The Doctor wheezed, the rough equivalent of a dying laugh. “You call that saving… You sentenced him… to hell.”

“No,” Sapphira began, but fell quiet. The man had stopped wheezing.

His body was limp. The Doctor was dead.

Sapphira’s arms began to tremble and ache with the dead weight. She pushed the corpse away onto the floor and stared at the blood-smeared platform. She waited several minutes before attempting to get up. The drug that the woman Cera had given her wore off quickly, and her mind Felt normal again. It could have been the adrenaline, but she couldn’t be sure. She didn’t really care. She gripped the sides of the tube and slowly pulled herself up, fighting the dizziness that she wrote off as a symptom of the first use her muscles have seen in over a century.

It didn’t take her long to get clothes. After a period of rest that including vomiting on a table stacked with old scattered papers, Sapphira managed to find the woman Cera’s belongings. There was a brief moment she considered not wearing her underwear; the thought of it made her uncomfortable but practicality won in the end. Thankfully they shared a similar build, so the black leggings and zip-up jacket she found fit well enough. Everything smelled slightly of verbena.

The pool of blood on the platform was larger when she returned. It looked darker now, and thick with coagulation. She had always been so used to seeing it, and strangely comfortable with the smell. 127 years past it was the only thing that had ever been a constant. People are liars, she remembered. Blood is not. And now—faced with a scene she had caused or witnessed a hundred times over—she began to tremble.

Cera Foley’s head. Sapphira was filled with the intense, irrational fear it was going to move. It sat in the crimson, hair matted together, with eyes open halfway, only the whites visible, and Sapphira imagined Cera could still see her from a limbotic stasis somewhere beyond in death. Her lips hung open with a final parting word, left unsaid and trapped somewhere in between. It was an unacceptable curse, to have died like that. Sapphira had seen death, and out of the many corpses this was the one that shook her. She did not know why, and she was afraid for that very reason.

Something had changed. Something was horribly wrong. Sapphira was hyperventilating, having dropped to her knees. She couldn’t look away from the face.

Stop staring, damn it! She didn’t know whether she was talking to herself or to Foley. She could feel tears running down her cheeks. What do you want! she wanted to scream. Give me the words stuck in your throat and release me!

The mouth hung open, still.

Sapphira began to weep. Her entire body trembled. She wanted it to stop, she wanted everything to be silent and her cheeks to be dry and her resolve to be strong…
And Logan to be alive.

That was it, wasn’t it? A miserably ordinary man at the epicenter of such an extraordinary beginning to… what?

No, it was a failure, all a disastrous chain of nothingness! None of him meant anything, nor will it ever!

These were fresh voices in her head. Sapphira gagged and a pang of sorrow shot through her chest like lightning. This was sensory overload. The room was still, the blood was still, the corpses were still, and yet there was a demon somewhere, coaxing them to life against her, embodying the screams that shrieked in her skull.

Make it stop! Make it stop!

Stop.