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Rosa did not stop crying until long after darkness had covered the lake.

She made no sobbing sounds, only short breaths that barely stirred the blanket. Recen stayed beside her. Every so often, he reached toward her face to make sure it was still warm. The blood had dried between his fingers and beneath his nails, but he seemed unaware of it.

Outside, there was no wind. No insects, night birds, or water against the stones could be heard, either. The entire cabin held a silence so absolute that Recen could make out the tiny beat behind Rosa’s ear.

Regular. Precise.

The same pulse he had seen in Ten.

He searched for an explanation and found only the certainty that he must not let anyone take her away.

Rosa opened her eyes around midnight.

“I’m thirsty.”

Recen filled the tin cup at the cistern and brought it to her. The little girl drank, holding it in both hands. The water level did not fall.

He noticed.

So did Rosa.

She kept drinking until Recen took the cup from her. The surface was still at the brim, smooth, without a single ripple.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

He set it on the floor. As it touched the boards, the cup gave a heavy, hollow sound, as though it were empty.

Rosa curled up beneath the blanket.

“My name is Rosa.”

“Go to sleep.”

“My sister called me Rosa.”

Recen looked toward the door. Beyond it lay three bodies he had not yet gone to check. He did not need to. He knew the difference between wounding and killing.

“You don’t have a sister.”

The girl closed her eyes, but a fresh tear crossed the track of the last one on her cheek.

“I remember her.”

“No.”

“I remember her telling me to run.”

Recen leaned over her.

“They put those memories in you. They want to confuse you.”

He did not know who they were or where that conviction came from. As he spoke, he felt that the words had been in his mouth before, perhaps many years earlier, beside another bed.

Rosa looked at him in silent fear.

“What about yours?”

Recen went still.

The lamp dimmed. For an instant, Rosa’s face seemed to be made of thousands of tiny points suspended at different depths. Then she was once more a little girl lying beneath a blanket.

“Go to sleep,” he repeated.

He sat on the floor with his back against the bed and the thick-bladed knife across his legs.

At five o’clock sharp, he opened his eyes.

The bed was empty.

The blanket still held the shape of Rosa’s body, even the hollow her head had left in the pillow, but when Recen touched it, the fabric was cold. He stood. The knife fell onto the boards.

“Celeste.”

He searched the cabin. He looked beneath the table, inside the pantry, and behind the door, though he knew an eight-year-old girl could not hide in any of those spaces. The front door was still barred. The back door stood open.

Outside, dawn had come.

The sun was already halfway up the sky, motionless above the mountains. The ground was still wet from the storm, but the mud held no footprints. The bodies had vanished. No blood, weapons, or signs of a struggle remained. The five chairs were four again.

Recen crossed the clearing, calling for Celeste.

He found Rosa on the dock with her back to the cabin. She wore the same clothes as the night before, but they were dry. The doll lay at her feet.

The girl was staring into the water.

“I told you not to go outside.”

Rosa did not turn.

“There aren’t any fish.”

Recen approached the edge. The lake was clear all the way to the bottom. Dozens of yards below the surface, he could make out rocks, submerged branches, and silt suffused with a blue glow. There were no weeds or fish. Nor any movement of a current.

“They’ll come back.”

“No,” Rosa said. “They took them out.”

Recen caught her shoulder and turned her around.

He could see the sun through her cheek.

He drew his hand away. Blue lines lit up beneath the girl’s skin, running down her neck and branching beneath her clothes. They lasted less than a blink.

“What did they do to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who?”

Rosa looked toward the cabin.

Ten stood by the door.

There was no bicycle or trailer on the path. He wore his blue jacket and clean boots. His arms hung at his sides, palms open.

“Good morning, Mr. Skantranovic,” he said. “You must step away from the girl.”

Recen placed Rosa behind him.

“Go away.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then you’ll learn.”

Ten came closer. His boots touched the mud without sinking.

“Rosa cannot stay here. Her presence…”

Recen picked up one of the dinghy’s oars.

“You talk just like the voices.”

The young man stopped.

“What voices?”

“The ones that speak when they think I can’t hear them.”

The regular pulse appeared beneath Ten’s left ear. This time it did not fade. It spread toward his jaw like a line of light beneath the skin.

“Give me Rosa,” he said.

“Her name is Celeste.”

“No.”

Recen raised the oar.

“Don’t ever tell me that again.”

