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The room encapsulates Jane within the decimated emotion of an evocation. It's like a memory of a souvenir of an echo of a place that can only, and will only ever exist in the stupor of a forgotten abstraction. It's a concept that always fails to be a concept.

As she walks, the floor sinks and creaks. Expansion and contraction have heaved and loosened the hardwood from its fasteners. Footsteps are a hazard in this...home? Was it? The memory of an emotion lives and dies like a stranger in Jane's mind.

The mire girl breathes in the aspect room. The air is coloured with a strong overpowering crushed pennyroyal mint. It sickens her as much as the colour blue.

The concrete walls have a cindered girth and have become a crumbling, powdery attenuation in certain spots, like the cement was unfortunately mixed upon the house's birth. A hovel constructed with poor materials by poor people to have a home to manage their oppression.

There's flayed floral wallpaper on one wall, vertically meandering and flaking like birch bark and iron wood. The dim floral yellows and reds and blues curl like a simulacra of songs; the paper flowers are protruding petals of flock.

The other walls are decorated in knotty gnarly curses of fissures and roots. They're like giant wooden pipes of woven stacks in a tumult of aborted ligneous darning that weave through an entire wall and part of the crumpling ceiling. This side of the house is claustrophobic in its exposure. And some of the roots breath like they funnel a deep whistle of vanquished blustery moans clawing and agonizing and rattling ticking shudders like the armless clocks of passing trains.

A picture in a frame still hangs on a strung hook like a noose above a blackened, rotting, water damaged grey dresser. Jane peers at the tiny, dirty glass window separating her from the print. It's a monochrome scene of four people grieving a fifth. A man lays upon a sheet that rests upon a catafalque with flowers rotting on his robes, as if the blossoms are being grieved as well. A woman has thrown herself down in anguish, hiding under the sheet of the tomb. Her feet linger, exposing ankle and toes at the border of the cloth. Behind the inconsolable heap is another woman. She kneels and watches the deceased. She holds both of her hands by her cheek, wrapping them in the hand of another that's resting on her shoulder. The person behind her is standing mostly in the shadows of the periphery. And a final, kneeling woman hides her face in her hood, unable to look upon the tether of what was. Jane is awed by its ceremony and saddened by its reality.

The mire girl realizes that death is where she stands. The door is gone and she cannot escape. And there's a small table close to a window. It looks eerily similar to the table from Rist and Rhie's kitchen. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it was.

Jane finds that two chairs are empty for sitting around the laminated fingernail tapping table top. She tip toes past the dresser and sits, positioning herself facing the window. Jane watches the outside world, full of the previous fever dream topography and then the sunless dawning of many malachite eyes. They gaze toward her in unison, moving frantically and creating wet macular degeneration of streamers within Jane's vision. She realizes that they're afraid. Then she notices someone is already occupying the other chair to her left.

A face peers from the shadow of a dangling giant root. The stranger is young. His hair is black and long and straight. His nose points like flesh made of wood. Jane wonders if it'll grow with a fable or a myth or more bullshit. He slowly opens his dim pale larghetto verdant eyes.

"Hello, Jane."

The stranger pulls something out of his robes and slams it hard upon the table. The object has a worn handle and dark to light orange serrated teeth. It's an olden rusted bone saw.

"And welcome home. This is where your life changed forever, and you weren't even here when your mother and father and younger siblings..."

An egregious smile xenomorphs his face.

"Well, you know what happened."

Jane grimaces and stands and kicks the chair back into the flock wall behind her, shattering it into splinters. The black haired man grabs the bone saw with thin, moonless glove hands and flips the table upside down and steps upon it with a stomp.

"Jane! I thought we would have a wonderful conversation about your past! About your short life and your very long death!"

