Warm air rolled over us as the door swung in.

The door swung inward on a breath of warm air.

Not generator exhaust. Warm apartment air. The kind that had things cooked into it. Laundry soap, rice steam, old carpet dust, a hint of instant miso that had boiled over at some point and never entirely apologized.

Light spilled around us, soft and yellow, cutting a rectangle out of the grey.

The Corridor didn't vanish so much as… lean back. The murk stayed at our heels like fog pressing against a window. Everything past the door ignored it.

Shoes were lined up along the wall in a way that made my throat tighten. Three adult pairs, two kid pairs, all different brands and levels of wear. A little plastic tray caught gravel and old salt from winters that had already happened. Someone had thrown a faded rug over warped floorboards; it curled at one corner like it had given up arguing with gravity.

Above the mess of footwear, the wall was busy.

A maneki-neko with a chipped ear sat on a skinny shelf, one paw forever raised.

Next to it, a cheap red string held a cluster of paper tags - ofuda with hand-brushed characters. A New Year's postcard with a cartoon rabbit hung from a bit of tape.

They lay abandoned deeper in the apartment, one half-visible around the corner, heel crushed where a toddler had stepped out of them in a hurry. Next to it, smaller socks left a trail like fallen flags.

Sonata's hand slipped from the knob. She didn't touch anything else.

I made myself breathe.

Behind us, the Corridor hung like fog just beyond the jamb, refusing to come any further. Ahead, the apartment kept breathing around a version of my family who didn't know they were being watched.

Sonata slipped past me without brushing my shoulder.

Her gaze tracked over the shoes once, quick, and then up along the wall. Her face gave away nothing. Whatever had hit her when she saw the door, she'd folded it away, one careful crease at a time.

Mayari stood just inside the threshold, hands folded behind her back as if she was afraid of smudging the air.

The hallway was narrow enough that two real people would have to turn sideways to pass. Coats hung on a rail, shoulders touching: Dad's jacket, Mom's cardigans, my tiny puffy thing with the broken zipper. A plastic grocery bag full of other plastic grocery bags bulged from a hook. The ceiling fixture buzzed faintly, light a little too warm, a little too dim.

Voices came next.

"Please, inside," Mom said from somewhere ahead. Her English was smooth and careful, each consonant placed exactly where it belonged. "Shoes by the door, if you would. We are not animals."

There was a soft chuckle in response, a deeper one and a lighter one braided together. The Echo smeared the actual words like someone had dragged a thumb through wet paint. I caught fragments /"always obedient," "no promises"/ - then they slipped away.

We followed the sound down the hall.

The narrowness opened without really opening. One breath we were in the corridor; the next, the apartment had made a decision and turned into a living room.

It was all slightly wrong.

Not wrong like monsters or terrifying extradimensional entities. Wrong like a half-remembered photograph. Edges bleeding, colors a touch too warm, everything a little softer than it should have been.

A low table squatted over a worn rug with a pattern that might once have been cranes or might have been flowers. Paper had colonized the walls: a calendar with careful kanji notes in each box, a bus timetable, a handwritten shopping list pinned with a chopstick. A bamboo scroll with a single brushstroke character hung a little crooked over the TV.

No photos. No framed smiles. Just the logistics of a young couple staying alive, taped up where you couldn't forget them.

Steam drifted in from the kitchen doorway, carrying soy sauce and ginger and the faint edge of something almost burning. A radio murmured from on top of the fridge, its words blurred down to rhythm.

The Echo kept adult faces stubbornly out of reach.

A giant I recognized as my father loomed in the middle of the room, a moving block of height and shoulders that never quite fit in the frame. His T-shirt had a Columbia university logo faded across the chest. His hair was shorter than in most of the memories I had of him, pushed back like he'd tried to make it behave for company.

This one moved differently. Less mass, more balance. Long arms folded and unfolded as he laughed, a hand coming up automatically to shield his face when Mom swatted at him with a dish towel.

