Sometimes, true light shone down. It peeked around the edges of side corridors and slanted through windows that stood high in the walls between corridors and the closed rooms to the right. Pockets of it glittered where the gaslight didn't reach, as spectral and soft as only moonlight could be. By this light the end of the main corridor became clear. As Elise and Marek reached it, the gaslights turned up enough to illuminate their destination: a single silver door laden with fanciful carvings of fruit, flowers, and leaves that blushed gold. The silvery numeral "7" glittered above the door in a field of starry wallpaper.

But there was one problem — no doorknob or handle was in sight. Marek stopped her wheelchair right in front of the door, bringing her so close that the hem of her skirt pressed against her knees. "How does it open?" Elise said.

"You ask it nicely."

If this was a comedy routine, he could go on the road with it. People in some other part of the country might actually have found him funny. "I'm serious."

"So am I," he said. There was the sound of whispering fabric, then his voice uncurled behind her right ear. "Just reach out and ask for what you want."

A shiver tripped down her spine. His voice stirred something in her, a mixture of fear and excitement and things without name. The muddle of feelings reminded her of ... of ... of moments she couldn't quite recall. Dreams and desires that no longer seemed like her own. Perhaps they belonged to the Elise she was now, but not the one had been. Or the reverse might be true. Past and present whipped together like debris in a gale. What should she feel? Which feelings should she trust? Which couldn't she?

Elise shoved everything away. Keeping her wits was more important. Her feelings could be sorted out later. "Ask the door?" she said to Marek. "Aloud, or in my head?"

"Either," he said. He had said that word before, when he'd first found her and told her not to make a sound, saying it as eye-ther like she would've done. But now he had said as if he were —

"Common."

Both Elise and her sister stopped cold at that. They'd been playing with their dolls on the sitting room floor, quietly babbling away about silly things, but that didn't matter. When Father used that tone, they had to listen. He rarely used it when talking to Meliora, though. No, it was usually for Elise, who always did something wrong.

She set her doll aside at once. If she didn't, he'd only get angrier. When your elders spoke, you had to give them your full attention. "S-sir?" she said. Her heartbeats had somehow found their way into her voice and turned it shaky.

Father lowered his paper enough to show the top of his head and eyebrows, but that was all. Once he sat down in his big armchair and started reading his evening newspaper, he liked to stay there until he finished every last bit of it. He didn't like interruptions from anyone until he'd folded it up and set it on the skinny table to his right. "When you pronounce the word 'either' as 'ee-ther,' it sounds common." He turned a page, quietly rustling the paper. "Those who have the Ellsworth name are anything but common."

The girl's heart stopped drumming so hard now that Father had let her know how she'd upset him. If she knew, she could fix what she had done. "I'm sorry, sir."

"If you were sorry," he said, "you'd stop sounding as if we had just brought you into our home." The paper rustled again, this time as he turned his attention to the other side of it. "Yet it's been a year since then, hasn't it?"

Yes, it had been a year, a whole year, and she still couldn't behave like an Ellsworth was supposed to. Her shame burned inside her, creeping hotly into her face. Then her eyes started stinging. She curled her hands tight, fingernails biting her palms. It hurt, but it kept her tears from falling. Father would be even more upset if she started crying. She couldn't upset him, because that would mean being Bad. "Y-yes," she said.

"If you know better," he told her, "do better," and the newspaper went back up, hiding him like a great grey wall.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Fireflies swarmed angrily above her, blinking purple light that flashed like neon signage all the way up to the distant ceiling. Pretty. She had only seen fireflies in photos and the occasional movie, both of those rarely in color. Some of the fireflies seemed close enough to touch. She reached out for them. Her arm refused to lift. It felt heavy, that arm, like someone had filled it with cement.

Marek appeared over her, his eyes wide behind his glasses. He was saying something, a lot of somethings. The strange buzzing in her ears engulfed his words. He leaned down to take her face in his hands, hair falling across his forehead. The feverish heat of his touch rippled through her. How could he feel so hot? Was something wrong with him? He shouted a single word, a foul word, one that she knew only by the shape that his mouth took when he said it. If Father had heard that, he would've had a thing or two to say about commonness.

That was the last coherent thought she had for some time.

A new heat, one worse than the heat of Marek's hands, grew inside her. It scorched her lungs and strained her ribs. Dark spots swam in her eyes. Shadows pressed in on her from all sides. Air, she needed air.

