The gavel rung before my counsel could object and I was led from court without another word, my sister reaching out from the audience straining for a single touch to hold against my departure. I could not even turn back to meet her gaze before the baliff presented me to a tall woman with pale skin and dark eyes, her hair, black, hanging to the small of her back. Her smile betrayed ruthlessness, a lifetime of honing her absolute control over her charges. "This way," was her greeting, and she gestured me through a corridor which sloped downward. If my eyes did not deceive me, the lights dimmed as we traversed the passage, she behind me and slightly to my left, so close that she was nearly touching my shoulder. I was compelled forward, disconcerted by her proximity and the absence of any others ahead of or behind me. There was only her. "Where are you taking me?" I asked if only to break the silence, but it was met only with silence and a further curl in her lips. There was a great door of heavy metal, its deep patina a testament to its age for those who would see. There was a wheel on the door which drew the latch. The woman turned this wheel. I could have ran, as so she knew, and it was left to me to ponder whether she had allowed this for the sureity of my recapture or by some deference by which I would be compelled to stay. But I didn't move. I just stood there, with no expectations and no designs on the world. The door opened with a clank. With a gentle touch upon my back, she urged me inside. There was a room of such monsterous dimension that the opposing side could scarcely be seen. The walls were of concrete, as was the ceiling high above butressed by immense steel girders and pierced with a few thin vents. The floor could not be seen, as its expanse was covered in its entireity in junk, flotsam of unncountable varieties piled upon itself. The floor seemed to sloped down from the door, but it was difficult to discern against the mounds of valueless artifacts. Thousands of people covered with varying degrees of flith scoured the floor, moving like rats in a trash mound and rustling the scattered piles in a manner that felt pathetically organic. The chamber was constructed in such a way to make one fact appear obvious: there was no exit. From beneath a nearby sheet of cardboard crawled a man, his skin blackened and aged from exposure to the conditions. He crawled desparately, emnating loathing upon his eyes' recognition of my warden, whose smile remained unscathed. His approach to her feet could not but help remind one of groveling. Finally, as if trapped in his last breath, he reached out with shaking fingers towards her but fell, his face meeting the floor as he yelled something angry and gutural, something no longer quite human. "Do you wish something of me?" she asked him, stooping down. "I want to kill you!" he exclaimed, sitting up. "Go ahead," she said. She unfastened her pistol from its holster and gave it to the poor lout. He examined it very closely, opening the chamber more than once, checking the safety, and took practice aim at her and at several empty points in space. She remained still, unconcerned. "Aren't you worried he'll actually shoot you?" I said. "No," she said, leaving a defined paused. She bore her eyes on me. "Once you enter this place you become infected. You will lose your hold on reality. Your context will become blurred and that anchor that holds your perception, your memories, that which you believe is fundamentallly true will disipate and vanish. If all is illusion, how could you not drift away?" At that moment, the shot fired, breaking the prisoner's larynx into a spray of blood. He lay there gasping, his chest heaving with his final heartbeats until they slowed and stopped and his corpse was still. His beguilement had made his form his own target. She then crowned the prelude. "I tell you this for I know you of genuine intelligence. You could last long before falling into delusion. Knowing this, I wish nothing more for you to suffer in its resistence." She drew herself back through the aperture and the door was shut. It haunted me later how she so easily claimed that I was intelligent when, if the surface's appearance matches, she could know nothing of me. I stood there, facing what to do. If I sunk into delusion, there was no hope of escape. An animal instinct urged, in minority, to scour the trash, to seek some hole undiscovered or some implement by which I might effect my egress, but these thoughts were quelled by the reality that carrying the infection that I would become immersed in my goals and actions and that these would bear me away to unreality. On the other side, I thought of dropping to the ground and sitting, aspiring one-pointed awareness to maintain my thoughts. Who knows if it would have been worse? Concentrating on staying grounded, I walked among the prisoners and their piles of junk, play-acting scenarios whose realities were only in their minds. One prisoner stood in front of a torn magazine cover, propped up as were it a mirror, brushing his teeth with steel wool. His face registered no sign of pain at the blood gushed from his mouth. Another played jacks with broken glass. Two more passed a non-existent cigarette between them perpetually. I knew that no perfection of effort would prevent me from becoming as they were. The prospects were hopeless from the beginning. I would sink into madness, but there was nothing I could endeavor but to be unmoved towards it. Her smile reflected in my mind's eye. There