It happened fast.

One second, Ivy was holding the paper close, fingers trembling against the crinkled edge, her thoughts still tangled in the jagged throb of what she’d just read. Next, the texture beneath her hands shifted. It began with a subtle warmth, as if the page had been left too close to a heater. Then a faint shimmer, the grain of the crayon lines softening and melting into the paper. Her hands jerked back instinctively, but it was already too late.

The note crumbled, dissolving like dried leaves underfoot, disintegrating into a fine gray dust that slipped through her mittens and scattered to the floor.

Her breath hitched.

A low creak sounded beside her. She turned to find Finn, his walker sliding to a slow stop next to hers. He looked at her first, then the ground, her again, his brow furrowed. The soft rustle of his diaper filled the space between them.

“What was it?” he asked, voice pitched low. Curious in the way only someone clinging to questions could be.

Ivy hesitated. Her mouth opened, then closed. The instinct to protect, to deflect, flared inside her. It would’ve been easy to shrug it off. Say it was nothing. Say it was just her imagination, a trick of the stress, a hallucination birthed by all the regression and formula and tickle games.

But something in Finn’s face made her pause.

The same quiet tension that had clung to her since the first trial rested behind his eyes. He wanted an answer, but more than that, he was ready to hear the truth, even if she didn’t believe it herself.

So she told him.

“It was a letter,” Ivy said, slowly. “Handwritten in crayon. It just said that someone was trying to rescue us.”

She let the words hang there, half-expecting them to sound ridiculous once spoken aloud. But they didn’t.

Finn’s eyes narrowed. “Someone’s trying to break into the Trials?” he asked. He didn’t laugh, just looked at her like he was trying to assemble a puzzle that didn’t have a picture on the box.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “It could be some weird part of the trials, like some loyalty test or hallucination planted to see how we react. Your guess is as good as mine.”

She turned slightly in her walker, casting a glance over her shoulder. Maria and Sarah were still near the console, their heads bent in quiet conversation over the glowing adoption interface, eyes flicking between graphs and metrics and percentages that measured how completely they'd been turned into children.

It made her stomach twist.

If someone was trying to reach her—if someone was really trying to help—how long could they do it before the Nursery noticed? Would there be more letters? More messages in mirrors or cracks in the walls? Or had she just watched the only signal crumble to dust in her mittens?

“You’ve got to keep trying, Ivy.”

The words came softly from Finn, casual in tone but with a strange kind of weight that hung awkwardly in the air between them. He hadn’t looked directly at her when he said it, just turned his eyes out toward the far wall, expression unreadable. Almost like he’d been repeating something he didn’t entirely understand himself.

Ivy frowned, eyebrows knitting as she angled her walker slightly to better face him. “What do you mean? I am trying,” she said, her voice sharper than she intended, confusion threading through the syllables. “I haven’t exactly been slacking off.”

Finn didn’t answer right away. He tilted his head, eyes still distant, like something behind his thoughts had tugged his attention. Then, slowly, he turned toward her again, blinking. The subtle tension that had settled in his face slipped away in the space of a heartbeat, and when he spoke again, it was with the same offhanded tone he used when talking about cartoons or bouncers.

“Do you think we’ll get actual food again?” he asked.

The question landed so abruptly that it made Ivy blink. “Wait. What?”

“Like,” he said, shrugging, “anything other than formula, you know? I’ve been dreaming about toast. Just bread and butter. Maybe jelly. God, that sounds good.”

She stared at him. Not because of the question, but because of the pivot. “No, no—back up. Just now, you told me I had to try harder. Why did you say that?”

“Try harder?” he echoed, his brows lifting, now looking genuinely confused. “Ivy, you’re in the top four. I don’t know how much harder you could try. Honestly, I’d be surprised if you didn’t win the whole thing.”

He gave a little laugh and leaned back in his walker like they were talking about a game show instead of survival.

Ivy’s mouth had gone dry.

Because she knew what she’d heard. There hadn’t been ambiguity in his voice, no teasing. It had been quiet. You’ve got to keep trying.

Her gaze slid across his face, searching for the cracks. But there were none. Just the usual tension and weariness that never quite left any of them these days. Finn was the same as ever and seemed unaware of what he’d just said a moment ago.

“You’re sure you didn’t say something else?” she asked carefully.

He cocked his head, smiling. “Like what?”

The more she pressed, the more she’d sound like her thoughts were slipping. And maybe they were.

“Never mind,” Ivy said quietly, the syllables slipping from her lips like steam off a cooling kettle. She turned from Finn, hands pressing lightly against the tray of her walker, and started rolling away before he could respond. She didn’t look back. Her heart still beat too quickly, and her thoughts were moving with the kind of speed that made them impossible to catch.

She rejoined the others at the console, where the soft, clinical light of the touchscreen flickered against their faces. Sarah was beside Maria, both of them thumbing through the data again with the half-bored intensity of people trying to find something new. Ivy came to a halt beside them, her eyes scanning the glowing graphs—but her mind was still with the letter and Finn.

Maria looked up first. And when she spoke, Ivy’s knees nearly gave out beneath her.

“Please, Ivy,” Maria said—but it wasn’t her voice.

It was too deep. Too heavy in the throat. A man's voice, smooth with the kind of emotion that wraps itself around the ribs. “Come back to us.”

Ivy blinked.

