The days bled into each other, but it didn’t matter. Time had become a foreign thing to me. The world was changing—not in the way the morning sun rises or the way seasons shift. No, this was different. It was as though the entire planet was breathing again, and each breath came heavier, more labored than the last.
He was still there, sitting across from me in the same café, but he was different. There was a distance in his eyes, a flicker of recognition that never quite settled. He would sometimes catch my gaze and for a moment, I’d see the old him, the Sam I knew—but it would vanish just as quickly as it had come.
“I dreamed of you again,” he said one day, his voice thin, barely above a whisper.
I didn’t ask him what it was about. I already knew.
“You’re remembering things,” I told him, my voice not as certain as I wanted it to be. “You’re waking up.”
His fingers trembled on his coffee cup. His eyes darted around the café, as if looking for something—someone—who wasn’t there. He had that haunted look, like someone who’d heard voices in the dark but wasn’t sure they were real.
“I know something’s wrong,” he muttered. “I can feel it. In my bones. Something’s coming. Something... we’ve been trying to forget.”
I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to remind him that we weren’t the ones trying to forget. The world was, and it was losing its mind as it remembered.
Out in the streets, whispers of the Resistance began to spread like wildfire. Small pockets of people, people who had never forgotten, were organizing, gathering, trying to piece together the truth from the fractured fragments of our shattered world. They were the few who hadn’t been affected by the overload, the few who were still whole.
And they were dangerous.
I found out about them when I overheard a conversation at the corner of Second and Rose. A tall woman with a scar on her face, eyes sharp as shards of glass, was speaking to a group of ragged, dirty-looking survivors.
“They think they’re safe,” she hissed. “But they’re not. The damage has been done. They’re only remembering half of it. And he is coming. We need to move fast before it’s too late.”
I’d heard that name before. In Kas’s voice. Him.
But what did that mean? Who was he?
I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was connected to something far worse than the memory-wipe. Something deeper. Something... alien.
As the weeks passed, the Resistance grew bolder. They started disrupting the power grids, making it harder for the rest of the world to stay connected, to stay asleep. Their leaders—those who had managed to piece together the fragments of the past—were talking of an invasion, an alien force that had been hiding in plain sight. A species so ancient, so hidden, that they had manipulated us into erasing them from our memories.
But now? Now that the floodgates of remembrance had opened, the alien threat was waking too.
It wasn’t just the Resistance I had to worry about anymore. It was the aliens who were stirring from their slumber, drawing closer.
And Sam—he was the key. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. But I could feel it in my gut. He remembered something now. Something important.
When I told him about the Resistance, about the threat we faced, his reaction was nothing short of... strange. He stared at me with wide eyes, like a man on the verge of remembering something even darker.
“I’ve seen them,” he whispered, gripping my wrist. “Not in my dreams. Not in my mind. In the sky.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
But I was about to find out.
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