Throughline: Splintered Edges, Part 1

The hospital corridor was always longer than it should have been. Liesa’s shoes squeaked on the tile, echoing down the dead-white hallway. She blinked and the world sharpened: rows of flickering bulbs, each fighting for its last hour of life; the chemical tang of antiseptic; the persistent, sour note of sweat and exhaustion that the cleaners could never scrub out. Every door had a number and a name, but they all blurred together in the hours after midnight.

A younger Myra drifted ahead, moving like a ghost in a white coat two sizes too big. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, flyaways snaking over her ears, her glasses perched on a nose gone sharp with sleeplessness. She held a clipboard against her chest like a shield, and her free hand jittered, flicking through files and pill packs with a speed that bordered on frantic.

Liesa followed, unable to catch up, watching the way Myra’s steps never faltered, even when she staggered. The woman’s eyes were red, not from tears but from the chemical burn of not blinking often enough. She moved from room to room, checking charts, adjusting IV lines, drawing blood, always moving, always moving.

It was the monotony that got you, Liesa thought. The way each shift bled into the next, how every act of care was a tiny apology for something that could never be fixed.

A monitor somewhere beeped an alarm, and Myra whipped around, lab coat flaring. She shot down a side corridor, Liesa trailing behind. At the nurse’s station, a kid with an intern badge and two days of stubble flagged her down. “Dr. Calder—this lady’s O2 sat is tanking. Room 214.” Myra didn’t answer, just snatched the chart and kept going.

Liesa pressed on, following Myra into the patient’s room. It was the same as every other: ancient equipment, a plastic pitcher of melted ice, the stench of old urine and fear. The patient was in her seventies, lips blue, eyelids trembling. Myra moved fast, checked the line, adjusted the mask. The woman’s hand shot out, grabbing Myra’s wrist with shocking strength.

“Don’t leave me,” the woman gasped, voice barely audible. “Please. Don’t.”

For a second, Myra hesitated. Then she placed her gloved hand over the woman’s and squeezed, hard enough to be felt but gentle enough not to break. “I’m here,” she said, her voice softer than Liesa had ever heard it. “I’ll stay until it’s better.” The patient’s grip loosened, and Myra stroked her hand until the eyelids drooped, then slipped away, closing the door as quietly as she could.

She stood in the hallway, alone, breathing like she’d run a marathon.

Liesa caught up, finally. She wanted to say something—anything—but her throat was tight. She watched as Myra slumped against the wall, eyes locked on the scuffed floor, then pinched the bridge of her nose so hard her fingers went white.

It was penance, Liesa realized. Every night, every patient, every extra hour Myra **** herself to work was punishment for something she couldn’t name. Even though Myra didn’t know the story—didn’t know the lie she had spun for Laura had led to her ****—part of her knew the harm she had caused, not just with that one lie, but throughout her younger years. Liesa saw the guilt, recognized it like a reflection.

Liesa’s own chest twisted. For a flash, the hallway flickered and became her apartment in Antwerp: the mildewed wallpaper, the too-thin mattress, the stack of bills she paid with money earned from men whose names she never bothered to remember. That was penance, too, a way to buy her father’s life back a day at a time, even as it cost her own. The shame was a physical thing, crawling up the back of her neck, threatening to **** her.

The scene snapped back to the hospital. Myra pushed herself off the wall and stumbled down the hall, hands shaking so bad she could barely hold the pen to sign off on her notes. Liesa saw it—the tremor, the dark circles, the way Myra never paused to eat or drink, just kept grinding forward, unstoppable but slowly breaking.

This is what it looked like to try to atone for something unforgivable.

Liesa stepped forward, her own heart pounding. She reached for Myra’s hand, half-expecting the woman to pull away, but Myra froze, staring at the contact as if she didn’t know what to make of it.

“You don’t have to bleed yourself dry to pay it back,” Liesa said, the words coming out low and strange.

