I open my eyes.
White.
The whiteness is everywhere—above, below, around. Not like clouds, not like light. Like existence itself has been erased, scraped clean down to nothing. There are no shadows, no edges, no distance. Just white, pressing in from all sides, endless and absolute.
Endless white.
No ground.
I look down. There is nothing beneath me. No floor. No earth. Just white falling away into more white, forever.
No sky.
Above me, the same. No ceiling, no stars, no sky. Just the white, humming with a silence so complete it feels like sound.
No sound.
"Where..."
My voice echoes in nothing.
The word travels out and keeps traveling, never hitting a wall, never coming back. Just fading into the white, swallowed whole.
"Is this the afterlife?"
I try to move.
I reach for my arms, my legs. I feel them there—somewhere—but they don't answer. Like calling a name in an empty house.
But then—
my hand moves on its own.
It rises in front of me, slow and certain. The fingers uncurl. The palm opens. It is my hand—the scar across the knuckles, the thick fingers, the nails cut short. But it is moving without me, like someone else is wearing my skin and testing it for fit.
Like something else is controlling it.
I look.
In front of me, where there was nothing a moment ago, there is a machine. Old. Heavy. Chrome and wood, the kind you'd find in a forgotten casino, tucked in a corner where the light doesn't reach. The chrome is tarnished, the wood cracked, but the machine hums with something alive.
A slot machine.
Old.
Chrome and wood.
One lever.
A single arm, worn smooth by hands that came before mine.
Three wheels.
Each wheel is dark glass, opaque, waiting.
My hand reaches out.
The arm moves toward the machine, steady, pulled by something I cannot see and cannot stop.
A gold coin appears in my palm.
It wasn't there before. Now it is. Solid. Warm. Heavy with a weight that has nothing to do with metal. The edges are stamped with symbols I almost recognize—faces, maybe, or words, or the memory of both.
"What—"
My body moves without me.
Steps forward.
My feet find ground that wasn't there a breath ago. Each step is solid, deliberate, the footfall of a man walking to his own execution and smiling about it.
Coin in the slot.
The machine swallows it with a sound like a heartbeat.
Hand on the lever.
My fingers close around the worn wood. It fits like it was made for me.
"This is where it all started," I say. "Gambling. The first mistake."
The lever pulls.
It moves down with a resistance that feels intentional—like the machine is testing me, making sure I mean it. Then it gives, and something deep inside the chrome and wood begins to turn.
Wheels spin.
The dark glass wheels whirl. Symbols blur into streaks. Red and gold and black, shapes that might be fruit, might be bells, might be faces I used to know.
Voices speak.
From the machine. From the white. From somewhere inside my own skull. Voices layered on voices, stacked like bodies in a grave.
Not words.
Just sound.
Dark.
Crispy.
Wrong.
I don't understand them.
Don't need to.
The wheels stop.
One by one. The first wheel locks with a clack that echoes through the white. The second follows. The third.
JACKPOT.
The word blooms across the glass in letters of gold fire. The machine begins to shake. Light pours from the seams. The voices rise to a scream.
THE NEW WORLD
I wake up.
Not on the ground.
The ground is gone. The white is gone. I am lying on something hard and cold, the surface rough against my cheek.
Not in the void.
In a room.
Small.
The ceiling is low, close enough to touch. The walls lean inward, like the room is breathing, like it has lungs and ribs and a heartbeat of its own.
Messy.
Papers everywhere.
Thousands of them.
They cover the floor in drifts, stacked in towers that lean against the walls, scattered across a desk that has no surface left uncovered. White paper, yellow paper, paper torn and folded and crumpled. All of it covered in writing.
Walls covered in symbols.
Not writing—not any language I know. Symbols. Loops and lines and angles, patterns that shift when I look at them, that seem to move in the corner of my eye.
Unknown language.
Every surface written on.
The walls, the ceiling, the floor beneath the papers. Every inch of the room is marked. The symbols crawl up the corners, across the doorframe, over the single window that looks out onto nothing.
Like a prison made of secrets.
"Where..."
My voice is different.
It comes out lower, rougher, scraped clean of something I didn't know I carried. Younger, too—there is an energy in it that my voice lost years ago.
