I Need You to Understand

Ben was dead.

So why did the guy staring at me make me think of him? Every time I glanced back I’d see it. Dark tectonic eyes that made the room tilt towards him. The same silent glare he’d give me when he had the solution but was waiting for me to catch up. This had become a ritual. Every Sunday at 4pm, the Victoria line, zone 2, I would find him. I studied him through furtive glances. I knew his patterns now, the carriage he chose, the seats he favoured. Every time I found him, it felt like Ben was waiting for me.

Today was different. I felt like something in me had changed. When the man got off at Seven Sisters, I got off too. I watched as he started to disappear into the throngs of people, becoming just another bobbing head. As the crowd swallowed him, it felt like he was evaporating in front of my eyes, and I couldn’t let him go. I flicked my hood up over my face. I followed the man with the strange glare.

He had left the station, and I had managed to keep up. The difficulty was keeping an appropriate distance, but London makes it too easy to disappear.

Ben had been an engineer before the cancer hollowed him out. He had no patience for feelings; he said emotions just sidetracked us from finding solutions.

When he told me he had a few months left to live, he explained everything in excruciating detail using scientific terms I didn’t understand. I repeated them back to him. He asked me how I felt, asked me to name my feelings as I just looked at him slack-jawed. He insisted that once something had a name, it could be understood and overcome. It didn’t help me. In the end there were no solutions.

Ben didn’t really do emotions. People said he was cold and he was. Sometimes he was distant, but he always looked after me.

We turned towards Tottenham Marshes. The crowds were thinning, and it was harder to follow. This guy didn’t even look like Ben, about twenty years older, thinning blond hair, but as the man quickened his pace, he even hurried like him. He must have known that I was following him. Part of me knew that what I was doing was insane. I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to cry out Ben — but Ben was dead.

We came to a block of flats, and the man went inside. I hesitated. There was no reason for me to follow, no explanation I could give if asked what I was doing. I bit my lip and proceeded inside.

The man had disappeared. I was faced with a lift and a set of stairs. I started to feel my heart race as I began to panic. I felt like I was losing Ben all over again. I exhaled slowly, stopped and listened, quieting my breathing until my heart stilled, and I heard footsteps from the stairwell. I went up, past the first two floors, and opened the door to the third. It was grotty and dilapidated, but there was no one in sight. I climbed up to the next floor. I felt like a child sneaking out of the house. I knew this was wrong. I knew I shouldn’t be here.

I opened the door to the fourth floor, and there he was, with his back to me. This was it. There was no plan. What was I doing here? What could I do now? He wasn’t moving, wasn’t going into any of the flats; he was just standing there. "Say what you came here to say," the stranger said. I was speechless. There was nothing to say. But I could feel a lump in my throat and tears welling up behind my eyes. I could feel my legs give out under me. This was stupid, I was stupid, mad, completely mad. I covered my head with my hands, and I was back at the hospital. The only man I had ever truly loved, and I had to watch him die bit by bit. I couldn’t breathe.

"Speak to me," the man uttered. I could barely hear him over the heartbeat monitor in the hospital. The sound of Ben’s laboured breathing, it wasn’t fair, I couldn’t move on, why couldn’t I ever escape that place? It had been years and years, and I couldn’t escape. I just needed him back, I just… "Please, Ben," I said. Not a question, not an accusation, it was an invocation. The word hung in the air and filled the hallway. The tears flowed freely. I could hear the man move, but I didn’t care as I bawled like a child. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Hello, little sister."

* * *

Inside the flat, we sat outside on the balcony; a mug of tea warmed my hands. I drank it and felt lightheaded, looking out into the twilight, sitting next to a man who was acting like my brother, but Ben was dead. The stars weren’t out but there was the moon. I always thought it looked eerie, like a dead sun, but Ben…

"I always liked the moon," he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. "Always got me home safe." He paused. I wanted to believe so much. It sounded like something Ben would say, but I wasn’t so mad that I could accept that this man was my brother. "Let’s get this out of the way, quickly." I felt my body tense and my knuckles tighten around the cup. I looked at him blankly. "You need to start."

"I… what are we doing?" He was direct and to the point. I wanted it to be Ben, but I was now keenly aware that I was sitting on the balcony of a man I didn’t know, in a part of the city I was unfamiliar with.

"Try to think, work it out for yourself," he said, enunciating each word.

Just like that, I was sitting cross-legged looking up at Ben while he helped me with my homework, and I was getting it wrong again.

"Why are you here?" I suggested cautiously.

"No, Henrietta, that is not the foundational question," he scolded. That felt like a kick to my stomach, like I was letting Ben down.

