The paperwork grew teeth.

  It always did, when the Auditor thought too hard.

  Lines on the slate writhed, tried to rearrange themselves, numbers flinching away from one another like they did not enjoy sharing a column. The dream report sat in the middle of the screen like a bruise.

  Asset: [REDACTED]

  Status: Updated (Winged)

  Sector: Cluster Processing / Experimental

  He had filled out the fields with his usual, narrow precision. Time of episode. Observable physical reactions. Direct quotations, where he could be reasonably certain. He had even resisted the urge to add commentary about the quality of her metaphors.

  He should file it and be done.

  Sleep anomalies in the recently dead were not unheard of. Glitches. Residual noise from higher up the chains. The upper stacks were fond of tinkering; sometimes pieces rattled loose. With most assets, you let the existing systems swallow it and the edges wore smooth on their own.

  But.

  He looked up.

  She was still sitting where he had left her, near the inner rail of the ring. Hands hooked around her knees. Wings folded tight along her back, feathers dulled by the red light.

  Her eyes were open, fixed on the shaft’s drop. Not looking at anything in it. Looking at the falling itself.

  The echo of her dream clung to her like a smell.

  Snow. Bus. Bathroom. Mirror.

  And the last thing she had said—soft, as if she wasn’t sure she meant to say it out loud at all:

  “Both.”

  He exhaled and tapped the report again, forcing the letters to behave.

  “You know,” he said, “if you stare into the abyss long enough, it is statistically unlikely to blink first.”

  She did not look away from the drop.

  “I’m not expecting it to blink.” she said.

  “Ah,” he said. “a competitive spirit. Always dangerous in an asset.”

  His joke landed and went nowhere. He watched the side of her face. The set of her jaw. The way her fingers were digging into the fabric over her knees, almost hard enough to tear it.

  “Any… aftershocks?” he asked.

  He hated himself for the question before it left his mouth. He did not do bedside manner. That was for the Guides, the Whisperers, the other soft-handed divisions.

  Still, he heard himself add:

  “Dizziness. Disorientation. Temptations to develop a personality.”

  She drew a small breath and then, finally, looked at him.

  “No.” she said.

  The word was flat, but her pupils were slightly too large. The red of the shaft caught on the edges of them. He wondered if she even knew.

  He glanced back down at the slate.

  There was a field the system wanted him to tick:

  Escalate: Y / N

  He thought of the phrase she had quoted—not hers, but lodged in the meat of her dream like shrapnel.

  You had such potential.

  Common enough, he had said. Statistically, that was true. But there were patterns the system pretended not to see. Repeating phrases that showed up clustered around certain constructions, certain experiments, certain attempts to make something new out of the human wreckage.

  He had told her, lightly, that someone up there had wanted this dream to reach her.

  He suspected, less lightly, that they would resent it being noticed.

  He ticked Y.

  “Get up.” he said.

  She blinked.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I am escalating you.” he said. “Try not to be excited. It is never for a good reason.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  He hesitated a fraction of a second.

  “Interpretation.” he said.

  Her fingers loosened on her knees at the same time his hand tightened around the slate.

  The path to Interpretation was not on any of the maps.

  That didn’t mean much. Most of Hell’s maps were more for reassurance than accuracy, like evacuation diagrams in buildings where all the doors were locked.

  The Auditor walked ahead, slate in hand, not bothering to check where he was going. The corridor curved around the shaft, then kinked sideways through a door that had no label, then dropped into a staircase that counted in an unfamiliar direction.

  The air changed as they went.

  It grew less metallic. Less scorched. The red glow from the shaft thinned, replaced by a lower, duller light that seemed to come from within the stone itself. The usual smells—ash, ink, the faint ozone of distant machinery—faded under something else.

  Dust. Old paper. A sharp, dry tang, like cracked glass.

  Her wings brushed the walls once, accidentally. The stone was warmer than she expected.

  “At any point,” she said, “are you going to explain where we’re going in a way that doesn’t sound like a warning label?”

