Sara woke to the sensation of absence. Not exactly emptiness, just the peculiar hollow left by something recently departed.

  The sheets were tangled around her legs in a lover's forgotten embrace, warm and rumpled where her body had disturbed them, cool and smooth where another's heat had only just evaporated. The space beside her held nothing but a lingering impression, as though someone had been there moments ago and simply stepped sideways out of time, leaving behind only the faintest indentation in the mattress and the ghost of warmth against the pillowcase.

  She blinked up at the sunlight vivisecting the room through tall factory windows, glass panes meant for illuminating the forging of tools or the breaking of backs, now transformed into canvases of spun gold. Dust motes floated through the beams like tiny forgotten constellations, suspended mid-orbit above the bed, each particle catching light like microscopic planets in a universe too vast and too still. They seemed to hang motionless, as if time itself had stumbled in its relentless forward march.

  The air in the loft carried stories in its scent. Sex still fresh enough to make her cheeks warm, old wood exhaling decades of accumulated memory, and something faintly metallic that lingered at the back of her throat. Copper, maybe, like pennies left too long in summer pockets, or the ghost of struck matches and lingering adrenaline. Beneath that, she caught something gentler, unexpected. A whisper of evergreen, like pine needles crushed between thumb and forefinger, or a sweater stored too long in a cedar chest. It wasn't unpleasant. Just... off-script. A foreign note in an otherwise familiar composition.

  She stretched, muscles unfurling reluctantly. Every limb protested in a different dialect. Her shoulders in the sharp consonants of exertion, her lower back in the rolling vowels of unfamiliar mattress contours, her thighs in the colloquial language of pleasurable strain. And then she listened.

  The quiet in the loft was the deep, echoing kind that had weight and substance. Not silence, but space demanding recognition. Converted from industry to indulgence, the factory-turned-loft had far too much room for one person, let alone two souls playing at intimacy. Every breath she took bounced off the brick walls and came back a little lonelier, a little emptier, as if the air itself was disappointed by what it found in her lungs. Montreal stirred beyond the glass, gears of the waking city beginning to grind. Yet here, inside, time had curled up like a cat and refused to move, purring in defiance of clocks and calendars and obligations.

  Her gaze drifted across the room to the countertop, where a note waited in étienne's looping, infuriatingly elegant handwriting. The kind of script that suggested a lifetime of practice rather than modern schooling:

  You were sleeping so peacefully I didn’t dare wake you. There’s coffee in the corner cabinet, milk in the fridge, but no sugar as you kept saying you were sweet enough. I have to agree with that part! But if you must there’s honey in the same pantry as the coffee, my favorite is the lavender. After tonight’s show, I know the best places for smoked meat and bagels, you said you wanted to try those before you continued west. Don't burn the crêpes. —E

  She rolled her eyes, but couldn't stop the smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth, a fragile, traitorous thing. That smile, brief and unbidden, faded just as quickly as it came, washed away by the tide of memory that crept back in with the persistence of waves against shore. This wasn't her life. It wasn't even her moment. It was just a strange detour on a trip meant to be something else entirely. A trip meant for two that she was making alone.

  Sara slipped out of bed, her feet padding across the worn floorboards. The wood was warm where sun had touched it, cool where shadow still reigned. A binary world captured in the texture beneath her soles. The planks were smooth from years of boots and sweat and whispered negotiations, polished now by shoes that cost more than some people's rent. A building that once made rivets and bolts now sold the illusion of authenticity, the appearance of industrial grit without the uncomfortable reality of labor. It sold vibes.

  On the dresser sat her father's urn.

  Plain brushed steel. Utilitarian. Sturdy. Exactly what he would've chosen, with no ornamental flourishes or pretensions of artistry. It stood untouched, perched with a kind of stubborn dignity that dared the world to ask questions. It looked, she thought, like it had judged the evening and found it lacking. Like her father himself might have, one eyebrow raised in that way that could collapse her defenses with a glance.

  She tapped it gently with two fingers, the metal cool beneath her skin, warmer than it should be.

  "You'd hate this place," she murmured, her voice catching on the edges of the too-large room. "But the view's good."

  A pause, then, "I'm not with him, okay? We're just… hanging out." The justification sounded hollow even to her own ears, a child's defense offered to a parent who'd already seen through the lie.

  The urn offered no response. But in her head, she could hear that old skeptical grunt. The sound he always made before tearing into a bad idea with both eyebrows raised and too much dry wit. The verbal equivalent of rolling up sleeves before dismantling an opponent's argument. She could picture his eyes with painful clarity. Moss green, sharp as cut glass, disapproving, and not a little amused. The same eyes she saw in her own reflection when she forgot to look away too quickly from mirrors.

  Sara crossed to the closet and opened it, the hinges whispering intimacies.

  étienne's shirts hung like theatrical curtains between acts. Long, layered, and too large by half, each garment a costume for a life she couldn't quite imagine living. She smiled despite herself, the kind of grin that only comes when grief steps aside for a moment and lets something softer slip through the cracks in the armor. When the body remembers how to feel pleasure even as the mind catalogs loss. She selected a red-and-black plaid flannel, faded soft with age, its edges frayed like memories worn thin from handling. It smelled like his skin and clove and something faintly citrus, like orange oil and books left in the sun too long. A scent that shouldn't work but somehow did, like everything else about him.

