​Chapter 9. Do Not Judge

His consciousness surfaced with a jolt, as if someone had shoved him up from underwater. Bare walls loomed around him, cold concrete. Barry stood beside him. At their feet lay a body.

Nothing remained of her head — just a mash of bone, flesh, and hair smeared across the floor.

“Really lost her mind,” Barry said, trying to joke, but he didn’t laugh.

Another image flickered in Mark’s memory — a dead man, that trip to the Western sector, the Ravens. But here it didn’t smell of smoke and oil; it smelled of damp earth and chemicals. Outside the window stretched the deformed farms of Sector 17. The North.

On the wall behind the body was a brown splatter. It was as if this woman’s final thoughts had burst outward — and just frozen there as a stain on the concrete.

Three precise shots to the torso. Heart, liver, lung. Anatomically exact — an execution, same as at Babylon.

Barry stepped to the wall and idly tapped the crude drawing above the bed — the goat’s head of Baphomet.

“So,” he said, “think she really believed in this stuff?”

He said it as if talking about the weather. Nothing in the room struck him as strange. For him, it was the first time; for Mark — it wasn’t.

He stared at the symbol, at the posture of the body, at the spray on the wall — and his mind snagged under the weight of contradictions. He remembered another sector. Another victim. But Barry stood here, talking about a woman, and they were in the northern Ring.

Mark looked at the symbol, at the body, and nausea twisted his stomach. The details didn’t match, but the ritual did. As if someone had taken a familiar scene and swapped out the actor: the same room, the same goat on the wall, the same execution — but a different victim. Which version was real? The one in his memory? Or the one lying in front of him? The world watched a new cut of the film; he was the only one who remembered the old one.

They left the body to the drone. Barry muttered something about paperwork, about Sector 17 being a nest of bastards, and about how crossing the Major was a bad idea. He said the same about every gang. Mark barely listened. He nodded, mumbled something, but his mind was elsewhere.

At last, they were done.

They had to return to the office — sign forms, check in, leave Barry behind. But in his mind, that other room still lived, the one from a different reality. Wrong. Misaligned. When he finally broke free of the agents’ empty chatter, he slid into the car.

“Route,” he said, his voice hollow, and gave the address.

The car moved off without a sound. For it, this was just another address among millions, just a set of coordinates. For Mark — a pilgrimage back to the place where his world had fractured. A desperate attempt to prove he wasn’t losing his mind.

The drive felt thick and slow, the headlights cutting through the rain, and with every meter the hum of the tires grew more intrusive.

Then he heard Eliza’s voice behind his shoulder, clear as breath on his skin:

“Mark.”

The seat was empty. Only raindrops crawling down the window.

“Mark,” she whispered again — muffled, as if coming from the car itself, from deep within its frame.

The whisper seemed to vibrate under his skin. Mark shut his eyes tight, teeth clenched, trying to force the apparition out of his head. She isn’t here. She isn’t.

He inhaled deeply, opened his eyes, and fixed them on the road.

The factory, the Ravens’ graffiti — everything as in the earlier version. The air outside once again stank of smoke and machine oil. The real reality, the one he remembered. The pressure in his chest eased a little.

His heart knocked dully against his ribs, marking each step as he climbed to the second floor. The building’s owner briefly poked his acne-pocked face out of a tiny window, then vanished.

The first door was covered with torn faux leather. The second. The third — the one where he’d spoken with Angela.

He knocked. First softly, then harder, drumming his fist against the wood. Silence. He pressed on the handle — locked — and leaned his ear against the door, but there was no sound, no floorboard creak. He pushed harder, and the door gave way. The apartment was empty.

A low drone in his ears curdled into nausea, a bitter wave rising straight to his throat. This couldn’t be. He had been here. The conversation, the pentagram, her strange reverent gaze...

Mark rushed downstairs and slammed the car door behind him. The cabin felt like a cramped, airless box of plastic.

“Call history for the last hour,” he forced out.

The car immediately delivered its verdict on his memory.

“9:11 a.m. Call. Homicide. Priority level three. Sector 17, North.”

He kept turning his cuff as if the device itself were to blame.

“No other calls?” he whispered. “Nothing for Westside? For the Ravens?”

The pause stretched too long, as if the car was trying to reconcile his insane request with the Circuit’s logic.

