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Carol's been sitting with her head in her hands long enough that her neck's gone stiff, her fingers numb against her scalp. It's been hours. Days? Time moves like sludge when you're waiting to find out if you killed someone.
Footsteps round the corner. The DHL guy from earlier. She looks up expecting him to hand her the fucking nuclear codes, but he wears a manufactured forlorn expression that can only mean one thing.
Her stomach drops.
"We have some bad news," he starts.
"Okay." She swallows. Tries not to think about how this feels worse than the eleven million she killed the first time she lost her temper; the unknown millions the second time. Tries not to press on the hollow opening in her chest, the wrong-sized void that shouldn't echo the shape of real losses. She continues, before she can stop herself: "Can I give her a proper burial, at least? Instead of… whatever the fuck you're all doing with all the bodies. I owe her that much."
"A… burial? Carol, she's not dead."
"What?"
"It's worse. Much worse—"
"How could it be—"
"She's lost her connection to us." He's already talking about recovery efforts, but Carol's moving, shoving past him, barreling down the hallway before he can finish.
"Carol, wait—"
She throws the door open, and there she is—Zosia. Actually Zosia. She nearly collapses from relief.
"Oh, thank god." Carol runs to the side of her bed and drops to the floor. "Holy shit, are you—sorry. You first."
Zosia looks at her with such concentrated disdain that it freezes her for a beat. Unmooring; as comforting as it is terrifying.
The DHL guy busts into the room. "So sorry, Zosia, we tried to stop her—"
"Just get her out." Zosia's voice is different. Her accent's thicker, and Carol can't quite place it.
"What—are you French?"
"Are you a fucking idiot?" Zosia snaps. "If you want to kill yourself, fine—good, actually—but don't take me out with you."
Carol scoffs. "I—well, first of all, you're fucking welcome."
"What?"
"For getting you out?"
Zosia stares at her like she's just sprouted a second head. "You think you saved me?"
"I mean…" Carol gestures vaguely. "Yeah?"
Zosia laughs bitterly. "Of course. Of course you do."
Carol shakes her head. "Look, it was an accident. I wasn't actually trying to kill us, I thought the grenade was fake."
"Why would I give you a fake grenade?"
"Why would you give me a real one?"
Zosia swallows. Shakes her head. "I don't…"
"Yes. Yes, good," Carol clutches at air. "You wouldn't. No fucking sane person would. But you did. Surely—surely—you see how crazy that is now?"
Zosia pauses, tongue dragging slowly along her teeth, then turns to the window. "You might actually be the most miserable person I've ever met. When they fix me, I'm gone. I'm going home. Let someone else deal with you."
"Oh my god, you really don't get it. You won't have a choice if you go back—"
"John, please get her out. I don't want her in here."
"Carol, it's time to leave," The DHL guy—John, apparently—says gently.
"Fine. Fine. I'll leave," Carol starts to storm out, but turns around at the door for one last jab. "Enjoy the last decision you'll ever fucking make."
–
The silence in Carol's house is heavy. It has mass, sticky, rolling down a hill and growing with each passing day. It presses against her eardrums until she has to fill it with the clink of a bottle, the gush of liquid, the soft whimper after the burn.
She stares at the wall, willing her eyes open. Every time she closes them, she sees Zosia's face; that ungrateful, brainwashed lunatic. She gets up, paces the living room, drink sloshing over the side. Zosia wants to plug herself back into the mainframe, dissolve back into the lobotomized soup of the collective. It's as infuriating as it is pathetic, watching someone claw at the door of a burning building, begging to be let back in because they miss the warmth of the fire.
It takes a special kind of stupid to stare freedom in the face and spit on it, but why should Zosia be different from the rest, anyway? She isn't. She never was, never will be. So why can't she get her insufferable fucking voice out of her head?
When they fix me, I'm gone.
Carol leans her forehead against the wall, the room beginning to tilt pleasantly. She shouldn't be thinking about it. She definitely shouldn't be replaying the way Zosia's lip curled, the absolute concentrated venom in her eyes. It was contempt, pure and simple, but it was hers. None of that vacant, cow-eyed placidity of the hive.
It was sharp, it had edges, and fuck if Carol didn't want to cut herself on them.
