Year Zero - 6. Cracked

Alter: Olivia

Local Network World: 0055/0306/0103

Dates: 19/06/2025 - 20/06/2025

Negative Space

The silence was eerie and all-encompassing. As Olivia walked slowly through the streets of Meanjin City - in Anna’s World - her mind reflexively expected the sounds of traffic…of people bustling around, chatting and laughing. All she could hear was the sound of wind passing through the curvatures of the abandoned urban landscape; brief whistles and constrained gusts, and the occasional sounds of trash and debris being scooted along asphalt and concrete. There weren’t even birds here, anymore. She didn’t know why, just that their absence was deafening.

She remembered the first time she’d walked these streets. Confused and alone, consumed with a kind of nervous energy, feeling the presence of a part of her which had always been missing, which she couldn’t place. She remembered the first time she’d seen Annabelle’s face, and how she’d just…frozen, unable to move a single muscle. This world had been so different, then. It had felt so vast and vibrant and full of possibility. Now it was just a shell. A thing hollowed out and desiccated by the absence of her. Olivia could relate. When she thought back, she could map her own history solely according to connections. Nothing else particularly mattered to her. And the part of her life dominated by her connection with Anna cast a long shadow over both her past before that time and her ability to see a future for herself moving forward.

Her feelings for Anna weren’t even romantic, particularly. Consuming, yes. Romantic, no. If she was truly honest with herself, she wasn’t sure she had ever had romantic feelings for anyone: just these rare, overwhelming fixations…limerent fascinations powered by this desperate, bone-deep longing to be really, truly seen. To be understood and loved in a way she couldn’t understand or love herself. She sniffed and rolled her eyes.

I fucking hate irony.

Olivia dragged her heels as she neared the entrance to the Helios Foundation, making her way towards the tinted glass fronting.

“Are you here?” She murmured. She stared into the glass. Her own reflection stared back. She sighed. “Please, just give me this. Just this one thing.” Nothing. Pulling back her elbow, Olivia half-heartedly slapped her hand forward against the glass, bracing herself against it and leaning in, resting her forehead on the cold, tinted surface. It was thick and offered nothing but resistance. “So I guess that’s it, is it? You just left me here, all alone. And I don’t even get to see you one last time.” She stared upwards, the Helios Foundation building stretching into a sharp point, creating an optical illusion that made it look as if it was a continuous plane of the same width stretching until it disappeared from view. “Fuck you.” She said quietly - definitively - and with all the sincerity in the world.

“What are you doing here?” Olivia didn’t react as she heard Kira’s voice. Rule three, after all.

“What are you doing here?” Olivia finally replied, not moving an inch.

“I felt you come here. You shouldn’t have. This place is dangerous.”

“Fuck it. Who cares, at this point?”

“I do.”

“We don’t care about each other, we’re just…stuck together cause we’re not like other people.”

“You really believe that?”

“I don’t know, Kira. Maybe. Probably.”

“Y’know…” Kira started, pausing as if they’d thought better of it. But then they went and said it anyway: “She wouldn’t want this for you.”

“What, she wouldn’t want me torn up over her being dead? Have you met us? Dying and having it matter to someone is basically our dream scenario.”

“Oh for fucks sake.” Kira closed the gap between them, grabbing for Olivia’s elbow and pulling her away from the glass.

“No, fuck off Kira,” Olivia pulled her elbow back aggressively.

“You can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dangerous.”

“Everything’s dangerous. Who gives a shit?”

“Liv, we had a plan.”

“Fuck the plan. Fuck Ari, and Tash, and Sage. Fuck Maya. Fuck Kade in particular. Fuck you. Fuck me. The wrong ones died and now we’re all completely fucked.”

“Yeah, maybe they did. But we can’t let it be for nothing.”

“Wake up, Kira. It was for nothing. I’m literally standing here, in hallucination plaza…the place dying to show us what we want to see, and I don’t even get to say goodbye to my girlfriend. The multiverse hates us.”

“You need to get your shit together, Liv.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

“We’ve been over this. We weren’t fighting because we thought we could win, we were fighting because not fighting would have been worse than losing. But Jesus, Liv, wouldn’t you rather fucking win? How’re you going to feel if Seven attacks your world and you lose your family, your friends, Dawn - just like you lost Anna - but this time there’s a little part of you that wonders…if you had just tried harder - if you’d just done what I told you to do - maybe you wouldn’t have?”

“I just needed some time…”

“I swear I am not trying to be a dick when I ask this, but Olivia…how long is it going to be until you don’t need some time?” Olivia’s fists clenched and unclenched semi-involuntarily. She gritted her teeth and scowled, rolling her shoulders and looking off into the middle distance.

“Yeah.” She finally conceded. “Yeah, you’re right. I know you’re right. Just give me tonight, okay? Just tonight. I’ll pull myself together and we’ll get back to it.”

“Liv. I need to know: can I count on you?”

“This isn’t my first barbecue. It’s just trauma, y’know? It lingers. Crawls into every bit of you until you’re just…infected with bitterness and shame and anxiety. Feels like the world ended and you’re just so alone, being the only one who seems to know that’s the case. Makes me wish I could still dissociate like I could pre-estrogen. It’s so long ago now, but it was like being able to turn the volume down on what I was feeling, at the cost of being…y’know…entirely present in reality. Sometimes I feel like it would be…easier.”

“Yeah. But then you’d have to go back to pretending you’re a boy, so...” Kira grabbed for Olivia’s elbow again, pulling her into a tight hug. Olivia’s arms instinctively pushed up to the backs of Kira’s shoulders, digging her fingers into them as she sunk her face into Kira’s shoulder. “You’ll be okay. As okay as girls like you can be, at least.” Olivia laughed into Kira’s clavicle, sniffling a little. “And we do care about each other, you fucking idiot.”

