Isaac did not understand her.
Worse, some part of him feared that he did.
The woman stepped back from the broken window, rain sliding from the edges of her dark coat. She glanced once toward the road, then toward the sky, as though she expected something there to answer the disturbance inside Isaac's house.
"We need to move," she said.
Isaac remained on the floor.
"Move where?"
Her eyes returned to him.
"Anywhere that is not here."
The answer did not comfort him.
Slowly, Isaac pushed himself up. His knees still felt weak beneath him, and tiny shards of glass fell from his sleeves as he stood. The room tilted for a moment. He caught himself against the edge of the table and forced his breathing to steady.
Who was this woman to command him?
But the question fractured before he could hold it.
Who had been inside the mirror?
What was it?
What was she?
And worse—
What was he?
In the middle of his confusion, his eyes found the ring again.
It remained beneath the table.
Small.
Dark.
Waiting.
The woman noticed where he was looking.
"Do not touch it," she said.
Isaac looked at her. "You said it could help them find me."
"I said touching it could help them find you again."
"That is not the same thing."
"No," she admitted. "It is worse."
Isaac swallowed.
The rain entered through the broken window in thin, slanted lines. It touched the floor, the glass, the scattered photographs. One of the frames had fallen near his feet, face up.
His wife smiled from behind the cracked glass.
For one terrible moment, Isaac forgot the creature.
Forgot the woman.
Forgot Habhay.
He saw only the face of someone who had once made the house feel alive.
The house had been hers once, too.
Her laughter had filled its rooms. Her voice had followed him through its halls. Her hands had touched the same tables, opened the same doors, arranged the same photographs now lying broken across the floor.
And now, even the ruins of those memories were being taken from him.
"Isaac."
The woman's voice cut through the moment.
He looked up.
Her expression had hardened.
"Now."
Something in the way she said it told him that arguing would not make the world any less impossible.
Isaac took one last look at the mirror, at the ring, at the ruined room that had held the remains of every life he had lost.
Then he moved toward the front door.
The rain struck him the moment he stepped outside.
Cold.
Real.
Isaac almost laughed at that.
After what he had seen, rain felt like mercy.
The woman stood a few steps away from the porch, pistol lowered but not relaxed. Up close, she looked even younger than he had first thought. Smaller. Slighter. Her wet hair clung to her face, and yet her eyes carried an exhaustion Isaac recognized too well.
Age without wrinkles.
Time without evidence.
She studied him for a moment.
"You really do not remember," she said.
Isaac tightened his grip on the doorframe behind him.
"Remember what?"
"Habhay."
"I told you. I do not know that place."
"It is not just a place."
The rain fell harder between them.
Isaac stared at her, searching her face for anything familiar. A lie. A threat. A weakness. Anything that might help him decide whether she was a rescuer or merely another danger wearing a smaller shape.
"How can I trust you, then?" he asked.
The words slipped out before he could remember that she had just saved his life.
The woman did not flinch.
"You should not," she said. "And I should not trust you either."
Silence settled between them, heavy and cold.
For a moment, only the rain spoke.
Isaac looked past her, toward the dark road beyond his house. The streetlights flickered against the storm. His car sat where he had left it. The neighborhood beyond the gate looked unchanged, ordinary, almost cruelly unaware.
The world had not ended.
Only his had.
"Then tell me everything I need to know," Isaac said.
His voice sounded steadier than he felt.
The woman's gaze sharpened.
"Not here."
"Then where?"
"Somewhere they cannot reach as easily."
"They?" Isaac repeated. "You keep saying that word as if I should know who they are."
Her jaw tightened.
"You should."
The answer struck him harder than he expected.
Isaac's hand tightened around the doorframe.
"I do not remember," he said, quieter this time.
"I know."
There was no mockery in her voice.
That almost made it worse.
Behind him, the house groaned softly, settling after the violence that had passed through it. The sound was small, ordinary. Wood against wind. Old walls carrying rain.
But Isaac's attention shifted back toward the broken room inside.
Toward the table.
Toward the ring.
The woman's face changed.
"No," she said sharply.
Isaac stilled.
For one impossible second, he wondered if she had heard the thought before he had even formed it.
"The ring," he said.
"Leave it."
"If that thing stays here—"
"Isaac."
The warning in her voice was quiet.
That made it more dangerous.
But he was already turning back.
He knew she had warned him.
He knew the ring was not ordinary.
He knew touching it might bring back whatever had tried to tear itself through the mirror.
But it was also proof.
Proof that something in his life had finally cracked open.
Proof that his immortality was not simply a cruel mistake of nature.
Proof that the answer he had searched for, suffered for, and buried generations beneath might finally have a shape.
And after one hundred and thirty-seven years of unanswered questions, proof was the one thing Isaac Abidan no longer had the strength to leave behind.
He stepped back into the house.
Or he thought he did.
The first thing he noticed was the silence.
Not the silence of a ruined living room after gunfire.
A larger silence.
An endless one.
The floor beneath his shoe did not creak.
It sank.
Isaac froze.
Slowly, he looked down.
Sand covered his polished shoe.
Dry.
Pale.
Impossible.
His breath stopped.
The rain was gone.
The smell of gunpowder was gone.
The broken glass, the fallen photographs, the dark living room, the shattered mirror—
Gone.
Before him stretched a desert so vast it seemed to swallow the horizon. The sky above it was not the sky he knew. It hung too low, too wide, painted in colors that felt as though sunset and dawn had been forced to exist at the same time.
Isaac staggered back.
But there was no doorway behind him.
No porch.
No house.
No rain.
No woman.
For the first time since she had appeared at his window, Isaac realized he had not heard her follow.
The thought should have relieved him.
It did not.
Only sand stretched behind him.
Only wind answered.
Only the impossible remained.
For a moment, Isaac could do nothing but stand there, his chest rising and falling beneath the same black suit he had worn to bury another piece of his family.
That morning, he had stood before a grave and wondered how many farewells one man could endure.
Now, beneath a foreign sky, with no path behind him and no one beside him, he understood the answer was not finished with him yet.
The wind moved across the desert.
The sand shifted around his shoes.
And once again, Isaac Abidan was left alone.