While getting dressed, Dahlia read a review of her previous exhibition. She threw on a sweatshirt with fraying stumps where the sleeves once were (a faster modification than sewing on a second pair) and hopped in place as she pulled on leggings while trying to read. The column came from the August issue of Artbomb!!, a monthly zine anonymously written and thrown off the roof of New York apartment buildings overnight. It had been dropped into the world about two months ago, and the reference to her collection had been a part of a retrospective on the pervious year, which attested: “Dahlia Rhode’s ‘CVLT’ (2013) brings to mind everything we hate about twenty-something orchestrators who dress like Wednesday Addams, deconstructs the commodification of the macabre with a startling self-awareness, and, incredibly, makes it all fresh again.” It then goes on to discuss a whole lot of what it means to be a cliché, what it means to be fresh, what it means to make a cliché fresh, a whole lot of Art Talk that made her want to do something drastic to every art philosophy major she’d ever met. That section didn’t much concern her. She had already made the things, the last thing she wanted to read was someone else talk about them. She had read this article exactly three times: the day it arrived, in a packet of similar periodicals which she would leave on her coffee table to bolster her credentials with arty guests, again that same night because she had felt oddly indignant about it the whole day and wanted to know the exact words it used to better argue with it in her head, and then again at just this moment. It was a glowing review from a respectably obscure source, and it would be proudly displayed in her living room magazine pile had it not been for that bit about “self-aware”ness, which stuck in her head like an insult she couldn’t quite understand.

She selected a couch on which to finish the article in the same way others in her tax bracket might alight on a bench in their topiary garden, draping herself like the subject of a Fuseli painting, one pair of arms holding the magazine and the other playing with her hair or stroking her leg. The living room was made to be a palatable facsimile of her aesthetic, a fatal collision of Modern and Gothic that left no survivors on either side, carefully constructed to balance her own sensibilities with those of people who actually had taste. All one really needs to know about the room regarding specific contents is that the centerpiece was a half-scale replica of the Cristo de La Laguna, Spain’s most famous crucifix, mounted on a mechanism which turned the dying savior into the hour hand of an enormous clock. The fact that it almost tied the room together was a thesis-worthy feat of interior decoration which Dahlia herself had no part in. Looking at it now, watching the blood-streaked image of Christ as He indicated that it was 1:54PM, she decided she would have to be more observant about the self-awareness thing.

She looked down from the clock to the inverted cross on her sweatshirt, to the black skull ring on her finger, to the goat skull on her coffee table. She shrugged. It was a theme.

She didn’t remember feeling particularly self-aware back when she was putting CVLT together. In the moment it had all been holy purpose and artistic instinct, but Artbomb!! seemed to think her genuine commitment was actually ironic detachment, and they were the ones who went to college for this sort of thing, so maybe they knew her intent better than she did. After all, her debut show had turned out to be “a calculatedly callous condemnation of media’s fixation on murder” and “a hauntingly garish collection that uses the infamous Black Dahlia slaying as set dressing for the true art on display here: mutilation as a profound metaphor for the loss of innocence”, whereas she had always thought of Bisected Youth Vigil as more “High School Sketchbook Doodles, 2007-2009”. Perhaps, then, she was genuinely committed to ironic detachment. Or, genuinely detached and ironically committed. Interpretation is what it is, regardless of intention, she mused.

The doorbell rang, and she rose to answer it.

 “Hello, Miss Rhode,” said Mike, the gallery rep, flanked by servitors in grey jumpsuits and trying very hard to be suave, “You look lovely this, um, morning.”

Cut to Dahlia, slumped against the doorframe, hair awry and still wearing last night’s makeup. She’d had the Go Towards The Sad Girl And The Mexican Guy dream again and slept badly both before and after. Cut back to Mike, meaning every word of his compliment. Michael, Mike to his friends and to wealthy patrons, was an oddly long and slender-bodied man whom Dahlia disliked in the lazy, general way she disliked everyone she did not personally select to be in her life. There were exactly two interesting things about Mike, and they were these: first, he looked as if someone had tried to make him into taffy at some point when he was very young. Second, it was painfully clear that he had fallen in love with her in the same way some people get hit by freight trains.