“I know.” Olivia admitted, her voice muffled in Kira’s shoulder.

“I’m gonna see you tomorrow, yeah?” Kira confirmed, pulling away from Olivia and holding her at arms length, looking probingly into her eyes. Olivia nodded.

“Yes. I will see you tomorrow.”

“Take care of yourself. I mean it.”

After Kira left her, Olivia found a bike. It wasn’t hard. The city was littered with abandoned bikes and scooters, slowly rusting and collecting dust and mould as they lay there, unused and exposed to the elements. She managed to find one in decent condition and started off towards Anna’s old house. She rode through South Bank, taking note of weak-points as she went, just in case she needed to make a hasty exit. But everything seemed deserted. She knew from when she’d left that electricity and water were no longer flowing, and that most of the remotely rational people still alive at the point when they’d left had been making for the outer suburbs and the country, where the possibility of finding food and water wasn’t already long past.

It took her the better part of an hour to get to where Anna’s house was. By that time she was breathing heavily and her legs ached from exertion. Olivia was not in good physical shape, and a long bike ride was not something she had been particularly prepared for. Dumping the bike in the driveway, she staggered towards the front steps, correctly identifying the pot-plant with the spare key under it and letting herself inside. Mid-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the windows of the old Queenslander. Anna’s house was exactly like Olivia remembered.

She slowly made her way through to Anna’s old room. The sheets and blankets were rumpled - Anna rarely if ever bothered making her bed - and familiar stacks of books were piled into uneven little towers in the corners of the room. There was a chair off to the left side of the bed that Anna sometimes liked to sit in and read. Stripping off her clothes, Olivia crawled into Anna’s bed - coughing as the motion kicked up a vortex of dust - just like she had a hundred times before. Pulling the sheets and blankets around herself, Olivia started to quietly cry.

Seven

“Hey Olivia.” Seven drawled. Olivia’s eyes flickered open. From where she lay, Seven’s face was in profile, like the head on a coin. Olivia could see the slight bump near the top of her nose that all of them had except Maya. Her hair fell messily around her temples, curly and unkempt. She was wrapped up in an oversized black hoodie and torn jeans. The one eye Olivia could see was angled in her direction. Seven had a slight smirk on her face, that little dimple at the left-hand corner of all their mouths sunken in. While they hadn’t met in person before, Olivia could feel who she was…but that was the extent of it. For some reason she couldn’t read her; couldn’t see where they diverged or feel any hint of history, shared or dissonant.

“What are you doing here?” Olivia asked. She was surprised that she didn’t feel any alarm, only irritation. Anger.

“I honestly don’t know. I guess I just wanted to uh…” Seven paused, swivelling her jaw slightly like she was turning something over in her mouth: “Talk.”

“So talk. What do I care?” Olivia sat up, reaching for the tank top and jeans she’d left splayed haphazardly over the top of the covers. Kicking off the covers she started pulling on her jeans and then her top over her boy shorts and sports bra, not bothering to stand, largely ignoring Seven’s presence.

“How’ve you been?”

“Oh, you know. Peachy fucking keen. So are you here to kill me or what?”

“Why would you think I’d want to kill you?”

“Oh yeah, cause I’d have no reason to think that. What is it with villains, man: always saying cliche-ass shit to bait people into having the conversation they want to have. You sound stupid right now, I hope you know that.”

“Okay, fine, yes, I can see why you’d think that might be the case. No, I’m not here to kill you.”

“So again I ask…what the fuck are you doing here? In what universe would you think I’d ever want to talk to you?” Olivia stood up, forcing Seven to look up at her from where she sat. With jerky, aggressive movements, Olivia fed her belt through the loops in her jeans before fastening it with an exasperated sigh. Looking away from Seven, she ran her hand over her chin and upper lip, feeling for the tiniest hints of stubble that years of laser had never quite seemed to kill. Nothing, thankfully.

“I’m sorry about what happened.” Olivia felt every single muscle in her body simultaneously tense. She stood statue-still.

“How can you say that to me?” She finally managed to whisper out.

“If it’s any consolation, none of them were real.”

“What?”

“The people on this world. They were all just…” Seven shrugged: “Shadows, I guess. Echoes.” In that moment, Olivia lost control. Almost out-of-body, she watched her hand rising up in her peripheral vision before flying forward in a wide arc, slamming into Seven’s face so hard that the other girl fell, sprawled onto the floor, the chair falling with her. Olivia stood over her, her breathing suddenly ragged.

“Say it again! Say Annabelle was a fucking shadow and I swear to fucking god I’ll - "

“ - There’s so much you don’t know,” Seven laughed quietly. “This whole thing is so much bigger than you think it is. Anna knew. Thinking about it, kind of strange that she didn’t tell you, no?”

“Fuck you.”

“Would you like me to tell you?”

“You think I’m gonna believe anything you say to me?”

“Suit yourself.”

“I should do the multiverse a favour, just kill you and be done with it…” Olivia hissed.

“You’re welcome to try. Trust me: it won’t do any good.”

“Dunno about that. The slap felt pretty great…”

“No, I mean…” Seven hoisted herself up onto her elbows, fixing Olivia with a mockingly innocent little smile. “I can’t die. I’ve tried. And not like we’ve all tried at some point or another, really tried. More than once. So…guess I’m stuck here. Guess you’re stuck with me.”

“Just a second.” Olivia clenched her jaw, turning on her heel and walking out of the bedroom. She went immediately to the kitchen, scanning the bench top for the knife block. The largest knife had a twenty centimetre blade, so she pulled that out and turned back towards the bedroom.

