"Emily!"

The tears were there before I opened my eyes, and I sat bolt upright in bed. A dream. Was it a dream? Was I awake? Had I been sleeping? A light went on outside my bedroom door and my dad poked his head in.

"Lauren, it's five thirty in the morning. What are you screaming about?" He asked, with all the rage and confusion of a man who had just been awoken in a very unpleasant manner.

"Was I screaming? I don't…it was a nightmare. I think…I don't…Emily, is she okay?" I demanded, jumping out of bed, my heart pounding so hard that it ached inside my chest.

"She's fine, she's asleep…was asleep, she probably isn't anymore with your screaming! That racket would wake the dead!" He hissed, rubbing his eyes. I pushed past him into the hallway, ignoring his protests, and ran to my sister's room, wrenching the door open and racing to the bed. I threw the covers off to confirm what, in my heart, I already knew.

"She's gone, Emily's gone!" I screamed, fear and panic conquering any common sense I might have had.

"What do you mean, "gone"?" My dad demanded, marching up the hall towards me.

"What do you think I mean? She's gone, she's not here, she's absent, she left, she's AWOL, astray, disappeared, there's an Emily-shaped hole in her bed where Emily should be but she's not, because she's GONE!" I rambled, frantically, pushing past him for a second time and making for the stairs. "I have to find her, I have to…"

"What…and where do you think you're going, young lady?" He demanded, but turned to see me frozen at the top of the staircase, hand clutching my chest, eyes bulging wide. "Lauren?"

I couldn't move; couldn't acknowledge him; couldn't see anything but the flashing blue light illuminating the landing at the bottom of the stairs. Flashing blue light that spilled in through the window on the front door from the police car parked outside of my house. The police car that belonged to the policeman who was rapping on the door now; the policeman who had come to tell us what I already knew. I collapsed where I stood, unable to move from the top step. There were no more tears…I was too far gone to cry. I just sat there, watching as my father stepped over me and descended the staircase, unsteadily. He knew. Of course he knew. He didn't know what I knew, hadn't seen what I had seen, but he knew that something was very wrong. Irreparably wrong. I didn't even hear what the policeman said, didn't even look up when my mother joined them, didn't feel a thing as I watched both of my parents holding each other, sobbing and wailing and breaking. I was catatonic. I stood up after an immeasurable amount of time and went back to bed. I closed my eyes, alone in the darkness.

And then: then, I cried. I cried and cried until I was empty, until I had no more tears left, and then I cried some more. I cried for hours. I cried until it ached, until the ache numbed, and then ached again. I cried until it got dark, until I fell asleep and dreamed about her. When I woke up and saw that I had two missed calls from her, frantic hope clutched at my being, and I tried to call her back. Straight to voicemail. Voicemail…that triggered something in the back of my mind. I checked my messages…one new message…from Emily.

At the age of eighteen, it sounds somewhat foolish to call myself a "scientist", but I don't mean I'm pottering about in a lab with test tubes, wearing a white coat and curing cancer. I'm scientifically-minded, always have been. I believe in earth and rocks and physics, not "The Force" or poltergeists or prophetic dreams or anything that might fall into the category of Supernatural.

But, that said, I knew that my dream had been real just as sure as I knew that the Earth was round. The voicemail Emily left me; I had heard it before I ever picked up my phone. And I knew it wasn't a case of filling in the blanks - I had listened to the voicemail and my mind had done the legwork and filled it into my memory of the dream – I knew it wasn't that because I knew every word she was going to say before I listened to it. And that meant that the dream had been real. And if the dream had been real, then the implications of that were too much for me to process in my current frame of mind.

But something had killed my sister. Some unseen force had sent her crashing to her death. Why? Of the two of us, Emily was always the softer one, the more popular one. We were identical twins, but only on the outside. Emily was the nicer one, the better one. Why would anybody want to hurt her? And how?

I didn't know, but I promised her then that I would find out.

I listened to the message over and over until eventually, grief and exhaustion won over and sleep claimed me once more. I don't remember dreaming.