We found other survivors. None of us can leave. I think I know why.

I don’t know how long we had been driving.

Amara was in the passenger seat, feet on the dashboard, somewhere between asleep and gone. I was running on three hours of sleep and the kind of focus that kicks in when panic has been going long enough to feel like a personality trait. The highway had been empty for hours. Everything had been empty for days.

We did not talk about what we had seen. You get to a point where talking about it just means living it twice.

We found the facility by accident. The road broke off from the main highway without a sign, curving downward like it was trying to stay hidden. Amara spotted it first. She put her hand on my arm without saying anything and I slowed down and we both looked at it.

A white light was coming from somewhere underground. Steady and electric and completely impossible given everything going on above ground.

We looked at each other and drove in.

There were maybe thirty women inside.

They were standing in silence when we pulled in and the look on their faces knocked something loose in my chest. It was not relief and it was not welcome. It was something closer to terror, and underneath the terror something that looked almost like grief.

Several of them had guns.

I rolled down the window. “Hey, we are just looking for—”

“Shut it off.”

A woman was already running toward us, whispering so hard it came out like she was scraping the words off the back of her teeth.

“The car. Shut it off right now. Do you understand what you have done?”

We got out slowly. The engine ticked as it cooled.

“It is too loud,” she said. Her hands were shaking. She looked at us the way you look at someone who has just made a terrible mistake on your behalf and cannot take it back. “They heard you. They are going to come now. You have to hide. Everyone. Go. Right now.”

And all of the women moved at once.

They scattered and every one of them already knew exactly where to go. Behind equipment racks, between wall panels, into corners. They lay down or pressed flat and closed their eyes and went completely, perfectly still.

The woman grabbed my wrist before she dropped to the floor.

“Wall. Eyes closed. Do not move. Do not open your eyes or you WILL die.”

She closed her eyes.

I grabbed Amara’s hand and we found a gap between two panels and pressed ourselves in and I shut my eyes.

I heard them before I felt them.

It didn’t sound like footsteps but it felt like a pressure change. The air in the facility got heavy and close and then there was a sound I did not have a name for, coming from too many directions at once. Metal doors flew open somewhere across the room. There was fast uneven movement, and then suddenly still and then fast again.

Something came close to me. I felt the temperature drop before I heard it. A wave of cold air and then something at my throat, then at my collarbone. Taking its time. I was prepared to be attacked.

But it moved on.

I do not know how long I stood there but it was long enough that my legs started to go numb.

Then the woman to my left made a sound.

Something small and involuntary. The kind of noise a body makes when it has been rigid too long and something in it gives without permission.

They were on her instantly.

In the chaos of it her hand found my leg and grabbed hold, fingers closing around my ankle with everything she had left, and the force of what was happening to her dragged me sideways. I went down hard, cheek against cold concrete, something warm hitting my face, and I lay there with my eyes shut and I did not move. I could not move. I pressed my face into the floor and I stayed there and I let her hand go slack around my ankle and I did not move.

Eventually the sounds moved away. The doors closed somewhere across the room. The pressure lifted and the air came back.

The woman to my left did not get up.

Her name was Priya. I learned that afterward. She had been at the facility for two weeks before we arrived. She had a daughter whose photo was still on her phone, sitting on the cot where Priya had slept.

The phone was there in the morning but Priya was not. Her cot was made and things were arranged neatly. She was simply gone and nobody said anything about it and I moved through the rest of that day without thinking about her again.

Sera seemed to be the one who ran things.

She had short hair, a quiet voice, and the kind of stillness that comes from surviving something so many times it has stopped feeling like survival and started feeling like just existing. She sat us down and explained the rules the way you explain something you have explained too many times and no longer expect to change anything.

The things came when there was anything too sudden or too loud. They assumed they had no eyes. If you were still enough and silent enough you became unappetizing to them.

There was an alarm. A red light that came on randomly, no pattern anyone had been able to find, but always at the same hour of night when it did come. When the light went red the things came with it. Thirty seconds, maybe less, to find your spot and close your eyes before they were already inside. In the beginning some of the women had tried to disable the alarm. Whatever they did made no difference. The alarm came on regardless and when it did the things came faster, like the disruption itself was something they could track.

