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“And the medication, did it work?” asked Dr. Brien.

“Yes.”

It
had
worked, way back then, but she hadn’t liked how it had made her feel. Slow, almost . . . muffled, as if they’d given her invisible earplugs. So when at the end of the month the medicine ran out and her mother checked—
Are you having any more of those funny dreams? You need to tell me, Lissa, if you do
—she’d said no. And when the dreams had come back, she just hadn’t said anything else about them.

She taught herself to ignore them instead. She learned to shut the pictures out of her daytime, learned to forget the dreams as soon as morning erased the darkness from the bedroom. As she got older they came less and less often, until it took hardly any effort to forget they’d ever been there at all.

She’d thought, earlier, how that had seemed a lifetime ago. That time before the symptoms.

If I’d known. If I’d only known I was living on borrowed time, I wouldn’t have bothered freaking out about all the tiny things that used to upset me. When I got to high school and Bruce
—
and freaking Cadan
—
still kept treating me like a little kid. Not being able to get matching shoes and swimsuit for Marissa’s sweet teen pool party. Not asking for help when I didn’t understand simultaneous equations and being pulled up in front of tZis thoughthe whole class. When I was sure Simon was going to ask me to the Newbies Prom and he never did.

She’d had friends—two best friends, and a whole heap of others. She’d been asked to most of the parties that mattered. She hadn’t yet had an official boyfriend, but she’d known, from giggling
oh-my-God-don’t-tell-him-I-told-you-what-he-said
conversations with Carlie and Marissa, that there were at least three boys working up the courage to ask her out. Her grades were good enough. She’d been promised driving lessons, and her own beetle-car if she passed her test the first time.

She’d had everything, and she hadn’t even realized.

Until . . .

“Until . . . ,” said Dr. Brien, and she nearly jumped, suddenly terrified he was reading her thoughts. But he was looking back at his screen. “Until about a year after you started menstruation, yes?”

Agh
. She ought to be used to that sort of question by now, but all the same, heat flooded her face. “Yes.”

He picked up a universal pen and sketched a rough square on his desk. The lines glowed briefly green, then the wood finish cleared to show a note-taking surface, smooth and translucent.

“Why don’t you tell me about the symptoms, the way they began?”

Again. Going through it all over again, with doctor after doctor . . .

But
this
doctor was going to fix her. She straightened a little in her chair, determined not to leave out anything that might help him figure out what he needed to do.
If it works . . . oh God, if it works this time, I might be okay for graduation. I’ve been a freak for half my time at school, but if this works, if they can all see me looking normal when we graduate . . .

“Okay.” She swallowed. “The pictures—they came back.”

For years they’d been nothing but flickers in her mind, fleeting and indistinct, easy to ignore. But when they returned, they were bright, vivid with detail, appearing as if lit by lightning flashes in her brain. And this time they
were
like nightmares. White-masked people, needles and syringes, huge humming machines she dreamed she was clamped into—and she woke biting down screams.

They brought pain, too. Pain that struck like lightning, white-hot, out of nowhere. She would have been able to hide just the pictures. But even if the pain hadn’t been bad enough to make her cry out or faint or—worst of all—throw up, she wouldn’t have been able to hide it. Because just as with the pictures came pain, with the pain came bruises.

Dark splotches creeping out from the nape of her neck up onto her jawline, or sometimes unexpectedly around her temples, or in thumbprintlike marks on the sides of her neck. Every morning when she looked in her mirror, she’d flinch from the sight of new marks.

Dr. Brien was nodding as she talked, making the occasional note in scrawly writing that shone a dark, wet green, as if he were using real ink.

Elissa told him everything she could think of that he might need to know. She told him how her grades had slid down to almost failin across his face again.

She didn’t tell him absolutely everything, though. He didn’t need to know about the times she hadn’t been able to get her makeup to cover the bruises, about the times at school when people had whispered about her—not always far enough behind her back. He didn’t need to know that, after one too many no-shows at parties, canceled shopping trips, and sleepovers ruined by screaming fits and late-night emergency calls to her parents to pick her up, even Carlie and Marissa had stopped inviting her anywhere. Or
that, after all, each of those three boys had asked other girls out instead.

