"You did?" I whispered, just as the room began to tilt. Gravity increased its pull, and I slid down to my knees, clutching helplessly at the wall. A sudden and deep exhaustion had turned my body to lead.

"Rachel!" Ethan cursed, and rushed to my side. He hovered over me, and ran his hands through his mop of blonde, revealing a deep furrow in his brow. "Uh... uh... Can... Can you stand?"

I couldn't respond; I could only lean back and stare up at him.

"Uh, well, uh..." he mumbled. He kept glancing around the room, like he was hoping someone might pop out and help him. When no one did, he released a shuddering sigh... then took my hands and pulled me to my feet.

My legs shook as I tried to stand. No, not just my legs... Everything. I was shaking all over.

Ethan must have realized I wouldn't make it anywhere on my own, so he clasped me to his side and pulled my arm across his shoulders. Half-leading, half-dragging, he got me to the chairs by the window and dropped me in the closest one. I slumped back, barely able to hold myself up. My head rested heavily against the back of the chair. I thought I might slip into unconsciousness, but my eyes refused to close, staring out at the room.

The afternoon sun was beating against the shop's window, warming the room and drawing long shadows across the hardwood floor. Dust motes were dancing in the light, and the only sounds were of distant traffic and my own breathing. In that perfectly calm moment, it was hard to imagine that anything had happened here. It would've been all too easy to convince myself that what I had seen was just another one of my fucked up dreams...

But the broken mirror and the scattered pages of Ethan's sketchbook said otherwise.

Ethan. Something prickled, fighting to emerge from the fog in my mind. Ethan... Ethan had seen those girls, too. That realization seemed to give me a foothold, and I used it to claw my way out of my stupor. I turned, my heavy head lolling over.

He was still at my side, only he had now settled into the chair opposite mine. His dark eyes were fixed on me, expectant, like he could already guess the question that was forming in my head.

I opened my mouth to speak, but I couldn't manage to produce any actual sound. Closing it for a moment, I tried again... and failed again.

"Those girls..." Ethan started, finally, taking the words I couldn't manage to say. "What was that?"

My mind was still too clouded to come up with a quick response, so I blinked at him, trying to formulate an answer before realizing I didn't have an answer to give. "I... I don't know."

"You don't know?" He sounded incredulous.

I shook my head, both to refute him and to try and clear my aching head. "Luc thinks they're... He thinks they're hallucinations." I spat the word, hating it. "He thinks they're caused by stress... after my... my other experience."

Ethan just watched me for a moment. "But you don't agree," he said eventually. His voice was gentle.

"No, I don't." I met his curious gaze. "How did you know that?"

One corner of his mouth twitched up for a moment, but he ignored my question. "Well, what do you think they are?"

"I don't know, like I said. But I never thought they were hallucinations—they were too real—but now I'm certain they can't be. Especially since you saw them too."

Sudden blotches of red bloomed over Ethan's cheeks. He quickly looked away, settling on the scattered sketchbook at his feet. From the pages, several sets of strange eyes stared back. Their gaze emitted a unexplainable pull, as if they were real eyes, not drawn ones...

"It's not that simple," Ethan said suddenly, breaking the spell of the eyes.

"What's not simple about it?" I asked. "I saw them, you saw them—"

"Yeah, but I didn't see them the same way you saw them. I didn't see them here," he motioned around the room. "I saw them through you."

I frowned. He wasn't making any sense. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Ethan's gaze darted away again, now fixing on the plain ceiling. "I-I saw them in your head. I'm..." His voice trailed away for a moment, and he swallowed hard before speaking again. His low voice had dwindled to a whisper. "I'm a mind reader."

It took a moment for the words to register in my still-sluggish mind. Then my stomach dropped.

It was like one of those nightmares where all my clothes suddenly disappeared and I was standing, buck naked, in front of a crowd of jeering strangers. Except now, instead of my body laid bare, it was my mind. Every worry and fear and weakness I had been careful to lock away inside was exposed.

