The car was already an oven by noon.
Its black interior had turned glossy with heat, the plastic dashboard so hot it could burn skin. The windows, rolled up tight, shimmered under the sunlight like sheets of warped glass. In the far corner of the parking lot behind the University Mall in Burlington, Vermont, the car sat angled into a patch of gravel, partially hidden behind a dumpster and a dying bush.
No one walked this far out. No one parked back here unless they had something to hide.
Inside the car, a small girl was dying.
Her name was Lili, though no one at the hospital would know it. No one in the school system. She'd never been registered anywhere. Her birth had been messy, undocumented, and inconvenient. Her mother didn't like children, especially not beautiful ones that looked nothing like her.
But Lili was beautiful—too beautiful. Long, pale blonde hair matted with sweat, lips cracked and dry, face flushed with the slow crawl of heatstroke. Her blue eyes stared unfocused at the back of the seat in front of her. She didn't cry. She'd already learned not to.
Her mother had told her to stay still and shut up. Just for a bit. Just while they ran in to get food and a few things for a friend. A few things had always meant alcohol, batteries, and electronics—small stuff, easy to pocket. Lili knew the routine.
She also knew not to cry, not to scream, not to move.
Crying never got her anything but a slap. Screaming got her ignored. And moving? Moving just meant being seen—something her mother hated more than anything else.
So Lili sat still. Even as the sweat rolled down her spine. Even as the seatbelt dug into her collarbone. Even as her head lolled slightly to one side.
Even as her breath slowed.
Inside her chest, her heart fluttered—slowing, thinning, fading. The oxygen was gone. The car's interior had reached nearly 120 degrees. Lili's small, underfed body, already fragile from years of poor nutrition, began to shut down.
She didn't know the words for what was happening. She just knew it felt like floating. Like sinking into the seat. Like being wrapped in a blanket that got tighter and tighter.
Her last thoughts weren't words, but a feeling.
I was good. I didn't steal. I didn't scream.
Why doesn't that matter?
Then there was nothing.
---
> Later, they wouldn't find her.
Later, they wouldn't even remember to look.
The police report wouldn't mention a daughter.
No one would notice that a small, pretty girl had died quietly in the back of a car in a forgotten corner of a sun-baked parking lot.
> Because Lili had always been forgotten.
Until someone else—someone far older, far angrier, and far more broken—opened his eyes in her place.
Darkness.
Not the kind that comes with sleep, or pain, or even death. This was emptiness. Weightless. Soundless. Cold in a way that wasn't temperature—just… nothing.
Then something flickered.
Not light. Not memory. Just a presence. A pulse. A question.
Bruce didn't answer it. He didn't have time.
He was slammed back into the world like someone thrown into cold water.
He gasped.
The air that hit his lungs was thick, scalding hot, and laced with plastic and old cigarettes. It clawed at his throat as he coughed, eyes flying open.
Everything felt wrong.
He tried to sit up, but his head hit something—hard. His arms flailed, small, thin, and caught by something across his chest. A strap. A seatbelt.
He blinked hard, trying to clear the blur from his vision.
He was in a car.
A boiling hot car.
His skin was slick with sweat, his legs sticking to the vinyl seat. He reached up to rub his face—and froze.
His hands.
Tiny. Soft. Pale.
Not his.
Not Bruce Steele's.
Panic flooded in. He scrambled, twisting in the seatbelt, breath coming fast and shallow. His voice escaped in a hoarse, high-pitched rasp.
> "What the—what the hell—"
He stopped again. That voice.
It wasn't a man's voice. It wasn't his voice.
He looked down at himself, and his stomach flipped.
A pink, sun-bleached dress clung to a small frame soaked with sweat. Stick-thin arms. Legs like twigs. The body of a little girl.
A tremor passed through him—not from the heat, but something deeper. Existential. Impossible.
> "This is a dream. It has to be. It's a coma. I'm still in the mansion. The fire—Frank—"
Frank.
The name cut through the haze.
He remembered the fire. The raid. The explosion. The moment of peace right before death.
And then this.
