Annabell and Eleanor Reid were splayed out over the living area furnishings, various limbs hanging limply over the sides as they stared up at the ceiling of their family quarters. The twins were the epitome of boredom as they idled away the time off they had been given from their studies. Usually by the late afternoon, their mother would call them down to the restaurant to help out with customers but she’d already sent a message telling them that they weren’t busy and the regular staff had everything well in hand. That meant the one distraction they might have had for the day would no longer happen.

“Ella…” Anna called out from her couch, “I’m bored!”

Ella rolled her eyes, “So am I, Anna…”

Anna rolled onto her stomach and frowned as she looked at her sister holding a PaDD in her hand, reading something. “Are you reading?”

“Yeah,” Ella answered dryly, “You act like that’s new…”

“Then you can’t be as bored as I am,” Anna complained in a sulking voice.

Ella sat the PaDD on her stomach and glanced over to her sister, “What makes you say that? Just because I’m reading doesn’t mean it isn’t boring.”

“Ella… you saying a book is boring is like a Ferengi saying that latinum is just a metal,” Anna groused.

“Wow… rude…” Ella glared at her sister.

“Let’s do something…” Anna suggested vaguely as she pushed herself up into a squat on the couch, “Oh! How about we go on a ghost hunt!”

“A ghost hunt… during the middle of the afternoon… on a starbase,” Ella remarked sarcastically.

“Why not? Niemi was talking about mysterious ghost figures wondering around the station in class last week. Said her and some of the others had spotted something creepy in the shopping quarter on the promenade. We should see if we can find some ghosts too!” Anna said, enthusiasm riddling her voice.

Ella let out an exaggerated sigh, “You know ghosts aren’t real, right?”

“How would you know? Did a novel say they weren’t and you just believed it?” Anna shot back with a snarky tone.

Ella let out an annoyed groan as she pushed herself upright, her PaDD clattering to the floor as she did so, “You seriously want to go all the way down to the promenade and hunt figments of someone else’s imagination? Like… seriously…?”

“Why not? Gets us out of our quarters for a while… and imagine if we did find a ghost! Wouldn’t that be so neat?!” Anna said, bouncing on the couch energetically.

Ella threw the leg that hadn’t been hanging off the couch over the side, bending down to retrieve the fallen PaDD and toss it haphazardly onto the nearby coffee table, “Fine… we’ll go to the promenade… but I’m telling you now… we’re wasting our time.”

“Yay!” Anna said, bounding off the couch and rushing over to put her shoes on. Ella followed behind her much more lethargically, taking more time than it required to put her own footwear on as her sister bounced with impatient energy. When she finally hooked the back of her shoe over her heel and gave it a brief stomp, Ella finally motioned toward to door for Anna to take the lead.

As the twins moved down the corridor, anyone passing by them could tell which of the two was leading whom. Anna’s spring filled steps exuded adventure-seeking energy while Ella’s hunched shoulders and reluctant trudge instantly clocked her as an unwilling participant in childhood mischief. As they moved to the turbolift cluster near their quarters, they passed several people that they knew from Ember’s, given polite nods or brief greetings as they continued on their path.

The ride in the turbolift car felt unusually long to each of the twins, though not for the same reason. Anna was a bundle of impatience as she seemed to vibrate with expectant energy. Ella, on the other hand, wanted the whole ‘adventure’ to be over already so she could go back to her reading and the drawn-out ride through the turbolift shaft did nothing but delay her return.

When the twins were finally deposited onto the promenade, Anna grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled her along at a near sprint as they crossed the distance between the lift cluster and the shopping district. Ella was, thankfully, in just as good a shape as her sister and wasn’t particularly winded when they arrived. She was, however, annoyed.

“Did we really need to run?” the girl growled.

Anna just smiled innocently, “It got us here faster, didn’t it, missus can’t wait to get back to her book.”

Ella rolled her eyes at her sibling but decided against a formal retort, knowing it would simply pass through her left ear on the way out of the right. Anna grinned smugly when she didn’t get any comebacks from her sister, thinking herself the winner of that exchange. With a theatrical flick of her shoulder length hair, Anna made her way into the shopping district with Ella close behind.

