Wake up.

  The words didn’t arrive as sound this time.

  They arrived as gravity.

  Everything inside her dropped at once—stomach, lungs, thoughts—like someone had cut the ropes holding them up. For a moment she had no shape, no direction, nothing but the sensation of falling inward.

  Then the world slammed back.

  She was standing.

  Her knees almost buckled at the shock of having weight again. The ground under her feet crunched, soft and brittle, like thin ice over something deeper. When she glanced down, it wasn’t ice at all.

  It was bone.

  Not clean bone. Not the neat white of anatomy charts. These were yellowed, stained, fused together. Fragments of ribs, finger bones, teeth. Someone—no, something—had crushed them into a kind of ash and packed it into a floor, but they hadn’t bothered to hide the shapes. Here and there, a jaw still grinned up at her, half-buried, as if laughing at the idea of ever being whole again.

  She lifted one foot experimentally.

  A faint print of her sole remained, darkening, then slowly filling back in as the crushed remains settled, as if the ground swallowed any sign of her existence on principle.

  “Don’t think about what you’re standing on.” he said casually behind her. “It was nothing good when it was alive. It’s even worse décor.”

  She turned.

  The tunnel they’d walked through was gone.

  In its place, the wall rose—if it could be called a wall. It climbed upward and outward, impossibly tall, curving away into a sky that wasn’t a sky at all. It looked like a mass of vertebrae and shattered arches welded together, layer upon layer of ruined cathedrals and ribcages, half-collapsed towers leaning into each other like drunk giants. What she had thought was stone, from a distance, was closer to… cartilage. Bone grown wrong. Old masonry stitched into it like an afterthought.

  Shapes protruded from the surface.

  She realized, slowly, they were bodies.

  Not intact ones. Limbs stretched into supports, spines frozen into arcs, skulls melted halfway into the structure so only empty sockets peered out. Some were wrapped in something like cloth, but the cloth clung too tightly to be fabric. It looked like someone had taken the idea of crucifixion and kept trying to refine it until it stopped being symbolic and became architecture.

  The sky bled between the structures.

  Not blue. Not red. Something in between—a sick, bruised glow that didn’t come from any sun she could see, just a diffuse, pulsing light behind the clouds. The clouds themselves looked wrong—too low, too heavy, like dirty cotton dragged over a wound. They snagged on the jagged towers, torn into long, trailing strips that fluttered without any wind.

  Far in the distance, something screamed.

  She couldn’t tell if it was an animal, a person, or the landscape shifting.

  “You wanted ‘Hell’.” he said, stepping up beside her. “Consider yourself oriented.”

  She swallowed.

  “This is…” She searched for a word and found none that fit. “Broken.”

  He seemed to consider that.

  “Yes.” he said finally. “That’s one way to call it. They’d say it’s… optimized. Maximum suffering per square meter.” A pause. “Personally, I think they overdesigned it.”

  A gust of air slipped past them, cold and dry. It carried with it a smell that made her eyes prickle—not rot, exactly. More like dust baked on a hot coil. The scent of something that had burned a long time ago and never stopped smoldering.

  The plain stretched out before them.

  It wasn’t flat. It tried to be, but things kept interrupting it. Towers that might once have been buildings before they were stripped and stretched into bone-spires. Mounds like hills, but when she looked closer, she saw they were composed of countless intertwined shapes—bodies, again, but elongated, melted, fused, as if they’d tried to crawl away and got stuck mid-motion.

  Here and there, thin poles rose into the bruised light, each topped with a figure bound in a way that didn’t make sense—limbs too long, torsos twisted, heads wrapped in stained bandages. Their silhouettes etched themselves against the sky like icons from a faith whose only doctrine was pain.

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  She realized she hadn’t heard anyone sobbing.

  No wails. No constant chorus of agony like the stories told.

  The silence was worse.

  The only sounds were the distant grind of shifting stone-bone, the dry whisper of ash being moved by nothing visible, and a low, continuous hum under her feet, like a gigantic throat clearing itself forever.

  “What is this place?” she asked softly.

  “Lower circulation.” he said. “Call it a district. A ring. The names change every few reforms. We’re somewhere between the spectacle and the machinery.”

  “I thought you said we were going to the machinery.” she said.

  “We are.” His gaze swept the horizon. “But you should see what it feeds.”

  Along one edge of the plain, something like a wall rose—taller than the bone-structures around it, smooth and dark. At first she thought it was another vertical cluster of vertebrae.

  Then parts of it moved.

  The wall shifted, shuddered, and she saw that it was made of bodies, piled and fused, their forms stretched thin as if they’d been pressed flat and then stacked. Faces were smeared into long ovals, mouths open in silent O-shapes, eyes reduced to holes that stared without blinking. Some of them twitched, a hand or a jaw trying to remember how to be separate.

