It’s impossible to live without windows. Every room in every home has at least one gss pane with light filtering through it. During the day we may never gnce outdoors, but if we were surrounded by four bnk walls our thoughts would become withered and bleak, even if we wouldn’t know why.

  Poets often call eyes the ‘windows of the soul’ because when looking at them, you can witness someone’s inner thoughts and emotions. But I believe that it’s more accurate to say that souls themselves, not eyes, are like windows. Just by being around someone and finding, yes, the spark in their eyes but also their voice, their thoughts, their touch, I can view another world.

  And like a window in one’s home, I never understand the light someone’s soul brings me til it’s gone.

  Isn’t that metaphor nice? But as it happens, the reason I’m musing about this is literal. I’ve just noticed that my hotel room suite, behind the curtains, behind the blinking gun, has a lone window sealed in melted iron.

  1:45

  My bedside clock illuminates the hotel room in a faint red light. Though the mattress is as soft as a cloud, my one good eye’s fixed on the ceiling, watching the patterned waterstains as I struggle to drift off. I then sigh, walk to the bathroom and open a small paper box that the Dragon’s pithily beled ‘I-CARE.’

  I don’t bother turning on the lights. I change the eyepatch, throw the old one away, and head back to bed. The king mattress creaks and groans as I settle in, and my eye no longer hurts, just itches.

  After the bed moans and groans and finishes all its compints, I still hear the sounds of an infestation from behind my wall. Tap, tap, tap… Tap, tap, tap…

  “I’m sorry,” someone mutters.

  “… “

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that wasn’t a bluff, Yuri.”

  “Don’t use that name.”

  “Is it your name?”

  “It’s against the rules to say,” I scratch at the pster wall, and close both my eyes, the good and the ugly bad.

  “I’m pretty sure the Dog is a vilger,” the Rat presses on. “From how thin these walls are, you could probably have heard her if she snuck out during the night.”

  It’s good that she’s a vilger, good like a mini-bar pretzel dinner, good like a working eye. Maybe even as good as a seasalt kiss! Not that the Rat would care…

  “I’m sorry for being cruel,” the Rat says, as if reading my sarcastic mind. “But—”

  But?

  “But you can’t just drift through a life or death situation acting like this,” the Rat says. “You can hate me if you want, but you just can’t. You should care a little more about the vilge; we’re both on the same side here, you know.”

  I don’t make a sound. I don’t even sigh, because then the Rat would know that I’m still awake. I remain silent, though the sheets still shift and my socks rub against the bedding.

  And soon I’m no longer pretending—I embrace a dead sleep—and yet—

  “Shut up!” I snap.

  —I’m awoken by a loud thumping and a sinister hiss… from my room’s left side.

  Suite Map

  2F

  Dog

  Snake

  Rat

  Hall

  Pig

  Goat

  Horse

  “Oh…”

  The bumping continues from the other side of the wall, the barrier between me and Lily. I’m frozen for the first strike. Then there’s a second, then a third—

  Thrun! Thrun! Thrun! The drumming continues on.

  I struggle out of the comforter as if this were a call to arms.

  I can’t leave the room through the door, and nor do I have the strength to burst through the pster wall. I rush towards the room’s only other egress, a series of metal sts simir to the one the Rat had been tweaking in the elevator. The hotel room’s vent is enormous, rattling, and sealed; I scrabble against the grate, willing it to open, praying that it connects to Lily’s room, but all I get is a puff of foul-smelling air for my trouble. It dizzies me, and I briefly colpse into a chair that I then drag all the way to the other side of the suite.

  Furniture runs all alongside this far wall: a set of drawers, and a ftscreen-TV perched on a desk. I push against one of the wooden dressers and it moves so slightly that it may well have been made from solid rock. So I bat the TV aside, and as it falls face-first onto the carpet I climb onto the desk’s surface, and press myself against the wall, listening.

  I hear a door creaking open, and there’s a sharp crack! as if rock, or bone, had struck wood. A softer tun-tun-tun thumping, and then.. gss breaking. It’s quiet now, except for my heart.

  “Lily?” I speak, then call through the wall. “Lily?”

  There’s no answer. But it’s so te, at 2:05, and the day so long that perhaps it’s had been a hallucination.