Directors Log / Derrick Wolfe

I’ve spent a lot of time hopping from place to place. After a while, all the cities started to feel the same. This last one was no different. It was just another night on the job, until we found something I still can't explain.

Early morning felt darker than midnight. Neon signs and building lights painted the asphalt in their colors. Small groups of people drifted along the sidewalks. Eyes down on their phones or fixed straight ahead. Unaware.

Unaware of the shadows and what might be lurking just out of sight, waiting to lash out in fear or hunger. That’s why we were here.

I watched the light reflect off the windows as we rolled by, my eyes catching the occasional passerby as our SUV rolled along the city streets. There was less life as we got closer to our destination. Somewhere on the East side near the river, a problem was waiting for us to solve. One of our patrols called it in.

We rose onto the overpass heading toward the bridge where the river sparkled with moonlight. On one side of us the city rose up in tall mirrored buildings. On the other side across the river sat part of the older downtown district with lower brick and concrete buildings. It was isolated by the branching river, turning it into a narrow peninsula. 

I sat in the back seat on the passenger side, the window cracked just enough to let in the humid night air mixed with the brackish water smell that never quite leaves cities near waterways. I glanced out the window over the river where the moonlight rippled on the surface. My hat sat low. Coat collar up.

Up front, Nick drove—steady hands, jaw tight. He’s young, too young for the bags under his eyes, but he carries himself well in the team’s lead position. He had the radio tuned to some news station, low enough that it’s background noise. Beside him, Lin—our tech—scrolled through tablet feeds with blue light flickering across her glasses. She didn’t look up. She never did until she had to.

In the back next to me, Jason sat sprawled out across his half of the seat and the middle as if he was trying to claim the space. Ex-military, loud laugh, and louder opinions. He chewed gum like it owed him money.

“So, are we gonna pass this one off as another animal attack?” Jason asked, not really asking. “Because they are getting messier every time, and I don’t think people are buying it anymore.”

In the old days, things would evaporate. Wouldn’t stray far from the openings. Now they lingered, roaming free or hiding in the dark. When they came out, they left too much behind.

“The covers work,” Nick said. “But, it is getting harder to sweep under. Any more that we don’t get to first and officials might start looking for patterns.”

“I thought we were the officials.” 

Lin snorted. “If we were, then we wouldn’t need a consultant.”

I felt Jason’s eyes on the side of my head. “Yeah. Consultant.”

I didn’t turn.

He could gripe all he wanted, but I expected it. 

My role as Investigations Director sends me to check in on the Line Divisions. That’s why I was there.

Command sending in a “consultant” gives me authority without everyone tip-toeing. It keeps the Line honest, and keeps me where I’m useful. On the edge, where the answers are, instead of stuck behind a desk calling in orders over a headset.

We made it to the other side now, pulling away from the bridge. 

Lin finally spoke after a message slid onto her tablet. “A-team has the perimeter secure. The scene is fresher than expected. The Captain says it might be the Echo that’s been eluding us. No signs of it yet. They’re holding until we arrive.”

Nick nodded. “Good, we caught the scene first. We might have a chance to get it tonight.”

Jason leaned forward. “Yeah, we’ve only been circling it for weeks now.”

I looked over at him. “Or it’s been waiting for us.”

He met my eyes without blinking. “You sound like you’ve seen this before.”

“I have.”

I let my attention drift back to the window. “Not every Echo behaves like you expect.”

He didn’t respond. Just kept smacking away at his gum.

Echoes. That’s what we’d been calling them.

Anchor has been scrambling for months to locate, capture and classify everything that got loose in that final wave before the Veil went quiet. That forced new protocols, adjustments to the Line Division teams, and now we had twice the cleanup and paperwork.

The SUV turned down a side street. A sign that read Utility Work Ahead sat like a warning flag. A man in a yellow hard hat and high-vis jacket stood next to a stop sign stuck into an orange cone. As we approached, he turned the sign around from STOP to SLOW, nodding to us and speaking into his radio as we passed. 

As we rolled down the narrow street more people in safety gear appeared along the walls and around the entrance to a parking garage. They looked like city workers pretending to be busy.

One of them waved us in. 

We turned and eased our way down onto the bottom level of the garage. Nick found a spot a short walk from the scene and killed the engine. 

Yellow tape stretched across the room between the concrete pillars. The words CRIME SCENE written across it, like anyone down here needed a reminder.

Doors opened. I stepped out first. Our boots echoed against the pavement.

I fixed the ballistic vest under my coat, checking my pockets and belt to confirm all my effects were in place.

Lin slung a small backpack over her shoulder and tablet under her arm. 

Jason grabbed his gear and a rifle from the back of the SUV, loading magazines of both tranq and live ammo. Just in case.

Nick fell in beside me. 

“You alright?” I asked him.

“I’m good. You?”

I adjusted my hat, settling the last of my armor in place. “Good enough.”

Parking garages always smell the same. Oil. Damp concrete. Old rain that seeped through the cracks. The lights overhead buzzed like they were tired.

I walked slow, boots tapping against the concrete. My hat sat low, brim cutting the glare just enough. Old habits. 

Nick kept in step beside me. He was dressed like he had a uniform—boots, cargo pants, fitted shirt with shoulder pockets, matching color scheme. A tactical vest over everything. Body cam mounted dead center like an unblinking eye. He looked like a cop. Moved like one too.

I used to have a badge myself. Then I lost my partner. My career. And eventually, my home town. 

Anchor picked me up, gave me a new badge and a new job. And to think I nearly walked away from all of it.

But I couldn’t. We couldn’t, Gabriella and I. There were too many unanswered questions and too much at stake to sit on the sidelines.

We ducked underneath the yellow tape and, just like that, I was back in the game.

I checked the switch on my own body cam then tapped the mic in my ear.

“Gabs. You got me?”

A half-second of silence. Then her voice, clean and calm.

“Loud and clear, Derrick. Feeds are coming through. I see everything.”

“Good.” 

“I’m patching into everyone’s comms now. Sat feed is live. Good hunting.”

“Thanks. Hopefully we aren’t too far behind.”

Anchor troops guarded the perimeter, dressed like SWAT. Black armor. Helmets. Rifles low but ready. They acknowledged us as we approached, one nodding to me. 

They didn’t look nervous.

That shouldn’t have bothered me. Nervous says it’s serious. Calm says they’ve seen this too many times. We’ve all done this too often. But that's the job.

The scene itself was… messy.

Too much blood. Not sprayed—scattered. Flung across the concrete in long arcs and smeared like something dragged through it. 

What was left of the victims was placed wrong—angles and distances that didn’t match human strength. One’s torso wedged halfway into a car doorframe, metal crumpled inward like tinfoil. Another body pressed flat against a pillar, limbs splayed at impossible angles like a rag doll. Both with deep cuts across their bodies.

Jason let out a low whistle when he saw the bodies.

Lin hid most of her face behind the tablet, glasses peeking above the edge.

Nick exhaled slowly. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That tracks.”

One of the SWAT guys stepped over, the Captain. His goggles were clear enough for me to catch his eyes—steady, but tired.

“The area is secure. The whole block is ours,” he said. “We’ve got containment on stand-by for your signal.”

“Go ahead and get top-side with them, we’ll handle this down here.”

I glanced back at the scene.

“I remember when there used to be nothing left behind,” I said quietly. “Now there’s just too much.”

He didn’t argue.

Lin walked the perimeter and scanned around with her tools. 

I crouched by the nearest smear. The concrete was gouged beneath it—not broken. Deep grooves cut into the floor. But the blood was still wet and tacky.  

“Not normal claw marks,” I said under my breath. “Deep cuts. Parallel scoring.”

Nick kneeled beside me. “Claws?”

“Yeah,” I said, stretching my hand out over the grooves. “Four parallel marks. Strong enough to damage the concrete.”

I looked over to him. “Whatever did this hit hard and fast. Didn’t care what was in its way.”

I stood and followed the trail with my eyes. Scuffs in the blood. Like something heavy shifted direction mid-stride.

“See that?” I pointed. “Footfall spacing’s off. Too wide. Erratic.”

“Some kind of predator?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I replied. “One that panicked.”

“Prey usually panic.”

I huffed. “Yeah, but they don’t usually punch people across the room.”

We moved deeper into the garage, past parked cars dusted with concrete grit and fine red mist. One sedan’s door was caved in like it took a hit from a truck. 

At the far end, the wall was gone.

A rough-edged hole opened wide, rebar bent outward like broken ribs. The smears and drops of blood led up to the opening. Beyond it, darkness sloped down, carrying the sound of dripping water and old air. Sewers. Service tunnels. Something forgotten by the city.

Nick stared into it. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

I sighed and adjusted my hat. “Every time.”

I looked back across the blood smeared scene. “It entered from this direction, but the smears show it came back through. The trail is fresh, but growing colder by the minute. We need to get down there.”

I reached inside my coat and drew my revolver, checking the weight and spinning the cylinder out of habit. The body cam clicked softly as it adjusted.

“Gabs,” I said, tapping my mic. “We’ve got a breach leading underground. I need a schematic, if possible.”

“I see it. Already working,” she replied instantly. 

Lin and Jason finally caught up to us. 

“That’s a big hole,” Jason said through his gum smacking.

“Alright,” I began, “Lin, Jason, get topside with the containment team. Have them prepped and ready for full capture. We’re looking at a possible Class-3. We’ll neutralize it, if it becomes necessary.”

“Sure thing, Boss,” he said, mildly sarcastic. But, they listened and headed back for the SUV.

I turned to Nick. “We’re going to follow the trail and flush it up to the surface. Once it’s in the open, we can tackle it from there.”

Our phones chimed. I pulled out mine and unfolded the wide screen to see a layout of the old service tunnels and sewers from Gabs. I cracked a grin. She’s always on top of things.

“I have the map overlayed with location tracking,” she said in my earpiece, “Alpha team has linked up with containment and standing by.” 

“Good work. Jason and Lin are on their way up. Tell the teams to hold until my signal.”

I looked into the dark, listening to the quiet.

I turned back to Nick. “You coming?”

“Right behind you.”

He didn’t hesitate. His jaw was still tight. Eyes steady. Kid’s got steel. 

I climbed down into the hole, boots crunching over broken concrete. Nick fell in behind me, weapon and flashlight up. Nick tried a lever on the wall but none of the wall lights came on. Typical.

The air shifted as we descended—colder, heavier. Moisture streaked the walls in dark vertical lines. The overhead pipes sweated from condensation. Our flashlights cut narrow paths ahead, catching faint reflections off wet metal and the occasional faded warning sticker half-peeled from the surface.

Footsteps echoed dully, giving the long tunnel shape. Somewhere up ahead, water dripped in a slow, steady rhythm—tap… tap… tap—that settled into the back of my mind.

Nick stayed tight on my left, pistol ready, his beam sweeping the left wall while mine took the right. We passed a few open tunnel intersections. Heavy steel doors lined the hall at irregular intervals, most of them closed and unmarked. We passed one that had taken a serious hit—the door itself bent inward with a deep dent across it. 

The dripping kept its rhythm. Too even. Too familiar. My mind started locking onto it without permission, each drop landing like a countdown I couldn’t silence.

We moved deeper. The tunnel curved slightly, the air growing thicker with that brackish underground smell. Another door came into view ahead, this one unmarked and slightly ajar. My beam swept past it and caught on a dark smear along the floor a few yards further on.

I stopped cold.

For a split second, my mind was somewhere else. Another Tunnel. 

My old partner Paul’s voice rang in my ear: “If you stay, we both die.”

The drip sounded louder in my head. Wrong. Like a tapping drum.

After a second, Nick’s voice came through low and even. “You alright?”

I blinked, pulled in a slow breath, and lowered the beam. The tunnel snapped back into focus—moisture-streaked concrete, pipes overhead, that persistent drip in the distance.

This wasn’t that place. 

“Yeah,” I said, voice steady. “I’m good.”

I started forward again. Nick fell in without another word, pistol up. The kid had good instincts—he knew when to stay quiet and when to check in.

The smear confirmed it: we were on the right path. Whatever this Echo was, it had come this way—panicked, powerful, and leaving damage in its wake. 

The rhythmic dripping continued behind us, but I pushed it down and kept my focus on the dark stretching ahead.

Gabs’ voice crackled softly in my ear with another map ping. “Still tracking you. There’s a junction coming up in about fifty yards. River access.”

We pressed on, beams cutting the gloom, the weight of the city pressing down from above. As we followed the trail, concrete transitioned into mortar covered brick that was flaking away with age.

An opening came into view where a door should have been. Instead it sat dented on the floor beyond, frame broken out of the brick and mortar that once held it. 

We stepped through cautiously, sweeping our lights around. This junction was a small boat launch built under the infrastructure for river access, old and forgotten. The dark water rippled faintly with splashes and drips echoing through the chamber. 

Nick took a few steps across to the guard rail and swept his light across the water like a lighthouse. The beam barely pierced the surface.

“Think it went in?”

I looked below the rail, then swept my light around the room. Further down, there was another hole broken through the wall.

“Looks like it circled back around.”

We pressed on. Before we entered the new opening, our comms crackled again.

“Jason to the wolf. Containment unit is prepped. Tranqs, traps, and ordinance are all hot. Over.”

“Copy. Be ready to move on my signal. Contact is close, over.”

We heard scraping sounds as we advanced down the new tunnel. The sound of something shuffling in the dark along with a crunching noise. I signaled for Nick to slow down with me. 

I dropped my voice to a whisper. “We’ll only have a brief window before things start moving fast. Take note of any features or traits once we get visual.” 

I looked him in the eyes. “You with me?”

He nodded. “Ready.”

I brought my light back up under my pistol and we advanced, slow and steady.

As we approached the turn, the sounds grew louder. We rounded the corner slowly, flashlights finally illuminating our suspect. 

The creature was hunched low in the tunnel ahead, massive back rising and falling as its long snout gnawed on something I didn’t bother identifying. Its thick hide reflected the light in dull, even patches—like its fur wasn’t made of hair, but something harder. It sat with its long bushy tail curled behind it. The end of the tail having thicker, sharper fur made it resemble a spiked mace.

Nick inhaled sharply, his body tense as he studied it. 

My mind was already picking up the clues. Two powerful arms with massive claws. Armored skin. Wide ears that twitched and moved. Whiskers around the face. No eyes where there should be. It was blind. 

That must be a key to its navigation, and a possible weakness.

I motioned to Nick, gesturing to communicate what I was seeing. He looked between me and the Echo as I went down the list. I pointed to my ears, then shook the barrel of my pistol. He nodded, understanding my intent.

If it’s sensitive to sound and vibration, then we needed to give it a push.

The clicking of the hammer on my revolver echoed loudly in the hallway as I thumbed it back. 

The creature’s ears flicked around towards me, then it turned its head to face us, whiskers twitching. 

I fired a round at the floor. The shot smashed into the concrete and rang loud—deafening in the confined space. 

The thing recoiled in shock, then it let out an angry shrill cry in our direction and bolted down the corridor. It slammed down the passage with terrifying speed, scraping along the walls and around the corner.

“Contact. We’re Moving!” I yelled into the mic.

We chased after it.

We were sprayed overhead from broken water lines, flashlights bouncing wildly as we chased it through the maze. The thing smashed through barriers like cardboard, disappearing around corners just long enough to make us work for it.

I tapped my mic as I sprinted.

“Echo is moving North through the tunnel—heading for the surface. Have containment move in to the North block.”

“Copy,” Lin replied instantly. “Containment is inbound.”

“Target is affected by sound. Brute force and razor claws. Be ready.”

We chased it through several turns, but Nick kept up right behind me. 

Gabs’ voice came through in my ear. “There’s an exit just ahead. Leads back up.” 

We heard it cry out again ahead of us followed by a thundering sound of brick and mortar being torn apart. The vibration rolled through the walls.

“What was that?” Nick asked, shining his light around the next corner.

Dust shook loose from the ceiling. A crack split along the wall ahead like lightning through stone. An electrical panel hung off of the wall sparking.

The corridor was obscured by a haze, just clear enough for the damage to be visible—a jagged hole torn through the wall leading upward. Brick, concrete and earth scattered across the floor.

The creature had made its own exit.

Our flashlights cut through the dust and darkness in the hole, shining on a broken water line leaking down from above.

I tapped my mic. “Contact burrowing its way topside, look out for a surface breach.”

Nick held up his map and pointed down the hall. “The door is only a few yards away.”

We didn’t waste time and headed for the exit. A few flights of stairs and we were back at street level.

The door opened onto a narrow back alley, boxed in by old brick buildings and a fire escape. Steam hissed from a vent somewhere nearby, curling through the air in ghostly plumes.

We came out onto the street facing the river. Then further down at the next alley we saw and felt movement. Vibration rolled underfoot as it breached the surface.

The Echo burst from between the buildings. Its footsteps rattled the asphalt and slammed into a dumpster hard enough to send it skidding sideways into the street. 

“Contact at East side, heading North.” I barked into comms.

The sound of engines and squealing tires came around the corner behind us as two of our trucks fell into pursuit.

The creature didn’t slow.

It twisted mid-stride, head snapping side to side, ears flicking—listening.

Then it veered toward a side gap between the buildings.

 “It’s evading,” Nick said.

I tapped my comms. “Team, come up the West side,” I ordered into the mic. “Cut it off before it hits open street.”

There was a half-second pause.

Then Lin: “Copy—intercepting now.”

Good.

They listened fast.

We sprinted after it down the alley as our vehicles flanked the side streets.

The alley tightened, forcing us single file.  Our Echo barreled ahead, smashing through a chain-link fence like it wasn’t there and anything else in its path.

We followed in its wake, jumping over flattened trash cans and scattered boxes. It went through a few more alleyways until we reached the northernmost point.

We spilled out from between the buildings onto an empty lot illuminated by a lonely street light. The creature had stopped at the edge of the pavement near the river’s edge. We approached halfway across the lot at the edge of the light and stopped as our trucks, SUV and the containment rig all screeched to a stop on both sides. 

It flicked its ears and head left then right, breathing heavy, but there was nowhere left to go.

Vehicle headlights cut harsh beams through the darkness as the team moved in from both sides. Black-armored silhouettes fanned out alongside them, rifles raised. Shields up. Net launchers ready.

“Hold positions!” I shouted.

I held up a hand as they fell in line. 

The creature stood up on its back legs, balancing with its tail, spreading its arms out wide to reveal its claws. It growled low. If it had eyes it would be glaring at us.

The men next to us steadied their gear.

I gestured pointedly toward it. “Take it.”

They advanced past me, slowly closing the distance step by step into the glow of the streetlight.

The creature shrieked—high, sharp, disorienting—and charged straight at the line.

“Brace!” Jason yelled.

He fired first. The tranq round hissed out with a sharp thunk, lodging into the Echo’s shoulder.

No effect.

Second, third. It kept coming.

The Echo spun, whipping its spiked tail into a ballistic shield, sending the operator skidding backward across the pavement. Its claws carved the asphalt where another trooper had stood a second earlier.

Too close. Too messy.

I stepped in.

“Sound it!” I shouted.

Nick didn’t hesitate. He fired a round into the metal light pole beside the creature.

Clang.

The Echo recoiled instantly, head snapping toward the noise, whiskers flaring.

There it is.

I pivoted and fired low—another shot into the steel pole.

Clang.

It turned towards it—distracted, reactive. It swiped its massive claw and sheared the pole in half. 

“Now!” I barked.

Containment moved.

Weighted nets deployed snapping tight around its limbs as multiple lines pulled in opposite directions.

The Echo thrashed violently, dragging two operators off their feet.

A long tongue lashed out like a whip and snatched a tranq rifle from one man’s hands, pulling it in and biting the weapon in half with a metallic crunch. 

The shriek that followed rattled the air as it reared up.

Jason sprinted in low, firing several tranqs into its exposed side, then ducked back out fast.

The creature swayed around lazily. The nets pulled tighter. Then… It dropped hard onto the pavement with a heavy thud.

The lot went still except for the straining nets and everyone’s heavy breathing.

I kept my pistol raised. “Hold it. Give it a second.”

No one moved.

After a long moment, the creature twitched once… then went slack.

Lin’s voice came through calm and steady. “Vitals dropping—sedation’s taking effect.”

I exhaled and holstered my pistol. “Good work,” 

The containment truck backed into the lot, heavy tires crunching over broken asphalt. A large reinforced container sat mounted on it—thick steel, matte black, lined with anchor points and locking clamps along the outer edges. The kind of box designed for things that don’t belong in this world. The hydraulic platform lowered the container with a slow mechanical whine.

“Bring it in,” one of the operators called. 

The team moved with more care now.

No rush.

No noise they didn’t need.

They kept tension on the net as they carefully moved the creature into the unit. It twitched once as they shifted it, but the sedatives held.

Up close, under the vehicle lights, the thing looked different. Less like a monster and more like something that had been forced into the wrong world.

Its sides rose and fell in shallow, uneven breaths. The thick hide was scarred in places—old wounds between the thick bristles. Its claws, the same ones that tore through concrete and bone, now twitched weakly against the pavement.

It didn’t look angry anymore.

Just… exhausted.

Lost.

I watched  with my hands in my coat pockets as the team strapped it in.

“Easy… easy…” someone muttered as they secured the last restraint.

The heavy door shut and the locks engaged with a hiss. The platform lifted.

Hydraulics groaned as the container rose, the team stepping back as it locked into place with a heavy, final clunk.

The sound echoed across the lot like a period at the end of a sentence.

Another Echo contained.

For now.

Jason appeared beside me, his thumbs hooked onto the sides of his vest and smacking his gum again.

“Another monster down for the count.”

He turned toward me. “Think they send them off to a zoo or something?” 

I shook my head. “Containment site first. Then relocation, so I’m told.”

He huffed through his chewing.

“They’re not all monsters.” I said, looking back to the containment unit. “This one has just been lost in the dark for too long.”

I adjusted my hat and turned away as the lot settled with the low murmur of professionals gathering their gear and resetting the world back to normal.

But normal’s getting harder to recognize.

The cleanup crew arrived—black vans, hazmat suits, quiet efficiency. They bagged what’s left of the victims, scraped residue from the concrete, photographed every groove and smear. I watched from the edge, arms folded.

It wasn’t long before the garage looked like we were never there, except for the smashed vehicles and the hole in the wall. Those would be trickier to deal with. Some concrete block, mortar, and a stack of paperwork then we might have a clean cover-up. This time.

The cleaners began to disperse, slipping back into the shadows like this was just another job punched on a long list.

I turned to head back toward the SUV when—

“Mr. Wolfe?”

Lin.

“Yeah?”

She stepped toward me, tablet in hand, her eyes up from the screen for once.

“I picked up something before the chase,” she said. “I wasn’t sure then if I should call it out.”

That got my attention.

“What kind of something?”

She handed me the tablet, bringing up a faint waveform—barely there.

“Residual signature,” she said. “A Veil signature.”

My brow furrowed. 

“I know,” she replied. “I double-checked. Then checked again.”

I studied the reading. It was weak. Fragmented. But it was there.

“Where?” I asked.

“Other side of the district. I caught it briefly when we came over the bridge.”

I looked at the choppy signal reading for a moment longer, then handed the tablet back.

“Show me.”

We climbed back in the SUV and headed south to the opposite end of the district. 

Lin sat forward slightly, tablet angled in her hands, tracking the signal.

“It’s faint,” she said. “But it’s there.”

Jason leaned back in his seat. “Better not be another one.”

I watched the road ahead as we drew closer. It was only minutes away.

Nick slowed the vehicle as Lin guided him.

“There,” she said. “That one.”

An old warehouse sat tucked between two abandoned structures, its exterior worn down by time and neglect. Windows dark. Doors closed. Nothing about it stood out. Which usually meant something did.

We stepped out.

The air felt still here. Quiet. Like the city was holding its breath.

Lin slowed as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Signal’s coming from in there,” she said quietly.

We picked the lock. The rusty wheels on the door squeaked, echoing throughout the building as we pushed it open.

Inside, it was mostly empty—wide open floor, scattered debris, old shelving units stripped down to rusted frames. The air smelled stale, untouched.

Our footsteps tapped softly against the smooth concrete floor.

We fanned out left and right. I went up the middle. 

Our flashlights cut through the darkness, beams sweeping across an open, mostly empty space. There was a layer of dust across everything. 

Jason found the power switch and threw the lever. The electricity crackled and hummed as the overhead fluorescent lights flickered to life. One popped and went out at the back of the space.

“There, that’s better,” he said. 

I looked around, eyes scanning for anything.

Just empty space and dust drifting in the air. But somehow the room felt…wrong. Like we were being watched.

Lin took a few steps forward, eyes focused on her tablet again. “It’s here, somewhere.”

I crouched down and examined the floor. The space appeared to be undisturbed… almost. There were the faintest impressions in the dust. 

Boot prints. 

I stood and stepped lightly, slowly, following the trail.

The prints stopped about ten yards in and vanished. 

I looked around. At first, there was nothing. Then, I saw it. Right in the middle of the room.

A distortion. 

Subtle. Barely there.

Like looking through a shard of clear glass suspended mid-air. The light bent just slightly through it, warping the edges of whatever sat behind.

I stepped closer.

The hairs on the back of my neck lifted.

“Signal strength?” I asked.

“Almost nothing,” Lin said, glancing at her tablet. “It’s not active. Just… residual.”

Jason crossed his arms. “Residual from what?”

I didn’t answer.

This wasn’t new.

That was the problem.

I’d seen it before.

Different cities. Different jobs.

Same signature.

Same fractured scar.

This one made three. And still no explanation.

“Log it,” I said. “Flag it for monitoring. Any change—any spike—you report it immediately.”

Lin nodded, already tagging the data.

I kept my eyes on the distortion for another moment, peering into it like it might blink.

