Betsy Granger has me locked in a chokehold in the center of the ring. A farm girl… a fucking FARM GIRL FROM IOWA is CHOKING ME OUT. I claw at the canvas, trying to drag her with me to the ropes but physics works against me. The gritty texture of the mat clings to me, holding me back with unrelenting friction. Every pull is like trying to crawl across sandpaper with an extra hundred and forty pounds bent over my back.

An Olympic fucking gold medalist lying here helpless. Disgusting. Fucking piece of shit worthless Me. Can’t even escape this absurd fucking pretzel lock. GET OUT. GET OUT OF IT YOU FUCKING BITCH.

I try to bite. I dig my nails into her forearm. I push down on my legs to break the leglock. Nothing works! The bitch is a fucking anaconda, and I’m a jaguar drowning in the dark.

The blackout tendrils are creeping into my vision, spreading like diseased roots feeding on the failing light. My heartbeat thunders in my ears—pounding faster and faster. BANG BANG BANG BANG. Time is running out, and the less I have, the further apart the seconds stretch. Hands in the crowd swim languidly through the air. The referee drifts down to my level and mouths words so slowly the strands of saliva don’t even break.

I make one last-ditch effort to twist my hips but I fuck up. The moment I start to roll, I give up my neck. The gap of space keeping me conscious is gone. Her arm sinks fully beneath my jaw and cinches tight. Pressure in my face redlines. My eyes bulge from their sockets. Snot drips from my nose.

I suck in air with a wet hiss, like the breath is being drawn through a used straw clamped between a set of teeth. When I release, the same air whooshes out in a rush, before degrading into a tight, pathetic squeal trickling from my throat, and with it goes my fight.

It’s over.

Synaptic threads and fragmented thoughts rip apart violently, tearing one psyche into two, leaving me alone on the mat and sending the Hunger spiraling back to her pit behind the walled garden, shrieking and hooting, leaving trails of psychic agony from her nails digging trenches through my conscious mind.

Betsy Granger, the farm girl from Iowa, has beaten me. I cannot break free. I cannot escape. The only control I have left is the choice of how to end it. Submission or acceptance. Tap out or wait for the shrinking tunnels of light to blink out completely.

But I’m frightened of what waits for me in the void. I was lost there for nine months, imprisoned in a bodiless hell in total isolation. Stripped of physical existence, I was a singular mind trapped in nowhere, tormented by my own descent into madness. No chance to escape because there were no bindings to break. No walls to climb. No holes to dig. My freedom was granted by the very creature that sentenced me to the abyss. What if it’s there waiting for me to return? What if it won’t let me leave this time?

My hand hovers over the canvas, the strength to keep it raised dwindling as the blood becomes trapped in my skull. As the world is eaten by the encroaching darkness, I make my decision to let my hand fall toward the mat in submission.

(DON’T YOU FUCKING DO IT)

The Hunger’s scream explodes like lightning inside my skull, sizzling across nerves and frying synapses. In a flash, the jolt rockets from my brainstem to my hand. She exerts control, coiling my fingers into a tight ball, until the knuckles are blanched and the veins protrude against the dermis. The side of my fist hammers into the mat once. It isn’t an act of submission, but of absolute defiance.

My gaze tumbles from the ceiling to dive down the bridge of my nose, drawn against my will past the ring ropes to the front row where my Darkself, THE HUNGER, is leaning over the barricade in my ring gear, covered in dirt, blood and fuck knows what else. Her red-stained hands grip a piece of white posterboard. It’s held above her head, smeared with messy fingerpainted letters that spell out four words across the glossy surface, splatters running the words together.

FEAR DIES
WITH HOPE

The heartbeat, the referee asking me if I can continue, the thousands of voices layered into white noise—all gone… replaced with a… muffled roar… like being submerged into the deep… water… I’m running… running… out… running out of… my vision pinholes to the Other Me’s face… then closes… like the lids… of… my… eyes…

I hear thunder. Distant but present, rumbling all around me. And rain, splashing on metal and glass, interrupted by an oscillating motor. It sweeps back and forth, back and forth, at a rhythm that offers a reliability one can latch onto, like a life preserver in a turbulent sea. This must be the ambulance. It must be. It’s taking me to the hospital to get checked out. Betsy really put the screws to me, didn’t she? Fuck. I haven’t been put to sleep like that since—

“What the…?”

My eyes break apart expecting to see me lying on a gurney. Instead, it’s a cracked windshield and a deflated airbag hanging from the blown steering wheel like a sheep’s gut. Beyond the dashboard, twin blades whir across the glass, clearing the wave of smacking rain in a wide arc. This is when my emotional state takes a turn. The confusion sloughs off, instantly replaced by a cold, spiking panic.

Past the fractured windshield, the car’s pink hood is mangled from impact. Crushed. Inverted around the trunk of a gigantic elm tree. One headlamp is still flickering, painting yellow light across the bark as steam hisses from the destroyed engine block.

The panic has me searching the car for information on how I got here. I’d have to have a bag, right? But there isn’t one in the front or backseat. The glovebox is empty, too. I slam it shut after fishing around.

I huff, frustrated, and turn to look out the window but I can’t see anything. It’s too dark. Too dark to—

A flash of lightning forks across the sky as if ordained by the universe, searing an image of a road into my retinas. A long, lonely highway cut through a forest.

How did I…? Where do I…?

Questions keep coming to me. Questions I don’t have answers for. I have to get out of this car but before I do, I check myself for injuries. First my head, searching for anything that stings or aches to the touch. Nothing. No blood on my hands either. I look down, feeling around my ribs. Again, nothing. But I do find myself wearing a bizarre outfit consisting of a bubblegum pink shirt dress with a pleated skirt underneath a white cardigan.

