The door opens for me into a barren room as long as the building. The concrete floor is cracked, the paint on the walls peeling off in layers. Exposed wires hang from the ceiling, and a flickering overhead light casts a harsh light on the two figures before me.
One is Mia. She’s strong here, as she no longer is in real life. Her bare arms ripple with muscle, the fitted jumpsuit hugging her full breasts and thighs. Her hair is long, like it was in Mana’s Hearth before she left when Tila and I were eight. But she is a long way away from the gentle woman in soft dresses that I recall. This Mia’s face is twisted in rage and bloodlust, and she’s wielding a scalpel stained with blood.
I shudder, my hand involuntarily going to the scar beneath my dress. Mia’s tool falls, and she bends over. My eyes finally rest on the other figure.
It’s Mana-ma.
Our former leader has collapsed to the ground. She’s alive, breathing hoarsely. The black robe she wears is heavy with blood. On her back, she gapes at the cracked ceiling, her mouth opening and closing. Mia has cut out her tongue. It lies next to her like a dead fish.
I cry out, stumbling away.
Mia pauses in her terrible work, her eyes meeting mine. Her face goes slack in surprise.
“Taema.”
I’m dressed as Tila. I have her face, and her tattoo snaking down my thigh. Despite this, Mia still recognizes me.
“Why are you here?” she asks. “You’ve never been in my dreams before.”
That’s a comfort, I guess. She’s never wanted to kill me. Mia’s covered in blood, and the broken shell of a replica of the woman who leads Mana’s Hearth cowers beneath her.
“Mia. Something’s happened to Tila. I need your help.”
“You’re … not part of the dream?” Mia seems confused.
Mana-ma gives a strangled gasp, more of a high wheeze. Without batting an eyelid, Mia brings down the scalpel into Mana-ma’s neck. The colors of the warehouse grow brighter, sharper, until they’re hypersaturated. I step back, horrified.
Without realizing what I’m doing, I focus on that mental state I found while in Meditation at the Hearth. The clear, calm stillness. “Stop,” I say. Mia’s eyes widen, but her hand jerks back, taking the scalpel with her.
“You don’t tell me what to do! Don’t make me do what I don’t want to!” she shrieks.
Did I make her do that?
Blood spurts out of Mana-ma, and once the blood—the reddest blood I’ve ever seen—leaves her body, it turns from scarlet to black. The dark oil rises, covering Mana-ma’s corpse, and then the figure collapses into a puddle. It reminds me uncomfortably of the spread of blood of the crime scene recreation.
The scalpel is still in Mia’s hands. I hold up my own hands, spread wide, to look unthreatening. “No, I’m not part of the Zeal,” I say. “They couldn’t pull you out, so I took a small dose and came in.”
Mia shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can believe that. They all say they’re real when they’re not. Either way, you shouldn’t have come. You’re too innocent for the Zealscape. Especially mine.” Her face creases in a grin, and I take another step away. She is utterly transformed from the woman who took us in just after the surgery, when we were weak as kittens and just as innocent in the ways of the world. I remember the way she pushed my hair back from my face, kissed my forehead goodnight. She took us to museums on weekends, patiently explaining so many things to us that we didn’t understand. Mia, my second mother in many ways, is looking at me like she wants nothing more than to stick that scalpel in my eye.
She shakes her head again, mystified. “Can’t believe a girl who escaped the Hearth would ever step foot somewhere where they mess with your brain. Didn’t you have enough?”
“Didn’t you?” I counter.
That same sly grin. A gesture at where Mana-ma’s corpse had been. “Do you really think I actually escaped the Hearth? It’s always here.” She taps her temple, and then considers me. “Maybe it’s still in you, too.”
My breath hitches. I don’t want to talk about the Hearth. “Tila’s in prison. She’s been accused of murder.”
That penetrates through her Zeal-fog. “Out there?”
“Yes. Real murder. I’m trying to prove she didn’t do it.”
I have to cling to the hope that she didn’t do it, even if the crime scene recreation left so little room for doubt.
“So why come here?” Mia asks.
“She … wrote your name at the crime scene. She led me straight to you. You tell me why, because I have no idea.”
She shrugs, the scalpel flashing in the light. “Don’t know.”
Even in this twisted dream world, I know she’s lying. I can’t read her as well as Tila, but we still lived with her for years. I heard her, thrashing in the dark, on the other side of our bedroom wall, unable to forget the Hearth when she closed her eyes. She never told us about her dreams, tried to hide them as long as she could as we adjusted to our new, separate lives. It was because of Mia that Tila and I became halfway productive members of society just before she ceased to be one herself.
“Bullshit,” I say.