When Death Isn't the End

THE MISSING HOURS

CHAPTER 22

I didn't eat. I didn't sleep.

The files were spread across my floor like a broken prayer—pieces of myself scattered through government printouts and half-erased photos, diagrams with no legends, reports that read like fiction.

But the worst part? The videos.

One in particular.

It was dated April 18th. One day before Manny died.

The file name was a string of numbers. But when I opened it, my body went cold.

There I was. Sitting in what looked like a clinic room. Fluorescent lighting. Padded walls. A doctor’s coat in the corner of the frame, just the sleeve, moving in and out.

I was strapped to a chair.

Eyes wide open.

Smiling.

But it wasn’t the kind of smile people wear when they’re okay. It was vacant. Like something else was puppeteering my face.

I watched myself laugh at nothing. Mumble. Stare into space like the walls were talking back.

There was audio, but it crackled. Mostly static. Occasionally, a word would slip through.

“Response… holding.”

“Variant exposure… showing inconsistency.”

Then, my voice.

But not me.

Not really.

“…I don’t want to go back in the stall…”

My whole body went still.

The stall.

Block C.

I scrubbed through the footage again, faster this time. At the end of the clip, I started screaming. No words. Just raw sound. My body thrashing against the restraints, head snapping back.

Then—cut to black.

Nothing else.

The file ended like that.

I sat back on the floor, laptop humming beside me, and felt something inside me shift.

This wasn’t about memory loss anymore.

This was about control.

Someone had done this to me.

And my mother had helped them.

The next day, I returned to Site E.

Not through the front.

I’d memorised the access map from one of her folders—a crude layout, barely legible. But it showed a back service route, near the water tower. No cameras, just a fence and a rusted gate.

It took three buses and a long walk through back roads lined with mechanic workshops and hawkers frying puff-puff. My hoodie was soaked in sweat before I got there.

The gate was right where the map said it would be. The lock was gone, hanging useless on the latch.

They hadn’t even bothered to fix it.

I slipped in.

The smell hit me first. Something chemical. Metallic. Under it, the faint trace of something rotting.

The corridors were quieter than before. No buzzing lights, no humming servers. Just the sound of my footsteps.

I kept my phone tight in my grip, flashlight on, camera ready.

The clinic rooms were worse in daylight.

Padded walls yellowed with age. Dried smears on the floor. One of the rooms had tally marks scratched deep into the plaster. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands.

In another, I found a name.

Etched into the padding with something sharp.

“Glory.”

The same name I’d seen in that document. Subject G.

It was beneath a broken light fixture, almost hidden in shadow.

I reached out and touched it. My fingers trembled. The fabric beneath my touch was soft, but the message was hard, deliberate. Like someone had been trying to leave proof of their existence.

“Glory.”

Why did that name feel like it belonged to me?

I made my way down to the sublevel again, past the door with the shattered keypad. This time, I knew what I was looking for.

The file room.

I found it behind a corridor marked RESTRICTED – CLEARANCE 2. The door was half open.

Inside: shelves. Metal cabinets. Dust thick on everything. A flickering bulb overhead.

I started digging.

Each cabinet was labeled by date. I went straight to April. Then the 18th. Then the 19th.

There were files marked “Variant Activity: Field Surveillance” and “Subject Discrepancies – J.C.”

J.C.

Jasmine.

My name.

I pulled the file.

Inside were printed surveillance logs. Some handwritten. Some typed. Every single one tracked my movements that week. Where I went. Who I talked to. What I ate. When I slept.

There was even a note from the night of the 19th:

“Subject was seen entering the Block C restroom at 8:47 p.m.

Anomaly occurred.

Subject exited at 10:14 p.m. without Manny Okoro.

Camera footage shows loss of time consistency between 9:12 and 9:57 p.m.

Possible Variant episode.”

Anomaly.

Loss of time.

Episode.

Was that what happened?

Did I lose time? Black out? Was something else awake in me when he died?

I flipped the page.

There was a printout. A forensic report.

Cause of Death: Unknown.

Toxicology: Negative.

Injuries: None.

Time of Death: Approx. 9:45 p.m.

Right in the middle of my missing hour.

And under that, circled twice in red ink:

Last confirmed contact: Jasmine .”

I sank to the floor.

It wasn’t just that I had been with him.

It was that they knew.

And they’d let it happen.

They’d watched.

Tested.

Recorded.

I wasn’t just a subject. I was a goddamn experiment.

I left the room with the file in my hoodie, pressed against my skin like a curse.

Outside, the sky was grey. Clouds swollen, ready to break. The scent of rain hung in the air.

I felt hollow. Not afraid, not angry.

Just... unravelled.

I walked until my feet ached. Until I stopped in front of Manny’s old hostel.

I stood there a long time. Watching the light in one of the upper rooms flicker.

I’d never asked who he was. Never really knew him.

And now, it was too late.

But I owed him something.

