They called it Echo Zone 9—a patch of uncharted jungle deep in the Karadari Range, wrapped in ancient fog and sealed off in every satellite image. Six of us went in. Three came back.

And I was not one of them.

I’m writing this from a bunker carved into the belly of a mountain, a place not marked on any map, because I need someone—anyone—to know we didn’t die. We were left.

It started like any mission. Ropes, gears, comms, adrenaline. Our team: Cam, Reyes, Laskari, Minh, Juno, and me—Codename: Moth. They picked us because we were ghosts in our own way. No families. No paper trails. No past worth mourning.

When we crossed the tree line, something shifted. Not in the air—in us.

The jungle pulsed. Our watches ran backward. Voices bled through the comms, speaking in the voices of people we’d buried years ago. Minh heard his dead sister calling him by the nickname only she used. Juno? She saw her daughter’s face etched into tree bark.

Reyes was the first to vanish. One second he was checking the perimeter, the next—we found only his boots and a tape recorder playing his childhood lullaby in reverse.

By Day 3, Laskari snapped. He kept trying to dig a tunnel, saying, “There’s a door beneath us… we just forgot how to open it.” He screamed when we dragged him away. His eyes were empty. Like someone else had borrowed him.

Only Cam, Juno, and I remained. That night, Cam told me we had to split up—one team would return, the other would stay and keep whatever was here contained.

“We draw lots,” he said. But I knew he didn’t mean it.

He left with Juno at dawn.

They came back, apparently. The debrief reports said “mission successful,” but refused to elaborate. Classified. Buried under layers of false documents.

And me? I stayed.

Because something in this place remembers us. Every day, it shows me Cam’s face. Juno’s laugh. My mother’s voice humming through the trees. But it’s not real. It’s the jungle, alive and watching, feeding on memory.

I’m not sure how much time I have left. My body’s still here, but my name… my voice… it’s fading.

If this message gets out: we didn’t fail.

We were sacrificed.

And we’re still listening.