The next day, there was no new sentence on the wall.
And that alone was terrifying.
The neighborhood was quiet in a way that didn't resemble silence… it resembled what comes after screaming. The trees did not move, the air remained heavy, as if it refused to pass through the lungs. Cairn and Alicia sat on the ground near the small fireplace, without fire, sharing glances instead of words. Nero was in the corner, drawing something incomprehensible on the wall—interlocking circles and lines, like cracks in an upside-down skull.
Alicia said:
— "I feel as if my body is getting heavier… as if my bones are shrinking."
Cairn replied, voice unfocused:
— "I can't remember… how long has it been since I breathed deeply?"
She stood, but staggered, as though the ground refused to be touched again. She held onto the wall for support, then gasped: her palm stuck to a thin, transparent film that hadn't been there yesterday. She pulled it away quickly, exhaled, and looked—but found nothing. As if the wall had tried to catch them, then regretted it.
Outside, the pain began.
Harsh coughing erupted from one of the houses, followed by brief screams, then heavy silence. An hour later, their neighbor, Valden, stumbled into the street. His face didn't look right… pale, but tightened, as if his skin had been drained from the inside.
He said in a strangled voice:
— "My wife… she didn't wake up. I tried. I tried to shake her but she…"
Then he fell. No thud. No blood. Just a collapse, as though someone had switched him off with a hidden button.
Alicia ran to him, checked his pulse, his eyes, but found nothing to prove he was alive. Nothing to prove he was dead either. As if he had… left.
Cairn wrote in his notebook:
> "A body without heat. A heart without rhythm. An open mouth that exhales nothing, swallows nothing. Is this what it means to be outside life, without dying?"
By noon, the illness had spread.
People in the Sixth Quarter began vomiting, collapsing, speaking in incomprehensible words, then dropping like autumn leaves caught by an early winter. No pattern. Children and elders, healthy and weak alike. Some fell while walking, some at the dinner table, some slept and never returned.
Alicia started coughing. A trace of blood stained her cloth. She didn't tell Cairn, but she knew she was next—or at least, she felt it.
That evening, the remaining residents gathered in the central square. Their number was far smaller than before. They looked at one another in fear, but spoke little. Something in the air devoured conversations, made tongues heavy, minds fractured.
An old man said:
— "This is not a sickness… it's something pulling us out from inside."
A weary-eyed woman replied:
— "My son said he saw a girl that looked like him playing in the alley… and moments later, he vanished."
Whispers, glances, then dispersal. As if fear itself had become contagious.
That night, Alicia worsened.
Cairn held her head as she coughed violently, each time blood growing more. Yet her eyes stayed sharp, resisting. She rasped:
— "I know this… doesn't feel like death."
Cairn answered:
— "It feels like disappearance."
She looked at him for a long moment, then whispered:
— "If I disappear, don't write me as if I left… write that I was here, until the last breath."
She smiled, then fainted.
From the corner, Nero watched. He quietly approached, laid a blanket over her, and murmured:
— "She won't leave… because she doesn't want to."
More died in the following hours.
People began marking doors, to know who was lost. Red meant sick inside. Black meant death. But by morning, all the marks had vanished. No paint, no trace. As if someone had wiped them away with bare fingers.
At dawn, a scream broke the air.
A woman staggered into the street, trembling, shouting:
— "They were here yesterday! My house was full! Today no one! Even the food is gone! Even the sound of footsteps!"
The people didn't know what to say. Some shut their doors and hid, as if fleeing the truth. Others stood frozen, shaking at something unseen.
Cairn wrote in his notebook:
> "It isn't death we fear… but disappearance without explanation. The void that remains, as if we were never born."
That night, for the first time, no new sentence appeared on the wall.
Instead, a strange mark appeared on their front door. Not writing. A small handprint, as though a child had dipped its palm in ash and pressed it there. But it wasn't ash.
It was gray dust.
Cairn approached slowly, his eyes fixed on the mark. Something inside him resisted touching it, as if instinct whispered: "The touch may mean something you can't undo."
Nero said from behind, in a voice that didn't sound like a boy's:
— "That's not for us."
Cairn spun around:
— "What do you mean?"
But Nero had already gone silent. He crouched by the dead fireplace, peeling flakes from the wall with his fingernail.
Alicia stirred weakly, groaning. Cairn rushed to her, lifted her head gently. Her eyes half-open, lips dry.
She whispered:
— "I feel like… my voice isn't coming from me."
— "What do you mean?"
— "I mean… as if my voice is trying to speak… from somewhere else."
The night passed heavier than ever. No one dared sleep. Outside, a faint sound—bare feet walking on gravel, stopping, then starting again. But the sound never drew closer, never faded… it simply remained.
By midnight, small things were gone.
A medicine box from the cupboard. Nero's notebook he had hidden under his pillow. The stale piece of bread they had vowed a hundred times to throw away but never did. Even the metal spoon that always sat by the fireplace… vanished.
Alicia noticed first.
— "Where's the notebook? It was here, I swear it was here!" She searched under the pillow, shook the blanket, rattled it like it hid a crime.
