Katalepsis

A beheaded Horror leered and loomed above the sea of darkness, beheld aloft on a neck of dream-bewitched arms as if atop an archipelago of wan and wasted islands, her bedraggled hair a halo of burnt and broken blonde like ashes on the ocean; beyond Horror’s dozen-doubled back, the Governor merely watched. Pink eyes stared impassive and uncaring, empty hands sunk deep in lab-coat pockets. She would not rise or rouse to take my side. And behind her, far away across the empty black of void and death and illimitable dissolution, a semi-circle of weak yellow light glowed above an unremarkable and unimportant double-door — the final island in a sinking chain, the final resting place of reality.

But that refuge lay too far distant, when even one step forward would be too much to take. To my own rear, another island of light stood beneath a bulb, blocked by a wall of nurses and their uniforms wrapped around false flesh. And then that light flickered out, the island sinking beneath the sable iron waves of the dream.

I stood beleaguered and besieged, by nurses and night, by the abyss of the mind, by nightmare madness from my own past.

Even I could see that much; one did not need to be a giant eyeball to figure it out.

“Patients are not allowed to wander the halls at night,” Horror crooned — a clotted voice of crackly blood, dried to crust in her dead throat. “It’s irresponsible of us to allow it. You could get yourself hurt! Or lost. Or get up to all sorts of mischief. Now, Heather, you must come with us, back to your room. You can’t expect us to allow you to flout the rules like this. Rules apply to everybody.”

The nurses shuffled forward, one organism of grey flesh and sagging meat, spread across dozens of bodies. The institution, embodied.

“No!” I screamed, waving Praem’s plush prison before me like a cross at a crowd of vampires. “Stay away from me! Stay away, all of you!”

My left shin sang with a muffled chorus of pain pinned beneath morphine. Sweat both hot and cold broke out all over my skin, screaming for fight or flight, though I knew I could achieve neither. The wall of nurses had become a ring, pressing inward on all sides, blocking me both in front and behind, contracting and constricting. I staggered on the unsteady support of my crutch, lurching around so I could wave the Praem plushie at the nurses to my rear.

“Now now, Heather—”

“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” I screamed.

The nurses slowed their shuffle. Praem held them back.

Horror — held high on her neck of nurse’s arms — let out a long-suffering sigh, followed by the tut of a woman who wanted to go home for the night after a hard day at work. I twisted around again and almost lost my footing, catching myself with a squeak of my crutch against the invisible floor of darkness.

“Heather, Heather, Heather,” Horror huffed. The arms which held her aloft shook her head from side to side. “You shouldn’t make demands which you cannot back up with action. It’s a very bad habit, you know that? If you can’t ever enforce your words, people stop believing them. You should really think more carefully before you speak. I thought you loved books and literature, this is the sort of thing you should know.”

“W-what?” I croaked. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t touch you?” Horror echoed my own words, raising her eyebrows. “Don’t touch you — or what, Heather? What are you going to do? Are you going to bite and scratch? We have methods of dealing with that. Are you going to struggle and spit? We have ways of handling that too. Are you planning to hurt yourself? Well, that can all be explained away.” Horror smiled, her lips a slash of lightless crimson in the suffocating shadows. “Heather, I am holding back out of respect for our history together, not because you can compel me to do anything. That is not how this relationship works. I am the nurse. I compel you, the patient, to do as I say. And if you cannot be compelled with words, then you will be compelled with force.” She smiled again, almost sad. “All for your own good, of course.”

I sucked breath down my throat, trying to clear my head, trying to ignore the meaning of Horror’s words and see past the symbols upon the surface of the dream. Had the Eye led me into a trap, or was the Governor telling the truth — was this all me, doing this to myself? Was this night shift my doing, my own pain and trauma inflicted back upon my own brain, a reflection of my own history, and nothing more?

But my breath came in jagged gasps. Fear had seized my heart. A panic attack was clawing up from my guts. And the nurses were shuffling closer still.

I had to fight, which in a dream meant I had to think, but—

Praem told me to take a deep breath. Count the inhalation. Hold the oxygen (in a dream? Doesn’t matter, just do it.) Count the exhalation.

Horror’s scabbed-up voice interrupted my purging breath: “You must come of your own will, Heather,” she said. “It is so much better for you if you engage with the process. Healing is quicker and easier if you allow it to happen, if you would only—”

“Did you lead me into this trap?” I shouted — past Horror, past the heads of the nurses, past the darkness, speaking to the scrap of glowing pink eye standing tall in the dark.

The Governor blinked, but did not answer.

Horror tutted — a dry and papery rustling. Flakes of blood floated from her lips; they vanished when they touched the darkness beneath our feet. She leaned forward, neck of arms holding her further out, looming toward me.

“You cannot go over my head on this matter, Heather!” she snapped. “You think the administration, the Governor, the Director, all of those types, you think they have any stake or say in the day-to-day running of a hospital? No, of course they don’t! They exist to keep the institution running, yes, but they’re not really the brain or the heart. The nurses and doctors, the real staff, we are the—”

“Just answer me!” I snapped, ignoring Horror completely. “I need a serious answer, just yes or no. Did you lead me into this?”

