Sam

The spotlights all turned out one by one until the stage was pitched in perfect darkness. Then the ceiling was abruptly yanked away, and the outside world came back into view. Sam found herself sitting on her butt in the dirt. Will lay sprawled next to her, heels scuffing weakly at the ground. There were maybe two hundred people around them in a rough circle just starting to get up.

Aching muscles forgotten, Sam rocked forward onto her knees and crawled over to Will. His face tipped in her direction when he heard her coming, but his eye stared right through her, sightless and glassy.

"Sam…" he wheezed. "Sam, I need to… I can't…"

"Shh," she whispered, and leaned over him to stroke his pale cheek. "I'm here. You're okay."

He tried to laugh, but ended up in a cramping coughing fit instead. "Have you… looked at me?"

She had been trying not to, in fact. He looked more like a mangled piece of roadkill that had spent a couple days bloating in a wet ditch than something that had any business breathing. There were blistering burns on his face and neck and arms. His left shoulder looked like it had been stepped on by a horse three or four times, and his right arm… It was twisted unnaturally like a broken bird wing, hand sticking straight out to the side. The front of his shirt, where it hadn't been burnt away, was soaked with blood. His breaths came shallow through pale lips with little sucking, snoring noises, as though he was about to swallow his tongue.

"I'm done, Sam. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"You shut your stupid mouth. You'll be okay."

"I… I won't. I love you, Sam. I need to… to say goodbye.

"No!" She jabbed a finger at his face. "You don't get to say goodbye!"

"I—"

"Shh!"

"Sam, please—"

"No! I know you, Will! You're too stubborn to die without saying goodbye. And I am not letting you die."

"Sam… Even a miracle won't fix this."

"Then I'll get you two miracles! Shit, you can have three if you want!"

"Haaa…" His lip twitched into a small smile. "It's really good to see you." She got the feeling he was trying to raise his left hand, but his shoulder was just jerking and clicking unnervingly.

She took his hand gently and guided it back down. "It's good to see you too, stupid."

"I loh… hurh…" His speech trailed off into something incomprehensible, and his eye rolled back in his head. He began to shake violently, bucking against her when she tried to hold him down, and a terrible gurgling moan escaped him along with a trickle of foamy saliva. His body arched, heels digging, twisted right arm crunching, back curling until it looked like it had to snap any second.

Sam leapt to her feet. "Doctor!" she cried as she frantically scanned the milling crowds. "I need a doctor here!"

* * *

Dawn

"Please kill me… Please kill me… Please kill me… Please kill me… Please just kill me already!"

Pain. Cold. Darkness. That had been the entirety of her existence for… she had no idea how long. Years? It certainly felt like it.

No one answered her pleas except her own echo. She was surrounded by perfect blackness. She was inside a cage, she knew, but to her all of reality was just a formless void without beginning or end.

Every once in a while, someone would come by to hurt her some more. Most of the time she didn't know why, or couldn't remember after the fact. But aside from the agony of it, she preferred torture at the hands of another person to the slow, crushing torment of utter isolation. Even as they hurt her, she was grateful to experience any kind of nearness, whatever flicker of light they inevitably brought with them in order to perform their work.

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Most of the time, she was too addled to make much sense of these rare encounters, her eyes useless in the light from spending so long in the dark. Though she usually could not make out the faces of her torturers, she always recognized them by the type of pain they inflicted.

Brimstone's was swift, furious, all-encompassing. William Greene's was methodical, cold, precise. That of the Physician whose name she did not know was furtive, reluctant, plodding. And the soldier's was blunt, brutal, rushed.

The soldier had been the last. After he had left her broken in the dark, no one had bothered to come by and sweep up the pieces; finish her off.

That man had made her tell him about the girl. She had clung onto some small shred of pride until that point, thinking that she would die without revealing her existence so that she might be safe. Sweet Sunny, who was precious beyond words, and deserved all the good things in the world. But torture, Dawn had learned well, would make just about anyone say just about anything in a shockingly small amount of time.

