The walls were beige. Not warm beige, not cozy. Just… colorless. Like they were painted to vanish.
Emily sat curled up on the secondhand couch in the corner of the living room, knees hugged to her chest, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan above that never spun. The house was small—two bedrooms, one bath, a box kitchen, and an aching silence that stretched from one end to the other.
It didn't feel like a safehouse.
It felt like a cage.
The doorbell rang with a low, mechanical buzz. Emily didn't flinch. She already knew who it was—same two PSIA agents who had been cycling in and out every other day like clockwork.
She opened the door.
"Afternoon," said the younger one—mid-thirties, decent smile, crisp haircut. He always wore the same navy jacket and smelled faintly of licorice gum. His badge wasn't visible, but it didn't need to be.
Behind him stood the older one. Bald, maybe mid-sixties. Broad shouldered. Never smiled. Always wore sunglasses, even indoors.
"We brought food," the younger said, holding up a plastic bag filled with takeout containers and a few cans of imported iced tea. "No updates."
"You said that yesterday," Emily replied.
"I'll say it again tomorrow."
She stepped aside without another word and let them in.
They placed the food on the small round table in the kitchenette. The older man peeled off his gloves and leaned against the wall, eyes scanning every inch of the place as if it might have shifted since their last visit.
Amelia sat silently in the armchair near the window, legs crossed, a half-full wine glass cradled in her hand. She didn't look up when they entered. Didn't speak. Just stared at the rain streaking down the glass like it was a language she no longer understood.
The younger agent caught Emily watching and offered a disarming shrug.
"She's… adjusting," he said.
Emily stepped closer. "What about Ryunosuke?"
The agent paused just long enough for her to notice. "Still in Tokyo. He's fine."
"That's it?" she asked. "No messages? No video calls? Not even a text?"
He looked at the older agent, who didn't move or speak.
Then back to her. "No contact. I'm sorry."
Emily clenched her jaw and nodded once.
They stayed five more minutes. Said things like "let us know if you need anything," and "we'll be nearby." It was polite. Empty. Mechanical. Then they were gone.
The door shut with a hollow thud that seemed to echo.
Emily stood there for a while, staring at the handle. The room behind her felt heavy—too still, too silent.
Amelia hadn't moved. She raised the wine to her lips, took a sip, then set it down on the windowsill. Her eyes never left the gray world outside.
"Do you want to talk?" Emily asked gently.
Amelia replied without turning. "No."
Emily waited. Then nodded again, even though no one could see it.
She turned, grabbed her messenger bag from the kitchen counter, and quietly stepped out the door.
The silence followed her, clinging like fog.
The sidewalk along Magnolia Avenue was cracked and uneven, its gaps filled with tufts of stubborn weeds. Emily walked with her hands deep in her jacket pockets, head slightly lowered to avoid the drizzle. The overcast sky pressed low on the city like a forgotten weight, smothering color and sound alike.
The safehouse was near a run-down section of the Magnolia Center, a neighborhood that once buzzed with small businesses and families out for weekend churros. Now it just felt tired.
A closed taquería's neon sign still blinked uselessly behind the darkened window. A bookstore next door had a handwritten "Back Soon" sign that looked months old.
Emily didn't stop. She just kept walking, letting her feet guide her east.
She passed under the shadow of the Riverside Plaza sign without a glance. Normally, she would have stopped at the movie theater—maybe watched something dumb and loud to drown out her thoughts. But not today. The plaza felt too loud and too fake.
At the intersection of Central and Riverside Avenue, she crossed without waiting for the signal, ignoring the honk of a passing car.
Something pulled her farther in.
She made her way north toward the Mission Inn District, where the old bones of the city still whispered through the Spanish revival architecture and crooked alleyways. It was the one part of Riverside that still felt like a place with memory, not just motion.
The rain picked up as she passed the old brick wall near Tio's Tacos, where hundreds of bottle caps and doll heads decorated the courtyard sculptures in chaotic artistry. Normally she'd find it funny. Charming even.
Now it just looked haunted.
She ducked into an alley beside a shuttered antique store and emerged onto Mission Inn Avenue. The street was nearly empty—no tourists today, no wedding photographers or violin buskers. Just wet pavement and shuttered windows.
At the far end of the block, across from White Park, something caught her eye.
A narrow lot between two abandoned buildings. Overgrown. Hidden behind a gate that hung half off its hinges.
Curious, she stepped through.
There, behind a wall of ivy and faded stone, stood the forgotten shell of a church. The stained glass above the entrance was shattered. The doors were ajar, creaking in the breeze.
No signs. No history markers.
Just silence.
Emily stepped forward, brushing her fingers against the stone archway as she crossed the threshold.
Inside, the air was musty and warm. Pew fragments littered the floor, and bits of glass crunched beneath her shoes. The ceiling was partially collapsed, letting rainwater drip in slow intervals onto a patch of overgrown moss near the pulpit.
