. It makes me writhe and twitch. I push away Joanna's hand when she tries to comfort me. I grunt, and the something in the back of my head shatters.

It was a shard. Her shard. A hyper-thin sliver cut out and implanted inside me. And now it spreads across every inch of my body. Across the muscle and bone and nerves. Systems on top of systems.

The pulsing stops. Strands curl outwards in the dark, and they're every colour and no colour both. They grab hold of the termite-ridden bedside table next to me, its outline, and then its shape coming to life. Then the mattress I'm lying on, and the fire and its quickly vanishing flames that sail upwards through the hole in the ceiling of the attic. The window with jagged glass still poking out from the frame. The boarded-up door to the rest of the house.

Joanna, huddled in front of the fire in a puffy jacket, with a hunting rifle slung across her shoulder. Her hair, matted to her forehead with blood. She's watching with wide eyes and wringing hands. Every few seconds her mouth twitches, and it doesn't seem like she notices. The strands have multiplied a thousandfold. They outline every minute influence of gravity. Her hair falling around her ears, the sag of her cheeks, the slump of her shoulders. The Earth enacting its dominion.

And I can change it all with a thought. Flip those strands the other way, twist them into themselves, manipulate them until the physical world is hoisted on puppet strings.

All of it is my domain, a world at my mercy in complete totality, and nothing can impede me. It's power at its most forthright—I am the puppetmaster. The strands glide into Joanna's body—with a single thought I could crush her trachea. Gasping. Choking.

Death.

I slink backwards away from the fire.

No, that's not me.

When I stop moving Joanna says, "So?"

"I can see you."

She lets out a sigh.

Breathe.

"Even after the attack this stuff still amazes me."

Her words mean more than what's on the surface, but it's beyond me. Too complex. I say nothing.

"Did you live here, before it happened?"

"I- no, no I didn't."

"That makes two of us, then." Joanna shakes her head with a smile. "Random chance."

"Yeah," I lie. "Random chance."

"Is there anyone out there that's scared for you? Wondering if you're okay, if they'll ever see you again?" she asks.

"Why do you care?"

"Because I know there are people doing that for me. Keeping them close to my heart makes it easier to wake up and keep going. It helps."

Harry Carlyle and three children living in Milwaukee. A little over a hundred kilometres to the east, but more than a world away. They loved each other. They do love each other, still.

"Is that what you want? To see them again?"

Her lip wobbles and she stares into the fire. "More than anything else in my life." She says it to herself as much as she says it to me.

It's an aspiration. Joanna's life has ended, her entire world torn down and ripped apart and crushed under Her bootheel, but she survives. She's found shelter, defence, she's cooking food and living. It's hollow, it's harsh, it's unfair, but she's living.

And in the back of her mind, in her dreams, when she cries herself to sleep there is the end goal of reuniting with her family. Sleeping in the crook of Harry's neck, celebrating her oldest getting her driver's license, nailing the promotion at work.

"Are you afraid?" I ask.

She smirks and lets her head fall into her hands. "Yeah," she says to the floor.

"Good."

"Why's that?"

Fear is good. Fear is survival.

"You care."

"Harry always says that."

"Then Harry's an intelligent man."

Her smile vanishes. "He is."

Joanna has something to fight for. What do I have? A nebulous directive to atone for sins I didn't commit. How does one seek atonement for destroying the lives of millions?

She seems comatose in front of the fire. The tears keep dripping off her cheeks to the floorboards.

"Joanna," I say. "Your family. I can get you back to them."

"How?"

I take the strands around the window and split them apart. The frame—the wood, the glass, the chipped coat of paint—disassembles. The window's broken down to its components. A small section of the wall will be no different.

"With that."

I was too focused on the window to catch her shooting up to her feet. Mouth agape she looks back and forth between it and me. "Who are you?" she asks.

I give her the truth.

"I don't know."