“Really?” Olivia paused as she saw Seven move into the bedroom doorway, crossing her arms over her chest with a single raised eyebrow and an amused, crooked little half-smile worming its way across her face.

“Really what? Do you think this is like a TV show? You think we’re gonna play some-cat-and-mouse bullshit across a half a season? Cap it off with some milquetoast debate about whether killing you would make me become you? This isn’t a morally abstract equation for me, bitch. You destroyed a world. You killed my friends. I don’t care if you can’t die. I owe them the attempt.”

“Olivia, just - "

“ - Oh shut the fuck up - "

“ - They were shadows!” Seven shouted. In that moment, Olivia felt weightless, like gravity had lost its hold on her. She found herself off the ground and hurtling backwards, slamming into the far wall of the room. Drywall crunched into wooden boards. As she peeled away, she imagined a cartoonishly Liv-shaped hole forming behind her. She crumpled down onto her hands and knees, coughing weakly: winded.

“What the h-hell? How did you just do that?” She wheezed, looking over at Seven.

“We’re not the same, Liv. I’m not one of your little friends. I’m different.” Seven sighed, raising a hand to massage the bridge of her nose, her eyes folding closed. “Look…fuck it, I’ll lay it out for you, okay? As much as I don’t want to be, I’m the one who matters, here. I’m the original. My world was the original. You’re all just…slightly divergent iterations.”

“Who says?” Liv hissed, still struggling to get her breath back. She raised a hand to her mouth, pads of her fingertips feeling along her lips and coming away wet with blood.

“The people who created the pyramids; the Helios Foundation buildings. The ones who are coming for me and not you. The ones who have us trapped like lab-rats in this tiny sliver of the multiverse. What do you guys call it: the ‘Local Network’?”

“Even if, what does that have to do with - "

“ - This place? Anna’s world?” Seven swept her hand up and around. “I needed to send a message.”

“And Annabelle?”

“What did you really know about your girlfriend? Like really, Liv?”

“I know she didn’t deserve to die.”

“Agree to disagree.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you. We’re living entirely different stories, here. Not you and me: all of us. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that all you know about someone is all there is to know about them. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that, because someone is a hero in your story, they can’t be a villain in someone else’s. Or vice versa, as the case may be.”

“So what was it, the thing that made her a villain in your story? What don’t I know? Come on…blow my fucking mind.”

“You don’t have enough context to properly understand. So…I’ll give you something better. Call it…I don’t know, ‘Rules of Engagement’. You have my word that I will leave your little clique of Alters alone. You and your worlds. Unless - and I want to be crystal clear about this - unless I find out that another one of you is working with Helios.”

“Helios?”

“Yes. Helios.”

“Like the Helios Foundation?” Seven nodded slowly; patronisingly.

“Like I just said: the people who created the pyramids. Keep up, Liv.”

“I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what this all means.”

“Which is good. That’s such a good thing for you, Liv. Trust me on that. And I genuinely hope that you don’t find out. Truly. But let the girls know, yeah? You might all be some cosmic joke at my expense, but it’s important to me that you know that I didn’t want this. It was just…necessary. It’s up to you whether the ‘necessary’ things that are going to happen moving forward happen to you and your friends, or just…somewhere off in the distance where you don’t have to think about them.” Seven smiled coldly over at Olivia, before raising her arm and flicking her wrist in a dismissive gesture. Olivia felt that familiar sense of resistance in the air around her. The world seemed to blur as if fading out of focus. All of a sudden, she was…elsewhere. A street. Empty, but the sound of traffic off in the distance was unmistakable. She felt a sudden pinprick of cold on her left hand, then another on her forehead. It was starting to rain. Her jaw clenched tightly and involuntarily: she knew where she was. Looking to the side, she saw the polished granite paving leading up to the entryway to the Helios Foundation. It towered over her. Getting to her feet, little chips of broken drywall fell from her back and around her feet. She looked down at the large knife still in her hand, before letting it clatter to the ground. She left it where it lay.

Maya’s World

Maya’s townhouse was on the edge of Mason’s Port - a sprawling web of canals, restaurants, and expensive apartment blocks - the general area of which corresponded to a suburb called ‘Morningside’ in Olivia’s world. Olivia had taken the Ferry up the river to the nearest stop and decided to simply walk the fifteen minutes or so to get to Maya’s. This, as it turned out, had been a mistake. In the end, it took her closer to forty-five minutes to lope her way there. Every part of her body ached, but the pain was concentrated most acutely in her lower back. She winced involuntarily and slowed her pace every few steps, feeling sharp stabs of pain emanating from the deep bruises Seven had left her with.

When she finally knocked on Maya’s door, Olivia was breathing heavily and leaning against the brick outer veneer of Maya’s entrance-way for support. After a minute, there was no response. Olivia knocked again, harder, and rang the doorbell. Nothing. Rolling her eyes, she started to look under the few small pot plants for a spare key. Nothing. Guessing that, in all likelihood, Maya was as irresponsible as she would be and might not bother locking her back door, Olivia made her way around the building, finding a wooden gate that led directly through to Maya’s small backyard. The back sliding door was unlocked and slightly open. Olivia let herself in.

