Chương 85: 84: Unfathomable

Clock's composure shattered. He lowered the prosthetic leg with impossible care, as though it might break, before his knees gave way beneath him. His hands covered his face as ugly, heaving sobs tore through his body, the kind that emptied years of grief all at once. Katherine's own eyes blurred. She'd cried for Butter. She'd cried for herself. She'd cried for the life they would never have, the future stolen before it could begin. She'd cried because she was tired. So very tired.

After what felt like forever, Clock slowly looked up. His face was streaked with tears. Katherine realised hers was too.

"She's gone," Katherine whispered.

"The wolf took her head. I... I didn't see it happen. Someone told me." His jaw tightened.

"When I found her... an Abomination was eating her. It had been stitched together from different bodies." Something dark flickered behind his shattered violet eyes.

"I killed it." Silence.

"I killed it with Harmony," she continued, forcing the words out.

"But it was already too late. The acid had melted almost everything into sludge. I... I did the only thing I could think of. I used the Nonagon to burn what remained. I couldn't leave her there."

"You... burned her body?"

"It was already gone," Katherine said, tears slipping free again.

"She was already gone." Clock closed his eyes. Long seconds passed before he finally spoke.

"You killed an Abomination." It wasn't a question. Katherine nodded.

"Alone? No training? No Gloom?"

"I had words." She gave a faint, broken smile.

"And Harmony."

"Words..." He studied her for a long time.

"You're strong," he said quietly.

"Stronger than you look."

"I didn't feel strong."

"And yet you're still standing."

"Barely." His gaze sharpened.

"What are you?"

"Human." She opened the satchel. Cobalt radiance spilled into the corridor. Clock froze. Every trace of grief vanished beneath naked disbelief.

"What... in the name of everything... is that?" His hand hovered above the opening, afraid to touch it.

"Nine sides..." he breathed.

"A... Nonagon?" Katherine nodded.

"That's impossible. Nonagon Apis cores don't exist. They're theoretical. The energy density alone-""I dreamt it." Clock blinked.

"I dreamt it for years," she repeated.

"Every night inside the pod. It built itself. When I woke up... it was already there. Butter panicked the moment she saw it." His expression fractured further.

"Your dreams... created a Nonagon?"

"I don't understand it either." Katherine looked down into the impossible blue light.

"But it's real." She paused.

"And it's starving."

"Apis cores don't starve," Clock said automatically.

"They're inanimate objects." Katherine watched the cobalt light pulse once inside the satchel.

"To be honest..." she murmured, "this one doesn't feel very inanimate."... Clock remained silent for a long moment before slowly reaching into the satchel. His fingertips brushed the surface of the Nonagon, making him recoil as though he'd touched living flesh.

"…It's warm," he murmured.

"Like it's alive."

"Because it is," Katherine replied.

"Butter said it could power a solar system. I'm using it to power... all this." He slowly withdrew his hand.

"You're going to destroy the facility."

"I'm going to destroy everything." The words landed without anger or hesitation. Silence settled between them. CLANG! The metallic report rang through the corridor like a cathedral bell. WHOOOOM! A torrent of energy exploded down the hallway. Katherine was hurled backwards in a spray of blood, smashing into the far wall hard enough to crater it. Clock never moved. He simply stood there, absorbing the impact like an immovable monument.

She coughed violently, forcing herself upright as blood streamed from her lips, fresh wounds and the corners of her eyes. Every automatic ability had activated. Understatement. Herculean. Ellipsis. She'd still been hit. She'd still been hurt. Understanding struck harder than the blast itself. The Nonagon wasn't invincible. Something powerful enough could simply overpower it. There were beings stronger than her. She buried the thought deep inside her mind. It might save her life one day.

Butter's prosthetic leg suddenly stood upright.

"What... in the seven hells?" Clock whispered. The leg twitched. Colours rippled across its divine alloy shell. Butter's stubborn yellow, structural blue and furious red flowed together with Clock's deep violet and even faint streaks of the Syndicate's sterile white and crimson. It looked as though the prosthetic was searching through reality itself for permission to speak. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. It hopped once. Twice.

A frantic little Morse code dance. Clock stepped closer, grief giving way to cautious wonder. Across the corridor, Katherine pushed herself onto trembling knees. Instead of coughing blood, a faint cloud of cobalt static escaped her lips. Thin luminous strands crawled beneath her skin like glowing stretch marks as the Nonagon quietly replaced shattered flesh with dream-logic. She was healing. She was also being rewritten. Clock barely noticed.

He knelt and carefully lifted the hopping prosthetic, holding it beside his ear. A voice emerged. Not through the air. Through the Gloom resonating inside his own body.

"DON'T KILL MY FRIEND, YOU ABSOLUTE FLUFFING IDIOT!" Clock nearly dropped it. It was Butter. Perfectly Butter.

