Sometimes, she thought the uncertainty was the worst part. No, not uncertainty as to what was coming—of that, she had no doubt. He was coming for her. He had made that clear. With every evidence of enjoying the fear she tried so hard to hide, he had made it abundantly clear.

No, the uncertainty was when. The waiting, the days and nights of tedium, sprinkled with their little indignities and minor horrors, seasoned with the menace of the nightmare to come, was a torture all its own. Especially these hours, as the city quietened and the evening deepened and the long night loomed ahead.

She'd been abducted. Imprisoned. Exposed and paraded and leered at. Judged to be...suitable. Worthy, if such a word could used for circumstances so vile. Deemed fit for purpose to fulfil whatever sick fantasy of degradation he had in mind. She'd been taken aside and kept apart, reserved for his sole use.

And then she had waited. Plotted and schemed and raged and despaired, but waited just the same. Hating every second. And yet wishing the wait might never end.

Lukewarm. To Nick's mild surprise, oblivion turned out to be lukewarm. He'd never given the temperature of oblivion much thought but he supposed, if pressed for a prediction on the matter, he would have gone for freezing cold, or maybe even boiling hot. Something extreme, anyway. Oblivion just seemed like that kind of place. The kind of place where the burger meal-deals were all super-sized, the booze was overproof and came on the rocks, and if you called Luke warm, he'd probably punch you right in your stupid face.

Nevertheless, lukewarm it was. Not to mention, now that he thought about it, kind of uncomfortable. Painful, even. Bruisy, with overtones of sting.

Hmm.

It occurred to Nick the thoughts with which his brain was presenting him appeared to be more or less—not to put too fine a point on it—a load of crap. As he considered this, his brain next presented him with the little nugget of information that besides being lukewarm, oblivion also sounded weird—kind of whooshy. It followed this up, in rapid succession, with the observation it appeared he hadn't taken a breath in a while, and the suggestion that if he wanted the nugget-presenting to continue, he should probably do something about that.

Given their debatable value, Nick wasn't sure he did want the nugget-presenting to continue, but for lack of anything better to do, he sifted through the nuggets supplied so far, on the off-chance they might contain something useful.

The room-temperature nature of oblivion? Meh. Its whooshy soundtrack? Yeah, yeah. The benefits of breathing? Whatevs. The...wait a second.

Breathing. That was the something. While indifferent to oblivion, he was very much pro-breathing. Breathing was great. As a matter of fact, he could really go for a breath right now. That should definitely be on top of his to-do list.

He opened his eyes, only realising in doing so that they'd been closed. The soft glow of a diffuse, hazy light greeted his restored vision, hovering somewhere over him, either dim and close-by or bright and far away—it was impossible to tell. For lack of any other cues where to go, he made his way towards it, until—with a start—it occurred to him perhaps this wasn't such a good idea.

Didn't people say to stay away from the light? He was pretty sure he'd heard that somewhere. But then again, he reasoned, what did people know? In the end? When it came down to it? Stupid people. With a mental snort, he set off again for the light. Or at least he did until it hit him in the head.

He paused, experiencing the curious juxtaposition of becoming more aware of the urgent need to breathe, while feeling the will to care about it ebb away. Still, he didn't want to hang around here all day, wherever here was, and with slow, laboured, but irrefutable logic, his brain presented to him the proposition that if moving towards the light meant hitting his head, then perhaps it made sense to go the other way.

Always a sucker for a well-reasoned argument, Nick did exactly that and a few seconds later his head burst out into the warm, not-particularly fragrant but nevertheless welcome night air of the city. For a moment he was tempted to not breathe, just to stick it to his brain and avoid all the I-told-you-sos, but the demands of physiology were too strong, and of their own volition his lungs drew in a long, shuddering breath, followed in short order by another and then another.

And as the oxygen-enriched blood flooded through his body and his mental fog receded, he took in his surroundings.

He was in a pool. To be more specific, he was in the pool. The pool of his oasis, of his mental getaway—the pool of his daydreams. There was no mistaking the gleaming deckchairs to one side, the lush gardens all around and the characteristic blue glow, which he could now see originated from a strip of lights along the bottom of the pool itself.

And as his jangled and misfiring synapses reassembled a coherent recollection of recent events, he came to a startling and unavoidable conclusion—he'd made it. Against all expectations—hell, against all reason—his uncontrolled, galvanic leap towards the imagined haven that had provided him with a modicum of solace over these past few months, had hit its target. And—judging by the bruised and aching feel of his body—had hit it hard.

With slow strokes, he swam to the side of the pool and pulled himself up onto the creamy marble tiles that edged the water, into which his limp legs still dangled. Staring at the surface, bubbling gently from concealed underwater jets, he found himself at a loss. Not for a second had he imagined winding up in this situation. Or really, for that matter, any situation—at least not one in which he could still imagine situations. It was just when he'd spotted the pool from the rooftop—remote, ethereal, yet as enticing as ever—it had allowed his mind to transform his leap as being to something, rather than away. Into a quest for something good—something pure, something better—rather than merely an inglorious and messy escape from the prolonged, slow-motion train-wreck that was his life.

To be sure, it was an ill-fated quest, irrational and doomed to failure, but that hadn't been important. Nothing screamed abject defeat quite like a swan-dive off a skyscraper, and some inner, core part of Nick's psyche, some last remaining shred of pride, had rebelled at the prospect.

"You wanna chuck yourself off a building?" it had said. "Well then, go right ahead. Fine by me, provided you chuck yourself at something."

