Joseph

The World Behind the World

Agent Nicholas Grayson. Where were you before you realized you were suspended in darkness? How much time passed before you became aware of the darkness? And what triggered the passing from the experiential you to the analytical you, the you that is an I? The authorial I. And why?

There are glints in your eye. Impossible glints. Mauve. Blood red. Green like deep forest at dusk. But there is no light. No light to glint from. And still, they glint.

You are a boy. It is night. Indiana. Cornfields. Overhead, the thing hovers. Motionless. Waiting. For you.

Darkness.

You are a man. Inside a gas station. A scream. Dogs barking. Rocío yells “Fuck!” Sharp with fear and warning and a thing unnamed.

Darkness.

You are younger. Before you, the oil towers. They burn like altars. Among them, a shape. Something not born of man. Arms too long. Head low. Watching.

Darkness.

Kurt Maurer claps your back. The sound like meat on butcher’s block. His hair red, cropped. His beard saltbitten. He laughs. Opens the door. Inside, the gang bang awaits. Fat men inked like war gods. Women straddling them, roaring. The end of the world a carnival of flesh.

Darkness.

Corinne holds a card to her brow. Her eyes fixed on you like she’s looking through your skull to the brain it contains.

“Now, darling. Tell me. What shape do you see?”

You squint. The world swims.

“It’s a green … star?”

She flips the card. A perfect golden circle. Her breath slow. The faint crease of disappointment.

“Let’s try again.”

Darkness.

You are in the safe house in Chula Vista. South Glass, Carrick called it. The room reels. At your feet, the dead infant dissolves into the filthy, concrete floor. It’s flesh bubbles and sizzles. And then it is gone, leaving a greasy smear.

From outside Rocío again.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

Repeats the word like it’s a mantra.

Carrick bolts for the door.

“Ro?”

His voice full of fear and concern.

“You okay?”

But no one is. Not now. Not ever.

You have no idea how long you have been asleep. Your pants still stick to you from your nocturnal emission from your nightmare. The air is frigid. Your breath streams from your mouth.

The blue plastic tarp hangs slack between you and the girl. Belle. Motionless.

She gasps.

A small sound. Sharp. Alive.

But she says nothing. She does not move. As if the cold has claimed her, too.

You step outside. Streetlights buzz. Somewhere distant, a siren winds down. The neighborhood dogs bark wildly. From windows, backyards, porches. They bark like they smell blood. Or something worse.

Carrick stands with shoulders squared, speaking low and calm like he’s handling a spooked animal. Rocío backs against the chainlink fence, her breath coming fast. One hand grips her thigh for balance, the other clutches her gun, not quite aimed—but ready.

She doesn’t blink. Doesn’t speak at first. Her mouth moves, then—

“It came through the wall.”

She jerks a thumb over her shoulder toward the rear wall of the safe house. Carrick says something, quiet, trying to steady her. Ro cuts him off with a sharp gesture.

“It came through the wall, Carrick! I saw it.”

She shakes her head. Her eyes are wide and glassy.

“It was a woman. I think. The shape, anyway. Large. Masiva. No face. Just this… torso. Black. Not shadows—like it ate the shadows. I swear to God, it passed right through me. Then, through the fence. And then—then it went into the building. Across the street. Like it  knew where it was going.”

She points. Light from a window flickers once, then goes dark.

No wind. No voices. Just barking. And a silence that feels loaded. Like the world holds its breath.

Carrick turns to you. “You see anything, Grayson?”

“No.” You say.

Though the night is cool, you feel the sweat bead on your skin.

Woman. Shadow. Torso.

The words pull you backward. Not gently. Not with mercy.

To the days when you were fresh out of the Corps. When your hands still remembered the rifle like it was a part of you. When you still believed the war had an outside to come home from.

You see the halls again. The classrooms. University of Southern California. The sunlit corridors of the surface world and the dark things buried beneath it.

Project Delphi.

Where you first learned a shadow could speak

And you?

You listened.

The air in Los Angeles hangs warm in the lungs, thick with exhaust and orange blossom. It’s September of 1991, and the skies over USC shimmer with that Southern California haze, the kind that makes everything feel like it’s waiting to become something else.

You stand at the edge of campus, your backpack slung over one shoulder, boots scuffed from sand and tarmac. You have been out of the Marines for barely three months.

You met up with Whittaker when you got into town. He’d joined the academy, said the uniform felt like armor and the badge like a weight he could carry. He took you out drinking. Got you good and wrecked. You threw up behind a bar that didn’t have a name worth remembering.

What surprised you wasn’t the drink. It was that he didn’t drag you out chasing tail like he used to. No strip clubs. No neon sin. Just two men in their youth, sitting with the silence that comes after the bottle runs dry.

He let it slip between drinks. Said he was seeing his high school girl again. Said he might marry her this time. Like saying it out loud made it real.

Then he looked at you. Asked if you were seeing anyone.

You told him no.

And it was the truth. Because a relationship wasn’t just far from your mind. It was buried. Under rubble. Under ash. Under the part of you that still dreamed of coming back whole.

The gates of the University of Southern California rise like something out of a brochure. Brick buildings trimmed in white stone. Lawns clipped with precision. Palm trees motionless in the late heat. Students drift past with Walkmans and textbooks, laughter rising in easy waves.

But you are not here by accident.

Back at the Greyhound station, an envelope waited for you, with a return address you didn’t recognize. Inside was a one-way cab voucher, a student ID with your photo already laminated, a class schedule heavy in psychology and law, and a seminar cryptically labeled “Special Research—DLPH.”

Alton Rusk, the agent who first pulled you out of staging in Qatar and offered you the “civilian transition package, told you flatly: “You’re an investment now. General Virek made sure of that. Your tuition’s paid. Your housing’s arranged. All you have to do is show up and sharpen.”

You had asked to sharpen what.

Rusk lit a cigarette and looked out the car window. “Whatever edge you came back with.”

You walk past the Leavey Library, where the windows reflect only sunlight and nothing else. You pass the Grace Ford Salvatori Hall, where the air feels colder, and the shadows stretch too long. You feel the eyes on you before you see anyone watching.

A professor in a linen suit nods without smiling. A student hands him a flyer without a word—something about lucid dreaming and group consciousness.

None of it feels real. And yet, none of it feels unfamiliar.

At the edge of the science quad, a woman with platinum blonde hair in black sunglasses pauses as she passes you. She speaks without turning her head: “Welcome to the world behind the world, Mr. Grayson.”

Then she’s gone.

Your first week at USC adjusting to civilian life goes by in a blur

You sit on the edge of your mattress. White walls. Linoleum floor. Government-issued sheets. You hold a book in your lap—The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Your reflection in the darkened window looks older than your ID says you are.

The next day, the campus sprawls like a map too neatly drawn—red-brick buildings, bell towers, palm trees lined like soldiers at ease. Students laugh and drink coffee. Radios play Nirvana and Ice Cube. There’s sun in everything. Different than the sun in The Desert

You’re in a classroom. Violet Adorno, or “Vi” as she likes to be called, sits backward in her chair, camera already rolling. Bleached hair tucked under a thrift-store Dodgers cap. Eyeliner smudged into defiance.

She studies you and says, “You look like someone who’s been edited too many times.”

She films you.

One afternoon, a protest forms near Tommy Trojan. Cardboard signs. Drums. Tie-dye. Sunglasses. Hand-rolled cigarettes.

Jonah Cheevers, one of your classmates, approaches barefoot, holding out a plastic bottle of water.

“Nice to meet you. Seen you in class.” He says, “You don’t seem like the protest type.”

“I’m not. What are you protesting?”

“What do you got? “He jokes. “But seriously? Government’s killing people over oil, and they’re working on some sort of trade agreement that’s going to take away jobs and ship them to third-world countries. You’ll see”

“That sounds like so much foolishness.” You pronounce.

“Okay, man.” He says. “You ever change your mind? You know where to find me.”

He turns and walks back to the protest, shaking his fist.

During your Chemistry Lab, Elena Cao frowns at your notebook. She’s in a lab coat, gum clicking between her teeth, tattoos of neurons peeking out from her sleeves.

“You missed a decimal. Unless you’re trying to blow us both up.”

You correct it. She doesn’t thank you.

One night on the campus, Vi points her Super 8 at you as you sit on a bench, eyes closed, focused on your breathing. The camera whirs. You open your eyes and see her.

“This is for my project. Working title: The Last Honest Face in Los Angeles.”

The gaze of the camera eye makes you uncomfortable, as does the subject of her film. You get up and walk away. She doesn’t follow. Just keeps filming.

One day, before dawn, you bolt upright in bed, gasping. Sweat on your back. Blood in your mouth from biting your tongue. There’s no sound, but you think you hear breathing in the corner of the room.

In the library, Elena sits across from you, books spread out. You stare through a page. Your hand shakes.

Elena punches you in the shoulder. Hard.

“Hey,” she says, “Come back.”

You exhale. Nod. But in your mind, you’re still in The Sandbox.

One night on the campus, Jonah sits cross-legged under a jacaranda tree and sees you walking by. “You’re not the same man every day,” he says. “You know that, right?”

“What do you mean” you snap.

“Whoa, easy buddy. None of business, but you look like you’re going through something. And it show.”

It’s afternoon, and you’re at the campus cafe.

Vi edits her short film. In the frame: you looking away from the lens. Smoke curls behind you. For a second, you look like someone else entirely.

She rewinds it.

Watches again.

And then… the basement. The unmarked door.

You stand before a nondescript door beneath the psychology building. Your hand hovers over the knob. A whisper of cold air leaks from the seam.

A plaque reads simply: RESEARCH – DLPH

You enter.

The room beyond is a hollow square of cinderblock and silence.

One long table under a bank of flickering fluorescents. The air still. Stale. Smelling faintly of salt, dust, and old sweat. A camera mounted in each corner, unmoving. A mirror runs along the back wall.

There are four others already seated.

One sits like a soldier at rest. Back straight. Hands folded. You like her military bearing. Her braid drapes over one shoulder like a black rope. Her boots rest on the floor. Her eyes—pale, silver, unreadable—watch you not with surprise but calculation. She gives the slightest nod. A concession. Or a warning. The sticker on her blouse reads SOFIA VALENTE.

Seated next to her, the man leans forward slightly, fingers pressed together. His skin bears scars. Ceremonial, you think. You think they look badass. His robes hang loose. His gaze lifts to you slowly. There is no expression. But something shifts behind his eyes—recognition or dread. Or both. He breathes through his nose and lowers his head, as if in prayer. His sticker reads EZRA DACOUR.

Next to him is a girl who grins the moment you enter the room. Her orange hair frizzed like static. Black mesh sleeves torn at the elbows. Definitely someone you’d like to get to know more of. She chews bubblegum. Blows a bubble, then pops it. She winks. Blows a kiss. Then laughs.

“Oh, good. The knife showed up,” she says, tapping her pink Hello Kitty backpack like it contains something alive. The sticker across her Slayer t-shirt is upside down. It reads MARA ELLISON.

Then—last—Silas Mercer.

He sits at the far end of the table.

His hair short and neat. His hands folded on the table. His posture perfect. Like a photograph of a man in stillness.

But his eyes—green, bright—fix on you with the full and terrible weight of attention.

Not curiosity. Not threat. Recognition.

He does not blink. He does not smile. He simply says, in a voice quiet: “Took you long enough.”

Mercer once told you that if you ever laid a hand on him again, he’d kill you. You knew he meant it. For a split second, you don’t know whether to bolt or rip his throat out. You know Mercer saw the hesitation.

You take the last chair. It is cold. Steel bolted to the concrete beneath.

The table before them is unadorned.

The lights above hum and flicker. Then stop flickering.

A door opens at the far end. Three people enter.

The first is a man of lean constitution. Tall. Gaunt. His suit charcoal. Shirt white. Tie black and narrow. Black nitrile gloves on his hands though there is no surgery to be done. His face like something printed too many times. Hair combed flat, not a strand out of place. Eyes pale and sharp as broken glass. He does not walk so much as unfold forward. He hasn’t said a word and already he commands your respect.

