The address on the paper led me to a faded parking lot behind an abandoned shopping complex. A dull gray sedan was already waiting.
Ethan stepped out from the passenger side. Still in his medical uniform, still with that unnerving calm.
"I'm Ethan," he said flatly, as if names were medical facts. "I used to be a trauma medic. Now I handle intake and recovery for those who still think."
"Get in," he said. No greeting, no inflection.
He opened the trunk. I hesitated.
"It has to be the trunk," he added. "Standard. Blindfold too."
He tied a strip of cloth over my eyes. No words of reassurance.
The trunk shut with a thud, and darkness swallowed me whole.
Then came the motion. The car started. The world became nothing but hum and vibration. I tried to count the seconds, then the turns. But time bent, looped, broke apart.
I began to hear things. The sound of boots marching. Shouts in a foreign language. Children laughing, then screaming. Rainfall. Machinery. A heartbeat. I smelled soil, bleach, metal, mint. A dying flower.
By the time the car stopped, I was sweating through my shirt.
They guided me down a flight of stairs. The air grew colder. The floor turned from pavement to concrete to something soft like dust.
The blindfold came off.
I stood in a dim basement. Fluorescent light buzzed from a cracked fixture. Piles of old electronics, books without covers, and a single portable generator surrounded us like corpses.
Ethan stood across from me, arms crossed. Next to him was someone else—a slim woman in an olive coat, her blond hair tied back, sharp eyes like broken glass.
"Alice," she said.
Alice’s tone was cooler, analytical. "You’ve seen symptoms. Dissociation. Memory disintegration. You felt it yourself, didn’t you? The instability. The 'place'."
She stepped toward a cluttered table, retrieving a sheaf of printed material. "This is what we know. A timeline, stitched together from half-deleted archives, oral accounts, things scraped from network dead zones."
2022: The Eastern European conflict ignites. Continues for nine years.
2030: The rise of the Neo-American Empire. A hundred years of proxy wars, shadow treaties, tech secessions.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
2130–2050: The Lost Twenty. No books, no media, no records. The Dusk begins.
"There is no official record of how it began," Alice said. "No origin event, no name on paper. Just a steady vanishing of narrative. People forgot. Libraries closed. History rewrote itself through absence."
Ethan cut in, voice edged with conviction. "That’s because the Dusk isn’t a thing you can observe. It’s a breach. A break in mind structure. The word itself is corrosive. The word itself triggers instability in most people. You say it? You think it? You begin to dissociate. That’s why there are no proper records. You can’t chronicle a force that dissolves the act of thinking."
Alice turned to him, clearly restraining herself. "But that doesn’t make it a weapon, Ethan. You assume there’s an architect, some hidden hand."
"Because there always is," Ethan replied. "Systems don’t just appear. They’re built. You think this is nature?"
"No," she said softly. "But not all disasters are designed. Some are inherited."
I watched them both. One ready to burn the structure down. One still trying to map the ruins.
Alice glanced at me. "This isn’t just theory. One of ours is missing. A field agent."
Ethan pulled up a screen. A photo appeared: a man in his thirties, resting beneath the flowering arches of a yellow-lit garden. Smiling, peaceful. Empty.
"His name was Elijah. He entered the Garden layer three weeks ago. Never came back."
"We need to know what happened," Alice said. "If he’s still... reachable."
Ethan stared at me. "Bring him out."
Alice added, "Talk to him.If he remembers anything."
She handed me a small object: a crystal pendant.
"It’s keyed to your signal," she explained. "Use it in the Garden. It may help you track him."
I looked down at the pendant. Felt its weight.
No further instructions. No promise of return.
Only another descent.
I didn’t accept the mission. Not really. I nodded, took the pendant, and left—but in my mind, I hovered on the edge. Something about it felt like a trap with no floor. I wanted to throw the pendant into the nearest drain.
Instead, I wore it around my neck.
And I whispered the word.
Dusk.
The Garden wasn’t a garden in any natural sense. It was the same space Lucy had taken me to before—a place of stillness, pleasure, and forgetting. But this time, the path led to a far more secluded corner, hidden from the usual flow of the Gardeners. I moved carefully, avoiding familiar voices and figures. It felt like returning to a dream, but slipping through its edge instead of walking into its center.
It was part botanical sanctuary, part therapeutic installation—sunlight filtered through tall windows in golden sheets, artificial but warm. The air smelled like childhood parks and half-remembered lemon balm. Somewhere, wind chimes hummed softly.
I followed the mental pull from the crystal. It led me across gentle hills and gravel paths, past sleeping people in reclining chairs, past bronze sculptures of animals I couldn’t name.
Then I saw him.
Elijah sat cross-legged under an arbor of white blossoms. A little girl—artificial, certainly, but lifelike—rested beside him. He was reciting poetry to her in a slow, almost reverent tone.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud… that floats on high o'er vales and hills…”
He looked… peaceful. As if he truly believed he was her father. I waited, listened, tried to interrupt. But every attempt—his name, a reminder of the mission—slid past him like wind through reeds.
Then the pendant pulsed.
Ethan’s voice—cold, flat, uninvited—buzzed through my skull.
“Mention his daughter. The real one.”
I hesitated. Then obeyed.
“Elijah. Your daughter. She’s actually not here. You remember, don’t you?”
The effect was instant and brutal. Elijah’s mouth twisted. His voice cracked mid-syllable. The girl flickered, then vanished. He let out a sound that didn’t belong in any garden.
And then the world bent.
Two guards emerged from nowhere, dressed in Dusk’s polite, silent black. They lifted him without effort, without reaction, and carried him away through the trees.
I stood still a long while. Birds chirped again. The garden began to reset.
Then the pendant buzzed once more.
Ethan’s voice was calm. “Well done. You’ve just completed your first extraction. You’re one of us now.”
I asked about Elijah. Ethan paused.
“He’s… recovering. Nothing more.”