The eyes weren't mine.
I stared at my reflection in the cracked mirror, watching as pupils that shouldn't exist dilated and contracted independently. Left eye: hazel, familiar, terrified. Right eye: amber, ancient, amused.
"Stop fighting," a voice whispered from inside my skull. Not the Collective's thousand-strong chorus. This was singular. Intimate. Wrong.
My hand moved without permission, fingers tracing the air in patterns I didn't understand but somehow recognized. Symbols materialized in faint golden light, hanging suspended before dissipating like smoke.
"You're doing beautifully," the voice purred. "Just like she did."
She?
Memories that weren't mine flooded my consciousness. A woman in a white coat, her face obscured by shadow, standing in this exact room fifty years ago. Her hands moving in those same patterns. Her scream as something invisible tore through the barrier between worlds.
"Dr. Eleanor Voss," I heard myself say, though I'd never known that name. "She opened the door first."
My legs carried me toward the wall where symbols had begun appearing on their own—ancient glyphs that burned themselves into the concrete like brands. Each one pulsed with that same amber light now shining from my stolen eye.
"I didn't steal it," the voice corrected, reading my thoughts. "You inherited it. Along with her debt."
The symbols formed a doorway. Not metaphorical—an actual door carved itself into the solid wall, stone and steel peeling back like flesh from a wound. Beyond it: darkness so absolute it seemed to devour the light around it.
And eyes. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All amber. All watching. All waiting.
"The Collective was just the waiting room," the voice explained, my mouth moving to form words I didn't choose. "We're what they've been waiting for."
Something reached through the doorway. Not a hand. Not a tentacle. Something my brain couldn't process, couldn't name, couldn't reject because it was already inside me, had always been inside me, coded into my DNA like a ticking time bomb.
"Your grandmother made a bargain," the voice said, and suddenly I understood why my mother never spoke about her own mother. Why there were no photos. Why I'd always felt watched.
"Every third generation, one of us opens. One of us becomes the door."
My body turned toward the darkness. Both eyes now amber. Both ancient. Both eager.
"And you, my dear..." the voice whispered as my foot crossed the threshold.
"You're right on time."
The door began to close behind me. But just before it sealed shut, I heard something from the other side—the side with light, with sanity, with everything I was leaving behind.
Footsteps. Running. A voice calling my name.
A voice I recognized.
The voice of someone who should have been dead for seventy-three years.
Dr. Eleanor Voss was coming home.