Myra’s lips parted. For a second, the mask dropped. She looked like a child, lost and scared, **** for someone to tell her the suffering was enough. But then the moment passed, and she pulled her hand free, wrapped it around her clipboard, and strode off down the corridor at double speed.

But she was slower than before.

Liesa watched her go, then slumped against the wall, the fatigue catching up all at once. She let herself feel it: the guilt, the hunger, the loneliness of trying to repair something that could never be repaired.

The lights in the hall flickered. For a split second, the world shifted again: she was in her old bedroom, the one with the floral sheets and the water-stained ceiling. Her mother was gone, her father already half-lost to grief, and Liesa’s own hands shook with the need to do something, anything, to keep the world from collapsing. She saw herself on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees, the shame and the fear and the hope all braided together into a knot that had never, truly, come undone.

The Garden let her see it, just for a second. Then it let her go.

Liesa pushed off the wall, wiped her face, and took a deep breath. The air was the same: antiseptic, cold, indifferent. But she wasn’t the same as she’d been a minute ago.

The hospital corridor dissolved—the fluorescent lights bleeding downward into grey nothing, the walls softening into smoke, Myra's figure dissolving into ash before Liesa could reach out again. The floor beneath her feet became insubstantial, then absent entirely, and Liesa found herself suspended in the familiar darkness of the Garden of Glass, gasping as if she'd surfaced from deep water.

Her legs trembled as she stood, knees threatening to buckle with the weight of what she'd just witnessed—not her own shame this time, but Myra's, worn like a second skin. She steadied herself, hands reaching instinctively into the void, and found the cool surface of a pillar, beaded with condensation that felt almost like tears. The mirrors hummed their gentle song around her, and she realized the darkness had softened somehow, the void less suffocating, as if something vast and patient had drawn one breath closer. She could see her reflection now in the larger shards—fragmented still, but the pieces were beginning to align, half-second delays in their mirroring creating the strange sensation that she was watching herself from a moment in the past.

A shard flashed ahead, musical and bright, and Liesa moved toward it on unsteady feet, drawn by the light like a moth. Around her, the whispers shifted: "No one will date me if I'm not tired. That's how you win at adulting" overlapped with "I can't mess it up again," and beneath them, almost inaudible, a younger voice saying "You did it, Andy! You're a hero!"—none of which belonged to the memory she'd just survived. As she reached for the threshold, she caught movement in her peripheral vision—another girl, perhaps, or the ghost of one, passing through the Garden in a different corridor of mirrors. Beside her pillar, smaller shards were flowing together like water, healing themselves into larger fragments with soft, liquid sounds, as if the Garden itself was being reassembled, piece by piece, around her.

Riley felt the world reassemble around her, brick by brick, molecule by molecule. First came the scent: wine, high-proof and cheap, sloshed into crystal flutes and already evaporating off the guests’ hands. Then the bite of turpentine, fresh paint, and the feral sweat of Friday-night bodies that had all decided SoHo was the only place left on earth with air worth breathing. Last, the acoustics—hard, glassy, reverberating every word through a chamber of white-walled gallery space, no corner left for secrets or soft landings.

The gallery was the kind you found all over lower Manhattan: a split-level box in a prewar building, all exposed brick, sandblasted pipes, and a second-floor mezzanine from which bored trust-funders could look down on the plebs below. The crowd was exactly what she expected—graphic designers, finance refugees, a few professors, a stray group of students herded by an adjunct who wore her exhaustion like a badge of honor. Riley made a beeline for the north wall, not because she cared about the art, but because she already saw her target.

Emily stood at the entrance, backlit by the streetlights bleeding in through the glass door. She looked small against the space. Tonight, she was all performance: a crisp white shirt knotted at the midriff, hair **** into a disciplined twist that only made the wisps and flyaways more obvious, and a bright scarf looped around her throat that screamed "see, I have style, I belong here." Under her arm, a slim portfolio. Her smile was a thin line, stretched almost to breaking.

