Seventeen-year-old Lena heads out to school and finds her apartment block behaving like it knows her.
Lena had already decided Monday was going to be bad before she reached the front door, but the stairwell was determined to make it stranger. On the third floor, the air smelled faintly of vanilla. One landing down, it shifted to old paper, dry and dusty, as if someone had just opened a library no one used anymore. By the time she reached the second floor, a sharp scent like ozone pricked the back of her throat.
She slowed, one hand in her pocket for her phone. She meant to text Nina a complaint about her day before it even started. The screen flashed once, violet and bright, then went black.
"Seriously?" Lena muttered, giving the phone a shake. Nothing.
At the second-floor doorway, Mr Hare was standing with his arms folded behind his back, as if he had been waiting for her. He was usually all closed-off shoulders and gruff nods, but this morning his mouth twitched into a smile she had never seen on him before. He looked oddly pleased, and not in a normal way. In a way that made Lena's skin tighten.
"Today has a habit of turning itself inside out," he said.
His voice sounded wrong too, distant and muffled, as if he were speaking from the far end of a tunnel.
Lena stared at him, but he only gave her a small wink and stepped back into his flat. The door clicked shut behind him.
She kept going, slower now. The stairwell seemed to breathe around her. The tiles under her shoes gave a faint pulse, like a heartbeat under stone, and the bulbs overhead flickered in time with her steps. By the first floor, the ordinary shape of the building had started to feel like a trick.
Then she saw it.
The basement door was open a crack.
A line of silver light spilled through the gap, thin as a blade and shimmering as if it were alive. Lena stopped. She should have gone straight out to school. She knew that. But from below came a whisper so soft she almost thought it was her own name.
She swallowed, glanced back at the empty stairs, and pushed the door wider.
The whisper came again, clearer this time.
The moment she took the first step down, the door crashed shut behind her, and the whole stairwell flared with a light that had never belonged to any building she'd ever lived in.