Lucy sat on a mossy log deep in the Norwegian wood, a small purple stone balanced in her palm. She stared into its violet facets until her eyes ached. Pressure built behind them, the same pressure she felt around people, but the stone gave back nothing. She needed a living soul to read. Without one, her kaleidoscope eyes would stay a locked door. She followed a winding path until the trees opened around a wild, swirling house painted in every color. Travelers gathered on its bright steps, pointing at the curling patterns, lingering as if the walls had hooked them. Lucy chose a man resting by the door and fixed her gaze on him. He smiled, thinking her eyes only pretty. The pressure rose. The world went still. An image struck her clean and certain: a child's grave, fresh dirt, his hands shaking. Then it passed. Lucy stepped back, breath caught. She had held the gaze. She had seen. But she did not know what the picture meant, or what to do with a stranger's buried grief now sitting inside her chest.

Lucy came back to herself with the man still watching her. The vision had passed, but her body had not yet caught up. She stood too straight, one hand half-raised, her breath held longer than a person's breath should hold. The man's smile was gone. He had felt the stillness in her the way an animal feels a shift in the wind. He stepped down from the bright steps of the swirling house and came toward her. "What did you just do," he said. It was not a question. His voice shook the way his hands had shaken in the picture she had seen. Behind him, the other travelers had stopped pointing at the walls. They were looking at her now. Lucy made herself move. She lowered her hand and turned her face toward the trees, away from the steps, away from him. A rusted iron cross stood at the edge of the clearing, bright wildflowers heaped at its base in colors that did not belong on a grave marker. She walked to it as if she had meant to all along. She knelt. She touched one of the flowers. "My brother," she said. The lie came out steady. "I saw it when I looked at you. I'm sorry. Sometimes I go quiet. I didn't mean to stare." The man stopped a few paces behind her. She did not turn. She heard him breathe out, long and broken, and she understood she had given him the only story that would explain her without frightening him. He believed grief. He had his own. After a moment his footsteps went back toward the house. Lucy stayed kneeling at the cross until the steps were empty again. Her hands were shaking now too. She had learned something her eyes could not teach her. A reading left a mark on her body, and the mark could be seen. If she meant to keep using this gift, she would have to learn to hide the moment it arrived.