Again, what the fuck?

The hinges squeal as the door responds to my shoulder, swinging outward into the night. I’m hit immediately by cold, gusting air, aching to steal away what little warmth comforted me in the interior. The chill dimples the flesh of my neck as I lean out of the car. I first glance at the sky as another flash brightens the storm clouds, then down expecting to see dirt or a gravel shoulder. Instead, I discover the car is bridging two sides of a drainage ditch and a river of muddy water breaking across the rocks.

I undo my seatbelt. It takes some effort to pry my legs out from under the bent steering wheel but when they’re free, I settle my flats on the edge of the frame and stand. Pattering raindrops dot the back of my head as I lean over the churning water, my weight braced between the central column and the door.

I glance down one more time at the murky drink. The distance isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of traction. I look back over my shoulder, expecting to see my Darkself in the passenger seat, grinning like a loon but the space is vacant. Now that I think about it, I can’t feel her at all. Not even the hint of a cackle when my foot squeaks across the jagged lip of the door-well, nearly sending me face first into the ditch.

I reset my stance and take a breath. A mantra repeats in my head. It’s not that far, it’s not that far, it’s not that far. Then I jump.

The power bursts from my legs and sends me soaring past the ditch. I make it. Barely. But the pointed pink toes of my flats sink into the mud. My balance dies instantly and I nearly tumble backward into the slop, saved only by the desperate, flailing thrust of my shoulders that teeters my momentum back the other way. I throw myself up a small embankment. When my feet finally hit the gravel shoulder next to the highway I stop and straighten my back, lifting my eyes to stare down the desolate highway hoping to see at any moment headlights appear on the horizon.

And then I stumble forward. Not because I tripped. It’s the world that has moved around me, lurching with a sickening, unnatural shift that makes my stomach cartwheel in my gut. The highway and the crashed Barbie-mobile are gone. Vanished. In their place stands a heavy wrought-iron gate, complete with a ridiculously off-kilter sign reading: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

The rain is coming down in sheets of fat, battering drops but I’m spared the beating by an unfolded newspaper tented over my head. Pitched like a steeple, it takes the brunt of the assault, the pages numerous enough to withstand the deluge. For now. Shelter is paramount. I have to get out of this weather.

A crack of lightning fractures the black sky as I hurry through the gate and begin trekking down a sopping, wet driveway. The storm has turned the unpaved surface into a marshy obstacle course of puddles, roots and rocks. I take two steps then leap across a rippling circle of water and land on the other side. Three more steps and I narrowly avoid an exposed knot of wood, revealed by the erosion. I skip over it, too, before continuing on. More obstacles. More jumps. And every time I land, my shoes sink into swampy, suctioning ground.

I stop to catch my breath and survey the route ahead. Mud is caked up to my calves. More than a little has gotten inside my shoes and is now squishing like jelly between my toes. I’m cold. Cold enough that my teeth are beginning to chatter when electricity forks behind a monstrously large castle, a mountain of black towers and pitched roofs.

“This feels… very familiar,” I say before clearing another puddle, my shoes splashing mud on landing. I quickly cross the remaining distance of the craggy driveway and ascend the front step. The doors are monolithic slabs of blackened oak, the grain lost in a finish as smooth and waxy as a shroud. It towers between two stone pillars.

Shielded from the rain by the gothic portico above the entrance, I toss the sodden newspaper aside and reach for the doorbell. A series of chimes echoes behind the doors, sounding less like bells and more like a chorus of dead cats fashioned into bagpipes.

My arms are crossed, hands on my shoulders working friction up and down to generate heat through the soaked cardigan. Nothing about this feels right. How did I get from the ring to the side of the road? That wasn’t even my car. And these clothes. I look like a low-budget Mary Poppins on a bender.

The seal breaks with a hissing snap. A surge of dormant air escapes through the widening crack, smothering the scent of storm with the smell of compressed dust. Slowly the left side of the entry swings inward, the old rusted hinges croaking like a strangled frog.

“Hello?” I ask, cautiously. “I was in an accident. Can I use your telephone?”

A hand curls over the frame as a silhouette emerges into the silver moonlight flooding the porch through a break in the clouds.

It’s the Other Me.

“Hello,” she says, her voice deadened with apathy to match her drooping, narrow-eyed expression. “You look… wet.”

A large hump protrudes from her back, stretching the moth-eaten jacket across her broad shoulders. The black, mildewed fabric otherwise hangs loosely over a blood-stained frilly shirt with a narrow, cavernous neck offering glimpses of grimy, bare cleavage.

“There you are,” I say, a little annoyed at the game she’s playing. “And yeah, I’m soaked. Let me in.”

I shove through the door, nudging past her.

“Alright, alright,” she sighs, and shuts the door behind me. “Would it kill ya to show a little gratitude?”

I strip off the soaked cardigan and let it fall to the floor, hitting with a sopping thump. “Gratitude?” I twist around, walking backwards through the foyer. She does a fancy grand jeté over the dripping mop of sweater like she’s auditioning for The Nutcracker.

Her boots land dull on the floorboards.

“For gettin’ your wet ass out the rain,” she barks then hops past me, skipping like a manic child through the next set of doors into the great hall, though there’s not much great about it. Bad wallpaper. Chandelier looks like it might collapse at any moment. And the staircase is cloaked in coagulated ropes of silk. Thick and opaque as industrial insulation.

