Content Warnings

Unreality / gaslighting / institutionalisation (same as the previous chapters so far in this arc)
Dysphoria

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And so, for the second time on that premature and artificial night, Raine ventured forth into the echoing shadows of Cygnet Hospital — alone, unsupported, without backup.

Raine — my steadfast knight, my faithful hound, my dream-bound lover, my rock in the storm-tossed seas, the divine hand from above which had pulled me from destruction in a way I could never fully repay — went out into the darkness once again, without argument or question, without debate or hesitation, without aid or comfort. She set out on a quest, for nothing more than a hunch of mine, about a nocturnal tapping on some distant node of the hospital’s heating system. She left the fragile safety of our refuge, to skulk and sneak through the hallways and passages of this unnatural witching hour, with the silver moonlight chasing her heels, with the darkly glinting blade of her unsheathed machete held easy in her unwavering fist.

I didn’t even have to ask; she volunteered, and would accept no rebuke.

“I’ll be safe enough alone,” she told me before she left, purring reassurances as she limbered up. “Sneaking missions are kinda my thing. Keep it smooth, keep it soft, keep it stealthy, I know what I’m doing. I’ll follow the pipes of the heating system, follow the sounds. Should take me right there, as long as it’s not too far.”

“Raine, please,” I had protested. “Don’t follow the trail anywhere dangerous. Please promise me. Please be a … a good girl? Be a good girl. I … I command you to be a good girl.”

Raine smirked. “Sure thing. Just for you. If I don’t find our tapping friend within thirty minutes, I’ll turn back, I promise. I’m not looking to be a hero over a malfunctioning boiler. Hey, not that I believe it’s just a mechanical fault. Somebody out there is calling. Maybe for us. Maybe this ‘Sevens’, right?”

“Right, right, exactly. Okay. Okay, good. Good.”

“And?”

“Good girl,” I repeated. Raine grunted with pleasure, then kissed me on the forehead.

Nobody was happy with the necessity of this solo expedition, except perhaps Raine herself. She had already risked capture or worse once before; she had already secured food and extra clothes and the weapon she now wielded, not to mention how she’d led Lozzie back to safety. She had done more than enough, the night wasn’t getting any younger, and we all needed rest. Her included. Raine was not superhuman, no matter how she liked to present herself. She did not have to offer herself up to the task.

But the tapping on the radiator pipes was a clue with a time limit.

A seven-tap pattern, though what it meant was anybody’s guess. Evelyn said it didn’t correspond to any magical symbolic system she was aware of; Raine said it wasn’t Morse Code. Lozzie could only attest that it was most certainly not a ‘funky beat’. We even had the Fox listen to it, by encouraging her over to the radiator where the tapping was most clearly heard, but she was uninterested and did not respond.

The tapping only came at night, not during the daylight. I could not recall ever hearing it during my long initial exploration of the dream-spaces of Cygnet Hospital. If we waited for morning, the trail might well go cold, leaving us with an unsolved mystery for the next night — and who knew if we would even make it to another dusk?

We needed every advantage we could get, every possible ally we could find, to exploit every chink in the institution’s armour.

We had to investigate this tonight, while darkness still lay upon Cygnet Asylum.

But we could not safely creep through the midnight halls with Evelyn’s wheelchair, not without the cover of the riot to distract the nurses and mask our passage. Evee would have to stay behind — but leaving her by herself was unthinkable, she would be defenceless; there was absolutely no way I was leaving Evelyn’s side in this place. We couldn’t leave her with Lozzie, either — not because I believed that Lozzie was a threat to Evee, even in Lozzie’s altered state, but because if a staff member wandered into the locker room again, Evee would need help hiding, as I had achieved previously. I wasn’t quite certain that Lozzie was capable of doing that.

Our only option was to pour all our cares onto Raine’s shoulders alone. She could move quick and light, darting through the corridors, then return to tell of whatever she found. Depending on the result, we could retrace her footsteps when dawn arrived, when the corridors were less dangerous, less filled with unseen monsters.

Raine carried nothing but her knife, barefoot for stealth and speed.

Last thing before she went, Raine shared a private word with Lozzie; I couldn’t hear what they said, whispering together at the end of the row of lockers, though I imagined it had something to do with my safety. Raine had not entirely trusted her before, always interposing herself between us. But things had changed over the course of this day, had they not?

Raine slipped a hand around the back of Lozzie’s neck and brought their foreheads together, flesh touching flesh, skulls beneath skin. Whispered words passed between them, brown eyes locked on blue. Lozzie smirked. Raine smiled back with a sharp edge to her lips.

They parted a moment later. Raine turned back toward me and Evee and the Fox; she saluted us with the naked blade of her machete, then slipped away, out of sight, heading for the single door of the locker room.

She was so light on her feet that I barely even heard the door open and close.

But somehow, down in my guts, I knew she was gone.

And then we were three — or four, if one included the Saye Fox, dozing once again on the wooden bench. Five if one counted the Praem Plushie in Evelyn’s lap. Of that, I was not sure.

Lozzie flounced and fluttered back down the row of lockers, pastel poncho dyed dark in the dead-eyed moonlight pouring through the high, narrow window. Her shiv was nowhere to be seen, her pale little hands empty of sharp objects and mostly clean of blood.

Evelyn spoke up from behind me: “Alright. Alright, you two, we are now alone and vulnerable. That means low voices, keep noise to a minimum, and listen for the sounds of anything moving out there in the corridors. And Heather, for pity’s sake, sit down.”

But neither Lozzie or I answered. We had eyes only for each other.

Lozzie paused just beyond arm’s reach. A playful smile bounced onto her lips, blue eyes dancing in the moonlit shadows. She opened her arms with a wide flourish, poncho fluttering outward like the softly furred membranes of a flying squirrel.

“Hug?” she chirped. “Heathy-huggies? Proper huggie-wugs? For Lozzer’s lozziers?”

