“What if Raine doesn’t come back?”
Evelyn’s voice quivered as she asked the question; a tiny whisper in the echoing dark.
I looked up from the thin strip of direct moonlight glittering on the tiled floor. Evelyn’s face was deep in shadow, far from the silvery illumination. Her eyes formed dark pits of exhaustion, as if the flesh was on the verge of collapse. She had not bothered to look at me, hunched in her wheelchair, arms folded across the narrow cage of her chest, staring at the bank of lockers on our left.
“Evee?” I whispered her name — then winced as the echoes danced down the length of the room, reflected from bare tiles and undressed metal. “Evee? What do you mean, what if Raine doesn’t come back? Of course she’s coming back. She promised me. She promised you.”
Evelyn snorted, a weak puff of breath from her nose. Her voice croaked from the shadows pooled upon her face.
“Promises are words,” she said. “Raine could so very easily get distracted by some other girl in dire need. Or get caught by the nurses, fooled by her own bravado. Her reach exceeds her grasp. She’s not immune to tasers and cuffs, you know. She’s not a zombie or a superhero. She’s barely even human, sometimes.”
“Evee, where is this coming from?” I cleared my throat and tried not to wince again — the echoes were awful. Evelyn and I had been sitting in silence for ages because of that, but now there was no choice but to talk.
“It would be just her style,” Evelyn grunted. “Promise the world, then fuck off and get herself killed.”
I shifted down the wooden bench — narrow, hard, uncomfortable on my aching backside — closer to Evelyn’s wheelchair, almost close enough to touch the Saye Fox, who was curled up at the very end.
“Evee,” I repeated her name, speaking almost at full volume. “I have faith in Raine. She made a promise. She’s coming back.”
Evelyn snorted again, then shook her head. She started to speak, but her stomach interrupted her with an audible gurgle.
“You’re grumpy because you’re hungry,” I said gently. “Just hold on until Raine gets back.”
“Yes, of course I’m getting hangry,” Evelyn hissed. “But it’s a legitimate question all the same. What if Raine doesn’t come back?”
Two hours after our escape — two hours after our rout before a squad of armed nurses, after our near-miraculous salvation at the hands of the King in Yellow, after a headlong flight down grimy hospital corridors and up staff-access stairways and along the twisty little dream-passages of Cygnet Hospital — Evelyn and I were camped out in a locker room, somewhere on the second floor, in the dark.
Moonlight shone through a single window high up on one wall, long and thin and fringed with pale lichen. The source of the moonlight was a mystery — the sky was still as false as ever, a wrinkled black firmament of Eyelid skin from horizon to horizon. The light itself was real enough, glittering in a narrow ribbon upon the wooden slats of the bench, dusting the dull orange floor tiles with silvery grace, leaving the twin rows of lockers plunged into deep gloom on either side, towering titans of steel-clad shadow. The air smelled of ancient sweat and stagnant water.
Evelyn and I were tucked in deep, sheltering in the narrow corridor between two banks of lockers, the second to last before the wall.
The room was longer than it was wide, with most of the far end taken up by a dozen parallel rows of metal lockers, creating a series of aisles between the looming steel walls. Each pair of locker rows came with a long, narrow, hard bench down the middle. Evelyn and I could not been seen from the single door into the room, nor could we see the cluster of shower stalls on the far side of the echoey space, nor the empty wire-frame baskets, which I assumed were for soiled sports gear or other clothes.
The locker room was an absurdity, of course; the real Cygnet Hospital had nothing so anachronistic. Patients had never been expected to shower or bathe in groups, let alone take off all their clothes in front of each other. Showers had been individual, separate, private. This place was pulled straight from somebody’s uncomfortable memories of school changing rooms.
Not mine. Twil’s, perhaps?
Evee and I had to be quiet. We didn’t know how far our voices might carry beyond the door. We didn’t dare switch on strip-lights affixed to the ceiling, for fear that a mysterious fire in the dark might attract unwanted attention.
We were hiding, without much to do except twiddle our thumbs.
Evelyn had not been taking it well; she had actually lapsed into silence first, shoulders pulled tight beneath her big grey dressing gown, her body so thin and worn out in the over-large support of her wheelchair.
My nerves were not faring much better, though I was probably doing a better job of hiding that fact. The locker room was big and echoey and chilly. One of the longer walls boasted a trio of big iron radiators in mushy-pea green, paint flaking with age, pipes occasionally ticking and tapping in the dark; but they were all cold to the touch, and did not respond when I twisted the valves. All I had was my yellow blanket, pulled tight around my shoulders, but the chill was seeping in at my extremities.
Raine had warned me that might happen. It was the wound.
My left shin throbbed with a growing ache, where I’d cut it when I’d clambered over the broken two-way mirror to rescue Evelyn. Earlier, flush with adrenaline and desperate with need, I’d barely felt the gash in my flesh. But now, given time, the pain had set in. Raine had done her best, washing my wound under one of the shower heads — I’d almost screamed, biting a mouthful of yellow blanket to muffle myself. Then she’d wrapped the wound in a makeshift bandage, made from a pair of scratchy institutional pajama bottoms which we’d stolen during our journey.
The makeshift dressing was holding up well. The fabric was stained red, but far from soaked through.
But the pain was a constant pounding against my flesh and my mind. Thinking was becoming difficult. Focusing made me irritable. Speaking was extra effort. The hunger and exhaustion did not help, either.
Still, hiding in pain was better than getting caught.
We’d stumbled upon the abandoned locker room after about an hour of cat-and-mouse through the corridors and hallways of Cygnet Hospital. Raine had taken the lead, keeping us one step ahead of the nurses. She’d also taken responsibility for handling Evelyn’s wheelchair, though on several occasions she had handed Evee off to me, whenever she had needed to creep ahead or prepare for a possible fight.
