She awoke, and immediately regretted her decision.

Her eyes were sewn shut, as was her mouth. Her attempts to scream for help turned her lips into ragged red tracts of gore. The pain was of such a magnitude that she felt as if all the matter in her body had been replaced by an aether of agony. Her lungs burnt with every breath. Her flesh was a war zone.

Through some miracle she had managed to stumble outside. The light was blinding, even through her forcibly closed eyelids. Judging by the screams, it had not taken long for someone to find her. She blacked out again.

She woke up in a fog in a hospital. The doctors sympathetically brooded over her, telling her not to speak but to tap her finger once for yes, twice for no. A BiPap was shoved up her nose and breathed her metallic air for her. Her effort to save on plastic surgery was at fault; she had selected a shoddy, back-alley hack for her work.

All she had ever wanted was to be perfect, and now she never would be.