They walked her to a carriage and put her inside. She fell ill of motion quickly. The hemp bag that had collected the breath of prior captives smelled as bad as could be expected, and she could not balance herself due to her limbs being tied. The sounds of city traffic, scared horses, and indignant men rose to a clamor as the carriage forced itself up one unwilling alley, then the next, then the next.
“What’s your name?” asked one of the men in the front.
Not Farisa. She could not use her real name for any purpose, and it would go best if she imagined the entire ordeal as someone else’s experience she had been afflicted to experience.
“She’s a quiet one. Not like F-19. Remember her? Bitch was squeaky.”
“Squeak isn't what you want, not in this place. If you’re overheard, the high’r-ups start asking questions. A bunch of guys caught 14-K’s for that.”
“That’s why you make sure the doctor is in on it. Let him take a turn or few. She’s not your wife, you have no reason to care. Get him to say she’s DRP and no one will believe anything she says. Besides, who hasn’t had a 14-K? You should be embarrassed if you’re with the Company for five years and don’t get one.”
The men laughed.
The carriage slammed to a stomach-mouth halt. A door opened, letting in city air.
“We’re here,” said one of the men as he pulled Farisa out of the carriage.
A pinprick of sun came through her hood.
“I’ll untie your ankles if you’ll walk. Otherwise, you’ll be dragged. Your choice.”
The rope around her shins loosened; she hated the idea of being tied or untied, because it meant a man’s eyes were so close to her bare feet. If I’m barefoot, I’m not Farisa. My name is not Farisa. I am not Farisa. I am authorless, like graffiti beside the road.
Her first step in the sunlit hot concrete stung. She still struggled to keep balance, being blind and half-tied. The odor of sun-drunk rotten fruit was ubiquitous, and a loud humming sound moved past her. Then the air turned still and there was no longer sun on her legs; she was indoors, and she could tell by sounds and echoes she was being led through a corridor, then another one, then into an open-bay with multiple levels of doors opening and closing, their hinges unoiled and whiny.
Someone untied her wrists.
“Is she ready?”
“Yuh,” said one of the men.
An insect bit her upper arm. The venom turned her veins to lightning; the pain was somewhere, then everywhere, then nowhere, because there was no place for it to be.
#
The abyss of sleep reluctantly lost itself. She could not open her eyes, because a crust had hardened on the lids, so she had to tilt her head forward and let enough dust irritate her nasal passages to make tears. Using her fingers to clean her eyelids was an impossibility, because her wrists had been tied again, this time around a pole behind her back. Once her eyes were wet enough to be opened, she noticed in horror that she still had no shoes, and tucked her feet behind herself, sitting down in a position that was uncomfortable, but that she resolved to sustain. This was a place of degradation, but she would not let it win.
This open space, concrete-lined and deep like an abandoned swimming pool, had two levels. Men patrolling the upper half’s catwalk had a direct view of her, sitting on the bottom. Steel ladders connected the high and low halves of the room that were otherwise fifteen feet apart. The room was mostly rectangular but had alcoves on the other side and a corner around which she could not see. She would discover it impossible, as it was now and would be for a long time, to determine the time of day, because the harsh chlorine lamps overhead were never turned off. She, like all the prisoners, had been dressed in a white gown with horizontal orange stripes. Some inmates walked free; others were restrained, a few of those more cruelly that she had been. Some were playing cards or conversing with neighbors; others had the mile-odd gaze of animals left behind by a bankrupt circus. A middle-aged woman was crying her eyes red, while an old man bashed his head against a concrete pillar.
Farisa felt a tug on her sleeve. A bearded man spoke incoherently. He was wearing no pants.
“Oh, go away,” said an old woman in paper slippers. When the man left, she said, “He doesn’t mean no harm. I’m Dawn.”
“Where am I?” Farisa asked. “Is this a madhouse?”
“I’d hardly call it a happy house.”
Farisa looked up again. The ceiling seemed both three times as high as an ordinary one, and oppressively close, due to a sense of magnification caused by the intense light. “I assume this one’s Globbo-run.”
Dawn glanced away. “Is ‘ere any other kind?”
A guard handed Dawn a pair of paper slippers. “New ones came in yesterday.”
Farisa pointed. “Can I have those?”
Dawn handed them over. “Take ‘em. The guards like me, so I get a new pair every six months.”
Six months. Farisa had already decided she would not spend a fraction of that time here. She would climb out over a mountain of bodies before willingly spending six days here. Still, she could not be rash. She would have to know the mechanics of this place, the policies and clockwork, before attempting an escape.
“Thank you so much, Dawn.” The slippers were scratchy, but better than cold air. “I don’t know the rules of this place, but do I—”
“Owe me some‘ing? Is ‘at what you’re asking?”
Farisa nodded.
“Don’t worry about it. Time is long here, and all debts converge.”
Dawn, before Farisa could ask what the old woman had meant, shuffled away.
Farisa was left, as she often would be in this place, with formless time, in which the gaze had nothing to fix upon and would become a mess of self-interferent perturbations. There were no books to read, as far as she could see. She had been deprived, by her restraint, of the means to walk. There seemed to be no color but the jarring orange of the inmates’ gowns, although most of the older people wore garments that had turned beige.
