Turn 12 of 13

Open the second email now, with Rae watching

You hand Rae the phone. She takes it, looks at you, and taps the unopened email.

The sender line is the same — the course address, the clean institutional formatting — but there's no subject, no greeting, no body text. Just a single line of text, centered on the screen like a line of verse, or like a sentence read aloud slowly into a microphone:

*You asked someone to hold your key. That was good. You'll find it easier now.*

Rae reads it. Reads it again. Her thumb hovers over the screen and she doesn't scroll, because there is nothing to scroll to. That's the whole email. One line. No signature, no module number, no attachment. The timestamp is 2:21 AM — eleven minutes into the time you lost.

"That's during your trance," Rae says. Her voice is flat. Not angry. Flat the way a surface is flat before it breaks.

"You were under and this was sent to you."

"I wasn't under. I was — I don't know what I was. I was writing forum posts that said the wrong number. I was moving mirrors. I don't know what I was doing at 2:21."

Rae sets the phone face-down on the arm of the chair. She stands up, walks to the kitchen, and turns the kettle off. It's already off. She turns the switch down anyway, presses it, presses it again, and you watch her hands and you understand what she's doing. She's checking something physical. Something with a switch she can control.

"It knows you gave me the key," she says, not turning around. "It knows that, Sam. How does it know that?"

You don't answer. You don't have an answer. The email was sent during the window you lost, before you came to Rae's door, before you asked her to keep the key — but it references the key as though the asking had already happened. As though the course knew what you would do before you did it. Or as though you were still under when you came downstairs, still following a script, and the asking wasn't yours at all.

Rae comes back. She sits on the edge of the armchair, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, and she looks at you the way she looked at the kettle — like something she needs to check before she trusts it.

"You said your words are coming out straight. Right now. In here."

"Yes."

"Then tell me exactly what's in the recordings that isn't in the transcripts. Say it plainly. I'm listening."

You feel it rise — the explanation, the full shape of it, the specific description of what the extra sentences sound like and where they sit in the audio. You feel it reach your mouth. And you feel it bend.