Not heaven. Not hell. Just a car. A seatbelt. A girl's body.
And a hammer.
His eyes locked onto the passenger-side floor. There, half-hidden under a dirty grocery receipt, was a small, rusted hammer. The kind kept under a seat for emergencies—or smashing windows.
He didn't hesitate.
The buckle wouldn't release—it was melted, warped. He pulled at it, snarling, twisting his new small fingers against the plastic latch until it finally popped open. He fell sideways onto the floor and grabbed the hammer.
The metal burned his palm, but he didn't care. He twisted himself around and smashed it into the side window.
Crack.
The glass held.
He hit it again, harder.
CRACK.
Spiderwebs. A hiss of air.
One more time, and the window burst outward, scattering into the parking lot in dull, shimmering shards.
Hot air rushed in. Not much cooler than inside, but moving. Alive.
Bruce squeezed himself through the opening, his hip catching on the door frame. He collapsed onto the pavement, gasping, the heat of the asphalt burning through the thin fabric on his knees.
He lay there panting for a long time, one cheek pressed to the ground, hammer still clutched in one trembling hand.
He looked up.
Across the edge of the parking lot, past the crumbling curb and dead bushes, he saw it.
A mountain.
Its silhouette was jagged, beautiful. Familiar.
Bruce's stomach turned with recognition.
> "Mount Mansfield..."
It didn't make sense. But he knew it. Like you know your own name.
He wasn't just in a little girl's body.
He was back in Vermont.
Back home.
But wrong. So wrong. The cars were old. The signs. The silence. The feel of the air. The smell.
> "What year is this…?"
There was no way to be sure yet. But the thought was already coalescing like thunderclouds in the back of his mind.
He was a six-year-old girl. In Vermont. In the past.
And Frank was out there.
Somewhere.
Alive?
He didn't know.
But he had to find out.
He pushed himself up, legs shaking under him. His knees were raw, blood streaking down his shin. The hammer hung in his grip like a talisman. The sky above was blinding, but it didn't matter.
He turned toward the mountain.
> "I need to find Frank. I need to know."
The heat didn't let up.
Even outside the car, the air pressed in like a heavy wool blanket soaked in oil. The sun hung in the sky like a white coin, bleaching the landscape in pale yellow and making every breath feel thick.
Bruce—no, Lili—staggered across the empty back lot of the University Mall, her sandals broken and slipping with every step. Her legs, stick-thin and bruised, trembled with the weight of her own body. She wasn't used to being this small, this weak.
She had to stop every twenty feet just to breathe.
But she didn't stop looking at the mountain.
It loomed in the distance—Mount Mansfield, the jagged spine of Vermont's highest point. It stretched across the horizon like the back of a sleeping god, cloaked in trees and silence.
Bruce stared at it as if it might vanish if he blinked.
He remembered it.
The feel of cold wind rushing down its slopes. The sting of ice against skin. The taste of pine in the air during autumn. He'd grown up in its shadow.
> "I know that ridge."
> "I used to hike up that trail."
> "That's where Frank took me after the academy. Said we needed to see the world before it killed us."
But everything was off.
The roads were too narrow. The cars in the lot looked like antiques. There were no phones. No billboards for streaming services. Everything smelled like a world that didn't know what tomorrow looked like.
> "I'm not just in the wrong body…"
> "I'm in the wrong time."
---
She dropped to one knee, dizzy. Her lungs couldn't pull enough air in fast enough, and her stomach was empty enough to fold in on itself.
But she kept her eyes on the mountain.
Somewhere—up there, on the western slope—was where it all ended. The mansion. The raid. The explosion.
Frank.
She had no proof. No map. No plan. But the thought took root in her chest like fire in dry grass.
> "He might be alive. He might be here. If I got pulled back…"
The words wouldn't finish in her head, but the emotion did.
Hope.
Faint, stupid, impossible hope.
---
She pulled herself upright again, gripping the hammer like a crutch.
Her dress was soaked in sweat, dirt streaked up her legs, and her lips had started to crack from thirst. But she began to walk—one foot in front of the other, across the empty gravel, into the woods at the edge of the mall lot.
