The thing behind us smiled.
I couldn’t see it, but I felt the skin of its face stretch. Its breath hit the back of my neck—a rank, damp gust that smelled like stagnant river water and old copper. My pulse hammered in my ears.
Grandma’s hand slammed over my mouth, her calloused palm tasting of dried galangal and salt. Her thumb dug bruised-deep into my cheek.
“Don't turn around,” she breathed against my ear.
Every nerve in my legs screamed to bolt, to tear through the drywall if I had to. I stood petrified instead, my knuckles white around the lotus pendant. The brass was ice-cold, biting into the flesh of my palm like a dead coin.
Behind me, the entity exhaled a sound. Not a roar, but a wet, rattling click—a jagged, multi-tonal word that scraped through the air like iron dragged across teeth. Not my name. Something ancient.
Grandma’s grip tightened until my lips pressed hard against my teeth. “Don't answer it.”
Neak Mean broke the paralysis. With a low grunt, he seized a splintered wooden chair leg, whirled, and drove it blind into the dark behind me. It connected with a wet, heavy thud—like hitting a hanging side of beef.
A sharp, guttering hiss filled the small room, smelling instantly of scorched hair.
I spun around, ripping free from Grandma’s grip.
Nothing. Just the jagged outline of the blown-out doorframe and the swallowing blackness of the hallway.
“Where did it go?” Nimol rasped, her voice cracking as she pressed her spine flat against the drywall.
Grandma didn't look at the hall. Her eyes were locked on my closed fist, on the dull brass lotus peeking between my fingers. “It didn't go anywhere.”
A sickening chill crawled up my spine, prickling the fine hairs on my arms. “What does that mean?”
“It means it isn't hunting the apartment.” She looked up, her dark eyes hollowed by shock, pinpricking straight into mine. “It's hunting the person holding the lotus.”
My stomach churned, dropping into a cold void. The room went dead quiet except for the ragged sound of our breathing.
Vannak crowded close, his shoulder pressing against mine, shaking so hard I could feel it through his shirt. “Then give it to Grandma. Give it back.”
I looked down at the brass flower. The logic hit like a physical weight. Grandma had carried it through the killing fields of Cambodia, through the overcrowded refugee camps in Thailand, across an ocean to this cramped Brooklyn third-floor flat. It was hers. It had always been hers.
I extended my hand, palm up, offering it across the small gap between us.
The moment the metal broke contact with my bare skin, every lightbulb in the apartment detonated.
Crack-crack-crack.
Shards of hot glass rained down in the dark. Vannak yelled; Nimol covered her face. Grandma jerked her hand back with a sharp gasp as if she’d touched a live wire.
The pendant didn't fall. It snapped back into my palm with a violent, magnetic jerk, the thin chain whipping around my fingers. Pain flared through my hand—a searing heat that felt like molten lead sinking straight into my marrow.
I dropped to one knee, crying out as the burn radiated up my forearm.
In the pitch-black, illuminated only by the faint orange wash of streetlights through the shattered windows, Grandma stared down at me.
“It won't leave you,” she whispered. Her voice was thin, stripped of the immovable authority that had governed our family for fifty years.
“What?” I gasped, clutching my throbbed hand against my chest.
“I carried it all these years.” She crouched, her knees popping in the dark, her hands hovering above mine, trembling. “But it chose you tonight.”
Those words chilled me deeper than the thing in the hall ever could.
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
She had never said those three words in her life. Not about the war, not about the spirits, not about anything. The realization that Grandma was blind in the dark terrified me more than the monster waiting outside our door.
Scratch. Drag. Scratch.
The sound rasped down the hallway floorboards. We all froze.
The Hollowkin pulled itself into the broken doorway.
It had changed. The dense, shadow-heavy form from minutes ago had thinned out, looking like black smoke trapped beneath a sheath of gray, translucent skin. Its long, jointed fingers dragged along the plaster, leaving thick trails of greasy residue behind. But its eyes—two pinpoint embers of pale, milky white—were razor-sharp.
And they were locked onto my throat.
Neak Mean stepped directly between us, his chest heaving, holding the broken chair leg like a club. “Stay back!”
