The promotion to Floor Supervisor meant I finally had a reason to leave Sub-Floor 8 and its oppressive hum each day, but it also meant longer hours. I often returned to my apartment building late, the city lights a blurred smear outside my taxi window.
One Tuesday night, as I fumbled with my keys at my apartment door, a hand suddenly clamped over my mouth. A sharp, metallic scent filled the air.
My heart leaped into my throat. I struggled, but a voice, low and urgent, hissed in my ear.
“Julian, it’s Clara! Don’t scream. He’ll know.”
The hand released me, and I spun around. Clara Delancy stood there, her face gaunt, her eyes wide and haunted. Marcus’s ex-fiancée, his former co-founder. The one who had vanished years ago.
Her hair was streaked with gray, her clothes rumpled. She looked nothing like the vibrant woman in the old corporate photos.
“Clara?” I breathed, my voice barely audible. “What are you doing here?”
“Hiding,” she whispered, glancing nervously around the empty hallway. “From Marcus. He sent people for me.”
She pulled me quickly into my apartment, locking the door behind us, her movements frantic. She pressed her ear against the wood, listening intently.
“Julian,” she said, turning to me, her eyes burning. “You have no idea what he’s doing at Aetheris. The severance tech, it’s not what he claims.”
I stared at her, my mind reeling. “He says it’s… cognitive optimization. Stress reduction.”
Clara laughed, a harsh, humorless sound that scraped against my ears. “Lies. All of it. He didn’t invent the microchips, Julian. He found something older.”
She pulled a thick, worn folder from a canvas bag slung over her shoulder. Its contents were bound with twine.
“Beneath the foundation of that building,” she continued, her voice gaining a feverish intensity, “he unearthed an 18th-century gothic relic. An altar, a binding stone. He didn’t invent anything. He just… repurposed it.”
She thrust the folder into my hands. It was heavy, filled with legal documents, photographs, and meticulously detailed notes.
“The daily severance,” she explained, her voice dropping to a horrified whisper, “it binds human consciousness. Feeds it to an ancient entity chained beneath the building. In exchange, the entity provides Marcus with hyper-predictive financial algorithms. He’s not wiping memories, Julian. He’s harvesting souls.”
I gripped the folder, my knuckles white. The black veins on my co-workers’ necks, the whispers, the bleeding wallpaper—it all slammed into place with sickening clarity.
“This folder,” Clara said, tapping the cover, “contains sworn legal affidavits. Testimonies from former employees, their families. Evidence of Marcus’s ritualistic human trafficking. Of what he’s done.”
She pointed to a grainy photo inside the folder: a dark, obsidian-like slab, etched with familiar, unsettling runes. It was the altar from my nightmares, from my brief, half-forgotten warning note.
“He’s been doing this for years,” Clara said, her voice cracking. “I tried to stop him. He tried to have me ‘severed.’ I barely escaped.”
I looked at the documents, then at Clara’s terrified face. The full horror of Marcus’s empire, and my own complicity, crashed down on me.
“You have to stop him, Julian,” Clara pleaded, her hands grabbing my arm, her grip surprisingly strong. “Before he consumes everyone. Before he consumes you entirely.”
➡️ Read CHAPTER 7 to continue the story
+ There are no comments
Add yours