It took a long time for Carl to find his car. He hadn’t run far into the wooded area on the side of the road, but it was as if the way back had been stretched and twisted out of shape, looping away from the car and the road. Carl was tired, he was frustrated, and, if he were honest with himself, he was scared—scared for Lefine and scared for himself. He had never seen his partner act like that. Why had he run off? What had he seen?
“Lefine?” he called half-heartedly. He didn’t expect Lefine to answer, but was frustrated all the same when he didn’t. “God damn it.”
He kept shuffling through the darkness. Every time he thought he found the path, a tree would loom suddenly in front of him, its branches scratching at him and catching his clothes. An unseasonably cold wind had picked up, blowing across the back of his neck and the places where he had sweated through his shirt, making him shiver. The wind carried the whispered voices and they surrounded him, telling him all the things in his body that were slowly dying. They told him all about what they had done to Darryl Lefine, and how much what was left of him was suffering…
He shined the Maglite ahead of him and saw the car.
“Finally!” he said, just to hear a real voice, and jogged toward his car. He opened the driver’s door, but before he could get inside, a hand clapped him on the shoulder. He jumped and turned, expecting to see Lefine.
It wasn’t Lefine, though. It was a tall man whose face was vaguely familiar. It came to him a moment later. He knew the man from the Paragon quarantine facility. He looked around the man and into the darkness behind him. Carl thought he could make out silhouettes but his head was starting to hurt and he felt dizzy. The whispering wouldn’t go away.
“Lieutenant Hornsby,” the man said, “we’ll need you to come with us.”
“Where’s Lefine? What did you do to him?” Carl said. His service revolver was in his glove compartment. The whispering told him to grab it. He glanced in that direction, just briefly, before fixing an angry gaze on the man.
“I imagine you’re considering going for the gun in the glove compartment,” the man said. “We’ve relieved you of it already. You left your door unlocked.” The man held up and jingled Carl’s keys.
The man was right; he hadn’t bothered to lock the door when he’d bolted after Lefine—hadn’t even grabbed the keys, in fact. He felt anger stirring in his chest. The whispering was like a rush of wind in his ears. It told Carl to peel off the man’s eyelids with his teeth.
Perhaps the man could read his mind, because he spoke with slightly less smugness in his voice. “Lieutenant, we don’t intend to hurt your partner or you. We just want to get you both somewhere safe, and quickly. You may remember meeting Dr. Greenwood? He thinks he can treat Lt. Lefine’s condition, but we’d like you there to keep him calm. Would you please come with us?”
“I saw blood,” Carl said. “Lefine is hurt.”
“We know, Lieutenant.”
“What did you people do to him? He was out there…Did you find him?”
“We can help him if you come with us.”
Confused and exhausted, Carl nodded, and allowed himself to be led to a white minivan parked behind his car. When Carl glanced back, the man at his elbow said, “One of our guys will get your car home safe,” and tossed Carl’s keys over the hood of the minivan to another equally tall and imposing man on the other side.
Carl was ushered to the back door of the minivan and assisted up into the back seat. Despite the circumstances, it felt good to sit. The whispering receded until it finally subsided altogether. The man he had been speaking to got behind the wheel.
“Where’s Lefine?” Carl asked.
“On his way to our facility. Now, Lieutenant, I have a lot to explain to you before we get to Paragon, so please listen carefully. You’re about to be part of something very important.”
* * * *
The elevator opened on subfloor 31, a vastly different floor than the previous one. This floor was fully constructed, with pale gray walls, drop ceilings, and overhead lighting. A long hallway lined with doors stretched out before the elevator, ending in a corridor running perpendicular. The alarm seemed to be coming from the left hallway.
Now that they were on the same floor as the gateway, the three moved with a little more reluctance toward their destination. The alarm, still calmly calling relevant personnel back to the lab in between blasts, grew deafening as they turned the corner. Kathy and Markham followed Rodriguez past offices and glass windows with drawn shades until they reached a door labeled “Suite 40 – Research.” Rodriguez tried the door, but it wouldn’t open.
“Lost my key card,” he explained sheepishly, and Markham stepped up to use his own. Once they were buzzed in, the door opened onto pandemonium.
