Two people came in first.
They swept the room — fast, practiced, taking in every corner, their movements the kind you only get from doing the same thing many times. One of them gave a small nod toward the door.
Then a third person walked in.
A woman. Younger-looking than I'd have expected. Dark jacket, hair pulled back. She came in steadily, without the tension the first two carried — more as if she'd already accounted for what she would find. She came to the machine, stopped in front of me, and instead of standing she crouched, bringing herself to roughly my eye level.
"Elena?" Her voice was even. Not loud.
I looked at her. Said nothing.
"My name is Sarah," she said. "We're here to bring you out."
I kept looking. Said nothing.
She didn't react to my silence. She simply kept going, in the same tone, as if this were something she'd already thought through how to do. "Your father — Michael — reported you missing about three weeks ago. We've been investigating since then. It took a while to get here."
Three weeks.
The number arrived and I held it apart from everything else for a moment. Three weeks. I had no way of estimating how long I'd been inside — time inside the dream had no reliable shape — but three weeks was a specific number, specific enough to be hard to immediately absorb.
"Your father's name is Michael," she said. "He's outside right now. Waiting for you."
My fingers tightened slightly against the surface of the machine.
She kept going without pausing. "The person who had possession of this machine — Noah Hale — is in our custody. His father, Dr. William Hale, is cooperating with the investigation. We need to get you out now and have you checked over."
Every sentence came with names, with specific details, with the kind of concrete information that the dream, in my experience, didn't provide. The dream gave me things that felt good. Things that fit. Things that landed softly. What she was saying landed heavily — the density of real information, names and timelines and specifics, nothing smoothed at the edges.
But I still didn't move.
"I understand this might be difficult to believe," she said. "You've been through a lot. We know something about what this machine does — how real it makes everything feel, how hard it becomes to tell the difference."
She stopped, then looked at me directly. "So you're not sure whether this is real right now. Am I right."
I looked at her. She was right.
"I can't convince you in a single sentence," she said. "All I can tell you is: what you're seeing and feeling right now is real. This room is real. I'm real. The people waiting for you outside are real."
"You've thought you were out before," I said. My voice came out rough — the dryness of it, from not speaking for a long time. "More than once."
"I know."
"Every time felt real."
"I know," she said. "But sit with this for a moment. Does this feel different from those times?"
I didn't answer immediately. I sat with it.
Every place the dream had constructed had felt seamless. Everything had fitted. Everything had been arranged to give me what I wanted — warm and smooth and without friction. But here: nothing had been given to me. Nothing had fit in the way the dream fitted things. The information she'd provided wasn't what I wanted — it was precise and complicated and full of things I had no way to immediately confirm. That texture, the texture of not knowing and not being made comfortable — I hadn't felt it for a long time.
The dream gave you what you wanted. It didn't give you uncertainty.
"Your father," she said, her voice dropping just slightly. "He's been outside since we found this place. He hasn't left."
I looked at her.
"He asked me to tell you," she said. "He's here. And not to be afraid."
The heat started behind my eyes.
Not because I'd fully believed her. Because the sentence sounded exactly like him — not an elaborate comfort, just the plain fact of his presence, and the instruction not to be afraid. Simple. Direct. The kind of thing he would say without having to think about it. The dream could construct scenes, could construct conversations, but that specific quality of a sentence — the way you could hear the person inside it — I didn't know if the dream could do that.
I held her gaze for a long time without speaking.
"Even if this is still the dream," I said finally, "what can I do."
She said nothing. Just let me finish.
"At least walking out with you," I said, "is a chance."
She gave a small nod and stood. "Then we go. The sooner the better — we've been here a while."
Her voice was still level, but something in it moved slightly faster. As if time were something that mattered.
She stepped aside to make room.
I slid down from the machine. My feet found the floor, and the cold of it pressed up from the soles. I stood for a moment, letting my legs adjust — like something that had been sitting too long finally being asked to work again.
I walked toward the door. As I passed the machine, my fingers brushed against its edge — the same soft material, the same temperature it had always been, the same texture as the first time. This was where it started. This was the place all of it began.
At the doorway, I stopped and looked back.
The machine sat in the centre of the room, quiet, no sign of activity. Like something abandoned. Like something that had never been used — or like something that had reached its end.
"Elena," Sarah said from the doorway. "Let's go."
I turned and walked out.