She thought of them as Squeaky and Dreamy, not that she ever called them that out loud, or that she ever told Aang or any of the rest. When Squeaky had asked if Toph and Dreamy weren’t just products of her brain, Dreamy had pointed out that it didn’t matter much, and that, on the whole, people seemed to become concerned if you started hearing imaginary voices in your head.

The point was, every twenty-eight days for the past few months she’d woken up in the middle of the night to hear them chattering away; she could tell they weren’t actually there—not their bodies, in any case—since she’d have been able to hear the echoes and feel their movements. Their voices had been flat, without reverberation. Like voices inside her head.

“Why every twenty-eight days?” Toph grumbled subvocally, knowing they’d be able to hear.

“Oh,” sighed Dreamy, “it must be because of the onset of menses, don’t you think?”

“Huh?”

“Yes,” squeaked Squeaky. “That makes sense. I don’t pay attention to that much, but you must be right.”

“What’s that men, mess thing you’re talking about?” Toph hated when they talked like this, like they understood each other, when she didn’t. Then again, it was a very familiar experience, and one of the things that reassured her that she wasn’t just going crazy. If they were just in her head, she’d be able to understand them, wouldn’t she?”

“The monthly sloughing of your uterine lining,” said Squeaky. “Blood flowing to blood.”

“Oh,” said Toph. It was something she thought about as little as possible, though she’d been aware of her mother’s and the female servants’ for as long as she could remember; hard to hide that from a blind girl. “We call that our moon time.” It had started for her not long after she’d joined Aang and the rest. It was humiliating and inconvenient, and she hated that Katara had been so kind and helpful. Come to think of it, the visits of her two odd friends had started not long after.

“Moon time,” said Dreamy, drawing the phrase out as if she were tasting it. “I like that. My name means moon.”

Squeaky, whose responses ranged from scary random to scary sharp, snapped, “My name means a large, coherent flow of water or other liquid across otherwise dry land.”

Toph grimaced, trying to figure out what the heck that meant. “Uh, I don’t think my name means anything at all.”

“It means you,” said Dreamy.

“I guess.” Toph turned on her bedroll. Slipping her right foot out from under the covers she touched her toes and was reassured to sense all of them were they should be, sound asleep. Aang. Katara. Sokka, next to Suki. A hot spot between them… Were they…? Holding hands? Blech. “Hey, listen, can I ask you two something?”

“Of course,” came the two ethereal voices.

“How nice to be asked,” said Dreamy.

“People are usually too frightened of what I’ll answer,” said Squeaky, and for a moment she almost sounded a little sad.

“Yeah,” said Toph, because honestly, if she wanted self-pity, she could wake Katara or Aang and get plenty. “So you’re both older than me, right?”

“Not terribly. I believe we’re both seventeen,” answered Dreamy.

“Mind of a child, jungles wild,” chanted Squeaky, who was clearly wandering in the deep end of the mine shaft again.

“Well,” Toph asked, pushing forward because she’d been wanting to ask this for quite a while, “does all the girl-boy stuff ever get better? I mean, our whole group, all of the rest of them, they’re all either sighing at each other, or snapping at each other, or… Holding hands and stuff. And there’s a war! I mean, when they’re all older, they’ll grow up about all of that, right?”

She heard nothing but silence for a good long while, to the point where she thought perhaps they were gone—sometimes the connection did that, though usually not till closer to dawn. Toph could feel that it was still the middle of the night, however: the rocks over her head were still cooling. The air hadn’t started to warm yet.

“The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact,” said Squeaky at last.

“Hmmmmm,” answered Dreamy in what sounded like agreement.

“But…” Toph spluttered, uncertain whether that had been anything like an answer, “come on! Don’t tell me it isn’t going to get better! I mean, you’re bunch’re all grown ups, right?”

“That part doesn’t seem to change much,” Squeaky answered. “The captain and Inara are like two moths made of flame, dancing around each other, flying around each other. My brother and Kaylee spent almost a year trying to pretend… They fight and sigh and kiss just as much. Only there’s sex.”

“Have you had sex?” asked Dreamy before Toph could—not that she’d actually have asked, not that she actually wanted to know, but—

“No,” said Squeaky, and this time there was a true sadness, a real sadness to her voice that shook Toph in a way that Toph didn’t like at all. It reminded Toph that Squeaky was floating in the middle of so much cold emptiness that it couldn’t be imagined; Toph touched her toes to the ground again.

“Everyone’s too frightened of me,” Squeaky continued.

“Hmm,” said the witch girl, Dreamy.

“Since I killed all those Reavers,” Squeaky went on—and the story came back to Toph as Squeaky had told it, flat and statistical: thirty-eight not-quite-humans, crazy, armed and blood-thirsty, killed bare-handed by a seventeen-year-old girl who liked to dance—“Jayne thinks of me differently. But he’s got a girl’s name. And he likes guns more than he likes people. Also, he almost had me and Simon killed once. I don’t think he wants to have sex with me, and if he did, I don’t think I’d like it.”

