The sky was wrong.
That was the first thing Mara noticed when she woke up in the middle of the road, barefoot and shivering. It was daytime, but the sky above her wasn't blue—it was a deep, swirling orange, as if sunset had gotten stuck and couldn't move forward.
Birds flew in loops. Trees leaned the wrong way. And the air tasted faintly like metal.
Mara sat up slowly, trying to remember how she got there. Her last clear memory was of falling asleep in her bed, wrapped in her favorite quilt, her cat curled up at her feet.
But this wasn't her neighborhood.
This wasn't even her world.
There were no cars. No people. The street signs had symbols she didn't recognize—like someone had taken English, flipped it in a mirror, and made it hum. Even her reflection in the store window across the street looked… wrong. It moved when she didn't.
Then the ground trembled.
Not like an earthquake—more like something underneath was shifting. Turning.
She stood up, heart pounding, and that's when she saw it: high above, in the swirling orange clouds, a shape floated upside down in the sky.
It was her house.
Perfectly intact.
Suspended in the air, as if gravity had given up.
And inside one of the windows, something watched her back.