Chapter 81: Breakfast With Bandits
I floated somewhere between sleep and waking, not quite anchored to either shore, drifting in the lazy, directionless current of a half-conscious state.
The world around me was less a place and more a suggestion of one—patches of color that shimmered like heat over stone, sounds that barely remembered what they were supposed to be, fragments of thought that never finished their sentences before dissolving into static.
Somewhere in the middle of it all, like a lighthouse glimpsed through fog, she appeared again. The woman from the cube. The one whose face I’d seen more often in dreams than I’d seen my own in mirrors lately.
I wasn’t even startled anymore.
No jolt of suspicion, no paranoid scanning of the horizon for tricks. She’d become... familiar. Not in the way you grow used to a neighbor’s voice through the wall, but in the way you grow used to your own shadow—always there, even when you forget to look for it.
Her presence didn’t slam into me; it slipped in, like warm water curling around my ankles. The light around her pulsed faintly, never steady, always flickering as if someone had put the sun on a dimmer switch and was indecisively fiddling with it.
I couldn’t make out her expression—never could—but there was a weight to the way she watched me, the same way you might watch a candle burn lower than it should, knowing you can’t snuff it out but wishing you could shield it from the wind. I wondered, not for the first time, if she actually knew me, or if this was some elaborate cosmic prank. But the strange thing was, I didn’t care. If she wanted to haunt my dreams, she was welcome. It was almost... nice.
Then came the whispers.
They began far off, little ripples against the surface of the dream, so faint I couldn’t tell if they were words or just the memory of them. They drew closer with every second, curling around me, thin and insistent, like ivy wrapping a column. I strained to make them out, and they sharpened—not much, but enough. Two words, breathed with the kind of softness that still cuts straight through you:
"Wake up."
And so I did.
The jolt was instant, like being dropped into my own body from a great height. My eyes snapped open to the dim canvas ceiling of our wagon, the fabric shifting slightly in the breeze, sunlight already filtering in at the edges. It was early morning—too early for anything to feel right—and yet my bones knew something was off before my head caught up.