Chapter 13: The Girl Beneath the Tree
[Day 13 — Begin.]
I walked.
The system had stopped sending notifications. The desert had stopped offering new content.
Sand and sky and the worm’s ripple somewhere behind me and the direction I had picked on day eleven and kept because changing direction required making a decision.
The worm had learned my walk pattern. It circled at a consistent distance now, close enough to respond if I stopped, far enough that I could maintain the pace without triggering it.
We had reached an understanding.
I was going to walk until I could not walk and then it was going to eat me and then day fourteen was going to begin and I was going to walk again.
That was the shape of things.
Hour four.
Hour seven.
Hour nine.
The mirages had been arriving since hour three but I had stopped engaging with them. The estate. The hospital room. The chair.
I walked through them without stopping. Looking too long only made them worse.
Hour eleven.
The door appeared.
Just a door standing in the middle of the desert. No wall around it. No reason for it to be there.
I looked at it.
The mirages had been getting more specific. More detailed. The room had felt real enough that I had sat in it. This was the next iteration. Something the desert had constructed from the parts of me that still wanted things.
I kept walking.
I walked past it.
The door stayed where it was as I passed. Mirages dissolved when you moved toward them or through them. This one did not dissolve. It stood in the sand behind me without dissolving.
I did not turn around.
[Day 13 — Death — 17 hours]
The worm.
Patient as ever.
[Day 14 — Begin.]
Hour six.
The door again.
Same door. Same sand. Same wrong-colored sky above it. Standing in the same relationship to the horizon.
Or the mirage had a consistent address.
I walked past it without stopping.
[Day 14 — Death — 14 hours]
[Day 15 — Begin.]
[The higher beings have a note.]
[The door is not a mirage.]
[That is the note.]
I stood in the sand and read the notification.
Then I looked at the horizon.
Then I started walking.
Hour six.
The door.
I stopped.
Stood in front of it for a long time without moving.
Long enough that the worm’s ripple changed pattern.
The circling tightened. Thirteen days had taught the worm what stopping usually meant.
The door was not a mirage.
The door was not a mirage and I had walked past it twice.
I looked at it.
Plain wood. No clue what was waiting on the other side. A handle on the right side, worn smooth.
The gap at the bottom where the door met the sand had a quality of light coming through it that was different from the desert light.
I reached out and put my hand on the handle.
The worm surfaced.
I opened the door and went through and closed it behind me.
White.
Everything white, the total white of a space that had decided white was the only option and had committed completely.
Not bright. It didn’t hurt the eyes. Just white in every direction, the floor and walls and ceiling blending together until it was hard to tell where one ended and another began.
Except for one point.
Far away.
A point of color.
I walked toward it.
The white did not change as I moved. The only proof I was getting closer was the point growing larger. I walked.
I had walked through a desert for fifteen days.
I could walk through white.
A tree.
The color belonged to a tree. Not a large one. Not an impressive one. Just a lone tree standing in the endless white.
Under the tree, someone was sleeping.
On their side, facing away from me. Crystal hair spread on the ground around them. The stillness of someone genuinely asleep rather than one of the desert’s fabrications.
I had seen sleeping figures in mirages before. The desert was good at copying things. Too good.
This didn’t feel like one of the desert’s creations.
I stopped beside the tree and looked at the person sleeping under it.
I did not know who she was.
That was the thing. The desert had spent thirteen days digging through my memories. This person wasn’t one of them.
I did not know her.
Which meant she was here independently of me.
Which meant she was real.
I sat down against the tree because my legs had been making the same argument for several hours and the argument had finally become persuasive.
I leaned against the bark.
I looked at the white space.
I closed my eyes.
I woke up.
The white was the same.
The tree was the same.
Something had changed.
I was not on the ground.
It took me a second to realize that. My head was resting on something soft. Something that wasn’t sand or the white floor.
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