…she loves me not.

Door 1:  Hyperdeath

Sleep is a night that grows, a malignancy, a labyrinth of dreams, expanding in silence and out of sight, forever and ever, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum. There’s no end to its spread or the doors that death opens beneath you and unto you. The earth is honeycombed, rotten, with freeways going nowhere.

It’s time to get up again, she thinks, waking in what she can only call a coffin, although she’d rather not. She’s naked, of course, buried naked in someone else’s memory, except for a chemise as thin as propaganda. Lies, lies, lies, that’s all that’s left. She crosses the chilled chamber on high-heels as fragile as icicles, overhearing distant switchboards. She sits at a white birch vanity to study her mirrored face for signs of rot.

The mortician has disguised her well tonight, her skin a painted moonscape starved as a geisha’s, lips drawn up in a small black strawberry, and eyes the color of a broken heart. It’s the kind of disguise that disguises nothing and yet grants her access anywhere. That is her only hope in this place where prayers aren’t answered. She has no name, no past, no memory, only a scar where her heart should be, used to be, will never be again. Her other injuries, which are massive, haven’t healed, but they’ve been pardoned, doctored by make-up artists and illusionists who transmute eternity into plastic. She has nothing left that is her own but a sense of mission, which might be said to be similar to the compulsive return of a ghost, a vacuous haunting.

The atmosphere here is thin and everything is slow-motion, intoxicated, lacking energy. Above ground the trees are withered for the season, their root-systems insinuating themselves, clutching the darkness in a stranglehold everywhere, to squeeze away what little nourishment is left. There is media, but all the stations are tuned to static, which is the language in this place. There are no clocks, but you always know when it’s time: the time is always too late. She puts down the brush, which she lifted but never touched to her perfect hair, and rises from the vanity to begin the night’s grim work.

She’s a spy, a booby-trap, a terrorist of love. She’s an assassin whose target is immortal, but who she must terminate at all costs all the same. The problem, stated simply, is this: how do you stop what has already come to an end?

She exits the stone cottage over a threshold she was meant to cross, but only once. Everything she does from here on out is unnatural. The name carved into the marble lintel above her head isn’t hers, she’s sure, although she isn’t sure of anything. It’s a family name, perhaps, but she has no family anymore, if she ever did. Anything you could call her is irrelevant at this point. But in the meantime (and it’s all in the meantime, after all) you can call her Xie.