Chapter 17
She confessed.
What surprised Lucas most in the dream wasn’t the girl’s courage but the fleeting, undeniable spark in the man’s eyes when he heard her words. Yet, despite that, the man’s face hardened, and he coldly pushed her away.
“I’m your uncle. I only see you as a child.”
Hearing those words, Lucas couldn’t help but scoff, a laugh laced with disdain escaping him.
“Liar. Hypocrite,” he muttered under his breath in the dream.
The jolting of the bus suddenly snapped Lucas awake. The vehicle had hit a patch of bumpy road, shaking him out of his slumber.
He looked out the window groggily and realized, to his dismay, that he had missed his stop.
Startled, he quickly pressed the buzzer, getting off at the next station. The distance between stops was considerable, and walking
back would take some time.
As he followed the edge of the road, his mind drifted back to the dream.
Yet the details were elusive. The harder he tried to recall, the more it slipped through his fingers. All that remained was the echo of his own words, “Liar. Hypocrite.”
A strange sense of loss crept over him, an inexplicable feeling that he had forgotten something important.
By the time Lucas finally made it back to campus, it was nearly 8 p.m.
His shared dormitory housed eight students, leaving little room for personal space. Summer’s heat still lingered, relentless even
at night, accompanied by the ceaseless hum of cicadas and waves of stifling humidity.
The dorm had air conditioning, but no one dared use it–saving electricity was a shared unspoken rule. Instead, the worn ceiling fan buzzed tirelessly overhead, offering little relief.
After skimming through a book for a while, Lucas climbed into bed, unusually early for him.
As he lay there, a thought stirred in his mind, “What if I dream of it again? What if I can see what happens next?”
He didn’t know why it mattered so much, but he was desperate to know how the dream would unfold. Desperate to know who the
girl was.
Holding onto the scattered pieces of the dream seemed irrational, yet an unshakable conviction of its significance persisted.
Lucas‘ roommates noticed his early retreat and exchanged puzzled glances. Lucas was usually the most studious one among
them, always the last to sleep.
