“We’re sorry,” came a calm, automated voice, “due to high volume, we cannot complete your call, please disconnect and try-”

“Fuck!” was all Emily could think to say. She resisted the urge to throw the screen over the barrier wall, into the darkness below. It would probably survive the trip, and the action would have felt satisfying, but taking out her frustration on it would solve nothing.

It was raining again. It was a persistent rain, that made rushing streams in walkways and alleys as it drained away. The murky day had given away to night and the rain had continued on, in sheets and spurts and drizzles, a constant tapping of fingers that drifted in and out of awareness. The temperature would spike cold in the middle of the night, and the fingers of rain would turn into a heavy spitting snow by morning.

Across the harbor, Bridgebane was doused in the same falling water, and somehow it all still managed to burn.

Through the shrouding fog that hung over the river, the blue and yellow murmuring glow of city had been replaced by a cutting orange of fire, and flashes that were too rigid and linear to be lightning. Not just one building or two or seven, but the entire skyline was wrapped up in converging columns of flame, reflecting on the fog and the clouds above. The dark water of the river separating Emily from the city reflected flecks of orange light, and appeared to be filling with debris. There were shapes in that torrent that could have been furniture, or could have been people, and she was unwilling to look too closely. She could not hear the inferno across the water, but periodically there was a clap that was probably not thunder, that she did not hear so much as felt as a deep rumbling that pressed against her breastbone.

She leaned against the concrete barrier, a knot growing in the back of her throat. In a sea of million of people trying to flee, and every service overloaded, it would be impossible to find anyone. All around her, she could hear the ever constant noise of terror in the driving rain. Footfalls, whirs of engines, and too many voices running up the hillside, and the water that pushed its way down.

“I’m sorry, mom,” Emily said to the blurry outline of the city. Whatever was going on across the water was not going to stop there. It was going to break free, and turn its attention to the crowd rushing around her.

Maria had been standing with Emily when she stopped to catch her breath, but now was no where to be found. Emily started shouting, and stopped, because everyone else was shouting. She couldn’t even hear her own voice in the din.

She finally spotted a familiar lone figure sitting on the hill that the road wrapped around, miserable and sullen. Emily made her way through the press as best she could, trying to keep her temper in check as vehicles buzzed carelessly and people shoved, and joined Maria on the far side. At the very least, there was less madness here in the weeds than on the road proper.

“Come on,” Emily said to her, offering a hand to help her. Maria came up stiffly, sodden and covered in mud, nearly losing her footing on the slick grass of the hill as she did. It was unclear if she was crying, or if rain was streaking down her face.

Maria scrubbed at her eyes with the palm of a hand, and it did little good. “Emily, my sister-”

“Will murder me if I leave you here,” Emily finished. Anyone who was not with them she could do nothing for, and could not worry about. Not tonight. Tonight the only goal was personal survival.

“Did you…did you leave your door open?” Maria asked, distantly, looking back the way they came.

Emily shook her head, pressing down frustration, and urged Maria to keep moving.

Maria was stuck in place and visibly shaking, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from fear. “Where are we going?”

“Doesn’t matter, anywhere.”

Emily swiped away from the call function on her screen, and pulled up a map. That much still worked, at least. She did not know where she was supposed to go, where any of thousands of people around her could be going. Bridgebank had no evacuation plan. Bridgebane, across the dark water, would have none either. There was simply no way to safely move that many people, and prior to this moment, no need to.

Maria tried her best to find her footing as she was pulled along the hill, the mud beneath them giving way as they stepped. “We’re going to freeze to death,” she complained.

Emily’s hair was getting in her eyes. Her wet clothing was already uncomfortable, and a deep ache was beginning to set into her limbs. In a couple of hours, when the freeze came, she was going to regret running out into the night unprepared. She had not realized, until they were already too far within the pack of people that would only ever move one direction, that she should have grabbed something, anything, in anticipation of not being home for a while.

It did not occur to Emily in that moment to consider that she may never be home again. That all the things that she had thought were inseparable from her definition of herself—the clothes, the trinkets, the collections—had very little to do with her after all. She had not considered that, if she ever had returned, she would not have recognized the broken shell of home, and perhaps more distressing, it would not have recognized her either.

“Maybe,” Emily agreed, and was going to add something a little more optimistic, if not for the blast of noise over their heads, that cut through the din and brought the terrorized mass of people around them to silence and stillness.

The clouds above obscured the immense shape of a ship until it was nearly upon them. A deep dark shadow, becoming larger and larger at threatening speed as it lost altitude. The cycling sound of thrusters drowned out all else, even the rush of water. For brief moment, it seemed that they would all die here, a throng of a thousand anonymous and lost people, on a damp hill, incinerated in one great conflagration of weapons fire.

The ship ignored them, if it saw them at all. Its impossible mass moved on, following the river, a stark and spiny shape against the orange skyline behind it, passing over the centenarian bridge that connected the two ends of civilization. The bridge, too, burst into flame. The pylons buckled, the cabling snapped, and though the sound of water muted its death into a dull series of thuds and shrieking metal, they could all see the span collapse.

