Chapter 118: Nothing Had Been Erased

Every surviving reflection showed someone standing beside Marek.

Dario appeared in the nearest pane with his hands raised as if he had been caught reaching for someone. Nadia stood behind another, looking down toward the bottom of a stairwell. Kellan was shown beside the rear of a vehicle, while Silas sat beneath the pale light of an interview room with a file open in front of him. None of the scenes lasted long enough to explain themselves.

Marek understood what Sareth was doing before he turned any of the memories into an accusation. He had taken Mara leaving with Venielle, Amara traveling alone, and Tomas disappearing eleven years ago, and tried to turn all three into proof that Marek’s family abandoned him.

Now he was doing it again.

The six people beside Marek had different histories. Sareth was going to take whatever hurt most in each of them and make it look like proof of something worse.

"You keep saying what happened before and after changes the meaning," Sareth said.

"It does."

"Then tell me where I’m wrong."

Thin lines of shadow spread from beneath Sareth’s feet, slipping between the chairs and across the broken glass. More followed behind them, branching over the floor until the separate lines began joining into a wider black pattern.

Rhovan attacked before they reached the others.

Gold burst from his hand and struck the nearest line. The floor flashed, but the shadow did not break. Instead, the gold sank beneath the shadow and vanished, as though the light had fallen through the concrete.

The lines reached Marek’s shoes.

Cold pressure climbed around his ankles before the shelter began disappearing. The windows darkened first. The benches and overturned chairs blurred after them, followed by the walls and the civilians still moving farther inside. Their voices became distant, then vanished completely.

For a moment, Marek could still feel concrete beneath his feet.

Then that disappeared too.

A long black hall stood around them.

Rows of records covered both walls, stretching farther into the darkness than Marek could see. Loose papers hung from open folders while others lay scattered across the floor. Some records ended halfway through a statement. Others had entire sections torn away. Names had been crossed out and written again beside different entries, sometimes more than once.

Marek passed a confession that began with an answer but showed none of the questions that had produced it. A few steps farther, the same accusation had been written across several sheets, while every answer to it had been crossed out.

Again and again, the records stopped after the accusation and before whatever might have answered it.

Dario’s memory opened first.

A narrow market lane formed around them beneath weak yellow lights, the closed stalls leaving long strips of darkness between them. Somewhere farther down, a little girl was crying hard enough that Marek turned to look.

A man had one hand locked around her arm.

The girl kept pulling back, shoes scraping against the pavement as he dragged her toward the darker end of the lane. She tried to shout, but the sound broke apart between breaths.

Dario came around the corner from the opposite side and stopped.

"Let her go."

The man turned, still holding the girl.

Dario moved before he answered.

He crossed the distance and struck him once. The man staggered into one of the shuttered stalls, released the girl, and ran before Dario could reach him again.

Dario started after him, then heard the girl crying behind him.

He stopped.

By the time he turned back, she had dropped against the side of a closed stall and pulled both arms against herself. Dario took off his jacket, crouched several steps away, and held it out until she finally let him place it around her shoulders.

She was still shaking when voices came from the other end of the lane.

Several adults appeared between the stalls.

The attacker was already gone.

Then the memory skipped.

Dario was suddenly crouched beside the frightened child when her father rounded the corner.

"Take your hands off her!"

Dario stood, but the mother was already demanding to know what he had done. Someone behind them supplied an uglier answer before the girl could speak, and another person repeated it.

Sareth’s voice moved through the hall. "You remember what they called you."

Dario looked toward the part of the lane Sareth had removed. "I remember what actually happened too."

A crack ran through the black wall.

"You showed what happened. Then you jumped to what they called him," Marek said.

Sareth did not answer before Nadia’s memory replaced the street.

Nadia’s memory followed.

She stood beside a concrete stairwell with a man blocking the way down. When she tried to pass, he reached for her arm, and Nadia pulled away before he could get a proper grip.

"Move."

He didn’t.

Instead, he stepped closer and reached for her again. Nadia warned him a second time, but the next attempt came faster, and his fingers closed around her arm hard enough to stop her from pulling free.

Nadia shoved him away.

She had only meant to put distance between them, but his heel caught the edge of the landing. He stumbled backward, tried to recover his balance, and failed. His shoulder struck the stairs first before the side of his head hit the concrete edge below.

The sound made Nadia freeze.

The man remained at the bottom of the steps without moving while she stood above him, breathing hard and staring down as though waiting for him to get back up.

He never did.

The memory shifted before anyone else arrived.

The stairwell faded into detention glass and a small interview room, where Nadia sat across from a screen during a video call.

Her older sister appeared on the other side in work clothes, the image freezing every few seconds before moving again.

She looked exhausted. By then, she had already left the country and taken whatever work she could find because the wages back home could not cover Nadia’s bail, a lawyer, and everything else that had followed the fall.

