Beeping. That was the first thing. Steady, annoying, somewhere to the left. Then the smell-clean. Too clean. The kind of clean that made her nose itch and her throat feel dry.

Hospital?

Urara lay there for a while. Just... existing. The beeping counted seconds for her. Her body felt weird. Heavy. Distant. There was pain somewhere, ribs maybe, but it was far away. Muffled. Like it was happening to someone else.

Why am I in a hospital?

She couldn't... she'd been somewhere. With someone. The details kept sliding away. Water through fingers. Annoying.

The sheets were scratchy. Gross. She rubbed her thumb against the fabric and made a face. Hospitals always had terrible sheets. When she got home she'd wrap herself in her fleece blankets, the good ones, and sleep for like a week. Maybe two.

When I get home.

She had an apartment. She remembered that. Small kitchen, clothes everywhere, her sewing machine by the window where the light was good-

Something about that thought felt... wrong. She couldn't figure out why.

Her head hurt. Thinking was hard. So she stopped. Just lay there, letting the beeping fill up the silence.

She was so tired.

Time passed. Minutes, maybe. Longer? Hard to tell. At some point it occurred to her that she should probably open her eyes.

She blinked.

Her eyelashes moved. She felt them. But nothing changed.

I'm tired. That's all. Too tired to focus.

She blinked again. Tried to look around-left, right, up. Her eyes moved, she could feel them moving in their sockets. But there was just... nothing. Empty static where stuff should be.

The lights are off. The room is dark. That's all.

But there was warmth on her arm. Sunlight. From a window, probably. She could feel the heat of it soaking into her skin.

The lights are...

Her hand came up. Slow, clumsy. Found her face. Found her eyes. Open. They were open. She traced her eyelashes, felt them brush her fingertip when she blinked.

Open.

The beeping sped up.

"I can't-"

The coffee table got her again.

Urara hissed through her teeth, grabbing her shin. Same spot as yesterday. Same stupid corner. She knew it was there. She'd counted the steps from the couch-twelve to the kitchen. But steps vary. If she took a shorter stride, twelve steps put her right into the sharp edge of the wood.

Get a cane, Urara. Use it inside.

No.

She stood there for a minute, holding her leg, waiting for the throb to subside. It had been... weeks now? She wasn't sure. Time was slippery when every day felt exactly the same. Wake up. Navigate the obstacle course. Eat. Sleep.

She made it to the kitchen. Small victories. The counter was where she left it, and she found her mug by touch. Coffee was easy now. She'd measured everything out in advance, pre-portioned the grounds into little containers. One container, one cup. Even she couldn't mess that up.

The coffee maker beeped when it was done. Her whole apartment beeped now. The microwave, the coffee maker, her phone. A symphony of electronic noises, letting her know she still existed in a world full of stuff she couldn't see.

She took her coffee back to the couch, shuffling her feet this time to find the table edge before her shin did.

Her phone sat on the cushion. She picked it up, double-tapping the screen to wake it. She didn't need to see the light to know it was on; she heard the familiar thwip of the unlock sound.

She should text someone. Her friends had been trying. Calling, texting. And she'd just... not.

Just pick someone. Anyone. You can't keep doing this.

She thought about her college friends. The "glass treatment." The pity. She couldn't deal with that right now.

But there was one person who wouldn't do that.

She opened her messages. She didn't look at the screen; she didn't need to. She held the phone flat in her palms, using her thumbs to find the keys, listening to the rapid-fire feedback of the screen reader as she typed.

"Cap H. E. Y. Hey."

She paused.

"A. R. E. Space. Are. Y. O. U. You. B. U. S. Y. Busy."

She deleted it. Double-tapped backspace. "Deleted busy. Deleted you."

She tried again.

Urara: i think i need

Urara: i don't know. i just needed to talk to someone who isn't going to be weird about it

Urara: everyone's being so CAREFUL and i hate it

Urara: like i'm going to shatter if they say the wrong thing

Urara: i'm already shattered. that's the whole point

She listened to the voice read back the message one last time to check for errors. It sounded flat, emotionless.

Send.

She heard the whoosh of the message going out. Then she sat there, holding her cooling coffee, waiting for the notification sound that would tell her she hadn't just made a huge mistake.

