The first thing is the sense of losing ground.

  Not a fall she can feel, only the raw knowledge that she is sinking fast and there is no bottom.

  Then the dark folds back, and she is in a long, colorless hallway.

  A corridor.

  Too long, too straight. Walls the color of old paper. Fluorescent lights buzz overhead, strip by strip, putting out a cold light that leaves the corners gray.

  Doors line both sides. All the same. All closed.

  Her shoes make no sound.

  Someone is walking away from her at the far end. A back, a coat, shoulders hunched. Every time she tries to focus, the figure blurs, like her eyes keep slipping off them.

  “Enough.” a voice says.

  It comes from everywhere at once. Flat. Tired.

  “I don’t want to know you anymore.”

  The words land hard in her chest, like someone dropped a stone into something hollow.

  She opens her mouth.

  Nothing comes out.

  The lights flicker once.

  The corridor tears.

  Snow.

  It comes up to her ankles, crisp and dry, squeaking faintly underfoot. Her breath should steam in the air. Her fingers should ache. The cold feels like it belongs to someone else.

  A playground rusts beside them. Swings. A slide. A metal climbing frame. The world is washed-out gray, sky heavy with low cloud.

  Two figures stand in the snow.

  The small one is close to her. A child in a too-thin jacket, boots half undone. She recognizes the angle of the shoulders, the way the hands disappear into pockets, head ducked like she is trying to fold into herself.

  Her.

  Small.

  The bigger figure looms over the child. A man’s height. His features smear when she looks at them. No eyes. No mouth. Just the impression of a jaw, a coat, broad shoulders.

  His voice is sharp.

  “Stop calling me that.” he says.

  The child looks up.

  “Daddy—”

  “Don’t.” he snaps. “I told you. Don’t call me that.”

  The word hits harder than the wind.

  The little version of her flinches and nods, mouth clamped shut. Snow catches in her hair.

  “Say it.” he demands.

  His breath fogs the air between them.

  The child swallows.

  “I’m sorry.” she whispers. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”

  He turns away.

  Leaves her there, in the white and the quiet.

  No snow falls.

  The whole scene hangs still.

  She wants to step forward. Put a hand on that small shoulder. Tell her something gentle, something true.

  Her legs will not move.

  A distant ticking starts up, thin and metallic.

  When she blinks, the playground is gone.

  A doorframe.

  She is standing in it, fingers curled around chipped paint that flakes under her nails. The room beyond is small. Bed. Desk. Clothes piled on a chair. Curtains half closed, letting in a stripe of flat daylight.

  A bag thumps into her chest and drops to the floor.

  The person in the room is taller than her. Their outline wobbles at the edges, like a reflection in dirty glass. They do not look at her. They move around the room, scooping up clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on the bed.

  “Get out.” they say.

  No shouting.

  No drama.

  Just that low, final voice.

  “Do you hear me.” they add. “Get out.”

  She can feel words trying to climb up her throat. Please. Don’t. I can fix it. Just tell me how.

  None of them make it past her teeth.

  The bag at her feet is heavy with her own things. The floor seems to tilt under her.

  The ticking gets louder.

  She grabs the doorframe harder.

  When she looks down, the carpet under her feet fades out to gray, then to nothing.

  Blue light.

  A phone screen in the dark, held too close to her face. Numbers glow at the top. The time shifts in small, cruel jumps. Her thumb rests uselessly over the keyboard.

  Messages stack one on top of the other.

  You exhaust everyone around you.

  You make everything about you.

  You ruin everything.

  You had such potential.

  The last one sticks.

  Her eyes burn.

  She types three different replies and erases them all. Each line she writes looks pathetic, needy, stupid. None of them sound like something a person worth keeping would say.

  A new message pops up.

  I don’t want you in my life anymore.

  Her vision blurs.

  If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  For a second she can’t tell if it is from tears or the dream itself.

  The ticking moves closer, like it has crawled into the walls.

  The light from the phone shrinks until the only thing she can see is a single word, floating in the dark of her room.

  Waste.

  Her own thought.

  She does not hit send on anything.

  The blue light blinks out.

  Bus.

  The overhead lights are too bright, making people’s skin look flat and tired. Night presses against the windows. Outside is just smear: streetlamps, vague buildings, reflected faces.

  She is standing in the aisle, holding on to a cold metal pole. The bus rattles around her, the engine a constant low roar under her feet.

  No one talks about her.

  Somebody laughs two seats over. Someone scrolls on their phone. Someone coughs.