"I… I don’t…" I stammered. Ben always demanded that I analyse, that I think, that I find the solution. I could feel frustration welling up inside me, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. He always pushed me, always forced me to go further than I could.

"Are you, you?" I said, almost shouting. That was the question, the one I needed the answer to.

He smiled. "Well done, now that’s the right question." Relief flooded over me as he nodded, but there was something else there now too. Ben had left me, and now it felt like he had come back just to test me. He didn’t care what I’d been through. "You need to believe that I am who you think." There was only one person in the world who could make me feel like he did, who could make me unravel. Suddenly I could see him. It was like an optical illusion. If I squinted, I could see my brother, the way he held himself, the way he spoke to me, but if I blinked I was sitting in a flat with an old man. He should have been there for me, and now he was lecturing me! "There can’t be any doubt…"

"Why did you fucking leave me!" I was furious; I hadn’t expected that. At that moment, it didn’t matter if it was Ben or not. I had had this inside of me for too long. "I had to watch you die. Why didn’t you come back sooner?!"

I screamed. Ridiculous, childish, but in that moment I had connected to something. It felt like a circuit was complete, like after so many years something had turned on and I couldn’t stop it.

All the while Ben looked at me as I screamed and cried and demanded answers. When I had exhausted my litany of rage and love and tears, sobbing quietly on a plastic chair in the moonlight, I looked at him, properly looked at him. I wanted it to be Ben so much, but how could it be? Ben was dead. I exhaled and felt my body begin to shake.

And then he put his hand on my shoulder. He touched me… he had never really done that before, and I froze. His hand felt so warm, and all those feelings of doubt, anguish and uncertainty evaporated.

"Do you remember that time, you were only four or five, I was old enough to know better, I chased you around the house pretending to be a big dog?" he asked.

I could feel a ghost of a smile on my lips. I placed my hand over his.

"You ran away so fast, and afterwards you made me promise I wouldn’t do it again."

"And you didn’t," I chuckled through tears.

"Do you remember what Dad always told us? What he made us promise each other every time we had a fight?"

He waited. We both knew the answer; it was our mantra growing up.

"I should listen to you," I whispered.

"And I’d always look out for you." He smiled. Those words were like a promise; when he died it was broken. Now, I felt like I was whole again, a sister again. "Listen to me now, really listen to me. I’ve got a lot I need to tell you." He paused for a moment before continuing. "So, I died," he said, leaning back into his chair. "I mean, you were there, right?"

He said it plainly. But that was the problem… I was always there. That moment. That fucking moment. The stillness while waiting for the end. Listening to his breathing. Mum and Dad holding his hands. I was afraid when they asked me to touch him. I just sat there waiting for his breathing to stop.

It was like being pulled into a chasm. I wanted to climb out, I wanted to be free, but I kept sliding back in, and at the bottom there was that fucking moment, the silence when the heart monitor stopped.

My thoughts were interrupted as he put his hand on mine. He didn’t say anything, didn’t look at me, just left his hand over mine, and suddenly, he’d brought me back.

"You died," I whispered, my voice cracking.

"Yeah," he said after a long moment. "That’s when it all began."

* * *

It was like I left a part of myself behind on that hospital bed. I could sense you and Mum and Dad one moment, and then the next, there was nothing. I don’t mean it was black; that’s something. This was a state defined by absence. I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t need to. I couldn’t see, but there was nothing out there. There were no dimensions a body could spread into. There was only this suffocating, enveloping nothing, and I began to think it was my eternity.

Years or moments might have been swallowed up with equal ease by that smothering absence. I can’t say how long I stayed like that. Slowly something changed. I cannot be sure if something found me or if I simply learned to perceive what had been there all along. Regardless, the longer I was there, the more I began to feel it.

It felt like vibrations, how can I describe vibrations, where there is no medium for waves to propagate through? It was like music that had no pitch, no timbre or source or origin, yet with clear design, directions and rhythms. We simply do not have the words. But whatever it was, I began to resonate with it.

It felt like surrender, like dissolution, like being dragged underneath the water. In that moment, all I wanted was a little more, just a moment, just something for myself. I wanted one last attempt at being me. Didn’t I deserve that? I’m not sure at which point it became a struggle, but I knew it was inexorable.

At that moment, I felt something. I cannot articulate it other than by saying it had the same quality as if someone were tickling my fingers. I thought it was you, Henrietta, showing me the way back. I tried to grasp your hand, but of course I had no body, so I simply wanted it, and I think it wanted me too. There was a muted thud, followed by cold. Then I opened my eyes and I was looking at the moon.

