She doesn't lose continuity of experience.

Which makes dropping from the sky onto a cheap plastic bench – the same faux chairs as in the laundromat – without injuring herself at all... Surreal. It'd been nothing like falling in a dream, but also nothing like falling in reality – just. Wrong.

Lily had been trying to prevent the fall from killing her. That's obviated entirely – she sits, stiff, and tries to get control of her breathing.

There's someone else here. A girl – a bit younger than Lily, maybe late high school, maybe a very weedy college student – standing about a dozen feet away. She looks about as startled as Lily feels.

"Hello?"

"...Hello."

"Where is this." And what the actual fuck is going on. 

"...None of us are sure. I... I'm pretty sure I'm dead. The other two aren't sure, and... I was watching the laundromat, but I couldn't see anything after the laundry machine."

"...Sorry I didn't do a better job warning you. I was trying to yell."

So. She wasn't hallucinating.

She was just being haunted by a well-meaning ghost.

"...Not your fault I wasn't listening."

"...Still could've tried harder."

Awkward, unhappy shrug.

"Is this the afterlife, then?" She doesn't feel dead, but how would she even know what that feels like?

"It's a boring one if it is. I want a refund."

That actually successfully gets a smile on her face! "Who would we even take that up with?"

"Some deity or another, probably. I haven't figured it out yet."

"I'll help." She stands. Her hip and ankle hurt from where she fell, which is just plain unfair, but everything about this is unfair, so.

...Still.

"You said there were two others here?" Four people is a weird number for an afterlife or whatever.

She nods and gestures. "There's a couch over there. They're looking at... Something? I can't really see it."

She looks.

It's a TV.

"Looks like the TV from the laundromat," she says, only a little spooked.

"How, though?"

"How does any of this happen?" She looks around more. 

Wherever they are, they're surrounded by low-rise brick buildings – the backs, looks like. Some kind of industrial area. There's no cars, this isn't a parking lot, but maybe it's a loading area of some kind? There's no distinct sun, but from the length of the shadow's it's either mid-morning or mid-afternoon. The air's cool, totally wrong for July, and the sky above them is a featureless pale blue. The light is...

Thin, like it's been stretched and scraped over something dark.

The plastic bench from the laundromat is kind of awkwardly in the middle of the courtyard. The TV had been a little behind her, a little to her right; she finally turns to look all the way around.

There are, as promised earlier, two other people present. They're both sitting on a couch, one facing the TV unlike Lily's bench. One's a short, bearded, elderly white guy; the other's a tall, pretty Korean woman. 

"At last," says the man, "She is notice us. Very curtious."

"Leave off," says the woman. "She was focusing on Petra."

"My grand-niece is not curtious," he says. "She is not introduce us."

The girl puts a hand to her hand, wincing. She doesn't react otherwise to their words.

What the actual fuck is going on here.

She steps around the bench, intending to ask them some questions, even though her knees and hip feel a bit unsteady – but she pulls up short, because...

Both couch-sitters are staring at her. After a few tense moments, the man leans forward. His voice hoarse, low, he says: "How is it that you are do this? Did he not get you too? Did he not show you? How is it that you can stand?"

What?

"He didn't get me – who are you even talking about? Some... Weird corpse thing, it tried to eat me or something. I wound up here."

The man leans forward and starts gesturing widely, speaking rapidly in a confusing mixture of English and Russian. The woman turns to him, grabs his arm, says, "Slow down you old coot, none of us can understand you – "

– And there's a wire coming out of the back of her head. Her hair's short enough Lily can see the bloodless gash in the back of her head, the white flash of bone.

Wires do not belong there. Injuries like that also have no right being clean; this would honestly be less freaky if there was a respectable amount of blood. Lily's seen worse get splattered everywhere.

She'd like to wake up, now.

The man finally calms down, and the woman says, "I'm Sun-ja Hyung. I've been developing the lot behind the laundromat – this is Grandimir Petrovich. That boy – Jake – he attacked us. Dragged up to... Somewhere. And then he made us look."

Uneasy, Lily walks around behind the couch. "Does that have anything to do with the wires coming from your heads?"

"Wires?" Mr. Petrovich asks.

"I don't think you're seeing what we're seeing," Ms. Hyung says, and points in front of them, at the perfectly normal TV. "When you look there, what do you see – ?"

"A TV?" She squints anyways though. 

It's a TV! One that seems to be hooked up to the wires plugged into the two couch-sitters, but otherwise normal. Its screen shows only static, though.

The static moves. Writhes.

There's a shape within it.

Oh.

It's beautiful.