The Governor shrugged. “Night’s yours.”

“Heather!” Horror shouted in my face, only a foot or two away now. I raised Praem and Horror’s head recoiled, but not by far. She ranted on. “You need to accept the healing process, Heather! And that means not engaging with these fantasies of meaning. This delusion that you will find answers in constructed worlds, in fantasies from inside your own mind. You must engage with reality! With reality!”

Fear curdled and boiled. “Reality!?” I screamed up at her. “In reality I would rip you all apart with my tentacles! This isn’t real! You’re a metaphor for something and I wish I could just—”

Deny you.

Realisation was a tingle in my brain, a tickle down my back, a flowering in my guts.

Horror went on: “Your sister is exactly where she should be. You need to accept—”

“You’re the denial,” I said, slowly and carefully. “You’re all of it — the denial, the diagnoses, the hospital, the trauma. You’re the bit of me that thinks I can’t free her, or I never deserved to, or that she was never real in the first place. Or the part of me which sometimes wishes I could slink off and die quietly, and pretend none of this ever happened, that the entire last year of my life was a lie.”

“Heather, this is—”

But she could not interrupt. “You’re right,” I said. “You are a nurse — you’re all the nurses and doctors I ever knew, even the kind ones, the compassionate ones, who really were trying to help. Because they did damage too. You’re the ten years of making me want to give up, leave Maisie behind, and surrender to the process. You’re the piece of me which wishes the diagnosis was real, so reality wouldn’t be so scary and complicated. You’re … you’re everything I hate about myself, everything I fear I could give into, everything I would have given into if Raine and I had not met by pure chance.” I took a great shuddering breath; it felt like vomiting, like purging my guts of poison. “I mean, yes, you’re also a metaphor for the carceral structure of the Eye and what it’s done to Maisie. But firstly you’re all my fears. Aren’t you?”

Horror smiled, slow and sharp in the strengthening dark.

“Oh Heather,” she purred. “I’m just a nurse. And it’s past time you went back to your room.”

The wall of twisted nurses shuffled forward, stomping and slipping, tripping and tapping, bumbling and bumping — and reaching for me with a hundred misshapen and swollen hands, pointing dozens of darkly glistening syringe tips toward my exposed flesh, brandishing their manacles and their zip-ties, their straitjackets and their handcuffs, a wave to drown me beneath the weight of the institution, no matter the cold clarity of inner revelation.

This time they did not recoil from Praem, though I waved her like a torch. One nurse clutched at Praem’s stuffed body, greasy claws closing about her velvet head. I screamed and yanked Praem back, fearing more than anything to be rendered finally alone; I crushed Praem tight to my chest, hugging her close, protecting her instead. She had no suggestions, only a return of my embrace, a soft apology, and a declaration that she would not allow them to hurt me.

A mad impulse bid me to wave my crutch instead — anything to keep the nurses back, to protect myself and Praem.

But the moment the tip left the floor, my left leg buckled.

I went down with a yelp, fell with a snarl, and landed with a breathless whine. I hit the ground with a crack of bone on solid concrete, though the floor was nothing but darkness. Pain shot through my left knee and into my hips in a jagged web, breath ripping down into my lungs, eyes fogged with tears. The world and my body became a blazing rod of pain.

My legs and backside began to sink, as if the darkness was turning to quicksand beneath my weight. The lightness and warmth of Sevens’ yellow blanket struggled against the sucking mire, but the buoyancy was not enough. The fabric began to soak through with rich black darkness.

The nurses closed in, tightening their ring, reaching down toward me with a hundred grasping hands. Syringes angled toward my neck. Scrabbling fingers closed around my right arm and pried at my grip, trying to take Praem away. Strings of frozen drool landed in my hair, sticky slick like old mucus. Feelers grabbed my ankles, squeezing at my bones. A bulging sack of distended meat brushed the back of my head. Horror watched from the apex of the closing circle, a mask of sorrow written upon her features, as if sad that our inner conflict had come to this. If I would not surrender, then she would grind me to nothing.

“Just relax, Heather,” she said. “We’ll take you back where you belong.”

A hand of knobbly knuckles and fingers like garden wire found my throat and squeezed. “H-help—” I croaked, not able even to cry.

A sigh rolled through the nurses, like a gust of wind through the leaves of a dead forest. They almost paused.

The Governor said: “You need to finish what you started.”

The hand about my throat tightened quick and hard. My pulse slammed upward through my neck; pin-pricks of syringes touched my flesh. Cuffs and manacles fumbled about my wrists; straitjacket fabric pressed to my back. The edges of my vision throbbed red, then faded black.

I wheezed. “What … ”

“You still have the chalk,” the Governor said. “It’s yours.”

With the last of my fading strength I pulled my left hand from the sucking mire of the floor; droplets of oil-like darkness clung to my fingers and palm, falling like rain back into the dark below. Nurses clutched for my wrist and forearm — but they recoiled from the Fractal, fingers twitching and jerking as if struck by electric shock. I stuck my hand into my yellow blanket. My sight dimmed to nothing, choked to the edge of the dream.

