The letter smelled like cinnamon.
That was the first thing wrong with it. The second was that it was on my desk. Not slid under the door. Not left on the kitchen counter where Luna dropped the mail before work. On my desk, in my room, in the apartment where both locks were still bolted because I hadn't opened the door in four days.
I picked it up the way one picks up a spider they're pretending not to be afraid of. Between two fingers. At arm's length.
Heavy cream paper. Edges slightly golden. My name written in ink so perfect it could have been printed if not for the slight flourish on the final stroke.
My eyes went to the window. Closed. Latched.
"Impressive delivery service," I said to nobody, because if you say it out loud it's a joke and not the fact that someone was in your room.
To Mona, it began, whose performance is wasted on an audience that cannot see.
I almost put it down. That line knew too much to be junk mail and too little to be Luna. Luna would have just said stop pretending you're fine, you idiot.
You have carried a name that is not yours, shouldered blame that was never yours to bear, and smiled through it all with such conviction that even those closest to you have forgotten to look twice.
My thumb pressed into the paper hard enough to dent it.
Three years. Three years of waking up at six to get to Luna's job on time. Three years of answering to her name and learning her colleagues' faces and laughing at inside jokes I wasn't part of. Three years of performance, and when Luna finally opened her eyes and the world sorted itself out, nobody pinned a medal on my chest. They handed Luna her desk back and I handed Luna her life back and then I went home and stayed there.
Six months now. The apartment was getting smaller.
But I have looked. I have looked many times, Mona, and I must say — what a magnificent waste.
I read that line again. Then once more, with the appropriate dramatic gravity.
"A magnificent waste," I repeated, one hand over my heart. The voice came out big and round and perfect — the voice I used at Luna's office when someone asked a question I didn't know the answer to. "How devastating. How poetic. Luna, come look at this — someone has finally recognized the depth of my suffering."
The apartment didn't answer. Tuesday. Luna worked late on Tuesdays, catching up on three years of someone else's filing system.
I kept reading.
I will not bore you with explanations you wouldn't believe. Instead, I will make a simple offer: a chance to live stories rather than endure them. Countless worlds. Countless roles. Wonders that would make your little performances look like rehearsals.
All you need to do is accept.
I put the letter down. Picked it up. Held it to the light like there might be a watermark, a logo, some reasonable explanation for how it got into a locked room and why it knew things Luna didn't.
Nothing. Just cinnamon and good paper.
"Well," I announced, and the voice was the big one again, the one that made rooms feel smaller and problems feel like punch lines, "if some mysterious benefactor wishes to whisk me away to adventures unknown — who am I to refuse such generosity?"
I flipped the letter over. Found a pen. Wrote in my messiest handwriting:
Sure. Why not.
I dropped it in the trash.
I didn't even hear it land.
Cold.
Not the cold of falling asleep with the window open. Deep cold, stone cold, and my palms were flat against something gritty and wet that was not carpet and had never been carpet and my stomach twisted hard enough to bring bile up my throat and —
I laughed.
Loud. Bright. Automatic. The sound came out before the thought did, the way a hand catches a railing before the brain registers the fall.
"Well! That was certainly dramatic! Points for theatrical flair, truly, whoever arranged this deserves a standing—"
My vision was swimming. The edges of everything soft and liquid. I pressed my palms harder into the ground because the ground was the only thing behaving consistently.
"—ovation, and the — the set design, Luna, honestly, you've really—"
The laugh got quieter. Because the ground was stone. Because the air tasted like smoke and something metallic. Because the light was red — strips of it embedded in the ground, pulsing in one direction. Arrows. And the ceiling above me was sky, dark and low and starless.
"Luna?"
Normal voice now. The real one. Small and stupid in a place that was too big for it.
"Luna, we're a bit old for this kind of thing, don't you think?"
Nothing answered. The red arrows pulsed. I followed one with my eyes. It pointed down a street — a real street, wide and lined with buildings that shouldn't exist together. Glass storefronts next to arched doorways with carved stonework, intricate geometric patterns climbing walls that also had modern wiring bolted to them. Like someone had built a palace and a city had grown through it without asking permission.
I was in pajamas. Grey. The boring ones I wore because nobody was supposed to see them, because nobody had seen me in anything for six months except Luna and the delivery guy.
The red arrows said shelter. I didn't know what that meant. Shelter from what. Shelter where.
I was dreaming. Obviously I was dreaming. You fall asleep at your desk reading weird letters and your brain builds weird cities. That was — yes. That was the thing that was happening.
I stood up.
My foot caught the hem of my pajama pants — too long, always too long — and I stumbled and my knee hit stone and something wet splashed across my face from a puddle I hadn't seen.
Not water. Thicker. Warm.
I touched my face. My fingers came away dark.
