Are You Even Human

It's an odd feeling, to know for the second time that you're definitely going to die.

The first time was pretty straightforward. Mom and Dad—my real mom and dad—they spent the entire time we were fleeing reassuring me that we would be okay. That I would be okay. Now I realize they were mostly just reassuring themselves, but I was a child and at the time I believed them. Up until the moment when the acid chewed through them, of course, leaving nothing but a caustic sludge.

They tried to shield me with their bodies, and they did, it… technically worked. I lived, barely. You'd think something like that would be pretty traumatic, but… honestly, I feel like I've always handled it pretty well. I don't remember my parents all that clearly anyway. It was, of course, agonizing beyond compare, but one of the nice things about an experience that's agonizing beyond compare is that it makes you go into shock, and memories of events that happen while you're in shock tend to get pretty muddled. So, y'know, it was pretty awful at the time but in retrospect it's just… a thing that I lived through. Somehow.

This time, though, I don't think I'll be that lucky. I've read the statistics on incursion survival, and 'being close enough to see the scar' leaves me at single digits. And let me tell you: I am not the ninetieth percentile on anything good. It requires someone truly special or truly lucky to make it out in my situation, and, y'know, it also helps if you can fucking run away.

But I can't. Not again. No superhero is going to just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Lightning doesn't strike twice. I'm going to die, for real this time. Which sucks, because despite everything I really don't want to.

The crack in the sky opens wider, and I see something moving on the other side of it. Something aches behind my eyes, but I ignore it.

"Emily!" Lia shouts, bursting out of the front door. Heh, she's so distressed that her hair is actually a little messed up. "Oh thank fuck, there you are! Come on, we gotta go!"

She grabs Emily's wrist in a panic, yanking her to her feet, but Emily pulls away.

"Wait!" she insists. "We have to bring Julietta! Help me carry her to your car!"

Huh? Me? What good am I going to?

"We don't have time for this shit, Emily!" Lia snaps. "We have to go. Now!"

For once I kind of agree with her; I don't like Lia, but she's trying to save Emily and I won't be able to do anything but slow them down.

"We. Are. Taking. Julietta!" Emily insists anyway, and my heart cracks a bit.

Lia seems startled at Emily's sudden fury, and she glances back and forth between my foster sister and me for a moment before groaning and reaching down to grab my ankles.

"I got her feet, come on!" Lia barks, and a relieved Emily grabs my armpits. As selfish as it is, I can't bring myself to argue, so I just let the pair of them start dragging me towards Emily's car, leaving my cane behind.

While she doesn't have much of my respect in the first place, Lia certainly doesn't lose any for being reluctant to bring me along. Her car is a tiny, sporty little two-door thing with nowhere near enough space to take our entire foster family, so exiting with the one member of it she actually cares about and leaving the rest of us has a certain practicality to it. And I, in particular, am just not really worth the effort of saving. Still, they toss me into the passenger seat and, my entire body shaking, I manage to struggle a seatbelt on as Emily hops into the back behind me.

"Wait!" Peter calls out as Lia starts the engine, he and Andre rushing out of the house. "Waitwaitwaitwaitwait!"

"Not more of this shit!" Lia growls, but she doesn't drive off. Hmm. Did I misjudge her, or is she just anticipating that Emily will throw another fit? …Honestly, I'm not sure if Emily would throw a fit for Peter and Andre, so who knows.

"Dad has the van, and I am not staying here and waiting for him with Mom," Peter insists. "Take us with you!"

"Me too!" Max yelps, rushing out of the house behind them. "Me too, me too!"

"My car doesn't fit six fucking people!" Lia growls as Peter and Andre leap past me into the backseat. "The back isn't even supposed to fit three!"

"Pop the trunk!" Peter says, leaping past me and claiming the backseat with Emily. "Hop in if you wanna come, Max!"

"Are you crazy!?" Max asks, and then the sky bleeds flesh.

It starts with the Leviathans, as it so often does. We do not know why. The enormous, thick-skinned snakes, each larger than a building, are clearly adapted for an aquatic environment. They are the largest and heaviest of the enemy, little more than a long, finned tube with enough power to crush entire skyscrapers to smithereens. They are great serpents of death, cascading down from the sky like living rivers.