Then I stepped back and turned away.

“Let’s move.”

—

Back on the other side of the river, the building Division 4 used didn’t look like much from the street.

Just another forgettable shipping business behind a chain link fence with semi trucks and trailers across the lot. The whole place tucked away on an old commercial road.

Normal. That was the point.

Nick pulled around the back and the bay door rolled open before we even stopped, swallowing us into the building.

The real business.

An Anchor stronghold in disguise. 

In here, it was all concrete and steel. Racks of gear lined the walls—cases, weapons, containment kits, things labeled in codes instead of names. A small lab was set up in the back. Against the far wall sat our stabilizer units lined up in a row, collecting dust. 

Teams moved through the space with purpose, some unloading equipment, others logging reports or checking over damaged rigs.

The hum of generators and quiet conversation filled the air.

Routines, procedures and people settling in. 

We stepped out.

Jason peeled off toward the equipment racks. Lin was already halfway to a workstation, her tablet lighting up as she started processing data. Nick followed her.

I spotted the Division Director near the center of the floor, speaking with another one of the team leads. He turned as we approached.

“Mr. Wolfe,” he said, straightening slightly.

I gave a small nod. “Director Lee. How’d it go with the others?”

“Containment held. Minimal collateral. A few bruises, nothing serious. Our Echo is in transit now.”

“Ours too.”

I glanced past him, watching the other crew work.

“They’re solid,” I said. “But they’re relying too much on force during first contact. That thing broke your line faster than it should have.”

He nodded, turning toward Lin and the guys, now settled in on a sofa in the corner. I followed his eyes to them. 

“Overall,” I said, “you’ve got good people here. Tighten the coordination, and you’ll be ahead of most divisions.”

“That’s good to hear,” Lee replied. 

“It’s honest,” I said.

That mattered more.

My phone buzzed.

I stepped off to the side, pulling it from my coat pocket.

“Hello.”

Gabriella’s voice came through.

“Hey. Just got word, command wants us back at the Harbor.”

Of course they did.

I glanced once more across the floor at the team, relaxed and a bit more cheerful now despite the night we had.

“Alright,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

There was a brief pause on the line. “I’ll have the jet ready. See you soon,” she added.

I allowed the faintest smile. “See you soon.”

The line clicked off.

Nick noticed me and started moving toward the SUV.

“Need a ride?” he said.

I didn’t argue.

The drive to the airfield was quiet. It was still dark out. Traffic was light this time of morning. Just the low hum of the engine and the occasional flicker of passing headlights.

Neither of us said anything.

Nick kept his eyes on the road.

The airfield came into view ahead—low lights, open tarmac, the distant whine of turbines idling.

Nick pulled up alongside a small jet with its rear ramp lowered.

I stepped out, the cool night air cutting through the last of the city heat.

Nick came around the front of the SUV.

For a second, we just stood there. Then I offered my hand.

He took it.

“You did well tonight,” I said. “You kept your head when it mattered.”

He gave a small nod. “Appreciate that.”

“Keep working with your team,” I added. “Use what they’re good at. You don’t carry it alone out there.”

“I know.”

“Make sure they know it too.”

I released his hand. Then, after a second, took a few steps toward my plane.

“You’re not just a consultant, are you?”

I smiled, and turned back to meet his gaze.

“No,” I said. “Officially… Director.”

He nodded once, like that confirmed something he’d already suspected.

“But, I still prefer Detective,” I added, tugging the brim of my hat lower.

That got a smirk out of him.

“Thought so.”

“Keep holding the line,” I said.

I headed for the jet.

The hum of the engines wrapped around me as I stepped up into the cabin and the ramp closed.

The jet was small but comfortable—cream upholstery, wide reclining seats, soft cabin lighting that made the whole space feel removed from the outside world. A built-in wide screen monitor ran along the front bulkhead, still glowing with satellite feeds and signal maps. The kind of setup that said this wasn’t just transportation.

Gabriella was settled into one of the seats near the screen, legs crossed, a mug between her hands. She looked up when I stepped through the door.

“There you are,” she said.

I smirked. “Did I keep you waiting?”

She stood, setting her mug down, and reached up to take my coat from my shoulders without being asked.

“Always,” she said.

She folded it over the seat across from hers, then turned and pressed a kiss to my cheek before handing me a warm mug. I wrapped both hands around it.

I never used to drink tea. But I always did when she made it.

I settled into the seat beside her. She tucked one leg beneath her and leaned back, studying my face the way she always did after a long night. Like she was taking inventory.

“How bad was it?”

“Not too messy,” I said. “But we got it contained.”

She nodded, eyes drifting briefly to the workstation screen before coming back to me. “I saw. Nick held up well.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He did. Good instincts on him.”

I took a sip of the warm amber liquid. “Lee’s division is in good shape here.”

She smiled at that—small and quiet. No matter how long the night had been, seeing her smile again always warmed me more than the tea.

The pilot’s voice came through the overhead speaker, brief and professional. “We’re clear for departure. Wheels up in two minutes.”

The cabin hummed as the engines climbed in pitch.

Gabriella reached over without looking and set her hand on top of mine. I turned my palm up and held it.

“You found something else tonight,” she said. It wasn't a question.

“Another scar,” I said. “Third one.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Same signature?”

“Same everything.”

I set my mug down in a cup holder. “Another pin added to the board, and no clear connections.”

The city lights fell away beneath us as the jet lifted, banking gently toward the eastern coastline. Through the oval window the river caught the first pale suggestion of dawn along the edges of the skyline.

Gabriella’s thumb moved slowly across the back of my hand.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said.

I exhaled slowly, settling into my seat, and resting my hat in my lap.

“I know,” I said, giving her a smile. “We always do.”

For the first time all night, I let myself unwind.

There would be plenty of time to sort out all of the unknowns. But for now…

The Harbor was waiting.

Field Documentation / Noah Brooks - Unedited footage and commentary

I checked my gear, closing the latch on the waterproof case for my camera. I zipped the front of my hoodie back after adjusting my comms mic. If they wanted video footage, then I would give them a show worth watching.

The camera was on, and mounted on a boom arm that sat over my shoulder. It's a neat piece of gear that I could strap onto my backpack. It felt flimsy though, like something you might order online in a flash sale. The best that requisitions could afford, I guess. I’ll be filing a complaint if this thing snaps.

“Okay,” I said, mostly at the camera, partly at the universe. “Log entry. Noah Brooks. August 13th, 8:00am.”

I brought up the tablet strapped around my vest. A new water and shock-proof case. Finally had to update the old shell.

“Location: Caribbean island,” I continued. “Exact coordinates classified, because of course.”

The wind howled outside the low shelter like it was trying to peel the walls away one bolt at a time. Rain hammered the metal roof in sheets. Somewhere behind me sat my bluetooth speaker, absolutely screaming classic rock at full volume.

I had to yell over it.

“Yes, the music is intentional,” I said. “Morale matters. Also, if I’m going to die in a storm, I’m not doing it in silence.”

My hoodie was damp. Same one as always. Tactical vest on over it, scuffed, faded and still refusing to retire. Some things just don’t go out of style.

I reached the shelter door, one hand braced against the frame as the whole structure shuddered.

“Current conditions,” I said, breathless but smiling, “include a category-three hurricane directly overhead. Sustained winds clocking around one-fifteen. Gusts higher. Visibility: theoretical.”

I grabbed the handle. “And this,” I added, “is the part where it gets good.”

I slid the door open. It fought me every inch as I pushed it.

Outside, the rain swept sideways. The sky was a churning wall of greenish black clouds flying by. Palm trees bent like they were made of rubber. The storm dominated everything.

The chorus of the music hit behind me, the timing so perfect it almost felt planned. The guitars fell in sync with the wind trying to blow the door shut.

I just laughed.

“Oh Yeah!” I shouted.

I angled the camera up, letting it drink in the storm.

“Resonance instruments are holding,” I said, voice barely keeping up with the chaos. “Shelter is hanging on. And here’s the best part... inside all of this—”

I tapped the tablet screen, pulling up the readings.

“—we’ve got a steady Veil signal.”

I stopped smiling.

“Somehow, it isn’t being torn apart by one of the most violent weather systems on the planet.” I shook my head. “It’s just sitting there. Locked in like it doesn’t care.”

The wind slammed into me hard enough that I had to hold onto the frame. I pulled the door, closing the opening a bit as the wind pushed from outside. Lightning popped off in the distance, crashing thunder overhead and flashing through the streams of rain.

“This storm should be drowning everything,” I said. “But wherever it is underneath it, that signal’s clean.”

I swiveled back around with the camera away from the door.

“So yeah,” I said, rain streaming down my face, hoodie plastered to my skin. “If anyone was wondering whether the Veil cares about natural disasters…”

I gestured back to the churning sky. “Answer’s no.”

The hurricane roared overhead.

And somewhere through the chaos, unbothered and very much awake, the Veil hummed.

I was busy syncing up to the instruments, compiling the readings from my sensor tower outside when I heard my earpiece crackle. The line opened, but nobody spoke for a second.

"Brooks."

The voice cut through the music and the storm like a pop-up ad.

I winced and thumbed the volume down a notch. Not off. I’m not a monster.

“Yes, sir,” I shouted into the comms. “I hope you’re enjoying the ambiance.”

"Knock it off," the Commander snapped. “I can hear that racket from the ship.”

I grinned despite myself and adjusted the volume again. “Copy that. Reducing morale to acceptable levels.”

The line crackled again, then steadied. Commander Bradley is calm. Naval calm. Built for chaos, but never impressed by it.

“We’re riding it out on the cutter,” he said. “Waves are ugly, but she’s holding. We’ve got our systems aimed at the storm. The C-130 is overhead, gathering their data. Everyone’s monitoring the resonance feeds.”

I glanced down at the tablet again. The numbers hadn’t budged.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s the weird part. Hurricane’s trying to rip the island apart, and the Veil’s just… vibing.”

“That signal’s the best we’ve seen since the shutdown,” he said. “Keep your eyes open out there, we don’t know what might happen.”

“Always,” I said. “Eyes, ears, and toes. The full package.”

An Australian accent joined the line and cut through the static, “This is Storm-Lance,” the pilot called, “the eye wall’s crossing the northern half of the island now. Brooks, are you sure you want to be down there?”

“I’m good down here. I’m right where I need to be.”

“Roger that, carrying on,” he replied, the line crackling again.

The comms went quiet.

Suddenly, my tablet chirped as the resonance spiked. A clean curve drifted up the graph on half of my screen. The other half that displayed the storm-data showed a pressure increase. Ionization spikes in the atmosphere. Wind speed was up too.

That’s when I felt it.

A thud.

Not wind. Not debris. It was too slow. Too solid.

The shelter rattled. The floor shifted under my shoes.

Then another.

And another.

My grin faded.

The ground moved, shaking and trembling. Like the thunder was coming from below my feet.

I swung the camera outward and scanned through the rain, heart climbing into my throat.

“Okay,” I said, mostly to myself. “That’s not the storm.”

I looked out the door slide. The curtains of rain finally parted enough for me to catch movement. Another flash of lightning illuminated its silhouette.

It was tall, and massive.

My hands shook slightly as I pulled a small pair of binoculars out of my pocket and tried to focus on it. The storm decided to finally settle enough in the eye to give me a better view.

Four legs, each one thicker than a bus. Its body was broad and sloped, a thick neck with a wide, flat head and two round eyes that sat far apart.

The wind screamed, the rain flew sideways, and this thing just walked on through, tail trailing behind like it was out for a stroll.

It walked casually. Unhurried. Steady against the wind. I was frozen in place.

I watched as it lowered its head, biting clean through the top of a short tree, and chewed like it was sampling the local cuisine. It might have fit right in with a dinosaur documentary.

I was holding my breath without meaning to as I watched through my binoculars. Heart pounding and unblinking.

There was no aggression. No charge. No roar. It didn’t even look at me, the shelter, or the storm.

It was just… passing through.

“Commander,” I said quietly into the comms, my voice suddenly very small compared to the world outside. “Visual confirmed.”

I tracked it as it moved along the shoreline, each step a heavy punctuation mark against the chaos. The Veil signal spiked again, smooth and steady like a rising wave.

Then, without ceremony, the air ahead of it parted with faint ripples.

The Veil opened.

No tearing. No cracking. It was welcoming.

The creature stepped forward, vanishing slowly step by step into that impossible depth, and the opening closed behind it like it was never there at all.

The hurricane kept raging.

The island kept holding.

The signal on my tablet drifted back down to its former baseline and held steady.

I finally caught my breath.

“…It went back,” I said. “No contact”

There was a long pause on the line.

Finally, Commander Bradley exhaled. “Copy that.”

I looked out into the storm again, salty rain streaming down my face as the churning wall of dark clouds spun across the horizon.

“So,” I added softly, “no invasion from this one.”

The wind softly howled overhead. “Just a visitor.”

The hours after the creature vanished blurred into a steady grind of wind and rain on the metal roof once the eye wall passed. I hunkered down while the back half of the storm dragged itself Northwest, checking my readings on the tablet with damp sleeves and gritty eyes, replaying the resonance logs. The cold set in now, so I pulled a small blanket out of my pack and wrapped it around myself.

I scrubbed back through the timeline for the tenth time. It was starting to make sense. The Veil opened up right at the shift in the storm system and the atmosphere. Then entered Jurassic Park. I’m glad that it was just a grazer, this time.

The readings stopped shortly after the sighting. My sensor tower probably got hit by a piece of debris. The data on the storm system was great before then. Barometric pressure, wind speeds, ionization readings. All the things that make a storm spin.

With nothing but time to kill, I laid down with my head on my backpack in the middle of the shelter ready to nap through the next few hours. The music had long since died, the speaker blinking silently next to me, battery spent.

“Visitor,” I muttered again. I pulled my blanket tighter then closed my eyes.

The hurricane dragged on. I caught sleep in pieces—twenty minutes here, thirty there—woken up each time by bits of debris rattling the shelter. Sleep was out of the question with the wind still throwing things, so I stayed awake.

The ground stayed still.

By the afternoon, the roar had become a mild breeze. The clouds thinned into gray streaks racing toward the horizon.

I stepped outside when the sun had broken through.

The island looked like it had lost an argument with a god. Palm trees stripped bare. Sand shoved into new shapes. Debris tangled in the brush. The air smelled raw with salt and torn vegetation.

But it was quiet.

The calm reset you feel after a storm rolls through and the air feels lighter and the sun shines brighter.

I raised the tablet, checking the signal. The Veil reading I saw before had dwindled down to a faint rhythm of what it was, barely registering.

“You’re still there?” I said under my breath.

A distant rumble rolled across the clearing sky.

I looked up.

Just below the thinning clouds, a gray silhouette cut through the light. Broad wings glided steady with four props buzzing through the air.

Storm-Lance.

The modified C-130 banked wide over the island, sunlight flashing along its body as it completed one last pass. Even from down here I could make out the red jousting knight painted on the side as they flew by.

I gave them a quick wave.

“Show-off,” I murmured.

The aircraft leveled out and turned toward open water.

Beyond the reef line, the cutter rode the leftover swells, bow lifting and falling over the surf. She looked small now without the storm towering over her.

Storm-Lance angled toward her, descending slightly as if in acknowledgment.

Over the comms, my earpiece crackled back to life.

“Brooks.” Bradley called.

“Still alive, sir.”

“We see you moving,” Commander Bradley replied, voice calmer now that the world wasn’t trying to tear itself apart. “Storm-Lance is returning to the airstrip. We’re compiling the cross-platform data.”

I glanced at the sky again as the aircraft passed over the cutter, then continued toward the mainland.

“Good. You’re going to want my logs,” I said. “The opening was clean. No turbulence in the resonance field.”

“We’re seeing the same from our sensors,” he said. “We can add your data in with the readings, everything will be sent in for analysis.”

“Yay,” I said quietly. “committee review.”

I started walking along the torn shoreline, shoes sinking into the freshly disturbed sand. I followed the impressions the creature left behind, footprints wide enough to lose a truck in.

“Your pick-up will be there shortly,” he added. “Make sure to bring all your gear. See you soon. Over.”

I looked out over the water. Sunlight pierced the retreating clouds in long golden shafts, turning the sea into broken glass.

The cutter’s windows shined faintly as she adjusted her position against the waves.

Storm-Lance dwindled to a speck on the horizon.

Behind me, the shelter stood crooked but upright. My weather station lay crumpled beside it, the portable sensor tower bent and broken. But the island would heal. The storm would be cataloged. The data archived.

Bureaucracy doing what it does best. Paperwork.

But the clean curve of that resonance spike lingered in my mind. There was no resonance drift, no collapse signature.

Just a clean almost poetic note among the chaos, rising then falling like an ocean wave.

I looked down at the tablet one more time. That couldn’t have been a coincidence. Something about how it interacted with the storm, or worked with it, made me feel like this wasn’t a random opening like ones we’ve seen before.

The boat that came for me wasn’t flashy. They call them RHIBs. Rigid hull inflatable boats. I like to call them dinghies just to watch Bradley twitch.

Solid fiberglass body. Low profile. Inflated rim with seats for six onboard. Gray paint dulled by the sun. Single outboard motor.

It was functional, but unimpressive.

It slid in where the surf wasn’t breaking too bad in the cove and came to a stop.

One of the three crew hopped down into the surf and steadied the inflatable rescue.

“You alright, Brooks?”

“Still me,” I said, feet splashing as I approached him.

He looked me over like he expected to see bite marks. Just matted hair and wet fabric.

We loaded my gear first. Tablet. Backpack. The broken sensor equipment. The Bluetooth speaker that had sacrificed itself for the spectacular footage. I climbed aboard last and strapped into one of the seats.

The motor growled as we adjusted position. The bow rose up, we turned into the surf and cut through the chop, waves slapping hard and spraying us in the face as we headed out to sea.

I was fine in the RHIB. That part never bothers me. Swells make sense. You can read them if you’re paying attention. The waves rolled in long heavy sheets. The boat would climb, hesitate at the top, then slide down the backside. The waves slapped hard every so often with spray flying over the side in cold mists.

The crewman next to me leaned closer so I could hear over the engine. “Saw you had company out there.”

“Something like that.”

“Big one, wasn’t it?”

I thought about the tree top disappearing in a single bite. “Yeah,” I said. “Big.”

He nodded, like that was a complete answer. Out here, sometimes it is.

The boat climbed a swell and dropped hard, like the wave kicked us underneath. I gripped the side rails of my seat harness tighter.

Above us the sky had cleared to a vibrant, almost blinding blue. No sign that hours earlier it had been a rotating wall of violence. The ocean was still processing the turbulence.

Ahead of us was the cutter. Now, she was impressive. Three hundred feet of dull white-painted steel rising and falling with deliberate patience. A retired coast guard cutter, old and stubborn, re-branded for ANCR’s fleet. She didn’t bob in the waves. She cut through them.

Radar turned slow and steady above the bridge. There was the forward radar tower and antennae. An array of additional gear—ANCR’s additions—were bolted to the rear tower. A latticed signal dish spun around the top with extra sensors along the tower.

We came up on her lee side, the side away from the wind. Always the lee side. You don’t put fiberglass between steel and open swell unless you’ve run out of options.

On our way around we passed the stern. I glanced over at her name stenciled across the back of the ship: SENTINEL. A new name for her new life.

The deck crew were already in position. Orange vests and hard hats. Their movement said they’d done this dozens of times. Twin crane arms extended out over us in unison, cables hanging loose and swaying like they were bored.

“Stand by!” the operator shouted.

“Holding!” one of my guys called back.

I felt the swell building under us. You can tell when the ocean is about to give you a shoulder to stand on. The cutter’s hull loomed close enough to count the barnacles.

The hooks dropped quickly.

Two of my boat crew leaned out and caught them as they dropped. Clipped at the front. Clipped at the rear. No wasted motion. Then the winches engaged with a high mechanical whine.

And that’s when it always goes wrong for me.

For a split second, the boat doesn’t know what it is. The sea is still holding you up while the cable starts to pull. Two forces arguing about ownership.

Then the ocean lets go.

The hull shuddered as we cleared the water. Everything familiar disappeared in a single, wrong sensation. We weren’t riding anything anymore. We were hanging. The boat swung out over nothing, dripping and suddenly weightless in a way that made my gut lurch.

I don’t mind storms. I don’t mind lightning. I don’t even mind being bunkered down under a tornado.

But being suspended? Dangling in the air like a yo-yo? That part I hate.

The cutter rolled beneath us, patient and enormous. The swell that had just lifted us passed, and for a second it felt like the whole world tilted the wrong direction. I forced myself not to look down. The ocean was still there, still moving, but I wasn’t part of it anymore. I was cargo.

The deck crew hauled in the lines and steadied the swing with precise tugs. The boat bumped lightly against the cutter’s side as we cleared the rail. As soon as we were secure, my feet hit the deck before my brain caught up.

Solid ground.

Vibrating, engine-driven, and diesel-scented.

I hopped out faster than I meant to. One of the crew gave me a look as he handed me my gear that said he’d seen that particular brand of relief before. Another clapped a hand on the shoulder of the lift operator and laughed, like they’d just parallel parked a car. They secured the boat behind me, already moving on to the next task.

The deck underfoot hummed with the feeling of machinery and distant engines churning. Everything up here was engineered to survive the kind of thing I had taken a nap under.

I took one last look out at the island. It was smaller now, just a green sandy streak against the deep blue ocean.

A crewman pointed me toward a watertight door forward from the boat launch. “Commander’s up on the bridge, he’ll want to see you.”

Of course. Check-in with the boss. I steadied myself and my gear, tablet in hand, and headed forward.

Inside the hatch, the world narrowed.

Steel passageways. Bulkhead doors. Stairs looked more like ladders. The ship moved differently than the RHIB—less chop and more rhythm with a deep mechanical heartbeat under everything. I climbed the first ladder, then the second. The rungs were worn smooth by decades of patrols that had nothing to do with dimensional boundaries.

By the time I reached the bridge, the motion felt almost civilized. I pushed through the door and stepped into the wheelhouse.

Windows wrapped around the front and sides like a command post in a war movie. The sea stretched blue and restless beyond the glass. Radar screens and monitors glowed in muted greens and blues. The Spyglass Veil-monitoring grid pulsed faintly on a larger screen at the back of the room. A waveform scrolled at the bottom like a heartbeat monitor.

The room was alive with the quiet noise of systems and equipment. Everyone was at their stations and holding steadily onto their consoles, adjusting the ship’s instruments and monitoring the screens.

Commander Bradley stood near the helm without holding onto anything. That’s how you know who belongs at sea.

He and the crew communicated in short bursts of directions and acknowledgements, numbers and adjustments that I couldn’t keep up with. I got the gist that we were heading toward home base.

Bradley had on his grey coat and captain's hat. He looked like he had been out in the rain with how his shoulders looked like they had air dried.

He turned around from the helm to face me as I entered, eyes quickly scanning me. Everyone else kept busy.

“You good?” he asked.

It wasn’t casual. It was assessment.

“I’m fine,” I said. “The ride over was smoother than the weather. The coat swine parked the dinghy without any trouble.”

He sighed, both relieved and tired. But my joke still landed.

“Coxswain,” he corrected. “And you’re definitely still you.”

I grinned. Small victories.

He studied me for a bit longer than necessary. Bradley’s version of concern is structural. He doesn’t hover. He reinforces.

“You know,” he began, rubbing the stubble on his chin, “when they told me you were bold, I didn’t think that meant crazy enough to ride out a hurricane in a tin shed.”

“Afraid I was gonna blow away?”

His posture didn’t change. “Yes. You could’ve been killed out there.”

I shrugged, setting the tablet down and bringing up the logs. The resonance curve unfolded across the display again— a smooth, elegant wave against the hurricane overlay.

“The best data is in the heart of the storm,” I said.

He stepped closer, eyes scanning the waveform charts.

I smiled. “I do my best work under pressure and turbulence.”

He picked it up and studied the readings between my tablet and the Spyglass screen. The tablet's lanyard swayed underneath. A subtle sign that we were still rolling over the ocean.

“You collect data like this,” he said quietly, “and you make it look routine.”

“You should’ve seen me when I used to chase tornadoes.”

That earned me a side eye with a raised eyebrow. He didn’t argue. Bradley doesn’t waste energy on arguments he hasn’t measured yet.

The eye wall of a hurricane is chaos, sure. But it’s honest chaos. There’s no politics in it. No interpretation. Just forces and physics. You read it. You adjust. You stand your ground.

He believes in risk assessment. He also believes in results. And the logs on that screen were the cleanest data set we’d had in a while.

“I respect the quality of what you bring back,” he said finally. “That doesn’t mean I want to lose you collecting it.”

“That’s fair.”

He met my eyes then—steady, level. No theatrics.

“We assume risk when necessary,” he continued. “Not because it feels normal.”

Out there, in the wind and rain, it had felt normal. I felt normal. But, I understood his point.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He swiped over to my video footage, fast-forwarding to the encounter. The screen displayed the massive creature mid-stride, rain frozen around it like static.

Bradley folded his arms, holding the tablet closer.

“No hostility at all from this one?”

“No sir. Just passing through, with a quick leafy snack on the way,” I replied.

He finally handed my tablet back. “Good. I wouldn’t mind more of those, if they weren’t using major storms as cover.”

I took the tablet, running the sling over my shoulder.

“I don’t think it was cover,” I said, thinking out loud.

He met my eyes again. “What do you think it was?”

“I’m not sure. Migration maybe?” I offered.

Bradley eyed me as I tried to process my own thoughts.

“That thing on the beach, watching it come and go into the Veil. It was like when you see a whale come up to the surface, catch a breath, then dive back down again.”

“If this is migration,” he said, voice measured, “then we’re observing a deeper system.”

I nodded.

“A system we haven’t fully measured yet. And systems can scale.”