Marek stared down at her, nearly looking a shadow himself in the darkening world. He suddenly moved down and didn't stop until his lips covered hers. His mouth burned her worse than his hands did. How could something so hot be that soft?

She gasped at the shock of this new sensation, and he tore his mouth away. The shadows and dark spots faded from her vision with each breath she took. His hands, still resting on her cheeks, felt only warm now. It was a warmth that had started to seep back into her own frozen body, thawing her blood. "Wh-what happened?" she croaked.

How awful she sounded, how awful she felt! As if she would never be warm again.

"You had an attack," he said, not quite meeting her eyes. His hands dropped slowly away from her face, fingertips gently trailing fading fire on her skin.

An attack? God, that couldn't be good. She sat up, rubbing her neck with a leaden hand. The awkward angle it had been sitting at hadn't done her any favors, but at least she could move. Moonlight fell over her in the new place that her wheelchair sat, not far from the silver door. Marek must have yanked the wheelchair around when he'd realized something was wrong with her. "The clinic." She dropped her hand into her lap, where it joined her other one. Her fingers knotted together. "We should go to the clinic. The doctor and the nurses, they'll help."

"They won't." He straightened up, raking his hair back into place. "What happened to you," he continued, taking off his glasses, "I've seen it before." He ran a hand down his face. A few fireflies weaved around him. "It's a power. A kind of mental manipulation."

"Tell me what that means." She had a good idea of what it entailed, but she needed to know for certain.

"It means that someone has made a playground of your skull." The anger in his tone made her shrink back. He noticed her reaction and softened his voice. "I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at whoever did this to you."

Playing around in her head? Yes, that could be another way of saying mental manipulation. "Someone has done this to me," she said, just to hear it confirmed in plain words. "It wasn't the fall I took."

For a girl who has forgotten herself, the rest of your mind seems wonderfully intact, Gerver echoed inside her head. The professor had no idea how right he'd been when he'd told her that — provided Marek was telling the truth about what caused her to stop breathing. She had no way of knowing if she could trust him, though. The best she could do was appear to believe him, so she could later confirm it with Willow and the others. Or, if not them, then Gerver or one of the nurses. Perhaps all of them, for she had been told to trust no one.

"How dangerous is this?" she said, because that was the sort of thing she would've asked if she had taken his words at face value. "How do I fix it?"

If she could fix it, she could have her memories back. She could have Charlotte back, in a way. She could have herself back.

"You believe me?" Marek said. "Just like that?"

Okay, so maybe there was such a thing as too naive. The existence of Abriana Adesso had proved that not everyone at Rambling was concerned about the welfare of fellow students, and she couldn't have forgotten that after relearning it today. But she didn't want to drive Marek off. He had helped her again and again since they had met; he had defended her against Adesso; he had, only minutes ago, saved her from a terrible attack. Yet something within her said not to get too close. In this dark corridor, so far from anyone else, his hair and unnatural eyes seemed like the warning spots of a poisonous spider. Beware, they said, do not touch. Considering the disbelieving questions he had just asked her, maybe he sensed her ambivalence about him.

Elise had a question of her own. "Is there any reason I shouldn't believe you?"

He stuck his glasses on, then pushed them into place up the bridge of his nose. "There's a killer on the loose," he said. "You know that better than anyone else, Ellsworth."

The way he said her name sounded almost exactly as her so-called father had said it. As if it meant something. Marek had also mentioned about her "knowing better," a coincidence that turned her stomach.

He must've noticed something of her reaction, because of what he next said. "I'll tell you what we can do." His tone had turned as gentle as his face had. "Let's go see Gerver. You can ask him whatever you like, or even have him take you to the clinic."

"You don't mind?"

A shake of his head. "No. In fact, I would've been offended if you didn't show any backbone. Most people wouldn't understand the meaning of 'self-preservation' even if the letters were spelled out for them."

Did she truly understand that? She thought back. Her first actions upon waking had been to run and to hide, not to call out for help. Add her new memory of the Ellsworths to the photographs where little Elise's smile had steadily faded, to her shabby school uniform, to the lack of visits from the family, and you came up with an ugly sum, that self-preservation had been a necessity of environment. Marek, with his worn shoes and patched book bag, surely understood that as well as she did. "Yes," she said, "most people wouldn't."