A/N: Thank you to everyone who's still reading this far in. I know I've gone pretty dark and experimental with these characters and it's a relief that no virtual torches and pitchforks have been erected in retaliation *knock on wood*

The downward pull slowed at some point, solidified into a stretch of slippery floor with no impact.

I found myself sitting back on my heels, vision not totally cleared from the stars and whiplash. Wherever I had landed happened to be cold. Very cold.

The cool air was antiseptic, neutralizing my senses. Pulling away my sweat, my aches, my passions until there was nothing to do but rock on my knees and chatter. Cold, like pain, was all consuming and transportive from personal concerns. It numbed my brain of its desire to to escape Dark Turnabout, and my willfulness not to be reined in by any one man or woman or system. My hope for a life worth motivating me to real responsibility, and my fear that I might already be lost to madness or eternal, virtual purgatory seemed remote and nonessential.

My skin clenched possessively over my muscles and my metabolism slowed so that I was in a not altogether unfortunate state of semi-suspended animation.

I pulled more and more into myself so that the hollowness in my chest became an anchor to the icy floor. The thoughts that passed through were persuasive to self annihilation. What was the point of ever moving again or exploring more? Why not freeze to death? At least it would be a choice that was totally and completely my own. Then I could be free from Jary, the institute, my family, my nagging, my puzzle piece past and introspective neurosis altogether.

The casual urging to slow death made an odd sort of sense.

I knew I could make fast work of it if I stripped to total exposure. With shaking fingers I began to unbutton my oxford.

Yield your hands and rise, Sarah. There is no end of the road for you here. Don't let your grim stepmother's psyche infect you.

Jary's voice was tight and humorless this time around, and my recognition of its rationale was a spark of light through the heavy blanket of depression that had suffocated my will. It suddenly stood out to me as clear madness that seconds, minutes ago a wave of pessimism had taken me with such a quiet force that I actually had contemplated suicide.

So that's how it was, I thought. I really was party to an invasion of my family's headspace, or at least a surreal and strange replica of them. But it still didn't compute that Jary would know anything about them to program such psychological scenes. Each one had its own emotional atmosphere and architecture.

"How are you doing this? You haven't even met Toby or Irene."

I don't have to know them. You've made easy work of the layout for each and everyone of your "bosom companions". This is all being pulled from your subconscious impressions and dormant telepathy. Surprisingly immersive and satirically cut throat for how thick headed you are to your own gifts, isn't it?

The cold air had taken my breath but Jary's explanation made the back of my throat burn. All the strange bits of dialogue that came to me without meaning or context, the strong, foreboding panic attacks I had before Meyers so much as mentioned a grant program or Jary King. And then there was the blank slate for the six months prior to Irene and Richard's decision to turn me into the institute. Had they gotten rid of me because I displayed extra-perceptory conditions or claimed to? Had I frightened them? And if that was the case, then maybe Dr. Meyer's traumatic effects on my brain with the shock treatment weren't an accident at all.

The edge of a deeper pool of potential betrayal and conspiracy disenchantment loomed and I couldn't bear to mull it over too long. Also, this claim was coming from Jary, and I couldn't trust the man who he put nothing past scheming and leaving cryptic clues for his entertainment. After all, Toby's whore-madonna complex and religious ego could have been nothing more than a bit of inspired improv from Jary. I hardly knew enough about my half-brother to cross-check his true self.

"It's easy to claim that when I haven't interacted with Toby or Irene since they practically first entered my life." I rubbed my tense brow. "You could have done some basic internet search and bs'ed the details that you knew I wouldn't know to confirm or deny. You've raised an interesting possibility, but nothing with you has been a foundation for me to lean on."

Hmmm I see I haven't helped matters with this approach.

This approach? Which part?

I whipped my head around as if I had spoken the questions aloud and stiffened as I took in the full panoramic of the room I was in. Jary had clucked against my attempt to leave my flesh open to the grasping chill, but when I let my eyes wander I felt naked anew in surprise.

Misshapen, raw meat hung from metal hooks across a pole, each of them packed in thick plastic. The cement floors and walls surrounding were coated in a thin sheet of frost.

"I think this will be an improvement." Jary's voice came at my back, tightened to mortal range. "Put us on equal ground again."

