He was still walking.
His steps had taken on a mechanical rhythm, almost automatic. Left, right, left, right. He wasn't really looking at the lights anymore - they were there, he could see them, but he'd stopped hoping they would move. They didn't move. That was a fact now, same as the silence or the cold beneath his soles.
He looked down at the floor.
And he stopped.
There was something there. Under his feet, in the black - not a light, not a shape. More like an image. Blurry, imprecise, like a reflection in a disturbed puddle. Colors he didn't recognize. Forms he couldn't define. But something that looked like... a place. A real place. Not the void, not the black - something that seemed to exist somewhere.
He didn't move.
As long as he stayed still, it was there.
He crouched down slowly, eyes fixed on it. The colors were strange - not Earth colors, not exactly. More saturated maybe, or differently distributed. He tried to make out a precise shape. A horizon, a sky, anything. But it was too blurry. Like trying to read through frosted glass.
He reached his hand toward the floor.
The reflection disappeared.
Not gradually - all at once. As if the act of wanting to touch it had been enough to erase it. He pulled his hand back, waited. Nothing came back. He stood up slowly and stayed there, arms at his sides, staring at the spot where it had been.
The floor was black. Smooth. Like everywhere else.
He stood there for a long time without moving.
His brain was running.
A reflection of a world. A real world, not Earth - something else, something that existed somewhere beneath this floor or behind it or through it, he didn't really know how to phrase that. But something.
And then the connection made itself.
A waiting room.
That's exactly what this was. He'd watched enough anime to understand the concept - you get pulled from your world, put somewhere, and sent somewhere else. Simple. Almost logical. This void, this black floor, these motionless lights - it wasn't a destination. It was an in-between. A corridor. A cosmic waiting room where he'd been dropped off until someone sent him somewhere.
That made sense.
For the first time since he'd been here, something made sense.
He took out his sheet of paper, jotted a few words in the corner. Waiting room. Reflection — another world? He put it away.
Alright. So he was waiting. That was it.
He could wait.
The silence came back.
It came back the way it always did - not suddenly, just gradually, filling the space his thoughts had occupied for a few minutes. And in that silence, a question arrived. Quietly. Almost politely.
If this is a waiting room - why isn't anyone coming?
He tried to push it away. He didn't quite manage.
A waiting room implied someone on the other side. A counter, a door, anything. It implied a system, an intention, someone or something that had decided to put him here and was going to come back for him. But there was nothing. There had never been anything since the beginning. Just the void, the lights, and now a reflection that had vanished the moment he tried to touch it.
He looked around.
Nothing.
- Alright, he said out loud, to no one.
He looked down at the floor one last time, at the exact spot where the reflection had been.
And that's when he saw it.
A mark. Thin, almost imperceptible, but there - a red line running from where he stood and stretching out in one direction. Not a message. Not an arrow. Just a trace, like something had grazed the floor and left a mark behind it.
He followed it with his eyes as far as he could.
It disappeared into the dark.
Macon didn't move for a long time. He looked at the trace, looked at the darkness at the end of it, looked at the trace again.
He thought about the waiting room. He thought about the reflection. He thought about the question he had no answer to.
Then he took a step in the direction of the trace.