When Death Isn't the End

MERGERS AND GHOSTS

CHAPTER 19

For a long moment, neither of us spoke.

My mother’s hands rested lightly on the desk, her expression unreadable, but her eyes—her eyes looked like something had cracked behind them. Tired. Raw. Not quite defeated, but close.

“I need you to tell me everything,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

She let out a slow breath and leaned back slightly. “You’re not crazy, Jasmine.”

That should’ve comforted me. It didn’t.

“Then what am I?” I asked. “Because I don’t remember that night. I don’t remember leaving that toilet. I don’t remember him dying—”

“You weren’t meant to remember.” Her voice was flat. “That’s the point.”

I stared at her, waiting for her to laugh. To say I was being paranoid. But she didn’t. She just reached for one of the drawers and pulled out a brown envelope. No name. No label. She slid it across the desk to me like it was nothing.

“What is this?”

“Open it.”

Inside were a few photographs. Black and white, timestamped. Surveillance-style. One of me. One of Manny. Another of someone else—taller, dressed in plain clothes, holding something small and metallic in their hand. Their face was turned away.

“This was taken where?”

“Block C,” she said. “The night you were there.”

I sifted through the photos, my stomach turning. “Who is this person?”

She hesitated. “We don’t know for sure. But he’s shown up in footage from other cases. Other… disappearances.”

“Disappearances?” My voice hitched. “You mean this isn’t just about Manny?”

She closed her eyes briefly, as though calculating what she could afford to say. “There have been others. Students. Mostly final year. Mostly those with no history of mental health issues. People just… vanish. No exit logs. No bodies. Sometimes there’s a story of them going abroad. Sometimes suicide. But none of it holds.”

I gripped the edge of the desk to steady myself. “And me? What do I have to do with it?”

“You came back,” she said. “But you weren’t the same.”

My breath caught.

She leaned forward. “The girl in that CCTV footage—it looked like you. It sounded like you. But it wasn’t… you. Not all the way. Not in the eyes.”

“What are you saying?” I whispered. “That someone took over me?”

“No,” she said. “I’m saying I think something was done to you.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“You started changing after that night,” she continued. “You barely ate. You stopped playing your guitar. You went from being sharp and present to… drifting. I thought it was grief. But then the dreams started, right?”

I looked up sharply. “How do you know about the dreams?”

“You talk in your sleep,” she said quietly. “Sometimes you cry out names I don’t know. Sometimes… you speak in a language I’ve never heard.”

I felt cold all over. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t want you to be afraid of yourself.”

Too late for that.

I sat back slowly, the chair creaking beneath me.

“You think someone experimented on me.”

“I think someone tried to erase something from you,” she said. “But they didn’t do it cleanly.”

We were both quiet for a long time.

Then I asked, “What’s Project K-Variant?”

Her eyes snapped to mine.

I’d found that name on one of the files in the envelope earlier—half-torn, barely legible, but it had stuck.

“Where did you see that?” she demanded.

I stood. “So it’s real.”

“Jasmine, listen to me,” she said, rising too. “There are people watching that project. People who don’t want the truth out. If you’ve seen that name, if you remember it—”

“I don’t remember it,” I said quickly. “Not really. Just the file.”

She exhaled hard, fingers pressed to her forehead. “You need to lay low for a while. Stop going out. Don’t talk to anyone about this. Don’t trust—”

“Don’t trust who, Mum? You’re already treating me like a suspect.”

“No,” she said sharply. “I’m treating you like someone who walked into something much bigger than she understands.”

“And what about Manny?” My voice was rising. “Did he walk into it too? Is that why he’s dead?”

Her silence was answer enough.

“I need answers,” I said. “Real ones. Not just crumbs.”

My mother looked at me—really looked at me. Then she stepped to a shelf, pulled out a thin hard drive, and handed it to me. “Start here. You’re not supposed to have this, but… maybe it’s time. Just promise me something.”

I hesitated. “What?”

“When you find what you’re looking for… don’t go after them alone.”

I nodded, throat tight.

Outside, thunder rumbled in the distance. Rain was coming.

But inside me, the storm had already begun.

I didn’t sleep that night.

Even after everything—after the photos, the whispered threats, the drive pressed into my hand like a final confession—I still couldn’t shut my eyes. Not fully. Not safely. Every time I tried, I saw Manny’s face behind my lids, heard my mother’s voice saying, They will come for you now.

So I stayed on the parlour floor with the laptop, the room lit only by the warm flicker of the rechargeable lamp beside me, and waited for the damn thing to finish decrypting.

Progress bar: 88%.

The folder she gave me was locked. Password protected. And not with some basic “1234” nonsense. This was serious encryption—government level. I’d tried guessing a few obvious ones: my name, her birthday, the year Dad died.

