The stars were still there when Jin opened his eyes.
For a moment he thought he'd only dozed off for a few minutes, that he was still lying on the moss on the school roof with the cold creeping into his back. Then he realized there was no roof beneath him at all.
He was floating. Drifting slowly through the dark with stars above him and below him and on every side, and he wasn't falling. He was simply moving, the way a leaf moves on a slow river, carried along by something he couldn't see.
He should have been afraid. He wasn't. Everything felt soft and far away, the way things feel in a dream right before you realize it's a dream.
He drifted past clusters of stars so close he could have touched them, blue and white and gold, humming faintly as he passed. Somewhere far below him, he thought he saw the faint outline of the maze, those stone corridors laid out like a thumbprint in the dark. Then he was moving away from it, higher and further, until it was gone.
