There were no doors in the spective’s house, just sheets of falling liquid that parted for us like curtains. Despite how hard it made conversation, I was thankful for our hazmat suits. I had no desire to join the people who’d been fully encased.

  Ana insisted on going first every time we went through a door, and maintained physical contact with me at all times. I don’t think the crimson child took it personally; they seemed halfway convinced they were an irredeemable monster already. So while Ana took care of physical security, I tried to get through to our guide.

  “So this is a question for all of you,” I said, and when the molten red in the shape of a kid tilted their head in confusion, I elaborated: “the person who’s talking to me and the voices in your head. Do you have names?”

  The spective stumbled, though there were no obstacles in the mirror-smooth pool of a floor. “I… my name is Thom. The voices, they don’t have a name. They just shout at me…”

  “Is it alright if I keep addressing them as ‘the voices’, then?” I asked.

  Thom paused as Ana peeked through the next curtain of liquid. “They like that. I don’t like how much they like that.”

  What the poor kid needed was a dedicated therapist, not a social worker and a soldier. But my job was to make sure Thom was safe enough to even be in the same room as a therapist, and I wasn’t qualified to figure out what was going on in their head.

  So I stepped past the matter and moved on to the matters I knew how to help with. “The people who were frozen upstairs—do you mind if I ask who they are?”

  Thom hunched over. “I don’t know. They were just… there, when I held the moment. I think they were his parents. Or maybe his siblings.” He hesitated, then—somewhat forcefully—added, “They were going to take him away.”

  “Him?” I asked.

  “Tsu.” Anachel interrupted, backing out from the doorway. “This one’s closed.”

  Stolen story; please report.

  I turned her way, and she tapped the curtain of fluid with a touchstick, parting it. The other side was sealed shut, the shiny fresh wax showing the outline of a door.

  I didn’t like the look of that, but this house wasn’t made for me. Thom placed one morphic hand against the doorknob, and I heard it click as the child swung it open.

  It must have been a playroom, before the spective’s power had preserved it under a coating of wax. A TV still glimmered, frozen between frames, its light blurred to illegible crimson beneath its semi-transparent shell. Foam bullets and toy guns were littered across the floor, their shapes nothing more than barely visible lumps.

  And in the heart of the room a figure—a child’s outline, couldn’t be older than twelve—was half-standing, turning to leave.

  “He was going to go,” Thom said, his voice quavering. “Forever. Do you see? I just need—I just want a little longer with him. Can you give me that? Please?”

  Thom’s form rippled, losing coherence, like the last splash in a summer pool, the droop of a flag running out of wind, and in that instant I saw into the shard of magic that a child named Thom had inadvertently made his own. His was the power of endings defied, hands held at sunset and farewells forestalled.

  Ana nudged my heel with hers, and I followed her gaze. Through the uneven coating of wax that had held Thom’s friend—or more?—in this instant, I saw the fluttering of eyelids.

  The people Thom had entombed were still conscious.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, to Thom, to the voices in their head, to the people who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time where a spective had been born.

  “Just let me have this,” Thom begged. “You can go back and tell them I’m not hurting anyone, okay? I’m just… keeping them here. For a little. They’re still alive, see? And I’ll let them go and it’ll be like nothing happened, I just… not yet. Please. Please, don’t make me do this.”

  “Tsu,” Ana said, as the walls sludged towards the sealed door and it twisted with a click. “Assay.”

  I closed my eyes, not wanting to see what came next. “I can’t help them,” I whispered. “Get us out of here. We’ll come back with someone who can help you, Thom, I promise.”

  “I don’t need help!” Thom shouted. “I’ll lock you up here forever if you ruin this!”

  “Kid, you can’t win this with violence. They’ll send you to the Neverfound if we don’t return,” Ana said, and there was an exhaustion bone-deep in her voice as she looked at one more child with too much power who was in too deep to back down.

  “I know,” Thom said, and in that moment I knew we’d made a mistake. “And in the Neverfound nobody will take this moment from me.”

  Blood-red wax surged inwards as Ana drew two artifacts from her belt, and I whispered one last apology to Thom.