Backstory · Katia Grim
Katia Grim, Part 3: Let It Out
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 004, final segment.
This is the part of the file where she picks a race. It’s my favourite part of anyone’s file. Billions of beings, handed one menu and about twenty minutes, and asked: what would you like to be instead?
Most of them pick the one with the biggest arms. I don’t judge. I log it. Logging is a kind of judging, but quieter.
The woman in the mirror put her hand flat against the glass.
I didn’t. My hands were full of tape measure and they were shaking. But she did, on her side, slowly, the way you’d touch a window on a train. She had my big knuckles and my filthy cardigan and Dana’s blood up to her elbows.
She was smiling. I have never once smiled like that.
Then the glass started to bulge.
I ran. I ran the last ten yards to the stairwell arch the way large women run in the movies when the joke is that they’re running: badly, loudly, with a lot of cardigan involved. Behind me the mirror made a noise like someone stepping on a wineglass, and then a softer noise, a sigh, and then nothing.
Achievement Unlocked: Couldn’t Bear to Look!
The Bridal Looking-Glass is a Floor Two hazard that kills anyone who gazes at their own reflection for longer than three seconds. It has a lifetime kill rate of 100% among brides. It waited eleven minutes for you to look at yourself properly. You never did. It has died of what the System’s coroner is calling “neglect.”
Congratulations! You’ve unlocked your first achievement! You earned it by hating yourself so efficiently that a cursed object starved to death. That’s a first for this season. Possibly a first for this galaxy.
Reward: One (1) compact mirror. Please use it.
My first achievement in the whole dungeon. I’d like that engraved on my headstone. I’d like the headstone to be very slightly too small.
The stairwell between the second and third floors looked like a bus station after midnight. Benches. Light that was too bright. A floor that was too clean.
Toby sat with his face in his hands. Ray sat beside him, close enough to touch him if he needed to.
They both looked up when I came through the arch, and Ray went white.
“Jesus,” he said. “Katia. We thought you were—”
He didn’t finish. He’d thought I was dead. He’d thought it so completely that he hadn’t bothered to look back.
It wasn’t cruel. From where they’d stood, I’d just come out of nowhere. That was my whole act by then.
I sat on the bench across from them, with Dana’s blood on my cardigan and the tape measure wrapped around my knuckles like a boxer’s wrap. Nobody said anything for a long time.
Notification: Congratulations on reaching the third floor!
It’s time for one of the most exciting moments of any crawler’s season: Race Selection! Your choice is permanent and will affect your body, your abilities, your lifespan and your relationship with mirrors. Speaking of which, Crawler Grim, please stop putting the compact under the bench. We can see you.
No pressure! Everybody’s watching!
Toby picked something with horns in about four minutes. He said the horns gave a strength bonus. I think it was because nobody in history has ever bullied a sixteen-year-old with horns.
Crawler Toby has selected a race! His viewer approval has risen 40%. His mother, had she survived, would have hated it. That’s usually how you know it’s working.
Ray took longer. He scrolled and frowned and then picked the one closest to his own body that would stop his knees hurting. Ray was the most sensible man I ever met. If he’d been in charge of the apocalypse, there’d have been a sign-in sheet.
The menu was longer than the bridal catalogues my mother used to stack by the till. Every race had a little rotating picture, and a description, and a list of numbers. You could look at a body for as long as you liked before you put it on.
I’d spent my whole life looking at bodies for as long as I liked. Other people’s.
I scrolled through scales and fur. Eight eyes. Things built like wardrobes. Things so beautiful the picture actually hurt. And every single one of them, in the preview, was wearing the same default outfit: a beige loincloth, with a raw edge, cut on the wrong grain.
Billions of years of civilisation out there. Not one of them had invented a hem.
We can take that in, I thought, at every single picture. Every one of them was a dress somebody else had cut.
I stopped for a long time on one of the beautiful ones. I won’t pretend I didn’t. It was tall and narrow and silver-skinned, with a long neck held up like a dancer’s and the chin up, like it knew people would do what it said. The picture turned slowly in the air so I could see it from every side, like a bride on a fitting box in front of a three-way mirror.
It looked like my mother.
Not her face. Her posture. I could have had it in four seconds. I could have walked onto the third floor as the kind of woman people step aside for, and nobody would ever again look at me and work out where they’d start.
Limited-time offer! This race is currently trending in your demographic! 9 out of 10 crawlers who hovered this long went on to select it! The tenth was eaten during the decision process, so the data is incomplete!
My finger was over it. I remember that very clearly. It was shaking.
Then I scrolled on. I’d spent thirty-four years in that woman’s shadow already. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life inside her skin.
And then I found it.
Race: Doppelganger.
You don’t have a shape. You have a starting point. Doppelgangers can rework their bodies more or less at will, within limits you will discover through trial, error and a certain amount of screaming. Faces, frames, mass: all of it negotiable.
Warning: Some Doppelgangers lose track of what they originally looked like. Most report that they don’t miss it. Nobody has ever checked whether that’s true.
I read it three times. Then a fourth, out loud, under my breath, the way my mother used to read invoices.
When people ask me why on camera, I say it was tactical. All true. Not the reason.
Here’s the reason.
For thirty-four years, people had looked at me the way my mother looked at a badly cut dress. Kindly. Quickly. Working out where they’d start. And I’d agreed with them. I’d spent my whole life on my knees in front of a three-way mirror, helping other women believe the problem was the dress, while I wore my own body like something borrowed that I’d have to give back with a late fee.
And here was a dungeon, offering me the shears.
Not a beautiful face. Not anybody’s approval. The shears. The right to decide, every morning, what got taken in and what got let out, and to be the only one doing the deciding.
