Skye
Something in the dark shifted.
At first Skye thought it was just her own breath changing — the thin, panicked whistle of it, the way it scraped at the back of her throat like it was trying to escape her body.
But then the voice came again, closer this time, not in front of her so much as through her.
“I won’t let go.”
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It wasn’t Mr Evans. It wasn’t Ben. It wasn’t the thing that had worn their faces like masks.
This voice was rough in the way real voices got when they’d shouted too many times in places no one could hear them.
Skye lifted her head. Her eyes burned from crying but there was nothing to wipe them on that didn’t also feel like it might dissolve.
“Who—” she tried, and the word snapped into a cough. Her chest squeezed tight, tight, tight. She tasted metal again. “Who are you?”
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Light cut the dark.
Not soft light. Not the comforting sort.
A hard spear, like a torch in a tunnel, punching a hole through nothing. The beam widened, widening, until it became an opening — a tear in the black, edges rippling as if the darkness didn’t want to let it stay.
A hand came through first.
Bigger than hers. Pale. Veined. Shaking, not from fear but from strain. The fingers opened and closed once, as if testing whether reality still worked in this place.
Then the voice yelled, louder, furious with urgency:
“TAKE MY HAND! I’M GETTING YOU OUT OF HERE!”
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Skye didn’t think.
Thinking was how you stayed trapped.
She got up. Her legs felt wrong — not weak, not strong, just uncertain, like they hadn’t decided if they were real. She stumbled forward anyway, palms out, eyes fixed on the light because the dark behind her felt like it was leaning in, listening.
The hand was waiting.
Skye nodded once — a stupid, tiny nod she didn’t even mean — and grabbed it.
The grip that closed around her wasn’t gentle.
It was absolute.
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The hand clamped like it had found something precious and wasn’t willing to negotiate with the universe about it.
Skye’s arm jolted as she was yanked forward. The darkness screamed — not with sound, but with pressure, like a vacuum resisting the loss of what it had already claimed.
For a moment she felt herself stretching. Not skin and bone — something inside her, something that had been threaded to this place.
Her head flared with heat.
Then she was dragged through the light like a person being pulled out of a rip current.
The world snapped.
—
Skye blinked.
A classroom slammed back into place around her.
Fluorescent lights. Mr Evans’ whiteboard. Posters. The smell of markers and radiator dust.
Her desk.
Her book.
Her hands, gripping the edge so hard her knuckles were white.
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Her lungs sucked in air like it was the first time they’d ever been allowed to. She gasped. Coughed. Forced another breath. Her chest still felt tight, but the air worked again. It went where it was supposed to.
She looked up.
The entire class was staring.
Not whispering. Not snickering. Not even breathing properly.
Every face held the same fixed attention — like an audience caught mid-performance, waiting for the next act.
Ben was behind her. She could feel him. She didn’t have to turn to know his pencil wasn’t spinning anymore.
Mr Evans stood at the front.
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But he wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking at someone else.
Skye followed his gaze.
A man stood near the classroom door — as if he’d just stepped in, soaking wet, dragging the storm in with him.
He wasn’t dressed like a teacher. Not like a parent. Not like anyone who belonged in this room.
A dark coat hung from his shoulders, heavy and too real for a dream. His hair was damp, stuck to his forehead in a way that made him look younger than he should, but his eyes—
His eyes did not match his face.
They looked ancient. Not in a mystical way. In a tired way. A way that made Skye think of old photographs in history books, the ones where children didn’t smile because smiling hadn’t survived into that decade.
He was breathing like it hurt. One hand was braced on the back of a chair, fingers digging into the plastic as if the room was trying to tip him sideways.
And when he looked at Skye, she felt it in her bones.
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Not fear.
Recognition.
Not her recognition.
His.
Like seeing her had yanked something loose in him.
Skye’s mouth went dry.
She remembered him.
Ipswich. The clothes store. The way his presence had prickled at the back of her neck, the way she’d looked up and seen him across the street, still as a post, eyes on her and Alice and Dad like he was… counting.
Not stalking.
Checking.
She’d told herself it was nothing.
Now she knew her body had been right.
Skye swallowed.
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“Wait,” she said. Her voice came out hoarse, like she’d been screaming for hours. “You’re— you’re that man.”
The man flinched, like the words had landed physically. He nodded once.
“Yes,” he said.
His voice was the one from the dark.
Skye’s fingers tightened around the desk.
“You were watching me,” she said, because facts were safer than feelings. “Hours ago. When I was shopping with my sister and my dad.”
His mouth moved, something like an apology trying to form and failing.
“I was making sure you were breathing,” he said quietly. Then, because he seemed incapable of leaving it vague: “I was making sure you were still here.”
Skye’s heart hammered. She shook her head once, sharp. “Why?”
The man’s eyes dipped, and in that small movement Skye felt his grief like a wave. Not her grief. Not yet. Someone else’s — thick, old, layered.
“My name is Elias,” he said. “And I—”
He stopped, like the next part was a knife he didn’t want to hand her.
Skye’s mouth opened on its own. “It was you,” she whispered, before he could say it.
Elias looked back at her, the storm-dark in his eyes tightening.
“Yes,” he said. “It was me.”
Skye’s stomach flipped.
The flashes hit her again — not images, but sensations:
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A quiet unmaking.
Then a quiet return.
Threads of light, drawn inward—
and a second presence caught in the same pull,
dragged along like a shadow that refused to detach.
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And then something else layered under that, like a memory buried under a memory:
A room with no air.
A child’s hand in his.
His ribs aching with the truth of it.
Skye pressed her palm to her forehead like she could hold her skull together.
“You pulled me back,” she said instead, and this time it wasn’t accusation. It was realization
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Elias stepped forward a fraction, careful, like she was a wild animal and he didn’t want to spook her into bolting.
“I didn’t plan to meet you like this,” he said. “I didn’t plan to meet you at all. I hoped—” His voice broke on the word and he swallowed it back with visible effort. “I hoped I could keep you out of it.”
Mr Evans coughed.
It wasn’t a human cough.
It was the sound of someone politely reminding you they owned the room.
“Oh,” Mr Evans said, voice smooth as laminate. “There he is.”
Elias went still.
Skye felt the temperature change, like the lights had turned colder.
Mr Evans tilted his head, eyes bright with something that wasn’t humour. “The hero.”
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Ben’s chair creaked behind Skye. She didn’t turn, but she felt him tense — like a dog sensing a shift it couldn’t see.
