she wakes face down in the sand.

she watches. what had been almost imperceptible, the slowest drip of sky, had become a torrent of smeared blue, like a great thumb had smudged the world. she felt sick, watching this. but she couldn't look away.

no, like paint. like paint peeling.

there's something wrong with the sky. the more she looks, the more she can't believe she hadn't noticed it before. not all of it, just up there, right in the very corner, do you see it? it looks almost like. a crease?

Crows cackle and unfurl in the sky, forming words their audience cannot understand. Luckily, we are not the audience. It's code. They hark alarms. In Shady Sands, a bird dead on the ground being poked by a kid with a stick suddenly awakens to carry the swift and terrible hand of mercy back home.

nothing is XXXX any more.

then suddenly, like a problem child with a very fragile snow globe, the whole world begins to shake.

she drinks the water even though she isn't thirsty. there is no thirst here, but it seems the thing to do, so she drinks from the stone pedestal and continues to walk. a rusted iron gate, a dead tree with dead leaves, struck down by lightning, maybe? she shrugs. it doesn't matter.

i *do* smell gas.

you see yourself walking through miles and miles of vast, open desert.

three words or less.

𝐖𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐎𝐑 𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐓 𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐄 jasper kysis, former medical director for colony 17. disgraced, captured, sentenced. ...escaped?