  One of the faces turned toward her.

  No, not turned. It was already facing her. She only now realized it matched her gaze.

  A hollow, peeled eye locked onto hers.

  Nothing moved. No scream. No plea.

  Just that watching.

  She looked away.

  “You’re handling this better than expected.” he noted.

  “I’m not handling it.” she said. “I’m… postponing the breakdown for later.”

  “Efficient.” he said. “You might actually last.”

  He started walking.

  The ground complained under his steps, bone-ash shifting and settling. The black lines under her skin reacted to each vibration, brightening faintly in response to the low hum beneath the surface. Every few steps, a fissure cut across their path, narrow and deep, edges sharp as if sliced overnight.

  She peered into one as they passed.

  Inside was… movement.

  Not fire. Not water. Something like a slow avalanche of loose parts—skulls, ribs, fingers, all tumbling downward in perpetual collapse, never reaching a bottom. Shadows skittered between them, long and insect-like, darting in to gnaw at whatever passed, then retreating again.

  She stepped slightly wider over the next crack.

  “Where are the demons?” she asked suddenly.

  “You’re talking to one.” he said.

  “I mean the… others.” she clarified. “The ones this is all for. I see walls and towers and…” she hesitated, glancing at a structure that might have been a church if someone had skinned it and turned it inside out. “…that. But I don’t see many keepers.”

  “They’re inside.” he said. “In the rooms. In the systems. In the rules.”

  “That’s not an answer.” she said.

  “That’s the only one you get until you earn the rest.” he replied easily.

  They walked for what felt like a long time, but the distance refused to behave. The tower they headed toward seemed near, then far, then near again, like the world itself was indecisive. It was taller than the others, thinner, like a spine stretched too taut. Its surface was a lattice of beams and bone-struts, platforms suspended by chains that disappeared into the sky.

  Figures moved on those platforms—tall, shrouded shapes, wrapped in tatters that fluttered in absent wind. They walked with slow precision, carrying long poles whose ends glowed dull red. Occasionally one would pause, lean down, and touch something below with the heated tip.

  The silence made the gesture worse.

  “What are they doing?” she asked.

  “Maintenance.” he said. “Adjusting the ratios. Turning some pain down, some up. Making sure no one habituates too much. You’d be amazed how quickly people get used to anything, given enough time. Hell hates plateaus.”

  She shivered.

  “And I’m supposed to… what? Fit into this?” she asked. “Become one of them?” She nodded toward a distant platform where a wrapped figure paused, its head snapping in their direction as if it had heard.

  “No.” he said. “You’re not patient enough for that job.”

  “Is that a compliment?” she asked.

  “Provisional observation.” he said.

  They reached the base of the too-tall tower.

  Up close, it felt like standing beneath a skeleton of a god that had died mid-rise. The supports were not just bone and metal; they were whole structures—staircases leading nowhere, church facades split in half, balconies that hung in the air without walls, all woven into a single, impossible column.

  At its base yawned an opening.

  The doorway had no door. Just a frame of warped supports and spine-like arches. Inside, a dull red glow waited, steady and slow, like a giant heart buried deep within.

  He turned to her.

  “Last time it was ‘What’s behind there?’” he said, nodding toward the passage. “Same answer. Just… closer to the engine.”

  “The part that moves me without asking.” she said quietly.

  He smiled slightly.

  “You remember. Good.”

  The symbol on her chest pulsed, answering the red glow inside the tower, like two hearts trying to fall into the same rhythm.

  She hesitated.

  The plain behind her was a nightmare, yes—but it was an open one. She could see its horrors, map them, choose where not to look. The inside of the tower felt different. Contained. Purposeful.

  Trapped.

  “If I go in…” she said, “I become whatever you want me to be. Is that it?”

  “If you stay out,” he said. “you become whatever they want you to be.”

  Her eyes drifted to the distant wall of flattened bodies, to the cruciform silhouettes on their poles, to the shrouded figures adjusting suffering like a soundboard.

  He didn’t need to clarify who they were.

  The whispers at the edges of her hearing rose for a moment, like static trying to form words.

  She thought of the world she had left. Of the curtain of darkness she had closed without regret.

  She thought of the way something in her had aligned when he said, You’re mine now.

  She hated that memory.

  She also trusted it more than she trusted the walls made of people.

  “Fine.” she said at last. “Show me your engine.”

  He nodded once, satisfied.

  As she stepped over the threshold, the bone-ash on the ground gave way to something smoother. The floor inside was dark, polished, almost reflective. She caught a glimpse of herself there—a pale figure with black veins and a broken sun burning beneath her skin, walking into a structure built of ribs and ruins.

  The tower swallowed her whole.

  The world narrowed to the slow, steady throb of the red light and the whisper that followed her inside, curling around her thoughts like smoke:

  Wake up properly.