When I opened my eyes, my gaze stopped at the ceiling first.
White fluorescent tubes lay flat above me, not flickering, brightness steady. I blinked twice. The edges of my vision came slowly back into focus. The arm that had been pressed against the desk had gone numb — I shifted it and felt the brief, sharp prickle travel from fingertip to elbow before dissolving.
The sounds of the classroom returned one by one. Pages turning. Pen on paper. Somewhere nearby, two voices murmuring, their words broken and unclear. My breathing deepened, and the air carried that particular scent of the classroom — chalk dust layered with old paper, something that never quite disappeared.
"Finally."
I turned. Ashly was tilted sideways in her seat, watching me, pen still between her fingers, mid-sentence abandoned. She kept her voice low and gave a small laugh. "You were out cold. I kept thinking about whether to wake you up. You were too deeply asleep. Then the teacher called your name and you didn't even move, and he just... looked at you for a second and kept going."
I sat up slightly. My back ached where I'd been curved against the desk. "I fell asleep?"
"Right there." She nodded. "You looked like you were dreaming something serious though. Your expression kept changing — frowning, like you were in a hurry somewhere."
I didn't answer right away.
The images from before were still there — not as fragments at the edge of memory the way real dreams fade, but as a continuous, intact sequence. The park lights. The Ferris wheel cabin. His voice. The feeling of the laughter leaving my lungs. The soft ear of the rabbit under my thumb. All of it still present, still specific. Not the way something feels after you've just woken up. More like I'd just left.
"Were you dreaming?" Ashly asked, watching me. "Your whole face was moving. At one point I nearly reached over to poke you."
I looked at her. For a second I almost said it — almost started explaining. What I'd been in. What I'd seen. The question of whether any of what she'd said to me before was real. But the words reached my mouth and stopped there, pressed back by something I couldn't name.
"I don't remember much," I said.
She made a small disappointed sound. "Always the same. I always forget mine too, the second I open my eyes."
I didn't say anything. I let my gaze drift toward the back of the room.
Last row, window seat — empty.
I looked again. It was clean in a way that was almost conspicuous — no books, no stationery, none of the small wear that a desk accumulates from regular use. The sunlight came through and lay across it in a flat, bright strip. Empty and bright and completely bare.
"Is Noah not in today?" I asked.
Ashly's pen stopped. She turned and looked at me with a slight frown. "Who?"
"Back row," I said. "The one who's always there."
She followed my gaze, then looked back at me, brow still furrowed. "That seat's been empty all term. Which classmate are you talking about?"
"Noah," I said, and kept looking at her. "You really haven't noticed him?"
She shook her head. "I genuinely don't know who you're talking about. Do we have someone by that name?"
I said nothing.
Her expression was real. Not a denial, not evasion — she was actually confused, the kind of confusion that doesn't have anywhere to hide. No flicker of recognition, no careful look away. Just the plain, open puzzlement of someone asked a question they have no answer for.
I turned back to the empty desk. It sat there, the sun flat across it, clean as something never used. I looked at it for a long time — long enough for the noise around me to dim, for the edge of that surface to fill my vision, white-bright, there and absolutely empty.
A thought came quietly: maybe it was always just a dream.
The thought arrived with no effort. It simply settled in, rational and intact, no need to force it. I went back through the sequence: the lecture, the corridor, the things Noah had said, the address written on a folded piece of paper, the dark jacket he wore at the side of the road, the temperature of the machine against my back as I closed my eyes — every detail specific, complete, nothing hazily assembled. None of it had the texture of things invented in sleep.
But the desk was right there. Clean. Empty.
"You okay?" Ashly asked.
"Fine," I said. "Just still half asleep."
The bell rang. Chairs shifted, books closed, the room began to fill with movement. I stood too, everything responding normally — no delay, no disorientation. To anyone watching, it was an ordinary end to a class.
But my heart was going faster than it should have been.
We walked out into the corridor together. The space was narrow, noisy, voices ricocheting off the walls. Ashly walked beside me, already talking about the afternoon and some assignment she hadn't done. I responded when I needed to, said the right things at the right moments, kept up the surface of it.