It's a devastatingly simple foe, but for whatever reason they're almost always too large, too unwieldy to slither properly on land. They pour out of the incursion scar like an oil spill, obliterating enormous swaths of the city and its suburbs in seconds. Many of them likely die on impact, too, but if there are any survivors they'll doubtlessly infect Lake Michigan and turn this entire section of the continent into enemy territory. Still, the thought of them always chills me, and the sight of them is worse. Such massive beasts must require an enormous amount of resources, right? So why are they so often wasted, left to simply die from the fall?

The shockwave of their impact hits us seconds after we see them land, and Max decides his objections to riding in the trunk are relatively trivial after all. He jumps inside and shuts the hatch the moment Lia slams on the gas.

Step one to surviving an incursion is pretty fucking obvious, all things considered: get as far away from the scar as humanly possible. Not just because they're where the enemy comes from (though that's a pretty good reason all on its own), it's also just because incursion scars themselves are weird. This time, the separation of the sky is the scar, but they often look different. In Denver, for example, I don't remember the sky being shorn into two, but rather… changed. Like someone took a picture of it and touched it up in Photoshop until it shined as some impossibly perfected ideal of the horizon. Incursion scars are almost all different, though I've heard their effects repeat occasionally.

…I think you're also not supposed to look directly at them, but I can't peel my eyes away. It hurts, I'll grant that, but what am I going to do in these last moments, but look? I need to see what's coming next. We were lucky when the scar didn't appear directly overhead, but the falling of the Leviathans is only the start. Next comes the real horror.

The Wasps.

They pour out from the ever-growing scar, its influence widening as clouds rush away from it, like even the very atmosphere wants to flee its presence. Long, spindly legs like mayflies, attached to a headless torso and held up by giant, buzzing wings. I may be a bit biased against them, since this is the same sort of creature that burned all my skin off, but personally I think they're the worst.

Lia hits a bump in the road, jolting me out of my thoughts. She's swearing constantly to herself, her eyes locked on the road as she shoots down neighborhood streets at upwards of seventy miles an hour and accelerating. It's a bit terrifying, but any slower and we'd likely be overtaken by the alien air force, and I do have to admit I don't want to have my skin burned off twice, no matter how briefly the second time would last.

My heart jumps up into my throat and I grip the door handle with all the limited strength I have as Lia screeches around a turn, the wheels on my side of the car briefly leaving the ground before slamming back down. Right. Right, okay. I'm not currently dying. I'm actually being rescued from potential death, in a manner that has some non-zero chance of success. I should probably stop with the doom and gloom brain and try to do something helpful.

My eye roams back to the scar. I can handle a bit of a headache if it means we have a better idea of what's coming after us. The Wasps are already spreading out in a circular pattern, freakishly coordinated as they sweep the city to kill everything that didn't get crushed by a Leviathan. And no, the irony of the creatures that gave me my scars emerging from something called a 'scar' is not lost on me. I guess the aliens couldn't stop at merely giving one to the world.

The scar continues to widen, the division of sky and sky breaking the two ever further apart. My head throbs harder, but I ignore it. It's just pain, and my body hardly feels that anymore. From within, more monsters emerge, but the more I stare the more it feels like something else is emerging with them. I don't know where the impression comes from; it's certainly nothing I can see, and yet I can't shake the thought regardless. Something is emptying into this world, and it approaches us far faster than the aliens.

I brace for an impact I'm not sure how I know will come, and the gentlest of breezes washes over me. A curious touch, a light and hesitant squeeze. I jolt and look around at the others in the car, but none of them seem to notice.

And then I black out.

"Juli—oka—seizure!"

Flashes of consciousness blink in and out around me. My body thrashes, held in place only by the seatbelt. Through it all, as my eyes flutter and my mind breaks, pain blooming brighter in my skull while blood trickles down my nose, I feel something. A presence. An interest. Something I invited by accident.

And whatever it is, it's killing me.

It's hard not to know that. I swear I can feel my brain leaking from my ears. And that kind of sucks, because I don't want to die. I don't. Honestly. It's just that… I've been dying since I was a child, you know? It's a miracle my body works at all, but it has never worked well and every day I expect it to finally give out on me. Every step I take, I anticipate finally stumbling, collapsing, and losing everything. Falling apart like a doll with her strings cut. It's always just a matter of time. It's hardly startling now that the time has come.

I wonder if there's a life after death. I hope it's relaxing.

