Year Zero - 3. Mirrors

Alter: Kadence

Local Network World: 0008

Dates: 14/06/2025 - 15/06/2025

Hell is Other Trans Girls

Kade had arrived in an Uber. The sun had recently set and, off towards the horizon, there was still a thin band of bright purple highlighting where the sky met the city skyline. Nervously, she stood outside the venue – a queer bookstore – taking a few minutes to contemplate the possibility of simply leaving.

She had never been to the launch of a grassroots movement before. Fundamentally, she supposed, that’s what it was. A bunch of trans people responding to a Facebook event about strategising ways to make the world a slightly less horrific one to live in. It had sounded like it’d be something worthwhile to be a part of. In the months since her…attempt, she’d been trying so very hard to make the most of things: to stay positive, find connections, engage with hobbies. But Kade was acutely aware of the toll that years of masking both queerness and autism had taken. She saw the walls between her actual self and the outside world as unassailably vast. In context, this event was just another checkbox on the list for her. Another fucking opportunity for growth. She tried to believe that maybe one day, one of these attempts would…help. That if she repeatedly smashed her head against those walls, eventually it’d be the walls that gave out. It seemed futile, most days. Sisyphean.

“We’ve done the hard part,” She could hear Kieran’s voice in her head.

“Fuck you ‘we’ve done the hard part’,” She muttered to herself: “The hard part hasn’t even started yet.”

“But we’re here. We’re gonna do it so just do it.”

Again with this shit.

With a groan and an eye-roll, Kade moved towards the entrance. She placed a hand on the door handle, but before she could push, the door swung inwards revealing a smiling older woman.

“Hi, welcome, come in!” She beamed. Kade smiled awkwardly, mouthing a ‘thank you’ and stepping over the threshold.

 As she waded shyly into the bookstore, it rapidly occurred to her that she hadn’t been around so many other trans people before. Not even close. She felt locked in place – just an observer – as she watched them milling around in little groups, splitting off to look at books and making small talk. Truthfully, they scared her: mirrors, all of them. Her mind started to lurch in the direction of comparison. Looking around at the other women present, she found herself cataloguing attributes and cross-referencing them against her own. Where was she doing better? Where was she doing worse? What choices - clothes, makeup, hair - could she see herself trying? What did she wish she could see when she looked in the mirror? What did she fear other people saw when they looked at her? She felt uneasy; unable to help herself. She felt shallow and childish, reducing other trans women to how-to or how-not-to guides for her own transition goals. Transition platitudes like ‘never compare yourself to anyone but yourself’ were great in theory, but felt nearly impossible to hold onto in the moment.

Slowly, everyone started to filter into a room at the back that had been set up with a number of chairs and started to take their seats. Kade did so as well, managing to sandwich herself into an extreme back corner of the room. She clenched her hands together tightly, hunching forward in her seat and setting them between her knees, which she pushed together on either side of her hands like a vice.

The problem, in Kade’s estimation, was that the whole situation was complete bullshit. What was she meant to do other than look at other trans women and judge them relative to herself based on how trans they didn’t look? She didn’t want to be trans; hadn’t asked for it, didn’t identify with it, like it, or feel in any way good about it.

In terms of how she actually thought about herself, transness was something she felt burdened with; shackled to. The word ‘curse’ was one that she thought about more than occasionally. Transness was, simply, a fact she couldn’t deny: a matter of definition rather than any kind of affinity she had. If she really dug into her feelings on it, Kade felt far more gay than she did trans. While the general consensus seemed to be that gender and sexuality were utterly separate, Kade felt as though - for her at least - her sense of the one correlated deeply with her sense of the other. And both her sense of her own gender and her identity as a lesbian were things she valued. Cherished. In contrast, she resented her transness. She was jealous of the girls who made it look easy. She felt, alternatingly, empathy for and aversion towards the girls who she viewed as - like her - struggling. She was terrified of what she worried they must think of her: moreso of the likelihood that they didn’t think anything at all. In the end, in her estimation, having been ‘force-masced’ by cis-heteronormative society was just a laughable mistake that had somehow been made her problem. In situations like this, she could feel the world shrinking down to little more than a collation of fun-house mirrors reflecting her pain, her dysphoria, and her obsession with passing: her fixation on the fact that, no matter what she did, her identity as both a woman and a lesbian would always be either preceded by a qualifier or followed by an asterisk. Cornerstones of ‘her’ that she would never be allowed to enjoy…only to apologise for. She sighed quietly to herself, shifting awkwardly in her seat…feeling herself inching back into mild dissociation.

