Status: bump in the night

There's an ugly bruise blooming on Montag's abdomen. It's mottled red right now, but she knows it'll fall into angry shades of purple in a couple days. It hurts to take a full breath. Fuck, Naomi can hit hard.

Montag's been lounging in bed all day feeling sorry for herself. She's out of ibuprofen, and the hotel hasn't given her any more, so part of her self-imposed misery lies in the ache of being whacked by a baseball bat. The rest of it is in her head, which she knows, but that doesn't make it feel any different.

When she saw Sinclair in the lounge she'd practically tackled him, chair wobbling against the wall as she pulled him into a tight hug. It took him a second too long to start hugging back, but she'd barely even noticed. "Where have you been, bastard?"

"In room seventy-two, apparently," Blake said. She was slurping the remnants of her margarita through a skinny straw. "Got stuck with a good book, like an absolute nerd."

"Hey, I couldn't get the door to open!" His sturdy hands eased Montag away, and she slouched into the chair next to him. A short glass of sparkling water had appeared on the table before her, but she didn't even reach for it. She just stared at him, his stupid little smile, the way he shrugged his shoulder almost up to his ears in insistence. "I tried everything, I swear. It just wouldn't open until today, so, yeah, I passed the time with the weird book in my room. Sue me."

Montag kneaded at her temple. "God, I'm so tired of this place. What book was it?"

"Oh, don't bother, he won't say a word about it," Blake cut in. "But he says he found Naomi. She came in here with him and then ran off, and, man, I don't mean to nag on you Montag, but that girl feels like bad news to me. Something in her eyes is just... off. She's cute, but she's way too twitchy for my comfort."

"You're right about twitchy," Montag muttered, glancing at the doorway. A couple was walking into the lounge hand-in-hand, massive, dreamy grins plastered on their faces. The pink-haired girl was nowhere to be seen, though. "She just beat me in the parking lot because she thought I was Rabbithead."

Blake snorted, and Sinclair asked, "She beat you? Are you okay?" He reached toward Montag, as if to inspect her, then swallowed and dropped his hand to his knee. He was squinting at her in this odd way, like he didn't quite know what to make of her. Like he was almost a little scared. It's not a look he'd ever given her before, and it made her hackles raise.

She just shrugged. "I'll be alright."

"If she thought you were Rabbithead, wait until she finds out-"

"Yeah. Look, I can't deny that she's a wild card. But so am I, and you put up with me. Trust me, she's useful to have in the loop. Probably less dangerous, too."

Blake bit the end of her straw, brown lipstick smearing all over the plastic. She had her elbows planted squarely on the table, ever the pinnacle of etiquette. "I think saying I put up with you is a generous overstatement."

"Oh, please. If I was into women you'd have made out with me by now."

"Mmhm. Naomi's on my list, too, and what about it? Not that I will, I mean. Laning would flay me alive if I conflicted her interests that hard."

"Blake has caught me up on just about everything," Sinclair interrupted. "At least her side of things. So we know that Silvia is hiding here in a new-ish form as a..." He appeared to be searching very hard for a term that wasn't degrading. "She provides people sex, basically. And she's not entirely 'awake'?"

Blake shook her head, glancing toward the stage a few feet away from them. It was dull and empty tonight, and Montag hoped sincerely that it stayed that way. "I've watched her perform every night since we've been here, and even followed her back to clients' rooms. She never says a word and you can tell on her face that she's in complete space-cadet mode. It's really creepy. She's such a blip, in terms of activity, that I'd almost say she's irrelevant, except for that first entry on Naomi's blog... it's all just weird. And Naomi comes and goes like a set of goddamn hiccups, and every single time she shows up she's doing some new weird violent thing, which is just cool. I dunno. Montag got the more interesting jobs."

