Chapter 2 — Content note: Child abuse, physical violence, and traumatic memories.

I woke to someone humming.

It was tuneless and absent-minded, the kind people do while their hands are busy. Dishes clinked somewhere downstairs. A chair scraped beneath the murmur of voices, and the smell of something hot and savory made my stomach clench. I lived alone. Nobody should have been humming or moving dishes around while I slept.

I opened my eyes to dark wooden beams. The door stood half open, and through the gap I could see a lamp lighting the hallway. Shadows shifted as someone passed beyond the doorway. I tried to sit up, but pain struck my side so fast that I cried out. A second ache flared behind my eyes, and I sank back into the pillow, breathing through my teeth. My voice sounded higher than it should have, rough enough that I swallowed, hoping it was only a dry throat.

As the pain eased, I remembered slipping at the edge of the cliff. I had reached for something to hold on to, but there had been nothing, and I'd fallen with the sky above me, still expecting to wake up in my bed. Before that, something had come out of the trees and driven me backward. What the hell had it been? I hadn't seen it clearly, but even now, remembering it made me glance toward the open door. I forced my eyes back to the ceiling, trying to convince myself it had only been a dream. The pain in my side made that difficult.

The humming stopped. Someone called quietly from below, and light footsteps hurried up the stairs. The door opened wider. A girl of about ten stood there, rosy-cheeked, with dark hair brushing her shoulders. She stared at me for a moment before slipping inside and drawing the door mostly closed behind her. She did it with exaggerated care, watching the frame to make sure it didn't knock, and I wondered how fragile I must have looked.

My first thought was that she shouldn't be in my room. My second was that it wasn't my room. There was no rain-streaked window, no laundry heaped on the chair. The blanket was the wrong weight, and the table beside me held a pitcher and a folded cloth instead of the things I usually left within reach. I tried to ask where I was and got a rasp.

She reached for the pitcher without waiting for me to try again. After pouring a glass of water, she slid an arm behind my shoulders. I pushed against the mattress while she steadied me, trying not to put my full weight on her. The movement pulled at my side, but we managed to get me high enough to drink.

"Slowly," she said. "Mother says you can't move around yet."

The water tasted faintly of metal. My palm stung where it closed around the glass, and I took three careful swallows before lowering it. "Thanks," I managed. "Sorry. I'm not usually this much work."

She glanced at the bandage around my ribs. "You fell in a river."

Fair point. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Where am I?"

The voice that came out was small, rough, and wrong. I filed that away to be afraid of later.

She told me, fast and low, that I was in their house, in a village whose name I didn't quite catch. Her father had found me on the riverbank that afternoon. At first, he had taken me for an animal tangled in the reeds. "Until he got closer," she said, her eyes dropping to my bandages. She didn't finish, and I didn't ask her to.

"He brought you home," she continued. "Mother's the village doctor. She cleaned your wounds."

"Did your father find anyone else?"

The girl shook her head. I hadn't expected her to say yes, but hearing it still made my stomach tighten. Her father had found me beside a river and carried me here. I understood what she was telling me; I just couldn't understand how any of it had happened. I had gone to bed like I did every night. How had that ended with a stranger finding me tangled in reeds?

I looked down at myself, trying to work out what I had to deal with before attempting anything else. A bandage around my ribs, tight and neatly secured. A thin cotton robe that smelled of somebody else's soap. No sign of the clothes I had been wearing, and no phone on the table. I actually looked for it, glancing beneath the folded cloth beside the pitcher. Years of habit, reaching for something that might tell me the time, my location, who I could call. There wasn't even a clock within sight.

"Does it hurt a lot?" the girl asked.

"I'm fine."

It was out before I had checked. She gave me a skeptical look, far too old for her face. "Mother says people who say that are usually lying."

"Your mother sounds difficult to argue with."

"She is."

I almost smiled. Then she leaned closer and reached toward my forehead, evidently checking for fever.

I flinched. It wasn't a decision. My body jerked away from her hand, tearing pain through my side, and my arm came up over my head before I could stop it. Her fingers stayed frozen in the air.

"Sorry," she whispered. "I only wanted to see if you were hot."

"You didn't do anything wrong." I knew I should lower my arm. She was a child trying to help, and I was frightening her. Nothing in her face had changed except the sudden worry, yet my heart was pounding as though I'd just run a marathon. "Just give me a second."

She drew back, still holding out her hand. I tried to take a slower breath, but pain split my skull behind the eyes. The glass slipped. She caught it, and I barely noticed. I pressed my palm to my temple and shut my eyes.

A house appeared behind them.

It was enormous. Dark corridors stretched in every direction, with paper doors opening onto covered walkways around a courtyard. Rain fell from tiled eaves into a stone basin. I had never been there, yet I knew which floorboards creaked and which I could cross in silence. I knew where to turn before I saw the end of the corridor. That familiarity was so complete that it frightened me more than the place itself.

Then the corridor dropped away, and I was kneeling on a polished floor. The wood was cold beneath my knees. A woman stood over me while other people lined the walls, watching without moving. A man in dark robes was studying the ceiling. My cheek burned, and my lip tasted of copper. When the woman stepped closer, I raised an arm over my head. I wanted to stand, to get away from her, but my body stayed on the floor.