  She pulled it over her shoulders. It swallowed her whole. The sleeves hung past her hands like the arms of a child trying on a king's robes, the heritage of generations too large for her frame. She folded the cuffs twice, shook out the hem with a decisive snap of fabric.

  "Okay, tall bastard," she muttered to the empty room. "This is mine now." A small theft, insignificant in the grand ledger of what had been taken from her.

  Her reflection caught her eye. Across the room, the full-length mirror leaned against the brick with lazy confidence, as if it had all the time in the world to capture her image. In it, Sara looked smaller than she felt, wild-haired and sleep-flushed, her rusty red waves tangled like fox fur after a chase through autumn woods. The flannel set off the green in her eyes, brighter now, almost jade in the morning light, and threw contrast onto her pale olive skin and the smattering of freckles across her collarbones, constellations mapped by no astronomer.

  She laughed, a short burst of sound meant to fill the silence. But it stuck halfway out of her throat, caught on the edges of too much emptiness. The sound died, stillborn and insufficient. The loft didn't echo anymore. It listened with the attentiveness of an audience awaiting the next line in a play no one had rehearsed.

  She shook it off. Straightened her shoulders beneath the borrowed shirt, squared herself against whatever the day might bring, and padded barefoot toward the bathroom. Behind her, the sunlight continued to pour through the windows, illuminating dust and absence in equal measure.

  On the dresser, unnoticed, the urn had warmed to the exact temperature of skin. Not just cold metal, but something almost alive.

  The bathroom matched the rest of the loft. Industrial chic with exposed pipes overhead like copper veins and dark stone tiles underfoot, cool and unforgiving. Sara turned the rainfall shower head on full blast and watched steam begin to rise, filling the glass enclosure with billowing clouds that obscured the outside world.

  She stepped inside, the water pressure pulsing against her skin in an uneven rhythm. Normal for old pipes... right? The thought lingered as the water alternated between forceful and gentle, like a heartbeat struggling to maintain cadence. Strong, then soft; insistent, then yielding. The plumbing in these converted buildings was always temperamental, she told herself, though the rhythm felt almost intentional, as if the water itself was trying to communicate.

  Sara closed her eyes, letting the hot water cascade over her shoulders, washing away the scent of étienne from her skin. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted it gone. Last night had been... unexpected. Good, but strange in ways she couldn't quite articulate. His touch had been both hesitant and certain, his whispers shifting between languages she almost recognized but couldn't quite place.

  When she opened her eyes, the steam had fogged the glass in a peculiar pattern. For a moment, it looked almost deliberate. Not random condensation, something crafted. Runes etched by an invisible finger, or vines creeping across frosted panes. Swirls that could be ancient script or simply the random dance of water molecules on glass. She blinked, and the pattern was gone. Just random condensation again, formless and ordinary.

  She grabbed the loofah hanging from a hook and lathered it with étienne's soap. It smelled like moss and rain, earthy in a way that reminded her of walks with her father in the Irish countryside. The summer she turned twelve, stepping carefully through fern-covered hollows, her father pointing out plants that had been used for medicine "before we knew better," he'd said with a wink. Too many memories lurking in a simple bar of soap. She pushed them away and focused on the sensation of water against her skin, the present moment, the physical reality.

  The temperature fluctuated, a quick, cold pulse that made her gasp before the heat returned. Her skin prickled into goosebumps, then smoothed again as warmth enveloped her. Another quirk of ancient plumbing, she told herself. Nothing more. Yet the cold had been so precise, so targeted. A single shiver of winter in the midst of steam.

  When she finished, Sara reached for a towel from the rack beside the shower. It smelled like pine needles and something metallic. Almost like blood, but not quite. Something wilder, more primal, iron and earth and something else that made her think of forests at midnight. She wrapped it around herself, trying to place the scent. Had étienne washed these with some kind of herb? Some artisanal detergent that cost more than her weekly grocery budget?

  The mirror above the sink was completely fogged, opaque as frosted glass. She wiped it with the palm of her hand, revealing her reflection in the cleared space. For a split second, so brief she might have imagined it, her image seemed to lag behind her movement, like a video feed with poor connectivity. Her hand moved, but her reflection waited a heartbeat before following suit, a discordance between action and echo.

  Sara blinked hard, her heart skipping a beat. Just steam playing tricks on her eyes. The reflection blinked back, perfectly synchronized now. She leaned closer, examining the gold flecks in her green irises, the constellation of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Everything normal, everything as it should be. The face that had stared back at her for twenty years, unmarked by strangeness.

  "Getting paranoid in your old age, McKenna," she muttered to herself, the familiar self-directed sarcasm a comfort in the growing unease.

  Still, something felt off. The bathroom seemed too quiet, the silence broken only by water dripping from the shower head and the soft sound of her breathing. No traffic noise filtered in from outside. No footsteps from other units. No distant conversations or slamming doors or any of the ambient sounds that make up the background hum of human existence. Just the hollow echo of water against stone, each drip distinct in the unnatural quiet.

