Mira withdraws her hand. The grain closes around her fingers without sound, seamless as before, and the sand_figure does not move — palm still raised, spiral groove still contracted — as though it will wait exactly like that until the desert reclaims it. She turns away deliberately, the way you turn from something that could hold you all day if you let it. The thread is still there at shoulder height, angled toward the ridge. She walks toward it and begins to climb. The ridge is steeper than it looked. Partway up, the singing finds her again — not faint now, not the ghost of a sound but something that fills the spaces between heartbeats. She crests the ridge and stops. Below, in a pale bowl of flat stone, stands the doorway. Narrow. Framed in something that is not wood and not quite stone. Unguarded, exactly as the sand_figure showed her. The thread of light slides through its threshold and disappears. From inside: her mother's voice, clear and close and entirely unaware that anyone is listening.