Jane runs at the stranger and twists her hips, extending her torn cloth leg and connects her bare heal into his pale, vicious smirk. His head bounces off a hairy root upon the wall and he collapses, holding himself up with his knees and palms in a piloerection position. He yowls. The mire girl football kicks him directly in the nose with such force, the stranger almost stands as he falls back, crumpling in the corner under a root. His face is broken. Blood streams from of his nostrils and eyes. Then Jane notices his breathing.

The needle of a record player crackles within him, in and out. His eyes glow and they look up at her. He begins an endless laugh. A distorted reverb trespasses the volume of the room. The stranger grasps the bone saw and stands for an instant like a broke back  hunchback as his face positions cartilage and orbital bone back together. Then he straightens his spine and speaks with the voice of a monster. A voice like her monster.

"I enjoyed everything I did to you. The others clamped you down and gutted you upon the autopsy table after the injections. But me? No. When you began screaming, I sawed off your jaw."

The stranger holds up the bone saw and moves it back and forth as if the air is osteal. He exposes his teeth and they're as black as his hair, black as the death he gave her. His breath is built of mold and fangs and ripping homicide.

"We injected you with what we call a resurrection serum. It speaks for itself, I think."

The stranger laughs in the way a dead thing releases gas when it rots. The inflection is an overpowering stench. He menaces from the slouching shadows of his recollections.

"Then we injected you with a chemical that would keep you away from your subconscious. This would wear off eventually, but not soon enough to give you any hope of peace. And then we injected you with another wonderful chemical. It was meant to keep you alert at all times. This one would also, eventually wear off, but alas, far too late for you to remain a whole being. You were awake for all of it, my dear, sweet Jane. And after you'd heal and painfully grow your absent physicalities back, we would torture you again and again and again until all that was left is what resides in me now. The weapon. The weapon that we sent to your friends. The weapon that almost destroyed all of them. Can you feel it, Jane? Can you feel the saw cutting your cheeks apart, hacking away your chin and jaw?"

He moves closer to the mire girl with slow steps. Each foot placement is a long cringing creak under his boots. The stranger continues moving the bone saw back and forth, like he's enjoying a pleasurable reminiscence.

"The first jaw that you dropped, I saved. I made an ornament out of it, hung it on my front door. It had the luck of a horseshoe. As for the newly grown chins, well, I just kicked them away after they fell. Do you know how many times I felt your breasts before I sliced them off?"

The strangers voice becomes even deeper, menacing in the way that a thunderstorm births a tornado. His rage fashions every fibre of his malevolent being toward Jane.

"You ruined everything! The city got to live! The city we wanted in our image! In our divinity! The city got to heal! The city of Veridiction rebuilt itself out of your heroic sacrifice! We wanted to rule! You took that from us! You stopped us and we never recovered. And so, Jane, now you exist only to die and die and die and die..."

Jane lunges at the stranger. Her elbow pulls back her rock hard fist like a crossbow bolt and she releases the punch and smashes his face yet again. His nose is crushed into his cheek. But he doesn't fall. His arm stretches toward her like a whipping scourge. The bone saw catches and grips Jane in the chest. The stranger then saws her down from stern to stem, spraying blood upon the walls and his snow white face. The mire girl's pink and crimson innards pool on the floorboard ground as she falls to her knees and collapses into the enclosing, vignette darkness of her vision. The final sound in her disintegrating mind is the howling scraping laughter crackle rust of the bone saw man's madness upon her.

                                             ****

Jane wakes laying on her back like she's colliding in bits and pieces upon the bottom of a wretched resurrection. Startling croaking confusion. Her mouth tastes burnt like she's drank the black coffee of Christ's blood. She twitches and jolts upright and bang's her head into a ceiling two inches above her eyes. And realizes something uncomfortable is covering her body. Not a blanket, more like a sleeping bag made of a tarp-ish cellophane. A body bag. She's in a body bag. And she knows exactly where she is. A morgue.

Jane's eyes widen as she remembers the stranger quickly grinding his bone saw into her sternum and jaggedly severing flesh and bone until he finished at her crotch. Thankfully, the pain didn't last long. The blackout death was swift. She nods to herself in remembrance and is thankful for the quick ending that she received, as horrible as it was.

