The Greyhound station was a temple of cheap disinfection and muffled sadness. According to Tatiana, it was technically true that she moved through it like a ghost. She was a carbon copy of a world that had been wiped, a relic without an original. The broken vinyl seats, the faded travel posters of locations no one was going, and the weary features of the passengers waiting were all bleached of colour by the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Nobody gave her a glance. Here, she lacked aura. Absence of gravity. Her eyes were focused on a middle distance that contained nothing but private destruction, and she was just another woman in tattered clothes with a rucksack draped over her shoulder. She blended in perfectly. She purchased a cheap duffel bag from a vending machine that also offered phone chargers and neck pillows using the five crumpled twenty dollars—a merciful, useful anomaly—and the remaining actual currency she had discovered in the backpack. She loaded it up with necess

In the encroaching dusk, the service plaza was a bubble of fluorescent light and artificial happiness. The pregnant woman's naive laughter was still echoing in Tatiana's ears as she walked through it like a machine.Isn't that silly? There was nothing ridiculous. Everything was a sign pointing toward a precipice, written in a language only she could understand. In order to feel the heat against her palms and have a tactile connection to the present, she purchased a bitter, scorching coffee from a kiosk. She watched Grayson through the plate glass window, away from the other travellers smoking by the doors. A picture of ordinary ennui, he was leaning against the bus's side and checking his phone. His eyes wandered aimlessly across the parking lot as he took a long sip from a travel mug. It didn't ever look for her. You are unknown to him. You don't own him. The idea made her stomach turn to stone. She had lost Mira to the story, Alexander to time, and now Grayson to... normalcy. In

The fragrance of crayon wax was a time machine. It took Tatiana back to the safehouse in Georgetown, to cold cereal and candles, to the hallowed, awful silence of a child making up worlds on paper as the actual one fell apart outside. The paper twisted at the edges and was pulpy and inexpensive. Bold and resolute, the lines were a child's attempt to bring order to chaos. Using a stubby black crayon as a protective symbol, the masked father stood valiantly with his cape blazing. Daddy, ghost. The words pierced her ribcage like a spear. The recollection of a memory, not a memory itself. An echo within an echo. Back then, it had been a childlike incantation against the dark, a plea. Now it was a verdict in her fingers as the bus rolled silently toward an unnamed town. Evidence that the narrative residue was there in the collective psyche of the world it had left behind, not only in white trees or bleeding sonograms. The narrative was seeping into children's artwork. The Phantom was bec

Mira's eyes were blank, which was a physical blow. It was worse than her disappearance, worse than her breaking up on the plane. This was an unacknowledged presence. Her kid had just gazed through her as though she were a park bench, a lamppost, or a ghost—who was complete, alive, and breathing the same chilly mountain air. As the queue of kids rebuilt, Tatiana stood still, and Mira was now fluently conversing with a girl with red hair. Her laugh was crisp, high, and quite normal. A void was created in Tatiana's chest by the sound. Every slide the other kids showed felt like a transgression. They were deleting her suffering and her tale, but they were also erasing the proof that she and Mira had ever been important. They were transforming Tatiana from a tragic heroine into a non-being by transforming epic tragedy into a kid's game. Sand and laughter were erasing a woman's greatest losses and loves. The universe was shown mercy on the slide. It was annihilation to her. The pressure

The cold was a thing. It penetrated Tatiana rather than merely encircling her. With each weak, startled breath, it crystallised the moisture in her nostrils and quickly soaked through her jumper and jeans, needling her skin. After the swing's vision's psychological roar, there was a bodily strain to the complete silence. Her boots crunched on a floor of compacted ice and rubble as she staggered to her feet. With the help of the dim, grey light that came in through the tall, dirty windows, her breath rose in spectral clouds. The extent of the neglect was astounding. This wasn’t just a closed facility; it was a tomb. Like cracked eggs, bank after bank of shattered glass incubation vats lay with their fluid long frozen into weird, opaque sculptures. At hideous angles, twisted metal skeletons of conveyor belts and gantries protruded from the ice. Chairs were overturned and frozen in place, while computers were lumps of ice-crusted rubbish. This was the origin. the cancer's origin. It sh