From Heaven's Door

Chapter 12

XI

I slowly blinked my eyes open from the threshold of a lonely, tormented sleep. I hadn't had any dreams. I was freezing and curled up on something plush on the floor. I groggily started to move and heard a mumbling voice behind me. My vision was heavily blurred out and my head was heavy, but as I looked back, I saw the beginnings of a thin velvet blanket wrapped around me and someone else sitting next to me. They were looking up and calling to someone else, but as I blinked away the remaining traces of sleep, I saw them face down to me.

"Easy, easy. Don't rush yourself into consciousness," they said in a soothing voice.

Their visage became clear. She had thick, curled black hair, chocolate-brown eyes, and dark skin. I could immediately tell from her riveting, powerful deep voice and face that they were of African descent. Initially, I thought "Arno," then I remembered Arno was, in fact, male. I could feel the woman's hand on my shoulder. It was relaxing.

"Now, slowly get up," she instructed. "Don't look away from me. You've been comatose for about five days now. We were starting to think you wouldn't wake up at all."

I quietly attempted to mumble, and once again, to my annoyance, nothing came out. I reached to my pocket to grab the communicator. Nothing was there. I was too dazed to feel surprised, and I looked at the woman eyes on. My question was clear enough.

"I imagine you're wondering who I am?" she asked. She gave a small laugh in that wonderful, wonderful voice of hers that had comforted me awake – the laugh itself was music to my ears. "Red Clover called me #85. My real name's Gladys Steele, but I've been living under the moniker of Lavender for a while now. Please, call me Lavender."

I nodded and my expression eased up a bit. Everything Lavender said was so firm and seamless I thought to myself that she planned everything she said in advance. I'd never met her, though I vaguely recalled Harlow mentioning #85. I was pleased that, for once, I could remember everything this time. Including the circumstances which had led me to pass out to begin with. My heart chilled a bit, and I looked around.

I immediately knew I was back in Paradise. The scent of coffee filled my nostrils. I was in what looked to be a cafe – a Starbucks-looking place with a warm, reddish-brown color palette across the interior, a front counter stocked with its own mini-kitchen, shelves lined with various pastries and ingredients and a door at the upper right corner of the room. There were about six round oakwood tables around the cafe, and I immediately recognized one of the people sitting at them.

It was Darby. He'd finally removed his bandages and the dye had seeped from his hair. He was still as androgynous as ever, his dark-blonde hair long and mangy and his face still a little cut up. His right eye had long swollen shut from what I assume was leftover damage from the Suits, but he'd gotten some new clothes from when I'd last seen him. It wasn't much else except a gray, long-sleeve shirt and a striped, aquamarine cardigan and some track pants, but it was more intact than what he'd been in previously. He was sipping what seemed a fresh pot of creamy coffee. He seemed to deliberate for a bit, then looked back at me, wiping away from traces of coffee from his lip.

"Aye. Tango. Remember me this time?" he asked. "It's your old chum Darby. You ain't seen me in a bit – unless you were dreaming about me."

He laughed. It was rough, but pleasant. I slowly sat up a little straighter, Lavender standing up. She was definitely an adult and she towered over all of us, her frame somewhat plump but supple and well-endowed nonetheless. I was laying on a cheap looking sheet alongside the cover. I finally willed myself to try and stand up. My legs started wobbling and Lavender immediately leaned over to take my arm.

"Easy, there. You haven't moved in a while." She gave me a reassuring smile as she helped me up. "Can't imagine how long you've managed to go with a single arm."

Darby stared at her in mock contempt. "I've only got a single eye, you sod, and I've managed extraordinarily. Meanwhile, what the f**k have you got to show for your eight weeks here? Absolutely bloody nothing."

They shared a laugh. I was slightly confused among all other things.

Darby called out. "Mint! Oi, kid! Tango's finally awake, if you wanna stop pissing around in there and see!"

Mint.

What the hell had happened in the five days I was out?

Mint stepped out of the door at the right corner of the cafe. They were dressed in the same clothes I'd last seen them in, but the gash I gave them had faded to a scab. They quietly put their hand other their mouth as they saw me awaken.

