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The corridor seemed to go on forever, lit up only by the dim, flickering lights that hung from the ceiling. The walls on either side were rough to the touch, and wet from the crimson splatter that pooled on the wooden floorboards. Anguished, ear-splitting cries broke the eerie silence that haunted the asylum, and my panicked breaths quickened. I pulled my hand away from the wall that had been supporting my weight and I moved faster. I could not bring myself to run - that was all I had been doing since I found myself trapped in this fucking place - but there was nowhere to hide. There was no time to stop and catch my breath. I had to keep moving.

"[NAME]!"

I could not remember the last time that I heard my name. Coupled with that familiar voice that I never thought I would hear again, it drew a tear from my eye and the rush of emotion made me fall to my knees.

"Get up, [Name]! Fucking help me with this!"

When I turned my head to look at him, watching him push a metal cabinet that blocked a metal door, I saw the blood on his hands. For a moment, I wondered whose blood it was. Then when he managed to move the barricade and reached out for me with his hand, I saw it.

"Miles . . . Your finger--" I managed to utter, shakily reaching out for his hand that missed its index finger, though he interrupted me with a snarl.

"Fuck it, [Name], we're running out of time!" Miles grabbed my hand, pushing the metal door open with his freehand, then pulled me to the elevator that waited on the other side. "I saw the exit, [Name]. I fucking saw the exit but I couldn't get to it because that sick fuck had me strapped to a fucking wheelchair!"

My head ached as I tried to process his words and I raised my hand to my temple, holding it as I backed up against the wall of the elevator.

"Who did?" I asked him softly, sliding down to the floor, opening my eyes to see Miles' blood on my hand. Then I looked up, watching him stick a golden key into the elevator's rusted keyhole.

"Richard Trager," Miles growled as the elevator shook beneath us, starting to descend. "Some white-collar, business school douchebag that fucking CUT MY FINGERS OFF! I want my fucking fingers back!"

"Well, aren't you a slippery little fucker?" Another voice added to the conversation and my heart raced as the elevator reached the floor below. Miles blocked the view, but I recognized the sound of chains as our pursuer unlocked the gate.

"Miles!" I cried out as I watched Miles stagger back once a pair of massive scissors plunged into his shoulder, then watched him fall back against the wall of the elevator.

Before I could crawl to him, a withered hand grabbed my throat and pulled me up to my feet. Wide-eyed, I stared at my reflection in the glass of our pursuer's steampunk-esque monocles. His face was withered and bony like the rest of him, as if he had been flayed alive and left to dry, and only a few strands of grey hair clung to his scalp. His freehand wielded the pair of giant scissors that felled Miles, and he held the parted blades up to my chin.

"Trager!" Miles snarled from behind me. "Let him go!" He ordered, though the breathy grunt and the whine that followed let me know that he was suffering.

"Oh," said Trager, feigning an epiphany. "I see what's happening here. You're jealous. You want my eyes on you again," Trager observed with a soft, dark chuckle. "Perfectly understandable. We did share a rather . . . intimate moment up there, didn't we?"

"Fuck . . . you," Miles growled back, crawling to Trager's feet.

"Hm," Trager sounded, gripping my throat tighter as he held me off the ground, then removed the scissors from my chin and held Miles' head up with them instead. "Not quite, buddy, not quite. Didn't you read the wall?" He asked with a sneer, just when I thought the prick could not possibly be any more condescending.

"Yeah," Miles spat. "I read your fucking wall. Fingers first. Then balls. Then tongue."

"That's right," replied Trager, relinquishing his grasp and letting me fall to the ground. "You owe me three organs, buddy."

I could barely make out the words that left him. His voice was almost drowned out by my breaths as I tried to drink as much air as I could.

"Miles . . ." I managed to rasp, reaching out for him, though my attempt was in vain. I watched as Trager grabbed Miles by the scruff of his neck, then looked up to see the hellish figure's fist coming at me.

➤➤ TIMESKIP!

"Hey!"

That voice ripped me from the confines of my mind and I slowly opened my eyes to see Trager's face behind a familiar camera that was aimed at my face. For a moment, it took me back to the day when I first gave that camera to Miles. What was Trager doing with it? That thought brought me back to the present and my breaths grew panicked. Wherever I was, it reeked of blood, piss and shit. I looked down to find myself in a wheelchair, with my wrists bound to it by leather straps, and I started rocking from side to side with the idea that I could fall over and somehow drag myself out of there.

"You paying attention, buddy? There's still a lot for you to absorb!" Trager told me cheerfully, then raked his sharp, overgrown nails across my face with a discombobulating smack.

My head turned with the attack and I found myself staring at the tiles with blurred vision. Blood pooled in various places, seeping into the grout, and my eyes followed one of the trails to a corner where dismembered limbs were left in a pile.

"What the fuck did you do to Miles?!" I snapped at Trager, jerking my head up to glare at him, ignoring the blood that slid down my cheek. "Miles? MILES? MILES!" I called out for him, foolishly allowing myself to hope for an answer.

