Throughline: Splintered Edges, Part 2

Myra's first sensation, surfacing into the next corridor, was that she was about to drown. Not from water—there was no humid tang of chlorine, no echoing blue—but from a pressure in the air so hydraulic and absolute it felt like her skull might collapse. The walls vibrated with it. Every molecule of her skin ached with a grief and a despair so pure it nearly buckled her knees.

She braced her hand against the nearest surface—lacquered drywall, faintly chilled—and tried to sort the sensation. This wasn't just sadness. It was the dense, specific despair of someone whose world had ended, yet who kept breathing through sheer inertia. It was so thick it was like trying to move through a room packed floor-to-ceiling with wet wool.

She steadied herself and took inventory: the air was warm, stale, with the after-scent of sweat and something metallic. Far off, a ventilation system droned, not a hospital's precise hum, but the lumpy, intermittent groan of an old apartment's HVAC. There was no movement, no voices, no flicker of digital presence. Only the slow, pulsing ache of loneliness radiating outward, hungry for a witness but terrified of being seen.

Her cane tapped forward, and the world resolved a little. She was in a hallway, the narrow kind—maybe a condo or a modern, shoe-box apartment. The floor was cold wood or laminate, the planks slick and new under her bare feet. The kitchen, she guessed, lay to her right: the scent of citrus detergent, the clink of a glass resting on a stone countertop, a faint aftertaste of burnt toast in the air.

She moved by feel, letting her empathy draw her forward as much as her hands. The grief grew denser with each step, drawing her inexorably toward a living room space at the end of the hall. Here, the air was different: sharper, spiked with the bitter resin of dying houseplants, and underneath it, the faint ghost of vanilla room spray, like someone had tried to mask the underlying rot and failed.

She found the edge of a kitchen island with her hip, then a bar stool, then the soft flange of a couch armrest. The couch itself exhaled heat and—she almost reeled—a sullen, bottomless emptiness. Someone sat there, not moving, but so present that even with her ruined vision she could sense the outline: upright, elbows on knees, a single hand folded into a fist tight enough that she could hear the skin stretching over bone.

"Hello?" she tried, voice barely a murmur.

The shape on the couch didn't respond. When it finally spoke—"What are you doing here?"—the voice hit her like ice water. Andy's voice. This desolation, this suspended animation barely registering as life, was Andy. Her stomach clenched as the realization settled: she was witnessing him at his absolute bottom.

She crossed the last few feet and lowered herself onto the opposite arm of the couch. It was an intimacy she would never have dared in her own life, but the air demanded it. The ache inside her chest was now so absolute it was hard to tell where his ended and hers began.

For a long time, neither spoke. Myra let the silence stretch, waiting for something to break it. When it did, it was a dry, almost paper-thin voice: "I'm sorry. I—wasn't expecting anyone."

She licked her lips, which had gone gluey with adrenaline. "You don't have to apologize," she said, voice measured, "I just—" she stopped, trying to think what a normal person would say. "I wanted to make sure you were okay."

A laugh, flat and splintery. "Yeah. I'm great. World champion at 'okay.'"

Myra rested her cane upright between her knees, twisting it gently. The fox head felt alive, as if it could sense the mood. "This is a memory," she said, more to herself than to him. "But it's not mine, is it?"

She heard Andy shift, the squeak of fabric, the slow, hard reset of a man collecting himself. "No," he said. "It's just… a Thursday, I guess."

She braced herself and leaned in. "You can tell me what happened," she said. "If you want."

For a while he said nothing. Myra kept her face neutral, sensing the turbulence swirling just beneath the surface. If she tried to push, he would clamp down, freeze up. Instead, she let the moment hover, counted her own slow heartbeats.

Finally, Andy exhaled, a single, shuddery breath. "I sold it today," he said. "The company. Aural."

She waited.

He laughed again, softer. "It wasn't even about the money. You know? They could grow it beyond what I did. It could help more people. But… it’s just—that was my… everything. My project. My way of pretending there was a reason for all of it. Even after—" He stopped, the word Laura thudding between them, unspoken. "And now it's over. It's gone. They shook my hand, they wired me a number with seven zeroes, and that's it. I'm supposed to start the rest of my life now. Except—" He gestured, the motion wide and helpless, "—there is no rest of my life. Not really. There's just—this." She heard the sound of paper flapping.

