See the animal in his cage that you built

Are you sure what side you're on?

Better not look him too closely in the eye

Are you sure what side of the glass you are on?

See the safety of the life you have built

Everything where it belongs

Feel the hollowness inside of your heart

And it's all

Right where it belongs

Right Where It Belongs

Nine Inch Nails

North Dakota was the darkest time he could remember. Even darker than that night by the campfire, lost and cold in the Siberian woods, the knife glowing like a slice of sunlight in the suffocating blackness. Shadows in the trees, flickering in the firelight, holding him down. He could still remember the exact moment the knife had hit bone; a sick, heavy feeling, not in his arm but in his stomach, his head, burning in the back of his throat, his screams lost in the remote Russian forest. He remembered the pain, paralysing and white hot, thick bursts of it with every stroke of the knife, and the one fleeting moment he wished desperately to fall unconscious. He remembered bleeding out onto the grass, helpless and immobile in the cold, watching with detached curiosity as the one armed men disappeared into the trees. He had wondered then if they took his arm with him. When he had woken up at last, his arm hadn't been there. They'd left the knife, though. It was coated with dark blood and fragments of bone. He hadn't been as disturbed by this as he ought to have been.

But despite that, North Dakota had been worse. At least pain can, with determination or unconsciousness, be blocked out. You can never erase the feeling of being emptied, violently and against your will, of a sentient parasite. Admittedly, not many people had experienced it and lived, and that was probably a blessing.

He remembered very little from when the Cancer had been in control. There had been a time, a very short time, that he was aware of himself and aware that he was fighting it. The woman, with her smart heels and shark grin in the airport bathroom. Then intermittent bursts of colour and sound. Blackness, for a long time. And finally the silo.

The space between Hong Kong and North Dakota was one long blank strip of tape. He was distantly aware, like a TV playing in the apartment next door, of snippets of conversations he must have been having. Car headlights, painfully bright in the rear view mirror. That sort of thing. But nothing he could piece together. Nothing that helped him make sense of it.

Dakota had been worse. He had lain, alone and afraid, in the freezing blackness of the silo. The walls stretched upwards for miles, smooth and treacherous, gaping ever upwards like a great schism in the earth. He didn't know what the silo looked liked from above ground. He watched his breath form delicate white clouds, dissipating like ghosts into the gloom, and imagined that he was watching the life physically ebb from him.

Afterwards, when he was feverish and confused and surrounded by apartment walls he didn't recognise, he asked how long he'd been stuck there. Five days, came the answer, matter-of-fact, as if he'd asked for the time. Five days. He hadn't been sure of time passing. He never wore a watch.

What he remembers about North Dakota scares him even now, and he is not easily scared. The screaming agony of Tunguska is a mere bad dream in comparison.

The first memory he had was of something purging from him. He hadn't been able to breathe for it. Thick, viscous fluid, thick in his lungs and nose, pouring in long, pliant strings from his mouth. His airways were blocked with it. For a time, he thought he might die right there, lungs choked with fluid, drowning on dry land. His throat burned and crawled with it.

And then his eyes. His vision was a mess of black, and as he felt the fluid draining from him, from every tiny corner of his face, slow and dragging and agonising, he realised that it was escaping from his fucking eyes. And that was the worst part, worse than choking to death on his own swollen throat, knowing that this thing was crawling out of his eyes, running in thick sludgy rivulets down his cheeks. And he remembered thinking that this must be what it feels like to be raped; that hideous creeping sensation of being pulled and dragged from the inside out, prying without your consent.

Afterwards, laying inert and exhausted on the cold steel (aluminium? Iron? Was it even metal?) he felt a terrible emptiness. That's what he can still feel most keenly, what terrifies him in those rare vulnerable moments, that intense feeling of missing something from deep inside, as if he had just vomited out his stomach. He didn't believe in souls, but he supposed that, if souls existed, that would be how it felt to lose one. That wrenching, tearing pain, radiating from your very core, haemorrhaging violently and leaking arterial blood from your nose, eyes, mouth, ears, except that it's not blood but something solid and physical and desperately painful. And all around, choking darkness, smooth concrete walls with no beginning or end, and the bitterness of knowing you're going to die here alone, a tiny speck in a black chasm.

