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WAIT FOR ME - ALICE PRIME

At the center of the city, Alice waited for an opening in the seething mass of bodies that were the Fallen Stars. She could barely see, her chest aching with every panicked breath. The cold calm that had settled over her when she'd entered the city was long gone. She had lost almost before she began, her berserk rage sated by the first kill, fading away to leave her with a boiling sense of uncertainty. Memories of the dark place she now willingly entered overcame her sense of duty, paralyzing her with fear of her enemy. Still, she pressed on, steeling herself against her own weakness, and brought them down with sheer will, with careful strikes of her staff, with speed that they could not match. They had fallen like dominoes, in waves and clumps and clusters: but a few mocking seconds later, they rose again, severed heads crawling on strings of flesh to reattach to their broken bodies.

They did not even have the decency to look tired.

Now she stood with her back to the unsympathetic glass face of the city's central skyscraper, surrounded by Fallen Stars. She thrust the Staff of Stars aloft and screamed in defiance at them all. "I am not yours!" Casting the staff at the sea of monsters before her, Alice forced herself to smile. She did take some grim satisfaction from the confusion amongst the Fallen as the staff arced through the air. It split and split again, and struck, knocking back the front line a few steps. They scrambled and stumbled over themselves, trying to dodge, many failing. Those that were pierced by the slivers of the staff fell howling to the floor, consumed by flames until they lay still. Victory lasted only seconds, maybe less. More Fallen stepped forward to fill the space she'd cleared, even while she called the staff's base copper back to her hand. She spit at them, trying to hide her cowardice with rage. "I will never be yours!"

Her voice seemed small and weak amidst their chaos. Worse, when she held the staff aloft again, gathering Tau Ceti's distant fire, they began to chant her name in dissonant chorus. "Alice!" She struck them down and did not pause, this time, calling to the magic even before the copper had returned to her hands, lobbing bolt after bolt of power from the Staff of Stars until her fingertips were burnt and she shook when she tried to lift her arms again, cripplingly weak with exhaustion. The flames that had been her constant companion since she summoned the staff flickered orange, then red, then died away, leaving the smoking copper skeleton of the Staff in her hands.

Stumbling, Alice nearly fell to her knees. A delighted cry shot through the waves of her enemy like thunder, and she bit the inside of her cheek until it hurt and her head cleared, turning to the building behind and running straight at it before the Fallen could advance.

At, and up it.

Behind and beneath her, as she soared up the slippery glass face of the skyscraper, the Fallen crashed up against the walls like a monstrous tide, shrieking in anger at her deceit. They screamed her name, voices that could as easily have been her friends, her family, as monsters. They made their voices sound desperate and frightened and she bit down harder, wincing at the little pinprick of pain. Focus. Alice ran where the Fallen could not follow, a blur of orange and red, and crested the roof, landing solidly on her feet seventy stories above their army. She shook, catching her weight with the staff to keep from losing her feet and falling right back off the edge. Up here, all she could hear were their petulant sounds of frustration like a distant sigh on the wind. It was almost enough to make her laugh.

For a time, Alice focused on breathing. Her head began to clear, though she still felt too tired to move, too burnt out to continue fighting. She set her shoulders, straightened, and surveyed the world below her. Thanks to the thick, smoggy haze that hung over the city, she could not see beyond its walls. From here, she could tell where all of the Fallen Stars were, however, and that seemed advantage enough. They had clustered near the building she now stood astride, thinking her captured and making their numbers seem impossibly high. Here, she could see how empty the rest of the city streets were, as though perhaps she had killed some significant portion of their ranks after all. She couldn't see an easy way out of the city now that she'd entered it but she hadn't fully expected to survive the excursion in the first place. She was, she thought, at peace with that. Hans had not answered her, and Christine had disappeared. If she was to die alone, she was determined to do it on her own terms, no matter how hopeless her situation.

