By morning, the footprints had evaporated—but the frost on the doorknob remained.
Esme stood in her doorway, staring at the delicate ice crystals that shouldn't exist in the warm house. They formed patterns like frozen breath on glass, spreading from where her hand had touched.
She reached out carefully, and the frost retreated from her fingertips, shrinking back like something alive.
She pulled her hand away and grabbed a towel from her dresser, wrapping it around the knob before turning it. The cold bit through the fabric, made her teeth ache. When she pulled the towel away, it was damp with condensation that smelled faintly of ozone and deep water.
Esme didn't mention it. Not the prints. Not the face in the reflection. Not the drip that echoed without a source. She kept it buried behind a practiced calm, just like she had for years, because some truths twisted into something less when spoken aloud. Some truths became weapons in the wrong hands, even loving ones.
She descended the stairs quietly, each step deliberate. The fourth stair from the bottom creaked—it always had—and she heard her mother's conversation pause in the kitchen.
Laura was already there, whispering into the phone with one hand and stirring oatmeal with the other, pretending not to worry while calling the therapist her friend had recommended. Her voice carried despite her attempts at discretion: "—been home four days now, yes—barely eating—stares at nothing—Dr. Reeves, I'm scared—"
The spoon clinked against the pot in an anxious rhythm. One-two-three-pause. One-two-three-pause. Like Trent's fingers against glass.
Her father sat in the living room, scrolling through old news archives, his laptop screen glowing with search terms like underground labs, missing persons, and psychogenic amnesia. He'd bookmarked dozens of articles: "The Recovered: When Missing Persons Return Changed," "Dissociative Fugue: Understanding Memory Loss," "Cult Deprogramming Techniques for Families."
They were doing everything they could.
And it wasn't enough.
Because they were looking for human explanations to something that had never been human.
Esme stood at the bottom of the stairs for a long time before moving to the window. Outside, the world looked normal again. Too normal. The kind of normal that felt designed—like a dream built to keep her sedated. Mrs. Chen was in her garden again, but she kept glancing at their house. A jogger passed, the same one from yesterday, taking the same route at the same time. Even the birds seemed to follow patterns, landing on the same branches in the same order.
But she wasn't asleep. Not anymore.
The names echoed inside her: Trent. Claire. Leo. Sabine.
She didn't just remember them. She felt them—still out there, alive in some unreachable elsewhere. Still waiting. Still watching through glass that wasn't glass. Esme pressed a hand against the window and whispered the only thing that made sense anymore:
"She wasn't the only one."
The glass fogged under her palm, and in the condensation, she found herself drawing three circles before catching herself and pulling away.
"Esme?" Her mother's voice, careful and light. "Breakfast is ready."
She turned to find both parents watching her from their respective doorways. How long had they been there?
"I'm not hungry," Esme said.
"You need to eat something," Laura insisted, moving closer. There were new lines around her eyes, deeper than the ones grief had carved. These were fear lines. "Just a little? Please?"
Esme looked at the bowl of oatmeal—normal food for a normal morning in a normal house. Her stomach turned. In that place, food had been different. Tasteless. Necessary. Delivered through slots in the wall at intervals that never quite made sense.
"I'll try," she said, because it was easier than explaining.
They sat at the table, a family mime of normalcy. Michael had closed his laptop but kept glancing at where it sat on the counter. Laura watched every spoonful Esme took, counting them like rosary beads. The oatmeal tasted like paste, but Esme forced it down, each swallow an act of performance.
The spoon clinked against the bowl in threes. One-two-three-pause. One-two-three-pause. Like Trent's fingers against—
No. That wasn't right. She shouldn't know that. Not yet.
"Dr. Reeves can see you today," Laura said finally. "This afternoon. She specializes in—" She paused, searching for words that wouldn't sound like accusations. "In trauma recovery."
