I could still taste the blood. It must have coated my teeth like a strange nail polish, the enamel slick and scarlet. I wondered if any of them thought I was the monster they’d been told would arrive to stalk their halls, with a glistening knife and wild eyes. I didn’t how long it’d been since I’d slept and I didn’t know when I’d get the chance to sleep again. There was a sharp, almost oversaturated edge to the hall around me, as though I were pacing through a television set rather than the physical world, as though none of this were real.

Where was everybody? This should have been a hive, a beating heart of whatever mutated creature Jabberwock was. Yet it was empty, and my footsteps echoed in my ears, solitary and uncertain of themselves. Even the brickwork seemed abandoned, with cracks and ivy running along its length from the inside. I passed a dozen more doors set deep into the walls as mine had been. No sound came from any of them.

They couldn’t have found Robin. If they’d found Robin they wouldn’t have been bothering with me. But she was in a bad spot no matter where she’d gone, for if she’d run off into the city there was no telling who’d find her; and Jabberwock certainly knew who my few allies were. Usher, Conjager… Worst of all the possibility that she’d fallen into Drakon’s hands, that the reason Jabberwock hadn’t retrieved her was because doing so would start an all-out war. In this, Drakon was no better: he would pry Robin apart for all the same reasons, and-

Footsteps. I pressed myself up against the wall, gripping the knife white-knuckled. Two nightmares, both in the same black uniform, walked past. One of them carried a paper with a strangely intricate letterhead, like a chandelier inverted and dripping wax. I couldn’t recognize it, but it looked officious, and Jabberwock had a strictly enforced hierarchy out of which few could break. They had to. There were no laws governing their conduct, nothing they could rely upon. Those at the top, like any skyscraper wobbling in the wind, needed harsh steel braces to keep the foundations in place. Those nightmares could only have gotten the letterhead from one place; and as much as I wanted to escape, I needed to know what was going on.

I waited until they were out of eyeshot and earshot, until the heavy silence had descended again. Then I slunk back the way they had come from, following streaks of red and yellow paint coating the walls. It was strange and out of place, like someone had detonated a circus tent inside. Maybe they had. Clowns and other non-comic nightmares had once been common, back in the days of carnival and traveling entertainers. Since then, they’d faded away, they’d lost their ability to terrify and with it their reason for living…but no one really knew where they’d gone.

Jabberwock had dredged up a host of ancient fears. The new feeding on the old, cannibalizing it like an ouroboros. I eased open another door and stepped into a hall of mirrors, a kaleidoscope that sung with fractured light. Or maybe they’d gone nowhere, I realized. Maybe they’d been hiding here on the outskirts and undersides of the city, and all Jabberwock had done is move into their funhouse. They hadn’t even renovated.

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There was a shout behind me. I turned—it was a horribly familiar shout.

Fletcher limped down the hallway. She had a black metal revolver in her hands and a crazed snarl on her face. A trickle of blood oozed from her arm where I’d cut her, but also from a puncture wound on her neck. Some sort of injection, some sort of injection, but whatever formula she’d used was clearly imperfect: her veins stood out in purple and blue along her face, a vessel had burst behind one eye, and her hands shook violently. She shouted again, but her jaw was still numb and sluggish, and her words were lost in a garble of sound.

Then she raised the gun and took a shot. Only the tremor in her hands kept it from taking me in the neck—the bullet instead zipped past my face, close enough to feel its heat, and shattered a mirror behind me. I cursed. I couldn’t fight her again, especially not now she had range. Before she could get off another shot and correct her aim, I scampered into the mirror maze, hands over my head.

I turned one corner, then another. I ran face-first into a mirror and reeled back. Maybe my nose had started bleeding from the impact, or maybe it was the blood I’d smeared across it. Somewhere behind me, I heard Fletcher’s footsteps stomp inside—I could only hope she was as lost as I.

I held the knife out in front of me. The poison still clung to the blade like film. A dozen versions of myself took the same cautious steps I did, reflected from every direction. If I’d looked monstrous in the hallway, here, in the half-light and angled shadows, I looked mad. I felt mad. The maze seemed to swirl around me, and I couldn’t track my path. I couldn’t have found my way back out again if I’d wanted. Was it right? Was it left? What were my reflections supposed to look like, anyway? I wanted to close my eyes and let it all drop away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of light in one of the mirrors. I dropped to the ground just as another gunshot shattered the glass. “Bastard!” came Fletcher’s voice, distorted and only half-audible. “Kill you forever!”

She was angry enough that her nightmare was barely a flicker. A doctor, a hospital, required control, the fine technique to shape a setting and a narrative and place around an unfortunate dreamer. Other nightmares flared up with anger or strong emotions. Sometimes I wished I had a spreadsheet or an index to keep track of it all, although likely more than half the names would have to be crossed off by now. “We can talk this out,” I said, trying to pitch my voice as though I were further away than in reality. “I said I was sorry for the knife and you’re clearly patched up.”

“It hurts,” she said. “It burns.”

A trickle of light paled against some of my reflections. I followed it as closely as I dared, sticking close to the wall so that I could keep a better view on the winding corridor. I stabbed out at what looked like Fletcher’s back, but it was my own, and the knife clattered against the mirage. The sound was jarringly loud, and I winced.

The light grew. I rounded a corner and saw a door, intricately engraved enough to be important. I took a step toward it, then froze. I’d mistook her for a reflection, at first—but it was clear, as she raised the gun, that this Fletcher was real.