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

Cattle Waiting for the Sky to Fall

Senator Wexley. The phone rings. Whitman again.

“You’re on every goddamn screen in the country, Bryce! Standing in the ash like a statue. That’s what they needed. That’s what they missed. Now here’s what comes next. You get your hands dirty. Roll up those sleeves. You dig with the firemen; you pray with the chaplains, you bleed a little if you have to. And you don’t speak until someone asks. You show them what a man looks like.” Whitman is on a roll. “This is what it’s about, Bryce. We are out of step with this decaying world not because we’re lost—but because we belong to another age. An age of order. Of sacrifice. Of hierarchy. And now that age is clawing its way back through fire and steel, and you—you—are its herald. You’re not out of place, Senator. You’re right on time!”

“Yes,” you say. “The sniveling weaklings need a strong leader to show them the way.”

“Bryce, listen close.”Whitman says in a conspiratorial tone, “Our man was supposed to tie off the threads in San Diego. The Flower girl. She slipped. Asset failed. Sloppy work. Unacceptable. Now, don’t panic. I’ve already got a new team en route—Delta boys, off the books. And I’m not just sending them to mop up. I’m sending them to cleanse. Burn the rot. You understand me?”

“Oh yes,” you tell him. “I get your drift. Wipe them out completely, leave no sign they ever existed.”

“Exactly. This is the age of men who do what must be done, Bryce. The rest are just cattle waiting for the sky to fall. Images are the biggest con ever invented. They don’t represent reality—they replace it. A fake becomes the reference point. You lose the original. Go give them the image, Senator!”

“Will do.” you say, and the line goes dead.

You sit with your hand on the door latch. Beyond it the sky rains ash and cinders and the towers burn like funeral pyres. You brace yourself to step out when the phone rings. You glance down. Vince Caruso. Breaking his own protocol. Breaking the one rule he swore to keep: Never call the mobile.

You hold the phone a moment longer than you should. Then you answer.

“You been busy.” Caruso says. “When I saw you on Tough Talk this morning, you had the fire in your gut, Senator. But that ain’t what got me. What got me was two hours later—your face, your whole damn self. Standing in front of the wreckage, covered in ash, you looked real presidential out there.”

“Thank you, Vince. Good to hear from a loyal supporter such as yourself.”

There is a moment of silence. Then Caruso speaks again. “Tell me something. You got a twin brother I don’t know about?”

“No, I’m an only child.”

“Reason I ask, I gotta guy holed up who claims he’s you. Tommy says he looked like a drifter, but once he cleaned up, he looks like you. I mean—exactly like you. Same height. Same nose. Same eyes. Scared out of his mind, raving about being replaced. Claims you’re the fake. Says he’s Bryce Wexley. Says you walked out of Alpine and took his life.”

“What the hell, that’s some lunatic. There must be a coincidence that he looks like me.”

“I want to know what the hell I’m looking at.” Asks Caruso. “And more importantly—what do I do with him?”

“I don’t give a damn.” You say. “Throw him out on the street. I don’t know who the fuck he could be.”

Caruso sighs. “All right. But Senator—this shit’s above my pay grade.”

“Don’t bother me with nonsense like this again.” You tell him and end the call.

You check the mirror before you move. Tilt your chin. Square the line of your jaw. The handsome devil looks back at you. You signal the driver with a flick of your fingers, and he steps out into the smoke to open your door.

The air hits you like a wall. Foul and wet and heavy. Your throat starts to close against it.

You crouch by the curb. Dip your fingers into the grey runoff pooling there. Then into a clump of ash. You smear it across your brow just above the right eye. Just so. A mark. A small touch of ruin.

You stand. Shoulders back. Eyes sharp. Scanning the broken street for cameras. For reporters. For witnesses.

You are ready now.

Ready to play the part.

The skyline burns. Smoke rises in spires of ash and ruin, the color of bruised ochre and old bone. The sun hangs behind it like a tarnished coin. Ash sifts from the heavens like slow snow. The wind bears the stink of jet fuel and blood and the black iron tang of burnt wire.

The sirens wail. From near and far. The sky stitched with the roar of rotors. A bell clangs. The radios whisper code, sorrow, and static. Somewhere in the bones of the ruin a girder gives way with a groan like a beast dying slow.

You stand there. Sleeves rolled. Tie gone to soot. Your hands blistered and blackened. Your nails cracked and rimmed with the dry red of other people’s blood. You hold one end of a rebar rod, the firefighter the other, and you pull like men at the plow. No speech between you. Just breathe and sweat and labor beneath the pall of a broken sun.

You shove at a slab of wreckage, heaving it up with both hands as if you expect to find something living underneath. There is nothing—only dust and ruin.

You look to the photographer standing hollow-eyed nearby. “Hurry up and get this shot!” you say. “I’m hungry.”

The woman lifts her camera without a word. The click of the shutter is sharp as a whipcrack in the smoking silence. She does not understand, or she understands your callousness too well. Either way, she obeys.

A body bag passes. Zipper closed. You stop. Close your eyes. The stench rises like incense. Meat and plastic. Circuitry charred to bone. You breathe it deep.

You are near the end of your patience with crawling in the dirt among these worms. You reckon you’ve earned a drink and a wash besides. The filth clings like a second skin, and the temper in you stirs mean and restless.

By the triage line, a girl coughs dark into a rag, spotted already with her life. You kneel. Lay your palm on her back. “The ones who did this will pay. We will hurt them. We will hurt them badly.” You tell her.

Nearby, a priest prays. Garbed in black. Words low, soft as dust. You bow your head. You mumble, make some vague gestures, and turn to the cameras and say, “The righteous wrath of the Lord is with us. We will make these heathens suffer for challenging the country blessed by God.”

You hear the voice of the world as it unravels. Radios. Weeping. The wind.

You join the line. Hands on buckets. Hands on bricks. Hands on memory. A ring in a palmful of dust. Gold catching sunlight in the ruin. You look at it and think it an ugly thing. Low karat gold, dull and false beside the ring you wear on your own hand. You look and did not take. Turn and keep digging.

A man retches in the gutter. Another falls like timber. You do not turn. Your eyes raw. Your teeth clench against some deeper tremor.

A woman comes with a mic in hand.

“I’m only here to lend a hand, my dear, standing with the weary and the wounded in their hour of need.” You say, feigning anguish. “But soon I must depart to join the finest minds our nation can summon, so that together we may see justice done and hold accountable those who brought this abomination upon us.”

She covers the mic with one hand and leans in “Senator, if you run for president, you’ve got my vote.”

You place a hand on her shoulder, look into her eyes, “Thank you. Every vote counts.”