"—always so dramatic," she said. Her slight enclave accent clipped one word, rounded the next. "You will frighten the children, Aleksei."

The name landed in my chest like a dropped wrench.

Aleksei.

I stared.

The Echo did not oblige me with more detail. His features stayed soft, like the universe had decided his face was classified and blurred it in post. But the way he bent his head when Mom spoke to him, the easy lean against the doorframe when he laughed - it all spoke of long practice.

He was not some distant Terran tycoon in this room.

He was the friend who let my mother poke him with a damp towel and only sighed.

Dad set something down on the low table. A pot maybe, or a bowl. The sound came through clear, ceramic against wood. His voice didn't.

"—promise I won't break anything," he said, or maybe, "—probably won't break anything." The Echo couldn't decide. Either way, it made Mom snort softly.

"You will sit down and behave," she said. "Both of you. I am already putting you to work too much. It is impolite."

The words were formal for the situation. The tone wasn't. She sounded tired in a way I hadn't heard then and couldn't un-hear now.

A shape moved in the corner of my eye.

The Important Zone took up the patch of floor between table and TV: a cheap character rug, a squat plastic bin that had once contained rice and now held blocks, and the kind of chaos only two toddlers could call an organized game.

Past-me occupied one end of the rug, cross-legged, a little boy in a shirt with a robot peeling off the front. His hair had not yet learned about gravity. He was very serious about arranging plastic blocks into a straight line that cut right across the rug's printed bunny.

Across from him, a little girl sat cross-legged in a silky pink dress. Her hair was pale. Paler than anyone's had any right to be in this apartment - catching the overhead light until it blurred into a soft, snow white streaked with silver streaks the Echo couldn't quite decide how to handle.

Her hair kept catching the light.

Every time she turned her head, the blur over her face thickened, like the memory flinched away.

Every time she leaned down, lost in whatever story she was building, the shape of her cheek, the concentration wrinkle between her brows, the little pinch of her mouth when something didn't fit. All of that slipped through.

She reached out and dropped a block right on top of my careful line.

Half the blocks toppled.

The clatter came through with painful clarity.

Toddlers-me made a sound that was basically "hey!" but with more vowel.

"That was the track," he protested. "It was straight."

"Straight line is boring," the girl said. Her words landed in the air with the same careful consonants as Mom's, but the endings were rounder, softer, the way kids made language their own. "Train go up!"

She stacked another block on the fallen one and held it there until it stopped wobbling.

"There," she announced. "Better."

"It will fall," he said, already reaching to adjust the base.

"If it fall, we fix it," she said, as if that settled it.

The Echo didn't bother to show me my own face. It let me see his hands instead: chubby fingers nudging the lower blocks into a more stable pattern, small palm flattening on the rug for balance. He rebuilt around her idea without even pretending he'd won that argument.

Something about that felt embarrassingly on-brand.

Dad shifted his weight, knee cracking a little as he lowered himself onto a cushion near the rug. That sound came sharp. His next sentence did not.

"Do not step on them," Mom called from the kitchen without even looking. "We won't have more bandages until Friday. Mind the budget."

"I am very nimble," Aleksei said. The Echo gifted me that one clear, his vowels stretched just wrong enough to mark him as from very far away. "Watch."

He tried to pick a path around the blocks.

The memory flickered.

One moment, he was lifting his foot over a precarious tower. The next, he was already on the other side, hand braced against the wall, laughing under his breath. The in-between steps blurred into static, as if my brain had only saved the start and end of the sentence and guessed at the middle.

"You see?" he said to the kids, crouching down to their level. "Still alive. No casualties."

The girl giggled and shoved a block closer to his toes, testing.

"I will report you," she said, very serious.

"To whom?" he asked.

"To Mama," she said, jerking her thumb toward the kitchen. "She scary!"

"Oh?" Aleksei glanced up, the motion too quick to resolve his features. "I had not noticed."