"Not really," Montag mumbled, but she gave Sinclair a run-down of the body in the pool, and a basic description of the church - a definite carryover from Adsophel - and the restaurant, which as far as she was concerned was a dead space. Blake had investigated the conference rooms and said they were just plain, drab conference rooms that you could find in any real hotel. There were even some people having conferences, which Montag had to imagine was the most miserable thing to dream about. The only other significant location was the road.

"It's the furthest wall of this place, so to speak, where everything falls apart and you're just left with pure Limn chaos. And it's swimming with demons. That's where Naomi formed her attachment with Rabbithead. I haven't had the heart to tell her yet that Rabbithead isn't the only thing attached to her."

Sinclair frowned, tracing a finger around the inside of his empty whiskey glass. "It's a good thing I didn't ask her about it, then, when she first woke up."

"What do you mean?"

He hesitated. "Have you guys found that hallway where the Limn is starting to leak in? It just sort of ends in a wall of darkness." Montag nodded. She'd wondered about it, but hadn't had the nerve to investigate too close. The Limn was the empty void between death and dreams, where spirits and demons alike dwelt. Getting too close to it was certain death. "Well, that's where I found her. She was on her hands and knees, slamming her head against the wall, maybe a foot from the barrier of the Limn. There was a shadow figure standing over her, but when it noticed me it scattered. By the time I got to Naomi was unconscious, and I didn't know what to do with her, so I carried her to the elevator and figured I'd somehow find you guys."

God. Montag sipped at her sparkling water and desperately wished it was something stronger, though this was the last place in the world she wanted to fall off the bandwagon. "We need to move faster. Get her out of here, at least. Then we can worry about making direct contact with Silvia or her corpse." As much as Montag had wanted Naomi's help for both, it seemed all at once like too much of a risk. She'd been an idiot for hoping otherwise.

Sinclair nodded. "I know I just got here so I can't really call the shots, but I think evacuating Naomi is the number one priority."

"Seconded," Blake added. "Not just because of my bias, I swear."

They parted ways; Blake stayed in the lounge to keep an eye out for Silvia, and Sinclair followed Montag as far as the stairs. He pulled her into a brief hug, much looser than the one she'd given him. He was so warm, though, and Montag had to work not to melt against him. "I'm sorry I was gone," he murmured against her temple.

"Buy me a steak once we're out, and we'll call it square," she said, bumping her fist against his as they pulled away. She felt like such a kid, suddenly too shy to meet his eyes. "Are you really not going to tell us what book you were stuck reading for a month? Was it at least good?"

He frowned, rubbed his face, tucked his hands in his pockets. Didn't look at her.

Her hesitant smile faded. "Look, you don't have to tell me, it's okay."

"No, it's just it-" he looked around the brightly lit hall, as if expecting someone to be coming. Finally, his eyes settled back on her. "Aw, hell, I'm being stupid. It was about you, Vega. About us."

She shouldn't have run away. She knows that. But she hadn't known what else to do. Even thinking about it now, a day or so later, it made her eyes prickle and her cheeks burn. It was about you, Vega. Of course she knew exactly what that meant.

He'd read about her dream, somehow. And that meant he'd read about her being in love with him, and, well, wasn't that a fucking joy?

They'd all been there. All her teammates. Somehow, Silvia had reached into memories that didn't even exist yet, plucking out Montag's reflections of people closest to her. Blake was her childhood best friend, the orphaned daughter of pirates who could control the ocean with her mind the way Montag could control shadows. Their other teammates, O'Donahue and Martinez, were other friends; even their relationship had been carried into the dream. Captain Laning had been Montag's proxy-mother and trainer, but she'd had the cruel hands and brandy-sour breath of Montag's real father. That had been particularly awful to handle post-wake, because this was the woman who'd saved her in the real world, yet even seeing her face made Montag tremble with unconscious fear and rage. It had taken a lot of time to get over that. She'd be lying if she didn't still cower a little when Brit's voice took a harsh edge.

