Dawn

The count is always the first thing Sella sees when she opens her eyes. A cross hatched trail of ballpoint blue reaches evenly across the featureless white wall - Sella marks each day and each escape attempt together with a single stroke.

She wakes always in the same place, at the same time, regardless of where and when she fell to her exhaustion the day before. 

In this narrow bed in this room where unidentified machines beep a soft lullaby, it is always not quite dawn, that vague grey time just before the sun breaks the horizon. No birdsong yet through the barred window.

The time bothers Sella far more than the place, this moment when all the world seems to waver between stillness and waking. This moment like a held breath; the moment it had happened. 

As always, the shudder of memory prompts her out of bed and she stands, refreshed and strong despite yesterday’s harrowing journey. Stronger in fact; and stronger every day; the history of lines on the wall has been enough to tighten the muscles in her arms and legs, to deepen her lungs and reserves of will. 

Sella collects the water bottle set out on the nightstand, then she finds the ballpoint pen under the bed. She marks the wall without counting and tucks the pen into her jeans pocket, as always. Then she opens the room’s one door and steps out into the dawning wilderness.

Which way today? South along the stream or east or west away from it? Behind her is a cliff face, a mess of crumbled stones and broken trees that spoke of a recent landslide. Sella had tried that way a few times but those had all been short days; falling when a rock broke under her hand, when a snaked coiled unseen above her had struck, when a downpour out of a blue sky had slicked the rocks. Each time she had lain broken at the foot of the cliff until she passed out, and woke again. The maze didn’t seem to want her to go that way.

Southeast, she decides. She made good progress that way yesterday - though she knows by now the maze’s great trick. As soon as she crests the rise that currently marks the edge of her world, she has no idea what view will be prepared for her today. The maze is a shifting tile puzzle, inconstant day by day, moment by moment and always, always with something new. Sella no longer tries to keep a map.

Nevertheless she proceeds southeast, and for all of the morning nothing challenges her. She has grown stronger and she has learned from each and every one of those marks on the wall. Practical skills - how to test a branch or boulder before trusting her weight to it, the look and smell of a creature’s den, when the current is too strong for her to swim. She has also learned to trust in herself, what leap she can make, the handhold she can reach, how far she can still go when she is tired, hungry, hurt. 

And she has learned never to turn back. 

She is heading in no particular direction now, following promising pathways through the wilderness, intent only on reaching the next dawn.

Sella stayed in the room once. Though her physical strength was always restored, that one day her will had failed her. She had stayed in the bed for hours and hours and she had cried and screamed but the sun had refused to rise until she got up, and faced the day.

She had grown so strong now she could walk far into the night, but the night seemed to go on and on, only getting darker and more dangerous. But she knew if she kept moving then so would time and the sun would come. 

Dawn was where she had fallen into this trap, so dawn is where the exit has to be. 

Evening - when she makes it as far as evening - always brings her a deep forest regardless of where she was a step before. Never the same forest, but always dense and tangled, trees and landscape conspiring to compound the darkness by hiding the stars from her.

Sella slows, alert to the slice of world the maze constructs around her. There is no reason to rush, not even to make the most of the last light of the sun. Running never makes the night pass faster. Carefully is the way, and always onwards, no matter what demons the maze puts in her way.

***

Later, Sella bursts from the trees into open air. She stumbles, falls, catches, and her hands as well as her feet are vanished suddenly in a bed of starlit mist. She pushes off and keeps running, but the only ragged breath she hears is her own; the reek of rot is cleansed in night-crisped air. She does not turn to see if it stopped at the tree line.  She wipes the blood from her eye with her sleeve and keeps moving forward. 

Adrenaline drains and her headlong stumble slows to a shuffle. She hears loose gravel under her shoes and nothing else. 

Head hanging, Sella walks a few steps more before the earth tilts sideways. A ragged shot of adrenaline barely lends her the strength to scramble upward through the agitated mist to what she hopes is solid ground. 

She lifts her head and there in front of her is a hill, dark against the lightening sky. 

There it is.

Sella starts up the hillside, resolves to stay on her feet, but too soon she is on her hands and knees again, fighting against the pull of the earth. She trembles all over; surely the slipping ground can bear her up for just a little while. But no, she has never come so close before and this thought alone keeps her reaching for the next handful of sharp and bloody inches.

Light washes over her as she reaches the top; not the sun, not yet, but the grey just before. Below her at the foot of the hill the haze is studded with the sleeping lights of a town, coming slowly into focus as the mist lifts. Sella chokes a sound that might be a laugh or a sob and pushes herself up to her knees, up to her feet to meet the dawn. Somewhere a bird takes up a warbling note and Sella stares fiercely at the halo forming over the eastern horizon until she cannot help but blink.

Sella wakes on the narrow bed. Grey light filters in through the curtained window and there is no birdsong, only the soft beeping of the machines. Her eyelids are heavy but she forces them wider, her limbs are numb but she pushes herself out of bed anyway. She stumbles towards the wall but tangles in the sheets and cotton gown. She reaches for it but her arm is stayed by the drip line pinning her wrist. In the background there is pain, somewhere the beeping rises to an alarm.

Sella sinks to her knees in front of the blank white wall, and weeps.