Take two! My tab closed as I was writing this, which was.... Unfortunate. At any rate, I'll be brief until I've caught up with before, so I apologize for that. It's 7AM and I haven't slept, so I'm a tiny bit... Sleepy? Ah, at any rate. The story's great, but work on the action. And as always, take this review with a grain of salt.
Firstly, your character seems a bit inconsistent. He feels as if he's changing too much in this story, with the first few paragraphs being very distant and distracted, where as later it's extremely sharp. The issue that I have isn't the change itself (the change is actually fine; people do that all the time, and I'm actually kinda glad someone painted that in their story), but with how you describe the change. It feels a bit clunky at times, and most notably, the flow of the story changes. From being very eloquent at the start to very choppy later on, it doesn't really piece together.
Secondly, the dialogue later in the chapter is very choppy. I mentioned this just a moment ago, but it's worth a mention of its own. In the next few chapters, you have actual dialogue being scarce, and most of the communication is either being described from the past or between Mira/Shay where it's almost no verbal communication. That lack of dialogue is fine (it's actually good, I would prefer that to very dialogue heavy books), and I'm only mentioning it because I have no way to judge your dialogue. I don't know if it has improved or what.
Something that I do when I have a simple problem like that is open up a Word document, grab a few characters, and throw them into a room with no door, and somehow being lit up without any source of light. That gives enough backstory to make them interact, and you can force pure dialogue from that to figure out what best works for you. Of course, since all characters are a bit different, you may want to use Shay/Konstantin/Mira/Lily to figure out how to Dialogue.
Then again, I could be completely wrong.
But I must praise you for something! I absolutely am stunned by how perfectly you lay out the groundwork for such a complex and vivid story in these few thousand words. It is amazing, and while a tiny bit clunky, an editor could easily clean it up to perfection. You grabbed my interest, forced me to read your story, and then forced me to make an account just so I could say that it was amazing.
--ielsgred