A bottle comes. You open it. Do not drink. Pour it down your scalp. Steam rises. The sweat and the ash sluicing down the ridges of your cheek. You breathe. Straighten. Say nothing.

In the distance, the wreckage smolders like the altars of a fallen faith. The flag stands among it, limp and then lifting—red, white, and blue beneath a sky that had forgotten such colors.

You stand beside it. Silent. Your shadow stretches long across the dead. The dust rises round your shoes. And you breathe the breath of the old world gone. And the new one not yet born.

You steady yourself, a smile flickering beneath your practiced solemnity. You think of the great responsibility soon to be placed in your hands—of the trust, the authority, the mandate born from fear. And you welcome it. All of it. For their sake, of course.

The Veil Shall Thin

Bryce Wexley. The light through the blinds cuts the room in slats, and you sit still in the chair they’d found for you. Tommy had rigged a dropcloth from a plastic sheet he took out of the limousine. The girl—you still don’t know her name—smokes long brown cigarettes by the kitchen window, her gaze wanders.

Then comes the knock. Three soft taps. Tommy answers, low words exchanged, and the stylist enters.

Young man. Slender. Hair in a bun. A satchel of tools that jingle. You tell him to cut it high and tight. To make you look like a man built for war. He nods once at you and sets to work.

No words for a long while. Only the sound of the scissors, the faint hush of hair falling to tile. You watch the strands drift down, brown and silvered and coarse with age.

You ride high still. You have turned the tables on your enemies. You will take back what was stolen. You will stand safe behind your hired men and bring the false Bryce to ruin. Make him kneel in the dust and kiss your boots for the sin of wearing your face.

The stylist trims along the jawline, the nape. He moves with care, his fingers sure. Then pauses. His reflection in the mirror catches your eye.

“Do you want to keep the beard?” He asks. “It looks good on you. Regal.

“Regal, you say? Like a king? Well, I suppose so.”

He works the shears with the slow patience of a man working on something delicate. Fifteen minutes of snip and silence. When he steps back, you lift your eyes. The man in the mirror is clean now. Clean. Well-groomed. Your dyed hair gone, leaving only the grey. A trimmed beard, pointy at the chin. The best you’ve looked in weeks. But not the same. The bones show sharper beneath the skin. The eyes hold something hollow. The face has been carved by fear, worn thin by hunger and long hours in the dark. Not a man reborn. A man returned. From somewhere worse.

“You like?” He asks, holding a mirror so you can see your reflection of your back.

At first you don’t like what you see. Shrunken. Worn down. You tell yourself it is the look of a soldier. A man ready for war. Fighting fit and hard as coffin nails.

The stylist sweeps up, gathers the tools of his trade, and leaves.

An hour later, the tailor arrives. Drives up in a dented Lexus with dealer plates, carrying two garment bags and a case the color of gunmetal. Tommy opens the door and lets him in without a word.

The tailor is small, dark-skinned, late fifties maybe. Wire-rimmed glasses. Calloused hands. He looks you over like you are a problem that could be solved with the right math.

You stand in the center of the room stripped down to undershirt and boxer briefs, the girl gone somewhere deeper in the house. Tommy sits on the arm of the couch, scrolling through his phone like none of it concerns him.

“Shirt first,” the tailor says. You slip into it. White. Crisp. The fabric whispering as you pull it down over your shoulders.

“Pants.” The tailor hands them over. Wool. Expensive. You button them slow, felt the weight settle across his hips.

“Jacket now.”

You slide your arms in. The tailor steps behind you, pulls at the shoulders, tugs the hem. Then come the pins. Fast, efficient. Cuffs. Lapels. Waist.

The man circles you like a sculptor sizing up the stone. Adjusts his tape. Measures you again.

Then he crouches, one knee to the floor. Looks up at you. Clears his throat.

“Do you hang to the left or the right, sir?”

“Left.” You tell him.

The tailor nods. “Very good.” Then he marks the adjustment, not even blinking.

“Very good. Take them off, please. I’ll have them ready for you within the hour.”

“Hey, Tommy,” you ask. “how many, how many boys you got ready to ride with me?”

“Hey, look, that ain’t my call, alright? That’s Mr. Caruso’s business. He’s on his way right now, you can take it up with him. Anything else I can do for you, Senator?”

“You got those, those guns, and the bulletproof vest I asked for?”

“Nah, I don’t. Far as I know, Mr. Caruso’s got that handled. You want a drink? A smoke? You want the girl too? Don’t get shy on me now. Just say the word, Senator. I’ll make it happen.”

“Any cigars?” You ask.

“I do indeed.” He takes one from the humidor, trims it, and lights it for you as you puff away as you think about your impending victory.

You smoke the cigar slow and easy while the tailor works his trade and leaves. The suit fits like a second skin. You marvel at how the flesh has fallen from your bones. You have not worn a frame so lean since the days when you still believed in such things as future and fortune. You look damn near magnificent.

There comes a knock at the door. Three times. A pause. Two more. Another pause. Then four raps sharp as bones on wood.

Tommy goes to answer it and when the door swings wide a man fills the frame. Broad as a barn beam and dressed in a suit that strains at the seams. The bulge beneath his coat plain enough to know without seeing. A gun.

Behind him comes Vince, smiling with all the warmth of a winter sun. And behind Vince another man larger still, big as a linebacker, carrying a duffel bag slung over one shoulder like a sack of feed.

Vince Caruso stands with the bulk of a man gone soft with comfort but not yet fallen to ruin. His hair slicked back, black and gleaming like tar in the sun. His suit loud in cut and color, more flash than form. He carries the air of a California businessman who remembers violence but speaks now with the easy grace of money. Late forties. A fighter gone to seed but still dangerous in his way.

Vince spread his hands wide like a man offering benediction.

“We need to have a conversation. Not here. Guest house out back’ll do. Tommy, you come too.”

The big man steps through first and opens the door to the backyard, motioning for you to follow. Vince and the giant in his wake. Tommy hesitates, then trailing behind like a condemned man.

The guest house is nice enough, although the air stale. Vince takes a seat in a chair by the window, crosses his legs easy.

“I’ll never forget this day, Senator. World Trade Center. Pentagon. Lord knows where that last bird was bound. White House? Capitol? The world ain’t ever going back to what it was.”

As Vince talks, Tommy busies himself at the kitchenette, grinding beans, rattling cups. The two suited men go to work in the living room, pushing the furniture against the walls without a word. From the duffel, the giant pulls a sheet of clear plastic like the kind painters use. They unfold it, heavy and slow, and tape it down to the floor.

“Yeah, the planes, it’s crazy.” You say. “I think the imposter must be behind it. It’s all connected. We’re going, we’re going to connect the dots. It’s all, it’s all ties together. I know it.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that.”

