When she woke up, the pain was there to greet her. It came in slow waves, throbbing around her face and neck. Breathing was almost impossible. What little of it she could do was painful and labored. It felt like her throat had collapsed into itself, and that it took so much effort just to pass a little air through the narrow passage.

The light had changed, too. No longer was she surrounded by a beautiful warmth. Now the world was a dull red, as if coated by a dark crimson smear. The sound of a car trunk opening met her ears. She was no longer free and flying. She was abducted and stuffed into a trunk.

There was blood all over her mouth. A rusty taste filled her mouth and saturated every breath. Her nostrils were blocked with it.

Worst of all was her eyes. No matter where she looked, or how hard or often she blinked, she couldn’t see anything but the dark red glow of the trunk light. It was as if someone had slid red lenses over her eyes. She reached her hand up to feel for whatever was blocking her sight, but there was nothing. The world remained a blurry red, and nothing else.

Her head spun wildly, unconsciousness threatening to take her again, when a new feeling arrived. A hot nausea rose from the pit of her stomach just as the spasms started. Carly rolled over just as she started throwing up. Damned if she was going to die choking on her own vomit.

“What the fuck?” someone outside the car yelped. It was a man’s voice—middle-aged, no discernible accent—no one she’d ever heard before. Why the fuck was he doing this?! Had her mother been right about Joan?

His hands reached around in the trunk, fumbling through a mess, and then grabbing at some metal tools. She still couldn’t see him and Carly flinched at the unexpected sound. She twisted away, trying to stay out of reach of the hands that had already done so much damage. It was all she could do. That, and plead for her life.

“Please.” Her throat hurt to talk and all she could get out was a hoarse whisper. “Please stop. Please.”

The sounds of his rummaging ended and his footsteps started again, heading away from the car. A moment later, a loud clang sounded from a few yards away, followed by the sound of a long metal chain clattering, falling down onto itself. There was nothing else. No traffic. No trains.

No other people.

How long had she been unconscious, lying there in the trunk of the car? Damn, she still couldn’t fucking see anything. Despite that, if she wanted to escape—or at least try—then now was the time. Her immediate surroundings were quiet, and she could scramble out of the car and feel her way in a direction. Anything was better than just lying there and waiting for it.

She lifted herself up on trembling arms and had just swung a leg over the lip of the trunk when she heard footsteps rushing back. Before she could move again, two hands wrapped around her arm, almost tearing it loose from the socket as she was yanked out of the trunk. She landed headfirst on a sharp bed of rocks and she tried to curl up to protect herself, but something stopped her from moving. A heavy foot on her back kept her in place, and Carly lost it. The weight pressed down on her harder, even as she cried at him, begged him to stop.

“Why?” she asked, almost choking again. “Why are you doing this?”

“Sorry,” said the man. He sounded bored. Professional. “It’s nothing personal.”

A new sound met her ears then. The distinct metal click of a gun being cocked, ready to fire.

She reacted without thinking, thrashing about until she managed to scramble out from under his foot. She didn’t think, she didn’t stop, just experienced a spasm for survival which sent her clawing to her knees, and up onto her feet, screaming madly while running blind across a rocky surface.

It no longer mattered where she was. Or where she was going. She’d rather die on her feet with her life in her own hands than be shot on the ground like a wounded animal. It didn’t matter that she was wearing knee-high boots, or that she nearly tripped over something that she couldn’t see, or that she banged her knee on something much bigger and harder and went tumbling downhill. She flopped over several times in the sand until she came to a stop against something hard—maybe a log—her back pinned flush against it. Anywhere seemed better than at the top of the hill, underneath a killer’s boot. Underneath the barrel of his gun.

She coughed hard through a cloud of dust and sand, finally regaining her breath. She still couldn’t see anything beyond the red haze, but now there was something new to listen to. Voices coming from back up the hill. Two men, shouting. One of them telling the other to freeze! and drop it! with the militant staccato of a police officer.

A brief silence.

And then gunfire. Multiple rounds echoing off the rocky sides of mountains.

And then silence once again.

She sat, frozen in the sand. Who had survived, the good guy or the bad guy? Was there even a good guy?

