“You brought me here—why?” I asked aloud.

“This is our home,” the voice said. I heard the sound of liquid pouring next to me and I turned to my right. Twenty feet away stood a creature made of the dark liquid, still streaked with luminescent stars. It looked like the Blob, and it extended a pseudopod toward me.

I stepped backward, holding out my glowing badge. “Send me back to the lobby, now.” The memory of them crawling over me, touching me, made my skin shiver. I didn’t want to go back to wherever they’d sent me inside myself. Helpless, lost, unwhole.

I didn’t want a Shadow touching me. Not ever, ever again.

“I will not touch you here, human. Not yet.”

“Keep out of my head.” I kept my badge out, for whatever good it was doing. “Why’ve you brought me here?”

“Because we have need of you.”

“What, you want to tell me how worthless I am again?” I let my badge drop against my chest. “I remember what it felt like last time, don’t need a repeat performance, thanks.”

The creature rippled and deformed, snaking in and out of itself, shimmering lights playing across it.

“If we wanted to destroy you, we would have already. So believe us that you still have some use.”

I crossed my arms, suddenly aware that it was freezing down here, wherever this was, and my coat was still in the elevator. “You’re going to have to explain more than that if you want me to agree.”

“We could crawl inside your head and make you but a shell of yourself, a puppet of meat, for which we keep the only strings.” It paused to let the impact of this settle in. “Please stop trying to be brave, and become the pathetic creature we both know you to be.”

My short nails bit against my arms. “Fuck you.”

The Shadow-thing laughed with other people’s voices, loud and long, before continuing. “This hospital is built on a place for gathering powers. Before it was a hospital, it was a church. Before it was a church, it was a burial ground. And before that, perhaps even passing dinosaurs walking above dipped their heads in sorrow.”

I nodded like I understood—but really I just wanted it to stop talking with that broken voice. “So?” I asked, when the last reverberation had gone away.

“There are lines beneath the County, Nurse Spence. They channel what we use as food into us, here. For us, they are like the circulatory system you know so well.”

“You don’t send out oxygen or nutrients or unicorns or rainbows. You’re a bottom-feeder, and you only send out shit.”

The Shadow let loose another mocking laugh. “Then think of us as a sponge, or a parasite, or even a baleen whale. Whatever you require in order to understand.”

Halfway through its speech I put my fingers in my ears. It only let me better hear the pounding of my own heart and didn’t block the Shadow-voice out at all. I gave up. “What’s this have to do with me?” I prompted.

It extruded an arm and gestured to the floor. “This is a map of all available energies.”

All I could see were stars and whorls and bright excited jumping lines. They looked like words written in an ever-changing language that I would never learn to read.

“A man dies near Broadway, shot by his ex-wife.” A lit spot on the floor, no wider than a pencil, rippled and raised. “A political rally, where people hope and hate in equal measure.” A thicker piece of light pulled up from the floor, maybe the width of my fist. “And lastly, here. County Hospital. Two thousand people—not so very many—but they are always in perfect agony, hoping not to die, and dying regardless.” The flat sun I’d seen before rose up like a tombstone. It beat like a glowing heart.

I stepped backward and the floor rippled. Like a heavy stone dropped into a still pond, those ripples carried out and over to the short pillar of light, coursing up its length on one side and down on the other, in blissful ignorance of physics.

But not everyone at County died. Surely not— “You don’t change patient outcomes, do you?”

“We don’t need to. This is the County’s hospital. The people who come here cannot go anywhere else. They wait too long for medical attention, and when they receive it, even should they live, they often wish to die along the way.” The creature made its way out, warping the field of lights along the floor—lights that I now understood represented combined pinpricks of human suffering and pain. “It is not a thick conduit—not like a war might bring, or the weight of crushing tyranny—but it is steady. It has lasted so far. It will continue.”

“So why do you need me?”

“We would like you to transport us.”

I took another step back and looked at the elevator behind me. “You’re not getting inside my head again.”

The creature chuckled. “There are other ways.”

“Why should I help you?”

“We will be able to find the vampire girl you seek. Surely she is currently experiencing a certain amount of pain.”

I nodded. Of course, when she’d been biting Mr. Galeman, she’d been causing him a certain amount of pain too. Realization dawned on me. If what they were saying was true, the Shadows had everyone coming and going.

