The world had a flavor, and it was the taste of rot festering in a wound stitched shut.
Not the poetic, earth-after-rain decay of fallen leaves, but the real, gagging thing. It was the cloying, sour-milk stench of a lunchbox forgotten under a bed for a month, fabric curdled and crawling. It was the sweet, putrid reek of a possum carcass on August asphalt, its belly swollen with gases, a black slick of flies buzzing over glistening viscera. That rot was in her mouth now, a thick, greasy film of other people's misery coating her tongue, seeping into the porous tissue of her cheeks.
Gwen was thirteen years old, her body crammed into the suffocating space between a nicotine-stained wall and the dusty, plastic fronds of a fake fern in Brennan's Funeral Home. The air itself was a wet wool blanket, heavy with the cloying perfume of lilies trying and failing to mask the underlying chemical bite of formaldehyde, a smell that clung to the back of the throat like a poison promise. She understood, with a cold, sickening clarity that settled in her bones, that the pain she tasted wasn't just the private, sharp ache of her own grief anymore. It had become a public spectacle, a feast of anguish she was being forced to consume.
Her father had been dying for two years. It wasn't a slow fade into gentle night; it was a brutal, systematic demolition of a man.
The diagnosis—glioblastoma—was a bone-saw of a word, grinding and final. It didn't mean sickness; it meant a meticulous, cruel dismantling. Their lives shrank to the grim schedule of pills that made his mind unravel into screaming hallucinations, and the humiliating choreography of bedpans that would slop their cold, foul contents onto the floor. It was the sound of him screaming, a raw, animalistic noise that tore from a place deeper than throat or lung, a sound that only stopped when the morphine flooded his veins and his body went terrifyingly, unnaturally slack.
She watched the cancer work. It wasn't a hollowing; it was a butchering in slow motion. It stripped the meat and strength from his arms and legs until his wrists were nothing more than bird-bones wrapped in papery, translucent skin. It stole his memories first, then his words, and finally, the warm, cognizant light behind his eyes. In the end, he was a scaffold of yellowed bone in a hospital bed that smelled of stale sweat and antiseptic, his breath a wet, rattling drag that smelled like something had already died deep inside his chest.
Three weeks ago, he'd called her into his bedroom. The summons wasn't in his voice, which was too thin to carry, but in the defeated slump of his shoulders beneath the thin blanket.
What she didn't expect was the taste.
It was grape juice. The cheap, sugary kind from a foil pouch that had been her favorite since she was six. For one dizzying, disorienting second, it was just that—the same comforting, saccharine purple sweetness. Then it turned. It went warm and metallic, flooding her mouth the second she sat on the edge of his bed, thick as congealing phlegm. Her salivary glands clenched in violent protest and she ran her sandpaper-dry tongue over the roof of her mouth, trying to scrape the synthetic stain of it away, but it was just there, a vile, purple ghost of a taste that had no business being real. She couldn't swallow. It just sat there, a pool of liquid candy turning to vinegar in her mouth, while his skeletal hands—the same hands that had lifted her onto his shoulders to see a parade—trembled on the blanket. He said words like weeks and so sorry, baby girl, his voice cracking like dry twigs.
The juice-taste curdled when he started to cry, sharpening into an electric, ozone tang, the taste of a lightning strike about to happen. When his hands shook, the flavor morphed again, becoming the copper-penny taste of blood from a bitten cheek. She barely made it to the bathroom, her hand slapping hard against the cool, unforgiving tile of the wall to keep from collapsing. Her stomach tried to climb its way up her throat, heaving until there was nothing left inside her but a burning, acidic bile that scorched her esophagus just as badly as the phantom juice had. She spat, over and over into the toilet bowl, but the taste was woven into the very fabric of her taste buds now, a permanent, sour thread in the tapestry of her senses.
In the weeks that followed, the house itself seemed to die with him.
The living room was a field hospital for a war already lost. Pill bottles, their labels smeared, littered every surface like spent shell casings. A wheelchair with a wobbly, complaining wheel stood sentry by the front door, a monument to uselessness. A stack of bedpans, their sterile sheen long gone, were shoved in the hall closet, right next to the tangled, cheerful strings of Christmas lights, a cruel joke.
Her mother moved through it all like a ghost haunting the ruins of her own life, her hair lank and greasy, her eyes permanently swollen and red-veined. She'd quit her job, and now her hands had a constant, fine tremor that made the coffee in her mug shiver. She hid the final notice bills in drawers, under couch cushions, tucking them away like a desperate, childish game of make-believe that they were all losing.
