Low though his voice was, Karin clung to every word. She did not have to strain to hear, did not have to ask for clarification. She understood all too well. Her lips parted on a sigh, her mouth working uselessly as she fought for even the simplest words. "I..." So quickly even that small, timid syllable died in her throat. Her heart felt as if at once it was racing and had stopped altogether. A coldness suffused her body, washing over her, lapping into her very limbs like some sentient, frozen tide.
"I was."
Her voice was so hushed it was barely a whisper, fraught with such pain as she could never put to words. All the weight in the world was in that fragmented sentence; she held nothing of it back, and did not regret her openness. "My sister came for me. We went out into the lobby. I'd smelled something burning..." She raked a hand through her hair. Stared down at the table, scarred by hands and pens and hot carafes of overpriced coffee. "Burning ozone. And there were times I didn't feel like myself." She struggled to explain. There were no useful turns of phrase for such insanity as this, but this man bore the markings of someone truly curious, not some agent of the state come to fit her for a straightjacket and a padded cell. And so she did her best to speak the unspeakable. "It didn't get better after the outage." She looked up at him, green eyes hiding behind thick lashes. "I've seen things, too. Things that sound like what the other tenants have seen. I hear them."