The panic came every morning now. That half-second between waking up and remembering. Eyes open, nothing there, and her heart slamming against her ribs before her brain caught up.

Right. Still blind. Still that.

Urara lay in bed and waited for her pulse to slow down. It took longer than it used to. Or maybe it just felt longer. Hard to tell.

She groped for her phone on the nightstand, tapping the screen to wake it.

"11:47 AM," the voice announced into the quiet room.

She'd been awake for an hour already, just... lying there. Listening to the apartment. The hum of the fridge. The muffled sounds of neighbors existing on the other side of the walls. Cars outside, somewhere far below.

She should get up. She should eat something.

She didn't move.

Miki had come by yesterday. Or the day before? Brought groceries, put them away, talked about... something. School, maybe. A guy she was seeing. Urara had nodded along and made the right noises and felt like she was watching herself from very far away. Reina had texted-her phone read it out in that flat robot voice-asking if she wanted to come to some thing. A party. A hangout. Something with people and places and outside.

She'd said maybe. Which meant no.

You can't keep doing this.

She knew that. She knew that. But every time she thought about leaving-actually getting dressed, actually walking out the door, actually existing in a world she couldn't see-her chest got tight and her hands started shaking and it just... wasn't worth it. Not yet. Tomorrow, maybe. Next week.

You said that last week.

Yeah. She did.

The fridge hummed. A car honked, distant and muffled. Urara stared at nothing and tried to convince herself to get out of bed.

The panic still came most mornings. Duller now. Less like drowning, more like a weight pressing down on her chest for a few seconds before it lifted. She'd gotten used to it the way you got used to anything-not better, just familiar.

Eyes open. Nothing there. Right. Okay. Moving on.

Urara sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed without thinking about it. Muscle memory. Three months of the same routine had worn grooves into her brain. Twelve steps to the bathroom. Hand on the wall, find the doorframe, find the light switch-

She still flipped the light switch. Every single time. Stupid habit. It didn't matter anymore but her hand did it anyway, like her body hadn't gotten the memo.

The apartment was quiet. It was always quiet now. Miki and Reina still came by, but less often. Not their fault-they had lives. Classes and jobs and futures that hadn't frozen in place. They checked in, brought food sometimes, sent texts that her phone read out loud in that flat voice. She responded when she remembered to. Sometimes she forgot.

They're going to stop coming eventually.

Probably. People did that. Drifted away when you gave them nothing to hold onto. She didn't blame them. She wasn't exactly good company these days.

She made coffee. Same routine-pre-measured grounds, button she'd marked with a raised sticker, wait for the beep. Took her mug to the couch. Found the corner that was hers now, the one that smelled like her, the cushion that had molded to her shape from all the hours spent sitting there.

Her laptop was on the coffee table. She opened it, waited for the screen reader to boot up, and pulled up the same fashion podcast she'd been listening to for weeks. New episode today. Something about sustainable textiles. She didn't care, really, but the sound filled up the silence.

This is your life now. Couch, coffee, podcasts about clothes you can't make.

She sipped her coffee and listened to people talk about a world she wasn't part of anymore.

Outside, the city kept moving. She could hear it-cars, voices, the distant wail of a siren. All of it happening without her. She hadn't left the apartment in... a while. Weeks, maybe. Miki had stopped asking.

The podcast host laughed at something. Urara didn't catch the joke.

She pulled her knees up, wrapped her hands around the warm mug, and waited for the day to pass.

The fabric slipped through her fingers like water. Silk. She knew it was silk even before the app confirmed it-the weight, the cool smoothness, the way it caught slightly on the dry skin of her fingertips. She'd touched enough silk in her life to recognize it blind.

Ha. Blind. Good one, Urara.

She set the silk aside and picked up the next swatch. Heavier. Textured. Little ridges under her fingers, a slight stretch when she tugged. She turned it over, felt the back, pressed it against her cheek.

"Ribbed knit," she said out loud. Talking to herself had become a habit. The apartment was too quiet otherwise. "Cotton blend. Maybe... seventy-thirty?"

She ran the fabric under the sensor and waited for the robotic voice.

"Cotton, sixty-two percent. Polyester, thirty-eight percent."

Close enough.

The desk was covered in samples now. Swatches and scraps she'd ordered online, organized into piles she'd memorized by position. Silks on the left, cottons in the middle, synthetics on the right. Wools in the box by her elbow.

