u/Dr_AK_Myst

GROUNDS MAINTENANCE HANDBOOK
Property of:  [REDACTED] Village, Hokkaido, Japan
Issued to:  [REDACTED]

Position:  Groundskeeper

 

WELCOME

Congratulations on your appointment.

We are delighted to have you join us. We hope your time here is both rewarding and long-lasting. This handbook has been prepared to help you settle into your new role quickly and comfortably. Please read it in full before your first day, and keep it somewhere close by for reference throughout your time with us.

 

ABOUT US

This village was formally designated a genkai shūraku, or "marginal settlement," ten years ago. This classification is issued by the regional government, to villages where more than half the residents are 65 or older, with no meaningful younger population to sustain the community. Once a village receives this designation, it is generally considered a matter of time before they are abandoned. Residents pass away or relocate, and no one arrives to replace them.

However, [REDACTED] village did not follow that pattern.

Rather than allow the population to decline, longtime residents began supplementing the community with lifelike dolls. The dolls are placed in homes, yards, and along the main paths throughout the village. These dolls are dressed, seated, and maintained daily, and are treated by staff and residents alike with utmost respect. Visitors are asked to extend the dolls the same courtesy and care they would offer any other resident.

The dolls require regular upkeep to remain presentable and undamaged, which is where your role comes in. As groundskeeper, a significant portion of your responsibilities will involve their maintenance, alongside the general upkeep of the grounds. Please review the following rules of operation carefully, as they reflect years of established practice for keeping both the village and its residents in good condition.

 

YOUR EMPLOYER

Your position has been posted, contracted, and will be personally overseen by Mama Yorie, the village's longest-standing resident.

Mama Yorie has lived in the village longer than any other person, living or otherwise. She personally reviews every applicant for the groundskeeper position, and personally approved your hire. She will be your primary point of contact for questions, concerns, and instructions not covered in this handbook.

Mama Yorie takes a personal interest in the wellbeing of everyone under her care, residents and staff alike. She is known throughout the village for her generosity, her hospitality, and the extraordinary lengths she has gone to in order to keep this community intact. Past groundskeepers have described her as warm, attentive, and easy to work for, provided her instructions are followed closely and without deviation.

You will most likely meet her on your first day, during your morning rounds, or whenever she has need of you. She does not require advance notice to call on your assistance, and she expects the same courtesy in return.

Please proceed to the following rules, which reflect her standing expectations for the household and its grounds.

 

RULES OF OPERATION

 

1.       Your rounds begin at sunrise and end at dusk. Mama Yorie does not require you to work past dark, but you are welcome to, if a doll needs finishing before the dew sets in.

 

2.       The dolls are placed throughout the village. Do not relocate one without asking first. Moving a doll without permission upsets the arrangement Mama Yorie has spent years perfecting.

 

3.       Dust the seated dolls each morning, gently, along the shoulders and collar. Avoid pressing near the throat, since bruising there takes longer to fade than expected, especially in the older ones.

 

 

4.       When washing the hands and feet of the dolls, use warm water only. Cold water makes them flinch, and a flinch in one tends to unsettle the others nearby.

 

5.       Some dolls are heavier than they look. Always lift the dolls from the base, never the torso. Improper handling makes them produce a sound that Mama Yorie does not like hearing.

 

 

6.       The hair in most of the dolls keeps growing. Trim it whenever it starts curling past the collar. For the dolls, use the small shears only. The large ones stay in the shed, for the fence line only.

 

7.       If a doll has shifted position overnight, simply return it to where it was. They get restless before their monthly dose, same as anyone would.

 

 

8.       Feeding the dolls is a task assigned to the locals. You may be asked to hold the tin. Hold it steady. Do not look away, and do not look too closely either.

 

9.       If you notice wet residue near a doll's eyes, do not wipe it away in front of Mama Yorie. She prefers to do that herself.

 

10.  Some of the dolls will still respond to their old names if you utter them. Always use the name on the collar tag instead.

 

 

11.  Loud tools should be used slowly near the east row. Sudden noise startles the dolls there. You will learn the sound they make when startled. You will get used to it. Everyone does, eventually.

 

12.  If a doll's skin twitches under your hand while cleaning it, say nothing and continue. This is called settling, and it gets better with each subsequent dose.

 

13.  Repairs near a seated doll should be done with the doll present. You can talk to it if you feel like it. They like it, even if they can no longer answer back.

 

 

14.  If you rest a hand flat against a doll's chest while repositioning it, you may feel a faint rhythm beneath the seams. It is a sign of their heart still beating. This is normal, and requires no action. It grows fainter the longer the settling goes, and disappears entirely within a few years.

 

15.  If you find a doll somewhere it shouldn't be (e.g. past the gate, facing a direction it was not placed to face etc.), fetch Mama Yorie. Do not speak to it while you wait, no matter what it says.

 

16.  A damaged doll should never be discarded. Bring it to the workshop and leave it exactly as found. Mama Yorie will decide what's to be done, like she always does.

 

 

17.  Wages are paid at month's end, in full. If you are offered your wages early, decline immediately. Early payment means Mama Yorie no longer expects you to need them.

 

18.  Homesickness past the first month should be mentioned to no one, because Mama Yorie interprets longing for home as an ailment worth curing. If you must speak it aloud, tell the dolls. They understand exactly what you mean, better than anyone.

 

 

19.  Your contract is valid for one year. Contracts here have never once needed renewing, thanks to Mama Yorie.

 

20.  If you ever experience the following symptoms- slower hands, heavier limbs, stiffness in the neck, reluctance to leave your seat- please don’t fight it. That is just a sign of the dose already working. Be patient, take some rest, and accept it as a blessing. Mama Yorie will find you a good spot for you, the same way she finds it, for everyone who stays long enough to call this place home.

 

Thank you for accepting this position. Mama Yorie asks that you take pride in your work, as every groundskeeper before you has. The grounds are in good hands with you, and you will find, in time, that the grounds have a way of returning the favor.

Please sign and date below to confirm receipt of this handbook.

Signature: _
Date: _

 

 

Investigator's note: The signature line above is blank in the recovered copy. No date of receipt was recorded.

 

EXHIBIT 12
In the Matter of the Disappearance of J.K.
Case No. [REDACTED]-2026
Submitted into evidence by: [REDACTED] Prefectural Police, Missing Persons Division

The document was recovered from the personal effects of the missing individual, identified in this filing as J.K., during a search of his last known residence. It is entered into the record as Exhibit 12, and has been reproduced here, in full for the purposes of investigation and review.

The name of the settlement referenced in this document, along with the identity of the individual's on-site supervisor, has been withheld from this filing pending further inquiry. All other content is reproduced without alteration from the original.

J.K. was reported missing by the staffing agency that placed him in his position, after his contract lapsed without the standard end-of-term paperwork being filed. No further communication from J.K. has been recorded since [DATE REDACTED], approximately eleven months into his one-year term. This document remains the most recent material evidence of his employment and whereabouts prior to his disappearance.

Members of the public with information relevant to this case are asked to contact the Missing Persons Division directly. This filing does not constitute a finding of fact regarding the circumstances of J.K.'s disappearance.

[END OF EXHIBIT 12 ]

 

I mean that with more sincerity than you'll probably believe. You didn't fail because you were careless. You failed because you stopped a few feet too early, hesitated a second too long, or maybe just got unlucky with the angle. I'm not upset with you. If anything, I've spent the last five days hoping you'd come back and do it properly.

I don't remember the sound of the impact. The first thing that I actually remember is the light. They were headlights- high beam, closer and brighter than they should’ve gotten before anyone touches the brakes. The next thing I remember is the ground. And then came the pain. At least I think it was pain, because honestly- it felt… different. It was more like my body reporting damage to me, from somewhere very far away, like a phone call with bad reception.

I was on my back. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I could barely keep my eyes open more than a slit. But I could hear everything, and I mean everything, with a clarity that still unsettles me more than the accident itself. And somewhere underneath the hearing, in a part of my head that I didn't know existed, I could feel you. Both of you.

Please don’t panic. I didn’t see you, so I don’t have the faintest idea what you look like. But I could feel you, vividly, the way you'd feel two different heat sources in a dark room. I could sense your presence as two separate rivers of blood, moving at two different speeds, across two distinct network of vessels.

The car door opened first. I heard some quick, panicked footsteps. It belonged to a girl, light and uneven.

"Oh my god ! Oh my god, is he breathing? We need to call an ambulance, we need to call someone right now…"

Her blood ran fast and thin. It was jittery, the way a struck bell is jittery, still ringing a while after the strike. There was something in it, some kind of haze perhaps. But it moved clean under the haze, like water that still moves clean under a little bit of mud.

The second door took longer. Heavier footsteps, dragging slightly, unhurried. And that’s when I heard your voice, a man’s voice-

“Come on, get back in the car !”

“Honey, we just hit someone ! We can’t just…”

“Baby, baby, just look at him !”

I heard a wet laugh, one that comes from far back in the throat.

"You think anybody's gonna miss this guy? Look at where we are. This is basically nowhere ! No cameras out here, no houses, no nothing. Ain’t nobody gonna know we were ever on this road. Just chill out, will ya?"

Your blood was nothing like hers. It surged and dragged in the same breath, thick in some places and racing in others. It felt polluted, dense with something chemical, and underneath that, there was something sharper that I'd later learn to recognize.

"Please, can we just call for help and go, I don't want him to…"

"He's fine. Trust me, guys like this get hit all the time and walk it off. Probably passed out drunk in the middle of the road anyway. Homeless piece of shit ! This ain't even our problem to fix…"

I don’t know why you said that, but you were wrong. I’m not homeless. Yes, I do live in the shoddiest location on the outskirts of the city, close to the highway, in one of those shacks with the lowest rent and highest noise. It’s not much, but it still qualifies as a home. And I also want you to know that I’m not an alcoholic. But I understand why I may look like one, since I hardly take care of myself, thanks to the multiple odd jobs that I juggle to make a living.

I wanted to say these to your face, but I couldn’t. And I couldn’t stop you from laughing and letting out a short ugly bark.

"You know how many times we've driven this road? Hundred times, easy. First time anything's happened. That's not bad luck, baby, that's just tonight being tonight. Now calm down and get in the car..."

"But-but what if he…"

"Just get in the car, bitch !" Your voice dropped, flat and mean underneath the slur. "Or I swear to god I’ll leave ya standing here with him !"

I wanted to tell you that I hadn't been standing anywhere to begin with. I don't remember walking onto Harrison Drive. I never have, for the past six nights.

Her footsteps hesitated. She moved towards me, then away from me, and pulled back like something on a leash. The car doors closed. The engine caught and revved once, showing off for no one. Then there was a sound, which eventually thinned into the distance. There was nothing left but the two currents fading with it. Hers steady and shaken, yours loud and reckless, both of them gone.

I lay there a long time after that. Long enough that the cold of the asphalt stopped registering as cold. Long enough that I stopped being afraid, because the dark night was suddenly feeling like a warm embrace. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, because trust me- it didn’t make sense to me either.

Still doesn’t…

I don't know how long I stayed like that on Harrison Drive before I heard the van. It slowed down first, then stopped a good distance away. I heard a door open, cautious footsteps this time, nothing like yours or hers. I heard a man's voice, much older than the both of you-

“Oh my god ! Hey, can you hear me?”

His touch felt… compassionate. More importantly, his blood felt different from both of yours. I remember thinking, in whatever was left of my head at that point, that it felt clean. I didn't have a word yet for why that mattered to me.

I do now, and I wish I didn't…

He called for an ambulance. I remember being lifted. I remember lights, sirens, and someone counting numbers that I understood, but couldn't respond to. I remember opening my eyes to see a hospital ceiling, white and bright. And I remember the quiet, steady beeping of a machine, a sound that I’ve now come to know all too well.

The first thing I noticed, once I could think clearly again, was how much better I felt, being surrounded by people whose blood didn't feel wrong. Nurses moving in and out of the room, doctors checking charts, a cleaner mopping the hallway outside my door- none of it screamed at me the way yours did. Most of it barely registered at all, which was its own kind of relief.

The doctors were confused almost immediately. I heard two of them talking outside my door on the second day, using words like-

"unusually rapid"

"inconsistent with the imaging"

“remarkable prognosis”

Thinking about it now, I understand why they used those words. Fractures that should’ve taken six to eight weeks were already knitting by day three. Internal bruising that should have deepened was fading instead. One of them asked me, half-joking, if I'd always healed this fast. I told him I didn't know. And trust me, that was almost the truth.

Almost.

The police came on day three. A tired-looking officer, and a younger one who did most of the actual writing. They asked what I remembered. I told them about the headlights, the impact, and the ambulance. Nothing about the voices. Nothing about a girl's shaking hands on a steering wheel. Nothing about a man calling me a homeless piece of shit, before telling her to get back in the car.

I don't fully know why I lied. Some of it, I think, was for her. She sounded young, and scared, and like someone who might still turn out fine if nothing else ever happened to her. But if I'm being honest with myself, most of it was for you.

I need you free. I need you driving. I need you to still have access to that car, and to Harrison Drive, and to whatever's left of the nerve it took to leave a man broken on the road and not look back.

They told me today that I'll be discharged in two days. I should feel relieved, but I don't. I've started noticing things about myself in this hospital bed. Things that I didn't notice on the road. Things that I shouldn’t say out loud.

As I’m typing this on my phone, I can’t stop thinking about the nurse who’s been assigned to me. Believe me, I don't mean that in the way it probably sounds. I think about how kind and professional she is in her approach. I think about her voice, that is deliberately soft, in the specific way people use when they think you might still be fragile.

And I also think about her blood, more than I'd like to admit.

Again, I'm not imagining anything violent. You know how a smell from your childhood kitchen can stop you mid-thought, for reasons you can’t explain? I sense her blood in a similar way. Her blood moves warm and unhurried, the way yours never did, and the way your girl's only halfway did.

And when I keep waking up at two in the morning, when the ward is quiet except for the sound of the machine- I find myself wondering, in a very calm way, what it would taste like.

I want to be clear that I don't want to hurt her. I want you to understand that distinction, because I'm not sure I'll be able to make it much longer.

There's a duty doctor who does rounds around one in the morning- a man who smells faintly of cigarettes, even through the antiseptic, even through the gloves. I can feel the nicotine in him, the way you notice a stain on a shirt that someone's tried to wash out. I've caught myself wondering whether that would make him taste better or worse. Sharper, maybe. Bitter, in an interesting way. I hate that my mind goes there. I hate more that it goes there without my permission, and the fact that it’s getting harder to make it stop.

A resident drew blood from me yesterday morning, a routine panel before discharge. I watched the vial as it filled. And I caught myself doing the same thing I do with everyone else, except this time it was mine. I don't have the words for what I felt looking at it. It was not clean, not polluted either. Something else entirely. Something I didn't recognize as human, and didn't recognize as anything else either.

I’ve been suspecting that something’s seriously wrong with me, ever since I did that trial. Three sessions, two injections each time. A stipend that covered two months of rent, in exchange for filling out questionnaires, and letting them draw blood before and after. I remember signing sheets of paperwork, in a form of English that was way too complex for someone like me. It had words like Desmodus rotundus- the only one that I can recall right now. I didn't ask for an explanation. I needed the money, more than I needed the answers. I signed it anyway. Everyone in that waiting room signed it anyway.

The sleepwalking started four nights after the last session. I found myself on Harrison Drive every time, a little further from home with each night that passed. I never connected it to the trial, to be honest. At least, not until I was lying in this bed, watching a vial of my own blood look like nothing I'd ever seen before.

During the day, I'm tired in a way that feels almost drugged. But somewhere around midnight, without fail, something in me switches on. My mind sharpens. My hearing stretches further down the hallway than it should. And even with my eyes closed, I can sense the presence of every single person on the floor- the patients sleeping peacefully, the nurses changing shifts, the cleaners mopping the floor silently.

I haven't told anyone about of this. Not the doctors who check up on me twice a day. Not the police, who came back once more, to confirm a few details for their report. I mean, what would I even say? That I can taste distance in blood? That I've started flinching at the blinds in the morning? That some part of me, a part that gets louder every night, is starting to feel less like a passenger in my own body, and more like it's waiting to escape?

What I can say is- I don't know what I am anymore. I know what I'm becoming feels less like an illness, and more like an inheritance, something that I agreed to the moment I signed up for that trial. You know, the one that paid better than all of my jobs combined. The one where I didn't ask enough questions, because the money mattered more than the fine print.

I also know one more thing, and it's the only thing that matters right now-

I need you to come back, before I find out what happens if you don't.

I'm writing this tonight, hoping that this message will find you, in one way or another. I’m doing this because I don't know how else to reach you. And because, out of everyone I've encountered on that road, you're the only one who can actually help me now.

You should know that you're not the first. But you know what makes you different from the others who hit me, or nearly hit me? They chose to brake. Every time, without fail, some instinct took over before they even decided to. A few have honked their horns and kept driving, annoyed more than alarmed. Some have stopped, gotten out, and asked if I was alright. One woman even offered to drive me home if I was in some kind of danger. Every single one of them, in their own way, chose to be decent.

But you? You didn't brake. You didn't slow down afterward. You called me a homeless piece of shit, and I know that you meant it. You told her to get back in the car, and then you drove off like nothing happened. You know- some part of me has been grateful for that, ever since I woke up in this bed. You are, as far as I can tell, the only person cruel enough to actually finish something. That makes you the right person for this.

Trust me- I don't say that as an insult. I say it because I need it to be true.

I remember the front of your car, or what little of it I caught, before the light swallowed everything. It was low and sleek- the kind of shape that costs more than I make in two years combined. I remember you bragging to her that you'd driven Harrison Drive ‘a hundred times’ without incident, which tells me that you'll drive it again. Probably soon, and probably at the same hour, because people like you don't change their habits over one bad night.

They’re discharging me in two days, which equals to seven days, almost to the hour, since you ran me over. I intend to go back to Harrison Drive myself, deliberately, at the same hour it happened. This time, I’ll be wide awake. And this time- I don't plan on calling it an accident.

I need you to hit me harder this time. I need you to not brake at all, not even out of instinct, not even for a second. If you can, and I mean this sincerely, get the car looked at before you come back. Reinforce the front bumper, if you can afford it, which I suspect you can. Whatever it takes to make sure that this time, there's nothing left of me to recover in a hospital bed. I don't say that out of despair, though I understand if it reads that way. I say it because- I've learned some things about myself this week, things that I can never un-learn. So I want this to be over, once and for all, before I find out what I do next.

I want you to do it, just like the last time you did it. Do it twice, if the first hit isn't enough. Three times, if you have to. I won't move to protect myself. I won't call for help. I won't remember to be afraid, not anymore, not in the way I used to be.

There's only one thing I need from you in return, and it matters more than anything else I've written here.

Whatever happens, don't get out of the car. Don't come back to check on me. Don't do what that van driver did five days ago. Don't be curious. Don't be decent. Don't let whatever's left of your conscience talk you into getting close to me. Drive away, exactly the way you did the first time, and don't stop until you're somewhere far away from that road.

I am asking you this because I believe, more than anything I've believed in for a long time, that you can finish what you started.

And because I’m no longer sure what I'll do to you if you don't.

Whoever ran me over on Harrison Drive, better luck next time.

Please don't miss…

Because I won’t.

 

 

I mean that with more sincerity than you'll probably believe. You didn't fail because you were careless. You failed because you stopped a few feet too early, hesitated a second too long, or maybe just got unlucky with the angle. I'm not upset with you. If anything, I've spent the last five days hoping you'd come back and do it properly.

I don't remember the sound of the impact. The first thing that I actually remember is the light. They were headlights- high beam, closer and brighter than they should’ve gotten before anyone touches the brakes. The next thing I remember is the ground. And then came the pain. At least I think it was pain, because honestly- it felt… different. It was more like my body reporting damage to me, from somewhere very far away, like a phone call with bad reception.

I was on my back. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I could barely keep my eyes open more than a slit. But I could hear everything, and I mean everything, with a clarity that still unsettles me more than the accident itself. And somewhere underneath the hearing, in a part of my head that I didn't know existed, I could feel you. Both of you.

Please don’t panic. I didn’t see you, so I don’t have the faintest idea what you look like. But I could feel you, vividly, the way you'd feel two different heat sources in a dark room. I could sense your presence as two separate rivers of blood, moving at two different speeds, across two distinct network of vessels.

The car door opened first. I heard some quick, panicked footsteps. It belonged to a girl, light and uneven.

"Oh my god ! Oh my god, is he breathing? We need to call an ambulance, we need to call someone right now…"

Her blood ran fast and thin. It was jittery, the way a struck bell is jittery, still ringing a while after the strike. There was something in it, some kind of haze perhaps. But it moved clean under the haze, like water that still moves clean under a little bit of mud.

The second door took longer. Heavier footsteps, dragging slightly, unhurried. And that’s when I heard your voice, a man’s voice-

“Come on, get back in the car !”

“Honey, we just hit someone ! We can’t just…”

“Baby, baby, just look at him !”

I heard a wet laugh, one that comes from far back in the throat.

"You think anybody's gonna miss this guy? Look at where we are. This is basically nowhere ! No cameras out here, no houses, no nothing. Ain’t nobody gonna know we were ever on this road. Just chill out, will ya?"

Your blood was nothing like hers. It surged and dragged in the same breath, thick in some places and racing in others. It felt polluted, dense with something chemical, and underneath that, there was something sharper that I'd later learn to recognize.

"Please, can we just call for help and go, I don't want him to…"

"He's fine. Trust me, guys like this get hit all the time and walk it off. Probably passed out drunk in the middle of the road anyway. Homeless piece of shit ! This ain't even our problem to fix…"

I don’t know why you said that, but you were wrong. I’m not homeless. Yes, I do live in the shoddiest location on the outskirts of the city, close to the highway, in one of those shacks with the lowest rent and highest noise. It’s not much, but it still qualifies as a home. And I also want you to know that I’m not an alcoholic. But I understand why I may look like one, since I hardly take care of myself, thanks to the multiple odd jobs that I juggle to make a living.

I wanted to say these to your face, but I couldn’t. And I couldn’t stop you from laughing and letting out a short ugly bark.

"You know how many times we've driven this road? Hundred times, easy. First time anything's happened. That's not bad luck, baby, that's just tonight being tonight. Now calm down and get in the car..."

"But-but what if he…"

"Just get in the car, bitch !" Your voice dropped, flat and mean underneath the slur. "Or I swear to god I’ll leave ya standing here with him !"

I wanted to tell you that I hadn't been standing anywhere to begin with. I don't remember walking onto Harrison Drive. I never have, for the past six nights.

Her footsteps hesitated. She moved towards me, then away from me, and pulled back like something on a leash. The car doors closed. The engine caught and revved once, showing off for no one. Then there was a sound, which eventually thinned into the distance. There was nothing left but the two currents fading with it. Hers steady and shaken, yours loud and reckless, both of them gone.

I lay there a long time after that. Long enough that the cold of the asphalt stopped registering as cold. Long enough that I stopped being afraid, because the dark night was suddenly feeling like a warm embrace. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, because trust me- it didn’t make sense to me either.

Still doesn’t…

I don't know how long I stayed like that on Harrison Drive before I heard the van. It slowed down first, then stopped a good distance away. I heard a door open, cautious footsteps this time, nothing like yours or hers. I heard a man's voice, much older than the both of you-

“Oh my god ! Hey, can you hear me?”

His touch felt… compassionate. More importantly, his blood felt different from both of yours. I remember thinking, in whatever was left of my head at that point, that it felt clean. I didn't have a word yet for why that mattered to me.

I do now, and I wish I didn't…

He called for an ambulance. I remember being lifted. I remember lights, sirens, and someone counting numbers that I understood, but couldn't respond to. I remember opening my eyes to see a hospital ceiling, white and bright. And I remember the quiet, steady beeping of a machine, a sound that I’ve now come to know all too well.

The first thing I noticed, once I could think clearly again, was how much better I felt, being surrounded by people whose blood didn't feel wrong. Nurses moving in and out of the room, doctors checking charts, a cleaner mopping the hallway outside my door- none of it screamed at me the way yours did. Most of it barely registered at all, which was its own kind of relief.

The doctors were confused almost immediately. I heard two of them talking outside my door on the second day, using words like-

"unusually rapid"

"inconsistent with the imaging"

“remarkable prognosis”

Thinking about it now, I understand why they used those words. Fractures that should’ve taken six to eight weeks were already knitting by day three. Internal bruising that should have deepened was fading instead. One of them asked me, half-joking, if I'd always healed this fast. I told him I didn't know. And trust me, that was almost the truth.

Almost.

The police came on day three. A tired-looking officer, and a younger one who did most of the actual writing. They asked what I remembered. I told them about the headlights, the impact, and the ambulance. Nothing about the voices. Nothing about a girl's shaking hands on a steering wheel. Nothing about a man calling me a homeless piece of shit, before telling her to get back in the car.

I don't fully know why I lied. Some of it, I think, was for her. She sounded young, and scared, and like someone who might still turn out fine if nothing else ever happened to her. But if I'm being honest with myself, most of it was for you.

I need you free. I need you driving. I need you to still have access to that car, and to Harrison Drive, and to whatever's left of the nerve it took to leave a man broken on the road and not look back.

They told me today that I'll be discharged in two days. I should feel relieved, but I don't. I've started noticing things about myself in this hospital bed. Things that I didn't notice on the road. Things that I shouldn’t say out loud.

As I’m typing this on my phone, I can’t stop thinking about the nurse who’s been assigned to me. Believe me, I don't mean that in the way it probably sounds. I think about how kind and professional she is in her approach. I think about her voice, that is deliberately soft, in the specific way people use when they think you might still be fragile.

And I also think about her blood, more than I'd like to admit.

Again, I'm not imagining anything violent. You know how a smell from your childhood kitchen can stop you mid-thought, for reasons you can’t explain? I sense her blood in a similar way. Her blood moves warm and unhurried, the way yours never did, and the way your girl's only halfway did.

And when I keep waking up at two in the morning, when the ward is quiet except for the sound of the machine- I find myself wondering, in a very calm way, what it would taste like.

I want to be clear that I don't want to hurt her. I want you to understand that distinction, because I'm not sure I'll be able to make it much longer.

There's a duty doctor who does rounds around one in the morning- a man who smells faintly of cigarettes, even through the antiseptic, even through the gloves. I can feel the nicotine in him, the way you notice a stain on a shirt that someone's tried to wash out. I've caught myself wondering whether that would make him taste better or worse. Sharper, maybe. Bitter, in an interesting way. I hate that my mind goes there. I hate more that it goes there without my permission, and the fact that it’s getting harder to make it stop.

A resident drew blood from me yesterday morning, a routine panel before discharge. I watched the vial as it filled. And I caught myself doing the same thing I do with everyone else, except this time it was mine. I don't have the words for what I felt looking at it. It was not clean, not polluted either. Something else entirely. Something I didn't recognize as human, and didn't recognize as anything else either.

I’ve been suspecting that something’s seriously wrong with me, ever since I did that trial. Three sessions, two injections each time. A stipend that covered two months of rent, in exchange for filling out questionnaires, and letting them draw blood before and after. I remember signing sheets of paperwork, in a form of English that was way too complex for someone like me. It had words like Desmodus rotundus- the only one that I can recall right now. I didn't ask for an explanation. I needed the money, more than I needed the answers. I signed it anyway. Everyone in that waiting room signed it anyway.

The sleepwalking started four nights after the last session. I found myself on Harrison Drive every time, a little further from home with each night that passed. I never connected it to the trial, to be honest. At least, not until I was lying in this bed, watching a vial of my own blood look like nothing I'd ever seen before.

During the day, I'm tired in a way that feels almost drugged. But somewhere around midnight, without fail, something in me switches on. My mind sharpens. My hearing stretches further down the hallway than it should. And even with my eyes closed, I can sense the presence of every single person on the floor- the patients sleeping peacefully, the nurses changing shifts, the cleaners mopping the floor silently.

I haven't told anyone about of this. Not the doctors who check up on me twice a day. Not the police, who came back once more, to confirm a few details for their report. I mean, what would I even say? That I can taste distance in blood? That I've started flinching at the blinds in the morning? That some part of me, a part that gets louder every night, is starting to feel less like a passenger in my own body, and more like it's waiting to escape?

What I can say is- I don't know what I am anymore. I know what I'm becoming feels less like an illness, and more like an inheritance, something that I agreed to the moment I signed up for that trial. You know, the one that paid better than all of my jobs combined. The one where I didn't ask enough questions, because the money mattered more than the fine print.

I also know one more thing, and it's the only thing that matters right now-

I need you to come back, before I find out what happens if you don't.

I'm writing this tonight, hoping that this message will find you, in one way or another. I’m doing this because I don't know how else to reach you. And because, out of everyone I've encountered on that road, you're the only one who can actually help me now.

You should know that you're not the first. But you know what makes you different from the others who hit me, or nearly hit me? They chose to brake. Every time, without fail, some instinct took over before they even decided to. A few have honked their horns and kept driving, annoyed more than alarmed. Some have stopped, gotten out, and asked if I was alright. One woman even offered to drive me home if I was in some kind of danger. Every single one of them, in their own way, chose to be decent.

But you? You didn't brake. You didn't slow down afterward. You called me a homeless piece of shit, and I know that you meant it. You told her to get back in the car, and then you drove off like nothing happened. You know- some part of me has been grateful for that, ever since I woke up in this bed. You are, as far as I can tell, the only person cruel enough to actually finish something. That makes you the right person for this.

Trust me- I don't say that as an insult. I say it because I need it to be true.

I remember the front of your car, or what little of it I caught, before the light swallowed everything. It was low and sleek- the kind of shape that costs more than I make in two years combined. I remember you bragging to her that you'd driven Harrison Drive ‘a hundred times’ without incident, which tells me that you'll drive it again. Probably soon, and probably at the same hour, because people like you don't change their habits over one bad night.

They’re discharging me in two days, which equals to seven days, almost to the hour, since you ran me over. I intend to go back to Harrison Drive myself, deliberately, at the same hour it happened. This time, I’ll be wide awake. And this time- I don't plan on calling it an accident.

I need you to hit me harder this time. I need you to not brake at all, not even out of instinct, not even for a second. If you can, and I mean this sincerely, get the car looked at before you come back. Reinforce the front bumper, if you can afford it, which I suspect you can. Whatever it takes to make sure that this time, there's nothing left of me to recover in a hospital bed. I don't say that out of despair, though I understand if it reads that way. I say it because- I've learned some things about myself this week, things that I can never un-learn. So I want this to be over, once and for all, before I find out what I do next.

I want you to do it, just like the last time you did it. Do it twice, if the first hit isn't enough. Three times, if you have to. I won't move to protect myself. I won't call for help. I won't remember to be afraid, not anymore, not in the way I used to be.

There's only one thing I need from you in return, and it matters more than anything else I've written here.

Whatever happens, don't get out of the car. Don't come back to check on me. Don't do what that van driver did five days ago. Don't be curious. Don't be decent. Don't let whatever's left of your conscience talk you into getting close to me. Drive away, exactly the way you did the first time, and don't stop until you're somewhere far away from that road.

I am asking you this because I believe, more than anything I've believed in for a long time, that you can finish what you started.

And because I’m no longer sure what I'll do to you if you don't.

Whoever ran me over on Harrison Drive, better luck next time.

Please don't miss…

Because I won’t.

My name is Jamal, and this is my dying declaration.

Or maybe it isn't. I'm not really sure, to be honest.

I'm not sure if what's coming for me is worse than dying, or better, or something different entirely. That's not me being dramatic. It's just who I am. I’ve never been sure about anything in my whole life. I second-guess directions I've walked a hundred times. Indecision isn't a flaw I have, it is a part of my identity.

But I’ve always been sure about what I wanted to do for a living.

I was seven years old when my father took me to get my hair cut, by a man named Mr. Munshi. His shop was called ‘The Seven Scissors’. It was small and dim, smelling like talc and old wood. Mr. Munshi didn't speak more than four words the entire time. But I watched his hands. I watched the way the scissors moved like they weren't being held, like they were an extension of something older than his arm. I walked out of that shop and told my father, with the kind of certainty a seven-year-old has no right to, that I was going to do that too.

It's the only decision I've never once doubted.

I know it might sound weird to you. But in the country I grew up in, barbering isn’t just a trade. It is closer to a calling, the kind of profession old men speak about, the way they'd speak about a poet or a soldier.

And in the lane where I grew up, no name carried more weight than The Seven Scissors.

I didn't learn the full story until much later. Pieces of it, anyway, from old men in the market who liked to talk a little too much. Decades before I was born, seven barbering families had crowded into that same short stretch of shops. All of them fought for the same customers, the same reputation, the same right to call themselves the best. People jokingly called it the Barber Wars. And from what I’ve heard, things got vicious. Sabotaged appointments. Stolen apprentices. Rumors spread deliberately to ruin a rival's name.

Six of those families had money, charm, and generations of technique behind them. The seventh had almost nothing. A dying shop, a mountain of debt, and a young man who'd inherited a business he had no right to survive in. That man was Mr. Munshi.

By the time I was old enough to understand what any of that meant, Mr. Munshi’s shop was the only one left standing. He was the undisputed winner of the Barber Wars. The other six shops had been absorbed, gone, or renamed under his. Nobody knew how a man with no talent, no money, and no name, had outlasted six families who had all three.

I didn't know either. And I wish it stayed that way…

By the time I was fourteen, my mother had passed. A year later, my father remarried. I suddenly had a stepmother. And with her came her son from a previous marriage- a quiet kid named Rahim. He attached himself to me almost immediately, the way younger kids do when they've decided you're worth admiring. I wasn't always kind to him. I was fifteen and grieving, and I didn't want a brother I hadn't asked for. But he kept showing up anyway, like my indifference was a puzzle he was determined to solve.

My father died when I was sixteen, and everything he'd built went with him. All of it was swallowed by debts I didn't understand fully. We lost the house first, followed by the small businesses he used to own. I dropped out of school. Not because I wanted to, but because there was suddenly no version of my future that included tuition fees. There was a massive fight- over what little remained, over blame, over who had let the businesses fail. I said things to my stepmother, and to Rahim, things that I've never quite forgiven myself for. When the dust settled, I walked away from all of it. I didn’t know if I’ll ever have a place to call home again.

What I did know, with a stubborn certainty, was that I wanted to cut hair for a living. And I wanted to learn from the only man who lit that fire inside me.

I went to The Seven Scissors, and asked Mr. Munshi to take me on as an apprentice.

He looked at me for a long time before he said anything. I remember thinking, even then, that he wasn't really looking at my face, but my hands. Then he said,

"You'll sweep the floor for a year before you touch a single head."

I said fine. I would’ve said fine to almost anything.

I ended up staying five years.

Those years are hard to describe in order, because most of what I remember isn't a single event, but a texture- the smell of talc that never left my clothes, the ache in my forearms after a twelve-hour day, and the particular silence of a man who genuinely didn’t care about anything except his work.

Mr. Munshi didn't talk. Not about politics, not about family, not about himself. If you asked him a question that had nothing to do with cutting hair, he'd either ignore you, or answer with something so short that it barely qualified as language. He was one of those rare people, who had narrowed his entire existence down to one obsession, and simply let everything else atrophy around it.

I was the opposite. I couldn't stop noticing everything else.

Customers used to talk while they waited, the way people do in small shops. I observed two of them in particular, a pair of businessmen who came in every few weeks, always mid-conversation about some new venture. They became an accidental education for me. I didn't understand half of what they said, but I absorbed the words like a sponge.

Scaling. Optimizing. Maximizing.

They talked about businesses the way Mr. Munshi talked about scissors, like the words themselves were sacred. I started turning those words over in my head while I swept the floor. I started looking at our shop- one chair, one mirror, a queue that sometimes stretched into the lane. And I couldn’t stop thinking,

‘This could be SO much more than this !’

I pitched Mr. Munshi constantly. Why can’t we have a second chair? Or maybe a sign that didn't look thirty years overdue for repainting? How about a price increase then, just a modest one?

Every single idea was shot down. Sometimes he wouldn't even look up from what he was doing. Just a small shake of his head, like I hadn't said anything worth acknowledging. Other times, rarely, something in him would flare. He'd say something sharp enough to end the conversation entirely. But he never actually explained why he acted up the way he did, when the shop could definitely use some scaling, optimizing, and maximizing.

There was one time I didn't just pitch an idea, but acted on it. I'd been saving tips for months at that point. It was enough to buy a quarter-page slot in the local newspaper-

The Seven Scissors: best barbershop in the city. Walk-ins welcome. Ask for Jamal.

Yeah, it was cheesy. And yes, I put my own name on it. But trust me, it worked.

It ran on a Thursday. By Saturday, the queue outside the shop had nearly doubled, spilling further into the lane than I'd ever seen it. Mr. Munshi found out around midday, when a customer complimented him on "finally advertising properly" and asked, half-joking, if he could finally afford a second chair now. I watched his face change in real time. It was not confusion, not curiosity. Something closer to alarm, quickly buried under something colder.

He didn't say anything until the shop emptied that evening. Then he asked me, very quietly, if I'd placed an ad. I said yes, thinking that the doubled queue would speak for itself.

I’ve never seen him like what happened next. He didn't shout exactly. It was worse than shouting. His voice dropped into something low and shaking, and he asked me, again and again, who told me I could do that, who told me I had any right to put this shop's name in front of that many people at once. He told me that I didn't understand what I'd just done, and that I didn't understand anything at all.

‘You should be thanking me !’ I exclaimed, ‘Don’t you see the potential of maximizing profits? Don’t you see that the business is getting scaled?’

Suddenly, he stopped. He sat down on the sweeping stool, like his legs had given out. He put his head in his hands, and spoke so quietly that I almost missed it.

"Jamal, you don't scale a thing like this. You don't know what you're feeding."

I asked him what he meant. Feeding what?

He didn't answer. He told me to go home. The next morning he acted as though none of it had happened, like the outburst had been a fever that broke overnight and left no memory of the sickness.

I stopped pitching him ideas after that. But I hadn't stopped noticing things. If anything, I'd started noticing more.

A journalist came into the shop that spring- a woman writing some feature on vanishing trades for a lifestyle magazine. She'd heard about The Seven Scissors, and wanted to interview "the legendary barber behind the name." At one point, she looked around the shop, and said something. I don't think she meant as an insult, but it landed like one anyway.

"This is it? THIS is The Seven Scissors? I expected something… bigger. It’s been around for what- five decades ? Should’ve scaled into something a bit more... impressive by now…"

Something in her sentence lodged itself under my skin and stayed there.

Scaled into something more impressive.

That night, lying awake in the small room above the shop, I made a quiet decision that had nothing to do with newspaper ads. I decided that when the shop was finally mine, whenever that day came, however far off it seemed, I wasn't going to let it stay this small.

I had no idea how soon that day would actually arrive, or how little warning either of us would get…

The day Mr. Munshi suffered a stroke was an ordinary Tuesday. I was sweeping near the door when I heard the scissors stop. I got to him before he hit the floor, though I don't remember crossing the room to do it. The ambulance took eleven minutes to arrive, though it felt considerably longer. In the back of it, strapped down, still fighting to speak clearly, he said my name. It was followed words I couldn’t quite understand. I could only make out a few syllables at best-

The cut…

The tool…

The pull…

Then there was something that sounded like "don't" , stretched and garbled, followed by more of the same desperate noise.

The doctors said it was a severe stroke. He was, thankfully, alive and stable. But the recovery, if it came at all, would be slow and uncertain.

I took over The Seven Scissors as its new head barber. There was no time for a real handover. There was no ceremony, and no proverbial passing of the torch. Just a lawyer who brought me a small cloth bundle. Mr. Munshi had apparently asked it to be delivered to me before the stroke fully took his voice. Inside the bundle were his personal pair of scissors, the ones I'd watched move like they weren't being held at all, wrapped the way I imagine his father had once wrapped them for him.

Grief, it turns out, is an excellent business partner.

Within the first month, I raised the prices. Modestly in the beginning, then less modestly once I saw that people paid without blinking. Within three months, I'd hired two more barbers to work under me in shifts. And I finally did what the businessmen in the waiting chairs had been talking about for years- I found investors to scale the shop.

It wasn't hard. The name alone opened doors I hadn't expected. Turns out "the last surviving shop of the legendary Barber Wars" is the kind of story that people with money find irresistible. Within six months, we'd signed for three new locations across the city. And these were real storefronts, with glass frontage, proper signage, and neon lights.