There was an introduction from the organisers, followed by the 20-or-so people present letting everyone know their names and pronouns and reasons for being there. Everyone talked about hope, and community, and allyship, and things that could be done to take care of people like them in the face of the rising tide of politicised oppression. Kade desperately wanted to feel like part of it, to have something to contribute. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. When it was her turn, she mumbled something about ‘good causes’ before melting into a puddle of overstimulated anxiety.

After: awkwardly stood in the corner while everyone else ate pizza and chatted, she felt jealous of the way the others were capable of talking to strangers. She flashed back over all the times she’d felt that way; too many to count. But this was somehow worse, because this time she didn’t just feel alone and incapable…she felt alone and incapable while surrounded by people who she genuinely felt that she should be able to connect with, to be close to. Shared experience, shared struggle, shared desire for connection and community…but she was overwhelmed, socially and sensorily. The longer it went, the worse it felt. She ended up having a brief conversation about books and writing with one of the organisers, but by that point she was in her own head to the extent that all she could think about was how awkward and quiet she was being. She ducked out to get an Uber home a few minutes later.

Well that was fucked.

Kade typed out over text to her friend Dawn, briefly summarising the night. The time difference between Queensland and England was significant, but Dawn got back to her quickly:

I’m sorry. But at least you’re trying. You need an extroverted chaperone for these things.

She observed. Kade smiled to herself. It occurred to her that Dawn hadn’t actually seen her go nonverbal and non-functional, because every time they’d been around one another in group settings, Dawn had been her ‘extroverted chaperone’. The person who helped her function. Kade’s ex, Sara, had also been that. A social safety blanket. It frustrated her, because it felt like a codependency she needed to escape - but how? As much as sensory overstimulation had become more manageable for her since she started transitioning - an unexpected and fascinating side-effect - she was acutely aware that she was still, and would always be…her.

It made her feel stuck. Child-like. Trapped in her own mind. Trapped between then-and-now. A familiar feeling washed over her, sitting silently in the back of the slightly musty car: she felt like Kieran. Since her attempt, she had - without specifically meaning to - built this structure around the concept of a ‘new’ her - the ‘real’ her, Kade - as different from ‘him’. Kieran represented cowardice, endless prevarication and desperation…autistic incapacity and dissociated stasis.

She knew it was, psychologically speaking, a dangerous precedent to set: siphoning all her self loathing and doubt into a fabricated, delineated construction of a ‘dead’ past self. It ensured that, when she observed in her behaviour the negative traits she associated with ‘him’, it triggered additional dysphoria and self loathing. It made her feel like a boy. It felt like little cracks - fractures and rivets - were forming in her identity, leaving her unable to reconcile who she was with an idealised and arbitrary internal image of herself. One that disregarded much of her history as nothing more than a bad first draft. She was rapidly realising that all she’d managed to do by scapegoating her pre-transition self was to open a new front in her endless, petty fucking war against her own ability to feel whole.

The driver took the tunnels, so they arrived back at her house more rapidly than Kade had expected. She was thankful. Ubers had gotten more awkward since she stopped entirely boy-moding. Rarely was anything said - other than the obligatory ‘dude’, ‘bro’, or ‘mate’ when entering or exiting - but there was always this moment at the start where the driver would react to the gender-fuckery of her, and it made the entire trip feel awkward. Just a little double take, or some creased in eyebrows, or a slight head-tilt. Of course…it could have just been her imagination, but that didn’t make it easier: Kade’s hyper-awareness of her own clockability; her inner monologue calling her a boy, a ‘brick’, or worse…they didn’t require external participation, but god did they weaponise any hint of it. In her estimation, she would never actually ‘pass’, and while she actively tried to internalise what other trans women seemed to be able to - that passing shouldn’t matter - she found it hard to believe that they, like her, didn’t all have a crack in their foundations around it; a structural vulnerability built around a wish that could never be granted: that they’d been born ‘right’ in the first place.

In Kade’s mind, she could learn to love her queerness and transness - and even herself, on a good day - until the heat death of the universe, and there would still be a scared, broken little girl at the heart of her wishing things had been…different. Wishing that instead of gels and pills and implants and surgeries, she had a button she could press: retroactive continuity to make her have always been externally what she had always been internally, even before she had known that was the case. Before she’d had the vocabulary to express or understand it.

And she was so intensely, consumingly bitter about it all: she wanted experiences of girlhood and, maybe, a self-concept not so utterly riddled with doubt and contradiction that she could, perhaps, access the kinds of experiences and connections she longed for so desperately in the present. Maybe then she wouldn’t have wound up being this off-putting hyperlexic mess of fifty traumas in a trench-coat masquerading as a fractured simulacrum of an intermittently non-verbal autistic girl. Or maybe she’d just be the same, minus all the raised eyebrows, or head-tilts, or fucking ‘dude’s’. And that would be more than enough. Deep in, on some fundamental, primal level…that was all she wanted. For the struggle to be solved; for the journey to be over.

