CHAPTER FOUR
By Thursday, Grandma’s box had become a very expensive-looking place to throw my bra. Not intentionally. I’d brought it home three days ago with every intention of figuring out why my mother had acted like handing it over required some kind of ceremonial preparation. Instead, I’d set i ton the chair beside my dresser, tossed my jacket over it that night, and apparently decided that was where things lived now.
I hadn’t opened it. Not because Mom told me not to. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. I just hadn’t gotten around to it. Between work, Maven, and Noa sending me approximately forty-seven birthday-related messages a day, an old box full of Grandma’s things wasn’t exactly at the top of my priority list.
My birthday was six days away. Noa had started a countdown. I had started threatening to block her.
NOA: SIX DAYS BITCH!!!!!!
The message came through while I was brushing my teeth.
Me: Its 5:14 in the morning.
NOA: and???
ME: seek help.
NOA: you first
I smiled around my toothbrush. Maven was sprawled across the bathroom doorway, watching me get ready with the exhausted expression of someone who couldn’t understand why humans insisted on participating in mornings. “I agree,” I told her. Her eyes were closed. “Very supportive. Thank you.”
By six-thirty, I was sitting beneath fluorescent lights with a headset pressed against one ear and coffee that had already gone lukewarm beside my keyboard. There were certain sounds you learned to ignore working dispatch. Phones ringing. Keyboards clicking. Chairs rolling across cheap carpet. Someone swearing quietly three desks over. The printer making a noise that suggested death was imminent despite continuing to work perfectly fine.
It all became background eventually. The calls didn’t. They couldn’t. Every voice that came through my headset had the potential to be someone’s worst day. Some were. Some were people furious that their neighbor had parked too close to their driveway. By ten, I’d had both. “You seriously called 911 because she won’t give you the PlayStation?” I muted myself. Noa looked over from her desk. I stared at her. She covered her mouth. I unmuted.
“Sir, again, your girlfriend refusing to return a gaming console is not an emergency.” A pause.
“No, sir.” Another pause. “No, please don’t call back unless there is an actual energency.” I disconnected the line.
Noa was laughing. “I hate people.”
“No,you don’t.”
“I hate that particular person.”
“Fair.”
I reached for my coffee. “Six days,” she whispered. I pointed at her without looking. “Don’t.” She grinned and turned back to her screen. The next call came in less than a minute later. I clicked over automatically. “911, what’s the address of your emergency?” Static answered me.
I straightened slightly. “911, can you hear me?” More static. Calls llike that happened. Bad service. Pocket dials. Disconnected phones. I chekced the information populating on my screen. Nothing usefull yet.
“Hello? If you can hear me, I need you to tell me where you are.” Something shifted beneath the static. Breathing. My fingers moved toward the keyboard. “Can you hear me?” A voice came through. Faint. Female, I thought.
“Maera vael en sael.” My fingers stopped.
The room around me seemed to recede. I don’t know how else to explain it. The phones were still ringing. Noa was still typing beside me. Someone behind us was asking for a unit number. I could hear it all. But the voice in my ear was suddenly clearer than everything else.
“Mara vael en sael.” I swallowed.
“Ma’am, I need you to-“ the static cracked. Then the woman screamed.
I jerked upright. “Ma’am?” Another rush of static swallowed the line. “Ma’am, can you tell me where you are?” Nothing. I started typing, pulling everything I could from the call. Then the voice returned. Clearer this tine.
“Sael ara ven.” my chest tightened, becuase I understood her. Not approximately. Not from tone or context. I knew exactly what she had said.
The light is waiting. My hands went cold.i stared at the screen. That wasn’t possible. The woman spoke again.
“Sael ara ven.” and before I could think, before I could stop myself, I answered.
“Vael en sael.”
The line went silent. So did I.
My mouth remained slighlty agape. I had spoken without deciding to. Three words. Three words I had never heard before today. Three words in a language I did not sopeak.
The call disconnected.i stared at the timer on my screen.
00:02:17.
Two minutes and seventeen seconds.
“Lara?” I didn’t move.
Noa’s voice came from somwhere beside me. “Lara.”
I pulled the headset away from my ear. “What?” She was watching me.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” Her eyebrows pulled together.
“That language.” Noa gave a small laugh, but there wasn’t anything amused about it. “The one you were just speaking.”
I looked back at my screen. The call information was still there. The timer had stopped. Everything looked completely normal. “I wasn’t speaking another language.” Noa stared at me.
“Yes, you were.” A strange pressure began behind my eyes. “No. I wasn’t.”
“Lara, I literally just heard you.” I looked at her, then at the headset in my hand. Somewhere beneath the confusion, beneath the fear, every rational explaination my brain was already desperatley trying to assemble , four words remain perfectly clear.
