Katalepsis

Night Praem — a living wave of gossamer shadow, a rushing torrent of sable velvet, a crashing stream of lightless foam — swept me and Raine before her, as if we had been scooped up in a million lace-frilled arms, cradled against a million phantom chests, and hurried onward with a million clacking footsteps, off into the depths of an unlit house, taken swiftly to the secret place where bad girls go.

She slammed through corridors of cracked concrete faster than any human could have sprinted, swirling us like flotsam carried on a wave of stygian water, racing past hundreds of steel cell doors; she carried us over the sides of rusted walkways and past the edges of bottomless stairwells, dropping straight down into the open shafts and empty voids below — only to cushion us at the nadir of the descent with the shadow-play splay of her own mutable mass; she wormed and wriggled through tight and twisty tunnels, squirming down collapsed labyrinths of crumbled brick, squeezing beneath bent doorways of long-tortured metal; she raced us across boundless galleries of naked stone, their ceilings lost in infinite shadow, their walls streaked with calcified deposits of ice-white minerals.

Raine roared with laughter, her voice echoing off rusty steel and ruddy rubble and rough-hewn rock. I did my best not to wail at every twist and turn, at every sharp angle where it seemed Praem might dash us to pieces against the walls or floor, at every stomach-lurching drop into the dark beneath the world.

Instead I bit Raine all the harder, chewing on her shoulder. I locked our legs together until my muscles screamed with cramp. Raine held me so tight my ribs creaked. I whined and growled and gnawed, wishing for my other six selves, my six missing tentacles, my pneuma-somatic truth.

With six tentacles and a bit of self-modification, I could have swam against even Praem’s sunless current.

Then, when it seemed that Night Praem might carry us down forever until the pounding rush of her waters extinguished the flames of hell itself, she stopped.

Raine and I were tipped onto our own feet — on cold, hard, solid ground.

I would have toppled over and landed on my own backside if not for Raine’s arms around my body, Raine’s determined protection, and Raine’s frankly absurd physical strength; I almost dragged both of us down anyway, clinging onto Raine’s front with all my might and both my legs, teeth still digging into her left shoulder. She staggered forward and caught our combined body weight with a twist of her hips, grunting with the effort.

“Feet, Heather!” she hissed right next to my ear. “Feet down, now!”

“Muuuuunhhh!” I grunted into Raine’s shoulder and wiggled my legs free, kicking for purchase. My feet found the floor, slapping and slipping as I lurched out of Raine’s grip.

“Steady, steady,” she hissed. “Steady, sweet thing. Easy now.”

“Ah— ow! Ah—” I was heaving for breath, shaking all over with adrenaline and shock. Pain radiated upward from my ribs, from where Raine had squeezed me so hard during our dark descent. “Ahhhh! Uh, ow.”

But I was intact and alive. My yellow blanket was still draped around my shoulders. And — miracle of miracles — I had somehow not lost either of my scratchy institutional slippers. They slapped against dirty linoleum as I found my feet.

Raine kept a firm but gentle arm around my waist, helping me to stand. “Take a sec to catch your breath,” she purred. “I’ve got eyes up, eyes on. We’re clear. Just breathe, breathe.”

“Where— where are we— where—”

Raine laughed, soft and dark. “Somewhere I’ve never been before. The end of the line. Ain’t that right, Night Praem?”

Praem didn’t answer.

I did as my faithful hound bid me — I took a moment to catch my breath and get my bearings.

Night Praem had deposited Raine and me just across the threshold of a large double-doorway; the doors were pinned permanently open, affixed to the plaster walls by long nails and thick rusty spikes driven through flimsy grey wood. Praem herself waited just across the invisible boundary between room and corridor, a membranous ball of fluttering, undulating, lace-clad darkness, framed by grey concrete. Doubtless she would push Raine and me back into the room if we dared challenge her decision of our final destination.

Behind us, stretching off into illimitable darkness, was a medical ward.

Dusty plaster walls and a sticky lino floor, with fixtures in dead-sky grey, curdled-cream white, and unflushed-toilet brown. Steel bed frames stood with their heads against either wall at regular intervals, leaving a clear walkway down the middle of perhaps ten feet wide. Some beds showed nothing but damp mattresses mottled with mouldy stains, while others menaced with manacles and restraints and nasty leather straps. Only a few beds offered the true refuge of normal sheets — though thin and scratchy, unwashed and unmade, greasy from the sleep of strange bodies.

Each bed was separated from the next by a pair of thin white curtains on rails attached to the ceiling, just like in a real infirmary or sickbay. The nearest curtains were pulled back to show the empty beds, as if to present new arrivals with their undeniable fate.

Further away all the curtains were drawn, enclosing each bed inside a private niche, creating an endless promenade of blind corners and secret depths.

Illumination was provided by bed-side night-lights. Each one was plugged directly into a wall socket, one for each bed. Many of the night-lights looked half-melted, their inner glow dimmed by damage. Others flickered and guttered, casting cold deep-sea colours across the empty lino floor. Most were curtained off alongside the beds, throwing ghostly sheet-shadows at jagged angles across the grey walls and pale ceiling.

