The Woman Who Walked Through Walls

Where the hell am I?

I couldn’t move. Leather straps held my arms, body and legs in place. I kept my eyes closed, as if I could deny reality by refusing to look.

This is just a bad dream.

The coppery taste of blood in my mouth, and the pain from the gag, killed that thought. My tongue felt the frayed edges of the strap, which tasted like old jerky left in the sun.

My teeth hurt. Why is that gag so tight? I’ve got a headache.

Opening my eyes, I looked up at the ceiling, avoiding the bright, fluorescent lights. My vision blurred for a few moments, and tears rolled down my cheeks from the brightness.

I must look terrible. My makeup is probably all smeared. If this is being filmed, I’m going to look like such a mess. God, what if this goes viral? My skin probably looks so pale under these awful lights.

The room smelled the way hospital rooms smell when they’ve been cleaned with something strong enough to cover something worse, antiseptic over the top, and underneath it something pungent and old that the antiseptic couldn’t quite reach. Like the smell had soaked into the walls years ago and decided to stay. It made my stomach turn.

A curtain, stained and worn and the particular yellow of something that was once white, covered the wall in front of me. Above, a large round clock ticked in the way institutional clocks tick, not urgently, just relentlessly. The clock read 12:40.

Overhead, a small spider busily spun her web in the upper corner of the room. I watched her work because there was nothing else to look at that wasn’t frightening. She was precise about it. Methodical. She had a system.

Ew. Spiders are so gross. I hope it doesn’t fall on me.

To my left, a monitor rested on a rolling cart. I stared at it, watching the steady blip of my heartbeat on the screen.

Nice and steady, a strong heart, I think. At least I’ve got that going for me.

A shiver moved through me.

Aubrey and Jasmine will rescue me. They must know I’m here. They have to know. We’re like, a team. The Terrible Trio. We stick together, right?

To the right, the side of the room with the door, a stand held up an IV bottle with a clear liquid inside. An IV needle had been inserted into my arm, and a tube stretched from the needle to the bottle. Water gently dripped into my veins.

A series of needles and three bottles of fluid rested on a rolling table next to the IV.

Those needles are huge. What are they going to do with those? This is so not okay.

The only sounds were the pounding of my heart and the deep, panicked pull of my own breath, plus the clock. Even my breathing sounded weird and echo-y in here, bouncing off surfaces that were all slightly too hard.

My heart skipped a beat when a man in a white lab coat walked in through the door. He didn’t look at me, keeping his eyes fixed on the curtain to the front. I tried moving, screaming, whatever I could to get his attention. I wanted to tell him this was a mistake, that I’d done nothing wrong, and that I didn’t deserve to be here. The straps were too tight for me to do much more than shuffle a tiny bit.

He walked to the window, grabbed a chain, and pulled on it to open the curtain. Something metal screeched, like it hadn’t been opened in years.

The curtain opened slowly, exposing a large glass window. People sat in chairs, in a kind of small auditorium, all of them looking at me as the curtains opened. The room beyond the glass was nicer than mine, carpeted, with proper overhead lighting. People in their regular clothes, looking at me the way you look at something in a zoo exhibit.

What the hell is this? Who are all these people? Am I on display? Is this some kind of sick reality show?

The clock hanging over the window showed exactly 12:55.

The chair moved underneath me, straightening out my body and standing me up straight. The straps held me down hard to what had become a long, vertical board. Like I was on display or something. Which I guess I was.

I stared at the audience, and they stared at me. I searched the faces for Aubrey and Jasmine, hoping they would rescue me.

Do they even know I am here? Do they care? They better care. We’re a team. We’re all me, but we were still a team.

In the back row, I thought I saw… Yes. Yes, that’s Aubrey, unmistakable even from here, that particular shade of pink she’d dyed her hair back in the casino job, still growing out at the roots. She wore dark glasses and a lot of makeup, her collar turned up.

And there, next to Aubrey, that’s Jasmine. She also wore dark glasses and the baseball cap she’d been wearing constantly for the past two months, the grey one she’d found in the lost-and-found at the hotel in the Kozlov dimension and had never returned. She’d worn it through every job since. I’d teased her about it once and she’d told me it kept the hair out of her eyes when she was working and after that I hadn’t teased her about it anymore.

I knew both women well. I ought to, since both are me, or rather, alternate versions of me. For the last, I don’t know how long it’s been, they’ve been my only friends. Or rather, I’ve been my friend. It’s enough to make my head swirl.