Chapter 23: Which World

The gym was empty and the lights hummed.

It smelled of rubber mats and chalk and the cold coffee someone had left on the front counter.

Haruka stood on the sprung floor in socks, with her old black training shirt on, and looked down at her own hands.

They were smaller than Eleonora's, and they had paler knuckles.

She flexed them.

The phone in her right hand glowed.

The Lily Saint of Carrow, chapter nineteen.

She scrolled down with her thumb, the way she had on the night she collapsed.

The Captain lifted the axe.

That was the last line.

There was nothing under it, no more words, only white.

"The author never wrote it," she said out loud, and her voice came back at her off the mirrors.

There was a staff room at the end of the hall, and the door stood open.

Through it she could see a stretcher on wheels and two paramedics in orange.

A woman in a gym polo stood by them with both hands over her mouth.

On the stretcher lay a young woman with short black hair, her eyes closed, a bruise rising on her temple, her chest not moving.

Haruka's chest tightened.

She had not known she would see it.

She walked down the hall and stood in the doorway.

Nobody looked up.

She tried to call out to the woman in the polo, her coworker of three years, and no sound came.

The phone buzzed in her hand.

Forty missed calls, from Mom.

The screen kept lighting up with them, one after another, a stack of the same word.

"Mom," Haruka whispered.

She wanted to answer so badly that her whole body leaned toward it.

She stood in the doorway for what felt like an hour, with her thumb over the green button.

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