Forget about up there.

She had to start moving again. Where the hell was she? Just how far would she have fallen were it not for the piece of wood she was resting on? Should she get up and try to make a run for it again, or was she sitting at the edge of a cliff?

She felt around her in the sand. The ground sloped away beyond her reach. A warm trickle ran down her cheek and Carly moved her hands to her body, checking for injuries. It felt like most of them were on her face. She gently touched where it hurt— her nose, her mouth, her eyes. At least they were all still there.

Still no sound from up the hill. A coyote howled in the distance.

And then a human voice. A man. It was coming closer.

“Carly!” The voice was coming from above, back at the top of the hill. It sounded different than her attacker. Or so she wanted to believe.

“Carly! Are you okay?”

The fact he knew her name didn’t mean anything. If her attacker had gone through the trouble of stalking and ambushing her, then he’d know her name. It wouldn’t be hard to find out who she was. He could have been in the bar, watching the show. He was probably the weirdo who wouldn’t stop staring at her.

If only she’d gone to the van for her gun. . . .

Fuck!

If only her eyes worked so she could stare back right now.

She listened helplessly to the sound of someone carefully descending a rocky slope. Fuck this. She hadn’t lain down to die when a gun had been pointed at her head, and she wasn’t going to start now. She patted the ground, looking for a stick or a rock, any type of weapon. Anything. But there was nothing useful to grab hold of, and the footsteps got closer.

“Stay away!”

“Carly, stay still. Stay there.”

Stay there? She considered digging a hole in the sand and burying herself.

“Just relax,” said the man, sounding closer and closer with each ridiculous command.

“Go away!”

But she could still hear him, his feet digging into the sand, the cascade of pebbles tumbling downhill with each step.

“Carly, it’s me.”

“Who the fuck is me?!”

“Tansy!”

Maybe some part of her brain heard it, the sound registering somehow, somewhere. But it came like radio static, dumbly and with no information.

“Tansy,” he said again. But it had just remained a sound fragment. A mystery. It certainly wasn’t a memory, or a friend. Or by any means a relief.

She fell back on all fours and began crawling away from the sound.

“Stop!” he cried. “Please, stop. It gets too steep!”

For Carly, there was no such thing. The steeper the better. Steeper meant the sound would have a harder time reaching her. It might also mean that she’d fall and die. But at that moment, the trade-off seemed more than acceptable.

She crawled on.

“It’s Tansy! From The Collective!”

His words broke through the red haze surrounding her brain. A faint memory, something. Something she could actually think about and connect meaning to. Tansy. From The Collective. Yes, she knew these things. These were familiar, real, and good.

She stopped crawling.

She rolled onto her side and waited for things to start making more sense. It was slowly coming back to her, the person behind the sounds, behind the names. She had only ever heard his voice a couple of times, years before, and had never seen his face, but there was an identity, a person who had been built so solidly inside of her. That kind of building took years, like a sand dune in the middle of a lonely plain. And in the years following its formation, she’d let it erode. She had let the sand blow away and smooth out, until it had almost disappeared into an unrecognizable flatness.

And then she felt his touch.

The weight of Tansy’s hand was suddenly on her shoulder. It formed a soft grasp that made Carly flinch.

“Are you hurt?” he asked quietly. And then, as if realizing how dumb of a question it was, “Where does it hurt?”

It was hard to tell, without the ability to actually look at her own body. The shock and endorphins had a way of buffering out the true sensations, the realistic damage. She knew by now to distrust them, discounting her body’s relative painlessness. Except for her face, of course, which felt like it had been stung by a swarm of bees. Puffy and on fire. Okay, so her face. “My face,” she said, finally answering his question.

And then she remembered who she was talking to. Or supposedly talking to.

Carly backed away from him. She moved, hoping that she was moving out of his reach, scooting backward on her butt, propelled like a crab by her heels and palms.

“Come on, stop it.” He grabbed her ankle and she collapsed, exhausted. “You’re from New Haven, Connecticut. Your favorite song is “Didn’t I,” by The Delfonics. You’re a hacker. And you’re safe. I promise.”