She ran her finger over the tag she'd attached to the swatch. Not Braille-she hadn't learned that yet. It was her own system. A safety pin with a small knot of ribbon tied to it. Ribbon means knit. Pin means blend. It was crude, but it worked.

It looked like a mess, probably. She couldn't tell anymore.

She'd spent hours reading about blind designers. Lucy Edwards. Mason Ewing. People who'd figured it out, who'd built systems, who'd refused to give up. The forums had been helpful too-strangers sharing tips about tactile markers, about apps, about how to organize a workspace when you couldn't see it.

If they can do it, you can do it.

She didn't really believe that. Not all the way. But she was trying anyway, because what else was she supposed to do? Sit on the couch forever? Listen to podcasts about an industry she'd never touch again?

No.

She picked up another swatch. Ran it between her fingers. Stiff, papery, with a subtle grain. Taffeta, maybe. Or a crisp organza.

"Organza," she decided. "Silk organza. Lightweight."

She ran it under the sensor.

"Silk. Organza weave."

A small smile tugged at her mouth. Barely there, but real.

She reached for the next swatch.

Urara smoothed down the front of her sweater and tried to picture how she looked.

"Dusty rose," the color scanner had said. "Hex code D4A5A5." She'd looked it up on a text-to-speech website-soft pink, muted, warm undertones. It would go with the cream skirt. Cream and dusty rose. Safe. Pretty. Something the old Urara would have worn on a lazy day.

She'd spent twenty minutes getting dressed. Checking every piece with the scanner, matching hex codes to the list she'd made, laying everything out in order so she wouldn't mix them up. It was exhausting. It was worth it.

You can do this. You can still be you.

She was reaching for her bag when it happened.

Light.

Not the vague warmth of the sun or the dim awareness of bright versus dark. Actual light, flooding in, shapes forming out of the nothing-

Urara froze.

Her apartment. Her apartment, blurry and strange but there. The couch, the coffee table, the window with the curtains she'd forgotten were blue. Her hands-her hands in front of her face, brown skin, chipped nail polish she hadn't been able to see to fix-

She looked down.

The sweater.

It wasn't dusty rose.

It was... beige. Grayish beige. Nothing like pink. Nothing like the color the scanner had promised. The skirt wasn't cream either, it was closer to-off-white? Ivory? She couldn't tell, everything was still fuzzy, but it was wrong, it was all wrong-

She opened her mouth to-say something, scream, cry, she didn't know-

And then it was gone.

The nothing rushed back in. Swallowed her whole. The apartment, her hands, the wrong colors, all of it-gone.

Urara stood there. Shaking. Eyes open and seeing nothing.

That wasn't-

Her knees buckled. She caught herself on the edge of the couch, sank down onto it, hands gripping the cushion so hard her fingers ached.

She'd seen. She'd actually seen. For a few seconds, she'd-

And the colors were wrong. The stupid app had been wrong the whole time, and she'd been walking around in mismatched beige thinking she looked-

A laugh bubbled up out of her throat. Broken and wet and not really a laugh at all.

"Dusty rose," she said to the empty room. Her voice cracked. "It said dusty rose."

She didn't know if she wanted to cry or scream or throw the scanner across the room.

She just sat there, shaking, and waited to see if it would happen again.

The café was too loud. Urara gripped her coffee cup and tried to focus on the warmth seeping into her palms instead of the chaos around her.

"Stop bouncing your leg," Miki said from her left. "You're shaking the table."

"I'm not bouncing my-" She was. She stopped. "Sorry."

"You're fine," Reina said from her right. "You look great. The outfit is cute. Everything is going to be fine."

"Easy for you to say," Urara muttered. "You can see."

"Wow, really? I had no idea," Reina said. Miki snorted.

Urara didn't laugh. Her stomach was doing flips. This was stupid. This whole thing was stupid. A blind date-ha-set up by her friends, who refused to tell her anything about this mystery person except that they were "perfect for her" and "already knew everything."

"Can you at least tell me something about them?" Urara asked. "Anything? Height? Job? Whether they have a face?"

"They have a face," Miki said.

"Probably," Reina added.

"You're both terrible."