No one stopped her.
No one noticed.
To them, she was nothing. A dirty girl in rags, probably a vagrant, probably someone else's problem.
But to her, the world had just narrowed down to one goal.
Reach the mountain.
Climb.
See what's left.
Because maybe—just maybe—Frank was up there.
And if he was, she'd find him.
Or die trying.
The woods swallowed her quickly.
One moment she was walking along cracked pavement behind the mall, the next she was pushing her way through a wall of pine needles and mosquito-heavy underbrush. The trees thickened fast, tall sugar maples and firs arching above her like watching sentries.
No trail.
No shoes.
No plan.
Just one word in her head, over and over again:
Frank.
---
The world beyond the trees faded away—the traffic, the distant hum of voices, the overheated city air. In the forest, it was all dirt and bark and birdsong. Sunlight cut through the canopy in shafts of gold, but even those couldn't disguise the oppressive humidity. Her lungs worked overtime. Her bare feet were already bleeding.
The hammer, still clutched in her hand, was a burden now. But she wouldn't drop it. She couldn't. It was the only thing she'd touched from her old life—something real in this soft, alien body.
---
At some point, the hunger arrived.
It didn't grow—it slammed into her like a punch in the gut. She hadn't eaten since... whenever this body died. And Bruce had never experienced hunger like this before, not truly. Not as something physical. Not as something that made your fingers tremble and your knees buckle and your mind fray.
She stopped at a stream trickling through moss and rocks, and dropped beside it, panting like an animal. Her small hands shook as she leaned forward and drank straight from the water.
It tasted like cold iron and dirt.
It was the best thing she'd ever tasted.
---
She moved again after that. Slower. More deliberate.
She found a flattened raccoon carcass along the roadside and vomited at the smell. But she still checked it—out of instinct. What if it had meat? What if it was usable?
It wasn't.
That shamed her more than anything else.
> "I've lived through cartel raids and meth house shootouts… and I'm checking roadkill for protein."
She tried not to cry. She failed.
---
Later, she found wild blackberries, the kind Bruce would've never picked as a cop for fear of parasites. But now she ate them by the fistful, thorns tearing her already-scarred fingers. The juice stained her chin and chest. She didn't care.
A few hours after that, she found the logging trail—an old one, mostly covered in leaves, but just walkable enough. The kind of road that hadn't seen trucks in decades. It led upward, curving along the western face of Mount Mansfield.
That was where the mansion had been.
In another life. In another year.
Before they burned.
Before he died.
Before she was this.
---
Her legs gave out sometime in the late afternoon, and she crawled on hands and knees the rest of the way. Her fingers were raw. Her dress was torn up the side. The hammer, still hanging from her belt by a scrap of her own dress, thudded against her thigh with each step.
She didn't stop. She couldn't.
And finally, as the sun began to sink behind the trees, she saw it:
Old foundations. Rusted beams. The skeleton of something that once was human industry.
A logging site.
Collapsed shacks. A twisted water tank. Steel railings overgrown with weeds. No mansion. No answers. No Frank.
Just rot and wood and ruin.
---
Lili collapsed into the husk of a storage shed, crawled into a pile of dead leaves, and stared out through a cracked wall toward the mountain that had once held her future.
Now it just held silence.
---
The abandoned logging site was a skeleton—bare bones of something that once breathed work and fire and noise.
Now it was only rot and silence.
Broken logs lay where they'd been dropped decades ago. Their bark had sloughed off, revealing bleached wood, worm-eaten and soft. A rusted saw blade hung crooked from a pole, half-swallowed by the tree it had been nailed to. Rails, once used to carry timber down the slope, had been overtaken by moss and soil, like veins buried in a dead body.
Lili moved through it like a ghost. She didn't cry anymore. Not because she wasn't sad—but because the sadness had dried up, like the water in her eyes.
---
She found a collapsed storage shed tucked between two mossy boulders.
The roof had partially caved in, but there was still enough shelter from the wind. One side of it faced the slope, giving her a narrow, high view of the valley below—trees stretching out toward the horizon, the hint of a distant town beyond.