"Liar," Mom said dryly. "Sit, Aleks. You are making the room uneven."

He obeyed.

I felt something tight under my ribs loosen and knot again all at once.

"I never knew he came here," I said.

The words came out thin.

Toddler-me had both legs kicked out, socks half-off, hair sticking up in a way that suggested someone had tried and failed to tame it earlier. He was very invested in lining up blocks in a row and building a pyramid now, brow furrowed with an intensity I recognized all too well.

Every time she tipped her chin up, the smudge over her face thickened.

Every time she looked down, concentrating on the block in her hand, the line of her nose, the curve of her cheek, the tiny pinch of her mouth slipped through.

She leaned over and dropped a block squarely on top of his line.

It teetered. The whole row collapsed.

She made a delighted sound, high and bright and weirdly clean in the muffled room.

He yelped.

That, at least, was familiar.

Something in the way she laughed threw static into the memory for a second. The walls hazed out.

Sonata watched the girl's hands.

Not her hair. Not the way the light caught on it. Her hands, small and chubby and determined, as they chased a block that tried to escape under the table. When the girl huffed in frustration, the sound hit Sonata's shoulders like a physical touch. For half a heartbeat, her jaw tightened.

She smoothed it out almost immediately.

Dad dropped down onto the edge of the rug with a soft grunt, one knee cracking as he did.

"Hey," he said, ruffling toddler-me's hair with a huge hand. The Echo didn't bother to translate tone; it gave me warmth and fond exasperation instead. "What happened to my perfect city, huh?"

"You made earthquake," the girl announced, pointing a tiny accusing finger at him

"I did?" Dad looked genuinely wounded. "Terrible. I'll file a complaint."

"With who?" Mom asked from the kitchen doorway.

The Echo blurred her face almost entirely when she stepped out into the light, but her posture was textbook: towel over one shoulder, arms folded, one hip resting against the frame, every line of her body saying I run this house and also I am very tired.

"With management," Dad said promptly.

"You are management," she replied. "Sit properly when you play, or you will crush them."

"Yes, Kiriko-sama," Aleksei murmured, not quite hiding his amusement.

"I was not talking to you, Zamir-dono," she said without looking at him. "You are already a well-behaved guest."

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

He ducked his head anyway, the gesture oddly deferential for someone who could probably tell a world's worth of people what to do with their energy grids.

I felt my own shoulders hunch a little, as if the remnant of her voice in the air could catch me slouching across decades.

The girl took advantage of the distraction to rebuild.

"Up," she demanded again, pushing a block into toddler-me's hand. "Make tall. Not boring line."

He frowned at her, then at the pieces.

"Lines are not boring," he declared. "Lines go somewhere."

"Up is better," she insisted. "Up goes… sky!"

She flung her free arm upward, almost losing her balance. A block escaped her grip and bounced off Dad's thigh. He didn't flinch.

"Sky is very tall," he said gravely. "Can you reach?"

She stretched both arms up this time, fingers splayed, as if she could catch the ceiling and drag it down.

For a second, the Echo did something odd.

The lights blurred, brightened, dimmed, like the bulb couldn't decide how much electricity it had been allotted that day. The wall behind them ghosted, showing a flicker of a different pattern. Something golden, shining, and unfamiliar. Like an infinite expanse of light before snapping back to cheap off-white paint.

Mayari's eyes narrowed.

She didn't comment.

The girl dropped her arms, satisfied with an answer only she understood, and went back to building. Toddler-me adjusted his blocks to accommodate her vertical ambitions, the first compromise in what would turn out to be a very long career of structural negotiation.

I watched them, the shapes they made in that cramped room, the easy way Dad's huge hand hovered near both of them when they leaned too far.

"They were here a lot," I heard myself say. "Weren't they?"

It wasn't really a question.

I didn't realize I'd said it aloud until I heard how thin my own voice sounded up against the hum of the old refrigerator.

Sonata's gaze didn't leave the rug.