Myra had never been so aware of the boundaries between bodies, between hearts, as she was then—her hand curled on the rim of Andy's couch, fingertips mapping microfiber, palm imprinting its heat. The memory had a gravity so immense it warped her sense of self, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if she was sitting beside Andy, or if she was Andy, or if both of them had become the same bruised organ pulsing in this rented darkness. Only the cane—its familiar grain, its persistent solidness—anchored her to herself.

She could feel the echo of her own past in him, not the particulars but the pressure—how each loss didn’t simply wound you, but calcified within, layering until movement itself became a miracle of will. Myra had mocked people for this kind of weakness when she’d been younger, as if grief were a stain you could scrub out with enough discipline, enough contempt, enough time. But now she understood: it wasn’t weakness. It was a slow, unremitting crush, the marrow of your bones being replaced, cell by cell, with a sadness that never left.

Still, empathy was not the same as understanding, and understanding wasn’t the same as fixing. She hadn’t come here to fix. She needed to speak—not to comfort him or herself, but because silence felt like suffocation.

“You don’t have to be alone with it,” Myra said, voice flat but not unkind. She didn’t modulate for him; she didn’t offer the soft, dissolving tone of the therapist or the friend. She said it like she meant it. “You don’t have to do all this by yourself.”

He didn’t reply. His presence was tectonic, unyielding. She could feel the muscles in his neck coiled against any intrusion, the way animals did when they believed the next move had to be a fight or a flight, but there was nowhere left to run.

She shifted her grip on the cane, grounding herself. “You let it go, Andy, and it’s still there, but it’s not just yours anymore.” She tapped the cane against her knee, a nervous tic, then **** it still. “Maybe that’s the point. Eventually everything you carry gets shared out. Even the stuff you think is just for you.”

Another long pause, as if the air itself were thickening in resistance to speech. Then Andy’s voice, so quiet it might have been a thought: “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to be—” He hesitated, and Myra saw it all: the way his face pinched at the bridge of the nose, the clench of jaw, the attempt to **** the admission past pride. “Anything, anymore. I’ve been the guy who fixes things for so long I don’t even know who I am without it. I thought maybe”—he inhaled, shaky—“maybe once it was over, I’d be able to start over. But I can’t even picture what that means.”

She let him sit with it. Then she did something she would never have done as the old Myra, the pre-Annex Myra: she leaned in, let her shoulder touch his for a heartbeat. Physical. Immediate. “It means you survived,” she said, and for once it wasn’t a platitude or a sound bite. “It means you get another chance.”

“At what?” he asked, and the question was almost plaintive.

Myra was quiet a moment, honestly uncertain. She didn’t have an answer for a man whose entire reason for being had just been hollowed out in a single transaction. She thought of her years at university, the patients she’d watched disintegrate under cancer or psychosis, the way the world just kept churning out new wounds for old people. She thought of herself and the thousand small deaths she’d carried, and how she’d always told herself she was above it.

Instead of an answer, she reached out—palm up, open, asking permission. For a moment she thought he would ignore it, rebuff her, but then Andy placed something in her hand. It was heavier than she expected, the weight of it disproportionate to its size. She explored it with her fingers: a card, thick and expensive, edges squared and beveled, embossed with a raised sigil she didn’t recognize. The surface was cool, but it warmed against her skin almost instantly, as if it were alive, or wanted to be.

“It’s an invitation,” Andy said, the words falling like loose gravel. “For a place called The HH. Came this morning. Some weird luxury resort, promising—” he paused, “—wondrous things. I thought about burning it, or just throwing it out. But—” He stopped again, a ragged exhale. “But what else do I have?”

She ran her thumb over the logo, memorizing its peculiar lines. She pictured the kind of person who would print a card like this: deliberate, theatrical, someone who wanted to make an impression that lasted even after the paper was gone. “You could throw it away,” she said, and meant it. “You could say no.”

He didn’t answer, and for a long time Myra wondered if the memory had simply frozen, if the mechanism inside this place had reached the end of its tape and was waiting for her to play it out. Maybe, she thought, this is where it always ended for him, in a vacuum sealed by his own refusal to act.

