Halloween is not particularly high on her list of holidays.

She's sentimental enough to like Christmas. Christmas smells good. It has soft lights and white glitter, really good desserts and a general air of niceness. It has love and family and giving and all that good stuff. She likes New Year's, too, even though she's too old to get drunk. She likes Thanksgiving. Nice warm holidays in every sense of the word. Those are the sort of holidays she likes.

Halloween is right down there with Valentine's Day. A nasty, commercial holiday that causes a great deal of fuss and hassle, tacky orange decorations, animated skeletons and way too much cheap candy that could quite possibly have been poisoned.

But she can't help by smile at the sight of Elsie, all dressed up in her shimmering pink dress and glittering crown. She's a princess this year (again). She's been a princess every year since she was three, and she has a whole collection of shiny dresses and crowns. Angeline doesn't mind. She thinks she might lose it if Elsie tried to go as a faerie or something.

It's six o'clock on the 31st of October, and Angeline and Elsie are standing in front of the Gap at the Westplace Mall. Elsie is clutching her Jack-o-Lantern shaped bucket and grinning somewhat maniacally. The mall is having one of those shop-to-shop trick-or-treating events and Angeline has decided that this is really much safer then actually going door to door.

At Elsie's insistence, Angeline is dressed up. Her outfit has somewhat more class then that of some of the other people around - particularly the fat woman in the plush pumpkin costume. Angeline is wearing a long, swishing skirt that's a deep purpley colour and a red silk peasant blouse, which - along with hoop earrings, boots, over-done makeup and a black scarf wrapped around her hair - denotes 'gypsy'.

The Gap is very crowded, spilling over with pirates and faeries and angels and knights and a weirdly high proportion of bananas.

"Go on in," Angeline says, not wanting to squish through them all, "I'll be waiting right here."

While everybody else is taking the opportunity to play dress up and not be chided for it, Lynx has regressed into one of the skins he is most comfortable in, which could ostensibly pass for a costume itself. Outlandish, and a trifle Mad Maxian, it’s only natural that it fits him to a tee.

The zipper of the motorcycle jumpsuit he’s strapped up in is undone, way down low on his cutting edge hips, and exposes too much pelvic bone for daytime television—worse when it’s publically flouted and made unavoidable. His circuitry is on display through sheer skin, and he often gets mistaken for a willing tattoo victim, because nobody has veins or birthmarks like these, with the crisp, detailed lines of a machine’s blueprint. They mustn’t be the cheap rub-on transfers either, as they pulse and snake around.

The aforementioned soft lights of Christmas have sequestered themselves in his hair, perhaps hoping to bring some life to its premature greying, but the glow encased in his throat is significantly more unorthodox, and though the vertical stripe of white paint on his lips screams ‘neo-geisha’, the dead blue of them says ‘been chilling (literally) on a slab at the morgue’.

An unlit cigarette is being contemplated in his mouth, the filter rolled around on his indecisive tongue, and it catches the eye of the store clerk, who has had it in for the blasé god ever since he walked through the automatic security barrier and set it off, beeping like a banshee, for no apparent reason. It’s one strike too many, so Lynx finds himself being escorted outside, away from the children and their poor excuses for ensembles.

He was harassing them before, quizzing them on what they were each meant to be, and the answers ranged from unimaginative to disappointing. The six-year-old dressed as a pirate didn’t even have the ingenuity to go as a space pirate, and the one ‘astronaut’ is just a brat in tinfoil who got stuck with a goldfish bowl over his head and decided to make the most of it. There is nothing astro about that, but the score is a big, fat naught.

Some of the more sheltered kids whined that their mothers had lectured them on strange men (vol. 1, chap. 6, sect. 2.7: talking to, the perils of), and when he harshed their buzz by pointing out that this evening was steeped in the tradition of requisitioning candy from strangers, he got dumb looks all around.

Oh, look, another human young. Bumping into her at the entrance to The Gap, he looks down at Elsie, and he has quite a long way to look, what with his height, taking her in with eyes like silver dollars. And then clicks his tongue, rife with metal, at the overload of pink and cutesiness, barbell clacking against his top row of teeth. The cig goes behind an ear—pierced too, as is the most of him, nipples not an exception.

So that the little girl’s (probably store-bought) banality doesn’t kill him, Lynx confiscates her crown and crushes it ruthlessly between his palms. When he pulls them apart, he also pulls out of thin air a much prettier, much ritzier diadem, and props the roseate redress on her head, but not before ruffling her hair with a staticky hand. “Here you are, princess.” Something to differentiate her from the pack.

He’s trying not to glance at her mum, because his last meeting with a gypsy didn't go too well. It might have been that he called said gypsy a Romany strumpet, and where did a guy in a whole herd of leathers get off on calling someone that?

Elsie has been using her sharp little elbows to knock several assorted ninjas, Vikings and some kid with a fish bowl on his head out of her way as she rushes to get into the Gap. Her big brown eyes are almost as sharp as her elbows and she saw some kids coming out of the store with Peppermint Patties, which she hasn't got any of yet tonight and really wants.

Not a yard away from her mother, she is in the process of tripping up a kid in an unidentifiable, multi-coloured outfit. Her actions are not honourable, but they're effective.

