Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 829 - 831

Chapter 829: Chapter 831

She walked around the room with careful curiosity, eyes scanning the walls, the old maps, the dusty shelves. Her gaze lingered on the fireplace, where a single iron pendant hung above the mantle, Jude’s old insignia, the last thing Darren had taken from the core chamber.

"Do you know why I’ve come?" she asked.

"You’re looking for the seal."

She turned, eyebrow raised. "You don’t seem surprised."

"I’ve been waiting."

"Then you knew it wouldn’t hold forever."

"I hoped it would. But hope’s never been enough."

She took a seat at the table, pulling out a small device, something sleek and silent, pulsing with soft blue light. Darren didn’t recognize the model, but he didn’t ask. She tapped it, and a three-dimensional projection appeared above it: a map of the old city, now marked with dozens of red fractures.

"This is the spread pattern," she said. "It started slow. People hearing voices. Then shared dreams. Animals moving in strange migrations. Last month, a research vessel in the southern sea picked up an anomalous signal. It matched the frequency patterns from the Helix logs."

Darren exhaled. "It’s waking."

"More than that. It’s learning."

He sat down opposite her, fingers steepled under his chin. "What do you want from me?"

"You were there. The only one who came back. You know the architecture of the seal. We think we can replicate it, but we need the original matrix."

"It’s gone. Buried with Jude."

She shook her head. "Not completely. Your mind still holds residual traces. That’s why I’m here."

Darren stared at her. "You want to go in my head?"

She met his gaze. "Not all the way. Just enough to access the pathways. Our neuro-mappers can extract symbolic references. We think we can reconstruct a synthetic seal, one that doesn’t require a human host."

"And if you’re wrong?"

"Then at least we’ll know before it spreads past containment."

Darren stood, pacing. His joints ached more than they used to. His scars didn’t fade. Every year away from Leonork had pulled a thread from the tightly woven tapestry of his sanity. But he hadn’t lost it yet.

He turned to her. "I’ll do it."

They left the village that same night. Maye had a transport hidden in the woods, hover-based, cloaked with low-frequency scatter tech that Darren only vaguely understood. Inside were two more agents: a young woman with burn scars on her neck who introduced herself as Lin, and an older man named Rojin, whose left arm was clearly mechanical. They didn’t ask questions, and Darren appreciated that. The less said, the better.

The facility they took him to was underground, somewhere in the northern regions where cold could preserve more than just bodies. It was clean, sterile, a stark contrast to the wild silence of his home. The walls were smooth white, lit by embedded panels that gave off a clinical glow. They led him to a chamber shaped like an egg, where a chair sat in the middle, surrounded by transparent screens.

"This is the neural echo chamber," Maye explained. "We’re going to map your long-term memory and isolate the symbolic architecture left behind by the Helix exposure. It may be disorienting."

Darren smirked. "I’ve been disoriented for fifteen years."

She didn’t smile back.

They strapped him in, gently but firmly. Electrodes were placed along his scalp, his chest, his spine. A dome lowered over his head. The lights dimmed.

And then it began.

He wasn’t sure what they did exactly, but it felt like being dropped through himself. Memories came unbidden, fast and wild. Jude laughing in the rain. The hum of the core. Blood on broken glass. The sound of someone whispering his name in a voice made of static. He saw the seal again, not just its shape but its meaning, a conceptual prison, a mirror turned inward, a song of order layered in fractal notes. He felt the pulse return, steady and hungry, pressing against the edges of his mind like fingers trying to pry open a lid.

He screamed once. Maybe twice.

And then it stopped.

The dome lifted. His vision returned slowly. Maye was standing in front of him, her expression unreadable.

"You got it?" he rasped.

She nodded. "Most of it."

He tried to stand, but his legs buckled. Lin was there, catching him with surprising gentleness. "We’ll get you to a cot."

They helped him into a room, and for the first time in years, he slept without dreams.

When he woke, Maye was waiting.

"We’ve begun constructing the synthetic seal," she said. "It’ll take time. Days, maybe weeks. But we’re close."

He nodded. "And if you fail?"

"We won’t," she said, but her eyes betrayed uncertainty.

Darren didn’t push. He’d done his part. Now it was their burden.

But late that night, as he walked the sterile halls alone, he felt it again.

Not in the walls. Not in his head.

In the silence between heartbeats.

The thing that had once been sealed wasn’t angry. It wasn’t vengeful. It was curious.

And curiosity never sleeps forever.

The cold was heavier underground. Not the kind that made you shiver, but the kind that seeped into your bones and reminded you that you were somewhere not meant for life. Darren paced the observation deck overlooking the synthetic seal chamber, a massive space filled with curved glass, cables wrapped in translucent shielding, and humming machines that looked too advanced to belong in the same world he remembered. Maye stood by one of the control panels, her hands dancing across a projected interface, coordinating teams and calling for updates with the calm authority of someone who had given up the luxury of panic.

The prototype seal structure sat at the center of the chamber, a sphere suspended in anti-gravity, its surface flickering with shifting patterns. It wasn’t beautiful like the original. It was precise, artificial, like someone trying to recreate a thunderstorm by programming raindrops. Darren watched it pulsing in low, rhythmic waves and felt something tug at the back of his mind. A whisper, distant but familiar.