Chapter 1: The Weight of Silence

The park should have been peaceful.

The late afternoon light slid through the trees, glinting off puddles left from the morning rain. Birds chattered somewhere high above, and children’s laughter echoed faintly from the playground. Yet to Stella, every sound — every emotion — felt amplified, tangled in a strange, humming chorus inside her skull.

She paused on the path, gripping her crutches tightly. Her arms ached from the effort. The long white plaster cast locked her left leg straight, forcing her knee stiff and her foot frozen in a rigid, downward angle. It was impossible to walk gracefully.

She tried to keep her toes from touching the ground, but the cast was heavy and unbalanced her, her hip twisting awkwardly with every movement. The plastered heel brushed and sometimes dragged faintly against the pavement, scraping softly as she swung forward.

Every clumsy step sent a dull vibration up through her injured leg and into her skull — and then came the whispers.

They weren’t voices, not exactly. They were emotions, bleeding into her consciousness like fluid through thin membrane. The concussion had done something — cracked her head open in a way that couldn’t be seen on an X-ray.