The days bled into one another, becoming shapes and silences rather than time. A stretch of cold tile. The scratch of a pen against paper. The taste of metal in the back of my throat.
I didn't know how long I'd been in the room. My sense of time had dissolved the moment the door first shut behind me. Sleep came and went like a stranger. Meals—if they could even be called that—arrived twice a day, or maybe three. Sometimes not at all. There were no windows, only the faint hum of power behind the walls and the low, static buzz that filled my head whenever I closed my eyes.
And when I did close my eyes, it was worse.
I saw Arin's face. Bright and laughing. Reaching out a hand I couldn't take. Eyes full of something that had been real—until it wasn't.
I curled into myself on the cot, pulling the thin blanket tighter around my shoulders. Cold air seeped into my skin regardless. I tried not to remember. But memory didn't wait for permission.
That moment in the street. The sirens. The voices. It played over and over again in my mind like a broken reel. Arin's blood on the pavement. My own screams echoing through the chaos. And then—
Nothing.
Not darkness. Not light. Just a single, vast nothing that had swallowed everything. Sound, breath, space.
And now I was here. Flickering at the edges.
The first time it happened, I thought I was dreaming.
I'd rolled over in bed, restless and sweating, when something cracked inside me—like a pulled muscle, but deeper and wrong—and suddenly I was standing across the room. Just there. Knees weak. Heart slamming in my chest.
Then it happened again. And again.
At first, only when I lost control—panic attacks, sharp flashes of memory, a sudden shout from the hallway. Each time, I blinked and found myself in a new corner of the cell. Sometimes mid-fall. Sometimes standing with no recollection of having moved. I thought I was losing my mind.
Now it was happening more often. Even when I sat still. A blink, and I was halfway across the room. A breath, and the walls twisted subtly, like I'd stepped into a version of the space that wasn't quite the same.
My cell was the same size. Same shape. But sometimes the corners didn't meet cleanly. Sometimes the door looked closer than it was. Sometimes the shadows crawled a little too slowly.
I hadn't told them. They already thought they knew everything. My Point, they said, was teleportation. One of the rarer kinds. They asked questions—when it started, how it felt, what I remembered.
I lied.
I told them it felt like a door opening. That I remembered white light. That it wasn't painful.
But it was.
It still was.
The sensation didn't just bend space—it bent me. Like something in my body twisted too far each time it happened. My bones ached afterward. My vision swam for minutes. And sometimes, when I rematerialized, my body didn't feel entirely real. Like my hands lagged behind my thoughts. Like my skin didn't fit.
And then came the memory again.
I'd been eating—or trying to, the food barely passing for edible—when it hit me harder than usual. The sudden mental image of Arin's head snapping back. The blood blooming across his chest. The scream lodged in my throat.
I didn't make it to the corner.
I vomited right there on the floor, gasping, forehead against the cold tile as everything inside me tried to claw its way out.
"Stop," I whispered, over and over again. "Stop, stop, stop."
But it didn't stop.
The grief clawed deeper every time. Raw. Primal. I missed Arin with a desperation that burned through every nerve in my body. Not just the memory of him—him. His voice. His stupid half-smile. The way he'd nudge my shoulder when I was being too serious.
That feeling of being known.
And now all that was left was silence.
I pressed my head to the wall, my breaths shallow and uneven. Somewhere outside the room, a door hissed shut. Footsteps. But they didn't stop for me.
They never did.
My body gave a sudden jolt—an internal shift, like pressure building just beneath the surface—and pop.
I was across the room again.
Not smoothly. Not like teleportation. My body snapped from one space to another like a frayed cord reattaching, and the pain hit behind my eyes like a migraine. I groaned, gripping my knees, barely able to stay upright.
"I'm not doing this," I said out loud. "I'm not doing anything."
But the walls didn't answer.
They just held me in place, flickering at the edges of my vision.
And then it happened.
A twist—not in the room, but in reality.
One moment, I was pacing, hand against the metal surface of the wall, trying to breathe. The next—
The light broke.
A loud crack echoed through the space like thunder in a canyon, and the air in front of me shimmered—no, split. Like glass pulled apart at the seams. A ripple ran through the center of the room.
My breath caught. My body tensed. I didn't want to move. Didn't mean to move.
But something in me reached forward anyway.
And then—space folded.
I didn't remember the transition. There was no falling. No motion.
Just a stretch of pressure, like gravity turned inside out—and when it eased, everything had changed.
I hit the ground hard, mud sucking at my hands as I scrambled to my knees. Wind bit at my face. The air was thick and wet, full of buzzing insects and the distant cries of birds. Trees loomed around me, tall and gnarled, tangled in vines and mist. The sky above was overcast and veined with streaks of yellow light, like it had been stretched too thin.
The silence here was alive.
I stumbled to my feet, heart racing, clothes damp with sweat and something else. My breath came in short, confused puffs.
"Where…?" My voice faded out.
I turned in a slow circle.
No walls. No metal doors. No guards or voices or cold ceilings.
Just untouched nature.