A groan of pain.

  Micheal opened his eyes again.

  His body was almost carbonized: skin split into black and gray patches, like leather burned too quickly; some areas still glossy, others dull and rigid. Every movement was an internal friction, a dry rasp that crawled up along his bones.

  Around him, devastation still smoked.

  He lay along the upper stretch of the circular slope, just below the rim of the crater — the hollow gouged out by the terrifying force that had struck them on the road back from Arcadia.

  A low, thin mist, mauve in color, drifted lazily over the rough expanse, thinning and dissolving in places like a tired breath. The scorched surface glimmered in an unnatural way, as if someone had brushed it with strawberry jam and then tried to lick it all away, leaving behind only a smeared, uneven sheen.

  The strontium-colored sky looked like an asshole.

  The crater was so vast that it made one thing immediately clear: if an attack like that had struck a medium-sized city in that world—Arcadia, for instance—it would have wiped it off the face of the earth.

  And in fact, in that area, everything except Micheal had been vaporized.

  At first, his mind held little more than confusion.

  He could make out a few distant sounds. Someone—more than one person—was screaming like a madman. Maybe someone was crying.

  Hard to tell. Everything came through blurred, without edges.

  His consciousness was still washed out.

  His senses were garbage.

  The pain, on the other hand, had become exponentially less tolerable in a very short time.

  Usually it should have been the opposite.

  If he was alive, he owed it to that body’s innate ability to harden and regenerate in a way that seemed almost supernatural.

  Maybe someone had survived.

  But how?

  He asked himself that with the few computational resources his physical condition still allowed his cognitive functions. The fact that the geological epitaph was still standing, and that he could hear sounds clearly produced by people, suggested there had been no shockwave.

  Those voices couldn’t belong to the attacker.

  And who the attacker most likely was—he already knew.

  The color of that mist left little room for doubt.

  He had never seen her unleash an attack like that before, though.

  That was the only real doubt.

  Damn her.

  Why?

  The voices were close.

  Annoying scotomas infested his vision as, with an effort wildly disproportionate in pain, he tilted his head back slightly to see who was ignoring—almost offensively naturally—the fact that it was their responsibility to check whether he was still alive.

  Impossible they hadn’t seen him.

  He felt his breath fail.

  For a moment, he thought he might lose consciousness.

  Apparently the damage had crossed a critical threshold, beyond which the automatic regeneration had short-circuited. Maybe that was why he had woken up: not because it was the right moment, but because the system no longer knew what to do.

  It would have made more sense to spend the remaining energy rebuilding him, rather than letting him witness the incompetence and indifference of the people he had dragged along—people who had never really been of any use to him.

  That position was too unbearable.

  He wished to lose consciousness.

  This fucking body… fuck, Micheal thought.

  The stabbing pains felt like a grid of gates snapping open and shut in rapid succession, each one briefly offering a shifting glimpse of hell.

  Then came screams of terror from above.

  Someone tried to run.

  He heard the sound of a body tumbling for several meters toward the center of the crater.

  The temptation was to turn his gaze away.

  Not because there was any need to understand what was happening.

  She was coming.

  Terror reflected in his eyes.

  Watery glints rose past the lower rim, brushing against his bloodshot sclera.

  Atrocious screams.

  Pain.

  The sound of flesh being torn apart.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  He could feel her gaze on him even without seeing her.

  She was climbing back up the slope.

  She would return.

  The thought locked itself in place: she will return.

  Deep within his brain, the neural correlate associated with a version of Micheal that had long remained dormant activated as a counterreaction, an automatic response to extreme stress.

  Micheal resisted, and the interference produced a cognitive tear.

  Blackout.

  *

  Micheal woke up in a huge room.

  Huge—and terribly familiar.

  The bed dominated the space like a private altar: oversized, well beyond king-size, luxurious without shame, topped by a violaceous canopy that fell in heavy, almost theatrical folds. The blankets, the same shade, were thick and matte, loaded with a calculated softness.

  Mauve saturated the air.

  Otherwise, the furnishings were surprisingly normal. Solid, functional furniture—almost sober. Nothing openly extravagant.

