Chapter Text
19 of 20 questions complete.
Rainier’s eye twitches. She wonders if she picked the right answers. Probably, right? All of her answers were honest on some level, at least. These things don’t have the space to gauge the breadth of each experience. They’re clear-cut, whole-number tallies of which answers point where, and the highest always wins. A psychological brand, the reward or consequence of allowing yourself to be perceived by some semblance of an objective observer. It’s far from any absolute quantifier, but it’s still stimulus. Opinion. And that input always changes something somehow.
“Do you fantasize about hurting other people?”
Rainier’s finger darts to the “YES” option, the quick reflex bookended by a careful repositioning to make sure the click lands on the option she’s aiming for. Her hands have always been shaky during slow movements. She always figured it was early-onset Parkinson’s or something, but logic tells her it’s probably just energy displacing itself when the rest of the body is still. Either way, the answers have to be perfect. Not to the point of lying in the hope of getting the desired outcome, obviously - honesty is what makes this work. But real honesty always falls by the wayside when you want something. Maybe the most honest part is how much this matters to her. It shouldn’t. She knows it shouldn’t.
Submit.
“You are: Arisa”
“You’ve been through a lot of suffering, but you’re stronger for it. Violence fascinates you, especially in the role of the victim, but you’ve grown out of your self-destructive tendencies and are working towards a better life.”
Fuck. FUCK. God damn it.
Rainier’s perfectly still demeanor betrays the geyser of instinctive rage spewing from her wounded ego and pressurizing the inside of her head. It’s not like she wasn’t expecting that answer. Dreading it. But she did everything right, didn’t she? By all logical accounts, she should have gotten Dorin. There was no way to be sure, obviously, but it just made sense. She dodged every logical trap the quiz tried to throw at her, she had read the book closely enough to exactly predict which options led to which characters, and none of that changed the fact that she still got fucking Arisa. A result like a drainage grate for the perfectly average and the sickeningly well-adjusted. Rainier flicks the button on her vape and takes a few short, shallow drags in sequence, staring at the twinkling LCD screen on the surface until it shuts off with an unceremonious blink.
She should’ve known. You can’t cheat a personality quiz. Well, she can’t, at least. Everyone angles for the result they want, but in Rainier’s eyes, there’s no reason to lie to something with no stakes. No eyes, no social capital or survival to be earned, not even anyone watching on the other end. Just you against a silent trial. To lie in that situation, with yourself as the only audience, would say more about Rainier’s character than any result a little pre-packaged flowchart could give.
It’s been two years since she got the diagnosis. Antisocial personality disorder. Fancy term for sociopathy that some board psychiatrist must have thought was politically correct in the nineties. It was all but effortless to have eight different therapists and “concerned adults” armchair-diagnosing her throughout her whole childhood, but it was a lot harder actually getting it medically recognized as an adult. Hell, maybe they never actually wrote it anywhere. Pretty damn easy for a shrink to tell you you’re diagnosed just to get you off their ass. Rainier learned that the hard way in middle school. She tried to surpass the stereotype at first. Prove the world wrong. Be “good representation”. That was the right way to do it, they said. But as time went on, that got less interesting. It’s not like it was tangibly beneficial for her - it only served to keep her at a baseline of “acceptable”, and even that was only theoretical. Rainier was born below that baseline, and with every missed cue or awkwardly-imitated smile or failed social quick-time event, the bar separating those with the right to exist from the degenerates who were just born wrong got further and further out of reach.
Eventually, she learned to love that derision. If she could never meet the criteria for a human, she wouldn’t be one; in fact, she’d stray so far off that gilded path that no one would ever try to compare her to a person again.
Ding. The stock sound effect of a text pierces Rainier’s haze of reminiscence. Her Ryde driver is here.
With one less-than-swift motion, Rainier hoists herself to her feet on a pair of anemic legs. Standing up always sucks. Whenever she goes vertical, it’s a gamble whether or not she’s going to pass out. This time, she narrowly wins the coin-flip, her movement halted only by a transient sense of vertigo. She’s got to find a shirt somewhere. Bending down, she gracelessly sorts through a small mountain of fabric on the floor, snatching each inky-black, amorphous blob that looks vaguely shirt-sized. Plain black, a faded old band tee, the garish turquoise “DRAMA FREE ZONE” shirt her aunt got her as a half-ironic gesture… convenient, sure, but not tonight. Tonight, she’ll be wearing something no one would ever associate with her.
Buried deep in Rainier’s closet, left to rot inside an old suitcase she packed during a messy breakup, is a truly shitty Anti Social Social Club shirt. She had shoplifted it as a joke a week after she got the diagnosis, with zero intention of ever actually wearing it. That’s why it’s perfect. Going out in her usual outfit would make people think “boymoder who couldn’t be bothered”. Wearing this, though? With just one little addition, the first impression changes to something more along the lines of “performative college guy who thinks he’s wise beyond his years”. With a practiced motion, Rainier slips on the shirt, taking care to slide both her arms through the sleeves at the same time. An old habit.
