Trenody

Optics

Senator Wexley. The door shuts with the weight of finality. The city is muffled behind tinted glass. You sink into the leather like a man descending into water. Dust streaks your slacks. Sweat dries in the hollows of your collar. Your hands lay open on your knees, black with soot and stone, your nails rimed with blood. No theatrics now. You had earned the grime.

Across the avenue the wound of the South Tower lay open to the sky, raw and vast, as if the hand of God had pulled it up like a rotten tooth. Men in helmets move among the ruin like shades condemned to labor. The air still chokes.

The engine stirs beneath you. You do not move. You lean your head back. Your eyes shut against the light. Your breath shallow. The dust in your nose, in your mouth, in the lining of your coat.

Buzz.

The phone stutters in your breast like a second heart. You open your eyes. The name on the screen burns like scripture. Whitman.

“Bryce. Bryce, listen to me.” He says. “I just watched it. Every network. You’re standing there at Ground Zero with your sleeves rolled, dirt on your face, hand on a first responder’s shoulder—you looked like the real goddamn deal. Not some legacy suit hiding behind a podium. You looked like command. Like authority. Like destiny.”

“Yes, just like we planned. I’m tired of this. Now, what’s next?” You ask.

“Bush is finished. He’s yesterday’s man. He’s Yale Skull and Bones, he’s oil cartels and country-club cowardice. That whole crowd’s fading like the Marlboro Man. You? You’re the new architecture, Bryce. You’re the forward-facing myth. The post-liberal axis made flesh. You just stepped into the breach. And people saw it. They felt it. You ready to be a president, Senator Wexley?”

“You’re goddamn right.” You snarl.

“Let me tell you what this is. We’re in the early stages of an epochal realignment. The whole post–Cold War liberal order? That soft technocratic slime they called governance? It’s burning. The rubble behind you—that’s not just the Towers, it’s the entire myth of American exceptionalism collapsing under its own weight. And out of that chaos, out of that ash? Comes a figure. Stoic. Strong. Pre-ideological. That’s you.”

Whitman loves the sound of his own voice. You’d stop him, cut him off clean. But he’s speaking on you now. And that you don’t mind.

“We’re done pretending this is about left and right. This is about order and decay. This is about building something sacred in the bones of empire. The next rulers of the world will be men forged in catastrophe. Not hedge fund clowns. Warriors of the eschaton. You’re not running against Bush, Bryce. You’re running against the 20th century. And you’re gonna win. Because people don’t want consultants in khakis. They want the man who walks through fire and comes out anointed by it. You looked Presidential today? No, no. You looked inevitable.”

You know Whitman well enough to hear the slack in his drawl. The words come slower. The fire gone out of them. He’s winding down. You’ve seen it before.

“Get your head right, Bryce. Hydrate. Sleep if you can. Because tomorrow? Tomorrow’s a deployment. We hit the ground running. Media wall to wall. Sunrise to sunset. Every outlet, every camera. You’re not doing interviews—you’re building narrative. This is the blitz phase. No letup. No dead air. You’re the tip of the spear now. And we drive it all the way through. Bryce, ol’ boy, you done good.”

You hang up.

You feel it. The rising heat. The blood beat in your ears like war drums. You are the thing that comes when the hour grows late. And the people—they will get what’s owed.

You forced your way into Alpine like a thief at a banquet. At first, you played the part. Looked away. Signed the papers. Let the bodies vanish and took your coin. But that was never enough. You wanted more than the taste. You sent kid girl sniffing, that pale girl with the code name: Swift Knees Eighty-Five. What was her name? Belle something. Belle Flower. That was it. You used her to pry open the door, and when the moment broke, you were already inside. Part of it. Of them. Whitman loathed it. Loathed you. But he could do nothing. Could not lift a hand.

You thought Whitman soft. Thought him weak. A coward dressed in cleverness. But now he’s seen you true. Hitched his wagon to yours. He’s hardened. Become capable. Become something else.

So have you.

Once the Senate was enough. The mask of duty. The illusion of service. But the presidency—too vast, too fraught—once seemed beneath your appetite. No longer. Whitman was right. It was never ambition. It was fate.

The city moves around your armored black car like a dream. Sirens wail distantly, muted behind bulletproof glass. Ash falls on the windows like snow, streaks of neon bending like nerves under pressure. Inside: leather, silence, the glow of a phone. It’s Lorraine Henshaw, your secretary.

Lorraine Henshaw is forty-two. Boston born. More handsome than fair. A face carved stern and plain, near matronly. Not the sort you’d have picked for a post such as this. You’d have taken a girl with softer edges, something easy on the eyes. But Henshaw came in like weather. A front you could not stop. And before you’d made sense of it she was in the seat across from you, already working.

