I swallowed against the bitter taste in my throat. My body began to tense up completely. The ache spreading from my ankles to the soles of my feet left a cut on my skin like the tip of a needle, before giving way to pure fear. All those fragmented memories I remembered about the laundry room were now strung together like beads on a thread. What was the Mechanism doing here? Was their goal to find another letter, if one existed? Or what was that thing they didn't want us to find? What would happen if we found it?
I broke into a sweat from my hairline to my forehead. Fatigue died out in my lungs like a single, final breath.
"What's going to happen?" someone said, practically trembling. While scouting the surroundings with their eyes, they looked at the scissors in Mert's hand. Light was practically dancing on the piece of metal. Each sharp stroke of light was surrounded by a lethal shadow. "W-what are we going to do?"
A portrait of desperation.
Someone with a pessimistic gaze standing right behind him looked at me. "You..." he said; I waited, holding my breath. When he made a great move to quickly close the distance between us, I automatically went into a defensive stance. But he had already grabbed me by the upper part of my t-shirt. Despite Hülya's failed attempt to protect me, I only looked into the grey eyes standing before me. This was a middle-aged man. The man who took a photograph out of his pocket and gazed at it longingly.
"You ruined us," he said through gritted teeth, spitting out the words.
The pressure of his fingers on my t-shirt was increasing. "Because of you. The Mechanism is punishing us because of you."
His shaky breath buried itself inside his mouth. I let him shake me. Because there was a faint, cowardly light in his eyes. That light was clearly burning with the longing for someone he loved. Just like... I didn't know what my husband always saw in my eyes when he looked at me, but it was like that flickering light of life.
"Why would the Mechanism punish you?" I asked without breaking my composure.
The others lined up in a row and watched us.
"Because you did not obey the Mechanism!" the man shouted with his deep voice.
W-wait a second!
I struggled to comprehend the words.
In that case, I really had put up that resistance. So, what I had seen wasn't just some vague hallucination. But what about Hülya... I looked at them. The face of the man with the lamp passed before my eyes like the reflection of a tree hitting the sea. Why had they gone so far as to tell me that I was living inside my own head?
"Now there is only one truth you must accept," I said, as the man's hands fell weakly from my collar.
I hadn't even felt the tightness of his grip until now anyway.
"I am not hallucinating!" I looked at Hülya. Why was there no expression in her eyes?
It occurred to me to look at her face. At Sis's face, but I didn't even have the courage to look at my own face.
The man slowly backed away. "You must do it before you ruin everything."
"W-wait a minute... We aren't speaking the same language," I stammered.
But he continued to look at me intently.
This triggered the seeds of doubt within me.
Mert continued to stand right behind him with a weary expression. The presence of the scissors in his hand was a knife cutting through the silence. Silence fell. Since all sounds went quiet in that brief moment of pause, the noise in my head surged.
An extremely violent sound was heard. Like a lid slamming into a giant hook.
It felt as if my feet were lifted off the ground.
The crevices of the ramparts widened violently and opened like two bird wings. As dust, dirt, and sand poured to the ground, a cloud of mist covered the air. The smell of dust filled my nostrils. My lungs began to burn. The moment I wanted to cover my nose with my hand, dust got into my eye and it hurt. My eyelashes got wet, my vision grew watery. The noise screamed like a train car dragging along a rail.
"Get back!"
"Move aside a bit."
"There's nowhere to go."
"Let's raise our hands."
"Absolutely."
"What are we supposed to do in this damn moment?"
When I involuntarily covered my nose with my hands again, the rising of the ramparts was no longer just a possibility; it confronted me as a grounded reality.
Truths were meant to be faced.
That strange moment I was in took me back to the laundryman again. The lemon-yellow clip in the red-haired woman's hair was in my mind like it was only yesterday. As the dust cloud swirled, it was as if it were being shaped by an air conditioner, never losing its curve.
Behind the walls, the door—which I didn't know what material it was made of, but was sure was very durable—opened. This looked like an elevator.
A "CREAKING" sound was heard.
My ears hurt; my eardrum was almost going to burst.
From inside emerged a group of people resembling a military team, dressed in black, their faces completely covered by masks, carrying submachine guns. Thick combat boots gripped the ground firmly. Knots, intertwined laces, protective shields, and rhythmically advancing steps. The team took a formation within themselves. That unique voice of the Mechanism spoke again: "Now, raise your hands! I repeat, raise your hands!"
I breathed in the air amidst the strangeness of those masks.
I searched for the pair of eyes I had seen in the tunnel that day, the ones that showed me the photos of my husband's accident.
Right now, I doubted everything.
Even myself!
Because nothing anyone said matched up.
Maybe they were going crazy.
But I had promised myself to stay busy enough not to lose my mind.
One of the people in black held a device up to the air and moved it as if drawing a shape in the sky without letting it touch our bodies.
Every time the "BEEP" sounded, it was as if the sound of a stopping heart was being reflected on a monitor.
The moment I held my breath, the device was at my stomach.
As I continued to look around, two of the figures in black swapped places. I stopped scanning the surroundings randomly. But wait a second. I froze. My breath seemed to stop along with me. This pair of eyes standing before me, piercing through me like an arrow, was familiar. The spark within them, the excitement in my stomach, was familiar. "Y-you..."
He stuck something he held in his hand onto me.
As if wanting to end that stare-down...
I clenched my fingers.
I locked my entire body.
Then, I felt my whole self trembling.
My legs wouldn't hold me; my bones felt as if they crashed into each other, crushed under a great weight.
Accompanied by a shiver spreading from my spine to my entire body, I felt my consciousness darkening.
"You are the one who makes this game entertaining," I heard a whisper. It was coming from very deep within. My breath was buried in my lungs. I wanted to move, but I couldn't. I was just seizing. The voice etched further into my eardrum: "When you are not around, they... will continue to live as animals."
Before the signal cut out completely, there was only one thing that crossed my mind: The boy who entered the red-haired woman's laundry room with me.
My half-open eyes caught the mole right above his left eyebrow.
The image flickered like distorted computer pixels.
It was him. The boy who gave me the letter A.