Abducted, Lyra said, and the furrow between Rosario's brow's deepened. The word choice put her uneasily in mind of Avery, with his tinfoil-hat ideas about extraterrestrial visitations – Avery, who Lyra had been nodding along with in full seriousness on Thursday, even as he'd spewed forth about Archer (and therefore Rosario) being some kind of alien.
Rosario's gut stirred with an awful foreboding. Abducted was a bad word by every definition. And as Lyra stumbled on, looking more and more rattled as the story unspooled, it became horribly clear that that was exactly how she'd meant it. The way Avery would've meant it. Grey-skinned creatures dragging her away and— and fairies and trolls and lost time and oh god, she was serious, this wasn't a joke. If anything, Lyra looked sick to her stomach.
Lyra's voice petered out and she sank deeper into her seat, and that meant it was Rosario's turn to say something, but Rosario was frozen, watching her best friend with a terrible twisting worry.
If it was Avery, she would've known what to say. She would've strode right into the argument, impatient, and hurled medical science in his face. Hallucinations caused by sleep paralysis, plus a propensity to believe in supernatural shit, plus a quack hypnotherapist: that was the formula for creating 'memories' of alien abduction.
But this wasn't some purely hypothetical alien encounter they were talking about. This was Lyra, her sister, telling her— no, more than that, believing she'd been pulled underground by fairies.
Oh god, she had to say something.
"I, I don't understand," she managed at last, because she didn't, but she wanted to. Fairies weren't real, but trauma was, and Lyra's apprenticeship had ended in February, so if she hadn't been on the boat... or had something happened on the boat...? Rosario's stomach churned with the terrible possibilities.