  She toweled her hair roughly, as if the motion could shake loose the growing unease settling between her shoulder blades. Probably just the aftermath of grief, she reasoned. Her brain searching for patterns in randomness, meaning in coincidence. That's what the grief counselor had said after her mother died, and again last month when her father's heart gave out mid-sentence during Sunday dinner, a forkful of roast beef suspended halfway to his mouth.

  The mind tries to make sense of loss by finding significance everywhere.

  Her father's ashes sat in a steel urn on a stranger's dresser, and here she was, spooked by steam patterns and water pressure. She wrapped the towel tighter around her body and reached for the door handle.

  Her fingers hesitated above the metal.

  Something waited on the other side. Not étienne; she would have heard him return. The loft had been silent save for her own movements and the occasional creak of old wood settling.

  Something else.

  Sara shook her head sharply and grabbed the handle. The metal felt unnaturally cold against her palm, as if it had been stored in a freezer rather than sitting in a steam-filled bathroom. The chill bit into her skin as she pulled the door open.

  The loft stretched before her, bathed in morning light. Empty and ordinary.

  She exhaled slowly, shoulders relaxing fraction by fraction. Just her imagination after all. The power of an overactive mind trained to diagnose, to find patterns, to see what others might miss. Medical school prerequisites sometimes made ghosts where none existed.

  From the kitchen, she could smell the faint aroma of coffee left warming in the pot, and her stomach reminded her that last night's absinthe, mead, and this morning's paranoia were poor substitutes for actual breakfast. The normalcy of hunger grounded her, pulled her back from the edge of something she wasn't ready to name.

  The loft seemed to hold its breath as she stepped from the bathroom, waiting for her next move.

  The evening light was fading when Sara found the bench overlooking the river. The Old Port hummed with the gentle winding-down of a summer day. Tourists strolled along the promenade in pairs and clusters, their laughter carried on the breeze like scattered confetti. Restaurant patios filled with early diners, silverware tinkling against plates, glasses catching the last golden rays. The distant call of a boat horn echoed across the water, mournful and searching.

  She placed her father's urn beside her on the weathered wood, its metal surface catching the last golden rays of sunlight. The river glinted ahead of her, a sheet of hammered gold rippling into twilight blue. Water rippled in the wake of a passing boat, light fracturing into a thousand brilliant points, each one a memory refusing to stay submerged.

  "So this is Montreal," she said to the urn, her voice low enough to avoid the attention of passersby. "Not exactly how we planned it, huh?"

  The scent of fried dough wafted over from a nearby food stand, sweet and comforting. Children laughed somewhere to her left, their voices carrying across the open space with the careless joy of those who hadn't yet learned about endings. Sara registered these sounds as if from underwater, present but muffled by the thick layers of grief that had surrounded her for weeks. A glass wall between her and the world, letting her observe but never quite touch.

  She looked out of place with the steel cylinder beside her, yet somehow right at home in her mourning. A woman apart, watching life continue without participating in it. Grief gave her a bubble of space on the crowded promenade; other pedestrians instinctively curved their paths to avoid her, as if sadness might be contagious.

  The breeze from the river carried a chill. Sara pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders and checked her phone. No messages. No missed calls. No one expecting her anywhere. The screen reflected her face back at her, tired eyes and pale skin, before fading to black.

  That's when she heard it. Laughter like windchimes, musical and strange, notes held too long and cadences that rose where they should have fallen.

  Across the street, the doors of an old theater building swung open with theatrical timing. Nine performers spilled onto the sidewalk, their voices rising and falling in what sounded almost like French but slipped into other cadences she couldn't place. Words with too many syllables, consonants that seemed to fold back on themselves. Their clothes seemed too formal for the setting, anachronistic in the fading light. Moth-eaten velvet coats over modern jeans, tarnished threads woven through contemporary fabrics, costumes that felt older than they should be yet impossible to place in any specific historical period.

  A banner hung above the theater entrance, its edges fluttering in the river breeze: "Aes Sídhe – Opening Night Tomorrow"

  Sara watched them, momentarily distracted from her grief. They moved with a liquid grace, their gestures too precise, their smiles too bright in the fading light. No wasted movements, no stumbles or hesitations. They seemed like dancers always on the verge of breaking into choreography, aware of each other's positions without looking.

  One of them, a man so tall he seemed to fold himself to fit beneath the doorway, peeled away from the others and walked toward her. Each step measured, deliberate, yet strangely light, as if he weighed less than his frame suggested.

  He was lean, with cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass and a frame that suggested he might blow away in a strong wind. His clothes were too slim, his scarf too long, wrapped twice around his neck and still trailing behind him like a pennant. But it was his eyes that caught her attention, green like spring leaves after rain, too vivid against his pale skin. They caught the last light of day and reflected it back deeper, richer.

  He stopped a few feet from her bench and nodded toward the urn, his head tilting at an angle that wasn't quite natural, birdlike in its precision.

  "Heavy thing to carry alone," he said, his voice softer than she expected from someone his size, melodic and lightly accented with something she couldn't place.

  Sara answered without looking up at him, her fingers protectively brushing the cool metal of the urn. "He wanted to see Montreal one last time."