Then someone takes her crown. People have been pressing into her from all sides since she arrived at the mall, so she wouldn't have noticed the man's presence if it hadn't been for the sudden lightness on her head. Looking up, she sees her crown apparently disappear, and the new one pulled from the air between the guy's hands.

As his hand frizzles across her already crazy hair, she remembers her manners instead of her mother's warnings. "Thanks, mister," she says, grinning upwards. She is reasonably impressed by Lynx and his outrageous appearance, but more ultimately interested in candy. Her outfit has been upgraded, now she wants sugar. She sidesteps a fat kid and shoves off into the gap.

Angeline is watching the exchange with a look of confused horror.

She's seen all sort of weird people roaming the streets of Bayfield. People she doesn't really want her kid hanging out with. People like her.

But she's never seen anyone like Lynx before, and the blue glow from his throat hits her like one of his electrical shocks. She's never seen him but she's heard about him. People warn you. Your mother says, don't talk to strange men and watch out for the guy with the white eyes. Funny eyes in general are bad. And glowy people. Definately stay away from the glowy people.

And here one is. A glowy person. He presents an almost hypnotic image, with the bad mall lighting hitting off his jewellery, his beating tattoos and the faerie lights in his hair. They look soft, pretty, innocent, even if the rest of him doesn't.

Angeline is still, and when Elsie ducks away into the store, she lets out a breath she had been unknowingly holding.

Lynx is bludging, however much it’s possible for Lynx to bludge.

It’s Halloween, so traffic is high, and the fact that he is doing billions of constructive somethings in other places, as we speak, does not nullify his not doing something constructive in the here and now, where he stands in one spot and looks mildly at lights on the ceiling. His attention span is phenomenally short, but brightness is enough to do it, and the lights flicker and tremble under his stare, anxious to meet their maker.

One child, easily frightened, yelps at the sudden darkness, but just as suddenly they’re back on, and she gives an embarrassed smile to her friend, rattles off, “Just kidding!” and floats behind a rack of clothing before she can be teased.

This holiday is a big day for him. Around the globe, people are logging on, tap-tap-tapping their keyboards to bluntness, purchasing outfits to throw together at the last minute—off sites that were thrown together at the last minute to glean some profit from the corporate occasion for celebration. Teenagers are sending each other ‘can you spot the difference’ and ‘look at this picture’ screamers, and it gets them every time, even when they’re waiting for it. Ghosts in the machine.

The mall is probably a bad choice of getaway, in that there are more teenagers and they’ve come in droves, but he has nothing against one or the other demographic. They are all very young to him, children and adults alike. He is young himself, when compared to his godly competition, but that is because his very nature begs rapid evolution, and his recent rebirth came with a boost in technology and his subsequent reimagining.

Back in the store, a frustrated cashier is near tears while she yanks at the electronic register, which has become inexplicably jammed. The clerk from before hurries over to help her, and Lynx takes the opportunity to snatch a pair of sunglasses off the display at the border of the store. He pushes the obnoxiously heart-shaped lenses up on the bridge of his nose, and reaches for another pair, these ones sleek and jagged, blue as chlorine. And another, going for triplets, until he is watching Angeline through three layers of coloured plastic.

In a perfect world, he would have multifaceted eyes, like the big, buzzing pest that he is.

He walks over to the gypsy with a bit of a saunter; he picks these things up sometimes, how a human body is supposed to move, but by the end of the day, it will fade into stiff mechanics. Just watch.

“You would be the chauffeur and retinue.” Clipping one set of glasses onto a pocket in the jumpsuit, he snaps the second off his face, and nudges the third onto his forehead. All of this he does with the one hand, but so quickly it’s almost simultaneous, and he might as well have three right arms. Not that it would matter. Lynx is, naturally, ambidextrous. Anything else would be wasteful.

He peers at her. “You on neighbourhood watch or something? You don’t look like a soccer mum.” The peering transgresses decency until it’s outright scrutiny, and Lynx doesn’t stop at looking at Angeline, he looks through her, past the clothes, past the skin, past the flesh and muscle, into her bones. It’s most uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of such an invasive x-ray.

They tell you to stay away from the ones who glow, but you never get to hear what to do if you can’t manage that. Whoever fails to heed the first warning isn’t around to tell you.

Angeline stares.

Just for a moment. It's rude to stare, and she knows it. Just like her daughter, it's her manners that kick in before the flee-or-fight instinct. But she had to stare for a moment. Even if it wasn't a god (that sounds so wrong to her, to the good church-going girl, there should only be one god, with a capital G) he's wearing three pairs of sunglasses. How can she help but stare?

Then she gets over it, blinks, and closes her reddened lips.

Her eyes try to follow the motion of his hand as he peels off his glasses. The action should be making him seem more vulnerable, but it doesn't. She swallows, hard.

"Yeah, that'd be me," she agrees. She's not sure that agreeing with the god is a really good idea, but silence is hardly an option and agreeing is better then not. "I..."

She's about to try and bat away the soccer mum comment when he starts really looking at her. His gaze isn't at all diffused by the heart shaped glasses (don't break my heart and I won't break your heart-shaped glasses, she thinks, but doesn't remember where she heard the words). He's peeling her apart, layer by layer. It feels like he can see all of her, through her costume to the lacy red bra and knickers that she's just slightly ashamed of. Past that, to the skin that's all stretch marks and tattoos. Past that, even, to blood and bone, lurking fat and hard-won muscle.

