“Me, duh,” Kenzie said. “All of us. You.”

Damsel shook her head, only visible from behind, and picked up the pace in a way that was sure to tire her legs out.

It didn’t help that we were getting into thickets of crystal. Spikes that soon appeared often enough that we’d take two steps, find a crystal in front of us, have to circle around it to get past, and find another crystal in our way, if the way wasn’t blocked. With a black sky and crystal faces that were black if they didn’t have any light coming from directly behind them, it was easy to not see them until they were in arm’s reach.

It was Sveta and Love Lost who had the most luck navigating, and they became our guides, the rest of us taking the paths they chose, as the crystals grew taller and came to rest at diagonals and horizontals, forcing us to duck and crawl.

The images that popped up, at least, were vague, with no coherency. Closer to watching a television show with someone who was endlessly channel surfing, but the scenes were from our lives. Sitting in a car. Getting up from our seats in class. Opening the fridge to find the contents. Lacing up a bit of armor.

Tattletale’s next flicker gave us further guidance, then picked up in intermittency.

We emerged from the worst of the thicket to a spot where a tear across the landscape had felled most of the crystals and sent them somewhere else. And to our left, head the size of a house, was the thin, tall woman, with spikes radiating from her head to infinity in each direction, empty eye sockets staring us down.

One of the kids shrieked on seeing her. One of the guys said something to the tune of ‘hofuc’ in a short exhalation.

Shit. We did absolutely not see her coming. Is she that fast? Something else?

We scrambled back, as she reached out and over the chasm. Ducking into the thicket of crystals slowed us down.

“Hello there, you shitty bitch,” Tattletale said, her voice low, angry.

I looked over, and I could see that past the tear in the landscape, Tattletale’s agent was an extension of the landscape, built almost like a cone poised on another cone, except it was a person’s body in a toga-cut dress, twisting and rotating in jerks, like every movement snapped its own spine.

It had an abstract, eyeless, mouthless head bearing a full head of thick cords that could have been wires, that trailed down to the crystal below her. Each jerky rotation suggested a different number of arms, as she interacted with the forest around her, bringing up images just by facing each crystal. Each image that was brought up sparked off transmissions for elsewhere.