These thoughts have been cycling for well over a day now. And when the Sane Zone begins, I know almost immediately that the nightmare isn’t over. Something isn’t right.

The white room fades back into my own cell in the Block. There is no needle stuck in me, no paralysis.

I sit up and face the cell door.

“What’s going on?” I whisper into the room, and my breath comes out in clouds of mist. It’s cold in here, ice cold.

My cell door creaks open and Mable slips into the room.

Mable had been the last inmate freed from the Loop. She had been eaten alive by rats in the Dark Train tunnels when I was unable to save her.

Mable walks slowly over to me and crouches into my field of vision.

“Luka,” she whispers, “why did you let me go into the tunnels?”

I want to reply, I want to tell her that I’m sorry, that I wish I had stopped her, but suddenly I can’t speak, suddenly I’m forced by the Sane Zone to silently watch.

“It hurt,” she says, and now lesions are beginning to appear on her arms, her neck, her face. “It hurt when they killed me.”

I see something bulging at her throat, something scrabbling beneath the surface, and then the blood-soaked snout of a tunnel rat pokes through.

“It hurt!” she screams. “It hurt when they bit into my skin, when they chewed my eyes out, when they burrowed into me. It hurt! It hurt!”

I want to scream. I want to look away. I can’t.

Mable’s cries turn into croaks as more open wounds crisscross over her body. And finally, as she collapses to the concrete floor of my cell, she disappears.

Even though I know this is a simulation, even though I know that this is just the Sane Zone, and in reality I’m still paralyzed, lying in this very bed in this very cell, I can feel my heart pounding in my chest.

I wait in the silence, hoping that there is no more.

What the hell was that? I think. What’s going on? Where are the memories? The adventures?

Maddox Fairfax blinks into existence before my eyes, leaning down into my face. The last time I had seen my old friend was here in this very cell. He was the first host, the first human that Happy had managed to upload itself into.

“Kill me, Luka. Kill me, please. You have to kill me, for god’s sake!” he screams into my face, the same words he had spoken to me when Happy had allowed the real Maddox to come up for air.