Please…God, please…just let me be a woman. The whole world - the people I meet, the memories I have, the clothes I wear, the body I live in - feels like a fucking mirror casting back a reflection that isn’t fucking me. Burn it all away. Just make me right. Just let me be.

Unity Bridge

Hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her coat, Kade walked slowly along the boulevard. To her left, there was a short wall of sandstone planters overgrown with shyly blooming bougainvillea. Beyond that was the Eden River, murky and opaque from dredging and pollution, glinting a sickly golden-brown in the mid-morning sun. Further still, on the far bank of the river, traffic crawled along riverside highways, and behind those, residential towers and commercial buildings cluttered the skyline. Dominating the city from the middle out was the pyramidal superstructure of the Helios Foundation. It was easily twice the height of the tallest surrounding buildings, all tinted glass and steel. A black pyramid, staring down over the city from above. As Kade walked, she found her gaze drawn repeatedly back towards it, as if it had some kind of gravitational pull on her focus.

For some reason, Kade found herself thinking back to the ‘Siege of Edenglassie’. It had been almost a decade ago, and - on a surface level - very little had noticeably changed. The damage had long since been filled in and covered over, but Kade could still remember the scars; the charred facades and shattered windows and piled debris. The only evidence that remained now, for anyone who felt like looking, lay here and there on the far side of the river. Rusty barricades stacked and abandoned; pylons and barbed wire piled on top, left there to slowly meld into the scrub and grass. Hints at what had been done - by whom; to whom - but offering nothing in the way of ‘why’ or ‘for what reason’.

You’d think someone would have cleaned it all up by now…

Kade mused, making her way towards Unity Bridge. Edenglassie, as sizeable cities went, was fairly compact at its’ core. The central area only spanned around one and a half square kilometres of mostly flat terrain, making it quite walkable. Nestled into a bend in the river, bridges arcing out and tunnels threading beneath it like veins and arteries. Unity Bridge carried traffic in and out of the city’s centre, with pedestrian walkways to either side. It was early on a Sunday, and Kade could only see a handful of people.

She made her way up towards the pedestrian walkway on the left. Barely present, she had started to mentally run through options for a late breakfast. Probably McDonalds. Or maybe she’d just pick up a coffee somewhere. There was a small part of her that was contemplating making her way to that one twenty-four hour pancake place that she’d only really seen while too drunk to stand up straight at three in the morning. All ageing red brick and iron railings on the outside, it was themed to look vaguely medieval on the inside, complete with chandeliers and banners and a suit of armour. She was really curious how her drunk-off-her-ass recollection of it would mesh with sober, daylit reality.

“Hey, Kieran?!” Kade turned instinctively, startled.

“It’s uh…” She paused, nervous. She didn’t want to have to correct him; didn’t know how she would go about that. She hadn’t seen Damien in over a year, and running into him unexpectedly was more than a little jarring. In her taxonomy of acquaintances, she largely classified him as an old school-friend. One of those friends of convenience a person makes when options are sparse and proximity is mandatory. They still saw each other from time to time, but typically not with any sort of real deliberation or intent: less and less as the years dragged on. He’d just occasionally get back in contact and they’d go for a drink or to see a movie or something. He’d always been warm, and supportive, and pleasant enough to talk to, but Kade had often wondered what drove him to maintain the connection. She was awful at keeping in touch with people, so it was, admittedly, mostly on him.

“Oh, sorry, I saw your thing on Facebook.” She nodded, happy to let him handle the clarification: “So what should I call you, now?”

“I dunno, man. Just call me whatever.” Kade leaned against the railing that ran flush with the left of the walkway.

“Come on, you know that’s not helpful.” He observed, his smile hinting towards teasing. She grimaced, feeling her cheeks getting warmer.

“Kadence. Kade. She and her.” She offered reluctantly with an involuntary upward inflection at the end that felt somehow like a betrayal of herself.

“See? Was that really so difficult?”

“Oh, you’ve no idea.”

“Why though? How long have we known each other? If you can be real with anyone, I would have thought it’d be me.”

“You’re not the problem, though. I am.” She countered apologetically, looking down at her hands. She absent-mindedly picked at her thumbnail. “I look in the mirror and I see a guy. I talk to people, they treat me like a guy. I look back on the last thirty-eight years and the whole time, I was cosplaying a guy. It all feels like someone else, or a mask I wore, or a character I made up, but it’s still what everyone else sees and interacts with. Everyone just sees…Kieran. Asking for ‘she’ and ‘her’ feels…unreasonable? It feels like I haven’t earned it, like I don’t deserve it or have a right to it.” Her voice wavered a little towards the end, her words hanging awkwardly in the air between them.