My fingers crushed the certainty of chalk. I gripped hard, and drew it forth.

The nurses recoiled, reeling backward, staggering away. Fingers left my throat. Syringes retreated. Straitjackets fell to the floor.

The world came rushing back; breath slammed into my lungs like a back draft of superheated oxygen. I heaved and wheezed, coughing and spluttering, strings of drool hanging from my slack lips. My eyes were full of tears and my face burned like fever. The pain in my leg was a living thing, stirring in sleepless dreams, and I prayed it would stay in slumber.

For minutes I sagged and spluttered, hiccuping more than once. Praem nestled close in my right arm. My left held salvation aloft.

Vision cleared, fog of tears peeling back. Breath slowed, calming to the pump of my heart. Praem suggested I raise my eyes and take a look, which seemed sensible enough.

The stick of chalk glowed in the dark.

Just as it had for the Governor, the chalk was lit with cold fire amid the infinite shadows. The nurses — Horror included — could not endure the pale shine of the chalk. They had retreated from me, but only by a few steps. The chalk-light was cold and weak, clean and white, with none of the yellow warmth of the electric bulbs or fluorescent bars.

“ … oh-okay,” I panted, throat still raw from being strangled to the border of unconsciousness. “Okay. Okay. I-I think I get it.”

“This is unwise!” Horror snapped. Her eyes were half-squinted against the glow of the chalk. “Heather, it was never meant for you! Put it down! Put it down and—”

“Shut up!” I shouted at her. “I wasn’t asking you!”

The Governor’s voice floated upward, trapped beyond the wall of nurses. “You need to finish what you started.”

“But what does that mean?!” I waved the stick of chalk. “Everything here is metaphor, fine. Then what does this represent? The ability to perform hyperdimensional mathematics? The capacity for self-examination? The acceptance of my own body? What!?”

“Just write,” the Governor said. “The rest will come to you.”

I felt like rolling my eyes and keening with frustration, but Praem suggested that I take the Governor seriously. Praem reminded me with gentle firmness that I did not have much choice. I was still trapped by a ring of nurses. I had no other way out but forward.

“Write on what … ” I muttered.

Praem made the obvious suggestion: the floor, of course.

Good girls did not scribble on the hospital floors, but I shed that objection with less than a shrug. I had not been a good girl in rather a long time; on the contrary, I had learned how to be very bad indeed.

The tip of the chalk clacked against the darkness itself, forcing the floor into solidity.

With no idea what to write, I simply scrawled on the ground — numbers, figures, mathematical symbols, all jumbled up one after the other, spiralling off around my collapsed legs and my aching knee. The symbols glowed like phosphorescent paint.

The nurses recoiled further, stumbling backward.

But the writing — or what I was writing - hurt. An all-too-familiar tingle grew behind my eyeballs, blossoming into a stabbing headache pain of twin lances into my skull. A roiling spot of queasy unease in my guts spread and spread and spread, until I swayed with nausea, bile clawing up my throat.

Brain-math, without the aid and cushion of six extra minds, without the power input of my bioreactor.

And I had no idea what exactly I was writing; the numbers and symbols spilled out from within me, appearing as if my hand was possessed, like automatic writing. As soon as I started to think about that, as soon as I focused on it, as soon as I questioned, I could no longer continue. I faltered, stalling, choking on the promise of vomit.

The letters started to fade, islands sinking back into the benighted floor.

The nurses pressed inward once again.

“It was always falsehood, Heather,” Horror said. “Just delusion. The product of an unwell mind. Nothing more. And delusion can only prop you up for so long.”

“Shut up!” I screamed at her, then tried to catch a glimpse of the Governor past the advancing wall of nurses. “I—I don’t know what to write! I keep running out of numbers! I can’t do brain-math anymore, how am I supposed to know what to write!?”

“It’ll come naturally,” she said. “It’ll come.”

“It bloody well isn’t!”

The Governor fell silent.

I scrabbled on as best I could, snorting back the need to vomit, blinking hard against the growing headache pain, pausing between each number and symbol, worried that they were all wrong, that I was writing the wrong thing, performing the wrong equation. I couldn’t write fast enough, the numbers vanishing in turn, catching up with my desperate shaking hands, glow fading to nothing. The nurses stumbled closer, raising their arms to shield their eyes from the light, reaching for me once again with hands like bags of walnuts and tendrils dripping with sticky mucus and—

“Needs both of us,” said the Governor. She sounded surprised, and almost regretful. “You have but half.”

“What?!” I shouted. “What do I do, then!? I can’t get free on my own! I can’t—”

Horror butted in, her severed head dangling from a cluster of hands gripping her hair. “You never could do anything alone, Heather. That’s why you require treatment.” The numbers of the equation faded and faded, growing dimmer along with the chalk clutched in my fist. I had exhausted my one chance, my one way out, because I had always been so bad at mathematics. “Now,” said Horror, dangling closer. “It’s time to put away these games and—”

Horror’s face blazed with yellow-orange firelight, cast from far to my rear.