"SHE DIDN'T KILL ME! Some ridiculously fast wolf experiment did! I didn't even see it! You'd better apologize to her right now!"

"Hey, I'm sor-" The words died. Butter. Alive. Inside the leg. His grief collapsed under the weight of impossible joy. A grin split his face so broadly it looked ready to crack his alabaster skin. Laughing and sobbing at once, he began bouncing excitedly on the spot, unconsciously copying the prosthetic's tiny hops.

"BUTTER!? YOU'RE ALIVE! Oh my God, how? What happened? Tell me!"

"Well, I got decapitated, that's what," the leg answered with unmistakable annoyance.

"That mischievous puppy must've cheated somehow because I never even saw it happen. I just... woke up in here. My body..." Her voice softened.

"My body's just an empty husk now. There isn't a 'Butter' inside it anymore." Behind them, reality stitched itself back together with a wet, grinding hum. Katherine groaned and rose onto one knee, another puff of shimmering cobalt static escaping her mouth. The Nonagon had already replaced her shattered spine with an intricate framework of dream-logic. It held her together. It also felt terrifyingly wrong. Clock finally looked at her. Joy instantly gave way to guilt.

He crossed the corridor in a blur, gently helping her to her feet.

"I apologize," he said quietly, the words awkward and painfully sincere. Katherine swatted his hand away and forced herself upright on her own new, unstable legs.

"Je t'emmerde!" she spat. Go fuck yourself! The Parisian curse cracked through the corridor with perfect venom.

"She's got a point, you know," Butter's voice chimed in.

"Now, are you two done trying to murder each other? Because I'm currently a leg, my best friend's turning into a glowstick, and my brother looks like he picked a fight with a forest and lost. We've got a wolf-god to disassemble. So hug it out or whatever, then get me my head back." The bravado fooled no one. Her voice trembled, and fear lingered beneath every word. Katherine stared at the leg. Her eyes bounced between the prosthetic and Clock's face.

He was grinning like a man who'd just been handed the keys to heaven, hopping in place while hugging the leg to his chest like a child reunited with a lost treasure.

"Who..." Katherine's voice cracked.

"Who are you talking to?" Clock blinked.

"Butter. Obviously." She stared at him. A careful step carried her backward.

"Okay," she said gently.

"I understand. Grief does strange things to people. I've been there. But you need to..."

"Need to what?"

"Put the leg down."

"I'm not putting the leg down. She's in there."

"Clock..."

"She's in there." Katherine lifted both hands in the universal gesture people used around frightened animals.

"I know it feels real. I know you want it to be. But Butter is..." Her voice broke.

"Butter is gone. I held her. I saw what was left." Clock sighed so dramatically it bordered on theatrical.

"Oh, for..." He pressed both palms against the prosthetic's calf and closed his eyes. Silence. A heartbeat later, a vibration rippled through Katherine's bones. The Nonagon resonated. Reality itself carried a familiar voice.

"... I told you to apologize to her! She's right there! Say sorry! Now!" Katherine froze. Her knees buckled. She collapsed onto the floor, clutching her head even though the voice wasn't entering through her ears. It echoed through her skeleton, through the Nonagon, through something deeper than sound.

"Clock, I swear if you don't, I'll give you the nastiest wedgie with my telekinesis."

"You don't have telekinesis."

"I'll figure it out. Also put on a shirt, guitar-boy. We aren't at the pool."

"Holy mother of Christ..." Katherine whispered. Her silver-fractured eyes widened.

"That's..." The voice continued, muffled but unmistakably annoyed.

"... and she's been through so much while you're standing there looking constipated..." Katherine slowly lowered her hands.

"Sugarbear?" The rant stopped instantly.

"... Honeycakes?"

"You're alive?"

"Sort of," Butter replied sheepishly.

"I'm a leg. A very fashionable leg. Still a leg." Katherine stared. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Then dissolved into helpless, hysterical laughter. The leg. The leg that belonged to the woman she... She broke. Sobs erupted from somewhere deep inside, violent enough to fold her in half. She dropped to her knees, burying her face in her trembling hands.

"Sugarbear..." she choked.

"Sugarbear, I thought... I thought you were gone..." The sentence dissolved beneath another wave of tears. Clock stood motionless, clutching the prosthetic against his chest. Butter's voice softened.

"I know, Honeycakes. I know." The prosthetic trembled in Clock's hands.

"I'm sorry," Butter whispered.

"I let myself get killed. I was supposed to protect you. I was supposed to keep you safe. I... I didn't even see it coming."

"Stop," Katherine sobbed.

"Don't apologize. It wasn't your fault."

"I should've been faster."

"You were fighting a wolf-god. How could you have been?"

"I should've—""You died for me," Katherine cried.

"You died... and I couldn't... I couldn't bring you back..."

"You did." Her sobbing faltered.

"I was trapped here," Butter continued quietly.

"Inside the leg. Ever since you found my body. Your words...

