Sound came back first.
Laughter, music, glasses meeting, many voices folded together into a dense and rising warmth — all of it arriving at once from all directions, as if someone had turned a dial from silence to full volume. I stood where I was, letting my eyes focus, letting my mind come up to speed.
I was in a room.
Not large, but full of people — the lighting a warm amber, the temperature high, the energy of it pressing against everything. A table along one wall held food and drinks. Coloured balloons and ribbons had been taped up, and in one corner there was laughter at something, and nearby someone was lifting their phone to take a picture. Someone was coming toward me through the people.
"Finally — you made it!"
Ashly pushed through the crowd with a drink in her hand, her expression the particular one where her eyes were smiling before anything else. She was wearing a dress I hadn't seen, her hair neater than usual, visibly put-together in a way that meant she'd tried for today. "I was about to call you," she said. "The cake's not cut yet. We were waiting."
I looked at her. "Is today your birthday?"
"What else?" She laughed and pulled me forward. "You look like you just woke up. Come on."
She led me through the people and I followed, glancing around as I went.
I recognised some faces — classmates, people I'd seen in the corridors. Others I could place only vaguely, and a few I didn't know at all. Music came from somewhere I couldn't identify, sitting underneath everything else without competing with it. The food on the table was arranged precisely, in the exact colours and types I'd have chosen.
I noted that and filed it.
There were no obvious inconsistencies to catch.
"Here." Ashly pulled me to a spot beside the cake, candles already lit, small flames tilting in the movement of the room. Someone started singing, voices joining without much coordination, but meaning it. I moved my lips and let my attention run elsewhere.
I knew this was the dream.
I couldn't find where it was wrong.
Ashly blew out the candles. Applause, noise, people nudging each other about the wish. She laughed and waved it off — a wish was private — and started cutting. She handed me a slice.
"You seem off today," she said, tilting her head. "Are you here?"
"Just tired."
"Or you didn't actually want to come?" Her tone was teasing, but she was actually watching me.
"I'm glad I came," I said.
She looked at me for a second, then let it go and smiled. "Good. Stop overthinking. Have a good time tonight."
I nodded and ate the piece of cake. Strawberry. Exactly the level of sweetness I preferred. I added it to the list.
The party continued and I moved through it — someone greeted me and I greeted them back, someone pulled me into a game and I went, I laughed at the right moments and said enough of the right things that nothing appeared out of place. Underneath all of it, a second process ran steadily: watching, noting, waiting for something that didn't fit.
At some point someone I didn't recognise came over and said that Ashly had told him a lot about me. I asked what, and he said mostly good things, and I said that was a relief, and he laughed. The exchange was completely normal. There was nothing in it I could point to.
The room gradually settled from its peak into a steady warmth. Some people sat down. Some checked their phones. Someone was already getting ready to leave. Ashly found her way to me near the window, where she stood looking out at the city lights, spread and low in the distance.
"Pretty," she said.
"Yes."
"When I was small," she said, her voice slightly quieter, "whenever I was upset I'd stand at the window and look at the lights outside. All those windows lit up, all those people in them — it made me feel less alone somehow."
I turned to look at her. She was still looking out, not at me, and the way she said it was simply there — not performed, not aimed. Like she'd just thought it and let it out.
I remembered the conversation she'd said she hadn't remembered having. That feeling of being somewhere empty, not wanting to come home. She'd told me it wasn't hers. And now this, pointing at the same thing from a slightly different angle, in a tone that was unmistakably real.
"Do you ever feel like that now?" I asked. "Really alone."
She turned. A pause. Then a short laugh, the kind that covers the edges of something. "Sometimes. Doesn't everyone."
I nodded and didn't push. She'd already closed around it.
Someone was calling her name from across the room — a group photo, everyone together. She looked back and said she was coming.
"Come on," she said to me.
I went with her to the spot, found a place in the cluster, looked toward the phone when the person holding it said to, and pulled something close enough to a smile.
The shutter sound.
In that instant, I saw myself in the screen — standing in the middle of the group, wearing the smile, ordinary as anyone else.
But my shadow was pointing in the opposite direction from everyone else's.
One second. The screen shifted and went normal, the image captured and gone, and the moment was over.
I stood still.
Around me, people were already asking to see how it came out, someone was groaning about their expression, someone wanted to go again. Everything moving as it should.
I was about to say something.
[Anomaly Detected]
The sound arrived as if inserted directly — cold, immediate, belonging to a different frequency than anything in this room. Cutting into the warm air of the party like a key into a lock.
[System Correction Initiated — Transitioning to New Environment in Ten Seconds]
I looked at Ashly. She was still talking, phone raised, expression animated, entirely present. She hadn't heard it. None of them had. Only me.
Ten seconds.
I tried to speak. Tried to move. My voice wouldn't form and my feet wouldn't shift — as if something from the outside had settled over me and pinned me where I was. I stood in the middle of the room, watching these people who weren't real, in this party that wasn't real, and something steady and quiet moved through me — not panic, not grief. Just anger. Clean and still. At the thing that kept placing me here, kept letting me think there was a way through, and then removed me before I could act.
Then everything stopped.