[h3][color=lightblue]The Hospital[/color][/h3]
[i][color=B6C6AB]*OH. You're ALIVE.*[/color][/i] Something snide dripped in Fluke's voice, crackling interference in Iris' earpiece. [i][color=B6C6AB]*You didn't just hear that explosion? Archer and Steel Rose were inside. It's over, our leader's gone so what's the point.*[/color][/i]

The sun blazed high overhead, shrouded in a film of rising violet smoke that sent the birds spiraling down into the spaces between the great gnarled trees and cracked clay buildings. An echo of screams haunted the streets. Fire sirens wailed in the distance.

Ahead, the dome of the hospital glistened with moving reflections of the smoke. The round door in the top of the roof had begun to slip shut the moment the healers and their stretcher had descended through it. The opening narrowed, nearly closed by the time Iris could complete her approach -- but she could see through the glass prisms of the dome, the rainforest of trees and flowers like a hidden world deep inside, swarming with spots of bright orange where the healers traversed the weaving lanes. The motorbikes landed on a wide stage at the center of the forest, converged with orange robes by the time the motors stopped.

From other angles, she could see more rooms within the hospital: a cafeteria, a waiting room, a hundred patient rooms with pulled curtains.

In the center of a wide empty hallway, an old man stood alone, thin as paper and reeds, leaning like a stick against a walker. He tilted back his shivering head, and though he was so far away, Iris would have the distinct feeling that he could see straight through her, like a needle shot into her soul.

[i]"Hello, Iris,"[/i] said a gentle voice in her head, the same way she had heard the voices through the ring still in her possession.

[i][color=B6C6AB]*You do whatever makes you feel like a hero or whatever,*[/color][/i] Fluke interjected. [i][color=B6C6AB]*I'm leaving before something else happens--*[/color][/i]

[color=ff4f61][i]*Archer! Cedar! Listener, Iris, Fluke, can you hear me?*[/i][/color]

[h3][color=lightblue]The Highrise[/color][/h3]
Rose's light beam cut like a knife through the roiling undulation of darkness and smoke; a vaporized hole punched the stunned shadows, which recoiled and scattered like a swarm of black wasps for the heartbeat Rose needed to stumble down the stairs. All around her, the walls and the floors and the ceiling were shaking and crumbling as if the world itself was shattering with the pitch of screams that stormed in the roaring smoke that smelled like cinnamon and burned flesh--

The Nox at her shoulder gripped tight despite Rose's thrashings, locked against her arm like a new appendage, but at least it wasn't reaching for her mask, nor making any attempt to possess her, as if it couldn't tell which part of her was the face. Still, Rose was on the floor and her gunblade out of reach, and the Nox weighed heavier by the second, twisting her arm as it pressed her shoulder into the floor and the ceiling cracked and rained plaster upon her while the smoke billowed dark down the stairs toward her feet--

[i][color=B6C6AB]*Finally, you feel like responding.*[/color][/i] Fluke's voice in Rose's ear scraped with static. Iris, too, could hear everything. [i][color=B6C6AB]*You sound like you're about to ask for help. Remember you're the one who went off on your own.*[/color][/i]

Rose would hear the scrape of her gunblade being picked up off the writhing floor, though the smoke now had engulfed the last shreds of sunlight around her.

[color=C2EC2C]"Close your eyes,"[/color] said Archer.

A beam of light flooded Rose's prostrate body, and the clinging Nox disintegrated with a screech. The air around her cleared, like a bubble of freedom beneath a dome of writhing smoke that would descend again in a few precious seconds. In the sharpened gray clarity, Rose could see the door that would lead outside--

--and between her and the door stood Archer, with Thorn dangling slack in her dark hands. Her mask was gone, and her head was engulfed in the inky black shine of a thousand Nox eyes, like writhing, slurping spiders. She didn't move nor respond again, like a statue, like a doll in her likeness, hollowed of all thought.