This is next-level anxiety. As if she’s reached a plane few people have endured.

There’s strength in that, she thinks.

She feels it, in every pocket of her body, every joint, each cell of her piqued brain: there’s nothing she can do. No way to vanquish this anxiety that, if she’s honest with herself, has been growing since she made the game-winning free throw with a second to play. Yes, Kit Lamb was changed that day and has been changed every day since. And it’s not for the better, no, as life force, it seems, is evaporating, even as the police force stands sentry in her drive, the same drive she learned to dribble upon, fetching the ball whenever it hit the cracks and did not bounce her way. Dead, yes, already, walking dead, at only seventeen years old. The sky in Samhattan has always been gray, but today it feels like ash, her own ashes, rising from the crematorium, her useless body burning in the casket, the eulogies still ringing in the funeral home:

Kit Lamb, who shouldn’t have asked that question of the rim:

Will Daphne kill me?

Still: strength in this.

No way of getting out from beneath it. None she knows of. No strategy, no resistance.

Yet…alive. And while she can’t outfight Daphne…maybe she can still beat her.

This is why she stands at the front door of Third-and-Fourth-Eye Books in downtown Samhattan, only forty yards from the entrance to the cemetery where they found Kennedy Lichtenstein crushed. If there’s one place that might know the workings of mind over matter, this is it.

Wearing “family time” clothes—that is, jeans, penny loafers, and a T-shirt (the opposite of what the ballers typically wear: she’s attempting to distance herself from everything Daphne)—she enters Third-Eye and smells, up-close, for the first time, the patchouli that hovers about the sidewalk outside and has since Kit was a little girl. A bell doesn’t sound as she enters, rather, a series of wind chimes rise in scale, augmenting the sense this is all a cruel dream.

Nobody greets her. This surprises Kit. She’s long imagined a bookseller surrounded by cats. Eyes behind thick glasses. An intelligent voice asking how she might be helped.

Because Kit needs help.

And again: strength in that. In looking for it.

The store is dimly lit, partially by candle, and the thick, glossy books are shelved in a semicircle around a blue rug with an enormous yellow eye stitched into it. There is no couch, no chairs, but Kit can tell the spot is designated for readers. The bookmarks upon the pupil tell her so.

The door closes behind her, the chimes sing in reverse, and Kit steps deeper into Third-Eye for the first time in her Samhattan life.

“Hello?” she calls. And this small, everyday question sounds complex.

Is Daphne going to kill me?

Swish.

“Hello?” she calls again.

Maybe they want you to make yourself at home in a place like this. Maybe they think it’s up to you to become one with the place, introduce yourself to it, make friends with the space first. A couple weeks ago, Kit would’ve laughed at her own thoughts.