Twenty to thirty feet down the ward, the darkness was too thick to penetrate, lit from within by the weak candles of distant night-lights. Beds and curtains alike were swallowed by thick inky gloom.

The room could have been a mile long. Or infinite.

“Tch,” I tutted, unimpressed and vaguely offended. “This is a very unsubtle metaphor.”

“Recognise the place?” Raine said.

“Yes and no.” I sighed and shook my head. “I think it’s meant to be the infirmary from the real Cygnet Hospital, but all stupid and spooky. Where are the murals on the walls? And the beds were never that bad. The beds in the infirmary were actually better than the beds in the residential rooms. And we got extra treats and stuff if we had to spend time in the infirmary. And there should be three or four nurses just bustling about in here.”

“Don’t jinx us, sweet thing,” Raine purred. “No nurses is good.”

“Oh, um, yes, yes. Sorry. At least it’s empty. And it’s better than the prison, I suppose. If this was reality we’d be miles underground by now.”

Raine nodded at the impenetrable gloom ahead. “You afraid of the dark, Heather?”

“Sorry?”

“This is your dream, right?” Raine asked. “Or your nightmare. So, you afraid of the dark?”

“Oh, no, not at all.” I almost laughed, despite everything. “I actually like the dark these days. And this kind of gloom, it almost reminds me of the deep sea. That’s almost … almost comfy. If only I had all my tentacles.” I sighed. “So, no, it’s not strictly my nightmare. It’s our nightmare. All of us. Plus the Eye. And I doubt any of this is that simple.”

“Mmmmmm,” Raine purred. She clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Yeah, s’what I thought too. Sure doesn’t seem like a punishment, right? This isn’t no solitary cell. This ain’t the naughty step for bad little girls. Right, Night Praem?”

Once again, Praem did not respond. Raine turned back around and stared at her, with narrowed eyes and a knowing smile. Praem just floated there on the other side of the doorway, totally unreadable, without face or features.

“Raine?” I asked. “What are you insinuating, exactly?”

Raine gestured at Night Praem with the padlock in her other hand — she’d somehow managed to hold onto that thing during our journey through the depths — and said: “I think our prison guard just rendered us some rule-breaking aid.”

“Ah?”

Raine shot a toothy smile down at me, enjoying my cluelessness. “Heather, sweet thing, poor little lamb lost in the dark. But you aren’t. Are you?”

“I’m … sorry?”

“Think about it for a second,” Raine said. “Does this look like confinement to you? Does it make you wanna hide under the sheets? Lie down, give up?”

I glanced back down the ward, into the jagged shadows, past the steel bed frames with their dirty sheets. “It looks spooky. And silly. It’s an unsubtle metaphor, like I said. Confined forever in the darkness, lost in ‘treatment’. It’s using my memories, but clumsily.”

“Yeeeeeeah,” Raine purred. “Exactly. Back then, you didn’t have me to help you escape.” She nodded sideways, down the rows of dimly-lit steel bed frames. “I bet if we walk deep enough into this we’ll find a way out.” She glanced back at Night Praem. “Always trust the maids. They know all the hidden passageways. Ain’t that right?”

I stared into Night Praem’s flowing shadows, squinting to make out the curves of her body beneath the darkness. Hope sparked in my chest once again — if Praem was trying to help us, that was a very good sign, even if she was still trapped.

“But how could she help us?” I whispered. “She’s still not herself.”

Raine shrugged. “Maybe we changed her mind.”

“How?”

“By the way we clung together.” Raine grinned and shot me a wink. “Witness a dyke and her femme pulling off a miracle? That sort of thing can change your whole world.”

I tutted and blushed slightly. “You almost sound like Sevens.”

“Hm? Is that a good thing?”

“Sevens always says lesbian romance is the answer to everything,” I replied.

Raine chuckled. “Good answer.” She nodded at Night Praem. “Try her again, Heather.”

“P-Praem?” I ventured, my tongue faltering, the words like spun glass on my lips. “Praem, please, if you’re still in there, if you’re still aware, please come with us, please help me save Evee, and all the others. None of this is real, you’re not a prison guard or an evil spirit or anything like that. You’re Praem! And Evee needs us right now, needs you, very badly. Praem, please. She’s your mother. You have to remember, you—”

Night Praem floated away.

She ghosted out of the doorway and down the corridor, like inky tumbleweed slipping into a lightless canyon. In a split-second she was gone, back into the darkness of Cygnet Prison.

This time Raine didn’t have to stop me from trying to follow. I was beginning to understand the rules of this place. I just tutted and sighed.

“Shame,” Raine said. “I’d sure like her on our side.”

“We can’t leave her behind,” I hissed. “Praem is one of us. I won’t, I refuse. Nobody gets left behind!”

