She blinks, voice cold. “Then we’d better hurry.” She nods at the human. A silent order.

“It is an honor to serve,” the human replies, and lifts a hand above my head.

At first I feel nothing. And then—everything.

Every inch of my skin burns like razors slicing over and over again across my flesh. Fire builds in the pit of my stomach, scorching through veins and muscle. And I feel my bones break in a thousand places, like I’m being ripped apart from the inside out.

I lose sense of time. Hours becomes days, days become weeks. The pain never stops, and by the end, I’m begging for silence. For peace.

I’m begging for death.

But the Residents don’t want me to surrender my consciousness. They want to find a way to tear it out of me for good.

I feel the Cut before it happens, like tendrils of smoke ahead of a fire. It snakes through me, searching for my soul. My being. When it finds it, my body goes rigid and an invisible blade tears through me, severing whatever is left of my existence from my body. I am broken and flayed and every miserable thing a person could ever be. I scream even though nobody can hear me—not anymore. Not after what they’ve done.

And then I am weightless, drifting toward the sky without purpose. Without understanding.

I don’t know how I got here or what I am, but I manage to glance back at the world below.

Two figures are standing over the body of a man with curly black hair. Sweat covers his face, and his mouth hangs open wide. Lifeless. His flesh becomes mist, his blood and bone fading into the air until there’s nothing left of him.

He disappears from this world, like he never existed at all.

The two strangers look up, searching for me, but I am already moving through the walls and ceiling and sky, moving across borders with a newfound hunger in my core.

I don’t know what I am, but I know what I need.

I will find what they took from me and make myself whole.

I tear myself away from the floating being—from Philo—and when my eyes soak in the familiar sight of the mountain around me, I scramble backward.

The mist wails, pulling toward me like it’s angry I’ve broken the connection.

No, my mind races. It doesn’t want a connection—it wants a body.

I saw his thoughts. His memories. Because the shapeless being in front of me used to be human. All that’s left of him now are the remains of his consciousness, struggling to hold itself together.