They Were Never Here — Part 3: Memory Eaters

 There’s something they don’t want us to remember.

Not just about who was here. But who we were, before they came.

Milo and I moved that night. We didn’t tell the others—not over text, not even on the forum. He said it wasn’t safe anymore, that something had changed. They’d found our signal. We barely had time to pack.

He took me to a warehouse on the edge of town, camouflaged to look abandoned. Inside were battered cots, solar panels, stacks of dusty notebooks—real ones. Written by hand.

“This was one of the first Unwritten strongholds,” Milo told me. “Before most of them disappeared.”

I asked what happened to them.

He didn’t answer.

There was a woman there. Name was Kas. Sharp eyes, shaved head, voice like gravel. She didn’t trust me at first. Asked what school I went to as a kid, what the mascot was. Then she asked who the president was in 2016.

I told her the truth: “It used to be someone else.”

She just nodded.

Kas used to be a neuroscientist. Said she saw the shift before she felt it. Noticed tiny changes in memory recall among patients. A name misspelled, a hometown replaced, spouses remembering different first dates. It all seemed like dementia… until the patterns pointed somewhere else.

“Their tech doesn’t erase,” she said. “It overwrites. Like putting new paint on a rotting wall.”

“But why not wipe us completely?” I asked.

She paused.

“Because we’re still useful. Until we’re not.”

That night, I dreamed of them.

Not their bodies—they don’t have those, at least not in the way we understand. I dreamed of shimmering, shapeless things that moved like thoughts. I saw them weaving stories, stitching lies into the air like silk.

And I remembered something new.

A man in a white coat, standing over me. Not Milo, not Kas. Someone… familiar. He said my name like he’d said it a thousand times.

“You’ll remember this,” he whispered. “Even when they change the rest.”

I woke up gasping.

There was a scar behind my left ear.

I’d never noticed it before.

Milo says that’s how they test us. Tag us. Some of us resist naturally—something about brain chemistry, maybe trauma, maybe even dumb luck—but others… others were made immune.

Engineered.

“We think some humans were trying to fight them off from the inside,” Kas said, “before the shift went global. Before the memory net fully wrapped around the world.”

She showed me a map. Red pins for known Unwritten. Blue pins for disappearances. Yellow for possible rogue labs.

There were only three yellows.

One of them was less than 200 miles away.

And it was still active.

Tomorrow, we leave.

We’re going to find that lab.

I don’t know what we’ll find—data, answers, maybe just a trap—but I know this:

I was part of something before I forgot. Before they made me forget.

And if I can remember who I was…

Maybe I’ll remember how to stop them.