She opens her eyes and she sees a light so blinding it could be the sun if the sun only were fluorescent blue, and for one mad moment she is thinking about angels and sweet-faced girls with long eyelashes and high-collared shirts and she is thinking that she has found her way home, but then her eyes focus, and she realizes she's alone.

"You're lucky, you know." The voice is subdued, dusty, dry. "You're lucky that you were hit so close to here. Lucky that you still had so much magic in you. You might have wound up dead if it weren't for that. You're lucky that I'm a genius."

Clarabelle groans, low in her ribs, and she says, eloquently, "God."

"I'm Kenspeckle, actually." Her eyes are still trained on the ceiling and she'd never realized that fluorescent lighting makes a sound until Lenka happened, because Lenka had opened her world to a whole other dimension mapped over the same terrible places and the one victory she feels in her weak, soft limbs, laid ineffectual by her sides, is that she probably doesn't look pretty at all right now.

"Kenspeckle." Her voice sounds weak to her. "Shit. This was a terrible first day of work, wasn't it?"

"Week." His voice is clipped, polite. "You were unconscious for quite a while."

"Jesus." Her eyes slide closed and something inside her is curled up, shivering and fetal. She falls asleep…

… Wakes up and the world has lost its shine.

"I was awake before?" Her voice is higher than she remembers hearing it chime since she was eleven and she learned to speak with her whole throat. "It seems hazy." Distant. Dazy, and yet she isn't thinking this, her mind is blank, and all there is is the sound and the words that she didn't plan and the light above her head.

"Only to be expected," Kenspeckle says politely. "You should be able to stay up longer this time, though."

Muscle memories fizz their way up to the forefront of her mind, pinpricks and scalpel cuts and wound after wound. "I was hurt pretty bad, wasn't I?"

"You're fixed now," Kenspeckle tells her. "Mostly."

And his voice sounds like it's foretelling some kind of horrible news but she can't bring herself to ask, not that question, so she forces her mouth open and forms instead the words "Can I get up?" and there's a soft hum of agreement from him and she draws the strength from her core and pulls herself up. "Wow," she says, because she hurts like anything, and then her eyes latch onto Kenspeckle's.

He's lounging in an armchair that's patterned florally in a manner that she is pretty sure she would have objected to before now but she just can't bring herself to care about right now. The light winds about him oddly, like he's absorbing it, and terror clenches in her veins, tight and hot and horrible.

And she wants to run.

"Still hazy?" he asks, and she would have thought his tone sounded sympathetic except that it accompanies his face and she can't look at him without panicking.

"Kind of," she says. Her voice sounds wrong. The alarm bells in her head are a clamor.

"Wait a while. It will pass." He's tending to something with a syringe now. Needle. She's primed to kick, smash and generally fight her way out, but she's trying her best not to move. If she's compromised, she should know just how fucked she is.

"All-right," she says, and she stares at her hands. The calluses. Doesn't even vaguely remember incurring them.

A/N: So, uh, this was planned to be four chapters long.

That's not going to happen.

~Mademise Morte, October 27, 2012.