One night, Gwen found her in the kitchen, not moving, just staring into the cold, white glow of the open refrigerator. The light bleached her face of all color, making her look like a corpse standing upright.
"I can't remember what we used to eat before this," her mother said, her voice flat and hollow, stripped of all emotion. "I've stood here and I tried to think of a meal that wasn't from a disposable pan, heated in a microwave. I can't." Then she closed the door, plunging the kitchen back into a darkness that felt heavier than the night outside, and walked away without getting anything, her footsteps echoing in the silent house.
Gwen watched her father with a clinical, cold focus that shamed her. The way his jaw went slack when he slept, drool webbing the stiff, stained pillowcase. The way he'd jolt awake, blind with a pain so profound it erased who he was, begging anyone, anything, to please, please make it stop. And her mother, hollow-eyed and moving like a sleepwalker, whispering that the doctor said not for another hour, the words a meaningless chant.
Sometimes, the door to his room would be shut. Once, she heard him crying, the sound wet and ragged, tearing itself from his chest. "Marlene," he'd pleaded with her mother, his voice thick with a shame worse than pain. "You can't let her in here. I can't…God, I can't have her see me like this." Her mother's shushing was soft, exhausted, the sound of a shore being worn away by a relentless sea. "I know, Tom. I know." Gwen had stood frozen in the hall, the patterned carpet pressing into her soles, understanding with a sudden, adult finality that the room had become a chamber for private humiliation, and that her father's pride was the very last thing to be carved away.
There was a before, and it had a flavor, too. It was the sharp, clean fizz of root beer floats he'd make every Friday night, the vanilla ice cream melting into a sweet, creamy foam that left a mustache on her upper lip. It was the taste of stolen salt from the pretzel bag they'd share while watching old monster movies, him doing a terrible, rumbling Godzilla roar that made her scream with helpless laughter. Those tastes were clean. They were pure. They were theirs.
The man in the hospital bed had no voice left, but the man from before sung Johnny Cash off-key while washing the car, suds flying. He'd been a carpenter, and his hands, now trembling bird bones, had once been capable of shaping a piece of raw oak into a delicate jewelry box for her tenth birthday. He'd stained it himself, his big, rough fingers surprisingly delicate with the small brush, his brow furrowed in concentration. That box was in her closet now. She hadn't opened it since he'd gotten sick. The smell of the varnish, once a comfort, now felt like a taunt from a parallel universe.
The day he forgot her name, his eyes darted over her face, panicked, uncomprehending, a landed fish gasping in a foreign, suffocating air. When it came back to him, finally, the relief that flooded his features was somehow worse than the fear. It was a confirmation of the loss. He'd sobbed, great, heaving, broken sounds, when she'd fled from the room, her own breath coming in sharp, painful hitches that felt like swallowing glass.
And now, Brennan's.
The place was a lie, a pretty fiction covered in flower-scented disinfectant. But underneath the cloying lilies was the truth: the chemical bite of embalming fluid, the faint, iron-taint of blood that no amount of washing could erase.
People milled about, their soft, pitying voices droning like flies buzzing against a windowpane. They touched her with damp, cold hands that felt like dead fish. He's in a better place.
Someone nudged her towards the casket. Each step was a fight against a tidal wave of tastes, a current of other people's inner lives pulling her under. She looked down at him. The morticians had done their best with wax and paint, but he was waxy, a doll made to look like her father, a cheap imitation. This wasn't him. The real him was the one who, two summers ago, had taught her how to skip stones at Miller's pond. He'd picked a flat, gray stone and placed it in her small hand, his own calloused one closing over hers. "Feel that weight, baby?" he'd said, his voice warm in her ear. "Now, flick your wrist. Just like that." The stone had skipped once, twice, three times across the still, green water, and that day tasted like pure sunshine and the clean, muddy edge of the pond.
"He looks so peaceful," someone whispered behind her, the words like a puff of foul air.
Gwen tasted lake water and sun-warmed stone. A clean, clear flavor. Then it was gone, washed away by the chemical lilies and the iron-taint of blood, drowned in the swamp of the room.
A man sniffled by the casket, and her mouth filled with the gritty, dry ash of a cold cigarette butt. A woman wept, and Gwen tasted the slick, clotted sourness of milk left to spoil in a hot car. An old couple's shared fear was the acrid, burning sensation of battery acid on the tongue.
Then, something else.
