The door to the only still-lit office building closes, with a click, before she can hear him finish.

There’s a body, on the floor, and there’s blood splattered everywhere. The body is a man’s, and there is a gigantic gash on his neck.

The sort of gash one would acquire from a shovel.

She feels... floaty.

Oh, yes. Of course there’s a body. Zeke had joked, earlier, about how many people he’d murdered today.

Something had to - had to be wrong with you, to joke about that. It was one thing to murder people via shovel, and it was another thing entirely to - to - she hadn’t really recognized it then but -

There is something very, very wrong, in the brain of Zeke Lakeman.

Something old, something seen, something borrowed, something green -

(Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker - it seems to be coming from the body, now, she isn’t sure if that’s supposed to be meaningful -)

Okay. Time to -

(bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - at this point its almost getting repetitive, the way that reality seems to hum and churn at irregular intervals -)

- time to get to work. She can hyperventilate about dead bodies and charming sociopaths and alien parasites - later.

(If there even is a later, these days. She’s been spending a terrible amount of time in the Before.)

She slides back up, off the floor - now when did she get down there? - and starts pacing. There's blood on her pants, now. It complements the color of the scarf around her neck, at least, and the scrap still wrapped around her wrist.

She doubts that Zeke will stay gone for very long; she needs to escape, or to hide. She could just leave the office straightaway, run away off the ramp -

Thunder cracks, outside, and the light pitter patter pitter patter accelerates, rapidly, until the sky is pouring rain.

So much for that. 

Hiding, then. 

She - can't, actually, hide very well in here. The only possible place for it is underneath the desk, and, be it better than nothing, it was still an obvious place...

Well, she wasn't a journalism student for lack of curiosity. She can try the computer, see if it has any files conspicuously labeled 'in the event of my death by shovel'. The computer is a Windows, surprisingly - the decor seemed like it would correspond to a Mac - and the username is 'wendyf'.

Wendy. The woman on the couch. Someone important enough to have a mobile office, placed incongruously in the middle of a construction site.

... and who apparently had a terrible sense of information security. Her password is 'Password'. 

She brings her infected hand, absent-mindedly, close to the screen, while the computer is still loading. The screen glows green, in delicate, pretty little swirls; she half-startles out of the chair, and closes it with a snap.

She wonders if that had happened to the television, back at the laundromat...

The blood - on the floor, on the painting, splattered everywhere - is still flickering.

And - did the man on the floor just breathe? Did his chest just rise and fall?

She frowns, leans down - the idea of him being alive is ridiculous, but this night had worn away most of her instinctive disbelief - and checks his pulse.

With her - injured, infected, glowing, electronics-scrambling, ambiguously magical - hand.

The world turns green. 

She's in the past, again - all the way back to daylight. 

A quick glance through the window - 

Wendy, there, looking more composed than she had been on the couch, her voice an aggressive, projected alto, in lieu of a childlike coo. Her face, firm - her every motion scripted for drama, for intimidation, for a sense of presence - the shorter woman before her with the look of a very, very small minnow, confronted with a corporate shark, rightfully intimidated.

The shorter woman is stuttering, stammering, stumbling over every word - 

"I-I-I-I just, I had to ask if you cuh-could move your office buh-back to the parking lot? It's not safe h-here. We cuh-can't guarantee that the ground here won -"

"Won't collapse? - tell me your name," commands Wendy.

"Ma-ma-Martha, Ma'am."

"Well, Martha, do you think that crane, over there, is about to fall into that pit?"

"What? Nuh-nuh-no, Ma'am, we double checked?"

"Yes, and my office is a fair fuck farther away from the pit than that crane, and I double checked, because I'll be damned if I have to pay out insurance because incompetent government busybodies injured themselves on my property. Not literally, mind you, if you get yourself killed it’s no stain on my coattails, but the paperwork, Martha, think of the paperwork!"

"Nuh-now you listen here -"

"No, honeybunches, I'm afraid you'll have to leave a message after the tone. My office is on Canadian granite, and the ground here - on my property, don't you forget - is solid for ten meters in every direction! And perhaps I'd be more willing to avoid random acts of plausibly justified inconvenience if you would tell me what is on my property -"

"That inf-inf-information is classified, Ma'am," says the shorter woman.