He doesn't like being confined now. He doesn't like being cuffed or shut away. It makes him panic, makes him claustrophobic. He refuses to admit it to anyone.

For the next five days he had alternated between sick, feverish sleep and futile bouts of screaming, smashing fists against the door, grinding his knuckles against the metal until they bled.

On the third day, he had tried, like a fool, to scale the walls of the silo. His hands were shaky and scabbed over and he was weak with sickness and starvation. There were no handholds. His fingers had scraped and scrabbled at the concrete for hours, and he'd never gotten off the ground. He'd screamed and cursed as his fingernails began to split. Sometimes he found it in himself to laugh a little at that memory. Now it hurt just to remember he'd once had two arms, and even so they'd been fucking useless in a crisis.

He'd stopped feeling hungry on the fourth day, the ferocious stabs deep in his stomach replaced by a pervading nausea. Sometimes he'd find himself retching, great spasming heaves, but nothing ever passed his lips. The pain of it would knock him senseless. He'd been grateful for the unconsciousness. Waking hours came with bizarre hallucinations. His mother, melting into the floor when he reached for her. A hollow-eyed dog, huge and silent, following him as tried to crawl away. A great swirling blue sun crossing the blackness where he supposed the sky would be, had he not been trapped hundreds of feet underground.

He'd been semi-conscious when they came for him. Laying on his side like a dead cat in the road, breathing shallowly, hands gnarled into claws, stuck together with dried blood. The door creaked open with a long, drawn-out whine. He hadn't the energy to lift his head. Their silhouettes were elongated in the dim light of the corridor. At first, he thought the aliens had come for their ship, for the oil-thing, and he smirked bitterly to himself as he pressed his face hard against the floor. Hopefully they'd kill him. The thought of being trapped inside that contraption, sitting still and silent like an ancient monolith in the centre of the silo…the thought of what they might do to him…

He didn't want any part of that.

The silhouettes settled as his eyes had adjusted to the sudden burst of light. They were human. Three of them. Maybe the Smoking Man had thrown him a bone and sent some men to kill him. They had approached him slowly, as if he were a cornered animal, a coiled cobra ready to strike. He had been amused at this. He could barely lift his arm, let alone throw a punch. He wasn't sure how long a man could go without water but he was sure that it wasn't much longer than this.

The first person to come into focus was a woman. Tall, pale skin. Blonde hair glowing like a corona in the dark. He couldn't make out her features, but her voice was familiar. "He's alive", she murmured to someone. Then, to him, "Can you stand?" Like an idiot he'd told her yes, of course I can stand. So she stood back and he tried desperately to get to his feet, but his legs weren't co-operating. He struggled on to his hands and knees, panting with the effort of it. His limbs shook beneath him, unable to hold his weight. He was about to collapse to the floor when another person, a man this time, had placed a strong arm around his middle, lifting him gently to his feet. He was dimly aware that he could barely feel his legs. Another man moved towards him, supporting his left side.

Crossing the room felt like running a marathon. He'd always been a reasonably fit man but suddenly lifting his feet took gargantuan effort. The two men said nothing as they all but carried him to the door, where other people were assembled. In the unwelcome brightness, he couldn't make out features. They were a mess of dark colours and textures, barely human in his confusion. Someone had brought a stretcher and he was gently lowered on to it. It was rough canvas but after the cold concrete it might have been a warm bed somewhere safe. He couldn't have been sure that he was really in the silo. It could have been a hotel room, or a hospital, or his own bed in his own apartment. The people milling around him and shouting orders might have been part of a dream. Someone…it was a woman, a different one this time…told him they were taking him to a hospital, and he laughed and told her he didn't need to go to the hospital, he was in his apartment and they'd all be gone when he woke up.

