Blame my Shadow

Someone is Using Me

The first sign that something inside me has shifted is not a blackout. It's the silence between them.

The gaps used to feel like sleep. Like I blinked and time politely moved forward without me. Now the gaps feel... occupied. Like I step out of the room and someone else steps in before the door even finishes swinging shut.

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror for a long time and try to catch myself doing it. Try to catch the moment I disappear. My reflection stares back with bloodshot eyes, jaw clenched so tight it aches. I look normal. That's the most terrifying part.

My hands tremble when I lift them. My reflection lifts them too. Perfect synchronization. No delay. No glitch. No clue.

"You're still here," I whisper to myself.

The mirror doesn't answer.

But something inside me does not feel alone anymore.

I do not tell the police what I suspect. I do not tell Sarah what I fear. Both of them would try to stop me for different reasons. The police because I am evidence. Sarah because I am fragile.

I am neither.

I am a hole someone keeps throwing bodies through.

If someone is manipulating my blackouts, if someone is moving me like a chess piece while my mind is gone, then the only way to catch them is to follow the path I vanish into.

Which means I have to start lying to everyone.

The sealed file is harder to access than any crime scene they have ever let me near. That is not an accident. Someone went to great lengths to make sure the last surviving child from that facility disappeared completely.

It takes bribery. Forged credentials. And a lie told with enough confidence that the clerk never checks twice.

The name surfaces like a corpse from deep water.

Max Cole.

Fourteen when he was placed in the detention facility. No discharge record. No reunification documentation. Just one clinical note stamped across his final page:

"Relocated under federal authorization."

That sentence chills me more than any crime scene photograph ever has.

People don't get "relocated" from illegal detention facilities. Evidence does.

Witnesses do.

Problems do.

I run his name through everything I can touch. Employment. Medical. Housing. Education. Financial activity.

Nothing.

No tax ID. No hospital visits. No phone contracts. No school records.

It's like the world was edited and he was cleanly removed.

Except for one digital blip.

A burner phone purchase made with a dummy corporate card tracing back to an old logistics company that once serviced the facility.

Active within the last month.

Location ping: a storage complex on the southern industrial edge of the city.

My hands start shaking so hard I almost drop the keyboard.

He's alive.

And he's close.

I don't tell Sarah where I'm going.

That is new for me.

That is wrong.