𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄'𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄? (𝗵.𝗮𝗸𝗶) ✓

23

The floor groaned, and began to tilt.

It was impossible. As if the hand of a giant had grabbed one end of the eighth floor and had slowly started to upend it, as casually as if it were part of a dollhouse. First a shiver had run through the entire structure of the building, like the dying breath of some large cement beast, and now it was keeling over, its great, stiff body succumbing to the forces of gravity.

And there they were, the motley seven, stuck right in its collapsing belly.

Everything appeared to be moving slowly through Hanasaki's eyes. When the first rumble signalled the gradual rotation of the floor, she thought she could feel each separate vibration as the foundations creaked and leaned in response to this immense exertion.

Kobeni was the first to stumble, a foot slipping on the treacherous hold of the carpet as the tilt hit about twenty degrees. Hanasaki, with her back against the wall, had nowhere to fall — she was on the new ground already.

In front of her was one of the beds. The bed was not on the new ground, and it most definitely had somewhere to fall.

What could the others do but either topple beside her onto the same wall, or grab onto something for dear life? It was surreal, almost, to sense the very material you rested on shift beneath your being, spinning on its axis lethargically like a miniature planet. She wondered, would they be trapped in this loop forever? Thrown about like dirty clothes in a wash cycle, with no other choice than to become victim to the laws of physics until something crushed them or the Devil got bored. And the latter seemed increasingly unlikely.

The lights flickered, a sudden black-out plunging the room into a thick gloom. Sounds were muffled to Hanasaki, but she could just make out the clatter of objects in the dark as the items on the bedside cabinets tumbled from their neat arrangements. Something roughly square-shaped hit her right wrist as the tilt reached forty degrees. She guessed it to be one of those small clocks that were the first indication that time had stopped on the eighth floor. As gravity pressed her torso and legs together, so she was half-sitting, half-lying on the new ground with her knees folded in front of her, she felt the clock rest by the curve of her hand.

The tilt had gotten to fifty degrees when the bed jolted an inch downwards, appearing to stop for a moment as the friction with the floor forced it to halt. The bulbs overhead spluttered back into shaky life, faltering between saturated yellow and brown, the shifting walls of the room repeatedly flashing into view and being swallowed by blackness again.

The space was illuminated for long enough initially for Hanasaki to see that the bed before her was moving, yes, just beginning to, the grip of its four wooden feet on the carpet failing with slow and dreadful surety. She didn't know quite why this was important until she realised that if the bed fell, it would do so right onto her, with a weight much larger than her own. Her head was just about level with its footboard. If it came down as quickly as she reckoned, and if the eighth floor would ever go back to being an ordinary hotel level, it would make it very hard to identify her body once they found it due to her face being completely smashed in.

The feet of the bed slipped. It rushed down the slope of the floor as smoothly as if it were made of butter, Hanasaki smack dab in the middle of the area of wall which it would ram into.

Her left hand flew to the face of the watch on her wrist.