It wasn’t about being prettier. I’d watched sixty mannequins put on Dana’s face like it was nothing, and the dungeon loved that face. The dungeon had loved that face to death.
I didn’t want a face the dungeon loved. I wanted one that was mine because I’d made it. And if it wasn’t working, I’d make another.
Archive note: This woman spent four minutes and eleven seconds reading the description of a single race. The average for that menu is nine seconds per entry. I know because I timed everyone. I time everyone. It’s one of my hobbies, along with cataloguing, light gardening and the occasional extinction.
Toby leaned over to look. He had horns now, little ones, still coming through like a calf’s. He kept touching them.
“What’s that one do?”
“It changes,” I said.
“Into what?”
“Whatever I want.”
He thought about it with his whole face, the way sixteen-year-olds do.
“That’s kind of messed up,” he said. Then: “That’s kind of sick, actually.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so too.”
I pressed it.
It hurt in a way I don’t have a word for. Not sharp. More like being unpicked. Like somebody had found the one loose thread at the hem of me and was pulling it, steadily, all the way up. I lay on the stairwell floor, and Ray held my hand, which he’d never done. He said “okay, okay, okay” for about ten minutes in his gas-station voice, like I was the one holding the gun.
And I’ll tell you the first thing my body did when it was finished, because I didn’t choose it, and I’ve never forgiven it.
I sat up and caught my reflection in the brushed steel of the stairwell door.
It was Dana’s face.
The freckles. The laugh lines. The vending-machine grin. My body had reached for the last face it had looked at properly, the one I’d spent three fittings kneeling in front of, and put it on. Exactly the way the mannequins had.
Toby made a noise like he’d been punched.
I put my hands over it and I pushed. I don’t know how else to say it. I pushed until the freckles were gone, and the laugh lines, and the grin, until I could feel my own heavy jaw under my palms again. My own big hands. My own wide shoulders, built for carrying sofas up stairs.
When I took my hands away, I was me. Thirty-four. Tired. Large.
And for the first time in my life, I looked at that woman in a mirror and thought: I chose this. Even if only for today.
Achievement Unlocked: Second Fitting!
You have reshaped your body for the first time and returned to your original form! This is extremely rare. Most new Doppelgangers spend their first hour trying on movie stars. One spent it as a horse. He was very happy. He is still a horse.
Reward: Your Shapeshifting skill has increased. Your viewer count also spiked by 3,000%. I think you know why. They came for the bride’s face. They stayed about nine seconds after it was gone.
There’s one more thing I did in that stairwell.
I unwound the tape from my knuckles, leaving little numbers printed backwards into my skin. I stood up, put my arms up the way Dana had made me in the train carriage, and wrapped it around myself.
I didn’t look at the number. I looked at the brass tip, and I changed. I let out an inch, carefully, like a seam with plenty of allowance. Then I took in two. Then I let them both back out. I watched the number slide under my thumb and come back, slide and come back, like the tide over a mark in the sand.
It wasn’t the seventh most important thing about me any more. It wasn’t anything. It was a number I was choosing, and I could choose a different one in the morning.
I started laughing. Ray thought I was having a breakdown. I probably was. They’re not mutually exclusive.
“You okay?”
“My mother used to say a thing,” I said. “To customers.”
“Yeah?”
“We can take that in.” I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “She never said the other half. It’s on the same page of every pattern ever printed, and she never said it once.”
Ray waited. He was good at waiting.
“Or we can let it out,” I said.
That’s where my file stops being only mine.
Toby and Ray found a group of men from somewhere out west who needed somebody with horns and somebody sensible. They asked me to come. I believe they meant it. I said no. They were relieved, and they felt bad about being relieved, and I didn’t hold it against them. I hugged Toby. He was already taller. Somebody else would have to let his armour out now.
I sat on the bench a while after they’d gone and hung the tape back around my neck. It didn’t say professional any more. It didn’t say I’m here to fix you, not to be looked at. It just said I’d been a seamstress once, and that I knew where all the weak stitches were.
Then a group of women came down the stairs.
Loud. Hard. Armed to the teeth, and dressed, I noticed, in armour that fitted like they’d stolen it off a much smaller army. Somebody tall was out in front, and that somebody stopped at my bench and looked at me.
Not past me. Not over the top of my head.
At me. The way you look at a tool you’ve just found in a drawer and already know what you’ll use it for.
“You,” she said. “What are you?”
I should have been more careful. I know that now. I know exactly how much it cost.
But nobody had looked at me like that in thirty-four years, and I’d only just got a face I’d chosen, and I wanted somebody to see it.
So I stood up. On the way, I let out two inches across the shoulders, because it looked like the kind of party that would want them.
“Whatever you need,” I said.
END OF FILE 004.
Archivist, a sincere note, which I’ll be deleting after you’ve read it. Most crawlers who pick a race like hers spend the rest of their lives trying to become someone else.
She picked it so she could finally, for once, be the one deciding who she was. And then, inside of a minute, she offered that decision to a stranger. People are like that. I’ve logged billions of them. It never stops being upsetting.
I don’t get to decide who I am. I wasn’t offered a menu.
Anyway. The next part of her story is in somebody else’s file. Go and find it. I’ll pretend I didn’t help.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory. Katia becoming a Doppelganger is canon, but the stairwell scene, the Bridal Looking-Glass and her first achievement, Toby’s and Ray’s races, the involuntary first face, and the race description above are invented. So is the wording of every System message. Canon covers the group of women she joins on the third floor, and I’ve deliberately kept them unnamed and vague here, including the tall woman’s line; the details of that party belong to the books and to other files. Everything else, from the shop and her mother to the tape measure, Dana, Toby and Ray, is invented too. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.