Chapter 1(her view)
Something was wrong here.
I didn’t know where I was. Everything felt strange, unfamiliar.
I could feel my eyelids—they were closed, not by choice, but as if stitched shut. I wanted to open them, but they wouldn’t obey. A foreign pressure pressed on them, as if something was holding me captive in this darkness.
And yet, a bright, almost glaring, aggressively harsh light filtered through my closed lids. It seemed to blind me—so bright it almost hurt. I couldn’t see, but the light was there.
Everywhere.
It pulsed.
“Wake up,” whispered a voice in my head—or was it just my own thought?
I tried to move. My fingers. My legs… Nothing. Everything was paralyzed.
Was this… the light people claimed to see on their deathbeds? A cold shiver ran down my spine, and panic slowly—but consciously—spread through me.
Suddenly, my heart began to race, and a suffocating feeling settled over my chest like a heavy veil. My eyes. I had to open my eyes.
Immediately.
With a panicked, desperate breath, I tore my eyelids open—and in the next moment, I was blinded by a harsh beam of light, like a punch to the face.
The light was too bright. Too intense for my eyes to adjust immediately. It made the thumping in my head explode like drumbeats and created a faint buzzing in my ears.
What the hell was going on?
Reflexively, I closed my eyes again, almost hoping to escape the throbbing pain—but it remained.
Very slowly, almost hesitantly, I forced them open again. The harsh light alarmingly reminded me of an operating room lamp. My head throbbed, my heart raced wildly in my chest.
Beneath me, I suddenly felt a hard, cold surface—the metallic bed beneath me. No mattress. No pillow. No blanket. Just the smooth, unyielding surface.
For at least five minutes, I lay completely still. The oppressive panic inside me grew with each passing second. I didn’t dare move. The fear that something terrible would happen was too great.
Finally, I dared to turn my head very carefully. My eyes, now slightly accustomed to the brightness, scanned the room cautiously but deliberately. Was this a cell? A dungeon? No—it couldn’t be. It was neither dark nor dirty. On the contrary.
In front of me: a flawlessly white wall.
Empty.
Or almost. Where a window should have been, a large screen was embedded. The image showed a blue sky with a few clouds, as if you could truly look outside. My eyes lingered on the strange picture for unusually long. It moved as if it were real—but my mind knew better. It was an illusion—a looping panorama, so convincingly lifelike you could almost believe it was real. My gaze wandered through the rest of the room.
Four bare walls surrounded me—pure white. Only to my right, the strange, large screen. None of it felt familiar.
The silence in the room was terrifying. Only the occasional drip of water or the faint hum of ventilation somewhere far away broke the suffocating stillness. I slowly turned my head to the side, instinctively searching for something to hold onto.
My hands felt numb, almost frighteningly foreign, as if they had been submerged in icy water for hours. The thought alone made me flinch. A sudden dizziness overtook me, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
Water?
With trembling legs, I stood and fought against the dizziness. I wanted to scream, to call a name, to shout for help—yet no sound escaped my dry, cracked lips. My throat felt parched.
Panic surged within me as I looked around frantically.
Stumbling, I ran my hands along the walls, gliding desperately over every reachable surface, hoping to find a switch, a crack, anything that might reveal an exit. But there was nothing.
This room—empty. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Not even a… door.
Finally, my gaze fell on myself. My once-bright shirt was covered in blood, full of holes and dirt. My beige pants were just as dirty and worn.
Blood. My blood? Where on earth was I?
Trembling, I touched my face.
In my mind, I tried to organize the few details I could remember:
White walls. No windows. No doors.
The strange artificial sky on the wall.
My blood-stained shirt.
Beige pants.
And my blonde hair, braided into two loose pigtails over my shoulders.
Minutes—or maybe even hours—passed in which nothing happened.
Countless times, I ran along the walls, listened in every corner for any voice—but without success.
Time had become meaningless. Only the eerie, oppressive silence filled the room, pressing on my thoughts like a heavy hand, suppressing every motion. Had it not been for the faint, irregular dripping somewhere in the distance, I might have gone insane.
With every passing second, my heart pounded louder in my ears, making it difficult to stay focused. It felt as if my own body betrayed me—every thump a drumbeat in my head.
Then—a sound.
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