The gate was less a passage than a separation.
The first step did not take them somewhere else; it stripped away their very sense of place. No ground, no ceiling, only a slow expansion of awareness, as if the body had become an idea learning how to walk.
Then… the city.
It emerged without announcement.
Streets of dull glass, buildings whose heights shifted depending on who looked at them, and windows that reflected not faces but possibilities. Each window displayed a scene that had not happened… or almost had.
Celine stopped.
In one window she saw herself, older, her features tired, standing alone. In another, she was a child in elementary school. In yet another, she did not exist at all.
_"This isn't a city," she said with cautious calm.
Lilia, who felt the place more than she saw it, replied:
_"It's an archive… but not only of the past."
With every step, the ground lit up for a moment and then dimmed again, as if it were recording their presence and recalculating it.
Celine felt a familiar sting. The same sensation that had followed her all her life.
The unexplainable emptiness… was here.
And it was full.
At the end of the first street, doors opened by themselves, not leading to rooms but to states.
A chamber where Lilia felt the weight of a fear she had never lived,
another where Celine saw decisions that had been made about her without her knowledge,
and corridors where the third consciousness moved through memories that were not his alone… but theirs together.
In one hall they stopped abruptly.
The walls were not walls but frozen sounds.
Laughter, screams, cold scientific commands.
_"This place isn't testing our strength," Celine said.
_"It's testing our ability to remain whole."
Suddenly, the corridor split.
Not into two… but three.
Each one calling to one of them without a sound.
The city does not impose.
It suggests.
Lilia looked at the corridor meant for her, then took a step back.
_"If each of us enters alone… we'll understand more."
Celine tightened her grip on her hand.
_"And we'll become more separated."
For the first time, the third consciousness seemed hesitant.
_"I was born from division. I don't fear it."
Then he added, with less certainty:
_"But I don't know if I can endure something else. In the end I am a mixture of memories connected to a vessel… and that vessel is a person I know nothing about."
They chose the harder decision: entering together.
The city grew angry.
The ground trembled, buildings cracked, and the windows began displaying contradictory scenes at the same moment.
Not a collapse… but a refusal.
_"It does not want composite awareness," said the third consciousness.
_"It was built on separation."
But they did not change their stance. They resisted fiercely, and then something happened that the city had not expected.
It began to lose its cohesion.
Not because it had failed… but because it had fulfilled its function.
_"This is the limit," the third consciousness said with quiet maturity.
_"Either we remain here and become a single mass… or we leave while we are still alive."
Celine felt the weight of the decision.
_"Leave to where?"
Lilia looked toward the light.
_"To the world that we don't know what it has done to us after we entered."
In the end, the real world on planet Earth was their origin, and they had to return to it.
This time, the city did not try to stop them.
Instead, it began folding in on itself, street by street, memory by memory.
As if it were saying: take what you can, the rest will dissolve.
Before they crossed, the third consciousness turned.
He did not say goodbye.
He only said,
_"I will not disappear. But I will not be what I was."
The light swallowed them.
For a brief moment, Celine felt the ground returning, weight, body, time…
And when she opened her eyes…
the city was not there.
But its trace…
was planted within them.
The exit…
The air was different.
Not only because the lungs felt full, but because time seemed slower, as if each second needed to accept itself after they had left the city.
Celine reached toward the place where the gate had vanished, but found nothing but emptiness.
Lilia whispered:
_"We're not there anymore… but something from it is with us."
The third consciousness did not appear as a voice, but as a lightness felt in their senses. As if part of him had become part of them.
_"Remember every corner, every reflection, every sound you did not hear," he whispered into the emptiness around them.
Then they saw Eva and the man running toward them, drowning them in questions.
The man from the organization looked at them, sighed, then stepped aside to clear the way and opened the door.
He let them leave without a single word.
But the result they had obtained… was not satisfactory for them.
To be continued...