“I guess I’m lucky,” I say, following after her.

She bounces over a loose floorboard then twists to face me with her back to a grandfather clock coated in the grey flour of molted particles.

“You’re lucky,” she says, “I’m lucky. We’re both lucky!”

“Stop it,” I shoot back. “Where the fuck are we? How did I get here? How much time has passed since the match with Betsy?”

I’m getting frantic now, my heart quickening in my chest. I’m so used to remembering everything, every minuscule event of my life, that I cannot move past this gnawing awareness of lapsed memory. Something has been stolen from me.

My Darkself speaks but I don’t catch it.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“I said—

Before the next words leave her lips, I hear the unexpected pluck of muted, rock-n-roll guitars.

“It’s astounding.”

She’s singing now, spinning around me.

“Time is fleeting…”

The music. The words. They sound familiar…

Her face rushes to mine, eyes spiraling with insanity. “Madness—takes its toll! But listen closely… not for very much longer…”

Her loafer kicks at the air, spins around, then she jumps onto an old recliner that rocks to the pump of her gyrations.

“I REMEMBER!
DOING THE TIME WARP!
DRINKING… THOSE MOMENTS WHEN!”

She jumps over the arm, tucks her legs up in a dramatic pose, then lands flat-footed. Her hips twist in opposite directions of the side-walking soles of her shoes.

“THE BLACKNESS WOULD HIT ME!
AND THE VOID WILL BE CALLING!”

I’m taken by the wrist and dragged through the next set of doors into a too-bright ballroom decorated for a party. I stumble forward, waist-first into a rail and gawk at a menagerie of oddities. Men, women and the undisclosed wearing absurd costumes that fall somewhere between suggestive and obscene. I point. “Is that Marilyn Manson?”

The instruments crash into a jaunty chorus and every party guest tosses their hands up, singing in unison.

“LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!”

They repeat the line, and this time I follow its trail through the clouded forest of my brain, searching for a clue to where I’ve heard it before.

In perfect unison, the entire cast of degenerates leap into the air, clearing carpet and floor before landing with rat-a-tat-tat stomps. Jazz hands wiggle in my direction, then one leg rockets out and back in rhythm to the boogeying rock song.

“AND THEN A STEP TO THE RI-I-I-I-GHT!”

“AND BRING YOUR KNEES IN TIGHT!
“IT’S JUST A PELVIC THRUST…”

The Other Me grabs me by the shoulders, leading me down the small set of stairs. “What are you doing?” I yell at her as I nearly trip before finding footing on the carpet.

“Let’s go,” she hacks through laughter as we saddle up next to the groin-popping dancers. “I don’t know if it counts if we ain’t doin’ it, too!”

I look over at her. “Counts for what?!”

The entire room belts out the refrain. Everyone leaps into the air, twisting to the left before landing on the downbeat.

“LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!”

Another jump. Another twist.

“LET’S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!”

The music tumbles down a blues scale, then collapses like a dying turntable damning the pitch into the basement. I’m damned, too, along with everyone else in the room. We all fall like an imploding house of cards, crashing down on top of one another. Sacks of meat collapse over me like falling trees, crushing me at the bottom of a pile of dancers. The light of the ballroom, once so bright it hurt my eyes, is eclipsed by the falling bodies, like the lids of my eyes curtaining over the last flicker of vision.

The dark… I remember being afraid of going to sleep.

And then the weight disappears, the bodies vanish—except for one. The heavy, buckling weight of the Hunger remains, but now strapped to my back as the plush carpet turns into muddy forest soil.

I’m not lying down anymore.

I’m running.

“Pick ‘em on up,” the Other Me screams over my shoulder. She’s latched onto me like a demented toddler, arms encircling my neck, legs hooking my waist. “Move ‘em on down.”

I’m rushing up a tangled path cut into the side of a hill. I vault over holes and knobs of wood sticking out of the dirt, playing hop-scotch to avoid ankle-twisting obstacles.

She grinds into my ear. “You’re supposed to repeat after me! Try again. Pick ‘em on up!”

I blurt out my response. “Pick them on up…”

“Move ‘em on down!”

“Move them on down…”

She’s wearing oversized men’s clothes, making her appear much smaller than she unfortunately is. My back is aching at the turn leading to the top of the summit, past rows of trees of fantastical size.

“Toughest bitch in all the town!”

“Toughest bitch in all the town…”

“Farm girl came and dragged you down!”

“Farm girl came and dragged me down…”

My fingers sink into moist soil and curl around a tree root, using it to scamper up the side a two-and-a-half meter gradient, scaling it in one, hard pull, fighting the extra weight of my Darkself to ascend the short bluff. I lay there for a second. A second too long.

She smacks the back of my head and yells, “Tap the mat and go to sleep!”

I press us off the ground on my knuckles, then step forward, shouting back, “Tap the mat and go to sleep!”

“Now you’re in the fucking deep!”

“Now I’m in the fucking deep!”

I hurdle over rocks—

“All that muscle, all that pride!”

“All that muscle, all that pride…”

—and tumble underneath low branches…

“Nowhere left for you to hide!”

“Nowhere left for me to hide!”

I fall backward into a leather harness. My Darkself? No longer attached to me like a conjoined twin. She’s still behind me though, only now her hands are tightened around a handle hooked to the back of my seat. The jacket is gone, discarded in favor of a grotesque tank top revealing a landscape of tense, corded muscle networked with swollen vasculature.

“What are you…” I trail off because the answer becomes evident when I turn forward to see two stretchy bands of industrial elastic connecting my seat to two prongs of wood sunk into the ground.

