For some reason, as I touch the pen to the page, an image of Ericson in his wrinkled business suit pops into my head. I can smell the coffee, feel the metal spoon in my hand. I close my eyes and see the words on the page, the notes I’d taken of my target.

That’s who I was. I despise the fact that a memory of Ericson—the piece of shit that he is—is what awakens me, but I hold on to it regardless, because it’s what binds me to Blakely and her life.

Then I write:

The forest sky is blood, the trees black veins. Decay is the wind that whispers through the limbs, corrosive, destructive. Like the rotted soil devouring the roots, he poisons my body, stealing that vital essence which makes me alive.

Shadows can’t exist without the sun, yet the stars burn like an inferno against the inky black, casting me in the deepest shadow of darkness. An inescapable void where he chains the lock.

Alex believes I’m sick, but his infection is even more dark and monstrous.

Her murder is his ailment—a festering disease seeping from his pores. Letting go of his taste for retribution is the only cure, or he’ll self-destruct.

The forest rot has leeched into him and only the cleansing water will free us.

At the sound of his approach, I stop writing. Hopefully my thoughts are abstract enough to be concerning, and even a little bit tempting. I’ve asked him before to take me to the water, but every request is met with silence. Before my mind is completely broken, I need one last chance at the outside world.

“The results don’t lie,” he says, as he enters the room. He’s wild and unkempt today. He hasn’t shaved, his face scruffy, hair disheveled. “I’ve tried to reproduce them, over and over…but the data is staring me in the face.”

He paces the room as if I’m not here, rambling and hands waving. I sit up and scoot back on the cot, trying to be unseen. It makes me feel weak, pathetic. It makes me loathe Alex in a way I’ve never experienced before—because no one has ever made me feel this powerless.

He yanks on his lab coat and pulls the computer cart around. He’s lost in thought as he clicks through pages of data. I look past him to the keys hanging on the wall. They’re so close, but just out of reach.

“That’s the variable. That’s the only difference,” he mutters to himself. “I have to recreate the first session.”

A sense akin to dread crawls over me, a million hairy spider legs walking over my skin. My flesh is tight and hot at the thought of experiencing that torture again. “Alex.” I try to get his attention, but he’s absorbed in his work. “Alex—”