The hallway loops.

  I know this without understanding how I know it. The corridor stretches before me, red stone veined with black, and somewhere behind me the same corridor stretches in the same direction, and the geometry of this refuses to settle into sense. I walk forward. I have been walking forward. The walls curve in ways that stone should not curve, folding gently as if the architecture itself has forgotten the rules it was built to obey.

  Motes of light drift through the air around me.

  They move slowly, these soft luminous spheres, suspended in nothing and drawn by nothing, orbiting paths that have no center. I watch one pass close enough to touch. My hand does not rise to meet it. My mind slides past the observation like water past stone, registering the detail and releasing it in the same breath. The motes are here. They have always been here. They do not matter.

  I am forgetting something.

  The thought surfaces and sinks, surfaces and sinks. Each time I reach for it the hallway seems to stretch, the red deepening to something almost black, the black veins pulsing with colors I cannot name. Something that exists in the space between what the eye sees and what the mind interprets. The golds are dimmed as if decades of dust have settled over them. The shadows fall at angles that do not match the sourceless light.

  I am forgetting something important.

  I keep walking because I do not know what else to do.

  The corridor ahead curves to the left, or perhaps it curves to the right, or perhaps it does both at once and my mind simply chooses one path to follow because it cannot hold both. My footsteps make no sound against the stone. The air tastes of nothing. I breathe in and I breathe out and the rhythm of it feels borrowed, as if I am remembering how to breathe rather than simply doing it.

  Time passes. Time does not pass. The distinction feels meaningless here.

  I turn a corner that I do not remember approaching.

  Voices.

  Children's voices, distant and close at once, drifting through the air like the luminous motes. I stop walking. The hallway stops curving. For one breath everything holds still, suspended in the moment between hearing and understanding.

  Two voices. Girls. Young. Speaking to each other in the easy cadence of familiar conversation.

  "—because echoes are not real," one is saying. Her voice is certain, the certainty of a child who has memorized an answer without yet learning to question it. "Mother explained it. They are just... shapes. Reflections of things that already happened. They cannot hurt anyone."

  "But what if this one is different?" The second voice wavers slightly, unconvinced by the logic offered. "What if it can see us?"

  "It cannot see us. Echoes do not see. They just repeat."

  "It looked at me, Penelope. Right at me."

  The name strikes something inside my chest.

  Penelope.

  I know that name. I know it the way I know my own heartbeat. I know it and I have forgotten it and I am remembering it now, here, in this corridor that loops back on itself like a serpent swallowing its tail.

  "You imagined it," the first voice says. Penelope says. Her tone is patient, the patience of someone who has explained this many times before. "Echoes do not look at people. They are not people. They are just..."

  "Haunted," the second girl whispers. "The palace is haunted."

  "That is not the same thing."

  "It is exactly the same thing."

  My feet carry me forward.

  I do not decide to move. I am simply moving, drawn toward the voices by something that lives in the marrow of my bones and the spaces between my thoughts. The hallway opens ahead of me, widening into a doorway I do not remember seeing, and beyond the doorway is light.

  Soft light, golden and warm, the light of afternoon sun through tall windows. The light of a moment preserved before catastrophe.

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  I step through the doorway without deciding to.

  The room beyond is whole.

  The stone gleams. The air smells of something floral, faint and sweet. Two-headed drakes watch from woven banners, their embroidered eyes patient, their dual gazes fixed on opposite walls as if standing eternal guard against threats that approach from every direction.

  Two girls sit together on a low couch beneath the windows.

  They are small. So small. Four years old at most, their legs not long enough to reach the floor, their hands folded in their laps with the careful posture of children who have been taught to sit properly but have not yet learned why it matters. One has platinum-blond hair that catches the afternoon light like spun silver. The other has hair like burnished copper, amber eyes that hold too much warmth for such a young face.

  Penelope. And the other girl, the one with fire in her coloring if not yet in her hands.

  They are looking at me.

  No. They are looking through me. Past me. At the space I occupy without truly filling it.

  "See?" Penelope whispers to her companion. "It is just standing there. It does not even move properly. Echoes never do."

  "It looks like a boy," the copper-haired girl says. Her voice is steadier now, curiosity replacing fear. "A boy with strange hair and strange skin. Why would the palace be haunted by a boy?"