On legs as cramped up as my fingers, I rose and turned. His blond head was lifted high while his casual, reposed position against the frozen wall to his right exuded calm.

"You think being my escort through a meat locker is going to repair things between us?" I asked.

He scrunched up his nose and narrowed his eyes with farcical uncertainty. "It couldn't hurt."

I certainly preferred it to his condescending great and powerful Oz routine, but he didn't deserve lush praise. Playing fair would have been letting me exit his mad little creation completely.

I scoffed softly and began to make my way through the aisle of arctic carcasses when a disturbing deviation of shape and color caught the corner of my eye.

It didn't take much closer inspection to realize it was a woman, and that woman was Irene.

I felt dizzy. It was too awful, too morbid to be real and yet there she was, packed away in plastic wrapping like so much of the hanging meat around her. Irene if she had been about 25 years younger, naked, and dead. .

"Oh god," I exhaled. "Who would do this?"

"Irene herself of course. It's important to her that she lock away her flesh in all its aging triumphs and tribulations throughout the years." Jary's hand came around to rub up and down my arms, warming them, and I was too startled by the sight before me to shake him off. "You're not looking at a corpse but a time capsule, perfectly preserved and salted for her greatest dissatisfaction and self loathing."

I couldn't imagine why such enviable beauty would bring her self loathing then or now.

Plump, peaches and cream skin glowed beyond the covering with the kind of vitality that made it seem possible that she could awaken at any moment. Her naked body was lean and full and toned to near perfection and her blonde hair fell around her shoulders in voluminous, ice blonde waves. I tried to picture how much softer her expressions might have been, how much freer she might have walked in that younger form. I wondered if she was kinder then for having so much going for her or if her assets had made her just as stuck up and icy.

I knew so little about Irene. She had never treated me in a way that warranted much curiosity, but now I had a chance to understand what might have broken Irene into the irritating shrew she was.

At the top of her packing, a thread hung with a memo attached. A tag of some type. I drew it out toward me without breaking its fastening. The transparent, plastic film was marked USDA Prime.

It read on the opaque card under it:

You could be a model, you know.

My beautiful little girl. I'm so proud of you.

I don't mean to bother you, but I have to say - you're incredibly beautiful.

Girl, I would kill to look like you. Don't even complain.

Four quotes, all non sequiturs, and all seemingly from different people.

Jary was practically mouth breathing at my heels so I knew he had rubber-necked over my shoulder enough to skim the tag as well.

I looked up at him. "She must have really taken these compliments to heart. They must have defined how she felt about herself... maybe even how she saw her entire value to the world."

He lifted a brow. "You're a quick study. I'm proud to witness you stepping up to your acute intuition on this. Irene, like many mortal women, was indoctrinated to put her stock in her youth, beauty, and sex appeal to men over any other characteristic of identity or motivation in life."

I chose to disregard the odd distinguishment of "mortal" women. Richard and my mom had never fixated on my appearance much outside of telling me to change out a ratty shirt or brush bed head or something obvious like that, but it wasn't hard to imagine what it might be like to develop a complex over it. My mother turned heads everywhere we went and everyone, from bank tellers to cab drivers treated her with a giddy sort of generosity, as if they were being paid a visit from royalty and not a bored housewife from two neighborhoods over. Her beauty and charm were dazzling, and I had been so proud of her particular shine. Proud in the way little girls are when they try on their mother's lipstick and heavily douse on her perfume when she's out to get a sense of what it might be like to walk in the footsteps of such mature glamour. But that was all before she left. Before her beauty and captivating presence became a one way ticket to abandonment, hot lights and elevated stages. Ones too bright and too high for her to see the hearts she was breaking.

"It's a shame that beauty alone is enough to mark a woman for success and admiration," I said.

"Even more shameful that the degradation of it with time and life's hardships is enough to sink all those advantages away like quicksand."

It was my turn to pull a quizzical look. Jary King, for all his obvious faults and machinations, was an incredibly attractive man and I couldn't imagine that his charm and appeal hadn't opened plenty of doors for Labyrinth Games Inc. and Dark Turnabout VR that would have been difficult for your run of mill software engineer.