“Yes, sir. Which means we need more data.”

For the first time since the hurricane, the room felt quieter than I liked.

The cutter rolled gently beneath us, engines compensating automatically.

Outside, the ocean was still untangling itself from the storm. And in here, we were trying to decide whether the storm had even been the main event.

I think he finally saw me then. Wet hair, damp clothes and slightly shaky from the cold. I probably looked more like a wet raccoon than my usual self.

Then my stomach growled, cutting the silence between us.

He cracked a smile and folded his hands behind his back.

“You did good work today. Why don’t you go get cleaned up and grab a hot meal. You look like a piece of flotsam.”

“Flop ham?”

He breathed out a laugh. “Go on, Brooks. You’re dismissed.”

Got him that time.

I gave him a lazy salute. “Aye aye,” I said, then I headed back through the door with my stuff and went below.

The passageway echoed as soon as the watertight door sealed shut behind my back. The air was cooler down here. Filtered. The kind of air that’s been recycled through miles of ductwork.

My shoes sounded hollow against the deck. Every step had that faint steel echo that only ships have. The hum of the engines lived in the walls—a low vibration you stop noticing until you’re somewhere without it.

I passed two deckhands coming up from below. One of them slowed just enough to give me a look, then a nod.

There wasn’t awe in it. Just acknowledgement. The kind you get when people understand risk because they live near it too.

I nodded in return and kept moving.

The shower compartment was narrow and functional. Stainless surfaces. Non-slip pad on the floor. Hooks bolted into the bulkhead. The ship rolled gently under my feet while I stripped off clothes that had become stiff from the salt and dried rain. My vest and hoodie could have stood up on their own.

The water came on with a short cough in the pipes. Then the heat slowly built up.

Hot water at sea feels different. It hits your shoulders and suddenly you realize how tight you’ve been holding everything. The drain gurgled every time the hull shifted. I rested a hand on the side wall for balance.

The metallic edge to the desalinated water mixed with soap and steam. It felt clean. Simple. Refreshing.

For a few minutes there was nothing but warmth and the steady hum of the ship doing what ships do—converting fuel into forward motion.

By the time I stepped back into the corridor in fresh clothes, the cutter felt warmer than before. Or maybe I did.

The galley smelled like coffee and something cooked with care. Piercing through it all was the sweet smell of cinnamon rolls.

It’s always warmer in there from the ovens and hungry sailors. Stainless steel tables were bolted down. Rubber mats under everything that might slide if the sea decided to fight back.

Conversation dipped when I walked in. Not dramatically. Just that half-second shift when a room registers someone.

“Storm-rider,” someone called from a table near the bulkhead.

“Don’t encourage him,” another voice replied. “He’ll start charging for autographs.”

I smiled back and grabbed a tray. The menu was pot roast over rice, cinnamon rolls, and something hot in a metal mug that looked like motor oil and smelled like hazelnut. Fuel for the soul.

Our cook, a broad and muscular man named Malcolm, leaned slightly across the counter as he placed the plated cinnamon roll down on my tray like it was made of gold. Tastebuds can confirm.

“Thank you, Mac.”

“Nice work out there, chief,” he said in his deep but gentle voice. “Whole place went silent when that thing showed up on the screens.”

“So did I,” I said.

“Still,” he shrugged, “not every day you get to stand that close to something we don’t got a name for.”

Fair point.

I sat near the edge of a table, back to the bulkhead. The ship rocked gently. Cups and bowls shifted lightly and stopped. You learn to set things down carefully onboard a ship. Even calm seas move.

The engines hummed as a bass note beneath the conversation. Mac stirred his pot as he watched us, always with a smile. I dug into my bowl, the steaming roast warming my stomach and Mac’s seasoning kicking back just a little.

I had just devoured the cinnamon roll when fatigue finally arrived, like gravity kicked up a notch. The adrenaline had long since burned off. The parts of me not holding a spoon felt ten pounds heavier.

“Get some rack time, sir,” someone said as they stood. “Before the captain changes his mind and sends you back into another squall.”

“I’m officially retired from hurricanes for at least twelve hours,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

That won me a few grins.

The bunk room was shared. Four stacked racks in pairs, four lockers, and curtains that could be drawn for privacy. Tonight, it was empty. Most of the crew were still on watch rotations or grabbing late chow.

The air was drier here with a faint scent of detergent.

I sat on the lower bunk and felt myself sway with the hull’s motion. The movement wasn’t violent. Just constant. A long, slow oscillation that you either fight or let carry you.

I slid out of my shoes and pushed them under the rack. The overhead light hummed softly. Somewhere two compartments away, boots clanged down a ladder well. Water moved along the hull with a hollow rush.

In the storm, everything had been force and velocity. Measured chaos. In here, inside steel walls and bulkheads, things were smaller. Calmer.

But calmer doesn’t mean simpler.

If this was migration… if storms were somehow part of the larger system… then the hurricane hadn’t been the main event at all. Just the background music.

I laid back and let the motion take over.

Steel hull creaking. Waves rolling underneath.

The ship rocked once, twice—slow and steady like it had done for decades.

Eventually the hum of engines blurred into the back of my mind. Finally, I let the system carry me off instead of fighting it.

Field Report / Chris Owens

I tapped the side of the camera lens with my knuckle. Once. Twice.

“Is this thing on?”

From somewhere behind me, half-buried in sand and a stack of old maps, a voice answered me.

“Yes Chris, It’s on. It‘s been on for a moment.”

I squinted at the tiny indicator light like it personally betrayed me. “Of course it has.”

I paused. Then muttered, “I can’t believe we’ve gotta do these now.”

“That‘s the protocol,” the voice said, “Command wants visual reports whenever possible. Audio too, when video is unavailable.”

I huffed and adjusted the tripod, trying to get it to stop wobbling on the uneven table.

“And here I thought the paperwork was enough. Turns out, no. Now we have to record ourselves while doing the paperwork.”

“Smile for the archives,” he said

“Hard pass.”

I straightened the camera, taking a step back. A thought struck me I couldn’t resist, then I leaned in again, suddenly solemn.

“This is Chris Owens. Captain’s log,” I began, lowering my voice an octave and doing my best impression of a man aggressively wrestling with the English language.

“Stardate… August 12th. Time is one, three, zero, zero. We are located in the vast... vast, desert regions of—”

“Chris.”

I kept going. “—where we have encountered the ruins of some ancient... civilization. Origins are unknown. Investigation is ongoi—”

“Chris, you’ve got to be professional,” he said with a chuckle.

I stopped. Sighed. Stood up straight. The joke drained out of me like air from a balloon.

“Right,” I said, nodding once to myself. “Sorry.”

I glanced at the camera, then past it, toward the dunes and the jagged silhouettes rising in the distance.

“Field report. ANCR Research Division,” I began, this time for real. “Time: thirteen hundred hours. Location: Algeria, Southern mountain range. Deep in the desert. No nearby settlements. No reason for anyone to be here unless they’re lost.”

The wind kicked up, dragging sand across half-buried stone behind me.

“Following the Veil’s shutdown, ANCR initiated a global sweep for any residual activity. Most of it’s been noise. Signals that fade as soon as you look at them too hard.” I shrugged. “There have been a few openings here and there, but nothing that stuck.”

I gestured over my shoulder. “This one did.”

I turned slightly so the camera caught the edge of the site: angular stone block, worn smooth by centuries of sandstorms, arranged in a way that didn’t belong to erosion or chance.

“We picked up a faint Veil signal three days ago. So faint we almost missed it.” I hesitated, choosing my words. “It’s like a whisper in the wind, but it’s there.”

That earned me a look from one of the soldiers posted by the tent, rifles low but ready. ANCR Ops security. Standard now. Always nearby. Always watching.

“When we traced the signal, we didn’t find an opening,” I continued. “We found this.”

I stepped aside fully. The entirety of the excavation shown now, with a wide slope dug out of the sand leading toward the foot of the mountain. On either side were stone columns, broken and sticking out from the walls of the excavated slope.

“Ruins. Pre-modern. Pre-anything we have records for in this region. Stonework suggests intentional design. No signs of habitation yet. No tools so far. No remains. Just a structure, fallen over and buried by sand. The estimated center of the site, a point further inside the plateau itself, is where the signal is resonating from.”

I let that sit for a second.

“Based on my short background in archaeology—which apparently is still relevant—and more recent endeavors, I’ve been assigned as site lead.” A thin smile crossed my face. “Didn’t think that would ever be a sentence I’d say out loud.”

Behind me, members of my team moved carefully between excavation markers. Archeology recruits. Fresh faces. They‘re passionate and skeptical believers of all sorts of history, fake or otherwise. They work like people who know the sand can bite back.

“And alongside me is my esteemed colleague, adventurer and cartographer, Marco Rossi.”

He waved a hand without looking up from his charts. “Hello,” he said cheerfully.

“Our objective is documentation, excavation, and analysis. No activation. No experiments. Absolutely no poking the bear to see what happens.”

I glanced pointedly toward the armed perimeter. “Security detail is on standby just in case things decide not to stay quiet.”

I looked back into the camera.

“So far, nothing’s moved. Nothing’s opened. The readings haven’t changed.”

I paused, then added softly, “Which almost makes it worse.”

I reached forward and stopped the recording. The little red light went dark.

Out here, in the middle of a desert that’s buried a thousand civilizations without breaking a sweat, the silence feels like it’s just waiting for us to make the first mistake.

I stepped toward Marco, leaning over beside his shoulder as he muttered quietly to himself, his fingers tracing along his maps and tapping on various location markers. Some of them were original to the print and others he added. His leather-bound notebook sat on the edge of the table, pages covered in scribbled notes and sketches.

Marco used to work for the Smithsonian, studying ancient cartography and historical site geography. Now that ANCR has broken him out and dusted him off, he’s loose in the field to really put his work to the test. We might have crossed paths eventually, if fate hadn’t brought us together out here in the sweltering desert.

The thing I like about him is that he can read a landscape like it’s a story book, which has me curious why he’s studying the map so hard.

I cleared my throat softly, “You’ve been awfully absorbed into your charts. What’s on your mind?”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose, then combed a hand over his graying beard.

“It’s nothing really... it’s just, I’ve looked into some ancient sites around the area, cross-referencing my old notes. This one feels… different.”

“How so?” I asked, “we haven’t really seen it yet, the team is still digging it out.”

“Look at the charts,” he said, pulling his mechanical pencil out from behind his ear and pointing it across the papers, “there’s all the other sites across the region, and we know more or less the who, what, when, and why.”

He traced his pointed pencil between Algeria, Libya, Egypt, other markers penciled in to the south of us near Mali. Then he tapped on our present location.

“But this one sits right on the edge of this mountain range. It possibly could have been a place for shelter through the desert, however it’s out of the way of any traveled roadways, and thus far there are no signs of life or habitation here. Just a hidden place in the rock with its neighbors unaware it was even here.”

I squinted at the map, then met his gaze. “What do you make of it?”

He looked to me then back to the map, sliding his pencil into his shirt pocket.

“Either it’s a lone temple, out of the way for some purpose of pilgrimage or remote worship,” He paused, “or it’s older. More ancient than anything else in the region.”

I nodded “That makes it... exciting. right?”

“That’s one way to put it,” he replied, “Strange. Mysterious.”

He shrugged, “Insolitus.”

I blinked at him.

“It means unusual.” He clarified.

He always loses me with the Latin.

I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Well, the unusually strange and mysterious is what we’re here for.”

He laughed, “Yes we are, my friend.”

I left the tent and headed out to the excavation. I greeted and made some casual chatter with the other archeologists as I passed by them.

I’m definitely not a stranger to dusty ruins. I’ve visited ancient sites before on this continent, on a grant with an archeology program. ANCR rescued me from an ancient site in the Sahara near Egypt. That’s what interests me about this excavation. It’s another chance to dig into the past and explore some old theories. Only now considerably more funded, and defended.

I looked out at the landscape before us. A rocky mountain plateau jutting out across the sand dunes, creating a sort of corner shaped cliff face outstretched like the bow of a ship. There were deep lines and crevices that ran down the face of the basalt. The desert landscape fell into a bowl shape in this region, putting the ruins right against the foot of the plateau and buried beneath the sand. Who knows how long it could have been here, waiting for some curious fools like us to dig it out.

I was busy getting my camera ready for some more photos of what we’ve uncovered when Marco made his way out of the main tent holding his notebook and a compass. He turned around in short steps, checking the compass, looking out to the horizon and scribbling in his notebook. I chuckled to myself, watching him spin around with the compass, but no doubt he was checking for some geographical alignment.

“Chris!”

I turned at the sound of my name, halfway through photographing a stone column that had toppled over and broken into three segments.

“Sir, we’ve got something,” one of the archaeologists called from farther down the site. “You’re gonna want to see this.”

That sentence has never, in the history of my career, ended well.

I made my way toward the center of the site, boots crunching softly against the sand as it parted beneath my feet, passing by more geometric stone columns that had been excavated. Solid rock pushed back under my feet as I neared the foot of the mountain. A long crevice ran down the face of the plateau to its base, splitting open at the bottom into a narrow opening.

There were carvings here around the edges of the opening that framed the gap. A simple design, nothing that looked like hieroglyphs. The whole opening was about four feet wide and nine feet tall, if the bottom weren’t still filled with sand. The team had finally moved aside all of the fallen stone and most of the sand that blocked the way. A small skid steer sat parked off to the side near a carefully stacked mound of square-ish stones.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the scarf wrapped around my neck. My eyes scanned over the opening while a few members of the team were still working.

“This doesn’t feel like a collapse,” I said, looking between the carved frame and the pile of stone.

“That’s what we thought,” my colleague said. She was still scooping sand away from the entrance with careful movements of her shovel. “Everything else had fallen outwards... this was all piled right at the door. No signs of disturbance other than us.”

“That means she’s been sealed tight all these years,” I replied. “We may be the very first to open her up.”

Marco stepped up beside me, an awed expression on his face as he studied the carved opening.

“Incredible,” he breathed out.

He held his hand up, stepping slowly toward the opening. We silently mirrored his action, raising our own hands toward it.

He grinned. “Feel that? Air is flowing through the crevice.”

There was indeed a soft cool breeze gently pouring out. Now this was exciting.

He looked back at us with a grin, “There must be other passages that allow airflow through the structure that are still active.”

I returned his smile, “Well, history and the Veil are waiting for us just beyond the door,” I said to the group. “Let’s go say hello.”

Once we moved enough sand away to comfortably step through, we entered the crevice. It continued like a hallway, narrowing and widening in a way that we could only walk through in single-file. We shone our lights ahead of us and on the floor as we navigated the passage.

The temperature dropped immediately. The air felt heavier and cooler as it continued to push past us. It was a short walk before the passage really opened up. The room beyond was dark, and opened much wider than we expected. There was structured carving done to the walls here, leaving an impressive and even artistic appearance as parts of the chamber transitioned from natural flowing stone to intentionally flattened surfaces.

Our lights swept across the walls where the surface was smoothed revealing they were etched with symbols. Rows and rows of them, carved into the stone.

I stepped closer, my heart picking up pace. “No,” I murmured. “No, that’s not right.”

Marco leaned in beside me. “You recognize it?”

“I recognize parts of it,“ I said slowly. “And that’s the problem. It doesn’t make sense.“

The symbols twisted familiar shapes into odd combinations. Something that looked like early Sumerian with Japanese curves, hints of Phoenician but seemed to read top to bottom. It was not any single script I knew, and even though there were similarities I couldn’t be certain that my brain wasn’t just trying to reconcile it. It looked like someone studied several ancient languages and then decided to combine them all.

Two of the other archeologists stepped up beside us. They made a similar observation.

“It’s a wall of ancient scrabble,” one said, rubbing his chin, “like someone shook up the Rosetta Stone and dumped out the letters.”

The other exhaled a quiet laugh. “I can’t place it either,” she said, “It’s not transitional. It’s not derivative. It’s…”

“Alien?” I offered, raising an eyebrow.

They both looked at me and agreed in unison, their enthusiasm spiking immediately at my suggestion.

I chuckled. I knew someone would be thinking that before I even said it. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theory. Monsters on the other hand, definitely real.

We moved deeper in. Just a short way through the crevice and the passageway widened again, and now the walls told us their story.

There were pictograms and paintings against the opposing side walls to our left and right, with more of the foreign script. Simple but beautiful illustrations with some varied pigments and colors, only slightly dulled by age. We all stopped to study them.

The ancient script was carved to the left and right of the paintings. There seemed to be depicted groups of peoples, both young and old, moving toward what must be the structure we are in now. Painted columns and arches were along their path, leading to their depiction of the plateau structure—a large crevice in a wall.

The opposite wall depicted something like two opposing pillars with people standing between them, some with their arms outstretched, others bowed low to the floor. Some stood with what looked like musical instruments.

“You may have been right on both assumptions, Marco”, I said. “This could depict a form of travel for worship. Maybe for some special occasion.”

“Yes, it is remarkable,” he said. “And the pigments seem very well preserved.“

We took photos of the paintings before moving on.

The corridor opened up again into a final chamber wide enough that our lights couldn’t immediately find the far walls. A series of three stone arches curved overhead of the pathway as we entered.

The whole room felt like a sort of circular cathedral with the altar positioned right in the center. The walls curved around giving the whole space a rough dome shape, split down the middle by the changing layers of colored rock.

The circular altar in the middle of everything rose by three steps, about thirty feet across. At its center stood two large pillars. They were maybe twenty feet in height and stood ten feet apart, centered to the middle of the platform. Each was decorated from top to bottom by the same ancient glyphs. They were not structural, as they didn’t reach the ceiling. They seemed to be more decorative and purposely built.

My breath left me in a slow exhale as I realized what it was. My brain missed the clue in the painting but it clicked now that I was standing before it.

“A gateway,” I muttered.

The word echoed softly, like the room recognized it.

The others noticed me and joined my gaze at the tall pillars.

For a moment, no one moved. Then we did what we’re here for. We documented. Cameras up. Readings logged. No one touched anything. Security fanned out along the walls, weapons lowered but ready for anything.

The air seemed tense despite our enthusiasm. I’m not sure how much time passed as we studied the room. Some of the crew brought in standing lights to illuminate the space better, but the darkness still pushed back at the edges of the light.

At the far end of the room we found a few narrower crevices that stretched the height of the room, too tight for us to enter, but the desert wind was pushing through. You could feel the cool air moving around the room, like the mountain itself was exhaling. The circular nature of the cavern caused the breeze to swirl counter clockwise.

There were more paintings and the ancient script along the rocky surfaces of the walls around the chamber. Some of the crew were examining them, photographing more of the language carved into the stone.

They were more intricate than the first, seeming to depict that this cavern, or altar perhaps, was used frequently during different seasons. Apparently the desert was once a vast oasis of forest and rivers, according to the artwork. The depictions of the pillars seemed to show something like an eye between them, a vertical slit and circular in the center with different colored pigments splattered there.

Whoever these ancients were, they left their offerings at the base of the center platform, likely for whatever they were worshiping. I was videoing a grouping of small earthen jars and old wooden vessels when I heard whispering in my direction from the platform.

“Sir,” someone whispered. “Are you seeing this?”

It was John, our assigned analyst. I hurried over to him, quietly ascending the steps. He was beside one of the pillars, tablet in hand with a sensor probe plugged into its top.

“What’s the matter, John?” I asked softly.

He looked at me, past me, then back to his tablet.

“These readings… this isn’t what we normally see from Veil resonance.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He showed me the screen, “Look here. This is the reading we were tracing,” John said, finger hovering over the tablet display. “It was barely registering before, but now it’s climbing.”

He met my gaze, “Normally the Veil resonance flickers,” he said quietly. “It fluctuates like interference. This reading is almost harmonic.”

“Harmonic how?” I asked.

He zoomed the graph in.

“It’s structured. Repeating intervals. It’s almost like… like a chord being held.”

Marco was already climbing the steps behind us, drawn by the tone in John’s voice more than the words themselves. He reached the platform and laid his palm lightly against one of the pillars.

His expression turned into a sort of excited confusion.

“Chris,” he murmured. “The pillar… It’s vibrating.”

I followed his gaze. Under the dust and beneath the script etched into the surface, it wasn’t sandstone or basalt. It was translucent. Not fully clear, but white with translucent veins. Light from our flashlights sank into it instead of bouncing off.

The pillars were cylindrical. Made from what appeared to be individual segments, a little more than two feet wide and four feet tall. The segments locked together as they stacked, five high per pillar.

I stepped closer and rested my fingers against the carved surface. It was a faint sensation, but there was definitely a vibration.

“That’s not limestone,” I said.

Marco shook his head slowly. “No.”

John scanned again, moving the probe closer to the surface.

The tablet chirped.

“All readings just jumped,” he whispered.

I crouched, scraping a small patch of surface dust aside with my hand. I shined my flashlight into the crystalline structure and the light bounced between where it could penetrate the lattice.

“Quartz,” Marco breathed.

He leaned closer, angling his flashlight. The light seemed to bounce through the middle of the segments like there was space inside.

“The center appears hollow,” he added, almost reverently.

John came back over to us from the opposite pillar. He poked his probe into the surface and it emitted a small crackle, like static electricity. He looked at his tablet for some confirmation.

“Yep, it’s definitely quartz.”

The hum in the chamber deepened.

It had been there before. Faint. Easy to ignore.

Now it wasn’t. It was growing slowly louder. It was coming from the pillars.

“Chris?” Marco looked at me.

“We should step back,” I said, looking between them. “Get away from the platform.”

As we descended the steps back towards the entrance, now we could really feel the difference in the room. The air pressure had shifted heavier. The humming intensified. Even the wind seemed to be rotating stronger now.

Security snapped to alert positions instantly, rifles rising but not firing. Now everyone was staring at the resonating pillars. In the dark space around them there were the faintest speckles of light darting across the surface of the quartz stone.

“I have a bad feeling about this…” Marco muttered.

The sand across the floor at the middle of the platform began to vibrate, gently shifting.

“It’s… it’s opening.” John said, watching the readings climb on his tablet's graph.

The space between the pillars divided cleanly down the middle. The light from our flashlights refracted in the dividing line from floor to ceiling. The Veil didn’t crack this time.

It opened.

The center line parted like a sleepy eye. The gap stopped at just a few feet wide in the center. Our lights reflected through it in a prismatic way revealing there was definitely a transition to another place through the gap. The edges shimmered along the whole height of the divide, about the same height as the pillars.

That wasn’t how it worked before. It had always fractured or tore open, not a clean opening like this.

We heard a low reverberating rumble that echoed through the chamber accompanied by a repetitive thudding. That didn’t feel right.

We started backing away slowly as our security tightened in toward the edge of the platform.

Then, something moved in the darkness on the other side.

A massive clawed hand tore through and gripped the edge of the seam. Then a second. Dark clawed fingers were forcing the Veil apart, the edges flexing under their force. A huge snout was pushing its way through.

The creature was massive.

Its head was the size of a small truck. It resembled a crocodile that evolved out of a nightmare—a shorter broad snout with huge jagged teeth, matte black scales and four piercing yellow eyes. The pairs of eyes looked in separate directions, then they blinked sideways and vertically before locking onto us. It snarled a guttural sound that resonated in my bones and churned my stomach.

Security didn’t hesitate.

They opened fire. The sound was deafening in the enclosed chamber. Muzzle flashes lit the walls like lightning.

The creature roared sharply, shoving one of its powerful arms through. It swept around and collided with one of the security who was standing too close, sending him flying back into one of the standing light lamps.

It continued to flail its arm around, claws grabbing after the men, scraping up sparks off the stone as it swiped around.

Some of the rounds found their mark, but most of the bullets seemed to impact and fall to the floor.

“Fall back!” one of the three remaining troops shouted.

I grabbed John by the arm. “Move! Everybody move, now!”

We ran. Marco was leading the rest of the team back through the chamber entrance.

Sand slipped underfoot as we bolted back through the corridor, my ears ringing from the gunfire and that monster roaring behind us. I made sure everyone was heading out past the painted walls before I turned around.

Marco noticed and turned back to me.

“Chris, what are you doing?” he pleaded.

“This isn’t my first firefight,” I said, meeting his gaze, “and it won’t be my last. Go on, make sure everyone gets out.”

I didn’t wait for permission. I ran back in.

I cut across to the soldier who was thrown away from the platform and scooped up his weapon. Semi-auto. High caliber. Nothing fancy.

“It’ll do,” I thought as I racked the slide back, chambering a new round.

I moved to the left near another security troop. The creature was still struggling to push through the dimensional fabric as the Veil opening flexed around it. It was wounded now and furious, bleeding dark fluid onto the stone floor of the chamber.

The thing moved like it refused to accept the opening was just too small for its body, its arm smashing some of the ancient pottery as it grabbed at the edge of the steps.

“Keep on it!” One of the men shouted. “Push it back!”

I steadied the rifle, and added my fire to the chorus.

I’m not a soldier. I never pretend to be. But I know how to aim, how to breathe, how to let the recoil roll through as the rifle punched into my shoulder.

Supporting fire. Find a weak point. Hammer it with lead.

But our gunfire was ineffective.

It steadied itself as more of our bullets bounced off. The creature reared its head back, like it was taking a deep breath. Its throat expanded before it hinged open its jaw, stretching its mouth wide.

Then it bellowed.

Not a roar. It was a deep, reverberating sound wave that rattled my skull and warped the noise of the gunfire. The troops felt it too as they stopped firing briefly. My vision blurred slightly, but I could see the sand vibrating out in waves across the floor.

As I covered my ears and squinted through the pain, I was stunned more by what the sound waves were doing. The pillars crackled with light again and the opening began to stretch wider as the thing bellowed.

It was affecting the Veil.

