Operation Watchtower

Agent Nicholas Grayson. The drone of the airliner moves through you, slow and rhythmic, a narcotic hum. You drift, thoughts unmoored, slipping backward through time. A stairwell. Cold cinderblock walls. Your steps in tandem with another. The sound of your heels ringing in the emptiness.

General Virek swipes his card. His voice low, measured. “This is important. Don’t scuff the circle.”

You nod. Swipe your own. The MP at the door marks your passing with the briefest of acknowledgments.

Beyond, a vast darkness. A cavernous expanse without measure. The space is unknowable, its borders lost to shadow. A single desk glows dim beneath the feeble light of a lamp. The man seated there is gaunt, his frame stark against the gloom. He lifts his hand, crooks a finger. The movement stretches his shadow long across the floor, reaching for you, the illusion of its touch against your cheek.

A voice not in the air but in your mind. Come.

Your body moves forward of its own accord.

As you near, the chalk line becomes visible. A circle, drawn with intent. You do not question its meaning; you only know that it must not be disturbed. At the last instant, you lift your feet, cross the threshold unmarked.

Sit.

The chair is a cheap, foldable thing. You sit.

On the desk, three manila folders. Names that carry weight. Waco Siege. Unabomber. Oklahoma City Bombing.

His gaze lingers on you, unreadable. Your work has not gone unnoticed, Agent Grayson. That is why you are here.

A sickness coils in your gut. You swallow it down. You wish yourself elsewhere. You are not elsewhere.

Tell me, Agent. What did you see in these operations that others did not? Things only you could see.

“Sir, I’m reporting with the understanding that what I say will remain within the confines of this room and your discretion. What I’m about to tell you is not speculation. It is analysis—drawn from direct field experience, intelligence correlations, and post-incident investigation. I’ll be blunt.

“The official narrative on Oklahoma City and Waco is incomplete—willfully so. McVeigh may have lit the fuse, but he wasn’t the architect. The evidence at the Alfred P. Murrah building suggests multiple explosive sources. Blast-wave patterns contradict a single-device detonation. Residue samples retrieved from interior columns showed chemical compounds that were not consistent with ANFO. We’re talking military-grade accelerants—black budget-level assets. Either McVeigh had help, or we did it ourselves. I lean toward the latter.

“At Waco, similar irregularities persist. Koresh wasn’t just leading a cult—he was running a rite. Ritualistic diagrams were found in the compound, traced in ash and blood. Burn patterns in the main hall showed circular containment glyphs—non-Christian, non-Western, but deliberate. Interviews with survivors indicate coordinated chanting. Sympathetic resonance, possibly. In plain terms, he was summoning something. And he nearly brought it through.

“I pulled twelve kids out before the fire collapsed the west wall. We lost seventy. I carry every one of those names—the kids from Oklahoma, too—daycare center, ground floor. I know the reports. I signed half of them. My shrink says that’s trauma. Fine. But trauma didn’t explain what I saw in that building. Evil did.

“In both cases—Waco and Oklahoma—we’re looking at overlapping anomalies: coded symbols, environmental irregularities, electromagnetic interference pre-detonation. There are threads here, sir. Threads that don’t trace back to standard operational enemies. This isn’t al-Qaeda. It’s not rogue militias. It’s something older. Smarter.

“You know that already.

“I’ve chased conspiracy theories before—most are noise. But some aren’t. I’ve seen enough to believe they’re real. And I’m not afraid to call it what it is: occult influence on domestic soil, cloaked behind anti-government sentiment, weaponized by people who know exactly what they’re doing.

“I’m not asking permission to dig deeper. I’m reporting that I already have. And that I intend to continue.”

His mouth smiles, a smile that is not a smile. His hands move over the folders, sliding them from view. He replaces them with a single file.

Operation Watchtower.

His voice does not change. The weight of the words presses just the same. Events of great portent are unfolding.

You will go to San Diego. You will go alone. There are matters beyond our organization’s conventional understanding. You will find them, and you will put an end to them. What is required is not understanding but resolve. There are movements in the dark. The Order of the Black Star. The Aryan Solar Circle. Their paths converge. What comes of it is unknown. You will see that it does not come to anything at all.

The Order of the Black Star, led by Erik Dunlop. He believes we stand at the edge of the Fourth Aeon, that the world as we know it must be razed to bring about divine order. Their bookstore, The Veil, is their gateway. A meeting place for mystics, drifters, the lost. It is where they are found. It is where they are made.

