Chapter 1: Candlelight and Hierarchy
The scratching of Harold’s knife against his plate was the loudest sound in the room. He focused on it, on the methodical sawing through Eleanor’s meatloaf—hers was always just a touch dry, but he’d never say so—letting the familiar choreography of a Wednesday night dinner settle around him. The dining nook was small, the peeling floral wallpaper a relic from the previous owners, but the oval oak table was his, a beast he’d built and sanded and finished himself years ago, back when his hands could wrestle sheets of plywood without protesting the next morning.
“Coach said starting lineup decisions are next week,” Liam announced, shoveling a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. At eighteen, he occupied his chair with a sprawl of confident limbs, his letterman jacket slung over the back. “It’s basically mine. Miller’s got a hitch in his swing you could drive a truck through.”
“That’s my boy,” Harold said, the words coming out with a warm, automatic gruffness. He caught Eleanor’s smile from across the table, a quick, private thing that crinkled the corners of her eyes. At forty-five, with her sensible bob and the tiny silver glasses perched on her nose, she looked every bit the part-time librarian she was. But the smile was all mother, all pride.
“Just don’t get cocky,” Eleanor said, her voice soft but carrying. “Miller might surprise you.”
“Doubt it,” Liam smirked, tossing a pea at his younger sister. “Lila couldn’t even hit off him in softball last year, and she swings like a rusty gate.”
Lila, fourteen and permanently indignant, stuck out her tongue. “I was twelve! And you’re a jerk.” She was all elbows and knees, a coltish copy of her mother with her father’s stormy eyebrows.
“Children,” Eleanor sighed, but there was no heat in it.
Harold’s gaze drifted to Chloe, the quiet middle.At sixteen, she seemed to exist in the spaces between everyone else’s noise. She was sketching in a margins of her notebook, something intricate and geometric, only half-listening. Her brown hair fell like a curtain, hiding her face. He felt a familiar, faint pang—he should ask her about the drawing, about school, about anything—but the moment passed, swallowed by Liam’s continued dissection of his athletic supremacy.Harold tuned it out, content. This was the symphony of his life: the clink of cutlery, the low hum of the refrigerator, the comfortable weave of his family’s voices. His hands, broad and nicked with a lifetime of small injuries, rested on the solid table he’d made.A foreman once, now a shop teacher. A provider.The bedrock.It was enough.Then the world flashed white.
It wasn’t a sound. It was a silent, sheer detonation of light that bleach-burned the room, searing through the windows and drowning the yellow glow of the overhead fixture. For a second, everything was absence—no shadow, no color, no depth.Just a flat, scorching white.
Harold flinched, squeezing his eyes shut. “What in the hell—”
His words were cut off by a vibration. It started in the floorboards, a sub-audible hum that climbed up the legs of his chair and into his bones. The glasses on the table chimed a brittle, discordant note.The vibration deepened, resonating in his molars.
“Mom?” Lila’s voice was thin, scared.Harold opened his eyes. The blinding whiteness was gone, replaced by a strange, lingering afterglow that pulsed at the edge of vision. The single candle Eleanor had lit for atmosphere flickered wildly in the center of the table, its flame now the only source of light—the ceiling light was dead.But that wasn’t right. The flame wasn’t just flickering.It was behaving. It elongated, spiraled, flattened into a blue disk, then snapped back to a teardrop, all in a frantic, silent dance.
“Don’t move,” Harold commanded, his foreman voice rolling out. He started to push back from the table.Eleanor gasped.It was a sharp, inward sound of pure shock. Harold looked at her.Her head was thrown back, her spine arched rigid against her chair. Her glasses had slipped down her nose, and her eyes… they were wide, unblinking, the pupils swallowing the hazel iris, black and depthless.They weren’t looking at the room. They were looking through it.
“Ellie?” Fear, cold and slick, coiled in Harold’s gut.Before he could rise, he saw Chloe.She had dropped her pencil. Her hands were splayed flat on the table, fingers wide. Her head was cocked, not in pain, but with the intense focus of someone listening to a distant, complex song. Her own eyes were wide, but where Eleanor’s were vast and vacant, Chloe’s were darting, calculating, tracking the erratic candle flame, the pattern of the vibrating water in their glasses, the dust motes stirred by the unnatural tremor.Lila whimpered. “My skin… it’s buzzing.”