Heading to the door of her apartment, Rainier hesitates for a moment, gaze fixed on the backpack she prepared beforehand. Lightweight, roomy, standard-issue. A bright blue tessellated pattern that radiates a middle-aged apparel executive’s idea of high-school chic. Unassuming like an obnoxiously loud sports car - people will look, but they’ll never look twice. Brash is safer that way. People don’t bother to second-guess your intentions if they think you want to be perceived.
Nonetheless, everything’s here. That’s what matters.
Rainier’s phone buzzes on the counter as she picks up the backpack, presumably the driver signaling their arrival a few minutes after the automatic notification. Nothing out of the ordinary. She won’t be needing her phone on this outing, though. Shoving her keys in her pocket and taking a deep, refreshing breath, Rainier exits her apartment.
She still remembers the first time she had one of her daydreams. It was spring, one of those late-spring evenings where the heat of her poorly-ventilated apartment building crawled up and down her spine like an AC current, and she was deep into the pages of a queer ero-horror novel - her first time reading Magenta Overcast, if she still remembers correctly. Maybe it was her second. Either way, the manic, macabre mix of fascination and lust Rainier had grown so accustomed to feeling while perusing her works of choice had hit her stronger than usual, and, like a dam bursting in a city of thin paper, she had started to think. Since she had been diagnosed - no, even before the official diagnosis - a feeling of inadequacy had haunted the hidden corners of her psyche. Like the world knew she wasn’t worthy of the label she didn’t even ask for in the first place. After a while, every hard-coded reflexive attempt at emotion she showed started to disgust her. Sociopath is an ugly moniker, but to be a sociopath who’s bad at being what they are is far uglier.
Maybe Rainier would always be doomed to be an Arisa, observing and obsessing without ever living up to the characters in the stories she loved. No one was coming to kidnap her. Her life would remain a monotonous march through the days, stagnant and painless and empty. Anesthetized by the world to save her from her own dreams.
Or - maybe, just maybe, it didn’t have to be. That’s how the first daydream crept in.
“Pickup for, uh… Ray-ner?”
Rainier nods and flashes a polite half-smile. It’s “Ray-neer”, like the mountain, but she won’t bother to correct the stocky man driving the mid-2010s Camry she’s now riding in. After all, she’s in a good mood. She already checked her backpack in the elevator, the only spot in the building besides her apartment that doesn’t have any cameras. Everything’s still there. Nothing’s broken. Tonight will be the night she takes control of her life. Tonight will be the night she proves to herself that she’s worth it.
Tonight, Rainier is going to kill someone.
*
The movies always told Rainier the city lights would twinkle at night.
They don’t. They simply blare, steady and fluorescent against a sky that’s long since misremembered the definition of “dark”. Even the occasional flicker of a motel sign feels uncomfortably still, like a pre-rendered asset shifting its luminescence in an endlessly-looped animation. Imitating movement while perfectly occupying its assigned place in space. Rocks crumble, leaves shiver in the wind, but this kingdom of grand steel edifice is untouched by heaven and earth. Makes her want to gag.
In a place far removed from Rainier’s world, some part of her is assessing her surroundings. The driver’s been talking to the windshield for the last ten minutes, and some neural autopilot has been taking the wheel on Rainier’s voice to respond. Cordial and practiced. She doesn’t understand why people hate it so much when their drivers talk. Talk is easy. It’s a perpetual distraction. All you have to do is press the right buttons. Silence, however, leaves space for further thought. So Rainier simply smiles and nods politely, following the rhythm of the small-talk game with deliberate, well-designed imprecision.
The speakers are hooked up to some faux-radio playlist on a streaming service. Some middling late-noughties throwback that Rainier probably loved as a kid, before she learned that what she was listening to wasn’t music - just manufactured culture. She used to want to be a musician. A fragment of a pre-packaged dream, picked from an unwritten list of acceptable options presented to her in childhood. It’s always easy to sell childish aspiration, especially when your client is too young to understand the caveat emptor of it all. Nowadays, Rainier understands that dreams are best realized in the dark, far away from that recycled stadium glow. Live for what excites you.
“What’s the backpack for?”
Over the span of a split second, Rainier is given pause. A thousand different answers would suffice, but what concerns her is the question itself. Ryde drivers aren’t supposed to ask you that sort of thing. It’s part of the policy, isn’t it? Rainier has taken Rydes more times than she would ever bother to count, and no one’s ever brought up her clothes, or her bags, or anything she was carrying with her. Does this guy have a fucking X-ray scanner hidden in his headrest or something?
Either way, it’s under control.
“Night class.”