With the loss of the bridge came the loss of the power to the smart road, and the neighborhood below, plunging them all into permanent darkness. The only light left in the world came from the burning city, and the flashes of weapons fire in the clouds.

The crowd descended into chaos.

The rush turned dangerous, and it was certain that more than a few people were caught in the push of bodies and feet. On the far side, at the barrier where Emily had been standing and trying to make her call alongside hundreds of others trying to do the same, more than one silhouette of a person disappeared over the edge, free-falling into the neighborhood below the road.

Emily grabbed Maria’s arm again, digging her fingers in deeply enough Maria cried in protest. She had to be absolutely sure they would not get separated in the dark. Some of the more fortunate people on the fringes on the panic began to break away and come off the road, up the hill towards them.

Maria was still shivering and transfixed, staring at the space where the centenarian bridge used to be, its skeletal remains still smoldering in the dark water of the river, until finally she allowed Emily to pull her along. It must have only been a few seconds that they lost to her daze, but just standing there felt an unbearable eternity, every heartbeat wasted that much closer to their own demise.

They clambered up the slick hill, and then into the woods beyond. There was an eerie ambient glow that permeated the mist, the orange light of fire reflecting through the fog and clouds across the river, but they still had to force themselves to move carefully once among the trees. It would not help anything if an ankle broke, no matter how urgent it felt to just flat out run.

The sounds of screaming diminished, turning from the roiling waves of voices into the occasional whispering shape in the dark fleeing alongside them. Then, that too gave way to the sound of their steps and rasping breaths in the wet undergrowth, of water trickling opposite their progress down the hillside to the river, and the occasional thrum of thunder that was not thunder.

Maria found it harder and harder to keep up the pace, until finally she learned against a tree, breathing in gulps, and openly crying between.

Emily repeated her entreaties to keep moving, but even as she did she felt halfhearted about it. They were both soaked, with soiled hands and knees from scrabbling through the mud, and Emily had at least one gash across her arm from a tree branch she had not seen in the dark. The map in her screen had stopped working, and it was now searching endlessly for a satellite signal that was likely no longer there. She did not know where she was, despite having lived in the area for years. These hills were outside of her normal routes, though she thought maybe there were homes up this way. With luck, their owners had vacated, getting a head start over the frenzied crowd, and the two of them could wait out the bitterest cold of the night in relative safety and shelter, before moving on. Maybe there were even supplies that could be taken, if someone else hadn’t already thought of it.

The temperature was already dropping. Emily could see her breath before her now. The pounding rain would begin turning to a coating of ice on the ground, and that would make rushing through this place even less safe.

She turned to grab Maria, to pull her along with renewed determination at the thought of a dry place to hide, only to find that her friend was gone.

Emily twisted around, looking into the gloom in every direction, calling after her. All that answered was the wet and the rumbling. It was so quiet and isolated under the dripping branches of the trees, that she was possessed with the strange idea that maybe no one else had ever been there with her, and it was silly to have ever thought there had been. There was no city, no screaming mass of people fleeing, no fire.

This was wrong. This was not how she remembered it. What she remembered was getting Maria moving again, dragging themselves through the woods late into the night, her hands becoming stiff with cold, her feet abused past the point of feeling. Through the freezing fog, outlines of other people had become more clear, their initial frenzy gone. A loose group of strangers formed around them wordlessly, all marching forward, as if they had some better chance of reaching safety together than alone.

They had fumbled in the dark with their silent companions until whatever was chasing them had finally caught up.

Maria had fallen to the ground, dead before she fully landed, the scorches of an energy weapon on her back, and Emily still fell to her knees next to her, begging her to keep going as if her friend had merely tripped. She knew that what she should have done was sprint and abandon the body, that stopping meant that she would be next, and still she was unwilling to stand up again, too exhausted to even try.

Around her, the group of people that had come together for their solemn march fell, too. She had sat there and waited, expecting the same. The line of mechanical drones walked past her, intent on the other fleeing forms in that thicket, and as she watched their backsides, confused, until a hand grasped her shirt collar, and then dragged her through the mud, disinterested in her attempts to regain footing. Maria’s body had vanished in the mist and became anonymous as Emily was dragged away, alongside everyone that had died with her.

That was how the memory was supposed to play out. Emily had touched it constantly, poking at it like a sore spot on the tongue. She knew its hurt and went back to it again and again, unintentionally, intentionally, more often than she should have.

It did not respond this time.

Instead, as she stood there alone, looking for her memory, the sky lightened overhead as if it were dawn, and the world began draining of color. Though it was still cold, the rain stopped. The rushing trickles of water ceased their tumbling, the trees vanished, as though they had never been there to begin with.

The fog rolled away, becoming the twinkling of white sand that spread from horizon to horizon, and the sky itself sat a dull gray, lit by a light source that was not there, not sun or fire or anything else. She watched the landscape morph and melt and drift into the white desert between living and death.