And then Eleanor moved.Or, more accurately, she unfolded.
It wasn’t a sudden jerk.It was a slow, deliberate straightening. As she sat forward, Harold realized with a dizzying lurch that she was no longer eye-level with him. Her shoulders widened, the fabric of her simple cotton blouse pulling taut across a back that was suddenly, impossibly broader. The chair creaked a protest under a new, significant weight. She kept growing, not in a monstrous, tearing way, but in a steady, relentless expansion. Her neck lengthened, her posture effortlessly perfect.When her head lifted fully, the top of her hair brushed the ceiling fixture. She had to be six and a half feet tall.Maybe more.
The candlelight, which had been at her eye level, now cast its glow upward onto a jawline that seemed stronger, more defined.The softness of her face had hardened into a structure of elegant, formidable planes.
“Eleanor?” Harold whispered, his voice small in the humming dark.She blinked. The depthless black of her pupils receded, but the eyes that remained were not his wife’s. They were sharper, clearer, like polished stone.They held a terrifying, luminous intelligence. She looked down at her hands, turning them over.They were larger, the fingers long and capable. She made a fist, and the cords of muscle and tendon in her forearm rolled under smooth skin with a power that was both graceful and absolute.
Then she looked at Harold, and for a heart-stopping moment, there was no recognition.Just assessment.“Harold,” she said.Her voice. It was lower, resonant, a cello note where a violin had been.It filled the nook without effort. “Your coronary artery has a 27% greater plaque accumulation than your last physical suggested. You need to see Dr.Chen next week, not next month.”
He could only stare, his mouth slightly open.
A crash from the other side of the table. Liam had shoved his chair back so hard it toppled over.He was staring at his mother, his face a mask of teenage horror and disbelief. “What the fuck is this?”
“Language, Liam,” Eleanor said, and the words, though gentle, carried an authority that physically pressed the air from the room. It was no longer a mother’s chiding.It was a statement of law.Harold finally found his legs, standing up. Or trying to.The perspective was all wrong. He was standing, but Eleanor was sitting, and he was barely taller than she was.The top of his head felt level with her eyes. A lifetime of being the broadest, the tallest in his own home had evaporated. He felt… reduced.A giggle, high and unsteady, cut through the tension.Lila. She was standing now too, looking at her own arms with delight. “Whoa.” She flexed, and a firm bicep swelled under her t-shirt sleeve. She was taller, a good head taller than she’d been minutes ago, her gangly adolescence compressed into a sleek, powerful six-foot-plus frame. She reached over and plucked Liam’s fallen letterman jacket from the floor with one finger, holding it up. “Look, it’s a doll coat!” Her voice was the same, but it came from higher up, a new, teasing alto.
“Shut up, Lila!” Liam spat, his face flushing crimson. He looked from his gargantuan mother to his suddenly Amazonian little sister, his own six-foot frame seeming to shrink in comparison. His confidence, so tangible just minutes ago, was leaching away, replaced by a violent, bewildered shame.
“Interesting.” The word was quiet, dry.Everyone turned to Chloe.She hadn’t stood. She was still in her chair, but she was different. The change in her was less about dramatic height—though she was unquestionably taller, her head now brushing the same fixture as her mother’s—and more about presence.The quiet girl was gone. In her place was a being of intense, radiating stillness. Her gaze was fixed on the candle, but Harold could see her eyes were taking in everything: the fractal patterns of the wax, the spectrum of light in the flame, the tremor frequency in the table.
“The phenomenon was electromagnetic in origin, but the effects are biomorphic,” she said, her voice calm, analytical, and piercingly clear.It wasn’t a question. “Focused on the X chromosome, perhaps?An acceleration of latent potential. The shift in Mother’s bone density and muscle mass is profound, but the neuro-cognitive expansion is the primary anomaly. Synaptic firing rates have increased exponentially.” She finally looked away from the candle and at her father. Her eyes were like her mother’s now—ancient, knowing. “Your adrenaline levels are spiking, Dad.You should sit.Your current blood pressure is unsustainable.”
Harold didn’t sit. He couldn’t.He was fixed on Chloe. This was his shy daughter, who mumbled hello to her friends on the phone.“Chloe? Are you… okay?”