“Maya?!” She called out. “Sorry for…barging in like this…?” Her voice lilted upwards towards the end as she caught sight of Maya lying motionless on the couch in nothing but her underwear, with her forearm draped over her face as if shielding it from an absent source of light. The coffee table beside where she lay was cluttered with random bits and pieces; fast food packaging and empty bottles of liquor. Olivia clocked a few empty baggies - the tiny, resealable kind that were really only used for one thing. Across the floor were strewn dirty clothes and random debris. It was the most un-Maya tableau she could imagine. When she’d previously seen Maya’s house, it had been spotless; manicured and sanitised to the point of suggesting OCD tendencies, or germophobia, or a Stepford kink. And Maya rarely drank, but when she did it was always like a teenager: alco-pops and Moscato and cider. Olivia could feel the immediate pressure of concern in her gut rising to the level of low-grade panic. “Maya,” Olivia fell to her knees beside her, grunting at the sudden stab of pain in her lower back, ignoring it and gently pushing at her friends’ shoulder. “Hey, can you wake up please?” Maya groaned, rolling away from Olivia’s touch and burying her face in the back-most seam of the couch.

“Go ‘way,” Maya whined sleepily, the last syllable distending out a good few seconds.

“Maya, I really need to know you’re okay,” Olivia insisted.

“None of us are okay,” Maya sighed into the upholstery with a grim little chuckle. “Bits of us, gone forever. Died away like cut flowers. Like just…nothing. Then you guys…left me here alone. All alone.” Her tone rose and fell almost musically, her words slurred in their middles and clipped at their ends.

“I didn’t know you needed us.” Olivia explained softly, very aware that Maya was more drunk than she had ever seen her.

“Needing people…” Maya snorted. “You’re like me, babes. I know you know. If they know you need them, sucks more when they’re not there. And no one’s ever there. No one ever stays, so…” Maya trailed off. Olivia couldn’t see her smirk, but she could hear it. “Trust no bitch.”

“I get it,” Olivia acknowledged, squeezing Maya’s shoulder lightly. “I just…didn’t know you felt alone like that.” With a sigh, Maya rolled back on the couch, stretching out like a cat. A pained expression washed across her face and she yawned, before fixing Liv with a vacant, glassy stare and a big dumb grin.

“That’s my secret, cap.” She smiled sadly. “I always feel alone like that.”

“Relatable.” Olivia smiled back at her, reaching up towards Maya’s face to brush some errant curls away from her eyes.

“They’re all dead, Liv,” Maya squeaked, her smile fading and her eyes getting glassier. She blinked hard, shaking her head vigorously as if she was trying to force back what she was feeling. “Why’d they have to go away like that? Why can’t I stop feeling like this?”

“Maybe you haven’t had enough drinks yet?” Olivia joked, before immediately regretting it as Maya stared back at her with earnest confusion.

“Oh I have though. I’ve drunk all the drinks.”

“Yeah sweetheart, I do see that.” Olivia confirmed, glancing back at the multiple empty bottles of vodka and gin on the coffee table.

“I lost my job, Liv.” Maya’s face contorted into a pained grimace. Olivia couldn’t help but smile: she looked like a kid confessing to a parent that she’d been caught smoking, all apologetic and anxiously awaiting a negative response. “I’ve done…so much dumb stuff. So much stupid, Liv…”

“Hey, hey…” Olivia cupped Maya’s cheek. “These things happen. I got you. We’ll work it out, okay?”

“Like we worked out Seven?” Maya slurred, raising her eyebrows skeptically.

“Y’know what I think?”

“What d’you think, Liv?”

“I think you’re too drunk to be that fucking sassy.”

“I’m not drunk.” Maya shook her head emphatically. “I slept. So I’m sober now.”

“Yeah, hun,” Olivia nodded reassuringly. “That’s how it works.”

Olivia spent the next hour convincing Maya to drink water, helping her to have a shower and get dressed, and making her a coffee. Slowly, the slurring and pseudo-coherence started to wind back, leaving Maya quiet and pensive, lapsing in and out of a thousand yard stare out the sliding glass door. Olivia had no idea what more to do, and immediately thought of Kira. It didn’t take much convincing to get Maya into an Uber with her to where Kira’s place would be. Once there, they found a weak point without issue, and - on the other side - Olivia knocked on Kira’s door.

“About time,“ Kira started as the door swung open, pausing as they saw Maya. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Kira asked, stepping aside for them to enter.

“Not really.” Maya said, her voice quiet, almost apologetic. “Liv took care of me.”

“That’s good. Come sit down and tell me about it, yeah?” Kira led them through to the living room. Olivia paused in the doorway, seeing Kade sitting across the room, hands pressed between her knees, awkwardly avoiding eye contact. Olivia chose to shunt the elephant in the room off to the side and to prioritise getting Maya comfortable.

“Hi, I’m Maya,” Maya said to Kade. “Have we met?”

“I uh…I don’t think so. I’m Kade.” Kade smiled awkwardly, getting to her feet with a small, stilted wave. Maya stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, before sitting down on the couch and patting the cushion beside her. Kade slowly sat back down.

“So what’s the situation?” Kira asked.

“Maya’s been going through it.” Olivia answered, hoping Maya would pick it up from there.

“I…” Maya took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and continued. “I lost my job. I’ve been going out. Drinking too much. Other things.” She summarised, glancing over at Kade. “Sorry, bad first impression.” She apologised. Kade shook her head emphatically.

“Because of what happened. With Seven.” Kira said. It wasn’t a question. Maya nodded, looking down at her feet. “I’m gonna need just a minute with these two. Is that okay?” Kira asked Maya. Maya nodded. “You’re sure?”

“I think I know how to sit on a couch and be sad.” Maya rolled her eyes.

“Okay. Liv? Kade?” Kade got to her feet, trailing Kira and Olivia as they left the room.

“How bad?” Kira’s voice dropped to a stage-whisper as they led the two other Alters into the kitchen.