The moment Riley saw the tension in Emily’s knuckles—how she clutched the portfolio, how her fingers fidgeted with the strap—she knew what kind of evening this would be.

She watched as the curator made her entrance. The woman’s hair was an architecture of razor-straight lines, her cheekbones sharp enough to slice cheese. Jewelry dripped off her ears and wrists, but in that calculated way that said “I’ll judge you for caring.” She glided through the crowd with a predatory stillness, pausing only to drop the occasional compliment-bomb before moving on to more important prey.

It was not long before she noticed Emily. She made a show of examining the portfolio, arching one perfect eyebrow, then beckoned Emily closer, into the shadow of a concrete column near the bathroom corridor. The exchange was brief, and brutal. Riley could not hear the words, but she saw Emily’s face as the blows landed—first, the slight recoil, then the automatic smile, then the telltale micro-second where Emily’s jaw tightened and her eyes flickered from hope to flat, defensive nothing.

The curator stepped back, offered a handshake that was more dismissal than greeting, and evaporated into the next social circle.

Emily, left in the wake, stood very still. She stared at the portfolio as if it might have begun to smoke or bleed. For one moment, she looked like she was going to bolt. Instead, she **** the smile wider, snapped the portfolio shut, and made her way to the bathroom with the rapid, mincing steps of someone who feared her knees would give out if she moved any faster.

Riley followed at a distance, slipping past the couples crowded around a Julian Schnabel knockoff and the man-child discussing “subversive post-painterly abstraction” like it was the cure for cancer. She reached the corridor and waited, watching the bathroom door for movement.

It took almost ten minutes. When Emily emerged, her face was clear of tears but red around the nostrils and eyes. She walked with new precision, the tightness now redistributed into her shoulders and jaw. Riley peeked into the bathroom—empty, save for a single smear of mascara on the inside of the door and the slow, metronome drip of a faucet that someone had not closed all the way.

She followed Emily into the empty stairwell, letting the sound of footsteps on metal echo. At the landing, Emily stopped, leaned against the brick, and took a long, slow breath, as if she were drawing all the oxygen from the city and filtering it through herself before she let it go.

Riley waited.

When Emily noticed her, she didn’t jump or feign surprise. She just said, “You saw that, huh.”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “I saw.”

Emily’s laugh was dry, unsweetened. “She told me my stuff was too personal. That it’s emotional, but not emotional in a way anyone cares about. That I should work on my ‘statement’ if I want to get into any of the juried shows.” She mimed air quotes, then shrugged. “Also, my color theory is lazy. That part was almost helpful.”

Riley wanted to say something sharp, something to impale the curator’s memory, but she knew it would just bounce off. Instead, she sat on the edge of the step, knees apart, elbows on thighs. “You were hoping it would go differently.”

“I was hoping for anything but that,” Emily said. “I didn’t think I’d be a shoo-in. But…” She trailed off, voice pinched.

Riley nodded, eyes fixed on the chipped paint of the stair rail. “It’s cruel. The way they train you to be ****, then punish you for it.”

Emily didn’t answer. She turned, staring up at the window on the landing, the city smeared beyond it in neon and sodium vapor. The scarf was in her hand, and she twisted it tight, as if she could wring the feeling out of her body and leave it behind.

“I can’t even let myself cry,” Emily said, voice so thin it nearly vanished. “If I start, I’m afraid I won’t stop. It’s easier to just… pretend I didn’t care that much. That it was all a big joke.”

“You cared,” Riley said. “I saw it on your face.”

Emily made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “That’s the worst part. The faces I make are always the ones I mean the least.” She pressed the scarf to her lips, biting down to keep her voice from quivering. “I wish I could just be real, even for a second.”

Riley looked at her, really looked, the way she’d looked at dying animals in the shelter when she was a kid—recognizing the pain, but refusing to flinch away from it.