The Hollowkin tilted its head with a sickening series of small pops.
“You...”
The voice didn't come from a throat. It layered out of the air—three, four different voices speaking at once: a child, an old man, a weeping woman.
Grandma’s jaw set hard. “Don't speak to it!”
The Hollowkin’s mouth split open, stretching too wide, showing rows of needle-thin teeth. “Remember...”
The lotus in my palm flared white-hot.
A violent surge of memory slammed into my brain, tearing me out of the room:
Blinding sunlight on red dirt. A humid courtyard from ten years ago. Grandma standing over us, correcting our forms in the ancient Boran martial style. Neak Mean sweating beside me; Nimol laughing in the grass because Vannak had tripped over his own feet. Grandma grabbing my wrist, shifting my weight.
“Your feet first,” she snapped.
“I know!” I yelled back, frustrated, wiping sweat from my eyes.
“No,” Grandma said softly, her thumb pressing into my forearm. “You think you know.”
The vision snapped like a cut film strip.
I stumbled backward into the present, gasping for air, disoriented.
The Hollowkin struck.
It blurred across the floorboards—a streak of gray skin and dark smoke. Neak Mean dove sideways to intercept it, crashing full-force into its chest. The impact sounded like a car wreck, sending Neak sliding across the floor into the radiator, his breath exploding out of him in a agonizing wheeze.
“Neak!” I lunged forward.
Grandma caught my iron shoulder, her grip terrifyingly tight. “No!”
“He's getting killed!”
“He's buying you time!”
The words hit me like a physical blow. The visions—the ones that had haunted my dreams for months—flashed behind my eyes. The people who always stepped in front. Vireak at the river. Sreyneang at the farm. Dara at the Thai border. Now Neak Mean on a hardwood floor in Brooklyn.
Every single time, someone stepped up to die so the family could live.
No more.
I tore my arm out of Grandma’s grip. “No more!”
The lotus didn't burn this time. It bloomed warm. A bright, amber light poured out between my fingers, illuminating the peel-and-stick tile of the floor, painting the walls in liquid gold.
The Hollowkin halted mid-stride. It didn't flinch or cower. It just stopped, tilting its head, its pale eyes wide and calculating. Watching me. Waiting.
Your feet first.
Grandma’s lesson echoed through the noise in my head. I didn't think; my body remembered. I planted my heel, rotated my hips, and dropped my center of gravity into the root-stance she’d drilled into us until our legs shook as kids.
The creature lunged, its thin, clawed hand sweeping toward my windpipe.
I ducked beneath the arc—the cold wind of its sleeve brushing my cheek—and slammed my left forearm up into its wrist.
The moment we collided, a shockwave of gold light shot from my skin through its arm. The Hollowkin let out a high-pitched, screeching wail that vibrated in my teeth.
I gaped at my glowing palm. “What... what did I just do?”
It didn't give me time to think. It lashed out with its other claw.
I didn't back up. I stepped straight inside its reach, pivoted on my back foot, and drove the heel of my palm directly into the center of its smoky chest.
Golden roots of light exploded across its gray skin, spider-webbing through its torso.
The Hollowkin froze solid. For a fraction of a second, the dark smoke dissolved, and beneath the monster I saw a face—a human face. A young woman, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth open in a silent scream for help.
Then the smoke rushed back over her.
The creature shrieked, a sound of pure agony, and ripped itself backward, tumbling toward the doorway.
Grandma seized my shoulder from behind, hauling me back hard. “Stop! Step back!”
I turned to her, my chest heaving, the light still humming under my skin. “Why? I can hit it!”
“Because you don't know what you're touching!” she barked, her voice shaking with an authority born of terror.
The Hollowkin scrambled onto all fours at the edge of the dark hall. It wasn't retreating from us; it was cowering from the light pulsing out of my chest and hands. The realization made my throat go dry.
Grandma gathered the family behind her like a hen shielding chicks. “Everyone. Behind her. Stay together.”
At the threshold, the creature turned its gaunt face back to me one last time. Its jaw worked, and it spat out that same guttural, multi-voiced word.
