Sarya stood in the doorway, unable to look away from the child's face — her own face, worn thin by too many years compressed into too little time, and yet, impossibly, also younger than she had been in longer than she could remember.
"Me," the child had said.
The word hung in the small, ordinary room, refusing to resolve into anything Sarya could immediately hold.
"I don't understand," she said finally.
The child rose from the chair, unhurried, and crossed the small distance between them with the easy, unselfconscious movement of someone entirely at home in her own body — something Sarya realized, with a small ache, she hadn't felt in longer than the two years the Nexus had lived inside her.
"You wouldn't," the child said. "You've spent so long being everyone the Nexus needed you to become that you forgot there was ever a version of you it didn't need to shape at all."
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