She woke screaming, which was at least honest.

  Her body got there before her mind did — already upright, already reaching for a wall that wasn't where she'd left it. She went down on one knee on the stone floor and held on, voice coming out in pieces, and one hand went to her hair and pulled. She caught herself pulling and made herself stop. Held the handful in front of her face and looked at her fingers, which were intact.

  All ten.

  She pressed both hands to the floor and studied them, and her breathing started its slow, ragged return to something functional. Her fingers were whole. They were covered in blood from her grip, but they were whole.

  She unclenched her hands very carefully, opened them ft, and waited.

  The breathing didn't resolve immediately. It came in and out in uneven measures, too fast, not deep enough. She sat back on her heels and counted. In. Out. The cave was quiet around her. No torches — she noticed this in a remote, half-conscious way — no torches and no shadows shaped wrong. Just stone and her own breathing and the cave's ancient, indifferent dark.

  She stood up. Her legs held.

  She looked at the exit — the one exit, the cave's mouth visible at the far end — and started toward it. The sound of her own voice surprised her before she finished the first step.

  "I don't see any butterflies," she said, and couldn't have expined why.

  "Wakey, wakey, sleeping darling."

  The voice came from her own mouth.

  Her feet stopped moving. Every small hair on her arms stood straight. Her eyes went very wide and very still, and the expression that crossed her face in the next second was the expression of someone trying very hard not to have an expression at all — brows ft, jaw locked, lips pressed together, the total controlled bnkness of a person who is certain that showing anything at all right now will cost them something they cannot afford.

  She didn't turn around.

  She couldn't have expined why not turning around felt, in this moment, like the only meaningful act of defiance she had left.

  Something touched her arm from behind. Light, almost gentle.

  Her knees registered this. She felt them soften, felt the involuntary liquid weakness spreading from that point of contact downward, and she locked everything she had against it. Her face didn't change. Her eyes went bright — too bright — and her lip pulled back in something that started as a smile and ended as something too thin to be one.

  She was shaking very badly.

  Then the ground moved. A deep, slow vibration that came through her feet first, then her knees, and that was, apparently, the st thing her knees were willing to stand through. She went down. Hard.

  A white box appeared around her. She hadn't seen it come — it was just there, translucent and thick, and beyond it she could see something burning its hands against the surface, the creature from outside pressing and pressing while the box repelled it. She watched its hands blister. She watched it keep pressing.

  Her mouth opened.

  "No," she said. The word came out very small.

  Everything went white.

  She woke in a hospital bed.

  She came up fast — sat upright, heart smming, hands going immediately to her chest. She tried to slow it down and couldn't, and the room tilted sideways with the effort, her vision gone narrow and bright at the edges. Her breathing had gone strange, too much air coming too quickly, not staying long enough to do anything useful.

  A hand found her shoulder. Firm, not harsh.

  "You're safe." The voice was quiet and level, the kind of level that takes practice. "Breathe in. And out. In—"

  She tried. It took a while.

  When the room finally held still, she looked around.

  Dust hung in the air in dense drifts, backlit by the light from the window — the kind of dust that accumutes during events, that documents what has happened by volume. The room was hers, or had been hers. The door was gone. The wall where it had been held the outline of impact. Most of the other details were difficult to focus on.

  Two people had all of her attention.

  The first was sitting beside her. He wore a long dark coat and gsses, and the concern on his face expressed itself not as softness but as stillness — eyes fixed on her, barely blinking, the deliberate immobility of someone communicating very clearly through what they're choosing not to do. His mouth was working, small adjustments at the corners, but his eyes didn't move from her face. They were calm in the way of someone who is choosing calm and will continue choosing it for as long as necessary.

  The second stood against the far wall. He wore a suit that moved when he moved with a faint metallic sound, like armour dressed up as formal wear. Extraordinarily good-looking in the specific way that makes a room feel smaller. The guards around him held their rifles with obvious intent and gave him the wide berth of people in the presence of something unstable. The air around him had the quality of a room where someone has just extinguished a cigarette — not dangerous, exactly, but alert to the possibility.

  He was holding a white box. Inside it, a small doll. Strings attached from the doll ran to her, affixed somewhere she couldn't identify, and he held the box with the ease of someone who has held things this way before and considers it unremarkable.

  "I retrieved the seal," he said, his voice carrying the measured effort of someone being careful with each word. "It was quite the experience working with—" He stopped. Swallowed something the rest of the sentence would have been. His hands were steady. His face was not.

  The man with the gsses looked at him.

  "You don't have the right to make decisions for our guest," he said, mild as an observation about weather.

  The beautiful man stopped. The dust in the air redistributed itself in the small shock of dispced air as he went still. The guards' grips on their weapons shifted marginally.

  "What decision?" The beautiful man held up the silver knife. "This is common sense."

  "He won't survive," the man with gsses said, and looked at her, and she understood he was answering her st question before she'd asked it.