The light swallowed us whole.
One moment we were stepping through the golden doorway, hands clasped together, the next we were falling through brightness that burned against my closed eyelids.
Then everything stopped.
I opened my eyes and immediately wished I hadn't.
We were standing in a memory, my memory, but wrong somehow, too vivid and too sharp and too real to be just a memory.
A foster home, the third one, I'd been there for six months and it was better than the first two but that wasn't saying much.
I was twelve years old, sitting on a narrow bed in a room I shared with two other kids, and I could feel it, the ability I'd been suppressing for two years, pushing against my consciousness like water against a dam.
"No," I whispered, but the memory didn't stop, it never stopped, it just kept playing like a film I couldn't pause.