Your wife raised an eyebrow. Then smiled. Said she was glad you’d finally chosen someone who led with their mind and not their figure.

In the time since, Henshaw has become a fixture. A spine to your operation. You hate the truth of it, but you lean on her. Heavily. There are mornings she knows your schedule before you’ve risen. She is brisk. Exacting. In her manner, you catch something of your mother. That hard-won competence. That quiet command. And though you’d never say it aloud, you are grateful for her. More than you like to admit.

You pick up the phone.

“Senator! I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time. I just got off with Mister Whitman—he and I are finessing tomorrow’s media schedule. He’s brilliant, by the way. Brilliant. The way he talks about optics—I swear it’s like he invented the word.”

“Yes, Lorraine,” you tell her. “I’ve been working with Whitman and training him to utilize his inner talent, which was previously neglected.”

“You’ve brought up the best in him.” She says. “And your appearance on Tough Talk this morning? Sir. You owned the moment. And Ground Zero? My God, you looked so virile. So presidential. The cameras weren’t even supposed to be there, but of course they were. You in your suit, lifting debris like you belonged to the earth itself. You didn’t just look like a leader. You looked like America. I—I think you’re going to win this thing, sir. I truly do. Bush won’t know what hit him.”

“It’s good to hear you’ve come around to my destiny, Lorraine. Usually you’re much more critical of my appearances.”

The man you were might’ve measured him fair. Seen Bush as a rival worth the weight. But that man is gone. Now you see Bush for what he is. A sorry thing. Meek and stumbling. And you mean to break him. Grind him down to dust beneath your heel.

“Senator… can I say something personal?”

“Speak freely, Lorraine”

“I think I gave you bad advice. About Alpine. About not… looking too closely.” She says. “It wasn’t my place. I know that. And more than that—I was wrong. Dead wrong. You’ve changed, sir. Since then. There’s a… power in you now. A stillness. You’re clearer. More certain. And if I may be bold—there’s something… sexy about it. About you.”

She laughs lightly, nervous, aware she’s crossed a line.

“Anyway. Just wanted to say that. I’ll email the talking points for tomorrow by ten. God bless, Senator.”

She disconnects.

There’s a sliver of unease. Thin as a knife’s edge. You don’t rightly know what she’s talking about. Alpine, yes. In the broad strokes. The shape of it. But the finer cuts are lost to you. Blurred. Like a dream on waking. Still, you don’t let it trouble you. You’ve no time for doubt.

And yet you find her praise agreeable. The gleam in her voice when she speaks of your stature. Your bearing. Henshaw, who’s spent her years henpecking like your mother before her. Now turned apostle. She sees you now. As Whitman sees you. As you are. And that, more than the truth of her words, is enough.

The limousine moves through the city like a shark. Each turn of its wheels carving space between you and the smoking crater where the world had come undone. The towers gone to ash and bone.

You sit in the hush of the cabin, not asleep but unanchored. The weariness upon you earned and absolute. And yet some joy unbidden stirs beneath the exhaustion. A brightness. The glow of something born at last into light.

The phone in your pocket stirs again, interrupting your reverie. You stare at it a long moment. A text message from Caruso asking you to call him at the number he provides. A payphone, no doubt.

Why Caruso dogs you now in the hour of your ascendancy is beyond you. But he would not press without cause. You signal the driver. “A pay phone,” you say. “Now.”

The limo glides to a stop, and you step out. The air is thick with grit and smoke, death clinging like a second skin. The stink of it coats your throat. People drift through the streets, eyes rimmed red, mouths slack. You raise your collar. Shield your face. No need to be seen.

You find the phone, feed it coins, and dial the number he gave you with hands that don’t quite feel like your own.

“Senator. Good news. That situation we talked about? It’s handled.” Caruso’s voice is low, but there is an edge to it. “You were right—guy was a goddamn head case. Wouldn’t shut up. But I put one in the back of his skull, nice and quiet. Clean work. Yanked the teeth, ground ’em down like dust. Took what was left out to a farm I know. Fed the whole mess to a pen full’a pigs. By this time tomorrow, they’ll be shittin’ out his remains.”

“Good. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” You tell him.

“One more thing.” Caruso’s voice tightens. “Before he went quiet, the guy kept runnin’ his mouth about Alpine. Over and over. That ring any bells?”

“Alpine? Place has a population of less than 1200. Why would he be talking about a small town? Strange. I’ll look into it.” You say.

“Anyway. You take care of yourself, Senator. We’ll talk soon.”

The line goes dead.

Alpine. Again.

It gnaws at you. The blank of it. Like a name half-formed on the tongue. You know it mattered. Know it lay at the root of all that shadow work. The vanished. The hacker girl. And Whitman. That’s where you found him or he found you. The line blurs.