I hesitated.

My earlier fear of Lozzie had curdled — separated into two distinct impressions. On one hand, this was still the girl whom I had caught earlier that day watching videos of torture and maiming, revelling in cruelty and suffering, which had turned my stomach and brought a cold sweat to my skin. Instinctive caution still held me tight. My body whispered that this was a predator, that I should run from her, without looking back.

On the other hand, the more time Lozzie spent with me and Raine and Evelyn, the more she seemed like her usual self, at least in outward behaviour, speech patterns, and the way she expressed herself.

But the fear remained. No matter how awake our Lozzie seemed, the dreamer dreamed on.

Had this always been a part of her? Had this aspect of Lozzie simply gone unnoticed because I hadn’t wanted to see it before?

So, I hesitated — but only for a moment.

“Hug,” I said with a nod, then stepped forward with a jerking limp, and opened my arms for Lozzie.

She drew me into a wriggly, giggly, enclosing hug, wrapping her pastel poncho around my back, mixing the fabrics of our protective colourations — her blue-pink-white rustling against my soft yellow blanket. She held on for a little while, rubbing her hands up and down my back, and did not slip a shiv between my ribs. When we parted, she bobbed her head in wordless gratitude.

I let out a breath that I hadn’t known I’d been holding. My trust was well-placed, the risk rewarded.

Evelyn cleared her throat. “Are both of you going to continue ignoring me, or have I turned invisible?”

I turned back to Evelyn, cheeks flushed with sudden guilt. Evee was frowning at the pair of us, one hand on the Praem Doll in her lap. The Doll was staring at us too, with those blank, flat, disc-shaped eyes of stitched fabric.

“Sorry, Evee-weeve!” Lozzie chirped, peering past me. “Had to get emergency hugs!”

Evelyn sighed and rolled her eyes, but she contained the worst of her ire; Lozzie was hard to stay angry at. “Yes, I’m sure you did. What were you and Raine whispering about, anyway? What was all that?”

Lozzie put a finger to her lips and tilted her head sideways, as if deciding what to say.

“Um,” I butted in quickly. “Lozzie, you don’t have to explain if you don’t want to. It’s okay, it’s—”

“I’m dangerous!” Lozzie chirped. “Danger girl!”

I swallowed a wince.

Evelyn said nothing, waiting for more. When it became evident that Lozzie wasn’t going to explain, Evee said: “Yes? Yes. You’ve always been dangerous, Lozzie. What are you talking about?”

Lozzie beamed at Evee. “Nothing!” She flapped her arms wide again. “Evee want hugs too?”

Evelyn cleared her throat, suddenly uncomfortable. “You know that’s hard for me. Even normally it’s hard. Like this, in this parody of a body? I feel as if a stiff breeze is going to snap me in two.”

Lozzie pointed at the plushie in Evee’s lap. “Praem can transmit!”

Evelyn squinted at her. “What?”

“Give Praem! Hug transmission! Hug transportation!” Lozzie held out both her hands. “I’ll be gentle, promise promise!”

Evelyn didn’t quite seem to comprehend, and I was a bit lost as well, but after a moment’s hesitation she handed over the Praem Plushie. Lozzie accepted the soft toy with exaggerated reverence, then squeezed the tiny Praem against her chest, engulfing the Plushie in a hug, emitting a high-pitched ‘eeeee!’ as she did so. Then Lozzie returned the Praem Plushie to Evelyn’s lap.

Evee didn’t seem to know what to do. For a moment she hesitated, then averted her eyes and pressed the Doll gently against her own abdomen.

“Well, yes,” she muttered, points of colour blossoming in her cheeks. “Mm. Indeed. I see now. Thank you, Lozzie. Yes.” Evelyn cleared her throat a second time as Lozzie smothered a giggle. Then she turned an unimpressed frown upon me, voice rising back to normal. “Heather, sit down.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m fine, I’m just—”

“Sit. Down,” Evelyn snapped. Apparently the second-hand hug had stiffened her spine. “Raine was right, you need to rest that leg. You have a bloody great gash on it, and it’s still bleeding. Standing there isn’t going to help anybody. Sit down.”

“I—”

“Raine will be back within the promised time slot,” Evelyn ground the words out through clenched teeth; she was wracked with doubt and fear as well, covering it with concern. “Sit down. Rest the leg. Now. Or I’ll … I’ll throw Praem at you.”

I tutted. “You wouldn’t.”

Evelyn raised the Praem Plushie in one hand. A blush burned in her cheeks, pale and thin, the most she could muster. “I shall have Praem menace you. Sit down.”

I made a show of surrendering, putting up both hands as I sat down on the wooden bench. I stretched out my wounded leg as best I could, trying not to wince. “Okay, okay. I don’t want to irritate Praem, after all.”

Lozzie joined us too, her pastel poncho pillowing outward across the cold wood. She bumped her knee against mine — against my uninjured leg — and shot me a sneaky little smile.

“Better,” Evelyn grunted, returning the plushie to her lap. “Now, we best spend this time wisely.” She nodded at the rest of the food Raine had secured for us earlier, much of it still inside the fabric shopping bag. “Eat up until you’re both full, we’re all going to need our strength. And pass me another sandwich. I feel like I could eat a racehorse, bones and all.”

Evelyn had a good point — we had little to do but eat and wait, counting the seconds and minutes until Raine returned, trying not to think about what would happen if she didn’t. I munched my way through several bags of crisps and a handful of little chocolate rolls, craving sugar and salt, trying to replenish my energy; what I really wanted was lemons, and lots of them. An entire supermarket bag of citrus fruit would set right everything that was wrong, or at least that was how I felt, though that was not an option. Evelyn ate another sandwich, chewing and swallowing with mechanical concentration, frowning at the failed magic circles she had drawn on some of the nearby lockers. Lozzie inhaled several bread rolls, and tucked one away inside her poncho for later use.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed with no sign or sound of Raine.

