She heard someone crying and then screaming and then babbling, all three mixed up together, all of it coming from her own mouth.

Trapped and eaten alive.

Eaten from the inside out, forever, no end, trapped inside seamless white stone, alabaster, a tomb that went inside her, immobilized her so that she couldn’t even lash out, couldn’t move as they ate her insides…

Never let it happen again.

Never.

Would kill herself first.

She clutched dirt in her hands, squeezed it like she was holding on to reality. The dirt ran through her fingers and she gathered more and again it got away and she grabbed at more and more, needing something to hold on to, and something to hurt. Needing to feel her body move and not be in that terrible blank white stone prison.

She was just a girl. Just some girl. Just this girl with the stupid name of Dekka. She had fought enough. And what for? For emptiness. For loneliness. All of it came to here. To this nothing. To clutching at sand and jibbering like a crazy person, beaten.

Die here, Dekka. It’s okay if you do. It’s okay to just lie here in the dark and let your eyelids close, because there’s nothing more to see, Dekka; do you hear me? Do you, Dekka, because there’s nothing for you but fear. And death is better because death is the end of fear, isn’t it?

Quiet. Peace.

It wouldn’t be suicide. That was the thing you could never do, right? Never kill yourself. But let yourself go? Where was the sin in that?

“You want me to explain how I could wish for that, God? Tell you what, hit the back button and play the last hour … no, no, the last, what’s it been, almost a year?

“Not even enough. Come on, God, you want to see, right? Have a good laugh. See what you did to me. Make me brave and then break me. Make me strong and leave me weeping in the dirt.

“Make me love and then … and then…

“Just kill me, okay? I give up. Here I am. You can see in the dark, right, God? Don’t you have night-vision goggles? You know, the ones that make everything green and glowing? Well, strap them on, oh, Lord, oh, God, oh, big-bearded guy in the sky, you strap on your goggles like some divine commando, and you look down at me, okay? You take a good long look at what you did.

“See? See me here facedown in the dirt?

“Can you hear me? Can you hear the sounds my brain is pushing out of my mouth, all that nonsense? I sound like a madwoman pushing a shopping cart down the street, don’t I?

“Can you smell me? Because when the fear had me I made a mess all over myself. Fear does that, you know; did you know? Well, probably not, being God and all and not afraid of anything.

“Just. One favor. Okay? Just kill me. Because as long as I live she might do it to me again, she might cover me like that, and it might squeeze me like it did, and then I might feel those… I might know what they were doing, you know, because it’s not like I didn’t see them pouring out of my guts as Sam cut me open.

“So, I beg of thee, all right? Oh, most high Lord: kill me. Do I have to beg? Is that it? You get off on that? Okay. I beg you to kill me.”

“I don’t want to kill you.”

Dekka laughed. In her fevered mind she thought for a second there she’d heard an actual voice. The voice of God.

She waited, silent.

Something was there. She could sense it. Something close.

“Is that you, Dekka? It sounds like you.”

Dekka said nothing. The voice was familiar. It probably did not belong to God.

“I was out here. I heard you crying and yelling and praying and all,” Orc said.

“Yeah,” Dekka said. Her lips were coated with dirt. Her nose was blocked by it. Her body was damp with sweat.

She couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Like you was wanting to die.”

He couldn’t see that she was facedown in the dirt. He couldn’t see that she was finished. Beaten.

“You can’t kill yourself,” Orc said.

“I can’t…” Dekka began, but then she couldn’t form any more words without spitting the dirt out of her mouth.

“If you kill yourself, you go to hell.”

Dekka snorted, a derisive sound, as she spit dirt. “You believe in hell?”

“You mean, like, it’s a real place?”

Dekka waited while he thought it out. And suddenly she wanted to hear the answer. Like it mattered.

“No,” Orc said at last. “Because we’re all children of God. So he wouldn’t do that. It was just a story he made up.”

Despite herself Dekka was listening. It was hard not to. Talking nonsense was better than remembering. “A story?”

“Yeah, because he knew our lives would be really bad sometimes. Like maybe we’d be turned into a monster and then our best friend would get killed. So he made up this story about hell, so we could always say, ‘Well, it could be worse. It could be hell.’ And then we’d keep going.”

Dekka had no answer to that. He had completely baffled her. And she was almost angry at him, because baffled was a different thing from despairing. Baffled meant she was still … involved.

“What are you doing out here, Orc?”

“I’m going to kill Drake. If I find him.”

Dekka sighed. She stuck out her hand and eventually encountered a gravelly leg. “Give me a hand up. I’m a little shaky.”

His massive hands found her and propped her up. Her legs almost gave way. She was drained, empty, weak.