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It is the nature of people to overcomplicate things: we want there to be nuance to evil and dimensions to good. The truth is often simpler than that. More often than not, it is about survival, making the pain stop. Looking at the wretched nightmare, the pieces finally together, I said:

“Were you that angry, Portia?”

I took in her ruin, her metamorphosis complete, and if there was any part of me that believed her capable of salvation, it was dead as the rest of our friends.

I swallowed. Through the lattice of her ribs, I could see the line of her mouth, embedded in the torn walls of her abdominal cavity, flinch.

“Why didn’t you just leave?”

There was movement there under the surface of the muscle: something pressing, straining to get free.

So much said about the Raw Mother and so little known.

I wondered—wonder still, will always wonder—if there were any other sisters in the sorority, if it’d been Portia alone, walking through that burned-down house, nursing this change.

If everything else that followed was the god growing in her belly, stretching through her skin, wanting more, wanting someone else to connect to.

If Portia had ever even existed or if it was the Raw Mother wearing her face, using her tongue, reaching with her hands for more, always more.

Because if there’s one thing I knew, it was that this world was hungry.

Portia struck the ground hard with one leg and the translucent chitin fractured.

Out from it emerged a fresh limb, this one banded in pewter and white, robed still in the leftover molt.

She shuddered, another leg writhing out of its molt.

I couldn’t tell how much of the girl remained, if it even mattered.

After all, it wasn’t like she even had a head any longer.

“B o w.”

“Dad tried that. Didn’t work on me.” Adam rolled one shoulder backward, then the other, a smile tipping onto his mouth, the expression nearly obscured by the smoke boiling from his skin. I couldn’t tell which of the two sheened in the low and gilded light was the worse monster.

Portia let free a silken laugh and said, without any of its slurring lunacy, with such clarity and nonchalance that if I closed my eyes I could have believed it was Portia standing there, human and whole and unchanged.

“Then I’ll make you.”

If I had any illusions left of being either of their equals, they were gone the moment they moved: Portia blurring into motion, Adam erupting again into fire.

Though she was the one to lunge, he was the one to strike first, bringing a hand scything forward.

If Portia weren’t just as fast, if her anatomy hadn’t been so irrevocably changed, that might have been all she wrote, but she torqued midair to one side at the last second, and Adam’s hand speared through her collarbone, bursting an eye.

Portia screamed.

The mouth in her chest widened farther, the jaws of her ribs spreading, and from the hollow sprung a second set of jaws, spearing into Adam’s chest. To my shock and his, the fire did nothing.

His expression went from one of insouciance to surprise as the jaws sunk through his skin like he was a pat of warmed butter.

Then the blood came, a mealy gush, entrails ribboning out, chunks pouring free.

Adam let out a noise, a gasp, really, and sank to his knees.

Portia stepped daintily over his smoldering form, her myriad eyes fixed on me.

To my surprise, there was contrition in her posture as she inched forward, in how she held her limbs meekly to her chest, and the thing Portia had become felt irrevocably her again, for all that she was missing a head and sporting a mélange of new bodily accoutrements.

Inexplicably, she seemed sorry, not just for what’d happened, but for all of it.

The fact we were here instead of wherever she had imagined us to be.

“You don’t want to eat me, I promise,” I said.

“It was easier.” It was Portia as I remembered her, the words gorgeously enunciated. I couldn’t tell you how. She didn’t have the correct appendages for it, at least not as far as I could say. “It was good for both of us. She told me this.”

“Lots of abusive assholes say shit like that.” I laughed, blood fountaining from my lips. “Trust me.”

“Touch me?” said Portia, skittering closer, claws reaching for my hand, so much rasping hunger there that my breath snagged in my rotting lungs. “Touch me. Make it stop. H-h-hold me. It hurts.”

They promised we would be fed, and they gave us carrion.

“Please.” The word was moaned like a promise, like a portent.

Portia crossed the distance between us and folded herself onto the ground beside me, her torso cocked so that she could flash puppy-dog eyes at me, so miserable I almost felt sorry for her, would have if not for the memory of her spooning meat from Eoan’s severed torso like he was a soup bowl.

Still, I almost reached a hand out for her.

“You’re dying,” said Portia.

But you will not; not you, not ever, wedded to us forever.

“No shit.” Trembling, I took the cigarette pack I’d stolen from Rowan’s pocket earlier, spun the battered cardboard in circles with a hand. “We all are. Well, some of us are doing it faster than others.”

“Hold me?”

She is ours.

“Was it worth it?” It’d be so easy to retrieve the last cigarette from the carton, light it, let myself bask in the nicotine for as long as it was sustainable. Let a substance do the work of distracting me from my aches. “Giving it all up to her? Subservience instead of release?”

O u r s.

“I was trapped,” said Portia. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“I get that,” I said.

In her, we live again. In her, we grow again.

“Frightened,” said Portia so very piteously.

Gone were the pith, the facade, the polish.

Gone was the monster, gone was the girl, gone was everything but an emptiness that ate through me like a disease.

“It hurt. It hurt for years. It hurt. She made me hurt. She hurt me. She took away the pain but it hurt still.”

She laughed then and the sound made me relieved to know I wouldn’t grow old with that echoing in my skull.

“Lonely,” said Portia like it mattered, and I guess in some strange terrible fashion, it did. “Don’t leave me.”

The words hiccupped out of me, a surprise.

“I won’t.”

So I gathered what might have been a god in utero to my chest, trembling as Portia folded herself around me, and I tucked my chin into the nook of her collarbone, felt eyelashes against my chin.

A part of me wonders what might have happened if I had said no, if I had rebuked her, refused myself this sentimentality.

Would Portia have been inoculated against what followed?

I think about that and other regrets a lot.

Adam rose up behind her, unfolding like a fable, the flesh melted from his bone. He was skin and charred tissue, grinning skull and those blue eyes still shining improbably through the mess. The hole gaped in his chest still, right where a heart should have rested.

“Fuck you too,” said Adam, driving both hands into Portia’s back.

I could feel him pull. I could feel Portia coming undone, and I ran what was left of my magic into her, taking apart whatever was left of her that was human, unraveling her, even as Adam’s fire blackened my vision.

I must have screamed. I think I did. I’m certain Portia wailed, pinioned suddenly between the two of us, but at that point, it didn’t matter.

When Portia was nothing but ash and clumps of meat on the ground, Adam stretched again to his full height, hands outstretched to receive the world’s bounties. “And so the prophecy is fulfilled.”

Except, of course, it wasn’t.

“Actually…”

“What did you do?” said Adam.

And I smiled.