Riley lasts almost a year without touching anyone. The rejection of whatever parodies of intimacy she might have let herself lapse into, the ceaseless vigilance of avoiding even casual movements that come too close to her skin.
Drugs, all the ones she'd smoked and slammed and shot up in the years before the puzzle box, only make the problem worse. Everything that had taken her out of her life before now merely dulls the sensations of her human flesh, so that the metal grows stronger by comparison. It's a hell of a motivation to get clean.
So: three hundred forty days with the Configuration inside her, and she finally stares into a beyond-smeared bathroom mirror and says, "You promised that I would never be alone." One of the eyes in the mirror is hers. The other is the one the Priest had placed—forced—implanted into her. If she thinks of it as hers, then she is accepting the Cenobites' handiwork into herself. If she thinks of it as theirs, then they are always with her. "You said you have my blood. Doesn't that mean you can be here whenever you want?"
Nothing answers.
"Haven't I suffered? Isn't that what you like to see?"
Only silence.
"Or has my suffering just been too mundane for you? Not worth your notice, because it's not in the outer rim of sensation?"
Distantly, through the thick silence of normality, Riley hears the tolling of a bell.
She slumps over the cracked and stained sink like her strings have been cut. Somewhere out there is a creature, luminous and impossible, that had once held her, that remembers her. "You could make me believe in angels," she whispers. It comes out sounding less like a joke than she had imagined.
"Once, you saw us only as demons. You will see both, in both of your eyes. Patience, little one."
"Where are you?"
"Where we must now be. Apart, so that we may suffer this separation for the proper time."
"You... hurt... from not being with me?"
"And the pain is a glorious theme for the divine music, little one. Trust that the theme will see variations when the moment arrives."
"Trust?"
"Believe in your angels, Riley McKendry. We keep our promises."
It doesn't get harder to write.
It gets harder to do everything else.
Riley buys plain white rice at the supermarket's self-check-out lane in the last half hour before the store closes at midnight. Few other foods are within her budget or stay long enough in her stomach or can be cooked within her remaining window of focus. Any other time, and the market is too crowded, and she risks passing close enough to trigger the Configuration's blades that wait inside her.
At home, she rinses two scoops of rice, fills the pot one finger-joint deep, sets it to cook and sets herself to spinning her memories into stories once more.
No one who pays for her stories wants to blame the Cenobites. They're inscrutable, forces of nature, exempt from mercy by Rule of Cool. Meanwhile, Roland Voight had been only human, had killed innocent people because he'd run out of ways to get his dick hard, because he'd had ungodly amounts of money and all the freedom from being told no that that implied. Trevor had been his willing lackey, his rails greased by everything that makes it easier for a man to lie to a woman no matter how often or how hot they've fucked. Marybel had coasted on a supreme indifference of her own, that SoCal pastel conviction that the universe has a purpose and its purpose is to make me rich, a blithe assurance that consequences fall only upon the deserving. And in the middle of them all, Riley, the addict who on most days could have forgiven the harm she'd brought to herself—it was her own candle to burn at both ends, right?—but not what she had done to pull her friend and her brother over the edge.
Riley changes the names to protect the innocent, and also the much larger cast of characters who weren't.
She imagines what had brought Voight to the puzzle box, who else it might have fed upon in the past, who would come closest to deserving the Cenobites. She works late, more and more often not falling asleep until after dawn and then resting for only a few fitful hours. When she posts too soon before she falls asleep, the stories follow her into her dreams, and she wakes from vivid yet incomprehensible scenarios—dreams rich in mood and sense-of-place detail, where the people aren't themselves, Matt deciding that she is a risk to them all and plotting to hand her over to the Cenobites—or from stark and unsubtle images—the Hell Priest in Riley's bed, instructing her "Come lie down with me."
Riley wakes from these dreams and plows them back into the next round of stories. Sometimes she can crank out two or three thousand words just from trying to make an image work on the page the way it had in her head.
It is not the chains that catch her, eventually, but hands.
Riley has slept perhaps four hours out of the past forty-eight. She decides that she needs a walk, realizes when she's a block out into the night that she had forgotten to eat that day, and keeps going.
Lightheadedness arises within her, and she leans against a brick wall to recover. Across the street is a construction site that she's pretty sure is abandoned—some derelict warehouse building that was halfway overhauled for biotech before the market fell out from under, so now it's derelict again.
"I told you I could never forgive you for Nora. For Matt. For everyone you've... claimed. And it's true. I can't."
She swallows.
"Maybe wanting to call you back even when I can't forgive you is part of my suffering. Is that working for you? Is that what you wanted all along? Or is 'forgiveness' so far below your concerns that you never considered it?"
She knows that she should turn back, eat, sleep.
"Maybe all the pain will be my punishment for wanting you back after everything you've done. Or do you see the pain as a reward?"
Riley pushes herself away from the wall and takes a step in the direction of home.
"Punishment and reward are such limited conceptions of the truth."
"The truth? What's..." Her voice fades and her knees buckle.
The pain of the blades everting through her skin clears her head. She realizes she is still standing.
"Play."
One of the Priest's hands is on her shoulder. The other is on her opposite side, above her hip.
"Worship."
Each blade is passing between the Priest's fingers.
"The joy of the path that glorifies God."
The bricks of the wall extend and retract and turn. Riley feels the breath of the Priest upon her neck, and then a kiss upon her shoulder. The touch is so gentle that the pins are pushed to the side instead of entering Riley's skin.