The second walks barefoot.

Hair silver and bound into a long braid. Desert camo jacket open over loose black linen. His eyes do not match—one soft and brown, the other a milky glass orb that moves on its own. He nods once. That is all. You’ve seen his type before, and you’re not impressed.

The last is a woman.

She wears a black sheath dress and red lipstick like warpaint. Her platinum hair swept back in a perfect coil. Her heels clack on the floor.

She walks past you and winks—not playful, not cruel, but knowing.

And you know her.

She is the one from the quad. The one in the sunglasses. You straighten. She has your complete attention.

They stand across from the students now.

Each still. Each watching.

The gaunt man in the black suit speaks first. A German accent.

“I am Dr. Emil Albrecht. Project Delphi is a protocol. You are its subjects. Its tools.
You are not here to be educated. You are here to be measured. Unmade. Reconfigured. Your pasts are irrelevant. Your futures are conditional. We are not interested in who you are. We are interested in what you can become once that is removed.”

He folds his hands behind his back. The room is silent.

The man in the desert camo shakes his head faintly, then speaks.

“What my brother in the grave suit is tryin’ to say is this: You’re not students.
You’re receivers. You’re gonna get stripped down to the part of you that listens, not speaks. Gonna float in silence. Gonna sweat in shadow. You’ll dream things that make language run backward. You’ll wake up and not know whose eyes you’re seein’ through. And that’s the point, man. You ain’t here to pass. You’re here to fracture—just enough to see through the cracks. Oh, and Commander Isaiah Reams. But you can call me “Bluebird.”

He smiles like the Buddha might if the Buddha carried a bayonet.

The woman with the platinum blonde hair speaks last.

“And I am Dr. Corinne Voss. Don’t be afraid. Everything that matters will hurt. That’s just how transformation feels. You’ll experience cognitive dissonance. You’ll hallucinate. Dissociate. You’ll feel eyes in the mirrors. You’ll forget your own name and be better for it. And if you’re very lucky… you’ll see the thing that lives beneath the floor of the world. The truth that bleeds through time.”

She smiles.

“And when you do…” she says “I’ll be right here. Waiting to ask you what it looked like.”

Bluebird

The walls are cinderblock. Cold and humming. The light overhead sputters. There is a chair in the center of the room. Worn leather. Bolted to the floor.

You sit. Barefoot. Shirtless. Wires fixed behind each ear. Electrodes along your spine. A band across your chest recording every breath.

Bluebird walks barefoot across the concrete floor. His braid swings like a pendulum. His field jacket open, his hands empty. His glass eye scans the room as if it sees something moving beneath the paint.

He sets a metronome on the table. Worn wood. Brass hinge. Ticks like a heartbeat trying to remember its rhythm.

He speaks.

“All right, brother. We’re in the deep now. No maps. No mission brief. Just you. And what’s left when the noise runs out. Thoughts, man… They’re meant to be thought. Not worn. Not carved into the body like truth. Circumstances? They ain’t stable. Don’t treat them like steel. They’re driftwood. Subjectivity—flexible. Stretchy. A mood ring, not a compass. No worldview of fact, Marine. Only usefulness. Only what works until it don’t.”

He circles you, slow. Measured.

“You start treatin’ yourself like an object among objects,” he says “You give up the game. Free will? Maybe. But not if you’ve already sold the soul for a discount on predictability. Belief—belief calcifies. It installs reason like drywall and calls it architecture. But it’s still hollow behind the walls. Ain’t no fact in worldview. Just workings.”

He adjusts the electrodes slightly. You flinch.

“Now dig this. The world’s got a new sacrament, and it’s numbers. It wants to count you, track you, box you up in a spreadsheet, and call you person. You get examined like meat, brother. Labeled. Filed. Coded for storage. And a person? A person is a thing that agrees to be predictable. A person is a system of compromises. But a soul…”

Bluebird is silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts before he continues.

“A soul’s wild, man. A soul grows from within. It is messy. It don’t comply. It don’t accept pre-described forms. A soul moves. And when you ignore it, you break.”

He steps in front of you, crouches. You catch a scent of sandalwood.

“Grayson,” he says “You are the expression of a biological actuality. And I say soul because it’s got weight. It’s got mystery. You ain’t a thing. You’re a becoming. Experience held in momentary cohesion. That’s all we ever were.”

Bluebird places a warm, dry hand lightly on your chest.

“This? This is the shell.” he says “The vehicle. But what’s driving it—that’s the question. And the soul? The soul don’t care if the answers hurt. It only cares that you ask.”

The metronome ticks. The wires hum. Your breath slows.

A flicker of something moves across the wall. A shadow without a source. A form without definition.

Bluebird continues.

“Mental health, brother, is a handshake with the culture that raised you. But what if the culture’s sick? What if the picture it paints don’t fit the world you’re standin’ in? That break you feel? That’s the beginning of truth. At first, it’s pain. Then it’s hunger. Then it’s revelation. We teach people to be persons. Persons are manageable. Predictable. The soul? Soul don’t play by those rules. And in a broken world, the soul is the last honest witness.”

Honest. There’s the word again.

The air grows colder.

You shiver. Your eyes close. Your body stills. Your mind opens.

The metronome ticks on. Like a clock counting down. To the moment you are no longer what they told you to be.

You’re gone. For how long, you don’t know. Time folds. Slips its leash. But slowly, the world begins to return. The room comes back first. Then the man in it.

Bluebird.

He stands above you, still as stone. You feel strange. Enlarged. And somehow heavier, like you’ve been filled with something old and mineral and permanent.

When you first met Bluebird, you wrote him off. Another soldier turned hippie. Another casualty of too much war and too much silence, chasing ghosts in incense and riddles. His talk of the soul didn’t match the God you were raised with. Didn’t match the man you’d become. But now, when he speaks, it rings.

Not like belief. Like memory. Like something you knew once and buried.

Things you’ve taught yourself since coming back from The Desert. Things they don’t print in any manual. Things you whisper in the dark when no one’s listening.

Bluebird says nothing. He moves slow. Unfastens the band across your chest, the electrodes from your back, the wires threaded through your scalp. Gentle, like closing the last page of a book read under firelight.

Not procedure.

A ritual.

The end of something.

Or the beginning.

Dr. Albrecht

The room is square and steel. No windows. The walls are lined with cables that vanish into conduits overhead, all humming with unseen current. The floor is seamless concrete, sloped for drainage. The air smells faintly of copper and ozone and something older. There are no lights save for a dim coil above the table.

In the center: a chair made of brushed steel. Thin black straps dangle from the arms like tongues. Beneath it, a grate.

You sit in the chair, wrists bound. Electrodes fastened to your scalp, your chest, behind your ears. A small tube snakes into your nostril, delivering something cold and vaporous. Your eyes are open. Barely.

Across the room, behind a glass partition, Dr. Emil Albrecht stands.

He does not blink.

He wears a tailored charcoal suit buttoned at the throat. Black nitrile gloves pulled tight. His tie is straight.

He presses the switch. The lights pulse once.

You twitch in the chair.

Albrecht speaks into the intercom, voice flat and dissected. “State your name for the record.”

“Nicholas Alexander Grayson.” you reply.

A brief flicker crosses Albrecht’s eyes, as if noting something incorrect.

“What was your mother’s favorite song?”

“Uh, ‘American Pie’.” You realize you’re unsure if it was her song or a song someone told you was hers. Albrecht does not react.

“Do you remember the first time you lied?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“What was the lie?”

You recall the memory. Tell him. “I was with my dad. We were out with our rifles. He told me to shoot a bird. I deliberately missed and told him my aim was bad.”

Albrecht considers your response, then asks, “Are you sure it was the first?”

“What?” you sputter.

The lights buzz.

“What color was the sky the day you were born?”

“I don’t—how could I possibly know? Bright blue, I guess?” you say.

“Not to you.” Albrecht states matter of factly.

Suddenly, you remember screaming—newborn eyes wide—as you beheld a spiraling black aurora above the hospital, seen only by you.

“Which memory did we remove in 2009?” he asks.

“I don’t understand. 2009? I don’t —I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know we removed it?” asks Albrecht. “Have you ever been in this room before?”

“This room?” you ask. “No. Never.”

Albrecht smiles faintly. “Check your left forearm.” he commands.

You look down. There, barely healed, a line of script: “YOU WERE HERE.”

“Who dreamt of you before you were born?”

Your pulse quickens. Your mouth is dry. “What are you talking about? I don’t understand these questions.”

“The question isn’t for you,” he says, writing something in his notebook. “If you walked backward from the day of your death, how many times would you meet yourself?”

“Uh, 7,000?” You say weakly. Your hands begin to shake.

“Which version of you is answering this question?” he asks.

“Me. Me. I’m the only version!” you snap at him. A cold sweat forms.

“The one that’s still pretending.” Albrecht responds. “Last question: What is the last word you will say before you cease to exist?”

“Oh, God.” you groan.

The temperature of the room drops. Your breath comes out of your mouth in whips. The mirror on the wall fogs. A single word appears in condensation: “Corinne.”

Albrecht’s voice in the intercom is flat. “Stimulus cycle one. Phase zero-zero-one. Memory destabilization protocol commencing.”

The lights flicker. Your breath shallow.

“We are not studying thought. Thought is irrelevant. Thought is froth on the surface. We are digging for impulse. Root-level cognition. What the machine of you hides from its own operating system.” he tells you.

The lights dim. A speaker hidden in the wall crackles. Low-frequency pulses emerge.

“What you are experiencing is the reduction of subjectivity.” Albrecht continues. “Your memories do not belong to you. They were installed. Constructed from sensory residue and assigned significance. We will strip them. We will locate the raw feed.”

He adjusts a dial. You wince. Blood runs from your left nostril.

“You are not Nicholas Grayson.” He says, “You are a collection of identifiers. An image formed through repetition. We intend to disrupt the loop. Erasure of name. Then intention. Then structure.”

He turns another dial. A faint strobe flashes from a slit in the ceiling. Irregular. Hypnagogic.

“What is left after narrative is function. What is left after function is void. You are approaching the void.”

You gasp. Your mouth opens but makes no sound. Your eyes roll upward.

“There.” says Albrecht, almost delightedly. “There it is. No language. No boundary.”

He leans forward toward the glass. His voice drops an octave, smooth and insectile. “This is where the useful versions of you begin. And the rest? We will burn away. As we must.”

The lights buzz faintly. The hum of the machines levels out.

Albrecht straightens his tie. Presses the button again. The lights go out.

What happened next, you cannot say. Cannot recall. Only know that you let Albrecht shape you.

Dr. Voss

Dr. Corinne Voss sits across from you, legs crossed, hand resting on a black lacquered box. The room hums low like it’s holding its breath.

She opens the box.

A deck of cards slides onto the table.

“Nicholas… Have you seen these before?” she asks.

She fans the cards in a slow, theatrical gesture. Green Star. Gold Circle. Black Square. Red Cross. Three Blue Wavy lines.

“No, ma’am.” You tell her.

“They were designed in the early 1930s.” she says. “Psychologist named Karl Zener, working with a man named Rhine. Parapsychology, darling. ESP. Clairvoyance. Telepathy. Mind reading, if you’re feeling vulgar. All the things men like our friend Dr. Albrecht call statistical noise. But let me tell you a little secret. The cards weren’t really made to test clairvoyance."

She sets the deck down precisely.

“These cards weren’t really made to measure psychic power. They were made to find cracks.”

She folds her hands. Her voice dips—confidential, almost intimate. “You sit across from someone. You guess the card they’re holding. You get it wrong. You get it wrong again. And again. And somewhere between the fifth and the fiftieth card… you start to wonder if the failure is yours or the system’s.”

She leans forward just slightly.

“And eventually,” she says, “you stop asking if the card is a star or a circle. You start asking if the problem is you.”

She smiles. It’s small and sharp.

“That’s the trick of the Zener deck, Nicholas. It’s not a test of perception. It’s a test of belief. Do you trust what you see… when nothing makes sense? Do you trust yourself to be right, even when you’re always wrong?”

