"The Ends of Worlds"

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. None of us set out with this end in mind. By the time anyone finds this, if anyone finds this, I will be long dead, along with the rest of us few who remain but someone’s got to tell our story. I suppose there’s no-one left to remember it now if we don't take steps to do so. It's the story of how Earth died, and our part in killing it.

Perhaps though I should start at the beginning, with the draft. It was in the spring of 2562 when the Homeworld Authority started sending out the notices, and I was more excited than afraid when I got that message. The media centers had been blasting the news for weeks by then: that the colony set up at Alpha Centauri had declared its independence in radio messages only recently received by Earth. They’d declared the Authority a tyranny and dredged up to replace it some eight-centuries old philosophy from contraband documents that someone had smuggled onboard the colony ships. This obviously could not stand - the Authority bent its will to building the Colonial Pacification Fleet the moment that transmission was received.

They trained us for two years, at first on simulators and later in the newly constructed warships - hundreds of them. Eric Hadley, my ship, was of the most common class, so even before it was done I got trained on the guns of several of its sister ships. There was no rush - after all, the colonists had sent the transmission four-plus years before it got to Earth, and it would take a good nine years for any fleet to get there, but as far as the colonists knew, it would take closer to thirty. See, the Authority had come out with a new engine, much faster - it couldn’t break the speed of light, nothing could, but it could get to point six.

We set off to a great fanfare, the armada launching simultaneously from Earth orbit in an unrivaled display of engine flares, and we all felt good - surely no mere colony could stand up against the might of mother Earth. We all knew the orders - if the colony could not be intimidated back into control, it would be wiped out, and new colonists would be sent.

The trip was dull, at least for me - some of the men had psych issues, staring at nothing but black out the windows every day for so long. The medtechs were quick to medicate those, and they were never really the same after that, but at least they stopped panicking. I suppose with as many gigawatts of laser power and as many megatons of fission missiles as each ship had, this sort of thing was sensible - couldn’t have a gunner, or Director forbid an officer, going unstable. That could ruin the whole venture, painting a fireball so bright that the colonists couldn’t help but be warned we were coming. Even some of those who didn’t lose it started to avoid looking out into space where possible, as if superstitious avoidance of the reality of our location would save their sanities.

At least relativity was our friend. See, when you get going that fast, it slows your relative time, so onboard each ship the clocks only counted about four years. That was still a long time, of course, so every day we ran one, sometimes two drills, to keep our training fresh and to keep us busy.

Deceleration was more abrupt than acceleration - Admiral Mathis had instructed each captain to wait until the last possible minute to decelerate, as doing so would require turning each ship’s blazing engine-flare toward Centauri. Even through the compensators, you could feel the pull aft with every step. After a week of that, though, the fleet had slowed itself such that it could enter the Centauri system without overshooting.

They had warships of a sort there, even more than fifteen years before they could have expected us - a dozen or so fair-sized asteroids studded with gun decks and powered by huge, lumbering fusion drives. The Admiral called for them to surrender, but those asteroid dreadnoughts opened fire on us instead. The battle was furious, but short - the colonists’ asteroid battleships were tough and well-armed, but the Pacification Fleet outnumbered them fifty to one or more. We suffered steep losses, but it only took about half an hour of fighting to crack those asteroids open and rupture their reactor plants.

The asteroid ships had some sort of escape pods, so some ships from the Fleet took on a few survivors for questioning, Hadley among them. I never spoke to the prisoners myself, being only a gunner, but I heard the officers talk about them. The rebels were adamant, and despite their defeat none of them could be made renounce their rebellious ways and swear allegiance to the Homeworld Authority. Eventually, the Captain had them all executed for treason, and he had the crew watch.

I was surprised when the vidscreens at my post came on to show the condemned that one of them was a woman who must have been quite attractive before the bruises and other injuries inflicted during her interrogation. The Captain performed the executions himself with his sidearm, one at a time, and the woman was last in line. After each, he asked the remainder if they would renounce their rebellion. Part of me spent the whole spectacle begging that woman to take the opportunity, where none of her compatriots did, and another part spent it chiding the first part for letting physical attraction play a part in things - I’d seen other men punished for lesser conflicts of interest, when they were so careless as to let them show.