Her eyes flew wide, then crammed shut, twinned with a scream from her lungless mouth. The nurses fell back — not in a staggering retreat as from my chilled and cold chalk-light, but as if a wave crashed over them. The nurses fell like bowling pins smashing into each other. They tumbled to the floor, crashing down in great wet heaps. Horror’s head went flying, then rolling, rolling, rolling across the darkness — until she hit the toes of the Governor’s boots.

Horror looked up, head lying on one side. The Governor returned her gaze without expression. Both were lit by the blazing flame down the corridor, pouring from some source far to my rear.

“I see you,” said the Governor.

“Ah,” said Horror. “Ma’am, I can explain—”

“No. No, you can’t.”

I tore my eyes from the tedious metaphor of internal institutional conflict and looked over my shoulder, back down the darkened corridor, facing into the flames.

A burning sword; a golden hilt. Gilt and gleaming glory, scouring the dark.

A yellow flame cut through a nurse staggering back to her feet, bisecting the twisted bones and parting the folds of grey flesh, sending the halves tumbling aside, casting leaping illumination up the walls and floors — real walls and real floor, dragging their forgotten forms from the shadowy deeps by sheer heat and light and the swinging arc of a blade.

It was Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight.

Sevens’ former guise as the Drained-and-Dry-Director had gone through an unthinkable transformation. She still wore the mask of the Yellow Princess, recognisable in those ice-blue eyes, that pale swanlike throat, those sharply heightened cheekbones, that neat and tidy nose. But she had shed the exhaustion and the eye-bags, the rumpled shirt and the torn-in-haste skirt; the pens and the clipboard were nowhere to be seen, banished along with the pencil which had nestled behind her ear. Seven-Shades-of-Stressed-and-Strained was washed clean by flame and fury. Scribe no more; this Sevens was a Queen of war.

Her hair had grown wild, golden tresses glowing like burnished bronze, affixed to her brow with a gilded circlet. Her starched white shirt had become a breastplate of gold-pressed steel, the front emblazoned with a design in silver and yellow — a trio of tentacles, free and rampant, strangling a tapestry-like representation of a nurse. Her slender arms were clad in metal, soft yellow flues and whorls of flower stamped upon the armour; gloves of golden cloth protected her hands, each digit a beacon. A billowing cape flowed from her shoulders, hemmed in impossible buttery fur, the fabric burning like dawn in the darkness. A skirt of lemon-chrome mail swished about her legs as she strode forward, reflecting the light back as a million swirling points. She wore the most ridiculous shoes I had ever witnessed, utterly unsuited to real combat, but very fitting for the dream of a goddess at war — a pair of platform heels made of what was apparently solid sunlight.

In a two-handled grip she held her father’s hilt, the gift he had given to me, the one Raine had pressed into Sevens’ grip. From the empty hilt sprung a blade of yellow flame.

Seven-Shades-of-Sovereign-Sunshine raised her flaming sword and split another nurse in two. The nurse parted down the middle, halves hitting the floor and sinking into the darkness below.

Sevens twisted the sword about herself, eyes wide with focus, lips peeled from her teeth in a way I had never seen on the Yellow Princess before; then again, was she Princess any longer? Did I look upon something which had burst from a queenish cocoon?

All the many dozens of nurses had been knocked off their feet by the arrival of Sevens’ light, but now they rose again, surging upward, scrabbling with dark and twisted hands, turning upon her with dripping syringes and clutching nets and the enclosing edges of open straitjackets. Sevens raised her sword, bellowed a war cry like the voice of a bird, and charged straight into them.

Nurses went flying, cut in two or impaled and kicked back — though I had no idea how Sevens managed all that, balanced on a pair of frankly absurd platform heels. She cut and burnt and swung, felling the parody nurses left and right, hacking and sawing, stabbing and slicing.

A larger-than-average nurse managed to get behind her, backed up by two smaller monstrosities; all three lunged for Sevens at once. For a horrible second I thought she might be overwhelmed, that this rescue would be short-lived.

“Sevens!” I screamed.

But then where the Queen-of-War had stood, Sevens’ other war-form flickered into reality, as if disgorged by the darkness — Hastur’s Daughter, eight feet of cone-shaped black armour frilled with yellow membranes, more alien than anything the dream could invent, and no less a queen of war. A razor-sharp tail flicked out and impaled one of the nurses, tossing her down the corridor in a careening spray of fluids too sickly to be blood. Massive crab-like claws closed on the second nurse, snipping her roughly in three. Poison stingers like hedgehog-quills impaled the third nurse a hundred times, turning her to ragged burst meat in an instant of violence.

A golden wave of downy fuzz shivered and shook, turning the air to toxic death; yellow spore-dust filled the corridor, melting the nurses down to pools of quivering flesh.

Sevens’ foes all lay defeated. A few nurses staggered away, sinking into the dark, but the way between her and I was clear.

Hastur’s Daughter was gone in a blink, replaced once again by the Warlike Queen.

Seven-Shades-of-Wrath-and-Ruin strode toward me, putting up her sword, a smile of such satisfaction spreading across her face.

“Heather!” she called. “Heather, I figured it out! I figured it all out! I—”

A lone nurse sprang from the shadows and crashed into Sevens from the side, ruining her regal bearing, sending her toppling over, and proving my point about those unstable shoes. Sevens went flying, struck from her feet, crashing to the floor in a clatter of golden armour. The nurse clambered all over her, scabby bleeding hands clutching for Sevens’ throat.