A taste that didn't belong here, that had no place among the human flavors. It slithered underneath them all—cold and vast and ancient, like the silt at the bottom of a frozen lake where no light had reached for a thousand years. It was there and gone in a heartbeat, a serpent flicking its tongue, but it left her mouth numb, her gums tingling with a dead sensation.
She looked around. No one else had noticed. The mourners continued their sad, slow choreography of grief.
Mr. Henderson, her father's old boss, patted her head with a meaty, heavy hand. "He was a good man," he boomed, and Gwen's mouth flooded with the waxy, artificial taste of a gas station slushie and the greasy, fatty aftertaste of a cheap steak—the flavors of smug, false sentiment, of a duty performed and soon to be forgotten.
Then came Sarah from the PTA, enveloping her in a choking cloud of department-store perfume. "You be strong for your momma, honey," she whispered, her breath hot in Gwen's ear, and Gwen tasted the cloying, chemical sweetness of sugar-free candy, a saccharine lie that left a bitter residue. A taste of performative kindness masking a hollow, empty core.
She backed into the wall, her fingers clawing at the peeling, velvety wallpaper, trying to find an anchor in the physical world. Breathe through your mouth. Don't taste it.
She fumbled in the tight pocket of her dress for the wintergreen Life Savers she'd stolen from the bowl by the front door. She ripped one from the roll and popped it into her mouth, the sharp, medicinal mint a clean, white shock to her brain, a blizzard in her skull. For three glorious seconds, there was only arctic coolness. Then the thick, medicinal, black-licorice taste of her Aunt Marie's guilt seeped through, merging with the mint to create a new, horrifying flavor—guilty wintergreen, the taste of trying to have fresh breath in a rotting, corpse-filled mouth. She choked, gagging, and spat the half-dissolved candy into her cupped hand, the green saliva slick on her palm.
It was useless. A child's defense against a tsunami.
Aunt Marie wobbled up to the casket, and the guilt—thick, syrupy, and black as tar-licorice—coated Gwen's throat, making her want to retch. Her cousin Danny, staring at his phone, was worse. He tasted of nothing. A void. A hollow so complete and empty it made her belly clench with a primal fear of the abyss.
Her mother sat rigid in the front row, a statue of grief, and the taste coming from her was rust. Old, oxidized iron. The flavor of exhaustion that had crystallized into something hard and metallic.
Then it came again. That wrongness.
Colder, this time. It tasted like absolute absence—like the flavor of a starless sky, of the vacuum between atoms. It made her teeth ache with a deep, resonant thrum. Made the room feel too small, the walls pressing in, and yet simultaneously too large, as if she were a tiny speck in an infinite, dark hall.
And beneath it, a pull. A compass needle buried deep in her chest, swinging wildly toward something she couldn't see, tugging at her sternum.
The room swam. Her head throbbed, a tight band of pain squeezing her temples. Acid burned the back of her throat, a constant, low-grade fire. She wanted to run, to sprint away until the only taste in her mouth was the clean, honest salt of her own sweat.
But beneath the panic, a new cold certainty locked into place, sharp as a shiv of ice between her ribs.
She wasn't just tasting his death anymore.
She was tasting everything. All of them. Their hidden fears, their secret shames, their quiet, desperate lies laid bare on her tongue.
And something else. Something that had no right to be here at all, something that smelled of the void between stars.
She had to move, had to escape. The tastes were a physical pressure now, a foul liquid building behind her eyes and in her sinuses, a headache blooming into a full migraine aura. The room began to pulse, the edges of her vision spotting with dark, oily shapes that squirmed. She was going to be sick, right here, on the floral carpet—
Then a hand landed on her shoulder.
It wasn't a gentle, comforting touch. It was a calloused, heavy weight that clamped down, the bones and sinew startling her so violently she nearly jumped right out of her skin.
It was her grandma's hand, the skin smelling faintly of Jergen's lotion and the ghost of yesterday's cigarettes. Grandma Birdie.
"Getting to you, ain't it, girl?" Her voice was a low, gravelly whisper, meant for Gwen alone, a sound worn smooth by smoke and hard living.
Gwen could only manage a tight, frantic nod, her throat completely strangled by the bile of other people's feelings, a knot of vomit she couldn't swallow.
"Come on," her grandma said, her voice quiet but firm, her grip tightening on Gwen's shoulder. "Let's get you some air that doesn't taste like regret and formaldehyde."
She steered Gwen, half-guiding, half-carrying her, out of the oppressive heat of the parlor and into the cool, sharp shock of the Pennsylvania afternoon.
