Ch15: Disappeared
794 Words
She fell asleep waiting for the grey city.
It didn't come.
Sari stood in darkness. Not the darkness of her bedroom—the darkness of nothing. No buildings. No street. No cold air or grey sky. Just emptiness, stretching in every direction, flat and infinite and silent.
She turned in a circle.
Nothing.
She called out. Her voice disappeared before it left her throat, swallowed by the void.
She waited.
The dream didn't return.
She woke with a gasp, her hand pressed to her chest, her heart hammering. The room was dark. The fan spun. The rain had stopped.
She lay still, staring at the ceiling, waiting for her heart to slow.
*It was just one night*, she told herself. *Sometimes you don't dream. Sometimes you sleep too deeply, or not deeply enough, or—*
She stopped making excuses.
She knew, in the place where certainty lived, that something was wrong.
---
The second night, she went to bed early.
She arranged her pillows the way she had before. She closed her eyes and thought about the grey city—the buildings, the cold air, the man who stood waiting for her.
She fell asleep.
Nothing.
Darkness again. Emptiness again. The same void, the same silence, the same absence of everything she had come to expect.
She wandered through the dreamless dark, searching for a door, a window, a c***k of grey light. She found nothing.
When she woke, her pillow was wet.
She hadn't been crying. She checked. Her eyes were dry. But the pillow was wet, as if the dream had pulled something out of her while she slept.
She didn't go to school that day. She called Ratna and said she was sick.
Ratna didn't believe her. But Ratna didn't argue.
---
The third night, Sari didn't sleep at all.
She lay in bed with her eyes open, watching the shadows shift across the ceiling. The fan clicked on each rotation. The frogs called from the rice paddies. The world went on, ordinary and indifferent.
She thought about the man in the grey city.
She had never seen his face. She didn't know his name. She had heard him speak only once—one word, *stay*—and even that had been muffled, distant, barely real.
But he was real.
She knew it. She had always known it, in the part of her that didn't question the dreams.
And now he was gone.
*What if he never comes back?*
The thought arrived like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through everything she thought she knew.
She pressed her palm against her chest, feeling her heartbeat, steady and slow.
*What if I never see him again?*
She didn't sleep.
---
The fourth night, Sari dreamed of nothing again.
She stood in the void, alone, and she screamed.
No sound came out.
She screamed until her throat burned, until her vision blurred, until she fell to her knees in the nothing and pressed her forehead against the dark.
No one heard her.
No one came.
She woke with tears on her face and a name on her lips—a name she didn't know, a name she had never heard, a name that meant nothing and everything.
*Adrian.*
She didn't know where the name came from. It was just there, in her mouth, on her tongue, as if the void had given it to her as a consolation prize.
She whispered it into the dark.
"Adrian."
The room didn't answer.
She reached for her notebook and wrote the name at the top of a fresh page.
*Adrian.*
Then she drew a line beneath it and wrote:
*He's gone. I don't know why. I don't know if he's coming back.*
*But I think his name is Adrian.*
---
Across the world, in a penthouse apartment in Chicago, Adrian Volkov sat in the dark.
He hadn't slept in two days.
He sat on the edge of his bed, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed. His phone lay on the mattress beside him, the screen dark.
He had typed a message to Dr. Chen an hour ago. He hadn't sent it.
*She stopped coming.*
Four words. Simple. True. Impossible to explain.
He read them again, then deleted them. Typed them again. Deleted them again.
*She's gone.*
He didn't know who "she" was. He didn't know why her absence felt like a hole in his chest. He didn't know why he couldn't stop thinking about the grey city, the empty street, the warmth that had disappeared.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling was white. The room was dark. The city hummed outside his window, indifferent and alive.
He closed his eyes.
The void was waiting.
- Writer