“You want coffee, Mike?” she asked, not heading towards the kitchen.

“Oh, sure!”

“Me too. I take four milk, four sugar. The machine is next to the toaster, sugar’s next to that, milk is in the fridge.” She moved her lips in a way that looked, to outside observers, like a smile. Mike nodded as if his neck were broken and hurried off, delighted at the agency he had been given.

They had originally met three years ago at a house party, shortly after Dahlia’s apprenticeship had ended. Dahlia had attended in order to fish for commissions, back when she felt she should do that. Remembering that night, Mike had formed the impression that they had made such interesting conversation (he had ended up playing something akin to twenty questions with her, except it was way more than twenty and she wasn’t playing), they had really hit it off (he had mentioned that his favorite animal was the blue whale and Dahlia was too high to remember what whales were at the time), and that maybe they could go out together sometime (she laughed so hard strawberry daiquiri came out her nose). He had managed to gather courage enough to suggest buying her lunch a few times (to discuss her work, of course, very professional) but had only ever succeeded in buying her two and a half drinks about a year ago. Even that night went nowhere, as Mike was nothing if not a coward and Dahlia was nothing if not a lesbian.

Mike had neglected to tell the servitors to come inside, and they stood just beyond the entranceway, staring ahead and seeing nothing. She beckoned them in with a universal wave, and they jerkily obeyed. As she looked them over, checking their scars and sigils with an expert eye, she set about planning the conversation to come. She would be allowed to put Ghost together herself, of course, and she would probably be allowed to do it alone, but Mike had a habit of dropping in on her unannounced, and being allowed to stay in the building alone after the showing would be tricky. Her challenge, therefore, was to devise some obscure artistic context, something about this piece in particular that absolutely required her to be alone and required him, best case scenario, to be on the moon. She had a few standbys. She would figure it out. The real issue was that she would have to make conversation leading up to and away from the moment of the question, an irritating fact which she tempered with the realization that she could probably get by with single-syllable responses, maybe a giggle if she started to lose him. Ghost had already been broken down into seven pieces that would each need to be taken down the freight elevator and loaded into a van, and she guessed that the process would take about twenty minutes total, which meant she probably had about fifteen minutes of talking to fake her way through. Simple.

Mike returned with the coffee a little ahead of schedule, handing her a mug with pride and grace. She tried to think of something subtly unkind to say and, looking at the coffee, noticed that it was darker than she would have liked.

“Darker than I would have liked,” she said, drinking it anyway.

“Sorry. You ran out of milk.”

“Mmm.”

“I always figured you took your coffee black.”

“Take it white,” she said, gulping down another swallow, “I’m addicted to the stuff, have to drink it every morning, the least it can do is not taste like coffee.” He laughed a little too loud, a social cue she almost physically sidestepped. She pointed the servitors in the direction of her studio with a command signal. They selected a path to the studio’s entrance that, while mathematically the most direct, took them through the awkwardly narrow space between a couch and an end table.

“So tell me about your boys here,” said Dahlia, waving to the ambling bodies with two synchronized hands. She followed after them, taking the proper way around, and Mike followed.

“Well, they aren’t mine, they belong to the gallery, but I guess it wouldn’t be wrong to say they work for me. Bought them off a family moving business that went under,” Mike said, padding after her, “Ooh, here’s a little detail you’ll appreciate: apparently, the taller one there was the father. Of, you know, of the family that had the moving company?” She snorted. At least he had her sense of humor pegged.

“We bought them last January with the money from the Drury benefit, had enough left over for some alterations.”

“Mhm.” Thirteen minutes to go.

“They have a second bicep in both arms and we went for… Something in their hands, something to help with lifting,” he said, trying to find the memory.