Most egregiously, he would probably lose nothing by aging and giving into gravity. Society treated older men with dignity and respect, if not more so than when they were in the peak of their vitality. If he empathized with Irene at all, it could only be conceptually.

"Not that you'll ever know," I couldn't help muttering aloud.

Jareth stilled his dance-like fidgeting and drew close enough to back me up into one of the frozen cuts. "I know better than anyone what it is to be crippled by my own form. Small, wrinkled as a raisin. Deformed and senseless so that my sharp mind dulled to a whisper in the dark. I know what it is to be sunk deep into the dirt, half eaten by worms and rot, and only scattered memories to remind me that I ever existed."

He peered at me so intently, so close that my whole being seemed to be filled with waiting...but waiting for what? I couldn't understand the conflicting feelings fluttering around near the surface of my chest. Deja vu, sadness, and something that cleaved my heart and put it back together.

He continued, his eyes dropping to fix on my lips. "But that was until you saw the good in me and reset me, bone by bone until you could hold me in the palm of your hand bigger than the earth. You let me start over and made me in your own, perfected image."

Quicker than I could do more than gasp, Jary's fingers wrapped around my wringing hands and brought them to either side of his face. "Well, what do you make of me now, Sarah? Am I still everything you wanted in the beginning? Do I still make the cut of your beauty standard?"

The tone and words were mocking, but his eyes betrayed a fierce sincerity. It was another insane claim. As if I had the power to create a person or morph their physicality. An intuit voice from down below said As insane as a VR environment that breaks the turing test. As insane as a snow owl in Amherst or all those little snatches of memory that make more sense than they should.

At some point I had to accept moving forward open to the uncanny, blind as I was. Only then would I find what I was searching for beyond the looking glass.

I let my eyes roam over Jary as if seeing him for the first time. Looking for signs of preference personal to me past his obvious, conventionally attractive features. His body, clothed in a black tunic and pants, was toned yet lean and graceful in a way that was almost too delicate and unthreatening for a man.

And I knew that if I had made him that way, it was effective for making him alluring without towering over myself. His eyes were a piercing shade of blue, which had always been attractive to me in men, but the permanently dilated pupil in the left seemed to mark him as having a separate self; a darker, enigmatic, existential shadow side that I recognized without fully grasping. The arched brows, dark lashes, high cheekbones and narrow jaw were androgynous to a degree that made me confused. Confused, maybe, because I liked their non-conformist glamour. He was all male and, yet, ethereally feminine to a degree too.

He was nearly perfect, until you got to the misaligned irises, the slightly crooked, thin enamel of his teeth, the hooded lids. Just enough flaws to tell a story. Perfect in his imperfections. Every part of him a marble, a sewing needle, a photograph tucked away in a shoebox of personal history and meaning that no outsider would be able to decipher.

When my eyes raised back to meet his, the dizzying current of depression, anxiety, confusion, and hopelessness were smoothed over with a shot of relief. He hadn't been lying. We had known each other intimately.

"Yes," I answered simply, not wanting to elaborate more and traverse into more uncomfortable, unsure territory than we already had. "You make the cut."

He pulled his head in close enough for a kiss and I felt an unwelcome surge of excitement. "Good. You may not get to enjoy me in the apex of my particular glow for much longer. You've kept your skull thick to epiphany and time is short in the mortal plane."

I could feel his chest's movement against my own as he breathed. His flirting was getting dangerously close to being effective.

I pulled away and stepped ahead of him, stopping short to point to another body of Irene's on the metal hanger ahead.

There was less frost around the exterior edges of the packing so I could make out quite clearly that this was a more mature, womanly Irene. Most of the baby fat around her temples and cheeks was gone, her skin had more texture around the T-zone and thinned lids, and her body had exchanged its taut definition for rounded curves. Yet she was positively lovely for those changes. She looked more femme fatale than the unsettling lolita she had been in her youth. I couldn't imagine how anyone could feel differently.

That's why it surprised me to read the stamped film over the tag on this one's packing. USDA Choice. Why not prime anymore?

Under the graded film it read as follows:

As a woman reaches 30 and beyond, her market value rapidly decreases and she becomes less attractive to men.

