Chapter Four

  "One more chance." Dr. Grace's voice cuts through my medicated haze, each word sharp as a scalpel. "After yesterday's episode, Dr. Terror believes socialization might still benefit your condition." She pauses the wheelchair just outside the cafeteria doors, leaning so close I can smell the chemical mint on her breath. "But understand this—disruptions will not be tolerated."

  The unspoken threat hangs between us, palpable as fog.

  The cafeteria doors part with a pneumatic hiss, releasing a wave of institutional smells—overcooked vegetables, canned fruit, and beneath it all, the acrid tang of industrial disinfectant. The noise assaults me next—plastic utensils scraping against trays, the murmur of subdued conversations, occasional bursts of hollow laughter.

  My gaze finds her immediately—that shock of neon pink amid the drab hospital uniforms. The pink-haired girl sits alone at a corner table, her wheelchair positioned at a slight angle that somehow suggests defiance. Her tray already before her, those strange eyes scanning the room with predatory awareness. When she spots me, her lips curve into something between a smile and a warning.

  Dr. Grace wheels me to the serving line where a stone-faced orderly slops shapeless food onto my tray—mashed something, meat-adjacent protein, vegetables boiled until they surrendered both color and dignity.

  "Thirty minutes," Dr. Grace says, releasing my wheelchair. "Not one minute longer."

  Left to my own devices, I navigate toward the corner table, plastic tray balanced precariously on my useless thighs. The pink-haired girl watches my approach, head cocked at an angle reminiscent of a raven examining something shiny and potentially edible.

  "Well, it looks like we're best friends now, huh?" she calls out before I even reach the table, her voice carrying across the cafeteria like an echo in an empty church.

  Several heads turn our way, then quickly back to their food. The pink haired girl just grins at them.

  I position my wheelchair across from her, setting my tray on the table with care. Up close, she's even more striking—her skin luminous despite the harsh fluorescent lighting, her features arranged with such harmony that looking at her almost hurts. The pink of her hair seems to pulse with its own internal light, defying the drabness that permeates everything else in this place.

  "I told you why I'm in," she continues, not bothering with small talk while tearing a piece of bread apart with delicate, soft hands. "Why are you in?"

  The question drops between us like a stone in still water. I remain silent, focusing on arranging my plastic utensils with unnecessary attention.

  The pink-haired girl's mouth forms an exaggerated pout. "That's not fair at all. I told you the Walls talk to me. I even told you my name." She leans forward in her wheelchair, voice dropping to a whisper. "That's a gift I don't give lightly."

  I shudder, actively suppressing the images that populate my mind at the mention. I quickly mull over my options. Better a friend than another enemy.

  "Fine," I sigh, the word emerging rusty from disuse.

  Her face brightens, eyes gleaming with hunger barely disguised as curiosity. She wheels herself closer, the movement so smooth it appears she's gliding rather than rolling.

  "Reality rejection syndrome," I say flatly, repeating Dr. Terror's clinical assessment. "I construct elaborate delusions to escape unbearable truths."

  "Boring," she sings, scooping mashed potatoes with her bare fingers and licking with her tongue. "That's just what they call it. I want to know what's in your head." Her gaze intensifies until it feels like a physical pressure against my skin. "What do you see when the drugs wear thin? What whispers to you in the dark?"

  I stab at the institutional food, appetite evaporating. "Why should I tell you?"

  "Because," she says with startling rawness, "I might be the only one who'll believe you."

  Something in her tone—a vulnerability beneath the playful exterior—makes me look up. For a brief moment, her carefully constructed facade slips, revealing something ancient and wounded beneath. Her fingers grip the arms of her wheelchair until her knuckles whiten, as if she's restraining herself from lunging across the table.

  "Well?" she presses, slipping back into her cheerful mask so quickly I almost doubt what I saw. "What's your delusion?"

  The words rise unbidden to my lips, dangerous but necessary. "I am the Queen of Terror and Grace."

  I expect mockery. Dismissal. Perhaps even fear.

  Instead, her eyes widen with such genuine delight it transforms her face. "Oh!" She claps her hands together like a child at a magic show. "Tell me more. Every detail."

  The request opens a floodgate. Words pour from me, descriptions of the Nine Realms spilling forth in hushed tones—the cathedral with its ceiling of stars that bleed light, the throne of bone built from generations of victims, the Princess of Flesh and Hate with her too many eyes and rabid devotion.

  I tell her of holding my hands over cooking flames as a child, of swallowing pain like water, of becoming a vessel hollow enough to contain an ancient power. I speak of my brother, fed to the things that live in the walls, and of fingernails turning black and falling away one by one.