“Who did the work?” Dahlia had already spotted the work; it looked like someone had widened the fingers and awkwardly padded the palms with abductor muscles, which was a waste of at least two good hands as far as Dahlia was concerned. The intended effect, she imagined, was a stronger grip and a wider surface area, but it probably only impaired closing the hand and certainly did nothing to support that second bicep.

“An unknown from Brooklyn! Very pleasant fellow, very affordable work,” Mike said, as if both of these things were true. Dahlia hoped so, for his sake.

“Did he do the bits as well?”

“He installed them, we provided them,” Mike chirped. As they entered the studio, the servitors stood just inside, stone still and waiting for a command. Their bits were plain white and full-face, not blended at the edges, with ESOTERICA CONTEMPORARY ART stenciled in a committee-approved copperplate font on the lower half of the mask.

Her studio was purpose-built for orchestration: it was a box with white walls, a freezer in the back, drains in the floor, hoses on all four walls, itself almost as big as the rest of her apartment. This was the only room her decorator had been forbidden to manage, and so Dahlia had taken it upon herself one summer to have the floor painted with an elaborate mural of ley-lines and nonsense pseudomagic viscera that she felt contributed to the ambiance of the room. A more tasteful person would have observed that the general disorder of the room, plus the fact that the floor was badly obscured by paint and furniture, rendered the design not so much ambient as nonexistent. She kept her maid out of here as well, and therefore it lacked the same showroom standards he kept the rest of the house to. In fact, to say that this room “lacked the same standards” as the rest of the house was a criminal understatement. It took a set of entirely different, much lower standards and then screwed those pooch on those too. Rolling trays piled with scalpels and wire stood like battered nurses around and under nine empty steel slabs in locations best described as “assorted”. Once in neat rows, they had been kicked, dragged, even overturned to clear the way for dozens of starting-all-overs and its-all-wrongs and don’t-tell-me-i-have-to-break-this-arm-AGAINs over the course of the past six months. The studio was a wreck, but it was Dahlia’s wreck, and she was proud of it. The only part of the room she had been more careful about not flinging morgue tables into was the wall of glass doors that led out onto the roof. Glass, she had learned the hard way, is expensive. The seven components of Ghost, silhouettes of white tarpaulin that subtly twisted and breathed in the half-light from the windows, dominated the room like pillars of fog.

“So this is where the magic happens,” Mike exhaled, putting on his Art Voice, “I’m very excited. Here, wait, let me get a good view. The reveal, the first moment, that’s my favorite part of your work, Dee, it’s all so intense and alive in those first seconds.”

“Don’t call me Dee.” She had long ago given up on subtle discouragement.

“Sorry.”

He paced, looking at them from different angles. Dahlia’s mind drifted back to her earlier meditation on intention and wondered how stupidity factored into the equation.

“I once heard that most crimes are solved within the first forty-eight hours after being committed. They become much harder to solve after those two days.”

“So my art is a crime scene,” she repeated, all four hands on her hips.

“In a good way,” Mike winced, more than seemed necessary.

“Pack another pipe, Sherlock. It still needs to be put together.” He cocked his head, breaking the reverie and blinking away potential curations.

“What?”
        “It’s too big to move in one piece, so I took it apart. I’ll put it back together in the space.”

“Oh. Oh! I thought it seemed rather different than your previous work,” he said, laughing nervously. Dahlia rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue to get the servitor’s attention, indicating each piece in turn. They shuffled forward and tapped gently along the sculptures to find a solid place to lift by.

“So, I’ll need to be totally alone putting this thing together. No interruptions, no supervision, no exceptions.”

“Certainly.” Something shifted in him, an uncharacteristic solemnity and professionalism which she greatly preferred. He took out a small journal to make a note.

“And I’ll need about three hours alone with the piece immediately following the opening night gala. Same terms apply.”

“Okay,” he said, still writing, “Any tools or items we can provide?” He looked up, pen at the ready. Something was wrong. Or, not wrong, but an unknown factor had changed.

“Uh,” she began again, eyeing him warily, “No, just... Nobody can come in or watch or anything. Nobody.”

