I wake to meat.

  The walls breathe around us—wet, red, pulsing with veins thick as my arm. Not the clean white of Mercy Hills' facade. This is what always lurked beneath.

  Sylene lies ten feet away, emerald blood pooling beneath her. Still breathing, but wrong. Metal pins driven through her wrists into the floor, each one etched with symbols that hurt to look at.

  I try to move. Can't. My own restraints are different—organic somehow, like tendons wrapped around my limbs. They tighten when I test them, feeding on my struggle.

  "Fascinating." Dr. Terror's voice comes from everywhere. "Your blood corrupts even our most stable binding spells."

  He emerges from the wall itself, peeling away from the meat like he was always part of it. No more human mask. His true form shifts between states—solid, liquid, something my brain refuses to process. Eyes cluster where a face should be.

  "Ward Nine," he says. "The real Mercy Hills."

  The chamber stretches beyond sight. Other sounds echo—screaming, laughter, something worse than both.

  "Sylene," I call out.

  She doesn't respond. Her eyes track movement I can't see, pupils dilated black.

  "She can't hear you." He checks something that might be instruments or might be parts of himself. "We've activated her base programming. Every death she's ever died, playing on loop."

  The wall ripples. Shows me glimpses—Sylene burning, drowning, torn apart, reformed. Over and over. My stomach turns, recognizing something in her dying face that mirrors my own nightmares.

  "Let her go."

  "No."

  He moves to a section of wall that opens at his approach. The restraints force me upright, drag me forward. Each step tears skin.

  Beyond: a corridor lined with glass cylinders. Inside each one, a person who used to be whole.

  First cylinder: a woman whose bones grow outside her skin. Still alive.

  Second: twins fused at the spine.

  Third: just teeth. Everything is teeth.

  I could be in any of these cylinders. Would be, if one small thing had gone differently. The thought settles in my chest like ice water.

  We pass dozens more. The child turned inside out makes me bite through my tongue to keep from screaming. Another cylinder holds a boy, maybe seventeen, his dark hair floating in preservation fluid. Something about his face—familiar in a way that makes my chest tight, though I can't place why.

  "Where are—"

  "Here."

  The corridor opens into an operating theater. On the table: me. Older, scarred differently, but unmistakably me. She's been opened from throat to pelvis, ribs spread to show emptiness where organs should be. The void where her heart should beat pulls at my vision, makes my own chest ache with phantom loss.

  "Eight months like this." The walls pulse with his pride. "The Wind won't let her die."

  The other me turns her head.

  "It hurts," she whispers.

  I know that voice. It's the one I use in my worst moments, when the weight of what I am becomes too much. My restraints tighten in response to my horror, feeding gleefully.

  "That's why we developed the anchor protocol." He gestures toward Sylene. "A secondary vessel to contain overflow."

  "You're lying."

  He produces a blade, draws it across his palm. Black ichor wells up. The moment it touches air, I feel it—relief, like pressure valves opening. The connection between us isn't love or loyalty. It's plumbing.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Tell me something, Doctor. If she's just hardware, why does she still remember lullabies?"

  His eyes swivel. The walls contract.

  "What?"

  "The songs her mother sang. She hums them sometimes."

  "Impossible. We extracted—"

  A crash echoes from the corridor. Then silence stretches, thick as the meat around us.

  Sylene stands in the doorway. She's torn her hands through the pins—not around them, through them. The metal protrudes from mangled flesh that's already trying to heal wrong. Her eyes are cold, focused, empty of everything but purpose.

  "When I was seven," she says conversationally, stepping over debris, "they made me hold my own intestines while they rearranged them. When I was nine, they flayed the skin from my back to write protection wards directly on muscle." She flexes her ruined hands, bones grinding against metal. "Pain is just information. And I've learned to ignore information I don't need."

  She moves to the nearest cylinder. Studies the teeth-thing inside.

  "They're aware. Fully conscious. Like me during the procedures. Like her." A nod toward the other me. "You need the suffering fresh for the binding to take."

  She applies pressure to the glass. Cracks spread.

  "Don't thank me yet," she tells the teeth-thing as it pours out.