“Rosa isn’t Celeste. You know that.”

The oar came down hard enough to break a skull. Ten raised his forearm and took the blow without moving. The wood snapped in two. For a second, the blue sleeve vanished, revealing a framework of luminous lines moving on joints around an empty space.

Recen still held the splintered half.

Ten looked at his arm. The fabric reappeared.

“You shouldn’t have seen that.”

“I’ve already seen too much.”

Recen drove the wood into his abdomen.

The point went through the jacket without meeting resistance. There was no blood. A high-pitched whine came from Ten’s body, and for an instant his face lost its features: eyes, mouth, and nose smoothed into a blue-gray surface. Then his appearance returned, but his voice came from several places at once.

“Sever the link.”

The lake shuddered.

It was not a wave. The surface split into perfect squares that rose and fell in different rhythms. The mountains flickered. Each time they reappeared, they were closer, as though the valley were folding around the cabin.

Rosa screamed.

Recen let go of the wood and scooped her into his arms. He ran to the dinghy, jumped in, and untied the mooring rope.

“We’ll go to the other side.”

“There is no other side,” Rosa said.

“There will be.”

He pushed the boat with the unbroken oar. The bow moved a few yards and stopped against an invisible resistance. Recen pushed again. The wood creaked, but the dinghy did not move.

Behind them, Ten was walking on the water.

With each step, one of the squares on the surface turned white. The transformation spread from his feet to the shores. The reeds, stones, and trees lost first their color, then their volume.

“Mr. Skantranovic,” Ten said, “let go of Rosa.”

Recen held the girl against his chest.

“They won’t separate us again.”

Rosa looked at him. She was no longer crying.

“I’m not her.”

“You’re scared. That’s why you’re saying these things.”

“Celeste isn’t here.”

The name opened something inside Recen. He saw fire in a window, a small hand disappearing behind smoke, and his own fingernails breaking against arms that held him back. The memory closed before it could show him more.

“You’re lying.”

“You were there.”

Recen squeezed Rosa until she whimpered.

“Be quiet.”

The girl began to grow weightless in his arms. Her legs vanished below the knees; then her skirt, her torso, and one shoulder became transparent. Recen tried to grasp parts of her that no longer offered any resistance.

“No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

Rosa raised a hand. She touched his beard with fingers made of light.

“You’re hurting me.”

It was the last thing she said.

Her body dissolved without falling. For a moment, it remained as a blue silhouette in Recen’s arms, then scattered into points that the air did not carry away.

He closed his hands on emptiness.

The scream that came from his throat did not sound human.

He hurled himself at Ten. Both fell onto the white water, which held them like a floor. Recen struck the young man again and again. Each blow erased a different part of his face, exposing that luminous web. Ten did not defend himself. He watched with eyes that vanished and formed again.

“I can’t stabilize him,” he said in all his voices.

“Bring her back.”

“I can’t.”

Recen drove his thumbs into the places where Ten’s eyes should have been.

The face gave way like a membrane. A blue light enveloped Recen’s hands and climbed his arms. He felt the pain in his skin again, more intense than on the lake, older than the seventeen years.

Ten spoke a name.

“Calahan.”

The world went dark.

The mountains vanished first. Then the forests, the cabin, and the dock. The dinghy hung suspended above the whiteness for a few seconds and came apart plank by plank. At last, the lake, too, went out beneath Recen’s knees.

He fell without moving.

Light pierced him from every direction. His clothes broke away in dark fragments. His beard retreated into his face; his hair vanished, and his body aged all at once, covering itself in scars he did not remember. Black fabric, tight and seamless, replaced the rags.

When he could see again, he was standing in a room made of mirrors.

There were hundreds. They covered the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. None reflected quite the same image of him. In one, he was young. In another, his face was burned. In another, he held a girl with no features. In the rest, he stood alone, his head shaved, dressed in black.

Recen searched for a way out, and all the reflected men did the same a moment before he did.

He struck the nearest mirror.

It did not break.

“Give her back to me.”

His voice returned from every surface, multiplied until the words were lost.

A figure appeared behind the reflections. It was tall, dressed in gray, and had Cat’s face without the wound in his throat.

Recen turned. There was no one in the room.

The figure was still there, passing from one mirror to another without walking.

“Recen Skantranovic,” it said in Cat’s voice. “Open your eyes.”

Recen struck the glass again.

This time, on the other side, something struck with him.