"That inf-inf-information is classified, Ma'am," parrots Wendy. "Listen, flunky number four, I already know about the buildings buried beneath there, what I don't know is anything about them, anything about why they're there, anything about why the city council didn't, oh, I don't know, tell me about them before I invested ridiculous amounts of money in this land -"

"We di-di-di-didn't have the re-records!" 

"I don't believe you! I knew that Henry Wood had something out for me, it would be perfectly in character for him to arrange a little mishap, don't you dare stand here and whine at me about - nevermind. I'm done with you. Go bother someone else. Skedaddle. Shoo."

The construction woman, wisely, obliges, and another man - official looking, formally dressed - scurries in front of Wendy, and starts briskly delivering some manner of report.

The very same man who lies dead, on her floor, ten hours from now.

No.

No, that isn’t going to happen.

She isn’t going to let it.

She - she’ll write a message. She rifles around in her pockets -

-  she lost the pen at some point - and she doesn’t want to interact with the possibly possessed computer -

But she does have a shard of broken time.

Or, well, that’s the best explanation she has for why she has a hunk of ominously glowing ice in her pocket. Come to think of it, she does remember a bit of the edge breaking off, when she was about to fall into the void - she’d been panicked enough to disassociate, but it’s plausible that she’d put it in her pocket -

(- bzzzzz - bzzzzz - flicker flicker flicker - )

She’s starting to feel a breeze, tickling her hair, a little whisper from the universe saying ‘don’t you dare’...

She dares.

Shrick, goes the shard of time into an abstract painting on the wall. There isn’t time to write anything complex, not with the wind picking up...

She carves the word ‘SHOVEL’...

Is that - why is there writing behind the abstract painting. Why is - that writing is in her handwriting - 

(“If you read this, you took dangerous way out of turning point. Must do three things before sent back to future: - On wall are two plastic baggies. Take big one, open it, INJECT SYRINGE IMMEDIATELY. - Take small baggie, hide in bra or shoe. - Lie down, start humming ‘if you like pina coladas’ song, on repeat. If you do not follow instructions, seizure kills us!”)

What.

- well, okay. She shoves the little ziplock into her bra, opens up the big ziploc, takes the needle, and the tourniquet -

She has no idea how to inject needles into people.

That. That may be a problem.

Well, she’s fair skinned enough to find a vein, and she’s probably supposed to tie the tourniquet around the arm that she’s injecting into? Maybe? She doesn’t know, why would she know that -

She ties a tourniquet, and carefully, carefully injects into her most prominent vein - she has to dig around a little, but she finally manages to find it, and inject -

Okay. That didn’t involve any horrible disasters.

She lies down, carefully - the wind is getting faster, now, like the roaring of a train, like an approaching tornado, her hair is flying everywhere and her clothing is rippling and blowing -

She starts humming the tune to ‘if you like pina coladas’. - wasn’t that’s song actually called something else, if she remembered correctly? She didn’t - she had to concentrate, every note right, she has no idea what this is doing but it must be helping somehow and it’s actually kind of soothing, otherwise she’d be panicking about the fact that the wind was pressing up against her and making it a little hard to breathe - pina coladas, pina coladas, just hum about the damn pina coladas -

The pressure stops. The world’s lighting changes.

She starts seizing.

She falls unconscious.

She walks into the office, and there isn’t a body there. There’s writing, on the wall, and no painting.

She slides to the floor, and, on some strange whim, starts humming.

She seizes.

She falls unconscious.

A man walks in.

He stares at her, for a few moments.

He picks her up - slung over his shoulder, this time - and carries her out of the room.

Amaris wakes up.

Her head hurts. Like someone drilled a hole in it and started pouring in alcohol, from some pipette. Like that searing ache when you’ve eaten a whole chili pepper in one bite, spread out throughout her brain, spreading out in delicate curlicues throughout her body.

She is on a couch.

