Neural Fortress

The weariness didn’t lift—it shattered. One moment, I was drowning in the fever-loop’s shattered mirrors; the next, my mind was a scalpel cutting through static. Process the data, hissed a voice in my synapses. The raw data collected, consciously and unconsciously. The journey. The ghosts. The gaping voids where my past should be. But the wall held—a smooth, obsidian barrier. Flashes of memory sparked like faulty wiring: flashes—here and there—then nothing. It didn't matter for now; the past would resurrect when it was ready. For now, the present demanded my full, fractured attention.

My apartment was a warzone.

Olive oil gleamed beside a half-packed bag. Kitchen knives fanned out like ritual blades. The Epic Leak. The aborted escape with Handsome Man. They’d been coming for my gear. I hadn't understood. Or perhaps the Epic Leak, for now, had merely faltered.

I tore paintings from walls. Ripped cords from sockets. Haunted relics of a dead self—all dragged into the bathroom. No, better. The back room. Not the bathroom—acoustics compromised. They were in the walls. In the current. Listening. Always listening.

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

Finally, I could focus on data processing. A text chimed from 3, a friend. He sounded genuinely concerned, knew I'd been to the hospital. Should I tell the Sheriff? The path I found?

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

A moment later, 3 replied: "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 felt like a tiny anchor in my turbulent mind.

Night bled 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 vanished. The Promised Land. Were the "dead" just... upgraded? Passed the test?

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

The daughter from the bar. Her face flickered behind my eyes. Not just a neighbor—one of us. Trapped. Exploited. Her whole life sold by the harridan, her adoptive mother, who ran 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 paid in advance for their dinner, meat and flesh, and nothing stirred suspicion.

The night of the Epic Leak—they’d pulled me there telepathically. Not for shelter. For absorption. Autistics record everything. Sense everything. I was a living hard drive for their SOS. Drugged? Yes. The harridan’s voice slithered through recall: "Handsome Man’s got plans for you..." She knew.

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

Then it returned, 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 shared a name, 6. A syndicate.

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

WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP.

10 AM. Helicopter blades shredded the sky above my roof. Thunder knives. They’d followed the crumbs. The olives I’d scattered on the Ghost Road. They were coming for the hunters.

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

"No," I replied, the new understanding a cold weight in my gut. "I heard the message."

So the dead ones. They were alive. In the Promised Land. They had 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 understood before me. They had tried, sometimes, to put me on the right path, but I kept getting distracted. How would I get to the Promised Land?

That night—my eye tore. Hot salt-blood.

Then: CLANG. A gate.

SHHHHK. A sliding door.

SCRAPE. Someone on the wall.

Cold air kissed my neck.

Then—nothing.

Until dawn.

The soft click of my front door closing.

My body remembered what my mind had blocked.

The truth detonated: They never stopped.

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

The entire village. Every face. Every smile.

Involved.

Days dissolved. Nights bled.

I traced 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 screamed inside my skull, louder than the helicopters, sharper than the tearing eye:

WHO WAS WHO?