"Seems like it," she said.

She didn't put any weight on it. No accusation. Just a fact, laid gently on the table.

Her face stayed composed. Her fingers, at her sides, curled in and out, just once.

The girl picked up one of the blocks that had rolled toward the edge of the rug.

She looked at it, then at me, then at the yawning space between our lopsided towers.

"You help," she decided, and scooted closer without asking permission. "We make big one. Not fall."

Past-me blinked at her, then at the block she was offering.

He took it.

Of course he did.

"I told you it will fall," he said, shifting his line to butt up against hers. "We need... more here."

"Here," she echoed, tapping the joint with her knuckle. The sound came through crisp, as if the Echo liked that moment. "You fix. I make story."

"What story?" he asked.

She thought about it. Her whole face scrunched up. The blur over her features thinned enough for me to see her tongue press briefly to the corner of her mouth.

"Train go see sky," she said finally. "Sky and... big water. And monsters. But we bonk them."

"Bonk," he repeated, dubious.

"Bonk!" she confirmed, wiggling the block like a little hammer until he laughed.

He turned his line into a curve without quite noticing. She added a second level where it made no engineering sense at all. Between them, the first version of a ridiculous, unsteady track started to exist.

I watched the two little knots of intent lean toward each other, the way their shoulders angled, the way their hands automatically made room instead of fighting for space.

Best friends in under thirty seconds.

Of course.

My throat hurt.

"Small, world, huh?" Sonata whispered, moving to stand a little behind me. It was a question that wasn't a question.

And I suddenly realized. She wasn't staring at the kids. Her gaze was locked on the cheap, chipped kettle on the counter. She was focused on a brand I recognized as an early model Terran kettle, but with a slightly different cord and a different kind of humming noise. It was humming in a frequency that was slightly too low for me to notice but probably loud as a jet engine to her.

"Wait," I said, turning to her. "You knew her. Not just... him. You knew her, too."

Sonata's jaw tightened.

"I do have some history with Zamir and his family," she admitted, her gaze sliding away from me. "His work really got around early on after the portal was opened. He was... busy. The whole family was. I don't..."

She trailed off, her gaze catching the little floating toy drone, and then moving to the small wooden shrine on the shelf.

The memory had other plans for us.

"More noodles," Mom said, emerging from the kitchen with two steaming bowls. She set them on the low table.

The steam hit me first—soy and ginger and something cheap trying very hard to be chicken.

"Careful," Mom said automatically, as if she'd already rehearsed this a thousand times. "Hot."

Aleksei made a show of scooting back on his cushion to clear space, long legs folding with the practiced awkwardness of a tall man in a low room. Dad reached up to catch a wayward block before it rolled under the table and vanished into the dust dimension forever.

"Emergency infrastructure secured," he said, flicking it back onto the rug.

"You joke now," Mom said, but the edge had gone out of her voice. She set down a smaller bowl, rim chipped, in front of the rug, between the two toddlers. "I know I will not hear the end of it if you step on it later."

The girl scooted forward immediately, eyes huge at the prospect of noodles.

"Too hot," Mom said, intercepting her hands with two fingers. "Count first. One… two…"

"Four," the girl chimed in, impatient, blowing at the steam.

Toddler-me imitated the blowing, cheeks puffed out, taking the exercise very seriously.

"See?" Mom said, dry. "You two have that much in common. Both full of hot air. Now, be a good princess and please sit down, sweetheart."

I heard Sonata make a very small sound at my shoulder. Not quite a laugh, but the ghost of one. She was still watching the bowl, like the thin twist of steam knew more secrets than any of us.

"Don't call her princess," Aleksei said mildly, reaching for his own chopsticks. "She will litigate succession."

"Too late," Mom said. "She has already conquered the toy box. It is the natural order of things."

The girl slurped a noodle, burned her tongue, and did a little wounded hop in place.

"Hot!" she declared, betrayed.