  “At any point,” he said, “are you going to develop a sense of patience?”

  “No.” she said.

  “Splendid.” he said. “Do keep up, then.”

  They passed other doors. Most had no markings at all. A few had tiny brass plaques, lettered in a script that seemed to change if she looked at it too long.

  One read: COUNTERFACTUALS. Another: COINCIDENCE MANAGEMENT. Another had simply been scratched with a fingernail: LOST.

  The Auditor did not pause at any of them.

  He led her to a door that had no plaque, no handle, no visible seam. It was just a blank panel of stone in the wall, slightly darker than the rest, like a bruise that had healed badly.

  He lifted his slate. The surface of the stone quivered, then rippled inwards. A circle of darkness opened, the edges lined with hairline cracks of pale light.

  “After you.” he said.

  She looked at the hole.

  “It’s very trusting of you,” she said, “to walk your experimental asset into a dark opening you can’t see the bottom of.”

  “I have complete faith.” he said.

  “In the system?” she asked.

  “In gravity.” he said. “If you vanish, we will know you reached the right department.”

  She rolled her eyes and stepped through.

  It was not a drop.

  It felt, for a moment, like stepping through the skin of very cold water. Her body resisted, then gave way. The resistance flattened against her like a second surface, then snapped back into place.

  She emerged into a room that might have been small, or might have been larger than the entire tower. It was impossible to tell.

  The walls did not hold still. They wavered in and out of focus, sometimes seeming only a few paces away, sometimes receding into a mist of shelves and shapes. The floor was solid stone under her boots, but even that seemed uncertain around the edges, as if something were gently editing it.

  At the center of the room was a table.

  On the table sat the crystal ball.

  It was not the clear, perfect sphere she had seen in cheap human depictions. It was cloudy, veined with opaque streaks. It looked more like a heavy clot of ice or opaque glass that had melted around something and then frozen again.

  Around the base of the ball, hair pooled.

  Long, grey hair, coiling over the table, down the legs, onto the floor. It lay in slow, pale drifts, crossing and recrossing itself like a map drawn in strands.

  The woman in the chair behind the table was almost lost in it.

  Her back was bent, her shoulders hunched. Her hands rested on either side of the ball, skin drawn thin over the knuckles, fingers swollen at the joints. Her face was a landscape of lines, wrinkles crossing and deepening, time carved into flesh.

  Her eyes were nearly white.

  They stared at nothing, milky and unfocused, a little off-center, like she was always looking at something just past whoever stood before her.

  “Don’t speak until she does.” the Auditor murmured.

  His voice sounded different in this room. Quieter, even though he had not lowered it much. The space ate sound greedily.

  The woman’s head turned, slowly, toward them.

  Her gaze passed just to the left of the Auditor, then to the right of the winged girl, then drifted back, unsure.

  “Someone,” she said, “has brought me numbers.”

  Her voice was thin but not frail. It had the papery strength of old letters that refused to crumble.

  “Madam Interpretation.” the Auditor said, with more formality than she had ever heard from him. “I apologize for the interruption of your—”

  “Liar.” the woman said, without heat. “You never apologize. You make a note. Different thing.”

  He shut his mouth.

  Wrinkles folded in unexpected places as she smiled, just for a heartbeat.

  “Well?” she said. “Let us see the numbers, then. Don’t just stand there like a misfiled page.”

  The Auditor stepped forward and placed his slate on the table, just beyond the fringe of grey hair. The strands curled around its edges like curious fingers, then stilled.

  “Dream report.” he said. “Cluster-adjacent asset. Updated construct. Anomalous content. Possible external seeding from above-stack.”

  “Possible.” she echoed.

  She lifted her hands, slowly, and let her fingers drag through her own hair, gathering a few loose strands. She twisted them lazily, then let them fall again.

  “Everything is possible.” she said. “We would not be here, otherwise.”

  Her hand found the edge of the slate by touch alone. Her fingers brushed its surface.

  The light moved into the ball.