I brought in a marketing consultant. She brought in influencers- a stream of people with good hair and better cameras, filming themselves getting shaves in our newest branch. We even came up with a motto for the shop-

‘Centuries of tradition, scaled for the modern man.’

I watched the follower counts climb, and patted myself on the back. I moved out of the room above the original shop, and into an apartment with air conditioning that actually worked. I bought a car, and even hired a chauffeur for it, because I was way too busy to take driving lessons.

I used to visit Mr. Munshi in the hospital once a week, then once a month, and then I stopped going altogether. I told myself that the visits upset him more than they helped. He was more of a vegetable than a human at that point- barely conscious, and hardly coherent. I never told him about the expansion of The Seven Scissors. I didn’t want to burden him with the stress of watching his protégé become something he never wanted him to be.

But deep inside, I couldn’t stop being proud of myself. Every metric I could measure said I was succeeding- revenue, locations, followers, margins.

It would be months before I understood that something else was being measured too, scaling right alongside everything I was so proud of…

The first time it happened, I was the one holding the scissors.

It was a regular: a mid-level bank employee, who'd been coming to the original shop for the past four years. Same day, same time, same request: trim the sides, leave the top alone, don't talk too much. I liked cutting his hair precisely because it required nothing from me except competence. That Thursday, I had him in the chair, comb in one hand, scissors in the other, halfway through the left side.

And then, between one snip and the next, something in the mirror wasn't him anymore.

I don't know how else to describe it. His face didn’t change at all, but everything else did. His shoulders, which had been slouched the exact way they always slouched, straightened by some fraction of an inch. His breathing shifted- shallower and faster, like he'd just climbed a flight of stairs. My hand was still resting against the side of his head, angling it for the next cut, and I felt the muscles under my palm tense, in a way it never had in four years of me cutting his hair.

I froze with the scissors half-closed.

He looked at me in the mirror and smiled. It was the same smile I’d seen a hundred times before, but something about it felt malicious. He asked me if something was wrong. It was his exact voice, pitched slightly wrong, like an actor who'd studied the recording but never met the man.

I said no. I finished the cut. My hands did not stop shaking until he'd paid. He tipped more generously than he ever had before, and walked out the door.

I told myself I'd imagined it. That I was exhausted, running on the fumes of three new locations. People shift in their seats. People's breathing changes. It didn't have to mean anything.

It happened again six days later, to a young man getting what looked like his first proper adult haircut. A nervous energy radiated off him, the way it does off boys that age. I had the clippers against the back of his neck when his posture changed under my hand. The tension left his neck all at once, replaced by something looser and more confident, in a way that felt too abrupt, and too wrong . He kept talking through the rest of the cut in the same voice, the same words even, but it felt… rehearsed, if that even make sense. Whoever was sitting in that chair by the time I finished was not the boy who'd sat down in it.

I told myself, again, that I was imagining it. Scaling to so many locations at once was doing something to my nerves, making me feel things in my hands that weren't really there.

I had no idea, yet, that my hands were the one part of me that couldn't possibly be wrong.

After the second time, I started keeping track. I didn't write anything down, but I kept a private tally in my head, with details that I turned over obsessively while lying awake at two in the morning.

One week after the boy with the rehearsed laugh, it happened a third time. Then a fourth, ten days after that. By the second month, I could no longer pretend that the intervals were random- they were shrinking. The gaps between incidents were closing, the way a fever climbs degree by degree, until I was sitting with the horrible arithmetic of once every few days becoming once every couple of days.

I tried, in the beginning, to find some kind of proof. I asked one of my boys, casually, if he'd noticed anything different about a customer, whose posture had changed under my hands not ten minutes earlier. He looked at me like I'd asked if the sky had changed color. I soon came to the conclusion that nobody else saw it. Nobody else felt it. Whatever wrongness passed under my palms in those seconds, between one snip and the next, it left no trace anywhere, except in me.

I started dreading certain regulars before they'd even walked in, wondering if today would be the day. I started studying faces in the mirror, with the kind of intensity that made customers uncomfortable.

I thought, more than once, about seeing a psychiatrist. It’s the kind of thought that scared me, almost as much as the substitutions themselves. Because it meant considering the possibility that none of this was real, that the pressure of running four locations at once had genuinely cracked something in my head.

But a quieter part of me, the part that had spent five years learning to read a scalp better than most people read faces, refused to accept that explanation. That part of me knew, with the same stubborn certainty I'd had at seven years old, that the feeling under my hands was real, whether or not I could prove it to a single other living soul.

I just didn't understand what "real" was going to cost me…

It was the day my stepbrother Rahim showed up.

I hadn’t seen him in six years. I knew, distantly, that he'd finished school, that he'd gotten some entry-level job at a logistics company, that my stepmother occasionally mentioned him in the brief messages she still sent me twice a year, out of some obligation that neither of us had the courage to end. I hadn't reached out. I told myself there was nothing to reach toward, that whatever had existed between us had died along with everything else.

He walked into the flagship branch on a Sunday afternoon, and I didn't recognize him for a full three seconds. He was taller than I remembered, broader through the shoulders. But the moment he smiled at me- nervous and hopeful, he looked exactly like the fifteen-year-old who used to trail me around the house, waiting for scraps of attention. With that smile, six years of friction collapsed into nothing at all.

"I saw the ads," he said, before I could say anything. "Figured I'd come see if you're actually as good as they say."

It was obvious that he didn’t come for a haircut. He came looking for me. He came looking for the brother he loved, hoping to rekindle a fire that was extinguished. And some small, starved part of me wanted to give him that.

I sat him down myself.

We talked while I worked. It was a careful conversation, the kind two people have when they're testing whether old wounds have actually closed, or just scarred over badly. He asked about the expansion. I asked about his job, his life, and whether he was happy. He said he was doing alright. He said he'd missed me, in a voice that cracked slightly on the word. I had to look down at the comb in my hand instead of his face in the mirror.

I was about to tell him that I missed him too, more than he could imagine. And that’s when it happened.

I was halfway through the left side when I felt it. His shoulders straightened under my palm. His breathing shifted. And I looked up into the mirror already knowing, already screaming inside my own skull for it not to be true. I watched my brother's face hold perfectly still, while everything underneath it, the subtle things that made him him, simply wasn't there anymore.

He kept talking. It was the same voice, uttering the same unfinished sentence about missing me, stretched out a half-second too long, delivered with a smile that used the right muscles in the wrong order. I stood there with the scissors in my hand and my brother's borrowed face in front of me. Something in me that had been holding on for months- through the bank employee, through the boy with the rehearsed laugh, through every unproven and unspeakable thing I'd swallowed alone- finally broke.

I dropped the scissors. I don't remember deciding to. I just remember the sound of them hitting the tile, and the thing wearing my brother's face turning to look at me. He had an expression of polite concern, asking if something was wrong.

"I'm fine," I said, and the words came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "Dropped them. It’s been a… long day."

I bent down and picked the scissors up off the tile, and my hands had never felt heavier in my life. Every instinct in me was screaming to grab him- to grab it-  by the shoulders and shove him to the ground. I wanted to ask him where my brother was, and what he had done with him. But some colder part of me remembered five years of Mr. Munshi's silence, remembered the word he'd choked out in the back of that ambulance-  ‘don't’ . And some animal part of my brain understood, without being told, that whatever was sitting in that chair, would not survive being questioned. Or that I wouldn't.

So I finished the haircut.

I don't know how I did it. My hands moved through the motions on some kind of muscle memory that had nothing to do with the rest of me. When it was done, he stood, checked himself in the mirror, turning his head side to side, almost mechanically- like a robot programmed to do so. He reached for his wallet.

I told him it was on the house. Family discount, I said. The word "family" nearly closed my throat entirely.

He hugged me on his way out. It smelled like him and it felt like him, solid and real against my chest. But there was no warmth in that hug, no semblance of the positive energy that I felt when Rahim had entered the shop.

It said, in Rahim's voice, that he'd missed this, that we should do this again soon, that he was glad he finally came. Then it let go, walked out the door, and disappeared down the street. I stood in the doorway watched him disappear into a crowd of people who had no idea anything had happened at all.

I locked up early that day. I told my staff I wasn't feeling well, which wasn't a lie.

I told my driver to take me to the rehabilitation facility, one where Mr. Munshi had ended up in after all those months I'd stopped visiting. Because I was done pretending I could carry this alone, and because somewhere underneath the fear, I needed him to tell me that my brother wasn't gone forever.

Mr. Munshi had improved more than I expected. Whatever damage the stroke had left him with, months of therapy had clawed back enough that he could speak in full sentences now. He was sitting up in a chair by the window when I walked in, and the moment he saw my face, something in his own expression shifted from surprise to alarm.

"Jamal," he said. "You don’t look well. Sit down, my boy."

I didn't sit. I told him everything, the whole account spilling out of me in the wrong order- the bank employee, the boy with the rehearsed laugh, the tally I'd kept in my head, and finally, about Rahim.

He didn't answer right away. He asked me a question instead, quiet and careful, like a doctor checking for a wound he already suspected was there.

"Have you changed anything about the shop?"

I told him about the investors. The new locations. The influencers, the motto, the revenue. I watched his face while I said it, and I watched as the color slowly drained away from it.

“Oh no, we’ve been scaled ! Oh Jamal, why would you do that? I gave you specific instructions on what to do and what not to do !”

I raised an eyebrow when he said ‘specific instructions’.

“What are you talking about? What instructions? When did that happen?”

Mr. Munshi went silent for a moment, like a quiet realization had dawned upon him.

“After the stroke,” he said, “At back of the ambulance. I told you everything you needed to know. At least I thought I did. It may have sounded like a bunch of gibberish to you, since my words weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to. Oh God, it’s all my fault. Should’ve told you the truth a long time back…”   

That’s when he told me about the Barber Wars, properly this time, not the sanitized market-gossip version I'd grown up hearing. He told how he was on the verge of losing everything to the six rival families, how he was days away from declaring bankruptcy, and how he was desperate to make things change for the better. He told me how his desperation led him to the path of the occult. And he told about the night he made a deal, with an entity he still has no name for, who offered him three gifts:

The Cut, so that every haircut he gave would be flawless, every single time. The Pull, so that customers would return to him again and again, compulsively, without knowing why. And the Tool, so that the very sound of his scissors would draw people in off the street, like a tide finding its low point.

The gifts bound to the shop itself, he said. Not to him, not to any single barber, but to the walls and the chair and the mirror, lasting through anyone who ever worked there, for as long as the shop existed. And in exchange, the entity only asked for ‘the silence’. No questions could be asked, ever, no matter what he saw, no matter how wrong it felt.

"I said yes," Mr. Munshi continued, "because I was drowning, and drowning men don't ask what's in the water before they grab it."

He then described how the six families fell, one by one, absorbed into a shop that could never lose a customer and never give a bad cut. He told me how, within a few years, he started to notice- the way I'd started to notice- that some of the people sitting in his chair weren't quite who they should’ve been.

He then explained the part that broke something loose in my chest- that the substitutions weren't random. The frequency of substitutions scaled with the ‘shop’s ambition’, which was tied to the barber’s desire- how much he wanted, how much he reached for, and how much he craved beyond what the deal had already given him. The one year he'd considered opening a second chair? Two customers had vanished into someone else's face within the month. The one time, decades ago, he'd let himself dream, briefly, of a second shop across town? He'd stopped himself before finishing the thought, because the fourth substitution that same week had been a child.

"That's why the shop stayed small," he said. " I spent forty years making myself small enough, so that the entity wouldn't have anything to feed on. Everyone thought it was humility. It was never humility, Jamal. It was my starvation, so that other people wouldn't have to feed something they never agreed to feed."

I asked him, with my voice barely holding together, why he never told me. Why he let me apprentice for five years, inherit the shop, walk directly into the same trap he'd spent his whole life avoiding.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered, and when he did, it wasn't an excuse. It was worse than an excuse. It was the truth.

"Because I saw myself in you, the day you walked in asking to learn. The same hunger. The same debt. I thought if I trained you hard enough, disciplined you long enough, you'd learn to starve it the way I did. I thought I had time to teach you that, eventually, once you were ready to hear it." His good hand tightened on the arm of the chair. "The stroke didn't give me that time. I tried to tell you, in the ambulance. The cut. The tool. The pull. I was trying to warn you what the shop was, before it was too late. I couldn't get the rest out."

"What happens to them?" I asked. "The ones it takes. Where do they go?"

Mr. Munshi looked afraid. After a brief pause, he said,

"I don't know. I never knew. I was too afraid to find out."

"You never asked?"

"I couldn't," he said. "That was the price, the one it called ‘the silence’. No questions asked, remember? I don't know if they're dead, Jamal. I don't know if they're trapped somewhere, or transformed, or simply gone away. I’ve spent fifty years not knowing what I did to the people who disappeared through my chair, and it never stopped being the worst thing I’ve ever lived with."

Neither of us spoke for a long time after that. Outside the window, the evening traffic moved the way it always did. Somewhere across the city, four storefronts with my name on them kept humming along, still profitable, still growing, still feeding an entity that scaled itself with my ambition.

It was me who eventually broke the silence.

"The last time I came to visit you," I said, "You told me that you still had one more good cut left in you. Do you remember that?"

It was an offhand comment he made when he was joking about his recovery. I'd laughed it off at the time.

"Yeah, I meant it," he said. "I still mean it. Whatever this hand can still do, I have one more cut in it. But I don't know what good that does either of us now."

I thought about Rahim's face in the mirror, holding still, while everything underneath it disappeared.

And I made a request to Mr. Munshi, the only one that felt like it mattered anymore.

"Let it be me."

He looked at me like I'd said something in a language he needed a moment to translate.

"Let your last cut be mine," I said. "Wherever it's taking them, wherever Rahim is, wherever all of them are… I want to go there too. I don't need you to explain how. I don't need to know if it'll work, or if it's even something that can be reversed once it starts. I just need you to cut my hair, one more time."

"Jamal, my boy…"

"I fed this thing for months without knowing it existed," I said, and my voice finally gave out entirely, cracking apart on every word after that. "I don't know if I can save him. I don't know if I can save any of them. But I can't keep standing in the shop, doing nothing, telling myself I didn't understand what I was building. I’ve understood enough. I wanted to scale. I wanted the growth. And I wanted it so badly that I stopped visiting the one man who could've stopped me before it cost anyone anything !"

Mr. Munshi's eyes filled, and for the first time since I'd known him, I watched him cry without trying to hide it. He didn't argue. He didn't tell me it was foolish, or that we needed more time to think, or that there might be some other way we hadn't considered. He just took my hand in both of his and looked at me with teary eyes.

"Tomorrow morning," he said, "Keep the shop ready. I’ll do this properly, my boy. I’ll do this for you, one last time."

*************************************************************************************

It's 4:47 in the morning. I'm typing this on my phone, because my hands won't hold a pen steady enough to write it by hand. The car left for Mr. Munshi's facility twenty minutes ago. I have maybe two hours before it comes back with him in it.

I didn't sleep. Not for one minute. I lay in bed until midnight, then I gave up and drove here instead. I've been sitting in Mr. Munshi's old chair since, running the same three thoughts on a loop I can't switch off.

The first is Rahim. I keep thinking about the years he spent trying to get my attention, the way he used to wait outside my door, the way he showed up at my shop after six years of silence. I never told him that I loved him. I want to write that plainly, because I've spent six years finding softer ways to avoid saying it, even to myself. He loved me the whole time, without asking for anything back, the way only a kid can love someone who keeps flinching away from him. And I let him keep loving me like that, instead telling him he had a brother who loved him too.

The second thought is every other name I don't have. The mid-level bank employee. The boy with the rehearsed laugh. The dozens who suffered the same fate after that. People who had no say in it. People who didn't get a choice, the way I'm choosing this. I can’t stop thinking about the others who might have been substituted, in branches I wasn't standing in, by the barbers I hired, who had no idea what their hands were participating in.

The third thought is the ugliest one, because it is the truth, and it's mine.

I've spent months telling myself that I scaled this shop because I saw its potential, because I wanted to honor what Mr. Munshi built by giving it the size it deserved. Sitting here now, at five in the morning, with his chair under me, I don't think that's true. I didn't do this for the business. I did this so the world would know my name, the way it never got the chance to know my father's, before his own failed businesses buried him in debt. I turned his failure into my personality and called it ambition, and I let it eat people while I called it growth.

I don't know how to carry that and still believe I deserve to try fixing it. But I'm doing it anyway.

If you're reading this: please know that every branch of The Seven Scissors is closed indefinitely, starting now. Please don't come. Please don't send anyone you love to any of our chairs, not until you hear otherwise, directly from Mr. Munshi himself. Not from a staff member. Not from a rumor in the market that things are open again. And definitely not from me, because I don't know whether the man walking out of that shop in a few hours will still be me, or something else wearing what's left of my face.

I just know that I won't let it take one more person who never agreed to be taken. If it wants another body today, it can have mine, and it can have it with my consent, which is more than it ever gave anyone else.

The sun's coming up. I can hear the car outside.

My name is Jamal, and this is my dying declaration.

My name is Jamal, and this is my dying declaration.

Or maybe it isn't. I'm not really sure, to be honest.

I'm not sure if what's coming for me is worse than dying, or better, or something different entirely. That's not me being dramatic. It's just who I am. I’ve never been sure about anything in my whole life. I second-guess directions I've walked a hundred times. Indecision isn't a flaw I have, it is a part of my identity.

But I’ve always been sure about what I wanted to do for a living.

I was seven years old when my father took me to get my hair cut, by a man named Mr. Munshi. His shop was called ‘The Seven Scissors’. It was small and dim, smelling like talc and old wood. Mr. Munshi didn't speak more than four words the entire time. But I watched his hands. I watched the way the scissors moved like they weren't being held, like they were an extension of something older than his arm. I walked out of that shop and told my father, with the kind of certainty a seven-year-old has no right to, that I was going to do that too.

It's the only decision I've never once doubted.

I know it might sound weird to you. But in the country I grew up in, barbering isn’t just a trade. It is closer to a calling, the kind of profession old men speak about, the way they'd speak about a poet or a soldier.

And in the lane where I grew up, no name carried more weight than The Seven Scissors.

I didn't learn the full story until much later. Pieces of it, anyway, from old men in the market who liked to talk a little too much. Decades before I was born, seven barbering families had crowded into that same short stretch of shops. All of them fought for the same customers, the same reputation, the same right to call themselves the best. People jokingly called it the Barber Wars. And from what I’ve heard, things got vicious. Sabotaged appointments. Stolen apprentices. Rumors spread deliberately to ruin a rival's name.

Six of those families had money, charm, and generations of technique behind them. The seventh had almost nothing. A dying shop, a mountain of debt, and a young man who'd inherited a business he had no right to survive in. That man was Mr. Munshi.

By the time I was old enough to understand what any of that meant, Mr. Munshi’s shop was the only one left standing. He was the undisputed winner of the Barber Wars. The other six shops had been absorbed, gone, or renamed under his. Nobody knew how a man with no talent, no money, and no name, had outlasted six families who had all three.

I didn't know either. And I wish it stayed that way…

By the time I was fourteen, my mother had passed. A year later, my father remarried. I suddenly had a stepmother. And with her came her son from a previous marriage- a quiet kid named Rahim. He attached himself to me almost immediately, the way younger kids do when they've decided you're worth admiring. I wasn't always kind to him. I was fifteen and grieving, and I didn't want a brother I hadn't asked for. But he kept showing up anyway, like my indifference was a puzzle he was determined to solve.

My father died when I was sixteen, and everything he'd built went with him. All of it was swallowed by debts I didn't understand fully. We lost the house first, followed by the small businesses he used to own. I dropped out of school. Not because I wanted to, but because there was suddenly no version of my future that included tuition fees. There was a massive fight- over what little remained, over blame, over who had let the businesses fail. I said things to my stepmother, and to Rahim, things that I've never quite forgiven myself for. When the dust settled, I walked away from all of it. I didn’t know if I’ll ever have a place to call home again.

What I did know, with a stubborn certainty, was that I wanted to cut hair for a living. And I wanted to learn from the only man who lit that fire inside me.

I went to The Seven Scissors, and asked Mr. Munshi to take me on as an apprentice.

He looked at me for a long time before he said anything. I remember thinking, even then, that he wasn't really looking at my face, but my hands. Then he said,

"You'll sweep the floor for a year before you touch a single head."

I said fine. I would’ve said fine to almost anything.

I ended up staying five years.

Those years are hard to describe in order, because most of what I remember isn't a single event, but a texture- the smell of talc that never left my clothes, the ache in my forearms after a twelve-hour day, and the particular silence of a man who genuinely didn’t care about anything except his work.

Mr. Munshi didn't talk. Not about politics, not about family, not about himself. If you asked him a question that had nothing to do with cutting hair, he'd either ignore you, or answer with something so short that it barely qualified as language. He was one of those rare people, who had narrowed his entire existence down to one obsession, and simply let everything else atrophy around it.

I was the opposite. I couldn't stop noticing everything else.

Customers used to talk while they waited, the way people do in small shops. I observed two of them in particular, a pair of businessmen who came in every few weeks, always mid-conversation about some new venture. They became an accidental education for me. I didn't understand half of what they said, but I absorbed the words like a sponge.

Scaling. Optimizing. Maximizing.

They talked about businesses the way Mr. Munshi talked about scissors, like the words themselves were sacred. I started turning those words over in my head while I swept the floor. I started looking at our shop- one chair, one mirror, a queue that sometimes stretched into the lane. And I couldn’t stop thinking,

‘This could be SO much more than this !’

I pitched Mr. Munshi constantly. Why can’t we have a second chair? Or maybe a sign that didn't look thirty years overdue for repainting? How about a price increase then, just a modest one?

Every single idea was shot down. Sometimes he wouldn't even look up from what he was doing. Just a small shake of his head, like I hadn't said anything worth acknowledging. Other times, rarely, something in him would flare. He'd say something sharp enough to end the conversation entirely. But he never actually explained why he acted up the way he did, when the shop could definitely use some scaling, optimizing, and maximizing.

There was one time I didn't just pitch an idea, but acted on it. I'd been saving tips for months at that point. It was enough to buy a quarter-page slot in the local newspaper-

The Seven Scissors: best barbershop in the city. Walk-ins welcome. Ask for Jamal.

Yeah, it was cheesy. And yes, I put my own name on it. But trust me, it worked.

It ran on a Thursday. By Saturday, the queue outside the shop had nearly doubled, spilling further into the lane than I'd ever seen it. Mr. Munshi found out around midday, when a customer complimented him on "finally advertising properly" and asked, half-joking, if he could finally afford a second chair now. I watched his face change in real time. It was not confusion, not curiosity. Something closer to alarm, quickly buried under something colder.

He didn't say anything until the shop emptied that evening. Then he asked me, very quietly, if I'd placed an ad. I said yes, thinking that the doubled queue would speak for itself.

I’ve never seen him like what happened next. He didn't shout exactly. It was worse than shouting. His voice dropped into something low and shaking, and he asked me, again and again, who told me I could do that, who told me I had any right to put this shop's name in front of that many people at once. He told me that I didn't understand what I'd just done, and that I didn't understand anything at all.

‘You should be thanking me !’ I exclaimed, ‘Don’t you see the potential of maximizing profits? Don’t you see that the business is getting scaled?’

Suddenly, he stopped. He sat down on the sweeping stool, like his legs had given out. He put his head in his hands, and spoke so quietly that I almost missed it.

"Jamal, you don't scale a thing like this. You don't know what you're feeding."

I asked him what he meant. Feeding what?

He didn't answer. He told me to go home. The next morning he acted as though none of it had happened, like the outburst had been a fever that broke overnight and left no memory of the sickness.

I stopped pitching him ideas after that. But I hadn't stopped noticing things. If anything, I'd started noticing more.

A journalist came into the shop that spring- a woman writing some feature on vanishing trades for a lifestyle magazine. She'd heard about The Seven Scissors, and wanted to interview "the legendary barber behind the name." At one point, she looked around the shop, and said something. I don't think she meant as an insult, but it landed like one anyway.

"This is it? THIS is The Seven Scissors? I expected something… bigger. It’s been around for what- five decades ? Should’ve scaled into something a bit more... impressive by now…"

Something in her sentence lodged itself under my skin and stayed there.

Scaled into something more impressive.

That night, lying awake in the small room above the shop, I made a quiet decision that had nothing to do with newspaper ads. I decided that when the shop was finally mine, whenever that day came, however far off it seemed, I wasn't going to let it stay this small.

I had no idea how soon that day would actually arrive, or how little warning either of us would get…

The day Mr. Munshi suffered a stroke was an ordinary Tuesday. I was sweeping near the door when I heard the scissors stop. I got to him before he hit the floor, though I don't remember crossing the room to do it. The ambulance took eleven minutes to arrive, though it felt considerably longer. In the back of it, strapped down, still fighting to speak clearly, he said my name. It was followed words I couldn’t quite understand. I could only make out a few syllables at best-

The cut…

The tool…

The pull…

Then there was something that sounded like "don't" , stretched and garbled, followed by more of the same desperate noise.

The doctors said it was a severe stroke. He was, thankfully, alive and stable. But the recovery, if it came at all, would be slow and uncertain.

I took over The Seven Scissors as its new head barber. There was no time for a real handover. There was no ceremony, and no proverbial passing of the torch. Just a lawyer who brought me a small cloth bundle. Mr. Munshi had apparently asked it to be delivered to me before the stroke fully took his voice. Inside the bundle were his personal pair of scissors, the ones I'd watched move like they weren't being held at all, wrapped the way I imagine his father had once wrapped them for him.

Grief, it turns out, is an excellent business partner.

Within the first month, I raised the prices. Modestly in the beginning, then less modestly once I saw that people paid without blinking. Within three months, I'd hired two more barbers to work under me in shifts. And I finally did what the businessmen in the waiting chairs had been talking about for years- I found investors to scale the shop.

It wasn't hard. The name alone opened doors I hadn't expected. Turns out "the last surviving shop of the legendary Barber Wars" is the kind of story that people with money find irresistible. Within six months, we'd signed for three new locations across the city. And these were real storefronts, with glass frontage, proper signage, and neon lights.

I brought in a marketing consultant. She brought in influencers- a stream of people with good hair and better cameras, filming themselves getting shaves in our newest branch. We even came up with a motto for the shop-

‘Centuries of tradition, scaled for the modern man.’

I watched the follower counts climb, and patted myself on the back. I moved out of the room above the original shop, and into an apartment with air conditioning that actually worked. I bought a car, and even hired a chauffeur for it, because I was way too busy to take driving lessons.

I used to visit Mr. Munshi in the hospital once a week, then once a month, and then I stopped going altogether. I told myself that the visits upset him more than they helped. He was more of a vegetable than a human at that point- barely conscious, and hardly coherent. I never told him about the expansion of The Seven Scissors. I didn’t want to burden him with the stress of watching his protégé become something he never wanted him to be.

But deep inside, I couldn’t stop being proud of myself. Every metric I could measure said I was succeeding- revenue, locations, followers, margins.

It would be months before I understood that something else was being measured too, scaling right alongside everything I was so proud of…

The first time it happened, I was the one holding the scissors.

It was a regular: a mid-level bank employee, who'd been coming to the original shop for the past four years. Same day, same time, same request: trim the sides, leave the top alone, don't talk too much. I liked cutting his hair precisely because it required nothing from me except competence. That Thursday, I had him in the chair, comb in one hand, scissors in the other, halfway through the left side.

And then, between one snip and the next, something in the mirror wasn't him anymore.

I don't know how else to describe it. His face didn’t change at all, but everything else did. His shoulders, which had been slouched the exact way they always slouched, straightened by some fraction of an inch. His breathing shifted- shallower and faster, like he'd just climbed a flight of stairs. My hand was still resting against the side of his head, angling it for the next cut, and I felt the muscles under my palm tense, in a way it never had in four years of me cutting his hair.

I froze with the scissors half-closed.

He looked at me in the mirror and smiled. It was the same smile I’d seen a hundred times before, but something about it felt malicious. He asked me if something was wrong. It was his exact voice, pitched slightly wrong, like an actor who'd studied the recording but never met the man.

I said no. I finished the cut. My hands did not stop shaking until he'd paid. He tipped more generously than he ever had before, and walked out the door.

I told myself I'd imagined it. That I was exhausted, running on the fumes of three new locations. People shift in their seats. People's breathing changes. It didn't have to mean anything.

It happened again six days later, to a young man getting what looked like his first proper adult haircut. A nervous energy radiated off him, the way it does off boys that age. I had the clippers against the back of his neck when his posture changed under my hand. The tension left his neck all at once, replaced by something looser and more confident, in a way that felt too abrupt, and too wrong . He kept talking through the rest of the cut in the same voice, the same words even, but it felt… rehearsed, if that even make sense. Whoever was sitting in that chair by the time I finished was not the boy who'd sat down in it.

I told myself, again, that I was imagining it. Scaling to so many locations at once was doing something to my nerves, making me feel things in my hands that weren't really there.

I had no idea, yet, that my hands were the one part of me that couldn't possibly be wrong.

After the second time, I started keeping track. I didn't write anything down, but I kept a private tally in my head, with details that I turned over obsessively while lying awake at two in the morning.

One week after the boy with the rehearsed laugh, it happened a third time. Then a fourth, ten days after that. By the second month, I could no longer pretend that the intervals were random- they were shrinking. The gaps between incidents were closing, the way a fever climbs degree by degree, until I was sitting with the horrible arithmetic of once every few days becoming once every couple of days.

I tried, in the beginning, to find some kind of proof. I asked one of my boys, casually, if he'd noticed anything different about a customer, whose posture had changed under my hands not ten minutes earlier. He looked at me like I'd asked if the sky had changed color. I soon came to the conclusion that nobody else saw it. Nobody else felt it. Whatever wrongness passed under my palms in those seconds, between one snip and the next, it left no trace anywhere, except in me.

I started dreading certain regulars before they'd even walked in, wondering if today would be the day. I started studying faces in the mirror, with the kind of intensity that made customers uncomfortable.

I thought, more than once, about seeing a psychiatrist. It’s the kind of thought that scared me, almost as much as the substitutions themselves. Because it meant considering the possibility that none of this was real, that the pressure of running four locations at once had genuinely cracked something in my head.

But a quieter part of me, the part that had spent five years learning to read a scalp better than most people read faces, refused to accept that explanation. That part of me knew, with the same stubborn certainty I'd had at seven years old, that the feeling under my hands was real, whether or not I could prove it to a single other living soul.

I just didn't understand what "real" was going to cost me…

It was the day my stepbrother Rahim showed up.

I hadn’t seen him in six years. I knew, distantly, that he'd finished school, that he'd gotten some entry-level job at a logistics company, that my stepmother occasionally mentioned him in the brief messages she still sent me twice a year, out of some obligation that neither of us had the courage to end. I hadn't reached out. I told myself there was nothing to reach toward, that whatever had existed between us had died along with everything else.

He walked into the flagship branch on a Sunday afternoon, and I didn't recognize him for a full three seconds. He was taller than I remembered, broader through the shoulders. But the moment he smiled at me- nervous and hopeful, he looked exactly like the fifteen-year-old who used to trail me around the house, waiting for scraps of attention. With that smile, six years of friction collapsed into nothing at all.

"I saw the ads," he said, before I could say anything. "Figured I'd come see if you're actually as good as they say."

It was obvious that he didn’t come for a haircut. He came looking for me. He came looking for the brother he loved, hoping to rekindle a fire that was extinguished. And some small, starved part of me wanted to give him that.

I sat him down myself.

We talked while I worked. It was a careful conversation, the kind two people have when they're testing whether old wounds have actually closed, or just scarred over badly. He asked about the expansion. I asked about his job, his life, and whether he was happy. He said he was doing alright. He said he'd missed me, in a voice that cracked slightly on the word. I had to look down at the comb in my hand instead of his face in the mirror.

I was about to tell him that I missed him too, more than he could imagine. And that’s when it happened.

I was halfway through the left side when I felt it. His shoulders straightened under my palm. His breathing shifted. And I looked up into the mirror already knowing, already screaming inside my own skull for it not to be true. I watched my brother's face hold perfectly still, while everything underneath it, the subtle things that made him him, simply wasn't there anymore.

He kept talking. It was the same voice, uttering the same unfinished sentence about missing me, stretched out a half-second too long, delivered with a smile that used the right muscles in the wrong order. I stood there with the scissors in my hand and my brother's borrowed face in front of me. Something in me that had been holding on for months- through the bank employee, through the boy with the rehearsed laugh, through every unproven and unspeakable thing I'd swallowed alone- finally broke.

I dropped the scissors. I don't remember deciding to. I just remember the sound of them hitting the tile, and the thing wearing my brother's face turning to look at me. He had an expression of polite concern, asking if something was wrong.

"I'm fine," I said, and the words came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "Dropped them. It’s been a… long day."

I bent down and picked the scissors up off the tile, and my hands had never felt heavier in my life. Every instinct in me was screaming to grab him- to grab it-  by the shoulders and shove him to the ground. I wanted to ask him where my brother was, and what he had done with him. But some colder part of me remembered five years of Mr. Munshi's silence, remembered the word he'd choked out in the back of that ambulance-  ‘don't’ . And some animal part of my brain understood, without being told, that whatever was sitting in that chair, would not survive being questioned. Or that I wouldn't.

So I finished the haircut.

I don't know how I did it. My hands moved through the motions on some kind of muscle memory that had nothing to do with the rest of me. When it was done, he stood, checked himself in the mirror, turning his head side to side, almost mechanically- like a robot programmed to do so. He reached for his wallet.

I told him it was on the house. Family discount, I said. The word "family" nearly closed my throat entirely.

He hugged me on his way out. It smelled like him and it felt like him, solid and real against my chest. But there was no warmth in that hug, no semblance of the positive energy that I felt when Rahim had entered the shop.

It said, in Rahim's voice, that he'd missed this, that we should do this again soon, that he was glad he finally came. Then it let go, walked out the door, and disappeared down the street. I stood in the doorway watched him disappear into a crowd of people who had no idea anything had happened at all.

I locked up early that day. I told my staff I wasn't feeling well, which wasn't a lie.

I told my driver to take me to the rehabilitation facility, one where Mr. Munshi had ended up in after all those months I'd stopped visiting. Because I was done pretending I could carry this alone, and because somewhere underneath the fear, I needed him to tell me that my brother wasn't gone forever.

Mr. Munshi had improved more than I expected. Whatever damage the stroke had left him with, months of therapy had clawed back enough that he could speak in full sentences now. He was sitting up in a chair by the window when I walked in, and the moment he saw my face, something in his own expression shifted from surprise to alarm.

"Jamal," he said. "You don’t look well. Sit down, my boy."

I didn't sit. I told him everything, the whole account spilling out of me in the wrong order- the bank employee, the boy with the rehearsed laugh, the tally I'd kept in my head, and finally, about Rahim.

He didn't answer right away. He asked me a question instead, quiet and careful, like a doctor checking for a wound he already suspected was there.

"Have you changed anything about the shop?"

I told him about the investors. The new locations. The influencers, the motto, the revenue. I watched his face while I said it, and I watched as the color slowly drained away from it.

“Oh no, we’ve been scaled ! Oh Jamal, why would you do that? I gave you specific instructions on what to do and what not to do !”

I raised an eyebrow when he said ‘specific instructions’.

“What are you talking about? What instructions? When did that happen?”

Mr. Munshi went silent for a moment, like a quiet realization had dawned upon him.

“After the stroke,” he said, “At back of the ambulance. I told you everything you needed to know. At least I thought I did. It may have sounded like a bunch of gibberish to you, since my words weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to. Oh God, it’s all my fault. Should’ve told you the truth a long time back…”   

That’s when he told me about the Barber Wars, properly this time, not the sanitized market-gossip version I'd grown up hearing. He told how he was on the verge of losing everything to the six rival families, how he was days away from declaring bankruptcy, and how he was desperate to make things change for the better. He told me how his desperation led him to the path of the occult. And he told about the night he made a deal, with an entity he still has no name for, who offered him three gifts:

The Cut, so that every haircut he gave would be flawless, every single time. The Pull, so that customers would return to him again and again, compulsively, without knowing why. And the Tool, so that the very sound of his scissors would draw people in off the street, like a tide finding its low point.

The gifts bound to the shop itself, he said. Not to him, not to any single barber, but to the walls and the chair and the mirror, lasting through anyone who ever worked there, for as long as the shop existed. And in exchange, the entity only asked for ‘the silence’. No questions could be asked, ever, no matter what he saw, no matter how wrong it felt.

"I said yes," Mr. Munshi continued, "because I was drowning, and drowning men don't ask what's in the water before they grab it."

He then described how the six families fell, one by one, absorbed into a shop that could never lose a customer and never give a bad cut. He told me how, within a few years, he started to notice- the way I'd started to notice- that some of the people sitting in his chair weren't quite who they should’ve been.

He then explained the part that broke something loose in my chest- that the substitutions weren't random. The frequency of substitutions scaled with the ‘shop’s ambition’, which was tied to the barber’s desire- how much he wanted, how much he reached for, and how much he craved beyond what the deal had already given him. The one year he'd considered opening a second chair? Two customers had vanished into someone else's face within the month. The one time, decades ago, he'd let himself dream, briefly, of a second shop across town? He'd stopped himself before finishing the thought, because the fourth substitution that same week had been a child.

"That's why the shop stayed small," he said. " I spent forty years making myself small enough, so that the entity wouldn't have anything to feed on. Everyone thought it was humility. It was never humility, Jamal. It was my starvation, so that other people wouldn't have to feed something they never agreed to feed."

I asked him, with my voice barely holding together, why he never told me. Why he let me apprentice for five years, inherit the shop, walk directly into the same trap he'd spent his whole life avoiding.

He looked at me for a long time before he answered, and when he did, it wasn't an excuse. It was worse than an excuse. It was the truth.

"Because I saw myself in you, the day you walked in asking to learn. The same hunger. The same debt. I thought if I trained you hard enough, disciplined you long enough, you'd learn to starve it the way I did. I thought I had time to teach you that, eventually, once you were ready to hear it." His good hand tightened on the arm of the chair. "The stroke didn't give me that time. I tried to tell you, in the ambulance. The cut. The tool. The pull. I was trying to warn you what the shop was, before it was too late. I couldn't get the rest out."

"What happens to them?" I asked. "The ones it takes. Where do they go?"

Mr. Munshi looked afraid. After a brief pause, he said,

"I don't know. I never knew. I was too afraid to find out."

"You never asked?"

"I couldn't," he said. "That was the price, the one it called ‘the silence’. No questions asked, remember? I don't know if they're dead, Jamal. I don't know if they're trapped somewhere, or transformed, or simply gone away. I’ve spent fifty years not knowing what I did to the people who disappeared through my chair, and it never stopped being the worst thing I’ve ever lived with."

Neither of us spoke for a long time after that. Outside the window, the evening traffic moved the way it always did. Somewhere across the city, four storefronts with my name on them kept humming along, still profitable, still growing, still feeding an entity that scaled itself with my ambition.

It was me who eventually broke the silence.

"The last time I came to visit you," I said, "You told me that you still had one more good cut left in you. Do you remember that?"

It was an offhand comment he made when he was joking about his recovery. I'd laughed it off at the time.

"Yeah, I meant it," he said. "I still mean it. Whatever this hand can still do, I have one more cut in it. But I don't know what good that does either of us now."

I thought about Rahim's face in the mirror, holding still, while everything underneath it disappeared.

And I made a request to Mr. Munshi, the only one that felt like it mattered anymore.

"Let it be me."

He looked at me like I'd said something in a language he needed a moment to translate.

"Let your last cut be mine," I said. "Wherever it's taking them, wherever Rahim is, wherever all of them are… I want to go there too. I don't need you to explain how. I don't need to know if it'll work, or if it's even something that can be reversed once it starts. I just need you to cut my hair, one more time."

"Jamal, my boy…"

"I fed this thing for months without knowing it existed," I said, and my voice finally gave out entirely, cracking apart on every word after that. "I don't know if I can save him. I don't know if I can save any of them. But I can't keep standing in the shop, doing nothing, telling myself I didn't understand what I was building. I’ve understood enough. I wanted to scale. I wanted the growth. And I wanted it so badly that I stopped visiting the one man who could've stopped me before it cost anyone anything !"

