The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.

Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

Love. I love you. I’ll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life.

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

That's what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable - and all the time we're being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.

I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.

"Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed... awake." Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. "I'm tired of sleeping."