Car doors open and shut. I’m shoved into the back of a low vehicle and sandwiched inside by a soldier on either side of me. We drive for about an hour, maybe more. I can’t see through the blindfold, but all the city noise is gone by the time the car stops. When they haul me out, my arms scream at the angle. I trip over some stairs, but they keep me upright, and soon, I’m indoors.

“Downstairs,” a man says, and I tense as I’m half-carried through the house and down a set of stairs to a space too cold to be above ground. It takes all I have to keep the panic from overtaking me. I try to think of Emma. I saved Emma. That’s the most important part. I just need to focus on that.

Once we’re down, my captors force me onto a chair and unlock my wrists to re-bind them to the chair itself. They do the same with my ankles, spreading my legs and cuffing each to a chair-leg. And I wonder if I’m just destined to die in a rank, old basement. I may have escaped fate before, but now it’s finally caught me.

Footsteps clomp heavily up and away, and it’s quiet. That’s when I hear it. Tick. Tick. Tick. A clock.

My breathing becomes ragged as an image flashes across my eyelids. Another clock. Another basement. The cold steel of handcuffs. The weight of chains.

Tick.

Tick.

I hated that clock. I fucking hated it.

A touch at the back of my head draws me out of my head, and I gasp.

I’m not alone.

I feel a tug, and the blindfold slips away. I blink, opening my eyes wide as they adjust. But it’s so dark here, pitch black, they may as well be closed.

The man at my back moves, and I turn my head to follow the sound. He’s like a shadow and when I look up at his face, I glimpse a skull and almost cry out.

It’s a mask. Just a mask.

“Where am I?” I ask as he walks confidently in this pitch-black. He knows his way around. That ticking of the clock continues. “Where the fuck am I?” I demand as he ascends the stairs.

Nothing.

The door opens. Light shines down momentarily, and I see the white face of the clock set in front of me. There are things stuck to the wall just beneath the clock. But I can’t make them out. The door closes too quickly, plunging me into darkness again, that clock my only companion. For a moment, as my heart pounds against my chest and I look around at all the blackness and feel the cold of the basement penetrate my bones as that clock ticks with hateful efficiency, I think this can’t get worse.

But it does.