3

For a few more seconds Alice just stood on the sidewalk, not quite grasping what had happened. Around her everyone was talking at once — someone calling for the crew, someone comforting the young mother, someone filming the fallen frame on their phone.

Alice pulled out her cell on autopilot.

"Hey, Marinka? I'm not coming in today. I suddenly feel sick. Can you cover for me?"

She listened to the reply, thanked her quickly, and put the phone away. She didn't want to explain anything. She didn't yet know herself what exactly there'd be to explain.

The walk home took an oddly long time — not because it was far, but because her legs seemed to refuse to move any faster, and Alice didn't notice until she was almost there that she'd made the whole trip staring at her own feet, as if she were afraid the sidewalk might betray her the same way reality just had. At her building's entrance she lingered longer than she needed to, punching in the door code — her hands weren't cooperating properly, and on the third attempt she simply pressed her palm flat against the panel and waited for her fingers to remember the sequence on their own, without any help from her head, which was currently occupied with other things.

At home, she didn't let herself panic.

This was her first rule for situations like this — one she'd worked out a long time ago, back in college, when she'd realized that panic always ate up time better spent figuring things out. So instead of sitting there hugging her knees and reliving what she'd just seen, she sat down at the table, grabbed a piece of paper — a habit left over from the days when a computer had felt too fast for genuinely slow thinking — and started breaking down what had happened almost like a work assignment.

Angle of the fall. Distance to the ground. Approximate weight of the structure. Wind speed, which she remembered well, since she'd been complaining about it out loud just the day before. She honestly tried to build a version of events where the frame really had bounced off something, changed course from a gust of wind, caught on some ledge nobody had noticed.

Nothing added up.

None of the versions explained that sound — the sharp inhale of space itself — and none of them came close to explaining the black water and the thing above it, which Alice had seen so clearly she could probably have sketched the shape of its wing, if she knew how to draw.

She set the paper down, the last line still unfinished, and looked at her own palm.

Just below the base of her fingers was a very thin silver line. Not a burn — the skin around it wasn't red or sore. Not a scratch — the line was too even, too deliberate-looking for accidental damage. It seemed to sit not on the surface of her skin but somewhere just beneath it, glowing there with a soft, almost imperceptible light.

Alice touched the line with her fingertip.

It vanished.

Simply stopped being there — no flash, no pain, nothing but a faint tingle that could have been chalked up to anything at all.

She stared at her empty palm for a few seconds, then decided that water was a reasonable idea. Water usually helped her think. She got up, went to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and held her hands under the cold stream.

The water reacted before she even had time to be surprised by the thought.

The surface in the sink suddenly bowed — not where the stream was hitting it, but off to one side, as if something invisible had pulled at it. For one brief moment — one short, precise moment — the water reflected not her bathroom, with its cracked tile by the mirror, but that same black lake: motionless, immense, under that same low, silver sky.

Then everything went back to normal: the faucet, the sink, her own face in the mirror, paler than usual.

Alice shut off the water. Her hands were shaking slightly, and she let herself acknowledge that as an honest fact rather than a weakness. Bracing her palms against the edge of the sink, she let herself be genuinely afraid for the first time that day — not with screaming and tears, but with the heavy, adult kind of fear that comes from suddenly understanding that every explanation you've ever relied on has stopped working at once.

She looked at her reflection and said out loud, as firmly as she could manage:

"Okay. Either I'm losing my mind, or the laws of physics decided to take a day off. I don't love either option."

The reflection didn't argue. If anything, it was behaving suspiciously normally now — no lag, no silver — which for some reason made it more unsettling, not less.

Her phone buzzed quietly on the table — a text from Marinka: *You doing okay? Should I call an ambulance?* Alice typed back *I'm fine, just a cold, don't worry* and, after sending it, felt a little better — as if the word "cold," so boring and so understandable, had the power to restore the world's normal boundaries for a few seconds.

She had zero appetite, but she made herself go to the kitchen anyway and fry an egg — not because she was hungry, but because dinner was one more item on an ordinary day's list, and today that ordinary list badly needed to be followed to the letter. Plate, fork, two minutes at the stove, keeping time in her head instead of setting a timer — simple, boring, completely well-defined actions that she wanted to hold onto with both hands, like a handrail on a swaying bus.

Alice dried her hands, carried a glass of water with her, and decided she'd go to bed early tonight. Not because she believed sleep would put everything back where it belonged.

Just because she couldn't think of anything else to do.