The door vanished.

‘Vanished’, as in not ‘closed’ or ‘shut’ or ‘locked’. It was simply gone. No panel, no indicator, and no seam, and it was difficult to believe that a door had ever been there.

Winterwing could not decide what to make of this. His inclination was to be concerned, in the manner of any creature that has suddenly found its point of egress missing. But, if anyone had meant ill will towards him, they had picked the absolute worst place to trap him; the kitchen was well stocked, and there was an abundance of improvisational weapons at his fingertips. The knives wouldn’t do much for him against a firearm, but he was also fairly sure, given enough time, he would be able to find one of those secreted somewhere as well.

Still, as minutes ticked by, he found himself less and less interested in the work in front of him on the table, and more in determining why he had been selected for isolation. Silence and boredom invited far too much time to think up terrible scenarios. The most likely possibility he landed on was the parasite was airborne after all, and he had been sequestered here for his own safety… or he had been cut off for the benefit of everyone else.

Eventually his anxiety built up enough that he gave up on the inscrutable text, and took another look at where the door was supposed to be. Smooth sheets of blue steel paneling. No sound when he put his head to it and listened, other than that ever-present hum, and no difference in pitch suggesting hollowness behind when he tested the wall with his knuckles.

Frustrated, he sat next to the space where the doorway should have been, on the hard floor. He pressed his head back against the wall, feeling that cold metal, closed his eyes, and listened to the hum.

The work was still spread about the table, unfinished, and he could not make himself stand up to try at it again. It might not have been fair to call it unfinished, ‘unfinished’ implied some sort of competence with the subject matter, and an obtainable endpoint. It did not matter if he stood up now or an hour for now, or tomorrow. He would not spontaneously be able to make something from nothing. He could not do it.

Something warm touched his knee, jerking him back from the abyss of falling into an uncomfortable nap.

The air turned sour, stung of copper or iron. She was kneeling next to him on the floor, the little medical gown they had given her torn, with glistening red smeared across it, and feathers entirely disheveled. She was as he should have expected: the necrosis, the sores, the bleeding. Her hands, the most obvious telltale, were nearly unrecognizable, ragged and useless flesh.

There was a hole in her chest, as if some exaggerated bullet wound, where a parasite would have punched its way out.

As ever, her name was Emily, and she should not have been there.

He should have been horrified, and all that he could find within his miserable self was a deep well of pity.

The wall to their side did not spontaneously turn back into a door. The medical gown dripped red on the floor. The hand on his knee was staining the pant-leg.

Winterwing had no idea what he was supposed to do. Even as he sat in the middle of a cacophony of dream logic, he could not find the confidence with which to call it a dream. He did not deny that the moment felt real enough. It did not matter how many times he dozed and woke again, he kept finding himself here, and here became increasingly worse each time.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” seemed the most correct thing for him to say.

For a moment Emily looked as if she were going to be angry, but she discarded it without following through and shook her head, visibly exhausted. “I’m sorry you thought you had to.”

“That’s what this was all for, right?” he shrugged a shoulder, indicating the table behind her, still piled with pages and pages of loose paper that were never going to be of any help. She followed his gaze but did not move from her spot.

“That’s what I was supposed to do,” he scrubbed at his face, irritated. “Except I can’t, even if I had a million years to do it, I can’t find the actual answer. I know it’s in there, and I can’t. I’m coming at it with five weeks of a poetry class. How is that even remotely fair?”

She was quiet for a moment, but when he opened his eyes again, she was still there, scowling at him.

“Winterwing, don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but not everything is about you.”

“Maybe the alternative explanation is I wasted today for no reason, and I like that option less,” he said.

Her hand disappeared from his knee, though the stain remained. She settled into position next to him, her back against the wall, staring into the room as he was. “I wasted most days, I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“Sorry,” he winced.

“Yes, you said that.”

The smell of copper persisted, and there was a smear on the floor where she had crouched by his knee. The gown had started to loose its glisten, and was drying into a dull ruddy brown. The door did not reappear, but she did not disappear, either, no matter how long he waited and tried to focus his eyes.

“Isn’t there supposed to be someone watching you?” he asked.

She frowned, as if stumbling for a memory long gone. “I think so. I think they were.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. Where’s the person that’s supposed to be watching you?”

A reasonable enough question, yet he could not leave the dangling thought alone.

“How did you get in here?” he asked, knowing the answer would make no sense.

“What do you mean?”

“What was the exact path you took before you sat down next to me?”

“I walked.”

“You walked,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“There’s ten miles of tunnel down here, and it’s all nearly identical. How in the world would you just happen to walk here like that?”

“You’re wrong, it was just around the corner, I walked-”

“What corner, Emily? There isn’t even a door for you to walk through,” he stood up and gestured at the wall behind him. “This is where it was.”

“No, I-” she looked over her shoulder, in the opposite direction, to another wall that had always been a wall, and then back at him, visibly confused.

“How did you end up on the side of that road?” he asked.

She blinked, entirely bewildered. “What?”

“The old road, Emily, out in the valley in the middle of no where, where you nearly froze to death before I found you. How did you get there? You walk there too?”

“No.”

“Then how?” he insisted.

She looked at the red smears on the floor and murmured very quietly “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No.”

