Episode 1: The Blood Wasn't Mine
Mara Voss woke up on the kitchen floor with her cheek pressed to cold tile and blood dried between her fingers.
For a moment she didn't move. She just breathed, counting the tiles above the stove the way she'd counted them a hundred mornings before, half-asleep, waiting for coffee. Four rows. Twelve tiles each. Her mind reached for the number the way it reached for anything solid these days.
The blood wasn't hers. She knew that before she even sat up, before she looked at her hands the way you know a stranger's voice from a familiar one, without being able to say how. There was no cut. No wound. Just rust-colored crescents under her nails and a smear on her wrist like she'd wiped something away in a hurry, or hadn't finished trying.
She sat up too fast. The kitchen tilted, resettled.
6:47 AM. The clock on the microwave blinked steady, indifferent.
The last thing she remembered was 11 PM sitting on the couch with Daniel, a glass of wine going warm on the table, some rerun neither of them was watching. Six hours. Gone. Not fuzzy, not dreamlike gone, the way a page goes missing from a book without the binding ever showing a gap.
This wasn't the first time. She knew that too, and hated knowing it.
Mara stood, gripping the counter, and made herself do the thing she always did when the world stopped making sense: check the facts, one at a time.
The apartment door locked, chain on.
The window closed.
Daniel's side of the bed empty, sheets cold, like he'd never come back after leaving around midnight to grab his charger from his place downstairs.
And in the hallway outside her door, when she finally worked up the nerve to open it: nothing. No smear, no drag mark, no sign that whatever had happened had come from anywhere but inside these four walls.
Except for one thing.
The door directly across the hall 4B, Elena's apartment stood open. Not wide, just a few inches, the way a door sits when someone leaves in a hurry and doesn't look back.
Mara had known Elena for eight months. Knew she took her coffee with too much sugar, that her cat was named Biscuit, that she worked nights at some downtown bar and always dropped her keys twice before finding the right one. They weren't close, exactly hallway friendly but Elena was real to her in the specific, textured way people become real once you've shared a wall with them long enough.
She crossed the hall. Knocked once, though the door was already open.
Elena?
Nothing.
She pushed the door wider. The apartment was empty not messy-empty, not moved-out empty. Just... unlived-in. No coat by the door. No shoes. No half-finished mug in the sink, no cat bowl, no Biscuit trotting over to see who'd come in.
It looked like nobody had ever lived there at all.
Mara stood in the doorway with blood drying on her wrist and a stranger's absence pressing into her chest, and for the first time in a long time, she let herself think the sentence she'd been avoiding for months:
Something is wrong with my mind, or something is wrong with this building and I don't know which one scares me more.
Behind her, down the hall, she heard the elevator chime.
She turned, wiping her hand on her sleeve before she could think better of it and found Detective Priya Shah stepping out, badge already in hand, eyes already on her.
Mara Voss? the detective said. We got a call about a disturbance on this floor last night. Mind if I ask you a few questions?
Mara looked down at her wrist. The smear was still there, just fainter.
Of course, she said, and made herself smile.