It was night, and I was in a desert. The stars shone like little daggers. I was drunk. I was always drunk, and my throat burned from stale whisky and cigarettes. I looked down at my hands, and they were old, dry, and wrinkled. It had been a hard life, and in a moment of vertigo I remembered every second of it. I was Jim. I remembered Jim’s life, his wife, and my own memories seemed like distant murmurs.

His truck purred as it idled. The fluorescent lights shone out into the desert as I clutched a whisky bottle with Jim’s hands. I can’t explain exactly what it was like, how it felt to be Jim, but it was a bit like being in a self-driving car. Your hands are on the wheel, but you’re not sure if it’s turning or you are. When Jim threw that empty bottle into the sand, I wanted it gone. I was sick of the taste in my mouth, and all I wanted to do was lie down in bed with my wife, and I knew Jim wanted that too. So which of us threw the bottle, I’m not sure. Which of us drove the car back home, bleary-eyed, hoping we wouldn’t get pulled over, I can’t say. All I know is that when I crawled into bed and cuddled up to the body next to me, I felt like I was home.

I never felt like I was in control, and I never felt like I was out of control either. We were one, in lockstep. So Jim wasn’t alone when the doctor phoned up and reported the results of his biopsy. He was terminal. He didn’t cry, though, just reached for another bottle. That night, in his drunken haze, I could feel his fear. It was asphyxiating. When the end came, I think I was a comfort to him.

I could feel Jim die. It wasn’t sudden, it happened gradually. This time, I could feel the Symphony coming, that music, soft and alluring. It seeped into the hospital room like sweat through pores. The air around us seemed to undulate as the room filled. This time, in Jim’s body, I was able to see it clearly. The music seemed to coalesce into a flat plane that bisected the walls of the hospital. As I felt Jim slipping into it, I was afraid I would be taken too.

The Symphony called, but I had found something far more interesting. I fell into a new life. It was easier this time. It was like a reflex, like sliding down rather than pulling myself up.

When I opened my eyes, I was a woman. I woke up in the middle of the night looking at the moon. Then, after she died, there were a dozen more. I was with some for decades. Every time they died, I found a new host; but the Symphony was always there, waiting, but each time it seemed angrier.

It wasn’t welcoming anymore—no longer resonant music but something that scraped against my entire being when it came. Each time I escaped. I found I no longer needed to flail to find my next destination; I only had to want it. But I couldn’t choose where I went. I simply fell, blindly, from one life into the next, tumbling onward into another body, with a new perspective, another self. It was intoxicating.

Then everything changed when I met the whale.

I was a girl in 1745, sailing off the coast of Iceland. One night, I woke to the sound of the hull splitting beneath us. My father pulled me from my bunk and hurried me below deck, but the water was already pouring in, black and freezing. We were driven back above as the ship began to sink. That was when I saw it. The whale rose beside us, vast and terrible, all blubber, teeth, and glistening flesh. Then the deck disappeared beneath my feet, and the sea swallowed me whole. Until then, I had wanted only not to end, to scramble for the next life. But as the boat sank, I, we, the girl, had a thought. It wasn’t one of fear. It wasn’t one of anger. It was simply “I wonder what it’s like to be a whale.”

The next time I opened my eyes, I was a creature of the sea. There was no moon to guide me, only the soft sibilance of the hissing waves. My world became the currents and the songs underneath them. It was a world where the centre of gravity was different, an alien world, not flat; it was volumetric. I saw in sounds and echoes, and I was part of a family, never alone, part of a continuous whole. I was happy.

That winter, the hunting had been poor. When my pod finally came upon the boat, I had almost forgotten. Forgotten the little girl, forgotten myself. When the time came, I ripped that little girl apart. I hadn’t changed anything — could not — I had always been the whale.

When death came, the Symphony rose to meet me, and I almost surrendered. I had spent decades moving within the pod, beside a mate and calves, until the boundary between myself and the world had worn thin. The music felt like the natural end of such a life: a final dissolution into something larger. I was ready to accept it—until acceptance began to feel like defeat. Once that thought came, I could not yield.

I held there in the moment of death, refusing both the pull to dissolve and the old reflex to flee, and in that stillness I became aware of something I had been falling through all along. I had never perceived it, because I had never stopped long enough to tell it apart from the falling itself.

What I felt were associations, not places. Something drew near when I understood it, and slipped away when I did not. I could not yet tell whether I moved toward these things or they toward me; thought and motion seemed to be one act.

Slowly, the connections between them became perceptible.

Nearness was not distance, but legibility. Attention gave direction. Affinity was proximity. To understand a thing was already to arrive at it. This alone determined which lives I could touch and which remained unreachable.

The Symphony began to fade, it no longer seemed to want me. I was no longer running. I had found an order. I understood its rules. I was in a maze.