“Don’t worry, Miss Rhode. I expected something like this. We all, we at Esoterica, we all understand.”

“Oh, well, good,” she said, attempting to retrace the conversation back to the point where she had lost control of it, “You’re sure it’s not a big deal?” She wasn’t sure how relived to be, but she was keenly aware of an unmistakable note of pity in his voice. She turned away, which seemed to be the right thing to do. He stepped lightly over to her, hands waving in an odd placating motion that might have been less awkward if he hadn’t been so afraid of touching her.

“Not for us! We want to do everything we can for you.”

“We? Not you?” Reflexes almost made this a pointed joke, but she resisted, trying to tease her tone into communicating an unfamiliar kind of grateful confusion. He took it.

“Well – both. I would do all I could as your friend, of course, but, to be frank, the board has given me some leeway with you. They like having you around.”

“That wasn’t very frank.”

“They – consider you a valuable asset. Very valuable.”

“Better. Why?”

“You’re good for business. Sigilwork draws crowds, and your sigilwork is unparalleled,” he said, “Your art has this incredible mixture of shock value and deeper meaning that the gallery wants to make itself known for. Plus, you’re a beautiful young woman of color, and the board is… none of… those things. We think you’re going places, and the board wants Esoterica to be where you can say you got your start.” She considered this. It might be nice, having a pet.

“So why are you worried about losing me?” He smiled warily, moving almost as if to catch her.

“People make big decisions when they are – dealing with grief.”

“Grief?” She repeated, bracing herself to accept whatever he was referring to with a tearful affirmation, something breathy and quick. “Ah – yes,” perhaps. She enjoyed a little applied deviousness, acting included, but feigning distress always made her feel silly. It would be worth it to keep Esoterica under her thumb, but she cringed internally.

“Well, everyone is worried about… Well, how you’re taking the, ah, recent tragedy,” he said, delicately, “You’ve been scarce since your father – passed away.”

And there it was. Dahlia’s father had been killed in a car crash while receiving road head from his business partner’s wife. To Dahlia, this particular mode of death failed to qualify him for the gentle euphemism “passed away” and put him squarely within the realm of the more blunt “fucking died”, to say nothing of her personal opinion of him, which ratcheted things up to “fucking died, the bastard”. She was in the planning stage of Ghost at the time, and it had caused no change in the course of her work except justification for one night of celebratory drinking that probably would have happened regardless. She had accepted her inheritance, which was more than superfluous, took the first offer she got for the body (like hell was she going to use it herself), and planned a perfunctory funeral for him just so she could sleep through it. Mainly, she had forgot it had even happened.

“Ah – yes,” she said, the very vision of sorrow. She tried to figure out what angle to keep her face at, to make her eyes shine with what she hoped would look like tears.

“If there’s anything we can do to help, please just let us know. Let me know,” Mike said, straining to comfort her without touching her. She smiled in the same way one might swipe a credit card.

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure, Miss Rhode.”

Ten minutes later, the pickup had been signed for and Mike was out the door. It was all really happening. She cracked four joints and twenty knuckles as she made her way to the bathroom, blowing herself a kiss from each hand in the mirror as she passed, one for a job well done and three more because she was worth it. She was sore from two weeks of late nights, so she took half a muscle relaxer without deliberation and two aspirin as a more responsible afterthought. She debated a shot of vodka as well, since it was afternoon already, and she still had some coffee, so she could always drink that if she got too sleepy, so why the hell not? She fancied herself quite good at balancing substances like this, but she would also be the first to recount any number of stories proving that she was, quite simply, not. She fingered the scar on her side, letting the textured whorl of skin under her thumb talk her out of the drink. Food first, at least. That seemed reasonable.

