The next morning, the light was a weak, gray apology for a sunrise. It did nothing to chase the shadows from the corners of her room or from the edges of her mind.
Sarah dressed in a fog, the memory of the dream clinging to her, the image of those pale, desperate fingers reaching through the floorboards.
She could still feel the phantom sensation of a silent scream caught in her throat. She barely remembered brushing her teeth or pulling on her uniform.
Her limbs moved on instinct, like a marionette following strings she couldn't see. Her mind was stuck in that moment, the hand reaching, the whispering silence, the weight of fear crawling beneath her skin.
Her first class was Music Performance I.
This was supposed to be the reason she was here.
Redwood was famous for its music program, a place where prodigies were forged into legends and was her chance to anchor herself, to find the one part of her life that still made sense.
Her music had always been a sanctuary, a world of color and light that no one else could touch. No expectations, no fear, just harmony.
She found the practice hall in the main building. It was a cavernous room with a ceiling so high it seemed to swallow sound.
A dozen grand pianos were arranged in a neat, intimidating formation, their polished black surfaces reflecting the gray light from the tall, arched windows.
They looked less like instruments and more like polished tombs, waiting to be filled. The air was cold, smelling of lemon oil and a profound, institutional stillness.
Other students were already there, sitting at their designated pianos, their postures a mixture of perfect discipline and nervous energy.
Their faces were turned away, but Sarah could feel the quiet tension buzzing between them.
She found the piano with her name on a small, neat card: Vance. Seeing her name there should have made her feel grounded but It didn't. It felt like a label for someone who no longer existed.
Her instructor, a man named Mr. Ezekiel, was tall and thin, with a face that seemed permanently fixed in a state of mild disappointment.
He walked between the pianos, his footsteps unnervingly quiet on the polished wood floor.
He didn't greet them.
He simply stood at the front of the room and said, in a voice as dry as old paper, "We will begin with the basics. A C-major scale. I need to hear your foundation."
Sarah placed her hands on the keys.
They were cool and smooth, a familiar weight beneath her fingertips.
She took a breath, closed her eyes, and waited for the color. For the clear, bright yellow of C, the warm orange of G, the deep, calming blue of F.
She waited for the world to bloom.
She pressed the first key.
A sound came out, a flat, dead tone but there was no color.
Nothing.
Just a sound, hollow and empty.
Her synesthesia, the vibrant and secret language that had defined her entire existence was gone.
She tried again, pressing the D. It was just a note, a vibration in the air.
Gray.
All of it was gray.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to rise in her throat. She looked down at her hands. They felt clumsy, foreign, like they belonged to someone else.
They felt like stone.
She tried to move them, to force them through the scale, but her fingers refused to cooperate.
They were stiff, disobedient.
She managed to play a few more notes, each one a clumsy, stuttering failure.
The sound was ugly, a discordant clatter in the hallowed silence of the hall.
A memory flashed, her mother sitting beside her at their old upright piano, guiding her tiny fingers across chipped keys.
Back then, each note had danced in color.
Music had made the house feel less empty, less like a tomb of grief. Now, even those memories felt muted, like they'd been dipped in ash.
Mr. Ezekiel's quiet footsteps stopped beside her.
She didn't look up, keeping her eyes fixed on the black and white keys, a landscape that was now utterly alien to her.
"Is there a problem, Miss Vance?" he asked. His voice wasn't cruel, but it was worse.
It was clinical.
He was observing a specimen.
A machine that had malfunctioned.
"I… I don't know," she whispered, the words feeling thick and clumsy in her mouth.
"Your file says you are a gifted pianist," he stated, the words a quiet accusation. "It speaks of a unique emotional connection to your music. I am not hearing it."
Her hands started to tremble.
The other students had stopped playing.
She could feel their eyes on her, a dozen silent judgments.
The grand, silent room felt like it was closing in, the air growing thick and heavy. Her heart pounded so loudly it nearly drowned out her thoughts.
She tried to play the scale one more time, a desperate, fumbling attempt to prove him wrong, to prove to herself that she wasn't broken.
The notes that came out were a monstrosity, a jumble of wrongness. There was no melody, no color, no life.
It was just noise, white noise.
The sound of a connection being severed.
"Perhaps you are not as prepared as you thought," Mr. Ezekiel said, his frown deepening.
The disappointment in his eyes was a physical blow.
He moved on without another word, his dismissal as absolute as a door slamming shut.
Sarah couldn't breathe.
The panic was no longer rising; it had consumed her.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, and the white noise of her failure filled her ears, drowning out everything else.
This was worse than the breathing walls, worse than the dream of buried hands.
This was a death.
The one part of her that had survived whatever came before, the part that was truly hers was gone.
She stood up abruptly, her chair scraping loudly against the floor.
The sound was violent in the stillness.
She didn't look at anyone.
She couldn't.
She turned and walked out of the hall, her movements stiff and jerky.
She pushed through the heavy doors and fled down the corridor, her own ragged breaths echoing in her ears.
She didn't know where she was going.
She just knew she had to escape the silence of the other students and the dead sound of that piano.
The hollow ache behind her ribs, the one she'd felt in the car, was no longer hollow. It was filled with a screeching, colorless panic.
She stumbled into the nearest stairwell, gripping the cold iron railing as the world swam.
Her fingers dug into the metal, trying to ground herself, trying to remember who she was before everything cracked open.
But even her name felt distant.
Sarah Vance, it sounded like someone else's life.
The silence of her room had been a threat.
The silence of the academy was a weight.
But the dead, gray noise of the piano was a final, damning verdict.
She had lost the only language she had left.