Mira's POV
I didn't fall into unconsciousness all at once.
It came in fragments, thin threads of sound and sensation drifting in and out, never staying long enough for me to grasp them before they slipped away again.
Every time I thought I was waking, the world dissolved, softening at the edges until I couldn't tell where I ended and the darkness began.
Somewhere far away, voices rose and fell, distorted as though I were submerged underwater.
I caught pieces of them—tones, inflections, the vague sense of urgency—but not the words themselves. Meaning floated just beyond my reach, slipping away the moment I tried to focus on it.
There were other sounds too: the muted click of metal, the quiet rustle of fabric, the faint shift of movement around me.
Something brushed against my skin, cool at first, then warm, then gone again, as if I were being covered, adjusted, repositioned. My body reacted weakly, a barely-there flinch, but I couldn't make it move the way I wanted. I felt heavy, anchored, like gravity had tightened its hold on me.
Hands touched me—careful, practiced, neither gentle nor cruel. Fingers pressed lightly against my wrist, my neck, my ribs, as if checking for something I couldn't understand.
I felt myself lifted slightly, shifted, settled again. I couldn't tell if the sensation was real or if my mind was inventing it, trying to make sense of the chaos.
My breathing was shallow and uneven, every attempt to draw in more air ending in failure. Something brushed my cheek—hair, fabric, a memory—and for a moment I couldn't tell the difference between them.
I tried to open my eyes.
They wouldn't obey.
Darkness closed around me again, not heavy, not frightening—just inevitable, like sleep had decided it no longer needed my permission.
And yet, beneath all of it, there was one faint certainty that stayed with me as I drifted under once more.
I was being moved.
I tried to remember what had happened.
There had been the road.
The noise.
My mother's voice telling me to run.
And then—
Eyes.
A man's face, half-shadowed, looking at me with an intensity that cut through the chaos. I couldn't tell if that moment had been real or something my mind had created to soften the fall into darkness.
Rescue, or illusion?
I didn't know.
At some point, a sharp, sterile scent replaced the salt and blood. Antiseptic. Clean. Clinical. It burned faintly in my nose, grounding me just enough to understand that something had changed.
I was no longer on the road.
Was I being treated?
I tried to move, to confirm it, but my body refused to respond. Whatever had been holding me upright finally let go, and the fragments slipped away.
This time, the darkness took everything with it.
When I woke again, the first thing I noticed was sound.
Soft. Controlled. The low hum of machines. The muted cadence of voices speaking somewhere nearby. A rhythmic beeping—steady, reassuring in its persistence.
I didn't open my eyes right away.
I tried to piece together where I was instead.
The air felt different from before—cool, filtered, impossibly clean. Every breath carried no scent of smoke, no salt, no blood. Just sterility. Order.
My body felt heavy, like I'd been submerged in warm sand, a dull ache stretching from my chest down through my limbs. It wasn't sharp pain, not the kind that demanded attention. It was muted, restrained, as if something unseen was holding it back, keeping it from overwhelming me.
When I shifted slightly, fabric brushed against my skin.
Sheets.
The realization settled slowly, clicking into place with strange calm.
A hospital.
Relief should have come with that realization.
Instead, confusion followed.
I opened my eyes.
Nothing changed.
There was no ceiling above me, no dim glow, no blurred shapes waiting to come into focus—no softened outlines of walls or shadows. Just darkness. Complete, unbroken, and unmoving, as though I were staring into something without depth or edges, something that didn't belong to any room I had ever known.
Just darkness.
For a moment, I clung to the simplest explanation, telling myself it was night, that the lights were off, that I had woken too suddenly and my eyes had not yet adjusted, that this was the ordinary disorientation of coming back to consciousness after shock. The thought steadied me, fitting neatly over the unease like a thin blanket, because it implied rules I understood and a solution that required nothing from me but patience.
That explanation made sense.
I held onto it, breathing carefully, waiting for the darkness to thin.
I blinked slowly at first, then faster, waiting for something—anything—to begin forming out of the black, for shapes to separate from shadow or light to press faintly against my vision the way it always had before. I swept my gaze instinctively from side to side, searching for contrast, for the dim outline of a ceiling or the pale geometry of a wall, for the smallest indication that the world was still arranged around me in recognizable form.
It didn't.
I blinked again, faster this time, my gaze sweeping instinctively, searching for contrast, for the faintest hint of light, for anything that would tell me where I was.
Still nothing.
The darkness did not shift with my movement, did not fracture into gradients or blur at the edges. It remained absolute, unbroken, as though my eyes were open inside a sealed space with no dimension.
A faint unease began to settle in my chest, slow and quiet, like a warning my body was whispering before my mind was ready to listen.
I blinked again, forcing my eyes wider, straining against the nothingness. Still black. Still empty. I tried to focus, to search for contrast, for the faint glow of equipment or the outline of a wall.
There was nothing.
My breathing grew shallow without me realizing it.
Something wasn't right.
Footsteps approached.
At first, they were distant, blurred into the low hum of the room, but gradually they sharpened, separating themselves from the background noise until I could track their rhythm.
My pulse quickened instinctively, my body responding before my mind fully understood why. I turned my head toward the sound, even though I still couldn't see anything, guided only by instinct and the faint shift of air as someone moved closer.
"She's waking up," someone said quietly.
Another set of footsteps joined the first, closer this time, slower, more deliberate. The air changed subtly, as though someone had stopped beside me. I couldn't see them, but I could feel their presence—close enough that the space around me no longer felt empty.
"Miss," a calm male voice said, professional and steady, the tone measured in a way that suggested training rather than instinct. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," I answered, though the word scraped on the way out, rough and dry and strangely detached, as if the voice belonged to someone lying a few feet away instead of inside my own body. The unfamiliarity of it unsettled me more than the darkness did, because it confirmed how disoriented I was.
"Good," he replied. "I'm Dr. Hayes. You're in a medical facility. You've been through a traumatic event, but you're safe now."
Safe.
The word echoed in my head, hollow and unreal, like something spoken in the wrong language. My body didn't recognize it. My heartbeat didn't slow. My muscles didn't loosen.
Safe required orientation, and I had none.
I could not see the walls around me. I could not see the person speaking. I did not know how far the door was from the bed or who else stood in the room listening to my breathing. I did not know whether it was day or night, whether hours or minutes had passed since whatever had happened to me.
Safe meant nothing when I couldn't see.
I swallowed, aware of how tight my throat felt, how the question pressed upward before I could stop it. "Why is it dark?" I asked quietly, hating the faint tremor I could not fully suppress. "Did… did the power go out?"
The words hung in the air longer than they should have.
There was a pause before anyone answered, brief enough that someone less attuned might have missed it, yet unmistakable to me now that sound had become my only anchor. It was not the pause of someone searching for the right words, but the pause of someone deciding how much truth I could bear in a single moment.
I felt it immediately, a subtle shift in the room, a change in breathing, a restraint that had not been there before, and my chest tightened as understanding began to take shape long before it was spoken aloud. The silence stretched just enough to confirm what the doctor had already said in careful terms, and the absence of reassurance settled over me with quiet finality.
And that pause frightened me more than any answer could have.