The light is waiting.
The scar on my shoulder blade began to burn. Not warm this time. Burn. I sucked in a breath and pressed my palm against it. Noa’s expression changed immediately. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Lara.”
“I said nothing.”
“You also just said you weren’t speaking another language when I literally heard you speaking another language, so forgive me if your credibility is a little shaky right now.”
Despite everything, I almost laughed. Almost. Instead, I pulled at the collar of my shirt, trying to get the fabric away from my shoulder. The burning had already started to fade, leaving behind that strange residual heat I was becoming increasingly familiar with-and increasingly tired of pretending wasn’t happening.
Noa leaned closer. “Is it your scar?”
My hand stopped. I looked at her. She looked at my hand, then back at me. Apparently, subtlety wasn’t one of my gifts. “It’s fine.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“It just feels weird sometimes.”
“Since when.” I turned back toward my computer. “Can we not do this right now?”
“No, actually, I’m pretty sure now is exactly when we should do this.” Another call lit up on my screen. Saved my someone else’s emergency. “I have a call.”
Noa stared at me for another second before rolling back toward her station. “Fine.”
I put my headset back on. “911, what’s the address of your emergency?” My voice sounded normal. That bothered me more than it should have.
For the next hour, I worked. A car accident. A woman whose smoke detectors wouldn’t stop chirping. A possible break-in that turned out to be the caller’s teenage son sneaking back into the house. A medical call that kept me on the line until paramedics arrived. Nomal. Every call was normal. I cling to that.
By lunch, I had almost convinced myself the earlier call had been normal too. Almost. Noa dropped into the chair across from me in the break room and slid a bag of chips onto the table. “You’re being weird.” I looked up from my phone. “Thank you.”
“I mean weirder than usual.”
“Better.” She opened her drink. I knew what was coming. “Noa.”
“What?”
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“you’re about to.”she stared at me for a moment, then leaned back in her chair. “What did she say?”
My stomach tightened. “Who?”
“Oh, good. We’re doing denial.”
“I’m not doing denial.”
“The woman on the phone.” I looked down at my screen. A stupid video played silently beneath my thumb. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t”
“Lara.”
“I don’t know what language she was speaking.”
“That’s not what I asked.” I looked up. Noa’s expression had changed. The teasing was gone. “What did she say?” I hesitated. I could have lied. I probably should have, I locked my phone and set it face down. “The light is waiting.”
Noa blinked. I immediately regretted saying it out loud. “What?”
“That’s what she said.”
“You’re sure.”
“No.” The answer came too quickly. Noa’s eyebrows lifted. I sighed. “Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve heard the language before?”
“No.”
“Studied it?”
“No.”
“Family?”
“Noa.”
“I’m asking.”
“And I’m telling you I don’t know.”
She went quiet. I hated that look on her face. Not because she looked scared. Becauase she looked worried about mw. “I probably recognized something,” I said “maybe it sounded similiar to something I’ve heard before. Spanish, latin, whatever.” Noa stared at me.
“What?”
“You answered her.” My stomach dropped again. “I know.”
“What did you say?” I opened my mouth. Nothing came out, because that part I didn’t know. I could remember the sound perfectly. Vael en sael. I could feel the shape of the words in my mouth. But their meaning. Nothing. Noa sat back. “Okay.”
I hated that word. “What does ‘okay’ mean?
“It means okay.”
“No. That was your this is absolutely not okay but I’m trying not to freak you out okay.”
“I don’t have those.” She reached across the table and took one of my fries. I slapped her hand.
“See? You’re fine.”
“Give me my fry.” She ate it.
“Bitch.”
“There she is.” I rolled my eyes, but the knot in my chest loosened slightly. Then Noa said, “pull the recording.” I stopped. Of course, the recording. Every call was recorded. I stared at her. She shrugged. “You want to know what she said? Listen again.”
It was so obvious that I felt stupid for not thinking of it myself. More importantly, it was something tangible. Something real. A recording didn’t misremember things. It didn’t get overtired. It didn’t hallucinate languages it had never learned.
The call existed, which meant the answer existed too. “I’ll check it after lunch.”
Noa nodded. Neither of us said anything else about it. But twenty-three minutes later, I was sitting back at my station with the call pulled up on my screen. I checked the number, the timestamp, the duration. 00:02:17
Same call. My fingers hovered over the mouse. Noa had turned slightly in her chair, pretending not to watch me. I clicked play. My own voice came through first. “911, what’s the address of your emergency?” I waited. “911, can you hear me?” More static. My pulse began to climb. “Hello? If you can hear me, I need you to tell me where you are.” I leaned closer. This was it.