  It did not glow from within suddenly. It thickened. The cloudy streaks darkened. Shapes crawled up through the murk, hints of movement trapped inside.

  Now, when she turned her head, her eyes found it.

  They snapped into focus with startling clarity. The milky haze cleared. The irises sharpened, a cold, pale color somewhere between gray and sickly green. Her pupils narrowed.

  The change made her whole face seem tighter, younger around the eyes, while the rest of it remained old.

  “Asset.” she said, without looking up. “Step closer.”

  She obeyed.

  The hair on the floor was thick near the table. It brushed against her boots as she stepped through it, whispering against the leather. It did not tangle, but she felt the drag.

  The ball filled her vision.

  At first, it showed nothing but its own cloudy depths. Then, like fog parting, pictures wavered into place.

  The corridor. Colorless, too long.

  The playground. Snow that did not melt.

  The little girl in the thin jacket.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The man with the smeared face.

  The bathroom. The mirror.

  Her own face peeling.

  She could see herself from outside, this time. Not inside the dream, but hovering somewhere above it. Her body stood at the sink, shoulders tight. Her reflection wavered, then split. Human blur. Winged thing. Red eyes.

  The old woman made a small, thoughtful sound in her throat.

  “You see?” the Interpreter said. “More than one face.”

  The girl swallowed.

  “In the dream,” she said, “it felt like I was watching something break.”

  “You were.” the woman said. “Not the glass. You.”

  The ball’s surface rippled.

  The image in it stuttered, then jumped.

  Now, instead of the bathroom, the snow filled the sphere. The child stood there, boots half undone. The man turned away. His shoulders were a featureless block.

  The voice—his voice—came from the ball itself, thin and slightly warped by the glass.

  I told you. Don’t call me that.

  The little girl flinched again, in exactly the same way she had flinched in the dream.

  “I am going to be ill.” the Auditor muttered.

  “Don’t.” the Interpreter said. “It stains.”

  “Can you determine the source?” he asked, more tightly. “Is that from the cluster? A residual?”

  She ignored him.

  Her right hand rose and hovered over the ball. Her fingers twitched in the air a fraction of a thumb’s width above the surface. As she moved them, the scene inside shifted, rewinding and slowing.

  The words climbed out and hung between them like smoke.

  You had such potential.

  The phrase froze.

  The letters crawled on the air, flickering at their edges. They were not written in any script the girl recognized, but she understood them anyway.

  “Not original.” the Interpreter said. “Office standard. Variants in all languages you lot built, and a few you did not.”

  “Yet they keep showing up in clusters like this.” the Auditor said.

  “And you are surprised?” she said. “You made ‘potential’ into a god and ‘waste’ into a sin. You cannot be shocked when the words hang around like flies.”

  The word waste pulsed once in the air, as if answering its name, then faded.

  The Interpreter’s hand dipped.

  The ball showed the bathroom again. This time, the moment of splitting magnified.

  Her human self in the mirror looked worse from this angle. More exhausted. The blur of her features sagged. The thing behind the glass, the winged version, looked sharper. Hungrier. The smile at the edge of its mouth had not yet fully grown, but it was already there, quivering with anticipation.

  “When did you do it?” the Interpreter asked.

  Her voice was softer now, but no kinder.

  “Do what?” the girl asked.

  “Put on the other face.” the woman said.

  “I didn’t.” she said. “It— it appeared, it—”

  “Ah.” the Interpreter said. “The story where things just happen to you, and you are dragged along like a dropped scarf. Very popular down here.”

  The Auditor stiffened.

  “You’re saying the updated form was—” he began.

  “Intended? Anticipated? Sketched in?” the Interpreter said. “Oh, yes. You don’t get that kind of insistence by accident.”

  The girl’s skin prickled.

  “So it was always going to happen...” she said. “Me, like this.”

  She looked at her own hands.

  “You were meant to be something,” the Interpreter said, “and then you were two somethings. That’s the problem. More than one face. You kept shifting between them. That leaves a mark.”

