“R-Reina…” I croak, reaching out a weak hand before it falls limp in front of me.

All sounds disappear.

Reina is no longer screaming.

No longer shrieking.

No longer…fighting.

A sob lodges at the back of my throat as darkness swallows me whole.

Decimation is an interesting process.

It starts with one crack. Then two. Then everything crumbles and falls apart.

The art lies in starting that first crack. It has to be precise and to the point.

It has to be unmistakable and with the purpose to hurt.

Better yet, it has to come out of nowhere. Victims are easier to handle when they’re ambushed, when their world is flipped upside down in a fraction of a second.

Today, a process of decimation has started.

Reina’s life is now mine to own.

Mine to torture.

And mine to finish.

One week later

Help!

Someone help!

Please help me!

“No one will help you, monster.”

I crack my eyes open and wince. The back of my head feels as heavy as metal.

Constant beeping. Smell of bleach and coffee. Classical music.

The moment blinding white light penetrates my eyelids, I screw them shut again.

I’m obviously at the wrong place in the wrong time.

Isn’t there a song about that?

“Reina?”

Someone’s fingers force my lids open and shove another blinding light into my line of sight. My pupils burn with the intrusiveness of it.

“Miss Ellis, can you hear me?”

“Reina, honey, open your eyes.”

Reina? Who the hell is Reina?

There’s something wrong about that name. Completely freaking wrong.

Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong name.

The voices continue drifting in and out around me. Someone calls me Miss Ellis. An older voice keeps calling me Reina. And then there’s another presence, someone I can’t quite pinpoint.

His masculine voice is like a dark forest in the middle of a starless night. It’s deep and rough around the edges as if all the ruthlessness in the world has been injected into it. It’s scary how much a voice can relay.

It’s almost crippling how much a voice can become a subject of nightmares.

All the other voices keep asking if I’m fine and telling me to open my eyes, but not him.

No.

The nightmare voice is calm, unlike them. He’s composed and speaks with chill-inducing purpose. “Wake up, monster. You don’t get to die just yet.”

His words register slowly. It’s my brain. The useless thing understands with delay.

My heart thumps loud and hard at the threat in those words, at what he called me.

Monster.

This can’t be true.

It’s a dream—no, a nightmare. Soon, it’ll all end and I’ll go back to normal.

Only…what’s normal?

I’m not Reina or Miss Ellis or whatever the hell they keep calling me. I’m someone else.

I’m…I don’t know who I am. Reina is familiar, but it isn’t me.

Wrong. Everything is so damn wrong.

My trips in and out of consciousness become exhausting. It’s like I’m playing hide and seek with the darkness; only I’m not sure if I’m running away from it or sprinting toward it.

There’s something enchanting about the darkness…a push, a pull. It’s like a haunting lullaby with ever-changing lyrics.

I keep trying to avoid the blinding light and the voices. So many damn voices surround me like audible torture.

They keep heightening and magnifying, and there’s no way I can stop them from assaulting my senses.

They’re like an unreachable itch beneath the skin.

Then, one day, when I think I’m about to go crazy, my eyes open. Or maybe my brain finally catches up to that fact.

The back of my head aches, and so do my limbs. It’s as if someone beat me up with a baseball bat.

Wait…is that what happened?

The blinding light renews the urge to close my eyes again, but I don’t. I keep them wide open—as wide as I can considering the circumstances.

If I close them again, I might never open them back up. I’ll return to the hide and seek game with the darkness.

I’ll go mad for sure.

My surroundings are blurry. Mismatched shades of white become more and more defined the harder I focus. A headache lodges firmly at my temples the more I try to make out my immediate environment.

White walls. The same bleach smell. No classical music or coffee this time, which probably means the man with the older voice who used to talk to me isn’t here anymore.

“Miss Ellis, you’re back,” a soft voice calls from beside me before an Asian woman’s kind face comes into view.

Her black hair is tied into a bun underneath her white cap, and some wrinkles surround her pulled brown eyes.

She checks something on the machines around me and nods to herself with a smile. “I’ll call Dr. Anderson. Do you need anything?”

I attempt to shake my head, but the stabbing pain at my nape stops me.

When I say nothing, she asks, “How do you feel?”

“Like hell,” I grunt in a scratchy, barely alive voice. “Have I been in hell?”

“You’ve been so lucky, dear. You gave us a fright.” She smiles and leans in to whisper, “Your fiancé hasn’t left your side the entire time.”

I have a fiancé?

No, that can’t be right. I don’t have a fiancé. I don’t have anyone.

Wrong. Everything is just so wrong.

“It’s rare to see that kind of devotion in college kids these days.”

College.

Okay, so my name is Reina Ellis, I’m in college, and I have a fiancé.

Did I mention wrong?

None of this adds up in my brain…or is it still trying to keep up with reality?

When I raise my eyes again, the kind Asian nurse isn’t speaking to me anymore. Her attention is on something—or rather, someone—over my head. “Congratulations on your fiancée’s recovery, Mr. Carson.”

“Thank you.”

My spine locks and a shiver shoots down my back, covering my entire body.

The rough, deep voice with the slight huskiness.

The nightmare voice.

The one who called me a monster and…something else.

There was something else, but I’ve forgotten what it was.

Hell, I’ve forgotten a lot of things.

I don’t even remember why I’m here, my age, or my damn name.

Everything is a blur. It’s like I can reach the answer, but the moment my fingertips brush against it, it turns into fog.

The nurse says something else, but I miss her words—again, my brain has trouble keeping up. Everything happens too fast, like in some futuristic show.

Wait, are we in a Black Mirror episode?

How do I even know Black Mirror and not my own life?

The last thing I focus on is the door hissing open then closed behind the nurse.

My throat chooses this exact moment to become scratchy and sour. I glance to the side, searching for water.

A bottle sits on a small table, and I reach my arm out to grab it.