"Don’t say you murdered him just because you think it’ll get you home faster," Nadia’s older sister said.

Sareth spoke from somewhere behind them. "You pushed him. He fell. He died."

"I pushed him because he grabbed me. He fell, and he died." Her jaw tightened. "That doesn’t mean I murdered him."

Another crack opened through the hall.

Kellan’s memory followed.

He stood near the front door of a small house with a bag over one shoulder. His father was behind him, holding the keys to the family car.

"Take your cousin across town first."

Kellan looked back. "No."

"You’re already going out."

"I said no."

His father tossed him the keys anyway.

The memory blurred to the car. Kellan sat behind the wheel while his older cousin gave directions from the passenger seat. He already knew there was some kind of dispute waiting for them. His cousin had been in enough fights that Kellan should have known better than to drive him there.

He did it anyway.

They stopped beside a narrow roadside lot where several men were arguing. Kellan stayed near the car until one of them threw the first punch. After that, everything happened quickly.

Someone went down.

Kellan’s cousin came running back with blood across his shirt.

"Drive."

Kellan stared past him toward the man on the ground.

His cousin slammed a hand against the roof. "Kellan!"

Kellan got behind the wheel.

Several streets later, his cousin pulled off a bloodied jacket and shoved it toward him.

"Hide this."

Kellan hesitated before taking it.

The memory moved again. His father was on the phone this time.

"Don’t come home."

Kellan stared at the screen. "You told me to take him."

"I told you to drive him somewhere. What happened after that is your problem."

The call ended.

Sareth cut the memory there.

The only thing left in the hall was the car moving through the dark with Kellan behind the wheel.

"You helped a killer escape," Sareth said.

Kellan watched his younger self drive away. "Yeah."

"You knew what you were doing."

"I knew enough."

"And still you drove."

Kellan finally looked at him. "I drove the car. I helped him get away. I didn’t kill anyone."

Sareth’s eyes narrowed slightly. "Does that make what you did better?"

"No." Kellan’s jaw tightened. "It makes it what I actually did. Fuck, you ask a lot of questions."

Silas’s memory followed.

He was carrying a small birthday cake in one hand and a bundle of flowers under the other arm when he reached his house. The front door was already open. One of the candles had bent inside the plastic lid during the walk, and Silas stopped long enough to straighten it before going inside.

"Mom?"

No answer came.

He stepped farther into the living room.

The cake slipped from his hand.

His mother was lying beside the sofa with blood spread beneath her, one arm bent under her body and the television still playing across the room. The flowers fell next, scattering across the floor as Silas crossed the distance and dropped beside her.

The memory moved forward.

His father, a detective, stood over copies of the case file late at night, reading the same pages again even after being ordered to stay away from the investigation. He kept saying the first team had missed something.

A few weeks later, his father was killed too.

After that, the case began turning toward Silas.

A weapon appeared in evidence after passing through hands that should never have touched it. Messages were recovered under Silas’s name that he insisted he had never written. Household fingerprints were treated as proof that he had handled things nobody could establish he had touched during either killing.

Then his criminology training became part of the case against him.

Classes on evidence handling became proof that he knew how evidence could be moved. Crime-scene procedure became proof that he knew what investigators would look for. Every inconsistency Silas pointed out only gave them another reason to say he understood the case too well.

By the end, even the thing that helped him notice the holes had become part of the accusation against him.

Sareth placed him inside an interview room with his name written where a suspect’s name should have been.

Silas studied the file for several seconds. "You started with the accusation."

Eren looked from him to the records covering the hall. "That’s what he’s doing to all of us."

Sareth’s attention shifted toward him.

"Different events. Different accusations," Eren continued. "We were all detained. That doesn’t make every accusation against us true."

Rafe finally raised his head. The smoke from the aircraft memory was still faintly visible behind him, but he was no longer staring into it. Dario had stopped watching the people who had found him with the girl. Nadia had stopped looking at the man lying at the bottom of the stairs, while Kellan kept his eyes on the road his younger self had driven away from.

None of them looked relieved, and Marek did not expect them to. The memories were still theirs, along with what they had done, what had been done to them, and everything that followed.

Marek opened a Case.

The memories were not his target. Sareth had not changed what happened. He was taking one part of each memory and forcing his accusation onto it while everything around it was treated as irrelevant.

That was what Marek separated.

Pain spread from Marek’s shoulder into his chest as the boundary tightened. The hall resisted, records shifting across the walls while old scenes tried to reconnect, but Degree IV kept the distinction intact.

"You showed fragments," Marek said. "That doesn’t make your conclusion part of them."

The black hall split from floor to ceiling, and the shelter returned beneath his feet with the sound of breaking glass.

Dario was still Dario. Nadia was breathing hard beside him. Kellan still carried what he had actually done, and Silas still remembered coming home with flowers and a cake.

Nothing had been erased.

For now, Sareth could no longer use those fragments to make his accusation stand.