NOMI
I woke up with a start, my heart hammering a steady, powerful rhythm against my ribs. But it wasn’t the panic-fueled spike of a nightmare. It was the heavy, absolute stillness that usually followed the kind of sleep so deep it felt like I’d dropped through myself and hit bedrock.
For a few seconds, I didn’t move. I just lay there, staring at nothing, letting the quiet press in around me. No alarms. No crowd noise. No track beneath my feet. Just the faint hush of a space that was too large and too still to be familiar.
My memory crept back in pieces.
Handsome faces. Sharp stone. Leather….A canopy ceiling that didn’t belong to any building I’d ever trained in.
Right.
I was here.
I exhaled slowly and became aware of my body all at once, from the weight of the blankets, to the stif