Your gut curdles.

“I don’t know what you’re doing with this plastic. Hey, I already got my hair cut. We don’t, we don’t need the plastic.”

“Oh, no, Senator, this isn’t a haircut.”

From the bag came sealed packets. They tear them open and shake out white hazmat suits. Don them like men dressing for war. Tape their boots, their wrists, their throats.

The giant sets a single chair in the center of the room and covers it with another sheet of plastic.

Vince nodded toward it. “Have a seat, Senator.”

You break into a sweat. You do as he says. You walk to the chair, slow and reluctant, like a man stepping into his own grave. You keep your gaze locked on Vince’s eye.

“What’s this all about? Vince, you trying to double-cross me? Are you in league with the imposter?”

Vince steeples his fingers and speaks low.

“Don’t know who you are, the man said. But you ain’t Senator Wexley. Know how I know? Cause I just spoke to him myself. And you know what he told me?”

He leans in close, his voice calm as prayer.

“He told me to get rid of you, but first, we’re gonna have a conversation.”

“You believe him? Ask me anything! I know everything about you! We go way back, Vince!”

“Oh, I’m gonna ask you lots of things.” Vince growls.

“Vince! You remember the first time we crossed paths? Wasn’t on a golf course. Wasn’t at a fundraiser. It was in that little bar down in City Heights, smelled like piss and bleach. You were still running numbers for the old man. You remember? I was nobody back then. Fresh off my first election win. City Council. Eighteenth District. Nobody paid me any mind… except you. You slid that manila envelope across the table. You didn’t say a word. Didn’t have to. Five grand in untraceables. No letterhead. No promises. Just a note: Remember your friends. And I did, Vince. I did! When the rezoning deal went through? You got first crack at those lots. When the city contracts came up for grabs? Your cousins got the bids. When the neighborhood association needed a new board? You picked the chairman. I never forgot who carried me when the big boys wouldn’t.”

As you speak a red light blooms from Vince’s belly like a wound torn in the fabric of the world. It pulses slow and terrible. No man turns to see it. Only you. As if it were meant for your eyes alone.

“I never forgot how you vouched for me when nobody else would touch a clean-skin kid with a trust fund and a crooked smile. You remember that thing down by the docks? The warehouse? The one we don’t talk about? I remember it too, Vince. Every second of it. Every shovel full of dirt we packed over that mistake. You and me. So don’t you sit there looking at me like I’m some stranger. I know you! And you know me! Question is, who do you want standing with you? The Senator with the cameras and the lapel pin? Or the man who never forgot who gave him his first goddamn shovel? Vince. We’ve been through so much. How could you, how could you doubt me? I’m right here in front of you!”

The more you talk the more light spills from Vince’s belly getting brighter and brighter.

He steeples his fingers and he says, “I don’t know who you are, but you know an awful lot about me, and we’re gonna get to the bottom of this. Now, the Senator, he told me to get rid of you, didn’t exactly say how, but we’re gonna find out a little bit more about you.”

“Wait, Vince, wait! How do you know the Senator is real? I’m telling you, he’s an imposter! He doesn’t have this information I just gave you”

“I’ll give you this. You do look like the Senator, but you’re thinner than the Senator. And I just saw my TV, not once, but twice. Saw him Tough Talk, and I saw him at ground zero. Whoever you are, we’re gonna find out. And Bue here,” Vince nods to the giant, “he’ll make sure you don’t clever with the details.”

The big man, Bue, goes to the duffel bag. Sets out the tools deliberately. A hammer. A set of pliers. A propane torch still scuffed from old work. Lays them in a row like relics before an altar.

He looks up. Smiles without mirth.

The quarterback pins you to the chair with strips of duct tape, binding your wrists and ankles.

Bue hefts the pliers, turns them once in his hand like a man testing the heft of a blade. Then he crouches. Takes your hand in his. Chooses a finger. Sets the teeth of the pliers against the nail, ruining your recent manicure from earlier.

“Who are you?” Asks Vince.

“Did the aliens get to you? Did they get to you? Vince, are you in league with the Greys?”

Vince frowns. “Wrong answer.”

Bue jerks his arm back in a short, brutal snap, and pain floods you so fierce it blots the world to a single white star.

The studio lights are searing. You sit across from Phil Doherty beneath the glow of national attention. You are dressed in a midnight blue suit. Power tie, discreet flag pin. The perfect American.

Doherty leans in. His voice is smooth, practiced. “Senator Wexley, your new reality show premieres this Friday. Cameras follow you into the halls of power—and maybe behind the curtain too?”

“What? What? Who, who? What do you mean?” You say.

You hear applause. Canned and clean.

Camera two zooms in.

The red light blinks. But it’s not a camera light anymore. Not entirely. It’s the red emergency beacon above the blast doors in Alpine, blinking as the first scream cuts through the feed room.

A technician mutters something in Russian. You sign off on the stack of files beside you. You don’t ask what the names mean. They’re already in the system.

“Some say the Senator is a man with vision. Others say you’re chasing ghosts. What do you say to the critics?” Asks Doherty.

“The ghosts are real! They’re aliens! They’re out there!”

The applause fades. It becomes the hum of fluorescent lights. Flickering. Failing.

The klieg lights that shine on you during your crucifixion. Blood in the grout. 3,333 human subjects arranged in rows of cots. Some drugged. Some still whispering prayers. All gone before the door was sealed.

You remember their names. You remember nothing.

A figure approaches. He is pale. Clad in surgical white. No eyes—just skin pulled taut across sockets. He hands you the last form. “The final seal must be affixed by one who has been seen.”

“I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” You scream.

Something brushes against your mind. A fouling. A trespass. It is like two pounds of sand poured into a one-pound sack. You feel it spill into you. Heavy and wrong. You are full to bursting. You cannot hold it, and yet you do.

Phil Doherty is saying something about leadership. About unity. But you can’t hear him. You are watching the monitor behind him. It’s playing footage from Alpine. The screen is not supposed to be playing that. But there it is. Out in the fields stand strange shapes. Sculptures that cast no shadow and lean against the sky. The earth is scoured clean in great rings. The bodies lie there too. Flayed and splayed. Pinned like insects by some hand unseen.

The chanting gathers in intensity.

A wide shot of you standing between two glass pods. Each holds a version of you. One gestating. One fully formed.

You flinch. The camera holds.

“Everything okay, Senator?”

You scream.

The pods hiss. One opens.

The version of you that remains inside is not awake. He is dreaming. That dream pours into you like cold black water. The pod opens and you fall to the floor, a thing discarded. A thing aborted.