It’s more than believable. She planned out her drop-off spot beforehand. A cafe a few blocks from the city college, one that makes a decent effort to look indie while still being cheap enough to attract the under-40 crowd. She had spotted some artsy-looking transmascs meeting there between classes on more than a few occasions, and she certainly looks the part right now. Her jacket’s zipped up to cover the tacky shirt underneath, and without her beanie on to envelop the sky-blue highlights staining her hair, she looks downright mainstream queer.
“I’m meeting up with my thesis advisor. My defense is next week.”
“Oh, good luck. What’s your major?”
This guy just won’t stop fucking talking, will he?
“Psych. I’m eventually trying to become a psychiatrist, actually.”
“Admirable.” The man in the driver’s seat subtly straightens his posture. “Hard, too. That kinda work must get more complicated every year.”
“How so?” For the first time since she stepped into the walls of the sedan, Rainier’s question is fully genuine.
“I mean, you probably know a lot more about this stuff than me.” The man reaches across the dashboard to adjust the silicone spring-holder keeping his phone in place. “But my sister’s a therapist, and she says the field’s getting overrun with teenagers diagnosing themselves over the internet. Like, fourteen-year-olds getting therapy for social anxiety who will come in one day and say they’re schizophrenic or they’ve got a split personality.”
As if matching the driver, Rainier’s whole body stiffens. A wisp of wavy, half-washed hair scratches the back of her neck like a burrowing termite.
“Yeah, I’ve. Heard about that.”
The man nods in something resembling solemnity. “Good on you for trying to be a positive influence, though. What these people need is real help, not pop-psychology articles.”
“Couldn’t agree more. I just hope I can make a difference.”
The music swells to a synth crescendo, and Rainier retreats back into the place of quiet streetlights, the autopilot in her muscles holding a steady smile and leaving her in peace.
*
Wakefulness. The lurching feeling of a slowing car. The destination has found her.
“Thanks for the ride!” The door slams as Rainier flashes a saccharine smile ripped straight from a shoujo anime. Inside, the roiling sickness of cordial discomfort gives way to a new sort of unfamiliarity. Something new, but prepared for in advance. A gymnastics meet. A thesis defense. A murder. No two things in life are quite as disparate as they seem. All just products of instinct, steered into their respective lanes by sapient thought.
As soon as she’s sure the car is out of view, Rainier zips down her jacket and ties up her hair, donning the beanie and taking care to make sure no strands of blue or platinum-gray slip out. It’s hard, but her hair is thin, and she can do it while she’s walking. Her real focus has to remain on navigation. No phone means no map, but she doesn’t need one. She knows where she’s going. Past the cafe, perpendicular to the college campus. Five blocks, and you’ll find a park. Never all that crowded, especially at night. This neighborhood’s too upscale for the park to be a homeless sleep spot, but not upscale enough to post security anywhere nearby - and even if there are cameras, that’s what the wannabe skater-boy getup’s for. Everything else she’s wearing is too generic to be identified on CCTV.
She doesn’t even mind if the park is empty when she gets there. Someone’s bound to stumble in there eventually. What she’s worried about is accidentally picking a target who someone would actively look for after the fact.
This part of town is always beautiful at night. Fragments of old-city design still peek through the veneer of minimalism and plascrete mortar, and cast-iron streetlamps fill the street with a warm, dim light, casting gentle refractions onto the overgrown foliage of the hellstrips. In this unfettered urban sprawl, the only real beauty is always accidental. There are those that would pay tremendous money to paint a neighborhood in this image of architectural negligence, but you can’t manufacture a place like this. A place that feels real.
There it is. James Hartwell Memorial Park. If there are cameras, they’ve already caught sight of Rainier by now, so she doesn’t slow her pace. There’s been less quick thinking than she figured there would be so far. She assumed she would be making a lot of moment-to-moment decisions, but as it stands, it’s been a lot less thinking and a lot more doing. She’s more than fine with that outcome.
From the moment Rainier enters the park, she feels a surreal sort of peace wash over her. The sea of clean-cut grass that makes up the grounds stretches impossibly far into the distance, more akin to a golf course than a public park. It feels isolated from the city around it, like the sidewalks and parked cars outside the iron-spear fence are just tricks of the light, phantasms of a time detached from wherever she is now. The slushie-blue backpack full of sin almost feels lighter on her spine here. This is where it happens, Rainier muses to herself. This is the place where art begins. She immediately wants to slap herself for even thinking something so cheesy, but her limbs are preoccupied maintaining a steady gait, and-
And then Rainier sees it.
