“He isn’t going to listen. He’s a moron,” the boy with the glasses said, without raising his face from his hands. “He wouldn’t wear that mask if he wasn’t.”

“Fuck off,” the Fallen boy said. “You don’t know anything about us.”

“You assholes set a mall on fire and trapped us inside! You were there at the door!” the boy with the glasses shouted. “Fucking idiots, what were you even trying to do?”

“You call us idiots, but we were right. We said the world would end, and it did. Now you’re all getting complacent again. You still don’t listen to us, so we make you listen.”

“People died,” Jonathan said.

“Their fault, from what I saw,” the Fallen boy said. He sounded sullen. “Through your eyes.”

The woman pulled her fingers from her mouth, and she screamed. She slammed one hand against the invisible barrier, and she dragged her fingernails down the surface until Jonathan thought that one would be pried off. She found her breath and screamed again.

“Shut up! Fuck off!” the Fallen boy shouted.

She’d broken. That she’d broken to the degree she had scared Jonathan, because he wasn’t sure how intact he was.

He might lose it entirely if every night was like this. This was only the second.

They’d all seen into his head, through his eyes. Was it random? One random person every night? An assortment of the things dropping out of the darkness above, distributed by chance?

He looked at the dark fifth of the room.

“You seem to be doing better than any of us. Except maybe that asshole over there,” the boy with the glasses said.

The idea surprised Jonathan.

“I’m not doing okay,” he said. “I feel—”

His voice distorted on that last word, rougher, painful to make the word ‘feel’.

“You feel what?”

“I feel,” Jonathan said, in that painfully rough voice, “Hollowed out. Numb. Angry. Lost.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“My voice—” he said.

“It changed just now.”

“It changed on the day. Smoke inhalation. I’m not wondering why it’s different. Why was it normal?”

The woman crumpled to the ground, hands up above her head, pressed to the wall, her head hanging. The Fallen boy with his crude demon mask stood above her, looking down. He didn’t say or do anything.

“Maybe it’s catching up,” the boy with the glasses said. “Why are we wearing the clothes we’re wearing? Why is he wearing that mask?”

Jonathan remained silent.

Nothing had fallen from the sky. He looked skyward, and saw only the darkness, the ceiling could have been twenty feet above them or it could have been a thousand feet above them, and he wouldn’t have known.

He walked over to the dais, past barren shelves that echoed his shop with no usable stock. He cast aside the debris and let it disintegrate.