The deadline wasn’t mine. It never was. But at 11:54 p.m., I was still the one at my desk, watching a progress bar crawl like it had sleep issues of its own.

  “Just one last fix, Amaya,” my manager said hours ago, jacket already on, smile already somewhere else. Reliable. That’s what they call you when no one plans their emergencies.

  I’m good at patterns. That’s my curse and my party trick. Logs, metrics, tiny mismatches other people’s eyes slide over—I catch them, line them up, make them confess. I found the bug, rewired the function, shipped the patch, and the red turned green like a hostage changing teams.

  No “thank you.” No “go home.” Just the quiet of an office pretending to sleep.

  I shut my laptop and let the exhaustion roll over me. It didn’t feel like a wave. It felt like a floor.

  —

  I didn’t remember lying down. I remembered waking up wrong.

  My eyes were open. My body wasn’t. The ceiling crack above my bed branched too far, like a map where the city kept duplicating itself. Something sat on my chest—weight without shape, pressure without source. The corner of the room held a darker dark, the kind that watches back.

  Move.

  Nothing.

  My chest burned, a slow drowning on dry land. My tongue might as well have been stapled to the roof of my mouth. The shadow in the corner uncoiled, the air thinned, and a sound like static dragged its nails across my teeth.

  Move, Amaya.

  The name didn’t help. Names are leashes. I didn’t have mine.

  Then the weight lifted. Not gently—like a decision being revoked. I snapped upright, lungs slamming open, room returning in messy pieces.

  2:37 a.m. Glowing on the clock like an alibi.

  I didn’t sleep again. I stared at the ceiling like it owed me answers.

  —

  “Amaya, you look like death,” Yuki said in the morning, depositing a canned coffee into my hand. She’s the only person in our floor who tells the truth as a courtesy. Her eyeliner was perfect; mine had migrated somewhere into the past.

  “Didn’t sleep,” I said, which was a generous verb for what happened.

  “Again?” She squinted at me. “You need a doctor. Or therapy. Or both. Your Slack timestamps are a cry for help.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You won’t,” she snapped, then softer: “You won’t.”

  I hate being cared for and I hate that I need it. By noon, I was in a clinic with a clipboard questionnaire that wanted to know if I ever felt little interest or pleasure in doing things. I wanted to tick “yes” for the clipboard.

  The doctor was kind in the careful way of people who’ve watched too many edges. “Short course,” she said, scribbling. “This will help you get a full night. Then we work on the rest.”

  The prescription felt heavier than it should have in my pocket.

  —

  That night, I put the pill on my tongue and waited for permission. I swallowed.

  Sleep came like an elevator with no buttons.

  —

  Morning found my eyes before my alarm did. For ten seconds, everything was ordinary in that dumb, generous way mornings sometimes are.

  Then I rolled up my sleeve to brush my teeth and saw it.

  A bruise bloomed on my forearm. Deep purple, five ovals in a curve, each the size of a fingertip.

  A handprint. Not mine.

  I stood there with a toothbrush in my mouth and a reality problem. I tried to file it under Reasonable Explanations. Fell in the night. Banged into the bed. Dreamed too hard. The kind of lies you can almost believe if you don’t look directly at them.

  I looked directly. The skin looked back.

  I pulled my sleeve down and went to work and pretended to be an adult.

  —

  It didn’t only happen once.

  By midweek there were more: a ring around my ankle like a grabbed rope; an arc along my ribs; a matching bruise on the meat of my palm as if I’d held something that didn’t want to be held.

  No dreams I could remember. Just flashes that wouldn’t stay—a corridor that bent the wrong way, a laugh I knew I’d never heard, a rhyme that keeps repeating itself, and the metallic smell of a place I couldn’t name.

  Each morning I tried to pin the fragments to the page of my brain and each morning they slid off, leaving only the mark.

  Yuki noticed the way I was getting more sucked into my hole, My stammer at interacting more loud and my detachment from life more clear. “You’re quieter,” she said, which was impressive considering my normal baseline is a whisper.

  “Its the pills,” I lied.

  “You hate lying,” she said.

  “I’m practicing,” I said, and she didn’t laugh, and I loved her for that.

  —

  On Friday night, the building settled around me like a sleeping animal. I lined the pills on the table like chess pieces and didn’t take one. I wanted to believe I could win without them.

  Midnight came and left. 1 a.m. took its shoes off at the door. At 2:11 a.m., my body did that sudden slide into almost-sleep.

  And I felt it again—the pressure, the wrongness, the corner drawing breath.

  I forced my eyes open. I didn’t see anything new. I didn’t see anything at all. But my skin knew a story it refused to tell.

  When morning arrived, it brought proof.

  A fresh bruise, neat as a signature, sat high on my shoulder. I pressed it. It pulsed back like a second heart.

  I stared at the ceiling and asked the question out loud because sometimes the room is the only witness:

  “If this is just sleep… why does it leave fingerprints?”

  The ceiling didn’t answer. It never does. But something in the silence felt like a promise—the kind that isn’t for your benefit.

  It didn’t stop after that. It kept happening. And the worst part wasn’t the marks. It was the feeling that there was a name behind them. A place. A rule. Something I kept almost remembering… and then losing.

  To be continued.