She stood, climbed the step to stand beside Emily, and reached for her hand. Emily let it happen. They stood in silence, fingers intertwined, until Riley could feel the pulse steady in Emily’s wrist.

“You don’t have to be okay right now,” Riley said. “You can hate her, or you can hate yourself, or you can just feel nothing. It’s allowed.”

“I know,” Emily whispered.

Riley let go, but gently. She searched for a joke to break the tension, failed, then tried something better: “For what it’s worth,” she said, “the world needs more people who care too much. Especially if they paint it in colors like you do.”

Emily looked up at her. There was a long silence, the kind that would have made Riley uncomfortable if she’d been any other person. But she stood there, willing to take the hit.

“Thank you,” Emily said, after a while. “I don’t know if I believe you, but… thank you.”

“You don’t have to believe me now,” Riley said. “Just maybe remember it next time you’re painting.”

Emily smiled, a real one, small and raw but undamaged. “Will you come see my next show?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Riley said, “I’ll be first in line. Even if it’s just a school gym.”

Emily let the scarf fall. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt, then squared her shoulders. She didn’t look back as she disappeared into the crowd, but Riley watched as, seconds later, Emily reemerged on the gallery floor, the smile now genuine, the posture a little less brittle. She floated through the crowd like a swimmer breaking the surface, eyes brighter for having cried.

Riley waited a minute, then followed. She felt lighter, not because anything had been fixed, but because—for once—she had managed to give comfort instead of just describing it.

The gallery, for all its whiteness and glass and curated cool, felt warmer now. She watched as Emily gravitated toward a group of students, and this time, when she laughed, it reached all the way to her eyes.

Riley let herself smile, then melted into the background, a ghost among the art, but happier than she’d been in weeks.

The gallery faded—the white walls bleeding into gray, the crowd's voices fragmenting into static, the scent of wine and turpentine evaporating as though it had never been. Riley felt the brick beneath her palms become glass, felt the hard floor tilt into nothing, and then she was falling upward into the familiar maze of fractured mirrors and endless dark. She emerged gasping, as if surfacing from deep water, her hand instinctively reaching out to steady herself—and found only fog, warm and almost alive against her skin. The Garden hummed in greeting, gentler than before, and she realized her cheeks were wet.

She stood for a moment, gathering herself, still trembling with the residue of Emily’s pain. Around her, the pillars' condensation caught what little light existed, beading like tears. A whisper drifted past—”That’s me”—Dawn’s voice. Another fragment of sound followed: “I need to tell you something, and I don’t know how, because it’s not even a big deal, except that it is, and…” Sam’s voice, anxious and distant. The mirrors hummed their three-note chord, and ahead of her, a larger shard flashed with faint movement—a shadow shifting within, waiting. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, steadied her breathing, and stepped toward it. Behind her, a reflection lagged half a second too late, catching her in profile as she moved. The darkness seemed less oppressive now, almost cradling rather than suffocating. She touched the flashing mirror.

Emi stepped through the doorway and immediately recoiled—not from fear, but from the overpowering, marrow-deep recognition of a scene she’d spent most of her life trying to erase. At first blush, it was her own childhood kitchen, resurrected by some cruel puppeteer who’d twiddled only a few dials: the air was sour with milk left out too long, and the laminate counters still gouged by years of cheap knives and cheaper arguments. But the refrigerator wasn’t avocado, as hers had been, but a jaundiced white, its handle caked with fingerprints that suggested not a family, but a feral pack. The window was present, but its view was all wrong. Instead of the haze and brown-sprawl of Riverside, this one offered a slice of sky the color of a dead computer monitor, and below it, a strip of scorched grass. That detail—along with the fragile, not-yet-hopeless blue of the hallway paint—made it clear: she was trespassing in the Ashford house. Laura’s old house.