She smiles.

“That’s the real trick of the Zener deck, Nicholas. It doesn’t reveal power. It reveals cracks. And darling… you’ve got plenty.”

She picks up the top card. Doesn’t show it. Corinne holds a card to her brow. Her eyes fixed on you like she’s looking through your skull to the brain it contains.

“Now, darling. Tell me. What shape do you see?”

You feel ridiculous, but you concentrate on the card. “It’s a green … star?” you tell her.

She flips the card. A perfect golden circle. Her breath slow. The faint crease of disappointment.

“Let’s try again.” she says.

She draws the top card. Holds it face-down.

“What shape?” she asks.

“Three wavy lines.” you say after a moment.

She flips it, revealing a black square.

She makes no comment. Shuffles again. Her slender fingers move over the cards.

This repeats. Over and over. Dozens of draws. Hundreds. You guess slightly better than chance. But never beyond it. Three out of five. Then two. Then three again. Enough to suggest something. But not enough to prove it.

She changes the shuffling pattern. Twice. Your success rate does not waver.

The clock on the wall ticks.

“You know, you are not failing. You are avoiding. There is a difference.” she says.’

She shuffles once more, then stops. Her hand rests on the deck.

Her eyes lock on yours. They stay there. The air in the room changes. Warmer, denser, charged like the air before a storm.

“Grayson.” she says.

She does not blink.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You are too much in your head.” She tells you and pushes the deck aside.

Her voice drops—slow, certain. “We need to shake things up. We need to fuck.”

“What?!? I don’t—I don’t know what to say. Are you sure?” You feel your face redden, radiating heat.

She watches you. No smile. No seduction. Just truth laid out like the cards on the table. She leans in slightly. Her breath is warm. “I know.” she says “ I know that goes beyond the propriety of our relationship. But we need to think outside the box. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, ma’am, yes I do.”

The room holds still.

The deck of cards sits untouched.

The ceiling light buzzes.

She stands, takes you by the hand, and leads you out of the room.

Isolation Tank

The corridor smells of saline, machine oil, and electricity.

At the far end: four tanks. Stainless steel. Rounded edges. Lids open like coffins.

A fluorescent hum flickers overhead.

Your reflection distorts in the slick surface of Tank One, you in your swim trunks. Your name is written in black marker on masking tape.

Everyone ignores your erection except Corrine, who smiles.

Dr. Albrecht stands to your right. Gaunt. Stark. His charcoal suit is too precise, like it’s been ironed by an algorithm. Blue eyes dead and distant. His black nitrile gloves stretched over hands.

He speaks without turning.

“The isolation tank is not therapeutic. It is not spiritual. It is a controlled environment for the redaction of input and—by extension—identity. When you deprive the nervous system of stimulus, it begins to read itself. Then it begins to rewrite.”

To your left stands Bluebird. His silver hair is tied back in a long braid, his desert-camo field jacket hung open over loose linen robes. One eye is pale and glassy—always watching something beyond the room.

“What he means, Marine,” he said, “is the tank’s like a clean mirror. Only trouble is… you bring in all your fingerprints. Ain’t no noise down there. Just the sound of what you ain’t ready to hear. You float long enough; you stop being a body. You become… resonance.”

Corinne steps forward, heels clicking softly on the tile. She wears a tailored black sheath dress and a high chignon. Her platinum hair glows faintly in the fluorescent haze. She smells of Chanel and cigarette smoke.

“It isn’t about silence, Nicholas.” She tells you, “It’s about the return. The tank strips you. Memory. Identity. Language. Until all you are is presence. And then it asks: ‘What’s left?’”

A lab assistant adjusts dials and throws a lever. The tank hisses. Its lid inches wider.

“You’ll hallucinate. You’ll question time. Eventually, you may ask which you is doing the asking. That’s when the work begins.” Says Albrecht.

“Or ends. Depending on how far you fall.” Bluebird says.

“But don’t worry, darling.” Corinne tells you. “We’ll be here. Waiting to see who climbs out.”

The lab assistant taps the vein in your arms twice and injects a solution into your vein.

Corinne helps you into the tank. You lower yourself into the water. It’s warm as blood.

Bluebird puts a dry, warm hand on your shoulder.

“Listen up, cowboy, your Western notion of time’s not gonna work in there. Aztecs had a way of looking at time that might help. For them, there was no beginning or end. There was only motion. What they called time-place. It’s weave. It’s dance. For them, time wasn’t something you measured. Time’s a rhythm. It’s not that events happen in time. It’s that time-place is the event. Like cloth being weaved from threads. And every one of us a strand in the weave, timed and placed, singing our part in a song that doesn’t end. Am I making any sense, Marine?” He asks.

You see Albrecht roll his eyes through the thick lenses of his glasses.

“Absolutely not, sir.” You tell Bluebird.

Corinne looks down at you as you float. Smiles. “See you in 24 hours.”

The lid closes, and you are engulfed in darkness. You hear the murmur of them talking outside. The sound of Corinne’s heels clacking on the floor, growing fainter and fainter. And then, silence. You float. Sometime later, you feel the rush of the cocktail the lab assistant injected into your bloodstream come on in waves.

You float.

No light. No sound. No weight.

The water is body-temperature salt, dense enough to hold you like a second womb. Electrodes are clipped to you, but you cannot feel them. The tank is sealed. The world, gone. What remains is void. Unmeasured, unbroken.

Then the entheogens unfurl you. A key turned in a lock that was always there, buried in the meat of your brain. No heat. No pain. Just the opening of a door that cannot be seen.

You begin to drift. Not the body. The self.

Out. Away. Beyond.

It feels like space—not the vastness of stars, but something more intimate and ancient. It is darkness without edge, a silence older than language. There is no up, no down, just suspension, the hum of everything, and nothing all at once.

And in that dark—

Everything means everything.

Every breath, every twitch of thought, every ghost of emotion carries a weight it never had before—a superabundance—as if God is watching, not to judge but to understand.

You see your life.

All of it.

Not as memory but as an event, unfurling in layers, spirals, time-compressed and widened into shape, color, and fire.

You see your mother’s womb and the moment of emergence, slipping into the cold, screaming, your father’s hands beneath you. Your mother weeping.

Above you then, even now—a dark spiral, not just a shape but a presence, a truth etched into the ceiling of the world.

You see your father and mother holding you. Then drifting apart, years stretched taut between them like glass. Shards of silence in their smiles.

Your sister, laughing beside you. A girl in church shoes.

You see them both in pews. The hymns. The lies told with love. The smell of dust and faith.

You see the recruiting office, the papers, the oath. The desert—its cruelty, its grandeur. The sun like a furnace. The sand like judgment.

You see Corrine. Her mouth. Her breath. The curve of her spine beneath your hands.

And then—

Bit by bit—

Strand by strand—

It unravels.

The thread of identity has been pulled loose. First, your name. Then, your story. Then, your shape.

The narrative collapses like scaffolding. The narrator fades. The “I” dissolves.

There is no Nicholas.

There is only that which remains.

The thing that watches. The thing that remembers. The soul is untethered, without a name, history, or mask.

And in that final stillness, it sings.

Not in sound. But in resonance. A note from the center of a being that never needed language to know itself. A truth that was waiting for silence. And found it.

Here.

Now.

Forever.

Time passes. You do not know how much, but at some point, you hear a faint sizzling sound. Eventually, you realize it is the sound of the synapses firing in your brain.

You are a boy. It is night. Indiana. Cornfields. Overhead, the thing hovers. Motionless. Waiting. For you.

You are a man. Inside a gas station. A scream. Dogs barking. Rocío yells “Fuck!” Sharp with fear and warning and a thing unnamed.

You are younger. Before you, the oil towers. They burn like altars. Among them a shape. Something not born of man. Arms too long. Head low. Watching.

Kurt Maurer claps your back. The sound like meat on butcher’s block. His hair red, cropped. His beard saltbitten. He laughs. Opens the door. Inside, the gang bang awaits. Fat men inked like war gods. Women straddling them, roaring. The end of the world a carnival of flesh.

Corinne holds a card to her brow. Her eyes fixed on you like she’s looking through your skull to the brain it contains.

“Now, darling. Tell me. What shape do you see?” she asks.

You squint. The world swims.

“It’s a green … star?”

She flips the card. A perfect golden circle. Her breath slow. The faint crease of disappointment.

“Let’s try again.” she says.

The grass wet with dew. Cold against your bare feet. You step out into the corn.

The stalks crowd close. Tall and dark and whispering. In the rows ahead something hangs. Hovering like a shadow made whole. A woman maybe. Or something that wore one once.

Its face pale. Hollow. The skull beneath near showing. A robe hangs off it like a ruined flag. Black. Tattered. Stinking of soil and smoke. It shifts in the air like a thing caught between motion and memory.

“Lo, my child,” It hisses. “To fashion thee into the instrument of mine own purpose, I must needs take the scales from thine eyes, yea, even thy innocence must I strip away. For I am the whetstone, and thou art the blade; and by mine hand shalt thou be sharpened.”

It comes down.

No sound. Just descent. Like a thought you can’t stop having.

It presses its mouth to yours. A tongue, cold and wet, snakes between your teeth.

It keeps coming. You try to breathe but you can’t. You try to pull away but you don’t. The taste is of stone. Of stagnant water.

You gag. Still, it comes.

Longer than breath. Longer than time. And still, it comes.

Your eyes are slitted. Tears roll down your face, and through them, you see something behind the thing that has its tongue down your throat.

It floats.

No wings. No sound. No wind stirred by its coming.

The thing is all curve and swell and obscene abundance. What floats before you is meat, and meat gone bad.

Its grey flesh pulses. Sick and wet. Veined with black rot. Swollen breasts hang like tumors. The belly ripples as if something beneath it still kicks, still feeds. The skin splits in places. Ruptures. Leaks. Worms writhe from folds like thoughts that should not be thought.

The head is eyeless. Faceless. Braided coils of hair molded in clotted sinew, looped like entrails. Where the mouth might be, there is only an open slit, yawning. A stink rises from it.

It drifts forward. The air grows heavy.

Low and wet and crawling through the roots of your spine.

Your body remembers.

It does not look at you.

It does not need to.

It already owns you.

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes
• Chapter Five: Shadow Work
• Chapter Six: The Suck
• Chapter Seven: Crushed and Broken
• Chapter Eight: Project Delphi

Push the World

Bryce Wexley. You are bone-tired.

The woman called Trenody left you alone in a bedroom. The bed wide as a pasture, the ceiling fan ticking like a distant clock. She showed you the frame. The thing in the frame. You saw it but you did not understand it. The towers falling? Alpine? The room that does not exist? The message that you are the door? Your perfect twin? A face like yours but not yours. Eyes in the sky? Their gaze fixed eastward.

You do not know what it means.

There is a knock at the door.

“Senator? Mister Wexley? May I come in? I need to speak with you.” Trenody says.

“Come in.”

You rise. You open the door. Trenody stands there. Her eyes are a question she does not ask.

“I know it is late, but I have to know.” She says.

She crosses the room. Takes up the remote from the nightstand. Aims it at the enormous rear-projection television. The screen flares to life.

And there you are.

No. Not you.

Your twin. Your shade. Standing in the rubble of a ruined city, soot-smeared, hair tangled, holding a woman who weeps without sound. He is rugged. Heroic. On the lower third of the screen the words: Senator Wexley Onsite at the World Trade Center.

Trenody watches.

“If that is Senator Wexley, then who are you?”

She sits on the edge of the bed.

“He’s my doppelgänger. Made by the aliens. I am going to kill him.” You say.

“You look like him.” She says, “Except you are leaner. And you have seen things. Like me.”

Her face goes pale at the word. She sits forward. Near the edge now.

“Kill?" she says.

You nod once.

“With a gun,” you tell her. “I’ll have Vince put a bullet between his eyes.”

She looks at you. Eyes wide, voice quiet.

“But,” she says, “all the flights are grounded.”

You scowl. A slow tightening of the mouth. The breath held too long. You had not considered that.