The heavy funeral home door sighed shut behind them, sealing off the swamp of human sentiment. The sudden quiet was a physical relief, a pressure drop that made her eardrums pop.
It was October, and the trees were in their full death-bloom—a violent, glorious riot of reds and golds and browns slashed against the bruised gray of the sky. The beauty of it felt like a personal insult, a mockery of the raw, ugly thing festering inside her.
But the air. The air was clean. Blessedly, brutally clean.
For the first time in hours, Gwen dragged a breath into her lungs that wasn't saturated with the taste of other people's emotional filth. The relief was so sudden, so complete, it was a physiological shock. Her knees buckled, the strength running out of her legs like water. She caught herself against the rough, cold brick of the wall, her palms scraping, her whole body trembling with the violent aftershock of release. She gulped the cold, neutral air in great, ragged heaves, like she was vomiting up the poison she'd been forced to swallow.
Her grandma didn't say a word. She simply fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the depths of her black coat, tapped one out, and lit it with a flick of a cheap plastic lighter. The first plume of smoke curled into the still air, a grey ghost between them. The silence wasn't empty; it was the first solid, quiet thing Gwen had been able to lean against all day.
"Better?" her grandma asked after a long moment, the word rough as gravel.
Gwen could only manage a frantic nod, still sucking in air, her chest hitching.
Her grandma studied her through the smoke, her eyes like chips of flint that missed nothing. "You've been tasting things you shouldn't, haven't you? For weeks now."
The question wasn't a gentle probe. It was a hammer blow, direct and unforgiving. A cold dread, so potent it felt like ice water in her veins, washed through Gwen. Her denial was a gut reaction, a creature scrambling for its burrow. "No," she choked out, shaking her head so hard her vision blurred. "I don't—I don't know what you're talking about."
Her grandma didn't flinch. She just took a long, slow drag, the ember glowing like a malevolent eye, her gaze pinning Gwen to the wall. "Don't lie to me, Gwen. And for God's sake, don't lie to yourself. It's a waste of energy."
"I'm not—"
"I can taste it on you," her grandma cut in, her voice low and final, leaving no room for argument. "The fear coming off you right now? It's like licking a nine-volt battery. Sharp. Metallic. Makes my jaw ache."
Gwen's mouth fell open. Her entire world, already cracked and fragile, tilted on its axis and shattered. All the air left her lungs in a single, defeated whoosh.
And then, another realization, so obvious it was humiliating. In the storm of tastes inside—the ash, the spoiled milk, the battery acid—there had been nothing from her grandmother. Not when she'd touched her, not when she'd led her outside, not even now, standing this close. Her grandmother was a pocket of quiet in the sensory hell, a blank space, a fortress.
"I thought I was going crazy," she whispered, the confession torn from a raw, scraped place deep inside her throat. "I thought something was broken in my brain."
"You're not crazy." Her grandma exhaled a plume of smoke that hung in the damp air. "You're a Crane woman. That's something different entirely."
Gwen stared at the hard, familiar lines of her grandma's profile, etched by decades of smoke and secrets she was only now beginning to fathom. "What does that mean?"
"It means you taste what people feel. What they really feel, underneath all the pretty lies they tell themselves and everyone else." Her grandma's voice was utterly matter-of-fact, as if she were explaining how to clean a fish. "Joy tastes like overripe peaches—cloying and sweet for a second, then it turns to rot in your teeth. But most of what's out there…" She gestured with her cigarette, a sweeping motion that encompassed the funeral home, the town, the entire world. "It's all vinegar and ash."
"It's in our blood," she continued, her gaze fixed on some distant point. "Runs through the women in our family like a sickness. Skips a generation, though. Your mother doesn't have it. Never will. She got her father's simple blood, God rest him. But you—" She looked at Gwen, and something that was not quite pity, but a grim recognition, flickered in her eyes. "You got it."
"But why—how—" Gwen's thoughts were a tangled snarl, questions piling on top of each other, tripping over her trembling lips. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably; she tucked them under her arms, pressing them tight against her ribs to hide it.
"Grief triggers it," her grandma said, slicing through the chaos. "Strong emotion. Trauma. Most Crane women don't get it until something breaks them open. For me, it was my father's death. I was fourteen. Tasted his heart attack before he hit the floor—like burnt wires and old pennies. For my grandma, it was watching her sister drown. For you—" She gestured vaguely back toward the funeral home with her chin. "Well. You know."
