How could she be so certain she didn’t belong there? It was all she had ever known, reeling out of cool, soft oblivion into the hard echoes of a hands-and-knees landing on metal panelling. Sounds that the silence caught and swallowed no matter how far they ran, but every second of it struck her senses like the reflex to vomit, to force out the wrong reality all around her.

Force away the room lined with empty, humming beds where she had woken, the white corridors where only sterile air dreamed, the doors, so many doors, that answered her touch with a sweet, muted chime but wouldn’t open. She didn’t know what out would look like, which door it might be hidden behind, but she searched for it anyways, for anything but more rooms filled with silence or empty beds, their glass covers all hinged back or cracked, shards scattered across the floor as if by people fleeing that wrongness more quickly than she knew how.