We looked at each other for a full minute. Neither Lavender or Darby disturbed the peace. Even if I could've talked, I wouldn't have known what to say. Mint quietly mouthed something I couldn't hear, and, finally, approached me.

"Tango... Tango, are you... alright?" they asked, in the same innocently curious tone I'd grown used from them. I slowly nodded, still a little woozy. Mint's lips pulled into a very gradual smile. "I... I didn't know what I could've done, back when you passed out. Do you... remember anything?"

Once again, I silently nodded. Lavender spoke up from behind me. "I imagine you'll be grateful. If Mint didn't act quickly, you'd probably be dead. They took you into Paradise and they've been looking after you all this time."

My eyes widened as I looked back at Mint. They rubbed the back of their head. "It's true. We'd, uh, landed at some room called the drop-off. In the room past the showers, there were chutes that led down into Paradise. I couldn't leave you and there wasn't any way I'd be staying in that room with Red Clover on our tails, so I carried you out into Paradise to find something there. Three days later, I met Lavender. She had Darby with her, and, well..."

I sincerely didn't know what to say.

"They've explained everything to us, kid," Darby said. "Red Clover, the program, who we were. It's all a bunch of bleeding bullshit, that's what it is." He leaned a little past his seat. "f*****g sociopath? Bullshit. I spent the next few days trying to find your little asses when you vanished in the store. I'm no goddamned sociopath."

That gave me a little relief. I still couldn't tear my eyes off Mint, and they walked over to me, leaning down and pushing up their glasses. "I couldn't let you die. Not after you'd already saved me twice. The Suits came and attacked us a few times. They seemed to be gunning for you especially." They reached into a satchel I only realized now they were carrying and pulled out what I recognized as my knife. It was a little dented now, and there was a chip on the blade. "I fought them off. Cared for you. Carried your body around Paradise even past my own breaking point... Three days. I thought we'd both die until Darby and Lavender came along. I'm... I'm just glad you're safe now."

My eyes were starting to water. Why all that effort, just to protect me?

Lavender pat my back. "Things have been absolutely swell, Tango. We found food, some supplies, and we've found a spot – this cafe – where no Suits have appeared." She signaled to the door from where Mint had come from. "In there's another surveillance room. Nobody was using it and it looked otherwise abandoned, but we're able to see almost all of Paradise from it. We've been mapping out a route to the Courtyard. It's at the top of the facility, on the 50th floor."

I remembered Mint getting a memory spike about that. I thought to myself.

Phantom, yard, seven.

Everything was becoming clearer. I still didn't know what "phantom" meant, but yard was the Courtyard, and seven was the number I'd been designated. The cow-milk lady was named Tara Waits. Vice President of Red Clover. Still didn't know why in all hell she was in my head, but at least I knew who she was. Mostly everything else, as uncomfortable as it may have been, had been answered.

"So," Mint begun, "with what you told me and what I've told them, we've come up with a kinda theory. Red Clover wants to open the door to Heaven in the Courtyard. When the time comes to do that, we think the Director themselves will be there. Soooo... we're gonna bust them right there and then! Lure them to us and stop the program!"

Everything was finally coming to a head, then. I looked at Mint, still barely able to think straight. They reached inside their satchel and took out the communicator.

"Here," they said, passing it to me. "I put this away when I was taking care of you. I know you've got a lot of questions. I want you to be comfortable in this circumstance.

I quietly attached the tube to my neck. Darby was grinning. "I've been waiting for you to get a chance to actually talk, mate! This'll be good!"

I struggled for a first question. How do you know the door will be opened in the Courtyard? What about the rest of Red Clover? Do you know who the Director is now?

I cut it down to the only question that really mattered to me right now.

"...Why'd you go through with all that just to save me, Mint? You... You could've died. I wasn't worth it," I said, quietly.

Mint's eyes teared up and they suddenly embraced me, tight. Lavender smiled behind me.

"You are worth it, Tango. You are. You are. Don't ever tell yourself you're not..." Mint sniffed and their words became a little less clear over their own crying. "You've already saved my life. Twice. I can't even properly express my gratitude for that. I wasn't going to let my friend perish to save my own hide. I don't care what you think about that. You've been through something horrible and you don't deserve any more suffering." With both their hands on my shoulders, they looked back at me with a tearful smile. "You're worth it to me, Tango."

