Page 1 of What We Become

ONE

SAGE

Scrape. Tap. Scrape. Tap.

The sound finds me before anything else does. Wet slide, dull strike. Over and over. Like a metronome set by someone who has nowhere else to be.

Scrape. Tap. Scrape. Tap.

My head is full of sand. Heavy, gritty sand that shifts when I try to think, filling the spaces where thoughts should be. My mouth tastes like rust and chemicals—metallic, bitter, wrong. I try to swallow and my throat clenches around the taste, gagging. The motion sends a spike of pain through the back of my skull that’s so sharp my eyes fly open.

My vision takes a second to catch up, resolving shapes that don’t belong to any room I remember. There’s a wall of silvered plastic sheeting in front of me, nailed crooked over rough plywood. A dangling light bulb barfs a greasy, yellow glow into the space—tiny, barely wider than my shoulders, with a ceiling so low that my breath stirs the dust from the joists. The air smells of fresh lumber, bleach, and wet cement.

Scrape. Tap.

Someone—no. Him. Jamie. His silhouette moves in and out of the lamp’s corona through the one gap in the plastic. Each time he leans in, the image distorts behind the wrinkles in the sheeting, making him look like a string of accidents spliced together.

He moves, and then I can see him through the gap, his eyes are open too wide, glassy and black beneath the light. His jaw locked so tight the muscle flutters under the skin. He’s stacking something in the gap, hands moving with the same measured repetition every time—load, place, press, smooth. The object thumps down with a puff of powder, and he trowels mortar in a thick, gray tongue.

Brick. He’s laying bricks.

I don’t speak. Not yet.

Assess your environment. Identify the threats. Seek your exits.

Holden’s voice in my head. I’ve heard it enough times in briefings that it fires before the panic can.

My wrists are zip-tied behind the metal bracket of a chair. The ties are commercial grade, not the flimsy ones you buy at the hardware store. My feet are lashed to the chair legs at the ankles with more of the same. The chair itself is metal-framed, and when I try to shift, it doesn’t move. It has to be bolted down, or weighted. The floor under my sandals is bare plywood, gritty with mortar dust. The plastic sheeting extends up and over, sealed at the seams with duct tape. It’s construction grade and marked with a small label that says, “vapor-resistant barrier.”

This isn’t improvised.

The thought arrives cold and certain. This room was built by someone who understands containment. Jamie planned every inch of it.

I catalog what I can see through the gap. A hallway beyond. Hardwood polished floor. Crown molding along the ceiling.

I’m in a house. The light from the hallway is warm, residential.

Brock’s beach house.

Memory punches through in jagged fragments. The water bottle in Jamie’s car. The cool slide of liquid down my throat, the chemical aftertaste I mistook for plastic. The growing weight in my limbs, the softening of the world’s edges. His indicator clicking on.

The text.

The driveway.

Jamie is Stephen.

My stomach drops. Bile burns up my throat, and I force it down.

“Hey,” it comes out as a croak, as if startled from a dry pipe. The echo is weirdly muffled, like the sound is afraid to leave this plastic cocoon. My tongue feels fat. Useless.

Jamie doesn’t stop or even glance at me. He slides the next brick into its slot and lines it up so precisely you’d think he was building a bomb, not a wall. The mortar smears up around the edges, splattering his wrists in ashy moons. When he finally glances over, his smile is soft, friendly.

“Hey, yourself.”

Another brick. Another layer in my tomb.

This can’t be real.