Pot--tially, my head throbs. PossIBly. PoSs…

…Huh? Well, yeah, it might be. But I doubt it. Any afterlife I go to would, at the very least due to my presence, contain people. And people… exhaust me. Sometimes it's in a good way; I can't function on my own, after all, so I have always relied on others, and it can feel really good to be able to do that. Overall, though? Despite all the help I need, it seems like everyone else has to rely on me. Because no one knows how to have a basic conversation with each other, no one knows how to communicate like a goddamn adult.

Com--NicAte, my agony repeats. YEs.

A rush of experiences I have no context for, like faded memories of smells, overwhelm my body. My arm seizes and cracks into the side of the door. I think I hear something break, but I don't feel it. That's my life, though. That's my body. My complete fucking shitstain of a body. It's fine, of course. I'm used to it. I might need help sometimes, but I'm capable. I know how to manage my lack of touch and smell and taste. I know how to look for the signs of injury I can't feel. I know how to handle myself, and it grates when people think I can't. It grates even more when they're right. I want to be like everyone else. I want to have that infinite potential of just being able to run. To function in this stupid, oppressive world that doesn't give two shits about me.

LiKe. Every, my breath catches. Have. EVERY.

I… are those words? I'm pretty sure that's not normal seizure stuff. I vaguely feel the pressure as someone in the backseat grips their arms around my head, pulling me as firmly as possible into the headrest to prevent me from getting a brain injury. Thanks, whoever you are.

JOY, my dopamine sings. APPREciaTION!

I seize again, the presence in my head blasting unfettered excitement through my nervous system. Yeah, okay, that's definitely not normal. But it's so hard to focus on, it's so hard to focus on anything for… for some reason.

"She's—! Hold h—et us killed!"

Right, yeah, the seizure. I hope I'm not making it difficult for Lia to drive. Emily's in her car too, after all. I hope she's safe.

SafE, my brain screams.

Yes, seizure-induced-hallucination-slash-possible-eldritch-alien! Safe. The thing I've never been. Not safe from monsters, not safe from abusive households, not safe from myself. Can you believe that this dysfunctional mess of a foster family is the best one I've ever had? I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't want to die. I'm just a little too prone to it.

AGREEMENT, my ears rupture.

I feel myself seize again, and then my sense of balance—one of the few I still have—goes absolutely haywire. My body is tossed randomly around by more than its own muscles as I realize the car has started to roll. Oh, fantastic. This will definitely help me not die. Thanks, freaky hallucination.

JOY, my muscles tear.

…And you don't understand sarcasm. Phenomenal.

NeW ANd wonDERFUL, my mind weeps.

I'll regret my next questions as soon as I ask them, I suspect. This conversation has not exactly been delicate on my brain, but it's mostly just pain. And the thing with pain is that it doesn't matter to me. It never has. So fuck it, here goes: who are you, anyway? Why are you here? And what do you want?

The presence answers immediately, a curse and a law and a declaration of all three answers in one.

WHAT IF, my everything becomes, and my eyes open to blood on the ground. Or is that the ceiling?

Oh. It's both. The car is upside-down, and I'm still stuck in the chair by the seatbelt. If I had any hair it would be cascading down around my face, but since I don't it's the blood on my many head wounds that drips down over my eyes instead.

I'm in pain, which is notable because it generally means I have a serious internal injury. Broken bones, torn muscles, damaged organs, things like that are all my body is capable of feeling. So even though any degree of pain I happen to experience means something is very bad, I've never really been debilitated by it all that much. I guess I don't need to worry, though; the blood loss, seizure, concussion, and probable stroke have all got me covered on the debilitation front instead. Every thought feels like it's being pulled through gelatin and popping out stuck to all the wrong things.

I hear the unbuckling, clonking, and shuffling of everyone else freeing themselves from their seats, but I don't even think to try. My body and mind are unresponsive, but I still instinctively turn my head towards the sounds, ignoring the sharp pain in my neck as I do so. Andre, Emily, and Peter scrabble out between the front seats, rushing free of the car through the driver's side. Emily runs around the front of the car to my door, while Andre and Peter head for the back. I don't see Lia, but I hear her swearing somewhere nearby.

"Hey, Julietta," Emily says, her voice full of adrenaline and horror and the need to project a calm, even tone that people get when talking to someone who isn't all there. "Hey, I'm gonna get you out of there, okay? Are you awake? Can you talk to me?"

"Emily," I say, because that's her name.