Cygnet Hospital was silent beyond the furtive rustling and muted breathing of our locker-lined corner — all except for the arrhythmic tap-tap-tapping on the radiator pipes, audible only when we three held our breath. Sallow moonlight lit a slice of my pajama bottoms, just above the wound on my left leg. The throbbing was slow and steady, hard and relentless. Pain washed upward through my hips with every beat of my heart. For a while the wound had not seemed so bad, but now I realised that had been an illusion. My nerve endings had been numbed by adrenaline, by the brief appearance of the King in Yellow. Now the pain was growing hard to ignore, turning my thoughts to static, absorbing a greater and greater portion of my attention. I felt fragmented and hazy.

We all slipped into an uneasy silence, food mostly finished, whispers trapped behind our lips. Evelyn sighed, eyes watching the moonlight through the window. Lozzie started to hum and swing her legs, but she trailed off after a while; her tune was light, but the echoes returned oppressive and gloomy. The Fox slept on, the only comfortable one among us.

Eventually I realised that Evelyn was staring at me instead of the window. Our eyes met, but she did not look away or speak up.

“ … Evee?”

“Mm,” she grunted. “Heather, come here and let me have a look at you, please.”

“Ah? What for?”

Evelyn made an impatient gesture. “Just slide down the bench. Don’t put weight on the leg, don’t stand up. Come here.”

I did as Evee requested, sliding to the end of the bench until our knees were almost touching. Evelyn leaned forward in the seat of her wheelchair to get a better look at me. One of her hands was coiled around the Praem Plushie in her lap, hugging it tight; those flat, disc-shaped eyes seemed to examine me as well, though with less intensity. The Fox briefly looked up, found nothing of interest, and resumed her nap.

Evee held out her free hand. “Give me your wrist. Either one.”

I offered my wrist. “What are we doing?”

Evelyn took my wrist and pressed her thumb over my pulse, pausing to count inside her own head. I could not help but notice how thin and tired her hands were, how pale and shrunken, all skin and bone.

“Normal enough,” she grunted. She turned my hand over and examined my fingernails one by one. Then she let go and gestured at my torso. “Show me your flanks, where your tentacles usually are.”

“Um … not that I mind sharing my body with you, but—”

Evelyn tutted, huffed, and rolled her eyes. Lozzie smothered a giggle with her poncho.

“Heather,” Evelyn hissed, “I’m not ogling you. I’ve seen you half-naked plenty of times. If I wanted to leer at your tits, I would probably not choose this as the location in which to do so. I’m not Raine.”

A lump formed in my throat; I hadn’t wanted to think about this. “I’m not trying to be funny,” I said. “I want to know what you’re doing.”

Evelyn huffed an impatient sigh. “What do you think I’m doing? Everything here is wrong, including our bodies.” She gestured with frustration at her withered leg and missing prosthetic. “You’re alone in there, correct? Singlet Heather, not seven of you like normal. Which is wrong. You’re missing your tentacles, your bioreactor, all of it, which is also wrong. I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything else out of place. Now, show me your sides, come on.”

My turn to sigh. “Evee, I don’t think you’re going to discover the secrets of the dream by goosing my flank.”

Evelyn squinted at me. “What happened to ‘I’m not trying to be funny’?”

The lump in my throat grew so large that for a moment I could not speak. I looked away, composure dropping from my face, pain in my eyes. Evelyn must have noticed, because her tone shifted to baffled concern.

“Heather?” she whispered. “What’s wrong now?”

I swallowed hard, unknotting my throat. “Evee, my body is all wrong, yes. You’re correct. More than you know. The … the … abyssal dysphoria? The same urge that led me to make my tentacles real in the first place? It’s painful, like this. I’m not quite at the stage where I want to claw off my skin, but I know I will eventually reach that point if I keep thinking about it. I’ve been in momentum all day, moving, moving, moving. No time to think, and … I need to not think, about that, about this. I … I feel … wrong, being looked at so closely, right now.”

“Oh,” Evelyn said. “Um. Mm.”

“Mmhmm.”

Lozzie murmured too. “Heathy … ”

Evelyn went silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I don’t know if it helps to know this, Heather, but I feel pretty much the same about my body right now.”

I nodded, unable to meet her eyes. “It does. Here.”

Then I lifted my new disgusting brown jumper and my scratchy white institutional pajama top, to show Evelyn my flanks and the base of my ribcage.

Evelyn was a saint; she didn’t react with surprise, or comment on my sudden acquiescence, let alone make a snide remark. She simply leaned forward and looked, clean and clinical, detached but caring, examining my skin without a sound, except a murmur of ‘Okay, other side, if you please’. Evelyn Saye, the mage, treated my body as a problem to be solved. For once, that helped.

When she was done, Evee leaned back. I covered myself again and pulled my yellow blanket tight. Lozzie peered out from behind her hands — I hadn’t even realised she’d covered her eyes for me. I could have hugged her again.

Evelyn said nothing.

“Well?” I asked.

Evelyn cleared her throat. “Do you want me to say anything, or not? I can just keep my thoughts to myself, if you prefer.”

“I mean, um … yes, please do tell me.”

Evelyn sucked on her teeth. “I saw nothing. No sign of your usual attachment points for the tentacles. No bruising, no damage, nothing at all.” She shrugged, narrow shoulders moving below her grey dressing gown. “Nothing useful. My apologies.”

“There’s no need for apologies, it’s okay,” I said. “I just … it feels so wrong. Like most of me is missing.”

“Mm. Obscene,” Evelyn said, sucking on her teeth, gazing at my face. “Heather, lean forward, look at me, please. No need for undressing this time, nothing like that.”

I did as Evelyn asked. She leaned forward too, so our faces were mere inches apart. For a moment I thought she was going to kiss me on the lips; Lozzie evidently shared the same thought, for she emitted a little giggle-gasp and then stopped up her mouth with a corner of her poncho.