“Who said anything about leaving her behind? We can always come back for her.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Raine. Sorry.” I cleared my throat and gestured at the doorway, at the walls, at the darkness itself. “I mean this, this place. The Eye. Whatever impulse this has all grown from. You hear me?” I raised my voice slightly. “I won’t leave anybody behind! Not Praem, not Lozzie, not even a single Knight! And not Maisie!”

My voice echoed down the corridor outside, swallowed up by rotten concrete and rusty metal, returned as a twisted parody of my defiance.

I cringed away with sudden regret. What if my shout attracted something horrible? What if Praem was replaced by a much worse jailer, a shadow-maw inching around the door frame, come to chase Raine and me down the limitless length of this lightless ward?

A terrible suspicion crept into my mind — what if that was the very purpose of this room? One could not see the limit of the space; it might go on for miles and miles, forever and ever into infinite darkness. For a moment it seemed all too reminiscent of something from one of Raine’s video games — a ‘boss fight’ or chase sequence set-up. Hadn’t my earlier efforts with the padlock seemed less like dream logic and more like video game mechanics?

I had a sudden image of Raine and myself fleeing for our lives, tripping over steel bed frames as some unspeakable horror barrelled down the ward.

My moment of courage threatened to recede into terrified silence; I wished I had my tentacles, so I could curl up into a ball.

“Awoooooo-wooooo!”

Raine threw her head back and howled at the top of her lungs, shaking the shadows and hurling the silence back into the void.

I almost jumped out of my skin, but Raine held me tight in one possessive arm.

Her wolfish cry reached down the corridor outside — and off into the shadowy depths of the ward to our rear. The echoes of her voice seemed to go on forever, long after the human ear had ceased to hear them, without the warping mockery of my earlier shout.

Raine’s voice rang clear and true. The dream could not conquer her wordless roar.

“Oh my gosh,” I whispered.

Raine grinned at me. “Better?”

“ … I … uh … y-yes, thank you. Thank you, Raine.”

“What do you say, when I do something smart?” Raine rumbled, purring like an animal, her grin gone sharp and dangerous. “You gotta learn, sweet thing. I can’t keep prompting. You gotta learn fast or we’re gonna get dangerous.”

“Good girl,” I added quickly. “Good girl, Raine. Good girl. You’re my good girl. Thank you. Thank you for keeping the nightmares at bay.”

Raine let out a long shuddering breath of raw pleasure. She planted a kiss on my forehead, then pulled me away from the double-doors and over to the nearest of the steel bed frames.

For a heart-stopping moment I thought she was about to twirl me around and throw me onto the rumpled sheets, to celebrate our successful Praem-based escape plan with a rousing round of sticking her fingers up inside me again. This was absolutely not the right moment for us to have sex again, right on the threshold of an infinite hallway of spooky darkness, on sheets which looked like they hadn’t been washed in six months. But I was not about to say no; I whimpered with anticipation.

Raine let go of my waist, allowed me to stand on my own two feet, and dumped the padlock on the bed.

“O-oh … ” I said, then cleared my throat. “Um. Right. Yes.”

Raine rolled her shoulders and neck, working out the kinks from the journey. She peeled one strap of her tank top away from her left shoulder, to examine a pair of jagged, curve-shaped indentations in her skin.

“Hoooooo girl,” she purred. “You get nasty when you’re needy, huh?”

“S-sorry?” I blinked, bewildered. “What’s that?”

Raine looked up with a grin. “These? These are your tooth marks.”

“Oh!” Mortified, I clapped a hand over my mouth, then quickly took it away again. “From— from me biting you? I’m so sorry, Raine. I—I— that looks like it really hurts? Did I really hurt you?”

Raine growled deep down in her throat; she gave me a look like I’d just asked her to make me pregnant. “Sweet thing, you can leave all the marks on my flesh you like.”

“Tch! Raine! I’m serious. I don’t like hurting you.”

“Ahhhh, don’t worry about it,” Raine said. “Doesn’t really hurt much. You didn’t break the skin. But I like it, a lot. You can bite me any time, anywhere, sweet thing. I’m your chew toy. If you’ll be mine?”

I huffed and pulled my yellow blanket tighter around my shoulders, partly to cover for the incandescent blush on my cheeks. “Thank you for the offer. I think. But no chewing! That can’t be healthy. Or fun.”

Raine winked at me and clucked her tongue. “Hey now, don’t think I didn’t see that disappointed pout when I didn’t throw you onto the bed.”

My blush felt like it might produce actual steam. “I was just— Raine— I meant— I didn’t think—”

Raine chuckled and shook her head. “Even I got limits, Heather.” She nodded past me, at the shadow-filled depths of the ward. “Not here. Not now. If you got all weak at the knees and something crept up on us? I might not be able to protect you. That takes priority. That’s all.”

I took a deep breath to help cool my head, then nodded and cleared my throat. “Thank you, Raine. We can … we can do that later. Again. Right.”

Raine nodded once, then gestured deeper into the ward. “Ready to go find the secret passage out of here?”

“You’re so sure there’s going to be one?”

