“Quiet,” I said. “Both of you. All of you.”

“Who are you—”

“I thought I told you to go!” I roared at her.

Bare feet padded against the floor, but not in retreat.

Tenacious, obstinate—too bold for a woman—she came to where I stood, propped against the roses, still clutching at the pouring wound. I did not mark her progress toward me through my own still-closed eyes, though. Rather, I viewed her approach from above. From the vantage point and through the empty eyeholes of Madness.

No. Not now. Not him.

She came to within a foot of where I stood, and lifting her hand, she reached, unafraid, toward my bloody figure.

Forcing my physical eyes open, I found myself back in my body. Back behind Tumult’s mask, which I covered with one bloodied hand, uncertain if I could truly keep her from seeing what she was determined to behold.

Instead of reaching for my mask, her small, pale hand did what it had tried to in the dream and took mine—the one covering the wound.

“What are you doing?” I asked, helpless to stop her as she began to tug my fingers away, prying them up with her own, which fast turned scarlet.

No sooner had she taken my hand from the wound, though, than did she abandon it to the air. And it hung there, as stunned as I when the digits of both her hands curled into the fabric of Tumult’s waistcoat.

“It cannot be helped,” I rasped as she began to undo the long row of buttons.

Stop her, urged all three of the voices Madness possessed. The voices that would soon possess me.

But, shocked into stillness by this—her newest and most astonishing act of bravery yet—I found I could not obey.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Stephanie

Terror, I realized in the moment I reached for his collar, was something that could—in certain situations—be set aside.

Later, I could open that parcel. Later, sometime after this moment ended, I could afford to scream and break down.

That later would come. Even now I could see it winking at me from its dark corner in the future. But for now, so long as I just kept going, my unborn terror would stand aside long enough to let me do what I needed to. Even if I didn’t know yet what that was.

Button after button, I undid his waistcoat, my hands shifting down after each unfastening, my bloodstained fingers moving on autopilot, repeating the same unhooking motion over and over. Next, I went to work on the buttons of his soaked dress shirt.

I kept my eyes on the task, not daring even the smallest of glances up at the new mask he wore, a glowering, mouthless metal face, pristine and polished on one half, but scarred and corroded on the other.

The obvious tumultuous nature of this mask combined with his silent stillness made me nervous. What was he thinking? Why had he stopped trying to stop me? And what would he do when the reality of what I was doing caught up to him? What would happen to us when my terror leapt from its corner to seize and devour me anyway?