But Evee didn’t react to that. Neither did she kiss me, to my slight disappointment.

She just frowned, peering into my eyes. After a minute or two she leaned back again.

“Huh,” she grunted.

“H-huh?” I echoed, still poised for the kiss that never came. “Evee? What does ‘huh’ mean?”

“Your eyes,” she said.

“What about my eyes?” I leaned back too, one hand going to my right cheekbone, just below the orb in question.

“They’re … odd.”

I waited for more, feeling almost as denied as when I’d thought she was about to kiss me. “Evee? Don’t be cryptic, please, don’t leave it at that. I think I need to know if my eyes have turned into mushrooms or if there’s something swimming behind my eyeballs. Just tell me. Nothing else is going to surprise me in this place, really.”

Evelyn frowned harder, but not without compassion. “I’m not sure I can put it into words. It’s not the colour or the shape. They’re still your eyes, they’re still you, just … different, somehow.” She sighed and waved a hand. “Maybe it’s because I’m only talking to one of you, instead of all seven. And it’s always been all of you, in the past, even before we knew it.”

Lozzie chirped in agreement. “Mmhmm! Just a smallllll piece of Heathies. Not the whole Heathy collective brain group!”

“Mm,” Evelyn grunted. “Perhaps that’s what I’m feeling. Like all we’re seeing is one limb, not the whole of her.”

“Oh!” I lit up. “Like what happened in that dream one time, the one with Mister Squiddy and Lozzie? I considered that too, but this doesn’t feel anything like that.” I flapped my arms. “I mean, what do you see when you look at me? It’s actually me, right? I’m shaped like me.”

“Heather-shaped is Heather-shaped,” Lozzie said.

“Well, mostly,” I sighed. “Other than the missing tentacles.”

Evelyn nodded slowly. “Yes, I just see you, nothing weird. Do you think the other six of you are around here somewhere?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Six other Heathers would be pretty active if they were free. They must be locked up somewhere. Maybe inside that high-security area. At least, that’s my working assumption for now. If we can break in there—”

A soft click came from the front of the locker room — the door.

A return, or an intruder.

We held our collective breath. Lozzie bounced to her feet, metal shiv sliding into her hand. Evelyn swallowed and clutched the Praem Plushie tighter. The Fox sprang from her nap and sniffed the air, little black nose twitching at some secret scent. I readied myself to grab Evee’s wheelchair, in case this was a repeat of earlier.

The door clicked shut again.

“Ladies!” came a panting whisper. “Your scout returns!”

“Raine!” I almost cheered — quietly.

Raine hurried across the locker room, no longer concealing the sound of her footsteps. I stood to meet her despite the pounding throb in my left leg, eager to know what she had discovered, eager to welcome her back with a hug.

A blood-drenched spectre stepped around the edge of the locker-canyon, into the shaft of moonlight.

I swallowed a yelp, saved from a scream only by the unmistakable shape of Raine’s face beneath the splatters of gore. A toothy white grin ripped a line of clean white amid the bloody mess.

Raine was covered with a liberal helping of fresh blood. The sticky crimson sheen was soaked into her tank-top and her ragged pajama bottoms, matted in her hair, stuck to her exposed skin, smeared on her face, and slathered on the naked blade of her machete.

Evelyn sighed, rather unimpressed, as if she’d expected this. Lozzie murmured, “Woooow!”

“Raine!” I blurted out. “Are you alright?! Did you get hurt? Did you—”

Raine shot me a wink. “You should see the other guy, sweet thing. And hey, don’t worry, none of this is mine. Haha— ah, ow.” She winced and tensed up around her stomach.

“Raine!”

I rushed to her side, but she waved me off with her free hand. “It’s okay, Heather. Seriously. None of this is mine, not even a graze or a nosebleed. Just a couple of bruises. Don’t get yourself all smeared with this. Stay off for a sec, okay?”

“Raine, we’re in a dream,” I snapped. “I don’t have to worry about bloodborne diseases. Swear to me that you’re alright!”

“I swear it, none of it’s mine.” Raine straightened back up and shook her head. “And it’s cool, I’m gonna rinse off in one of those showers in a sec. No sense muddying us both.”

Evelyn snapped: “Did you leave a trail? Raine, did you leave a trail of blood on your way back?”

Raine shook her head. I realised she was still panting with effort, doing her best to hide it in the cadence of her words. “Nah. Wiped off the worst on a wall. Feet too. No footprints, no trail, no evidence. Except the corpse I left, didn’t have time to move that.”

“Alright, good,” Evelyn said. “Well done. Go get rinsed off if you need to. You absolute fucking mad woman.”

“In a sec,” Raine answered with a smirk. “Hey, sweet thing, Heather. Sling me one of those chocolate rolls from the bag, will you?”

“Of course!”

I grabbed a snack for Raine, unwrapped the packaging, then pressed the packaged end into her free hand so she didn’t smear blood all over her own food. She inhaled the snack in three quick bites.

“Good girl,” I murmured. “Good girl. Well done. Well done for coming back to us. Well done. Oh my gosh, but that is a lot of blood.”

“I found our mysterious tapper,” she said.

Evelyn tutted. “Debrief can wait. Get clean.”

“Uh-uh,” Raine panted. “Gimme a sec. The tapping, it’s not too far from here, in a staff area on the hospital ground floor. All scratchy carpets and cubicles, like an office. Know what I mean?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “Anyway, the tapping pipes lead through a wall, into a corner office or something like that. But it’s weird, it’s not like anything else we’ve seen in this place.”

“Weird how?” I asked.

“Steel door. Steel and glass. Chrome frame. Like some shit from a Silicon Valley techbro office. Not real security, all style, no substance. But I couldn’t get the thing open, it’s locked up tight, can’t jimmy it or anything. Dream logic, I guess. But get this — it’s locked with a keypad. But not like a normal keypad. It’s got dozens of buttons, things that aren’t even numbers on there. I played with it for a bit, but no dice.”

