She sat before the dusty mirror, her fingers gliding through the silky strands of auburn hair. The soft hum of the house whispered in the background, a constant, steady presence. Nova had long since stopped noticing it—the house was always like this, quiet, and empty. The glow of the screens around her flickered like quiet, blinking eyes, but they didn’t seem strange anymore. Everything about this place felt… normal. The cold air, the absence of warmth, the way the silence seemed to stretch out for hours. She didn’t mind it, for she had stopped missing the warmth of human presence a long time ago.
Her parents were always gone; their voices were distant echoes, faces faint memories. Business trips, research projects—she never really understood what they did. It didn’t matter, though. She had learned how to take care of herself. She knew the routine by heart: school, homework, meals eaten alone, and the lonely hum of the house at night. It wasn’t a life she resented. She had grown used to it, and had come to expect it.
And yet… something always felt wrong, and she always wondered why.
Some people were polite, and others ignored her, but nobody ever asked about her life. Nobody ever wondered what she was thinking. It was as if she didn’t really exist to them, just a shadow in the corner of their lives. She didn’t mind, exactly. She had grown used to it. But deep down, it stung. How could she be so present and yet… so invisible?
The mirror reflected her perfectly—her silky auburn hair cascading down her shoulders in soft waves, the faintest gleam of silver in her eyes. She looked… normal, didn’t she? But when she truly looked, when she focused, there was something beneath the surface. A hollow feeling. The slightest sense that the girl in the mirror wasn’t really her. It was almost as if she were looking at someone else’s face—someone who didn’t belong. Someone out of place.
Was that what it was? Was she out of place? She could never quite shake the feeling that there was something wrong with her, something she couldn’t name. It wasn’t like a simple feeling of not fitting in. It was deeper, a nagging sensation that her own existence, her own presence, wasn’t quite right. Maybe she had been put here, in this world, but she didn’t quite belong.
School, too, was a series of moments that left her feeling like a stranger in her own skin. She was clever, quick-witted, always able to make people laugh, but she was never truly seen. The other kids never really knew her. They liked her, sure, but they kept their distance, as if she were a figure in a painting—someone to admire but never get too close to. They smiled at her, said hello, but there was a line, an invisible barrier, that kept them from reaching out.
The soccer game that day had started like any other. The shouts of kids running up and down the field, the sound of feet kicking the ball, the rough, wind-stung air. But the moment the ball left her foot, everything changed.
It wasn’t her foot that had kicked it. That was the only thought that mattered. No—her body had moved with an unnatural precision, the ball sailing across the field as though it had been guided by invisible hands. It had been too perfect, too sharp, like a machine executing an order it had been programmed to follow. The motion was so fluid, so exact, that for a split second, Nova couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet, couldn’t hear the world around her.
What just happened?