When he woke up, everyone was indeed gone. His head ached like a rotten tooth. He didn't recognise the room he was in. It wasn't like any hospital he'd ever known, although given his tendency to self-medicate, he wasn't as familiar with hospitals as perhaps he ought to have been. There were lines and wires taped to his arms, IV drips pumping clear liquid into his veins. Inherently suspicious, he had considered pulling out the IV lines, disconnecting the wires. They'd left him to die deep underground. It didn't make sense that they were now trying to keep him alive.

He slept dreamlessly for what must have been days. Sometimes, in the rare moments he spent awake, he had been distantly aware of someone sitting across the room from him. He couldn't make out who, but he thought it might have been the blonde woman from the silo. He supposed they would have killed him already if they were going to. Someone really was keeping him alive.

Some time later, when his fever had dissipated and he felt well enough to eat and converse, he asked the blonde women why she hadn't killed him.

She told him they (and he had known without ever being told that 'they' referred to Smoky and co) had asked for his body to be disposed of as well as the removal of the 'artefact'. She had expected to find him dead. "You must be very resilient," she told him. She didn't smile very often. She had a permanent look of the hunted about her. Her apartment - he assumed it was hers, it smelled unmistakeably female - was always quiet, the curtains always drawn, lights always dimmed. He wondered who she was hiding from.

He told her that she would have been better off killing him. She smiled then, a pained smile, and explained that they would never find out she had spared him. She did not intend to volunteer that information. And - her tone had grown cold and he supposed she was trying, in her own way, to intimidate him - since she had in fact saved his life, it was the least she ought to expect from him, keeping this secret. He had switched on the charm then, assuring her that he would not tell another living soul of what she had done for him. They parted ways that night satisfied with the arrangement.

In the days that followed she had told him a little about herself. Her name was Marita Covarrubias. Her father was a diplomat born in Valencia, her mother a Swedish journalist. She was vague about what it was she did for a living, although it was clear by her décor and antique furniture that she brought home a good pay check. She mentioned that she played the flute but refused to show him. "I'm not here to entertain you," she had said, and that was that.

For his part, he had revealed very little - just his name. They talked about New York - she'd told him that her apartment was somewhere in the city - and he explained that he didn't make a habit of staying in one place for too long, so he had seen rather a lot of the US by now. They didn't mention Smoky or the others, although the subject hung between them, ever the elephant in the room.

He was no longer sick and incapable, though. Now he was twitchy and nervous, a bristling ball of paranoia, and he knew she had noticed. She seemed to understand. He was not accustomed to recuperating in beds that weren't his, in apartments he didn't recognise, much less apartments belonging to mysterious women who'd rescued him. As his strength grew, so did his need to get away. Marita mostly left him to his own devices, which he appreciated - he didn't like being seen in such a pathetic state. He didn't like to show weakness. Weakness made him a target. So did staying here.

After the third day at the apartment he found that he could move around without pain, and that was a good enough reason to get moving again. His senses felt sharp again. He pulled out his IV line, dressed in the clean clothes she had left for him, stuffing the rest of his things into a holdall. He folded the sheets, left them neatly stacked on the end of the bed, a cursory attempt at thanking her for her hospitality.

She wasn't home. He scribbled her a note on the back of an envelope, left it propped up on her coffee table - I owe you. Thanks for everything. A - Her living room had been still and dark when he crept away, closing the door quietly behind him, wincing at the click of the long springing back into place.

When she had returned, she was not surprised to see him gone. She was curiously relieved to be rid of him, though - the stranger in her back room who had told her his name and nothing else, who had stared at her with such mistrust and apprehension that she had been sure he though she might kill him at any time. For the first time in days, she slept soundly, without the nagging fear that there would be a knock at her door and it would all be over for both of them.