She looked the Captain in the eye as he pronounced her death sentence, and asked her one last time if she would relent. She took a shaky breath to reply, and my heart leapt as the Captain’s gun lowered a little. We all thought she was going to renounce the colony’s rebellion. The words that came from her mouth weren’t a surrender, though. Rather, she called out a rebel slogan, something about liberty or death. She looked like she was going to say more, but the Captain shot her immediately, and then emptied the rest of his gun’s charge into her charred corpse for good measure. When I went back to the saved replay of the execution ceremony later, her last words had been cleverly excised, and despite that being proper for such rebel poison I thought it somewhat a shame. She’d had guts, not to mention looks, and those were both things I could respect.

The colony didn’t put up too much of a fight after that. I suppose they were probably expecting us to land and take the place the old-fashioned way, but after having his order for surrender flatly refused, Admiral Mathis gave the weapons-free order. By laser and missile the remainder of the fleet turned every sign of civilization on that rock into glowing rubble, shot down every satellite and station that orbited it, and even turned the cannibalized hulks that had centuries before been colony ships into dust and slag.

Mathis and a few others went down to plant the Homeworld Authority’s symbolic flag in the dirt in the middle of what used to be the planet’s largest city. Mathis had one of the men take a vid-recorder and broadcast the whole thing to the fleet. In front of everyone, dressed in his yellow radiation suit, he unfurled the banner of the Homeworld Authority, with its wireframe-globe emblem, and stabbed the base of its pole into the charred dirt. It flapped gloriously for about ten seconds before the wind picked up and blew a cinder hail over the site, which didn’t bother the radiation-suited men, but did riddle the flag so full of holes that the thing looked more like the colors of the losing side than the winning one. The video ended there, with the ragged, burnt Authority flag, and Mathis standing beside it, gesturing at the cameraman to stop recording.

Lacking further orders, Mathis sent word of our success back to Earth, and ordered the fleet to prep for the long haul back to Earth. It took us a month to make what was left of the fleet ready for interstellar travel, but through scavenging the wrecks and the most damaged ships for parts we were able to do it. We all chipped in, taking shifts suiting up and cutting parts off of derelicts at the techs’ direction, or helping use salvaged parts to repair battle damage to still-operational ships. It was during that process that when a salvage team found the device.

No-one knew what it was, at first - the sealed, unmarked black box someone found attached to the computer of one of the ships that’d been split open in the battle. It had been buried inside a bulkhead right next to the computer core, plugged right into the back of the computer - and it wasn’t on any schematics of any ship.

What exactly it did no-one bothered to tell anyone as low-ranking as a gunner, but Mathis ordered techs on all the ships to locate such devices, and sure enough, they found one hidden behind the computer core of every single ship. Tech teams tore each and every one out, and each was jettisoned into space. We thought that was the end of it, and soon enough the fleet’s engine flares again pushed us all back into the interstellar void, back toward Earth. Most of us thought we’d return to a hero’s welcome - after all, we’d completed what we’d set out to do. The Homeworld Authority’s dominion was secure.

The return trip was a good deal more relaxed - Mathis ordered that drills would be reduced to once per week, and though we still had to be on duty the atmosphere was laid back, satisfied. After all, humanity had had its first interstellar war, and we were the returning victors. There weren’t near as many psych cases on the trip home, as I recall.

By fleet reckoning, we started to decelerate three days before my thirtieth birthday, but something like nineteen years had passed on Earth. What we did not expect was to be met in the outer system by newer, sleeker warships that ordered the fleet to halt. The new ships were no bigger than Hadley, and outnumbered thirty to one, so I thought them to be a sort of escort, or honor guard. Their ships and ours drifted idly while Admiral Mathis spoke with their commander. We all thought that this was just a formality, and that we’d be on our way home soon. When the order to fire on those ships, we were all surprised, and I’m sure many of us hesitated - but enough of the fleet trusted Admiral Mathis that our ragged opening salvo wiped out every last one.

