Day One

The pit is twenty feet across. Sarah knows because she counted her steps. Twelve paces from the north wall to the south. Eleven from east to west. The walls are smooth concrete, gray as bureaucracy, rising forty feet to a circle of sky that's either overcast or just looks that way from down here.

There's no ladder. No rope. No convenient handholds worn into the concrete by previous occupants. Just walls and floor and sky and three people who woke up here six hours ago.

"We should try again," Marcus says. He's been saying this for the past three hours. Different variations on the same theme. We should stack something. We should boost each other. We should try calling out again. Each suggestion delivered with the manic energy of someone who refuses to accept what's happening.

"There's nothing to stack," Sarah says. She's sitting with her back against the wall, knees drawn up. "There's literally nothing here."

"There has to be something. We're just not seeing it."

"I can see the entire pit from where I'm sitting. There's nothing."

The third person hasn't said much. Elena. She's been doing laps around the perimeter, dragging her hand along the wall like she's reading braille. Every so often she stops, presses her palm flat against the concrete, then continues. Sarah stopped asking what she was doing after the second hour.

"Maybe if we—" Marcus starts.

"Marcus." Sarah's voice is flat. "Stop."

"We can't just sit here."

"Why not?"

He stares at her like she's suggested they all start eating dirt. "Because we're in a fucking pit."

"I'm aware."

"So we need to get out."

Sarah doesn't respond. What's the point? They've been through this already. They've tried yelling. They've tried jumping. Marcus managed to get about seven feet up the wall before sliding back down, scraping the shit out of his palms in the process. The concrete's too smooth. No purchase. No way up.

Elena completes another lap and sits down across from Sarah, mirroring her posture. She's maybe thirty. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that's starting to come loose. She's wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt that says PORTLAND MARATHON 2019. Sarah wonders if she actually ran it or just bought the shirt.

"How long do you think we've been here?" Elena asks. First thing she's said in over an hour.

Sarah checks her wrist even though her watch is gone. All their watches are gone. Phones, wallets, keys, everything. They woke up with just the clothes they were wearing. "Six hours maybe? Hard to tell."

"The sun hasn't moved."

Sarah looks up. Elena's right. The circle of gray sky above them looks exactly the same as it did when they woke up. No shadows shifting across the pit floor. No sense of time passing at all.

"Cloud cover," Marcus says. He's pacing now, hands on his hips, staring up at the opening like he's trying to will a rope ladder into existence. "We just can't see the sun through it."

"Or the sun isn't moving," Elena says.

"The sun doesn't just stop moving."

"The earth doesn't stop rotating," Sarah corrects automatically. Then feels stupid for doing it. Like proper astronomy matters right now.

Marcus ignores her. "We need to think systematically. What do we know? We're in a pit. We don't know how we got here. We don't have our belongings. The walls are too smooth to climb. The opening is too high to reach. What else?"

"We're not thirsty," Elena says.

Marcus stops pacing. "What?"

"We've been here for hours. I'm not thirsty. Are you?"

Sarah does a mental check. No. No thirst. No hunger either, now that Elena mentions it. She should be both. She remembers eating breakfast yesterday—or was it yesterday? Time's already getting slippery. But either way, she should need water by now.

"Adrenaline," Marcus says. "Your body suppresses those signals when you're in survival mode."

"For six hours?"

"It's possible."

"Is it?"

He doesn't answer. Instead he goes back to pacing, but slower now, like Elena's observation has taken some of the wind out of his sails.

Sarah watches him. He's probably forty, fit in that aggressive way some men get when they hit middle age and panic about mortality. The kind of guy who does CrossFit and tells everyone about it. He's wearing khakis and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The shirt has a small embroidered logo over the pocket. Some tech company she doesn't recognize.

Elena's still staring at the walls. "There are no seams," she says.

"What?" Sarah asks.

"The walls. Where they meet the floor. There's no seam. It's all one piece. Like it was poured in a single pour. But that's not possible for something this size."

Marcus stops pacing again. "Does it matter?"

"Probably not. But it's weird."

Everything's weird. That's the problem. Sarah keeps waiting for this to click into place, to make some kind of sense. Kidnapping? But why? And how did they all get here without waking up? Some kind of gas? She doesn't remember going to sleep. She remembers getting ready for work, starting her car, and then nothing. Just waking up here with two strangers and a growing sense that all her usual frameworks for understanding reality aren't going to help.

"We should introduce ourselves properly," Elena says. "If we're going to be here for a while."

"We're not going to be here for a while," Marcus says.

"Sure. But just in case."

There's a long pause. Then Marcus sighs and runs a hand through his hair. "Fine. I'm Marcus. I'm a project manager at a software company in Austin. I have a wife and two kids. I was driving to work when..." He trails off. "I don't remember what happened next."

"Elena. I'm a nurse. I was coming off a night shift. Stopped at a gas station to get coffee." She shrugs. "Then here."

They both look at Sarah. She doesn't want to play this game. Doesn't want to make it real by acknowledging it. But they're waiting. "Sarah. I teach high school English. I was..." What was she doing? The memory feels greasy, won't come into focus. "I don't remember either."

"What's the last thing you do remember?" Marcus asks. "Clearly, I mean."

"Getting in my car. Starting it. NPR was on. Then nothing."

"Same," Elena says. "I remember paying for the coffee. The cashier had a tattoo of a cat on her forearm. Then blank."

Marcus nods slowly. "Someone drugged us. Had to. There's no other explanation."

"Why?" Sarah asks.

"I don't know. Ransom maybe? If this is some kind of—"

"You think someone built a forty-foot concrete pit to hold us for ransom?"