The other pod cracks open. The doppelgänger steps out. Perfect hair. Perfect skin. Smile unbroken. He does not look at you. He does not need to. He has already replaced you.

“You are the door,” say the twins in unison. Their mouths do not move. Their voices come from within your skull.

You lunge at the doppelgänger, hands groping for his throat, wild to close on it, to crush the life from him.

Phil Doherty leans forward. “Senator?”

Your scream goes on without end as you clutch at the throat of your own likeness, bent on throttling the life from it.

“And what does the future hold, Senator Wexley?”

You turn to the camera.

The feed distorts. The audience screams. You are no longer in the studio.

You are beneath it, in a room that does not exist, a dark space humming with ritual geometry, with blood in the seams of the tile. The applause echoes like ritual chanting. You look down. Your hands are red. Not metaphor. Not symbol. Just blood. Still warm.

From the edge of the dark, your better self steps forward, suit immaculate, hair perfect.

He speaks in your voice, but the words are not yours.

“Thank you for joining us. Now the veil shall thin.”

Phil smiles at you, grinning ear to ear and then some. “We’ll be back after you return from the Alpine.”

He smiles. The lights go out.

The Bue and the other man lay curled on the floor like something folded in on themselves. Their breaths shallow. Their gaze fixed not on any thing in this world. Catatonia. Or else some deeper fugue. A silence without end.

Caruso kneels in the wreck of himself. The front of his slacks dark with urine. His face lifted as if in prayer, though there was no god to meet it. He sobs without shame.

Tommy slides down the wall. The stink of voided bowels is sharp in the air. He shakes like a struck animal, eyes wide, lips working. “No. No. No. No. Too much. Too much. Don’t. Want. It. In. My. Head.”

He draws the pistol from his holster with the slow resolve of the condemned. Sets the barrel in his mouth. Pulls the trigger.

The blast cracks the room like thunder made flesh. A bloom of blood and bone cast like seed against the drywall. You feel the spray of it on your face and newly coiffed hair. Warm.

Caruso blinks. Looks at the body, then at you, then at the sleeves of his coat, slick with what remains of Tommy’s brain.

He bares his teeth.

“What the fuck was that? What just happened?”

You try to lunge at him but are still bound to the chair.

Caruso stands in the blood-warm hush of the room, taking in what he’s seen. His face turns slack, his jaw goes heavy. Behind his eyes, the slow grind of thought like stones moving beneath old earth.

He looks at you then. Looks through you. The kind of gaze a man gives the moment the veil lifts and the truth of things comes screaming in.

“Bryce, I didn’t believe you. Can you blame me? It sounded like lunacy. But after what I just saw… Fuck. It’s true. Every goddamn word you said.”

His voice breaks. Then something else passes across his face. A flicker. A spark behind the eyes. Realization.

“Bryce. Oh God. Bryce.”

He steps back from you as if the air around you had turned to flame.

“I told the other one. The Senator. I told him about you. He knows you’re here. In San Diego. We gotta move. We gotta get you out of here. Right now!”

Cyberphr33kz

Belle Flower. Your mother leads you into a mirrored tent where every reflection is wrong. Not backwards—wrong. The glass shows versions of you spliced with beasts: a second head curled like a fetal twin; feathers sprouting from your scalp; your torso shaped like a spider’s abdomen; goat hooves stitched where your hands should be; he body of a horse grafted to your spine; a toucan’s beak nailed over your nose and mouth. The seams are rough and weep blood and pus in slow and endless measure. Each reflection speaks in your mother’s voice.

“You were born opened,” they say.

“The mother of monsters takes her own.”

This has to be a dream—a nightmare. You have not seen your mother in so long, and yet here she stands. You don’t know how you came to be with her, and you don’t know why. You thought you had escaped, thought you were free. But you are back—back in this place—and you cannot say how.

In one of the mirrors, you see the words stitched in silk, the letters running backwards: La Belle et la Bête. Your mother towers over you, her hand heavy on your shoulder, whispering things you cannot bear to hear. “Perfection is a curse. We’re saving you from it.”

She nods to your reflections in the mirror.

You want none of it.

You feel yourself cleaved from your own being, slipping away, and you would give anything to be made whole again.

Your mother tuts and turns you this way and that before the glass. In the mirrored depths, you see yourself adorned with new monstrosities: a rhinoceros horn fastened to your brow, the hide of a zebra sewn raw along your back.

“These are your inheritance. The Mother doesn’t want pretty things. She wants truth.”

You turn to run, but the mirrors fold in, closing like a flower. You see your father, kneeling, weeping, clutching something in a cloth. You lift the edge.

It’s your own face, calm, doll-like, stitched at the lips, eyes wide open.

Your body begins to unravel. Scars split open, revealing not organs but symbols carved into bone—sigils you doesn’t recognize but feel burning in your skull like migraine. You collapse into the dirt, and the bones of your spine stretch up like a serpent, rising from your back.

Even in the dream, you try to scream, but your mouth is sewn shut with silver thread.

You wake with tears running down your face. Maybe you whimper. Your throat is raw, and every muscle in your body screams. You are cold to the bone.

As the world steadies, you feel the bandages wrapped around your elbows and skull. Your right wrist swollen and dark with bruising.

You are in a car. The sky is bright and blue, and the trees slip past in a blur. A highway sign swings into view: Chula Vista. Five miles.

The man driving wears a shirt loud with flowers and a bucket hat. He leans to the dash, and the fog on the glass clears. And that is when you see it. On the back window, a shape reveals itself in the glass: a spiral. You didn’t draw it. But it’s there. A perfect coil.

You feign sleep. Breathing slow. Eyes half-lidded. Biding your time.

The car slows. Gravel cracks under the wheels. Above you, a sun-faded sign leans against the wind: Rico’s Autos.

The man nudges your shoulder. “Hey, you awake? How you doing? You up yet? Hey, hey kid.”

You stir like something half-dead, come back from the dark.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

He looks at you, and there is something like sympathy in it, though not quite.

“You’ve been through a lot. I’m Detective Grayson, FBI. I was investigating you—routine background—planned to meet, ask a few questions about matters you’re already familiar with. But things escalated. You were attacked. No question, the man intended to kill you. We stopped him. He’s in custody. Right now, we’re at a secure safe house. Intelligence suggests you’re being followed by individuals with hostile intent. Our priority is your safety. That said—you are in legal trouble, young lady. We’ll address that when the immediate threat is neutralized. For now, you’re secure. I intend to keep it that way. Are you hungry? Need anything?”

“I think I know what you mean,” you say. “But I don’t think I’m who you think I am. I’ve been trying to get back to my apartment. That’s what matters. There’s someone I was supposed to meet. I need to go.”

