The first thing that occurred to me was that whoever had just body-checked me out of the aether was very warm, very heavy, and very, very soft.

The second thing was that I couldn't breathe.

The third thing was — pink.

Pink hair in loose waves, haloed by broken starlight.

Pink-amber ribbons half-formed and flickering like someone had paused her transformation sequence mid-frame. Gold dust still falling off her like she'd punched through the ceiling of heaven and forgotten to wipe her shoes.

My vision refocused.

Celestial Sonata was sprawled on top of me, one arm over my forearm, the other on the ground. Slender legs entangled around mine. Eyes wide and stunned and a few inches over my face.

"Oh," I croaked.

Her pupils contracted. For a heartbeat we just stared at each other, mutual shock perfectly synchronized.

Our breathing was ragged. The air between us felt thin, electric, tasting of light perfume and sugar.

And then, my body, with an absolute, unerring talent for betrayal at the worst possible moments - made its opinion on the situation known.

It wasn't a gradual dawning. It was a sudden, flag-rising, all-hands-on-deck announcement of interest.

Celestial Sonata's face turned a shade of crimson that had nothing to do with her magical girl powers.

Her eyes widened further, her gaze involuntarily darting down for a fraction of a second before snapping back to my face, her jaw tight with a silent, mortified scream. I could feel the heat of her blush even through my own rising mortification.

My own face felt like it was on fire.

Then, she made a noise I had never expected to hear in my life from the world's most beloved Magical Girl.

"Ee...eeph!"

A strangled little squeak of pure, unadulterated panic. Her body jolted, her arms and legs suddenly remembering they had no business being intertwined with mine.

She scrambled and launched herself me with the clumsy, frantic energy of a startled cat, her limbs tangling in the starlight ribbons that still clung to her. She arced through the air and landed hard on her rear end a few feet away, her back pressed against the flickering, dissolving wall of the suburban house.

Air came back in a burning rush. My ribs protested. My brain filed the last five seconds under: We Are Never Speaking Of This Again, and then immediately betrayed me by replaying how soft and warm and comfortable she'd been.

She was real. That was the part my brain latched onto next.

Not a projection. Not a scripted construct like Aleksei.

Her glowing aura hit my senses like a live current. Messy, overclocked, bleeding raw emotion at the edges. Too vivid to be anything but genuine.

"Uh. Ow," I added belatedly, because my dignity was already dead and might as well stay consistent.

"You..." Mayari repeated again, her voice a raw, disbelieving thing. She didn't completely lower her crystal spear. Her eyes - still that piercing, analytical twilight, were locked on Sonata.

Sonata scrambled to her feet, the motes still falling from her hair like dying embers. She looked from me to Mayari, her face a mask of total confusion that was quickly hardening into something else.

Recognition.

"…Mayari of the Twilight?" Celestial Sonata breathed, like the name had been locked behind her teeth for years.

They stared at each other.

The ruined suburban living room hummed quietly, glitching at the edges. The wallpaper behind Sonata rippled into wireframe for half a second before the floral pattern snapped back, slightly misaligned. The ceiling fan above us rotated a quarter turn, then reversed, then froze mid-spin.

No one commented on it.

Celestial Sonata was about three or four inches taller than Mayari. The two of them stared each other down across the ruined room, framed by wallpaper that kept trying and failing to remember what decade it belonged to.

I could feel something coiling between them. Old history, half-buried. Not the kind you interrupt lightly.

Which was unfortunate, because my lungs and my survival instincts had a joint complaint.

I pushed myself upright, ribs protesting, and got my feet under me. The floorboards flickered into wireframe under my palm, then snapped back into glossy hardwood a shade too perfect to be real.

"Right!" I said, eloquently trying to defuse the situation. "So umn. New rule, going forward - no more surprise collisions from higher-dimensional directions. My heart really can't take it."

Sonata blinked like she'd genuinely forgotten I was present for a second. Her aura - visible gold with threads of pink and a lot of frayed white static-like noise stuttered, then tried to smooth itself into something more dignified.

"Sorry," she mumbled.

The apology sounded automatic, like it came from the part of her that did PR tours and talk shows, not the girl who had just squeaked on top of me.

Mayari didn't lower her gaze.

"The last time I saw you," she repeated, enunciating every word like it had edges, "you were my height. And you had pigtails."

Sonata's throat bobbed.

"That was—" She caught herself, shoulders stiffening. "That was another life."

