Check. You're almost out of time.

Not quite running, Avery pumps her arms in the fastest walk her pajama pants will tolerate without catching under foot. Tendrils suffocate her from within: they wrap around her chest, crushing and writhing and demanding her attention. It was one detour. By request! Why does my brain have to be like this?

The Hall of Discovery winds in front of her; a slithering eel made of concrete, plaster, and carpet; lined with murky, unlit tanks on both sides. It'd be creepy if she didn't know what was inside every single one of them. As she passes, she can see shadows floating inside them — each unique in their own way.

Names pop to the forefront of her mind, as numerous as her footsteps: marsh periwinkles with their distinctive, conical shell; the bulbous eye sockets and long face of redlip blennies; writhing, wiggling masses of wandering nudibranchs.

Her mind wanders along with them. Her pace slows. I'll never keep the names of the sea slugs straight.

String go taut. Sneakers slap against the ground and she flies down the hallway in a half-jog, half-sprint. Cramps jolt through her stomach and the pressure in her chest creaks and cracks against bone. She pulls against her feet, trying to break free from the strings.

All she can do is look out from behind her eyes; observe whatever passes through a warped pane of glass. It's like her entire being is lurking beneath her skin and some one-purposed demon stole her body and damned her to suffer, disembodied within.

Before she knows it, the source of her obsession looms in front of her: a tank that stretches from floor to ceiling. The home of darting shadows that belong to molies, angelfish, and Congo tetras.

From the depths of a lake of her mind's own making, Avery breaks the surface. She gasps for breath. Shadows flirt with the edges of her vision, sweat falls down her face, and her hands tremble. She doubles over, hands on knees. Heaving breaths. "Why— is my— brain— like this." She says.

The fish don't answer her, they just flit around in the darkness of their tank. Content to pretend she doesn't exist. After a few more breaths, she cranks her head up. "So— how are you guys?"

As she told herself in her room twenty minutes ago, they're perfectly fine. She clomps a testing foot on the ground a couple times. No squelch, so no big leak. She runs a finger along the bottom seam where plaster meets glass. Not wet.

At that, all the knots inside her disappear. "So nothing after all, then." She says.

What about the tests? What if some stray water from that girl's power splashed into the tank and messed with the PH? They'll die.

She can't even muster an effort to fight back. Instead, she offers an olive branch. She squints her eyes past stinging sweat, trying to make out the water line at the top of the tank. Looks like the same level as usual, to me.

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And her mind is finally quiet. No retorts, no new compulsions. None. Nothing. She whirls around and crumples against the tank. The glass catches her shirt and the skin of her back squeaks all the way down to the floor. It hurts. A raw, painful streak next to her spine. It doesn't matter, though. Exhaustion hits the next moment and she buries her head between propped knees. Finally. I could fall asleep right here.

You can't. They'll fire you when they find you in the morning and you'll never complete your degree.

She rolls her head back — where her head thunks against the glass — and she sighs. "Was a nice few seconds."

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Time passes in a vague reality at the edge of sleep. With the slightest pluck of a string, Avery's thoughts swirl from exercise regimens to a non-existent, sushi-themed hero. She's his biggest fan, after all. Anything and everything. But, one thing sticks out. Green eyes with vertical-slit pupils shimmer, slinking within the land between. Not fully real; not all imaginary.

Her eyes flutter and something grips her heart in icy claws. Fear? She forces herself to blink. Water floods her eyes and her face, obscuring her vision with burbling bubbles of specular highlights. She scrubs away the tears with a coat-covered palm: they dampen the cloth and it sits warm against her skin.

She whips her arm away.

Carpet and concrete and tanks, that's it. Those green eyes were just part of the dream. Figments of her tired, paranoid brain. She rocks up to her feet. I should go home.

Down the winding hallway, her feet drag anchors the whole way. Exhaustion pangs in every scratch of shoe rubber on carpet: a hypnotist's trigger that forces her eyes to roll closed and fight to flutter open.

She turns around the final bend to see the lobby. And there's something there. Near the middle of the stretch of hallway, a line bisects the space. A white line that definitely didn't exist when she walked through here earlier. How long was she sat by that tank nearly asleep? Five minutes?

Avery's exhaustion is a distant memory, now. She creeps forward. "What in the world..."

The line sits perpendicular against the main walk, connecting the Hall of Discovery's maintenance area door with the impromptu janitor's closet — rather, the subsection of the hallway that they hide janitor stuff in.

Five steps closer, the solid white turns to glinting crystals; five more and the doors... they're propped open. Both of them.

Her heart's beat and her feet stop at once. Someone's here.

Sound ceases to exist for her — at least, that's what it feels like. Burbling air pumps of nearby aquariums fade to silence. That one lightbulb that always hums, too. Gone. Her lungs burn: she doesn't dare breath in case it makes a sound.

But it's not actually silence.

There's something there, underneath everything that her mind is filtering out. A shifting. Like paper sliding over itself. Her already stopped heart judders — struggles to beat.

It's murderers.

Avery presses her back against the wall. The one harboring the door emitting the odd, papery noise. She stands there, frozen like a deer in headlights. It's just Tamika playing a prank. That's it.

Sure. They probably already know we're here, so run.

Compulsion tugs one of her feet to the left. Away from the lobby, away from her car in the parking lot, and hopefully, far away from whoever is past that door. She doesn't let her foot move. It's Tamika. Breathe.

No rebuttal springs out. Compulsions lay quiet in recesses, content to wait for a better time to prod her.

Face simmering between fear and confusion, she turns to look at the weird white line and the door. What am I supposed to do? I have to check, right?

It's as if the doorway is sucking her in. A black hole, exuding curiosity instead of gravity. So she drifts closer. Inch after inch, she creeps along the wall and the sound doesn't change.

Shifting paper.

She peeks a single eye around the door's frame. At the precipice of fading into shadow, a man kneels, pouring white powder out of a burlap sack. Under a blonde pompadour, his blue eyes pierce her own.

See? A murderer.