  The stranger tilted his head slightly, studying her with unnerving intensity. Not leering, not the way men often did. Something more clinical, like she was a puzzle he was trying to solve, a book in a language he could almost read. A pause stretched between them, filled with the ambient sounds of the port, tourists and seagulls and the gentle lap of water against stone.

  The breeze picked up, carrying the scent of rain though the sky remained clear, a contradiction of senses. The stranger's companions called to him, their voices overlapping in that almost-French. One of them, a woman with ebony skin and silver-threaded braids that caught the twilight in metallic flashes, waved impatiently.

  "They're waiting for you," Sara said, nodding toward the group, hoping to end the uncomfortable scrutiny.

  "They're always waiting." He shrugged, a single fluid movement of sharp shoulders. "They have nothing but time."

  Sara studied him more carefully. There was something off about the way he stood, too still, as if he'd forgotten to perform the small shifts and adjustments humans make when standing in place. No weight transfers, no subtle balancing acts. He might have been a statue carved from pale wood.

  "I'm étienne," he said finally, offering his name like a gift held in open palms, "May I have your name?"

  She hesitated before responding, something in her father's old stories tugging at her memory. Names given too freely to strangers. Her mother's cautionary tales. "No, but you can call me Sara."

  "Just Sara?"

  "Just Sara."

  He nodded, accepting this with peculiar gravity, as if she'd passed some test he hadn't meant to administer. "We're going for drinks. You should come." He gestured to the urn with long, elegant fingers. "Both of you."

  The invitation was so unexpected that Sara laughed. A real laugh, one that caught her by surprise, bursting past the layers of grief she'd wrapped around herself. She hadn't laughed since the funeral, the sound rusty from disuse.

  "Are you seriously hitting on a girl sitting with her dad's ashes?"

  étienne's expression remained neutral, neither embarrassed nor amused. "I'm inviting a living person to join other living people. The dead are always welcome, but they rarely contribute to the conversation."

  The absurdity of it struck her. She'd come to Montreal with her father's ashes because she couldn't bear to leave them behind, couldn't bear to cancel the trip they'd planned for months. The last thing they would do together. And now she was considering accepting a drink invitation from a strange man and his theatrical friends.

  Her father would have hated this guy on principle. Too thin, too pretty, too assured. Everything about him would have raised red flags in her father's practical mind.

  Which was exactly why she stood up, tucking the urn carefully into her tote bag.

  "One drink," she said, surprising herself with the decision. "And if you or your friends try anything weird, I'll pepper spray the lot of you."

  étienne's mouth curved into a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, lips curling to display perfect teeth.

  "Fair enough. Though I suspect your definition of 'weird' and ours might differ considerably."

  Sara followed étienne down a narrow set of stairs tucked beside a bakery. The entrance was unmarked save for a small wooden plaque bearing a symbol that looked like a crescent moon cradling a star. The scent of fresh bread from above mingled with something older and earthier as they descended. Mead, dust, and what might have been lavender.

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  "You're not taking me to some pretentious speakeasy, are you?" she asked, her hand instinctively tightening around the strap of her tote bag, the urn a reassuring weight against her hip.

  étienne glanced back at her, his eyes catching the dim light in a way that made them seem to glow from within. "Much older than that."

  The door at the bottom of the stairs opened into a space that defied Sara's expectations. Not the sleek, manufactured nostalgia of a modern bar designed to look old, but something that felt genuinely out of time. The ceiling was low, crossed with dark wooden beams that bent at impossible angles yet somehow held the weight above. Mismatched tables and chairs were arranged haphazardly around a small open area where a fiddler played a tune that seemed to double back on itself, the notes echoing strangely off the stone walls. The melody felt circular, beginning where it should end, ending where it should begin.

  The rest of étienne's troupe had claimed the largest table in the corner. They beckoned to him with movements that seemed too fluid, their voices rising above the music in that language Sara still couldn't quite place, almost French, almost Gaelic, but neither.

  "What are they speaking?" she asked as étienne guided her toward them with a light touch at her elbow that felt barely there.

  "Old things," he replied, unhelpfully. "The first languages we learn are the hardest to unlearn."

  Before Sara could press him further, they reached the table. The group parted to make room, their curious gazes fixed on her with varying degrees of intensity. The woman with silver-threaded braids offered a smile that revealed teeth too white and too even. Her skin was dark as midnight, with an almost imperceptible violet undertone that caught the light when she moved.

  "You brought a guest," she said, her English accented in a way Sara couldn't place. "How unlike you, étienne."

  "Sara," étienne introduced her with a simple gesture. "Just Sara."

  The woman nodded, as if this confirmed something important. "I am Nyeme. Just Nyeme." Her voice held amusement at some private joke.

  The others introduced themselves in turn, each name offered with the same peculiar gravity as étienne had stated his. Sara nodded to each, trying to commit their striking appearances to memory.

  "We were just discussing casting for the new production," Nyeme said, gesturing to an empty chair beside her. "They've made me Winter again." She rolled her eyes dramatically. "Of course they would cast me as Winter, again. I suppose when you're from up north, they think you can't play anything else."

  "Up north?" Sara asked, settling into the chair.

  "Further than you've been," Nyeme replied with a mysterious smile. "Much further."

  A server appeared, sliding glasses in front of each person at the table. The liquid inside seemed to glow faintly, amber and gold in the dim light. Another tray followed with small, ornately decorated glasses of cloudy green liquid.