Before she could come up with a strategy for the masses below, however, a voice called out from across the roof, sleepy and amused and unsettlingly familiar.

"Well!" It seemed to laugh, oddly mellow in tone despite their serious circumstances. "Imagine seeing you here."

Alice swallowed her answer, willing herself not to draw more attention than she could handle as she slowly turned. Behind her, there stood a creature that could well have been human, once. It stood on two legs, its feet wrapped in armor, and its huge, heavily-muscled arms ended in clawed, semi-human hands. She'd seen any number of Fallen Stars in her time, and while they could follow certain trends, each one tended to look unique up close. This beast was watching her with amusement gleaming in its eight orange eyes, and sported greasy, unkempt hair the same pale shade as her own. With a knowing look, the Fallen Star threw back her head on an uncannily long neck, guffawing at Alice's speechlessness.

"You're looking a little different than I remember, actually." Straightening, the Fallen Star leaned in closer, masked face close enough to run an inhumanly long tongue along Alice's cheek.

"Don't--" Alice slid back half a step, and instantly regretted it as the Fallen Star swept her up with a grab of one huge hand. It- she- pulled Alice into a crushing embrace, and began to laugh as she struggled, gasping in pain. She thought deliriously that this could not be who she thought it was. She knew her own history: she had escaped, not succumbed, when the Fallen Stars captured her.

The arms about her tightened, as if to silently deny her. Aloud, the disturbing creature chuckled, nuzzling her face with its own. The etched, toothy grin on its helmet split open to reveal a much more horrific creature beneath. With a breathy laugh, the semi-human thing ran its long tongue over its teeth, this time, as if in thought. "Is it cannibalism, do you think? If I eat you, do I turn back?" It squeezed her until a sharp scream of pain escaped her efforts at staying silent. The strain on her back was sheer agony. She nearly expected to snap into two. "Come on, I'm asking your opinion, aren't I?"

"Fast."

"Pardon?"

"I-- s-said--" Her head was spinning, and no matter how she shook it, it wouldn't clear. "You should fast," Alice croaked, the defiance she'd meant to spit out coming across as more of a pathetic plea. She'd expected to die in the city when she entered.

She'd not expected it would be at her own hands.

Across the city, the bell-tower began tolling. She could only barely hear the bark of the bell, a distant shimmering sound beneath the roaring of her own blood in her ears, but the Fallen creature-- she could not stand to think of it as bearing her name-- went still, grip loosening ever so slightly as she focused on the unexpected sound. .

Alice gasped for air once, twice, and quite suddenly the world dropped out from beneath them both, casting them from the vanishing roof out into the same, vast Nothing that she'd been stuck in since she'd heard Hans calling her name. At least this time, she reasoned wryly, she was not technically alone. Her doppleganger seemed to be thinking something similar, for it laughed wickedly in her ear and ran its tongue along her cheek as they began to plummet.

"Request denied," purred her other-self, biting down on her right shoulder with inhumanly sharp teeth.

They fell into the forever dark distance of the Nothing, her Fallen counterpart humming as she screamed in pain. Below, past the icy cold sting of the clouds they were passing through, there seemed to glisten the festive colors of a city: she could almost smell the soil, the stink of pollution, the ocean rolling away, unfazed by everything. The unfairness of it all was typically balanced in the Ranger way, really. She was finally going to be returned to Earth, and she was going to be dead before she got there. Gustavo was probably laughing about it right now, assuming he even remembered who she was.

"Come on," she murmured, pressing her lips against Alice's wound and then sucking again on it to take the blood into her mouth. "Yield to me, Alice Valkki. Yield to me like I yielded to the ones who made me; yield responsibility and heartache, and sorrow and death."

"Death?" Alice breathed, hooking her fingers in the jawline of her Fallen self's helmet to steady herself. "What do you mean?"

