The way she speaks is frantic.
“Can’t you see the possibilities? I’m telling you,” her steps echo out in the deserted lab, in the deafening silence, but she continues because nothing else matters now. “This will change the world as we know it…” Ada’s voice is usually hard to understand, but even more so in this moment, with how her mouth opens to say anything and everything and nothing at all. She’s brimming at the seams, and the space around her strains to contain her. Just what had she discovered? Her hands twitch—a health and safety hazard, Lewis thinks, an instinct learnt from rote warnings and burnt fingers. With the way she’s pacing, with the way she’s hyperventilating, it’s like all the air in the room has been sucked out. Even though he’s feeling lightheaded, Lewis can’t get ahead of himself.
A voice in his head asks, quietly, worriedly, if this is all over nothing. It’s the part of him that tells him to check once, twice, three times, again and again. It had, once-upon-a-time, saved him from being shot—but that was a story for another time. If he was being honest, Ada was the one who really saved him—the only one crazy enough to help him, and see that he had something to offer. A knot of gratitude and guilt over how much he owes and the debt he’ll never repay settles in his stomach like an old comfort.
Lewis takes a deep breath in. His head feels like it’s going to split open, but these kinds of migraines are common for him. He schools his thoughts to focus on the situation in front of him. There’s no space for distractions.
She grabs his hand and drags him toward the table. It’s, what, 2 am? Lewis has no idea where she gets her energy from, but the air around her is electric.
Ada goes on and on, and through the pounding of blood in his ears, Lewis can’t make anything out.
On the table is a cloth that seems to hide some sort of box-like container underneath it. Her boots click on the floor as she grabs it, tugging the cover to the ground. There’s a glass box, lying upside down, and Ada gingerly removes that too. The container in her hands has an odd shine to it, but Ada tucks it behind her on another table before Lewis gets the chance to look at it properly.
Now that the table is exposed, Lewis’s eyes search and yet… there’s nothing there. Lewis adjusts his glasses, narrowing his eyes on what would have been under the box.
“Look,” Ada slows her voice down, pointing at the centre of the workbench. “Just—just look at it. It’s not about what you see—it’s about what you don’t.”
She twists her hand, concentrating on one point and—her hand disappears. His mind urges him to look away from the way Ada’s hand has suddenly been amputated, wrist floating out in the open.
She preens at it, like a performer showcasing their favourite magic trick.
A trick, a trick—that’s what it has to be. Ha! A performance to pull one over him, Lewis is sure of it. Because otherwise…. No, that’s just not possible. It—it can’t be, can it?
Lewis’s eyes darted around the lab. Logic is what’s most important here. There has to be something hidden around them, bending the light. Ada’s made some sort of reflector, and is using Lewis as a guinea pig before she inflicts grief on the new interns. Lewis can see it now: vanishing pens and paperwork right before deadlines. Ada has a sick sense of humour and has always enjoyed seeing them squirm.
Still. It’s–
Lewis rips his eyes away. Don’t. Don’t look at it. It’s completely gone. And not in the way other magicians do it. —Even his sister Tracy with all her sleight-of-hand needed to hide or distract the audience before the grand reveal.
The previous discomfort becomes a pulse in the back of his neck, and his headache is coming back full force. It’s so real, and the lab is so, so empty with no place to hide.
“That’s… nice. I didn’t know you were so good at magic.” The face Lewis gives her is a little more than a grimace, “Maybe you should exchange notes with my sister. Trace talks about how she misses you, and she’s always looking for a new main act to perform downtown.”
Ada pulls her hand out, the corner of her mouth twitching up. She coos something under her breath. Lewis catches the words, “… that tickles! Stop that.” He promptly feels the world ending. Ada has finally lost it. She’s finally snapped under the pressure, and now she’s going to try and rope Lewis into her mad scheme.
She directs her gaze to him, full of expectation. Lewis doesn’t know what to do, other than to say he just wants to go home and take some paracetamol before knocking out in record time. He says as much, and—maybe this is all a weird dream?
That’s unlikely; even when he’s trying his hardest, Ada’s face blends together in his dreams. Not like now, when her expression’s so open—it looks wrong. Lewis backs away. Maybe this can be chalked up to Ada’s eccentricity, and thinking anymore about any of this might actually be like trying to parse meaning from a fever-induced daze. Lewis remembers the times he tried to figure out the ways Tracy made a rabbit appear out of her hat—no matter how he tried to explain it, she would shake her head, smiling.
He’s trying his best not to look at her but from the corner of his eye, Ada’s expression hardens, and the happiness shifts to annoyance. Or something even stronger—venom and disdain.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Ada often says those words to him, but never like that. She’s usually joking and quick to explain what she’s talking about, but now she sounds cruel, and the question sits between them unanswered.
She snaps, reaching over the table, flinging off his glasses so that the frames click on the hard floor, and fists the nape of his neck. Her fingers dig into his shoulders, and it’s hard for him to breathe. She forces Lewis’ eyes forward, holding him down with strength he didn’t know she had.
“Look! Just look, for once in your life!” The only thing keeping her voice down is the fact that it’s pitch black outside, and shouting often makes security guards run to the scene.