Sitting on a bench in absolute solitude, listlessly staring at some video on an old, caseless phone, is a girl. A thick, matted mass of hair blacker than printer ink stretches down to her lower back and leaks around the sides of her face, its surface only broken by a pair of heavy over-ear headphones that seem more suited for sound engineering than casual wear. An ill-fitting shirt with some Impact font catchphrase half-obscured by jet-black wisps hangs over her thin frame, and through the polyester, outlined unflatteringly by a stray streetlamp outside the fence, are two vaguely conical protrusions. Another tranny. Perfect. And no matter how close Rainier gets, she hasn’t looked away from the screen.
Here it is. The blink-and-you-miss-it opportunity. Go time.
Stopping in front of the bench, Rainier’s wiry shadow hangs like a harbinger over the Perfect Victim she’s found. She likes how she looks in this light. A lanky, impossibly tall darkness over that which waits below. Her pulse isn’t even particularly high, apart from the normal circulatory toll of walking any distance greater than the confines of a one-bedroom apartment.
She still hasn’t looked up.
“Hey.”
Rainier’s voice escapes her lips without practice, a deepened echo of a time before she was herself. She’s not herself right now, though. She knows the way these upper-middle-class city fags think. In the eyes of the Victim, she’s some neoliberally-mythologized delinquent superpredator named Mark who’s had a few beers and wanted to go on a nice homicidal stroll.
“Oh, uh, hey.”
The girl finally tears her eyes away from what appears to be a playthrough of a deck-building game. Her voice is a raspy, half-falsetto hiss, an overworked ideal of femme that’s already clocked out after a long day.
“There’s a gun in my jacket pocket. If you run, or call for help, or do anything other than what I tell you to, I’ll shoot you dead. Understood?”
Rainier’s lying, of course. The gun is in the backpack, and if this girl didn’t look like she was about to collapse from malnutrition, she might have a good chance at a getaway. Still, Rainier has to fight down a childish, shit-eating grin. She’s wanted to feel this sort of absolute control for so long.
“Um. Uh, alright? Alright. Yes. Sorry.” The Victim winces like she’s about to get shot for stuttering.
“You’re going to stand up and walk with me. Make it look normal, like we’re friends who were planning to meet here.” Rainier carefully adjusts her posture, mimicking a carefree chat for any cameras that might be watching. “Before we leave the park, you’re going to brick your phone. Make it look unintentional.”
“I… Okay, sure. How am I going to-“
“I’m not your fucking babysitter. Figure it out. If you don’t, or if you have any other tech on you that you’re not telling me about, you die.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
The Victim stands up and takes a deep, vocalized breath, presumably to calm whatever tidal wave of adrenaline must have just crashed into her, and the two start walking. No yelp-siren fanfare, no duct tape, no more than two girls and Schrödinger’s gunpoint marching them both down the road to oblivion.
“Do you drive?”
“Sometimes. I probably shouldn’t be.”
Rainier groans internally. Is she trying to make small talk? Humanize herself?
“What I’m asking is, did you drive here?”
“Uh. Yeah. My car’s parked a block from here.”
“Lead the way, then. You already know what you have to do before we’re out of the park.”
The black-haired girl walks with a casual slump, keeping her hands out of the pockets holding her phone and keys. Good. She’s decided to play nice. It’s for the best, anyway - Rainier still isn’t sure what she would have done if the girl actually had tried to run. She was mostly gambling on the threat being enough, and it seems to have paid off.
“Nice park. Lot of open space here.”
At this point, Rainier’s riffing. She’s gone over the important parts already, and now, she’s not sure whether she’s trying to keep up the façade of a conversation or just dicking around and making vague threats for the thrill of it.
“Yeah, it’s pretty here. Gives me space to think at night.”
The Victim’s tone, flat as it may be, indicates that she’s actually trying to make small talk with someone she knows is going to kill her. More humanization tactics? No, she’s too calm. No waterworks, not even an attempt at conveying primal terror. She’s just talking. Underneath the scratchy Goodwill beanie swaddling Rainier’s forehead, her brow furrows a bit. She’ll play along with this, if only to see what the girl’s angle is here.
“You like being alone, huh?”
“Yeah, I-“
Rainier nearly trips as the Victim’s foot lands at a bad slant on the wet grass, laying her out in a pratfall almost too believable to be fully intentional. Her head hits the sidewalk as she makes a split-second scramble to catch herself, and the obsolete phone in her pocket makes a high-pitched crunch as it shatters between her hip and the adjacent sidewalk.
“Show me the phone.”
The girl stumbles to her feet, the right side of her face moderately scraped and bleeding superficially from torn layers of skin. She silently holds out the phone in her palm like the world’s shittiest proposal.
“Is it just a cracked screen?”
The girl repeatedly clicks the power button on the side of the phone, to no response. Now that Rainier can actually see the damage, its bent frame becomes obvious. That thing’s busted. Whatever off-the-record location tracking could be in there is just micro-silicon trash now.
“Good. Start walking to the car.”