"Surely by now you've noticed!" It laughed, and released her from its teeth entirely, as if to make a point. The wound still throbbed in the back of her mind, though it seemed to be sealing itself after a minute or two, driven by some magic she didn't find familiar. "The Fallen cannot die, little Alice. When we hit the city, do you want to splatter like a water balloon? Or do you want to bounce?"

It was a pitiful shadow of the defiance she'd thrown out in the City of the Fallen, but Alice didn't have the willpower to do anything more than repeat herself. "I'm not yours."

"You have a funny way," countered her other-self, "of showing it."

They fell locked together, its teeth edging closer and closer to her wounded shoulder again, until at last her fingers found the clasps of its helmet and opened them. She was desperate for some defense against its touch. The clouds around them bit into her eyes and made them sting enough that she was already red-eyed by the time her fingers found their mark and threw open the latches of the other-Alice's helm. First, the dark jaw bracer dropped away, leaving her to stare down at a mockery of her own face, stretched and distorted to fit inside a space too small for human heads. Then smoke streamed from its body and it began to scream so loudly she could hear nothing at all. She was left with nothing but smoke in her hands as she dropped like a stone through the sky.

WAIT FOR ME - BULLET

Alice was falling.

Alice was falling in more ways than one. The arm moved on its own most days, and sometimes the rest of her would, too. She didn't know how or why she'd been popped out of her every day routine struggle with the machine that ruled her body and into the middle of the sky, but there was no one around to ask except...

...herself?

Calling to the figure falling far below her, Alice reached out, meaning to wave in greeting. She shouted over the wind as it whipped her hair into her face, and fancied that the falling figure even heard her, looked up.

It was a split second, no more, no less: suddenly the robot arm was targeting, and charged to fire.

On her other self.

"ALICE!" She grabbed at the metal prosthetic with her other hand, trying to pull it off target. Whatever else might have been true about the falling figure below her, she couldn't tolerate the idea of potentially killing herself, no matter how it might be realized. The programming linked through crawling wires in her neck was too strong to shake off, though, and Alice screamed desperately, willing the other figure to look her way. She could think of nothing else to do. "Alice, get out of the way!"

Something struck, but it wasn't her: and then Alice was tumbling, turning end over end while blood pooled on her stomach and trailed behind her as she fell. Above, there was a dark, familiar face, and with the face came a hand that held her hand, that squeezed it while everything started to grow cold. The Staff of Stars was nowhere to be seen, though she knew she'd used just such a weapon once, before she'd lost her other arm. It was difficult to think, but surely this, too, was 'herself', wasn't it?

"I--" she coughed, and spat blood, not bothering to turn her head. Internally, the machine was in a panic, driven still to protect her from death, from herself, at any cost. Already she felt cold, and a strange darkness was coming over her sight as they tumbled down through the air. With a small smile, Alice tried to squeeze back on that supportive hand. "Thank you-- very much."

The world began to slip away, her hand shaking with the pain in her chest. Above her, there was a single bright voice, saying: "Don't mention it."

WAIT FOR ME - MERCY

When I lost my grandmother, I wished never to be forgotten again.

Nothing, I said, was as painful as being forgotten. Nothing had hurt as much, not even when she couldn't remember her own name. Without remembering me, she couldn't even be sorry she'd forgotten, and I hated it. I never wanted to feel that way again.

I regret that decision all the time.

How I'd ended up free-falling through space was beyond me. Ahead, I could see a streak of orange and blue. Behind, I'd left the other one to tumble like so many rags and bones, after I closed her eyes.

I got as close as I dared. This new 'self' had already been hurt, so I didn't worry much that she might see me. She looked harmless. Maybe even ridiculous, with her little green bandage on her wounded thigh. Her shoulder, too, looked injured but only sometimes: flickering in and out of phase, as if the wound were only an illusion. She appeared harmless, sure, but if she was myself-- some distant dream of myself, as I could have been-- then she could easily be dangerous. I'd already lost so many Rangers to 'dangerous'. Eventually, she caught sight of me, and that made up my mind, ending the paralysis that had kept me hovering out of reach from her, watching, waiting.