“The aliens. It keeps coming back to the space aliens.” She says, “They are not gods. They pretend to be. They are keeping us from the Next Level. And the ones who help them, the Luciferians. They are human. They wear skin like ours. But they are not like us. And they want something from you. I do not know what.”

“It’s a long and complicated story.” You tell her.

She lowers her voice. “I am a simple girl. Texas born. Ti and Do—they showed me the way. But you come from a wealthy family. You might as well be royalty. To think we would be under the same roof. What strange destiny led you here?”

That word.

Destiny.

It draws the dust off an old memory.

The sun going down over the Pacific. You, five years old, astride a dark horse beside a man who has never once said “I love you” and never needed to. He is clearing brush in silence, canvas jacket slung over one shoulder.

His boots dusty with the earth.

He is your great-grandfather. Calder Wexley. You never called him that. You called him “Sir.”

He stops. Tethers the horse. Draws a satchel from the saddle.

“Boy, someday all this will be yours. This is your destiny.”

He lifts his arms. One hand holds the manor. The other, the sea.

“The time left to me is short. I’ll make use of it.”

He opens the satchel. Pulls out a steel gauntlet. One from the old suits in the castle hall. It gleams in the amber light.

“In the old days, men understood the weight of signs. Symbol was not metaphor but law itself. To strike a man with a gauntlet was not violence. It was memory made manifest. A blow fashioned not for harm but for permanence. It marked the flesh and the mind alike. A ceremony of pain and spectacle. And all who saw it carried the lesson in silence.”

He draws the armored glove on. Flexes the metal fingers. Makes a fist.

“Civilization has forgotten what pain remembers.”

He turns to you.

“Listen to me, boy, the world doesn’t bend to the strong or the clever. It bends to the one who controls the narrative. The one who holds the story holds the future. Those who make the rules don’t play by them—they rewrite them when necessary. To be the ruler, you must understand that everything is a transaction—money, loyalty, history, even blood. Power is never a right; it’s a thing you earn—through manipulation, force, and the stories you tell. The truth is nothing but a tool in your hand, Bryce, and that truth can be shaped into any form you wish. But remember—truth is power only if you can make others believe it. Never forget that.”

He snaps his arm back, swings, and smashes you in the face. Steel on skin. A crack like thunder in your skull. You’re lifted from the earth, and the sky spins. You hit the dirt hard. Your mouth fills with blood.

You see stars.

He stands above you. The glove dripping red. His boot nudges your face.

“Never forget that.”

You flinch at the memory of Old Man Calder’s blow.

Trenody sees it. She watches you.

“I would give you a penny for your thoughts, but I believe they would cost me more than that.” she says.

“Sorry.” You tell her, “I was thinking about a lesson I was once taught.”

She lowers herself next to you. Slow. Deliberate. Her denim skirt pulls tight at the knees as she sits. She does not look at you. Not yet.

“I know that you and I come from very different places. You were raised in a manor. I was raised next to strip malls. But we are both haunted. That much I can see.” Her voice is quiet. Not soft.

You bridle at the comparison. She’s nothing but a peasant. But what she said about being haunted is true.

She inches closer. Slowly. The warmth of her leg against yours, thigh to thigh.

“It has been a long time since I was intimate with anyone.” She says, “Years, maybe. I do not remember when the loneliness became a habit instead of a feeling.”

She breathes out. Not quite a sigh.

“I know I should not. I know this is not proper. But I need to be touched, and I believe that you do, too.”

She turns slightly.

“I hope I am not being too forward.” she says.

She takes your hand. Moves it with hers. Presses it gently against her breast. Holds it there.

“This is my vehicle. It is how I remain here. It is how I hold the ache. It is how I offer peace to those who need it.”

She closes her eyes.

“I would like to be intimate with you, Bryce. If that is what you wish as well.”

“I do.”

The room is quiet.

No wind stirs the curtain. No noise comes from the street. The world seems to lean in.

Trenody stands before you in the half-light.

She lifts your jacket from your shoulders. Folds it. Her hands find the buttons of your shirt. One by one. She does not rush.

Her breath is steady. Her eyes do not leave yours. She watches you like a woman watching a flame she does not want to die.

“You are still a man, no matter what the aliens have done to you,” she says.

Her fingers trail the hollows of your collarbone. She undresses with quiet purpose. No ceremony. No shame. Her body is not a seduction.

“This is my vehicle.” she says. “It has been broken. But it still moves. It still carries me forward. And tonight, it wishes to carry you.”

You embrace not with hunger but with gravity.

She climbs onto the bed beside you and draws the covers over your bodies. Her hands rest on your chest. Her head on your shoulder.

When she kisses you, it is not passion. It is benediction.

Your bodies move like tide and shore. Slow. Relentless. Old as grief.

No words pass between you.

You have never known this kind of intimacy. Not like this. Not with tenderness. Not with reverence. All your life the body has been a weapon. A lure. A thing used to conquer or be conquered. Sex was barter. Sex was a battlefield. Sex was rutting in the dark like animals blind to themselves.

And sometimes, sex was death.

Charlotte.

Princess Charlotte Eleanor Victoria of Gloucester.

Blood of kings. Member of the House of Windsor by way of the Gloucester line. Twenty-seventh in line to a crown older than most languages. Or was it thirty-seventh? But her Crown was light, and her voice was laughter, and she looked at the world as if it were a stage that owed her no curtain.

Your family’s money made her lineage look poor. Generations of oil and empire. A different kind of royalty. A quieter violence.

She was Regal but unaffected. Known for her striking dark auburn hair, usually worn long and braided in the old court style. Publicly proper, but in private: rebellious, whip-smart, emotionally intense.

You remember her beneath you.

Not tender. Not sacred. Just bodies. Her plaited hair pulling loose with each thrust, her breath ragged, her teeth at your throat.

It was not lovemaking. It was fucking.

You were both drunk. The party in Hertfordshire gone to smoke and murmurs and political lies whispered over cut crystal.

You had the keys to a Jaguar Mark X.

She wanted the wind. You gave her the road. The curve came too fast. The bridge did not move. The car hit stone and folded.

She died where she sat.

Her face crushed and broken on the dashboard.

You crawled from the wreck with ribs shattered, blood in your mouth, and your hands slick with her blood.

The Royal Press Office said she passed peacefully. A lie. The last gift they gave her.

Closed-door funeral. No press. No photographs. Just a redacted page and the smell of lilies.

MI6 swept the floor. Burned the files. General Voss sent a jet and a handler. You were gone before her body cooled.

The Crown forgets nothing. But it sometimes erases.

The world moved on. The line of succession closed around the wound.

But you remember.

You keep her silver cigarette case in a drawer back at your estate.

Inside: A flower, pressed flat like memory. A matchbook from the Wheatsheaf Tavern. And the corner of a love letter. Not to you. From one of the men who courted her. The ink ran pink from the rain the night she died.

After that, your father and mother would no longer indulge you.

They spoke in quiet tones behind thick doors. They hosted dinners where your name was not mentioned. The wine was poured but never offered to you. You were tolerated like weather—something to be endured until it passed or broke.

You still remember the day that sets things in motion to where you are now, Trenody beside you.

You and your father rode out across the land. The same land you and your great-grandfather cleared when you were a boy. The same ridge lines. The same dry winds. Only now, the brush grew back quicker than it once did. Like the earth no longer respected your family name.

Your healing ribs ached with each step your horse took. Father rode ahead. His back straight. His coat was dark against the pale hills. He did not speak and you did not ask him to. The horses breathed steamed in the morning chill. The sky was a lid of pewter and the sun did not show.

Your father’s horse trotted near the old fencepost. The one your great-grandfather marked with a copper nail. He did not dismount. He looked out over the land like it belonged to someone else.

“You understand what you’ve done.” He said. It is not a question.

“Yes, father.” You said, “And I know you and your mother are ashamed of me..”

He did not look at you.

“We don’t recover from things like this. Not really. We bury them deep, and we walk like they’re not there. But they are. And they own us. Forever.”

You looked out at the hills. At the brush that grew wild again. At the sky that wouldn’t break open.

“You’ll inherit all this. But not clean. Not proud. You’ll inherit it like a man inherits debt. And you’ll carry it until it kills you. That’s your future now.”

You rode in silence for some time. The wind moved through the dry grass. The horses made no complaint. The sky above was vast and pale and without mercy.

His father spoke without turning his head. “And I don’t want to hear more talk of you entering politics. Politics is for show ponies and social climbers. It’s theater. And you’re not an actor, son. You’re a Wexley. You’re supposed to be useful.”

“You never approved me of me! You always looked down at me! I know I always disappointed you and Mother!” You snarl.

You crested a rise. Below you, the valley unfolded—acres of land, oil rigs distant, vineyards coiled in perfect lines like snakes at rest. The empire.

“You want to play politics? Buy a politician.” he said “Hell, buy a whole damn caucus. Buy a Supreme Court justice if that’s your fancy. That’s what we do. We don’t run for office; we own it. We don’t make policy. We write the checks that make policy happen.”

He turned, the reins slack in one hand.

“Do as your great-grandfather did. As I did. Stay in the shadows. Push the world with your thumb. Never let them see your fingerprints.” he said.

“No,” you tell him “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go into politics. I don’t care what you say.”

Your father smiled. Thin. Cold.

“You still want the limelight? Then go big. Presidency big. Aim for the chair they still believe matters. Put your face on the postage stamps if you can stomach the lies.” He paused. “But you and I both know, you don’t have the balls for that kind of work.”

He turned his horse and rode down the hill.

You stayed where you were.

The wind at your back.

The silence inside you louder than any voice.

That Thing Down by the Docks

Senator Wexley. The phone rings.

You blink as though waking from a dream. You hold a long, black blade, a gem the color of blood in its center. How long have you been holding it? Where did it come from? The room reels.

You steady yourself and carefully lower the sword, setting it down on the polished glass of the end table, careful not to let it touch the marble.

The suite is whisper-quiet, opulent. Everything upholstered in ghost-white or gold. One wall is all glass, looking out over the city’s starlit ruin. Beneath the chandelier, a decanter of whisky sits untouched. The fireplace glows blue with a gaslight that does not warm. The carpet is cream-colored and so thick it steals every footstep like a secret.

You pick up the phone. Your wife. Celeste.

You stare at the name a moment longer than you need to. Like it is a riddle.

Then you answer, already annoyed. “Yes?”

“Darling? I saw you on Tough Talk. It’s completely forgivable why they had to push back the segment on Wexcess.” she says. “They are going to reschedule the segment?”

“I’m sure they will. Is this really what you wanted to talk about, Celeste?”

She won’t let it go. “What’s unforgivable is your only comment to Doherty. ‘Nice suite?’ Really, darling? I’m surprised Loraine did give you a tongue-lashing, especially after all the media training she gave you.” She pauses “You looked… polished. Polished and hollow. And the footage. From the World Trade Center. The one where you’re holding that woman, covered in soot. The networks play it constantly. You know what the strangest thing is?”

“No, Celeste,” you tell her, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you?” She asks, “You looked beautiful. Heroic. But it wasn’t you. Not the man I married. Not the way you move when you think no one’s watching.”

“Maybe you’re finally seeing me. The real me.” you say.

“The reason I call, and I do so hate to disturb you at this hour, because Graham’ has been asking strange questions. About dreams. About ‘the other father.’ I caught him talking to a mirror.”

You pinch your brow. “He’s probably gay.”

Celeste is silent. Then has says gently, almost kind, “Come home soon. Not for me. For Graham.”

She disconnects.

Celeste said Graham had dreams about “the other father,” the other you. Everything keeps coming back to Alpine. And meeting Caruso set fateful night in motion.

You remember when you first met Caruso.

The bar was low and narrow and stank of bleach and piss. You could miss it from the street if you weren’t looking for it, and no one ever was. Neon dead in the window. Dust on the bottles. The fan overhead spun slowly as if bored of the heat.

You sat at a booth in the back. Vinyl torn. Duct tape curling at the edges. You wore a suit that didn’t yet fit your name. Hair still neat. Tie still tight. Skin too clean for the room.