Luckily that had never happened; we’d managed to go the entire hour without once blundering into a patrol of armed Cygnet staff or getting ourselves spotted by a sentry.
We were not the only patients causing an uproar, after all; by the time we had burst from the foreboding ‘corrections’ area and plunged back into the regular corridors of the hospital, the remnants of the riot had spread out all over Cygnet Asylum. As we had fled, we’d overheard the aftermath of a dozen little confrontations — girls fighting the nurses, hurling objects and curse words alike, backed into corners and dead-end rooms, howling their defiance at the implacable advance of the institution itself. Once or twice I swore I’d heard Lozzie herself, cackling or giggling, whooping encouragement to her ‘troops; but always she was there then gone again, any hint of her vanishing back into the widening gyre.
I had longed to stop and help every one of those scattered last stands.
But we couldn’t. We — Raine and I and arguably the Fox too — had a responsibility. We had to get Evee to safety. We had to find somewhere to hide and regroup, so we could rekindle the hope of freeing Zheng and Twil, so we might gain an upper hand.
And what could we do to help, even if we tried? Raine was still basically unarmed except for that little plastic knife. I had nothing but my fists, and they did not work like magic on anybody except Loretta Saye; besides, by then I was limping from the pain in my left shin, struggling to scurry around each successive corner. Evelyn’s magic did not work either, she was barred from the most fruitful of her skills. The Saye Fox had wonderfully sharp teeth in that vulpine jaw, of course, but in the end she was very small and quite vulnerable. We could not ask that of her.
The locker room served our purposes perfectly; we could hide in the back without being seen from the door. Initially the room had just been another temporary stop on our ‘sneaking mission’ — Raine’s phrase, which made Evee roll her eyes.
But as we had waited, the sounds of distant commotion had finally faded away. Lozzie’s riot had been broken, scattered, and defeated in detail.
Raine had taken the opportunity to get us organised. She’d found an old sports drink bottle in one of the lockers and filled it with cold water from the showers, so we could all drink our fill. She’d dressed my wound, then used the remaining strips of clean cloth to bind Evelyn’s maimed hand, to spare her the further indignity of leaking pinkish blood plasma on anything she touched. We’d done the best to clean the worst of the blood off ourselves, with a wash-cloth wetted under the shower heads, but there was only so much we could achieve. Evelyn had borrowed my black marker pen and started scrawling magic circles on the nearest of the lockers — but nothing worked.
The Saye Fox had padded up and down the room a few times, then curled up on the end of the bench, and seemingly fallen asleep.
And the sky — the false light of this dream-world — had turned ruddy with an onrushing twilight.
That made no sense. I’d eaten breakfast maybe four or five hours earlier; it could not have been much past three o’clock in the afternoon.
But nobody noticed. Raine didn’t react to sunset, not at all. She treated it like it was natural, like night was meant to be falling already. Evelyn had barely responded either, which confused me. Hadn’t I woken her by killing the dream of her mother?
Was I the only one who noticed that time was going wrong?
As dusk had deepened, Raine had proposed that she venture out alone to fetch food and find herself a real weapon. We could not all go together; swift and stealthy sneaking was not possible with Evelyn’s wheelchair along, and somebody needed to stay with Evee, since she was near-helpless by herself. We agreed on several rendezvous points out in the hospital grounds, in case Evee and I had to move. I did not like saying goodbye to Raine, not even for a few minutes. But she promised me, she promised Evee, and kissed both of us — me on the lips, and Evee on the forehead.
She would be back soon. She would never abandon us.
Within minutes of Raine’s departure, full night had fallen like a blanket unfurled across the false sky. Evelyn and I sat alone together, deep in silvery moonlight, with a sleeping fox on the end of the bench.
Raine had been gone for perhaps about half an hour when Evelyn voiced her pessimistic question. The pain in my leg was making it hard to keep track.
“Evee,” I hissed her name, then raised my voice to normal speaking volume. “Evee, please look at me.”
Evelyn finally raised her eyes, glowering at me from within deep pits of shadowy exhaustion. “You do know you sound exactly like her, yes?”
I blinked. “I’m sorry? Pardon? Like who?”
Evelyn snorted again. “You don’t even notice it? Who do you think I’m talking about? You sound like Raine. You’ve even picked up some of her speech patterns. I didn’t know linguistic habits could be transmitted via sexual osmosis.”
I let out an indulgent little sigh. “And sometimes I sound like you, Evee. Because you’re one of the most important people in my life, and I like the way you speak. I don’t think ‘sexual osmosis’ can account for that.”
Evelyn rolled her eyes and looked away, suitably embarrassed. She stared at the strip of silvery moonlight on the floor. “Well,” she grunted. “Well, that’s the last thing I’d want for you. Sounding like me. Bloody hell.”
“There’s no need to be so self-deprecating, Evee.”
“Ha!” she spat. “For you, maybe.”
“Evee, please look at me.”
Evelyn glanced at me again, a touch less hostile now, but even more exasperated. “Alright, Heather. I’m looking. Say your piece.”
“Raine is coming back,” I repeated. “She’s going to come back with food, and supplies, and hopefully even a fresh change of clothes. She’s probably going to be armed, too, though I don’t know with what. She’s safe, she’s skilled, she knows what she’s doing. If anybody is capable of sneaking around this hospital in the aftermath of a riot, it’s Raine. She is coming back.”
Evelyn said nothing for a long moment, staring at me in thought, then snapped: “She’s been nearly an hour, Heather. What do we do if—”
“Raine is coming back.”
“I think it’s a reasonable question,” Evelyn said. “What to do if—”
“Raine. Is. Coming. Back!”
Evelyn flinched, blinking several times.