"I've been... lost since," Mayari whispered.

Sonata's fingers curled at her sides. For a moment she looked less like the poster girl of humanity's hope and more like someone who'd just run into an old photo she didn't remember taking.

"…That incident was a long time ago," Sonata said quietly.

Mayari's jaw flexed.

"How... how long? Exactly?"

Sonata looked down at her hands.

"Three years," she said. "Almost to the day."

Mayari flinched. The crystal in her hands flickered violently. "Three—? I... I see," she said, her voice a strained monotone. "Days. For me. It was... Days. A year at most, subjectively."

"I'm sorry," Sonata said.

Mayari shook her head sharply, as if trying to clear water from her ears. "Sorry? For what? Defending your city? For being a Magical Girl?" Her words were brittle.

"Hana of the Dawn was there to rescue me and Tara of the Night Sky. You couldn't have known. All you knew was that three Magical Girls of upper A-Rank capabilities were on a rampage in your city. You did what you had to."

Celestial Sonata's shoulders slumped a fraction of an inch. The confident, heroic facade I'd seen on the news screens a hundred times had completely crumbled away.

"I still shot you out of the air and compromised you," she said quietly. "I thought—"

Her voice caught. She looked away, jaw working.

"I thought if we didn't end it fast, the city would fall. I didn't stop to ask why three Magical Girls with stellar reputations as heroes were tearing through the city's defenders, coming out of a top-secret research facility."

The word facility hung there like smoke.

Mayari flinched.

"A research facility, huh? To us, it was just any old drab prison."

Sonata's aura flickered. "It was... a bad day. For everyone."

Mayari didn't answer. Her gaze was distant, staring through Sonata like she was reading ghost script on the wall behind her.

For a second, I thought Mayari might lunge. Her posture was tight, coiled, her fingers trembling around her spear.

But instead, Mayari dispelled the crystal spear - which exploded back into harmless motes of light. She seemed... tired.

"I'm not the same person who fought you that day," she said, her voice softer now. "You're not the same person who killed her."

Sonata's face crumpled at the last two words.

"I..." Sonata started, but the words wouldn't come.

Her gaze went blank for a second.

"It has been far longer for you than me," Mayari said, her tone flat. "But we have a much more pressing problem right now."

Her gaze cut past me, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

The house groaned.

The floral wallpaper began to peel away not in strips, but in pixels, revealing the humming, wireframe skeleton of what looked like a computer simulation beneath.

The floor tilted.

Mayari stumbled, catching herself on the back of a sofa that was rapidly dissolving into light.

The couch in the corner stretched by half a meter, then snapped back. A picture frame went from holding a family portrait to a blank, gray gradient and back again. The ceiling fan completed one stiff, stuttering rotation, then froze.

And then as suddenly as it began, it all snapped back into place.

The walls remembered they were walls. The floor remembered it was horizontal.

But the world didn't feel reset so much as… downgraded.

The colors were wrong.

The shadows lagged by a fraction of a second when I moved my head. The fake sunlight through the curtains hit my skin at the wrong angle for where the window actually was.

Like a game running on too little RAM.

[RAIKO-OS//SYSTEM_WARN]

● Sandbox integrity: 74% → 54%

● External interference: escalating

● Unexpected occupant count: 2 (sparkly)

okay so good news: you are no longer alone

bad news: we're are no longer alone

My shoulders sagged a little at the familiar font, then tightened at the percentage.

I didn't know what this Sandbox Integrity was supposed to represent, but we'd dropped nearly twenty points in… what, a minute?

Sonata steadied herself with one hand on the wall. Her fingers sank in too far, the plaster stretching like rubber before snapping back with a shiver.

She stared at her hand. Then at the room.

"This isn't..." she started, then stopped, brows knitting. "Whatever this is, it's not any type of barrier or entity dream space I recognize."

"That's because it isn't," Mayari said.

Her voice had gone back to that clinical calm that somehow made everything worse.

"This is your fortress," she added, tipping her chin toward me. "A Gossamer space woven out of discarded possibilities and anchored to your mind. Something built it around you."

I swallowed.

"Gossamer space?" Sonata parroted, tilting her head. Her gaze flickered between Mayari and me, a question forming in her pale blue eyes that she was too proud, or too confused, to ask aloud. She was looking at me like I held the instruction manual.

I didn't.

