The first thing you notice is the cold — not the kind you get from rooftop air at midnight, but something deeper, older, like it’s been waiting for you. It sinks past skin and bone, curling into your core. You’ve been walking these steel corridors for too long; every turn looks the same, every corner opens only to more silence. Under the sterile white lights, the floor gleams like a mirror. No dust. No warmth. Perfect — in the way that feels wrong.

You brush your fingertips against the wall, needing to feel something real, but the surface is too smooth, too precise — as if someone erased the world here and replaced it with an imitation. And in that emptiness, her voice still lingers, velvet over steel.

“They fear you. I don’t. I see you.”

Cassandra.

The name alone is enough to tighten your jaw. She’s been in your head for too long — whispering, pulling threads, making you doubt where your thoughts end and hers begin. You remember the first time you saw her: composed, unreadable, eyes like two points of gravity pulling everything in. You were exhausted then — tired of holding back your abilities, tired of standing on the outside even among the gifted. She didn’t offer comfort. She offered certainty.

And you almost believed her.

But you see the shape of her lies now. Every step through this maze is a step away from her, and she doesn’t like it. The pressure builds behind your eyes, a static hum rising in your skull.

“You’ll never make it out,” she says — not from a single point, but from the walls, the air, your own thoughts. “You’re just a child with more power than sense.”

You hold the words at bay, focusing instead on the flicker in the lights. Your gift stirs — warm, sharp, uncoiling — and in its glow you sense the minds around you, scattered and hidden. Hers is there too, vast and wound tight, wearing a mask made of false truths.

The corridor wavers, and for a split second you see what she’s been hiding: dented metal, deep scratches, the marks of a struggle she couldn’t quite erase.

The vision hits you hard, not like pain in the body, but like something in your own story being torn and rewritten. And you wonder — which memories are truly yours… and which ones are Cassandra’s?