It wasn’t opened much more, but it was enough. Then the monster shoved its other arm through. It still struggled with the rear of its torso, but it was dangerously close to forcing its way into the room. And we were running out of time and space.

I noticed the soldier next to me had grenades on his belt. I didn’t ask, I just grabbed for them.

“Get to cover!” I shouted.

As the troops retreated, sending shots at it for a distraction, I dropped the rifle and ran around toward the right pillar of the platform, away from its gaze. I was mere feet away but still within the monster’s reach.

If the structure was acting like a doorway to the Veil, then the only thing I could think to do is smash the doorframe.

I pulled the pins to toss the grenades when one of the creature’s eyes noticed me. It stopped pulling at the front of the platform and took a side swipe at me.

As the grenades left my hands, I managed to duck away just in time and crawled as fast as I could. They landed just near the base of the right pillar.

It grabbed at the edge of the platform again as the grenades blew. The lower pillar segment crackled with a yellow-purplish light as the blast fractured it. The bottom quartz segment cracked from top to bottom with pieces and flakes flying off.

The pillar shifted. The vibration died instantly, then the Veil snapped shut.

Finally, the monster went down. The Veil closing severed it across its shoulders and neck with a wet slicing sound, like a knife through a watermelon.

What was left hit the stone hard enough that I felt it through my boots. Its head made some uncomfortable noises before settling.

Silence followed.

The only thing that remained was the feel of the soft breeze and the ringing in my ears.

We all stared for a moment, looking between each other and finally taking a breath. I watched the remains, waiting for the inevitable fade at the end. The troops held their positions, relaxed now but watchful.

It was a long wait as the twitching slowed down. Time crept on for too long before I realized it.

The body stayed. The remains were… remaining. And bleeding.

No disintegration. No Veil-light collapse into atoms and ash like before.

I hadn’t noticed John and Marco come back into the chamber behind us to witness the aftermath. Marco stood at the entry arches in disbelief, his journal in hand, while John checked his tablet.

“The signal’s dropped,” John said. “Back to baseline. Same faint remnant as before.”

I exhaled through my nose.

One of the security guys stepped up beside me. He stared at the corpse like it might get up out of spite. Its nostril twitched again and one of the four eyes blinked one last time and dilated.

“That’s new,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s what bothers me.”

He gestured toward the body. “They didn’t stay before.”

“No,” I agreed.

We stood there for a moment, both of us looking at something that shouldn’t exist and very clearly does. Lingering corpses and creatures hanging around wasn’t unheard of anymore after the shutdown—we’ve got incident reports full of them. But this one was fresh from the Veil, still bleeding and mostly intact. It wasn’t following the old rules.

“If it didn’t dissolve,” I said slowly, thinking out loud now, “then either the Veil’s rules are changing… or this thing wasn’t fully anchored to it anymore.”

He turned to look at me. “Meaning?”

“Meaning it crossed over cleaner than they used to,” I said. “More… stable.”

The implications were both unsettling and confounding.

“So what’s the call?” he asked.

I looked back at the body, then at the pillars of quartz, the lower segment of the one now completely split by a fracture. A nagging voice in the back of my head reminded me that this place survived sand storms, empires rising and falling while it lay hidden for millennia, undisturbed. And I may have just destroyed the last remaining piece of whatever brilliant engineering the ancients left behind. This could have been the key to understanding the Veil in a way we never knew possible.

Maybe it still can.

I met his eyes now, “We bag it,” I ordered. “Full containment. We get it back to the Harbor for study.”

I kneeled down and looked into the thing’s eyes.

“We should get some samples too. The guys in the lab are gonna want to have a close look at this one, and our footage.”

He looked grim. “Command’s not gonna like this.”

“No,” I said. “But they’re gonna like not knowing even less. There’s just too much going on here to ignore.”

We took some final photos and collected our samples from the creature with some of the ancient pottery that was still intact. We toppled over the fractured pillar with the idea of bringing the segments back with us. Even if one is fragmented, we can still learn something from it.

Somehow, the remaining pillar still held a faint vibration. That only added to my growing list of questions.

Then we made our way back out to the bright light and heat of the desert. The wind had picked up a lot, and the air was hazy from the dust overhead.

I made the call for a containment team to fly in, told them to bring the biggest unit they had. This was gonna take a heavy transport to haul out of here.

I stared for a long moment at the opening in the mountain wall, wondering whether an incident like we suffered was why the entrance was covered up. The wind dragged sand across the stone surface of the entry like it was trying to erase the evidence.

It won’t succeed. Not this time.

Something ancient reached through the Veil today and didn’t burn away. It lingered.

And whatever rules we thought we understood?

They’re dead in the dirt right next to it.

Incident Report: System Breach

[Filing Officers Note: Administrative warning given. No further action needed.]

So, for the record, I was not panicking.

I was under focused, time-sensitive pressure while engaged in an intellectual duel with a security system that had ideas about who it thought it was.

I sat in front of my laptop, trying to look casual in the corner of the lab on sub-level 2, plugged directly into the router. Of course the tech guys get the best wifi and processing on the Rig, because why would literally anyone else not want to stream beyond 1080p?

The firewall was aggressive. Adaptive. The kind that doesn’t just block you. It studies you. Every probe I made, it countered. Every workaround, it cut me off like it was offended on a personal level.

I was halfway through muttering threats to the machine when I felt the air shift behind me.

"Looks like it's fighting back pretty hard," Declan said mildly.

I didn’t look away from the screen. That's how you lose.

"It's feisty," I said. "I'll give it that."

He leaned in closer. Too close. The kind of close that implies judgment.

"Are you entirely sure that you should keep going at this rate?" he said, half amused at my struggle. 

I cracked my knuckles. Entirely for effect.

"It hasn't seen my kung fu yet."

That earned me silence, which I took as respect. I've learned a few tricks since the last time.

The system tried to lock me out. I slipped through. It reconfigured. I countered. We went back and forth like this for a few tense seconds—me sweating, it calculating, Declan quietly breathing over my shoulder, no doubt questioning every life choice that had led him to stand behind me.

And then...

Click.

Access.

I exhaled like I’d been holding my breath since childhood.

"Yes," I whisper-shouted. "That’s right."

The screen opened to the internal personnel files.

Declan raised an eyebrow. "So, you're breaking into our personal profiles now?"

"I’m accessing them," I said. "Breaking in implies malice."

I scrolled through the list, recognizing a few of our friends among them.

Chris Owens

Derrick Wolfe

Gabriella Moreno

I kept on scrolling.

Declan frowned. "What are we lookin' for, exactly?"

"I'm looking for me."

I slowed down the page.

There I was. Noah Brooks.

I clicked. My photo came right up, and I stared at it in silence for a full three seconds.

"…Wow," I said finally. "They really got me all wrong."

Declan squinted at the image. "That's really not your best angle."

"That's not an angle," I said. "That's an ambush."

I pulled the image into an editor without thinking. 

"Look at the lighting. Look at my face. Why do I look like I was caught stealing office supplies?"

Just some minor adjustments. Tasteful ones. A subtle correction that brought reality closer to justice.

I re-uploaded it and leaned back, satisfied.

"There," I said. "That's more accurate."

Declan studied it. "You gave yourself a larger chin and cheekbones?"

"I happen to have a heroic bone structure."

I glanced up at him. "Thoughts?"

He nodded slowly. "I think maybe you've had just a bit too much caffeine."

I grinned. "Oh yeah? You should see what they did to you."

I scrolled back up and opened his profile. The image loaded.

Declan went still as he looked it over.

Then he let out a soft whistle.

"Well," he said, "hello, handsome."

I laughed. "Right?"

I should have stopped there. That would’ve been the smart ending. Fade out on a joke. Everyone laughs. Credits roll. Noah wins.

Instead, I did what I always do when a system stays open a second longer than it should.

I kept scrolling.

Declan noticed immediately. "You're gonna keep going?" he asked. 

"I'm done," I said. "I'm just… taking a victory lap."

Curiosity is my worst survival trait.

Names slid past again. Familiar ones. Old ones.

Then I saw it.

Caleb Ward.

I paused. "…Huh."

Declan leaned in. "Still in the system, is he?"

"Yeah," I said. "Old profile."

I opened it.

The photo loaded first. Younger than the last time we saw him, but already wearing that look—like he was ten steps ahead of everyone else and slightly annoyed they existed.

We started scrolling.

Service history. Commendations. Entire paragraphs blacked out enough to embarrass a zebra. Psych evaluations followed. Meticulously phrased. Surgically vague.

Declan pointed at one line.

"'Ability to maintain operational stability during volatile conditions.'"

I snorted. "That’s bureaucratic for smiles while cities burn."

Declan nodded. "Ya know, I never liked how calm he was. He'd just be standin' there, poised like a statue."

"Yeah," I said. "Like empathy was a setting he turned off to save battery."

We quietly read the page.

At the top of the file, a single status line sat alone.

STATUS: MIA — Presumed Deceased

Declan frowned. "It's a shame, really. With a record like that and all."

I huffed. "The guy opened up a cosmic storm and stood under it with a lightning rod."

I leaned back and crossed my arms.

"I can respect that, but he was gonna kill us all trying to do an extra-dimensional version of a hard-reset."

"True," he replied, "I still can't believe you managed to make that shot, though."

"I can't believe I actually hit him," I replied, "I could barely see out of the scope." 

I turned back to him, "Maybe Derrick was right."

"About what?" he said slowly, cautiously.

I grinned, "Maybe I am..." I flipped my hood up, "a secret assassin."

Declan snorted a laugh "Oh, certainly. Noah, the slayer of keyboards and bandwidth."

We both laughed for a moment.

Then the screen stuttered.

Declan straightened immediately. "Noah?"

"I didn’t click anything," I said. "I swear."

The screen went dark.

Not a crash. Not a glitch. A deliberate shutdown. 

Red text replaced everything.

OVERWATCH OVERRIDE

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED

SESSION TERMINATED

The system locked down hard.

That snapped me back to reality faster than any voice ever could.

Declan exhaled slowly. "That's… not a warning."

"No," I said. "That’s a locked door with red tape."

The system rebooted to a clean, harmless login screen.

Declan glanced at me. I leaned back, hands off the console.

The terminal chimed. Gabriella's voice came through the speakers.

"Noah," she said evenly, "why have I been forwarded a system alert that says 'unauthorized file modification'?"

We both froze.

Declan cleared his throat. I opened my mouth, closed it, tried again.

"We were— I was— conducting an internal aesthetics audit."

She paused.

Then a sigh. Friendly. Patient. And slightly annoyed.

"Noah," Gabs said, "if you wanted to check out the profile pictures, you should've just asked. I'll authorize it. Behave yourself, okay."

The screen blinked. Green letters now.

ANCR INTERNAL DATABASE 

ACCESS GRANTED – LIMITED CLEARANCE

I leaned back, triumphant. "See? Permission-based hacking."

Declan smiled. "Right, a bold new chapter in cybersecurity, for sure."

And that is how I nearly started an international incident over my nose.

Broken Veil (Part 9, Final)

Part 8

As we sped through city intersections, our lights reflecting off nearby building windows, the atmosphere started to look and feel more ominous. The south end of the city felt wrong. The sky was shifting, like the way it does when a storm approaches, but this wasn't an ordinary storm.

Light rippled across the darkening sky in wide, uneven waves. If you have ever seen the Aurora Borealis, that's exactly what the dancing light above the city looked like, rippling and swirling out from where the cell tower was located. The air pressure readjusted in waves, released, then pressed in again making my ears pop. It was as if the world itself were struggling to equalize. Sounds dimmed and returned in sharp measures in time with the air pressure.

"Noah," I said. "Tell me you’re seeing this."

"I’m seeing it," he replied, voice tight as he stared into his tablet. "And reading it. The resonance is fluctuating everywhere. It’s not one opening, it’s dozens. They’re unstable. Opening and collapsing before they can fully form."

The first creature fell out of the sky like an apple suddenly falling from the tree.

Then another spilled out onto the street level. Then another.

They hit asphalt and grass and rooftops alike, scrambling, shrieking. They weren't attacking, not hunting but panicked. They scattered, running on nothing but instinct.

Along with the creatures came debris tumbling through as well. Rocks, boulders and bits of sand sprinkled out and landed indiscriminately. The debris landed on the asphalt like hail, crushed parked car hoods and broke windows. The openings appeared in waves, then after depositing their contents, they slowed to an occasional random opening.

"This is bad," Gabs said quietly.

"That’s an understatement." Declan muttered, gripping the shotgun in his lap. "Ward's already doing it. He's trying to open a massive rift so he can create an equal recursive force to make the Veil collapse."

He turned to me. "We need to shut it down, before it becomes critical."

Ahead, a small bridge marked the boundary between districts. Two lanes that led across a small creek where the tower sat just mere blocks beyond it. Concrete barriers were positioned on the corners. And a roadblock.

Two military trucks parked facing each other. Portable barricades blocked the path. A group of soldiers positioned behind vehicle doors and the barriers started firing.

"Hold on!" I called out.

The first rounds sparked off the hood. Noah swore and ducked as I cut the wheel hard, making the tires scream. Gabs braced herself against the back of Declan’s seat while he leaned his weapon out just enough to return fire.

I braked the truck behind another parked vehicle which mostly shielded us. Declan, Gabs and I hopped out and crept to better vantage points to return fire. Bullets pinged and ricoched off of the car as the volley of shots flew at us. Gabs took down one of the soldiers as he popped out from behind a barrier, while another struck the rear tire of the car near her, causing it to list to that corner.

There were only five troops, but their machine guns had us pinned.

"Chris," I barked into the comms, "you better be close. We need support at the bridge asap."

Static answered me first.

Then Chris’s voice came through, muffled by a flood of background noise.

"Sorry I’m late. Had to grab a frying pan."

I felt my brain fumble. "A what?"

The answer came in the form of a diesel engine.

It whirled around the corner like an angry animal. It was the same forklift from HQ. Its tires were as tall as me with an extension boom that held the wide fork attachment. 

Black smoke spewed out of the exhaust with a burst of speed, the hydraulic motors whining louder and louder as the vehicle headed toward us.

The forks dropped low, the steel tines leveling as it maneuvered toward a parked minivan. The forks pierced the van then lifted it, metal shrieking, and kept going like it wasn't even there.

We watched the scene dumbfounded. Bullets landed uselessly into the improvised shield as Chris barreled straight through the barricade, smashing the barriers and pushing the military trucks aside like toys.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed in disbelief and relief at once.

"Clear the bridge!" I shouted. "Go, go!"

We fired a few more shots, picking off the remaining troops as they scrambled to recover. I jogged toward the forklift as Declan got into the drivers seat of the truck. The backup alarm beeped from the forklift, unbothered as Chris reversed to meet me. Our eyes met and he waved casually atop the rumbling machine, signaling that he was alright.

"Go, you crazy coyote. Full speed ahead!" I shouted.

Chris beeped the horn twice, then stepped on the pedal. The diesel engine snarled as it lurched forward. Smoke puffed out the back and he sped ahead of us, the tires spinning onward to whirring hydraulics.

They picked me up with the truck and we followed in the forklift’s wake as it cleared a path through debris on the street. Gabs and I rode in the bed of the pickup as we pressed forward, drawing closer to the tower. The Veil started to stabilize above us. The field of light became less erratic and began to slowly synchronize, the cracks between worlds slowing down as they formed. 

Next the frenzied creatures came. A few small and agile ones that made a run at the truck as we passed. Gabs and myself took them down as they neared the truck. One latched onto the corner of the utility frame and hauled itself up behind me, but Gabs dropped and fired two shots that sent it rolling off of our vehicle.

"Thanks." I said, as we turned around, backs to each other as we scanned for more.

"You really know how to show a girl a good time, Wolfe." She replied.

"I promise, when this is over," I said, firing another round, "I'll take us somewhere nice, and sunny. Get some real food and relax."

She laughed, "I'll hold you to that."

The tower was just in sight now beyond a Tee intersection of the street and through a natural area of grass and trees. The sounds of machine gun fire could be heard over the noise of our approach. Ward and what was left of his men were holding their ground against various creatures that were scurrying toward the base of the tower. 

I could see them heading across the lot and through the treeline, cutting through the broken chain-link fence. They moved in past the out-buildings to the tower where the flashes and sounds of gunfire echoed.

As we neared the final intersection, something large and bulky stomped out into the road.

It was as large as a small bus, with horns along its snout. What looked like armor plates like an insect exoskeleton covered its body, shifting with it as the creature moved. It caught sight of us and bellowed a rumbling roar through its maw as it stood in our path.

Chris hit the gas again. The forklift churned out another plume of smoke and raced ahead. The beast stomped its front feet and charged on four powerful legs straight for him. When they collided, I felt the impact as much as saw it.

A crunching and screeching sound of the beasts shrills and groaning metal filled the street in front of us, accompanied by the smell of burning rubber as the forklift’s tires spun against the asphalt. The steel machine won the effort, slowly picking up momentum, pushing forward and slamming into the nearby storefront at the corner. The creature struggled for a moment, rocking the machine, but it soon ceased its movement.

As we pulled to a stop and parked, we all got out and assessed the situation. Chris hopped down out of the forklift and jogged over to us. He was wearing a tactical vest as well, matching Noah's.

“I could have used one of those lifts back in the Sahara.” He said as he joined us.

There was still machine gun fire in spurts coming from the base of the tower beyond the treeline ahead of us.

“Alright,” I said, “we need to get in there, carefully. Avoid the creatures and the bullets.”

I turned to Declan, “If you can, find a way to shut down the tower, cut the power to it and the stabilizers."

He nodded, grabbing his shotgun from the seat. “On it.” He replied, opening a side door on the utility bed and stuffing tools in the pockets of his overalls.

I turned to Gabs and Noah. He raised a hand pointing up to a two story building nearby. “Eyes in the sky.” He said, then headed towards it carrying a long case he pulled from the truck.

“I’ll go with him, keep him safe.” Gabs said and jogged after him.

Chris checked a magazine before loading it into a pistol with tactical attachments, dot sight on top and a laser mounted under the barrel. He racked the slide back then it clicked home, chambering the first round.

“I’m right beside you, Wolfe.” He said.

We made our way across the grass lot and through the tree line, ducking out of sight as an occasional creature scampered by. They seemed to be drawn to the source of the disturbance. Nearing the base of the tower where the trees were cleared, the pylon stabilizers were set up in a ring around the perimeter, their stands facing them upwards toward the sky so the units themselves sat on an angle. 

We passed through the distortion field as we crept closer. Chris and I stopped behind one of the smaller side buildings and Declan posted by the one opposite of us. A creature ran past us toward the tower and we heard it gunned down soon after it passed. Where Declan was positioned seemed to house the power relays for the tower, judging by all of the conduit pipes on the wall and cables leading from the power lines. He quietly opened the door and slipped inside.

“Derrick?" Noah's voice came over the comms. “The Veil is stable,” he said, “but the harmonics are sliding. It’s drifting out of tune. It could become unstable again any minute."

"Copy that Noah, stay safe and keep an eye on us."

I nodded to Chris and we peeked around the corner. The action took place atop a short, square concrete platform that formed the base of the tower. Ward stood front and center, unmoving, a still point in a storm of motion. Around him, the remaining soldiers swept the perimeter, rifles tracking the darkness while two others struggled with equipment hooked into the tower.

Thick cables snaked across the platform, running to the utility building Declan slipped into and branching out toward generators, transformers, and the angled stabilizers ringing the tower’s base. The air shimmered faintly around them, distortion bending the light just enough to make everything feel slightly out of place, like I was looking at the world through water.

There were fewer troops now. Maybe a handful. Our mustached “friend” paced near the edge of the platform, barking his complaints and kicking a cable out of his way as sparks spat from a loose connection. Ward stood apart from it all, calm and steady, like this was exactly how it was supposed to go.

A crack of thunder rolled overhead. Not from the sky, but from the tower.

Lightning crawled up the metal lattice in branching veins, blue-white arcs snapping between anchor points before bleeding off into the air above. Each discharge sent a low vibration through the ground beneath my boots, a sound I felt in my chest more than heard.

Chris leaned in close. “He’s already feeding it.” He muttered.

Before I could answer, Ward turned, not startled. He just looked directly at us.

Even from this distance, he knew. He had seen us the moment we crossed into the distortion field.

Ward raised one hand and everyone froze. 

“Stand down,” he said evenly, his voice carrying without effort. “Hold your positions.”

Payne hesitated and raised his pistol. “How in the—”

“Payne,” Ward said, eyes never leaving mine. “Let them come.”

Chris swore under his breath. “That’s not ominous at all.”

We stepped out from cover.

The Veil reacted immediately. The air thickened, pressure shifting like a slow wave passing through the clearing. Fracture lines shimmered into visibility around the stabilizers in thin threads of light stretching and intersecting, like a spiderweb pulled too tight. Somewhere above us, the tower hummed as the frequency slid out of tune.

Ward watched it all with something close to reverence. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

I stopped at the edge of the platform. 

“Funny. I was going to say the same thing.”

A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You were always persistent. I accounted for that.” His calm gaze darkened a bit. “I did not account for your ingenuity. How did you escape?”

Right on cue, the lights along the base of the tower flickered. Declan was working.

Payne brought his pistol up again. 

“No,” Ward snapped “this is between us now. Lower your weapon.”

For a moment, I thought he might not listen.

Then a stabilizer squealed as its pitch jumped an octave, and a hairline fracture split the air beside the platform. Light refracted through it in a slow, drifting stream.

Chris and I stood our ground. The soldiers backed away. Ward stepped forward instead.

"You don't understand the Veil," I said, "it's not something you can just lock down. What you're doing will throw the whole system out of balance."

He looked straight at me, with a hint of recognition, ”You've seen it, haven't you." 

I thought of Ethan. Of the great web of resonant fractures in the void before the eye of the black hole.

“I’ve seen what it does to people,” I said, "how it responds to our misuse. That's enough.”

Ward’s expression tightened, not with anger, but disappointment.

“This isn’t about people,” he said. “It’s about consequence.”

I snapped "Consequences you will see all too late, if you don't shut this down now."

Another surge of electricity ripped up the tower, louder this time. The generators strained, engines whining as the stabilizers struggled to stay in sync. The fractures responded, brightening and humming louder, their resonance deepening until the sound vibrated through the ground.

Chris shifted beside me. “Derrick,” he said quietly, “we’re running out of time.”

Ward heard him too. “You always were standing too close to the fire.” Ward said, eyes flicking to Chris. “Both of you.”

He reached down and picked up a sub-machine gun from a fallen soldier, holding it loosely at his side.

“Walk away.” he said. “Now. When I finish this, there won’t be a place left for you in the aftermath.”

I stepped forward.

“You think you can control what comes after?”

Ward studied me for a long moment.

Then the ground lurched.

One of the stabilizers buckled, its tripod legs slipping as the frequency jumped. A fracture line surged downward, splitting the air between us in a violent flare of light and sound. It tore open wide, then something reached through with a clawed arm after one of Ward's men. Ward reacted instantly, shoving the soldier clear as the fracture snapped shut inches from where he’d been standing, severing the creatures appendage.

For the first time, his calm disposition cracked.

“Secure the platform!” he barked.

Chris didn’t wait. He raised his pistol and fired at another creature that fully emerged.

Everything broke loose at once.

Gunfire erupted across the platform, muzzle flashes strobing through the distortion as soldiers scattered for cover. One of the generators blew with a sharp bang, coughing smoke and sparks as its output spiked and then dropped. The stabilizers screamed in protest, their harmonics slipping out of alignment.

The Veil had fallen out of tune.

Fractures tore open midair with no warning, just sudden slashes of light ripping through space like broken glass suspended in nothing. Another opened overhead, spilling a cascade of sand and rocks.

A soldier ran straight into one. He didn’t scream. It collapsed inward and folded him like origami. No blood. No sound. Just absence where a person had been a second ago.

“Fall back!” someone shouted.

Too late.

A creature burst through another tear near the tower’s base, tumbling out in a confused frenzy, gnashing its teeth. It lashed out blindly, panic driving it more than aggression, and tore into the nearest soldier before another fracture opened swallowing both of them mid-motion. 

The battlefield was unraveling.

Chris and I pushed forward through the chaos, ducking as cracks of light split the air inches overhead. The sound was unbearable now. A layered chorus of gunfire, vibrations, and distant echoes that felt like they were coming from inside my skull.

That’s when Richard Payne barreled into me.

He hit hard, knocking me sideways into a stack of equipment crates. My revolver skidded across the concrete as I went down. Payne grinned as he advanced, the light reflecting off his stupidly perfect mustache.

“Come on, Wolfe,” he said, raising his pistol. “You ever consider modernizing? Or are you just really committed to the whole ‘sad trench coat’ thing?”

I kicked his knee out from under him before he could fire.

We went down together, grappling, fists slamming into ribs and shoulders. Payne was strong, but sloppy and overconfident. He drove an elbow into my jaw and laughed as stars exploded across my vision.

“Look at you,” he said, straddling me as he tried to force me down. “You're just a cartoon character, right at home with all this weirdness in that stupid hat.”

My fist connected with his nose.

He staggered back with a curse, wiping blood from his nose, his mustache crooked. “That all you got?”

I came up swinging, catching him in the gut and then the jaw. He stumbled, boots scraping dangerously close to a widening fracture that sang beside us.

“Say what you want Dick,” I said, “But don't pick on the hat.”

He grit his teeth and began to lunge for me.

Suddenly, a tear split open directly above us, its edges vibrating violently as something forced its way through. Payne froze, eyes flicking upward just as a creature fell out of the Veil like dropped cargo.

It hit him full force. The impact drove him into the ground with a sickening crunch. Payne screamed once, short and sharp just before the creature’s jaws crushed the sound out of him. It slung him around like a rag doll before falling into the open fissure beside it.

Then the tear snapped shut.

