Julia can hear the sound of a thousand heartbeats, feel the ricochet of her thoughts off the skulls of hundreds of other beings. Are they even her thoughts? She can’t tell anymore. Everything feels fuzzy, blurred together like ink on a wet page.

She misses Erin, and Matteo, and her friends at the bar. She misses Erin’s dogs, and she misses sunlight. When did the sun go away?

She feels like a husk being filled with something wrong and thick and too big to fit. Like a hermit crab in a shell too small for its own body. When she can feel her body within reach, it’s pulled away again, and she’s forced into dark silence.

Julia waits for the sunlight to return, waits for the pressure of a thousand screaming minds to go away. She waits, but it doesn’t go. And the sun doesn’t come.