With that final humiliation, she had allowed herself to spiral into nothing. Not a person anymore. Just a thing in the dark, waiting for the pain to stop. She had not received any food or water in what felt like a very long time, but what did it matter? Her latrine bucket had not been emptied either, but she no longer had the energy to drag herself over to it anyhow. She simply allowed her urine—what little she still produced—to trickle down her thighs, a constant irritant to already raw skin.

Pain. Cold. Darkness.

Awake. Asleep.

Hungry. Lonely.

What did it matter?

None of it did. None of it, except for the end. Blessed non-existence. Her only desire was to meld with the void; to become one with nothing.

There was a sound. Dawn stiffened, shaking. The approaching click, clop, click, clop of footsteps; strangely mismatched. The scrape of a key being turned. The squeal of dry hinges. A shaft of light fell on her, blinding. She hissed and clamped her eyes shut. Her heart fluttered weakly.

A person.

They hadn't forgotten her.

Maybe if she begged enough, they'd finally cut her throat and get it over with.

"Pleeease…" she moaned. "Please kill me. Please, please, please, please, please… just kill me."

"God!" echoed an outraged voice through the stone room, jarringly loud. More footsteps. The light got closer, bright through her eyelids. There was talking back and forth. Her cage squealed as the door was thrown wide.

Slowly, Dawn forced her gummy eyes open, blinked at the tall figure silhouetted by the bright lights of those tramping behind him.

"God, what have they done to you?" said the man in such an impossibly kind voice. He bent down toward her. Instinctively, she jerked away as much as her withered state would allow. "Don't worry, my lady," he said softly. "You're safe now. Brimstone is dead."

Dead?

He said it as though it should have meant something to her. It didn't. After all, what did it matter? It would just be someone else tormenting her.

Dawn gasped as the man gently, gently cupped her chin. "You have the most beautiful eyes."

She blinked up at him, unable to process the meaning of his words. Had he come here to rape her? To enact some sick fantasy on the living corpse that no one else had any further use for?

Effortlessly, the man lifted her up into his arms. "Make way!" he called in a voice rich with authority, and indistinct shapes holding the bobbing lights of lanterns and torches shuffled aside.

Unable to muster any strength, Dawn let her head roll with the man's movements. She blinked up at him, everything blurry, but she thought…

"It will be all right now," he assured her. "You're safe. No one is going to hurt you anymore." The kindness in his voice was sweet as syrup. Almost instantly, it was beginning to wear down her chains of apathy. Made her ache for more of that sweetness. Just one more kind word. It had been so long.

Though she could not quite make out his features, Dawn thought she was looking at the most beautiful face she had ever seen.

With the desperation of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of an empty ocean, Dawn grasped at the man, so urgently that she was quickly out of breath and her atrophied muscles burned with the effort. She clawed at him. Scratching him to the point of drawing blood, she realized, but she couldn't stop herself.

He did not fling her aside, or recoil in pain, or sneer in disgust at the terrible stench that surrounded her. If anything, he hugged her tighter.

"Please…" she whispered urgently. "Please get me out of here. Please don't put me back. I'll do anything. I'll say whatever you want. I'll…"

"Shh. Save your strength, my lady, and put all worries from your mind. I will make sure that you never have to feel pain again."

"Who are you?"

The man smiled with the radiance of a sun god. "I am Buck. You may have heard of me."

She hadn't. But that didn't matter.

My savior.

Dawn wept quietly into the man's chest, and decided to put her complete faith into the chance that he was telling her the truth. That he was not some cruel prank conjured by her delirium.

"Save me," she whispered.

"I will," said the man named Buck. "I am. I have."

"Save me."

"Shush now, my lady. Rest."

"Save me." She couldn't stop saying it, because she craved the reply more than air. Needed to hear it again. Not sure whether to laugh or cry, she did both, mad giggles and racking sobs intermingled.

"You are saved," Buck murmured. And he brought her out of that room. He brought her up, up, up…

Out of the darkness. Into the light.

I am saved.

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