Maybe they somehow knew I wouldn’t help them. Either way, two weeks later, I woke up in a strange motel room in Nebraska. Now I knew how I had always loved torturing animals since I was a young boy. How excited it made me, even now. I wanted to deny it, to say it went against everything I thought about myself and other memories of my life, but I was beginning to appreciate how little those internal protests actually meant in the face of the thing poisoning my mind.

Like Hannah, I tried repeatedly to tell someone, anyone, about what was happening to me. But somehow, I could never get the words out. Like she predicted, I tried to hang myself in the closet of that same Nebraska motel room with a drying cord from the dirty bathroom. But my hands wouldn’t cinch it around my neck. The following day, my feet similarly betrayed me, refusing to step out in front of a passing concrete truck.

Three days ago, I was taken again, though this time I actually remember some of it. I remember waking up to people surrounding me, and the low drone of the plane’s engines while we were in flight. I remember being taken back to the clinic, not through the beautiful lobby, but through some dark service entrance that sent back the lonely echoes of our footfalls as I was pulled back inside. Yet even then, I was surprised at how little I struggled, at how few noises I made. I could see and understand everything well enough by that point, having woken from whatever stupor they had induced, but I still found it hard to do much other than look around blandly while my insides felt like they were dissolving in an acid bath of terror.

Then I was in the procedure room again, stripped naked and strapped to the chair and staring at that one blemish on the white wall. There were several people around me, but there was no show of giving me injections this time or scientific fanfare of any kind. I wanted to ask questions, but I found I couldn’t speak, and no one would speak to me. So I was left staring at that dirty spot on the far wall, and at first I thought it was my imagination that it was growing larger. But no, it was, or at least the white was disappearing as the wall slid away to reveal a black tunnel.

Suddenly, Mr. Aller was beside the chair. He glanced down at me, his smile cold. “Welcome to Tier Three.”