Before it got better, it got worse—and it did not, in fact, get better after that. There were no silver linings to this.

A man’s head, along with a good deal of his neck and upper chest had simply exploded. E4 was left in a state of catastrophe. Blood, guts, and bone sprayed and splattered on every surface, intermixed with black ooze. A faint green tinge dusted the air.

The next half-hour or so blurred together. Demands and desperation tugged at me from so many different directions that the whole thing felt like a kind of out-of-body experience.

I got hounded by questions. I knew the physicians and nurses meant well—they were just as scared as I was—but it felt like I was being attacked and it was difficult for me to endure. I started crying. Yet another piece of evidence for Margaret’s case against me (“he’s not a real man”; “he’s a poof in doctor’s clothing”; “he’s not a good father figure”; and so on and so forth.)

I felt awful; even more so when I lied and said I was doing acupressure when Mr. Draunborn had died. I know he’d given me the permission beforehand, but, darn it, I still blamed myself. I mean, if you thought you were turning into a demon Norm, wouldn’t you?

And then, there was his family. Jim’s wife, Iora; his sons, Hugh, and Casper, and their young daughter Helen. I was the one who broke the news to Iora, and she absolutely lost it. Screamed and raged, gnashing teeth, flailing her hair as she clawed into the cabinet of the examination room I met her in. I was about to step out to leave her be when she hunched over, groaned, and started hacking up green and black glop, gasping for breath. She started bleeding from her nose, and began coughing up blood a moment later. I ran out and got a nurse, who told me—almost instantly—that the woman was bleeding internally. We lifted Iora into a bed and rolled her into surgery. For want of time, we had a surgeon from Seabreeze General do it remotely, by way of the hydraulic arms in the operating room’s ceiling.

By the time I got back, the Draunborn’s children were showing symptoms of Type One infection. This time, I didn’t spare a moment; I had them put into beds without delay. I made my best effort to put them in adjacent rooms, or even a group room, but found it difficult due to a lack of familiarity with Ward E’s staff and the fact that the bureaucratic procedures differed somewhat from the ones I was used to. I managed to end up getting help from Nurse Kaylin, who promised she’d try her best to keep the family of together—particularly once Iora woke up from the surgery—nevertheless, Kaylin insisted that I should, “expect the (expletive) worst.”

I wanted to dive back into the work after that, but Dr. Marteneiss told me that she would not let me back on the premises until I’d taken a walk for at least ten minutes, to clear my head.

“I know how you are, Genneth,” Heggy said. “You wanna leap back into the fray. But when you’re upset, you don’t always think clearly. I don’t want you ending up like the Lass at Southmarch.”

And, as ever, Heggy was right—and more so than she could ever know. Like when the Lass left us at the Battle of Southmarch, I, too, was hearing words of doom from a strange voice—only mine came from a forlorn phantom of a little girl.

Southmarch.

There are moments of history that straddle the boundary between fact and fiction. The Battle of Southmarch was one of them. We knew it happened. We even knew where and when; archaeologist discovered the site of the battle little over a decade before the Prelatory’s ugly birth. Yet our only records of the Battle were in myths and scripture.

Since ancient times, Southmarch had been the name for the southwestern extreme where Trenton bordered Polovia. According to legend, to avoid defeat at Southmarch at the hands of King Krog and his hordes, the Lass had called upon the Hallowed Beast Itself. Its roar fractured the very earth beneath the armies’ feet, decimating the Polovians with fire and fury as it warned them of the dangers of Hell.

Everyone at the battle heard the Beast speak. In Old Trenton, the words were: Se gastleas rodor! Se eallslítendlic rodor! The dead sky; the all-consuming sky.

For this, the greatest of Her Miracles, the Lass was Translated into Paradise. What remained of her physical body was transfigured into a flock of giant hummingbirds. In challenging King Krog and his army, the Lass had overextended Herself, bringing victory to the faith, though at the cost of Her life.

When my end came, I doubted it would be anything as spectacular as that.

I wonder: do demons even die?

Ordinarily, walking up and down the halls would have calmed me, but it did little to abate my troubles. My guilt over Jim’s horrific death acted like a gateway drug, opening up a pit of existential darkness that shook me to my core.

Nina and Dr. Horosha had been blessed by the Angel. Meanwhile, I was falling into darkness, and I was terrified that there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was bad enough the Last Day was upon us; but no, it didn’t stop there; I had to be on Team Darkness. I didn’t want to believe that, just like I didn’t want to believe in Hell. It was too horrid. Too cruel.

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But what evidence did I have to counter it? Nothing, that’s what!

I stomped my foot on the vinyl as I stormed off around a corner and down a corridor. The corridor in front of me was relatively calm. A couple of civilians were there, sleeping in their day clothes as they sat in the egg chairs that lined the walls. Filled patient beds occupied a great deal of the available wall-space, like cars parked on a street. IV lines and health monitoring devices stood at their side like the parking meters of old. Semicircular pots built into the walls held plastic orchids in artificial soil. Droplets of epoxy and glue clung to the rubbery leaves, simulating dew.