There was an unfamiliar paper on the countertop next to the coffee machine, which she collected without interest on her way to the pantry. She was unsurprised to find that it was Mike’s phone number, flanked by a long and lingering missive about the loss of his own father. She had thrown his number away often enough to have it near-memorized, and she knew full well she would forget anything she learned about Mike’s father within the hour, so into the garbage it went. She leaned into the doorframe, considering the contents of her pantry as one might watch a cityscape from an airplane. Cooking held no fascination for Dahlia. She adored food and the eating of it, but when she had to make it herself, it died somehow. She could never crystalize any joy in following a recipe, and when creating her own dishes had proven to be a less than viable option, she detached automatically. She cooked in a fugue, idly mixing salt and hot sauce into a pot full of boxed ramen while the conscious part of her plowed through obscure sigil formulas and their particular uses. When it came to providing the mental space to work out problems, she had always considered cooking the lesser cousin to showering. The mechanism that formed the keystone in the sophisticated array of runes governing the behavior of a stretching torso in Bisected Youth Vigil had been the product of a three hour long shower and a fistful of coke, back before she eased off the hard stuff. Cooking, meanwhile, still required enough awareness and focus that the most she could do was turn problems over and around, chewing through basic troubleshooting and wishing she could get her hands on a body instead of a pot.

Today was the twenty-third. That gave her a week for final preparations.

She padded barefoot through her living room, food in one pair of hands, coffee and utensils in the other, and stepped into her study. Originally designed as a draining and defleshing room before it was discovered that sigils could do these things faster than knives and beetles, Dahlia had the six-foot coffinboxes removed from the walls so that the cavities could be used as awkwardly deep bookshelves. This was her research room and private study, alternately a place of great and frenzied productivity or none at all. It consisted of four walls, a desk, one door to her studio, and one door to her living room. Available wallspace was choked with corkboard and clustered sketches (she had bought pushpins only once and had lost the better half of them almost immediately, so the few that remained held dozens of pages each) depicting complex and dubiously functional sigilwork overlaid onto a phantasmagoria of body parts in a hundred thousand configurations. Many other orchestrators kept the sum of their work in one bound grimoire, the enormous books serving as both portfolio and reference library, but Dahlia found more formal mediums constricting. As such, many of the half-designed symbols and cutaway diagrams pinned to her walls were scribbled on cocktail napkins, drawn in sharpie over torn magazine pages, even sketched onto toilet paper and applicator wrappings with lipstick or eyeliner. The desk was covered with sprawling stacks of more complete sigil designs, the ones at the top being mainly focused on draining, storage, and condensation. Somewhere in the mess were the hours of blueprinting and research that went into Ghost, and below that, the paper trail for CVLT, and so on. Previous layers rarely got disturbed unless she was looking for lecture notes from years back, and even then, she was able to assume dates with relative confidence and pluck what she needed without much upheaval. She knew she was getting close to original drafts of Bisected Youth Vigil, for instance, when her own system of margin notes and scribbled arrows briefly turned into orderly blocks of NYU’s Command Compression notation – she had tried to learn NCC in the winter of 2011 and found it fought her every step of the way. For college kids doing rote work, perhaps, or orchestrators who would be building dock workers for the rest of their lives. Not for her.

The shelves contained all the classic orchestration books as a matter of course – daddy had seen to that – but they were grossly outnumbered by videos. Five seasons of Sailor Moon on VHS took up more space than her entire art library combined, and that’s before the three movies. Even that paled in comparison to her collection of horror movies (large, but mostly unwatched), a variety of unpleasant documentaries (small, but mostly watched), and, hidden away, some pornography (medium, all watched). This is not to say that what books she had went unread: Dahlia had adapted her own grafting technique from Terrence Brown’s I Went To Med School So You Don’t Have To and she often found herself turning to Harvey Tossil’s infamously banned memoir Limbs, Limbs, Limbs for inspiration. Most of her reference library – pages and pages of sigils stolen from professors or ripped out of textbooks – she’d had transferred to microfiche a few years back, when it was becoming popular again.

