Chapter 2
The green hell was calling him to madness. The dead man was back in the reflective wall, luminous, grinning at Dazen, features squeezed skeleton-thin by the curving walls of the spherical green cell.
The key was to not draft. After sixteen years of drafting only blue, of altering mind and damaging body with that loathsome cerulean serenity, now having escaped the blue cell, Dazen wanted nothing more than to gorge on some other color. It was like he’d eaten breakfast gruel morning, noon, and night for six thousand days, and now someone was offering him a rasher of bacon.
He hadn’t even liked bacon, back when he’d been free. Now it sounded lovely. He wondered if that was the fever, turning his thoughts to sludge and emotion.
Funny how he thought that: ‘Back when he’d been free.’ Not ‘Back when he’d been Prism.’
He wasn’t sure if it was because he was still telling himself that he was the Prism whether he was in royal robes or rancid rags, or if it simply didn’t matter anymore.
Dazen tried to look away, but everything was green. To have his eyes open was to be dipping his feet in green. No, he was up to his neck in water and trying to get dry. There was no hope of dryness. He had to know that and accept it. The only question wasn’t if he was going to get his hair wet, it was if he was going to drown.
Green was all wildness, freedom. That logical part of Dazen that had basked in blue’s orderliness knew that sucking up pure wildness while locked up in this luxin cage would lead to madness. Within days he’d claw out his own throat. Pure wildness, here, would be death. He would finally accomplish his brother’s objective for him.
He needed to be patient. He needed to think, and thinking was hard right now. He examined his body slowly, carefully. His hands and knees were lacerated from his crawl through the hellstone tunnel. The bumps and bruises from his fall through the trapdoor and into this cell he could ignore. They were painful, but inconsequential. Most worrisome was the inflamed, infected slash across his chest. It nauseated him just looking at it, oozing pus and promises of death.
Worst was the fever, corrupting his very blood, making him stupid, irrational, sapping his will.
But Dazen had escaped the blue prison, and that prison had changed him. His brother had crafted these prisons quickly, and probably put most of his efforts into that first, blue one. Every prison had a flaw.
The blue prison had made him the perfect man to find it. Death or freedom.
In his reflective green wall, the dead man said, “You taking bets?”