The argument could have easily escalated from there, but my entry 
into the scene shocked Ma out of her blind anger and gave her a 
second to think. 


When Ma spoke again, her voice was low. “What do you care, huh? 
Why—’” 


“—I| wanna be able to sit in my room in peace—” 


“This is my house,” Ma said, “and I'll make you regret it if you 
interrupt me again. Understand?” 


| lowered my eyes. “Okay, Ma.” 


“I’m asking you why you care now. | have a job, you know. And | 
can’t help your sister with English, history. Where are you? If you 
care about this, why aren’t you helping her succeed?” 


Connie’s cheeks were sticky with tears, and her hair was plastered 
to her face. | hadn’t heard her crying over Ma’s yelling. When | 
looked at her, she refused to meet my eyes. 


“Come on, Ma, she’s right there.” 
“And?” 


“And—and, look, she’s smart, she can figure things out, okay? I’m 
her sister, not her tutor.” 


Connie mumbled something. Ma and | both turned; before Ma could 
yell at her to speak up, she said, more clearly, “I’m not.” 


“Not what?” | asked. 


“Not smart. I’m not lazy, either. I’m sitting there, looking at my 
homework, because | don’t know how to do it. And I’m trying to 
figure it out. But | can’t.” 


She got up and left, and when she closed the door to our room 
behind her it barely made any noise. Ma and | were too tired to 
argue with each other any further, so we sat there in silence. 


“Who'd you blame for her death?” 
| looked at Death sideways. “That’s a loaded question.” 


“Sure,” Death said. “Maybe there are people who wouldn’t blame 
someone. But you’re not one of them.” 


“Fine,” | said. “In order of least to most: you, Ma, myself. Happy?” 


“| don’t think Connie would have been very happy about you blaming 
yourself.” 


Beneath the table, | clenched and released my fists. My frustration 
was obvious; Death did what Connie would’ve done and ignored it. 


“How do you know Connie wouldn't have liked it?” | asked. 


Death brought her knees up to her chest, resting her bare feet 
against the chair. “I know it because | took her,” she said. “Her 
thoughts, memories, personality—all of it is within me.” 


| exhaled. “If you have all of those, what’s the difference between 
you and her?” 


Death shrugged. She rocked forwards on her feet, reaching 
forwards to grab a pen and notebook halfway across the table, and 
ripped out a page. With the pen, she drew a smiley face and wrote, 
“Connie”. Then, she put the page over her face. 


“Who am |?” 

| stared at Death. “What’s the point of this?” 
Death ignored me again. “Not Connie, right?” 
“No.” 


Death removed the paper and waved it in my face. “To me, a dead 
soul is like this paper. So, | really, really have no idea why you keep 
confusing me with your sister.” 


| kept staring. 


| actually wasn’t sure, between myself and Ma, who | blamed more. 


Eight years after our argument in the kitchen, | destroyed my 
relationship with Ma without her even knowing it. When | visited her 


after graduation, Ma still lived in the same Los Angeles home, but 
now, the room that Connie and | had once shared was stacked high 
with cardboard boxes. There was a new picture of Connie and me, 
dressed in winter clothing, on the mantle that hadn’t been there 
when Connie was alive. 


Ma had made a curry chicken soup—a Burmese recipe she’d picked 
up from a neighbor in Taiwan. | ate my food with rhythm: strip the 
meat from the bone, dip in soup, add noodles, slurp. | did it all with 
my eyes fixed on the soup itself. Ma was eating slowly, and her 
chopsticks clattered around the soup bowl as she stirred her food. 


“Claire, is something wrong?” 


It took me a moment to finish chewing, and | swallowed heavily. “I’m 
fine, Ma.” 


| had decided weeks ago that | was going to accept the Foundation’s 
offer, because | knew | couldn’t tolerate any more time in the occult 
community. I’d be a rare defector, and | knew that | would make an 
outcast of my mother in doing so—a woman who raised two 
daughters, one dead and the other a traitor. 


In between bites of chicken, | wondered how | would tell her what | 
was planning on doing. All | could think of were questions of blame. 
Would she understand if | told her | blamed the occult community? 
Or that | blamed the two of us? Would she blame me for running 
away? Would she forgive me? 


| bit into a chunk of potato, pulverized it, and then realized that the 
soup was gone. | hadn’t told Ma anything. 


“Your lease in New York is settled, right?” Ma asked. “And your 
tickets...” 


“Yeah. Everything’s fine, Ma, don’t worry.” 
“And your job?” 


| laughed. “PTOLEMY Division pays a lot, Ma. I'll be able to send 
you money.” 


“| don’t care about the money. Will you be happy, Claire?” 


Maybe | hesitated a moment too long before answering, but | kept 
the smile on my face. “The work is interesting. The people seem 
driven. | will, Ma.” 


“Good,” Ma said. She slurped up another spoonful of noodles and 
chewed on it slowly. “That’s good.” 