The library was also the home of Mr. Doe’s closet. Some people had teddy bears, some people had pets, Dahlia had the ruined corpse of an unidentified biker. Her father (‘s manservant) had taken her to buy a body and tools within twelve hours of her first animation, and this is how she first met John Doe. Back in ’02, the body of a man had been scraped off the walls (walls, plural) of an underpass and, since the body could not be identified, what was left was immediately sold as scrapple to a local corpsemonger. While most of him was too shredded for even the most optimistic orchestrator, his torso was still in one battered piece and even had one (utterly shattered) arm still attached. Dahlia, then ten, had bought him for cheap in the same way wealthy children from previous generations might buy a gently used drum set. The corpsemonger in question was a short and broad man named Pilkington who Dahlia still purchased from once in a blue moon, and while he had been calling the body Lord Nelson, Dahlia never got the joke, and since his papers marked him as John Doe #02136 (NY, NY 10268), this was what Dahlia called him. She ordered and installed the bit herself, set his arm herself, and drew her first sigil (Wong’s Closure, most every orchestrator’s first sigil) in sharpie on his back. Over the next few months he became her first servitor, wordlessly stumbling around her father’s house with poorly chosen legs, good for practice setting bones after he took that week’s header down a flight of stairs and not much else. As she grew older and went to work under Paxton Burton, Doe was slowly stripped of usable pieces until he was back to a torso dangling limply from a ceiling harness. This is how he was when she entered her library that morning, hanging in the library’s small closet like some ripe and gruesome fruit.

He had been a large man in life, but a decade of harvesting and modification had left him gaunt and hairless and pale, all of which were exacerbated by the hundreds of thin scars that crosshatched his body. Some were neater than others. His hair was mostly gone, sparse and silver where it hadn’t been eradicated by scar tissue. He raised his only arm in greeting when she opened the door, downing her coffee, feeling it slither warm and searching into her belly as the whisper-touch of animus sent golden feathers down her arm. Doe waggled his thigh stumps and attempted to feign a living stillness while she set her plate down, pecking contemplatively at her food and looking him over like a long-lost storybook. He was, in a way. For those who knew where to look, Doe’s body was a road map of Dahlia’s career. His shifting was a series of subtle programmed movements on a long loop; a childhood attempt to break up the eerie mannequin-stillness that servitors naturally idled in. It was her first homebrew sigil project, a trio of saucer-sized circles on Doe’s left hip. The guts of each sigil were so verbose and tightly packed that they were almost black at a distance – it was a miracle that they worked half as well as they did, especially eight years on. Accidental abrasions and tentative slices scarred over years before with ragged and uneven edges where amateur stitches once held them together gave way to sharp, flat blocks of darkened skin when she first began to use real gut instead of fiber thread. Six two-inch marks ran like the steps of a ladder up the side of his neck where Dahlia had, years later, tested different brands for discoloration and ease of use. Venkmann’s was her preferred brand, of course, but Adu was a must when she worked with darker skin. Of course.

He waved again, not understanding, some part of her stance or movement renewing the behavior. She waved back. His phosphor-dot eyes tracked her sluggishly, like twin searchlights through fog: there was only the faintest of sparks in him now. She hadn’t left much in him to begin with, too much animus is an accident waiting to happen, but Wong’s Closure tended to burst when asked to cooperate with more complicated sigils. Some testing she had done in June, maybe, popped it – probably one of the funnels she had routed through it. It would be a simple matter to look it over, find the leak. The sigil could be harvested wholesale, skin and all, to be reused for next time, and…

Something far away garroted the thought. She blinked. What was she doing? John Doe began his cycle of subtle movements again. She took one last slurp of ramen, patted Doe on the head, and ripped the life out of him. As his animus flowed into hers, the glowing will-o-wisps of his eyes faded, and she could feel the weak pulse in his nerves wink out like candles in a wind. He slumped very slightly, as he didn’t have much left to slump with, and was still. Under the bit, his face was gaunt and pale from years in darkness, with sealed lips and empty sockets staring through and beyond her.