The outskirts of the shopping district were aimed almost exclusively toward tourist and transient freighter crews. Trinkets and knickknacks of every conceivable variety were lined up on market stalls and in window displays for those that were lucky enough, or old enough, to have actual storefronts. It was the perfect spot to waste a few hours during a layover, but it didn’t scream ‘ghost hangout’ to Anna, which meant the pair were off to parts much deeper.

Beyond the more tourist-oriented stores came the establishments that had been on the station for decades, if not a full century. Furniture stores, household goods, things that transients didn’t need but residents would. And almost every vendor in this part of the shopping district had their own store, the only stalls were simply spillage areas for what people could find inside. And because of how much further into the interior of the station it was, there were plenty of little alleyways and passages for the girls to explore.

And explore they did. Anna forged ahead with all of the energy of a girl rapidly approaching fifteen, taking corners like some bold heroine in a holodrama. Ella, for her part, merely trudged along with all the comparative energy of sloth. It took the girls about an hour of combing through the nooks and crannies of the back areas of the shops to become a bit tired of the hunt.

“We haven’t found a single ghost… not one!” Anna complained as they returned to the main thoroughfare.

“Told you…” Ella countered, her own face now as smug as her sister’s had been when they began.

Anna rolled her eyes at her sister, turning her head away just in time to catch sight of a strange figure she couldn’t quite place. The being, oddly androgynous and almost ethereal, stood next to a stall like the objects contained within were some mysterious treasures that the being had never seen before. The being’s strange features, most notably the rather large, swollen looking head, was what caused Anna to stop dead in her tracks. She reached out and grabbed her sister’s arm, yanking her over to her side as she stared at the stranger.

“Do you see that… person?” Anna asked, hesitating to settle on a gender for the being she was looking at.

Ella looked at her sister in confusion before turning toward the person she was supposedly entranced by, only to fall victim to the same awe her sister was experiencing. Unlike Anna, Ella had read dozens of books on different species across the Federation, but the being that was standing at the shop at that moment was alien to her in every sense of the word. From the strange head to the delicate features that may or may not have been entirely feminine or masculine, everything about the person felt… off.

“I see… them…” Ella mirrored her sister’s hesitation, “But I’m not sure I understand what I’m looking at…”

The being didn’t seem to notice the girls standing in the passageway quietly staring at it, so engrossed in its observation of the goods on display as it passed gracefully from storefront to storefront. When the being began to drift out of view, the twins scrambled to follow, their curiosity driving their footsteps. And the longer the girls followed the figure, the stranger things got.

At first, it was just the way the being was staring at the objects in something of a trance, as if every stall brought new revelations despite the being exuding an aura of wisdom that felt even older than their parents seemed to have when they were giving the girls life lesson lectures. And if that had been all there was to the encounter, the mystique might have worn off on the girls and they might have abandoned the pursuit, but they started to notice that other people were acting even stranger than the being itself.

As their target moved into more heavily trafficked portions of the shopping district, people passing by seemed to give the figure a wide berth without ever seeming to look at the person or register that there was a person there at all. The being would stop in front of stalls being manned by a store employee, only to have that employee ignore the being as if they weren’t standing there at all. Several actually helped other customers standing nearby while flagrantly ignoring the figure. What seemed the most bizarre was that the being itself didn’t seem to mind being treated as invisible, almost as if that were the whole point.

After tailing the person that the world seemed to ignore for nearly ten minutes, the girls had managed to close the distance on the mysterious being. Whether it was bravery born of their curiosity getting the better of their caution, or because the person they were following seemed oblivious to the people around them wasn’t certain. What was certain was that the gap between them had closed to just over ten meters, close enough to see the veiny protrusions across its enlarged head.

And that’s when it happened.

The being who had appeared indifferent to everyone around suddenly turned toward the girls and stared at them. Anna jerked backward in surprise, feeling as if she’d just been caught committing some heinous crime. Ella also flinched a little, but she was far more disconcerted by how deep and unfathomable the being’s eyes seemed to be. She’d read metaphors about people staring into abysses, and in that moment, Ella understood viscerally what the authors truly meant by the words.