  She tapped the ball.

  Inside, the bathroom scene rewound further.

  Her human reflection grew younger.

  The shoulders less stooped, then more. The light over the sink flickered, healed, flickered again. The tiles cracked and mended. The hair in the reflection shortened, lengthened, changed.

  The winged version did not move at all.

  She remained, crowding the frame, smile fixed, eyes bright, wings arched. The rest of the scene passed through and around her like fog. Human years peeled away, but she stayed, untouched by it.

  “See?” the Interpreter murmured. “That one isn’t new. She was there before you were ever clever enough to be frightened of her. A line drawn ahead of time.”

  The girl stared.

  “What is she?” she whispered.

  “Not a dream.” the Interpreter said. “Or not only. A design shadow. A pre-image. Someone drew that outline around you before you ever touched a mirror. She existed as a possibility long before your pulse stopped.”

  The Auditor’s jaw tightened.

  “You mean—” he started.

  “Don’t ask for words you won’t like.” the Interpreter cut in. “The simple version is this: that face is real. She is real. And yes—”

  The old woman’s mouth twitched.

  “She was laughing at you.”

  The girl flinched.

  “At me?” she said. “In the bathroom she looked— pleased, but—”

  “Pleased at you.” the Interpreter said. “At your confusion. At the moment you realized you were not the only one living behind your eyes. Some creatures call that cruelty. Others call it birth.”

  The girl’s stomach dropped.

  “So she’s… separate?” she asked. “A different person?”

  “Wrong question.” the old woman said. “She is a different face on the same person. That is worse, usually. Strangers can walk away.”

  The ball dimmed a little, as if the topic bored it.

  The Auditor cleared his throat.

  “Do you know why he is here?” the Interpreter asked suddenly, nodding toward him.

  She shook her head.

  “He dragged me up here,” she said, “because I had a dream and wasn’t polite enough to keep quiet about it.”

  “And?” the Interpreter asked.

  “And he thinks someone put it in my head.” she said.

  “And?” the Interpreter said again.

  “And I saw myself.” she whispered. “Both of me. The one I know. And the one I don’t.”

  “There.” the old woman said. “Now we are closer.”

  She let her fingers rest on the glass again.

  “This is the part you’ve been trying not to understand.” she said. “You think you ended up in Hell because you died. That your heart stopped, your brain surged, some bureaucrat stamped a form, and down you came. Yes?”

  “That’s… how it works.” the girl said. “Isn’t it?”

  The Interpreter laughed, a dry little rasp.

  “Oh, child.” she said. “Most of the dead do not come here. They go on. Or they go out. Or they go nowhere at all, which is a kind of mercy. This place is for special cases.”

  The Auditor shifted uncomfortably.

  “Special.” he repeated. “We prefer ‘selected.’”

  “Of course you do.” she said. “It sounds less like an illness.”

  The girl frowned.

  “So why me?” she asked.

  “Because you were already splitting.” the Interpreter said. “We do not like unfinished work up there. Or down here.”

  Her hand moved through her hair again, fingertips catching on a knot.

  “People die every second.” she said. “Most of them never see this tower. But you—”

  Her fingers brushed the air in front of the girl’s chest.

  The same cold twang sounded under her sternum, the not-quite-physical line she had first felt on waking in Hell. The hook. The pull.

  She had always assumed it was the giant’s doing. The shaft’s. The tower’s.

  “There.” the Interpreter murmured. “Do you feel that?”

  The girl nodded, throat tight.

  “The hook.” she said. “The thing that drags me toward the shaft. I thought—”

  “You thought we put it in you when you arrived.” the woman said. “Some of it, yes. Our metal. Our claim. But there were threads there already. Old ones. Worn, knotted, frayed. We only tied our rope through the tangle.”

  The girl’s mouth went dry.

  “Old threads from what?” she asked.

  “From you.” the Interpreter said simply. “From before. From all the times you decided you were nothing and meant it. From every night you lay awake and wished, not for help, not for change, but for an end that wasn’t your responsibility to choose.”

