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The memory of his ill-fated maiden trial at the Shadow Run lingered as he dimly perceived, on the periphery of his rising panic, the shambling shape that was him-and-not-him seizing his flashlight and leaving.

Before he became overwhelmed he thought fleetingly of Lawrence, and wondered if his doppleganger would finish what Taym had never gotten around to starting. He hoped so, and he realized that this, his final thought, was one of anger and of violence and of hate, and the bitterness was resigned and tired. The mob won over. Fiona was a whispered, wordless apology.

The first thing he'd done had been to reach for the pendant, and of course it wasn't there, of course it wasn't, not that it had made any difference before and wouldn't now. For a moment he simply laid in the crawling filth, disoriented, disgusted, stilling an urge to retch, with his hand resting on his chest and absently, unthinkingly, feeling out the hollows and crests of his birdcage sternum, fingers shifting back and forth as though the jut of his bones was an injury that required assessment. He let the bugs crawl over him, too stunned and absent to resist.

And then he saw the light of his phone, and he half-crawled, half-stumbled towards it, for no reason other than that no other immediate goal presented itself. He gagged, trying to shiver off the swarm the way a deer might, his instincts jumbled up with Fiona's in an incomprehensible wreck, and he shoved a handful of skittering shapes off the screen and blinked, stunned by the sudden brightness.

A long few minutes passed while he stared uncomprehendingly, first at Kostya's terse message, then at the ones from Sunny and Jane, and then at the flood of texts and pictures from America. He lingered over these last for far too long, mute and terrified and bewildered, until Fiona's muffled urging broke through to his awareness.

He felt things scuttling through his hair and he shivered and shuddered but did not move from where he lay, clutching his phone and reading and re-reading and re-reading, and his hands shook violently while he tried to dispatch a text, already sure that it would fail to send, already waiting for the notification that it had been queued while he rapidly fumbled his way through another, pausing occasionally to shake a bug from the screen.





He realized he was laughing, high, nervous, hysterical laughter: naked, caked in gore, lying in a seething pile of tiny insect legs and sending a doomed text message and laughing, laughing, laughing. He did not stop as he hauled himself to his hands and knees, phone still tightly clutched, and began fumbling his way along the walls, watching the constant march of his cellmates and trying to determine if they were coming in or leaving out anywhere.

As the delirium of waking settled the realization that there was nowhere he could escape the constant crawling took its place, and he stood, swaying, unsteady, and the laughter broke up into a handful of panicked sounds before he silenced himself and frantically scrubbed at his hair. One foot scrubbed at the opposite ankle and then switched places in a futile effort to stem the tide, and he began to shake, violently and from head to toe.

Mastering himself with an effort of supreme will, he painstakingly, slowly, composed a handful of texts to Jane: capitalized, punctuated, a succinct but extremely glossed-over relay of the events leading up to this moment, disregarding the queue notifications that popped up every time he ran out of room and had to move to a new message. And then another, reminding her that a fuller report would be regrettably impossible unless someone managed to bail him out. He did his job: he conveyed his useless, trivial, sniveling intelligence to the uncaring phone, even as he was certain that the texts would never be sent.

He summoned Fiona, and now both his hands were occupied as he shivered and trembled his way from tiny opening to tiny opening, futilely and absently trying to pry open gaps that didn't exist, to jimmy doors that weren't there. After several unending minutes of pointless attempts he returned to the center of the room, flicking his feet like a cat that had stepped in a puddle, laughing intermittently strange crazed laughs, and then succumbing to absolute silence and stillness. He let them crawl up his ankles, because he had no choice. There was nowhere to climb up out of the way; there was nothing to create a barrier.

Exposure numbed his will to care. He folded himself up gently back onto the floor and he lay down, shivering and twitching and closing his eyes while he counted, one two three, and willed himself not to start back up retching and bolting for a sanctuary that did not exist. The angle of his hipbone was painful against the floor; his shoulderblade was a point of unbearable pressure.

