Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of fucking rye. But for Katherine it was like saying these things backward: rye fucking of full pocket, a sixpence of song, a sing.

She went down.

At the bottom of the chemical ladder there were dripping tunnels. She stepped into the room with the window to nowhere and saw the bathtub where he dissembled his first kill. A lady taken apart, divested of her flesh, a lost man looking for a lost place to keep all of his blackness and brought to fury when he looked in between her muscles and found no space for himself. Carved open her torso and found no crawlspace. Stain of rage living in the walls and whispering, always whispering. The blood in the water. No body. He’d cleaned it up. I am a mess, she whispered, feeling the words come out of the damp air and settle inside of her. I am such a mess.

I want to talk about Julia Hickson.

Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Carl?

Rumbling overhead. Tinkling of chimes. The floor awakening beneath her feet, rising up inside her feet.

You feel pretty.

Carl, where is Julia Hickson?

The water in the tub churned. Crimson boil. No names, the bubbling water whispered. No numbers.

Katherine tossed it out like a lit firecracker: Rhiannon Heath.

The walls shivered apart, pulling themselves into beads of condensed stone. The darkness melted away. The stone pulled into itself like water. The walls lightened, then darkened, wisped away into purple twilight before exhaling back into darkened bricks. The ceiling pulled apart for the stars. They fell, hanging low and pregnant with adamantine, turning and throwing off needles of light. The walls snatched away with a sound of heavy cloth. Twilight poured in and filled all of her senses, thick with cloves and the scent of broken stones. She sensed his movement all around in the humming of the stars, felt it reflect in the gleam of the obsidian floor. Fear sharpened the inside of her mouth.

More.

You miss her.

Katherine opened her eyes and saw an alabaster statue. Though it wore the garb of a goddess borne of obsidian and heart’s blood, she recognized the shape of the nose, the set of the mouth. It stood with a hand outstretched toward a gloaming horizon. Hummingbirds embedded in the pale stone struggled to get free, their broken wings twisted. Fire ants crawled out of a deep cut in the cheek. They swarmed over the still lips, dripped off the chin. As she watched a blackened vine laced with blades for thorns twined tight around the arms and unfolded cobalt blooms that fluttered toward the moon. The limbs twisted, the skin roughening into scales, and they lost their shape like melting wax, sliding into the thick trunks of albino pythons. The snakes twisted out of a falling pile of pale feathers and slithered across the floor, crawling with red ants, entangled in vines that withered. The hummingbirds broke free and flew in circles. The ants tried to run away. The snakes wove themselves into a circle. The hummingbirds described graceful column of spirals while iridescent feathers disintegrated into plumes of snow that fell softly upward. Katherine smelled something like alcohol and seawater steeped in oleander, rubbed across the broken backs of cacti.

More.

She felt his heat but couldn’t see him. She’s near.

A chorus rained down from the sky, each individual star murmuring cem-anáhuac yoyótli; the warm syllables drizzling down all over her skin. They landed like feathers and made her shiver. Yes, she said, not knowing what she was saying yes to but feeling it all through her flesh. She stepped out of it and the words followed. Yes. Yes.

I want.

First, tell me about Julia.

I want!

She struggled to draw something up out of her surroundings. She tried to shape the darkness but there was nothing. Below the heat simmered his coldness, the crystals tucked away between the plates of his armor and the childish keening of the skin beneath. She smelled the mud he felt in her flesh, the stink of shit and ordure left behind after a hard rain. She herself had no power. All of her leverage lay compressed in a tiny luminescent sphere tucked in the palm of her hand, the place where all of her thoughts and memories of Rhiannon lay. He smelled the pearl. His attention sharpened and focused upon it. Katherine tightened her fingers around it. Sickly light frosted her knuckles. A carrion bird cried out somewhere, caught in the sticky depths of its nightmare.

Give.

No. Julia. Tell me about Julia first. Then you may have it.

The carrion bird screamed. Shrieks and growls joined it until there was black outrage everywhere, welling up, terrifying primal noise distilled down into the throats of miscarried chimeras. She trembled. She sharp smell of urine sliced across her senses. Her thumb hovered over the alert. There was movement. He came out of the darkness, a gorgon made of dried blood and eyes trapped in a wild face, the lines raw where the hummingbird shape had been carved into the skin on his dirty forehead. His hair matted into thick dreads and tied with long gore-stained feathers. The stench of rotten blood backed up in her throat. He circled her, in his loose hand a maquahuitl, the long ironwood sword of the ancient world. Around its edges gleamed chips of green obsidian and the stone was hungry, she felt its ravenousness like the slimy waters of a rotten pond just waiting to devour. He didn’t seem like he’d been this big; reduced to a hospital bed, all of his dead weight covered in a pristine white sheet hadn’t prepared her for this twist of overbearing muscle.

Want.

A small child ran between his legs. He was pale, dressed a pair of blue swim trunks. His reddish hair hadn’t been cut in a while. He shrank back into the darkness and noticed the expression on Katherine’s face. He held a finger to his lips.

Shhhh. The voice swirled into her ear like a half-formed thought. When I’m small he doesn’t see me.

For the first time, Katherine felt terrified. Panic fluttered up inside her and burned between each rib, drawing them tighter and tighter around her heart.

I know the water goddess. Childish breath with the faint scent of fabric softener. I can take you there.

“I don’t know what’s going on in there,” said Dr. Miriam. “The monitors are showing distress.”

Hotch looked up at her. “Is it enough to pull the plug?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not yet.”

Rossi paced. He made wide circles in the control room and went out into the hallway and looped a few there before returning to the control room. He looked at the woman through the glass. “I don’t know about this,” he said. “I feel hinky. Anyone else feel hinky?”

“I’m no more comfortable with the idea than you are,” said Hotch. “But we have to do what we have to do.”

“It’s gonna get dangerous, I think,” said Rossi. “Fast. It’s just a hunch, but I can’t shake it.”

“I’ve been over Katherine’s report of her first time in and the transcript of the interview,” said Reid. “I can’t find anything. I cross-referenced some of the significant imagery and linguistic details and sent them to Garcia. She’s coming up with nothing.”

"Goddammit, this is her mind," said Rossi. "Who knows what kind of crazy shit he has going on in there? This is like sending a foot soldier into a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Alone."

Hotch said nothing.

"Would you do it?"

"Yes." Hotch cleared his throat. "Yes, I would."

"Good." Rossi stopped pacing and looked at his watch. "Because you may have to."

“I’m aware of the time, Dave,” said Hotch.

“I fuckin hate this.” Rossi rubbed his face. “It feels like a big circle jerk.”

A soft bell chimed. Dr. Miriam looked up at a flashing red light. She hit an intercom. "Get her out of there. Do it now."