Bryce Wexley, City Council, Eighteenth District. Newly elected. Still shaking hands like they meant something.

And that was when he walked in.

Vince Caruso.

Thick in the shoulders. Heavy in the eyes. Shirt unbuttoned one past respectable. Hair slicked back but thinning in a way he pretended not to notice. He moved like a man who’d carried things in trunks. Heavy things. Wet things.

He didn’t sit. Just slid into the booth across from you like he owned the air between you.

He said nothing.

Just set a manila envelope on the table. His hand lingered there for a moment. Then left.

You looked down. You didn’t open it. Not yet.

No name. No seal. Just a faint thumbprint where someone had gripped it hard.
You knew without knowing.

Five grand. Untraceable. No memo. No contract. Just a small note, folded like a prayer: Remember your friends.

He lit a cigarette. Blew smoke toward the jukebox that hadn’t played in years.

“City Heights ain’t Washington,” he said finally, voice like gravel under boot.

“You’re goddamn right.” You told him.

He looked at you like he’d already seen the whole arc, beginning to end.

“You got the face for the cameras.” he said. “But you need to decide what kind of man you’re gonna be when they’re off.”

“I am rather photogenic, aren’t I?” you said. “But I already know exactly what kind of man I am.”

The choice had been made the moment you walked through the door.

Caruso rose. Left the cigarette burning in the tray. Never looked back.

You opened the envelope. You counted the money. The amount was a paltry sum. Laughable. You accrued more money through your family’s empire in the seconds it took you to count. You tucked the note into your inside pocket.

You carry it still. You never needed it. What you needed was Bryce. Someone to do your dirty work. He was beneath you, but that had its appeal, knowing your family would disapprove.

The next step was that night.

Late autumn, 1992.

Fog thick on the San Diego waterfront.

You were still a city councilman, not yet thirty.

Caruso was a mid-tier muscle for the Bravanti outfit—connected through labor unions and port security. A fixer. A messenger. And when needed, a cleaner.

A man named Tomas Reza—mid-level union accountant and federal informant—got cold feet. He contacted a local reporter with names and routing numbers and whispered rumors of City Hall connections. He’d been seen at three fundraisers. One hosted by your people. He had photographs.

Tomas Reza had to disappear. But no one wanted the blood on their hands. Not officially.

The call came in the night.

Caruso picked you up himself in a grey Ford with no plates. You didn’t speak much on the ride.

“He’s in the warehouse already. All you gotta do is help me bury the problem.” he says.

“‘Help?’ I’m here to make ensure the job gets done right. And I want him to know.”

The warehouse was condemned. Steel walls rusted to ash. Windows busted and patched with plywood. Somewhere, a freighter horn moaned in the fog.

Reza was bound, beaten, mouth taped. Eyes pleading. He recognized you. That was the best part. He made mouth noises behind the duct tape. You couldn’t make out what he said, but his message was clear: “Please don’t! Please Don’t kill me!”

It was quick. A length of cable. One pull.

Reza was the first man you had put down, and you knew there would be others in your future. You were more excited than ill. You had crossed a threshold.

Neither of you didn’t talk after that. Just worked. Just shoveled dirt into a makeshift grave cut into a gravel pit behind the warehouse, under a trapdoor in the concrete floor that Caruso said used to be part of a smuggling tunnel. After a few scoops you let Caruso do the rest of the work.

“It’s deep enough.” Cause said, wiping sweat from his brow with Reza’s tie. “We pour concrete next week. City’s paying for it. Funny world, huh?”

Caruso asked you to help move Reza’s body. You made a token effort, and then, after a few moments, you let Reza’s legs fall to the ground. Caruso glared at you but said nothing. He knew who held the leash.

Your shoes were ruined. You threw them in the bay later that night. You went home barefoot.

Neither of you spoke of it again. No names. No location.

Only “that thing down by the docks.”

The cover-up held. Reza vanished. The story died.

You rose in the polls.

Caruso moved up, too. Quietly. Doors opened. Favors exchanged.

But you both remembered.

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes
• Chapter Five: Shadow Work
• Chapter Six: The Suck
• Chapter Seven: Crushed and Broken
• Chapter Eight: Project Delphi

Get Right with God

Agent Nicholas Grayson. The dogs are barking. Down the street someone screams. High and broken like glass in the wind. It pulls you from the dark where you’d been dreaming. Some place black and wet. You lay there breathing. Your pants stick to you. Your cock slick with the last heat of it. The spillage cooling on your thighs. You do not move. You feel a fly crawling across your cheek, and you let it.

Then the smell comes. Old meat. Sweet and foul. You know it at once though you’d tried to forget. The bunkers. The silence beneath the earth. The heat and the bodies. What you found there. What you kept. You close your eyes but the dark only brings it closer.

You remember what came before. Before the war and the sand and the silence that followed. The day the recruiter came. The house The fan humming overhead and stirring the heat but not cooling it. The smell of coffee and dish soap. Early summer. Dust on the sill. Light slanting through the yellowed curtains.

The house is plain. Suburban. Brick with streaked siding and a porch that creaks in the heat. The lawn is cut to regulation height, edged sharp as a blade. You mow it not out of pride but discipline. A need for order. A ritual to keep the chaos at bay.

High school’s behind you. You’re still lean, all elbows and wire, but the body’s changing. You’ve taken to lifting. Running. Waking before the sun to train. Muscle and motion and meat. Steak, chicken, eggs. You eat like it’s war.

You’ve played ball—football, basketball—so you’ve got a base. But this is different. This is hunger turned inward. This is the grind. And it suits you.

He sits across from you in dress blues. Palms flat on the table. Like a man laying down cards. Staff Sergeant Clay Devlin. His eyes calm. Measuring. The kind of man who’d seen fire and never flinched from it. He speaks softly. Like a thing rehearsed. But not dishonest. Not quite.

“Ma’am, I know this ain’t easy. I get mothers in tears. Fathers who slam the door. That’s part of the job.” he says.

Your mother sits stiff-backed in her chair, hands in her lap, eyes never leaving the sergeant’s face. “Then maybe the job’s wrong.”

“Your son’s got something, ma’am. Discipline. Grit. I seen it the second he walked into my office. Most boys come in looking for glory or a way out. Nick—he just wanted purpose.”

“My son’s got purpose right here. This land. This family. Nicholas, why don’t you tell me what you told the officer here why you want to join the Marines?”

“I want a chance to serve my country and the Lord, fighting against the world’s evil.” You say. “I want to do something with my life. I want to be useful.”

“Nicholas, you’re such a smart boy. You don’t have to do this. There are so many other ways you can express your God-given talents. But your daddy was changed when he came back from the war. That’s when he started drinking, and that’s why he left us.”

She turns toward you, face flickering with pain.

“The uniform don’t know you. The flag ain’t gonna send you a letter when your body comes back zipped in a bag.”

“I have to do this,” you say. “I have to do something. You’ve told me my whole life, how much evil there is in the world. And we pray, we pray to the American flag, we pray to protect the president and the troops. And I’ve always known that that was something that called to me, and now I know it is what I’m supposed to do. I feel a calling, Mother.”

“Ma’am,” says Devlin with a gentle, practiced calm, “I’d be lying if I said it was safe. But I will tell you this: he’s got leadership potential. He’s smart. Observant. Steady under pressure. I don’t just want him in my Corps—I need men like him. Men who don’t flinch. He’ll be part of something that matters.”

“I already lost my husband to the bottle, Sergeant,” she says. ”My boy’s the last steady thing in this house.”

She stands. Walks to the sink. Her back to you. Her shoulder shake.

“Nicholas, you’re a grown man. Old enough to make your own decisions. I can’t stop you.”

She turns around and look you in the eye, and you see the pain etched on her face.

“Make sure whatever’s left of you comes back through that door one day.”

“I’ll come back to you, Mom.” You tell her.

“Ma’am, the Corps takes care of its own." Says Devlin.

Staff Sgt. Devlin turns to you. “Pickup’s Thursday. 0600 sharp.”

He nods to your mother again, respectfully.

Then he’s gone. Only the clink of the tap and the steady breathing of your mother trying not to cry.

“I’m gonna make you proud, Mom,” you say, “I’m gonna make you proud.”

You’re full of it. Hope. The real kind. The kind that hums in your bones and makes the world seem like it might open its arms instead of its teeth. For the first time you can remember, the path ahead doesn’t feel like a trap. There was a time you thought the only way to keep from falling into darkness was to put on the collar, become a priest, seal yourself off from the rot of the world.

But not now.

You suck in your gut and puff your chest. Try to look like a man. For her. To give your mother something to believe in. To ease that worry behind her eyes. It hurts to see her afraid. But you feel it in your bones—this moment. You’re strong. Invincible. She’s wrong. It’s not dangerous. Not for you.

You think of your dad.

He left when you and Marley were still small. Started fresh somewhere else. Remarried. Took in her kids. Younger than you by a stretch.

After he left, you and Marley did what you could, but it was your mother who carried the weight. Day in, day out. And though she never said it, the leaving broke something in her. Left it unfixed.

You were bitter for a time. Shut down. Quiet. But as the years passed you stepped up. Took on more. And this past year, you made your choice.

You enlisted. Marines. Not for escape, but for purpose.

Something clean. Something true.

Boot Camp, MCRD San Diego

Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. Summer 1990. Day 12 of training. 0430 hours.

The lights come on with the wrath of heaven. White and sudden and unkind. A trashcan lid clangs against the concrete like a bell calling the damned to reckon. You woke hard, breath shallow, heart kicking. Above you Whitaker mutters a curse thick with sleep.

“Rise and shine, you goddamn abortions! This ain’t your fucking mama’s sewing circle! This is the United States Marine Corps!” Barks the DI.

The squad bay erupts like a nest of stirred hornets. Cots groan. Flesh slaps tile. Your body moves before thought arrives—folding sheets, lacing boots, tucking your shirt. You did not speak. You did not look. You simply obey.

The floor stinks of mildew and old socks and the thousand-foot stink of boys not yet men. The ceiling fans turn above you like the rotors of ancient machines, carving time out of the dawnless dark. Outside the sun had not yet breached the wire, but sweat already silvers your brows like a baptism in a bloodless church of war.

You worry you won’t measure up. Not the worst in the platoon, but nowhere near the top. And you reckon you won’t rest easy till you are. You don’t know the others yet. There’s laughter, sure, but it’s the kind with teeth. The kind men use to test each other. All chest and shoulders and eyes that don’t blink. It wears on you.

Their language comes hard and constant. Profanity like breath. Like ritual. You’d heard cussing in high school, but not like this. Not like the flood of filth that fills the air here. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Faggot. Cruelty braided together in jest. Shirts are called blouses. Toilet paper’s shit paper. Words twisted. Made crude. Familiar things made strange.

You were raised Seventh-day Adventist. Raised to mind your tongue. In high school, they left you alone for it. Gave you space. Not here. Here it’s everywhere. And now you try your hand at it. Swearing. Just to belong. The words come out awkward. Clumsy The others laugh. Elbows in ribs. Grins like blades. No harm yet. But you feel the edge.

They see you pray. Morning and night. Quiet and steady. A cross beneath your shirt, warmed by your skin. Some of them pray too. But not like you. Not with fire. Not with fear.

They’ve given you names—Preacher, Padre, Choir Boy. Words meant to belittle, but not to wound. Not yet.

You miss home. Miss your mother. There are moments you regret coming here. Real fear, cold and deep. But your body changes. Hardens. The boy you were begins to vanish. And what’s left, you don’t recognize. Not yet. But it’s coming.

They tell you to embrace The Suck–the Marine Corps and its daily misery. So you embrace it.

Obstacle Course – 0900 Hours

The course cuts through the base like a scar. Ropes, walls, sandpits, barbed wire—challenges carved from pain and repetition.

You pull yourself up a cargo net, arms burning. Beside you, Whittaker grunts and swears and laughs like the whole thing’s a joke.

“I swear, Nick,” he says, “if I survive this I’m gonna marry the first woman who brings me fried chicken and don’t ask no goddamn questions.”