She's not quite sure how good his eyes are, but they pierce. He can't read her heart, she hopes. But it feels like he can see that too - not just the working organ, pumping her blood, but all the fear and love that's knotted up inside her. Love for Elsie, and fear of people (things, even, he's a freak and doesn't really count as a person) like him who might hurt her.

Angeline swallows again.

Yes, she lives in a Neighbourhood Watch community.

"Nah," she says, finding her voice again. "I never was much a sports person. Anyway..." she glances over to where she can just see Elsie in a crowd of children, "she's a bit girly for soccer."

The heart-shaped glasses don’t fare so well once they’re in his hand, and when he brings them up to his jaw and bites into one of the earpieces, it breaks off as readily as a piece of gingersnap. Chewing thoughtfully over what Angeline has said with his mouth open, minding his manners is not Lynx’s strong suit, or his highest priority. He treats the painfully polite with the same indifferent curiosity as he does those discourteous. Besides, it would be hypocritical if staring bothered him. The brittle plastic splinters under his sharp, sharp teeth, and it’s not spittle that flies from his mouth, but a flurry of white-gold sparks.

Worse still, he doesn’t do this to frighten her, or for any reason other than: he can. If it can be done, he’s probably gone there at one point in time.

Saucy lingerie makes her look like even less of a sports enthusiast, but he doesn’t linger on all the red lace for too long—the god is pretty much immune to pleasures of the flesh, which prevents him from using his power for evil. Power, singular; the others in his arsenal can be not as ambivalent. After something stirs in him at the green writing on her back, his eyes pull back the skin he sees and comb over her ribcage, then go prying into her coronary arteries. They call the mortal equivalent of what he’s doing ‘eagle eye’, but his eyes have both the flatness of a fish and the hunger of a mantis. Hunger for discovery.

There’s no one thing that attracts or repels him. He’s looking one moment, deep inside the cavity of her chest, and not the next. Pulse is a fine indicator of love, as the heartbeat nearly never lies, and fear he can smell as a change in pheromone count.

Lynx wants to tell her they have machines for that nowadays. To save surgeons half the work and steady-handedness, they have rotor blades mounted on little mechanical arms that will cut you nice and clean down the middle, open you up wide. But without context, it will be a non sequitur from a horror B-movie, so he stays his tongue.

There’s nothing terribly inhuman about her, which doesn’t surprise him in a human. Everything appears to be in order. He wants to touch her—the soft humanity of her—and since he acts on most of his impulses, he does, reaching across the distance between them to put his hand up her shirt. His palm crackles with constrained electricity as it glides from her prize-winning stomach to her floating ribs, up beneath the swell of her breasts, skirting their curves, and finally to her back. It’s a finality because that’s where his hand comes to rest, most disconcertingly along her spinal chord. One good volt now and hello, quadriplegia.

He touches the tattoo, reading it with his fingertips as easily as he would Braille. It’s ink, which he’s fond of, but at the same time it doesn’t sound dedicated to him. Sounds more like a tribute to death, or knowledge at the very least. It irks him, just barely, and he wonders if he should swap some of the words around or make the ink run. That could poison her. In the end though, he does nothing to the heretic; he’s not the wrathful God for whom she goes to church.

Someone walks past, sees them how they are, and calls Angeline a cougar beneath their breath, because here this young man is with his sticky fingers under the blouse of a gypsy twice his age, and there are children present. Shame on them.

At the mention of Elsie, Lynx curls the fingers of the hand he has spare into a fist, holding it out demonstratively, palm up. As if he’s got a kitten by the scruff of the neck. There’s a whiff of dictatorship that comes with the gesture, as if he believes he’s onto something and will not be convinced otherwise. “You have to mould them,” he says. It’s perhaps the scariest thing yet. His tone is literal. Mould them—take the frailty of a child and shift the pieces of its skeleton around until it’s what fits the bill.

That settles it. No man is in him, only machine.

The god may be immune to the pleasures of the flesh, but the woman is not. Her entire body tenses under Lynx's touch, his fingers leaving tangible marks on her skin. No one has laid a hand on her in so long (excepting herself) and her skin is unused to the sensation, the foreign touch.

His hands slid around, running over her tattoo, and she can't help but smile just slightly despite her fear. She's fond of the tattoo.

"April is the cruelest month," she recites, not knowing whether he can read the words through her skin (and wondering whether gods necessarily know how to read backwards, or if they have to conjure mirrors or if it just doesn't matter to them) "breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire."

It is her favourite poem and she knows it by heart. Nonetheless, she keeps the book it's in next to her bed. She's read it on any number of lonely nights, running her fingers across the page like it's someone's stomach. If you pick up her copy of The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot it will fall open to page fifty-seven.

Elsie prefers Practical Cats, of course.



There is a pause after he speaks. They are standing close to each other in the crowd. Angeline is watching her daughter.

"You gave her a crown," she tells Lynx, as if he doesn't already know. "You molded that, too, didn't you? Crushed it and broke it and took it apart and found something new inside of it."