Mr. Munshi's eyes filled, and for the first time since I'd known him, I watched him cry without trying to hide it. He didn't argue. He didn't tell me it was foolish, or that we needed more time to think, or that there might be some other way we hadn't considered. He just took my hand in both of his and looked at me with teary eyes.

"Tomorrow morning," he said, "Keep the shop ready. I’ll do this properly, my boy. I’ll do this for you, one last time."

*************************************************************************************

It's 4:47 in the morning. I'm typing this on my phone, because my hands won't hold a pen steady enough to write it by hand. The car left for Mr. Munshi's facility twenty minutes ago. I have maybe two hours before it comes back with him in it.

I didn't sleep. Not for one minute. I lay in bed until midnight, then I gave up and drove here instead. I've been sitting in Mr. Munshi's old chair since, running the same three thoughts on a loop I can't switch off.

The first is Rahim. I keep thinking about the years he spent trying to get my attention, the way he used to wait outside my door, the way he showed up at my shop after six years of silence. I never told him that I loved him. I want to write that plainly, because I've spent six years finding softer ways to avoid saying it, even to myself. He loved me the whole time, without asking for anything back, the way only a kid can love someone who keeps flinching away from him. And I let him keep loving me like that, instead telling him he had a brother who loved him too.

The second thought is every other name I don't have. The mid-level bank employee. The boy with the rehearsed laugh. The dozens who suffered the same fate after that. People who had no say in it. People who didn't get a choice, the way I'm choosing this. I can’t stop thinking about the others who might have been substituted, in branches I wasn't standing in, by the barbers I hired, who had no idea what their hands were participating in.

The third thought is the ugliest one, because it is the truth, and it's mine.

I've spent months telling myself that I scaled this shop because I saw its potential, because I wanted to honor what Mr. Munshi built by giving it the size it deserved. Sitting here now, at five in the morning, with his chair under me, I don't think that's true. I didn't do this for the business. I did this so the world would know my name, the way it never got the chance to know my father's, before his own failed businesses buried him in debt. I turned his failure into my personality and called it ambition, and I let it eat people while I called it growth.

I don't know how to carry that and still believe I deserve to try fixing it. But I'm doing it anyway.

If you're reading this: please know that every branch of The Seven Scissors is closed indefinitely, starting now. Please don't come. Please don't send anyone you love to any of our chairs, not until you hear otherwise, directly from Mr. Munshi himself. Not from a staff member. Not from a rumor in the market that things are open again. And definitely not from me, because I don't know whether the man walking out of that shop in a few hours will still be me, or something else wearing what's left of my face.

I just know that I won't let it take one more person who never agreed to be taken. If it wants another body today, it can have mine, and it can have it with my consent, which is more than it ever gave anyone else.

The sun's coming up. I can hear the car outside.

My name is Jamal, and this is my dying declaration.

I won’t tell you the exact amount of my debt. What I will say is: I had taken it willingly. That’s what you do for the people you consider family. You carry what belongs to them. You tell yourself it’s not a burden. Because the word burden implies you resent it, and you don't. After all, you are the one who chose this.

Trust me, I had tried everything reasonable by then. The bank said no twice. I picked up extra shifts until my hands shook from exhaustion. The number barely moved. There is a particular humiliation in working yourself to the edge, and watching it make no visible difference. I stopped sleeping well. I started doing the math in my head at 2am, rearranging the same numbers, hoping they would come out differently.

They never did.

That’s when I saw the flyer from Aldermore and Associates.

The flyer was taped to a pillar outside a pharmacy. Photocopied, slightly crooked. The kind you walk past a hundred times without seeing. That day I saw it.

Paid volunteers needed. Neurological response study. Healthy adults aged 20-40. One-time compensation. Discretion assured.

There was a building name. A floor number. A phone number of a certain Mr. Rafiq at the bottom.

I stood there long enough that a woman behind me had to step around me to get through the door. Then I took a photograph of the flyer and kept walking.

I called Mr. Rafiq that evening. He was the senior manager, in charge of recruiting volunteers for the study.

I showed up the next morning as instructed. The building had a lift that didn't work. Third floor. A waiting room with two plastic chairs. A receptionist who took my form without looking at my face. I sat and watched a ceiling fan move the warm air from one side of the room to the other.

The doctor introduced himself as Dr. Cyrus Mollah. He was pleasant and professional. He had the particular manner of someone who answers questions without quite addressing them. He explained the study in language that sounded precise but meant nothing to me. Neurological response mapping. Non-invasive compound. Mild and temporary side effects. He said mild twice. He said temporary once.

The consent form was four pages. Dense, in English. I read the first page carefully. I skimmed the second. I signed the fourth.

The injection was in my left forearm, inside the elbow. The needle was cold. He said slight pressure and he meant it. I felt almost nothing.

The payment arrived before I reached the ground floor. I stood on the front step of the building, looked at my phone, and felt something I had not felt in months.

Like I had fixed something.

I went home and slept better than I had in a year.

Three days later I knocked over my tea.

My left hand had moved half a second before I intended, as though it had anticipated the gesture and arrived early. I cleaned up the mess. I blamed my exhaustion.

That night I woke at 3am. My left arm was hanging off the side of the bed, pointing at the floor. I told myself I had rolled in my sleep.

The door was unlatched.

I lived alone. I always locked it.

I checked every window. I checked the door twice. I went back to bed and lay in the dark. I eventually convinced myself I had forgotten. Stress does things to routine, I thought.

The next night, I woke up at the same time in the same manner. There was mud on the floor.

It was a trail from the door to the bed, already drying at the edges. Whatever had tracked it in had also been considerate enough to wipe itself on the doormat on the way back.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. This just didn’t make sense.

On the third night, I set my phone to record before going to bed.

I watched the footage the next morning with the phone flat on the kitchen table and my tea untouched beside it.

2:17am. My body sits up. Swings its legs to the floor with the slow precision of something that has done this before. My face is slack. My eyes are half-open and seeing nothing that is in that room.

My left hand leads, like the needle of a compass.

The rest of me follows the way a coat follows a hook it's been lifted off.

I watch myself walk out the door. I return exactly an hour later.

I had heard of sleepwalking before, but this seemed so surreal that I had to play the recording five times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

That night, I tied my left hand to the bedframe. A simple knot, tight enough that I had to work at it. I woke at 3am with my left hand resting in my lap, the rope on the floor beside the bed. The knot was undone with a patience I found more disturbing than if it had simply torn through it.

The week that followed was full of surprises.

I found a receipt from a coffee shop three kilometers away, timestamped 3:04am, in the pocket of trousers I had not consciously worn. I found a key on the windowsill that fit nothing in my apartment. I woke once with the smell of rain on my skin when the night had been dry. Another morning, I found my sandals by the door, the soles still faintly damp.

The hand was going somewhere. Regularly. Purposefully.

I decided, on a Thursday, that I would follow it.

I drank enough water to make sleep uncomfortable. I lay on top of the covers, fully dressed. I watched the ceiling. I watched the clock on my phone. I felt the pull of sleep arrive, and I kept refusing it.

At 2:09am, my left hand twitched.

I grabbed it with my right and held it flat against the mattress.

It opened anyway.

Not forcefully. Not urgently. Simply and completely, the way a door opens when the latch has already been turned.

I let go.

I followed it out.

I walked with my left hand slightly ahead of me. Not pulling exactly, just orienting, the way a compass needle orients. My right hand stayed in my pocket. I was a passenger in my own body.

We walked for twenty minutes. Then fifteen more. The streets narrowed and the buildings changed character. I started to recognize the general shape of where I was without being able to place it exactly. Something in my chest recognized it before my mind did.

Then my stomach recognized it…

Then everything did.

The building was a low one, two floors, paint peeling at the corners. No lights on. My left hand brought us to a stop on the pavement directly across from it. It did not move again.

I knew this address. I had not been here in over a year. I had not allowed myself to think about it in almost as long.

I don't know how long I stood there before I started struggling. With all the consciousness I had left, my body just began trying to leave. My legs pulled back. My right hand reached for something to orient myself away from it.

The left hand grabbed to a nearby lamppost and held. It felt like the heaviest thing in the world, rooted to that exact point on the pavement, and the rest of me was attached to it. I pulled against it until I was breathing hard. Then I stopped pulling eventually. There was no point struggling, and some part of me had already understood that.

I stood still.

And the memories came, the ones I had made a decision not to keep. Not as a flood, because that would have been easier. They came one at a time, with the patience the hand had shown untying the knot. The particular way she laughed at something funny. The specific weight of her head on my shoulder when we used to take the bus together.

The way she made me take those debts on behalf of her.

The first time she asked, it was rent. The second time, a medical bill for her mother. The third time she didn't explain and I didn't ask. I kept taking loans, kept a running total in my head for a while. Then I stopped keeping it because stopping felt like trust. By the time she left, the number was large enough that I still haven't said it out loud. It was her debt that I was carrying, a burden I was carrying for the one I loved.

I kept telling myself that I was doing it for ‘family’, because that’s what me and my parents considered her. I thought I was going to marry her, my actual family thought that too. I had looked at rings. I had a price range. I had a specific idea of how I would do it that I had refined over months. I had thought about what she would say and I had been certain, with the certainty of someone who has never had that certainty tested, that she would say yes.

Then she found someone with a car and a salary and a father with connections. All of a sudden, I was ‘just a good friend’.

The phrase kept ringing in my ear for three days before I made a conscious decision-

I chose to forgive her.

I chose to take responsibility for what I had allowed. I chose not to be the man who falls apart over a woman, who nurses a wound into an identity, who mistakes being used for being chosen. I chose to carry the debt because I had taken it with open eyes. It was mine now regardless of what it had originally been for.

I chose all of that. Consciously. Deliberately. With what I still believe was genuine grace…

My left hand had let go of the lamppost by that point.

I don't know when the tears started. I only noticed them when one reached my jaw. I was sitting on the pavement by then. I don't remember sitting down. My left hand was resting open on my knee, palm up, doing nothing, as though it had delivered me here and considered its work finished.

I sat there and cried on a pavement at 4 am. I did not try to stop it. There was nothing to stop it for. There was no one to see it. It was just me and whatever the hand had known that I hadn't: I had never gotten closure, I had only convinced myself that I had, which is a different thing entirely.

Just before 5 am, a light came on in the upper floor.

A silhouette moved behind the curtain. The slow movement of someone not yet fully awake, going through the first motions of a morning routine.

My left hand closed. Not in anger. It just closed, the way a hand closes when it has been open too long. Then it found the pavement and pushed. I was standing again. We walked back home. I was in my bed before the sun came up. I don't remember the walk at all.

I let the hand lead me out for the next three nights.

I want to be honest about that. I didn't follow reluctantly. I lay on top of the covers and I waited for the twitch. Every time it came, I got up and followed its lead. I am not sure what that says about me. I have chosen not to examine it too closely.

The second night, it took me to a coffee shop. The receipt in my trouser pocket was from here. I stood outside it and understood, suddenly and completely, why the hand had come. The first time I brought her here, she spent the whole hour talking about a book she was reading. I had barely heard a word of it. I was too busy thinking that this was what I wanted my life to look like.

The third night, a park. A specific bench near the east entrance. I had told her I liked her sitting on that bench. I had rehearsed the sentence for two weeks. When I finally said it, it came out too fast and sounded wrong. She just laughed and said ‘I know’.

The fourth night, a bus stop. The last stop before her old house, the one she lived in before she moved to the low building with the peeling paint. I had walked her here every time. Every single time, without exception, for two years. I had never once thought of it as a ritual. It was just what I did.

We stood at the bus stop for exactly one hour. Then we went home.

Which brings me what happened this morning.

I woke up to an email from Mr. Rafiq, senior manager at Aldermore and Associates.

It was the same address I had received my payment confirmation from. The subject line said ‘NRx17 Study: Phase Two- Invitation to Continue.’

I opened it.

The language was the same. Dense, precise-sounding, meaning nothing. Neurological response mapping. Expanded trial parameters. Smaller sample size. They used the word voluntary three times in the first paragraph.

I read the whole thing. I don't know why. I had already decided, somewhere around the third sentence, that I wasn't going to do it.

Then I reached the fine print.

It was the same four-page document. The same dense English. I had read the first page carefully last time. I skimmed the second. I signed the fourth. This time I read all of it.

Everything was identical to the original consent form. Same clauses, same language, same formatting.

Except for one detail.

In the original, the injection site was listed as the left forearm, inside the elbow.

In this version, it is listed as the neck.

I don't know what they are trying to reach that they couldn't reach the first time. I don't know what is deeper than whatever they already unlocked.

What I do know is that the hand is not waiting for me to fall asleep anymore.

It started three days ago. Small things at first- reaching for my phone before I had decided to, turning off the stove half a second before the thought formed. I told myself it was nothing. Muscle memory. Coincidence.

Yesterday it picked up my keys.

I was standing in the hallway, thinking about whether I needed anything from the shop, still undecided. The hand reached into the bowl and closed around the keys, completely out of my control.

I put the keys back. The hand let me. But it took a moment. There was something in that moment I cannot accurately describe. It felt like a negotiation, and I am not certain who won it.

I am writing this today because the email said Phase Two is being rolled out in clusters. Their word- ‘clusters’. Same city, same trial window, same compound. Which means there is a reasonable chance that someone reading this has already had the injection.

I need to know what happens after the second dose. I really do.

I already know what the comments are going to look like:

Don't do it. 

You are out of your mind. 

You're just a hopeless romantic who refuses to move on. 

I own all of it. The naivety and the debt. The two years of dropping her at a bus stop. The night I sat on a pavement at 4am and cried, because my own hand knew something about me that I spent a year refusing to know.

But I also owe a lot of money, to people who don’t have a lot of patience.

The compensation for Phase Two is exactly the amount I currently owe.

My left hand is on the table as I write this.

The email is still open on my phone.

I haven't replied.

If anyone has been through the trial- Phase One, Phase Two, any of it- please tell me what you know. Tell me what the second dose does. Tell me if the hand stops eventually, or if it just gets better at asking permission.

Tell me if there is anything left of you that is still only yours.

Please respond.

Please...

 

I won’t tell you the exact amount of my debt. What I will say is: I had taken it willingly. That’s what you do for the people you consider family. You carry what belongs to them. You tell yourself it’s not a burden. Because the word burden implies you resent it, and you don't. After all, you are the one who chose this.

Trust me, I had tried everything reasonable by then. The bank said no twice. I picked up extra shifts until my hands shook from exhaustion. The number barely moved. There is a particular humiliation in working yourself to the edge, and watching it make no visible difference. I stopped sleeping well. I started doing the math in my head at 2am, rearranging the same numbers, hoping they would come out differently.

They never did.

That’s when I saw the flyer from Aldermore and Associates.

The flyer was taped to a pillar outside a pharmacy. Photocopied, slightly crooked. The kind you walk past a hundred times without seeing. That day I saw it.

Paid volunteers needed. Neurological response study. Healthy adults aged 20-40. One-time compensation. Discretion assured.

There was a building name. A floor number. A phone number of a certain Mr. Rafiq at the bottom.

I stood there long enough that a woman behind me had to step around me to get through the door. Then I took a photograph of the flyer and kept walking.

I called Mr. Rafiq that evening. He was the senior manager, in charge of recruiting volunteers for the study.

I showed up the next morning as instructed. The building had a lift that didn't work. Third floor. A waiting room with two plastic chairs. A receptionist who took my form without looking at my face. I sat and watched a ceiling fan move the warm air from one side of the room to the other.

The doctor introduced himself as Dr. Cyrus Mollah. He was pleasant and professional. He had the particular manner of someone who answers questions without quite addressing them. He explained the study in language that sounded precise but meant nothing to me. Neurological response mapping. Non-invasive compound. Mild and temporary side effects. He said mild twice. He said temporary once.

The consent form was four pages. Dense, in English. I read the first page carefully. I skimmed the second. I signed the fourth.

The injection was in my left forearm, inside the elbow. The needle was cold. He said slight pressure and he meant it. I felt almost nothing.

The payment arrived before I reached the ground floor. I stood on the front step of the building, looked at my phone, and felt something I had not felt in months.

Like I had fixed something.

I went home and slept better than I had in a year.

Three days later I knocked over my tea.

My left hand had moved half a second before I intended, as though it had anticipated the gesture and arrived early. I cleaned up the mess. I blamed my exhaustion.

That night I woke at 3am. My left arm was hanging off the side of the bed, pointing at the floor. I told myself I had rolled in my sleep.

The door was unlatched.

I lived alone. I always locked it.

I checked every window. I checked the door twice. I went back to bed and lay in the dark. I eventually convinced myself I had forgotten. Stress does things to routine, I thought.

The next night, I woke up at the same time in the same manner. There was mud on the floor.

It was a trail from the door to the bed, already drying at the edges. Whatever had tracked it in had also been considerate enough to wipe itself on the doormat on the way back.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. This just didn’t make sense.

On the third night, I set my phone to record before going to bed.

I watched the footage the next morning with the phone flat on the kitchen table and my tea untouched beside it.

2:17am. My body sits up. Swings its legs to the floor with the slow precision of something that has done this before. My face is slack. My eyes are half-open and seeing nothing that is in that room.

My left hand leads, like the needle of a compass.

The rest of me follows the way a coat follows a hook it's been lifted off.

I watch myself walk out the door. I return exactly an hour later.

I had heard of sleepwalking before, but this seemed so surreal that I had to play the recording five times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

That night, I tied my left hand to the bedframe. A simple knot, tight enough that I had to work at it. I woke at 3am with my left hand resting in my lap, the rope on the floor beside the bed. The knot was undone with a patience I found more disturbing than if it had simply torn through it.

The week that followed was full of surprises.

I found a receipt from a coffee shop three kilometers away, timestamped 3:04am, in the pocket of trousers I had not consciously worn. I found a key on the windowsill that fit nothing in my apartment. I woke once with the smell of rain on my skin when the night had been dry. Another morning, I found my sandals by the door, the soles still faintly damp.

The hand was going somewhere. Regularly. Purposefully.

I decided, on a Thursday, that I would follow it.

I drank enough water to make sleep uncomfortable. I lay on top of the covers, fully dressed. I watched the ceiling. I watched the clock on my phone. I felt the pull of sleep arrive, and I kept refusing it.

At 2:09am, my left hand twitched.

I grabbed it with my right and held it flat against the mattress.

It opened anyway.

Not forcefully. Not urgently. Simply and completely, the way a door opens when the latch has already been turned.

I let go.

I followed it out.

I walked with my left hand slightly ahead of me. Not pulling exactly, just orienting, the way a compass needle orients. My right hand stayed in my pocket. I was a passenger in my own body.

We walked for twenty minutes. Then fifteen more. The streets narrowed and the buildings changed character. I started to recognize the general shape of where I was without being able to place it exactly. Something in my chest recognized it before my mind did.

Then my stomach recognized it…

Then everything did.

The building was a low one, two floors, paint peeling at the corners. No lights on. My left hand brought us to a stop on the pavement directly across from it. It did not move again.

I knew this address. I had not been here in over a year. I had not allowed myself to think about it in almost as long.

I don't know how long I stood there before I started struggling. With all the consciousness I had left, my body just began trying to leave. My legs pulled back. My right hand reached for something to orient myself away from it.

The left hand grabbed to a nearby lamppost and held. It felt like the heaviest thing in the world, rooted to that exact point on the pavement, and the rest of me was attached to it. I pulled against it until I was breathing hard. Then I stopped pulling eventually. There was no point struggling, and some part of me had already understood that.

I stood still.

And the memories came, the ones I had made a decision not to keep. Not as a flood, because that would have been easier. They came one at a time, with the patience the hand had shown untying the knot. The particular way she laughed at something funny. The specific weight of her head on my shoulder when we used to take the bus together.

The way she made me take those debts on behalf of her.

The first time she asked, it was rent. The second time, a medical bill for her mother. The third time she didn't explain and I didn't ask. I kept taking loans, kept a running total in my head for a while. Then I stopped keeping it because stopping felt like trust. By the time she left, the number was large enough that I still haven't said it out loud. It was her debt that I was carrying, a burden I was carrying for the one I loved.

I kept telling myself that I was doing it for ‘family’, because that’s what me and my parents considered her. I thought I was going to marry her, my actual family thought that too. I had looked at rings. I had a price range. I had a specific idea of how I would do it that I had refined over months. I had thought about what she would say and I had been certain, with the certainty of someone who has never had that certainty tested, that she would say yes.

Then she found someone with a car and a salary and a father with connections. All of a sudden, I was ‘just a good friend’.

The phrase kept ringing in my ear for three days before I made a conscious decision-

I chose to forgive her.

I chose to take responsibility for what I had allowed. I chose not to be the man who falls apart over a woman, who nurses a wound into an identity, who mistakes being used for being chosen. I chose to carry the debt because I had taken it with open eyes. It was mine now regardless of what it had originally been for.

I chose all of that. Consciously. Deliberately. With what I still believe was genuine grace…

My left hand had let go of the lamppost by that point.

I don't know when the tears started. I only noticed them when one reached my jaw. I was sitting on the pavement by then. I don't remember sitting down. My left hand was resting open on my knee, palm up, doing nothing, as though it had delivered me here and considered its work finished.

I sat there and cried on a pavement at 4 am. I did not try to stop it. There was nothing to stop it for. There was no one to see it. It was just me and whatever the hand had known that I hadn't: I had never gotten closure, I had only convinced myself that I had, which is a different thing entirely.

Just before 5 am, a light came on in the upper floor.

A silhouette moved behind the curtain. The slow movement of someone not yet fully awake, going through the first motions of a morning routine.

My left hand closed. Not in anger. It just closed, the way a hand closes when it has been open too long. Then it found the pavement and pushed. I was standing again. We walked back home. I was in my bed before the sun came up. I don't remember the walk at all.

I let the hand lead me out for the next three nights.

I want to be honest about that. I didn't follow reluctantly. I lay on top of the covers and I waited for the twitch. Every time it came, I got up and followed its lead. I am not sure what that says about me. I have chosen not to examine it too closely.

The second night, it took me to a coffee shop. The receipt in my trouser pocket was from here. I stood outside it and understood, suddenly and completely, why the hand had come. The first time I brought her here, she spent the whole hour talking about a book she was reading. I had barely heard a word of it. I was too busy thinking that this was what I wanted my life to look like.

The third night, a park. A specific bench near the east entrance. I had told her I liked her sitting on that bench. I had rehearsed the sentence for two weeks. When I finally said it, it came out too fast and sounded wrong. She just laughed and said ‘I know’.

The fourth night, a bus stop. The last stop before her old house, the one she lived in before she moved to the low building with the peeling paint. I had walked her here every time. Every single time, without exception, for two years. I had never once thought of it as a ritual. It was just what I did.

We stood at the bus stop for exactly one hour. Then we went home.

Which brings me what happened this morning.

I woke up to an email from Mr. Rafiq, senior manager at Aldermore and Associates.

It was the same address I had received my payment confirmation from. The subject line said ‘NRx17 Study: Phase Two- Invitation to Continue.’

I opened it.

The language was the same. Dense, precise-sounding, meaning nothing. Neurological response mapping. Expanded trial parameters. Smaller sample size. They used the word voluntary three times in the first paragraph.

I read the whole thing. I don't know why. I had already decided, somewhere around the third sentence, that I wasn't going to do it.

Then I reached the fine print.

It was the same four-page document. The same dense English. I had read the first page carefully last time. I skimmed the second. I signed the fourth. This time I read all of it.

Everything was identical to the original consent form. Same clauses, same language, same formatting.

Except for one detail.

In the original, the injection site was listed as the left forearm, inside the elbow.

In this version, it is listed as the neck.

I don't know what they are trying to reach that they couldn't reach the first time. I don't know what is deeper than whatever they already unlocked.

What I do know is that the hand is not waiting for me to fall asleep anymore.

It started three days ago. Small things at first- reaching for my phone before I had decided to, turning off the stove half a second before the thought formed. I told myself it was nothing. Muscle memory. Coincidence.

Yesterday it picked up my keys.

I was standing in the hallway, thinking about whether I needed anything from the shop, still undecided. The hand reached into the bowl and closed around the keys, completely out of my control.

I put the keys back. The hand let me. But it took a moment. There was something in that moment I cannot accurately describe. It felt like a negotiation, and I am not certain who won it.

I am writing this today because the email said Phase Two is being rolled out in clusters. Their word- ‘clusters’. Same city, same trial window, same compound. Which means there is a reasonable chance that someone reading this has already had the injection.

I need to know what happens after the second dose. I really do.

I already know what the comments are going to look like:

Don't do it. 

You are out of your mind. 

You're just a hopeless romantic who refuses to move on. 

I own all of it. The naivety and the debt. The two years of dropping her at a bus stop. The night I sat on a pavement at 4am and cried, because my own hand knew something about me that I spent a year refusing to know.

But I also owe a lot of money, to people who don’t have a lot of patience.

The compensation for Phase Two is exactly the amount I currently owe.

My left hand is on the table as I write this.

The email is still open on my phone.

I haven't replied.

If anyone has been through the trial- Phase One, Phase Two, any of it- please tell me what you know. Tell me what the second dose does. Tell me if the hand stops eventually, or if it just gets better at asking permission.

Tell me if there is anything left of you that is still only yours.

Please respond.

Please...

 

 

[TRANSCRIPT - RECOVERED FOOTAGE]
File: backup_jp_002
Transcription courtesy of Aldermore and Associates
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. CIRCULATION OF THIS DOCUMENT OUTSIDE THE PREMISES IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

 

Title Card: ONCE UPON A GENKAI SHŪRAKU

 

[00:00:03] The footage begins mid-motion. A young man's face fills the frame, too close, slightly out of focus. His breath fogs faintly in the cold air.

Off-screen, an old woman's voice, mid-sentence, unintelligible.

The young man (identity confirmed; code: JAMEEL) pulls the camera back slightly, catching himself in frame at an awkward angle, cloudy sky behind him, weak sunlight breaking through in patches.

JAMEEL: Sorry… can I record this? Like, is that okay?

OLD WOMAN (off-screen): [laughing] Record what, an old woman drinking her tea?

JAMEEL: No, just… talking. Just a video of us talking.

OLD WOMAN: If you like.

(He turns the camera toward her. She's small, weathered, dressed plainly, sitting on a low wooden stool, outside a house with peeling paint. Her eyes are sharp despite her age. She watches the lens without flinching.)

JAMEEL: So you're my grandmother? Like, actually?

WOMAN: Depends how you count it. What did your mother tell you?

JAMEEL: Nothing. That's the problem… (artifact found; audio too unclear to transcribe)

(Transcriber’s Note: From what I can derive, they go back and forth for a moment- a cousin of a cousin, a sister who married into the wrong branch, a generation Jameel clearly doesn't have mapped in his head. Eventually they land on a single conclusion. She is, functionally, his grandmother. Not by blood exactly. Close enough that it doesn't matter.)

WOMAN: Yorie. You can call me Yorie.

JAMEEL: Yorie. Okay. Cool. Yorie it is.

YORIE: You want tea?

JAMEEL: I mean, sure, if it's not a hassle…

YORIE: It'll take some time. The stove here isn't what you're used to.

JAMEEL: No worries, take your time. I'll just record an intro…

(He gestures vaguely at the camera. She nods, unbothered, and disappears into the house. The screen holds on the empty doorway for a beat. Jameel turns the camera back on himself.)

 

[00:03:47] Hard cut. It is a different location: a dirt path lined with houses in various states of disrepair. The camera pans slowly, deliberately, clearly composed rather than candid.

A doll sits on a porch railing. Life-sized. Dressed in a faded blue yukata. Its hands rest in its lap with unsettling precision, fingers slightly curled.

The camera moves on.

Another doll stands near a fence post, tilted slightly, head angled downward like it's studying the dirt.

Another doll sits in a doorway.

The camera moves swiftly through four more dolls.

It settles on a group of three dolls arranged in front of a house. The dolls are seated, as if mid-conversation, faces turned toward each other. All three are smiling. The smiles are wide (Transcriber’s Note: a little too wide).

 

[00:04:52] Jameel walks into frame from the left, adjusting his jacket, clearing his throat.

JAMEEL: Hello, this is your boy Jameel… fuck ! No. That's not, that's not it…

(He walks out of frame. A beat. He walks back in.)

JAMEEL: This is Jameel, reporting live from… cut it ! Too on the nose. Gotta start cold. Cold open, just like Mansoorie says it. Think, Jameel, think…

(He walks out again. Longer pause this time. When he returns, his posture has changed: shoulders lower, voice quieter, more deliberate. He glances down at his left hand, where something is written in faded ink. He squints at it.)

JAMEEL: Here I am, right in the center of [attempting the village name, several syllables, clearly mispronounced]. Screw that. I'm not gonna get that right. Moving on.

(He looks back up at the dolls behind him, framing himself against them.)

JAMEEL: Ten years ago, this village was officially declared a genkai shūraku. Its English translation is a "marginal settlement." It's a term the Japanese government uses, for villages where more than half the population is over sixty-five. Where, basically, there's no path back. No young people having kids. No industry. No reason for anyone to stay. Once a place gets that label, it's not really considered a living community anymore. It's considered a place that's, quite frankly, finished.

(He pauses, letting that sit for a while.)

JAMEEL: Except this place didn't finish. Because one woman decided it wasn't allowed to.

(He gestures behind him, toward the smiling dolls.)

JAMEEL: For years, she's been making these. Life-sized dolls, as you can see. Placed all over the village. Filling the empty houses, the empty streets. Filling them with… I don't know what to call it. Company, I guess? Basically, a population that doesn't leave.

(He looks directly into the lens.)

JAMEEL: This is Jameel. Founder, President, and Spokesperson of JK Motion Arts.

(Beat.)

JAMEEL: And this... is a genkai shūraku.

(He exhales, breaking character immediately.)

JAMEEL: Gotta fix that in post. Jeez. "Spokesperson." Who says that ? Mansoorie wouldn’t like that…

 

[00:09:14] Cut to Yorie's kitchen. The camera rests on a low wooden table, angled up slightly, catching both of them in frame- Jameel on one side, Yorie on the other, a teapot and two cups between them.

YORIE: You're still recording?

JAMEEL: If that's okay. You can tell me to stop anytime.

YORIE: It's fine. Better than the cameras they used to bring. They were big and loud things, you know? Made everyone nervous.

JAMEEL: People used to come film here?

YORIE: A long time ago. Before it got- [she gestures vaguely]- official.

(She pours the tea. Steam curls between them.)

YORIE: So… you're making a movie?

JAMEEL: More like a documentary. Honestly… I didn't plan any of this. I'm criminally unprepared. I have, like, one microphone and a prayer. But this place is just… it's too unsettling to not film, you know?

(He catches himself.)

JAMEEL: Sorry. That's… sorry, that's a weird thing to say to your face.

YORIE: [laughing] You're a funny kid. Just like your mother.

(Jameel glances at the lens.)

JAMEEL: Note to self- cut this part in post.

(They drink. There is a long and comfortable silence.)

YORIE: I didn't know you existed, you know. Not until the letter.

JAMEEL: Yeah. Mom wasn't exactly forthcoming about… any of this.

YORIE: Your father. He's a foreigner?

JAMEEL: He’s from Bangladesh. Came to Japan as a migrant worker.

YORIE: [blank] Bangla- where is that?

JAMEEL: South Asia. Near India.

(She nods slowly, clearly still not placing it, and doesn't push further.)

JAMEEL: That’s not important, anyways. What’s important is that- he met my mom in Osaka. Married pretty fast, from what I understand. I was born outside Japan, raised outside Japan. Always thought that was weird. Like, why not come back, even to visit? She always had an excuse. Work, money, timing. Eventually, she just stopped giving excuses. Just said leaving the village was the best decision she ever made. And she hoped it'd stay that way.

(Yorie's expression doesn't change, but something behind her eyes goes very still.)

JAMEEL: She passed a couple years ago. Cancer.

YORIE: [quietly] May the deity have mercy on her soul.

JAMEEL: Thank you. I’m not really a religious man but… yeah, thank you.

YORIE: And your father? Is he well?

JAMEEL: [dry laugh] Define "well." He stopped talking to me when I dropped out of film school. I found a mentor after that. Guy named Mansoorie. Industry guy, really connected, actually wants to take me under his wing. He's the one who told me to come here, you know? Said I couldn't make anything with ‘real identity’ if I didn't know my own. Something like that. Took me six months of digging just to find this place. Spent every dollar I had saved just to get here.

YORIE: For a film.

JAMEEL: For a film. [beat] I know how that sounds.

(Yorie says nothing. She refills his cup without being asked.)

 

[00:16:30] Cut to a workshop. Wooden shelves line the walls, crowded with unfinished figures: torsos without faces, limbs stacked separately, half-painted expressions frozen mid-formation.

JAMEEL: This is neat, Yorie, really neat. The craftsmanship is careful, precise even. But honestly? Nothing here matches the dolls I’ve seen outside.

YORIE: These are practice. You have to fail a hundred times before your hands know what they're doing.

JAMEEL: [examining a half-finished face] These are actually pretty good, though. Way better than I could do.

YORIE: They're nothing compared to the finished ones.

JAMEEL: Yeah, I noticed. The ones outside… they're insane. Like, genuinely, unsettling levels of realistic.

(He laughs, half-joking, gesturing vaguely with the camera.)

JAMEEL: Does this village even have real people anymore, or is it just you and like, forty mannequins?

(Yorie doesn't answer right away. She looks directly into the lens and smiles. The shot holds for a beat before cutting.)

 

[00:19:02] Cut to a small dining room. Warm light. The presence of food implied by steam rising off dishes on a low table. A child runs a lap around the room before being scooped up by a woman (identity confirmed; code: NAOMI), laughing.

NAOMI: Sora, sit, sit. We have a guest.

A man (identity confirmed; code: KENJI) gestures for Jameel to take a seat.

KENJI: Mama Yorie said you'd be joining us. We don't get visitors often. Please, eat.

JAMEEL: [to camera, voiceover] These people are genuinely so nice. Like, disarmingly nice.

(He eats. Chews. Pauses.)

JAMEEL: [to Kenji, mouth half full] This is really good, actually.

NAOMI: All thanks to Mama Yorie. She keeps the whole village fed. Doesn't matter what the land gives, she makes sure there's enough.

KENJI: Such is the kindness of Mama Yorie.

(Jameel nods, still chewing, and brings the camera closer to his own face, angling it so the family can't see the screen.)

JAMEEL: [quiet, half-whisper] Not gonna lie- the food tastes fresh. Like, actually fresh. Which, in a dying village, is kind of a miracle. But the aftertaste is... really bitter. Like, medicinal bitter. Can't say that out loud, though. They'll think I'm rude. I mean… look at them. They're so nice.

(He forces a smile and turns the camera back around.)

JAMEEL: [to the table] Like I said, this is amazing. Thank you so much !

 

[00:24:18] JAMEEL: Would you guys mind if I got a proper interview? Like, sit-down, on record?

KENJI: Of course. But please give us a moment. We have to get ready for what’s about to come.

NAOMI: We'll be right back.

(They usher Sora out with them, leaving Jameel alone in the dining room, camera still running.)

(Jameel wanders the room idly, filming the walls, a shelf of photographs, a low shrine in the corner.)

(A soft creak is heard from the next room. He pans toward it. There is nothing.)

(He turns back toward the window. Outside, a doll seated on a low wall tilts its head. Not dramatically, just slightly, the way a person's head drifts when they're listening to something. Jameel's camera catches it mid-motion and holds there a half-second too long before he moves on.)

JAMEEL: [muttering] Must have been the wind…

(From somewhere deeper in the house, a sound is heard. Barely vocal. A single broken syllable, cut off before it fully forms.)

JAMEEL: [under his breath] ...the hell was that?

 

[00:25:40] Kenji and Naomi return, carrying a wooden case between them. Sora trails behind, swinging a small metal tin like a lunchbox.

JAMEEL: [camera raised, curious] What's all this?

NAOMI: [already walking past him] Evening rounds. You're welcome to watch, if you want. Might be good footage, actually.

JAMEEL: [to himself, low] Might be good footage. Sure. Why not.

(The camera follows them outside. Kenji sets the case down on the porch step and opens it. Inside: a row of glass vials filled with opaque liquid, and several long, thin syringes.)

KENJI: The fresh ones need this every evening for the first few weeks. After that, once a month's usually enough. Depends on the person, honestly. Some settle faster than others.

JAMEEL: [voice slightly higher than usual] Settle into what, exactly?

KENJI: [already moving] Themselves, I suppose.

(He crouches in front of the doll in the blue yukata. He tilts its head back gently, with two fingers.)

KENJI: [to the doll] There we are, Itu-san! Long day, huh?

(He uncaps a vial. Naomi is already prepping the next one, three houses down. Her voice carries back across the yard.)

NAOMI: Sora, bring the tin over, sweetheart. I need the small ones for Auntie Michiko.

(Sora runs over, humming something under his breath, and hands his mother a smaller vial from the tin.)

JAMEEL: [camera shaking slightly] Auntie Michiko. That's… she's one of the…

NAOMI: [not looking up] She's been with us eleven years now. Longest-settled on this street, actually. Barely needs the full dose anymore.

(The camera drifts to "Auntie Michiko"- seated on a stool, hands folded neatly, eyes open. Naomi tilts the doll's chin up with the same casual tenderness Kenji used, finds a spot at the side of the neck, and pushes the needle in.)

(Something under the doll's skin twitches. Just once. A full-body flinch, small but unmistakably alive, gone as fast as it came.)

JAMEEL: [barely audible] What the…

NAOMI: [smiling] There we go. Good girl.

(She caps the vial, pats the doll's shoulder twice like burping a baby, and moves on to the next house.)

(Kenji, meanwhile, is finishing up on the porch doll. He wipes the needle site with a small cloth, tucking a loose strand of the doll's hair back into place.)

KENJI: [to Jameel, glancing back] Once they're settled, they don't feel a thing. It's just the first stretch that's hard on them. Everyone goes through it.

JAMEEL: [voice cracking slightly] Everyone?

KENJI: [nodding, already moving to the next one] Everyone who stays, that is.

(Sora skips past Jameel's camera, humming his tune again, swinging the tin.)

SORA: [singsong, half to himself] One more street, one more street…

(Jameel lowers the camera slightly, catching his own hand shaking in frame before he raises it again.)

JAMEEL: This is… this is normal to you? This is just… what? Just a Tuesday?

KENJI: [genuinely puzzled] What else would it be?

 

[00:31:44] Fragmented footage follows

(Transcriber’s Note: hard cuts, no clean transitions. Transcribed to the best of my abilities.)

He's walking the main path again, camera loose in his hand, filming without really watching the screen.

JAMEEL: [muttering] Just gotta get enough B-roll. Just gotta get enough and then I can…

(He stops walking.)

(The doll seated on the porch railing is no longer seated. It's standing at the edge of the railing, feet together, facing the road.)

JAMEEL: [quiet] ...okay.

(He keeps the camera on it. The doll doesn't move for a moment ((Transcriber’s note: 17 seconds)). Suddenly, its head snaps sideways, tracking Jameel as he takes a step back.)

(The frame jolts. He's run several meters before the shot stabilizes, breathing hard, camera shaking.)

JAMEEL: [panicked laugh] Messed up. This is really messed up !

(He keeps walking anyway, faster now, cutting through a narrow gap between two houses.)

(A window to his left. A doll's face fills it from the inside, pressed so close to the glass that its nose is flattened white against it, mouth stretched into an abnormally wide smile.)

JAMEEL: [strangled sound, not quite a scream]

(He stumbles backward, camera swinging wildly, catching only ceiling, sky, dirt, his own shoes.)

(When the frame settles again, the window is empty.)

(The camera rounds a corner into a narrow alley. The frame fills, instantly, with a doll's face, inches from the lens.)

(Its eyes are open too wide, and lashless. Its mouth opens. It sounds like a recording played through a broken radio.)

DOLL: [whispering] Save… me…

(Transcriber’s note: I played this part of the footage nine times. Presence of an artifact is highly unlikely. The sound did come out of the doll.)

Jameel screams. The camera drops. The footage shows nothing but dirt and the underside of a wooden fence, before he snatches it back up.

JAMEEL: [hyperventilating] No, no, no. That’s it… I'm done, I'm actually done, that's it, I'm leaving…

(The camera catches a row of five dolls lined up against a wall, the same five he filmed hours earlier. They are not seated now. They are standing, evenly spaced, arms hanging straight at their sides, and every one of them is facing the exact spot where Jameel is standing.)

(The five heads turn in unison, a single sound like knuckles cracking in stereo, and lock onto him.)

