Chapter 236: The Past Is Addictive.
The silence belonged only to dying places. Not peace—never peace—but the ground forgetting what rain felt like, the wind carrying nothing but the faint metallic taste of dust, and waves of heat rising like ghosts from soil that had once known life.
It was the silence of a world that had already passed judgment on me and was now simply waiting for my body to accept the verdict.
"Abram." Venna’s voice cut through even here, soft but insistent, her fingers still threaded tight through mine in the shadowed quiet of the libra. "If it’s too much, open your eyes."
I didn’t. The pull of the memory was stronger, dragging me deeper.
The wind scoured the wilderness in lazy, indifferent sweeps, pushing pale dust across the cracked plain like it had somewhere urgent to be. The sun, however, had nowhere else to go and made that everyone’s problem—blazing down with merciless white fury, turning the air into rippling glass.
The plain stretched out flat and endless in every direction, utterly uncaring. It had ignored years of screams, blood, and futile hope, and it would ignore me too.
My lips were split canyons of pain. My vision blurred at the edges in that treacherous, dreamy way that meant my body was negotiating surrender.
"Forward," I murmured to myself, the word coming out of a place below thought, raw and automatic. "Always forward."
I collapsed. Knees hit the dirt first, then my palms, then my forehead scraped against the dirt that felt like heated stone. The walls shimmered on the horizon—massive, fortified sentinels of hope—distorted by heat haze but real. Still possible. If the body would just cooperate.
"Hey." A voice. "You."
I couldn’t move. My arms trembled, refusing to push me up.
"Eeeg. Heeey."
The tone hooked something in me, too grounded, too specific to be another hallucination. My mind had been serving up far more elaborate torments lately. I dug trembling palms into the scorching dirt, arms quivering with the bone-deep weakness of a machine running on vapor, and forced myself upright.
The sun tried to murder me on the spot. White fire stabbed through my skull, forcing my eyes to squint against the glare.
I blinked hard, eyes watering with the last pathetic drops of moisture my body could spare, and focused.
A man lay sprawled maybe twenty feet away. Clean clothes—shockingly, impossibly clean against the filth of the plain. The first time I lived this moment, I’d assumed he was from the walls. Clean fabric out here meant safety. I hadn’t questioned it. There’d been no time for questions when survival was the only law.
I was already crawling toward him before conscious decision kicked in, knees scraping raw across the abrasive ground. A vicious bite mark marred the back of his hand—jagged, deep, the edges torn wrong. Not like the infected. Their bites were messy, frantic frenzies. This was deliberate. Precise in its brutality.
Something is entirely off about how I ended up here, the present-day me thought, the realization running like a cold undercurrent beneath the fevered memory. I was directed to this place. Something—someone—brought me here.
The infected were closing in behind me now. Their moans rolled across the flat expanse like distant thunder building to a storm, wet and guttural, growing louder with every dragging step. I could smell them.
What else have I missed? I demanded of the memory, straining against its fixed current while Venna’s fingers squeezed mine in the present, anchoring me. What else was happening around me that I was too busy surviving to see?
The memory seized control like a riptide.
I was running again—legs pumping on pure animal instinct, feet pounding the plain toward the distant walls. Dust exploded in gritty clouds with every stride. The sun clawed at my back, turning sweat to steam on my skin.
But the question gnawed at the edges of everything, quiet and relentless: How had that man ended up out here? You didn’t just stroll out of the walls. And that bite on his hand—those teeth marks were too clean, too deep, too wrong for the frenzied rot of the infected.
What brought him there?
The horde slammed into me from behind before the thought could finish.
Impact like a freight train of decaying flesh. Claws raked my shoulders. Teeth—fresh, sharp, impossibly human—sank into the side of my neck with a wet, searing crunch. White-hot pain lanced through the heat exhaustion, clarifying everything in a single, vicious instant.
They swarmed over me in a writhing mass, crushing me into the dirt, their moans a deafening wet chorus inches from my ears. I opened my mouth to scream, to curse, to beg—anything—but the sound died stillborn in my throat, choked by blood and weight and terror.
Relax, the present-day me whispered beneath the memory, a calm current fighting the chaos. This is when it happened. This is when the system awakened. This is the part you came for. Relax... and watch.
Teeth sank deeper. Cartilage tore. The world narrowed to blinding pain and the copper stench of my own blood.
My eyes slammed shut.
****
I gasped awake in the dark room, chest heaving, skin slick with fresh sweat. Venna’s fingers remained locked in mine, warm and steady anchors in the velvet blackness. The air here was cool, still, scented faintly with old stone and faint incense—worlds away from the burning plain.
"What happened?" I rasped, voice raw.
"We timed out," she said softly.
"Take me back." My grip tightened around her hand. "Please. Take me back."
She had yanked me out at the razor’s edge—the exact heartbeat before the system ignited in my blood for the first time. I had been so close to the truth.
"I can’t," Venna replied. Her breath was measured, careful, like she was handling fragile glass.
"Please."
"Abram." Her voice dropped to a low, warning hush. "The past is addictive. It will eat you alive if you let it."
"Please."
The darkness pressed in around us, intimate and heavy. Only the sound of our breathing—mine ragged, hers controlled—filled the small space between us.
"Okay," she said at last, reluctant. "But not today. Tomorrow. We go back with more time."
I said nothing, jaw clenched.
"And remember," she added quietly, "we have a deal."
"Okay," I muttered.
I sat there in the suffocating dark, turning over the fragments I’d finally seen. The man in pristine clothes lying on a plain no one simply walked across. The bite mark that belonged to no infected I’d ever encountered. The shadowy figure gliding through the dead like the wasteland itself had granted him passage.
I had always believed I survived the plain through raw stubbornness and blind luck.
Venna was offering a different answer.