"Yep, that's me," she says, the words ping-ponging around the inside of my skull. I smile. Yeah, that's Emily. "You're gonna be okay. We're both gonna be okay."

Peter pops open the trunk, and Andre vomits as Max's battered corpse tumbles out onto the ground. Up above, the sky buzzes with Wasps, hovering low to the ground as they expand outwards in an ever-growing spiral, wiping the Earth clean of human life. They travel together in startlingly large groups, rather than the unorganized swarms I remember from last time. Fuck, I hope the aliens aren't getting smarter.

"I don't think we are," I admit.

"Yeah, not since you fucking made me crash the car!" Lia shouts.

Oh. There she is. Lia storms up behind Emily as she fiddles with my seatbelt, fury and blood on her face. Does she think the car crash was my fault…? But she was driving. Although… I was having a seizure. Maybe I kept smacking her in the face or something. Is that how seizures work?

"Calm down and help me get her free, Lia," Emily says evenly.

"Calm down? Calm down!? I told you to leave the bitch, Emily! Now we're fucking dead because of her epileptic ass, and you think I'm going to waste time escorting her again? We need to start running. Now."

"No, we need to free her and take her with us, because she doesn't have epilepsy," Emily snaps. "She has powers. Julietta just became our only chance at getting out of here alive."

"What the fuck?" Lia asks. "How do you—"

Emily just holds up my hand, and for some reason that shuts Lia up. I can't really see it. I don't entirely want to. I just feel tired and loopy and in pain. I definitely don't feel powerful. I just want to rest.

"Okay," Lia hisses, kneeling down to help Emily get me free. "Okay, does this actually help, though? Can she fight monsters?"

"It's not really about fighting the monsters," Emily insists. "Look, just… trust me?"

"Nope, I don't think I will," Peter says, backing away from the rest of us. "Fuck this."

The lopsided grin that's always on his face looks a little strained as he stares at Max's body. Then, he turns and sprints away. Emily's eyes narrow, but she doesn't say anything. She just lets him run. We all do, even knowing he almost certainly won't make it alone. We probably won't make it either, so why bother? Andre, meanwhile, seems to not notice any of this is happening. He's still staring at what's left of Max.

It isn't pretty, honestly. The car was moving fast when it started to roll, and trapped in the trunk like he was, Max never stood a chance. It's a hollow feeling, staring at what was once a person, but I'm mostly just concerned that I don't feel anything beyond that. I suppose I never liked Max much, and the gore doesn't really impact me, but still… nothing? Hopefully I'm a good enough person to cry about it later, but I suppose I'm still pretty concussed.

Speaking of, I nearly hit my head again as Emily finally frees me from the seatbelt, she and Lia barely catching me as I fall. They drag me clear of the car, my head lolling painfully in Andre's direction as he continues to hyperventilate.

"Come on, Julietta," Emily encourages. "Get up."

I groan and try to do just that, but the overwhelming wave of nausea I get from trying forces me to squeeze my eyes shut and stay still.

"...Can't," I tell her.

"Shit," Lia hisses. "Shit, shit, shit. This is our one chance to get out alive?"

"Yes," Emily insists. "We'll need her if an Angel or Queen emerges. Come on, grab her legs, we'll carry her. Andre!"

He twitches at the sound of his name, staring blankly in our direction.

"Come on," Emily says. "Help us if you can. We need to make at least another mile in the next half-hour or so, and that'll be tough if we have to carry Julietta the whole way."

"Then we should leave her behind," Lia hisses.

"Do you wanna run off on your own away from the person with superpowers, Lia? Do you think you can outrun a Behemoth?"

Lia groans, but she does ultimately lean down to pick me up by the ankles. Emily shouts at Andre a bunch and soon enough he starts to follow us as well. I'm still feeling… out of it. But there is one little detail that I think might be the problem.

"...I do not feel like I have powers," I croak.

"Oh, great," Lia grunts. "And you know what that feels like, do you?"

"I… should?" I manage. "Because… if I have powers, then I should feel like I have… power. Or something. Right?"

I loll my head from side to side, which hurts and makes me nauseous again, but it's kind of hard to care.

"Julietta, you just stared at a tear in reality until every hole on your face started bleeding and instead of dying you just started… not bleeding anymore," Emily says. "I'm pretty sure that means powers."

"...Oh," I blink. "Maybe people should look at weird tears in reality more often."