“All right,” Grayson says. “Some of your belongings were taken by whoever this guy was working for. The rest are in the custody of the San Diego Police Department, pending evidence processing. We’ll do what we can to recover them, but right now it’s tied up in red tape. Is there anything you need urgently—medications, anything critical?”

“If I could get my cell phone?”

“Is there anyone you need to contact right now?” Grayson asks.

“Yeah. There’s someone I need to talk to.”

Grayson studies you.

“I want you to understand the situation.” He says. “We’re aware of your involvement with certain online message boards, and we believe you had prior knowledge of the events that unfolded today on the East Coast. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“No, and I don’t have my phone or laptop or anything to prove anything or, you know, have any evidence. Do you have a warrant? Or, like, are you detaining me?”

You’ve spent your life evading eyes like his. Hackers don’t talk to agents. That’s the rule. But you’ve seen things. You know that much. You just don’t know what it all means.

Grayson exhales.

“All right, listen,” He says. “I don’t have a warrant. And I know your type—suspicious of law enforcement. Frankly, we could have a long, philosophical debate about whether that suspicion’s justified. But right now, here’s the truth: you shouldn’t trust me. Look at me. I’m not even dressed properly. It’s ridiculous. All of it was to keep you alive. A little gratitude would go a long way toward making this process easier—for both of us. But I understand where you’re coming from. You don’t have to say a word right now. All I need you to do is step out of the car. We’re at an FBI-sanctioned safe house. We’ll take this one step at a time."

“How do I know you won’t just tie me up?”

“You don’t know that for sure.” He says. “Your options are simple: you can stay in the car while I figure this out—I’m not going to drag you out—or you can get up and come with me. I don’t advise running. It’ll only make things worse. I’m going to look you straight in the eye and say this: You’re safe. And you can trust me—at least as far as knowing I am who I say I am.”

You study his face—the small flickers of truth behind it.

“What happened to my friend in the trailer?”

“He took a round to the stomach. He was in bad shape, but he was still alive when the paramedics took him. We can call the hospital and check on his status if you want. You’re welcome to use my phone if you need to call someone. Do you know the number by heart? Because you’re not getting your own phone back anytime soon.”

“There’s someone I do need to call. Someone I’m supposed to meet.” You tell him.

“I’m advising you to be careful. You’re not in deep shit—not yet—but you are a person of interest. If you’re thinking about calling a drug dealer or anyone like that, I strongly suggest you don’t. Now, who exactly were you supposed to be meeting?"

“Buck Flanagan. He’s family, in a way. I haven’t seen him in a long time, and we were supposed to see each other.”

“Would you like to make that call here, or would you like to make that call inside?” He asks.

“I’ll take the call outside.”

You step out into the light.

The garage squats in the dust like some gutted thing. A pale blue ruin under the morning sun.

Chain-link fence rattling in the wind. Beyond it, the sound of traffic, dogs, a siren. Two rust-bitten cars out front, still as corpses, their windshields cataracted with grime. The windows boarded or blacked out. A patch of wild grass clawing through the cracked asphalt, obscene in its greenness. Oil-stained concrete and cigarette butts. No name on the door. No mailbox. Only the faint scent of rust and rot.

Grayson hands you his Blackberry. You fumble with the keypad, pretending to recall Buck’s number. But you’re digging.

Grayson’s recent calls:

A number from San Diego.

A Boyd Whittaker in Los Angeles.

Marley Ginger.

Dolores, last name a heart emoji. Cute.

Calls to a General Virek.

Multiple to Langley, Virginia.

Text from Alicia Hightower: I’m here to talk if you need me.

Grayson’s reply: Thanks.

You dial Buck.

His voice jumps through static. “Belle, are you okay?”

In the background you hear: elephants trumpet and heavy machinery beeping.

“Yeah, I’m, I’m okay." You tell him. “I don’t know how I will be able to meet you. Some guy, some Fed, picked me up. The guy who was been following me, that guy I told you about earlier, he found me again when I was at Red’s house in the trailer park. He tried to get in, and he shot at me, and I’m okay. Just grazed my temple. I got knocked out. Right now, I’m in Chula Vista, but I’m gonna be able to meet up with you. Where are you?”

“I’m still in Arizona. I got about an hour to go, and I’m gonna head out of here. I’ll get you the phone and clothes you asked for. I can’t believe what’s happened to you! I’m glad you’re okay. Red hasn’t a picked up his phone, though.”

“I think he’s in the hospital.” You say. “There’s more, but I can’t talk about it now. I’m on someone else’s phone. But I need a way to reach you.”

“I’ll call this number when I’m an hour out. Tonight.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

You hand the phone back to Grayson.

The wind moves around you.

Grayson opens the trunk of the car. Inside lay a flak vest, a pump shotgun with the stock taped up crude, and a med kit with dried blood rusted at the latch.

And your laptop.

Compaq Armada. Old but built like a tank. Loved by hackers for being cheap and stubborn and born for Linux. Security men and pentesters prized them, too. The black plastic casing plastered with stickers. One, the sad ghost face of an old Macintosh screen. Another of some local band: Drive Like Jehu. Your hard drives velcroed to the sides like cargo meant for rough roads.

And there, too, was your phone.

“Look,” Grayson says, voice steady. “I’m going to need some assurances from you—that you’ll cooperate. If I hand this over, you’re free to make your own decisions. But I’m coming clean with you. I want to work with you as an informant on an issue of national—and international—security. There’s more I can tell you, but right now I need a commitment. I’m just asking you: don’t run. Cooperate with me a little while longer.”

You look at him. “I have no choice,” you say. “I have nowhere else to go. I’ll stay. I’ll cooperate. But I need to know more before I give you anything. You owe me that.”

He doesn’t answer because the door groans open behind him, a Winston smoldering at the edge of his mouth. His hair buzzed tight, gray at the temples. His eyes lock on you, then your shirt. “I’m a Steve Earle man myself.” He says. Then to Grayson. “Afternoon, Agent. What division you say you’re from?”

“It’s Lookout division, but you wouldn’t have heard of it.” Grayson shows the man his badge.

His jaw works behind the smoke. “We just moved our C.I. on your say-so. You know how hard it is to move someone when they’re halfway through an investigation? Come on in. I’m Leland Carrick. Everyone calls me ‘Lee.’”

You step through the door, and a fly drifts in before Grayson. Its green thorax catches what little light there is. It moves without urgency, as if summoned, as if it belongs.

Inside, the air smells of rust and ghosted gasoline. A ceiling fan spins slow overhead, creaking in protest. Pigeons rustle in the roof beams. Lanterns threw long shadows against hanging tarps that formed makeshift walls inside the converted garage bay.

A work lamp buzzes, its filament pulsing like the heartbeat of something dying.

