Chapter 1: We See You

Chapter 1: We See You

The silence in Elara’s apartment was a physical weight. It pressed down on her, thick and suffocating, a shroud woven from dust motes dancing in the blue-white light of her phone screen. It had been three months since the silence had first moved in, an unwanted tenant that had slowly evicted every other sound from her life. No music. No television. Not even the soft scratch of a pencil on paper. Her graphic design work, once a passion, now lay dormant on a laptop filmed with a fine layer of neglect.

Grief was a scavenger. It had picked her life clean, leaving only the bare, aching bones of her existence.

Her thumb hovered over the search bar, the cursor a patient, rhythmic pulse. How to make it stop. Too vague. Painless ways to... She couldn't finish it. The words felt like poison on her tongue, even in the privacy of her own mind.

Her eyes, shadowed with sleepless nights, drifted around the small living room. A stack of unpaid bills formed a leaning tower on the coffee table. A framed photo on the mantelpiece was turned face down, a denial she couldn't bear to confront. Every object was a monument to a life that felt like it belonged to someone else. The anxiety was a constant, low-frequency hum beneath her skin, a premonition that the floor was about to give way. This wasn't living. It was waiting.

With a shuddering breath that felt torn from her lungs, she deleted the half-formed query and typed something new. Something she should have typed weeks ago.

Suicide hotline.

The search results were a list of sterile, official-looking links. She chose the first one, a government-sponsored site with a bland, reassuring color scheme. A phone number was displayed in bold, promising a “confidential, compassionate ear.”

Compassion. The word was so foreign it felt like a term from an ancient language.

Her fingers felt like clumsy blocks of ice as she dialed. The phone felt cold and heavy against her ear. It rang once. Twice. Then a click.

“We hear you,” a voice said.

Elara flinched. There was no warmth in it, no human inflection. It was a perfectly modulated, androgynous tone, as smooth and sterile as polished chrome. It sounded less like a person and more like an advanced AI reading a script.

“Hello?” Elara whispered, her own voice a fragile, rusty thing.

“You are experiencing a period of significant emotional distress,” the voice stated, not asked. “Your biometric markers indicate elevated cortisol and a depressed heart rate. Is this assessment correct?”

Elara’s blood ran cold. “My… what? Who is this?”

“We are a support network. We are here to help you navigate your current crisis. Please describe the primary source of your despair.”

The clinical detachment was more jarring than any judgment could have been. It wasn’t an ear; it was a data collector. “I… I don’t understand. How do you know about… markers?” Her heart began to hammer against her ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. This was wrong. All wrong.

“Your pain has a unique signature,” the voice continued, ignoring her question. “We have registered it. We can help you find equilibrium.”

“No,” Elara stammered, scrambling to end the call. “No, I made a mistake.”

She fumbled with her phone, her thumb mashing the red icon on the screen. The line went dead. The silence that rushed back in was somehow worse than before. It felt… observant.

Her breath hitched in her throat. She tried to pull up her call history to block the number, to report it, to do something. But there was no record of the call. It was gone. She frantically navigated back to the website she’d found.

404 Not Found.

It was as if the number, the website, the entire conversation had been a hallucination, a phantom conjured by her exhausted mind. Relief warred with a new, sharper kind of fear. Was she losing her mind? Was this the final stage of her descent—a complete break from reality?

Then, her phone buzzed.

A new message from an unknown number. There was no text. Just a single, cryptic link, a jumble of letters and numbers that meant nothing.

Don’t click it. The last functioning part of her brain, the small, terrified animal part that knew a predator when it saw one, screamed at her. This was how people got scammed, how their identities were stolen, how viruses took over their lives.

But the voice… Your pain has a unique signature. It had seen her. In her suffocating, crushing loneliness, the idea of being seen, truly seen, was a siren’s call. Maybe this was help. A different kind of help. The kind you found in the dark corners of the internet when the officially sanctioned kind had failed. A desperate, irrational hope bloomed in the wasteland of her chest, a toxic flower that promised relief. It was a gamble against a reality that had already dealt her the worst possible hand. What more did she have to lose?

Her thumb, moving with a will of its own, tapped the link.

The browser opened to a black screen. For a moment, she thought it was broken, but then white text slowly faded into view. It was stark, minimalist, and chillingly direct.

We see you. Help is on the way.

That was all. The background wasn't a solid black; it was a roiling, subtle pattern of digital static, like a television tuned to a dead channel. It seemed to writhe just at the edge of her perception. Elara stared, mesmerized and horrified, as the message burned itself into her retinas.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The sound was so loud, so sudden, it felt like a physical blow. Elara gasped, dropping her phone on the couch. No one ever knocked on her door. Her food was delivered and left on the mat. Packages were left in the lobby. In three months, the only person to knock had been the building manager asking about a leak.

Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, panicked rhythm. She crept to the door, her bare feet silent on the worn wooden floor. The peephole was a small, fish-eyed window into the dimly lit hallway.

There was a figure there, but its features were lost in the gloom, a tall, indistinct silhouette. Her gaze dropped, searching for anything familiar, anything to quell the rising tide of panic. And then she saw it.

Through the peephole’s distorted lens, she could just make out the street below. Parked at the curb, directly under the flickering orange glow of a streetlight, was a white van. It was old, streaked with rust and grime. On its side, barely legible, were two words in faded blue lettering, the paint flaking away like sunburnt skin.

Support Team.

A wave of dizziness washed over her. Help is on the way.

It was impossible. It had been less than a minute. They couldn’t have gotten here that fast. And yet, there they were. The promise from the screen made manifest on her doorstep.

Terror and a wild, desperate hope warred for control. The terror told her to run, to hide, to barricade the door and pretend no one was home. But the hope, that insidious, treacherous hope, whispered a different story. It whispered of an end to the pain. It whispered of equilibrium. It whispered that someone had finally, truly, heard her silent scream.

The silhouette shifted, and a hand, gloved and featureless, rose to knock again.

The war inside her ended. Despair was a powerful gravitational force, and right now, any promise of escape, no matter how strange or terrifying, was a star she couldn't help but steer towards.

With a trembling hand, Elara Vance undid the deadbolt. The click of the lock sounded like a final, irrevocable verdict. She opened the door.