But then: “I can’t,” he said, soft but final. “There’s nothing left for me here. Aside from Sam, there’s nobody.”

The ache in Myra’s chest didn’t just double; it ricocheted across every surface in her mind, like a tuning fork struck at exactly the wrong frequency. In this moment, there was no separation: his shame was hers, his regret, his certainty that he’d already used up every second chance there was. She wanted to believe she was just a conduit for the memory, a neutral observer, but she could taste the truth: she was here because she owed this man a debt. For hurting him, sabotaging him, even if she had not meant it. For hollowing him out, taking away the one thing that had made him whole. She curled his fingers around the card and pressed his hand shut.

“There will be,” she said, voice raw. “You don’t see it yet, but there will be. People. Women. Claire, Erin, Marissa, Liesa, Norah, Riley, Dawn… Even Sam will be there. A whole future. You will be loved. You just—” She faltered, her mind blank, then **** herself to continue. “You have to trust the pain won’t last forever.”

He laughed, but it was a laugh so denuded of humor that it sounded like a reflex, like the cough of a dying engine. “That’s easy for you to say.”

She let her hair fall forward, a curtain drawn in solidarity, not as a shield. “It’s not,” she said, and this time the words came out even. “I’m one of them. I’m going to be there.”

He turned toward her, more out of reflex than belief. “You’re going to be in The HH?”

She nodded. It was the simplest truth she had. “You’ll recognize me when you see me.”

“How do you know?” he asked, and now there was something like hope in the question, a tremor of belief he didn’t want to admit to.

“Because I have lived it,” she said, her own honesty startling her. “And because I’ve never felt anything this strong before.”

She felt him look at her, or through her. The silence stretched, but his breathing had changed, the rhythm less choked, more deliberate.

She stood, balancing carefully on the cane, and found her way to the door. The echo of her footsteps was sharp, but she didn’t rush. She let herself linger at the threshold, the weight of the memory pressing in from both sides.

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she said over her shoulder. “But if you do—we’ll be waiting.”

Andy didn’t answer, but the room felt fractionally lighter, as if a window had cracked open somewhere.

She stepped through the door and into the corridor, releasing herself from the grip of the scene. But she carried a piece of it with her, the echo of a man who had already lost everything but who might, just might, allow himself to begin again.

The apartment dissolved around Myra like the last notes of a symphony. The weight that had crushed her chest suddenly inverted, pulling inward instead of pressing down, as if the memory itself were being sucked back through a drain. Her feet suddenly found no ground. She stumbled forward into a void that lasted only a heartbeat before solidity rushed up to meet her—the thin, almost-liquid floor of the Garden of Glass, which her bare soles registered as a presence rather than a surface, like stepping onto something breathing.

The pillars' hum rose to meet her, a three-note chord that seemed to resonate through her body rather than around it, and the darkness shifted—still eerie, still infinite, but less hostile now, more like the air had thickened into companionship. Myra's breath came shallow and fast, her cane raised instinctively before her like a weapon or a shield, though she didn't remember drawing it. She could feel the fog curling around her ankles with what felt like recognition, and for a moment she could have sworn it was warm.

She steadied herself, letting the hum of the pillars settle her racing heart. The Garden held her gently.

The whispers came in layers now—no longer pure chaos, but patterns almost becoming coherent. She caught fragments as they drifted past her ears, some from the memory she'd just left, others from places she didn't recognize:

"I’m always left behind," said an achingly familiar voice. The same voice, but younger: “Here’s your slice of cake, doctor!” And Myra whimpered, because she remembered that moment, as a child, at the only birthday of Laura’s she had attended.

“I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I’d taken more risks,” echoed Chloe’s voice. “I’m sorry I misunderstood your interest in me,” said Claire softly. “I think I’m focusing on work too much,” whispered Emi.

"...the world needs at least one of us..." —Myra recognized the voice now. Laura, but sadder, layered beneath something like resignation.

Myra stood very still, letting the whispers wash over her. She was breathing heavily, her empathic senses still raw from Andy's devastation, her own body still trembling with the aftershock of carrying his grief. But here in the Garden, surrounded by the gentle hum and the mirrors and the whispers that seemed to know her name even when they didn't speak it, she felt something shift in her chest.

