Jack settled into his seat as the professor described a battle in the ancient city of Carthage. The city, later destroyed by the Romans, rested on the northern coast of Africa, beside the Lake of Tunis. He turned to a page in his book and stared at an artist’s rendering of an ancient naval harbor. It was a massive circular structure on the city’s edge. Ships entered a secure area to dock.

The image seemed to jump off the page and into his mind. The illustration was in sepia tones, but he saw vivid colors and bustling crowds. Next to the drawing was a modern-day photograph of Lake Tunis. He stared at the water on the page until bloated bodies floated up from the depths. Red clouds of blood drifted lazily around the corpses.

He traced his index finger over the edge of the page and lost focus. Was the image moving on the paper or in his mind? Snapping his eyes closed, he felt a sword hilt resting in his sweaty palm. Without thinking, he slid the blade under the breastplate of an enemy, plunging it into soft flesh, as Dido, his queen, looked on. Opening his eyes, he slammed the book closed, focusing on the steady rhythm of the professor’s voice. She was describing Dido, the founder of Carthage. A few students glanced at him, but the professor did not pause.

The vivid images were like memories. “They are memories,” whispered the voice. “The humans are abominations. Put them out of their misery.”

Jack’s hands shook, and he laid them flat on the desktop. It’s not me, he thought. I don’t want to kill. It’s Jode. “Easy,” he whispered. Millae said Jode’s voice would disappear if he came back. But maybe it was all an illusion, maybe he was losing his grip on reality completely. Maybe he should talk to a professional psychiatrist. Medication might help if he was schizophrenic. An old familiar thought. Hadn’t he been down that road when he was young? Hadn’t he taken the medications after the voice first came, after the fight at school? He thought about his father sitting next to him in therapy. Of his own rage, wild and uncontrollable. His father’s eyes watching him, pleading with him to be the son he once was. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. No therapists or VA doctors could help him.

Ann, sitting in the front row, raised her hand. She was an older student, in her late twenties, like him. Her auburn hair was like a beacon guiding him back to reality. The professor pointed to her.

“How do we know Dido was real? All we have are a few poems from the Greeks and Romans, and most of the poets weren’t even around when Carthage was founded.” He could listen to her talk about anything. Her low tones and gravely inflections calmed his mind. She would make a great radio DJ, but she was probably going to school for nursing or something like that.

“We don’t know if she was real,” the professor said. “But, based on the poems and carvings, we assume she was.”

“I need facts and evidence, not stone fragments and scraps from ancient poems,” she said.

“History is bound together with stone fragments and ancient poems,” the professor said, with a gentle smile. “That’s what makes it a living field, always changing based on new discoveries.”

Jack recalled Dido’s face and knew the old poems were true. Or true enough, at least. Someone had founded that city, and people had fought and died for it. The truth of it was nestled in those poems somewhere, but truth was a shifty idea. He had seen the so-called truth of an ideology force rational thought away from good people. Especially when they were gripped by fear.

The bell rang and Jack pushed himself up from the desk, looking for Ann, but he lost her in the mob of fleeing students. This time, he might have found the courage to speak to her. Maybe she was the one he was supposed to find. Maybe talking to another person, about anything, might calm his nerves and quiet his mind. Instead, he wandered around campus until finally climbing the long steps to the library. He pulled back on the worn brass handle of the oversized door and stepped in, pausing.

The smell of old books and musty carpet rolled over him. This was not a modern library filled with community space, computers, and tablets. This was an antique library illuminated by islands of light from tabletop lamps. Red velvet curtains hung over tall windows. The dark weathered tables were smooth, the wood polished by countless students and librarians over the years. He had never been a voracious reader or ambitious student, but he found comfort in the old building. The quiet space settled the noise in his mind and seemed to calm the demon.

He tried to study at work but never seemed to get around to it. As a business security analyst, he had plenty of time, but lacked the motivation, as if stepping into an office filled with modular furniture and half cubical walls sapped his willpower. He stumbled into the job a few years ago, after separating from the military. While the office life dulled his mind, it paid well, and he was good at analyzing systems. It was easy to see the entire landscape of a business system. It was just like a theater of operations or battle-space. Once he could see it, he could identify potential risks with employees or technology and recommend safeguards.

He drifted to his usual table, but to his surprise, surrounded by books and papers, he saw Ann. Her auburn hair drifted down around her face as her head lolled and rocked slightly up again. Her chest, wrapped in a tight green t-shirt, rose and fell in the steady rhythm of sleep. He settled into the creaky wooden chair across from her. He wondered if it was polite or rude to wake someone up in the library.

“Hey there,” he whispered. She jerked violently, rattling the table, and her head rolled to the side, her eyes darting back and forth frantically under closed lids. But she didn’t wake up. A few students looked toward them from the next table. He stood, leaned over the table, and put his hand on her shoulder.

