Chapter twenty-one:

                                    

                                          
   Clarity felt like she was sitting there for three, maybe even four eternities. It was over a thousand times worse than when the scavengers had captured them and they'd had to wait for a while, such a short while. That had been nothing in comparison. She couldn't even move her head to look at her surroundings, which were about as interesting as the color gray anyways. The only plus was that she wasn't getting sore or numb, which was a relief.
                          
    It was limbo, and she was just as frozen as the land around her.
                          
   She didn't know when or how, or even why, but after a long, long, long time, she was finally able to get up. 
                          
   It happened just like the times before; Exactly like the first few times she'd dreamed the dream which wasn't really a dream, at all. She looked at the sky. She walked into the house. It was like she was on a set course. She couldn't think of anything better to do than do exactly what she'd done every other time she'd been there.
                          
   When she got to the part where she could hardly breathe, she was ready and willing to wake up and forget all about it, but she didn't wake up, she just lay there, panting for even the slightest breath of air. Her throat was clogged, her chest filled with cotton, her mouth glued shut.
                          
   She struggled endlessly to breathe. Her lungs didn't seem to want to cooperate. Her head was getting foggy with the lack of oxygen. She couldn't keep her eyes open any longer if she wanted to. If she died here, would she die in...
                          
   She gave up, then, unable to finish the thought. With one last heave, she gave up. She couldn't stay awake any longer. Not without air. But just as she was slipping away into the darkness, her lungs opened again, and she was able to suck in enough air to keep from passing out.
                          
    She had no clue why any of the dream was happening at all, nor why it had changed from its original course. She wished she could figure out why she hadn't woken up that time. She would give anything to wake up.
                          
   She struggled to her feet. She was shaky and weak, but at least she was still breathing. Still breathing. The air was sweet on her tongue, in her burning lungs. She stumbled out into the open air and found it even easier to breathe there. She collapsed into a patch of carrots, her back against the wall. 
                          
   She needed to catch her breath, if only a little bit of it.
                          
   She looked at the sky again. Her recently regained breath caught in her throat when she saw that, instead of a hardly-visible barrier holding the storm back, there was a thick, blueish-purple wall. It was barely translucent. She could hardly see the clouds churning beyond.
                          
   It had been cracking, so long ago, and now she knew that nothing could ever break through from beyond, where the storm was held back from releasing its rage. That was, inexplicably, very worrying. 
                          
   Clarity got up and turned around. She was completely baffled to find that the house, although perfect before, seemed to have gotten even cleaner. 
                          
   The paint was just a tad glossier, the doorknob was ever-so-slightly shinier, and the garden was a pinch more neat and tidy. Everything was impossibly perfect. She'd thought that it was perfect before, she was dead wrong. It had been dull and messy compared to how it looked now.
                          
  She mulled over it for a time that seemed like seconds compared to the infinity she'd spent frozen in place, and a thought occurred to her. 
                          
   The cleaner the house looked, the thicker the barrier in the sky became. One thought led to another, and she realized that there was a chance that she could get August to come back, even if it was just a fuzzy, television-screen version of him. She just had to wreck the house, and the barrier would crack enough for him to get through again, as he had before.