Born of starlight and shadows

~Part forty-two: Maria~

Where was she? Where was she really? It seemed like she was somehow split down the middle, in two places at once but also nowhere.

And someone was calling her name. Oh, right. Maria, that was it. She opened her eyes, not even realizing that they had been closed. Her brain felt strangely foggy, her thoughts far away.

But there was an echo...

An echo that was calling to her from somewhere in the distance.

Then there was a sudden lightning bolt strike of clarity. She sat up, breathing heavily.

"W-where am I?" she asked, her words sounding jumbled together.

Her mother looked at her, concerned. "The doctor's office. You were feeling sick, so we took you here."

"Oh, yeah," Maria said, trying to recall the specifics of that. "Right, of course, sorry. Where-uh where-what happened to me? What happened to her?"

"Who are you talking about?" her father asked.

There was a name dancing at the tip of her tongue that she wanted to spit out. But it felt wrong, somehow.

"I mean--Stella. Where is she?" Maria asked.

"Stella?" her dad asked carefully. "I'm sure she's fine."

Maria wanted to protest, but just then, she heard her name being called and hesitantly, shakily stood up.

This is strange, she thought. Very, very strange...

Maria wished she knew what was happening around her, but it seemed as though the world was simply going forward as she stumbled around blindly. She barely was even aware of nodding yes, shaking her head, sitting down and feeling reality slipping away...

"Well, I'm sure she'll be fine!"

She was barely even aware of someone saying those words, barely aware of her surroundings, or anything else.

What was wrong with her?

Everything was slowing down around her, but speeding up at the same time. She was inside her panicked thoughts, trying to reach out to someone. But she couldn't. She could sense a million voices, but they were just out of reach.

Surely I'm not useless, Maria thought.

She concentrated her mental reserve of energy on, well, something. It didn't make enough sense to her to be able to explain what it was. All she knew was that the interior of her parents' car seemed to suddenly disappear. Of course, she hadn't been entirely sure if she was really there in the first place. But now she knew she was someplace else entirely.

She had fallen through a rip in time, a space that never should have existed. But reality had decided to rewrite its own rules, and now she was sprawled across the dirt in a place she knew she had never seen before. She was at least fairly certain. It was hard to say with all of the strange things that had been happening to her lately.

Maria's breath suddenly quickened.

Someone's coming, she thought, though she wasn't sure how she knew.

She stood up and looked around cautiously.

An invisible force seemed to slam into her brain, nearly knocking her backwards.

WHO ARE YOU?

"I-" she started, and then her eye fell on the source of the mental shout.

"How?" She gasped.