Nor did she tell him how, to start with, her parents had put their own social lives on hold, but when a year had passed and there was still no sign she was going to get any better, they’d started going out again, leaving her at home with medication, their number to call, and a pillow to scream into.
I’m sorry,
her mother had said.
Really, I am, Lissa. I don’t want you to feel abandoned, and we’re just on the end of the phone. But it’s not like we can even do anything if we stay in with you, and your father’s work contacts . . .

Dr. Brien flipped his pen over, touched the nonwriting end to the surface of his notes, and transferred them to the upright screen, leaving the square blank. “So, hallucinations—‘pictures,’ as you say. And phantom pain and bruising. They all come together?”

“Yes.”

“Every time? You don’t get, say, bruising without the pain first? Or the pictures without any pain at all, like you did when you were very young?” He watched her face, waiting.

Not anymore
. “No.” Then a thought struck her.

“Elissa?”

“I . . . I didn’t think before, it was so vague . . .”

He waited, pen blinking its ready signal, a tiny emerald spark at its tip.

“The pain—yes, it normally comes with the pictures. But sometimes, I have just a—well, I guess it’s a hallucination, but I never really thought . . .”

“Why is that?”

“It—they—sometimes they come at night, so it feels more like a dream. If there’s no pain I don’t remember them much.
I didn’t think . . .” She looked at him guiltily. If she’d thought of this before, if she’d told someone, would it have helped earlier?

He smiled briefly at her. “Don’t worry, Elissa. So, you have hallucinations
without
pain that might just be dreams. Such as . . . ?”

Such as waking up crying in the night, shaking with sobs that didn’t seem like hers, bursting with misery and rage . . . feelings that didn’t seem like hers either, and that faded almost immediately, leaving nothing but bewilderment behind, and a fatigue that dragged her back down into the depths of sleep.

She’d been looking down at her hands, twisted in her lap—it was easier to talk if she didn’t have to watch him listen—but now she glanced up. Dr. Brien ha">She cleared her throat. , cd laid his pen down, and was tapping out his notes on the upright screen instead. He’d tilted it away from where Elissa and her mother sat, so she couldn’t see what he was writing.

“These particular hallucinations, Elissa. Are they
just
feelings—emotions? Is that all?”

She blinked. “I . . . Like I said, they don’t have any pain with them . . .”

“I mean, do you see anything? Are you aware of your surroundings? When you have your ‘pictures,’ they’re associated with images of people in white masks—scientists, presumably. In these night pictures, in these dreams, is it the same thing?”

“No. I don’t think I really see anything. I guess . . . I’m just in bed.”

“Your own bed?”

She stared at him, confused. They were freaking
hallucinations
. What did the furniture matter? “I don’t know. A bed. It’s dark.”

“All right.” He smiled at her. “Don’t worry, Elissa. You’re doing great. I’m just collecting as much information as I can. Anything that happens in your brain draws on all sorts of other data—movies you’ve seen, music you’ve listened to, conversations you didn’t even know you’d heard. And sometimes the type of data it’s drawing on helps us make a more accurate diagnosis. Now, if that’s all you can remember, let’s move on to your latest recurrence of the symptoms.” He pulled down the corners of his mouth. “It sounds like a nasty one, from what I’ve been sent. Suppose you tell me about it.”

As she obeyed, her stomach cramped. Ever since it had happened, late yesterday afternoon, she’d been sick with fear that it was going to come again. The pain had been . . .
oh God, just awful
. She’d been at home, thank goodness, and it had come so suddenly, so violently it had taken her feet from under her. She’d fallen, halfway up the stairs to her bedroom, dropping the orange juice she’d been holding, doubling over, retching bile onto the pale carpet.

“And the pictures?”

“White masks. A machine. A huge machine, much bigger than the others. And wires. They were putting wires into my head. Something . . . my hair, I think it got burned. There was an awful smell.”

