I didn't know how I'd arrived here.
When consciousness came back, there was no transition — just suddenly present, suddenly standing here. As if I'd been lifted from one place and set down in another with nothing in between.
I looked down at my feet.
Water covered the ground — shallow, barely reaching the ankle, completely still, a surface so flat it reflected me back with full clarity. I shifted my foot. The water moved, my reflection broke apart, then slowly reassembled, calm and clear, as if nothing had disturbed it.
I raised my head and looked around.
Nothing. Not nothing as in no buildings or people — nothing in every direction. Whiteness, everywhere, the same in all directions, sky and ground without a visible seam between them, just white dissolving into white. No wind. No temperature. No sensation from outside at all. Just my own breathing, my own heartbeat, and the shallow water beneath me.
Then I saw the door.
It stood some distance ahead — alone, no wall, no frame attached to anything, simply standing in the water. Its edges traced with the pale glow I'd come to know well.
I didn't go toward it.
I sat down where I was. The water covered my palms, cool, an even and mild coolness, not sharp, just present. I sat there, looking at the door, and let myself think.
Noah had told me the door was the exit. Walk through it, return to reality. That had been the rule since the beginning.
I thought about where I'd been. The living room. Mum. The amusement park. The classroom. The hospital. The stretch I'd taken to be real, with its days accumulating. The white space here. One place after another, each one I'd accepted at some point as the end of it, only to discover I was still inside.
And the first time.
At the kitchen doorway, I'd turned away from her and walked to the door at the end of the corridor instead — testing it, wanting to confirm it before I let myself go to her. I'd pushed through. The light came. I opened my eyes and there was the room, the machine, Noah asking how it felt. I'd thought I was out. I'd believed the door was real. I'd believed that was the moment of return.
But if every door led only to the next dream — then that first time was no exception. That room. That version of Noah. The thing I'd taken for a successful exit.
I had never actually woken up.
The thought completed itself fully, and I felt something begin to sink in my chest — not the violent kind, but the quiet kind. The kind that goes steadily down, the way something heavy does in water, without rushing, until it reaches a depth too far to retrieve.
I looked down at the water, at the face looking back from it. Very still. Steady in a way that felt almost unfamiliar, like a face that looked like mine but had received different news.
I pressed my hand flat against the surface and held it.
Cool. Genuinely cool.
But everything in every dream was genuine. Every texture was real, every temperature, every sound, every tear. Reality of sensation was never the measure. I'd understood that for a while. Understanding it and sitting in it were different things.
My eyes started to burn. I didn't let it continue — I breathed in steadily and pressed the feeling back down.
Don't think in that direction. Think about what can be done.
I thought about it for a while. Going through the door led to the next dream. Staying where I was left me in whatever this space was, with no indication of what would happen. Either way, the next destination was another dream. There was no path I could see that led somewhere else.
So what would actually get me out.
I brought my gaze back to the door. There had been a time when seeing that pale glow meant something like hope — a signal for exit, a way back, an end. Now the glow was the same but my response to it had changed. Not hope, not the pull of it. Something more like the exhausted, optionless stare of someone who can't see another direction.
I stood. The water shifted outward from my feet, a small circle of waves spreading and then flattening.
I walked to the door and stopped, hand resting on the surface.
I didn't know if this was right.
But there was nothing else.
And: what if.
What if this one time was different. What if the odds were small but not zero. What if Noah had been telling the truth and this particular door was the one that led back. The possibility was small — I could see that clearly. But it existed, and as long as it existed I couldn't dismiss it entirely.
That was what moved my hand.
Light came through. I walked forward into it.