"No they shouldn't, because it kills people," Lia grunts. "I get a splitting headache just glancing at the thing. I have no idea how you managed to stare."

"Pain doesn't really hurt, when you think about it," I mumble. "What are my powers?"

"How should I know? Something about healing, maybe?" Emily answers. "It shouldn't matter. Just rest, okay? We need you to be functional."

It shouldn't matter? Why wouldn't it matter? What does Emily know about powers? Can I even afford to worry about this while my brain feels like it's been hit by a train?

"...Okay, I'll rest," I sigh, and close my eyes. I'm still not sure any of this is happening, but it's just so hard to think. I should just trust Emily until my brain starts working again. Everything is so weird right now, so surreal. We just crawled out of a car crash on the side of the road, the apocalypse is escalating behind us, but more than anything our surroundings are just… quiet. We're deep inside an urban sprawl, one of the many neighborhoods with hardly anyone alive, and everyone who was here has already evacuated. Occasionally, I hear a car zoom by, but they're too far away to help us and likely just as unable to hold everyone in our group as Lia's car was.

Doom hasn't caught up with us yet. …But it will.

Still, my ravaged body desperately craves sleep, so even though I'm being yanked around by the armpits and ankles my head only seems to get fuzzier. It's nice to have my eyes closed, crisis and all. One of the nice things about being nearly insensate is that it's not too difficult to get comfortable for sleep. Normally I'd have a sense of balance that might mess with my ability to rest while being carried around like an oversized potato sack at a farmer's market, but the concussion is really pulling some work on my inner ear and making everything just feel equally awful. It's not difficult to sleep while everything just feels generically awful. I'm used to that.

The more I doze off, though, the stranger my ride seems to become. In my exhausted haze, I start to feel a strange tingle around my ankles, one that I can't really recognize until I wonder if that's what touching somebody feels like. Then it clicks for me; I'm dreaming. I've dreamed about the senses I used to have before, after all. I don't remember how to touch or taste or smell, but I definitely used to be able to do those things, so some part of my brain must still feel like it knows how.

Yet the more I think about it, the more detailed the feeling becomes, beyond any dream I can remember. At first it's just a tingle, but soon I can make out the sensation of each of Lia's fingers, the way they close around my skin, the pressure of her nails as they dig into my ankles, the angle of her fingers as they bend how hands are supposed to bend, the interconnected tapestry of her muscles, woven together like fine cloth to provide the needed force to move. Every crease in her palm is worn there from how the skin bends whenever her hand scrunches. So, too, are the lines in her wrist formed, out of sight and out of mind because who thinks about that sort of thing, the way every cell of her epidermis slowly but surely works its way into little ruts over time, as the body adapts and grows and learns what parts of itself will and will not be folded. These details aren't just part of her DNA, aren't mere facets of the programming her body was constructed on (and isn't that just fascinating all by itself) but instead emergent consequences of how that programming reacts to stimuli and trauma and wear and tear, and when all those things build on each other over and over and over the end result is far more than even the tens of millions of—

"Julietta!" Emily whispers into my ear. I flinch. I blink. Wait, were my eyes open?

"What—" I try to say, but she slaps a hand over my mouth.

"You were hyperventilating," she says. "It was getting loud. We really need you to be quiet right now."

I blink some more, looking around. I'm… not being carried anymore. I'm sitting on the ground, inside a small office building. The lights are off, and it's not quiet outside anymore. There's too much buzzing.

"Oh," I whisper.

"I think they've mostly passed for now, but we need to stay hidden until the military clears them out," Emily whispers. "We should have a brief window of safety between the Air Force showing up and any Angels emerging."

I take a slow, deep breath, nodding while my mind races. I'm feeling… a little more clear-headed now, and I really want to know what's up with Emily. She's not normally so… assertive. It's almost like I'm talking to a different person.

"How do you know this?" I ask quietly.

She shrugs.

"I don't want to die," she says. "And this sort of thing is always a risk, so I made sure I'd know what to do if it happened. That's all."

I frown, not exactly buying it. Emily seems confident about military response time statistics. That's not exactly a normal level of investment into emergency procedures, but I guess it's not secret knowledge either. Emily's not the sort of person to do anything halfway. She's very meticulous about anything she sets her mind to. Still… I kind of expected her to be the kind of person who collapses into a sobbing wreck during crises like these, not someone who turns into a hyper-competent commando lady.

