Miko woke up standing.
Not sitting on the edge of the bed, not blinking against the ceiling. Standing, barefoot, in the middle of her room, her hand pressed flat against the closet door like she'd been about to open it. Or had just closed it. She didn't know which.
The clock on her nightstand said 3:47 AM.
Her last memory was 11:12, the tuition homework half-finished on her desk, her pen still uncapped. That was over four hours gone. Four hours folded up and tucked away somewhere she couldn't reach, like a page torn out of a notebook so cleanly you'd never know it was missing unless you counted.
She counted.
Her feet were freezing. When she looked down, there was a thin ring of sand caught in the creases of her ankle, gritty and pale under the streetlight coming through the window. She hadn't been outside. She hadn't been anywhere near sand in months. She stared at it until her eyes burned, half-expecting it to dissolve, to turn out to be lint or dust or nothing at all.
It didn't dissolve. She had to wash it off in the sink, watching it spiral down the drain, grain by grain, and even after the water ran clear she could still feel it, phantom and gritty, between her toes.
She didn't tell her mother. What would she even say. I don't remember four hours of my own life and there was ocean on my feet. That would just be one more piece of evidence in the file her mother kept, cross-referenced under dramatic and attention-seeking and just like her father.
It happened again two nights later, except this time she wasn't standing still.
She surfaced mid-motion, her hand already closing around her phone, the screen lit, a message half-typed into Rina's chat. Four words: I need to tell
Her thumb hovered over the rest, except there was no rest. She hadn't written it. Her own thumb, twitching slightly, waiting for her to finish a sentence she had no memory of starting.
I need to tell
Tell what. Tell her what??
Miko deleted it, her hands shaking so hard the phone slipped once against the sheets. She sat with her knees pulled to her chest for a long time, staring at the black rectangle of her phone screen like it might start talking if she looked away.
Somewhere underneath the panic, quieter, colder, a second thought surfaced.
It's not writing lies, it said. It's trying to warn her.
Miko didn't know which idea frightened her more — that something else was moving her hands, or that the something else might be telling the truth.
By the third blackout, she started keeping a log. A cheap spiral notebook shoved under her mattress, the kind she used to fill with sketches before drawing became a language she'd forgotten how to speak. Now it held dates, times, gaps.
Tuesday. Lost 11:40 PM – 1:15 AM. Woke up on the floor, not the bed. Salt taste in mouth.
Thursday. Lost roughly 40 min during dinner — Mom says I "zoned out" and didn't answer when she called my name three times. She was angry. I don't remember her calling my name even once.
Saturday. Lost most of the afternoon. Found the bathroom mirror fogged over like after a hot shower. The water heater wasn't on.
She stared at that last line for a long time before writing the part she didn't want to write.
There were four words traced in the fog. I wiped them away before I let myself read all of them. I only caught the first two.
NOT YET
She closed the notebook and sat with her back against the wall, knees to her chest, listening to the house tick and settle around her, and underneath all of it, so faint she could have imagined it, the sound of water somewhere it had no business being — a slow, patient drip, drip, drip, like something counting down.
She thought of the mirror from her dream. You know who I am. You've always known.
Maybe she did know. Maybe that was the worst part — that some buried piece of her wasn't frightened of the thing taking her hours. Some buried piece of her trusted it.
That thought scared her more than any blackout had.
Because if the Void wasn't trying to hurt her —
what was it trying to keep her from?