Page 4 of The Devil May Care

Real fall. Not a stumble, not a trip, plummeting. Weightless. No air in my lungs. No ground beneath my feet. Gravity abandons me. Just heat and dark and a pressure that pulls me down, down, down, but burns like fire.

The sound rushes out of me, but I can’t hear it. My scream vanishes into a roaring silence so deep it feels personal. My skin prickles. Mystomach flips. My vision doubles, then goes white-hot, then black. My limbs are jelly. My thoughts scatter.

This is it.

Not some magical shift. Not a moment of heroism.

Just—

The thought slides in between the chaos. Cold. Familiar. A whisper I haven’t let myself listen to in months.

You’re dying, Kay. Of course you are. And maybe it’s a little—okay, entirely—your fault.

Because I’ve been worn down for so long, I forgot what upright feels like. Because I stopped checking in with people. Because I told myself I was fine when I wasn’t. Because I keep doing this—walking into rooms where I don’t belong, into other people’s fights, because it’s easier to bleed for someone else than to admit I’m tired of standing at all. I should have walked away. Goddammit. What was I thinking? My fingers burn. My chest aches. Something splits behind my eyes. And still I fall. The silence isn’t comforting. It’s hollow, like the beat after a final breath.

All I ever wanted was to matter. To someone other than my cat. Now I won’t get the chance, and he won’t even get to feast on my corpse for sustenance until the smell of my decay alerts the building super. Grand.

And then, impact.

Its not hard or violent.

I’m dropped into thick, humming air and lowered gently to the ground like I’m someone important. Like being caught.

My knees hit hot stone. I blink. Everything hurts, but nothing’s broken.

The air is thick, heavy with heat and the smell of something burning. Not smoke. Not sulfur. Something stranger—like scorched iron and sweet rot. My hands are scraped, my mouth tastes like copper, and I can’t tell if I’m sweating or melting.

I push myself upright, palms raw against the ground.

The sky above me is red. Not sunset red. Not natural. It glows; a dark velvet canvas streaked with slow-moving clouds like smoke. The ground beneath me pulses faintly, like it’s breathing. Eventually, I get to my feet. Around me there are cliffs of dark stone. A vast, lifeless plainstretching into red haze. No hotel. No elevator. No men. No stranger in black.

Just me.

The heat presses in. My legs wobble. My body won’t stop shaking. I take a step forward, and the stone beneath my feet hums like it’s listening. The ground radiates heat in steady waves, pulsing up through my shoes and into my spine. A wave of scorching air brushes over my skin. It smells like scorched stone and something older. Metal. Or ash. Or blood that dried too long ago to remember what it was.

I stare down my hands, half-expecting them to vanish or pixelate. To fade into something ethereal. Like this is a lucid dream and I’ll wake up drenched in sweat in a hotel bed with too many emails and a neck cramp. Like the kids in that movie about traveling back in time. But my hands stay solid. Scraped. A little burnt. Still shaking. And the pain in my knees is very, very real.

I don’t know where I am. But I hope I’m dreaming and not in a coma after a tragic elevator accident. Lying in some antiseptic hospital room hooked up to machines I can’t afford, my chart marked with a sticky note that says, “No Next of Kin.”

If this is real—this sky, this heat, this air that tastes like burnt sugar and rust—then I’m in trouble. Big, irreversible, possibly biblical trouble.

I turn slowly, taking it in.

Cracked earth stretches to the horizon, broken by jagged ridges of black stone. They rise like spines from the ground, some shaped like crooked teeth, others split down the middle like they’ve been cracked by something massive. The sky isn’t a sky. It’s molten. It glows dark red, swirling with lazy clouds that move like smoke underwater.

There’s no sun. No moon. No wind. Just heat and that strange, endless hum beneath my feet, like the planet itself is vibrating. Or I’m hallucinating while lying on the floor of a destroyed elevator box.

“Okay,” I whisper to no one. “Cool. Sure.”

My voice sounds too small out here. Like it doesn’t belong.

Neither do I.

I half-expect something to rise out of the earth. A demon, a dragon, the elevator doors again. Something to declare this a hallucination with some narrative structure. But the silence stretches on.

Maybe I hit my head.

Maybe I am already dead.