Page 93 of Psycho Obsession
“He’s self-harming! Sedate him!”
The door bursts open. But it’s not nurses. It’s the “Choir.” Six kids in silver masks, their bodies translucent, their chests open to reveal glowing vacuum tubes. they don’t grab my arms; they plug cables into my neck.
I’m back in the harbour. I’m back in the cellar. I’m in both places at once, a split-screen nightmare. In one eye, I see the detective’s worried face; in the other, I see the Mother standing over Hallow’s charred remains, stitching the white lace dress back together with a needle made of moonlight.
“Ryker was right,” I howl, my head slamming back against the chair. “The Ledger wasn’t empty! It was written in the blood we haven’t spilled yet! We’re not the monsters, we’re the ink!”
I look at the mirror. The glass cracks, a spiderweb ofblack lines. Behind the silver, there’s another room. Another white box. And in that box is Ryker. He’s sitting in the exact same chair, in the exact same position, clawing at the exact same spot on his arm.
We aren’t in different rooms. We’re the same person, split down the middle by a Mother who wanted to see if a soul could be partitioned like a hard drive.
“Hallow!” I scream, the word tearing the ceiling open.
The ceiling doesn’t fall. It dissolves into a thousand white butterflies—no, they’re birth certificates. Blank ones. Thousands of them, raining down like snow.
The detective stands up, but her legs are twenty feet long now. She towers over me, her voice a thunderclap. “Who is the Fourth Child, Jex? You kept mentioning a Fourth Child in the warehouse. Who is the one who stayed in the garden?”
The garden.
The memory hits me like a lightning strike. The dirt. The small, shallow hole behind the clinic. We didn’t just bury the Mother there. We buried the part of us that knew how to tell the truth.
“I’m the garden,” I whisper, my eyes rolling back until I can see the inside of my own skull. It’s not brain matter. It’s a server farm. Rows of black towers humming with a low, electric hive-mind energy.
The Mother walks out from behind the server racks. She’s not static anymore. She’s flesh. She’s bone. She reaches out and puts a finger to my lips. Her skin is cold—colder than the harbour, colder than the cellar.
“Don’t spoil the ending, Asset 401,” she whispers. “We still have to see if the fire in the next room is real.”
The white box starts to melt. The walls turn to liquid wax, dripping onto the floor. And as the detective vanishes into the static, I see the door at the top of the cellar stairs swing open wide.
But it’s not light coming through. It’s the ocean. A wall of black, salty water, carrying the scorched remains of a white lace dress.
I open my mouth to scream, but all that comes out is the humming.
One long, perfect, digital note.
The world isn’t “rebooting.” It’s rotting.
The detective’s face doesn’t flicker with static; it bruises. Her skin turns the colour of bad meat, her eyes sinking into her skull until she looks like the mother we buried in the dirt behind the house. She’s leaning over the table, and her breath smells of the copper-milk and the gasoline we used to wash the blood off the floorboards.
“Jex, you’re not in a lab,” she says, and her voice is the sound of gravel being poured into a grave. “You’re in a psych ward in the basement of a courthouse. You’ve been here for six hours. You haven’t stopped screaming about a ‘Signal’ since we pulled you out of the harbour.”
“The Signal is her!” I howl, my hands clawing at the table, my fingernails ripping against the wood until they bleed. Real, red, hot blood. No wires. Just the mess of being alive. “She’s the one who told us the neighbours were ‘The Council’! She’s the one who gave Ryker the ledger!”
“There was no ledger, Jex.” She slides a folder across the table.
It’s not leather. It’s a manila folder, stained with waterand salt. Inside aren’t names of global elites. There are photos. Polaroids.
I look at them. My stomach turns over, a cold, oily weight.
It’s the family from next door. The ones who came over with a casserole because they hadn’t seen our “Mother” in weeks. In the photos, they aren’t ‘Magistrates.’ They’re just people in pyjamas, their faces frozen in the same shock I saw on Hallow’s face before she jumped.
“We thought…” I choke, the air in the room turning to ash. “Ryker said they were the ones who wired her. He said they were the Reclamation Team.”
“Ryker is in the room next door, Jex. He’s been catatonic since he arrived. He keeps trying to ‘delete’ his own skin with a plastic spoon.”
The room starts to stretch. The white walls are closing in, pulsing with the rhythm of my own frantic heart. The “Mother” isn’t a silver-haired scientist. She’s the shadow in the corner of my eye—the one I’ve been talking to since I was five years old to keep from hearing Dad’s belt hit the floor.
I look at the mirror. I don’t see a “Prototype.” I see a boy with hollow eyes and a mind that has been hollowed out to make room for a ghost.