A slight, almost imperceptible smile touched her lips.It wasn’t warm. It was the smile of someone who has just solved a difficult puzzle.“I am more than okay. I see the grain in the wood of this table. I can trace the growth rings of the oak, estimate its rainfall by year from the density. I can hear the electrical wiring in the walls humming at 60 Hertz, with a slight variance indicating a faulty connection in the kitchen light switch. I am… optimized.” Her gaze shifted to Liam, who was trembling with a rage he couldn’t articulate. “Your anger is a physiological waste product, Liam.Your testosterone is crashing in response to the perceived threat. It’s making you irrational.”
“You shut your mouth!” Liam roared, taking a step forward, his fists clenched. It was a move that, a lifetime ago, would have made Chloe flinch and lower her eyes.Now, she didn’t even blink.Eleanor did.Eleanor moved. It wasn’t a fast movement; it was preternaturally smooth.She simply stood up. The full, breathtaking reality of her new size hit Harold like a physical blow. She dominated the cramped nook, her head a clear foot above his, her shoulders blocking the light from the doorway. The air seemed to part for her.She didn’t touch Liam.She just looked down at him. The sheer, calm dominance in that look froze him mid-step.
“Sit down, son,” Eleanor said, her new voice leaving no room for argument.“We need to assess. Panic is a luxury we cannot afford.”
Liam’s jaw worked. He looked from his mother’s impassive face to Chloe’s analytical one to Lila’s gleeful smirk. The hierarchy of his world had not just been upended; it had been inverted, pulverized. With a sound that was half-groan, half-snarl, he righted his chair and slumped into it, staring at his plate as if it held the answers.Harold finally sank back into his own chair. The wood felt different under him.Smaller. The table, his proud creation, now seemed like a child’s toy between these powerful women. His eyes went to Eleanor’s hands, resting on the tabletop. They were still her hands—he knew the shape of her wedding ring—but they were overlaid with a new map of strength.Capable of terrifying force. Yet when she reached across and placed one of those hands over his, the touch was familiar, deliberate.The warmth was the same.
“Harold,” she said, and this time her voice softened, the terrifying edge replaced by a concern that was deeply, fundamentally her.“Are you hurt?”
He looked at their joined hands. His, rough and scarred, was utterly engulfed by hers. A symbol he couldn’t escape.“No,” he managed, his throat tight.“I’m… fine. What happened to you?”
“A change,” Eleanor said, and the simplicity of the word was devastating. “A fundamental one.” Her eyes lost focus for a second, that vast intelligence turning inward. “The thinking… it’s like a room I’ve lived in my whole life just had all the walls removed.I can see the whole sky.I know… I know things. How to reinforce the foundation of the house.The chemical formula for a more efficient fertilizer for the garden. The probability vectors of the next seventy-two hours based on current events and human behavioral patterns.”
“Can you fix the TV?” Lila asked, grinning. “I wanna see if this happened everywhere.”
Eleanor’s gaze snapped to the dark flat-screen in the living room.“The main board is fried. A power surge concurrent with the event. We have capacitors in the garage that could temporarily bypass the damage, but a permanent fix would require a replacement part from—”
“Everywhere,” Chloe interrupted, her head tilted.“It’s global.The event.I can… feel the network disruptions. Cell towers overloading.A cascade of panic in major population centers. The signal pattern is unmistakable.” She looked at her family.“The world is doing this right now. Or… women are.”
A heavy silence descended, broken only by the now-calm flicker of the candle. The humming had stopped. The strange vibration was gone, leaving behind a world that was utterly, irrevocably altered.Harold looked around the table. At his wife, a serene titan whose mind now worked on a scale he could barely comprehend. At Chloe, a quiet oracle who saw the matrix of reality.At Lila, a playful giant testing her new strength. And at Liam, a shrunken king in a ruined castle, his head in his hands.
He thought of his shop class tomorrow.The lathes.The table saws. The confident way he’d guide a kid’s hands on a piece of pine.The unspoken assumption that his strength, his experience, mattered.
What did it mean now?
Eleanor squeezed his hand, her grip strong enough to crush his bones, yet perfectly measured to convey only comfort. “We’ll adapt, Harold,” she said, and in those three words, he heard the death of their old life and the terrifying blueprint of the new.“We are still a family. The rules are just different now.”
Outside, in the distance, a car alarm began to wail, a lonely, frantic sound in the deepening night. It was joined by another, then another, a rising chorus of confusion from a world that had just been flashed white and remade in the dark.
