Noa walked, one hand on the wall, the other gripping her phone and pressing the power button, her brightness adjusted to 1%. That was all she needed to see in the darkness—barely anything, just the faint outline of stone directly in front of her—and she would take a few steps blind before pressing the button again.

  She hated the dark. Something she never voiced, not after the age of ten when her brother teased her relentlessly for it, doing that stupid thing where he'd flick the lights on and off and make ghost noises until she'd shove Liam hard enough that he would leave her alone.

  She just toughed it out. You don't complain, you handle it. Adapt.

  But there was always something about darkness and deep shadows that made her think something was there. Moving just beyond where senses could perceive, and that anxiety pressed down on her physically as she moved—weight on her shoulders, tension coiling at the base of her skull, the prickle of awareness down her spine like fingers trailing over skin.

  With time, her breathing regulated even if her emotions didn't, and the pauses between her pressing the button got longer. Her eyes adjusted and—

  Noa stopped fully, mid-step.

  Adjusting meant there was light.

  She looked up, analysis cutting through the fear.

  There. On the ceiling above her, a trail of light. A continuous ribbon of soft, shifting light that seemed to move more like fabric or water than light, flowing along the stone. She stared, eyebrows drawing together as she watched it. Pale, with soft inflections of color appearing and disappearing as it moved. Hints of magenta, touches of green, every color gone before she could fix on them. Traveling in the direction she was walking.

  Noa looked over her shoulder into the yawning darkness and shuddered. There was definitely less light the way she came. Noa defaulted to the numbers. Thirty meters high, ten across. Wide for her but so tall that the more she thought about it, the more she looked over her shoulder and up, expecting something to be looking at her in a hallway made for giants.

  Was she dead?

  She stared at nothing, considering.

  Two graves.

  Her mother withering away when she stopped eating.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Her father drinking again.

  She pushed it back into the box she'd shoved it in five years ago. Tears started beading in her eyes, and she wiped them away hard, almost angry.

  No crying. Not here. No tears for the enemy. And the darkness was her oldest enemy.

  Noa clung to truths and assumptions. If she was dead, would she feel scared? And she was scared. She could feel her heart beating, her lungs working, the rough stone under her palm. She did what felt right.

  Noa walked towards the light.

  She checked the ribbon as she moved, watched it grow thicker, as if gathering more light like a physical thing. The air seemed warmer but she couldn’t be sure. The first real relief came when she found an intersection, a T-section, and there she had a choice: left or right. A choice implied a design by people and not the endless hellscape she was imagining. Noa looked up, morbidly fascinated to see that from her hall and the left, the light traveled towards the intersection and flowed in a thicker band towards the right.

  Noa went right, walking with more surety as the hall became easier to see. She could take the next step. She could figure out a way home. Her heart felt a little less heavy, like someone had lifted one of the weights pressing down on her chest.

  There were more intersections and each time she observed the light, followed its flow. She kept walking until it was bright enough she could stop tracing her fingers on the rough wall as a guide, until she could see details—little things dotting the stone. She tried to identify the pale white sprouts emerging from cracks, and little bubbles of fungus in the crevices along the floor where water dripped through. She didn't dare touch them. She kept moving, heart starting to pound with a different rhythm now—not quite hope, but something adjacent to it—as small lizards skittered out of sight ahead of her.

  When she turned a corner and saw daylight, actual daylight, she almost ran towards it. The entrance was lined with vegetation and she approached quickly, her flats slapping against stone now instead of shuffling. She heard birds chirping, the sounds competing and overlapping, and it sounded so alive that her face broke into a relieved smile as she stepped between ferns that clustered around the tall rectangular exit.

  Her eyes had a harder time adjusting to the brightness after so long in the cavelike building. It was much brighter, real sunlight, and she blinked against it as shapes resolved into trees just beyond the exit.

  And they were wrong.

  She stopped at the threshold. Toes in the grass that spilled over the stonework. The bark on the trees was white. Not familiar birch white but like someone had plastered lumpy chalk to the outside of a tree, textured and almost luminous in the sunlight. The leaves were green, but also bluer than they should be in places, like someone had mixed the wrong shade of watercolor.

  What kind of bird call was that? Something unfamiliar, almost musical but not quite, like someone playing notes that didn't belong in the same scale.

  Her chest tightened with aching. The more she learned, the more details she gathered, the less she felt like she was leaving. And she needed to leave. She needed to get home, needed to call her parents, needed to prove she was okay, that she was alive, that they didn't have to—

  Noa looked back at the darkness of the maze behind her. It was possible to retrace her steps. Her mind quietly had calculated the distance. Even in the darkness she still had her sense of direction. She was confident of the turns she made. Maybe walking back meant going home. Noa stared at the brown stones and the dank, winnowing darkness.

  No. She wasn't going back into the dark. That was never a choice.