Her tone is flat and somewhat strained. A deliberate suppression of emotion, but she can't hide the fear that makes her voice sound breakable.

"Is that what you want me to do with her, too?"

To take her between my hands and... and smush her? To pull her apart, atom by atom, and make something different out of her? To change what she is?

It hurts to even think that.

Feeling her tense, he beams out a little command from his fingertips to her nervous system that tells her to relax. He’s great at making people uncomfortable, but he’s not in the business of it, and he’s intrigued enough by this woman that he doesn’t want her to go into shock. It’s happened before.

She smiles when he goes for the tattoo, and since a smile is generally perceived as a good thing in human culture, the god increases his attentions, skimming his knuckles along her back and rubbing his thumbs in small circles over individual words. Ink is to Lynx as moth is to flame, and even if she isn’t a fan of close contact with him, he’s sure her tattoo is.

Most of the circuitry under his skin, as he touches her, has wormed its way down to settle in his wrist, but at the recital of lines from the poem, it wavers back up to his face, concentrated blue around his ears and temples. He listens with his head on one side and the unintelligent look of a cinderblock; it’s a bit like hearing an audio book, but he suffers through it affably enough, since it’s a rare day when someone does something purely for his benefit. Of course he can read backwards, he’s the world’s top central processing unit, but he can’t quite muster up the incentive for canned applause.

“Yes.” As well as reading backwards, Lynx has eyes in the back of his head, and doesn’t have to turn to see the child or her once measly crown. “It’s stronger now. Nicer to look at. Bigger and better. She is happy with the new model. I pride myself on customer satisfaction.”

Discussing her daughter with him thickens the fear in Angeline, a by-product of the phenomenon that is maternal instinct. It’s unclear whether she reads his mind and her question is intuitive, or if she’s just done herself in by giving him ideas. Her instinct is strong, but he knows he is stronger.

All the time she’s been talking, he’s been systemically devouring the pair of shades, until they’re gone and leave no crumbs behind. (One down, two to go?) Now he takes his hand off her and holds it up to his chin, and when his mouth opens, melted plastic pours from it like a deluge of black tar. It pools into his palm and he closes his fist around it, moulding it, cooling it, hardening it. He presents the result for her between thumb and forefinger: an inches-tall figurine of Elsie, complete with big hair.

“If I agree, is that what you’ll do?” It’s rhetorical, and straightaway followed up by, “Let’s see.”

With another clench of his hand, he’s demolished the miniature Elsie and ground her down into fine powder—his own special brand of fairy dust—which he exhales mightily and blows into Angeline’s face. “Tell her this year is the last she’s to be a princess.”

Lynx isn’t keen on soccer; he would rather parents leave their kids in front of the television more often to soak up its nutritious (for him) rays.

He prides himself on customer satisfaction.

That amuses her, if not quite enough to make her smile. She wonders if perhaps part of his mind (or whatever it is he has) is based in an Asian call centre. It would seem likely.

Nonetheless, that's his hand on her back. It seems unrealistic, strange. Different to anyone else's hand on her back, too. After all, he is a god. And not just any god. A god of metal and code and things with blinking flashing lights. He's probably like androids in cheap sci-fi. Heartless and cold. Without emotion. That would probably explain his willingness to crush things.

Angeline wonders if she's meant to thank him on Elsie's behalf for providing this new tiara. She decides not. Elsie's manners are impeccable - she will have already thanked the god. Angeline, on the other hand, is not at all grateful for his interference. She will not thank him. Nor does she answer his question. The answer should be obvious enough anyway. Of course she won't. She's a mother. She has no interest in breaking things, only in nurturing and caring and fixing. She is brilliant with plasters (the coloured ones, glow in the dark, sparkly, but never beige) and kissing things better. She can mend ripped jeans and shattered egos and she can make beds and pick up laundry and draw pictures of flying elephants and while she might break the odd plate by accident, she is not by nature destructive.

No more princesses?

"Why do you care?"

It's probably not a good question to ask a god. It's a bit mouthy, and a bit impertinent. Also, she doesn't really want to know the answer. But she couldn't help asking. It's that delightful human urge. Curiosity. An innocent trait for the most part, but hiding an intrinsic desire for death.

Already she is wondering what Elsie could be next year.

A ballerina, maybe. Or a butterfly. She might like all the colours and the face paint.

It’s unfair, with all the downloading that’s going on, and all the background noise, to ask such a loaded question. And no, mouthing off to a god isn’t the most self-preserving idea Angeline has had that day, but luckily for her technology isn’t the sadist the others are, nor does he get as offended. Sometimes he’ll make people squirm, sure, but purely for science.

Care? He runs the word through his online dictionaries and memory bank, but turns up no correlation between this act of ‘caring’ and himself. But, not to disappoint her, Lynx takes an educated guess at what she wants to hear. If she thinks of him as a monster, she’ll probably be waiting for some monstrous purpose of his. Anything benign would come across as suspicious, and she might ask what the catch is.

Why does he care? What’s he after? Tears from Elsie? Will she beat her head against the wall and scream at the top of her underdeveloped lungs that Angeline is a bad mother—the worst mother? The child seems too well-mannered for bratty behaviour, if one overlooks her shoving and elbowing as ambitious and a necessary evil, but she also seems fond of her princess gear. Perhaps it will be a bonding experience for them, or a lesson in the disappointment that marinates the salad of life.