“Mathematics!” I said, eyes going wide. “Brain-math! Evee, do you think—”

“Mmhmm,” Evelyn grunted. “We can’t be certain, but it could be an abstract representation of self-implementing hyperdimensional mathematics. Maybe. Good thinking, Heather.”

“I can get in there!” I said. “I can probably solve it!”

Raine grinned and held up a hand. “Slow your roll. We ain’t doing it right now. It’s not good out there. Nurses are gonna be swarming all over the place after I passed through.”

“Ah, indeed,” Evelyn drawled. “Is that why you look like an extra from an interactive Halloween show?”

“Yes,” I added, clearing my throat with very careful politeness. “That is … well, I think it might be the most blood I’ve ever seen you covered with, certainly. Other than your own.”

Raine raised her eyebrows at me. “Other than my own?”

“Oh, you got shot in the leg once,” I explained. “Long story. Maybe later.”

Evelyn sighed. “Yes, Raine, what happened?”

Raine lost her smug sheen. She blew out a slow sigh. “Ran into a nurse on the way back. Or, what I think was a nurse, probably. Couldn’t get away clean, not without a fight. She was gonna raise the alarm, then I would have been up against a dozen of the things, up shit creek with no paddle. Had to go hard and fast.” She gestured with her machete. “This is lot worse than it looks, it was over pretty quick.”

“What … ” My stomach went sour. “What do you mean, you ‘think’ it was a nurse?”

Raine gave me a dark look. “Shit is weird out there at night. Like all the masks are off. I don’t even really know what I saw, just that it bled.”

“Good,” Evelyn grunted. “Things that can bleed are also things that can die.”

“Bleeding and dying!” Lozzie did a little cheer, waving the hem of her poncho. “Woohoo!”

We decided to wait for dawn. Despite her outward bluster and bravado, Raine was clearly exhausted from the fight with the mysterious ‘night nurse’. I suspected the confrontation had been a much more serious battle than Raine was letting on, despite her easy victory. Perhaps she was trying her best to shelter Evelyn and me from our worries; after all, we had almost come face-to-face with one of those nocturnal nurses a little while earlier. The last thing we needed was growing paranoia about monsters stalking just beyond the locker room door.

Raine needed food and rest. My left leg needed time to heal, as much time as we could buy. Evelyn probably needed sleep, no matter what she said. Lozzie wanted to be off soon, off into the dark to assist the ringleaders of her riot; I had the distinct impression that she was planning a series of daring breakouts. But the sight of Raine covered in blood and panting with effort put a pause on Lozzie’s plans for now. She agreed to stay with us for the night, even if she must depart come morning. The Saye Fox did not seem eager to leave either, sticking as close to Evelyn as she could.

To my surprise, Raine decided that it was safe to take a shower, in one of the locker room’s dingy little cubicles; she posted Lozzie as a lookout at the locker room door, to alert us to the approach of any wandering midnight staff. Raine washed her machete and dried it carefully on a towel, taking better care of the blade than she often did of her own safety. Then she stripped, which was much to my lingering delight, even if I couldn’t act on it at that moment; despite the shock of seeing her covered in blood, the implication of her violence made my belly clench up with excitement, fuelled by a moonlit glimpse of her naked form.

But sexy shower times were not meant to be, not this night, not in this place, not with Evelyn and Lozzie within earshot. Raine was all practical solutions, not showy displays — though she did throw me a wink and a flex, just for the sheer fun of it.

She washed the worst of the blood from her clothes, then dried them on a towel as well, before dipping her naked flesh beneath the stream of water. The whole process took less than ten minutes, though she remained wrapped in a towel for some time, until her clothes were dry. If I’d been involved, it would have stretched out to over an hour, and we could not afford such indulgences.

We needed to remain hidden that night, not thumping against the walls.

We bedded down as Raine had suggested earlier, spreading out and bunching up towels on the floor as best we could, wedged into the narrow gap between the two rows of lockers. The floor was cold, but the towels helped, and the company helped even more. Raine and I assisted Evelyn out of her wheelchair so she could lie down properly; she said the floor would be preferable to the chair, despite any problems with the hard surface. Lozzie snuggled up inside her poncho, a nice extra layer of comfort for her; she ended up cuddled close to Evee’s side, though very gently.

Raine took the first watch, sitting on the bench and munching on spare bread rolls. The Saye Fox curled up too, wedged between Evee and Lozzie. I lay down next to Evee and fell asleep before I knew it, with the fingertips of one hand gently touching Evee’s wrist beneath the makeshift blanket.

The night was blissfully uneventful. Raine woke me after several hours and changed the dressing on my shin, cleaning the wound and wrapping it in a fresh section of torn pajama bottoms. I took the next watch while Raine slept, listening to the silence of the Cygnet night. I thought about the implications of this dream for a while, then I examined the blade-less hilt of the sword, given to me by the King in Yellow. I hoped this strange gift would make sense to Sevens.

Lozzie took over last; we had already agreed not to subject Evelyn to a turn on watch. Dream or not, Evee was in a terrible physical state compared to the rest of us, malnourished and exhausted and worn down to a stub.

When I returned to sleep, I pulled the excess of my yellow blanket over Evelyn. She whimpered in her slumber, turning toward me in the dark. A soft mass fell against my side — I groped around and realised it was the Praem Plushie. Evelyn had been clutching it in her sleep. She murmured again, so I returned Praem to her grip, pressing the plushie to her chest. Evelyn hugged it and settled back down, none the wiser to what I had witnessed.

I only wished that I had all my tentacles, so I might have cushioned her all the better.

I slept away the rest of the night cuddled between Raine and Evelyn. I did not dream within the dream. Sleep here was oblivion, to ease the passage of time.