She can’t move her legs, or lower body.

Her hand moves up to brush at the back of her head, and - wire.

Television wire, squirming around like a bundle of snakes.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay, she can panic this is a perfectly reasonable time to panic but she cannot open her eyes she cannot open her eyes she won’t -

Half an hour later, having successfully panicked and successfully kept her eyes shut, she starts considering her options.

Her pockets are empty - Zeke must’ve had the foresight to empty them out -

But she hadn’t put the shard of broken time - or at least she though it was a shard of broken time, for all she knew it was a piece of decorative plastic - into her pocket. She’d stuffed it into her bra, with the smaller baggie. 

It might’ve been a bad idea, in retrospect - it’s sharp, and doesn’t quite seem like something she wanted in contact with her body - but she’s glad of it, now.

She’s attached to something, now. She doesn’t know if it has lived for the lifespan of the world, or if it was born a hundred years ago. She doesn’t know if it’d been unearthed, as the construction site implied, or if it had simply re-arisen. She doesn’t know if it’s really as it presents itself, or if that’s some sort of facade; she doesn’t know if it’s really waking up, or if that’d been the rambling of a madwoman.

She knows that it wants her to pay attention. 

She knows that she wants it out of her head.

One hand rises, and grips the television wire. It feels like holding something venemous, something angry, something static electric -

Her other hand rises, and grips the shard of broken time.

Shrick. 

Nothing explodes.

The world is buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, but - no explosions.

She tries moving her legs, experimentally, and - yep, she can.

Carefully, ever so carefully, time to get up off of the couch, walks over to behind the couch, and opens her eyes.

The sugar factory, and the courtyard.

No Caden, this time.

She tentatively touches the back of her head, expecting to find blood - nope. It seems perfectly fine.

Okay. She can - do this, probably. She can’t just kill Caden, again, and get out in the same way, but if the first thing that occurred to her, the first time around, worked, she’s probably going to find a second.

She spends a while, considering her options - she could try killing herself, but that seemed excessive, for the moment - she spends a little while staring at the sky.

- is that a star? Just one, dim, tune little star, barely visible in the darkness -

... no. 

She remembers something that her grandmother told her, once, a long time ago. She’d been watching television, and news anchors had been fawning over some celebrity or another, and her grandmother had muttered about how stars were just stars, from far away, all pretty and bright and shining. But then you got up close, and they were hooks, instead, and they’d catch on you and drag you up and up and up until you would do anything to keep riding their coattails.

There isn’t a star, up there. There is a hook.

She unties the bit of scarf still wrapped around her wrist. She stands, slowly, shakily - she still hasn’t gotten a speck of real sleep, tonight.

She takes the scarf. 

She flings it up, and it soars, unnaturally, fluidly, like a stream of blood flowing in reverse. Impossibly, unnaturally - it catches, on that single hook, in a lonely, darkened, muddled sky.

She starts climbing.

It should take ages, ages and ages and ages. Perhaps it does. But it feels like it takes minutes, the intervening time slipping away. Like blood, slipping away, hardly even missed...

She really does need to start coming up with less morbid similes.

She’s so, so close, then, to the light...

“- girl? Girl, you must awaken, or else perish, as I perish alongside you. Do you wish to die in vain, girl? Wake up.”

She does.

Her head still feels like she bathed it in boiling water and gave it a thousand little paper cuts, on the inside, but - less so, than it did when she was still attached to the Botfly.

And she really, really has to use the restroom

She opens her eyes, half-expecting this to result in entrancement.

The man she’s next to is handsome enough to suit the most discerning critic, bruises and dishevelment aside, but he’s not that pretty. They’re handcuffed together, with the chain running behind what looks like a - gas line? 

Their surroundings look distinctly suboptimal, as surroundings go; the foundation has a crack running through it, support pillar in the middle of the room is bending, and some madman dug a large hole through the floor, with a single ladder leading down it.

”Good. - good. Do you have a paperclip or pin? Other options are less pleasant.”

She goes to shake her head - and stops, partway through the motion.

She'd almost forgotten about the ziplock.