The Saye Fox raised her head, saw that the two humans were merely bickering, and then back curled up, returning to her nap.
“Sorry,” I said.
Evelyn cleared her throat, hesitating over her words. “You’ve never spoken to me like that before, Heather. I’m … I’ve … I made you … angry.”
“I’m sorry, Evee,” I said, then sighed. “I love you, and I know you have legitimate concerns. But I need you to have faith, I need you to share my faith in Raine, right now. I need you to believe with me.”
“Because this is a dream? Clap your hands and believe? You think that’s how this place works?”
I shook my head. “No. Well, yes, actually, that too. I think that might have something to do with how this dream functions. So, yes, I think actively believing might help Raine get back to us safely. But that’s not why I need you to believe.” I swallowed and found my throat was dry. My hands were shaking. I had to clutch them together in my lap. “Evee … Evee, I’m terrified. I woke up alone this morning, in a recreation of the hospital I hated when I was little. The place where they made me pretend Maisie never existed. And I stayed alone, again and again and again, after talking to you, to Twil, to Zheng, to Lozzie. Everyone! The Knights, the Caterpillars. Until Raine. And then when I found Raine, I wasn’t alone. And now she’s not here and we’re in the dark — literally — and I have all the responsibility and I am trying very very hard not to freak out.”
Evelyn held my gaze in silence for a long moment, her face deep in the moonlight shadows, dusted with the echo of distant silver.
Then she unfolded her arms, reached out with one hand — her maimed, bandaged hand — and touched the back of my palm. Slow and awkward, she said: “Alright, Heather. Alright. I … I get it. I … mm. Okay. Raine’s coming back.”
I nodded, swallowed, and took a deep and cleansing breath. Suddenly I felt terribly embarrassed, and gently took Evelyn’s hand in mine. She couldn’t feel my skin through her bandages, but I hoped she could feel the gentle pressure of my touch.
“I’m sorry, Evee. I’m really sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. And I didn’t mean to imply that … that … um—”
“That I’m useless right now?” Evelyn finished for me.
“No! No, Evee, you’re not—”
“Yes I am.” She snorted, gesturing at the inert magic circles scrawled on the front of the nearby lockers. “I can’t do anything but run my mouth and complain, whining when I should be quiet. I’m a fucking cripple in a wheelchair right now, Heather.”
“Don’t— Evee, don’t use that word for yourself!”
“What word?” She almost sneered. “Cripple? Crip? Lame? One-legged? I’ll call myself whatever I like, thank you very much.”
“I … o-okay. Okay.” I averted my eyes, with no idea what to say. “I don’t have any right to tell you otherwise. That’s fair.”
A moment of deeply uncomfortable silence passed between us. I stared at the way the fake moonlight dusted the floor tiles. The scent of old chlorine and sweat-stained clothes lingered in the air. The Saye Fox made sleepy little breathing sounds as she napped. At least one of us was relaxed and calm.
Evelyn swallowed, loudly. “Sorry.”
My eyes went wide. Evelyn Saye did not apologise easily. “Evee?”
She was staring into her own lap. “I’m sorry, Heather. I’m taking this out on you. I … ”
I waited. Evelyn had the right to say anything she wanted, especially as she’d apologised.
Eventually she lifted her other hand — thin and bony, her muscles wasted, her skin sallow and pale, like something which had been locked in the dark for months — and let it flop into her lap.
“I can’t deal with this,” she murmured. Her breath hitched in her throat.
“Deal with what?”
Evelyn wet her lips with a flicker of her tongue. She shifted her shoulders, kinked and uneven beneath her grey dressing gown. She couldn’t even sit straight, her spine was so lopsided with chronic pain and slow damage.
“I used to have nightmares about this,” she said quietly. “For years after Raine and I killed my mother. Has she … ” Evelyn’s eyes slid sideways, approaching mine without making contact. “Has Raine never told you about that?”
I shook my head. “She may have referred to that in passing, but no, not in any kind of detail.”
Evelyn nodded. Her throat bobbed, throat dry and scratchy. “I used to have nightmares that my mother was still alive. Or that she’d come back from the dead. Or that I’d never met Raine, that she’d never climbed over the garden wall and snuck into my bedroom. And I would be back in that chair. Or … or somewhere worse. Tied to a table ready to have another limb hacked off. Things like that.”
Evee trailed off. I squeezed her hand, very gently. “Evee.”
“But that’s not the worst part.” She finally turned her eyes to look right at me. Haunted pits, fringed with the whites of her sclerae. “I still have nightmares. About this.” She plucked at the fabric of her white t-shirt, lifting it away from her malnourished body, the concave pit of her stomach, her protuberant ribcage. “Even over the last year, living with you and Raine, with Praem. After everything, all the ways my life has gotten better, I still have nightmares where I’m wasting away to nothing. Rotting. Skin and bones. Nightmares where she’s in control again, where she’s shaping me for her purposes. Where I don’t belong to myself.”
Her voice shook so badly, punctuated by little panting breaths. Her eyes were bulging. Sweat broke out on her forehead.
“Evee, it’s all a dream, I promise it’s a dream, I promise it isn’t real.”
“It feels real,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “I want my body back. Mine. The one I worked for, the one I took from her! It’s mine! Not hers!”
“I’m going to free us,” I said, struggling to keep my own voice level. “I promise. Whatever did this, however this works, I am going to put an end to this. I promise you.”
Evelyn swallowed again, rough and raw, as if trying to control herself. She heaved a sigh, then sagged into the embrace of her wheelchair. Her rage was spent, her energy along with it.
I simply held her hand for a while, trying to ignore my own anxiety, trying not to feel the dark pressing against my back, between my shoulder blades.
Beyond our little hidey-hole, Cygnet Asylum was totally quiet. No tell-tale shouts and screams echoed down the corridors, not like the distant noises of the previous night, when I had woken alone in my residential room. The aftermath of the riot somehow sharpened the silence.