The Flaming Valkyrie was gone. The Blood Goblin — Seven-Shades-of-Squeak-and-Gurgle, her most familiar and intimate mask — closed a maw of needle teeth on the nurse’s hand, ripping and tearing out a massive chunk of rubbery grey flesh. The nurse recoiled. Sevens spat out the gobbet of vile meat, then—

Blinked out once again, replaced by a girl I’d seen scant times before — a scared teenager in a uniform too large for her starved body, with a pistol at her hip and desperation in her eyes.

The Gunner — the one mask Sevens showed most rarely of all — jammed her stubby black pistol into the nurse’s chin and pulled the trigger.

She emptied all the bullets, making an awful mess on the ceiling; each spot of blood drew reality from the dark, glowing red in the night. The nurse slumped, dead as a sack.

The Gunner, Seven-Shades-of-Scared-and-Shaken, rolled the dead weight off her front and clambered to her feet, shivering all over, face and uniform splattered with blood. She met my eyes, re-holstered her gun, and nodded once.

And then she was gone too.

The Yellow Princess was back, once again clad for war, carrying a sword of yellow flame in a mailed fist.

She strode to my side, heels clicking on the darkness. Each step forced the shadows to assume solid form, dragging the bare banal linoleum up from the dark waters, leaving behind footprints of reality in the abyss of infinite possibility. The light of her sword forced the shadows back, peeling the shade away from ordinary walls and the edge of an iron radiator.

Many nurses remained between me and the Governor, struggling back to their misshapen feet. But now they recoiled afresh from the clean glow which poured from the sword of Seven-Shades-of-Heir-Apparent. Hisses and warbles rose from dozens of warped and twisted throats. The nurses slunk back, too silly to be scary anymore, like a crowd of hissing extras in a bad horror film.

Sevens stopped, but did not look down at me. She stared instead at the Governor — who was still gazing downward at Horror’s severed head, which lay on the dark carpet of the formless floor.

“ … S-Sevens?” I croaked.

Praem, still hugged tight to my chest, suggested that I stay quiet for a moment. Gods were talking.

“You,” said Seven-Shades-of-Crowned-in-Sunlight. “Pay attention.”

Horror winced. “Oh, bother,” she whispered.

“Not you,” said Sevens. “You. The lady in charge. Pay attention.”

The Governor raised her eyes of seashell pink. She looked at Sevens, unsurprised by either her appearance or the manner of her dress.

“I am,” said the Governor.

“You weren’t,” said Sevens. “Pay attention. And take responsibility.”

Sevens whirled the sword in her hands, flames licking across the walls. For a moment I thought she was going to duel the Governor for the prize of my mind; I started to croak a denial, choked by my own surprise. I did not want her to kill the Governor, I did not want her to kill the Eye! If she fought the Governor and banished her, I would never have my answers, never have my closure, and Maisie would be lost in the dark forever.

But my refusal was unnecessary; Sevens’ flaming flourish served a dual purpose, not the purpose of a duel. The flash of fire drove back the nurses who seemed to be regrouping, and brought the point of the regal blade downward, to indicate Horror’s head.

“Take responsibility,” said Sevens.

The Governor shrugged, hands still firmly in her pockets. “I was never in charge of the night shift. It was never mine.”

“It may not have been your fault, but you have to take responsibility regardless.” Sevens removed one hand from the hilt of her sword and indicated me with a finger clothed in golden silk. “For her.”

The Governor looked down at Horror’s head again. Horror pulled an oily and ingratiating grimace.

“You really don’t have to, you know?” Horror said. “Ma’am, you can just go back to your project. All these details are beneath you. Let the staff handle this. That’s why you employ us—”

“Silence,” said Sevens — neither loud nor sharp, but with a cold fire of absolute certainty which belonged nowhere but in the mouth of a monarch.

Horror choked on her own words. Sevens stepped forward and jabbed the tip of her sword into the flesh of Horror’s neck, lifting her off the ground like a scrap of meat on a skewer. Flames licked Horror’s cheeks and scalp, but the fire did not consume or blacken her flesh, nor even singe the ends of her hair.

But it clearly hurt. “Ow ow ow ow!” she chattered. “Ow oh ow ow oh, ow! Hot! Hot! Hot! Ow!”

Sevens ignored the complaints and thrust the speared head toward the Governor. “Take responsibility.”

The Governor just gazed at Horror’s head, as if confused. “But—”

“I can become your equal,” said Seven-Shades-of-Storm-and-Strife. “I can be any bit as great and terrible as my father at his worst. That is one of the paths open to me now — the blinding of those who see, the never-ending prison of the self, the incomplete work. The unread book by the death bed. I can be those things, if I wish, and I can be them for you. But I would rather not. I would rather remain as I am. Take responsibility.”

The Governor got halfway through another shrug, then stopped and removed her hands from her pockets. She produced a towel from somewhere — had she held onto it when she had tossed the head into the crowd of nurses?