"I've been trapped going between different Gossamer Echoes for days upon days," Mayari continued, her tone that of a field surgeon calmly explaining a bizarre wound. "They're psychic refuges. Reality anchors woven from memory and regret. They're dangerous. Usually, they're small. Focused on one person, one trauma. Always potent moments in a world's history. A great warrior's last stand replayed forever. A mother's final loving lullaby looping on a ghost song."

She took a slow, deliberate step toward me, her movements economical and precise. "Duke-class Aberrations have been known to cause them. The Count-class Judicators created by the Imperator of Liminality weaponize these spaces to corrupt and turn their victims. The Emperor-class Aberration that ended Earth's Fourth Chaos War, it left echoes like this all over New York's ruins."

Every word was a stone dropped in the silent room, and they all landed too close to home. Gossamer Echoes. Judicators. These weren't terms I'd heard in any of Elio's lectures.

"I've studied them extensively," she finished simply, as if that explained everything. And for her, it probably did.

Sonata absorbed this, her brow furrowed. The sheer, casual academic density of it seemed to bounce right off her heroic, straightforward worldview. "So... someone trapped him in a memory?"

"A memory's a fragile thing," Mayari countered, her gaze finally, fully landing on me. There was no pity in it, only a cool, analytical intensity that made my skin prickle. "They tend to break when you poke them. This place is a different thing entirely. This is... curated."

Mayari gestured at the room around us, at the slightly-too-perfect sunlight, the slightly-too-clean floorboards. "This isn't a random memory. This is a palace. A fortress built from the brightest moments of a life. It's got multiple anchors. The idealized father figure. The overprotective sister. The ditzy, loving aunt."

Then, her eyes cut to Sonata. "And pray tell. How did you come to be here?"

Celestial Sonata twitched in place for a second, before suddenly put on the world's most unconvincing 'cocky' face. She puffed out her chest, putting on the brave Celestial Sonata™, Humanity's Hope grin I associated with her. Eyes closed and hand loosely brushing her chest and everything.

"I was… between engagements," she said. "Taking a cooldown away from the main impact zone. My support network flagged an anomaly."

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Anomaly?" Mayari repeated.

"Yes, erm! Yes. A lot has happened in the last three years. I've climbed all the way into the S-Ranks, you see. And er, there's a full-blown Magnitude 9 Chaos Event going on outside. Wherever outside is supposed to be."

Her gaze flicked to me for half a heartbeat, then away again, like she'd just glanced at the sun by accident. "Something… off. A spike in hostile interference. A premonition if you will. I followed the resonance back," she went on. "Like tracing feedback along a microphone cable. Next thing I knew, I found an unconscious victim in a shelter being torn apart. I engaged and then there was a crack in the air and then—"

She made a vague gesture that encompassed: this house, this nightmare, and the part where she'd landed on top of me with full body contact.

Her ears were still tipped red.

"You dived into an unknown spatial construct," Mayari said flatly. "During an ongoing Duke-class engagement in a high magnitude event. Without backup. To investigate a single-point anomaly. Likely as one of the few S-Ranks in... wherever you were. Probably necessary to deal with whatever the biggest monster in the incursion is."

"I've done stranger things," Sonata shot back, a little faster than she probably meant to.

Then, realizing how that sounded, she winced. "I mean—"

She stopped. Took a breath. Rebuilt the sentence.

"There was no time to escalate," she said more evenly. "If I'd waited, whatever this is might have finished its work. Pulling someone out of an active intrusion is easier than pulling them out of whatever's left afterward."

She kept her eyes on Mayari as she said it, but I could feel the weight of what she wasn't saying like static in the air.

You were lying on the floor. Unconscious. Something eldritch and otherworldly was leaning over you.

Nope. Not thinking about that. Absolutely not picturing it.

Mayari studied her for a long moment.

"You traced it and pierced through it clean," she said finally. "Dropped straight into the core of the Gossamer instead of brushing against the outer layers. That isn't normal."

"I had help," Sonata said, a little too quickly again. "My… support for this one is good with weird, evidently. We locked onto the anomalous frequencies and… I rode the harmonics."

Harmonic. Resonance. Feedback.

She sounded like she'd swallowed a tech blog in a hurry and was hoping no one noticed.

It was weirdly cute.

Also, in fairness, if anybody got to talk about "riding harmonics" into an extradimensional death house - it was the girl whose entire brand was turning emotions and sound into city-sized explosion.

There was some a lot off about her frantic explanation that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but I shelved it for later.

