--No, this isn't right. There are fingers right there, she can see them, attached to her hands. Are they hers, then? She tries to wiggle the fingers, and they move; she taps them against each other, and feels a dull pressure. Hers, then, probably. She still has fingers -- maybe toes, too? -- there's just... something wrong with them. With her.

She'd better hurry up and get to school. One of the teachers can tell her what to do about it.

She makes it most of the way before something catches her leg -- she must have misjudged a step with the walking-on-stilts she was doing -- and she falls. She half-twists and catches herself on her forearms, her elbows slamming painfully into concrete. She lies there for a while, just breathing, before working herself into a sitting position.

Nothing's broken, she doesn't think, just bruised. But she doesn't think she can keep her balance while walking, even if she can get back up on her stilt-legs without hands. She glances around; there's no one to have seen her fall. No one to ask for help.

Her breaths are coming faster, now, as she starts to really get worried. She gulps in a breath and holds it, lets it out slowly.

Another.

Another.

Another.

All right. Something is wrong with her. She has to get somewhere with people, somewhere she can get help, and it doesn't matter how she looks doing it.

Crawling seems manageable. She tries it, but the hands in front of her keep scraping against the ground when she moves and something about it is weirdly painful, so she stops.

She sits there. It's February; the air is chilly, and she's starting to feel it. A dog barks in the distance.

She doesn't have a cellphone. Her father thought she didn't need one, and she didn't even really disagree. She wishes now that she'd given more thought to the 'for emergencies' angle.

She imagines raising her voice and yelling for help. It's a distinctly unpleasant thought; she shrinks from the idea of purposely attracting attention that blatantly. She's not even sure what help she needs, exactly.

What else is she going to do? Sit here until someone happens to pass by in an hour or two? What if she's worse by then? What if whatever's wrong is serious? What if she dies, because she was too stupid to do anything to prevent it?

She doesn't have to sound crazy or anything. She can just call out like a reasonable person who's having difficulty. Someone from the school will probably hear her; she's behind it here, out of the way of the flood of students who enter at the front, but there's likely someone within earshot.

"Hello?" she calls, loudly but not quite shouting. "Can anyone hear me?"

It takes three tries before she gets a response, a boy her age she doesn't recognize stepping around a corner into view.

"Uh, yeah?" he asks, frowning at the sight of her just sitting there.

"Hi!" she says with a smile. "Um, I'm having some sort of -- medical problem," that didn't seem quite right, but it would get across the idea -- "and I'm hoping you can call my dad for me?" Nothing weird here, just a simple way to help someone out with a phone call, easy as anything.

"…I guess," says the guy, coming closer. "Here, you can call him." He unlocks his phone and hands it out.

"I don't have --" He can't tell what's wrong, she realizes. There are normal-looking hands at her sides, connected to normal-looking arms, connected to her own shoulders. Of course he would assume they were hers. "I can't do that right now. I can tell you the number and you can put it on speaker?"

He does that.

She tells her father enough to alarm him into coming to get her. The boy awkwardly leaves to tell a teacher, who makes it out to her eventually and waits with her. When her father arrives, he asks her a few concerned questions about whether it hurts, whether she can move at all, before lifting her outright into the car. It pulls away from the curb and starts driving. She leans her head back and lets herself relax, just a little.

"Where are we going?" she asks. Home or the doctor, presumably, but she isn't sure which.

"The hospital, unless you really think it's a bad idea," says her father. "It still doesn't hurt at all, kızım? Can you try wiggling your fingers?"

"I don't have fingers," she says. "These -- I know it looks like I do, but these aren't mine. Or the arms or the legs or anything. That's what I meant about having trouble moving."

"...All right," he says. "...Can you wiggle them anyway?"

Can she? She stares at the hands, wills them to move and tenses all her muscles. The hands obligingly clench into fists. She unclenches and wills the fingers to wiggle, and they give a twitch. "...Kind of. It feels really weird, though." And she noticed, as she was speaking just now --

"Also," she enunciates carefully, "it's getting harder to move the mouth."

"We are definitely going to the hospital," says her father.

Yeah. That seems like a good idea.

The hospital doesn't know what's wrong with her.

She can answer yes-or-no questions, for a bit -- one blink for yes, two for no -- before she loses the eyes, and there is no longer any part of her that can move at all.

She shrinks to the size of a marble, to a pinpoint, nearly to nothing. Things are done to the body around her, and she feels them distantly, as though through a thin layer of ice. Her vision grows blurry, then someone closes the eyes and she sees only darkness.

She can still hear. People talk to her, and she can't answer. Her father talks to her, sounding variously worried or reassuring or upset, and she can't answer.

She devotes herself to trying not to panic. She would take deep breaths, but has no lungs with which to do so, and can't think of how else to manage it. Is what she's feeling even real, when there's no physical evidence of it? She stops trying to control anything. She exists.

