8:30 a.m.
Six minutes had passed since the last message appeared on Mumin's phone. He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, his shoes abandoned near the door, his shoulders hunched beneath the steady hum of the tube light. The curtains remained drawn. A thin seam of morning brightness escaped around their edges, but the room itself was colourless: pale walls, dark furniture, a cup of water he had forgotten to drink. Even the ceiling fan seemed to turn reluctantly, pushing warm air from one corner to another without cooling anything.
The western wall stood opposite him. Its old punch marks looked different in daylight—or perhaps he was simply looking at them differently now. They were not just damage anymore. They were a record of the moments he could not remember, the anger he could not explain, and the person he had named Musa. Beside that history, the messages on his phone felt like another kind of mark: words left by someone who knew far too much.
He opened the conversation and scrolled to the beginning. Three messages. Three separate moments. The first had arrived after the prayer: "The fire does not run. Neither do you." The second had appeared after the battle in the sand field: "You fought the battle well. But that was the first. There are more." The newest had come only minutes ago: "You fought well today. On your own. But Musa will not leave you. Neither will I. See you very soon."
They had arrived at different points in the morning, yet each seemed to reach backward into his life. The sender had known about the fire, about the battle that belonged to his childhood, and about the moment when Musa had not taken control. Whoever stood behind that number was not guessing. They were watching—or they had access to things no stranger should have known.
Who are you?
Mumin typed the number into a search engine. Nothing useful appeared: no name, no public listing, no reliable location. He tried other searches, then checked the number against several public directories. Each result led nowhere, or to a page that vanished as soon as it loaded. The number looked ordinary on the screen, but the trail behind it felt deliberately scrubbed clean.
Since childhood, Mumin had been more comfortable with computers than with people. While other boys had spent their free hours in the street, he had sat in front of old machines and watched tutorials, learning code in small, stubborn pieces. He had taught himself how networks spoke to one another, how digital records could reveal traces people thought they had hidden, and how to follow a technical clue without fully understanding where it might lead. He was no magician, and he knew he was not invincible. But behind a screen he could be patient in a way he rarely managed face-to-face.
He opened a set of diagnostic tools and began to examine the digital trail left by the number. The work was slow and uncertain. The number itself was a mask; it appeared to have been routed through several layers of relays. One trace contradicted another. Twice, the connection failed. The third time, an unfamiliar identifier flashed on the screen before the window closed. Mumin tried to retrieve it from the temporary record. This time the record stayed long enough to reveal a name.
IMOLLODIA.
He stared at it. He had never heard of the country. A map search placed it in Europe, a small nation tucked among borders he had never needed to study. The name appeared in a few government directories and in scattered news reports, but almost every result was brief, formal, and strangely uninformative. It was as if the country existed plainly enough on a map, yet kept the important parts of itself behind locked doors.
A second search led him to an institution whose name appeared only in a handful of records: the Royal Intelligence Corps. The words looked too grand, too old-fashioned, to belong beside the anonymous messages on his phone. But the identifier he had recovered matched a protected communications network associated with the organisation. The connection was not proof of everything he feared. It was enough, however, to make his hands go cold.
He tried to open one more record. The screen froze. For a moment, the room seemed to quiet around him, as though even the fan had stopped turning. A dark window replaced the page. White letters appeared in the centre of it.
YOU HAVE COME FAR ENOUGH. STOP NOW, OR THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.
The message remained for three seconds. Then the window closed, the page vanished, and the computer returned to its ordinary desktop. Mumin sat perfectly still. The warning was not a random error. It had appeared in direct response to his search, and whoever had sent it knew he was there.
"What did you find?" Musa asked.
The voice came from the quiet place inside Mumin's mind, low and measured. He did not answer at once. He was looking at his reflection in the darkened computer screen: a tired young man with shadowed eyes and a face that seemed to belong to someone who had spent years bracing for an impact that never arrived.
"A country called Imollodia," he whispered. "And an intelligence organisation. The Royal Intelligence Corps. I think they're following me."
"Why?" Musa asked.
"I don't know." Mumin swallowed. "That's what I'm trying to find out."
He stood, walked to the wardrobe, and pulled open the upper compartment. Dust rose in a soft grey veil. An old file lay on top of a stack of folded clothes, its corners bent, its paper cover stained where damp had once touched it. He had not opened it in years. He could not remember deciding to keep it, only the vague memory of being told that the papers inside might matter someday.
He carried it to the bed and opened the cover. Medical forms. Appointment slips. A few pages of instructions written in his mother's careful handwriting. Beneath them lay a report bearing the name of Dr. Nazmul Hasan, psychiatrist. The date at the top was 15 January 2018. The age written beside Mumin's name was seventeen.
