About the same time Jack's eyes shut, Henley's open. At first, she doesn't notice; there's nothing to see.
The perfect dark locks her out of waking entirely. She could go under again with ease. Except, Henley's not comfortable. Sleeping on something very flat and hard, there's an ache in the small of her back, and her arms feel like they've been folded over her chest for the longest time. She wriggles. Anyway, she tries to; half a second and both elbows are bruised, and her nose is brushing something an inch from her face.
Panic is instantaneous. Her trapped breath, let loose, would be a scream. Both hands press up in front and slap flat on polished wood, pressing again and again when it doesn't budge.
Coffin. That's where she is, and it's the only thought Henley has, constant and deafening. Coffin-coffin-coffin, killing off every other sense, every moment except the one she's trapped inside. She has nothing but the pitch-black box. Inside and outside, she has nothing but the box.
It takes a flash of pain in her wrist, the clack of her knee against the same lid, to stop her frantic struggling.
Through the ache of her bruising kneecap, she realizes the noise it made was hollow, echoing. So a coffin, maybe, but at least she hasn't been buried yet. And though it's a little too hot to be comfortable, she's having no trouble breathing. These facts are just enough to help her swallow down that scream. While the other hand massages the still-crackling wrist Henley measures out her breathing until it levels. Not only is it a big step towards regaining some calm, but she's quieter. Henley listens intently. It's hard to be sure, they might just be waiting her out, but she can't hear anybody outside the box. So not only has she escaped burial so far, but she's not in any immediate danger of it either.
There could be something to be said for such a cruel awakening; it makes every other little thing in your day seem like such a sunbeam.
"Is anybody there?" She's so sure she won't get any answer at all that it's worth the risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention. And while she's on such a great run of luck, who can say? Maybe there'll be somebody around to help.
A few wasted seconds, another tentative, "Hello?" and it becomes clear her luck won't stretch that far. Henley's on her own with this one.
So with a sigh and a little more care this time, she pushes out her hands again. As far as she can reach, in every direction, she explores the smooth surface in front of her. She does it with her eyes shut; she can't see a thing anyway, and behind her lids she can imagine flower-speckled meadows and echoing banquet halls and wide open canyons that are not the box and bear no resemblance to it. The closeness of her roving fingertips keeps it from having any real effect. Still, she keeps trying, turning to beaches and boundless oceans and a cloudless sky.
They all vanish when her right index finger touches something colder than the coffin lid. Metal, a flat, wide bar of it pressing out into the edge of the lid and down the side. The bulges at the corner seam have grooves, a screw-head rounding out either end. A hinge.
Very slowly, so as not to lose it, her hand moves and finds the edges. Either end of the hinge blooms in a broad brass trefoil.
Brass? How does she know what colour they are, what kind of metal? Because Henley knows this hinge. She knows there's another one at about the level of her hip and one on down at mid-calf. Henley knows this box. It's not a coffin at all, it's her first act transportation box, and if it has been at all damaged in the process of her apparent kidnapping, Henley won't be responsible for her actions. Do what you will with the lady herself and the response will be measured and appropriate. But this is specialist equipment. You can't get it made just anywhere. Due to the delicate nature of certain mechanisms, you can almost never have it repaired. If this box has been damaged, Henley won't rule out violence.
For the moment, however, she puts that out of her mind. The only salient point is, Henley knows this box. She knows she won't open it, won't get so much as a line of light around the rim, by shoving the lid. The locks are entirely concealed within the wall. They can only be activated from outside. Even then, only if you're wearing the right gloves.
But just locking someone in is no trick.
Henley shifts all her weight to the right hand wall, angling as much of her body sideways as she can in the space. Then, hands and feet all pressing out as hard as she can, she braces. When she shoves again, it's not to open the lid. The twist of her core throws the box just a few inches up on one side. Not much, but enough to prove to Henley that this can be done. Another push and she gets the coffin up on its corner. For one frozen moment it could fall either way. Henley holds her breath and ends up flat on her back again. It's a mistake she doesn't make twice. Next time she finds herself on the pivot, she jerks hard, bruises hip and heel and head all to send the box crashing onto its narrow side and then its face. The back of her hand saves her nose from breaking.
After that, it couldn't be easier. Just a matter of worming a hand around to her back, pressing on a panel behind her ribs until it clicks and opens. Then she can reach out and pull the simpler latch on the coffin's back.
