“I’m home!”

With a little too much force I kick my sneakers onto the shoe rack, causing one of them to bump back off and need to be kicked again to submit, and then I unceremoniously dump my backpack onto the bench near the door. Mom’s jacket isn’t on the coat rack. Good. But she might not have taken it today. It’s almost October, and in my opinion it’s still sweater season for another week or so.

5… 4… 3… 2… 1… sweet silence. Excellent, I’m alone.

Mrow.

Well, not completely alone. My all-grey pudgy boy is lying belly up on his giant cat tree. Knowing the Master of Snacks and Keeper of the Cupboard has returned to his castle, he lazily lets out a half-meow, half-squawk to let me know it is near to his dinner time, and he would not be averse to an early meal.

“Hi big guy, did you miss me?”

Mrrrrr.

I’m sure that’s a yes. My little prince has 201k followers on his Instagram account, ‘Chonky Kitty-Wittums the Third.’ He’s famous. Ish. My little celebrity’s aliases include Prince, Kitty-Bitty, Kitty-Wittums, Chonks, and Chonky-Tonks. He’ll respond to any of them, even though his official name on his certificate is Sandwich. He’ll sometimes respond if you call him that too, but you’d better have an actual sandwich for him if you do.

‘The Third’ part of the title comes from the fact that he’s my third cat. We had a ginger boy when I was a baby, but he was already old when I was born. We got a female tabby when I was 7 but it bonded more with Grandma so we let her take it with her to the care home so she wouldn’t be lonely. It’s not like we were planning to visit much.

I adopted Chonky when I was twelve. No one else wanted him because he was massively overweight, considered too old when he was only four, and it would be too much work to make him healthy again. And if he became diabetic, it would be expensive. Complete bullshit.

So I took him in, got him on a diet and an exercise program, and of course made an Instagram to document my handsome man’s weight loss and health journey. Within a year it was popular because he’s adorable and who doesn’t like cute cat pictures? Especially with his stylin’ headbands and customized soccer jerseys.

Yeeeah, a lot of my income goes towards my cat. The rest goes into my Secret Emergency Escape Cache. You know, for the worst-case scenario. I’m sure plenty of healthy and normal teenagers have a getaway bag.

I give my prince a few head scritches before heading into the kitchen to grab a bag of chips. Oh. Mum left a note on the fridge.

I’ll be back late. There’s a plate of meatloaf in the fridge if you get hungry. Please call me next time you’ll be out after school. I worry.

Your priorities on what to worry about are a bit skewed, mother. Whatever. Like I could have an appetite knowing what’s gonna happen tonight. Without my notice, my hand clenches on the chip bag a little more tightly than necessary.

It’s close to 6 o’clock now so I dump some low-cal kibbles into Chonky’s bowl before heading for my tower. After he’s done eating the food, that he has already teleported in front of magically, because he was definitely still on his cat tree three seconds ago, he will start whining at the base of the stairs for me to come get him.

He’s on a diet and exercise regimen but he insists on being carried up or down those particular stairs because he hates them. He’s more cautious of them than the puppies in those ‘Pupper’s First Stairs’ videos. For good reason, I guess.

Our house doesn’t have a real floor plan or any clearly defined floors or levels. At least not by normal standards. The kitchen-dining room combo is the first room you enter, the living room is in a sunken half basement to the left, and there’s a door in the corner leading to the real basement. No railings, cement steps, steep as all hell. Mom’s room is behind the kitchen and up a few steps. My room is up in a tower of sorts, you go up a tight spiral stairway with, you guessed it, no railing to get there. Mum claims she’ll put one on eventually, but it's been two years so I’m not counting on it.

Basically, there’s stairs all over the place, no railings to be found, and the person who built this place was probably a grown man-child who wanted a tree house indoors.

It would never pass a safety inspection.

Kitty-Bitty hates it, mom tolerates it because we got it for cheap, but she stubs her toe a lot, so I don’t know how much longer that’ll last, but I don’t mind it too much. Maybe because I never got a tree house of my own as a kid.

It’s one of the few properties here in Ashvale that Nana, my grandma on my mom’s side, used to rent out. Not to be confused with Grandma, or Gran, or Granny, my dad’s mom who I don’t know as well. She’s a little crazy, but in a funny way. Nana is just eccentric.

The house is small, but it has a lot of land up here on the plateau and we have very few neighbours. Nana gave it to us at-cost when we moved back. She said it ‘had good energy.’ Whatever that means.

