The ground beneath her feet no longer felt like synthetic turf. The horizon no longer seemed real. Her breath hitched as a new sensation crashed over her—an overwhelming flood of information, of images, of fragments of things that didn’t belong. A rush of faces, of places she didn’t recognize, memories that weren’t hers. The blink of a clock on a distant wall, the sharp smell of burning metal, the sound of voices speaking a language she couldn’t understand.
They were her memories, but not.
They were someone else’s.
“Nova?” Emma’s voice was strained now, more urgent. “Nova, hey, talk to me. Are you—”
But Nova couldn’t hear her anymore. All she could hear was a dull roar in her ears, a pressure building up in her skull as if her mind were being flooded with things it couldn’t process. And then, somewhere—far away, but so close it was suffocating—there was a voice.
It wasn’t Emma. It wasn’t anyone she recognized.
“Do you remember?”
The words pressed against her mind like a weight, cold and implacable. A deep, low voice, calm yet commanding. For a moment, Nova couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t remember anything except for that voice.
But then, a flicker. A flash of memory. Or was it a dream?
White walls. A sterile room. People watching her. The acidic smell of sanitizer and rubbing alcohol. An experiment?
She shook her head violently, trying to break free of the rush of sensations that was threatening to swallow her whole. Her heart pounded, her eyes stinging as she blinked hard, trying to focus on the real world around her, on Emma’s face that was now inches away, concern written in the furrow of her brow.
But the voice… it lingered.
“Do you remember?”
And Nova didn’t know whether she was about to scream, faint, or run.
Everything—everything—felt wrong, and she could feel herself unraveling, thread by thread. What if she had never been meant to be here? What if the life she had lived was a lie? What if she had been created for something else, something beyond her understanding?
The strange sensation of disconnection, of not being fully in her body, swept over her again.
And then, just as suddenly as it had all begun, it stopped.
The voices faded. The strange flood of alien thoughts receded. The world snapped back into focus. The noise, the shouting, the kick of the ball, the sharpness of the sky—it all returned to its ordinary, mundane state.
But Nova was different.
She stood on the field, breathing hard, her hands shaking. The ground felt solid beneath her feet, real again. She looked around, disoriented, like a person who had just woken from a dream but wasn’t sure if she was still asleep.
Emma was still watching her, still waiting. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t even asked what had just happened. She just… waited. The others were starting to gather around, but no one said anything.
And then Nova realized it. They didn’t see it.
Whatever had just happened—the ball, the synthetic ground, the voice—it was only her experience. No one else had noticed.
She was alone in this. Alone in this weird, unshakable feeling that something inside her had shifted.
Maybe it has always been like this. And maybe… just maybe… she was finally starting to understand.
Nova blinked rapidly, trying to push the dizziness from her head, but it lingered, a thick fog that refused to lift. She heard Emma’s voice again, soft and insistent, but it sounded far away, like it was coming from another universe entirely. “Nova? Hey, are you okay?” The voice echoed in the distorted silence, a desperate plea for something she wasn’t sure how to give.
She tried to focus on Emma, to connect with the girl who stood so innocently in front of her, the kind of person Nova used to think she could understand. But now? Now, everything felt like a mirage—an illusion she wasn’t sure she could hold onto. Emma’s face, her wide eyes and furrowed brow, seemed to blur into the world around them, as if they were all painted on the surface of a glass pane, existing only as reflections of something real.
Is this what it feels like to not belong? Nova wondered, her heart racing faster with each beat. Is this how it feels when you’re not… human?
Her fingers still hovered over the smooth, unnatural surface of the ground. It wasn’t right. The synthetic texture under her skin sent a shockwave of dissonance through her body, as if her very essence were rejecting it. She could still feel the ball’s trajectory, the perfect, mechanical arc it had made through the air, but it didn’t feel like her own action. It had been someone else’s. She hadn’t willed it to happen; she hadn’t even understood it. But somehow, it had been her body that executed it, as if she had been sidelined in her own existence, forced to watch as something—or someone—else took control.
It wasn’t just the way her body moved. It was the way the world shifted around her. The colorless sky, the sharp edges of the bleachers, the distance between herself and everyone else—all of it was wrong. It felt as if she were standing in a world that wasn’t made for her, a world built with the wrong material. Everything felt… unnatural.
She hadn’t told anyone about the dreams. The ones that seemed to stretch on forever, like she was walking through a dark tunnel that was always just out of reach, where the edges of her vision would flicker like a faulty lightbulb. They had started months ago, slowly at first, and then more frequently—so vivid that when she woke, she was unsure if she had been asleep at all. And the dreams were always the same: vast, sprawling cities with towering structures that hummed with cold, metallic energy. People—if they could be called that—stared at her with vacant eyes, not seeing her, not even noticing she was there. But their faces—oh, their faces—those had haunted her. Too perfect. Too still. Too… blank.
Sometimes she’d wake up with her heart thumping, her breath shallow, knowing that something was wrong but unable to name it. She’d told herself it was just loneliness, that the dreams were simply her mind’s way of dealing with the isolation, the endless quiet of her house. But now? Now, with the air growing colder and the world around her warping, Nova wasn’t sure if she had been lying to herself all this time.
She felt something brush against her arm—Emma, her touch tentative but grounding. It pulled Nova back from the edge of that spiraling sensation, the feeling of being untethered from reality.