  As I speak, I notice the cafeteria around us seems to dim, the fluorescent lights flickering in rhythm with my words. The ambient noise recedes, as if the entire room holds its breath to listen.

  The pink-haired girl leans forward in her wheelchair, fingers drumming against the table in complex patterns that somehow complement my narrative. Her pupils dilate until the green of her irises is a mere ring around bottomless black.

  "And the prophecy?" she prompts when I pause for breath. "Something about a hollow wind?"

  I freeze, heart skipping a beat. I never mentioned that.

  "Yes," I say cautiously. "The hollow wind shall swallow the crown and the nine shall become one."

  She nods as if confirming something she'd suspected all along. "And what does it mean?"

  "I thought..." I hesitate, uncertain now of what I knew with such clarity in my delusion. "I thought it meant I would destroy the realms to save them. Collapse everything into a single point."

  "Or perhaps," the pink-haired girl suggests, her wheelchair inching closer still, "it means the beginning rather than the end. Creation rather than destruction."

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I've never considered this interpretation. It sends little electric shocks through my nerves, awakening parts of me that have been dormant for six hundred and fourteen days.

  "But that would mean—"

  "That you are still becoming," she finishes for me. "That the hollow wind hasn't yet blown through the Nine Realms." Her gaze flicks to the walls of the cafeteria, which seem to pulse subtly, veins visible beneath plaster skin. "That this—all of this—is just preparation."

  A chill spreads through me. "Does it get worse?" I ask, my voice barely above a whisper.

  The pink-haired girl laughs—a sound like silver bells ringing. "But of course!" Her eyes dance with manic glee. "What fun would it be if it didn't?" She leans forward, wheels of her chair squeaking softly. "The best stories are the ones where everything gets so much worse before it gets better. If it gets better at all."

  Throughout my confession, the pink-haired girl listens with rapt attention, occasionally nodding as if confirming details she already knows. She doesn't interrupt except to ask clarifying questions that somehow sharpen my own memories. She absorbs.

  When I finally fall silent, emotionally drained by the recitation, she sits back in her wheelchair, eyes gleaming with an emotion I can't decipher.

  "That," she says with absolute conviction, "would make an excellent novel."

  The comment deflates me. Of course—even here, among the broken minds of Mercy Hills, my reality is too strange, too terrible to be believed.

  "I hope it's real," she adds, surprising me. "It sounds much more interesting than this place."

  I open my mouth to interject—to explain that I'm no longer certain what's real and what's delusion, that the line between worlds has grown tissue-thin—when she suddenly shifts in her wheelchair. Her hands grip the wheels, and with a swift, practiced motion, she propels herself up onto the chair's back wheels, balancing there with supernatural poise, her body elevated as if about to rise.

  "I can see it!" Her voice rings with wonder. "You're right. The crown of bone, the cathedral..." Her hands gesture in the air, sketching structures only she can see while maintaining her precarious balance on the wheelchair's tilted frame. "The Princess with her many eyes, watching, always watching."

  She drops back down, the front wheels of her chair hitting the linoleum with a decisive click. Leaning across the table with such intensity that I instinctively pull back, her eyes—now entirely green, all amber vanished—lock with mine.

  "Good thing we're already best friends," she says with a wink that somehow contains multitudes of meaning.

  A sound escapes me then—a rusty giggle that scrapes my throat raw, as if my body remembers laughter even if my mind has forgotten its purpose. It feels like breaking something precious and dangerous at once.

  "Don't laugh," she cautions, glancing around the cafeteria, though no one appears to be paying us any attention. Her voice drops to a whisper that somehow carries with greater clarity than her normal tone. "Not if we're going to get back to your throne."

  I do a double take, certain I've misheard. My heart pounds against my ribs like something trying to escape. "What did you say?"

  Her expression shifts to practiced innocence, green eyes wide. "I said, 'if we want to get dessert.'" She gestures toward the serving line, where orderlies are distributing cups of pale-yellow pudding.

  The misdirection is so transparent it nearly insults, yet her smile contains such knowing complicity that I find myself playing along. Whatever game this is, I've decided to participate.

  "Right," I say carefully. "Dessert."

  She nods, satisfied. "Dessert first, then the Nine Realms. One step at a time."

  As she maneuvers her wheelchair toward the serving line to fetch our pudding cups, moving with a grace that suggests she's merely humoring the laws of physics, I notice something I missed before: a thin chain around her neck, disappearing beneath her hospital gown, from which dangles what looks like a tiny key.