Mint. A companion, a guardian, a lifesaver. All because I'd given them the gift of friendship.

I embraced them back. I didn't care if it was with only one arm.

"Thank you, Alice..." I said, choking back a few tears myself. "Thank you. For everything."

Mint smiled brightly. "Right back at you."

Darby yawned. "You two are mighty sweet together, y'know that?" He looked at Lavender. "Er, you gonna fill in Tango on what we're doing next?"

"I don't see why not," Lavender said in response. Mint took a few steps back and I faced Lavender as she explained. "We're currently on the thirty-sixth floor of Paradise. The elevator goes up to the forty-sixth and no higher. We've mapped out every possible route; there don't seem to be any other elevators that go any higher. We'll be heading up to the forty-sixth floor and going up the rest of the way on foot. We've mapped out the quickest path up, so all we need to do now is get lucky. Suits are everywhere, and while none of the rooms have randomly changed like your little time in the Slaughterhouse, we can't be dead certain it won't flip on us again. Most pressingly, the way to the Courtyard cuts right through a Red Clover nest, and we have every reason to believe it's where supervisor Chayne Summers is located and running this whole gig. We stay together at all times and never leave anyone behind. Got all that?"

I nodded in understanding. "Right, ma'am."

Lavender laughed. "Oh, don't call me that. I'm a survivor, just like you."

Darby finished his coffee and set his cup aside, brushing off his mouth with a swipe of his hand. "We'll give you some time to wake up. Give us a nudge when you're ready, mate."

I weakly nodded and got up, stretching. I didn't really feel hungry or thirsty. It was probable Mint had fed me while I was unconscious. My gaze turned to the left and I saw Mint looking back, smiling.

"We're ready to take this place down," they said. "You excited?"

I quietly nodded. My eyes had fixed on the scabbed-over cut I remembered obliviously giving them prior to going comatose. The longer I stared at it, the guiltier I felt, and I frowned. Mint saw me do so and reflected my own face with a frown of their own.

"What's wrong?" they said.

"It's that cut I gave you," I said after a little bit of hesitation. "I'm really, really sorry for that. I wasn't thinking straight and-"

Mint cut me off, putting a hand on the wound. "Don't be, Tango. You saw something you didn't mean to and you had every right to lash out."

"But not at you!" I protested. My blood was starting to boil as my mind dwelt on the subject. "Why the f**k did Red Clover cover that up?! Why did they let Ash go after doing that?!" I seized my hair, grit my teeth and took a deep, trembling breath in. Everything else blurred when I thought about that, and I forced myself to sit back down and ball up. "I just... I can't f*****g think straight. Not after learning about that."

Mint paced over to me and leaned down, putting a hand on my armless shoulder, pushing the strap of the tank top back onto it and gently lifting my face to look at theirs.

"Listen, Tango," they said. "I'm not gonna rest happy until Ash pays. What he did was horrific and I want to see you happy again. If it means tearing down this entire establishment to get to him, I'll do that."

I quietly ruminated. Maybe killing Ash would give me some relief. I doubted it would be satisfactory, though. I still felt used. You couldn't change the past.

You could only hope for the future.

I quietly nodded my head. "Right," I said, simply. I stood up and called out to Darby. "Let's go. I don't want to waste a minute."

Darby was behind the cafe's counter, in the middle of refilling his own cup of coffee. He looked a little flabbergasted.

"You absolutely sure, mate?" he said, sounding skeptical. "You just woke up. We got vittles, shelter, and-"

"The sooner, the better, man," I interrupted. I looked to Mint and Lavender and put a giddy smile on my face. "Let's take down Paradise."

Darby looked at his cup of coffee for a bit, took a deep, disappointed breath in, and splashed it into the nearby sink with a sigh. "Whatever, chum," he said with a tinge of bitterness over dumping his drink.

Lavender took up. "It's settled, then. You got everything you want?"

I held up the communicator. "Everything I need."

"Alright, then," she said. "Everybody else ready?"

Darby was putting his shoes on, coughing. "Yup," he replied. "Let's stock some f*****g weapons on our way there. I'm not going up against guns with bare knuckles, satisfying as it might be to punch a Red Clover member in the face."

