Some children are born with their eyes closed to the world, content to sleep through the shock of arrival.
Ayla Serin was not one of them.
She came into the world screaming—loud, fierce, and wide-eyed—her gaze not fixed on the lights above, but on something behind them. Something deeper. Something no one else could see.
The house behind her was burning. Smoke clawed at the sky. Her mother's body, still warm, lay cradled in soot and silence. And Ayla cried—not in confusion, not in fear—but like a siren calling into a world that had already cracked open to let her through.
They found her in the arms of a stranger.
An old man, barefoot, blind with cataracts, sat quietly in the field outside the ruined house, whispering lullabies in a tongue long forgotten by time. When emergency workers approached, he didn't flee or speak. He simply laid the child gently on the grass and vanished—no sound, no struggle—leaving only a ring of scorched footprints burned into the earth.
No one ever identified him. No fingerprints. No history. Just a fading impression in the soil, and the girl.
They named her Ayla—after the last word her mother had spoken.
No surname. No father. No family willing to claim her.
She spent her first two years in the foster system, passed from one home to the next like a book no one wanted to finish. Strange things followed her wherever she went. Mirrors cracked at night, even when there were no earthquakes. Toys arranged themselves into perfect pyramids by morning. Lights flickered at precisely 3:17 AM in every home she entered, always the same time.
Families whispered.
They said the energy was wrong. That she talked to empty corners of the room. That shadows moved where shadows shouldn't. Most sent her back with polite apologies and quiet relief.
Until she came to the Varas.
Daniel and Mira Varas weren't warm people. They lived in a gray house with thick curtains and quieter arguments. They didn't hold hands. Didn't laugh. They were the kind of couple who shared space, not love.
Daniel had been a soldier once, now a high school history teacher with scars he didn't talk about. Mira ran a flower shop no one visited, filled with wilted lilies and dust. They weren't cruel. Just tired.
When Ayla arrived, Mira took one look at her strange, golden eyes and muttered, "She's not right."
Daniel shrugged. "Then she'll fit in here."
They never gave her back. Not because they loved her.
But because the house, long haunted by unseen things—cold spots in the nursery, whispers in the walls, footsteps in the attic—fell silent the night Ayla arrived. The air stilled. The voices stopped.
It was as if the house had been holding its breath for years.
And now, finally, it exhaled.
Ayla grew up learning what silence meant. What it cost. She understood early that stillness was safety, and asking questions only stirred things better left alone.
The Varas gave her everything she needed—meals, books, clothes. But no affection. No bedtime stories. No soft hands brushing back her hair at night. They didn't ask about her past. They didn't want to know.
And she didn't mind.
Because Ayla had her own rules:
Don't speak to ghosts.
Don't react in front of others.
Never look twice.
Because if you look twice… they know you see them.
But the ghosts were always there.
At school, she sat at the back of the classroom, careful not to glance under the desks where the boy with no eyes crouched, grinning. On the playground, she avoided the sandbox corner, where the girl in the red coat whispered secrets into the dirt.
She trained herself not to blink. Not to flinch.
The other kids called her strange.
The teachers called her gifted.
But no one ever called her afraid.
Until the day she made a mistake.
She was six when she told her teacher, matter-of-factly, about the woman who stood behind her desk. Pale. Smiling. Dead.
They sent Ayla to a child psychiatrist.
The pills they gave her made the dreams fade.
But the ghosts didn't care. They kept coming.
By twelve, Ayla had mastered the art of pretending. Her heart was a locked room. Her face gave nothing away. Her eyes, when she let them be seen, were polished stone.
She could walk into any house and know instantly if someone had died there. Even when the paint was fresh and the carpets new, the sadness lingered. The heaviness clung to corners like cobwebs. Sometimes, if she stared long enough, she could see the dead walk by. Quiet. Lost.
That was her life. Not chosen. Just inherited.
And it might've stayed that way.
Until the rainy night she saw the man standing beneath the streetlamp.
Tall. Still. Waiting.
He wasn't a ghost.
But he wasn't entirely human either.
And for the first time since the fire, since her mother's final breath, since the mark on her wrist had faded into skin—
Ayla chose to look twice.
End of Chapter 2