He is like she was; indestructible ashes. A revenant of death and madness. And she remembers nothing past her demise at his hands. Maybe her doppelgänger didn't leave her, though. Maybe her monster did show itself and she can't remember because she wasn't there. Maybe she became worse than she was after the Holden street massacre. Maybe the top became the bottom over and over again. And what would a monster like his do with a monster like her's? Perhaps leave her in the morgue. Things seem off and out of place in her inklings. Deja vu and yet not quite.

The mire girl grabs the thick plastic and rips it at the zipper, shredding the little buttoning fasteners. She rolls over onto her belly and begins punching the cabinet door.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

She hits it a fourth time.

Boom!

The door flies across the room, smashing into the white cinderblock wall opposite her. The sound it makes is of a single deep smash like a reverberating ride symbol. She grabs the edge of the opening and slides herself out, banging her buttocks on the ceiling of the compartment as she drops. The mire girl flops onto the waxed vinyl composite tile floor. Jane is again naked as she pulls the whole body bag off of herself and then kicks it away while on knees and palms.

She moves and crouches upon her feet, investigating the room. It's the exact same morgue she was in before. The place where she named herself. She looks down at her foot and finds another strung toe tag. She wonders what her name will be this time.

Then, as she looks to the exit, one thing catches her eye. A picture is taped to the wall by the back and forth double doors. Jane stands and walks tip toe toward it, looking down at her torso. There's no evidence that her body has been profusely gutted. No hint of any damage exists upon her pale flesh. Only the ancient gun shot wounds.

The picture that's scotch taped to the wall is one of the two that she found in the old man's inauthentic home. It's of her and the black haired boy. The younger Rist has been torn out of the souvenir by someone. Why? What does this mean? Sinking thoughts drown through her mind. Did the man who just dragged a bone saw through her innards bring her here? Why would he tear Rist out of the picture? What does it mean?

The light dims around Jane's vision and a horrible inclination forces her to turn and face the morgue cabinets. Anxiety begins eating at her spine.

I can't. I won't. I can't do it. I don't want to check. Oh my god...I don't want to.

Jane turns back and leans her hand against the wall. She puts her face down and looks at her feet, taking in deep, shuddering breaths. Her legs feel weak at the thought of walking toward what may become her final sane act. Jane slaps the wall and forces herself to walk quickly toward the cabinets.

She begins opening them and sliding them out, one after the other after the other. All of the body storage containers are empty so far, but there're a few more anticipations to go.

Then she opens the drawer beside the one that she destroyed. It slides fluidly and easily. Someone's in it. A white cadaver pouch waits for her fingers to unzip it. Jane places her thumb and forefinger upon the small, flat metal slider. She pulls and the sound in her head is of tiny bones snapping apart. The mire girl wants to close her eyes but she forces herself to keep them open. She doesn't need to unzip it all the way. She looks.

Jane screams like she's being burnt alive. Her legs give out and she collapses to the floor, curling her body into a fetal position and screaming into her knees. The tears flood her face and drown like kittens any contingent future that Jane had been longing to find. She lays there, cold and alone and destroyed.

The tears turn to ash. The numbness sets in. The world is gone, her world, the world that she so longed for. Gone in a second. Gone with her best friend and lover.

Jane pulls herself up by the exposed body cabinet. She looks deeply into Rist's beautiful eyes. The eyes that mean what they say. She pulls Rist's hand out of the plastic and kisses the skull mask lady's palm and Knuckles over and over again. She presses Rist's cold hand onto her cheek and shudders at the feel of her own warm tears upon her best friend's ending. She kisses Rist on the lips. Jane realizes that she isn't out of tears and that they've merely begun. She pulls her out of the horrible cabinet and tears the ugly plastic bag from Rist's body. She leans Rist against the corner wall and curls up in her lap.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I died. I'm sorry that I didn't recognize what I meant to you back then. I'm sorry we couldn't....we couldn't....have each other....oh god, Rist. I love you so much...those moments were the world. You exposed your feelings to me, my brave lover...you took a chance and I wanted to experience all of everything with you...I wanted you...I want you...please wake up...please...please..."