She plucks it out of her bra, and deposits it’s contents into her hands. 

... a sparkly wristwatch, a folded piece of paper, and a paperclip.

She hands the man the paperclip, snaps on the wristwatch - a bit awkwardly, given her current state of confinement - and unfolds the note.

He promptly starts fiddling with the handcuff - the end gets unfolded from the body, the tip goes into the little keyhole, he bends the rest of the paperclip against the handcuff so that the tip acquires a hook, and he sets to work.

The note reads:

Ceiling falls at 5:57.

Remember party!

- AJ (you AK, one before me AI)

PS: Tell the Woman, green is not her color, bad with complexion, too matchy.

PSS: Take gas-mask!

And she can hear something singing, softly, off in the distance, voice perfect in every respect.

”Someone can hear, child, someone can hear, 

Someone can see, child, someone can see,

Someone can feel, child, darling my dear,

No matter your hardship, there will be me...”

- her mother used to sing her that lullaby - god, that was just gratituously creepy -

She checks her watch - 

They have two minutes.

The sound of singing is growing louder.

The man’s handcuff falls away, and he stares at her’s for about two seconds, before unceremoniously bending out the other end of the paperclip, and lodging it into the gap between handcuff and chain. He shimmies it a bit, and her own handcuff pops off.

“High quality handcuffs always guard keyholes, rarely guard gaps,” he comments, idly, standing up, pulling her to her feet, and then pulling her towards the hole. “It is like guarding windows but not walls. And we must go down ladder, now, dangerous to stay, someone approaches -“

The singing stops, and a woman dressed in a green dress and an unnerving glow starts walking steadily down the stairs.

”Yes,” agrees a voice that seemed much farther away a few seconds ago. “Someone does.”

He turns his head -

And stares.

Amaris refrains from looking at her directly.

Can she just pull away and go down the ladder herself - no, doesn’t seem like it, he’s clinging too tightly to her hand -

Well then. 

She elbows him in the neck, and uses an added push to send him toppling backwards into the pit, before slipping out the shard of time and throwing it at her.

She leaps for the hole -

The Woman in Green looks at the shard, annoyedly, and plucks it out of the air before it reaches her; it crumbles to dust in her hands -

The man snaps back to alertness, as he’s falling, and grabs at the ladder; it helps, for a moment, and then promptly starts falling backwards with him -

She grabs hold of the ladder, on her way down.

They fall.

So does the laundromat.

Amaris Baker’s Dream, Age 16

She’s so, so drunk.

The world is spinning, and tilted, and truncated and elongated and stretched, and she keeps walking towards things and finding that they’re farther away than they appear, and bumping her shins, and having to lean on walls. And she’s giggling, and she doesn’t feel at all obliged to avoid walking on her toes, and she can gesture grandiosely, and her attempts at babbling incoherently get laughs instead of stairs, and it’s fun.

She knows that the next part isn’t fun. She knows that it’s horrible, and painful, and traumatizing. But she can’t stop giggling, anyways; the tone is a little different, less dizzying glee and more hysteria, but nobody seems to notice.

There’s one guy there, who’s cute, cute, cute; he latches on to her, and she latches on to him, and they’re kissing, and then he picks her up and brings her gracefully up the stairs. She knows that this ends poorly, this time around, even if she was ignorant the first time, but her head is spinning like a top and isn’t he such a nice boy, he would never do anything like that, he’s so nice -

And hadn’t had so much as a beer, that night.

She might’ve forgiven him, if he had.

He throws her onto the bed, and starts taking off his clothes, and she sits there, and giggles, and then he takes off her top, and she giggles, and he takes off her pants and she stops giggling, tries to say ‘no’ -

But she can’t quite manage it. Might not’ve been able to manage it sober. 

She tries to fend him off, but she’s slow, slow, slow, and he’s fast, and he just pins down her arms and breathes some sentence that she doesn’t quite hear and -

It’s horrible. It isn’t over quickly. Her mind is blank, for most of it, can’t quite accept what’s happening and she sort of wants to vomit and sort of wants to cry and mostly wants to stay very, very still -