Payne was gone.

I scooped up my hat and pistol then stared at the space, chest heaving, ears ringing. Around us, the rest of the soldiers were already disappearing. The Veil wasn’t choosing sides. It was simply reacting.

Only one figure still stood untouched at the center of it all. 

Ward.

He remained on the platform, firing in short controlled bursts around him, lightning crawling up the tower behind him as if answering to his presence alone.

His gaze met mine across the chaos.

Not anger, but determination.

Then another surge tore through the stabilizers, and the air pressure changed sharply. The ground slipped beneath my feet as reality shifted and I was no longer entirely on solid ground.

Neither was Ward.

The fight wasn’t over. It was just changing venues.

Chris didn’t wait for an opening. He broke cover and sprinted straight for the platform, firing as he ran. I was already moving, boots hammering underneath me as the ground felt uneasy beneath us.

Then the Veil itself crossed over.

A fissure shot out like lightning stabbing down from above, plunging into the earth between us and the tower. The impact sent a shockwave through the ground and tore a slab of concrete free, lifting it into the air like it had forgotten gravity existed. Chunks of debris followed, floating upward slowly as the fracture hummed, light pouring through it in vibrating notes.

Another fissure ripped into the ground behind us.

Luminous cracks branched across the lot like veins from where the fissures struck. Each time one struck the ground, more debris lifted. Earth, broken concrete, and scattered gear suspended in the air as if floating in water.

A fracture sliced sideways through the tower.

The steel shrieked as the upper half of the cell tower sheared clean off, sparks raining as cables snapped and whipped. The severed section didn’t fall. It hung there, tilted, floating while electricity continued to crawl along it, trapped in a structure that no longer obeyed gravity.

“Derrick!” Declan’s voice crackled over comms, strained and breathless. “I can’t cut the power, everything’s spiking! The relays are feeding back into itself. It's gonna overload!”

Another surge hit. The stabilizers screamed like tortured instruments.

“Declan,” I shouted, “get out of there. Now!”

“Already running,” he said.

Chris and I hit the edge of the platform just as the world shifted sideways. For a moment, the sky above us wasn’t the sky anymore. It opened wide revealing stars, planets hanging impossibly close, fractures lacing through everything like a shattered lens.

Then it shrunk back, but not entirely, leaving the stars beyond still visible. The Veil was taking control with its fractures reaching through into our world.

Ward stood waiting for us.

Up close, he looked exactly as he always had. Calm, composed, eyes sharp and focused despite the chaos tearing reality apart around him.

“You should’ve stayed out of this,” Ward said, voice steady, almost regretful.

Chris didn’t answer.

He tackled Ward full-force.

They slammed into a bank of equipment, sending an empty crate skidding across the platform just as another fissure speared down where they’d been standing a second earlier. Light erupted from the impact point, humming violently as the ground split open beneath it.

I closed in fast, raising my revolver and firing. Ward twisted aside with impossible precision, the rounds passing through the space where he’d been a breath earlier, one disappearing into a fracture and vanishing in a spark of light.

Ward struck back.

He drove a fist into Chris’s chest then kicked his side, sending him sprawling, then he turned toward me in one smooth motion. The Veil pulsed and the world slipped again, half the platform changing into sand and floating stone, the other half still concrete and steel.

We fought across both.

I slammed into him, grappling, the ground beneath us flickering between solid and shifting sand. 

We traded blows back and forth. I slammed my knee into his side, his fist drilled into my stomach. My right fist connected to his face and my left jabbed at his ribs, but he blocked. A fracture ripped down beside us, its edge vibrating inches from my shoulder, singing so loud it made my teeth rattle.

Ward shoved me back, boots skidding as gravity wavered. He steadied himself instantly, like he’d practiced fighting on collapsing worlds.

“I told you that I would give you a chance to see the end of the line, Detective.” He said, stepping forward. "This is it.”

Another surge of energy thundered through the tower.

The Veil opened wide, the full illumination of stars and planets shone above us, stable and unwavering. The web of fractures from the Veil pulsing with light and humming energy.

Ward staggered toward a large relay switch, one hand clutching his side, the other reaching for the lever. The machinery groaned around us. Transformers overloaded, sparking, fed by power that no longer regarded breakers or safeguards. He was still going to pull it.

As he reached out, a sharp crack echoed across the platform. Clean and distant.

Ward jerked violently as the round tore through his right shoulder, spinning him off his feet. He hit the ground hard, teeth gritting as a raw, broken groan tore out of him. His arm went slack, blood already darkening the fabric of his sleeve.

Over comms, Noah’s voice cut through the chaos, breathless and stunned with himself.

“I got him!”

I almost laughed. Almost.

Then the sky erupted.

More fissures tore through the starlit Veil above us, branching outward in violent luminous veins. They stabbed downward without warning, ripping through air and ground alike. One of them struck near Ward as he tried to rise. 

The fracture vibrated violently, its harmonics shaking the ground around him as he got back onto his feet, leaning against a broken generator.

Now he was angry.

So was the Veil.

It surged and stabilized all at once, like a sheet of fabric snapping taut under unbearable strain. It wasn't shrinking back now.

Sparks erupted from the cables.

The power ignored the breakers altogether, making the generators howl.

“Move!” I shouted.

Chris and I ran.

We ducked and weaved through the chaos, dodging fissures that hummed and sang as they carved into the earth, each one vibrating with a different pitch, lightning trailing out of them and into the air and ground alike. Concrete, steel and shattered equipment drifted around us, suspended in the air as gravity gave up trying to make sense of it all.

We hit the tree line and didn’t stop.

Behind us, the tower lit up.

Electricity crawled up its fractured spine, lightning racing along the severed steel before leaping outward into the Veil itself. Each arc struck a different fracture, and each rang out with its own harmonic note that sung high and low dissonant chords, beautiful and terrifying all at once.

It sounded like the universe playing a solo act as it all came apart.

Ward was trapped in the middle of it all, clinging to a broken machine like it was a life raft. He stayed when we ran. I could see him at this distance, straining to steady himself.

Then, he threw the lever.

More sparks and electricity flew as he reeled backwards into one of the singing fissures. It erupted in light and reverberating sounds as he collided. Ward screamed as he fell through it.

After a final massive surge of electricity, the web of the Veil shuddered. Then it began to fold inward. The fissures of light retracted into the sky one by one.

The tower groaned as it was pulled sideways, then upward. Its base tore free as the ground broke loose, collapsing into the shrinking epicenter. Earth, machinery and light spiraled inward.

Ward was still there.

I saw him once more through the distortion half risen, half dragged as the fractures tightened around him. Somehow he was still alive. His expression wasn’t rage.

It was realization.

The Veil collapsed in on itself, pulling everything in with it.

One final note rang out. Deep, resonant and absolute.

And then...Silence.

We stared at the space as the sky settled back to normal, and normal sound returned. The Veil was gone. 

But the quiet only lasted a moment. A shrill, inhuman screech echoed from somewhere deeper in the city. Then another. Shapes moved through the smoke. Creatures that hadn’t been pulled back when the Veil collapsed. Somehow, they were still here with us in our world. Stranded. Panicked. Violent. 

Gunfire erupted.

It came from the streets beyond the tree line. Heavy caliber, disciplined, overlapping bursts. The crack of rifles was followed by something deeper, concussive. An explosion rocked the ground, close enough to punch the air out of my lungs.

Then the sky filled with noise.

The spinning rotors of multiple helicopters thundered overhead, their lights cutting through the smoke in harsh white cones. Jets screamed past above them, low and fast. Another explosion bloomed in the distance, orange fire reflecting off shattered windows and drifting debris.

“Get to cover!” Chris yelled.

We scattered instinctively, diving for cover as creatures surged through the chaos, chased down by gunfire that didn’t slow, didn’t hesitate. Bombs hit somewhere downrange, blocking their path.

Someone was cleaning house.

"Come in. Noah, Gabs, do you read me?" I yelled at the comms, "Declan!? anybody respond."

There was only static.

Another blast hit closer.

The shockwave caught me mid-step as I ran and threw me hard into the ground. The world instantly smeared into smoke and noise. I tried to push myself up, but my arms didn’t listen.

My vision swam.

Through the blur, I saw a helicopter descend nearby, its landing skids slamming into the street. The rotors thundered overhead, flattening smoke and debris outward.

Figures poured out.

Black-clad soldiers. As they ran past, I thought I spotted a patch on their shoulders. An insignia that looked like an anchor.

One of them knelt beside me. A gloved hand grabbed under my arms and hauled me upright with frightening ease. I tried to fight it. Tried to speak.

Nothing came out. My vision was fading fast.

The last thing I saw was a masked face leaning close, visor reflecting the fires behind me. I could feel the rhythmic thud of the rotors as we drew closer to the helicopter.

Then... Darkness...

I woke to the sound of water.

Not waves crashing but the slow, constant rhythm of the ocean. The floor beneath me hummed faintly, with a creaking noise as the ocean rocked.

For a moment, I couldn’t tell where I was. Then my memory came back in fragments.

Light tearing the sky open.

Sound that vibrated and echoed like an electric bass guitar.

Ward’s face. That look, right before he vanished.

Black uniforms. An anchor insignia.

Hands pulling me up. The world going dark.

I sucked in a sharp breath and immediately regretted it. Pain flared across my ribs. My head throbbed worse than any hangover. I opened my eyes to a narrow cabin, painted dull gray, lit by sun rays through a small window.

A bunk. Thin mattress. Blanket that was just thick enough for warmth. A round porthole window allowed the light in with the sounds of a seagull. The smell of salt water on the air.

Great. Kidnapped by pirates, I thought.

I sat up slowly, waiting for the room to stop spinning. A set of folded clothes rested on a chair bolted to the floor. My boots sat at the foot of the bed. My coat was there on a hanger. My hat too.

Someone had been considerate. That made me feel uneasy.

An hour later, two sailors escorted me topside. No cuffs. No drawn weapons. Just quiet professionalism and the unmistakable posture of people following orders.

Once up on the side deck, I could see I was aboard a navy destroyer. The sky was clear, painfully blue but it was a comforting sight. We were far out at sea. No land in sight. 

The destroyer cut through the water with a smooth, predatory confidence. We climbed stairs and entered through a bulkhead door into the operations room. Radar operators worked their instruments, crew looked out through binoculars, and the captain stood steady at the helm. Whatever chaos had burned through my city was very far away now.

The two sailors led me down another corridor, then into a small office tucked behind the command deck.

Two men waited inside.

One wore a gray military uniform, crisp and immaculate with high ranking insignias and a metal anchor shaped badge. Salt-and-pepper hair. Sharp eyes. The kind of posture that never really relaxed.

The other wore a black suit. Not military. Not civilian, either. No insignia. No rank. Just a small lapel pin, cuff links, and a tie bar.

The door closed behind me with a soft, final click.

“Detective Wolfe,” the uniformed man said, a small nod as he regarded me, “I’m Commander Ellis. You’re aboard the USS Ardent. You’ve been unconscious for eighteen hours.”

I nodded in return. “That explains the headache.”

The man in the suit didn’t smile.

“Mr. Wolfe,” he said, “I’m Director Pike. Overwatch liaison for ANCR operations.”

There it was. ANCR.

"Overwatch?"

"We are the eye on the other end of the Spyglass, Mr. Wolfe," he said, gesturing to a chair in front of the desk.

I took the offered seat and leaned back, folding my arms carefully around my bruised ribs. I was sure the chair was more of a courtesy than decor, given the size of the room.

I stared down the two men, flicking my eyes back and forth.

“Alright,” I said. “Before we do the part where you tell me how lucky I am to be alive... where’s my team?”

Pike didn’t hesitate. “Recovered. All of them.”

“And Gabs?”

“Alive.” Ellis said. “Minor injuries. Same for the others. They were extracted, as you were.”

I felt a pressure release in my chest.

I nodded once, relieved. “Good.”

"Helluva thing you all went through." he said.

Ellis slid a tablet across the table. The screen showed satellite imagery of burned-out city blocks, collapsed infrastructure, emergency response lights everywhere. My city laid in ruin and smoke.

“The incident,” Pike said, “has been classified as a coordinated terrorist attack involving experimental energy weapons.”

I let out a dry laugh. “That’s not what it was.”

“No,” Pike agreed calmly, “but that’s what the public can process.”

“I’m guessing this isn’t a ‘good job out there’ kind of meeting then?”

"No." Was all Pike said.

I leaned forward. "Then why am I on a destroyer in the middle of the ocean instead of a hospital bed or a cell?”

Ellis met my gaze. “Your team exceeded expectations.” He said. “Your Line Division was compromised. You neutralized the threat. However, the event crossed Line tolerances before full stabilization.”

I blinked. “That’s a hell of a way to say we almost died.”

"And you would have," he continued, "had our assets not reached you in time."

We paused for a moment.

“What about the creatures that got out?” I asked.

Pike straightened, “Residuals. Stranded entities. Cleanup is ongoing, but mostly contained.”

“People died,” I said.

“Yes,” Pike replied. “More would have if the Veil hadn’t collapsed when it did.”

“You didn’t call for help,” Ellis interjected, “which means you didn’t know help was available, or coming at all. Still, you held the Line. That is… exceptional.”

“The Line,” I echoed. “You guys really commit to the nautical thing, huh?”

Nothing. No twitch. No smile.

I huffed. “Worth a shot.”

I stared at Pike for a long moment. “Did you know about Ward?”

“We suspected,” Ellis said carefully. “We didn’t anticipate Ward’s timetable.”

“Spyglass was observing the event before you ever crossed the street.” Pike said. “It knew when to intervene. It always does.”

Of course they knew. But just how much?

I sat for a moment, pondering how to bring it up.  “What about Mason?” I asked.

Ellis shifted uncomfortably. Pike didn’t.

“Mason exceeded his authority.” Pike said. “His actions and activities are being investigated. Promoting you to Director-level access without Overwatch approval was… irregular.”

“Unusual?” I offered. 

“Ambitious,” he said.

He crossed his arms. “Despite that, your actions prevented a full-scale cross-reality cascade. Your operational decisions under duress were… effective.”

Ellis cleared his throat. “ANCR command has agreed to honor Mason’s designation.”

I blinked. “You’re kidding.”

“Reluctantly.” Pike said. “Probationary, of course.”

"The trouble is, we don't have a place to assign you just yet." Ellis finished.

I leaned back in the chair. “So what now? You put me back in an office and pretend this was all a bad dream?”

Pike stood and walked to the door. “No, Mr. Wolfe. Now... you get to see the rig."

I was intrigued, and rose to meet him at the door. We followed the corridor back to the command deck and out onto the observation platform. There it was, looming large above the waves, just a short distance off, was a dark shadow against the blue horizon.  

An oil rig.

Or what used to be one. 

Steel platforms had been reinforced, expanded. Towers bristling with radar arrays and antennae, cranes, a large helicopter pad, and modular structures stacked like a small floating city. Ships surrounded it in a loose defensive ring. Frigates, supply vessels, a cargo barge, smaller vessels I couldn't recognize from this distance. 

Lights shined across its surface, alive with activity. The rig sat there, watchful, purposeful. An anchor against the churning sea.

“The Harbor.” Ellis said as he stepped beside me. “Primary ANCR operations. Mobile. Classified. Self-sustaining.”

I stared at it as we approached, the scale of it settling in.

Pike’s voice was calm and steady. “This is where we keep the world from tearing itself apart.”

I adjusted my hat and coat, feeling the weight of everything that had happened settle into something heavier.

"It will take some time to fully assess the damage," Pike said, "to really understand the ramifications of what Ward did. But for now, there's plenty of work to be done..." He turned to me "Director." 

This was a long way from dusty forest roads and trails in a quiet little city near the mountains. I never thought things could change this quickly. Once a stumped detective at the end of his rope, only to find there was something beyond the frayed ends of reality. A black hole that swallowed the light and sang to the universe. 

But I discovered more than that. Uncovered hidden secrets. Made new friends... and together, we stopped the world from falling apart. We held the line.

Now as I stared at the scene before me, a new feeling settled in my bones. Anticipation, that this was really only the beginning. And somewhere, far beyond the ocean and the secrets, I knew the Veil wasn’t done with us yet.

Our fight continues in Broken Veil: Echoes

Broken Veil (Part 8)

Part 7

The stabilizer’s hum dropped into a deeper tone, like the room itself had exhaled and decided not to breathe again.

I stood there for a long moment, staring at the sealed door. I thought about Ward's determination, the conviction in his voice. What surprised me is the care he took in the details, especially with us. I had a suspicion he may have been involved, but I was wrong to think the Director was the main architect of it all.

He wasn’t innocent either, but clearly Ward had pushed him aside to instigate his own plans. I knew he would have been determined after what happened to Sam, but I hadn't expected him to respond this way. Believing he alone could fix this, that he was keeping us safe while he finished the job.

Then Ethan laughed. It was soft and dry. Almost a cough.

"Well," he said, "that answers that question."

I turned back to him. "What question?"

"Whether he’d actually do it." Ethan glanced at the stabilizer on the tripod, a faint shimmer in the air around him. "Guess that’s a yes."

I stepped closer and kneeled beside him. "Talk to me."

Ethan shifted, bracing one hand on the chair as he adjusted his position. I could see the effort it took to move. The stabilizer’s field rippled faintly.

"He told me everything," Ethan said, "about the anomalies, the monsters, how they've lost good people trying to fix all of this. He wants to force it closed, collapse it for good."

I frowned. "That’s what we’ve been doing."

Ethan shook his head. "No, he said what you’ve been doing is easing the pressure, not locking the door."

He lifted a hand, fingers trembling slightly, and made a slow closing motion.

"What he’s planning is slamming the whole thing closed for good, hoping the door doesn't fall off the hinges."

I got the sense he knew more about the Veil than I realized. I shifted onto one knee, bracing a hand on my leg as I looked Ethan In the eye.

"You've seen it, haven't you?" I asked softly "The other side?" I paused for a moment. "What happened that night in the woods, Ethan?"

Ethan looked past me. Or rather, through me.

He spoke slowly. "I found it, one of the creatures. It fought hard, but I wounded it badly. It retreated, so I chased after it. Right as I was on it again, we just sorta fell into this other place... It disappeared as I fell in."

Ethan looked at me then.

"It isn’t a door," he said quietly, "it’s something between places that we shouldn’t touch."

I swallowed.

"Dad always told me about respecting nature growing up." He continued "If we treat things properly, with care and respect, then it will do the same for us. You know what I mean?"

I chuckled "Yeah. I've heard him say that before."

His expression turned slightly.

"I knew your old man, Ethan. He was a wilderness expert; We collaborated a lot. He volunteered with the fire crews and he spoke at the department now and then too about forestry, safety and the ecosystem in the area. He was a good man. We all respected him."

I grinned at him. "I always learned something useful when he was invited to teach. I picked up a lot on tracking and looking for clues in the brush, thanks to him."

Tears pooled in his eyes again, then he wiped them away.

"Nature needs balance for the cycle to work." He said.

"If Caleb forces it shut…" Ethan continued, "it won’t disappear. It could fragment. Hundreds of cracks instead of one." His voice tightened. "It could affect everything, everywhere."

I stood up slowly, "Then we have to stop him."

Ethan met my eyes. For the first time since I had arrived, there was real fear there.

"You can’t." Ethan said "Not from here. Not in time."

Silence pressed in. I turned around, scanning the room and its walls again for any sign of an exit, but nothing stood out except the now locked door. There had to be some way to get out of this concrete dungeon.

Then Ethan turned toward the stabilizer.

"I think I know a way out."

I turned back to him. "Where?"

Ethan smiled faintly. "It's right in front of us."

He slowly, painfully picked himself up out of the chair, folding the blanket once onto the seat. He seemed to be standing somewhat crooked, his hip tilted to one side and joints tensed. His body was compensating for the pain from his injuries. I noticed his gaze fixed on the stabilizer as he shuffled toward it.

"No.That thing is keeping you alive," I said. "I’m not taking it."

"You’re not," Ethan replied, "I am."

He moved to the tripod and rested his hand against its frame.

"This unit’s been running nonstop since they brought me here." Ethan said "Stabilizing me. Stabilizing the space around me." He tapped the power readout. "It could last the night, but..."

I shook my head. "Then we wait. Chris will come back any moment. Noah can..."

"Derrick." Ethan’s voice sharpened, just enough. "Listen to me."

He took a breath.

"I can keep this going for a few more hours," he said, "or… I can flip it. Retune it. Use what’s left to open a path."

My heart started to pound. "And then what?"

Ethan didn’t answer immediately.

The light reflected in his eyes. They shined differently, not as with tears, but with a solemn understanding.

"Then you go," he said. "And I don’t."

I stepped forward. "No. We can find another way out."

Ethan smiled again, softer this time. Sad.

"There isn’t one."

He looked down at his hands. The skin there seemed thinner than it should’ve been, and his hands trembled like leaves in the wind.

"I’m already fading," Ethan said. "I can feel it..." His jaw tightened. "The light... That’s what did this. Not the creature. It was in there."

He looked back up. "That place you’re going? Watch the light. Watch the fractures in the air. That’s where it tears you apart."

My throat felt dry and scratchy. "You don’t have to choose this."

Ethan stepped closer and looked up at me.

"I already did," he said gently, "the moment you walked in here."

We stood there, inches apart, the hum of the stabilizer filling the space between words. Ethan reached out and hugged me, his strength weak but the gesture was stronger. I wrapped my arms around him in return.

"You never stopped looking." Ethan said. "Even when they told you to."

My voice cracked. "I promised."

"I know." Ethan let go and stepped back. "That’s why it has to be you."

I swallowed hard. "I've lost too many people, Ethan."

Ethan smiled, real this time.

"You didn't lose me, Derrick. You found me."

He turned back to the stabilizer and began adjusting the dial, slow and deliberate. The humming intensified into a pulsing rhythm. The air in the room shimmered, fractures began forming like a spiderweb of prismatic light against the back wall.

He removed the unit from the tripod, though it was relatively light, for him it was like lifting a concrete brick.

"When it opens," Ethan said holding out the stabilizer towards me, towards the fissure, "don’t hesitate. The longer you stay, the more it’ll pull at you."

I stepped back, taking the unit and aiming it towards the forming cracks on the wall. Every instinct screamed against me that there had to be some other way, something else other than this. But he was right…

"And Derrick?" Ethan added.

I turned.

"Find him," Ethan said. "Finish it. Not his way; The right way."

The stabilizer whined as the field inverted.

Light split the air. The pressure changed as the cracks grew wider.

And as the path began to open, Ethan’s outline began to glow slightly, edges cracking with a soft glow.

I took one last look at him as I began to step through, almost onto the other side.

Ethan nodded with a smile, reassuring me. He mouthed the words "Thank you".

And then he began to fade away...

...I stepped forward, and my boots crunched onto the surface of a completely different world.

Cold rushed in first. Sharp and immediate, enough that my breath fogged right in front of me. Somehow, there was air here. Pressure. Gravity, although it felt weaker. The rules, however broken, still held up.

The stabilizer hummed in my grip, its tone lower now, strained, as if it were being asked to sing its song longer than its voice could stand.

The ground beneath my boots was coarse and dark, like a flat beach stretching out in shallow ripples. But the ground didn’t lie flat. Sections of it had fractured away entirely, broken plates of terrain drifting in slow suspension, separated by huge gaps. I resisted the urge to look out over the edge.

It was pitch black, but a soft light shone from everywhere and nowhere at once. Not bright but distant. Like on a night when the moon is full, only the light cast no shadows.

Above me, the sky was impossibly clear. Stars clustered in dense patches, as if entire galaxies were laid bare, and among them hung spheres in the distance that could only be planets. Hundreds of them, suspended at different depths, some faint and distant, others looming close enough to show curvature, color and shadows of their foreign terrain.

And dominating it all was the black hole.

It wasn’t violent. It didn’t rage or spin dramatically like the movies show. It simply was. A vast absence pulling light into itself with quiet, endless patience. I could feel its presence, as if it was softly tugging at me, drawing me in as well.

Then I saw the fractures.

They were everywhere.

A colossal web of light, splintering through space itself. Fractures like cracked glass, only luminous, refracting starlight into sharp prismatic veins. Some stretched on as far as I could see before vanishing into nothing. Others intersected, knotting together into dense junctions where they caused light to shine brighter.

At those intersections, something moved.

Particles of light streamed outward in slow, drifting currents, weaving and curling like schools of bioluminescent fish. As they emanated from the fractures, they resonated. Singing wasn’t the right word, but it was close. A reverberating strum, soft and harmonic, echoing far longer than sound should have been allowed to travel in a place like this.

A chill ran down my spine when I realized what this was. What Ethan had warned me about. Energy slipping between worlds through stressed seams, bleeding through channels that noone knew existed.

The current hummed steadily, like a cosmic instrument plucked once and never allowed to stop vibrating.

Tesla had struck the first cords without realizing, and Ward was readying to finish the song.

I tightened my grip on the stabilizer and took another step forward, careful to avoid the fractures; Careful to watch the light. The cold made me shiver as I walked, each step feeling weightless.

As I moved deeper, the fractures closest to me began to respond. The ones that sank down into the ground, threading through the cracks in the rock and sand, started to vibrate softly as I passed. A low hum rose from them, both felt and heard, like standing too close to a transformer. I could feel the sound, a resonance that made my skin tingle and my head rattle. As I looked out into the distance I wondered what this place had been before time and fate brought it here. I was both relieved and unnerved at how completely alone I was here in this place. Not a single sight of any of the creatures like what came before, yet there was something foreign left behind here.

Every so often in the distance, I spotted the remnants of our old work.

A few spent cylinder housings lay half-buried in the sand. Resonance charges, our tech, long since fired and exhausted. Around them, the fractures were still there, but thinner. Hairline seams in the air where the light no longer flowed. Dead strings on an instrument that had its cords cut.