I risked closing the distance between us, running on the air itself and taking her into my arms when she was in reach. She seemed small and fragile but didn't cling to me, instead looking up at me searchingly. I felt sorry for her, looking at that face. She was tired, and so lonely she hurt to look at, in a certain light. The scar and crack in her helmet didn't stop her from pretending at confidence. It was as if she was silently saying, before I had even asked if she was all right, 'there are more important things to worry about than a little scratch'.

I held her, memorized her, watched her in silence, forgetting to ask whatever questions I'd thought I had. So she spoke first, in a voice just like mine. "Are you another Alice?" She held herself warily, and I wondered how many other Alices were floating and falling through the air alongside us. How many she'd already met, and fallen away from again. How many she'd been forced to kill, as a mercy, like the lifeless body above us.

"Yes."

"What did you wish for?"

I felt suddenly embarrassed, realizing that I had no idea how similar or different we might both be. Suppose she had wished for something incredible, something selfless and pure, instead of such a petty wish as mine? I felt compelled to answer but terrified all at the same time, inexplicably shy to tell her. I worried she would laugh, and then I would regret having helped her, however inadvertently.

She did not chide me, nor say a word more as we fell. She waited, silently watching me, and haltingly, I told her:

"To never be forgotten."

I had long been ashamed of my wish, because I could see how it served no one but myself. Even had I not been bound by karmic fate to bring an end to those who suffered around me, the wish itself was terrible. When she spoke, I thought, she would be cold and disapproving, and I would know that she was right to scorn my selfish desires. Even if her wish was completely different, she would surely understand why it was faulty and judge me all the same.

But in the end, she said nothing at all. Instead, she kissed me: chastely, as if she knew no other way, but firmly too, until at last I relented and relaxed, and kissed her back.

For the first time since I'd made my wish, someone had remembered exactly who I was.

Description
WAIT FOR ME - ALICE PRIME

At the center of the city, Alice waited for an opening in the seething mass of bodies that were the Fallen Stars. She could barely see, her chest aching with every panicked breath. The cold calm that had settled over her when she'd entered the city was long gone. She had lost almost before she began, her berserk rage sated by the first kill, fading away to leave her with a boiling sense of uncertainty. Memories of the dark place she now willingly entered overcame her sense of duty, paralyzing her with fear of her enemy. Still, she pressed on, steeling herself against her own weakness, and brought them down with sheer will, with careful strikes of her staff, with speed that they could not match. They had fallen like dominoes, in waves and clumps and clusters: but a few mocking seconds later, they rose again, severed heads crawling on strings of flesh to reattach to their broken bodies.

They did not even have the decency to look tired.

Now she stood with her back to the unsympathetic glass face of the city's central skyscraper, surrounded by Fallen Stars. She thrust the Staff of Stars aloft and screamed in defiance at them all. "I am not yours!" Casting the staff at the sea of monsters before her, Alice forced herself to smile. She did take some grim satisfaction from the confusion amongst the Fallen as the staff arced through the air. It split and split again, and struck, knocking back the front line a few steps. They scrambled and stumbled over themselves, trying to dodge, many failing. Those that were pierced by the slivers of the staff fell howling to the floor, consumed by flames until they lay still. Victory lasted only seconds, maybe less. More Fallen stepped forward to fill the space she'd cleared, even while she called the staff's base copper back to her hand. She spit at them, trying to hide her cowardice with rage. "I will never be yours!"

Her voice seemed small and weak amidst their chaos. Worse, when she held the staff aloft again, gathering Tau Ceti's distant fire, they began to chant her name in dissonant chorus. "Alice!" She struck them down and did not pause, this time, calling to the magic even before the copper had returned to her hands, lobbing bolt after bolt of power from the Staff of Stars until her fingertips were burnt and she shook when she tried to lift her arms again, cripplingly weak with exhaustion. The flames that had been her constant companion since she summoned the staff flickered orange, then red, then died away, leaving the smoking copper skeleton of the Staff in her hands.