Not that I'm complaining, especially after she saved my life. It's just… weird.

My thoughts are torn away from such musings by the screaming sound of fighter jets flying overhead, finally heralding the arrival of help. Andre picks me up by the armpits this time, Lia still on my ankles as Emily signals us all to rush out of the building we've been hiding in and continue down the road. I glance up at the sky, seeing the horrid Wasps swarm upwards towards the aerial invaders. I can't help but note that these Wasps look different from the ones I remember, with only four limbs that each end in such sharp, rigid blades that I wonder how the monsters could even stand on them. Maybe they don't, and they just fly forever until they die.

Dying is definitely what they start to do, at least. Four F-22s shriek towards the incursion scar, flanking not a lead plane, but a bright, glowing woman. She's a blinding white streak in the sky, only identifiable as a person because everyone recognizes Agnus Dei. Phosphorous streaks of machine gun fire complement searing laser blasts as her strike squad pierces through enemy territory like an arrow. Missiles erupt from the planes as the squadron opens fire on the incursion scar itself, attacking the hole in the world with the rage of our entire planet at their backs. I watch, awed, as the missiles seem to slip into the scar, attacking the hard-to-discern shapes beyond it.

I realize, belatedly, that I probably shouldn't be staring into it at all, but doing so doesn't hurt my head anymore. I'm not really sure what that means.

The squadron banks away from the scar and takes another pass at the Wasps, raining down lead and light with unmatched lethality. I don't know how fast Agnus Dei can fly, but I do know she's leading a squad of fighter jets that outspeed Wasps by two orders of magnitude. While Wasp acid can eat through whatever jets are made of, it requires a very lucky alien or a very bad pilot to actually risk getting hit by them. I watch in awe as mere minutes pass before the skies are clear of monsters.

These are the moments they show you in those propaganda videos. These are the triumphant victories we get drip-fed to keep up hope, to allow morale to stay high enough that people keep signing up for war. And I'll give them this: the skies truly are mankind's domain. Though nature may have never intended us to fly, no one matches us at it. Giant winged monsters are scary, sure, but they aren't supersonic warhead-armed death machines. But that begs the question, doesn't it? If our air superiority is so absolute, why do we only have one squadron up there in the sky? Where's the entire rest of the Air Force?

"...Shit," Emily swears, and it's still so weird to hear her swear. "Even the military thinks we're going to die. Julietta, are you ready?"

"For what, exactly?" I ask. "I'm feeling a bit more lucid, if that's what you mean."

"Yeah," she sighs. "Okay. You're going to need to protect us."

"How?"

"Yeah, how?" Andre gasps. "This is… this is impossible. Didn't you say you saw Behemoths touching down? We're going to get overrun."

"I don't know!" Emily snaps. "We're just going to stay close, and you're… you're going to figure it out, alright?"

Oh. Okay, no pressure I guess.

"O-okay, just… help me stand up, then," I stammer, taking deep breaths to try and get my brain working again. "If somebody acts as a cane for me I can probably hobble a little faster than this. And… I guess I should get some blood flowing."

"You had blood flowing," Lia snorts.

"...In the right places, I mean," I correct. "Um. Am I really not bleeding anymore? I can't actually tell."

"You're dry as a bone," Emily sighs. "Alright, get her on her feet, I'll be her support."

Geez. That's… a little wild to think about. Powers, huh? Shit, I'm going to have to join the military if we survive this after all. Andre and Lia set me down, helping me to get an arm around Emily's shoulder. Now that I'm finally not trussed up like a dead pig, I can briefly pat myself down to check if… uh.

I try to give myself a once-over, but Lia beats me to it, her hand shooting in out of nowhere and brushing my face exactly where I was going to do it. It can only be Lia's hand, with her horribly smooth skin and disgustingly perfect nails. It feels weird, which is particularly strange in that it feels like anything at all. And it's even more strange when I notice that Lia isn't standing anywhere close enough to touch me.

I'm touching me.

I flex my fingers, and Lia's immaculate digits obey. The hand is also, quite clearly, attached to my ratty-ass arm and not hers. But from the wrist down, there are no scars. No burns. No numbness. Indescribable sensations jolt through every inch of skin, and I have no way to know if they're completely random or just based on stimuli I simply don't remember how to identify. I flex the fingers, slowly, watching them move at my command without shaking, without catching on the hundreds of little problems that would normally prevent me from making a fist. Lia's hand is mine. It works. It's… fixed.