The being’s face shifted in an inscrutable way that neither girl could decipher. After holding Ella’s gaze for what felt like an eternity, the being turned away and walked just as slowly and deliberately between two stores as it had moving through the shopping district. Counter to what might have normally happened, Ella was the one to chase after the person first, with Anna following behind a few beats later once she realized that she’d been the one left behind for once.

They watched as the person rounded a corner, and scrambled to catch up, only to find that the passageway led immediately to a dead end, and their target had vanished as if they’d never existed at all. Even with their familiarity with transporters, the girls were both convinced that the being hadn’t used that to escape them, there’d been no bright light of any kind to suggest such a tactic.

“What the hell was that?!” Anna demanded, all pretenses of being a ‘good’ girl thrown to the wind.

“The hell if I know!” Ella screamed back, her heart thundering in her chest from the adrenaline that had surged through her system at being stared through by something she couldn’t readily identify or understand.

“We have to tell Dad!” Anna insisted.

Ella shot her sister a skeptical look, “Tell him what? Dad, we saw a big-headed person that no one else would even look at, and they stared through us like we were specks of dirt or something?”

Anna bit her lower lip as she mulled over what her sister had said. She began to realize just how unhinged it all sounded when she replayed the events in her head. Why had no one looked at that person? How had it gone completely unnoticed by everyone except her and her sister? And most damning of all, how could someone just disappear without using a transporter?

“Okay… maybe we don’t tell Dad…” Anna said after running what she’d seen through her head piece by piece.

“No… we need to tell him,” Ella said, shaking her head. “If we don’t tell him, and this… thing… was dangerous… I don’t think I could sleep at night…”

“And what if we just imagined it?” Anna asked, a bit frantic.

“What, like some shared hallucination?” Ella’s face scrunched up, “I really don’t think we would see the exact same thing if it was all in our heads.”

Anna threw her arms up in frustration, “Then what do we say?”

Ella closed her eyes and leaned her head back as she struggled to formulate an answer for her sister, “I’m not sure yet… But I guess I’ll have to think of something.”

“Fine, you think, I’ll find Dad,” Anna said, storming out of the alley to a nearby store. She asked the storekeeper politely to use a PaDD so that she could find her father while Ella stared at the floor in an effort to construct a believable narrative that would explain what they’d seen in a way that they wouldn’t be quickly dismissed. It took Anna a few minutes of haggling with the shop’s owner to finally get the device she’d been after, and about a minute to nail down where he was.

“Dad hasn’t left the command deck yet, so he’ll probably go see Mom first. We can meet him at the restaurant,” Anna said, handing the PaDD back to the store owner after she’d wiped the search from the device’s memory.

Ella nodded numbly as she followed her sister along the promenade, her mind still occupied with the construction of the story they would eventually lay out to their parents. Because Ember’s was on the same deck of the station that the shopping district occupied, the twins simply had to navigate around the expansive deck to the restaurant district on the opposite side.

The girls entered the establishment, a place they saw as an extension of their home, with a lot less enthusiasm than they normally did. Their dour mood did not go unnoticed by some of the regulars of the place, but none of them reached out to ask the girls what was wrong. In their somewhat frantic state of mind, the twins didn’t pick up on the strange silence that pervaded the room at their arrival as they scurried into the back of the restaurant looking for their mother.

Tessa looked up from a dish she was preparing when she noticed a bit of movement out of the corner of her eye. The looks on her daughters’ faces seemed incredibly dire, which was alarming enough for her to pass the dish off to one of the other chefs so that she could attend to them.

“What’s wrong, girls?” Tessa asked as she gathered her children, one in each arm.

“We need to talk to Dad,” Ella said, but withheld any other explanation.

Tessa’s face morphed into concern, “Are you two alright?”

“We’re fine, Mom,” Ella insisted, “We just need to tell Dad something.”

“Alright honey,” Tessa relented, “We’ll wait for your father to get here.”