  Her body sways with the movement. Every turn feels a little too slow, a little too delayed, like the signal from her head to her muscles is travelling through wet sand.

  Her stomach churns.

  Not sharp pain. Just a heavy, queasy wrongness that spreads from the center of her chest outwards. Her fingers feel strange around the pole, too loose, as if they belong to someone trying on a body for the first time.

  The air seems to thin.

  People are packed around her, shoulders, bags, the smell of perfume and sweat and old fabric. Somehow she cannot get a full breath.

  The edges of her vision gray out.

  Sound pulls back.

  The roar of the engine becomes a thin, distant hiss. The chatter shrinks to a muffled buzz. Her heartbeat gets louder, a heavy, unsteady thump that doesn’t feel like it’s in her chest anymore, but under her feet, under the floor, in the bus itself.

  Hold on.

  Her hand slips a little on the pole.

  Her knees go soft.

  She doesn’t faint. The dream will not give her that. It traps her in the almost. The world tilts, the light smears, and she remains painfully conscious inside a body that feels half switched off.

  The bus lurches to a stop.

  Someone pushes past her without looking up.

  The doors hiss open.

  Cold air hits her face.

  The scene shudders.

  Silence.

  Real, for once.

  No bus. No traffic. No ticking.

  She is standing in a small bathroom.

  Tiles underfoot. A sink in front of her. A single bare light bulb over the mirror, harsh and humming.

  Her hands rest on cool porcelain.

  Water drips from the tap in slow, uneven drops.

  The mirror is streaked.

  Her reflection looks back at her from behind them.

  At first, it is the human face the world used to know. Blurred at the edges, refusing to find focus no matter how long she stares. Eyes a foggy shape. Mouth a pale line. The sadness is clear, drawn into the slope of her shoulders, the tired set of her jaw.

  She watches herself.

  The weight in the room presses down.

  Some part of her knows this is the last moment. The edge. The before.

  She wants to move.

  She does not.

  A drop falls from the tap and hits the sink.

  The sound is too loud.

  The mirror surface ripples.

  Her reflection stutters.

  The blur peels away.

  Skin smooths to pale wax. Hair darkens, pooling into deep, jade-black strands that fall heavy around her face. Her pupils swallow light, sharpening into cold, unnatural red. The color burns against the flat light of the bathroom.

  Her wings unfold behind her reflection, black as ash, feathers drinking in the dim. They crowd the frame, far too big for the small room, arching up and out as if they would tear through the ceiling if there were space.

  Her human shoulders flinch.

  The version in the mirror does not.

  That other her straightens, the sadness gone from her posture like it never existed. Her head tilts just a fraction, as if admiring something only she can see.

  The smile starts small.

  Just a twitch at the corner of the mouth.

  Then it grows.

  Slow. Wrong.

  It stretches too wide, baring teeth that look a little too sharp, a little too even. Her lips pull back until it is less a smile and more a splitting. Her red eyes flare, wild and bright, full of manic delight.

  There is nothing kind in that face.

  Nothing tired.

  Only a sharp, hungry joy, like she has been waiting a long time for this exact second.

  The wings in the glass flare wider, blotting out the rest of the bathroom. All she can see now is her own hellish face, framed in black feathers, smiling at her like a secret finally revealed.

  Her throat closes.

  The cold from the bus, from the snow, from every hallway and room presses in at once.

  The other her leans closer to the glass.

  Crazy, gleaming eyes locked on hers.

  That smile widens, just a little more.

  Cracks spider through the mirror.

  Everything breaks.

  She tears out of the dream on a broken inhale.

  That twisted grin is still there when she blinks, burned into the dark.

  “Pleasant dream?”

  The voice came from the edge of her allowed circle.

  Her head turned, slow, like she had to wrench it away from the invisible mirror only she could see.

  The Auditor was leaning against the inner rail of the ring, one forearm resting on it, ledger tablet in his other hand. The red glow carved sharp planes into his face, accenting the sardonic line of his mouth, the steady focus of his eyes.

  He looked at her as if she was an interesting entry that had just twitched on the page.

  “Yes.” she said. “It was lovely.”

  One of his eyebrows lifted.

  “Sarcasm.” he said. “Always an encouraging sign in the recently unconscious.”

  He straightened, tapping something idly on the slate with his thumb, but she could see that his attention was not on the numbers.

  He had been there long enough to watch her sleep.

  Or whatever this counted as.

  “How long?” she asked.

  The question came out before she could decide not to care.

  He checked the slate for real this time.