It was then that the Admiral took to fleet-wide comms to explain what was going on. He told us that the black boxes he’d ordered removed from each ship were self-destruct mechanisms, and that the ships that we’d just killed had been sent here to broadcast the signal to trigger those mechanisms. Rather than welcome us home, the Authority had planned from the beginning to eliminate us to reduce the risk of us carrying home any of the colony’s infectious propaganda, according to Mathis. We trusted him instinctively, and the fleet moved as one again towards Earth. I’m not sure even Mathis knew why - we had nowhere else to go, of course, but it should have been obvious to us that the Authority would not let us simply come home after what we had done to its cleanup crew.

More ships scrambled to meet us, new, powerful things, but they were outnumbered - the Authority apparently hadn’t invested in as many warships after the Pacification Fleet had been launched. We took losses, but each wave of defenders burned and fell behind us, cooking in the fires loosed by their own ruptured reactors. Finally, the Fleet loomed over Earth itself, much as we’d loomed over the rebels’ world at Alpha Centauri. We were down then to about half the number of ships that we’d been when we’d decelerated into Centauri, but still the firepower that Admiral Mathis had pointed at the planet was staggering. We didn’t know that down there on Earth, thousands of missiles designed to repel a rebel attack were being readied instead to destroy us.

The Admiral broadcast a request for cease-fire, on open channel so the fleet and anyone listening on Earth could hear it. It was a long-winded, diplomatic affair, which ultimately was met with silence, followed by the peal of missile lock alarms on every ship in the fleet as Earth’s ground-based defenses sprung into action.

What did they expect us to do? Those of us manning lasers fired on the missiles before any order could possibly be given. We even got some of the things, but every beam continued on, past the advancing missiles, to burn the planet’s surface. As we desperately fired to save ourselves, millions below died. I think if we’d had a second to think about it, we might have held our fire, but we’d drilled for a decade on those guns, and instinct took over.

The Admiral’s orders came as we were firing our second salvo at the oncoming projectiles, and each ship swung into position to dodge at the last second, down toward the planet. The Authority, the Admiral hysterically explained into the comms, would disable its missiles when they were burning back toward the planet. They had to.

Just before the laser turrets recharged for the fourth salvo, Hadley executed its juke, using its main engine to blow right past the oncoming missiles before they could correct course. Not all the ships in the fleet pulled it off - several died in thermonuclear fireballs as scores of missiles found their mark. The remaining missiles arced around, turning to again seek the Fleet, and again we fired on them, this time the stray beams bit nothing but space.

As I lined up each shot, I heard the Admiral, still on open channel, begging the Authority for everyone’s good to scrub its missiles, that his ships were well into the upper atmosphere. No-one replied. Thinking back on it, I am pretty sure no-one was alive to - a lot of missiles came from the area around Central, so we probably cooked the Authority’s command center by accident with the first volley.

We fired and fired, eight salvos. Nine. I thought we’d get a tenth, but the missiles were too quick. We did good, too, but not good enough - I think had every beam in those last five volleys burned one missile, we still would have not gotten them all. About half of the missiles got through. Hadley was hit only once, and didn’t quite die, but from my turret I watched the fleet die a thermonuclear death around us and fall burning toward the already-scorched Earth, along with hundreds of missiles whose targets had already been destroyed.

Hadley, despite the damage, had enough left in her to limp into a stable orbit before the engines quit. A few of the other ships survived too, but not many - Mathis’s Lavorne, the fleet’s largest ship, seemed to have weathered the storm the best, but she was losing atmosphere from several large, gaping wounds and her engines were visibly sputtering. Besides Lavorne and Hadley, nine other ships pulled through, none unscathed.

We survivors turned our gazes down then, and watched Earth, the planet where we all grew up, die. Between the wrecks’ meteoric reentry and the radiation from hundreds of reactors and thousands of fission warheads, little was spared. Earth burned below us, and we few survivors could only watch.

That was two years ago now. We’ve been in orbit ever since, all eleven surviving ships docked and welded together to pool resources. As it is, we’ve got probably two months of supplies left. We’ve watched Earth’s death throes, watched blue and green turn to gray and brown. We’ve watched our world die.

Humanity’s not dead, not everyone. We still pick up signals from the Mars base from time to time, and there were probably still a few colony missions still in transit - but even if we had the power to get to those people they would never welcome us. After all, they can see what we did. So we stay in orbit around Earth, guarding its lifeless body because we’ve nothing left.