In the lab room, researchers were running toward another Plexiglas enclosure, this one surrounding an upright six-by-four-foot rectangle of some strange dark burgundy viscous liquid framed neatly in polished metal. Kathy assumed it was the gateway. Each portal to another dimension she saw astounded her, proof that there was so much beyond human knowledge and understanding. She wished she had more time to inspect it, but in the midst of the chaos around her, professional instincts took over, and she assessed the situation.
A solitary shoe lay just beneath the gate. The substance within rippled. Several feet away, people in lab coats conferred with others, who in turn, hurried off to confer with others. Behind and to the right of Kathy, the observation control room was a frantic crowd of researchers and scientists tapping at keys and peering into computer monitors, over shouts of confusion and frustration. No one stood near the gate, and no one noticed Kathy or her companions, who made their way uncertainly toward it.
The alarm stopped mid-shriek as a voice from the observation room came over the loudspeaker, carrying across the lab. “We lost him! He’s gone! His stats went blue!” and then “Wait! Oh God…they’re black. Repeat, Ravi’s stats went black.”
The words slowed the whole chaotic process to a defeated crawl. Markham tapped a military-looking young man of probably no more than twenty-one or twenty-two on the shoulder. The soldier snapped to attention as Markham asked, “What happened?”
The young guy answered, “We lost Ravi, sir. Either he fell, or something sucked him through the gate.”
“What?” Rodriguez stepped up to the young man. “What do you mean?”
“We’re not sure exactly how it happened, sir. We lost contact with the subject entirely. Best if you ask them.” The young man gestured toward the observation control room.
“Dismissed,” Markham said absently, and the boy saluted and walked off.
Evidently Rodriguez’s professional instincts had taken over as well; he stalked off toward the observation room, Kathy and Markham at his heels.
“What happened?” Rodriguez said as he swung through the doorway. “Where’s Ravi?”
For a moment, the other researchers just stood there, staring at him in awed silence. Finally, one young woman in a ponytail stepped forward. The ID badge around her neck showed a picture of her smiling, with the name KETTERING, ABIGAIL printed beneath it. “Dr. Rodriguez? Is that really…really you?”
It occurred to Kathy, as it must have occurred to Rodriguez just then, that most of Paragon probably hadn’t even known Rodriguez was back, let alone expected to see him there in the lab. Rodriguez held up a hand. “Yeah, yeah, sorry. It’s me. I’m back. Long story. Tell me what happened here.”
Responding to the urgency in his voice, the younger researchers scurried into action, gathering the data they had been printing from the observation control room computers.
“See those black lines there?” Abigail pointed to one of the monitors. “Those are Ravi’s life stats. Ravi Varma. He’s a junior researcher here and—”
“I know Ravi,” Rodriguez broke in a little more gently. “What happened to him?”
“He was…alone in here. We’re not really sure what happened. When we heard the alarm, we came running, and…”
“And he was on the inside of the quarantine zone,” said another young researcher, whose name tag read FERGUSON, GEORGE. “It looked like he was being pulled through the gate.”
“Pulled through, or voluntarily passing through?”
“Pulled through,” Abigail said. “By the time we got here, we saw—well, we thought we saw…” She looked to George for confirmation and he nodded. “A hand, sort of, made of that stuff from inside the gate. It had his arm all the way up by the elbow, and was pulling him.”
“It was whispering,” George added softly. “Like the faces do.”
“His vital signs,” Kathy broke in. “You said they went black. What does that mean, exactly?”
Abigail and George looked startled by her presence, as if only just noticing her standing there with Markham.
“Abigail, the signs,” she repeated.
“Oh, right. Well, our monitors can only determine four statuses for implanted personnel on the other side of the gate. Honestly, I’m surprised it works at all. We tweaked those things for months—”
“And even now, they can’t track where you are, just how you are,” George added.
“Yes,” Abigail replied. “When the researchers are alive and okay, the data appears on the screen in green. When someone dies—” Abigail’s voice fluttered just slightly and she gave Markham the tiniest guilty glance, “the lines go red. That means the vitals have stopped entirely. If for some reason the implant is no longer connected to its host tissue—if it were removed, say—the lines would go black. We’d be disconnected. And then there’s the status of the lost team members. Ms. Banks and her team all have blue lines.”
“So what does blue mean?” Kathy asked.
The junior researchers glanced at each other and then Rodriguez before answering.
