Chapter 7: Molejo

I don’t talk in my sleep. My sleep talks me.

Awake, I know nothing. Ask me the name and the question falls through me like a coin through a broken machine. Asleep, I’m a witness to a room I was never in. The bird with no wings is still under the mattress. Every number is a door someone is still standing behind. And the girl who hums like rain keeps reading the wrong numbers out loud — I can hear her from here, and I can’t make her stop.

They sing me down with a worn-out lullaby and they wait. I give them everything around the name and never the name. The tape gets thinner. The room stays locked.

Memory’s the last thing that burns. Mine burned first.

So says the Code.