"I don't need a doctor," Esme said quietly. "I need—" She stopped. What did she need? To go back? To find the others? To understand why Yashan had chosen her?
"What do you need, sweetheart?" Michael leaned forward, his coffee mug forgotten. "Tell us. Anything."
Esme looked between them—these people who loved her, who'd searched for her, who'd mourned her. Who had no framework for understanding what had happened to her.
"Time," she said finally. "I just need time."
But time was exactly what she didn't have. She could feel it in the way the air had changed since last night, in the way shadows fell at wrong angles, in the way her reflection sometimes moved a half-second too late.
The morning stretched like taffy. Laura called to cancel her shift at the library. Michael worked from home, his typing punctuated by long pauses where he'd stop and listen, making sure Esme was still there. They orbited around her like anxious satellites, trying to give her space while terrified she'd disappear again.
Esme sat in the living room, pretending to watch television. The shows were all wrong—too bright, too loud, too full of problems that could be solved in thirty minutes. She found herself studying the screen's reflection instead, watching for movement that didn't belong.
In the dark glass, she saw herself still watching even after she'd looked away. The reflection's eyes stayed fixed on the screen while her own had turned to the window. She blinked hard, and both sets of eyes aligned again.
At noon, the doorbell rang.
Laura jumped, her hand flying to her chest. They weren't expecting anyone. Michael answered it, his body tense like he expected—what? Police? Doctors? Something worse?
It was Mrs. Chen, holding a casserole dish and wearing a nervous smile. "I thought—I mean, I wanted to—" She peered past Michael, spotted Esme on the couch. Her smile faltered. "Welcome home, dear."
Esme met her gaze steadily. Mrs. Chen had aged too, but it was more than time. It was the weight of knowing something impossible had happened next door. Of wondering if impossible things were contagious.
"Thank you," Esme said, her voice flat.
Mrs. Chen practically shoved the dish at Michael and retreated. Through the window, Esme watched her hurry back to her house, saw her pull out her phone before she'd even reached her door. By evening, the whole neighborhood would know the Winslow girl was "not right."
They weren't wrong.
"You don't have to see Dr. Reeves today," Michael said after Mrs. Chen left. "We can wait until you're ready."
"No," Esme said, surprising herself. "I'll go."
Because maybe having someone to talk to—someone outside this house of whispered fears and careful movements—would make the waiting easier. Or maybe she just needed to practice being human again before she forgot how entirely.
Dr. Reeves' office was professionally soothing—beige walls, soft lighting, a white noise machine that hummed almost like the facility but not quite. Wrong frequency. Wrong intent.
The doctor herself was younger than Esme expected, with kind eyes and careful hands that gestured as she spoke. "I want you to know," she began, "that nothing you say here will sound strange to me. I've worked with many people who've experienced unusual circumstances."
Esme almost laughed. Almost.
"Tell me," Dr. Reeves continued, "what do you remember about where you were?"
Esme considered lying. It would be easier. Craft a story about being held somewhere, about human captors with human motives. But the weight of the truth pressed against her sternum like a physical thing.
"Glass rooms," she said finally. "White walls. People who weren't supposed to be there but were."
Dr. Reeves nodded, making notes. "Can you describe these people?"
"Trent. Claire. Leo. Sabine." The names came easier now, like a prayer. "We could see each other but couldn't speak. Couldn't touch. Just... existed."
"And how long do you think you were there?"
Esme looked at the clock on the wall. Its hands moved in perfect increments, measuring time the way time was supposed to be measured. "Time wasn't the same there. Sometimes minutes felt like years. Sometimes years felt like minutes. We aged in ways that didn't match."
"That must have been disorienting."
Disorienting. Such a small word for such a vast wrongness.
"There was someone else," Esme continued, surprising herself. "A woman. Not like the others who ran the place. She came from... somewhere else."
"Tell me about her."
"Her name was Yashan." Speaking it aloud in this beige office felt like blasphemy. "She watched us through the glass. Through the water. Through the spaces between moments."