“I don’t know. But she’s spiralling, she’s not taking care of herself, her house looks like shit. There were drugs. I don’t know what, specifically. She didn’t talk about it. I wouldn’t worry so much but it’s Maya. She doesn’t do things like that, so she has no clue how to handle herself. Beyond that, I think there might be other stuff she’s not telling me as well. So I’d say it’s pretty fucking bad.”

“Why didn’t you just read her?” Kira asked.

“You know how this works. I just get bits and pieces unless I specifically try. I saw a lot of crying and a lot of drinking and that’s pretty much it. I’m not going to go digging around in her brain - or any of your brains - because unless you tell me something, it’s none of my fucking business. You have no idea the amount of shit I get glimpses of and keep to myself. Which…you’re welcome, by the way…” Olivia sighed, opening Kira’s fridge and looking around for a drink. She found a partially emptied bottle of vodka, grabbed it out and took a long swig, gritting her teeth and wincing dramatically before returning it to the fridge.

“Really?” Kade raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, you could probably stand to cut back a little yourself.” Kira confirmed.

“I’m functional. It’s fine.” Olivia growled.

“Whatever.” Kira rolled their eyes. “I always forget that Maya had a dramatically different life trajectory to us. She never went through what we did - the home invasion; the…other stuff - "

“ - We all went through that?” Kade asked.

“Most of us. We don’t talk about it.” Kira nodded.

“Fuck.” Kade sighed, slumping back against the kitchen bench.

“Anyway…yeah. Realistically, this is probably Maya’s first really big trauma outside of…y’know…the never-ending bullshit of growing up trans. She also didn’t have a version of Dawn, and I, personally, can’t imagine where I’d have ended up if I hadn’t had her to work through things with. So it’d make sense for her to not have the uh…infrastructure in place to…”

“Compartmentalise? Dissociate? All that useful, completely healthy stuff the rest of us love to do so much?” Olivia confirmed. Kira nodded.

“I dunno what I can do, but I’ll do what I can. Obviously.” Kira smiled wanly. “Now, onto the two of you.” Kira began. Olivia instantly, aggressively did not want to have the conversation that they were clearly edging towards. She made the decision to actively avoid it.

“This morning, before I went to see Maya…I talked to Seven.” She offered.

“You fucking what?” Kade queried in a completely normal and totally measured tone of voice. Olivia ignored her. Her eyes trained on Kira’s face, she explained the morning ambush, and recounted Seven’s ‘Rules of Engagement’.

“So her problem is Helios.” Kira concluded.

“Whatever that is. Whoever they are.” Olivia shrugged. Kira paused, considering.

“Well…we don’t know nothing.” They said slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“We know the Helios Foundation buildings weren’t there prior to The Incident. We know that they appeared around the time we all got powers. We know they exist in every world we’ve been to. We know that ‘normal’ people ignore them and avoid them, but that we don’t. The question, really…is whether her problem with Helios is based in any kind of actual fact, or - ”

“ - Is she just being kind of a crazy bitch?”

“Yeah. That.”

“She did say that the people who built the pyramids were coming for her. That they weren’t coming for us.”

“Did she…like…expand on that?”

“No. She was mostly talking about how she was the ‘original’, and the people she killed didn’t matter because they were all just echoes. She also said that she couldn’t die. In the sense of…having actually tested the theory and being very certain that she was right about it.”

“I’d love to test that theory…” Kira muttered.

“Yeah, same. And I tried. She threw me across the room.” Olivia said, her hand reflexively moving behind her and onto her lower back. “So apparently we can add telekinesis to the list of things she can do that we can’t. She really fucked up my back. Thankfully I managed to swipe some paracetamol at Maya’s place and it’s starting to feel a bit better, so I guess it’s just bruising.”

“So that’s your professional, medical opinion on it, then?” Kira raised a skeptical eyebrow. Olivia shrugged.

“If it gets worse, then I’ll start worrying.”

“Fine.” Kira conceded the point.

“Why is she so much more powerful than us?” Kade asked.

“We don’t know.” Kira replied.

“Who knows, maybe she is the original and we are just…bad copies.” Olivia folded her arms across her chest with a small shrug, looking down at her feet.

“That’s not how Many Worlds works.” Kira stated definitively. “There is no ‘prime’ Alter or world. She’s just another iteration. Just like us.”

“So her powers are random chance?” Olivia asked doubtfully.

“I didn’t say that. But unless we can find a way of sitting her and the Helios Foundation - whoever they happen to actually be - down for a long, technical conversation…I doubt we’re going to be able to work out why she’s different.”

“She also…” Olivia sighed: “She also teleported me to a different place on a different world. Just…flicked her wrist like it was nothing and sent me home.”

“Like what I can do?” Kade asked.

“No, it wasn’t through an Otherwhere, I just went from the house to out the front of the Helios Foundation building in my world.”

“Still. It’s possible that there’s a connection.” Kira mused.

“It’s possible there’s a connection between 5G towers and shingles, but with no affirmative evidence you’re still a moron if you’re speculating about it.” Olivia stated. Kira just glared at her before asking:

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m good.”

“Oh really? You’re good?” Kade raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah. I’m good.” Olivia reiterated. “I took a day. I thought it through. I’m managing it.”

“Oh please. You’re just as fucked up over that apocalypse thing as Maya is.” Kade observed. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to logic your way out of dealing with trauma, and it’s not working, because it never works. And every time it fails, you lash out. So you’re fine now but what happens the next time something rocks your boat? I might be a coward and an idiot, but so the fuck are you.”

“Okay, maybe I deserved that.” Olivia admitted.

“Maybe?” Kade raised an eyebrow.

“Probably, based on what I’ve heard.” Kira added.