He stared at her, and she refused to make eye contact. “I can’t believe you exploded on a lab table and you are still lying to me!”

“I don’t know! I don’t know anything! What difference does it make?” she shouted. “Do you think I have enjoyed any of this? There’s bits of me smeared on the ceiling! You can go see for yourself! I turned inside out and there wasn’t anyone left to care! Do you feel better now?”

Winterwing looked down at her, still completely soiled. He wanted to be angry, he so badly wanted to be angry. It burned away the longer he stood there. All he was doing was berating a sick person.

“What are you doing, walking around like that?” he said quietly.

“What?” Emily snapped from her seat on the floor.

“That must hurt,” he said. Her feet appeared as torn and mutilated as her hands.

She observed the tear in the gown, that must have come from branches of parasite pushing through her chest. “I’m... not sure.”

“It’s important,” he said. “They are going to ask you the same thing, when they find us.”

She seemed to deflate, doubling over, and grasping at her already disheveled hair. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t-”

For a moment, it was like he was no longer there, and he had a brief remembrance of witnessing the ramping ravings of the first victim he had witnessed in the Raptor.

He knelt beside her and grasped at her head with both palms. Her hair had become crusty as the blood dried, and it stuck unpleasantly to his fingers.

“Emily,” he said, though could once again think of nothing useful to say.

Her eyes refocused, “I think I burned away. I think I died.”

“You’re right here,” he said.

She seemed to stop, for a moment, and then carried on, “No, no, there’s something else.”

“I don’t understand,” and then shook her lightly to get her attention. “What aren’t you telling me?”

She gave him that look again. The slowly dawning awareness that something terrible was about to happen, and that neither of them could stop it.

This was perhaps the first time, through the conversation, she ever showed a sign of discomfort. She made a low sound, that could almost have been confused for an aggravated sigh, but it escalated. He did not see her stop to take a breath, rather it just seemed to be one continuous noise that proceeded through groan into an all out scream. It came paired with a sound that he had heard before, that resembled something like far too many joints popping, and he was gripped by the realization that she had survived until exactly this moment only to come apart directly before him, his final punishment. This is what he got for questioning instead of acting, for wasting his chance, every single chance to help.

It was not like the others. It wasn’t a branching, jagged tree that expelled itself. It was closer to writhing blue vines, a spreading lacework of organic mass that began at that horrific hole in the chest, and moved outward. It tore through the medical gown just as it did flesh, and moved outward to the head and limbs, and she screamed through all of it. It nipped like fire at his fingers as it passed over her scalp, and he pulled his hands away in reflex.

But it ended, the wave of blue subsided, and instead of a destroyed corpse, she was fine. Better than fine, there was no indication left that anything unfortunate had ever befallen her.

The stains and sores had washed away, and instead of the deep necrotizing purple of dying skin, there was just her hands, pristine. The blood was gone, her hair was no longer matted and rested golden blond. Somehow, the gown itself was pristine and clean, and the tears in it were mended. Most of the smell of copper vanished, but some still lingered, as if to assure him that he did not imagine the whole thing. The smears on the floor were still there, as was the stain on his pantleg.

Winterwing gingerly touched the cloth hanging from her shoulder, and sure enough, it billowed and acted as clean fiber should. It only occurred to him then that perhaps he should not have been so eager to touch her, and pulled his hand away carefully.

“What did they do to you?” he murmured.

She shook her head, weary and halfhearted, murmuring a hoarse repetition: “I don’t know.”

He sat in silence, pondering for a moment, and the only sounds in the room were the appliances. This was it, then. The answer that everyone had wanted, that made her the target of attention over all the other captives. It did not explain the mechanism by which she was chosen, nor did it explain what it was actually for. It did not solve the puzzle neatly. It just meant that the prior deaths had been unintentional, that the ruthlessness of the illness was not the end goal. The Saurians had made her into a thing.

“They asked me if I thought you were dangerous,” Winterwing said, half to himself.

Emily shrugged, seeming truly at a loss.

He looked back to the space that had once been a door. “Was that you?”

She raised an eyebrow, “You think I can turn a door into a wall?”

“Look, don’t get shitty with me, it’s a fair question.”

“No, that was not me.”

“Well, I’m not sure if I feel better or worse,” he mused.

Emily touched his elbow, and he flinched before he caught himself. The needling sensation of branching blue fire was not there, but the memory of it lingered.

She had done as he had asked. He could not be angry. He had demanded to know. She had told him first.

Winterwing resumed his position on the floor, next to the wall that was supposed to be a door, and she took up residence next to him, oblivious to the blood that lingered on the floor. She leaned a head against his shoulder and said nothing else. He did not stop her.

It was hard to tell, underground, how much time had passed. Every time he looked again, she was still there, and her limbs were still unblemished. The gown was still white.

In the end, the doorway did come back. It made no sound and it did not appear as he thought it might, rather he was suddenly aware that it existed again, and it seemed absurd to believe it had not always been there.

His double, his supervisor, and not-a-medical-doctor were standing over them both, visibly a mix of confused, relieved, and suspicious.

Winterwing could not tell them, because he had wasted days and nearly lost her twice, and they would take her away again if they knew. So, instead he looked up at them and declared, as indignantly as he could demanded: “Where the hell have you been?”