“Nottt ttto youuu.”
“How do we get rid of it?”
“Youuu can’ttt.”
“Why not?”
A pause. “Becaussse…” the thing says, at last. “Itsss yoursss. Bothhh offf youuu. Yourrre…”
“…Part of it,” Tom fills in, softly.
Alicia snorts. “Like fun, tai pan.”
(That phrase: Chinese? Nim knows she’s heard it before, just can’t think when, or how—then feels the down on the back of her neck go up again, ruff-stiff, as she suddenly recalls exactly where.) More snore-y breathing. The ?
?doll” speaks on, ignoring them both. Says:
“Ittt…hhhe. Knowsss youuu aaate himmm. Hisss liiife. Hisss…paiiin.”
“Well,” Tom says, softly, “he would, wouldn’t he? Can’t really miss it while it’s happening, not even if it’s done expertly.”
Alicia shoots him a look. “Enough of that crap,” she says, warningly, which gets her nothing but a single arched brow in return. As Tom points out—
“Really, ‘Lish: You’re the one who asked.”
And all through this, Nim is backing away, her face and body held equally rigid. She feels the plastic bead curtain hit her spine, stroke up her back, then collapse together in front of her; Tom, Alicia and the puppeted puppeteer blur and distort between the strands, as they fall into place. Step by step, Nim forces herself through, drowning in plastic. The music’s getting louder again, still reverberant with distance and distortion, and underneath it there’s a strange cross-current of sound; phantom cellos, sawing up from below.
Recognition’s a jolt of ice and adrenaline to the spine: That second layer, the Apocalyptica version of “Until It Sleeps” is her ringtone. Nimue fumbles in her purse and digs the phone out, the muffled tinniness of its repeated music refusing to fade, like it’s wrapped in invisible cotton. She puts it to her ear.
“Veruca?”
Static, broken by arrhythmic crackles that might be words. Nim feels her balance going out. She can’t tell if she’s pushing or falling. Her feet have gone numb. The plastic beads trail slowly alongside, kelp fronds in a nightmare sea that cling, and clutch, and—
Give way.
Nim stumbles back out into the Speed, the noise disorienting for half an instant. Then her mind seizes on Veruca’s voice—now obscured by nothing but the ordinary background roar—echoing in her ear. “Nim, where are you? Nim, please, talk to me—”
“On the floor!” Nim shouts. She casts about, futilely seeking blonde cornrows or lens-distorted green eyes. “Where the hell are you? What happened? Why—”
“I couldn’t do it. God, I was so wrong—sorry—” A hiss and a coughing huff follow, sounds Nim finds almost welcome in their previously-infuriating familiarity: Veruca’s taking a stress-triggered blast off her inhaler. “But I was right, too, you saw—had to see—tell me you saw—”
“V, where the fuck are you?” Nim yells back, jamming a finger past her naked tragus. “Your voice sounds weird.”
“It’s him, Nimue. Looks exactly the same, just…young.”
“Who looks the same?”
Another huff. Then, even fainter—like Veruca’s talking through a mouthful of cotton—
“…im…”
Nim scans around again, frantically. Eventually, something—some light-sliver glimpsed from the corner of one tearing eye—suggests where Veruca might have gone. “Dude,” she says, “listen to me, okay? Are you in the john?”
A fizzle-click “s”-slur is her only reply; might pass for “yes,” on a bad day. Nim takes it as her cue to head for the pertinent sign at speed, a flickering Georgia O’Keefe rubyfruit done in flickering neon. As Veruca keeps on chattering, between white noise waves:
“…said, it’s him. Them. They did it…like the story says, not made up, it’s all true. All of it. ”
“I’m comin’, man. I’m almost there.”