Chapter 108: A Strange Kind of Guest

Astrid Vale

I woke up in the same white room, and for one brief, merciful second I forgot where I was. Then it all settled back in at once, the east wing, the illusion, the endless hallway, and this strange underground city stretching out somewhere beyond my door. I sat up and looked around. No restraints this time, nothing physically holding me here at all. Just the same unanswered question sitting on my chest like a weight. Nobody had told me when I’d be allowed to leave.

Maximus came for me not long after, and instead of leading me straight back to the dining hall, he told me I was free to walk through the settlement.

"You’ve been cooped up long enough," he said, gesturing toward the door.

I didn’t trust the offer, but I took it anyway, mostly because staying in that room another minute felt worse than whatever waited outside it.

As we moved through the streets, I noticed people glancing at me longer than a passing stranger should. A woman selling bread stared until I met her eyes, then quickly busied herself with her stall. A group of children stopped their game entirely to watch me pass. Some teenagers my age throwing occasional glances at me.

"They’re not used to visitors," Maximus said, noticing my discomfort. "Especially not from the surface. Forgive the staring. Curiosity, nothing more."

I let it go, though something about the intensity of it didn’t feel like simple curiosity.

The longer I walked, the more the settlement revealed itself. People worked in small groups, tending stalls, carrying tools, herding children who darted between legs and doorways with the same restless energy kids had everywhere. Farmers moved between rows of crops lit by artificial light designed to mimic something like sun. Families sat together over meals near open doorways. It felt, despite everything wrong about the ceiling stretching too high above us and the total absence of sky, remarkably ordinary. These weren’t people simply surviving. They’d built entire lives down here, generation after generation, out of nothing but necessity and time.

A young woman named Wren, who’d been introduced to me somewhere along the walk, asked me something that stopped me in my tracks.

"What does the sky actually look like?" she asked, her voice carrying a kind of hunger I hadn’t expected. "Is it really blue during the day?"

"You’ve never seen it?" I asked.

She shook her head. "None of us have. Our parents remember stories from their parents, but nobody alive now has actually stood under it."

Another man asked about sunlight, what it felt like against skin, whether it was warm the way fire was warm or something different entirely. A child tugged at my sleeve and asked if the moon really looked the way the old paintings showed it. I answered as best I could, describing things I’d taken completely for granted my entire life, and felt the weight of what this curse had actually cost them settle over me more heavily than Maximus’s explanation ever had. An entire population, robbed of something as simple as daylight, for a mistake none of them had made.

Later, while I sat with a small group near one of the communal tables, an older woman asked me something that caught me off guard.

"Do you get sick often?" she asked, studying me with an expression I couldn’t quite place.

"Not really," I said, confused by the question. "I mean, no more than anyone else, I don’t think."

"Have you ever been seriously injured? Something that should have taken longer to heal than it did?"

I frowned. "Why do you ask?"

She smiled, quick and practiced. "Just curious. It’s rare we get to speak with someone from the surface. I wondered if life up there is harder on the body."

She moved the conversation along before I could press further, and I let it go, though the specificity of it lingered somewhere in the back of my mind, refusing to settle properly into anything as simple as idle curiosity.

Not long after, I caught someone else watching me from across the market, an older man standing near one of the stalls. The moment our eyes met, he looked away too fast, busying himself with something on the table in front of him that clearly didn’t need his attention. I told myself it was the same curiosity everyone else seemed to carry. But the feeling stayed with me longer than it should have, sitting uncomfortably alongside everything else I’d noticed today.

I kept turning the contradiction over as we walked. If I’d been kidnapped, nobody here was treating me like a prisoner. Nobody had raised a hand against me, nobody had threatened me since the restraints came off. But if I was genuinely a guest, nobody had told me how long I’d be staying, or when I might be allowed to simply walk back to the surface and find my way home. The kindness didn’t erase the fact that I hadn’t chosen to come here, and it didn’t answer the question that mattered most.

We turned down a narrower street eventually, and I noticed the noise around us dropping the closer we got to it. The market chatter faded, replaced by a strange, deliberate quiet that didn’t match the rest of the settlement’s easy rhythm.

"What’s down there?" I asked, nodding toward the path ahead.

"Storage," Maximus said smoothly, already steering us in a different direction. "Nothing of interest. Come, there’s something else I want to show you."

I let him redirect me, but the quiet of that street stuck with me, distinct enough that I doubted it was simply storage. Something about the way people near it had lowered their voices told me I’d stumbled onto a place I wasn’t meant to notice, let alone ask about.

By the time we returned to my room that evening, my mind wouldn’t settle. I thought about how strangely welcoming everyone had been today, the curiosity in Wren’s voice when she asked about the sky, the ordinary rhythm of families going about their lives underground. Then I thought about the staring that lingered a beat too long, the old woman’s careful question about my health, and that narrow, quiet street Maximus had steered me away from without hesitation.

And underneath all of it, the scream from yesterday still sat unresolved in my memory, its exact sound slipping further away every time I reached for it, no matter how hard I tried to hold on.

I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself finally admit what I’d been avoiding all day.

I just knew, with a certainty I couldn’t quite explain, that something here wasn’t right.