The darkness dissolved into the gritty smear of a rainy night.
Iron found himself standing. The transition was less a journey, more a brutal editing of reality. One frame: the white room. Cut. Next frame: this.
He was on a bus.
An old city bus, interior lit by the sickly yellow glow of overhead fluorescents. The engine idled with a deep, unhealthy rumble. Rain streaked the black windows in distorting rivulets. The air smelled of damp wool, stale diesel, and something faintly coppery.
He looked down. He was no longer in the hospital gown. He wore dark, practical clothes—tactical pants, a black sweater. His own clothes, from his old life. He flexed his fingers. The bite on his index finger was gone. He touched his neck. No ligature marks. For now, he was physically whole.
The bus was moving, cutting through a vaguely familiar urban nightscape—downtown, but bleached of specific landmarks. Shuttered stores, flickering neon, empty streets glossed with rain.
He wasn't alone.
Seven other passengers sat scattered across the worn blue seats. Their heads were bowed or turned toward windows. And they had… no faces.
Where their features should be was a smooth, blank expanse of flesh, like unfinished clay. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. Just the vague shape of a human head.
Iron's pulse, already elevated, kicked harder. He remained still, back against the cool metal near the rear door, scanning. A system prompt materialized at the edge of his vision, subtle but persistent:
[Current Room: Midnight Bus No. 23]
[Objective: Establish the true cause of death for all passengers. Time limit: 12 hours (subjective).]
[Note: Memory contamination accelerates within active rooms. Death is permanent.]
Twelve hours. One cause for all? He focused on the passengers. While faceless, each bore distinct markers.
Passenger 1 (front right, female build): Clutched a half-crumpled wedding invitation in her hands. The paper was singed at one corner. A name peeked through: Lin Weiwei.
Passenger 2 (middle, student backpack): A keychain dangling from their bag bore a miniature etched key and the words Chem Lab 3-B.
Passenger 3 (across the aisle, gender indeterminate): Their hands were constantly moving, knitting invisible threads in the air. A tic, or a memory of action.
Passenger 4 (behind driver, businessman in a rumpled suit): The breast pocket of his jacket had slipped open. A laminated card inside caught the light: Chen Corporation Employee ID. The photo area was a blank oval.
Passenger 5, 6, 7… each had similar telling details—a distinctive scarf, a military dog tag, a small, ornate music box held on their lap.
They were arranged, Iron realized, not randomly. Passenger 1 (wedding invite) seemed most recent, clothes modern. Passenger 7 (music box holder) wore attire from a earlier decade. An order? Reverse chronological by time of death?
He needed to interact. To explore.
He moved down the aisle, the bus lurching slightly. The faceless heads didn't turn. He stopped beside Passenger 4, the Chen Corp employee.
"Excuse me."
No response. The blank face remained pointed forward.
Iron reached out, intending to tap the man's shoulder. His fingers passed through the fabric and the arm beneath, encountering only a strange, staticky resistance. A hologram? A memory imprint?
He couldn't touch them physically. So how?
A pressure built behind his eyes—instinctual, born of desperation. He focused on the employee badge, on the sheer wrongness of the blank photo. He pushed with his mind, not toward the passenger, but toward the space the passenger occupied, the emotional residue.
[Ability Unlocked: Memory Resonance (Basic)]
A jolt, like a low-voltage shock. A flash of sensation-not-vision flooded him:
—cramped elevator, smell of toner and stale coffee, digital watch beeping 5:00 PM, a crush of bodies, someone's briefcase digging into his ribs, a profound, soul-deep weariness—the grind. Then, a different weight. A hand on his shoulder. A voice, smooth, authoritative: "The report on the subsidiary, Chen. I need it silenced. Permanently." A surge of cold fear. Not for himself. For… someone else. A daughter? The face in the mental image was blurred, but the protective panic was crystalline—
The resonance snapped. Iron gasped, leaning against a seat pole. The memory—fragmentary, emotional—wasn't his. It belonged to this man. A corporate lackey pressured into something terrible. Fear for a loved one as a motive.
He turned his attention to Passenger 3, the one knitting air. He focused, initiating Memory Resonance again.
This time, the feedback was violent. Instead of an emotional snippet, his mind's eye was wrenched into a void. The passenger's "face"—the smooth flesh—melted away, and beneath was not a skull, but a rotating abyss. A miniature black hole, swirling with faint, screaming motes of light. It pulled at his consciousness, a psychic undertow promising oblivion.
[Contamination Warning! High-density corrupted memory detected!]
He severed the connection with a mental wrench, staggering back. His nose was bleeding, a warm trickle. Passenger 3 was different. Older death? More damaged? Or… something else entirely?
The bus driver, a hunched figure in a standard-issue cap, hadn't moved or spoken. The vehicle continued its meaningless route through the rain-slicked night.
Strategy reformed. Passenger 4 was a potential source of intel on Chen Corporation, his own family's empire—a lead he couldn't ignore. But the resonance was draining, risky. He needed a safer approach.