Taking John Doe apart was easy. There was no extraneous gristle in him anymore, no bits of connective tissue that needed to be hacked or sawed away like there were in fresher bodies, and no fluids to foul her desk. Peeling away unnecessary muscle and dermis was an act more akin to separating orange slices than butchery, and once his skin was out of the way, she could pull out what she needed mostly by hand. Long patties of muscle slid free of the skin around them with wet pops and smacks, like red-grey slugs, and she sorted each into a pile based on function and size. Later, this harvested musculature would be tossed into sorting bins or reworked into the thing Doe would become. For now, it sat in sad and sagging stacks at the edge of her workspace, more like a mechanic’s castoff hardware than meat that used to be a person.

Doe’s empty sockets regarded her without motion or judgment. She had always found freedom in the hollow eyes of unbridled servitors – the stark black felt like soul-shaped hole, the surefire sign of an unpopulated space where her voice would ring true. Their void felt like being listened to. It made her want to talk, to fill their emptiness, to put brush to blank page, and, most recently, to build a ghost. She settled into her work, methodically slicing away muscles and excising sigils using her four arms with spiderlike ease. She could cut and stitch at the same time if she were so inclined, with a needle and thread in one pair of hands and a scalpel or dermatome in the other, but she was in no hurry, and using all four arms on the same task gave her a sense of arachnid satisfaction. She cut along his sides, peeling the skin up and out in wide sheets, which were then pinned to the underside of his arms and secured with a single deft knot in the thread. Similar sheets of skin came from his back, carved and shaped to patch remaining holes. Where the sewing was done, she drew a finger over each line of stitching, feeling flesh knitting together, watching the grey gut thread melt into skin and form neat lines of scar tissue rising and blooming like dough in an oven. Down at her fingertips, she could see her fingernails growing. She cut a few breaks into his arm and fused them together again at an angle to form the rim of a wide, flat surface across his front, stretching from the tip of his left elbow stump to the elbow of his more intact right arm. In the end, it was a gently sloping vertical dish of flesh, trapezoidal and lightly taut.

        She rose and selected a sheaf of sketches, carefully set off to the side from the rest of her paperwork. The first few pages were blueprints of limb positioning, not necessarily precise but mindfully drafted, and continued thumbing through until she found the sigil she was looking for. The Lens, as she figured it would go down in history books, was the focal point that all the other sigils fed into. It was a triumph. Quadruple-nested funnel points, self-culling seals, if-statements running four and five variables deep, all written with an eye for efficiency bordering on brutal. Even scaled-down, it filled the paper with millimeters to spare, a perfect circle packed with command glyphs so tight that she’d had to fix any mistakes with the tip of a pin. In the lower right corner was written, “LENS Mk 4”. Then, below, with obvious relish, “FINAL VERSION (FINAL) (REAL)”. It practically throbbed with power – theoretically. It relied on a number of assumptions about the way certain poorly-understood command glyphs filled a body with animus, and though small-scale testing and natural egotism had given her confidence enough to move forward, she would have greatly preferred a more thorough testing phase and less threat of jailtime. Even if it didn’t work now, workshopping the Lens might be task enough to garner the attention of a team of well-paid double-blind grad students over a summer.

         She pressed the page to John Doe’s widened chest, searched for a pushpin, found one on the wall, reached for it, found she couldn’t reach it, reached again, dropped the sigil, picked it up, pulled the pin from the wall (ignoring the cascade of papers that followed), realized she needed a second pin, settled for a scalpel, kicked papers out from under her feet, pinned the Lens to John Doe, and stepped back to inspect it. She leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to decide where to start.

When she opened them, she was in bed. The clock on the far wall said it was nearly four in the morning.

Dahlia started the next day early and angry. At herself, really, for there was nobody else that could possibly be to blame, but angry all the same. How could she be wasting all this time with less than a week to spare? Getting blackout drunk while drafting a sigil was stupid, but correctible stupid. Doing it while applying a sigil was a recipe for disaster. She dressed angrily, she drank her dark bitter coffee angrily, had worked herself up into a nice simmering rage in anticipation of the half-finished mess she would have to spend the morning cutting off of Doe’s chest. That would be something like five feet of skin wasted. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She had even ruder than usual on the phone with Mike when he’d called to let her know Ghost had been installed and was culling properly. But when she stomped into her library to inspect the damage, she found her papers neatly arranged and Doe covered with a discreet tarp, ready to be transported. Her anger evaporated in the face of a kind of low-level disquiet that washed over her, a dark tide that pulled at her edges. When she yanked the tarp away, the Lens was printed on Doe’s chest with her usual precision – even in the tight corners where the runes had grown shrunken and cramped in her drafting. Her hand had never wavered or gone on some drunken attempt at optimizing the formulas. It was perfectly applied. Eerily so.