“You’ll marry the first girl that kisses you.” You say.

You and Whittaker reach the top. From the far side of the course, Silas Mercer clears an obstacle without breaking stride. Efficient. Joyless. His face unreadable beneath the dust and sun.

Kelso lags behind. Cuts corners. Breathes through clenched teeth.

You and Whittaker are cut from different cloth. He’s loud. Loose. Laughs like a man who’s never known the weight of silence. You keep to yourself. Tight as wire. More at home with a page than with a punchline. And yet, somehow, you’re becoming friends. It could be the bunk assignments. It could be just circumstance. You’re different enough that you don’t have to pretend. There’s peace in that.

You like his lightness. The way he floats above things. It’s foreign to you, but you admire it. It makes you feel, in some quiet way, proud. Like you’ve reached across some divide. You think he’s trying to break you open, loosen you up. And maybe he’s right to try.

Mercer is something else. You’ve only known him a short while, but he carries the air of a man who’s seen too much or not enough. At first, you think there’s kinship. Same background, maybe. But the longer you’re near him, the less certain you become.

There’s something wrong beneath his skin. He’s distant, yes, but more than that—superiority. Like he’s above it all. Above you. You don’t think he came here for duty. You think he came here to kill. And not for cause. But for pleasure.

The others may be crude, loud, simple—but you can feel their hearts beating in their chests. Their souls, scuffed but intact. With Mercer, there’s only silence. Something cold. Like a man-shaped absence. Like whatever was meant to be human in him has packed up and left. Or died in place.

Chow Hall – 1230 Hours

The food is grey and flavorless. Eggs that bounce. Coffee that tastes like burnt rubber and battery acid.

You eat in silence. Mercer sits alone, always. Kelso goes to sit next to him, and Mercer just looks up at him with hose dead eyes of his, as if daring Kelso to sit. Kelso shrugs his shoulder and walks over to your table and sits across form you.

“Mercer watches people sleep. Did you know that?” asks Kelso.

“Well, we all can’t sleep.” You say. “It’s probably nothing.”

“I don’t know. Man, the way he looks at us, it’s like a fucking spider looking at its prey.” Says Kelso.

“I had that same thought at one point.” You say. “He does have way of looking at you, like he’s planning something, like he wants to eat your face.”

Across the room, Mercer smiles. Just slightly. Like he heard every word.

Whittaker talks as he shovels food into his mouth. “I hear there’s a circus in town. Marle Brothers Big Top. I shoulda joined the circus instead of the Corp. Food’s probably better.”

Whittaker is the yin to your yang. In the mess hall he pushes at the edges. Just enough to make you smile. When the sergeant’s back is turned he shapes faces in his food. Sometimes worse. Mashed potatoes molded into mockery. Peas for eyes. A crude cock and balls drawn with gravy like ink on a page. It’s stupid. And it’s perfect. In a place meant to grind you down, it feels like defiance. You feel it too. Like sin without the stain.

He leans over while you eat. “You gonna eat that?”

You open your mouth to answer but he’s already helped himself. Fork scraping your tray. You don’t stop him. Don’t even flinch. You let him take it. Long as he doesn’t touch the meatloaf.

Rifle Qualification – Day 24

You lay prone. Breath held. Sight steady.

The rifle is a language now. You speak it fluently. Your grouping is tight. Your posture perfect. The instructor nods once.

Next lane over, Mercer doesn’t miss. Not once. His score is perfect, but he shoots like he’s removing something from the world. Not practicing. Purging.

After qualification, Mercer approaches you for the first time. “You shoot clean.”

“Oh, well, you know, I’m just getting the hang of it.”you tell him. “You’re not a bad shot yourself there, Mercer.”

He doesn’t acknowledge the compliment. “You need to shoot fast.” He says. “You’ll need both.”

He walks off, and for a second you watch his back and think: that’s not a man—they just gave something shaped like one a uniform.

A thought’s been creeping in lately, one you don’t want to name. But the way Mercer moves, the way he looks at people—it’s like something else is in him. Something old. Something wrong. You used to think all that talk about the devil was just metaphor, or maybe you believed it but never expected to see it. Now you’re not so sure. He feels possessed.

Barracks – Night

The squad bay is quiet. Except Mercer, laughing in his sleep. Soft, muffled. Like a child dreaming of pulling wings from flies.

Whittaker whispers from above. “That motherfucker’s gonna shoot somebody who ain’t wearin’ a uniform one day.”

Outside, the wind rattles the flagpole. You stare at the ceiling and do not sleep.

The Desert

Forward Observation Post, near Al Khafji, Northern Saudi Arabia. Three days before the ground assault begins. The air is still. The world waits to crack.

The desert in February is cold before dawn and hot by midday, and cruel no matter the hour. The sand stings the eyes and clogs the throat, whispering over the dunes like a voice without language. Everything is the color of bone. Dull. Scoured. Forgotten.

You lay flat in a shallow fighting hole cut into a ridge of shale and sand. Your rifle cradled to your chest like an infant. The lens of your scope fogs slightly with each breath. You adjust without thinking. Movements slow. Smooth. You’ve been in-country long enough now that your hands know what to do before you do.

Beside you, twenty feet away, Boyd Whitaker hunkers down behind a berm, chewing sunflower seeds and scanning the horizon through binoculars.

“Ain’t nothin’ out here but God and the people he forgot.” Says Whittaker.

“I don’t know if God forgets anyone,” you say, “but they sure have joined the ranks of the unguided, lost misfit souls.”

Whittaker grins. “That’d be us, huh?”

“We do what we can.” You say.

You both fall quiet again.

Behind you, far to the west, the artillery boys are drinking warm water and telling lies to stay warm. Up front, it’s just them. Silence, sand, and radio static. A horizon so flat it feels like the edge of the world.

In the Sandbox, they gave you a rifle and made you a sniper. Whitaker beside you as your spotter, laughing even when there was nothing to laugh about. Mercer had the same assignment, and Kelso his reluctant spotter.

As a boy you’d held rifles in your hands, your father beside you in the scrub fields behind the house. But they never sat right in your palms. Cold and alien.

The M40 is different. It speaks to you. There is a cleanness to it. A discipline. You strip it down, part by part, and learn its language. Steel and spring and breath. A thing that holds death like a secret and gives it shape.

When you shoot, you pray. Not loud. Not for show.

“Lord Jesus, God, bless this bullet.” You say.

Or, “Still my breath. Steady my hand. Let this be Your will.”

Each trigger squeeze a prayer. Each round a rosary bead. And in the scope, justice comes in small and distant shapes. And you are its vessel.

You carry your phrasebook like scripture, dog-eared and damp with sweat. As-salaamu alaikum. You say it under your breath, again and again. Peace be upon you. The words settle in your mouth like dry bread. You whisper them before you shoot. A prayer of precision. Peace by way of fire.

The Quran you keep hidden. An English translation tucked in the jacket of your Arabic manual. You study it in secret. You’re drawn to the washings, the prayers, the aching beauty of the mosques and the voices rising from minarets. There’s order in it. Cleanliness. Discipline. You admire it the way you might admire a distant star. Bright, unreachable.

But the words don’t speak to you. Not the way your own do. The text is dry. Hard. Full of rules. The tone cold. And yet the names of God comfort you. The reverence. You like how they speak the Prophet’s name with care. Peace be upon him. Always.

You haven’t bathed in a week. You drink water like a man dying but never feel clean. Your body is covered in dust and sweat and grease. The stink clings to you. You no longer notice it on yourself, only in the others. You watch the locals and envy their purity. Their white garments. Their rituals of water.

Your body has never been stronger. Thirty hours of training a week. Your muscles burn, your lungs bite, and you welcome it. The pain strips something from you. Ego. Doubt. You believe each blister, each ache, brings you closer to God’s work. To the man you’re meant to become.

In Okinawa, you studied what you could. Shinto. Zen. Watched monks in gardens of sand. They moved with silence and purpose. You tried to sit like them. Empty your mind. But prayer did not live there. No Christ. No cross. Just the breath and the void. It felt wrong. But still, you respected it.

The others went out at night. Whoring and laughing. Whittaker always asking if you’d come. Kelso too. You wanted to. Some part of you did. But you knew the shame would hollow you out. So you lied. Said there was a girl back home. There wasn’t. But your mother always said a white lie was better than a black sin.

They call you Altar Boy. Say it with a smile. Say it with a sneer. Doesn’t matter.

0830 Hours

Over comms, a soft click. Then the voice.

Mercer, over radio, says “Movement. Single truck. Road westbound. Two occupants.”

“Copy that.” You say.

Kelso mutters “Four-eighty meters. Civilian pattern. Possible scout vehicle.”

There’s a long pause. Then Mercer again, voice calm. “Want me to pop their teeth out or just erase the heads?”

Whittaker shoots you a look.

You mute your mic and mouth to Whittaker, “What the fuck?”

“Jesus, Silas…” says Kelso.

The Whittaker. “Rules of engagement. Confirm identification.”

Another pause. Then static.

“Roger that.” Says Mercer, like it’s nothing.

The truck disappears over a dune. Nothing happens. No shots. No confirmations. No reprimands.

You shift slightly. Your knees ache from lying still. Your right shoulder burns from holding the rifle steady for hours. Sweat cools against your lower back, then dries again. The flies come anyway. Always.

The other Marines grow restless in the lull. No shots fired. No blood drawn. They joke of blue balls and wasted rage, of needing to kill just to feel like men. But you are a sniper. And what you feel is not hunger. It is dread.

You follow orders. You understand the mission, at least in the way it’s been explained to you. The enemy is the enemy. That’s what you’re told. And most days you nod and swallow it. But some part of you holds back. You don’t see the threat with your own eyes. You are told who to hate, and you try. But there’s a stone in your gut that won’t move.

You fear the moment your finger tightens on the trigger. You fear the recoil of your soul. You fear falling apart. But more than that, you fear the absence of feeling. That you’ll kill and feel nothing. That something in you will die, quiet and final.

They say it’s a rite of passage. Mercer believes that. Believes in it like gospel. Maybe he’s right. You know you’re good with the rifle. Gifted. And a part of you—small and still—wants to know what that means. Wants to move from theory to act. Not for glory. Not for hate. Just to know.

But you want it to be clean. You want it to be holy. You want the shot to ring with purpose, like a bell in a quiet church. You want to feel God’s hand on your own. You want peace to bloom from the barrel.

The others don’t talk that way. For them it’s blood and duty and keeping the man next to you alive. Politics don’t matter. But for you they do. Or they did. You were told Saddam was a tyrant. That his people were godless or bowed to the wrong god. You believed that. Mostly.

But in the stillness, the questions come. Why would God scatter the faithful so wide? Why divide truth like that? Why make it so hard to know who’s right?

till, you press on. You cling to the thought that you serve something greater. That through the rifle and the oath, you bring order to a broken world. That the men above you—Bush, the brass, the banner—stand in the place of shepherds. That your aim is just. And that heaven watches.

100 Hours

You watch a lizard emerge from the sand. Stops. Stares. Runs back into its hole like it remembered something.

“Think we’ll be in Kuwait by March?” Asks Whittaker.

“March, maybe” you say. “I mean, we’re not moving that fast, but a lot can happen in a few weeks.”

As the words leave your mouth you hear and feel a low rumble to the south. Thunder, but not sky-born. The ground itself muttering. A column of tanks appears on the horizon, black silhouettes swimming in heat distortion.

“First wave?” Says Whittaker.

“Let’s just keep our eyes open,” you tell him.

You watch as M1 Abrams roll past like prehistoric beasts—dust trailing them in long braids. No one waves. No one smiles. The men inside are faceless behind glass and steel. You feel something sink inside you. The future rolling by, too heavy to stop.

Nightfall

The temperature plummets with the sun. Whittaker lights a cigarette. Passes the pack to you and you light your own. The glow paints your face in brief flickers, then fades. Beside Whittaker, Kelso digs into an MRE with mechanical effort. Chicken something.

“Quietly, Whittaker asks, “You’ve always been tightly wound. You always been this way?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m tightly wound.” You tell him.

