White. Real.
For a heartbeat, I thought I was hallucinating.
Hope surged through me so sharply it hurt worse than the wound.
“Carina—” I turned, breath hitching. “Carina, look—”
She wasn’t there.
“Carina?” Panic clawed up my throat. I spun clumsily, scanning the rocks, the shadows spilling away from the road. “Carina!”
Nothing answered.
No movement. No voice.
I couldn’t search.
I couldn’t call louder.
Every second bled strength from me. If I went back into the rocks, if I stopped moving forward, I wouldn’t get up again. I knew it with cold certainty.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the night, though I didn’t know if it was for her—or for myself.
I staggered forward, one arm pressed tight to my chest, the other reaching blindly toward the approaching lights. Each step felt unreal, disconnected, like I was watching myself from far away.
Please, I thought, focusing on the headlights, on their growing brightness. Just reach me.
The lights loomed closer.
Every step felt like wading through broken glass.
The dirt road stretched ahead in a cruel ribbon of moonlight, pale and unforgiving, its gravel surface biting mercilessly into the soles of my bare feet.
I could feel the skin tearing with every step, raw and exposed, but pain had become background noise—another thing to endure.
I kept my right hand clamped tightly over the gash across my chest, fingers slick and warm, trying to slow the steady drip that marked my passage in dark, glistening spots along the road.
Blood pulsed beneath my palm in time with my heartbeat.
The wound burned with a deep, relentless fire—hot, swollen.
Don’t stop.
Don’t slow down.
My vision doubled, then blurred, then snapped back into focus only to split again.
The white car ahead wavered like a mirage, its shape swimming in the darkness as if the night itself were trying to swallow it.
The headlights were off now. The vehicle sat crookedly beside what looked like an abandoned roadside structure—low and squat, its windows dark, walls barely visible against the stone.
I locked my gaze on it.
That pale shape became everything. Not safety. Not rescue. Just something solid to walk toward.
One foot in front of the other.
Drag.