Okay, here's chapter three. Hopefully someone will review this soon, so I can feel like I haven't totally wasted my time. 

Is this what it feels like to be dead?

It wasn't at all what I'd expected.

I began the string of scientific reasoning. The personality, or soul, logically had to be housed in the brain, and the brain, as anyone who had done basic biology knew, ran on electrical impulses. When someone was clinically dead, no electricity in the brain. Hence no personality. Hence no soul. None, zip, zilch.

According to science, there was no way I should be thinking about what it felt like to be dead right now. Yet somehow I was. Logically, there was only one conclusion I could reach from this train of thought. And that logical conclusion was that I wasn't dead.

I opened my eyes.

It was extraordinarily uncomfortable. Something hard was poking into my back. I appeared to be lying down face up. The light seemed too close, somehow. It was dense and greenish and scratchy – something was poking insistently at my face. I raised a hand – too heavy, although the leaden sensation had faded away – to remove it, and felt a twig intercept my fingers. It came to me.

I was in a bush.

I mused. At least I was face up, saved the indignity of having to eat dirt. I decided to sit up and then just as quickly decided against it. I didn't want a tree poking my eye out. And my glasses had gone missing.

I felt around for them clumsily. The fingers of my right hand brushed something metallic and I pulled the frames towards me, inspecting them. Crap. One of the lenses was cracked, and they were both dirty. I put them on anyway. I couldn't afford to lose my glasses. I was as good as blind without them.

My arm felt strangely itchy. I moved my hand to scratch it and screamed.

I wasn't normally a pansy but oh God it was a goddamn scorpion thingy with wings, no shit, wings, and it was on my arm and its tail was curled forwards, a black stinger with a drop of oily venom suspended from the end of it –

I leapt out of the bush that had been holding me prisoner and swatted at it. 'Get it off, get it off,' I yelled at no one in particular. The thing buzzed, wings vibrating into life, and flew off my arm, thank God. My shoulder itched, and I scratched it, feeling more than a little silly. I had the strangest feeling, as though someone was watching –

I turned. Oh crap.

Me.

The figure-hugging black tunic she wore looked surprisingly practical. The corners of a red mouth were curled upwards in amusement. Her eyes were dark, harsh and reflective. I couldn't identify their colour. She looked older than me, about eighteen or nineteen. She was tapping one booted foot, raising little clouds of dust.

'And here I was thinking there was an assassin hiding in that bush.' She had the sort of coolly sarcastic voice designed specifically for making lesser people like me feel small. Not that that was a very difficult thing to do at the moment. 'I would have killed you, little girl, do you know that?'

I stepped back cautiously, out of the bush. I looked around. I must have been hit by a car – but this didn't look like any of the suburbs near St. Helena's. I couldn't see anything except for trees and bushes and dust. And her. What had happened? Nothing looked familiar, I hadn't been here before –

And then it hit me, in a long sick rush, and I had a sudden urge to vomit.

I'd flipped out. Again. I was hallucinating; I'd gone crazy again after all my efforts to make myself appear sane so I could be normal again – And now I was going to have to go back. Back there. No. No. Oh, please no.

I wanted to scream, rip the hallucination out of my head, take it all away. But I couldn't. I had a sudden, horrifying mental image of the driver of the car – some middle-aged woman dropping her kids of to school – leaning over me and jerking back as my unconscious body began to scream. No, I couldn't do that. All I could do was go along with it. Go along with the nightmare, and try not to give it any more of myself than was necessary.

I breathed.

She spoke to me again. 'What, can't you talk, little mouse? Don't you have a name?' Her nose wrinkled.

I squared my shoulders. 'Yes. I've – got a name.' My voice sounded unsatisfactorily shaky. I cast around mentally for a name, and found one from a book I'd read not so long ago.

'Nemi. What's it to you?'

The woman smiled. 'Jun. Not that you need to know.'

I heard a shifting behind me, a rustling, like the motion of some sort of giant beast – Something wet stung my ankle, and I fell, swallowed by lead paint again.