“So I’ve heard of this thing - internalised transphobia? Am I using that right?”

“Get fucked.” She laughed.

“Not recently.” Damien shrugged.

“Okay, sure. But also…same.”

“Well that’s to be expected. The breakup’s still pretty fresh, after all.” Kade felt every muscle in her jaw involuntarily tighten. As if picking up on her desire to move on, Damien pivoted: “So how’s the whole…girl thing going?”

“My transition?” She clarified. He nodded. “I’ve barely started.” She swept a hand theatrically down over her body. Her oversized mens’ coat and the black long sleeved shirt and khaki chinos beneath it covering her wide, slightly-less-flat-than-previously chest and the relatively straight lines connecting her waist and hips. “There’s not really much to say at this point.”

“Come on, dude.” Damien scoffed, his eyes drifting pointedly towards her recently obvious breasts. Kade raised an eyebrow. “Sorry, I meant ‘dude’ in like…a gender neutral kind of way? But seriously, even just starting is such a massive step, right? Do you feel different?”

“Yeah, it’s…” Kade considered. “It’s difficult to separate out what I’m feeling from the situation I’m in.” Kade considered elaborating. “Losing Sara was…a lot.” she settled on.

“I bet. I’m sure she has a lot to process and work through as well.”

“Which is so very comforting. Misery loves company and I’ve got no company.”

“It’s gotta be rough.” Damien reached out to touch Kade’s shoulder, squeezing an apologetic little squeeze. She resisted the urge to flinch beneath the unexpected touch.

“I’m probably just being melodramatic.” Kade tried to laugh it off. It came out bitter with an edge of self pity that made her cringe at herself a little. “What’re you up to today? Do you feel like taking a walk?”

“Sure.” Damien shrugged. “I’ve got some time.” They walked in silence, staring out over the river.

On the far side of Unity Bridge there was a wide, paved area bookended by several old multi-storey sandstone buildings. They were some of the oldest buildings in Edenglassie, from back when the city first started the process of graduating from colonial hub to something a little more comprehensive. Kade pointed out to Damien that some of the sandstone blocks were slightly off-colour compared to the rest, having been damaged in the Siege and since replaced.

“Were you there for any of it?” He asked. Kade shook her head.

“Not really. I watched it all happen on the news.”

“Yeah.” Damien said. “Strange to think about it all happening right here, though.”

“Strange to think about, given we have no idea what was actually happening. Even after all this time.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Hmm?”

“The agenda.” Kade bit back a joke about whether he was referring to her trans agenda or her gay one. “Errands, or…?” He trailed off. Kade smiled wanly.

“Honestly? There’s no real plan. I’m mostly just trying to uh…inoculate myself against agoraphobia.”

“Huh?”

“I’m trying to get out of the house. Exist in public. Prove to myself I can do it and that it’s not scary.”

“Ahh, I see. How’s that going for you?”

“Well…it’s been less than an hour and I’ve already been deadnamed by this one fucking guy,” She smirked, bumping into him playfully.

“Sorry about that…”

“Don’t be. It’s not a big deal. You didn’t know what to call me, so…”

“You’re not just saying that?”

“Personally, I feel like intent is what matters. Dude.”

“Yeah, alright then…” he rolled his eyes, bumping her back.

“It’s funny. I’ve got it in my head that I’m meant to be kinda militant about all of this, but honestly…I think virtually all of us are just trying to live our lives. Unless someone’s deliberately being a huge, belligerent asshole…” She paused, considering: “And uh…even then.”

“Even then?”

“Yeah, even then. I’ve had a couple of incidents. Minor, but they were scary at the time. Some guy following me off the bus when I was heading into work. Bailed me up and was like ’so what are you?’. And then there was this other time, having someone try to bum a cigarette and when I didn’t have one got up in my face and said…some things.”

“What things?” Damien asked. Kade shook her head emphatically.

“Take note of how I chose not to repeat them and work back from there. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Ahh. Yeah, okay. That’s really awful.” Kade shrugged.

“It kinda was, yeah. But the point is, I didn’t do anything, other than…y’know, start flashing back to all the stories I’ve heard about just how badly that kind of shit can end and deciding to be more careful about public transport and being alone at night in sketchy areas. Little things here and there - pronouns, my old name - kind of pale in comparison. But even then, you never really know how someone’s going to react if you call them out on something. I think the real irony of the situation is that, if you get something wrong, you’re probably not gonna know it bothered me unless I feel safe enough with you that it…actually didn’t.”

“Well I’m glad you feel safe with me.” He bumped into her again. In the back of her mind, Kade noted that the amount of physical contact they’d had so far was well in excess of their usual ‘none’. Not that it was a negative thing, it just surprised her that there was an actual observable and quantifiable difference in the way they were interacting. “How does that kind of thing not scare you into never leaving the house, though?”