Mint stood by me. "Have been for a while," they said, eagerly.

Lavender walked over to the elevator, opened the doors, and walked in. Me and Mint followed suit, and Darby trailed in, dragging his feet. He didn't really look enthusiastic. I gave him a silent smile to try and perk up his spirits, and he replied with an unsettling, tooth-bearing grin (I use the term "grin" loosely) that looked as if he'd broken his jaw in an attempt to smile.

I took a few steps back with a nervous laugh at Darby's half-assed, painful looking smile. Maybe he was a f*****g demon clown or something. That'd certainly be a shocker to Red Clover.

Lavender tapped button labeled 46. The doors closed, the elevator started moving upwards, and once again, "That's the Way I Like It" started playing.

Ooh ooh ooh, ooh, ooh ooh, ooh ooh ooh...

It seemed literally the only song Paradise had. No wonder I woke up remembering it; it was such a horrifically effective ear worm that it resisted the effects of amnesia and continued repeating long after you'd forgotten everything else.

That's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh...

Darby was scratching his ear, his tone dripping with thinly-veiled sarcasm. "I haven't gotten tired of this f*****g song yet. No sirree, nuh-uh, please kill me."

I was silently moving my head to the beat alongside Mint, Lavender in the corner and stoically watching us with a small smile. I no longer felt any of the hatred I had for it previously. This would be the song that would play through my head as I marched to the Courtyard, killed Ash and Chayne, and assassinated the Director. This would be the victory tune that would sing through the heavens as me and my friends stood over the smoking wreckage of Red Clover.

When you take me, by the hand, tell me I'm your loving man

When you give me, all your love, and do it, babe, the very best you can!

It was very ill-fitting music for our triumphant march. I gave not one singular f**k. I yearned for Toucan Sam again. I missed him. I missed his bright, undying smile. I reasoned I probably wouldn't be able to eat anything more broad than Froot Loops after I got out. A decent existence to me and me alone, I figured.

The elevator stopped. The song stopped but continued playing on repeat on my head as it tended to do, specifically those first sixteen seconds.

Ooh ooh ooh, ooh, ooh ooh, ooh ooh ooh...

Mmm. That was the way I liked it.

Lavender was first to walk out; she seemed to have taken the mantle of de-facto leader. Darby, Mint, and I followed. The room ahead breached out into another series of plain white hallways like the ones I remembered from before I woke up at Jilton's. The ceiling seemed even taller and the atmosphere even more deathly quiet.

"These right here," Lavender explained, "were the research centers. They weren't actually meant to be accessed by the survivors – at least not anywhere passed the outlying hallways – but I think the effects of the dimensional warps and the Mad Rooms jolted them here. Lookie lookie." She held up an ivory-white key card with a blue stripe across it. "I woke up with this on my pocket on the twenty-second floor and used it to open a whole trove of abandoned computer rooms and storage faculties in these hallways. Works on just about any scanner-locked door in Paradise. That's convenient."

I puckered up my face and started to cry again. That was a stupid replacement for the wonderfully shitty Key of Utmost Convenience Red Clover had stolen from me. f**k that key card. f**k that showy wannabe new-age futuristic hippie bullfuck.

Lavender frowned in confusion as I abruptly teared up and Mint started laughing. "You'll shed tears over anything, won't you? Disco music, cereal mascots... key cards..."

"That key was important to me. You don't understand how important that key was to me," I feebly countered, sniffing.

"Every little mundane thing is important to you, kid," Darby said in a snarky voice. "Like that weird blue cardboard pelican or whatever you befriended."

Pelican? f*****g Pelican Sam!?

I lashed out at him, although by now my face was mixed between tears and laughter from the absurdity of it all. "D-Don't remind me about Sam! He's my best friend!"

"Oh, suuuure he was. I'm sure he had a vast f*****g emotional capacity. Ring me when you befriend a f*****g lampshade."

I snorted. "You're so f*****g insensitive, Darby."

"At least I'm not completely f*****g nuts," he replied with a grin.

We all had a good laugh. I brushed away my tears. Lavender was just staring at us in vague confusion.