Elias looked at Mr Evans the way someone looks at a live wire — not with fear, but with calculation. Like he was already counting the steps it would take to reach him.
Then whatever Elias saw made his face change.
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Not confusion.
Not fear.
Rage.
It rose in him like something waking.
“You,” Elias said, and the word came out like a vow.
Mr Evans smiled wider. “Hello again.”
Elias took one step. Then another. The chairs didn’t scrape when he moved past them. The room didn’t dare make noise.
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Skye watched him cross the aisle and felt the air thicken. Felt herself bracing without meaning to.
Elias stopped inches from Mr Evans.
“I know what you are,” Elias said, voice trembling with the effort of keeping it down. “I know you.”
Mr Evans’ eyes gleamed. “And I know you. All too well.”
Elias’ hand shot out and grabbed the front of Mr Evans’ shirt.
Gasps should have filled the room.
They didn’t.
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No one moved — not because they were frozen, but because they no longer mattered. Like someone had stopped time on them.
Elias’ fist drew back, knuckles white.
“Go on,” Mr Evans said softly, almost kind. “Hit me.”
Elias’ jaw flexed like he was biting down on something he wanted to scream.
“It won’t change anything,” Mr Evans added.
Skye pushed herself up, chair legs squealing — finally a real sound.
“Stop,” she said, and her voice shook but it existed, and that mattered. “Stop! Both of you.”
Elias didn’t look away from Mr Evans, but his grip loosened slightly, like Skye’s voice was a rope tied around his waist.
Skye stepped closer. She couldn’t help it. She needed answers the way she needed air.
“Who is he?” she demanded, voice climbing. “What does he want with me? Why can’t I wake up? Why—” Her throat tightened. “Why do I have your… your memories?”
Elias let go of Mr Evans so abruptly it looked like restraint was a physical pain. He backed up, turned toward Skye, and the anger on his face didn’t vanish — it redirected. Like a shield swinging to cover her.
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He dropped down onto one knee in front of her.
Not submissive.
Strategic. Anchoring. Bringing himself closer to her height like he was trying not to overwhelm her.
“Skye,” he said, and her name sounded strange in his mouth — careful, like he didn’t think he deserved to say it. “Listen to me.”
Skye’s fingers curled into fists. “I am listening.”
Elias’ eyes flicked over her face like he was checking her for fractures he couldn’t see.
“People think reading someone is magic,” he said. “It’s not. It’s just… attention.” His voice softened by a hair. “Everyone can do it.”
Skye blinked. “No they can’t.”
“They can,” Elias said, and there was a little edge in it now — not anger at her, but at a world that had failed her. “They just don’t.”
Skye stared at him, trying to breathe properly, trying to keep her chest from closing.
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Elias held her gaze. “What can you read from seeing me?”
Skye’s stomach twisted.
“I… I’m not sure if I can,” Skye said nervously.
Elias looked at her steadily. “You already know,” he said. “You just haven’t let yourself believe it yet.”
She was afraid because she could read too much.
She didn’t want to.
She looked at him anyway.
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Really looked. His coat was wet but he didn’t seem cold. His face looked thirty-ish, but his eyes weren’t. His eyes carried grief like it was a second skeleton. His hands were steady now, but it wasn’t calm steadiness — it was the steadiness of someone who had learned how to hold shaking inside his ribs and never let it show.
Skye swallowed.
“I see…” Her voice wobbled. She forced it steady. Facts first. “I see someone who’s lived too long.”
Elias’ mouth tightened, almost a smile and not one at all.
Skye kept going, because once she’d started, stopping would feel like lying.
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“And you’ve lost… a lot.” She tried to count the weight in him and couldn’t. “More than people are supposed to lose.”
Elias’ eyes flickered. Something in them softened, as if he hadn’t expected her to say it out loud.
Skye frowned, trying to sort the feeling.
“And you didn’t used to be violent,” she said slowly, surprised as the words formed. “You— you didn’t want to hurt people. You—”
She stopped. Her head flashed white-hot for a second. A memory that wasn’t hers bled forward: hands shaking, not from fear, but from rage that had nowhere to go. A hallway. Boots. Screams cut short.
Skye’s breath hitched.
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Then she whispered, because the truth was already in her mouth:
“Something happened—” Her face tightened. “No. Not happened. It’s… already here.” She pressed her fingers lightly to her chest, frowning. “Like it’s been waiting. Like I’ve known it longer than I should.”
Elias went very still.
Skye looked up at him, unsettled by the certainty forming in her.
“It doesn’t feel borrowed,” she said quietly. “It feels… mine.”
The name rose anyway — not forced, not dragged through someone else’s grief, but lifting on its own.
“Anna.”
It didn’t sound discovered.
It sounded remembered.
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Elias’ face cracked. Not sobbing — cracking, like the inside of him had finally pushed hard enough against the surface to leave marks.
“You got all that from a look?” Elias said, and the attempt at humour was thin, shaking.
Skye shook her head, throat tight. “Not all of it.”
Elias exhaled through his nose, long and ragged.
“Right,” he murmured. Then, quieter: “Of course.”
Mr Evans made a small appreciative sound from the front of the room, like a critic enjoying the performance.
Elias’ gaze snapped up. The rage was still there, coiled and ready.
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But Skye grabbed Elias’ sleeve — light, reflexive.
It worked like a tether.
Elias didn’t turn away from Mr Evans. But he didn’t move toward him either.
Skye swallowed, voice shaking again. “So… you’re going to read me too?”
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Elias looked back at her, and the expression on his face changed — not to pity, exactly. More like guilt that was trying to become useful.
“You like books,” he said.
Skye blinked. “Yes.”
“You like rules,” Elias continued, watching her reaction like accuracy mattered more than comfort. “You like knowing what’s next.”
Skye’s throat tightened. She nodded.
“You love your family,” Elias said. “You love your sister. You love your dad. And—” His eyes flicked behind her, toward Ben. “You care about your friends. You’d die before you’d admit how much.”
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Skye felt a stupid, helpless smile twitch at her mouth — and then vanish as fast as it came, because the next thing Elias said hit like a fist.
“And you want to go back to school,” Elias said quietly, voice breaking. “You want it so badly you built this whole room in your head and begged it to be real.”
Skye’s eyes stung.
She hated that he could see that. Hated it because it meant it was true.
