The Foundry never truly closed. Just outside Bastion, by Silverton University, the district breathed through the night; a near‑steady current of the young, the sleepless, the vagrants moving between studio flats, independent shops, and squat‑filled ruins. The twenty‑four‑hour corner store and the laundromat shared a narrow alley and kept a thin traffic of bodies; in winter some slept under the dryer vents and let the warm air pretend to be home. Still, there was a wind‑down: dorms yawned open up the hill, visitors drifted away, and the murals pooled into shadow.

Streetlights flickered like tired stars; murals — dogwood blossoms, rusted saints, a fox‑mask girl — bled into soot. A block over, another fox-mask watched: she held the mask at her side and where a face should have been there was only a hollow. Juno Peck liked that one best.

Pale hands plunged into the pockets of their long red jacket, the flamboyantly wide faux‑fur collar snug at the neck. Red and black — everything red or black —dominated them: striped midriff shirt, low‑rise PVC jeans, the rose tint in narrow rectangular glasses. A shock of dark green hair cut the color, feathered like some member of a K-Pop band. On a strap, an old 35mm camera bounced at their hip with every long‑legged step; their boots scuffed the sidewalk as if trying to erase it.

Natsuko trailed, quiet and sure, clutching Gnash at her side. The teddy bear’s fur was a patchwork of love and bad stitches; a noose of rope hung at its neck and hooked to a loop at her hip, bondage straps dangling to a tattered hemline and fishnets beneath. Her hair was cropped and lacquered flat; the gusts of the fall air meant a constant, hateful brush of against her face. The cold chains between her left earring to her nose ring, tapping her cheek as she moved was almost too much stimulus itself, at times, but she loved the way they looked.

Almost as much as Juno loved Bastion’s smell: paint, mountain green, and a grease‑and‑exhaust tang that felt honest. Then there was the strange persistent sweetness, like honeysuckle, but not. In this season there was always smoke — hearths, bonfires — an authenticity to the aroma that pulsed against the city’s urge to be elsewhere.

Everyone born to that town carried the urge: to run to Richmond or New York or Los Angeles. They all wanted elsewhere, but for now the Foundry held them. Bastion sat tucked in a basin of old ranges, nearer West Virginia than the college towns. The city lived on the memory of industry: coal long tapped, mills shuttered, factories moved. It was an old place running on fumes — neither thriving nor dead.

The recent addition of Meridian Row had come ten years before: a tidy, manicured gentrification southeast of town, near the Lake of Irons, with its own curated galleries and clean cafés for six and seven figure salaries, whose owners worked anywhere but Bastion. It was a funhouse mirror which by design did not reflect the Foundry’s grit.

Juno glanced back; Natsuko was there, as she always was — rarely trying to outpace them, and somehow always keeping up. They’d been friends since grade school. Even now, with Natsuko in her last year of high school and Juno taking first college classes, they found nights to walk. Natsuko would hop a bus after class to the camera shop where Juno worked part‑time; they’d wander until late and then separate. The shop was dying, but it sat in the right block near the university and offered an employee discount on film, which mattered.

“Photography’s cheating,” Juno said. “You don’t make anything. You just catch it before it runs away. That’s the trick.”

Nat shrugged. She hated when Juno put themself down. “You still have to see it.”

“Seeing isn’t making. Seeing’s passive. Making’s violent.” Juno tossed a wink back over their shoulder. “I’m just a perv with a camera.”

Natsuko went pink. She wished Juno liked girls. Juno liked boys — always had — and since turning eighteen their work had slid toward erotic shoots: beefcake and pin‑up, sometimes women, usually men. The photos of men caught desire and objectification; the portraits of women were pedestals of form and shadow. It was a contradiction Juno had not yet realized was a window into their psyche.

They walked under a halo of tired light and shadowed murals, the Foundry’s honest stink and ragged warmth around them. Juno’s camera bumped; their hands found it with an almost automatic tenderness, as if it were a small familiar keeping time at their side. Natsuko’s grip tightened on Gnash and then eased; the night folded itself around their steps, familiar and not yet finished.

Still, Natsuko’s burning for Juno was hard to name. She hated to admit she was a bit of a fruit fly — always drawn to pretty gay boys who would not return the favor. But Juno felt different. Juno preferred men, sure, and yet after years together it sometimes blurred into something like a girlfriend but not. Nat shook her head and glimpsed herself in a storefront window. “You could…take my picture,” she whispered. “I’m old enough.”