Wires snake along the walls, half-hidden behind torn insulation and peeling paint.

In the garage bay, the roll-up doors braced shut with welded iron bars.

A foldout table held a scatter of maps, a pair of radios, a pistol laid out on a towel like an offering. A coffee can full of cigarette ash. A Gideon bible wrapped in duct tape.

The cameras run silently, their feeds flickering green in the half-dark like frog eyes in a swamp. Someone had written a phone number on the wall in grease pencil. A knife stuck into the drywall below it. And beneath it all, the quiet hum of power drawn from a rigged generator.

Carrick turns to Grayson. “You were at Waco. You think it was about guns? Or did somebody not like the idea of a messiah in Texas who wasn’t federal-issued?”

“That’s a can of worms,” Grayson says. “My friend, I would be happy to break it down over a few beers someday. But right now, there’s a lot in motion.” Grayson’s face clouds. Were you there?”

“Nah, I got some buddies with the A.T.F. who were there. But yeah, I’ll take you up on that beer. Let me introduce you to the crew.”

A man in his early twenties sits cross-legged on a milk crate near a surveillance wall, sipping Mountain Dew from a can that looks older than the kid himself. He wears a faded Bauhaus tee. C.R.T. monitors glow green behind him.

“Yo, uh, is this the package?” he asks, blinking furiously. “Didn’t know we were running intake again so soon. Was about to heat up some Cup Noodles.”

Carrick nods in the direction of the kid. “That’s Evan Park, our surveillance tech. Evan, this is Agent Grayson.”

“Call me ‘Blinky.’” the kids says. “Wait a minute. You’re the Agent Grayson? So, uh… real talk, Grayson—what if Kaczynski wasn’t wrong, y’know? What if we’ve already crossed the threshold? Like, the control systems are too good, and now we’re all just… sleepwalking into a technological apocalypse?”

“Honestly, I think he was more right than he realized.” Grayson tells him. “I don’t know what kind of evidence he had, but you folks are asking questions that are way above my pay grade right now. Like I said, get a few beers in me sometime, and we’ll talk it through—at least what I’m cleared to discuss. Some things I know, I’m not authorized to share.”

“Roger that.” Blinky says.

A woman steps in from the side bay, braids tight. She glances at Grayson, then you, then Carrick. “Who the hell’s this?”

“That’s Miss Belle Flower.” says Carrick. “New intake. Temporary. Agent Grayson, this is Deputy Marshal Rocío Velasquez.”

“You can call her ‘Ro.’” says Blinky.

Rocío Velasquez steps up and extends her hand to Grayson. You can tell she has a strong grip. “Good to know you, Agent. You better not be bringing ghosts into this place. We just cleared one out on the say so of your friend, Guthrie. We can stay on board for a day or two to help out.”

“That would be great.” Says Grayson. He leans in. Whispers something meant for no other ears.

Carrick leads you toward a back room. Former office. Two cots. One chair. A place for the displaced. “You can sleep here.” He says.

Ro crosses her arms. “Not taking the panic room?”

She nods to the pit in the floor covered by a mat and some tires. Steel ladder leading down to the dark.

“Bathroom’s still dead. Use the bucket system. Fresh water’s in the jug. Don’t flush if you can help it.” Says Carrick. “Generator’s on its last legs. How long you need this place?”

“Honestly, I don’t expect we’ll need this location for long. We’re likely going to stay mobile.”

Velasquez asks: “And what’s the girl running from?”

“She’s been through a lot, so let’s keep this professional. She’s rattled—needs time to get her footing. What I can tell you is she’s witnessed violence, and she’s been targeted. At the same time, she’s a person of interest. So stay sharp. And let’s make sure she doesn’t disappear on us.”

Velasquez looks at your feet. “Well, I don’t think she’s going to go too far. Let me get you some sandals, kid.”

Velasquez pulls out a pair of flip-flops from a bag.

“Where is the bathroom?” You ask. “Because I need to take a shower and wash my feet.”

You wash. It helps only in the way it always helps. A little. Not enough.

Later, Grayson comes to you. The overhead lights threw long shadows.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. You don’t have to trust me—I get that.
But I’m asking you to stay put.” He says. “Right now, this is the safest place for you. We’re going to work with you to figure out a long-term plan. Going back to your old life isn’t an option—it’s not safe anymore. I know it’s a lot to take in. I’m sorry for that. But you could be a critical asset in something bigger than either of us. If you need anything, let me know. These folks here will make sure you’re taken care of."

“Okay. Thank you.”

Grayson nods and leaves.

Blinky hands you your computer. At long last, you’ve got your laptop. It feels like it’s been an age since you last had it. You plug in Blinky’s ethernet cable, adjust your settings and you are back online. You can tell that your laptop is being monitored. You open a terminal window, type rapidly, and you are free of scrutiny. Across the room, Blink does a spit-take with his Mountain Dew. Tries to play it cool.

You check your PayPal account. You’re flush.

Alerts pinged. eBay. Cyberphreaks message board.

You ignore the eBay alert, focus on the message NullCatastrophe, fellow denizen of Cyberphreaks. It was sent in the dead hours before the towers fell.

“Need help,” they said. “Something’s following me through the sites. It’s coded in corrupted JavaScript.”

NullCatastrophe spoke of a digital presence. A thing without form but not without will. Drifting between domains like smoke through a keyhole. It left marks in comment threads. Whispers in backend code. A glimmer in the static. You follow the trail, but each time you do, your browser begins to act strange: the URLs redirect to nowhere. Your webcam flickers on for a moment, then off. And the speakers—your own speakers—say your name. Not the name the world knew. The old name. The one sewn into a silk banner above the freak tent: Belle et la Bête.

And you ask yourself: “Did I hear it? Or did it hear me first?”

You hunch deeper into the chair. Lose yourself in the code. Barely notice when Blinky drops food and soda at your elbow. Didn’t see night fall until he turned on the lamp.

Later, Grayson comes back. Wearing the Federally-issued suit of his kind. Asks how you are. You muttered you’re fine.

He nods. Lay. on a cot. Out cold in minutes.

Hours pass.

The air grows cold. Your breath steams like smoke from your mouth.

From the other room comes a sound. Low. Wounded. It’s Grayson. A whimper. Wrong from a man like him.

You freeze.

And from the edge of your vision, a shadow moves.

A shape large and bent and black.

The rot hits you next. Thick and wet in your throat. Your stomach turns.

A thud. Wet meat on concrete.

And the thin, thin wail of an infant.

Each time it cries, your body answers.

Your breasts swell.

Your nipples throb.

Yellow milk leaks and soaks your shirt.

You can not move.

You can only listen.

