Lena slips into an abandoned hospital and finds a violet portal hidden in Room 12, opening onto a city that should not exist and a presence that seems to notice her first.
The abandoned hospital on the edge of the city had become a warning people liked to repeat and a challenge Lena liked to ignore. Years ago, the place had been full of alarms, hurried voices, and the smell of antiseptic. Now it sat behind a rusted gate, sealed in silence, with broken windows staring out like darkened eyes.
Lena pushed through the gate with a torch in one hand and her notebook tucked under the other arm. Her friends spent their nights in crowded bars and bright rooms full of noise. She preferred places that had forgotten how to be ordinary. She told herself she was here for reference, for atmosphere, for the comic strip she kept trying to make feel real. The truth was simpler: she wanted to feel something that had not been packaged, shared, and flattened by everyone else.
Inside, the corridors were littered with fallen tiles and old dust. Her torch beam skimmed peeling paint, rusted bed frames, and doors hanging crooked on their hinges. In the surgical wing, the air still held a faint chemical bite, as if the building had never quite finished dying. Every footstep came back to her from somewhere farther down the hall, and when a dry creak sounded behind her, she stopped so suddenly her breath caught.
Then she saw the light under Room 12.
It was a thin line at first, violet-blue and impossible against the dark. Lena moved closer, her pulse thudding hard enough to drown out the hum in the walls. The door was old, painted a tired institutional green, but the light beneath it trembled like a living thing. She reached for the handle, opened it, and forgot how to breathe.
The room was empty except for a portal standing in the centre of the floor, perfectly round, perfectly still, and blazing with a light that seemed to bend the air around it. Electricity prickled across Lena's skin. Through the surface she could see a city that did not belong to any map she knew, a vast maze of towers leaning at impossible angles, their windows glowing like a pulse in the dark.
She took one involuntary step forward. The portal answered with a deeper shimmer, and somewhere on the far side, a silhouette turned toward her as if it had been waiting. For one heartbeat it seemed to smile.
Then the light swelled, and Lena realised too late that something in that other city had just noticed her.