  More vessels emerge. Each one broken in unique ways. They cluster near Sylene like dying stars drawn to a black hole. I see myself in their grateful, desperate faces—what I almost became, what I still might become if this goes wrong.

  She moves to my restraints. "The binding feeds on struggle. So don't."

  Her mangled fingers press against the tendons. They recoil—not from damage, but from the wrongness she radiates. The emptiness where fear should live.

  "I died the first time when I was six. Not here—before. When they came for me. My mother tried to stop them, so they made me watch her burn. Then they stopped my heart to see if I was worth taking. I was dead for thirteen minutes. Long enough to see what comes after."

  The restraints fall away.

  "Nothing," she continues. "Just nothing. And it was so much better than this." Her eyes go distant. "Except... there was a moment. A flash of something. Bone stairs spiraling up into darkness. A cathedral made of grief. And someone calling a name I couldn't quite hear."

  I reach the table where the other me lies. Place my hand over her opened chest.

  "What was your name?"

  "Echidna."

  "I'll remember it."

  She smiles as the Wind flows between us. Her memories flood into me—eight months of tests, procedures, secrets. I see Ward Nine's true shape. The names hidden in its bones. And something else: whispered conversations between staff about "the old ways" and "Mother Mors knows the true price."

  "You." I turn to Dr. Terror. "Your name isn't Terror."

  His form flickers.

  "Run." I smile with forty-two attempts' worth of rage. "I'll find your true name."

  He flees in pieces. The building convulses without his will.

  "It's dying," Sylene observes.

  I look at the failed vessels—dozens of them, broken beyond repair. In the mirror-skinned man's fractured reflections, I see myself multiplied into all the ways I could have ended. The dark-haired boy from the cylinder stands among them now, and for a moment—just a moment—I swear he mouths a word that might be "sister."

  "You can't fix them," Sylene says. Not cruel, just fact.

  "I know."

  The teeth-thing clicks forward. "It's mercy. We're grateful."

  I move among them, touching each one. The Wind flows gentle for once—not destroying but unmaking, releasing. Each vessel sighs as they dissolve. In their final moments, I see flashes of who they were before. Children. Students. People with names and dreams and favorite songs.

  The dark-haired boy is last. As my hand touches his shoulder, he whispers: "Find her. The mother who remembers. In the cathedral where grief becomes bone."

  "Thank you," they whisper as they fade.

  When it's done, only Sylene and I remain. The silence feels heavier than their screams.

  "You're crying," she observes.

  "They deserved better."

  "Yes. But at least they got an ending."

  We run through the dying facility. When we breach the surface, dawn burns my eyes. The hospital facade crumbles into a sinkhole.

  From the depths: a scream of pure rage. Terror survived.

  "Where now?" Sylene asks.

  I sort through Echidna's memories—a map drawn in agony and overheard whispers. "The outer districts first. The Regent Vore has been ruling in my absence."

  "And after?"

  The dark-haired boy's words echo in my mind. Mother Mors. The cathedral of bone. "There's someone we need to find. Someone who knows about prices and saving what matters."

  "The city center would be suicide."

  "Good thing we're already dead."

  She almost smiles. "I can't feel my hands anymore. The nerves are too damaged."

  "We'll find a healer."

  "No." She flexes her ruined fingers. "They match how I feel inside."

  We walk toward the outer districts. Behind us, something crawls from the ruins—fleeing, not following.

  The Wind whispers in Echidna's voice, teaching me names. Each one a key to a lock I'm going to break. But underneath, another whisper grows: Mother Mors knows. The cathedral remembers. The price has already been paid.

  "I know their names," I tell Sylene. "Not their true names, but close."

  "Then we hunt?"

  "Then we hunt. But there's something else. Someone called Mother Mors. A cathedral made of bone."

  Sylene's step falters for just a moment. "I've heard that name. In the space between death and waking. She who collects grief and builds with it."

  We walk in silence after that, two broken things held together by purpose and proximity. The city awaits, and with it, answers written in blood and betrayal.

  The Wind no longer whispers of forty-three voices. Just three now—mine, the echo of mercy given, and something that might have once been my brother.

  It's enough.