Quoted By:
You are Madrigal Fitzpatrick, professional broker, reliable deputy, and increasingly the sanest woman you know. You'd been getting along just fine in life until you got dumped by your boyfriend Ellery and dragged by your frenemy Charlotte into getting parasitized by a snake, kidnapped by a crazy bitch, and implanted into a semi-solid goo body. You've been plotting your escape from dream prison for three days. Kind of. Right now, you're asleep.
Fuck!
No you're not. You are jolting up, nostrils flaring, wide awake on the stiff sofa in the beige lobby in the dark. It's fucking dark. Night? Is it still night? Shit! Did you fall <span class="mu-i">asleep?</span> What <span class="mu-i">time</span> is it?
>[It is EARLY MORNING, DAY 4]
>[Your GRIT is: Maximum]
Early morning, probably— no way Pat's up yet. Right? Unless she lurks around in the dark, which you wouldn't put past her. Shit. Shit, you must've been dreaming. Right? Something about... snakes? Maybe? You don't know how other people do that, remember their dreams. They just sieve right through you. And a good fucking thing that is, too, judging by how many cold sweats you wake up in, by how many wet eyes, by the time you screamed yourself awake and Monty came flying in at 300 fucking miles per hour all disheveled and you screamed <span class="mu-i">again</span> (because who <span class="mu-i">does</span> that?!) and then you had to explain for 20 fucking minutes to half the fucking camp that you were not being murdered and nobody else was being murdered and you were just having a nightmare. Which you couldn't even remember at that point.
Which isn't to say that you don't have ideas. You grind your teeth in your sleep and you kick and apparently you mumble, and <span class="mu-i">apparently</span> Ellery got the bright and not-creepy idea to stay up and jot the mumblings down. Which he did, for weeks, until he got bored. His illegible findings: lots of gullshit about the family. (Nothing happy.) Lots about getting shot, the boys getting shot, getting caught, cuffed, family getting cuffed— always coincided with a lot of kicking, he said— drowning, drowning, drowning, drowning, waking yourself up coughing on nothing. And that's just the specifics. Half of it's just generic shit: stuck in a closet, stuck in a cave-in, stuck in a dumbwaiter, thrown into solitary confinement, crushed into a cube from water pressure. Fessing up to the lies. All the lies. Crushed into a cube from 20 years of easy lying.
(1/4)
