Chapter 2: You Never Told Them Your Name

Chapter 2: You Never Told Them Your Name

The smile on the monitor was impossible.

It wasn't a human expression of warmth or humor. It was a predatory curve of the lips, a knowing, ancient thing that didn't belong on the gaunt face of the woman in Cell 2. Her eyes, wide and black, seemed to drill through the screen, through the stale air of the control room, and pin Liam directly to his chair. A strangled gasp caught in his throat. His blood felt like ice water. He had broken a rule—a simple, nonsensical rule—and this was the consequence.

His first instinct was to bolt, to slam his fists on the sealed door until his knuckles bled. But where would he go? Miles underground, in a facility that had no name, run by people he’d never seen. The sterile concrete box wasn't just his workplace; it was his cage.

His second instinct, born of a deeper, colder panic, was to obey.

He forced his gaze away from the horrifying smile, his eyes darting to Camera 1, then 3, then 4, then 5, each glance a frantic, desperate tick of a mental clock. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand… before his eyes snapped back to Camera 2. She was still there, still smiling, her face pressed so close to the lens it was distorted at the edges. The violation of it—the sheer physical impossibility—made his stomach churn. Rule 9 said they couldn’t see him. Rule 9 was a lie.

He grabbed the keyboard with trembling hands. His mind, the analytical tool he’d always relied on, was sputtering, failing to find a logical framework for this madness. All it could cling to was procedure. Rule 1: All events must be logged precisely.

2:58 - Inmate 2 altered position. Facing camera. Smiling.

The words looked insane on the screen. He felt insane typing them. For the next thirty minutes, his entire world shrank to that single, agonizing rhythm: a four-second scan of the other monitors, then back to the unblinking horror in Cell 2. The smile never wavered. She never blinked. He was trapped in a staring contest with a ghost in a machine, and he couldn't afford to lose.

His cynical dismissal of the rules had evaporated, replaced by a raw, superstitious terror. The list on the laminated card was no longer a psychological test. It was a scripture for survival.

He watched the master clock on the console. 3:30 AM. 3:31. The approach of the next scheduled event felt like a judgment.

Rule 4. At precisely 3:33 AM, the feed for Camera 4 will experience a single, three-second visual distortion.

His eyes were glued to the fourth monitor, where an inmate lay sleeping on his cot, a picture of perfect stillness. Liam’s heart pounded in time with the digital seconds ticking over.

3:32:58… 3:32:59… 3:33:00.

The feed for Camera 4 ripped itself apart.

It wasn't a simple flicker of static. For three agonizing seconds, the image tore into horizontal bands of shrieking digital noise, the sleeping inmate’s form elongating and contracting like a corrupted file. It was violent, a technological scream that made the hairs on Liam’s neck stand on end. Then, just as suddenly, it snapped back to normal. The inmate hadn't moved. The cell was exactly as it had been.

Liam’s breath hitched. He forced his fingers to move.

3:33 - Scheduled Anomaly on Camera 4.

He typed the lie the rules demanded of him, his own complicity a bitter taste in his mouth. This wasn’t an anomaly. It was an event. A demonstration of power.

The rest of the night passed in a blur of hyper-vigilant dread. At some point after 5 AM, the lights in Cell 3 began to fade. He remembered Rule 6—do not adjust the monitor’s brightness or contrast—and watched, frozen, as the light in the cell didn't just dim, but seemed to be actively drained away, pooling into the corners until the man on the cot was nothing but a lump of shadow. After a minute that stretched for an eternity, the light bled back into the room, returning to its normal, sterile hum. Liam logged it with a numb detachment. 5:17 - Ambient lighting fluctuation in Cell 3. Resolved without intervention.

When the dull buzz of the shift-change alarm finally sounded at 9 AM, the relief was so profound it almost buckled his knees. The smile on Camera 2 vanished, the inmate returning to her position against the back wall as if nothing had ever happened. The other inmates were precisely as they had been twelve hours ago. It was over. He had survived.

He stood on stiff legs, every muscle screaming from the tension. He gathered nothing, for he had nothing to gather. He just wanted out. Out of the cold, out of the silent, oppressive judgment of the screens. The heavy door clicked open, and he stepped into the long, fluorescent-lit hallway.

The silence here was different. It was no longer empty; it was watchful. The clean, seamless walls seemed to hold their breath as he passed. He walked towards the industrial elevator at the far end, his rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the polished concrete floor. His own footfalls were the only sound he expected to hear.

That’s why he saw them.

Leading from the base of the elevator doors and heading down the corridor away from him were footprints.

They were starkly, impossibly clear against the pale gray floor. They were wet. And they were made by bare feet.

Liam stopped dead, his blood running cold for the second time that night. The facility was hermetically sealed, clinically dry. There was no water here, no source for it. He scanned the empty corridor. He was utterly alone. He hadn't seen anyone come or go. He hadn’t heard the elevator. Yet here was the proof: someone, or something, had been here. Barefoot. Wet.

A primal fear, a feeling of being hunted, seized him. He forced himself to move, his steps quickening towards the elevator, his eyes fixed on the wet tracks. He needed to get out. Now.

As he got closer, he saw that the footprints stopped about twenty feet from the elevator doors, turning to face the wall. And on that wall, something was written. The letters were dark and glistening against the matte concrete, as if scrawled with a wet finger.

He squinted, his mind refusing to process what he was seeing. It was a short, simple sentence. Four words that shattered the last vestiges of his composure. Four words that proved the prison was infinitely larger than the room he had just left.

The message on the wall read:

Nice to meet you, Liam.

He had never told them his name.