Jane wails into Rist's lap, holding the skull mask lady's hips and pressing her face hard into the cold thigh. As she does, she manages to make a decision. The mire girl looks up into Rist's eyes and kisses her on the lips one last time. She lays her friend down, closes her beautiful eyes with shaking careful fingers and covers her with the body bag.

Jane rips the toe tag from her own foot and throws it away along with her curiosity. It slides under an autopsy table as the abyss swallows her will to find out what name was on the little yellow prophecy. She stands and wipes the remnants of tears from her face. The mire girl turns to leave but looks back at the white plastic bag one last time.

"It's time for me to go, skull mask lady. Maybe I'll get to see you soon. I hope that wherever you are is where I'll end up."

The mire girl turns away from the remnants of her best friend and she notices a bi-fold closet door standing wide open, like she was meant to find it this way. Like it's an entrance to another reward for beating another level.

Whatever, I don't care anymore. If the crumbs he's left will bring me to my end, I'll follow them. I'll play his game. I want out. I want to die. With all that's left of my heart, I want to die.

She finds a gray reglan dress on a hanger and rolls her eyes into the tears still forming and blurring her vision. Why does it always have to be a gray dress? Because it feels like an emotion that feels like home. If only she could see the world in gray, then blue would be perfectly gone forever. The stranger in her memory and all of the other executioners wore blue. A calming blue. A blue that could never ever calm Jane again.

She puts the dress on over her head, arm by head by arm and notices a picture that was hidden behind the new, old attire in the closet. It's of a tall building she recognizes. It's the tallest that she's come across in her wanderings through the devastated city. A sepulchre waiting for Jane to embrace its function. A function meant for her in this time and place, like it was built for this moment. Maybe she can fly.

Jane crashes through the double doors and enters the dim, fluorescent hallway. There're no tolls. No other breathing human inhabits this place in this moment. The building sounds completely empty. And yet every door is wide open along the path to the exit. Every room's exposed to anyone who would like to take a peek inside. Jane doesn't care about any of them. She doesn't care if they are portals to other dead worlds. She only wants to proceed through one door. The exit to the stairs and then out of the place where her best friend rots. She looks directly at the sickening blue exit sign and begins walking swiftly toward it.

The mire girl feels like she's watching herself from every doorway and from different interpretations as she walks through the corridor. When she turns her head to see each entrance to somewhere else, green eyes and a silhouette hold her departing gaze. These apparitions are quite possibly her own silhouette watching her as she exits the dim, sleeping hospital. Maybe they're pieces of her. Maybe they're pieces of her that never were. Maybe they're the "her" of many times before.

I can't. I just can't. You can all fuck off now.

Jane slams like a haunting wind through the stairwell door, smashing the blue exit sign into a broken plastic carcass with her angry fist as she egresses. She jumps down each flight on her way to the final entrance, exiting the hospital. Once there, she rams the metal storm door with her shoulder and escapes the very worst moment of her life. Witnessing her best friend as a lifeless shell hurt her beyond torture. Beyond amnesia. Beyond the monster. Her reasoning's still intact and her direction is the footsteps leading away from the anguish that is eating every breath that she has left.

Jane's tired of fighting because there's nothing left to fight for.

Now I know how Rist felt and it's....the very bottom of the very bottom. I'm tired of losing...I just want to die. I just want to be let off the train.

The street's empty. There's no swirling, dust exhuming wind. There're no twinkling pinhead lights in the sky. The bright black clouds shroud a dim, waxing moon. It's like the sun's barely able to cast itself upon the orbiting darkness of the lunar. It's almost like there's only an apparition to reflect off of.

The only blooming flowers tonight are grey and black upon the mounds. All of the other colours look like they never grew to exist.