* * *

Inside the flat the kettle boiled and I watched Ben make me another cup of tea. As he stood in the kitchen it was like watching a ghost. He was there, he was present, physical, but he was uncanny.

He placed the mug on the kitchen table and sat down. As he let go of the cup I went to pick it up, I just wanted to feel his skin on mine for a moment. I just needed to know that he was real. I stood for a long moment and just watched him. I suppose I watched him for too long because he coughed and gestured to the chair opposite him.

"Do you have any questions?" Ben said after a moment. Questions. About what? The afterlife? My disembodied brother inhabiting lives upon lives? About a fucking whale? I sighed. For the first time in a long time I remembered what it was actually like to be Ben’s sister. There was no emotion, not really. He would stay up all night tutoring me but he never put his arm around me when I cried, he never hugged me. He got me where I needed to go, but never how I wanted to get there.

"Ben, I don’t think I care. I don’t care about this story. You haven’t asked about me, you haven’t asked how I am, about Mum or Dad?" I said finally. I was standing up. It’s a funny thing, grief. It takes love and it makes it something else. Like rust, eventually it eats away at everything until all you have is something old and broken and no longer fit for purpose.

He was quiet for a moment and his face changed. I saw something in his eyes I hadn’t seen for a long time. He was trying to solve a problem.

"Drink your tea," he said. "It’s getting cold."

I didn’t move.

He stood up and crossed the room and he hugged me. And I buried my face in his chest. He held me for a long time. Longer than I expected he ever would.

"Please," he said, "I need you to understand. It’s the most important thing." His voice was steady but there was something underneath it, something that sounded almost like an apology.

"Okay," I said, wiping the tears from my eyes. "Okay." I sat down and took a sip of my tea. It tasted bitter on my tongue. When I was a child I hung on his every word. I was so angry at him for leaving me but now I just wanted him to be my brother and if he needed to talk about his experience then I would listen.

“This bloody whale, then,” I said, and he smirked, and I found a curl of a smile on my lips. “That’s when you realised you were in a maze?”

"That’s when I understood the rules," Ben said. He leaned forward, and I recognised the look on his face. It was the same look he had when he was helping me with homework. Like this was something I needed to get right. "I call it a maze. This is important, Henrietta. What you understand, what you perceive, it changes what you are. To know something is to become compatible with it. The wrong thought will lead you to a dead end. The right thought opens a door. I wouldn’t have got there unless I had lived all those other lives. Think of it like learning to sing."

"You can’t sing, Ben," I chided, while I drank more of the tea.

He didn’t laugh. He was watching me in a way that made me feel like he was waiting for something, I didn’t know what.

"No," he said, and something flickered in his eyes that I didn’t recognise. "Some people can never learn to sing."

I sat back. He continued.

* * *

I had become obsessed with understanding the Maze and I moved through it with joy and purpose. At first I confined myself to the past, but why? So I tried the future: a year, then ten, then a hundred. It was intoxicating. I died gasping in the vacuum between stars. I was the last man standing on Mars.

Each life changed me. It gave me a new perspective, and with that change new frontiers in the maze opened, like passages revealing themselves. But not every life moved me forward. A herder, a gardener aboard a starship, a mason buried in the foundations of ziggurats, all moved me backwards. I didn’t understand why. Progress was slow, most of it minuscule. That was until I found Ned.

As a child, people said Ned was slow. Ned seemed to have trouble understanding simple concepts, they spent hours wedged into corners, just watching the walls. Teachers and specialists, who spoke in hushed voices, were consulted but Ned excelled at every exam or test given. By the time Ned was sixteen they had their first degree, by eighteen a PhD, at twenty-one for all intents and purposes they disappeared. The problem was never Ned’s intellect. Identity. Social expectation. The unspoken rules that governed who spoke to whom, and why, and what it meant. Not unrecognised so much as simply rejected.

They decided, eventually, that this was not reduction but elevation. That the concepts others grasped so easily were not beyond them but beneath them. That they alone were truly human amongst a world of sleepwalkers, creatures of pure habit mistaking their rituals for meaning. Ned did not see themselves as man or woman. They did not see themselves as anything so small as a category. Ned was something else, something honed and sharp. In all my wanderings I found Ned to be truly singular.

In the 2080s, the computers were faster and security was better. But people still walked home alone. Still took shortcuts through quiet and empty places. Ned still remembered how to fold themselves into unexpected spaces, where they could watch and wait. They watched people hurry and stumble home late at night until Ned found those who were the most vulnerable, the last thing those people ever saw was moonlight catching on Ned’s glasses. It wasn’t always like that though. Sometimes a practised smile, a touch on the arm, a whispered promise, was all that was needed. Ned was an apex predator and I learned more than I thought possible.