She did not belong here. That struck her as evident immediately. A young man with sandy-colored hair, scurrying on all fours, barked like a dog until a man in gray kicked him in the side, causing him to fall over and moan. The upstairs inmates responded with jeers; a screaming match erupted amongst them, and a piece of bread, so dark with mold even its cleanest crumb would have been unpalatable, whizzed over Farisa’s head on its way to collide with someone else’s. This was a house of broken people, a cove of permanent night sea where her presence was an insult to sense.
Still, she listened to others' conversations. She could not get around while bound to a pillar, so she would need to learn about this place by eavesdropping. Most of these people had been done bad by life and would never recover, but one in four inmates seemed entirely lucid. Two elderly men were playing farmer draughts, using pebbles of cement to stand in for missing pieces. Their speech was grammatical and their interactions were friendly. Nothing in their conversation suggested either of them belonged here, except for one’s claim that the Global Company had found a way to communicate with orcs using hand gestures, and that they were being trained to serve as spies. Educable orcs? What nonsense. Otherwise, though, the only evidence she could see of their madness was that they had been here for so long and not escaped or overthrown the place.
There were no clocks, not here. They existed in other bays, but were apparently inaccurate. The sharpness of the overhead light did not change as the hour did. It might have been a plausible guess that the outside world’s night was coming on, but the quotidian rhythms of a place so far away held no sway here. It seemed clear, from the behavior of others, that one did best by sleeping like a cat—sixteen or eighteen hours per day, but in a doze rather than deep rest, because one’s guard could never be let down in a place like this.
Somewhere she could not see, a door was slammed. The airflow changed slightly, and a draft came from a different direction, causing her to look at a wall where someone had written in brown, dribbly letters: Jenqat Cimm ot upmz e gostv-cuul wommeop. She could not in her state deduce a cipher, so she suspected the writing’s language of being the oldest one, the infantile argot of regression. A foul odor proved that neither paint nor earth had been used to write it.
I must escape. I am inside the Global Company and it is digesting me.
She would have to wait for the opportunity, though. That was the infuriating thing. Every second in this place was poison, so in that sense she did not want time to pass, but to be here in stasis would be intolerable, and the means of escape had not been provided yet, so she needed time to flow. She decided that it surely would if, on principle, she counted to herself in Lyrian. The language had been used two thousand years ago; it still, in a sense, existed. She might have a past, too; she might not be swallowed by this place. Etta, wy, ter, rosz, bez... Her mother had died in a Globbo prison. Hala, siolo, kana, nay, tael... Had the woman, consigned to give birth to her fourth child in such filth as this, tried to escape? Tael-etta, tael-wy.... Why had her mother failed? Wyetz-bez, wyetz-hala.... If Kyana had been in a place like this, and unable to get out, then...? Sioletz-kana, sioletz-nay...
The terror that existed here did not promote sweat, did not hasten the heart, did not bring any sense of heat, but instead lived solely in the gums, somewhere beneath the back teeth, too dull to saturate or fade in the nerves, instead filling bodily space and time like water in a container, fluid and fair and fairly miserable... she was at the bottom of something and the top was artificial light, so bright and ugly it could not really have existed, and must have been farther away than it looked...
Bezeletz-si’zohn-haletz-ter… bezeletz-si’zohn-haletz-rosz…
Dawn returned.
“Who do I talk to?”
“I suppose, whoever you want,” said the old woman. “I’d be careful not to anger ’e men in gray.”
“What I mean is that I was brought here by mistake. With whom do I address the matter?”
The old woman laughed.
“What?”
“‘Wi’ whom do I address the matter?’ You have a funny way of talking,”
Farisa remembered that this woman had given her a pair of unused shoes. It would be best not to respond as her inclination might have her do so.
Dawn continued. “Each one of us, if you’ll hear him tell it, is ’e only sane person in the world. No one else sees the truths I do, we all insist, a claim ’at would justify escape, for how foul would it be to confine a prophet, if it were not so insane.”
“I’m not like that,” Farisa insisted.
“Nine hours ago, ya were burblin’ on about some Monster in ’e forest. One wi’ forty eyes, ya said. Ain’t no’ing in ’is world has forty eyes. So, I reckon ’is is exactly where you belong. “
“Nine hours ago? No. Nine hours ago, I was…”
Nine hours ago, she was picking up tulip bulbs in Cait Forest, but was she outdoors, or was she in the greenhouse? Was it night or day or twilight? This pit was somewhere in Exmore, a hundred and twelve miles east of there; how could she have covered that space in so little time? She had not felt sure of her perceptions in quite some time; come to think of it, since that insect bite...
“See, ’at’s why you’re here,” said Dawn. “You don’t remember any’ing.”
“Stop fuckin’ with her,” said a man whose skin as dark as Farisa’s, but who had tightly curled hair. “No one remembers the first hours. They drug you for questioning.”
Farisa swallowed. “Questioning?”
He pointed at the welt, which she had believed to be an insect bite. “They have to make sure you’re no one important.”
“What if I were a—”
Dawn chuckled and put a hand on Farisa’s shoulder. “It’s a good ’ing ye’re a nobody, kid.”
“But I am—” No, Farisa. You’re not. Stay safe, stay nobody. “I am absolutely no one, and glad for it to be the case.”