As Jane walks, she comes across a raven, perhaps the one from earlier in the week. It lays in a puddle of blackened blood and its head and wings are twisted in unnatural positions. Jane can see a rat tail protruding from it's beak. She realizes they killed each other.

As she lifts her head toward the street, she witnesses a legion of glaring green eyes again. They're everywhere within the realm of her noumenal phenomenal vision. There isn't a window or a dark corner without eyes staring back at her interpretation. So Jane will have an audience for what she intends to do.

She begins her final journey down the street that her and Rist walked through many nights ago. It was her halcyon moment. Or so she thought at the time. The real thing came when Rist jumped off of that van and took Jane in her arms and kissed her with so much passion that something melted within her. Something ancient and frozen dissolved and something else woke up within her. Maybe it was a part of her soul that her body thought was long gone. It was love. The real thing. The desire and jouissance of the moment in itself, naked and in the rain and knowing that her best friend was exposing everything to her.

Jane stops and leans her right shoulder against the black ashen concrete wall of a partially destroyed building. She hugs herself and cries. Her breaths shudder like cracking coughing hiccups. The absolute devastating grief of her situation slaps her like the sound of an ancient sealing sarcophagus and tempts her motivation to continue toward the end. She pushes off the cold olden cement and runs, slapping her bare blacken sole feet upon sidewalk pavement.

She arrives at the tallest sepulchre in the vandalized, epilogue city. It stands watching the conurbations psyche like a towering panopticon. Its gaze is a looming, crumbling shadow, molded by the inclement of time ticking its remorseless temperance. The world that she looks up at is the height of despair but also Jacobs ladder. Maybe the pseudo apotheosis will show her mercy in the fall.

I'm going to fly tonight. I'm going to be a raven.

Jane finds a parking garage under the building protected by giant vertical sliding doors. The number four is a faded waymark upon the entrance she chooses. The mire girl rips apart the large locked sliding door with punch after punch until it's a broken and twisted entry into the murky blackness of cement Spandrel beams and double tee beams and columns and empty parking stalls. It's a vast slurry cement arroyo of dust and debris and darkness with no likeness of an Acheron ferryman to skiff pole her to the other side. Jane needs no skiff. She hurries through protruding brittle skeletal remains like she's walking on the solid water they're sunk in and finds a stairwell with a large black on grey number four in a Gilroy font. And above the door exist two letters. T and E.

The End. This is the way to find where I need to be.

Jane kicks open the metal door and walks like a phenomenologist through the entryway. A code is written on the wall just before the stairwell begins. The only legible number is of a six. The only legible letters are of a T that seems to be missing its middle section and a P. It's faded but doesn't wipe off upon Jane's slight touch. She doesn't know why she looks upon the P as if it means something, but she continues peering at the curve and the straight. Perhaps it's another tether of what was.

Jane turns and begins her ascension, one hundred and ten stories, barefoot and in the darkness of her glowing malachite eyes. She climbs, flying up four, five steps at a time. As she gains momentum, Jane begins jumping up entire flights of stairs, leaping and grabbing the middle of each railing and propelling herself up to the next landing over and over again. She's a purpose and a look in her eyes, a hope that she'll soon die.

Jane crashes through the roof entrance, smashing the hinges off the casing and hurtling the thick metal storm door across the roof and off the edge of the sepulchre in one big broken flat piece. Jane kicks her feet and runs toward the ledge. In an instant she's upon it, balancing herself so as not to fall, not just yet. The mire girl looks down. The street is blanketed in the depths of darkness and thousands of green pinhead eyes peer up at her. It's like gazing into the murkiness of a leaden pool and finding an entire civilization looking back from under a reflection. Jane notices that her reflection could be the darkness. Perhaps the entire city is her reflection. Perhaps the entire city was always her reflection.

The wind howls and the giant cement and metal tomb sways like a tree in a storm, almost sending Jane off balance before her willing drop.