Her eyelids lifted, eyeballs rotating back into her head until only white was visible. Her body trembled. He wondered if it was a seizure, if he should check her vital signs and airway. But before he could move, the temperature plummeted, and he found himself in a cocoon of silence. It was absolute as if his hearing had failed. He rubbed his ear with one hand and rapped his knuckles on the table with the other. He felt the impact but heard nothing.

“Ann,” he said, feeling the vibration of his vocal cords, but his voice didn’t resonate outside his head.

Ann’s mouth stretched into a silent scream. He imagined her torment pouring out but heard nothing. He stared at her until the wail crashed through the prism of silence in a physical wave, filling the library. Mist from her breath poured into the air as if they were standing outside on a brutally cold day. The scream rolled over him while the blood vessels in her sightless eyes expanded, leaving only the dark rich color of blood. As the sound faded away, he planted his hands on the table and leaned forward, gazing into her crimson-filled eyes.

“Ann,” he said again. Glowing strands of electricity streamed furiously back and forth, under her eyelashes, before streaming out to her cheeks and forehead. He sensed people gathering around them.

“Jack?” she said, her voice cracked and raw.

“Yes,” he said.

The blood dissolved like a cloud, and her eyeballs rolled down, settling properly in their sockets. Red angry veins surrounded glowing green irises. The strands of electricity finished racing over her skin, spinning away to nothing.

“So many lives,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

Her face dissolved before him, and the library vanished. In its place, a stream of high definition images glided by. Some still, some in motion. They started slowly moving from one to the other in a rhythmic show of events. Ann standing at the head of a classroom pointing to an image of a DNA strand. Back further, Ann graduating from college for the first time, ready to teach, ready to make a difference. Still, further, she is arguing with a high school principal before walking away with clenched fists and a red face.

She is replaced by a younger Ann sitting on the edge of someone else’s bed, crying, arms wrapped around her own naked body, clothes strewn about a messy bedroom. Then, at a birthday party, a younger Ann is hitting a piñata and squealing with delight. Then as a little girl, she is playing in the front yard. Her mop of red hair is bouncing as she runs through dandelion seeds she has blown into the wind. Her laughter echoed through the neighborhood. Finally, Jack looked down at an infant crying in a wooden crib.

“What is—”

A gray pulsing curtain dropped over Jack’s vision and the child’s cry faded away.

“You can’t leave!” a woman said as she took shape. Her hair was honey-colored and her eyes were shining bright yellow. The gray veil pushed backward, stretching over the new landscape before it snapped away completely.

“The Isle of Song,” he whispered.

“You have to stay. The Shen need us!”

The woman stood in front of a tall man with broad shoulders. Another man and woman flanked him. He could not see their faces, but the woman had short-cropped blue hair.

“We have built the great gateway to Haven, and now we must hunt the Shu. That is how we help the Shen.”

The woman started to argue again, but her words were swept away as the image shifted. Now, she stood in a small apartment surrounded by strange gleaming objects and furniture he did not recognize. Twisted-looking metallic chairs and a low-slung couch rested against white walls. Outside, brilliant flashes of red light descended from the sky almost without stopping. Tears streamed down the woman’s face. She held some sort of holographic screen in her hand and spoke into it.

“You have to get out—”

Her words were cut off by a blinding red light as one of the beams filled his vision. He blinked rapidly and tried to calm his racing heartbeat. His fingertips pressed into the polished wood of the tabletop painfully. Crouched on all fours, he stared at Ann in front of him. A whisper of air was all that separated their lips. He drank in the texture of her bronzed skin, the intensity of her green bloodshot eyes, and the lingering memories of her life… her lives. A gentle exhale brought Ann’s breath to his lips.

“I think I was supposed to find you,” he whispered.

“What was that?” she asked, not moving, lips brushing against his.

“She told me to find you.”

“Who?”

“Millae.”

Ann blinked slowly and pulled away, climbing down from the table. The sudden absence of her sent a shiver through his spine, but he mirrored her, moving backward off the table, using it to steady himself as he looked around. The smell of old book bindings and wood stain returned, and he wondered if he was in the library the entire time or if they had been transported to some ethereal plane. Books and note pads surround them like debris from a tiny tornado.

“What did you see?” he asked.

Ann looked at him with wide eyes, shaking her head. She gathered her books and shoved them into her bag.

“Wait,” Jack said.

She stumbled away through the gathering crowd. Jack grabbed his backpack and noticed charred streaks on the table’s antique surface. He ran his finger along one of the burns. It was still warm. A drumbeat settled inside his skull, pounding relentlessly, and his stomach convulsed violently.

He felt fear from the students around him, like searing heat from a pan. A few of them pointed phones at him. He wondered what the video would show. Clenching his backpack between trembling fingers, with head down, he pushed through the spectators. The demon voice was silent. It did not command him to kill or dominate the people standing around him. Was it gone? He planted his shoulder into one of the huge double doors and pounded out into the crisp fall air but did not see Ann among the students.