Screaming, I launch myself up and leap on Mia again. She has another scalpel in her hand. I manage to dodge it, knocking it to the floor. The demons pull on my ankles but I ignore them. My hands are around her throat and I’m squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Mia gasps, purpling beneath me. I can’t calm down enough to try and affect the dream in any other way.

“Lucid dreaming, my ass,” I gasp.

If this was a straight Zealscape, I know that if I killed her in the dream, she’d wake up, strapped to the Chair, knocked out of her hallucination. That’s dangerous enough. But I have no idea what happens in a Vervescape. What if it’s more of a shock to her weakened body, and I kill her in the real world?

I should care. But my hands don’t slacken.

Strong hands grip my shoulders, yanking me back. “Let go of her,” Nazarin says. “Let go. You’ve learned all you can from her.”

His deep voice snaps me from the iron vise of Verve. My hands jerk from her throat, though a red imprint remains.

“It’s the drug,” he says. “Happens to everyone who takes it. Everyone has a darker side.”

“Zeal or Verve?” I ask.

His brow furrows. “What?”

“This batch has been contaminated. We’re in a Vervescape, not Zeal.”

“Shit,” Nazarin says. “We need to get out of here.”

“Where have you been?”

“Mia found a way to trap me in a different part of her dream. It disappeared when she was too distracted to control it anymore.”

He means when I was half-strangling her. I flush in shame at what I’ve done.

Mia has already stopped paying attention to us, like I never interrupted her. Mana-ma has returned, whole and shivering in her black robe. Mia is engrossed in a grisly task involving one of Mana-ma’s hands, peeling back the skin and picking out the tendons one by one. Simulacra of the hands that once rested on our heads, giving us benedictions, asking us to purge the darkness within.

“Mia,” I say. She looks up, eyes distant.

I gather that stillness within me again. “You don’t need to do this to live. You can be free of it. Try to live your life in the real world again. I loved you so much, and you were so good to us for those years we needed you most. You can be good again.”

Her breath hitches. She gives me a long, unblinking stare, and a flash seems to pass between us, before she turns her head back to Mana-ma, her shoulders heaving with silent sobs.