I was falling.

  And falling.

  And falling.

  Until I wasn't.

  The impact never came.

  One moment I was hurtling through darkness, the next I was standing ankle-deep in something warm and viscous. The coppery smell hit me immediately. Blood. I was standing in a shallow sea of blood that stretched in every direction to the horizon.

  "Well, this is just fucking fantastic," I muttered, looking down at my prison-issue slippers now soaked red.

  The sky above wasn't sky at all, but a canopy of interwoven bones. All knitted together like some grotesque cathedral ceiling.

  The bones pulsed with red light that cast everything in a bloody glow. Between the gaps, I could see what looked like organs—massive, building-sized hearts and lungs, contracting and expanding in a nauseating rhythm.

  I wasn't just in a Trial dimension. I was inside something. Something alive.

  In the distance, perhaps a mile away, stood a structure that made me freeze mid-step.

  Our apartment.

  Only it wasn't our apartment, not really. The building was constructed entirely of bone and sinew. The walls were made of massive rib cages fused together. The windows were empty eye sockets in bleached skulls. The door was a massive jaw, hinged open in a perpetual scream.

  Around it, shambling through the blood sea, were figures that moved with jerky, puppet-like motions. From this distance, they looked almost human. Almost.

  I started walking toward the bone apartment, because what else was I going to do? Stand in a sea of blood until I died?

  The blood resisted each step, like it was something semi-solid, as if it were trying to hold me in place. When I lifted my foot, thin crimson strands stretched between my leg and the surface, snapping only when I pulled hard enough.

  "What kind of blood is this," I said aloud.

  As if responding to my voice, the blood around my ankles suddenly surged upward, wrapping around my calves like desperate hands. I yanked free with a panicked jerk, stumbling forward as the blood fell away.

  Okay, so don't talk to the blood. Good to know.

  I focused on the bone apartment, trying to ignore the way the blood seemed to reach for me with each step, trying to ignore the shambling figures that were slowly, steadily moving to intercept my path.

  I was halfway there when I got my first good look at one of the figures.

  It wasn't human.

  It wasn't even humanoid.

  It was a collection of bones—floating in roughly human shape, held together by strands of white, writhing worms. The worms threaded through the bones, connecting them, pulling them along in a grotesque parody of movement.

  The thing had no face, just a skull with empty eye sockets where worms crawled in and out freely. As it walked, the worms contracted and released to drag the bones through the blood.

  I somehow knew that if they caught me, they would wrap their worms around my bones and add me to their collection.

  "Fuck that," I muttered, picking up my pace.

  I reached the apartment building just as the first wave of Bone Puppets closed in. There were perhaps a dozen of them, lurching through the blood with a single-minded purpose. I ran for the screaming door, nearly slipping in the blood that grew deeper the closer I got to the structure.

  The door—the massive jaw—snapped open and closed as I approached. I timed my dash and leapt through during an open moment, tumbling onto a floor made of interlocking vertebrae.

  Behind me, the jaw slammed shut with a sound like a guillotine dropping, severing several worm-threads that had been reaching for my ankles.

  The worms writhed on the floor for a moment before going still.

  I was inside.

  The interior was a nightmare version of our apartment.

  The layout was the same but everything was constructed of bone, sinew, and organs. The couch was a massive ribcage lined with lung tissue. The kitchen table was a giant pelvis. The lights were glowing bladders filled with glowing fluid.

  And everything was bleeding. Blood oozed from the walls, dripped from the ceiling, pooled on the floor. Not rushing, not gushing, just a slow, constant seep that kept the entire place slick and wet.

  "Welcome home, brother."

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  The voice froze me in place. It was Rell's voice—not the Rell who had been eaten by our father, but child Rell, maybe six or seven years old. The voice came from the kitchen.

  I turned slowly, already knowing what I would see but dreading it anyway.

  Child Rell sat on the pelvic kitchen table, swinging her legs cheerfully.

  She wore the yellow sundress she had loved at that age, the one with daisies on the hem. Her hair was in pigtails tied with yellow ribbons.

  She looked perfectly normal except for her eyes, which were empty sockets filled with writhing white worms.

  "You're late," she said, her voice sweet and childish despite the horror of her appearance. "I've been waiting for forever to play with you."

  "You're not Rell," I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

  "Of course I am silly. I'm the Rell you let die." She giggled, a sound that used to make me smile but now sent shivers down my spine. "Do you want to play a game? We have to play a game."

  "What kind of game?" I asked cautiously, taking a step back.

  "It's called Piece by Piece," she said, clapping her hands together. The sound was hollow, like bone striking bone. "I need new parts, you see. Mine got all eaten up."

  She hopped off the chair and skipped toward me, her movements fluid, and perfect.

  "First," she said, stopping in front of me, "I need an eye. You have two, and that's not fair when I have none."

  She reached up, her small hand moving toward my face with unnatural speed. I jerked back, but not before her fingers brushed my cheek, leaving a burning trail like acid.

  "Don't be a spoil sport," she pouted. "If you don't play, you can't move forward. And if you don't move forward, you'll never get strong enough to kill Daddy."

  The word Daddy made my blood boil. This thing knew. Of course it knew. The Trial was constructed from my mind, my memories, my trauma.