Of all the things to spend my time thinking about now, I find myself trying to remember that rebel woman's last words, the ones cut from the recording. She deserves to have them recorded somewhere. But I no longer remember, and no-one else that I've asked can either. It's strange, how that bothers me more than the fact that I'm going to die in a few months when our supplies run out.

Though, I suppose if there is any sort of afterlife I might get the chance to ask her about it...

This story written for Klazzform's Short Story Competition on dndonlinegames.com.

"Hide and Seek" (Part 3 of ?)

Part 2 to this story posted previously (here)

Mark wondered almost cautiously if that cold feeling he was supposed to feel all those years ago from contact with an imagined being was what Caroline wanted him to feel now. That was ridiculous - wasn’t it? He’d dismissed any possibility that Caroline’s imagination was anything but some years ago.

He was still pondering this question about five minutes after he sat down when his thoughts were interrupted by the “ice cube spider” his sister had mentioned all those years ago. Mark felt a little uncomfortable about the whole thing, but he was at least able to recognize the feeling enough to know to turn to the next page in Carrie’s book.

Now, get up from the desk and leave the library. Before you get into your car, open the passenger-side door. If you’re worried about looking strange, rummage through the glove box or something, it won’t matter what you do as long as the door is open. Count to thirty, then shut it again, and you can go on to the next step.

Mark had just gotten to the library a few minutes prior - now he was leaving? Things made less and less sense, even when the inexplicable request about his car door was ignored. 
Of course, a part of Mark’s mind pointed out, this entire process made a good deal more sense if Carrie’s old imaginings were assumed real. He wasn’t quite able to take that leap, though - imaginary friends and fictional places inexplicably different from here were ridiculous things to consider factual. 

With a scowl and a resigned sigh, Mark put the book back in his pocket and headed for the stairs. That Caroline was treating this as a serious matter was about all that kept Mark from shoving the item in his glove box and leaving it there until he finally tracked down Caroline - that and the growing suspicion that Caroline would keep herself reasonably impossible to find until he did whatever these steps were supposed to accomplish. The rain had lightened a little, it seemed, since Mark had gone inside, so he didn’t get too much more wet dashing to his car, unlocking the passenger’s door, and getting inside. 

After thirty seconds’ worth of halfhearted shuffling through his glove compartment, during which he felt another one of those strange but unmistakable cold feelings, Mark closed the passenger door and shifted uncomfortably over to the driver’s seat to avoid having to go back into the rain. That done, he once again dug out the little book, and flipped to the next page. 

If you’ve gotten this far, Mark, you’re probably wondering what all this is about. I can’t tell you, but I encourage you to think about it a great deal - perhaps you’’ve already figured out where this is going by yourself. At this point there’s no reason for you to stay around campus - go ahead and go home. Rest assured, you won’t find me around college for the time being. 

Mark shrugged to himself in annoyance. So that was how it was going to be, as he had already suspected. Caroline had gotten it into her head that he had to do whatever this was he was doing without her help. He started the car, wondering what he’d tell his mother when she inevitably called to check if he’d seen to Carrie. It might be easier, he realized, to just lie to her, say that he’d not been able to check on Carrie yet. True, that would make his would-be puppet-master mother rather angry with him, but if he said he couldn’t find Carrie his mother would probably panic and do something stupid, like reporting Caroline as a missing person when something different was going on. 

Then there was still the problem of the instructions. Mark decided to suppose for the sake of trying to figure things out that the cold feeling was, as Carrie had once implied, the result of some interaction with an invisible entity of some kind. If that was the case, then that entity could reasonably be assumed to be in the car with him. 

Mark’s skin crawled a little, until he forcibly dismissed the notion. Carrie’s imagination was compelling, but it didn’t create autonomous invisible people, he told himself. That sort of thing was impossible. Of course, he had no other operable theory on how Caroline could predict (or perhaps cause) those cold feelings, so it was still the best theory. Well, the best theory besides the one where Caroline was crazy, but Mark didn’t want to believe that either.

