Miko started wearing her watch on the wrong wrist.
It was a small, stupid thing, but it meant that every time she glanced down out of habit, the unfamiliar weight on her right hand instead of her left made her actually look — actually check the time, actually count backward from now to whenever she'd last been sure she was here. She'd read once that people used strange little tricks to catch themselves sleepwalking. She didn't know if this counted as the same thing. She didn't know what this was at all. But the watch helped. A little.
At school, she started keeping her phone unlocked in her lap during class, the clock visible, so she could check it every few minutes without looking like she was checking it. It became a ritual. Glance. Confirm. Exhale. Glance again.
She almost believed it was working.
Then, on a Wednesday, sitting in the third row of her literature class, she lost eleven minutes.
She didn't feel it happen. That was the worst part — there was no lurch, no static, no warning hum in her chest like the tuition center. One second she was underlining a sentence about symbolism in her textbook, the pen moving in slow, careful loops beneath the words the sea represents, and the next second the teacher was saying her name.
"Miko. Miko?" A pause, sharper. "Are you with us?"
She blinked. The classroom rearranged itself around her — not physically, just in her understanding of it, like a photograph snapping into focus. The clock on the wall said 10:47. Her memory insisted it should have been 10:36.
"Sorry," she said automatically. Her voice sounded far away, even to herself. "I didn't sleep well."
A few kids snickered. Someone whispered something she didn't catch. The teacher gave her a long, unreadable look — not angry exactly, more like the look you give something that doesn't add up — and moved on.
Miko looked down at her notebook.
She had kept writing. For eleven minutes, apparently, her hand had kept moving beneath a sentence she had no memory of finishing. The looping underline she remembered making had continued on, but the pressure had changed — heavier, jagged in places, like whoever was holding the pen had been gripping it differently than she did.
Beneath the sentence, in the margin, in handwriting that was almost hers but not quite — the loops too tight, the letters leaning the wrong way — three words were written.
it sees you
She stared at them until the bell rang.
She didn't tell anyone. Who would she tell. The notebook under her mattress had a new entry that night, her hand shaking badly enough that the ink smeared:
11:00 min. Awake, in public, doing something. Wrote something I don't remember writing. Handwriting wasn't mine. Or wasn't only mine.
She underlined wasn't only mine twice, then stared at the words until they stopped looking like English.
That night, she didn't dream of the ocean.
She dreamed she was standing at the edge of her own bedroom, except the room went back farther than it should have — the walls receding into a corridor of grey nothing, like the room had been stretched from the inside. At the far end of the corridor, barely visible, something stood at the threshold of the dark.
It didn't move toward her. It didn't need to. She understood, in the specific wordless logic that dreams run on, that it was simply waiting for her to walk close enough on her own.
It had a shape roughly like a person — shoulders, the suggestion of a head tilted slightly, as though listening — but the shadow around it didn't behave like a normal shadow. It didn't fall away from a light source. It seemed to be generating itself, spilling outward from wherever the figure stood, pooling across the floor like something poured rather than cast.
She tried to look directly at it.
The moment her eyes found where its face should be, there was nothing there to find — not blankness, not a face turned away, just the specific, nauseating absence of anything her mind could resolve into a shape. Like trying to read a word with her peripheral vision only, the letters sliding away the instant she tried to focus.
"Who are you," she said, though her mouth didn't move, and the words came out the way they had in the ocean — as shimmering, wordless spheres that dissolved before they reached the figure.
It tilted its head another few degrees. The shadow around it rippled once, like water disturbed by something moving beneath the surface.
Then, so quietly it felt less like sound and more like a thought that wasn't hers arriving in her skull anyway ..
not yet.
She woke up gripping her own wrist hard enough to leave four crescent-shaped marks, her nails having dug in without her permission, in her sleep, with a hand she apparently hadn't fully controlled.
In the morning, her mother noticed the marks first, before she noticed anything else.
"What is this," she said, grabbing Miko's wrist harder than necessary, turning it toward the window light. "Did you do this to yourself?"
"No," Miko said, and it was, technically, true. "I don't know. I must've scratched it in my sleep."
Her mother's face went through several expressions in quick succession — suspicion, disgust, something that might have been fear if it hadn't curdled so fast into anger. "You're doing this for attention," she said finally, dropping Miko's wrist like it had burned her. "If you're not careful I'm sending you to your aunt's. I don't have time for whatever this is."
Miko pulled her sleeve down over the marks and said nothing.
She thought about the eleven minutes. She thought about the handwriting that wasn't quite hers. She thought about the shadow with no face, waiting so patiently at the end of a corridor that didn't exist, saying the same two words the whisper had said at the tuition center, the same two words that had bled through the bathroom mirror.
Not yet.
Not yet meant later. Not yet meant it had already decided. Not yet meant the only question left was how much longer Miko got to keep pretending she didn't know that.