For a moment neither of them moved. The room held its silence in a way that felt deliberate, staged, the small chairs still pulled out from the little table where the twins had eaten their evening meal, Luna's wooden fox still lying on its side at the foot of her bed exactly where she always left it, as if the girls had simply dissolved out of the room mid breath and left every ordinary object behind to prove it had happened too fast for anything to be disturbed.

Marina's knees nearly went out from under her. She caught the doorframe instead, her nails digging into the wood, and the sound...