  And behind her—just for an instant—a shadow stretches against the wall, extending far larger than her slender form should cast. It ripples with shapes that hurt my eyes to focus on, suggestions of limbs and appendages that have no place on a human silhouette.

  While she's gone, I examine my own reflection in the polished metal of the table. My face looks alien to me—hollowed cheeks, eyes too large, skin too pale. But beneath the surface, I catch glimpses of someone else—someone with emerald hair that floats as if underwater, eyes that hold galaxies of suffering.

  The pink-haired girl returns, balancing two pudding cups on her lap, her wheelchair rolling with a rhythm that aligns precisely to my heartbeat. She places one before me with a flourish.

  "They say the pudding is the only edible thing in this place," she says, dipping her finger directly into the yellow substance. "Though I suspect they add extra medication to it." She licks her finger clean, eyes never leaving mine. "Makes the nights more... interesting."

  "What do you see at night?" I ask, voice barely audible even to myself.

  "Nothing." She leans forward, her breath smelling of pudding and something metallic. "Everything." Her voice takes on a singsong quality. "The walls that whisper secrets. The doors that open to places that shouldn't exist."

  A chill runs down my spine, stopping precisely where sensation ends at my hips. "And your legs?" I ask, the question both too bold and too necessary. "Are they real?"

  Her smile widens, revealing teeth that seem just slightly too sharp at the canines. "Are yours?"

  Before I can respond, her hand darts across the table, fingers pressing against my thigh in a spot where sensation technically ended months ago. Yet I feel it—a cold burn that travels from the point of contact straight to my core.

  "Did you feel that?" she asks, voice thick with triumph.

  I nod, speechless.

  "Good." She withdraws her hand, leaving five distinct red marks on my flesh that slowly fade to white. "That's how you know."

  "Know what?"

  Her eyes flick to the clock on the wall—7:03 PM—then back to me. "That your body remembers what your mind has been forced to forget."

  Something about that phrase unlocks a memory—not of the Nine Realms or the throne of bone, but of something Dr. Terror said during one of our sessions. "The trick is learning to love what is, rather than what could be."

  "Could it all be real?" I whisper, the question burning my lips like acid. "The Queen, the Realms, the power?"

  The pink-haired girl's expression sobers, all playfulness vanishing. "There's only one way to find out." She glances at my untouched pudding cup. "Eat. You'll need your strength for tomorrow."

  "What happens tomorrow?"

  She taps the tip of her nose with one finger, a gesture so human it seems out of place on her otherworldly features. "Day six hundred and fifteen. A good number. Divisible by five and three and forty-one."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means," she says, voice dropping so low I strain to hear, "that if you want to know if your legs work, tomorrow is the day to test them."

  Another orderly approaches, his face a blank mask of professional indifference. "Time's up," he announces, hands already gripping the handles of my wheelchair. "Back to your room."

  The pink-haired girl watches as I'm wheeled away, her gaze never wavering. Just before the cafeteria doors close between us, I see her mouth form words meant only for me:

  "The Queen must choose."

  The doors swing shut with a finality that makes me shiver. The orderly wheels me through corridors that seem longer and darker than before. The shadows in the corners don't move correctly—flowing rather than shifting when we pass.

  Back in my room, I find the cat waiting on my bed, its form a deeper shadow among rumpled sheets. It watches with unblinking eyes as the orderly deposits me next to the bed, then leaves without a word.

  The moment the door clicks shut, I reach beneath my tray where I've hidden my pudding cup. The yellow substance gleams under the harsh lighting, concealing whatever they've mixed into it.

  "What do you think?" I ask the cat. "Is it medicine or poison?"

  The cat stretches languidly, then places one paw deliberately on my thigh—exactly where the pink-haired girl's fingers left their marks.

  Decision made, I set the pudding aside untouched. Whatever comes tomorrow, I want my mind as clear as possible.

  As twilight deepens outside my small window, transforming the glass into a mirror, I study my reflection. For just a moment, overlaid on my gaunt features, I see a crown of bone, a mane of emerald hair, eyes that hold galaxies of suffering.

  The cat purrs, the sound vibrating at a frequency that makes my teeth ache.

  Day six hundred and fourteen is ending.

  Day six hundred and fifteen approaches, bringing with it new possibilities—and a pink-haired ally who might be as much a delusion as my crown of bone.

  Or perhaps, just perhaps, the most real thing in this sanitized hell.

  The clock on the wall ticks over to midnight.

  A sound emerges from the walls—not quite a voice, not quite a heartbeat. Rhythmic. Familiar.

  And beneath my skin, I feel my fingernails beginning to turn black.