Clipped to the dossier is a photograph. Erik Dunlop at a lectern in some dim and cavernous hall. The gathered sit in rapt attention, their faces drawn with something like reverence, something like hunger. Their suits tailored, their jewelry discreet, the quiet wealth of those who do not need to announce themselves.

Dunlop stands among them yet apart. The cut of his Armani suit immaculate, the silk sheen catching the light like oil on water. Around his neck a pendant of obsidian, dark as the space between stars. His smile does not reach his eyes. His hands rest upon the wood like those of a man delivering a verdict, not a sermon.

The Aryan Solar Circle. A Nazi faction under Kurt Maurer. They see the West as weak, dying. They seek empire in its place. Their stronghold is a bar in Ocean Beach. Dugin’s.

Clipped to this dossier is another photograph. Kurt Maurer stepping from a black limousine, the door held open by a man whose face is turned from the camera. Maurer is powerfully built, the kind of strength that does not come from vanity but from war. His red hair shorn high and tight, his goatee salted with silver. The sleeves of his expensive shirt rolled back to reveal the ink coiled along his arms, symbols of old allegiances, old gods, the sigil of the Aryan Solar Circle harsh against his skin—a sunwheel encircled by runic inscriptions, jagged script whispering of ascendance through destruction, of blood and fire and the breaking of weak men. A symbol carved from old hate, its lines grim and unbroken.

Behind him the glow of neon, the low slouch of a biker bar, its sign half burned-out. Dugin’s. A den for those who trade in shadows and violence, where men speak of war not as history but as prophecy. Maurer stands as though an empire has already been conquered. A man who does not wait. A man who does not ask. A man who takes.

You listen. You do not interrupt.

Our division is small, Agent Grayson. You will have no backup. You will need allies among the locals. Begin with Miss Belle Flower. A hacker. We have watched her. We have found nothing beyond the petty crimes of her kind. But she has reach. Connections. She will be useful.

He opens the folder. The paper whispers against itself, the weight of what is written there bending the air around it. He lifts a sheaf of pages, crisp, orderly, squared at the edges. Stapled clean. Paper clipped to the top is a photograph of a girl not yet full grown, eighteen maybe. She stands outside a stuccoed building scorched by the western sun, San Diego heat rising off the pavement like breath. Overhead, the iron bellies of jets split the sky and leave nothing behind. She does not smile. She does not frown. Her face is a blank page, unwritten. The wind lifts her hair and lets it fall. She does not move.

You thumb through the dossier. The pages are thin.

She was born into the sawdust and smoke of a traveling circus, her parents fixtures in the freak tent. Giants and grotesques. She was neither. Had no claws, no second head, no forked tongue. Just flesh. And so they made use of her the way a butcher makes use of a carcass. She was theirs. No state had claim to her. No birth recorded. No name but the one they gave.

Her mother was a tower of a woman, her arms thick as fence posts. Her voice could still a crowd or send them howling. Her father was small and clever and with many fingers, nimble as rats, a surgeon by instinct and desire. They took her body like a canvas. Sewed into her the limbs of beasts. Goat tail. Rabbit ears. Small things at first. Later, stranger. She could not animate them. They rotted on her.

The scars remain. Lines drawn in tissue. A map of what was done.

The circus knew. Of course, they knew. It was not hidden. It was spectacle. This is the cost, they said. This is life under the big top. And she—just a contortionist. Folded but not rare. So they let it happen. Every one of them. Not one lifted a hand.

She fled. One night, under a low moon. Buck Flanagan drove the rig. Weathered man. Hair the color of old bone. He saw what they did to her. Maybe not all of it. But enough. He drove her to the edge of the county. Passed her off to a man named Red. No last name needed. That’s how it ends, most stories in the dark. Red took her West.

Next page. A new paragraph. The words are sharper here.

She had eyes on a forum. Lurker’s eyes. Thread after thread. A cell. Plans. Smoke and fire. Her hands on the wire before it burned. But she said nothing. Maybe fear. Maybe she couldn’t believe. But the silence was hers.

Flip again.

A new contact. Anonymous. Knows the circus. Knows what was done. Says they want to help. But she does not trust it. How could she? The past does not reach out a hand unless it means to pull you under. And yet, someone out there knows her. Knows her name, her shape, her history. Knows she ran.

Wants her back.

A silence settles between you.

Then he stands.

And his shadow rises behind him.

You expect the silhouette of a man. What you see is not a man. It is something else.

It is something alien and terrifying. The room does not contain it. Cannot contain it. It does not obey the space it occupies.