"Is... Is this some sort of weird complex in-joke you guys made before we all met?" she asked in sincere bafflement.

"It's not a joke," I insisted in my most serious voice, which fell flat through the laughter I was still trying to suppress. "Toucan Sam is serious business. So is that heinous f*****g key card."

Lavender's eyes shot to the key card and she slowly tucked it away. "...Not going to bother questioning that."

Mint was struggling to breath through their laughter and was leaning on the wall for support, and Darby had a beefy-looking grin on his face. Mint finally caught their breath, readjusted their specs, and looked at me, face still screwed up in a dorky smile.

"He'll be fine, Tango," they reassured in as much a supportive voice they could manage. "We'll find him and your other stuff. Promise."

The Key of Utmost Convenience. Toucan Sam. The HF hairbrush. Even that horrifically useless cloth I never paid attention to. They were my babies, my children. I'd stop neglecting the cloth. I'd use it to clean up all my spillages. I'd use it to wipe away my tears – which, I now realized, fell forth way too easily from my eyes. I'd dampen it, roll it up, and spank a Red Clover member with it. I quietly thought to myself of all the wonderful things I could do now, with conscious knowledge that I'd once again spaced out and both Darby and Mint were breaking into laughter again behind me as I stared vacantly at the wall.

Ooh ooh ooh, ooh, ooh ooh, ooh ooh ooh...

The tune of "That's The Way I Like It" came back up again, I suddenly imagined someone pelvic-thrusting to the beat, and I completely lost my s**t. Me, Darby, and Mint started cackling like drunk hyenas as Lavender watched us with the most "what the f**k" face you could ever see on a person.

After a full minute passed and we finally got ourselves together for the second time, Lavender cleared her throat. "So. Giggleshits. You finally ready to actually move on as opposed to losing your minds again?"

I resisted breaking down into laughter for a third time and just silently nodded. My cheeks were hurting from smiling so much. Lavender considered something and looked at the closest door.

"Maybe you all need some time to calm down, first. I've got something to show you all," she said with a proud smile on her face.

She walked up to the door, located on the right side of the upper hall with another key card scanner by it, and swiped the card. A light on the door's lever handle turned green with a small beep, and Lavender opened it.

The room was incredibly big, much more than I was anticipating it to be, cubed and with a lot of open space. There were a series of six long rectangular tables that stretched almost the entire length of the room each, spaces between each other and through the walls. There were rows of about eighteen dormant, Apple-made computers under each of the desks, flat-screened monitors hooked up to them and turned off. Each had gathered dust; Red Clover obviously hadn't used this room for a while.

"Voila," Lavender said. "One of Red Clover's unused computer rooms. Meant for the staff. There's a few other independent offices scattered about the halls, but sometimes you just cram a bunch of computers together to save on money, I guess. They could really spruce up the interior design of this place."

Darby scoffed. "No f*****g kidding. Everything's pale as a f*****g ghost. Or Mint."

Mint looked back at him and smiled, knowing the comment was in good heart. "I think even the walls here are whiter than me. They're almost Conservative-level white."

I walked in. Despite the tables taking up a good portion of the room, I felt so free in this large, otherwise empty section of Paradise. Everything outside the grocery store had been narrow hallways or tightly enclosed rooms. I felt the urge to run around and found myself leaping up on top of the table to stand a little taller.

"This place is so big!" I said. "Why the hell didn't they use these shitty rooms? Seems like a waste to me."

"I wouldn't really expect efficient business practices out of Red Clover," Lavender quipped. "Let alone moral ones."

They had a point. Red Clover was about as sound a company as f*****g Oscorp.

Mint walked up to me and looked around the computer room. "Not often we've seen rooms so wide open, huh?" they said.

"I dunno," Darby said. "Outside of some of the shitty businesses, a lot of the sections of Paradise I f*****g went through were pretty empty. I mean, of course, but..."

I felt energetic. I wanted to motivate someone into dashing around the room like a sugar-addled teenager with me. Me and Mint shared our gaze for about a second, then out of impulse, I leaned down, snatched their glasses in the same hand I was holding my communicator in, and took off. Mint squeaked in surprise behind me.