There is a saying, 'Men age like fine wine, women age like milk.' It's the truth!

Sorry, honey, you take a cute picture, but you just can't compete anymore against the younger, prettier girls I've got coming through my door everyday. The modeling game is an evolutionary one. It's best that you snatch up a husband while you still can.

I really had a good time tonight, but….this is awkward. You're wonderful, but I noticed you ate second helpings of bread and I only want to take a chance on a woman past her prime if she's going to take exceptional care of herself. Molly told me you used to model and all, so I expected more from you.

Sweet girl, you need to take Dr. Moher's card. He fixed me right up. Minimally invasive. Never let time take away your greatest asset.

Reading through the misogynistic, ageist bullshit made my skin crawl. Thirty was barely cutting into a life, not even into the middle, and Irene might as well have been a fossil to whoever these assholes were. If they thought this was old, they must have found any woman old enough to earn golden, extended years invisible. That wasn't a reality I wanted to accept or live in and I couldn't imagine Irene suffered through that messed up perspective without major damage.

I shook my head. "I don't get it. She's still so young and beautiful here. They had to be trying to bring her down for other reasons."

Jareth stretched the tag into himself to skim over. He nodded. "Take your pick: sexual jealousy, sexism, fragile egos, shallow superficiality. Women, for all their physical delicacy, have the ability to create and carry on life itself. Women, for all the roadblocks they face in careers or any life of influence they might pursue outside of neutral domesticity, have the advantage of sensitivity and intuition and wider neural pathways surrounding base intelligence. As fearsome, intimidating and virile as a man can become, one beautiful, assured woman can reduce him to a quivering, uncertain child again. It is these inconvenient truths that slowed the right to vote and own property. That erected the glass ceiling and pushed men into the evil of distracting women to flimsy concerns with their looks."

"Are you implying you believe women are superior to men?" His beautifully laid out argument brought out a resounding hurrah in my heart, but with Jary, it was hard to tell if he was building toward some twisting irony or was being truly sincere. He seemed to think him and I were of a different class than human beings, which left some doubt as to what his social perspective might be. I thought gender equality was as positive an ideology as could be reached when it came to gender politics.

"No doubt, my dear. God herself is proof. Man was created to be a companion and guardian of life on earth, but there are billions of other worlds, other universes and dimensions where there is no such division of sex. In fact, more often than not, life on other worlds defies any clean cut definition of gender identity as you know it. But you already know all this deep down. You've just forgotten."

"But where does that leave your ego? Are you really above being threatened by women?"

He flashed a smile that sent my pulse racing all over again. "I gratefully yield to my betters and best. I would be nothing without my goddess and my position as a coveted companion brings its own unique satisfaction. I've never had any power over you - none but the illusion of it, and even that was calculated games and theater. All for you."

"Progressive." I said it dryly, but it was the truth in theory anyway. If he meant one word of it, he was in a league of his own. But that didn't necessarily redeem him from his obvious sickness and control schemes.

He threw back a wink and turned to step on ahead of me along the aisle of meat shelves this time. Our boomed footsteps on the sweating cement floor went on long enough to create a grave rhythm against the buzz of the fluorescents and refrigeration cycling. The crimson chunks gave way to rust colored blobs, and the marbling gave way to more stringy tendons and muscles.

I glanced over Jary's shoulder for an idea of how much farther there was to go, but the dark vanishing point seemed neither closer nor further than before.

"There's more meat between...Irenes..." I reflected aloud. "I suppose that's meant to represent the passage of time or something?"

"Could be. Or it could just be for atmospherics. Irene has a flair for the dramatic like anyone else."

First Toby and his church of religious ego and depraved desire, and now Irene's cold debasement of herself to nothing more than meat. I feared exploring any more subconscious basements for clues in the cobwebs and what they might do to the few relationships I had in my life.

On that thought I halted in my tracks. Irene's latest body bag was fogged with a layer of moisture that belied a disturbing freshness. The other ones had been preserved in various degrees of ice.

"Jary, look."

"Good eye."

He turned and lifted the body partially off of the rack for both of us to view. It was in that moment, holding up the other side of Irene's partially warm, packed body for closer inspection that I realized I'd become as much of an impartial voyeur as any of the men and women that had graded Irene on a narrow scale all her life.