The shadow writhed. It breathed and buckled like wind in the grain. Out from it came arms not arms, spindled and black, stretching into the air and gone again like smoke in reverse. It pulsed. Grew. Diminished. You thought you saw teeth in the turning of its head. Long and thin and sharp as awls. But they, too, dissolved, unshaped, and what remained was only the silhouette. A thing unbeheld yet seen. A thing that bore watching. And watched.

You hear a whimper. Thin, dry. You recognize it belatedly as your own.

He extends his hand. You cannot refuse it. The fingers close around yours.

Godspeed, Agent Grayson.

Your memory is a broken thing after that. A series of flashes. The long walk back. The circle unmarred. The door closing behind you. The cool night air and General Virek’s voice, distant, making some empty sound of comfort.

Your apartment. The go-bag waiting by the door, as always. The airport. The ascent into the sky.

Now.

Something stirs against your hand.

You look. A fly. Small. Metallic green, its thorax gleaming like something wet, something unnatural.

The tickle of the fly on your hand is the first thing to call you back. You’ve been gone. Drifted somewhere beneath thought, beneath memory. A hollowness where a man ought to be. You had slipped into the old places, fear-worn paths carved through the meat of you, left there to keep you safe once and long ago. You do not remember where you were. Not truly.

The Agency sent a woman. Alicia Hightower. A therapist, they called her. Said she’d help you root out the rot. Teach you to listen again. To feel. Said it was new science. Revolutionary. But there is nothing new under heaven. The engine hums through the floor. The air is cold. You breathe. In. Out.

You raise your hand and swipe at the insect but it is gone before you move. Drifts to the window. Impacts the glass. Again. Again.

A soft chime sounds through the cabin.

Then again.

And again.

Something shifts. A ripple in the air. You see a steward emerge from the cockpit. His face is pale, unfocused. The other attendants glance at one another. At their hands. At the lights overhead.

You do not know what is wrong.

Only that something is.

Terribly, terribly wrong.

Swift Knees 85

Belle Flower. Your phone rattles against the wood of your nightstand, insistent. Dragging you up from the depths of sleep. A rare sleep untouched by nightmares, and you resent it for that. You turn your head, eyes heavy, the red glow of the clock staring back at you. 6:01 AM. You lie still, listening to the hum of it. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. In another moment, it will tumble to the floor, a thing desperate to cast itself down, to be done with its purpose, to end.

From the next apartment, you hear the faint sound of a television broadcast and your neighbor sobbing.

Your landline rings.

You know what this is. You’ve always known. You sit in the dark with the knowing of it heavy in your chest. As if you’d swallowed iron. You’ve seen it. Not just once. Night after night. The thing circling in your thoughts, a wheel that never stops turning. You did nothing. And now it’s come. You do not answer. You only listen. And wait.

The cell phone stops buzzing. The landline rings on, stubborn in its purpose, until at last it yields to the tape.

“Miss Flower?” It’s Harold Nguyen, your doorman. “Your father is here. Shall I send him up?”

Then a sound. A dull percussive thud, like the popping of a paper bag. A sharp intake of breath. A wet and shuddering gurgle.

Silence.

The line goes dead.

You are in shock. Your father. The thought of him. Why is he here? What could he want? How did he find you? Your breath shallow in your chest. Your heart a drumbeat of old fear. The first thought is to flee and fast. You know he could be just beyond the door. You do not want to see him. You do not want to hear his voice. Of all the men in this wide and wounded world, he is the last you want to meet.

There’s a knock at the door. Three sharp raps. Measured. Unhurried.

“Sorry to bother you, Miss Flower. It’s Jones, your super. There’s a gas leak reported coming from your apartment. Needs to be looked at, pronto.” A southern accent. New Orleans?

The voice flat, even. No urgency in it. No real concern. Just the words, the way they ought to be said.

You take the knife from the kitchen drawer where it waits. You slide it down into the waistband of your sweatpants, where it rests against your hip. Then you go to the door.

“Now’s not a good time. Please leave.”

“I must insist, Miss Flower,” he says. “It’s very dangerous, this gas leak.”

“I don’t smell anything in here. Please go away.”

He knocks on the door again.

“I’m warning you,” you say. “Please leave me alone. It’s not a good time for me.”

The door explodes open, the force of it throwing you to the floor. Above you stands a man in a grey suit, well-fitted. His skull smooth and bare, the shine of it catching the hallway light. Maybe shaved by choice. Maybe not. Maybe a concession to male pattern baldness.

