Makun opened his eyes to cold tile against his cheek. Everything ached, but he was alive.
He pushed himself up onto his elbows. His head spun and nausea rolled through him, though his stomach had nothing left to give. Vomit covered his shirt and jeans and pooled on the floor around him, and scattered through it, white and half dissolved like broken teeth, were the pills. Every one he had swallowed lay there on the tiles. His body had refused them completely.
He stared at the mess while the meaning of it sank in. He was back, and alive, which meant all of it had happened: the drift through the layers, the chains around his soul, the presence in the dark and her voice inside him. You were never unlucky. You were eaten. Dive deep into the Mystic. It was real. There was more to life than the nine-to-five and the daily grind of surviving and failing. Had the religions been right after all? Had the cultists he'd read about online been telling the truth about hidden worlds?
Then the other thing reached him, the one he had been stepping around since he opened his eyes. Not long ago he had sat on the edge of that tub and swallowed every pill in the bottle, one at a time, with a steady hand, and he had meant it. If his body had been a little slower to fight, someone would have found him days from now, when the smell reached the hallway, and Mr. Okoye would have been angrier about the cleaning than about anything else. Makun drew his knees up and sat there in the mess, and for a long while he shook. It wasn't the cold tile or the sickness. It was the plain size of what he had done. He didn't cry; he wasn't sure he remembered how. But underneath the shaking, quiet and stubborn, was something that had not been in this bathroom an hour ago. He did not want to be dead. Whatever had happened to him down in the dark, it had sent him back wanting to stay.
He would think about that later. First he had to clean this up.
He braced his hands on the floor to stand, and the moment his weight shifted, he felt it. Something was different. He couldn't have explained it, except that he seemed to have a little more hold on his own life, as if a weight had come off his chest and he was breathing freely for the first time in twenty-three years. Whatever had come back to him when that link broke, he meant to find out what it was.
He looked around the cramped bathroom for paper towels, bleach, anything at all, and yelled.
Dense, translucent masses of particles hung beside the door, swirling like smoke made of light, or light made of smoke. He blinked hard and turned his head, and they were everywhere, not many but unmistakable, drifting through the air like dust motes in a sunbeam with no sun behind it.
Then pain drove into his forehead, sharp and stabbing, as if someone were drilling out of his skull from the inside. He pressed his palms to his brow and gasped. Something was opening there. A third eye, it felt like, but opened only an eighth of the way, partial and incomplete, like seeing the world through a keyhole. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping the dark would ease it, but even with his eyes closed he could feel the particles drifting around him, overwhelming and alien.
He needed answers, and he needed them now. The changes were too sudden and too large to stumble around blind, and the presence had warned him that people were coming. Information mattered more than anything. The internet was full of it, but he had no way to tell real knowledge from fantasy and fraud.
Then he thought of Zuri. She had seen something in those shells that terrified her, something about him. If anyone knew what was happening to him, it was her. Once this mess was cleaned up, he was going back, whether she wanted to see him or not.
He cleaned the floor with paper towels and whatever he found under the sink, keeping his eyes off the particles at the edges of his vision while the ache in his forehead throbbed with every heartbeat. Then he stripped off everything he was wearing and stuffed it into a garbage bag; he would rather have gone naked than put any of it back on. He pulled on clean jeans, a black T-shirt and his only decent jacket, and checked his phone.
12:17 PM.
That was impossible. He had left Zuri's before ten. The pills, the drift and the conversation in the dark had felt like hours, an eternity hanging in nothing, yet barely two had passed out here. Time in that place hadn't followed time in this one, like a dream where you live through days and wake to find you dozed for minutes.
The bus to the Lower City took twenty-five minutes. He sat at the back and tried not to stare at the particles drifting between passengers and swirling around the windows, moving with a purpose he couldn't understand. It was just past one when he climbed the rusty stairs of 47 Osapa Street again. The yellow building looked exactly the same. The only thing that had changed was him.
He knocked on 3B. "Zuri. Open up."
Quick, angry footsteps answered. The door opened as far as the chain allowed, and one sharp, furious eye appeared in the gap.
"Are you fucking serious right now?"
"We need to talk."
"No, we don't." Her voice was ice. "Why are you bothering me? If it's the money, I was going to send it back anyway. Stop pestering me and leave."
"This isn't about the money."
"I don't care what it's about." The door began to close.
Makun slapped his palm against it. "Wait."
"Get your hand off my door!"
"I need your help." The desperation leaked into his voice despite him. "Something's wrong with me. Something's been wrong my whole life, and it's getting worse."
"I can't help you."
"You saw something in that reading. Something that scared you." He leaned closer to the gap. "I don't need you to fix me. I just need a direction. Tell me where I can find knowledge, information, anything."
"I told you to leave."
"My whole life has been shit. Twenty-three years of bad luck and accidents and failure, and you looked at those shells and saw why. I know you did."
Silence.
"I don't know what's happening to me, but you have some idea. I'm not asking you to solve my problems. Just tell me where to start looking. How do I learn to take care of myself?"
"I don't know anything."
"Bullshit." His voice hardened. "You wouldn't have panicked like that if you didn't know exactly what you were looking at." Then the hardness went out of it, and he leaned his forehead against the door. "Please. I've got nowhere else to go and no one else to ask. I'm drowning here."
On the other side he could hear her breathing, shallow and quick.
"I can't—" she began.
"You don't have to do anything. Just tell me where people like you learn this stuff. Books, places, people. Anything."
There was a long pause. Then the chain slid free, and the door opened.