We locked eyes from across the operating room, and I knew something was very wrong.
The anesthesiologist froze.
The surgeon’s scalpel stopped halfway through an incision. A nurse dropped a metal tray that clattered across the floor, but no one looked away from me.
I wasn’t supposed to be awake.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink. The paralysis held every muscle prisoner while my mind screamed in silence. My chest rose and fell only because a machine demanded it.
“Increase the sedation,” someone whispered.
“It already has,” another voice answered, trembling.
The surgeon slowly stepped closer until his masked face hovered above mine. “Can you hear me?”
Inside my skull, I shouted yes.
He sighed, a sound of resignation rather than relief.
“So it remembers.”
Every person in the room exchanged terrified glances.
The nurse shook her head. “No patient has ever woken up before the extraction.”
Extraction?
The surgeon reached into my open chest, not with urgency, but with careful precision, and lifted something invisible between his gloved hands.
The moment he did, memories I had never lived flooded my mind.
Cities buried beneath oceans.
Stars stitched together like beads on black thread.
A door hidden behind the moon.
And something enormous waiting outside reality, searching for the tiny fragment that had been hidden inside me since birth.
“It knows where we are now,” the anesthesiologist whispered.
The operating room lights flickered.
Hairline cracks spread across the ceiling, not in the concrete, but in the air itself, as if the world were painted on glass.
Beyond those cracks, something opened its eye.
The surgeon looked at me with genuine pity.
“The anesthesia wasn’t meant to keep you asleep,” he said quietly.
“It was meant to keep it from noticing you.”
Then the ceiling shattered.
Not downward.
Outward.
And reality came looking for what had been stolen.
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