Younger.
Deeper.
A table.
In the center of the room, half-buried in papers, a wooden table. Its surface is scarred with knife marks, burned with cigarette ends, stained dark in places I don't want to name. Across its center, written in red that has dried to rust:
Words written in red:
NEW WORLD
I touch it.
My fingers press against the dried red. It flakes under my touch, then softens, then—
Smells like blood.
The iron taste fills my mouth. My lungs. My eyes.
Pain.
It starts behind my eyes, a pressure that builds and builds until my skull feels like it will crack. Then it moves—down my spine, through my chest, into every nerve, every fiber.
My head—
information flooding.
Images. Words. Sounds. The papers on the floor rise up, the symbols on the walls lift off, and all of it—all of it—pours into me. Everything written in this room, everything carved into these walls, every secret pressed into these pages—it all forces its way inside.
Everything.
The papers.
The walls.
The building.
The past.
The future.
Blood pours from my nose.
Warm, thick, running down my lip, my chin, dripping onto the papers at my feet.
My ears.
A trickle from each, hot against my neck.
My eyes.
Tears of red, blurring the room, blurring the symbols, blurring everything.
I stumble to a mirror.
It hangs on the wall behind the table, its frame black iron, its surface dark and waiting. I have to push through drifts of paper to reach it, my hands outstretched, my face wet, my body shaking.
The face staring back—
isn't mine.
Younger.
The lines are gone—the ones those dead people put there, the ones the army carved, the ones grief etched into my skin. The jaw is sharper. The cheekbones higher. The face is the shape of a man who hasn't yet lost everything.
Different.
I lean closer. My reflection leans with me. The eyes are mine—the shape, the set, the way they sit in the skull. But the color is wrong.
Grey.
Not brown. Not anything I've ever seen in a mirror. Grey like storm clouds. Grey like ash. Grey like the space between living and dead.
I stare at them. They stare back.
"This is not my body."
I say it flatly. Forty-four years of seeing worse.
"THIS IS NOT MY BODY."
The symbols light up.
Every mark on every wall, every page, every surface—they ignite. Red, gold, white, colors that don't have names. The room blazes with them, and the light is not light—it is knowledge, it is memory, it is a thousand lives all being pressed into one body, one skull, one soul that was never meant to hold this much.
Voices chant.
Not the voices from the slot machine. New voices. Older. Deeper. A chorus that vibrates in my teeth, my bones, the hollow spaces where my heart used to be.
Light wraps around me.
It coils up my legs, my chest, my throat. It is warm and cold at once, gentle and crushing. It holds me like a mother holds a child she is about to lose.
Information pours in.
Too much.
Too much.
Too fast.
Too everything.
I collapse.
My knees hit the floor. My hands catch me in the drifts of paper. The symbols on the pages beneath my palms burn into my skin, leaving marks that will never fade.
I don't scream.
I've been through worse. Been burned. Been broken. Been left for dead in places that don't have names. This is just pain. Pain is an old friend.
Bleeding.
From everywhere. The blood runs down my arms, my legs, pools on the papers beneath me, turns the symbols red.
Dying?
Living?
Don't know anymore.
Don't care.
Somewhere—
a voice.
It cuts through the chanting, through the light, through the information flooding my skull. It is small. It is familiar. It is—
My mother.
"One more step, beta."
Her voice. The one that tucked me in. The one that held me. The one that said "God is watching" a thousand times, a million times, until I believed her.
I don't laugh.
I don't cry.
I just breathe.
"One more step to what?"
The chanting continues.
The light burns.
The symbols crawl up my arms, my neck, my face. The room spins. The papers rise into a cyclone around me. The mirror cracks, and in the cracks I see a thousand faces—all mine, none mine, all wearing the same grey eyes.
And somewhere—
deep in this new world—
I feel it. A presence. A weight.
Something watching from beyond the light, beyond the voices, beyond the white that birthed me and the room that is remaking me.
Something watches.
Something waits.
I've killed men who thought they were gods. I've walked through fire that didn't leave ash. I've lost everything a man can lose and kept walking.
Let it watch.
Let it wait.
I'm still here.