When the World Stopped Sounding Right

The light was wrong.

That’s the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes—not the pain, not the chemical smell of antiseptic and bleach, not even the fact that my body felt like it had been filled with wet sand. It was the light. It was too thin, too white, too clean. Hospital light. Fluorescent light. The kind of light that tells you nothing good has happened here, and nothing good is about to.

I tried to move my fingers. They responded, but slowly—like I was pushing through honey. My lips were cracked. My throat felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to it. And there was a woman standing by the window, watching me with eyes that had seen too much.

I knew her. I just couldn’t remember her name.

And that terrified me more than anything.

Because I knew, deep in the marrow of my bones, that I had been somewhere. Somewhere else. Somewhere the light wasn’t like this. Somewhere the air smelled like jasmine and rain and something electric—something alive. I could still taste it on my tongue, could still feel the warmth of a hand in mine, could still hear a voice that had whispered things I was never supposed to forget.

But the voice was gone now. The hand was gone. And I was here, in this room, with this woman and this doctor and this terrible, sterile light that made everything feel like a crime scene.

“Mr. Cross? Can you hear me?”

The doctor was speaking. I turned my head—slow, so slow—and saw a man in a white coat holding a clipboard. He had kind eyes. That made me suspicious.

“I’m Dr. Grieves,” he said. “You’ve been our number-one priority here for the past eight months.”

Eight months.

The words landed like stones in my chest. Eight months. I had lost eight months of my life. Eight months of sunrises and rainstorms and conversations I would never remember. Eight months of someone—Tamara, her name was Tamara, I could see her face now, I could feel her lips against mine—waiting for me. Eight months of her wondering if I was ever coming back.

And I had no idea where I’d been.

The doctor kept talking. Something about toxins in my bloodstream. Something about my brain rewiring itself, showing signs of plasticity they’d never seen before. He sounded fascinated. He sounded like a scientist examining a particularly interesting specimen. I was supposed to be grateful, I think. But all I could feel was the hollow ache where my memories used to be.

“You’ve been semi-coherent over the past four weeks,” he said. “But we believe the worst is behind you.”

Four weeks. Semi-coherent. I tried to remember fragments—flashes of images, snippets of sound—but they slipped away like water through my fingers. There was a desert. There was a woman. There was something about frequencies, about vibrations, about the way the world hummed beneath the surface of what we called reality.

And then there was the letter.

The letter that had started all of this.

I remembered the envelope. Red. Sealed with wax. The symbol on it—a spiral, maybe, or something older, something I couldn’t quite place—had glowed in the dim light of my apartment. I remembered thinking it was beautiful. I remembered thinking it was dangerous.

I had opened it anyway.

And now I was here, in a hospital bed, with a detective who wanted answers I didn’t have.

The woman by the window stepped forward. She was wearing a brown suede jacket and blue jeans, and she moved like someone who had spent a lifetime walking through rooms she didn’t want to be in. Inspector Moretti. That was her name. I remembered her now, remembered the way she had looked at me the last time we spoke—like I was a puzzle she couldn’t solve, a loose thread she wanted to pull.

“Mr. Williams, we’re going to have to ask you to leave,” she said.

David. David was here. I turned my head again and saw him sitting in a chair by the door, his face lined with worry and something else—something that looked almost like fear. He gathered his things and waved goodbye. I nodded, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Moretti.

She waited until the door clicked shut before she spoke.

“So, Jacob. You mind if I call you Jacob? It’s been so long, I figured I’d ask again.”

I didn’t answer. I was too busy trying to remember why she was here, what she wanted, why the sight of her made my stomach clench like a fist.

“I want to know what happened to your friend Tarif,” she said. “I want to know why I found Arabe’en symbols in your apartment, sealed wax symbols over messages with odd notes on them, red envelopes… Does that ring a bell at all?”

It did. It rang a bell so loud I could feel it in my teeth. But I wasn’t going to tell her that. Not yet. Not until I understood what was happening, what I had gotten myself into, what the hell had happened to the eight months I couldn’t remember.