Emi tried to move, but felt herself snagged by the gravity of the scene. She’d always prided herself on remembering nothing—blanking out the bad stuff until it lost its teeth—but the room conspired against her. Even the floors were wrong: the vinyl tiling was a pattern she’d seen only in Laura’s childhood home. It was like standing inside a snow globe of someone else’s trauma, only there was no glass to keep her hands clean, and no holiday song to make it seem less obscene.

A muffled voice bled in from the next room. Emi flinched at the sound, then braced for impact.

In the living room, the television blared, tuned not to cartoons but to the evening news, the anchors’ faces locked in a perpetual rictus of concern. “Hot and dry again tomorrow, with advisories in effect up and down the valley—” But the weatherman’s drone was instantly obliterated by a human voice, deeper and twice as loud, as if the TV were being used not for entertainment but as an instrument of ****.

“You never fucking listen, Princess!” The words hit the drywall like a thrown bottle—sharp, venomous, designed to leave a mark. Emi recognized that voice immediately. She could never forget the arrogant timbre of Laura’s father, the way he made Laura’s mother’s name sound like a curse. It was the voice of every man who had ever tried to discipline the world with his rage. Syllables torn up by years of Pall Malls and Budweiser and disappointment so thick you could use it to caulk a boat. “You never listen, and you never shut up!” A sound echoed, a slap and a whimper.

Beyond the kitchen, the silence pooled for a moment, followed by the gentle clatter of utensils. Then, floating from down the hall, a different voice—womanly, but so threadbare it nearly dissolved in the air: “I’m making dinner. Please just… let me finish this, please.”

“Dinner? You fucking call that—” Another crash, this time the unmistakable shatter of glass. Bottle, plate, or just the TV remote—Emi couldn’t say, but the sound was so precise, so expertly calibrated to hurt, that it sent a shudder down her back.

She thought of leaving, but her feet wouldn’t cooperate. The kitchen itself seemed to close in tighter, the walls bending at the corners. The linoleum stuck to her shoes, and each breath was thick as pudding. She wanted to believe that this was just a simulation—something constructed for her own enlightenment, or maybe just Arabella’s amusement—but the dread in the room was too authentic to be artifice. It was the kind of dread that colonizes your inner organs, that leaves you with a permanent ache even after you’re grown and should know better.

Then came the sound of running: the high, light slap of bare feet on hardwood. Emi’s gaze snapped to the threshold just in time to catch a blur, a child’s silhouette with hair hacked off at the chin and a T-shirt so big it could have doubled as pajamas. Laura—or at least, the Laura who had lived in this place, a Laura reduced to essentials by years of strategic deprivation. The girl must have been eight, maybe nine, her arms skinny and marked with the telltale sunburn of a child who spent too much time outside, hiding.

Laura paused at the kitchen entrance, eyes flicking from the floor to the ceiling and settling, at last, on the fridge door as though it might open up and swallow her whole. She looked terrified, and struggling to hide it. Her eyes glistened and she winced with each echo of her father’s voice. Emi wanted to reach for her, to break the spell—she remembered too well what it was to be both invisible and the center of gravity in a house like this—but she could only stand there, a powerless observer to the most private kind of disaster.

She’s not even supposed to be here, Emi thought. The fight was a grown-up thing. Except that was the lie they all learned—kids heard everything, and it never, ever missed.

The shouting didn’t let up. “Princess! Now!” Laura’s father’s voice shot up a notch; Emi squeezed her hands over her ears as if that could muffle the crack of rage. She looked at Laura—pressed back into the hallway’s peeling wallpaper, shoulders hunched, as if she could melt into the surface and disappear.

This wave of helplessness clung to Emi’s bones. If you made yourself smaller, quieter, maybe you could outrun the next outburst. Laura’s chin trembled in the same way Emi’s had all those years ago. Unsure if she should only observe or intervene, Emi’s instinct burned hot: she had to reach out.