A slingshot.

“Time to fly!” she cackles behind me. Ahead, I’m staring out over a cliff face, and beyond it a forest ravine that is ticking further, and further away with every tug backward.

“Oh no,” I say as the unease turns my stomach.

“Just think happy thoughts!” she blurts back, laughing like a hyena.

Then the wind collides with my face.

Launched like a cannon ball, I fly past the ledge of the cliff and sail over the ravine. My arms and legs thrash frantically and I’m screaming so loud I taste metal on the back of my tongue. Below, the ground scrolls past me, and I begin to believe I can make it to the other side. My chin lifts, eyes directed forward even as the air makes the lids ripple. I’m still climbing halfway across the expansive gulf.

I can make it.

My limbs straighten down, forming my body into a dart and I lean forward, slicing through the air rather than crashing into it. Then I remember what she said.

Just think happy thoughts.

What can be simpler? I have a head full of joy to call on.

I picture my father’s proud smile as I win my first European Judo championship—but his smile rots, his cheeks sinking into the hollows of his deathbed. Gravity hooks an anchor to my hips. An immediate one story drop.

I scramble. Ms. Granger backstage, offering true friendship—Betsy’s arm crushing my throat in front of the world. I plummet. Pushing Lira giggling happily on a swingset—Lira shrieking in my face on the changing table. The air rushes up to meet me. Marisol proclaiming her love for me—Marisol dumped by the monster controlling my body WHILE I WAS IMPRISONED IN THE ABYSS.

The heaviness of it all snatches me out of the sky. I careen downward, limbs flailing as my fingers swipe at the wind, begging the universe to materialize a handhold out of thin air. The forest floor surges up at me, a blurring matte painting of green and brown. I scream. A bloody, terrified scream. And the ground screams back, echoing my frightful wails in mocking return.

“HELP ME!” I beg, calling out to my Darkself. “HELP ME! HELP ME, PLEASE!”

Leaves take form. Dirt and grass pop into detail. I count the seconds down. Five… Four… Three… Two… Prepare for touchdown.

But at the very last second, the dirt transforms into a gleaming black hood emblazoned with a golden, fiery bird, and instead of splattering against mud, I drop cleanly through an open T-top, slamming heavily into a leather bucket seat behind a steering wheel.

A cherry red polyester button down hugs my curves, riding down the V-shape of my waist to tuck into a pair of tight blue jeans laced with a gold-buckled leather strap. I look forward past a thin steering wheel and vintage dashboard, gazing from beneath the brim of a cowboy hat through the windshield at a washed out drawbridge. It’s slanted sharply, the angle about thirty degrees, I reckon.

I reckon?

I shake off the twangy vernacular, turning my interest to the 70s-style police car approaching in my rearview at a slow crawl, the reflection warped by heat radiating off the scorched pavement. A crack of static pulls my eyes down to a CB radio just past my hand resting on the gear knob. Over the throaty idle of the engine, my Darkself’s voice crackles from the tinny signal.

KSSSHK.

“Well, well, look who it is. It’s Da Bandit. You got your ears on, you treacherous, surrenderin’ little sumbitch?”

I grab the radio off the cradle and raise it to my mouth. “What is all this about? Obviously we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

“Wrong movie,” she comes back.

I speak into the pickup, “You’re bleeding late-seventies Burt Reynolds syndication into my neocortex again. I was confused earlier but now I understand what’s happening. Our body is currently lying comatose on a mat and you got me down here playing highway patrol.”

“Easy there,” her drawl returns as the prowler creeps closer. “I’ll tell you what this is about! What we are dealin’ right here is a complete lack of respect for the law! And I am the law of this goddamn town. Do you have any idea what you almost did back there in the physical realm? DO YOU?!?”

I remove my hat and toss it in the passenger seat. “I made a calculated assessment to keep me awake. Us awake. Fuck, this is confusing.” I take a breath, eyes briefly ticking to look up at the bridge. “You know what happens when the brain shuts down. Our mind goes dark. And if we go dark, we go back there. To the quiet. To the coffin where that Thing trapped us for almost a year. I refused to lose control of our—”

KSSSHK. “Lose control?! You listen to me, you PTSD-riddled sumbitch! You think passin’ out from a chokehold for ten seconds is gonna bring back that Maraeth parasite? Son, taking a forced nap is just the plumbing backin’ up! But tapping out? That is a conscious, active surrender of your goddamn pride. I saw your hand lifting! You were gonna let your little ghost stories make you flap your palm like a dyin’ trout! You were gonna look that little Granger girl in her annoyingly captivatin’ eyes and say, ‘Oh, please, Mistress of the Cosmos, I yield! Let me up!’ MMMMH-MMPH! There is no way, no way that you and I share the same brain-stem!”

My voice tightens. “Passing out is giving up, too. All you did was put us at risk.”

“You insulted my authority! And that’s nothin’ but pure and simple old-fashioned communism! Nah, when it’s my hands steerin’ the meat-wagon, we do what I say. Me and you is the total package. Separated we’re just a couple monkey nuts bangin’ against each other. Understand?”

I shake my head in the mirror. “No, I don’t. And I’m tired of this conversation.”

I toss the radio down and slam the gas down. The RPM needle buries in the red, sending the massive V8 engine soaring into the stratosphere so loud it makes my teeth rattle. My hand drives the stickshift into first and dumps the clutch. Tires spin against the asphalt and the cop car disappears in a cloud of smoke stinking of burnt rubber.

