Jynx awoke to an almost complete darkness. The only lights in the clubhouse were the digital clock and a few tiny LEDs on her stereo, computer, and the wireless routers. She was groggy and disoriented, as if woken from a particularly active dream, although she couldn’t remember what she had been dreaming. She remembered lights, colors, and sounds, but they were kaleidoscopic memories tumbling around her subconscious and slowly fading, replaced by the comfortable swirling colors of near perfect darkness. She tugged at the blanket around her shoulders, realizing that they were someone’s arms. Startled at first, she jumped slightly.

Austin jerked behind her, shifting to sit up, instinctively holding her tighter in the darkness. “What?” he asked the void.

Jynx relaxed slightly. It was just Austin, and she was safe in her home. She lay back again, clutching at his dusty forearm. She was too tired to move.

“Are you alright?” he whispered.

Jynx nodded, feeling herself falling back to sleep, content to float in the amniotic underground emptiness.

“What happened?” he asked.

Jynx remembered reaching for the metal piece, remembered every moment up to touching it and then it exploded in her mind, a blinding flash of swirling lights and colors. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

He lay beside her, afraid to move. “It looked like you got electrocuted,” he whispered.

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She shook her head. “I just…” she couldn’t think of a way to describe it, “I think I fainted,” she said, remembering scenes from movies, fair damsels melodramatically collapsing into a hero’s arms. She didn’t like the idea, but it was the only explanation. Less than a genteel collapse, it had felt more like getting hit upside the head with an advanced calculus textbook and somehow absorbing everything in it. There was no way to describe that to Austin.

“If you’re sure you’re okay, I should probably go.” He shifted slightly, recognizing that this sort of thing was exactly what her mother was trying to avoid.

Jynx shook her head and held his arm tighter. “Stay,” she said, so quietly that it was like a sigh. She secretly hoped that he would just shut up and go back to sleep.

He did lay quietly for a little while. She listened to him breathe, smelled the rust and the dust on him, and just under that, his salty sweat and deodorant. He cleared his throat gently and finally spoke. “Where do you go, Jynx?” he asked, still whispering.

She answered from the edge of her dream. “What?”

“When you go away. Where do you go?”

Jynx glanced down at the invisible palm of her hand, looking into the center of it. She frowned. “I go through it all.”

“Through all what?”

She shrugged lightly; the rustling of the blankets audible in the absolute stillness. “I just kind of float out from my body, and then out of the place, and then out into space, and then further until I come back through.”

“Back through where?”

She held her palm up to him, nearly invisible in the darkness; he saw only the silhouette eclipsing the tiny lights in the far end of the railroad car. Like a black hole through a powerful telescope, he only knew what she showed him because he could not see her hand in front of his face. “Through here,” she said.

Austin didn’t answer but continued to hold her. Wrapped in his arms, she drifted off to a seemingly dreamless sleep.