The first thing he registered was the texture.
Not the hard wood of the apartment floor. Not the cold of a morgue slab. Not the nothing of actual nothing.
Soft. Slick. Wet.
Membrane. Warm membrane pressed against his face, against his back, against his curled knees. It was fibrous, like a bad cut of beef and the leathery skin of a snake.
The second thing was the temperature. Hot. Feverishly, sickeningly hot.
The heat wrapped around him like a fever, like the inside of a mouth, making him feel like he was being digested alive—except the digestion never completed. Just an eternal peristaltic pressure, squeezing from all sides, rhythmic and patient.
'I'm inside something.'
Grigor tried to inhale.
His mouth opened automatically—the brainstem overriding conscious thought, the ancient reflex demanding air—and thick liquid rushed in. It flooded over his tongue, tasting of salt and copper and old seawater. It hit the back of his throat. It poured down into his lungs.
'No. No no no—'
His chest spasmed. The cough reflex fired, violent and desperate, but there was nothing to expel into. No air pocket. No surface.
His diaphragm convulsed, pulling in more fluid, and the fluid pulled back, and he was choking on something that wouldn't let him choke.
The burning started in his bronchi. Spread outward. Filled his chest with a heat that felt like inhaling steam, like swallowing fire, like every cell in his respiratory system screaming in a language older than thought.
'I'm drowning.'
Panic hit like a freight train.
The analytical part of his brain—the part that had catalogued crime scenes, calculated trajectories, made peace with the chemistry of death—vanished. In its place was something ancient. Something that had spent four hundred million years learning to avoid this exact scenario.
He thrashed.
His limbs hit a barrier—tight, rubbery, yielding just enough to suggest escape was possible before snapping back into place.
He clawed at the membrane. His fingernails—still yellow-stained, still cracked from years of solvents—scraped uselessly against the slime.
He kicked. The membrane stretched. It didn't break.
He tried again. Harder. His muscles burned with oxygen they didn't have. His vision—such as it was, a blur of bluish-white glow filtering through translucent flesh—began to pulse at the edges.
'Break. Break. BREAK—'
The membrane held.
Grigor's body gave out before his mind did. The thrashing slowed. The kicks became twitches. He floated there, curled in the fetal position, suspended in a pressurized darkness that wasn't quite dark, and felt his lungs continue to burn without the release of unconsciousness.
'I should be dead.'
The thought arrived with crystalline clarity, cutting through the panic like a scalpel through infected tissue.
'Three minutes. That's how long the human brain can survive without oxygen. I've been here for—five minutes? Ten? My lungs are full of fluid. My brain should be starving. I should be—'
Dead.
But he wasn't.
The fluid entered his lungs with every involuntary gasp, hot and thick and wrong.
It provided just enough oxygen to sustain consciousness. Just enough to feel every second of the drowning. Just enough to experience the panic, the burning, the desperate animal need for air—forever.
'This is Hell.', something whispered in the back of his mind. 'You believed in nothing, and nothing sent you here.'
He tried to scream. His throat worked, his chest convulsed, and nothing came out. Just bubbles—fat, sluggish globules that rose toward the glow and dissolved before they reached the membrane.
'Sound requires air. You have no air. You have only this.'
Somewhere outside the membrane—past the glow, past the pulsing flesh—he heard something. Muffled. Distant. Wet.
Screaming.
Not one voice. Hundreds. Thousands. A chorus of gurgling, choking, half-swallowed shrieks that had been going on for so long they had become background noise. A river of lungs. A symphony of the drowning.
'Other people. This is happening to other people. Everywhere.'
And threaded through it all, a heartbeat. Not his—his own was a panicked staccato of one hundred, one-ten, one-twenty beats per minute. This one was slower. Massive. Rhythmic.
Thump... Thump... Thump...
Like a drum buried beneath the earth. Like something the size of a city, breathing.
Grigor floated in the dark and felt the panic try to rise again. He pushed it down. Not because he was brave—he wasn't—but because panic required energy, and energy required oxygen, and whatever this place was, it was designed to give him just enough to suffer.
'System', his brain supplied. 'This is a system. A process. And processes have parameters'.
The analytical part of him clawed its way back to the surface, bloody and gasping.
'If I am being kept alive, there is a purpose. If there is a purpose, there is an exit condition. If there is no exit condition—'
He kicked the membrane again. It stretched. It held.
'—then this is eternal.'
The word sat in his mind like a stone.
'Eternal. Eternal drowning. No death. No release. Just this, forever.'
He should have been terrified. He was terrified. But beneath the terror, something else stirred—something cold and stubborn and utterly, irrationally angry.
'No.'
He pressed his hands against the membrane. Felt for seams. Felt for weakness.
The slime made it hard to grip, hard to feel anything except the pressure and the heat and the burning that never stopped. But he searched anyway. Because searching was doing, and doing was better than drowning.
The silver cat was gone. He couldn't feel it against his thigh anymore. The souvenir that had gotten him killed—vanished, like everything else from his old life.
But the weight of it was still there. A phantom pressure. A ghost of ownership seared into his palm.
'I'm the stain now.'
The membrane pulsed. The heartbeat continued. The drowning went on.
And somewhere, in the darkest part of his mind, something stirred.
Something that was not entirely him.
'Clean it', a voice whispered. It came from inside his chest, inside his skull, inside the space where his soul would be if he believed in souls.
'Clean it all.'
Grigor closed his eyes—or tried to; the eyelids wouldn't quite shut, the fluid too thick, the pressure too constant—and focused on the only thing that still made sense.
'There are rules. I will learn them.'
'And when I do—'
He kicked the membrane. It stretched. It held.
'—I will clean this place.'