And you could only pray it had not yet seen you.

The Box

Agent Nicholas Grayson. You drive the Impala away from the safe house. Carrick called it South Glass.

When you left the Kearny Mobile Home Park you called Guthrie and told him you needed a place. He said you wouldn’t like it. He was right. Still. He delivered.

The crew were solid. Carrick and Park asked too many questions but you could live with that. Velasquez kept her questions to herself. That counted for something.

You told her to make sure Park kept an eye on Flower’s internet use.

“We want her motivated to dig.” You said. “Get her whatever she needs. But monitor her internet activity—covertly. And bug the phone. I want a full record of who she’s talking to.”

You watch the lights of the city drag past the windshield.

You hope Flower will be all right. Surprise yourself with the paternal instinct kicking in.

Still. She is stronger than she looks. You can see it plain. The way a tree grows twisted in a hard wind. The scars told the story whether she wants them to or not.

General Virek calls. Sounds like he’s walking through a hallway.

“Agent Grayson, I only have a minute. Today’s been hell since the attacks. Your digital footprint’s been compromised. Someone’s been sniffing around your secure files, but the IP trail’s been rerouted through a series of proxy servers—maybe even a chain of zombie nodes. It’s clean work. Could be Russian, could be Chinese, could be private-sector. The signal’s been bounced too many times to trace directly, but the access pattern suggests they’re combing through Alpine-related intel. Whoever they are, son, they know what to look for.”

He hangs up.

Your Blueberry vibrates.

Guthrie.

“I just left the trauma unit at UCSD Medical.”

“How is he?” You ask.

“Mathers is alive. Took a round to the lower spine. Paramedics got to him in time, stabilized his vitals. But it’s bad.”

“Jesus.” You say under your breath.

“He’ll live, but he’s not walking again. Bullet severed the spinal cord. Complete paralysis from L2 down. The surgeons installed a colostomy system. He’s looking at permanent care. No more rodeos. Not ever.”

“Guthrie, keep me up to date on his status.”

“Yeah. He’s unconscious for now. Heavy sedation. But when he wakes up, he’s going to need answers. One more thing—hospital’s tight-lipped, but the media’s sniffing around. Local PD put out a boilerplate report: home invasion, one suspect in custody. That won’t hold long.”

“Do your best.” You tell him. “I’m heading to the police department.”

The line goes silent. And then you arrive.

You sit in the stale chill of the homicide bureau with the sun just now lifting over the windows slatted with dust. The two detectives across from you wear shirts wrinkled and ties askew. A clock on the wall ticks time that will not be returned. One of them scratches at a legal pad. The other stares as if watching something far off through a fogged pane.

“This isn’t how I saw the day unfolding.” You tell them. “Obviously, none of us could have predicted—or prepared for—an attack of this scale. I expected a simple pickup. Bring the girl in, start the work. But there are other forces in play here. We need to find out who—or what—is involved in the attack on her. And who’s pulling the strings.”

One of the detectives hands you a coffee.

“Agent Guthrie speaks highly of you. Questions your methods, but says you get results. We got Mercer in the box. You want to interrogate him?”

“Affirmative.” You say.

“Oh, and Guthrie said you’d want this.” The detective hands you a plastic bag containing your suit.

“Thanks. I’m going to change.”

When you come back you hand them the bag. The sandals and the shorts and the shirt and the hat you took from the civilian at the Kearny Mobile Home Park. Borrowed, if that’s what you want to call it. You gave them back just the same.

“Can you return these?” You include a twenty in the bag as a way of thanks.

You follow the man down a corridor lit white and unkind. The walls close in like the sides of a long forgotten tomb and the stink of old sweat and sour coffee is thick on the air. He opens the door and you step inside.

The box. Four walls and a single light hissing overhead. The floor is scuffed and dulled by the scrape of shoes and struggle. The air is still. Still as death.

And there he is.

Silas Mercer.

Chained at the wrists to a bolted steel ring like some dog they never could break. His head shorn close to the scalp, the flesh of his face dark with bruises, split, bandaged. Left eye swelled shut beneath a web of gauze and blood. They say he may lose it. That the glass got in deep when you drove him into that mirror.

But he sits there unmoved. Back straight. Breathing slow. A calm about him that is not peace but something more feral, more profane. The stillness of a man who has seen what lies beneath the world and made his peace with it. He looks at you with the one eye left to him and smiles.

Like he’s waiting on the next act. Like he already knows the lines.

“I was just talking to our old buddy, Boyd Whitaker.” You ask. “Hard to believe how long it’s been. When’s the last time you were in touch with anyone from our Gulf outfit?”

“Whitaker? I haven’t talked to the motherfucker in years.”

“Yeah, well, you never really got along with most of the platoon. It’s been a long time. What have you been up to?”

“Been busy. You got me in a chokehold, huh? Been takin’ jiujitsu classes on the side? Hell, you’d never have put me down like this back in the Sandbox.”

“No, I guess my skills have come a long way since then. Although, to be honest, there were plenty of times I wished I’d put you in a choke hold.”

“Back then we were young.” Mercer says. “Saddam, he was a bastard, no doubt. But he was our bastard. Iraq’s got no sea. Couldn’t play ball with Iran when the mullahs dropped their oil to bleed the markets. Saddam warned ‘em. Said if nobody stepped in, he’d take Kuwait with both hands. Hell, he told the U.S. government. Told the western press. Nobody listened. So he did what he said he’d do. And we used it as our excuse. That’s why we were there, Grayson. That’s what we fought for. Not justice. Not peace. Just the story folks back home could stomach.”

He stares at you with his one good eye.

“You been busy since. Waco. McVeigh. The goddamn Unabomber. All them ghosts clingin’ to your coat like soot. And still you punch that Bureau clock? Still think you’re clean in all this? Didn’t learn a thing, did you? Thought you were one of them Seventh-Day boys. Thought y’all believed in judgment. Investigative kind. So tell me, when’s yours comin’?”

“The way I see it, Mercer, judgment’s happening all the time. It’s not for you or me to figure out how it works. Our job is to follow the law—God’s law, in this case. And we just have to hope we see a little justice now… and the rest in due time.”

Mercer spits on the table.

“When all is seen, ain’t nothin’ understood. You drown in the light and come up empty. Mais, you ever sit and think on them men? Kaczynski. Koresh. McVeigh. I do. I done thought on ‘em plenty. They like dominoes. One knockin’ the next, and the next, till the whole line gone down. Koresh, now, he thought he was the Lamb of God. But lemme tell you, Grayson—God been dead a long time. We done kilt Him. Still, the man weren’t wrong ‘bout everythin’. We are livin’ in Babylon. Babylon with its shiny badges and black boots and big ol’ buildings, and despite all Koresh’s guns and sermons, Babylon came knockin’. Came with fire. Took him and a whole house of folk with him. Why? So the ATF could flex a little muscle ‘fore budget season? So ol’ Janet Reno could make an example, say this what happen when you push back?"