Lily can't help but stare, as the lime-green light flickers into the desaturated blue-grey of the world. She leans forward – the couch is in her way –

What's she's looking at – it's so much more beautiful than mere reality. It's everything she's ever wanted, twisted together and revealed in the light. It's hers, and so too is shown how to get everything she could possibly ever want – if only she will see –

She reaches. She can't not, not and remain herself. Her hands try to grab the thorny vines reaching for her.

The vines pass through her hand like ghosts of light.

And they aren't quite vines. They're moving, writhing, like snakes.

Except they can't be snakes.

Wrong teeth.

She shakes off the strange vertigo as she sees the new girl reach for – for –

Wait.

She starts running – she can't stop her.

"You're bleeding!" she screams, helplessly, "Stop, you're bleeding, you're going to die – or worse – "

She can't see the cause of the bleeds. It's not information her mind will let her acknowledge exists in the same reality as her.

But her clothes and hands exist in her reality. She takes her grandmother's scarf off, the last remnant she has, and without a second though she lunges for the girl's arm – she can't do anything to get in her way, she tries to keep pace, tries to put pressure on the holes, tries to stop the bleeding – she can't –

She doesn't hear.

But there's something in her arm – annoying, how can she reach for everything she deserves, everything she desires, with a bandage on her arm?

– Bandage?

There's blood on her arm, at her feet. There's a girl trying to wrestle some semblance of a bandage over – over –

There's wires sticking through Lily's arms. No. Thicker. Cords? Or – tendrils – they won't focus in Lily's mind – black, and there's static dripping with the blood –

Everything beautiful and desirable is still in front of her. Still in reach even of her mutilated arm, still shining green. She just needs to ignore the pain, just for a moment, needs to keep her eyes fixed on her goal –

What sort of person will she be, if she turns back now?

– A person who exists –

She closes her eyes. 

(She'll claim it was easy, some day. She'll never know if that's true or not.)

"My power is my own!" she snarls, or something in her does, wild and furious and burning. 

And then her knees buckle.

Oh thank fuck.

She drags the other girl the fuck away from the mysterious evil patch of air, hissing, "Close your eyes!" She needs to get something in between them, some visual barrier – looking started this, didn't it? There's basically just the couch, and it's far, still to close to – to – her head swims briefly – focus. 

She drags the other girl behind the couch, rips her shirt off over her head, balls it up to use as a better impromptu gauze – tries to put pressure on the puncture holes.

Her eyes were already closed, and, well, opening them won't be a problem.

She passes out.

 

LILY'S DREAM

AGE 7

 

Lily's sitting cross-legged on the dirt floor of her grandfather's workshop. She's scowling at the stupid broken pieces of a radio. She picks one up, turns it over in her hands.

It's just her and her grandfather right now, and he's given her the kind of half focused attention that feels more like freedom than neglect. The old lady who lives next door comes over in a few hours, and Lily abandons the stupid radio and goes to see if she brought any candies, and she gets teased for her light fingers even though she hasn't stolen anything in a whole week – that's then, though. Now, Lily's trying to fix something broken, and she's almost ready to ask for help.

Oh.

And her friend Petra. Her friend's here, too, but Lily can't ask her for help, even if it'd have felt less weird than asking her grandfather. Her friend wasn't here, the first time. She isn't here, not yet.

Her friend sits next to her anyways, looking curiously at the scattered pieces of radio. 

She hasn't heard this story yet. She's curious about Lily's grandfather; her own grandmother meant more to her than the world.  She doesn't say anything, though, because she isn't supposed to be here, not yet.

She doesn't need to say anything. Lily can read, thank you very much. She's not a baby. 

Lily's angry. She always is.

This time, she's angry because her parents are getting rid of her. They say they're not. She knows they are. Why else send her to some horrible town she can't find on a map, where there isn't even TV service, to stay with a man they've never once mentioned? 

They say he's her grandfather. That she should respect him and do what he says. Mother is tense the entire drive down, and Lily keeps the anger in her chest bottled up until it buzzes under her skin.

She hasn't even gotten to really bring anything. No books (her parents found out one of them was stolen from the library, so Lily lost book privileges), no games (she stole a Game Boy cartridge from a classmate two weeks ago), not even any music (she didn't even actually steal anything there, but her next oldest brother decided to lie; plotting her revenge has been her only source of entertainment that isn't staring out a window, since she's not allowed to talk while mother's driving).

Everything here looks poor and dusty and old, and Lily's skepticism rises. Her perfect rich mother is out of place, here, and her fancy city car is complaining about the pot holes and the dust.

Her friend sits beside her, looking out the window with her. She sees things the little girl doesn't; perhaps that helps the boredom.

It doesn't, when this is happening, but it will, when it happens again. 

But the boredom almost doesn't matter, and she barely remembers it by the time she's trying to fix the broken radio, several weeks into her stay.