He was twenty-two now. Five years lay between the report and this morning, yet the sight of the old date made the years feel thin, as if they could be peeled back like paper. He remembered fragments of appointments: a white room, a clock whose hands seemed too loud, questions he had not known how to answer. He remembered leaving with his family and feeling that something about him had been decided in a room where he had barely spoken. Most of the rest was blank.
The report began with a summary. Mumin read it once, then again, silently moving his lips over the words.
PATIENT: Mumin Ahmed
AGE AT ASSESSMENT: 17
DATE: 15 January 2018
CLINICAL IMPRESSION: Recurrent complex hallucinations; paranoid features under severe stress; episodes of lost time and altered sense of agency. Possible Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), provisional and requiring further assessment.
REPORTED EXPERIENCE: Patient describes an internal presence he calls "Musa," experienced at times as a separate person who acts against his conscious will. He reports incomplete memory for certain episodes and repeated injuries to the hands, apparently associated with striking walls during periods of distress.
RECOMMENDATION: Ongoing psychiatric follow-up, appropriate treatment, and consistent family support. Help the patient recognise patterns that precede episodes, establish ways to remain grounded, and develop safer methods of managing anger, fear, and dissociation. The nature and meaning of "Musa" should be explored carefully; the current assessment does not establish a separate external person.
His fingers tightened around the paper. He read the last sentence again: the assessment did not establish a separate external person. It did not say that Musa had never existed. It did not say that a stranger could send messages about him. It only said what a doctor had been able to write down in a room five years ago. Still, the words seemed to drain the air from the bedroom.
The file slipped from his hands and scattered across the floor. Mumin lowered himself after it, but his knees touched the tiles before he realised he was falling. He sat among the papers, looking at the old report as though it were a verdict on a life he had not known he was living.
"Musa," he said, his voice breaking. "Are you my illness?"
For a long time, there was no answer. The tube light hummed overhead. A motorbike passed somewhere outside, its engine fading along the street. Mumin waited, each second stretching wider than the one before it.
At last Musa spoke. "I'm not a disease you can point to and blame for everything. I'm the way you learned to survive."
Mumin pressed his palms against his eyes. "That doesn't make you real."
"When you were small, you were frightened and alone," Musa said. "You couldn't tell those boys what they had done to you. You couldn't make anyone understand how much it hurt. So you kept it inside. When the anger became too much, something in you moved where you couldn't. You gave that strength a name. You called it me. Maybe that was the only way you could bear it."
"Then you're only inside my head."
"The pain is inside your head sometimes, too. Does that make it unreal?" Musa's voice softened, though the words still carried a sharp edge. "Your fear is real. Your bruises were real. The wall is real. I am what you made of the part of yourself you couldn't reach. Whether you call me a voice, a shield, or a mistake won't erase what happened."
Mumin bent forward until his forehead touched the floor. The paper beneath his hand crumpled. He cried quietly at first, then with the helpless force of someone who had been holding a door shut for years and had finally lost the strength to keep pushing. He did not know whether he was mourning Musa, himself, or the childhood in which he had learned that loneliness could become so loud it needed another voice to answer it.
When the tears eased, he gathered the papers into a crooked stack. The room looked the same—the drawn curtains, the humming light, the wall with its scars—but he could no longer look at any of it as he had before. The file had not solved the mystery. It had given the mystery another face.
He picked up the phone. His thumb hovered over the unknown number. A message was not enough. If someone had been watching him, he wanted to hear the voice behind the words. He pressed call.
The line rang once. Twice. Three times. On the fourth ring, the call connected. A low electronic hiss filled his ear, followed by a voice so heavily distorted that he could not decide whether it belonged to a man or a woman. The sound seemed to come through several rooms, several countries, perhaps several machines.
"You've come a long way, Mumin. Congratulations."
Mumin forced himself to speak. "Who are you? Why are you following me?"
A small laugh crackled through the interference. "We are the Royal Intelligence Corps of Imollodia."
The words landed with more weight than the medical file. Mumin rose slowly from the floor. His legs felt weak, but he kept his back against the side of the bed, as if he needed the furniture to remind him where he was.
"Why me?" he asked. "I'm nobody. I have no power, no influence. I'm just trying to understand what's happening to me."
"You misunderstand the nature of our interest," the voice replied. "We are not calling to offer you a position. We are developing a weapon, and our work has reached a point where conventional systems can take us no further. We need you—and Musa."
Mumin stared at the phone. "A weapon?"
"Not a device that can be locked in a steel room and activated with a switch. We are seeking a new kind of adaptive weapon: one that can respond under pressure, change its approach, and continue when ordinary limits have been reached. Our research suggests that the relationship between your conscious self and the state you call Musa may contain the missing element."
"You want to use us?"
