The coffee sat untouched beside her. Ilia had pulled off her coat, unwrapped her bandaged palm, and laid the fragment gently on the floor. It looked harmless now — no ticking, no glow. Just a perfect metal cube with shifting seams, like puzzle pieces always one degree from locking.
"You're sure no one followed us?" she asked.
"Sure as I ever am," Rien replied, chewing on the end of a matchstick. "Which is to say: not remotely."
Ilia sat cross-legged and stared at the object. "It's… quiet."
"That's worse," Rien muttered. "The ones that glow are at least being polite."
She didn't laugh. Her palm itched. Then burned.
Without thinking, she touched the cube again.
The world cracked.
She wasn't sitting anymore. She wasn't anyone anymore. She was inside something — vast, cold, and humming with invisible language.
Images hit her like waves: a city folded into mirrors; a child standing at the edge of a collapsed tower; a woman with white-blind eyes whispering to a council of statues. Then —
A field of stars, tearing open like silk.
Her body jerked. Her mouth opened, but no sound came.
She saw herself standing at the vault again — but this time, it wasn't her hand reaching for the cube. It was someone else's. Older. Taller. With the same braid she wore now, only streaked with silver.
"Don't," a voice whispered. It echoed through time like an aftershock. "If you take it again, you won't return the same."
Ilia tried to move, to shout, to wake up—but the cube was still pulling. Still remembering.
She saw fire. So much fire.
And then she was back.
Slumped on the floor of the drop house, chest heaving, palms bleeding from clenched fists. Rien crouched over her, wide-eyed, a knife in one hand and a vial in the other.
"What the hell was that?" he demanded.
"I… I don't know." She stared at her hands. The lines in her palm were glowing faintly — not red, not gold. A color between. Something you only saw in the corners of mirrors.
"It wasn't a vision," she whispered. "It was a memory."
Rien narrowed his eyes. "Whose?"
She didn't answer.
Because deep down, she already knew:
It was hers.
But not from this life.