“We don’t know,” George said. “We aren’t sure how to qualify it quite yet. We designated blue as a catch-all for…” He seemed at a loss to explain further.
“For ‘Status Unknown,’ right?” Rodriguez sighed. “If an individual is not able to be read as either alive or dead, for example, but somewhere in between.”
“I don’t understand,” Kathy said.
George cleared his throat. “Well, if an individual was to be materially altered, say, or assimilated with other DNA, that would be blue. Essentially, it was meant to determine if a significant percentage of decay or alteration to the DNA caused confusion in identifying the host. We didn’t really expect anyone to show up like that, though.”
“But my team shows as blue? I was blue?” Rodriguez tried to meet the gazes of his junior researchers, but their discomfort was evident.
Finally, Abigail answered. “You and the rest of the team would flicker—blue, green, blue, green, then blue for a while with a burst of green, then vice-versa. It was inconsistent, hard to follow. Now they’re all blue.”
Kathy raised an eyebrow. “Could blue still mean they’re alive, though?”
“I…I guess it could, but it would be unlikely that they would consider it much of a life,” Abigail replied. Even minor alterations to our genetic code can cause fatal mutations, tumors, that sort of thing. For the nanobots to report blue, there would have to be changes so significant that the technology doesn’t recognize them as fully human anymore.”
“What if the people showing up as blue had parasites?” Kathy asked. “Parasites which could attach themselves in such a way as to confuse the nanobots but otherwise avoid detection, even on return trips through the gate?
“Parasites?” George looked bewildered. “Initial studies showed no signs of single- or multi-cellular animal life, no bacteria or viruses, and nothing like parasites. Plus, we already proved nothing organic survives coming through here.”
“Depends on how you define organic, kid,” Rodriguez replied. He turned to Kathy. “I’m sure of it now. They let me go. The Wraiths. They sent me back because it was the only way to come through.”
“Sure sounds that way,” Kathy said.
“What are they doing now?” Markham asked suddenly.
“I’m sorry?” Abigail looked startled again. Kathy decided those poor junior researchers probably often looked startled or confused in a place like that.
Markham looked at her impatiently. “The Green Team. Dr. Rodriguez’s team. What are their statuses doing now?”
“Oh, right. We’re monitoring them over here,” George said gesturing to a laptop on a corner of the observation room counter. Another junior researcher, a blond boy with round, nervous eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses, looked nearly panicked by their approach.
“Owen, show them,” George said.
The blond boy muttered unintelligibly to himself as his fingers darted around the keyboard in front of him. The monitor pulled up several lines in peaks and valleys reminiscent of a lie detector printout. Each line was labeled with a name and number:
Banks, Claire 032764
Gordon, Richard034519
Rodriguez, Jose037683
Vogel, Terrance032280
Jose’s line was black and flat. The others offered a steady output of jagged blue line, out of unison and with no seeming pattern, rhyme, or reason. Kathy watched her companions study the screen. Markham’s face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking. Jose, however, looked dismayed. Kathy suspected he was staring at his own line, gone black. He was there, alive and well, and to the best of their knowledge, still carried the nanochip inside him. He should have come up green, but he didn’t. To the computer, the technology that he had no doubt trusted his whole professional life, he was lost, still missing in the world beyond.
“We have to go back,” he said softly, then turned to Kathy and Markham. The look in his eyes was sad and sort of desperate. “We have to find them.”
“You’re sure you want to? No one would blame you for bowing out,” Kathy told him. “They can’t compel you to go.”
“No,” Jose agreed, “but they can.” He nodded at the screen. “It’s right there, Kathy. They aren’t the only ones who are lost, you get me?”
Kathy nodded. She believed she did understand him. Some might have called it closure that Jose needed, but it was more than that. It was the need to know for sure just how much of himself was left on the far side of the gate, and if he could—or should even want to—reclaim it. He needed to know in a figurative and maybe even literal sense how much of his own line had really gone blue.
Markham clapped a meaty hand on Jose’s shoulder. “We’ve got your back, man.”
“We’ll be watching out for you,” George slipped in softly. “All of you, if you’re going back through.”
“We’ll do everything we can on our end,” Abigail added.
“Let’s go, then,” Jose said, and strode out into the lab.