"People build bunkers. Underground complexes. Maybe this is part of something bigger."

"Or maybe it's just a pit," Elena says.

"That doesn't make sense."

"None of this makes sense. That's the point."

They fall silent. Sarah finds herself counting the breaths. In, out. In, out. The air is stale but not suffocating. Temperature's mild. Not hot, not cold. Everything about this place is aggressively neutral. Like someone designed it specifically to be as unremarkable as possible while still being a concrete hole in the ground.

"We should organize," Marcus says. He's found his footing again, slipping back into solution mode. "Take shifts. Someone stays awake in case something changes. Someone watches each wall. We can—"

"Marcus," Elena interrupts. "What if there's nothing to organize for?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if this is it? What if we're just here?"

"That's insane."

"Is it more insane than any other explanation you've come up with?"

He doesn't have an answer for that. Sarah watches the small muscle in his jaw twitch. He's not going to accept this. Maybe some people can't. Maybe there's a certain personality type that needs problems to solve, and when presented with a situation that has no solution, they just... break.

She wonders which one of them will break first.

The sun—or the gray circle pretending to be sky—doesn't change. Sarah's been watching it for what feels like another hour, though without any reference point for time, it could be twenty minutes or three hours. Her body refuses to give her answers. No hunger. No thirst. Just a mild sense of existing in a space that shouldn't exist.

Marcus has finally stopped suggesting escape plans. He's sitting now, back against the wall, staring at his scraped palms. Elena's doing another lap. She never stops moving. Sarah's starting to recognize it as a coping mechanism. Motion equals not thinking too hard about what's happening.

"Do you think we're dead?" Marcus asks suddenly.

Sarah and Elena both look at him.

"I mean, what if we died? Car crashes or something? And this is..." He gestures vaguely at the walls. "Whatever comes after."

"This is your idea of an afterlife?" Elena asks. "A concrete pit?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's purgatory. Maybe we did something wrong and this is the waiting room before judgment."

"You religious?" Sarah asks.

"No. Not really. But my mom was. Used to talk about purgatory. A place where you go to think about what you've done." He laughs, but it's hollow. "Guess I've got plenty of time to think now."

Elena sits down next to Sarah. Close enough that their shoulders almost touch. "I don't think we're dead."

"How do you know?"

"Because this feels too real. Too boring. If I were making up an afterlife, it would be more interesting than this."

Sarah finds herself smiling despite everything. "What would your afterlife look like?"

"Good coffee. Books I haven't read yet. Maybe a dog." Elena pauses. "What about you?"

"An endless library with no late fees."

"That's very on-brand for an English teacher."

"What can I say? I'm predictable."

Marcus doesn't join in their hypothetical afterlife game. He's staring at the wall across from him with an intensity that suggests he's either having a revelation or a breakdown. Sarah's betting on breakdown.

"We should sleep," Elena says. "Take turns. Someone stays awake."

"What's the point?" Sarah asks.

"Routine. Structure. It helps."

"Helps with what?"

Elena doesn't answer right away. When she does, her voice is quieter. "With not losing your mind."

So they agree. Three shifts. Eight hours each, though without watches or moving sun, the eight hours is purely theoretical. Marcus volunteers for first watch. Sarah suspects it's because he still can't accept that there's nothing to watch for, but she doesn't argue.

She and Elena settle against the wall on opposite sides of the pit. Far enough apart to have privacy, close enough that neither is completely alone. Sarah closes her eyes and tries to sleep, but her brain won't shut off. Too many questions. Too many things that don't make sense.

The pit is clean. That's what keeps nagging at her. Perfectly clean concrete. No dirt, no debris, no evidence that anything has ever happened here before. Like it was built yesterday specifically for the three of them.

But why?

She must fall asleep eventually because she dreams. In the dream she's at school, teaching her fourth period class about existentialism. She's explaining Sartre, something about hell being other people, when she realizes all her students have the same face. They're all Marcus, rows and rows of Marcus staring at her with that desperate problem-solving intensity.

She tries to continue the lesson but her voice comes out wrong. The words won't form. She looks down and realizes she's drawing her words in the air with blood-red ink, symbols that shimmer and twist and mean nothing at all.

When she wakes up, Elena's on watch and Marcus is asleep. The gray circle of sky hasn't changed. Time hasn't passed or has passed hours. There's no way to tell.

"How long was I out?" Sarah asks.

Elena shrugs. "Hard to say. A while."

"Did anything happen?"

"No. Nothing ever happens here. I think that might be the point."

Sarah pulls her knees up again, wrapping her arms around them. Elena's right. Nothing happens here. That's what makes it unbearable. Not danger or threat or even discomfort. Just the absolute neutrality of existence in a space designed for nothing except containing them.

"What do you think we did?" Sarah asks.

"What do you mean?"

"To end up here. Marcus is right about one thing—this isn't random. Someone put us here for a reason."

"Maybe," Elena says. "Or maybe there is no reason. Maybe the universe is just fucking with us."

"You really believe that?"

"I don't know what I believe anymore."

They sit in silence. After a while, Marcus wakes up. He looks around, seems briefly surprised to still be in the pit, then settles into resignation. The cycle continues. They take turns watching nothing happen. They have conversations that lead nowhere. They count the walls and the hours that may or may not be passing.

And the pit remains exactly what it is. Twenty feet across. Forty feet deep. Smooth concrete walls. A circle of unchanging sky. Three people learning what it means to exist without purpose or progression or hope.

Day one stretches into something that might be day two or might still be day one. Time stops having meaning. The pit becomes their entire universe.

And nothing changes.