When the Veil Breaks

She was in the library.

Not at the catalog desk looking at the library. In it. Standing in it. The east-facing windows were catching four o'clock light, Monday afternoon, the long amber slope of October sun coming through the old glass, and the room was warm and real and full of the particular silence of a library at its quietest hour.

Maya was six feet away, packing the tote at the reference desk.

Sophie could see her. Not the flattened impression of a psychometric read, not the sense-and-feeling overlay she'd experienced a thousand times before. She was standing in the room. She could feel the floor under her feet, the warmth of the afternoon, the smell of the library's paper-and-dust-and-radiator signature. She could hear the radiator ticking. She could hear Maya humming something, low and tuneless, under her breath.

Sophie took a step. The floor held.

She was inside the memory. She could walk.

She moved closer. Maya was checking a library book's due date against the stamp inside the cover, quick and practiced, and from this angle Sophie could see the ink stain on her right hand, dark blue going to violet, and the way her glasses sat slightly crooked on her nose, and the focused absorption of someone who was organizing a departure. Maya tucked a folded piece of paper into the tote's inner pocket. She patted the pocket once, confirming.

Maya's phone buzzed.

Sophie watched Maya pull it from her coat pocket. She was close enough now to read over Maya's shoulder. The screen:

6pm works. I'll have tea. —D.

Maya read it. Her face did something. Not fear. The steadying breath of someone about to do something hard and necessary. She read the text a second time and put the phone away.