As the shambling husk of a girl leads Rainier out onto the sidewalk, whatever sense of placebo calm had steeled her nerves in the park is quickly subsumed by hyper-vigilant dread. The city proper is different from the dreamlike qualia of the park. Even a completely empty street feels too populated for Rainier to keep a cool head, but if she starts frantically looking over her shoulder like a tweaker, someone will know something’s up. Worse, she might lose her intimidation factor in the eyes of the Victim. And so, like she always does in situations out of her control, Rainier chooses to gamble. Eyes front, face stone. If someone comes by and realizes something’s wrong, freaking out certainly won’t help their first impression of her.
“Which one is it?”
“Gray station wagon. Third on the right past the intersection.”
Station wagon. No trunk. She was hoping for a little alone time once the two were a safe distance from surveillance, but it’ll still work.
“Give me the keys.” Rainier steps past the Victim, the two now walking side-by-side. Holding out her hand slightly, she feels dry, calloused fingers dropping an old-school ring of keys into her hand. Old enough to lack a keyfob entirely. That means the car probably doesn’t even have GPS. She retracts her silent complaints - tonight just keeps getting better.
Ducking her head to fit inside the driver’s-side door, Rainier enters the car and takes the wheel, popping open the manual lock on the passenger’s side. Upon hearing the thunk of the door unlocking, the Victim wordlessly enters the car and buckles herself in. Rainier’s relief at the lack of any attempt to escape shares space with an uneasy feeling. She could have tried to run there. They’re right by an intersection, and there’s lots of parked cars to use as cover from retaliatory fire, but she didn’t even try. She buckled herself in, for fuck’s sake. Unprompted self-restraint. What the hell could she be planning? Did she manage to sneak a 911 call before Rainier even got to that bench?
“Stay quiet. Try anything and you’re dead.”
As Rainier turns the key, the engine sputters to life with something between a cough and a roar, and a pre-inserted CD spins up in the player.
“…And, honey, I won’t cry when my credit’s running low with you…”
A fucking Redtide CD? There’s a lot of god-awful Christian rock bands out there to pick from, but no one under the age of fifty listens to-
Oh. This is her parents’ car. This girl still lives with her parents, and she drove their car out to a random park in the middle of the night to watch YouTube alone in the dark. Without even turning off their CD.
Rainier stares into the abyss of the street with contempt, and pulls out of the parking space. She doesn’t turn the music off, either - it gives her motivation. If she gets caught on this drive, she goes down in history as the kidnapper-slash-would-be-murderer who listens to fucking Redtide. So she’d best not get caught.
“…I’m standing in the sunrise on my own…”
She just wishes she’d learned how to properly drive manual.
*
“Where are we going?”
The Victim’s voice is almost a comfort against the onslaught of softcore worship emanating from the car’s speakers.
“I thought I told you to stay quiet.”
The girl slumps back into her seat, closing her eyes. They’ve been on the road for an hour, and Rainier feels like she’s been driving for a week. Between checking the rear-view for cops and making sure they’re headed in the right direction without so much as a paper map in the glove box, she’s starting to wonder why she didn’t just shoot this girl dead in the park. The Ryde guy was right about one thing. She has picked one seriously stressful career path.
The half-developed outskirts surrounding the city aren’t pretty to look at, but they’ve got enough landmarks for Rainier to know she’s going the right way. Familiar graffiti on walls no one bothers to cover up, “temporarily” blocked-off exits onto side streets, long-abandoned buildings she used to go urbexing in as a teenager. This is well-trodden territory for her, a few minutes out from her old high school.
When the Victim’s not keeping her eyes shut, she’s staring out the window like someone trying not to get carsick. Her gaze lingers on every passing building, every bit of trashfire scenery bookending the gradually-emptying highway. It almost pisses Rainier off. She’s treating being kidnapped like a scenic drive through a national park.
“What’s your name?”
“Quiet.”
“You’re pretty clearly not going to kill me right now.” The Victim’s voice, still hoarse and fatigued, seems to take on a concerning new confidence. “We’re on the highway. Someone would see, and you’d get blood all over the car.”
“You wanna test that theory?”
The Victim looks oddly disappointed. “I mean, if I’m gonna die anyway, might as well find out who’s killing me, right?”
Rainier takes an exasperated breath.
“Mark.”
The Victim raises an eyebrow. “Really? You got some serial killer pseudonym or something, like Zodiac?”
“Afraid not.” Silently, Rainier feels a tiny bite of envy. It would be nice if she did have one. “Make something up if it makes you feel better.”
“I don’t really know enough about you yet to think of anything. And I’m not all that creative, anyway.”
Rainier’s getting genuinely irked by this girl now. She doesn’t try to save her own life even once, but she’s perfectly fine giving her kidnapper lip, apparently. Why is now the time she decides to play risky? Is it some reverse ploy for trust, or is she just stupid?
Fine. She’ll play whatever this little game is.