Work became sanctuary. Investigation. Research. Opening things up and sometimes reassembling. Ned’s focus was absolute. Ned stripped away the incidental, the decorative, the misleading, until only the mechanism remained. Their entire life was built around the conviction that anything could be understood if only it was dismantled far enough. Eventually, Ned turned that principle towards death.

To them death only appeared unknowable because no one had dismantled it far enough. That was what drew me.

Ned conducted their experiments with a ruthless efficiency. Men, women, the children were the worst. But through the screaming, I told myself that death was nothing to be feared. In many ways what we were doing was truly kind. Ned’s sole preoccupation was bringing someone back from the dead, a necronaut, they called it. Ned’s dwelling soon began to resemble an abattoir, or a meat locker, with all the failed attempts. There were too many complexities, too many variables. So Ned tried something new.

Her name was Mary, I still remember the look in her eyes, like a caged animal, darting left and right. It was strange to witness, watching her go from screaming and banging on the doors of her cell to sitting against the wall sobbing. If she knew what Ned planned she would never have stopped screaming.

The electrodes pierced her skull. There were thousands of them, woven together into something that looked like a halo. It didn’t seem to hurt.

Ned tried to explain what was going to happen. They showed Mary a map of her own brain, then a diagram of what would replace it. Eighty-six billion neurons. A hundred trillion synaptic connections. Reduced to a simple network, small enough that a child could have diagrammed it. When Ned flipped the switch, electricity shot through Mary’s skull, collapsing synapses, burning away memories and thoughts, little by little. The artificial network took root like a parasite. An alien connectome slowly replacing what had been her.

Ned left what they needed intact. Motor function. Respiration. The limbic structures that would keep her docile. Everything else was substrate. Night after night, Ned escorted her back to her cell on shaking legs. At first she begged. Then she cried. Then she asked where she was, and who Ned was. Then the questions stopped. She stopped crying, she just stared at the wall. Every now and then there was a spark. Her eyes would dart around, wild, searching. Like something was still in there, pressing against the glass. Then it was gone, and she just stared.

It took months to remake Mary. Ned laboured over electronics and medical equipment, keeping her alive so that she could become what they wanted her to be. When the day of the experiment arrived, Ned asked the thing that had been Mary, as it sat in a worn leather chair, "Are you ready?"

"Yes," it droned.

Then Ned killed it. A moment passed. A buzzing. A wet, hot noise as the thing came back again. Its eyelids were shut for a long, lingering moment before they flicked open. The air was silent.

“What did you see?” Ned asked, leaning towards the thing as they checked her vitals. I could feel Ned’s anticipation, but their pulse was steady. Something in me strained against the inside of Ned’s skull. I wanted to reach through them and pull the answer from the thing myself: What was the purpose of the Maze.

"The centre of a house that was built to confuse," Mary said.

Ned’s heart was pounding. My heart was pounding.

"What is it? I want more," Ned and I cried in one voice.

Nothing. Just a blank look on its face. But it had seen the Maze, and in that ruined mind there had to be more. I wanted to rip it out.

"What did you experience, what did you see?" Ned asked.

Silence. The thing’s eyes were fixed on the wall and when it answered its gaze never shifted, as if it was talking to something far away.

"Ben," it said.

The word hung there in the air and seemed to fill the room. Ned didn’t know why their knuckles turned white, or their hands began to shake.

Ned wrote the word down. A name, it was just more data, but to me it was everything. A message? A waypoint? I had become fixated on the Maze and now it seemed like it was answering back.

And I … I reached. It was my tongue in Ned’s mouth, my demand in Ned’s voice. "More information," and for a moment Ned was somewhere behind me, a passenger, and there was only me and Mary and that word. Ben. I needed to know what she had seen. I needed more.

"Charybdis," it said.

Then the thing smiled with its fat, meaty lips. It didn’t say anything else after that, no matter how much we pushed it.

We killed it again. It didn’t come back after that.

Ned wanted to start over, to build another one, but they never got the chance. Ned was caught and executed publicly about six months later. I was with Ned until the moment they seemed to surrender to the Symphony that had no use for me. I considered my next jump, my next route through the Maze.

But things were different now. Ned had shown me something I thought I already understood. How to strip away everything that was not the goal and keep only that, until nothing else could reach you.

I had spent lifetimes trying to understand the Maze. Ned had shown me that I had not been trying hard enough.

Understanding the Maze was all there was, and I set about understanding it with single-minded voracity. Slowly, I began to see the Maze in a way I had not before. Even when I was with a host, it was clear that I had changed. Colours seemed more vibrant and shadows sharper.