“So you two spent five minutes getting to know one another and now you’re piling on?”

“I’m not piling on anything.” Kira raised their hands, palms outward. “I just wouldn’t hate some further context on what went down between you, and I feel as if Kade might appreciate some as well.”

“She knew Anna.” Olivia looked over at Kira. “Kade knew Anna.”

“What?” Kira’s brow furrowed.

“What are you talking about?” Kade asked, confusion evident in her voice: “That thing on the beach?”

“Yes.”

“It was just a story. Annabelle is just a character.” Reflexively, Olivia’s jaw clenched. Hard. Her mouth twisted into a scowl and her eyes narrowed. Kade held her hands up: “Is that what this whole thing is about?”

“Yes.”

“I’m gonna need more than ‘yes’, Liv: what the actual fuck are you talking about?”

“The situation with Seven was on an Alter’s world. An Alter called Annabelle. She…died, there. She and Liv were involved.” Kira clarified. Kade’s eyes widened comically.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“We weren’t ‘involved’. I don’t know what we were.”

“Oh so we’re back to denial, then?” Kira rolled their eyes. “Great. Excellent.”

“So I used to write stories about this girl called Annabelle who I later realised was…well…me as a cis girl - might have been processing a few things, there - and it just so happens that an alternate version of me in a parallel world was also called Annabelle, and Liv was fucking her?!” Kade summarised incredulously, turning specifically towards Olivia: “And then you abandoned me in an Otherwhere and yelled at me about it without providing a shred of context?” For the first time, Olivia looked directly at Kade, levelling a defiant little glare in her direction. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“Yep.”

“That’s fucked.” Kade informed Olivia with emphasis: “You’re fucked.”

“Which bit?” Olivia smiled sweetly.

“Pick one.”

“It was jarring.”

“And your reaction wasn’t?”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence.” Kira interjected.

“What?” Olivia sighed out the word with as much exasperation as she could physically force into a single syllable. Kira ignored her, speaking directly to Kade:

“It’s too similar and too specific. The Annabelle we knew was cis as well.”

“There was a cis version of us?”

“I told you that when we had lunch. Anna was cisgender. We had a Kieran - Kier - who was completely fine with being a boy. Supposedly; I had thoughts.” Olivia glanced at Kira pointedly.

“How is it useful to speculate?” Kira sighed.

“We don’t all subscribe to the ‘egg prime directive’, Kira. Speculating that someone might be trans shouldn’t be at all a bigger deal than assuming they’re cis. If you believe that it is, you’re basically agreeing that being trans is a bad thing.”

“Liv, this is so not the time to rehash this argument.”

“Fine,” Olivia sighed, returning to her summary: “And we have three enbies and counting.”

“She-slash-they,” Kira raised a hand awkwardly.

“Yeah…” Olivia nodded, raising her hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, letting her eyes fall shut. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you that it’s not not like Pokemon. Somewhere out there there’s one of every kind of us. Just a matter of finding them.”

“And fucking them, apparently,” Kade countered.

“Hey. Watch it.” Olivia growled.

“Watch what? This is insane.”

“Welcome to the multiverse.” Kira shrugged.

“So you think…what, somehow I was aware of her?” Kade asked Kira, her tone softening.

“I think that we can’t rule it out. We don’t understand your powers. We don’t really understand any of this. We’re just speculating.” Kira looked over at Olivia who immediately smirked. “Don’t even.” Olivia raised her hands innocently, allowing Kira to continue: “So yeah, I think maybe there was a…connection, there. I mean, what’s more likely, given the multiverse that we find ourselves in: that you had a connection to her, or that you just…randomly wrote an alternate version of yourself that mirrors one who actually existed?”

“Who cares?” Olivia interjected.

“You, apparently,” Kade snapped.

“Fuck you.”

“I mean, given half a chance I’m sure you would. Sounds like I’m your type.”

“You need to grow the fuck up, Kadence.”

“You need to not take your fucking trauma out on me, Olivia. You said some really fucked up things to me the last time I saw you, and yeah: finding out it’s because something awful happened to you puts them in context but it doesn’t make it okay. How do you think it feels, having someone with your same face repeat back to you the worst shit you think about yourself?” Kade’s voice cracked harshly, her final words forced out like they were being dragged over a cheese-grater. Olivia could see Kade’s eyes getting more reflective. Tears. She paused, forcing back her anger. She knew that she was in the wrong. Before she had a chance to say anything, Kade clenched her jaw and stepped backwards, blinking away into thin air.

“Fix this.” Kira softly swatted Olivia upside the head. It felt more affectionate than aggressive, but Olivia got the point. “I’m going to go take care of Maya.”

“Okay, I’ll be back.” Olivia got to her feet reluctantly, moving towards the sense of resistance she had felt Kade disappear through. The world shifted, and on the other side…Olivia paused, taking a second to be impressed. It wasn’t a place that could feasibly exist. It was dreamlike. Soft, lukewarm breeze gusted lazily around her face. The sky above was a series of smooth gradations of cornflower blue, speckled with wispy cotton-wool clouds that looked closer to animated than photo-realistic. She was standing on a single, perfectly rounded hill covered in soft, fragrant grass, surrounded entirely by calm and gently lapping ocean that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Kade sat, spread out on the grass a few metres in front of her, her arms pinned behind her, holding her up. From behind, Olivia could see her back shaking with small sobs every time she exhaled.

“You’re getting good at this.” Olivia noted quietly, her tone as soft as she could manage to make it.