"We need both of you," the voice said. "Musa, by himself, is force without a stable anchor. You, Mumin, are the anchor—the memory, the restraint, the part that returns and understands the cost. Without you, the force cannot be directed. Without Musa, the mechanism we seek cannot be activated. One cannot replace the other. That is why you matter."
The room seemed to tilt. Mumin clutched the edge of the bed. "Musa is an illness. He takes control of me. I lose time. I wake up hurt. How could you possibly want that?"
"Because you have mistaken the label for the whole truth," the voice said. "Your doctors described what they could observe. We have studied records you have never seen. We believe your condition—or whatever lies behind it—may be the key to a weapon we have been unable to complete. We do not require you to understand that now. We only need you to understand this: we will not stop looking for you."
"I'm not going to help you turn myself into a weapon."
"You may think that decision belongs entirely to you," the voice answered. "For now, keep the file. Read it carefully. Learn what you can about Musa. The better you understand the connection, the clearer our purpose will become."
The line crackled. Mumin heard a faint sound behind the speaker—perhaps a door closing, perhaps another voice too far away to make out. Then the caller added, almost gently, "We will speak again." The call ended.
Mumin lowered the phone. For several seconds, he could not move. The light in the room looked too bright; the edges of the furniture seemed unnaturally sharp. In his mind, Musa began to laugh. It started as a quiet breath, then swelled until it seemed to fill the room, echoing from the ceiling and the bare walls.
"Did you hear that?" Musa said. "They know I'm here. They know what I can do. They need us."
"You're not a weapon," Mumin said. He spoke loudly, trying to make his own voice stronger than the one inside his head. "You're a part of me. You're the reason I can't trust my own memories."
"And you call me whenever you're frightened," Musa replied. The laughter faded, leaving a cold certainty behind it. "Whenever you're alone. Whenever the pain is too much and you don't know how to answer the world. You ask me to stand up when you cannot. You may hate me afterward, but you still reach for me."
Mumin clapped both hands over his ears. It did nothing. He felt an old tightening begin beneath his ribs, the familiar warning that came before his body stopped feeling entirely his own. His fingers curled. His shoulders drew back. For one dizzy second, the room seemed to slide away from him, leaving only the wall and the voice.
"A'udhu billahi min ash-shaytan ir-rajim," he recited, each word deliberately separated. He drew a breath, then another. "Musa. Please. Not today. I'm too tired."
The laughter stopped. Silence moved into the room so quickly that he could hear the faint electrical buzz of the tube light again. Mumin stayed still, afraid that even a small movement might bring the change on.
"All right," Musa finally said. His voice was lower now, difficult to read. "I'll stay back today. But don't forget what they said. They want both of us. And people who decide they need something rarely stop because they are told no."
Mumin sat down on the floor beside the scattered papers. He did not know whether Musa had made a choice or whether the force rising inside him had simply passed. Either way, his hands were steady. There was no new wound, no fresh mark on the wall. For the moment, that was enough.
The phone vibrated once more.
A new message from the same number appeared on the screen: "We will wait, Mumin. In the meantime, learn what Musa is—and what you are when he is not in control. Our weapon cannot be completed without both of you. One day, you will understand why we chose you."
He read the message until the words blurred. Then he turned the phone off and placed it face down on the bed. Outside, the morning had become ordinary: a vendor calling from the street, a gate creaking open, sunlight spreading across the neighbouring wall. The world was continuing without permission from anyone.
Mumin looked again at the marks on the western wall. They had been made over many years, each one a record of anger or fear he could not hold, each one a question no one had answered. Now a foreign intelligence organisation had put a new meaning around them. It wanted to turn the divide inside him into a weapon. It claimed to know what Musa was. It claimed to know what Mumin could become.
Musa said nothing.
That silence frightened Mumin more than the call. He did not know whether Musa was thinking, hiding, or simply waiting. He did not know whether the warning from Imollodia was a threat, an invitation, or the first move in a plan that had begun long before the messages arrived.
He leaned his head against the wall. The plaster felt cool against his forehead. Under his palm, the old scars rose and fell in tiny ridges. He closed his eyes and whispered a dua—not for strength to defeat an enemy he could not see, but for the clarity to recognise one when it finally stood before him.
It was only 8:49 in the morning. Less than half an hour had passed since he began reading the messages. Yet the day already felt as though it had crossed a line from which there could be no easy return.
The wall remained silent. The phone remained dark. And inside Mumin, Musa waited—no longer merely the name attached to old injuries, but the centre of a secret that powerful people wanted to turn into a weapon.
Mumin did not know which part of the truth frightened him most: that someone was hunting them, that his memories could not be trusted, or that the people on the other end of the line might be right about how much they needed each other.
Outside, the sun climbed higher. Inside, the silence began to change.