In my profession, you don’t get the luxury of a slow awakening. To depend on coffee and the irregularly-present sunlight is to leave yourself open to far too much danger—tired eyes are but the gasp of a predator rolling over to show its belly, relying upon sympathy or morality to save its life. And there was a damn lack of sympathy and morality in the circles I moved in.

I sat up like a shot and slammed my head against a beam set into the ceiling. Black spots danced in my vision and pounded into the back of my head like nails. I groaned, or I think I did. My voice ground against the back of my throat and I couldn’t hear it make a sound. There was a strange tightness around my stomach, something hard and digging into the skin. It might have been my arm except I felt my arm dangling onto the ground. I might feel like I’d been dismantled and put back together like a doll but I was pretty sure I knew where all my parts were.

The air smelled like hospital. The barren kind. No flowers, nothing to lighten the mood. I grit my teeth. I knew who that signified.

I flexed my fingers until the feeling returned to them. I reached up and felt my face. Tender around the cheekbones, with bruises that pulled the skin tight and cuts which had clotted and scabbed over. At least a day, then. My mouth was dry and tasted like soap, with a sort of crusted gritty tang against my teeth that wouldn’t come off even when I ran my tongue against it.

As I blinked, rubbing the sand from my eyes, the room came into focus. There was a single bare bulb stuck into the ceiling, with the kind of wire mesh they use to trap birds covering it. A trapped sun in a cage, throwing out heat and light and burning you if you looked at too long. The walls were bare and streaked with water damage, the tiles warped and cracked at their corners. Fresh paint made it all brighter, all highly saturated, like an overexposed photograph, but it couldn’t hide the way it was rundown and sinking slowly. The bed I sat in was pushed up against the corner—not regulation, then. Usher had let me know. Nurses and doctors needed to be able to get you from every angle.

The room had no window. No sunlight and no storm except what the light could provide. For a moment I thought there might not be a door, that the twists and turns of logic within a dream had abandoned me in this room with no way in and no way out. Then I saw it—an outline, set back into the wall, which had eluded me because the handle had been removed from this side.

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There was another bed slotted into the opposite corner. It might have been bolted there. The sheets were perfectly fitted and there was a loose belt hanging from its side, but the bed itself was empty. I sat up further: it was the same kind of belt keeping me pressed in the bend, ratcheted tight but not locked. I fumbled with the strap for a moment with undexterous fingers and undid it.

My jacket was gone. They’d left me a sickly green paper gown with nothing in the pockets. It was rough and cheap and there were flecks of wood in the material that rubbed against my back. My shoes were at the foot of the bed, upside-down and with the laces undone. I picked one up and turned it over in my hands, trying to figure out why the weight felt wrong. Maybe it was this place. Everything felt wrong here and I couldn’t tell what would make it right. I didn’t even know where I was, except that it was still the Outscape.

It hurt a little more, now. I’d seen outside the Outscape. I remembered, beyond empty words, that there was a world out there. And I couldn’t get back to it.

I stood up, leaving my shoes to sit. There were bruises mottled along my legs, and my muscles burned with the effort. Jabberwock had done a number on me—I wondered what I’d looked like in its throes, how much Fletcher had been telling the truth about what it looked like. Had I really been that much of a danger to myself, that I needed to be strapped down? Or was that just another method to try and keep me prisoner here? How honest had she been with Robin and I?

Robin…

Damn! She was gone. She’d run off like a fool and now she was lost in the back alleys of the city somehow. “Damn!” I repeated, aloud now. My voice was shot. “Damn, damn, damn! Why can it never be so easy?”

This wasn’t what a hangover felt like. This wasn’t the burnout of too many cigarettes, where the smoke had sat too long in your throat and settled into the phlegm and mucus and infused it with detritus. Everything felt…burned out, scoured, as though my veins and nerves had been lit alight with incandescent fire, and now I was left with the soot and char afterwards. I spat onto the ground, staining the burnished tiles.

Robin would have to wait. She would have to survive on her own…or not. She’d made the decision to abandon me—not that I was in any better state at the moment—and I couldn’t help her until I’d managed to help myself. To get out of this place, whatever it was.