Mayari's eyes narrowed the moment Sonata said support.

"Your… handler dropped you into this," she said slowly. "On purpose."

Sonata flinched.

"They trusted me," she said, a little too hot. "And they were right. I reached him before that thing did."

"Maybe," Mayari said. "Or maybe it wanted you here, too."

The air went colder.

I suddenly became extremely interested in the floorboards.

"Okay," I cut in, because someone had to. "Can we maybe not do the 'who made the worse tactical decision' thing while we're inside the haunted brain palace?"

Neither of them laughed.

Typical.

The house gave a slow, splintering creak, like it was offended on my behalf. The far wall warped inward for a second, bulging toward us before snapping back, the frames rattling in unison.

The room gave another low, unhappy creak. Somewhere in the kitchen above, a cabinet door visible through the glitching walls and floors moved between a state of 'open' and 'closed' on its own, three times, like a glitched loop.

"It's getting worse," I said, because that was the kind of razor-sharp observation I brought to the table.

Mayari's eyes narrowed. "There's more pressure now. The last Echoes I saw, they didn't… lean like this. They were more like trapped snow globes. No one pushing from the outside. This one feels like someone's trying to twist the whole thing inside out."

Sonata's shoulders squared. "Then we hit it before it finishes twisting. Simple."

"Simple?" Mayari echoed. "You can't just punch the space and call it a day. It's anchored to his mind. Probably for good reason as well."

Her chin flicked toward me.

Sonata froze, actually processing that for the first time. Her gaze snapped to me, a dozen questions and one very sharp realization crowding behind her eyes.

"Oh," she breathed.

I grimaced. "Apparently, this is what I get for having a personality or something?"

Mayari stared at me a second longer, then seemed to file me under ongoing problem and turned her attention back to the room.

"The important part," she said, "is that this place is not stable. And it's built on you."

"Built on me," I repeated weakly. "Great. Love that. Very flattering."

The room gave a tiny, almost offended twitch. One of the family photos on the wall jittered, cycling through three different versions of the same pose before settling on one again.

A new window slid into my vision.

[RAIKO-OS//STATUS]

● Sandbox integrity: 54% → 51%

● Anchor load: elevated (3 concurrent real processes)

● External interference: climbing

note: this instance was sized for one (1) extremely average human boy current usage: you plus a pair of walking magical singularities recommendation: leave the center quietly, figure out a way to punch back

My stomach did a slow, unpleasant flip.

I opened my mouth, then very carefully closed it again.

The window hung in my vision for another heartbeat, snark and numbers and all, before I gave it the mental equivalent of a side-eye and it politely minimized.

Sonata was watching me.

Not the room, not Mayari. Me. Like she'd heard something, some tiny shift in my breathing.

"You're making a face," she said cautiously. "Is this your 'you're about to tell a joke' face? Maybe an 'I have a really stupid idea I should run by everyone but won't' face?"

She tilted her head, a strand of pink hair falling over her cheek. "I'm… not great at telling them apart. Er. I think that's what I'm seeing at least."

"Wild extra option," I said. "It's the 'my… migraine just gave me lifestyle advice' face."

That was the best I could come up with on short notice that wasn't: Actually, there's a sarcastic artificial human living in my eyelids.

Mayari's eyes narrowed, just a fraction.

"You see something?" she asked.

Her tone wasn't accusing. Just sharp. Observant.

"Just… artifacts," I said, waving a vague hand at the room. "Edges flickering. I have a feeling the creator of this place doesn't like us standing still while all this is happening."

I had no idea what the heck Rai-chan really was or what her limitations were. However, it was still a sobering realization that she was currently having what appeared to be a metaphysical slug fest with an extradimensional monster straight out of our worst nightmares. And she wasn't losing too badly.

"Point taken," Sonata muttered under her breath. She pushed off the wall, the last of the starlight ribbons evaporating from her sleeves. "Then we move out."

"Our direction matters," Mayari said. She did another slow sweep of the room, eyes half-lidded like she was listening for something I couldn't hear. "In most Echoes I've seen, the emotional center is the clearest scene. The further you get from that center, the more the world forgets its lines."

"So we, what," I said, "walk until the set designer gives up?"

"Something like that. Things are more complicated because it isn't just your memories at play here. Ordinarily I would try to poke holes into the anchor's field of recollection. It is usually clear who the Echo is based off of. The memory, the regrets. But here..."