  She looked at the ball.

  Snow flickered through it again, then bus seats, then the blue light of the phone. Words on the screen. Waste. Potential. All the little deaths before the last one.

  “You kept throwing parts of yourself away.” the Interpreter said. “Promises you made to yourself and broke. Faces you wore and then dropped when they got heavy. We notice, down here, when someone keeps cutting pieces off. Sooner or later there isn’t enough left to float.”

  The girl swallowed against the sudden ache in her throat.

  “So I’m here because I… gave up?” she said.

  “No.” the woman said sharply. “You are here because you did it carefully. Over and over. You didn’t just fall. You carved yourself toward this. Your death was a signature, not the contract.”

  She stared.

  “I never signed anything.” she whispered.

  “You did.” the Interpreter said. “Every time you thought: let someone else decide what I’m worth. Every time you believed them when they said you were waste. Every time you let that other face—”

  Her fingers tapped the glass.

  The smiling, red-eyed reflection swam up, as vivid as if the bathroom were right in front of them.

  “—take one more step forward,” she finished.

  The Auditor’s pen—metaphorically—scratched over air.

  “We had no record of prior contracts.” he said tightly. “No shares registered. No external claimant.”

  “Of course you didn’t.” the Interpreter said. “Whatever put its hand on her wasn’t filing paperwork with your pretty tower. It reaches through dreams, not forms.”

  She looked up at the girl again.

  “For clarity.” she said. “You did not end up in Hell for no reason. You are not random debris we swept off the floor. You were already half-built into something that belongs down here. We simply finished the process.”

  The girl’s hands curled slowly into fists.

  “So it is my fault.” she said. “Because I was… tired. Because I didn’t fight harder. Because I wanted everything to stop and I meant it.”

  “Fault.” the Interpreter said, “is a human word. You’re not human anymore. What you are is a set of decisions and consequences. They brought you here. Death merely opened the door.”

  She paused, listening to something only she could hear, then added, very quietly:

  “And do not flatter yourself with the story that you were only ever a victim.”

  The girl’s head lifted, sharp.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You were not just hurt.” the Interpreter said. “You learned the language that hurt you and spoke it back. You took the tools they used on you and tried them on other throats. For a while, you were just as cruel as the people who broke you.”

  Heat prickled at the back of the girl’s neck, an ugly, rising flush.

  “That’s not—” she started, then stopped. Memory bit down.

  Sharp words. Smaller faces flinching. The bitter satisfaction after, sour and bright.

  The Interpreter’s voice thinned, but did not soften.

  “Innocent, then wounded, then wounding,” she said. “From one end to the other. From softness to a kind of viciousness you told yourself was honesty. From sadness to a little pocket of madness where you thought making others feel as small as you did would balance the scales.”

  She turned her blind-seeming eyes back to the ball.

  “Your soul did not fall in a straight line.” she went on. “It warped. It twisted. Restless. You swung between extremes—begging, then biting; begging, then biting—until there was no quiet ground left in you to stand on. That is why you ring so loudly to places like this. Not just because you were harmed. Because you learned how to harm back and could not stop.”

  The girl’s fingers dug into her own arms.

  “So that’s in the ledger too.” she said hoarsely. “Not just what they did to me. What I did to everyone else.”

  “Of course it is.” the Interpreter said. “We are not sentimental here. We count all of it.”

  The girl forced herself to look back at the ball.

  Inside, the bathroom scene had frozen again at that same second. Two faces overlapping. Her human one drab and blurred, the winged one sharp, teeth bared in delighted horror.

  The Interpreter’s fingers traced the air over the image.

  “This one,” she said, “is not just a possibility. She is anchored. That laughter? That’s memory. She remembers how many times you let her step in for you. Every time you thought: ‘I can’t do this, someone else can take over,’ you fed her. Down here, we call that consent.”

  The girl winced.

  “She’s still… in me?” she asked. “Now?”

