The diary was pulling me.
It wasn't a suggestion. It was a physical tug, a low thrum in my bones leading me away from the main drags and into the city's rotten heart. The rain had become a mist, clinging to everything like a shroud.
I stopped in a dead end alley, facing a wall of scarred brick and old graffiti. A dead end.
The diary burned against my chest. Not dead.
I placed a hand on the cold, wet brick.
A seam of ghost-light, the same gold green as the diary's ink, appeared in the mortar. With a silent, grinding shift, a section of the wall recessed and slid away.
Not a room. A staircase, leading down into darkness. The air that wafted up was cold and smelled of wet stone and forgotten things.
The Gray.
I descended. The wall sealed behind me, cutting off the world above. The corridor down here was unnaturally smooth, absorbing the faint glow from the diary in my hand.
This was the city's subconscious. A dumping ground for everything it wanted to forget.
I walked until the corridor opened into a vast, circular chamber. Shelves, carved from the same light-eating stone, spiraled up into infinity. They weren't filled with books.
They were filled with things.
A tarnished locket. A single child's shoe. A cracked pair of glasses. Each one hummed with the faint, sad energy of a lost memory.
A library of loss.
My diary pulsed, its rhythm syncing with something on a nearby shelf. A twisted piece of wire, bent into the crude shape of a dog.
I reached for it.
The moment my fingers touched the cold metal, a memory that wasn't mine exploded in my head.
A little girl with rust colored hair, grinning. "Look, Benny! I made a protector!"
Ben's voice, young and fond. "It's ugly, Lee." But he pockets it. He always keeps them.
The memory vanished, leaving a phantom ache. The diary flared in my hand. The ink on the page swirled and reformed into a new sentence, in a girl's looping handwriting.
He kept it.
Lena.
Then, a second, darker memory hit me like a punch.
Darkness. The smell of fear. Ben's voice, tight and desperate. "Stay here, Lee. Don't make a sound. No matter what you hear." He presses the wire dog into her small hand. "This'll protect you."
A lie. A kind one, but a lie all the same.
The memory shattered. The diary's ink shifted again, back to Ben's angry, hardened scrawl.
They came for her. Not the Blue Demons. Something else. Men with quiet voices and eyes that didn't reflect the light.
They called it a "culling."
The word hung in the dead air. The diary's pages began to flip wildly on their own, searching, searching… until they stopped near the very beginning. The writing was a child's.
The men in the nice car took Mrs. Gable's boy today. Mom says he was "special." Dad says they cull what they fear.
I stood in the silent archive, the wire dog in one hand, the burning diary in the other.
This wasn't just a story about gang wars. This was a conspiracy. A predation.
Lena wasn't just taken. She was harvested.
The plea "Don't forget me" was bigger than Ben. It was a cry for all the lost.
The compass in my coat tugged again, harder now, pulling me deeper into the Gray.
I came here to collect a story.
I was walking right into the crime scene.
To be continued.....