“What’s yours, then?”
If this girl’s going to try so hard to ingratiate herself to Rainier, she might as well invite the humanization. Test herself. Anyone can kill a faceless, nameless something on the street if they’ve got a good enough reason for it. People are harder, and Rainier’s going to accept that challenge.
“Uh. Whitney.”
“I don’t think you’re telling me the truth.”
The Victim sighs, the sort of sigh you hear when a friend just lost against you in casual chess. “Vanta.” She’s telling the truth now.
“Like vantablack? You named yourself after a shade of black paint?”
“Name myself? I-“ The girl’s words catch on a cold, spiny insecurity in her throat. “No, actually, it’s a character from… Never mind. I’m just Vanta.”
Rainier knows a character named Vanta. She knows her very well, and she knows every lurid, visceral detail of what happens to her. But it’s not that Vanta. It’s statistically improbable for it to be that Vanta.
Either way, whatever psychological tactic Vanta had been attempting had taken Rainier’s focus off of the road. Once her concentration returns, the drive becomes simple again.
A minute passes, then ten minutes, then an hour. Familiar ground passes, and the mindless purgatory of the interstate takes its place. In her periphery, Rainier watches Vanta fall asleep and wake up a total of three times, repeatedly adjusting herself into positions that no sane person could find comfortable enough to sleep in, let alone to the excruciating loop of elevator-rock stylings soundtracking the road trip from hell.
After thirty more soul-suffocating minutes, Rainier is the one to break the silence. If she can’t stick Vanta in the trunk, she certainly won’t let her sleep comfortably.
“Have to ask. Why were you actually in that park?”
Vanta drags herself to consciousness and shuffles in her seat, momentarily reaching for something indistinct. A neural pathway from an old life, a life before this car and this road and the gunshot wound that might be. Rainier knows the feeling well. With only the ghost of a murdered comfort to accompany Vanta, she’s no longer imperceptible. No longer shielded from the world and all its stingingly tangible realness. The native fauna of dreamland, displaced and abandoned in this rot-infested waking.
“You don’t have to tell me why, actually.” Rainier does the best she can to make her instinctive words of understanding sound blank and impregnable.
“I was collecting my thoughts.”
“Well, what are your thoughts?”
“Fuck if I know,” Vanta chuckles. “I guess, in my mind, I would have ended up at that park anyway. A few hours earlier, I could have been in my room, or out on my bike, or at the grocery store, and I’d end up in the same place at the same time either way.”
“So you’re a determinist?”
“Nah, don’t determinists like… think everything has a reason for happening?”
So far, Vanta’s baseline cadence has been curt and muted, like a bandage being ripped off with every word she forces herself to utter. It’s uncomfortable, and it leaves a residue that’s hard to scratch off, but it’s gotta get done either way. Now, for whatever reason, her tone has changed. A layer of casual contentment, something you might hear on a call in an Entropy group chat. For a moment, she seems to have set aside the gravity of the situation.
“That’s not really the way I think,” Vanta continues, her hands unconsciously gesturing as she speaks. “The way I see it, if you traveled to the end of time, everything in the universe would already have happened. You skip to the last scene of the movie, and the plot’s already played out like it always would have. The script’s gonna go the way it’s gonna go.”
“You don’t believe in free will, then?” Rainier can’t help but engage. “That’s kind of the whole central point of determinism.”
“Nah, I believe in free will. I can choose to do this.”
Vanta slaps herself hard on the scraped side of her face, then cringes and curls her fingers.
“See? Free will.” Flecks of coagulated blood fall from her cheek like ash. “But free will is what builds the future that’s bound to happen. We make our own choices, and those choices compound into how things would always have ended up.”
“…Interesting.”
A sinking feeling creeps under Rainier’s skin. She might have picked an even worse target than a rich person. From the looks of it, Vanta is completely unhinged, which means she may very well be planning something.
“I mean, do you disagree?”
“I think we’re just here. At this time, right now. No point questioning the ontological reason for it.”
“Sounds to me like you agree, then.”
Vanta smirks. She’s squeezing a lot of mileage out of Rainier’s strategic unwillingness to shoot her dead here and now. Who the fuck is this girl? Rainier had taken her for a standard girl-failure type, a dime a dozen among trannies their age. But those girls shut down easier than this. Vanta’s acting like nothing could be done in the first place, and that realization isn’t even bothering her. Is it dissociation? No, dissociation for Vanta is what she was doing back at the park. Drowning every external signal in sweet distraction. This is presentness. This is a moment without that weight on her shoulders, a moment spent staring into the face of the girl that kills her. No amount of benzodiazepine apathy can manufacture that - certainly not to this degree. The human brain is hard-wired to avoid the threat of death at any cost, whether tangible or imagined. Vanta’s foundational circuitry must be as broken as her phone’s.