After we exchanged more small talk, | hugged Ma good-bye and 
gathered my things to leave. | was set to rendezvous with my 
Foundation contact a four-hour drive away, and | wanted to make it 
before nightfall. My bags were in my trunk and | was five exits down 
the freeway before | realized that | would never eat that soup again. 


Connie ended up going to the ICSUT campus in Washington state. 
I’d posted the test scores to get into the San Francisco campus, the 
most prestigious one west of the Mississippi, but if l’d Known how 
often Ma would make me take the eight-hour drive up to the 
Washington campus to check on Connie, | might've decided to just 
go there instead. 


After what had happened in high school, Ma hadn’t even wanted 
Connie to go up to Washington. It came down, as always, to another 
argument—Connie wanted to work for the Coalition, and the 
Coalition rarely recruited specialists outside ICSUT. She didn’t want 
to stay in LA and get a Bachelor’s. She wanted to live in the same 
world that grandfather, Ma, and | did. 


Things didn’t go well. Connie took a semester off after her first year. 
When | came home that summer, Ma cornered me and told me that | 
needed to persuade Connie to not go back to Washington. 


| didn’t want to talk to her in our room, with the door closed—| didn’t 
want her to feel trapped. Instead, | approached her after dinner. 


“Wanna go out for a walk?” 


Connie glanced at me sideways. It was an expression she’d picked 
up from me. 


| ran a hand through my hair. “Come on. | want to talk.” 
“Fine,” she said. 


Living in the San Francisco campus had made me forget how 
uneventful the suburbs were. Every couple minutes a minivan would 
glide past us, or we'd see a group of kids clustered around a 
basketball net in the street, messing around and trying to dunk. 
Nobody paid us much attention. 


Connie started chewing her nails almost as soon as we stepped 
outside the house. | waited a few minutes before saying, “Jesus, can 
you stop that?” 


She hesitated before taking them out. “Probably should.” 

“Then stop.” 

She shoved her hands into her pockets for the rest of the walk. 
“Why do you want to go back to Washington so badly?” | asked. 


| stared at Connie for a few seconds before she gave mea 
noncommittal shrug. “Why not?” 


We crossed the street, Connie lagging a few steps behind me. | kept 
slowing down so that she could catch up and | could look her in the 
eyes. 


“You know,” | said. “So you can stay out of trouble.” 


She snorted. “It’s not like I’m getting any better here. Ma just wants 
me close because she’s worrying. It doesn’t make a difference.” 


“| thought you were feeling better.” 


“Not really. | just haven't tried anything again, because Mom keeps 
the med cabinet locked so | can’t really—” 


“Stop it,” | said. 


“Stop what.” 


Both of us were standing still in the middle of the sidewalk. There 
was nobody around us; all | could see of people were their television 
screens flickering behind their windows. The sun overhead was 
beginning to set. 


“Do you not want me to talk about it?” Connie asked. “Is that what 
this is?” 


Her eyes were fixed on me. She hadn’t raised her voice and her 
hands were still stuffed in her pockets, but she didn’t move her eyes 
from my face. 


“Why do you want to talk to me about going back to school if you 
can’t even talk about me trying to kill myself?” 


| clenched and released my fists. “Connie...” 
She shook her head. “You don’t get it.” 
“What don’t | get?” 


“What it’s like to be on the edge of dropping out from an entire 
society,” she said. “You and Ma always had a place.” 


She turned around. “I’m going back.” 
“Home?” | asked. 
“Washington. | can’t stay here anymore.” 


She walked away, leaving me alone on the sidewalk. Overhead, the 
sky was beginning to ignite in reds and oranges. | crouched down on 
the curb, stuck my elbows on my knees, and planted my chin on my 
hands. | was thinking about so many things at once—what it’d be 
like for Connie back in Washington, what to tell Ma, what | was 
supposed to do about it all—but the predominant thing running 
through my head was white noise. 


“Fine,” | said. “I get it. You can put the paper down.” 


Death balled the paper up and tossed it behind her chair. “Sorry. | 
got frustrated.” 


| winced when Death apologized again, but | tried not to let it show. 
Instead, | asked, “So what exactly are you? Some kind of 
psychopomp guide?” 


“No,” Death said. “The dead never see me, not that they see 
anything.” 


“A personification, then? A God?” 


Death shrugged. “I’m what happens to everything. Stars, people, 
ideas. I’m a universal constant. Like, well, gravity.” 


“Ideas?” 


“Yeah. The Mandarin you don’t have anymore. The way you loved 
Ma when you were a kid. | took those too.” 


| examined Death. On the surface, and even to the level of 
personality, everything about her was intimately familiar. But ina 
deeper sense that | could not entirely understand, she was alien. 
The girl in front of me who seemed to be my sister was an illusion, 
what my mind perceived when confronted with an all-powerful force 
of nature. 


The room felt colder. “You already know a lot about me, then.” 
“Yeah. But, like | said, not on a personal level.” 


“Well,” | said, “I do, despite the rocky conversation, want to know 
you too. Do you have a will of your own?” 