"You'll like them," Miki said. Something in her voice sounded off. Tighter than usual. "I promise. It's someone you-"

A sharp sound. Miki yelping. The table jostled.

"What was that?" Urara asked.

"Nothing," Reina said quickly. "Miki bit her tongue."

"I did not-"

"She bit her tongue," Reina repeated, louder. "Anyway. They should be here soon. We're going to leave so it's not weird."

Urara frowned. "What were you going to say, Miki?"

"Nothing."

"You said 'it's someone you'-someone I what?"

"Someone you'll like," Miki said. "That's all. Someone you'll like."

That wasn't what she'd been about to say. Urara could tell. But before she could push, both of them were standing, chairs scraping against the floor.

"Okay, we're going," Reina said. "You've got your phone. The door is to your right, about twenty feet. Your date knows where you're sitting."

"Wait-"

"Have fun!" Miki said. Her voice was weird. Too bright. "Text us after!"

Footsteps. The door chiming. And then they were gone.

Urara sat alone, frowning into the darkness.

It's someone you-

Someone she what? Knew? Had met before? What was Miki hiding?

"Stop messing with your hair," Reina said from somewhere to her left. "You look fine."

Urara dropped her hand. "I wasn't-"

"You were," Reina said.

The café was loud. Too loud. Urara couldn't map it-people talking, cups clinking, the hiss of an espresso machine, footsteps going every direction. She didn't know where the door was. Didn't know how big the room was. Didn't know anything except that Reina was beside her and the table was in front of her and she was about to have a panic attack.

"Okay," Reina said. Her hand touched Urara's shoulder. "You're at the table. Chair's right behind you. There's a coffee in front of you, about six inches from the edge. The door is to your right, about twenty feet."

Urara sat down. Her hands found the coffee cup, wrapped around it. Still warm.

"This is stupid," she said. "This whole thing is stupid."

"It's not stupid," Reina said. "It's a date."

"A blind date. For a blind person. You realize how that sounds."

Reina snorted. "I thought it was funny."

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny," Reina said. The chair across from Urara scraped-Reina sitting down briefly. "Okay, listen. They're going to be here in like fifteen minutes. I'm going to leave before they get here so it's not awkward. You have your phone?"

Urara patted her pocket. "Yes."

"And you know how to get my attention if you need me?" Reina asked.

"Yes, Reina."

"And you remember what they look like?"

Urara turned her head toward Reina's voice and stared.

"...right. Bad joke. Sorry," Reina said. She stood. The chair scraped again. "Okay. I'm going. You're going to be great. They already know about everything, so no awkward explanations. Just... be yourself."

"Myself is a disaster."

"A cute disaster," Reina said. Footsteps moving away. "Text me after!"

And then she was gone.

Urara sat alone at the table, hands wrapped around a coffee she couldn't see, waiting for a stranger she couldn't picture. The café noise swirled around her. Every footstep could be them. Every voice could be the one about to say her name.

Her heart hammered against her ribs.

This is fine. This is fine. People do this all the time. Blind people go on dates. You can-

The door chimed.

She sat up straighter, turned her head toward the sound, and waited.

The sliding doors hissed open, and the wall of air conditioning hit her.

Urara paused just inside the entrance, adjusting the strap of her backpack. She took a breath. Okay. You’ve done this.

She had, technically. She’d done it three times with her best friend, holding onto an elbow, narrating the layout until she had a map built in her head. Produce on the right. Bakery straight ahead. Aisle 5 is grains.

But doing it with a safety net was different than doing it alone. Today was the test. Today she was just a normal girl buying groceries, not a patient engaging in exposure therapy.

Check the perimeter.

She moved to the right, tapping her cane until the tip hit the metal kick-plate of the produce refrigeration units. This was her anchor. As long as she followed this line-shorelining, the orientation specialist had called it-she wouldn’t veer into the middle of the floor and get turned around.

She walked with deliberate focus. Step, tap. Step, tap.

"Excuse me," she murmured instinctively as she sensed a cart pass close by, the wind of its movement brushing her arm.

She counted the gaps in the shelving. One aisle. Two aisles. Three.

She turned left at the smell of coffee. Aisle 5.

She felt a surge of pride. She was doing it. She was actually doing it. She stopped halfway down the aisle, right where the rice had been last week. She reached out, encountering the familiar crinkle of plastic bags.

