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There is no turning back.

Chapter 4 - Meera

Light pours in from my periphery in a prismatic swirl and breaks up the suffocating dark. As if the stars from the sky have been smashed up and sprinkled on top of me.

Then, novelty dissipates, as novelty must. Awareness sinks its teeth into me. I come to, and the light is just synthetic, assaulting me from above and around me, flattening the world into a bleached-out plane that has no depth, no shadow, no mercy to offer me.

It beats down against my eyelids, even when I squeeze them shut.

Are they still closed? I can’t tell.

I can’t tell where my body ends and the surface beneath me begins.

My limbs are leaden. The signals between my brain and my extremities arrive waterlogged, delayed, like messages sent through a wall of wet cotton. I strain my fingers, and I manage a twitch.

I don’t know where I am. What the hell happened to me?

Think. Think, Meera. You’re a scientist. You deal in observable phenomena. Start with what you can observe. One thing at a time.

I’m upright, I decide. My body is vertical—standing, I think, though it doesn’t feel like my choice to be prone like this. There’s an inordinate amount of pressure on the balls of my feet, my heels on stilts that leave my ankles aching. These aren’t my shoes. Where are my shoes? When did my shoes come off? Who took them? Why would someone—?

I was wearing the block heels. The ones that gave me the blister. The blister. I’d been walking from the T stop. I’d been carrying—

The curry.

Memory lurches sideways, and for a moment I’m back on the sidewalk with the smell of leather in my mouth and the sound of Tupperware cracking against concrete. The van. The hands. The hood. The needle. I’d been walking home and then I wasn’t. I was on the ground and then I was in the air and then I was in the dark and then—

And then this.

Glass. There’s glass around me. Curved, tinted, surrounding me in a ring that catches the light and sends it ricocheting in directions my drugged brain can’t track. I’m inside something. A fishbowl? No. No, that’s not right.

I’m at the center, and the glass is the perimeter, and beyond it—

Shapes. Dark shapes, arranged in a pattern I can almost make sense of if I squint. Individual enclosures. Pods. Lit from within by single warm-toned lamps that make each one glow like a lantern in a field of black. There are people in them. I think there are people in them. But the tint of the glass obscures everything beyond the first few feet; all I see is reflections of me, bedecked in crystals, blinded by overwhelm that renders my vision swimming. But I can sense it. Eyes are boring into me like lasers.

Someone’s watching me.

The realization incites a wave of nausea so violent I think I’m going to be sick right here on this platform in front of whoever is behind that glass. My knees threaten to buckle. I catch myself—barely—and the motion sends a wave of vertigo crashing through me that nearly takes me down again. Every part of my body aches. I push past the haze, straining to pinpoint where it originates. My wrists ache. My neck aches, at a specific point on the left side that throbs with the ghost of a puncture.

A voice fills the space. It comes from everywhere—above, below, the glass itself, the air. A woman’s voice. Or the perverse manufactured version of one. Modulated. I can’t process a single thing. It’s all a dizzying deluge of words and—and numbers?

My head swims. I turn it like a bird, cocking it this way and that, trying to clear it. My eyes lock on another pair. Tears are spilling from them, rolling in glistening trails down waxy cheeks. Frantic, I search for reason or remedy.

All my eyes find is another haunted, glazed over face. She isn’t making any sound at all.

I understand her. God, I understand her completely. Because the only thing keeping me from following her into that vacancy is the part of my brain that won’t stop cataloguing. Won’t stop observing. Won’t stop trying to build a framework of logic around something that has no logic in it.

Meera. Focus. Observable phenomena. The glass. The pods. The voice. The numbers on a display you can barely read. This is an auction. These are bidders. You are being—

No.

I can’t finish the thought. My brain flinches away from it the way a hand flinches from a hot surface—instinctive, protective, primal. Brimming with fear.

The voice spits out of an invisible speaker again, louder somehow. A number. Is it my number? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I want to go home.

Darkness devours me once more.

***