JAMEEL: [barely a whisper] Fuck… what the actual fuck !

(Jameel runs. The camera catches almost nothing coherent.)

(Transcriber’s note: blurred motion, duration- 28 seconds)

JAMEEL: [shaking] I don't… I don't feel good. My stomach… it feels like it's moving wrong…

(The footage cuts hard for 2 seconds. It resumes to an unsteady shot. Jameel is walking now instead of running, seeming disoriented and unfocused.)

JAMEEL: [whispers] Battery's at, what… twelve percent? Great.

 

[00:39:20] Cut to the path that leads outside the village. Blocked by five villagers (identities unconfirmed; code: VILLAGER <NUMBER>). They are standing shoulder to shoulder, unhurried and unbothered.

JAMEEL: Hey… sorry, I think I'm gonna head out, it's getting late, I've got what I need for…

VILLAGER 1: Mama Yorie didn't say you could leave yet.

JAMEEL: [laughing, uneasy] I mean… I don't think she needs to say…

VILLAGER 2: Won't you say goodbye to Mama Yorie first?

JAMEEL: [camera shaking slightly] Yeah. Sure. Of course. Just… she's at the house?

(They don't answer. They simply turn, walking ahead of him, expecting him to follow.)

(The camera follows.)

JAMEEL: [barely audible] I really don't feel good.

 

[00:44:57] Cut to the workshop again. Yorie stands among her unfinished dolls, hands folded.

On the table beside her is a half-finished face. It resembles the face of Jameel.

The camera catches it for 3 seconds before Jameel's hand goes slack, the frame dipping.

JAMEEL: [slurred] Wait… that's…

YORIE: [calm and warm] Sit down, sweetheart. You don't look well.

JAMEEL: [struggling] What did you… the tea, the food, what did you…

YORIE: I gave everyone in this village the same gift. I'll give it to you too.

(Jameel tries to move, but no significant movement is visible.)

YORIE: I spent my whole life taking care of people. Every soul in this village called me Mama. I fed them, I raised their children, I sat with them when they were dying. And when there was nothing left here- no work, no money, no reason to stay… they left anyway. One by one. And the country followed right behind them, crossed us off like we'd already died.

JAMEEL: [gasping] Please…

YORIE: Genkai Shūraku. Half the village was already gone by the time they gave us that name. And I knew, trust me I knew, the rest would follow. My heart couldn't take it. Do you understand? A feeble old woman's heart, watching everyone she ever loved walk away, one after another.

(The camera slips further, catching only fragments now: the ceiling, Yorie’s hands, and Jameel’s arm, unnaturally still.)

YORIE: And your mother Amaya? She always blamed me. Said I worshipped the wrong deity. Said that the deity cursed this soil, cursed the weather, cursed everything I ever tried to grow here.

(Her voice softens further, almost tender.)

YORIE: But you know what, sweetheart? When everyone else abandoned me… the deity was the only one who listened. He gave me a gift. He gave me his elixir. And thanks to his grace...

(Jameel's breathing slows. His fingers, visible at the edge of frame, have stopped moving entirely.)

YORIE: ...no one will ever leave Mama Yorie again.

 

[00:51:03] The camera has fallen. It rests on the floor, tilted, still recording. Jameel is visible at the edge of frame- upright, motionless, eyes open.

KENJI (off-screen): [casually] Where should we put the new one, Mama Yorie?

YORIE: [equally casual] Somewhere with a good view. He'd like that. He was always looking for the right shot.

(Laughter is heard: warm and domestic. The kind of laughter shared over where to place a new piece of furniture.)

(The battery indicator, barely visible in the corner of the frame, blinks red.)

(From Jameel's motionless form, a single sound escapes.)

JAMEEL: [barely audible] …help….

The screen cuts to black.

[END OF FILE]

 

NOTE: Footage reviewed (ref. 086531EBD). No evidence of tampering. Subject matches the referral intake dated six months prior. Target compound (codename ‘Medusa’) exhibiting effects as usual.

 

RECOMMENDATION: Client relationship remains active. Site producing as expected.

 

REFERRING CONTACT:

Mansoorie [REDACTED]

Recruitment Officer, [REDACTED] Branch,

Aldermore & Associates

 

 

[TRANSCRIPT - RECOVERED FOOTAGE]
File: backup_jp_002
Transcription courtesy of Aldermore and Associates
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY. CIRCULATION OF THIS DOCUMENT OUTSIDE THE PREMISES IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

 

Title Card: ONCE UPON A GENKAI SHŪRAKU

 

[00:00:03] The footage begins mid-motion. A young man's face fills the frame, too close, slightly out of focus. His breath fogs faintly in the cold air.

Off-screen, an old woman's voice, mid-sentence, unintelligible.

The young man (identity confirmed; code: JAMEEL) pulls the camera back slightly, catching himself in frame at an awkward angle, cloudy sky behind him, weak sunlight breaking through in patches.

JAMEEL: Sorry… can I record this? Like, is that okay?

OLD WOMAN (off-screen): [laughing] Record what, an old woman drinking her tea?

JAMEEL: No, just… talking. Just a video of us talking.

OLD WOMAN: If you like.

(He turns the camera toward her. She's small, weathered, dressed plainly, sitting on a low wooden stool, outside a house with peeling paint. Her eyes are sharp despite her age. She watches the lens without flinching.)

JAMEEL: So you're my grandmother? Like, actually?

WOMAN: Depends how you count it. What did your mother tell you?

JAMEEL: Nothing. That's the problem… (artifact found; audio too unclear to transcribe)

(Transcriber’s Note: From what I can derive, they go back and forth for a moment- a cousin of a cousin, a sister who married into the wrong branch, a generation Jameel clearly doesn't have mapped in his head. Eventually they land on a single conclusion. She is, functionally, his grandmother. Not by blood exactly. Close enough that it doesn't matter.)

WOMAN: Yorie. You can call me Yorie.

JAMEEL: Yorie. Okay. Cool. Yorie it is.

YORIE: You want tea?

JAMEEL: I mean, sure, if it's not a hassle…

YORIE: It'll take some time. The stove here isn't what you're used to.

JAMEEL: No worries, take your time. I'll just record an intro…

(He gestures vaguely at the camera. She nods, unbothered, and disappears into the house. The screen holds on the empty doorway for a beat. Jameel turns the camera back on himself.)

 

[00:03:47] Hard cut. It is a different location: a dirt path lined with houses in various states of disrepair. The camera pans slowly, deliberately, clearly composed rather than candid.

A doll sits on a porch railing. Life-sized. Dressed in a faded blue yukata. Its hands rest in its lap with unsettling precision, fingers slightly curled.

The camera moves on.

Another doll stands near a fence post, tilted slightly, head angled downward like it's studying the dirt.

Another doll sits in a doorway.

The camera moves swiftly through four more dolls.

It settles on a group of three dolls arranged in front of a house. The dolls are seated, as if mid-conversation, faces turned toward each other. All three are smiling. The smiles are wide (Transcriber’s Note: a little too wide).

 

[00:04:52] Jameel walks into frame from the left, adjusting his jacket, clearing his throat.

JAMEEL: Hello, this is your boy Jameel… fuck ! No. That's not, that's not it…

(He walks out of frame. A beat. He walks back in.)

JAMEEL: This is Jameel, reporting live from… cut it ! Too on the nose. Gotta start cold. Cold open, just like Mansoorie says it. Think, Jameel, think…

(He walks out again. Longer pause this time. When he returns, his posture has changed: shoulders lower, voice quieter, more deliberate. He glances down at his left hand, where something is written in faded ink. He squints at it.)

JAMEEL: Here I am, right in the center of [attempting the village name, several syllables, clearly mispronounced]. Screw that. I'm not gonna get that right. Moving on.

(He looks back up at the dolls behind him, framing himself against them.)

JAMEEL: Ten years ago, this village was officially declared a genkai shūraku. Its English translation is a "marginal settlement." It's a term the Japanese government uses, for villages where more than half the population is over sixty-five. Where, basically, there's no path back. No young people having kids. No industry. No reason for anyone to stay. Once a place gets that label, it's not really considered a living community anymore. It's considered a place that's, quite frankly, finished.

(He pauses, letting that sit for a while.)

JAMEEL: Except this place didn't finish. Because one woman decided it wasn't allowed to.

(He gestures behind him, toward the smiling dolls.)

JAMEEL: For years, she's been making these. Life-sized dolls, as you can see. Placed all over the village. Filling the empty houses, the empty streets. Filling them with… I don't know what to call it. Company, I guess? Basically, a population that doesn't leave.

(He looks directly into the lens.)

JAMEEL: This is Jameel. Founder, President, and Spokesperson of JK Motion Arts.

(Beat.)

JAMEEL: And this... is a genkai shūraku.

(He exhales, breaking character immediately.)

JAMEEL: Gotta fix that in post. Jeez. "Spokesperson." Who says that ? Mansoorie wouldn’t like that…

 

[00:09:14] Cut to Yorie's kitchen. The camera rests on a low wooden table, angled up slightly, catching both of them in frame- Jameel on one side, Yorie on the other, a teapot and two cups between them.

YORIE: You're still recording?

JAMEEL: If that's okay. You can tell me to stop anytime.

YORIE: It's fine. Better than the cameras they used to bring. They were big and loud things, you know? Made everyone nervous.

JAMEEL: People used to come film here?

YORIE: A long time ago. Before it got- [she gestures vaguely]- official.

(She pours the tea. Steam curls between them.)

YORIE: So… you're making a movie?

JAMEEL: More like a documentary. Honestly… I didn't plan any of this. I'm criminally unprepared. I have, like, one microphone and a prayer. But this place is just… it's too unsettling to not film, you know?

(He catches himself.)

JAMEEL: Sorry. That's… sorry, that's a weird thing to say to your face.

YORIE: [laughing] You're a funny kid. Just like your mother.

(Jameel glances at the lens.)

JAMEEL: Note to self- cut this part in post.

(They drink. There is a long and comfortable silence.)

YORIE: I didn't know you existed, you know. Not until the letter.

JAMEEL: Yeah. Mom wasn't exactly forthcoming about… any of this.

YORIE: Your father. He's a foreigner?

JAMEEL: He’s from Bangladesh. Came to Japan as a migrant worker.

YORIE: [blank] Bangla- where is that?

JAMEEL: South Asia. Near India.

(She nods slowly, clearly still not placing it, and doesn't push further.)

JAMEEL: That’s not important, anyways. What’s important is that- he met my mom in Osaka. Married pretty fast, from what I understand. I was born outside Japan, raised outside Japan. Always thought that was weird. Like, why not come back, even to visit? She always had an excuse. Work, money, timing. Eventually, she just stopped giving excuses. Just said leaving the village was the best decision she ever made. And she hoped it'd stay that way.

(Yorie's expression doesn't change, but something behind her eyes goes very still.)

JAMEEL: She passed a couple years ago. Cancer.

YORIE: [quietly] May the deity have mercy on her soul.

JAMEEL: Thank you. I’m not really a religious man but… yeah, thank you.

YORIE: And your father? Is he well?

JAMEEL: [dry laugh] Define "well." He stopped talking to me when I dropped out of film school. I found a mentor after that. Guy named Mansoorie. Industry guy, really connected, actually wants to take me under his wing. He's the one who told me to come here, you know? Said I couldn't make anything with ‘real identity’ if I didn't know my own. Something like that. Took me six months of digging just to find this place. Spent every dollar I had saved just to get here.

YORIE: For a film.

JAMEEL: For a film. [beat] I know how that sounds.

(Yorie says nothing. She refills his cup without being asked.)

 

[00:16:30] Cut to a workshop. Wooden shelves line the walls, crowded with unfinished figures: torsos without faces, limbs stacked separately, half-painted expressions frozen mid-formation.

JAMEEL: This is neat, Yorie, really neat. The craftsmanship is careful, precise even. But honestly? Nothing here matches the dolls I’ve seen outside.

YORIE: These are practice. You have to fail a hundred times before your hands know what they're doing.

JAMEEL: [examining a half-finished face] These are actually pretty good, though. Way better than I could do.

YORIE: They're nothing compared to the finished ones.

JAMEEL: Yeah, I noticed. The ones outside… they're insane. Like, genuinely, unsettling levels of realistic.

(He laughs, half-joking, gesturing vaguely with the camera.)

JAMEEL: Does this village even have real people anymore, or is it just you and like, forty mannequins?

(Yorie doesn't answer right away. She looks directly into the lens and smiles. The shot holds for a beat before cutting.)

 

[00:19:02] Cut to a small dining room. Warm light. The presence of food implied by steam rising off dishes on a low table. A child runs a lap around the room before being scooped up by a woman (identity confirmed; code: NAOMI), laughing.

NAOMI: Sora, sit, sit. We have a guest.

A man (identity confirmed; code: KENJI) gestures for Jameel to take a seat.

KENJI: Mama Yorie said you'd be joining us. We don't get visitors often. Please, eat.

JAMEEL: [to camera, voiceover] These people are genuinely so nice. Like, disarmingly nice.

(He eats. Chews. Pauses.)

JAMEEL: [to Kenji, mouth half full] This is really good, actually.

NAOMI: All thanks to Mama Yorie. She keeps the whole village fed. Doesn't matter what the land gives, she makes sure there's enough.

KENJI: Such is the kindness of Mama Yorie.

(Jameel nods, still chewing, and brings the camera closer to his own face, angling it so the family can't see the screen.)

JAMEEL: [quiet, half-whisper] Not gonna lie- the food tastes fresh. Like, actually fresh. Which, in a dying village, is kind of a miracle. But the aftertaste is... really bitter. Like, medicinal bitter. Can't say that out loud, though. They'll think I'm rude. I mean… look at them. They're so nice.

(He forces a smile and turns the camera back around.)

JAMEEL: [to the table] Like I said, this is amazing. Thank you so much !

 

[00:24:18] JAMEEL: Would you guys mind if I got a proper interview? Like, sit-down, on record?

KENJI: Of course. But please give us a moment. We have to get ready for what’s about to come.

NAOMI: We'll be right back.

(They usher Sora out with them, leaving Jameel alone in the dining room, camera still running.)

(Jameel wanders the room idly, filming the walls, a shelf of photographs, a low shrine in the corner.)

(A soft creak is heard from the next room. He pans toward it. There is nothing.)

(He turns back toward the window. Outside, a doll seated on a low wall tilts its head. Not dramatically, just slightly, the way a person's head drifts when they're listening to something. Jameel's camera catches it mid-motion and holds there a half-second too long before he moves on.)

JAMEEL: [muttering] Must have been the wind…

(From somewhere deeper in the house, a sound is heard. Barely vocal. A single broken syllable, cut off before it fully forms.)

JAMEEL: [under his breath] ...the hell was that?

 

[00:25:40] Kenji and Naomi return, carrying a wooden case between them. Sora trails behind, swinging a small metal tin like a lunchbox.

JAMEEL: [camera raised, curious] What's all this?

NAOMI: [already walking past him] Evening rounds. You're welcome to watch, if you want. Might be good footage, actually.

JAMEEL: [to himself, low] Might be good footage. Sure. Why not.

(The camera follows them outside. Kenji sets the case down on the porch step and opens it. Inside: a row of glass vials filled with opaque liquid, and several long, thin syringes.)

KENJI: The fresh ones need this every evening for the first few weeks. After that, once a month's usually enough. Depends on the person, honestly. Some settle faster than others.

JAMEEL: [voice slightly higher than usual] Settle into what, exactly?

KENJI: [already moving] Themselves, I suppose.

(He crouches in front of the doll in the blue yukata. He tilts its head back gently, with two fingers.)

KENJI: [to the doll] There we are, Itu-san! Long day, huh?

(He uncaps a vial. Naomi is already prepping the next one, three houses down. Her voice carries back across the yard.)

NAOMI: Sora, bring the tin over, sweetheart. I need the small ones for Auntie Michiko.

(Sora runs over, humming something under his breath, and hands his mother a smaller vial from the tin.)

JAMEEL: [camera shaking slightly] Auntie Michiko. That's… she's one of the…

NAOMI: [not looking up] She's been with us eleven years now. Longest-settled on this street, actually. Barely needs the full dose anymore.

(The camera drifts to "Auntie Michiko"- seated on a stool, hands folded neatly, eyes open. Naomi tilts the doll's chin up with the same casual tenderness Kenji used, finds a spot at the side of the neck, and pushes the needle in.)

(Something under the doll's skin twitches. Just once. A full-body flinch, small but unmistakably alive, gone as fast as it came.)

JAMEEL: [barely audible] What the…

NAOMI: [smiling] There we go. Good girl.

(She caps the vial, pats the doll's shoulder twice like burping a baby, and moves on to the next house.)

(Kenji, meanwhile, is finishing up on the porch doll. He wipes the needle site with a small cloth, tucking a loose strand of the doll's hair back into place.)

KENJI: [to Jameel, glancing back] Once they're settled, they don't feel a thing. It's just the first stretch that's hard on them. Everyone goes through it.

JAMEEL: [voice cracking slightly] Everyone?

KENJI: [nodding, already moving to the next one] Everyone who stays, that is.

(Sora skips past Jameel's camera, humming his tune again, swinging the tin.)

SORA: [singsong, half to himself] One more street, one more street…

(Jameel lowers the camera slightly, catching his own hand shaking in frame before he raises it again.)

JAMEEL: This is… this is normal to you? This is just… what? Just a Tuesday?

KENJI: [genuinely puzzled] What else would it be?

 

[00:31:44] Fragmented footage follows

(Transcriber’s Note: hard cuts, no clean transitions. Transcribed to the best of my abilities.)

He's walking the main path again, camera loose in his hand, filming without really watching the screen.

JAMEEL: [muttering] Just gotta get enough B-roll. Just gotta get enough and then I can…

(He stops walking.)

(The doll seated on the porch railing is no longer seated. It's standing at the edge of the railing, feet together, facing the road.)

JAMEEL: [quiet] ...okay.

(He keeps the camera on it. The doll doesn't move for a moment ((Transcriber’s note: 17 seconds)). Suddenly, its head snaps sideways, tracking Jameel as he takes a step back.)

(The frame jolts. He's run several meters before the shot stabilizes, breathing hard, camera shaking.)

JAMEEL: [panicked laugh] Messed up. This is really messed up !

(He keeps walking anyway, faster now, cutting through a narrow gap between two houses.)

(A window to his left. A doll's face fills it from the inside, pressed so close to the glass that its nose is flattened white against it, mouth stretched into an abnormally wide smile.)

JAMEEL: [strangled sound, not quite a scream]

(He stumbles backward, camera swinging wildly, catching only ceiling, sky, dirt, his own shoes.)

(When the frame settles again, the window is empty.)

(The camera rounds a corner into a narrow alley. The frame fills, instantly, with a doll's face, inches from the lens.)

(Its eyes are open too wide, and lashless. Its mouth opens. It sounds like a recording played through a broken radio.)

DOLL: [whispering] Save… me…

(Transcriber’s note: I played this part of the footage nine times. Presence of an artifact is highly unlikely. The sound did come out of the doll.)

Jameel screams. The camera drops. The footage shows nothing but dirt and the underside of a wooden fence, before he snatches it back up.

JAMEEL: [hyperventilating] No, no, no. That’s it… I'm done, I'm actually done, that's it, I'm leaving…

(The camera catches a row of five dolls lined up against a wall, the same five he filmed hours earlier. They are not seated now. They are standing, evenly spaced, arms hanging straight at their sides, and every one of them is facing the exact spot where Jameel is standing.)

(The five heads turn in unison, a single sound like knuckles cracking in stereo, and lock onto him.)

JAMEEL: [barely a whisper] Fuck… what the actual fuck !

(Jameel runs. The camera catches almost nothing coherent.)

(Transcriber’s note: blurred motion, duration- 28 seconds)

JAMEEL: [shaking] I don't… I don't feel good. My stomach… it feels like it's moving wrong…

(The footage cuts hard for 2 seconds. It resumes to an unsteady shot. Jameel is walking now instead of running, seeming disoriented and unfocused.)

JAMEEL: [whispers] Battery's at, what… twelve percent? Great.

 

[00:39:20] Cut to the path that leads outside the village. Blocked by five villagers (identities unconfirmed; code: VILLAGER <NUMBER>). They are standing shoulder to shoulder, unhurried and unbothered.

JAMEEL: Hey… sorry, I think I'm gonna head out, it's getting late, I've got what I need for…

VILLAGER 1: Mama Yorie didn't say you could leave yet.

JAMEEL: [laughing, uneasy] I mean… I don't think she needs to say…

VILLAGER 2: Won't you say goodbye to Mama Yorie first?

JAMEEL: [camera shaking slightly] Yeah. Sure. Of course. Just… she's at the house?

(They don't answer. They simply turn, walking ahead of him, expecting him to follow.)

(The camera follows.)

JAMEEL: [barely audible] I really don't feel good.

 

[00:44:57] Cut to the workshop again. Yorie stands among her unfinished dolls, hands folded.

On the table beside her is a half-finished face. It resembles the face of Jameel.

The camera catches it for 3 seconds before Jameel's hand goes slack, the frame dipping.

JAMEEL: [slurred] Wait… that's…

YORIE: [calm and warm] Sit down, sweetheart. You don't look well.

JAMEEL: [struggling] What did you… the tea, the food, what did you…

YORIE: I gave everyone in this village the same gift. I'll give it to you too.

(Jameel tries to move, but no significant movement is visible.)

YORIE: I spent my whole life taking care of people. Every soul in this village called me Mama. I fed them, I raised their children, I sat with them when they were dying. And when there was nothing left here- no work, no money, no reason to stay… they left anyway. One by one. And the country followed right behind them, crossed us off like we'd already died.

JAMEEL: [gasping] Please…

YORIE: Genkai Shūraku. Half the village was already gone by the time they gave us that name. And I knew, trust me I knew, the rest would follow. My heart couldn't take it. Do you understand? A feeble old woman's heart, watching everyone she ever loved walk away, one after another.

(The camera slips further, catching only fragments now: the ceiling, Yorie’s hands, and Jameel’s arm, unnaturally still.)

YORIE: And your mother Amaya? She always blamed me. Said I worshipped the wrong deity. Said that the deity cursed this soil, cursed the weather, cursed everything I ever tried to grow here.

(Her voice softens further, almost tender.)

YORIE: But you know what, sweetheart? When everyone else abandoned me… the deity was the only one who listened. He gave me a gift. He gave me his elixir. And thanks to his grace...

(Jameel's breathing slows. His fingers, visible at the edge of frame, have stopped moving entirely.)

YORIE: ...no one will ever leave Mama Yorie again.

 

[00:51:03] The camera has fallen. It rests on the floor, tilted, still recording. Jameel is visible at the edge of frame- upright, motionless, eyes open.

KENJI (off-screen): [casually] Where should we put the new one, Mama Yorie?

YORIE: [equally casual] Somewhere with a good view. He'd like that. He was always looking for the right shot.

(Laughter is heard: warm and domestic. The kind of laughter shared over where to place a new piece of furniture.)

(The battery indicator, barely visible in the corner of the frame, blinks red.)

(From Jameel's motionless form, a single sound escapes.)

JAMEEL: [barely audible] …help….

The screen cuts to black.

[END OF FILE]

 

NOTE: Footage reviewed (ref. 086531EBD). No evidence of tampering. Subject matches the referral intake dated six months prior. Target compound (codename ‘Medusa’) exhibiting effects as usual.

 

RECOMMENDATION: Client relationship remains active. Site producing as expected.

 

REFERRING CONTACT:

Mansoorie [REDACTED]

Recruitment Officer, [REDACTED] Branch,

Aldermore & Associates

 

I have made mistakes in life. A LOT of them, to be honest. The husband I married at twenty-two because I confused intensity for love. The needle I picked up at twenty-four because the marriage left things in me that needed quieting. The gambling that followed because apparently I wasn’t done yet. I made all of it, and I own all of it.

But Ayesha was not a mistake. Ayesha was the only decision that I would make again without hesitation. The day she was born I understood, very clearly, that I had to stop. So I did stop, for her sake and mine. By the time she was five, we were in a one-room slum, with a ceiling that leaked when it rained. But I was clean. And she was fed. And I had stopped arguing with myself about whose fault any of it was.

So when the man in a pale shirt told me about free housing, three meals a day, and a weekly stipend, I laughed at him. The offer was too good to be true, and I was too tired of making mistakes.

His name was Rafiq. Senior manager at something called Aldermore and Associates. Sleeves rolled exactly twice. He had a smile that reeked of reassurance, if that makes sense. He slid a printed brochure across the table without being asked, which told me he had done this before.

I asked him why a man like him would do this much for a woman like me.

He looked at me with a patience that felt almost insulting.

"We want proof, ma'am. Proof that we can make a difference in the lives of single mothers like you. Proof that you are stronger than the world perceives you to be. Proof that you matter, young lady."

I looked him up that night. Aldermore and Associates, A&A for short. Multinational corporate consultancy. Charitable initiatives listed under their Corporate Social Responsibility or some shit. Housing for single mothers, free Iftar for orphans during Ramadan, winter clothes distribution for slums. A website that had been designed to make you feel slightly ashamed for doubting them.

I lay in bed staring at the leak in the ceiling, rain drops falling on a sleeping Ayesha.

I moved in three weeks later. I told myself I’d be careful. I told myself it wasn’t a mistake. I told myself a lot of things…

The building was fifteen stories. Four flats per floor, all single mothers. Small apartments that were clean. Better furnished than anything I had lived in since my marriage. Three meals arrived at the door every day. The income work came with it. I was one of the fifteen women who were given a sewing machine, with a weekly quota of winter clothes for an orphan drive. Other women were charged with cooking food for a nearby slum. A few others made handmade goods for a local boutique. The work fed back into the charitable output of A&A, though I didn’t think about that at the time.

Rafiq visited every week. He remembered everyone's names, everyone's children. He made me feel comfortable. I sometimes felt he went out of his way to do so. Like the time he arranged Ayesha's enrollment in a private kindergarten two streets away, which I took as a personal favor. I felt like I owed him something small and good. He never looked like he wanted anything in return.

‘Just doing my job,’ he would say, smile reeking of reassurance as usual.

Most of the mothers kept to themselves, but my neighbor Sarah was an obvious exception.

Loud laugh, terrible cooking smells, her son's drawings taped crookedly to her door. She listened to conspiracy podcasts and talked about them whether or not you asked. She was the first person in two years who made me feel like I was allowed to be a person, not just a mother. We smoked on the stairwell after the kids were asleep. We became quite good friends in the process.

I was happy, for a while. I want to be honest about that. I was genuinely happy.

Then, four months in, Ayesha had her first nosebleed.

I had mine two days later.

I told Rafiq on his next visit. He nodded slowly, and referred me to an on-call physician from A&A. He asked me, gently, not to mention the symptoms to anyone in the building. It could cause unnecessary panic, he said. It could reflect badly on him personally, he said. He reminded me, very kindly, about Ayesha's school.

I stayed quiet.

The physician from A&A, Dr. Cyrus Mollah, paid us a visit the next day. He gave me and Ayesha a single tablet each, long before I finished describing my symptoms. I remember thinking that was strange. I did not say so. The nosebleeds stabilized soon afterwards.

I thought that was the end of it. Until Ayesha started sleepwalking two days later.

I would find her standing in the kitchen at 3am, eyes open, completely still. I would say her name and she would not respond. I would guide her back to bed. She wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning.

In the same week, I started losing time. Small amounts of it. Arriving somewhere with no memory of the journey. Waking mid-action with a glass in my hand or the tap running, with no recollection of getting up.

And it got worse every day. It was barely a minute when it started. It was a little over five by the end of the month.

I told Sarah on the stairwell one night, mostly because I couldn’t hold it anymore. I didn’t know what I was thinking. I probably expected her to list three podcasts that explained it. Instead, she went very quiet.

She revealed that she had the same symptoms. All of them. She had told Rafiq months ago. He had asked her to stay quiet too. He had been secretly supplying her cigarettes, the imported ones, which I hadn’t known about. And he made her feel comfortable, she said, sometimes going out of his way to do so.

We sat in silence for a while. We had each believed we had a private arrangement with him. We had each been managed into silence with different currencies. Small debts, carefully chosen. The kind that feels like kindness, until you see them from the outside.

Sarah told me she had spent weeks trying to find out who actually owned the building. Not A&A, the actual owner. Every company name she traced folded into another dead company name, which folded into another, which led nowhere. She had heard something about Aldermore once, on a podcast she followed. The series was cancelled abruptly mid-episode. No explanation. No final upload. Just gone.

I told her about the school. How Rafiq had arranged Ayesha's enrollment at the private kindergarten two streets away, and used it to purchase my silence.

She looked at me.

Every mother in the building had received the same reference, she said. Every single one. All of our children now study in different classes of the same school.

I had never been the special one.

I had always been the next one.

Two days after that conversation, Sarah's door had a new nameplate on it. Her son’s drawings, once crookedly pasted, were nowhere to be found.

Rafiq told me she had requested a transfer. To a rehab facility, of all places. It turned out she had been lacing her cigarettes with cannabis, he said. The company was taking care of her and her son. He said it smoothly, without pausing once.

I tried reaching her phone. It was disconnected. Her Facebook, with ten years of photographs and four hundred friends, was also gone.

I asked the neighbors. Two of them smiled and said they were sure Sarah was doing well. A woman in unit four, who had been in the building longer than anyone, looked at me for a moment.

"She talked too much," she said. Then she went inside.

I found the article three days later. Page 6 of the local paper. Four sentences. A woman had been found in the river. Death ruled accidental. No family came forward. No photograph.

There was one identifying detail. A tattoo on the back of her neck. A snake tattoo.

Sarah used to lift her hair off her neck when she laughed, showing it off. She was proud of that tattoo.

I sat with my phone in my hands for a long time after that…

I started paying more attention to myself, and to the house itself. I started noticing things I had trained myself not to see.

A lens inside the smoke detector in Ayesha's room. A router with a model number that returned no results on any manufacturer's website. Behind a loose panel under the kitchen sink, there was a small secondary device wired into the building's plumbing column. The mirror in the bathroom had a half-centimeter gap between its backing and the wall, something that it did not need to have.

I photographed everything and emailed it to myself. The emails bounced on the building's Wi-Fi, but they sent fine on mobile data. I don’t know how long that had been the case.

I contacted a friend from my old life. One of the few fellow addicts who had actually rebuilt their life. He was working in environmental services now. He tested the device off the record. He called me back speaking quietly, like someone who had just made a decision about how much trouble he was willing to be in.

He said he could not tell me anything officially. He just said I should stop letting Ayesha drink the tap water.

He hasn’t returned my calls since.

I found a deleted thread on Reddit. The post was deleted, but the comments remained. Former residents of an Aldermore housing project in another city. The same symptoms listed by different women- fatigue, memory gaps, children sleepwalking. One comment said: The doctor kept saying stress. But my daughter had never sleepwalked before we moved in !

I wanted to share the link here, but there is nothing left to share. Because the subreddit itself no longer exists. Not deleted, just gone, like it was never there to begin with…

It has been ten months since I moved in.

I know what I know. I also know I cannot leave.

Ayesha's school, the stipend, the meals, every fragment of the stable life I built for her- all of it runs through Aldermore. I am trapped in a system that I can’t escape.  

I can’t say it loud, and trust me, I’ve thought about it. And even if I did, who would believe me?

I have a history that makes me exactly the kind of woman nobody believes. A former addict, a divorcee, a slum address on her record. I have photographs of a smoke detector and a device I cannot identify. I have a dead Reddit thread and a four-sentence news article. I have nothing that looks like evidence to anyone who has not lived inside this building.

Which brings me to what happened yesterday.

Rafiq came for his weekly visit as usual.

“I heard you had some issues with plumbing,” he said, “Something regarding a faulty device under the kitchen sink?”

He smiled.

“You’ll be happy to know that- it has been taken care of.”

I smiled back, trying to fake an expression of gratitude.

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” He continued*, “We’re always here, we’re always near, and we’re always paying attention.”*

That extra emphasis on always made my skin crawl, in a way I couldn’t articulate.

Rafiq sat down across from me like he had all the time in the world. He looked at the cold cup of tea I had made for him, then back at me.

“By the way, are you alright? You look tired.”

I laughed once. It came out wrong. But I really didn’t care at this point.

I don't know what happened in me. Maybe it was ten months of swallowing everything. Maybe it was the tap water still sitting cold in my stomach.

"How do you think I'm doing, huh?" I said. "I have symptoms I can't explain. My daughter has symptoms I can't explain. I've stopped trusting my own eyes half the time. And the other half I'm scared of what I'm seeing clearly. Something happened to Sarah, and I don't even have the comfort of being sure about it ! There's something in the water I drink. Something in the air in my daughter's room. Something in the food that gets delivered to my door every single day. I don't know what it is, I don't know what any of it is ! And despite knowing all of that, despite everything I have just told you, I cannot leave. Yeah, I can’t FUCKING leave this place! Because every single thing in my life runs through it now. My daughter's school. My income. My food. My rent. You made sure of that. You made very, very sure of that."

Rafiq's face lit up.

Not with guilt. Not with alarm.

With something closer to satisfaction.

"I got what I wanted," he said. "Thank you, Aliyah."

He stood to leave.

"What do you mean?" My voice cracked. "What was it that you wanted?"

He stopped mid-step. Turned around slowly, like a man who had all the time in the world, and had simply forgotten to finish a sentence.

"I got the proof, Aliyah," he said. "Proof that we can make a difference in the lives of single mothers like you. Didn't we do that? I mean, look at you! Housed, fed, and employed. Proof that you are stronger than the world perceives you to be. Isn’t that true? You're describing symptoms most people would’ve collapsed under months ago, and here you are, still standing, still asking questions. Proof that you matter, young lady. Because trust me…  your participation matters a great deal to this operation."

I recognized every word. I had heard them in a different room, ten months earlier, when I still believed a kind voice meant a kind man.

He reached the door and paused there, smoothing his sleeve, rolled exactly twice, the way it always was.

"Anyways, thank you for your attention," he said. "Like I said earlier, we've been paying attention as well."

He opened the door.

"Oh, and take care of Ayesha. She'll be needing it."

He closed the door behind him

His words didn’t sound like a threat. That’s the part that still unnerves me. It sounded like he cared, like he actually cared. I just didn’t know what exactly he cared about. The wellbeing of my daughter, or the success of whatever ‘operation’ he mentioned…

That night I found Ayesha at the kitchen tap. Filling a glass. Drinking in long, automatic swallows, eyes open and completely empty.

I pulled the glass away. She did not wake. Did not react. Just stood there with water on her chin, looking at nothing.

I carried her back to bed and sat on the floor beside her until it was light.

That was three nights ago.

I am writing this on my phone, parked two streets away from the building. The engine is off. The streetlight above the car flickers every few seconds, and I keep flinching like it means something.

I don't remember driving here.

I do remember lying beside Ayesha. We’ve been sleeping on the same bed since the last incidence. I somehow convinced myself that doing this will protect her. And then I remember this- the wheel in my hands, the gearshift already in park, the building sitting small and lit-up in the rearview mirror, like nothing had happened at all.

I don't know how much time passed in between. I don't know what I did in it. I’ve stopped being able to trust that gap. I’ve stopped being able to trust a lot of things, actually.

Ayesha is in the backseat. She's asleep, or she looks asleep. Head against the window, mouth slightly open, one hand curled the way it always curls when she's actually dreaming. I've been watching her in the mirror for the last twenty minutes while writing this. I keep waiting for her eyes to open the wrong way, the way they were at the kitchen tap. I don't know what I'll do if that happens out here, in a parked car, with nowhere to bring her and nowhere to run to.

I don't know what happens when she wakes up. I mean that literally. I don't know if she'll wake up as herself, asking for water or complaining about the seatbelt. Or if she'll wake up the other way, the way I've started to expect, quiet and distant, already somewhere I can't follow her.

I can’t go to the police. I can’t leave the city, or even really leave the block.

I’ve made mistakes in my life. A LOT of them, to be honest. And I never really learned my lesson, did I? Trusting Rafiq was a mistake. Coming to this place was a mistake. Not finding a safe exit while I still had the chance was a mistake.

But my daughter was not a mistake. My daughter is the only decision that I would make again without hesitation.

Her name is Ayesha. She likes dinosaurs. She likes the color orange. She used to need the lamp on to fall asleep.

And she’s not afraid of the dark anymore…

I don't know when that changed. I don't know which of those is worse- the child who was scared of shadows, or the one sleeping in the backseat of a car right now, completely calm, no matter what might come.

I want you to remember her name.

I need answers. I don’t know where to find them. I don’t know if the answers are even allowed to be found. So if you are reading this, and know anything about Aldermore and Associates, about Rafiq, about the housing project, about the water, about ANYTHING, please let me know. I want to understand what’s happening to me and my daughter, before we both get consumed by this system we’re trapped inside.

There’s no one I can trust, not anymore. I did have a friend I could rely on, a friend who has been missing without a trace. I’m still not sure what happened to her and her son.

Her name was Sarah. She had a snake tattoo on the back of her neck, and she used to lift her hair to show it off when she laughed. Remember that name as well.

If this account goes quiet, if I come back in a week and say everything is fine, that it was all stress, that we're happy and settled and there’s nothing to worry about…

That’s when you should start worrying.

Remember their names. Please just remember their names…

I think Ayesha is stirring. I have to go.

 

I have made mistakes in life. A LOT of them, to be honest. The husband I married at twenty-two because I confused intensity for love. The needle I picked up at twenty-four because the marriage left things in me that needed quieting. The gambling that followed because apparently I wasn’t done yet. I made all of it, and I own all of it.

But Ayesha was not a mistake. Ayesha was the only decision that I would make again without hesitation. The day she was born I understood, very clearly, that I had to stop. So I did stop, for her sake and mine. By the time she was five, we were in a one-room slum, with a ceiling that leaked when it rained. But I was clean. And she was fed. And I had stopped arguing with myself about whose fault any of it was.

So when the man in a pale shirt told me about free housing, three meals a day, and a weekly stipend, I laughed at him. The offer was too good to be true, and I was too tired of making mistakes.

His name was Rafiq. Senior manager at something called Aldermore and Associates. Sleeves rolled exactly twice. He had a smile that reeked of reassurance, if that makes sense. He slid a printed brochure across the table without being asked, which told me he had done this before.

I asked him why a man like him would do this much for a woman like me.

He looked at me with a patience that felt almost insulting.

"We want proof, ma'am. Proof that we can make a difference in the lives of single mothers like you. Proof that you are stronger than the world perceives you to be. Proof that you matter, young lady."

I looked him up that night. Aldermore and Associates, A&A for short. Multinational corporate consultancy. Charitable initiatives listed under their Corporate Social Responsibility or some shit. Housing for single mothers, free Iftar for orphans during Ramadan, winter clothes distribution for slums. A website that had been designed to make you feel slightly ashamed for doubting them.

I lay in bed staring at the leak in the ceiling, rain drops falling on a sleeping Ayesha.

I moved in three weeks later. I told myself I’d be careful. I told myself it wasn’t a mistake. I told myself a lot of things…

The building was fifteen stories. Four flats per floor, all single mothers. Small apartments that were clean. Better furnished than anything I had lived in since my marriage. Three meals arrived at the door every day. The income work came with it. I was one of the fifteen women who were given a sewing machine, with a weekly quota of winter clothes for an orphan drive. Other women were charged with cooking food for a nearby slum. A few others made handmade goods for a local boutique. The work fed back into the charitable output of A&A, though I didn’t think about that at the time.

Rafiq visited every week. He remembered everyone's names, everyone's children. He made me feel comfortable. I sometimes felt he went out of his way to do so. Like the time he arranged Ayesha's enrollment in a private kindergarten two streets away, which I took as a personal favor. I felt like I owed him something small and good. He never looked like he wanted anything in return.

‘Just doing my job,’ he would say, smile reeking of reassurance as usual.

Most of the mothers kept to themselves, but my neighbor Sarah was an obvious exception.

Loud laugh, terrible cooking smells, her son's drawings taped crookedly to her door. She listened to conspiracy podcasts and talked about them whether or not you asked. She was the first person in two years who made me feel like I was allowed to be a person, not just a mother. We smoked on the stairwell after the kids were asleep. We became quite good friends in the process.

I was happy, for a while. I want to be honest about that. I was genuinely happy.

Then, four months in, Ayesha had her first nosebleed.

I had mine two days later.