Mayari's gaze drifted to the now-blank picture frame on the wall, and then to the empty space where Aleksei had vanished.

"It's messy. Too many anomalies," she said.

Sonata, meanwhile, seemed to have a much more… straightforward approach.

She stepped up to the wall opposite the one she'd crashed through. She raised a hand, then paused.

"Messy fits," Sonata muttered. "Let me... let me take a look here..."

She pushed off from the wall, rubbing her hand over the plaster.

Her eyes moved over the toy keyboard, the metronome, the posters - quick, precise passes that somehow didn't linger on anything. But her posture shifted noticeably.

Her shoulders had gone very still.

Not battle-ready still. The other kind. The kind of stillness that came from something you already knew was gone. There was even a misty nostalgia in her eyes.

I realized I was holding my breath.

"This isn't a regular enclosed barrier," Sonata said finally. Her palm flattened against the wall, fingers splayed like she was feeling for a heartbeat. "Even incredibly advanced magical enclosures and traps like the Void Clan's famous Amitabha or the Vinci family's Cogito Fortress... they're built like cages. Even the Amitabha - which utilizes an infinite light that makes escape nearly impossible by making it impossible to gauge direction or progress, is still fundamentally a cage. There are edges, even if you can't see them. This feels... different. It's more like… an unspooled thread. There is no cage, it's all just openness upon openness."

She looked at me over her shoulder. "Does that… make sense?"

No. Not at all.

"No," I said. "Not even a little. But I'm willing to pretend it does if it gets us out of here if it keeps us unspooled."

Mayari stepped closer to the wall, eyes tracing where Sonata's fingers pressed into the plaster.

"Think of it this way," Mayari said. "A cage has bars. If you hit them hard enough, they bend. This feels less like bars and more like… someone took the floorboards of reality and pulled them into an endless hallway."

"Still not loving it," I muttered, but the image lodged in my brain anyway: the world pulled into a ribbon, stretching away into somewhere that wasn't mine.

My gaze drifted around the room.

A fancy childrens' keyboard on a study-looking stand. Metronome with a slightly chipped corner. A lovingly crafted convertible desk.

My skin prickled.

"This… isn't my stuff," I said quietly. "I mean, obviously. But it's not random either. It's…" I swallowed. "If Aleksei was somehow pulled into the Echo, then this should be his daughter's room. Or the room she grew up in, anyway. I think."

Sonata huffed, narrowing her eyes as she continued to trace lines with her hands.

Mayari's gaze flicked from me to Sonata, then back again.

"Then it's reasonable to surmise that it's relying on more than one anchor," she said. "You. Perhaps whatever entity created this is pulling from another source also."

Mayari paused again. "And... I don't know what to make of this."

The Magical Girl sounded annoyed at herself for not knowing. That scared me more than any vibration in the walls.

"Is that… bad-bad or just regular bad?" I asked.

"New," she said. "New is usually bad."

The room hummed like it agreed. The floor shifted a fraction of a degree to the left and stayed there. My inner ear did not appreciate the update.

"I have an idea," Sonata said abruptly, stepping back.

She turned to face us, the confident hero's mask snapping back into place so tightly I almost believed it. "If this space is built on memories, then the strongest parts are the ones that matter most to you. The parts you've touched. So if we want out safely, maybe we need to find the thinnest areas and punch through. The memories that anchor you to reality. Like shaking someone out of a deep dream."

"You can do that?" I asked.

"In theory. I have some... special working knowledge when it comes to dimensional displacement theory," Sonata said, not looking at either of us. "I can use my Signature to feel the vibrations in the space around me. Find the weak spots. The places where the 'construct' is weakest. We just have to find the memories that anchor you to reality and shake you out of a deep dream.

"...Or we could wind up exposing him to whatever is out there," Mayari cut in.

Sonata's mouth closed with an audible click.

They stared at each other over my head again. I suddenly felt like a very important medical file being argued about over the patient.

"It shouldn't make a difference," Sonata said, after a beat.

"No," Mayari said. "It absolutely does."

She stepped around me, into Sonata's space, just enough that their auras scraped. Gold-pink light and twilight crystal slashed against each other, then reluctantly settled.

"In the last Echo I saw," Mayari said, "the strongest scene was the one that broke. A soldier's last stand. The memory of watching their friends die, that was the core. That was what held the space together. But when you touched that memory, when you… confronted it, it destabilized the whole thing. Because the pain was the anchor."