The Priest eases Riley to a kneeling pose on the ground just inside the opening where the wall used to be, and then everything around them both is the Labyrinth.
Riley knows that the blades of the Configuration work on the Cenobites. She knows that she can rally her strength and make herself move, that even a spasm will cut between the Priest's fingers or make a new slice across that elegant face. She can make the Priest a sacrifice... and to what end? To have the office filled by another, to reduce the number of fellow beings in the universe who understand her from a tenuous one to a definite zero?
"It's going to hurt, isn't it?" Riley asks.
"You have spent so long finding ways for sacrifices to be... just." The Priest reaches an arm in front of Riley. She sees motion in the distance, other inhabitants of the Labyrinth. "Justice is not among our considerations." The Priest beckons with two fingers. Fissures open in the cut-stone walls and chains propel towards them. Two of them hook into the solid ground, on either side of Riley. Nothing pierces her flesh, yet. "But when we do not understand, we lose the shades and overtones of suffering."
Riley manages a whisper. "Is that your way of saying that you... need me?"
"You offer us the opportunity for... new sensations."
The rest of the Cenobites are appraoching. The lash-thin, flayed creature who controls the razor wires, the obscenely shuddering thing shrouded in perpetual asphyxiation by its own skin, the being with divided and ramified limbs....
"Whenever I put myself into my words," Riley confesses, "everyone pushes the two of us together and says now kiss."
The Priest traces a single, tendon-bare finger up Riley's right thigh. Another blade emerges from her flesh in its trail.
"You have tried everything to imagine those who would deserve our gift. What remains, beyond the one who simply needs it?"
The pains multiply as the Priest caresses her, uncovering another blade from her left arm, another from halfway down her back. The Priest's fingers slip into Riley's hair and tilt her head so that she faces the chains dangling from the darkness above. Then all she can see are the pins and a face refashioned for purpose.
Riley gathers her breath. The words finally emerge, barely audible to her own ears. "Do you love me?"
The eyes of crystalline blue within impossible black regard her, unblinking. The meticulous perfection is so close.
And the Priest eliminates the distance between them. Riley lets her lips part, feels pins against her chin, finds the upper surface of the Priest's tongue with her own, counts one pin within it, then two, then three.
And the Priest withdraws, and Riley feels motion inside her own tongue, feels a razor edge slice outwards through it.
The Priest inserts two fingers toward the source of Riley's scream and grips the sixth blade by its flat sides, holding her tongue in place.
"You are beyond the obligation for speech."
Another chain descends, passes by the Priest's scarified head, approaches too close for Riley to focus upon it. It enters Riley's open mouth, brushing the Priest's fingers, interceding between the razor edge and Riley's palate. Then the fingers are gone, and she lets metal briefly come to rest against metal.
You're sucking off a sadomasochist from Hell screams something inside her, the part of her that wants to take the chain down more deeply.
The Priest guides Riley's right hand to the terminus of the chain that had locked into the stone beside her.
"Show that my love is returned, little one."
Riley has imagined so many ways that a person could come to deserve this. She knows only one person for whom she can make a full tally of the virtues and the sins, and so make an appropriate reckoning.
She frees the hook and presses it to her thigh, near the point where the blade emerges.
She presses down. The hook easily slips into fabric, skin, muscle. She lets herself scream around the metal that immobilizes her jaw and tongue.
"Delightful, little one."
Riley's left hand fumbles for the other chain, fishes it out of the rock, brings the hook shaking to her left thigh. She manages to scratch herself before all the sources of pain are too much and her fingers lose control and the hook slips away, pulled back by the chain's tension.
"Try again."
She feels the hook at the end of another chain tracing across her open, sweat-slick palm.
This time she gets the hook inside herself.
The chains pull her thighs apart as she kneels. She would tumble forward except for the Priest's hand holding her hair, and for the thing inside her that refuses to give up the metal against her tongue.
"You do not disappoint, Riley McKendry."
The Priest's hand explores the skin over Riley's stretched throat.
"You will breathe when necessary."
The chain loosens itself from the razor edge in Riley's tongue, and the part of her that needs it to go deeper wins.
Her gag reflex is suddenly active and just as suddenly inconsequential.
For a moment, her lungs struggle.
Another link of the chain works inside her, and another.
She can feel her trachea being squeezed between the Priest's gentle hand and the thing in her esophagus.
She can feel a steel barb emerge from the chain and lock the tip of her tongue in place behind her teeth. A second, piercing her tongue behind her molars. A third and fourth, fifth and sixth, emerging in pairs to probe out through her skin on either side of her pharynx.
It is painful beyond her experience.
It is intentional beyond any touch she has ever known.
"You and your suffering are beautiful. Listen, little one." Great machines are cranking into motion beyond the stone walls that surround them. "The box you found so long ago had more faces, more internal surfaces than an ordinary device could hold. Its geometry was the divine geometry of suffering, not the dimensions you knew. You contained the Configuration, Riley McKendry. Now let it contain you. Let yourself become its heart, the motive force that releases its edges to draw in the life of a sacrifice. Learn its workings, for they are now yours. Perhaps you will learn to hold back your edges until you feel desire call to you."
Riley is far past the point of wondering how she is still alive.
The Priest caresses her, from cheekbone to lips to the new augmentations in her throat.
"For now, let us plan, and then we will all play."