Camille Yu thought silence was safety. Now it is a sentence.
The message arrived at 3:04 p.m.
From: Mom
Meet me in the old art studio. 4:00. Don't tell anyone.
No explanation. No signature.
Camille stared at the text.
Something about it felt… off.
Her mother never messaged like that. Not without an emoji, a period, a second message correcting the typo she hadn't made.
But Camille didn't ask questions.
Some part of her — the part that hadn't slept in days — wanted to be summoned. Wanted to be seen. Wanted someone else to take control of the story spiraling around her.
She got dressed in silence. She didn't tell anyone where she was going.
She walked alone to the east wing.
And stepped into the past.
The old studio had been sealed off since Lyra died. Supposedly under renovation. The broken windows had been taped shut, the door padlocked. But today, the door hung slightly open, as if waiting.
Camille stepped inside.
The door shut behind her with a solid, final click.
Darkness wrapped around her like cold fingers. The scent of plaster, mold, and turpentine clung to the air. Only a handful of lights flickered — not enough to show the full room, just enough to create shadows that breathed.
Then she saw it.
And froze.
An installation.
That was the only way to describe it.
This wasn't graffiti. This wasn't vandalism.
This was deliberate.
Curated.
Sketches hung on the walls, tacked to easels, suspended from strings. Some were framed, others were torn at the edges like they'd been ripped from a private sketchbook. Every surface in the room had become a gallery.
And every piece of art was of Lyra Sato.
Lyra, kneeling on the floor, arms wrapped around herself.
Lyra in the bathroom stall, mascara bleeding down her face.
Lyra underwater, hair fanned out like seaweed, eyes open and watching.
Dozens of versions of her.
Crying. Screaming. Cracking.
And in nearly every image, Camille appeared — a pale figure in the corner, in a mirror, in the shadows of the background.
Watching.
Frozen.
Doing nothing.
Camille's chest tightened.
She tried to look away, but the room pulled her attention back, again and again, to the girl she'd ignored. The girl she had buried in the shallow grave of memory.
The lights dimmed. A projector flickered on behind her.
A silent video began to play on the far wall — grainy, timestamped.
Security footage.
A hallway.
Lyra runs past the camera, tears streaming down her face.
She stops just outside the bathroom.
A few seconds later — Camille walks into frame.
She pauses. Hears the sobbing. Looks toward the door.
And then — she keeps walking.
The video loops. Over and over.
Camille backed away, trembling. "Stop," she whispered. "Stop, please."
But the projector changed.
Now, a different clip — audio only.
Her voice. Recorded.
"If Lyra's always that dramatic, that's not my fault. She always made everything a problem."
Then Lyra's voice. Fragile. Breathless.
"I'm trying. I swear I'm trying to make it stop…"
The recording ended.
Camille stumbled back. Her knees hit the floor.
"I didn't mean it," she gasped. "I didn't know—"
But that was the lie, wasn't it?
She had known.
At the center of the room stood a chair.
On the wall behind it: one last drawing. Larger than the rest.
It showed Camille in this exact room — seated, surrounded by Lyra's agony.
But in the drawing, Camille's reflection in the mirror was split in two — half her real face, half a distorted version, twisted in guilt.
Above the sketch, a single word:
"Witness"
And below it, written in Lyra's unmistakable handwriting:
"This is where you could've said something."