The trapdoor pops up. Henley climbs out and lies for a second on an unfamiliar floor, letting all the little aches of her escape cry out for a minute. You have to let them have their way. Force them under immediately and they'll punish you later, rear up screaming at the worst possible moment, stiffen you throbbing sore when you ought to be asleep. You have to acknowledge them. Anyway, that's what Henley tells herself in this moment when she cannot move.
In the moment after, when she is pushing the pain away, she tells herself the facts.
Rebecca came for her. It was Rebecca's intention to reveal her to the world, to strip her down to her fiercely-defended identity and to rain down upon her all the unthinkable problems that would come along with that. To this end, Rebecca drugged her. And that is where Henley quite literally loses the plot because that, evidently, has not come to pass and, quite contrary to being unmasked, she has been hidden away.
When she finally sits up to take stock of her surroundings, she finds that the coffin she woke in was just a box within a box.
The room around her is stark and empty. The floor she's sitting on is bare concrete, as are the walls, and unpainted. There are no windows and only a single bulb hanging down from the ceiling. The door is behind her, so that at first glance, not even seeing that, her heart stops just the way it did at the thought of being buried alive. Irrational, this time, and much easier to breathe through. A glance over her shoulder and it's gone.
Admittedly, the vanishing of her fear has less to do with the glossy red door and more to do with the discovery that there is a second box lying right behind her.
Henley edges up to sit next to it. It is identical to the box she woke up in, and just as immovably locked. No echo comes back when she raps on the lid – not empty, packed with something soft and, Henley suspects, warm. Something like her. She lowers her head, listens with her ear to the wood for any sign of life. Whether she can't hear anything or there's nothing to hear is too hard to tell and too hard a question. Quick enough she gives up on listening. She kneels instead and pushes at the coffin's top edge. But the outside is polished smooth. The lid sits flush, with no lip. Far from flipping the box, she can't even get it off the ground.
From sheer frustration she cries out and slaps the side of the box.
When the contents of the box slap back, she cries out louder. A groggy yell joins her, harmonizing for just a second before it strengthens to drown her out. Henley tries to cut in, through the pleas for help, the demands for an explanation. She tries to be comforting and calming. That is, right up until she finds she recognizes the voice.
"Wait. Danny?" Nothing, no response, too busy cursing his captors to even know she's here. The speed and strength of her surging annoyance washes out any doubts she might have had about who's in there. One balled-up fist swung sideways like a hammer, she pounds the side panel by his hidden head. In his startled silence, "Shut up!"
"…Henley?"
"Thank you."
"You were being nicer before you knew it was me."
"You ought to know better. All that screaming and yelling – I could have been anybody."
"What screaming? There wasn't any screaming, Henley, it was j-" She tunes out. Rolls her eyes, sighs and, while resisting the urge to punch the side of the box again, finds that there is something about all of this that she has missed since she saw him last.
But it would never do to let Danny know that. She barks, "Stop whining and press over away from my voice."
"Press where? I can't move."
"We have to get the box to flip. Shift your weight."
A little more gentle guidance – and another sharp order or two – he gets the idea. When the coffin rocks Henley grabs it underneath, pushing until she feels the stretch across her back and down both arms, until her legs tremble with the effort of trying to turn it over. Once it's on its side, she turns her shoulder against it. The box falls with a crash and another yell from Danny.
Henley opens the latch and leaves him to knock the door open himself. He rises up with one hand pressed to an aching nose. Quick, almost grudging, Henley asks, "You okay?"
"Yeah."
"That was way harder than when I did it. Have you put weight on?"
"It's toning, more than anything. Muscle weighs more than-", but that's when he hears the mocking note in her voice and stops himself. He turns to glare. Right before his eyes can settle on her, Henley stands up out of his sightline. She goes to the red lacquer door with the words, "Nice hair," chasing her. Danny himself comes about thirty seconds after, standing right by her side. By then, Henley has already tried to turn the handle and inspected the surface of the door for any visible lock mechanism. There doesn't even seem to be a hinge. She tells him as much. Danny nods, accepts, then goes on to check both of these things anyway.
Once they're both satisfied, they fall still, stumped, both staring at the door's gleaming panels as if it might be intimidated into opening.
Somehow, this approach fails them. They give up in the same moment and wheel away. Henley is already sitting down as Danny is closing the door of the box he arrived in. He doesn't settle by her, but wanders on to check the walls she has already studied. He asks, dimly thoughtful, "What's the last thing you remember?"
"Dropping a sandbag on Trapdoor Becky. You?"