At the next opportunity, I chose not to jump. Every death before this, I had fled towards the next life with either fear or excitement. Ned had shown me that both were distractions from comprehension.

Everything else fell away. Cold came, and then the dark, and then suffocating pressure, but I welcomed it. The more completely I gave myself to that singular purpose, the clearer the darkness became. There was something within it that answered something within me. What had once been incomprehensible started to feel familiar.

A structure began to reveal itself. The Maze opened before me like the petals of a flower, and I found myself in the place Mary had tried to warn me about.

The centre of the Maze.

* * *

Ben was still talking, and the teacup felt heavy in my hands. The kinds of lives he had lived were horrible. It was hard to digest. His story was making me dizzy. I didn’t want to think about all the things he had done. There was only one question that came to mind.

"Why didn’t you come back for me?" I interrupted quietly.

Ben kept talking, so I asked again. "Why didn’t you come back for me?"

His tale came to a sudden stop.

"What?"

"If you were jumping around like that, if you were going into the future and the past, why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you sit with me by the hospital bed while I watched you die? Why didn’t you knock on the door the day of the funeral?"

I suddenly felt very sick.

"Henrietta, I’m giving you the secrets of the cosmos. People would kill and die for the information in this story. Listen," Ben said sternly.

I shook my head and looked down. Then he came and put his arm around my shoulder. It was strange, but after he died that was all I had ever wanted.

"I can’t undo the past, but I’m here now."

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t fair. I wanted to scream. But in a way he was right. He was always right. He was here now, and that was all that mattered.

With my head on his shoulder, I sighed. I felt very tired, as if I had lived all those lives myself. I could feel his hand on the top of my head. Everything seemed far away. My thoughts were heavy.

"What happened next?" I asked. "When you found the centre?" My head was still pressed against him.

"The centre…" he said slowly, and started to speak again.

I felt myself drifting off, and his words began to sound more and more like a bedtime story.

* * *

My first memory of the centre of the Maze was my lungs drawing breath like rusty bellows, my heart hammering, blood dragging through my veins. For the first time in centuries I had a body, and it hurt.

My second memory was of featureless grey sand stretching from horizon to horizon. I walked because there was nothing else to do. There were no rules to learn, no system to deconstruct. I had reached the centre and it had given me nothing to grasp on to. The landscape never changed, no matter how far I walked, I began to lose myself.

I do not know when I started digging. There was nothing above me; I could no longer bear the thought that there might be nothing below. At first, I searched for an answer. Then I searched for proof that something else had been there. I clawed at the ground until my hands forgot they had ever done anything else. Soon I was no longer travelling through the desert. I belonged to it. I became a creature of the sand.

The first bone I found was small, a knuckle, perhaps, or a tooth. I kept it as proof that something else had existed here. Then I found another, and another. When my hands were full, I filled my mouth. When there was no room left, I tore out my teeth and replaced them with fragments of bone. Larger pieces I pushed beneath my skin, just to feel that I was not alone.

The deeper I went, the smaller the bones became, splinters, then slivers, then grit, and then a grain no larger than the ones I had been kneeling in all along. I sifted a fistful and could not find where the bone ended and the sand began. I dug in a dozen places and every place was the same.

The sand was bone. All of it, ground so fine that I had walked a hundred million dead and mistaken it for a desert. I imagined that every grain had belonged to someone who came here before. This was not where the dead found respite. It was where they were worn away. Given long enough, I would be no different. I felt panic, not just in my mind but, for the first time in an age, my body.

Mary had said that the Maze was built to confuse. My obsession had led me into a graveyard, so I looked up.

It had always been there, looking over me. Every life, I woke to it, and every life it brought me home. If I could find it, it would know the way, it always had. I searched the black for the one thing that had never once abandoned me, the moon.

There was nothing there. The sky was empty. For the first time in centuries the moon was gone, and something in me came loose. The moon was never gone. Not once. Not ever.

Then the ground beneath my hands began to glow.

A pale light spread across the desert, passing from grain to grain until the entire horizon shone. It pierced my flesh and filled the bones buried beneath my skin. For a moment, I could do nothing but stare.

The light was not falling from above. It was rising from beneath me. The moon had never abandoned me. There was no moon in the sky because I had been standing upon it all along.

"This is the centre, Ben." The voice was warm and reassuring. I turned and saw a woman standing before me. Her skin was grey, and looked like it was made of the same stuff as the desert she appeared from, and she was wrapped in folds of pale silk. Her eyes were perfectly white, save for small flecks of yellow that moved within them like beckoning stars.