Mark got on the road and headed for the highway which would take him home, stopping only to fill up the gas tank of his car. He deliberately tried not to think about the little book or its instructions until his car was cruising down the long stretch of interstate that would get him home. The rain had eased up for the time being, but the clouds remained, and as the sun set behind them the evening deepened into a damp, cool night. Besides the occasional slower-moving trucker, Mark had the road more or less to himself. 

Relaxing his mental block, he supposed for the time being that Carrie’s “imagined” companion was real all along. Logically, he thought, what would that mean? Well for one, it didn’t mean that Carrie’s imagination actually created things - the entity could have already existed, and all that made Carrie special would have been the ability to see it. It would also mean that this entity was either incapable of or unwilling to cause harm to him or Carrie, as it would have had their whole childhood to do so. 

“So you won’t or can’t hurt us.” Mark muttered, not really paying attention at first to the fact that he was speaking aloud. After all, he was still supposing - he didn’t really believe any of where this train of thought was going. “That’s some comfort.” He only belatedly remembered that under that line of thought, the intangible being in question was sitting next to him, and that he remembered Carrie saying something about her invisible companion hearing and seeing things more or less normally. 

As if to confirm his supposition, the cold feeling returned briefly. Mark’s skin crawled, and he took his eyes briefly off the road to look at the “empty” passenger seat. Nothing jumped out of the air at him, though: it still looked empty. After all, he reminded himself, that was all supposition. The cold feeling was in all probability more psychological than anything else - something like the shiver of fear one experiences in frightening or unnerving situations.

After a few miles of telling himself this, Mark even managed to make himself go back to believing it.


As soon as Mark got home, he got out of his car, and stood there, debating whether or not to open the passenger-side door. Carrie’s instruction book had said nothing to this effect, so he decided after several moments to just close the driver’s door and go inside, up to his apartment. The elevator was on the ground floor, but he elected instead to take the stairs. He tried and failed to convince himself that this had nothing to do with the book in his coat pocket.

Mark opened the apartment’s door, and once again felt that cold, familiar feeling. He jumped as if stung, and darted inside, closing the door behind him before he realized how ridiculous this whole thing was. He’d let Carrie get into his head again - she’d always demonstrated the ability to manipulate Mark, usually in good fun, at a whim. She now had him jumping at shadows, he realized, just from words on a page - this had to be a joke.

But Mark remembered the serious tone on the first page again, and knew it wasn’t, or at least it wasn’t all. There was a grain of something Carrie thought was important in all of this, and he had to find it, probably by playing her games for the time being.

The apartment was dark, and Mark used the light of his cell phone screen to turn on the tiny bar/table’s overhead light and pull up a stool. He laid the book on the counter and stared at it for almost a minute before he put a thumbnail to the index card bookmark and opened it again, turning to page six.

All right, supposing you’ve stayed with this so far, you get a little explanation. Years ago, you asked a friend of mine a question which went unanswered, but has not been forgotten. If you follow this to the end, she’s willing to answer it in person, but if you don’t then you’ll probably mess it up for good.

Mark frowned. She was playing on his curiosity and this - 

Yeah, I’m playing on your curiosity, and  yes, I’ll bet you resent that a little. Sorry, but it’ll be clear in the end. Probably. But I promise you’ll get your explanation if you play along.

Upon reading this, Mark put a hand to his forehead. Carrie’s book practically answered his thoughts as he had them - who else could ever pull a stunt like this off? With a chuckle, Mark looked down to the next paragraph, expecting more instructions.

Chances are good you have work tomorrow, and that by now it is late. The last section read. Turn to the next page when you have a good-sized block of free time - say, five hours.  

Mark looked at the time on his cell phone - it was almost midnight. How, he wondered, had Carrie thought of all of this? She was good, but this was uncanny. It was almost like she was writing each page as he completed the previous one. 

Reluctantly, Mark got ready for bed, but despite leaving the book on the counter and locking the bedroom door he felt uneasy about his sister’s little steps. There was something about the whole thing that made him wonder if he wanted to know. 

Of course, he very much wanted to know. Caroline would have known that  he would.