I told Rafiq on his next visit. He nodded slowly, and referred me to an on-call physician from A&A. He asked me, gently, not to mention the symptoms to anyone in the building. It could cause unnecessary panic, he said. It could reflect badly on him personally, he said. He reminded me, very kindly, about Ayesha's school.

I stayed quiet.

The physician from A&A, Dr. Cyrus Mollah, paid us a visit the next day. He gave me and Ayesha a single tablet each, long before I finished describing my symptoms. I remember thinking that was strange. I did not say so. The nosebleeds stabilized soon afterwards.

I thought that was the end of it. Until Ayesha started sleepwalking two days later.

I would find her standing in the kitchen at 3am, eyes open, completely still. I would say her name and she would not respond. I would guide her back to bed. She wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning.

In the same week, I started losing time. Small amounts of it. Arriving somewhere with no memory of the journey. Waking mid-action with a glass in my hand or the tap running, with no recollection of getting up.

And it got worse every day. It was barely a minute when it started. It was a little over five by the end of the month.

I told Sarah on the stairwell one night, mostly because I couldn’t hold it anymore. I didn’t know what I was thinking. I probably expected her to list three podcasts that explained it. Instead, she went very quiet.

She revealed that she had the same symptoms. All of them. She had told Rafiq months ago. He had asked her to stay quiet too. He had been secretly supplying her cigarettes, the imported ones, which I hadn’t known about. And he made her feel comfortable, she said, sometimes going out of his way to do so.

We sat in silence for a while. We had each believed we had a private arrangement with him. We had each been managed into silence with different currencies. Small debts, carefully chosen. The kind that feels like kindness, until you see them from the outside.

Sarah told me she had spent weeks trying to find out who actually owned the building. Not A&A, the actual owner. Every company name she traced folded into another dead company name, which folded into another, which led nowhere. She had heard something about Aldermore once, on a podcast she followed. The series was cancelled abruptly mid-episode. No explanation. No final upload. Just gone.

I told her about the school. How Rafiq had arranged Ayesha's enrollment at the private kindergarten two streets away, and used it to purchase my silence.

She looked at me.

Every mother in the building had received the same reference, she said. Every single one. All of our children now study in different classes of the same school.

I had never been the special one.

I had always been the next one.

Two days after that conversation, Sarah's door had a new nameplate on it. Her son’s drawings, once crookedly pasted, were nowhere to be found.

Rafiq told me she had requested a transfer. To a rehab facility, of all places. It turned out she had been lacing her cigarettes with cannabis, he said. The company was taking care of her and her son. He said it smoothly, without pausing once.

I tried reaching her phone. It was disconnected. Her Facebook, with ten years of photographs and four hundred friends, was also gone.

I asked the neighbors. Two of them smiled and said they were sure Sarah was doing well. A woman in unit four, who had been in the building longer than anyone, looked at me for a moment.

"She talked too much," she said. Then she went inside.

I found the article three days later. Page 6 of the local paper. Four sentences. A woman had been found in the river. Death ruled accidental. No family came forward. No photograph.

There was one identifying detail. A tattoo on the back of her neck. A snake tattoo.

Sarah used to lift her hair off her neck when she laughed, showing it off. She was proud of that tattoo.

I sat with my phone in my hands for a long time after that…

I started paying more attention to myself, and to the house itself. I started noticing things I had trained myself not to see.

A lens inside the smoke detector in Ayesha's room. A router with a model number that returned no results on any manufacturer's website. Behind a loose panel under the kitchen sink, there was a small secondary device wired into the building's plumbing column. The mirror in the bathroom had a half-centimeter gap between its backing and the wall, something that it did not need to have.

I photographed everything and emailed it to myself. The emails bounced on the building's Wi-Fi, but they sent fine on mobile data. I don’t know how long that had been the case.

I contacted a friend from my old life. One of the few fellow addicts who had actually rebuilt their life. He was working in environmental services now. He tested the device off the record. He called me back speaking quietly, like someone who had just made a decision about how much trouble he was willing to be in.

He said he could not tell me anything officially. He just said I should stop letting Ayesha drink the tap water.

He hasn’t returned my calls since.

I found a deleted thread on Reddit. The post was deleted, but the comments remained. Former residents of an Aldermore housing project in another city. The same symptoms listed by different women- fatigue, memory gaps, children sleepwalking. One comment said: The doctor kept saying stress. But my daughter had never sleepwalked before we moved in !

I wanted to share the link here, but there is nothing left to share. Because the subreddit itself no longer exists. Not deleted, just gone, like it was never there to begin with…

It has been ten months since I moved in.

I know what I know. I also know I cannot leave.

Ayesha's school, the stipend, the meals, every fragment of the stable life I built for her- all of it runs through Aldermore. I am trapped in a system that I can’t escape.  

I can’t say it loud, and trust me, I’ve thought about it. And even if I did, who would believe me?

I have a history that makes me exactly the kind of woman nobody believes. A former addict, a divorcee, a slum address on her record. I have photographs of a smoke detector and a device I cannot identify. I have a dead Reddit thread and a four-sentence news article. I have nothing that looks like evidence to anyone who has not lived inside this building.

Which brings me to what happened yesterday.

Rafiq came for his weekly visit as usual.

“I heard you had some issues with plumbing,” he said, “Something regarding a faulty device under the kitchen sink?”

He smiled.

“You’ll be happy to know that- it has been taken care of.”

I smiled back, trying to fake an expression of gratitude.

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” He continued*, “We’re always here, we’re always near, and we’re always paying attention.”*

That extra emphasis on always made my skin crawl, in a way I couldn’t articulate.

Rafiq sat down across from me like he had all the time in the world. He looked at the cold cup of tea I had made for him, then back at me.

“By the way, are you alright? You look tired.”

I laughed once. It came out wrong. But I really didn’t care at this point.

I don't know what happened in me. Maybe it was ten months of swallowing everything. Maybe it was the tap water still sitting cold in my stomach.

"How do you think I'm doing, huh?" I said. "I have symptoms I can't explain. My daughter has symptoms I can't explain. I've stopped trusting my own eyes half the time. And the other half I'm scared of what I'm seeing clearly. Something happened to Sarah, and I don't even have the comfort of being sure about it ! There's something in the water I drink. Something in the air in my daughter's room. Something in the food that gets delivered to my door every single day. I don't know what it is, I don't know what any of it is ! And despite knowing all of that, despite everything I have just told you, I cannot leave. Yeah, I can’t FUCKING leave this place! Because every single thing in my life runs through it now. My daughter's school. My income. My food. My rent. You made sure of that. You made very, very sure of that."

Rafiq's face lit up.

Not with guilt. Not with alarm.

With something closer to satisfaction.

"I got what I wanted," he said. "Thank you, Aliyah."

He stood to leave.

"What do you mean?" My voice cracked. "What was it that you wanted?"

He stopped mid-step. Turned around slowly, like a man who had all the time in the world, and had simply forgotten to finish a sentence.

"I got the proof, Aliyah," he said. "Proof that we can make a difference in the lives of single mothers like you. Didn't we do that? I mean, look at you! Housed, fed, and employed. Proof that you are stronger than the world perceives you to be. Isn’t that true? You're describing symptoms most people would’ve collapsed under months ago, and here you are, still standing, still asking questions. Proof that you matter, young lady. Because trust me…  your participation matters a great deal to this operation."

I recognized every word. I had heard them in a different room, ten months earlier, when I still believed a kind voice meant a kind man.

He reached the door and paused there, smoothing his sleeve, rolled exactly twice, the way it always was.

"Anyways, thank you for your attention," he said. "Like I said earlier, we've been paying attention as well."

He opened the door.

"Oh, and take care of Ayesha. She'll be needing it."

He closed the door behind him

His words didn’t sound like a threat. That’s the part that still unnerves me. It sounded like he cared, like he actually cared. I just didn’t know what exactly he cared about. The wellbeing of my daughter, or the success of whatever ‘operation’ he mentioned…

That night I found Ayesha at the kitchen tap. Filling a glass. Drinking in long, automatic swallows, eyes open and completely empty.

I pulled the glass away. She did not wake. Did not react. Just stood there with water on her chin, looking at nothing.

I carried her back to bed and sat on the floor beside her until it was light.

That was three nights ago.

I am writing this on my phone, parked two streets away from the building. The engine is off. The streetlight above the car flickers every few seconds, and I keep flinching like it means something.

I don't remember driving here.

I do remember lying beside Ayesha. We’ve been sleeping on the same bed since the last incidence. I somehow convinced myself that doing this will protect her. And then I remember this- the wheel in my hands, the gearshift already in park, the building sitting small and lit-up in the rearview mirror, like nothing had happened at all.

I don't know how much time passed in between. I don't know what I did in it. I’ve stopped being able to trust that gap. I’ve stopped being able to trust a lot of things, actually.

Ayesha is in the backseat. She's asleep, or she looks asleep. Head against the window, mouth slightly open, one hand curled the way it always curls when she's actually dreaming. I've been watching her in the mirror for the last twenty minutes while writing this. I keep waiting for her eyes to open the wrong way, the way they were at the kitchen tap. I don't know what I'll do if that happens out here, in a parked car, with nowhere to bring her and nowhere to run to.

I don't know what happens when she wakes up. I mean that literally. I don't know if she'll wake up as herself, asking for water or complaining about the seatbelt. Or if she'll wake up the other way, the way I've started to expect, quiet and distant, already somewhere I can't follow her.

I can’t go to the police. I can’t leave the city, or even really leave the block.

I’ve made mistakes in my life. A LOT of them, to be honest. And I never really learned my lesson, did I? Trusting Rafiq was a mistake. Coming to this place was a mistake. Not finding a safe exit while I still had the chance was a mistake.

But my daughter was not a mistake. My daughter is the only decision that I would make again without hesitation.

Her name is Ayesha. She likes dinosaurs. She likes the color orange. She used to need the lamp on to fall asleep.

And she’s not afraid of the dark anymore…

I don't know when that changed. I don't know which of those is worse- the child who was scared of shadows, or the one sleeping in the backseat of a car right now, completely calm, no matter what might come.

I want you to remember her name.

I need answers. I don’t know where to find them. I don’t know if the answers are even allowed to be found. So if you are reading this, and know anything about Aldermore and Associates, about Rafiq, about the housing project, about the water, about ANYTHING, please let me know. I want to understand what’s happening to me and my daughter, before we both get consumed by this system we’re trapped inside.

There’s no one I can trust, not anymore. I did have a friend I could rely on, a friend who has been missing without a trace. I’m still not sure what happened to her and her son.

Her name was Sarah. She had a snake tattoo on the back of her neck, and she used to lift her hair to show it off when she laughed. Remember that name as well.

If this account goes quiet, if I come back in a week and say everything is fine, that it was all stress, that we're happy and settled and there’s nothing to worry about…

That’s when you should start worrying.

Remember their names. Please just remember their names…

I think Ayesha is stirring. I have to go.

 

I'm a Sociology student in my early twenties. I study at an university I worked my entire life to get into. I was born an orphan, and grew up in a foster home with barely enough money. So when I say I worked my entire life for this, I mean it literally. Every exam, every assignment, every late night with a textbook while the other kids were watching TV- all of it was pointed at one thing. Getting out of this place. Getting somewhere that meant something.

The only truly good thing in my life, through all of it, has been Sabrina. She's my childhood sweetheart. Currently living three cities away, finishing her own degree. Every night without fail, she calls me and asks the same question- when are we going to be together again? And every night without fail, I say the same thing before we hang up-

"Very soon, Sabrina. Sooner than you realize."

It is embarrassingly cheesy. She knows it. I know it. We say it anyway. It has kinda become our ritual.

I want you to remember that line.

About two and a half months ago, I was drowning financially. I have a merit-based scholarship that covers half my tuition. However, the city is really expensive, in a way I wasn't prepared for. I had applied for a need-based scholarship top-up. But the pool of eligible candidates was enormous, and the available slots were not. I had also applied for a Teaching Assistant position. But the rumor was that the Professor already had someone in mind.

So there I was, watching both doors close simultaneously.

My fellow students do delivery work, or wait tables part-time to make a living. I've always considered these 'odd jobs' to be beneath me. That is not arrogance, it is self-preservation. I have worked too hard and come too far to go backwards. So I started looking for private tutoring gigs, because at least that felt like a use of what I actually had.

I looked up various tuition mediums throughout the weekend. Tuition mediums are commonplace in South Asia, in case you didn't know. Most of these turn out to be shady companies, who exploit potential private tutors and run off with their money. I had to be sure that I was applying to one of the credible ones.

That is when I found: Elite Educators - A Concern of Aldermore & Associates.

The name was a mouthful, but the website was clean and professional. The kind of interface that signals money behind it. The rating was near-perfect: 4.9 across hundreds of reviews. And unlike every other tuition medium I found, they charged zero commission from the tutors. I found that slightly odd, but I assumed they took their cut from the parents instead.

I applied as fast as I could. I uploaded my CV in a hurry without proofreading it. I really needed a tutoring gig, and I needed it fast. I revised my CV the next morning, and noticed the typo almost immediately.

"Officous zeal."

I had written officous instead of officious.

I remember yelling out a curse word.

I cringed, closed the tab, and moved on. That was enough embarrassment for one day.

I called Sabrina that night and told her about the typo. We had a good laugh about it. Didn't make it any less embarrassing though.

Surprisingly, I received a placement within two days. The file said that the child's name was Numero Tres. I found that interesting. 'Numero Tres' in Spanish translated to 'Number Three' in English. Who names their child like that, I thought.

The parents were named Dr. Alejandro Mateo Tres and Dr. Lucia Carmen Tres, both listed as physicians. I looked at the surname 'Tres'. I figured it was a Latin American surname I wasn't familiar with. It was unusual, but it wasn't my business.

The note from the parents read:

"We are both doctors who stay outdoors most of the time. We home school the child to make sure he is not influenced by external confounding factors. Need a competent private tutor who can be an appropriate role-model for the boy to follow."

I remember scoffing at that. Rich, overprotective parents with a clinical way of describing their own child. I had seen worse. The salary was three times the average monthly rate of every other tutor I knew, paid weekly in advance at the start of each week. I accepted before I finished reading the rest of the document.

Attached to the offer letter, once it came, was a second document titled TUTOR CONDUCT PROTOCOL. I skimmed it, eager to start.

1. Arrive and depart at the scheduled time only. Do not linger in the house after the lesson ends.
2. Do not discuss your personal life, relationships, or private routines in the child's presence.
3. Do not leave personal belongings unattended in the study.
4. If the child repeats a phrase, gesture, or habit that belongs to you, do not acknowledge it. Continue the lesson as though nothing happened.*
5. Do not ask the child personal questions, even in passing.
6. Report any behavioral anomalies to Elite Educators support line before the next scheduled session.
7. Elite Educators can, under no circumstances, be held responsible for outcomes resulting from a tutor's failure to comply.

I remember thinking Rule 4 was oddly specific, especially for a household tutoring gig. But the pay was too good to question it. I checked the box labelled ‘I Accept’ as fast as I could.

The house was in a quiet part of the city. Nice neighborhood. The kind of street where every gate looks the same and every garden is too neat.

The parents were just leaving when I arrived for the first session. Both wearing white coats. The father gave me a firm handshake and a clipped greeting.

"You must be the new tutor," he said. "Punctual. Good."

The mother smiled briefly.

"The lesson plan is flexible," she said. "Numero will guide you as much as you guide him."

They were gone before I could ask a single question.

I was nervous. It was my first gig, in what was clearly a wealthy household, and I had no idea what to expect from the child.

I'll be upfront about this- I've always been clumsy. My foster father used to find it funny, this big-brained kid who could not walk through a doorway without incident.

On this day, in that house, the nerves made it worse. I walked in too fast. Chipped my shoulder on the door frame. Laughed it off awkwardly. Scraped the chair loudly across the floor when I sat down.

The boy was already at the table. He watched every single one of my antics with a blank expression.

There he was- Numero Tres. Ten years old. Small for his age, I thought. He did not say hello. He did not smile. He simply watched me get settled with those flat, patient eyes.

"Good afternoon, kid," I said. "I'm your new tutor. You can call me whatever you like."

"Good afternoon, Teacher," he said.

His voice was soft. Almost too soft for the room.

I noticed the textbooks immediately. Three books, each with glossy pages, hardback covers, and that particular smell you only get from high-end publications. I had bought children's textbooks from the market to prepare for this gig. These were nothing like those. But the content was age-appropriate for a ten-year-old, so I filed it away and opened to the first chapter.

Numero struggled with basic arithmetic in the first ten minutes. I watched him work through a simple multiplication problem, with the slowness of someone wading through deep water. I pulled the notebook toward myself.

"Watch and learn, kid," I said, and walked him through it.

He watched. He did not blink for the entire duration.

The silence started getting to me from the very first session.

Not silence in the room, I could handle that. Silence from him, specifically. I heard no footsteps when he moved. No sound of breathing. No shift of weight in the chair, no rustle of turning pages, nothing. I couldn't confirm he was present in the room, unless I was looking directly at him. It was the kind of absence that a person shouldn't be able to produce.

On the third session, I closed my eyes for a moment, to collect my thoughts mid-explanation. I couldn't feel that he was in the room at all. It was awkwardly silent. I smiled for a bit, thinking about how weird it felt.

Then I opened my eyes.

Numero was in front of me. Crouching on the table. Face two inches from mine. Completely still. And he was smiling, for the first time since I had met him. He had something in his expression that I can only describe as excitement.

"I get it now," he said. "Thank you, Teacher."

I rode my bicycle on the way home, thinking about the strange encounter. I told myself it was just a weird kid, from an overprotective household, acting out in the only way he knew how.

But it wasn't his behavior that was bothering me.

It was the way he smiled. The way it pulled higher on the right side than the left, with a dimple forming on the left cheek.

I have that smile. The exact same smile. My foster mother used to be fond of it. She said it was the most lopsided, ridiculous, lovable smile she had ever seen. I have the photos to prove it.

I told myself this counted as compliance. Rule 4 said not to acknowledge it, and I hadn't. I said nothing. I simply noticed, filed it away, and kept teaching. I told myself that was enough.

Two months passed since the encounter.

I kept showing up three days a week- Maths on the first day, English on the second, Science on the third. The textbooks changed every couple of weeks. They always had the same premium quality, and followed the same template. But each new set was more advanced than the last.

And Numero was improving FAST. And by fast, I mean that his skills were improving by leaps and bounds with every lesson I took. For instance, he was currently working through 10th grade Calculus. His English books had moved on to Shakespeare. Specifically, the plays I remembered from my own 12th grade Literature course. His Science books were now almost entirely focused on cloning, DNA mutation, and genetic engineering. He was frustratingly good at this material, even correcting me on two occasions. He had the casual confidence of someone who had known it all his life.

The shift didn't feel normal. I mean- he could barely say a full sentence on the first day, and struggle with basic multiplication in the first week alone. How did he get so smart in a matter of months? I even talked to Sabrina about it.

"Maybe he's gifted," she said. "A prodigy by birth. Who knows?"

"Lucky guy," I said.

One Maths day, I gave Numero some problems to solve. While he was busy, I took out my college notebook. I was working on an assignment that my Professor had given. I was only halfway through when I was interrupted by a phone call. I stepped out, leaving my notebook open on the table. I was gone for maybe eight minutes.

When I came back, I found Numero with my notebook. He had solved the entire problem set. It was college-level Calculus, the kind that even mathematicians struggle with. And this ten-year-old had solved it, on his own, in eight minutes.

I stared at the notebook for a long time. The steps matched. His answer was correct.

The English essay was the one that broke me. I assigned Numero a short composition- describe a person you admire. He handed it back after 15 minutes. It was covered in grammatical errors, which was normal for a child of his age. But it was threaded with complex vocabulary, words that no ten-year-old should have known. I was used to Numero's intelligence by then, so I listed it off as impressive, not unexpected.

I was circling the errors when I stopped. I saw a word that I recognized immediately-

Officous zeal.

That spelling. That specific, embarrassing, incorrect spelling. One that I had identified two months ago, in my own writing, and regretted not correcting sooner.

I looked up at him slowly.

"Where did you learn that phrase?"

"CV, Teacher."

I felt something cold move through my chest.

"What... CV? How did you get my..."

He closed his notebook and stood up.

"Time's up, Teacher. Thank you for the lesson."

He walked out.

And I need you to understand this- he walked out loudly. Footsteps against the floor. Chair scraped on his way past. Shoulder catching the door frame, a short laugh following it. I watched him go and felt my vision narrow.

Every single one of those movements was mine. My clumsiness. My laugh. My exact physical signature, replayed back at me from a ten-year-old's body.

I sat alone in that room for a very long time before I left.

I didn't sleep well that night. But the next morning, two things happened, knocking everything else out of my head.

Firstly, the need-based scholarship had come through. Apparently, my application essay had moved the Committee deeply. I heard this secondhand, but I was in no position to question it.

Secondly, the TA position was mine, effective next week. The professor's first choice had dropped out to start a business. I was always the second pick, and he needed someone urgently.

I cannot describe how I felt. The closest I can get is: like a fist that had been clenched for years finally opening.

I was happy. Genuinely happy. I laughed until my eyes watered.

But I had no time to celebrate. I had to go to the house that afternoon. First class of the week. Maths. Already paid for in advance.

I arrived to find the parents on their way out, as always. But this time, I stopped them.

"Can I have five minutes? I have something to share."

They seemed taken aback, but they recovered quickly. They invited me to sit. I told them about the scholarship and the TA position. I informed them that I wouldn't be able to come from next week onwards.

They exchanged a look I couldn't fully read.

"Oh no, that wasn't expected," said the father. "You can't do that, sir. The child sees you as a role model. He is making remarkable progress, in ways we haven't seen before."

Then the mother spoke. The first time I'd heard her say more than a greeting.

"Can't you see that you're in the middle of a process? You can't stop it midway, can you? What is it? Is it money? We can offer more. Five times? Ten times? Just name it. We can make some calls."

The father nodded the moment she said make some calls.

I felt a brief pull. I'd grown genuinely fond of the kid, strange behavior and all. And ten times the salary was an enticing offer. But something about the offer felt off, in a way I couldn't articulate. Nobody offers ten times the salary for a private tutor.

"I appreciate it, I really do. But the tuitions were always temporary. I like Numero. He's the brightest kid I've ever met," I said. "I'm sure Numero has a bright future. But right now, I need to focus on my own future."

The father frowned.

"Numero? Wait... what?"

I blinked.

"Your son? Numero Tres?"

Both parents looked at each other. Then they laughed. Briefly, almost involuntarily. I was confused.

"Oh, is that what you thought?" said the mother. "Is that what they told you? Sir, the child isn't Numero Tres."

They stood up.

"You are."

The father turned toward the door.

"Please reconsider our offer, sir. We already rejected two tutors before we found you. We can't afford a fourth. Hope you make good progress today."

And they left.

I sat in that hallway for what felt like a very long time.

Then I went into the study, because I didn't know what else to do. The boy was already at the table with his books open.

The lesson was uneventful. He worked mostly on his own, occasionally turning a page towards me and asking, "Is this correct, Teacher?" I answered. He nodded, and returned to work.

I watched him for twenty minutes without speaking.

He had my smile. He had my way of scratching the side of his head when he was thinking hard. My habit of rubbing my nose absently at the end of each problem. My specific exhale- half sigh and half laugh, whenever he arrived at a correct answer. It was like sitting across from a mirror that was slightly behind me in time, catching up.

"Hey kid," I said finally. "Do you know my name?"

He didn't look up.

"Yes, Teacher?"

"What is my name?"

"Numero Tres, Teacher."

I steadied myself.

"Then what is your name?"

He looked up.

"I am Iqbal."

A chill ran down my spine. I've heard that name before, every day of my life, and still hear it every time Sabrina calls.

It was MY name! MY FREAKIN' NAME! And the kid just uttered it proudly, wearing my smile, dimple on the left cheek.

"We're finishing early today," I said. I gave no explanation. I had none, after all.

He seemed completely unfazed, his focus locked in on a function graph.

"Okay, Teacher," he said.

I cycled back home as fast as I could. I couldn't stop thinking about the absurdity of the whole situation. It was unnerving, to say the least, if that was even the right word for it.

My train of thought got derailed the moment I walked into the apartment. As soon as I turned the lights on, a party popper went off. I was immediately buried under my friends, all screaming at the top of their lungs. They had apparently planned a surprise celebration for the scholarship and the TA position, which I had completely forgotten about in the past two hours.

We cut a small cake at home. They took me out. I had my first beer. Then another. Then another. By the third, the heaviness had lifted entirely. I was standing outside a restaurant, looking up at the sky, saying things I only half remember.

"Thank you! Thank you for everything! God is great! Life is great! I feel great!"

My friends carried me home. The rest of the night was a blur.

The next day, hungover and moving on muscle memory, I showed up for the English lesson. Second class of the week. The parents were leaving as I arrived.

The father stopped.

"Sorry for our unprofessional conduct yesterday. We have come to the conclusion that your discontinuation is a decision that is yours to make. The best we can do is adjust accordingly."

I noticed the language. Too formal. Too precise. Not how a parent speaks about their child's tutor.

"We have already found alternative teaching methods," said the mother. "Perhaps some external exposure isn't bad after all. Feel free to bid farewell to your student today. Take care and stay healthy."

They left.

The lesson was warm. My student was in a good mood, laughing at the comedic scenes in The Merchant of Venice, producing character analyses that wouldn't have looked out of place in a university seminar. I let him work. I watched him. I tried to feel normal.

I said it eventually.

"Hey kid. This is our last class together."

"I know, Teacher."

Easier than I expected.

"Anything you want to say to me?"

He thought about it.

"Umm... thank you?"

I smiled in spite of everything.

"You're most welcome, kid."

He stood up suddenly, looked directly at the ceiling, and screamed-

"Thank you! Thank you for everything! God is great! Life is great! I feel great!"

It was my voice. Not an impression, mind you. Not a recording played back through a speaker. My voice, produced in real time, in the cadence and pitch of a drunk twenty-something standing under an open sky the night before.

He sat back down and returned to his commentary on Shylock, as if nothing happened.

I stood up. My legs were not entirely cooperative.

"Alright. I... I gotta go now."

"Okay, Teacher."

"You, uh... take care of yourself. Hope we meet again."

I didn't mean to say those last words. It came out on reflex. The kind of thing you say when you're leaving somewhere and your brain is elsewhere. I didn't mean it as anything.

"I know, Teacher," he said, still looking at his notebook.

Something cold moved through me.

"Really? You know we'll meet again? What do you mean? When?"

He looked up.

"Very soon, Sabrina. Sooner than you realize."

My voice. Her name. That line, which was OUR line! The one that existed, only between two people, at the end of a nightly phone call. The last thing I said before sleep, coming out of a ten-year-old's mouth, in my exact voice.

And then I remembered. I was drunk, coming home the night before. Sabrina calling, asking when I'd take her out for her own first drink. Me, barely coherent, saying the usual.

He had been listening. I don't know how or why or when, but this kid had been listening. It was private. ME AND SABRINA ARE PRIVATE! He had crossed a line he shouldn't have.

I grabbed him by the shoulders in a fit of rage. I knew it was too hard, and I didn't regret it.

"Look at me, you creep! What did you say? How do you know that? What did you do? Tell me, what the fuck did you do?"

He looked at me with an expression I'll not forget. Not fear, not guilt, but curiosity. Pure, open, and innocent curiosity.

"Oh," he said. "This is new. This is new, Teacher."

Then his hands came up and grabbed my shoulders.

The grip was wrong. Too hard for a ten-year-old. Too precise. His face changed- cheeks flushing, breaths coming heavy, something moving behind his eyes that looked like anger.

"I only did what you told me to do, Teacher."

My voice. Coming out of his mouth. Saying my words back to me.

"What did I tell you?"

He smiled.

"Watch and learn, kid."

I shoved him back and ran. Out of the study, through the hallway, out the front door. I didn't stop running until I reached my bicycle. Something compelled me to run away. It was not the voice, not the grip, and not the expression of anger.

It was the eyes. What I saw in those eyes was something beyond his usual innocence, beyond his newfound curiosity, even beyond the rage he just acquired.

It was malice. Trust me when I tell you this- I haven't seen pure malice before. Not until I looked into those eyes. Eyes on a face that now looked awfully similar to mine, with my smile, my dimple, and my voice.

I called the Elite Educators support line the second I got home. My hands were shaking too hard to hold the phone steady on the first attempt.

A representative picked up on the second ring. He sounded calm, almost bored.

"Elite Educators, how can I help you?"

"Something happened. Something happened with Numero. He- he knew things he shouldn't know. He grabbed me. He had my voice. I need someone to explain what's going on, right now !"

"I understand this is distressing, sir. Let me pull up your file."

A pause. Keys tapping somewhere on the other end.

"Sir, can you confirm- on one occasion, did you leave personal belongings, specifically a notebook, unattended in the study, while stepping out for a phone call?"

"What? Yes, it happened once, but that has nothing to do with-"

"That would be a violation of Rule 3, sir."

"I don't care about Rule 3! Tell me what's happening to that kid!"

"And more recently, did you physically restrain the child by the shoulders, and verbally acknowledge a repeated phrase or behavior belonging to you?"

I went quiet.

"That would be a violation of Rule 4, sir."

"Just tell me what he is. Please…"

"Sir, as stated under Rule 7 of your Tutor Conduct Protocol, Elite Educators can, under no circumstances, be held responsible for outcomes resulting from a tutor's failure to comply."

"That's it? That's all you're going to tell me?"

"I'm afraid that's all I'm authorized to say, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"No. No, there's nothing else."

The line clicked off before I could respond.

I called back six more times. Every single time, I was told all operators were busy. I stayed on hold. Nobody responded. On the seventh call, I listened to the hold music for eleven minutes, and then hung up.

I can't call Sabrina. I don't know what to tell her. And I don't want to frighten her. Not yet.

I almost didn't post this. I've never asked anyone for help. Not during my struggles in the foster home, not during my admissions, not during any of the financial lows that followed. I always considered it a kind of defeat, a sign of weakness, a suggestion that you can't handle your problems or carry your own burden.

But something happened 30 minutes ago, something that precedes all rational explanation. Something I don't think I can handle. Something I genuinely cannot carry. Something that is making me doubt my own existence.

I've received a friend request on Facebook. From an account with my full name and my profile picture. My bio, copied word for word. The account looks exactly like mine. Except for one thing- the friends list is empty. Then there's the other thing.

The account is verified. It has a blue tick, sitting there like it belongs. My account, the real one, the one I've had for six years, has no such thing.

This new account has only one post. Shared one minute before the friend request arrived.

"I get it now. Thank you, Teacher."*

I've been staring at it for a while. I keep switching between his profile and mine, back and forth. I need to tell you something that I don't know how to say, without sounding completely unhinged-

His one looks more real than mine.

I don't know what I am right now. I don't know what he is. I don't know what 'Elite Educators- A Concern of Aldermore & Associates' actually does. I don't know what the parents are, and whether they are even real parents to begin with.

What I do know is that somewhere out there, something is walking around. Something with my smile, my voice, my name, my clumsiness, my typos, and even my most private words. Everything I handed over, three days a week for two months, without realizing what I was giving away.

And I know that, on the very first day, I told someone to watch and learn.

No one told me that I was the lesson.

 

Do you know how many people summited Everest last year?

Look it up, you'll find it easily. Tourism boards love that number. It looks good in brochures.

And do you know how much trash they left behind?  

7,000 kilograms.

Don’t look it up. You won’t find it. That kind of number doesn't make it to the internet.

Empty oxygen canisters. Torn tents. Human waste frozen into the ice. Energy bar wrappers with cartoon mascots grinning up at you.

I know it, because I was the one who carried it down. Load after load, for almost a year.

I don’t expect you to relate to my story. Unless you were born as a Sherpa like I was.

My name won’t matter much to you. Just call me Nima. It's not a rare name where I'm from. Think of me as one of a hundred Nimas working the mountain right now, and you wouldn't be wrong.

I won't tell you the name of my village either. It sits a few hours' walk off Pangboche, if that means anything to you. Small enough that it wasn't worth marking on the old trekking maps.

Ten years ago, when the usual villages started choking with foreigners arguing over WiFi passwords at six thousand feet, the guiding companies started routing new clients through places like mine instead.

My father used to joke that the mountain was running out of room to hide us.

Speaking of my father, he was one proud Sherpa. He dedicated his life guiding climbers to the summit. He genuinely loved it, until the day his lungs gave out.

Thirty years of hauling gear does something to a man, something that no clinic in Nepal has a name for. Towards the end, Baba was counting his own breaths like currency. Spending them carefully. Running out early.

It reminded me of the reason I wanted to leave this life behind for good.

I studied harder than anyone in my class. Harder than I've worked at anything since. Because I wanted out. Not out of shame, mind you. I was proud of my father, proud of what the Sherpas built with their own hands for a hundred years. I wasn’t sick of being a Sherpa. I was sick of seeing how Sherpas were being treated these days.

Sick of seeing men, who couldn't tell a crampon from a carabiner, treat my father like a bellhop. Why? Because they'd paid sixty thousand dollars, and expected a summit selfie to match.

I had a seat waiting at a college in Kathmandu. I had a whole life picked out that didn't involve fixing another man's oxygen mask, while he filmed himself for an audience that would forget his name in a week.

On his deathbed, my father made me promise that I will carry on his legacy as a Sherpa guide. And I did make that promise, since I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of man who was on borrowed time.

‘Swear on the mountain, my son’

Not on his life. Not on our family name. On the mountain itself, the way our people have sworn oaths for longer than anyone can trace. I won't try to explain what ‘swearing on the mountain’ meant to us. I only need you to understand one thing-

I could’ve broken any other promise I ever made, but I couldn’t break that one.

I never went to Kathmandu. Instead, I started training to be a Sherpa guide, two days after Baba’s funeral.

I started the way every young Sherpa starts- carrying and cleaning. Learning the mountain's moods, under men who'd survived it longer than I'd been alive. The man who trained me was Pasang. He'd led more expeditions up the South Col than he could count on both hands.

Speaking of South Col, that is the ordinary route. The one everyone takes. The one so overcrowded now that photographs of climbers queued single-file below the summit have made international news.

I wasn't guiding yet. I was barely trusted to carry supplies past Base Camp without an escort. That suited me fine. I wasn't in a hurry to fall in love with the job. Especially a job I'd spent my whole life trying to leave.

Again, I don’t expect you to relate to any of this. My world is much different than yours. Even the bedtime stories we heard growing up are way different from the ones you heard. And I say this because it matters.

You probably grew up with stories of the Boogeyman. Or a man in a hockey mask. A shape in your closet. Something that calls your name from the woods behind the house. We didn't grow up with any of that.

We grew up with Zamba.

Specifically, the legend of Zamba the Sherpa. The most gifted guide the mountain had ever raised. Always devoted to the climbers in his care. When tragedy struck his expedition decades ago, he gave his own life so that hundreds of climbers could make it home. And the gods, seeing his sacrifice, gave him something like immortality. They let him walk the mountain forever, as a silent guardian and protector. Watching over every soul on that ice, and punishing any Sherpa foolish or lazy enough to abandon their duty.

I want to be honest with you. I never believed a word of it. It's a good story. It's the kind of story a tired industry tells its children to make sure they never leave.

And trust me, the people in my village did believe it to be true. They revered the myth of Zamba, and knew his story by heart. But no one knew the story quite like Doma.

Doma was a junior Sherpa, around my age. She was my best friend in the village. She grew up revering the image of Zamba, aspiring to be a legendary Sherpa like him. And she was very disappointed in me for always dismissing this ‘glorious piece of our history’ as nothing but folklore.

And yes, I did dismiss it, until the week Viktor Sorokin arrived.

He came during acclimatization season. An old Russian, traveling alone. He was clearly an aristocrat, and he had the body language of someone who had seen his fair share of peaks and valleys.

The best guides in our village lined up for him. But he asked for one particular Sherpa.

He asked for me, by my full name.

Not for Pasang. Not for any of the senior guides who actually knew what they were doing. For me- a nobody who still spent most of his days hauling other people's garbage down the mountain.

"There has to be a mistake," I told the coordinator. "He doesn't know me."

"He asked for you. Nima. Your family name. All of it."

"I've never met the man."

"Well." The coordinator rubbed his fingers together, the universal gesture. "He'd like to."

When the company explained I wasn't qualified to guide anyone anywhere, Viktor produced an amount of cash that made the coordinator's eyebrows disappear into his hairline. Whatever hesitation existed evaporated on the spot. Money does that here, faster than almost anywhere in the world, because so little of it ever reaches the people actually risking their lungs.

I found Viktor that evening and asked him directly.

"How do you know my name?"

He had pale, tired eyes, and hands that shook slightly even at rest.

"I knew your family," he said. "A long time ago."

"My father never mentioned you."

"No." He turned back to the mountain. "He wouldn't have."

That was all I got out of him for days. He kept to himself. Ate alone. Watched the mountain from a distance like he was waiting for it to do something. The only time I saw him fully present was the night of Mani Rimdu.

Mani Rimdu is the biggest annual festival we celebrate in the mountains. In our village, one of the highlights of the festival is the fireside storytelling session organized by the village elders. As expected, the story everyone wanted to hear was that of Zamba the Sherpa. 

That evening, I saw Viktor chugging down mugs of Raaksi- the local liquor of the Sherpas. His behaviour during the recitation of Zamba’s legend was particularly unusual.

The story began with a group of Russians, arriving during off-season, who were hungry for adventure and eager to bring glory to their country and its flag.

Viktor laughed sarcastically.

“They did want glory, alright,” he said, “But trust me, their country and their flag was the LEAST of their concerns !”

At the part of the story where Zamba ‘sacrificed’ his life, Viktor’s jaw tightened like he'd bitten down on a stone. Upon hearing that ‘a hundred climbers were saved that day’, he made a sound. I can only describe it as a scoff, dragged halfway back down his throat before it could get out.

By the time the story reached its ending- the ascension, the mercy of the gods, the eternal watch, Viktor was already walking away into the dark. Like the story itself had shoved him up out of his seat.

“Liars !” I heard him mutter in a drunken stupor, “It was no legend. It was tragedy- a FUCKING tragedy !”

The rest of the audience were visibly uncomfortable.

“God had nothing to do with it !” he said on his way out, “Quite the opposite. The absolute opposite !”

Doma leaned over to me. "Some people can't sit with holiness."

"That's not what that was," I said.

I didn't understand it then. I understand it now, and I wish I still didn't…

Our expedition began three days later. Pasang was the team leader, with me and Doma supporting him. Apart from Viktor, there were four other paying clients, each there for a reason that had nothing to do with the mountain the way it deserved.

Firstly, there was Brittany, an American content creator. She filmed everything, narrating her own life to a phone screen like anyone actually cared.

Then there was Grant Whitfield, the Canadian. His family money bought him more confidence than competence. He spoke to Pasang and me the way you'd speak to hotel staff who'd forgotten to refill the minibar. He reminded me of the kind of tourists who made my father overwork in his final days as a guide.

And what can I say about Ingrid Larsen ? She was an European in her thirties, who'd never climbed anything higher than a gym wall. She checked her gear four times, not because she didn't trust the gear, but because she didn't trust herself. And we didn’t trust her to make it to the Summit either.

Finally, there was the twenty eight year old Australian named Cody Marsh. He was easily the strongest of them, who'd turned back on this same mountain the year before in bad weather.

Viktor came with us as far as his body allowed. Which, given his age, was further than any of us expected.

We went up the South Col, the same as every commercial expedition. The traffic was obscene even at Base Camp. Tents packed shoulder to shoulder. Generators turned on throughout the night. Someone's drone buzzing overhead to capture footage nobody asked for.

It was Viktor who suggested we avoid the worst of it.

"There's a better way," he said, spreading a map across a crate. "Between Camp One and Camp Two. You skip the bottleneck entirely."

Pasang looked at where his finger was. "That’s the lower shoulder of the West Ridge."

"You know it."

"I know of it." Pasang didn't touch the map. "Nobody climbs there."

"Which is exactly the point," Viktor said. "No crowds. No queue. No traffic."

"Nobody climbs there," Pasang said again, and this time it wasn't information. It was a warning wearing the clothes of a fact.

“The terrain can be a bit challenging,” Pasang concluded.

Viktor took an envelope out of his coat and set it on the map, over the West Ridge, like he was pinning it down. He didn't open it. He didn't have to. Pasang looked at the envelope, and then at me. I understood that he was going to say yes, and that he hated it.

