The room was quiet except for the soft creaking of the ceiling fan above Tasha's head. She sat curled up on her couch, eyes fixed on the message still faintly visible on her mirror.
Blood remembers. So does the jar.
She hadn't touched it ever nor ever seen it with her najed eyes—not even wiped it off. Somehow, it felt like erasing it would be denying that something… real had happened.
But what disturbed her more than the writing were the dreams.
They weren't dreams, not really. They felt like stolen memories.
A woman in a black shawl, her eyes rimmed in kohl, standing before a pyre. The sound of chanting. Flames eating through fabric and flesh as someone screamed.
Tasha had woken up gasping, her hands clenched around the bedsheets, soaked in sweat.
She glanced at her phone and pressed record.
"Voice note... Day nine," she whispered shakily. "The woman came again. She was holding something in her hand this time. It looked like a crescent… like the one on the pendant that you guys showed me."
Her voice broke slightly. "I don't think it's just visions. I think I'm remembering something. Something that didn't happen to *me*."
Meanwhile, at Naya's place, the rest of the girls gathered around her dining table, their faces dimly lit by the glow of the pendant they had retrieved from the chapel. It hadn't stopped pulsing ever since they had returned from Mapatoni.
"She says it's getting worse," Naya murmured, scrolling through Tasha's messages. "She's seeing things. Smelling smoke. Feeling like her house isn't hers anymore."
"That's how it started for us too,"Sienna said softly. "The dreams, the static, the voices…"
"And now we have this," Alani added, nodding toward the pendant.
As if hearing its name, the pendant suddenly flared.
Sasha reached for it, but the second her fingers touched its cold surface, she hissed in pain and recoiled. A thin red mark, like a burn, seared across her palm.
"Sasha!" Naya grabbed her hand.
"I'm fine," Sasha said, gritting her teeth. "But… it showed me something."
They all leaned closer.
"A mark. A tree, carved into rock. Not just any tree. It looked like the one near the chapel. The one they called Mti wa Kiapo... the Oath Tree."
Naya's eyes narrowed. "You think it's a map?"
"Or a warning," Alani said, her tone low.
Elsewhere in the city, Liona stared at her reflection—except it wasn't entirely her reflection anymore.
The woman in the mirror didn't blink when she did.
She turned away and gripped her car keys.
The number the hooded man had given her was still in her messages. "Mzee Kaaya – answers, no questions asked."
She didn't believe in spiritualists. But something had cracked since she started tracking the girls. And now, she was seeing things too.
Thirty minutes later, she stood at the threshold of a dim room, thick with incense and lit only by a single oil lamp.
The old man didn't ask her name.
"You've come with death riding your shadow," he said without turning. "But you didn't bring it. You *awakened* it."
She flinched. "I want it to stop."
"You interfered with a cycle bound in blood. Now it watches you. And when it remembers… it returns."
"To do what?" she whispered.
He finally looked up, eyes cloudy. "To finish what was broken."
Back at Naya's, the girls had started piecing together journal notes, pendant symbols, and recordings.
Sasha's phone buzzed. A voice note.
The contact? Unknown number.
She hesitated. Hit play.
At first, it was just static. Then a low whisper, her own voice—but drawn out, slower, almost dreamlike.
"…Naima… Naima…"
The phone slipped from her fingers.
"Who's Naima?" Zara asked.
Sasha looked pale. "I don't know."
But the jar sitting at the corner of the room pulsed—once.
Then again.
As if it did.