Esme's fingertips trembled against the wallpaper where frost had been. The wall was dry now, warm even, but her palm remembered cold so intense it burned. She pressed harder, searching for evidence of what she'd seen—what she'd almost done.
Nothing. Just faded yellow flowers on aging paper.
She remembered the water, the way it had opened like a mouth beneath Yashan's hovering hand. She'd stepped forward. Or thought she had. Her foot breaking the surface tension, the sensation of falling upward, of being pulled through—
Then the frost. The wall. Her room again.
Had something pulled her back? Or had she never truly left?
Her alarm clock blinked "12:00" in endless reset. Her phone insisted it was 3:12 a.m. Through the curtains, dawn light suggested otherwise. Time had come unmoored, each device telling its own version of when.
She sat on the edge of her bed, trying to catch hold of the night's events. They slipped like water—Yashan's galaxy eyes, the triangle of droplets, the choice she'd made to follow. Or had she? The memories flickered and shifted. Maybe she'd only dreamed of choosing. Maybe she'd stood at her door all night, hand on the knob, frozen between worlds.
The only certainty was the taste in her mouth—ozone and deep water.
Downstairs, breakfast unfolded in muted tones. The kitchen seemed drained of color, like someone had turned down the saturation on reality. Even the sunlight through the window looked thin, watery.
Laura set a bowl of cereal in front of her. The milk swirled in patterns that made Esme think of galaxies, of eyes, of doors opening in water. She blinked and it was just milk again.
"Did you sleep okay?" Laura's voice came from far away, though she stood right there.
Esme looked up, caught her mother's anxious gaze. In the spoon's curved surface, her reflection moved a half-second late—blinking after she'd already opened her eyes.
"Yeah," she lied softly. "No dreams."
Michael rustled his newspaper. The sound was too loud, then too soft, like someone adjusting volume badly. "Dr. Reeves called. She's recommended a program. For... adjustment."
Adjustment. Such a careful word.
"It's just a support group," Laura added quickly. "Other young people who've had... experiences. It might help to talk to people who understand."
People who understand. Esme almost laughed. But the sound stuck in her throat, transformed into something else. Agreement, maybe. Or surrender.
The community center smelled of floor wax and resignation. Folding chairs in a circle, motivational posters peeling at the edges, fluorescent lights that hummed just wrong enough to notice. Five others sat waiting—teenagers mostly, one girl who might have been twenty. They all had the same look. Not traumatized exactly. Displaced. Like they'd been badly translated from somewhere else.
June Park stood as Esme entered. She was younger than Esme expected, maybe late twenties, with dark hair pulled back and clothes that suggested comfort over professionalism. Her smile was warm but her eyes were sharp, taking in everything—the way Esme scanned exits, how she chose a chair with her back to the wall, the slight delay before she sat.
"Welcome," June said. "I'm June. This is a safe space to share whatever you're comfortable sharing. Or just to listen. No pressure."
The session passed in fragments. A boy talked about losing three days last summer, waking up in his bed with grass stains on clothes he didn't remember wearing. A girl described recurring dreams of corridors that felt more real than her waking life.
Esme said nothing. But she watched June watching her, saw the counselor's fingers unconsciously tracing patterns on her notepad—spirals and intersecting lines that looked almost like...
"Would you like to share anything?" June asked gently when the silence stretched too long.
Esme met her gaze. Behind the professional kindness was something else. Recognition? Curiosity?
"Not today," Esme said.
June nodded. "That's perfectly fine. Sometimes just being here is enough."
But as the session ended, June touched Esme's elbow lightly. "If you ever want to talk one-on-one, I'm here. Sometimes it's easier without an audience."
Her fingers were cold through Esme's sleeve. Cold like frost. Like water. Like choosing.
That night, Esme lay in bed, counting her breaths. One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four. The pattern felt important though she couldn't say why.
At 11:47, the humming began.
Not from her dreams this time. From the vents. From inside the walls. A vibration that made her teeth ache and her bones remember. She sat up slowly, every movement deliberate.
The sound built in waves—mechanical but also organic, like breathing through tubes, like hearts beating in glass chambers. She stood, drawn to the mirror on her wall. Her reflection stared back, and for a moment, she saw—
White walls. Endless white walls. And herself, standing in a room that couldn't exist, wearing clothes she didn't own, moving in ways she'd never learned.
The vision shattered. She was back in her room, palm pressed against the cold mirror, her reflection finally synchronized but somehow wrong. Older. Sadder. Knowing.
The dreams, when they finally came, were not dreams.
She stood in one of the white rooms—not remembering it but being in it, present tense, real time. Around her, in their own glass cubes, the others moved. Sabine. Leo. Claire. Trent. She knew their names like she knew her own heartbeat.
They were dancing. No—that wasn't right. They were performing something older than dance, more precise than ritual. Their movements synchronized perfectly though they couldn't see each other, couldn't hear anything but their own breathing and the eternal hum.
Arms rose in unison. Fingers spread in specific configurations. Bodies turned at exact angles. A step forward. A pause. Hands pressed against glass that wasn't quite glass.
Esme's body moved with them, remembering what her mind couldn't. The movements felt like words in a language she'd learned before speech, before thought. Essential. Necessary.
Part of something larger.
She woke with her arms still raised, fingers spread against empty air.
Three days passed in strange compression. Esme attended June's group sessions, saying little but absorbing everything. She noticed things—how one girl's fingers sometimes moved in patterns similar to what she'd seen in the white room. How a boy counted under his breath using the same rhythm that haunted her nights.
June noticed too. Esme caught her watching, making notes that looked more like sketches than words. Once, passing behind June's chair, she glimpsed the notepad—spirals within spirals, and at the center, three circles intersected by a line.