  “Where else would she be?” the Interpreter said. “You share a spine. You share a history. You share every door you ever walked through together.”

  The Auditor cleared his throat.

  “We need something we can file.” he said. “Clarifications are all very well, but—”

  “You want neat causality.” the old woman said, irritated. “Fine. Write this down. She isn’t here just because she died. She is here because she volunteered, piece by piece, long before her heart stopped beating. Not knowingly. Not clearly. But the universe is not particular about the phrasing of surrender. And she did not only surrender to pain. She surrendered to cruelty as well. From innocence to cruelty, from sadness to the edge of madness, back and forth until there was nothing straight left in her. Warped and restless souls fall sideways, boy. They don’t land somewhere quiet.”

  He stared at her.

  “That’s… a difficult sentence to put in a box.” he said weakly.

  “Then make your boxes larger.” she snapped.

  The ball’s glow dulled as if exhausted.

  The Interpreter’s shoulders slumped. Her fingers slid away from the glass. As they did, the clarity in her gaze began to fade again. The milky film crept back, thickening.

  “That face from your nightmare exists.” she told the girl, before the brightness left her eyes entirely. “She isn’t a hallucination. She isn’t just a fear. She is the part of you that accepted every cruel word as a command and made a home out of it—and the part that enjoyed, however briefly, passing that cruelty on. She was laughing because you finally looked at her. Creatures like that enjoy recognition.”

  The girl’s stomach twisted.

  “And now?” she asked, voice small. “What is she now?”

  “Hungry.” the Interpreter said. “And patient. And tied to you. Which brings us back to why he brought you here.”

  She let her hand rest on top of the ball again, briefly. A last tremor of light stirred inside.

  “You are leaking.” she said. “In your sleep, you open doors that should stay closed. You feed that face. You feed whatever is behind it. We prefer our assets solid, not hollowed out from the inside.”

  “Mitigation strategy?” the Auditor prompted tightly.

  The old woman sighed.

  “I already told you.” she said. “Stop sleeping.”

  The words fell into the room, heavy.

  The girl stared.

  “That’s not really—” she began. “I don’t get to choose when—”

  “You’re dead.” the Interpreter said. “Choice is narrower now, not gone. This one you still have. Refuse dreams. Refuse the pull when it comes. It will hurt. You will fray around the edges. But any river that isn’t fed eventually stops eating its banks.”

  “Assets require rest cycles.” the Auditor said. “There are regulations about—”

  “Regulations are for people who function properly.” she said. “She has more than one face and too many hands on her strings. We don’t let the leaking machines take on more pressure.”

  “What happens if I keep dreaming?” the girl asked.

  The Interpreter’s fingers tightened briefly on the glass.

  “You will feed the other you.” she said. “And whatever claimed you before we did will have more to chew on. The next time you look in a mirror, she may not be confined to the other side.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, the girl saw the Auditor’s hand move again, thumb hovering over the slate.

  “And when that face finishes building itself?” he asked quietly.

  “In here?” the Interpreter said. “You’ll have something the tower wasn’t designed to hold. Upstairs?” She wrinkled her nose. “You’ll have a creature that remembers every time you wished to disappear and takes that as an order to give the wish to others. You don’t have a category for that yet. Be grateful.”

  The girl swallowed.

  “And if I stop sleeping...” she said, “it… slows?”

  “Yes.” the Interpreter said. “Slow is good. Slow is survivable. Fast is how things tear.”

  She leaned back in her chair. Her hair rustled, curling around her elbows.

  “My advice.” she said. “Break its diet. Do not give that laughing face any more nights to grow in.”

  The Auditor tapped his slate, brow furrowing.

  “I cannot file ‘tell asset to never sleep again’ as an official mitigation strategy.” he said. “Scheduling will throw a fit.”

  “Scheduling can knit themselves a new crisis.” she said. “It will keep their hands busy.”

  He looked at the girl.

  “You heard the nice lady,” he said. “No more dreaming.”

