The suspect had been tied to the chair for twelve hours.

His wrists were raw where the rope bit into skin, his ankles swollen, his shirt darkened by sweat and old blood. The room smelled of metal, dust, and something sour that never quite left interrogation chambers—fear that had soaked too deeply into the walls to be scrubbed away. The single bulb above him flickered like a nervous witness.

The investigator leaned forward, palms flat on the table.

“Say it again,” he demanded.

The man lifted his head slowly. His eyes were dry, strangely calm, as if tears had already been spent somewhere far away.

“I have already met Him,” he said.

The investigator exhaled sharply through his nose. Twelve hours. No confession. No names. No network. Just that sentence, repeated with the patience of a prayer or a curse.

“You expect me to believe that?” the investigator snapped. “You expect mercy because you claim you saw God?”

The man shook his head.

“Not God,” he said softly. “Your God.”

The investigator straightened.

Silence pressed down on the room. Behind the one-way glass, officials observed, took notes, waited for progress. The machinery of order required results. It always had.

The investigator turned away, running a hand through his hair. His reflection did not meet him—because there was no mirror in the room. There never was. Mirrors complicated things. They reminded men that power had a face.

“Last chance,” he said, reaching for the pistol at his side. “You tell me who you work for, or this ends.”

The suspect looked at the gun, then back at the investigator.

“I met Him when I was a child,” he said. “When your world first arrived with chains and scripture in the same hands.”

The investigator’s patience snapped.

He drew the gun.

And that was when he saw it.

Not in a mirror—but in the one-way glass. A reflection he was never meant to notice.

His own face.

Twisted. Red. Wet with tears he did not remember shedding.

The gun wavered.

For a fraction of a second, the room felt wrong—older than concrete, heavier than law. The bulb hummed like an insect trapped in amber.

Behind the glass, the observers froze.

The investigator lowered the gun slowly.

“What did you say?” he whispered.

---

Long before interrogation rooms existed, before glass learned how to watch without being seen, fear had already perfected its craft.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, colonial outposts spread across African soil like deliberate scars. They arrived with maps that renamed rivers, with laws that misunderstood land, and with a God who spoke a foreign language but demanded immediate obedience.

Villages learned quickly what silence meant.

A knock at dawn. A list of names. Men taken for labor. Women counted. Children measured not by age, but by usefulness. Fear became routine. Faith became dangerous.

The suspect had once been called Ayo.

He remembered the day the missionaries arrived in his village. He had been no older than ten. They came smiling, carrying books they said contained salvation. They taught hymns before they taught commands. They spoke of heaven while pointing at the ground.

Ayo’s father had listened politely. His mother had hidden the sacred objects beneath the floor.

Two weeks later, soldiers followed the missionaries.

They said the village had harbored rebels. They said God demanded order. They said resistance was sin.

Ayo remembered his father kneeling, hands raised, trying to translate dignity into a language the soldiers would accept. He remembered the rifle shot that interrupted him.

That was the day Ayo met “God.”

Not in the sky.

In the eyes of men who believed violence became holy when justified.

That night, the elders gathered what was left of the village. They spoke in whispers. They said memory must survive where bodies could not. They said fear could be taught—but so could endurance.

Ayo was sent away before dawn.

“Remember what they fear,” his mother told him. “They fear seeing themselves.”

---

The investigator sat heavily in his chair.

“You’re trying to provoke me,” he said, though his voice lacked conviction. “Religious nonsense. Psychological tactics.”

Ayo smiled faintly.

“You put me in a room without mirrors,” he said. “And still you found yourself.”

The investigator slammed his fist on the table.

“Enough.”

But the word echoed back strangely, as if the room disagreed.

“Why do you keep saying that sentence?” the investigator asked. “What do you want?”

“I want you to understand,” Ayo said. “That what you call order is only fear wearing a uniform.”

Behind the glass, a supervisor shifted uncomfortably.

The investigator stood again, pacing.

“You think you’re special?” he said. “Men like you always think suffering gives them authority.”

“No,” Ayo replied. “Suffering gives memory. Authority comes from forgetting.”

The investigator stopped.

A memory surfaced uninvited.

His own childhood. Hunger. The uniform promised food, structure, purpose. The law promised clarity. Interrogation rooms promised clean endings.

He had never asked what they promised the people on the other side of the table.

“Tell me about Him,” the investigator said quietly.

Ayo closed his eyes.

“I met Him in the forest,” he said. “Where the bodies were left because burial was forbidden. I met Him in the camps where men prayed in languages their guards couldn’t understand. I met Him in the silence after the whip stopped.”

He opened his eyes again.

“He looked like you,” Ayo said. “Every time.”

The investigator felt the room tilt.

“This is manipulation,” he said weakly.

“Is it?” Ayo asked. “Or recognition?”

The bulb flickered again. For a moment, the investigator thought he saw shadows moving where they shouldn’t—figures standing just outside the circle of light.

Generations watching.

Waiting.

---

Fear among the colonized had never been singular. It was layered, inherited, taught alongside survival. Children learned when to speak and when to vanish. Elders learned which truths could live only in stories. Resistance learned patience.

Ayo had grown up moving between settlements, carrying messages disguised as prayers, names hidden inside hymns. He had learned that belief could be weaponized—but also shielded.

When he was finally captured, he did not resist.

Interrogation was another ritual. Another language of power.

He chose a sentence simple enough to survive repetition.

“I have already met Him.”

Because it was true.

---

The investigator raised his eyes to the glass again.

His reflection stared back—older now, smaller.

“Turn the lights on outside,” he barked.

No response.

He stepped closer to the glass.

Instead of the observers, he saw rows of faces behind his own—men and women, scarred, silent, unblinking. Not ghosts exactly. Memories.

He staggered back.

“This isn’t possible,” he muttered.

Ayo watched him gently.

“You asked for the truth,” he said. “This is what it looks like.”

The investigator laughed once, sharp and breaking.

“You expect me to believe the past is judging me?”

“No,” Ayo said. “The past is patient.”

The gun lay forgotten on the table.

Outside the room, alarms began to hum—not loud enough to explain, not quiet enough to ignore.

The investigator sank into his chair.

“What happens now?” he asked.

Ayo tilted his head.

“That depends,” he said. “On whether you choose to look away again.”

The light flickered one last time, casting the investigator’s shadow long and distorted across the floor—stretching backward, not forward, as if reaching into history itself.

Somewhere deep in the building, a door unlocked itself.

And fear, having waited centuries, leaned closer.