Gwen felt something monumental shift in her chest. A terrifying, dizzying lurch that was part relief, part sheer, unadulterated terror. "So I'm not dying? I'm not sick?"
"Oh, you're sick alright," her grandma said with a dry, humorless laugh. "Just not the way you think. This isn't the kind of sick that kills you. It's the kind that makes you wish it would, on the bad days."
"That's not—" Gwen started to protest, a weak spark of defiance.
Her grandma held up a hand, calloused and firm. "I'm not being cruel, girl. I'm being honest. You'll taste things you don't want to taste. Know things you don't want to know. See people for what they really are, underneath all the pretty masks. Most folks spend their whole lives lying to themselves. You don't get that luxury."
"Can I make it stop?"
"No." The word was absolute, a stone dropped into a well with no bottom. "You can't pray it away. You can't drink it away, though God knows some of us have tried. It's in the marrow of your bones." Her grandmother's expression softened, just a fraction, the leathery skin around her eyes crinkling. "But you can learn to live with it. I'll teach you. How to build walls inside your mind. How to filter the noise. How to swallow it down without letting it poison you from the inside out."
"When?"
"Not today." Her grandma squeezed her shoulder. The touch was firm, grounding, a tether to the real world. "I need to go back in there. Your mother's going to need help with people. But you—" She looked at Gwen's pale, clammy face, the violent tremor in her hands, the way her body was still braced against the wall as if against a gale-force wind. "You need more time. Take a walk. Clear your head. Just don't go far, and come back before dark."
"Grandma, I don't understand what's—"
"I know." Her grandma's voice was quieter now, almost gentle. "And I'll explain everything, I promise. But not today. Today you just need to breathe. Just breathe."
She crushed the spent cigarette under the heel of her sensible black shoe, grinding it into the pavement with a final twist. Without another word, she turned and went back inside, leaving Gwen alone in the dying afternoon light with the taste of cold air and old smoke in her mouth.
Gwen stood there, her mind reeling, the brick wall cold and solid against her back. A Crane woman. A gift that tasted like a curse. A future full of other people's emotions poisoning her mouth.
But beneath the terror, a single, fragile thread of hope wound its way through the wreckage. She wasn't alone. At least someone understood.
That had to count for something. It had to.
Gwen stood there, her mind reeling. A Crane woman. A gift that tasted like a curse. A future full of other people's emotions poisoning her mouth.
But at least she wasn't alone. At least someone understood.
That had to count for something.
Gwen stood there for a long moment, just breathing. Just existing in her own skin without the violation of other people's feelings crawling under it.
The funeral home sat at the edge of town. Behind it, a narrow trail wound into the woods—a path for smoke breaks and escapes. She should go back inside. Should play the role expected of her.
But the thought of walking back into that taste-made hell made her stomach clench.
So she walked toward the trees.
The pull was there immediately; that compass needle in her chest, swinging north.
The trail was overgrown. Gwen picked her way along it, her cheap funeral shoes slipping on damp leaves. The woods were quiet. The smell was rich and organic, the honest stink of decomposition without the emotional weight of human death. For the first time since that morning, she felt almost human.
The pull grew stronger.
It came from the inside, insistent, undeniable.
It was so different from the emotional tastes.
The trail narrowed, then disappeared. Gwen pushed through undergrowth, thorns tearing at her stockings, branches catching her dress. She didn't care. She had to follow it.
The woods grew denser, darker. And then, suddenly, they opened up.
The clearing was a perfect, bald circle in the earth, as if something had burned the life out of it. The trees at the edges leaned away, twisted. No birds sang.
In the center sat a rock.
Dark gray, the size of her fist, pitted like old scar tissue.
It hummed. Not a sound, but a vibration in her teeth and bones.
Gwen's mouth flooded with that taste again. The one from before. It wasn't human. It was the flavor of a starless sky, of the absolute zero at the end of the universe. It was the taste of a grave so deep no sun ever reached it. It made her dizzy, like standing at the edge of everything.
Her legs moved without her consent.
She knelt. Her hand hovered. Up close, the pits in the rock weren't random. They swirled in patterns that made her eyes water, hinting at a geometry that defied space. The surface shimmered with a color that didn't have a name—a color that was an absence, a hunger.
Every instinct screamed to run. To flee this blasphemous, wrong thing.
She touched it.
The cold was not a temperature. It was an annihilation.
It exploded up her arm, freezing the blood in her veins, and for a moment, she was unmade.
