Okay.

Okay.

So, malicious intelligence drives the spikes, trying to kill me.

Or, more likely, it's multiple malicious intelligences.

Yes, yes! That makes so much more sense!

Like, look. At first, there were only three spikes. That was a trial run. An exploration.

Then the spikes fell at random, all over the place, only a short drop on each, with little commitment to any one location. But after I huddled by the grate, there was a flurry of movement in that corner.

Basically, it was a competition to drive a spike closest to me as far down as possible to hit me. Sort of variation on the battleship guessing game. So I crawl around, crying, hoping the next round isn't for a while yet.

Suspense torments me. How many players are toying with me? How clever are they? Because it can't be just Irene. She'd have driven a spike through my heart already. Something is holding her back, delaying the pleasure of watching me die.

My agony is a gambling game for persons unknown. I don't know Irene all that well, but her love of the casinos is legendary in L.A.

Okay, think, Bryn. Think like a gambler.

The problem is I'm a horrible gambler. Gambling requires a cold mind capable of calculating steps in advance. Mine is a mess, that always goes on tangents. I squeeze my temples to help contain it.

Irene is a croupier... yes, yes, this fits. She gathers bets on each spike. Say, on each spike's number and how many times it moves. Probably, the stakes also go higher, the closer to the floor each spike starts out in every round.

And to make it exactly like playing battleships, the players shouldn't see my position until after all the bets are taken and the spikes move. There, I have it. That's our game.

Of course, in the battleships, the battleships have no say in the outcome. So, the question is, how do I get a seat at the table and play? Fucking hell...

I hang my head over the stone edge. A water drip drums on my skull, as I retch over the void. Then, in a sudden fit of devil-may-care attitude, I twist around on my back and open my mouth. The drip pressure-washes it and my cheeks too.

Another round of spikes chase my movements around the cave before I have any bright ideas. Then nothing happens, because the suffocating black of the night falls outside.

The swiftness with which this darkness envelops me is appalling. As a city dweller I don't watch the phases of the moon, because the glare of the electric light makes them irrelevant. In the wilderness, I'm reminded of the importance of the moon.

Still, I'm aghast because I'm so unused to waiting for light. There's nothing to see in the black cave. No spikes, no stone, no waterfall, no monkey and no hummingbird.

Next, I astonish myself by drifting off to sleep by the wall upon which I would have seen the painted monkey if I had enough light.

I wake up to the tentative thumps of my heart. The dawn is upon me, teasing me with a glorious sunrise, and the first inkling of hope.

Sure, my prospects for this day are limited to rolling between the two walls, the hummingbird and the monkey. But, but, but! I can win a seat at the table. Well, maybe not a seat exactly, but at least I would enter the casino.

I would screw with Irene's game, but not too too much by becoming more difficult to predict.

The spectators of the show need just enough hope to impale me after every round of bets—or they would start playing strategically and cut me off from the water source or lock me in a corner for an easy kill. The motherfuckers have options. I have none but acting randomly.

Luckily, I'm natural at it, and my mind always dashes about like a spooked hummingbird.

It's on the third night of the nightmarish game that I finally realize that I have another option. I laugh in the dark, hugging my knees and rocking back-and-forth on the unforgiving floor. By now I recited the two lines Irene left on the walls for me so often, I'll never forget them. It's from some poem. I don't know how it starts, but I sure know how it ends. It ends in this cave, with me, and it ends like this:

Tamarin to it loses her speech,

Humming's wings won't flutter.

I turn it over in my mind until I'm tired of it. My thoughts wander farther and farther from the writing on the wall. From what Irene put there for me. Her prediction of my fate.

I'm a woman with a hummingbird's mind, but I don't have wings. I have a monkey's body, with or without the ability to speak.

Maybe, the way to win is to become a monkey... or it is a way to die.

Yes, a monkey can die as easily as a wingless hummingbird. No, it's not ideal. Not ideal at all.

You know what's ideal?

Ideal is Matteo showing up right fucking now. With a chainsaw squeezed in one hand and holding Irene's head by her stupid hair in another. Next, Matteo would waste the metal grate to smithereens with his chainsaw. Or a blow torch. Anyway, he'd cut me out of my prison in some formidable way. The sparks would fly, metal would groan and the barrier between me and him would collapse.

I know it will happen, eventually. Matteo will come with a chainsaw or a crowbar or a dynamite stick. He will come. It's inevitable.

Alas, the rate at which the spikes move, means he will come too late for me.

I sigh for the thousandth time in a thousandth farewell to my Matteo-as-my-savior dream. It's a beautiful dream, but only a dream.

In reality, the odds against my reunion with Matteo are billions to one. But at least I have a one-in-a-billion chance of success. That's one over zero.

And if I miss my single shot, well, then I can die more gracefully than curling slug-like around a bleeding wound in my middle.

On the morning of the third day, I glare at the spikes as if I could see the hands that move them. To them, I have only one thing to say.

"Make your bets, ladies and gentlemen! Make your bets!"

Then I grin, glide ghostly until I find an imaginary seat at their table—it's just like CGI—and we play the next round.

Me against them. That's me, playing. "Take that, Irene. Take that!"

The spikes drop. So many spikes... but instead of panicking, I cackle and rake my hand through my damp, tangled hair.

It's my move, bitches! Watch me soar!