Eventually I said: “Evee, will you help me figure out what’s going on here?”
Evelyn looked up again, squinting — though with professional curiosity now, not inner torment. Her stomach let out a gurgle of hunger. “You mean with this dream? This whole bloody place?”
“Yes. Before this all started, before I woke up in bed, I think I did something, with brain-math. Or the Eye did something. Or we … cancelled each other out. It’s hard to explain.”
I did the best I could to explain my fragmented, metaphorical memories of the moment the Eye had attempted to squeeze itself shut and stop observing us, stop observing Wonderland, or stop observing itself. I could barely put it into words; the images were not images, but simply impressions of the vaguest kind, drawn from the raw mathematics and metaphysical movements of reality. I told Evee about holding the waters asunder, about Sevens stepping in to weave meaning into madness, and about forcing the Eye wide with a spear of thought.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
When I finished, I lapsed back into the uselessness of speculation: “I’ve been thinking about it all day. Or rather, all however long this has actually been. Lozzie isn’t fully lucid, not like you, so she couldn’t help with any insight, even though she’s had more experience with dreams. I don’t know what’s going on here, on the metaphysical level.”
Evelyn snorted. “The metaphysics? Heather, your guess is as good as mine. I’m a mage, which means I know how to draw the special shapes to make people’s heads explode. I haven’t the foggiest what is going on here. We may as well be plugged into a big virtual reality machine, as far as I’m concerned. Die in the game and you die in real life, and all that. Stupid trope. Always hated that one. Lazy bullshit.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe I want to hear your guess. Maybe your guess is valuable to me. Maybe I’m all guessed out and need other guesses, because I can’t think of anything else. Or maybe your guess will be ever so slightly more informed than mine. Please, Evee. I trust you. I want your judgement. It’ll help me. You’ll help me.”
Evelyn averted her eyes and cleared her throat; she must have known exactly what I was doing, because I wasn’t exactly being subtle about my technique. I really did want her guess, her input, whatever she had to offer. But I also wanted to make her feel useful.
She ran her tongue over her teeth and sighed through her nose, then said: “I think you’re right to call it a ‘dream’, whatever exactly that means in a metaphysical sense.”
“And why’s that?” I asked.
Evelyn gestured at the inert magic circles on the locker — collections of meaningless black lines and snatches of Latin. “These don’t work. That doesn’t make any sense, Heather, it’s elemental stuff. Even that little trick I was muttering back in the horrible room with those nurses didn’t work, and that was one of the most simple things I could think of. Magic simply doesn’t work here, but that is a contradiction in terms. There is no ‘here’ where magic could theoretically not work. In some places Outside, magic might work differently, but it’s still going to work if we perform the necessary actions. Magic is like … ” She huffed and waved a hand. “Oh, I hate pulling these metaphors out of my arse, but magic is like cheat codes for reality. It reaches beneath the layers of what we experience, and jabs at the hidden controls. Same with your self-implementing hyperdimensional mathematics, Heather, just clumsier. Magic and maths are both broken, here. There is absolutely no way you could rewrite reality to the extent that such things just plain didn’t work. Unless you’re some kind of god and we’re in a new universe running on different rules. That I seriously doubt. No.” She took a deep breath and sat straighter in her wheelchair, chin raised. “Physics is broken. Therefore, this is not reality. This is a dream.”
I nodded along. “That does make sense. Evee, can I ask you to do something for me?”
“Mm? What?”
“Look out of the window up there, and tell me what you see?”
Evelyn squinted at me with vague suspicion, then turned her head and looked out of the high, narrow window on the far wall. “I see outdoors. I see the Eye, just wrinkles filling the sky. A bit hard to make out in this moonlight, to be fair.” She turned back to me. “Is that all?”
“Okay,” I said with mounting hope. “So you can see the Eye. Nobody else can. Not Raine, not Lozzie, none of the patients as far as I can tell. They just see the sky, or they think it’s the sky. But … Evee … is it … is it night time? As in, right now?”
Evelyn squinted harder. “Just spit it out, for pity’s sake.”
I surrendered. “Evee, night fell in the space of about twenty minutes. And it can’t have been even six hours since breakfast! There’s no way it’s time for night. The day was short. Raine didn’t react to that. Neither did you.”
“Hmm,” Evelyn grunted. She squinted at me again, but now she was taking this seriously. “I have very little memory for time, before you ‘woke me up’. It just made sense to me, that this was the end of the day.”
“But it’s not. It’s definitely not. Trust me.”
Evelyn shook her head. “I do trust you, Heather. But no, it still makes perfect sense.”
I blinked several times. My stomach dropped. Was Evee not fully awake, not fully free, even after I’d murdered the memory of her mother? “What does that mean exactly?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Think about it,” Evelyn said slowly. She rolled her shoulders back as best she could, dropping into the comfortable tone of the learned teacher. I let that pass without comment. Evelyn deserved all the comfort in identity she could get right then.
“I have thought about it,” I said gently. “What am I missing?”
“This whole place is a dream. A metaphor. A narrative, right? What are we doing, right now? You and I, Heather, what are we doing?”
“ … having a conversation?”
“Tch, no,” Evee tutted. She gestured around the room, at the narrow gap between the two rows of lockers, our dark and private canyon. “Here, in this room. We’re hiding, yes? After a shocking amount of violence, in the aftermath of a riot, so on and so forth. Night has fallen because we’re narratively ‘done for the day’. The narrative has changed to fit our actions, not the other way around.”
“Oh.” I frowned and sucked on my teeth, thinking about that concept. “That does make a kind of sense. I suppose.”