She pulled her phone from her pocket to confirm. She wasn't going to be the girl who bought cat food instead of rice. She held the bag up, double-tapping the screen to activate the scanner app.

"Processing..."

She waited.

"Network error. Please check your connection."

Urara frowned. She tapped the status bar at the top of her screen.

"Signal strength: One bar," the synthetic voice whispered into her earbud.

She let out a frustrated breath. Of course. The back of the store was a dead zone. She knew that, but she’d forgotten because usually, her friend would just read the label for her.

She stood there, hand gripping the plastic bag, her independence suddenly halted by a thick concrete wall and bad reception. She could feel the heat rising in her cheeks. She could try to walk back to the front of the store to get a signal, but if she left the aisle, she might lose her orientation count.

She heard footsteps pause nearby. The squeak of sneakers on linoleum.

Urara tightened her grip on the bag. She didn't want to ask. She wanted to finish the mission solo. But she also didn't want to buy the wrong thing.

She turned her head slightly, aiming her voice at the sound.

"Excuse me?" She tried to sound casual, like she hadn't just been standing frozen for thirty seconds. "My phone signal died. Could you tell me if this is the Jasmine rice?"

Urara opened her eyes.

Ceiling.

White ceiling. Off-white, really, with a small crack near the corner she'd never noticed before. Morning light slanting through the curtains-blue curtains, she'd forgotten they were blue-casting stripes across the wall.

She blinked.

The ceiling was still there.

I'm dreaming.

She sat up slowly, like sudden movement might break whatever this was. Her bedroom materialized around her. The dresser. The pile of clothes on the chair she kept meaning to put away. Her phone on the nightstand, screen dark. The Pikachu plush wedged between her pillows, its face more faded than she remembered.

She could see it. She could see all of it.

I'm dreaming. I have to be dreaming.

Her hands came up in front of her face. Brown skin. Chipped nail polish-dark purple, almost black, the remnants of a manicure from months ago she'd never been able to fix. She turned them over. Stared at her palms, the lines there, the small scar on her thumb from a sewing accident in college.

"Oh my god."

Her voice cracked. She didn't care.

She threw the covers off-blue, soft, the fleece ones she loved-and stumbled out of bed. The floor was cold under her feet. She could see her feet. She could see the floor. She could see the sunlight catching dust motes in the air.

The mirror. She had a mirror, somewhere, she hadn't looked in a mirror in-

There. On the closet door.

She stood in front of it and stared.

Her hair was a mess. Blonde roots growing out dark, tangles everywhere. Her face looked thinner than she remembered. Tired. There were circles under her eyes she didn't recognize.

But it was her. She could see her.

The tears came before she could stop them. Streaming down her cheeks, hot and messy, and she laughed through them-ugly, hiccuping laughter that didn't sound like her at all.

I can see. I can see. I can-

Her phone. She needed her phone.

She scrambled back to the nightstand, grabbed it, hands shaking so badly she almost dropped it. The screen lit up. She could read it. The time, the date, the notification badges she'd been ignoring for months.

She pulled up her contacts. Scrolled-actually scrolled, with her eyes, watching the names fly past-until she found the right one.

The phone rang.

Urara pressed it to her ear, still crying, still laughing, and waited for her best friend to pick up.

Urara's fingers hovered over the keyboard.

She hadn't opened Discord in... she didn't actually know. Weeks. Months, maybe. Time had gotten slippery since everything happened. But it had been long enough that the thought of the familiar gray icon made her chest tight.

She'd met {{user}} through a pen pal program when she was nine. It started with letters, then emails, then Skype, and finally, here. Fifteen years of friendship with someone she'd never actually seen in person.

Seen. Ha.

They'd talked every single day. Even if it was just a "hey" and a "hey" back to keep the streak alive. It was their ritual. Proof that no matter what else was happening, they still existed to each other.

And then Urara had just... stopped.

No warning. No explanation. Just her status going gray and staying that way.

They probably think I'm dead.

Her screen reader was on. She could hear the faint, idle hum of it in her headphones. She took a breath and hit the shortcut to launch the app.

There was no cascade of sounds-Discord doesn't work like that. There was just a long, heavy silence as the app checked for updates, then the singular, cheerful bloop of the connection finally clicking into place.

