She helps the other girl stand. Of course she does.

And then they can make their way, one stumbling step at a time, to the door out of the courtyard.

It's hard. Lily's woozy, and the world's thin. Like the omnipresent, unchanging light's a dust that's settled on everything, choking and cloying and making everything - hazy.

The world's strange. The gate they're walking past - there's mounds and mounds of some kind of root vegetable behind it. It smells sickly sweet, maybe rotten. They won't be able to slip through the slats of the gate, though, and -

There's no flies, no insects trying to get into all that sugar.

It's creepy.

The door beside the gate isn't a ton better, but... The glass in the little window in it looks thick and opaque, and there's no other windows pointing toward the courtyard. They won't have to be careful of the - thing. And Lily knows how to pick door locks, though padlocks like on the gate are a lot harder without real tools.

But - the door opens easily in her hand. It's unlocked, to her at least.

There's something written on the inside of the door, in a black mud. Or - she thinks it's mud.

what kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?

" - Are you seeing that too? The writing on the window."

"Yeah."

"There's writing on the smoke stacks, but - that's part of the set."

"This feels..."

"Wrong."

She doesn't want to touch it. She doesn't want to think about it.

(She realizes, too - her nose has started bleeding a little. Ugh. (But it quickly fades to the back of her mind.))

"...Should we still go in?"

"The writing's on the inside of the door..."

"But the - thing - is out here."

"The other two didn't write it, and - I haven't seen anyone else."

"Whoever wrote it might still be around, then."

"Figure they're friendly?"

"Figure there's only one way to find out."

Sharp nod.

Onward, then.

And inward...

The end of the crack.