  "Mead and absinthe," explained Tovi, a man with rich mahogany skin and golden dreadlocks tied with copper wire. His voice was warm and rich, like honey poured over thunder. "One for memory, one for forgetting. Your choice which is which." He winked at Sara, his smile infectious.

  Sara eyed her glasses suspiciously. "What is this exactly?"

  "Mead," Tovi answered. "Honey wine. Older than most religions."

  "And safer than the water," added Amaya with a wink. Her bronze skin contrasted with black lipstick, and her mohawk of sea-green braids caught the light as she leaned forward. "At least where we're from."

  Sara sniffed the mead cautiously. It smelled like summer flowers and something spicy she couldn't identify. She took a small sip, and warmth bloomed in her chest, spreading outward to her fingertips.

  "It's good," she admitted, taking another sip. The taste lingered on her tongue, complex and ancient.

  Across the table, Jianyu was carving something small from a piece of pale wood, his fingers moving with hypnotic precision. His porcelain skin and long ink-black hair gave him an almost androgynous beauty. He looked up suddenly, catching Sara's gaze with eyes that seemed to hold centuries.

  "For remembering," he said softly, holding up the half-finished carving that somehow resembled both a rose and a neurological cell. Sara's breath caught in her throat. She hadn't mentioned her tattoo to anyone here.

  Beside him, Lys hummed along with the fiddle music, though somehow always half a beat ahead of the tune. Her willowy frame and paper-pale skin made her seem almost translucent in the bar's dim light. Her platinum buzzcut caught the candlelight, creating a halo effect around her sharp features.

  "Are you all in a play together?" Sara asked, gesturing to the banner she'd seen outside the theater.

  "I played Puck in 1596," étienne said offhandedly, swirling his absinthe so the green caught the light. "Back when the river didn't have lights on it."

  Sara snorted, finally looking up to meet his gaze. "Cool. High school Shakespeare?"

  The corner of his mouth twitched, but he didn't smile. Something old moved behind his eyes, then vanished.

  "Something like that."

  "A revival," Kellan said, his deep voice surprisingly gentle for someone his size. The broad-shouldered man with dark brown skin had glowing gold tattoos that seemed to shift subtly when he moved, though Sara blamed this on the flickering candles. "Very old stories told new ways."

  "You should come tomorrow," Lys offered, her childlike voice at odds with the knowing look in her frost-colored eyes. "First night is always the most... transformative."

  Sara picked up the absinthe glass, watching as Tovi demonstrated the proper ritual. He placed an ornate silver spoon over his glass, set a sugar cube on it, and slowly dripped icy water over the sugar. The clear liquid turned cloudy, swirling like smoke underwater.

  "The green fairy," Tovi said with a theatrical flourish. "She shows you what's already there, just hidden behind the veil of everyday things."

  Sara followed his example, mesmerized by the transformation in her own glass. The ritual felt ancient, meaningful in a way she couldn't articulate.

  "Vacation?" Nyeme asked, cocking a perfectly shaped eyebrow.

  "Pilgrimage," Sara replied dryly, nudging the tote bag resting beside her leg.

  Róisín, a woman with cork-red curls and ash-pale freckled skin so similar to Sara's own it was unsettling, leaned forward. Her mossy eyes sparkled with mischief.

  "And after your ghost tour, what comes next?" she asked, her words tumbling out too quickly, as if she was always rushing ahead of herself.

  "Med school," Sara answered, taking a sip of the transformed absinthe. It tasted of anise and something wilder, herbs she couldn't name.

  That pulled a few eyebrows up around the table.

  "You're young for that, aren't you?" asked Vero, speaking for the first time. The figure was completely hairless, with alabaster skin that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Their iridescent eyes shifted color like oil on water.

  "Graduated early. I start in Dublin this fall," she said, as casually as if she'd announced a grocery run. "This was supposed to be the last summer off. Before... the grind."

  étienne tilted his head, not quite smiling. "Grind," he repeated, rolling the word around his mouth like an unfamiliar taste. "That's a very mortal word."

  She laughed, the absinthe already warming her blood. "Well, I'm very mortal. Most days."

  Kellan raised his glass. "To mortality. The most fascinating condition."

  "To mortality," echoed the others, glasses clinking in an almost-melody.

  One of them, Tovi, had begun to juggle small knives that glinted in the bar's dim light. Sara watched, mesmerized, as the blades seemed to hang in the air just a fraction too long between tosses, as if reluctant to obey gravity.

  "Just a trick of the light," étienne murmured close to her ear, though she hadn't spoken the observation aloud.

  Amaya slid closer to Sara, her movement sinuous. "So, Dublin. The old country. Do you have family there?"

  "My father's side. From Cork originally," Sara replied, the absinthe loosening her usual reserve. "He used to tell me stories about the hills and the standing stones."

  "Cork," Róisín said, perking up. "Lovely place. The veil is thin there." When Sara looked confused, she added quickly, "The mist, I mean. Very atmospheric."

  The fiddle music swelled, notes bending in ways that shouldn't have been physically possible, echoing off the stone walls until it seemed like three or four instruments played instead of one. Sara found herself swaying slightly to the rhythm, the mead and absinthe warming her blood and softening the sharp edges of grief that had defined her days since her father's death.