"H-Hey! Tango!" they cried. "Give those back!"

I ran off, laughing through the communicator, vaulting over the tables and running to the end of the room in about ten seconds. I looked back behind me with a gleeful smile on my face as Mint awkwardly crawled over the first table, accidentally stumbled off, and fell flat on their face. They staggered up, dazed.

"Come and get 'em! " I called out. "I wanna run!"

Mint stumbled about, their right hand on the table next to them. "Tangooo," they whined. "My sight's wonky. I'm not gonna be able to!"

I groaned good-heartedly. "C'mon! You're no fun!" I darted back over to Mint. They put out their hand expectantly. I once again acted on impulse and affectionately tackled them to the ground, rearing over them with a grin. We shared a loud, amicable laugh together as Darby and Lavender looked on, Darby snickering.

"Kids," he said. "Gotta love their spirit, eh?" He nudged Lavender, who looked back at him with an amused expression.

"You're not worried about the possibility of the Suits hearing us?" she said.

"Naw," Darby said, blowing the admittedly-realistic concern off. "They wouldn't dare attack us. Not while we're having fun."

Me and Mint happily played together for a while longer as Darby and Lavender watched like stern but approving parents. It was the happiest moment we'd ever reached in Paradise.

It'd be the last, as well.

After our break in the computer room, things went by as smoothly as they could. We worked our way through the halls, went up another staircase, and ended up at none other than a Dairy Queen-looking ice cream restaurant. None of the machines used to dispel the ice cream were working and there wasn't anything else, ingredients, to-go treats, or otherwise, in stock. The refrigerator and kitchen were completely empty, and we ended up leaving in disappointment against Mint's protest that "we haven't looked hard enough!" The path cut through a neighboring fast food restaurant adjacent to the Dairy Queen, a dumpy-looking place with a toppled table that, too, was deprived of any food. We reasoned runaways must have raided the places a few weeks back. It was then I wondered if any of the other runaways realized the nature of this place – or anything revolving around Red Clover. The vast majority, at least, had been killed off by the Suits. It wouldn't be too out of the realm of possibility for some of them to have died out of thirst or hunger, some unfortunate accident, or simple suicide. Red Clover directly killing them if they were to come upon any of the inhabited surveillance rooms didn't seem likely, if Jilton's case was anything to go by. Of course, Ash might've already disposed of them. My hatred at their betrayal had waned a little with time and the revelation that they were just as much a pawn as I was. Nothing outside delusion or hypnosis, however, could excuse watching people die with a smile.

I still wondered what the other runaways had been like. Harlow had remarked none of them had been "morally upstanding" and that Billy was "run-of-the-mill." Were only the seediest people applying to the program? The hell was I like? Some backstabbing lech Tara had applied out of desperation? Once again, I craved answers. At the same time, some empty dread within me jeered that I'd end up leaving Paradise (if I left at all) with no more knowledge of who I was than how I woke up. It didn't explain why Tara registered me for some "special purpose." Nor that of the Director requesting my removal. I sighed to myself, prompting Mint to look back at me.

"Something wrong?" they asked, concerned.

I shook my head and held up the communicator. "Nothing. Just thinking about all this is all."

We looked around. We'd entered out of the fast food restaurants and entered another series of dumpy-looking green halls, the stench of s**t apparent through it. I clasped my nose and winced. That was utterly f*****g revolting.

Darby looked back. "That's horrible on the f*****g sniffers, mate. Christ, there's f*****g bathrooms everywhere in this place! Was some fucko really desperate enough to s**t on the floor?!"

Darby had said everything I had to think on the matter. I gagged a bit. "Actual f*****g Christ..." I said bitterly.

Lavender looked back at us, her own nose plugged but looking at us sternly. "Keep in mind some of the others might not have been lucky enough to run across any of the more civilized areas," she said.

"There are a pair of f*****g eateries not a walk away from here with restrooms each," Darby spat. "They must have been pretty f*****g unlucky."

We rounded a corner, found the source of the smell, and found it wasn't defecation that was giving the smell.

It was a corpse.

