When Death Isn't the End

NINE SILENT DAYS

CHAPTER 23

The laptop’s fan whirred louder than usual as I opened the final folder Gloria had labeled “K-VARIANT / PHASE III.” Most of the files were password-protected, but one video—corrupted at the edges, barely holding together—started playing automatically.

At first, there was only static. Then the screen blinked to life.

I saw myself.

Strapped to a metal table.

Eyes open.

Not blinking.

Not… me.

The room was dark, lit by red emergency bulbs, and a voice off-screen kept saying numbers—serial codes, maybe. The camera zoomed in on my face. Something twitched beneath my left eye, like a muscle misfiring. I looked drugged. Or worse.

I paused the video. My hand hovered over the mouse.

That wasn’t me.

It couldn’t be.

I slammed the laptop shut and leaned back, air scraping into my lungs like it had to fight to get in. My chest was tight. My hands slick with sweat.

And somewhere deep inside, a memory fluttered like a broken wing trying to take off.

A white room.

Cold.

A face—familiar, then gone.

A hum. Like a machine powering up.

Then—nothing.

My fingers found the hard drive again, still plugged in. I scrolled through the folders I hadn’t opened yet.

There. Buried at the bottom.

Subject_JK-081 / Incident Report.

The document opened into a series of logs. Time-stamped. Clinical. Cold.

Subject JK-081 (F) experienced memory divergence after Exposure Trial 2B. Residual effects observed: hallucinations, emotional flattening, dissociation. Reinstatement protocol failed. Attempted full reset at Site E unsuccessful. Transfer to Phase IV approved.

I didn’t understand all of it. But some words rang clear.

Memory divergence. Reinstatement. Reset.

I was Subject JK-081.

I was the experiment.

No.

No, no, no—

I stood up too fast and hit my knee on the desk. The pain grounded me for a second, brought me back into my body. But everything inside was still spinning.

Why would she do this to me?

I stumbled to the window and yanked it open. The sun was high now, but it didn’t feel warm. It felt harsh, like it was seeing too much.

Downstairs, someone honked from the street. A hawker called out for gala and cold minerals.

Life was moving like nothing had happened.

But in this room, everything had.

I turned back to the screen.

I had to keep digging.

I opened the backup folder labeled: MANNY.

Inside—photos. Voice recordings. Chat transcripts. A police file scanned in poor quality.

I clicked on a .wav file first. Static, then muffled voices.

“…you said she wouldn’t remember—”

“She wasn’t supposed to. Something went wrong.”

“Then fix it.”

Then a voice I recognized.

Manny.

“I don’t want to do this anymore, sir. She doesn’t know. But it’s like… she feels it. Like something in her still knows me.”

Click. End of recording.

I sat frozen.

He wasn’t just some guy I met that night.

He knew me.

Had always known me.

And I’d forgotten him. Or been made to forget.

I opened the next file. A heavily redacted transcript. The parts that remained were chilling:

Subject expresses residual recognition toward Operator M.O.

Subject refers to Operator as “the boy from the passage.”

Emotional attachment detected. Procedure failure. Operator compromised.

Terminate exposure. Terminate Operator.

Terminate.

My stomach turned.

They killed him.

Because he got too close.

Because he remembered when I wasn’t supposed to.

And my mother—Glory—knew. She knew and still brought me back here like everything was fine. Like the last few weeks weren’t an unravelling of whatever fragile reality she’d stuffed me into.

I paced the room, needing to scream, but afraid of who might hear me. I needed to leave. To breathe something that wasn’t this house. This lie.

I grabbed my bag, shoved the hard drive into it, and bolted for the door.

As I stepped into the sunlight, my phone buzzed again.

Unknown Number: They know you know. Don’t go to the ministry. Don’t trust her.

I froze.

Who was watching me?

Who was trying to help?

Or… mislead me?

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. My fingers wouldn’t move right.

But I knew one thing for certain now.

This wasn’t over.

They’d taken Manny.

They’d taken me.

And I was going to find every single one of them.

Even if it meant destroying whatever was left of my own mind in the process.

Nine days.

That’s how long it has been since I found the hard-drive and the truth began to bleed through the cracks my mother left in it. Nine dawns of waking while Glory—my own mother—slept behind her locked door, and nine nights of lying on the parlour couch, listening to the generator kick, waiting for NEPA to snap the power off so the house would drop into the kind of silence liars hate.

In those nine days I stopped asking her anything. The way she avoided my eyes whenever I passed her in the corridor told me what I needed to know: she would protect her secret before she would protect me.

So I hunted alone.

