When she woke up, she was staring up into a purple sky.

Cautious, she sat up. The world lurched sharply, turned her upside-down and sent the shadows of trees and creatures and feral moons skittering at the corners of her eyes.

Ground inches from her feet, pressure building against her neck. A sound like waves - like exploding gallon drums of water - roared in her ears. Kirsten twisted sideways, trying to open her eyes, and saw a long block of stone that had been holding her aloft. It rested on naught but empty air; beneath it, curling black plants that resembled pulled spider webs tussled with blue-powdered sunflowers.

She was dangling and her fingers were clawing at her neck, and she felt a tight plastic cord that felt like fishing twine. Kicking back, she managed to turn her head up. Above her the rest of the string hung from a ceiling of stars: a parting ocean of tree branches and a night sky that turned to lavender rust.

"I didn't do this. I couldn't do this. I wouldn't do this. I shouldn't do this. I have done this - I haven't done this - there is anything of this left in this..." People swung beside her; dozens, then just one: the blue-haired boy that had first recognized fear in her eyes.

Kirsten, amid her panic, groped at the air. Her arms were too short to reach across the space between them. "Jinx," she said. "Jinx, I can't get free."

With agonizingly slow motions, he turned to face her. Piercings, fresh and surrounded by red swelling, racketed over both his eyebrows and his top lip. His eyes were white, wild, and unfocused - like the horse's had, the brown Palomino that had killed Kolleen.

"What happened." Her windpipe squeezed shut under the weight of the rope. "Your...face. What happened. You're made of metal. Why are you made of metal?"

"I wanted to be different," he said. "I sold my soul to individuality."

"God." Kirsten clenched her eyes shut. She didn't want to see him. Why was he here? Where was she, and why was he here? "Are you dead?"

"What if..." he coughed black smoke. "What if I was never alive?"

Something about his voice was stilted. In life he had been vibrant - when he was not settling into a pit of fear and aggression, he was soft-mouthed, humorous. His words, his reassurances, fell from his mouth as if each was a preserved droplet of blood that contained the essence of who he was.

She turned her head again and understood.

The long snouts of a dozen camera lenses protruded from the bushes. The rocks, under the moon - was it even a real moon? - resembled paper mache. It was a waiting game. It was a watching game. This was the part where she would scream...

Observation. Kirsten hadn't understood the first trial but she now she pieced both occurrences together: her trial of failure, ever present in life, and now this, her trial of observance. The consistent tracking cameras that awaited her sisters and had captured her as well. The shouting, jostling paparazzi that had dehumanized her each time she stepped outside her house.

"The rope," she said, to the boy who looked like Jinx but did not have his eyes. "Why I am hanging from a rope?"

"Yours - I don't know. Mine - it's a noose of expectations, Kirsten." He smiled. His teeth were yellow, stained with cigarette smoke. "I hung myself on my hopes..."

"And," Kirsten whispered, inhaling, "I haven't done anything. I haven't - I'm not dead! I'm not dead! I thought I was dead."

"No," the boy said. "But didn't you construct a cross of the reasons why you hated your sisters? Didn't you give them leave to hurt you? You let them drive me away."

"You aren't Jinx."

"No," he said again, "because Jinx is alive. But you? I suppose this is a bridge - don't fall, dear Kirsten."

Blackness ebbed towards her. One final desperate tug at the rope -

And the boy who was not Jinx, the product of her unsightly imagination, pushed her into a wall of waiting thorns.