“Of course it does,” Evelyn scoffed. “You and Sevens made this place, somehow, to resist or redefine whatever the Eye was doing. My theory? This is still Wonderland. But now it’s a story, a narrative, written on the surface of reality, with Sevens’ nature as the engine.” She laughed. “And it’s you, Heather, it’s your way of looking at the world. Everything is stories, literature. We’re lucky you’re such an avid reader, rather than, I don’t know, a big fan of violent games. We’d be in for a much worse time.”
I frowned. “Well, actually, if that was the case, couldn’t we just shoot everything? I feel like that logic would be easier!”
“Hm,” Evelyn grunted. “Maybe. Anyway, this means you’re right, probably, about clapping our hands and believing. So.” She cleared her throat. “Raine is going to return. I guarantee it. She’s never failed me before. Don’t listen when I turn into a pessimistic bitch.”
“Right,” I said, feeling a lump in my throat. “Raine is coming back. No question about it. But … don’t call yourself names, Evee.”
Evelyn smirked. “I’ll call myself whatever I want. I’m in the story too, aren’t I? Maybe that’s the trick, maybe if we find Sevens, we can just rewrite things directly. After all, you already summoned … the … ” Evelyn trailed off, paused, and cleared her throat. “The King in Yellow.”
What little colour Evelyn possessed drained from her face. She suddenly went quiet, all her animation dying away.
“I didn’t even know that would work,” I said. “I had no idea what he was going to do. I really must thank him, somehow. I hope he’s alright.”
Evelyn took a deep breath, visibly trying to rouse herself. “Yes, well. I still can’t quite get over the fact you did that. Dealing with this dream is one thing, accepting the … the ‘King in Yellow’ is another.” Evelyn squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I can still feel the logic of the dream at the back of my head, like a second set of memories. Like a lurking nightmare I haven’t quite shrugged off.”
“None of this is real, Evee,” I tried to reassure her. “You have to try to hold onto that.”
Evelyn’s eyes flew open. “Oh, on the contrary, Heather. I think we have to embrace it.”
“Ah? What do you mean?”
Evelyn jabbed a finger toward her inactive magic circles. Her lips flickered with a nasty grin. “I cannot do magic. Why? Because I haven’t fulfilled the necessary narrative conditions. You know what I think I need, in order to be a mage again?”
“A magical tome?” I ventured. The look on Evelyn’s face was unsettling and impressive at the same time, like standing before a growing fire.
Evelyn shook her head. “No. I need my mother’s corpse.”
“O-oh.”
“I need to desecrate her body. Take off a leg, remove the skin, the tendons, the meat. Carve myself a new wand from one of her thigh-bones. She tried to take my flesh, so I will take hers and use it as a tool, all over again.”
I put a hand to my mouth. “You can’t be serious. Evee, is that … is that where your bone wand came from?”
“I am deadly serious, Heather.” Evelyn started to hiss with low, dark laughter. “It makes narrative sense, doesn’t it? She’s dead, the memory is defeated. But I’m still like this, still emaciated, still in her grip, still under her control. I need to re-purpose her. Use her up. I need access to her corpse, and a good butcher’s knife. I’ll do it myself if I have to, down on my elbows and my fucking stump.”
“Evee—”
“Don’t you get squeamish about this!” Evelyn snapped. “This is your fault too, Heather. This whole place has the logic of a story, of literature! You helped build it! Don’t turn away from what I need, do not!”
A cold certainty swept through me, a knowledge that in the end I would do whatever Evelyn needed. I loved her too much to do otherwise. I would gut her mother’s corpse with my bare hands if I had to.
I nodded, just once. “I’m sorry, Evee. Yes. Of course. If we can access your mother’s corpse again, I promise we’ll—”
Click.
Somebody or something had just opened the door to the locker room.
Evelyn and I both went silent. Sweat broke out on my face and down my back. Evelyn gripped the armrests of her wheelchair, knuckles turning white on her unbandaged hand. The Saye Fox rose from her comfortable coiled nap, hopping up to her paws, careful not to tap against the wooden bench with her claws; her ears were perked straight up, her little black nose sniffing the air.
We waited, heartbeats racing, for Raine to give the signal.
But none came.
Instead, a slow, dragging, uneven tread slapped against the locker room floor tiles, like a melted elephant’s foot sliding deeper into the room. The door clicked shut behind our uninvited guest. The heavy, clomping footsteps trudged away from the door and the shower stalls, moving toward the rows of lockers, heading for our hiding place.
Evelyn’s eyes were wide with panic. She was shaking all over. I shot to my feet — big mistake, as a spike of pain radiated upward from the wound on my left shin; I had to bite my lips to hold back a scream, my eyes filling with tears. I cast about, desperate to do something, suddenly feeling helpless.
I had no weapon, no tentacles, no brain-math, and no Raine.
The dragging footsteps stopped. A moist and clotted wheezing echoed off the walls, like buckets of mucus trapped in rotten lungs.
A snort — phlegm sucked back down a sticky throat — and the dragging footsteps resumed, then stopped again.
Whatever it was, it was checking between the rows of lockers.
The Saye Fox moved first; she hopped down off the benches and scurried to the end of the row, in the opposite direction to where our unwanted observer was doing her rounds. I darted to Evelyn’s wheelchair, grabbed the handles without asking, and then pushed her as quickly as I dared, following the Fox. I winced at the near-imperceptible sound of the wheels moving against the tiles. I prayed that the nurse — or whatever that thing was — could not hear the whisper of rubber wheels over the sound of its own ragged breathing.
The Fox darted into the next row — the final one before the wall, with a bank of lockers facing nothing but whitewashed plaster. I pushed Evelyn after the Fox, just far enough so we were no longer visible from the mouth of the row we had just occupied.
Our only chance was to hide in the blind spot, and then move back again. The timing had to be split-second perfect.
