The gap didn't take me all at once this time. It came in like water finding a crack in a hull, slow enough that for a handful of seconds I was still half-present for my own disappearing, aware in some distant, muffled way of Rena's hand closing hard around my wrist and her voice shaping my name without any sound reaching me clean, the whole chamber tilting sideways into something thick and cold that wasn't quite unconsciousness and wasn't quite anything I had a better word for.
Underneath it, where the last of my own awareness went to wait it out, I felt the chains.