“No. In the last twenty-four hours, the logs contain one call. Sector 17, North.”

There had been no man, no Angela. The system was sure of it. Barry was sure. The whole world was sure. And he was left alone with his memory — of a reality that had never existed.

He sat in the car, listening to the rain drumming over the roof. What had happened?

First thought — he had finally snapped. Completely. He’d seen it plenty of times. Good cops, soldiers — at some point their minds just said “enough” and buckled. Showed them demons, made them hear whispers or crush invisible insects. Maybe it was his turn now. Twenty years in this filth. The war. The Ring. Sooner or later it had to happen.

He rubbed his temples. The theory was logical, but wrong. He’d once read that a madman never knows he’s mad.

The smell of smoke and machine oil in Westside, the torn faux-leather on the door, the cracks in the wall. You don’t invent things like that. A broken mind doesn’t conjure details that specific.

It felt like... an old reel of film. As if someone had taken the record of his day, cut out a section — the call with the dead man, the encounter with Angela — and spliced in another. A new piece, with the woman and the North. And the old one was simply left on the floor, forgotten.

And everyone around him — Barry, the car, the City’s system — played back the new, edited version only. He alone remembered what lived in the removed scene. But who could have done it? Who was the editor playing with his life?

That thought was worse than madness itself. Because if he wasn’t insane, then someone existed who could, with a single flick of thought, change reality. Rewrite the past.

But how do you cut a strip of film straight out of a man’s mind? And then a horrifying, vile idea flashed across his consciousness: a patch.

What if they’d implanted something in him? During the war, in the hospital? Or last night while he was drinking with Barry? A hidden neural chip that could erase and overwrite memory. Make him obedient. Controllable.

The thought grew, swelled into something grotesque. And what if they didn’t implant anything at all? What if he’d always been like this?

Mark lifted his hand. Skin. Fingers. They felt fake. What if he was a borg? A flesh-puppet stuffed with synthetics and borrowed memories. His life, his service, his hatred for the City and the Ring — nothing but data scraped from a database. And now... now the program had glitched, and he’d seen something he was never meant to see — a cut piece of film.

Something boiled inside him — hot and black. Rage. If he was a machine, then he was a broken machine. And he would find whoever built it and tear the truth out of them — what was real, and what wasn’t. He slammed his fist into the dashboard. He had to prove that at least something was real. Otherwise, he might as well step out of the car and walk into the path of a truck.

The drive home — to Eliza’s apartment in the Ring — was short, too short. In the car, Mark let himself drift into a half-sleep. His mind thickened, heavy, and he watched the vehicle glide forward. He stopped thinking about the cuffs in the drawer, about the two versions of the same death. He just needed to reach the place he, for reasons he couldn’t explain, called home.

The streets grew narrower and darker; the rare streetlights caught strips of wet, cracked concrete and the rusty bones of rebar jutting from the walls. In the rearview display, a black, empty street stretched behind him.

The car turned into the final alley before the building. The wheels sloshed through a wide puddle coated in an oily film. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the ripple — and the drowsiness vanished at once.

For a fraction of a second, in the rainbow sheen of the puddle, a reflection flickered. Not of streetlights or walls, but of two predatory pinpoints of light.

A white van.

He snapped around — nothing. The street behind was utterly empty, silent. Not a sound. His heart stumbled, stopped for a beat, then struck again — heavy, hollow. A slight shift, a hairline crack in reality, showing what was hidden beneath. The reflection in the water hadn’t shown what was, but what might be there.

Long ago, they had taught him how to spot a tail by the double appearance of a car, by illogical turns. But how do you notice someone who isn’t there at all?

That tail was as flawless as the borg’s movements back in the bar. It didn’t hide in alleys. Most likely, it was right behind him — invisible to any normal eye. And only the fracture in the world had let Mark notice it at all.

Cold shot through him — a sharp, sobering stab of reality straight into the heart of paranoia. He wasn’t losing his mind. Someone was hunting him.

The car stopped by the entrance. For several seconds, Mark sat still, listening to the rain and the pounding in his chest. He didn’t turn around. He knew: if he looked back, there would be nothing there. But he felt eyes on him — an alien, inhuman presence grazing the back of his skull.

He stepped out of the car, and the rain immediately clawed at his hair and clothes. Every step toward the entrance felt heavy, a little too deliberate. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but he felt the emptiness behind him — a void more frightening than any pursuer. A void that watched him.