The smell had still been in her nostrils when she’d come around, making her feel sicker, making her think for an insane moment that her hair had really burned, although when she’d put her hand up to it, it had been soft and undamaged.

“So with this one, the pain was worse than before?”

“Yes,” she said, not wanting to think about it.

“All right.” He tapped in the last bit of information, nodding a little at the screen as if he’d been doing sums that all added up the way he’d expected. “This was yesterday. And you’ve had nothing—neither pain nor pictures—since?”

She started to agree, then stopped. She hadn’t thought before—after that awful pain nothing could have had anything like the same impact, and she’d been thinking of them as dreams, anyway . . .

“I did have">She cleared her throat. , c another picture. La1;

Dr. Brien looked up at her, a sudden movement. “Last night?”

“Yes. I— Do you want to know about it? I don’t know if—”

“Yes.” An infinitesimal pause, then: “Please, Elissa, if you would.”

Something about it—the swiftness of his response, the quick jerk of his head as he’d looked at her—trickled discomfort through her. Suddenly she didn’t want to tell him about anything else. Especially not about the dream.

Which was dumb. She’d already agreed with herself to tell him everything that might be useful,
anything
that might help him fix her.

“I . . . Okay.”

It had started with something that was neither pain nor picture. A feeling of heat, of electricity in her hands, of brightness exploding like fireworks in her head. A half-familiar feeling, which she might have dreamed before. But this time it had been like a
focused
firework explosion, a feeling that she’d summoned it, that it was hers to control. Then a sensation of directing it outward. Of restraints breaking off her wrists. Of triumph.

And then the fire.

“A fire?” His voice was unexpectedly sharp. “Where?”

“In a building. A big building—like a hospital. Or a school, I guess.” Like she had earlier, she thought,
Why does it matter? It’s a hallucination
.

“All right. And you were?”

“I was running away from it.”

His fingers tapped briefly over the keyboard. “So, a building on fire, and you were . . . escaping it?”

“Yes.”

“And this dream, it was vivid, like the other ones you’ve described? It wasn’t what one might call a normal dream?”

“It was vivid.”

And it had been. If she shut her eyes she could still see the flames licking up halfway to the pitch-dark sky. She could still conjure up the memory of people fleeing, screaming, of herself running barefoot over rain-wet grass, fighting fatigue like darkness that swelled inside her head. Locking her hands into the wire loops of the fence, pulling herself up and up, knowing the electricity was off and yet having to force herself to keep hold of the metal. Dragging off her hoodie to put over the barbs at the top, still catching her arm on a wicked spike, the adrenaline racing through her veins meaning she scarcely felt the pain. Thinking that after all this time, she’d managed it, she was out, she was free.

When she’d jerked out of the dream, out of sleep and up into full wakefulness, she’d been exhausted, the aftermath of a headache lingering like poison fumes in her head, the smell of smoke still in her nose. As if this dream too had left bruises, but bruises inside her head rather than on her body.

She couldn’t bear to say all this to Dr. Brien, though. She described the dream baldly, leaving out the details, the
smoke that had smelled of chemicals and hot metal, the feel of the cold grass under her feet. The feeling, wonderful and terrifying, of triumph. Of freedom.

He obviously felt she was telling him plenty, though. He listened int across his face again.

Next to Elissa, her mother sat very still, hands locked in her lap.

“Is that all?” asked Dr. Brien. “The dream ended there? When you’d climbed the fence?”

“Yes.” The links had cut into her hands, she remembered. And halfway down the other side, her foot had slipped and she’d fallen, landing with a skull-shaking thump on the ground outside the fence. But that was where the dream had cut off short. She remembered nothing else.

“Nothing else? Nothing later?”

“No.”

“Not even which way you turned?”

Which way?
The unease rose now within her, like cold water creeping up through every vein. He
couldn’t
need to know that. Okay, he’d explained the significance of his questions, but he couldn’t
possibly
need to know which imaginary way she’d turned after she’d escaped an imaginary building and climbed an imaginary fence.