The lights flickered overhead, which caused people in the upper-story cages to howl. The sounds came from all directions, mingling together in an agonal sobbing that reminded Farisa of the Monster’s victim as her struggle ended.
No, Farisa. That’s not your memory. You’re not you until you escape this place.
She bit the inside of her mouth, having heard this to be a good way to end a nightmare, but it had no effect. She bit harder, dislodging a particle of skin from the inside of her cheek. The concrete walls refused to dissolve. She bit once more, as hard as she could, with all her jaw’s force, and the taste of her own blood filled her mouth, causing her to shake in terror, as she had just done the sort of thing an insane person would do. She understood now the wanton self-injury she saw in this place—the woman biting her wrist, the man punching himself, the total lack of hygiene some of these people exhibited—as in kind to her own motivations: they all had different methods, but they were all trying to end the nightmare. None of it ever worked. She felt sympathy for the other people trapped here, but then she felt rage that, if nothing else, carried her through time.
No sun, no night. Soulless white light, constant. White always. Concrete walls. Shadows but they never move. Time, passing? Time. Time. Time. There is no Mason Hall bell tower. The day is not divided into hours because the numbers would twist around each other here and lose order. Hunger. No appetite, but hunger yes, because stomach growling minute minute minute hour minute.
“Dinner,” said a man who seemed never to have worn a facial expression in his life. A plate had been set on the floor.
Farisa, whose aching arms were still behind her, banged her cuffs against the metal pole. “How am I supposed to…?”
“Like a dog.” The man laughed before walking away.
On a flimsy wooden plate sat a piece of stale bread, mashed potatoes covered in lumpy milk, and a slim piece of what was here called street sausage—most likely, rat meat with sawdust mixed in. She had no use of her hands, but she was not the only person in such a position, so she decided no one would notice if she swung her head down and took a bite. Her mouth refused to produce saliva, and the bread was too dry, so she tried the potatoes, which made her gag.
Sleepless. Exhausted. No rest ever. What time is it? Is it ten o’ twelve o’ two o’clock? What is...? What is time? My eyes are burning, burning. My arm is cherry red from that needle welt, itching like a whore’s cunt... ow, my jaw hurts, my leg hurts, my arms have been behind me like this for far too long. White light, white light everywhere, but the concrete rejects it so it bounces around. We all wish there were no light, because this place looks best when there is nothing to see, as in the moonless shadow of the world. What color is a shadow? None, because there is no color but the orange of my striped gown, the color of confinement. I rock sometimes now. Things turn fog when head still. Say nothing, Farisa. Say nothing. Those who complain get kicked, hooded, put back in the black, and when they are moving you it is even worse in that dark then in this light. Wish could not see, but don’t want hood. Silent; stay silent but don’t forget who you—
#
The woman in the light-blue sleeveless dress was lovely—forever thirty-four. She, who had never lost the ability to care for another human being, walked the little girl across the desert. Days whipped around: the sun and moon went up and down and up, their relative phases switching—they were synchronized, then they were antipodal, then they were synchronized again—as they traveled. At night, the woman and the girl counted the stars they could see, up into the thousands.
The sun was rising when the mother spotted a pear tree, plucked a fruit from it, and handed it to the girl, who bit into it. She had never tasted anything sweeter.
“Why does the sun rise in the west here?”
“I don’t know, F—”
The girl could not hear, even when her mother spoke it, the sound of her own name. “Where are we going, Ma?”
“You’ll see.”
The midday sun, no longer swinging around the world so fast, shone as they came to a stand of palm trees surrounding a tiny lake.
“Did I ever teach you how to swim?”
“You did, Ma, but I can’t go in.”
“You must.”
“I can’t. She is down there. She’ll drag me to the bottom and tuck me away.”
“I won’t let her,” Kyana said.
The little girl stepped into the lake, its water as clear as the sky. She dove, finding she had no need to breathe—this place had different rules—and her descent changed the coral wall’s dominant color from sandstone to verdigris to ultramarine to midnight. Fluorescent fish, white and blue, swam around her. She hovered over a city; at first she thought it to be a ruin, but when its lights came on she recognized mermaids. She wanted to dive deeper and see them, but this desire to move faster than the water would allow caused a perturbation that brought her immediately to the surface.
Kyana stroked the girl's hair. “Is it beautiful down there?”
The little girl nodded.
“What did you find?”
“If I tell you, you have to promise to believe me.”
“I promise.”
The little girl tried to speak, but the sound of tearing cloth ripped through the air. Space dissolved into bubbles and points. She spun around, getting quite dizzy, grabbing at the dream to wrap it around herself, but it slipped through her arms like a bright tropical fish, until nothing remained but the stench of the madhouse and the unchanging harsh light.
She heard her mother’s voice one last time: “When you think no one’s watching, the smallest kindness will save you.”
#
“Wake up if you’re not,” Dawn said. “Breakfast is ’e one decent meal we get.”
There had been a period of sleep and unsleep, the two of which had slurried together. The headache behind Farisa’s eyes that had begun six or twelve hours ago was getting worse, so she thought eating might help her feel better, and she did take in some nutrition, but the meal did not qualify as decent, not by her standard. The biscuit was as dry and hard as bone. A soapy porridge had been served, and it did not taste all that bad, but she lost interest when she found the severed thorax of a housefly in it. The meat served was one of the vilest in the Known World, from an ocean cockroach whose flesh was known to rot after two days.
