At this point, our story requires what polite historians might call "a strategic temporal adjustment." Alice—nine years old, tragedy-hardened, and stubborn as winter frost—had resolved to master dust control. Not the most thrilling of arcane arts, perhaps, but hers was a patience honed in darker places than most children know. She wanted to dedicate endless hours to it. Life, naturally, laughed at her plans. Schoolwork piled up: homework, tests, those soul-crushing assigned books with their brittle yellow pages. Household chores loomed too—though Helena would've cheerfully shouldered them all, humming all the time. But unfortunately for little girl, Not-a-Doctor vetoed such coddling with a single hissed word: "Independent." No one dared ask what nightmare-shaped definition he attached to that term, so lessons began.

  Helena taught cooking, sewing, the sacred art of removing bloodstains from linen. Walery, between paintings, showed her animal husbandry, resource rationing. Gregory drilled survival—edible fungi versus liver-failing lookalikes, tracking, how to build everything from campfires to a nightstand. On paper? Thrilling. In practice? A nine-year-old’s exhaustion, compounded by spectral taskmasters who forgot human children need sleep. Weeks blurred. Too fast for reflection. Too fast to question why ghosts cared about a living girl’s curriculum—or what debt this training might incur. Boredom, that fertile soil for childhood epiphanies, never took root. Gone were the days of sulking with sticks in dirt. Now Alice stirred pots with one hand while reciting poems for school. Then came the animals—less "exotic stewardship," more "don’t-let-the-chickens-starve-again" duty. Afterward, paint-splattered and determined, she’d wrestle with kitchen cabinet doors. Only if the ghosts drifted into distraction would she dart upstairs, flashlight in hand, to wage war under her blanket against mutinous dust particles. Victory was rare.

  Months passed without cosmic revelations—at least regarding dust. But elsewhere, proof of her labor grew tangible: kitchen cabinets that no longer groaned like dying men when opened. a painting above the fireplace, two burlap sacks of foraged mushrooms and berries—none poisonous, a point of quiet pride. Yet straight A’s and renovated furniture couldn’t stifle the gnawing sense of spinning her wheels. She was nine. Morality? A half-drawn map. Life goals? "Avoid death" topped the list. Her "profound" musings on injustice earned patronizing hums from Helena and literal vanishing acts from Walery. So she stopped sharing them.

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  It Was a Saturday. A beautiful, sunny spring Saturday. Alice woke with purpose. Breakfast was a swift ballet: sandwiches assembled, water boiled on the antique stove, ham sliced by Walery. Gregory hammered ominously in the living room—another "educational" renovation she’d dodge like a draft notice.

  She inhaled her meal and exploded outdoors, leaving behind the clatter of abandoned tools. The wind bit at her smile, but she ran anyway—lungs burning, braid whipping—until her side cramped like a clenched fist. Collapsing onto a fallen pine, she surveyed the woods. The bunker loomed in her mind, its darkness thick with unkept promises. She’d added it to her mental ledger, somewhere between achieving adulthood and conquering global domination. A logical sequence, really.

  The wind howled through the trees, battering branches like a drunk rattling cellar doors. The canopy shrieked overhead, smothering her half-hearted singing. Alice huddled behind the oak’s gnarled trunk, her hood drawn tight as a shroud, and watched dead leaves pirouette in the gale. Could she ever bend them to her will? The vision came easily: leaves snapping into formation like soldiers, aligning into intricate patterns. But… was that really possible? Not-a-Doctor had sworn it was real. But his silence these past months had grown louder than any lesson. No dreams. No whispers. Just absence, thick as the bark at her back.

  Alice was learning the weight of reality now. Schoolbooks praised Newton’s apple, not enchanted dust. Spring’s return followed equations, not incantations. Even her experiments with particles felt silly—a child’s game, like whispering to stuffed animals about tea parties. Ghosts? Undeniable. She knew that. Dancing leaves? Pathetic fantasy. Then—

  A crack. A thud. Something heavy meeting earth.

  Alice lunged upright, pulse jackhammering in her throat. She scanned the undergrowth. Nothing. But the air itself seemed to recoil, holding its breath. Something felt… off.