Madison woke without opening her eyes, and for a moment she thought she was back at Gramma’s. The sensation of being in bed was so overfamiliar to her now, so inextricably tied with the concept of being trapped, that the weight of the sheets had become synonymous with confinement to her. The soft plush of the mattress a sapping, degenerative force, a vacuum that kept her in place and ate away at her muscles, worried her skin into sores.

  When she opened her eyes and was greeted by the dim interior of the hospital room, she was hit with a wave of disorientation that she took a few nauseous seconds to ride out. Ripples of panic, and then relief, and then quiet unease worked their way through her.

  She was alone, accompanied only by the gentle beeping of some medical instrument and the distant, scuffing sound of some nurse walking the halls in the night. She’d awoken facing the far window, and she watched the distant lights of cars on the highway through it while her brain defogged, shedding the cobwebs of sleep. She yawned, shuffled, and turned over.

  Her door was open. Just a crack.

  A man was peering through it, at her.

  She stiffened, startled but not terrified. The man had the look of some sort of employee. He was in all black, with a cloth mask and a baseball cap and dark glasses.

  This last detail troubled her, on second thought. Why would someone wear dark glasses indoors? And he wasn’t a nurse, clearly, he wasn’t in scrubs, so why was he looking at her?

  The man had clearly seen her shift to face him, and, after a second, drew himself up and walked into her room. He closed the door behind him, quietly, hand held up to his face in a “shh” motion. What was he, some sort of technician?

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  It was then that she noticed the shimmer of something odd around the man’s skin. Like an almost imperceptible cloud of color, shifting and refracting in the dim light, somehow visible despite the darkness.

  The man slowly raised his hand, as if offering something up to her, from across the room. He was holding what looked like a metal ball bearing, perched between his middle finger and thumb. Like he was about to flick it in her direction.

  The shimmer surrounding the man shuddered and jumped. Madison noticed a spark, or, it wasn’t a visible spark, more like the feeling of a spark, arc up from some point in the backpack the man was wearing and dance along his arm, toward his outstretched hand.

  “Excuse me,” she said, deeply uneasy now. “Are you with the-”

  There was a bang, and Madison felt a queer, cool pain lance through her forehead as the man propelled the ball bearing at the speed of a bullet, directly through her brain.

  Quiet, and then an explosion. All five senses engaged at once, more being layered on every second.

  A feeling of confinement, brief and detested, then discarded. Cage broken. The lion is out.

  Flying, hurtling, screaming through a roaring sky. Shapes and colors blur around her, and she leaves them behind, outpaces sound, outstrips light. Nothing, no person or being or concept can touch her now. Nothing can hold her in place.

  This new and incomparable exhilaration lasts less than a second and more than forever, and then, as quickly as it appeared, it is gone.