"Mostly good weather window," Pasang said quietly. "We move fast. We don't camp there if we can help it."

"Of course," Viktor said.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I know better now.

Nobody uses that stretch of the West Ridge. There's a reason. It has nothing to do with the terrain…

We reached the site by mid-afternoon, a blizzard building on the horizon. We had no choice but to camp early, the one thing Pasang had said he wanted to avoid.

Grant was visibly upset at the sudden setback, venting out his frustration on a nervous Doma.

Cody was much relaxed in comparison, except for the time he said- ‘Not this weather, not again. Can’t go back like last year…’ .

Ingrid was more nervous than the rest of us. She approached me four times in fifteen minutes asking-  ‘This is normal, right? There’s nothing to worry about, right?’.

And Brittany was lip-syncing to something that barely resembled music, attempting to do something in the snow that barely resembled a dance. And of course, she was doing it for the camera.

I looked around. Viktor was nowhere to be seen.

I found him a little later, away from the tents, on his knees, in the snow.

At first I thought he'd fallen. Then I heard him. He was crying. The kind of crying old men do when they've held something in, longer than the body can manage.

There was debris around him. Old rope. Fragments of gear too worn to identify. And things I didn't want to look at directly: pieces of bone, half-buried, bleached from decades of exposure. The gear was old. Foreign. Not the kind of thing that gets left on a modern commercial route.

I called out his name.

He didn't hear me. He was muttering, in Russian and broken English.

“It shouldn’t have happened. Not to you, not to your brothers ! I never knew about the sacrifice. They never told me ! I am sorry, oh, I am so sorry…”

That’s when he noticed me approaching him.

"Viktor. What’s wrong? What happened here?"

He looked up at me, and for a second he didn't see me at all. He was seeing someone else standing where I stood. Then his eyes cleared, and something worse than grief moved across his face. He said nothing.

That evening, the temperature rose in a way it shouldn’t have.

We were hours out from a blizzard, at an altitude where cold isn't a feeling, but a fact of existence. And every one of us was sweating inside our jackets, like we'd just been dropped into a sauna.

"Climate change finally doing us a favor," Cody said.

Nobody laughed.

Viktor grabbed my arm before I could walk away. His grip was stronger than any old man's had a right to be.

"When the storm breaks," he said, "we move. Immediately. By any means."

"We can't move in the dark, Viktor. Not here."

"Nima, please. For everyone’s sake, we must move !"

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He was staring up at the ridge above us, the way you stare at a door when you've heard something on the other side of it.

"Viktor. Why?"

"Something’s been sleeping here," he said, “Asleep for decades. And I might have woken it up.”

And that was all…

I noticed the shadowy figure just after the blizzard broke.

I don't know how to describe the first moment cleanly, because my memory of it isn't clean.

I remember seeing a green light first. Like something bioluminescent, bleeding up through the snow.

I remember Brittany's scream, cut short faster than a scream should ever be cut short.

I remember seeing Grant, backing away from his own tent with his hands raised, saying something about how much money he'd paid for this trip, as if that had ever mattered to anything on this mountain.

It killed them both before I understood what I was looking at. Slashing them repeatedly, at a speed that definitely wasn’t human.

I stood there, frozen in every sense of the word, when I noticed its appearance for the first time.

It was tall, and unnaturally thin. Its frame was stretched and elongated. Its hands didn’t have any fingers. Instead, there were ice hooks, three in each hand, curled where fingers should have been. The hooks were ice-crusted and uneven, like tools scavenged over decades, from different climbers who never made it home.  It wore a patchwork jumpsuit, which looked like it was stitched together from six or seven mismatched climbing suits of different colors and materials. It was torn in places and faded in others. Ancient, frayed ropes are wound tightly around his torso and limbs, binding the suit to its body, the fibers bleached and worn with age. Its face was the most disturbing element: the lower right side and jaw remained eerily well-preserved, weathered brown skin stretched taut, almost lifelike aside from its stillness. The upper left quadrant of his face was severely decomposed, exposing cracked bone, patches of skull, withered tissue, and dark dried blood, with the eye socket on that glowing faint green.

It was Viktor’s voice that brought me back to my senses.

“Stop ! It is me that you want, not them !”

Viktor approached him steadily. The humanoid figure looked at him with something resembling curiosity.

Viktor continued, “Oh, what has it done to you? Oh no ! You didn’t deserve it. None of you did ! Forgive me. Please forgive me, my friend…”

Viktor dropped to his knees, and he said the only words that have ever made any of this make sense to me.

"Forgive me… ZAMBA!"

I had spent my entire life hearing that name used like a blessing. Hearing it screamed like that rewired the word inside me permanently.

Zamba screamed, thrusting its hooks into Viktor’s sides, lifting him off the ground.

Viktor didn't fight it. He kept speaking in a feeble voice.

“I am here to repent, Zamba. Look… who I brought with me…”

He shakily lifted a finger towards me.

“Your descendant… Nima… he will get it, all of it… whatever I earned from the ritual…”

I didn’t know how to react. It was too much for me to unpack.

Viktor begged. He said the others were innocent, that they had nothing to do with what happened here, that it should take him and only him.

Zamba killed him anyway. Slammed him on the ground, and slashed away with all ice hooks on both of his hands.

For a moment afterward it stood still, its green aura pulsing slow, almost like it was breathing. I thought that might be the end. Then it turned toward Ingrid, who was still frozen by her tent, and it started moving again.

Pasang and Doma stepped in front of me before I registered any of us moving.

"Don't run," Doma whispered. Not to me. To herself. "Don't run, don't run, whatever you do, don't…"

The aura shifted.

The green color slowly turned to blue. It looked at us in a way that almost seemed human.

It raised one clawed hand and pointed at the three of us. And it asked, in a voice that sounded like it hadn't spoken in years and had forgotten how words were meant to fit together:

"Sherpa?"

We nodded. All three of us. Without discussing it. Without thinking.

We approached.

It pointed at itself, one ice hook pressing against its chest.

"Zamba… also… Sherpa."

A single tear fell from the eye still intact.

I have never seen anything more human. And I’ve never seen anything followed so immediately by something less.

"It's you," Doma breathed. She wasn't afraid. She was in love with the story, and now the story was standing in front of her. She stepped towards it with her hands open. "It's really you. You saved them. You saved all of them, you…"

The blue aura drained back into green before any of us could react. It slashed Doma’s throat in a single motion. Faster than I can describe, without lying about the details to make it more bearable than it was. Doma was dead, with her hands still open. Still believing.

Zamba had killed the one person on that mountain who loved it, mid-sentence, while she was defending it.

Pasang was killed in the same breath. Caught in the same motion. His body flew and landed a few feet away, drenched in blood.

It should have taken me next. I was standing right there, waiting for it to happen.

Instead, the aura flickered blue. One final time. It didn’t cover its entire body. It was just around its head, just around the eye that still worked. It looked directly at me, struggling to sustain the green aura that was about to overlap the blue. And whatever was left of the man surfaced for one last second, and it spent that second on me.

"Run… Sherpa… RUN!"

I ran. And I swear I heard my name being uttered while I was doing so…

I don't remember most of what happened after that. That's the honest truth, and it's also the part that frightens me most now, looking back, because of the little that I do remember.

I remember snow. I remember Ingrid somewhere near me, and Cody half-carrying her, all three of us moving and not looking back.

I remember Base Camp in fragments. I remember someone wrapping a blanket around me.

And I remember, or I think I remember, men in tuxedos.

I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. Men in formal black at eighteen thousand feet, moving through the tents like they'd stepped out of a different photograph entirely, one that had nothing to do with mountains. They went to Ingrid. They went to Cody. They put their hands on their shoulders and spoke to them low and gentle, the way you speak to people you're consoling. Ingrid nodded, and Cody nodded, and they let themselves be led away.

One of them stopped before he followed the others out.

He turned and looked at me. The way you look at a piece of luggage you don't need to carry. Then he turned and walked out of the frame of my memory. Ingrid and Cody went with them, and I never saw either of them again…

That was six months ago.

I live in Russia now. Viktor's estate came to me exactly the way his final wishes specified. I inherited more money than my family had seen across three generations combined. Enough to finally do the one thing I'd wanted, ever since I was old enough to understand what I was watching my father spend his body on.

I’ll finally start college, in Saint Petersburg, in a few weeks.

I told myself, most days, that what I saw on that mountain was a trauma response. People die on that mountain every season. The details don't need to be supernatural to be tragic.

My testimony didn't survive the village for long. By the time it filtered back through secondhand retellings, it had softened into something people could live with. An inexperienced Sherpa led a group onto a dangerous, unfamiliar route. A storm rolled in. And Zamba appeared, just as the old stories always promised. He guided the survivors home through the blizzard, out of mercy.

I stopped correcting it.

I want you to understand why I stopped. It wasn't grief, and it wasn't peace. It’s that I’d stopped believing that the mountain deserved the effort.

Because here is the thing nobody in that village will say out loud. The mountain doesn’t love us back. It took my father's lungs, one breath at a time, and gave him nothing. It took Pasang, who had given it twenty years as a guide. It took Doma, who loved it more than anyone I’ve known, who defended it with her hands open, and it killed her mid-sentence, for the crime of getting close enough to say thank you.

I swore an oath on it. And it has never once, in a hundred years, sworn anything back.

So I let them have their guardian. I let them have their mercy and their gods and their beautiful dead man on the ice. I took the money the mountain finally coughed up, sixty years too late, through the wrong hands, and I left.

I also inherited Viktor’s box that came with the estate.

It had a diary, with decades of entries.

I'll give it to you the way it came to me. In pieces. Out of order. The way the truth actually arrives, which is never as a clean paragraph-

There was an expedition, decades before I was born. Off-season. A group of young Russian climbers, rich and strong, who paid an enormous premium for the finest Sherpa team on the mountain, led by its most gifted young guide.

His name was Zamba.

They did not go up for the summit. Viktor writes this plainly, in the flat handwriting of a man who has stopped protecting himself. They went up for the peak because of what could be done at the peak. Where, in his words, ‘the signal was strongest’. There was a ritual. There was an entity they meant to call. Viktor was supposed to be the vessel that carried it home.

And the entire Sherpa team was to be the ‘human sacrifice’. This is the part of the plan that Viktor was never aware of.

The ritual worked. That's what Viktor could never make peace with. It actually worked. The entity did come. And then it did something they hadn't accounted for, because men like that never account for being refused.

It rejected Viktor as the vessel they'd chosen.

Zamba had died by then. Died fighting them, trying to save his men, and failed. And the entity reached for his freshly killed corpse and chose him as a vessel.

Zamba was reanimated- a fallen Sherpa fighting with a malicious entity for control of his own body. He got up in a fit of rage and grief, and slaughtered half the men who'd murdered his team, with a precision Viktor spends three pages failing to describe. It chased the rest toward a cliff. An avalanche took him before he could finish, and buried him in West Ridge. The survivors, including Viktor, crawled back to Base Camp, broken in a way that never healed.

One of them could only say the same thing, over and over, for days.

“Zamba. No. Zamba. No. Nooo….”

The rest of them chose a different sentence to say.

They said he was a hero. They said he'd sacrificed himself to save the expedition. They said the gods had rewarded him. They took the man they'd killed and wrote a beautiful lie on top of it. They went home, and they never came back. The lie stayed on the mountain and sank into it.

The men who paid for the ritual are named in the diary. The expedition was financed by a Mr. Aldermore and his partners.

I didn’t know that name then. I’ve since come to understand that it’s the kind of name you look up and find nothing.

But Viktor kept going. Past the ritual and the cover-up. He grew a conscience in his later years, unable to carry the guilt of aiding a human sacrifice. Mr. Aldermore rewarded them, even after the botched ritual, because they managed to ‘breach the veil’- in Viktor’s words. Viktor chose to put that fortune into years of quiet obsessive work, hoping to find a way to repent for his sins.

Here’s what he found-

Zamba never married. He was young, and gifted, and gone before he could become anything as ordinary as a husband.

But six months after he vanished on that mountain, a boy was born in a village, a few hours' walk off Pangboche. It was a lovechild, born to a woman who never named the father to anyone. There was no marriage to trace. No name on any register. Just a quiet woman and a fatherless boy, in a small village that wasn't even on the maps yet.

That boy was my grandfather.

Viktor spent years and a great deal of money proving what no one in my own family ever knew:

Zamba was my great-grandfather.

The gifted young guide who died trying to save his men. The dead man they filled with up with an evil entity and left on the ice. The thing that killed Pasang and Doma in front of me and then flickered blue, one last time, and spent the last human second it had telling me to run.

Viktor didn't fund that expedition to reach the summit. Viktor came to die at the site where it happened, in front of the thing he'd helped make, and to hand his fortune to the one living descendant of the man he'd killed…

So I told myself I would start fresh. And for a while I almost did.

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I still think about the green aura. The way it reeked of malice, if a color can reek. I think about the blue that came underneath it, and the man surfacing through the thing like a face pressed up against the underside of ice. I think about the blue when he recognized us as Sherpas like him, and the tear from the eye that still worked. And I think about how fast the green swallowed it again, and how the same hand that pointed at itself came down on Pasang and Doma a breath later.

And I think about that last flicker. The tiniest fold of blue, just around his head, just around the eye. The one that looked at me and found something in me worth the last of what was left of him.

“Run… Sherpa… RUN !”

These things are hard to forget. I've tried. That's the reason I'm writing this account at all, because I need to get it out of my head, where it has been circling for six months with nowhere to land.

And it would have stayed there. I really thought it would.

Except my mother called me yesterday. And then she sent me a link.

The video was two minutes long. It was online for a little more than an hour before it came down, flagged and removed as ‘AI-generated content’. I want to say only this about that: there was nothing artificial about what I watched.

I saw a small group of adventurers, the kind who go up when nobody sensible does, chasing an empty mountain. Late evening light. And they were on the South Col route. You know- the safe route, the crowded one, the one everyone takes.

The footage shakes. There's blood, more of it than a two-minute video should be able to hold. Limbs where limbs are not supposed to be. Men screaming in a register human voices don't usually reach. And through it, there was a shape. It was a figure, with ice hooks for fingers, three in each hand.

And around it, there was a mist, which was green in color. The mist was so thick and so dense that it almost swallowed the figure's features entirely.

A woman had the camera turned on herself, the way Brittany used to, narrating her own death without meaning to. You could see her face, shaken, mouthing something, before a hook catches her across the throat and drags her out of the frame.

The camera keeps recording. It fell, I think, or she still had it. The last twenty seconds are just snow. Just white, and the sounds off-screen, someone slashing at something that has already stopped moving, over and over again.

And you could hear a word. Throughout the whole two minutes. After every kill. After every movement. After every wet, ugly sound the camera was kind enough not to show. One word, in a voice that had forgotten how words fit together, screamed again and again into the empty white mountain.

I watched the video eleven times before it was taken down, and I have no doubt about the only word it kept uttering constantly-

"NIMA!"

"NIMA!"

"NIMA!"

It was my name. Zamba was screaming my FUCKING name.

And in two full minutes of that green, in every frame of that mist, in every swing of those three hooks -

There was not a single tint of blue.

Whatever fraction of my great-grandfather was still fighting inside that thing, still recognizing his own, still weeping from one working eye… it was lost. The entity had won.

And now Zamba has come off the dead path. It has walked out of its grave and onto the safe road, the crowded one, the ordinary one where everyone is supposed to make it home.

And it’s screaming the name of the last person who ever made it human….

Do you know how many people summited Everest last year?

Look it up, you'll find it easily. Tourism boards love that number. It looks good in brochures.

And do you know how much trash they left behind?  

7,000 kilograms.

Don’t look it up. You won’t find it. That kind of number doesn't make it to the internet.

Empty oxygen canisters. Torn tents. Human waste frozen into the ice. Energy bar wrappers with cartoon mascots grinning up at you.

I know it, because I was the one who carried it down. Load after load, for almost a year.

I don’t expect you to relate to my story. Unless you were born as a Sherpa like I was.

My name won’t matter much to you. Just call me Nima. It's not a rare name where I'm from. Think of me as one of a hundred Nimas working the mountain right now, and you wouldn't be wrong.

I won't tell you the name of my village either. It sits a few hours' walk off Pangboche, if that means anything to you. Small enough that it wasn't worth marking on the old trekking maps.

Ten years ago, when the usual villages started choking with foreigners arguing over WiFi passwords at six thousand feet, the guiding companies started routing new clients through places like mine instead.

My father used to joke that the mountain was running out of room to hide us.

Speaking of my father, he was one proud Sherpa. He dedicated his life guiding climbers to the summit. He genuinely loved it, until the day his lungs gave out.

Thirty years of hauling gear does something to a man, something that no clinic in Nepal has a name for. Towards the end, Baba was counting his own breaths like currency. Spending them carefully. Running out early.

It reminded me of the reason I wanted to leave this life behind for good.

I studied harder than anyone in my class. Harder than I've worked at anything since. Because I wanted out. Not out of shame, mind you. I was proud of my father, proud of what the Sherpas built with their own hands for a hundred years. I wasn’t sick of being a Sherpa. I was sick of seeing how Sherpas were being treated these days.

Sick of seeing men, who couldn't tell a crampon from a carabiner, treat my father like a bellhop. Why? Because they'd paid sixty thousand dollars, and expected a summit selfie to match.

I had a seat waiting at a college in Kathmandu. I had a whole life picked out that didn't involve fixing another man's oxygen mask, while he filmed himself for an audience that would forget his name in a week.

On his deathbed, my father made me promise that I will carry on his legacy as a Sherpa guide. And I did make that promise, since I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of man who was on borrowed time.

‘Swear on the mountain, my son’

Not on his life. Not on our family name. On the mountain itself, the way our people have sworn oaths for longer than anyone can trace. I won't try to explain what ‘swearing on the mountain’ meant to us. I only need you to understand one thing-

I could’ve broken any other promise I ever made, but I couldn’t break that one.

I never went to Kathmandu. Instead, I started training to be a Sherpa guide, two days after Baba’s funeral.

I started the way every young Sherpa starts- carrying and cleaning. Learning the mountain's moods, under men who'd survived it longer than I'd been alive. The man who trained me was Pasang. He'd led more expeditions up the South Col than he could count on both hands.

Speaking of South Col, that is the ordinary route. The one everyone takes. The one so overcrowded now that photographs of climbers queued single-file below the summit have made international news.

I wasn't guiding yet. I was barely trusted to carry supplies past Base Camp without an escort. That suited me fine. I wasn't in a hurry to fall in love with the job. Especially a job I'd spent my whole life trying to leave.

Again, I don’t expect you to relate to any of this. My world is much different than yours. Even the bedtime stories we heard growing up are way different from the ones you heard. And I say this because it matters.

You probably grew up with stories of the Boogeyman. Or a man in a hockey mask. A shape in your closet. Something that calls your name from the woods behind the house. We didn't grow up with any of that.

We grew up with Zamba.

Specifically, the legend of Zamba the Sherpa. The most gifted guide the mountain had ever raised. Always devoted to the climbers in his care. When tragedy struck his expedition decades ago, he gave his own life so that hundreds of climbers could make it home. And the gods, seeing his sacrifice, gave him something like immortality. They let him walk the mountain forever, as a silent guardian and protector. Watching over every soul on that ice, and punishing any Sherpa foolish or lazy enough to abandon their duty.

I want to be honest with you. I never believed a word of it. It's a good story. It's the kind of story a tired industry tells its children to make sure they never leave.

And trust me, the people in my village did believe it to be true. They revered the myth of Zamba, and knew his story by heart. But no one knew the story quite like Doma.

Doma was a junior Sherpa, around my age. She was my best friend in the village. She grew up revering the image of Zamba, aspiring to be a legendary Sherpa like him. And she was very disappointed in me for always dismissing this ‘glorious piece of our history’ as nothing but folklore.

And yes, I did dismiss it, until the week Viktor Sorokin arrived.

He came during acclimatization season. An old Russian, traveling alone. He was clearly an aristocrat, and he had the body language of someone who had seen his fair share of peaks and valleys.

The best guides in our village lined up for him. But he asked for one particular Sherpa.

He asked for me, by my full name.

Not for Pasang. Not for any of the senior guides who actually knew what they were doing. For me- a nobody who still spent most of his days hauling other people's garbage down the mountain.

"There has to be a mistake," I told the coordinator. "He doesn't know me."

"He asked for you. Nima. Your family name. All of it."

"I've never met the man."

"Well." The coordinator rubbed his fingers together, the universal gesture. "He'd like to."

When the company explained I wasn't qualified to guide anyone anywhere, Viktor produced an amount of cash that made the coordinator's eyebrows disappear into his hairline. Whatever hesitation existed evaporated on the spot. Money does that here, faster than almost anywhere in the world, because so little of it ever reaches the people actually risking their lungs.

I found Viktor that evening and asked him directly.

"How do you know my name?"

He had pale, tired eyes, and hands that shook slightly even at rest.

"I knew your family," he said. "A long time ago."

"My father never mentioned you."

"No." He turned back to the mountain. "He wouldn't have."

That was all I got out of him for days. He kept to himself. Ate alone. Watched the mountain from a distance like he was waiting for it to do something. The only time I saw him fully present was the night of Mani Rimdu.

Mani Rimdu is the biggest annual festival we celebrate in the mountains. In our village, one of the highlights of the festival is the fireside storytelling session organized by the village elders. As expected, the story everyone wanted to hear was that of Zamba the Sherpa. 

That evening, I saw Viktor chugging down mugs of Raaksi- the local liquor of the Sherpas. His behaviour during the recitation of Zamba’s legend was particularly unusual.

The story began with a group of Russians, arriving during off-season, who were hungry for adventure and eager to bring glory to their country and its flag.

Viktor laughed sarcastically.

“They did want glory, alright,” he said, “But trust me, their country and their flag was the LEAST of their concerns !”

At the part of the story where Zamba ‘sacrificed’ his life, Viktor’s jaw tightened like he'd bitten down on a stone. Upon hearing that ‘a hundred climbers were saved that day’, he made a sound. I can only describe it as a scoff, dragged halfway back down his throat before it could get out.

By the time the story reached its ending- the ascension, the mercy of the gods, the eternal watch, Viktor was already walking away into the dark. Like the story itself had shoved him up out of his seat.

“Liars !” I heard him mutter in a drunken stupor, “It was no legend. It was tragedy- a FUCKING tragedy !”

The rest of the audience were visibly uncomfortable.

“God had nothing to do with it !” he said on his way out, “Quite the opposite. The absolute opposite !”

Doma leaned over to me. "Some people can't sit with holiness."

"That's not what that was," I said.

I didn't understand it then. I understand it now, and I wish I still didn't…

Our expedition began three days later. Pasang was the team leader, with me and Doma supporting him. Apart from Viktor, there were four other paying clients, each there for a reason that had nothing to do with the mountain the way it deserved.

Firstly, there was Brittany, an American content creator. She filmed everything, narrating her own life to a phone screen like anyone actually cared.

Then there was Grant Whitfield, the Canadian. His family money bought him more confidence than competence. He spoke to Pasang and me the way you'd speak to hotel staff who'd forgotten to refill the minibar. He reminded me of the kind of tourists who made my father overwork in his final days as a guide.

And what can I say about Ingrid Larsen ? She was an European in her thirties, who'd never climbed anything higher than a gym wall. She checked her gear four times, not because she didn't trust the gear, but because she didn't trust herself. And we didn’t trust her to make it to the Summit either.

Finally, there was the twenty eight year old Australian named Cody Marsh. He was easily the strongest of them, who'd turned back on this same mountain the year before in bad weather.

Viktor came with us as far as his body allowed. Which, given his age, was further than any of us expected.

We went up the South Col, the same as every commercial expedition. The traffic was obscene even at Base Camp. Tents packed shoulder to shoulder. Generators turned on throughout the night. Someone's drone buzzing overhead to capture footage nobody asked for.

It was Viktor who suggested we avoid the worst of it.

"There's a better way," he said, spreading a map across a crate. "Between Camp One and Camp Two. You skip the bottleneck entirely."

Pasang looked at where his finger was. "That’s the lower shoulder of the West Ridge."

"You know it."

"I know of it." Pasang didn't touch the map. "Nobody climbs there."

"Which is exactly the point," Viktor said. "No crowds. No queue. No traffic."

"Nobody climbs there," Pasang said again, and this time it wasn't information. It was a warning wearing the clothes of a fact.

“The terrain can be a bit challenging,” Pasang concluded.

Viktor took an envelope out of his coat and set it on the map, over the West Ridge, like he was pinning it down. He didn't open it. He didn't have to. Pasang looked at the envelope, and then at me. I understood that he was going to say yes, and that he hated it.

"Mostly good weather window," Pasang said quietly. "We move fast. We don't camp there if we can help it."

"Of course," Viktor said.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I know better now.

Nobody uses that stretch of the West Ridge. There's a reason. It has nothing to do with the terrain…

We reached the site by mid-afternoon, a blizzard building on the horizon. We had no choice but to camp early, the one thing Pasang had said he wanted to avoid.

Grant was visibly upset at the sudden setback, venting out his frustration on a nervous Doma.

Cody was much relaxed in comparison, except for the time he said- ‘Not this weather, not again. Can’t go back like last year…’ .

Ingrid was more nervous than the rest of us. She approached me four times in fifteen minutes asking-  ‘This is normal, right? There’s nothing to worry about, right?’.

And Brittany was lip-syncing to something that barely resembled music, attempting to do something in the snow that barely resembled a dance. And of course, she was doing it for the camera.

I looked around. Viktor was nowhere to be seen.

I found him a little later, away from the tents, on his knees, in the snow.

At first I thought he'd fallen. Then I heard him. He was crying. The kind of crying old men do when they've held something in, longer than the body can manage.

There was debris around him. Old rope. Fragments of gear too worn to identify. And things I didn't want to look at directly: pieces of bone, half-buried, bleached from decades of exposure. The gear was old. Foreign. Not the kind of thing that gets left on a modern commercial route.

I called out his name.

He didn't hear me. He was muttering, in Russian and broken English.

“It shouldn’t have happened. Not to you, not to your brothers ! I never knew about the sacrifice. They never told me ! I am sorry, oh, I am so sorry…”

That’s when he noticed me approaching him.

"Viktor. What’s wrong? What happened here?"

He looked up at me, and for a second he didn't see me at all. He was seeing someone else standing where I stood. Then his eyes cleared, and something worse than grief moved across his face. He said nothing.

That evening, the temperature rose in a way it shouldn’t have.

We were hours out from a blizzard, at an altitude where cold isn't a feeling, but a fact of existence. And every one of us was sweating inside our jackets, like we'd just been dropped into a sauna.

"Climate change finally doing us a favor," Cody said.

Nobody laughed.

Viktor grabbed my arm before I could walk away. His grip was stronger than any old man's had a right to be.

"When the storm breaks," he said, "we move. Immediately. By any means."

"We can't move in the dark, Viktor. Not here."

"Nima, please. For everyone’s sake, we must move !"

"Why?"

He didn't answer. He was staring up at the ridge above us, the way you stare at a door when you've heard something on the other side of it.

"Viktor. Why?"

"Something’s been sleeping here," he said, “Asleep for decades. And I might have woken it up.”

And that was all…

I noticed the shadowy figure just after the blizzard broke.

I don't know how to describe the first moment cleanly, because my memory of it isn't clean.

I remember seeing a green light first. Like something bioluminescent, bleeding up through the snow.

I remember Brittany's scream, cut short faster than a scream should ever be cut short.

I remember seeing Grant, backing away from his own tent with his hands raised, saying something about how much money he'd paid for this trip, as if that had ever mattered to anything on this mountain.

It killed them both before I understood what I was looking at. Slashing them repeatedly, at a speed that definitely wasn’t human.

I stood there, frozen in every sense of the word, when I noticed its appearance for the first time.

It was tall, and unnaturally thin. Its frame was stretched and elongated. Its hands didn’t have any fingers. Instead, there were ice hooks, three in each hand, curled where fingers should have been. The hooks were ice-crusted and uneven, like tools scavenged over decades, from different climbers who never made it home.  It wore a patchwork jumpsuit, which looked like it was stitched together from six or seven mismatched climbing suits of different colors and materials. It was torn in places and faded in others. Ancient, frayed ropes are wound tightly around his torso and limbs, binding the suit to its body, the fibers bleached and worn with age. Its face was the most disturbing element: the lower right side and jaw remained eerily well-preserved, weathered brown skin stretched taut, almost lifelike aside from its stillness. The upper left quadrant of his face was severely decomposed, exposing cracked bone, patches of skull, withered tissue, and dark dried blood, with the eye socket on that glowing faint green.

It was Viktor’s voice that brought me back to my senses.

“Stop ! It is me that you want, not them !”

Viktor approached him steadily. The humanoid figure looked at him with something resembling curiosity.

Viktor continued, “Oh, what has it done to you? Oh no ! You didn’t deserve it. None of you did ! Forgive me. Please forgive me, my friend…”

Viktor dropped to his knees, and he said the only words that have ever made any of this make sense to me.

"Forgive me… ZAMBA!"

I had spent my entire life hearing that name used like a blessing. Hearing it screamed like that rewired the word inside me permanently.

Zamba screamed, thrusting its hooks into Viktor’s sides, lifting him off the ground.

Viktor didn't fight it. He kept speaking in a feeble voice.

“I am here to repent, Zamba. Look… who I brought with me…”

He shakily lifted a finger towards me.

“Your descendant… Nima… he will get it, all of it… whatever I earned from the ritual…”

I didn’t know how to react. It was too much for me to unpack.

Viktor begged. He said the others were innocent, that they had nothing to do with what happened here, that it should take him and only him.

Zamba killed him anyway. Slammed him on the ground, and slashed away with all ice hooks on both of his hands.

For a moment afterward it stood still, its green aura pulsing slow, almost like it was breathing. I thought that might be the end. Then it turned toward Ingrid, who was still frozen by her tent, and it started moving again.

Pasang and Doma stepped in front of me before I registered any of us moving.

"Don't run," Doma whispered. Not to me. To herself. "Don't run, don't run, whatever you do, don't…"

The aura shifted.

The green color slowly turned to blue. It looked at us in a way that almost seemed human.

It raised one clawed hand and pointed at the three of us. And it asked, in a voice that sounded like it hadn't spoken in years and had forgotten how words were meant to fit together:

"Sherpa?"

We nodded. All three of us. Without discussing it. Without thinking.

We approached.

It pointed at itself, one ice hook pressing against its chest.

"Zamba… also… Sherpa."

A single tear fell from the eye still intact.

I have never seen anything more human. And I’ve never seen anything followed so immediately by something less.

"It's you," Doma breathed. She wasn't afraid. She was in love with the story, and now the story was standing in front of her. She stepped towards it with her hands open. "It's really you. You saved them. You saved all of them, you…"

The blue aura drained back into green before any of us could react. It slashed Doma’s throat in a single motion. Faster than I can describe, without lying about the details to make it more bearable than it was. Doma was dead, with her hands still open. Still believing.

Zamba had killed the one person on that mountain who loved it, mid-sentence, while she was defending it.

Pasang was killed in the same breath. Caught in the same motion. His body flew and landed a few feet away, drenched in blood.

It should have taken me next. I was standing right there, waiting for it to happen.

Instead, the aura flickered blue. One final time. It didn’t cover its entire body. It was just around its head, just around the eye that still worked. It looked directly at me, struggling to sustain the green aura that was about to overlap the blue. And whatever was left of the man surfaced for one last second, and it spent that second on me.

"Run… Sherpa… RUN!"

I ran. And I swear I heard my name being uttered while I was doing so…

I don't remember most of what happened after that. That's the honest truth, and it's also the part that frightens me most now, looking back, because of the little that I do remember.

I remember snow. I remember Ingrid somewhere near me, and Cody half-carrying her, all three of us moving and not looking back.

I remember Base Camp in fragments. I remember someone wrapping a blanket around me.

And I remember, or I think I remember, men in tuxedos.

I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds. Men in formal black at eighteen thousand feet, moving through the tents like they'd stepped out of a different photograph entirely, one that had nothing to do with mountains. They went to Ingrid. They went to Cody. They put their hands on their shoulders and spoke to them low and gentle, the way you speak to people you're consoling. Ingrid nodded, and Cody nodded, and they let themselves be led away.

One of them stopped before he followed the others out.

He turned and looked at me. The way you look at a piece of luggage you don't need to carry. Then he turned and walked out of the frame of my memory. Ingrid and Cody went with them, and I never saw either of them again…

That was six months ago.

I live in Russia now. Viktor's estate came to me exactly the way his final wishes specified. I inherited more money than my family had seen across three generations combined. Enough to finally do the one thing I'd wanted, ever since I was old enough to understand what I was watching my father spend his body on.

I’ll finally start college, in Saint Petersburg, in a few weeks.

I told myself, most days, that what I saw on that mountain was a trauma response. People die on that mountain every season. The details don't need to be supernatural to be tragic.

My testimony didn't survive the village for long. By the time it filtered back through secondhand retellings, it had softened into something people could live with. An inexperienced Sherpa led a group onto a dangerous, unfamiliar route. A storm rolled in. And Zamba appeared, just as the old stories always promised. He guided the survivors home through the blizzard, out of mercy.

I stopped correcting it.

I want you to understand why I stopped. It wasn't grief, and it wasn't peace. It’s that I’d stopped believing that the mountain deserved the effort.

Because here is the thing nobody in that village will say out loud. The mountain doesn’t love us back. It took my father's lungs, one breath at a time, and gave him nothing. It took Pasang, who had given it twenty years as a guide. It took Doma, who loved it more than anyone I’ve known, who defended it with her hands open, and it killed her mid-sentence, for the crime of getting close enough to say thank you.

I swore an oath on it. And it has never once, in a hundred years, sworn anything back.

So I let them have their guardian. I let them have their mercy and their gods and their beautiful dead man on the ice. I took the money the mountain finally coughed up, sixty years too late, through the wrong hands, and I left.

I also inherited Viktor’s box that came with the estate.

It had a diary, with decades of entries.

I'll give it to you the way it came to me. In pieces. Out of order. The way the truth actually arrives, which is never as a clean paragraph-

There was an expedition, decades before I was born. Off-season. A group of young Russian climbers, rich and strong, who paid an enormous premium for the finest Sherpa team on the mountain, led by its most gifted young guide.

His name was Zamba.

They did not go up for the summit. Viktor writes this plainly, in the flat handwriting of a man who has stopped protecting himself. They went up for the peak because of what could be done at the peak. Where, in his words, ‘the signal was strongest’. There was a ritual. There was an entity they meant to call. Viktor was supposed to be the vessel that carried it home.

And the entire Sherpa team was to be the ‘human sacrifice’. This is the part of the plan that Viktor was never aware of.

The ritual worked. That's what Viktor could never make peace with. It actually worked. The entity did come. And then it did something they hadn't accounted for, because men like that never account for being refused.

It rejected Viktor as the vessel they'd chosen.

Zamba had died by then. Died fighting them, trying to save his men, and failed. And the entity reached for his freshly killed corpse and chose him as a vessel.

Zamba was reanimated- a fallen Sherpa fighting with a malicious entity for control of his own body. He got up in a fit of rage and grief, and slaughtered half the men who'd murdered his team, with a precision Viktor spends three pages failing to describe. It chased the rest toward a cliff. An avalanche took him before he could finish, and buried him in West Ridge. The survivors, including Viktor, crawled back to Base Camp, broken in a way that never healed.

One of them could only say the same thing, over and over, for days.

“Zamba. No. Zamba. No. Nooo….”

The rest of them chose a different sentence to say.

They said he was a hero. They said he'd sacrificed himself to save the expedition. They said the gods had rewarded him. They took the man they'd killed and wrote a beautiful lie on top of it. They went home, and they never came back. The lie stayed on the mountain and sank into it.

The men who paid for the ritual are named in the diary. The expedition was financed by a Mr. Aldermore and his partners.

I didn’t know that name then. I’ve since come to understand that it’s the kind of name you look up and find nothing.

But Viktor kept going. Past the ritual and the cover-up. He grew a conscience in his later years, unable to carry the guilt of aiding a human sacrifice. Mr. Aldermore rewarded them, even after the botched ritual, because they managed to ‘breach the veil’- in Viktor’s words. Viktor chose to put that fortune into years of quiet obsessive work, hoping to find a way to repent for his sins.

Here’s what he found-

Zamba never married. He was young, and gifted, and gone before he could become anything as ordinary as a husband.

But six months after he vanished on that mountain, a boy was born in a village, a few hours' walk off Pangboche. It was a lovechild, born to a woman who never named the father to anyone. There was no marriage to trace. No name on any register. Just a quiet woman and a fatherless boy, in a small village that wasn't even on the maps yet.

That boy was my grandfather.

Viktor spent years and a great deal of money proving what no one in my own family ever knew:

Zamba was my great-grandfather.

The gifted young guide who died trying to save his men. The dead man they filled with up with an evil entity and left on the ice. The thing that killed Pasang and Doma in front of me and then flickered blue, one last time, and spent the last human second it had telling me to run.

Viktor didn't fund that expedition to reach the summit. Viktor came to die at the site where it happened, in front of the thing he'd helped make, and to hand his fortune to the one living descendant of the man he'd killed…

So I told myself I would start fresh. And for a while I almost did.

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I still think about the green aura. The way it reeked of malice, if a color can reek. I think about the blue that came underneath it, and the man surfacing through the thing like a face pressed up against the underside of ice. I think about the blue when he recognized us as Sherpas like him, and the tear from the eye that still worked. And I think about how fast the green swallowed it again, and how the same hand that pointed at itself came down on Pasang and Doma a breath later.

And I think about that last flicker. The tiniest fold of blue, just around his head, just around the eye. The one that looked at me and found something in me worth the last of what was left of him.

“Run… Sherpa… RUN !”

These things are hard to forget. I've tried. That's the reason I'm writing this account at all, because I need to get it out of my head, where it has been circling for six months with nowhere to land.

And it would have stayed there. I really thought it would.

Except my mother called me yesterday. And then she sent me a link.

The video was two minutes long. It was online for a little more than an hour before it came down, flagged and removed as ‘AI-generated content’. I want to say only this about that: there was nothing artificial about what I watched.

I saw a small group of adventurers, the kind who go up when nobody sensible does, chasing an empty mountain. Late evening light. And they were on the South Col route. You know- the safe route, the crowded one, the one everyone takes.

The footage shakes. There's blood, more of it than a two-minute video should be able to hold. Limbs where limbs are not supposed to be. Men screaming in a register human voices don't usually reach. And through it, there was a shape. It was a figure, with ice hooks for fingers, three in each hand.

And around it, there was a mist, which was green in color. The mist was so thick and so dense that it almost swallowed the figure's features entirely.

A woman had the camera turned on herself, the way Brittany used to, narrating her own death without meaning to. You could see her face, shaken, mouthing something, before a hook catches her across the throat and drags her out of the frame.

The camera keeps recording. It fell, I think, or she still had it. The last twenty seconds are just snow. Just white, and the sounds off-screen, someone slashing at something that has already stopped moving, over and over again.

And you could hear a word. Throughout the whole two minutes. After every kill. After every movement. After every wet, ugly sound the camera was kind enough not to show. One word, in a voice that had forgotten how words fit together, screamed again and again into the empty white mountain.

I watched the video eleven times before it was taken down, and I have no doubt about the only word it kept uttering constantly-

"NIMA!"

"NIMA!"

"NIMA!"

It was my name. Zamba was screaming my FUCKING name.

And in two full minutes of that green, in every frame of that mist, in every swing of those three hooks -

There was not a single tint of blue.

Whatever fraction of my great-grandfather was still fighting inside that thing, still recognizing his own, still weeping from one working eye… it was lost. The entity had won.

And now Zamba has come off the dead path. It has walked out of its grave and onto the safe road, the crowded one, the ordinary one where everyone is supposed to make it home.

And it’s screaming the name of the last person who ever made it human….

I graduated from my local college, with a Master of Library and Information Studies degree.

The degree sounds impressive exactly once- the moment you say it out loud for the first time. It looks impressive only in movies and TV shows, where the librarian is always brilliant and mysterious and pivotal to the plot.

In real life, in this country, in this city, you are somewhere below accountant and somewhere above… actually, no. There is nothing below accountant. You are at the bottom.

The doctors have their clinics. The engineers have their firms. The businessmen have their consciences to trade away. And you have a laminated card that grants you access, to buildings full of books that nobody reads anymore.