She was elsewhere. A non-space of howling silence and crushing pressure. Here, human emotions were less than dust. She felt things that had no shape, thoughts that were older than planets, a consciousness so vast and cold her own mind was a guttering candle in a hurricane.
Something turned toward her. Not attention—not awareness of her specifically. More like she'd stumbled into the path of something immense already in motion. The weight of it was a glacier. The focus of it was a predator's eye sweeping across terrain, and she was a single cell caught in its path.
Something reached past her, through her, around her.
The touch wasn't meant for her. But it scoured her anyway. An atomic blast in a space too small to contain it. Every memory shredded. Every feeling scraped raw. The very concept of Gwen dissolving into static.
She was a meaningless scream in a vacuum that couldn't hear her.
No.
The thought was bone-deep reflex. A pathetic spark of defiance against the void.
Gwendolyn Crane. Thirteen. Daddy. Dead.
She clawed the shards of her identity back together, and with a gasp that tore her throat, she was back. Kneeling in the leaves, jerking her hand from the rock as if burned.
Her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest. She felt hollowed out, scraped clean.
She didn't know what she'd just witnessed. A recording. A memory. An echo of something that had happened elsewhere, elsewhen. But she knew, with certainty that bypassed thought, that whatever had been preserved in that stone was vast beyond comprehension.
And it hadn't even known she was there.
Wrapping the rock in the hem of her torn dress, its cold seeping into her skin, she stumbled out of the clearing and ran, not caring about the branches that whipped her face. She burst from the tree line, gasping, the funeral home's lights a beacon of the mundane world she had just left behind.
It didn't feel safe. Not with the rock humming against her stomach, a fragment of something immense now pressed against her mortal flesh.
The funeral home felt different. Or she did.
The rock was a cold brand against her skin, its alien taste a thin, constant wire in her mind. Her grandma was waiting, eyes sharp.
"You're shaking."
"I'm fine. Just cold."
Her grandma's gaze dropped to the bunched fabric of Gwen's dress. "What did you find out there?"
"I don't know," Gwen whispered, the truth torn from her. "A rock. It tastes… wrong."
Something flickered in her grandma's eyes—fear, recognition. "Show me later. Not here." She squeezed Gwen's shoulder, a warm anchor. "Can you make it through the rest of this?"
Gwen wanted to say no. She nodded.
"That's my girl. Just breathe. I'm right here."
The next two hours were a new torture. The rock's cold seeped into her bones, making every human emotion feel distant and small. Her mother's grief was bitter and viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
And underneath it all, the awareness. Not of being watched. But of having touched something that contained memories of things so vast, so alien, that her human mind could barely hold the impression of them.
Later, in the dark of her room, Gwen placed the rock on her nightstand. It looked ordinary. It wasn't.
Her grandma appeared in the doorway, her gaze going straight to the stone. She didn't touch it. "That's not from here," she said, her voice rough. "Not from anywhere on Earth."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've tasted thousands of traces. Human emotions leave marks. That?" She gestured, a flick of her wrist. "That's something else entirely."
"What is it?"
Her grandma was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was careful. "I don't know. But I know what it means." She looked at Gwen, her eyes shadowed. "Your gift isn't just about tasting human emotions, girl. It's about tasting everything. Every feeling, every intention, every trace of consciousness that touches this world."
She paused. "Most Crane women never encounter anything like this. Most go their whole lives only tasting human things."
"But I did."
"Yeah. You did." Her grandma's expression was unreadable. "Get some sleep if you can. Tomorrow, we start."
She paused in the doorway.
"And Gwen? Don't touch it again tonight. Not until you understand what you're dealing with."
Then she was gone.
Gwen stared at the ceiling, the alien coldness still a stain on her tongue. She was a Crane woman. Flayed open not just to a world of human pain, but to echoes of something vast and incomprehensible.
The rock sat on her nightstand.
She watched it in the darkness. Ordinary. Gray. Still.
Her eyes grew heavy. Sleep pulled at her, exhaustion finally winning over adrenaline.
Just before she drifted off, the taste came back.
Faint. Distant. Like a radio signal from impossibly far away.
Not a voice. Not a message meant for her.
Just fragments. Static. An impression of something playing on a loop in a frequency she was never meant to receive.
The rock didn't move. Didn't watch. Didn't know she existed.
But somewhere in its depths, a memory was preserved. A recording of something that had happened light-years away, in a place where human concepts like time and space bent into shapes that had no names.
Gwen's eyes drifted closed.
The rock sat on her nightstand, full of ghosts.
And in her dreams, she would see them.