Chapter 1: The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

The policeman dragged a pale-blue chair across the linoleum floor, the sound long and scraping, echoing through the quiet ward. He sat, the notebook balanced on his knee, the pen poised. The air was thick with the sterile perfume of disinfectant — and beneath it, something faintly sweet, like rain on old flowers.

He tried not to breathe too deeply; hospitals always smelled to him like someone had bleached the afterlife.

The woman on the bed turned her head at the noise. Her hair, dark and dishevelled, spilled across the pillow in soft waves, streaked faintly with silver. Her eyes — green as wet glass — regarded him without fear or interest, only the measured calm of someone who’d seen too much of the world to be startled by it anymore.

He cleared his throat. “Do you feel up to answering a few questions, miss?”

She hesitated, then nodded faintly. “If I can,” she said. Her voice was low and melodic, a voice that didn’t belong in this room of machines and bleach.

He flipped to a clean page. “Let’s start simple. What’s your name?”

Her eyes went distant, as if the question itself were foreign. “I ... don’t know,” she murmured after a pause. “I can’t seem to remember.”

He watched her carefully. “The doctors say there’s no sign of a head injury. Nothing that would cause memory loss.”

She gave a thin, weary smile. “Then perhaps it’s my soul that’s concussed.”

The remark made him snort before he could stop himself. “We don’t have a form for that injury, ma’am. Paperwork’s bad enough as it is.”

She almost smiled. “Then leave it blank. That’s what my head feels like anyway.”

He frowned at that. “Do you recall where you were before the accident? The old glass factory — you were found outside it.”

“Factory?” she repeated softly, the word tasting odd on her tongue. “No. I remember ... wind. And light. Then pain.”