Then Sarah turned her head, as if continuing a conversation that had already been happening. And when she spoke, her voice didn’t belong to her either.

“We miss you, sweetheart,” she said, her voice warm and soft, filled with so much love it hurt. “We love you.”

It was a woman’s voice this time. Maternal in the way real mothers actually sound when they’re trying not to cry.

Ivy’s breath hitched. Her fingers gripped the foam of her walker tray so hard she couldn’t feel them anymore.

Maria turned to Sarah, as if nothing strange had just happened, and asked, “You think that’s what it’s trying to say?”

Just like that, her voice was back to normal.

Sarah shrugged and made a face. “Hell if I know. I know as much as you do.”

Her voice was hers, too.

Ivy backed away. Her eyes flicked from one girl to the other, searching for… anything. A wink. A crack. A smile that said they were teasing her. But there was nothing.

“You okay, Ivy?” Sarah asked, her head tilting slightly.

Ivy rubbed at her eyes with her mittens, the gesture clumsy and ineffectual. Her voice felt brittle as she forced it through her teeth.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I think the trials are just… getting to me. I’m seeing and hearing shit now.”

She didn’t believe it, but she needed to. Because the alternative, was too much to make sense of.

Maria leaned back in her walker, one brow raised. “You sure? Because that kind of ‘hearing shit’ sounds like some next-level trial twist.”

“Yeah,” Sarah added, lips twitching into a smile. “Or maybe Mistress decided we need ghosts now. You know, to really drive the theme home.”

But Ivy couldn’t laugh.

Because ghosts didn’t call you baby girl in your mother’s voice, ghosts didn’t leave notes in crayons that dissolved in your hands. And ghosts didn’t slip messages into the mouths of your friends and then vanish without a trace.

“Ivy, please, push through it.” Finn’s voice floated from behind her, almost gentle, almost pleading, and for an instant it didn’t sound entirely like him.

She jerked in her walker, a sharp yelp tearing free before she could help herself. The wheels skidded awkwardly on the floor, and she spun to face him, chest heaving.

Finn stepped back so quickly his walker thunked against the wall. His hands went up in mock surrender, eyes wide and honest. “What the hell, Ivy?”

“What the hell me?” Her retort came out raw, tinged with confusion and accusation in equal measure. “What the hell you? What was that? What are you even trying to say?”

He blinked at her. “What? I was literally just standing here, Ivy.”

Maria rolled closer, her expression caught between concern and exhaustion. “He was, Ivy. Seriously. Girl, you've got to get some sleep or ask for whatever passes for a break in this place.”

A thread of panic unspooled inside Ivy, quick and hot. She opened her mouth to fire back, but Sarah spoke before she could, her tone shifting so suddenly it made Ivy’s skin crawl. “Please, Ivy, we miss you.” The words were velvet and weighted, aching with a maternal warmth that didn’t belong in this place. Sarah’s eyes flickered, her mouth twisting as if she tasted something strange, and her voice pitched up again, perfectly ordinary. “Seriously, though, something is off with you.”

“Off with me?!” Ivy’s mind scrambled to keep up, dread clawing at the back of her throat. She looked at each of them, their faces all a little too still, a little too perfect, each a mask she suddenly didn’t recognize.

“What’s wrong with you all?” Her voice rang too loud, too desperate in the sterile room. Her hands shook on the walker tray. She could see her reflection in the glossy white finish: flushed cheeks, wild eyes, hair falling messily around her collar.

No one answered, they just stared.

Without another word, Ivy spun on her heel and strode for the door, her walker bumping hard over the lip of the threshold. She had to move, had to put walls between herself and those impossible voices, before they twisted her thoughts any further.

As soon as Ivy left however, the door behind her hissed shut, sealing off her retreat with a sound that cracked like a judge’s gavel. She froze, one hand still on the edge of her walker, breath held, spine tight. But the hallway wasn’t a hallway anymore.

It had become a room, and not just any room.

Her feet stopped moving, though she hadn’t consciously told them to. Her eyes flicked left, right, then froze again. Her mind reeled back on itself, trying to process what it was seeing, trying to rewrite the image as illusion or coincidence, some elaborate stage piece designed to rattle her. But the longer she stood there, the more impossible that explanation became.

She was standing in her childhood nursery.

Not a mock-up nor an approximation. A replication so precise it bordered on violation. The walls were painted the exact shade of soft green that had once calmed her to sleep. The baseboards were still slightly chipped near the closet where she used to bang her toy xylophone. The rocking chair in the corner, gently swaying on its own, had the same fabric tear along the armrest, right where she’d once clumsily cut it with safety scissors in a failed attempt to make doll clothes.

Even the toy chest bore the same jagged scratch down the side where her cousin had pushed it too hard during a tantrum. She hadn’t seen that scar in over a decade, but the moment her eyes landed on it, the memory surged to the surface like an echo through time.

A sharp hiss broke the quiet, and she let out a startled yelp as mechanical arms appeared from the ceiling, grabbing her sides. But they didn’t force her into restraints or drag her to some playpen cell. They simply lifted her and set her carefully on her feet in the center of the room. Her walker was gone before she could even glance back at it and the arms disappeared into the ceiling.

And then came the voice.

“Welcome to Trial Nine,” Mistress said, her cheer crackling through the overhead speakers like a razor slicing through gauze. “Good luck, Ivy!”