“Feeling better now are we?”

Cass let her breath rush in and out of her, cooling her lungs. The blade was somehow back on her hip, pretending it had never left. She raised her head and saw Madigan standing in front of her again.

“That should hold you over for a while.”

The door revealed itself and Alan walked in to clear up the remains of his earlier manifestation.

“Don’t worry about Alan here, we’ll bring him back good as new. I, however, would be a different story. Luckily I programmed in some visual assists back in the early days. Very useful. Of course at the time I just thought they looked cool.”

From behind his back Madigan produced a small rectangular mirror.

“You haven’t seen yourself in quite some time have you?”

He angled the mirror and Cass saw her face slant down into view.

At least, it was almost her face. The shape was recognisable, the set of the eyes and hair, but the rest was off. The skin was pale and drawn, similar to the vampires she no longer needed to avoid. Her cheekbones pushed out, tight and shiny over her small tense mouth, pointing the way to the real change. The eyes. They were covered in a milky coating, a pale cloud swirling back and forth across the pupil, windows to a stormy atmosphere within.

“It’s a measure of the addiction, of how far gone you are. And when the hunger comes over you they change again, flooding with black ink, dark as blood in the moonlight.”

Her image flashed away again as Madigan slid the mirror back behind himself.

“You don’t have much time.”

His arms came back in front, empty now. Sleight of hand. How could she trust anything in this place?

“You can’t. You can only trust your instincts, which have led you here before it was too late. They have been honed out there in the dark. Did you never wonder what the purpose was? The goal at the end of the road you walk?”

He motioned to the wall where a monitor now sat. On its screen a dark figure stood in the centre of the lane, shrouded in black. Cass felt an instant shock of recognition. Quarters. The figure she saw with him. The woman that turned towards her.

“You’re becoming more like her with every kill. Less like a user, more like a virus. That is the purpose. You contain some of her already, and thanks to your peculiar talents, you have the power to stop her before she ends it all. Perhaps you alone.”

The screen changed now to a long shot of the Grid, glowing in the distance.

“We brought these powers to bear on ourselves, perhaps we deserve what is coming. The Boulevard will still be here long after we have gone.”

The monitor began to change, to grow. Cass was transfixed as Madigan’s voice faded into the background.

“It’s not so bad being stranded here, really. I know I can never go back. This is my universe now. Sometimes I wonder if the Boulevard has always been there. Other times I question if it has ever been there at all.”

The wall itself was the picture now, then the room around her, then it was gone. She was standing in the street, staring off at the Grid in the distance. Madigan’s voice was a whisper in her useless ears.

“What is life without goals, after all?”