'Resurrect.'

'Undo.'

'Wake up.' I felt every single one. They didn't bring me back completely, but they woke me up. I've been conscious this whole time, screaming at you, and you couldn't hear me." Katherine's breath hitched.

"The Nonagon..." she whispered. Her gaze drifted toward the satchel where impossible cobalt light pulsed steadily.

"It took my words..." she breathed.

"And anchored you here." Clock's shattered violet eyes widened.

"You used resurrection words on a dead person... and the Nonagon-""It must've rerouted the energy," Katherine murmured, more to herself than anyone else.

"It couldn't bring her back completely... so it put her somewhere." She stared at the prosthetic.

"You're alive," she whispered.

"You're actually alive." Katherine broke into helpless laughter. It came out cracked and almost hysterical, but it was laughter.

"A leg," she wheezed.

"My best friend is a leg."

"Your best friend is a very cute leg," Butter corrected.

"Don't leave out the important part." The laughter only grew stronger. Tears streamed down Katherine's face. She was still shaking, still barely holding herself together beneath the Nonagon's impossible power, yet for the first time since Butter's death, she was laughing. Butter's voice softened.

"Honeycakes... your eyes." Katherine instinctively touched her face.

"What about them?"

"They're different. And your tattoos..." A pause.

"Did you always have those?" Her fingers drifted to the cobalt geometric patterns spreading across her collarbones.

"No. The Nonagon's been... changing me. Metamorphosing me. I don't fully understand it yet." She glanced at Clock.

"He asked if I was an Abomination."

"Well..." Butter said gently,"you do look rather Abomination-ish now."

"I don't think I am. I'm still human. Mostly. The Nonagon's just... optimising me. Making me more capable of surviving whatever comes next."

"Unfathomable," Butter muttered. Clock's attention lingered on the tattoos. His brow furrowed as his thoughts caught up. Honeycakes? Sugarbear? He'd never imagined his sister liked women, let alone had a girlfriend. What in the world had happened during the few hours he'd been gone? He quietly abandoned the thought and focused on something safer.

"They're well done," he said.

"Traditional geometric work. Ethiopian, if I'm not mistaken." Katherine blinked.

"You know Ethiopian tattoos?"

"I know a lot of things." A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"They suit you. They're... cool."

"Super cool," Butter corrected immediately.

"You're a proper cosmic warrior now, Honeycakes. The eyes, the tattoos... honestly, I'm a little jealous." Katherine touched the corner of her luminous grey eye, the cobalt limbal ring faintly pulsing.

"I don't feel like a cosmic warrior," she admitted.

"I feel like I'm falling apart."

"You're still holding together," Butter replied softly.

"That's what matters." Silence settled. Katherine almost confessed everything. The false-twin chambers. The hundreds of preserved bodies. The machinery she'd destroyed. The certainty that every Enforcer who died from this point onward would stay dead forever. They weren't zombies like the Talons. They'd been human. The thought still weighed heavily on her. She swallowed it.

"The wolf," she said instead.

"I destroyed all its copies. The false-twin chambers are gone." Clock's expression hardened.

"All of them?"

"All of them. Every last one. If that wolf dies..." she met his eyes, "... it stays dead." He studied her for several long seconds before nodding once.

"Good." Butter's voice was quieter now.

"How many?"

"I don't know. Hundreds, maybe." Katherine looked away.

"I didn't count. I just... made sure none of them could ever come back." Another silence. When Katherine looked up again, the laughter was gone. Tears still clung to her cheeks, but her fractured silver eyes burned with fierce resolve. She rose to her feet.

"We're going to find that wolf," she said.

"We're going to kill it. After that, we'll find a way to put you back into a real body."

"We are?"

"Yes."

"But how?"

"I don't know yet," Katherine answered.

"I honestly don't care. We'll figure it out. I promise, Sugarbear." Clock watched her for a long moment before nodding.

"If there's a way," he said quietly, "we'll find it." He carefully set the prosthetic on the floor. It balanced itself upright without assistance. Butter spoke again, her voice almost hesitant.

"What about the Nonagon?"

"What about it?"

"It's... doing something to you." Katherine lowered her gaze. Thin cobalt tendrils still traced beneath her skin like glowing veins.

"I know."

"We don't know what it'll do in the long run. If you keep using it-""I know."

"But-""Fais chier!" Katherine snapped. She dragged a hand through her blue hair, breathing hard.

"I know, okay?" she shouted.

"I know it's changing me. I know I'm becoming something that isn't entirely human anymore. I know the Nonagon's rewriting me from the inside out." Her voice cracked, equal parts rage and exhaustion.

"I know I might never come back from this." She closed her eyes.

"I just..." A long, shaky breath escaped her.

"I don't care anymore." ("Fais chier!" is a French vulgar expression roughly meaning "For fuck's sake!", "God damn it!", or literally "Go take a shit!" depending on context.)