"That little fucker? If there is one thing I cannot goddamned stand, it's a quitter!" Trager remarked bitterly under his breath, staring at the screen of the camera in his hands. I did not doubt for a second that I was on that screen. "But I know how much he means to you."

I watched as he lowered the camera from his face and I gulped at the sarcastic smile that graced his withered lips.

"So I waited for you to wake up," he added with a shrug, then placed the camera in my lap before circling the wheelchair to stand behind it. "Come on, I'll take you to him. I've never had a spectator before, so this will be a new experience for the both of us."

My hands trembled as I stared at the bloodstained, shattered mirror on the wall. Then just as my eyes travelled down to the sink, I felt the wheelchair rear beneath me. My next breath caught in my throat as Trager turned the chair to face the door and my eyes followed the blood on the wall outside once he pushed me into the corridor.

"Hmm! Hm!"

My eyes switched to the bed that we were passing and I watched a man struggle in the straps that restrained him. I watched as blood spilled from his mouth with his wordless protests.

"Shh, shh," Trager shushed the man as we passed him. "You weren't putting that tongue to any use anyway," he said over his shoulder, then paused to lower his head beside mine. "Truth be told, I was just tired of licking my own stamps," Trager whispered for my ears alone. Coupled with his chuckle, his soft, calm voice sent a chill down my spine.

This sick fucker was the reason that I reunited with Miles, but he would also be the reason that I lost Miles if I just sat here.

"Wait right here," Trager muttered before the wheelchair stopped moving and I turned my head to see the elevator beside us.

I controlled my breaths, staring at the pool of blood on the elevator's floor, listening to Trager's footsteps as they grew distant. The wordless cries of the man that we had passed grew louder and more desperate. Trager must have gone back to kill him. Now was my chance.

"Come on," I urged myself, then jerked my hands around in the leather straps, struggling in the restraints that bound me to the chair. The restrains grew looser around my wrists, probably made easier from Miles' earlier escape. "Gah!" I stumbled to my feet once my hands were free and I fell to my knees.

I was exhausted. I had been cheating death ever since we arrived at this fucking asylum. We never should have sneaked into this place. We should have turned back when we found the first dead body. The blood trails that led up to it should have been our first fucking clue to leave!

"[Name]!"

A voice whispered and I glanced up to see a face in the vent above. My heart raced and I scrambled to my feet, and I wasted no time in stumbling toward the bloodstained bed below the vent. Climbing onto the bed, I reached up for the hand that waited for me to pull myself up into the vent.

"Miles," I whispered the name of my saviour once I was inside the vent, facing him as the two of us laid still in the darkness of the confined space. Coupled with the sticky blood that painted it, the vent's cold floor against my stomach made me shiver. "You escaped."

"What did he do to you?" Miles asked, withholding an explanation, running his remaining fingers over my hand and feeling for anything out of place. "I'll fucking kill that scissor-wielding prick."

"Why aren't you dead?" I whispered, staring at his shadowy face as he raised a hand to mine. I gulped as he inspected it with his fingertips and I held my breath as he stopped on the grooves that Trager's nails left.

"The fucker missed my heart by a mile," he muttered, dropping his hand from my face and holding the wound on his shoulder. He grimaced, though he managed a chuckle. "He's probably shit at golf."

"What?"

"Well, he fucking seems like the type to play golf, doesn't he? The fucker was talking about a two-martini lunch after he sucker-punched me." Miles shrugged, though realized his mistake when he winced at the pain in his shoulder. "I'd bet the rest of my fingers that he was the top brass of Murkoff before this shithole changed him."

"How do you know?" I asked him under my breath, though our conversation made me anxious. My mind was haunted by the blood-curdling thought of Trager grabbing my ankles and pulling me out of the vent.

"I'm a fucking freelance investigative journalist," Miles scoffed, somehow managing to sound amused. "With a name like that, I gotta know things." Recognising his failure to make me laugh, he continued: "After he cut off my fingers, he left the room . . . probably to find the tool that he was going to cut my balls off with. Anyway, I escaped from the wheelchair, grabbed my camera and fucked off as fast as I could."

Miles paused and I held my breath.

"I was so close to the exit, [Name]." He sighed. "I heard a whisper and I followed it to the back of another room. It must've been a sickbay or something because there were so many beds. There was one bed in the middle of the room, though. That's where the guy was. His arms and legs were bound to the bed, and his head was in some sort of . . . head sling. The bed was fucking drenched with his blood, [Name]. He told me that he wasn't a patient, that he was an executive like Trager. Richard Trager. Whatever happened in Mount Massive Asylum, Trager got the treatment and it filled him with the nightmares of some guy called Wernicke. I don't even know what that means."

"Wernicke," I murmured the name. He could have been another executive. "What happened to this place?"

"You got the same anonymous tip that I did, [Name]. Murkoff Coporation brought the guy in to fix the computers or something and he dug up dirt on this place. These white-collar pricks are experimenting on their patients and they're fucking turning on each other in the process. I mean, Trager fucking KILLED the guy that he was meant to be killing other guys with."

