The station had become a bunker under siege from the impossible. Captain Rourke's voice, usually a booming drill sergeant's, was now a hoarse crackle over the din of ringing phones and frantic radio chatter. Orders were given—liaise with emergency services, set up perimeters, divert traffic—but they felt like gestures, small rituals performed in the face of a god. The primary fact of existence was the throbbing, silent pulse of the red-orange light washing through the windows at irregular intervals.
Caleb had turned from the window, the storm of his emotions forced down into a hard, cold nugget in his gut. He moved to his desk, not seeing the files, his mind running painful circuits. The VTube lunatic. The pressure drop. The stuttering spin. Marcus's smile. Azaqor's empty eyes. They were not dots. They were pieces of a shattered mirror, each reflecting a different slice of the same unthinkable whole.
Beside him, Nia was staring at her computer screen, but her fingers weren't typing. They were rigid on the keys. The afterimage of the rough-faced man's grin was superimposed over her desktop background. The memory's sensory overload—the ozone stink, the visual distortion of hunger, the loss of that silvery wisp of herself—had left a psychic nausea in its wake. The sky's light was a cleaner version of that poison, which was somehow more frightening. It meant the poison had a source, and the source was vast.
Her internal monologue was a silent, desperate cascade. Danny was right. He was talking about parasites. About possession. He said they leave a "residue" on the world, a kind of stain that sensitive equipment—or traumatized people—could sometimes see. Was that what I saw? A stain? And Azaqor… is he a parasite? Or is he something else? The victims… Desai was a tech genius. Wynter household was a philanthropist group with deep ties to medical research while Marlene dealt in salon business which might have been her covering up her family's real businesses. All connected to Orphagenynx, even if it was through six degrees of funding and board members. The mother of Aubrey… her husband worked in logistical security for a Halvern subsidiary. Elijah was a graduate student who won an Orphagenynx-funded grant. Chloe, the very granddaughter to the late Theodore Halvern the man who brought Halvern consortium to new heights . Vivian, a social worker whose clinic received a massive, last-minute donation from the Wynter Foundation.
It's a net. A wide, fine-mesh net. And Azaqor isn't randomly killing. He's cutting specific threads. The thought was ice water in her veins. But why? To destabilize the net? To collapse whatever it's catching?
And Marcus. Sweet, little Marcus. Caleb's boy. Where did he fit? His mother, Caleb's ex-wife… she was a geneticist. Did she ever take contract work from Orphagenynx? Caleb had never said. But the pattern was too precise to ignore. Azaqor took him. Not killed. Took. To that "unknown region" Danny was too afraid to name.
The higher-ups. The men who took Danny. They weren't just hiding Azaqor. They were hiding the net. They were hiding the fact that Orphagenynx and the Halverns were at the center of something that was snatching people off the streets and making the sky bleed light. This cyclone wasn't an attack on the city. It was a symptom. A catastrophic, visible symptom of a disease that had been spreading in the shadows for years, maybe decades.
Something huge is happening. No. Something huge has been happening. And we've been brushing against it, calling it "serial murder" and "missing persons," slapping ordinary labels on an extraordinary predation. This… this event in the sky… it's like the infection has finally reached the skin. It's erupted.
And the memory. Why did it feel so real? Why now? The light. It triggered it. It was a key. That meant the thing inside her, that fractured, lost moment, was real. She really had seen that… that distortion. She really had felt something leave her. It wasn't a stress-induced hallucination. It was a glimpse behind the curtain. And if that was real, then everything Danny said was real. The parasites were real. The possession was real.
Which meant the world was a haunted house, and the ghosts weren't dead people. They were something else. Something that hungered.
Her eyes tracked back to the window. The cyclone had begun to move. Not much, just a subtle, grinding shift, like a titan adjusting its footing. It was turning, ever so slightly, away from the purely commercial district. Its leading edge now pointed towards the older, denser neighborhoods of Crestwood, where the streets were narrower and the buildings housed thousands in sleeping quarters and cramped apartments. A wave of pure, undiluted dread, colder than anything she'd felt before, locked her muscles.
It wasn't just a symptom. It was becoming a vector.
Just what is happening? The question was a scream trapped in her skull. What is the world now? She thought of Danny's terror, of the smooth men's empty eyes, of the rough-faced man's devouring grin. She thought of Caleb's silent, furious grief, a grief for a son who might be trapped in a dimension of monsters. She thought of all the people in the city going about their lives until an hour ago, whose biggest worry was rent or a job or a bad date. They had no framework for this. No psychic defense.
I'm just hoping it won't lead to catastrophic chaos. The hope was ashes. It was catastrophic chaos. It was the end of the world she knew. The chaos wasn't just in the streets; it was in the very rules of reality. And she and Caleb, with their badges and their case files and their very human rage and fear, were standing at the epicenter of it with no tools, no understanding, and no way out.
She finally looked away from the window, her gaze finding Caleb's profile. He was staring at a map on his desk, but she knew he wasn't seeing it. He was seeing Marcus. She saw the tension in the line of his shoulders, the absolute rigidity of his spine. He was a spring coiled to the breaking point. And she knew, with a certainty that chilled her, that he would walk into that hellish light outside if he thought it would lead him to his boy. He would walk into the grinning mouth of the thing she remembered.
The fear for the world curdled into a more immediate, sharp terror for the man beside her. And for herself. Because she knew, with that same cold certainty, that she would follow him. Not just as a partner. But as someone who had seen the teeth behind the curtain, and who could not let anyone, especially not someone she cared for, walk into that dark alone.
Her expression, when Caleb finally turned his head and met her eyes, told him everything. The professional composure was gone. In its place was the raw, unguarded truth: a bottomless fear, a galaxy of worry, and a resigned, grim solidarity. They were in the belly of the beast now, and the only way out was through.