All of Rainier’s speculation quickly takes a backseat the moment she sees the exit she’s been waiting for, illuminated by a string of unseasonably-festive white lights wrapped around an oak tree.
She knows exactly where they are now. As she finally pulls off the interstate, she’s half-tempted to roll down the window and take in the scent of her old home.
Merrygrove. A town that’s less of a town and more of a memory. The whole place was built around a ski resort, but the snowfall got too sparse a few years before Rainier was born. Tourists filtered out, regulars stopped coming back, and the once-great winter wonderland was left as a second home for the ultra-rich and a summer stay for whoever could afford to rent a cottage for a week. Rainier’s parents used to take her here as a kid, riding out the last few years that anyone still came in the colder months. The boat had sailed on skiing and snowboarding, so Rainier would find her entertainment in exploring the surface streets. She still thinks about how she probably looked to the other vacationers. Some scrawny little kid walking into people’s driveways and looking under their cars for fun.
“Eyes wide, sunshine. We’re almost there.”
Vanta’s rest-deprived eyes pop open, wrested from the momentary, unfeeling respite of microsleep. Even under the guise of this deep-voiced masquerade, Rainier still has to resist hitting herself for saying it like that.
The clunky old stick-shifter begins to thread a thin road through the resort town, passing house after house of brick chimneys and tastefully overgrown ivy and framed department-store platitudes hanging by every address number. Just about the same as it was… mostly, anyway. Those hanging signs used to say stuff like “Property of the Slope Squad” and “Beware of Rogue Snowball Fighters”. Now, it’s all “Go Jump In the Lake”, “Chill Zone Enforced”, things like that. Rainier always hated the corny skiing slogans, but their absence leaves a disquieting gap.
Either way, the town at large gives off the same energy it always has. Secluded, faux-cozy, and prohibitively expensive.
“This place is nice.”
Vanta’s voice feels antithetical to this place. She shouldn’t exist in this vestigial remnant of memory. Then again, as it stands, neither should Rainier. She’s an interloper in her own dreams here, a blue bruise on the membrane of fragile nostalgia - and she’s brought a stowaway.
“It is nice.” An errant softness slips into Rainier’s voice for a moment. “Real quiet, real empty.”
Vanta doesn’t respond. She’s staring out the window again. Rainier clears her throat, swallowing any femininity that may have crept into her speech.
“What, you sightseeing or something?”
Vanta’s gaze remains fixed on the scenery outside. “I’m just thinking.”
“You seem to do a lot of that.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
Pulling around a corner, down a road surrounded on all sides by thick firs and signs pointing to places that no longer exist, a section of asphalt fades into a long stretch of dirt. They’re here.
During her last winter spent at Merrygrove, a then 8-year-old Rainier had been out on one of her aimless exploration walks when she had found something. Off to the side, separated from the rest of the town by a mile-long driveway, was a huge cabin-style house on a hill. It looked megalithic to her young mind. She always wondered who lived there, who could possibly occupy such a grandiose wooden castle, and what dark secrets they may have been hiding inside. One night, she caught sight of the owners through the window. The King in a button-up shirt and the Queen with a stiff bob-cut, dining on something that her personal fantasy interpreted as caviar and the flesh of the wooden castle’s sworn enemies. She’s still disappointed that she never tried to go in.
Probably best in the long run, though. Always fun to save the most exciting part for last.
The marathon of a driveway is much different to navigate in a car than on foot. With the eyes of an adult to pierce the rose-tinted miasma, what was once a fantastical journey is now just inconvenient. Rainier never got her license. Driving through the city is one thing, but navigating anything more rural than suburbia is a challenge. At least Vanta’s not falling asleep or snarking at her now.
Rainier smiles slightly. “You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
She doesn’t know how to respond to that. Ready to die? That’s for me to know, and you to find out? The playbook hasn’t exactly been written on what a killer is supposed to say when their victim’s acting like they’re on a field trip.
After a long stretch of awkward turns, Rainier sees a familiar shape coming over the horizon, letting her shaky foot off the gas pedal and finally shutting off the CD. She had all but forgotten the sound of a world without the dulcet tones of the four most insufferable cis guys you’ll ever be forced to learn about. In the first moment of blissful silence she’s had since the park, she allows herself a few seconds to take in some rejuvenating air, then unzips the backpack and retrieves the handgun. A vintage 1911, clearly well-cared for by whoever it was that she bought it off of.
“Out of the car. Follow behind me. Run and I shoot you.”
Rainier closes the backpack and lifts it over one shoulder, exiting the car and pocketing the gun for real this time. Vanta follows close behind, walking with that same beaten-down stance as before, and the two traverse the gravel driveway to the porch steps. The door’s going to be locked, obviously, but if Rainier remembers correctly…
Knew it. Spare key in the frame of a hanging lantern. Everyone in Merrygrove did it. Kind of a local culture thing among old vacationers, she’d noticed. Simple observations like this had let her into quite a few places she didn’t belong as a kid - a stray variable in the cogs of time and infrastructural redevelopment, slipping between the chronological cracks of on-loan lodges and overpriced timeshares into a place that simply was.