“I mean, it kind of has. Which is why I’m out here, doing this. You can’t let that stuff break you, or you may as well just…” she trailed off, not wanting to finish the sentence. “Hey, do you…” Kade stopped and paused, her eyes narrowing.

“What?”

“Do you wanna go get some pancakes?” She asked.

“Sure, why not?” Damien shrugged.

It didn’t take them long to get there. Kade hadn’t known exactly where it was, but Eden City was divided into a series of neat blocks that made navigation simple. There was an awkward moment on the way in where both Kade and Damien tried to hold the door to let the other go in first, but once that was resolved they were led to a table and sat down.

“So what’ve you been up to anyway? How’s the whole…journalism thing going?” Kade asked.

“Work has been pretty painful lately, to be honest. Just a lot of competitive assholes, a lot of being overlooked for projects, that kind of thing.”

“Always the way.” Kade nodded sympathetically.

“There’s this one project in particular I’ve had my eye on. It’s this big investigative piece. I can’t get into details, but it’s tracking down these people affected by…let’s say, corporate negligence. Mostly just information gathering, but it’s really sensitive. It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to be involved in, and I think I could really contribute, but they just have me doing…y’know, ‘grunt work’…” he trailed off, shaking his head.

“I mean, I know nothing about journalism, or the project you’re looking at, but I hope it works out. I know exactly what it’s like, being passed over even though you know you’d be great for something.”

“Yeah. I dunno, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. I’m currently running down some leads in my own time, and hopefully I’ll find something that’ll make them pay attention.”

“My fingers are so very crossed for you,” Kade smiled, raising her hand and crossing her middle finger over her index.

“Thank you. How’s your work?”

“Uh…” Kade chuckled. “Well, I just came out, so…good, I think?”

“Oh shit, what was that like?”

“Surprisingly painless, actually? I think I’m pretty lucky in the sense that everyone at work has been pretty accepting, no one’s really said anything negative and they got all my systems changed over really quickly. I was so nervous about it in the leadup, and even now it sort of feels like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and there might be a problem. But that’s probably just in my head. Still, I’m almost certain I’m the only queer person of any kind in the whole organisation - or at least the only one who’s had to say anything about it - and they didn’t really know what I was talking about when I first went to Human Resources to work out how I was going to handle it. I ended up uh…making a presentation.”

“What, like a Powerpoint presentation?”

“Yeah. I figured I’d put all the information in one place, give them a bunch of links to resources so I didn’t have to be the one to answer any questions. So HR ended up sending that out to everyone and that was that. And hey…if anyone else comes out as trans, HR can just give them my slide deck to fill in.”

“Very thoughtful.”

“Only incidentally thoughtful, really. Ninety-five percent self interest, five percent trying to help.”

“I can think of a lot of things about the world that would be significantly less shitty if more people were five percent helpful a little more of the time.” Damien observed.

“Guess that’s true.”

“Hi, there - are you ready to order?” Kade jolted in her seat as the waitress spoke from behind her and to the right. Damien raised an eyebrow, smiling.

“Well we haven’t really looked at the menu yet - do you know what you want?”

“Do you?” Kade countered.

“I mean, I’m boring - I’m just gonna get a short stack.”

“Okay, I’ll get…” Kade flipped open the laminated menu, scanning for anything that included the word ‘bacon’. “That.” She pointed to an item that came with bacon and eggs, looking over her shoulder towards the waitress. “And a flat white, please?”

“Same.” Damien nodded. The waitress repeated back the order, they both nodded a confirmation, and she left.

“So I’m curious: when did you know? Is that okay for me to ask?” Kade shrugged.

“Sure.” She said, before considering that it was probably too complicated to get into. She turned the question over in her mind; searching for a single, simple answer she could provide. Maybe some examples for context? She could start early - childhood stuff - like the way she cried her eyes out at age five because her parents wouldn’t buy her the skirt that her kindergarten friend showed up wearing? Or that time she’d put on one of her mothers’ dresses before hiding under her bed so no one would catch her and make her take it off? Those were both, in retrospect, fairly telling. And stereotypical: exactly the kind of thing cis people tended to expect.

Maybe the body stuff? She had always had this habit of obsessively looking in mirrors because the wrongness of the shape and contours of the stranger staring back at her were endlessly confusing in a way she could never really place. Or the thing where she had sat down to pee since age ten and felt this impossible-to-describe ‘uncomfortable’ feeling in her gut whenever she looked down. She also remembered never, ever going swimming without a shirt on and not really understanding why, other than that her chest felt and looked…wrong to her. And, as a kid at school, always locking herself in cubicles to get changed for sports rather than getting changed around the ‘other boys’.