She dragged herself inside and curled up in the corner, her back against the cold stone wall. Her legs trembled. Her stomach was a pit.
She laid the hammer beside her like a sword.
It was all she had.
---
The sky turned orange, then purple.
Then black.
The forest came alive with sounds—branches creaking, insects humming, distant owls calling. Every sound made her flinch. Her breath came in slow, shallow gasps, her ears straining for movement.
But nothing came.
Nothing ever came for her.
---
She looked at her hands in the moonlight.
So small. So pale. So weak.
She remembered wrapping these hands around a pistol grip. Disarming a man twice her size. Pulling Frank out of a burning building.
Now?
They could barely hold a stick.
---
The wind howled through the gap in the boards, and for a moment, she swore she heard something—a voice, maybe. Deep and calm and familiar.
> "You always charge in too fast, Steele."
Her eyes widened.
She knew that voice.
But when she sat up, the wind was gone.
Just her imagination.
> "No. Not imagination."
> "A memory."
Frank was still out there. Maybe.
If the world had brought her back… then maybe him too.
---
She didn't sleep that night. Not really.
She dozed, startled awake. Dozed again. Her dreams were flashes—of fire, of steel, of gunfire and screams.
She awoke just before dawn.
The sky was pale, the air sharp with mountain cold. She drank from a puddle at the base of the shed, gnawed on a strip of bark, and looked out toward the east.
The mansion wasn't here.
There was no sign of it ever being here.
But she remembered this slope. The curve of the ridge. The shape of the trail.
And down there, across that valley—that's where the Redfield estate stood.
She didn't know them. But she remembered what Frank once said.
> "If I had a family, a real one, I'd build a house up there. Right by the treeline. Away from everything."
If he was anywhere in this world now, it was there.
---
She picked up the hammer.
Her body groaned in protest. Her feet were cracked and bloodied. Her arms ached with every breath.
But she moved.
Because if there was even a chance—even one percent of one percent—that Frank was alive, that he'd been brought back too...
She had to find him.
The wind was sharper now. Colder.
It whispered through the trees like something alive, brushing past Lili's torn dress and tangled hair. She stood at the edge of the logging camp, her bruised feet sinking into soft moss and damp needles. The first light of morning crept over the eastern ridge, casting the forest in pale gold.
Down there—beneath the mountain's shadow—was the only place left to go.
The estate.
The one built where Frank said he'd one day raise a family.
The one that now bore a name she didn't recognize: Redfield.
---
The descent was harder than the climb.
Her legs were stiff. Her knees trembled with each step. But the thought of going back didn't even occur to her.
She used the hammer as a crutch, planting it with each footfall to keep from slipping on the damp leaves. The trail, if it could still be called that, narrowed as it snaked down the slope, overgrown with thickets and tangled roots.
Once, she slipped and fell—her foot catching on a rock. She tumbled forward, landing hard against a tree trunk. The impact stole the air from her lungs. Her vision swam.
But she got up.
She always got up.
---
Midday came and went. The sun rose high, and the heat returned—but not the blinding, brutal heat of the parking lot. This heat was humid, sticky. The air clung to her skin like wet cloth.
She stopped only once to drink from a creek and eat a handful of green berries she couldn't name.
They tasted bitter, but they didn't kill her.
The Light Core pulsed gently in her chest—just enough to keep her from collapsing. Just enough to keep her moving.
By the time the sun dipped below the ridgeline again, painting the forest in orange and shadow, she saw it.
---
The mansion.
It wasn't the one she remembered from the raid in 2026. That had been newer, colder. Built for men who liked the smell of power and concrete.
This one was older—stone and timber, sprawling and elegant. A wide wraparound porch. Ivy-covered walls. Massive windows with glowing lights inside. A carved wooden sign at the road's edge read:
> Redfield Estate
Lili's breath caught.
She crouched in the underbrush across the road, barely breathing.
It wasn't Frank's house. She knew that.
But something inside her—some instinct, some echo—told her this was where he would be.