His goatee is trimmed neat, salt and pepper, the kind a man keeps when he cares about control.

He does not fidget. Does not shift his weight. He stands still as stone, his face blank, unreadable. Not waiting. Not impatient. His gun aimed at your face.

The knife slips from your waistband, but you catch it, the blade cold in your palm. Your first thought is flight. The circus had made you fast and limber and hard to hold, and you move before thought betrays you. Down the hall. Into your bedroom. The window waiting. Below, neatly trimmed hedges. You leap. The branches catch you, scrape you. And then you roll to lessen the impact.

Above, the man leans from the window and laughs. “You run, I follow. That’s the way it is.”

Then he ducks back inside.

From your apartment, you hear your parrot squawking the name you use on the dark web: “Swift knees. Eighty-five. Swift knees. Eighty-five.” Over and over. A name that should not be known.

You run. Behind you the footfalls of the man and the silence of his intent. You chance a look and there he is, close now, look of grim determination on his face. His hand finds your shoulder but you twist from it, slip the grip. You feint left and vanish right and you are gone.

And then you feel the dew on your soles like the breath of the earth come up through you, cold and quickening. You tear through a stranger’s yard, leap the fence. Your breath is ragged in your throat, and the sweat rolls off you like oil.

You are compromised. Everything you carried—thumb drives, disks, the laptop—is gone to him now.

You need out. You need to be online. There’s a library in Mira Mesa, public and quiet. You run toward it, cutting through streets and backlots like a hunted thing. An hour later you arrive, chest heaving, sides burning, and there it is. Closed. Still dark behind the glass. The hour too early.

So you stand there with nothing.

Except a name.

You cross to the pay phone. You punch the number you haven’t used in years, feel the metal buttons press into your fingertips. The line rings.

An operator’s voice. A pause.

Then Buck.

“Yeah. I’ll accept.”

Street sounds behind him, the hum of the world still turning. He’s driving. Going somewhere.

“Belle, I tried calling you earlier! Phone just rang and rang! Have you turned on the TV? Do you know what’s going on?”

“Going on?”

“Two jets. They just crashed into the World Trade Center. We’re under attack. Belle, America’s under attack!”

There’s a sickness low in your gut. A knowing. You are complicit. That much is clear. The blood isn’t on your hands but it’s near enough. Close enough to taste.

This is the reckoning, you think. This is the shadow come knocking. That man at your door, he was no accident. You knew. When the phone rang. When the sobs bled through the wall. You knew. And you did nothing. You turned from it. You looked away. A coward’s silence. A coward’s sin.

“Buck, someone just broke into my apartment. I barely escaped. He claimed he was my father. Oh, God, I think he killed my doorman!”

“Calm down, Belle. Your mom and dad are in the trailer behind me.”

“Oh, God. Okay, so this has nothing to do with my father. Where are you?”

“We’re in Arizona. We’re gonna be in San Diego in two weeks. But if someone’s after you, I’ll ditch this caravan and come scoop you up.”

“If my parents are with you, I don’t want them to know where I am right now, and I still want to avoid them.”

“Belle, they’re the last people I would ever tell. How can I help you?”

You stand there in the morning hush, breath ragged, heart a hammer in the dry well of your chest. You need your laptop. You need money. You’d ask Buck to wire you some, but you realize your ID is back at your apartment. You think furiously.

“Buck, is there anyone in San Diego you know that can help me?” You’ve met unsavory folks during your life in the circus. You hope that Buck knows someone big. Someone aggressive. Someone who’s intimidating who can check on your apartment and see what’s there, and see if they can grab your things so that you can get out of there.

“Belle, remember when I got you out of the circus? Remember Red, the guy who drove you to San Diego? He’s in Convoy. He’s close by. He could be there in like 15 or 30 minutes. I’m gonna give him a call. You stay put.”

3,333 Faces

Bryce Wexley. You are weary. The sun has carved its mark upon you, and the wind has taken its share. Your skin is dry, cracked at the knuckles, the lips. Your clothes stiff with sweat, and with dust. You smell of old concrete and city heat, of grease from borrowed meals and the salt of your own body. The grime has settled in the lines of your hands, beneath your nails, in the creases of your face where sleep has been a fleeting thing.

Three weeks since Alpine. Since the Black Labs. Since you crawled free of that place like something aborted and unwanted. The city has given you nothing but its empty corners, its cold steel benches, its unblinking neon. You’ve kept moving, though the weight in your limbs grows heavier, though the nights stretch long and restless. You’ve seen the way men look at you. The way they look through you. You’ve learned where to hide when the wrong ones are near.

