A hand from the future.

She didn’t notice at first, but she had lifted off the ground. Her curls floated in the air as she held her arms open in front of the book.

The bells from the church struck twelve. On the sixth chime, the lights in the apartment went out.

The book began to glow with a light of its own as she kept reading. The windows started to rattle as her voice grew louder.

There was a crack, and the windows blew apart. The glass hung suspended in time for a second, and then every sharp shard started floating toward her—but by the time they reached her, they had turned to sand.

The sand never touched her. An invisible bubble, traced by the drifting grains, protected her. The book was protecting itself.

The sand on the ground began to lift, moving between her hands. Slowly, it gathered into a ball, the particles spiraling around her arms as they found their way to her palms.

At the center, a red glow emerged. The sand melted, morphed, and took the shape of a small mirror.

When the last grain had joined it, she spoke the final word and dropped to the floor.

The lights came back on. The windows were whole again. Floating above the book was the small mirror.

She picked it up by the edges, careful not to leave fingerprints on the surface, and turned around. Behind her, a mirror hung on the wall.

She lifted the smaller mirror and placed it over one eye, holding it between her eyebrow and cheek. Looking into the infinite reflections of the larger mirror, she reached into the mirror on her face and pulled out a ball of light.

She swallowed it.

The mirror on the wall began to change. Images flickered across it—memories, long lost but necessary to understand the future.

Her uncovered eye started to shift colors as the figures in the mirror moved. The eye took on the color of whoever was doing most of the taking.

At the end of the memory, a hand extended from the mirror, asking without words. She nodded. The hand reached into her chest and took the ball of light.

The mirror flared. Her eye changed again—this time a blue outline blending into green, finishing in yellow just before the pupil.

Another memory began, except nothing in it had happened yet. She didn’t recognize anyone, and her eye no longer changed when someone spoke.

As the memory faded, the same hand emerged. It stretched the images with it, twisted them into a sphere, and placed the ball of light back into the mirror on her face.

A sudden flash filled the room. She shut her eyes by instinct.

The mirror over her eye cracked and crumbled back into sand. Pain flared as her other eye shifted back to its natural brown.

She pressed a hand to her heart and closed the book.

As she slid it back onto the shelf, she knew exactly what she needed to do next.