The awakening is not a single day. It has already—
The words were exactly as she had written them, ink dark and steady on the old paper. Then the letters began to move on their own.
They bled and shifted, reshaping slowly in front of me like something alive. Fresh strokes formed beneath the first line, the black ink blooming across the yellowed surface as if an invisible hand was writing in real time.
I transferred what I was carrying to Venna Belmonte. You have to stop the awakening, Abram. The world can still be a better place for everyone.
Venna Belmonte.
My eyes went back to the photographs on the walls. The girl. The one in every frame — maybe twenty, with the same striking blue hair and the same piercing eyes as Riya. She smiled in garden sunlight, sat reading by a window, stood beside a man who could have been her father. The same girl, again and again.
