Eight

Two hours later, and Bich’s head still ached, even if her memory of why it ached was a little hazy.

She’d been in the Bad Place with Elle. They’d uncovered the hole in the kitchen floor, dropped the camera down into it on the end of Elle’s scarf. Bich could remember standing over the hole, scarf in hand. She could remember the smell of dust and dirt and old filth, feel the cold of the ruined house.

They’d lowered the camera, it’d hit ground, and then—

And then . . .

Then Bich had woken up, face pressed into grimy floorboards, Elle’s hand gently shaking her shoulder.

“What happened?” Bich had asked, when her mouth had stopped feeling stuffed with cotton wool and potting mix.

“I . . . I don’t know.” Elle’s eyes had been very wide and very green, the brightest things in the gloom. “We . . . There was the hole? A-and the camera? And then . . .”

And then they’d woken up.

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Seven

By the time I get back to the hotel, I’m feeling decidedly flammable.

I know what the “Tooth Girl” is. I saw her, stared straight into her . . . well. “Eyes” is the wrong word, for both of us, but I stared down her soul and she stared back at mine and in that one moment, before she ran, I finally, finally figured out what it is we’re dealing with.

She’s not a meme. At least, not in the modern sense. Nothing about the Tooth Girl exists in the modern sense, in fact, because she’s as old as I am. Older, maybe. Pulled from the misty shadows of Helheimr by a couple of fame-seeking kids, trapped and twisted by their wills and egos and pain.

Because this is the truth about the Tooth Girl, the thing the camera doesn’t show: she’s a mara. Not the Buddhist kind, the European one. The same one that appears in the word “nightmare”, a literal spirit of fear that brings paranoia and sleepless nights.

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Six

Elle was really pissed.

“They filmed me,” she kept saying. “They fucking filmed me.”

Back at Roxx’s, Elle’d watched the new holehere vid on her phone, then had spent the next fifteen minutes storming around in the, well, in the storm, looking into bushes and trying to find any trace of . . . whomever she thought had uploaded the video.

Taylor. She was convinced it was Taylor.

“I just fucking spoke to him,” she’d said, ripping a great big leafy chunk out of someone else’s pittosporum. “That little piece of shit!”

Elle was really, really pissed.

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Five

Nic hadn’t been able to find anything juicy on Taylor’s DDHH mob, nor on the so-called Orgonull. Whatever the drug is, it’s well off the radar of the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

I describe not being able to feel Taylor, about the kid having no Wyrd. Nic’s only audible reaction to this is to say, “ . . . hm” exactly once, but I can still feel the disapproval from halfway across the state.

She thinks I’m getting messed up in things I shouldn’t be. She’s not wrong about that, exactly, but I’m here now. I’m involved. And this is my city, my dominion. And I still haven’t been able to find the Tooth Girl.

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Episode 14

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Four

Standing in the middle of the hotel room, contents of my bag spread like a hipster hurricane across the bed, I have to admit I didn’t come prepared to be read by the locals as a girl.

“Shit.”

It happens sometimes, particularly standing next to Sig, who’s stout and stubbly and exhales a particular sort of modern day masculinity with every awkward, shuffling breath.

Lain, on the other hand, is tall and willowy, with better fashion sense and longer hair and sharper cheekbones. And if we do something Daring And Modern like hold hands or rub noses, there are still people out there who’d rather assume I’m a slightly tomboyish girl than any sort of alternative.

Well, whatever. Truthfully, my people—the jötunn risar—don’t do gender like humans do, and it took me a good couple of decades to even figure out things like dicks and boobs.

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•hole• (and Three)

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Two

I watch the first half-dozen episodes in Em’s bedroom, sitting on her aggressively ergonomic chair, Em herself looming over my shoulder. Sigmund and Wayne have declined to participate in the screening, for understandable reasons.

The set-up is of some random YouTuber, filming themselves walking around the highly tedious streets of what looks like suburban Melbourne, hence the channel name. There’s about fifteen minutes of this, just long nauseating shots of grass or pavement, the sound of breath and the roar of cars humming in the speakers.

Episode 5 introduces the hook.

“That’s Golgotha,” I say when I see it. The screen is showing the as-of-yet-unnamed cameraperson walking down a cracked and littered pavement, a huge cyclone fence rearing up to the right.

“Yeah,” Em says.

The footage on the screen flickers. Just one single burst of static.

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Episode 6

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