I had an uncle once – my father’s twin. Twins, twins – dig back far enough and I spect this family is prlly full of em.

Fair twin, dark twin. Twin of innocence; twin of crime. Poles and counterpoles.

But this is not true, not at all. None of us are innocent.

And what about the triplets? Do they whirl around in circles, looking for weighted circumstance to give meaning to their lives?

I digress.

Picar leads me northeast this night, along the curving western coastline. The tides are slack and silent; the inlets sparkle in the moonlight. I could stand in the dry darkness of the caves and make them echo.

But not tonight.

Tonight I head around the bend to Parallax Point, which you will never find for as long as you search. You must simply walk in its direction, and if you are meant to make discovery, you will.

If you should find the Point you will know it by these things: a flickering fire; a circle of shadowy figures. And they will chant from beneath their hooded robes just to scare you; to bring you into that wavery nightmarish place of hot sparks and uncertainty in the inky blackness of night vision ruptured by flame. The chant means nothing; the robes are mere costume. Ritual and illusion: remember this. You will only fall if it is your desire.

And tonight, again, at long last, it my desire.

My need.

This island is not that small. The eco-tourists who have the balls to come here think they can hike n bike the circumference in a week’s time, and are invariably surprised when they’re still hundreds of miles from their final destination on the day they’re due to fly out. Fly home; back to the civilized world where topography plays by cartography’s rules.

Because Picar on the map looks like your average ordinary week-long adventure island. A couple hundred miles of gorgeous coastline; crescent beaches and sea cliffs and switchback trails. Sun, sand and surf.

But Picar on the ground is a whole different story. It doesn’t matter how expensive your compass or detailed your atlas, you won’t find your way unless the island says you will. Unless yours stars and moons are right.

And there’s hazard in that, too -- because chances are you still won’t end up where you intended.

But there’s nothing to be done about that. It’s out the window I go, in the pale light of half-past midnight. Slippers, robe, old red backpack filled with things we never understand.

K3 is calling again.

The problem with Jemima (or one of them, anyway) is that she talks too much. Way too much. Does not understand the weight of silence, and how it can hold things down that need to be kept in place.

Flight has become necessary. Something I should have realized days ago. Those who wish to help can only harm, themselves and others. Possibly me as well.

Jesus! That woman …

There are some things that are so true you can’t believe them; you spend your whole life fighting against their weight. Any son of Picar should know his life will always be someone else’s game to play. Free will, self determination – these thing exist, for sure. But on the small island where I was born there are other forces in motion – forces that supercede even the strongest of wills to pursue one’s own reality.

You can escape these forces for a while, but only because they let you. Which is, of course, no escape at all. And eventually you end up right back where you started: drenched in an ocean cave, tides turning ebb, draining your life force back to the sea. Vampire tides.

There will be moonlight on your face, as you lie flat on your back within the arch of the cave. Chest heaving, hair matted, patches of sand clinging to your chilled skin. There will be a presence all around you – a presence you cannot see (of course) but can most certainly feel. And those childhood ghost stories – all that legend and campfire bullshit -- will suddenly be true. K3 will have come for you.

It doesn’t matter if you’re of native or colonial blood; karaii or karaiia -- you can see from the words themselves how unimportant such a distinction is. What matters are your moons – the ones you were born under – and whether they can tap your tides. Conduct you like a circuit board; an electrified marionette.

And yeah, there’s power to be had in going with the flow, especially if your tides are strong. You can surf it, kinda. It’ll get you high. Riding that cresting wave of energy, hundreds of thousands of years of everything K3 has come to be. Not one man – not even a king. So much more than that.

But there’s always a wipeout in the end. An ocean cave, ebb tides. Gasping for breath as the rippling moonlight takes everything away from you. And each time it takes more than you thought you had, until you find yourself inhabiting negative space. You no longer exist.

Boo.

No, I don’t think Aliss is one of them. I think she’s mixed up in it now, somehow, and if I discover it’s my fault I’ll probably try to kill myself all over again.

What am I saying? Of course it’s my fault – if it wasn’t she wouldn’t be involved. She’d still be here. Or ... wherever she is when she’s not with them.

Which is most certainly where she currently is. With Them. Fuck. And she probably has no idea what’s going on. How could she? Aliss knows a lot about a lot, but who could ever grok K3 unless they were allowed?