The Governor reached out with the towel and accepted Horror’s head.

“You really don’t have to wrap me up again, you know?” Horror rattled on. “A good manager listens to her staff, especially down at ground level. There’s all sorts of things you don’t comprehend or can’t see without— mm! Mmmm-mmm—mm! Mmm!”

Horror’s chatter was muffled with a wad of towel. Within a few seconds the Governor had her wrapped neatly back up once more.

Sevens retreated a couple of steps, returning to my side, heels clicking on the floor; I thought she was going to look down at me, a monarch gazing from her lofty perch. But to my surprise she turned her sword so the tip touched the floor, holding it like a cane. Then she lowered herself in turn, going down on one knee before me.

The Yellow Princess gazed deep within me, with eyes blue as ice and a-glitter with the reflections of raging flame.

“Sevens?” I rasped.

“It is I, kitten,” she purred. “As I always was.”

“Uh … um … ” I tried to find the words, but found my throat rather painful. I swallowed hard, then looked her up and down. “Uh … ”

“Say it, kitten.”

“You … Sevens, you look absolutely absurd. You’re wearing nine-inch platform heels with an armoured skirt. You’ve got gloves made of golden cloth. You have a crown!”

Sevens smiled, a tiny kink of her royal lips. “And you are the only one in all the worlds who could get away with saying that.”

I sighed and laughed at the same time. “Thank you for saving me. Thank you. I … I think I was about to die. You saved my life, again. How many times is that now?”

“Counting is for bankers and architects, kitten.”

“Are you … awake, Sevens? I’m sorry for asking, it’s just that the dream keeps getting more and more confusing. Did the sword wake you? What happened? Does it work in the same way for you as for everybody else? You seem … coherent.”

Sevens took a deep breath. “Oh, I am so much more than awake. I am flying, kitten. I understand it all, now.”

“Understand what?”

Sevens glanced at the sword. Her lips barely moved, but a smile entered her eyes, a glow of pleasure and promise. She glanced back over her shoulder, at the Governor and the darkness. The misshapen nurses were beginning to regroup again, shambling out of invisible side-corridors, raising clutches of dripping syringes and the iron maidens of straitjackets. They crept forward, ignoring the Governor, shambling to press against the rim of Sevens’ firelight.

“It seems we have little time to discuss the details,” said Sevens. “The rush of the stream does not afford us many moments to speak.” She turned to me all the same; nurses loomed behind her shoulders, peering out of the darkness with grey expanses of eyeless flesh and sagging mounds of folded skin. “But the short version is simple enough.”

She jerked the hilt of the sword toward me, as if to show me the proof of what she had become.

“The … the sword?” I asked. “Yes, it was from your father. He asked us to give it to you.”

“My father made his own story,” she said. “The hubris, the arrogance, the fall from grace, it was never merely his obsession. It was him! It was his own story, with my mother. To wed a human, with such a limited span of life, that was his kingly arrogance, his ultimate hubris. Her death — by old age, by life, by nature — his own fall from grace. Do you see?”

Nurses pressed in from all sides, fighting against the glow of Sevens’ blade. I eyed them with my heart in the throat. “Sevens. Sevens, I think you were right, we don’t have time!”

“He made his own story,” she said. “Cutting through reality with the edge of the narrative. A pen that is a sword and a sword that is a pen. But he made a poor choice! Without that, my mother may have become like him. She needed not be mortal in the end, except for his nature.”

Sevens reached out and tucked the edges of the yellow blanket close to my chest, covering Praem on one side and my heart on the other. She muttered a tiny thank you to Praem, for looking after me. Then she gently plucked the stick of chalk from my fingers and slipped it inside the blanket too.

“Sevens, Sevens we—”

“But me!?” Sevens roared, rising to her feet again in a sudden rush. “I can make whatever story I wish! And I choose one where my love rides free!”

She swung her father’s sword in an overhand arc, bisecting the nearest nurse with a sweep of flame. Before the halves had time to fall to the floor, Sevens leaned down and used one arm to sweep me upward as swiftly as she had moved her sword.

All of a sudden I was back on my feet, my crutch pressed into my left armpit, Praem clutched to my chest.

Sevens took me by the shoulder and shoved me toward the Governor. I staggered, the echo of pain screaming upward from my left shin, strangled to quiet by the morphine in my bloodstream. The Governor put out one hand to catch my fall, but I recoiled in confusion and disgust, managing to catch myself at the last second, heaving onto the support of my crutch.

The Governor stared at me, then shrugged, turned away, and carried on toward the final light.

Sevens turned to the nurses, sword held high. “Go with your God, kitten!”

“Aren’t you coming with us?” I cried out. “Sevens, come with me!”

“My fight is here, with the nature of the narrative,” she said, whirling her father’s sword like a flaming baton. “Yours lies ahead, with the one who wronged you. Go with her, kitten. You have to do what the rest of us cannot! Go on!”

Praem suggested I take the opening; to do otherwise would waste Sevens’ efforts, and anger a wild and warlike future queen.

Besides, Sevens did not need any help. Her pen had become a sword, and the dream — the play, the narrative, all gone to horror and darkness — could not stand before the edits wrought by that blade.