  "Do you believe in old stories?" Jianyu asked suddenly, his carving now looking remarkably like a Celtic knot. "The ones about people who slip between worlds?"

  "My father did," Sara admitted. "He used to warn me never to give my full name to strangers. Especially in places that felt..." she searched for his exact words, "...thin."

  A knowing look passed between several members of the group.

  "Wise man," Vero commented, their voice neither male nor female but something in between, melodic and ancient.

  The conversation flowed around her after that. Snippets of stories, inside jokes, references to places and times she didn't understand. Nyeme spoke of winters so cold "even the northern lights froze in place," while Tovi described festivals where "the sun never fully set for forty days." They argued good-naturedly about music from centuries Sara didn't recognize, and performances in venues that sounded like they couldn't possibly exist.

  She should have felt like an outsider, but instead, there was a strange comfort in their circle. They asked her no painful questions, demanded no explanations for the urn she kept close. They simply included her in their warmth while respecting the space her sadness required.

  "The truth about grief is that it's love," Kellan said gently during a lull in conversation, "bottled up. No release, no one left to share the cup."

  Sara looked up at him, startled by the insight. "That's... actually the most helpful thing anyone's said to me since he died."

  Kellan nodded solemnly. "I've had practice." Something ancient moved behind his eyes, then disappeared.

  étienne watched her from across the table but didn't push. They didn't talk much, just shared a warmth that felt foreign yet welcome. For the first time in weeks, Sara felt a little lighter, as if these strange performers had, for a few hours, helped carry the weight she'd been shouldering alone.

  Hours passed, though the dim lighting and underground setting made time feel elastic. One drink became two, then three. The mead left her buzzed but sharp, like it had cleared her head instead of fogging it. The absinthe added a dreamy quality to the edges of her vision, making the already strange group seem even more otherworldly.

  Róisín eventually pulled her up to dance, her movements too quick and precise. "Come on, namesake," she laughed, twirling Sara beneath the low beams. "Let your bones remember what your mind forgets."

  The music changed, becoming wilder, more primal. Sara found herself laughing as she danced, her body remembering joy even as her mind cataloged the strangeness of the evening. Amaya joined them, her movements sensual and fluid, while Tovi clapped rhythm that somehow both matched and challenged the fiddle.

  "We should go," étienne said eventually, as the crowd in the bar thinned, though Sara hadn't noticed anyone leaving. "Dawn comes earlier than you think."

  Sara checked her phone. Nearly midnight. She'd lost track of time completely.

  The walk back to étienne's loft was quiet, the streets of Montreal transformed by night into something older and more mysterious. Sara felt the weight of her tote bag on her shoulder, her father's urn still heavy but somehow less burdensome than it had been earlier.

  étienne walked beside her, his impossibly long legs matching her pace with ease. There was an old sadness behind his eyes that she recognized, the look of someone who had outlived too many people they cared about.

  "Why did you invite me?" she asked as they turned onto his street. "Really."

  He considered the question for several steps before answering.

  "Because grief is a language I understand," he said finally. "And because you looked at your father's ashes the way I once looked at the stars, like something precious that's both there and not there at the same time."

  Sara had no response to that. They walked the rest of the way in silence, their footsteps echoing in the empty street beneath a sky where the stars fought to be seen through the city's glow.

  When they reached the entrance to his building, a converted textile factory with tall arched windows, étienne paused.

  "I have tea," he offered, his voice casual but careful. "Or whiskey. If you'd like to talk more. Or not talk. Sometimes silence is better with company."

  Sara studied him in the amber glow of the street lamp. His offer seemed genuine, not a line, not a move, just a simple invitation for continued companionship. She thought of her empty hotel room across town, the silence there that felt like a vacuum. The urn that would sit on the nightstand, watching her pretend to sleep.

  "Tea sounds good," she said. Then, with a directness that surprised even her, "but I don't want to talk about my dad. And I don't want to be alone tonight."

  Something flickered in étienne's eyes, surprise, perhaps, or recognition.

  "I understand," he said simply.

  As he unlocked the building's front door, Sara made a decision. She stepped closer and turned his face toward hers with a gentle touch to his jaw. His skin was cool beneath her fingertips, like marble warmed by the sun.

  "To be clear," she said, meeting his gaze steadily, "I'm not looking for anything complicated. Just... tonight."

  étienne's lips curved into a genuine smile, the first one that reached his eyes.

  "Nothing lasts forever," he agreed, though there was an ancient sadness in his voice that suggested he knew this truth better than most. "Especially not nights."

  He held the door open, and Sara stepped across the threshold, her father's urn still heavy in her bag, her grief momentarily lightened by the prospect of hours spent forgetting rather than remembering.

  Sara moved through étienne's kitchen with deliberate focus, the routine of cooking offering a familiar comfort in an unfamiliar space. Sunshine streamed through the tall factory windows, bathing the open-plan loft in warm light that poured across exposed brick and steel beams like honey over ancient ruins. The converted textile factory wore its industrial heritage proudly, its bones repurposed but not disguised, much like the strange troupe Sara had met last night.

