Prologue
The house was almost hers.
Same couch. Same scuffed coffee table with the ring from a glass that had been left there two summers ago. Same hallway leading back to the bedrooms where her children should have been sleeping. The photographs on the wall were even in the right order.
But the walls themselves were wrong.
They rose only high as her shoulders before dissolving into a pale, incomplete gray. Above that, there was no celling; just a soft, directionless light that never changed. When she looked up too long, her eyes watered.
She stopped looking up.
Somewhere beyond the unfinished walls she could hear the real house continuing without her. Water running. A cabinet door shutting. Her husband's voice, low and tired, telling one of the kids to go back to bed. The sounds were close enough that she sometimes answered them. No one ever answered back.
She had tried to walk out the front door once. It opened onto a street that looked like theirs but wasn't finished either. The asphalt stopped in ragged edges. The streetlights stood dark and hollow. In the distance, other houses waited in the same half-built state --frames without walls, windows without glass, porches that ended in empty air. Nothing moved out there except the occasional flicker of something that might have been a person, far away and hard to focus on.
She no longer went outside.
Time worked differently here. She measured it by the sounds from the real house. Morning cartoons. The garage door. The television left on too late. Sometimes days seemed to pass between one familiar noise and the next. Sometimes the same moment repeated, like a skipped record.
The only thing that ever changed was the radio.
It sat on the kitchen counter, the same cheap one they had owned for years. On her side it still worked. Most of the time it produced only a low steady hiss. But every so often the static would thin, and she would hear voices - real voices, close and clear. Children mostly. Once she thought she recognized a neighbor's boy. Another a girl who sounded like she was trying not to cry.
The children never seemed to hear her when she spoke back.
Tonight the static cleared longer than usual.
A boy's voice came through, quiet and careful.
"Is anyone there?"
She crossed the unfinished kitchen so fast she nearly fell.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, I'm here. Can you hear me?"
the static swelled, then thin again.
"...tower," The boy said. Someone else spoke over him, a girl, too far from the microphone. The words broke apart. When the voice returned it was clearer, closer.
"we're at the tower. Somethings happening."
The light above the incomplete walls brightened for a moment, the way it always did when the real tower drew power. She had learned to dread that change.
"You need to leave," she said, louder now.
"Whatever you're doing, stop. Don't let them see you."
The radio hissed.
Then the boy's voice again, smaller.
"Who is this?"
She opened her mouth to answer.
The surge hit.
It was not a sound. It was pressure-sudden, enormous as if the unfinished house had been struck from the outside by something vast. The walls trembled. The pale light flared white. For a spilt second, she saw through the incomplete celling into a night sky that was not the same as she remembered.
When the pressure passed, the radio was silent.
She stood in the half-built kitchen with both hands on the counter, listening.
From the real house, very faintly, she heard a screen door open and close. Footsteps. Her husband's voice calling a name that use to be hers.
She closed her eyes and did not answer.
Somewhere above her, in a different version of the same town, five children were already running.
And the soft places had begun.
