“Honestly? I have no fucking idea,” Bash calls out from the control booth. “The simulations suggest it could be anything from a mild headache to… Well, let’s focus on the mild headache scenario.”
Terror and adrenaline flood my system as lights begin flashing above me. “Wait, Bash, maybe we should?—”
“Too late to back out now. Neural mapping initiated. Whatever happens next, don’t fight it.”
Pain explodes through me like a wildfire—hot, rapid, and utterly unrelenting.
Then there is only darkness, followed by blinding bright-white light.
Chapter Thirteen
LOG THIRTEEN – APPARITIONS OBSERVED: SHE HELD A CONVERSATION WITH SOMEONE NO ONE ELSE COULD SEE.
“It’s you again.How are you here?” I ask, blinking until my eyes adjust to the brightness of the room. I’m staring at the woman from the photograph again.
I’m back in that sterile, hospital-like room, but something’s different this time. She’s standing in front of a large mirror mounted on the far wall, her back to me, but I can see her face clearly in the reflection. Her expression is knowing, almost amused.
“You mean how areyouhere,” she corrects me, and I can see her slight smile in the mirror’s surface.
I guess that makes more sense. Maybe.
Am I the visitor, or is she? The enhancement procedure must have somehow strengthened our connection, made it easier for me to cross over into this space between worlds.
“Is this where they kept you? What did they do to you here? Do you have powers like me?” The questions tumble out before I can stop them.
She begins to turn slowly to face me, but something’s wrong. The room glitches around her movement, like a videowith corrupted frames. For a split second, she appears to be moving impossibly fast—her turning motion becomes a blur of motion that my eyes can’t quite track.
I blink hard, trying to focus and clear whatever’s happening to my vision.
“I only let them keep me here so I could find my path,” she says, and that statement raises about a dozen more questions in my mind.
Let them keep her? That suggests she had a choice in the matter, which contradicts everything I know about how Avids are treated. But I force myself to focus on what matters most right now.
“Before, you told me to find the door. What did you mean?” I ask, shooting for the most important question instead of demanding her entire backstory—which is what I really want to do.
“You’ll know the door when you see it. It will feel like remembering something you never learned,” she says, and her voice carries a wisdom that seems impossible for someone who doesn’t look much older than me.
“Why do I need to find the door? What is Project Viridian? How did you die?”
There I go again, running my mouth and asking more than one question at a time, but I can’t help myself. The questions are burning inside me.
“The door isn’t an exit. It’s a way to stop running from the truth you’re not ready to see.”
That sounds absolutely terrifying.
“Katja, does it hurt? Do you feel anything?” Bash’s voice cuts through the vision, yanking me back to reality. The girl begins to fade away just as the bright-machine lights above come back into sharp focus.
“How long has it been?” I ask, blinking hard as my visionadjusts. Everything feels disjointed, like I’m reassembling myself piece by piece.
“Um, a handful of minutes. You made a noise like it hurt, then you completely stopped responding to me.” His voice takes on a slightly higher pitch, the kind that suggests he might have been genuinely worried I wasn’t coming back.
“It did hurt, but it doesn’t anymore,” I tell him honestly. The pain is completely gone now, replaced by a humming energy beneath my skin that feels both foreign and familiar.
I hear his audible sigh of relief echoing through the lab.
I wasn’t even thinking about that girl. I wasn’t trying to contact her, wasn’t thinking about crossing the Veil. I didn’t have any of the same sensations I usually get when crossing over or speaking to a spirit. That was just… weird.
Was it all a hallucination brought on by the procedure?
