The wind on the roof possessed a sharp, cutting edge that smelled of damp tar and distant rain.
When Jenna opened her eyes, the cold did not register immediately. Her senses returned in fragments: the coarse bite of asphalt gravel grinding against the soles of her bare feet, the violent whipping of dark hair across her mouth, and the vast, hollow expanse of the night sky tilting overhead. Above her, the full moon hung low, pale and bloated, drowning the suburban street below in a wash of bleached bone.
She looked down. Her toes were curled over the concrete coping. Three inches beyond her bare skin, the world dropped four stories straight down into the asphalt driveway.
"What…?" The word tore from her throat, dry and thin.
She tried to reconstruct the path that had brought her here. She remembered setting her alarm for six in the morning. She remembered the sound of her bedroom radiator clanking against the floorboards. She remembered pulling her faded blue comforter up to her chin. She did not remember turning the brass knob of the hallway door, nor climbing the wooden access ladder, nor stepping out into the November air.
The neighborhood was dead. Row after row of two-story houses sat crouched beneath the dark, their windows shuttered, their lawns frozen over with silver frost. Not a single car engine turned. Not a single streetlight flickered.
Then, cutting through the low whine of the wind, a voice called her name.
"Jenna."
The syllable was flat, devoid of echo, sounding as though someone had leaned down and spoken directly into the shell of her ear. She whipped around so violently her heels skidded on the gravel.
The gravel was empty. The brick chimney stood solitary against the sky, its shadow stretching toward her like a dark finger. Her chest seized, her heart hammering against her ribs with the force of a trapped bird.
"Hello?" she called out. Her voice was swallowed whole by the silence.
She retreated one cautious step from the ledge.
"Jenna."
It came from the dark side of the stairwell housing. A silhouette stepped forward into the pale moonlight. It was slender, hooded in shadow, its face obscured by the heavy gloom that clung to the brickwork. It did not move with the hesitant sway of someone standing on a slick, freezing roof; it moved with mechanical, terrifying precision.
"Who are you?" Jenna whispered, her fingers curling into tight, trembling fists. "How did you get up here?"
The figure gave no answer. It took another step.
Panic surged through her bloodstream like ice water. Jenna stepped backward, desperate to put distance between herself and the stranger. "Stop. Don't come near me."
Another step.
She backed away, but the heel of her right foot caught against an exposed flashing bracket. Her ankle buckled. In the split second she fought to regain her footing, something cold and solid struck her sternum—not with the clumsy shove of a brawl, but with the deliberate, heavy force of an executioner.
Jenna lost her balance. The rooftop vanished from beneath her soles.
The air screamed past her ears. The brick facade of the house tore upward in a dizzying blur of dark masonry and flashing window panes. She clawed at the empty sky, her fingers scraping against the rough edge of the gutter, tearing her nails against the metal, but there was nothing to hold. Gravity seized her with iron jaws.
She braced for the crushing impact of the asphalt driveway.
It never came.
Beneath her, the ground had dissolved into a yawning, pitch-black void. It was a circular chasm that swallowed the earth, extending downward into an infinite, suffocating vacuum where no light survived.
The scream died in her throat.
Hovering within that absolute darkness, suspended halfway between the earth and the void, stood a girl.
The figure slowly raised its head. Moonlight penetrated the darkness just enough to illuminate her features.
It was Jenna.
Not an approximation. Not a sibling. It was her own face staring back at her—the same slight asymmetry of the jaw, the same narrow, dark eyes, the same strand of black hair plastered against the temple.
Then the other Jenna smiled. It was a wide, hollow, lifeless stretch of the lips that reached neither her eyes nor her cheeks.
Jenna screamed—a raw, tearing shriek that filled her ears—and bolted upright.
The comforter was tangled in a damp knot around her thighs. Cold sweat ran in thin rivulets down her temples, stinging her eyes. Her breath rattled in her lungs, ragged and shallow, her fingers digging so deep into her mattress that the springs groaned beneath her weight.
She was in her room.
The faded yellow wallpaper with its repeating ivy pattern peeled slightly at the baseboards. Her school desk sat square under the window, cluttered with half-finished homework sheets, highlighters, and an empty ceramic mug. Her navy school backpack leaned against the wooden chair. The little green LED on her phone charger cast a faint emerald halo against the wall.
Normal. Perfectly, suffocatingly normal. "It was just a dream," she muttered into the dark, her voice shaking violently. "Just a nightmare. You fell asleep thinking about finals."
Her hand trembled as she reached for her nightstand. Her fingers knocked over an empty water glass before finding the cool glass of her smartphone. She pressed the side button.
The screen flared to life, illuminating her pale face in stark white light.
3:17 A.M.
Jenna stared at the glowing digits. A strange, irrational pressure clamped down on the base of her skull. She didn't know why, but the sight of those three numbers felt like an accusation, a door clicking shut in an empty hallway.
She set the phone face down on the wood and pulled the blanket over her shoulders, determined to force herself back into unconsciousness. But sleep did not return. In the absolute quiet of the house, where the only sound was the faint hum of the refrigerator downstairs, a single word continued to reverberate through the chambers of her mind, clear and distinct:
Jenna.
When the morning alarm finally sounded at six-thirty, she stumbled into the bathroom to wash her face. Under the glare of the bare vanity bulbs, she leaned over the porcelain sink and turned on the cold tap. As she cupped her hands under the stream, a sharp, burning sting flared across her right palm.
Jenna froze. She turned her hand over.
A clean, thin red line was scored diagonally across the meat of her palm, the skin split and dried with a bead of dark rust. It was a scratch from an abrasive edge—identical to the sharp flashing of a roof.
She stared at it for a full minute, the water rushing noisily between her fingers.
You slept with your keys on the bed, she told herself firmly. Or you caught it on a corner of the desk when you were thrashing around.
She dried her hands, put on her uniform, and pulled her sleeves down over her wrists. She told herself she would forget about it by the third period.
She didn't know that she had already crossed the border into something that had been waiting for her long before she was born.