Elias swallowed hard. “But your life doesn’t fit the same way anymore.”
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Skye’s breath hitched. Her hands started to shake. She looked down because if she looked at him she might fall apart.
Elias’ voice softened. “People look at you like you’re a miracle.”
Skye’s throat closed.
“Or a secret,” Elias added, and that one was worse, because it was accurate in a way she didn’t have words for.
Skye’s chin trembled. Tears slid down her face without permission.
Elias lifted his arms slightly, not touching her, just… offering.
A question without pressure.
Skye didn’t think.
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She stepped forward and went into him like she’d been looking for a place to put her fear and had finally found one.
Elias wrapped his arms around her carefully, like he knew she was breakable and was furious that anyone had made her that way.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair, and his voice sounded like it had been scraped raw. “I’m so sorry, kid.”
Skye’s sobs shook her shoulders. She pressed her face against his coat. He smelled like rain and metal and something older.
“It’s not your fault,” she managed, because that’s what you said when someone was hurting and you didn’t want them to drown in it. “It’s not—” She hiccupped. “It’s not your fault, I mean you saved my life, it’s not your fault the way people see me now.”
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Elias’ arms tightened once, a fraction. Like he didn’t believe her but wanted to.
Then Mr Evans clapped.
Slowly.
Once. Twice. Three times.
The sound was unbearable in the quiet.
Elias lifted his head, still holding Skye, and stared at Mr Evans like he wanted to set the whole room on fire.
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“Well,” Mr Evans said pleasantly, “that was sweet.”
“So you chose a teacher,” Elias said, voice flat. “Of all the things you could have worn.”
Mr Evans’ eyes stayed bright, watching Elias with a kind of focused dislike.
“Am I not?” he said, slow and unbothered.
Then he looked at Skye, like she was a puzzle he’d rather not solve politely.
“Alright then,” Mr Evans said. “Skye. Your turn.”
Skye’s stomach knotted.
Mr Evans leaned his hip against the desk like Mr Evans used to — casual, teacherly — but it was wrong on him. Like a mannequin trying to copy a person.
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“What do you read about me?” Mr Evans asked.
Skye swallowed.
She forced herself to look at him.
To read.
She felt… nothing.
No warmth. No texture. No emotional hum.
Not emptiness like a quiet room.
Emptiness like the dark.
Her stomach turned.
She stepped back without meaning to, shoes scraping.
“You—” Skye’s voice came out thin. “You feel like… what you did to me.”
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Mr Evans’ smile widened.
“You feel like that place,” Skye whispered, trembling. “No sound. No response. No—”
Her throat closed.
The word sat there, heavy and wrong. Saying it felt like opening a door that would never shut again.
She shook her head once, backing up half a step. “You’re not… you’re not empty,” she said, panic creeping in. “You’re worse than that.”
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Mr Evans’ smile didn’t change.
Skye’s vision wavered at the edges, the classroom thinning like paper soaked through. Her pulse pounded in her ears.
“You feel like when I was there,” she breathed. “When nothing answered. When I couldn’t tell if I still existed.”
Elias’ hand came to her shoulder — light, steady — but his fingers were rigid with tension.
“It’s alright,” he said quietly.
It wasn’t alright.
His voice carried a low vibration now — restrained violence.
“Say it,” he urged. “Who is he?”
Skye stared at Mr Evans.
Really stared.
And the longer she looked, the less he looked like a teacher. The edges of him felt wrong. Too precise. Too arranged. Like something wearing a shape instead of living inside it.
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Her breath broke.
“You’re not a person,” she said, and the fear in her voice cracked wide open. “You’re not— you’re not even alive.”
Mr Evans’ eyes gleamed.
Skye felt the word rise again, this time not from fear — but recognition.
Like naming gravity.
“Death,” she said.
The room didn’t gasp.
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It compressed.
Elias’ hand dropped from her shoulder.
Slowly.
He stepped forward.
His jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped.
Death.
The word didn’t surprise him.
It confirmed something.
The anger didn’t flare. It settled. Old. Personal. Already waiting.
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He took another step.
Mr Evans smiled wider.
“My thoughts exactly,” Elias said — but there was no humour in it now. Only heat.
His fist tightened.
And for one long second, it was clear he was deciding whether to break the mask off with his hands.
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Mr Evans clapped again, sharper now.
“Bravo,” he said. “Half a star.” His eyes flicked to Elias. “You had help.”
Something in Elias’s face shifted — not anger blooming, but restraint failing.
Elias moved.
Fast.
Before Skye could even suck in breath, Elias crossed the aisle and punched Mr Evans square in the face.
The sound cracked through the room like a snapped ruler.
Mr Evans stumbled back, hit the floor.
Skye froze, heart slamming.
Elias stood over him, shaking — not from fear. From rage he’d been holding down for too long.
“Enough,” Elias said, voice ragged. “Drop the mask.”
Mr Evans sat up slowly, touched his cheek with two fingers, and smiled like he’d just been given a gift.
“Oh,” Death said. “You want truth.”
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The air in the classroom thickened.
The fluorescent lights flickered.
The posters on the walls seemed to curl inward, like the room didn’t want to stay cheerful.
Death rose.
His face… shifted.
Not like makeup. Not like a disguise being removed.
Like wet clay being forced into a new mould — cartilage popping softly, skin rippling as if it couldn’t decide what to be.
Skye’s stomach lurched. She swallowed bile hard.
“I’m going to be sick,” she whispered, hand flying to her mouth.
Death turned his head, considering her like she was a specimen.
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Then he smiled, slow and indulgent.
Then he looked at Elias. Just Elias. Like Skye had stopped being relevant entirely.
He changed again.
And the man in front of Skye became a little girl.
Not Skye.
A different girl.
Small. Twelve. Eyes too bright. Wearing a striped uniform that made Skye’s skin crawl because she’d seen it in documentaries and in the corners of Elias’ memories like a wound that never healed.
Death looked at Elias through Anna’s face and smiled.
“There,” Death purred. “Is that easier for you, Elias?”
Elias went utterly still.
Like his body had forgotten how to move.
Then the rage surged back, doubled, twisted into something uglier. His fists clenched until his knuckles went white.
“How dare…,” he said, voice shaking. “How dare you wear her.”
Death — Anna — tilted her head, tsking like a teacher.
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“Careful,” Death said softly. “You don’t want to hit a little girl, do you?”