  She poured orange juice into a glass, the citrus scent sharp and clean against the lingering sweetness of absinthe that clung to her memory. The carton was almost empty. She wondered if étienne had bought it specifically for this morning, a small hospitality for an anticipated guest. The thought pulled a reluctant smile from her lips, the expression still unfamiliar after weeks of grief.

  Eggs cracked against the edge of a mixing bowl, their yolks breaking in swirls of gold that caught the sunlight streaming through the windows. The borrowed flannel shirt slipped off one shoulder as she whisked, revealing the pale constellation of freckles scattered across her skin. She didn't bother to adjust it. There was something freeing about moving through this space half-dressed, claiming temporary territory within another's world.

  CBC Radio played softly from a vintage set perched on the windowsill, its wooden casing worn smooth with age. Sara turned up the volume slightly as she poured the egg mixture into a thin, even layer in the hot pan. The sound grounded her in the present moment, a tether to the ordinary world.

  "...continued analysis of the James Webb telescope data has led to confusion among astronomers," the announcer's voice filled the kitchen. "Spectral redshift patterns across multiple galaxies have begun shifting against expected norms, with one researcher noting that quote, 'It's as if the universe is folding in on itself, but selectively.'"

  The crêpe sizzled in the pan, butter browning at the edges and filling the loft with a warm, familiar aroma. Sara slid a spatula beneath it, checking for readiness. Not quite. The edges needed to crisp further, the center to set just enough to hold its shape without becoming tough. Her father had taught her patience in cooking, the same way he had taught her patience in life. Always waiting for the perfect moment.

  "Some are calling it a software issue," the broadcaster continued, "but one team from the University of British Columbia reports a similar signal anomaly found in gravitational lensing data from archived Hubble records. More after this—"

  The segment faded into a classical music interlude, soft violins playing something Sara vaguely recognized but couldn't name. A melody that lived in the back rooms of her memory, familiar yet just beyond reach. She found herself humming along, realizing gradually that it resembled a lullaby her father used to sing when she was small. The recognition came without the usual stab of pain, softened somehow by the morning light and the simple act of cooking.

  "If I burn these, it's your fault for not being here to babysit them," she called toward the empty apartment, her voice bouncing back to her from the exposed brick walls. The sound of her own words hanging in the air made the emptiness of the loft more pronounced, a canvas awaiting its painter's return.

  Last night had been unexpected. Not just the sex, though that had surprised her too. How easy it had been to make the first move, to ask for what she needed without complication or explanation. But the ease between them afterward had been the real surprise. The conversation that flowed until dawn, his stories that seemed too vivid to be invented but too fantastical to be true. Tales told with the weight of memory rather than imagination.

  She'd fallen asleep mid-sentence, she remembered, while he was telling her about a winter so cold the Thames had frozen solid and they'd held festivals on the ice. The way he'd described it, the colored lanterns, the smell of roasting chestnuts, the creak of the ice beneath hundreds of feet, made it seem like something he had witnessed rather than read about in history books.

  Sara turned to check the view from the kitchen window. The Lachine Canal stretched away, peaceful in the morning light. Its surface captured fragments of sky between ripples, blue shards scattered across dark water. A bike courier pedaled along the path, red messenger bag bright against the green of early summer foliage, a splash of color moving through the landscape.

  As she watched, something impossible happened.

  The courier's front tire wobbled, normal enough, but then the entire bicycle seemed to flicker, like an image on a failing screen. For a split second, the rider and bike blinked out of existence. The world stuttered. Then they were back, but the bicycle was crashing, front wheel buckled against a lamp post that hadn't been there a moment ago. The metal pole stood solid and undeniable, its presence contradicting Sara's memory of emptiness in that exact spot.

  Sara blinked hard. The lamp post remained. The courier was picking themselves up, examining the bent wheel with obvious confusion, their face a mask of disbelief that mirrored her own internal state.

  "What the hell?" Sara whispered, pressing closer to the glass. Her breath fogged a small circle on the window, obscuring her view momentarily before clearing again.

  The smell of burning batter snapped her attention back to the stove. The crêpe had blackened at the edges, smoking slightly. She quickly flipped it onto a plate, wincing at the charred underside. The pale center seemed to mock her inattention, a ruined canvas.

  "So much for not burning them," she muttered, glancing back to the window.

  The courier was gone. The lamp post stood alone beside the canal path, innocuous in the sunshine as if it had always been there, as permanent as the brick walls of the surrounding buildings.

  Sara shook her head, blaming the hallucination on too much mead, too little sleep, and the disorientation of waking in a stranger's bed. She turned her attention back to making a fresh crêpe, ignoring the prickle of unease creeping up her spine, each vertebra a stepping stone for growing dread.

  Outside, the canal's surface rippled in a sudden breeze, though the air inside the loft remained perfectly still. The water moved against its natural current, small waves traveling upstream before settling into unnatural stillness.

  Sara stood at the stove, pouring batter for a new crêpe while trying to shake off the unease from what she'd just witnessed. The radio was playing a news segment about local traffic conditions when it suddenly cut out mid-sentence, the announcer's voice disappearing as if someone had sliced through it with a knife.

