The memories continued to come, married to delusions, nightmares, things she was not so sure she'd never experienced before. Beyond the rest of it, she began to sense reality. Though she tried to guide the ship of her consciousness out of the disorienting fog, the stormfront seethed, and the mental storm continued to stretch its tendrils outward.

Her eyes saw gray in the real world, her mind saw vivid color in the other worlds. And in the foggy apex where the worlds met, her mother began to form — strange and new.

But her mother perhaps wasn't the mother she'd had before. Her mother, she began to understand, had a droning, far away voice. Her mother had broad shoulders and a furrowed brow.

She did not wear the composite of her delusions but the strange, slack skin of a stranger.

She had a gray beard streaked with white and it was wound tightly into a matted braid and wrapped in a gray cloth. Her skin was sallow and hung slack around the wide breadth of her jaw.

This was not the bright-eyed woman she would conjure hunched over a cabin stove, staring listlessly out of a picture window, or barefoot among the rows in a kitchen garden.

Her new mother's lined eyelids lazed over steely gray eyes. The unfocused discs of the irises moved with an uncanny motion below the thick, once-dark brows.

Evara felt no prickling of recognition, no connection in heart or mind. Nevertheless, her mind told her that this creature huddled on the bedside stool was Mother.

She did not clear her throat or look at her with concern. The tight lines disrupting the wells of her eyes deepened as she watched her daughter blink into the strange shared consciousness of the gray room.

After a moment of indecipherable speech and blank staring, it became apparent that Mother's tinny voice originated from a speaker placed on a machine screwed into the side of her neck.

"055-7426B, Greenblade, can you respond?" The voice was vaguely masculine, its depth lost in the fuzz of the speaker and the echo of the empty room.

Evara tried her voice, tried to respond in the affirmative, tried to ask where in the hell she was, tried to ask where her real mother was — her sister, her father. She tried to move her shoulders to shift upright and was answered with a wave of dizziness as if her body refused the truth in her nerves.

"Your response has been acknowledged." The voice was as clipped as Mother's movements. A hand met with her shoulder and pressed Evara gently back into the bed. "Movement is not immediately advised. Per last medical assessment at current day, zero four hundred, by Hunter, physician 78-224."

A soft sense of realization came over her, something had happened — something terrible. The room she was in was made of gray cement — the walls, the ceiling, the floor. The only break came from a small, shielded porthole window on the far wall.

This was not her home.

The person at her bedside was not by any stretch her mother or any mother, she could barely clock them as a person. It was a human, but its eyes did not focus and it slouched strangely as if its back had been broken and its lips did not move when it spoke.

She had heard the word 'physician' before — only in a passing rant her father laid into after he got into an argument with their neighbor. There were layers of meaning in the use of that word and it cut through her thoroughly.

First came the realization that she was in a city, a supposedly 'civilized' city. In the wilds, there were plant workers that were wise to which tonics or salves aided recovery from which ailments. 'Physicians' were an invention of the others.

The rest fell into place awkwardly.

Based on the foggy emptiness of her thoughts — by the narrow, singular internal voice — she had been separated from her family, especially her sister, Senya.

If she had been assigned a physician she was likely injured or ill. So, they had either taken her by force or she had been found in some state of delirium, somehow separated from her folk.

The creature at her bedside studied her as she muddled through the blunted waves of information created solely by her own observation. The voices and their vast stores of knowledge continued to lay beyond her perception, she could sense it there but all had gone dark — no information available — like being pulled out with the tide.

It took her a moment to acclimate to the mechanical hum of the creature's machine but once she did, she realized she could not hear any hum of consciousness. But it was awake, and it moved with the delayed grace of an injured human.

"055-7426B, do not be alarmed," It whirred through the machine on its neck. She could see the speaker, a small black square among the steely plates. "I must do vital checks upon you as it is now the hour of fifteen."

She did not know what vital checks meant or what significance the number of the hour held but she did not fight the thing as it picked up her arm and placed several electrodes along the inside.

An independent machine at her bedside clicked a few times and the machine person stared blankly at the readout screen as a brief stream of numbers filled the blackness.

Then it spoke out loud, first to itself: "055-7426B became conscious at approximately fourteen-fifty and upon fifteen was found to have temperature, blood pressure, oxygenation, and pulse well within normal parameters."

Then it addressed her directly: "Will you add any personal observations to the report?"

She tried her voice again. At first, it felt as if her breath would not catch against the unsteady instrument of her throat. She stammered and made wheezes and grunts. Then came a stumble of resonance. "I am fine, I suppose. I feel no pain. But I am confused, I do not know where I am."

Her confusion was not immediately addressed — but the statement provoked a strange whirring sound from the machine and the stranger's gray-eyes rolled back, flitting against the heavy, yellowed, lids before dropping back down to steady somewhere near her face.

"055-7426B, you are in the city of Isosceles, block 56, building R, facility omega dash epsilon, room 44H."

She may be an outsider, but she knew enough that Isosceles was the so called "capitol" of the "civilized" cities — the beating heart of the strange world beyond the wilds.

"Why am I here? What is the function of this facility?"

"Facility omega dash epsilon is a medical facility for the intake of mystic civilians and dyads."

"Intake?" She asked. Heat touched her cheeks as she tried to understand.

Then, as if some curtain had dropped and a plain intelligence spoke from within the unnatural human at her side he explained plainly, "There are only two ways that wildfolk are brought into the cities — as identified mystics passing through the tiered intake process or through —" Its voice cut off and it raised a wrinkled hand to point at the machine on its neck.

"Welcome, 055-7426B."