Raine shrugged. “If this is a dream like you say, then sure, why not? It stands to reason. If it’s not a dream, then there’s gonna be service passages, back ways out, maybe even a lift to the surface, for freight and stuff like that. So. You ready?”

“And Lozzie,” I said. “Don’t forget Lozzie, if she’s here as well.”

“And your Lozzie,” Raine said, lowering her voice and narrowing her eyes. “That could get interesting. Maybe messy, too. Been a while since I locked horns with somebody like myself.”

“Don’t hurt her, please,” I hissed. “She’s like a sister to me, Raine. And you, too. Please don’t. She’s not anything like you, back in reality. She’s sweet and gentle and loving. Please be careful with her. Be gentle.”

Raine ran her tongue over her teeth, behind the sheath of her lips. “I can’t promise no harm.”

“Raine—”

Raine held up one hand. “Not if she’s like me, in here at least. Not if she’s willing to mix it up. But I promise nothing permanent. No broken bones. No cruelty. I might have to twist her arm, though. Maybe give her a nosebleed.”

I chewed on my lower lip. The idea of hurting my Lozzie, my beautiful and bouncy little Outsider jellyfish, it made my chest ache with horror.

Raine waited, silent, eyes on me.

“Y-yes?” I said. “Is there more?”

Raine sighed. “I need you to say it’s okay for me to do that, Heather. I’ll protect you if it comes down to that, but I’d rather be proactive. If you give me permission, that lowers the chance I’ll need to hurt her.”

I swallowed, disgusted with myself, with this entire situation. “Try your best not to. But … okay. You have permission.”

Raine bowed her head to me with utmost seriousness. “Understood.”

“Good girl,” I whispered. “Good girl.”

Raine reached out and took my hand, interlacing our fingers. She gestured at the padlock on the bed. “Mind if I leave that here? I’m more of a knife and blade sorta girl, and it’s too heavy for you, right?”

I nodded. “I think it’s served its purpose. Let’s go.”

Raine and I walked into the jagged cross-cut shadows of the hospital ward, hand in hand.

We crept down the central passageway between the endless rows of steel bed frames, peering into each secluded curtain-cubicle, alert to the possibility that we might not be the only lost girls down here in the dark. Raine moved like a cat, quick and light on bare feet, silent except for the drag of her pajama bottoms against the lino and the whisper of her breath in her throat. My slippers slapped against the floor with every step, despite my inexpert attempts at stealth.

Most of the beds were simply empty, bare of sheets, little more than naked mattresses with vague dark stains soaked into the fabric. A few looked as if they’d been slept in recently; jumbled bedclothes lay dragged aside, open to the air to turn frigid and unwelcoming, as if the occupant had lurched from sleep, fleeing some unseen nightmare. A few beds were completely curtained off into absolute privacy, sometimes with a night-light glowing from behind the fabric, sometimes sunk in total darkness. Raine did not allow any of those to pass unexamined — she crept over and teased the curtains open, always to reveal yet more desolate and abandoned bed frames.

Occasionally we came across worse sights: a mattress stained from tip to toe with flaky brown-black crust, stinking of iron and excrement; a padded leather chair covered in restraints where a bed should have stood, with hookups for power and a drain for bodily fluids; an electroshock therapy table, reeking of urine and fear, with bite marks all over a mouth-strap; a wheeled trolley of surgical instruments, bone-saws, scalpels — and the unmistakable hammer and elongated chisel of a orbitoclast, a lobotomy tool.

I hung back as Raine investigated that last one. I almost asked her not to touch any of the surgical tools, especially not the lobotomy pick, but she needed a proper weapon, so I swallowed my disgust. But when she picked up the bone-saw it crumbled to rust in her hand. The other tools were no better. She tested a scalpel against the trolley and the blade disintegrated.

“Huh,” she grunted with surprise. “Guess even in a nightmare this shit is out of date.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Bloody right. Pardon my language. Even in a dream, I wouldn’t allow this.”

Raine returned to my side, peering into the darkness ahead. “Do you think this means your ‘Eye’ doesn’t approve of barbaric medical practices?”

“I don’t think it’s capable of approving or not.”

Raine cocked an eyebrow at me. “You sure?” She nodded sideways, toward the collapsed remains of the surgical tools. The lobotomy pick was nothing but flakes of orange-red rust now. “‘Cos that looks like pretty heavy-handed symbolism to me. If we’re in a dream, the dreamer does not approve of cranial ice-picks.”

“Good! But … yes, I see your point. I suppose that does have implications for the metaphysics. The Eye is too inhuman to care. Only one of us actual people would care about that. But none of us, certainly not me, would subject us to all this cruel nonsense.”

“Maybe we’re doing it by accident,” Raine suggested. “Can you control your dreams?”

“Well, no. But … ” I trailed off and sighed. “This isn’t going to help us right now.” I gestured into the dark. “How far do you think this goes? We’ve been walking for ten minutes, easily.”

Raine clucked her tongue. “As far as it has to.”

“To achieve what?”

