👉 Previous decision: You continued to feign devotion, gaining deeper access into Aethelgard Sanctuary’s operations.
My feigned devotion bought me a terrifyingly clear view of Marcus’s ruthlessness. Just days after my discovery, he escalated his strategy in the most insidious way possible. Clara, my daughter, arrived at Aethelgard with my grandson, a forced smile on her face.
“Father,” she said, her voice stiff, a coldness in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. “Marcus thought it best we join you.”
She avoided my gaze, pulling my grandson closer. Marcus had twisted my financial collapse, my former career, into a narrative of spiritual impurity. I was branded an unrepentant “heretic” whose worldly attachments threatened their salvation.
“You’re disrupting their peace, Julian,” Marcus whispered to me in a secluded hallway, his voice a silken threat. “Their spiritual journey.”
My grandson wouldn’t meet my eyes. Clara deflected my attempts at conversation, citing my “negative energy.” I was isolated, trapped within the sanctuary’s walls, watching my own family turn against me.
One evening, I found a small, folded note tucked into my locker among my clean clothes. It was crude, handwritten, and smelled faintly of floor wax. “Sub-basement. Midnight. Maintenance Room.”
My heart pounded. I went. The air in the maintenance room was thick with the smell of ammonia and rust. A figure emerged from the shadows: Eli O’Connor, a former janitor whose face bore the marks of years of fear and silence.
Eli’s hands trembled as he spoke, his voice barely a whisper. “They’re not just wiping memories, Julian. They’re harvesting them.”
He pointed to a grimy pipe running along the ceiling. “Downstairs. The sub-basement. It’s not just servers. They’re illegally extracting and storing cognitive data. Selling it.”
“Who?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Who is ‘they’?”
Eli’s eyes darted around the room, as if the walls themselves had ears. “Offshore. Syndicate. Marcus is just the local face.”
He dug into his pocket, pulling out a small, metallic object. “This. It’s an override. For the server vault. But it only works for a short window during shift change.”
He pressed it into my palm. It was a cold, hard piece of truth. Ten years, he’d been silent. Ten years of fear, finally broken.
**➡️ Read CHAPTER 6: The Brother’s Signal to continue the story**
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