The dark-skinned man with curly hair said, “If people cooked this stuff right, it would be a delicacy.”
Dawn laughed. “Lobster, a delicacy.”
“I used to be a chef.”
“Everyone here used to be something else,” Dawn said.
“In my case, it is true, but I have learned this is not a place where one takes pride in winning arguments.”
“Sure, sure. You’re a million miles better ’an ’e rest of us.”
“That I would never say. I had a job. I made food, and I knew how to do it.” He walked away.
Farisa noticed that this man, though his face and gown were old, lacked the busted posture and sunken features of the lifers; he was one of the lucid ones. She asked Dawn, “Why’s he here?”
“Guess.”
“Nothing seems wrong with him.”
“You’re a perceptive little ‘ing. No, ’ere’s not, except for his weird ideas about lobster. You should hear him go on about flying machines. Says ’ey're less ’an twenty years away.”
“Flying machines?”
“Strange ideas, like I said, but on ’e whole, he’s a sane man. A smart man. Plays a stiff game of ehrgeiz.”
Farisa looked around. “So if he doesn’t belong here, then why is he?”
“Give me your best guess.”
“If I had any idea, I wouldn’t be asking.”
“What do you ’ink is ’e point of ’is place? To get better?”
Farisa looked at her knees. This institution belonged to the Global Company, whose very purpose was the expansion of purposelessness, so it could not have been intended as a place of healing. Still, while she understood the appetite for violence and vice, the boring cruelty that existed here—the wardens and orderlies did not seem to be enjoying themselves, for the prevailing mode of mistreatment was not passionate violation, which the Company had probably learned could not be efficiently sustained under circumstances of long-term confinement, but shopworn neglect.
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“I suppose I don’t know,” she finally admitted.
“You’re probably too young to remember Reverie.”
What a rude thing to say, Farisa felt. She was Kyana’s daughter. How could she think I would forget...? Farisa rubbed the bridge of her nose. “You really don’t know who I am, do you?”
Dawn looked puzzled. “Nicole Beatrixa. Does that name mean something on the outside?”
“Nicole Beatrixa,” Farisa said. “Is what I told the Globbos?”
“I presume so,” Dawn said.
“She I am. Nicole Beatrixa.” Farisa had pulled a disguise from graffiti; so long as it worked, she would not abandon it. “So tell me more about Reverie.”
“It was a resistance movement. Half of ’e old-timers here were part of it. ’E problem, from ’e Company’s perspective, is ’at if ’ey kill someone like ’at, he becomes a martyr.”
“Like my m—?” Remember, Farisa. “I mean, continue.”
“So, rather than let ’at happen, ’e Company puts ’em all here. The world is told he blew his mind out on booze or opium or jugweed, and it moves on. Instead of being martyrs, ’ey are forgotten.”
“So this is where they put political prisoners. But conflicts end. Are they ever let out?”
“Once in a while, ’ey will, if someone’s been here for twenty years and lost all sense of reality, because it proves ’eir point, or seems to. Decades in ’is place will—”
“Make them insane, even if they weren’t before.”
“Precisely.”
“The Company creates madness, where it is not, to sustain a lie it has told, but the Company is one big lie that persists only because a billion people believe it. Maybe the madness the world needs to be cured of is outside this place.”
“Girl, ye’re fixing on my own heart, aren’t ya?”
“You do seem nice,” Farisa said. “Hey, can you tell me how long I’ve been here?”
Dawn held up two fingers.
“Two...?”
“Two days. I don’t know what time of year it is anymore, but I can track day and night.”
“So, it’s still April.”
“I miss spring.”
Farisa lowered her voice. “You seem lucid. Were you part of Reverie?”
“I wish I could claim that for myself, but no.”
“So... what, then?”
“Infertility.”
“You were put here for infertility?”
“Legally speaking, it’s hysteria. At least, it was. Don’t know if ’e laws’ve changed, or if ’ey even pretend ’ere are any.”
“These days, the Globbos pretty much do whatever they want.”
“So, same out ’ere as in here.”
“Pretty much,” Farisa said.
“I suppose it’s better to be here, ’en, since ’ere’s no way I could live on the outside after so long. Infertility got me in ’is place, but now I’m of-’e-place.”
“I’m sorry, Dawn.”
“I had a daughter when I was twenty-nine.”
“Then you weren’t infertile at all.”
“No, but I had no male children, and I was getting older. My husband lost his patience. He wanted a son who’d wreck ’e world even more ’an he did, more ’an he could. Of what use, in ’e game of destruction, is a girl? Girls are born to be broken, not to break things.”
“Where is your daughter now?”
“My husband sold her to a mining company when she turned six. After her, I had two boys, but ’ey crowned with eyes closed. Doctor said my womb was vurkt, but I personally ’ink it was the same soul, rejecting the world twice.”
“So, after two stillbirths, he committed you. Couldn’t he have just...?”
“Divorce? A Z-5? No, honey. It would have ruined his career.”
Farisa’s eyebrows tried to move, but swelling on her forehead kept them immobile.
“I know I don’t look like a Z-5’s wife in ’is crummy sack.”
“I’m infertile too.”
“You? Darling, you’re just a kid.”
“I’m older than I look. I’m twenty.”