"You understand this place, don’t you, Ben?" It was not a question. Only a few steps separated us, yet I could not cross them. Something barred the way, not a wall, but a condition I had not yet fulfilled, faint as a taste in the air. I had reached the centre of the Maze, and still it denied me. "Otherwise, you could not have come this far." She was right.

The Maze was made of ideas; to pass through it, you had to understand what stood before you. I tore out my eyes. The nerves snapped like elastic, and the burning dropped me to my knees, but the way opened. I crawled towards her. It was clear to me then that the Maze had always delighted in suffering. "You’re so close, Ben," she said softly. "I knew you would make it." Her toes were almost within reach when something stopped me again. I had nothing left to sacrifice, only what I was, and gave it gladly.

I dragged myself forwards. My body compressed beneath an impossible weight, crushing the breath from me. My arms and legs withered and fell away, but still I moved, blind and limbless, sliding over the ground on my belly. At last I felt her take me in her arms and wrap herself around me.

"I’ve got you, Ben. After all this time, I’ve got you." Her flesh was like welcoming fire, like finally coming out of the cold. She held me to her breast like I was a child.

"What are you?" I asked.

"I am the Maze. My body is what you moved through to get here, and as you moved you struggled to understand." I could feel her fingers through my hair, winding around my face. "Understanding is what makes you perfect, Ben." I felt a love, want, need and desire. I felt my body change, my limbs began to soften, I felt my flesh swell. As she combed her fingers through my hair, I felt it fall to the ground. "But you’re not ready yet. I’m going to show you the rest of the way."

She laid a hand on my head, and I jumped.

The whip fell again and again until there was no breath left in me. Then I was back in her arms, standing upon the moon. Before I could speak, I jumped again.

It was dark. I was thirsty. He had been gone for days. I could not move, and the wounds beneath the ropes around my wrists had begun to stink. In my final moments, I thought of my mother and wondered where she was…then I was back beneath her hands.

"Why?" I begged. Another life seized me, then another.

"To make you delicious," she cooed softly.

* * *

Ben hit me, though gently. Just a tap on the side of my face.

"Henrietta," he said.

I was falling asleep. My body felt so heavy. I blinked a couple of times and realised my head was in Ben’s lap.

"What’s going on?" I murmured, as he put the teacup to my lips.

"What did I just say?" Ben glared down at me. His eyes were cold and wide. "What did I just say?"

As he repeated himself, I felt like a child again. He always made me feel like a child. How did he do that? I wondered.

"So this was God?" I asked Ben slowly. My voice sounded far away.

"No, Henrietta. You are not listening. You need to understand. It’s imperative that you listen and understand. That creature was not God. She was no god at all."

"Why am I lying down, Ben?"

"You fell, but you’re alright now. You don’t need to worry. But you do need to listen," he said. It was hard to think straight.

"How did you get away then?" It was getting harder to talk. "You must have got away. You must have..."

"No!" he said abruptly. "Don’t you understand, Henrietta? I’m still there. You need to listen."

* * *

I couldn’t resist her. With each life she forced me to live, I changed. Each change closed another path until hers was the only one left open to me. Countless lives, and each one stole more and more from me, while what it gave back in return was ugly and brittle. But if something could be understood, then it could be beaten. I needed her to believe she had already won.

So I surrendered. I drew her in with obedience and feigned defeat. I chose bad lives for myself, terrible lives, and she let me. I felt her satisfaction as I became the self-sustainer of my own torture. I felt her grip on me loosen. I took my chance.

I found a life I could use to fight back with. I took aim and jumped.

I opened my eyes and saw the moon, opaque and translucent like a ghost reflected in Ned’s glasses.

To be Mary was a suffering I could not have begun to imagine. Worse was the knowledge that every time Ned had drilled into Mary’s skull I had wanted it. Now I was the one in the chair, and I still needed it. It would be worth it. I knew. Mary had seen the centre of the Maze and returned. I had watched her do what I could not. Understanding how she did it would be the engine of my escape.

As I endured Mary’s mind being burned away, I was surprised by how much of her remained. Buried, diminished, trapped inside and disconnected from her body. She was not in control, but she was present. Despite her state of living death, Mary was terrified and when Ned asked, "Are you ready?" so was I.

As the machines started up, I could feel Mary from inside her skull. Her panic started off like a hum and built to a scream that felt like the sounding of a horn. All that came out of her mouth was a robotic "Yes." Then we died.

I found myself back at the dead centre of the Maze.

I had to find Mary. She was the key. Through her, I might still learn how to escape.

But I did not need to search. Mary had already wound herself around me. In that place, where thought became form and flesh, she appeared as a vast black worm, coiled tightly around my being. Yet the shape was only an impression. What truly remained of Mary was her screaming.

