A few days later, Em’s begrudgingly making her way to the job fair. As much as she’d like time to recover, Lena’s right. Her bank account agrees. No more skipping brushing or flossing, she resolves. She’s now far too poor to get cavities.

The job fair’s actually for new graduates, which she absolutely is not. Her goal is to blend (sneak) in with them—if anything, having work experience should be an asset, shouldn’t it? And if not, well… She needs to roll the dice anyway. There aren’t exactly a ton of companies hiring in the area.

After getting turned around downtown and rotating her phone in three useless directions, she eventually cross-references her way to the building. It’s one of the tallest in the area, stretching ominously towards the sun and casting a shadow across most of the block.

There are no signs for a job fair, but two anxious-looking men with name tags push through the double doors. This must be the place. She enters a grand lobby and immediately slows. Oof, intimidating. A floor-to-ceiling window offers a sweeping view of water and mountains, while the sleek marble floor practically declares the level of success required to pass through here.

Although she put real effort into dressing professionally, she’s suddenly hyperaware of the dumpiness of her dress pants and the frizziness of her hair. Should I have worn more makeup? she wonders, watching an immaculate woman in a crimson pantsuit descend the stairs while consulting a tablet. Then she notices another woman with a natural, streamlined look sitting and drinking coffee like she owns the place. Should I have worn less?

She fidgets with her hair, making a mental note to find a bathroom to fret in later, and searches for the room where she belongs. She ventures farther into the lobby. A mezzanine curves above her, brass doors gleaming along it, and a cafe fills one corner with the smell of espresso. Expensive-looking people mill around tables, working, chatting, reading their phones.

As she scans the lobby, she plays with the bracelet on her wrist, toying anxiously with the charm. Lena had given it to her years ago, and somehow, it helps make this feel less like something she’s doing alone. She pulls out her phone to double-check the event information that Lena texted her. Room 54. The only sign points down a hallway towards rooms 150–159. She squints at Lena’s text, then back at the numbers. Maybe a typo?

Down a cream-coloured hallway edged in dark wood, people rest with pamphlets and document holders, drinking coffee and hanging out on their phones. She’s getting warmer. She has to remind herself to unclench her jaw. Job fairs are an unnerving cocktail of putting yourself out there, being assessed by strangers, and grinning through awkward small talk. Like cough medicine: helpful, maybe, but unquestionably unpleasant.

Her neck prickles with the uncomfortable sensation of being observed. Fed up with herself, Em reaches for one of her grounding techniques and tries naming the feeling instead of arguing with it. Anxiety. Not prophecy, not danger. Just run-of-the-mill anxiety.

For a second or two, the naming helps. Then her brain pushes its glasses up and reminds her that, actually, danger remains a possibility.

Still, a second or two is better than nothing. Her mouth tight, she continues down the hall and spots 154 above a pair of doors in an alcove. A young man nearby flips through a folder full of resumes while a woman leans against a wall, nervously checking her phone. Good; job-fair people. She’s found it.

She heads for the doors. And then—

Nope.

Absolutely not.

A cold certainty settles in her chest: If she opens those doors, she’s going to die.

Whoops, close one. Relieved to have caught that, she turns around comfortably and decides to head back home.

She’s back in the lobby before she catches herself. What the fuck?

She knows her anxiety can get carried away, but this is getting ridiculous. She calls Lena.

Ugh.

She sends pleading eyes back.

(!!!)

She thinks about it, then sends the thumbs-up and arm emoji.

A few days ago, she’d survived making a public spectacle of herself. And this? This is just a job fair behind a pair of doors. Doors have zero reason to be worse than scooping condoms off the sidewalk. She turns back around and faces the doors again with determination. They stand confidently in solid brass, with an Art Deco sunburst radiating across the handles in sharp geometric lines.

I can beat doors, she coaches herself. I could beat up a door.

No, you can’t. She huffs at her downer of an inner voice. Just watch me.

She forces her hand against the door.

The edges of her fingers briefly refract against themselves, each one offset into translucent copies, lagging a fraction of an inch behind her hand. The space beneath her hand warps inward like stretched fabric, a web of faint prismatic fractures tracing the path of her fingers across the sunburst plate.

She barely perceives it—more afterimage than something truly seen, gone almost before her mind can process it. What…?

She hesitates, staring at her hand as the uneasy feeling grows. But if she stops now, she’ll lose her nerve entirely. She inhales sharply and shoves her way through the door.

Past the threshold, her vision splinters nauseatingly. A wave of vertigo tilts the room, and a high-pitched ringing rips through her ears. You’ve—made a mistake, her inner voice tries to gasp through the flood of sensation.

Her eyes struggle to find purchase in the dark room as reality fractures; the walls slide from perpendicular into impossible angles, corners refusing to meet where they should. Then even the distorted planes split, breaking into progressively smaller iridescent shards as the ringing breaks discordantly into multiple tones.

Her dread coalesces as five glowing yellow eyes split the darkness open, refracting through the shards of reality. Arranged in a wide arc, they fluidly turn and fixate on her, their pupils constricting as they focus. At their size and height, they’re too large to belong to something that should fit inside this room. She freezes like a mouse finding a snake in its path, throat locked as she tries to retreat over the threshold.

A sinister figure rises from the darkness beneath them, its edges traced by the light from the eyes. The second her attention lands on it, the figure whirls around towards her, long blond hair whipping around its face.

A man, she realizes, taking in the icy, almost sociopathic detachment in his eyes. Her first fleeting impression is that he’s in some sort of costume, with two pairs of wings flared high behind him, each wing as wide as she is tall.

Then one wing shifts, feathers flexing with unsettling precision, and every excuse in her head goes silent. It’s not a costume, she realizes, her gut freezing. An angel? No. Something only pretending to be one.

