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I wanted to say something—thank you, maybe, or sorry—but the words wouldn’t come.

Instead, I just sat there, letting the cold from the concrete stage up through my boots, and tried to remember how to belong.

My turn. Maven’s hand flicked, signaling me forward, and I rose, the pain in my arm slicing through the bandage like a fresh brand. I steadied myself with my good hand, found the battered edge of the table, and faced the room.

Every eye followed me. Kang’s, too—he didn’t blink, didn’t move, just watched.

I didn’t give them a speech. I started with the only thing I could offer: facts.

“Authority isn’t just running the Zone. They’re using it. Everyone inside, everyone born in, transferred in, or left to rot—it’s all data. An experiment.” The words felt heavy. I said them anyway.

The round-faced woman folded her arms, unimpressed. “Experiment in what?”

“Memory,” I said. “And control. And maybe evolution.”

The crowd rippled—some faces with the bright, hungry look of the terminally curious, others stone blank.

I coughed, cleared the metallic taste from my mouth. “You know the patterns. How sometimes a person just… vanishes. How two people will have different memories of the same day, the same event. It’s not trauma. It’s designed. They’re mapping it.”

The stick-thin man lifted his head, skepticism drawn in the angles of his cheeks. “That’s been rumor since before the barricades.”

I nodded. “Rumor, but true. They use low-level radiation, neurotoxins, electromagnetic pulses—sometimes subtle, sometimes not. The goal isn’t to kill, it’s to rewrite. Rewire. They’re searching for a population that adapts, that can endure the environmental exposure without losing cognitive integrity.”

Another councilman, his accent rough from the northern mines, sneered. “So we’re just rats?”

I almost laughed. “Not just. Authority wants the Zone to solve itself. They think if a cohort can survive, organize, and maintain identity through all their interventions, then that population is the future. Everyone else? Collateral.”

The skepticism started to fall away. I saw people leaning in. Maven smiled, the edge of their mouth quirking.

“But why the memory stuff?” piped up one of the kids from the benches—maybe sixteen, face streaked with engine oil. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just, you know, kill everyone who doesn’t fit?”

“Because then you don’t get what you want,” I said, heat creeping into my words. “You can’t breed for resilience if you wipe out the variables. You want to push, not destroy. Authority wants a survivor’s mind. A mind that can break and heal, over and over, and still remember who it is.”

The room stilled. Even the woman with the piercings dropped her arms.

I looked down, stared at my hand braced on the table, the knuckles white. “They did it to me, too,” I said, softer. “There are days I wake up and I don’t know whose voice is in my head. Sometimes it’s mine. Sometimes it isn’t.”

A long silence. Then the man with the melted ear barked a laugh. “So what, we’re the lucky ones? The next phase?”

“No,” I said. “Not lucky. But maybe the only ones who can see it.”

I started to explain more—how the Authority had mapped the entire region with a patchwork of electromagnetic “clear zones,” how the foods in the ration packs could spike or suppress neurotransmitters depending on the lot, how certain colors of Authority blue and black were calibrated to trigger conditioned responses—but as I spoke, a cold sweat started at the base of my neck.

My words blurred. The red of the lights became a pulse in my skull.

Sudden: a flash, not memory but memory-overlaid-on-now. I saw myself in a room of glass and steel, hands gloved and shaking, some kind of serum burning the air with its sweetness. I was alone, but not. There was a presence behind me, whispering in my ear: “You’re almost done, Dee. Just a little more.” I looked down and my hands were moving, quick and precise, swapping vials and pipettes, a blue stain running down the inside of my wrist.

“Almost done,” the voice said again, a tickle at the edge of recognition.

Then I was back. The table, the crowd, Maven’s eyes locked on mine.

My hand gripped the metal so tight it left grooves in my skin.

I faked a cough, tried to play it off. “Sorry. Long day.”

The council didn’t buy it, but they didn’t push. Instead, the questions came, sharp and overlapping:

“Is there a way to shut it off?”