“So, this is where you hide,” came a voice, rasping as the sand around her.

In the intervening weeks, they had told her his name was Wraith, as he had never been polite enough to introduce himself. He was a gnarled creature, hunched over, so visibly ancient and shriveled that it seemed possible that he had been alive when DuCaine himself lived. His scales were a sickly gray, and even though he was forever bent, supported by an equally gnarled staff, he still towered over her.

“Your evasion is pointless,” he said, standing a little straighter, arranging his robes with an arthritic hand. He looked to the red writing that hung at the horizon in all directions with disdain and contempt. “Look at the state of this place, you don’t even know what you’re trying to do,” he said this to her as if he were scolding a student.

“You,” she started, still reeling from the change of scenery, “you don’t belong here.”

Rather than making him disappear, this seemed to amuse him.

“I suppose you think you opened the way to this place yourself,” he said with a smile missing teeth. Before she could say anything he tapped the butt of his staff on the sand, “No more rescues, no more stalling.”

Emily felt each tap as a tremor in the sand beneath her, making her stumble. It permeated into her, like taking an accidental breath of cold water, and a second one after the body tried to expel the first. It sliced through her chest, and the thing inside her that was not her writhed in response. She was brought her to her knees in uncontrollable coughing.

The sand swirled at her feet. Branches of familiar black sinew pierced through it, growing and bursting through as individual vines, grasping at her as it did.

“You will obey, as you were designed to do,” Wraith told her.He was going to drag her back to that place where he had stripped her of everything, from clothes to heartbeat, and finish whatever vile thing he had started. He was so sure of himself, too, that he didn’t notice when she caught her breath again and ceased coughing. Until she looked to him with a year of suppressed rage, instead of terror.

Wraith paused, confused, and gave the ground another forceful poke, with no effect.

The thing inside her didn’t have a name, though it did not seem to understand the purpose of such a thing anyway. The others had finally given it one beyond ‘parasite’, and now called it something clinical and abstract, that failed to encompass what it actually was. What it actually felt like to carry it, now that it was awake. Its meandering moods reminded her more of a deep blue in the open ocean, and though it didn’t seem to understand what blue or an ocean was, it liked the mood the image brought her, and that feeling was how it chose to address itself from then on.

So, she did something that could not be explained anymore than someone could explain reaching for a memory, and reached for the deep. Awake and swimming in the rage she fed it, it answered readily.

“You,” she repeated through gritted teeth, “do not belong here!”

The vines ceased grasping at her, flicking away as a tangled mass. They paused, and then impaled his form in a dozen places before he had the time to come up with a retort. His only protest was to stare at her, wide-eyed and struggling. He bled sand instead of blood, hollowing out as the vines tore at him, as if his skin itself were deflating, and the shreds of robes were taken in the wind.

It was an illusion of dream, and it was not as satisfying as actually killing him would have been.

But, the rage she had dumped into that pit in her chest had been too much, and the creature that had never felt anger before became overwhelmed in it, and began tearing at the inside of her waking skin.

It startled her truly awake, and in her attempt to curl into a fetal position to cradle her chest, she instead managed to roll out of her bed, smashing a glass of water off the desk as she flailed.

Emily had had no shortage of bad dreams since the night the river shone orange, reflecting the fire of the city beyond it. The white desert was new, but persistent. Its gray rocks and burnt buildings poked its fingers out over the dunes. The red writing still hung in the sky, though it seemed maybe dimmer, or maybe more distant, as if it were floating away. The massive shape that she took to be an image of her tenant was still there, though sometimes it chose not to be massive or explicitly a shape. She had hoped to have seen the last of the desert, weeks ago while lying on the medicom with limbs rotting, but it came back. Not every night, but it did come back.

In fact, she was sure that the desert somehow was still there whether or not she was there to see it.

She did not like how real it felt, to stand there. The sand had grit, the air was dry and smelled of old dust and heat. If anything, she thought, it might have been becoming more clear, rather than less.

The deep did not seem to mind her company when she visited the sand. It was not quite friendly, rather it reminded her of a skittish, half-tame animal that had been fed by strangers. It did not talk, but it did experience, and it did think, in a way that made no sense to her but she had no choice but to overhear. The most fleeting of thoughts, those that she could almost, almost convince herself were her own, except they were too sporadic and disjointed. Nothing complex, no sentences, but thoughts all the same.

Now, as she lay on the cold steel floor of the room where she had fallen asleep, the deep lashed out and whipped through her internally, and she could not help but cough and writhe as things inside her shifted that were not meant to. The sores reopened, violently, splitting her fingers and running up her arms as she tried to grasp at the thin shirt over her chest, as if she could have caught the deep to soothe it, buried as deeply inside her as it as.

She begged it to stop, because if it didn’t stop they were going to turn inside out again, and that they had come back together the first time was a miracle, so maybe they should not push their luck.