Dr. Arthur Blackwood stood in the ruins of what had been his laboratory three months ago. Now it was merely a shell — blackened stone, shattered glass, and the ghostly silence that followed catastrophe. On the workbench before him, a single glass sphere floated in mid-air, no bigger than a marble, pulsing with a faint amber light. It had done this ever since the night of the Incident. Ever since Catherine vanished.

He had not slept properly since. The physicians at St. Bartholomew's had prescribed laudanum, which helped with the shaking but did nothing for the voices. They came every night at the same hour — a susurrus of whispers from the sphere, as though some vast intelligence were trying to form words through water. Arthur could almost make them out. Almost.

He picked up his notebook — leather-bound, bought from a shop on Fleet Street — and began to write by candlelight. The entries were always the same: observations, measurements, hypotheses. If he could only understand what had happened, he might undo it. Or at least make sense of the hollow chest that had replaced his heart.

"Day 87," he wrote. "The orb remains suspended at approximately 30 centimeters above the bench surface. Temperature readings fluctuate between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius. No detectable electromagnetic emission. The whispering frequency appears to correlate with lunar phases — a finding I noted in my previous entry but wish to verify."

He paused. His hand trembled. Not from fear — he had passed that stage — but from the cold. The manor was drafty, and the coal supply had run out weeks ago. He could not afford to replace it. The estate was mortgaged to the hilt, and the bank showed no patience for a widower who could not produce an heir.

Widower. The word still felt incorrect. Catherine was not dead. Death implied an end, a finality. What had happened to her was something else — something the scientists at Cambridge were still too cowardly to name. Quantum delocalization. That was the technical term. She had simply... been everywhere and nowhere at once. A state between being and non-being.

Arthur traced the edge of the desk with his fingers. He remembered the last time he had seen her alive. She had been standing by the window, looking out at the Yorkshire moors, her dark hair catching the afternoon light. She had turned and smiled at him — that particular smile, the one that made her eyes crinkle at the corners — and then the sphere had appeared.

It had come through the window like a dream, a ball of golden light no larger than a peach. It had hovered between them for a moment, pulsing gently, and then Catherine had reached out.

"Arthur," she had said. Her voice had been calm, curious. Not afraid. "Look at it."

And then she had stepped into it.

There had been no explosion, no fire, no sound. One moment she was standing in front of him, and the next — nothing. A woman had become a void, and the void had become a sphere the size of a marble, floating gently to the floor.

He had caught it. That was the cruellest joke of all. He was still holding her, in a way — this tiny glowing ball, warm to the touch, humming with a frequency just below hearing. He had held it for eighty-seven days, and every night it whispered to him, and every night he pretended it was her voice.

The candle flickered. Arthur blew on it, repositioned the wick, and continued writing. He had to keep documenting the phenomenon. Someday, perhaps, another scientist would come along — someone braver, more ruthless — and they would find his notes and understand. They would figure out how to bring Catherine back, or at least how to end this agony.

Outside, the wind howled across the moors. Somewhere in the manor, a floorboard creaked. Arthur did not look up. He had learned long ago not to trust the sounds of the house. They were echoes of the living, and he was no longer sure which side of the veil he belonged to.

The sphere pulsed brighter. For a moment, the whispers coalesced into something almost intelligible.

"Arthur," it said. Or something like it.

He closed his eyes. "I am here, my love," he whispered. "I am here."

And in the darkness of the laboratory, the only light in the world was a sphere of golden fire, floating above a notebook full of desperate equations, whispering words that might have been love or might have been goodbye.