Hanna rounded another corner, the circle of light at the end of the flashlight’s beam bouncing along ahead of her in the gloom like an enthusiastic puppy.

If it was enthusiastic, it was the only one. Another corner, and yet another corridor running off into endless dusty dimness. Hanna’s knuckles tightened around the flashlight’s handle. No markings or signs, no doors, just like all the rest.

Why the hell did I ever come here anyway?

She noticed that her light seemed to be dimming slightly, the puppy finally tiring.

She pushed a sweaty blonde strand of hair back out of her face, and somehow kept herself from simply sprinting off down the corridor, running until she smashed into a wall. Forced herself to - keep - walking - slowly, one sneakered foot planted in front of the other. The sounds of those steps against the floor were very loud in the silence.

Only...

It wasn’t silence any more. She stopped and listened.

Beyond the thump of her own heart, there was a new whisper of sound, the first she’d heard since the glass front doors of this Godforsaken place had swung shut behind her. She couldn’t pin down exactly what it was; a sort of hum? A buzz? Maybe an air-conditioning unit? The building was certainly climate controlled; while maybe it was dusty, it was also blandly warm throughout...

No. It sounded... nice. At least nicer than any air-conditioning she’d ever heard. Almost like music, in fact. And it was coming from down the corridor ahead of her. Hanna squared her shoulders and walked on.

And stopped again. Something else had changed.

The sound of her footsteps. She pointed the flashlight down, and saw that there was something different about this hallway after all: the floor. Instead of the bare concrete that had been on display everywhere else in the building, she was now standing on some sort of vinyl floor-tiles. Bland and drab and free of pattern, something you’d find slapped down in an institution.

Institution. That was such an ugly word.

She shrugged off the thought and walked on.

The music-noise was louder now.

Her flashlight died. It was a knife-edge thing, so sudden she gave a small squeak of surprise, staggered and almost lost her balance. She reached out, flailing, in the darkness...

Only it wasn’t dark. She wiggled her fingers and saw them moving in dim blue light. Dim and oddly colored and possibly flickering just a bit? But definitely there.

The light was coming from near the end of the corridor. She walked on, now trailing her fingers along the wall for support, holding the dead flashlight in her other hand. It could still be a pretty good club, if the need were to come along.

She sniffed as she moved, then again more deeply. There was a smell tingeing the air now, again the first one in the building. A light sweet waft of sweetness. More desserts than flowers, but pleasant enough.

And then there was a door, finally an actual door, set in the left-hand wall, and the light was coming from under it, a blue slash, bright and steady but not glaring. She touched the door’s surface, and it was cool metal. The half-music throbbed there under her fingertips, slow and monotonous, and the smell grew stronger. The two combined brought to mind a contented beehive, drowsing its way through a summer’s afternoon.

There was a discrete white panel mounted on the door, with something written on it, but it was faded. She squinted as she traced its edges with her finger. Without better light all she could read was, evidently, the room number: 42-A.

42-A?

She reached in the pocket of her jeans, and fished out a scrap of blue paper, crumpled down under the loose change she’d absently stuck in there after buying that sandwich in the cafe early in the day, before... Unfolding the paper revealed, written in a neat blocky script:

42-A

Under that, slightly smaller, was something more.

RQ23

The door was half of why she had come here...

So...

The knob wasn’t a knob, but one of those bent-angle things you find on doors in schools and hospitals and...

Institutions.

She hovered her hand over that handle for a short indecisive moment, then grabbed the thing and gave the it a sharp twist. There was a study-looking lock mounted in the metal plate above it, but the handle moved and the door opened easily, with only a faint pneumatic resistance.

The light was still slightly blue, but also dimmer than she had expected, after seeing it under the door.

The middle of the longish rectangular room was empty, the dark blue carpet stretching smooth and undisturbed, carefully vacuumed into rigid conformity. No dust in here. Overhead, the blue lights were set in rows in a suspended-panel ceiling. There was also a string of extra, slightly larger lights, spaced evenly around the edges of the room, and

under each of those lights

in front of the subtly-swirled wallpaper

Standing on each of the pedestals under those special lights was...

A mannequin?

Hanna came the rest of the way into the room on stiff legs, letting the door swing shut behind her. It clunked loudly to rest, brushing lightly against her butt.

The smell was much stronger now, making Hanna’s head swim just a little as she took a couple more steps, and was standing in front of the first of the..

Mannequins?

No. It wasn’t a mannequin. It was far too realistic, with no seams on display at the joints, and featuring those vague little asymmetries that came with...

A wax statue?

No.

A slow chill crept down Hanna’s spine.

It was real woman. 100% real. Even though there was no sign of movement, no rise and fall of breath, it was a real woman.

She was tall, taller than Hanna by at least a couple of inches, and slender, and had skin the color of creamed coffee under a buzz of dark-brown hair. She had one strong-looking hand raised and slightly extended, as if reaching for something.

She didn’t move, or blink, but stared at something invisible out in front of her, even when Hanna hesitatingly raised the flashlight and waved it in front of the other’s dark brown eyes.

Hanna dropped her arm and moved on to the next girl, violating the carpet’s pattern as she shuffled. This was a shorter more voluptuous brunette, also with dark skin, but that of an Italian, perhaps, or one of those countries hugging the northern shores of the Mediterranean.. Her pitch-black hair reached down to the small of her back in a carefully messy torrent. Both her hands were more or less at her sides, but she had the same expression on her face as the first, one of fascination and vague puzzlement.