  Static hissed briefly, a sound like distant ocean waves or the whispered conversation of ghosts. Then the radio settled into a music bed. Something classical. Soft violins, playing with mechanical precision, the notes too perfect, too measured, lacking the subtle imperfections of human musicians.

  Sara frowned and tapped the radio. The display flickered, digital numbers scrolling randomly before settling back to the station number. The violins continued, the same passage repeating without transition, a musical loop with no beginning or end.

  She switched it off. The silence that followed pressed against her eardrums.

  Sara moved to the window, scanning the canal path. Empty now. No cyclists, no joggers, no morning commuters. The path stretched away, curving out of sight, unnaturally still in the sunshine. The world outside the glass seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something she couldn't name.

  Then, as if to contradict her observation, a dog trotted into view. A golden retriever, moving at a lazy pace, leash bouncing behind it on the ground. No owner in sight. The animal paused, lifted its head, and looked directly toward her window. Its gaze seemed to find her through the glass, eyes too knowing for a creature of instinct.

  "What the hell?" Sara whispered again, pressing her palm against the glass. The surface was warmer than it should have been, almost hot to the touch.

  That's when she heard it. A single, pure note, like a tuning fork struck just out of reach. It seemed to vibrate inside her skull rather than enter through her ears, a perfect tone that made her teeth ache and her vision blur momentarily. The sound resonated with something primal, something she recognized beyond conscious thought.

  Her ears popped, the pressure changing as if she'd descended rapidly in an airplane. The world adjusted around her, settling into a new configuration.

  The note faded, leaving behind a silence so profound she could hear her own heartbeat accelerating in her chest, each pulse a drum against the hollowness of the air.

  Her hands started to tremble. She clenched them into fists, pressing them against the countertop to steady herself. The stone was cool beneath her skin, solid and real when everything else felt increasingly intangible.

  "Get it together, McKenna," she muttered, reaching for her phone on the counter. The familiar weight of it in her palm offered temporary reassurance, a technological talisman against growing fear.

  The screen showed full bars. Wi-Fi connected. Battery at 87%. All the signifiers of normality, all lies.

  She opened her messages, thumbs hovering over the keyboard. Who would she even text? The only person she'd spoken to in days was étienne, and he was somewhere. Back soon, he'd said in his note. Soon. Such a relative concept. Soon measured in minutes, or hours, or something else entirely.

  She created a group message to three people. Her roommate back in Toronto, her father's best friend, and her academic advisor. A simple "hello??" sent to all three. The question marks hung in the digital void, plaintive and unanswered.

  The messages delivered. Three gray check marks. The system working perfectly.

  No response.

  Outside, a church bell rang once, the sound traveling across the still water of the canal. A single note, ringing out like a warning or a farewell. Then nothing. Just the hollow echo fading into silence, the vibration dying in the air like the last breath of something ancient.

  Sara's phone vibrated in her hand. A voice note from étienne from a few minutes ago.

  "Hey, pharmacy's closed. Heading to the one on Charlevoix. Want coffee?"

  His voice would be there, waiting. A moment of him captured before whatever had happened, happened. His cadence, his accent, his existence preserved in digital amber.

  Her thumb hovered over the play button, but she couldn't bring herself to press it. There was something final about hearing his voice now, as if doing so would acknowledge the strange reality settling around her. As if playing it would confirm that he was gone, that this message was all that remained of him in her world.

  Instead, she set the phone down gently and turned back to the stove.

  The crêpe was burning again, smoke rising from the blackened edges. The smell seemed distant somehow, less important than it should be, as if her senses were prioritizing for survival, filing ordinary concerns beneath extraordinary ones.

  Her gaze was drawn back to the window. The emptiness outside seemed to press against the glass like a physical presence, a void with weight and texture. No wind stirred the trees now, yet spooked birds flew overhead. No human voices carried from nearby streets. The world had fallen silent with frightening completeness.

  The world hadn't exploded.

  It had simply emptied.

  And she was still here.

  Sara crossed to the window, étienne's flannel shirt hanging loose around her frame, the sleeves rolled up to free her hands. She pressed both palms against the cool glass and peered out at the vacant landscape. The canal's surface was mirror-smooth now, reflecting a sky so perfectly blue it seemed artificial, too saturated, too uniform, like a background image rendered before nature took back over it’s chaotic churn.

  "Dad?" she whispered, though she knew the urn on the dresser couldn't answer. "What's happening?"

  For the first time in her life, the silence that followed her question felt less like an absence of response and more like an answer in itself, one she wasn't ready to understand. The quiet seemed to acknowledge her, to bend toward her, attentive in a way silence should never be.

  Behind her, the radio switched itself back on. The violins had stopped. Now there was only a soft, rhythmic sound, like waves lapping at a distant shore. Or perhaps like breathing, slow and steady, as if the world itself had fallen asleep. The cadence matched her heartbeat perfectly, beat for beat, as though whatever controlled the radio had synchronized itself to her most vital rhythm.

  And Sara, standing barefoot in a borrowed shirt, framed in morning light that illuminated nothing but emptiness, realized with sudden clarity that she was utterly, completely alone. The knowledge settled into her bones with terrible certainty, a truth her body accepted before her mind could fully grasp it.

  The world had become a stage emptied of its players, leaving only her to deliver monologues to vacant seats.