Guns made it worse. Someone tried in the beginning but the noise sent them into something beyond frenzy and it cost four women before it ended.

And the exit. Sera mentioned it the way you mention something that has stopped being worth feeling anything about. No matter what they tried they could not cross back through the way they had come in. She did not explain further and something about the way she said it made me not ask.

The days settled into a rhythm. Between the nights there was food and quiet conversation and a version of routine that almost felt like a life. We moved slowly. We spoke softly. We existed in that facility the way you exist somewhere you are not sure you are allowed to be.

But something felt off about my body even then and I did not let myself look at it directly.

I was always hungry. Not the regular kind of hungry that food fixes. A deeper hunger, like something was being taken from me at a level I could not locate. I was tired in a way that sleep did not touch. I told myself it was the stress. I told myself it was everything we had been through before we found this place.

We were all noticing but not one of us was saying it.

Three weeks in, Amara came and found me.

She had been quiet for days in the specific way she gets when she has been pulling something apart and finally has all the pieces in front of her. She sat down close and kept her voice low.

“I need you to do something right now without thinking about it first,” she said. “Look at your hands and count your fingers.”

I looked at her.

“Just do it.”

I looked at my hands and counted.

Eleven.

I counted again. Ten. I counted a third time and lost track somewhere in the middle and had to start over.

“Did you know that when you are dreaming you cannot count your fingers,” Amara said quietly. “Your brain cannot hold the number steady. It keeps changing.”

I looked at my hands again. The count kept coming out wrong in a way I could not pin down.

Part of me wanted to tell her she had lost it. I counted my fingers again.

“What about those things that come at night,” I said.

“They only exist here. In this layer.”

“And the people they kill.”

“Die here and do not come back.”

I thought about Priya. About how I had not thought about her once since that first morning. About how her phone was still on that cot and none of us had touched it and none of us had said her name since.

“Amara. If we have been dreaming this whole time.” I stopped. “Where are our bodies?”

She did not answer right away.

“Whatever is happening to our bodies in the real world is bleeding into the dream,” she said finally. “The mind does that. When the body is in danger it does not just shut off. It translates. It turns what is happening into something the dreaming brain can process.” She looked at me. “Those things that come at night. I think they are the dream’s version of something that is actually happening to us right now. Somewhere real. And the hunger we feel. The way our bodies feel wrong. That is real too. That is our bodies sending information through the only channel they have left.”

“Then the ones who get killed here,” I said.

“Something is reaching them in the real world,” she said. “And the dream is how we are finding out.”

We brought it to Sera.

She listened to everything without interrupting. When Amara finished Sera was quiet for a long time and I watched her face and could not read it.

“Count your fingers,” I said.

Sera looked at me. Then she looked down at her hands. Something moved in her expression and was gone before I could name it. She did not count.

She got her notebook and opened it to a page near the beginning and set it on the table.

“I have been keeping a list,” she said. “Every name I could remember. Every woman who has passed through here.” She turned it toward us. Forty-seven names filled the page in small careful handwriting. “I do not recognize a single name on this list except the ones still here and Priya.” She paused. “I wrote all of these down myself. I know I did. And I cannot remember a single one of them.”

Nobody spoke.

“There has to be a way to wake up on purpose,” I said. “If we train ourselves to do it during the attack. When they come, we scream the word awake inside our heads, over and over, until something breaks through. The problem is we cannot open our eyes to check anything without giving ourselves away. So writing the word on our skin is the last resort only, something to look at if screaming it stops working. But the moment you open your eyes you are visible to them. So that has to be the very last thing.”

“Why only during the attack,” Sera said. “If we are dreaming right now why can we not just wake up now.”

“Because right now it feels completely real,” Amara said. “There is nothing to push against. The dream is too stable. But during the attack the fear creates a break between the two layers. That is the only moment the edge becomes accessible. It is the same reason you can wake yourself out of a nightmare when you almost never wake yourself out of a normal dream. The intensity is what opens it.”

Sera was quiet for a long moment.

“In the beginning we tried to fight,” she said. “Stay loud. Resist. Every time we did more of them came. Faster. Like something was adjusting.” She folded her hands on the table. “I used to think they were hunting us. I am not sure I still think that.”

