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In and out of dreams.

At one point, Piper remembered picking up her pen to write down the images she’d seen. But this? This was illegible.

Piper had been having vivid dreams ever since her Runker-Bailey Syndrome symptoms started to show up.

She didn’t enjoy the sensations they left after she woke.

Piper had friends who went to sleep at night, and they woke up in the morning, and that was it.

But for her, it was dreams.

This was an improvement. After her father died, it used to be nightmares every night.

Nightmares. Every night.

It had gotten to the point where she didn’t want to go to sleep.

She’d tried medication, because who wouldn’t?

But the meds held her in a state of neither wake nor sleep. And she would get trapped in the dreams with the demons.

It was just so much better to wake up and feel horrible than to be a prisoner to fear and pain.

She knew why. Pain was stage one of the disease that killed her family, and her dad had suffered to the bitter end.

Piper considered giving herself a shot of her formula.

But since her symptoms weren’t full-blown, she wanted to be one of the cases before the FDA; her experience was useful data. So she had to wait until the formula was in production.

Piper wandered into her bathroom, dropped the plug, and started the water.

Her bladder was sending out urgent sirens, and Piper slid onto the toilet before the sound of the falling water had her peeing down her leg.

Afterward, she brushed her teeth while the bathtub filled—even without reading her dream journal—with the sound of the water, Piper remembered.

The night had no clear delineation between asleep and awake, dream and reality. In both, Piper lay in her bed, aching. In real life, that was from yesterday’s fight for life. In the dream, she’d gone too hard at the gym because the gym gave her relief from stress. In the dream, Piper decided to take a bath.

She was in an old building—an ancient castle—where the tub didn’t originally exist and was added in as best they could as a modern convenience.

Because this tub was oddly placed, Piper had to get in from the end away from the spigot. It was an old-fashioned soaking tub that sloped to make a backrest.

Enameled and slippery, when Piper’s foot came down and she lifted her other leg to step in, her supporting foot slipped out from under her.

Piper reached behind her and grabbed the towel bar, but her weight and momentum carried her forward as her body continued to fall.

Her hand had clenched the bar, saving her from hitting the back of her head.

And as her body slipped, she felt the rip in her shoulder, her rotator cuff. Piper knew she’d injured herself badly.

Her dream-self thought that had she gone unconscious, she’d drown, and then, being in the old building, no one would look for her. She could be floating in the ice-cold water like a rotting fish for weeks or months before someone found her.

Most of that made sense, given yesterday’s old bridge, the fall, the cold water, and her pain.

The dead-and-bloating part, she couldn’t resonate with.

Piper shut off the sink water. Spit out the last of her toothpaste and climbed—with extra care—into her tub.

There, she slipped deep under the water and let the heat permeate. It helped her sore muscles, bringing her a little relief.