Libraries are a rarity in my area, so I was unemployed after graduation, to no one’s surprise. I needed to make money, and I wanted to make it fast.

Eight months ago, I found a prediction market app. The app, recommended by a friend, paid out in a cryptocurrency called Chacha Coin. I was good at it, genuinely good actually. My critical thinking skills have always been reliable, even if nobody ever paid appropriately for them. I correctly predicted the cause of death of Rebecca Roy, a once-famous singer, who fell out of the spotlight some 5 years ago. The jackpot was substantial, and my account was flooded with Chacha Coins. I reinvested everything for better rewards.

The app turned out to be a scam. Chacha Coin was a pump-and-dump scheme. It currently has no value, so I currently have no savings.

I have been surviving on bad decisions and instant noodles ever since.

So when Mr. Abdul called me one morning, I picked up on the first ring.

Mr. Abdul was a professor from my college days. He was a middle-aged man who always smelled of old paper. He said he had a job offer for me. In the city’s biggest university, no less. The kind of posting that librarians in this district would kill for. He wanted me to come in for an interview the next morning.

I asked him why me. I was an average student at best. There were a dozen better librarians from our college alone, most of them still employed.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he replied:

"You were never the most brilliant. But you were always the most obedient. You followed the rules without question. This ‘particular’ job requires exactly that quality."

The interview was the next morning. I was the only candidate. He interviewed me himself, in a small office that smelled identical to him. He slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. The list of rules, he called it. He told me to read it carefully.

If you thought my degree was a mouthful, wait till you hear the name of the position I was offered-

ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN, DIGITAL PRESERVATION & DIGITIZATION UNIT, UNIVERSITY RECORDS VAULT

Graveyard shift. 9 PM to 9 AM, six days a week. The pay was five times what my peers were currently making, deposited in advance, at the start of every month. He told me the position was mine if I wanted it.

I read the list of rules. I read it twice. I read it thrice, for good measure. I looked up at Mr. Abdul.

"Any questions?" he asked.

"No," I replied.

He told me I was starting the following evening. He would be there to hand over the keys.

On my first night, he showed me the vault, Bay 3, the security desk, and the watchman's station. When I asked him how long he had been doing this, he looked at me for a long moment and said:

"Long enough."

He told me to go through the list of rules again. He was gone by nine-fifteen.

The list read as follows:

NIGHTLY OPERATIONS- DIGITAL PRESERVATION UNIT
University Records Vault- Graveyard Shift (9 PM to 9 AM)

1. Sign the attendance log at the security desk before 9:15 PM. You are not allowed to leave the premises before your checkout time of 9 AM.

2. The scanning equipment in Bay 3 runs continuously. Check the document feed tray every two hours. Clear any jams immediately. Do not leave a document face-down in the tray overnight.

3. Log every digitized file into the accession register before moving to the next batch. Do not skip entries, even for damaged or partially legible documents.

4. At midnight, begin the manual vault walkthrough. Check all cabinet locks on Rows A through F. Record the date and time on the register and sign it.

5. Row D has no cabinet locks. There is only one item on the shelf- a red ledger. During your midnight walkthrough, open it to the last written page, and leave it open on the reading table. Turn the desk lamp on. Return to Bay 3 and resume work. Do not read any other page. At 2 AM, return to the table, close the ledger, and place it back on the shelf. Turn off the lamp, leave the vault, and lock the door. Do not go back in until morning.

6. All digital devices, including mobile phones, tablets, cameras, and portable storage drives, must be submitted to the night watchman before entering the unit. Retrieve your devices from the security desk at the end of your shift.

7. The morning shift supervisor arrives at 8:45 AM. Have the accession log ready for handover.

Rule 5 had a bold font. Parts of it were underlined with red ink. I should’ve questioned it, but I didn’t. Maybe that’s why I was chosen in the first place. I really needed the money, and they really needed someone who followed the rules to the letter. I was determined to be that guy.

I checked out the vault itself. Heavy metal shelves ran in rows, labeled A through F, loaded with document boxes, manila folders, and deteriorating binders. They went back further than I cared to calculate.

Row D looked identical to the others from a distance. At the far end, on the middle shelf, sat a single red ledger. It was large, and it looked older than everything else in the vault. The cover was dark red, almost brown at the edges. The spine cracked and re-cracked in patterns, suggesting it had been opened and closed thousands of times.

At midnight, I did what Rule 5 said. I opened it to the last written page. I left it on the reading table. I turned on the desk lamp. I did not read any other page. The last written page was halfway full. Text was arranged in two columns- one for the name, one for a date and time. All of it was written in a tight, dense script.

I didn't recognize any of the names. Except for the one at the very top of the page-

ABDUL HAMID.

Abdul Hamid was the full name of Mr. Abdul, my predecessor and professor.

The date was five days from that night. The time was 3:13 AM.

I stood there for longer than I should have. Abdul Hamid is a common name in this country. It is genuinely, statistically common. That’s what I told myself. I told myself a lot of things.

I returned to Bay 3 and resumed work. I logged fourteen documents between 2 AM and 8 AM. I don't remember a single one of them. I went back at 2 AM, closed the ledger, turned off the lamp, locked the vault, and finished my shift.

The following nights were… uneventful.

But one thing kept bothering me.

The ledger added three to five new names every night. I know this because, despite my best efforts, I started counting. I wasn't reading any other page, as per the rules, but you can count the lines on a page without reading them. My brain did it involuntarily. I just couldn’t help it. It didn’t make sense.

Actually, a lot of things didn’t make sense.

I called Mr. Abdul on the second night. No answer. Third night, same. I called four more times across the following days. His phone rang and rang.

On the fourth night, in a moment of weakness I am not proud of, I posted about the ledger in a Facebook group for local librarians. I kept it vague- new job, strange rules, unusual object, trying to make sense of it. The comments were swift and unanimous.

“Nice story, bro.”

“Whatever drug you're on, I need some of that.”

“Desperate for likes much?”

I deleted the post.

On the fifth night, I counted seven new names on the last page. I closed the ledger at 2 AM. I turned off the lamp. I locked the vault. I told myself, for the last time, that Abdul Hamid was a common name.

The sixth morning, the supervisor was late. She arrived at 0920 instead of 0845, slightly breathless. She didn't ask for the accession log. She sat down, put her bag on the desk, and sighed.

Mr. Abdul was dead.

He had been smoking on the roof of his building the previous night. It was a night of heavy rain. He slipped on the wet concrete near the railing. Witnesses placed the time at around three in the morning.

I didn’t know how to respond.

I handed her the accession log. I walked outside. I sat down on the pavement and stayed there.

The night watchman was leaving his post at the same time, jacket over one arm. He looked at me on the pavement and slowed his pace.

"Something wrong, sir?"

I told him about the red ledger. I told him that the rules around it felt wrong. I told him that I had been there for five nights, and I hadn't seen a single person enter or leave the vault. I told him that didn't understand who was writing in the ledger, or why it seemed to know the things it shouldn't know.

The watchman was quiet for a moment. Then he chuckled softly.

"Those scanning machines are hella loud, sir. If you wanna hear something that bad, try turning them off."

He left.

I sat on the pavement until the sun was fully up…

Night six. Graveyard shift. I followed all the rules. Attendance log, equipment check, accession register. At midnight I walked towards Row D, opened the ledger, left it on the table, and turned on the lamp. Saw three new names with dates and times. I didn’t recognize a single name.

I returned to Bay 3 and looked at the scanning equipment for a long time.

Then I turned it off.

The librarian in me felt genuinely terrible about this. I thought about two hours of lost digitization progress. I thought about the accession register that would show a gap. But the rules never said that I wasn’t allowed to switch off the equipment. Technically, I was clean. Ethically, not so much.

I pulled an encyclopedia from the main library shelf and sat down to read. The silence of the building settled around me in layers.

I heard the sound at 1245.

It was a heavy, rhythmic rumbling, regular as a machine. But machines don't shift their weight. And machines don’t get louder every second.

I looked at the equipment. Still off.

The sound continued.

Then the lights began to flicker.

Not in the way that old lights flickered- random, electrical, indifferent. This was sequential. Starting at the far end of the main library and moving toward the vault in a straight line. Each fixture going dark for a fraction of a second before the next one did, too fast for the eye to fully track. It created the impression of something moving through the lights themselves. A darkness traveling throughout the infrastructure of the building.

I watched it reach the vault corridor and stop.

One minute passed. There was nothing.

I let out a breath. I felt humiliatingly foolish. There I was- a grown man sitting in a library at 1 AM, frightening himself with bad electrical wiring and the power of suggestion. I set down the encyclopedia.

Then, very slowly, the vault door creaked shut.

I crossed the room in four steps and put my hand on it. It didn't move. It was closed, but not locked. Locked doors don't move, but they give slightly under pressure. This one gave nothing. It felt less like a locked door, and more like a wall that had previously been a door.

From inside, I heard laughter.

It was… not normal.

It was not laughter you hear from the next room at a party. It was laughter that had never been informed of the space containing it- echoing off surfaces in a way I didn’t know sounds could echo. They were getting louder, then softer, then louder again. The laughter came in rhythms that suggested breathing, a physical presence drawing air to sustain the sound.

I had never heard laughter make me want to stop existing before. I have now.

I ran.

I ran through Bay 3, through the main library, to the transparent door at the far end, the one that led to the security desk. The watchman was on his stool, fully awake, a newspaper open on his lap. The door was chained shut from his side.

I hit the glass with both palms.

"There's something in there. You have to open the door. You have to let me out !"

He looked up from his newspaper.

"Don't worry about it, sir. Just do your job and let me do mine."

"You don’t understand. It's not human ! Whatever is in that vault is not human, and I am locked in here with it. Open the gate and let me out !"

"Shift ends at 9 AM, sir."

"I am asking you to help me. Why are you doing this to me?"

He folded his newspaper carefully and set it on the desk. He looked at me through the glass, like a man who has had this exact conversation before.

"Sir. Please cooperate. You're not the only one with rules to follow…"

I returned to Bay 3.

The lights were normal. The footsteps were gone. The laughter had stopped. When I reached the vault, the door was open, swinging gently on its hinges.

I checked my watch. 1:20 AM.

I walked in anyway. I didn’t know what to think anymore. Mr. Abdul was dead, the watchman had rules of his own, and I had been alone in this building for six nights with something I did not understand. No one wanted to give me the dignity of an explanation.

The ledger was open. Three new names on the last page. Dates and times. Nobody I recognized.

I turned to the previous page, because of course I did.

Names, dates, times. Page after page, going back further than what made sense. The handwriting shifting subtly across the years, ink changing color and density with age. I turned pages backward with my bare hands. I couldn’t care less…

Until I finally saw a name that I recognized-

REBECCA ROY.

The date matched. The time matched. I know it for a fact. I predicted her very real car accident in a very fake prediction market app. Now I see a ledger with her name, her date of death, her time of death. All recorded weeks before it actually happened. All written in the same tight, dense script as everyone else.

I turned back to Mr. Abdul's page. His full name, his date, his time: 3:13 AM, five days after my first night, give or take twelve minutes.

I stood at the reading table, in the vault of the most prestigious university in the city, surrounded by centuries of records.

That’s when I understood.

I still don't know what it is. I want to be honest about that. I don't know who writes in this ledger or how it knows what it knows. But I understand what the ledger is. It is a record of deaths. Accidental deaths, unnatural deaths. All predicted accurately, long before they happened.

On one of these nights, Mr. Abdul saw his own name on the ledger. I am sure he did. He called the most obedient student he could remember. He handed over the keys as fast as he could. Whether he made his peace with what was coming, or simply ran out of time, I cannot say.

What I can say is- I made my peace then and there, standing in Row D at 1:38 AM.

I was the new librarian. I would open the ledger at midnight and close it at 2 AM. I would turn off the lamp and lock the door. I would do it every night, for however long my name did not appear on one of its pages. It was not the life I had planned. But it was significantly better than the alternative…

At 2 AM, I closed the ledger, placed it back on the shelf, turned off the lamp, left the vault, and locked the door. I turned the scanning equipment back on. I checked the tray, cleared a small jam, and logged the remaining documents until 8:45. I handed the accession register to the supervisor without incident.

Outside, I lit a cigarette.

The night watchman was leaving at the same time, jacket over his arm as always. He walked over and stopped a few feet away.

"Sorry about last night, sir. I was just doing my job."

"No hard feelings," I said.

He produced his own cigarette and lit it. We stood together on the pavement in the early morning heat, two men finishing a long night.

"That thing you encountered," he said, after a while. "I don't know how long he's been there. Mr. Abdul didn't know either. We stopped asking a long time ago."

He took a long drag.

"The names on the ledger. They aren't random, you know. He only chooses people who break the law. That was Mr. Abdul's theory, at least. Take that singer, for example. Rebecca something? Well, she was proud of ignoring speeding tickets. Heard her say it in a drunk interview once. Laughed about it."

Another drag.

"Mr. Abdul, God rest his soul, was a good man. So good that he didn't charge late fees to a student named Sabrina, even when she returned a book two years overdue. She'd been fighting cancer, you see? Went into remission, came back, returned the book herself. He waived the whole thing. Didn't charge her a single penny."

He looked at the ember of his cigarette.

"Kind gesture. Genuinely kind. But totally against the rules. Two years of late fees, just forgiven. No authorization, no documentation, nothing. Just one man deciding the rules didn't apply in this particular case."

He dropped the cigarette and pressed it flat with his shoe.

"Rules are rules, you know, especially to the entity. But don't worry." He looked up at me and smiled. "You'll be fine. I mean, you haven't broken any of the rules, right?"

The morning traffic moved on the road behind us. A crow landed on the pavement a few feet away.

I froze in my tracks.

I thought about Rule 5.

I thought about the specific language of Rule 5-

“…Do not read any other page…”

The watchman's smile faded, one degree at a time.

His voice had changed completely.

“Sir, you haven’t broken any of the rules… RIGHT ???”

I'm a Sociology student in my early twenties. I study at a university I worked my entire life to get into. I was born an orphan, and grew up in a foster home with barely enough money. So when I say I worked my entire life for this, I mean it literally. Every exam, every assignment, every late night with a textbook while the other kids were watching TV- all of it was pointed at one thing. Getting out of this place. Getting somewhere that meant something.

The only truly good thing in my life, through all of it, has been Sabrina. She’s my childhood sweetheart. Currently living three cities away, finishing her own degree. Every night without fail, she calls me and asks the same question- when are we going to be together again? And every night without fail, I say the same thing before we hang up-

"Very soon, Sabrina. Sooner than you realize."

It is embarrassingly cheesy. She knows it. I know it. We say it anyway. It has kinda become our ritual.

I want you to remember that line.

About two and a half months ago, I was drowning financially. I have a merit-based scholarship that covers half my tuition. However, the city is really expensive, in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I had applied for a need-based scholarship top-up. But the pool of eligible candidates was enormous, and the available slots were not. I had also applied for a Teaching Assistant position. But the rumor was that the Professor already had someone in mind.

So there I was, watching both doors close simultaneously.

My fellow students do delivery work, or wait tables part-time to make a living. I’ve always considered these ‘odd jobs’ to be beneath me. That is not arrogance, it is self-preservation. I have worked too hard and come too far to go backwards. So I started looking for private tutoring gigs, because at least that felt like a use of what I actually had.

I looked up various tuition mediums throughout the weekend. Tuition mediums are commonplace in South Asia, in case you didn’t know. Most of these turn out to be shady companies, who exploit potential private tutors and run off with their money. I had to be sure that I was applying to one of the credible ones. 

That is when I found: Elite Educators - A Concern of Aldermore & Associates.

The name was a mouthful, but the website was clean and professional. The kind of interface that signals money behind it. The rating was near-perfect: 4.9 across hundreds of reviews. And unlike every other tuition medium I found, they charged zero commission from the tutors. I found that slightly odd, but I assumed they took their cut from the parents instead.

I applied as fast as I could. I uploaded my CV in a hurry without proofreading it. I really needed a tutoring gig, and I needed it fast. I revised my CV the next morning, and noticed the typo almost immediately.

"Officous zeal."

I had written officous instead of officious.

I remember yelling out a curse word.

I cringed, closed the tab, and moved on. That was enough embarrassment for one day.

I called Sabrina that night and told her about the typo. We had a good laugh about it. Didn’t make it any less embarrassing though…

Surprisingly, I received a placement within two days. The file said that the child’s name was Numero Tres. I found that interesting. ‘Numero Tres’ in Spanish translated to ‘Number Three’ in English. Who names their child like that, I thought.

The parents were named Dr. Alejandro Mateo Tres and Dr. Lucia Carmen Tres, both listed as physicians. I looked at the surname ‘Tres’. I figured it was a Latin American surname I wasn't familiar with. It was unusual, but it wasn’t my business.

The note from the parents read:

"We are both doctors who stay outdoors most of the time. We home school the child to make sure he is not influenced by external confounding factors. Need a competent private tutor who can be an appropriate role-model for the boy to follow."

I remember scoffing at that. Rich, overprotective parents with a clinical way of describing their own child. I had seen worse. The salary was three times the average monthly rate of every other tutor I knew, paid weekly in advance at the start of each week. I accepted before I finished reading the rest of the document.

The house was in a quiet part of the city. Nice neighborhood. The kind of street where every gate looks the same and every garden is too neat.

The parents were just leaving when I arrived for the first session. Both wearing white coats. The father gave me a firm handshake and a clipped greeting. The mother smiled briefly and said something about the lesson plan being flexible. They were gone before I could ask a single question.

I was nervous. It was my first gig, in what was clearly a wealthy household, and I had no idea what to expect from the child.

I’ll be upfront about this- I’ve always been clumsy. My foster father used to find it funny, this big-brained kid who could not walk through a doorway without incident.

On this day, in that house, the nerves made it worse. I walked in too fast. Chipped my shoulder on the door frame. Laughed it off awkwardly. Scraped the chair loudly across the floor when I sat down.

The boy was already at the table. He watched every single one of my antics with a blank expression.

There he was- Numero Tres. Ten years old. Small for his age, I thought. He did not say hello. He did not smile. He simply watched me get settled with those flat, patient eyes.

"Good afternoon, kid" I said. "I'm your new tutor. You can call me whatever you like."

"Good afternoon, Teacher," he said.

His voice was soft. Almost too soft for the room.

I noticed the textbooks immediately. Three books, each with glossy pages, hardback covers, and that particular smell you only get from high-end publications. I had bought children's textbooks from the market to prepare for this gig. These were nothing like those. But the content was age-appropriate for a ten-year-old, so I filed it away and opened to the first chapter.

Numero struggled with basic arithmetic in the first ten minutes. I watched him work through a simple multiplication problem, with the slowness of someone wading through deep water. I pulled the notebook toward myself.

"Watch and learn, kid," I said, and walked him through it.

He watched. He did not blink for the entire duration…

The silence started getting to me from the very first session.

Not silence in the room, I could handle that. Silence from him, specifically. I heard no footsteps when he moved. No sound of breathing. No shift of weight in the chair, no rustle of turning pages, nothing. I couldn’t confirm he was present in the room, unless I was looking directly at him. It was the kind of absence that a person shouldn’t be able to produce.

On the third session, I closed my eyes for a moment, to collect my thoughts mid-explanation. I couldn’t feel that he was in the room at all. It was awkwardly silent. I smiled for a bit, thinking about how weird it felt.

Then I opened my eyes.

Numero was in front of me. Crouching on the table. Face two inches from mine. Completely still. And he was smiling, for the first time since I had met him. He had something in his expression that I can only describe as excitement.

"I get it now," he said. "Thank you, Teacher."

I rode my bicycle on the way home, thinking about the strange encounter. I told myself it was just a weird kid, from an overprotective household, acting out in the only way he knew how.

But it wasn’t his behavior that was bothering me.

It was the way he smiled. The way it pulled higher on the right side than the left, with a dimple forming on the left cheek.

I have that smile. The exact same smile. My foster mother used to be fond of it. She said it was the most lopsided, ridiculous, lovable smile she had ever seen. I have the photos to prove it…

Two months passed since the encounter.

I kept showing up three days a week- Maths on the first day, English on the second, Science on the third. The textbooks changed every couple of weeks. They always had the same premium quality, and followed same template. But each new set was more advanced than the last.

And Numero was improving FAST. And by fast, I mean that his skills were improving by leaps and bounds with every lesson I took. For instance, he was currently working through 10th grade Calculus. His English books had moved on to Shakespeare. Specifically, the plays I remembered from my own 12th grade Literature course. His Science books were now almost entirely focused on cloning, DNA mutation, and genetic engineering. He was frustratingly good at this material, even correcting me on two occasions. He had the casual confidence of someone who had known it all his life.

The shift didn’t feel normal. I mean-  he could barely say a full sentence on the first day, and struggle with basic multiplication in the first week alone. How did he get so smart in a matter of months? I even talked to Sabrina about it. She suggested that the child might be gifted in some way. Maybe a prodigy by birth, who knows?

Lucky guy, I thought.

One Maths day, I gave Numero some problems to solve. While he was busy, I took out my college notebook. I was working on an assignment that my Professor had given. I was only halfway through when I was interrupted by a phone call. I stepped out, leaving my notebook open on the table. I was gone for maybe eight minutes.

When I came back, I found Numero with my notebook. He had solved the entire problem set. It was college-level Calculus, the kind that even mathematicians struggle with. And this ten-year old had solved it, on his own, in eight minutes.

I stared at the notebook for a long time. The steps matched. His answer was correct…

The English essay was the one that broke me. I assigned Numero a short composition- describe a person you admire. He handed it back after 15 minutes. It was covered in grammatical errors, which was normal for a child of his age. But it was threaded with complex vocabulary, words that no ten-year-old should have known. I was used to Numero’s intelligence by then, so I listed it off as impressive, not unexpected.

I was circling the errors when I stopped. I saw a word that I recognized immediately-

Officous zeal.

That spelling. That specific, embarrassing, incorrect spelling, One that I had identified two months ago, in my own writing, and regretted not correcting sooner.

I looked up at him slowly.

"Where did you learn that phrase?"

"CV, Teacher."

I felt something cold move through my chest.

"What… CV? How did you get my…"

He closed his notebook and stood up.

"Time's up, Teacher. Thank you for the lesson."

He walked out.

And I need you to understand this- he walked out loudly*.* Footsteps against the floor. Chair scraped on his way past. Shoulder catching the door frame, a short laugh following it. I watched him go and felt my vision narrow.

Every single one of those movements was mine. My clumsiness. My laugh. My exact physical signature, replayed back at me from a ten-year-old's body.

I sat alone in that room for a very long time before I left…

I didn't sleep well that night. But the next morning, two things happened, knocking everything else out of my head.

Firstly, the need-based scholarship had come through. Apparently, my application essay had moved the Committee deeply. I heard this secondhand, but I was in no position to question it.

Secondly, the TA position was mine, effective next week. The professor's first choice had dropped out to start a business. I was always the second pick, and he needed someone urgently.

I cannot describe how I felt. The closest I can get is: like a fist that had been clenched for years finally opening.

I was happy. Genuinely happy. I laughed until my eyes watered.

But I had no time to celebrate. I had to go to the house that afternoon. First class of the week. Maths. Already paid for in advance.

I arrived to find the parents on their way out, as always. But this time, I stopped them.

"Can I have five minutes? I have something to share."

They seemed taken aback, but they recovered quickly. They invited me to sit. I told them about the scholarship and the TA position. I informed them that I wouldn't be able to come from next week onwards.

They exchanged a look I couldn't fully read.

"Oh no, that wasn’t expected," said the father. "You can't do that, sir. The child sees you as a role model. He is making remarkable progress, in ways we haven't seen before."

Then the mother spoke. The first time I'd heard her say more than a greeting.

"Can't you see that you're in the middle of a process? You can't stop it midway, can you? What is it? Is it money? We can offer more. Five times? Ten times? Just name it. We can make some calls."

The father nodded the moment she said make some calls.

I felt a brief pull. I'd grown genuinely fond of the kid, strange behavior and all. And ten times the salary was an enticing offer. But something about the offer felt off, in a way I couldn't articulate. Nobody offers ten times the salary for a private tutor.

"I appreciate it, I really do. But the tuitions were always temporary. I like Numero. He's the brightest kid I've ever met.” I continued, “I'm sure Numero has a bright future. But right now, I need to focus on my own future."

The father frowned.

"Numero? Wait... what?"

I blinked.

"Your son? Numero Tres?"

Both parents looked at each other. Then they laughed. Briefly, almost involuntarily. I was confused.

"Oh, is that what you thought?" said the mother. "Is that what they told you? Sir, the child isn't Numero Tres."

They stood up.

"You are."

The father turned toward the door.

"Please reconsider our offer, sir. We already rejected two tutors before we found you. We can't afford a fourth. Hope you make good progress today."

And they left.

I sat in that hallway for what felt like a very long time.

Then I went into the study, because I didn't know what else to do. The boy was already at the table with his books open.

The lesson was uneventful. He worked mostly on his own, occasionally turning a page towards me and asking "Is this correct, Teacher?" . I answered. He nodded, and returned to work.

I watched him for twenty minutes without speaking.

He had my smile. He had my way of scratching the side of his head when he was thinking hard. My habit of rubbing my nose absently at the end of each problem. My specific exhale- half sigh and half laugh, whenever he arrived at a correct answer. It was like sitting across from a mirror that was slightly behind me in time, catching up.

"Hey kid," I said finally. "Do you know my name?"

He didn't look up.

"Yes, Teacher?"

"What is my name?"

"Numero Tres, Teacher."

I steadied myself.

"Then what is your name?"

He looked up.

"I am Iqbal."

A chill ran down my spine. I’ve heard that name before, every day of my life, and still hear it every time Sabrina calls…

It was MY name ! MY FREAKIN’ NAME ! And the kid just uttered it proudly, wearing my smile, dimple on the left cheek.

I told him we were finishing early today. I gave no explanation. I had none, after all.

He seemed completely unfazed, his focus locked in on a function graph.   

I cycled back home as fast as I could. I couldn’t stop thinking about the absurdity of the whole situation. It was unnerving, to say the least, if that was even the right word for it.

My train of thoughts got derailed the moment I walked into the apartment. As soon as I turned the lights on, a party popper went off. I was immediately buried under my friends, all screaming at the top of their lungs. They had apparently planned a surprise celebration for the scholarship and the TA position, which I had completely forgotten about in the past two hours.

We cut a small cake at home. They took me out. I had my first beer. Then another. Then another. By the third, the heaviness had lifted entirely. I was standing outside a restaurant, looking up at the sky, saying things I only half remember.

"Thank you ! Thank you for everything ! God is great ! Life is great ! I feel great !"

My friends carried me home. The rest of the night was a blur…

The next day, hungover and moving on muscle memory, I showed up for the English lesson. Second class of the week. The parents were leaving as I arrived.

The father stopped.

"Sorry for our unprofessional conduct yesterday. We have come to the conclusion that your discontinuation is a decision that is yours to make. The best we can do is adjust accordingly."

I noticed the language. Too formal. Too precise. Not how a parent speaks about their child's tutor.

"We have already found alternative teaching methods," said the mother. "Perhaps some external exposure isn't bad after all. Feel free to bid farewell to your student today. Take care and stay healthy."

They left.

The lesson was warm. My student was in a good mood, laughing at the comedic scenes in The Merchant of Venice, producing character analyses that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a university seminar. I let him work. I watched him. I tried to feel normal.

I said it eventually.

"Hey kid. This is our last class together."

"I know, Teacher."

Easier than I expected.

"Anything you want to say to me?"

He thought about it.

"Umm... thank you?"

I smiled in spite of everything.

"You're most welcome, kid."

He stood up suddenly, looked directly at the ceiling, and screamed-

"Thank you ! Thank you for everything ! God is great ! Life is great ! I feel great !"

It was my voice. Not an impression, mind you. Not a recording played back through a speaker. My voice, produced in real time, in the cadence and pitch of a drunk twenty-something standing under an open sky the night before.

He sat back down and returned to his commentary on Shylock, as if nothing happened.

I stood up. My legs were not entirely cooperative.

"Alright. I… I gotta go now."

"Okay, Teacher."

"You, uh... take care of yourself. Hope we meet again."

I didn’t mean to say those last words. It came out on reflex. The kind of thing you say when you're leaving somewhere and your brain is elsewhere. I didn't mean it as anything.

"I know, Teacher," he said, still looking at his notebook.

Something cold moved through me.

"Really? You know we'll meet again? What do you mean? When?"

He looked up.

"Very soon, Sabrina. Sooner than you realize."

My voice. Her name. That line, which was OUR line ! The one that existed, only between two people, at the end of a nightly phone call. The last thing I said before sleep, coming out of a ten-year-old's mouth, in my exact voice.

And then I remembered. I was drunk, coming home the night before. Sabrina calling, asking when I'd take her out for her own first drink. Me, barely coherent, saying the usual.

He had been listening. I don’t how or why or when, but this kid had been listening. It was private. ME AND SABRINA ARE PRIVATE ! He had crossed a line he shouldn’t have…

I grabbed him by the shoulders in a fit of rage. I knew it was too hard, and I didn’t regret it.

"Look at me, you creep ! What did you say? How do you know that? What did you do? Tell me, what the fuck did you do?"

He looked at me with an expression I’ll not forget. Not fear, not guilt, but curiosity. Pure, open, and innocent curiosity.

"Oh," he said. "This is new. This is new, Teacher."

Then his hands came up and grabbed my shoulders.

The grip was wrong. Too hard for a ten-year old. Too precise. His face changed- cheeks flushing, breaths coming heavy, something moving behind his eyes that looked like anger.

"I only did what you told me to do, Teacher."

My voice. Coming out of his mouth. Saying my words back to me.

"What did I tell you?"

He smiled.

"Watch and learn, kid."

I shoved him back and ran. Out of the study, through the hallway, out the front door. I didn't stop running until I reached my bicycle. Something compelled me to run away. It was not the voice, not the grip, and not the expression of anger.

It was the eyes. What I saw in those eyes was something beyond his usual innocence, beyond his newfound curiosity, even beyond the rage he just acquired…

It was malice. Trust me when I tell you this- I haven’t seen pure malice before. Not until I looked into those eyes. Eyes on a face that now looked awfully similar to mine, with my smile, my dimple, and my voice…

That was a few hours ago.

I'm writing this now because I don't know what else to do. And trust me, I've tried everything else. I told two of my friends already. They laughed it off, saying I was still drunk. I called the Elite Educators hotline seven times. Every single time, I was told all operators were busy. I stayed on hold. Nobody responded. On the seventh call, I listened to the hold music for eleven minutes, and then hung up.

I can't call Sabrina. I don't know what to tell her. And I don't want to frighten her. Not yet.

I almost didn't post this. I’ve never asked anyone for help. Not during my struggles in the foster home, not during my admissions, not during any of the financial lows that followed. I always considered it a kind of defeat, a sign of weakness, a suggestion that you can’t handle your problems or carry your own burden.

But something happened 30 minutes ago, something that precedes all rational explanation. Something I don’t think I can handle. Something I genuinely cannot carry. Something that is making me doubt my own existence…

I’ve received a friend request on Facebook. From an account with my full name and my profile picture. My bio, copied word for word. The account looks exactly like mine. Except for one thing- the friends list is empty. Then there’s the other thing.

The account is verified. It has a blue tick, sitting there like it belongs. My account, the real one, the one I've had for six years, has no such thing.

This new account has only one post. Shared one minute before the friend request arrived.

"I get it now. Thank you, Teacher."

I've been staring at it for a while. I keep switching between his profile and mine, back and forth. I need to tell you something that I don't know how to say, without sounding completely unhinged-

His one looks more real than mine.

I don't know what I am right now. I don't know what he is. I don't know what ‘Elite Educators- A Concern of Aldermore & Associates’ actually does. I don’t what the parents are, and whether they are even real parents to begin with.

What I do know is that somewhere out there, something is walking around. Something with my smile, my voice, my name, my clumsiness, my typos, and even my most private words. Everything I handed over, three days a week for two months, without realizing what I was giving away.

And I know that, on the very first day, I told someone to watch and learn.

No one told me that I was the lesson…

 

"Emotionally scarred creatures. They have a way of helping each other heal."

I looked at Dr. Mollah, waiting for him to finish talking.

“That’s why you should get a pet from the shelter. And trust me, you do need a pet. Living alone will only worsen your symptoms.”

I thanked him for his time and I took my leave.

I'd been seeing Dr. Mollah for three months at that point, ever since my breakup had left me in a state of functional paralysis. My depression wasn’t obvious on first glance, especially to my PhD supervisor. I was showing up. I was eating. I was technically working on my dissertation. But I wasn't present for any of it.

The shelter was a forty-minute drive from my apartment. I have never had a pet before in my life. But I did have a dissertation due in a few months, and absolutely nothing to show for it. At that point, I would have followed any suggestion Dr. Mollah threw at me.

That’s when I saw her for the first time.

She was in the second-to-last kennel. A German Shepherd, black and tan, large and lean, with ears that stood perfectly upright. She didn't bark at me. She just observed me with a kind of alertness you don’t see in animals.

When I crouched down to her level, I noticed the marks on her body. There were several of them.

They ran along her left flank and the inside of her front legs. Not scars from a fight. Not the random damage of a rough life outdoors. The patterns were too… deliberate. They were small, precise, and symmetrical. I asked the attendant about them. She looked briefly uncomfortable, and said they didn't know the dog's history.

I looked into the dog’s eyes and felt something. We were both scarred in our own ways. We both were in a rough shape. Maybe, just maybe, we could help each other after all…

I completed the paperwork that afternoon.

I brought her home and let her explore the apartment. That's when I noticed the cord around her neck.

I don't know how I'd missed it at the shelter. It was partially hidden under her fur. It was a knotted cord, dark and tightly wound, with smaller knots spaced along its length. It wasn't a collar. It wasn't a tag. It was the kind of thing you tie with intent. It felt wrong in my hand, in a way I still can't articulate.

I took it off and threw it in the dumpster outside the building. It was clearly a sign of the dog’s past, and it had no place in her new home.

Then I went back inside and started making lunch. And by lunch, I meant spicy chicken curry.

While cooking, the smoke from the pan got ahead of me. It rose fast, and the dog noticed. She panicked and let out a wail. I followed her as she bolted across the room and collided with the bookshelf in the corner. The collision sent my only houseplant, a gift from my supervisor, crashing to the floor. The pot caught her behind the ear on its way down.

It was not a bad cut, but enough to bleed.

I rushed to my bathroom. I grabbed the first aid kit, crouched beside her, and pressed a clean cloth to the wound.

I expected her to resist. But she didn’t. She trembled once, then went still. Not the stillness of fear, but one of trust. She let me clean the wound, dress it, hold her ear between my fingers. She closed her eyes, and I felt her relax against my hand.

That was the moment I named her Asha.

In my native language, Asha means ‘hope’.

And for the first time in a long time, I actually felt hopeful about what lay ahead.

The few weeks that followed were an adjustment. Asha was withdrawn, cautious, and easily startled. But she was present. And somehow, so was I.

I noticed the first strange thing about three weeks in. Every morning, I'd find her sleeping in the same position, facing the same corner of the room. I told myself dogs had preferences. I didn't think about it again.

The second thing I noticed was around week five. I'd gotten up for a glass of water at half past two in the morning. I found her standing in the center of the living room, completely still, facing the front door. Not growling. Not whining. Just standing and staring at a door without blinking. I watched her from the hallway for a few minutes. She didn't move.

I went back to bed. I told myself it was residual anxiety from the shelter, which was probably true.

Probably.

The third incident was on a walk. She ignored every person we passed- joggers, couples, a man walking his bicycle. That was until she saw someone. He was a completely unremarkable figure, wearing a grey hoodie, who passed us on the pavement. Asha stopped dead. No growling, no barking. She just watched him until he rounded the corner and disappeared. Then she followed my lead and we walked home. She never looked back once.

Asha didn’t eat anything until the next morning.

The fourth incident occurred during Eid. I wanted to decorate the apartment for the occasion. So I lit incense- just a couple of sticks, nothing dramatic. Asha went to the front door, pressed her nose to the bottom, and backed away slowly. She spent two hours under my desk, pressed flat against the wall, visibly shaking. I put the incense out immediately.

I thought she'd had a bad experience with smoke before. Given what I'd seen of her past, it almost seemed reasonable.

Almost.

By the end of the second month, she was sleeping at the foot of my bed. We were playing catch every afternoon. We were watching Looney Tunes every night, Asha wagging her tail with joy. Meanwhile, I had drafted three chapters of my dissertation.

For the first time in almost a year, I thought I might actually finish it…

Until the fateful night they entered the house.

I don't know exactly how they got in.

I woke to the sound of someone muttering in my room. Before I could sit up, there were hands on me, and something cold at my throat. There were two of them. Their clothes were dark and loose, and they wore multiple beaded necklaces. They smelled of something sweet and chemical. Even in the dark, they looked unclean and unwashed.  

One of them grinned at me with too many teeth.

"'Aven't got all night, mate. Stop wigglin'."

I tried to shout, but I couldn’t. Something was pressed to my face- a cloth soaked in a thick, sweet smoke. It moved into my lungs like a warm hand closing around my thoughts.

I lost consciousness soon after…

I don’t know how long I was out for.

When I came to my senses, my cheek was against the floor. My hands weren't working the way I told them to. The room smelled of burnt wax and something floral, something I have no name for.

I turned my head.

Five candles were arranged on my living room floor, in a pattern I didn't recognize. Four were already out, their wicks still smoking. The fifth was still burning. Asha stood in the center of the arrangement, completely still. Not frightened, not struggling. Just still like a statue. Standing in the middle of the room like she was waiting for something to be finished.

In the corner, a man in a pale shirt stood, writing something in a small notebook. His sleeves were rolled up exactly twice. He didn't look up.

One of the men was crouched near Asha, watching her with an expression of unsettling satisfaction. The other one kneeled on the floor, eyes closed, chanting something I couldn’t decipher. The last candle went out on its own.

Asha dropped to the floor, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

"Oi Rafiq! That's what I'm talkin' abaht!" The crouching one stood and grabbed the other by the arm, laughing. "Best one so far, I tell yer. Aldermoor really 'ave outdone themselves this time!"

The man in the pale shirt, the one they probably called Rafiq, closed his notebook. He walked over to me and crouched down, with the calm of someone performing a routine courtesy.

"I'm sorry about all of this," he said. His voice was measured, warm even. "Truly. It was never meant to involve you." He held my gaze for a moment. "As long as it stays that way, you have nothing to worry about."

He stood and straightened his sleeves. Exactly twice.

One of the others crouched over me, with that same too-wide grin. I understood what was coming, long before it arrived.

"Alright. Time ter clean up. Yer 'ouse..." A pause, full of theater. "...an' yer MIND !"

The smoke hit me again. The last thing I heard was maniacal laughter.

I woke up to Asha licking my face.

It was six in the morning. The apartment was immaculate. No candles, no marks, no smell. Nothing broken, nothing moved. Just Asha, tail cautiously wagging, looking at me like I'd fallen asleep on the floor.

I called the police the next morning.

A senior inspector was brought in, who looked sharp and professional. He asked me to walk him through everything I remembered. I told him about the candles, about the smoke, about the man in the pale shirt. The inspector wrote things down and nodded. He then asked me if I remembered any names.

I mentioned Rafiq. I mentioned Aldermoor.

He stopped writing. There was a pause- brief and almost undetectable. Then he excused himself, and stepped outside with the other officers.

They have been politely useless ever since. One of them suggested, gently, that the stress of my PhD might be affecting my perception of events. There was no evidence of forced entry. No evidence of anything, really.

I understood what they meant, perhaps more than I was supposed to.

I moved out three weeks later.

My new apartment has good floors. A window ledge that Asha claimed within twenty-four hours. I bought another houseplant, same as the previous one, and put it somewhere she couldn't reach.

She was a different dog in the four months that followed. Playful and warm, in the small ways that make you love an animal completely. She'd steal socks and bring them to me like trophies. She'd fall asleep on my feet while I wrote, and I'd sit there longer than I needed to, just to avoid waking her.

I finished my dissertation on a Thursday morning. I submitted it at 11:47 AM. My supervisor seemed pleased. I sat very still for a long time afterwards, feeling genuinely grateful for everything.

Then I went home to tell Asha.

I called her name as I entered the house. I thought I heard her before I opened the door. A familiar movement, the sound of paws on good floors.