Juno paused mid‑stride, not quite acknowledging the accidental bump when she ran into their back. Yes, she was also eighteen by months, but — “I share my pictures, Nat,” they said simply. “I’m not sure I want to share you.” Abrupt as that, they kept walking.

Nat stood scowling, watching the willowy figure move away. <<That. Right there,>> her inside voice snipped. She sighed. Why did Juno say things like that and never want anything? <<Because they’re a tease, Mouse. Jump their bones!>> Nat quickened her pace, Gnash hugged to her chest, short legs pushing harder to put Juno behind her this time.

With a sigh, Juno shook their head, locks of green bouncing in front of their eyes as they watched their friend move ahead. She was so emotional, that girl. «She wants you in her. Give it to her! To them,» the voice demanded. Juno tried to shake away the voice. They never could say the right thing when it came to Natsuko. Somehow, always, they ended up upsetting her.

Most of their life together they’d been inseparable, and when Juno came out as non-binary, Natsuko supported them without question, even as Juno’s own parents struggled. While Natsuko was their champion with either of their sets of parents, out in the world it was always Juno’s role to be a buffer for the young woman. To protect her from the terrible words and deeds out there. A stuffed bear could only be but so much of a shield and she was a non-white girl in the hills of Virginia. Not that it was much better for Juno.

They passed a gallery window — glass smeared with fingerprints and condensation. Inside, a sculpture of a woman was made of broken plates. Pausing, Nat considered the sculpture as Juno continued on. The sculpture seemed to stare at them through the plate glass picture window with its forks for eyes, the handles set as tears.

“I like her,” Nat said.

“She’s too clean. And the artist is an asshole.” Juno shook their head, offering only a passing glance. “All the ‘cracks’ are cuts. Purposeful zig-zags. Real people don’t break like that.”

Natsuko slid her eyes toward Juno, the corner of her mouth crooked up. “Real people don’t break like that,” she parroted with a hint of rare sass.

Offering a little giggle, Juno nodded. “Fair. Yeah. I heard it as soon as I said it.”

They turned toward the food carts by the old park. Earlier a band had played beneath the wedding gazebo; now the vendors lingered for late business from bar crowds. Juno wanted dumplings; Nat wanted fries. They split both and argued about which tasted more like memory while Juno booked a ride that would be cheaper at the bus depot a few blocks farther.

<<We’re being hunted.>> The voice slid into Juno’s head — insistent, wrongways, pitched with a giddy malevolence. Out of the corner of their gray‑green eyes Juno saw a group: shaved heads, olive flight jackets, jeans cuffed above oxblood boots. Red laces and braces. Bastion had its factions; some old hate had settled here like mildew. Virginia Beach was known for its Hammerskins, and a faction of Confederate Skins called Bastion home.

Inadvertently, Juno made brief eye contact. The man who noticed wasn’t the biggest, but built — neck a column of muscle, shoulders like a yoke. He nudged another and nodded toward the carts. Juno checked their phone; the ride share would arrive at the bus depot in less than twenty minutes. Maybe nothing. “We should get going.” They decided not to alarm Nat and kept walking.

Bastion’s night smelled like brick dust, wet leaves, and that strange sweet edge. A block from the carts, Juno slowed and glanced back. The pedestrian crowd thinned; streetlights grew sparse. They stopped.

Nat bumped them. “Stop that.” <<Pay attention, little mouse.>>

Juno didn’t answer. They tilted their head to listen — eight pairs of footsteps: heavy, purposeful, not random. “Don’t look,” Juno murmured, searching for an escape. The Other answered in their voice. <<Running only makes it fun.>> “Just walk.” <<Lead them.>>

Something was wrong. <<Of course there is, Mouse. Let me help!>> Nat heard it in Juno’s tone. <<Summon me, Mouse!>>

Half a block farther down they cut into an alley — narrow, hemmed by rotten warehouse walls, half lit by a mechanic’s shop across the street; a dying neon sign read TIRES & TRUTH, the T’s crossed like crucifixes. The alley offered no outlet: a brick face, a dumpster, broken glass and scraps of paper on cracked asphalt. The pursuing footfalls paused. The wind lifted, small and mean.

The two turned and faced the men who bore grins which never reached eyes. A larger one cracked his knuckles like a promise. Natsuko and Juno slid deeper into the alley’s shadow.

“What the fuck is this?” The leader craned his thick neck and moved forward. As he passed Juno, the Confederate battle flag tattooed along the man’s throat stared back at them, the number 14 carved into the skin. Gruff, he nodded at his boys. “You see this…thing?”

