Skira wakes dreaming of bees.

Bees and blood, bees and cages, bees and honey, suffocating her, drowning her. The same woman, every time, facing away from her. Skira does not know her, does not know her name, but she knows she must get to her, she must. She touches the woman’s shoulder, and she turns. Her face is a cage, the bars adorned with strings of gore and honey and the last surviving threads of chestnut hair. Bees mill around within it, buzzing, stopping suddenly and seeming to look Skira straight in the eye the moment she meets the space where the woman’s eyes would be. Skira blinks. Always, she is surprised in the dream, though she has seen this metal-sweet tableau a hundred times before. The next moment, she is within the cage. The next, she is a bee, and she cannot get out. The next, she is drowning in honey, tasting blood, weighed down by metal chains. Always, there is one thought clear through the sickly sweetness of it all: I was too late.

Skira has begun to hate bees.