“Are we going in there?”
Rainier shoots an incredulous look at Vanta. “Are we- No, I just drove for two hours in the middle of the night so you could look at the front of a house.“
A latch releases with a satisfying metallic click as Rainier unlocks the door.
“Not a fucking word once we go in.”
Vanta nods.
Silently readying herself for what she’s about to do, Rainier slowly turns the tarnished brass doorknob, steps inside, and-
The lights are on.
Fuck, the lights are on. How did she not process that walking up to the house?
It’s fine. It’s okay. There are people here. It’s 4 in the morning - they’re probably asleep, if the sound of that piece of shit car driving over gravel didn’t already wake them all up. They could make it out. Find another place. No, there’s no other place Rainier knows to go. In that case, the stakes are simple - improvise fast or everything goes to shit.
So Rainier’s going to improvise.
A swift check over the shoulder. Vanta’s still waiting patiently. Knowing the crowd around here, if they got woken up, it’s only a matter of time before one of the owners comes downstairs with a shotgun. Which means she has to beat them there.
Rainier flashes the grip of the pistol in her pocket, beckoning Vanta inside before shutting the heavy door as quietly as she can manage. The foyer is covered wall to wall in family photos. Christmas, New Year’s, graduations and weddings and candid shots from parties. History. Twenty-odd lives that, at one point, touched this enormous house; and now, with a few creaking steps on old floorboards, Rainier and her Not-Quite-So-Perfect Victim have joined and tainted that ensemble.
The walk up the massive staircase is agonizing. Time seems to slow, quicken, and slow again on a 16-speed turntable as the two make their ascent, Rainier’s thoughts blending together into a cacophonous amygdala scream. Part of her is in that place of streetlights again, the remembered glimpses of concrete towers and flickering billboards now inspiring momentary calm instead of revulsion. Here, inside the walls of this cruel destination where The End seems to approach from behind every blind spot, maybe it’s okay if things stay still.
Rainier’s foot hits the top step, and the first thing she sees is a taxidermied deer head tastelessly mounted on a wall.
It’s also the last thing Rainier sees before she forgets everything.
She didn’t notice it until now. For the last three seconds, just as silent as she had promised, Vanta’s been pointing somewhere. No, pointing at something. Two indistinct shapes in the middle of a huge open room.
One of the shapes stands up from a table, and a new voice invades her rightful airspace.
“Get out now or I’m calling the fucking-“
Every streetlight blinks out in an instant.
BANG.
One shot rattles off with a recoiling kick, narrowly missing the shape and hitting what looks like a stainless steel refrigerator. Block-letter magnets come loose and hit the floor, and the shape doesn’t have time to get cover before-
BANG.
A second clean shot explodes through its temporal lobe before its face has time to solidify in the gaze of the Killer.
Something wails from the table. The other shape, an object under blinding ceiling lights. A stiff, graying bob cut around a cognitive censor bar.
A rush forward. Shoes impact sturdy pine flooring.
BANG.
Clipped skull. Non-lethal if treated in time. The shape stumbles, resisting syncope.
A roar like an atmosphere on fire escapes the Killer’s lips, diametrically opposed to any rational definition of humanity. A hand reaches out. Time spins backwards in all directions, and the bob-cut thing is pinned against the table.
Eye contact. Epinephrine.
BANG.
BANG.
The thing is gone.
Frozen in time, in a split-second haze of deep, hyper-awake unconsciousness, the Killer surveys her very own wooden castle with no people in it. The floor isn’t there anymore. There’s only an ocean of sheer crimson, sick and swirling in its infinite depth. Charming rustic accoutrements and framed photos of merrymaking shapes float aimlessly in the space beyond space. A hemorrhaging deer sputters and twitches in the red tide, crying a postmortem lullaby for its pulped mate.
And then the Killer sees it again.
At the nexus of the gore pit, standing impossibly tall and resolute like a statue, is the Victim. Vanta, the void-black angel who died long before Rainier found her, the great unknowable at the heart of this impulse. She’s wearing a familiar look on her marbled face. A look like a cancer cell splitting. The same look Rainier wore a universe ago, in her filthy one-bedroom apartment on that hot spring evening, reading the chapter where Vanta from Magenta Overcast gets carved open and splayed like an artistic fucking masterpiece of a deathwhore against the concrete canvas of a parking garage. Fear and loathing and self-actualization in the sacred death of all that made them themselves.
In other words, neither of them have ever been more horny at a single point in their miserable little lives.
And then Rainier passes out.