Turn 3 of 11

Close the panel and help with the bread, buy yourself time to think

You close the panel with a thought — not a click, not a gesture, just the intention of a door shutting — and the history log collapses back into the thin air it came from. Your hands are shaking. You shove them into the pockets of your jeans and take a breath that smells like cardamom and warm bread, and by the time Tamsin turns around with the loaf on a wire rack, you have rearranged your face into something that passes for fine.

"Let me get that," you say, and reach past her for the tea towel. She gives you a look — one of her looks, the kind that starts at your eyes and ends at your hands — but she hands it over and steps back to lean against the counter. You wrap the loaf the way she taught you, cloth folded over the crown to keep the crust soft, and the mundane rhythm of it steadies you. Your fingers know what to do even when your head doesn't.

The identifier fragments are already blurring at the edges of your memory. Six characters. You caught two letters and a number before the panel closed — something like an H, a 7, and maybe a K — but they're not fixed in your mind the way you need them to be. You should have written them down. You should have taken a screenshot, except there's nothing to screenshot. The panel exists only in the space between you and whatever this thing is that woke up in your head on a Tuesday morning.

Tamsin watches you fuss with the bread for longer than the bread deserves.

"You've been weird since you got back from Edinburgh," she says, and her voice has shifted — still sharp, but with tired underneath it now, the way a blade sits in a sheath. "Not weird-bad. Just — present, somehow. Like you're paying attention to something I can't see."

She's right. She's more right than she knows. You fold the cloth over the loaf and set your hands flat on the counter, feeling the cool of the tile through your palms, and you try to decide what you can say that isn't a lie but isn't the truth either. The bread steams gently under its cloth. Outside, a siren passes on the street below and fades into the ordinary traffic of a city that doesn't know it's full of floating tags.