Dr. Reeves' pen stilled. "The spaces between moments?"
Esme met her eyes. "You don't believe me."
"I believe you experienced something," Dr. Reeves said carefully. "Trauma can affect how we process memories, how we—"
"I'm not traumatized," Esme interrupted. "I'm changed. There's a difference."
The session continued for another forty minutes, dancing around truth without ever touching it. Dr. Reeves prescribed something for anxiety, something for sleep. Esme accepted the prescriptions knowing she'd never fill them. Sleep wasn't the problem. Sleep was where the truth lived.
That night, Esme prepared for bed with ritual precision. She brushed her teeth (normal human maintenance). Changed into pajamas (costume for the performance of sleep). Kissed her parents goodnight (practiced affection that almost felt real).
But when she lay down, she didn't close her eyes. Not yet.
She waited for the house to settle, for her parents' whispered conversation to fade, for the telltale sound of her father's snoring. Then she sat up, pulled her knees to her chest, and let herself remember.
The invitation hadn't come all at once. It had built slowly, like water rising. First, the dreams of drowning that weren't quite nightmares. Then the pull toward water—any water. Bathtubs. Rain puddles. The river.
Always the river.
And in the water, a voice: "You don't have to be alone."
And her voice, small and desperate: "I don't want to be here anymore."
She'd meant here—this life, this blindness, this suffocating normalcy. But Yashan had heard something deeper. Had offered something else.
"Come elsewhere," the voice had said. "Come see what sight really means."
And Esme, fourteen and angry and tired of darkness, had said yes.
The memory fractured there, dissolving into fragments. Water closing over her head. Hands—not hands—pulling her through. The first glimpse of white walls and glass and others who'd said yes to their own invitations.
Esme's eyes grew heavy despite her resistance. The room temperature dropped, her breath misting in the air. Somewhere in the walls, pipes groaned like a building breathing.
She knew what was coming.
She let it take her.
The dream began as it always did now—with the hum.
But tonight, it didn't feel like dreaming. It felt like returning.
The hum returned first—low, alive, omnipresent. Not heard but felt, vibrating through bones and teeth and the space behind her eyes. Then the sound of something mechanical shifting, like walls rearranging themselves to accommodate her presence. Her dream-self opened its eyes, but there was no body. Only vision. Only purpose.
She moved—not through space, but through rooms. Through layers. Through the architecture of something that had never been entirely real.
In the first: Trent.
He sat cross-legged in a glass cube, his missing fingers pressed against the pane. Three fingers gone from his left hand, two from his right, the stumps healed smooth as melted wax. He tapped a rhythm—four quick beats, then two slow. Again. And again. His mouth moved silently, repeating the same sequence as if reciting a language only he remembered.
The glass pulsed faintly under his hands, responding to the rhythm. With each pulse, the walls seemed to thin, showing glimpses of somewhere else—a house with yellow walls, a woman crying over a photo, a name being carved into a memorial stone.
His home. His mother. His death, recorded and grieved while he still lived.
Trent's eyes snapped to hers, seeing her despite the impossibility of it. His lips formed words: "She's coming for you too."
The dream shifted, pulling her sideways through space that didn't exist.
In the next: Claire.
She stood in the center of her room, humming. Her voice was soundless in the dream, but Esme could feel it—low vibrations, like the hum had become part of her. Had replaced whatever Claire had been before. She turned slowly, eyes closed, arms raised like a conductor with no orchestra. The lights above her flickered in rhythm with her breath, casting shadows that moved wrong, that showed too many arms, too many faces.
Claire had been a teacher once. Esme knew this suddenly, completely. Kindergarten. She'd loved finger painting and story time and making voices for puppet shows. Now she conducted silence, orchestrated emptiness, led invisible things in songs that human throats couldn't sing.