The static shifted. I remembered the breathing. I remembered the voice. Maera vael en sael. But on the recording-nothing. Only static.i frowned; the recording continued. My voice came through again. “Can you hear me?” Then- “Ma’am, I need you to-“ I stopped breathing.
Her voice should have been there. It wasn’t. I looked at Noa; she was looking at me now. I turned the volume up. The woman screamed. That was there. Sharp and distorted, but unmistakable. My stomach twisted. “Ma’am?”
Static. “Ma’am, can you tell me where you are?” More static. Then my voice.” can you hear me?”
I know what came next. Sael ara ven. The light is waiting. Except the recording held nothing but a low electrical hiss. And then- my voice. Clear as day. Every hair on my arms lifted.
Noa slowly stood from her chair. The recording continued for another few seconds before the call disconnected. I didn’t move. Noa came closer. “You heard her,” I whispered.
It wasn’t a question.” Yes.”
“Here. Earlier. You heard her talking.”
Noa’s face had gone pale. “Yes.”
“But she’s not on the recording.”
“No.”
I looked back at the screen. There was something deeply wrong about hearing my own voice speak words I didn’t understand. Something worse about hearing them spoken to no one. I replayed that section. Static. Then me. Vael en sael. Again. Static. Vael en sael. Again.
Noa reached over and stopped the recording. “That’s enough.”
I stared at the waveform on the screen. “No.”
“Lara-“
“She was there.”
“I know.”
“You heard her.”
“I know.”
“So why isn’t she there?” Noa didn’t answer because there wasn’t an answer. Not one I wanted, anyway.
I grabbed a sticky note from beside my keyboard and wrote down the words before I could forget them. Maera vael e sael. Sael ara ven. Vael en sael. I stared at my handwriting. Something about seeing the words written down made my skin crawl. Noa read over my shoulder. “You know how to spell it?”
My pen stopped. Slowly I looked down. I hadn’t thought about the spelling. Not once. I had just… written it. “No.” The word made it out. Noa looked at me; I looked at the three lines instead. Perfectly formed. Perfectly certain. Somehow I knew I hadn’t misspelled a single word. I folded the sticky note in half and shoved it beneath my keyboard. Noa watched me do it. “And we’re jsut putting that away?”
“For now.”
“Lara.”
“I’m at work, Noa. What exactly do you want me to do? Call 911?” She stared at me; I stared back. “Okay, bad audience.”
“Very.” I rubbed my hands over my face and leaned back in my chair. The scar along my left shoulder blade had stopped burning, but I could still feel it beneath my shirt. No pain exactly. More like awareness, like suddenly noticing your tongue in your mouth and then being unable to stop noticing. I hated it.
Noa pulled her chair closer. “Search it.”
“Search what?”
“The words.” I looked at the edge of the sticky note peeking out from beneath my keyboard.
“You want me to Google the mystery language spoken by the disappearing 911 caller?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds stupid.”
“It is stupid.”
“Still doing it.” Before I could stop her, she pulled the note free and unfolded it. “Noa.”
“What? You wrote it down for a reason.”
“I wrote it down because apparently I’m fluent in a language that doesn’t exist.”
“That is exactly why we’re Googling it.” She typed the first phrase into her search bar.
Maera vael en sael. Nothing. Or, more accurately, nothing useful. A few results with individual words. Names. Some fantasy game I’d never heard of. A company selling lighting fixtures. Noa frowned.” Try the second one.”
She typed it: sael ara ven. More nothing. I leaned closer despite myself. “Put quotation marks around it.” Noa glanced at me
“Look at you, participating.”
“Shut up.” She added them. No exact result. Something cold settled in my stomach. “Okay,” Noa said. “Maybe we’re spelling it wrong.”
“We’re not.” The words left my mouth before I thought about them. Noa stopped typing and I stopped breathing. Slowly, she turned her head towards me. I already knew what she was going to ask.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t.”
“You just said-“
“I know what I said.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I don’t know, Noa.” My voice came out sharper than I intended. She went quiet. I looked away. “Sorry.”
“No, you're fine.”
“I’m not.” That silenced both of us.
For the first time since the call, I let myself actually think it. Not joke about it. Not explain it. Not shove it into the same mental drawer as the flickering lights, strange dreams, the impossible sky, or every other thing I’d been pretending had a perfectly reasonable explanation.
I understood the woman. I answered her. I wrote down words I’d never seen, and somehow, I knew how they were spelled. I stared at the three phrases. Something about them bothered me beyond obvious. The shape of them. The repetition. The way my eyes moved across the letters without stumbling. sael. I knew that word. Not because she’d said it. I knew it differently. I closed my eyes. Light.
