The weeks after the Oak were strange ones.
It happened in Leo's room, late at night.
He was lying in bed, unable to sleep. His skin itched. His blood hummed with that strange new energy that had been building since the crystal.
On the nightstand sat a book, one of the battered adventure stories he'd read a dozen times.
Move, he thought, not really meaning it. Just a stray thought. The kind you have when you're half-asleep.
The book slid three inches.
Leo sat bolt upright.
Lift.
The book rose off the nightstand.
It wobbled in the air, unsteady. But it rose. Held by nothing but his will.
He grinned in the dark.
----
Lucia's awakening was quieter.
She had been doing laundry, a mindless task, the kind that let her think about other things. Her mind was on the crystal. On the visions. On what the oak tree had unlocked.
She picked up one of Mrs. Hale's aprons, worn thin from years of use.
And suddenly she wasn't in the laundry room anymore.
She was in the kitchen. Earlier that morning. The light was different, grey, pre-dawn. Mrs. Hale was stirring porridge, rubbing her lower back, muttering under her breath:
The flour's running low. My hip hurts. Thomas would have rubbed it for me. God rest him. Ten years now and I still...
The image shattered. Lucia gasped and dropped the apron.
----
The next few days were a minefield.
She reached for a serving spoon at breakfast and saw Mrs. Hale's hands, years younger, stirring broth while tears ran down her face. She grabbed the banister on the way upstairs and felt a child's palm, sweaty and small, gripping the rail during a thunderstorm decades ago.
She stopped touching things.
It wasn't possible, of course. You couldn't go through a day without touching anything. But she tried. She used her sleeves to open doors. She carried plates by their edges where no one's fingers had rested. She flinched away from things that had been handled too much, too long, by too many people.
She sat on the laundry room floor for a long time after the cellar.
Not crying. She wasn't the kind of person who cried easily. Just sitting, back against the cold stone wall, hands in her lap, trying to understand what had just happened to her. The girl in that memory had been real. The pain had been real. And Lucia had felt all of it, every moment, as if it were her own.
She looked at her hands.
This is going to happen every time I touch something, she thought. For the rest of my life.
She had no training. No one to ask. No idea whether this was permanent or whether it would kill her or drive her mad before she turned fifteen. She only knew that the gifts Leo was so excited about were going to cost her something she couldn't yet name.
She picked herself up off the floor.
Then she went back to the laundry.
The gloves were an accident. She was elbow-deep in laundry, dreading the next flash, when she grabbed a pair of old leather work gloves from the shelf above the wash basin. She pulled them on and reached for one of Mrs. Hale's aprons, the same one that had started everything.
Nothing.
She held the fabric. Turned it over. Pressed it between her fingers.
A whisper. Faint. Like hearing someone talk through a wall. But no flood. No drowning.
She let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.
Mrs. Hale noticed later that morning. "Why are you wearing gloves to do laundry?"
"My hands are chapped," Lucia said. "The lye soap."
Mrs. Hale gave her a long look but said nothing.
The gloves helped. Not perfectly. Strong memories bled through leather like heat through thin cloth. But they muffled the worst of it. Turned screams into whispers. Made the flashes bearable.
Most of the time.
But some memories were stronger. Some didn't care about leather or sleeves or careful fingers. Some reached up and grabbed.
She found this out in the cellar.
She had been sent for potatoes, another mindless task. The cellar was cold and dark, lit only by the square of light from the open door above.
Her hand brushed the wall as she reached for the crate.
NO...
The scream wasn't hers.
A girl. Not much older than Lucia. Cornered against the stone. A man reaching for her, his face twisted.
"Please. I won't tell anyone. I'll be good..."
Pain. Terrible pain. And then nothing.
Lucia wrenched her hand back.
She sat on the cold floor, shaking. Her hands wouldn't stop trembling. She pressed them flat against her knees and tried to breathe.
She couldn't make herself stand.
----
Upstairs, minutes crawled past. Mrs. Hale glanced at the cellar door.
"Leo. Go see what's keeping that girl. She's fetching potatoes, not mining for gold."
He took the lamp from the hook by the kitchen door and went down.
The cellar stairs were steep and narrow. Halfway down, he heard breathing: quick, shallow, wrong.
He found her against the far wall, her back pressed to the cold stone, her arms wrapped around her knees.
"Lucia?" He set the lamp down and crouched beside her. "Hey. Are you okay?"
She looked up at him. Her face was pale, her eyes red-rimmed.
"No," she said. "I'm really not."
He sat down next to her. The cellar was cold and dark, the lamp casting long shadows across the crates of potatoes.
"What happened?"
"I touched the wall." Her voice was barely a whisper. "And I saw... I saw something terrible. A girl. Someone hurt her down here. A long time ago." She shuddered. "I felt it. Like I was her."
"I'm sorry," he said.
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Lucia turned to look at him.
"Have you felt different? Since the oak tree?"
Leo hesitated. Then he held out his hand.
A potato rose from the crate. It wobbled in the air, unsteady, and floated across the cellar to land in his palm.
Lucia's eyes went wide. "Leo-"
"I know." He gestured, and three more potatoes lifted, spinning slowly around each other. "I don't know how I'm doing it. It just... started happening."
One of the potatoes shot sideways and slammed into the wall with a wet thunk.
Lucia flinched. "Did you mean to do that?"
"No." Leo winced, shaking out his hand like it had cramped. "It doesn't always do what I want. Sometimes it just... goes."
She stared at the splattered potato, then at the others still hovering in the air. "That's incredible. And terrifying."
"Yeah." He let the potatoes drop. They thudded back into the crate. "That's pretty much how I feel about it."
Lucia pulled her knees up tighter. "Mine isn't like that. I can't move things. I just... see. When I touch something old, I see what happened to it. Or near it. Memories that aren't mine."
"Can you control it?"
"No." Her voice cracked. "It just happens. And I can't make it stop."
They sat in silence for a moment.
"This is really scary," Lucia said quietly.
"Yeah. It is."
"What do we do?"
"Practice, maybe?" He shrugged helplessly. "Try to figure it out? I don't know. There's no one to teach us."
"We're on our own."
"Yeah." He stared at his hands, the hands that had just moved things with his mind. "We are."
Lucia was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was very soft.
"Sometimes I think about what I could do with this. If someone was hurting the twins. If someone was hurting us." She looked at him. "I don't want to think about it. But I do. And it scares me."
Leo met her eyes.
"Maybe that's okay," he said slowly. "Maybe it's good that it scares you. It means you're still... you."
She didn't look convinced. Neither was he.