She moved into a nursing home at center town, aka Upper Ashvale, almost a year ago. I don’t visit her as often as she’d like, but hey who asked her to move to Creepsville Central, as I like to call it.

Fuck! Even after that spiel about how dangerous the stairs are, I almost slip on the way up. Which would not have been good. I have a three-hour workday tomorrow. The maximum my school allows us to work at a time. Possibly the legal limit too, but I never bothered to check. Feels a bit short to me, I’d love to perform more child labour.

I don’t know why I feel the need to work so much. I’ve almost finished my Work Experience class hours already and I’ve only worked there for a year now.

Well, that’s a lie, I do know why. I just don’t like it.

Like I said before, I feel that if something bad happens, I should have escape funds. But I try not to think of that too much, because in that scenario I’m alone when I leave, hence the need for funds.

The door to my room creaks as per normal as I enter my room. I keep asking mom to oil it, but she probably likes having a method of knowing if I sneak out. Jokes on her, I have a window.

And here it is!

With a dramatic flourish, despite my lack of audience, I pull down a sheet I had tapped to the ceiling near the far wall. It’d be clearly suspicious if someone actually entered the room, but mom never does and I don’t invite my pretend-friends over anymore, and it gives me a bit of peace of mind to know it’s covered.

What, you ask? Behold, my Wall of Conspiracy!

It’s a working title, sue me.

It’s really just three corkboards beside each other with an additional, small, white board further to the left. It covers half of the left wall opposite the door, with the window in the center and my desk to the right. The closet and door to my bathroom are on the wall adjacent to that.

I have everything on here. Everything I’ve discovered. The stuff I told the Outsiders and the stuff I kept to myself. It helps me think, and to keep those thoughts organized. After all, there’s a lot to unpack here.

The truth is, we’re heading towards that worst-case scenario at record speed. This December it will be three years since we came here. It’s amazing how fast everything started falling apart. It didn’t happen all at once. The truth snuck up on me, strung together by tiny things that didn’t seem so alarming until I went to sleep on Sunday two weeks ago and woke up inside a cougar. That was the last straw for me. The camel’s back of the fake reality broke that night.

I can no longer deny what I know to be fact: my mom and I are not safe here. I don’t think anyone is.

I can accept that this is an obviously government funded secret city. I can accept that our presence here is possibly making some people unhappy, hence the surveillance and the pointless maintaining of the false pretenses. I don’t like it, but I can accept that. It’s not my fault, anyway, I’m a minor so I go where my mom goes.

Up until two weeks ago, all the crazy Mutant shit happened outside, it didn’t come home with me. Now shit is personal. I’m being kidnapped or controlled or whatever by a cougar now. That cat is probably a Monster or something. But the weird dreams don’t happen every night. Which means it could be happening to other people too, potentially. That means not just me, but no one is safe here.

The weirdest part of it all is the fact I’m dreaming in the first place. I only started dreaming two years ago, or close enough. I started the first night we moved in. That makes me, at age fifteen, a dream amateur. Even so, I think two years’ dreaming experience and fifteen years of general life experience is enough to know what is normal, and what is not, where dreaming is concerned. Or at least what should be expected, and not. The dreams of the past two weeks are, to put it as simply as possible for you, unexpected as hell. It’s safe to assume they are not normal.

After the first weird one that Sunday, I did some research on lucid dreaming. That’s what I thought it was at first. I’m not so crazy that I’d jump straight to possession right out of the gate. Lucid dreaming is something I’d heard about but never cared about because it never concerned me before.

Turns out it still doesn’t. Google was very unhelpful. Odd, I know. Apparently, no matter how lucid a dream you’re having, your body is supposed to stay where it is, and not go off on its own. To top it off, there’s nothing that indicated your spirit, or soul or whatever you call it, should be inhabiting animals.

Can you believe it? Not only is it not a lucid dream, but it’s not anything, according to our friends at Google. It can’t be happening. My experiences shouldn’t be possible. At all. Well, shit.

Fun fact: now I know to never type ‘cougar dreams’ into any search engine I ever come across ever. There are images in my head now that no one should have in their head.