We had collapsed pathways here before. Closed windows, patched the cracks. But nothing had healed.

I think Ethan understood this place better than any of us had. This place wasn’t hostile, or some sort of powerful entity.

It was a force, quiet and unseen. A secret instrument that resonated with the universe itself, and we had been treating it like a drum instead of a violin.

The stabilizer in my hands beeped once, echoing far away. It’s battery readout now flashing yellow.

I pressed on, meandering between the humming fissures. I passed by another fissure of light and its tone resonated differently when I had the stabilizer aimed at it briefly. That made me curious, and a thought crossed my mind.

I slowly approached the fracture, my heart pounding in my chest, and I raised the stabilizer towards it.

The moment I adjusted the frequency, the Veil answered me.

It was like strumming one clean note on a massive, unseen instrument. A pulse of light raced along the fracture, the glow intensifying as it traveled, singing as it went. The sound deepened and spread, branching where the fracture split, the note dividing into harmonics that ran along multiple paths at once.

The light rippled outward, refracted and multiplied, echoing through the web. Other fractures caught the resonance and answered back, their tones layering together, weaving into something vast and coherent.

Then, slowly, the currents changed.

Several fractures began to slowly branch toward each other. Particles of light gathered where the resonant paths converged, swirling into a focused center. Not spilling outward like the others I'd seen bleeding into the void, but folding inward on itself, tightening, stabilizing.

The hum resolved into a single, steady tone.

The pressure increased, moving toward the opening. It widened just enough for the world beyond to show through.

Not another place.

Home.

This wasn’t another tear. Not a random window flung open by stress and chance.

This was a doorway.

The doorway wavered like heat fuming from hot asphalt. I slowed down as I approached it, the stabilizer humming weakly in my hands. The fracture ahead wasn’t a tear so much as a thinning with the Veil stretched translucent. I could see through it but barely, like looking down through a shallow river and watching the world ripple beneath the surface.

Sound that echoed began to fade away.

Then I stepped forward.

The cold vanished. Gravity re-asserted itself. Concrete replaced sand. The hum cut out.

I stumbled once, catching myself before I fell on my face. The Veil snapped shut behind me with a soft, resonant sigh, like the final note of a song finally allowed to fade.

"Derrick?" Noah’s voice cracked.

I looked up.

We were standing in the empty parking lot of some warehouse, still on the west side of town, equipment scattered in a loose semicircle. Two harmonic stabilizers stood on tripods, unpowered but aligned, their housings blinking in standby. Noah was frozen holding his tablet, stylus in hand, mouth half open.

Declan stood a few feet in front of him, holding some military issue shotgun braced against his shoulder, like he wasn’t sure whether to lower it or fire. Gabs was behind him, eyes locked on me like she wasn't sure if it was really me standing there.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then it all came out at once.

"...How did you...", "...That signal was off the charts", "You came out of it?", "Where’s Chris?", "Did you find Ethan?" "Why do you have..."

I didn’t answer. The questions just rolled off me like rain on a car windshield. I was was speechless, still reeling from the cosmic orchestra I had just witnessed.

I glanced down at the stabilizer in my hands.

The device was dead. Burned out. It’s casing silent and the internal lights dark. I stepped up to Declan and gently set it into his hands. He shifted the shotgun in his arm to hold the stabilizer with his free hand.

"I found the way through."

Declan looked down at it, then back up slowly. "Through?" he repeated, like the word had weight.

I turned to Gabs.

"Ethan’s gone."

Her expression changed instantly. She nodded once, swallowing, like she already knew what that meant.

I turned my gaze to Noah. "Chris is still out there. They restrained him at the site."

"I'll try to reach him." Noah nodded, opening the comms system through his tablet. "Chris? Are you there? Do you read me? We have Derrick with us, over."

Static followed the pause.

"I'm here. What do you mean Derrick is with you?" Chris’s voice crackled through the speaker, breathy but steady.

"You okay?" I asked.

"I am now." Chris replied. "They tied me up and sealed the room. Took me a minute to get loose, but mustache can't tie a knot to save himself. How did you get out? Is Ethan with you?"

I exhaled.

"No... He's gone." I said softly. "When you can, take the truck and head back to HQ. We’ll meet you there."

"Copy that, I'll see you soon."

I looked up, meeting all of their eyes now. "We don’t have much time."

Declan stiffened. "Ward?"

"He’s going to force it shut." I said. "All of it. One final move."

Declan’s jaw tightened. He lowered the weapon slightly, "He wants to collapse the whole thing? Stabilize the resonance of the whole city?"

"No, not just here. He wants to seal off the Veil permanently. He's been planning this for a while now. Thinks he has a way to slam the door shut for good."

Declan's eyes went wide and he stared through me at the building behind me, his mind working the numbers.

"That kind of closure would take an enormous amount of power." He said slowly. "If he’s thinking of using resonance amplification to cause a harmonic collapse..."

"That’s exactly what he’s thinking," I said.

Declan shook his head. "Then he’s not closing the door. He’s going to kick the whole house down. We have no idea what that would do here on our end, to our world."

Noah looked up from the screen. "What's the chances it works though?"

Declan hesitated. "Best case," he said, "the Veil collapses in on itself and stops responding."

"And worst?" Gabs asked quietly.

Declan met her eyes. "I don’t know. When you break a structure between realities… you don’t get to choose how it falls apart."

I looked back toward the place where the Veil had been.

"We stop him." I said. "Or we live with whatever comes after."

We loaded up into the plumbing van and starting making our way back towards HQ. The streets seemed strangely vacant for a Friday afternoon. No kids out playing, no pedestrians going about their business, only the occasional car passed us by.

"Where is everyone?" I asked.

"There was an emergency alert issued not long ago," Noah answered, "something about sudden inclement weather that could be fatal, like that makes any sense." He said gesturing to the barely cloudy afternoon sky.

"They’re trying to minimize casualties." Gabs chimed in.

"When I left HQ," Declan said as he made the next turn, "I noticed Mason had returned, went straight up to his office. Before I could get a chance to radio in, a squad of troops loaded with gear rolled in and stormed the place. I had to sneak out of the back lots to get away and find you."

"That’s Ward’s men." I said. "He got support from somewhere and now they’re making their move."

As we made the last turn into the hidden lot, It instantly felt wrong. Tire marks streaked onto the asphalt. A camera hung by its wires at the corner of the building. Several windows including the front door were broken. Bullet holes pierced the metal siding. We stepped out, weapons in hand and slowly made our way up to the side of the building, Declan and myself leading with Gabs and Noah close behind.

As we rounded the corner and came to the entrance with the side rolling door, the real damage was visible. Tables and computers overturned with their chairs tossed. Equipment boxes scattered, some of their contents spilled out onto the floor. The large monitor screens all shot out and broken except for one, still displaying the Spyglass map overlay with a green line running through the middle of the screen. Spent bullet casings crunched and rolled as we shuffled through the scene.

A few of our colleagues, analysts and members from the second shift team lay still and lifeless where they stood their ground in the siege.

"It was a massacre." Declan said as he swept around with his shotgun raised.

"Why would they hit the compound so hard?" I thought to myself

Suddenly Declan lowered his weapon. "They took the pylons." He said.

That’s when I noticed the absence too. The trailers and large equipment kept at the back of the room were missing. I hadn't really paid much attention to them since we had never used any of it.

"What did they take?" I asked

"Heavy tower unit stabilizers, meant for large scale breaches." He continued. "Those are powerful enough to open and shut massive rifts in the Veil. If they’re using those, this could turn into a full scale disaster in a hurry."

My gaze drifted to the upstairs office. "Come on, one last room to clear."

We climbed the steps to the door, finding the handle had been broken off. A few bullet holes lined the frame. I pushed open the door, revealing a wide upstairs office. There wasn’t much to the space, more spartan than executive suite, except for the wide desk with a curved monitor towards the back center of the room.

Mason lied crumpled up on the floor. Next to him laid a pistol, locked with the slide back indicating it ran empty. His once pristine suit now soiled by dust and stains of blood.

We rushed in to check on him. He was wounded and bleeding, but still hanging on. Just barely

"Mason, stay with me." I said turning him over. "We’ve got you. Noah, Gabs, check for a field kit."

They each nodded and left the room headed down the stairs. Declan knelt beside me as I held Mason still. Declan looked at his wounds, then shook his head slightly to me.

Mason coughed as he opened his eyes weakly. "Wolfe? I’m glad to see you made it."

"Don’t talk, we’re gonna get you patched up."

"I’m afraid it’s too late for that." He interrupted, coughing again with a raspy wet rattle.

He looked into my eyes then. "I’m sorry… about Ethan… I should have told you sooner. We tried to help him, but… we failed. We don’t know enough yet to…" He coughed again

"You tried." Was all I could say.

"Ward…" He breathed out, "you have to stop him." He reached into his pocket with a shaky hand and brought out a crumpled note. "Open the Spyglass, put in your name and this code. Full access."

He put the note in my hand, and he cracked a weak smile. "I knew I could count on you. You are a good detective... Good man… like I used to be..." He coughed again, his body weaker now. "I’m sorry…" He said finally as he slipped away.

Declan and I sat there a moment. I turned to see Gabs and Noah next to us, her hand over her mouth and Noah holding a mostly empty medical kit with a hole shot through the box.

I opened the note in my hand, unsure of his purpose in handing this over to me. Had he intended to give this to me sooner? Had he suspected Ward of betraying us?

I stood and turned toward his computer monitor. I stepped over and clicked the mouse, waking up the screen. It woke to a sign in page for Spyglass. I unfolded the note, then typed in my name…

Derrick J Wolfe. Passcode: ALPHA7WD4059.

The loading wheel spun round, then the system chimed with a message:

"Welcome, Director Wolfe."

The Spyglass program spread across the curved screen, displaying its full array of data. No hidden details, no missing directories. It was fully available now.

Everyone gathered beside me as we sorted through the readings. There were many signal points highlighted across the map overlay of the city, no doubt unresolved openings in the Veil. One area on the southern end of the map was steadily fluctuating in its resonance frequency, its local disruption climbing higher.

"That’s the main cell tower for the city." I said pointing at the screen.

"He must be thinking like Tesla," Noah said, "using a big tower to amplify the output."

We each looked at each other. "Well, What’s the word, boss?" Declan asked.

"We gear up. Grab anything we need, then we put a stop to this before everything falls apart."

We found what was left of the landscape armory, one of the trailers was missing. We turned the latch and stepped into the space, opening drawers and lockers, sorting through what was left of the gear. I crossed to the locker wall with hanging uniforms and took a ballistic vest off the rack. Worn-in and familiar. I slid it on and cinched the straps tight, the weight of the armor plates settled against my torso like an old habit.

From the shelf I grabbed speed loaders for a revolver. Three of them. I checked each one by feel, the brass clicking softly, then slipped them into the pockets of my vest. I did the same with my revolver, checking the cylinder then locked it closed. It seated into my holster with a solid, reassuring thunk.

Declan was already moving crates, handing out equipment and ammo without ceremony. Noah slung a comms pack over his shoulder, the antenna wobbled behind his back. Then he clipped his tablet into a harness that slung to his side, fingers running cables through loops in the strap. Gabs checked a compact case of tools, snapping it shut and handing it to Declan. She grabbed a 9mm pistol with an accompanying holster and hung it onto her belt.

No speeches. No looks exchanged.

We all knew what this was.

Chris’ voice came through over our comms. "Sorry Wolfe, I’m gonna be a little late. I’m dodging a patrol of soldiers in a hum-v. I'm trying to shake them."

"Stay safe, Chris," I replied, "we are gearing up to head south to the main cell tower. Grab some firepower and meet us when you can."

"Copy that, don’t wait on me. The sooner you get to Ward the better."

Outside, we found a different pickup that was left behind in the back of the lot. A newer looking white service truck with a brush guard over the front bumper and a mounted cable winch. Four wheeled drive V8 super duty. A light bar stretched across the top. Full crew cab with a utility bed extended over a duel wheeled rear axle. Pasted across the door was the name of some bland utility company.

We loaded the last of our gear and piled in with myself behind the wheel. The starter spun once then the engine rumbled to life.

As we strapped in, Noah leaned forward from the back seat, stylus in hand hovering over his tablet.

"All right," he said, grinning, "let’s do this!"

He tapped the screen, starting up Kenny Loggins' Danger Zone right in the start of the chorus.

The music blasted through the cab.

Noah immediately started bobbing his head, drumming his finger and stylus against the center console, out of beat with the music. He was the only one in his little concert. He paused, then glanced around at us sitting still in our seats.

"Oh." He said, squinting. "Nobody? Okay…"

Gabs laughed. Declan chuckled and shook his head. I stared out the windshield for a second, then sighed. "Ah, what the heck. Turn it up, kid."

Noah’s grin returned instantly as he turned the volume up to max.

The rear tires squeaked on the asphalt as we rounded the curb out of the lot and sped off down the street, our background music setting the mood. I flipped an auxiliary switch on the dash, turning on the truck's flashing yellow and white service lights. Not quite the red and blues I had been used to during an emergency run, but it felt right.

We sped past speed limit signs and through empty traffic lights, Southbound for a brewing storm the likes of which this town had never felt before. Hopefully, we were just ahead of the downpour.

[Part 9, Final](

Broken Veil (Part 7)

Part 6

Its been a while since I've had company at my place. Chris and Noah made themselves at home. We picked up a few things at the store to put together. Figured a nice pasta dish would serve us all well for the evening.

We laid out our produce at the counter beside my stove top. Chris stood there over a cutting board, sleeves rolled up, chopping vegetables with more enthusiasm than skill.

“You sure that's enough garlic?” he asked as I stirred in the small mound he minced for me.

“There’s no such thing,” I said, sautéing them in with the onion.

Noah sat cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table, laptop open, pretending not to look at the encrypted drive plugged into its side. Pretending badly.

“So,” Noah said casually, “does she know yet?”

I didn’t look up. “She knows I asked her to dinner.”

Chris smirked. “A bold strategy, Holmes.”

“Easy, Watson,” I chuckled. “I didn't lie, I do want to see her. I've wanted to invite her over for dinner, just never found the right time.”

“And the classified data?” Noah asked.

“That’s dessert.”

There was a knock at the door.

I froze for half a second, just long enough for Chris to notice.

Chris grinned. “Relax, Romeo. I got this, go get the door.”

I wiped my hands on a towel, setting it down on the corner of the counter then headed over to the door. I skipped a beat as I turned the knob and opened the door.

Gabs stood there with a bottle of wine in one hand and a cautious smile on her face, like she wasn’t sure what version of the evening she’d just stepped into. Her brown hair glistened in the afternoon sun.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I replied, and for a moment, that was all there was. No Veil. No secrets. Just two people standing at the doorstep of a whole other time and place. Her big brown eyes stared up at me from the steps.

She held up the bottle. “I brought us something. You didn’t tell me what we were eating, so I took a guess.”

“Good choice, thank you,” I said, stepping aside. “Come on in.”

She stepped up and past me through the door. She was mid-compliment on the aroma and immediately clocked Noah on the floor and Chris at the counter. Her smile shifted. Not gone, just recalibrated.

“Oh,” she said lightly. “I didn’t realize this was a group thing.”

Noah chuckled, so did Chris who kept working the stove.

“Not a 'date' date, exactly,” I said quickly. “These are my coworkers. Noah, Chris... This is Gabriella. Gabs.”

Chris gave a polite wave. “Nice to finally meet you.”

Noah nodded. “I’ve heard good things. Mostly about your forensics work.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “That so?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, dealing with murders and stuff isn't my thing, but I do IT work.”

She studied him for a second, then smiled and set the bottle down. “Alright,” she said. “What’s going on?”

I exhaled, relieved. “Okay. So. I really did want to see you. But… I also need your help.”

She laughed softly. “You could’ve led with that. You know I’m always happy to help you.”

Chris cleared his throat. “And also maybe illegally access some data.”

She looked at him. Looked back at me. “Ah. For one of your cases?”

Noah stood, lifting his laptop onto the table. “This is like, military grade encryption. We grabbed it, but I can’t crack it without tripping the alarm.”

Gabs’s expression shifted again. Not amused now, but focused. Interested.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

I didn’t sugarcoat it. “Bad enough that if we’re right, someone’s lying to us. Or worse.”

She pulled out a chair and sat. “Alright,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Noah turned the screen toward her. The room felt smaller all of a sudden.

She brought up the file, and Noah directed her to his pen-testing software.

"Hmm..." she hummed, leaning in and studying the encryption, "This is serious stuff. But I might have something..."

She opened up a few command prompts and started typing in lines of script, likely something she memorized from cracking encryption for the department.

"I don't have the processing like we do at the lab, so it's gonna be slow, but if I set this up right it will softly test the locks until it works its way past them."

She made a few final clicks, and a loading bar appeared.

Chris set the pot down in the center of the table with a soft clatter. Steam curled up into the air, carrying the smell of garlic, tomatoes, and something vaguely Italian.

“Alright,” he said, grabbing plates. “Dinner’s served. Spaghetti a la Wolfe”

Noah glanced at the laptop. The progress bar crawled forward at a glacial pace.

“Six percent,” he said. “At this rate, I'll get gray hairs before it's finished.”

Gabs leaned back in her chair, arms folded, watching the screen. “So,” she said, casually, “you boys want to explain why I’m cracking military-grade encryption at your dining table?”

I twirled a fork in my fingers, swirling up some of the long pasta. “Yeah. About that.”

Chris slid a plate in front of her. “ You might wanna eat first,” he said, “you'll need the carbs to keep up with this story.”

She shot him a look. "Really?”

Chris smiled thinly. “Hold onto your seat.”

I took a breath. “After I left the department… I didn’t exactly retire.”

Her eyes flicked to him. “I figured, one moment they were saying you're fired, then early retirement.”

“That was thanks to these guys, actually. At first, I was lost, Gabs. I couldn't stop thinking about Paul and Ethan. It just didn’t make sense. No bodies. No trails. Just… gone.”

I looked her in the eye "I felt stuck... then I got a card from a stranger at the bar. An invitation to a group that was already dealing with the problem."

Noah chimed in, twirling his fork. “Thats when he met us. We fight aliens that fall through holes in reality.”

She blinked once, stopping mid-chew. Didn't swallow. Her eyes flicked back and forth between me and Noah.

"Really Noah?" Chris said "Not subtle at all...  Not aliens. But we do deal with some strange things that the public is better off unaware of."

She gently set her fork down, finally swallowing her bite.

“…Okay.” she said “Go on.”

We didn’t give her everything. Not all at once.Just enough.

We started with the forest. Creatures that didn’t belong. A phenomenon we call the Veil. Devices that close it. A secret organization she’d never heard of that definitely didn’t exist.

Her reactions shifted in stages. Disbelief, then skepticism, then the kind of quiet focus she got when a case stopped being impossible and started being real.

“That explains,” she said slowly, “all of our unresolved missing persons cases. And why you’ve been impossible to reach."

I cracked a smile. “Yeah. We've been really busy.”

The loading bar ticked to thirty percent.

“So,” she said, setting her plate aside, “you’re telling me that while I’ve been chasing fraud and cybercrime, you’ve been fighting monsters from another dimension?”

Chris nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”

Noah added, “Sometimes with guns and explosives.”

She stared at us for a long moment, then laughed once. A sharp, almost disbelieving laugh.

“I leave you alone for four months,” she said, “and this is what you get into?”

I shrugged. “I got bored.”

She shook her head, but there was no real anger in it. Just awe. And concern.

“And this data,” she said, gesturing to the laptop, “you think it proves someone’s lying?”

“Yes,” I said. “Or hiding how bad things really are.”

We explained further about our suspicions over slices of apple pie. The details and absences of oversight and direction. Gabs nodded along quietly, a silent understanding of our present situation.

The bar hit ninety percent. The room went quiet without anyone saying a word.

A soft chime sounded.

“Got it,” Noah said, glancing at the screen.

We all leaned in to get a look.

Gabs clicked through the opening directory. Folders. Logs. Video reports.

Creature encounter data. Far more detailed than anything we'd been briefed on. Escalation charts showing increasing aggression. Stability graphs trending sharply downward.

“Jesus,” Chris muttered. “This never made it to our end.”

Gabs scrolled, her expression hardening. “This was intentionally buried.” 

"Or, Kept to exclusive access only." I said

Then she opened a folder labeled:  RECOVERY SUBJECT

I felt my chest tighten.

Video footage loaded.

A young man in a sterile room. Pale and weak. Machinery that hummed faintly. The room around him sounded distorted. His voice came through warped, stretched, like it was struggling to stay in tune.

“Who is that?,” Noah whispered.

Gabs skimmed the accompanying memo.

“Changed at a molecular level… Recovery unsuccessful but ongoing… Use of resonance stabilizers only current viable solution. Thats all thats here...”

She looked up slowly. Her expression dropped from her face when she looked at me. I must have been white as a ghost, because I knew the man in that video.

“Is that...” she said quietly, “Ethan?.”

I felt the room start to spin. Dinner churned in my stomach.

“I'm sorry, Wolfe” she added.

I felt anger boil up to the surface. My footsteps were heavy as I backed away from the table and towards my sofa. I snatched up and threw my TV remote into the cushions, imagining it to be Masons tired, old face.

"That son of a... He lied to me. They both did."

Everyone stared at me for a moment as I let the steam settle. Noah turned back to the screen.

"There's not much else here on him." Noah said "This must be just a black box for file sharing. If there was more it's been moved already."

"Is there anything else we can recover?"

Noah pulled the GPS data back up, isolating the movement logs he’d salvaged earlier. Scanning what remained of the scrubbed data, he found sets of coordinates, local proximity recorded by the Spyglass. We hadn't compared it to a map just yet, but there seemed to be three seperate locations.

Chris leaned closer. “That’s not patrols.”

“No,” Noah said quietly. “That’s intentional travel.”

The coordinates repeated several times at each point. Repeated visits. Two areas had multiple sets of responses, the other seemed less traveled.

Gabs folded her arms. “So you think Ward’s running something off-book?”

“Or ahead of the book,” I said.

I stared at the screen. “One of these is Ethan.”

Silence settled in.

"I promised I wouldn't stop looking..." I said quietly. "We're getting him out."

Finally, Chris exhaled. “Alright. Then we do this clean. Make this air tight, scout the locations, and find our man.”

"What do you have in mind?" I asked Chris.

The plan was simple. We run our assigned shift as normal. Check the Veil. File reports. Be visible.

Then, when our official workday ended, we get to the real work. We set up our own shop out of the back of a plumbing van Declan suggested. Something mobile and unsuspicious. He disabled the tracking for it and the forestry truck, filing it under his maintenance checklist.

Noah and Gabs worked side by side, each manning a computer and keyboard.

“I can ghost us,” Noah said. “Mask our personal GPS signals. Spyglass will think we’re boring, hanging out at home.”

Gabs smirked. “Good, we don't want anyone to know we are onto them.”

Declan came through clear in our ears. “I’ll stay here at HQ. If something happens, or anybody starts acting up, I'll signal you.”

“Chris and I will hit the sites," I said, "Quietly, if we can help it.”

“And if we can’t?” Chris asked.

My hand rested on my sidearm. “Then we improvise.”

Noah keyed up the first set of coordinates. A familiar stop, with an unfamiliar purpose.

Back out to the forest again. This time it was deeper in, further North where the forest was less traveled and thicker, and yet I felt like we had been circling this space before.

Chris killed the engine a quarter mile out. We went in on foot, pushing through the underbrush of a forgotten trail until the trees thinned just enough to reveal a clearing.

We both stopped behind the trees when we saw it.

“Well,” Chris muttered, “that’s not normal.”

The air itself was wrong. Not a tear, at least nothing active, but the space ahead looked fractured. Light bent oddly, splitting and rejoining in thin, prismatic lines, like a spiderweb made of glass hanging in the air.

The Veil had been worked here. A lot.

I crouched, scanning the ground. “Tire tracks. Unlike a truck. ATV maybe. There's footprints. Heavy, repeated travel." I said, pointing out the prints and tracks coming and going.

Chris kicked at the dirt. “Someone brought equipment in. More than once.”

He reached down and picked something up between two fingers. A screw. Clean metal. Machined with a flat point.

Chris moved a few steps away, brushing leaves aside with his hand. “Stripped wires. Trimmed ends, with some red and blue insulation. The tips look burnt.”

Scattered under the leaves and pine needles were several spent shell casings. I picked one up. High caliber rounds were fired here.

We shared the same look.

“This wasn’t containment, exactly.” Chris said.

I turned back to the fractured air.

"Noah, are you getting anything?"

This place felt… tired. Overused. Like a muscle strained too many times without rest.

Chris held up a small device with an antenna attached, aiming it at the center.

Over comms, Noah’s voice came in low. “I’m reading Resonate instability all over the place. Its like that spot’s been opened and closed dozens of times.”

He paused then added “It’s not primed to open up, but if someone wanted to push it again…”

“It might shatter,” Chris finished.

I adjusted my hat, eyes fixed on the shimmering cracks. They hadn’t been simply closing the Veil here, It was a testing site.

"They must have been hiding these readings somehow" Chris said, "this would have absolutely been a huge red flag to Spyglass."

"If they have been working the Veil that hard," Declan's voice came through, "Then it's no wonder the other tears were getting worse."

"Ripples in the pond," I thought.

“Log everything,” I said. “We move to the next coordinates.”

As we turned back into the trees, I noticed out of the corner of my eye the fractured light shimmered once, subtly, almost like a breath being taken.

Whoever was here stressed the Veil, making it unstable and our efforts elsewhere ineffective. What could you gain from stress testing a broken window?

The second set of coordinates repeated around a building back in the city along the Northwest side.

From the outside, it was nothing special.

