Chapter 115: Where Did He Go?

Astrid Vale

I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the father’s body twisting into something feral, heard the boy’s scream, watched the soldiers drag him away with the kind of practiced efficiency that still turned my stomach hours later. And then the mother’s face, blank and offended, insisting she’d never had a husband at all.

I told myself there had to be some explanation that didn’t involve losing my mind. Maybe I’d confused the timeline. Maybe the boy I’d followed wasn’t actually the same child. Maybe grief did something strange to people down here, some custom I hadn’t learned yet that made them deny loss out loud rather than mourn it openly.

But I knew what I’d seen. I’d been there. I’d felt the impact of his body when he lunged, had shoved that boy out of the way myself.

The next morning, I found one of the settlement workers near the market stalls, a woman I’d exchanged a few words with before, and tried to raise it as casually as I could manage.

"There was some kind of disturbance yesterday," I said. "Near the eastern corridor."

She frowned, genuinely puzzled. "I don’t think so. Nothing happened yesterday that I heard of."

"No one became ill? Nobody needed the doctors urgently?"

She shook her head slowly, studying me now with a faint concern that made my skin prickle. "No. Why do you ask?"

"No reason," I said, and walked away before she could press further.

It wasn’t just the mother and the boy, then. Whatever had happened to their memory of it had spread further than one family. The entire settlement, or at least everyone I’d spoken to so far, seemed to have simply forgotten a man had turned feral in the middle of a crowded street.

I went looking for the boy after that, and found him easily enough, playing some chasing game with a handful of other children near the settlement’s edge. He looked exactly as he had at dinner, laughing, entirely unbothered, his arm moving freely without a trace of pain. I studied him for a long moment before I noticed something that settled the last of my doubt.

He was wearing the same shirt from yesterday, a distinct pattern along the collar I recognized immediately. This wasn’t some other child who resembled him. This was the same boy. Which meant I hadn’t confused two families, hadn’t misremembered which child belonged to which parent.

That had genuinely been him.

I found a man working near one of the storage buildings and asked, as neutrally as I could manage, "What happens when someone becomes feral?"

His expression shifted instantly into something uncomfortable. "The doctors handle it."

"And then?" I pressed.

He hesitated. "He’s taken care of."

"Where?"

"The medical ward," he said, already stepping back toward his work, clearly eager to end the conversation.

The medical ward. The same place I’d been taken for my examination. The same doctor who’d gone pale over my blood sample. I filed that connection away carefully as I walked in that general direction, not sneaking exactly, just finding reasons to pass close enough to observe.

Soldiers moved in and out of the entrance with a steady rhythm, and doctors crossed between rooms with clipboards and trays I couldn’t get a clear look at. One door near the back stood more heavily guarded than the rest, two soldiers positioned on either side of it without any pretense of casualness.

"What’s kept there?" I asked one of them, keeping my tone light.

"Treatment rooms," he said, giving me nothing beyond that.

I noticed something else as I lingered. Nobody entered that section alone. Every person who approached did so with at least one other person beside them, and nobody who came out spoke about what waited inside. That silence told me more than an actual answer would have.

Then I saw Dr Audrey crossing the corridor with a tray in her hands. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second, and something flickered across her expression before she smoothed it over. Not fear exactly. Something closer to recognition, mixed with a concern she clearly hadn’t meant to let show.

She looked away quickly and continued on without a word.

I didn’t confront her. I simply stood there a moment longer, turning everything over in my head. My blood, drawn and treated like something valuable rather than routine. An entire community’s memory of a violent incident, simply gone overnight. A heavily guarded section of the medical ward that nobody discussed.

Three things that didn’t fit together yet, but felt, increasingly, like they belonged to the same puzzle.

I made my way back toward the dining area later that afternoon, and found the mother and boy there again, exactly as they’d been the night before. She was laughing at something, her son beside her devouring a plate of food like any ordinary child. Nothing about either of them suggested loss, or fear, or the faintest memory of yesterday’s violence.

I watched them for a long moment, and a new question settled into my chest, one I hadn’t thought to ask yet.

Where was the father?

If the wife had forgotten him entirely, if the boy claimed he’d never had one, someone somewhere had to still know where he’d actually gone. He hadn’t simply vanished into thin air. The soldiers had restrained him. The doctors had taken him somewhere. A person didn’t just cease to exist because everyone around him forgot he’d ever been there.

I approached an older man sitting nearby, someone I’d seen at dinner the previous night, close enough to the incident that he must have witnessed at least part of it.

"Where is the man who became feral yesterday?" I asked directly, no longer bothering to soften the question.

He blinked at me. "What man?"

My stomach dropped. "The one near the eastern corridor. He attacked a child. The soldiers took him."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," he said, his confusion looking entirely genuine, nothing performed about it.

I asked someone else nearby. Same blank confusion. Same complete absence of recognition, as though I were describing something from a dream rather than an event that had happened in broad view of an entire crowded street less than a day ago.

Nobody remembered him. Not his wife. Not his son. Not the strangers who’d stood close enough to watch soldiers drag him away. It was as though the man had never existed at all, erased so completely that even the people who should have grieved him carried no trace of the loss.

I looked toward the medical ward again, toward that heavily guarded door nobody would discuss.

If an entire settlement had forgotten he ever existed, then somewhere, that man’s body still had to be. He hadn’t disappeared into nothing. Someone had taken him somewhere and dealt with whatever he’d become.

"Then where the hell is he?" I whispered, mostly to myself, staring toward that guarded corridor with a growing certainty that whatever answer I found there wasn’t going to be simple.