She didn't know why she felt calm.
Only that, somehow, this ruin was more honest than anything in the safehouse.
She moved toward the back, where a dusty curtain hung behind the altar—just barely hiding something behind it.
She hesitated.
Then reached out.
Emily's fingers brushed the edge of the curtain. It felt heavier than it looked—dusty velvet clinging to her skin, as though it hadn't moved in decades. She drew it aside slowly.
Behind it, on the back wall of the sanctuary, revealed in full for the first time in who-knows-how-long, was the mural.
Even faded, it stole her breath.
The image stretched from floor to ceiling. Time had chipped away the edges, but the center remained remarkably intact—protected, maybe, by neglect.
At first glance, it looked like a garden. Not just a beautiful one—but impossible.
Violet flowers, rows upon rows, bloomed in patterns that defied perspective. They spiraled in unnatural symmetry around a central figure: a towering silver tree with twisted branches, its bark cracked with glowing veins of blue.
On one side of the tree stood a dark figure cloaked in shadow, arms outstretched, veins etched like ink across his limbs. His feet touched nothing. He seemed to hang in the air, suspended in indecision.
Opposite him stood a woman—draped in flowing white, hair like midnight, a serpent of pure light coiled around her. Her eyes had been scratched away by time or intention, but she radiated calm. Power. Stillness in motion.
And above them… a second sun. Shattered. Fragmenting like glass in slow motion. Its light poured across the sky in sharp rays, splitting the horizon like open skin.
Emily stared, rooted.
She didn't understand what she was seeing—but she felt it. Like something forgotten had reached out from the wall and brushed against her thoughts.
The room suddenly felt too still.
She stepped closer, trying to read the words carved beneath the painting—half-buried in dust and flaking paint:
"Den Gi walked through the Weeping Garden.
Where the second sun fades, there begins the true world."
She said it aloud without meaning to. Her voice barely louder than the rain dripping through the broken roof.
The words echoed.
Not with sound, but with weight.
The air grew thicker. Not colder. Not warmer. Just—denser. Like the world had inhaled and was holding its breath.
Emily took a step back, heart starting to race.
Something about the mural was familiar, even though she'd never seen it before. The silver tree. The broken sun. The figures.
The garden.
It wasn't religious. Not exactly. It felt older. More myth than scripture.
A feeling stirred in her gut—part awe, part dread.
She turned toward the altar behind her, half-expecting something to move.
Nothing did.
But she noticed a wooden drawer built into the side of the platform, mostly hidden by rotted lace and ivy.
She crouched beside it and tugged it open.
Inside was a bundle wrapped in wax cloth, sealed by time and neglect.
A manuscript.
The manuscript was delicate, the wax cloth flaking at the edges as Emily carefully unwrapped it. The paper inside was yellowed and curled, but the ink—though faded—remained legible. Not typed. Handwritten. The penmanship was erratic but elegant, as though the author had written in a trance and paused only when the weight of the words overtook them.
She sat cross-legged on the dusty floor near the altar, the mural looming silently behind her.
The first page held no title. Just a sentence scrawled across the top in looping script:
"This is not memory. This is what remembers me."
Emily blinked and kept reading.
The narrative wasn't linear. It unfolded more like a dream—fragments of place and sensation stitched together in frantic bursts. There were no names. No maps. Only images and feelings.
"I walked between stalks of violet glass, where time ran upward and gravity bent around thought. The flowers opened as I passed. Not petals—eyes. And they wept."
"The silver tree was not alive. Not dead. It remembered what the world had forgotten."
"I saw her. She did not speak. She did not breathe. But she turned and the sun broke into pieces behind her. She carried something not meant for this place."
Emily swallowed hard. Her fingertips brushed the edge of the page.
She flipped to the final entry. The writing was messier here, more fragmented—as if whoever wrote it had been running out of time.
"The garden does not end. It folds. It folds around belief. She planted something there. I do not know what."
"But it grows."
"And it waits."
The last line was written in darker ink, almost like it had been pressed harder than the rest:
"She walked between two worlds, planting seeds where only ruins remained."
Emily sat in silence, staring at the final sentence. Her breath caught in her throat.
She looked up at the mural one last time. The woman with the serpent. The silver tree. The broken sun.
None of it made sense.
And yet it felt like she had stumbled onto the edge of a story that had already begun—with or without her.
She carefully folded the manuscript and tucked it into her bag, then stood and brushed off her hands. The moment her foot crossed back through the broken arch of the chapel's entrance, the weight in the air lifted. The wind stirred again. A bird cried somewhere in the distance.
The sun peeked faintly through a slit in the clouds, casting light through the hole in the chapel's roof. It landed perfectly across the center of the mural, illuminating the silver tree in a shaft of gold.
Emily paused in the overgrown lot, looking back one last time.
Then she turned and walked back toward the safehouse, the manuscript pressing gently against her ribs with each step.
She didn't know what she had found.
Only that it had found her too.