Heat rose up and tingled in my face and throat, washing away the cold reserve. I couldn't look at Jary or allow my eyes to graze and regard what was on display beneath the plastic. The pattern didn't take a rocket scientist. I knew she must be older, and less vital in both subtle and less delicate ways skin deep.

"I hope this is the last one," I sighed. "This is getting too creepy for me."

"It has to be, check the tag." He stretched down the white card for me to read.

The top read USDA Select and I rolled my eyes.

Below it followed:

It's not that women over 35 are disgusting, it's just that they don't exist to me. I'm not going to lie about my taste to appease your gender politics. I'm not interested in taking this past dinner. You should have been more forthcoming on your profile.

You can't expect men younger than your father to show any interest in your dating ads. The forties are denial, denial, denial, but then you wake up and no young men are at your heels, no middle aged men ready to hold open a door. Your best bet are the men two steps from the casket.

Oh Irene. That man in the produce aisle wasn't staring- he was glaring! I love you, girl, but not one of us have that shiny mark of youth to shield us anymore. Embrace it. I've shed the mass sex appeal for me-time and life is good. Nothing good wine can't fix!

Alright, after examining your proportions and bone structure portfolio, I'd say an S-line mini facelift, blepharoplasty and some fat grafting around the temples, lower lids and nasolabial folds to start, so we can correct most of that slack elasticity and hollowing. Six months out, we'll move onto to cheekbone implants and a sliding genioplasty to add some needed definition from the years of volume loss. How do you feel about juvederm filler in your lips?

Jary was the first to break the silent disgust. "Damn shame. Aging should draw more respect and dignity, not less of it."

"She's so pretty though... even now," I admitted aloud before I could, in my general history of animosity toward Irene, redact it. "Even if she didn't get all that work done or wear all that makeup. Age doesn't really diminish anyone who was beautiful to begin with."

"Why, thank you Sarah." Irene's shaking voice cut in like a slap to the back of the head and both of us snapped around to face the horror scene that waited for us at the end of the hanger lineup. "It means a lot coming from a young, sparkling bud like you."

An uncontrollable shudder swept up through my body and my heart pounded in my ears. I fumbled for a hold of the free metal of the rod to my left and missed, but Jary was quick to grapple me up from tripping to the ground with his arms wrapped up under my shoulders.

The harsh lights flickered on and off, highlighting and creating an inkblot after image of the blood. So much blood. Speckled on Irene's waxen face that smiled darkly at me, on the meat saw she held in black lacquered butcher gloves, on the body that shouldn't have been.

"Oh my god."

"Turn away from it, Sarah. Turn back." Jary warned in a hushed tone at my ear.

But as stomach turning as the sight was, I couldn't. Because the girl on the chopping block was me. Me, torn open from the rib cage down. The peachy undertone of my skin said it was fresh.

My shaking hands immediately rose to touch at my torso in an empathetic confirmation that I was still in one piece where I stood. "What are you doing?" I couldn't help croaking.

It was plain to see what she was up to with her callous, steel edged tools and plastic coveralls, but I needed to resolve to myself the monster, the myth, the broken woman that was Irene. I also needed to ground myself back in some semblance of reality that assured me I was still walking in the right frame of consciousness and not on that dirty table with half my organs teased out. I couldn't let my mind drift to that dull-eyed girl.

She pointed to my gored torso with the saw. "Preparing to dispose of the new stock. It wouldn't do to let meat this fresh go to market. One bite, one sniff, and all my other supply would have to get marked down."

"I'm not a piece of meat, Irene and neither are you."

Irene blinked then smiled, or rather bared her teeth and came around the table to stand before me.

Jary's hand squeezed my shoulder. "Sarah," he said. "We've seen enough of her troubles. It's time to go."

I shrugged him off gently. This wasn't the same as with Toby. The threat was more direct, the motives just as tangled but I could actually sympathize with Irene's struggles. The patriarchal road she had been forced to tread had failed her and left her without a shred of dignity past the surface. I couldn't bring myself to turn and flee before giving her a chance at self reflection.