“I love you, Sevens!” I cried out. “Stay safe, please!”

Sevens roared with cold laughter, sword splitting another nurse, driving back the crowd with flashes of fire. The nurses shambled past the Governor and I as if we were no longer present, totally focused on swarming toward the towering golden figure of Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight.

I turned away with regret and reluctance in my heart, a crutch wedged beneath my armpit, and hobbled after the Governor.

She waited for me at the plain double-doors, beneath the fluorescent bar of clean yellow light. I staggered up to her, sweating and panting with the effort of walking on my crutch and my wounded leg, body singing with the adrenaline and fear, throat sore and raw from the nurses’ many fingers. I glanced back over my shoulder, down the long dark corridor sinking into empty black. Seven-Shades-of-Sunlight was nothing but a distant spark, almost smothered by the staff of Cygnet Asylum.

“She’ll be okay,” said the Governor.

“What?” I twisted back to her, lurching sideways on my crutch. “How can you know that?”

“She will.”

The Governor turned away and pushed one of the doors aside. She stepped through the gap, into safety beyond the dark. I cast one final glance back at Sevens’ private war, then left her behind.

Over the threshold was more darkness — ordinary darkness, a refreshing plunge into the cool waters of private shade. My slippers and the tip of my crutch caught hard on the rough and scratchy surface of a carpet. The door clicked shut behind me. A familiar old feeling swelled inside my chest, bitter-sweet and distant, and brought the prickle of tears to my eyes.

For the ghost of a moment I felt like a squid who had squeezed into a gap between two shelves of ocean rock.

Had my other selves, my other six, my abyssal side, been inside me all along?

Then the Governor reached past my shoulder and clicked on the lights; the cephalopod sensation fled, driven deeper into the rocks by electric illumination.

“Ah … ” A dying murmur escaped my lips. I sniffed back tears, then took a deep breath. Praem hugged my chest. I had to concentrate.

The Governor strode away, toward what I could only assume was her desk.

The Office of the Governor of Cygnet Hospital, Asylum, Prison, and Maximum Security Containment Facility was refreshingly normal after our journey through the dreamlike corridors of night. The room was very wide, carpeted in plush yet scratchy institutional brown; the walls were the plain off-white slight-cream of a doctor’s office. The skirting board, light fixtures, window frame, and all other such flourishes were made of a rich dark wood polished to a high sheen. The room was illuminated by a trio of powerful incandescent bulbs in the ceiling, cupped behind plastic shades, and a matching quartet of standing lamps, all pointed at the walls so as to splash their light back upon the room, leaving behind no scrap of shadow or shade.

A large window dominated the right side of the room, looking out over the hospital grounds from four or five floors up. The gardens and lawns were now freed from the impossible darkness, lit by a gentle whisper of silver-grey moonlight, flickering between the distant trees and sliding across the empty grass. From that angle I could not see the false sky above, the wrinkled black underside of the Eye.

A short row of unremarkable filing cabinets flanked the window, alongside one of those glass display cases in which accomplished people liked to show off their trophies. Next to that was a tall, imposing, powerful bookcase made of ornamental wood. The bookcase was overflowing, but the letters on the spines of the resident tomes made my eyes hurt and my vision blur with ocular pain. The glass display case was stuffed with trophies and cups of all shapes and sizes — but the shapes made me feel sick and the sizes played tricks on my sight. Lining the wall next to the bookcase was a mosaic of diplomas and degrees, the exact sort of things one expected to see upon the wall of a distinguished professional — except the ink had run and rendered the words meaningless, turning each award and qualification into a smear of grey.

The seat of the Eye’s mind boasted two desks. The first stood toward the rear of the room, right where it should be, and was pretty unremarkable — a great slab of oak with a jumble of stationary and documents atop, pens and pencils littered everywhere, a discarded newspaper in one corner, nothing that one would not expect to find in such a place. The only element out of sync with reality was the total absence of any words on the documents, the newspaper, or the notepads. All the papers were blank white, empty of content, only there in form.

A high-backed, expensive-looking office chair stood behind the desk, mirrored by a low trio of uncomfortable plastic seats in front. No warm welcome for any members of staff who wished to address the Eye in person.

It was that first desk which the Governor walked up to. She tossed Horror’s head onto the surface with a wet and meaty thump, then stared at the result for a moment. Eventually she turned back around and looked at me again.

“The archives are through there,” she said. But I wasn’t really listening.

A second desk filled the entire left-hand side of the office. Polished steel stretched from wall to wall. Before that desk stood a chair more at home in the lair of a cartoon mad scientist than a doctor’s office — a huge reclining throne of plush fabric layered atop reinforced black plastic and sleek reflective metal, mounted on a ball-and-socket joint in the floor, so that any person seated within could turn the chair any which way, via the aid of a small electric control box mounted on one of the curved arms.

The second desk itself contained nothing, serving only as the foundation for a framework of monitor mounts.