You remember it all. Until you don’t. The base itself—beyond the checkpoint, past the gate. After that, it’s noise. Fragments. Smells. Shapes. Then nothing. And that nothing unsettles you more than you’d care to admit. Because it was recent. Close. You can still feel it on your skin. The clearance was top-tier. Eyes-only. Buried so deep you’d need a map and a spade. And yet a ragged man, some sidewalk prophet, had whispers of it in his mouth.

Mercer was meant to handle the Belle girl. He failed. Now he rots in custody. The vagrant? Taken care of. Permanently.

You pull out your phone. Type slow.

To Voss: There might be some moles around Alpine. Did you leak?

You stare at it. Thumb hovering. Then send.

Minutes pass. The screen buzzes once.

From Voss: Negative. Will investigate.

It has been a banner day.

Your suit is spoiled, sweat-stained and caked with the grit of a nation’s graveyard. Your limbs ache with the labor of honest work long forgotten. Last time you felt this raw and drenched with sweat was when you hired that damn golf coach. Had you swinging over and over under a sun that peeled the skin. No shade. No mercy. Just the weight of that club and his voice counting off the strokes like a sentence. You held your tongue as long as you could. Then you didn’t. Sent him packing. Never picked up the club again.

The stench of the people clings to you still — the broad and broken many. But none of it matters. Not now.

You have laid your cornerstone. Set your hand to the foundation of something vast. The crowd saw it. The cameras. The nation. And Whitman — at last — Whitman bends the knee in his own fashion. Calls your name like a priest calls fire. You are no longer his gamble. You are his altar.

And Caruso — God bless him — he has done what you feared you could not. The last ghost swept from the stage. The one man who knew too much now known no longer. Gone to the earth, or what devours it.

You feel something rising in you. Barely held. A pressure behind the teeth. You want to laugh. You want to howl.

But still —

There was something in Caruso’s voice. Not the usual gravel and threat. No. Something else. A hitch. A tremor. As if the man had seen a shape behind the world and it had looked back.

Caruso. Afraid.

You chuckle in the back of the limousine. The sound dry and low.

No.

He’s carved from bedrock. You’ve seen him break men with his silence alone. Whatever you heard, it was a trick of the line. A phantom in the wires.

The rest of the day stretches before you like a red carpet unrolled through the heart of empire.

You arrive at the tower as dusk lays its last hand on the city. It stands there in its vanity, black glass and gold. The brass doors spin without end. Men enter and men leave. A nearby flag hangs at half-mast. Still as judgment. No wind to stir it. The SUVs idle at the curb. A low growl in the throat of power. The doorman tips his cap without looking.

Inside, the concierge greets you. A man who knows well the hungers of those who rule. He leans in with the hush of a priest.

“Any medicinal needs, sir? A companion, perhaps?”

The words fall harmless. Once, they might have found purchase. You’d have taken the drugs, the body, the forgetfulness. But not now. That man is gone. You nod and pass.

Your suite is high above the city. You peel off the day. Step beneath the scalding hiss of the shower and let it burn what it must. When you emerge, you dress in something clean and cut sharp. The old suit—filthy, frayed at the soul—is thrown out.

You ring Henshaw. Wake her if you must. Tell her to find a photographer. First thing. You want headshots. Statesmanlike. Something for history to get right. You say nothing more and she says nothing less than “Yes, sir.”

Later, the room gone still, your hand moves of its own volition. Finds the case. Cold steel with a lock you don’t recall setting. You open it.

Inside, the knife.

Long and black. Twin-edged. At its center, a gem the color of old blood, pulsing faintly. You lift it. Turn it.

Time slips.

The blade hums some low frequency in your bones. You do not know where it came from. Alpine, perhaps. Or before.

You sit with it. The red stone fixed like an eye. And you understand.

The knife is you.

Not the man you were. But the thing you’ve become, of what comes next. Not promise. Not threat. Only certainty.

Next Level

Bryce Wexley. Vince sets the blade to the tape and draws it slow. His hands shake. The edge is notched and fouled. He works the strip free. Then another. The tape comes away with a sound like breath through teeth. The chair groans beneath you as you stir, wrists welted and raw, the skin gone the color of bruised fruit.

“I’m sorry, Senator.” He says. “Jesus. I didn’t know. Thought you were just another nutcase with delusions of grandeur. You kept going on about Alpine and the twins and—I didn’t believe a word of it. But after what I just saw…"

“It’s all right, Vince, I know it’s a lot to take in. You got to, you’ve got to call the impostor and tell him that you took me out.”

“That’s, that’s a great idea, Senator.” He says. “Give me a moment. Lemme collect myself.”

Vince finishes cutting the last strip. Lets it fall. His breath catches. He wipes his face with the sleeve of his shirt, smearing tears across his cheeks. Unknowingly streaks of something pink and grey now nest in his hair.