Pain. Actual pain, sharp and bright in my knee, the kind that doesn't happen in dreams because I'd had enough dreams in the last six months to know what they felt like and they didn't feel like this.
The city was empty. The windows were dark. Everyone was already gone.
Something growled.
I ran.
It wasn't a choice and it wasn't brave and it wasn't the measured response of someone assessing the situation. The growl hit my ears and my legs moved and I was fast — faster than I should have been, faster than someone who hadn't left her apartment in weeks, my bare feet slapping stone and barely feeling it, corners taken at full sprint with a precision my body had no business having.
I didn't question it. You don't question a gift horse when the alternative is teeth.
The grinding sound followed. Low and wet and wrong — not a dog growl, not any animal sound, more like stone against stone if stone had a throat. It wasn't running. It was walking. Because it didn't need to run.
A doorway. Cracked frame. I squeezed through and pressed my back against the wall and my lungs burned and my knee throbbed where I'd fallen and my face was still wet with whatever was in that puddle and I held my breath.
The grinding walked past.
I let the air out in a long thin stream through my teeth.
And then the scream.
Close. Not the next street — closer, the end of this one. I could hear it through the cracked wall. High and sharp and cut short the way sounds get cut short when the thing making them suddenly can't.
More grinding. Not one. Several.
I stood up.
I thought about the arithmetic. One of me. Multiple of whatever those things were. Several people who hadn't reached shelter. The numbers were simple. If one person draws attention from the group, the group's odds improve. Ordinary calculation. Not courage.
I stepped out of the doorway.
Three of them. Smaller than the first but the same broken anatomy — dog-shaped things split at the torso, the gap between ribs replaced with rows of grinding teeth. They had cornered people against a collapsed market stall. Five, maybe six, civilians in normal clothes who had not made it to whatever shelter the red arrows promised.
"HEY!"
My voice came out the way it came out at Luna's office when a client was angry and someone needed to sound like they were in charge. Enormous. Projected. The voice of someone who has done this a thousand times.
Every grinding mouth turned toward me.
Oh.
That was all of them. I had wanted one. One would have been responsible.
"Yes! Hello! Over here! The girl in the — the stunning evening wear, if you please—"
They moved. Fast now.
The first one reached me and I had nothing.
A chime.
Bright and sharp and so completely wrong for this moment that my brain stalled on it — a game show notification in the middle of surgery, a doorbell during an earthquake.
「 SPECTACULAR! 」
Text exploded across my vision. Actual text. Floating in the air. Golden. With sparkles.
「 Oh, BRAVO, bravo, what an ENTRANCE! Couldn't have timed it better myself — well, actually, I DID time it myself, but who's keeping track! 」
The creature lunged.
「 Oh — right, right, one moment — think "shield," sweetheart! Just REALLY think it! Like you MEAN it! 」
I thought shield the way a person thinks please don't eat me — desperately and without dignity — and something erupted from my skin. Light. Solid light. The creature slammed into it and bounced off like a thrown tennis ball and for one impossible second I was standing inside a wall of gold and nothing could touch me.
Magic. Actual magic. From my hands. From me.
That thought arrived and I put it in a box and closed the lid because if I opened it now I would stop functioning entirely.
「 NATURAL! Oh, you're a NATURAL! Okay okay okay — introductions! I am your host, your guide, your biggest fan, and your most devoted admirer — you may call me ZAIN! 」
"I didn't — what is—"
「 And I have given you a WONDERFUL set of tools — skills, a shop, all SORTS of goodies — but we'll browse the catalogue LATER because right now — 」
The barrier cracked.
「 — right now you should REALLY point your hand at the big one and think something aggressive! "Blast!" or "Perish, foul beast!" — dealer's choice, really, just MEAN it! 」
I pointed my hand at the big one.
I thought something between blast and please and closer to a scream than a word.
Light left me like a breath held too long. White and blinding. It hit the creature in its grinding torso-mouth and the thing screamed — metal shearing, a sound that would sit in my skull for days — and collapsed into something that dissolved before it touched the ground.
The civilians behind the market stall stared at me.
I stared at my hand. It was shaking. My whole arm was shaking. My whole body was shaking, actually, and had been for some time, but the important thing — the critical thing — was that nobody could tell if I kept it moving.
「 MAGNIFICENT! Oh, this is going to be SO much fun! 」
Two left. Circling. The light buzzed under my skin like a current waiting to be told where to go. The red emergency lights pulsed on the ground. The civilians weren't moving.
I smiled. Wide and bright and exactly as in control as I had been in every meeting, every phone call, every three-year-long performance of being someone I wasn't.
"Well then," I said, to the monsters, to the strangers, to the golden text with the sparkles, to absolutely no one who would understand, "it seems the evening's entertainment has only just begun."
My hands were shaking.
Nobody could tell.