So he had. In the instinctual certainty of failure, he had taken aim and launched himself at the rooftop oasis, closing his eyes tight as he forced himself to imagine the feel of plunging into its refreshing waters, even while his body tensed for the inevitable, eventual impact with the concrete so far below. For the sickening crunch as he experienced the consequences of his fruitless dive missing its mark.

Only it hadn't. It would seem he was either a better jumper or a worse estimator than he'd thought, because here he was. Despite himself, he couldn't resist a smile. There was something deliciously appropriate about pulling off an almost impossible task when his actual goal had been to...not. Nick Devine been a spectacular failure at finding success, and now he'd failed at failure, too.

It wasn't too late to rectify that. He was still almost forty stories up and despite having suffered a rare blemish on its record, gravity would no doubt be ready and waiting to chalk up another knockout win, should he care to take it on again.

But that moment had passed. As the hypoxia-induced euphoria and delirium of his near-drowning ebbed away, as the weight of his crumbling world once again settled on his shoulders, he found himself too deflated, too overwrought, just too brain-fried to muster up the fortitude to go there again tonight. Nothing had been solved, nothing had changed, and his life was as gloriously fucked-up as ever, but he'd worry about that tomorrow. Tonight, now, all he wanted was to go home, to make his way to his apartment, to his bed and to the temporary escape of sleep. The rest of his life, for what it was worth, however much of it there might be, could wait.

Which was fine in theory. There was just the slight complication of working out how to make that happen. Of how to find his soaking wet way from the private rooftop garden of an unknown building, down through who-knew-how-many stories of who-knew-what, to arrive unaccosted and unarrested at street level, where he'd then have to deal with the minor issues of a drowned phone, and a wallet which—while bone-dry—was in an archive box on the rooftop of a different building.

Who knew the simple act of jumping off a building could lead to so many complications?

Still, he wasn't getting any closer to home sitting there in his squelchy underwear. So, wincing at the protests of his bruised body, he clambered to his feet and looked around for options. Not too far away, a flight of marble stairs leading down to a lower level of the rooftop presented an obvious course of action, but Nick couldn't help but wonder if there might be a road less-travelled for him to pursue. Or, to be more precise, a road less-populated.

Although never up for conversations with strangers, he was feeling particularly ill-equipped to handle any such encounters tonight. Trespassing on private property, soaked to the skin, bereft of any form of ID and/or justification as to why he might be there, and just having emerged from a self-inflicted near-death experience, he couldn't begin to imagine what he might say to the unsuspecting pool-owners after stumbling into their living room. Even without a stutter.

Although he very much doubted a modern luxury skyscraper would sport an old-school fire-escape, he made the rounds of the rooftop anyway, hoping against hope to find the welcome, rickety ladder that would provide a private, no-explanations-required means of escape.

No such luck, of course. Given his success at building-hopping, he contemplated making an attempt on one of the adjoining buildings—but only briefly. When it came to skyscraper-scotch, he couldn't help but feel it would be wisest to rest on his laurels.

Which left the stairs. Dredging up the sad, tattered remnants of his courage, he made his wary way down, to find himself on a broad, tiled area, framed by more gardens and fronting an expansive, glass-walled structure, glowing softly in the night air.

Dreading a confrontation, but seeing no other choice, Nick approached the building, slowing as he noted its immaculate decor, plush furnishings and grand piano—it was clear whoever lived there had excellent taste and some serious money. And, he presumed, would not be pleased to have a soggy, unemployed accountant traipsing through their squillion-dollar penthouse.

Thus, it was with significant relief that he spotted the plain door off to the right-hand side of the building, half-hidden behind a palm-tree. Surely it had to be the door to the stairs, and therefore the ticket to his escape.

There was only one way to find out. Even though he'd yet to spot anybody in the penthouse, Nick hunkered down and scuttled over to the doorway in his best commando-crouch, although the stealthy effect was somewhat lessened when he tripped over an irrigation hose. Cursing in frustration, he scrambled to his feet. Desperate to remain undetected, he took the last few paces at a run, put his shoulder to the door—and bounced right back off it.

Lying there, as the pain of the new bruise blended into the general background ache of the rest of his body, as the miasma of misery hanging over him pressed down so hard he found it hard to draw breath, he didn't know whether he had the will to get back up again. Looking up into the dark, hazy murk of the night-time sky—starless despite the best efforts of his imagination—he wondered how long it would take for him to dissolve into the tiles, or to dry up and blow away, to cease to be the failed attempt at a human that was Nick Devine. A year, maybe? A decade? He resolved to find out.

In time, though, the edge of a tile digging into his back brought the discomfort of his position to his attention, and the image of his bed floated through his traitorous mind—the simple allure of sleep, the freedom from care, even if only for a little while.

Groaning, he once again got to his feet, and inspected the door—locked, of course. Securely locked, with a depressingly chunky-looking deadbolt.

Although tempted to just bash the stupid thing down with his bare hands, his throbbing shoulder convinced him to resist the urge. So, sighing his umpteenth sigh for the night, this one a particularly weary and resigned example, he turned towards the penthouse—to find someone inside looking back out at him.

Heart hammering, he regarded the apparition—a slight, raven-haired woman, dressed in a silken white robe. Expression solemn, she returned his gaze. And then, her movements slow and deliberate, she held up a large sketchpad, emblazoned with stark, black pen-strokes. Pen-strokes that spelt out a single word.

Help.