When she looked up, the sky was grey, brackish with rusts and oily browns. The clouds hung low-- soggy, waterlogged creatures too heavy to float in such liquid oxygens. The greenish cast of the supposed sun scattered its debris across the ailing landscape. There was nothing here. Nothing. A path cut through, regardless. Like someone would be traveling out here along this unsung road of broken glass, tetanus wire, and rotten wood.

But she was. That's where she stood, her breath caught between two fence posts. Weak and overworked, the curve of her spine wilted into the weight and drag of her endless walk. She left no footsteps, only trace reminders that, oh god, she was tired. To either side of her teetering path, the dead were hanging. Animals. So many of them. They danced so completely still, caught in the wires, struggling to escape. They shivered when she did, quivered with the failing of her shallow breath. She tried to hold it. She couldn't. And so she walked with the click and clatter of trembling bones. This was the state of her miles. This would be the state of the miles to come.

Her feet were bleeding. She didn't remember why she'd left home barefoot.

Years and years she'd been alone on that path. The skeletons never moved, never changed. They just hung like radio static. Even when the wind blew dust from the trail into those wasted blue eyes, they hung. She burned, paper thin and torn to pieces.

When you are bound by nothing, you go beyond sorrow. You understand words and the stitching together of words and you want nothing more.

The clarity of her vision faded. The honesty of her sight left her, slowly, and she was left with the windstorm in her hair and a figure on the horizon.

She ran. Despite the shaking of her knees, she ran. She sacrificed her wellbeing for the chance at a word-- to be heard in this wasteland. Oh, she ran.

When she closed that mile she gasped for air. Screamed for the comfort of water, of word.

Please, she wailed. Say something. Say anything.

The figure hid herself in a sheet. Now something more than a silhouette, an illusion of silence and need, she moved. Regarded the trespasser, too proud to shiver.

She swallowed. They swallowed. Chapped. Dry.

Her body was crossed with deep trenches, stitched together with amateur twine. Some of the skin that covered her body was lukewarm, rotting, rotten. Other patches seemed rosy and alive. But her face, oh her face was so beautiful. Until she turned her head. Half her face was covered in a slab of putrid flesh that sagged around the bottom curve of her black, ruined eyeball.

She backed away, terrified and alone, but before she could run, they were one.

No matter what you do, I said you said I said, you will never be anything more than what I was when you found us.

Those patches of skin began to itch. They crawled like cockroaches running from the rain. Tickled and burned beneath her fingerprints. She had no choice but to scratch-- and it sloughed and it sloughed, pussed and ruptured and bled all over the dusty patch of radioactive earth she splattered with the infection of her fluids.

Then, all the bones dropped down.

And as much as I crave, none of me is ever you. You cannot be me. and I cannot be anyone to anyone but you.

Locke has learned to cry in silence so no one has to know who she's hiding.

Thank you for all that you have done.

Please. Please be quiet. Please, be quiet.