The Empty Bed

The morning Kael lost his sister, the frost had painted pictures on the orphanage windows.

He'd woken before the bell, which was unusual. The bell made sure nobody in the Harrowfield Home for Foundlings ever had the luxury of waking naturally — it clanged at six-fifteen sharp, rattling teeth and shaking dreams apart. But this morning something else had pulled him from sleep. A feeling. Like a hand withdrawing from his, leaving his fingers curled around nothing.

He turned in his narrow cot and looked across the gap to Lira's bed.

Empty.

Not just empty the way it was when she'd snuck to the kitchen for bread heels, or when she was hiding in the supply closet reading. This was a different kind of empty. The blanket was folded with impossible precision, every crease sharp enough to cut. Lira's pillow bore no dent from her head. And on the mattress, arranged in a perfect spiral, lay a trail of pale blue petals — flowers that did not grow anywhere within a hundred miles of Harrowfield.

"Lira?" His voice came out smaller than he intended.

He swung his legs over the side of his cot and his bare feet touched something cold. Not the floorboards. Something slick and organic, like the surface of a leaf magnified a thousand times. He looked down. The floor between the two beds had changed. Where there should have been battered wood, there was a circle of dark moss, soft and glistening with dew that caught no light from the window.