He turns. Looks back and forth. Tommy slumped against the wall. Bue on the floor, drooling. The other one next to Bue like a man halfway to judgment.

Vince squares his shoulders.

He goes to Tommy first.

The boy’s face is still stretched in awe. Eyes wide. Mouth open. Like he’d seen the face of God and it wasn’t beautiful.

“Oh, kid…” he says, lowering himself to his knees. Gently folds Tommy’s arms over his chest. Closes his eyes with the pads of his thumbs. Palms lingering there, shaking. Vince leans in. Mouth near the boy’s ear. “Tommy,” he says “you were a good boy. I’m sorry I brought you here.”

He sobs once, short and hard. Then he’s quiet. Hands on his thighs, head bowed.

He stands. Wipes his face again. The tears smear what’s left of Tommy further up into his hairline. He doesn’t notice.

Vince crosses to the bodyguards. First Bue. Then the other. Both slack-jawed. Gone inside.

He crouches, snaps his fingers in Bue’s face. “Hey. You in there?” He asks.

Nothing.

He slaps him. Hard. Bue’s lip splits open.

Still nothing.

Vince exhales through his nose. Rises. Pulls his phone from his back pocket.

“Yeah. Spilled some wine in the guest house of La Jolla. Needs to be cleaned up. Hell of a thing. Pick up a bag of laundry while you’re at it.” He says, and then looks at Bue and his other solider. “Two guests drank too much.” He says. “Passed out. Make sure they’re okay.”

He ends the call. Slides the phone into his jacket. Thinks. Then looks to you. He sees your hand. The blood slipping from the raw bed where the nail once was. Says nothing. Just turns and walks out.

When he returns he brings gauze and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He pours it over the wound and the fire of it rips a sound from your throat you didn’t know you had. He binds your hand in silence.

The gauze soaks through slow. Like a flower opening in red.

“Okay, Senator.” He says. “I think I know how to play this. Let’s go. I got another place we can go where no one will think to look for us. We can make plans there.”

“I’m not leaving here without a gun.” You tell him, and grab Bue’s pistol from the giant’s holster.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Senator, point that thing down to the ground. I’ll get you up to speed on how to shoot it later.” And then Vince presses painkillers into your palm. “This will help take care of the pain.” He says, you down them dry,

Vince removes Bue’s bullet proof vest and straps you in it, adjusting it to your slighter frame.

Vince shrugs off his bloodstained jacket. Uses it to mop the mess from his face. Wipes it across his cheeks, his mouth, the creases under his eyes. Then tosses it over a chair and walks to the main house.

He returns a few minutes later wearing a track suit, the jacket taut across his gut.

You both walk to the main house.

The girl is still there. Perched on the edge of the couch. Legs crossed. T-shirt, panties, long brown cigarette coiled in her fingers. Next to her, the man with the bloodshot eyes who first opened the door.

Vince walks straight past them. Doesn’t slow.

“You two.” He tells them. “Out. Don’t come back.”

“I need to get dressed—” says the girl, and the man slaps her across the face. A sharp crack. Her head jerks sideways.

“We leave. Now.” He tells her.

He grabs her by the hands and drags her stumbling toward the front door. She doesn’t resist. She doesn’t look back.

Vince moves to the kitchen. Grabs one of the laptops off the marble counter. Closes it. Tucks it under his arm.

Turns to you. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The town car waits at the curb. Engine low. Windows dark.

You climb in. Vince follows. The doors shut.

And just like that, the house falls away behind you. The hedges. The guest house. The place where something came through and changed the rules.

The road unwinds.

The pills take hold. Slow and certain. Your limbs turn to lead. Your thoughts unwind, slack and senseless. There is comfort in it. The weight of the vest across your chest, the cold press of the pistol at your ribs. You don’t know how to use it, not really. But you’ve seen the films. You know how men look when they kill.

The comfort doesn’t last.

As the last of the adrenaline bleeds out, the sickness crawls in. Your nose leaks blood. Your ears too. The itching begins. The rash. It always comes first, before the visions. You try to raise your hand, to claw at yourself. Nothing moves. You lie like a corpse. Mouth open. No sound. Just the wet line of drool on your chin.

Your eyes remain open.

The world folds in on itself. Faces bloom like wounds atop the living. Grotesque. Watching. Vince sits beside you. But his face cracks. Hardens. Plates of bone sliding from beneath his skin. He is molting. Becoming. You’ve seen crabs do this on the shore. You’ve never seen it in a man.

The city beyond the window slides past like a dream. Every passerby blind and mute, lips sewn, eyes sealed. A parade of meat. The sun opens like a lidless socket. One great eye rimmed in fire. Around it, a halo of smaller eyes, blinking and staring, always staring.