"I told you," Mom said. There was no apology in it, but she blew gently across the bowl anyway, a soft, steady breath. Some part of me that had been clenched for years loosened at the sight and immediately hurt.

Dad watched her for a second. There was a look in his body language I had never seen clearly in person. The Echo let me notice it now: the way his shoulders dropped a centimeter when she finally sat down, the way his hand twitched, wanting to touch her shoulder and then not daring to, as if saying thank you out loud would make the moment break.

"Ikazuchi," Mom said, without looking. "Come here."

Toddler-me looked up mid-slurp, noodle still hanging comically from his mouth.

"Hm?"

"Come," she repeated, softer. Her free hand patted the cushion right beside her legs. "Before your father steals your noodles."

Dad put a hand to his chest, scandalized. "Kiriko. My own house—"

"Our house," she corrected, with the sort of automatic precision that comes from having had this argument enough times to file it under reflex. "And our child. Sit."

He sat.

So did toddler-me, eventually, abandoning the bowl long enough to wobble over and plop down right against her hip. The top of his head barely reached her ribs.

Up this close, the blur over her face thickened. I saw hair, the shape of a jaw, the line of her neck. Nothing else. The Echo would not give me more.

Her hands were clear.

She wiped a smear of soup from toddler-me's chin with the side of her thumb, then rested that hand against his cheek for a second, as if checking he was still real.

"You remember what we talked about?" she asked.

He blinked up at her, solemn. "…No running?"

"Also yes," she said. One corner of her mouth twitched. "But I meant something else."

Her other hand, the one not still guarding the noodle bowl, slipped down to her lap. To the swell of her stomach.

She guided toddler-me's small hand with her own, pressing his palm gently against the side of the curve.

Something moved under his fingers. A tiny flutter, like a fish turning in shallow water.

His eyes went enormous.

"That," Mom said quietly, "is your imouto."

He stilled.

The girl on the rug leaned forward, craning to see. "Baby?" she demanded.

"Baby," Mom agreed.

The word sank into the room like a stone in a pond. Even Aleksei paused, chopsticks halfway to his mouth.

Dad's hand slipped over his knee and tightened, knuckles whitening, but he didn't speak.

"You remember what you asked me at the clinic?" Mom prompted gently.

Toddler-me nodded hard, then stopped, as if afraid to jostle whatever was happening under his palm. "You said… she is small."

"She is very small," Mom said. "For now."

He frowned, concentrating. "When will she come out?"

"Soon," she said. "She will be ready soon."

He considered that. Toddler-me had never been very good at waiting.

"Will she be scared?" he asked finally.

The question landed harder than he knew.

Mom's shoulders went very soft, just for a second. Not slumped. Just unbraced.

"If she is," she said, "she will not be alone."

Aleksei cleared his throat lightly, as if rescuing her from having to say something heavier.

"In my hometown," he said, halfway between teasing and serious, "we have a very important tradition."

Mom shot him a suspicious look. "We do not need your folk magic, Aleks."

"Just this one," he said. "Is okay. Harmless. Good for morale."

Dad snorted. "Last time you said that we ended up with salt under all the window frames."

"And did anything get in when Kiriko was away from home?" Aleksei countered. "You are welcome."

He shifted on his cushion, leaning over the table to bring himself level with toddler-me.

"Ikazuchi," he said. "Do you know what a big brother is?"

Toddler-me puffed up a little. "…Big boy?" he tried.

"Also true," Aleksei said gravely. "But a big brother is a very important job. The first friend. The first shield."

"Shield…" toddler-me repeated, as if tasting the word.

"Yes," Aleksei said. He gestured with his chopsticks toward Mom's stomach. "You see, very small people, when they arrive, they do not know about New York. Or rent. Or… how to file complaints with management."

"Nobody knows that," Dad muttered.

"So they need someone to watch," Aleksei went on, ignoring him. "To say: 'This is safe. This is not. You can walk here. You should not put that in your mouth.'"