  "What happens if I give you an eye?" I asked, playing for time, looking around for any way out of this situation.

  "Then we move to the next part of the game," she said simply. "And then the next, and the next. Until I'm all better or you're all gone." She giggled again. "Whichever comes first."

  This was a test. A sick, twisted test, but a test nonetheless. And tests had rules. Patterns. Solutions.

  "How do I know giving you parts won't just kill me?" I asked.

  "Oh, it will hurt," child-Rell said with a smile that stretched too wide for her face. "It will hurt very, very much. But you won't die unless you give up everything. And you wouldn't do that, would you? Not when you need to get strong enough to kill Daddy."

  She reached for my face again, and this time I didn't pull away. Her fingers—cold, so cold—touched my right eye.

  "This one, I think," she said.

  Pain exploded through my skull as her fingers sank into my eye socket.

  I screamed, falling to my knees as she pulled.

  Something tore free, with a sick pop and suddenly I could see only from my left eye. Through the haze of pain, I watched as she held up the bloody orb.

  "Perfect," she said, popping the flesh ball into one of her empty sockets. Immediately, light shone from that socket, illuminating her face from within. "Now I can see what you see. All the fear. All the hate. All the helplessness." She sounded delighted.

  I remained on my knees, panting, one hand pressed to my now-blind right eye. The pain was already fading, but the sense of violation remained.

  "Good job, brother," she said, patting my head condescendingly. "You've passed the first test. Now you can move deeper into the house."

  She skipped away down the hallway, disappearing into the darkness.

  I stayed where I was for a long moment, trying to process what had just happened.

  I struggled to my feet, swaying slightly as I adjusted to monocular vision. The apartment seemed different now—the bones more pronounced, the sinew thicker, the blood flow increased. It was responding to my sacrifice, becoming more solid, more real.

  I followed child-Rell down the hallway, moving cautiously.

  The walls pulsed around me, the bones creaking like an old house settling. Each door I passed was a different type of jaw—some human, some definitely not—all closed tightly.

  Except for one.

  Rell's bedroom door—a smaller jaw made of what looked like child-sized teeth—was open just a crack, a soft light spilling out from inside.

  I pushed the door open, bracing myself for another horror.

  Rell's bedroom was both familiar and alien.

  The layout matched her real room—bed against the wall, desk by the window, bookshelf in the corner—but everything was constructed of the same bone-sinew-organ material as the rest of the apartment. The bed was a cradle of ribs lined with something that might have been stomach lining. The desk was a shoulder blade balanced on leg bones. The bookshelf held skulls instead of books, each with a different expression frozen on its face.

  Child-Rell sat on the bed, legs crossed, playing with something in her hands.

  "Do you remember when we used to play in here?" she asked without looking up. "Before Daddy started his experiments?"

  I said nothing, watching her warily from the doorway.

  "He chose Mom specifically for her genetics. Raised us carefully, lovingly, like prize pigs."

  She looked up then, blood dripping from the stolen eye making her face ghoulish.

  "And you never noticed. Never suspected. Even when I tried to warn you."

  The accusation hit harder than any physical blow. Because she was right. I had been blind—figuratively then, literally now.

  "I'm going to kill him," I said, the words emerging as a growl.

  "With what power?" she laughed. "You're nothing. Weak. Useless."

  She held up what she had been playing with—a small figurine made of bone. It was a perfect miniature of me, down to the prison clothes I still wore.

  "But you could be something," she said, her voice suddenly gentle. "If you're willing to pay the price."

  She snapped one of the figurine's arms off. Simultaneously, pain lanced through my left arm, and I felt it go numb, then cold, then absent. I looked down in horror to see my arm dissolving into white worms that fell to the floor and quickly slithered away.

  "Oops," child-Rell giggled. "Looks like you're disarmed."

  I staggered, off-balance both physically and mentally. My left arm was gone up to the shoulder, leaving nothing but a smooth stump that oozed tiny white worms.

  "What the fuck!" I shouted, panic rising. "What did you do?"

  "I told you, we're playing Piece by Piece," she said calmly. "I need parts. You have parts. This is how the game works."

  "This isn't a game," I snarled. "This is fucking torture."

  "No, brother," she said, her voice suddenly sad. "This is your trial. The worms are testing you, seeing if you're worthy of joining them, of becoming one with them. They take the pieces they need and leave you with what you deserve."

  She broke off the figurine's right leg. My right leg dissolved into worms, and I collapsed to the floor, now missing an eye, an arm, and a leg.

  "Stop," I gasped, the pain overwhelming.

  "But we're just getting started," she said, standing from the bed and walking toward me. "I need so many more parts. A heart that isn't broken. Lungs that can breathe. Bones that aren't hollow."

  She knelt beside me, the figurine held in her small hands.

  "Unless," she said thoughtfully, "you're willing to make a different trade."

  "What... trade?" I managed through gritted teeth.

  "Your memories," she said simply. "The happy ones. The ones of me, of us, of the family we thought we had. Give those up, and I'll let you keep your physical form."

  I stared at her with my one remaining eye.

  Trade my memories of Rell? The real Rell, not this nightmare version? The thought was more painful than losing my limbs.