Harper’s POV
The white is startling. It’s too bright, too pure, and it wraps around me like a fog that refuses to lift. But it’s not comforting like a blanket. It’s suffocating, sterile, and cold. Something this bright shouldn’t feel so cold, but it does. It seeps into my bones, into the marrow of me, until I shiver despite the stillness in the air.
I blink, trying to adjust my eyes, but nothing changes. The world around me is just white. Endless, unmarked white. And then, suddenly, the whiteness begins to shift, to shape itself into walls. Long, narrow ones, painted a sickly off-white now that color has returned. A corridor stretches in both directions, impossibly long, the floor beneath me tiled and humming faintly underfoot with the artificial buzz of fluorescent lighting overhead.
I