Her eyes opened suddenly. Bright blue, too bright, like lights were on behind them. She looked at Esme.
And smiled. Just once. A teacher's smile, proud of a student who'd finally understood the lesson.
The dream pulled her on.
Leo's room.
Dark, except for the glow of chalk lines drawn on every surface. The walls, the floor, even across his own skin—circles inside circles. Always the same: three intersecting rings with a line through the middle. He traced them methodically, his fingers leaving glowing trails that faded and renewed with each pass.
But now Esme could see what she'd missed before. The circles weren't just symbols. They were maps. Each ring showed a different layer of reality, and the line through the middle was the path between them. Leo was trying to chart the way home—or the way deeper in. She couldn't tell which.
He worked with desperate precision, a cartographer of impossible spaces. His fingernails were worn to the quick, his eyes bloodshot from staring at patterns that shifted when observed directly.
He stopped. Turned. His mouth opened, and this time Esme heard him clearly:
"Don't trust the door. It opens both ways."
Before she could ask what he meant, the dream yanked her forward.
Sabine.
She stood in a room of mirrors—except none of the reflections were her. Each mirror held a different woman: older, younger, different hair, different eyes. All versions of herself. All trapped. All watching.
Sabine moved from mirror to mirror, pausing at each like she was taking attendance. This one wore a wedding dress. That one held a baby. Another in a hospital gown, aged and withered. Futures that would never be, or had already been, or were happening somewhere else to other Sabines who'd made different choices.
At the center of the room stood one mirror with a blacked-out center. Sabine approached it slowly, her hand hovering, not quite touching it.
"This one's mine," she whispered. "The one where I said no."
Then—she looked up. Past the mirrors. Past the room. Through the dream itself.
Right at Esme.
"I remember you," she whispered. "You were the first. The one Yashan saw before she began watching the rest of us. You made her curious about what else might be possible."
The room began to fracture, mirrors cracking, realities bleeding together. Sabine reached out, her hand pushing through the dream space between them.
"Find us," she said urgently. "She's keeping us for—"
The dream shattered.
Esme jerked awake gasping, her heart hammering against her ribs. The sheets were soaked with sweat that smelled of ozone and chemicals. Her hands shook as she pushed herself upright.
The room was dark, but not empty.
In the corner, where the shadows gathered thickest, something shifted. Not quite movement. More like the idea of movement, the potential for it.
Esme's throat was raw. Had she been screaming? Her parents hadn't come, so maybe not. Or maybe they'd learned not to respond to the sounds she made in sleep.
She rose on unsteady legs, crossed the room, and pulled open her desk drawer. Her hands moved without conscious thought, digging past old notebooks and unused pencils, searching for something she didn't remember hiding.
At the back, wrapped in a piece of fabric she didn't recognize, she found it: a thick, black permanent marker.
The weight of it in her hand felt right. Felt like purpose. Like something she'd held before, in Leo's room maybe, watching him draw his endless circles. Or had he given it to her? The memory slipped sideways, refusing to clarify.
She crossed to the closet door, uncapped the marker, and drew three interlocking circles with a line through them. The marker moved smoothly, like it was following grooves already carved in the wood. Like she'd done this before. Many times.
The moment the symbol was complete, something clicked inside her. Not memory—deeper than memory. Understanding.
The invitation hadn't been random. Yashan hadn't chosen her by chance.
They'd been watching her long before she'd been aware of them. Through her blindness, she'd seen things others couldn't. Patterns in the darkness. Movements in the void. She'd been perceiving their world all along, mistaking it for imagination, for the phantom visions of damaged optic nerves.
But it had been real. All of it.
And when she'd finally said yes, when she'd walked into the river that night seven years ago, she hadn't been escaping.
She'd been coming home.
Her chest heaved. Not from fear. From recognition.
From hunger.
Because now that she remembered, she wanted to go back. Needed to. The pull was physical, painful, like hooks in her sternum drawing her toward—
Downstairs, a knock echoed through the house.