None of these things ring true to him. He’s thinking so hard that his imitation skin is burning up (even the best latex-silicone amalgamations heat up under pressure); smoke and the smell of frying plastic rise from beneath his unzipped jumpsuit. The look on his face—slack, not tense with concentration—would, if he were still in school, warrant a recommendation for remedial classes.

Finally he settles on an answer. “I don’t. I’m just curious.” A finger is lifted to track across her throat, tilting her chin up, exposing the jugular. “You know what that’s like, Angeline. Curiosity. It’s,” he taps the pulse in her neck, the pulse he is separated from by a few flimsy sheets of skin, “in your blood.”

Lynx would argue for breaking in the name of fixing. Deconstruct to reconstruct. Being a princess year after year after year smells like a rut to him, and an idle mind is the playground of some kind of devil; suppose he is the other kind, here to dust off the cobwebs.

Watching the god fizzle and smoke, Angeline raises one eyebrow. It's perfectly plucked and kohl darkened, and it forms a mathematically correct arch. "Are you supposed to do that?"

The question escapes her lips before she remembers that it might not be such a good idea. But the question was posed in perfect innocence - perhaps even with some concern. She can't help it. She knows that she is a worthless mortal and that he is a god and so far above and beyond her, but her mothering instinct kicks in anyway. Fizzling and smoking can't be healthy. He probably doesn't get enough vitamins. Or minerals, or... somethings.

"Curious?"

The questions just keep coming, and that answer did not compute. What, exactly, is he curious about? Angeline is not sure. She surmises that he is curious about Elsie, and she could probably write a thesis on how this is a metaphor for curiosity about humanity. But she could be totally wrong. After all, she has very little (well, none, to be honest) experience with gods.

His finger on her throat, her neck tilted back... It makes her feel exposed all over again. The pulse, right under his finger, is beating double time.

She knows what he means, though. About curiosity. It's the thing that's working with fear to hold her in place. The thing that makes her wonder about him. Does his mouth taste like metal? Or like electricity? What does it feel like? How are his thoughts - coded like the Matrix? Organised into files?

And it's really none of her business, but she can't help but wonder.

Maths is great fun to the god. The more seizure-inducing the better. Apoth has cooked up some A-grade brainteasers in the past, and whittling them down to a lineup of neat little answers pushes all of Lynx’s buttons. It isn’t cheating if he doesn’t bring a calculator into the test area, and while technically he’s doing just that by bringing himself, he will squall about discrimination if he is ever called on it. Angeline’s eyebrow makes for pretty geometry, and he’s so mesmerised by it and the bassline thumping against his fingertip that her question has to take a running start to punch through his thick head. And even then–

“What?” The screen of smog pulls together to block her from view, calling attention to itself, but then twists away with a loud sucking sound. “Oh, that?” Lynx, visible again, is dabbing at the corners of his still smoking mouth, so he must be the Hoover in question. “It’s nothing. I’m the newest model, you know. Takes more than a puff of smoke to rough me up. See?” He pirouettes for her inspection. “Not a scratch on me.” Maybe the old gods could be overcome, chained under mountains and whatnot, but he is galvanism and fortification, the storm and the forge. Like the tinman, he could do with an oil change, but otherwise he powers ahead.

He’s never had a mother. Or mother figure. Whether or not she realises it, Angeline has done her daughter a service. Her second-guessing everything Lynx does or says elbows the issue of Elsie aside, triggering the part of him that’s a help desk and wants to fill her inquiries. But a want does not necessarily translate into cogent communication.

Lynx says, “?” Actually says it.

Not the words ‘question mark’, he says the punctuation. To every other machine, it’s a feasible query. An ATM standing next to a nearby kiosk beeps back at him, eager to be of assistance. To a djinn or technodryad (two of his patron creatures), it’s something close to a peal of whalesong, or sometimes, if the question is loud and pressing enough, a terrifying sonic boom. How a human hears it has to do with what frequency they’re on, but it passes most by like a dog whistle, unheard and unnoticed.

Stumped by the redundancy of her question, he puts it into words Angeline must understand, because they are ripped straight from his browser-based interface, “Your search yielded no results. Please clarify your search terms.” His voice remains impassive, but he folds his arms over his chest, a sulky teenager, and gives her a look that’s just trying to be difficult.

Quite a few people/deities have been wondering about the properties of his mouth lately. If this keeps up, it might need its own ticker symbol.

He's right. Not a scratch on him. If only children held up that well, Angeline mused. Elsie is always coming in bashed and scratched to fuck. They go through cartons and cartons of Tinkerbell and Dora plasters. Part of it is Angeline's motherly paranoia - most of the scratches would never amount to anything, but there's always the possibility... Things might get infected. It's possible. You never know. Better safe than sorry, and all that.


"It doesn't matter," she says, hurriedly. "I just wondered what you were curious about."

She realises that she's playing with fire. She should be following the standard protocol for large, mean looking dogs. No eye contact, no surprising moves. Don't do anything threatening (ha ha, as if she could threaten him). Just back slowly away and hope the stupid thing doesn't chase you.