Evelyn was shaking, hissing jerky little breaths through her nose as she tried not to panic. I put one hand on her shoulder, as gently as I could. The Fox waited at my feet — then, to my surprise, she leapt up and into Evelyn’s lap.
Evee strangled a yelp, showing it only as a vibration in her shoulders. But the Fox didn’t seem to be causing her any pain. The creature settled down in Evelyn’s lap, ears still pointed and alert, eyes wide, staring off toward the oncoming footsteps.
Drag-drag drrrraaaaaag-scrape. Drag-drag scrrrrrrape, went the intruder.
It stopped, very close, presumably peering into the row we had just occupied. The wet and wheezy breathing intensified, as if the thing was growing agitated, or struggling to suck enough air into its ragged lungs.
Sweat prickled down the back of my neck and across my scalp. My left shin burned with pain, throbbing upward with a spider web of dull agony. My timing had to be perfect. Both Evelyn and the Fox had placed their trust in me.
Draaaaag—
It was moving, to look into the final row!
I pulled back on the wheelchair, easing us out of the final row, back into the one we had previously occupied, trying to keep the row of lockers between us and our pursuer.
It worked — I didn’t even see the thing.
The footsteps stopped again. The intruder stared down that final row, wheezing like a pair of bellows filled with swamp water. I waited, holding my breath. Evelyn swallowed, loud in the silence.
Our unseen pursuer turned and started back the way it had come — draaaag-scrape. I eased Evelyn’s wheelchair back into the end row again as it passed by, just in case it paused, or turned to look, or saw us in its peripheral vision.
But it didn’t. Those dragging footsteps receded down the row of lockers. Clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp.
The door went click — then clack.
The moist breathing vanished along with the footsteps.
Evelyn’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, her eyes blazing with warning. She pressed a finger to her lips and nodded in the direction of the door.
I nodded back; I knew exactly what she meant. What if the thing was faking? What if it was standing right there, waiting for us to make an unwary sound?
Leaving Evelyn alone with the Fox in her lap, I crept along the back wall of the locker room, shin throbbing with every step, yellow blanket pulled tight around my shoulders. With my heart in my throat and my skin drenched in cold sweat, I paused at the end of the locker area and slowly eased one eye around the edge of the first row.
The door was shut. The shower stalls were unoccupied. All was dark and silent.
Whatever that had been, it was gone.
I scurried back to Evelyn as fast as I could, limping on my wound leg. “It’s gone!” I hissed. “It’s gone, it’s gone, we’re clear! Evee, we’re clear, we’re okay!”
Evelyn let out a huge, shuddering breath. She looked like she wanted to cry, covered in cold sweat, quivering all over. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. For a moment I was about to reach out and hold her somehow, despite the wheelchair. But then the Fox nudged her snout against Evelyn’s arm.
Slowly, hesitating with uncertainty, Evelyn put her hands on the Fox’s back.
The Fox settled into her lap. Evelyn stroked her russet fur, surprised and confused.
“Well,” I said. “That was … that was horrible.”
“Yes,” Evelyn hissed between clenched teeth. “I wish we had a gun. Or better, working magic.”
“We should try to settle back down,” I said, moving to sit on the bench again. “Maybe if—”
Click!
I almost screamed, shooting back to my feet and clutching at my chest. Evelyn bristled in her chair. I whirled back toward the door, eyes wide, ready to grasp Evelyn’s wheelchair again, ready to—
“It’s me!” came a ridiculous stage-whisper, floating over the lockers. “The baddest dyke in all the land! And I come bearing gifts!”
“Raine!” I almost whimpered her name.
In a few quick paces she was upon us. Raine stepped around the corner of our secluded little locker-canyon with a fabric shopping bag in one hand, a bundle of towels slung over her opposite shoulder, and a smug, shit-eating smirk plastered across her face. She had more than earned the right to look as self-satisfied as she liked. She was grinning like the sun.
“Heather, Evee,” she purred. “Sweet thing. Lady Saye. Good to see you both. Missed me?”
“About fucking time!” Evelyn snapped.
“Raine!” I said, barely holding myself back from flying into her already occupied arms. “Raine, oh my goodness, we thought you were something else, something back to hunt us again. Are you okay, are you safe?”
“More than safe, I’m doing just fine.” Raine shot me a wink. “Look who I found.”
A flutter of pentacolour pastel poncho flittered out from behind the end of the row of lockers and bobbed into place at Raine’s side, followed by a wave of greasy blonde hair framing a sneaky little smile.
“Ta-daaaaa!” said Lozzie, wiggling her fingers. Her eyes lit up with mischievous light. “Heathy! And Evee-weevey, too!”
“Lozzie,” Evelyn said with a sigh. “Good to see you. Yes. Very good.”
“Lozz! You’re safe!” I said.
I almost moved forward to hug her, but I restrained myself at the last moment. I couldn’t help but notice how Raine had positioned herself in just the right way to stop Lozzie and I coming into direct contact, just in case. Lozzie still reeked of that ineffable predatory aura. I didn’t care anymore. She was just our Lozzie, however she was acting.
“Safe and soundy and stuffed with silly!” Lozzie chirped.
“What happened?” I said. “I mean, Lozzie, what did you do earlier? You caused a riot! How did you—”
“Woah, woah,” Raine said, stepping forward to set her haul down on the wooden bench. She kept herself positioned between Lozzie and me the whole time. “Slow down, sweet thing. We can talk about the past in a second. We need to get provisions distributed first. We might not be safe here. Might have to move soon. Focus first, talk later.”
“Yah-yaaaaah!” Lozzie chirped. “Weird night time wanderers out there! Scary scary.”
“I’m sorry?” I said, backing up to give Raine room, even as I reached out to touch her shoulder.
