The hilt was so hot and slippery with blood that it was hard to grasp. Your hands were bare. It took a few goes to get it. The grip was made of polished wood or plex, and your fingers didn’t close the way I expected them to, probably because they were shorter than mine.

We were in a narrow, sweaty corridor, dark, lit only by a thin rail of overhead red lighting. There was an alarm blaring somewhere, and a distant white-noise buzzing sound, like you’d get from a piece of malfunctioning machinery. You were soaked through with blood, and where you weren’t soaked through with blood you were soaked through with sweat. The air was shimmering with the heat. Standing in that hallway was like standing next to a bonfire, one that also made you wet.

Beneath you a bunch of blood was smeared playfully on the floor and lower walls, as though someone had rolled around in it, which I guess you had. But there wasn’t that much of it. It hadn’t been a fight. Whoever stuck you with your own rapier hadn’t let you get a shot off. You weren’t around to be furious, but if you had been, I would’ve told you not to bother; I planned on making them sorrier than they had ever been in all their fucking life.

Pool of blood: check. Air so hot: check. Surrounded by big and illicit bones: check. Looking at your hand to keep this tally—what hand there was, beneath the blood, and your fingers, and your small palms, and their absolute lack of thenar muscle—reality went through me. Kind of like a big iron railing, now that I think about it.

You were gone. You’d left me behind. Inside you.

“Fuck,” I said. It wasn’t my voice. “Fuck. Oh, shit. Oh, fucking hell. Help. Yuck. Aaaargh.”

In the darkness of that hot and bony corridor, something bumbled into view before you—us; me—which at least forestalled my full-on physical and emotional breakdown. It was a nightmarish nonsense of wasp, and bone, and meat, and it was alive, and when it saw me it stopped.