I owed him the truth.

Whatever it was.

Whatever it cost.

There was something about the silence that made me feel like I was already being watched.

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my mother’s—Gloria’s—office, folders spread open like a ritual around me. I’d gone past fear. Past disbelief. Whatever was happening to me, whatever truth was buried under all this silence and secrecy, I wasn’t going to stop until I uncovered it.

The hard drive she gave me hummed gently in the laptop’s port. Files loaded slowly—documents, images, folders named with strings of numbers, and dates that didn’t make sense. Some reached as far back as 1997. Others were labelled simply “TEST RUN – CANDIDATE J”.

Candidate J.

I didn’t want to believe it was me.

But I clicked anyway.

The folder opened to reveal seven video files. No labels, no timestamps. Just files named sequentially: trial_01.mov, trial_02.mov… down to trial_07.mov.

I hesitated. My fingers hovered over the trackpad, then clicked the first.

The screen flickered, then showed a stark white room. No windows. Just a single table, a metal chair, and a girl sitting upright, hands folded neatly in her lap.

Me.

Hair pulled back. Eyes wide. Skin pale under harsh white lights.

She wasn’t moving.

Not blinking. Not even breathing.

I paused the video. My heart pounded. That couldn’t have been me. That… thing on screen looked like me, but hollowed out. Like a puppet. I tried to breathe deeply. Pressed play again.

A voice came in from off-screen. Male. Slightly distorted.

“State your identifier.”

The girl—me—answered, calmly.

“K-VARIANT-013.”

Not my name. Not even my voice, really. It sounded like something had been flattened in it. Like emotion had been stripped out and replaced with static.

The voice spoke again. “What’s your assigned memory?”

A pause.

Then she said, “March 3rd, the lake. Gloria’s hand. The smell of akara. The word drown.”

I stopped the video.

That memory… I hadn’t thought of it in years. A trip with my mother—Gloria—to a resort in Kogi. I’d nearly drowned. She’d dragged me out. Held me too tight. Whispered something in my ear I couldn’t remember.

The word drown.

Why would they implant that memory?

What the hell was this?

I backed out of the folder, my hands trembling, and opened another one marked “Observations – Subject 013”. Inside were a series of reports. Clinical. Cold.

“Subject responds well to layered memory scripts when paired with maternal stimuli. Regression episodes have increased since external trigger: Manny Okoro. Recommend Phase IV lockdown.”

I read that line over and over again.

Manny.

He wasn’t an accident.

He was a trigger.

For me.

I closed the file, stomach churning. None of this made sense. How could I be the subject of some psychological experiment? How could Gloria—my own mother—be involved?

My throat was dry. I stumbled up, pacing the office. My eyes landed again on the corkboard.

And then I saw it.

A small file tucked behind the red folders. Not labelled. Just sealed with a paperclip. I pulled it out.

Inside were printed emails. Internal communications.

From: dr. o. adekunle@aetherresearch.ng

To: g.craslow@moha.gov.ng

Subject: Re: PROJECT K-VARIANT PHASE IV

We’ve contained the side effects for now, but the mental bleed-through is increasing in Subject 013. If exposed to another collapse event, she may recover full memory. That would terminate containment integrity. Gloria, we need to discuss emergency protocols.

Mental bleed-through.

Memory collapse.

I couldn’t read anymore. I dropped the pages and staggered back, my head spinning.

Had my whole life been one long experiment?

Everything I remembered—was it even real?

I heard the front door slam.

Then footsteps.

I barely had time to shut the laptop before Gloria appeared in the doorway, her face tight, her eyes unreadable.

“You opened it,” she said quietly.

I didn’t respond.

She stepped in. Closed the door behind her.

“I was going to tell you,” she said. “Just not like this.”

“Tell me what?” My voice broke. “That I’m… what? Some lab rat? A project? That Manny died because of me?”

“No.” Her voice cracked. “He died because they didn’t follow the protocol. He wasn’t meant to get that close to you. He… he was just supposed to monitor. Report back.”

“He didn’t monitor,” I whispered. “He kissed me.”

“I know.”

Her eyes were wet now.

“I tried to pull the plug after the first month. You started remembering things you weren’t supposed to. Hearing things. Seeing people who were dead. But they wouldn’t let me.”

I backed away. “You let them mess with my mind.”

“I was trying to protect you.”

“You were trying to control me.”

Her mouth trembled. “You don’t understand what they’re capable of. What they’ve done to people who got too close. You were born into this, Jasmine. I couldn’t change that. But I tried to buy time. To keep you safe long enough to escape it.”

I stared at her.

The woman who raised me. The woman who loved me.

And lied to me.

And maybe even broke me.

Silence stretched between us. The only sound was the hum of the fan and the static in my head.

Then I asked, quietly, “Is any of it real?”

She looked at me like the answer hurt her more than anything she’d said.

“I don’t know anymore.”

And for the first time, I believed her.