My blood went cold and I my heart stopped as we all simultaneously looked on it. Not far off, splayed in the middle of the path extending in front of us, was a dead body. They were indistinct, their limbs twisted into disjointed angles that all but stated their arms and legs had been broken into five different places. Their neck had been wrung and they were covered in bloody, festering cuts. They weren't a fresh kill, but Lavender's reaction sealed the fright of this moment.

"That... Oh, God, that wasn't on the surveillance of this path!..." she blurted.

The sound of something unsheathing prompted us to look behind us all of a sudden.

Suits. At least eight of them were standing in a bundled, quivering group from the path where we'd just come from. Some were still just staring at us, clicking their tweezers, but some had already brandished clownishly-exaggerated scissors and daggers, seemingly from the empty air they themselves had been birthed from. I hadn't seen them in a while. There weren't any less frightening. I still didn't know what they were. I didn't want to.

I didn't waste any time. While the others were still staring in shock at the increasingly-aggressive gathering of Suits, I took off like a rabbit from a f*****g wolf, my heart in my throat and my only thought being to get as far away from those pigfuckers as possible. I jumped clear over the body, its nauseating, rotted stench briefly filling my nostrils for a second, and I eventually heard footsteps behind me. I took all of a second to look back, saw the others were madly running after me, and looked back.

There was a sudden flash of something silver, I felt something cut through my face, and I was yanked off my feet and sent into the wall. Harshly colliding with it, through the sudden burst of pain and the dizzy blur that became my vision, I saw another Suit having materialized in front of me. I sucked in a deep breath, put my working hand to the cut to suppress the bleeding, and rolled between its legs, continuing to blindly run forth. I heard voices behind me and a clash of metal. I couldn't hear them clearly until I started to turn the corner.

"Tango! Don't!"

Huh?

The moment I whirled around the corner, I saw a new silhouette, and something, once again, whirled out from nowhere and hit me hard in the face. I felt my pain doubled as I fell back and looked up, sight in a daze and blood gushing from the cut on my cheek.

"Hey, fucker. Miss me?"

Ash.

His grinning face reared up over me and I backed up against the wall. I quickly noticed he had a crude, impromptu eye patch around his left eye – almost certainly from when I'd cut him back from the lower rooms. As I focused on that, I saw another figure behind him. From the unclear blur I saw them through, she had graying black hair, a dull red blouse, tight-fit jeans, and the face of a tiger poised to strike. She was glaring down at me with ice-blue eyes, and my gaze briefly drifted to a gray tag pinned to a black cardigan she was wearing over the blouse. It was unclear, but I could make out a few letters and I knew immediately what it said.

Chayne Summers

Executive

I reached for my communicator, and Ash's foot came out at me. I saw it kicked out of my hand, and not a second after Ash put his foot down on it and crushed it with a virulent look on his face. There went my voice. I struggled up and my head turned to the others.

Darby had cut through the Suits that had materialized in front of me and Lavender had thrown what looked like an improvised Molotov cocktail at the gathering of Suits behind her, resulting in a brilliant scarlet flare that had consumed some of the Suits and was quickly spreading to the rest. Mint was sandwiched between them, their eyes wide and focused on Ash. I heard Chayne's bladed voice cut through the bustle of noise around me.

"They've seen too much. All of them. Sedate them and bring them to the nest on the forty-ninth floor. Me and Ashton will take things from there," she ordered.

A flock of the masked Red Clover grunts flooded out from behind them, whipped out what seemed like tranquilizer guns, and fired upon the others.

I clutched my head and balled up like I'd done before seeing the pre-simulation outline notes. Everything was on fire. Everything was just noise and things banging against my head, a flurry of thoughts and a disorganized cacophony of voices and sounds that had long overwhelmed me, a clusterfuck of sensations flattening my being like an anvil.

I didn't want this to happen. Not now. Not now.

I felt my face roughly grabbed and made to stare up again. Ash was rearing over me. Hate replaced every other sensation I felt and I started to struggle.

"I finally remember what I fuckin' did to you, #7. Man, that fuckin' powder plays a fiddle with your brain, but Jesus, that was nice!"

My entire body was quaking.

"You ready to go through that ride again, lil' cherry?"

Something went into my side, Ash's hoarse, psychotic laugh filled my ears again, and the dreams of car accidents resumed.

Darkness.