I expected her to come running towards me, barking playfully and wagging her tail.

For the first time in four months, that didn’t happen.

I walked to the living room looking for her, still calling her name. That’s when I found ‘it’, looking at me from the center of the room.

It was a German Shepherd, black and tan, large and lean, with ears that stood perfectly upright. It didn't bark at me. It just observed me with a kind of alertness you don’t see in animals. There were marks on its body, several of them. They ran along her left flank and the inside of her front legs. The patterns were deliberate- small, precise, and symmetrical.

“Asha, there you are ! You okay, girl?”

My voice was childlike, as usual. I hugged my dog as usual, lifting it off the ground as usual.

And it took me less than ten seconds to sense something unusual.

The first thing I felt was the weight. It was close, but not quite right. Like lifting a bag you've carried a hundred times, finding it slightly lighter than you remembered. Your hand notices this before your mind does.

Then there was the smell. I know how Asha smells. Six months of shared space, of her sleeping on my feet, of her fur against my face when she'd push her head into my chest. This was close. Close enough that I stood there, telling myself I was imagining it.

That’s when I noticed the cord around its neck.

Dark and tightly wound. Smaller knots spaced along its length. I had seen that cord before. I had felt the exact texture of that cord before. I threw that cord in a dumpster six months ago. At an address where I no longer live.

I set the dog down carefully. It was silent, awfully silent. My Asha was never silent, not when I was around. There was always a bark, a whine, a huff, or a nudge. This was just silence, and stillness, and those eyes.

My hand, already trembling, moved the way it always did. Up along its jaw, behind the ear, to the place it always found without thinking. The place where Asha cut herself on the day I found her. The wound that never fully healed, the one that reminded me of the time we first warmed up to each other…

The skin was smooth. Unbroken. Unmarked.

I felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

They haven’t stopped since.

If anyone is reading this, please help me make sense of this. Because I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t know what is happening to me. I don’t know why any of this is happening to me.

I just know that Dr. Mollah was right all along. Emotionally scarred creatures really do help each other heal. My dog taught me how to smile again. She gave me a reason to live again.

I named her Asha. In my native language, Asha means ‘hope’.

And this evening, I called out hope…

I still don't know what answered back.

 

I'm a Sociology student in my early twenties. I study at a university I worked my entire life to get into. I was born an orphan, and grew up in a foster home with barely enough money. So when I say I worked my entire life for this, I mean it literally. Every exam, every assignment, every late night with a textbook while the other kids were watching TV- all of it was pointed at one thing. Getting out of this place. Getting somewhere that meant something.

The only truly good thing in my life, through all of it, has been Sabrina. She’s my childhood sweetheart. Currently living three cities away, finishing her own degree. Every night without fail, she calls me and asks the same question- when are we going to be together again? And every night without fail, I say the same thing before we hang up-

"Very soon, Sabrina. Sooner than you realize."

It is embarrassingly cheesy. She knows it. I know it. We say it anyway. It has kinda become our ritual.

I want you to remember that line.

About two and a half months ago, I was drowning financially. I have a merit-based scholarship that covers half my tuition. However, the city is really expensive, in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I had applied for a need-based scholarship top-up. But the pool of eligible candidates was enormous, and the available slots were not. I had also applied for a Teaching Assistant position. But the rumor was that the Professor already had someone in mind.

So there I was, watching both doors close simultaneously.

My fellow students do delivery work, or wait tables part-time to make a living. I’ve always considered these ‘odd jobs’ to be beneath me. That is not arrogance, it is self-preservation. I have worked too hard and come too far to go backwards. So I started looking for private tutoring gigs, because at least that felt like a use of what I actually had.

I looked up various tuition mediums throughout the weekend. Tuition mediums are commonplace in South Asia, in case you didn’t know. Most of these turn out to be shady companies, who exploit potential private tutors and run off with their money. I had to be sure that I was applying to one of the credible ones. 

That is when I found: Elite Educators - A Concern of Aldermore & Associates.

The name was a mouthful, but the website was clean and professional. The kind of interface that signals money behind it. The rating was near-perfect: 4.9 across hundreds of reviews. And unlike every other tuition medium I found, they charged zero commission from the tutors. I found that slightly odd, but I assumed they took their cut from the parents instead.

I applied as fast as I could. I uploaded my CV in a hurry without proofreading it. I really needed a tutoring gig, and I needed it fast. I revised my CV the next morning, and noticed the typo almost immediately.

"Officous zeal."

I had written officous instead of officious.

I remember yelling out a curse word.

I cringed, closed the tab, and moved on. That was enough embarrassment for one day.

I called Sabrina that night and told her about the typo. We had a good laugh about it. Didn’t make it any less embarrassing though…

Surprisingly, I received a placement within two days. The file said that the child’s name was Numero Tres. I found that interesting. ‘Numero Tres’ in Spanish translated to ‘Number Three’ in English. Who names their child like that, I thought.

The parents were named Dr. Alejandro Mateo Tres and Dr. Lucia Carmen Tres, both listed as physicians. I looked at the surname ‘Tres’. I figured it was a Latin American surname I wasn't familiar with. It was unusual, but it wasn’t my business.

The note from the parents read:

"We are both doctors who stay outdoors most of the time. We home school the child to make sure he is not influenced by external confounding factors. Need a competent private tutor who can be an appropriate role-model for the boy to follow."

I remember scoffing at that. Rich, overprotective parents with a clinical way of describing their own child. I had seen worse. The salary was three times the average monthly rate of every other tutor I knew, paid weekly in advance at the start of each week. I accepted before I finished reading the rest of the document.

The house was in a quiet part of the city. Nice neighborhood. The kind of street where every gate looks the same and every garden is too neat.

The parents were just leaving when I arrived for the first session. Both wearing white coats. The father gave me a firm handshake and a clipped greeting. The mother smiled briefly and said something about the lesson plan being flexible. They were gone before I could ask a single question.

I was nervous. It was my first gig, in what was clearly a wealthy household, and I had no idea what to expect from the child.

I’ll be upfront about this- I’ve always been clumsy. My foster father used to find it funny, this big-brained kid who could not walk through a doorway without incident.

On this day, in that house, the nerves made it worse. I walked in too fast. Chipped my shoulder on the door frame. Laughed it off awkwardly. Scraped the chair loudly across the floor when I sat down.

The boy was already at the table. He watched every single one of my antics with a blank expression.

There he was- Numero Tres. Ten years old. Small for his age, I thought. He did not say hello. He did not smile. He simply watched me get settled with those flat, patient eyes.

"Good afternoon, kid" I said. "I'm your new tutor. You can call me whatever you like."

"Good afternoon, Teacher," he said.

His voice was soft. Almost too soft for the room.

I noticed the textbooks immediately. Three books, each with glossy pages, hardback covers, and that particular smell you only get from high-end publications. I had bought children's textbooks from the market to prepare for this gig. These were nothing like those. But the content was age-appropriate for a ten-year-old, so I filed it away and opened to the first chapter.

Numero struggled with basic arithmetic in the first ten minutes. I watched him work through a simple multiplication problem, with the slowness of someone wading through deep water. I pulled the notebook toward myself.

"Watch and learn, kid," I said, and walked him through it.

He watched. He did not blink for the entire duration…

The silence started getting to me from the very first session.

Not silence in the room, I could handle that. Silence from him, specifically. I heard no footsteps when he moved. No sound of breathing. No shift of weight in the chair, no rustle of turning pages, nothing. I couldn’t confirm he was present in the room, unless I was looking directly at him. It was the kind of absence that a person shouldn’t be able to produce.

On the third session, I closed my eyes for a moment, to collect my thoughts mid-explanation. I couldn’t feel that he was in the room at all. It was awkwardly silent. I smiled for a bit, thinking about how weird it felt.

Then I opened my eyes.

Numero was in front of me. Crouching on the table. Face two inches from mine. Completely still. And he was smiling, for the first time since I had met him. He had something in his expression that I can only describe as excitement.

"I get it now," he said. "Thank you, Teacher."

I rode my bicycle on the way home, thinking about the strange encounter. I told myself it was just a weird kid, from an overprotective household, acting out in the only way he knew how.

But it wasn’t his behavior that was bothering me.

It was the way he smiled. The way it pulled higher on the right side than the left, with a dimple forming on the left cheek.

I have that smile. The exact same smile. My foster mother used to be fond of it. She said it was the most lopsided, ridiculous, lovable smile she had ever seen. I have the photos to prove it…

Two months passed since the encounter.

I kept showing up three days a week- Maths on the first day, English on the second, Science on the third. The textbooks changed every couple of weeks. They always had the same premium quality, and followed same template. But each new set was more advanced than the last.

And Numero was improving FAST. And by fast, I mean that his skills were improving by leaps and bounds with every lesson I took. For instance, he was currently working through 10th grade Calculus. His English books had moved on to Shakespeare. Specifically, the plays I remembered from my own 12th grade Literature course. His Science books were now almost entirely focused on cloning, DNA mutation, and genetic engineering. He was frustratingly good at this material, even correcting me on two occasions. He had the casual confidence of someone who had known it all his life.

The shift didn’t feel normal. I mean-  he could barely say a full sentence on the first day, and struggle with basic multiplication in the first week alone. How did he get so smart in a matter of months? I even talked to Sabrina about it. She suggested that the child might be gifted in some way. Maybe a prodigy by birth, who knows?

Lucky guy, I thought.

One Maths day, I gave Numero some problems to solve. While he was busy, I took out my college notebook. I was working on an assignment that my Professor had given. I was only halfway through when I was interrupted by a phone call. I stepped out, leaving my notebook open on the table. I was gone for maybe eight minutes.

When I came back, I found Numero with my notebook. He had solved the entire problem set. It was college-level Calculus, the kind that even mathematicians struggle with. And this ten-year old had solved it, on his own, in eight minutes.

I stared at the notebook for a long time. The steps matched. His answer was correct…

The English essay was the one that broke me. I assigned Numero a short composition- describe a person you admire. He handed it back after 15 minutes. It was covered in grammatical errors, which was normal for a child of his age. But it was threaded with complex vocabulary, words that no ten-year-old should have known. I was used to Numero’s intelligence by then, so I listed it off as impressive, not unexpected.

I was circling the errors when I stopped. I saw a word that I recognized immediately-

Officous zeal.

That spelling. That specific, embarrassing, incorrect spelling, One that I had identified two months ago, in my own writing, and regretted not correcting sooner.

I looked up at him slowly.

"Where did you learn that phrase?"

"CV, Teacher."

I felt something cold move through my chest.

"What… CV? How did you get my…"

He closed his notebook and stood up.

"Time's up, Teacher. Thank you for the lesson."

He walked out.

And I need you to understand this- he walked out loudly*.* Footsteps against the floor. Chair scraped on his way past. Shoulder catching the door frame, a short laugh following it. I watched him go and felt my vision narrow.

Every single one of those movements was mine. My clumsiness. My laugh. My exact physical signature, replayed back at me from a ten-year-old's body.

I sat alone in that room for a very long time before I left…

I didn't sleep well that night. But the next morning, two things happened, knocking everything else out of my head.

Firstly, the need-based scholarship had come through. Apparently, my application essay had moved the Committee deeply. I heard this secondhand, but I was in no position to question it.

Secondly, the TA position was mine, effective next week. The professor's first choice had dropped out to start a business. I was always the second pick, and he needed someone urgently.

I cannot describe how I felt. The closest I can get is: like a fist that had been clenched for years finally opening.

I was happy. Genuinely happy. I laughed until my eyes watered.

But I had no time to celebrate. I had to go to the house that afternoon. First class of the week. Maths. Already paid for in advance.

I arrived to find the parents on their way out, as always. But this time, I stopped them.

"Can I have five minutes? I have something to share."

They seemed taken aback, but they recovered quickly. They invited me to sit. I told them about the scholarship and the TA position. I informed them that I wouldn't be able to come from next week onwards.

They exchanged a look I couldn't fully read.

"Oh no, that wasn’t expected," said the father. "You can't do that, sir. The child sees you as a role model. He is making remarkable progress, in ways we haven't seen before."

Then the mother spoke. The first time I'd heard her say more than a greeting.

"Can't you see that you're in the middle of a process? You can't stop it midway, can you? What is it? Is it money? We can offer more. Five times? Ten times? Just name it. We can make some calls."

The father nodded the moment she said make some calls.

I felt a brief pull. I'd grown genuinely fond of the kid, strange behavior and all. And ten times the salary was an enticing offer. But something about the offer felt off, in a way I couldn't articulate. Nobody offers ten times the salary for a private tutor.

"I appreciate it, I really do. But the tuitions were always temporary. I like Numero. He's the brightest kid I've ever met.” I continued, “I'm sure Numero has a bright future. But right now, I need to focus on my own future."

The father frowned.

"Numero? Wait... what?"

I blinked.

"Your son? Numero Tres?"

Both parents looked at each other. Then they laughed. Briefly, almost involuntarily. I was confused.

"Oh, is that what you thought?" said the mother. "Is that what they told you? Sir, the child isn't Numero Tres."

They stood up.

"You are."

The father turned toward the door.

"Please reconsider our offer, sir. We already rejected two tutors before we found you. We can't afford a fourth. Hope you make good progress today."

And they left.

I sat in that hallway for what felt like a very long time.

Then I went into the study, because I didn't know what else to do. The boy was already at the table with his books open.

The lesson was uneventful. He worked mostly on his own, occasionally turning a page towards me and asking "Is this correct, Teacher?" . I answered. He nodded, and returned to work.

I watched him for twenty minutes without speaking.

He had my smile. He had my way of scratching the side of his head when he was thinking hard. My habit of rubbing my nose absently at the end of each problem. My specific exhale- half sigh and half laugh, whenever he arrived at a correct answer. It was like sitting across from a mirror that was slightly behind me in time, catching up.

"Hey kid," I said finally. "Do you know my name?"

He didn't look up.

"Yes, Teacher?"

"What is my name?"

"Numero Tres, Teacher."

I steadied myself.

"Then what is your name?"

He looked up.

"I am Iqbal."

A chill ran down my spine. I’ve heard that name before, every day of my life, and still hear it every time Sabrina calls…

It was MY name ! MY FREAKIN’ NAME ! And the kid just uttered it proudly, wearing my smile, dimple on the left cheek.

I told him we were finishing early today. I gave no explanation. I had none, after all.

He seemed completely unfazed, his focus locked in on a function graph.   

I cycled back home as fast as I could. I couldn’t stop thinking about the absurdity of the whole situation. It was unnerving, to say the least, if that was even the right word for it.

My train of thoughts got derailed the moment I walked into the apartment. As soon as I turned the lights on, a party popper went off. I was immediately buried under my friends, all screaming at the top of their lungs. They had apparently planned a surprise celebration for the scholarship and the TA position, which I had completely forgotten about in the past two hours.

We cut a small cake at home. They took me out. I had my first beer. Then another. Then another. By the third, the heaviness had lifted entirely. I was standing outside a restaurant, looking up at the sky, saying things I only half remember.

"Thank you ! Thank you for everything ! God is great ! Life is great ! I feel great !"

My friends carried me home. The rest of the night was a blur…

The next day, hungover and moving on muscle memory, I showed up for the English lesson. Second class of the week. The parents were leaving as I arrived.

The father stopped.

"Sorry for our unprofessional conduct yesterday. We have come to the conclusion that your discontinuation is a decision that is yours to make. The best we can do is adjust accordingly."

I noticed the language. Too formal. Too precise. Not how a parent speaks about their child's tutor.

"We have already found alternative teaching methods," said the mother. "Perhaps some external exposure isn't bad after all. Feel free to bid farewell to your student today. Take care and stay healthy."

They left.

The lesson was warm. My student was in a good mood, laughing at the comedic scenes in The Merchant of Venice, producing character analyses that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a university seminar. I let him work. I watched him. I tried to feel normal.

I said it eventually.

"Hey kid. This is our last class together."

"I know, Teacher."

Easier than I expected.

"Anything you want to say to me?"

He thought about it.

"Umm... thank you?"

I smiled in spite of everything.

"You're most welcome, kid."

He stood up suddenly, looked directly at the ceiling, and screamed-

"Thank you ! Thank you for everything ! God is great ! Life is great ! I feel great !"

It was my voice. Not an impression, mind you. Not a recording played back through a speaker. My voice, produced in real time, in the cadence and pitch of a drunk twenty-something standing under an open sky the night before.

He sat back down and returned to his commentary on Shylock, as if nothing happened.

I stood up. My legs were not entirely cooperative.

"Alright. I… I gotta go now."

"Okay, Teacher."

"You, uh... take care of yourself. Hope we meet again."

I didn’t mean to say those last words. It came out on reflex. The kind of thing you say when you're leaving somewhere and your brain is elsewhere. I didn't mean it as anything.

"I know, Teacher," he said, still looking at his notebook.

Something cold moved through me.

"Really? You know we'll meet again? What do you mean? When?"

He looked up.

"Very soon, Sabrina. Sooner than you realize."

My voice. Her name. That line, which was OUR line ! The one that existed, only between two people, at the end of a nightly phone call. The last thing I said before sleep, coming out of a ten-year-old's mouth, in my exact voice.

And then I remembered. I was drunk, coming home the night before. Sabrina calling, asking when I'd take her out for her own first drink. Me, barely coherent, saying the usual.

He had been listening. I don’t how or why or when, but this kid had been listening. It was private. ME AND SABRINA ARE PRIVATE ! He had crossed a line he shouldn’t have…

I grabbed him by the shoulders in a fit of rage. I knew it was too hard, and I didn’t regret it.

"Look at me, you creep ! What did you say? How do you know that? What did you do? Tell me, what the fuck did you do?"

He looked at me with an expression I’ll not forget. Not fear, not guilt, but curiosity. Pure, open, and innocent curiosity.

"Oh," he said. "This is new. This is new, Teacher."

Then his hands came up and grabbed my shoulders.

The grip was wrong. Too hard for a ten-year old. Too precise. His face changed- cheeks flushing, breaths coming heavy, something moving behind his eyes that looked like anger.

"I only did what you told me to do, Teacher."

My voice. Coming out of his mouth. Saying my words back to me.

"What did I tell you?"

He smiled.

"Watch and learn, kid."

I shoved him back and ran. Out of the study, through the hallway, out the front door. I didn't stop running until I reached my bicycle. Something compelled me to run away. It was not the voice, not the grip, and not the expression of anger.

It was the eyes. What I saw in those eyes was something beyond his usual innocence, beyond his newfound curiosity, even beyond the rage he just acquired…

It was malice. Trust me when I tell you this- I haven’t seen pure malice before. Not until I looked into those eyes. Eyes on a face that now looked awfully similar to mine, with my smile, my dimple, and my voice…

That was a few hours ago.

I'm writing this now because I don't know what else to do. And trust me, I've tried everything else. I told two of my friends already. They laughed it off, saying I was still drunk. I called the Elite Educators hotline seven times. Every single time, I was told all operators were busy. I stayed on hold. Nobody responded. On the seventh call, I listened to the hold music for eleven minutes, and then hung up.

I can't call Sabrina. I don't know what to tell her. And I don't want to frighten her. Not yet.

I almost didn't post this. I’ve never asked anyone for help. Not during my struggles in the foster home, not during my admissions, not during any of the financial lows that followed. I always considered it a kind of defeat, a sign of weakness, a suggestion that you can’t handle your problems or carry your own burden.

But something happened 30 minutes ago, something that precedes all rational explanation. Something I don’t think I can handle. Something I genuinely cannot carry. Something that is making me doubt my own existence…

I’ve received a friend request on Facebook. From an account with my full name and my profile picture. My bio, copied word for word. The account looks exactly like mine. Except for one thing- the friends list is empty. Then there’s the other thing.

The account is verified. It has a blue tick, sitting there like it belongs. My account, the real one, the one I've had for six years, has no such thing.

This new account has only one post. Shared one minute before the friend request arrived.

"I get it now. Thank you, Teacher."

I've been staring at it for a while. I keep switching between his profile and mine, back and forth. I need to tell you something that I don't know how to say, without sounding completely unhinged-

His one looks more real than mine.

I don't know what I am right now. I don't know what he is. I don't know what ‘Elite Educators- A Concern of Aldermore & Associates’ actually does. I don’t what the parents are, and whether they are even real parents to begin with.

What I do know is that somewhere out there, something is walking around. Something with my smile, my voice, my name, my clumsiness, my typos, and even my most private words. Everything I handed over, three days a week for two months, without realizing what I was giving away.

And I know that, on the very first day, I told someone to watch and learn.

No one told me that I was the lesson…

 

People at work call me the ‘Ninja Nurse’.

I didn't hate the nickname at first. There's something almost dignified about it. Ninjas are disciplined and precise. They’re quick, and they move without being seen. If you're going to be called something behind your back, you could do worse.

But I know why they call me that. And it isn't a compliment. Not really.

I wear a scarf that covers the perimeter of my head and neck completely. Over that is a facemask, the kind that leaves only the eyes exposed. And over that, a pair of large, dark sunglasses. It ensures that even my eyes aren't visible, to anyone I pass in the corridor.

Some of the older staff members nod approvingly. They see me a devout woman who prioritizes modesty.

The other staff, the ones who know me long enough, don't nod approvingly.

They remember what I looked like six months ago. Full makeup to every shift- foundation, eyeliner, the works. Hair done properly, not just pulled back and hidden. Brows plucked to something I considered perfection.

And I wasn’t shy to show it off. I had just under 15,000 followers on Instagram. I did post pictures somewhat regularly. Nothing scandalous, though. Just a person who liked the way she looked and wasn't shy about it. A person who turned toward cameras, not away from them.

In their defense, my transformation happened almost overnight, with no warning or explanation. I haven’t shown my face to another human being since.

My friends at work have been kind about it. They support me, or they try to. But even they get uncomfortable around my one absolute rule- I never take photographs.

Not group shots in the break room, not candid snaps, not the kind of harmless phone photo you take without really thinking. I see the camera come out and I am already moving, already raising a hand to cover what is already covered. They find it strange. And I don't blame them.

I am writing this because I need someone to understand. I can't say it out loud. Not to them, not for their sake and mine. The least I can do is tell the truth somewhere, even if that “somewhere” is the internet

I’ve been a night shift ER nurse at A&A Nightingale Hospital for seven years.

A&A stands for Aldermore and Associates, a multinational corporate consultancy firm. They fund the hospital as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility. The Nightingale part refers to Florence Nightingale, the legendary nurse herself. The administration invokes her image constantly. It is plastered on the walls, referenced in orientation, and woven into every conversation. It is written in guidelines regarding workload and duty and what it truly means to serve. I used to find it inspiring. I understand now that it was a management technique. You don't complain about extra duties when the ghost of Florence Nightingale is watching you from a framed poster by the door.

The hospital charges its patients nothing. Not a single penny, regardless of treatment required. It sustains itself entirely on Aldermore's funding and external donations. As expected, it attracts the poorest and most desperate people in the city. People who have nowhere else to go and nothing to offer, apart from their suffering and their gratitude.

It is, genuinely, a good place to work. The pay is better than any other hospital in the city. The sense of purpose is real. I believed in it for a long time.

The night shift has the lowest admissions and the highest deaths. You get used to that arithmetic. You also get used to the ‘other duties’ that the hospital assigns you with.

Yes, there are a number of ‘other duties’ that come with the job, duties that nurses usually aren’t supposed to do. One of those Florence Nightingale extras that no one agreed to, but everyone performs without question. I won’t give you the full list, but I’ll tell you about the one that matters.

When an unclaimed patient dies, the ER nurses go through their belongings. It is done to establish identity and contact known relatives. It sounds compassionate. In theory, it actually is. In practice, it means going through the pockets of strangers who died alone at 5 in the morning. It means looking for a phone, an ID card, or a scrap of paper with a name on it.

We’ve run out of placeholder names for those who remain unidentified. You know- John Doe and Jane Doe? We exhausted those long ago. The nurses have started using creative names instead. Like the man who was found carrying a book on Judo. The ER nurse named him ‘Joe Doe’. Joe Doe and Judo. Juvenile humor. The patient died at midnight. The joke lived on for a week.

I don't find it funny. But I understand it. The work gets overwhelming, so people cope however they can. Seven years has taught me not to judge the coping.

It was on one of those ordinary nights that the first patient arrived.

Two young men carried him in. He was a man in his mid-forties, clearly malnourished. Bald head, long white beard. A torn jacket over a pair of dirty white trousers.

His symptoms were unlike anything I had seen before.

His chest had a bluish discoloration, spreading from the sternum outward. His eyes were bloodshot, but the hue was wrong. It wasn’t the red, but a deep, unsettling blue, like ink dropped into water. He was foaming at the mouth. His fingers were curled inward, all of them, both hands. When I tried to gently straighten them, they refused to move. Not from rigor, not from resistance. Just completely, impossibly fixed. He was gasping for air with his whole chest and throat working, but producing no sound whatsoever. And every thirty seconds or so, his entire body jolted. It was neither a seizure, nor a tremor. But a violent, jerking movement, that lasted two or three seconds before it released.

I had never seen this combination before. Not once.

I followed protocol and initiated symptomatic management. And within thirty minutes, Dr. Cyrus Mollah appeared.

I considered myself lucky. Dr. Mollah is our chief physician. He operates on a schedule- morning rounds and evening rounds. That is generally where his presence in the ER begins and ends. But that night he happened to be in the vicinity, he said, and thought he would look in. He stood at the foot of the bed with his small writing pad, completely still, completely composed. He directed us with a quiet sense of authority. I had always admired that about him. The way nothing ever seemed to rattle him.

The patient died in just under two hours.

Dr. Mollah graciously offered to prepare the death certificate himself, a task that normally falls to the junior doctors on duty. I observed him as he wrote down-

Cause of death: cardiorespiratory failure due to idiopathic cyanotic heart disease.

I told him the symptoms seemed unusual. The presentation had been unlike anything in my experience.

He took his time to explain it to me. Cyanosis is a lack of oxygen in the blood, which accounts for the blue discoloration. The associated symptoms are the body's response to prolonged oxygen deprivation. And poor nutrition, combined with years of inadequate hygiene, can produce presentations that look dramatic on the surface. The findings may look peculiar, he said, but they make complete sense. That is, once you know what you're looking at.

He was so knowledgeable, I thought. So composed. I thanked him and went back to work.

The two men who had brought the patient knew nothing about him. They had simply found him collapsed and done the decent thing. No ID in his belongings. No phone. I was about to close the jacket when I noticed something in the inside pocket.

A crumpled polaroid.

I unfolded it.

It was a photograph of me.

I was in my bathroom. Brushing my hair. The photograph had been taken through the window. I could see the edge of the frame, the angle of the glass. I was completely unaware of the camera. I was just standing there in my bathroom, at what looked like early morning, brushing my hair.

I turned it over.

Scrawled on the back, in handwriting that looked hurried and slightly uneven:
"Looks different in reel and real. How come? Need answers..."

My hands were shaking before I realized they were shaking. I looked up at the corridor. Patients, colleagues, the gurney being wheeled toward the morgue. All of it completely normal. All of it completely indifferent to the fact that I was standing there, holding a photograph of myself. Taken through a window I had never once thought about covering.

I pocketed it. I told no one. I finished my shift.

I went home and sat on my bed with every light in the apartment blazing. I read those two lines over and over until my eyes burned.

Not a threat. Not even an acknowledgment that I existed as a person, one with feelings and a life and a right to privacy. Just a question. Like I was a problem to be solved.

That was somehow the worst part…

I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I go the police?

I live in a country where policing is, to put it kindly, a joke. A joke with a long history of punching down, of harassing the very people who come forward, of making the process of reporting a crime feel more shady that committing a crime itself. And even on my best day, what evidence do I have? A crumpled polaroid found in a dead man's pocket. A note on the back. No suspect. No name. No face.

I also know what else you are thinking. Install cameras. Set up a security system. Move apartments.

I want you to understand my reality before you finish that thought. I am well paid for my position, better than any other nurse in the city, and I am not ungrateful for that.

But I have a brother in college. I have a mother undergoing cancer treatment. I have a father who is quadriplegic and requires a full-time paid caregiver. All three of them are entirely dependent on me. Every penny of what I earn above basic survival goes toward keeping those three people alive and functional.

So I couldn’t afford a security system. And I couldn’t afford to move.

The best I could do was check every lock, every window latch, every corner of every cabinet, over and over. And try to catch a few hours of rest at the hospital, because paranoia had made sleeping at home something close to impossible.

Two nights later, there was another patient.

It was a woman, appearing around fifty. Clearly homeless. A restaurant waiter had found her collapsed on the pavement on his way home. Same symptoms- identical, in every detail. The blue chest. The blue eyes. The foam. The locked fingers. The silent gasping. The jolting.

Dr. Mollah appeared. He’d been in the building for another patient, he mentioned, and thought he would look in on this one too.

I watched him more carefully this time. I saw him click off the stopwatch on his smartwatch when the monitors flatlined. The patient had been with us for one hour and fifty-three minutes.

Same cause of death on the certificate. Same wording. He offered to prepare it himself again.

I went through the woman's belongings. Tucked into the folds of her clothing, was a crumpled polaroid.

This one was taken inside my apartment. I was in my kitchen. Facing away from the camera.

On the back, in the same bad handwriting:
"The nose is the first one to catch attention. The nose looks smart. That nose knows stuff. Nose knows? Nose knows! Hahahahahahahahahhahahahaha"

I found the waiter who had brought her in. He was a young kid, clearly shaken, clearly there because he thought it was the right thing to do. I looked at him carefully for a long moment. He knew nothing. You could tell just by looking at him.

I said nothing to anyone.

The pattern repeated every two to three days. Same symptoms. Same two-hour window. Same death. Same certificate. Dr. Mollah had stopped making excuses for his timing. I overheard him telling a junior doctor about a recent surge in cyanotic heart disease cases in the city, something he intended to research properly. He suggested that the ER nurses could serve as data collectors, possibly even co-investigators in the study. He glanced at me as he said it.

His gaze used to give me confidence. Now it made my skin crawl, in a way I couldn't articulate.

I tried to delegate the identity-checking to another nurse, but that wasn’t possible. I was the senior nurse on the block. Everyone else was already past capacity. It came back to me every time.

The third polaroid showed me checking my front door. It was taken from outside, through the gap under the door or through the letterbox, I still don't know which. I was checking the lock for what must have been the fifth time that afternoon.

On the back it said:
"Have you seen how a man dies, for the sake of your pretty eyes? Yes you do. Yes you do... YES YOU DO!"

The fourth one was taken from across the street, while I waited for the hospital bus in the early evening. I was standing on the pavement in daylight, surrounded by people. My stalker was across the street, holding a camera, and I had no idea.

The note on that one read simply:
"Lips. Lips. Lips...."

Repeated fourteen times. I counted.

By the time the fifth patient died, I had been living in the hospital for two days. Sleeping in the nurses' room. Eating in the cafeteria. Never leaving the building. My colleagues didn't ask. They were too buried in their own work to question it. I think they assumed I was pulling extra shifts for the money. I let them think that.

The fifth polaroid was taken in the ER. I was dozing in my chair between patients, head tipped back slightly, completely unaware.

The back of this one said:
"That face. Want to keep seeing that face. Will do anything for it. Anything. Anything... ANYTHING!"

He had been standing a few feet away from me while I slept. In the building I had retreated to, because I thought it was safe. He had stood there, in the middle of a working hospital, photographed me sleeping, and walked out without anyone noticing a thing.

That was the one that broke me.

I caught Dr. Mollah as he was leaving the ER that night. I started to explain. He didn't let me finish.

Such matters were outside his jurisdiction, he said. He recommended I contact the hospital's Code of Conduct hotline. He gave me the number and walked away.

I called it from the nurses' room at half past two in the morning. A man answered. His voice was warm, measured, and professionally calm. The kind of voice that is specifically trained to make people feel heard. I don't remember everything I said. I know the call lasted sixteen minutes, because I checked afterward. I know most of it was me talking, barely coherent. I know that my tone probably wasn’t professional. And I know that I was getting everything out, in whatever order it came.

He didn't interrupt me. He didn't redirect me. He just listened.

When I finally ran out of words, he said:

"HR block. Top floor. I'll be there in an hour."

It was three in the morning.

I went there anyway.

The HR block was empty. Dark corridors, locked offices, the particular silence of a building that isn't meant to be occupied at this hour. Except for one light at the far end of the corridor. And a voice I recognized from the phone, telling me to come in.

The man introduced himself as Rafiq. He wore a pale shirt with the sleeves rolled exactly twice. He looked barely thirty, but he carried himself with the settled authority of someone who knows his place. His Staff Pass looked different than mine. It identified him as an Aldermore employee, not a hospital one.

He told me to take a seat. He asked to see the polaroids. He examined them for five full minutes without speaking. Then he looked up.

"So the patients who carry these polaroids… they all present similarly, you say?"

"Not similarly. Identically. Symptoms unlike anything I've seen in seven years. The bluish chest, the blue eyes, and the fingers… "

"Fingers curled inward? Foaming at the mouth? Gasping without sound? Full-body convulsions at irregular intervals?"

I stopped.

"Yes, exactly ! But how did you…"

"You didn't finish your thought, young lady. Was there something else you wanted to tell me? Something else about these patients?"

I steadied myself.

"Well… umm… the gender varies. We’ve had three men and two women so far. All of them appear to be…"

"Aged between forty and fifty? All of them coming from the slum? The one in the northern part of the city?"

The room felt very still.

"Yes," I said. "But I never told you…”

Rafiq stood up.

"You've had a long night. Get some sleep. Your problem will be taken care of. You have my word."

He smiled. It was a warm, genuine smile. He then walked out of the cabin, at a pace that suggested he had somewhere more important to be.

I sat there for a long time after he left. Something kept bothering me.

Not that he knew the symptoms before I described them. Not that he knew the demographics before I mentioned them.

But the fact that he knew where the patients were coming from. I never gave him that. I just couldn't do it, even if I wanted to. Because I never had that information. In fact, no one in the hospital has that information, as far as I know.

Looking back, I didn’t know a lot of things…

The month that followed was, genuinely, a breath of fresh air.

No more polaroids. The patients with the strange symptoms kept arriving, but less frequently. We only had three in thirty days that followed. Dr. Mollah quietly ensured they were routed to a different block, one I was not responsible for. From a distance I could still see him, standing at the bedside with his writing pad and his stopwatch. But he no longer looked at me while he did it.

I started sleeping at home again. I started feeling like myself again, or something close to it.

I wish that was the end of the story.

Instead, it lead to the part that I can’t share with people around me.

It was the season of Eid. The hospital had given most of the staff an extended holiday, retaining only a skeleton crew for essential services. My roster fell on the second night.

It was just me and a duty doctor, who had been yawning since the moment he arrived. My block was, for the first time in a long time, genuinely quiet. A few patients were in their beds, none in critical condition. The kind of night that feels like the hospital is exhaling.

The doctor excused himself for a coffee break sometime after midnight. He soon disappeared through the double doors.

I was considering a coffee break myself. The quiet was making me drowsy.

That’s when the ER door slammed open.

Something barely resembling a human stepped inside.

It was a man, or at least it used to be one. He was bare from the waist up. His jeans were covered in dried blood, brown and stiff, not fresh. He was drooling from the corner of his mouth. His chest was indrawing sharply with every breath, the effort of it visible across the whole ribcage. He was making a sound in his throat. Not a groan, not a word, but something more animal than either.

His eyes were bloodshot. But the color wasn't red. It was green. A deep, flat, impossible green.

His chest had a large irregular patch of the same color, spreading from the sternum. Beneath the skin, I could see the outline of vessels- dark green and prominent, tracing a path toward a pulsating area at the center of his chest. I could see the outline of his heart through the surface of his skin. It was still beating, and everything surrounding it was the wrong color.

His fingers curled and uncurled randomly with every step. His limbs were twitching, like a signal firing without a target.

He staggered towards me. Every step looked like the last one he would manage, looking like he was about to fall.

But he never fell.

And through all of it, through the drool and the growling and the green, he was trying to smile at me.

"Reel and real," he said. "Different indeed. Wanted answers. I just wanted some FUCKING answers."

I screamed. I don't remember deciding to. It just came out of me, sharp and involuntary. I was already on my feet, already stepping backward.

He stopped.

"Is that fear?" he said. "Or is that care?"

My right hand picked up a scalpel from the nearest Mayo stand. I braced myself with the only weapon I could find.

He placed his hand on his chest, over the pulsating outline.

"Don't worry. This one's different. Takes its time. Like a body decomposing while the mind is alive." He laughed. It was sudden, genuine, and hysterical. "What a joke."

My back had found the corner of the room before my mind realized it. I had nowhere to go. I clenched the scalpel as tightly as I could.

"The eyes," he said quietly. "The ears. The nose. The lips…"

Then he vomited. A pool of dark red blood hit the floor and spread. He looked down at it, chuckled, and raised his eyes to mine. Blood still running from the corner of his mouth. Green eyes fixed entirely on me.

"THE FACE !"

He ran at me.

Not staggering, but running. Frantic and lurching, twisted fingers reaching forward, green eyes wide, entirely focused on me. I pressed myself into the corner and screamed with everything I had.

His body hit me with its full weight.

I noticed it was less weight than I expected, and getting lighter. He slid against me and dropped down slowly, barely conscious, barely holding his eyes open. His breathing had changed. It was shallower, getting further apart.

The weight made be crumble to my knees. He grabbed my elbow with his right hand, but the grip was much feebler than I expected. His body jolted for a couple of seconds.

He looked up at me. At my face, to be exact. Just looked, for a long moment, with something in his expression. Something that I cannot name and do not want to.

He gasped.

“Finish… it… please…”

In one movement, I drove the scalpel into the pulsating outline of his heart. I don’t know what came over me, and I don’t know where it came from.

His eyes closed. A single tear ran down the side of his face.

He was smiling…

I only remember fragments of what came after.

Staff flooding the block. Voices that I recognized. Dr. Mollah arriving within minutes, as though he’d been waiting nearby. Someone putting a hand on my shoulder. The floor tilting slightly. And then, as my vision began to narrow and darken at the edges, I saw Rafiq standing at the far end of the ER.

Then there was nothing.

The official account read something like this: a potentially schizophrenic patient, also suffering from cyanotic heart disease, arrived at the ER in a state of acute delirium. He attacked the duty nurse without provocation. The nurse defended herself. The patient died despite the hospital's best efforts.

An external police investigation confirmed it. The security guard had been asleep on the job and was terminated. The duty doctor had stepped out for a coffee break and was therefore not present. The ER security cameras experienced a technical malfunction, beginning approximately four minutes before the patient's arrival. It was an open-and-shut case, which was closed in a week.

I read through the clinical notes. There was no mention of green discoloration anywhere in the documentation. Description of the deceased read like a textbook presentation of cyanotic heart disease. Possible undiagnosed psychiatric condition, typed in bold. It also said that that a small amount of blood was vomited following the stab wound. The cause of death, signed by Dr. Cyrus Mollah, was precisely what you would expect it to be.

A certain Mr. Rafiq had signed the document, as an unbiased witness to the events.

There were patients in other blocks of the ER that night- the ones resting in beds in their beds, and the ones who had been awake. The ones who had seen the green and had rushed me after the attack. But I couldn’t find a single one of them, never again. They were poor people, possibly homeless. Unregistered and untraceable. Gone with the wind, as people from that part of the city tend to be.

There were two nurses who had been staffing the adjacent blocks that night. I was told that they resigned within the week, citing unsafe working conditions. I tried calling them several times. Their phone numbers are no longer in service.

I was given thirty days of paid leave, full salary, no questions asked. Not once in those thirty days did anyone contact me to take a statement.

The hospital took care of it, I was told…

That is why I cover my face. And that is why I don't take photographs.

I have theories about all of it. About what was really happening in that hospital, about what the patients were dying from, about what Aldermore is actually using that building for, about what Rafiq's role in all of it truly is. I would like to discuss those theories with someone, I really do. Been carrying them alone for six months, and trust me, they are getting heavy.

But I really have to go now. My shift starts soon, and the workload hasn’t gotten better.

If anything, it has been increasing steadily over the past few weeks, ever since the epidemic of cyanotic heart disease has returned to the city.

But this time, the patients are no longer presenting with blue discoloration.

They are presenting with pitch black.

And they are no longer taking two hours to die.

The current average is twenty-two and a half minutes.

I know the exact figure, thanks to Dr. Mollah. He still times every single one of them, right in front of me.

He stopped hiding it a long time ago.