After that…misadventure, I figured hey, maybe half the strangeness of my recent dreams could be explained by sleep walking. I mean, why not? People have been known to get up and stumble about and not remember any of it. But I did research on sleepwalking too, and people typically can’t walk down to 7-11, buy a chocolate bar, eat it, hop on a bus and take a walk though the park, and then make it back home and crawl back into bed. That seems to be too complicated a process to undertake while sleeping.

The fact I somehow opened my bedroom window and climbed down a thirty-foot ash tree without breaking any limbs really should have been enough indication on its own that it’s probably not sleepwalking. At least, not in my case. I trip on the daily, and that’s while awake. Since sleepwalkers, according to Wikipedia, tend to have less coordination than their woke selves, I should have fallen out that window. And been hit by that bus, not riding on it.

The ‘possessing animals’ thing, well, google says that is just a dream. It’s not possible to fall asleep and wake up trapped inside a cougar, and then wake up again in your bed. With an O’Henry wrapper and a receipt in the pocket of the sweater you weren’t wearing when you fell asleep, and dirt and leaves all over your PJ’s.

But riddle me this, Google, if it was just a dream, then why did I have the taste of blood in my mouth after the second one? The dirt and leaves came from my body walking about, (presumably?) but the bloody taste? The cougar killed and ate a rabbit. The internet says dreams can’t translate into reality.

That leaves only two options, either I have gone insane, or the other option.

I haven’t actually figured out what that is yet, I’m just hoping there is one. Being insane isn’t exactly ideal.

I know talking to myself, or people who aren’t even here, isn’t a good sign, but the last couple years haven’t been easy, okay? And they’ve been lonely. Sure I have friends, but they refuse to believe me. About anything. It’s isolating. This entire city has made me feel stalked and spied on since I got here. We can get into that later.

In any case, I can feel your presence, and I know you can hear me, even if you don’t talk and I don’t know who you are. Who knows, maybe the creepy townsfolk are reading my mind, or maybe something is inhabiting my mind just like I’m inhabiting cougar minds. It doesn’t have to make sense if it helps, right? So I’m gonna keep talking to you.

Anyway, to sum it up, the whole normal-dreaming thing was already new to me and then it got all weird when I started hunting rabbits.

My mind keeps going back to the beginning when we first arrived. If I had begged her to reconsider, if we had moved somewhere else, anywhere else, maybe this wouldn’t be happening to me. To us. The first feeling of strangeness is embedded in my memory now. It started small, as most things do, when we first drove past the Welcome Sign.

I almost missed it, even though mom stopped to take a picture. My attention was drawn to the ginormous, imposing trees that seemed so out of place, and appeared to form a canopy border along the open eastern entrance, and then around the base of the mountains, then going up. Continuously in a perfectly straight line, stretching out from both sides of the road, these massive, moss-covered trees went on farther that I could see from there. All the way up into the clouds.

It only took a couple months of exploration to discover I was right. There is an actual border of Ash trees that goes all the way around most of the mountains that contain the greater Ashvale area. It’s too uniform as well, they were planted deliberately. A long time ago, considering their size.

To understand how absurd an undertaking it would be to make a flawless border like that, you have to understand how big Ashvale is. It already is a large city, not much smaller than Toronto, with a north to south distance of 41 kilometers, and an east to west distance of 41 kilometers. For you weird metric folks that’s 28 miles and 26 miles, or around 230 square miles. The actual shape is like a lopsided figure eight, with a heavy bottom. The eastern side, which is where you enter, makes up a good two thirds of the entire size and is called Lower Ashvale. There are two mountains, one to the north, one to the south, that poke out into the city at around the two third mark, leaving only a one-mile entry way into the Upper Ashvale area, located in a smaller section of the valley. Although it’s further west the valley also starts to turn south here.

When you reach the end of Upper Ashvale, there are two more mountains that stick out yet again, leaving a two-mile entry way into the Ashwood Reservation. The reserve is about the size of Red Deer at 64 kilometres squared. That’s about 24 square miles.

The perfectly organized border of Ash trees goes all the way around all of that.

Down further south from that, by hiking through no less than three large mountains, is Ash Forest Park. This goes down all the way to the Rocky Mountain Trench. There used to be a few small towns down there, but they were all destroyed during the first and second bi-international wars. Now the Trench is a protected zone of the park, with only the Ash Forest Rangers being allowed to enter.

The line of Ash trees stops before the forbidden area, but still, the perfectly organized border of Ash trees goes all the way around the rest of all of that. Seriously. That’s so many kilometers and no I’m not willing to do the math. But it’s a shit ton, which should be considered a standardized unit of measurement.

