Not every voice inside you is yours, and not every memory means what it pretends to mean.
She was talking about me, and they stared my way. Their eyes bold, the older one, Derrek, had eyes that could kill. Dark and ready to harm someone if he needed to.
The closet seemed to shrink around me. The smell was a cocktail of old wood, iron, and something sour, as though breath had been trapped here for years. My palms slid over the splintered boards, finding tiny grooves where fingernails had dug for escape. The dust tickled the back of my throat, making me cough into my sleeve. A bead of sweat crawled down my spine, cold despite the heat in the room.
Every creak of the floorboards outside the door felt like a countdown.
They had started making their way slowly towards the closet, and there was nothing I could do.
I looked at her, and she seemed frightened. The way she cowered down in his presence made me sick.
I'm not sure if she was scared of me or of them when she ratted me out, but I'm betting it was them. Or at least him.
We used to sit on the apartment steps after she got home from the museum, her boots tapping against the stone while she told me half-truths about her childhood. She'd smile at nothing, but her eyes always darted away when family came up. I'd told myself she was shy, not hiding something. Now, seeing her shrink in Derrek's shadow, those memories curdled. Had she always been trying to warn me?
She'd once told me she hated the sound of thunder because it reminded her of childhood storms. That she was more of a gentle rain kind of girl. But now I wondered if she'd really meant fists on doors, boots on stairs—Derrek's boots. All those little confessions I'd taken at face value rewrote themselves in my head, turning her smiles into signals I'd been too blind to read.
Her past was darker than I could have imagined. I thought she led a happier life, fairytales and dreams of love and merges. A dream I now see that she would have never had with me.
She never told me anything about these two brothers. She sugarcoated her life, whether for everyone around her or for herself.
I had to snap out of it. There was no time to regret the past right now.
I had to think of something fast before he reached me.
But I didn't know how to leave.
They were inching closer to the door. Footsteps louder than before.
The floor groaned beneath their weight in slow, deliberate pulses. I could tell who was who just from the sound—Derrek's heavy heel-first stomps, Allek's lighter, nervous scuffing, as though he might bolt at any second. The vibrations climbed up the closet walls and into my ribs.
Allek grabbed Derrek's arm, "Maybe we should go get mom and dad." He stuttered.
"No!" "I can handle this, now shut up," Derrek said while shoving him off.
I closed my eyes and tried thinking of anywhere but here.
Valley, I need to talk to Valley, please.
"Valley!" I yelled this time in panic.
I need to see behind her eyes.
Every creak distracts me from trying to envision a space I've once occupied—a place I thought I knew before it slipped away.
I panicked, my breath getting heavier and my body twitching from the stress, unsure of what to say.
Or if they would run away to get their parents before I could even speak, the moment they saw me.
Or what the older one planned, there was just something sinister about him.
The doorknob was turning. How was I going to explain this to them? I couldn't even explain it to her, and she was surely the more approachable one.
I kept my eyes closed until the door opened.
Expecting something, anything.
But I heard no screams, no children at all anymore.
Just my stomach dropping as one would when you went up and down a hill really fast.
I opened them again—no one was there.
The door had opened to a new room. A dark but spacious room where I could hear her current thoughts now, again.
And I could breathe again.
I stepped through. And when I did light didn't pour in—it cracked, like thin ice breaking across a pond. Sound stretched into a ringing tone that vibrated against my teeth. The walls dissolved, not falling away but unfolding like paper. For a moment, I thought I was falling through a photograph, my body weightless, before my boots hit a floor that hadn't been there a heartbeat ago. It smelled of distinct metal and old paper.
There was a faint hum in the distance, vibrations left my teeth and entered the walls, but hardly as strong as the quakes I felt before.
The white light flickered, one by one, until the whole room lit up.
I tuned in to find her working. Not just her out there, but her mind, working in here as well. Gears grinding in the distance.
I did it, somehow, I made it to the room of presence, which is much better than her memories have been so far.
She was reading files and scanning them.
I had never really seen her at her job before. She had only had it for a month and seems to be doing well at it.
I sat for a while, listening to her inner voice, reading the files. This was one thing I actually liked about my job: researching and reading.
It was less dangerous than my field work.
Anger suddenly rose inside me.
My anger, no one else's.
Something didn't add up in the file she just read. I don't think she caught it.
A date of an event I know for a fact didn't occur when it was reported to have happened. Because I was there.
The file bore a name I knew too well—Danielle Griffin. My comrade. She'd been my partner in the field before Atropa's bullets cut her down.
Her body was stolen before anyone ever got to say goodbye.
Now they lie, the file stating she died by self-inflicted wounds, unmerged, and couldn't overcome the pain of feeling unwanted.
It had been ages ago, long before I met Valley on her side of the world.
I was fifteen and fighting for a cause, somewhere in the middle of Solence and Noctira. An island between the two. They won that day, but no amount of time could erase the injustice I just read and the ceremony we were robbed of.
Danielle's laugh flashed through me, a memory sharp as broken glass. She'd always hated paperwork, always signed her name with a star instead of a dot over the 'i.' She'd died with her boots on, in the mud and chaos of a job gone wrong, and I'd been too far away to stop the bullet. To see her reduced to a footnote of 'self-inflicted wounds'—it was like watching her being killed again.
Heat rose in me, and I was ready for war once again.
I tried to channel my rage into a thought for Valley.
What if some of these files were altered before they got to us?
She heard it, but she's not ready to question her way of life yet.
And I wondered if she ever would be ready.
I accepted that, but what I couldn't fathom was hearing her think, just as clearly as if she'd whispered it in my ear.
That she'd already been here a year. The thought didn't just pass—it echoed, bouncing between our minds as if it had traveled a great distance to reach me.
A year?
I wanted to punch something, but how do you release anger in this place?
If I punched a wall, would it be punching Valley, or harming her in some way?
I've been dead for just short of a year. I'm not sure if I'd been here the whole time or if time had passed before I woke up.
It hit me unexpectedly. I started to feel weak.
I dropped to the white tiled floor in frustration. A bomb that couldn't blow.
I knew I was dead, so it shouldn't have hit me so hard—but the memories, the echoes of life I'd left behind, felt strange and painfully vivid.
I didn't like not knowing, especially since time worked differently here. I don't think I could ever get used to it.
She asked, How do you know what is true if the person telling the story believed it to be that way?
You don't. People tend to follow what makes the most sense or who they're most loyal to.
I responded, and my rage turned into disappointment, with a little less hope than a few moments ago. I wondered if I'd ever be able to show her the truth or if she'd even accept it.
She grew up in this system. I didn't. I couldn't help but think of home. My home.
I miss the trees, the ground, the rain, and my family. I lay on the floor of this room and closed my eyes.
I heard a voice, not mine or Valley's, a cold, endless whisper—Or maybe it was just a quieter kind of vanishing.
The whisper lingered, sliding through the seams of the room like a draft. It gathered in the corners, low and endless, not quite a voice but a shape of silence. If I listened hard enough, it almost resembled my own name stretched out over miles of empty shoreline. It promised release without saying a word, a lullaby with no melody, only the soft pull of oblivion.
For a heartbeat, surrendering to it seemed easier than fighting.
I didn't question it. Instead, I fell prey to it.
A quieter kind of vanishing sounded nice—like fading away with the night breeze of her mind.