Stumbling, Alice nearly fell to her knees. A delighted cry shot through the waves of her enemy like thunder, and she bit the inside of her cheek until it hurt and her head cleared, turning to the building behind and running straight at it before the Fallen could advance.

At, and up it.

Behind and beneath her, as she soared up the slippery glass face of the skyscraper, the Fallen crashed up against the walls like a monstrous tide, shrieking in anger at her deceit. They screamed her name, voices that could as easily have been her friends, her family, as monsters. They made their voices sound desperate and frightened and she bit down harder, wincing at the little pinprick of pain. Focus. Alice ran where the Fallen could not follow, a blur of orange and red, and crested the roof, landing solidly on her feet seventy stories above their army. She shook, catching her weight with the staff to keep from losing her feet and falling right back off the edge. Up here, all she could hear were their petulant sounds of frustration like a distant sigh on the wind. It was almost enough to make her laugh.

For a time, Alice focused on breathing. Her head began to clear, though she still felt too tired to move, too burnt out to continue fighting. She set her shoulders, straightened, and surveyed the world below her. Thanks to the thick, smoggy haze that hung over the city, she could not see beyond its walls. From here, she could tell where all of the Fallen Stars were, however, and that seemed advantage enough. They had clustered near the building she now stood astride, thinking her captured and making their numbers seem impossibly high. Here, she could see how empty the rest of the city streets were, as though perhaps she had killed some significant portion of their ranks after all. She couldn't see an easy way out of the city now that she'd entered it but she hadn't fully expected to survive the excursion in the first place. She was, she thought, at peace with that. Hans had not answered her, and Christine had disappeared. If she was to die alone, she was determined to do it on her own terms, no matter how hopeless her situation.

Before she could come up with a strategy for the masses below, however, a voice called out from across the roof, sleepy and amused and unsettlingly familiar.

"Well!" It seemed to laugh, oddly mellow in tone despite their serious circumstances. "Imagine seeing you here."

Alice swallowed her answer, willing herself not to draw more attention than she could handle as she slowly turned. Behind her, there stood a creature that could well have been human, once. It stood on two legs, its feet wrapped in armor, and its huge, heavily-muscled arms ended in clawed, semi-human hands. She'd seen any number of Fallen Stars in her time, and while they could follow certain trends, each one tended to look unique up close. This beast was watching her with amusement gleaming in its eight orange eyes, and sported greasy, unkempt hair the same pale shade as her own. With a knowing look, the Fallen Star threw back her head on an uncannily long neck, guffawing at Alice's speechlessness.

"You're looking a little different than I remember, actually." Straightening, the Fallen Star leaned in closer, masked face close enough to run an inhumanly long tongue along Alice's cheek.

"Don't--" Alice slid back half a step, and instantly regretted it as the Fallen Star swept her up with a grab of one huge hand. It- she- pulled Alice into a crushing embrace, and began to laugh as she struggled, gasping in pain. She thought deliriously that this could not be who she thought it was. She knew her own history: she had escaped, not succumbed, when the Fallen Stars captured her.

The arms about her tightened, as if to silently deny her. Aloud, the disturbing creature chuckled, nuzzling her face with its own. The etched, toothy grin on its helmet split open to reveal a much more horrific creature beneath. With a breathy laugh, the semi-human thing ran its long tongue over its teeth, this time, as if in thought. "Is it cannibalism, do you think? If I eat you, do I turn back?" It squeezed her until a sharp scream of pain escaped her efforts at staying silent. The strain on her back was sheer agony. She nearly expected to snap into two. "Come on, I'm asking your opinion, aren't I?"

"Fast."

"Pardon?"