He has no choice. Lewis tries to sharpen his gaze, not to observe but to perceive—and under the stark fluorescent light, there it is. Lewis isn’t sure how to describe it: it’s like a tear. A jagged cut, like threads splitting and unravelling into the fibres that make them up. Whenever Lewis tries to focus on it, it’s like his eyes are being forced to look away, and even seeing it through his peripheral vision made his head feel like it was going to implode.
Ada is still relentless in her grip, and whenever he tries to close his eyes, she peels them open.
Sirens in his head go off, left and right. The only thing stopping him from pushing Ada off and running far far away, the only thing that’s keeping his feet planted on the tiles, is the fear of what Ada would do without Lewis to ground her.
“What–what is that?” Lewis whispers, throat freezing up with the primal instinct to stay away from what he doesn’t know, what he doesn’t understand.
The other scientist, despite the almost violent look in her eyes before, looked at him humorously. Her nails still claw into the flesh of his back, and Lewis doesn’t know what to think anymore.
“Hmm, can you hear it?” Ada asks, a bit amused. She tilts her head towards the table without a care in the world and towards whatever that thing is.
“…you know I can’t,” Lewis mumbles out.
Her eyes look wrong wrong wrong, dead dead dead. “That’s a shame,” and she gives him a look, like this is all some inside joke.
“It can hear you, you know. Perfectly well—too well, sometimes.”
“…?” Lewis tries to come up with an explanation consisting of more than just confusion, but before he can, his sentence trails off into a gasp as the air itself thickens and compresses around them. The tear—if that’s even the right term—suddenly pulses, warping the sterile lab light into a chaotic spiral of shadow and brilliance. Lewis feels his heart drop, and a sense of weightlessness, as though the ground itself is rebelling against him.
Ada’s expression sharpens, her earlier mania replaced by something colder, almost clinical. “It’s responding.” she says. Her grip relaxes, letting him stumble back. She doesn’t follow.
Lewis barely hears her. There’s a sound now—low, resonant, like the universe is groaning under its own weight. It’s not a sound you hear with your ears. It’s deeper, burrowing into his bones, his thoughts, pulling at the very fabric of his being. He’s not sure if the pain in his skull is from the migraine or if something far worse is happening.
“What did you do, Ada?” he manages to croak, backing away as far as he can without daring to turn his back on the anomaly.
“I didn’t do anything,” Ada says, almost wistfully. She steps closer to the tear, as if enchanted by it. “This isn’t creation. This is— it’s truth. Lewis, I’ve been trying for so long, but this is the first time it’s reacting like this. Before, it would just whisper, but now it’s screaming.”
She reaches out towards the tear again, her hand dissolving into the distortion just like before. But this time, she doesn’t pull it back. Instead, she gasps, eyes wide with wonder—or terror? It’s hard to tell. Her voice drops to a whisper, trembling. “It’s…alive. And it’s looking back.”
Something shifts. The air around the tear begins to ripple outward in waves, and for a fleeting moment, Lewis catches a glimpse. It’s not a shape or a figure. It’s an impossibility, a concept that makes his mind blank and his vision blur. He forces himself to blink and look away, but the imprint of it lingers behind his eyelids, seared into his memory.
“Close it!” he shouts, panic overriding any rational thought. “Ada, close it! Ada!”
But Ada is far beyond his reach now—physically and mentally. She doesn’t respond, doesn’t even flinch, as the ripples intensify. The tear grows larger, consuming the space on the workbench and spilling into the air. Objects nearby—tools, papers, Ada’s heavily stickered laptop—begin to distort, stretching and twisting before flickering in and out of existence.
Lewis can’t stay. Every survival instinct in him screams to flee, to abandon Ada to whatever this is. But as he turns to run, her voice stops him. It’s no longer frantic or cold. It’s calm. Resigned.
“Don’t fight it, Lewis,” she says, her tone almost serene. “This is what’s next. This is what’s always been next.”
He doesn’t look back. He sprints for the exit, heart beating out of his chest, but even as he throws open the lab door, he knows it’s too late. And then, just as he crosses the threshold, the world tilts. A moment of weightlessness, of suspension, and then—
Nothing. Silence. The lab is back to the way it was before—the tear and Ada are gone. The chaos from before seemingly collapsed onto itself and vanished. The glass container from before lies shattered on the floor, shining with a knowing glint.
Lewis breathes in. Out. In again. His fingers tremble. His palm is clammy and the phone in his hand almost slips out, fingers covered in sweat. It rings twice before Tracy picks up, even in the dead of night.
“Tracy Grant, at your service.” His sister had always kept odd hours—surely she could explain this one away. The grand act where the magician vanishes, leaving only shards of broken glass in her wake.
“She– the lab, a tear—”
“Lewis. Calm down. What’s this about? Why are you calling so late?”
“She’s gone, Trace, she tried to–and then she vanished, into thin air right before my eyes and there was this thing and…”
“Who’s gone? Someone disappeared? Lewis, who?!”
“It’s Ada, Tracy. Ada! There’s nothing left—the lab started glowing and then—”
“Lew! You’re not making any sense. Who’s Ada?”
Writer – Areeba Zabrina
Editor – Ally Chu
Artist – Rufina Chan
–April 2025–
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