Nero stood at the cupboard, staring at the empty shelf.
— "And the box… no one touched it, right?"
Then he looked at them slowly, his voice trembling:
— "So… if we didn't take them… and no one came in…"
Cairn scratched his head, scanning the floor.
— "Maybe they fell? Maybe… a rat? Some animal?" He said it without believing, his eyes drifting slowly to the corners.
But Nero stayed frozen, gazing into emptiness, as though seeing a larger void.
— "The house is forgetting things." His words slid out like cold air.
Alicia spun toward him.
— "What?"
— "I mean… things aren't gone because they left. They're gone because the house forgot they existed." He sighed, slapped his forehead.
— "I know I wrote yesterday. So why is there no trace? No line, no page, not even a pen?"
A weight pressed into Cairn's chest. Not fear of loss. No—fear of being the next thing forgotten.
— "Nero… that's madness." He tried to laugh, a dry, cracked laugh that betrayed him.
Alicia flipped through her notebook quickly.
— "I wrote a list of things we needed to buy. It was here, I saw it. Even the torn edge of the page." She froze, gasped, then stared at them:
— "It's gone!"
Silence devoured the room.
Nero sat on the ground, hugging his knees.
— "If small things vanish… maybe soon we won't find our names. Or our voices. Or our faces." He looked at Cairn, his face pale:
— "Imagine waking up, and finding you've forgotten who you are. Not because you lost memory… but because the place refused to remember you."
Cairn swallowed hard, air tightening in his chest.
— "As if we're dissolving without a trace."
Alicia whispered:
— "I don't want to disappear."
Nero closed his eyes, muttered:
— "No one does… but the house doesn't ask anymore."
Then something happened.
A faint noise… something dragging across the floor. The scrape of metal on old tiles.
Cairn shot to his feet, glancing toward the entrance.
— "Did you hear that?"
Alicia inhaled sharply, pointed toward the kitchen:
— "It's… it's coming from there."
Nero didn't move. He opened his eyes slowly, staring into the dark as if he knew exactly what awaited.
Cairn crept to the doorway, picked up an iron rod lying by the fireplace—the last thing he was certain hadn't vanished yet—and stood at the threshold.
The darkness in the kitchen wasn't ordinary. It looked heavier. As if the air there was hiding a secret.
He leaned his head in slowly, then—boom!
Something exploded against the wall.
But it wasn't sound. It was inside him. In his mind. As though the wall screamed directly into his skull.
He stumbled back, raising the rod, but nothing lunged.
Instead, on the wall, a single word appeared in faint gray script:
"Your turn is near."
Alicia gasped.
Nero finally stood, stepping up behind Cairn. He looked at the word and said, like the sigh of the dead:
— "See? I told you… it doesn't forget everything. It chooses."
Cairn stayed silent. His heart raced, but anger welled inside him. Not anger at fear—anger at not understanding.
— "Why? Why us?"
But the wall, like the rest of the quarter, gave no answer.
Silence returned—heavier.
As if everything was waiting. Waiting for the next to vanish.
The next morning, the street was silent.
No birds, no wind, not even the gray cat that always lingered at the corner.
The houses looked like sealed boxes, holding postponed deaths.
Alicia sat on the bed, pale but defiant. She said:
— "We're still here… but something is trying to erase existence itself."
Cairn didn't answer. He only wrote:
> "If the end swallows meaning… what remains of us? Our shapes? Our voices? Our memories? Not even our footprints survive…"
By noon, Alicia saw something from the window. A little girl, standing in the alley.
She looked exactly like Alicia, but with gray eyes. And she smiled at her.
Alicia screamed and ran outside. Cairn followed, but when he emerged, no one was there.
He looked at Alicia, standing in the middle of the street, mouth open, staring at emptiness.
She whispered:
— "I saw me."
He gently pulled her back to the doorstep. Her eyes were distant, as though still stuck in that alley where the "copy" had appeared.
He said:
— "Maybe it was just a girl who looked like you?"
She shook her head:
— "No… it was me. Even the same scar on my left shoulder… even the way I stood."
She paused, then said:
— "And she smiled… not at me. At me."
Silence stretched between them, until the sun retreated from the quarter like a cat shivering from the cold.
That evening, some residents decided to light a great fire in the square. They sat around it, as though the flames were the only thing that wouldn't betray them. Some wept. Others stayed quiet, as though waiting for their names to be called—to be next.
From behind the crowd, Cairn saw something strange on a far wall.
Not writing.
A drawing… a small mirror, sketched in charcoal. And inside the mirror, a single sentence written in thin script:
> "Whoever looks too long… will be seen."
They returned home in silence. Cairn didn't tell Alicia. But he felt the wall breathing again… a faint pulse, like an old heart announcing its return.
Inside, they found something else.
A photograph, placed on the table. An old picture of them… one they had never taken.
But they were all there.
Cairn, Alicia, Nero, even the gray cat.
And in the corner, a faceless figure.
The chapter ends here… the memory that never happened, the person never born, and the handprint never left by a hand but by gray dust.
> And the Sixth Quarter, it seemed, had begun to decide who remains… and who is erased.