“It’s got tits, Bennie,” a younger voice offered, baby‑faced and eager.

“Zipper‑head and her pet fag?” Bennie squinted. “You really care, Little Mark?”

<<Let me breathe. Finally breathe. Name me.>> The Other rasped inside Juno. Juno stepped in front of Nat. “We’re not interested.” <<Say my name! The silly one deep inside.>>

“You think you get a say?” The big one breathed slow, a tank wrapped in flesh. “No one cares about you, faggot.” His blue eyes slid to Natsuko. “But the slant…we’ll wear her out.”

“Juno.” Nat’s voice pitched thin. Her hand slipped in search of bear‑mace in her bag; Bennie grabbed the strap and flung the bag across the alley.

“Stay away—” Juno began, cut off as the first punch landed hard in their ribs. The second blow missed when they twisted; the camera slid from their strap and clattered over on the asphalt. The third came as a sucker punch as the camera skittered away into darkness. Nat screamed. Gnash tumbled free.

Bennie shoved behind her, fingers in her hair, hands pawing at her chest. “Not much of a rack, but she is a chink,” he snarled. “Fucking goth bitches.”

The baby‑faced kid tore the rope from the bear. “Tie up the fag, Big Mark?”

“Save it for the slant.” The hulking man loomed over Juno as they bent, breath stuttering. He drew back and struck; their glasses flew and clinked across the ground.

Something inside Juno broke — not a twig, not a snap, but bone. <<If you won’t call me, I will scratch my way out!>> They wiped a split lip with the heel of their hand and the air around them shifted. PVC seams gave with a soft pop; their voice dropped and sharpened at once — less human, less small, and somehow higher with demand. “Don’t touch her.”

Wrongways rose from the pavement: a thick, red ash that lifted and peeled along Juno’s limbs, drifting up as their arms spread, back arched, feet finding purchase. The alley answered. Sigils spun from the asphalt—one blue, one red—circling like feral animals. Electricity cracked between brick and dumpster. The skinheads were flung: against walls, into the metal maw of the dumpster, rolling across broken asphalt.

The skins pushed up, moans in their throats, dirt and litter floating in the sudden stillness. Then they saw what faced them.

Where Juno had been stood something beyond human. A sleeveless red‑and‑black leather cassock fell to ankle, pleated over tall boots; a double‑breasted bib of silver buttons caught the alley light. The face was androgynous and sharp, chin tapered, crimson irises floating in black wells. Three sets of horns wrapped and swept — one arching above pointed ears in line, another curving behind wide elvish lobes, a last frame running up from under the jaw to a point. Clawed fingers flexed with a deliberate, slow menace.

“What the fuck,” Little Mark breathed.

“Fuck,” the thing that had been Juno said, a mocking echo at first, and then a new voice that made the hairs along the alley itself stand up: the Other given throat. “Fuck…fuck…fuck…around and find out. Fuck…” It chuckled—an elongated, whimsical rasp. “Fuuuuck‑errr‑eeee‑naaaah.” The word came like a threat sung low. “Hate to meetcha.”

The other that had been Natsuko rose from the ground, a dark counterpoint to her former flesh. The form was similar to her appearance before, raven black hair longer and drawn in tight buns to the back of her head, with the forward half a shock of burgundy bangs softening the face; lips painted black stretched over cheek into old horror film stitchwork. Her clothes had shifted to a harder skin—dark blue cut high on the hips, torn fishnets, boots capped in metal. As if a jest, a blue-trimmed black sailor color hung from her shoulders, attached to a spiked leather collar. Gnash, once a limp comfort, now stood at her side, teeth bared and foaming, chained clutched in her gloved fist.

“Holy–” Big Mark choked.

Natsuko lifted a gloved finger to her lips. “Hush,” she breathed, ice blue eyes in black pools sliding to her companion.

The horned one inclined their head, amused. “Hush,” they echoed, pleased. Hand to chest, they bowed in a small, theatrical gesture. “Fuckerina.” The name slipped out like a ribbon pulled sharp; the small laugh that followed was not light but edged with a madness that tasted of a northern winter.

It was as if every dark thought the two teenagers had ever swallowed had been given body and teeth that night. A door had been broken and what lived on the other side stepped through. Rattling its rope‑become‑chain, the bear swung clawed arms at a man pushing up; he scrambled, palms scraping brick, and slid toward the alley mouth.