Sit down on the couch, overwhelmed, and ask Lina if I can just rest for a few minutes before we talk.

You sink onto the couch, your legs suddenly unable to support your weight. The lead helmet dangles from your fingers, heavy and awkward. The apartment—Jane's apartment—wraps around you like a memory made physical. There's her coffee mug on the side table, a linguistics textbook splayed open beside it. The throw blanket over the arm of the couch smells like her. Everything does.

"I just need..." Your voice cracks. "Can I rest for a few minutes? Before we talk? This is a lot."

Lina watches you, her expression a complex blend of sympathy and something harder to name. The oversized t-shirt slips further down her shoulder as she nods, revealing the delicate curve of her collarbone—Jane's collarbone, on another body.

"Yeah," she says softly, turning toward the kitchen archway. "Rest. I'll prepare some sandwiches till then."

She pads barefoot across the worn carpet, her legs bare beneath the hem of the shirt. The resemblance is uncanny and disorienting—the same walk, the same slight curve of her spine. You close your eyes, unable to process it.

From the kitchen comes the soft sounds of domesticity—a refrigerator opening, a knife against a cutting board. It's surreal, this moment of normalcy after the blood-soaked garage, after the teleportation, after everything.

"Do you like pickles?" Lina calls from the kitchen.

You hum in agreement, not trusting your voice.

"Of course you do," she says, and there's a wistfulness there that cuts deeper than any blade. "Jane does. I do."

Present tense. Jane does—not did. The slip isn't lost on you.

You let your head fall back against the couch cushions, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion. Six days of captivity, of fear, of **** scientific improvisation—it crashes into you all at once. Your body feels hollowed out, your mind fuzzy at the edges.

On the coffee table, framed photographs catch your eye—two identical girls in summer dresses, arms around each other, laughing at some forgotten joke. Jane and Lina, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Another of just Jane, mortarboard on her head, diploma in hand. Your throat tightens. You never saw her graduation. She told you her family couldn't make it—another lie in a relationship built on them, you realize now.

The sounds from the kitchen continue—bread bags rustling, a jar lid popping open, the hiss of a soda can. Such mundane sounds after the horror of the garage. You wonder distantly if the blood has reached the van's undercarriage yet, if it's pooling in the concrete seams of the floor.

You should feel terror. This woman just liquefied three men's brains and then made you a sandwich. But all you feel is a bone-deep weariness and a strange, uncomfortable sense of coming home—of being in the one place you were never invited while Jane was alive.

The lead helmet is heavy in your lap. Your fingertips trace the edge where you'd taped it to Lina's neck. The same neck as Jane's. The same voice. The same eyes. But not the same woman. This one can kill with a thought and turn to diamond at will.

And somehow, impossibly, she's the only person left alive who understands what Jane meant to you.