Carly rubbed her eyes in vain. Everything was still dark. “Tansy.”

She still didn’t believe it.

“Cscape,” he replied.

“If you’re Tansy, then. . . .” she trailed off.

“What? Ask me anything.”

“Um. . . .” Again Carly drew a blank. She could barely remember what had happened before she’d found herself pinned to the ground, let alone think of a proper question.

“One time for your birthday, I hacked into your ISP. Remember that? I made your internet free for a year.”

It sounded vaguely familiar.

“You were upset about it, at the time.”

She couldn’t tell if she was crying or bleeding. Or if she’d been imagining the whole thing. How the hell was Tansy here, out in the desert? How did he—

“What about. . . .” She was shaking again. “What happened to the. . . ? Where’s. . . ?”

“He’s gone,” Tansy’s voice was flat. “He’s dead.”

“Why was he doing that?” Yep, definitely crying now.

“I don’t know. I saw him throw you in his trunk, at the bar.”

It all came suddenly flooding back. She was traveling, on tour with her band, playing a show at a dive called the Dolphin Club. She had a life outside of the last half hour, something more than being a victim.

“I looked you up,” said Tansy. “I found your band online, and your tour schedule. And I came out here to meet you.”

She cried harder. The shock was wearing off, leaving her bare. Raw and exposed like a live wire.

Hands touched gently on her shoulders, her face.

“Can you see?”

“No.” She was sobbing now.

“Your eyes look red.”

Maybe that was good news. After how it’d felt when the blows were raining down on her, and the blackness that was now surrounding her, she was glad to hear that she still had eyes.

Tansy was patting her shoulder softly. “It’s happened to me once, too. I got knocked in the head, when I was serving.”

She nodded, sucking in a deep breath, trying to gain back some courage.

“Scary as hell, but it should clear up.”

“Thank you.” She could barely say it.

“It’s okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“Thank you, Tansy.”

His fingers brushed lightly across her cheek, his touch almost intimate. But she still couldn’t see his expression. She couldn’t see anything. It reminded her of their old online friendship—a faceless, disembodied connection. It was an old comfort.

“La La I Love You,” she said.

“What?” He sounded startled.

“The Delfonics song. That’s my favorite.”

“Oh . . . okay. Can you walk?”

She hadn’t thought about that. She had crawled only out of fear of blindly smashing into something.

“I’ll help you up,” he said, sliding an arm under her shoulder. “And we’ll walk out of here.”

“Okay.” She still wasn’t entirely present in the moment. She was still assuming that she was dreaming, or dead.

Or at least riding out some trip induced by the roofies someone placed in her drink that night. Probably that guy wearing black. Stranger things had probably happened at a place called the Dolphin Club.

Tansy picked her up slowly, his arms under her armpits, guiding her up until she was back on her wobbly legs. They felt like jelly, barely having the strength to hold up her weight, let alone carry that weight up a hill. Her knees shook.

“It’s alright,” said Tansy, holding up the majority of her weight. “I got you.”

With her arm around the top of Tansy’s shoulders, Carly began limping up the hill. She moved slowly, hesitating at every step she took forward in the darkness. But with each step, she gained confidence, trusting her guide all the way back to the peak of the hill.

“Where is he?” she asked, remembering her attacker. Was his body still lying somewhere nearby, bleeding out into the sand?

“Don’t worry. He’s gone.” That was clearly all Tansy was going to say about it. “Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, aside from your eyes?”

“I don’t know,” she said, still holding on to him as she walked. “Sometimes I can’t feel my face at all. And then sometimes it hurts so fucking bad. What did he hit me with?”

“I don’t know, a torch maybe, his gun.”

“And who the fuck was he?” She stopped walking.

“Let’s keep going,” Tansy said. “My car is just on the other side of this hill.”

She slowly started moving again, her foot slipping on a pile of rocks.

“We’re almost there.” He helped her up on top of a rock ledge and then stopped. “Or do you want to wait here? It’ll just be a minute. I can bring the car around and pick you up.”

She didn’t want to be alone. Not even for a minute.

“Okay, we can keep going,” he said, understanding her silence. It was a silence that lasted all the way to the car.