Her gaze cut to me. "The strongest part of a Gossamer Echo isn't always the happiest one. Sometimes it's the loudest. He is being shielded by memories of safety, security, and love. That is a rare, potent type of protection." Her gaze drifted to the now-blank picture frame on the wall, and then to the empty space where Aleksei had vanished. "But you are correct that there are likely other types at play here. You can only selectively choose so much when you try to draw multiple reality fragments together."

A sick feeling crawled up my throat.

"If what we see here is the happy memory," I said slowly, "what happens when we find the sad ones? The thin ones Sonata was talking about?"

"There may not be enough to form a coherent space. And then we would be cast into Imaginary Space where the laws of reality are in flux. There's not much in the way of a consistent timeline or physics out there. It can manifest as a chaotic storm of light and color, or as a place where your thoughts become manifest. It is not a place we want to be," Mayari continued. "The space between the Gossamer Echoes can be...unpleasant. I have been able to survive due to my powers as a Magical Girl but it has not been easy."

Mayari didn't look away from Sonata.

"If we rip through the loudest memories or the thinnest memories," she went on, "we might get us out under its cover. Or we might dump him straight into whatever is hammering at this place from the outside. Without protection."

"So we do nothing?" Sonata shot back. "We stand here and let it hammer away?"

The house creaked again, like it appreciated being used as exhibit A.

"I am not saying we do nothing," Mayari said. "I am saying we exercise caution with what we touch and how we move forward."

"And I'm saying the more 'safe' you make this for him, the easier it is for that thing to find him and swallow him whole," Sonata said. "Echo, Domain, dream—if something's folding reality this hard around one person, it isn't because it wants to give him a spa day."

Her gaze flicked to me, then away.

"Sorry," she added, a beat late.

"Thanks," I said weakly. "I'm really loving being the walking loot box everyone is fighting over."

They both flinched at that.

Sonata dragged a hand through her hair, scattering the last of the starlight motes.

"Look," she said, quieter. "When someone is trapped in a barrier, you don't always get to pick the gentle option. Sometimes you yank them out through the scariest part because that's where the door is."

"And sometimes," Mayari replied, "you tear the door off the hinges and the whole room collapses on their head."

She said it like she'd seen both outcomes.

The silence stretched, tight and thin.

I cleared my throat. "Counter-proposal," I said. "We try not to find out which metaphor kills me, erases me from existence, or gets me puppeted first."

That got me two matching, equally annoyed looks.

"What if," I barreled on, "we start small? You both sound like you're talking about… surgery. Maybe we poke at something that isn't obviously one of my Top Ten Life-Defining Moments before we start ripping out emotional load-bearing walls?"

Mayari's gaze shifted, thoughtful. "Trial cut," she murmured. "On a non-critical section."

Sonata frowned. "If there is such a thing in here."

"There has to be," I said. I turned, scanning the room.

Bed. Keyboard. Desk. Posters. A little bookshelf. The corner where Aleksei had vanished still felt like it was humming at the edge of my vision.

My attention snagged on the closet door.

Plain white. No stickers. No little name plaque.

No cutesy stars. Just… door.

"That," I said, pointing. "I don't feel anything from that at all. Like, emotionally. Zero nostalgia. Just wood and crime scenes in horror movies. This is also a section of the Gossamer Echo that wasn't pulled from my memories. That tracks, right?"

Sonata followed my gaze, and the face she'd been putting on vanished as her eyes widened in shock.

For the first time since she arrived, her face did something unguarded and complicated in here. It was just... a teenage girl's gaze of wonder. It was gone in a heartbeat, but I caught something.

"I… agree," she said, her voice a little too level. "That spot is... Quiet."

Mayari considered it, head tilted. "Low emotional resonance is as good a place as any to start."

She stepped forward, crystal already coalescing around her fingertips, but Sonata raised a hand.

"Wait."

She walked toward the closet, her steps hesitant. She stopped a foot away, her aura pulsing in soft, pink-amber waves that lapped at the white paint like water. Not trying to break it. Just… listening.

I watched her, my own chest tight for a reason I couldn't name.

She reached out, her fingers hovering just over the wooden surface.

"Okay," she breathed. "Okay. This is safe. Let me."

Mayari stiffened, her own energy crackling in protest. "You'd best b—"

"I know exactly how to handle this one," Sonata said, her voice firm but quiet.