“When? Now?” The sooner I could save Anna, the better. Truth be told, I didn’t know how I’d protect her from another attack, or how I’d keep her fed. But wherever she was now … the images from Mr. November’s walls were burned into my brain. No one should be left there, wherever there happened to be.

“It will take some time. One person’s pain is not very distinct from another’s. We think you might understand.”

I nodded. Everyone at the hospital wanted to think that their case was special, and if you were a good nurse, you helped them keep that illusion alive. Knowing that someone down the hall had it worse than you never stopped your own paper cut from hurting, at least not until they came in and bludgeoned you senseless with their amputated leg.

“We are not typically surface creatures, and we cannot come out in bright light,” the Shadow continued. Five dark columns rose out of the fluid on the floor. It moved its bulk across the floor toward these columns as it went on. “Thus our ability to interact with the outside world is limited, and there have been recent inconsistencies in our map.”

“So?”

“Certain areas have gone dark to us. Someone is siphoning away our rightful pain.” The Shadow gestured toward the few thin plateaus of black. “We cannot point to a simple area and say this represents a certain region above without aid. And even then, when many things are happening, triangulation can become difficult.”

“Is it possible that everyone in those places are just happy?” I couldn’t think of any place in the County where that would actually happen, but who knew?

“It is highly unlikely. We feed off happiness too—it just never lasts as long as pain.”

“Great.” I pursed my lips. “So you currently have a lack of information? From somewhere above?” I asked, gesturing grandly up toward the rock ceiling.

“Yes. Which, given our rights to all free energies within this County’s lines, should be impossible.”

In its creepy multivoice, I could hear a thousand different kinds of frustration.

“So everyone inside these five areas is either dead or—”

“Blocked from us, in breach of our contract with the Consortium. And we do not know where the perpetrators physically are. We cannot sense the absence of something.” The Shadow multivoice narrowed down to one distinct voice that was somehow worse than all the rest. “We have an ancient contract. We cannot be denied,” it hissed.

I did not ever want to meet that voice in a dark alley. “But what can I do? I’m only me.”

“Rest assured we have other pieces of meat performing surveillance,” the Shadow’s other voices returned. “We have learned, however, that having minions capable of independent thought is sometimes useful too.”

I snorted.

“Do you have something that you can keep on you at all times?” the Shadow continued, beginning to swirl near.

I looked down at myself. I took everything off for work—no earrings or necklaces, and I’d never worn any rings. “This is it,” I said, holding up my badge, which still held a faint orange glow of its own.

“Give it here.”

I unlooped the lanyard from around my neck and handed it over carefully, so as not to touch the Shadow. My badge already had some qualities imbued by Y4’s mysterious nursing office, prior to being assigned to me. My employee number was only on the back with label tape, and my name was just written on the front. It didn’t even have my photo on it.

The creature took my badge and enveloped it entirely into its black, lanyard and all. Then it extruded my badge again through the other side, and passed it back toward me. I grabbed it as carefully as I’d handed it over.

“If you wear this, we will see through your eyes,” the Shadow said, as I looped the lanyard around my neck again. “Skin contact is best.”

“I bet.” I left the badge on the outside of my scrubs. Behind me, the elevator doors made their opening ding.

“Never take it off,” the Shadow continued.

“Fine.” The elevator’s light outlined the Shadow like an eclipse. It melted into the ground, making a minature tsunami on the floor.

I couldn’t wait to leave—and I also remembered my lawyer appointment that I was now becoming late for. Surviving just today wasn’t enough, not when there was the tribunal in three days. “How will you let me know when you’ve found her?”

“When we know, you will know as well.”

The Shadow was gone, so I addressed the ground. “And when do I start looking for you?”

“Now.” Its voice was a faint echo, the rind of a distant, aged fear.

I shook my head. “That’s not what I—” I began, but I closed my mouth. Whatever. I began shuffling my way back toward the elevator, watching the patterns on the floor ripple as I did so. Did I have any control over the pains of the outside world from here? I hoped not. I took three big steps and made it into the elevator, never so happy to smell were piss in my entire life. As the doors began to close, I thought of one more question I had to ask.