I knew these walls, too. But not like this.

I knew them spattered in blood, the window turned scarlet and opaque, the picture frame tumbled to the ground and smashed. I knew this place in the aftermath of murder, with the smell of death hanging about it and the roof made more claustrophobic by my own fear. But now, Jabberwock had pried open the heady mix of memory and nightmare that preceded it all.

A man sat slumped in a high leather chair, his eyes glassy and unfocused. Even in the dim, smoky half-light, his hair shone with grease and too much product, slicked back so that it spiked out around his ears. The air was thick with an acidic, alcoholic scent that prickled my nose and burned at the back of my throat, wafting in thick, greenish tendrils from toppled bottles on the table. Basil Grier, I knew. Like these walls, I’d never seen him alive—but everything about this night was burned into my memory, imprinted upon it as the first things I could remember.

He snorted in his stupor, breath catching on phlegm. I stared down at him, and felt a burning rage rise in my chest. It was his fault I was here. It was his stupidity, his carelessness, his lust for drug-addled power, that had dragged me into the Outscape.

The dream hadn’t left me my gun, nor my knife. No matter. I could have strangled him where he sat. Wouldn’t that be ironic? He had to die to bring me here—let my own hand kill him this time, even if it was just in a dreamscape. Let it be my own goddamned choice. Let it be suicide and not murder, let it be a choice and not rotten random chance, a roulette wheel which impossibly came up blue.

The door opened.

I looked up from my anger to see a woman, slipping through the half-opened door. A switchblade glittered in her hand, and from the rusty stains creeping up its point, it looked like it had been used recently. She had short hair, tucked up in a neat braid, and she stood in the shadows so that I could hardly tell what color it was. She flicked the knife up and down in her hands, letting it catch and unclip, as though uncertain of herself. Then she shook her head: “No,” she said. “The city will be better off without him. There is no loss to be had by his death.”

“No,” I said. I didn’t even realize I’d spoken aloud until my words echoed in the room. Cold and hollow and useless, like I was speaking to a theater without anybody there to listen. I’d never have done this voluntarily. I didn’t want to remember everything I couldn’t change. “No,” I said again, even more futilely. “Don’t do it, damn you! Don’t you dare-”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

She stepped forward and slit his throat. One swift motion, a line of dark blood following the blade and running down his neck. Grier gasped, but he was still trapped in the nightmare, in my nightmare, and whatever concoction he’d taken wouldn’t let him escape. He spasmed, coughing and throwing blood against the walls, hands flailing, grasping without ever catching anything. The photograph on the wall shuddered and fell. And then he stopped, all at once, as though he were a marionette and she’d cut his strings rather than his neck. His head lolled to the side, eyes still open.

Eyes still flickering, back and forth, back and forth. Even in death he couldn’t escape the nightmare. He wouldn’t escape it until it caught me in its web and dragged me here—only then would his nightmare end, and mine would have just begun.

She turned, scraping her knife against the wall to remove some of the blood. It caught the edge of the window shutter, allowing a ray of dirty sunlight to shine into the room. In that brief moment before it flicked shut again, spattering a few drops of blood onto the floor, I saw that her hair was flame-red.

I blinked. “Philippa?”

She picked up an envelope from the table and threw the door open, letting it slam against the wall. I ran after her, trying to get a better glimpse. It couldn’t be her. She stayed out of these sort of disputes, and…and…she would have told me. She would have let me know. If it was her fault that I was trapped here—if it’d been her fault this entire time and she’d never told me-

There was a rustling from the room behind me. I skidded to a halt. I knew what I would see when I went back. I remembered it. And yet I found I couldn’t leave it alone. I had to see it again.

Lying in the pool of blood, rubbing at her eyes as though still trying to wake up from a bad dream, was…me. Young, unknowing. She—I—gasped and scrambled to her feet, staring at the dead man in the chair with wide eyes. Her lips moved, but she didn’t make a sound.

It fell to me to say something. Anything, just to fill the silence. It would be an hour, at least, before Usher arrived to find the scene. “I—it…doesn’t get better,” I said. “The city never gets any better than this. It’s bloody and terrible and filled with backstabbers and their secrets.” She turned, almost as though she were looking at me. “But you do. You get better. Tougher. Sharper around the edges. What hurts you now won’t be able to hurt you anymore—and that’ll save you, in the end. You make it this far, at least, and that’s the best I can give you.”

She wasn’t reassured. She wouldn’t be. I sat on the ground next to her until my own dream slowly, painfully, fell apart around me, to return me to my own troubles in the Outscape.