Ethan stares off blankly into the ground. Although his gaze looked tough, Aiden's despair-filled eyes were practically drilling a hole in the earth with the sheer weight of his uselessness.
"Certainly not unexpected. Someone had to die at some point. Just be happy it wasn't you," Nika dictates to the group.
Jo remains calm, gently consulting Aiden. And standing off to the side, watching everyone, is when Nika notices something.
"Your group is missing someone… But who? That one—Maya—just died. And the three of you are here. But I'm positive you're missing someone..."
The original group members glance around. Confused.
"Quit it... This is already enough. We aren't missing anybody. So just stop. Someone just drive the damn bus," Jo says with a slow, tired voice.
"RV," Nick corrects Jo before sliding into the front seat and starting the vehicle.
He drives off in—some direction. With no map, no destination. Just forward. A joyride into nowhere, while the rest of them grieved.
Nothing changed.
That is, until the hills stopped. And all that was left was flat grassland.
The grass rolled out like an endless carpet—clean, quiet, unsettling in its sameness. No more floating objects. No more broken white lines in the sky. Just flat, open green that never blinked.
Nick hummed something at the wheel. It wasn't a tune. It wasn't human.
Aiden finally spoke. His voice had cratered into something dry and low. "...What if Nika's right."
"Don't humor her," Jo muttered.
"No. What if… we are missing someone. Like—there was someone else. We just don't remember."
Ethan stayed quiet. But something twisted deep in his gut.
Nika turned her head sharply toward him, eyes narrowing like a blade. "You feel it, don't you?"
"What?"
"The gap," she whispered. "The missing beat in your memory."
Ethan looked at Nika.
"Who... who's missing?" he asked.
With that question, a jolt—like static electricity wired through his spine—shot through his eyes. For a second, he saw something.
A teenage boy. Black hair. Navy blue hoodie.
Then—gone. Like a skipped frame in a dying VHS.
"What the—, who—" Ethan yammers before falling to the ground with the others.
The RV had accelerated drastically. The speed causing everyone upright to fall back.
Nika looks toward her brother.
"What are you doing?" she glares at him, but she sees her answer up ahead.
"Buildings."
She turns. The grass and hills are gone. The only thing ahead is street, houses, and a slightly faraway sign reading:
"WELCOME TO A COMMUNITY."
Buildings stretch out as far as the eye can see. The terrain replaced by a grid of identical homes and cul-de-sacs. It's like someone copy-pasted suburbia from a half-rendered dream.
Sky blue, two-story houses with perfectly trimmed gardens and untouched garages. Every single one is exactly the same.
The group stares, dumbfounded.
Nick makes turn after turn, but it's all the same.
"I don't know about you fools, but I am hun-ger-y," Nick blares before parking the RV in a random driveway.
"Welp. We're here. Can't leave. Might as well live life and move on," he adds, tossing the keys in a lazy arc and stepping out like he just pulled into his vacation home.
Nika gets up and follows her brother.
"If you're stupid enough to believe you can escape infinity, stay in here," she says coldly.
Without another word, Ethan springs up and follows, gun in hand.
Jo wants to follow too, but Aiden is still sitting motionless, lost. She doesn't want to leave him behind. She's stuck.
She gazes out the window at the trio walking toward the house.
Nick checks the front door.
It's unlocked.
He walks in without hesitation, and once the door closes behind them, Jo loses sight of them.
"Aiden. Let's go. These houses might have food. Maybe even water. You could use a shower. A hot one."
She pulls Aiden up to his feet and helps him out of the RV and into the house.
And it's shockingly real.
---
It was a very nice house.
Almost too nice.
The kind of clean that felt staged. Like it had been waiting for them.
Jo led Aiden inside, and the door clicked shut behind them with an eerie softness. The air was cold. Not chill, not freezing—just cold in the way hospitals and banks were. The living room opened out in front of them like a showroom. Polished wooden floors, a long modern couch too pristine to be sat on, and a wide flatscreen TV hung perfectly centered on the white wall. Not a speck of dust in sight. Not a trace of someone ever having lived here.
Ethan stood just inside the threshold, glancing between rooms. "This place is... normal," he said flatly.
"Yeah," Nick called from the kitchen. "Too normal. Creepy-ass sitcom normal."
The kitchen was stocked. White marble countertops. Stainless steel appliances. The fridge even hummed gently, alive with power. Inside: bottled water, neatly organized groceries, rows of identical boxed meals—no expiration dates. Jo opened the pantry and saw the same brand of cereal repeated on every shelf, like copy-pasted assets from a broken game.
Nika checked the drawers. Everything was where it was supposed to be. Knives in perfect order. Plates stacked military straight. Towels folded with absurd precision.
"I hate this," she muttered.
Aiden moved slower. He touched things like they might vanish if he blinked. He trailed his fingers across the table, the walls. Everything felt real. Too real.
Nick had already opened the fridge and popped open a soda. "Cheers, new home," he grinned, raising the can before chugging half of it. "Tastes like capitalism."
Jo turned on the TV.
It worked.
The screen flickered to life in an instant. But there was no signal. No channels. Just static.
No—not just static.
For a few seconds at a time, blurry footage would flash. A view from the corner of a room. A window. An empty staircase. A dark hallway. No sound. No explanation. Just surveillance footage. And then it would glitch back to grey and white fuzz.
Jo turned it off.
"This place is wrong," Ethan said.
"You think?" Nika replied, eyes scanning the hallway. "It's not even pretending to hide it."
Nick had disappeared upstairs.
Ethan followed—gun still in hand, finger near the trigger.
The second floor was just as pristine. Identical bedrooms. Matching sheets, matching furniture, matching paintings. All blue, white, and beige. No personal touches. No family photos. It looked like a catalog puked on itself.
Each room had a window, but none of them showed the street. Only more blue houses. More identical homes. The exact same lawn. Every direction.
Ethan opened a closet. Nothing but rows of the same outfit—navy blue hoodies, white T-shirts, black jeans. All in his size.
He slammed it shut.
Downstairs, Aiden was standing in the hallway, staring into the bathroom.
"Jo," he said. "You need to see this."
She came over. Looked in.
The bathroom was flawless. Towels hanging perfectly. Soap untouched. But written across the mirror in fog was a sentence:
"YOU LEFT HIM BEHIND."
Jo stepped back, breath catching in her throat. But the mirror was dry. There was no fog on the glass. No steam. Just the words burned into the reflection, lingering like memory.
Aiden blinked. And it was gone.
No trace of writing. Just her face, staring back, haunted.
From upstairs, Nick's voice echoed out:
"Hey… uh… there's something in the attic."