Skye stared, chest tight, and a strange feeling rose in her throat — not recognition exactly, but the way a word hovered on the tip of her tongue and refused to land.
Death noticed.
Anna’s smile sharpened.
“Do I seem familiar?” Death asked Skye, almost kindly.
Skye’s mouth opened.
“I—” she whispered. “You…”
Death’s eyes glinted. “Hear that, brother?” She said to Elias. “I look familiar to her.”
Elias’ voice snapped, harsh and raw. “Stop.”
Death laughed, delighted. “Oh, no. This is the interesting part.”
She leaned closer to Elias, still wearing Anna’s face.
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“I’m angry at you, Elias,” Death said, voice sweet. “Do you know why?”
Elias’ breathing turned ragged. “Because I stole.”
“Yes,” Death said — and then Anna’s voice softened, tilted, became something that made Elias’s jaw clench like he’d been struck. “Because you took her from me, Eli.”
Eli.
Not Elias. Not the name soldiers used. The name a twelve-year-old girl had used when she was cold and couldn’t sleep and needed someone to remind her the dark wasn’t permanent.
Elias went very still.
“Don’t,” he said. One word. Barely sound.
Death smiled with Anna’s mouth. “Don’t what?” Soft. Innocent. Cruel. “I’m just saying what she’d say. Isn’t that what you wanted? When you kept her alive in your head all those years?” A tilt of the head. “You wanted her to talk to you.”
Something moved through Elias — not rage yet. Something worse. Something that had been locked for a long time and was now being picked at with a very small, very precise instrument.
His throat worked.
When he spoke, the name came out flat — not because it meant nothing, but because if he put feeling into it, he wouldn’t be able to keep standing long enough to say the rest.
“Avi.”
Death blinked. Just once. A flicker — not fear, but recalibration, like a musician who’d played the wrong note and was covering it.
Anna’s voice didn’t waver. “That’s not going to work, Eli—”
“Sara.”
The air shivered. Not with magic. With pressure. The way the room had shivered when Skye realised the classroom was a trap.
Death took one small step back. Barely a shift of weight. Barely anything.
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But it happened.
“Bex,” Elias said. “Hayley. Chloe.”
Each one struck somewhere behind Skye’s ribs, as if the syllables had weight and she was the one holding them.
Elias’s breath snagged.
“Fiona.”
Skye felt it — the tiny hitch in him, the way that name landed differently. Like it didn’t belong in the same category as the rest. Like it was a wound he kept covered because if he didn’t, he’d never stop bleeding.
Death’s smile stayed — but it was working now. Maintained. The difference between a smile that came naturally and one that had to be held in place.
Anna’s voice came again, a little faster. A little less steady. “You can say all the names you want. It doesn’t change what you—”
“Sam. Tom. Ezra.”
He didn’t just say them — he threw them. Each name hurled like a stone.
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Death flinched.
Not dramatically. Not a stumble. But the expression on Anna’s face shifted, just for a half-second, into something that wasn’t performing.
“Levi. Asher. Jonah. Micah.”
“Stop.” Anna’s voice — Death’s voice — came out thinner than intended. Almost sharp. Almost rattled. “This is—”
Elias’s hands shook. He pulled them into fists and forced them still.
“So many,” he said, voice scraped raw, “that saying them out loud feels like ammunition.”
He swallowed.
“Like feeding you.”
Death said nothing.
For the first time, Anna’s face simply watched him without performing at all.
Elias drew one slow breath.
“And I’m tired of being careful.”
The restraint snapped.
The classroom began to blur at the edges. Posters peeled, not falling so much as releasing, as if the room had been nothing but paper pretending to be walls.
Ben’s face — the whole class — drained of detail. Not fading like a dream.
More like they’d never been important enough to be rendered in the first place.
Skye’s stomach flipped as desks stretched into distance. The ceiling lifted, climbing away into shadow. The fluorescent lights broke apart into scattered points, like stars trying to remember how to be a sky.
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And then the museum arrived.
It didn’t crash into being. It assembled itself with terrible calm — a hall opening around them, wide and dim, the air heavy with the hush of places built to hold what hurts.
Photographs lined the walls.
Not curated neatly. Not sanitized.
Pinned, taped, stacked, overlapping like someone had run out of room and refused to stop anyway.
Faces in black and white. Faces in colour. Faces half cut off by frame edges. Soldiers with mud on their cheeks. Women with hospital bracelets. A boy with a missing tooth grinning beside a birthday cake. A girl in a school jumper holding a book to her chest. Someone’s wedding photo, creased down the middle like it had been folded and unfolded too many times.
Underneath: names.
Some written clean. Some written shaky. Some scratched in like the hand had been angry.
Elias stood in the centre of it like this place had been living behind his eyes the whole time.
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Skye realised, coldly, that he hadn’t summoned it.
He’d simply stopped holding the door closed.
Death’s gaze swept the walls.
Anna’s face went quiet.
Not cautious exactly. Something more unsettled than that — the look of something ancient that had just encountered a corner of the world it hadn’t catalogued. A predator realising the room had more exits than it had counted.
Death’s chin lifted slightly, the way people do when they don’t want you to see they’ve swallowed.
Elias’s hand went to his neck.
He yanked out his dog tags.
They hit his chest with a dull clink — real metal, real weight — and Skye felt the sound in her teeth. He held them up like evidence, the chain taut between his fingers.
“These,” Elias said, voice thick, and his eyes shone with something that wasn’t just rage. “These were boys who thought they’d come home.”
His fingers tightened around the tags until the chain bit into his skin.
“These were women who joked in trenches so they wouldn’t scream.” His voice cracked on the edge of a name he didn’t speak yet. “These were kids who shouldn’t have been anywhere near a war, but wars don’t ask permission.”
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Death — Anna — watched him. For once, not performing. Just watching.
Elias lifted his head and his stare pinned Death like a blade.
“You said I took one from you.”
He laughed once — not humour, not disbelief.
A sound like a door slamming shut behind him.
“You want to talk about taking?”
He turned, gesturing at the walls, at the hundreds of lives packed into this hall like the world had run out of space for them.
“These are my people,” Elias said. “My brothers. My sisters.”
His voice rose, ragged.
“And they’re gone because you took them.”
Death’s eyes narrowed.
Anna’s voice came back — quieter than before, and that was worse somehow, because it meant she was choosing it now rather than performing it. “So this is because I did my purpose?”