The morning is warm, the air thick with the quiet hum of a city waking. The sun presses against your eyelids, a dull and insistent light. You’d like to sleep. To drift a while longer in the half-world between dreaming and waking. But the sun will not be denied.

You push yourself up, bones stiff, the ache of pavement, and restless nights settling into your skin. It is time.

You think of Wong. A light touch. His diner not unfriendly to men like you, men who slip in and out of places without leaving much of a mark. He looks the other way when you take scraps from emptied plates, pretends not to see when you ghost through his diner after closing. Sometimes, if you put a broom to his sidewalk, he’ll press a lunch into your hands, a quiet offering. Then there’s The Big Kitchen. Judy the Beauty and her staff generous with their portions. A kindness that means a long walk, more than a mile, past storefronts, past men who look as if they, too, have woken unwilling. And then, of course, there is Marge Calloway with her soup kitchen, but that’s even further away. You weigh the choice, the day stretching out before you, empty and waiting. Wong’s it is, then.

You have been nowhere and everywhere. Moving, always moving, because if you stop, they will find you. If you stop, you will think too much. San Diego is too hot, too bright, too full of people who don’t see you. Mission Beach at night, when the ocean air makes it almost bearable. The alleys behind the Gaslamp, where the stink clings to you and no one asks questions. A shelter on Market Street, but you don’t like sleeping there. Too many eyes, too many whispers. The nightmares come fast when you try to rest.

You have seen things. Too much, really. A man bleeding out behind a bar while the world kept moving. Symbols scratched into brick that made your head throb. A man in a perfect suit staring at you from a diner window. Just watching. You left before he could stand up. Once, you saw a cat slinking through the shadows, tail flicking like it had no worries in the world. You almost called out before you realized it wasn’t him. Mister Whiskerford. He probably thinks you abandoned him. He probably hates you. No, scratch that; he probably doesn’t think about you at all.

They are still out there. The ones from Alpine. The Black Labs. You know because you helped them. You thought you were doing your job. You signed the papers, greased the wheels, let them make people disappear without a trace. Then you saw things you weren’t supposed to see. Security footage that moved wrong, shadows twisting behind locked doors, things speaking in voices that didn’t belong to them. The U.S. government has a deal with something not from here. Aliens. Extraterrestrials.

Something happened to you in Alpine. You should have died, but you didn’t. You don’t know why. You remember a voice that wasn’t a voice, something pressing against your skull like it was peeling you open. You can feel things now. Know when someone isn’t what they seem. Know when a place doesn’t belong. It’s like your brain got rewired, but you don’t know what the hell to do with it. It hasn’t saved you from anything, just kept you running.

They haven’t stopped looking. General Conrad Voss is leading them. He was always the one with the orders, the real power behind it all. Maybe he’s the one who made the deal. Lorraine Henshaw, your secretary, must have known something. She was different before it all went down. Colder, watching you like you were already dead. Was she always in on it? Did she try to warn you? No, she would have done more if she cared.

You need help. Vince Caruso is your best shot. You did favors for him when you were in office, greased the right wheels, made his life easier. He owes you. He knows it. If anyone can make you disappear the right way, it’s him. Unless he’s already decided you’re not worth the trouble.

For now, you survive.

The other day, you saw a cat waiting by the back door, watching you. Just for a second, you thought it was Mister Whiskerford. Your chest was tight. You wanted to believe he found you, like he had been looking for you this whole time. But that’s stupid. He’s fine. He moved on. He has probably forgotten you completely. You would if you were him.

You need a plan. A way out. Something. Because you can feel it now, more than ever. They’re getting closer.

Without warning, your head explodes in agony. Like an iron spike driven clean through the crown of your skull. You lurch, knees striking pavement, pedestrians parting round you like water round a stone. The sky blackens. The world peels away. Overhead, stars wheel in unfamiliar patterns. Moons hang low and bright, pale-bellied things that do not belong. Comets trail fire through the heavens, their paths slow and deliberate, as though watching. The constellations shimmer like glass spun thin across the firmament, casting long, strange shadows that move independent of the light.

San Diego still murmurs, its sounds muffled as if heard through water.

You see them then—two black towers, tall and still as grave markers. Between them and beyond, a citadel rises. Immense. Impossible. It recedes even as it sharpens to clarity. You feel it before you see it.

A weight behind your eyes. A pressure in your chest.

Something there is watching. Not with sight but with a mind vast and cold. For a moment, it touches yours. Brief. Wordless. You reel. You are known. And then it is gone. Or worse—it remains.

