Then she heard, beneath the breath, the whispers. At first she thought them patterns like those the mind imposed on any chaos: song in the surf, a voice from the crackle of a burning bush. But as she lay trapped she heard the words repeated.

“Help us.”

“Hear us.”

“Save us.”

She wanted more than anything to answer them, but a mask bound up her mouth. The most she could manage was a faint moan through closed lips.

She yanked again at her manacles, twisted her hands inside them. Leather chafed and cut. The left cuff was looser than the right. Cupping her thumb into the nest of her four fingers, she pulled. The meat of her thumb caught, and beneath that meat the angular protrusion of the joint.

She pulled harder.

The pop as her thumb joint gave echoed through the room, or else only in the confines of her head. She strangled her own cry. She wanted to be sick, and could not. The tubes would not let her.

With four good fingers she tore at the buckles of her mask. Metal bit her fingertips, but at last the buckles gave, and she gasped fresh air free of leather and dried spit. “Help!” Her first shout cracked midway through and fell, a broken bird. “Help!” The second had wings. “I’m here!” No answer but echoes. The whispers stopped. “Let me go!”

Footsteps struck stone. She craned her neck up and saw a woman drift down the aisle between beds, white coated, hair up in a bun.

Kai clawed at the harness that bound her shoulders, but found no buckles to open. Nor could she pull her right wrist free.

The footsteps neared, and stopped. The woman loomed over Kai like a mountain. Her face seemed familiar. A mother’s face.

She caught Kai’s wrist. Kai fought, but was too weak, too slow. The woman held her without effort.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. Kai realized she was crying.

The needle was sharp. She barely felt it slide into her arm.

*   *   *

“Gods and demons.” Mara held her coffee mug with both hands, but still it shook. She sipped, and stared out the restaurant window over the ocean. “And how long have you had these dreams?”

“Since I got home,” Kai said. They sat in the main dining room of the Grande Flambeau, all white, pine, and linen, the kind of place rich pilgrims ate. A skeleton in a hooded cloak read a newspaper by the gilded ornamental fireplace. Two bankers, a pale-skinned Iskari woman and a shorter man, probably Quechal, argued about interest rates at the next table over. Cotton light filled the air: everything here reflected. Kai sank into the opulence, into the silk tablecloths and cushions. The bay beyond the window glimmered. This at least was not a dream. “Maybe longer. I first remembered the nightmare a few days after I came down off the mountain, but it felt familiar then.”