We rose at the first crack of dawn. Everyone drank water and ate more of our provisions.

Evelyn was, as in reality, not a morning person.

“Fuck me,” she groaned once we got her situated back in her wheelchair. Raine pressed a bread roll into her hand. Evelyn stared at the roll as if it had personally insulted her. “Fuck this. Fuck being awake in this parody of body. Fuck, fuck, fuck—”

“I know the feeling, Evee,” I said. “Fuck this.”

“Oooooooh!” went Lozzie. “Heathy’s grown fangs!”

“I hope that’s not literal,” I sighed. I knew what she meant — teasing me about swearing — but I ran my tongue over my teeth regardless, hoping against hope that I had gained some modifications overnight. No such luck. I was still blunt.

“Ah, mm, yes, well.” Evelyn cleared her throat and trailed off, then turned her eyes to the narrow window running along the top of the locker room’s back wall. “Are we sure this is going to work? The night nurses will be gone?”

Beyond the walls of Cygnet Asylum, dawn was breaking — though I had no idea how the light was being produced, without a sun to crest the horizon.

The black wrinkles of the Eye’s underside were lit as if by the blazing orange rays of a cloud-graced sunrise; dark red and burnt umber played across the ridges and pits, warning of a rainy day or cloudy skies to come. Dark orange dawn poured into the locker room through that high window, catching dust motes in the cool air, reflecting off the metal of the lockers, turning the floor into a sea of freezing lava — for the dawn brought no warmth, only chill and cold, as if we had returned somehow to the depths of winter.

Raine drew her machete and nodded, mouth a hard line. “Our best chance is to get mobile before the asylum wakes up around us, before the day staff arrive and start their rounds. Or before the night staff turn back into the day staff, if that’s how it works.” She shrugged. “We’ll make for the door with the keypad, so Heather can try it. There’s a way out into the asylum grounds in that office space I told you about, not more than fifty feet from the door. If something goes wrong, that’s our exit. We head out, find somewhere to hide for the morning, then wait for Twil to show herself. That sound about right, sweet thing? Any objections?”

“None,” I said, though my heart was pounding. “I think we can do this.”

Raine nodded at my leg. “How’s the wound feel this morning?”

I made a show of flexing my calf muscle and putting extra weight on the wound. I winced, not entirely for show. “It hurts. A lot. More than yesterday, actually, but in a different way. It’s stiff and slow. I can put weight on it, though. I can run if we have to. I can do this, Raine.”

She smiled for me. “You can do anything. And don’t you know it.”

Evelyn swallowed. “I have no objections.”

Raine raised an eyebrow and cracked an indulgent smile. “I smell a but, Lady Saye.”

“A butt!” Lozzie chirped, then fell about laughing. The Saye Fox watched her with curious intent.

Evelyn huffed and rolled her eyes. “But — do not leave my wheelchair behind. Do not.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Raine said, then winked. “I gotcha, promise.”

“I would carry you myself if I had to, Evee,” I said. “I’ll handle the wheelchair, I promise.”

Lozzie raised a hand high into the air, like a schoolchild with a pending question, beaming a big smile. Raine indicated her with a gracious wave of one hand. “And Lady Lozzers?”

Lozzie lit up. “Oooh! Lady?”

Raine chuckled. “You like that?”

“Mmhmm!” Lozzie chirped. “Buuuut I’m not coming with you three. I gotta go help my other girlies!”

“Right,” Raine said. “You can link back up with us whenever. We’ll be out in the grounds.”

Lozzie sketched a loose salute. “Yups!”

I gave Lozzie another hug; Raine watched closely, as if ready to leap, but she did not move to separate us. “Good luck,” I said. “And, Lozzie, don’t get caught. You’re doing so well, so well now. Don’t get caught. Please be careful.”

Lozzie did a big comedy wink at me. “Next time you see me, I’ll have a whole squad of freaks at my back!”

“I do hope so. Good luck. Love you, Lozzie.”

Lozzie left the locker room first; she managed to turn her departure into an unintentional comedy routine. She eased open the single door open and peered out into the shadowy morning corridor with big exaggerated gestures, then tiptoed over the threshold like a cartoon character. When she confirmed the coast was clear, she did a big twirl with her poncho, sending her wispy blonde hair all over the place. She giggled, bowed to the rest of us, then turned and skittered off into the labyrinth of Cygnet Hospital, poncho fluttering out behind her.

“She’ll be alright,” Raine purred. “She’s a hell of a lot more robust than I expected. Our little rabble-rouser.”

I nodded along. “She always comes back. From Outside, I mean. She always, always comes back. This is no different.”

Raine raised a curious eyebrow.

“I’ll explain some other time,” I said. “Or maybe I won’t have to, if your memories return soon.”

Raine winked down at me. “You can tell me the story anyway, sweet thing. Let’s move.”

Stepping through the door and back into the warren of hospital hallways was not as simple as it seemed. Raine went first, naked machete in her fist, holding the door for Evee’s wheelchair. I wheeled Evelyn gently through the doorway. The Saye Fox slipped past us, circled Raine’s ankles, and sat on her haunches, keeping watch. Evelyn clutched the Praem Plushie in her lap. Our fabric carrier bag of supplies hung from one of the wheelchair handles.

But I paused on the threshold. A moment of fear took hold in my guts. An absurd notion flowered open in my mind.

“Heather?” Raine hissed.

Evelyn tried to twist around in her seat, squinting at me. “Heather, what the hell are you doing now?”

We had been safe, this one night, tucked away in an unseen corner.

What if we simply stayed there, the three of us, forever? The Fox was free to come and go if she wished. And Lozzie could come visit whenever she liked. Here we would be safe and hidden from the nurses and doctors, from the gaze of the Eye above, from the logic of the hospital, like rats tucked into the walls. We would live in the dark, but we would live, and I could not bear the thought of having Raine or Evelyn ripped away from me again. If only we stayed put, stayed inside the walls, inside the system, inside—

I cleared my throat.