Irene shook her head slowly. "It's easy to assume that women are more than meat when you're tender and full of young blood. I knew from the moment I saw that theater post of your mother on Richard's dresser that I was in for trouble. You could be her twin. The same raven locks that never saw a split end, and your cherubic prettiness. That face bought you an endless childhood so you were like an oversized infant into your fifteenth year and able to rule over your poor father like he was your whipping boy and servant. If I so much as set a boundary, requested a chore, your father and the whole fucking town were up in arms to 'rescue' you from your wicked stepmother. Every store, every block party, barbeque, school function I stepped foot into with you in tow had me steam rolled into invisibility for my gorgeous daughter. For the little angel they assumed you must be, when what you really were was a demon straight from the depths of my personal hell, sent to remind me of everything time had taken from me. The pretty privilege, the easy kindness and respect, the opportunities around every corner, while I had to be content to be a maternal figure, alienated in my own home and some sort of frumpish consolation prize for a man that left me cold in the sheets every night."

It felt like she was talking about someone else. I couldn't recall making so much of a splash as that during my youth, or at least I wasn't aware of any magnetism at that time. There was the occasional hair ruffle and reference to Linda's resemblance, or a tilted smile at my theatrical antics and precociousness, but nothing close to the picture Irene painted. Either way, it hardly supported her morbid, shallow obsessions.

"Superficial niceties or lack thereof shouldn't determine your self worth or what kind of relationship we have. Initially, I saw you as an unworthy replacement for my mother and acted petulant and unfair, and that's on me, but there were times when I was vulnerable for support and understanding if you had only taken the time to see it. If you had seen me as a daughter and not a rival, we might have become friends."

Jary clutched at my shoulder again but didn't say anything. A dormant, analytical part of me knew his instincts for the whims of Dark Turnabout must be keener than a newbie like myself, but I wanted to hear her out. I felt I still had a little more time.

"Friends?" The gritted teeth that acted as a mockery of a smile softened, then wavered completely. Softly, Irene shook her head. "No, no, no. It's too late for that. It's too late for me to be nice and gentle. I have to think about myself now."

The gloved hand holding the dripping saw blade rose and I leaned back into Jary's protective arms.

"The best I can do for you now is preserve you for my collection. Maybe then I can keep you around for reference. In memory of your beauty."

"Collection?"

"I guess Toby never showed you my dolls. Set into perfect, ivory colored china. You'll be the prettiest one. Top shelf and dressed in the best maroon velvet."

My heart began to pound.

"Get behind me," Jary hissed. He said this more to prepare me than to give me any autonomous direction, because he braced me by my upper arms and shoved me backward and around, making my hair whip in front of my face and my shaking legs stumble into the nearest hanging flank.

A yawning hum of energy drew my attention to my immediate right and I witnessed the wall, floor and storage around it warp and bend, gellify around the edges into a colorless cavity. My vision flashed back to Jary and I saw that both his arms were extended at Irene, who was frozen in the active, melting blur like the hole's edges.

"Jump in!" His voice jumbled in and out of the hollow's energetic call.

My arms tightened around the plastic wrapped behemoth of frozen cattle behind me and I set in my heels against the sudden increase in the void's vacuum of power. "No!"

It looked like a mouth with an endless throat leading into dissolution and chaos. I wouldn't have anything to hold onto or ground me and I had already fallen in Dark Turnabout's abstract dimension so many times. I was terrified to return to the tortuous first drop on a rollercoaster, except with no metal bar over my lap or predictable track to assuage the descent and disturbed senses. Nothing could make me take that plunge again. Not willingly.

The suction of the gaping hole turned into a windstorm that Jareth had to shriek over. "You must go in, Sarah! I'll follow after you!"

Inside I screamed another resounding No and perhaps a feeling in my chest closer to please, god, no but by that point, the powerful pull left me sure that so much as parting my lips would allow the groaning monster of dark nothingness to untether my intestines from my body like Irene had gutted my doppleganger on the metal table.

One by one, I had to watch my fingers lose their ability to grip onto the frozen meat flank behind me and prepare to tighten my abdomen against the coming weightless thrust into hell's cavern.

I gritted my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, and it was my last and only bracing against the shock of the horizontal slide and the scream of energy that gripped me with a madman's certainty.