People say life is like time, every minute counted, every second a coin you either spend or lose. They say lives are flexible, malleable: changeable with choices, swayed by will. They say we have freedom. I used to believe that. I used to think you could steer the current if you paddled hard enough.
Now I run through the library like I'm trying to outrun a verdict.
I tear between stacks, palm skimming spines of books that smell like dust and old secrets. My sneakers whisper against the carpet, and each whisper sounds like a lie. Time is slipping; not the polite, observable kind with clocks and schedules, but a thin, oily slippage that could steal your breath. The time on my phone says the same as it always did, but my chest says otherwise.
Maybe if I had known, maybe if I'd listened when Gabriel told me to wait, when Vivienne's eyes asked me to be cautious. Maybe if I hadn't dragged Gabriel into my half-finished plans, if I hadn't ignored the warning signs and assumed everything would sort itself out, maybe then Ophelia wouldn't have vanished, and maybe Albien wouldn't be….
My hands find a corner where the light bends wrong. A shadow clings to the shelves like a smear of ink. It feels wrong in my fingers, like I've stuck them into cold water and pulled them out just as they go numb. Heat settles against my chest, someone pressing close enough that I can feel the warm timbre of breath. Not Albien, not a friend. But a stranger whose proximity tastes like a threat.
"Don't speak," the voice says. The words are low enough to make the ink leaves rustle. "Unless you want to end up like him."
Like him. The phrase drops between us, and the library takes it in like a confession. My brain does that frantic thing of refusing to pick a path, fight or flight both feel like betrayals. I freeze. My mouth opens and closes like a gull catching wind. For a second I think I can outrun the gravity of the sentence by refusing its weight. It's useless. I can feel things rearrange: my ribs constrict, the blade of panic slides beneath my skin.
I turn, because turning is a motion I can still control, and I find Albien where light gives way to shadow. He's less a person than a folding up of his old self; sprawled, pale, a dark map seeping across his sweater. The crimson blooms slowly and sovereignly, beautiful in a way that makes my stomach sick. His breath is a fragile thing, lungs trying to be honest and failing. He looks at me, and the look punches a hole through every one of my self-made alibis.
"Koa…" he says, voice grating like metal on metal. It's not a demand, it's a concession.
I want to tell him I won't. I want to tell him we'll get him help, that this is just a bad scene and we can stitch it back together. Instead I find myself murmuring the most useless of truths: "I'm here!."
The man who pressed close enough to steal my warmth steps forward. His face is that weathered not-by-younger-years kind of anger; not a face for pity. He wants names, numbers, the story that explains us away. He leans in, the knife catches the light and becomes a grammar threat against my throat. The pressure asks for answers I don't have.
"How many of you are here?" he asks, like he's tallying sins instead of bodies.
There are so many ways to lie. There are fewer ways to tell the truth without killing someone you love.
"I don't know," I say, and the words taste small and betray my tongue. I want to say we were looking for Ophelia. I want to say we followed footprints and glitching surveillance until the world folded in on itself with a shining blue light on our feet. I wanted to say Gabriel's grip had been the only thing that anchored me. I want to say all the things that would explain what dragged us through the seam, but the knife digs an argument into my windpipe.
"Do you even know where you are?" I gulped. "Isn't this the high school…?"
The tinted blue white-haired man pressed his knife deeper into my skin. "Which high school? Tell me."
I wanted to shatter my voice, but it came out cracked. "Celestial Grove Academy…"
For a brief moment, his eyes brightened, like my words had shocked him. The knife lifted slightly from my throat, though his caution remained.
"You're in the Veiled Dimension," he said, as if naming it could make it less monstrous. But it didn't. It only made it more real. The phrase landed and settled like ash on my skin. The library remained in structure, but it's like a drowned city, it obeyed different laws. In this place you inhale differently. The dust of old books moved with purpose. The silence hummed like an instrument tuned to someone else's grief.
I remembered Ophelia, not as a puzzle piece, but as a laugh that filled the hallway like summer. I remembered Gabriel's hands, steady and callused, the way he'd tuck a stray wisp of hair behind his ear without thinking. I remembered Vivienne's exasperated sighs and Alora's quiet support, always smiling, always offering herself to anyone who needed her.
Memories in the Veiled Dimension are elastic. It snapped and pulled and left frayed edges of regret that snagged on every thought.
If only I had listened, if only I had never tried playing detective, thinking that my crazy ideas could solve Ophelia's disappearance. If only I had left Alora to her plans without worrying her, Vivienne to her guarded steps, Gabriel to his careful and unhurried life. These "if onlys" were like moths circling a porch light, useless but hypnotic, flapping against the window of my mind until the glass fogged with blame.
I'm the only one to blame.
But I knew what had to be done. This was only the start. A ticking clock that would not wait, a fate so unreal it made time itself feel heavier than the life I carried in my chest. Fate was not a personality; it was not a choice. It was the force that made you someone other than yourself, bending the world around you until nothing felt familiar. Reality, as I had known it, was a fragile thing, far thinner than the one I now stood in.
And this… this was the beginning of an impossible fate and perchance the end of it too.