Maybe I can help you, the invisible one said. I made you this way. I didn’t mean to. Maybe I can fix you.

  Taylor felt. She hadn’t felt lately, but now she felt. Something. Like she was water and someone was plunging a hand into her. She gave way: she formed around the probing.

  For a moment she was gone. Then back. For a moment she felt disturbed, and then not.

  Suddenly she gasped. She drew air into her mouth. It was surprising. She hadn’t breathed lately, though she remembered breathing before. That other Taylor.

  “I can’t remember what I did to make you this way.”

  She heard the voice, though she saw no one here.

  “But I’m trying.”

  She reached up and touched her hair with a golden hand. “My hair,” she said, the words a shock to her. The voice coming from her thoughts felt alien. “It’s wrong.”

  “Like this?” Little Pete asked, because now she knew it was him.

  She touched her hair, and it was no longer a single rubbery sheet. It was black hair. Her hair.

  “This is better,” she said.

  “Your eyes,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this better?”

  She felt that strange touch, that solidity where she was somehow liquid. And suddenly she saw him. He didn’t look like Little Pete. He looked like a swirl of light, like a thousand fireflies swarming together.

  “I can’t do more right now,” Little Pete said. “I am weak, and the Darkness will notice. It looks away from you now. It has forgotten you.”

  Some part of Taylor, some reawakened part of her, some fragment of the old Taylor, realized that she was not back to what she had once been. Her eyes saw things and her ears heard things differently than in the old days, before. But there was breath in her lungs. And a heartbeat in her chest.

  And she had hair.

Light, Chapter 20