The defeated slump had passed, and once again, the lab was a flurry of new activity. All around them, scientists and researchers rushed around with clipboards and instruments which, to Kathy’s untrained eye, they seemed to bring close to the gateway’s quarantine chamber but never inside of it. Kathy guessed they were looking to evaluate the new data and possibly run some tests. Their excitement was quickly eclipsing their fear. Something had made contact from the other side, or from within the substance of the gate itself, and that was big news. To them, it was probably not unlike a piñata filled with mysteries of other universes, just waiting for them to crack it open.
Kathy wondered what Ravi’s disappearance would mean for their little scheduled trip through the gateway. Clearly, there were forces acting on the situation that Paragon would have to reevaluate.
She didn’t have long to wonder. The three of them hadn’t covered much ground between the observation control room and the gate when they saw Greenwood heading their way with a confused-looking middle-aged man in tow. The man was paunchy and balding on top, but had a pleasant enough face, the kind of face that could be warm when he smiled. Kathy bet that pleasant face could also look intimidating when he wanted it to. The man moved like a cop, took in his surroundings like a cop, and was regarding Greenwood like a cop might regard a murder suspect.
“Oh, you made it,” Greenwood said, as if their escape from his quarantine chamber had been no more impressive a feat than their showing up at his house for dinner. He didn’t look annoyed or even surprised, and again Kathy felt the jarring aspect of his unconventional personality. The odd half-smile that accompanied his words only served to reinforce to Kathy that there was something wrong with the man—wrong with the whole situation. Cases that were recommended to her through the Network, the covert group of occult specialists she was affiliated with, were always vetted for her protection, and she trusted the Network implicitly. Still, she couldn’t help finding that she most definitely did not trust Greenwood or where this case was going.
“Please don’t let that most unfortunate business with Mr. Varma alarm you,” Greenwood said as he approached with the confused man in tow. Behind them, four very large and well-armed men hovered in silence, each with a backpack dwarfed by the meaty hand that held it. “We have our best people on it. It doesn’t affect anything regarding the important matters we’ve discussed.”
“You just lost a researcher to a force you know nothing about,” Jose said, eyeing the large men behind Greenwood with suspicion. “Not on that side of the gate, where anything can happen, but over here, where you’re supposed to be the first line of defense. How can you say it doesn’t affect anything?”
“Dr. Rodriguez has a point,” Markham said. “I’m no scientist, but I would think proof that there’s something from the other side capable of crossing through, of making unwanted, even hostile contact, would warrant some re-evaluation.”
“It doesn’t change the urgency or importance of your mission,” Greenwood replied in that disconcertingly calm voice. “Preliminary evidence shows that what took Mr. Varma is simply another incarnation of the faces, a manifestation of the parasitic infection. It was a unique occurrence. Mr. Varma’s proximity to the gate and individual genetic predisposition to the substance therein led to another unfortunate but unforeseeable incident, but one, as I stated, that was particular to Mr. Varma. If anything, the incident underscores the urgency of your departure.”
“What about our safety?” Jose asked.
“What about it? I don’t see how anything has materially changed in that regard.”
Jose threw up his hands. “Do you understand the bullshit that falls out of your face, or do you just keep throwing words together until the people around you stop talking?”
“Jose—” Kathy cautioned, glancing at the big men, but inwardly, she was smiling. She’d been pretty close to saying something similar herself.
Greenwood ignored them. “I understand your renewed anxiety regarding the journey. I do. However, it’s more important than ever that you cross through and make contact with Claire Banks and her colleagues. Obviously, the situation on both sides of the gate is growing more complicated. Of course we want you to be safe, but we need you in there, gathering information—information, I might remind you, which is crucial to the protection not only of the Green Team, but of humanity in general.” He gestured to the man behind him, whose expression of confusion had fully morphed into suspicion beneath a veneer of genuine awe and unease. “This is Officer Carl Hornsby. You may be aware that Officer Hornsby and his partner were first responders on the scene when poor Dr. Van Houten expired. Officer, this is Kathy Ryan, Dr. Jose Rodriguez, and Sergeant John Markham. You’ll be going with them.”
Carl, who had still been taking in the details of the lab itself, pulled his gaze away from the gate and shook hands with each of them. “Is…is that it?” he asked, pointing toward the gate. It was quiet now, a placid upright pool of dark burgundy with static swirls of color. It was the first time Kathy had gotten a good look at the gate herself. She had seen gateways before—too often for any one person, if she thought about it—but she’d never seen one quite like that. She supposed it was because most of the gates she’d seen were ones opened from the other side, through magickal means. This was, perhaps, the first she’d seen opened from this side, through scientific procedure.