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Elias’s expression cracked — and suddenly the anger turned inward, as if it had finally found the real target.
“No,” he whispered.
His shoulders trembled once. He swallowed hard.
“No. I’m not mad that you took them.”
Skye felt her own breath stop, like her body knew something was coming and tried to brace pre-emptively.
Elias’s voice dropped into something bare.
“I’m mad because I don’t understand why she died… and I lived.”
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He looked at Anna’s face — Death wearing it — and for a second the rage slipped, revealing something underneath that was worse than rage.
Grief with nowhere to go.
He sank to his knees.
Not for Death.
For the memory.
For a twelve-year-old girl in stripes, too thin, eyes too bright, hand disappearing in his.
“I lived while she didn’t,” Elias said, and the words broke properly this time. “I lived—”
His hands curled on the floor like he was trying to hold the world in place by force.
“She deserved the life,” he rasped. “She deserved… everything.”
His breath hitched. Tears slid without permission, not pretty, not dramatic — the kind that happened when your body finally refused to keep lying.
“And I got stuck,” Elias whispered. “I got stuck here. I can’t die, no matter how many times I try, and she—”
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He cut off, jaw clenched so tight it looked like it might crack.
Skye stepped forward without choosing to. Her hand landed on his shoulder.
Small. Real.
Elias flinched like the touch hurt — then leaned into it like it was the only thing keeping him from splitting apart.
Death watched this from Anna’s face and said nothing.
For a long moment, she simply stood there.
Something crossed Anna’s expression that Death didn’t seem to intend — not pity. Not calculation. Something older and stranger, the way an ocean looks when the wind drops and you can suddenly see the depth of it.
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Then it was gone.
His voice dropped, ashamed and furious at once.
“I brought Skye back because I wanted you to feel it,” he said to Death. “Just once. I wanted you to feel what it’s like to have something taken.”
Anna’s face tilted. The performance slid back into place, but it sat differently now — a little looser. A little less certain of itself.
Skye’s head throbbed — the museum pulsing around them — but she kept her hand on Elias’s shoulder, because she understood something instinctive and simple:
Whatever this was, he had been alone with it for too long.
Elias dragged a breath in, wiped at his face like he resented the wetness, and lifted his head again.
His voice went quieter.
And that was worse.
“And Anna,” he said.
Just the name.
No list. No explanation.
A single syllable that landed in the museum like a bell.
Even Death stilled, as if the sound had rules.
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Skye looked at Death, breath shaking.
“You left me,” Skye said, voice cracking. “You left me in that darkness.”
Death blinked at her, mildly curious. “You were dead.”
“I didn’t know,” Skye snapped, panic flaring. “I didn’t know anything. You could have— I don’t know— you could have told me.”
Death’s mouth twitched. “That is not my purpose, child.”
“What is, then?” Skye demanded, tears hot on her cheeks.
“To carry souls through the threshold,” Death said evenly. “To let them adjust. To let them accept. Then… the light.”
Skye’s fingers dug into Elias’ shoulder. “Do you know how long I was in there?” she demanded, voice rising. “Five years! That’s what it was!”
Death laughed.
It wasn’t cruel laughter.
It was worse.
It was certain laughter.
“Two hours,” Death said.
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Skye’s thoughts tried to line up like numbers on a page and slid straight off.
“Two hours?”
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Death lifted a hand and the world folded.
The museum-hall blurred away. The air opened. The floor vanished.
Skye, Elias, and Death now stood on something like rock — except rock implied permanence, implied that the ground had decided what it was and stayed that way. This hadn’t. Beneath her feet, the surface shifted between solid and suggestion, like standing on the memory of stone rather than stone itself. Sometimes her weight pressed into it. Sometimes it seemed to press back, curious.
She looked down.
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Her shoes were real. Her laces were real. The ground beneath them was a question.
Skye lifted her head slowly, because the world up here — if world was even the right word for it — required looking at in pieces. The whole of it at once was too much. It arrived in the eyes like music played too loud, not painful exactly, but overwhelming in a way that made her brain keep trying to translate it into something familiar and keep failing.
It was dark, but not the dark of a room with the lights off.
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Not even the dark of the place she’d been before — that airless, answering nothing.
This was a different dark entirely. A living dark. A dark that moved the way deep water moved, slow and enormous and aware of its own weight. It rolled above her, below her, around her in currents she could see but not feel — great slow rivers of black threaded through with something that glittered, not like stars exactly, more like the idea of stars, light that had forgotten the specific shape it was supposed to take and was simply being luminous instead.
She turned slowly.
There was no horizon. There was no up or down in any definitive sense — only the vague agreement that she was standing on something and everything else was elsewhere, and that elsewhere stretched in every direction without stopping.
It was, she thought distantly, the most honest place she had ever been. No walls pretending to be permanent. No ceiling trying to pass for sky. Just the bare fact of existing, undecorated.
Physics here felt more like a suggestion than a law. Like the rules of the world she knew had been written in pencil and someone had come through with an eraser — not to destroy them, just to loosen them a little. To let them breathe.
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She could feel it. The looseness of it. The way distance seemed negotiable, the way the rock beneath her feet had opinions about gravity rather than obligations to it.
Then she saw the light.
It stopped her completely.
Not because it was bright — though it was, in its way. Not because it was beautiful — though that wasn’t the wrong word for it either. It stopped her because it was the only light. In all of this vast and glittering dark, in all these rolling impossible currents, there was exactly one source.
Far away.
Impossibly far, and yet somehow visible in a way that suggested distance didn’t apply to it the normal way.
It was black.
Or it had been.
She could see the shape of it — a vast and perfect circle of absolute darkness, the kind of dark that didn’t have light in it because light had never been there, because it was a place where even the concept of illumination had been swallowed whole — and from the centre of that absolute nothing, light was coming out.
White light.
Not like a lamp. Not like the sun. Not like anything she had words for.
It poured outward the way water poured from a wound — not violent, not rushed, but inevitable. Steady. Like something that had always been there and was only now choosing to be seen.
It moved through the dark in seams, the way light cracked through old glass — following the lines of least resistance, bleeding into the currents, making the glittering dark glitter differently. Not illuminating so much as suggesting. Showing the shapes of things without naming them.
Skye stared at it until her eyes ached, because looking at it was like looking at a word she almost understood. Like standing on the edge of remembering something she’d never known.
Her stomach turned — not with nausea, but with the specific vertigo of scale. Of smallness.
