His scans showed mild neural scarring. It was enough to explain partial memory loss and jumbled speech, but not the stubborn clusters of technical terms that kept returning. He wasn’t babbling nonsense. There was structure buried in the brokenness. Helen found herself reading old notes at midnight, trying to understand how knowledge survived where identity frayed.
He woke suddenly during her next visit, eyes wide and disoriented. Before she could speak, his fingers closed weakly around her wrist. “Report…warning…dangerous…” he whispered. The rest came out as a tangled string of consonants. “Under…the cliff.” His brow furrowed with frustration, as if the words betrayed him.