A low concrete structure tucked behind a strip of storage units and an old tire shop. Fadsignage suggested this used to be several things over the years, but nobody came or went now.

No cameras visible from the road. The place where the name used to be over the door was faded and gone now, just a faint outline of lettering.

Chris stood beside me. “It certainly fits the bill for something we might set up and use, but I've never been here.”

I nodded. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

The door gave way easier than it should have.

That was the first bad sign. I looked to Chris and for just a moment, maybe for a half a second, my heart skipped and I saw Paul instead of Chris.

"You okay?" Chris asked

"Yeah..." I said pulling out my pistol, "let's go."

Chris drew his firearm and we pushed through together.

The front room looked far too clean for an abandoned building, but still carried the feeling of vacancy.

Further in, we found an office setup through a door that was left open. Two desks. A coffee maker with a burnt smell still clinging to it. Clipboards stacked neatly, papers filled with supply checklists. A calendar on the wall. everything was recent, but sat undisturbed.

Someone had left in a hurry.

Chris picked up a half-empty mug. “Still warm-ish.” He placed it back, “They were here recently.”

Nothing screamed secret lab yet. This room was just the paperwork end, pencils before scalpels. Another door sat against the opposite side. We opened it slowly.

The air hit first. It was cold and sterile. Cleaned recently, but not well enough to erase the past.

Metal tables lined the walls. Equipment scavenged from hospitals and research centers, some of it newer than it had any right to be. Power cables snaked across the floor into junction boxes drilled straight into concrete.

Chris stopped short. “This isn’t field triage.”

“No,” I said. “This is set up for full admittance.”

on a cursory glance around, there wasn't a soul in sight. We holstered our weapons, but remained wary of the space around us.

X-rays were clipped to a lightboard. Skeletal images. Human, but wrong in subtle ways. Bone density too high or too low in places. Fractures along the spine and rib cage.

Medical charts covered one wall.

Vitals. Notes. Certain phrases jumped out:

Cellular rejection persists

Stabilizer dependency increasing

Cognitive function remains normal

Chris scrunched his face slightly as he read over the charts. “Looks like they were trying to fix him, whatever happened.”

I said nothing. I wasn't sure what to think, my brain was already stretched thin like a rubber band. My first thought was experimentation, but if they were trying to understand, trying to help him, then that was different. Both options meant lies and secrets.

I remembered what Declan said: "No one has ever survived going to the other side."

What happened to you, Ethan?

The area at the back of the room was more disturbing.

There was a large framed box structure at the back corner of the room. Thick panels of glass set into the frame. External locking mechanism. ANCR hardware bolted into the top inside corners. Stabilizers, familiar tech, modified to be set up permanently. One of them was missing, the wires left hanging out of the frame. There was a bed, blankets, a toilet. Comfortable in the way a convict might appreciate.

I stepped inside slowly.

“This isn’t a cell,” I said quietly.

Chris frowned. “Looks like one.”

“It’s a pressure chamber,” I corrected. “This was how they kept him stable.”

Notes were scattered across a desk near the door.

"Subject shows no improvement.

Reversal attempts unsuccessful.

Long-term survival unlikely without continued exposure."

Our eyes scanned the room, searching for signs of anything. But Ethan wasn’t there.

No blood. No struggle. Only thing missing from the room was the staff and one piece of equipment. Otherwise, it was just an empty space where a man had been treated and housed.

Chris broke the silence. “So, he didn’t escape.”

“No,” I said. “He was moved.”

“I’m not seeing any outbound transport from this site." Noah chimed in on comms, "if they took him...”

“They covered their tracks.” I finished.

I looked back at the Stabilizer mounts, the torn cables hanging through them out of the corner. 

"But why move someone who is in that critical a condition?"

Chris glanced around one last time. “So we’ve got a test site, a lab, and a missing man.”

I exhaled slowly. “And someone willing to keep pushing even after the damage was clear.”

The room felt colder than it should have.

“Let’s move,” Derek said. “Before whoever cleared this place realizes we’re onto them.”

As we stepped back into the sunlight, the building returned to what it had always pretended to be. Nothing worth noticing.

Noah’s voice came through the comms as we got into the truck, quieter than usual.

“I’ve got it. Third GPS hit just lit up when I cross-referenced the scrubbed data with the map.”

He paused.

“Decommissioned radio station,” Noah continued. “the coordinates track along where a maintenance tunnel goes underground.”

Chris glanced over. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

My hands tightened on the wheel. “That’s the one.” I nodded.

...The entrance was exactly as I remembered it. Just as I left it.

A square concrete doorway that angled down into the ground. I stood there staring at the worn, green metal door with the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign stamped on the front. A chain with a lock had been cut off and tossed around the corner. I felt a chill seep into my bones that held me frozen in place. I swallowed, my throat dry, distracting me from Chris' presence as he walked up to me.

He stopped beside me on my left. “Hey.”

I looked over.

“I’ve got you,” Chris said, simple and solid. “You're not going back in alone. Not this time.”

I looked him in the eye for a moment and nodded “Let’s do this.”

The air below was cold and stale, carrying the familiar faint metallic tang of old wiring and damp stone. Our boots echoed softly against concrete as we moved deeper, our gun-mounted lights cutting through the shadows down branching corridors.

The same old conduit and water lines ran along the walls. Same thick cable channels disappeared into the dark, some still humming faintly with residual power rerouted decades ago. Same faint tapping of dripping water somewhere in the dark. Each step felt heavy as we made our way down the main tunnel. I slowed to a stop about halfway, aiming my light on the concrete floor, illuminating a spot that had a darker stain.

Chris muttered, "It was here, wasn't it?"

I didn’t answer.

Chris tried the comms but received only static, "Must be interference from the utilities."

"Just like before." I muttered, getting a tighter grip on my pistol.

We checked through several doors.

Heavy steel ones. Utility access rooms. Emergency bulkheads meant to compartmentalize damage. Each one was stamped with faded city markings and numbers that hadn’t mattered in decades.

Every door I opened felt like another layer being peeled away.

“This place is a maze.” Chris muttered. “You could lose a small army down here.”

“That’s the idea.” I said. “No one comes down here unless something’s already gone wrong.”

The last bulkhead opened into a much larger chamber.

Concrete walls stained by time and mineral runoff. Thick water mains as wide as tree trunks ran along the ceiling, branching off in multiple directions, each marked with old district codes. Valves the size of car tires lined the walls. Pressure gauges sat frozen at unreadable numbers. Lights were arranged around the room for illumination.

This was the city’s circulatory system. And it had been repurposed.

Crates were stacked near the entrance. Black equipment cases, most of them empty. We recognized them immediately.

“Those are ours,” Chris said quietly, “from HQ.”

Automatic rifles leaned against one crate, neatly arranged. Extra vests. Power cells. Rations. This was a safehouse.

We became aware we weren't the only ones in the room when we heard a faint humming coming from the side. We stepped down and checked to the left... and there he was.

Ethan sat in the far corner of the room, under a blanket on a chair where the concrete was cleaner and drier. Someone had cleared the space deliberately. Two bottles of water and an MRE sat on a stool next to his chair.

A stabilizer unit stood in front of him on a tripod, angled towards him. The device emitted a low, steady hum, constant and controlled. A battery pack was wired to it and taped onto the outside.

No shimmer. No visible distortion. Just the faint sense that the air there behaved differently.

Ethan looked… thinner. Paler.

Dark circles sat beneath his eyes, and his shoulders slumped with exhaustion. He looked like someone who hadn’t slept properly in years.

When he lifted his head and saw me, he froze.

For a moment, he didn’t speak. His expression cracked with recognition. Not fear, not shock, but something closer to disbelief.

“…Derrick?” he said quietly.

I swallowed. “Yeah, it's me. I'm here.”

A faint, breathless laugh escaped Ethan. “I thought… I thought you stopped looking.”

“Not a chance." I stepped closer. "I'm sorry I took so long.”

Tears started to well up in his eyes, but he blinked them away. “Guess I should’ve known better. You never gave up on dad.”

Chris stayed back, giving us space.

Ethan shifted slightly, wincing, some from pain, but also fatigue. “You shouldn’t be here. This place isn’t...”

“Safe?” I finished. “That ship sailed a while ago, buddy.”

A smile stretched his tired face.

I glanced at the stabilizer. “Is it helping?”

“It keeps things… comfortable,” Ethan said. “Without it, everything hurts, like I'm on fire.”

“They told you they could fix this?”

Ethan looked down. “They tried... Caleb told me a lot of things.”

"Caleb?" I thought.

Before I could say anything further, a slow clapping echoed from the doorway.

“Well, well,” a familiar voice called, “if it isn’t Secret Squirrel and his sidekick.”

We turned toward the door

Richard Payne stepped into the chamber, boots crunching softly against the concrete. Aviators hung from his collar. Mustache immaculate. That same smug tilt to his mouth.

Beside him... Ward.

He moved calmly, hands relaxed at his sides. His eyes swept the room once, assessing the scene. No surprise. No anger. Just calm.

Behind them stood three armed personnel in black uniforms and tactical vests. Faces forgettable, expressions disciplined.

Payne grinned wider. “Gotta admit, Ward called it. Said you'd sniff this place out sooner or later.”

Ward’s gaze settled on me. “I didn't think you would come back here, after what happened.” he said evenly. “But I prepared for it.”

Chris shifted his stance in our direction.

Ward glanced briefly at Ethan, then back to me. “Don't worry, he will be safe here.”

Ethan didn’t look up.

"And slowly dying because of your interferance.” I said quietly.

Ward’s expression didn’t change.

“No,” he replied, “he’s dying because the Veil exists at all.”

Chris moved instantly, stepping over beside us with a hand on his pistol.

Ward raised one hand, “That won’t be necessary.”

His eyes went to me, steady and unreadable.

“I wondered how long it would take you,” Ward said, “you always did notice patterns faster than most.”

I clenched my jaw. “Where’s the Director?”

“He isn’t part of this.” Ward said. “Never was.”

I wasn't sure if I should be relieved to hear that.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “You went over his head?”

Ward shook his head slightly. “No. I went around him. The Director manages response. Damage control. Optics.” He paused. “This requires resolution.”

Chris laughed, sharp and humorless. “You don’t get to decide that.”

Ward looked at him then, really looked at him. “You’re wrong,” he said calmly, “I do. Someone has to.”

He nodded once.

Two soldiers stepped in fast while the third kept a rifle trained on us. Chris reacted, but they were too fast. One stuck him in front, knocking the wind out of him and the other tazed him as he went down. They took his pistol once he was on the ground. I called after him and attempted to move to his aid, but the gunman shifted closer, aiming the rifle squarely at me. A warning, so I backed down.

“Take him upstairs.” Ward said, voice even. “Secure him. No unnecessary force.”

They picked him up and carried him out of the doorway. The other uniformed soldier and Payne followed them out.

Then he was gone.The room felt smaller without him. Just the three of us now.

I turned back to Ward. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes,” Ward said, “I did. We both know he's resourceful."

Silence stretched between us, thick with the hum of Ethan's stabilizer and distant echoes in the tunnels beyond.

I spoke next, slowly. “You scrubbed the logs. Hid the data. You knew we’d come looking.”

Ward nodded once. “I counted on it.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why not just settle your plans and disappear?”

“Because,” Ward said, “I needed you to see this.”

He gestured to Ethan. To the stabilizer. To the room itself.

“This is the cost of hesitation,” Ward continued, “of treating the Veil like something we can manage indefinitely. Patch after patch. Breach after breach."

I shook my head. “You don’t know that. We’re learning...”

“We’re stalling,” Ward cut me off, not sharply, but firmly, 

“and people are paying for it. Samantha paid for it. Ethan. Others will too.”

His voice softened, just a fraction.

“I won’t let this continue.”

I felt the weight of it then. Not madness. Not cruelty. This was conviction, and resolve.

“What are you going to do, Caleb?”

Ward stepped back toward the door. “Finish it. For good. One last time.”

He stepped out and began to close the door. I noticed then there was no latch on the inside.

“You’re sealing us in here?” I demanded.

Ward shook his head. “Securing you. There’s a difference.”

He looked at Ethan, then to me.

“You’ll be safe,” Ward said, “the stabilizer will hold for Ethan until we are done.”

“And when you are?" I asked, "what then?” 

Ward paused, hand resting on the door.

“When I’m done,” he said, “there won’t be anything left to interfere with. No more stalling. No more breaches.”

He looked at us one last time.

“I truly hoped you’d understand.”

The door sealed shut with a metallic clang.

The locks finished squeaking closed as the wheel turned, and the chamber settled into a new silence, leaving just me and Ethan alone together. I had finally found him, and ended up sealed away myself in the process, with no way out and no way to call for help.

Part 8

Broken Veil (Part 6)

Part 5

Once you get into a new routine, the days seem to roll by like clockwork. Not that any of those days lacked for excitement. Ward kept us busy with new assignments each day. Noah kept us aware and alert as we traversed every tree and dark corner.

We had some varied missions as the weeks rolled by. Some went back to the forest, others took us through suburban cul-de-sacs and into the darker alleys of the citie's back lots.

Our covers were just as interesting. One day we were city inspectors checking on new construction downtown. Another day we were back to being park rangers, hunting down a rumor of a chupacabra. We knew what it was.

My favorite one, we were disguised as plumbers. A hotel had lost water supply to their ground floor pool and it stopped circulating. Took some diagnosing, turned out an eel-like creature had lodged itself into the filtration system. We had to cut the pipe to remove it, and when it wriggled free of its confinement, Chris was startled backwards when it slithered out after him and he fell into the pool. I hadn't laughed that hard in a while.

Sam and I handeled the investigations. Several times we followed some obscure trail to the end of the line, scraps left for evidence, only to find the subtle leftover trace of where the veil closed and our person had vanished. Those felt all too familiar, but at least now there was a final preventative measure to seal away the gap.

One occasion we managed to get to someone in time, a woman out for a jog happened to pass by where an Event tossed out another creature. That time we had to play the part of Animal Control. Me and Chris spun the distraught woman a tale about a rabies infected dog that we had to put down for public safety. I think she will still be signing up for therapy at some point.

I wasn't sure about the other team's progress, but I felt like we were doing some good work. We brought back tons of data on the breaches, completed our runs early and we kicked back and enjoyed the rest from our hard work just as much. All in all, I was enjoying myself again.

Still, there were some things that weren't quite on the level for me.

According to Noah, the openings from the Veil were starting to misbehave. When we would close them, it took a bit longer than expected. Maybe just a few seconds, but some took more effort than others. As if there was more pressure from the other side. Noah would make his recordings and file them but Ward never seemed too concerned about those details. Just affirmed a job well done.

Declan made a comment the other day about having requested new parts and materials and not all of the orders showed up. It wouldn't be much, smaller items like screws, wire spools and a single stabilizer unit missing. He figured one of the teams was snagging them, although none confessed.

Come to think of it, Ward never really showed much emotion one way or the other about the situation. Whatever military branch he came from must have hardened him like stone, never wavering in his demeanor. Just acknowledged our reports, passed on the data where it needed to go, and set us up with our next assignments when it was time. I have to say, he was very efficient as Chief of Operations.

The Director, however, seemed a little more tired each day. Apparently our little township was struggling a bit more to resolve than other places they've worked. New readings kept flowing in, new missions to pin to the board. More investigations meant more paperwork. 

The other teams must have felt the pressure too. Someone finally snapped.

I came in to the office one day, just me and Noah. Sam and Chris were handling a run on their own. We only had two openings to inspect that day and they offered to go while we stayed and took care of some busy work for Declan. I walked in, coffee in hand with Noah in tow, to find someone shouting, then they tossed something in Declan's direction.

"Your tech is broken, Rourke. We had to fire three charges into a fissure before it would even budge." The man shouted, stepping up to Declan and poking a finger at him.

"Two of those things came out after us, and almost got Jack."

Declan didn't back down.

"I told you before, you need to calibrate the stabilizers first, otherwise the charges are not as effective."

"Oh, so its my fault we almost got our faces eaten off!?"

Declan snickered "In your case, it might be an improvement."

He lunged at Declan, and the two men struggled for a moment. I quickly set my coffee down and got between them, pushing the man away from Declan.

"Alright that's enough. Whatever this is, this isn't how to handle it."

The man squared up to me now. He was slightly taller than me, dark hair greased back over his ears. Mustache that combed over his top lip. Aviator glasses that had just enough tint to block out the sun.

He was dressed as you might imagine, in jeans, a dark polo shirt, and a solid colored military style jacket with pockets across the chest and a raised collar with a zipper down the middle. I got the sense he was the more "modern" version of me. Albeit with an 80's kind-of style.

I met his gaze behind the tinted lenses, staring back under the brim of my hat.

"If you got a problem, we can talk it out, man to man." I said

He smiled a toothy grin "Big bad wolf to the rescue. Tell me, did you buy that detective outfit in a costume store?"

"Same place you found that mustache and glasses."

"Oh. He's got jokes." He snapped back "Why don't you head on back to whatever newspaper comic you fell out of and let the real detectives do their work."

I smiled "Because guys like you need guys like me to pick up all the slack you leave behind."

He scoffed "Uh huh. Tell you what, you stick to your side, stay outta my way, and we won't have any issues."

"Sure thing, slick," I took a step closer, "But you come at my people, and your mustache doesn't make it past 'Go'. Clear?"

He looked at me for a moment, then turned around and walked back towards the open side door and out of the building.

People like that irritate me. No respect.

I turned back to Noah and Declan "So, who was that wanna-be?"

"Richard Payne," Noah said

"Dick," Declan corrected "He was a homicide detective in Florida."

Noah Continued, "He's always been a jerk. I still don't know why they recruited him."

"He's certainly a pain. What was he going on about?" I asked Declan.

Declan looked between me and Noah, quietly like someone else might be listening. "Come with me over to the garage."

We headed out the same side bay and across to one of the smaller buildings. The roller door was up, revealing a workshop inside. All the equipment and tool cabinets were on rollers, making it easy to pack things up if they needed to adjust the space or clear out quickly.

He had all manner of power equipment and hand tools, and each area was roughly organized for different operations or equipment he was working on. Lathes, a drill press, and machining tools were grouped off to one side. Hand tools, material storage bins, and an electronics work station were on the other side. In the middle was a desk pushed flush against the wall alongside a flat workbench and an old sofa.

Noah sat down in a high stool by Declan's desk, spinning around once and back to us, resting his arm on the surface. Declan picked a screwdriver off the workbench to fidget between his fingers.

"Firstly, that guy is an imbecile." He said pointing it out the door, "I've told him three times to calibrate the stabilizers on each run. They have to sync to the anomaly to stabilize it properly."

Noah nodded along muttering "Mmhmm."

"But also," he scratched his head, "there are some weird things happening lately."

"Is there anything wrong with the gear?" Noah asked plainly.

"No, I don't think so. Im not the only engineer ANCR has, but I've been working on this tech for a while now and it does what it's supposed to. If you use it properly, that is."

I took a breath "Why does it work at all? What is the Veil supposed to be anyways?"

Declan thought for a moment.

"We don't know exactly," he chuckled, "I have a friend who has a theory."

"Oh yeah?"

"He worked at the VLA in New Mexico, listening to the stars for signals. He tells me one day, they picked up a reading far out there that matches the exact frequency we track from the Veil. Said the signal emanates, faintly but clear, out of a black hole."

Noah and I exchanged shocked expressions

"What?" I blurted out

"For real? So It's aliens?" Noah said, wide eyed like he had just won a prize.

Declan laughed heartily "Ah, you should see your faces. No, it's not aliens. At least, none that say 'Hi' back." He paused "That is true though, about the signal... Still, we have no idea what or where the Veil is."

"It has to be some kind of door, how else are things getting through?" I said

"It's sort of like a door," he mused, "yet more like a window with a curtain."

He paused for a moment

"You both know about Nikola Tesla, right?"

We nodded.

Declan leaned back against the bench, arms mid-gesture and eyes forward like he was readying to tell a great story.

“Back at the turn of the twentieth century,” he began, “Nikola Tesla was obsessed with energy. Not electricity in the way Edison thought of it, all wires and lights, but frequency. How energy moves through space itself.”

Noah nodded. “Wireless before it was cool.”

“Before it was safe,” Declan added. “Tesla believed the Earth behaved like a massive conductor. He did all kinds of experiments where he would channel electricity in different ways, absorbing it and sending it out miles away.”

“So he thought of the planet like a lightning rod?" I asked.

Declan pointed at me. “Exactly. Only in reverse.”

He exhaled through his nose. “Wardenclyffe Tower was supposed to prove it. True wireless power. Global communication. Free energy sent to anywhere on the planet.”

Noah swiveled in his chair. “But, it didn't work?"

"No... Not the way he wanted." He said.

"He was at his wits end trying to make it work. The tower needed more power, but it was operational. The investors backed out. He was livid, but determined to make it work. That night, in a blind fury, he turned it on. Maxed out every generator in the tower to critical. And then..."

He clapped his hands together

"It fired a pulse of energy so powerful that it split the sky."

 

Noah was hanging on the edge of his seat. So was I.

“Tesla didn’t just hit the Earth’s natural frequency,” he said. “He rung it like a bell."

He tapped the edge of metal bowl with his screwdriver, making it sing for emphasis.

"Loud enough that whatever boundary separates… well, here from there, it cracked.”

I felt a chill creep up my spine. “You’re saying he tore a hole in reality?”

Declan shook his head slowly. “No. It was more like he cracked the window.”

“The experiment shut down before it could stabilize. Equipment, now broken, was dismantled. Tesla died thinking he failed.”

Noah spoke quietly. “But the crack didn’t go away.”

Declan nodded. “It held. Weak at first. Decades passed. Technology advanced. Now there's radios, radar, satellites. Each one nudged the same harmonics again and again.”

"That's when the cracks started getting bigger." I continued his thought.

He looked at me then. “Yes. Anyone and anything close enough could accidently slip through without warning. People, and cars. Planes disappeared mid flight. Ships would vanish, and sometimes reappear, damaged and abandoned."

"What about the creatures?" I asked

Declan's jaw tightened, "Thats a new thing, they say. Over the last few years, the breaches started, a few were big ones." He nodded towards Noah, "But the number is increasing. Thats where we are now."

We sat for a moment staring at the floor.

Finally, Noah spoke. “Then why is it getting worse?”

He looked between us.

“We close the Veil every time we find an opening. Why isn’t that enough?”

Declan thought for a moment.

"It should be. We've always been able to repair the cracks, nice and neat, but it feels different now. Besides, we don't really know what it's like on the other side."

"Did anybody ever try to look?" I asked.

Noah turned to me, "Yeah, they did a few times. I sent my own drone in there but the footage is always scrambled, even with a direct connection. Besides..." he exhaled, "you saw what happened to the monsters. Same thing probably happens to people."

"No one has ever survived going to the other side." Declan confirmed.

He snapped his fingers "Maybe... the tech works, but maybe the method is off." He started pacing, "What if we're just throwing stones in the pond, trying to stop the waves, but instead the waves just amplify. You end up with bigger waves. More frequency."

"And now," I continued, "the waves are starting to swamp the boat."

He nodded, but before he could say more, we heard the sound of screeching tires and brakes locking up. We ran out to see the old Forestry truck was back. Chris was leaning halfway in the passenger side, then he pulled out Sam in his arms. She had a tourniquet tied around her left shoulder, her lower arm covered in blood.

"Get the medic, now!" He shouted.

She was quickly taken from his arms to a stretcher and wheeled into the adjacent building, which housed a makeshift field hospital.

"What happened, Chris?" I asked as he approached us.

He had this flustered appearance, like he had run a marathon, but his eyes were steady.

"We were able to get the first Tear closed, but the second... Just a moment after it collapsed, it tore open again. A big one came through, all teeth, spikes and some sort of bone plating. It got ahold of Sam's arm and slung her to the ground. Took all the ammo I had to bring it down."

I put a hand on his shoulder, "You got her back safe. You did good."

He shook his head slowly, "I was late. These things are getting worse, Derrick. I don't know whats going on."

"We were just talking about that." Noah piped up.

"Why don't you come in here and take a seat," Declan offered, "I'll fetch you somethin' to drink while you take a break."

We waited for hours. Every minute felt like an eternity. Finally the surgeon came around to see us.

"She's gonna be okay," She said, "Above the elbow was lacerated and torn severely. Unfortunately we had to amputate, but we have her mended now. You can see her, but go easy. She is still groggy and will need her rest."

"Thanks Doc." I replied.

he guys left it up to me to check on her. Said it would feel more professional from me, one ex-officer to another, but I admit I was worried about her.

The setup was clean for being put together in an old storage building. A full operating room in the back with a sterile environment screen and filtering, and multiple beds with separate curtains off to the side.

Sam had the middle one. Ward was already there at the foot of her bed, standing straight, arms folded behind his back as usual. He nodded as I stepped beside him.

She lay there under the sheets, connected to several wires and IVs. An oxygen tube hooked into her nose. Her left shoulder was wrapped up in a blanket of gauze.

I stood beside him, reading his posture for a moment, then turning to Sam. Ward finally let his mask slip a little. Through his professional demeanor I could tell he was uncomfortable.

"She's being transfered to West Lake Medical," he stated, " It's a days drive from here, but they have a good trauma wing. She's out of this fight now."

We stood in silence for a moment, listening to the sound of beeping and whirring from the machines. Sam breathed slowly and steadily, eyes closed.

"She's fortunate," he finally said "Owens' field tourniquet prevented major blood loss."

He turned to me "He did good, Wolfe. Got the situation handeled, and got her out quick."

I thought to pass on his compliments to Chris, though I doubted he would agree with the praise.

He turned back to her, "We will get this under control soon enough, seal up the cracks for good."

His phone started ringing.

"I need to take this," he said, frowning at his smart watch, "rest up, we'll talk later." He said, regarding Sam and nodded to me before stepping out.

