The hallway stretched wrong.

  I stood outside the classroom, my hand still on the doorframe, fingers pressing into painted wood because if I let go the floor might tilt, and I was not ready for the floor to tilt, not yet, not when I still needed to walk.

  My head felt like someone had filled it with static, white noise turned physical, a pressure that pushed outward from the inside, trying to crack my skull like an egg. Each heartbeat sent a pulse of pain radiating from somewhere behind my left eye, spreading like ripples in water, except water did not hurt like this, water did not make your vision swim.

  I took a step forward, then another.

  The walls were too bright, fluorescent lights overhead buzzing in a frequency that felt like it was vibrating my teeth, and I tried to focus on the floor, on the tiles, on putting one foot in front of the other, but the pattern of the tiles kept shifting, kept refusing to stay still.

  Someone walked past me, their shoulder colliding with mine, and the impact sent me stumbling sideways, my hand shooting out to catch myself against a locker. The metal was cold under my palm, cold and real, and I held onto it for a second longer than I needed to, waiting for the world to stop spinning.

  "Watch it," someone said, but the voice was muffled, like they were speaking underwater, like there was cotton stuffed in my ears, and by the time I turned my head to look, they were already gone, swallowed by the crowd of students that filled the hallway like a river, like a current, like something I had to fight against just to stay upright.

  I pushed off the locker, stumbled forward again.

  The noise was overwhelming, voices layering over voices, laughter and shouting and the slam of locker doors and the squeak of shoes on linoleum, all of it blending together into a wall of sound that pressed against my eardrums, that made my headache throb harder, that made my stomach twist.

  I could hear whispers, I thought, somewhere in the cacophony, threads of conversation that stood out sharper than the rest, but I could not parse their words, could not hold onto them long enough to understand. They slid past my comprehension like water through fingers, like smoke, like something that was there and then was not.

  Someone laughed nearby, high and sharp, and the sound stabbed into my skull.

  I flinched, my hand coming up to press against my temple, and the motion made me sway, made the hallway tilt to the left before correcting itself, before pretending it had never moved at all.

  Keep walking, I told myself. Just keep walking. Get outside. Fresh air. Cold. That will help.

  But each step felt wrong, my legs moving too slow or too fast, my feet landing heavier than they should, like my body had forgotten how to distribute weight properly, like I was a puppet being controlled by someone who did not quite know how puppets worked.

  I crashed into someone else, a girl with dark hair and a Académie Sainte-Marguerite sweater, and she turned to glare at me, her mouth moving, saying something I could not hear over the ringing in my ears, over the static, over the sound of my own breathing which had become too loud, too present, each inhale scraping.

  "Sorry," I tried to say, but the word came out slurred, came out wrong, and her expression shifted from annoyance to something else, something that might have been concern or might have been disgust, I could not tell, everything was too blurry, too distant.

  She said something else, her hand reaching out toward me, but I was already moving, already pushing past her, because if I stopped I might not start again, might collapse right here in the middle of the hallway and never get up.

  The lockers on my left became a smear of color, blue and gray and metal, the numbers on them bleeding together into meaningless shapes. The windows on my right showed pale winter light that hurt to look at, that made my eyes water, that turned everything into overexposed photographs.

  I stumbled again, my shoulder hitting the wall, and I used it to guide me, kept my hand trailing along the painted surface, feeling the texture change from smooth to rough to smooth again, feeling the vibrations of voices through the plaster, feeling the cold seeping through from outside.

  How far was the exit, I could not remember. Had I passed it already, was I walking in circles, had the building rearranged itself when I was not looking. Nothing looked familiar, everything looked familiar, the hallway was every hallway I had ever walked down and also completely foreign.

  A door opened ahead of me, students spilling out, and I had to navigate around them, had to weave between bodies that seemed to multiply, that seemed to press in from all sides. Someone's backpack caught my hip, someone's elbow jabbed my ribs, and each contact was disorienting, was a small collision that threatened to knock me completely off course.

  The whispers were louder now, or maybe I was just more aware of them, voices that seemed to come from inside my head instead of outside it, murmuring things I almost understood, words that were just on the edge of comprehension but dissolved the moment I tried to focus on them.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  My vision was narrowing, tunneling, the edges going dark and fuzzy while the center remained sharp, remained too sharp, every detail magnified and overwhelming. I could see the individual threads in someone's sweater as they passed, could count the scratches on a locker door, could see dust motes floating in the light from the windows, could see everything and nothing all at once.

  The floor tilted again, properly this time, and I stumbled forward, my feet tangling, my balance gone.

  I hit something, a trash can maybe, or a person, or the wall, I could not tell, the impact jarring through my body, sending a fresh spike of pain through my skull that made white spots bloom across my vision.

  I caught myself, barely, my hands flat against something solid, and stood there for a moment, breathing too hard, tasting copper and bile, trying to remember where I was going, why I was moving, what I was supposed to be doing.