Vince looks at you. He’s afraid. He doesn’t understand. But he sees the ruin in your face. The color gone. The sweat. The dead weight of you beside him.

He lights a cigarette. Offers one to you. You do not speak. Cannot.

Your eyes find his. In them you see motion. The slow churn of claws beneath the skin. He draws back. Silent. Leaves the cigarette on the dash.

And drives on through the dark.

The highway spills off the 15 and into a lonely cut of blacktop, a gas station sunk into the earth like a blister. The lights above it buzz in their housings and cast their pale light across the pavement. The air is thick with the smell of old fuel and sunburned rubber. The town car idles beneath the canopy, its motor ticking. Overhead the sky hangs low and dirty, the color of sheep’s wool dragged through ash, smeared at the edges by the city’s ruinous glow.

Inside the car the you sit with your hand swaddled in gauze, the fabric browned through with blood. The ache is dull now, flattened beneath the pills Caruso had pressed into your palm. But the memory remains. The smell of Bue’s breath. The snap of the nail tearing loose. The explosion of pain.

The painkillers and the visions have subsided. You are wrung out like a rag. Hollowed. Spent. Not just in body but in mind and spirit. As if some great tide has passed through you and taken all but the shell.

Vince slides the car into park and opens the door. His shoes hit gravel and glass and the door shuts behind him with a thump.

He walks across the lot beneath a halo of failing light. Finds a payphone. Vince pulls a worn black flip book from his coat and opens it to a page. Presses numbers into the keypad. He lets it ring. Then hangs up.

He stands there with his back to the car and the wind teasing the hem of his jacket. Waiting.

The pay phone rings.

He answers. Talks. Nods. Hangs up.

He dials again.

This time he speaks at length. Hangs up again.

He returns to the car and does not speak. Slides into the seat and pulls the door closed behind him.

The engine purrs as you pull away for the gas station.

“Senator,” he says, “it’s done. Your… twin. The other you. That situation’s handled. Permanently.”

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding. Long and low. “Good,” you say.

“We’re heading north. Gonna see someone. Name’s Trenody. She was mixed up with that Heaven’s Gate mess back in the day. Only one that walked away. Used to think she was cracked. Talking about signals and watchers and doors made of teeth. But after what I saw today… She might be the sanest person I know.”

Vince glances at you.

“Look. I gotta know, Senator. What happened in Alpine? Why are there two of you? What the hell did you people do out there? I need to know whats going on so I know what I’m getting into and how to help you. Talk to me, Bryce. Start from the beginning.”

You take a deep breath. Gather your thoughts. And tell him.

“I knew something big was happening in Alpine. My secretary Lorraine kept pushing me, telling me I had to get on top of it or I’d miss my shot. So I hired a hacker to dig into it. With the intel she gave me, I went to General Voss and invited myself to a base out there. It’s just outside a small desert town. Real quiet. But out in the hills, they’ve built something secret. They took me in. What I found was stranger than I imagined. There’s talk of a cult. Aliens. Experiments. They say I’m the key. They grew another version of me. A copy. A twin. They say it’s part of the process. Somehow, I escaped. I don’t know how. It’s like what happened in the guest house. Something follows me now. I feel it in the back of my skull. Always just behind. Watching. I have to kill the other me. That’s the only way. He’s taken over my life. It’s the only way to reclaim what’s mine.”

As you speak, Vince watches. You’ve known him long. Done things for each other that don’t bear telling. But now there’s fear in his eyes. Real fear. And it unsettles you in a place you thought long calloused. He listens without a word. Weighing each one like a man sifting for lies.

Some part of him thinks you’ve slipped. Lost the thread. But the rest remembers what he saw. The thing in the room. The way the air turned wrong.

And that part believes. Or wants to.

“All right, Senator, this is way beyond my pay grade, but I’ll help you. I just don’t know what to do. What’s the plan?”

“For now? I need to sleep.” You tell him.

“All right. We got about a half hour drive ahead of us. You just kick back, rest up. I’ll let you know when we get there.”

Vince drives north with the sea falling away to your left, cliffs bleeding down into the surf. The sun low behind you. The shadows lengthening. He pilots the town car with one hand on the wheel, the other resting like a dead thing in his lap.

You pass Torrey Pines, where the trees leaned toward the wind, their roots gripping the sandstone like the fists of the dead. Then on through Del Mar Heights, where the houses sit quiet and sunburned, their windows catching the dying light.

As you climb into Rancho Santa Fe, the road narrows and the world softens. The scrub goes lush. Oleander and eucalyptus. Wide lanes shaded by olive trees brought over a century ago and still refusing to die. The air smells of loam and cut grass. There is a moneyed stillness, bought and bred.

Gated estates rise like fortresses, hedges grown tall and sculpted into walls. Horses move behind wrought iron. Stucco walls blooms with bougainvillea, and the mailboxes are shaped like old-world lanterns. There are no sidewalks. No strangers. Just wealth gone to seed.