That, she understood without being told, was the entrance.
Not a door. Not a gate. Not a bridge.
A black hole that had swallowed itself and come out the other side as something else entirely. A threshold so enormous it had stopped looking like a threshold and started looking like weather.
She dragged her gaze sideways, because there was something else — something closer, something that made the first thing worse by contrast.
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A rip.
That was the only word for it. A tear in the dark, ragged at the edges, and through it — colours. Colours she knew. The specific grey-green of rain on old stone. The amber of church windows in afternoon. The particular blue-dark of a storm coming in from the coast, the colour her dad always pointed at and called serious weather.
Home colours.
She almost moved toward it before she knew she was moving.
Elias’s arm came out — not grabbing, just present. A quiet interruption.
He was staring at the rip, face tight with something she couldn’t fully read. Recognition, yes. But older than that. The expression of someone who had seen a place they hadn’t expected to see again and weren’t sure yet whether that was good.
Skye looked back at the white light bleeding from the black.
“What is this place?” she asked, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it.
Nobody answered immediately.
The dark moved around them in its slow, enormous currents.
Skye thought: between.
That was what it felt like. Not nothing. Not somewhere. The hyphen between two words. The pause between a question and its answer. The space that existed only because two things needed something to separate them, and so this place had obliged — vast and dark and glittering and patient, existing outside of everything, belonging to none of it.
She thought: I died and landed here and didn’t even know I was between things.
The white light poured on, steady and enormous, at the end of everything.
“I remember this. I was trapped here longer than anyone realised,” he murmured, voice thick.
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“This is the in-between,” Death said. “Call it a station. A seam. A platform where time doesn’t behave.”
Skye’s head pounded.
“So… that’s why—” Skye whispered. “That’s why it felt like… like hours when I woke up. Even though everyone says…”
“Five years,” Death finished, watching her. “Yes.”
Skye shook, overwhelmed. “Five years,” she whispered. “My mum waited five years. My sister did. They built a life around me being gone.”
Her chest tightened.
“And now I’m back and everything’s wrong. I’m wrong.” Her voice thinned. “Time’s cracked. He’s angry. You’re angry.”
She looked between them — at Death, at Elias, at the wound in the dark sky.
“If I’m the tear,” she said quietly, “then stitch it.”
Her throat worked.
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“So you want me back?” she blurted. “Fine. Take me. If that fixes it—”
Elias snapped his head toward her, eyes fierce. “No.”
Skye flinched.
Elias’ voice shook. “Your mum needs you,” he said, and the words sounded like they were torn out of him. “Your sister. Your dad. They need you. You do not get to—” He swallowed hard. “You do not get to offer yourself to make the universe comfortable.”
Death’s eyes gleamed. “Brave,” she said to Skye. “But no. I can’t undo what’s been done — not cleanly.”
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Skye’s breath hitched. “Why not?”
Death lifted her hand, and a bottle appeared in it — plain glass.
She let it drop.
It shattered against the rock.
Then it reformed, glass sliding back into place like time rewinding.
Skye blinked. “It fixed.”
Death held it up.
“Look closer.”
Skye leaned in.
Hairline fractures ran through the glass — pale scars, webbed and permanent.
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Skye’s throat tightened.
“Even if I took you,” Death said softly, “the wound remains. The scar remains. The world remembers the break.”
Elias glared at Death. “So what do you want?”
Death’s smile returned — smaller now, edged with something like irritation.
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“What I want,” Death said, leaning down until Anna’s face was inches from Elias’, “is to understand how you got here.”
Elias didn’t move.
“This realm is not meant to be entered,” Death continued. “And yet you walked in as if you owned the platform.”
A slow smile touched the corner of Elias’ mouth.
“How did you bring her back?” Death asked, voice sharpening. “How did you do what you did?”
Elias stared at her.
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Long enough to make it deliberate.
Then he laughed.
Not humourless.
Not broken.
Bright. Brief. Sharp.
“You don’t know,” he said.
Death’s expression didn’t shift — but something flickered behind the eyes. A recalculation. A fracture.
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Elias straightened slightly, like pain had taken a step back just to watch this.
“You rummaged through my memories,” he went on, almost conversational now. “You wore her face. You sifted through every war, every grave, every name.”
His smile widened — not kind.
“And you still don’t know.”
Death’s voice tightened. “Tell me.”
Elias tilted his head, studying her the way she had studied him.
“Oh, that’s beautiful,” he said softly. “You’ve been taking people since the beginning of language. And this — this one thing — slipped past you.”
He leaned closer.
“Doesn’t that terrify you?”
The question landed like a gift.
Elias’ eyes shone now — not with madness, not with cruelty — but with vindication.
“You don’t get to take credit for everything,” he said. “Not this.”
Death went very still.
For the first time, she wasn’t in control of the question.
Elias smiled.
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“You’ve already been inside my head,” he said softly. “So why can’t you find it?”
Death didn’t blink.
“Find it,” Elias continued, almost kind. “You seem so certain you’ve seen everything.”
The air tightened.
Death’s gaze sharpened — and then it shifted.
Not to Skye.
Not to the room.
Inward.
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Then Death looked away.
Just slightly.
And Skye felt it — a pressure in the air, like something stood behind Death and watched.
Death’s jaw clenched.
Death’s eyes flicked—just once—like something behind her had moved.
“I can’t,” she said, and for the first time it sounded like uncertainty. “Something is… in the way.”
Silence fell.
Not the theatrical kind.
The real kind. The kind that comes when a god stumbles.
Elias didn’t move.
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Then slowly — slowly — his mouth curved.
Not wide.
Not wild.
Certain.
“You tried,” he said softly.
Death didn’t answer.
Elias took one small step closer.
“All those centuries,” he continued, voice low and steady, “walking through minds like open doors.”
His eyes gleamed now — not madness. Not cruelty.
Triumph.
“And this one doesn’t open.”
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Death’s jaw tightened.
Elias let out a breath that might have been a laugh, but it wasn’t amused.
It was relieved.
“You don’t get to see everything,” he said. “Not this.”
Skye felt it then — not just resistance.
Protection.
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Something old and deliberate standing between Elias and Death like a hand pressed flat against glass.
Death’s eyes narrowed.
“There is a way,” she said.
Elias didn’t answer.
“Something is shielding the memory,” Death continued, voice steady now. “Not consciously. But it is sealed.”
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Her gaze flicked to Skye.