She crouched down on the balls of her feet, level with the trembling child. Laura’s eyes flicked up—bright blue through tangled hair. Emi whispered, barely louder than the roar beyond the next wall, “You’re going to be okay. You deserve better. You’re not broken.”

Instead of freezing, Laura’s brows shot up in alarm. “Who—who are you?” the child demanded. Her eyes widened at the sight of Emi’s arms—six slender limbs fanning around her torso. “Why do you have six arms?” Panic edged her voice as she planted her heel, ready to bolt. “Get away! My dad will be even angrier if you’re here.”

Emi’s heart squeezed at the fear. She pressed a single palm to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said gently, “I won’t make him angry. He won’t see me. I’m here because I care about you. No one should ever shout at you or your Mom like that.”

Laura’s mouth twisted. “You don’t know me.” She backed up another step. “Go away.” But her foot caught on the threadbare rug, and she stumbled—only half ready to flee.

Emi rose one of her extra arms, transparent at the edges in the shimmering Garden of Glass. “I—I know what it’s like to be small and scared,” Emi said. She inched forward, the faint clink of glass echoing. “My arms…” she paused, lifting them gently, “help me hold all the people who felt alone.”

Laura’s breath caught. She swallowed, gaze flicking toward the wall where Greg’s yells had climbed to a fever pitch. Something thumped to the ground. Slowly, she let Emi’s outstretched limb graze her sleeve. The fabric was thin, but the contact registered. Laura exhaled a tight, shaky breath. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t run, either.

The noise in the living room climbed in tempo, but Laura no longer cowered. She straightened, shoulders braced as if the shouts might scratch at her but not break inside. Emi remembered every moment she’d longed for someone to tell her she mattered—that she was allowed to exist. She’d never truly heard it, not when it counted. But maybe, in this fractured, glass-formed memory, she could give Laura the words she’d never gotten herself.

“You’re safe with me,” Emi whispered, each arm gently folding around her as if gathering the child into a protective cocoon. “You’re allowed to be here, and you’re not alone.”

Laura's blue eyes glistened once, and then the dam broke. Her small body convulsed with sobs against Emi's chest, her fingers clutching desperately at Emi's shirt.

"I hate it," she choked out between gasps. "I hate being so scared all the time. I hate how he hurts Mom." Her voice cracked on the last word, dissolving into hiccuping cries.

Emi's six arms enveloped her completely, creating a sanctuary of limbs.

"Laura," she whispered into the child's chopped hair, "you are loved more than you know." She hesitated, knowing boundaries she couldn't cross. "Andy loves you. He'll always wait for you."

Laura stiffened in her embrace, pulling back just enough to search Emi's face with tear-swollen eyes. "Andy?" she whispered, something like hope flickering across her features.

Emi nodded, subtly, as if this explained everything. The words twisted inside her, but she kept her face gentle. “He’s your best friend, right? Sometimes when you need him most, he can’t be there. But he’s always waiting, even when it feels like everyone else is gone.” She wanted to say, someday you’ll be the one to save him, but the knowledge of that future—what it would cost, how little it would fix—felt like a mouthful of ice.

Laura’s lip trembled again. “He’s just a kid,” she said. “He can’t save anybody.”

Emi smiled, a little wobbly. “He doesn’t have to. Sometimes it’s enough just to wait for you to come and find him.” She smoothed the tear-wet hair from Laura’s brow and let the girl burrow into her arms again, the two of them making a cocoon against the screaming from the other room. "Andy thinks you’re the bravest person in the world," Emi said. “Even when you’re scared.”

Emi wanted to say more, that Andy had never stopped loving her, that nobody with a heart could look at her and not love her at least a little. But the truth wouldn’t fit inside the lie they’d always told children about grownups: that everything makes sense if you just wait long enough, that hurt is always temporary.

Laura stilled, breathing in short, shuddery gulps. “You’re not real, are you?” she muttered, muffled by Emi’s shirt. “You’re just a dream.”

