Luka pulls me close, and I imagine, more than hear, him telling me to breathe. But every time I do, I feel as though I’m inhaling the electric pulse in choking particles. Purple lights flash over the chiseled ceiling until I feel like they’re going off behind my eyes. Exposed flesh all around us lights up in glowing tattoos: three claws on the shoulder of a woman, tearing skin down the bare chest of another. The dragon, eating its tail, constricting the neck of another in an ultraviolet choker.

Ahead of us, Claudia has thrown herself into Piotrek’s arms, arching back so far it’s a miracle her wig hasn’t come off. A scaled dragon, invisible until now, dips into her décolleté. She drops her arms back like a blissed-out rag doll as a Mad Hatter in red stockings takes Piotrek by the shoulders.

Luka pulls me toward him, and the beat is undeniable, infectious, far too demanding. The only thing that feels better at all is to move. The lights go out completely, fluorescent lashes, masks, and fingernails glowing in a bobbing frenzy in the pitch-black around us. I hold tight to Luka’s neck. His trench coat is missing. He’s warm, clothing already damp beneath my arm. Tension, fear, and confusion have welled up in me at once, and I feel it all sweating through my pores like a demon that must be exorcised here, now, as the strobe shocks the black cavern back to life.

It does not stop. I cannot stop. I spin around and find myself face-to-face with a Greek comedy mask, a cap with bells falling down over pale, gilded cheeks. He kneels so close to me I fall onto his back. Hands lift me onto a set of shoulders. I flail once and close my eyes. I am floating, a dozen hands grasping my arms, back, and legs. And for the first time since I woke up in the Center, I do not think of danger. I do not think at all. There is only the beat of surrender, and breath and bliss. I open my eyes on a ceiling raining blue light, the strobe flashing like lightning.

Amerie loved rain . . .

And for that one, perfect, ruined moment, she did not worry about the future, and the past was washed away.

I barely feel my feet touch the floor, belatedly realize I have landed on my toes in the boots with the precarious heels that should have crippled me by now. But I feel no pain. There is nothing but this rapid burn of everything I have been carrying with me for far, far too long.

I am alive for the first time since I woke up in the Center’s clinical white room. Perhaps ever.

I don’t know how long I go like that—a half hour, an hour, two.