“To get us out of the prison, of course.” Raine shot me a grin and a wink, then took my hand, and led me forward. “Come on. Can’t give up now. Never give up, that’s what the bastards want you to do. Grind you down, leave you in the dark. But we ain’t staying here.”

A minute later we found the corpse.

The body emerged from the shadows ahead like the swell of a wave upon a moonlit sea, picked out by the cold white glow of half a dozen night-lights — a humped and mangled mass down on the lino floor, a speed-bump right in our path.

Raine and I halted well short of the body, beyond the bank of a pool of blood, glinting black in the gloom. Raine drew the little plastic knife, as if the canteen utensil made any difference.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “Um. What is this?”

“Somebody’s been real busy,” Raine purred, with far too much appreciation.

The corpse was human, sort of — or at least humanoid. It lay on its back, presumably where it had fallen. The figure was very tall and spindly, with legs as long as my entire body and arms twice the length of my own, each limb sporting multiple joints and knees and elbows. The legs and arms both terminated in massive pale hands, with fingers twelve inches long and palms thick with muscle. The body was dressed in a light grey uniform — smart trousers, shiny leather belt, button-up shirt, grey tie. The belt had loops for equipment, like a walkie-talkie or a truncheon, or perhaps even a firearm — but the slots were empty. The clothes sat oddly upon the body, sucked tight to a shrunken chest and empty belly and hips all bone and angle.

The face was a white shapeless mass of flesh, with two deep-sunken black pits for eyes, a featureless slot for a mouth, and no ears.

A prison warden, I decided.

The ‘warden’ had been stabbed dozens of times in the upper chest, throat, and lower face. Puncture wounds had torn apart the fabric of the dress shirt and penetrated through the bundle of brittle sticks that passed for a rib cage. The jaw and cheeks had sustained only a few glancing blows, but the throat was a mangled ruin of bloody ribbons and exposed bone, slashed open and ripped sideways, lying upon the floor like a piece of discarded meat.

The corpse was surrounded by a wide pool of its own blood, still and silent. The crimson mess was slowly soaking into a nearby curtain. The hands were raised, clutching empty air in a parody of rigor mortis.

A name tag pinned to the shirt read: ‘A.TRUTH.’

“Lozzie’s work, I expect,” I said with a tremor in my voice. The blood and meat was too real, too fresh and raw for a dream. The air reeked of wet iron and voided bowels. Bile rose up my throat. “Oh. Oh dear. Um.”

Raine poked the corpse with one foot.

“Raine!” I hissed. “Don’t … um … ”

Raine shot me a grin. “Don’t wake it up? No worries, this thing is extremely dead.”

“We don’t know that! It doesn’t even look remotely human!”

“So?” Raine shrugged. “Do the rules of this dream include zombies?”

I tutted and frowned at her. “I hope not! And don’t jinx it by saying so, you might introduce new concepts.” I sighed and forced myself to glance at the corpse again. “Though this does bode well. I think.”

“Hm? How so?”

“Well,” I said, trying to gather my thoughts, trying to see the silver lining. “This was a prison guard. Like the nurses, I think, produced by the same principles of the dream. At least this confirms they can be killed.” I sighed deeply. “Though I wish Lozzie hadn’t been the one to do it. She hates violence. She hates having to be involved in this. If she remembers this when we all get out of this dream … ” I swallowed. “Well. I do dearly hope this wasn’t a real person, somehow.”

Raine squatted down and examined the corpse up-close, leaning over the pool of blood. She stuck her fingers into the empty belt loops and patted the pockets.

“Huh,” she grunted. “This is bad.”

“Ah?”

Raine stood back up and peered into the darkness ahead, then checked behind us, down the length of the ward we had already traversed. The space we’d passed through had been swallowed back up by the crooked gloom, lit by the tiny smouldering fires of the hidden night-lights. The double-doors were long gone, ten minutes back across a sea of subterranean black.

Raine said softly: “If he was armed, your Lozzie has those weapons now. Possibly including a gun.”

I bit my bottom lip and put a hand to my mouth. “She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t!”

Raine shot me a look, dark and unsmiling. “Let’s hope you’re right, sweet thing.” She nodded at the corpse. “You die in the dream, you die in real life? I’d take a few bullets for you, but I don’t think I’m immune.”

“Tch! Don’t say that, please. And don’t treat this like an actual dream, no.” I raised one hand and flexed it several times. “This all feels very real. Like reality has been re-organised. I have no idea if violence here is … ‘impermanent’. Please, Raine, I love you so much, don’t risk that kind of thing.”

Raine held my gaze for a moment longer, then broke into a toothy grin. “Love you too. And?”

“Good girl,” I added.

Raine reached over and ran her fingers through the back of my hair. “Now,” she purred. “I’m making an executive decision. We need to move quieter, just in case Lozzie is waiting for us. Slippers off. Breathe through your mouth. Follow my lead. And no words, not even a whisper.”

I did as Raine told me, taking my slippers off and stashing them inside my yellow blanket. The colourless lino floor was freezing cold against my poor toes, even through my socks. I breathed slowly and carefully, through my open mouth, minimising the sound. Raine rolled up the cuffs of her pajama bottoms, then crept ahead on silent feet, clutching the white plastic knife. I stayed close to her heels, my heart racing in my chest.