“I know. It’s easy.” Kade deadpanned. Her inflection was a little nasal, like her nose was slightly blocked. Olivia could immediately tell that she was trying to sound like she wasn’t crying.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m…” Kade sighed aggressively, still not turning to look at her. “For starters, I’m on like…quite a lot of estrogen. I’m hormonal as fuck. My entire body chemistry is shifting into a new fucking paradigm. You can’t just pull this kind of shit on me and expect me to…” she trailed off.

“Yeah. It was like that for me in the early days too. Heightened. Like your emotions got bigger and broader. And you’re thinking…maybe it’s the dissociation fading away, or maybe it’s finally the real you, or maybe you’re just going through puberty again. At a certain point you realise it’s just…all of the above, really. And then you slowly get used to it. It’s easy to forget what it was like, though. And…look, for the record…even if your emotions weren’t all ‘heightened’, it still would have been a fucked up thing to deal with. I can acknowledge that.”

“I’m just so embarrassed. Every time I get a bit emotional I start crying. I’d barely cried for decades, it feels like…”

“Like no one’s going to take you seriously if you can’t hold it back? Like it lessens the impact of the points you’re trying to make? Yeah…” Olivia smiled quietly to herself as she saw Kade’s head bob up and down in a sullen little nod. “I get that part too. It’s uh…conditioning, I think? Internalised sexism, kind of? That was the conclusion I came to in the end. Like you were raised to think of expressive emotionality as illogical, so you beat yourself up for it even though that’s a standard you wouldn’t apply to anyone else. But letting it out is good, actually. It’s healthy. And the only people who’ll take you less seriously for actually showing how much you care aren’t really worth caring about the reactions of.”

“Yeah? Well it feels like shit.” Olivia moved towards Kade, slowly sitting down beside her - wincing slightly and adjusting as a minor spike of pain drove into her lower back - cross legged on the grass. She reached back behind them to give Kade’s hand a quick, sympathetic squeeze.

“Look, I’m really messed up.” Olivia admitted. “We all are. Everyone kind of is. I mean…can you imagine the sort of person that wouldn’t be messed up, growing up in the sorts of worlds we live in? Let alone with all the trauma we have, and the gender stuff…” Olivia trailed off, collecting her thoughts before continuing: “I’m trying to say that I’m sorry.” Kade shrugged.

“Why? You were right. I am a coward and an idiot. You probably can’t rely on me in this fight. I couldn’t even…” Kade’s voice wavered. She raised a hand to carefully dab tears away from her eyes, trying not to smudge her eyeliner: “Y’know what my biggest regret is about my relationship?” Olivia waited patiently. She already knew roughly what Kade was going to say, and felt a sympathetic lump rising in her own throat: “When Sara left me, I wasn’t even going to transition. I knew what was coming, I’d seen enough to know that she couldn’t love me as a woman. She knew I was trans from the start of the relationship, but when I started to do…y’know, even simple, little things, I could see it in her eyes. She’d see me doing my skincare routine, or hear me talking about makeup I thought looked interesting, and…it was like I could see her feelings for me dying in realtime.”

“Skincare and makeup shouldn’t even be gendered anyhow…” Olivia grumbled. Kade just continued on:

“It wasn’t her fault. I’m aware of that; academically, at least. You can’t force yourself to be attracted to something you’re not. But it still hurt. I was watching as the person I loved slowly stopped loving me. So I decided to leave it. I tried to choose the relationship over transitioning, like I’d always chosen anything and everything over it. I’d been doing that for as long as I could remember, even though it felt like a black hole opening up inside me when I’d think about those choices after the fact. But the damage was done: she’d seen me - really seen me - and that was the beginning of the end. But right up until she broke up with me, even though I knew it was coming, I was so resolved to just…bury it, to lock that part of me up and throw away the key. My entire adult life had been this cycle of knowing the way I was living was slowly killing me, but inventing all these endless, bullshit reasons why transition wouldn’t work, or couldn’t be worth it, to try and make the life I had seem…I guess, preferable? Not that it ever really worked. I’d honestly gotten to this point where I genuinely believed that thinking about suicide multiple times a day - feeling like the idea of ending it was comforting, as if knowing I had the option gave me some sense of control in my life - was just a normal thing that didn’t even really speak to depression, or my transness, or anything like that. And then Sara made the choice for me. I transitioned because she left me, not the other way around. That’s how pathetic I am, Liv: I was living as half-a-fucking-zombie and I wasn’t even the one who made the choice to stop doing it.”

“I feel like you might be forcing a bit of an impossible standard on yourself, here?”

“Really? You think I don’t know that it was the first thing you noticed about me? How…useless I am? You’re not subtle.”

“Kade, I - "

“ - It’s okay, Liv. You’re not wrong. With transition…like everything else in my life, I just followed a path that had been laid out for me. I’d lost so much at that point that…that when she left me over it, I was just like ‘well if you’re going to kill yourself anyway, you might as well try this thing that you’ve been treating like an impossibility for twenty years first’.” Kade took a deep breath, looking over at Olivia. “See, you worked out you were trans and you just…you did something about it. I worked out I was trans, so I gaslit and tormented and terrified myself over the idea of actually doing something about it for two entire fucking decades. And then the night I started HRT I tried to kill myself anyway because I was just that much of a coward. I was scared that it might turn out that I was broken beyond repair and I could never be okay, with or without HRT; that maybe no one could love me or want me as who I actually was, like the only thing attractive about me had been the mask I’d been suffocating behind all that time; or that…maybe…I’d find out that it was right for me, and I had wasted all that time avoiding the one thing I should have just done from the start. Currently it feels like I’m three-for-three.”

“Yeah. Jesus.” Olivia whispered, reaching out to put an arm around Kade’s shoulders, pulling her into a hug. “You’ve been going through it. No question.”