And if not now… then someday.
---
She waited until deep night.
The moon had climbed high. The forest was alive with crickets and rustling leaves. A dog barked in the distance, then went quiet.
When she was sure no one was looking, she crept across the gravel drive, hammer clutched in one hand, the other holding the rags of her dress tight against her chest.
She reached the front steps. Wood—old but polished. Clean. They felt wrong under her feet. Too warm. Too soft.
She raised her hand.
Hesitated.
Then knocked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Soft.
Too soft, maybe. But she couldn't bring herself to knock harder.
A light flicked on inside.
Heavy footsteps.
She stepped back, heart racing. Her knees wobbled.
The door opened fast and hard with a crack of wood against frame.
And there he stood.
---
Not Frank.
A stranger. A tall man with graying temples, still in his shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up and his eyes blazing with irritation. He smelled like aftershave and liquor.
> "Who the hell—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
His eyes scanned her—wild blonde hair, bruised limbs, dirt-smudged face, rags hanging off a body too thin to be healthy.
And then the disgust crept in.
> "You've got some nerve knocking on my door, girl. What are you, a runaway? A beggar?"
She opened her mouth.
No sound came out.
Her voice was stuck somewhere behind her ribs.
> "Well? You mute now?" He leaned forward, face twisted with contempt. "Get off my damn porch."
She still couldn't speak. The look in his eyes wasn't just anger—it was rejection. Again. Like the parking lot. Like her mother. Like everyone.
> "You think I'm gonna let another stray into my house?" he snarled. "Already took in one. That's enough."
> "Now get the hell off my property—"
She flinched back as he raised his foot.
And then—
The kick.
Hard.
Sudden.
She flew back, weightless for a second, then crashed onto the gravel. Her elbow struck a stone. Her side exploded with pain. The hammer clattered beside her.
She didn't cry out.
Not even once.
The door slammed shut.
And she was alone again.
The door had slammed shut behind her.
The world had gone so silent now.
Lili lay crumpled on the gravel, one arm twisted awkwardly beneath her, her legs drawn in instinctively like an injured animal. Her elbow was bleeding, scraped raw. Her ribs throbbed with every shallow breath. She could still feel the man's boot against her side—its echo burned into her bones.
The porch light above flickered once, then went out.
She didn't move.
Not right away.
There was no reason to.
---
She'd come so far.
She had crossed mountains, bled, starved, survived the collapse of two lives—and this was what waited for her at the end of it. A boot. A door. A man who didn't even ask her name.
Not Frank.
Just another stranger.
Another rejection.
She could still hear his voice in her head, like oil on water:
> "Already took in one."
One.
Chad.
That meant he was here. In that house. Living under the roof she'd once been willing to die under.
So close.
And yet unreachable.
---
She pushed herself up slowly, every muscle protesting. The hammer lay a few feet away, and she crawled over to it, cradling it in her arms like a doll. Her fingers clenched around the handle so tightly her knuckles turned white.
Then, with shaking limbs, she pulled herself behind a bush near the porch, where the light didn't reach. Where no one could see her if they bothered to look.
She curled in on herself. Pulled her knees to her chest. Closed her eyes.
She didn't sleep.
Not really.
---
Inside the house, the Redfield patriarch returned to his study, muttering curses under his breath. He poured another glass of scotch, sat down heavily, and flipped on the television, trying to forget the girl's eyes.
He wouldn't remember them later.
But someone else would.
---
Upstairs, in the far end of the house, a young boy stirred in bed.
Chad sat upright in the dark, eyes wide, breathing uneven. His heart was pounding for no reason he could name.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, walking to the window.
He looked out across the lawn.
Nothing.
Just trees. Gravel. The faint outline of a porch.
But something… felt wrong.
Familiar.
Like a scent he couldn't place. Like a dream he couldn't remember.
Déjà vu curled in his gut.
> "Weird," he muttered, and turned from the window.
He went back to bed.
But sleep wouldn't come.
And outside, hidden behind the shrubs, Lili lay awake—watching the house, eyes unblinking, heart broken.