Emi considered lying. She could say yes, she could say no, but it didn’t matter. “Maybe,” she said, “but I believe in you anyway.” It was the truest thing she’d ever said—truer, even, than the things she’d confessed to Andy or herself. In this moment, the rest of the world was nothing.

The kitchen light shimmered, shadows flexing along the walls. Emi felt the scene dissolving, the edges unzipping, but she held Laura for as long as she could. “You don’t have to be brave all the time,” she whispered, lips close to the girl’s forehead. “You can be scared if you need to. It doesn’t make you weak.”

Laura nodded, squeezing tighter, then let go. She stepped back, a little taller, a little more herself. The bruises of fear still lingered on her face, but her eyes were steady now. She didn’t smile—she just looked at Emi, as if memorizing her, as if she might need to remember this feeling someday when the world tried to take it away.

“Is he okay?” Laura whispered.

The question was a knife, and Emi nearly flinched. “He will be,” she said, the lie so tender it became the truth for just a second. “He misses you every day. But he remembers you with the biggest smile. Like you’re still making fun of him from wherever you are.”

Laura actually smiled at that, weak but real. “He’s easy to make fun of.”

The room around them softened, the harsh edges dulling to something like safety. It couldn’t last, of course—it never did—but for a moment Emi let herself believe it might.

“Can you stay a little longer?” Laura asked.

Emi almost said yes, but she could feel the memory already loosening its grip, the world starting to pixelate at the corners. She touched Laura’s cheek—her own hands steady now, even if her heart was shaking itself to pieces.

“I can’t stay,” Emi said, “but I’ll see you again. I promise.”

Another crash from the living room. Laura didn’t flinch. She turned and walked toward the sound, head lowered but unbroken, the way kids do when they’ve already seen the worst and know it’s not the end. “He’s gonna say sorry,” she whispered. “He always does. Then it happens again. And again.” Her lips pressed together, folding the memory of a smile deep inside.

Emi watched her go, heart buckling. She waited until the child disappeared down the hall, then let her own knees give out, curling onto the darkness that was the floor of the Garden of Glass. She pressed her face to the water and let the tears come, finally, all six arms wrapped around her chest until she could barely breathe.

The kitchen dissolved like salt in water—not melting, but dispersing, each detail atomizing into component particles that drifted upward and vanished into the oppressive dark. The walls came apart first, then the linoleum, then the very air that had carried the weight of Laura’s father’s voice. Emi remained kneeling in the space where the floor had been, watching Laura's silhouette disintegrate into nothing, her small shoulders the last thing to fade. The darkness rushed in to fill the void, absolute and suffocating, swallowing the memory whole.

When the garden reformed around her—mirrors humming their gentle, patient resonance—Emi found herself gasping as if surfacing from deep water. Her six arms trembled as she pushed herself upright, each one visibly slower than it should have been, as if grief had made them heavier. The pillars stood closer now, their glass beaded with fine condensation like tears held suspended. She could see her reflection in the larger shards, but it lagged—a half-second delay that made her feel like a ghost watching herself move. A whisper drifted past: "I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry," in a voice she recognized as Laura’s, followed by another, fractured and ****: "When I see her, I keep thinking it could be me." And beneath both, almost inaudible, the echo of a scream full of horror and despair: "Nee, nee, Mama, nee, nee, alsjeblieft, Mama!"

A larger mirror fragment ahead flashed with blue light—faint, as if someone had carried a lantern past on the other side of the fog, though Emi saw no one. She moved toward it slowly, her legs unsteady, each step splashing against nothing. The darkness around her seemed less suffocating than before, or perhaps she was simply too hollowed out to notice. The condensation on the pillars caught what little light existed and refracted it into fractured rainbows that made her eyes sting. As she approached the threshold—the mirror shard that would lead her into the next room, into someone else's wound—she paused, pressing one hand to her chest and letting the other five unfold, steadying herself against the geometry of a space that was slowly, incrementally, beginning to hold her.