She put the shopping bag down on the bench and hefted the towels off her shoulder, dumping them alongside. Raine lost her grin. “Corridors are full of weird shit,” she said, dead serious. “As soon as night fell, it was like a switch got flicked. All those nurses, all those doctors, they don’t look so friendly in the dark.”
“Yes!” Evelyn snapped. “One of them came in here! We had to hide! We need a better hiding place if we’re going to risk sleep, Raine! We cannot stay here.”
My eyes went wide with realisation. “I saw them! The first night I was here! The morning, I mean! I think I saw them, outside in the corridor. They peered in through my bedroom window. Those were nurses?”
Raine shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but I think so.”
“I saw it happen!” Lozzie chirped, hopping forward. Raine allowed her closer. She flashed a grin at all of us, sleepy-eyed and predatory in her movements. Evelyn squinted at her; was she having trouble picking up on Lozzie’s dream-aura? Lozzie said: “Saw the nurses go all funny funky.”
“So,” Raine said. “We need to prep, in case we need to move.” She reached for the shopping bag, then paused, turned, and took a step toward me.
Suddenly Raine was in my face, looming overhead, filling the shadowy moonlit air.
“R-Raine?” I squeaked.
“You haven’t said it,” she purred, unsmiling. “I can’t keep prompting you, Heather.”
“I … said what? S-sorry?”
Raine placed a hand against the lockers, boxing me in. “You know what.”
Evelyn muttered: “Oh for pity’s sake. Is now really the time? Do this later!”
Lozzie just gasped, like she had a front row seat to a very exciting show.
“I-I-I—” I stammered, overwhelmed. “R-Raine, you’re scaring me a little bit—”
“You didn’t say it earlier, either,” she purred, voice dropping lower and lower. “Okay, fair enough, I was freeing Lady Saye, not you. But still, you gotta throw me a bone or two, sweet thing. I can’t live off bread and water alone, you gotta—”
“Good girl!” I blurted out as I realised. “Good girl! Good girl, Raine. You’re such a good girl.”
“Rrrrrr, that’s right.” Raine broke back into a smile, grinning down at me. She smelled of sweat and iron and unwashed flesh. She eased back, giving me some air. “Don’t stop there.”
I reached up and ran one hand through Raine’s hair, raking my fingernails gently along the rear of her scalp. She closed her eyes and let out a breathy grunt, hard enough to make me blush.
“Good girl,” I muttered again. “You’re my very good girl, Raine. Thank you for getting all this stuff for us. Thank you, thank you for risking it, thank you for coming back. Good girl. I love you.”
“‘Course I came back,” Raine purred. “Couldn’t miss this. Love you too. Mmmmm-mmmmmmmm.”
Lozzie had both hands to her mouth, a naughty look in her eyes. “Woooow, Heathy,” she whispered. “Wow wow!”
Evelyn huffed. “Can we please focus on the supplies, not the mating ritual? I’m about to start gnawing off my other leg here if I don’t get some food in the next sixty seconds. Food. Now.”
Raine pulled herself from my ministrations and shot Evee a wink. “Whatever you say, Lady Saye.”
“Tch!” Evee tutted. “Bad pun. Down, girl.”
The fabric shopping bag contained plenty of food for all four of us — mostly bread rolls, pre-packaged sandwiches, a few bags of crisps, and a veritable armful of sweets, chocolate rolls, cupcakes, and other assorted confectionery. Raine claimed to have raided some sort of staff room, though her haul of goodies could easily have been shoplifted from a Tesco Express. Within ten seconds, Lozzie had a bread roll stuffed in her mouth and Evee was tearing into a BLT. Raine shook out the innards of a beef sandwich for the Fox, who happily jumped down to the floor to scarf up the meat. I hadn’t felt particularly hungry until the smell of food hit me, but when it did I found my hands shaking and my gut clenching with ravenous need. Raine pressed a prawn sandwich into my hands — “It’s got lemon juice in it, closest thing we got,” — then made sure I sat down and started eating.
She’d also snagged a roll of Peperami — those preserved pork sticks I remembered from childhood, an authentic slice of the real Cygnet poking through from my memories. “Reserved for Zheng,” Raine explained as she shoved them back in the bag. “She needs meat, right?”
“We could feed her a nurse!” Lozzie chirped around a mouthful of bread roll. “Fresh and wriggling!”
“That too,” Raine shot back with a wink. “But just in case we can’t catch one.”
Raine had also secured herself a proper weapon — one which made my eyes bulge from my head as she drew it from the bag. No wonder she hadn’t been carrying it when she’d walked in, the thing was massive. She drew the blade from a fabric scabbard, naked black metal glinting in the moonlight.
Evelyn almost choked on her mouthful of bread and bacon. “Fucking hell, Raine! Be careful with that, you’re liable to take off your own arm.”
Raine cracked a very satisfied grin and held up her new sword, sighting down the blade like it was a gun. “Nice, right?” She spun it over her hand — a significantly more impressive feat than twirling a little plastic kitchen utensil. She caught it again with a flourish. “Wish I’d had something like this earlier. I would have cut through those nurses like nothing.”
“What … ” I cleared my throat. “Raine, what exactly is that?”
“A machete,” she said, slipping the massive knife back into the sheath. There was no belt or clasp, so she was going to have to carry the thing in her hands. “Brand new, by the looks of it. Maker’s mark is in Chinese. Razor edge on one side, saw-teeth on the back. Perfect weapon.”
I swallowed. “Uh, good girl, yes. Well done.”
A change of clothes had been much harder to obtain. Raine had found a jumper for me — a vile looking thing in cream-brown, the colour of cold coffee with too much milk. It smelled of medical alcohol and had a huge hole beneath the left armpit, but I wriggled it on over my head, hugging myself in the increased warmth after I wrapped my yellow blanket back around my shoulders. Raine also dispensed new socks — one pair for me, one pair for Evee — and a scarf, for whoever wanted it. Evelyn accepted that, for now.