Anyway, back to my creepy memory. The two ash trees directly beside us as we passed were the biggest of all the ones I’ve ever seen, except one. Their rounded and full bodies met each other in the center, creating a sort of leafy tunnel we drove through as we continued onward.

I’d never seen trees like this. Most ‘round topped’ trees, or anything that wasn’t pine or similar, I’d seen were small, contained, with little individual fences around them. I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get it. Big city trees.

These ones here were wild, old, and tall, and the moss covering their trunks and main branches made me feel like we were entering a jungle, not a mountain’s forest.

As we continued, more ash trees appeared and were still making a tunnel for us. It was dark inside it, with only splashes of light, but I could still see my mom grinning while stealing glances at me. She was excited, I was losing the little enthusiasm I’d had in the first place.

Maybe this all sounds fine to you so far. Idyllic even. The start of a grand adventure.

I assure you, it’s not.

“They’re Ash trees. They can grow over a hundred feet, you know.”

“Lies,” I scoffed at her. She’d noticed me gawking at them. I guess she thought it was curiosity, but it was more like…dread. They made me uneasy. Still do.

“The two at the entrance are both over eighty feet, and there’s one in Memorial Park that’s almost two hundred feet. If I’m remembering right.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You will when you see it, Kara.”

Sigh. Oh my god, were things ever innocent before, when the strangest thing I ever thought I’d see was a two-hundred-foot tree in the middle of some park.

The tree is real, by the way. They make a point of measuring it every year, making a festival out of it. The Measurement Ceremony. Bizarre right? But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We moved along. The entire road leading up to the massive, black-iron, entry gate being lined by these huge trees, with us stuck inside their creepy, dark tunnel. I hate feeling locked in anywhere, so I was already squirming in my seat. A feeling of wariness started then, and it never really left.

The road didn’t seem like it would ever end, like we’d ever escape, and a feeling started to grow. I was barely conscious of it at first. I couldn’t place it or explain it, but the second we entered Ashvale territory I already wanted to leave. I should have left. We should never have come.

There was no impenetrable wall, but I felt the border under us when we entered it, and I felt the barrier once we were inside, and I’ve felt trapped ever since. It seemed crazy then, but I blamed the trees. It was just a feeling at the time. One slow to awaken. I had no idea how real all this was.

I mean, you remember the whole getting lost and finding myself back in town with a whole two hours of my life missing thing, right? Well, I don’t know how, but I blame that tree barrier. It must be some kind of magic. But why trap us?

And if it is trapping us, then how was my mom able to leave years ago? Is it selective?

Aah… I got a chill.

That was how it started, but this sensation only grew more as time went on. It was just a spark in the beginning, barely alive, with no thoughts of its own. However, the more I learned and witnessed, the louder it would shout at me.

I ignored it as best I could for the first year: my belief that this city and its people were not normal. That maybe I wasn’t normal. I brushed it off. Too many horror movies, or, it’s because we watched The Truman Show in class. Nothing was wrong. I wasn’t being watched. I’m just prejudiced against boring places. Yeah, that’s it, I’m looking for things to fear because this town is so boring.

The biggest lies I ever told were to myself.

Have you ever driven through a small town far out somewhere and all the people there just kinda glare at you? Or just stare all creepy-like? And you feel unwelcome. Like if you stay too long something might happen? Doesn’t even have to be a town. Could be a neighborhood? Times that by 100 and you’ve got Ashvale.

But what was I supposed to do? No one believed me, and the only proof I had were small things. Circumstantial evidence at best. Even if I have a whole wall covered in it, it’s not enough.

Ashvale is on mom’s map, which she bought in Ashvale years ago, because she grew up here. But if I try to order anything online, the site will claim our address doesn’t exist. So does Google.

I mean, how can Google, that knows everything, not know about a city almost as big as Toronto? With the same population density, I might add. How can there be no information about it anywhere? How come I never heard about it outside of Ashvale before? Not only that, but it’s full of Shifters. I’m not wrong. It’s fishy. But no, according to everyone else, I’m the crazy one.

That’s not even getting into the massive government building that is literally a castle and has no place being in a place that isn’t a national capital. The city is big, yeah, chock full of people, yeah, but not so big you’d need a huge castle stuffed full of government workers to run it.