There was always the less traumatic side of her experiences with women: like how she would periodically try shaving her legs and armpits until she inevitably got shamed out of it by a partner…or the constant confusion over whether she wanted to be with someone, or be friends with them, or whether she was just jealous of how they looked, how they carried themselves, or their sense of style (not mutually exclusive categories, as it turned out). Probably the most obvious entry in the category - if she really wanted to get that far into it - was the whole issue she had with dissociating during sex whenever her parts were in any way the focal point. Or if she wanted something specific, there was that time she’d felt completely emotionally broken for days afterwards when a girl she’d hooked up with compared her physicality to the Hulk.

She had a million little vignettes she could cycle through, any and all of which could have meant nothing. But gender - and her sense of it - was, as it turned out, gestalt. In retrospect, what the sum of her experiences and memories were pointing to was obvious to her. But nothing ‘gendered’ by society makes you inherently anything. Any ‘dead giveaway’ for transness could just be ‘doing random crap’. But in Kade’s estimation, every person - if not consciously then instinctively - knew who and what they were. Up until her ‘egg cracked’, she had always known something was wrong with her. She’d known it was to do with her body, and that it also had something to do with how she felt about men and women. But for the longest time, that was as far as her understanding had gone. A lot of the things that now seemed like such obvious signs had just, at the time, congealed into this opaque miasma of anxiety and discontent, crystallising during her teenage years into a belief in a sort of innate, fundamental brokenness. By the time she had finally worked out what the situation was - by the time she’d learned the words to describe it - the damage had been done, psychologically, emotionally, and physically. It wasn’t really a wonder she’d tortured herself into learning to live with it until, finally, she couldn’t: transitioning was an event she’d spent the first twenty years of her life training herself to reject.

But she didn’t say any of that.

“So I worked it out when I was about twenty, but it was always sort of a thing. I just didn’t have the words for it until that point.”

“It must have been a really strange thing to navigate, knowing all that time?”

“You’re not wrong.”

“Can I ask you another weird question?”

“Shoot.”

“What changed?”

“Ahh.” Kade paused as the waitress arrived with their food and coffee, setting them down at the table before leaving. Kade could feel herself salivating, realising she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink yet this morning. “This looks pretty great.”

“Yeah. I can’t remember the last time I had pancakes.”

“Oh, I can. It was here, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. About a year ago. Bit after midnight, trying to keep the menu in focus, worried that one of my friends would end up needing to throw up. It was a good night.” Kade chuckled.

“So yeah. What changed?”

“Oh, right. It’s…hard to explain. It wasn’t really any one specific thing. The dysphoria wasn’t getting better, my mental health was getting worse and worse. It was reaching a point where…” Kade took a bite of bacon and eggs, chewing slowly and considering. After a few moments, she swallowed and continued on: “I guess the simplest way of explaining is that I just ended up having a disagreement with myself about it. Not one I haven’t had a million times before, but we sort of…came to a different conclusion than we usually do.”

“With yourself?” Damien’s brow furrowed.

“Oh. Yeah. In the mirror. It’s this thing I do sometimes.” Kade took another bite, this time of bacon, eggs and pancake.

“So a literal disagreement, then?”

“Yes.” Kade drew the word out over the space of a couple of seconds, suddenly feeling self conscious as she realised how it sounded, saying it out loud.

“Oh sure.” Damien shrugged. “I guess that’s one way to process things.”

“Probably sounds really fucking weird, no?” He shook his head.

“No, not at all.” He smiled reassuringly, taking a sip of coffee. “On my scale for ‘weird’, conversations in the mirror don’t even hit the ‘get therapy’ mark. And everyone should get therapy.”

“I mean, I didn’t exactly tell you how regularly I do it.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like you’re talking to yourself away from the mirror, is it? Seeing a bunch of other versions of yourself around the place?” He chuckled.

“Yeah, nothing like that. I guess it is pretty minor, as quirks go. Still. Thanks for not making me feel crazy about it.”

“Call it an apology for the whole deadnaming thing.”

“Oh my god, I told you I don’t care.”

“Well, maybe I care. How about that?”

“Fine. Thank you. That’s very sweet.”

“You’re welcome. Dude.”

“And now you’re paying for the food. Hope it was worth it. Dick.”

Black Mirror

After talking awhile longer, Damien had said goodbye, insisted on paying for brunch (even though Kade had repeatedly told him she’d been joking), and the two of them had parted ways. Kade had decided to continue to wander around the city. She briefly considered going shopping for some new clothes but, after walking by a few storefronts - then doubling back and doing it again - couldn’t bring herself to go in anywhere. The persistent, burrowing neuroses around how she might be perceived; how people might react, it was paralysing. On a normal day, she would have spiralled about it. But lunch with Damien had been nice. She was surprised to find she was feeling less down on herself than usual. So she continued to wander aimlessly.