You blink, and the city is back. But not as it was.

A woman staggers, sits hard on the curb, her hands trembling, staring at her Walkman in disbelief. Cars roll to a halt, their drivers faces a look of stunned confusion. Crows provide a choir with their caws.

No, no, oh, God, that wasn’t real, you think. That wasn’t real. It saw me. It knew me, not like a person knows another person, like a fire knows dry wood, like an ocean knows a drowning man.

You see after images of towers burning.

I shouldn’t have seen that. I wasn’t supposed to. Aliens. It has to be aliens!

The people around you look upon you with disgust. Or they look past you, through you, their gaze skimming the world as if you were never there. And some do not see you at all.

Your flesh begins to tingle. Begins to itch. Rivulets of sweat trickle down your spine. You know you’re about to have another terrible vision. And then it hits you like a sledgehammer burying itself into your skull.

The world disappears.

You are in a hallway that should not exist.

It is endless—narrow, featureless, white, the kind of white that hurts the eyes, the kind that makes everything inside it feel surgical and forgotten. The floor is wet. Not with water. With something else. Something that smells like copper and old grief.

Along either side, at exact intervals, are doors. 3,333 of them.

Each is numbered.

Each bears a single name—and you know them all.

Names you never learned in waking life, but you recognize every one.

Behind each door is a person you helped vanish. Not directly. But by signing something. Ignoring something. Making a call. Just doing your job.

The doors begin to open. Slowly. One by one.

First, soft whispers. Then voices. Then screams.

A child with no mouth sobbing through his eyes.

A woman whose bones are on the outside of her body, still walking.

A man shaped wrong, limbs moving like water.

They emerge, silent at first, then speaking in perfect unison:

“We remember you, Bryce.”

You try to run, but the hallway stretches. The lights flicker.

You stumble. The wetness on the floor is now ankle-deep, now knee-deep, now rising.

You turn back—and the doors have vanished.

Only faces remain, embedded in the walls.

All 3,333 of them.

Their eyes open.

Their mouths open.

And they begin to sing.

A terrible, perfect, hymn of remembrance.

The sound drills into your skull, vibrating through your teeth, through the marrow of you.

Then, there is a last voice, quiet and close. It breathes into your ear:

“You are the last door.”

The vision fades, and the pressure crushing your brain lifts. You find yourself sprawled on the ground. You lay there for a minute, and the sun beats down on you, and you feel piss drying on your leg. You realize that your clothes are in disarray. You were a senator, dammit! Are a senator, and you straighten what, underneath all the filth, is an outrageously expensive blazer.

You stagger towards Wong’s and hear people around you talking about the towers. How could they know about the towers that you just saw in your vision? Just as you’re about to open the door to Wong’s, you see a television above the counters broadcasting the World Trade Center. Smoke billowing into the New York City skyline. As you’re about to push open the door, goose bumps rise on your flesh, and the urge to scratch at your skin returns. You scream because you know what will happen next. And it does.

The sky is dark.

The Alpine wind like razors across your skin, slicing without blood. You are bound to the wood. Arms stretched wide. Ankles strapped tight. The grain of the crucifix rough against your back, splinters finding their way home. Your skin shivers in the cold, and your body, unbidden, betrays you. Your member stands erect, throbbing.

Below you, the crowd moves. Robed and hooded. Faces hidden. They chant in an alien tongue. The sound is wet and clotted and old.

Beyond them, soldiers. Rifles cradled like infants. Eyes forward. Breath held. Waiting.

And behind the soldiers, the scientists. Cold-eyed. Watching monitors that glow with terrible colors. Their fingers dance over keys as if in prayer. Not a one looks up. Not a one looks away.

Then, the twins. Thin as bone, white as salt. Sexless and yet obscene in their symmetry. Their faces smooth and expressionless, their movements like glass through still water.

They approach.

One raises a hand.

The other places long fingers on your belly.

There is no blade. No cutting.

Still, you open.

A door. Hinged in the meat.

And from within you issues a torrent. A flood of shapes and smoke and screaming mouths.

Winged things. Crawling things. Things that burn and things that whisper.

They pour from you, shoving past one another, hungry for air, for space, for violence.

The chanting rises.

And through it all, you hear one of the twins whisper—not aloud, but into your marrow:

“You were never one man. You were the lock.”

You find yourself on hands and knees, vomiting the meager contents of your last meal on the sidewalk. It splatters on your knuckles. Your tongue burns from the bile.