Questions That Get You Killed

The dreams would not leave him alone.

By the third night of broken sleep and half-remembered deaths, Jax decided that sitting still was no longer an option. The book under his mattress and the entries in his journal were not enough. Something was waking up inside him, and it wanted answers.

He started small.

During slow stretches at the bar, he asked careful questions of the older human regulars—the ones who had been grinding through the Sprawl longer than most. He kept his voice low and his wording vague.

“You ever hear about people who remember things they shouldn’t?”

Most of them shut him down immediately. One man simply stood up and left his drink unfinished. Another stared at him for a long second and said, “Don’t,” before turning away.

It was the old woman near the end of the bar who finally answered.

She had been coming in for years. Gray hair pulled tight, deep lines in her face, eyes that had seen too many resets of the people around her. She nursed the same cheap drink for hours and rarely spoke to anyone.

When Jax asked the question, she didn’t look at him right away. She waited until Vexor was distracted in the back, then spoke without turning her head.

“There used to be more of them,” she said quietly. “People who started remembering pieces. Old words. Old light. They asked the wrong questions.”

Jax kept wiping the same section of the counter. “What happened to them?”

The old woman gave a thin, humorless smile.

“They disappeared. Not the usual way. Not a reset you come back from. One day they were here. Next day they weren’t. Demons don’t like it when the meat starts waking up.”

She finally glanced at him, eyes sharp.

“Whatever you’re scratching at, stop. The ones who remember too much don’t last long in this place.”

Jax opened his mouth to ask more, but she had already looked away, ending the conversation as cleanly as if she had closed a door.

That night, after his shift, the warning proved useful.

He was cutting through a lower maintenance corridor on the way back to Megastructure Epsilon-9 when he heard the voices. Two of them. Low, rough, and clearly not human.

“…blue light. Not standard. Boss wants anything that moves wrong.”

“Check the levels near the bar. Someone there saw it happen twice.”

Jax pressed himself into a recessed doorway and held his breath. Two low-level demon enforcers moved past the intersection ahead, weapons hanging loose at their sides. One of them paused, head tilting as if scenting the air, then continued on.

They were looking for information about the dagger.

About Kaelor.

About anyone connected to the attacks.

Jax waited until their footsteps faded, then took a longer, darker route home. By the time he sealed his capsule door, his hands were steady again, but his thoughts were not.

He sat on the cot and opened the journal.

*Asked around. Most people shut down. One old woman said the ones who remember too much disappear for good. Not resets. Gone.*

*Enforcers are asking about the blue light now. They’re looking near the bar.*

*I think I’m running out of time to pretend this is nothing.*

He closed the journal and stared at the place under the mattress where the book waited.

Outside, the Sprawl kept grinding forward, indifferent and endless.

Inside the capsule, Jax sat in the dark and accepted a simple truth:

The more he tried to remember, the more the world would try to make him forget—permanently.