Somehow, without particularly meaning to, she ended up outside of the Helios Foundation. The street adjacent to the front of the building was largely empty and eerily quiet. She could hear the sounds of traffic from adjoining streets, but it all sounded distant, somehow. Something about acoustics, Kade surmised. The plaza leading up to the buildings’ entranceway was paved in what she assumed was granite, polished to mild reflectiveness. Without really thinking about it, she wandered past a small, dry fountain and up to the black glass of the buildings’ exterior. Each pane was about twice her height. Looking up - it seemed to stretch forever vertically towards the sky; its pointed top creating an optical illusion that made it look as though it simply continued up endlessly. She idly wondered how many panes it had taken to clad Helios in its entirety. Looking back down, she locked eyes with her reflection. And then her breath caught and she held it. Locked in place, her eyebrows furrowed. She took a step closer, close enough to touch the glass.

Kade reached slowly out, watching her fingers…noting the slight tremor in them. She let her fingernails drag along the tinted pane. She half expected it to ripple like water where she made contact, for tiny waves to ricochet out and obscure the uncanny reflection.

“What the fuck…” she murmured, leaning closer, staring into those eyes that were undeniably hers, framed by a face that was undeniably…not. The reflections’ cheeks were different - more rounded - and its’ brow was shallower, its’ forehead slightly compressed, its’ chin shallower, with less space between its bottom lip and where it ended…”Fuck me,” she exhaled.

“It’s who we could have been,” She could hear Kieran in her head. Kade nodded slowly, mesmerised by the reflection mimicking her movements. “She’s so beautiful. Not like…” he trailed off.

“Us.” Kade finished bitterly. She raised a hand to her chin, scratching along the ever-present stubble that never quite shaved away entirely…watching her mirror image running her fingers along smooth, unblemished skin. “Fuck.”

“More laser. More time. We’ll be fine.”

“Yeah. One day.” Kade murmured to herself. “Maybe one day.” She let her hand drop to her side. Her eyes widened as her reflections’ hand stayed in place. She raised her hand again, reaching out - and watched as her reflection’s hand continued to hold its place, not reacting to her movements. She could see a small smirk creeping onto its’ face that she knew - she could feel - was not there on her own. Fingernails now centimetres from the glass again, Kade felt a strange feeling rising up from the middle of her. A sense of being pushed away, but not in any direction. Her reflection held her gaze. It winked at her, smile widening. The world around her began to blur, like a storm of dust had suddenly, silently blown up and around her, fogging her vision. She blinked rapidly, trying to bring it back into focus.

As clarity returned, Kade was somewhere else. She couldn’t see any buildings around, just grass and small, willowy trees. The sky above was suddenly grey and overcast. Over to the left of her was a small canal that looked like more of a glorified drain than anything else. It was shallow; an incidental trickle as opposed to a deliberate waterway, clogged with debris and what looked like shapeless, random garbage. It reminded her of those ‘stroke images’ that simulate the visual experience of going through certain, specific kinds of strokes; it all looked familiar, but none of the garbage actually - on closer inspection - looked like anything. There was the texture and material of glass and paper and fabric, but not in any shape or configuration that made…sense. At the edges of the water, there were brief slicks of oily sludge glinting dirty rainbow.

Cautiously, she walked towards a nearby tree, slowly reaching out to run her fingers along ridged, paper-like bark. She could remember trees like this from a long time ago: a family trip she’d taken to Adelaide. Thinking about it, it wasn’t just the trees. Everything here looked as if it had been lifted from one of Kade’s memories or another. The canal was from a park near Birmingham she had walked through with Dawn on her first trip to England. Off to the right, in the distance, was a dilapidated wood-and-wire fence, falling apart in places, that she felt as though she could remember from a farm her parents’ friends used to own. That was the first - and last - time she had ridden a horse. She felt a sense of something akin to vertigo as her brain flashed through images - memories - that she could see reflected around her in realtime.

“So this is…interesting,” A voice said from behind her. Kade spun around, coming face to face with, jarringly…her own face. Or almost her own face, at least. The main difference was the complete lack of shadow from facial hair. But, beyond that, her doppelgängers’ eyebrows were thinner, and she had more makeup around her eyes than Kade had been brave enough to try using up until that point. Her lips were glossy, and pink, and set in a private little smirk. She wore some simple, black, high-waisted jeans and a tank top, but Kade’s eyes immediately tracked down to her hips which…existed. Kade found herself remembering her reflection in the black mirrors of the Helios Foundations’ tinted exterior, but the person in front of her wasn’t…that.

“Uh…” Kade’s eyes narrowed as she tried to find some words. Her doppelgänger’s smile deepened and left eyebrow raised, watching her fail to do so.