Tessa was grateful that when she’d finished saying the words, Vernon came walking through the door to the kitchen. When he saw the look on her face, combined with the worried expressions on his daughters’ faces, Vernon’s back straightened noticeably as he walked over to his family.

“What happened?” he asked, his voice projecting his fatherly protective instinct.

“They said they wanted to talk to you,” Tessa said, her face drawn with worry.

Vernon nodded and jerked his head toward the back office. Tessa nodded quietly and herded the twins inside. Vernon closed the door behind them and took a seat on the desk, while Tessa sat in her chair.

“What happened, girls?” Vernon asked in a firm voice, “I can tell you’re shaken up. Did someone try to hurt you?”

“Dad,” Ella said in a tone that suggested she wanted him to simply listen and not surmise.

Having only heard Ella speak so bluntly a handful of times, Vernon couldn’t help but falter in his pursuit of details. He was suddenly reminded of the way Tessa used to ‘reign him in’ when the girls were little and every little bump and bruise had sent him flying into a parental panic. He took a deep breath and let it out to calm his nerves.

“I’m sorry, Ella. Please, what did you want to tell me?” Vernon said, preparing himself to listen.

“Anna and I were in the shopping district earlier,” Ella began, launching into a retelling of their boredom-fueled adventure on the promenade. She outlined the initial purpose for going there, their fruitless search, all of it very much on brand for children of their age. Vernon and Tessa started to relax until Ella revealed the details of their encounter with the mysterious being.

The longer Ella spoke, the more unease her words conjured in her parents. At several points in her story, Anna piped up with clarifying details that sounded far too real for it to be pure fantasy or a child’s prank. Vernon’s brow furrowed when Ella reached the point in the story where she described how the strange being had stared at her, into her, through her. She described it in a way that Vernon had only heard patients on the verge of death describe sensations, which only disturbed him all the more hearing it from his fourteen-year-old daughter.

“And when the person turned the corner, they just vanished. No sounds, no sparkly lights… just an empty wall,” Ella concluded her story, her hands shaking just slightly as her nerves began to fray.

“I’ve never heard of any species that looks even close to what you described,” Vernon said after giving the somewhat meandering narrative a bit of thought. “I don’t doubt that you two saw something… you’re too upset for it to be a joke…”

“We’re not lying!” Anna yelled, tears starting to form at the edges of her eyes, “We saw it. No one else would look at them, but we saw it!”

Tessa pulled Anna into her arms, running her hand through her hair as she tried to comfort her daughter, “It’s okay, sweetheart. No one’s saying you’re lying.”

“But you don’t believe us! I can tell!” Anna’s voice was muffled by Tessa’s shoulder.

“That’s not true,” Vernon said firmly, “Your mother and I never said you were, not once throughout your story.”

“Story,” Ella repeated with a frown, “Not report… not recounting… story.”

It was Vernon’s turn to frown, “You know I didn’t mean it like that, Ella.”

Ella looked up at her father, “If you really didn’t think we were making something up… why would you look at us like that?”

Vernon looked at Tessa, then back to Ella, “Like what?”

“Like you feel sorry for us… like you used to when we’d have nightmares,” Ella’s voice came out as a strangled whisper.

Vernon slid himself off the table and knelt down in front of his daughter, “Honey, I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t think this was all just a bad dream. It’s just… it’s a little hard to take in. Everything about what you’ve described just feels…”

“Wrong,” Ella finished his sentence, “Yeah… that person felt wrong.”

Vernon winced at hearing his daughter say the words with such certainty. The seeds of doubt that had nudged at the corners of his mind seemed to suddenly relent, allowing him to finally internalize all the signs he was seeing in the girl. Whatever had convinced him that she was fabricating a story suddenly felt laughable… it felt wrong.

Vernon rose to his feet, “I’m going to look into it. Show me exactly where you two were when you saw this being. Every place you stopped, every alley you walked through.”

Tears began to slide down Ella’s face, “You mean… you believe us?”

“I believe you saw something, Ella, and I intend to find out what it was,” Vernon assured her.