The third was Japanese. (One of Hanna’s roommates back in college had also been Japanese, or rather of Japanese descent, and had always raised a big stink about being able to tell different types of Asian people apart...) Unlike Barbara-the-roommate’s omnipresent ponytail, this one had a short shiny helmet of hair, and she seemed more angry than the first two pedestal-girls, her small hands half-curled into fists. With that expression on her face, she sort of looked like Barbara, even beyond the shared ancestry. Maybe it was because of this similarity that for the first time, Hanna felt tempted to reach out and touch the woman, but her hand faltered half-way and hung there for a moment before being withdrawn. None of these women were dead, somehow at some fundamental level Hanna knew this, but would they be warm or cool if touched? Hanna now realized she didn’t want to find out.

The buzzing was loud in her ears, and seemed almost to drag her on to the next woman, even as she wanted to linger with the Barbara-substitute.

This one was a redhead, a flaming redhead, with wide green eyes, pale freckled skin and a pair of truly impressive breasts thrust slightly forward. It was this last feature that caused Hanna to finally notice what the women were all wearing. They were functional but elegant two-piece garments, things with smooth flowing lines that hovered half-way between “underwear” and “swimsuit”. They appeared to be seamless, and were colored...

Colored exactly the same the pedestals.

Hanna’s eyes dropped to the pedestal that the redhead was occupying, just to confirm it. Yes. Then she became aware of another new detail. There was something incised there, in square blocky letters on the "side" of the pedestal under the redhead’s bare feet. (Hanna noted vaguely that the woman needed to trim her toenails, and had a long-healed scar cutting across her right shin.)

RQ15

The paper was already crumpled back in Hanna's pocket, and she retrieved it once again, tucking the flashlight under one arm as she flattened the paper back into readability.

RQ23

She walked to the next pedestal, a fellow blonde, thinner and... glossier than Hanna, in more ways than one.

RQ41

And the next.

Another brunette.

All frozen.

RQ65

All beautiful and young and alive.

RQ36

RQ... 23.

She was now at the far end of the room.

The sound was buzzing between her ears, and smell was very strong.

She started to lift her eyes to see who was on the pedestal, but was distracted, seeing out of the corner of one eye something new standing to one side. It was a roughly bullet-shaped garbage can, with a swinging flap. Even though it was made of more of the silverstuff, it was so prosaic-looking that Hanna started to giggle, a noise that turned into... something else. So she forced herself to stop.

She turned and looked back the way she came, even though moving in that direction was like wading through a lake of molasses. The other end of the room was very far away, and wavering slightly in the sweetbuzz. Still, she could see the door, see quite clearly that while there was no handle mounted in the metal plate on this side, or even a keyhole for a lock, there was a glowing green EXIT sign mounted overhead, and to one side, a large red fire extinguisher professionally mounted inside a frosted glass case.

Very institutional.

She started to giggle again, and this time she couldn’t stop as she was turned back to RQ23.

It was empty of course, and the light mounted above it was slowly strobing off and on.

“No.” She whispered the word and shook her head even as she tottered to the garbage can. She again stowed away the flashlight, and very carefully ripped the paper into four neat equal pieces. Those pieces went into the can, and the flap bobbled back and forth for a moment, before coming to rest again. The flashlight was next, (giving off a single defeated thunk as it ended it’s fall) and then she began to pull off her Eastside Hooligans T-shirt. The giggles sputtered slowly to a stop. She started to whisper “no” again, but then she saw and she felt what she was already wearing under her shirt and jeans.

The two pieces were slick and cool and seamless against her skin, and of course both fit her perfectly. They glistened in the light, and were the most sexy and beautiful things she’d ever seen in her life. There were patterns down in there, endless interlocking patterns to trace slowly with the very tip of her tongue...

Shirt. Jeans. Sneakers. Socks. Watch. Bits of jewelry. The black interior of the can ate them all without discrimination, and the flap was still.

Everything in the room except her was very very still.

She pushed at her hair, and this time, for maybe the first time in her life, it all fell perfectly into place without so much as a whimper.

She got up on the pedestal, and turned so she was facing outward. The carpet had been soft and thick, but when she tried with vague curiosity to feel the pedestal under her bare soles, nothing came to her. Her feet were already gone.

And her hands. She couldn’t feel her hands anymore, and when she tried to lift her arms to look at them, they got maybe a quarter of the way there, and slowed to a gentle stop.

And went away. All that was left was the parts of her body touched by the clothes, and those burned.

The sound buzzed louder than ever, pulling back and forth, lumberjacks working on a tree with a long saw. The light strobed overhead, keeping time. She could see more when it was off than when it was on. When it came on, the blue darkness grew, and her field of vision shrank into a circle.

The light grew brighter, and the rate of the strobing slowed.

Darkness, growing.

Surrrounding a smaller and smaller circle.

The sound and the smell were everywhere and everything.

She couldn’t move a single muscle in her body. Not even her heart. She was no longer breathing, but she was still alive.

Still...

Darkness.

A final tiny wavering pinprick of light.

And then stillness.

Hanna had been instutionalized.