“That’s it,” Greenwood said.
“Okay, so why me?” Carl asked. “These three, I understand. You explained that much, but I still don’t see how I fit in here. I’m not a scientist or a military guy, and I don’t know anything about all this occult stuff…about dimensions and whatever.”
“Certain…less scientific but perhaps more experience-driven data—that occult stuff—suggests four of you stand a better chance than three, and my superiors have instructed us to integrate all data into our research. Further, Officer Hornsby, much like them, you appear to be immune to the infection’s mutation,” Greenwood replied. “And you are a man of questions that need answers.”
“Look, you’ve been feeding me bullshit since before I even got here,” Hornsby said. “Your men told me I was here to help with Lefine’s treatment. I went against my gut and trusted them and let them bring me here. Then you bring me here and tell me that the only way to cure my partner was to go through the gate and gather information to fill in the gaps of your knowledge. I’m not an idiot. Of course I see the absurdity of sending a townie cop to do the job of trained military and scientific personnel. But again, I went with it to get some answers, to try to understand what the hell was going on. Now you’re telling me that some voodoo plan of yours has magically added me to the roster of other people you’re lying to and screwing over?”
Greenwood sighed, and his expression darkened. “You know, Lieutenant, you’ve been a problem from the beginning. We assumed you would succumb to the physical infection like your partner did and save us the trouble of figuring out what to do with you, but you surprised us. Luckily, the occult data gave us an option—helped us kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”
All four of them turned to Greenwood, surprised. Kathy’s instinct for trouble ratcheted up.
Greenwood tapped a couple of buttons on the device around his wrist, and the glass door enclosing the gate opened. Kathy noticed that suddenly, the very large men, larger even than Markham, surrounded them. Each of these mammoth men took hold of the left arms of Kathy and her group and pressed something circular and metallic against their shoulders.
Markham, who had been assigned the largest of the men, evidently because of his size and strength, made to yank his arm free, but his handler held him fast. Jose managed, “What the fu—” and then there was a brief little gust of wind from inside the metallic things. In the next second, Kathy felt a tiny spot on her skin burning, and in the moment after that, the large men and their devices had retreated to their original position behind the old scientist.
Markham drew his service weapon and pointed it at Greenwood, but the scientist looked unperturbed. Immediately, the big men had their weapons drawn as well and pointed at Markham.
“Please don’t make this difficult,” Greenwood said. “You’ve only been inoculated and implanted with the vital stats chip. You’ve also been implanted with an updated data chip which we believe will relay information about your environment as your body and mind perceive it, allowing us to map the world a little better and keep an eye on your whereabouts.”
“Who the hell said you could implant us with anything?” Beneath Markham’s practiced military calm was a smoldering anger. The look in his eyes indicated that he very much wanted to pull the trigger.
“Sergeant, please, lower your gun,” Kathy said. She didn’t think the men would hesitate for a second in taking Markham down, and she didn’t want to see that.
“It’s for your protection,” Greenwood said, looking nettled.
“And what does any of that have to do with protecting us?” Jose interjected. “Your chips—they don’t work so well.”
Greenwood smiled. For the first time, Kathy thought, it was genuine—and she hated the smug, seething disdain in it. “You really are exhausting, the lot of you. I have one goal, Mr. Rodriguez, and that is to get you through that gate by whatever means necessary. I tried to be pleasant, to allay your fears and project genuine concern for your well-being, but you are all beginning to try my patience. The fact is, you are four uniquely qualified information gatherers, both because of your evident immunity to progression of the entity-driven infection and because of your individual training and background. As far as some of the prevailing cooler heads at Paragon are concerned, our sending you through the gate is a win-win. If you survive there on the other side, that is beneficial to us. It is in our best interest that you stay alive as long as possible, so that you can bring us back more information about that other world. If you don’t, it would be a loss to science, but then four loose ends who know way more about MK-Ostium than anyone at Paragon is comfortable with would have been dealt with. Nevertheless, believe it or not, the company does want you to return. I, personally, don’t care one way or the other about any of you. I believe we can develop all we need from what we already have. Of course, your recovery is not my problem anyway—that’s the yellow team’s concern. I’m content to let your little sycophantic underlings scurrying about like mice in the observation control room worry about that.”