Dozens upon dozens of screens stretched upward from that desk, lining the wall all the way to the ceiling, leaning forward as if sagging under their own weight, sprouting like dark fungus upon the spreading boughs of an electric fern. All different shapes and sizes and styles were represented — modern flat-screen televisions stood flush with the curved glass of cathode ray tubes; grainy CCTV footage unspooled while framed by high-definition video; film stock flickered and jumped and bloomed with imperfections shoulder-to-shoulder with to unshakeable digital clarity.

“The archives are through there,” the Governor repeated.

She pointed at a door, a steel door with a trio of heavy locks built into the wall, next to the tree of monitors.

I spared the door only the briefest of glances. I staggered across the office, crutch and slippers scuffing on the carpet. I lurched up to that steel desk and gripped the arm of the chair. I craned my neck to look upward, to watch the screens.

To observe.

On one camera feed, my own residential room; on another, Raine’s cell down in the prison. Both empty.

Another screen showed Sevens, whirling in fire and flame in a dark corridor, slaying nurses left and right. On yet another — Twil and Evee in the infirmary, Twil with her shoulder to the filing cabinet against the door, the door buckling and breaking, Evee shouting silent words from her wheelchair.

On another — Raine! My Raine! Raine, sprinting down some nighted hallway, clutching her machete in one hand and the blooded paw of a girl in the other — a girl with ruddy red skin and black hair and Zheng’s face on a body too small to be Zheng, her lips smeared with fresh blood and scraps of meat, the pair pursued by a crowd of things that should have been nurses. Raine was laughing. Zheng was howling. Away they went.

Another screen, and another, and another, and another! My eyes whirled across hundreds of views, inside and outside the hospital, into the patient wings, burrowed past the staff areas, dripping down in the prison. All of it, all at once, all without filter. I peered into every dark corner of the earth, every hidden secret of the asylum, every mind and heart and pair of eyes plugged straight into my vision.

There was Lozzie, poncho fluttering out behind her, leading a crowd of patients around a corner in the depths of the hospital. They blundered into something not-quite-doctor and fell upon the monster like a crowd of piranhas upon a carcass, shivs and knives rising and falling in dozens of little fists.

The patients were everywhere, on so many screens — some moving in ones and twos, scurrying and skittering through the dark, holding hands and hiding in corners. Others moved in big packs, flowing like water, avoiding concentrations of nurses. Lozzie’s revolutionaries were laying their groundwork for tomorrow’s dawn.

But I could not stay. My vision whirled away, as if I couldn’t control my own eyes.

Down into the prison I saw a vortex of shadow — Praem’s other half, flanked by half a dozen Knights in their armour and visors. Guns raised and bucked in silent hands, firing at something beyond my sight. Not at Praem. They were on her side. Our side. Us.

Had they been fighting all night, all day, for all time?

Sight whirled on. I couldn’t stay with them either.

On another monitor — an exterior view, deep in the woods. A flash of russet fur flickered past, vulpine tail whipping out behind. Shapes lumbered through the trees behind the fox, led on a merry chase deeper into the woods.

Exterior views flashed by, rolling across my mind. On another camera a white hump of ridged armour crashed over a low wall, fleeing a line of dark figures armed with crackling spears. Was that a Caterpillar? It was moving too fast, and so were my eyes. Tree lines and horizon and the exterior wall sped by, blurring into night and moonlight and out of sight. One section of the exterior wall look crushed or broken, bent inward by some great weight; I tried to go back, tried to focus on the gigantic fluttering shape that blocked out the night itself, but I could not stall. My eyes whipped on, as if drawn by gravity, down and down and down, into the black hole of endless observation.

One cluster of monitors showed a place I had not seen before — steel corridors, bulkhead doors, flickering lights, all placed to guard huge glass tanks of murky water.

There, my sight finally slowed.

All the views of that hidden place were drowned in emergency lights, strobing red and orange, silent sirens reflected off pools of standing water; many of the glass tanks had burst, flooding the hallways with brackish water, dripping off metal gantries, pouring down empty lift shafts. Gunfire flashed in the blinding darkness, chewing into walls, chasing slender figures I could not pin down as my eyes jumped from screen to screen. Bodies lay upon the floor, bleeding dark ichor into spilled water from the shattered aquariums. A moment of panic, but then no — they were not Knights, no, not ours at all. But if those armed guards were not our Knights, then what were they? I saw no face, no flesh, just blood and armour and broken guns. But I could not stop. My eyes tore onward.

Half-glimpsed forms slid through the shadows, their sinuous motion oddly familiar. Were those the ones who had slain the guards, and still fought them now? Had they burst their watery prisons and surprised their jailers? Did they know about Lozzie’s revolution? Did they know about me?

My eyes followed the logic of the screens, spiralling toward the centre of this dirty secret.

And there, in the core, was the largest glass tank of all. Set amid hissing pipes and high guardrails, warning signs and wary checkpoints, ringed by automatic guns and electric fences, it was armoured in glass many meters thick, large enough for a pod of whales, and filled with an ocean of water.

A single mote of flesh floated in the distant core of that main tank, deeper down and further away than the floor of the abyss itself. The flesh, the figure, the hint of life — it was little more than a smear of pale skin, obscured behind glass and pressure and murk.

Upon that, my eyes finally halted.

I knew what I beheld.

“Maisie?”