She slides back along the open door, her bracelet catching on the sunburst handle. There’s the sharp ping of metal and a brittle crunch under her heel, but the ringing in her ears swallows both sounds before they can mean anything. I’m so sorry, please don’t kill me, she tries to croak, but the words catch in her throat.

He raises his hand. She winces in anticipation of a smiting, evisceration, or spontaneous combustion; to be honest, not exactly how she expected to go out. Instead, she hears a voiceless hiss in her head:

Out.

In the next heartbeat, she finds herself outside the room, facing the other door.

Resisting the urge to look over her shoulder, Em hurries away as quickly as she can while still technically walking, her face fixed in what she hopes is a neutral expression.

For several seconds after the door closes, the room holds its dark stillness. Then orbs of light blink into existence.

Serith covers his mouth, staring at the door. That was… embarrassing.

Centuries without being properly seen by a stranger, and all it took was one distracted moment and a woman with questionable self-preservation instincts. Threshold resistance insufficient, reaction time compromised—he clearly needs to revise his safeguards immediately.

Then he spots something ice-blue glinting on the floor. Flattened brass, crystal fragmented into shards and dust; a broken little thing. He stoops, and the fragments rise before he touches them, glittering above his palm in a slow, precise spiral.

Serith studies the fractured light. A shame.

Back in the lobby, Em collapses shakily onto a bench, her heart still pounding. The experience, if you’d call it that, happened so quickly that it barely counted as a moment, almost like a mental sneeze.

She stares sightlessly while she processes what happened. The people around her chatter indifferently, and their presence steadies her a bit. Her heart rate slowly drops from a race to an easy canter.

Gripping the bench, she runs through the possibilities. What causes hallucinations? She’s never had one before, and she did not care for the experience.

The rational part of her is half tempted to check behind the door again, but the fear she experienced there is still wrapped around her throat so viscerally that she’d rather not take her chances.

She rubs at her wrist, then looks down in confusion. The charm is missing from her bracelet. Her stomach sinks as the memory catches up: the snag against the door, and the crunch under her heel. She lifts her foot to check, and sure enough, there’s a delicate sliver of light blue crystal lodged between the treads. Fuck.

She googles the list of symptoms, and the algorithm proudly concludes she likely has a brain tumour or meningitis. Great. She’s not sure if she likes those options much better than the idea of a near-miss lethal encounter with… whatever that was.

Once her nerves calm, she starts working on what she saw. It was in my head. I’ve been under a lot of stress, and I went into a dark room and my imagination ran wild. Not eyes, stage lights. Of course. Dude was clearly practicing for a play or something.

After a few minutes of strategic rationalization, she’s now feeling quite silly. She takes one more deep breath and gets up. Her anxiety changes tactics, switching from thoughts of doom to calm, reasonable suggestions: You’ve had a deeply unpleasant experience. Clearly the stress is getting to you. Go home.

Honestly? Solid points. But she’d already learned something annoying this week: wanting to run didn’t mean she had to.

She peeks back down the hallway. The pair of normal people are still sitting at the normal bench, having a perfectly normal day where everything happens as it should. She approaches them. “Sorry, could you tell me where the job fair is?” Her voice almost sounds normal, too.

The woman smiles warmly and points her back to the lobby. “The graduate fair? Down the stairs. Room 54.”

Em thanks her and returns to the lobby. Down the stairs, a registration table waits outside propped-open double doors. Relief washes over her. Harrowing mental health incident or not, she still needs work. Compared to whatever just happened, talking to grinning company reps doesn’t sound so bad. She can’t shake the pit of dread, the sense that she narrowly avoided something. But she squares her shoulders and heads for the registration table.

Well, that was unexpected, Vael thinks, lowering his coffee. How did she make it into the room? Anyone with any self-preservation instincts at all shouldn’t even be able to touch the door handle.

Vael had been following one of his usual weekend routines: sprawling across a lobby table, one hand idly toying with his necklace while he kept half an eye on the doors to Serith’s room. Dark hair spilled unprofessionally past his shoulders, and his showy dark clothing made him look wildly out of place in the upscale corporate atmosphere. He seemed entirely unbothered by that fact.

At first glance, one might think there was more shadow around him than necessary. A second look would dismiss it as a trick of the light.

His gaze lingered on the doors a second too long before he caught himself and forced it away. Annoying.

Then a woman headed straight for Serith’s room, and his attention snapped back before he could help it. His eyes narrowed slightly as recognition clicked into place.

Ah. Bus stop girl. He’d watched with mild interest as she directly approached Serith’s room, retreated (naturally) and then somehow mustered the courage to re-attempt opening the doors. “Nooo, dear—” Vael muttered under his breath, fingers splayed across his mouth in scandalized fascination. “Bad idea.”

No way she will… And then to his delighted shock, she did, shouldering her way past the threshold.

Vael sat up fully then. The girl froze and practically tripped over herself as she backed out moments later with a shell-shocked expression, but who wouldn’t? He can only imagine what she saw.

The corner of his mouth twitches; Serith must’ve been pissed.

He watched her rush off, stop, and then—to his surprise—turn back around to find her way down the stairs. Most people would’ve called it a day after that.

That’s three times now that she’s surprised him. Vael props his chin on one hand, grinning. “Ha! Isn’t she a fun one?”

Cassia looks up from her crossword puzzle. “Hmm?” Vael tilts his head towards the woman heading for the stairs, and Cassia follows his gaze. “Should she be concerned?”

“Probably,” Vael says, snapping his laptop closed. He leans forward. “I want more on her.”

“The usual intel?”

“Mm.” He watches Cassia as she gets up to head to the job fair.

For better or for worse, she has his attention now.