The apartment greeted him with half-darkness and its familiar smell. He locked the door behind him, slid the heavy bolt into place — a useless ritual. If a borg was after him, no door would stop it. If his own mind was the one hunting him, a door would help even less.

Leaning back against the door, he stayed there in the dark. His breathing was rough. A borg. Surveillance. He went over the things he could still call facts. The reflection in the puddle. That foreign gaze. It had been real.

But what if it wasn’t? What if it was just a glare, a trick of light on oily water? And everything else — just nerves?

He moved across the room and sat on the unmade bed. The streetlights pushed back only a thin layer of the gloom. Everything was where it belonged. Too ordinary for a world where invisible killers were hunting him.

Maybe this is what madness really looks like — not screaming, not foam on the lips, but a quiet, suffocating certainty about things that don’t exist at all. The unshakable conviction that a reflection in a puddle is more real than the pavement under your feet. Mark checked the cuff: pulse normal. Blood pressure normal. The system registered no panic, no stress response, nothing unusual. According to it, absolutely everything was fine. Perhaps, he thought, the system knew better than he did.

“Cuff,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“I’m listening, Mark,” it answered immediately.

“Tell me about paranoia.”

There was a pause — tiny, almost courteous, as if the device weighed how honest it should be.

“Of course, Mark. In simplified terms, paranoia is a state in which a person becomes convinced that someone or something intends them harm. Ordinary events may appear meaningful, glances or coincidences may seem threatening. Distrust becomes pervasive. In certain cases, the brain may generate auditory or visual hallucinations.”

Each calm, helpful word landed like a clean incision straight into his thoughts, cutting through whatever was left of certainty. A psychiatrist? No — a psychiatrist meant BioTech, and BioTech had one answer to everything: a patch. A patch that would rewrite neural pathways, reset the mind, polish it until it gleamed. No, he wasn’t letting anyone do that to him.

He pulled off his jacket, and his fingers brushed something hard inside the pocket — the book he had taken from Babylon. He had almost forgotten it existed. The cover was warped, swollen from moisture. Using the cuff, he forced the thing to speak, to unfold its contents. The translation streamed out in jagged, feverish fragments: “...spill the blood upon Ishet and call the Whore...”, “...Zazas, Zazas, Nasatanada Zazas...”, “...the torch-bearing goddess led the Nameless One...”. A collection of rites, scraps of delirium, a mixture of alchemy, invocation, and rot. And beneath the familiar sigil — the half-cross entwined with the serpent — there was nothing. Not a single word.

At the very end, on the inside of the cover, something had been carved by hand, the letters crooked and desperate:

The Book of the Nameless.

There is no truth, only the border of sleep.

Your number is eighteen.

Candle, wormwood, and lavender — light only one.

The truth of your will is a lie.

The truth of your lie is will.

Fire devours itself to burn brighter.

Numbers are a lie.

Follow her.

He sat there staring at those lines, the words sinking through him like cold rain through cracked concrete, and didn’t notice the moment when reality thinned and softened, giving way to the heavy, bottomless pool of sleep.

Morning seeped into the room with the same gray, bloodless dawn as always. He rose with a pounding skull and the sour aftertaste of last night’s fear on his tongue. The other side of the bed was cold — Eliza had not returned. He didn’t even flinch at that. It had become the rule, not the exception.

Protocol demanded he report to the office. The only ritual that still made sense in this fractured world.

The rain had stopped, but the air hung thick and wet, as if sagging under its own weight. The street was empty: no people, no cars, no sound. For a moment, he almost believed that everything that had happened yesterday had been some elaborate fever dream.

He had already reached his car when a sharp pinprick pierced the back of his hand. A thin dart protruded from his skin, its dark plastic flights trembling slightly.

Warmth surged through his veins — heavy, syrupy, immediate. His knees gave way. The world tilted, blurred, shuddered like a malfunctioning holo, the edges dissolving into nothing.

Two figures glided out of the shadow of a nearby building. Black jumpsuits, sealed helmets — faceless, efficient, inevitable. They caught him under the arms without a word and dragged him toward the open doors of a white van.

The last thing he saw was the indifferent sky of the Ring — gray, hollow, uncaring. Then the darkness closed in completely and swallowed him whole.