He tilted his head briefly toward the rug.

The girl had, in fact, been about to test a block with her teeth. She froze, caught, and slowly put it back down, hands behind her back as if that made her innocent.

"See?" Aleksei said. "Already useful."

"That is your job," Mom said softly, to toddler-me. "If you want it. To look out for her. To be kind. To be… responsible."

Toddler-me swallowed.

"Like Papa?" he asked.

Her mouth softened. "Like Papa," she said. "And like your friends. Like Zamir-san." She hesitated, then added, just as carefully: "Like me."

Something under his hand fluttered again. Maybe baby movement. Maybe the Echo filling in a beat.

I realized I was holding my breath.

"You do not have to say yes," Mom said. "You are small too. It is a big promise."

Toddler-me stared at her stomach, at his own hand resting on skin and fabric, at the idea of a person existing there that he couldn't see yet. His eyebrows did their best impression of load-bearing beams.

"I want," he said finally. The words were slow, picked one by one. "I want to."

He lifted his free hand and pressed it awkwardly over the first, as if doubling down.

"I will watch her," he said. "I'll… I'll protect Izumi. Promise."

The name cut through me.

I didn't know if I'd ever heard Mom say it in this room. I didn't know if three-year-old me had. The Echo let it ring anyway, soft and clear and unbearably new.

On the rug, the girl made a small, affronted noise.

"Me too," she declared, scooting closer on her knees until her dress bunched around her ankles. "I help!"

Toddler-me looked over at her, suspicious. "You don't know her yet."

"I will," she said. The certainty in her tiny voice made the hair on my arms stand up.

She shuffled the last bit of distance and slapped both hands onto Mom's knee, just below where his were resting.

"We both be shield," she said. "Double shield. No monster. I will be a shield for everyone!"

"Triple," Dad said quietly, finally moving. His big hand came down to rest lightly on Mom's shoulder. "Quadruple, if you count your mother. She bites."

"Correct," Mom said primly. "The monsters will be very confused."

"Like Papa?" he asked.

"Correct," Mom said primly. "The monsters will be very confused."

Everybody laughed, even if half of them sounded tired. The Echo held the sound for a second longer than it had to, like it wanted to memorize it.

The girl twisted around, grabbed a handful of blocks without looking, and started stacking them with wild abandon around Mom's knees.

"Fort," she explained, as if this were obvious. "Baby need house!"

"Baby will need knees," Mom said, but she didn't move her legs. "Careful."

Toddler-me caught on immediately, redirecting the blocks she put in structurally terrible places into slightly better positions. Within a minute, they had ringed her in a lopsided, colorful wall—one that would do absolutely nothing against gravity, let alone aberrations, but that cast little, silly shadows on her dress.

Aleksei watched them build, chopsticks forgotten in his hand.

"Strong civil defense posture," he said. "Very cutting-edge. Now, if you two don't mind... there is the matter of the dimensional anomaly that's forming over California I should really get back to." His face blurred, the memory refusing to give me a clean expression, but the warmth in his voice was undeniable.

"Do not start," Mom warned. "This is not work time."

"Yes, yes," he said. "I am off duty. See?" He set the chopsticks down like he was laying aside a weapon.

Something in the air hummed.

It might have been the fridge motor kicking in. It might have been a truck passing on the street outside. It might have been nothing at all.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose anyway.

For a moment, the edges of the room pixelated.

The calendar on the wall tried to straighten itself into a grid, neat black lines running too rigid, numbers sharpening into something like zoning codes before the ink smeared back into ordinary handwriting. The rug's blurry pattern glitched, resolving into clean triangles, then dissolving.

Under my palm - no, under toddler-me's palm, the warmth of Mom's skin went intensely, impossibly precise. I could feel his heartbeat and a second, smaller rhythm hitching under it, like an echo trying to sync.

Mom made a small, dismissive sound. "California will still be there when the noodles are finished. Sit, Aleks."