He placed Fiona flat over his chest, his fingers white-knuckled on the hilt, and he lifted up his phone to read, again, the things that he had been left: America's missives, and Bashmet's restrained request. He would, he thought, give himself just five minutes, just five minutes before he resumed the futile, stupid efforts of escape. Just five minutes to pore over photos, to read, again and again, the proof that someone cared that he would not come back. Five minutes, he thought dimly as he twitched and shivered and tensed, would be enough.

She laughed sweetly, but there was derision in it as a single moth entered his mouth. "One for one, then."

Life spilled into Lawrence, just a bit. Just enough to make him feel the slightest bit younger. A single year maybe.

The laughter continued as two more moths scrawled into his mouth. Another sound joined it, the sound of light footsteps, stumbling and sometimes dragging toward them. Soon Lawr's light caught a bare boney foot, and then Taym stumbled toward them, bald and naked, with eyes that held bright curiosity.

Moving past, Lawrence, the creature finally came to light. Delicate parchment skin stretched over bone and flowers framed a sweet face as tiny moth bodies crawled over her in a living, shifting gown. She placed a hand on Taym's head and he keened, pushing into the contact. "You will take this with you, worthless one. Teach it what it must know to blend among those of the blood and the traitors who aid you."

More sounds in the distance, and soon half a dozen more Taym's shuffled close, eyes cloudy and blind, expressions vacant. They dropped items on the floor, including clothes, a pendant necklace, boots of good quality. One carefully handed the first Taym a lighter, and Famine nodded, a soft rattle was followed by the sound of wooden chimes.

The moths of her gown began to flutter rapidly, "Don't break it, creating an intelligent one is most...onerous." The dress began to blur. "They will lead you out, worthless one. I will see you again." The creature exploded into a cloud of moths that scattered back through each of the doors.

He swung wildly between practical considerations--turn your phone off; turn it back on briefly to check the time, check the date, save the battery--and mindless hysteria.

The last several years of Taym's life had been a prolonged study in avoiding idle thought. Every second that he could fill up he did, be it with work or self-deprivation or ravenous reading or casual sex or worse distractions: anything, anything to shut off his thoughts. By the end of the first six or seven hours of wakefulness, the realization that he would run out of distractions began to override his gnawing hunger and thirst and the pain in his back and his legs and even, eventually, the constant dull disgust of the crawling swarm.

He devoted himself to mindless tasks: pushing the tip of the knife into the insects' doors, craving and scraping away, prying at imaginary gaps and making no progress. He crushed under his bare feet hordes of the never-ending intruders, retching (and only retching, his stomach empty), trying to construct a dam, a coffin of bodies where he could lie down and find some sort of respite. He twitched and shuddered constantly, now, and realized that he expended precious calories with every nervous shiver but could not stop. He wept. He tempted himself with five snatched minutes of distraction on the phone, shielding it with one shaking hand. He composed in whispers long acrostics and complicated anagrams. And then back to the pointless scraping at the walls while he begged Fiona to talk, talk about anything, just talk, while he rocked back and forth and scrubbed the beetles out of his hair and trembled.

He'd known true hunger before in a way that few people of his age and background did, and he'd harnessed it on the Island as a tool in his arsenal of distractions. It was nothing, nothing, compared to what he experienced now, and when his desperate glimpse at the phone showed that twelve hours had rolled past since waking--days since the last he'd ate or had anything to drink and his body already pushed to the very brink of its limits--he very nearly considered trying to eat what he did have, and actually gathered up a palmful, crushed until they stopped moving, until he retched again at the thought and remembered the worm, remembered reading of some of the things that a famine bug could do once it got into you, and decided against it anyway. In the beginning the hunger was preferable to thinking--it drowned out thought, as Taym knew well, when it spiked--but eventually, after far, far, far too much time, it dulled to an ache that co-existed with the introspection, and it was then that he began screaming.

At first he only screamed curses and wordless rage at the apathetic walls, interspersed with hysterical, shaking laughter. He screamed until he was hoarse, and his throat was parched and so this took almost no time at all. Ten minutes elapsed before he began again, coughing violently, and this time he alternated between cursing and crying and then, desperately, between defiant demands and tearful pleading directed at anyone or anything that might possibly be listening, somewhere, if only for the purpose of indulging satisfaction at his torment. He beat uselessly at the walls with weak arms, until his fists bled. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.