But Sinclair was the worst. He'd been her lover. She knew the quiet way he laughed when he was alone with someone. The way he bit his tongue between his teeth when he was concentrating on something. She knew what his hands felt like on her skin, how they teased and coaxed and comforted. When she'd first woken up, sometimes just hearing his laugh made her want to double over, guts twisting with loss and longing and shame. Because how dare she be in love with a stranger? It had only ever been a projection of him, a twist of the mind. He had no fucking clue who she was.

They weren't strangers anymore, but that almost made it more unbearable. As long as he never knew, she always told herself, it would be fine. As long as she dated real people, she'd eventually get him out of her head. Except dating real people was exceptionally hard, given her new line of work mingled with her mountains of personal damage. She wasn't, if she put it nicely to herself, a lot of guys' type. She was too angry, too busy, too rough around the edges, too not enough of anything. Her body didn't curve in the right places or respond to pleasure the way it was supposed to. The few times she'd attempted to hook up with anyone, she always ended up leaving before it got started and crying alone in her car.

So she hadn't been dating. So she hadn't stopped thinking about Sinclair. But at least he didn't know, right?

Well, so much for that.

She rubs her palms where the pits of the thorn scars used to be. They still ache, sometimes, and that scares her more than anything. More than the fact that her dagger (much as she loves it) still exists. Even more than Silvia's corpse and that little patch of the ocean. Because what if the skin of her hands starts to blacken with infection again? What if the fevers and convulsions and blood in her lungs come back?

What if the dream still kills her, even now that it's over?

She's not really sure what she's supposed to be doing here anymore.

She drifts into an uneasy sleep, still drifting near the coasts of consciousness.

Her dreams are all crooked hallways.

A sky dripping blood.

Ships crushed against the cliffsides and their passengers swirling toward a black hole beneath the waves. A girl screaming, sobbing, because she can't save them.

Adsophel lost within an inferno, collapsing like a dying star, while an immortal liar watches from the mountains, her bloody fists raised to the sky in victory.

Montag herself, cast in dark silhouette, eyes pinpricks of blinding light.

Then there's a woman in the corner of the room. Pale skin, pale hair. She's coated in blood that's both scarlet and black. It's every color imaginable, every color that isn't. "I promised," she says over and over as she straddles Montag's waist, spidery hands locked around her throat, both of them stripped naked. Montag can't move, can't scream, can't think. "I promised. The dead need to die. The immortal needs to wake again. I promised it, I promised you."

She takes a great gasping breath and the hair whips out of her face, revealing her pale eyes. Her gaze seems to burn through Montag's skull as golden tears drip down her face. Her frail body is quaking like a leaf. "I trusted you, Vega Montag, because your name did not exist in the annals of my history, and you've never wished for anyone to know it. I put the world on your shoulders because I could not carry it myself, anymore. You need to find the truth. All of it. Set me free. Let me out.

"Wake up. Please wake up."

Montag jolts awake, a mess of tears. There's something pounding on the wall been her room and Naomi's. Something big, because her bed is rattling from the force. She lurches up, mostly just because she needs to move, and collapses over a wayward boot. She scoots across the floor on the palms of her hands, staring at the blank wall. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Something vast, and steady, and regular. Like a heartbeat.

Like an ocean.

Before she can think properly, she stumbles out into the hall. The knob to Naomi's room turns without any resistance. Montag pushes it open, revealing empty darkness. "Hey, Naomi?" she croaks. She's suddenly aware that she's standing here in her underwear, but it's kind of too late to put on pants.

Nothing answers. The darkness yawns.

She steps into it, and the door slams shut behind her.

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I don't feel comfortable making notes on this entry, except for pointing out that we did, in fact, meet Sinclair much earlier, back in entry fifteen.

It is also worth considering the possibility that the Silvia who "attacked" Montag near the end of the entry is the Silvia that wanders the hotel, and not a dream manifestation of the presumed-dead Silvia.

Apologies, this is getting overwhelming even for me.