My legs moved before my mind caught up. I tore through the narrow hallway, bare feet slipping on warped boards slick with dust. The walls shuddered around me, plaster cracking, the ceiling shedding flakes like snow.
I couldn't tell what I was hearing anymore, thunder? Footsteps? My heartbeat? It felt like something inside me was trying to claw its way out.
"Eli! The window!" I shouted, my voice breaking on the last syllable.
Our escape route.
The one we'd practised a thousand times, whispered plans in the dark, rehearsed footsteps, promises made with shaking hands.
I reached the end of the hall, the window looming like an exit carved from the dark. Cold night air seeped through the cracks, brushing my skin with a whisper of freedom.
I turned back—
No Eli.
Where the hell was he?
The hallway behind me stretched empty, swallowing sound. A hollow, echoing quiet that didn't make sense.
For a moment, everything in me stopped, breath, thought, heartbeat. A cold, numbing pressure spread through my chest, squeezing so tightly it made the world tilt.
The plan had always been together.
Always.
I hovered by the window, frozen, staring down the hall as if the force of my fear alone could drag him through that doorway.
"Come on," I whispered, voice trembling. "Eli, come on, please."
I waited.
First a heartbeat.
Then two.
Then too many.
My fingers curled against the wall, nails scraping the peeling paint as panic bloomed hot and fast beneath my ribs. The silence felt wrong.
BANG!
The sound of a gunshot broke the air in half. The sound lingered in the air. It felt physical, like a whipcrack through bone.
"Eli?" My voice trembled.
Did they just shoot him?
"No, no, no—Eli!"
What the fuck is happening.
The sound of footsteps continued to spread throughout the house.
I couldn't react. My knees hit the floor, my hands slipping in the dust. My breath came in gasps that weren't really breaths at all. The ringing in my ears wouldn't stop, a shrill, endless tone that filled the space where his voice should've been.
The walls around me flickered, light and shadow overlapping, reality bending at the edges. The air grew heavier, pressing in against my skin.
Something inside me was freezing or burning, and I couldn't tell which. My hands trembled. The floor beneath me hummed, vibrating softly like it was alive.
The air shimmered. Dust lifted off the ground in slow spirals.
"What's happening?" I gasped, pressing my hand to my chest. My heart was beating too fast, too hard, too loud. Each thud echoed through the walls.
The light changed. Red. Blue. White. The same colours from my dreams, bleeding into the room until I couldn't tell where the light ended and I began.
My skin burned. My vision blurred. And the air sounded like it was screaming.
And then...it broke.
A blinding pulse of white erupted from my chest, ripping through the walls, the air, the dark.
The sound wasn't a sound at all... it was everything... wind and light and static colliding in one impossible instant.
The force hit me like a tidal wave.
I didn't feel my feet leave the ground. I didn't even feel the glass explode behind me. Before I knew it, I was falling, or flying, or maybe both, weightless, spinning through light so bright it drowned the world. My body was there and not there, stretched thin between every heartbeat, every breath, and every scream I hadn't finished.
For a moment, I imagined Eli's hands reaching for me, just a flicker, a shape inside the white, but it vanished before I could touch it.
When I opened my eyes, the world had changed.