“Like I said, a kid.”
She whispered, “It’s the Marquessa.”
Farisa regretted her confession immediately. She had known Dawn for less than sixty hours. She had shared this not with forethought, but because isolation and neglect had evolved into a real sense of ubiquitous rejection—the screamers on the top floor faced physical abuse, but at least they were seen—and she would now say anything, even something as stupid as that, to sustain human contact. Still, she now wanted to shrink into oblivion, because two orderlies in Globbo gray were approaching in a hurry...
... and then they passed, to harass someone else.
“Ha!” Dawn said. “A mage, just like all ’e others in here. Tell us about ’e dragons you’ve slain. Oh, and ’e orcs too!”
Farisa smiled. “Oh, as a mage, I killed all kinds of orcs, big ones with giant, throbbing goblin cocks. You know their penises are forked, right?”
“Could be so. I’m told ’ey were a problem in sword times, but gunpowder scares ’e little fuckers.”
“Turns them on, actually.” Farisa laughed. “Sorry, I’m making bad jokes. I’ve been—”
The old woman cracked her knuckles. “Don’t explain yourself. We all get a little bit weird in here.”
Farisa pointed to a woman with olive skin and dark hair, the kind of person she would have, in a different world, considered approaching. “Tell me about her. Why’s she here?”
“No’ing wrong with her, asides of her being an invert.”
Farisa scratched her ankle. “A what?”
“An invert. A lesbian.”
“A lesbian?”
“Oh, dear. You haven’t seen much of the world, have you? A lesbian is a woman who prefers—”
Farisa laughed. “I know what a lesbian is. Why does the Company care about u—lesbians?”
“It doesn’t, not really, but how do you think ’is place makes money?”
Farisa looked at the empty plates strewn around the floor. “I’ve been trying to figure that out. I’ll admit I don't have a good answer.”
“All ’ings the Company does are business. In here, we’ve got ’e vagrants, ’e really plonkered ones, but none of ’ose have a grot to their name. As for ’e politicals, ex-Reverie types—”
“If they’d ever had money, the Company took it long ago.”
“Right,” Dawn said.
“So…?”
Dawn crossed her arms.
“I can’t imagine anyone pays to be here,” Farisa said.
“No, of course not. Where ’ere’s a fortune to be made, ’ough, is in the need for rich families to hide embarrassing daughters: preggies and lezzies and girls who make ’eir husbands beat ’em.”
Farisa’s disgusted anger was, this time, averse to language.
Dawn, in a changed accent, continued. “I don’t look it, but I’m an Easthorn.”
“You are?”
“I was raped at seventeen. Family left me here to… well, to die. It’s taken longer than I thought it would.”
Farisa leaned forward. “You just said you were put here because your Globbo husband—”
Dawn stood up, as if Farisa had broken an unwritten but sacred rule. “Darling, in this place we all share stories. It doesn’t take long before we’re all mixed up together with the same history, the same memory, the same life, at least as pertains to the time before. My mixture of events will continue to live on in others’ minds, long after old age has shut my body down. In a sense, I guess, we are immortal.”
The old woman walked away, whistling.
To no one, Farisa said, “Then I refuse to live forever.”
#
Time passed, marked by meager meals and events that seemed to come without pattern. Farisa’s skin had taken on a red hue, although the hospital—if it could even be called such, since she had been here for at least five days and never seen a doctor—grew colder and colder. She would have done anything for a deck of cards or a book. Boredom was this place’s weapon of choice.
Those of who are here are here because society has deemed us bad at thinking; it is the Globbo way, then to leave us with nothing else to do..
Dawn, of all of the inmates, seemed most able to go as she pleased. Others were reproached by guards for the smallest infractions, but she seemed to have no fear of anyone, and therefore did not draw the abuse inflicted on others. She had lost her usual emotional spectrum. The old woman could tell a sad story or a happy one—which were hers, none could know—with no change in her affect. She had her full intelligence, could have passed for a third-year college student, but had convinced the guards to leave her alone, because there was no one there who would suffer. As well, Dawn would never leave this place; she had acquired a fluency in this world that had never been available to her before, and certainly would go unattained if she were let out now.
The old woman’s adaptability could not be feigned, though. Farisa was unsure whether she could pretend to be emotionless, to have lost hope of escape, with enough fidelity to the real thing to get out of here in reasonable time. She would have to find some other way to destroy her restraints. She tried to draw from the blue, with her gaze fixated on a piece of thread that had fallen on the floor.
She could not move it. The blue would not take a mage, in this spent state, into itself.
But I have nothing else to do, do I? Practice, Farisa. Practice.
The last meal had been served on small wooden plates, which remained strewn about on the floor. When no one was watching, Farisa directed her gaze at the nearest one, then closed her eyes, then tried to move it.
If it wobbled, it did so barely.
She had time, though—time for practice and more time than she could possibly want, it seemed, because so little happened here. The outside world fixed a person’s moment, destined inflexibly to move at one second per second, but allowed movement in space. Here, the rules had reversed. Alertness and daydream mingled. It could be three in the morning or three in the afternoon and the overhead light would be the same. Rats were consuming unfinished meals. Chairs were squealing as they scraped against the floor up above. Muffled screams suggested that guards were taking liberties somewhere. These occurrences all seemed diffuse in time, as if it had become a matter of taste and opinion whether they were happening now or had occurred one hundred years ago. One could choose, she imagined, to exist at another point in time and render this place’s happenings as harmless as the snowy skies over the Polar Ocean or the ten-flag heat of the endless equatorial desert.