"A blue-lipped clown darting me with a gun she took out of her afro."
Henley feels those words sink in, painfully slow, and by the same increments turns her head to look directly at him. His expression, or lack thereof, tells him she heard right. Her gaze swings back to centre and, "You win." Soon after that she straightens her shoulders, shakes the daze off. "Okay," she begins, "We need to catch each other-"
But Danny had begun too, and in the same moment. "I meant it, by the way. I said it like I didn't, but-"
"Mean what?"
"Your hair. I can tell you hate it and I understand why, but it's nice, it suits you and-"
And as little as she understands of what is happening, as impossible as their situation seems, she's glad he's here. Henley missed it all, she knows nothing of how Danny came to be here. To her, it has the kind of the magic none of them is capable of, to lose consciousness in the dark, alone and in danger, and somehow to wake with the one person you might have called out for.
But it would never do to let him know that. Snapping, "Danny? Focus."
She waits, but no witty retort is forthcoming. Henley glances over her shoulder. It's only a reflex; any time Danny appears to resist his perpetual desire for the last word, she likes to check he's okay. This time, the reflex turns into a double-take; he's at the far wall where the room is darkest, both hands pressed against it, leaning close.
"Danny?"
"Come here a second."
Henley goes to him, and as she does she feels the air around her getting colder, clammy. It sticks to her skin like city smog. When she mimics him, laying her hands to the stone, she almost pulls away again. The wall is freezing, weeping slick with slime. "Damp."
"More than damp," Danny mutters, "It's wet. And listen-" Faint behind dungeon-thick walls, but there's a rushing noise, like holding certain shells against your ear. "Henley, I… I think we're underwater."
More reflexes; there are thoughts behind them but they are too quick to articulate. The result of them is this; Henley, after feeling her own pockets and finding them empty, wheedles a hand into one of his and finds a single copper cent. She pitches it hard behind her, back to the gleaming red door. The noise it makes when it bounces off the surface is sharp and metallic. And hollow.
By the time the coin has stopped spinning she has caught up with it. This time she looks past the surface of the door, turning her head to see that it has unframed edges. The red metal ends a millimetre shy of the wall. That's why the handle wouldn't turn, why there doesn't seem to be a lock. The door has no hinges because it was never designed to open.
Danny's logic follows a step behind hers; "It isn't real." By the time he adds, "But if the door isn't real then how did we-?", Henley is already pushing one of the coffins up on top of the other.
If they're underwater, then this is a cellar. If the door is fake, there's only one way they could have gotten down here. Henley figured out the probable position of the trapdoor by looking at how the boxes fell next to each other. Her fingertips have found an edge in the concrete ceiling by the time Danny has climbed up to join her.
"Boost me," she tells him.
"Wait. We don't know what's up there."
"And what's down here?"
He looks around at empty boxes and algae-scented nothing. With a sigh, he turns back to her. He doesn't quite take her hand but touches it, fingers trailing down the bones that spread from her wrist. "Sure about this?"
Her hand catches hold of his for all the answer she'll give. It might be a terribly sweet moment, but it doesn't last long enough. Henley lets go because, in the end, she asked for a boost and hasn't gotten one yet. Danny takes the hint. He crouches to take hold of her boot – "The heels are never going away, are they? How many times have I had a spike heel in my palm?" – and pushes her up into the ceiling.
With her shoulder grinding against what appears to be a paving slab, Henley's not paying a lot of attention, but it sounds a lot like Danny keeps talking down below her. She catches something about Rebecca Dasko and tunes in for a second. When it turns out he's not giving her any useful information, just some ill-constructed, stumbling apology, about dragging her into this and not protecting her and other things that make minimal sense, she tunes back out again and concentrates on moving the stone above them.
She gets a corner out of place, up onto the floor above. After that Danny shifts his grip; her heel bites his knee now, and with both arms he braces her legs so she can put all her strength into shoving it out of her way. The second there's room Henley hauls herself up.
Sitting on the edge of the opening, she surveys her new surroundings.
Or anyway, they ought to be new.
"You're not going to believe this," she breathes.
"What?" he asks. "What won't I believe? Henley? What's up there?", but she's having trouble answering. It's not just that she's stunned, or that something prevents her – it's simply that there's nothing to tell him.
What's up here? Nothing. A grey floor. Grey walls. An empty room with cool wet air and a bare lightbulb. In front of her, there's a gleaming, lacquered door, in a shade of red that hits the retina like a gunshot.