This time, the lotus responded on its own.
A sharp pulse of golden light violently expanded from my chest, striking the entity point-blank.
It didn't burst. It didn't burn. It simply vanished—erased from the doorway like ink washed away by torrential rain.
Dead silence fell over the apartment.
The air smelled of ozone, burnt dust, and copper. Outside, the distant hum of city traffic felt miles away.
Neak Mean pushed himself up off the floor, clutching his ribs with a groan. “You... you okay?”
I lowered my hand and looked at my palm.
Beneath the surface of my skin, glowing with a soft, residual ember, was a faint golden mark—a delicate, six-petaled lotus etched into my flesh.
“I think so,” I whispered.
Grandma reached out and took my hand. Her fingers were ice-cold, trembling violently. In my twenty years, I had never seen Grandma tremble. Not during eviction notices, not during family crises, not ever.
“Grandma?” I asked softly. “What is it?”
“I don't know,” she murmured, staring at the mark on my hand.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it is the truth.” She swallowed hard, her eyes slowly lifting to the empty doorway. “For fifty years, I believed the lotus was just a memory. A piece of the home we lost.” She touched the glowing mark with her thumb. “Tonight, it answered you.”
The heavy weight of her words settled into the quiet room.
I looked around at the wreckage of our life. The blown-out front door. The shatter of glass sparkling in the streetlights. The black scorch marks on the wallpaper. The bucket of water tipped over on the floorboards.
Nimol was shivering in the corner. Vannak was holding Neak Mean up. Grandma looked small.
And then, with terrible clarity, the truth locked into place.
This wasn't an ancient ghost story. It wasn't Grandma's past coming back to haunt her. The lotus hadn't woken up because of Cambodia or the camps.
It had woken up because of me.
Whatever was creeping around in the dark had felt me. And if my visions meant anything, the dark wasn't going to stop sending things through that door until someone made the sacrifice Grandma had spent her whole life trying to spare us from.
Fight. Stand your ground. Protect the bloodline.
I looked at Neak Mean’s bruised face. At Nimol’s wide, terrified eyes. At Vannak.
They were my blood. My home.
I couldn't fix what happened forty years ago in the jungle. I couldn't undo the grief that had carved lines into Grandma's face. But as the warmth in my palm hummed against my bone, I knew one thing with absolute certainty.
I wasn't going to let anyone step in front of me again.
Grandma looked at my face, reading the shift in my posture, the set of my jaw. A faint, sad understanding softened her eyes. “Now you understand why I made you practice the stances.”
I nodded slowly. “You weren't teaching us how to fight.”
“No,” she said softly, clutching my marked hand between both of hers. “I was teaching you how to stand when everything inside you wants to run.”
A siren keened in the distance.
Then another. High-pitched, frantic wails cutting through the Brooklyn night, growing louder, heading straight down our avenue.
Then came the second sound.
It didn't come from the street. It came from beneath us—a deep, resonant vibration that rattled the floorboards, shaking the dust out of the ceiling plaster.
The golden lotus mark on my palm suddenly flared, searing with a sudden, agonizing heat. I gasped, clutching my wrist.
Grandma froze, her head snapping down to stare at the floor. “What...?”
The floor jolted beneath our feet. A long, thin crack snapped open through the linoleum, snaking from the hallway straight toward the kitchen.
And from deep within the earth, far below the subway lines, echoed a sound straight out of Grandma’s nightmarish visions of the war—a sound that had no business being under a New York apartment building.
The long, mournful, screeching blare of an old steam train whistle.
My blood ran instantly cold.
Grandma grabbed my forearm with a desperate, iron grip, her eyes wide with unadulterated dread. “That sound...” She stared at me, her face pale in the faint golden light of my hand. “It isn't a memory anymore.”
The building shuddered again, a heavy, rhythmic thumping ascending through the foundation. Something impossibly massive was climbing the elevator shaft.
Grandma turned and shoved Vannak and Nimol toward the back fire escape.
“Run!” she screamed.
For the first time in her life, she wasn't telling us to hold our ground. She was terrified.
And whatever was coming up through the floorboards of Brooklyn was already here.