I can only imagine what kind of scenery they’ve painted for her; what the hell they’ve said about me. Have they cast me as a twisted monster? Pathetic nutjob? I guess neither is far from the truth if you’re standing in a certain light. But neither one is accurate without the proper context, either (is anything?) and if she believes them I’ll never be able to reach her.

Fucking Lucy.

She ... oh, SHE – she’s been with them all along. I know this now. She didn’t just show up on my doorstep. She was sent. And she didn’t need my help to find her way back to Picar. K3 could have deposited her on Jemima’s doorstep anytime she wanted. Or at least, anytime they wanted.

Maybe that’s how they p0wned her.

The new “nurse” has disappeared (no surprise there) but her visit has been memorable. Heh. Fuck. To say the least.

She was in my room last night, all moonlight on the edge of the bed, and maybe it was just a crazy lucid dream like I used to have – I don’t know. Maybe they’ve started cooking my meds into my jello because they know I’m not fucking taking them.

Anyway. I wake up and her tart little face is in mine, slanting angles and a strange softness, and her bony fingers wrapped around my wrist. Cold hands.

“He needs to get out,” she whispers, dark eyes shining. “Please don’t try to stop us.” The look on my face must have been saying something, because she smiles then, a hint of menace, and squeezes my wrist.

And I get a flash – like a video montage – of the whole damn thing. From the beginning. Cochrech’s easy smile, that first day in class, feet up and chair tilted back but eyes oh-so alert. Camping at crater lake: firelight, rustling underbrush, snapped twigs, that blur in the woods, terror and exhilaration and acid shakes in the sleeping bag all night. The knives, the blood, the scars. The freefall into sweet, all-seeing oblivion. And then graduation, K3 in the shade of the greening maples, smoking his damn cigar. So fucking cliché, all of it. Which is exactly why it worked.

And I had forgotten it all – all but Tristan’s name, Tristan’s face. And a hazy narrative in my head that matched not at all the truth I’d just remembered. How the fuck did that happen?

“Alicia,” I blurted out – surprised the both of us. She looked excited but scared. Glanced around in classic paranoid fashion, then leaned in close.

“Leo,” she said, but it became a kiss before it was ever fully a word, my name, her lips, her hips pressed hard against mine, sliding over my prone body, knees to either side, but she kept sliding and then she was gone. Nothing left but a trace of cinnamon and me to wonder if I’d just woken up – or if I was still sleeping.

Alicia.

Tristan.

Good Christ, is that what this is all about?

Then that makes Lucy ... and Aliss too?

Oh, hell.

What the fuck? New Nurse just came in and snatched the Adidas off the trunk. Looked me right in the eye as she squeezed it in her firm little hand. “Tristan needs this,” she says. Struts the fuck out.

Tristan?

If she means Tristan Cock-Wreck my whole sideways world just went upsidedown.

New nurse today. Weird. Curvy little brown slip of a thing, breezed in with my tray of fucking jello and wafted out again on a cloud of ... cinnamon? Twitch of the hips in her tight little uniform, underneath which she was clearly not wearing granny panties. Come to think of it, none of the other nurses dress like that. They all wear scrubs. It was almost like this chick’s getup was ... a costume?

Christ, I hope she didn’t poison my fucking jello. I’m the only one around here who’s allowed to kill myself, and I’m done with that gig. Things are getting way too interesting.

Woke up this morning and the sun was shining in.

Wait, that’s not my line.

But it was. Shining in, that is. Nice change after four days of rain. Spring and all.

Still, it’s hard. The air smells like home, like childhood. Like something I’ve lost that I won’t ever get back. I let my eyelids drift down and reduce the room to shapes and light and it’s almost there. Hardwood floors and white cotton curtains instead of speckled old lino and cheap plastic venetians. It flickers into place for a moment -- a signal in the static, and then the nurse squeaks in on her thick white sneakers and it’s gone. Bitch.

No – it’s not her fault. What the fuck do I know – she may not even exist. Even if she does, she is apart from all this. She knows nothing. About Lucy, about Aliss, about the strange shoe sitting on top of the trunk when I woke up this morning. It looks like a vintage Adidas, brown with white stripes. Pretty beat-up. Maybe a size 10? Anyhow, the nurse didn’t give it so much as a glance when she came in. Like it wasn’t even there.

Heh – maybe it’s not.

I’d think maybe I wasn’t either, except for the jello they keep fucking feeding me. Christ – at this point even Jemima’s burnt toast would be an improvement.