SAGE
"How do you feel, Sage?"
The voice echoed inside my head, too close, too intimate to belong to the world I knew. And it was familiar, yet unfamiliar at the same time.
It wasn't Darius. And it wasn't Adam. It was someone else… a woman. Yet, not Makeh.
My eyes fluttered open, one lagging behind the other as confusion wrapped thickly around me. For a heartbeat, I thought I was still in Peter's living room—still slumped on the couch, waiting, listening, breathing in the familiar.
But that wasn't where I was.
The couch was gone. Everything was gone.
I lay suspended in a gray void, an endless stretch of nothingness that pulsed faintly, like static trapped between worlds. The air looked dry—felt dry—dust particles floating aimlessly, catching on no light source I could identify.
It reminded me of an abandoned joint unit, the kind sealed off for decades, stale and forgotten. My throat burned instantly. I was thirsty. Achingly so.
I tried to swallow and failed.
