"I'm sorry... I'm really, really sorry..."

"If this keeps going..."

Hedi lay dazed across the bed, her cheek against the sheets.

Under fierce stimulus and hollowed-out fatigue, her mind splintered, then got ground down by nameless pleasure into muddy thoughts, melting into a sticky, oily haze.

"I'm going to... die... I'm going to die..."

Words slipped out of her awareness, drifting light and unreal.

Heavy damp filled the room, making Hedi think of endless rain. The water refused the gutters’ routes, like lively microbes spreading to every corner.

Every inch of space. Every seam.

The wet breathed like a living thing. It bred in the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, even inside the fibers of cloth, steeping the whole room in suffocating gloom, like being sealed in a white cocoon, feeling vapor gnaw and time crawl without a sound.

"We've got plenty of time, Professor."

Hedi stretched forward, trying to grab anything—maybe some imagined straw to clutch—but found only an empty nightstand and a white wall, bare and handleless.

"Eee—"

She felt the jolt and couldn't stop her body's answer. She convulsed, then her knees locked together, a shell snapping shut against unknown danger. She curled in tight, side-lying at the bed’s center.

"It won't help, Professor!"

"No... don't..."

The next waves hit like electric shocks, chewing her nerves raw. Sensations stacked and surged, an invisible hand stirring inside her skull, turning an orderly brain into a gray, lumpy slurry.

Her body answered again on instinct: her head and upper torso arched back, hoping to flee the crashing tide; her waist bent forward, a bowstring pulled tight—ready to release, yet helpless against ruin that sank into bone.

The stimulus clung to her nervous core. It wouldn't fade.

"I'm sorry... I... I shouldn't have made that sort of joke!"

"That's not it."

"...Was I mean to you?"

"Not that either."

"Then—"

"Who would've thought," Selina stood on the bed, amused, looking down at Hedi, "I'd just keep going."

"Mmm-mmm."

"Twenty-two, and still sniveling."

"Don't throw my words back—ugh—my head's really going to break—"

Hedi knelt, prone on the mattress, a tiny hum sanding down her hearing. More sounds spilled in, cluttered and uneven:

Cars racing down the road, the loose chatter of passersby, a little dog barking, the plip-plip of rain.

Why does rain make those sounds?

Moonlight slid through the half-drawn curtains. It splashed across floor-wet, tracing clear white veins. A few scattered clothes lay like deliberate abandon, casting deep, sculpted shadows in the black.

"You're too adorable! I never get tired of bullying you!"

"Bullying... me?"

"I'm not angry at you at all. I just want to bully you. I don’t know what kind of twisted heart that is—seeing you this cute makes me want to ravage you, make you wail and run, then drag you back for a cruel punishment!"

Selina hugged Hedi. "Isn't cuteness, pushed to the limit, a kind of ruin? You make me ache to destroy."

Hedi scrambled off the bed in a panic, but her legs went soft and she spilled onto the floor.

"That's it. Run."

"Don't... don't come closer..."

Grinning, Selina caught Hedi’s ankle and dragged her into an unnameable abyss.

The punishment continued.

It nearly robbed Hedi of language. Cold air skimmed low, stealing all warmth, pouring a strange, indistinct mixture into her head, forcing her to feel her body—and the meaning of it—become someone else's property.

Hedi fought to dam the stimulus. Vertigo punched up, and her forehead ached like it had struck an icicle. She heard the clean sound of water, but distance slid away—near as fingertip, far as horizon.

I'm so stupid... too stupid...

Selina didn’t take her usual walk. That meant danger was close, and I felt nothing! I even cheered, “yay.”

No need to pace around. Suits my lazy dog streak.

"Don't... I really... can't..."

Hedi tried to lift her arm and stop Selina, but it wouldn’t rise. Everything weighed a ton. Even her voice failed, as if those few words had drained all the oxygen from her lungs.

The human body is a complex machine.

Bone fits bone under living law. Nerve fibers are conducting lines in a circuit, crossing and knitting, carrying signals clean from one nerve to the next.

From high-thinking brain to the last toe, everything obeys the neural web.

But now, a perfect system fell into unprecedented chaos.

Organs ran wild like loose horses, each taking the lead.

Nerve pathways that should be clear jammed for no reason.

From the brain’s core to the soles, every inch of skin, every organ, declared a total collapse.

Hedi breathed in pain, like there was a tiny hole in her bronchi, each inhale leaking through it.

She gathered what strength remained to fight the sweeping vertigo. Her muscles stopped listening. Her limbs went soft and slack.

Her heartbeat boomed in her ears, sharp at first, then weaker and weaker.

Under relentless stimuli, her sight blurred.

The world kept collapsing without end.

Sound and scenery shed their color, turning into stuttering, warped frames, like the hallucinations of mushroom poisoning.

Consciousness spread ring by ring, then dissolved into a dark whirlpool.

A tiny noise sounded deep in her brain, loud enough to drown all others, like turning off a TV—the button rebounding with a springy click.

Click.

Hedi lost all sense of the world, her self ebbing away into irreversible faint.

"Professor?"

"Are you okay?"

"Why aren’t you speaking?"

Selina got no answer. She leaned close and listened to the thread of Hedi’s breath.

The pocket watch hands had slipped past midnight.

No moon. No stars.

The room was wrapped in heavy night, the scene stark and desolate.

Selina lifted Hedi aside, changed the damp sheet, then laid her back with care. She adjusted Hedi’s posture so she wouldn’t wake stiff, turned on the radio, let a lullaby play, half-listening to music braided with the sound of breathing.

Sleep came late, and soft.