Fuck that. You’ve worked too hard and too long to give up now. Come on. You want more than oblivion. You want to live.

A ghostly chuckle reverberates through the shadows. Through the unending black. It curls around me, caressing the jagged edges of my consciousness, soothing the broken shards at my center. Surrender, little mouse. Let me devour you.

I hurt. With each pulse of the darkness, the pain intensifies until I cannot bear it.

It’s your heart. The sharp voice returns, louder now. Louder than even the rhythmic drumming. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Tha-thump. Instinctively, I shy away, but I cannot hide from the sound. From the pain. It echoes everywhere, all around me. It’s still beating.

I try to process this, try to peer through the darkness to where a heart might indeed beat. But still I see nothing.

Don’t hide from it, Lou. Own your pain. Use it.

Lou. The word is familiar, like the exhalation on a laugh. The breath before jumping, the gasp when you fly instead. It’s a sigh of relief, of irritation, of disappointment. It’s a shout of anger and a cry of passion. It’s . . . me. I am not the darkness. I am something else entirely. And this voice—it’s mine.

There you are, it says—I say—in unabashed relief. About time too.

However, on the wings of one realization comes another, and I flex abruptly, pushing against the crushing black. It responds in kind, no longer simple darkness but a sentient presence all its own. An insidious presence. It feels wrong, somehow. Foreign. It shouldn’t be here—wherever here is—because this place . . . it belongs to me too. Like my heartbeat. Like my name. Though I flex again, testing my strength, spreading myself further, pushing and pushing and pushing, I meet only ironclad resistance.

The darkness is unyielding as stone.

A Game of Questions

Reid

Lou’s fingertips skimmed my leg in time with the others’ rhythmic breathing. With each inhale, she walked them upward. With each exhale, she turned her wrist, trailing downward with the back of her hand. Wind whistled through the cracks in the sanctuary, raising gooseflesh on my arms. I sat rigid beneath her touch, heart pounding in my throat at the subtle friction. Tense. Waiting. Sure enough, those fingers gradually crept up, up, up my thigh in slow seduction, but I caught her wrist, slid my hand to cover hers. To pin it in place.