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Chapter 4 : Echo

The polished oak of the hallway door felt impossibly solid under her trembling hand as she pushed it open. Damian’s words—control yourself—were a brand on her mind, searing through the fragile barrier she’d tried to rebuild. The humiliation was a taste, metallic and coppery, at the back of her tongue, distinct from the ever-present phantom taste of the void.She walked, her stride a fragile mimicry of her usual grace, toward the library. It was the only place that ever offered the illusion of sanctuary. But with each step, the sound, which had receded to a background whisper during the meeting, began to pulse back into prominence. It was different now. It had a direction.

It gathered in her lower abdomen first, a coalescing warmth that was not pleasure but a focused, invasive attention. The scritch-scrape formed not a word, but a sentence. It built itself, syllable by terrible syllable, along the pathways of her nerves.

The sensation was no longer a diffuse violation. It was an instruction. As the silent sentence completed in her cortex, a specific, unimaginable pressure manifested inside her, deep within the cradle of her pelvis. It was not the mimicry of a human touch. It was the distinct, horrifying impression of something latching on, of minute, hook-like structures gently, irrevocably, anchoring themselves to the inner walls of her being. A biological docking. She stumbled, catching herself against a cold stone pillar in the library foyer. Her breath came in short, sharp gasps. No one around her, students hunched over laptops, heard the scream building in her chest.

She fled to the stacks, to the deepest, most deserted rows on the sub-level, where the air smelled of crumbling paper and dust. She sank onto the floor between the towering shelves, her back against a shelf of 19th-century theological journals. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eye sockets, as if she could physically push the sensations out.

When she opened her eyes, blinking in the dim, greenish fluorescent light, her vision swam. Then it cleared, and changed.

The world fractured.

It was not a metaphor. Her view of the opposite shelf, with its rows of dark, gold-lettered spines, splintered into dozens of identical, repeating images. She was seeing through a compound lens. Each hexagonal fragment presented a slightly different …