It doesn't matter, because when the car finally stops there'll be an old man on his porch, and her mom won't even get out of the car, and Lily won't turn around to say goodbye - 

An old man with wrinkles on his face like mountains, who looks like someone made him out of the dust. An old man who lives alone, joints swollen with arthritis but eyes keen beneath all the wrinkles, with grey coarse hair and threadworn clothes. A house with no AC, no TV – no electricity at all – and water from a well. A house where the only rule is no alcohol is to cross the property line. She hates it, she decides, before she gets out of the car.

She hates everything. 

She doesn't seem to hate her grandfather, though.

She does, but she won't. She's only a little grouchy when now comes around; in a couple of months, when the question of her schooling comes up and her mom doesn't answer the phone even though Lily walks all the way to the postal office, she'll get mad for him. She'll ask why they ignore him. Why they leave him alone out here, poor and fading into dust. Why, when he's spent his whole life fixing things, they won't see him?

And he'll look so, so sad, and he'll say, Not a single one of us should have to say a single word to the people who've broken us, little dustbunny. And I hurt your grandmother more than anyone has.

And she'll look at him, and she won't say anything, but that night she'll make dinner with vegetables brought over by the neighbor Lily is giving up on pretending she isn't getting to know, and she'll take over more and more of the little finicky repair tasks as he ages, and things will be alright, for a time. Her broken places will be fixed, for a time.

But that's then.

This is now. Now it's only weeks into her stay. Now she can't yet put old broken things back together. Now she's still grumpy, still broken. She got bored of stealing a few days ago. She just got teased about it. No one got mad. And all there is to do is stare at this stupid broken thing.

She picks up a piece and turns it over in her hands.

It's a bit later, after her grandfather has chided her into a water break. It's about the time she gave up. It's about the time she asked for help.

"I wish you were here," she says, suddenly. 

"I'm sorry I'm not, little dustbunny," he says, and his voice is as real as ever. Tired, and a little amused. "I'd like to be in your audience."

Turn. Turn. Turn. "I want you to fix it. Lots of stuff's broken here." She doesn't know at seven what's wrong with this stupid thing; she does at twenty, and her fingers travel of their own accord to repair it. "I think including me."

He looks pained. "I know," he says, voice suddenly raw. "I wanted to be there for you a little longer. I'm so sorry I wasn't."

"You have a stroke," she says. "I don't think that's your fault. And even just six years... It'll mean a lot to me."

Her friend leans against her, supportive.

She picks up another broken piece. "Can you tell me what to do?" she asks. "What the catch is, how to fix this?" 

"No," he says. "No one can tell you that, little dustbunny. There's no tricks, here, no glue or thread that'll help, no way to speed up time. There's no shortcuts when something important's broken."

"Then what do I do?" she asks, right hand tightening on something metal until pain shoots up her arm.

He's before her, then, kneeling in the midst of what had been a total mess the last time this happened. Then, the only thing she couldn't fix was a radio. His hands, large and dry and cracked, envelope hers.

"You get up, little dustbunny, and you give her hell," he says, and the metal thing slides out of her hand, leaving behind something – else –

"Hey, wake up, come on – "

It's almost a mantra. She hasn't been able to stop the bleeding. Not really. She doesn't know why, and every moment's turned into an eternity while she's been trying.

"Please wake up – "

She does, as much as she'd rather not.

She feels horrible, and only somewhat because of the blood loss.

There's a vine. A thorny bramble she tried to grab – no. A wire. A wire emerging through the TV, passing through the middle of her idiotically grasping right hand from back to front, sliding between her second and third metacarpals – it's vibrating. Like running machinery. Like a distant rumble of jets overhead.

Like the buzz of a fly's wings.

The vibration echoes through her bones, quivering through her ulna and radius, buzzing up her humerus – it fades through her clavicle, but apparently her teeth are sensitive enough to pick up even a faint hum. They hurt.

It loops back, too, because fuck her apparently, flopping down through her wrist to slither bloodily across the floor. 

(Her left hand hurts, too, but it's not as bad. There's already a bloody wad of cloth tied to it, no wires.)

"Oh thank fuck."

"I can't get the bleeding to stop." She keeps trying anyways – is this girl even capable of helping, with multiple wounds like this – ?

"The wire," she says, groggy. "It won't stop bleeding until the wire's out."

" – What wire?"

Oh. Of course.

"We're seeing different things," she says, awareness coming back a bit with the jolt of adrenaline. That idea shouldn't be as scary as it is, but... Lily relies a lot on her perception of reality functioning like it should. "I'm seeing a wire – no, thicker than that, a cable – through the holes in my arm. It's making everything worse – "

She scowls down at the wounds, like that'll make the mystery cord appear. "Explains why I can't get the bandage in place – but I can't see it. Can you pull it out on your own – ?"