Death shook her head. 


“You just do your thing, then? You never stay your hand or take 
something before its time?” 


“That, you know, breaks things. Like, well...” Death said. She 
furrowed her brow while she thought of an analogy. “Like gravity 
acting on something more or less than it should.” 


“Well,” | said, shrugging, “that happens all the time. They’re 
anomalies. We contain them.” 


“An anomaly like that would have to act on a level higher than fate 
and causality.” 


| felt strangely comforted. “So it doesn’t happen, which means you 
don’t have your own will.” 


“Oh. Well, it happens.” 
| blinked. “What?” 
“The O5 Council.” 


“But,” | said. My palms were gripping the armrests, and | could feel 
sweat beginning to gather underneath them. “How?” 


“Well, I’m in a unique position where | don’t actually vote,” Death 
said. “So when they pass a measure that involves me, | just do it.” 


“No, | mean...look, | don’t care about the voting,” | said. “The O5 
Council alters the course of Death—your course—in defiance of 
causality, a fundamental force of, what, reality? How?’ 


“Well, yeah,” Death said. She was giving me the same look that 
Connie would give me when she'd try explaining one of her sci-fi 
books and | couldn’t get it. “I mean, you’re right, causality is 
fundamental, but so is the O5, and more so.” 


| made a choking noise. 


Death snorted. “I guess it was good to get this out of the way before 
you started working with them. I’m not an outlier among the O5. The 
rest of them are also like me.” 


“And they want me to work under them?” | said. “Why?” 


“Uh, your expertise in East Asian occult history. The others have pet 
projects that they think you’d be pretty useful for.” 


| didn’t say anything for a while. After some time sitting in silence, 


SCP-980 regardless of its level of focus or activity seems to lend 
some amount of support to its claims. Though there is the possibility 
of manipulation or deception on the part of SCP-980, it appears 
probable that the effects themselves are an entirely different force 
than SCP-980 and have merely focused around it. 


Subject D-980-18: Build changes, habit loss, suspected 
personality changes, slight heart chamber fusion, 
blindness, heart failure 


Subject D-980-19: Slight facial and build changes, slight 
suspected memory loss, hearing loss, liver failure, 
blindness, deafness, severe lung alteration 


Subject D-980-20 was the second D-class subject to show results 
similar to D-980-07. Though minor facial changes took place, similar 
behavioral changes were noted and subject was introduced to 
D-980-07. Though at first neither appeared to notice the other, after 
approximately 15 minutes left in containment D-980-07 began 
walking toward D-980-20 and stopped inches from his face. Both 
subjects remained still in this manner for the remaining hour and 45 
minutes of the exposure. 


Subject D-980-21: Build and slight facial changes, 
personality changes, deafness, lung alteration, kidney 
failure, fusion of skin over eyes 


Subject D-980-22: Severe memory and personality loss, 
liver failure, blindness, heart chamber fusion 


Subject D-980-23: Slight facial changes, severe 
personality loss, deafness, fusion of skin over ears, heart 
chamber fusion, muteness 


D-980-07 was exposed to SCP-980 a second time, albeit separated 
by a glass pane. Subject acted of his own accord for the first time in 
weeks to press himself against the glass, seemingly in an attempt to 
reduce distance between itself and SCP-980. SCP-980 backed 
away from the subject and sat against the far wall. D-980-07 was 
wheeled towards SCP-980 to ensure further changes would have 
the opportunity to occur. SCP-980's body language displayed fear. 


Death squirmed. “Hey,” she said. “Don’t be intimidated. You’re 
smart, and you'll do your work well.” 


“Thanks,” | said, without thinking. | remembered too late to whom | 
was speaking and felt strange. 


“| think Connie would’ve said something like that, at least.” 


This time, | thought about it for a bit, and then let myself smile. 
Death looked vaguely pleased with herself. 


“You know,” | said, “this doesn’t really matter, but if you don’t vote, 
then how does the O5 tiebreak?” 


“They don’t. They use consensus.” 


My smile cracked, and | burst out laughing. 


| apprehended causality lying face-down on my dorm mattress, 
listening to the clock tower play the latest pop hit. Outside my 
window, the sun melted through the San Francisco fog and baked 
the inside of my room. | could hear people outside, laughing, getting 
ready to graduate. 


A glossy pamphlet and letter from the GOC’s PTOLEMY division sat 
on my desk. | hadn’t touched either of them since they’d arrived. 


My roommate peeked her head in through the door. “Hey, Claire! 
They’ve got a grill set up on the slope, wanna go check it out?” 


| rolled over onto my back and smiled. “Nah, I’m good. Feeling kinda 
off.” 


“Oh. Well, hope you feel better. Seeya!” 


She didn’t know. Nobody did, and it wasn’t their fault; | just hadn't 
talked about Connie at all. If | went to work for PTOLEMY, | could do 
the same thing. Barring the off-chance that | ended up working with 
anybody who'd known her from Washington, it’d be like my sister 
had never been alive at all.