But Zamir was already pushing himself to his feet.

The hum pushed in.

And then it hit something.

I didn't see my mother's face, but I felt it in the way her shoulders drew in and then flared, just slightly.

The air tasted different. Sharper. Like ozone over incense.

"Enough of that," she said.

No one else reacted. Dad didn't turn his head. Aleksei didn't flinch.

The room did.

The grid-lines on the calendar blurred and ran. The rug went back to being a rug. The hum dropped to the level of background appliance noise and stayed there, sullen.

And suddenly, my mother was standing by the balcony window.

"Kiriko?" Aleksei asked, glancing up once, just a fraction too slow to prove he'd felt whatever that had been. "You alright?"

"I am fine," she said. "I have soup on the stove. Watch them. Do not let them fight."

"Us? Never," Dad said.

"Always," she corrected, and walked out of the room.

The room breathed out with her.

Back on the rug, the girl finally sat back on her heels, inspecting their handiwork. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand in a way that would have gotten me scolded on any other day.

"Safe now," she said, satisfied. "We keep safe."

She tilted her head, listening to some secret story only she could hear, then added: "Even if sky fall!"

"Sky is not going to fall," toddler-me said, rolling his eyes so hard he almost tipped over.

"If it does," she insisted, "we bonk it!"

He snorted. "You can't bonk the sky."

"Can," she said. "We bonk everything! Heroes can bonk anything!"

Her hands flew out in an expansive gesture that knocked over half their fort.

"Ahhh!" Toddler-me lunged to catch the falling blocks, laughing despite himself.

I realized my own hands had curled into fists.

Beside me, Sonata was unnaturally still.

Her eyes were fixed on the little wall of blocks, on the way toddler-me automatically reached to shore up the weak corners while the girl happily demolished and rebuilt. Something tight and complicated moved under her composure.

I heard her breathe in, shakier than she meant it to be.

"You were toddlers but... do you not have vague recollection of this?" she murmured.

It took me a second to realize she was talking to me.

"No," I said. My voice sounded scraped raw. "I… knew there was a clinic. I knew Izumi… existed before Philly. But I have no recollection of anything that happened a few months after the Fall of New York. This—" I gestured vaguely at the room, the blocks, the half-ruined fort around my mother's knees. "This is new."

"It isn't," she said quietly. "Is it?"

I looked at her.

She didn't look back. Her gaze was locked on toddler-me's small hand, still resting over where he'd promised, where he'd decided a job without knowing what it meant.

"You've been living under this for a long time," she said. "You just didn't have the picture."

Mayari shifted behind us. I'd almost forgotten she was there.

"I'm making a broad assumption we're not here to take it away," she said, voice very soft. "Just to let you see the shape. So the wrong things can't grab it first. A promise that goes far back. One that can be twisted."

The word Promise hung in the air, heavier than steam.

On the rug, the girl abandoned the fort entirely, lured back by her bowl. Toddler-me followed, belly-first, already planning how to turn spilled noodles into roads.

The scene held there for a heartbeat longer.

Mom's blurred silhouette moving in the hallway. Dad writing something on a torn envelope with a leaky pen. Aleksei watching all of it with a face the Echo refused to show me. Two toddlers side by side, cheeks shiny, making a mess of broth and blocks and destiny.

Then the steam thinned.

The radio's murmur dropped into static.

The edges of the room feathered out into orange.

Warmth drained, not all at once but in careful layers, like someone folding a blanket. The low table ghosted, then the rug, then the little plastic tray by the door.

The last thing to go was the small, clumsy ring of blocks around where my mother's knees had been.

They hung there in the air for a second, unsupported.

Then they came apart into dust, and we were standing in the Corridor again.

Cold, empty almost-space stretched out on all sides.

I realized I'd been standing with my hand braced against my own ribs, right where toddler-me had rested his.

I didn't move it.

Sonata blew out a slow breath.

"I hate it here," she said, very softly.

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