I slept. I woke. I slept again. All without dreaming, all without falling back into those memories that Jabberwock had provided. Despite the taste stubbornly clinging to my tongue, the last remnants must have lost their sting. I gained a personal familiarity with the walls, memorizing every line and every pockmark in their padded beige surface like I might the freckles on a friend’s face. A day or two must have ticked over like that without my knowing. The hours blurred together, a morass of time undistinguished from itself.
I wanted a cigarette.
Was this the plan? I wondered. They must have known I would never tell them anything if I occupied my right mind—was the plan, then, to drive me out of it like a landlord with an eviction order? Did they mean the solitude to leave me mad?
The worst of it was the light. It stayed on, humming just below the register of what I could hear but setting my nerves on edge. Even when I shut my eyes, the red-orange glare seeped its way through and colored the inside of my eyelids. I would have smashed it but for the cage which surrounded it, upon which my fingers and nails could do nothing but scrabble.
You shouldn’t stare at the sun. They tell you not to, I knew well enough not to. But what about when the sun was the only damn thing in the room? I tried time and time again to turn my face away, to lie face-down on the bed so that it couldn’t drag my gaze back…and every time, after I’d counted a few dozen breaths and barely a few minutes, I’d find myself glancing at it again, burning my eyes a little more. If this went on too much longer I’d burn all the way through to my skull…and the light would still be on. Still buzzing.
I was somewhere in the middle of that endless cycle, going insane as Arcadia surely wanted me to, when the door was pulled open. Fletcher again, still in her doctor’s coat—but the white was smeared with a rusty red around the shoulders and up the collar. She looked nervous, and not because of me. I could barely regain my legs and stumble to my feet, running a hand through my hair as if it could fix it. “What’s going on?” I said, and my voice cracked on the words from disuse. “What are you here for? I’m not going to give you anything.”
“We’re not here for that,” Fletcher said curtly.
“Then what can you be here for?”
“Encouragement,” she said. “Something to think about. Arcadia’s orders.”
So she was already disavowing them, shoving the blame. She wanted me to pin this on Arcadia and not on her. Despite myself, I grinned at the vote of confidence—if she was that worried about me, I couldn’t be as powerless as I felt. “Oh, a surprise,” I said. “Wonderful. How many guesses do I get before you give it away? Three? Five? Or should I be asking for clues instead?”
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Fletcher grimaced. She raised a hand to her shoulder and tried to flick off the blood. “No surprises,” she said. “No guesses. Arcadia wants you to see so that you have…” Her lip curled, and I could hear the quotations, “a more visceral reaction.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Two nightmares, with masks covering the lower half of their face and a dull listless look in their eyes, carted a stretcher into the room. They seemed not to be putting in any effort, as though the figure wrapped in white cloth atop it was no more than a mannequin, a stage prop designed to fool the casual onlooker. Both of them wore dark gloves which dripped as they walked. They put the stretcher down in the center of the room and hefted the figure into the other bed. More blood dripped onto the ground as they did so. “You’re getting a roommate,” she said. “Someone to make you think a little harder about that monster. Think about why giving us answers might be the safest option for your stay.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No,” she said. “I am no threat to you here. I just want you healthy. He, on the other hand…”
“What’s his problem?”
Fletcher pressed her finger to her cheek and drew a long, slow line all the way down to her heart, like what a claw might have carved. She lifted her hand into the air and curved her fingers into talons. “He ran up against a nightmare he couldn’t control and couldn’t understand,” she said with strange calm. “All of us might do the same. Monsters care little for our petty factional disputes.”
The figure on the bed didn’t make a sound.
Fletcher withdrew without another word. I waited until she was gone, then slowly approached the bed. The sheets had been a uniform off-white before my roommate’s arrival—now, streaks of crimson already baking to brown under the light were visible. They’d pulled the blankets almost all the way to the top of the bed so that I couldn’t see an inch of skin beneath the bandages. “Hello?” I whispered. “Talk to me. If we’re in the same damn situation we might as well get out of it. I don’t mean to be an example and I doubt you do…”
Still no sound. No motion. I swallowed—I had a nasty feeling about what kind of visceral image Arcadia might have decided to gift me. She and her clawlike hands, teeth sharpened to points and gleaming with silver implants. I bit back anything else I might have said, reached down, and pulled off the blanket, letting it fall abandoned onto the floor in one motion.
Now I really wanted a cigarette.
It was everything I’d seen in the alley. Everything that had torn Chesnes apart. Long, hooked blades had torn him to ribbons, exposing shreds of muscle and shards of bone that had been left to dangle atop his bloody skin. One eye had been gouged out, and the other was wide and bloodshot with fear. His mouth was still open, jaw taut, frozen in a shriek. Clutched in his fingers—no, pressed there, the paper was far too fresh and clean for him to have been holding it this whole time—was a note, folded over and set in dark ink.
I wrenched it free and unfolded it. The handwriting was neat, slanted—I didn’t recognize it. The monster stalks the streets near your office, it read. Now it perches in the alleyways here. Only you are the common factor.
You are hunted, Starling. Discover its cause before it discovers you.