Chapter 2: Miya

"Shyla."

She didn't wake up so much as arrive. One moment gone, the next simply there, sitting upright in a dark she didn't recognize with her heart doing something fast and her hair doing something terrible.

She rubbed her eyes. Looked around.

Nope.

Definitely not her room.

Her room had the smell of her blanket, which was the best smell in the world and which she had decided long ago she would keep forever. Her room had the orange glow under the door when the hallway light was on, and the creak of the third floorboard that always told her Grandpa was coming before he even knocked. Her room was hers, completely and in every way, and this place was none of those things.

This place was dark. Not the ordinary kind, not the comfortable dark of nighttime and curtains. This was a different sort of dark entirely, the kind with weight to it, the kind that sits. And at the edges of it, far away and patient, a red. Not bright. Not angry. Just there. Slow and deep, like something that had been burning for a very long time and had stopped being in a hurry about it.

Shyla turned in a slow circle.

Then she saw it.

It was sitting very still a little way ahead of her, watching her with eyes so large she could see herself in them. Round and wide and catching the red light from nowhere obvious. Its fur was dark and dense, the kind you want to push your whole face into. Tall pointed ears rose from the top of its head, wolf-sharp, swivelling toward her with slow and deliberate attention.

It looked, Shyla decided after approximately two seconds of very serious evaluation, like an extremely large dog that had been designed by someone working from a description.

She had no fear of dogs.

"Bigg Doggy!" she announced, and took a step forward.

The creature blinked its enormous eyes.

"Shyla," it said.

Shyla stopped.

Her mouth fell open. She stared. Then she raised one small finger and pointed it directly at the creature's face with the energy of someone who has just caught someone doing something.

"You can talk," she said.

Not a question. A verdict.

"I can," it said. Its voice was low and even, unhurried, and underneath it, barely there, a current. Something pressing. Something with somewhere to be. "My name is Miya. And I am your friend."

Shyla tilted her head and considered this.

Then considered it some more.

Friend was a word she knew well. Friend was Popo from next door, who had a red ribbon and shared her biscuits. Friend was not dark places and ancient watching eyes and fur you had never seen on anything before. She turned the word over carefully.

"No," she said.

Miya blinked. "No?"

"Grandpa says I mustn't talk to strangers." She said it the way she said most important things, simply, clearly, with the calm confidence of someone who has thought it through and is not interested in a debate.

A silence settled between them.

The red at the edges of the dark seemed to deepen, just barely, as though it too were waiting to see how this went.

Miya lowered its great head slowly. Not quickly, not sharply. The way something very old bows when it has decided to mean it.

"I understand," it said.

But the current beneath its voice was stronger now, the pressing thing pulling at the edges of every word like a tide coming in.

"But I am not a stranger, Shyla."

"You are," she said immediately. "I've never seen you before in my life." She considered. "Except maybe in a dream. But that's different."

"This is a dream," Miya said.

Shyla frowned. "Then it doesn't count."

Miya paused. As though it had not prepared for this particular line of argument.

"That is," it began.

"And anyway," Shyla continued, with the momentum of someone who has just discovered they are winning, "you still have a name I didn't know before and a face I didn't know before and that means you're a stranger. Grandpa said specifically."

The enormous eyes regarded her.

"You are," Miya said at last, very quietly, "exactly as he said you would be."

Shyla opened her mouth. Closed it.

That landed differently.

"He?" she said. Slower now. "Who's he?"

Miya did not answer that. Instead it shifted, barely, carefully, one small degree closer, and when it spoke again the lightness was gone from its voice and the current underneath had risen to the surface, clean and cold and real.

"I know this is strange," it said. "I know you don't know me. But I know you, Shyla. I have always known you. And there is something I need you to hear before..."

"Shy."

The voice came from everywhere and from nowhere.

Warm. Certain. His.

Grandpa.

The dark shuddered. Not visibly, not with noise, but somewhere under itself, the way a floor shivers when something very heavy moves beneath it.

Miya's head snapped up.

"No." The word escaped before it could stop it. Small, raw, real, and in the moment after it, just one fraction of a second, the patience in those enormous eyes cracked. And what lived underneath was not patience at all. It was urgency. It was something that had been waiting a very long time for this exact moment and was now watching it slip away.

Shyla had already turned toward Grandpa's voice, the way she always turned toward it, without deciding, without being asked.

"Shyla, listen to me..."

But the dark had already made up its mind.

It folded, quietly, completely, the way a story folds itself closed, and took the red light with it, and the ancient eyes, and the voice that knew her name.

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