The darkness seemed to pulse around her, and emotions echoed in the void. Love, anger, grief, joy, longing, a melange she couldn’t quite understand. It was new.

She took a breath, steadied her grip on her cane, and waited for the next room to reveal itself.

Emily emerged from the corridor of glass into the familiar unease of a house she had never visited but knew by heart. The kitchen was small, not quite vintage but not modern either, counters lined with chipped Formica and appliances in muted colors that were last fashionable sometime in the nineties. She knew this kind of place. The table was already set, a heavy white cloth draped over it and sagging where the extension leaf joined the original. At the center, a riot of food: yellow rice, roasted pork glistening under a tent of aluminum foil, a steamer basket full of pasteles, a mountain of green plantains fried to golden chips, a bowl of sweet corn pudding, and a glass pitcher of horchata beading condensation onto the laminate.

The men were already seated: Dawn’s father at the head, back straight, collared shirt open at the throat, jaw set in the way of men who have only recently remembered how to run a household. Luis, the middle brother, wore his firefighter T-shirt, sleeves rolled to show off gym-carved arms, gesturing animatedly with his fork as he spoke. Sebastian, youngest and smallest, hunched over his phone at the end of the table, thumb scrolling, earbuds dangling and ignored for the moment.

At first, Emily didn’t see Dawn. Then she caught the movement—a flash of a black ponytail and the shimmer of a skirt as Dawn moved from stove to table, from fridge to sink, never quite settling, never quite still. There was a practiced efficiency in it, the kind that comes from years of serving without being asked and learning that the only gratitude you get is the opportunity to do it again tomorrow.

Dawn’s hands were deft, but her face was set in a near-smile that never reached her eyes. She placed bowls, refilled glasses, wiped a bead of sauce from the lip of a serving spoon, all with a precision that looked like care but, on closer inspection, was something closer to hope. Each time she approached the table, she hesitated, just a little, waiting for someone to notice.

They did not. Not really. When her father laughed at something Luis said—a story about a fire that had gotten out of hand, about the stupidest thing a rookie could do—he thumped the table so hard the pitcher jumped, but he didn’t look to see who caught it before it spilled. When Sebastian muttered a request for more rice, he kept his gaze locked on his phone, never noticing that the bowl had been refilled before he finished speaking. When the older brother went on about a new promotion track, their father’s face shone with a pride that left no shadow for anything or anyone else.

Dawn moved like infrastructure: visible only when it failed. The food was perfect, the drinks topped off, the plates cleared before anyone had to ask. When she finally slid into her own seat, it was at the corner, as close to the kitchen as possible. She sat upright, waiting for a cue to rise and fetch something forgotten, and every time the men at the table spoke, she watched their mouths as if memorizing lines she’d never be invited to deliver herself.

Emily felt the weight of it—the slow calcification of a girl into a function. She knew the shape of this labor, the way it gnawed you down to a point. She knew, too, what it meant to love people who only saw you in reflection: the fullness of her own childhood came roaring back, and with it, the soft ache of every time she’d made breakfast or managed a schedule or listened to someone’s heartbreak, only to find herself alone once the plates were washed and the house went quiet.

Dawn’s grandmother’s recipes, her mother’s favorite sides, all of it arranged with reverence and care, and yet—when her father reached for the salt, he didn’t even glance at the girl who passed it to him. Not once did anyone ask if she’d eaten yet, or if she liked the way the rice turned out, or if maybe she wanted to sit for more than the length of a single meal before being summoned up again.

Dawn’s absence, in her own home, was a fog that pressed against the windows.

Emily felt a tightness in her chest, a throb behind her eyes. She remembered the slow realization, at fifteen or sixteen, that her mother wasn’t coming back for the holidays, and her father would never be the kind to notice the absence. She remembered how she’d filled that hole with chores and errands and good grades, how every bit of recognition she ever craved came tied to the next job, the next favor, the next invisible, indispensable effort.

She stood at the kitchen threshold, watching memory-Dawn load the dishwasher with ritual grace. The men at the table had shifted to the living room, plates abandoned and conversation growing louder, more boisterous, as if the food had been fuel for something more important. Dawn scrubbed a pan, her hands red from the hot water, and for a second, she just stood there, fingers dripping, gaze fixed on nothing at all.