Nobody asked her what she thought instead.

We wrote the word WAKE on the inside of our left wrists in black marker, just in case. Amara spent the days between practicing, trying to find what it felt like to hold two things at once, the dream and the awareness of the dream, so that when the moment came she would not lose it.

Two nights later the alarm went off and the lights went red.

I found my spot between the panels. Pressed my back against the wall. Closed my eyes. I held the word in my mind and I waited.

They came in fast.

The cold hit first and then the sound of them moving through the room and the fear came with it, clean and total, the kind that does not leave room for anything else. I screamed the word awake inside my head over and over and nothing happened. From across the room someone was being attacked, I could hear it, and the screaming that followed was cut short in a way I will not describe. Something shifted. The floor shook. More sounds. More than one person. The room was falling apart around me and I was still not waking up and I had no choice, I opened my eyes just enough to look at my wrist, the letters were moving, and I screamed the word again inside my head with everything I had.

Nothing happened.

Something was moving toward me from across the room. Fast and getting faster. I was out of time and I was still asleep and I was going to die here and—

Amara’s hand closed around my wrist from somewhere that was not the dream.

Cold. Real. Shaking.

I was awake.

Stale air was the first thing I noticed.

I opened my eyes.

It was the same walls but gutted and dark and old. Half the lights dead. The rest throwing a dim yellow over everything that made the room look like something abandoned mid-thought.

There were pods lining the walls, arranged in rows across the floor. Each one just wide enough for a body. Tubes running in and out. Most of the monitors above them dark. A few still running on whatever power was left.

Some of the pods had cracked open on their own. What was happening inside those ones had been happening for a long time before we woke up and whatever had gotten to them had not heard us yet, was still focused on what was already in front of it, and I looked away before I could see more than I already had.

Amara was beside me, her hand still on my arm, barely able to stand. She was the thinnest I had ever seen her. Her eyes were sunken and awake in a way that looked like it had cost her everything she had left.

I looked down at myself and did not recognize what I saw.

The skin on my arms hanging loose. Bones I had never been able to see before. I touched my face and felt my skull too close to the surface and understood all at once what the hunger had been telling us the whole time.

All around us the other pods were sealed. The women still inside them, still under, eyes closed, monitors running. Still in the facility, still hiding from the red light, still believing the dream was the only world there was. We moved to the nearest pod and tried to open it and could not. We did not have the strength and there was no mechanism on the outside we could find and whatever was still in the room with the cracked pods had started to register that something else was awake in the building. We could hear it adjusting.

There was no time. There was no way. The only thing we could do was get out and come back with help or come back with something and that is the thought I held onto as Amara pulled me toward the exit. There was a car outside, parked with the keys inside. We got in as fast as our bodies allowed. I drove because Amara’s hands would not stop shaking.

I do not know exactly when it started happening.

It was not one moment. It was like watching a photograph fade while you are holding it. One minute I could still see the pods clearly and the next time I reached for the image it was softer. The details were still there but they had stopped feeling like something that had happened to me and started feeling like something I had heard about once.

By the time we hit the main highway I could not have told you what the inside of that building looked like.

By the time the sky started going grey I could not have told you why my arms looked the way they did or why my hands would not stop shaking or why every time I looked at Amara I felt something close to grief but could not find what it belonged to.

I knew something had happened. I could feel the outline of it. But when I reached for the specifics there was nothing there.

Suddenly I became aware that I was speeding and could not remember why I was in such a rush. I found the map in the back seat. Three routes marked in red pen. Two of them crossed out in my own handwriting.

I did not remember crossing them out.

I stared at the X marks for a long time and felt something behind a door I did not want to open and then folded the map and put it back.

Amara’s hand came to my arm.

I looked up.

Down the highway, where the road curved and the tree line broke, a white light was coming from somewhere underground.

Steady. Electric.

I looked at the light.

Something in me said no. Something in me said keep going. I reached for this feeling but it was already gone. I looked down at my hands and it looked like I had two extra fingers for some reason. I quickly blamed it on exhaustion.

Amara and I looked at each other and we drove in.