Chapter 3 Not Again

Ivy's POV

The footsteps behind her don't rush, and that, unhurried, almost bored, is worse than if they'd been running.

Her mouth keeps shaping the same word. I catch part of it this time, more than I got through the window glass, enough to know it isn't a scream at all. It's a name. Two syllables, over and over, aimed at the door instead of whoever's behind her, like the name itself might be a password that opens locks.

I don't get the rest of it. The bulb overhead sputters once and the hallway folds in on itself, and I'm back on my own floor with my spine jammed against cold metal ribs and my palm burning where the button sits.

I fling it away from me without deciding to. It skitters across the floorboards and stops against the leg of my desk, and for a second I just sit there with my hand held out in front of me like it belongs to somebody else. My knee knocks the water glass beside me and it goes over, soaking straight through the rug, and I don't even reach for it. There are worse things happening in my head right now than a wet rug.

My breath comes too fast to be useful. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum, not because it helps, because doing something with my hands keeps me from doing the other thing, the thing where I curl up on this floor and stay there until morning. My phone is still on the nightstand where I left it hours ago. I could call Nora. She'd pick up on the second ring, she always does, and she'd talk to me until my heart rate came back down to something normal.

I don't reach for it. Calling her means saying the words out loud, and that makes them real in a way sitting alone with them somehow doesn't.

A name. Not a scream. That detail sits wrong in my chest, worse than the hand against the door, worse than the footsteps that never hurried. Screaming means terror with nowhere to go. A name means she thought somebody specific was listening. She thought somebody specific was going to open that door.

Nobody did.

I know that the way you know the ending of a story you've heard enough times, not because I saw it finish, because the pause afterward had the shape of an ending. The vision didn't show me a rescue. It showed me a woman spending her last clear thought on a name, and whoever that name belonged to never came.

Part of me wants to argue with what I just saw. That part says two syllables aren't much to go on, that I could have imagined the shape of a name where there was only noise, that grief does that to people, fills in gaps that were never there to begin with. I've used that argument on myself before. It usually works long enough to get me back to sleep.

It doesn't work tonight. I know the difference between a sound my mind invented and a sound that came from somewhere outside me, because the two have never once felt the same, and pretending otherwise now would just be another lie I tell myself to make the night shorter.

I sit with my knees against my chest for longer than I want to admit, staring at the button where it landed by the desk leg, telling myself I can leave it there until daylight, that nothing requires me to touch it again tonight. My legs don't agree with that plan. They get me up and across the room before the rest of me finishes arguing.

I don't pick it up right away. I stand over it first, arms crossed, like distance changes what it is. Then I crouch, and this time when I lift it, I carry it straight to the lamp on my desk instead of holding it in the dark the way I did both times before. If I'm doing this again, I want to actually see what I'm holding instead of just feeling it.

I click the lamp on and the bulb takes a second to warm up, flickering weak and then steady, the same way the bulb in the hallway did right before the vision cut out. I push the thought away, because there's only so much my head can hold at once without breaking something.

Under the bulb, the metal looks worse than it did through moonlight, older, greener at the seams, a small crack running along one edge that I never noticed until now. I turn it slowly between two fingers, telling myself I'm checking for damage, though I already know that's not really why I'm doing this. My hands are steadier than they have any right to be. Steady hands used to mean calm. These days they just mean I've had enough practice at pretending.

There's something scratched into the back. Not decoration. Not wear. Lines too straight and even to be accidental, the kind of marks a tool makes on purpose, not the kind time leaves by accident. I bring it closer to my face, close enough that the smell of old metal fills my nose, faint and bitter, like a coin that's been in someone's pocket for years.

Numbers. Six of them total, small, cramped together like whoever carved them ran out of room. My first thought is that it's a serial number, something stamped at a factory decades ago, meaningless, the kind of detail that would mean nothing to anyone who hadn't spent the last three years memorizing a very specific string of digits.

I have. I know that exact number the way you know your own birthday, worse, because a birthday doesn't visit you in your sleep. It's printed on the corner of every page in the file I was allowed to read exactly once, the case number stamped across the top of the evidence log from the night I almost didn't survive.

My hand doesn't shake when I set the button down this time. It goes very, very still instead, which somehow frightens me more.

Six digits. I mouth them without meaning to, matching them one at a time against the number burned into my memory from three years ago, certain I'll find one wrong, one digit that breaks the pattern and lets me put this down as coincidence and go back to bed.

The first two match. I tell myself that's not unusual, case numbers from the same year would share a prefix, plenty of files start the same way. The third matches too, and I stop telling myself anything at all.

I go back to the beginning and start over, slower this time, in case my memory is the thing that's wrong instead of the button. I have read that number enough times that it should be impossible to get wrong, but I want it to be wrong right now more than I have ever wanted anything.

They match. Every single one.