  Outside, the voice in my head supplied, not my voice, the teacher's voice, cool and precise. Get outside.

  Right. Outside. I could do that.

  I pushed off whatever I was leaning against, forced my legs to move, one foot then the other, mechanical, automatic, a rhythm I could follow even when thinking became too difficult.

  The hallway opened up, became wider, became an intersection where corridors met, and I turned, I thought I turned the right direction, toward where the main entrance should be, toward where I remembered the doors being, but memory was slippery, was unreliable, was something I could not quite trust anymore.

  More people, always more people, a mass of bodies in uniforms and winter coats, moving in their own directions, following their own paths, oblivious to the boy stumbling through them like a ghost, like something already halfway gone.

  I crashed into someone else, harder this time, my chest colliding with their back, and we both went off balance, they turned, said something sharp and angry in French, and I mumbled an apology that did not sound like words, that sounded like noise, and kept moving, kept pushing forward because stopping was not an option, stopping meant collapsing, meant giving up, meant accepting that something was very very wrong.

  The doors appeared ahead, glass and metal, showing a slice of outside, of white snow and gray sky, and relief hit me so hard it was almost painful.

  Almost there, almost outside, almost done.

  I aimed for them, my trajectory wavering but determined, and crashed through, my hands hitting the push bar too hard, the door swinging open with more force than I intended.

  Cold air hit my face like a slap, sharp and clarifying for exactly one second before my head

  throbbed harder, before the cold became just another sensation I could not properly process, could not properly feel.

  I stumbled down the steps, my foot missing one, catching the next, momentum carrying me forward in a way that was barely controlled, that was almost falling but not quite.

  And then I was standing on the pavement, snow falling around me in lazy spirals, and I stopped.

  The world was quieter out here, or maybe my ears had finally given up trying to parse sound, but the absence of the hallway noise was its own kind of overwhelming, was too much silence after too much chaos.

  I lifted my head, my neck protesting the movement, muscles aching like I had been holding tension there for hours, for days, for my entire life.

  The teacher's voice echoed in my mind, clear as if he was standing beside me, as if his mouth was next to my ear, speaking directly into my brain.

  When you get outside, look above.

  So I did.

  I looked above.

  I looked at the sky, gray and heavy with snow clouds, the kind of February sky that Montreal wore like a funeral shroud, and for a moment everything seemed normal, seemed exactly as it should be.

  And then I noticed.

  And my breath caught.

  And my mind tried to reject what I was seeing, tried to rationalize it, tried to explain it away, but could not, because the evidence was there, was undeniable, was wrong in a way that made my skin crawl and my stomach drop and my heart stutter in my chest.

  There was no sun in the sky.

  Not hidden behind clouds. Not obscured by weather. Not setting behind the horizon or rising from the east.

  Just gone.

  The sky was lit, daylight existed, pale and diffuse, illuminating the world in that flat winter way that erased shadows and made everything look washed out, but there was no source for that light, no sun burning at the center, no orb of fire hanging in space where it should be.

  Just empty gray sky, luminous without reason, bright without cause, light that came from nowhere and everywhere, light that existed in defiance of how light was supposed to work.

  My knees went weak.

  "There is no sun in the sky," I whispered, and my voice broke on the words, cracked and splintered, because saying it out loud made it real, made it impossible to deny, made it something that existed in the world instead of just in my failing, deteriorating mind.

  The wrongness of it hit me like a physical blow, like someone had reached into my chest and squeezed, like the universe had revealed a fundamental broken rule, a cosmic error, a glitch in reality itself.

  Day without sun.

  Light without source.

  The world should not, could not function like this, and yet here it was, functioning anyway, indifferent to its own impossibility.

  I became aware of something warm on my upper lip, something wet, and I reached up to touch it, my fingers coming away red.

  Blood, I thought distantly, from my nose, but the thought felt like it was happening to someone else, like I was watching myself from very far away, from another country, from another dimension, from somewhere I could observe but not truly inhabit.

  The blood was bright against my skin, bright against the snow, bright against the gray world that should have had a sun but didn't.

  And then several things happened at once.

  The headache that had been building, building, building finally crested, finally broke, a wave of pain so complete and overwhelming that it whited out everything else, turned thought into nothing, turned sensation into a single point of agony that consumed all other input.

  My legs stopped working.

  My vision went from narrow to narrower to gone.

  The ground rushed up to meet me, or I rushed down to meet it, and the impact when I hit was distant, was muffled, was something happening to a body I no longer properly occupied.

  Snow against my cheek, cold and wet.

  The taste of copper in my mouth.

  The sound of voices, far away, calling out words I could not understand.

  And then the black came, merciful and complete, swallowing everything, swallowing the pain, swallowing the wrongness, swallowing the impossible sky and the missing sun and the blood and the fear.

  Swallowing me whole.