Then Jane realizes that she's invigorated in this moment. This sad, heartbreaking final moment. And it's rage that she finds within herself. Rage for Rist being taken from her. Rage for the life that she was beginning to fathom for herself. Rage for the moments that've been forever stolen from her. She looks around at the city and knows it's a graveyard and always has been. She looks down at the green lights and knows they're useless. Pathetic. Meaningless. Nothing. Jane turns her back to the edge and raises her arms. She stands like a crucifix and raises both of her middle fingers. A cloud passes over the moon and the light shifts across her hands.

"Fuck all'f  this! I'm nothing but a dead body standing at the top of the very tallest tomb in a giant graveyard. Fuck this world! I'm nothing without..."

Her tears come as rage dripping and bristle mixing like watercolour draining sadness at the thought of Rist's smiling face. Jane lets herself release her balance to the engulfing whim of gravity. She drops. She looks up at the dark, ghostly clouds as she falls backward. The gloomy phantoms seem to extend their curling, whispering fingers toward her, as if they want to catch her and pull her back up. But like everything else in this world, they're too late.

As she falls, she thinks of Rist. The many Rist's painting her mind with actual memory. The masked Rist of the train who found her in a picture and cried behind her skull. The waiting Rist of the bench who stood and watched Jane in the crowd and told her she loved her. The motherly Rist of the house, combing Jane's hair and holding her after the raven flew. The hot and wet Rist of the van, jumping down and pressing her hard and hourglass body against Jane in a moment of passion and kisses. The sexy Rist in the van, pulling Jane's jacket down, touching her everywhere and making out. The vengeful Rist of the "in between," catching Jane under her clothes as she let go from the wall of their surveillance building. The Rist of the lake, looking down at her, crying like she'd failed forever.

Jane thinks like a downpour of ashes from an open urn traveling on a zip line.

I've been here before, falling. Wanting to die. But the way I feel about Rist is separate from this, somehow. The deja vu. The deja vu? Wait...

Jane hits the cement and bounces. The world moves up and down as if a concrete trapeze net catches her. She's broken into protruding bones that coat and twist and tear muscle and flesh. The wind knocks out of her along with everything else but she knows she isn't dead and also that this attempt won't do the trick. As she lays in bits and pieces like a brainless scarecrow, she feels the hot lava pain cool and begin healing her corporeal shroud.

Jane witnesses a man's voice. Her ears are broken but somehow, vocal vibrations fumble like incorporeal fingers through the healing gore. It's like he's talking to her and himself.

"Did I just see what I think I saw? Are you ok?"

Jane moves around and sits up while her bones crack back into place. Muscle oozes and reconnects. Skin melts back together, crawling like tarantulas over a red torso. Her pulpy legs solidify and return to their prior state of existence. The man's standing behind her and she hasn't attempted to look at him yet.

Jane croaks, "sorry, whoever you are. I'm trying to die and this obviously hasn't worked out in my favour."

Jane climbs to her knees and cracks her neck and shoulders and spine and hips and ankles. She knows the man is watching her. When he doesn't say anything, she breaks the silence.

"My best friend's dead. I just want to join her but I don't know how. Why don't I know how? Maybe it's because I have no memory of who I was. If I knew who I was, maybe I could find a souvenir or a map within myself that can point me toward death. I just want to die..."

"I know how you feel," speaks the man whose  body stands much closer to Jane than before. "I've wanted to die for a long time. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I kept thinking that it's not what you would've wanted. You would've wanted me to live. Which is why I hate you."

Jane stands and bends over, cracking her back in a few more upper and lower places.

"You hate me? That's ok. I can live with that because hopefully I won't have to live much longer. I think I'll try cremation next. I'll have to find someone who's willing to dump my ashes off a building, or something. Are you up for that? I'd appreciate it."

"Terra."

She brushes the dust from her gray dress and turns around. She has to look up at him. He's right in front of her, staring at her through a mane of long black hair and a chisel unshaven face. He's tears flowing down and across his cheeks.