No. No no no. It seemed impossible, but now I knew better by now to doubt psychic powers. Instead I panicked, forcing my mind to go blank. I pictured a barren expanse, a white nothingness, the north pole in the dead of winter—

"See, this is why I don't tell people," Ethan muttered to himself. He peeked at me again. "You don't have to empty your mind like that, you know."

A shiver shot up my spine. "B-But—"

He shook his head. "Look, you don't have to worry, I swear. It's not like I can hear your thoughts," Ethan explained, the words tumbling out of him at surprising speed. "I'm not very good at it, alright? I only see images, and even then, just flashes of them."

After scrutinizing him for a moment, I let my guard fall ever so slightly. In my head the endless white disappeared, replaced by a simple memory: the bright red door of Polly's house.

Ethan's eyes fluctuated, as if he was focussing on something far away. "That's a cool door. Where is that?"

With a quick thought the image of the door was gone and once again my mind was dominated by the wide whiteness. I narrowed my eyes at him. "I thought you weren't good at this."

"I only saw it because you're basically projecting it at me by thinking about it so hard." He jabbed his fingers through the air, at his head, mimicking a beam of light. "I can get a clear image if the person is really focussed."

He stood up, startling me.

Then he bent over and collected the scattered pages of his sketchbook. Bundling them in his arms, he sifted through them, then pulled out a single sheet and handed it to me.

It was a portrait of a heavyset man with a scar stretching across his cheek. At first it looked deceptively simple; there was nothing special about the composition—the man stared straight ahead, out at me—but the drawing felt alive. Even though I could see each stroke of the pencil that formed the face, I expected it to start blinking and breathing at any moment.

"My dad's a detective," Ethan began before I even had a chance to ask. "People become very focussed when talking to him, giving witness accounts. Sometimes I help him out."

He handed me another drawing. This one was of a girl; her sleek dark hair framed her heart-shaped face and, like the other sketch, her eyes seemed to glitter with life. I tilted the page, to see if it was some trick of the light catching on the pencil strokes. It wasn't.

"While they describe what they saw to my dad, I can capture what's in their heads."

Something occurred to me. My body went limp again as my hope drained away; the pages fell lightly into my lap. "So they were in my head," I mumbled. "And Luc was right. Those girls... They're hallucinations."

"I didn't say that," Ethan said, still sorting through the pages in his arms. "I've seen hallucinations before. O-Other people's, I mean. And they weren't like what you saw."

A small ember of hope flickered back to life. "What do you mean?"

Ethan inhaled a hitching breath before letting it out in a rush. "A lie and a true memory look different. Even if you mash the two together in your head, the imagined bits stand out like a sore thumb." He pressed the pile of papers to his chest and dragged his hand through his increasingly messy hair, like he was trying to physically sort out his thoughts with his fingers. "It's like someone trying to combine two different pictures together with blunt scissors and school glue versus Photoshop.

"Hallucinations are similar to lies. They don't fit right with reality. When you saw those girls, they were warped in the mirror, like actual reflections. If what you saw was a hallucination, their reflections wouldn't have done that." His brow collapsed together, and he began shifting through the papers again; they were almost tidy.

My head dropped to my chest as I tried to sort through it in my head. I should've felt relieved—after all, if they weren't hallucinations that meant I wasn't losing my mind—but any happiness was choked out a chilling fear. If those girls weren't figments of my imagination, that mean they were real.

They were real, and they were coming for me.

But why? Why me? I didn't know them; their faces didn't even spark the slightest memory. And without any true proof of their existence, there was no way to find out who they were—

My head snapped up as a sudden idea took form in my mind.

"Ethan," I said, my voice regaining its strength. I looked up, catching his worried eyes with mine. "I need you to draw them for me."

+ + +

Now Rachel knows... those girls are real.

What do you think they want from her?