Every twisted inch of my body aches. I swallow acid, the first drops of coppery bile.

“Shall we have a cup of tea, my darling?” she says, and I gasp, doubling over and falling to my knees beside Tai. It’s her voice. Every inflection, every honeyed consonant. It doesn’t come from her chest, but from the walls themselves, as if she is this cabin, and the cabin is her. As inseparable as the cabin and the decades of vines woven through its exterior. Tai takes my hand, like it’ll save her, pluck her from this heart-stoppingly gorgeous nightmare. The figure moves toward the tea set and kneels with us, lifting the teapot as if it’s nothing but air. Her feet are veined with blue, her toenails carefully shaped and pristine. The fizzing builds inside my chest.

“Did you feel her touch you?” I whisper to her, my cheeks wet.

Tai blinks at me with glossed eyes, mouth opening, then closing like a guppy’s. Speechless. I shut my own eyes, smelling Tai and the toasted rice and lavender, lavender, lavender, its sickly sweet smell, warming, burning, and when I open them—

She is still there. Opaque as milk.

“What are you?” I ask the figure, as she pours steaming tea into the two bone cups.

She looks up at me, a smile in her eyes. To see those eyes, those bones, arranged as only they have been and could ever be, I should be as unmoored as Tai. I should be succumbing to the coppery rush I can still feel in my chest. But I can also feel this moment slipping away, grains of slick raw rice through fingers, and I wish I could freeze this cabin as it is for all time, to scoop up every grain and hold them in that hollow in my chest.

Her breath makes a soft whistling sound. “I should think you know.” She pauses, considering what she’s said, then continues pouring. A humming builds, somewhere—maybe the core of the house. I pray it’s not inside me.

“What—what happened to you?”

She only sighs, almost imperceptibly, the air in the cabin humming and heaving with her. “I’m—I’m sorry this is so strange.” She says her apology lightly, but with great tenderness, the tenderness of a mother, and my heart heaves in my chest as the floor reverberates under our feet.

I wait for Tai to say, That’s the understatement of the fucking century. I wait for one of us to burst into sobs. But she is silent. Awestruck. And I’m smelling metal and smoke, all at once. I taste that toxic roiling in the back of my throat. The effervescent building of those thickly coated pennies I thought I could stave off. I rub Tai’s arms to fend it off. They are thin and too fragile.