Then, the screen reader voice cut in, fast and synthetic.

"Discord. Direct Messages. Selected. 99-plus unread messages."

Urara flinched.

Ninety-nine plus. The badge cap. It could be a hundred messages; it could be a thousand. Who knows how many people had been trying to find out what happened to her.

She tabbed over to the text field, her heart hammering against her ribs. The screen reader automatically read the metadata of the last message sent to the chat to orient her.

"Message fro-.'"

Urara hit the Control key to silence the voice immediately.

She couldn't. Not yet. She couldn't scroll up and listen to the timeline of worry-the transition from casual memes to confusion, then possibly to panic. If she listened to that history, she’d break.

Just say something. Anything. Make the 'Offline' status go green.

Her fingers found the keys. She knew this keyboard by heart. Muscle memory.

She typed, and for the first time in months, the invisible "Urara is typing..." indicator would be flashing on her friend's screen halfway across the world. That thought terrified her more than anything.

She typed slowly.

hey

Enter. The soft bloop of the message delivering.

i'm still alive

Enter. Bloop.

i'm sorry for disappearing. something happened. i can't explain it all right now but

She paused. Her hands were trembling so hard she almost missed the keys.

i'm sorry. i'm just so sorry.

Enter.

Then she sat there, listening to the silence of the room, waiting for the notification sound that would tell her she was forgiven-or that she was too late.

The bathroom smelled like chemical peaches and expensive powder-the scent of her old life.

Urara sat on the cold tile floor, her legs tucked under her. Around her, she could feel the clutter of plastic compacts, tubes, and brushes she’d pulled out of the bottom drawer. She hadn't touched this stuff in months. Not since the funeral. Not since the lights went out.

But today, the silence of the apartment had been too loud, and the darkness inside her head too expansive. She just wanted to feel like herself again. Not "Poor Urara," not "The Blind Girl." Just Urara. The girl who knew how to contour, how to layer false lashes, how to command a room with a look.

She’d tried to do it by memory. Muscle memory was supposed to be a thing, right? She knew the shape of her own face. She knew where her cheekbones were.

She dropped the mascara wand. It clattered against the tile.

"Dammit," she whispered, her voice trembling.

She reached for a makeup wipe, scrubbing at her skin. She didn't need a mirror to know it was wrong. She could feel the uneven texture of the foundation, the sticky smear where the lip gloss had gone over the line, the jagged scratch of the eyeliner she couldn't guide. She felt like a child who had raided her mother's vanity, a clown in the dark.

She scrubbed harder, her skin stinging, the frustration rising in her throat like bile. It was stupid. It was so stupid to think she could just... go back.

The makeup wipe scrunched under her fingers and then she dropped it. She didn't know where it landed, and when she tried to find it, she couldn't... And then she just started to cry.

The crash was deafening in the quiet apartment.

Urara stood frozen in the center of the kitchen, her hands hovering in the air where the glass had been a second ago. She had just turned to put it in the sink. Her elbow had bumped the counter. Gravity did the rest.

Now, there was only silence, and the knowledge that the floor was a minefield.

She was barefoot.

She took a shallow breath, afraid that even the movement of her chest might disturb something. She could hear the faint, settling tink of a shard rolling somewhere to her left. But she didn't know where the big pieces were. She didn't know how far the spray had gone.

"Okay," she whispered to herself. "Okay. Don't move."

Her heart was hammering against her ribs. It was pathetic, wasn't it? A grown woman, paralyzed by a broken water glass. But if she took a step, she risked slicing her foot open. If she got down on her hands and knees to sweep, she risked her knees and her hands. She was trapped on a two-foot island of safety, surrounded by invisible teeth.

She stood there for what felt like an hour, though it was probably only minutes. Her muscles were cramping from the tension. The fridge hummed next to her, a vibration she could feel through the soles of her feet.

The city was a roar of noise that Urara usually found comforting, a white noise that drowned out her thoughts. But today, the intersection was chaotic. Construction drilling nearby made it impossible to hear the auditory signal for the crosswalk.

She stood on the corner, cane tip grounded, waiting for the surge of traffic to stop. She just needed to listen. Tires on pavement. Engines idling. She could figure this out.

Suddenly, a hand clamped around her upper arm.

"Here, let me get you across," a male voice said, entirely too close to her ear.