It was joined by another, then another, a rising chorus of confusion from a world that had just been flashed white and remade in the dark.
Inside, the silence was thicker. Harold could hear his own heartbeat, a frantic drum against his ribs. Eleanor’s hand was still on his, a warm, heavy weight that felt both alien and anchoring. He stared at their joined hands, his mind a blank static.Shop teacher. Foreman.Provider. The words rattled in his skull, empty husks.
Liam broke the silence. He shoved back from the table again, the legs screeching. “This is bullshit!” he yelled, his voice cracking. He wasn’t looking at his mother or sisters. He was glaring at the faded wallpaper as if it had betrayed him. “Some… some sci-fi crap! It’s gotta be in the water or something. We gotta… we gotta call someone.”
“The phones are dead,” Chloe stated, not looking up. She was tracing a finger over the wood grain of the table. “The cellular network is experiencing catastrophic failure due to simultaneous mass panic and infrastructure overload. There’s a 92% probability landlines are also compromised. The event likely induced a localized EMP effect.” She said it like she was reading a weather report.
“Stop talking like that!” Liam snapped, spinning to face her. “You sound like a robot! You’re Chloe. You got a B-minus in Algebra!”
Chloe’s gaze lifted. The indifference in her eyes was more devastating than any insult. “No. I was Chloe. And I understood the fundamental inadequacies of the standard pedagogical approach to polynomial functions. I just couldn’t articulate them before. Now I can design a better curriculum.” She blinked slowly. “You, however, are still Liam. Just… smaller.”
Lila snorted, a loud, unfiltered sound. She was experimenting, rising up onto her tiptoes and then sinking down, making the floorboards groan. “Look! I’m taller than the fridge now!” She bounded the two steps into the kitchen doorway and stretched an arm up, her fingertips easily brushing the top of the refrigerator. “Mom! Can you reach it?”
Eleanor didn’t answer immediately. She was looking at Harold, her immense eyes searching his face. He saw a thousand calculations going on behind them, but also a well of concern that was purely her. “Harold,” she said again, and her voice, for a second, stripped away the new resonance and found its old cadence. “Talk to me.”
He opened his mouth.Nothing came out. What was there to say? I’m scared?I feel useless? He was the man. He fixed things. But the thing that was broken was the basic physics of his family, and he had no tool for that.
A thump from outside, followed by a yell. Then a scream—high, piercing, and cut abruptly short.
The sound acted like a slap. Eleanor’s head swiveled towards the front window, her movement fluid and predator-fast. “Stay here,” she commanded, and it wasn’t a suggestion. She stood, and the room seemed to shrink further. She had to duck her head slightly under the doorway beam as she moved into the living room. Harold followed, a step behind, instinct overriding the numbness.
The living room was darker, lit only by the orange glow of streetlights filtering through the blinds. Eleanor moved to the large picture window and peered out, not by crouching, but by simply leaning down. From his position beside her, Harold saw the street.
It was a scene of quiet chaos. A car had swerved onto a neighbor’s lawn, its front end crumpled against a maple tree. The driver’s door was open.No one was inside. Further down, Mr. Henderson from two doors over was standing in the middle of the road, spinning in a slow circle, his hands clutching his white hair. But it was the figures moving in the shadows that held Harold’s gaze.Mrs. Cline from across the street was kneeling beside her porch swing. Even from here, Harold could see she was different—taller, broader. She was trying to help a man up from the grass. Her husband, he thought. But as she lifted him, the motion was effortless, like picking up a child. The man’s legs dangled, his face a pale moon of shock.
Then there were others. Miss Turnby, the elderly woman who used a walker, was standing tall and steady by her mailbox, looking down at the aluminum frame in her hands as if it were a toy. A group of teenage girls huddled under a streetlight, their postures transformed, their long limbs awkward and magnificent. One of them threw her head back and laughed, a sound that carried clearly through the glass—not hysterical, but triumphant.
“It’s everyone,” Harold breathed. “It’s all of them.”
“Not all,” Eleanor murmured. Her enhanced eyes were scanning, cataloging. “I see men. They are unchanged. Visibly.” She pointed a long finger. “Look at Paul Cline.His posture. The physiological markers of acute shock are present, but also… submission. His wife is dominant in the dyad now. It’s written in their body language.”