“I cannot tear it open. But if we walk it — if we follow the path from the beginning — the barrier weakens.”
Skye frowned, head throbbing. “All of it?”
“Memory resists intrusion,” Death said. “It does not resist recognition. You cannot leap to the moment. You must arrive at it.”
Her eyes returned to Elias.
“If we move through it in sequence… I will see where you crossed.”
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Elias didn’t answer immediately.
He looked at Skye.
Really looked.
Her face was pale. Her eyes too wide. Too young to be standing in a place like this.
She wasn’t thinking about realms or barriers.
She was thinking about home.
About her mum.
About being normal again.
The fury in him faltered.
He took her hand.
Not defensive.
Protective.
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“She’s done,” Elias said quietly.
Death watched him.
Elias squeezed Skye’s fingers once.
“We’re leaving.”
He turned, as if expecting a door to appear because he wanted it.
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A door did appear — plain wood, absurdly ordinary against the dark.
Elias reached for the handle.
Skye screamed.
It wasn’t a cry of surprise.
It was a rupture.
Pain detonated behind her eyes. Her vision fractured, splitting into shards of light and shadow. Her knees gave way. She didn’t feel the floor — she felt herself slipping.
Not falling.
Unthreading.
It was like something inside her skull had been hooked and pulled hard, ripping through memory, through thought, through identity.
Her heartbeat stuttered.
The air wouldn’t stay in her lungs.
“Elias—” she choked, but his name dissolved into a sob.
He was there instantly.
He dropped to his knees and caught her before her head struck the ground, one hand cradling the back of her skull, the other gripping her shoulder hard enough to anchor her to something real.
“Skye.” His voice cracked. Not controlled. Not measured. “Skye, stay with me. Look at me. Breathe. Breathe.”
Her fingers clawed at her temples.
“It’s pulling me,” she gasped. “It’s— it’s tearing—”
Her body arched as another spike of agony hit.
For a split second her eyes lost focus — and Elias saw it.
Saw the space behind them.
Saw the edge.
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Something in him went cold.
Then hot.
Understanding hit him like a hammer.
He lifted his head slowly.
And when he looked at Death, there was nothing restrained left in him.
“You did this,” he said.
Not shouted.
Pronounced.
The words carried weight.
“You are tearing her apart.”
The air around him seemed to tighten, as if even the in-between recognised the shift.
“If she dies here—” His voice dropped lower, more dangerous. “If you let her unravel—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t need to.
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Death laughed.
It wasn’t loud.
It was delighted.
“Oh, Elias,” she said softly, still wearing Anna’s face. “You always assume I need to interfere.”
She tilted her head, studying Skye like a broken toy that had surprised her.
“This isn’t me tearing her,” Death continued. “This is you.”
Elias went still.
Skye whimpered in his arms, fingers digging into his coat.
“You pulled her back wrong,” Death said, almost gently. “You dragged something through the seam without trimming it.”
Her eyes flicked to Skye’s temple.
“She is carrying what isn’t hers.”
Skye shook her head weakly. “It feels mine,” she whispered.
Death smiled wider.
“That’s the problem.”
She crouched slightly, lowering herself to Skye’s level, speaking like she might explain a scraped knee.
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“When you brought her back, you didn’t close the door properly. So the world did what it always does when something impossible happens.”
Her fingers traced a small circle in the air.
“It made a buffer.”
“A what?” Skye gasped.
“A waiting room,” Death corrected lightly. “A safe mode. A place where she can exist without breaking.”
Elias’ grip tightened around Skye.
Death’s voice lost its softness.
“The moment she leaves this dreamscape with your memories still inside her…” She shrugged one shoulder. “Her body will not reconcile it.”
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Skye’s breath stuttered.
“She will die properly this time.”
Silence.
Not dramatic.
Final.
Elias’ face drained of colour.
“You’re lying,” he said.
Death laughed again — sharper this time.
“Oh, I don’t need to lie. I win either way.”
She looked at Skye, then back to Elias, and there was something disturbingly pleased in her expression.
“You see?” she said. “He thought he was clever.”
Elias’ jaw trembled — not fear.
Fury.
“You stitched her back together,” Death continued, “but you left your memories in her.”
Her smile sharpened.
“And now it’s killing her and the only one who is stopping her from dying….. is me.”
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Skye made a small, broken sound in her throat.
Elias lowered his forehead to hers for half a second, grounding her.
“The memories,” he said hoarsely, eyes never leaving Death. “In order.”
Death nodded once.
“The excess unravels.“
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Her eyes glittered.
“She keeps her life.”
Elias swallowed.
“And she forgets?” he asked.
Death’s smile curved.
“She forgets what was never meant to be hers.”
Skye frowned. “What does that mean?”
Death’s gaze lingered on Elias.
“It means she stops carrying what you survived,” she said lightly. “She stops carrying what you buried.”
Something in Elias went rigid.
Skye felt it before she understood it — the way his hand tightened just a fraction too much around her shoulder.
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Death tilted her head.
“But we don’t skip,” she continued. “We don’t jump to the end. You don’t get to hand me the answer.”
Her eyes gleamed.
“You don’t skip the parts that hurt.”
Elias’ voice was flat. “No.”
Skye looked at him.
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It wasn’t anger this time.
It was something closer to fear.
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Death’s gaze stayed on Elias. Not on Skye. Not on the in-between.
On him.
“I have walked through every mind that has ever existed,” she said quietly. “Every secret. Every buried thing.” A pause. “And yours is the first I cannot read properly.”
Something moved behind Anna’s eyes that wasn’t performance.
“That should not be possible,” Death said. “And I need to know why.”
Elias turned away from Death like he couldn’t stand to look at her wearing that face for one more second. He walked two paces, stopped, and stood with his back to both of them.
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His shoulders were rigid.
His hands were at his sides.
Skye watched him and said nothing, because something about the shape of him right now — the particular stillness of a person who is holding themselves together through sheer structural will — told her that speaking would be like tapping a fault line.
Death waited with the patience of something that had never needed to hurry.
Then Elias said, quietly, to no one in particular:
“You’d see a boy.”
Skye frowned. “What?”
He still didn’t turn. “In the beginning. That’s what you’d see.” His voice was level but wrong underneath — the way a floorboard sounded level until you stood on the one that wasn’t. “Someone who thought being good was enough. Someone who thought if you were careful and quiet and didn’t give the world a reason—”
He stopped.