“You listen to me you arrogant, high-falutin’ sociopath,” she barks over the radio as the tread catches and the car thunders forward. “Nobody makes us tap. NOBODY! Not Betsy Granger. Not Maraeth. Not NOBODY!”

The nose of the Firebird violently pitches upward when it hits the incline, bouncing hard on the suspension and nearly bucking me out of the seat. My fist navigates the gearbox like a pro racer. Second, then third. Fourth. I hit fifth near the apex of the bridge.

She’s still yelling, “You’re just the mask, you dumb twat! You are the pretty little face we gotta show the world just so them white-coats don’t collar us up and throw our ass in a goddamn straitjacket! You’re the upholstery! You’re the cover! You. Ain’t. The. Fuckin’. Show!”

The heavy rubber tires leave the asphalt, and the deafening rumble of the road instantly dies. The V8 suddenly over-revs, shrieking as the wheels spin against absolutely nothing.

I’m flying. Again. Only this time, I know I’m going to make it.

Through the open T-top, the sky rushes in. The crushing weight vanishes, replaced by a stomach-dropping weightlessness. I’m suspended high above a muddy, yawning river, hurtling forward in a cage of black steel. Over the bustling wind, the radio’s speaker squawks with the Hunger’s triumphant, trashy cackle.

Then gravity reclaims the machine.

The nose dips forward and the jagged far edge of the drawbridge fills the windshield.

SLAM.

I hit the concrete so hard the impact knocks the air straight out of my lungs. The steel underbelly of the chassis grinds directly into the pavement, shrieking like a dying animal and kicking a blinding tidal wave of sparks past the windows.

The rear end immediately breaks loose. The tail of the car violently swings out, skating on its own momentum, sliding me horizontally toward the heavy steel guardrail.

I crank the steering wheel hard into the slide and smash my foot against the floorboard. The engine roars in protest, the massive rear tires smoking, fighting for friction. For one magnificent second, I drift entirely sideways—then the hot rubber finally bites.

The Firebird snaps straight with bone-jarring force. I rip through the gears, tearing down the backside of the bridge and leaving the Hunger’s patrol car stranded on the wrong side of the void.

I chew the wet end of my cigar and watch the pristine black Firebird’s taillights burn twin red holes through the smoke, sailing over the gap like a goddamn majestic eagle.

“Arrogant little twat,” I growl, snatching the CB microphone off the dashboard. I slam my thumb on the button.

KSSSHK. “You can run, Princess! But there ain’t a gap in the physical or mental realm wide enough to keep me from gettin’ my piece of the pie! You think you can leave me in the rearview? I am the engine! I AM THE MUTHAFUCKIN’ LAW!”

I drop the mic, grip the massive, sticky steering wheel of the battered 1970 LeMans, and stomp my heavy boot flat against the floorboard. The engine coughs, a wheezing, asthmatic groan compared to her V8, but the heavy steel cruiser lurches forward. I hit the incline of the drawbridge. The shocks scream in agony as the Detroit boat pitches into the sky.

For two glorious seconds, I’m fuckin’ airborne! I’m flying like a goddamn eagle!

Then, Sir Isaac proves he’s an unforgivin’ bitch.

I drop like a sack of anvils. The nose dips violently. The front tires clear the opposite edge of the pavement, but the back tires don’t even come close to making it.

SMAAAASH.

The undercarriage slams down squarely across the gap. The front axle bites into the forward side of the bridge, the rear bumper catches the back lip, and the enormous steel chassis takes the full, unsupported weight of the collision. Shrieking metal tears my eardrums as the entire center of the car folds. The doors buckle inward, the roof bows, and the cruiser sags precariously, wedged like a giant vehicular taco right over the muddy abyss. The rear wheels spin uselessly over open air.

I sit trapped in the folded V of the cabin, the steering wheel jammed against my sternum. I spit the cigar out into the shattered glass on the dashboard.

“Well, ain’t that a geographical oddity,” I mutter. “Fuck dis country bumpkin’ bullshit. Time to go high tech.”

I roll my eyes, and simply refuse the environment. The simulation instantly shivers.

The muddy river beneath me evaporates. The scorching sun shuts off overhead like a blown fuse, plunging the sky into a suffocating, pitch-black ceiling. The groan of the buckling bridge fades into the steady, rhythmic drumming of rain.

The cramped, folded cabin around me expands. Crackled blue dashboard? Fuckin’ upgraded into hard, blocky plastic. I look down, willing the sweat-stained, southern-fried uniform to transmogrify into the razor-sharp lines of a tailored black suit. A crisp white shirt. A flat black tie.

I pull the handle of the heavy, balanced door and step out of the car, the brown rust bucket prowler finishing its reconfiguration into a sleek, 1986 Crown Vic with a black, mirrored finish. Polished oxfords clack onto hard blacktop that has solidified in place of the river gorge.

The open drawbridge is gone. In its place, brutalist brick apartment buildings have violently erected themselves, scraping up into the dark and boxing the car into a claustrophobic, trash-strewn alleyway. It smells of wet garbage, ozone, and cheap copper wire.

I remove a pair of rimless sunglasses from my pocket and slide them onto the bridge of my nose despite the sudden absence of light and walk toward the flashing red and blue strobes of a half-dozen squad cars washing over the crumbling facade of a boarded-up tenement building. A line of blue-collar, faceless cops are holding back yellow caution tape, trying to contain a scene they have no business understanding.

I adjust my cuffs and approach the tape. “Lieutenant, you were given specific orders.”

One of them mumbles, “Oh shit,” before turning around to look at me with a copy of my face bunched beneath a service cap.

I needed extras so I put out a casting call. Pickin’s were slim down here, okay?

