Penelope kept walking.
That was the only thought she let herself hold onto with any real conviction — keep walking, keep your face still, keep your feet moving in the same rhythm as everyone else's — because if she let herself think past that single instruction, the whole hallway would start spinning.
Vanya Dexter.
The original female lead.
She'd buried that notebook page so deep in her memory she'd genuinely believed it didn't matter anymore. Three months in the space. Three months of training, of family dinners, of Aurora's tiny fingers curling around Erik's over these past two days, of building something so solid and warm that the novel — the actual novel, the one she'd read in a hospital bed in another life, in another body — had started to feel like something that happened to somebody else. A story she'd once read. Not a blueprint she was still standing inside of.
Stay away from Erik and Vanya. Those two will be the reason why I die.