Emily crossed to her, wanting—desperately—to say something, anything. But the words caught. She saw herself in the curve of Dawn’s back, in the tilt of her chin, in the way she blinked twice, quick, to keep tears from falling. She didn’t want to make it about herself, but the pain was so old, so familiar, that it was impossible not to.

She reached for Dawn’s hand. The contact was like pressing a finger to a bruise that had never healed. Dawn turned, eyes wide, and for a split second, she looked surprised to be seen.

“It’s okay to stop,” Emily said. Or tried to. What came out was a breath, a hiccup, a wordless plea.

Dawn smiled, small and hollow. “If I stop, who will do it?”

Emily shook her head. “Someone else can. Just for tonight.”

Dawn looked at her for a long moment, then down at her hands, as if trying to remember how they’d come to be so raw and tired. The silence between them stretched, thick as dough, until Emily’s own hands started to shake.

“I’m not sure I know how to be anything but useful,” Dawn said. She said it lightly, like a joke, but Emily heard the truth in it, clear as the sound of glass breaking in a quiet room.

Emily tried to reply, but her throat was thick, her own old grief suddenly alive and thrashing inside her. She wanted to tell Dawn that she was more than what she did for others, that she mattered even when she wasn’t pouring herself out like this, but the words tangled and burned. Instead, she just stood there, the two of them side by side, bound together in the ache of being overlooked.

When Dawn went back to the dishes, Emily couldn’t follow. The room spun, the edges of the scene blurring. She staggered backward, away from the hum of the dishwasher and the clatter of plates and the bright, artificial light. She let herself sink to the floor, back pressed to the cabinet, knees drawn up. The tears that came weren’t for Dawn—they were for herself, for the girl who had learned, so long ago, to disappear into usefulness, and who even now sometimes called that surrender by another name: devotion, toy, whatever made it easier to bear.

From her place on the floor, Emily watched Dawn in profile: shoulders tight, hair clinging to her neck, still moving, always moving. She didn’t know how to reach her. She barely knew how to reach herself.

When the world finally tilted and pulled her away, Emily let it. She let herself fall through the dark, tears still hot on her face, knowing that the ache would follow her into the next room, and the next, and the next. The world went white.

Norah expected darkness, but the light in the gym was fluorescent, flat, almost medical. She stood at the edge of the old hardwood, painted lines faded to ghost stripes under decades of sneaker scuff. There was the distant echo of basketballs—maybe from a real team somewhere in the building—but here it was empty, save for two girls in the center of the floor, their voices slicing through the stillness.

They were both thirteen, or close enough to it: one with black hair chopped into jagged lengths and blue eyes that looked too old for her face; the other taller, with curly brown hair and a mouth set in a permanent frown. Norah recognized Myra at once—she’d seen the childhood photos, and she’d memorized the tells: the set of her shoulders, the refusal to ever show when she was scared. The other girl must have been Laura. Norah had never seen her alive, not even in a dream, but she knew her the way you know a character from a book you’ve read a hundred times: all the contradictions, all the soft spots, all the pain.

They were fighting about school, but that was just the opening salvo. At the edge of the gym, Norah picked up every tell: brittle, fast-moving rage—that this was no simple spat over a missed assignment or a lazy teammate, but something ancient, fossilized in their bones and ready to crack.

Laura started it, snatching a manila folder from her backpack and slamming it on the floor between them. Papers fanned out like a spatter of accusation across the scuffed wood.

“I did all the research,” Laura spat, voice already pitched for parental showdowns. “I triple-checked sources, printed everything, and you didn’t write your part. That’s why we got the bad mark, Myra—because you can’t do anything unless someone holds your stupid hand.”

Myra arched an eyebrow—she’d mastered the look of someone twice her age—and shot back, “Oh please. Nobody wants to be on your team because you boss everyone around. Maybe if you let someone else talk for once—”

Old ground, automatic. Norah saw Myra’s shoulders square, defensive but unflinching. Laura’s face bloomed red, her jaw locked, yet her fingers trembled as she gathered the papers, craving order, an illusion of control.

