Some rooms remember fire long after the flames are gone. Liorana's studio is one of them.
The smell hits him first — wet ash, thick enough to taste, like a chimney that never quite finished smoldering. Kaelman has to remind himself to breathe.
In the corner, a desk lamp throws a small, sickly yellow sphere of light over a landscape of ruin: canvases abandoned mid-stroke, tubes of paint curled and dried into husks. Everything in this room looks like it died reaching for something.
He's been watching Liorana since the first distortions started showing up in the neighborhood — since things stopped making sense in ways nobody wanted to say out loud. Now she stands frozen in front of an easel, a sketchbook balanced on her knees. It belonged to a relative of hers, once. Someone who doesn't exist anymore, not in any way that matters — swallowed whole by time's appetite, the way everything eventually is.
Kaelman steps closer to a pencil drawing pinned above the easel.
A windowless room. Lit by broken lamps.
Something in his chest seizes. He's back there before he can stop it — the protocol room, that light that hurt to look at, the airlessness, the sense of faceless men carving through his skull like it was clay on a wheel. He blinks it away. Or tries to.
On the nightstand beside the easel sits a glass, filled halfway with water gone black with ink.
"What do you think, Kaelman?" Liorana doesn't turn around. "I can feel time bending around me. Am I the one painting — or am I just the chisel in someone else's hand, someone out there sculpting the pictures themselves?" A pause. "You look sad. Why is that? Have you seen my neighbor — the sour one, the one who sits on that little stool by the entrance all day?"
"Something's wrong with him, that's for sure." Kaelman doesn't look away from the drawing. "There was a misunderstanding. I shot him in the left leg. Now I see him dragging the right one instead."
"Have you ever felt like you spat out a piece of yourself and couldn't get it back?" she asks. "No — you wouldn't know that feeling. You can find anything. That's why they call you the Retriever, isn't it."
It happens without warning. Her body convulses, hard, and her hands fly to her throat. Kaelman takes a step toward her and stops — because her throat is swelling, bulging in a way throats aren't supposed to, like something is forcing its way up through her from the inside.
She coughs. Once, twice, violently.
Then, with a final, wrenching heave, Liorana spits something into her paint-stained palm — a small doll, slick with black muck that reeks of wet ash.
The room seems to crack open around them.
The desk lamp flickers.
"What did I just spit out of myself?" she whispers, staring down into the doll's bulging eyes. "I didn't mean to."
The doll's mouth — wart-covered, swollen — splits open, and a dry rustle crawls out of its throat, like dead leaves scraping against each other.
"Curses don't die, woman," it says. "They just wear something new."
Kaelman doesn't move. Can't.
He blinks — and when his eyes open again, the doll has dissolved into a black stain, ink running down through Liorana's fingers, pooling into a shape on her skin. A mark. A picture, of sorts.
"What does that mean?" Kaelman asks, nodding at the dark print spreading across her palm. "What's it a drawing of?"
Liorana looks up at him. Something in her face has already changed — like whoever was standing there a moment ago has stepped out and left the smile behind.
"The beginning," she says.
And then she's laughing — a high, cracking sound that doesn't belong to her — and her hand comes across his face before he even sees it move.