"I-- s-said--" Her head was spinning, and no matter how she shook it, it wouldn't clear. "You should fast," Alice croaked, the defiance she'd meant to spit out coming across as more of a pathetic plea. She'd expected to die in the city when she entered.

She'd not expected it would be at her own hands.

Across the city, the bell-tower began tolling. She could only barely hear the bark of the bell, a distant shimmering sound beneath the roaring of her own blood in her ears, but the Fallen creature-- she could not stand to think of it as bearing her name-- went still, grip loosening ever so slightly as she focused on the unexpected sound. .

Alice gasped for air once, twice, and quite suddenly the world dropped out from beneath them both, casting them from the vanishing roof out into the same, vast Nothing that she'd been stuck in since she'd heard Hans calling her name. At least this time, she reasoned wryly, she was not technically alone. Her doppleganger seemed to be thinking something similar, for it laughed wickedly in her ear and ran its tongue along her cheek as they began to plummet.

"Request denied," purred her other-self, biting down on her right shoulder with inhumanly sharp teeth.

They fell into the forever dark distance of the Nothing, her Fallen counterpart humming as she screamed in pain. Below, past the icy cold sting of the clouds they were passing through, there seemed to glisten the festive colors of a city: she could almost smell the soil, the stink of pollution, the ocean rolling away, unfazed by everything. The unfairness of it all was typically balanced in the Ranger way, really. She was finally going to be returned to Earth, and she was going to be dead before she got there. Gustavo was probably laughing about it right now, assuming he even remembered who she was.

"Come on," she murmured, pressing her lips against Alice's wound and then sucking again on it to take the blood into her mouth. "Yield to me, Alice Valkki. Yield to me like I yielded to the ones who made me; yield responsibility and heartache, and sorrow and death."

"Death?" Alice breathed, hooking her fingers in the jawline of her Fallen self's helmet to steady herself. "What do you mean?"

"Surely by now you've noticed!" It laughed, and released her from its teeth entirely, as if to make a point. The wound still throbbed in the back of her mind, though it seemed to be sealing itself after a minute or two, driven by some magic she didn't find familiar. "The Fallen cannot die, little Alice. When we hit the city, do you want to splatter like a water balloon? Or do you want to bounce?"

It was a pitiful shadow of the defiance she'd thrown out in the City of the Fallen, but Alice didn't have the willpower to do anything more than repeat herself. "I'm not yours."

"You have a funny way," countered her other-self, "of showing it."

They fell locked together, its teeth edging closer and closer to her wounded shoulder again, until at last her fingers found the clasps of its helmet and opened them. She was desperate for some defense against its touch. The clouds around them bit into her eyes and made them sting enough that she was already red-eyed by the time her fingers found their mark and threw open the latches of the other-Alice's helm. First, the dark jaw bracer dropped away, leaving her to stare down at a mockery of her own face, stretched and distorted to fit inside a space too small for human heads. Then smoke streamed from its body and it began to scream so loudly she could hear nothing at all. She was left with nothing but smoke in her hands as she dropped like a stone through the sky.

WAIT FOR ME - BULLET

Alice was falling.

Alice was falling in more ways than one. The arm moved on its own most days, and sometimes the rest of her would, too. She didn't know how or why she'd been popped out of her every day routine struggle with the machine that ruled her body and into the middle of the sky, but there was no one around to ask except...

...herself?

Calling to the figure falling far below her, Alice reached out, meaning to wave in greeting. She shouted over the wind as it whipped her hair into her face, and fancied that the falling figure even heard her, looked up.

It was a split second, no more, no less: suddenly the robot arm was targeting, and charged to fire.

On her other self.

"ALICE!" She grabbed at the metal prosthetic with her other hand, trying to pull it off target. Whatever else might have been true about the falling figure below her, she couldn't tolerate the idea of potentially killing herself, no matter how it might be realized. The programming linked through crawling wires in her neck was too strong to shake off, though, and Alice screamed desperately, willing the other figure to look her way. She could think of nothing else to do. "Alice, get out of the way!"

