|1| Doctor’s Office
“It felt like the worst feeling of all time. How I ended up here, well, it was like a bizarre dream—constant buzzing and screeching until I awoke.”
“I see,” said Doctor Hemlock, his voice muffled through his silver-beaked plague doctor mask. “I have had Marked patients before, you know. But none of them had stories quite as fantastical as yours. And your name?”
“Stella,” said the girl in the chair across from him. “Stella Barnes.”
Hemlock wrote it down on his notepad. “Good, good.”
Stella observed her surroundings. They were in a room made of obsidian bricks, and the chairs were covered in blinding white fabric. The contrast disoriented her, but not nearly as much as the buzzing and screeching had.
“Would you mind describing the buzzing to me?” Hemlock asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. . . .” Stella scrunched her face up to think. “Like . . . Like a bee? Or, no, a mosquito. Some kind of bug. Like when you can hear there’s a bug in the room, and it keeps flying by your ear, but you can’t find it and it keeps tormenting you every five seconds—” she shuddered.
Hemlock nodded and scribbled something else into his notepad. “And the screeching?”
“I don’t know . . . ,” Stella said. “It’s like nails on a chalkboard . . . only, worse . . . and louder.”
She had a disturbed look on her face. Recalling this made her feel as if she were living through it all over again. “Look . . . can I please go home?” she asked. “They need me back there.”
“You know you can’t leave yet, Stella,” said Hemlock. “The first phase of the experiment isn’t over.”
“I don't know why I even signed up for this. Honestly, I don't. I know you can't capture it. So there's no point in me trying to do it, right?” Stella looked all around the room, and then it flipped sideways, making her fall out of the comfort of her chair.
“You will return,” said Hemlock, slowly turning into green mist. “It's just a matter of time.” A familiar buzzing sound greeted Stella as she warped away.
Stella landed and sighed. She looked up at the night sky above her, littered with stars like fireflies in a jar, and she looked down at the frozen lake she stood on, still covered in the creature’s claw marks.
“Find the creature,” Hemlock had told her three days before. Three attempts later, she still had no luck. And still, the buzzing continued.
Stella looked at the blue diamond-shaped mark on the palm of her hand. It had appeared after the first attempt, and she still had no idea what it meant. Hemlock clearly liked being cryptic on purpose.
Despite the snowy and icy landscape, Stella didn’t feel the cold. The heaters in her travel boots took care of that. She pressed on her earpiece, and the Sight Shades appeared over her eyes, tinting her vision blue.
“Fourth time’s the charm, maybe?” Stella murmured, and she set off across the frozen lake.
