Iria didn't touch the laptop again.
Not at first.
She stood there, barefoot on cold hardwood, staring at the sentence she had apparently written to herself, as if it might rearrange itself into something less damning if she waited long enough. The cursor blinked steadily, a metronome counting time she no longer trusted.
Her phone was dead. Her shoes were muddy. Her wrist was bruised.
And she had anticipated all of it.
That realization went deeper than panic. Panic was loud and sudden. This was quieter, a feeling of unease that seemed to tighten around her with every breath.
"I need data," she said aloud.
Her voice sounded steadier than she felt. Good. She clung to that. Data was neutral. Data didn't care whether she was afraid.
She went to the bedroom first and looked carefully at the floor. The dried mud near the bed wasn't random. It formed a path: faint, partial footprints leading toward the door. She followed them, her heart beating faster, noticing where they faded and where they showed up again. Someone—she herself—had moved through the apartment with a goal.
She knelt near the door and checked the lock. Still engaged. No sign of forced entry. Her keys were in the bowl on the console table, exactly where she always dropped them.
Which meant she had left willingly.
Iria straightened and grabbed her jacket, slipping it on as if the familiar weight might restore some sense of normalcy. She hesitated only a moment before stepping into her shoes. The dried mud cracked faintly under pressure.
Outside, the hallway smelled faintly of cleaning solution and old carpet. Mrs. Delgado's door across the hall was closed, a grocery bag hanging from its handle. Nothing out of place. No one was peering at her like they knew something she didn't.
The elevator ride down seemed to take forever. Iria looked at her reflection in the mirrored wall, searching for anything she might have missed. There was dirt under her fingernails, a faint smear of grime along her jaw, and her eyes looked too sharp, too alert.
*What did you do?* she thought.
The lobby doors slid open, and cool morning air rushed in. She stepped outside and paused, scanning the sidewalk. The city was waking up: commuters, delivery trucks, the low hum of traffic. Ordinary. Comfortingly so.
She crouched and examined the soles of her shoes again. The mud was thick in the grooves, stubborn. Not from a city park. Too dense. Too heavy.
"Okay," she murmured. "Let's see where you went."
She walked the block slowly, watching the pavement. At first, it felt silly, almost like a child's game, but then she saw it: a faint smear of dried earth on the curb. Another appeared a few steps later, barely visible unless you were looking for it.
She followed the trail.
It led her away from the main road, down a side street she rarely used. The buildings thinned out, replaced by a stretch of older warehouses and an overgrown lot she had always avoided out of mild, sensible caution. The kind of place you didn't wander into alone after dark.
Her stomach clenched.
At the edge of the lot, the trail ended.
The ground beyond was churned up, the earth uneven as if something heavy had been dragged over it. Iria stood at the edge, the morning light showing details that made her skin prickle: deep marks in the soil, not quite footprints, but signs of movement. Marks made by hands. By knees.
By work.
"I was here," she whispered.
A sudden, irrational urge surged through her—to step into the lot, to keep following whatever invisible path her other self had taken. Her foot lifted before she consciously decided to move.
She stopped.
Her wrist throbbed sharply, as if warning her.
"No," she said firmly, forcing herself to step back. Curiosity without preparation was how people got hurt. She knew that. She *lived* by that principle.
She turned away and walked back toward the street, every instinct telling her not to. The feeling stayed with her all the way home—a sense of being watched, not by eyes, but by something less clear, like a system waiting for a signal.
Back in her apartment, Iria finally returned to the laptop.
She sat down slowly, as if the chair might vanish beneath her, and placed her hands on the keyboard. For a moment, she stared at the sentence on the screen.
**If you're reading this, your phone is dead and you don't remember last night.**
Her fingers hovered, then began to move.
*What happened?* she typed.
She waited. Nothing appeared.
A sharp, brittle laugh escaped her. Of course. The version of herself who wrote this wasn't here to answer questions. That past Iria had expected this confused, searching Iria, and had only left clues behind.
She scrolled.
The page extended downward. More text appeared below, lines she hadn't noticed in her initial shock.
**Start with what you can prove.
You left the apartment.
You came back alone.
You were not injured until after midnight.**
Iria's breath caught.
She checked the time stamps embedded in the document. The first entry had been written at **11:48 p.m.** The next at **2:03 a.m.** Then **4:19 a.m.**
Hours she did not possess.
Her pulse thundered in her ears as she scrolled further.
**Do not panic.
This has happened before.**
The words blurred as her vision grew unsteady.
"Before?" she whispered.
Her mind raced, grasping for something—anything—that might explain how an entire portion of her life could vanish without leaving so much as a ripple in her memory.
She scrolled again.
**You will want to believe this is stress.
It is not.
You will want to believe this is sleepwalking.
It is not.**
Iria closed her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her temples.
Evidence of movement. Evidence of planning. Evidence of foreknowledge.
Whatever happened during the full moon wasn't an accident.
It was a routine.
And she was only now starting to realize she had been living with these gaps much longer than she thought.