But it's already gone way past that. This strange god, wearing the pretty-boy cyberpunk body and the laconic teenage expression, has her caught up like a fly in a spiderweb. Maybe he doesn't mean to, but he does. Angeline is mesmerised. Transfixed. At this point, she probably couldn't look away if she wanted to. Couldn't run even if she knew he wouldn't follow.

Is that all?

The drizzle of belligerence trickles away into the rain gutter of his mind, and he phases back into blankness. She’s lost him again, or else regained him, or whatever confusing thing it is with Lynx. More than that, she goes on grilling him. It isn’t so unusual, only Angeline knows or thinks she knows what he is, so it really, really is. There is some looming, unspoken agreement in Bayfield, the gist of which is that the gods are right by default. They’re gods.

Of course Elsie gets banged up. All skin and bones like that. What does her mother expect? Mice are made of the same breakable stuff, and they splinter with a snap of the fingers, dry wood in the most delicate of traps. Baby people are as bald as baby mice, but they stay that way throughout their lives, hairless and prone to wrinkling. They stumble blindly in the dark, deaf to the higher pitches. Their voices do not carry for miles, and their pack mentality is shoddy at best.

Still, he is curious. “About you.” About her, how her words speed up when she is frightened, how she held her breath when he touched Elsie’s head. Her softened and silly human reactions. “Her,” he whisks his hand at The Gap, and the cigarette from behind his ear is between his index and middle fingers now. “Them.” The shoppers mill around, and they too are curious; Angeline is clearly a gypsy, but what is Lynx? A circuit boy part-time mechanic from another planet? “I’m curious why you thought April was so cruel a month as to ink it into your skin.” Using his machines, his needles, his people (some of whom do not know it, but they are his people).

He lights up very unmagically, with a gas lighter he scrounges from his pocket, but the cig is weird. (It could be a quota he has to fill: no less than ten things about him must aspire to weirdness at all times.) Not a snuff of smoke exits it, mostly because he has the exiting end in his mouth, where the filter isn’t. What he does breathe out is recycled and reprocessed, refreshing and clean and pine-scented, like an air freshener, or one of those green tree cut-outs for hanging on the rearview mirror and sprucing up the car.

With a jerk of his head and a tug of the blue shades over his eyes, he tells her to, “Go,” and it’s not anywhere near ‘you are free to’. Go deliver the news—the embargo on princesses—to the littlest Monroe. Lynx will be over here, smoking the air cleaner.

Angeline - despite being a good churchgoer - has never been quite down with G-d. As a child, any number of notes were sent home from Sunday school. Mostly they concerned her failure to accept the truths of the Bible. And then there was that embarrassing incident in which she got thrown out of youth group. For communism, homosexuality and devil-worshiping, no less. It was a moment that she was particularly proud of - getting the Congregationalist church pissed off is something of a feat.

Anyway, these days she's trying to be good. Going to church, sending her kid to Sunday school. She tries to be involved in things, brings coffee for social hour and raises money for staving African children. She sits through boring, ripped from the internet sermons with obscure morals and tells herself that it's making her a better person.

But she doesn't ever quite believe. The whole thing... Three powers in one combined, that want her to do be good and fair, but will forgive her no matter what? What the hell does the Church think she's smoking?

As for gods, plural, no caps...

Without having ever seen one before, she's sort of always known they were there. It's just one of those things you know. She might never have met a selkie or a kangaroo, but she knows that they exist.

She's just been trying to deny it the last while. However, confronted with one, she can't break a lifetime's habit of contradicting religious authority. Which is presumably why she's been mouthing off at Lynx with little or no regard to her own health and well-being.

She is however worried enough about it to hope that when he says "you" he means humanity in general. The last thing she needs is an immortal stalker. And she can't help the tensing in her muscles when he looks at Elsie. She had been sort of hoping - against all reason - that the god had forgotten about the little girl.

"April..." she starts, and then stops. "It's just a poem," she tells him. This is not the case. It's a brilliant poem, her favourite poem. But more than that, it's some sort of tribute. She would be hard pressed to explain it, especially to a stranger and a god. She got it around the time her daughter was born, when the pain of having a child was still fresh.

Looking over towards the Gap, she can see Elsie coming towards her, parting the crowd like a small and frilly Moses parting the sea. She wants to shake her head, or yell, "don't come over here" or something equally silly. Instead, she finds herself following Lynx's command, despite that here is that urge. The desire just to stand there, bottom lip stuck out, and say "no."

The fact that Lynx, with his ridiculous jeans and his lithe body and his air-cleaning cigarettes looks like some teenage punk, like he could be one of her students, or her brother, or even some son she never had isn't helping. She feels like she should be lecturing him, not mindlessly obeying.

But she has more sense then that. She walks across the mall towards her daughter, hand outstretched. Elsie is swinging her pumpkin-shaped collecting bucket in one hand and grinning like a Cheshire cat. The basket is getting pretty full.

"Nice tiara," Angeline says, collecting her nerves and taking Elsie's available hand in hers. It's tiny in comparison, and dry. Angeline's palms are sweating, and probably not just from the claustrophobic mall. "But I think maybe next year, you should be something knew. How about a.... how about a nurse?"