His jaw shifted.
“Someone who was wrong,” he finished.
Skye felt the weight of that settle somewhere in her chest she didn’t have a name for.
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Death tilted Anna’s head. “Afraid of what you’ll see?” she asked lightly. “Or afraid of what she will?”
That landed.
Elias turned.
His eyes went straight to Skye, and she understood in an instant that she was the problem. Not Death. Not the memories themselves. Her. Standing here. Twelve years old. Having to watch.
Something cracked in his expression.
“There are things in there,” he said carefully, like he was choosing each word for weight, “that a person shouldn’t have to see.”
“What kind of things?” Skye asked, even though part of her already knew she didn’t want the answer.
He didn’t answer straight away.
She watched it move through him — whatever it was. Not a memory rising so much as a memory pressing against the inside of him, something that lived just beneath the surface and had teeth.
His breathing changed. Just slightly. Just enough that she noticed.
“There’s smoke,” he said at last. Very quiet. “And cold. And a room—” He stopped again, harder this time, like the next word was a step off a ledge he’d already fallen from once and knew exactly what the landing felt like. “A room where they put people.”
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Skye’s stomach turned.
She didn’t know the specifics. She didn’t need to. The shape of what he wasn’t saying was enough.
“She was there,” he said, and his voice went rough in a way that had nothing to do with volume. “Anna was there. And I—”
His hands opened and closed.
“I came back,” he said. “And she didn’t.”
The three words sat in the air of the in-between with nowhere to go. The dark currents moved slowly around them, indifferent and enormous.
Skye thought about the photographs in the museum. The girl in the school jumper. The boy with the missing tooth.
She thought about Anna’s face on Death’s skull and felt sick.
“And after,” Elias said — and now his voice had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere flat and distant, the tone of a person describing something that happened to someone else because it’s the only way to say it without the ground coming up — “after, I did things.”
He looked down at his hands.
Skye looked at them too.
They were still. Ordinary. A man’s hands, a little scarred, nothing remarkable.
“I was a pacifist,” Elias said, almost to himself. The word came out like something he’d found at the back of a drawer, something he used to own and could barely remember how to hold. “Before. I believed — I genuinely believed—” A short, humourless breath. “It doesn’t matter what I believed.”
His hands closed.
“I don’t want you to see what I did,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to see it. I have spent a very long time not seeing it myself.”
Death smiled pleasantly from Anna’s face. “And yet.”
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Elias’s eyes snapped up, sharp with a hatred so old it had gone quiet.
“You’d enjoy that,” he said. “Wouldn’t you.”
“I’d understand it,” Death corrected, tilting her head. “There’s a difference.” A pause. “Well. For me there is.”
Skye looked between them and felt the shape of the dilemma land in her properly for the first time. Not as an abstract problem. As a weight.
He wasn’t afraid of Death seeing his memories.
He was afraid of her seeing them.
She was twelve. She was already in this place because she’d died, because something had gone wrong, because the universe had made a crack and she’d fallen through it. And now the price of going home was sitting in a room while a man who had been trying to protect her was forced to crack himself open in front of both of them.
While she watched.
The throbbing behind her eyes returned — not violently, but insistently. A reminder. A clock.
“If we don’t do it,” she said quietly, “I die.”
Elias’s jaw tightened.
Skye swallowed. Her voice was small now — not heroic. Not dramatic. Just tired.
“I don’t want to be brave,” she said. “I just want to go home.”
That did it.
Not the threat.
Not Death’s taunting.
That.
Elias looked at her properly then.
She wasn’t asking for answers.
She wasn’t asking for myth.
She was asking for her mum. Her sister. Her bed.
She was twelve.
And this was too much.
“You don’t understand,” Elias said, but it came out softer than he meant it to. “Those aren’t stories. They’re—”
He stopped.
Skye saw something flicker across his face — flashes she couldn’t name but felt anyway.
Smoke.
Cold.
Screaming.
A weight no child should see.
“I know,” she said, even though she didn’t. “But I won’t remember them.”
That made him flinch.
Death laughed — pleased, almost delighted.
“Oh, she understands the bargain better than you do,” Death said. “You relive. She survives.”
Elias’s eyes snapped back to Death.
“You’ll see it,” Death continued, voice almost playful now. “And so will I.”
There it was.
Skye didn’t fully understand the mechanics — but she understood that part.
Death wasn’t just offering a cure. Death was hunting for the answer.
Elias understood it too.
His shoulders sagged for half a second.
If he walked the memories in order, Death would see.
There was no version where he kept both.
Skye squeezed his sleeve weakly.
“I don’t want to die again,” she said. “Please.”
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The word wasn’t dramatic.
It was small.
Human.
Elias closed his eyes.
When he opened them, something had settled.
Not defeat.
Decision.
He looked at Death.
“You get what keeps her alive. Nothing more,” he said quietly. “You get what she has to see. Nothing more.”
Death’s smile sharpened.
“We’ll see.”
Elias took Skye’s hand.
It wasn’t instinct this time.
It was chosen.
“Stay with me,” he said to her. “No matter what you see, stay with me.”
Skye nodded.
“I just want to go home,” she whispered.
“I know,” he said.
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Something in him locked into place.
“We do it,” Elias said, voice rough. Then, softer, to Skye: “Only because it helps you. Not because it helps her.”
Skye swallowed. “Okay.”
Elias squeezed her hand once.
Death clapped.
Once.
The sound echoed too far in the in-between.
“Wonderful,” Death said, and the space around them shifted again, folding like fabric being pulled across a frame.
A cinema formed out of darkness and light — rows of seats, a wide screen, velvet that was too red, too clean, too much like something pretending to be normal.
The classmates were gone. Ben was gone. The school was gone.
Only Skye, Elias, and Death remained.
Death — still wearing Anna’s face — now stood at the front in a little usher’s uniform, expression amused.
A ticket stub appeared between her fingers.
“Welcome,” Death said lightly. “To the Book of Elias.”
Skye blinked, still shaky. Her voice came out thin, but real.
“Do I… get popcorn?” she asked, because her stomach had the audacity to exist through terror, and because sometimes asking a normal question was the only way to stop yourself from disappearing.
For the first time, Elias’s mouth twitched into something that almost resembled a smile.
Death’s eyes narrowed, annoyed by the humanity of it.
Then the lights dimmed.
And the screen began to glow.69Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡB6GPJKeG8F
and then Add to home screen.