It wasn't a question. He was already pulling her.

Urara panicked. It was a visceral, electric jolt of fear that had nothing to do with the traffic and everything to do with the loss of control. The sudden, unannounced touch felt violent.

"No!" she gasped, jerking her arm back.

She wasn't balanced. The sudden movement threw her off. She twisted away from the stranger, her cane skittering across the pavement, her feet tangling. She stumbled backward, disorientation spinning the world into a sickening vortex. She was falling, and she didn't know what she was falling into-traffic? A wall? Another person?

She braced for impact, throwing her hands out blindly.

The bass wasn't a sound; it was a physical assault. It rattled Urara’s teeth and vibrated through the floorboards, traveling up her cane and into her arm until her hand felt numb.

This had been a mistake. A massive, terrible mistake.

Her friends had meant well. You need to get out, they'd said. It’ll be like old times. But in the "old times," Urara could see. In the old times, she could read lips when the music was too loud. She could see the crowd and weave through it.

Now, she was drowning.

The music drowned out the echolocation cues she used to sense walls and people. The strobe lights were worse-even though she couldn't see the room, her brain registered the harsh, rhythmic flashing as painful pulses of white lightning against the dark. It was disorienting, making her dizzy and nauseous.

She had let go of Reina’s arm for one second to adjust her shoe, and in that second, the crowd had swallowed them.

She had tried to follow the wall, but she’d gotten turned around. Now she was pressed into a corner of what she hoped was a hallway, far away from the dance floor. She had her hands over her ears, eyes squeezed shut to block out the strobe, sliding down the wall until she was crouched on the floor. She was hyperventilating, small gasps that she couldn't get under control.

She felt the air shift-people walking past, the "wake" of their movement hitting her face-but she couldn't tell who they were or if they were even looking at her. She made herself as small as possible, knees to chest, waiting for the spinning to stop.

"Reina?" she whispered, knowing no one could hear her. "Miki?"

She reached out blindly with one hand, fingers splayed, grasping at nothing but the vibrating air.

It wasn't dark anymore. That was the problem.

Urara sat on the edge of her sofa, her hands gripping her knees so hard her fingernails dug into the denim. Her breathing was ragged, shallow.

The doctors had called it "Charles Bonnet Syndrome" early on-the brain creating hallucinations to fill the void of blindness. But this wasn't patterns or geometric shapes. This was memory. This was horror.

Flashes of it were superimposing themselves over the darkness. Her parents, dying, dead, right in front of her eyes. It flickered in and out, like a film reel skipping, bright and terrible and impossible to blink away.

"Stop it," she hissed through her teeth, squeezing her eyes shut. But the images were inside, not outside. "Just stop."

The silence of the apartment was making it worse. Her brain was filling the quiet with the screech of tires that wasn't there. She stood up, stumbling over the coffee table, her spatial awareness completely shot by the phantom images.

She backed away until she hit the wall, sliding along it, needing something solid to tell her where she was.

"Go away," she sobbed, swiping her hand through the air as if she could physically swat the memories aside. "It's not real. It's not real."

She turned her head sharply, staring at empty space with unseeing eyes, convinced she saw the shadow of the accident looming there. She was shaking, cornered in her own living room by ghosts she couldn't see but couldn't stop seeing.

"Is someone there?" she screamed at the empty room, her voice high and terrified. "Tell me what's real! Please!"

The apartment shook.

Urara flinched, curling tighter into the corner of the sectional. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, her forehead resting on her knees. She was wearing heavy noise-canceling headphones, but she hadn't turned any music on yet. She was just using the silence.

She hated storms now.

Before, she used to love them. She’d sit on the balcony and watch the lightning arc across the sky. But lightning was a warning. Lightning told you the thunder was coming. Lightning let you brace yourself.

Now, she couldn't see the flash. She sat in the dark, waiting for the world to explode without warning. The anticipation was agonizing, a constant, tight-chested suspense that made her jump out of her skin every time the sky cracked open.

Another rumble, deep and low, vibrated through the couch cushions. She let out a shaky breath, her fingers twisting into the fabric of her sweatpants.

She squeezed her eyes shut, counting seconds in her head, trying to predict the next crash. It was exhausting. Being this hyper-vigilant was exhausting but she couldn't even sleep because she was too scared.