Delirium by Erin Kellison Page A

But the image was seared into his mind—where he’d grown up. Where his and Jess’s and Jake’s heights had been measured on the pantry wall when they were little kids.
    He was ready to commit murder. No one touched his family.
    Him-not her. The crackle burning inside made it hard to hold on to Sera. She didn’t seem to fight the proxy at all, not that he could tell. Him-not her. The proxy was like acid eating at his nervous system. Was she in pain, too? He couldn’t tell. She made Indirect Surveillance seem easy, flipping the Middle Man the bird over her shoulder when he finally let her and Rook pass.
    The Middle Man and his Scrape-aiming Judas hole were interesting. It made sense that some Darksiders might enter the black market from the Scrape—occasionally breaches happened in the Agora—but Harlen hadn’t known that a person could knock on a door and negotiate—maybe force?—entrance. Most revelers had to use someone’s Rêve setup and descended directly into a black market dream. But a door in the wall? Very interesting.
    Rook had been holding out on Chimera. Maybe that’s why he was still accepted inside the market. It also begged the question: what else was Rook keeping to himself?
    Him, not her. Harlen ignored the sensation and concentrated on where they were headed. If he could just see , just understand what was going on, maybe he could mount a defense. Make them burn. Stomp out their fantasies of the Sandman.
    The Middle Man’s passage into the black market led to steep stairs, almost medieval in their plunge into darkness. It smelled earthy and dank and sour. Harlen marveled at how Sera’s sense of smell seemed to have a spectrum all its own, discerning subtle variations of funk. That alone almost drove him from her mind.
    But Rook piqued Harlen’s interest, saying in a hushed tone to Sera, “This is the Underground. I avoid it at all costs. You’ll see why, but since you can’t cross black market Rêves like I can, we have to enter this way. You can’t bluff your way past everyone.”
    “You mean about filleting that guy?” Sera returned. “Who said I was bluffing?”
    The stairs led to a crowded parking lot of infinite space, with ugly concrete columns holding up the low, gray ceiling—a cheap hack of the Corinthian columns inside the Agora. Golden sand drizzled and misted from cracks in the pavement above, as if the structure might collapse at any moment. Illumination was conveniently patchy—hard to see who was who. Revelers gathered in small groups, their voices distorted into hisses and growls to obscure what they said.
    Rook’s arm came around Seraand leaned in close to her ear. “Don’t freak,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do for them.”
    Naturally, Sera looked around for the people for whom she could do nothing.
    “Do not freak,” Rook repeated.
    On the far side of the space— oh dear God —was a line of revelers, chained by the neck. Each looked absolutely miserable: thin, ill, confused, defeated. One was crying. They stood on a platform from which people standing below could see them and haggle over a price.
    “Are you kidding me?” Sera angrily whispered back to Rook.
    Harlen’s own rage was hard to handle. Slaves. It happened, he knew. If there were slaves in the waking world, there would be the same Darkside, but these poor people were living horrors bounded only by their masters’ imaginations.
    Someone yelled a bid in a language Harlen didn’t know and couldn’t guess at over the din of the crowd.
    “There is a child up there,” Sera said, her control slipping. Harlen could feel the schism between him-not her opening, and he scraped to hold on to the proxy. It seared his brain and screamed along his nerves. This Underground was not the place to separate from her. These revelers would kill them.
    “If you don’t do something,” Sera said to Rook, “I swear I will.”
    She was right. The child in question was a boy about ten, maybe. Young enough