It doesn’t come.
The panic explodes into pure terror. My chest tightens until I can’t breathe. The room tilts violently. I feel like I’m falling even though I’m chained to the wall. Everything is slipping. Her face. Her voice. The way she looked at me like I was worth something.
"Tell me where she lives," Valeria says. Still soft. Still patient. "Tell me one specific thing about her that exists outside your own mind."
The compass. The needle. North.
I look at my hand, but it’s blurry, the ink swimming. The needle pointing at?—
At what?
At who?
"She's—" My voice breaks apart completely now, thick and heavy and slurred. “She’s real, she has to be real, I felt her, I touched her, I held her, I?—”
The words tumble out faster, more desperate, but theyfeel wrong in my mouth. My heart is pounding so hard it hurts.
How…it’s not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to feel nothing. But the panic is a living thing clawing at my throat as the last solid pieces of her start to dissolve right in front of me.
I can’t lose her.
Not her.
Just. Not fucking. Her.
Valeria moves toward the door. Pauses. Looks back at me one final time.
"There is no Sophia. There was never a Sophia."
"No." The word tears out of me, but it sounds weak, drugged, uncertain. "She exists. She was there…in Paris. In Greece. She was fucking there,” I mutter, but my mind’s scrambling desperately to find her while I’m saying the words, and the images are fading faster and faster. “She was in here. A few minutes ago. She was right here.”
Bleeding.
Dying.
Because of what you did.
The door closes. The lock catches.
I look at the empty vial on the floor. Look at the compass. The needle pointing at north. At nothing. At a woman who might be a ghost I invented in the dark to survive this hell.
"Sophia." Her name into the room. Into the stone. Into the nothing. "You’re real. I know you’re real. You have to be real. What the fuck is happening to me?”
The room doesn't answer.
The room never answers.
The warmth spreads deeper, pulling me under, and I let it. Because if she’s not real, there’s nothing left to stay sober for. And if she is real… I can’t survive knowing I might have already forgotten her face.
Either way.
Either way the warmth is the only thing left.
14
RETH
The vial is empty. I feel it before I understand it—the warmth spreading slow and heavy through my veins like thick, poisoned syrup. It promises sleep. It lies. It always lies. My body knows first, going heavy and loose. My mind lags behind, foggy, sluggish, fighting to stay above the tide.