But underneath, another line of thought was running.
If Noah doesn't exist — then what was any of it? The machine, the address, what I experienced inside — where did it come from? And if none of that was real, why were the memories so specific? Why did every detail hold up when I tried to examine it?
Without quite deciding to, I slipped my hand into my pocket.
The paper was still there. Folded, small, sitting in my palm.
I took it out. Unfolded it.
Blank.
Nothing on it. No address, no time. Just a clean white page, never written on.
My hand began to tremble.
"Something wrong?" Ashly asked.
"Nothing." I folded the paper and pushed it back into my pocket. My voice came out even. Like it didn't belong to me.
We kept walking. But I'd stopped knowing where we were going. Two things in my mind were fighting, one saying: calm down, think this through. The other saying: stop thinking.
I didn't know which one was right.
By the time school ended, the light outside was already falling. We came through the gate, and the air was slightly cooler than the classroom, someone cycling past ringing a bell that faded ahead of us.
"Going straight home?" Ashly asked.
"Probably."
"Me too." Easy, relaxed. "Where else would I go."
I took a few more steps, then stopped.
"You said once..." I started. "That you didn't always want to go home. That it felt empty sometimes."
Ashly stopped and turned, brow knitting slightly. "Did I say that?"
"Yes. At school. In the morning. You said it."
She was quiet for a second, then gave a small, uncertain laugh — the kind that comes with not quite knowing how to respond. "I don't think I said that. I'm usually fine about going home. Did you maybe hear it wrong?"
I looked at her.
Her face was sincere. No careful deflection, no looking away at the wrong moment. She just looked confused, the way people do when something doesn't match their memory of themselves.
I searched for the image: morning, her voice dropping slightly, that brief candour and then the quick laugh that closed it off. The detail of how she'd tugged her bag strap. The particular quality of the corridor light. I didn't imagine that. I knew it.
But she was standing here telling me she didn't say it.
We walked on in parallel, footsteps landing together. Ashly kept talking — something about homework, something about a class — and I said the right things. On the surface.
But underneath, quietly, several things were starting to connect. The machine. Noah's vanished desk. Ashly's denial. And something larger, still not fully formed, drifting upward slowly from somewhere deep.
I stopped on the pavement, letting the people around us move past on both sides.
Something was wrong. Not the vague, unspecific feeling — something concrete, becoming clearer.
If I was still inside the dream right now...
The thought arrived, and the street went slightly unreal around me. I stood and looked — the road, the people moving through it, the shopfronts, the parked cars. Everything in place, everything ordinary. But I was looking at it differently now, noticing things I'd walked past every day without recording. The sign on that shop. The number plate on a car at the kerb. The traffic light at the corner. I looked at these things and they held their positions, held their surfaces — but something about them felt static, like objects that existed to be set pieces rather than things that were part of a world still going.
The exit. Noah had told me. If the time limit passes without you going through the exit, the system moves you to the next dream — but the exit will appear again, somewhere.
If I was still inside — it had to be somewhere.
I turned and started moving. First intersection — I scanned left. Ordinary shopfronts, ordinary people. Nothing. Kept going. Second corner, turned right — still nothing. I went faster, covering the edges of each space I passed, scanning every alcove and shadow, anywhere the light might sit slightly differently, any border where things didn't quite resolve.
Something over there?
I stopped and went closer. Just shadow. A wall.
That one?
I pushed toward it. Nothing. Just the surface.
My chest was tightening. Not from running — from the feeling of the space pressing in. If the door was closing, if the time was almost gone —
I looked up. Further ahead, maybe thirty metres, something about the air looked slightly wrong. Not dramatic — just a small area where the light sat differently, where the edges of things didn't quite merge with the surrounding space, like an object placed there without being fully absorbed by the world around it.
I stared at it for less than a second, then went straight for it.
The door. Right there. The edges already dimming — the glow drawing inward, shrinking, but still visible, still present.
I didn't look back. My footfall became clear and rhythmic in my ears. I reached out and pushed the door open.
Light came down and covered everything. I walked through.