The dream was vivid, mildly pleasant, and action-packed, but it dissolved at the first jagged beep of Mark’s cell phone alarm. He spent the next four beeps collecting himself, simultaneously wishing that the dream would continue and wondering what it was about to make him wish that. All he could remember was an attractive, redheaded woman, a castle, and snatches of what seemed to him like an action film, but even that was uncertain by the time Mark reached out for the shutoff button. If the rather surreal events of the night prior had produced any troublesome nightmares, he did not recall them.

During Mark’s morning routine, the little book lay shut on the counter. Funny, he suddenly thought as he left the apartment for work - he had thought he’d left it open. With a shrug, though, Mark turned on the part of his mind that dealt with work matters and headed off.

---

“Mark, Carrie’s just growing up.” Lauren said slowly, as if Mark were a stupid kid. Darnit, he fumed, he was fifteen now and by all indications a bright kid, and didn’t need the patronizing tone anymore. This was serious, why would no-one else treat it that way? “She’s learning to live with us, in the real world.”

Mark shook his head. “No, Mom, she’s not. You’ve done something.” Carrie was just a few weeks shy of eleven, and Mark hadn’t failed to notice her suddenly-subdued personality, which tended to be most subdued right after breakfast and dinner.

“Done something?” Lauren huffed. “Of course. I’ve raised her as best I can since your father died, and it looks like that’s finally taking hold.” 

Mark balled his fists. “Mom, cut the crap. You’ve - ” 

 A stinging blow to the side of his face cut him off. “Don’t you ever talk to me like that, young man!” Lauren screeched. her hand raised and trembling with rage in case she decided Mark needed to be slapped again. “Next time I hear you take that tone I’ll...” Mark toned out the rest of the self-righteous diatribe, nodding subserviently at the right points, but inside formulating a plan. His mother would not tell him what she’d done, but Mark had a suspicion. As soon as he was able, Mark slunk off, making for the kitchen. 

Lauren’s vitamin cabinet was better stocked than the adjacent spice cabinet, due to her incessant desire to regain her long-faded youth through modern science and pseudoscience, and for almost a year now Mark and Carrie had been, without their prior consent, put on a vitamin regimen of their own, recommended by the loud guy on TV for growing adolescents to keep them healthy and hormonally balanced. By now, three pills with breakfast and two with dinner was pretty routine - and Mark hadn’t really had anything to say that he hadn’t benefited from them. After all, he hit his growth spurt about two months into the regimen, and his mother had taken that as proof the pills worked.

The vitamin cabinet was locked, but Mark’s little pocket knife slipped the catch fairly easily. He quietly eased the cabinet open, expecting at any second for his mother to shout a sanctimonious “What on earth do you think you are doing!?” from behind him. But in ten seconds, the cabinet was open without repercussion.

Mark scanned the double sea of  brown glass and white plastic caps for a moment, feeling lost. Most of these, he knew, were for his mother’s current regimen, or for one of her dozen-odd previous regimens - where were the bottles for the kids’?

After opening several of the front bottles Mark located two whose contents matched the tablet-like pills that he recognized - both himself and Carrie had two of those at breakfast and one at dinner. The label was scientific gobbledygook, and he ignored it, continuing the hunt.

That’s when Mark noticed the bottle at the back, which wasn’t made of brown glass. It was white plastic, opaque, with one of those annoying “child-proof” lids. Reaching in, Mark pulled it out. The label, like the others, was mostly illegible, but this was no vitamin - the label displayed “FOR PRESCRIPTION USE ONLY” in large, unfriendly letters. There was a warning on the back about taking more than one pill at a time, and a list of side effects which was rather frightening. Mark didn’t know what it was, but he knew that if it was his mother’s it would be in the medicine cabinet where it belonged.

The screw-top lid not proof against his efforts, Mark spilled one pill into his hand. It was ovoid, gray, small. He knew what it was immediately - the “new brand” of Carrie’s “suppliment for growing girls.” Lauren, Mark could prove, was lying to Carrie about the “vitamins.” He wasn’t sure if what he knew was illegal, but he knew it was wrong. Carrie wasn’t even eleven, true, but Mark knew she was just as bright as himself, if not brighter, and that she should be party in a decision to use powerful pharmaceuticals (what else could have that long a list of side effects?) to change her mind.

