He was still walking.
Or at least trying to. His feet were moving, that much was certain - he could feel it, the dull sound of his soles on the black floor confirming with every step that he was actually going somewhere. But going somewhere toward what, that was a different question. The lights were where they'd always been. No closer, no further. Still, like they'd been painted directly into the void.
He took the sheet of paper out of his left pocket.
It was creased at the folds, covered in numbers that didn't mean anything anymore. He flipped it over, looked for a blank space. He found one in the bottom right corner - barely enough to scribble something. He took out his pen and tried to draw a line.
The ink came out. Clean, normal.
He put a dot in the center of the page - himself. Then a straight line going up - the direction he thought he'd been heading since the start. He marked a small cross at the end. The lights, somewhere out there. He looked at his drawing for a second.
It was useless. He knew that. But he kept going anyway, because doing something was better than doing nothing, and doing nothing here felt too much like disappearing.
He folded the sheet and put it back in his pocket.
He stopped after a while.
Not because he was tired. Just because his eyes had landed on the floor and he hadn't been able to look away.
He crouched down slowly.
The floor was black. Smooth. Cold under his palms when he touched it. But the longer he stared at it, the more something bothered him - not in what he saw, but in what he felt while looking. Like staring at it too long did something to him from the inside. Not pain. Not exactly. More like a dizziness that didn't come from his head but from somewhere deeper, further in, like something behind his ribcage had started turning slowly for no reason.
He kept looking.
The feeling got worse.
He stood up fast.
- Damn.
The word came out hard, without him deciding it. He stood there, arms slightly out, waiting for the feeling to pass. It passed. Slowly, but it passed.
He tried to understand why he'd said that. He more or less could - it was the sensation, the discomfort, the dizziness. That part he got. But why that specific word, why that particular sharpness, he couldn't have explained. It just came out. Like something in him had needed to confirm he was still there.
He didn't look at the floor again.
He took out his phone.
6:07 PM.
He went to his notes. There were a lot of them - dozens, maybe over a hundred if you counted the work reports. He scrolled through. Reports, numbers, client names, things he'd jotted down quickly during meetings. He moved past all of that fast.
And then he found the recipes.
A chocolate mousse. A lemon cheesecake. A tiramisu without alcohol - because yes, even in his tiramisu recipe he'd written no marsala, replace with orange juice. There were cocktails too. Real ones, detailed, with proportions noted down to the milliliter. Virgin mojito. Sunrise without tequila. Something he'd invented himself one evening and simply called friday cocktail because he hadn't come up with anything better.
He read. He swiped. He searched, because the recipes were scattered between dozens of work notes and you really had to look to find them. But he looked anyway.
It was the only thing here that managed to make him forget where he was. Not completely - never completely. But a little. Just enough.
He thought about his apartment. His kitchen, small but tidy. He thought about how he had all the ingredients for the cheesecake, how he'd been meaning to make it for three weeks and kept pushing it back for one reason or another. He thought that the next time he was in that kitchen he'd make it. No conditions. No postponing.
If I go back.
The thought arrived on its own and he pushed it away immediately.
He put the phone away.
He looked at the lights.
He'd been walking toward them for a while now - an hour, maybe more, he didn't really know. What he knew was that they hadn't moved. Not a centimeter. Not a millimeter.
He took one step to the side. Just one, to test.
The lights stayed exactly where they were.
He took three steps to the left.
Nothing.
He took ten steps to the right, quickly, watching them the whole time.
Nothing. Not the slightest shift. They weren't following him, they weren't pulling away. They were just there, fixed, as if they existed outside of any spatial logic. On Earth, even the moon moved slightly when you walked - that was parallax, the effect that made distant objects seem to follow you as you moved. Even the moon did that.
These lights did nothing.
He took out his phone, opened the camera. The interface loaded normally. He framed one of the lights, pressed the shutter. The flash went off, the little click sound too.
He went to the gallery.
Nothing new. The last saved photo was still Amine, stupid grin, restaurant table behind him.
He closed the app.
He looked at the lights again - these things that wouldn't get closer, that didn't follow parallax, that left no trace when you tried to photograph them.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
- Alright.
He started walking toward them again.