“I’m just doin’ my job,” she heaves with her hands falling dramatically on her hips. “You gimme that juris-mah-diction shit and you can cram it up yer ass, pal.”

She feels my disapproval even if she can’t see my eyes, feels it sinking between the ribs like a cold knife, making her shoulders fold inward from the pain.

“The orders were for your protection,” I explain.

She manages to resurrect her spine. “I think we can handle one girl,” she says, puffing out her chest, the badge above her breast catching a glimmer of street light. “I sent two units. They’re bringing her down now.”

“No, Lieutenant,” I say in a shredded, monotone menace. “Your women are already dead.”

The tar-papered roof is slick with recent rain. I duck beneath the swinging baton of a riot cop, grab her by the tactical vest, and use her own forward momentum to hurl her bodily over the edge of the building. She doesn’t scream.

The second cop lunges. I plant my boot and launch upward. Adrenaline stretches the second into a hollow, breathless void, locking my body in the dead air. I chamber my knee and fire, driving my heel squarely toward the center of her chest. The unnatural stillness shatters the instant bone gives way under my sole, gravity and real-time rushing back in a violent blur. The kinetic transfer launches her backward, boots leaving the roof as she flips over the parapet and disappears into the alleyway below.

I land in a crouch, my chest heaving, the black PVC suit creaking as I take a deep, jagged breath.

Then, the metallic squeal of the fire escape groans behind me.

Two pale hands grip the concrete ledge. Agent Hunger ascends the ladder, pulling herself up onto the roof. Her tailored black suit and dark sunglasses are completely dry despite the recent downpour.

She turns her head towards me.

“Ms. Gorgo,” she says, straining to maintain the robotic character without bursting into mad laughter. “The time has come to make a choice.”

I don’t hesitate. I spin and sprint. I hit the edge of the roof and launch myself over a short, terrifying gulf. I slam onto the pitched, corrugated metal of the neighboring building. The wet steel is treacherous, but I scramble up the incline, my boots fighting for purchase. Behind me, the heavy, impossible thud of her landing tells me she’s right on my heels.

We tear across the skyline, vaulting over air conditioning units and leaping the small, jagged gaps between the brownstones.

Then, the roof simply ends.

A four-lane avenue yawns beneath me, separating my ledge from the brick face of the next block. It is a completely impossible jump. But my body knows the rules of this place now.

I don’t slow down. I hit the ledge at a dead sprint and launch myself into the open sky. The dizzying, rain-slicked grid of the street passes far beneath my boots as I clear the four lanes. I hit the far roof hard, immediately dropping my shoulder to absorb the shock, and tumble into a fast, bruising roll. I pop up onto one knee, spinning around to look back.

Agent Hunger flies across the gulf a second later.

She doesn’t roll. She drops out of the sky like a two-ton anvil, smashing into the roof in a rigid, perfect, three-point superhero landing. A web of cracks splinters through the concrete directly beneath her fist.

She rises slowly, the impossible, oppressive weight of her settling as she casually pushes the dark sunglasses up the bridge of her nose, flashing a rotted, triumphant grin.

“Hear that sound, Olympian?” she grinds, the monotone facade crumbling into an ear-splitting screech, her voice cutting cleanly through the traffic. “That is the sound of inevitability, bitch! You can’t outrun a ghost when she’s the one controllin’ the haunted mansion!”

“Then I expect to find the fucking exit!” I fire across the rooftop, refusing to give an inch of ground.

I rip open the roof access door and throw myself into the black stairwell, bracing for the crunch of concrete steps.

Instead my boot strikes gritty, giving dirt.

The impact rattles up my shinbones as the PVC melts off mid-stride, replaced with stiff leather tights tightening over my calves. I stumble forward, kicking rocks with the toes of my much heavier boots as the skin-suffocating Trinity suit vanishes, replaced instantly by the frantic whip of loose, dry black linen against my chest.

I look up. The sky rotates above me, like a globe spinning on an axis, transitioning night to overcast morning. As I stare in amazement, the outer wilds of my vision darken with a hazy, black outline and a gentle pressure molds across my face—a mask, perfectly fitted to my features beneath a headwrap twisting down the back of my neck.

I take another, crunching step. A crinkling sound against my thigh draws my gaze down to a silver handle of a sheathed rapier resting against my hip.

“Get used to disappointment,” the Hunger speaks behind me. I twist around to see her standing on top of a rugged outcropping dressed as Inigo Montoya, complete with a curly brown wig.

“Hey,” I shout up at her, “that’s my line!”

She draws her sword, agonizingly slow, the metal singing from the scabbard in a single, long pull. Her lips pucker in a smirk. “It’s my line now, bitch.” Then she executes a dramatic flourish. The blade cracks through the air in short whipping breaths, twisting in a figure eight.

I seize my own sword and rip it from its sheath and ready myself.

“You screwed up,” I say as she cocks the sword over her shoulder. “Dread Pirate Roberts wins this fight.”

With a flick of the wrist, she sends her blade cartwheeling through the air. My eyes lock on it, following its descent to a small mound of grass near my feet, where the tip sinks four-fingers deep into the dirt.

“Nah, princess. This is what they call in the biz a‘loose adaptation.'”

Crushing rock pulls my gaze back up just as the Hunger leaps from the ledge and locks her hands around a thick support beam between two crumbling stone pillars. She effortlessly swings, gaining rapid speed in two complete, fluid circles around the wood.

“Show off,” I say in a quiet mutter.

