I didn't wake up.
There was no clear moment when my eyes opened and the world snapped back into place. No sharp transition. No clean line between before and after.
It felt more like reality had been unplugged and then slowly plugged back in, piece by piece.
First came the weight.
Not a weight on my chest. Not on my limbs. Something deeper, more intimate. An inner heaviness, as if my body hesitated, unsure how to remember its own shape. As if it had briefly forgotten how to exist.
Then the cold.
Or maybe the absence of warmth. I couldn't tell the difference. It wasn't painful, and it wasn't comforting either. Just neutral. Indifferent.
When I finally realized my eyes were open, all I saw was white.
Not a wall.Not a ceiling.Not a floor.
Just white.
A uniform white, without texture or depth, without any sense of distance. I couldn't tell whether anything was close or far away. I couldn't even tell whether I was lying down, sitting, or standing. The space refused to give me that information.
I blinked.
Nothing changed.
My first instinct was to breathe harder. That was a mistake.
The air rushed into my lungs without resistance, far too easily, like I was inhaling something that hadn't been meant for me. There was no smell, no warmth, no coolness. Just air, or something pretending to be.
I coughed.
The sound died almost instantly.
No echo. No return. As if my voice had been swallowed before it was allowed to exist.
That was when panic tried to settle in.
Not violently. Not all at once.
It crept in slowly, like a quiet pressure whispering without words that something was wrong. A cold certainty bloomed behind my eyes, right at the moment when you start searching for something, anything, to hold on to.
I sat up abruptly.
The movement was real. Sharp. My body responded immediately. My muscles were still there. My joints worked. My hands trembled slightly, but they existed.
I stared at my fingers as if I were seeing them for the first time.
They looked normal.
Too normal.
Then I noticed someone else.
A short distance away, though distance itself felt unreliable here, Amad was sitting with his back slightly hunched. Both hands were clenched on his knees. He was breathing fast and unevenly, like he expected the ground to vanish beneath him at any moment.
Our eyes met.
The relief in his expression was instant and overwhelming, almost painful.
"Leymane…"
My voice came out lower than I expected. Rough. Almost unfamiliar.
"Do you know where we are?"
I didn't answer.
Because I had nothing honest to give him. Because the only thing I understood was that nothing around us was meant to be understood quickly.
A movement to my left made me tense.
Bintou.
She was standing perfectly still, fists clenched, shoulders tight. Her eyes scanned the white around us as if she were looking for a weakness, a crack, something she could break.
Her whole body was ready to react.
"If this is some kind of joke," she muttered through clenched teeth, "it's not funny."
Her voice didn't shake, but something just beneath it did.
Then there was Ayyi.
He stood up slowly, without urgency. He took the time to look at his hands, then at what might have been the floor, then at the space around us. His eyes never stopped moving. Not frantic, but precise. Calculating. Like he was trying to measure a place that refused to be measured.
"No one's hurt?" he asked.
We shook our heads.
Silence settled again.
Not an empty silence, but a dense one. Compressed. As if even the smallest sound might trigger something.
That's when I noticed something deeply unsettling.
There was no echo.
When Amad shifted his weight, when Bintou adjusted her stance, when I swallowed, the sounds existed, but they didn't travel. They were born and died immediately, as if the space refused to carry them.
"There are no walls," I murmured.
Ayyi nodded slowly.
"Or they don't work the way they should."
Bintou took a step forward, then another.
She stopped.
"Is it just me," she said, frowning, "or does it feel like the space is moving?"
I felt it too.
Something subtle. Almost ridiculous. Like a faint current under the skin. Like the place was breathing, but not at our rhythm. Not hostile. Not welcoming.
Just present.
The white stretched endlessly around us. But the longer I stared at a single point, the more it felt like it was slowly pulling away. As if the space refused to be observed for too long.
Amad finally stood up.
"Guys…" His voice trembled despite his effort. "We were in class, right? I remember the room, the door, the light. And then…"
He stopped.
Because the rest wasn't there.
I searched my own memory. Room 3-C. The scrape of chairs. The tension. Then a gap. A different kind of white, inside my mind. Empty. Inaccessible.
Bintou took a deep breath.
"I don't like this."
No one disagreed.
Because it wasn't an opinion. It was a fact.
A scream suddenly cut through the silence behind us.
I turned sharply.
At a distance I couldn't measure, another student had appeared. A boy I vaguely recognized. He was running, or at least trying to. His movements were slowed, as if he were pushing through something thick and invisible.
"Hey!" Amad shouted. "Wait!"
The boy kept running. Faster. Farther.
Then, without sound or warning, he was gone.
Not pulled away.Not thrown.
Just gone.
The white closed over the place where he had been.
No one spoke.
Bintou clenched her jaw. Ayyi didn't blink. Amad turned pale. I felt something cold slide down my spine.
It wasn't a threat.
It was worse.
It was proof.
Time passed, or maybe it didn't. There was no way to tell. No sun. No shadow. No rhythm. Just our breathing and the endless white.
That's when I noticed something else.
My thoughts felt delayed, like they were arriving a fraction of a second after my sensations. As if my mind and body were no longer perfectly synchronized.
I raised my hand.
It moved.
Just a little too late.
Ayyi noticed.
"You felt it too," he said quietly.
It wasn't a question.
Bintou stepped closer.
"Okay. We're not standing around. We stick together. We move together."
Amad nodded too quickly.Ayyi agreed without argument.
We closed the distance between us instinctively.
And that's when I felt it.
Something adjusting.
Not around us.
Inside us.
A subtle pressure, like a calibration. As if the place had taken note of our decision. As if staying together wasn't neutral.
A thought crossed my mind, uninvited.
What if we didn't arrive somewhere?What if something happened to us instead?
I pushed the idea away.
The white remained unchanged, but it no longer felt empty. It felt attentive, like a space waiting for something to give.
Amad whispered, "I feel like we're late for something."
No one answered.
Because deep down, a certainty was settling, slow and painful.
What mattered now wasn't understanding where we were.
It was how long we could hold onbefore something inside usfinally broke.