Skye didn't remember walking out of the hidden room.
One minute she was holding the photo, heart galloping. The next, she was sitting on a park bench… barefoot. At night. In her pajamas.
The city around her buzzed with unnatural silence. No cars. No wind. Just the streetlights, humming like they were whispering secrets in Morse code.
Her phone was gone. So was the key. But the ring remained.
Still warm. Still watching.
She stood slowly, dizzy. Her head throbbed with fragmented images—hands she didn't recognize, voices she never heard, flashes of a little girl staring through a one-way mirror.
Was she remembering… or dreaming?
Then she saw him.
Sitting at the end of the bench was a man in a white coat, sketching something in a leather notebook. His face was pale, clean-shaven, and unsettlingly symmetrical—like he'd been drawn by AI that couldn't quite replicate human randomness.
"Skye," he said, without looking up. His voice was too smooth. "You made it through the first five. That's impressive."
"Who the hell are you?" she snapped. Her voice cracked on the last word.
He looked up. Smiled politely. "I'm the Memory Merchant. I collect what people forget. Sometimes what they shouldn't forget."
She took a step back. "I don't know what you're talking about."
He raised an eyebrow. "No? Then how do you explain this?"
He turned the notebook toward her.
It was a sketch—of her. Sitting exactly as she was, on this very bench. But in the drawing, her eyes were missing.
Just hollow sockets.
She shivered. "You're sick."
He chuckled softly. "No, I'm just curious. Do you know how many of your memories aren't yours? Do you know how many times you've done this already?"
Skye's pulse quickened. "Done what?"
He flipped the page. Another drawing—this time, of a dark room with red string crisscrossing walls. A name circled in the center.
SKYE ASHWIN.
"It's not the first time you've played this game, Skye," the man said, standing now. His coat brushed the ground like a doctor at the edge of a bad diagnosis. "And it won't be the last. Unless you figure out who started it."
He leaned in, close enough she could smell ink and dust.
"You weren't chosen. You volunteered."
Skye's stomach dropped.
"No," she whispered.
"Oh yes." He tapped her temple with his pen. "And every time, you come a little closer to remembering why."
He stepped back into the shadows, and before she could speak—he was gone. Like he'd never existed.
She staggered to her feet.
A new object lay on the bench where he'd been sitting.
A memory card. Labeled in permanent marker: "6: The Watchtower."
Skye stared at it. Her hands were trembling. She picked it up—and as her fingers touched it, the world tilted.
Reality spun on its axis. The bench, the trees, the streetlights—gone.
She was in a stairwell again. Only this time, it wasn't the one from her building.
It was industrial. Wet concrete walls. Red warning lights. The kind of place where bad things happened—and no one asked questions.
Above her, painted in peeling white letters on a metal door:
WATCHTOWER - ACCESS LEVEL 6
Her ring buzzed.
And this time, the message wasn't just text.
It was a voice.
"Skye. He's right. You've been here before. But this time… someone else is watching."