Chapter 24

• A wordless attendant comes to collect my bag and I take it as my cue that it’s time to go. I follow her to a room right at the end of the hallway. She enters through the door and it opens up to an even longer hallway with many different steel doors. We pass each door and I note that there aren’t any names on them. They’re all closed and I wonder if they’re other bedrooms. She walks down to the end of the longer hallway and walks through the door. I follow her inside and it is a big room tiled in black with a nearby wall full of screens and buttons. Some light up, some flicker, some are off. To my left is a wide space. In the centre is a circular platform that lights up from the inside out. On the left and right sides of the platform are what looks like stage lights, pointed to the centre of the circle. Alex comes in after me.
• “Where’d you run off to earlier?”
• “Would you quit it?” My cheeks flush again and he chuckles. “This is the control room,” Heather says to me. “It’s where we come to jump from dimension to dimension. We use this spot since it has been validated that the veil between this realm and that one is the thinnest,” I nod understanding since it’s what I read in the books at the library. I start to wonder if those books were staged too. There’s no time to think too much about it because Heather flips a switch and the lights beside the platform at the centre lights up and glows a shimmering blue.