  The excess lay in the details.

  Objects were scattered everywhere, as if someone had strewn the room with a collection of fixations: lamps with ambiguous geometry, mirrors tilted at useless angles, small artifacts that seemed to come from mutually incompatible cultural contexts. All of them, without exception, pulled back into that same range of dirty purples.

  Not an aesthetic choice.

  An imposition.

  His body no longer hurt.

  All that remained was a diffuse stiffness, the kind that follows a sleep far too long, past anything physiological.

  He exhaled.

  Shit.

  It was the only thing he managed to think.

  A female voice drifted in from outside the room, singing Skyfall by Adele.

  The sound was muffled by the walls, but in tune.

  For Micheal, that voice was an abominable Proustian madeleine.

  Cold sweat.

  Heart in his throat.

  The sound grew sharper.

  A sonic blueshift.

  It was getting closer.

  She stopped singing.

  “Mikeyy! You’re finally awake.”

  Sometimes she did things like that.

  Knowing things she had no way of knowing in a world without surveillance technology.

  Useless to ask how.

  Impossible not to wonder how it was possible.

  The garish mauve set her irises on fire.

  The same color soaked into the provocative house dress she was wearing: a soft slip, clinging without restraint, with a deep neckline that followed the breasts effortlessly and a hemline deliberately too short to be called “loungewear.”

  The same mauve spilled into her hair—long, wavy, unnaturally dyed that shade, as if the color were a physiological extension of her rather than an artifice.

  Even her lips, with less conviction, tried to comply.

  She was a stunning woman.

  Not aggressively so, not ostentatious, but with a full, mature sensuality, perfectly aware of itself. A harmonious body, generous where it mattered, a bright, open face shaped to smile.

  And smile she did.

  A radiant smile.

  Voluptuous.

  Genuinely affectionate.

  She truly seemed happy that he was well.

  And Micheal knew that, in that woman’s distorted mind, she truly was.

  Only, she was so in a sick way.

  A way that wasn’t entirely foreign to him.

  Because a part of him operated according to a similar logic.

  Recognizing it was what disgusted him the most.

  That thing had produced indelible memories—memories that, for him (still Micheal, though he preferred to think of himself as the Mediator), constituted more than enough reason to contemplate extreme escapism:

  suicide as an attempt to wash away the immense and irreducible stain that that bastard had woven into his interstitial memory.

  “Awwww! Your pretty little face is back to how it was. How cuuute.”

  She said it while hopping briefly in place and clapping her hands, just beyond the doorway, up and to the left from his position.

  She deliberately adopted that childish attitude she liked to use to provoke men.

  She brought a fingernail to her mouth and bit it slowly, in a calculated, suggestive way.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  The Mediator stared at her like an idiot, suspended between arousal, anger, and a kind of reverential disgust.

  He said nothing.

  “Aha! Playing hard to get.”

  She approached slowly, almost panting. Then, all of a sudden, she lunged and sprang up beside him.

  In moments like these, the Mediator wasn’t afraid of her.

  He knew what she wanted from him.

  Now that wreck was lying in front of him, prone.

  Her face a breath away from his.

  Her long, shapely legs lifted in the air, swinging back and forth absentmindedly.

  She rested her chin—marked by a small, pretty dimple—on the back of her right hand. Her hands were stacked one atop the other, resting on the blanket that separated her female skin from Micheal’s chest.

  His gaze dropped.

  Her ass, full in just the right way.

  Her legs.

  Impossible for his friend not to react.

  He looked away.

  But it was just as impossible not to be hypnotized by her mauve eyes, mesmerizing.

  “I see you’re not very responsive,” she said, pouting.

  “Don’t you like me anymore?”

  Her voice turned syrupy, higher-pitched, like that cloying, unpleasant tone some women use with children.

  “Why did you do it?” the Mediator asked seriously, struggling to resist the urge to pounce on her.

  “Ughhh.”

  She rolled onto her back, knees bent, her thick mauve hair spilling over her covered chest, still using that gratingly high tone.