With that one pill in hand, Mark left the cabinet as he’d found it and snuck to his room to plan, cradling the single gray pill like it was a dangerous and fragile weapon. This had to stop, he resolved.

The next morning, Mark (for once) came down when he was called. He apologized to his mother for his behavior the previous afternoon, and offered to help set out breakfast for the three of them. Surprised, Lauren allowed Mark to do so, and set him to work preparing Carrie’s usual breakfast of a pair of toaster waffles while she herself got out a few plates and busied herself with the vitamins.

Mark watched carefully out of the corner of his eye as his mother removed a pill from the white bottle and put it in the little cup marked “C” for “Caroline” - he noted that she did it last, after even her own cup full of pills (a dozen at least) had been laid out.

As usual, Mark set himself at the table next to Carrie’s place setting, and she eventually came down, hair mussed into a tangled halo, still yawning and rubbing her eyes. Groggily, she sat near the waffles, and started abstractedly digging in.

Mark, deciding that it was now or never, sprung into action, though from outward appearances he didn’t do anything. Looking out the window toward the trees beyond the backyard, Mark did a fake double-take. “Is that a hawk?”

Carrie perked up. “Ooh!” She dashed to the window to look out. She’d always been drawn to birds, hawks and falcons especially - and such birds of prey were occasionally seen around the house. “Where, Mark?”

He stepped up behind her and put his hands on his younger sister’s shoulders. Underneath his left hand, he crinkled a little slip of paper against her shirt. “Right over there.” He pretended to steer Carrie in one specific direction. “Oh, no, I think it took off. It was on that branch right... there.” Mark pointed toward the highest branches of an arbitrary tree.

Carrie’s head drooped. “Aww, man.” She batted Mark’s hands off, but in the process of doing so grabbed the slip of paper. They’d passed notes to keep their mother in the dark before, but it had been some time - Mark had been worried she’d misinterpret the gesture. Mark stepped back, and went back to his cold cereal, not even letting himself look toward his sister to see if she read his little note.

If Lauren noticed her children’s sleight of hand, she did not mention it, and within minutes breakfast was done, vitamins were taken, and Carrie and Mark were shooed out the door toward the bus stop. It was chilly, but not really cold - all they had on against the weather was hooded sweatshirts.

As soon as Mark and Carrie were around the hedges at the corner, Mark broke the silence. “Carrie, did you read the note?” He asked.

Caroline looked at him funny. “Of course.“ She held open her hand, to reveal a small gray pill wedged between her index and middle fingers. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s strong stuff. Prescription.” Mark replied. He assumed Carrie would understand the word, and was proven right.

“I have been feeling... odd lately.” Carrie nodded. “Seeing Roz less and less.” She held up the pill. “There are times when she is just unbearable.” Caroline’s tone mocked the one both kids had heard Lauren use to describe Carrie’s behavior to another parent at a school function once.   

“I don’t know what to do, Carrie. You can’t keep taking them. You’re... not my little sister when you do.” Mark felt uncomfortable admitting it, but over the previous few weeks, he’d missed Carrie, though in a way she was never gone.

“I can’t stop taking them entirely” Carrie replied. “The doctor will notice.”

Carrie referred to the mysterious Dr. Halwicz, who Mark had heard of but never seen or met. Carrie had two appointments with him a month, supervised by Lauren, where the doctor would apparently leave Carrie to her own devices in the room and speak only to Lauren about Carrie indirectly, as if the girl wasn’t even there.

“So... then what?” Mark asked. They were at the bus stop now.

“Then the week before we go to the doctor, I take the pills. The week after, I don’t.” Carrie replied. “Roz will understand. Mom will only try harder if she doesn’t win, and I can play stupid in the off weeks.”

Mark nodded. “Let me know if you need my help, Carrie. Mom’s... Well, she’s trying to change you, and she doesn’t have the right.” Mark patted his sister’s shoulder.

“I go to the doctor day after next, so I gotta take this one.” Carrie held up the gray pill with a scowl. “See you in a few days, Mark.”

The elder sibling turned away, unable to watch her swallow the pill, that embodiment of everything about his mother that Mark could not stand. Before it could take effect, thankfully, Carrie’s bus came and took her away, and Mark was left alone at the bus stop.

Story continues in part 4 (here).