Try Again

Her brother had been acting weird for the last few days.

He kept looking over his shoulder, like someone was watching.

Tracy couldn’t remember exactly when it started happening—time seemed to blur these days—but it was clear. He had been avoiding spending any time alone with her high school assistant, Joanna, and it had gotten so bad that they couldn’t stand to be in the same room together.

And anytime that she could force them to be, they would barely acknowledge each other.

(Instead, they would both look at her in a way that made her skin crawl. Like she was the key, the light on their path to salvation–maybe not now, but one day. Tracy got chills just thinking about their piercing glances.)

It was odd. Tracy remembered the ways Lewis and Joanna would chat on and on about nothing at all. The two had something in common. Tracy knew that as an objective fact, but the details still evaded her.

Now they would do nothing but glare at each other. The tension was thick enough that Tracy could cut it with one of her trick knives. They were always a hit at her performances; people got tired of the same card shows.

Still, neither of them liked it when she waved one around—”that could cut you, Trace!”, they would say together, even though she had told them countless times that it was nothing more than a butterfly knife, and a dull one at that. But currently, it’s like now they can’t seem to focus on anything at all.

Just today, she caught Lewis dozing off three times, in the same way he does when he hasn’t slept in days. But other times, Lew has fits of restlessness, where his sudden pacing polishes the studio floor into a bright shine.

But it wasn’t just him—Joanna couldn’t seem to pay attention either. She just stared at the walls, like something was missing. Like someone came and unravelled her, leaving her empty and hollow.

Even stranger, whenever Tracy turned her back, they would whisper to each other. Lewis would cave into himself, and Jo would speak, her voice low and hoarse like it pained her. As if the act of just being here was so unbearable that it took all her strength to stay upright.

She would clutch and twist her heart locket, pulling down tightly. Her neck ended up red and white, serrated with chain-like grooves.

“It happened again. I don’t know how many more times I can take it.” she said, breathing heavily, eyes vacant. Her sharp face is even sharper under this unbearable burden. Tracy had to strain her ears just to hear them, pretending to check a booking for a boy’s birthday party that was confirmed months ago.

“Well…” Lewis‘s voice takes a sharp turn, and it fills with the bitterness of a man who is exhausted and frustrated beyond belief. “You have all the time in the world, Miss Ark… I hope you don’t forget it.”

“… you really are heartless, aren’t you?” The rigid formality between them makes Tracy uneasy. What are they talking about? What are they hiding?

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy. After all, it’s not like he can live being anything else.”

Joanna’s silence is telling—Tracy can see it now: tight fists and anger sharpened into a weapon. Lewis isn’t much better. He always had a habit of being too honest, and whenever he said something he couldn’t hold in, he would brace himself, holding his arms close to his chest, posture ramrod straight.

But as she peeks at their conversation, she sees something else entirely. From a distance, Tracy can’t even recognize them. Lewis looks drained in a way she hasn’t seen in a long time, eyes bloodshot. He’s hunched into himself, like something really did claw into his ribs and rip out his heart.

And when Tracy looks at Joanna, it’s clear that the loss Lewis feels is nothing more than a paper cut compared to the sorrow that drips from her frame. Her outline—because her face is shrouded in a shadow that Tracy can’t make out—is a harsh thing against the ashy walls. She’s held together by a little more than the navy jumper she’s wearing and stubborn pride.

Both of them stand, still in time. Something’s building, something that both of them want to say and yet, nothing happens.

///

Joanna can’t recall when she caught on. When she finally snapped out of the trance she had slipped into—when she realised someone so essential had vanished, like smoke in the wind.

But here’s what she does remember.

Death wasn’t something that happened in isolation. Someone told her that once, and those words clung to her head like a sugary sweet syrup.

But this wasn’t death, was it?

Joanna feels it seamlessly—this ache, this emptiness. Like it had always existed. But that couldn’t be true could it? She knows it deep inside her, the same way she knows anything else: her name is Joanna, her favourite colour is red, and she works for Tracy Grant, a woman a few years older than her who puts on magic shows with dreams to make it big. The same way she knows she wants to become a historian, in hopes of discovering the past and documenting the future.