Caruso turns onto Paseo Victoria. Slows the car. Nods toward a stone-wrapped estate set back from the road behind a curtain of pepper trees.

“This street used to be called Colina Norte. Before it all went sideways.” He says, pointing through the windshield. “That’s the place. Heaven’s Gate. All thirty-nine of ‘em. Lined up like dolls. They tore the house down. Demolished it. Built that mansion in its bones. New owners now. Rich types. Wine cellars and prayer rooms.”

He drums his fingers on the wheel.

“This neighborhood’s got memory. But folks like to forget. Keep it quiet out here. Best not to trespass. Outta respect. You understand.”

Vince taps the brakes. The car rolls forward a little farther. He points again.

“That one. Down there. That’s where Trenody stays.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then speaks as if confessing.

“Back in the mid-nineties I was expanding—moving money through properties that didn’t like paperwork. Retreat centers out in Joshua Tree. A sweat lodge in Temecula. That Heaven’s Gate house—cleanest books I ever saw. Didn’t know what they were doing. Didn’t care. They paid in cash. Bundles. Crisp. Never asked for anything. And the tax shelter? Airtight.”

Vince sighs.

“First time I saw Trenody she was playing some tinny keyboard, humming like she’d seen heaven and it hadn’t impressed her. I was there to twist arms. Get a greenhouse permit signed. She didn’t even look at me. Just kept playing. Then they went and drank the Kool-Aid. Or whatever it was. Bodies all laid out like a choir. The deed was tied to one of my paper shells. If the Feds dug too deep, they’d find blood and fingerprints all over the wrong ledgers. So I did what I had to. Burned the trail. Sent in a cleaner. Cleaner didn’t come back.”

Vince glances at you.

Two nights later, she shows up. Trenody. In my driveway. No shoes. Wearing that black Heaven’s Gate sweatshirt. Holding a VHS tape labeled EXIT. She was crying and laughing. Both. Hands wrapped in gauze. Burned through.”

Vince pulls the car to a slow stop before the estate. Stone wall. Iron gate. No intercom. No guards.

“She told me, she couldn’t go with them. I let her stay. Pool house. Fed her. Let her talk. Then I watched that tape. Started like you’d expect. Bunk beds. Uniforms. All lined up neat. Looked like one of those news clips they ran on the networks, except the camera was moving. Someone walking around with it. Breathing real loud. Tall as sin. Dressed in wire and shadow. Face like a snowstorm on a dead channel.”

Vince shudders, then continues his tale.

“And those fingers, Bryce. Christ. Long like tines. Like something that pulls you apart slow. They were on the screens. Still. But not right. Eyes moving when they shouldn’t. Jaws working like they were trying to chew through silence. Then it cuts. Just static. Buzzing. But under it, I could still hear them. Talking backwards. One guy kept saying,  ‘I am not my name. I am not my name.’ Then comes the ritual. You’ve seen the photos. Black clothes. Nike Decades. All that. Only in this version, their mouths don’t stop moving when they go still. They keep whispering. Like they’re still in the room.”

Vince stares out the windshield, seeing something only he can see.

“Couldn’t tell what they were saying. Sounded like locusts learning to pray. And up on the ceiling… something was spinning. Not fast. Not slow. Just… wrong. Like it didn’t care what gravity meant. Like it was above laws. Above God. Trenody says it wasn’t a ship. Said it was a door. And she was right. Because the last thing on that tape—was me.”

Vince turns. Holds your gaze with his eyes.

“Standing in my own driveway. Two nights after the suicides. Wearing my robe. Smoking a cigarette. Looking straight into the camera. But I wasn’t being filmed. Not by anything on this planet. I smashed the tape. Burned it in my sink. Swore to forget. But I still see it, Bryce. That thing. That room. That mirror. And that version of me? The one in the frame? He wasn’t blinking. And he wasn’t smoking. That’s what I saw on that video tape.”

Vince exhales. Unbuckles his belt. Looks over at you.

“She’s not right, Senator. But maybe none of us are, after what we’ve seen. She keeps the place up. Lives quiet. Doesn’t talk much unless you ask the right kind of questions."

He opens the door. The air smells of eucalyptus and lavender and something faintly electric

“Come on, Senator. Let’s go see Trenody. She’s expecting us."

She owes you all right, you think.

Vince walks to main door, which opens just before he rings the bell. The woman who greets him has hair that is long, unbrushed, the color of rusted copper. It falls around her face like a veil, matted in places, threaded with dried lavender stalks. Her face is gaunt, though not starved. Her eyes wide and glinting, the irises a pale green that seems nearly colorless in the dim. She does not blink often. There is a stillness to her.

