I was beginning to suspect that today was not going to be a good day.

My subsequent attempts at banishing the hellscape had fared as poorly as the first. I’d swipe some of the darkness away, only for it to come flooding back into being. Also, it didn’t help that the way my confidence fell with every failure only made my next attempt to clear away the evil hyperphantasia even more difficult. By the time I gave up, I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was a two-pronged assault on my mind, one from my subconscious, the other from Hell itself.

And, speaking of two-pronged assaults… maybe that was what the fungus was doing! Instead of combating Andalon on just one front—corrupting the souls within me—perhaps it was also trying to attack me directly. The hellscape was certainly a mental assault. Could it progress to a physical, or even magical one, as well?

Holy Angel, I hope not.

Fudge.

I was screwed.

Ward E was now literal Hell. It was dark, freezing cold, and terrifying beyond words. Unearthly howls roared in the depths of the Night, and I couldn’t make out the source.

“Mr. Genneth, please!” Andalon begged. “Please! Make it go away! Make It! Go! Away!”

She kept trying to tug my PPE gown, but her hands kept phasing through me.

“I wish I could, Andalon,” I said, jaw agape. “I wish I could.”

I couldn’t trust my eyeballs. I had to guide myself by wyrmsight, using it to keep track of real people’s positions like some kind of a soul-based version of infrared vision.

If there was one saving grace to the experience, it was that I couldn’t see the aura-figures’ faces. I imagined they were staring at me quite awkwardly, as I was very much stumbling around like a weirdo.

“Mr. Genneth!” Andalon pointed ahead. “What’s that?”

Elevator doors!

“C’mon,” I whispered, before charging forward to the set of elevator doors up ahead.

They were open—a doorway in the air, at the top of a snowy hill. Andalon followed along as we walked up the slope. I felt like I was climbing, even though I knew the ground below me was actually flat. Thankfully, we got there before it closed, and quickly stepped inside—into a perfectly ordinary elevator.

I didn’t need to look for the button to press for the second floor. My perfect memories extended to perfect muscle memory, as well; I knew exactly where to look.

Unfortunately, my wandering eyes ended up looking at the buttons anyway, and I clenched my fists as I saw that the numbers on the buttons had been replaced by demonic-looking sigils.

Andalon made another attempt to grab me the instant the elevator doors opened onto the second floor.

I stepped back in shock.

“It’s following us…” I muttered.

The second floor was just as ruined and icebound as the ground floor.

“Mr. Genneth?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, either. But we have to go. I have a job to do!”

We stepped out of the elevator. As was to be expected, there were fewer real people on the second floor—but that wasn’t what caught my attention.

“Beast’s teeth!” I whispered. “The windows!”

The second floor’s windows should have given us a view of the central courtyard. And, while I suppose they did, it was all wrong. Looking out through a window, I saw the hospital’s surroundings embedded in the hellscape. The ice formations, the snow, the craggy peaks, the roaring blizzard… it was all there. The city was in ruins. The skyscrapers were broken and skeletal. The whole world had frozen over.

“Is this a vision of the future?” I whispered. “Is this what the world will become?”

As I looked, I thought I saw golden eyes staring out from the ruins.

Were they Norms?

One of them moved!

“Oh, fudge!” I hissed, staggering back.

“Uh… Mr. Genneth?” Andalon said, tremulously. “I… I don’t think we’re alone…”

I turned to look down the hallway. My jaw dropped.

Masses of glowing ice tore through the floor and ceiling in columns and cones, like the teeth of a great beast. Ghosts were strapped onto them. My ghosts. They were held in place by white chains that wrapped around them, binding them, anchored by points that had been hammered into the ice. The chains hissed where they touched the spirits’ flesh, and sent up wisps of mist.

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I saw Aicken. He was like a sculpture in a frieze: a figure of ice, emerging from the stalactite to which he was bound.

I saw Frank. Every piece of Mr. Isafobe’s fractured specter was tied onto the column by its own set of white chains. Here, a severed leg. There, Frank’s shattered face. And, of course, that monstrous arm of his, with its polygonal claws.

Neither spirit moved.

“Mr. Genneth…?”Andalon muttered.

“I don’t know, Andalon.” I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

But that was a lie. I did know; I just didn’t want to admit it.

What I saw was exactly what I’d imaged Hell to be. Aicken and Frank were trapped before my very eyes, waiting for the forces of Hell to come to finish transforming them into demons.

I turned around, only to find that the elevator had vanished.

“Beast and Queen…” I muttered.

Where the elevator doors should have been, the hallway continued, forming the nave of a cathedral of ice and stone. It was a place of torture, lined with fluted pillars and icy eruptions bearing spirits bound up in white chains. But, unlike Aicken or Frank, these ghosts moved. They struggled.

They screamed.

Andalon covered her mouth in horror.

The spirits writhed beneath their bindings, howling in pain. They begged for help. The hissing of the chains was the sound of their bodies burning from the cold.

I moved forward to help them, only for my PPE visor to bash into the invisible elevator doors.

I shook my head and blinked.

The elevator was still there, even if I couldn’t see it.

Hunger boiled in my belly as a wave of dizziness swept through me. For a moment, everything twitched.

“Andalon, what can I do? How can I help them? There has to be something I can do!”