She knows these facts the same way she knew her.

Now, if only Joanna could recall her name…

All she could place was that there was this flash, and she’s missing. It’s obvious. Like knows like, blood knows blood. In the dark, while waiting outside, something fell out of place. It’s glaring, an inconsistency that can’t be explained away.

So then why do the details evade her? Joanna’s memory had always been perfect—dates and place names stuck in her head in ways that even she couldn’t remove. But there was only one thing she could see this time: overwhelming blackness, and then nothing at all.

It was like the world skipped a beat, and she can’t remember why she’s there…

The world distorts and dilates around her.

She stumbles, and her sight fails her. And then her legs do. She tumbles down and stays there. Her worn plastic watch, little more than a toy that can tell the time, reads 12:21 am.

She wants to stand up and go. Somewhere, anywhere—she can’t handle it, stuck here.

She stays until the sun rises.

///

It hits Tracy like a bad sense of deja vu.

Lew is still distant, speaking with Jo when he thinks Tracy isn’t looking. Both of them disappear for hours at a time, as if she doesn’t notice. The way they interact is tense, uncomfortable, but the sharp hisses of before become subdued.

(Like it’s a well worn routine, kept only because of the nostalgia it brings. But that’s not true– weren’t Lewis and Joanna friends? Tracy remembers days where, between performances, they would joke and laugh. She remembers feeling almost jealous. It was a petty feeling: nothing more than ‘I knew you first’, but that’s not quite right, is it?)

What are they hiding? What’s lurking underneath?

It doesn’t matter, not when they both look away from her. None of it does—if they aren’t going to tell her anything, she’ll just need to find out. Find out why they’ve been shifting around, lying to her. She needs to see what doesn’t fit. And then, and only then, can she take the pieces, follow the lines of logic, and create the final picture.

The first part was easy. A bit too easy actually.

Joanna always carried this USB drive with her, judging by the way it was stained with graphite smears. It was a silver flash against the dark jumper and jeans she normally wore.

Tracy knew it had to mean something. Lewis’s face twisted into a bittersweet expression the moment he saw it.

So really, it was quite simple: years of practising sleight of hand and a target that wasn’t expecting it. It was the oldest trick in the book, a simple bait and switch. A flick of the wrist, a misdirection, and the world would look exactly where they were meant to. Everything but the truth.

This was her bread and butter: the very work Tracy had spent her life mastering. A slight bump into Joanna—disguised as clumsiness—and what Tracy wanted was in her hand. With the audience none the wiser.

The paint on the USB was chipped, the edges smoothened by time. It was almost underwhelming, if it wasn’t for the weight of it in her hand. It seemed to burn across her palm and slip through her fingers like it never existed at all.

She had to be on the right track, right?

It was a shame that it ended up as a dead end later that night, after she wasted hours trying to decode what was stored inside the folders. She ran it through all the software she had—computers were always Lew’s domain, not hers—but nothing seemed to work.

Even the file names had been corrupted, reduced to a string of meaningless digits.

Plan A had failed, but that didn’t mean Plan B would too.

The next part was directed at Lew. When he had called her weeks ago, panicked and paranoid, he had carried a laptop bag home with him. His phone call still rings through her memory—the shake in his voice, his quavering breath. Lewis had mentioned someone but it was hazy too, shrouded in the darkness of that late night. The next morning, when she tried to ask about who he was talking about—Alice, was it?—he had looked at her with a blankness that scared her.

“Alice? Alice!?” he had said, before breaking out in a sort of manic giggle, and if Tracy knew anything it was that her brother didn’t giggle, not ever. “She’s no Alice, but this might just be Wonderland.”

Since that day he’s been quiet, murmuring under his breath at seemingly random times. But Tracy can’t seem to make it out, his words falling deaf on her ears.