A glance at the consoles on the wall told me I was in Ward G. I could take this hall down as a detour and loop back around into F Ward, which would take me back to E without too much lost time.

I took all of three steps down the hallway before something clicked inside me, making me intensely lightheaded. I staggered forward, reaching out to brace myself against an obtruding bed. My hand slipped across sheets and mattress before I grabbed hold of the railing at the bed’s edge.

My head buzzed like it was a tuning fork or my funny bone. I rubbed the back of my head, but the buzzing didn’t go away. It got clearer. Louder. Almost like…

I froze. The hairs on my neck stood on end. Panting in distress, I took a few more steps forward.

I didn’t dare look over my shoulder.

The buzzing continued, and it followed me, accompanied by the tinkling of shattered glass.

It was the same feeling that had struck me during Rayph’s play. The same feeling that brought Aicken Wognivitch’s ghost into my waking world.

I walked forward, trying to appear calm.

Heavy footsteps trundled behind me.

No… this was different. It was… worse than Aicken.

Something was wrong.

I squeezed my fists. My fingernails pushed into my gloves as they dug into my palms. Then, with a deep breath, I turned around. My vertebrae creaked.

Nothing. There was nothing behind me.

My stomach twisted into a knot.

The falling-glass-sound was loud in my ears, like rain.

I turned to face forward, only for a wall of glistening, metallic blue and gold vertical cords to slam into me and send me flying. I hit the floor like a stone skipping on a pool, quickly skidding to a stop. My glasses got ripped off my face, but they bounced off the inner surface of my PPE visor and smacked me in the face. Something else fell to the ground, hitting the floor with a loud crash.

My shoulder burned. My left flank ached.

But there was no time to think about the pain.

I scrambled to my feet, skittering low along the floor as I stuck my hand up in between my face and my visor to straighten my glasses. It took me a second to push them into position, and that was enough time for a large mass to hurtle at me and knock me to the floor. The back of my visor took the brunt of the blow, as my glasses were knocked back into place. A horseshoe-shaped ache ignited at the back of my skull.

Wheels creaked.

I rolled to the side, dodging a careening patient bed. I pushed myself up as quickly as I could. Standing up, I turned my head to the source of the falling-glass sound.

I gasped in horror.

A ghost lumbered toward me. Electric sparks sprouted from its footsteps. The ghost was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. It was a digital specter; a spirit for the software age. The ghost had no bones, though its body suggested their presence. Clouds of particles like flocks of birds bound together in an approximation of a human frame. Its left arm was as big as a door and nearly as wide, with a massive, polygonal hand at its end, tipped in four sharp claws, furred in noisy monochrome. The middle third of its right leg was a tenuous helix of ever-spiraling light. Shield-like shards floated around it, constantly flickering between there and not. They shuddered every couple of seconds, switching between different textures: skin one moment, clothes the next, and then pure energy—crackling electric blue. The specter’s particle-being quivered like a flame, billowing behind it in pixelated trails.

And its face…

Its face was a mirror, shattered into fragments that had been glued together, even though they didn’t belong. Different scenes of a man’s life played out in each pane.

Checking my wyrmsight revealed an anomaly: he had no consciousness-aura.

At first, as I stared into the specter’s mystifying face, I didn’t recognize him, but then a memory of Brand materialized in front of me: I saw Dr. Nowston examining the case file on his console—a memory from the autopsy of Frank Isafobe.

Oh God.

I had seen the man in the shards before. He was face on Brand’s console. Now I saw it repeated in the specter’s sharded visage.

The image of Brand vanished into mist, revealing the specter.

Frank?

What had he become?

The monster trundled forward. A shattered security camera lay on the floor beside it. The wave of force that had sent me flying had also ripped the hallway’s security camera off its mount.

Trembling, I rose to my feet. I wasn’t going to forget my recent hallucinogenic encounters anytime soon. I knew the apparition in front of me wasn’t physically real.

But then what had sent me flying?

“Frank…?” I whispered.

The specter turned to face me, pivoting on its monstrous left arm’s curled, polygonal fingers.

The shard-face expanded, the fragments moving away from one another like an exploding dandelion, letting out a roar that shook me to my bones. The specter swept its massive arm in a circle, grabbing hold of one of the beds. A bolt of lightning cracked atop my head and jolted down my spine and leg the instant its fingers made contact with the bed. I screamed.

Fire burned in my nerves.

The specter grabbed the bed and lifted it off the ground. Brilliant blue and gold surrounded them both. Tears flowed from my eyes, blurring my view.

Everything burned.

The specter threw the bed. The pain brought me down to my knees right as the bed flew at me. A second later, and I wouldn’t have had a head.

The pain ceased the instant the bed crashed onto the floor. It was like a train wreck. The metal crumpled against the wall, splattering blood as it crushed one of the strangers sitting in the egg chairs. The bed landed upside down, pinning down the body of the man who’d laid in it a second before.

They were dead, and there was nothing I could do.

I looked back.

The ghost was gone.

For a moment, I stared at my hands, trembling in shock and disbelief.

Voices shouted in alarm from the direction I’d come.

And then I stood up and ran like the wind.