"Mother, please," I heard myself say. "I'll do better. I'll get stronger."

The voice was mine, but I hadn't chosen the words. Her hand closed around my jaw, nails pressing into my skin as she dragged my face upward.

"How could I have given birth to you?" she said. "No gift. No strength. Even your hair makes you look like a stranger in this family."

A strand of pale gold had fallen across my eyes. Last time I checked, my hair had been chestnut brown, not blonde. And what did she mean, no gift? No strength? I barely had time to make sense of her words before she hit me again. I turned my face away from the blow, and the room dissolved.

The girl was in front of me, her hands locked on my shoulders. Tears streaked her cheeks. Her mouth moved, and it took several seconds for the sound to catch up.

"Please. Please look at me."

The bed was shaking. I was shaking it. My throat was raw, and I understood slowly that I had been screaming. The words still coming from my mouth were the ones I had just said to the woman: Mother, please. I'll get stronger.

"I'm here," the girl said. "My mother's coming. She's coming."

I tried to focus on her. I needed to tell her I could hear her, that she didn't have to cry, but I couldn't get enough control of my breathing to speak. I wanted to ask why my cheek still stung and how I knew my way through a house I had never entered. The pain behind my eyes swelled until her face blurred at the edges.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs. A woman and a man filled the doorway, then crossed to the bed. The woman spoke as she touched my forehead, her hands cool against my skin. I tried to hold on to her face, tired and steady, but the light behind her stretched into a pale streak. Then everything went dark.

When I opened my eyes again, the room was almost black.

Moonlight came through a window I hadn't noticed and lay across the floorboards. A lamp burned low on the desk in the corner. The door had been left ajar, and the house beyond it was quiet. Something rustled beside the bed, drawing my attention downward.

The girl was asleep on a futon, curled on her side with the blanket pulled up to her nose. Had she been here the whole time? I watched her for a while, listening to her breathe. The last thing I remembered clearly was her crying while she tried to get my attention. Now she looked comfortable, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, and I was relieved that at least one of us could sleep.

I tried to prop myself up, but my side pulled so hard that I gave up. Whatever had happened, I wasn't going anywhere tonight. I lay back carefully and looked toward the ceiling, trying to put the last few hours into an order I could understand.

The house was still there whenever I closed my eyes. I could picture its corridors as clearly as the rooms in my own apartment, and I could still hear the woman's voice. I raised a hand toward my cheek, half expecting to find swelling. There was none. It should have helped to know she hadn't actually struck me here, but I could still feel how quickly I had covered my head when the girl reached for me.

Was I still dreaming? Had the fall happened at all? I looked at the plain wooden walls, the low furniture, the bedding on the floor. Nothing shifted or faded. My side continued to throb, and the girl's breathing remained steady beside me.

Beyond the door, a floorboard creaked. Voices drifted up from below, a man's and a woman's, kept low. I wouldn't have listened if the man hadn't said "river."

"...nothing on her," he was saying. "No bag, no name. If she came from upriver, someone will be looking."

"Let her heal first." The woman sounded tired. "She couldn't answer anything tonight."

A cup was set down on wood. "And if no one comes?"

There was a pause before the woman answered. "Then we'll work out what to do."

Their voices moved farther away. I couldn't make out what came next, and I lay there with my heart knocking against my ribs. Of course they were wondering who I was. A stranger had been brought into their home badly injured. They had every reason to ask questions, and I should have wanted someone to help me answer them.

Instead, I found myself hoping that whoever was looking would never find this house.

I didn't know where that thought came from. I didn't know the woman I had seen or why I had called her Mother. But imagining someone arriving to take me back made my stomach tighten so sharply that I pressed a hand against it.

I glanced at the sleeping girl. For now, nobody was coming through the door. I tried to let that be enough until morning.

I turned my head toward the moonlit floor, and that was when I noticed the paper pinned above the desk. One sheet, a few lines of black brushwork, just inside the lamplight. I squinted. The strokes reminded me of the lettering on the manga covers lined up on my shelf, but I had always read those books in English. I wouldn't have known where to begin reading this.

I looked more closely, expecting to make out only the shapes of the characters. Instead, I found myself reading the note as easily as if it had been written in English.

Rest. If the pain worsens, call out.

I stared until my eyes ached. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked. The girl sighed and turned toward the wall. I read the instruction a second time, then a third, waiting for it to become something I couldn't understand. It never did. I had never learned those characters, but I could read them anyway.

I tried to find one question I could answer. How had I ended up here? Why could I read this? Whose memories had I seen? Every time I tried to work through one, I ran into something else I couldn't explain. The ache behind my eyes began to build again, and I let my head sink into the pillow.

For now, I listened to the girl breathe. It was steady and quiet, occasionally interrupted by a rustle of bedding as she shifted in her sleep. I didn't have to make sense of that. She was here, asleep beside me, and nobody downstairs seemed to expect anything from me tonight.

My body grew heavy. The beams above me blurred, and I could no longer hold on to the questions. I stopped fighting the exhaustion and closed my eyes.