Her aura dimmed as she went, gold tucking itself in, like someone pulling in a trailing gown so it wouldn't catch on anything. Up close, the doorknob looked wrong if I stared too long. Too smooth, then too sharp, shadow in the wrong place.

Sonata put her hand out, then hesitated, looking back at us.

"Last chance to vote for the bedroom door instead," she said.

Joke, but not really.

"Nope," I said immediately. "We respect closets in horror stories. Especially the tentacley mind-screwing sort. I'm not turning my back on it."

Mayari nodded once. "Closet," she said. "Small space. If the construct reacts badly, easier to retreat from."

"This is the worst tactical justification I've ever heard for opening a cursed door," I muttered.

Sonata huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh. "Okay," she said. "On three. If it tries anything, I'll… blunt it. Just a little."

"Blunt," Mayari repeated. "Not shatter."

Sonata's jaw tightened. "I know."

Her hand closed around the knob.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then the room subtly leaned toward her - as if all the lines in the wallpaper, the grain in the wood, the invisible direction of gravity itself had turned to watch.

"One," Sonata said under her breath.

Gold light gathered in her fingers. Not a full song. Just the suggestion of a note.

"Two."

My heart was hammering so hard it felt like it would knock me out of my own chest.

"Three."

She turned the knob and yanked the door open.

No jump scare. No monster. No screaming void.

Just dark.

Not black, but that deep, unlit hallway dark that never quite goes absolute. The air beyond felt… thin. Like someone had stretched the oxygen farther apart.

A faint draft brushed my face. It smelled like dust and old electronics.

Sonata let out a breath I hadn't realized she was holding.

"Okay," she said. "That's… better than expected. Given what I know."

"Don't say that," I said automatically. "That's how you jinx it."

"Stay here," Mayari said.

She stepped past us, hands loose at her sides, and leaned just enough to peer into the closet. Her eyes unfocused slightly, like she was listening to something that wasn't sound.

"What?" Sonata asked, after a moment.

"It doesn't want to exist," Mayari said.

I stared. "I'm sorry, what?"

"The edges fray as soon as I look directly at them," she said. "Like it was pasted in after the rest. This isn't a true memory. It's a corridor. A graft."

Sonata's shoulders straightened. Her aura warmed again, like someone turning up the volume a little.

"So we walk the part that hates existing," she said. "That tracks."

"It also means it may not hold together for long," Mayari warned. "If we go, we go quickly."

She stepped back, giving Sonata room.

"This is still safer than poking at the core and foundations," Mayari added, glancing at me. "For now."

"Great," I said. "Wonderful. Love our options."

Sonata held out a hand to me, fingers steady despite the faint tremor in her aura.

"Trust me?" she asked.

Objectively, the correct answer was no.

We had known each other in person for maybe five minutes, during which she had landed on me, squeaked, and then proposed invasive metaphysical brain procedures.

I took her hand anyway.

Her grip was warm and sure. The contact took the edge off the wrongness bleeding out of the open closet.

"Try not to let go," she said.

"I wasn't planning to wander off," I replied. "Seems like a bad time to explore my independence."

Mayari moved to my other side, close enough that her shoulder brushed mine.

"If anything tries to overwrite you," she said calmly, "close your eyes and listen to my voice."

"Cool," I said faintly. "Super cool sentence. Totally calming."

Sonata gave my hand a small squeeze.

"Ready?" she asked.

"No," I said. "But let's go."

We stepped over the threshold together.

The world hiccuped.

For a split second, gravity forgot which way was down. My stomach flipped; my vision pixelated at the edges. Sonata's grip tightened, anchoring me to something that wasn't the floor.

Then we were standing on—

...Not carpet. Not wood. Not anything I had a word for.

The space beyond the closet was a corridor made of almost.

Lines that couldn't decide whether they were walls. Squares where doors should be, outlined in thin white, waiting to be assigned meaning.

Behind us, the closet door was still there, hovering in the air like a free-standing rectangle. Through it, I could see Natasha's room. Smaller. Farther away than it should have been.

"Don't look too long," Mayari said softly. "You'll want to go back."

She was right.

The room looked… safer. Even with all the glitches. Familiar shapes. Furniture. Warm light.

This place felt like the draft folder of reality.

Sonata let go of my hand but stayed close enough that the hem of her glowing skirt brushed my leg.

"Okay," she said, voice low. "Edges achieved."

Her eyes met mine, then flicked to Mayari.

"Now," she said, "let's see what we can do with this.

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