“And you think you can coerce us into helping with any of this?” Markham held the gun at Greenwood’s face while he kept close watch on the men whose guns were pointed at him.
“Oh, I think you know I can.”
“He knows we’re carriers,” Kathy said. “Even if we weren’t before, he can see to it we are before we leave here. We can infect our loved ones, family, coworkers. We can’t leave the facility without neutralizing the entities, or we’ll infect every place we go. And Greenwood here will hold the quarantine and neutralizing processes over our heads until we bring him what he wants.”
Greenwood winked at her. “Smart girl,” he said. “Of course, if you do this for us you have the word in writing of the CEO of Paragon himself that we’ll neutralize the parasites and eradicate all elements of the infection before you leave this facility. Either way, the problem will end with you.”
Markham finally lowered his gun, but that simmering rage still lit his eyes.
“I knew something about this didn’t make sense,” Rodriguez said. “If you can neutralize the parasites now with tech we have in the lab, what information are we really going through the gate to get? You can’t tell me you actually care about Claire, Terry, and Rick, so what are you looking for over there?”
Greenwood glared at him. “We need to know for sure what the blue status means. Your personal data isn’t enough. And we need to know how the parasitic carrier system works.”
“Jesus,” Markham said, the dawn of realization in his voice. “You want us to bring something else back through. You said it yourself. You need carriers because it’s the only way anything over there can survive here. You want to weaponize whatever we carry back to this side of the gate.”
Greenwood didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The superiority in his expression had hardened in defensiveness.
“You son of a bitch,” Jose said.
“You’re all just making this up as you go along, aren’t you?” Kathy said to Greenwood. “Paragon hired me to keep casualties to a minimum, until you saw an opportunity to repurpose me. You just couldn’t give up the chance to make money off a biohazard.”
“It’s not about the money,” Greenwood said, and strangely enough, Kathy believed he thought he was being sincere. “If not us, then someone else, some other corporation or country less interested in our well-being will come along and thoroughly explore every part of the place, every stone and overturned leaf, for profiteering. We got here first, but do you think the member states of CERN are far behind us? We’re simply staking a claim and protecting our interests before the real people holding the purse strings do.”
For Greenwood, it might very well have been the scientific discovery he was after, and the misguided belief that Paragon might really be able to use alien biological agents to protect the country. He didn’t strike her as that naïve, but she supposed it was possible.
“If you’ve genuinely convinced yourself that you’re doing this to protect the country, then I feel sorry for you.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me, dear lady,” Greenwood said, that unnatural, unflustered expression returning to his face. “I’m not going through the gate.”
While they had been talking, the five large men who had inoculated them had encircled them again. All of them still had their guns drawn, and were still carrying small backpacks in their free hands.
“Greenwood, think about what you’re doing,” Kathy said. “Think about what sending us through is going to lead to. You’ve lost control of this whole project.”
Greenwood regarded her coldly. “Thank you, Ms. Ryan, but for the time being, your input regarding the future direction of the project is not needed. Your consulting might be better utilized beyond the gate.”
The large men turned their guns on Kathy and Jose, who reluctantly backed toward the gate’s open quarantine doorway. Markham and Officer Hornsby held their ground despite the guns pointing at their faces. However, seeing Kathy and Jose ushered into the quarantine room and so close to the gate ended whatever standoff Markham and Hornsby were planning. They grudgingly took the backpacks they were handed and then they, too, joined Kathy and Jose inside the gate’s quarantine chamber.
“I sincerely wish you luck,” Greenwood called.
Jose flipped him the middle finger.
“Who first?” Kathy asked.
“I’ll go,” Markham said, and with a short, quick breath, he plunged into the swirls.
“Age before beauty,” Hornsby said, smiling awkwardly at Kathy. He, too, took a breath and then dove through the gate after Markham.
“Ladies first,” Jose said, gesturing to the gate. He looked terrified.
“See you on the other side,” Kathy said and gave him a small smile. Then she forced herself to move forward, to surrender to crossing the gateway. She felt the wet-not-wetness as the swirling fluid engulfed her, obliterating sound and light, and then she was falling.