Harold looked. Paul Cline was standing now, but he was leaned into his wife’s side, her arm around his shoulders holding him up. He was looking at the ground.
A hot, shameful spark ignited in Harold’s gut. That won’t be me, he thought fiercely. I won’t be led around.
“The social order is collapsing in real-time,” Chloe said from behind them. She had joined them, silent as a ghost. Lila and Liam lurked in the doorway to the dining room. “The immediate threat isn’t external. It’s internal. The psychological adjustment. Males,” she said, the term clinical, “are experiencing a massive, involuntary displacement in the hierarchy. Predictable responses will range from catatonia to violent overcompensation.” She looked at Liam. “You’re currently hovering between the two.”
“Shut up!” Liam screamed, his voice raw. He took a step forward, fists clenched. “I am not! You’re all freaks! This is a nightmare!”
“Liam,” Eleanor said.Just his name. But the power in that single word, the sheer sonic weight of it, stopped him cold. She turned from the window to look at her son. In the half-light, she was a colossal silhouette, a goddess of hearth and home turned monument. “Your anger is natural. But it is a fuel. We must decide whether to let it burn us or warm us. Right now, you are choosing to burn.”
Liam stared up at her, his chest heaving. Harold saw the conflict in his eyes—the love for his mother, the terror of what she had become, the seething resentment at his own sudden insignificance. Liam’s eyes darted to Harold, desperate for backup, for the old alliance of men.
Harold couldn’t give it to him. He was adrift himself.
Then, Eleanor straightened. Her head tilted. “Do you feel that?”
Lila frowned. “Feel what? My socks are too tight all of a sudden.”
“No,” Chloe whispered, her analytical cool finally cracking with a sliver of awe. “It’s a resonance. A secondary wave. The initial change was stabilization. This is… amplification.”
A low hum returned, not through the floor this time, but inside Harold’s skull. It was a pressure, a tuning fork struck somewhere in the core of the earth. The air in the room grew heavy, charged, like before a thunderstorm. The few remaining electronic devices that had survived the first pulse—a digital clock on the DVR, the microwave display—flared with a brilliant, doomed light and then went black permanently.
Eleanor gasped. It was a sharp intake, not of pain, but of profound shock. She looked down at her own arms.
Harold watched, helpless, as it happened.
It wasn’t a violent burst. It was an inevitable rising, like bread dough under a perfect warmth. Eleanor seemed to… unfold further. The seams of her blouse, already stressed, gave way with soft popping sounds along her shoulders and back. The denim of her jeans tightened, the fabric stretching to a sheen over thighs that were pillars of solid muscle. Her height, already staggering, increased. The top of her head, which had been a few inches from the eight-foot ceiling, was now pressing against it. She had to bend her knees slightly, a slight crouch that did nothing to diminish her majesty, only made her look like a giantess in a dollhouse.
Lila let out a whoop that turned into a grunt of effort as her own body surged upward. Her growth seemed more explosive, less controlled. She shot up, her head smacking into the ceiling fan with a metallic clang. She didn’t cry out; she laughed, a wild, exhilarated sound. “Whoa!Okay! This is way better!”
Chloe’s transformation was silent, a continuous, smooth elevation. She observed it happening to herself with detached interest, watching her hands expand, her fingers lengthening into elegant, powerful tools. Her head brushed the ceiling, then pressed against it. She simply bent her neck, her eyes never leaving the phenomenon of her own physical expansion.
Harold stumbled backward, his legs hitting the couch. He was staring up, and up, and up. His wife, his daughters, were no longer just tall women. They were myths. They were beings who had to consciously maneuver to avoid the architecture of the home he had built for them. The scale was monstrous. Beautiful, in a terrifying way, but monstrous.
Eleanor was now easily nine and a half feet tall. Lila and Chloe were close behind. Their proportions were not grotesque; they were scaled-up perfection, like statues from a forgotten age of giants. The room was obliterated by their presence. The ceiling was a low, oppressive lid. The furniture was pathetic, shrunken.
Liam had gone utterly silent. He was pressed against the wall, his face blanched of all color. He was looking at his mother’s calf, which was thicker than his waist.
The hum faded, leaving a ringing silence broken only by the frantic car alarms outside and the heavy, rhythmic breathing of three colossal figures cramped in a suburban living room.
