DON’T TELL ANYONE
1392 Words
CHAPTER 18
Her office door clicked shut behind me.
Mum didn’t speak at first. Just sat behind her desk like she was bracing for a storm. Her hands were clasped in front of her, but I could see the tension in her knuckles. Even the way she breathed felt controlled, like one wrong word would blow the whole thing open.
“Sit down,” she said finally.
I didn’t. “Tell me what’s going on.”
She looked up at me. Really looked. Her eyes were tired in a way that made me feel like I hadn’t seen her in months, not days. “Do you remember Manny’s last name?”
“Okoro.” I swallowed. “I saw it on the photo. Emmanuel Okoro.”
She nodded. “His mother works with the Special Projects Division.”
Something fluttered in my chest. “So he wasn’t just—?”
“No.” Her voice was firm. “He wasn’t just some random boy from your school. And the night he died, you weren’t just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I took a shaky step closer. “Then what was I?”
She hesitated.
“Mum,” I snapped, more forcefully than I meant to. “I need you to talk to me like I’m not your child. Just this once. Like I’m not too fragile for the truth.”
That landed. She leaned back in her chair, and I could almost see her shed the mother mask.
“There’s a programme,” she said, low. “Not publicly funded. Not acknowledged by the ministry. It's older than me, older than most of the people still working on it. It's been called different names over the years—Project K-Variant is just the latest.”
I frowned. “K-Variant?”
She nodded slowly. “It began as a study. Cognitive mapping. Behavioral prediction. But eventually it became something else. Something more experimental. They started working with substances. Test environments. Live memory simulations.”
I didn’t understand half of what she was saying. “What does that have to do with me?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“I don’t know how or why you were pulled into this. But when your school sent us the footage from that night—the same night Emmanuel died—I knew something was wrong. The timestamps didn’t match your account. Your eyes in that footage—Jasmine, you weren’t there. Not fully.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. My heart was beating so hard it felt like it was shaking the floor.
“They’ve been testing this on students,” she continued. “Mostly boys. Some girls. All seemingly random. But Emmanuel wasn’t random. He figured something out. He came to see his mother three days before he died. Told her he thought something was happening to his memory. He said he’d been blacking out. Having dreams that weren’t his. Seeing places he’d never visited.”
That sounded terrifyingly familiar.
“She thought he was just tired. Exam stress. But then he went back to school and…” She sighed. “That night. You. The toilets. And then his body was found behind the Arts Theatre the next morning. No bruises. No wounds. Just… gone.”
“Are you saying I killed him?”
She looked me straight in the eye. “I don’t know.”
I sat down.
For a long time, the only sound in the room was the ceiling fan clacking lazily above us.
“Mum,” I said, finally. “Have you been investigating this on your own?”
“No. I have one person inside. A man who used to work on K-Variant before they tried to wipe his memory. He got out. Barely. He’s the one who sent me the photo of you. He says you’re not the only one.”
I gripped the edge of the chair. “There are others?”
She nodded. “Young people. Mostly university students. All of them experienced what you’re describing. Holes in memory. Visions. Blackouts. Some of them got violent. Some went missing. A few tried to kill themselves.”
I felt sick.
“Manny wasn’t the only one who died,” she added. “There was another girl. Abia. A final-year law student in Ibadan. Her parents said she started acting strange. Talking in her sleep. Saying things like ‘it’s not my life.’ She jumped from the third-floor balcony of her hostel two weeks ago.”
Jesus Christ.
“And what about me?” I whispered. “Why would they… test anything on me?”
“I don’t know,” Mum said again. “But I think you were marked long before now. You’ve always had… episodes. Strange dreams. Even as a child. Things you’d say in your sleep. You don’t remember?”
I shook my head slowly. “No.”
She opened one of the folders and pulled out a sheet of paper—yellowed, folded in four.
“You were seven,” she said, handing it to me.
I unfolded the page.
It was a scrawled drawing. Done in crayon. The kind children make—except it wasn’t childlike at all. There were figures with missing eyes. A large black circle. A girl with hair like mine standing in the centre.
At the bottom, in a careful, neat print:
“She isn’t real.”
My own handwriting.
My stomach turned.
“I kept it because it frightened me,” Mum said. “You used to say things like ‘the other Jasmine.’ You’d wake up screaming. Say someone else was wearing your body. I thought you were just imaginative. Traumatised from the divorce. But now…” Her voice trailed off.
I looked at the drawing again.
“She isn’t real.”
Was I the ‘she’?
Or was there another me?
“Mum,” I said slowly, “what exactly did they do to Manny?”
“They ran simulations on him. Chemical trials. He was part of a group study called K-PHASE 3. They said it was voluntary, but it wasn’t. Most of them didn’t even know they were being watched. It was part of a trial to induce controlled dissociation.”
“Dissociation?”
“Split memory. Rewritten sequences. Erased guilt. Synthetic recall.”
My blood felt cold.
“You think they used that on me?”
“I think they tried. But I also think it didn’t fully work on you. You remembered more than they wanted you to. And someone—” she paused, voice low, “—someone was assigned to monitor you.”
I didn’t like how that sounded.
“Who?”
She looked like she was choosing her words carefully. “You’re not going to like this.”
“Say it.”
“The name in your file—the person listed as your student contact on the K-Variant roster—it’s not me.”
My mouth went dry.
She passed me a printout.
I scanned it. Stopped at the name.
Craslow, Ragnar.
“No,” I whispered.
My mother looked at me. “Yes.”
“But that’s impossible. He’s my stepbrother.”
“Only on paper.”
My throat tightened. “So he’s been in on this? All this time?”
“I don’t know. But Jasmine, listen to me carefully now.” She leaned forward, voice trembling just slightly. “Do not trust him. Not until we know more. Not until we’re sure.”
I looked down at the page in my hand. Ragnar’s name in bold. Tied to something that had been warping my life behind the scenes. That had taken Manny. That was maybe—just maybe—still inside me.
Watching. Waiting.
I stood up, the page crumpling in my hand.
“I need to find him,” I said.
“No.” My mother’s voice cracked like a whip. “You need to stay away from him.”
I looked at her.
“I don’t trust him either,” she said. “But if he’s part of this… he might not be who you think he is.”
I didn’t say anything.
Because deep down, I already knew that.
And I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what came next.
- Writer