The darkness ahead of us seemed to thicken, like mist pooling against a cliff-side in the depths of a lightless forest, though the ward went on and on and on. Behind us, the shadows unfurled across the floor, creeping closer and closer to our backs. In a moment they had swallowed the corpse.

Raine checked every bed, peering into every curtained cubicle, knife held ready.

Minutes passed. Neither of us spoke. I began to shiver with adrenaline and tension and a desperate need to get out of there, out into the light, out of this confined space, before the ceiling fell and crushed my skull, before the shadows ahead and behind rushed in to devour us, before—

Raine was checking around another half-closed curtain; she went completely still, then raised a hand and gestured to me, ordering me to her side.

I picked up my feet and joined her, peering into a secluded bed-chamber; I clamped a hand over my mouth in surprise.

Lozzie.

Fast asleep.

Lozzie had found one of the least filthy beds, climbed under the covers, and curled up on her side. Her petite frame was shrouded by thin blankets, her head pillowed on a lumpy cushion, her long wispy hair trailing across the bare mattress. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her chest rising and falling with slow, deep, peaceful sleep.

Her right hand was outside the covers, clutching her metal shiv.

The shiv was coated with blood.

Raine held up one hand to pre-empt any reaction from me, then quickly cupped my ear and whispered: “This is our best chance. We can pass on by and she won’t know. Do we—”

I shook my head, hard and certain, and mouthed: ‘No! Never! Nobody left behind!’

“Alright,” Raine whispered into my ear. “Be ready.”

She pulled back again. I mouthed, ‘Ready for what?!’

‘Anything,’ Raine mouthed.

To my incredible relief, Raine then handed me the white plastic knife. I almost breathed a sigh of relief before catching myself.

Raine darted toward the bed, toward Lozzie, moving with cat-like silence, even muscle pulled taut and ready; for one moment she was poised over Lozzie’s sleeping form like an archaic vampire from a silent movie, hands raised and ready to strike, eyes watching for the slightest quiver of motion in her prey. I thought my heart was going to burst. I bit my own tongue. I curled my toes against the cold floor.

Raine struck like a snake.

She leapt atop Lozzie, slam-rolling her onto her back by one shoulder, mounting her in a flash. Raine sat on Lozzie’s hips and trapped her legs beneath the blanket.

Lozzie jerked and spluttered awake, eyes wild with panic, thrashing with her legs and lashing out with both hands — but Raine had already caught Lozzie’s right wrist in an iron grip, immobilizing her shiv and pinning the hand to the mattress. Lozzie kicked her legs and writhed and spat and hissed and landed a single blow on Raine’s ribs with her empty left hand, but Raine quickly pinned that wrist as well.

“Gettofffff!” Lozzie screeched.

Lozzie bucked, trying to throw Raine aside, but Raine was too heavy and too strong. She slammed Lozzie back down against the mattress

Raine purred: “Down, girl. Down. Down. Ease down. We ain’t here to hurt you. Down. Drop the shiv. Open your fingers and drop the shiv. Drop the—”

“Mmmm-no!” Lozzie spat, raging wild, twisting like a fox in a snare. “No!”

“Drop the shiv,” Raine purred. “Come on, Lozzie. You got no choice. Drop the shiv. Drop the shiv. Drop it. Just let go and I’ll get off. Drop the shiv. Drop the shiv. Come on, girl. We ain’t gonna hurt you. Caught you sleeping. Could’a hurt you bad, but we don’t wanna. Just want you to drop the shiv. Come on, come—”

Lozzie bucked again, trying to wriggle free. She twisted her head sideways and tried to bite Raine’s arm, but Raine jerked out of the way, grinning like the mad woman she was. Lozzie’s teeth clacked shut on empty air. Her wispy blonde hair went everywhere, lying across her face in a greasy veil.

“Ah ah ah,” Raine tutted. “Only one girl gets to bite this dyke. And that ain’t you. Drop the—”

“No!” Lozzie spat again. “No no no!”

Raine snapped over her shoulder. “Heather, here. Left side of the bed, now.”

I scurried forward, heart in my throat, palms coated with sweat. Lozzie’s eyes found me.

She suddenly went still and relaxed, totally focused on my face. I stared back at her, shocked and transfixed. She lay there, panting and flushed.

“Heather,” Raine repeated my name, her voice cracking with command. I jerked as if stung. Raine nodded down at the bloody shiv in Lozzie’s fist. “Grab her little finger and bend it outward. The rest of the fingers will follow. Take the shiv as soon as her grip is loose enough.”

Lozzie whined and mewled and twisted. Her knuckles went white around her pitiful weapon. It was a jagged little thing, perhaps carved from a spoon. But it was all she had to protect herself.

“No,” she mewled. “Nooooo!”

“Heather,” Raine snapped again. “Heather. Grab her little finger, bend it—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, Raine. No. This— this is all wrong. No. Lozzie, Lozzie I won’t take your weapon. Lozzie?”

