The first thing I knew was the room. White walls, white bedding, a pale wood floor that was impossibly clean. A wall of glass looked out onto a sea of furious green, trees bleeding into one another under a sheet of silver rain. The air was sterile, cold, smelling of lavender and old paper. It was too clean. I hate the smell of wet pine, the cloying rot that pretends it’s life. This room was a sterile box designed to keep that smell out, and for that, I was almost grateful.
Almost.
The door was closed. A simple, solid white door with a silver handle. My breath caught. My fingers dug into the silk of the duvet. It wasn't locked—I didn't have to know, I could just feel it—but it was closed. The four white walls pressed in, the ceiling lowered by an inch, the air thinning. Stupid. It was a perfectly large room. Luxurious, even. But the irrational panic was a snake coiling in my gut. I had to get out. I always had to get out.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. I was wearing a simple grey tunic and matching trousers, soft as a sigh. My own clothes? I had no idea. I had no idea of anything before the white room. My name was a single, stubborn stone in a river of amnesia. Lunox. It felt right. It felt like the only thing that was mine.
A man entered without knocking, and the snake in my gut loosened its coil as the door swung open. He was beautiful, of course. Golden-eyed, blond hair swept back from a face that was all compassionate lines and impossible youth. He looked like a doctor from a recruitment poster.
“I’m Carlisle,” he said, his voice a low, soothing melody. “You’re safe here.”
Safe. The word hung in the air, a lie so polite it was almost believable. Nobody who says you’re safe means it. They mean *they* are safe from *you*.
“Where is ‘here’?” My own voice was rusty, unused.
“My home. Near Forks, Washington.” He moved closer, but stopped a respectful distance away. He was watching my hands. I glanced down. They were resting on the bedside table, a modern piece of dark, polished wood. “You’ve been… unwell.”
“Unwell,” I repeated. It wasn’t a question. I remembered a feeling. A chaotic, tearing sensation, like being ripped apart and stitched back together all at once. Pain that wasn’t pain. And a deep, resonant hum. “What am I?”
Carlisle’s composure was flawless. He didn’t blink. “You’re like us. My family and me.” He didn’t say the word. Vampire. He didn’t have to. The stillness of him, the predatory grace under the physician’s calm, the faint, sweet scent that clung to the air around him—it was all the answer I needed. The coldness of my own skin was the confirmation.
But there was something else. A vibration under my own skin, a low-level thrum of energy that felt like two notes playing in disharmony. I focused on it, on the memory of the tearing. My right hand, still resting on the table, felt… thin. Less real. I pushed, just a little, not with muscle but with will.
My fingers sank into the wood.
There was no sound, no displacement of matter. They just… passed through the dark, solid surface as if it were smoke. The wood felt like nothing, a cold suggestion of form against my incorporeal skin. I pulled back. My hand was whole, the table unmarked.
Carlisle’s golden eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “We’ve never seen a gift quite like that.”
My gift. So this was my addition to the menagerie. I could make myself into a ghost. Handy.
“What do you want with me?” I asked, flexing my fingers. They felt normal again. Solid.
Before Carlisle could answer, another appeared in the doorway. This one was younger, his bronze hair a chaotic mess, his face a study in sculpted fury. He was tense, a wire pulled taut, and his gaze fixed on me with an unnerving intensity. He looked from me to Carlisle, a question in his eyes that was pure frustration.
“Nothing,” Carlisle said quietly, answering the silent query. “I can’t hear her, either, Edward.”
Edward’s eyes snapped back to me. The raw animosity in them was a physical force. “What are you?” he demanded, his voice a low growl. It wasn’t the curious question Carlisle had fielded. It was an accusation.
My chin lifted. I would not be treated like a stray dog with a strange disease. “My name is Lunox,” I said, my voice cold and clear. “What I *am* is your prisoner.”
“You are our guest,” Carlisle corrected gently, but his eyes were on Edward, a silent warning.
“A guest who could phase through the walls and be gone,” Edward countered, taking a step into the room. “A guest who could walk into our weakest moment and…” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The thirst. It was the undercurrent to everything.
“I have no memory of anything before this room,” I stated flatly. A gamble. But the truth, as far as I knew it. “If I am a threat, it is one I am unaware of.”
Edward scoffed, a bitter, ugly sound. “Amnesia. How convenient.” He looked at my hand, then back at the table it had passed through. The disgust on his face was potent. He saw my power not as a marvel, but as a perversion. A glitch in the reality he understood. “She is a disruption. A variable we cannot account for.”
“She was found near what the nomads described as a tear in the world, Edward,” Carlisle said, his tone dropping, becoming serious in a way that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with something larger. He was not just humoring his son; he was reminding him of a fact he would rather ignore. He withheld the rest. Where, exactly? What nomads? What did a 'tear in the world' even look like? The questions piled up, unanswered.
A tear in the world. The phrase resonated with the tearing sensation in my memory. The hum.
“All the more reason she cannot be trusted,” Edward insisted. He took another step, his golden eyes burning with suspicion. He was trying to get a read on me, to find a flicker of duplicity, but my mind was a closed book to him, and it was making him furious. He was a creature used to holding all the cards, and I had just shown him a hand he couldn’t even see.
I stood up. The move was sudden, and both of them tensed. I was shorter than them, slighter, but I would not be interrogated lying down. I walked to the glass wall, turning my back on them both. The rain had eased to a persistent drizzle. The forest was a wall of oppressive, dripping green. I hated it. It felt like it was watching me.
“I don’t want to be here,” I said, my voice low. “I don’t care about your family or your problems. I just want to leave.”
“I don’t think you can,” Carlisle said, his voice laced with something that might have been pity. “What you are… it is not stable. The energy you use… it has a cost.”
I felt a sudden, profound exhaustion, a weariness that sank into my bones. Not physical tiredness, but a deep, metaphysical fatigue. The single act of phasing my hand had drained something vital from me.
Edward was silent behind me. The weight of his stare was heavier than the closed door had been.
“You’ll stay in this room,” Carlisle said, his tone shifting back to the calm physician. It wasn’t a request. “Rest. We will talk more later.”
He left, and the soft click of the door closing behind him should have sent the snake of panic coiling again. But this time, he’d left it ajar. A single inch of open air. A concession. Or perhaps a calculated move to placate the feral thing they’d caged. Edward remained for a moment longer, a silent, burning statue of condemnation, and then he, too, was gone.
Alone again. The white room was no longer a prison cell, but an observation chamber. I was a specimen. A beautiful, dangerous, unknown quantity. I stared out at the endless, hated trees, the grey sky pressing down like a lid. The open door didn't matter. I was trapped. Not by the walls, but by the cold, still shell of this body, and the gaping, starless void where my past was supposed to be.