The tattoo is a tribute, yes. The only hiccup is that Angeline isn’t letting it be his tribute. It should be his. People get a lot of different inkwork done on their bodies, and a lot that goes to death or love or literature, or war or music or revelry, but whatever the content he will get a bit of the tribute, and every little bit counts. Lynx doesn’t think he is asking for too much. Not a sacrificial lamb or anything.

They weren’t always his, and in some cultures where they continue to do their tattooing with ashes in open wounds and needles made from chicken bones, they still aren’t. But with printers, cameras, dyes, sterilised equipment and nitrile gloves—the whole yawning mouth of a technological age—he owns them. He owns every inch of her skin that’s been turned green and poetic, and he wants to know why she thinks her decoration has any meaning beyond that, as though she isn’t wearing his brand (like clothing and like cattle).

The god follows her to her daughter, close at her side like a glittering canker. As he passes them by, an elderly couple smiling at all the dolled up children suffer a mild fit of misfortune, the old woman’s walker shocking her with static, and the old man doubling over in pain when the ball bearing in his false hip squeaks inside his body and swivels towards Lynx.

There. That wasn’t so hard, now was it? He doesn’t even suggest Elsie be an engineer and not a nurse. He just loads one of his fake smiles, points to her basket and says, “Nice haul,” and he almost sounds normal, almost sounds like he could be Elsie’s mum’s hip new boyfriend, trying to get into the kid’s good graces. Angeline has shown herself to be a more responsible mother than that.

And Lynx won’t let go of the tattoo. She’s being less stubborn, so he tries again. “TELL ME MORE ABOUT APRIL.” It comes out ridiculously loud, because it is coming from all of the mall’s sound systems at once, and Lynx looks like he didn’t mean for that to happen, slowly raising his eyes to the ceiling and then back to the baffled shoppers around them, who are wondering if this is the latest viral marketing campaign. 20% off menswear in April?

“Sorry,” he apologises, touching the glow behind his Adam’s apple. “Frogger in my throat.”

The idea that getting her back inked was anything other than a fit of rebellion against her impending middle age never occurred to Angeline, otherwise she probably wouldn't have done it. Her allegiance is to the One G-d, the all-powerful, semi-benevolent creator who watches her from some unseen vantage point. She's never sacrificed anything to him, not unless you count ten dollars in the offering plate every Sunday. And it's not like that doesn't ultimately end up at the soup kitchen.

Elsie is fairly impressed by Lynx's little trick with the speakers. She seems able to identify it has being him immediately. "Would you like a piece?" She asks, trying to butter him up. She holds the bucket towards him. "How did you do that?" The idea of making her voice come through the PA is extremely appealing. She is staring at him with a look of wide-eyed innocence that is at least as fake as his smile.

"He didn't sweetheart," Angeline says, taking shelter in the comfort of a lie. "It was just an advertisement. Sale on men's pants this April or something." Like that makes any sense at all. She has a PhD and should know better, but clearly she doesn't. She gives Lynx a nervous look. His throat glows and he's very beautiful, in a way that makes her uneasy and makes her palms damp with sweat. She should know better, a woman of her age, and him as young as he is. Not to mention the whole being-a-god thing.

"April is the cruelest month," she tells him, flatly, despite her insistence that it is in fact the month of cheap trousers, "breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain."

It's not like he can't read that much off her skin.

These things come out on a need-to-know basis, which at its heart just means that no one knows them until they’re well past the point of staying out of the trouble in question, perhaps because they didn’t know to. There are many, many books in circulation today that, when shuffled around and put together, describe a small portion of What Not To Do, but they are scattered so far and wide over different bookshops in different countries in different continents that they might as well be the bits and pieces of a page torn up and thrown to the wind.

And if they were compiled into one big book, who would read it? The slamming of lockers when the bell rings on a school day is testament to the fact that kids don’t lug their textbooks around with them anymore.

Lynx lets her mother answer first, but then his smile thrums. It is one smooth, rolling lightning fork of a word, with the kind of influence that makes someone try their first joint: “Magic.” He lets it stand on its own, so that Elsie can dismiss it as the standard adult-to-child explanation of how strange happenings occur, but he has a feeling it’s the last thing Angeline wanted him to say.

Candy isn’t good for him, but it isn’t bad for him either, and he reaches into the bucket obligingly and trawls through it with his long fingers, touching everything but never choosing. “What do you recommend?” Like it’s an à la carte menu and not a plastic pumpkin, and Elsie the maître d’ and not a little mountebank in the making.

When Angeline says April, he thinks for a moment that she is really going to tell him. She doesn’t. She feeds him the lines again, but she doesn’t tell him anything, and he feels—he feels—something bend and break in the general area of his impossible self-control.

When Technology takes a step forward, the earth doesn’t move, but the air does, sucking away from Angeline to make space for him. To all the unlucky girlfriends and wives out there, it’s the familiar step that comes before the backhand, before the stern word and the split lip. Leaning over her, leaning into her, leaving her no room to breathe that isn’t full of god and lean muscle, Lynx doesn’t look so young. He looks like a cripple with a goddess of love for a wife, a blacksmith with rough hands and a rougher approach.