“And now I have all these Alters,” Kade continued, letting her head loll to the side and softly bump against Olivia’s: “and I see all these other trans girls, and I’m just…so jealous and angry. I’m so fucked up over who I don’t get to be, over how long it took me to do anything about it, and what I never got to experience. I’m doing my best, but christ. It’s not easy. I’m such a brick, and I see some of you and it makes it so much harder to feel like it’s going to be okay.”

“Yeah, well. Hell is other trans girls.” Olivia smiled sadly. “Meeting Maya would have been a lot.” She nodded to herself.

“Meeting you was a fucking lot.”

“I mean…” Olivia resisted the urge to flip her hair and throw out a ‘who, me?’. “We might not be able to go back in time and fix it all completely, but the good news is that this shit?” She sat back a little, sweeping her hand down her body indicatively: “This is attainable. I went through a male puberty, just like you. Even just on a purely superficial level, HRT does more than you think it will. It’s not perfect, but I’ve got hips and a waist now. I’ve got boobs. Our shoulders are a little wide, sure, but we’re gay. Some girls like that kind of thing. Like…yeah, we’re stuck with a lot of things, but it’s not as rigid as you think. Your frame will get a little smaller. You might even lose a little height, or drop a shoe size or two. The doctors won’t typically tell you those parts, but they do sometimes happen. They did for me, so they should for you.”

“Have you had FFS?”

“So flattered that you think I might have, but no. This is just HRT.” Olivia pulled away from the hug, holding a hand just below her chin, as if to showcase her face. “Look, I know I talk a good game, but there are still a million things about me that I wish were different. Things I’d change if I had the…well, money, frankly. But that is mostly a vanity thing. Some of it’s about dysphoria, but a lot of it is just vanity. It’s kind of important to remember that not everything you hate about your face or your body is actually a dysphoria issue that you can solve for. I know it, and somewhere deep down, you know it too. Like…do you genuinely think cis girls don’t have this same exact problem? Looking at other girls and judging, contrasting, comparing? Wishing they looked different, had bodies that would better suit different clothes?”

“If you’re about to say ‘welcome to womanhood’, I swear to god…”

“No, I really hate when people say that. We’ll never know what it’s like to be cis girls, and they’ll never know what it’s like to be dolls. We have entirely different formative experiences, and very different relationships to womanhood. Just for starters…we’ve had to fight for it. Also, stop calling yourself a fucking brick. I’m literally you, so you’re technically talking shit about both of us.”

“Nothing wrong with being clocky…” Kade mumbled.

“Yeah, I don’t think there is, but you do, so ‘brick’ isn’t like…a cute, jokey thing for you, it’s an active value judgement. So maybe…work on getting past that?”

“Fine. Noted.” Kade rolled her eyes. “Look. Liv…” Kade started, before falling silent. She took a deep breath. “I think we need to talk about the ‘Annabelle’ situation.”

“Which part?”

“The part where you’re clearly not okay about it.”

“I’m really not, am I?” Olivia laughed bitterly. “And here I was trying so hard to just…I dunno, let it wash over me so I could be done.”

“Since when do we ever let go of anything?”

“Yeah, it’s a fair point.”

“Why did the thing on the beach bother you so much?”

“I think…initially, it was seeing her again. Even blurry and from a distance, it was just so unmistakably…her.” Olivia let her head fall back and her eyes flutter closed, enjoying the surreal mildness of the fake sun in Kade’s fabricated sky on her skin. “Then it was anger. This…misplaced anger made of a lot of jumbled up emotions, and I just pointed it at you and pulled the trigger, I guess. It felt like your fault at the time, as if it was all just some kind of joke at my expense. Something you’d done deliberately to hurt me. Even now, the idea that you have some kind of a connection to her…I don’t like it.”

“What, like you’re jealous?”

“No, not quite that. If I had to put it into words, what it feels like is…for me, she’s dead. And whatever we had, she was in my heart. And now she’s gone, and she left a hole there. I feel it constantly, this sense of absence. Maybe it’s worse because it’s literal: like we can all sense each other all the time if we try hard enough. Alters, I mean. Even if it’s way off in the distance, I can feel so many of me out there. All these…variations on who I might’ve been. But not her, not anymore. And I never will again and it…fucking tears me up inside, Kade. So the idea that you have a piece of her…a piece that you couldn’t give me, even if you wanted to, that you get to hold onto forever? It’s hard to not hate you a little bit for that. And I’m sorry.”

“Who says I can’t?” Kade asked slowly.

“What do you mean?”

“Who says I can’t give you that piece of her? Your power…I know it’s stronger than you act like it is. I know you pick up on all sorts of little things during our conversations.” Olivia looked confused. “Your face has subtitles. I’m autistic, not blind. I could tell you about her. Show you what I know. What I wrote would have been before you knew her…from back when she was a teenager and in her early twenties, but if you were as close as you say, maybe that would be…something. Maybe that would help.”

“That’s very…” Olivia paused, watching Kade’s eyes narrow and focus drift down towards the shoreline. “What?”

“Can you…feel that?” Kade asked, her voice quiet…slow…distracted. Olivia looked down towards the empty space where Kade’s eyes seemed to be fixed.

“It’s a weak point.” Olivia confirmed.

“There’s something wrong with it. Can’t you feel it?” Kade paused, clearly trying to find words to express what she was sensing. “It’s like it has…gravity.” Olivia nodded slowly.

“Should we check it out?”

“I think we better had…” Kade murmured uncertainly. Getting to their feet, they approached the seemingly empty space. Olivia could feel it properly, now - a sense of pull - separate to and stronger than the usual feeling of resistance. Together, they stepped through.