Re: Dreaming: Billy & Eames
“Only in the same way that a loaded gun is a way out.” Billy’s fingers walked his arm up to the sensitive skin of his inner bicep, so that he could pinch himself with his fingernails digging in hard. It didn’t hurt the way that it should have hurt. The pain was fogged, like a beam of light through smoke: indirect, and scattered. It didn’t make sense when he squinted hard at it, only when he looked sideways and played pretend. He didn’t think the clock was their escape. He thought it was their end.
He looked down at the new arrival’s upturned face where they smiled at him from the floor, hands painted like stigmata. “Because when he put it in the food, I just stopped eating.” His face was cooly blank, but his fingers tightened against their shoulder. There was something there, a thread that snagged as it ravelled. “He doesn’t visit when I’m healing.”
Billy took a staggered step back when the new arrival stood up without warning, reeling because the clock was suddenly weighing on his head and he needed time, space to slip the book out of his waistband and flip open the cover. The pages inside had been hollowed out, a narrow slit just long enough to hold the thing he’d finished making last night.
He took it in his hand and held it up to the thin band of ambient light that filtered through the windows: a key, or something roughly like it. A piece of metal that had started off as a nail or a screw before he’d pried it out of the bedframe, melted it down and shaped it to fit into the lock. (His cell didn’t have a bed, but on nights he spent with the Prince, Billy got to sleep on a real mattress and real sheets. The frame had been made of flimsy particleboard, and after a few nights of bare-fingered digging the screw had just slid right out.) “When he doesn’t come, he can’t take the power. That means we get to take it back, little by little the longer he stays away. We're gonna need this.”