  “Look at me. A woman with a body like this can’t wait to get mounted, and you want to be serious instead. You’re not my wild puppy. Let him out.”

  She turned onto her left side.

  Tilted her head so he could look her straight in the eyes.

  A sly move.

  Her thighs on full display.

  His friend was going insane with the urge to dive.

  But he didn’t give in.

  “You know it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Fine. I get it. Then go away. I wanted a quickie, but you’re boring even when you fuck.”

  She got off the bed and started wandering around the room, touching things at random.

  “Can I leave?”

  “Not the villa. This room, asshole.”

  “Why?”

  The woman shot him a glare that froze him in place.

  Message received.

  He had received the message, but there was a problem.

  “Uh… there’s a problem,” he said.

  “What problem do you have, idiot? Don’t you understand that when I tell you to leave, YOU LEAVE!?”

  She was now at the foot of the bed, staring straight into his eyes.

  The Mediator swallowed. He tried to preserve a shred of self-respect.

  “I’m leaving, I’m leaving. No need to get hysterical. It’s just that I don’t want to walk around the house with a hard-on.”

  “And what’s the problem?” she snapped, her brow furrowed. “You’re well-endowed, asshole. It’s probably the only thing you can brag about, considering that otherwise you only ever fuck things up.”

  What the fuck is she talking about? he thought, a chill running through him.

  What did I do wrong?

  “Which fuck-ups?”

  “You’re telling me you still haven’t figured out the reason for this punitive confinement?”

  She took a step back, irritated. “Now get the fuck out.”

  What is she referring to?

  He didn’t understand. He had always done everything she wanted.

  Well—no surprise there. He wasn’t discovering now that she was completely insane.

  “What would it cost you to give me some pants?”

  “You know your dick is the only reason I haven’t buried you yet, asshole.”

  “I don’t want to be raped,” he said.

  No irony. Completely sincere.

  “Aww.”

  This time the sound was blatantly fake. “You shitty little puppy…”

  Then, all of a sudden, she snapped.

  “Son of a bitch! I can see the bulge under the covers. If I wanted to rape you, I would have already done it. You know perfectly well that sooner or later I will. That it amuses me.

  So why don’t you get out of this goddamn room before I flay you alive?”

  Micheal was panting.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  She was completely unpredictable.

  He had pushed his luck because he knew that, in moments when the semi-autonomous, sadistic, animal fragment of his identity—the one she was proud of and obsessed with—entered a kind of maintenance phase to prevent it from dissolving, there was nothing more effective for her perverted desires than forcing the proto-identity to surface.

  That same proto-identity was now suffering from a form of Fregoli syndrome:

  in every person, it saw her—and what she had done to him when he first arrived in that world.

  Memories that had been repressed, but were still active.

  And yet, in her, it did not perceive a threat.

  She treated him well—and then traumatized him again.

  It had happened more than once.

  That was why he didn’t want to leave.

  If she raped him after he had made her angry, and not by surprise, he might manage to spare Proto-Micheal yet another fracture.

  Another fracture meant more autonomy for Psycho-Micheal.

  It had to be stopped. At any cost.

  That deranged version of himself could not be allowed to take full possession of their ego. It already happened, at times, that it slipped out of his control.

  It couldn’t catch him off guard.

  That was the only fixed point left.

  He had to become its pressure valve as soon as possible.

  And hope it would be enough to placate that punitive craving—blind, disproportionate, entirely independent of anything he had done to deserve it.

  In reality, he didn’t have time to properly articulate those thoughts.

  A moment later she was on him.

  Straddling him.

  Her face hardened into a mask of depraved, turbid rage.

  But he didn’t need to process it.

  It had happened many times over the past two years.

  The rule was simple: don’t be taken by surprise.

  A violent assault, designed to inflict acute, atrocious pain, if unexpected, was the worst possible scenario.

  This way, instead, it was acceptable.

  This way, only he would suffer—the Mediator.

  His resilience would hold together the already rotting stability of the archipelago of identities his self had become.

  The Mediator had become the Henry Kissinger of that connectome.