as she kept coughing, a reedy, dry cough that hurt her lungs. She grabbed at the chain again and the metal burned her hand so badly she pulled it away, pure reflex. Her arm swung out and pulled her off balance as her feet shuffled on the mold, trying to find purchase as the metal edged up to touch her boots—
—and she opened her eyes.
She was awake.
She was lying face down on the floor of the mill, her cheek pressed against the cold cement. The crucible stood empty and cold at the far end of the open space.
Behind her the half-deads were gathered around their fire, giggling away. How she had gotten so far away from them while she slept was a mystery. Had she crawled away in her sleep? She heard a sound like running water and looked up.
Reyes stood a dozen feet away. The drawstring pants were down below his buttocks and he was relieving himself on a pile of old, rusted metal, pissing out not urine but blood. When he was done he pulled up his pants and strode over to where she lay.
She didn’t have the strength to get up. She didn’t have the strength to lift her face from the icy floor. She couldn’t see any of him but his pale white feet. The toenails were thick and ragged. They looked like they could cut through flesh like steak knives.
“You don’t scare me,” she managed to croak. She expected her throat to be scorched—she could still taste smoke in the back of her mouth. But of course that had all been a dream. “You were human, once. You were a sad little man who stayed home and jacked off to the bra advertisements in magazines—”
One of his feet moved backward, lifting off the floor. It swung away from her, and then it came back. He kicked her right in the stomach and she wasn’t ready for it. She felt like her guts liquefied inside of her body and came swimming up her throat, pressing down against her rectum. The pain was going to make her shit herself. She clenched down hard and somehow kept everything together.
“You had nothing, you were nobody,” she cried. “Now you’re even less. You’re unnatural. The light of the sun melts you, you—”
He drew his foot back for another blow. She called out and he stopped, his feet spread on the cement, ready to kick her if she didn’t say what he wanted to hear.
She would gladly have said anything, anything at all, but she had no idea what the right words would be. “What time is it?” she asked, just trying to stall.
The foot went back and hit her once more. It was like being struck by a moving car. She felt bones give way in her chest. The pain surged upward, to her brain, and without warning she—
—opened her eyes and saw black smoke drifting along the ceiling. She looked down and saw the red glow of the burning metal once more. She was back in the dream.
In the few moments while she’d been awake her dream-self had been busy.
Ignoring the searing pain in her hands, Caxton had clambered up a thick chain and hung suspended perhaps ten feet above the surface of the molten metal. With her legs wrapped around the chain and her arms holding her in place she was, for the moment, safe, but she didn’t see a lot of options as to what to do next.
Nothing of the floor remained visible—the liquid iron had flooded the mill until the molds and tools and all but the uppermost lip of the crucible were submerged in burning, smoking metal. The mold she had stood on before had melted and was no more than a black stain on the reddish-orange surface of the bubbling sea below.
The lake of fire was still rising, too—she could see it climbing up the windows, a thick meniscus of darkly glimmering slag spreading across the brick walls as still more molten iron poured from the crucible.
There was no way to go but up, and little enough above her worth climbing toward. She tried to wake up. She tried pinching herself, grabbing a thick fold of skin at her waist and twisting it, hard. The pain screamed through her belly but nothing happened. She pulled off one of her gloves and dropped it into the heaving liquid below. It struck the surface with a hiss and a gout of flame, then disappeared forever. She got her teeth into the sensitive webbing between her thumb and forefinger and bit down, hard. Harder. Hard enough to draw blood.
The pain didn’t wake her up. In desperation she closed her eyes and tried to imagine it all away, tried to find her way back to the waking world through sheer willpower. Again, she failed.
She thought of the cold mill, the long defunct mill of reality where the half-deads waited to taunt her, where Reyes kept beating the shit out of her. Did she really want to go back there, she wondered? Was it so much better than the burning mill of her dream?
Desperate, alone, barely able to see or breath for the smoke, she clutched to the hot chain and sobbed. She couldn’t handle it anymore. The dream world was a hell of fire. Reality was pain and torture. There was a third option, she knew.
She could just let go.
She tried to shove the thought away, to ignore it, but it kept coming back. It haunted her. She could just let go. Let go, and fall, and fall forever.
39.
She awoke to find moonlight pooling on her face. She blinked away the silver illumination and sat up. The moon was coming in through a broken pane in the mill’s high windows, painting a broad rectangular patch of floor with its light.
Caxton tried to stand up. It wasn’t easy. Her entire midsection screamed with pain every time she moved, a tearing pain as if she were being pulled to pieces. Her legs ached where the half-deads had cut her the day before. Her head was full of ugly things and she kept having to snort and clear her throat and spit out bloody mucus. Some of the things in her lungs wouldn’t come out no matter how much she blew her nose.
Slowly, mindful of her aching rib cage, she rose to her feet and looked around.
Reyes was nowhere in sight. The half-deads and their fire were halfway across the mill. She had moved, or been moved, in her sleep until she was well out of earshot of her captors. Nobody was watching her. Nothing kept her from running away.
She felt like cold water was pouring down her back. It was impossible. She had been given a reprieve— somehow the vampire and his minions had just decided to ignore her. Did they think she was still unconscious, perhaps sleep-walking around the mill? Did they think that she was too weak to get away?
It was too good to be true, she knew that, it had to be some kind of trap, but she also knew she had to capitalize on whatever small freedom she’d been allowed.
Keeping an eye on the half-deads around the fire she hurried toward the wall of the mill. A pile of broken carts had been left there, miniature rail cars that had once moved ingots from one side of the mill to the other. The jagged wood and rusted wheels made a lot of noise as she clambered up to the top of the heap but there was no way to silence them. The pile shifted under her feet and hands but it was stable enough to let her get up to the bottom ledge of the tall windows.
She found a broken pane, an open space as wide as her hand filled with chicken wire. Shards of frosted glass still hung from the wire. She carefully brushed them away and looked out.
The moon lit up a rural landscape for her, a tableau of black trees swaying and bending in the cold wind. A vacant lot stood directly behind the mill, perhaps a parking lot once or a railyard that had been so overgrown by weeds it no long served any purpose at all. A few rows of fifty-gallon oil drums stood forgotten and skeletonized by rust directly below her.
There was no way out. She was perhaps twenty feet up in the air. Even if she could break out the glass and somehow get through the wire she would have to drop to an unknown surface and trust she didn’t break her legs in the process.
Something moved behind her and she panicked and nearly fell off the heap of broken carts. She looked back and saw a group of half-deads in the center of the mill floor. They held torches and were muttering amongst themselves. They weren’t looking at her but they had to see her—didn’t they? Maybe their vision wasn’t as good as hers. Maybe she was overestimating them.
Caxton turned her face once more to the broken window. It was good, it was helpful, just to get a whiff of fresh air. In a moment she knew she would be discovered and put back to sleep. Just a glimpse of moonlight on trees was worth the effort.
She breathed in deeply—and nearly choked. The air outside was foul with the smell of baking manure. She