Her hands are scarred, pink latticework across her palms and fingers, the skin too smooth in places, too new. Old burns, long healed but never forgotten. She clasps them behind her back as she watches you approach.

She wears a denim skirt that hangs asymmetrically and a pair of hospital socks, the kind with rubber grip on the soles. One is missing.

She and Vince look at each other a moment, and then she gives him a quick, clumsy embrace.

When she looks at you, she tilts her head like a crow noticing a new kind of shine.

“You’re the one who came back wrong.” She says.

“What do you mean?” You ask her.

“You’ve seen something like I did.”

“Yeah,” Vince says’ “she’s still like this. Trenody, this is the friend I told you about.”

“Pleased to meet a fellow traveller. How are you called?”

“Bryce.” You tell her.

“You look familiar. Have we met?”

“Can’t say we have. You might have seen me on TV.”

“Are you an actor?” She asks. “A newscaster? How would I know you?”

“I’m a goddamn senator of the United States of America.” You tell her.

She looks at you again and something shifts behind her eyes. Your face settles into its shape within her memory. She knows you now.

“Oh, yes,” she says, “you did come back wrong. Please come in.”

She leads you through the house, slow and silent, her steps echoing off marble and stone. The place is vast. Built for ghosts or gods.

Vince leans in close, his voice low. “Senator, you helped pay for all this. Consider this place yours.”

She takes you to a patio in back that overlooks a large pool. She offers you both chairs and iced tea, and then she sits.

Three weeks past you lived soft, born into wealth, the world laid smooth before you. Then the fall. Down into the gutter, into the stink of dumpsters and the hard cold of pavement nights. This morning you found yourself in a modest house in La Jolla. Not rich. Not poor. But now you stand in an estate vast and quiet, an place that feels more like home—more like the world you come from.

It unsettles you. You don’t show it. The shift in scale. The return. You’ve changed in the fall. You don’t take the taste of cold tea for granted now. You drink it slow. Like it means something.

The sleep did you good. Your bones ache less. The sun is kind. The hush of the house stretches out like a hand. For the first time in a long time, you feel the edge of peace. A whisper of hope.

Vince lights a cigarette. The smoke drifts. Trenody looks at you. And she sees something.

“They called me Trenody, back then.” She says. “Trenody of the Next Level. Funny how that name still fits, even after all the others fell away. It means a song for the dead, you know. In the Classroom, we learned that our bodies were not really us—they were vehicles. Just a kind of container. You learned to speak of them that way. ‘My vehicle is experiencing discomfort.’ ‘This vehicle needs rest.’ You stopped saying ‘I.’ The ‘I’ was your mind, your true self—the part that came from the stars, from the Evolutionary Level Above Human—we called it TELAH. That was our heaven. Not pearly gates. Not clouds. Just pure function, pure unity, no ego.”

It sounds hopeful, almost childlike in its reach. You’ve never given much thought to the line between mind and body, but now it settles in you with the weight of something half-remembered. A shape in the dark that makes sense only once it’s passed.

Heaven, though. That part rings false. A story for the weak. Trenody speaks of it like a place she’s seen with her own eyes, but you know better. She’s not right. Not in her body. Not in her mind.

Still, there’s something in her. Something tied to the things you’ve seen. The wrongness. The signals. Vince is right—she knows more than she should. And she believes herself to be a piece of this thing.

You believe it too.

But not all of it.

Some of what she says is broken. Bent. Maybe she’s lying to herself, maybe she’s been lied to. But not everything she tells you holds weight. And yet still, you listen. Because some part of her knows you. And knows what’s coming.

Trenody continues.

“Ti and Do were our shepherds. Ti was the feminine aspect—Bonnie—and she left her vehicle earlier, cancer. We called it her Exit. That is what death was: an exit ramp off this freeway of lies. Do carried the rest of us after she left. He grieved, I think. In a quiet way. Like a computer with a corrupted drive, still trying to run the program. We were the Crew. Just passengers waiting for the signal. We wore uniforms—black shirts, black pants, those Nikes everyone talks about now. But that was just the outside. Inside, we were mind, shedding our humanness. We practiced slippage checks—any hint of desire, vanity, memory—and our check partners would call it out. No love. No jealousy. No families. Some of the men even underwent castration—Do did. Said it helped quiet the noise.”

“Oh, boy. You say under your breath.

Vince’s face is stone. You figure he’s castrated people before, and with blunter tools.

Trenody looks down.