Eventually, her father's voice comes close, speaking urgently. "Listen. Can you hear me, kızım?" -- and she feels a flash of stupid, pointless fury at him for asking a question when he knows, by now, that she can't answer; but then he goes on -- "God, I hope you can hear me -- they think you're awakening. You're going to be an esper, kızım, an esper. This will only last a week, and then you'll be an esper."

He repeats it several more times, but she heard it the first. An esper -- she can hardly think about what that might mean, beyond what she's currently experiencing. What it means, most importantly, is that they're not going to find a way to fix this. It's not going to be over in an hour, or by tonight, or in a day. There's nothing they can do to end it before the week has elapsed. But it will be over in a week; it won't be permanent. She won't be stuck like this for the rest of her life, as she has been terrified of. She won't seem to get better, then relapse unpredictably. It won't be an entire year before this is over; it won't be a month.

It will be a week.

If they're right.

They think you're awakening, her father said. They think. How sure could they be, really? Strange things happen to people all the time that doctors can't diagnose. Her father sounded reassuring; but he would, she thinks, no matter how sure he really was.

But they're probably right. She hopes they're right.

A week.

The day passes. Someone puts on an audiobook, and she tries to lose herself in it. Strange aches and itches fade in and out. She maybe manages to nap, or maybe not. When she's awake, she has nothing to do but think.

She imagines a prosthetic body, something they could put her in and have her control, so she could once more move and sense and talk. If she's not awakening after all, if she's stuck like this, is that something that could be done? She's never heard of anything like it. Prosthetic limbs attach to stumps, and are moved by them; there's nothing left of her that can move to control anything else. Maybe there are dungmats out there that could be controlled only by her mind; but they would be hideously expensive, surely, and already being used for something better.

But they wouldn't just leave her like this. Would they? She'd never looked up policy about what's done with permanently comatose patients, let alone those who aren't even in a coma and who can still think. Would they know that? Can they scan her somehow and find out? Would it even make them more likely to let her die eventually, or would it backfire --

She stops thinking about it for now. The audiobook is at an exciting part (though she missed how it got there), with the heroes about to win.

Eventually the light dims, and the sounds of other people moving around grow less frequent. It must be nighttime. She is glad, so glad, that she can still keep track of time.

She succeeds in falling asleep.

The second day passes in much the same manner.

In a gap between audiobooks, it occurs to her to worry about being kidnapped by a dungeon. What could she possibly do about it, if one took her now? Maybe it wouldn't especially be trying to kill her, but would have dangers it expected victims to be able to move away from. Or maybe it would just be Nightmare. She tries not to think about Nightmare on the best of days, and it's not particularly easier right now.

She's probably awakening. But even if she is -- dungeons don't take espers, but do awakeners count? Is it the beginning of hell week that matters, or the end? She doesn't know. She doesn't know, and she can't find out.

In time -- slow, dragging, unforgiving time -- the day ends.

There is another day. Time passes. She exists.

Another day.

Another.

Another.

Another.

Leyla wakes up.

She squints her eyes open, then closed against the light. Then she realizes what she just did, gasps, and flails halfway upright before getting stymied by the various... things... attached to her. All right. That's all right. There's beeping, someone will come, and she'll be able to talk to them. Her whole body feels kind of terrible, but it's her body, and she can move, and the week is over.

She made it.

Someone does come. She's given water. Her father comes, and hugs her tightly, and she can raise her own arms and hug him back. Preparations are made for her leaving the hospital. It doesn't take long; she'll be able to go home soon. She feels a little like she wants to collapse and sleep for another week, and a little more like she wants to run a kilometer and yell at the sky and climb a dozen trees, but most of all she wants, so much, to go home.

She stands to follow her father out -- feeling surprisingly steady on her feet -- and takes a few steps toward the door, and then there's a loud crash in another room, and she stretches out to check what it was, and her body is made up of two rooms and a piece of hallway and a bit of the ceiling and a chunk of the walls of the story below and she knows the shape of all the furniture within herself and there are people in both of her rooms and in one of them someone just dropped a tray of some sort of supplies and the tray is wobbling its momentum down to nothing on her floor --

She snaps back into herself, into the flesh-and-blood body that's been hers all her life. What was that -- it was a new power, obviously, it must be her esper power, she's an esper now -- but she hadn't quite done that on purpose, hadn't really meant to do it at all --

"Siktir," she says very quietly, and raises her hands in front of her. The fingers -- her fingers, they're right there on her hands, they're obviously her fingers -- wiggle obediently at her command, as though pulled by puppet strings. The tips of the her fingers are once again slightly numb.

She'll have to learn how to avoid reaching out reflexively like that. Apparently, control over when she uses her power isn't something she gets for free.

At home she showers, and eats, and recovers. She climbs several trees, if not quite a dozen, and it's easier than ever before. Her father gets her a cellphone, without her even mentioning it. She starts looking up agencies and mixers.

Her eyes are a dark purple now, which she likes; when she pulls out a few strands of hair to check the roots, she sees that it's coming in very light, white or nearly so. She's not sure how she feels about that just yet.