“It’s a lot messier than the public was ever told—and that’s for their own good. You’re not wrong to think something bigger is at work here. But it’s better to stand with the light than with the devil. The only real question is, Mercer: whose side are you on?”

“My own side. I’ll tell you something, that fire lit somethin’ in McVeigh. He was out there at Waco, sellin’ bumper stickers, flyin’ the flag. Watchin’ that compound burn down with women and babies inside. He saw that and it twisted somethin’. Thought he could strike back. Thought he was defendin’ the Constitution, blowin’ up that buildin’. Thought the men and women who torched Waco worked there. But all he did was hand the government the excuse it needed to tighten the leash. Dominoes, cher. Just fallin’."

“You can argue about whether it was the right role to play, or whether the dominoes should have fallen at all.” You say. “But we can both agree—they’re falling. And it’s about time you made a choice. Word is, you’re losing that edge. Your days as a gun for hire are numbered. Not many people are going to hire a shooter who can’t see straight down a barrel.”

“Nah, I’m not worried about that.” He says.

“What are you worried about, then?”

“I know what my future is.” He says. “Your future is Kaczynski. Now that one, he saw the whole game laid out. Knew we weren’t made for this world of concrete and cameras. Said we’re creatures meant to hunt and bleed and run free in the wild. Not be penned up in apartments and cubicles and told how to live, how to think, what to want. He said we in a zoo, boy. Bein’ domesticated. Obedience is the endgame. Smile for the zookeeper.”

Mercer looks up to the ceiling, then back at you.

“And now? These attacks today? Maybe it’s foreign. Maybe it’s homegrown. Don’t make a lick of difference. It’s just the next domino, Grayson. Watch close now. They gonna come with more laws, more eyes, more fences. And we? We’ll ask ‘em for it. Beg ‘em to keep us safe. Hand ‘em the leash with a thank you. But today? Just today, the veil slip a little. And folks see Babylon for what it is. But it won’t last. They goin’ back to sleep. Ain’t nobody drivin’ this engine no more, bébé. This thing done wound itself up, and now it’s runnin’ where it wants. So I ask you, mon ami—where’s that next domino fall?”

“Let’s get straight to it, Mercer. I need to know who you’re working for and why you were hunting the girl. You can make this easy on yourself —or you can make it hard. Your call.”

“Look, Grayson, I am a consummate professional. You’re not getting anything from me.”

You lean forward, both hands on the table, and look him in the eye. “You want to make it hard on us? Fine. We can handle that. You? You’re going away for a long time.”

“You listen close now.” He snarls. “First fella look at me crosswise in that yard? I ain’t gon’ hesitate. I take him out right there, clean an’ mean. Make a scene they won’t forget. Let ‘em all know—I done arrived. After that? Oh yeah, they gon’ come knockin’. I’ll have to pick a crew. Might be the Aryan Brotherhood, the kind with the lightning bolts an’ bad tattoos. Maybe the local flavor, y’know? Don’t matter. Give me three years. I’ll run that gang like a Sunday sermon. And then? I run that whole damn prison. And you, on the outside, you’re in prison, too. You got some hard choices to make.”

You tell the guard you’re done and leave. Outside in the garage the sun has risen higher. Your ribs throb. Your knuckles split. You lean against the cold steel of the car like a man held together by old injuries and newer regrets.

The FBI building was new. Fluorescent lights hum overhead. You pass through checkpoints and doors, nodding to clerks and analysts who don’t know him and didn’t want to. You step into Conference Room C.

Miller sit there with a file like a priest with a sin list. She flips the pages as if they might rearrange themselves. She does not look up.

“You want to explain yourself?”

She reads from the page. Unauthorized operation. Transport of a civilian witness. Violation of protocol.

“Look, you can hand over the forms or not.” You say. “Either way, I’m doing my job—and how I do it isn’t your call.”

She stares at you for a long time and says nothing. There was a kind of mercy in that.

You sign forms until your hand cramp. Use-of-force reports. Custody logs. Transfer records. Signatures that would be filed and boxed and never read again. Your name, over and over, as though it might eventually become someone else’s.

By dusk you sit in the Crown Vic they assigned you parked beneath a sky smeared with red like a wound across the horizon. You had not eaten. You had not slept. The bruises beneath your shirt blooms like some terrible flower. Your bones ache. Your mind replays the scene like a reel jammed in a projector. The girl’s blood on his hands. Mercer’s eyes in the mirror before it shattered.

You grip the wheel.

There was no peace to be had.

There would be no sleep.

Only the long night and the forms he hadn’t signed yet.

And finally, the drive back to the safe house.

You check in with the team. No trouble while you were gone. You ask who’s taking watch through the night and offer to take a shift yourself. Velasquez shakes her head. “You look beat to hell, she says. Get some sleep.”

She’ll take first watch. Then Carrick. Then Blinky.

You nod. A smile half-formed and broken on your face. “Yeah,” you say. “I’m just gonna lay down.”

You pass by Flower. The pale glow of the laptop screen on her face. She barely looks up.

You shrug.

Find your cot.

Sleep takes you before you can think twice about it, and in your dreams, you are once more a child. In the old farmhouse in Indiana where your mother was raised. The walls hung with sun-faded posters of the shows your grandparents let you watch. The Superfriends. Deputy Dawg. Yogi Bear. Your mother did not approve.

It is that night—the night it happened.

You rise from the bed and step out into the darkened hall. Past the kitchen. Past the living room. The television spilling the national anthem into the stale air. Your father slumped dead asleep in the Barcalounger, the floor about him littered with empty cans of Old Milwaukee. His mouth open. Your mother has already gone to bed. Worn out from the fighting and the futility of it. She tries to get him to seek help but it comes to nothing. They argue and argue. Like beasts in a pen with no gate.

Somewhere, the man you are now, dreaming this dream, begs you not to take another step, not to leave the farmhouse. But your pleading goes unheeded. You open the door and step out into the summer night.

The grass is wet with dew and cold against your feet and you move out into the corn. In the rows ahead something hangs in the air. A woman maybe. A thing. Its face pale and skull-like. The black robe it wears is fouled and torn and it flaps in the faint stirring of the night.

“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 drifts down out of the dark and presses its mouth to yours.

It’s tongue. In your mouth. The taste of it. Cold. Wet. You gag on the length of it, and still it comes. Unending.

In the distance, you hear yourself mewling, trying desperately to wake from your nightmare.

• 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