"You're drawing it," Esme said without thinking.
June's hand stilled. She looked up, and for a moment, her professional mask slipped. "Drawing what?"
But Esme was already walking away, heart pounding. She shouldn't have said anything. The symbol wasn't for sharing. It was for finding. For being found.
Dr. Reeves wanted to increase her sessions. Her parents watched her constantly. The house felt smaller each day, reality pressing in like walls closing. Only at night, when the humming came and the movements played behind her eyelids, did Esme feel like she could breathe.
June called on a Thursday afternoon. "I'd like to do a home visit," she said. "Just to see how you're adjusting to your environment."
Laura agreed eagerly. Anything that might help. Anything that might fix what was broken.
But when June arrived, Esme saw her notice things the parents couldn't. The way shadows fell differently in certain corners. How the air near Esme's room felt charged. The faint marks on the doorframe that might have been scratches or might have been symbols.
In Esme's room, June stood very still. Her eyes found the closet door where the faintest trace of the triad seal remained, mostly erased but still visible if you knew how to look.
"You drew this?" June asked quietly.
Esme didn't answer.
June reached out, not quite touching the marks. "I've seen this before. In my notes. Students draw it sometimes, the ones who've..." She trailed off.
"Who've what?"
"Who've been somewhere else." June turned to face her. "Haven't they?"
The question hung between them. Esme could deny it. Could play normal a little longer. But something in June's expression—not just professional interest but personal recognition—made her nod.
"So have I," June whispered. "Not the way you have. But I've seen the edges. Felt the pull." She paused, something shifting in her expression—awe mixed with old grief. "I spent years thinking it was just a pattern. A mental trick people's minds played when reality got too heavy. Then I met someone who vanished mid-sentence. Right in front of me. One moment talking about the symbols she kept seeing, the next—gone. Like she'd never been there at all."
June's fingers unconsciously traced the air where that person might have stood. "That's why I do this job. Looking for others who've been marked."
She left soon after, but not before pressing a card into Esme's hand. Her personal number. "When you're ready to talk," she said. "Really talk. About what's calling you back."
As she stepped through the threshold, Esme noticed frost gathering briefly on the brass door handle where June's hand had been—then gone. Like an echo of this morning's melted evidence. Like June carried winter with her without knowing.
That night, unable to sleep, Esme found herself in the attic. She didn't remember deciding to go there, just suddenly standing among boxes and insulation, drawn by instinct older than memory.
In the far corner, behind a beam, she felt rather than saw the loose board. It came away easily, revealing a cavity that shouldn't have been there. Inside, wrapped in plastic, was a notebook.
Water-damaged. Aged. Filled with her handwriting, though she had no memory of creating it.
Pages of symbols—the triad seal repeated in variations. Diagrams of mirrors reflecting into infinity. Charts that might have been star maps or might have been floor plans for impossible buildings. And throughout, notes in her careful script.
But some of the symbols weren't hers—not in form, not in intent. They pressed into the paper with different weight, curved in ways her hand wouldn't naturally move. It felt like something had answered her through her own hand, using her fingers as a conduit for knowledge that belonged elsewhere.
Notes filled the margins:
"The movements must be precise." "Five points to open, five to close." "Time runs differently there—remember to count." "They're not captors. They're teachers." "The humming is how they speak." "One door opens another. The wrong rhythm invites something else."
The final page held just one line, written larger than the rest:
"To open one door, five must move as one."
Esme stared at the words until they blurred. Five. Always five. But five what? Five people? Five movements? Five moments?
The phrase felt like a warning and a promise twisted together. What opened when five moved as one? And more terrifying—what had they been keeping closed?
She thought of the others in their glass rooms. Four of them, with her making five. But that felt too simple, too obvious. The notebook suggested layers of meaning, codes within codes.
She closed the notebook carefully, mind racing. This was evidence that she'd been preparing for longer than she remembered. That whatever had taken her seven years ago had been calling to her even before that.
But preparing for what?
The next evening, as dusk painted her room in purple shadows, Esme stood before her mirror. The notebook lay open on her bed, turned to a page showing the movement sequence. She'd been studying it for hours, letting her body remember what the diagrams suggested.
Slowly, carefully, she began.
Arms rising, fingers spreading in the specific configuration. Weight shifting, spine curving at precise angles. The movements flowed like water, each position leading naturally to the next. Her breath fell into rhythm—in for four counts, hold for four, out for four.
As she moved, the humming rose. Not from the walls this time but from inside her, resonating through bone and blood. The mirror began to fog though the room wasn't cold.
Turn. Reach. Press palm to glass.
The glass beneath her hand pulsed faintly, like a second heartbeat. Not hers. Something deeper, older, waiting just beyond the silvered surface.
The surface rippled.
For just a moment, her reflection smiled—though Esme's own face remained serious. The other-her wore white, moved with perfect grace, eyes bright with knowledge Esme didn't yet possess. Behind the smiling reflection, hints of movement—arms rising in unison, shapes that might be glass rooms or might be altars, a rhythm she knew but hadn't learned yet. Like looking through water at something deep and essential.
Then the image steadied, returning to normal. But the glass still hummed faintly under her palm, warm now where it had been cold.
Esme stepped back, breathing hard. The movements worked. They did something, opened something, made the boundaries thinner. But she wasn't ready. Not yet. She could feel it in the incompleteness of the sequence, in the way her body wanted to continue into movements she didn't yet know.
Behind her, the notebook pages fluttered though no wind moved through the room. The diagrams seemed to shift in her peripheral vision, revealing patterns that vanished when looked at directly.
She had work to do. Practice. Preparation.
Because whatever door the movements opened, she was beginning to understand it wasn't meant to be opened alone.