The World Outside
587 Words
The world felt too wide.
Rina stood at the edge of the field, grass swaying at her ankles, the air too quiet after so many months—or years—of echoes and whispers. For a long time, she didn’t move. She simply breathed.
Lala sat cross-legged nearby, watching the sky as if it might blink back.
“So… this is real now?” Rina finally asked.
Lala shrugged, her tone cautious. “I don’t know. It feels real.”
They had spent what felt like hours just walking, but there were no roads, no signs, no school ruins behind them. Just horizon.
“What if this is another layer?” Rina said. “Another trap?”
Lala looked at her, dead serious. “Then we fight through that one, too.”
Rina smiled faintly. “Easy for you to say. You’re a backup version of me.”
Lala blinked. “Excuse me?”
Rina raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t know?”
Lala looked away. “…I had a feeling.”
They sat in silence for a moment, letting the weight of the truth settle. They were fragments—glitches born in a system that tried to rewrite them.
But now, the system was gone.
Or so they hoped.
That night, they found a road.
It was cracked and overgrown, but it was something. A path. A direction.
As they followed it under moonlight, they saw signs of the real world again: an old gas station, rusted and broken; a billboard with faded paint; even a single car skeleton half-buried in grass.
But no people.
No lights.
No sound.
“This isn’t how the world’s supposed to look,” Lala murmured.
“No,” Rina said. “It’s not.”
Then she stopped.
At the edge of the road, nailed to a bent metal sign, was a poster.
Yellowed. Torn.
Her face was on it.
“MISSING: RINA THORNE, Age 16
Last seen near St. Celestine’s Academy.”
She touched the paper. Her own eyes stared back at her, wide and innocent, from another lifetime.
It had a date.
June 2013.
Rina’s heart dropped.
“That’s twelve years ago,” she whispered. “We’ve been gone twelve years.”
Lala paled. “But we… we haven’t aged.”
Rina turned around slowly, heart hammering.
They hadn’t escaped time.
They had been outside of it.
They walked in silence until they reached a small town—one that should’ve been bustling. Instead, it was abandoned. Streetlights flickered. Stores were boarded up. Dust coated everything.
A phone booth still stood near the corner of a cracked intersection.
Rina picked up the receiver.
No dial tone.
But before she hung up—
A voice answered.
“Rina Thorne,” it rasped.
She froze. “Who is this?”
“You don’t remember me yet. But I remember you.”
“You took something when you escaped.”
“And now something’s following you.”
Click.
The line went dead.
She turned to Lala.
“Someone’s still running part of the system.”
“You think it’s the Headmistress?” Lala asked.
“No,” Rina said. “She was a symptom. Not the source.”
They both turned to the street.
Far at the end of the block, a figure stood under a flickering light.
Not moving.
Watching.
Amelia.
Only this time, she wasn’t alone.
Behind her, more girls began to step out from the shadows.
Each one frozen in a smile.
Each one with Rina’s face.
- Writer