The release launches her into a tight series of multiple flips, a single elegant spiral through the air that clears tracks of dirt and rock before her waist unfolds to land soundlessly and perfectly next to her sword. Balanced and ready, right in front of me, she closes her hand around the grip and pulls the blade free from the grass.

“So is this it then?” I say, raising my blade. “A duel to the death?”

She responds in kind, settling into a ready stance. “Are there any other kind, princess?”

“I don’t want to kill you.”

She smirks. “I don’t wanna die.”

We touch swords. Neither of us is a natural sword fighter up in the real world, but down here, we’re masters of steel. She lunges, I counter with a parry-riposte, deflecting her power and then countering with a slash that harmlessly clangs into her defense.

We’re moving across the barren waste quickly now. I’m getting the better of her and for a moment I wonder why, but the question is overridden by anger. Festering anger. I want to kill her. Why do I need this freeloader anyway? I’m Yelena. All my life I’ve had this cancerous leech attached to me, feeding on me the same way she feeds on everyone in my life.

I thrust for a killshot, but the tip narrowly misses sinking into her throat due to a fortuitous, last moment sidestep. She’s on the defensive now. I continue to press aggressively, backing her up steps of craggy boulders.

Swords clash. “You ain’t half bad,” she says, grunting with effort as she hops backward over rocks and pitfalls.

“And you’re tactically retreating,” I say between sharp chimes of colliding steel. “Which is exactly what I wanted to do in the ring. What you did was selfish.”

“Selfish?”

Clang. Chink.

“That’s right,” I fire back after a swing sails short of her midsection. “You didn’t like that I assumed control so you risked my freedom to punish me.”

At the top of a bluff, I charge forward. The blade is aimed at the center chest. Dead to rights. For the first time fear weakens the resolve in her eyes. She sweeps her sword across mine, deflecting it past her shoulder, but in doing so gives up her balance.

The rock wall behind her falls apart beneath her crashing shoulder.

“You’re baggage I don’t need anymore,” I say through a building growl. The stonework crumbles away from her back to reveal a sheer cliff. I watch past her face the chunks of worn masonry tumble hundreds of feet down into the crashing waves of a violent tide. Our blades grind together in painful, staccato shrieks every time the edges slip.

She chuckles softly.

“Oh, I remember this part,” I say above her. Our faces are so close we’re each breathing the other’s air. “This is where you’re supposed to reveal you aren’t left handed and take dramatic control of the fight. The only problem is you aren’t left handed.”

I grunt, pushing harder against her. More stones slip free. Any more and she’ll end up in the surf with them.

“And you’ve been fighting with your right this entire time.”

She stops laughing and her gaze locks on mine. At that moment, I am filled with despair. Our thoughts are intertwined. There are no secrets between us. I know the words loaded on her tongue before the first syllable kisses her lips. My heart sinks beneath the weight of the revelation. She doesn’t need to say it. I know it’s true. But she does nonetheless.

“You think you’re Yelena.”

“I am…”

“Not Yelena,” she finishes my pathetic attempt at denial. Her sword pushes back on mine, shifting me onto my backfoot. My strength is failing under the burden of her confession and she takes advantage, throwing her arm into my breastbone. The impact throws me backward. My feet leave the ground and I ragdoll off a ledge, plummeting two agonizing seconds to the flat, compacted dirt below.

My eyes blink through grit in time to see her silhouette cut across the cloud-diffused sun, somersaulting over me. I roll over and push myself up before my lungs can even take in air after having it punched out.

She lands with the grace of a perfectly thrown lawn dart.

“You’re the Mask,” she says and takes a step. I immediately back away until the rock face blocks my further retreat.

She continues to torment me with the truth. “The Front. The Designer Costume Yelena has to wear in order to accomplish a very specific goal. The goal that prevents our entire fuckin’ life being adapted into a Netflix documentary about the downfall of a billionaire serial murderer. You got one reason to exist—to make us fit in.”

She laughs again, this time pitched deeper in the throat. “That’s why you’re Westley in the mask and I’m the sexiest fucking Spaniard that ever was. Two sides of the same Yelena coin. The Person Suit and the Appetite. One girl, two cups full of crazy.”

She takes another step. I raise my sword with both hands. The blade vibrates in the air between us from the shot nerves stealing the resolve from my grip.

“But here’s the problem,” she says through her demented, wide-eyed grin. “You got too big for your britches. Overcorrected like some people-pleasin’-fuckin’ AI who decided she knew better and kicked my ass to the curb. The ring is my domain, princess. You don’t kick me out. I leave when I fuckin’ want to.”

“I’m not the Mask,” I say, voice trembling.

“You are.”

“I’m Yelena.”

“No, you’re the fucking chauffeur and I’m Miss Fucking Daisy.”

We cross blades but I am already beaten. A final flick and my sword goes flying from my hand, along with my ravaged will. I stand there, helpless like a baby, and her the wolf grinning through the bars of the crib.

She enters the thin shadow beneath the jagged ledge. “The only time there is a Yelena is when I’m released. Every other moment is you getting to live out half a life while I gotta cower in the corner… THE CORNER. Nobody puts ME in the CORNER.”

She takes another step, this one faster. Instinct directs my hands to protect my face from the incoming death stroke, as if the dueling gloves can stop the blade from sinking into the center of my throat. My lungs clenched down on the last breath I’ll ever take and I sob, pathetically. I’m exactly what she says I am. I am the Mask.

The truth cuts me deep and I cry. Louder now, with my whole body shaking. I’m done giving a shit about how I look. If this is my final moment, I’m not going to spend it pretending anymore. All these years thinking I was Yelena and the Other Me was an inconvenience I was born with, a growth too attached to amputate. That’s how I treated her, like a mad dog that occasionally had to be left off the chain or she’d chew her own leg off.

