It didn’t take long for her to lose focus of her original aim.
First, she followed a link in a comment about strange bouts of nausea and unusual cravings. Then another. The title of a post in the sidebar caught her eye, about memory gaps and still another complaining of missing time.
That post was rambling and poorly written, the poster describing whole days they could not account for, and a sense that they’d returned to their life with everything slightly out of alignment. They mentioned a sticky heat, music and dancing, the vague certainty thatsomething had happened to them.
The comment section was brutal.
Bruv, are you fuckin mental?
Mental health resources were shared, endless jokes were made, a few crude memes shared in place of advice. Silva felt a tightness within her reading it, too many similarities in the story with her own experience to find the comments amusing. Under her breast, her little wing shivered and shifted.
It was late afternoon by the time she realized she’d spent the whole day falling down one rabbit hole after the next, none bringing her any closer to answers she’d been seeking. She put it behind her when Tannar came home, smiling on cue, Silva of the Daytime never missing a line.
“I know there’s not as much shopping here,” he admitted after asking what she’d done that day. “Not like you’re used to. But it’s not too far from the city.”
“I actually spent the whole afternoon looking at replacements for that vase the movers broke,” she lied easily with a sheepish little laugh. She should have been shocked at how easily untruths fell off her tongue, but Silva considered it a skill necessary to her hustle at that point. “And checking out the community website. I thought maybe I could find some volunteer work.”
The next day, however, she was back at it.
Days melted into weeks. A rabbit hole of posts about lucid dreaming, liminal spaces. There was a consistent theme of missing time and blank spots in otherwise perfectly recalled memories. It all had the sharp edge of familiarity, one that made her skin prickle. Silva of the Daytime would have never wasted a single afternoon entertaining the bizarre ramblings of anonymous strangers online, but Silva of the Nighttime recognized the value in the seediest places. A good hustle wasn’t always savory, after all.
She learned the difference between the posts meant to be taken seriously and those that were clearly performances of imagination, learned how to recognize the posts that would incur moderation, screenshotting them immediately and hiding them in a file on her laptop. Threads were locked with terse explanations, users deleted, and their histories wiped clean. Links removed for beingunsafe. She made sure to screenshot those as well. What had started as a tentative search for information about whatever was growing inside her had turned into something else entirely. The little wing within her grew quieter the deeper she fell, as if it, too, were reading along.
She moved her searches to new platforms, following breadcrumb trails to sites that required a dedicated VPN subscription, silly usernames replaced with cryptic strings of numbers and letters, posts becoming more pointed and almost threatening.
As she moved into the darker, hidden corners of the internet, Silva remembered the promise she’d made herself the previous year, shortly after he’d gone missing.
She would do whatever she needed to do to reassert her place inherworld. There was safety in the privilege of an enclave, and she knew in her heart that he would understand the choices she’d made.Whatever you need to do to survive in this world. She would be a perfect little mouse, Silva of the Daytime,obedient and invisible. And when the opportunity presented itself, she would find him.
The other heartbeat within her thumped. She didn’t know anything about fae babies, Silva realized. The length of time, the cravings . . . this all might be normal.Or there might be something terribly wrong. And she wouldn’t know the answer until she knew where to look . . . and in looking, it might lead her to wherever he was.
Everything escalated the day she made her first post.
Silva hadn’t intended on ever doing anything beyond reading as much as she could, but the need to share her own spotty memories, the certainty that someone or something had taken an eraser to her mind, the need to beseenby someone — anyone! — had been too great to overcome. She wrote and rewrote several drafts, keeping things as brief as she could with no identifiable details. Her hands were trembling when she hitsend, and then it was too late to change her mind.
She decided to take her mind off the foolishness of her post by texting her mother. Within just a few moments, her phone jangled with a video call.
“Darling, it’ssogood to see your face.”
Her grandmother was unable to keep her eyes dry, and at the sight of her tears, Silva felt the welling of her own. She told them about the most recent monthly brunch with the other families, updates on the happenings in the club to which she now belonged.
“They don’t have a real events committee,” she sighed, “not really. They don’t even have a fashion show in the spring! Maybe . . . maybe I can come back for a visit, once the weather breaks.” Her mother was nodding before she’d even finished the thought. “We can have tea, and you can catch me up on everything I’ve missed.”
“That would be wonderful, dear.”
“We love you so much, Silva,” her grandmother cut in, noisy tears rising to the surface at last.
By the time she ended the call, her head ached from crying, but she was too far gone to stop. Noisy, wailing sobs that shook her shoulders and scratched her throat, echoing around the empty house that would never, ever feel like home. Tears that she’d been bottling up for five long months, tears for how much she missed her family and how simple her life had been just a few short years ago, tears over the knowledge that she would never be that elf again, and that even if she went home tomorrow, it wouldn’t be home without him there. Nothing ever would be again. No one would everseeher again.
Silva wiped her cheeks dry with the back of her hands. She couldn’t ever go back to the life she’d had. She would follow this rabbit hole down as far as it went, if it might lead to him.
It was then that she noticed the message icon in the corner of her screen, toggling back to her research.
Delete that immediately. You don’t know who might be watching.
The hair on the back of her neck rose, a shiver moving through her, raising goosebumps on her arms.This is crazy, she told herself. This was stupid and silly, and she didn’t have time for tinfoil-hat theories and the sort of people who believed them . . . but she deleted the post, just the same.
The second message contained a link and a jumbled mix of characters that could only be a password. The site it led to was like a conspiracy theorist’s fever dream, packed with nested threads, each containing links and files, information about books that weren’t available in any library, and streets that didn’t seem to exist. The messages here didn’t bother attempting to sound anything but unhinged, for there was no threat of moderation.