  “By tower count, eight minutes, thirty-two seconds.” he said. “By your breathing and general flailing, longer.”

  She frowned.

  “I didn’t move.” she said.

  “You did.” he said. “Hands. Shoulders. Once, you said something. Incomprehensible, I assure you. You are not secretly reciting forbidden truths in your sleep. I checked.”

  He said it lightly, but there was a narrowness to his gaze that didn’t match the tone.

  He was searching her face the way he would a line that refused to total properly.

  “What did I say?” she asked.

  He made a small, dismissive gesture.

  “It was mostly air.” he said. “Something like ‘no’ and something like a name. Or a profanity. Hard to tell with you lot. Half of what you call each other sounds like a curse anyway.”

  A name.

  Her name.

  Or someone else’s.

  The thought pricked at her, sharp and immediate, before she could smother it.

  “You shouldn’t be dreaming.” he said.

  No more jokes in it now. Just assessment.

  “Dead minds down here are meant to be… quieter.”

  She let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

  “Take it up with whoever designed me.” she said. “I’m just the product.”

  “Oh, I intend to.” he said. “In triplicate. With charts.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched, but the expression didn’t quite make it to his eyes.

  “I assume you are going to say it was nothing.” he said. “That there is nothing worth noting for the record. That your sudden descent into subconscious dramatics is simply your unique way of making my job harder.”

  “I don’t know.” she said.

  She could feel his attention sharpen, like pins sliding into place.

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  She could lie.

  Say it was noise.

  Say it was just leftovers from yesterday’s assignment, washed through her by the cluster’s pull. The woman on the couch. The dead man in the bed. The texts on the phone.

  Hell was full of curated horrors. No one would question if they bled.

  But this wasn’t that.

  Her gaze drifted to the side, to the red shaft, to the nothing dropping away below.

  “Before.” she said.

  The word was small, but it expanded in her chest until it hurt.

  “Before what?” he asked.

  She knew exactly which “before” he meant.

  Before Hell.

  She swallowed.

  “Rooms.” she said. “Voices. People.”

  “Your people.” he said.

  “Strangers.” she said.

  That, at least, felt true now, in the light of the shaft. The man in the snow. The shoulders in the doorway. The blurred faces that would not stay solid when she tried to remember them.

  Strangers she used to know better than herself.

  The image of the child in the thin jacket flashed up. The way his voice had cut through the cold.

  Don’t call me that.

  She felt her jaw lock around the memory.

  The Auditor watched the way her throat moved as she forced it down.

  “Any overlap with the cluster?” he asked. “Names. Places. Specific phrases. I’d hate for you to be freelancing on my delicate balance sheet without realizing it.”

  She almost said no.

  The word sat on the back of her tongue, ready, safe.

  Instead, what came out was:

  “‘You had such potential.’”

  He went very still.

  “Ah.” he said.

  He tapped the slate again, but this time it felt more like a nervous tic than a note.

  “That one shows up often.” he said. “If it’s any comfort, you are far from unique in being haunted by other people’s expectations. It is one of your kind’s favorite curses.”

  “It wasn’t mine.” she said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  The bathroom came back at the edge of her vision. Pale tiles. Streaked glass. Her own face peeling away to show something worse and truer underneath.

  Her hand twitched towards her chest before she caught herself.

  He noticed anyway.

  “Did you see yourself?” he asked.

  His voice was too flat now to be anything but careful.

  She nodded.

  “Human.” he prompted. “Or… updated.”

  “Both.” she said.

  The word scraped.

  He exhaled slowly through his nose, as if considering several outcomes and discarding them one by one.

  “How did you look?” he said.

  She thought of the sad blur. The tired set of the shoulders. The way the eyes had refused to hold shape. Then of the other her—wings crowding the frame, red irises too bright, smile too wide.

  “Wrong.” she said.

  “That narrows it down beautifully.” he said.

  “She was enjoying it.” she added.

  He tilted his head.

  “The you in the mirror.” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Laughing at you?” he asked.

  “No.” she said. “Pleased.”

  He studied her in silence for a moment, thumb resting now still on the slate.

  “You understand there is a list somewhere in the upper stacks.” he said slowly. “A list of words we prefer not to see associated with assets like you.”

  She didn’t ask if “pleased” was on it.

  She suspected the list was shorter if you wrote down the things they did want.

  He looked up into the red gloom for a heartbeat, then back at her.

  “Whatever you dreamed.” he said. “It was not drifting loose. Someone up there wanted it to reach you.”