  "Echoes are not ghosts. They are not anyone specific. They are just..." Penelope pauses, searching for the words she half-remembers. "Shapes. From when the dimensions fold wrong. Mother says they happen sometimes in old places."

  "This place is not that old."

  "Old enough, I suppose."

  The copper-haired girl tilts her head, studying me with the fearless scrutiny of childhood. "It is looking right at us, Penelope. Right at us."

  "It is looking at the wall behind us. Echoes cannot see people. Everyone knows that."

  "What if everyone is wrong?"

  Penelope does not answer. Her blue eyes, so familiar even in this young face, pass over me like I am furniture. She has already decided what I am. She has already placed me in a category that does not require fear.

  I watch them.

  Something is loosening inside my chest. The forgetting that has wrapped itself around my thoughts like fog is beginning to thin, burning away strand by strand as I look at these two small figures on their couch beneath the windows. I know them. I know at least one of them. The shape of her face is familiar even transformed by years that have not yet passed, even softened by baby fat and smoothed by innocence.

  I know her.

  The name rises again, stronger this time, breaking through the resistance that this place builds against clear thought.

  Penelope.

  I remember her now. I remember her standing in rain outside a monument, water streaming through her hair. I remember her voice explaining things I already knew in tones that expected me to need the explanation. I remember her looking at me the way she is not looking at me now, with recognition, with assessment, with the careful attention of someone cataloguing potential threats.

  She was older then.

  She is so young now.

  The joy comes all at once.

  It floods through me like light through glass, pure and absolute, the relief of something recovered that was never supposed to be lost. I remember. After all the fog and the forgetting and the way this place erodes thought like water erodes stone, I remember. Her name. Her face. The fact that she exists, that she is real, that somewhere in whatever passes for time she is growing into someone I have met, someone who knows my name, someone who—

  My mouth opens.

  The word rises from my chest without permission, spoken before thought can catch up, offered like a gift I do not know I am giving:

  "Penelope."

  Horror.

  The copper-haired girl screams first. The sound rips through the preserved stillness like a blade through velvet, high and sharp and utterly animal.

  Penelope screams half a heartbeat later, her composure shattering like dropped glass.

  "It talked," the copper-haired girl is shrieking, scrambling backward on the couch, her small hands pressed over her ears as if she can block out what has already been said. "It talked, it said your name, it said your name, Penelope, it talked—"

  "Stop," I try to say, but my voice has no volume here, produces no sound that registers against the screaming. "I did not mean—"

  Fire.

  It erupts from the copper-haired girl's hands without warning.

  She stares at her own hands in horror that exceeds even her fear of me.

  "Aria," Penelope gasps, and now I have two names, now I understand who the copper-haired girl is, now I recognize her even through the mask of childhood. "Aria, stop, you have to stop—"

  "I cannot—"

  The flames spread.

  They catch the couch first, racing along the fabric with hungry speed. They leap to the curtains, climb the walls, embrace the ceiling beams like lovers too long separated. The two-headed drakes on their banners writhe as fire consumes them, their embroidered eyes blackening, their patient vigil ending in ash.

  Aria is still screaming. Her hands are still burning. Flames pour from her palms in sheets and streams and she cannot stop them, cannot close the door that terror has thrown open, cannot become again the girl who sat calmly on a couch discussing whether echoes were real.

  Penelope tries to reach her.

  The fire drives her back.

  I am moving before I understand why, stepping into the room that is rapidly becoming an inferno, reaching toward the girls I have somehow doomed. The flames roar around me. The heat should blister. The smoke should choke.

  Neither touches me.

  Fire bends around my body like water parting for stone, sliding past my shoulders and streaming around my outstretched hands without so much as warming my skin. I am here and I am not here. I am inside this moment and outside it at once, present enough to trigger catastrophe but absent enough to be immune to its consequences.

  I reach for them.

  House Vermilion burns, and I am there as it—

  Something seizes me.

  The force comes from everywhere at once. From behind and below and within, a grip that closes around something deeper than my body, something that exists in the space between presence and absence. I am yanked backward with violence that steals my breath.

  The burning room recedes.

  I see Penelope's face through the flames for one instant, frozen in terror, her eyes wide and wet and fixed on something she cannot see. I see Aria collapsed against the far wall, fire still pouring from her hands, her small body shaking with sobs. I see the palace consuming itself around them.

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