…I hate it.

How do I change it back? I don't know how I changed it in the first place. But it's constantly scratching at my attention, like someone following me around and playing the world's worst music. This is my power? My motherfucking superpower is to have the basic functional capabilities of Lia? Fuck off, eldritch sugar daddy. I don't want this shit, I want lasers!

As if on cue, lasers streak overhead as Agnus Dei launches more death beams out of her hands, because her powers are cool and useful and relevant to the current wartime situation. She's basically Superwoman and nothing short of an Angel can even cause her to blink. I, meanwhile, can look like a girl I hate and heal from concussions slightly faster. …Okay, well, realistically the second one there might actually be useful again soon. But I hope it won't be!

"Quit staring at yourself and walk, Jules!" Lia snaps. "Come on Emily, we need to move!"

"Y-yeah," Andre agrees. God, he's so out of it. I mentally mark him as a panic risk if we run into a beastie. Which... yeah. This is a crisis situation. I can worry about my superpowers later. Like in a couple minutes, when I die because of how useless they are.

With Emily supporting me, we stagger forward at a bit quicker of a pace than before, hurrying away from the scar as best we can. The rumbles and cracks of the aerial battle behind us almost distract from the screaming sensation of my new hand, but I do my best to ignore both and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. It wouldn't do to trip and slow everyone down even more.

About fifteen minutes of fleeing pass, and though we're making decent distance it's not becoming any less stressful. There are still Behemoths back there somewhere, trying to track us down and crush us into paste. We can hear the occasional thunder of one of them knocking over a building, and they only seem to be getting closer.

"Okay, I need a break," Emily pants. "Swap with me, Lia."

"Fine," Lia grumbles, grabbing my other arm and letting me lean on her so Emily can step away. My foster sister glances between us, worry on her face as she takes in how ragged we are.

"...Thank you for sticking with me, Lia," she says quietly. "I know you didn't want to."

"Uh-huh," Lia grunts. "Well, you owe me when we get out of here."

"Yeah," Emily smiles, a flash of worry on her face. Fuck, I hate whatever that implies. Can't deal with it now, though. "Andre? You okay?"

"A-as okay as I can be, I guess," he mumbles.

"That's good. Stick as close as you can to Julietta, okay? The only way we're getting out of this is together."

"Right," Andre nods. "Yeah."

Emily frowns, probably thinking exactly the same thing I am: still a flight risk. Andre is always prone to trusting himself over everyone else, even at the worst times. If we had time we might be able to talk him out of it, but we don't. It's going to be a disaster if something unexpected happens, and that's basically guaranteed. The question is, what's it going to be? An alien jumping into the middle of the street? A stray shot from the good guys getting a little too close? A car barreling out of nowhere to run us over?

We all feel it as the skies rip again, like someone took the sound of tearing metal and turned it into a physical force. What was two becomes four, as the long tear in reality becomes an X-shaped break. A second cut, further dividing the first. And then it happens again. And again. Something cuts into the world over and over and over and it just won't stop. I can't help but stare transfixed at the wound in the sky, watching it open deeper and deeper, revealing more and more of whatever lies beyond. It's so hard to make out. I see planets, I think, or maybe moons. Spheres in brilliant and fantastical colors, hovering in the sky beyond the sky. It's so colorful and bright, an almost cheerful beauty that feels so sick and wrong given the current circumstances. Something on the other side calls to me, a light tug as if I was buoyant underwater. But then a slithering figure fills the cracks and blocks my view, rendering it impossible to focus on anything else.

The Leviathans are, generally, the largest beasts that the aliens field in battle. But there is one thing bigger, that they hold in reserve. It does not see battle, not technically, because its arrival means they have already won.

A Queen.

It looks like a hundred thousand building-sized cells, constantly bulging and growing and dividing in mitosis-like separations, its slick, slimy flesh in nonstop motion. The giant, perpetually-splitting orbs rise to the surface, split in half, and then get quickly overtaken by their rapidly growing fellows, and all the while the whole of the monster still maintains something almost like a cohesive shape. Masses of the cells group together to form tendril-like limbs, which themselves split at the ends and grow into two new tendrils over and over until they're too small and short to be called tendrils anymore at all, returning to the main, cohesive mass. It is an abomination against biology, a wound on physics itself, and yet still it moves, slithering ever-defiantly towards our world.