must be some treasure in this junk. A secret way, or some items that a clever man could use to breach the door. I wasn't sure how far I would go, or how quickly. I looked into the scattered items, seeking a way, when a man came to me. "Do you still have your senses about you?" he said. "Yes," I said. "I just got here," I felt obligated to add. "We're planning an escape," he said, "There is a train that comes here. It is hidden and most of the prisoners have lost it, to the point that they wouldn't even see it if it was in front of them. But others have gotten out this way. There should be four seats. I need a fourth. Are you in?" I cast a panoramic gaze about the chamber, seeing the poor saps bloody themselves on imagined card games with razor blades, fucking coatracks as imagined lovers, petting plastic bags as if they were their children. All was faded brown with a flurry of discordant colors. "Count me in," I said. He nodded, then turned and made off at a brisk pace to join two girls scarcely come of age. We walked in silence to the far wall, winding through the narrows between the garbage piles. He led us through a narrow passage between a precarious stack of cracked wooden chairs and the concrete wall until we saw light pour through an opening. I could faintly hear the hum of an engine. "It's here!" he said, and we followed him through the hole in the wall into a cabin of luxurious wood with windows through which sunlight fell and the green of tree leaves greeted us. We sat down on benches on two sides of a table. The girls giggled. The guy and myself merely exchanged wearisome smiles of relief. The door closed and the train huffed, faster and faster, as we came to speed. "I can't believe we made it," the man exclaimed gladly. "Thank you for taking us," said one of the girls. "Of course, Frieda," he said. "Yes thank you," I said, "How did you find out about this escape?" "It was the last words of a dying man," he said, and would say no more. We watched the cascade of the shimmer and shadows in the trees through the windows and wondered where we were being taken. We did not speak much. The other girl, who called herself Greta, told that she had some scratch of land where we would be safe if we could make our way. "How beautiful the cherry blossoms are this time of year," she said. "Cherry blossoms?" I said. "Yes," said Greta, pointing out the window, "The trees are full with them." I looked but I saw no blossoms of any kind. I had forgotten myself. I breathed in, remembering as were it some dying promise, and the train faded. I looked and saw her pointing to a concrete wall as the others looked on and marvelled at it. We were on no train but seated at a lopsided plank near the wall in chairs stacked on refuse. The whir of the engine was only the cold mechanical fans above the air vents. Saying nothing, I walked off. It had gotten to me. The illusions. I now feared they would come in increasing rapidity and knew, secretly, that even if it was not preordained that my fear would make it so. My next hours, or days, or whatever timeless count of moments, were spent grasping at my thoughts as they fled me into the melange of dreams mixing with nightmares, beholding the depraved acts of others, driven by illusions, and unwilling gratitude when my memories departed and the portents of terror left me. I remember digging in garbage looking for the key to the door that had no keyhole. I remember crawling in the filth, thinking there was some drain deeply buried that I may pry open. In some illusory world, I crawled in the sewer pipes beneath the citadel. It was only her that brought me back to again grasp in one last measure at reality. The pale woman, her black hair dripping shadows stood over me. My dishonor already broken, I nonetheless stood and faced her, wondering what brought her within these walls where she had put me. She waved me away, nearly turning around, "You're already gone. There is no point in even trying to draw your conscience out with torment." "There is no torment any longer you can befall upon me," I said. She leaned in closed, the sharpness of her eyes stabbing mine. "Or perhaps he lives?" she wondered, as if to herself. "Perhaps even now the infection may clear for some moment." She paused, and in the silence the past echoed. "Your sister faced court yesterday," she said, "But for poor chance she might have joined you in this room or been elsewise discarded in one of a thousand like it. But upon the magistrate's entrance she was distracted by a gurgle from a child and she missed the cue to stand. He took this, rightly, as a measure of contempt. And so he went to me." It was all I could do to clear my head enough to make sure the words I heard were her speech and not the castings of my fractured thoughts. My sister was the only being I held dear my entire life. My own fate was nothing to me, but the prospect of her pain weighed heavily on my heart. "I will burn her, slowly," she said, "I care nothing for her suffering but only that you might die knowing that it was for you that she was tortured." In the rubble I spied a Swiss army knife, its chief rusted blade already drawn. I lunged for it and, grasping it, pointed it at her. "Don't", I said. "What? Will you stab me?" she said. "Yes," I said, moving closer, "I will." "Go ahead," she said. I put the knife through her stomach. In that moment, but from far away, as if connected to a body that was no longer me, I felt a strange pain pierce my abdomen. And there was blood. I knew what had happened.