The exchange is silent. My hard-won coin slips from my hand to the guard’s without a single word traded between us. He studies the silver, turning it over in his palm.

I’m not offended, but I am impatient. I don’t want to be here. I really, truly do not. But I’m here and I have a task I aim to complete. “It’s real, I assure you.”

The man’s only response to that is to hold my gaze as he brings the coin to his mouth and sets it between his teeth. Satisfied, he grunts, slipping the coin into his pocket. It’s more than what he makes in a month, but he seems unsurprised and underwhelmed. I wonder how often he takes this sort of bribe. Who comes here to gawk at the dead? And why? Are they doing more than just looking?

A chill steals through me. That is a thought best left alone.

The guard moves aside, removing a large ring of brass keys from a hook by the door. He slides one into the lock and turns it. “You have ten minutes.”

I don’t thank him as I step through that heavy door. I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t want to be here at all. But I have to be. I have a limited window in which to work before I lose my chance to find some answers. And in the absence of answers—any answers, no matter how flimsy—I fear I might go completely fucking mad.

The door closes behind me, plunging me into darkness.

Panic seizes me, tightening my muscles, clogging my throat. In the moments it takes for my eyes to adjust to the dim, barely there light of the candle on the table by the door, a primal urge takes hold of my body. I want to run, to pound at the heavy wooden bulk of the door until the guard lets me out. I have known death before, but never this intimately. I wish I had never made its acquaintance.

I rest my back against the door and breathe.

In and out. In and out. In and out.

My heart hammers at the walls of my chest while I force air into my lungs and out again. In the quiet, each ragged breath seems louder than it ought to. After a moment, my pulse begins to slow. My eyes adjust to the dim. And I see, finally, what awaits in this room.

A body lying stretched out on a table.

Alejandro, my mind supplies. That is Alejandro.

But I push the thought away. I cannot think of it as Alejandro. It isn’t him. Not anymore. It is just a body. A lifeless sack of meat and bones. Whatever it was that made that body Alejandro is gone.