It is a horror all on its own, but as is always the case with these aliens the horror does not stop at this incursion. Each Queen looks completely different, a totally unique spite against reality. We don't have any idea why, because even after thirty years we know basically nothing about any of these genocidal monsters. But despite their differences, it's impossible to mistake a Queen because of the simple fact that they are the size of an entire city. They're so large that the incursion scar needs over an hour to finally grow large enough to let them squeeze into our world. But once they do, that's it. That's the point of no return. Either the Queen is destroyed before it can take root, or the whole region is lost.

Because just like the paragons of humanity, a Queen and all her Angels have superpowers.

"Fuck," Andre hisses. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"Stay right where you are!" Emily snaps. "Everyone grab onto Julietta!"

A half-dozen warheads shriek off the fighter jets towards the slowly-emerging Queen, but a single tentacle presses through the cracks in the world. In the very same instant, they all explode prematurely, looking for a split second like they had all been cut.

"We need to run," Andre insists. "We need to run right now!"

"No," I shake my head. "We need to get to an open area and brace ourselves for the shockwave of that thing touching down."

Agnus Dei fires a blinding blast of white light, and this time I know I'm not imagining it. The shot, the blast of light, is cleaved in half. It does nothing, and the Queen continues to emerge.

"...Jules is right," Lia agrees. "A few seconds of running won't help, we need to make sure nothing's going to collapse on us. Or under us, or… fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

We start to move, Emily dragging us out into the middle of the street as we hope to god that we aren't over a sinkhole or about to be jumped by a Behemoth. The Queen's ever-shifting tendril continues to extend into the world, and the more it does the more tendrils it becomes, splitting and splitting and splitting and splitting even as it grows. More of the monster follows, reaching down towards the ground at speeds that my brain struggles to parse at the massive scales involved.

And then, it drops. Agnus Dei shoots at the Queen a few more times, but her whole squadron turns and flies away before it hits the ground. Not even humanity's strongest can take on a Queen alone. Lia, Emily, Andre, and I all huddle up together, bracing low to the ground. Then the Queen hits the earth, taking the fall almost gracefully compared to the Leviathans, despite the enormous difference in size. But we can see the shockwave as it comes towards us, so we cover our heads and pray.

We luck out. Or maybe we just happened to pick a good spot. While the quake collapses buildings all around us, shaking and shattering what feels like the entire planet, the road holds with only a collection of cracks in the pavement. Slowly, with shuddering breaths, we unfold ourselves from the ground to take in the devastation around us. The entire neighborhood is splinters and shattered stone.

Out in the distance, the Queen looms, having caused all this devastation not even with her incredible power, but simply with her bulk. But she does have power. I can feel it, somehow. In the air around me, there is a pressure. A presence. Her grip envelops me, testing and squeezing and trying to cut. To kill. Always waiting, always furious that I am not in enough pieces.

"Okay," Andre breathes. "Okay, now we run."

"Andre, no—" Emily tries to insist, but he cuts her off.

"Fuck you guys!" he snaps, his breaths coming faster and more panicked. "Did you see that? What more are you waiting for? We need to go. Now!"

But we can't. I feel it pressing at me. And not just me, but the others too. I grab Andre by the wrist as he tries to let go of my hand. Emily holds the other, and Lia supports my shoulder. Everyone is touching me, and somehow that lets me feel the invisible cutting pressure trying to pierce into them, too.

"Andre, she's right," I press, "I'm pretty sure that we're in danger."

"I fucking know that we're in danger!" he says. "Which is why I'm tired of waiting for your slow a—"

He doesn't get to finish his sentence, because in that moment he breaks out of my grip. And the moment he stops touching me, he becomes a flow of red.

Some gruesome part of me wants to count the cuts, but they all seem to happen at once, turning what was once a boy into an oozing pile of cloth and cubed meat faster than any of us can blink. We don't scream. We don't cry or gasp or vomit. It's too fast for any of those reactions, sudden to the point that it seems impossible that it could have ever happened at all. We simply stare in shock, as someone we've lived with for years is killed so brutally that they become unrecognizable as having ever been human.

Emily, to my surprise, is the one that recovers first.

"...So. We're making sure not to let go of Julietta, right Lia?" she says, inflection utterly absent from her voice.

"Yeah," Lia says quietly. "Agreed."

We keep our vomit in our throats, and walk away.