The Red String Effect

Chapter Five -- Part One: Echoes

Layla hadn't stopped hearing him. Even back in her room, with the broken window taped over and the storm now gone... however, Peter's voice lingered. It wasn't loud. It wasn't constant. It came like a breath against her ear when she was alone, when she thought she might finally be safe.

Layla.

Sometimes it was her name, whispered soft and pleading. Sometimes it was fragments of sentences, broken and distorted. Sometimes it was just sobbing, muffled by the hum of her own thread. She pressed her hands over her ears in bed, trembling beneath the covers. It didn't help. The knot in her chest was alive, pulsing, always syncing with the echo of his voice. She wanted to believe it was a dream. A hallucination. A trick of exhaustion. But she'd seen him in the Tangle. She'd felt his hand reach for her, the pull in her thread desperate and real. Peter wasn't gone. Not yet.

School the next day was unbearable. Layla sat through classes with her hood up, ignoring the teachers sharp looks. The words on the board slid into nonsense as her vision blurred, red and black threads drifting across the page. She could barely tell where reality ended, and the Tangle began anymore. She saw it everywhere now. Threads flickered out of the corners of her eyes, sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes both at once. Fragments of places appeared and vanished—her grandmother's garden gate in the middle of the stairwell, a shard of Peter's sketchbook overlaying her math homework.

She bit inside of her cheek until she tasted iron, trying to ground herself. It didn't work. At lunch, she didn't eat. She sat in the back corner of the cafeteria; eyes fixed on the knot pulsing faintly in her chest. Her tray sat untouched, food going cold. Luca slid into the seat across from her. No tray. No Food. Just him. "You're hearing him," he said, not a question. Layla's throat tightened. "It's not him. It can't be." "Then stop listening." Her eyes flashed. "I can't. He won't stop." Luca leaned forward, his voice low. "That's how it starts. The more you listen, the more it pulls. The echoes wear you down until you can't tell what's yours anymore." Layla gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white. "What if he's really still there? What if I can save him?"

Luca didn't answer right away. He studied her like he was searching from something inside her face. Finally, he said, "What if saving him means losing yourself?" Layla's chest ached. She looked down at her untouched food, at her trembling hands. She wanted to scream at him, wanted to believe he was wrong. But the whisper in her ear said otherwise.

Layla... help me.

She shut her eyes.

That night, she dreamed again. Not the Tangle this time. Something else. She was in her childhood bedroom; toys scattered across the floor. The air smelled like dust and lavender. She was small again, six years old, knees scraped, staring out the window at the garden. And Peter was there. Not shadowed, not flickering. Whole. Laughing. His red string pulsed bright and strong, stretching beyond the hedge. "Come on, Layla!" he called. "Hide and seek!" She almost believed it. But when she looked at her own wrist, her thread wasn't red. It was black. And when Peter turned his face back toward her, his eyes were hollow. She woke screaming.