Before I Wake Up
Every night, Nina Starling dreams of a collapsing iron bridge. A man named Ember Wildwood waits beneath the storm, always telling her the same words: "You're late." Then Nina wakes at 2:14 a.m. with the taste of river water in her throat. When she sees the same man alive on a subway platform, wearing the torn charcoal coat from her nightmare, she realizes the dream may be connected to something happening in the waking world.Ember does not recognize Nina. Doctors, records, and official databases insist that he does not exist, while people around Nina begin losing memories, documents, photographs, and physical traces of him. Her friend Quinn tries to keep her grounded, her sister Cora searches for a medical explanation, and Sylvie Ember's colleague provides evidence that the erasure is spreading. Together, they uncover a temporal phenomenon called the Threshold Horizon, tied to the bridge disaster Nina has relived night after night.The truth is more painful than a nightmare: Ember has been caught inside a repeating causal event, and Nina's memories are part of the mechanism keeping it alive. Each attempt to save him changes what the world remembers, while the clock moves relentlessly toward another 2:14 collapse.With the bridge once again approaching destruction, Nina must enter the nightmare while awake and confront the event that has controlled both their lives. To save Ember, she must do more than survive the collapse. She must break the cycle without allowing the world to erase the man she has finally learned to remember.Nina's investigation takes her from the subway and city archives to the abandoned structures surrounding the river, where physical evidence begins to contradict official history. The more she learns, the more she understands that her recurring dream is not simply predicting disaster; it is preserving fragments of a timeline that reality is actively trying to erase. Ember's own memories are unstable, but pieces of their connection survive in instinct, touch, and repeated details that the erasure cannot completely remove.The approaching storm brings every thread together. Nina, Ember, Quinn, Cora, and Sylvie must face the difference between accepting a fixed tragedy and changing it without creating another. The final confrontation returns Nina to the bridge where the nightmare began, forcing her to decide whether memory is something to escape or something strong enough to anchor a future.
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