Whittaker laughs, “Oh, you’re tightly wound, alright!”

“Well, nobody can be as as loose around the edges as you.”

“You got that fucking right!” He says.

“But I remember, when I was a boy, I used to joke around a lot more.”

“Oh,” he says, “what happened?”

“I don’t know. I think I just grew up, huh?”

“Well,” he says, “you sure as fuck ain’t like that boy, Mercer.”

“Well, that guy’s a psycho. I think we can all agree at this point.”

You settle in. You watch. You wait. Somewhere out there, Silas Mercer breathes like a man asleep in the middle of a fire. Somewhere else, death is on the move, quiet and barefoot.

You stare through your scope at the blank nothing of the night.

You never notice when the lizard comes back.

The Burning Towers

The edge of the Kuwaiti oil fields. February 1991. Days into the air campaign. Nightfall bleeding into dawn.

You march toward it like men drawn to a funeral pyre. The sky is dark as ink and thick with the breath of burning oil. It churns above you in thunderous silence, the color of old bruises, the wind carrying heat and grit and the smell of something dead and buried clawing its way back up.

You walk point. Rifle slung, boots sinking into ash-laced sand. Your flak jacket coated with soot. Your skin beneath your sleeves damp and blistered. Whitaker follows, silent now, eyes narrowed against the smoke.

The towers burn. Dozens of them. Oil derricks lit up like candles in a black cathedral. Great tongues of fire arced into the heavens and did not go out. The flames are alive. They roar without wind. They feed without mercy.

Whittaker says quietly, almost reverently “Looks like hell forgot to close the door.”

You watch one of the towers collapse in the distance, steel bones snapping under its own inferno. The earth trembles. The heat comes in pulses.

It begins to rain oil.

It feels like something hellborn is moving before your eyes, undoing the work of God in plain sight. Spoiling His creation. Tainting the grace and the bounty you were handed without asking. A ruin come to walk among the living.

You pull your goggles down to protect your eyes and take shelter behind a rusted-out personnel carrier, long since abandoned. The desert is littered with the bones of machines, some still smoldering, others twisted into sculptures of war. The bodies had mostly been cleared. Mostly.

This is more death than you’ve ever known. The ground littered with bodies. Twisted shapes in the dust. Enemy uniforms soaked dark. At first you’re gutted. Hollowed out. You start to question yourself. Your purpose. Your place in this.

But time wears things down. Even the sacred. You stop seeing faces. Stop seeing men. The dead become matter. Shapes. Chaff. Roadkill on the highway of war. You tell yourself it’s not cruelty. It’s survival. You’re not denying their humanity. You’re setting it aside. That’s the story you sell yourself, anyway.

Then there’s Mercer.

He moves among the corpses. Slow. Intent. And he begins to jab them with his bayonet. Not to check. Not from fear. Just to do it. Like he’s practicing. Like it means nothing.

Your gut turns. You’ve worked hard to find the line, to hold it steady. Mercer steps over it like it isn’t there. He treats the dead with scorn. With play.

You remember these were men. The enemy, sure. But still men. You wouldn’t want it done to Whittaker. Or to your own body. Or to your mother.

Kelso sees it. Has seen it before. Says nothing. Just looks away.

But Whitaker doesn’t.

He turns, voice sharp and loud. “Mercer, knock it the fuck off.”

You drink from your canteen. The water is hot. Tastes like metal.

And then you see it.

Movement, in the fire. Not the flicker of heatwaves or the slow roll of smoke, but a shape. Immense. Moving through the inferno as if born to it. No sound. No howl. Just the thunder of its footsteps somewhere beneath the world.

A silhouette. Towering. Vaguely human. Arms too long. Head too low. Like a man half-forgotten by the laws of nature. It walked between the flames like a dream stained in blood. It did not burn.

Whittaker smacks you on the back of your helmet and peers into the flames. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

“I thought, I thought I saw something.” You say.

You lift your goggles and rub your eyes. The shape was gone.

The derricks stand like black crucifixes in a wasteland of light and heat.

You move on. Silent. The stench follows them—crude oil and charred flesh and something else. Something older. The wind carries whispers you couldn’t place. Metal groaned like breath. Flames danced in patterns too precise to be random.

And far behind you, something walks.

You tell yourself it’s nothing. A trick of smoke. The mind reaching for shape where there is none. Like faces in the fire. That’s all. But this feels different. And it leaves a chill behind despite the heat.

You whisper a prayer. Not for courage. For mercy.

At the time you don’t name it trauma. Don’t think to. Just a vision. A sign. But later, maybe, you begin to wonder. If something in you cracked open. And if the thing that stepped through wasn’t just in the fire.

The Bunkers

Iraqi defensive line, southern border. February 1991. Day five after the ceasefire. An operation to secure and clear enemy positions. “Sanitation duty.”

They call them bunkers, but they weren’t built to protect men. They were graves waiting to be filled.

You step down into the earth, rifle low, breath held. The sun above has already burned the world to bleached ruin, but the air below was worse. Still. Stale. Thicker than oil, heavier than blood.

The flashlight on your vest cuts a pale ribbon through the dark. Cement walls slick with condensation. A map still tacked to the far wall, untouched by fire, curled at the corners like a dying leaf. Radios knocked from their cradles. Shell casings littering the floor.

And the bodies.

Six of them. Maybe more. Hard to count in the stink and the shadows. Twisted where they’d fallen. One slumped against a desk. Another face-down beside a machine gun that never fired. One sat upright, arms folded in his lap, like he was waiting for something that never came.

Their skin had turned the color of boiled leather. Eyes sunken. Lips split like old paper. And the flies—the flies never left. They moved like thoughts, crawling in and out of mouths and sockets, indifferent and eternal.

Whittaker gags behind you, retching into a sandbag.

“Ain’t natural.” He gasps. “They ain’t even been dead that long.”

Bunker clearing puts the fear of God in you. The thought of being inside one—waiting for the breach, for the fire, laying traps in the dark like some wounded animal—it chills you. And being the one sent in isn’t any better. The tunnels are tight. The air sour. Each corner feels like it could be the last. You move slow, heart thudding like a drum in a funeral march.

And yet you keep coming out. Alive. Each time the terror fades a little, worn down like old stone. You learn the rhythm of it. The terrible cadence of survival.

At the rigs it was different. The bodies there were distant. Easier to strip of meaning. To reduce to shape and mass. You learned to look without seeing. But the bunkers don’t allow that. The stink of rot is thick. Clings to your clothes. Gets in your teeth. There’s no wind down there. No smoke to blur the edges.

And these dead—they aren’t just the enemy. They’re the men you’ve been picturing for days. Studying their minds. Their habits. Their fears. When you find them broken in the dark, you can’t pretend they were never real.

You tell yourself to stay cold. To stay sharp. See them as remnants. As aftermath. But it doesn’t hold. Not for long. The weight piles up slow and quiet.

You start drinking more. Not to toast the living. But to calm the nerves. To steady the shaking hands. To drown out the dead, who wait for you in every shadow.

Against all order and code, Mercer draws a small camera from his kit. He leans into the dead man slumped at the table, throws up a peace sign like some grinning tourist, and snaps the photo. His smile is wide. Pleased. Kelso sees it and just shakes his head. No words.

But Whittaker speaks. “Mercer, what the fuck?”

He smacks the side of Mercer’s helmet. Not hard. Not soft either.

Mercer freezes. Turns slow. Cold as stone. He steps into Whittaker, chest to chest. No shouting. Just stillness. Tension like a wire drawn tight. One breath more and they’d be on each other. And you know in your gut that Mercer wouldn’t stop. Not till something broke or someone died.

That’s when it happens. Something breaks in you.

You move without thinking. Grab him by the front of his armor, fists already swinging. You aim for his face, for the soft skin behind the helmet’s edge. One blow lands. He absorbs it, shifts, returns it with force. A hard jab to your temple. You stagger. Regain. Swing again. He ducks. You hit his vest, shove him back.

Then his fist comes like a hammer. Connects clean.

And everything fades.

Dark.

You wake to Whitaker over you, slapping your face, voice sharp and distant. Kelso and a pair of grunts are holding Mercer back, his face a mask of cold judgment. No rage. Just a quiet certainty that you’ve become something beneath him. An offense. A mistake. A thing to be erased.

You lie on the bunker floor, the world ringing, your pulse pounding in your skull. Whitakker’s shouting something. You blink.

And in that moment—bleeding, broken—you see it. A small object. Black. Irregular. Obsidian, maybe. You snatch and almost swear that you felt it pulse in your glove.

Later, you burn the bunker. Didn’t say it was policy, but no one objected. Diesel pours in, lit with a match. The flames caught fast, greedy and bright. No ceremony. No prayers. Just a few seconds of silence while the wind shifted and ash rose like snow.

Whitaker sits on a ration crate, staring at nothing. Lights a cigarette and behind the smoke, he says “Don’t reckon I’ll ever forget that smell. You faced off against Mercer. I get it, but he’s gonna hold a grudge.”

“I don’t know what came over me. You say. “I lost myself there for a second. That was not like me. It’s these bunkers, just it gets to me.”

“Same.” He says. “Watch your six.”

Far behind you, the fire rages. Inside your pocket, the amulet sits like a wound that will never clot.

You don’t know why you took it. It was instinctual. The moment it touched your palm, it felt like it belonged there. Like it’d always been.

Midnight

Forward encampment. The war is over, but the fires still burn in the distance. The oil fields paint the sky in slow ruin. Most of the men sleep fitfully. Grayson does not sleep at all.

You sit alone by the burn barrel. The amulet weighs in your pocket. You haven’t taken it out since the bunker.

Footsteps crunch the gravel behind you—too slow to be an officer, too steady to be Whittaker.

He looks at you as if you are a frog splayed to a plinth.

“Don’t ever lay hands on me again, or I will kill you.”

He extends his hand and without thinking you reach for it. Muscle before mind. The old reflex. And the moment your skin meets his you’re filled with a sickness. Shame rising up like bile. The act small and simple and yet it brands you.

“You’ve been carrying it.” He says.

“Carrying what? What are you talking about?”

“I watch everything.” He says.

The wind sighs. Far off, a generator hums its broken song.

“I saw one like it. Not here. Valley in Afghanistan, before anyone said we were there. Same stone. Same shape.”

Mercer crouches by the barrel, his eyes reflecting the coals. Pale and twitchless.

“I dunno, man. Maybe it’s a key. Or a piece of something too big to carry whole. You ever feel like the sand’s whispering when no one’s around?”

You say nothing, hoping he’ll leave.

“I don’t think it talks. No. I’m saying it listens.” He says. “Men dig deep enough, they start finding things that were never buried. You brought that piece back from a place meant to be forgotten. You should bury it again. Or keep it. I don’t care. Just don’t ask it for answers.”

He walks off, boots crunching like bones in the dirt. The wind picks up again. You stay there, staring into the burn barrel as the embers pulse red and die.

You take out the amulet. Black as pitch and cut in angles that catch the firelight like blades. Obsidian maybe. Or something older. Hard to say in the glow of the dying barrel, where the coals pulse like heartbeats. The facets shift as you turn it. Or seem to. Could be a trick of the light. Could be the thing itself. Watching. Changing. Remembering its shape. You put the thing back in your pocket.

You don’t sleep that night. You don’t take the amulet out.

But you do dream.

You stand in the bunker again.

But the walls are made of meat. Pulsing. Veined. Breathing. The lights are gone, but everything glows with a dull, red rhythm like a heart too old to die. The floor sloughs underfoot. Wet. Soft. Screaming without sound.

You walk forward. Rifle in hand though you don’t remember picking it up. Ahead of you, the corpses sit upright now. Watching. Their mouths open, filled with flies. Their teeth black. The smell. That same smell.

Burned oil. Dead milk. Something older.

You try to turn but the room turns with you. The ceiling stretches into dark ribs, long and curving like a ship’s hull. Or a womb.

In the far corner, something moves.