“Look, let’s just cut to the chase, okay? How does this…” the reflection gestured broadly. “work?”

“…What?”

“This place. What is it? How did you do it?”

“I’m so confused…”

“Okay. Let’s take a step back. Who’ve you met so far? Maybe we have some Alters in common?”

“Am I in the middle of having a stroke?” Kade hissed, feeling agitation rising in her gut: “Who are you? Why do you look like me? Where are we? What the fuck is going on, here?”

“Right. Okay.” The other ‘her’ held up her hands: “So you must be really new to this. Sorry, it’s…been awhile since I met one of us who wasn’t…up to speed.” The girl took a step towards her, before carefully lowering her hands to her sides. “I’m Olivia. Liv. What’s your name?”

“Kadence. Kade.”

“Hi Kade.” Olivia smiled. Her demeanour had shifted. Kade suddenly felt very much like she was being spoken to by someone who saw her as a small child. “Out of interest, what were you doing right before you found yourself here?”

“Uh…” Kade paused, trying to shrug off the surrealness of the situation and focus on answering the question. “I was outside the Helios Foundation. I was looking in the glass.”

“Right, okay. And it wasn’t your reflection?”

“No, it was…but it wasn’t.”

“Mmhmm. You but different, yeah? I’m guessing…” Olivia folded her arms across her chest, tilting her head slightly to the right and narrowing her eyes. Kade felt uncomfortably perceived, as if Olivia was running some sort of visual diagnostic: “Further along than you. More passable, right? Closer to cis? Prettier?” Kade raised an eyebrow.

“Are you calling me ugly?”

“Well…no. I guess technically I’m calling you shallow? Insecure?”

“What the hell?”

“I mean, not to be a dick about it or anything…but…” Olivia pursed her lips, clearly trying to piece together an explanation: “That glass you were looking in, it has…a vested interest in you continuing to look at it. So it shows you what you want to see. The you that you want to see. So I’m seeing you - and clearly it’s early days - and inferring based on that.”

“What, like the building has an agenda?” Kade scoffed. Olivia raised an eyebrow.

“It’s not a building.” Olivia deadpanned. “It’s uh…how do I explain this simply? It’s the Chernobyl sarcophagus, okay? It’s a field of thorns. It’s something that people need to stay the absolute fuck away from. Most people feel that in their gut, as a kind of instinctive repulsion. Which is why there’s never anyone around when you go there.”

“You get how this all sounds, right?”

“Look, I’m very aware. We’re stood here, in…” she looked around: “Wherever the hell you brought us - "

“ - I didn’t do shit!” Kade insisted. “Like I said, I was in the city, and then…” She gestured aggressively around.

“Yeah, but I mean…it had to be you. It wasn’t me. There is no third option here, Kadence.”

“Can you not say my name like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a fucking child or something?”

“Well…” Olivia started, before rolling her eyes and recalibrating: “Look. We can only go to the same place in other parallel worlds. This doesn’t look like Brisbane City to me - "

“ - Where?”

“Where you just were,” Olivia’s face was starting to show clear signs of exasperation. Kade didn’t know what to do with that. It was surreal watching her own face mimic reacting to a set of emotions she was intimately familiar with. Surreal and…condescending, in this really specific, uncanny way. “So what did you do? How did you do it?”

“I don’t know…?”

“You have to fucking know, Kade,” Olivia scoffed. “Powers take conscious effort to use. So what did you do?”

“I told you, I don’t know!” Kade shouted, overwhelmed. The tableau darkened, like thick clouds had suddenly passed in front of the sun. Kade glanced up and around, then noticed Olivia’s eyes narrow, focussing on the space behind her. Kade turned, looking over her shoulder. Three figures wearing hooded sweatshirts were approaching them. There was something wrong with them, like with the debris in the waterway: the closer she looked, the more the detail was…not quite what it was meant to be. The fabric of their clothes; the shapes of their silhouettes…they were simply approximations of actual clothes and human bodies. They were close, but there was a certain uncanny lack of discernibility to them that her eyes wanted to glance off of and ignore. One of them had something in its’ ‘hand’ - like a hastily sketched approximation of broken glass; jagged and sharp and translucent.

“We should go. Like now.” Olivia lunged forward and grabbed for Kade’s arm, pulling her along rapidly before pushing her away. Kade felt that same sensation of a directionless push - of resistance - before falling backwards, the world shifting out of focus. She hit the pavement - alone - as clarity returned, rolling to the side as a passerby almost stepped on her:

“Sorry dude!” He said, continuing on his way.

“Fucking…’dude’…” Kade muttered, slowly getting to her feet…looking around, confused, as if she’d never been on the path across Unity Bridge before.