The air tastes different tonight.
It clings to my skin with a weight I can't shake, thick and metallic, like swallowing cold iron. Every breath feels heavier, as if the room itself presses down on me, squeezing the air from my lungs without mercy. The faint hum overhead—the ceaseless drone of the lights—seems louder, but hollow, like the echo of a voice lost in a cavern.
I shift in my chair. The fabric beneath me groans softly, a familiar creak in the otherwise suffocating silence. Around me, the others sit—five shadows carved from the same waiting, the same endless pause in time.
They don't speak much. Words feel fragile here, like glass ready to shatter.
But tonight, the silence breaks.
The woman in green, who usually drifts like a breeze through the room, folds her arms tight across her chest and says, "What if we're not meant to leave?"
Her voice is thin, fragile as dry leaves crushed underfoot. It hangs in the air, fragile yet piercing, like a shard of something broken.
The man across from me snorts softly, though his eyes remain wild, searching the edges of the room for answers that don't come. "Then why would they put a door here?" he asks, his voice low but laced with impatience.
I look toward the far wall. There is no door. There never was.
But the thought claws at me—there was once, wasn't there? A door I touched, a handle cold in my palm, a gap in the wall I could slip through. The memory flickers, elusive as smoke—there, then gone.
"I've seen it," the old man murmurs, his voice like cracked wood. The one with trembling hands, who has sat quietly for so long I almost forgot he was here. "The door. It's not always there, but it's waiting. We just don't know how to find it."
She pulls her sleeves over her hands and shakes her head slowly, "Maybe the door is a trap. The way out... the wrong way."
Her words make the stale air shiver. The buzzing light flickers, just once—a tiny, subtle pulse, as if the room itself gasps and holds its breath.
"We can't stay here," the man with the wild eyes insists, leaning forward, voice low and urgent. "We have to try. Together. Press the walls. Push. Find a crack. Something to break through."
The old man laughs bitterly. "How do you break through nothing?"
His words cut deep, sharp and cold.
How do you shatter a wall that isn't there?
My mind swirls with a heaviness, the weight of uncounted days stretching out like shadows without end. I glance at the clock—or the space where it once hung—high above the doors. The absence is louder than any ticking, a silence thick with expectation and dread.
"I think," I say slowly, the words strange and foreign in my mouth, "maybe it's not a wall outside of us. Maybe... it's part of us."
They all turn toward me.
The hum in the ceiling swells, a buzzing at the edge of hearing that tightens in my chest.
"If that's true," the man with the wild eyes replies carefully, "then maybe one of us... is the way out."
The room falls silent again.
But I can feel the shadows behind their chairs leaning closer, listening—watching.
The woman in green breathes out softly, almost a whisper. "Then what if the way out... is the one thing we're too afraid to become?"
The old man's hands tremble more fiercely now, as if fighting against an unseen force. "The waiting... it's not just a room. It's a weight on the soul. A place where hope decays."
I close my eyes and the silence folds into me, cold and endless.
There's something here with us. Something alive beneath the stillness, its presence brushing at the edges of thought like a cold breeze down my spine.
A watcher, waiting for us to make a move.
I don't know if it wants to help—or to stop us forever.
But the waiting has stretched too long.
I need to try.
We all need to try.
Because here, in the room where time sleeps, doing nothing is death.
The clock above the doors remains motionless.
But something inside me stirs.
And I feel, somehow, that the door is not gone.
Not forever.