The centre of the Maze was alive with it. The sound came from nowhere I could name. It had no mouth, no origin, no direction. It trembled through the darkness and shuddered inside my bones. I felt Mary in every vibration. Whatever remained of her was there with me, her suffering threaded through me completely.

I turned my attention towards the heart of the Maze. There, I saw him. I saw myself. The Grey Woman cradled my body against her breast, holding it with the tenderness of a mother soothing a frightened child. My face rested peacefully against her, as though I had surrendered to sleep.

Vertigo seized me. I was there with Mary, entangled in her agony, but I was also across the chamber, helpless in the monster’s embrace. The Grey Woman ran her finger through the flesh of the body in her arms. It offered no resistance, sloughing away around her knuckles and coating her hand. "Why didn’t it work, Ben?" she asked.

She looked past the body she held and directly at Mary and me, her gaze a suffocating pressure. Had Mary stopped screaming, even for a moment, I might have laughed as I understood. There was no now or then in the Maze. This was the mechanism by which I had traversed the centuries with ease.

"There is only one Maze," the Grey Woman said. "It exists above the world and beyond it. And I told you before, Ben." Her smile widened. "I am the Maze."

I did not understand. Not completely. But enough to know that I had been a fool. I had never deceived her. She had allowed me to live this life because it was no different from all the others—another path to exhaust me, another existence built to strip away my hope, another curving configuration that led back to her.

"What about Mary?" I cried. "Why did you let her go?"

The Grey Woman pressed a finger to her lips, as though entrusting me with a secret.

"Mary never belonged to me, Ben," she whispered. "It was you. It was always you."

There was nothing I could do from within the Maze: all-devouring.

I felt Ned’s cold machines pull me back into the lab along with Mary, whatever was left of her.

Reason had evaporated. I was screaming through Mary, banging against the inside of her skull, trying to warn myself. I fought to take control, but Mary’s nerves were shards of shattered glass. Every path, every answer, every thought that had brought me here, it was all to her—her, her, I tried to communicate. "The centre of a house that was built to confuse" was all that Mary said, followed by "Ben."

I wanted to scream that the Maze was a creature that waited patiently as the bedrock of all things, and it was gorging itself on me, every moment, forever. But all I could say through Mary’s ruined mind was one word, "Charybdis," in a flat and broken voice.

Then Mary died and I was back in the maw of the Maze.

I tried again and again. Different lives, different centuries, different trajectories through the Maze. When my hosts resisted, I stole control from them. I drove their bodies towards deaths they had not chosen, forcing open paths I thought might lead away from her. But every route curved back towards the centre. Every death returned me to her arms. I could never escape.

Life after life, she had broken me. It went on and on. She forced me to do terrible things, to suffer terrible things. But I couldn’t accept that. Every problem has a solution. Every equation must be balanced. I just needed — I just needed you, Henrietta. At some point I simply knew. It was you. It was always you.

Everything I’ve done in this life was to get you ready. I brought you here. I made sure you noticed me. I prepared you. You’ve been following me for weeks, Henrietta. I’ve been watching you for years.

* * *

"You poisoned the tea?" I said quietly.

"Of course I poisoned the tea. Who cares, a singular little life is meaningless."

"No," I whispered. As he held the cup to my lips I could see the last of the pale brown liquid draining from the cup down my throat, but I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t feel anything. "No," I sputtered.

"Listen, avoid the music, the Symphony, whatever that is, stay away from it. You understand what the maze is now, so it will draw you in and you’ll be able to navigate it”. He was shaking. "I’m not sorry, Henrietta," he blurted out. "I’m not taking anything away from you, I’m giving you the world, the universe, you should thank me." It was hard for me to keep my head up but he lifted it for me.

Every breath was a struggle now. "Tell me, what is it, what is the maze?" he screamed. That cold glare was gone, it was wild now, and, whatever Ben had become, it was untamed.

"The maze is..." Every word was a fight not to slip into the darkness. "Ideas," I corrected myself as I felt myself slipping away, "ideals".

"No!" Ben cried. He let my head drop and it fell like a puppet with no strings. I could hear him get to his feet, take a deep breath, and then lift my head up again and look right into my eyes. "The Maze is a monster and..." he said slowly.

"...and she’s devouring you," I whispered as my eyes rolled back into my head.

"Yes. Understand, listen to me, Henrietta."

Ben was smiling. The smile was inhuman.

All I could think of was the last line of the old mantra, in his voice: I’ll always look out for you.

"You’re going to save me, Henrietta. You’ve got to come and get me."

"You killed me, Ben. You’ve taken everything from me."

"I’m coming for you," I whispered.