She realized that her restraints were adjusted when she slept. Her left hand was still cuffed to the pole, but she earned her right one free, giving her more range of motion, although her joints still ached due to the cumulative effects of her body’s unnatural position. Sleep, with nothing but an iron pillar behind her, had been a matter of defeat rather than rest. She seemed to get what she needed and not much more.
Into the blue, she went again. A wooden plate still failed to move. A fallen sheet of paper refused to catch fire. It seemed she had managed to put bias into the swing of a key on the belt of a warden as he walked by, but she could not be sure.
It was clear that meals were named—breakfast, dinner, lunch—out of their usual order, and that madhouse time seemed to run, if the visible tiredness of guards were an indicator, on a thirty-hour cycle, to save money on meals. Ambient chatter suggested it was early morning by the enforced time, though the meal being served was called dinner, and that this was going to be the best day for food of the year. Farisa pictured pancakes with maple syrup, smoked beef, and bottomless glasses of pulpy orange juice.
While the orderlies were serving the meal—they were still too far away to tell what it was—two men were on the upper-level catwalk, discussing a mage of some kind. A matter-of-factness in their inflection made clear they had no doubts about one being here, but had not figured out which inmate she was. She would have to be more careful.
The food arrived: a hard-cracker sandwich with salted fish, some lard, and a dollop of mustard inside, along with a few leafy greens lightly doused with vinegar—not excellent food, but solidly edible, being prepared for humans as opposed to the leftover pig slop usually served. Inmates swiped each others’ portions, causing fistfights to break out, but Farisa had been placed far enough from the room’s center to escape conflict or even notice. Savoring it reminded her of civilization.
“Don’t get used to it,” said a man with a long gray beard.
“I never will.” She wanted to say, but did not say, for she feared it might be rude, that if she were at risk of being here long enough to get used to anything about this place, he had permission to kill her.
She decided to save half of the sandwich for later, putting it behind herself. Eating was one of the few sensory experiences that existed here, and to have edible food on two days rather than one would make the ordeal less intolerable. No other distractions existed. She had seen only two books in her time here, both out of reach, with pages missing and covers long gone. She did better to let her eyes rest until words, out of her imagination entirely, appeared on the walls. Sometimes, a story would tell itself...
“Git, you fucking varmint!”
A rusty screw, thrown at the despised animal, whizzed across the room. Everyone seemed to hate this cat, the gray tabby known for stealing food and getting in the way. The inmates treated it like a pest, while the guards and orderlies often kicked it, sometimes hard enough to cause the animal to go airborne.
Only Dawn, in one of her more loquacious states, had said a good word about the creature. “She’s a healer, that cat. She curled up to me the other night, and my leg pain disappeared.”
The animal was in the center of the floor, meowing. Various kinds of projectiles were thrown at it.
“Come here,” Farisa said, extending a hand in the animal’s direction. She decided to share a portion of her meal. The animal butted its whiskered gray head against her knee. She petted the cat until it began to purr. It jumped into her lap and curled up there.
#
Time continued to pass. Sleep and wakefulness remained commingled like foods in a stomach; the secretions dissolved the boundaries, but the nature of this did not change. Dreams of escape, though vivid, were repetitious—she would find herself in wonderful places that shared nothing in common but being anywhere else—while the world of her waking hours was colorless concrete, so bereft of features it was becoming invisible, like a mist that stretched to the edge of the universe. Her restraints had been adjusted again. This time, the cuff around her wrist was tighter than it had been, and she could not infer a reason why.
Dawn was here. They made conversation. This time, she had been a dancer in Moyenne. Farisa did not ask what kind of dance, being unsure the old woman would know. the mage had given up on trying to figure out which of her stories had been her real personality before coming here. Any of them? It really didn’t matter.
Farisa pointed to a sleeping old man, around whom a blue chalk circle had been drawn. “Who’s he?”
“Jack Maywood. Reverie.”
“The J—? I mean, oh.”
Dawn told Farisa things about the man and his legend that she already knew.
“So what does the blue circle mean?”
Dawn lowered her voice. “He has madhouse fever.”
Three others, in various states of languor, had been similarly encircled. “So, he’s going to die here.”
“Probably so, unless he did it himself to get some distance from the others. When I was young and pretty like you, I did that all the time. The guards decided I wasn’t young and pretty enough to risk getting sick, I suppose.”
Farisa was unsure whether to be relieved or insulted that no such attention had come to her. She settled on relief; her powers, depleted by the battle with the Monster, had not returned to the degree where she could have defended herself. “Madhouse fever. And the doctor’s not going to treat him?”
Dawn laughed.
“This is a hospital. There have to be doctors here.”
“There’s one. Doctor Bugg. It’s best to avoid him. He’s a collector.”
Dawn walked away before Farisa asked what she had meant.
