My hip scrapes roughly over the loose brick as I'm pulled inside through the hole. For a moment I'm falling through space.

As my body collapses in a heap in the basement, my head knocks against the concrete floor.

I'm lost in pain.

My head is ringing so violently that I can't form thoughts.

"What the fuck is this?" The guy hovers over me and kicks my shoulders over to get a look at my face.

Through the reverberating pain in my head, I see his now-familiar face, the same that had caught my eye on the subway a week earlier, now squinting down at me hatefully.

Then he recognizes who I am.

"You..." he says with nervous bitterness.

I try to stand, but he moves quickly. He binds my wrists with the same kind of wire he used on the others, and even though he twists the wire awkwardly with only his thumb and pinky, I'm too addled by the pain to pull away. It's like a weight holding me down.

In the next moment, he thrusts a tube up my nose. He slaps a strip of duct tape over my face to secure the tube tightly.

The pain in my head vanishes.

A rush of euphoria lifts me up like a bird on a summer breeze. The sensation of the ketamine pumped into my system straight through the tube is like nothing I'd felt a year ago when he'd sprayed the drug just once up my nose. I feel so disgustingly happy I could cry.

I'm able only to lie on the floor, unable to move, lost in a state of synthetic bliss.