My thoughts filled with images of monstrous demons tearing through the city, wreaking havoc and devastation unlike any the world had ever known.

I looked back.

Oh God…

The ghosts howled!

“You need to be more wyrmeh, Mr. Genneth,” Andalon said, tears freezing on her cheeks. “You’re not strong enough yet!” She trembled. “You—”

The ghosts began to twitch uncontrollably.

Andalon looked at me in terror. “—Mr. Genneth! What’s—what’s happening to them!?”

We stepped back.

They were changing.

Just like Joe-Bob. Just like Esmé.

Their bodies deformed. Arms and legs swelled with muscle. Spike and claws burst free from their flesh, followed by new limbs altogether: wings, tails, extra arms, extra legs, tentacles, and tendrils; Angel, I didn’t know the words for some of what I was seeing! Jaws cracked and changed as the agony in their eyes turned to burning anger—a hatred of all that lived.

“They’re turning into demons,” I said, softly, shivering with disbelief. I repeated it, louder: “They’re turning into demons!”

The developing demons flailed against their bindings, flinging shards of ice and stone as they slammed and clawed into their surroundings. Cracks shot through the ice and stone where their chains were anchored. They started to come loose!

Andalon and I looked at one another, and then ran like mad. Well, I ran. Andalon floated above the ground as she followed at my back.

I didn’t care that my feet were numb. I didn’t care that my head ached and that my belly screamed and that the world around me had been twisted into a nightmare. I was too scared.

The roars chased after us.

We ran down the hallway, around a corner, and down another hallway. Swaths of the hellscape flickered as we ran, giving me glimpses of the second floor as it actually was. It was like reality was fighting against the unholy illusion.

“Help!” someone screamed. “Help me!”

A woman’s voice.

It came from up ahead, where the hallway branched in three.

Andalon pointed down one of the halls. “I think it came thattaway!”

What did I have to lose—other than my head to the demons chasing after us?

I followed Andalon’s directions.

“Why!?” the voice screeched. “Why am I here? Tasha?! Evyan!?”

We rounded a corner. A stench reached out of my memories: the sickly sweet smell of Ileene Plotsky’s corpse.

“Help me, Holy Angel!” the voice screamed “Help me! Save me!!”

Roars shook the air. The hallway rumbled beneath my feet.

Andalon shrieked. “They’re coming! They’re coming!”

I had to do something!

My thoughts spun.

The hallway shook once more.

Maybe… maybe…

So what if I couldn’t make the hyperphantasy hellscape disappear? Maybe I could still manipulate it. Would that be enough.

Oh God oh God oh God…

Raising up my arms, I imagined up a booby-trap to end all booby traps. I pictured the stone walls of the ruined, illusory hallway sliding out and slamming together right down the center of the hallway. I smacked my palms together, miming the motion I wanted, and, by the Angel, the stone did the same! An icy gust blasted at me as the corridor behind us sealed shut. Part of the stone smashed right where my hands were, and I screamed in shock, expecting horrifying pain. Instead, the stone just phased through me. Or, rather, I through it.

That’s right. I reached up and ran my fingers through my hair, pressing down on my head, as if to keep it from rolling off.

It isn’t real.

I wished I could tell that to my surroundings!

Everything seemed to spin. I felt like I was going to throw up.

“Is someone there?!” the voice yelled.

Whoever she was, she was close.

“Mr. Genneth?”

Looking up, I saw that Andalon had moved to where the hallway turned a corner. She was pointing down the corner. Slowly, I walked up beside her, stopping several times to look over my shoulder to make sure the stone barrier held—and thankfully, it had.

Then, I turned to see what Andalon was pointing at.

Or, rather, who she’d been pointing at.

My jaw went slack. I made the Bond-sign for good measure.

I beheld a woman in chains. Cuffs around her wrists and ankles linked to gleaming white chains that had been bolted into massive icicles that had bitten through a ruined cathedral. The chains held her body in a taut X. Behind her, the walls of a hexagonal apse bore the labyrinthine patterns I’d seen in Merritt’s MRI, only here, the glowed a seething red. In front of her, pieces of reality glitched through; fragments of the corridor’s real walls floated in the cathedral nave’s, parallel to the aisle, as if stuck in a glitch. Windows to nowhere hovered above the pews.

“Who is she?” Andalon asked, in a whisper.

The woman was like one of the monks from Biluše (the epic operatic retelling of the tale of the ancient Princess of Polovia and the First Crusade), back when the faith was just beginning to bloom across the face of the earth. She wore the dove robe of a monastic Sister, complete with a veil covering her head. The absence of any feather-shapes woven into her robes meant she had still been a neophyte when she’d died.

There was no trace of consciousness-aura on her.

For a moment, I dared to believe she might have been the Lass herself, but then I noticed the neon green zigzag across her wavy, auburn bangs, and my memory told me who she was.

“I-Ileene?” My words echoed in the cold.

“Can you help her, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked.

With a jolt, Ileene opened her eyes, turning her gaze to me. Her lips quivered. “Who-oo…” she stammered. “Are you real?” She spoke in whispers.

I nodded. “I—”

Ileene flailed her limbs. The cuffs hissed, searing her flesh with their cold.

She cried.

“Help me!” Tears froze into icicles on her cheeks. “Help me! Hel—”

—She didn’t need to tell me twice.