It crawls out of the wall like it was born there. No face. No eyes. Just shape. Human in form, but wrong in proportion. Too long. Too slow. It does not walk. It arrives.

And then it speaks.

But not with sound.

The words unfurl inside his mind, syllables wet with rot:

“We. Remember. What You. Took.”

You stumble back. The amulet is in your hand now, though you never reached for it. It burns like dry ice. You open your mouth to scream.

No breath.

The shape reaches for you.

”We. Remember. The Burning.”

Suddenly, you’re outside. The oil fields again. But there are no stars. The towers are gone. Only the flames remain—suspended in the sky, unmoving. Like they’ve been nailed to the air.

And walking between them: that same silhouette. Towering. Human-but-not.

This time it turns to you.

This time you see its face.

It’s yours.

Or what you would become. Skin stretched too tight. Eyes like burnt holes in the world.

It smiles.

And you wake.

You bolt upright in your cot, soaked in sweat. The other Marines are still asleep. Whitaker turns slightly in his bunk above, mutters something about his mother, then stills.

You clutch the amulet in your fist. Blood on your palm from where it bit into him.

You look down.

The stone is warm.

Still pulsing.

You know in your gut the thing doesn’t belong to you. Never did. The amulet. Black and and wrong. You should not have taken it. You feel the pull to be rid of it like a fever rising. You think of burying it. Deep where no one will find it. Let the earth keep its secret.

But you don’t.

Something stays your hand. Not fear. Not quite. A thought like a splinter. Maybe there’s a purpose to it. Maybe someone knows what it is. What it means. Maybe it’s a key. And you need answers more than you need peace.

The dream still clings to you like wet ash. You’d call it stress, once. Chalk it up to the weight of war and the blood you carry. But Mercer’s words are still crawling through your mind, and that thing in your pocket burns like a coal.

You feel watched. Not by men. Not by God.

By something older.

You feel the edges of the world curling inward. Thin. Hellish. And you are not alone.

You wonder now if you carried something out with you.

Or if you woke it. And it followed.

The Envelope

Makeshift observation post, outskirts of Basra. Three days after the ceasefire. The wind has changed direction. Everything smells like the end of something.

You sit beneath a ripped canvas tarp stretched over steel poles driven into the sand. The wind tugs at it like fingers, but the knots hold. You stare at the horizon.

Nothing moves.

Not the tanks, not the trucks, not the birds. Not anymore.

He reach into your thigh pocket of your trousers and pull out the envelope.

It is heavy. Not thick, just… heavy. Cream-colored. Government stock. No seal but a faint watermark. Your name typed clean across the front.

Grayson, Nicholas – USMC, 1st MarDiv

You turn it over once. Then again. Then tear it open.

Inside: one sheet. Folded three times with bureaucratic precision.

UNITED STATES FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION LIAISON OFFICE – JOINT OPERATIONS GULF THEATER

To: Lance Corporal Nicholas Alexander Grayson

Your name has been forwarded for recommendation to the Bureau’s Special Activities Review Committee under direct advisement of General Matthias Virek, USMC Command.

Based on combat record, psychological evaluations, and command assessments, you are invited to submit yourself for screening related to field operations within the Federal Bureau.

If interested, report to provisional debrief center – U.S. Embassy, Kuwait City – no later than March 14, 0900 hours. Further instructions will follow upon interview.

This is not an offer. This is a window.

Special Agent Alton W. Rusk Bureau Liaison – CENTCOM Coordination Unit Semper Fidelis.

You read it twice. Then a third time.

Until now, your future felt unclear. You thought about another tour, maybe something else, but nothing took shape. It all felt murky. Then suddenly, it clicked into place—sharp, certain, like a lens snapping into focus. It felt obvious, inevitable, like a calling, a gift from God.

You’ve heard of General Virek but are too far down the chain to have met him. Still, somehow, he knows who you are. He recommended you for this new position.

It takes a moment to sink in.

The realization hits like you’ve been walking around naked without knowing it. Now you feel exposed. Watched. You start replaying your actions from the start of the war, wondering who’s been observing you, and what they’ve seen.

The wind tugs the paper slightly in your grip.

Behind you, Whitaker’s boots crunch in the dirt. He sits down beside you with a grunt and pulls off his helmet, setting it on his knee.

“That the one from Virek?” He asks.

“How’d you know?”

“Oh, there’s been some talk amongst the boys. I don’t rank, apparently, but the general sees something special in you. You gonna take it?”

“I can’t figure out what it is,” you say, “But yeah, I think I will take it.”

Whittaker shrugs. “Whatever they want, it’s probably the same thing we all want. Somebody who can see without blinkin’.”

Whittaker looks at you sideways. “You saw something out there, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You say. “I mean, we all see things out here, that’s part of the madness of this place.”

Whittaker shrugs, knows you’re holding something back.

Later that night, long after the sun buries itself behind the dunes and the fire barrels have gone cold, you fold the letter again. Put it back in the envelope. Then place the envelope beneath the amulet in your footlocker.

But you don’t lock it.

Because you know whatever came next wasn’t coming through the front door.

It was already inside.

Recruitment

U.S. Embassy, Kuwait City. March 14, 1991. Room B3 – sub-level security chamber. 0902 hours.

The room is small and ugly in the way all government rooms are. Pale green walls. Fluorescents overhead humming like insects. A metal desk bolted to the floor. No windows. One camera in the corner, blinking a red dot like it’s bored with its job.

You sits with your back straight, forearms resting on your knees. Not at ease. Not at attention. Somewhere in between.

You haven’t slept. You haven’t shaved. Your blouse still smells of sand and engine oil. You left the war six days ago and it hasn’t noticed that you’re gone.

Across from you sits Special Agent Alton W. Rusk. Civilian dress, dark blue suit, desert boots instead of Oxfords. He reads from a slim file. Turns a page. Breathes through his nose.

“You don’t talk much.” He says.

“Well, sir,” you tell him, “this Marine reserve his words for important moments and for when he has something to say.”

Rusk nods. “That’s fine. We’ve got too many talkers. Not enough listeners.”

He finally looks up.

“Lance Corporal Nicholas Alexander Grayson. Iowa. One sister. Mother, father living. High school diploma, no priors, no citations. Rifle expert, top three percent in your unit. Commendation for action during the Battle of Khafji. Citation for bravery in a chemical weapons facility near Basra, which, officially, does not exist.”

He tilts his head, studying you.

“There’s something unusual about you. You make decisions quickly. You don’t break under pressure. You take orders—but you also think two layers above what you’re told. That’s rare. What’s rarer is that you know how to bury what needs burying.”

“This interview is about options. You can go back to Iowa. Get yourself a dog. Learn to sleep again, maybe. Open a tire shop. Marry a woman who lies about how much she drinks. Or—”

He slides a manila folder across the desk. It’s heavier than it looks. Sealed. No markings.

“You open this, you’re agreeing to think differently. Act differently. Operate outside the lines you’ve been taught.”

“Sir,” you say, “you do paint an appealing alternative picture of this Marine’s future, but he is curious about what’s going on.

“Only one way to find out.” He says. “If you say no? Then you walk. We never had this meeting.”

“Do you think this Marine will regret opening this envelope? Sir?”

“If you say yes? Then the next war you fight won’t have a front line. It won’t have medals or funerals. And when you lose, you don’t die—you vanish. We don’t need heroes. We need ghosts. We need someone like you.”

Something in his voice hooks into you. Like he’s not just speaking but summoning. As if the world holds shadows deeper than men and you are meant to walk among them. To see what others can’t. To move where only ghosts go. You open the envelope.

The Dinner Table

The Grayson family kitchen. Supper just after sundown. Ceiling fan spins above them like a slow metronome.

The plates are chipped. The roast is dry. The potatoes are soft but lumpy. No one says anything about it. Your family just passes dishes, scoops servings, nods thanks without words.

The clink of silverware is the only sound for a long time. Through the open window, the cicadas buzz like static.

You sit at the head of the table, not because you asked to, but because your father wasn’t there and someone had to.

Marley sits to your right, arms tanned from the sun, her dark hair pulled back in a loose braid. She still wears the silver chain he gave her when she turned sixteen, before Kuwait, before Basra, before the bunkers.

Since you’ve been back you take to long drives. Daylight to dusk. Just to see the green again. Trees bending in the wind. The slow breath of fields alive and whole. The air smells of dirt and growth and old rain. It steadies you. You’ve no wish to see the old crowd. High school ghosts. You lift weights. You run. You stay sharp.

You buy a rifle. Practice in the back fields. Bottles and cans lined like sinners waiting judgment. Sometimes your sister comes along. You teach her to shoot. You talk less and less, but the silence between you feels full. You spend time with your mother. You all go to church.

You try speaking with the pastor. Your words falter. They live somewhere behind your teeth but won’t come forward. Still, sitting near him feels like placing your hand on a steady rock in a flood. You don’t speak your questions. Maybe because you don’t yet know them.

Most of the platoon drifts off. You don’t keep track. But Whittaker writes. Calls once in a while. Says he’s moved to Los Angeles. Says he’s joining the police force. Says he’s marrying his high school girl.

He sounds content. Whole.

You don’t know what to make of that. But it lingers. Like a note struck too low to hear but felt all the same.

Marley studies you in the soft light.

“Nick… what was it like? The war, I mean. What was it really like?”

Your mom doesn’t interrupt. Just pours herself a bit more tea, eyes lowered. The question had been coming for days. Someone had to ask it.

“What was it really like? Honestly, it just didn’t feel fair. Didn’t feel like a fair fight. Felt like a lot of decisions had been made, and we were just there to clean up a mess somebody else had made. I know it was the right thing to do, but it was messy. It was just messy. You don’t want to hear about that stuff anyway.”

Something strikes you. As a boy you’d asked your father about the war. He’d looked at you a long time and said a few words that meant nothing—answered without really answering.

Now you hear it in your own voice. The same dodge. But it also brings a flicker of understanding. For the first time, you feel a kind of kinship with him.

After dinner, you stand on the porch alone.

The stars are out, but they look wrong. Too clean. Too ordered.

Behind you, through the window, he see Marley washing dishes. See your mother drying them, back to him.

Inside was peace.

Out here—you pull the amulet from your pocket, feel the weight of it.

Out here, something is waiting.

Now

Enlisted young. The Corps. The desert. The badge. All of it drawn by some hand you’d never see till it was too late. And now. America laid open like a wound. Smoke and silence where the towers once stood. And you laid out on this cot in a safe house they said was clean. The girl you saved, on the other side of the blue tarp that separates the two of you, is still working on her laptop.

The stink hits you again. Meat long gone. Sour. Once it turned your gut. Now it’s just a part of the world. Like dust. Like rust. Like grief.

The dogs still barking. Something feral in it. But the screaming has gone out like a fire in wet wood. And from outside, Rocío’s voice: “What the fuck was that?”

You tell yourself: Get up, Marine. Check the wire.

You rise. Slow. The blanket clings and the skin pulls and your pants hang heavy and wet. You don’t look down. You know. You remember the dream. The corn. The thing that rose up from between the rows and kissed you with a mouth full of ruin. A tongue like a snake, slick and choking.

There something’s seriously wrong with me, you think. Something’s desperately wrong with my soul. I made a mistake. At some point I went wrong. I need to get right with God.

You steady yourself. The safe house is dark and humming with static. And there it is. A few feet off. Small. Still.

Takes you a moment to understand what you are seeing.

Then it doesn’t.

The body of an infant. Dead. Flesh rotting. Dissolving into the concrete floor like wax under fire. Skin bubbling. Eyes gone. No mouth to cry with.

And in your chest, something breaks. Quietly.

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes
• Chapter Five: Shadow Work
• Chapter Six: The Suck
• Chapter Seven: Crushed and Broken
• Chapter Eight: Project Delphi

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.

• Chapter One: Operation Watchtower
• Chapter Two: Tough Talk
• Chapter Three: Ground Zero
• Chapter Four: Dominoes
• Chapter Five: Shadow Work
• Chapter Six: The Suck
• Chapter Seven: Crushed and Broken
• Chapter Eight: Project Delphi