Nothing.

Then I remembered what she said, just before handing me the drive.

“Use what you remember. Not what I’ve told you.”

At first, I thought she was being dramatic. But now I realised… she meant it literally.

So I closed my eyes and dug back. Back to the beginning. The earliest thing that didn’t make sense.

The day of the accident.

Manny’s death.

That blank stretch of time that seemed to rearrange itself every time I touched it.

There was a number that kept showing up—on the files, on her board, even in my student record: K-1932.

I typed it in.

The screen went black for a moment.

Then blinked.

The folder opened.

Just like that.

And everything changed.

Inside were four files.

Three videos.

One PDF.

My fingers hovered over the first video, labelled TEST-11A_JK-SUBJECT. I clicked.

A grainy feed filled the screen. A dim hospital room. Metal bed. Harsh white light. A girl sitting up straight, arms strapped to her sides. Tubes in her neck.

I froze.

It was me.

Not exactly. But close enough.

Same eyes. Same cheekbones. But younger. More vacant. Her hair was cut short, military short. There were dark circles under her eyes, and when she turned to face the camera, something in my chest buckled.

She looked like she hadn’t slept in months.

A voice came from offscreen. Male. Calm. Flat.

“Subject 11A. State your full name.”

The girl blinked slowly. “Jasmine Kelechi Craslow.”

My stomach dropped.

The voice asked again. “And what year is it?”

She hesitated.

Then: “2017.”

That couldn’t be right.

She looked seventeen. I was seventeen in 2017.

But this wasn’t a video from back then. I knew it. The timestamp said 2023.

Six years too late.

The video skipped. Glitched. Then resumed.

Same room. Same girl. But now she was screaming.

Not words. Just sound. Raw, guttural, animal.

The kind of scream you didn’t come back from.

I slammed the lid shut.

My breath came in short gasps.

I crawled backward on the floor like the laptop might bite me. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely hold the lamp.

What the hell had I just seen?

That was me. Or a version of me.

And yet I had no memory of it.

I reopened the laptop, forcing myself not to look away.

Clicked on the second video.

RE-ENTRY_FOOTAGE_MK4

Another corridor. Darker this time. Surveillance angle. A group of people in lab coats escorting someone down the hallway. That same girl again—me—but stumbling, her steps slow, robotic.

As she passed under the camera, she looked up.

Dead eyes.

And then, right as the video was about to cut off—she smiled.

I slammed pause.

The third video was only five seconds long.

A flickering candle.

A hand reaching out toward it.

Then a voice whispering: “She’s remembering too much.”

I didn’t know if I’d said it or heard it.

The screen went dark.

I clicked on the PDF file last.

PROJECT K-VARIANT: Subject 11A Report – Final Phase.

My name was all over it.

It read like a science fiction horror script.

Terms I didn’t understand. Things like neuromemory displacement, sleeper subject instability, constructive implantation, MK-phases 1–3, proxy deaths.

And the most chilling line of all, near the bottom:

“Subject 11A has been successfully merged with field host following synthetic incident trigger. Memory scrub incomplete.”

Merged.

Field host.

Synthetic trigger.

None of it made sense.

Except it did.

Because it explained everything.

The missing time.

The half-memories.

The fact that I remembered Manny, but couldn’t trace the shape of our last night.

I wasn’t just missing the past.

It had been rewritten.

And somehow—I was the one who let them do it.

I stared at the screen until my eyes blurred.

I had so many questions I didn’t know where to begin.

Who was the girl in the video?

Was she me… before me?

What did Manny know?

And if he found out something he wasn’t supposed to…

Is that why he died?

I picked up my phone and tried calling Kene again. No answer.

Then Beverly. Straight to voicemail.

Everyone I trusted felt a million miles away.

I glanced back at the folder.

I needed to find the source. Whoever had been running this Project K-Variant. Whatever lab that footage came from. Whatever agency was behind it.

Because the way it was looking now… my mother wasn’t just protecting me.

She was hiding me.

From them.

From myself.

And maybe—from the girl I used to be.

I clicked through the file again and saw it—a tiny signature at the bottom of the last page. Not a name. Just initials.

G.

I sat frozen for a long time.

That wasn’t random.

That wasn’t some stranger.

That was Gloria.

My mother.

She didn’t just investigate the project.

She’d worked on it.

And suddenly, I knew where I had to go next.

Not the Ministry. Not the school.

Her old lab.

The one she swore she never returned to after her resignation in 2021.

But I remembered the name now.

Aether Research Unit – Site E.

Buried behind an abandoned maternity hospital on the outskirts of town.

Nobody went there anymore.

But I would.

Because whatever this was—whatever I’d become—wasn’t finished.

And the truth?

It was waiting for me in the dark.