Ima, 1912. Before the silence. Elara didn't sleep that night. She sat at her kitchen table, the photograph under a magnifying lamp, and she remembered .
It was tucked inside a secondhand copy of The Forgotten Peoples of the Caspian Steppe , a book she'd bought for its absurdly detailed footnotes. The photograph was sepia-toned, curled at the edges, and showed a group of twelve people standing before a structure that defied physics: a tower that twisted like a double helix, its surface covered in symbols that seemed to move when you weren't looking directly at them. Ima, 1912
She remembered that she was not Elara. She was not Ima. She was the space between them—the act of remembering itself. the photograph under a magnifying lamp