He moved to a seat diagonally across from Passenger 2, the student. The Chem Lab key. He focused not on the person, but on the object. The keychain.
Another resonating pulse, milder:
—the sharp, clean smell of acetone and ozone, the hum of a fume hood, notebooks filled with precise, cramped handwriting. Pride. Then, a shadow falling across the page. A teacher's voice, not encouraging, but… greedy. "Your results are exceptional, Xiao Su. Such… purity. Let's discuss a private project. Funding is no object." A flicker of unease, buried under flattery and ambition—
Su? A surname? The memory tasted of youthful brilliance exploited. A lab accident? Or something deliberately engineered?
He was piecing together a mosaic of mundane tragedies. But the bus, the facelessness, the looping route—this was the memory of the bus itself, or of the collective death event. The passengers were facets of it.
The bus hit a pothole, jolting violently. The fluorescents flickered, and for one strobing instant, the passengers' faces flickered into clarity—agonized, terrified, real. Then back to blank.
Time was passing. The rain outside seemed heavier.
He approached Passenger 1, the woman with the burnt wedding invite. Lin Weiwei. The name triggered a deep, unsettling tremor in his gut, unrelated to the resonance. Familiar. He pushed the feeling down and focused.
The resonance this time was a wave of sheer, devastating love and betrayal:
—white silk, laughter, the scent of peonies, his hand in hers, rough but gentle. Promises whispered. Then, the smell shifting—to smoke, acrid and thick. Heat on her skin. Not from joy. From flame. A figure standing in the doorway, backlit by fire, holding the other end of the invitation. His voice, distorted: "I can't let you have this. Not with what you know." The realization, sharper than any pain: the wedding, the future, it was all a lie. A beautiful, deadly trap—
Iron broke away, breath coming short. Lin Weiwei. Betrayed and murdered by her fiancé? Connected to fire. His mind raced, trying to link this to the other fragments. Corporate cover-up (Passenger 4), illicit research (Passenger 2), a fatal wedding fire…
The bus's engine note changed, climbing to a strained whine. The driver's shoulders, until now a statue, tensed.
Iron looked out the front windshield. The road ahead was… dissolving. The asphalt peeled away into pixelated fragments, revealing not ground, but a profound, starless darkness. The bus was driving off the edge of the mapped memory, into the raw, corrupted data of the death event.
"No," the driver muttered, a dry, rasping sound. His hands tightened on the wheel. "Not again. Not so soon."
Again? The driver was aware? A persistent element within the memory loop?
The bus lurched forward, accelerating toward the void.
The faceless passengers began to murmur, a soundless vibration that Iron felt in his teeth. Their blank faces turned toward the abyss ahead.
Iron acted. He couldn't let the memory destabilize completely. He needed an anchor. Instinctively, he focused on the driver's seat—the only point of apparent control in this chaos. He poured his will into it, the concept of stability, direction, seat of the driver.
[Ability Unlocked: Memory Anchor (Basic)]
A faint, silvery thread, visible only to his mind's eye, spun from his consciousness to latch onto the driver's seat. The bus's careening motion dampened slightly, the nose lifting a fraction from its plunge.
But it wasn't enough. The void yawned.
As the bus teetered on the precipice, Passenger 4—the Chen Corp man—sudstood up. His blank face turned toward Iron. From his mouth, a voice that was a composite of all the whispers and screams Iron had heard upon entry:
"He knows you're here… The son… returning to the scene…"
Then, the passenger's form dissolved into a shower of static and faded employee badge photos, each picturing a different, terrified face.
The bus tipped over the edge.
Weightlessness. The scream of bending metal. The fluorescents exploded in showers of sparks. The passengers were flung from their seats, not as bodies, but as streaks of colored light—trails of fear, regret, love, pain.
And as they tumbled in the dark, their blank faces finally resolved. One by one, they flashed into clarity.
And every single one of them was Iron Chen.
Passenger 1: Iron, younger, in a groom's tuxedo, face etched with horror.
Passenger 2: Iron, as a teenager, wearing a lab coat, eyes wide with betrayal.
Passenger 4: Iron, in a business suit, middle-aged, expression hollow with corporate guilt.
Passenger 7: Iron, as a child, clutching a music box, weeping.
His own face. At different ages. In different roles.
"The bus of your broken selves…" the driver's voice echoed, now clear and sorrowful. "Each a memory you locked away. Each a death you haven't faced."
The driver turned his head.
Under the cap, the face was no longer generic. It was a man in his forties, features sharp with intelligence and a deep, fanatical intensity. Iron knew this face from stolen glances at old, hidden family files.
Dr. Zhang Qiming.
His biological father.
The man smiled, a chilling, empty curve of the lips. "Welcome home, Subject 327. Let's see which fragment survives the crash."
The memory-anchored bus plunged into the screaming, starless dark, carrying Iron Chen into the wreckage of his own past.