Something struck, but it wasn't her: and then Alice was tumbling, turning end over end while blood pooled on her stomach and trailed behind her as she fell. Above, there was a dark, familiar face, and with the face came a hand that held her hand, that squeezed it while everything started to grow cold. The Staff of Stars was nowhere to be seen, though she knew she'd used just such a weapon once, before she'd lost her other arm. It was difficult to think, but surely this, too, was 'herself', wasn't it?

"I--" she coughed, and spat blood, not bothering to turn her head. Internally, the machine was in a panic, driven still to protect her from death, from herself, at any cost. Already she felt cold, and a strange darkness was coming over her sight as they tumbled down through the air. With a small smile, Alice tried to squeeze back on that supportive hand. "Thank you-- very much."

The world began to slip away, her hand shaking with the pain in her chest. Above her, there was a single bright voice, saying: "Don't mention it."

WAIT FOR ME - MERCY

When I lost my grandmother, I wished never to be forgotten again.

Nothing, I said, was as painful as being forgotten. Nothing had hurt as much, not even when she couldn't remember her own name. Without remembering me, she couldn't even be sorry she'd forgotten, and I hated it. I never wanted to feel that way again.

I regret that decision all the time.

How I'd ended up free-falling through space was beyond me. Ahead, I could see a streak of orange and blue. Behind, I'd left the other one to tumble like so many rags and bones, after I closed her eyes.

I got as close as I dared. This new 'self' had already been hurt, so I didn't worry much that she might see me. She looked harmless. Maybe even ridiculous, with her little green bandage on her wounded thigh. Her shoulder, too, looked injured but only sometimes: flickering in and out of phase, as if the wound were only an illusion. She appeared harmless, sure, but if she was myself-- some distant dream of myself, as I could have been-- then she could easily be dangerous. I'd already lost so many Rangers to 'dangerous'. Eventually, she caught sight of me, and that made up my mind, ending the paralysis that had kept me hovering out of reach from her, watching, waiting.

I risked closing the distance between us, running on the air itself and taking her into my arms when she was in reach. She seemed small and fragile but didn't cling to me, instead looking up at me searchingly. I felt sorry for her, looking at that face. She was tired, and so lonely she hurt to look at, in a certain light. The scar and crack in her helmet didn't stop her from pretending at confidence. It was as if she was silently saying, before I had even asked if she was all right, 'there are more important things to worry about than a little scratch'.

I held her, memorized her, watched her in silence, forgetting to ask whatever questions I'd thought I had. So she spoke first, in a voice just like mine. "Are you another Alice?" She held herself warily, and I wondered how many other Alices were floating and falling through the air alongside us. How many she'd already met, and fallen away from again. How many she'd been forced to kill, as a mercy, like the lifeless body above us.

"Yes."

"What did you wish for?"

I felt suddenly embarrassed, realizing that I had no idea how similar or different we might both be. Suppose she had wished for something incredible, something selfless and pure, instead of such a petty wish as mine? I felt compelled to answer but terrified all at the same time, inexplicably shy to tell her. I worried she would laugh, and then I would regret having helped her, however inadvertently.

She did not chide me, nor say a word more as we fell. She waited, silently watching me, and haltingly, I told her:

"To never be forgotten."

I had long been ashamed of my wish, because I could see how it served no one but myself. Even had I not been bound by karmic fate to bring an end to those who suffered around me, the wish itself was terrible. When she spoke, I thought, she would be cold and disapproving, and I would know that she was right to scorn my selfish desires. Even if her wish was completely different, she would surely understand why it was faulty and judge me all the same.

But in the end, she said nothing at all. Instead, she kissed me: chastely, as if she knew no other way, but firmly too, until at last I relented and relaxed, and kissed her back.

For the first time since I'd made my wish, someone had remembered exactly who I was.