“Kierk, we have to go, we have to go now!” Carmen hisses, trying to tug him violently down, but he shrugs her off and takes the last step up and holds one hand out to touch the door. A knock so hard and loud that the metal shrieks like a subway train and Carmen begins to scream and scream in the dark of the stairwell. The door had nearly vibrated off its hinges and Kierk’s ears are buzzing. There is a presence beyond, just beneath his palm laid against the metal. Hand against the door he can almost feel it, almost see it. A dark star. A dark star throbbing with the sound of itself. The shape of an iris. A dark star in the sky spreading like liquid over the pond of night. The tide of pure black liquid meets the bloom of blood coming the other way, curling, mixing. A sound so loud and so deep it is a stone vibrating at the center of the universe. The view of an alien desert at night cyclopean with obelisks. His and Carmen’s bodies lying contorted in the White Room. Both corpses have been surgically altered. Kierk has been given the lower body of a horse and Carmen’s hair has been replaced with snakes. Then mold spreading over their bodies, eating them, turning them into gardens. Foliage sprouting. The unearthly sound of a blue rose growing up out of her eye socket. The outline of him snatched away and inserted, waking, now sent into an entirely new body plan. The disorientating proprioception of having so many newborn limbs waving about weightless. Limbs that are not limbs but people. Not one but many, the many in the one, each a digit or appendage looking out, millions of eyes at once. Nausea rising at the ant-like patterns flashing too fast in a thousand languages. Syllables out of order, backward. Screeching. Pulled in all directions at once. Too stretched, his remaining disembodied bloodless shell of a ghost is ripped apart by the force of it, a husk dissolving fast. The planetary roar cuts off into silence.

A hand on his, pulling it away from the door. In the bobbing lights from their phones he moves slowly at first, Carmen still gripping his hand, and then faster and faster down the stairwell. As they descend it is like he is being woken from a dream into a world beyond this one, realer than this one.

Wake up.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the two who believed in this book when it was just loose pages and binary strings: Chelsea Cutchens, my editor, and Adam Schear, my agent.

Thanks to Noreen Tomassi and The Center for Fiction, the missing connection without which this book may never have been published.