Sound came back first.
A distant hum. Low. Constant. Mechanical.
Elliot tried to breathe.
Nothing happened.
He felt… wrong. Weightless and heavy at the same time, as though his body were both gone and still failing him. The pain in his chest was gone, replaced by a numb pressure that spread outward, dissolving thought.
Light flooded his vision.
Not the soft glow of streetlamps or the orange wash of dusk, but something harsher—white, sterile, unforgiving.
Fluorescent.
Shapes formed slowly. Glass. Shelves. Bright colors stacked in neat rows. The air smelled of plastic, sugar, and burnt coffee.
A 7-Eleven.
Elliot stood across the street from it.
No—floated.
He looked down at himself.
There was no blood. No body. No weight. His hands passed through each other when he tried to clasp them together.
"Am I…?" His voice didn't echo. It didn't exist.
The store glowed like a beacon in the darkness, impossibly bright compared to the night around it. Its automatic doors slid open and shut as customers came and went, unaware of the man standing just beyond the reach of the light.
Elliot felt drawn to it.
Not by hope.
By habit.
Go where it's warm.
Go where there's light.
Go where you might be allowed to exist.
He drifted forward.
As he crossed the street, memory surged back into him—not as a stream, but as weight. Every small theft. Every excuse. Every time he'd told himself just this once.
And beneath it all, the image of the envelope.
Still on the road.
Still short.
"I didn't mean to," he tried to say again.
The doors opened.
Light swallowed him whole.
For an instant, Elliot felt something like falling—and then pressure. Crushing. Squeezing. Like being forced through a space too small to hold him.
He screamed.
He awoke to pain.
Real pain.
It came in waves, sharp and disorienting. His body felt compressed, folded in on itself. Sound battered him from all sides—muffled voices, urgent and panicked.
He tried to move.
Something resisted.
He tried to breathe.
Liquid filled his mouth and nose.
Panic surged.
Then—air.
A violent rush of it tore into his lungs, burning as it went. Elliot screamed, the sound ripping out of him raw and desperate.
Hands gripped him. Lifted him. The world spun.
"Another one!" someone shouted.
"He's strong—listen to him!"
The light above him wasn't fluorescent anymore.
It was warm. Golden. Alive.
Elliot's vision blurred, then sharpened. Shapes resolved into faces—huge, distorted, crying and laughing all at once.
A man's voice broke through the noise, trembling.
"Elliot," the voice said. "We'll call him Elliot."
The name hit him like a blow.
No, he thought weakly.
That name belongs to someone else.
But his body didn't listen.
His body was small.
Too small.
As consciousness slipped away, Elliot felt something unfamiliar settle over him.
A heartbeat that wasn't broken.
Lungs that didn't burn.
Hands that hadn't yet learned how to take.
The last thought he had before darkness claimed him was not relief.
It was fear.
Because somewhere deep inside, he knew—
He hadn't been forgiven.
End of Chapter 5