Three soft raps. Deliberate. Patient.
Then silence.
Her parents didn't stir. Their snoring continued, deep and rhythmic. Too deep. Too rhythmic. Like they'd been helped into sleep.
Esme's hand tightened on the marker. She set it down carefully, quietly, and stepped into the hallway.
The frost had returned to her doorknob, spreading now to the walls around her door. Her breath misted in the suddenly cold air. Each step toward the stairs left condensation on the floor, her bare feet printing wet shadows on the wood.
At the top of the stairs stood a woman.
Esme's breath caught. She didn't know if her body wanted to run or kneel. The hallway seemed too narrow to contain what stood there, like the walls should buckle from the pressure of her presence.
Tall. Pale as winter moonlight. Hair in silver braids that seemed to move without wind. Dressed in white that wasn't quite fabric—more like solidified light, like wearing the idea of white. Her eyes held galaxies. Not metaphorically—Esme could see stars in them. Distant, moving. Watching back. Ancient light from places that had never known human names.
Not threatening. Not smiling. Just present. Just waiting.
The same face she'd seen in the puddle. The same voice she'd heard in the water seven years ago.
Yashan.
Esme gripped the railing. The wood creaked under her fingers, frost spreading from her touch. "You're real."
The woman tilted her head. When she spoke, her voice came from everywhere and nowhere, vibrating through the walls, through Esme's bones, through the spaces between seconds.
"I've always been real. You're the one who's been sleeping, threshold-child."
The words vibrated through more than air—through time, through possibility. Threshold-child. Not her name, but what she was. What she'd always been.
Then, softer, like a secret meant for later: "The fifth one never said yes. And yet she still fell."
Esme blinked—and Yashan was gone.
But on the landing, three drops of water shimmered. They formed a perfect triangle, each drop containing a reflection that wasn't of this hallway. In one, Esme saw white corridors stretching endlessly. In another, glass rooms stacked like honeycomb. In the third, four faces pressed against barriers, mouths open in silent screams.
A message. A map. A promise.
Esme stepped forward, her foot hovering over the first drop.
She wasn't just remembering anymore.
She was being called back.
And this time, she understood why.
The others weren't just trapped. They were anchors, holding something in place. Something that needed all five of them to work. She'd been allowed to leave because her absence had broken the pattern, made the whole system unstable.
Now they needed her back to complete it.
Or to destroy it.
The water drops began to evaporate, but their message remained burned into her retinas. Three locations. Three choices. Three ways back to elsewhere.
Behind her, her bedroom door creaked open. The marker rolled across the floor, leaving a black line like a path.
Or like a warning.
Or like the first stroke of the triad seal, beginning to draw itself.
Esme looked back at her parents' door, still closed, still silent. She could wake them. Could scream. Could choose the morning and therapy and medication and the slow, careful process of pretending to be human again.
She could stay. Stay for Laura's trembling hope. For Michael's quiet determination to believe everything would be okay. For her own heartbeat, which had finally learned to trust softness again. For the possibility of normal birthdays and normal Christmases and a normal life built on the careful architecture of forgetting.
But if she stayed, they'd come. For her. For all of them. And this house, this family, this fragile attempt at ordinary life would shatter like glass.
Or she could follow the water.
Find the others.
Face whatever they'd been anchoring in place.
The frost on the walls pulsed like a heartbeat. Waiting. The whole house held its breath.
She pressed her hand against the wall. It was slick with frost, burning cold. Cold like the hallway in the facility. Cold like Trent's skin when she'd glimpsed him through the glass. What if this time, she didn't come back? What if coming back was never really the plan?
Her parents slept on, unaware their daughter stood at the edge of leaving them again. Maybe forever this time.
But the alternative was worse. The footprints would keep coming. The frost would spread. And eventually, something would step through that her love couldn't protect them from.
Esme made her choice.