Lozzie went still again, staring up at me, panting ragged and raw. She blew her hair out of her face.

Raine raised her eyebrows at me. “Really? You sure, sweet thing?”

I nodded. “Yes. Raine, can you hold her safely, even without disarming her?”

Raine chuckled and flexed her shoulders, still holding Lozzie pinned to the bed. “Sure. She’s all skin and bones.” She glanced back down at Lozzie. “You gotta lift more, girl. Eat a burger. Or a block of tofu, if that’s your thing?”

“Don’t neeeeeeeeeed it,” Lozzie whined.

Raine grinned down at her. “I guess you did do good work with that warden back there. I shouldn’t criticise. Nice work, really.”

“Tsssssh,” Lozzie hissed.

I cleared my throat: “I don’t think she’s taking that as a compliment, Raine. Lozzie, I’m so sorry you had to do that.”

Lozzie’s eyes found mine again. Heavy-lidded, deep dark blue, framed by greasy pale skin. She was all twisted up under the bed covers, showing a hint of her pastel poncho.

She smiled, thin and smug. “Sorry? Har-dee-har-har-har.”

“Lozzie,” I said. “I’m sorry we’ve had to be rough with you. I really am. The last thing I want is to hurt you.”

Lozzie said, “Could’a passed me on by, Heathy-Heaths. Let me sleepy-sleeps. I was having a nice dream. Nicer than this one!”

I shook my head. “I won’t leave you behind, Lozzie. Not down here in the dark.”

Lozzie snorted. “I’m a nasty little monster. Don’t I belong riiiiight here? Shouldn’t you be running?”

Ignoring the blood-stained shiv in Lozzie’s right fist, I leaned closer, leaning over the bed, so we were almost face to face. “You are not a nasty little monster. You’re the girl who believed that I would come rescue you, against all the odds. You’re the girl I committed murder for, with my eyes wide open. I moved heaven and earth to rescue you once before, and I will not leave you behind. Not even when you’re like this.”

Lozzie’s smile curdled into a sullen pout. Her eyes seemed sad. She sniffed. “You’re scared of me. Scaredy cat Heatherrrrr.”

I sighed sharply. “Yes. Yes, you’re freaking me out, Lozzie. Right now, you scare me. But that doesn’t mean I would leave you down here, in the dark, alone, with no way out. I love you like a sister, no matter how you’re acting. I don’t care how messed up you are right now. I know you’re gentle, and kind, and—”

“Ha!” Lozzie chirped a laugh. “I can be sharp too. Really really super duper sharp and scary. Maybe I was always like this. Huh? Heathy? You think of that? Huh?”

“Lozzie, I don’t care if you never stop being this way,” I said. “I would never leave you behind.”

Lozzie stared at me for a long moment, then looked at Raine, then back at me again. She said: “Scared I’ll hurt you.”

Was that a question for me — or a statement about herself?

“You might,” I admitted. “But I have to believe that you won’t.”

Lozzie pouted harder. “Didn’t seem that way, earlier,” she grumbled. “Scaredy-cat Heathy running away from me. Not giving me a hug.”

I crammed my patience down tight. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to believe you. And, fine, I owe you a hug. You’re all still you — you, Raine here, Praem, everyone! I have to trust you, it’s the only choice. Anything else won’t help fix reality. Breaking us apart won’t help fix this.”

Lozzie tilted her head against the pillow. “Head’s all fucked up. Memories don’t make clean lines. You broke everything, broke the world, broke me inside. You have to finish breaking, Heathy. Break us all the way!”

I eased back and met Raine’s eyes briefly, then said: “Lozzie, what does that mean? Are you asking me to hurt you? Because I won’t do that.”

Lozzie snorted. “No. And you’ll never get it. Nobody ever does. Nobody gets Lozzers!”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I’m really trying. Help me to comprehend, Lozzie.”

Lozzie met my eyes, then sniffed and looked down at her own belly. She seemed sad and lost.

“Lozzie,” I said gently. “We’re in a dream. Or an illusion. None of this is real, none of it is really us. I think you’ve figured part of that out, but you’re still stuck, still … like this. We were trying to—”

“Eyeball eyeball in the skyball!” Lozzie chanted. “Saving twins and twinning saves!” She huffed and gave me a look like a very grumpy teenager. “I know, Heathy. I knows that I knows! And you knows that I don’t have a nose. But we don’t know the way. Do we?”

I nodded with strange relief; Lozzie was halfway back, halfway here, at least in knowledge if not in personality. That was new and different; Raine had her entire personality, intact and whole — so intact that she had fallen in love with me all over again in a matter of minutes. Lozzie had the knowledge, but her sense of self was blurred.

Raine cracked a grin, still staring down at Lozzie. “Your dream theory is rapidly gaining ground, Heather. This is independent verification.”

Lozzie snorted up at Raine. “Bull dyke dumbo. Biiiiig muscles.”

Raine grinner wider. “You just try me, slasher-smile.”

