What is Grace?

"I'm breathing," she managed to muster through the flood, the salt stinging her eyes and caking her skin. "My name is Mali, and I can breathe underwater."

She feverishly swam, searching for some sort of solution but none yet to come. The only solution present was that of sodiom chloride and one part hydrogen, two parts oxygen. The sand slowly began escaping her feet as she drew on through the deep. Glowing sands soon became black muck. The sky appeared miles above her. She sank, she plummetted, submerged.

"You better run like hell," a voice rang out to her from a bodiless entity.

"Why?"

"RUN LIKE HELL," it repeated.

"I can't move any faster," she cried, her tears mixing with the black water around her. There was no bottom, no place to rest, no vision. She had tried one of those isolation tanks once and this was by far the closest camparison she could make of the matter, disregarding the ominous voice following her through her strained movement.

So she attempted, as well as she could, to run. Her feet swayed with what felt like a current and before she knew it she found herself on solid ground, staring at the face of the addict they had encountered earlier with a somehow glowing black aura surrounding her.

"Seagulls."

"What?"

"Th-think about them," the addict asked in a desperate plea to Mali.

"It doesn't make any sense."

"THINK ABOUT THE FUCKING SEAGULLS OR HE'LL COME AFTER YOU."

The only 'he' she could think of is the bodiless voice, but why? There's no face to a voice in the dark, there's no face to an addict on the street, none of this should matter.

Black, gray, and white seagulls are colored. They flock around metropolitan and seaside areas as rodents of the sky, a nuisance to locals and tourists alike. Theme park rides are ridden with white specks of shit because of them, and this broad wants me to think of them?

Before Mali knew she found herself face first on the ground, her knee bleeding with gravel and sand in the wound obviously from tripping.

The only thing in front of her face was a square shaped stone with six darker indents. The only thing that came to mind was 'dream.'