It’s the same tone he talks to Joanna in. It might even be more accurate to say hisses in, just low enough to escape her hearing. Its robotic quality makes it feel like it’s someone else’s voice, taking form in her brother’s mouth.

But that laptop he had brought back with him—it was definitely not his. Lew always acted so impersonal to his belongings, Spartan in the way he would treat his desk and other possessions.

So what was he doing with a heavily decorated laptop, stickers clinging to the cover like fungus, and stacks of paperwork in writing that is so clearly not his? It wasn’t some sort of new project, because if there was, Lew would have mentioned it by now. Nothing was close to his passion for his work at the lab. It couldn’t be that, not with the way he hid any trace of it, away from where she could find it.

But clearly, he didn’t hide it well enough, as it was currently tucked under Tracy’s arm as she snuck out of his room and into the studio below their apartment. It’s dark, and Lewis is out.

This might be just what she needed.

///

A note stuck through the hinge contains a number— 1296.

“Well, it’s clearly not a phone number…” Tracy thinks. He was basically asking her to break into the laptop, with the way he had the passcode out in the open.

She did not expect what came next.

Most of the files weren’t Lew’s. That much she could tell. They contained piles and piles of research documents, all scanned in. The work of whoever wrote it was… manic, written with words of visions and the worlds beyond.

Tracy knows genius: she’s seen it in the hands of performers that have gotten the better of her, those whose skills are better even than hers. This was different. This was brilliant, in ways that she could never understand.

Another thing she knew is how ego, narcissism really, went hand-in-hand with brilliance. Whoever wrote it had a vision, something that could change the world. A way to conquer space, tear into existence and gaze into the vast unknown.

This was greater than what her brother could ever think up. So, whose computer was it?

Lewis had never mentioned a new colleague, any new mad scientist on the block. And, honestly? Tracy wasn’t sure if her own brother had been hiding things from her. It was always them against the world, but she doesn’t know if she can trust that anymore.

Alongside the files were pictures. Pictures of a woman with a face sharp and severe. Her eyes were a deep, dull, grey. They were so… oddly familiar. It was like seeing into someone’s soul. She was definitely staring into yours.

She just looked so familiar. The name was on the tip of Tracy’s tongue, this unbelievable weight of recognition.

How did Joanna factor into this?

And that’s when it clicked. Joanna must know this woman too.

With the photographs, there were drawings. Joanna’s drawings. Charcoal portraits, shadows over faces, each sketched so lovingly.

But where was this woman? Who was this woman? Even glancing at her face through the screen of the laptop—one that didn’t belong to her, or her brother for that matter— made her eyes burn, the harsh light drilling into her thoughts.

It hurt, it hurt so much—something was digging into her head, pushing aside everything and anything that might already be there.

In the depth of the night, the light was even more blinding. It buried into her eyes, and anything other than the overwhelming weight on her skull was unimportant. There was something more, though. Something more than the veil that was covering her eyes, something more—a revelation that would lead her, would lead all of them into salvation.

Is that what that woman found out? It couldn’t be…

It was so simple. So simple. Why couldn’t Tracy see it earlier? The truth was so, so close,, just one more step was all it would take.

Did Joanna know? Did Lewis? Did they hide this from her? Are they conducts of the creature–nay, being, more than what she could conjure up—that knows all?

Was this what Lewis had seen all those nights ago? Surely not—he wouldn’t have lied to her about something like this… Something so bright, something so world-altering. This was what would save them all. This was the truth, something that digs into her hollow head, her empty self nothing more than a willing shell, and she can’t take it.

It’s too bright, too great, and her head swimming, her brain turning into mush that can’t be translated. Is there more than what she knows? Has there always been? A presence began surrounding her, and suddenly Tracy couldn’t remember anymore than the severing of the connection between her brain and body. And the sensation of falling down, headfirst into the screen, her mind cracked open.

Writer – Areeba Zabrina
Editor – Ally Chu
Artist – Daniel Wang

–June 2025–