"I'm sorry, did I make you cry? And what did you say? You called me something?"

"You've made me cry for the best parts and the worst parts of my life, Terra."

Jane peers deeper into his shadowy pale blue eyes and feels lights turning flickering on within the very deep depth her abyss. The monster had departed on the way to her destiny. The monster was the thing holding her back from remembering. She can now hear...her name?

"I'm...Terra?"

She keeps looking into his dark, pale wine sea eyes. "I know you."

His hand touches her cheek and she places her hand on his. "Garret. You're Garret. I'm Terra and you're Garret."

Garret pulls Terra into him and hugs her as hard as she thinks he can. Then he kisses her. Then he feels her torso with his grippingly strong hands. He kisses her so hard that she loses her balance and falls back. He begins kissing other areas while feeling the freshly healed flesh under her dress.

Terra's getting hotter and sweaty and overwhelmed with physical interaction and memory and emotion. It's all coming back. It's all coming back too fast. Way too fast. Something isn't right. Jane pushes away.

"Rist...something isn't right."

Rist? There was no Rist in these old memories. Her best friend's name was Patricia. The recurrence spins like a Möbius and Jane remembers the final moments with her best friend and her lover in the old memories. It wasn't love. It was hatred.

Jane looks Garret directly in his eyes with hostility and screams at him. "We broke up on terrible terms, you asshole! You abandoned me when I needed you the most! You called me every name in the book when I gave you one order that you didn't like! You didn't follow it and I got worse than killed because you abandoned me! You piece of shit!"

Garret doesn't move. He shows no emotion and his pale blue eyes flicker like two tiny glitches.

"Patricia went with you! My best friend told me to shove my order up my ass. You didn't trust me! None of you did...and then they caught me and tortured me and turned me into a monster. And I tried to kill all of you..."

Tears begin forming under Jane's eyes. But an echo within her rage remembers Rist and the other world. She wants the memory of Rist far more than anything that came before. Rist is the world that she wants. Jane wants to forget everything that she just remembered.

Behind the sullen countenance of Garret blurs  the silhouette of a woman who penetrates Jane's focus. She's in a red dress with white polka dots standing across the street, watching them. It's the raven hair girl from the balcony in her mind. Jane reads her lips when the raven perched in her mouth whispers, "I'm sorry."

While looking at the woman, she notices that in her peripheral vision, Garret's eyes have become a sickly pale green. A horrible smile creases his face and everything glitches and disappears. Garret and the raven girl and the city are gone.

Jane closes her eyes. She knows exactly what this is. She's going to wake up at the bottom of the mire and start the eternal recurrence all over again. She's supposed to lose her memory and wake up from herself. The beginning is supposed to be the end and the snake is supposed to eat it's own tail. She's supposed to exist in a purgatory of always watching the green lights disintegrate into bubbles in the murky depths of the mire. Forever? Who knows. But someone told her that she's a caesura. A gap between events. She doesn't recognize the voice who said it, but she believes it.

Jane can truly care less about her old memories now. Was Rist a game changer? Was she not supposed to find Rist? Is Rist the one thing that's breaking the horrible spell?

Jane opens her eyes and lays naked at the bottom of the mire but she has all of her memories for better or worse. She's furious and needs to think quickly.

The bottom. I'm at the bottom. The top becomes the bottom. The top...becomes the bottom!

Jane digs through the thick bottoms muck, kicking hard against the wet buoyancy of her body. Mud fogs everything around her, stinging her eyes and blinding her. She's running out of time like witnessing the countdown of a bent off handless pocket watch. She'll have to breath soon and if she gives up and swims to the surface, the eternal recurrence will begin again. There's no going back.

Jane finds the bottom with her hands and punches hard as she can. Her fist goes through the floor boards of the mire's upside down ceiling. She rips the creaking boards apart and pulls herself up into the ancient root wreckage house where the stranger gutted her.