The sky had already lightened by the time I gave up pretending. I hadn’t slept a second. My body felt like wet sand inside skin, every step heavy, every thought dull and dragging.

  I washed my face until it burned, hoping the sting would trick me into feeling awake. It didn’t. The bruise on my arm throbbed under my sleeve like a secret, one I wasn’t ready to share with anyone. I tugged the fabric down hard and left the apartment.

  The hallway smelled faintly of burnt toast. Damian, my neighbor, was muttering again behind his door—a singsong rhyme cut off halfway by laughter. Another episode. I didn’t stop to listen.

  Outside, the world spun forward as if nothing had happened. Cars coughed smoke, buses hissed, vendors shouted. People streamed past me, caffeinated and purposeful. I just stood among them, a ghost carrying a laptop bag, my head thick with exhaustion.

  At the office, a stack of work already waited, glowing on my monitor. Twenty-seven emails. Three flagged urgent. My boss gave me a distracted wave that counted as his good morning. I buried myself in tasks that weren’t mine but had somehow become mine, like everything abandoned eventually did.

  By noon, my head buzzed with static. By three, my eyes burned. By evening, I was running purely on caffeine and the muscle memory of typing.

  No one asked why I looked like death.

  No one ever did.

  That was the curse of being useful—you worked until you disappeared.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  It was only when I shut my laptop at night that silence found the courage to speak.

  The apartment felt heavier in the dark, like the walls were leaning in. All day I’d outrun the thoughts with deadlines and error logs, but now they slid back into my head, soft as knives.

  The bruise.

  The forum.

  “You’re already in. We see you.”

  I told myself I wouldn’t go back. That I wasn’t stupid enough to click twice. That nothing waited on the other side of that onion link except malware and paranoia.

  But the thought wasn’t something I chose. It crept up, like damp climbing a wall.

  What if I looked again?

  What if there really were answers?

  The laptop gleamed faintly across the room, lid closed but still watching. I curled into bed, dragged the blanket up to my chin. Not tonight, I whispered. My voice didn’t sound convincing, even to me.

  When sleep finally came, it wasn’t rest.

  I was standing in a cavernous dark, the air thick with too many shadows. They writhed and flickered, faceless shapes crowding the edges. They weren’t speaking words, but their layered voices folded over one another in a sick rhythm, chanting like a ritual too old for me to understand.

  The noise climbed higher, pounding against my skull.

  Then, without warning, the shadows parted.

  A voice sharper than the rest cut through the chaos:

  “Amaya. You’re back.”

  The words were familiar, and that made my skin crawl.

  I stumbled, tried to turn, but something brushed my ankle. A vine—dry, brittle, impossible—curled around me like rope. Another knotted itself on top. Then another. They scraped against my skin, dragging me down into ground that wasn’t there.

  I screamed. The voices around swallowed it whole.

  I jerked awake, drenched in cold sweat.

  For one heartbeat, I convinced myself it had only been a dream.

  Then I shoved the blanket away and looked down.

  The bruise bloomed across my ankle, perfect and cruel, exactly where the vein had tied itself around.