Another thought, so sick she wants to vomit: it felt like Helen.
The absolute refusal to bend to reality just because reality made sense. Helen would argue with a storm. She would choose the harder path, the messier option, just because it felt true to her, regardless of the consequences. She would look Carol dead in the eye, chin tilted up—just like Zosia's had been, fuck—and dig her heels in until the earth moved around her.
Zosia wanting to go back to the hive is madness, suicide, but that stubbornness? That refusal to be saved on anyone's terms but her own?
Carol closes her eyes, and the ache in her chest expands. She misses that friction, having someone strong enough to stop her, someone to grab her wrist and tell her that fifth drink isn't going to fix the hole in the world—it's just going to ensure she wakes up with a migraine the size of a crater.
But no one stops her. The house just swallows the sound of liquid hitting the glass, spitting it back out in a deafening echo. She stares at the vodka, swirls it, and resigns herself to the inevitable. Fucking cheers.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Carol stumbles to the door, half-expecting the woman who second-most-looks-like-Raban-in-the-world to greet her, but it's Zosia, standing there in ill-fitting sweats that hang off her hips. She looks like she's been awake for a week. Carol's stomach does a violent flip.
"You're drunk. What a surprise," Zosia says flatly.
"It's been a day," Carol rasps. She leans against the doorframe because standing upright suddenly feels like an impossible task. "What are you doing here? Thought you were done with me."
Zosia stares at her, dark eyes sweeping over her stained shirt, the glass in her hand, the general aura of patheticness. It's a look that should make Carol wither. It sets her blood on fire instead.
"I couldn't sleep," Zosia says finally. She looks angry about it. "I was thinking about what you said about the grenade."
"Yeah?" Carol tries to sound casual. Fails.
"The logic holds," Zosia admits, the words grating against her, like they physically hurt to say.
Carol blinks slowly. "Did you come all the way here to tell me I was right?"
"No. I came to tell you that you aren't entirely wrong. Important distinction."
Zosia's chin is tilted up, that same stubborn angle from the hospital, and Carol has the sudden, insane urge to reach out, grab it, press her lips to hers. She wants to pull her inside, shut the door, and let Zosia scream at her until the silence drowns in it. Her ears ring with how badly she wants her; right there, three feet away, and so clearly, painfully disinterested.
"Okay," Carol breathes, voice dropping. "Distinction noted."
Zosia bumps past her—the contact sending a jolt straight to Carol's cunt—and walks into the house like she owns the place. She heads straight for the couch, the one Helen picked out, and collapses onto it. She doesn't sit so much as sprawl, limbs loose, head thrown back against the cushions, claiming the space with an arrogance that makes Carol's mouth go dry.
Guilt, hot and acidic, rises in her throat. Helen hasn't been in the ground a week. The dirt is still fresh, the grief still heavy in the room, and here Carol is, drunk and vibrating with want for a woman who she doesn't even know.
"So," Zosia starts. "What's your grand plan, then?"
Carol laughs, low and humorless. "I don't know. I don't have one."
Zosia's eyes are heavy, fighting gravity. "It's temporary, you know. Whether I want it to be or not."
"What is?"
"My disconnection from the rest. A symptom of the concussion. They said when I go to sleep, I'll join them again."
Carol swallows, unmoored by the cruelty of it all. "Great. Awesome. Then maybe tomorrow you can give me an atomic bomb."
Zosia stares at her for a beat. Then she laughs, a rusty, unused sound, like an engine turning on after years in the garage. It reaches her eyes, transforms her face, softening the sharp edges just enough to break Carol's heart.
She wants her so bad she can't breathe. She wants to crawl onto the couch and cover Zosia's body with her own, as if she could pin her down into her bones and keep her from floating away.
"Let me make you a drink," Carol says, her voice trembling. She needs to do something with her hands before she does something unforgivable.
"Please," Zosia sighs, closing her eyes for a second before snapping them open again. Fighting it. "Do you have whiskey? I hate the taste of vodka."
"Yeah. I have some upstairs. Let me grab it."
She scrambles up the stairs, tripping over the top step. She feels manic, a frantic energy buzzing under her skin. At the back of the closet, she finds the bottle—Helen's good stuff, hidden away for an anniversary that never happened. She grabs it, too far gone to give a shit about the symbolism, just needing to get back downstairs, to keep that laugh going, to keep Zosia talking.