“I suppose not,” said Dreamy.

“Ugh,” added Toph.

“I watch Kaylee and Simon sometimes, and it’s so lovely…” The sadness returned for a moment before it was replaced by a kind of sly humor. “Neither of you have had sex either.”

“NO!” gasped Toph, hoping she hadn’t said it out loud. The idea! Some boys weren’t so bad, but the idea of one touching her, it didn’t sound… At least not much. And not in a way that she wanted to think about just now.

“No,” agreed Dreamy, wistfully. “Of course, since I’m a captive at the moment, I suppose that that is rather fortunate. Mr. Ollivander is quite lovely, but he has been hurt rather a lot and I do not think that he was ever a terribly erotic person to begin with. And my captors are unlikely to introduce me to sexuality in a way that I should find at all pleasant or even enlightening.”

Toph shuddered, trying not to understand what Dreamy meant, but failing.

“Mine removed part of the lining of my amygdala,” murmured Squeaky. “It wasn't pleasant. But it also meant that I was too strong for them to keep.”

“Well, that was nice,” said Luna, sounding genuinely pleased.

Toph shuddered again. “I hate seeing things others don’t.” She hoped that her voice didn’t sound as wet and miserable in the other girls’ heads as it did in her own.

Both other girls agreed, Dreamy dreamily, Squeaky squeakily: “Yes.”

“Though I should like your gift just now,” sighed Dreamy. “I have not seen light in months. I wonder if the Eugenwraiths will have eaten my eyes. I would love to be able to feel everything that was around me. And I could kill my captors with large rocks.”

“Human bodies are highly susceptible to extreme inertial variances.” Squeaky began to sing: “Sticks and stones can break your bones…. Though I would prefer to be able to see inside of people’s bodies to seeing inside of their heads.”

Dreamy hummed, “Hmm.”

“What are… Eugenwraiths?” asked Toph, though she knew she shouldn’t.

“They are tiny flying creatures that latch onto the optic nerve and suck the vitality out of the host’s eye, leaving it as dry as a raisin.”

“Ew!” said Toph and Squeaky together.

“Though not everyone has accepted their existence,” Dreamy mused. “And you wouldn’t have to worry about those, would you, Toph?”

“No,” conceded Toph.

“And,” Squeaky chirped, “Simon could probably get rid of them. He is a wonderful doctor.”

“How nice,” said Dreamy, somewhat less dreamily.

“Even so, there times that mine eye offends me, so that I would pluck it out.”

“Oh,” Toph said, squirming, knowing the crazy girl might actually do it,
“don’t! Being blind is no fun, trust me.”

“I suppose,” answered River. “I think what I would like to pluck out is that I know things before they happen.”

“Why?” asked Toph. “I’d love that.”

“It… can be disconcerting. To me. To others.”

“Oh.”

Dreamy hummed again, and said, “I think that we spend too much time thinking of causality flowing in only one direction. But it doesn’t, you know. Not really.”

Squeaky was silent. Toph too said nothing, but she thought about prophecies, and how they were nearly always a rip-off—they never meant what you thought they meant, and you couldn’t ever understand them until it was too late.

Toph thought of the other two: River flying through open space, Luna sitting in a dark cellar. Through her toe, she reached out and felt the whole of the Air Temple: the cracks, the places where the sun’s heat had finally radiated away and the stones were singing against each other. Alone, she felt the warmth of the half-dozen bodies around her, and the heat of the two minds to whom hers was linked.

“Glad you’re here.”

The others were silent, but Toph could feel a pulse of their presence in her own head.


: :


Jayne stumbled as he came onto the bridge. River was driving the ship with her feet, upside down in the pilot’s chair, her hair all over the floor. She waved her arms like she were some tama-de old dancing statue. “I am become Death,” she said, “the Destroyer of Worlds.”

Jayne gulped. She scared the living crap out of him. It turned him on and that confused the hell out of Jayne. “Brought your supper,” he said, placing it on the console.

“I wish I could see into your body, Jayne,” she said, looking through him like he weren’t there at all.

He backed down the gangway, trying to hide a really humiliating stiffy. “Yeah. Seeya.”


: :


He heard her sigh and sighed himself. If she were to go mad—or madder—he would be lost himself. Odd as she was, she had been his lifeline, his rock in this awful place.

“We are not alone,” whispered Luna, and she sounded so certain, so pleased, that Mr. Ollivander wanted to believe her. Wanted her to be right, and not merely insane.

“No, my dear,” he said, reaching out toward her and finding her thin arm, holding it. “No. We are not.”


: :


“Toph?” asked Katara. “Are you having problems sleeping?”

“Nah,” said Toph. “Just thinking.”

“Oh.” The other girl lay back down in her bedroll; Toph could feel her shift, could feel the need and fear and anger radiating from her. “Good night, Toph.”

“’Night,” said Toph, lifting her toe, and letting the quiet sigh of the cooling cliffs lull her to sleep.

We are not alone.