My eyes snapped open. “What?” Noa asked. I hadn’t realized my expression had changed. “Sael.”
“What about it?”
“It means light.” Noa stared at me.
I stared at the word. “That’s what she said, right?” Noa asked carefully. “The light is waiting.” So you figured it out from the sentence.”
“No.” That certainly came immediately. Noa’s face tightened.
“I mean, yes, she said that. But that’s not why I know.”
“Then, why?”
“I don’t know.” There is was again I don’t know. It was becoming my answer for everything. Noa pulled out her phone. “Okay. Translation apps.”
“Noa-“
“We have six days until your birthday, and I refuse to let you become possessed before then. I already put down a deposit.” A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. She smiled. “There. Still human.”
“Debatable.”
For the next twenty minutes, we tried everything we could think of between calls. Translation sites. Language databases. Different spellings. I even said the phrases into a voice translator while Noa held the phone between us.Nothing recognized them. Once, an app confidently informed us I was speaking Finnish. At least, I was pretty sure I wasn’t. Y the time we gave up, the sticky note had started to feel heavier than paper had any right to. I folded it again.
“Maybe it’s not real,” I said. Noa gave me a look.
“You know what I mean. Maybe she made it up. People make up languages.”
“And you happened to understand the one she made up?”
“I said maybe.”
“And spell it.”
“Thank you, detective.”
“You’re welcome.” I slid the note into my pocket. That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. The thought followed me through the rest of my shift. Sael. Every time I tried not to think about it, there it was. Sael. Light.
By the time I got home, I was exhausted enough that I almost walked straight past the chair by my dresser. Almost. I stopped in the doorway. My jacket was still thrown over the back of it. A sweatshirt had joined it sometime yesterday. Beneath both sat Grandma’s box. I stared at it. Maven pushed past my legs and trotted into the bedroom. “Excuse you.”
She jumped on the bed; I didn’t move. The box hadn’t changed; of course it hadn’t. Dark wood. Scratched edges. Old enough to look like it belonged somewhere other than my apartment. I walked toward it and pulled the clothes away. There it was. The symbol on the lid. I crouched. For a few seconds, I just looked at it. The same strange sensation beneath my skin. Recognition without memory.
I took the sticky note from my pocket and unfolded it beside the box. The words didn’t look like the symbol, not exactly. But something about them belonged together. I couldn’t explain how I knew that either. “Fantastic.” Maven lifted her head. “I’ve officially lost it.” Her tail tapped against the comforter. I picked up my phone and took a picture of the symbol. Then another closer.
I opened a reverse image search. Nothing. I tried to describe it. Nothing. Ancient symbols. Religious symbols. Alchemical symbols. Dead languages. Old alphabets. Nothing.
I sat crossed-legged on the floor for almost an hour. Every path led nowhere. Eventually, Maven jumped down from the bed and shoved her nose beneath my arm. “I know.” She pushed harder. “I know.” I scratched behind her ears and looked at the box one last time.
Mom had told me not to open it yet. Three days ago, that had annoyed me. Tonight, I was grateful for the excuse. I pulled the sticky note in the top drawer of my nightstand and covered the box with my sweatshirt again. Then I went to bed.
Two days passed. Nothing happened, no strange calls, no flickering lights, no burning scar, no impossible skies. Nothing. By Saturday night, I had almost convinced myself that was a good thing.
Four days before my birthday. Noa had transitioned from sending countdown texts to sending outfit options, which someone felt more threatening. I was lying in bed scrolling through them while Maven slept beside me, her body pressed in close to mine.
“No.” Swipe.” Absolutely not.” Swipe. “Where would my ass even go in that?” Maven exhaled heavily. “Exactly.” I tossed my phone onto the pillow beside me and turned off the lamp. Darkness settled over the room. For once, it felt normal. Quiet. Safe. Maven shifted against me. I closed my eyes. Her breathing slowed. In. Out. In. Out. Without realizing it, I stared, counting.
En. A breath. Dara. Another. Sei. My eyes opened. The room was dark; I didn’t move. Maven breathed again. Va. My heart began pounding. One. Two. Three. Four.
I knew what they meant.I knew each word as naturally as I knew my own name. But they weren’t English. I sat up slowly. Maven stirred beside me. “No.” My voice sounded small in the dark. I squeezed my eyes shut. One. Two. Three. Four. English. Easy. Normal. I opened them again; Maven’s chest rose. En. Fell. Dara. Rose. Sei. I covered my mouth. The words weren’t coming from somewhere else. There was no woman on the phone. No static, no voice whispering inside my apartment. They were mine. For the first time, I understood what scared me the most.
It wasn’t learning this language.
I was remembering it.