But still, now that she was looking at it, something was off. Not missing – maybe misplaced? The Lens was too complex to parse without going through the whole thing glyph by glyph, but she could already see that the sigil on the skin didn’t quite line up with her mental map. Something far away tickled the back of her mind, not quite a thought and not quite a feeling.  Distracted, she kicked it away, staring down the ragged hole in her memory and searching the void for an explanation. When none came, she sighed hard. She would have to adopt a more professional outlook. The debugging she would have to do to understand the whole of the problem would be a significant time investment, given the complexity of the piece, but when it was over, she would basically be done. From there, it was just some joint loosening, a quick test to be sure he would fit in the duffel bag she had set out, and then she would be good to go. She cracked her knuckles, all twenty fingers, and went to fetch her debugging skull.

Severed head debugging of was mainly a matter of explaining one’s way through the sigil in question, rune by rune, to an inanimate object of one’s choice until the problem became evident. Given the thematic leanings and materials available to most orchestrators, this was most commonly a severed head. Thus, the name. Dahlia’s debugging skull was relatively storied, as these things go: it had been a gift from noted orchestrator/rapper Lich King, whom she once drunkenly offered to trade livers with at a house party. Even though she fell asleep halfway through the operation, he remembered her fondly, even telling variations on the story in several interviews. Days after the party, her mailbox contained a light-hearted but eerily pointed letter, alongside a skull, which he assured her was his favorite debugging head. Considering certain events in the news at the time, Dahlia had come to quietly suspect that the head had once belonged his ex-wife. While several of Dahlia’s lawyer friends advocated turning it into the police, several other friends, with a better grasp on the non-legal aspects of the situation, suggested that she simply never think about it ever again. She went with the latter.

It was a full hour in when she found the problem. She had just begun reading off the sources the animus funnels were pulling from when she came across a glyph she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t just an obscure letter that rarely got used, either, it was a completely alien marking, a tiny three-pointed crown over an inverted cross. Staring at it made something squirm in the back of her head. Sure enough, it was in the exact same place on all sixteen funnels – not just a mistake, then. Something unknown but deliberate. She was having a hard time focusing, now; the far away thing gripped and fumbled in her brain, like some facet of a dream trying to surface, but she pushed it away, chewing though case after case of microfiche, searching for any reference to the unknown symbol. The alphabet sigil coding used was deduced wholesale from thirty years of trial and error, so discovering a new letter wasn’t unheard of, but usually it was the result of making small variations to known runes for a few weeks or months until something worked. Nothing like this.

 Finally, she found something close, a regular cross with only a triangle above it, written on an open legal pad in the background of an old photo. There was what might have been a description next to it, but the quality was far poor to be sure. The rest of the picture was of a man in a lab coat, surrounded by reference books, standing before a bank of computers. The Lazarus LTD symbol – the old one, from when she was a kid – was prominent on his breast pocket.

The far away thing seized her consciousness and tore it out, settling itself into the resulting hole in her mind. She went limp. She stiffened. It tested her limbs, trying to remember how to move a body. Just as it removed the microfiche from the machine, something else grabbed the far away thing’s attention. It panicked. It looked for an easy way to destroy the microfiche but found none and, in frustration, the far away thing released her husk and made its retreat. She fell face first into her desk.

The far away thing came back, replaced her mind with hurried care, and swam off again. Dahlia blinked. It was almost noon, though she had just checked the clock moments before. There was a piece of microfiche in her hand.

Next Chapter: II-His-Will-Be-Done