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Eliza won't talk about it, later.
She won't say that it felt like forever. She won't reflect that really, they weren't in Raife Highmore's machine very long at all. She won't dwell on how it feels to have magick drained out of her, strapped in besides Atlas, unable to reach her, knowing her sister is going through exactly the same thing.
She won't tell Professor Swan about pain that comes in prismatic parallels. Like seeing all the colours, and knowing there are colours that humans can't see, and then being able to feel them somehow too - the pain of the refractionary extract machine is like that pain. She screams. Atlas screams. They drown each other out, panting in broken rhythm.
She won't talk about the things she tried to think about instead. She won't remember the visions that crowded in: her friends scattered and battered, Zeph unconscious, Beckett bloody. She won't unpack her trauma to her more-than-friend...
Because this is what happens: she thinks of Shreya, and it isn't a distraction, it's worse. She thinks this isn't happening, and the machine responds as if it's listening and it's given her the hallucinatory set up to a really good, really vicious joke. The sense of dissolving fades, and all Eliza can see and feel is Shreya, and the sense of magick running through her veins and out of her turns to the sensation of Shreya stroking her arms from shoulder to fingertips, stroking her legs from groin to toe. Light and sure and withering. It feels as if it should feel good. It feels worse than pain. Every touch - and she thinks it's the machine's touch - takes something.
There's no Atlas and no Raife. Eliza tries to remind herself what's actually happening, but she can't find her way back to it. There's just Shreya, smiling, leaning over her, sealing her mouth with a kiss and breathing in. Warmth hemorrhages out of Eliza and she's not sure if she'll ever draw in any more air.
She won't tell Shreya, later, about any of this. About twisting violently underneath Shreya in the hope that thrashing about will break the illusion where metal restraints, not a human grip, chafe her ankles and wrists. About the way it doesn't work: the way that Shreya captures her wrists and murmurs soothing things against her cheek.
Eliza's ears go numb. Her hands go numb. All of her edges feel as though they're dissolving, evaporating. She isn't even sure she has hands any more. She knows she doesn't have lips. All these soft touches are washing her away, like a creature of mud rather than blood and bone.
She's dying. She's imagining a version of Shreya who is killing her.
She won't tell anyone any of this. It's not just because she can't bear to remember it. It's because it's too much to bear now. And it's too late. The machine is working; the machine has won.
Eliza feels and sees nothing but Shreya. She isn't alone in her final moments, and it isn't a consolation.
She won't talk about it, later, as either catharsis or confession.
She'll never have the chance.