Liam cut her off. “He said we can go. Let’s go.”

Emma was not so easily silenced and lashed us with a furious onslaught of curses in both Spanish and English. But Liam managed to get her into the car, closed the door, and with a baleful look back at Messenger and, I suppose me as well, started the engine and drove off into the night.

I am never without words, but not then, not at that moment when I felt so utterly drained, so helpless and hopeless that I feared I would simply slip into unconsciousness.

“You are tired,” Messenger said.

I was shaking too much to even nod my head.

“Yes, you need sleep. And food. We will go.”

He watched me, saw my incapacity, the shock that reduced me to a near-paralytic state, and nodded.

“It is very shocking, the first time. You will grow more accustomed to it.”

I wanted to tell him that the very idea of becoming accustomed to such foulness made me want to vomit. I wanted to tell him that I would have no part of this, not now, not ever. I wanted to rage and beat my fists against his impassive face.

But he was no longer there.

I was in a bed.

The covers were pulled up to my neck.

My head rested on a soft pillow.

And sleep took me.

MY DREAMS.

I don’t want to speak of them—to speak of them, to relate the details, in some way makes them more real. I have decided to tell the truth here, as far as I can. But even as I determine to tell every detail, those details slip away, just out of my grasp. The dreams are like wraiths, like smoke, all incorporeal, all of it elusive as dreams so often are.

But as dreams will, they left behind a pall, a sense that in my sleep I had been victimized, my mind taken over by dark beasts that reveled in my fear and laughed at my dull efforts to snatch meaning from raw emotions.

I rolled out of the bed, examining everything around me as I did. Was this my bed? I had slept in it, but was it mine? Was this my room?

I touched the pillow thoughtfully. It was slowly recovering from the weight of my head upon it. Was that fabric familiar to me? And this quilt. Was it mine?

The room was almost a square, with gray walls and a warm hardwood floor. A window shade allowed only the dimmest of light to sneak around its edges. A table lamp on the nightstand illuminated the contours of a desk and chair.

Slippers awaited my feet. Somehow I had been dressed for bed, though my last memory was of a heedless surrender to exhaustion. I wore soft, baggy shorts and a T-shirt. I pushed my fingers back through my hair, smoothing the few tangles. I wiped at my sleep-crusted eyes with the back of my hand.

There was a cork bulletin board over the desk. A blue ribbon hung there. I thought of looking more closely at it and learning whether it would tell me something of the reality or falseness of this place. This was not my bedroom. I had long since abandoned any faint hope that all of this was a dream. The dreams of my sleep were dreams, but what had happened with Liam and Emma, with the Game Master, with Samantha Early, Oriax, and Daniel, all of that I now accepted as real.

Messenger was real, that taciturn but not completely emotionless creature whose careless touch had set off a cascade of horror but who was, for all of that, not truly wicked. Or so I reassured myself.

It was Messenger who had sent me to this bed. I would not call it “my” bed. It was Messenger who must have seen that I had reached my physical and mental limit. Maybe I should have blushed at the idea that he had undressed me and then dressed me as I now was, but I dismissed that notion. He was not to be touched. Surely his fingers on any part of my body would have awakened me screaming, no matter how deep the sleep.

There were three doors. One was almost certainly a closet. Another, I fervently hoped, was a bathroom. The largest door, the one most completely framed in painted molding, was surely the exit. I was nervous to check it, for fear that I would try the handle only to find that I was a prisoner.

I nerved myself to try the closet. It was deep but not wide. Clothing was hung and shelved on the left side. There was an overhead light activated when I tugged on the string.

I sighed in disappointment: it all looked very much like the sorts of things a girl like Kayla would wear. Too fashionable, too adult for what I imagined my own tastes to be. I could not call up memories of my own closet or my own shopping preferences, but I had convinced myself that I was a simpler, more straightforward person than that. But when I pulled a top from its hanger, the immediate impression was that it was likely to fit me.

I gathered a few things and went to the bathroom, which was, to my great relief, a very normal bathroom. There was a toilet, quite welcome at that moment. And there was a shower, which was my next stop.

Has there ever been a better relief for stress and the effects of jading fear than hot water coursing through hair and over skin? I showered and shampooed and felt as if I might just stay beneath that comforting spray until the hot water ran out. But it felt cowardly to hide away longer than necessary, or at least longer than I could justify.

I dried and dressed and stepped back into the bedroom. It was as I had left it. My eye was drawn to the posters on the walls, the same, it seemed at a superficial glance, as those on Kayla’s walls. Presumably Messenger, or whatever other creature of his had made this place, had relied on those images to create the layout and decorations.

I was suddenly aware that I was dying of hunger and thirst. No food magically appeared, which meant that I must risk the final door. I approached it with my heart beating too fast and my breath too slow, convinced that opening it would reveal my imprisonment.