“You made me look like a freak in front of the whole class,” Laura yelled, shoving the folder at Myra. The papers skittered across the floor. “You always do this. You pretend you’re smarter, but you just—” She pressed a hand to her jawline, tracing the faint ridge of her scar. Her eyes flicked down to her fingertips, hesitation flickering. “You don’t care about anything except making fun of people.”

In that instant, Norah recognized the real fracture beneath Laura’s fury: fear. Fear of what her father would say when he saw her broken again—broken grades, broken confidence, the broken flesh he once snapped. Laura’s hand lingered on the scar, both her anchor and her terror.

Myra stared at Laura a long moment, then rolled her eyes and bent to pick up the folder, never pausing to dust off the layer of grime. “You’re right,” she said, voice flat. “I don’t care. Not about this, and definitely not about what you think.” Norah felt the tremor in Myra’s jaw—too subtle for anyone else to notice—and she recognized it as the same wound she’d glimpsed in Myra’s eyes before: the ache of loneliness, the shame of a childhood surrendered because her mother sold her love for money.

Laura’s shoulders curled inward at the words, and Norah flinched in sympathy. She knew, from the way Laura’s arms folded across her chest, that Myra had struck a hidden nerve. But Laura wasn’t finished.

“Just admit it,” Laura pressed, each word a blade. “You tanked the project because you hate me.”

For a heartbeat Myra looked bored—her features slack, as if she’d rehearsed indifference so often that it threatened to swallow her. Then she smiled, thin and humorless, and stepped forward until her shadow merged with Laura’s on the gleaming hardwood. The gym lights picked out every line of her face: the tightness around her mouth, the flicker in her eye that betrayed something raw and unspoken.

“You want the truth?” Myra said, voice low and dangerous. “Fine. I did it. Because I’m sick of you acting like the world revolves around your sob story.”

Her words hit like a slap. Laura’s mouth fell open, but no sound came out. Norah watched Laura’s eyes flicker, her lip trembling—she tried to rebuild her anger, but the structure had collapsed, leaving only a soft vulnerability that Myra seemed determined to expose.

“That’s not fair,” Laura whispered, so quiet it was almost lost in the distant clap of basketballs.

Myra leaned in, as if sharing a secret. “You want fair? You want honesty?” She paused, letting Laura’s fear hang between them. “Even Andy doesn’t really like you. He told me behind the gym that you’re too weird—that he only hangs out with you because he’s afraid you’ll freak out and cry.”

The words were surgical—precise, remorseless. Norah felt each syllable in her chest, but beneath the cruelty she also detected the echo of Myra’s own loneliness: a sharp edge cutting into someone else because no one had shown her mercy.

“That’s a lie,” Laura managed, voice hollow even to her own ears.

Myra shrugged, triumphant. “Ask anyone,” she said. “You’re the only one who doesn’t see it.”

For a moment the world narrowed to the white midcourt stripe and the two girls standing on either side of it, breath ragged, hearts pounding. The banners overhead, the distant squeak of sneakers, the faint tang of polish—all of it receded into silence. Norah looked at Myra’s rigid posture, her clenched fists, and saw how alone she was, how she’d learned to wear cruelty like armor.

Laura’s posture finally gave way; she wrapped her arms around her middle, as if to hold herself in place. Then, in a single, small voice, she asked, “Why do you hate me? What did I ever do to you?”

In Myra’s face something flickered—regret, maybe, or the memory of a little girl abandoned because her mother couldn’t love her. But it passed before it could settle. “You exist,” Myra said, flat.

Laura didn’t cry. She turned and began gathering her things with methodical calm, her sneakers squeaking softly on the polished floor. Norah watched her go, then looked back at Myra standing alone in the middle of the gym, shadowed by her own words.

An aftershock rolled through Norah’s chest—she remembered the day in sixth grade when she’d wounded her best friend with a casual cruelty, then spent months pretending she hadn’t meant it. The hollow victory, the shame that sprouted like mold in her memory—she felt it now, for both of them. And she understood: Myra hurt Laura because she was hurting too, her loneliness and shame turned inward until they could only be unleashed on someone else.

The gym was a tomb now. Every fluorescent bulb hummed in disapproval, and the space between Myra and the door stretched, impossible to cross.