“To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength,
Gives, in your weakness, strength unto your foe,
And so your follies fight against yourself.
Fear, and be slain — so worse can come to fight;
And fight and die is death destroying death,
Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.”

The words flowed from me, pure memory. I took a deep breath, straightened up, and nodded to Raine and Evee. “Sorry,” I said. “I was just afraid for a moment.”

“What the hell was that?!” Evelyn hissed.

“Poetry,” Raine whispered, cracking a delighted grin. “There’s my beautiful girl. Reciting poems by heart.”

“Oh, um, no,” I said. “It’s Shakespeare. Richard II. It’s a good mantra against fear, I always thought. The worst thing about fear is fear itself, and retreating from fear. All that stuff. So, let’s go!”

Raine nodded, winked, and saluted me with her naked machete. Evelyn huffed and clung on tight to both her chair and Praem’s empty vessel. I stepped out of the locker room, abandoning our hidden refuge, forever.

We crept through the dim daybreak light of Cygnet at dawn. Deep orange shafts of illumination crept around the corners and across the floors, spears of light stabbing into the shadows of the hospital, peeling back layers of night-time shade, splashing glowing reflections across the white walls, glittering on the metal doorhandles, gathering like liquid flame upon the skirting boards and windowsills.

Raine ‘took point’, as she liked to call it, though the Fox happily overtook her position to scout ahead, doubling back again and again to let us know it was safe to proceed. I took responsibility for Evelyn’s wheelchair, moving as quickly as I could, using the counterweight to help with the pain in my left leg.

We journeyed past sweeping metal stairwells and down single-file back passageways, following the route Raine had traced last night, when she had tracked the mysterious tapping sounds. The pipes of the heating system were silent now, the message ended by the dim light of the ruddy dawn.

The aftermath of the riot was everywhere. We passed makeshift barricades which looked as if they had been smashed aside by battering rams. We discovered discarded weapons — mostly pots and pans from the kitchen, along with broken chair legs, lengths of rope, and even an archaic fireplace poker; a few were stained with blood, but not many, not enough to speak of victory. We spotted shredded straitjackets, broken handcuffs, and a door hanging from its hinges. We stepped over bloody bandages, sooty blast-marks from illegal fireworks, and a single shattered megaphone.

It felt like a city, the morning after the spasms of a revolution struggling to be born.

“They really went for it, damn,” Raine whispered. “And this was only the first try. These girls have got some real fire in them, oh yeah. Second time’s gonna blow the roof off this place.”

“Not while we’re in it, I hope,” Evelyn grunted.

“What if we do the blowing ourselves?” I asked. Raine smirked at me. Evelyn rolled her eyes. I tutted. “That is not what I meant, and you both know it! Gosh. Tch.”

Eventually we reached the site of Raine’s solitary fight the previous night — a crossroads of sorts, a junction where two long hospital corridors met in a wide space, with a defibrillator and a first-aid box affixed to one of the walls.

Raine paused and frowned, examining a massive splatter of sticky crimson all over the floor and up one wall. The Saye Fox padded over and sniffed at the drying blood. A corner of orange sunlight crept onto the stain, turning it bright and gleaming, still wet in the weak dawn.

“Is this where you put down a nurse?” Evee whispered.

“Mm,” Raine grunted, peering into each of the corridors, machete at the ready, every muscle pulled taut in case of surprises.

“Um,” I whispered. “Where’s the corpse? Where’s the body?”

Raine murmured: “Maybe it got up and walked away.”

Evelyn tutted. “Don’t even fucking joke about that!”

“My apologies,” Raine murmured, unamused, head on a swivel. “The other nurses probably took it away. There were dozens swarming around in the night.”

Evelyn sighed. “Yes, and where are the rest of them now? We’ve haven’t even heard anything moving about! It’s like this place is dead.”

“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth,” I whispered. “Raine? What are we waiting for?”

“For a zombie to shamble out of the shadows,” she whispered back, then winked at me. “Come on, it’s just up here, not far now.”

Raine led us down one final corridor and through a pair of nondescript double doors; she eased one of the doors open, slipping inside slowly, before nodding me and Evelyn through to join her. The Fox went first, darting through the gap.

I pushed Evelyn’s wheelchair through, then followed, blinking at the sudden bright light, fluorescent and harsh.

“Yeah, mind your eyes,” Raine whispered. “It’s a bit of a shock. And stay low, I can’t cover every angle in here.”

We stood on the edge of a large open-plan office — a stereotype straight from any sitcom or movie. Little cubicles were separated by modular plastic walls, furred with blue fuzz to aid in sound dampening. Everything was dark blue or grey or made of plastic pretending to be wood. Each cubicle contained a grey desk and a grey computer and a grey plastic chair with blue upholstery. Some of the computers were powered off, but a few of them were on, their screens in night-time power saving mode or showing screen savers that would be more at home in the 1990s. The floor was carpeted in scratchy blue, so perfect and untouched that it looked as if the room had never been used. The ceiling was all fluorescent light bulbs and foam panels. A clock sounded time with a tick-tick-tick, somewhere behind the endless cubicle walls. Some of the desks sported personal effects — pictures of spouses or children, a paperback book here and there, a few vases of flowers. All the little touches were wrong, however; the people in the pictures were melting blobs of indistinct flesh, the paperback books had titles like ‘Anagrammatic Puzzles For Your Quadruple Amputee Cousin’ and ‘How to Make the Most of Being A Dreaming Dead Thing Beyond the Ken of Your Family’. The flowers in the vases were all dead and withered.

One wall — far away to our collective right — was made of big glass doors and long windows, showing a nasty back area between two buildings, a sort of gravel-floored liminal space covered in abused weeds, where employees might go to smoke a cigarette or two. The real asylum grounds were visible at one end, a hint of rolling hills and verdant lawns.

