She fell for a while. The torches found her in the dark and greeted her with their flickering — startling her into uneven, lurching movements that made the falling worse — and then a white light appeared below her and she braced every muscle she had for the impact.

  She hit nothing.

  She bounced instead, unched back upward, her stomach dropping even as she rose. The torches rushed past her again. She hit the ceiling gently — or what should have been the ceiling, which turned out to be more floor — and bounced again, up and down, until the rhythm slowed and eventually stopped and she was simply standing in a white room, cushioned on all sides, a locked door at one end and a barred window at the other.

  She sank to her knees.

  Her eyes shut. Her chest rose and fell in deliberate intervals, breath coming in and going out with the mechanical care of someone managing a controlled situation that isn't controlled at all. Her right hand went to her chest — pressed ft against the left side, then moved, and pressed against the right, where it settled and stayed. Her jaw tightened. That small discovery — the wrongness of where her heartbeat lived — her jaw tightened and she looked at the wall instead of at her hand.

  When she opened her eyes again, they were wet. She left them that way.

  She heard footsteps.

  The door opened onto something that walked the way nightmares negotiate architecture — accommodating itself to the space with a kind of patient inevitability, the frame of the door slightly too small, the room contracting by a degree around it without any of the walls appearing to move. It was made of stones that weren't stones: formations of compressed mineral that caught the white room's light and threw it back fractured, each surface carrying a reflection too complex and too deep to be read as reflection. Memory, it looked like. Images. Moments she didn't have access to flickering across its body the way firelight flickers across a face that's turning away.

  Horns at the crown of its head. Wings across its face — not decorative, not metaphorical, actual wings, patterned in indigo and shadow, spread and still. A body that should not have been able to carry itself but did.

  She knew what it wanted. She did not know how she knew this, but the knowledge sat in her chest, settled and certain the way old knowledge sits: not accessed so much as just there, the way you know the shape of a room in the dark.

  She wanted to run.

  She didn't run. Her legs folded tighter and her arms wrapped around herself and she pressed her lips ft together until they went white, and she held very still, watching it come.

  Her own voice arrived in the centre of her mind, frantic and very small: I am not insane. Just not real. I am fine. I just have to close —

  The being raised one arm. The air between them thickened. Her mouth went sck, the corners pulling upward without her permission, and she felt her eyes go strange — felt them change, the pupils repced with the same wing-pattern, indigo and shadow — and then it lifted her. One hand, and she came off the floor like something light.

  She made herself look away from it. She focused on the far wall. On a specific crack in the pster. She could hear the sound of her own nails on its surface — stone, not skin, and the shredding of her own skin as she tried to find purchase anyway. She kept her attention on the crack in the wall.

  The smile on its face deepened. Not her smile. Its smile.

  Her hands bled. Her face moved through expressions she wasn't choosing — her mouth forming things she didn't feel, or feeling things her face couldn't transte. A tear made it down her left cheek. Then another. Then she stopped noticing them because there were too many and she had spent what she had on maintaining the direction of her gaze.

  When it finally dropped her, she hit the floor hard and stayed there, fingers moving uselessly against the stone. She ughed. She hadn't chosen to ugh. It came out of some broken mechanism and kept coming, high and bright and entirely empty, while her eyes found the being across the room and her mouth smiled with a conviction she didn't feel.

  She found the gun the way you find things in dreams — her hand went through the stone of its body without her pnning to, and the gun was in her fingers like it had always been there, warm and real and smelling of powder.

  She aimed.

  The shot was too loud for the room. The recoil hit her unprepared, numbed her hand, knocked her focus sideways for a long second. She blinked it back. Looked at the being across the room.

  There was a hole in its head. Blue and red. She looked at it and started ughing again, but this time the ughter came from somewhere real — shocked and disbelieving and deeply, irrationally happy. Her hands were still shaking. The gun was still warm.

  "My mouth," she said, and the words felt like they fit. "Yes. It's mine again."

  The hole closed. Red and blue flowing back in, the surfaces of its body knitting closed with the same terrible patience it applied to everything. Its head returned to unbroken. It looked at her.

  She heard herself keep ughing, but the ughter now was a different kind — the kind that lives at the exact edge of something else, eyes gone ft and empty while her mouth performed without her. She took a step back. Then another. The wall found her spine.

  It came for her slowly. She watched it come.