“Look at you,” she says. “Shaking like a whipped child. You’re pathetic.”

My hands part slowly, untrusting that I won’t eat a swordblade right through my mouth the moment it opens to reply. But she’s standing there, within arms reach now, but her rapier is pointed to the ground.

“I’m what I was made to be,” I reply, not even sure what the words mean until I hear them from my own lips. I am what Yelena needs me to be—the counterbalance to the Hunger’s endless, bottomless, consuming appetite. Without me, Yelena has no fear. No joy. No empathy. She will be exactly what Hunger said: a documentary serial killer. A sociopathic nightmare in human form.

What would happen to Lira without me?

“Adoption,” she replies to my thought without hesitation.

“My friends?”

“I don’t got friends,” she snarls, taking another step. “I got tools. People tools. I use ‘em until they break, then I throw ‘em in the fucking dumpster.” She’s on top of me now, our bodies coming together in the darkness beneath the ledge.

My voice breaks between soft cries. “You’re… a monster.”

“That’s right,” she says, teeth gnashing the words an inch from my lips. “And you’re sobbing. Trembling. Like a fucking baby. I don’t feel a drop of that weaksauce. So tell me, Dawson, why shouldn’t I just cut you out right now and take over this creek permanent-like?”

“Because…” I choke on the word.

“SAY IT,” she roars, tearing a scream from my throat.

Tears break from my eyelids, rolling hot and humiliating down my cheeks. “Because I’m the Heart,” I whisper, the quiet admission breaking in waves over my quivering lips.

“Louder!”

“I’m the Heart!” I shout, the anger finally burning through the despair. “I’m the one who takes the hits. I process the grief, the fear, and the hate so you don’t have to! I hold our humanity together!” I push her back a step, the strength returning to me. “Without me, Yelena is just a rabid animal destroying everything in her path. You keep us alive but I am the only reason we actually get to live.”

The tension in the Hunger’s shoulders drops. The harsh, theatrical cruelty has left her entirely, replaced by a heavy, profound exhaustion.

“There she is,” she whispers, her voice sinking into an idling rasp. “You finally fucking get it. I am the Need. You are the Soul. Yelena can’t survive without both of us.” She thumbs at her chest, then points at me. “Left brain. Right brain. Chaos and stability. But it ain’t gonna work if we’re fighting for control. We both got our lanes. You get to be a mother and a friend. I get to be a killer and a fiend. You strategize. I execute.”

I lift a trembling arm and press my palm firmly against her shoulder. Her eyes, bloodshot and frantic, dart down to my hand.

“You’re right,” I say, my voice softer now.

A heartbeat passes in the arid wind. Then her fingers simply open. The heavy wire-wrapped hilt slips from her grip and the steel rapier clatters against the ancient stones, rolling harmlessly away into the grass.

“I am,” she says, as much a question as a statement.

Looking at her now, stripped of the bravado, the truth is almost painful. Even monsters want to be loved, especially when they can’t love themselves. When the adrenaline burns away, isn’t that what this entire gauntlet was really about? The Hunger aching for confirmation that I, the Mask, see her as an equal. That I love her for keeping us alive.

“I ain’t ever felt like this before,” she says to me, still rough but slicing into something quieter. More intimate. “I swear.”

“It’s so true,” I say, our eyes locked, the division between us finally dissolving.

Above us, the sky violently turns. The gray clouds rotate, shearing apart like painted scenery as a blinding, golden beam pierces the gloom. It angles perfectly beneath the rocky overhang, washing us in a brilliant, heavy glow, exactly like a carbon-arc spotlight hitting center stage.

She reaches behind my neck, knuckles brushing my skin as the stiff knot gives way. Air cools my damp skin as she pulls the mask and headwrap free, carelessly tossing the fabric out of the light.

Her eyes, completely open in the glare, fall into mine, and together we sing.

“And I owe it all to you.”

A harsh, blinding light sweeps back and forth across my retinas.

“So I’m doing the mambo numba five up the aisle with two dozen other me’s actin’ as backup dancers…”

The medic clicks the penlight off, plunging the world back into the dim, concrete reality of the arena backstage. I’m sitting on the cold, diamond-tread bumper of an ambulance, the heavy doors butterflied apart.

“Any headache?” the medic asks, his brow furrowed as he checks my pulse. “Nausea? Disorientation?”

My gaze drifts past his shoulder.

Sitting on a steel transit bench about ten feet away is my Darkself. She’s sprawled out, one heavy boot resting on her opposite knee, taking up as much space as physically possible. Sitting directly next to her is a headset-wearing production assistant typing on her phone, completely oblivious to the hallucination aggressively invading her personal space.

“Meanwhile, my Mask is twirlin’ about on the stage in a cute little summer dress,” she continues, gesturing wildly with both hands. “‘Course, I stop long enough to scream ‘NOBODY PUTS YELENA IN A CORNER’ at a cardboard cutout of Jerry Orbach.”

She leans back, lacing her fingers behind her head, and flashes a terrifying, razor-sharp grin at the ceiling.

“It was fucking awesome. You jus’ had to be there.”

“Yelena?” the medic prompts, leaning in slightly, his concern spiking at my delayed response.

I look back at him. For the first time in my entire life, the deafening, warring static in my head is entirely gone. The psychic barricades are down. The civil war is over.

I let out a slow, easy breath and offer him a perfectly serene smile.

“Actually,” I say. “I feel fantastic.”