A fourth person was encircled an hour later. Farisa, too, began to feel ill, though she did not know if this could be attributed to anything worse than the fatigue that came naturally here. Her belly hurt, and the ache had begun to spread into her chest. She attributed this, however, to her staunch refusal to use the tin bucket beside her, emptied once per day, for other-than-liquid purposes. Those who did the more solid thing, in the open like animals, were letting it be known, even if no one saw them, that they belonged here—and she did not. She would endure the pain as a reminder that this place was not for her.
An orderly, who did not look very old except for his being bald, walked by in a manner that caused Farisa to think about Elior XVI. She muttered, “He will be so angry. I haven’t been to work in a long time.”
Who was Elior, again? Did it matter? Katarin would protect her.
“A long time. I haven’t been to work in a long time, and I miss it. Long, long time.”
Indeed, nothing but time. She closed her eyes and pictured a clock face and demanded of it that the hands be in motion, but their positions amidst the illegible numbers never changed. Time, time, time. Count the seconds. They must pass, if you do. Those are the rules. Etta, wy, ter, rosz, bez....
A long, long time.
A man’s booming voice shouted, “Nobody move!”
At the same time, a buzzing sound cut the air, waking even the people who had gone sick with fever. The overhead lights shimmered, then went out. She heard her voice whisper Lyrian numbers, and quieted herself. The patients in the upper-level cages shrieked like animals facing slaughter, but she still had the presence of mind, at least at this time when she possessed no power, to follow the order.
“Heads down, eyes closed! Don’t make any noise!”
Farisa complied, as there was no light to see by, save the dim oil lamps of men walking around, mostly on the upper levels. Footfalls grew louder. She could smell burning tobacco. Someone had stopped in front of her. Hiding an open eye, she could see trouser bottoms. The man cleared his throat, then his boots walked away.
Somewhere in the world, the hand of a clock was moving. There might even still be sun and moon, day and night.
“Lift his gown,” said a guard.
“You don’t have to do this.” A leather belt whipped through the air. “Please, don’t.” Another strike. “I’m very sick.” Men ran toward him. He whimpered like a broken dog. “Please, please let go.” His voice receded, screams higher in pitch until a door closed somewhere probably far away and silence reigned again.
She could hear water dripping, slowly eroding the building, and she wished the sun would grow to a hundred times its size, bringing winds and rains and floods that would demolish this place and set her free. Muffled conversations came from unseen rooms around corners. Her heartbeat sounded more like sloshing than thumping. Walking men’s oil lamps swung and the shadows seemed to twist.
Then came the itch. From hands to shoulders, from thighs to the tops of her feet, from throat to the roof of her mouth, she felt the nibbling of phantom insects and, knowing any movement would be punished, resisted the need to scratch by digging fingernails into the back of her neck, causing pain that would distract her. The floor seemed uneven, as if the world were being shaken like a dice cup, and she tensed every muscle to keep balance, knowing she was one wrong motion from being dragged away to some screaming fate beyond some corner of this place... and those walking lights were more numerous now, the foul stench of kerosene spreading in sheets, and her chest grew resistant to breath, so in panic she opened both eyes and looked for light and found it but now the darkness could not be seen, there was no darkness, nothing at all but white blindness and, and, and...
The Marquessa is coming. No, I cannot have this happen here. You, I, Farisa, you cannot lose control. Farisa, you do not belong here. If you lose control, they will think—they will decide; they will know—you do, and then you will never get out—never get out—never get out—and so, and so, and so, keep breathing but keep yourself together at any cost, any cost at all. Breathe. Do not slip. Do not slip. The Marquessa is here—she sees you. This is her dominion. She is the queen of this underworld. But be strong against her, Farisa. Be strong, because if you let the madhouse win (but the house always wins) because if you let it win (the house always wins) then you will make it known to the world (but the house always wins) with a scream and if you scream, you have spoken your first word of the local language, which means you belong here. Scream, and this is your new home. Do not scream. Do not scream. You cannot give up. If you give up now, you have fought for so long for nothing. You cannot give up. You cannot (but the house always wins) give up this fight. Fight, goddamn it, fight. Resist. Fight, but do not scream. Do not scream. Do not scream. If you give in to the terror, even for a—
Farisa screamed.
#
The Marquessa’s vapors gathered. The room glowed with tinny off-purple light. Farisa’s itching worsened, her skin wrinkling against itself under a ninety-knot wind from nowhere.
A guard shouted, “Close your damn eyes!”
She barely heard the order, nor could be sure if it had been directed at her, but let her eyes because it did not matter at this point. The woman, nine feet tall and emaciated, shone as bright as ever before.
You don’t belong here, the Marquessa said.
“I am afraid you have won,” Farisa said.
I have won nothing, but if you believe you are mad, you are so.
The Marquessa’s face whirled into a new form—a third eye had grown in her forehead, and she was still very old, but her expression seemed kind.
You do not see me. You see a perception of me, an old one. If you let it make you sick, it will.
“Dawn? Is this a joke? Are you plonkering me?”
Farisa shivered, and found herself outdoors under an iron sky. A fleck of snow landed on her bare shoulder, near the scar, melting on contact. She was not cold, despite the snow, but realized she had no clothes on.
“Could you give me something to wear?”
The Marquessa did not respond.
“Where am I?”
She walked further until she recognized the red-brick library of the Medvesziget orphanage. Boof and Lani and Jed and all Farisa’s other childhood bullies came running, having aged substantially, with jowls and thinning hair, but still of a child’s stature.