And then there’s the tower. Unlike mine, this is a real tower. Its base is in the valley but it’s built so high the tops of it are in the clouds. It’s taller than some near-by mountains. Mountains. The city claims it’s a hotel, but I don’t believe it is. I can’t tell you for sure because I’ve never worked up the nerve to investigate it. But we don’t even have an airport. A single dirt road, that’s closed half the year, is the only way to get here unless you feel like hiking for a couple weeks. Who’s staying there?

The fact a city this size doesn’t have an airport might seem strange to you as well, and I certainly thought so at first, before I realized we’re inside a Bubble. Duh. You can’t fly into a Bubble. However, most large and well-known Shifter cities will have an airport outside. Smart way around the problem. Guess there’s no smart guys in that big castle though, because no one thought to build one here.

My information on center town is a little lacking, admittedly. I don’t go to Upper Ashvale very often. I get anxious when I go there, and I am not the nervous sort. I mean, I wasn’t before I came here. Ashvale has ruined me, ruined I say!

I’m a nervous wreck these days.

Center Town, Uptown, Upper Ashvale, however you wanna call it, it has all the fancy places, that absurd government palace, the private schools with dorms, Ashvale University, that weird tower, and ten large suburbs ranging from upper middle class to mansion filled. Like I’m talking big, fenced off mansions inside gated communities.

And the men there all dress and act like they’re Mr. Darcy (pre-redemption arc) and the women all look and act like the Stepford Wives. That’s more than enough to weird me out, but there’s more. I get this tense feeling when I look at them, and my stomach hurts, and the effect worsens if they look back at me.

I know you could easily write that off as anxiety. And I did at first. Until the day I saw someone, who had given me that feeling earlier, Shift.

I’ll never forget it. He was some kind of lizard-man. I only saw his reflection in the store window beside him. I had been walking behind them, and he had a full head of hair and a hat on, so he looked normal from the back. I was just minding my own business trying to visit my mom at work, since the main hospital had to be in center town, right? Sheesh.

Anyway, I got the annoying feeling when I happened to glance at the guy in front of me and slowed down. I tried to look at other things to lessen the nausea. And that’s when I saw his reflection in the glass.

I thought he was a Variant at first, until his reflection suddenly went back to ‘normal’ in the store window and he turned to cross the street, his face now that of an average middle-aged man.

He had Shifted. He was a Shifter. That was the moment I realized what that feeling I kept getting, which was always so much worse uptown, was. I was sensing them. This was a city full of Mutants, a Bubble.

I don’t remember much about the rest of that day. Never made it the hospital. Came to my senses when I was already home in my room, with Chonky-Tonks insisting loudly in my ear that it was dinner time.

My mom and my ‘friends’ kept telling me I was silly. That everything could be explained by my anxiety and I just had to open my heart to the new experience. As big as Ashvale is, it’s a very isolated city. At times it can feel like small town, if you aren’t downtown. And even then, their downtown is oddly quiet. Not dead per se, but before now we lived mostly in big cities that felt and acted like their size.

Tried my hardest to believe them, I’ll admit. I even agreed to see a shrink. Being crazy isn’t ideal, but the alternative was just too frightening. I let it all go.

Well, I did until two weeks ago, anyway. Up until then the odd things were all witnessed, observed, but it never came home with me. My house was safe. Then the sleep-walking and weird dreams started.

This all leads me here. Now you’re all caught up. More or less.

Tonight’s operation is imperative. It must be successful. Because before now, that cougar was still outside the Boundary. Maybe it won’t be able to break through, but if it does, that will put it in my path. What the fuck can I do against a cougar? A potential Monster cougar.

Nothing, that’s what. I’ll die.

I don’t know if it truly means me harm, but I’m not willing to take the chance. If I can’t get enough evidence tonight to convince my mom to leave Ashvale, then I’ll have to make preparations to leave on my own. That will most likely include burning down a lot of Ash trees to make it past the barrier, becoming a wanted arsonist among Mutant Society, and having to flee to the nearest Sapient city with unobstructed wifi to tell the world in order to gain protection.

I’d have to pop another Bubble, so to speak. If that starts another war, then so be it. If they had let me live in peace, I wouldn’t have to do this. There might be a good reason this city is hidden here. But that doesn’t give them the right to play games with my life. I’ll go full scorched earth if I have to. Everything on this wall of mine is damning evidence, along with my testimony.

If my life is a game, I’m going to play to win.