I started at school, but lecturers only shook their heads when I mentioned Manny. A few classmates muttered about cult boys and overdose rumours—lies that tasted ready-made. The official story said natural causes. Nobody asked how a twenty-year-old with no medical history dies of “natural causes” in a campus toilet. That sort of question makes people uncomfortable. Makes them remember nobody is safe.

By the fifth day I found Chidi, Manny’s roommate. We met under the mango tree beside Block A where he sold bootleg textbooks. His eyes were red—sleepless, maybe stoned, maybe both. When I told him I just wanted to understand why Manny was in Block C that night, Chidi stared at me like he was measuring something.

“He left this,” he said finally, pulling a small grey notebook from his backpack. The cover was stained with palm-oil fingerprints, corners chewed. “Said if anything happened I should give it to the girl who looked like she was half-awake. That’s you, abi?”

I nodded, throat tight.

Chidi didn’t ask for money. He pressed the notebook into my palm, closed my fingers around it, and walked back to his stall without another word.

I took a keke to the lagoon front. Sat on one of the concrete benches where people come to watch cheap sunsets and drink orijin from sachets. The breeze off the water carried pepper-soup smoke from the canteen nearby; waves slapped the retaining wall with lazy disgust. I opened Manny’s notebook.

First page: his neat handwriting, blue BIC, dated 27 March.

They call it K-Variant. Nobody above assistant lecturer level admits it’s real, but the files are in the departmental server if you dig after midnight. Memory trials, mirror tests, something called “passage induction”. Test subjects listed by initial only—except one. “J.C.” Girl, nineteen. They’ve used her before.

I felt my pulse in my ears. I kept reading.

02 April – She doesn’t remember me from class anymore. Last week we talked about Fela samples; today she looked straight through me like I was air. She says she’s tired, headaches, missing time. They told her it’s exam stress. (It isn’t.)

09 April – Security camera in Block C flickers between 21:12 and 21:18 every night. Same gap in the metadata log, like someone edits the feed in real time. Found maintenance guy who swears the DVR keeps overwriting itself. Said he’s seen a girl in a white slip dress on the monitor, standing behind whoever walks in. Always gone when he rewinds.

11 April – They moved the trials forward. “Full exposure event.” If they’re right, it wipes the subject’s short-term recall. If they’re wrong, she breaks. Either way they get data. My mother says pull out; men in plain clothes were at the house asking if I’ve skipped clinic appointments. I think they know I’ve been digging.

18 April – Saw her near the Senate Building. Eyes glossy, like she’d cried but forgotten why. She said “I keep seeing a toilet door that won’t open.” Told me her mother hums in the kitchen like nothing happened. I tried to warn her—Watch the mirrors, stay out of Block C—but she laughed like it was the last joke in the world.

19 April – Tonight’s the night. If you’re reading this, I didn’t make it out. Or maybe I did and I’m not me anymore. Check the cracked eye on the janitor’s closet, third floor, Block C. Behind it there’s a duct that leads to a locked room. That’s where they keep the equipment. If you hear singing, run.

The rest of the pages were blank.

I sat there until the sun fell behind Third Mainland Bridge and mosquitoes started drilling into my ankles. My chest felt too small for my ribs.

Manny had been trying to help me. And someone killed him because of it.

I needed that locked room. But if security saw me snooping round Block C after hours they’d drag me to the dean. Worse: they might drag me to whoever replaced Manny as monitor.

I shoved the notebook into my bag and headed home.

The house was dark when I reached our street. Our gen was off; NEPA must have brought light, then seized it again. Ahead, I saw a black car—the same one from the week before—parked under the bougainvillea across the road. Engine running, windows up. My pulse jumped. I ducked behind a neighbour’s gate pillar, waited. Nothing. Whoever sat inside didn’t move.

I forced myself to step into the open, shoulders squared. The car pulled away, tyres whispering on the asphalt, and disappeared round the bend.

They wanted me scared. Good. Fear keeps you sharp.

Inside, I found Glory in the parlour, asleep in an armchair, reading lamp still on. A pile of case files lay open on her lap. One photo—my student ID—peeked out from under her hand. She’d been combing the evidence again.

I should have woken her, demanded answers. Instead I watched her chest rise and fall, noticed the new grey in her braids, the tight clutch of her fingers. She looked smaller than I remembered. A mother who’d bargained with devils and lost.

I went to her office, booted her spare laptop, and copied Manny’s scans into a hidden folder on my phone. Then I found a flashlight, a roll of red electrical tape, and the rusted set of small screwdrivers Dad taught me to use years ago.

Because tomorrow night I was going back to Block C.

I would find the closet with the cracked-eye symbol.

I would crawl into the duct if I had to.

And I would see what they’d been hiding—what they’d done to Manny, to all the other names in those folders, and to me.

If the memory thieves wanted a variant who wouldn’t break, they had chosen the wrong girl.