  “How exactly,” she said, “am I supposed to do that?”

  “Ask Containment.” he said.

  “Containment handles leaks in the shafts.” she said.

  “And you,” he said, “appear to be a walking shaft problem. They will be thrilled.”

  The Interpreter closed her eyes, the light in them dimming completely now. She reached up and, with obvious effort, lifted a handful of her own hair off the table, then let it fall again.

  “I am tired.” she said. “Go on. File your notes. Argue with each other in corridors. You do it so well.”

  “Is there nothing else you can give us?” the Auditor asked.

  She thought about it.

  Her fingers, resting on the ball, twitched one last time. A final flash sparked inside the cloudy glass.

  For a moment, something looked back out at them.

  Not the human girl. Not the winged thing.

  Something deeper in the shadow, behind both. A hint of a hand, enormous and delicate, drawing a line in the air.

  “Someone up there,” she said, “is not just curious about her. They are invested. They pushed the design. They watched every time she put on the other face. They tugged the threads that brought her here. Death was just the last tug.”

  The girl’s mouth went dry.

  “Counting on me to do what?” she asked.

  The old woman smiled vaguely toward her, but her eyes were white again, blind.

  “Break.” she said. “Or refuse to. That’s the thing about potential. It’s always a gamble, and warped souls make the most interesting throws.”

  Back in the corridor, the door to Interpretation folded itself shut behind them with a soft, final sound.

  The air outside felt thin after the dense quiet of the room.

  The Auditor walked in silence for several paces, slate held so tightly his knuckles paled.

  “So...” she said at last. “How much of that did you like?”

  “Precisely none.” he said.

  “Good.” she said. “We agree on something.”

  He stopped suddenly.

  “We have to adjust your schedule.” he said.

  She almost laughed.

  “My what?” she asked.

  “Rest cycles.” he said. “Assignments. Exposure windows. I will need to file requests with Containment and with Behavioral Adjustments. And possibly with whoever handles… whatever that was in there. We also need to make sure no one else learns you are producing usable design shadows on your own.”

  “Usable for what?” she asked.

  “You heard her.” he said. “Someone is invested. People like that tend to want a return.”

  He started walking again.

  She followed, fingertips brushing the wall, feeling its faint, warm thrum.

  “Do you believe her?” she asked.

  “Do I believe that someone, somewhere, intended you to be exactly as you are?” he said. “Unfortunately, yes. Our organization does not do accidents this elaborate.”

  “And the other me...” she said quietly. “In the mirror. The one who laughs.”

  He didn’t answer immediately.

  “At least she’s honest.” he said finally. “The rest of you is very fond of pretending.”

  Her shoulders tightened.

  “That’s exactly what she said.” she replied.

  “Yes,” he said. “I hate when people agree with me without consulting me first.”

  They reached the staircase that would take them back toward the ring, toward the red shaft, toward her permitted circle.

  He paused on the first step.

  “For what it is worth,” he said, not quite looking at her, “we will try the no-sleep thing.”

  “We?” she asked.

  “Do not get attached to the pronoun,” he said. “It is purely administrative.”

  She thought of the Interpreter’s milky eyes sharpening when they turned to the ball. Of the delighted curve of the other face’s mouth. Of the words: warped and restless; just as cruel; you carved your way here.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” she asked.

  “Then,” he said, “we will at least have good data on how quickly you unravel. Think of the charts.”

  She snorted, faintly.

  “You are terrible at reassurance.” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “but I am excellent at counting. And right now, I would like the number of things inside your head that are not you to stay as low as possible.”

  He started up the stairs.

  She hesitated for a while, looking back the way they had come.

  For a moment, she thought she could still hear the faint whisper of hair on stone, and the old woman’s voice saying: more than one face. Innocence and cruelty. Sadness and madness. Warped and restless.

  Then the door in the wall smoothed itself back into blank stone, and there was nothing left but the tower’s usual red, and the quiet ache of the hook under her ribs, tugging her back toward the shaft.