I was silent for a moment, trying to process every word that left him. If someone told me that being a journalist could get me killed, I never would have done it. I only became a journalist for Miles. I only wanted to be there with him while he faced the world and reported the shit that happened in it.

"Miles," I finally managed to utter. "We're going to die in this asylum."

"Fuck that," retorted Miles before he started wiggling backwards. "Let's get out of here. If Trager was here, we would've heard the fucker yelling. He hates when his playthings escape."

I nodded, too afraid to utter another word, and I crawled after him. I stared at the features of his that I could make out in the dark, holding his gaze as our movements through the vent echoed in my ears. Then we reached the exit of the vent and I suddenly regretted saying anything.

"[NAME]!"

For the first time in our lives, Miles cried out to me for help. Adrenaline coursed through me and I threw out my hands to grab his, though his wet and bloody skin was slippery, and my blood ran cold as his hands slipped out of mine.

"Miles!"

Hanging out of the vent, I found myself staring down at Miles and the shocked expression on his face. It was as if he had stopped falling in midair, though my eyes travelled down to his chest to see that he was being held up by the pair of massive scissors that were thrust up into his back. I watched the blood spill from the wound and the tears were hot on my cheeks.

"[Name]," Miles coughed, spluttering blood as my name left his lips. "What - what are you, a f-fucking pussy?" He laughed, then coughed louder, starting to wheeze. It hurt. It hurt me to see that the only person I had left in this world was dying in front of me, and by the hands of some twisted fucker with a pair of scissors.

Before I could watch the life drain from his eyes, Miles was thrown aside with the scissors in his back and I was pulled down from the vent with a withered hand around my throat. As if he were nothing more than another human subject in this godforsaken shithole, Miles was left to die at his own pace. It should have been me. I turned my eyes away from Miles and toward the withered face in front of me, though I did not recognize the face of the cold and broken man in the reflection of Trager's monocles.

"I should have cut off his feet first," Trager admitted with the same sarcastic smile that I was harrowed by before. "Amateur move, on my part," he added and neither of our gazes strayed from the other's.

The fear I felt before, I did not it feel now. Holding the gaze of this fucker neither quickened my breaths nor stirred my heart. Miles was dead, and so I welcomed death. Trager must have seen that. Then the familiar sound of metal piercing flesh reached my ears and my eyes dropped to the familiar pair of scissors that stuck out of Trager's chest, where the existence of his heart was debatable.

"Father Martin sends his regards," said the faceless man that wielded the scissors behind Trager.

Once Trager released my throat, I stumbled back and I watched him fall onto his knees.

"That little shit," Trager growled, then fell onto his face.

I looked up to the pale face that had spoken the words into Trager's ear. Then something solid connected with my head.

➤➤ TIMESKIP!

"This is not the apostle that our Lord sent us."

I followed the voice with my head, and I slowly opened my eyes to see a face hovering above mine. The expression on my observer's face was considerably creepy, though my racing heart settled once I remembered where I was.

"Are you the man I have to thank for Trager's death?" I mumbled, taking in his robed, portly form, then looked around to find myself laying on the floor.

"Who's this?" Another voice asked and my eyes followed the voice to two pale, identically repulsive faces on the other side of me. The men with these faces were naked and their muscular, hairy bodies were drenched with blood and dirt. The sides of their stomachs were scarred, further proving that the two were twins.

"Not Father Martin's man," replied the voice's twin as the two stared at me with calm, unblinking eyes.

"That one's dead."

"Because of you," I growled, looking between them. For a moment, I forgot about the robed man that was there with us.

"It is unfortunate," interjected the robed man that I could only assume was Father Martin. "As I feared Trager would, that secular maniac carved up the apostle that our merciful God, the Walrider, had sent us."

"If you had sent these sick, inbred fuckers earlier, my brother would still be alive!" I snarled back, influencing a silence between the twins. "I'll fucking kill both of you," I rasped, exhausted from the time that I had spent in this place, exhausted from trying to survive, exhausted from living.

"He can try," said one of the twins.

"He will fail," said the other.

"Then we will kill him."

"And when we kill him, we kill him slow."

"You will not," Father Martin told them and the twins fell silent again. "He shares the blood of the apostle. The Walrider has sent this one to us, too. Our Lord has given us a second chance."

Sitting up, I shuffled back until my back hit something solid. Who the fuck were these guys? Did Miles meet them while we were separated? I looked between the three faces that stared down at me, and I felt around behind me for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing.

"Who are you?" I asked him with the hope that he was not out to finish what Trager started.

"We are your only way out," replied Father Martin, holding his hand out for me to take. "I will take you to freedom. You alone shall escape to spread the word. This is your penultimate act as a witness."

This fucking priest was deranged like the rest of them, but I could not do this alone without Miles. When I realized that I was holding my breath, I swallowed the lump in my throat and I nodded. If this delusional, bible-thumping fuck was my only way out, what choice did I have? I doubted that Trager was the only monster in this place. Breathing in, I reached out for his hand.

"Okay," I whispered.