Neural Fortress

The weariness doesn't lift, it shatters.

One moment, I am drowning in fever-loop's shattered mirrors. The next, my mind becomes a scalpel cutting through static. Process the data. The raw data collected, consciously and unconsciously.

My apartment is a warzone.

Olive oil gleams beside a half-packed bag. Kitchen knives fanned out like ritual blades. The Epic Leak. The aborted escape with Handsome Man. They have been coming for my gear. I have not understood. Or perhaps the Epic Leak, for now, has merely faltered.

I tear paintings from walls. Rip cords from sockets. Haunted relics of a dead self, all dragged into the back room. Not the bathroom. Acoustics compromised. They are in the walls. In the current. Listening. Always listening.

By dawn, home is a fortress: Bare walls. Barricaded door. A nest of chairs stacked with paranoid precision. I sleep on the floor, pressed flat against the wood, convinced no vibrations, no stray hum, can betray me to their unseen devices.

Finally, I can focus on data processing.

A text chimes from 3, a friend. He sounds genuinely concerned, knows I have been to the hospital. Should I tell the Sheriff? The path I found?

"Please, 3," I text back, my fingers clumsy. "Can you call the Sheriff and tell him to come over?"

A moment later: "Let me see, I found a phone number. Do you want me to call now, or wait until tomorrow morning at 10?"

Yes. I can wait. The precision of a scheduled call feels like a tiny anchor in my turbulent mind.

Night bleeds into pattern-recognition: Two tribes. Us (the trafficked, the autistic, the "children") and Them (the normals, the takers). And the third category, the ones who vanish. The Promised Land. Are the "dead" just upgraded? Passed the test?

Memory-fragment: Sand. Different beaches in jars on the neighbor's stairs. Each one a coordinate I have to decode.

The daughter from the bar. Her face glints behind my eyes. Not just a neighbor, one of us. Trapped. Exploited. Her whole life sold by the harridan, her adoptive mother, who runs the "bar." A front. 4, and the young girl with my same name, 5, both trapped, sold for years under the guise of quiet dinners. Clients pay in advance for their dinner, meat and flesh, and nothing stirs suspicion.

The night of the Epic Leak, they pull me there telepathically. Not for shelter. For absorption. Autistics record everything. Sense everything. I am a living hard drive for their SOS. Drugged? Yes. The harridan's voice slithers through recall: "Handsome Man's got plans for you..." She knows.

And Handsome Man's neighbor, the one with the sunglasses. A pimp too. The harridan fears losing the profits I bring in, now that Handsome Man is here. And the other pimp, fearing the same for him.

Then it returns, a ghostly whisper: a light voice waving goodbye, "my little darling." I may have been part of her stable. Wait. Sunglasses Neighbor. Handsome Man's ex. Even the harridan, all share a name, 6. A syndicate.

Confusion, a raw, burning fog. I was dead tired when I got to Handsome Man's house. They made me sleep alone, right by the living room door. While I was unconscious, have they exploited me?

WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP.

10 AM. Helicopter blades shred the sky above my roof. Thunder knives. They have followed the crumbs. The olives I scattered on the Ghost Road. They are coming for the hunters.

My phone chimes. 3: "Do you want me to call the Sheriff?"

"No," I reply, the new understanding a cold weight in my gut. "I hear the message."

So the dead ones. They are alive. In the Promised Land. They have faked their deaths, managed to be transported without detection. 31, who jumped in front of a train, no way to recognize him. 32, incinerated by cancer. 7, 3's brother, in a devastating car accident. Yes. All children of us. They understand before me. They have tried, sometimes, to put me on the right path, but I keep getting distracted. How will I get to the Promised Land?

That night, my eye tears. Hot salt blood.

Then: CLANG. A gate. SHHHK. A sliding door. SCRAPE. Someone on the wall.

Cold air kisses my neck.

Then: nothing.

Until dawn.

The soft click of my front door closing.

My body remembers what my mind has blocked.

The truth detonates: They never stop.

They drop me under, drugs, exhaustion, terror, and sell the hours. To village elders. To winter tourists. Mostly men. We are the attraction. The "children." The quiet ones. And I comply. Blank. Empty. A vessel.

The entire village. Every face. Every smile.

Involved.

Days dissolve. Nights bleed.

I trace the wires of betrayal.

Aunt 1's rice milk. Handsome Man's halos. The magistrate's sudden interest. The harridan's meat reservations. One question screams inside my skull, louder than the helicopters, sharper than the tearing eye:

WHO IS WHO?