Farisa asked, “Do you have anything to say?”
Boof and Lani looked at each other. Boof, boasting about having poured water on stone steps, pointed and laughed as an old monk slipped and fell. Jed blinked stupidly. Lani faded, and soon the whole scene did as well.
Farisa sneezed. Heat and spring pollen and chalk dust were all over her, and now she was in the Old Schoolhouse, still naked—very ill-dressed for Cait Forest—while dissecting one of those tricky Lyrian sentences that could be parsed eighteen different ways. She had lost her train of thought. She, although no one seemed to notice her lack of clothing, wanted her indigo teacher’s dress more than anything.
A boy whispered to the other beside him.
“Quiet, she said. “I need to figure this out.”
The sentences on the board had been replaced by chemical equations for some kind of combustion reaction, although the numbers weren’t correct, and she would need a moment to fix the errors.
The boy was laughing much more loudly.
“I said, be quiet.”
“I’m not laughing at you, but at him.”
Elior XVI, also nude, was sitting cross-legged on his desk rather than in his seat, and began to masturbate. Ring-shaped wrinkles deepened, then smoothed out, then deepened, then smoothed out, then deepened again on his decrepit nozzle.
Farisa felt the chalkboard press into her shoulder blades. She had stepped back, wanting to get herself away from here, but the wall would not budge, so she inched herself to the schoolhouse door, hoping not to draw the attention of the self-abusing old headmaster, but instead get herself away and home.
The man disappeared in a vapor. Erysi, who had taken his seat, raised her hand.
“Yes, Erysi,” said Farisa.
“I don’t know how to say this in Lyrian, but you’re fat and ugly.”
The students laughed.
“I’m not fat,” Farisa said. She pinched her belly, finding barely an inch to grab. “I mean, I have some, but no more than most girls—”
“Fat and ugly, fat and ugly,” the students chanted.
“I’m not!” Farisa grabbed her hips so her arms blocked the view of her torso. “I’m not—”
Pain blasted through Farisa’s jaw and neck as Erysi’s thrown stone struck her. The rock had torn a hole in her face but, rather than feel shock or terror in her disfigurement, she felt a sense of power, for she had grown a second mouth and would eat just as fast. A third erupted suddenly on her back, a fourth on her stomach, and a fifth in the caldera of her collapsed chest... her former body, the limited one, disintegrated. The world smelled of rotting meat, delicious filth, and she wanted to slither through the woods, chasing meal after meal, consuming all that had once moved, all that had once seen.
Her body bloated, and new legs appeared on it, some fully grown and others warped like thwarted carrots. Her voice came out as a warbling trill. Her visual field split and settled into itself as double vision, then quadruple, then more, as her eyes numbered six eight ten fourteen twenty—more than her mad mind could integrate. Thirty eyes. Forty. Forty eyes live forever. She was all-knowing, she was male and female both, she was a desirous hunger filling all of space. Her myriad gums ached for the warmth and pressure and struggle of a meal. Her eyes and lips and tongues wanted the sweet taste of anguish. She craved, more than a desert beggar craved water, the taste of terror sweat—the acrid sweet pure panic that tasted like power. A boy would be edible; a girl would be better; if she were beautiful—could she ingest enough of humanity to know what it considered beautiful?—it would strike at the human spirit with a serpent’s precision. She would start with the delicate toes; she would relish the cracking of bones as she worked her way up the legs, and if bones cracked and turned sharp they would tear new holes inside her that could become more mouths, and she could eat faster. Thick thigh bones she would snap with crocodile force and let the marrow fill her, passing that delectable matter from one stomach to another with orgasmic precision. She’d fill the night air with odors of fire, odors of fear, odors of death; charred muscle and sizzling fat and ejecta purged in terror; she’d have all these scents and tastes to herself, to fill her mind with, to fill the next five thousand years of slumber with, she’d have that delectable sound and wetness of a young woman’s sobbing as she realizes her beautiful body is being destroyed...
“No,” Farisa insisted. “I am not the Monster. I fucking killed that thing.”
A calm female voice said, So you say. But where is it?
“It disappeared after I—”
She was falling as fast as the last anvil out of heaven through airless blackness that did not reduce her speed until she landed in a coarse powder, the color of snow but not cold. She had been here before, but could name the place because she had never seen it like this, with trees blackened and a ground cover of soot. She tried to stand but cut her shin on something metallic. Brushing the ashes away, she uncovered the heat-warped gearwheel of a bicycle.
“You’re saying I killed Erysi?”
No response.
“I didn’t. I couldn’t have. I loved her.”
The Marquessa materialized as a middle-aged woman with dark skin and orange eyes. You’re a good person, Farisa. You are, truly. I’m afraid you’re very sick. You’re down somewhere even I can’t help you, but I wish I could.
“You want to help? I don’t understand. You’re the—”
If you don’t get out of here soon, you’ll die.
Farisa’s breath hastened. “Die?”
Madhouse fever is here, the worst strain in decades. One of four will perish, and you will be among them if you do not escape soon.
“So help me.”
A stone and a cloud in the same place, the Marquessa said.
“A stone and a what in a… what?”
You want out of the madhouse, right? A stone and a cloud, in the same place.
The Marquessa’s violet aura dimmed, and the woman vanished.