“This is all very eclectic,” Evelyn grunted. “Where did you get it?”
“Your room,” Raine said with a subtle grin.
“My … ” Evelyn blinked. “My what, sorry? My room?”
“Your residential room,” Raine said. “I snuck into one of the record offices, during all the commotion out there, so I could look up your name and find your room. The jumper, the scarf, the socks. It’s all yours. The machete was under the bed. Weird, right?”
“Why? What possessed you to do that?” Evelyn’s eyes lit up with savage hope as she realised. “Did you find my leg? My walking stick? My wand?!”
“Call it a hunch,” Raine said. She was grinning with anticipation, enjoying this a little too much. “A hunch which paid off. Here, I believe this belongs to you.”
Raine reached into the fabric shopping bag; for a moment I assumed she was going to pull out a crumbling tome or a piece of rolled-up canvas with a magic circle on it. There wasn’t enough room left in the bag for Evelyn’s prosthetic, however cathartic that may have been.
Raine extracted a bundle of cloth, black and white and blonde, all lace and frills and fluff. She placed it in Evelyn’s lap.
It was a plushie — of Praem.
Praem, Evelyn’s demon-maid daughter, reduced to a twentieth of her real size, cast in felt and cotton. The head was a ball of fabric topped by a mass of fluffy blonde hair. The eyes were flat disks of stitching, along with a line for a mouth and little flaps for ears. She was dressed in a miniature maid uniform, perfect in every detail. Stubby arms stuck out from little frilly sleeves, ending in flat nubs instead of hands. Stumpy legs emerged from beneath a long skirt, terminating in coloured fabric to represent her shoes.
“Praem?” Evelyn whispered, wide eyed, very still. “It’s … is it—”
“She doesn’t move or speak,” Raine said. “She’s just a doll, as far as I can tell. If that’s the real Praem, or an essential component of the prison guard downstairs, I’ve got no way to tell.”
Evelyn swallowed, unable to tear her eyes from the dream-imitation of Praem. Carefully, with one shaking hand, she tucked the plush toy tight against her lap. “Where did you find her?” she asked.
“Sitting on your bed,” said Raine. “Like she was waiting for us.”
Evelyn nodded slowly. “Alright. Alright. Okay. Maybe … ”
“Maybe if we reunite the doll with Night Praem?” I suggested.
Evelyn nodded. All the spite and spittle had gone out of her, replaced with cold determination. “My thoughts exactly. We have to try.”
Raine cleared her throat. “Ladies, right now, we gotta eat, refuel, and rest. We ain’t going far at night, not with the heebies-jeebies patrolling the corridors.” She gestured at the towels she’d dumped on the wooden bench. “Those are for sleeping on, ‘cos face it, we’re probably holding up here overnight, or at least in a nearby room with a lock on the door.”
“Not meeeeeee!” Lozzie chirped. “I got plans!”
“You have?” I asked, frowning. I was still struggling to take all this in. The Praem doll didn’t seem quite real, and now Lozzie was heading off somewhere?
“Yeah,” Raine confirmed. “Lozzie’s got shooters out there, girls from the riot, people she wants to see if she can free, or help.”
“Gotta keep my promises!” said Lozzie. “That’s how you run a movement!”
“Maybe we can help too,” I said. “We do need to plan, we desperately need a coherent plan for the next day. We need to work together, not scatter in different directions. Lozzie, will you at least stay to talk about that? And tell us what you did earlier, how you started that incredible riot. It might be useful if we can—”
Click, went the door to the locker room.
Raine whirled and drew her new machete in one smooth motion. Lozzie was suddenly holding her dirty little metal shiv in one tight fist. I clapped my hands to my mouth, backing away to shelter Evelyn. The Fox hopped back into Evee’s lap, alongside the Praem plushie. Evelyn swallowed a barely chewed mouthful of sandwich.
Tap-tap-tap went sudden, smart, sharp little footsteps.
“And the players retire to the wings for the evening, is it?” said a soft and melodious voice, drawing closer with every tapping step. “With the show over, the curtain down, the lights out, and the audience departed.”
“Oh!” I said with a huge sigh of relief, waving at Raine and Lozzie to lower their weapons. “It’s okay, it’s okay! It’s him!”
“Ahhhh,” Raine said, relaxing her shoulders and sliding her weapon away. “I was hoping to meet the man.”
“Who?” Lozzie squinted at me.
“The King,” I said. “The King in Yellow. Raine, did you tell Lozzie what happened? Please, Lozzie, don’t—”
“Don’t what, indeed?” said that slow and sinuous voice. “Don’t interrupt the playwright while he is giving direction to his actors? Don’t pre-empt the scene before it is penned? Don’t pull your punches, lest the conflict fail to excite?”
Lozzie lowered her shiv. “Ooooooooh!” She sounded rather excited.
The King did not.
Something in his tone was wrong.
He tapped closer, feet ringing against the floor; was that metal, clicking on the tiles? I realised with growing trepidation that he was clinking as he walked. As if he was dressed in steel.
He was almost upon us. A shadow loomed at the end of the row of lockers — a shadow which should not have been there, since the moonlight did not fall at such an angle.
“Tell me, errant players upon the stage to which I have been so roughly invited,” he said in that once-soft tone, now growing with tremors most terrible. “Tell me. Unfold to me. Expound upon the point. Illustrate for the elucidation of this poor mummer.”
“Tell you what?” Raine shot back.
The shadow climbed the wall. The King’s shade was ten feet tall.
“Tell me,” he said, voice gone cold. “Where oh where is my darling daughter?”