“The signal was the comet—Hale-Bopp. Do said it was the marker. Behind it rode The Craft. Not a ship like in Star Trek. It was metaphor and machine, both. And it was coming for us. I did not take my Exit. I—my vehicle—failed. I stayed behind. Sometimes I dream that they are still in orbit, waiting for me to be ready. They called it madness. A cult. But we called it preparation. The Earth, they said, was about to be recycled. Only those who had purified their minds could be evacuated. We believed it. I believed it. Now? Now I live in this place. I do not use contractions when I speak. I still say ‘vehicle’ without thinking. And every time I hear the word ‘crew,’ I see them again. Sitting in rows. Eyes bright. Waiting for the Craft.”

Tears stream from her face.

When Trenody speaks of the Earth being recycled, something clicks. A thread winding tight through your own theories. Maybe that’s the bargain. Maybe that’s always been the bargain. The Earth scrubbed clean. Burned down to the roots. And a few chosen taken. Preserved like insects in amber.

You see it now. The government don’t run the show. They serve it. Provide specimens. In return they get seats on the lifeboats. Escape pods for the elect. When the blade drops. And it’s dropping soon.

The thought coils in your gut like wire.

You’re too tired to mask the shift in your face. Vince sees it. Sees the fire catch behind your eyes. Watches you. Watches Trenody. Back and forth. His gaze like a pendulum. He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t need to. The silence holds the weight.

“TELAH is The Next Level.” she tells you. “The transcendental, non-human realm we aspired to ascend to — a higher evolutionary level above human existence. The Space Aliens are beings posing as higher powers but actually working against the Next Level.”

“Is there a lower level? What’s at the lower level?” You ask her, your gut churning.

“There is a lower level. There is TELAH, and then there is the Luciferians. They are our fellow humans who are trying to stop our glorious plan. And then there are the space aliens, who are posing as higher powers but actually working against the next level.” Her yes lock on yours. “Please, I need to know,” she pleads, “the things you saw, were they TELAH or space aliens?”

“They were definitely space aliens. There was no sense of purity or goodness about them.” You think of Wong. Maybe he is an outlier. “They are terrifying and awful.” You tell her.

Trenody looks away. Smiles. A brittle thing that barely holds.

“That is what they all said.” She says. “That is what we said, back then. Ships and beings from the Next Level. Galactic shepherds here to ferry the worthy. That lie was soft. Easy. It made suicide feel like a promotion.”

She sets her iced tea down. Walks to the window. Stares out into the dark.

“But ships do not haunt your dreams. Ships do not bleed time. Whatever came through… it was not made of stars. It was made of memory. And it remembers us.

“My dreams are mainly haunted by horrible crab people and people with their eyes and mouth sewn shut.” You say.

“It is not a stranger. It is not visiting.” She continues. “It is not an outsider peering in through the window of reality. It is something older than humanity, older than language, older than light. And it has been here before. Maybe not in this form, maybe not in flesh or in craft—but in myth, in ritual, in dreams, in the architecture of the mind. It has encountered us before—not as explorers or abductees, but as material. As tools. As fuel. It knows our patterns—the rhythms of human thought, the edges of fear, the seams where identity frays. It knows our story better than we do, because it may have written parts of it.”

As Trenody speaks, a cold settles in you. What once sounded like the ramblings of a fractured mind now strikes true. Her words fall in line with what you felt. What you saw. The thing that touched you and left you marked. The Entity. Its voice still echoing in your skull.

Your face betrays you. Something in it shifts. Trenody sees it. She nods slow.

“This Entity—whether it is called TELAH, a god, a signal, or an alien — is not discovering humanity. It is returning to it. It remembers us because we belong to it in some deep, pre-linguistic way. Because we are, at least in part, its expression. And when you called it an alien, you placed it outside the self. It remembers us means: It knows the doors in your head. Because it built them. It is not learning you. It is waiting for you to remember it back.”

She then says nothing. The room seems to hold its breath. There are no words spoken between you and Vince. Then at length, as if some verdict has passed unseen, she rises.

“I have something to show you.” She says.

Trenody takes your hand and leads you out. Vince watches. Meets your eye and gives a slow shake of his head. He doesn’t rise. Just sits there in the quiet, smoking his cigarette down to the filter, the ember burning low and mean.

She leads you down a narrow hall behind a woven curtain. The air is cooler back here. Denser. Like something was sealed long ago and still breathes in the dark. The walls are lined with banker’s boxes and obsolete tech—reel-to-reel players, Betamax decks, a dusty Sony camcorder that looks like it witnessed a war.

She unlocks a low cabinet with a brass key shaped like an ankh, though the top is broken—more hook than symbol now.

Inside: is a single burnt film frame, encased in glass. The edges are melted, warped inward like the heat came from behind the image.

She holds it up to the lamp.

The image is nearly black. But there’s just enough left.

She hands the frame to you, and what you see is figure in a dark hallway. A mirror at the end of it. The figure is walking away. But in the mirror, he’s walking toward the camera.

Closer.

And closer.

And smiling.

The grin is wrong. The eyes are too calm. The teeth are too many.