Myra stood there for a long time, longer than Norah expected. She let the folder slide from her hand to the floor and just stared at it, as if hoping it would evaporate or erase the evidence of her cruelty. She looked, for the first time, small—a kid with no audience, no opponent, just the echo of her own meanness ringing in her ears.

Norah stepped into the silence, the ache of Laura’s exit still raw in the air. The gym, so big and echoing before, now felt like a vacuum, every fluorescent bulb buzzing at a frequency just above human tolerance. Thirteen-year-old Myra stood in the center circle, hugging her own elbows, eyes locked on the spot where Laura had disappeared. She looked like someone who’d just realized there was no crowd left to cheer, only the janitor sweeping up after the fight.

Norah moved toward her, crossing the distance with the deliberate pace of someone who knows there’s no such thing as privacy in a memory. Her footsteps—she could feel them, solid and biting against the wood—didn’t make a sound. The Garden wanted her invisible, but she didn’t care. She wanted to be seen.

Norah’s shadow stretched long and trembling across the lacquered wood, her own posture halfway between accusation and collapse. She felt like she was watching herself through plate glass: the way her arms were crossed, her jaw set, her eyes narrowed to slits of blue indignation. She took in the girl—Myra in miniature—who had delivered the kill shot, and felt every atom of her body lock into the old, familiar grid of adolescent warfare. She was thirteen again, then sixteen, then thirty, all at once, spiraling through the infinite recursion of old wounds.

“Feel good about that?” she said. The words tasted like sour wine, sharp on the tongue. She watched the echo of them strike the younger Myra, saw the way they made her flinch, but also the way she clamped her face into that practiced, furious mask. Norah had seen that expression on a hundred playgrounds, in a thousand mirrors.

The girl squinted up at her. “Who are you supposed to be, anyway?” There was a thin, wavering line of courage under the contempt, like a bridge made of dental floss strung across a chasm.

Norah didn’t dignify it with an answer, just stepped closer, looming. “That story about Andy and Chloe,” she said, letting the words drop like coins into a well, “it’s bullshit. You made it up because you knew it would hurt her the most.”

Myra’s mouth worked for a second, opening and closing, and Norah could see the battle playing out behind her eyes. Deny, deflect, double down, or dissolve. The girl opted for option three, shoulders tightening, voice crackling like a shorted-out radio: “She needed to hear it. If it wasn’t me, it’d be someone else. At least I did it straight to her face.”

Straight to her face, Norah thought. As if there was purity in the method of cruelty.

“You think you’re doing her a favor?” she said. “You think shoving a knife in a person is some kind of mercy?”

The girl’s glare sharpened, but the heat in it wasn’t all malice—there was an electric undercurrent of shame, too. “It’s better than lying and saying everything’s fine when it’s not. She’s been hanging on Andy like… like he’s her only air supply. Like if she just tries hard enough, it’ll matter. She had to know.”

Norah felt the words wash through her, stinging and cold. She remembered the poison of that age: how truth could be wielded like a cudgel, how the urge to puncture other people’s bubbles became a way of staving off the emptiness in your own. She saw the outline of her own old self in the girl’s posture—the arrogance of the wounded.

But there was a deeper question, a core to the rot, and Norah advanced another step, her sneakers squeaking on the dry floor. “Why Laura?” she pressed, voice low and calm. “You could have left her alone. You could have just walked away. Why did you have to go nuclear?”

She watched the tremor run all the way from the girl’s clenched hands to her teeth. “Because,” Myra said, blinking three times in fast, jagged succession, “she acts like the world owes her an explanation for everything. Like she’s the only one who’s ever gotten hurt. Like if she just yells loud enough, people will come running to fix her life.”

“She was terrified,” Norah said. She remembered the look on Laura’s face, the folding-in of her body, the searching for a wound she knew was coming but couldn’t dodge.

Myra’s gaze collapsed to the floor. “I was terrified, too,” she whispered. “But nobody cared.”

The words reverberated through the empty gym like church bells. Norah felt a chill ripple up her own spine. There it was: the black box at the heart of every villain story. The wounded animal, the primal kid, the one who learned too early that pain was only ever real if you could export it.