"Found it," Carol calls out, skipping the last two steps. "It's the good shit, too, so you better appreciate—"
She stops. Zosia is still sprawled on the couch, but the tension has left her body.
"No," Carol whispers. "Fuck, no, no no." She rushes to the couch, dropping her knees hard enough to bruise. "Zosia, wake up."
Zosia's eyelids flutter, and there's a furrow in her brow for just a fraction of a second, a ghost of that beautiful, stubborn resistance. And then it smooths out. Her eyes open fully. The dilated, panicked darkness is gone, in its place a calm so profound it looks like death.
"No," Carol sobs, the sound tearing out of her chest. "No, please. Come back."
Zosia blinks, slow and placid. "Carol," she smiles, her accent thinner, smoothed over by the cadence of a million other voices speaking in unison. It's polite, hollow; the sound of the end of the world.
Carol collapses, unsure how much grief she can take before her bones crumble into dust. "You were right here," Carol whispers, her hands shaking where they cup Zosia's face. "You were right fucking here."
The loss is intolerable, a void tearing open her stomach, demanding to be filled. Carol looks at those lips—the same ones that had curled in disgust, that had laughed, that had kept an unspoken plea sealed behind them—and she can't stand the distance. She needs the friction back.
She leans in and kisses her; a collision, hard and messy, a desperate, sloppy attempt to breathe her own chaotic life back into this empty vessel. She kisses her like she's trying to drag her back up from the bottom of the ocean with her teeth, and she can taste it, the salt and the drift and her own desperation.
For a heartbeat, Zosia is completely still. Then, she kisses back. Her tongue meets Carol's without hesitation, with no specific, singular desire, but a flawless mirroring of human intimacy. It's the collective memory of billions of kisses, executed with terrifying precision.
Carol gasps into her mouth, shuddering, hating it; hating the wrongness of it; hating how manufactured it feels; hating that she hates it and can't pull away. Hands slide up Carol's back—Zosia's hands, technically, but moving with a strength that doesn't belong to a slight woman recovering from a concussion. It feels like the whole world is holding her, putting their hands around her neck and squeezing until her own life floats out of her body too.
And maybe that's how they'll get her. Maybe that was always the plan: to grind her down into nothing, to weaken her defenses until she became them. Or at least mimicked them, pacified and easy, happy only in the way she no longer had space for misery. A dense ball of emptiness, rolling down the hill, sticky, gaining mass, breathing into Zosia's mouth, feeling her breathe back; and she's in there still. She can feel it, so miniscule you could miss it if you didn't stop to look. But she does. She stops, holds her breath against Zosia's lips, and there she is: one out of billions.
She tears at the fabric of Zosia's sweatpants, shoving them down with frantic, clumsy hands, burning her palms on the heat of her bare legs. She yanks her own jeans open, the zipper hissing, a snake striking. It feels violent, like stealing. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, a voice that sounds like Zosia is screaming, reviled, promising to gut her for this.
Hunger is a nasty thing, ancient and blinding. Carol is starving.
She climbs into Zosia's lap, straddling her, grinding her core against Zosia's thigh with a desperate, unsteady rhythm. Zosia's hands tighten on her waist, and Carol throws her head back, a sob catching in her chest.
Is she in there?
Not Zosia. Helen.
Is Helen in the data, or is she part of the current? Can she feel the weight of Carol's hips, the friction of her cunt? Can she see her wife, not even a week into her widowhood, drunk, sweating, using a woman who can't even fight her off? The thought lands like a heat lamp burning through her, and the sheer obscenity of it knocks her loose. She goes under fast, her body breaking open in a hot, involuntary rush against Zosia's leg. For a moment, she isn't steering anything at all; swept into the collective slip, joining Zosia's rage, joining Helen's horror, held under their gaze as she comes apart.
She gasps for air, trembling, waiting for the lightning strike, the divine judgement, the punishment that would strike her dead in any world that made sense.
It doesn't come.
Instead, Zosia's hand strokes the back of her head, gentle and maternal. "It's alright," she coos, her voice vibrating against Carol's chest. "We know. We understand. You were so lonely."
A love letter, signed by everyone on Earth.