“That tells me nothing,” he says, and it is a quiet roar.

Angeline didn't know, but now she does. There's a line and she seems to be standing right on top of it. One step more and she'll have crossed it. G-d knows what will happen if she does. Or rather, this god knows. But she's not that stupid. We hope. Or what are those degrees good for?

Elsie meanwhile is getting underfoot. "Pep'mint patties are nice," she informs the god, smiling. Unlike his smile hers is genuine, and full of pure good intention. "Mum says magic doesn't exist. She says it's a silly fantasy for people who can't bear the sight of the real world. She says it's..." Elsie's face puckers up into a frown as she tries to remember, "a blind behind which the weak hide... I think."

Angeline did indeed say this. It didn't occur to her at the time that Elsie would remember, and be able to parrot her word for word. But Elsie is a very talented little girl.

"Elsie, hush please," Angeline says, wearily. She's fucking up bad enough herself without Elsie adding to it. The god is so close, invading her personal space, space that Angeline isn't used to having occupied. There is rarely anyone to violate her bubble, no lover, no friend, who comes that close to her.

Elsie at least as the sense to be quiet.

Angeline breaths in, slowly. It's not the sharp inhale of fear, but a calm, steadying breath.

"Sorry," she says, and you can hear her measuring each sound out carefully, trying not to talk to quickly. "It's..." She's not sure how you explain poetry to a god. Especially this god. Why couldn't she have gotten Love, or Knowledge? But no, she gets some bullying cyperpunk teenage brat. Who wants her to explain a fairly debated piece of literature. "It's called the Wasteland," she says, thinking he probably knows that, thinking please don't hurt me, "because it's an expression of the spiritual emptiness of human existence, fuck, can't you google this?" She's being mouthy again, but what does he expect? Does she look like an English professor to him?

It’s a ley line Angeline is standing on, geometric pressure building beneath her. It’s a landmine, but she hasn’t lifted her feet for it to go off.

Lynx knows intimidation—the tanks taught him, or else he taught them—and this isn’t how it goes. She doesn’t back down. He stays where he is for a minute, hunched over her like an electric vulture, ruffled feathers and lights in his hair, teeming with energy that has nowhere to go, so it just bounces off his muscles and makes them twitch under his skin. He’s eaten up a good bite of their time since intercepting Elsie at The Gap, but this is hands-down the most alive he’s been. On his face is some long-lost last vestige of emotion and temper that flickers on and off like an unstable television set, before it goes out with blackness and a sense of finality. And with that, the residual memory of the old god is gone.

The new god is back in full and he doesn’t look pissed anymore. He’s back to not looking anything, his eyes flat behind the shades. “Machines cannot explain the human condition to other machines. Information has been fed into machines by humankind, yes, but it is vague and fruity.” ‘Fruity’ being the technical term. “And—” Lucky Angeline, for there to be an ‘and’. “It does not tell me why you put it on your body. This ink...” He traces it with his finger again, which means reaching under her blouse again, and he’s still very much in her space but nothing about him is like a lover. “This part of you. It’s a part of me too.” The strongest bindings are often made in blood, but what if this is Lynx’s blood, dark green and scripted?

“Why?” he asks again, and then wagers an innocent guess. “Are you empty?” Humans don’t fill up like ink cartridges—that much he knows. Once empty they often have to be thrown away.

Crisis averted, he looks back at Elsie, a little late. “She says that?” His hand goes into the pumpkin and his fingers scan the names on the wrappers until he finds the recommendation. The Peppermint Pattie is wrapped in shiny foil and he likes it already. “You should listen to your mother. I’m like her.” He doesn’t even look at Angeline, the sunglasses slipping down his nose while it’s pointed down at Elsie. “I like real things. Solid things. Strong things. Things I can touch with my bare hands.” If inanimate objects could blush, there’s a very good chance that her tiara would be a lovely shade of crimson, with all those compliments!

Angeline almost laughs when he says that the information is 'vague and fruity'. She knows a lot about human thought and the communication thereof, and that's an apt way of putting it. But given the situation she just quirks her lips upwards, awkwardly, and stiffens under his touch. It reminds her of sticking her finger in an electrical socket.

And oh good, it's part of him too now? Last time she gets a tattoo. She doesn't particularly want a bit of this tarted up cyber-punk under her skin. His pestering means that he's under there metaphorically as well as literally.

"I'm sorry," she says, "I didn't realise."

Probably wouldn't have done it if she had.

Is she empty? This is insightful, for a computer. Angeline wonders if she can avoid answering. 'Yes, I'm empty' isn't the sort of thing you tell a total stranger, especially not in front of your child. "Our culture is a spiritual wasteland," she points out. "I think most people are a bit empty." She's not so empty she needs to be thrown away, she hopes. It's not like she doesn't serve some purpose.

Elsie is listening intently to what the god is saying. She watches his long fingers sorting through her candy, and looks up at him with wide eyes. She's very impressed with this strange man, his sunglasses, and his tiara-transforming skills.

"I am a real thing," she says, holding out her hand towards the god as evidence. Her nails are short, painted with glittery pink varnish. "Solid. I can be touched. I am strong, I am... resilant." She smiles up at him and her expression is pure, almost affectionate.