Eleanor moved first. It was a careful, deliberate rotation of her head. She looked at the ceiling pressing down on her crown, then at Harold, who was seated on the couch, staring like a child at a parade float. Her expression was unreadable, a mix of awe, sorrow, and a fierce, new ownership of the space she occupied.
“Well,” she said, her voice deeper than ever, a vibration that Harold felt in his sternum. It was no longer just a voice. It was a force. “This complicates the furniture situation.”
She tried to take a step towards him, but her shoulder bumped a bookshelf. The whole unit, solid oak, rocked precariously. She stopped, a flicker of frustration crossing her magnificent features. She was a prisoner in her own home.
Chloe’s mind was already working on the problem. “The structural integrity of the house is now compromised for our needs. Doorways are obstacles. The ceiling is a hazard. We need to relocate to a space with higher clearances. The school gymnasium is a possibility, but it will likely be a focal point for collective panic.” She looked at her massive hands, flexing them. “Our caloric intake will need to increase by approximately 500%. Basal metabolic rates have soared.”
Lila was exploring her new reach. She stretched an arm across the living room and, without moving her feet, plucked a small porcelain figurine from the mantle—a little shepherdess Harold’s mother had given them. It looked like a pebble in her palm. “Oops,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. She closed her fist gently. When she opened it, the figurine was powder.
“Lila!” Harold barked, the first fatherly sound he’d made since the change. It came out weak, a tiny protest in a room of giants.
Lila looked down at him, her face high above, framed by the ceiling. Her expression was unfamiliar. Not malicious, but amused. Distantly amused. Like he was a puppy that had yipped. “It was ugly anyway, Dad.”
The words, the tone, lanced through him. It wasn’t just the size. It was the distance. The emotional gulf that had opened alongside the physical one.
Eleanor sensed it. “Lila,” she said, and the command in it brooked no argument. “You will control your strength. You will respect your father’s home. What is left of it.” She turned her gaze back to Harold. “We need to go outside.”
“Outside?” Harold’s voice cracked. “Look out there! It’s chaos!”
“Precisely,” Eleanor said. “And we are now equipped for chaos. Staying here is dangerous. The house is a cage. We need to assess resources, find others… like us.” She said ‘like us’ with a new weight. A tribe had been defined in an instant, and it excluded him.
“I’m not going out there with you looking like… that.” Liam’s voice was a thin scrape from the corner.
“You don’t have a choice, son,” Eleanor said, and there was a finality in it that Harold knew could not be challenged. It was the voice of the new world.“We stay together. That is the only rule that still matters.”
She began to move towards the front door, a slow, careful process of navigating a space never meant for her. She had to turn sideways to get through the doorway to the foyer. The doorframe groaned in protest.
Harold stood, his legs shaky. He followed, a dwarf trailing behind a goddess. Chloe and Lila came after, ducking and maneuvering with increasing, unsettling grace. Liam loitered, then, seeing no alternative, scurried after his father, keeping close.
At the front door, Eleanor paused. Her hand, enormous and capable, rested on the knob. She looked back at her family, her eyes lingering on Harold. In their depths, he saw the ghost of his wife, swimming in a sea of terrifying, unbounded potential. She offered a faint, sad smile.
“Ready or not,” she said, and pulled the door open.
It tore off its hinges. Not with a crash, but with a soft, splintering sigh. She hadn’t meant to; she had simply underestimated the lateral force required. The solid oak door tilted outward and fell onto the porch with a floor-shaking thud.
Eleanor looked at the door in her hand, then at the empty doorway. A shadow of the old embarrassment flitted across her face, followed by a shrug of pure, practical acceptance. She stepped through, leaving the wreckage of the threshold behind.
Harold Vance stepped out after his wife into the cool night air. He looked up. The streetlights cast long, distorted shadows of the giants now standing on his modest porch. Eleanor straightened to her full height on the lawn, free of the ceiling’s constraint. She was a titan, ten feet tall, silhouetted against the swirling red and blue lights now painting the sky from the direction of the city center. The sirens were a symphony to this new age.
She breathed deep, expanding a chest that could hold storms. She looked down at Harold, her eyes reflecting the distant emergency lights. From her vantage point, he knew he looked small, fragile, utterly conquerable.
But her voice, when it came, was for him alone, a low rumble meant to travel the short, immense distance between them.
“Stay close,” she said.
And Harold, his old world in splinters like the door behind him, had nowhere else to go.