Lozzie bucked — playfully, this time, rocking upward against Raine.

“No!” I snapped. “No, please, both of you, no. You are not like that, out in reality. Neither of you are like that with each other. Please, stop.”

Lozzie bit her lip and smirked at me. “Heathy jealous? Greeny eyed?”

Raine chuckled. “Nah. She knows more than we do. And you ain’t my type, Lozzers. No offence.”

Lozzie giggled; she almost sounded normal. Perhaps more of us gathered in one place was having an effect on our minds, helping to normalise our behaviours.

“Okay, so,” I said, trying to regain control of the situation. “All three of us are ‘on the level’, as Raine here would put it. We’re all on the same side. We all want to break the dream open. We can’t stay here like this forever, with Lozzie pinned to the bed. So, what next?”

Lozzie went quiet, grumbling in her throat. Raine sucked on her own teeth, eyeing the blood-stained shiv. I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“It’s your call, Heather,” Raine purred.

“It’s really, deeply, fundamentally not,” I said. “It’s not my choice, it’s all of ours. I don’t—”

From behind us, from back the way we’d walked down the impossible length of this gloomy ward, a warbling voice cried out:

“Patients and inmates must cease fraternising in treatment areas!”

The voice wavered and wobbled, slipped and slopped, slid and slithered, as if the vocal cords were made from a block of lard and the words formed by slapping it with a rolling pin. The vibrating noise echoed off the walls and vanished down into the dark.

Raine jerked upright. Lozzie’s eyes went wide. I whirled, looking for the source, but the speaker was still buried deep in the gloomy shadows through which we had walked.

“Heather!” Raine snapped. “Decide, now!”

“Let me up! Up up!” Lozzie chirped. “Up up! Now now!”

I whirled back to Lozzie. “Lozzie, you can keep the shiv. Promise me — promise me you won’t hurt me or Raine, or any of the others.”

Lozzie bit both of her lips together as if she was trying to hold back a sob. She shook her head wildly, matting her hair against the pillow, getting blonde strands in her face.

Behind us, down in the shadows from which we had emerged, a soft clicking and tapping began to sound against the lino floor — like claws or fingernails, creeping closer through the darkness.

“Lozzie!” I whined. “Lozzie, please, just promise me! I’ll trust you! Promise!”

Lozzie keened: “I caaaaaan’t! I can’t!”

Raine snapped my name: “Heather. We take the shiv or we let her up, right now. There’s no more time. Decide.”

“ … let her up!”

Raine sprang off the bed in a single movement, unleashing Lozzie limb by limb, leaving her right wrist for last. Raine held onto that wrist as she herded me away from the side of the bed, then finally let go, leaving Lozzie free to rise.

Lozzie squirmed out of the sheets and shook herself all over. She shot Raine and I a huge beaming smile, then saluted us with the bloody shiv. “Love you, Heathy!”

“I—I love you, too, Lozzie. Look, we have to—”

That gooey, slapping, blubbering voice called out of the shadows once again: “Patients and inmates will return to their designated treatment options!”

The voice was much closer now, just beyond the shadows, just beyond sight.

And it seemed to call from multiple throats.

Raine grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the curtained-off area around Lozzie’s bed, back into the central clear passage of the elongated ward. Lozzie trotted after us, swinging her shiv through the air like a child with a paper tube, playing at sword fighting. Raine kept herself carefully between Lozzie and I, but we all faced into the gathering shadows, back the way we’d come.

Raine held out her hand. “Knife me,” she hissed.

I pressed the white plastic knife back into her grip. I whispered, “Shouldn’t we be running? I think there’s more than one of them!”

“Huh,” Raine chuckled. “Running? If Lozzie here could take out a warden, I think I can go three-on-one. No sweat.”

“Heeee!” Lozzie chirped. “With plastic?”

Raine smirked back at her and twirled the plastic knife over her fingers, then caught it in a backhand grip. “I’ll beat your score with bare hands, Lozzers. Apparently you ain’t much for a bit of violence, back in the real world. Maybe you need a proper hound to show you how it works.”

Lozzie stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry. Raine grinned back at her.

“Raine,” I hissed, “that’s not what I mean. Y-you’re a very good girl, but I don’t think it’s just one of them, I think it’s—”

The wardens scuttled out of the shadows.

They didn’t move anything like people; they scurried on all fours with limbs outstretched, their torsos parallel to the ground — and to the walls, and the ceiling too, where more of them clicked across the grey paint and colourless tiles. Grey ties dragged along the lino or hung upside down. Smart grey uniforms were contorted into unnatural poses, with legs and arms spiralling outward in dozen-jointed angles of insectoid motion. Fingernails went clicka-clicka-click as they moved. Their rubbery faces were turned toward us, slot-mouths gaping, dark-pit eyes unblinking as holes punched in maggoty meat.

They burbled in chorus, scuttling toward us. “Patients will return to their designated treatment options!”

There were eight of them.

“Alright!” Raine shouted, grabbing my hand. “Now we run!”