Page 116 of How (Not) To Raise The Dead

“Look at me.”

“No.”

“DO IT.”

The command slams into my skull like a sledgehammer, bypassing my will entirely, eyelids snapping open. And there she is. Eden. But she’s not the soft, cardigan-wearing disaster I remember. She’s absolute, biological ruin.

She traipses toward me in a ragged jerk of mismatched angles. The peaches are gone, replaced by the cloying stench of the meat-locker. She looks like she’s been put through a grinder and loosely reassembled without the manual.

Subtlety really isn't the Oubliette’s strong suit.

I’ve been here for ten days… thirteen… maybe a fiscal quarter?

I don’t fucking know. I lost count somewhere in the middle of my ninth session with the neural-whips.

“The bind was too tight, Malachi. I didn’t even make it back to my apartment.” It reaches out, tracing a cold, gore-slicked finger down my jawline. “I’m dead because of you.”

“Oh, shut up,” I rasp, jerking my head away from the touch. “Honestly, the dialogue in this place has gone downhill since the last epoch. ‘I’m dead because of you’? That’s the best the torment-writers could come up with?”

“I never went back, Malachi…”

“Boring. Derivative. Next,” I snarl, focusing on the throb of the headache behind my eyes rather than the visual horror show in front of me.

The real Eden is fine. She’s back in that drafty apartment, hopefully swaddled, hyperventilating over a cup of herbal tea, or reading her terrible romance novels. She is safe. She is whole. She is delightfully, boringly alive in a world full of taxes and pizza and dating shows.

“You killed me…” the hallucination wails, escalating the volume to an annoying screech.

“You’re a bad loop of corrupted code,” I mutter to the floor. “And you’re interrupting my sulking.”

“No one’s interrupting a damn thing.” A sharp, bored, and irritatingly familiar voice cuts through the noise.

I peel my eyes open just as the thing flickers away, dissolving into pixels of grey smoke.

Good fucking riddance.

Instant regret blooms through me as I try to crack a smile, only for the chapped skin of my lip to split wide open, weeping fresh iron into my mouth.

“Is that a new suit?” I croak, eyeing the neon-blue ensemble that is arguably more painful to look at than the LED glare. “You look like a highlighter.”

“Hmm. Yes,” Veraxia says, smoothing a lapel. “And you look like a rejected prototype. Half-dead really isn't your color.”

Without looking at me, she reaches out with a manicured hanger and presses a recessed switch on the wall. The chains holding me to the ceiling lose their tension instantly and I drop like a sack of wet cement, hitting the tiles in an ungraceful, bone-jarring heap.

A fresh wave of agony explodes through my upper body—my shoulders burning, muscles seizing in relief.

“Ow,” I wheeze into the floor, waiting for the room to stop spinning. “Cunt.”

With a snap of her fingers, two Wardens march in. They don't lift me so much as dredge me up from the tiles, their grip bruising what little skin I have left. Before I can even get my feet under me, one of them jams a syringe into the side of my neck.

The stimulant hits my bloodstream like a freight train made of liquid anxiety, and my eyes snap wide, pupils blowing out as the fuzzy numbness of exhaustion is ripped away, replaced by a chemical vibration that rattles my teeth.

I feel awake. Horribly, violently, nauseatingly awake.

I dry heave, the sudden clarity making the pain in my shoulders a thousand times more vivid.

“Is it execution day?” I gasp through retches. “Because if it is, I’d like to lodge a formal complaint about the pre-show amenities.”

Veraxia inspects a microscopic smudge on her cuff. “Worse. The paperwork was flagged. Someone Upstairs saw your file.”