“Why were you searching my apartment?” I asked.

“We had reasonable cause,” she said. “With the death of your friend, with the money stolen from Netex. The judge practically threw the warrant at us. And then we found the letters from the Arabe’en.”

“I don’t know where those came from.”

“You’re lying.”

The word hit me like a slap. I wanted to argue, wanted to tell her she was wrong, but the truth was—I didn’t know. I didn’t know where the letters had come from. I didn’t know why I had them. I didn’t know what any of it meant. All I had were fragments, pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit together, and every time I tried to reach for the whole picture, it slipped further away.

She leaned closer. “I could bring in the RCMP right now, Cross, just given the nature of my discovery.”

“So why haven’t you?”

“No one else knows about the letters… yet. I wanted to hear it from you. Do you have anything to do with the Arabe’en? This is serious, Jacob. People are being rounded up like cattle and shuffled off into ‘freedom camps,’ whatever you want to call them, for processing. Do you have any idea how much trouble you could be in? The Arabe’en are being hunted down like dogs. You better give me something here; otherwise, I’ll just hand you over to them right now.”

I stared at her. The words hung in the air between us, heavy and sharp, and I could feel the weight of them pressing down on my chest. Freedom camps. Hunted down. The Arabe’en. None of it made sense, and yet—somewhere, deep in the part of my brain that was still waking up, still trying to piece itself back together—I knew it was real. I knew I had seen things, heard things, felt things that would make her eyes go wide and her voice go quiet.

But I couldn’t tell her. Not yet. Not until I understood what I was carrying.

“Thanks for painting that lovely picture,” I said. “It’s been a helluva morning.”

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. She just stood there, watching me, waiting for me to crack.

“How can you be so irresponsible?” she asked.

“You still don’t believe I have anything to do with this,” I said. “And you’re right. I’m a research scientist. That’s it.”

“I have you for embezzlement right now, Jacob.”

“How do you know it wasn’t legitimate business, Moretti?”

“Business for 2.3 million dollars?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. The number hung in the air like a ghost, and I could feel the walls closing in around me. 2.3 million dollars. I didn’t remember stealing it. I didn’t remember anything about it. But the look on her face told me she believed it, and that was enough to make me doubt everything I thought I knew about myself.

“Are we done with the small talk yet?” I said. “Get the fuck out of here. Now.”

She didn’t move. She just tilted her head, studying me like I was a specimen under a microscope.

“There’s something I think you’d like to know, Jacob,” she said. “Netex isn’t the actual name of the company you worked for; that’s just the name they recruit under. The actual company is called Chemical Dynamics, International Research.”

The name hit me like a punch to the gut. Chemical Dynamics. I knew that name. Everyone in my field knew that name. They were the ones linked to the untested drug studies, the ones who had made people go blind, the ones who had killed people and walked away without a scratch. They had a class-action lawsuit pending against them, and everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the truth came out.

And I had been working for them. For eight months. Maybe longer.

“You’ve got nowhere else left to turn,” Moretti said. “Your friend Williams there, he can’t help you. Your girlfriend’s gone. I’m all you’ve got. I’m willing to stick my neck out for you, but you’ve got to tell me everything.”

I closed my eyes. The light was still wrong. The air still smelled like bleach and antiseptic. But somewhere, beneath all of it, I could feel something else—a hum, a vibration, a frequency I had almost forgotten. It was faint, like a radio signal from a distant station, but it was there. It was real.

And it was calling me home.

I opened my eyes and looked at Moretti. “All right,” I said.

But even as the words left my mouth, I knew I wasn’t telling her everything. I couldn’t. Because the truth—the real truth—was something I was still trying to understand myself. The letters. The symbols. The woman whose name I could almost remember. The desert. The light. The way the world had shifted, had shimmered, had shown me something I wasn’t supposed to see.

I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know where I had been. But I knew, with a certainty that burned like a flame in my chest, that I had to find out.

The light was wrong. But maybe—just maybe—I could learn to see in the dark.

📚 The Seventh Journey Trilogy

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When the World Stopped Sounding Right