The sunrise had curdled to a grim grey morning, spreading a thin trickle of rain across the glass.

Raine nodded at the glass doors. “That’s our exit. If we get separated for whatever reason, go that way. As for the weird door, follow me. It’s in the back.”

Raine led us on a winding path through the cubicles, keeping her head ducked low. I followed her lead, trying to stay down and out of sight as I pushed Evelyn’s wheelchair along. Evee stayed completely silent, hunched in the chair, grinding her teeth. The Fox stayed at Evee’s side now, sticking close. The office was a maze, and strangely muffled. One nurse on the far side would easily see our heads bobbing over the cubicles, and we might get turned around if we tried to flee, stuck in this tangle of low walls and grey surface.

Eventually we reached the back wall. The cubicles ran out, leaving a long clear passageway formed by the plastic dividers and the white plaster of the wall itself. Raine slipped out and to the right. I followed the last few paces to the mysterious door.

Raine stopped, crouched by the strange portal, peering left and right for any sign of pursuit. “Here,” she whispered. “Keypad is on the right.”

The door was exactly as Raine had described — shiny steel behind a layer of decorative glass, in an ornate frame made of glossy chrome. It looked more like something from a bad science fiction movie than anything I had dreamed up. I wondered who had influenced this. Twil, perhaps?

A keypad was set into the wall just to the right of the door, sporting the same steel-and-chrome aesthetic. It was huge, with over fifty little metal buttons protruding from the flat surface, topped by a tiny green LCD screen. Some of the buttons were numbers — one through zero, the usual — but most of them showed obscure mathematical symbols, signs I had only ever seen in passing. A few of them were absolutely bizarre, little swirls or spirals, spike-edged crosses, even a tiny picture of a splayed hand.

But that was not the oddest thing about the door.

My eyes were drawn to the little brass plate above the keypad.

Raine followed my wide-eyed gaze, then frowned. “Huh,” she hissed. “That wasn’t there last night. That’s new.”

Words were etched into the plate.

‘Professor Wilson Stout. Mathematics Consultant.’

Evelyn grew in a gasp. “Heather, that’s—”

“Notes Toward a Unified Cosmology,” I murmured. “Yes. Evee, it’s—”

“I know,” Evelyn rasped. “I know.”

“I don’t,” Raine hissed, all business. “Who’s Wilson Stout? Do we know him?”

“Yes!” I hissed. “Well, no, actually. But I know his book. His pamphlet, really, he … um … I-I don’t even know where to start, I—”

“Professor Stout was an academic at the University of Sharrowford,” Evelyn hissed quickly. “One of the original Sharrowford Coven which founded the Medieval Metaphysics Department. We — oh fuck this, Raine, you don’t remember any of this. He wrote a pamphlet explaining the theory of self-implementing hyperdimensional mathematics — a pamphlet which I gave to Heather when we first met, to explain to her what was happening to her, to give her something to work with. The professor went missing shortly after writing it, in 1974. Went missing from inside a locked office.” She took an unsteady breath. “I once joked with Heather than maybe he had messed with the maths too much, and met the Eye.” Evelyn swallowed. “Well, egg on my face, hm? Not a joke anymore, is it?”

I could barely comprehend what I was looking at.

The mathematics in Notes Toward a Unified Cosmology had helped save me. Evelyn had handed me that slim volume when I was barely two weeks In The Know, still groping for meaning, for a handhold, for any way to understand what had happened to me. She had gifted me the blessing of a sliver of insight, in that dingy, sad little room beneath Sharrowford University Library. That book and the hints it had contained had opened the way for me. I owed the real support to Raine and Evelyn, of course, to my friends and allies. But without the words in that book — without the mathematical notation, the foundation through which to understand brain-math — I was not certain I would ever have found all the tools to mount this rescue operation for my sister.

The notion of another person who had journeyed beyond and returned was not so shocking anymore, not since I had met Taika.

But Maisie had been out here, in the clutches of the Eye, for about ten years.

Professor Wilson Stout had vanished from a locked office in 1974. He had been Outside — or in the abyss, or right here in Wonderland — for four and a half decades.

What manner of creature had been calling for help by tapping on those pipes?

Who — or what — was behind this door?

“Heather,” Evee hissed. “Heather, we don’t know what’s in there.”

“He could be an ally,” I whispered back. “He was calling for help! Evee, I’m not leaving anybody behind here. Nobody! Nobody gets left with the Eye!”

Evelyn clenched her jaw. Raine was poised, ready to move at a moment’s notice, eyes watching and ears listening for any sign that we were not alone. The Saye Fox waited on her haunches, still and alert in the way only an animal can be.

“Nobody gets left behind, Evee,” I whispered. “Not even an elderly mathematics professor.”

Evelyn swallowed. “Fine. Fuck it, I guess you wouldn’t be Heather if you didn’t say something like that. Alright. Try the keypad. Raine, be ready, this might be nasty. Let’s see if the Professor is accepting office hours walk-ins.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

What goes bump in the night? Mathematics Professors, clearly. This wouldn’t be the first time Heather has been assisted by a mysterious benefactor with a doctorate in maths. (Okay, Badger isn’t mysterious, he’s largely the opposite of mysterious, but the point stands.)

We plunge deeper and deeper into arc 24! As I keep saying, this part has become wild beyond all my expectations, but oddly it’s still sticking mostly to the plan! Paradoxical, but I’m glad it’s working. I hope you’re having as much fun with this part of the story as I am, dear readers! Heather needs to keep pushing ahead, keep her head on her shoulders, and keep gathering up her crew. Sooner or later she’ll achieve critical mass, and then it’s time to light the reactor. Onward we go!

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Next week, Heather infiltrates the offices of a dead man, and hopes that it’s not his dry and empty bones tapping on those pipes …