She almost—almost—wanted to take the girl’s hand, or at least offer her a tissue. But Norah’s own hands had balled into fists, fingernails digging into her palm, knuckles blanching. She could feel herself wanting to shake Myra by the shoulders, to demand that she run after Laura and take it all back, unbreak the moment, but the air felt thick with inevitability.

“She’s going to believe you,” Norah said, voice rough. “Even if she knows it’s a lie, she’ll believe it. She’ll carry that forever.”

Myra shrugged, but the gesture was all bone and no muscle. “Welcome to the rest of her life,” she said.

Norah wanted to spit, wanted to scream, wanted to peel her own skin off and run from the gym, but she stood her ground. “You hate her that much?” she asked. “You hate her more than you hate yourself?”

Silence. Norah watched as the lines in Myra’s face rearranged into something that looked like defeat, but kept just enough anger to not give up entirely. She recognized the strategy. It was the survival tactic of a kid who’d never once been allowed to lose a battle.

“You’re not her,” Norah said, finally. “You’re better than this. You could do better than this.”

Myra’s laugh was small and bitter. “You don’t know me.”

“I know what it’s like to set your own house on fire just to see if anyone notices the smoke,” Norah said, her voice shaking for the first time. “All you get is the smoke, and you never stop smelling like it.”

The girl’s mask cracked, just for a second. She looked away, toward the exit doors, the bravado draining out of her like a slow leak in a tire.

“Maybe,” Myra said, softer now, “that’s all some people get.”

Norah inhaled, let the air burn all the way down. She could keep talking, keep pushing, but she knew the futility of it. Thirteen-year-old Myra would go on to be who she would be, and so would Laura, and so would Norah. The past was a tongue-tied god, disinterested in redemption.

But she had to try, even if it was only for herself.

“If you ever get the chance,” Norah said, “tell her you’re sorry. Tell her you didn’t mean it. Even if you did. Because sometimes people just need to hear you say it.”

Myra didn’t answer. But Norah thought she saw, in the subtle dip of her chin, in the way her shoulder blades retracted, the faintest echo of a nod. Maybe even a plea.

The lights flickered, and the whole room shuddered. Norah felt herself being pulled away, the world bending at the edges. She let it take her, but not before glancing back one last time at the girl in the center circle, frozen under the glare, a statue built entirely of regret and stubborn pride.

The gym dissolved, each detail fragmenting into constituent particles that drifted upward into grey. The fluorescent lights dimmed to nothing, the hardwood floor losing its solidity, becoming texture, then memory, then absence. Norah's footsteps fell silent as the space unmade itself around her, walls collapsing inward not with **** but with the gentle inevitability of something that had never truly been solid at all. She stood suspended in the dissolution, watching the last brightness swallow itself, until the gym was nothing but a faint thermal echo fading into cold.The Garden of Glass reasserted itself in layers: first the humming—a gentle, three-note chord that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere—then the mirrors, their fractured surfaces swimming into focus like eyes adjusting to darkness.

Norah found herself standing in the spiral of thin glass pillars, their flute-like forms beaded with condensation that caught what little light existed. The fog curled around her ankles with almost familiar warmth, and she realized her breathing had synced with the pillars' hum without her noticing. Inhale. Exhale. Hum.

She was steadier than when she'd entered—the confrontation had wrung something out of her, leaving behind a strange clarity—but also hollowed, as if someone had reached into her chest and reorganized her carefully. One of the larger mirror fragments flashed ahead of her, the light refracting blue for just a moment, and she moved toward it with the automaticity of someone following a thread. As she drew closer, she caught fragments of whispers threading through the darkness: "I thought maybe, if he remembered me, it would mean something," in a voice she almost recognized as Emi’s. "They need me to. Dad can’t, so I have to," layered beneath it in someone else's cadence; and underneath both, younger and clearer than the rest, "I had to say it. Even if nobody ever heard me."

The darkness around her felt marginally less oppressive than before—or perhaps she was simply less frightened of it now. She could see shadows moving within some of the larger mirror shards, too distant and too quick to identify, but their presence was oddly comforting: evidence that she was not alone in this place, even if she would never quite meet the others. She reached out and pressed her palm against the flashing shard, feeling the glass accept her touch, and braced herself for the next room.