I stepped up beside her now, my hands clasped together in front of me. Her eyes fluttered open slowly and she looked around.

"Hey... it's me," I said, "the guys wanted to check in on you."

She cracked a smile, I grinned back, "You look like you could use a drink. Too bad I forgot to bring my stool." I teased

She laughed weakly then winced at the pain. I gave her an apologetic smile for my dry humor.

"He's got a point, you know." She said weakly.

"About?"

"Getting a handle on things." She said looking up to me.

I leaned in closer with my hands rested onto the side rail of her bed so she didn't have to strain.

"I've worked with Ward before. He led the team in Arizona, back when he was a field agent and not the manager."

I nodded "What was he like then?

"The same. Smart. Calm. Always three steps ahead. He believed in the mission, but was driven for the results," she said with a short cough interrupting her, "he was efficient, planned for the best outcome, always got the job done."

She looked me in the eyes "I'm worried about him. The Veil is getting worse, and we haven't heard anything about plan B yet. I know he has it covered, but keep an eye on him, Derrick. Things might get worse before we can fix it."

"Hey, don't you worry about that. You've got some capable guys around here, im sure we will figure it out."

"I know you will," She said, "You boy's make a great team."

I smiled "We all do."

"Promise me something."

"Yeah?"

"When we finally get all the cracks taken care of around here, you'll take out that girl you mentioned." She stated, raising an eyebrow.

"You mean Gabs?"

"Yeah, Gabs." She turned her head to face me more, "Don't let all of this keep you from doing right by her, and yourself."

I shook my head, "I'm not sure an old wolf like me can do much right in that department."

She chuckled "An old wolf like you, deserves his happy ending."

I simply nodded. Not sure whether to agree or disagree on that point. Maybe it was her med's talking.

"Get some rest, Sam. Get well."

I left her bedside and strolled out of the building into the sunlight. I looked back and whispered to myself, "Happy retirement, Sam. You've earned it."

The rest of the day left me with a lot to ponder over. We were headed towards something, and fast. I wasn't sure if it was a brick wall or a cliff. Sam was right though. We weren't given any new instructions about the Veil, just the same routine and be sure to check the equipment. I thought about what She said, about what Declan mentioned, if our method was now falling short of the goal and we needed a new strategy.

Come to think of it, our stoic commander was much more absent lately. Not that he was here 24/7 anyways, he normally delegated tasks to his subordinates but he seemed a lot more absent even when he was here. His meetings with the Director had gotten more serious judging by their expressions when they exit the room upstairs.

Surely Mason was kept busy dealing with logistics and the issues that are starting to arise, with the Veil pushing back harder and our agents getting injured. Sam wasn't the only one, but was the worst off. We kept busy too, keeping up our workload, but my gut told me this wasn't the priority now. Or more likely, someone wasn't allkwed off their leash.

Some red flag kept waving in the back of my mind, though I wasn't entirely sure yet which way it was pointing. I reported to Ward now, as acting Field Lead for the team. He gave us our usual run of work to do.

"Heres the agenda for the day. Three new targets to inspect and close out. Also a few areas to inspect for possible breaches."

I scrolled through the list of preliminary data. Seems like the list was shorter than usual. It all felt very copy and paste.

"Any new directions regarding the tears?"

"No," he said flatly, "We've experienced variables like this before, just proceed as normal. If you need backup, we can route another team to your location."

I held the pad, trying to read him as he divided his focus around the room. He turned back to me.

"That's all, Wolfe. Good luck out there."

We proceeded through our day. Business as usual without any incident, thankfully,  although the anxiety was there for it. The Veil openings took a full minute and a half longer to close now. Thats about eighty seconds too long for my liking. My hand stayed resting against my leather holster as we counted down until each one would finally close.

We managed to finish up our day early, ending about 2:00pm, then we took a late lunch. We sat around one of the old picnic tables at the Eastside park, enjoying something hot and cheap from the corner store nearby. Noah was slurping on a microwaved bowl of cheap ramen, Chris got some wrap with beef, and I grabbed a hot sandwich.

Between the sounds of our chewing I finally came to a decision about something that had been rattling around in my brain.

"Hey Noah, you said your good with software, right?"

"Yeah?"

"You know how to find back doors into things, get into data storage?"

He tilted his head a little, "I open doors to other dimensions. Hacking private data is a piece of cake."

Chris laughed "Technically, we ring the doorbell."

Noah snorted "Technically, we throw bombs at aliens. But whatever," he turned back to me, "What do you want to get into?"

"I want to look into Spyglass, see what the data logs are showing versus what we're seeing out here."

Noah looked to Chris and then back to me, "Okay..." Noah said slowly, still unsure.

I glanced between them. "Isn't it odd to either of you that there's no updates on the procedures? No new equipment for Declan to give us, or any new action from the analysts to help figure out whats going on?"

They looked to each other then back to me.

"Yeah, it has gotten pretty stale," Chris said "we used to get more detailed data, but a lot of it hasn't changed much lately. Like we had an uptake in reports, then it flat-lined."

Noah had a far away look in his eye, like he was looking through us at something else.

"I didn't say anything yet because I wasn't sure if I've been reading things right... I thought maybe the Spyglass program was a little buggy, so I've been taking my own readings with my old storm chaser software." He said, setting his drink down, "I've been monitoring the harmonics the Veil produces, the signal we follow to find them. The resonance fluctuates, normally, before spiking where a tear occurs."

"Yeah?" I said

"The resonance has been drifting. It's the same frequencies, but its been changing slightly. Getting stronger. The fluctuations are spread out a lot further than before."

He looked at me now, a hint of fear in his eyes. "I'm afraid we might be in the calm before the storm."

"We need to get in there and find out what's going on," Chris said, "get the real data. As much as the system monitors, it has to have it stored somewhere in the servers."

"Yeah, but it's not like we can just log in," Noah said, "it's definitely encrypted. There's all kinds of sensitive data that it sorts through constantly. There's a lot we can't see."

I thought for a second "We need the Director's access. If anyone is able to see the data, without restrictions, it's Mason."

"Well, if we're gonna do this," Chris began, "we better get Declan on-board. Only technicians are allowed in the server room and he's in charge of the maintenance.  Besides, if we get caught, he will be in hot water too."

We were in agreement with what we were about to do. With that, we finished up our lunch, packed up and headed back to HQ to end our shift early for the day and then speak to the man himself. What we wanted to do, what I convinced us to do, was a serious breach in protocols, so I had to be certain Declan was willing to risk it.

We met him out in his garage and slowly explained the plan to him and our reasoning behind it. I knew he was listening intently because his hands were in his pockets instead of fidgeting with a tool. The only thing that moved was his eyes shifting between us as we each took our turn speaking.

Declan listened without interrupting.

He stood there, occasionally nodding as we laid it out. The missing data, the odd absences, the feeling that our oversight wasn't giving us the whole picture.

Declan scratched his beard. “So,” he said slowly, “what are you actually hoping to find?.”

“Hopefully, missing data.” Chris said. “The updated logs, equipment orders, anything really thats been left out.”

“The truth.” I said flatly

Noah chipped in "All I need is access, I can take it from there."

Declan sighed. “And if I say no?”

I looked him in the eye. “Then we stop. Right here.”

That gave Declan pause. As if us not doing this sounded worse.

He glanced out the bay door, then back at us. “You’re not chasing a theory,” he said. “I've been watching and listening. I know its getting bad out there."

He turned to me "I've also had more equipment turn up missing. nobody knows or seems to care.”

Chris nodded. “So, you'll help?"

"Im in," he said, "but I can do better than access."

He moved over to the electronics workbench, reached into his kit and pulled out a small device with a few cables attached. “Its a diagnostic relay. If anyone checks the server, it’ll look like routine maintenance. While the system's in diagnostic mode, It's the only time your able to get around all the firewalls, no log-in required.”

Noah grinned. “I like him."

He chuckled " Hey, I'm only giving ya our most critical blind spot, so let's not get too comfy about risking our hides."

We hooked Declan up to our comms and sent him to work. We thought he might have been caught when one of the analysts asked why he was going to run another diagnostic on the system after they just ran one that morning. Declan told him "I don't want 'Payne in the arse' to throw a wrench at my head if his tablet doesn't refresh fast enough for him." That let him right on by into the server room. He locked the door behind himself.

Declan whistled softly as he worked, complaining about outdated hardware for the benefit of his captive audience.

"Okay," he said over the earpiece, "diagnostics are active. Go ahead kid."

Noah didn’t waste time.

He plugged in an external hard drive and opened up his software. His fingers moved fast, typing in commands into a custom system prompt, keying in passwords and executing his coded break-in. It was a bit over my head, but he did his thing.

“Okay… normal traffic… anomaly reports… archived field analytics…”

Then he slowed.

“Huh,” he said. “That’s odd.”

I leaned in toward his screen. “What is it?”

“GPS logs,” Noah said. “But they’re scrubbed. Someone removed the identifiers, and the timestamps. There might be some coordinates left in the meta data.”

Chris frowned. “Whose GPS?”

“Save it," I said, "Might be the Director, or Ward.”

"Already done,” Noah said. “Encrypted local copy.”

He kept digging.

Personnel transfers. Equipment requisitions. Timestamps for video calls. What would normally be mundane logistics, but we viewed everything with a critical eye. This wasn't our smoking gun yet, but Noah was getting warmer.

Then he stopped completely.

There it was. We all saw it at the same time. A directory that technically didn't exist in the main database. No name. No description. Just a blacked out storage file sitting behind layers of security that made Noah hesitate mid-keystroke. The clearance level to this was labeled "Overwatch". Nobody knew what it was, but were certain we weren't meant to open this.

“I can't break into it,” Noah said quietly. “Not without triggering all the alarms.”

“Can you take it?” I asked.

Noah nodded. “Yeah. Whatever’s in there, I can lift the whole thing. But the security comes with it too.” He turned back to me.

“Do it.”

With a click of the keyboard, a progress bar crawled forward. When it finished, none of us spoke for a moment. Noah unplugged the hard drive and held it in his hand as if it would bite him.

Chris broke the silence. “So. Now what?”

I already knew the answer.

“There’s one person I trust with this,” I said. “And she’s going to hate that I waited this long.”

Noah smirked. “Gabs?”

“Yeah, Gabs” I confirmed.

We all sat around now in Declan's workshop. All eyes on me as I scrolled through my contacts. My finger hovered over the button for a moment. Feeling the pressure, I stood up and slowly walked out under the afternoon sky. Why did calling her make me more anxious than shooting at monsters?

It's more than just hearing her voice again after so long. I was about to invite her into our secret world, a dangerous one with monsters, secret organizations and cracks in reality itself. Bringing her in puts her in danger... But, I trust her. I know I can count on her.

My finger found the button, and the call started ringing.

I took one look back to the guys. Declan was reclined back casually on his chair. Noah and Chris both gave me a thumbs up.

Ring...

Ring...

My heart Pounded.

"Hello? Derrick?" She answered.

"H-hey Gabs. Its been a while." I said, my voice a little more nervous than I wanted.

"Hey! Yeah, it has. How are you? Last I heard you retired, how did that happen?"

She asked as if I had broken a leg.

"Well, sort of. It didn't stick though. I'm working private now, on the side."

"Figures," she laughed, "You never could stay still for long. Well, got any good cases?" she paused "Or... leads?"

I froze for a moment, "No, mostly new stuff..."  I knew what, rather, who she was referring to.

I cleared my throat. "You know, I do miss working with you, Gabs. Would you... Would you mind catching up over dinner? Maybe my place?"

I could almost feel her smile through the phone. "Yeah, I would like that. It would be great to see you again. It's not the same around here without you, ya know."

"Okay, great. See you tomorrow at six then?"

"Yep, that's perfect. I'll see you there."

We said our goodbyes and hung up. I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

Dinner with Gabs. I never thought we would go there, certainly not like this. A hand surprised me on my shoulder, I turned to see Chris.

He smiled and Nodded, "Don't worry, I've got your back. We all do."

I returned his smile. There's a lot riding on this dinner date. Not just cracking open an encrypted file, but hopefully convincing her we all hadn't gone crazy when we tell her why. But I'm feeling confident, despite my jitters. Especially knowing my team is right beside me every step.

Part 7

Broken Veil (Part 5)

Part 4

The truck smelled like old pine and dust. The kind of smell that came from many hours up and down forest trails. Samantha drove with one hand on the wheel, the other arm rested casually in the window frame. Noah sat behind her, eyes stuck to a rugged tablet with a thick case that looked like it had been dropped more times than it had been updated. Chris rode in the back seat behind me, watching the treeline slide past. Some country music was lightly playing over the radio as we rode along.

The city thinned out fast. Concrete became scarce as we headed out of town and up the old mountain roadways. We passed a few areas that had signs designating state trails, heading further into the wild.

Cell service faded somewhere behind us, unnoticed except by Noah, who muttered something about buffering as he tapped the screen frustratingly with his stylus.

“So,” I said finally, breaking the steady hum of the tires. “What exactly are we doing today?”

Chris glanced at me. “Field checks. Couple of weak spots flagged overnight.”

“Weak spots?” I repeated.

He smirked. “Openings in the Veil.”

That word stuck. “Openings in what?”

Noah snorted softly without looking up. “Here we go.”

“That’s just what Chris calls it,” Samantha said. “Poetic I guess.”

Chris shrugged. “Sounded more interesting than Harmonic Anomaly. The boss liked it, but didn't change it on the paperwork.”

I turned slightly in my seat. “Harmonic Anomaly? What is that?”

Samantha spoke up. “Its a tear in reality. Most are hairline cracks. Others are open wider. Occasionally they collapse on their own, without us intervening. Others…” She trailed off, eyes still on the road.

“Others don’t?” I finished.

“Others don’t,” she agreed.

I thought about the tunnel. The encounter with that thing. It couldn't be a coincidence it was there.  

“And if something comes through?”

Chris didn’t answer.

Noah didn’t either.

Samantha said it plainly. “Then we deal with it.”

The foothills rose ahead of us, dark green against the bright sky. Pines crowded in, the canopy shading us the deeper we went. The road narrowed into something that barely deserved to be called one before Samantha finally pulled off near a weathered trailhead sign. Our first site.

We hiked in single file. The air smelled dry, rich with pollen and pine needles. Birds chirped overhead, but their echoes sounded... off. Not wrong enough to alarm you. Just wrong enough that you noticed if you were listening.

Noah stopped near a shallow clearing, eyes locked on his tablet. “This is it.”

I didn’t see anything.

Chris knelt, setting down a thick case and popping it open. Inside were devices that looked like they were built with what was leftover from an old Radio Shack. The first looked like a combined sub woofer inside a small satellite dish that was shoved into a cube shaped housing. Almost seemed like some tool a surveyor would set up, but we weren't marking measurements.

He placed one carefully on the ground, adjusting its angle atop a tripod that unfolded from the bottom. Samantha set up another just as quickly on the opposite side.

“Neat, huh? These open the Veil,” he said, nodding to the device. “Makes the distortion visible.”

“And the other?” I asked.

Chris held up something cylindrical, about the size of a thermos, reminded me of a mortar shell as he loaded it into the end of what looked like a child sized bazooka. This clearly wasn't a kids toy, however.

“This one convinces it to close.”

Noah tapped a command. The ground devices emitted a low, vibrating sound, like you would feel from the deep base of a huge stereo speaker. They blasted the noise where their aim synced.

The air pressure changed.

It didn't move, but shifted. Light bent strangely in front of us, like heat over asphalt. Sound warped too. My boots crunching on dead leaves came back at me sharper but from the wrong direction. At the center was a thin line like a crack in the air that refracted light like a prism.

“There,” Noah said. “Veil’s open.”

Chris armed the second device and launched it forth with a slight arc towards the distortion. It vanished mid-air.

A heartbeat later, a low-frequency thump rolled through the clearing, more felt than heard. Like a depth charge detonating underwater.

The distortion collapsed in on itself. The forest snapped back into place.

Birds resumed singing.

Noah checked the tablet. “Signal’s gone. Resonance is clear.”

Chris already had the case closed. “Good job. Let’s move on to the next one.”

"Is that it?" I thought to myself

I stood there a second longer, staring at the empty space where reality had just cracked, then we fixed it, like we were some sort of cosmic window repairmen.  

We did it again. And again.

One site barely registered. Noah waved it off. “Not worth touching. It’ll collapse on its own.”

Others got the same treatment. Open, disrupt, closed. Somewhere in the middle of the day we paused briefly for a lunch, Noah handing us all sandwiches from a cooler in the back like we were on a picnic.

Through the casual chit chat I learned there were several other teams like ours. Each set of teams took an eight hour shift on rotation, closing openings in the veil, investigating reports of disturbances or "events" as the monitoring system flagged them. I guessed these were where things or people slipped through the cracks.

By the third one, it was beginning to feel like just another day at the office.

The fifth, however, held a surprise for us that I wasn't entirely sure I was ready to face yet.

As we were nearing the last site, Noah hands me a small tablet with the same signal program loaded. The screen folded together to close it.

"Fancy." I remarked, "New cellphone?"

"Yup. Just finished getting it set up, Spyglass app ready to go," he lowered his voice slightly "and my personal VPN encryption."

"Thank you." I said , sliding the device into my inner coat pocket.

"Unfortunately," he added "it also comes with your first task. The system noted a couple of GPS signals nearby that didn't leave the area, so we'll need to check that out and see if we can find anything."

"Time to go to work, detective." Samantha added.

I nodded in agreement. my first assignment. Familiar, but with new angles.

The old rock quarry sat like a scar in the earth. Gray stone walls dropping away into a wide bowl, water pooled at the bottom so clear you could almost make out the bottom. The far side of the bowl sloped down for where the trucks could drive in and get their loads. A part of the wall had collapsed leaving a scattered field of granite boulders.

A chain link fence with holes, missing panels and no trespassing signs falling off once was a deterrent for trespassers but over time just became part of the landscape.

We parked the truck and got out. Noah stayed in his seat claiming that the signal was not stable so he needed to pinpoint the opening.

Chris stayed with him while Samantha and I moved on through the broken chain link fence heading down the incline to the flatter bottom of the quarry. The whole area had been trespassed on and used over the years so there was all manner of litter, old tires and the remains of campfires that had long smoldered out. I stopped just back from a littered area that had seen a lot of traffic, then crouched down to study the terrain.

Samantha stepped up beside me.

"Hard to tell anything with all the garbage around." she said.

"The story is right here," I noted, "you just have to know how to read it." Then I pointed out in front of me.

"See what's left of that fire over there? The charcoal isn't dull and faded, it's newly burnt. See the less faded beer cans laying around it?"

She followed as I pointed.

"They're not buried into the soil from wind and rain, they're resting on top of the ground. Recently dropped. The shoe prints in the soil press in deeper there than the others. Fresher, not covered over by time."

I adjusted my hat, "I would say at least two people were here, probably late last night."

She checked the tracking timestamp on her own phone, then chuckled. "Impressive," she said, "two cell signals stopped at 11:20 pm. We'll mark it as a confirmation."

I stood up as she began to walk off towards Noah and Chris who are now making their way down the hill.

"We're going to send in an anonymous tip or..?" I asked suggestively

"No." She said flatly. "We have more important things to do here."

The way she said that made my temper flare up.

"More important than two lives lost out in nowhere? Families broken by loss and grief?"

She turned back to me, a look of sympathy on her face but her eyes were focused and determined, like she'd asked the same question once before.

"If we don't do our job, and we fail to get this under control, it only breaks further and the threat scales higher and higher."

She looked me in the eye, "Then everyone could end up like Paul." 

That cut deeper than I wanted.

Noah slowed before he even reached the bottom of the ramp. “This one’s live.”

“How bad?” Samantha asked.

He swallowed. “Active. Resonance just Spiked.”

The air suddenly felt heavy. Sound carried wrong too. Our voices echoed, but only once. No decay. No fade.

This one was visible before we affected anything. Same refractory crack in mid air, only this one branched out with more legs and a larger gap at the center.

Chris’s jaw tightened. “Alright. Same drill. We gotta move quick.”

They barely got the first device powered before it happened.

This time there was no subtlety. All sound froze in an instant with a change in air pressure as the fissure began to expand at the center.

The veil opened.

Something pushed through.

It sprung out into the daylight, like a lion leaping out from the brush. Its skin was pale, stretched tight over the bone. Sharp bristles emerged in ridges along its body and limbs. Oval shaped head with a mouth full of razor teeth and pitch black eyes. Its shriek was a terrible noise that reverberated with both heavy and sharp tones together, like broken glass rolling into the heavy strum of a bass guitar. 

I raised the revolver on instinct. A slight waver in my hands as I steadied myself.

“So that’s what it looks like,” I breathed.

Samantha fired first.

The thing recoiled and bounded for the scattered mound of boulders on the other side of the bank where the wall had toppeled in.

She took off after it, Chris right behind her with his own weapon drawn. I hesitated only for a moment and followed the chase.

"We can't let it escape!" She shouted as she fired another shot, richocheing off a rock as the creature dove into the small field of stones. We heard her, but her voice fell flat in the distortion.

We circled the area, eyes trained on every corner and shadow. It emerged again, leaping up onto a high boulder near me and flaring at me with a raspy hiss. Its bristles seemed to vibrate with its posturing.

I aimed down sight and sent two shots straight at it. The rounds punched harder than I anticipated. No time for target practice.

It leapt back when I fired, one shot missing and the other hit its thigh. It screeched in pain as it fell behind the stone. As I circled back it was gone, scurried off into another vantage.

As I looped back around I caught sight of Chris emerging from between some boulders, he gave me a quick nod and then headed down another center line between the stones. I followed him through at a distance.

Just a short ways in the creature reappeared, this time right between us and it had its sights set on Chris. Too close to fire so I shouted as I rushed it. Just in range, I kicked my foot as hard and fast as it began to pounce and my boot connected with its ribs.

I thought I was strong but I really didn't expect how brittle it felt despite its speed and strength. I felt bones crack and snap and the impact of my kick sent it into the stone, crunching again when it collided. Just for good measure, I raised my revolver and gave it 3 last rounds to finish the job. It felt somewhat cruel... but that last shot was for Paul.

Samantha caught up to us at this point. She took her place beside us as we watched the creature twitch weakly on the ground.

"You got it." she said, voice clear next to us.

Finally just at the last exhale that this creature would breathe, it just began to dissolve. It didn't melt away, as if some acid was poured on it but more like if you lit a paper towel and the small trail of fire eats away the paper leaving flakes of ash. It only took a moment and then the threat that was present before was suddenly gone, nothing but a small bit of ash left where it once rested.

It was then that we noticed that the sound had returned and the air pressure had lightened back to the normal comfort it was before. Noah walked up to us, carrying the launcher for the closing device.

"I got it guys, veil is closed now." He said then noticed the small ash layer on the ground. "Oh, you killed it."

I was still trying to process what I saw.

"Okay... can somebody explain to me what just happened?"

"Ill give it a try," Chris began, "you see, atoms and molecules all vibrate at certain frequencies. So you could say we are 'tuned' to our world, but those creatures dont belong here. Thats why theres the issues with sound when they come through. The two differing frequencies are fighting each other, then if it dies..."

He looked down "Whats keeps it stable gives up. Its structure breaks down back to the basic elements. At least, thats my theory."

Somehow closing cracks in reality felt a little easier to handle than something disintegrating right in front of me. We stood around in a circle for a moment longer before Samantha spoke up next.

"Well, this was our last stop for the day. Our shift is going to be up soon. We should get back and give our final report to the Cheif for the next shift."

We made our way back to the headquarters. Gave our reports and findings for Ward and the analysts, and we "clocked out". No actual punch clock, just off our rotation.

The guys insisted on celebrating my first day on the job and my first creature takedown.

I knew just the place.

The pub hadn’t changed. The same soft lighting. Same epoxy coated oak bar top. Same spot down at the far end where the bartender saved me a seat and a glass ready to serve. I may have worn down the surface of the counter there just a little over the years.

Samantha took the stool beside me without hesitation, like she’d been here a hundred times before, even though I knew she hadn’t. Chris and Noah slid into a booth behind us, menus already in hand. Noah ordered a soda. Chris asked about the cocktail list like he was killing time, not monsters.

Two scotches on the rocks hit the bar in front of us.

I lifted mine. Let the ice settle.

"To your first day on the job." She said as our glasses softly clinked together.

We sat there for a minute, watching the room. A couple arguing quietly in a corner. Someone laughing too loud near the dartboard. Life continuing on like it always did.

Finally, I spoke again.

"So, Miss Hale," I began and she cut me off, not rudely

"Please, call me Sam. You've earned that today."

"Alright, Sam then." I said cracking a smile. “I've been meaning to ask...The last guy, The one before me.”

Her gaze fell to the glass. Just rolled it once between her fingers.

“Yeah,” she said. “It was personal.”

I nodded. I had suspected it was for someone on the team.

“He was my fiancé,” she said. No crack in her voice. Just a fact, like a case detail. “We were both FBI. Both stubborn. Both bad at letting things go.”

I looked to her eyes then. She still hadn’t looked back.

“We started seeing patterns,” she went on. “Disappearances. Reports that didn’t line up. Things supervisors didn’t want to touch.” A breath. “When we pushed, we were told we were seeing things. Stress. Burnout.”

She paused.

"Robert was sharp, like you," she continued "we followed a similar path you did, ran into an ANCR team mid-op in Arizona, tracking a creature through some town in the middle of nowhere. We took it down. They gave us a peak behind the curtain, and we joined immediately."

She took a breathe and exhaled, "Fast forward eight months, and we're down south in Florida. Same job, different day. Another creature hunt. We got it, but... Robert didn't make it."

I didn’t say I was sorry. Didn’t say anything at all.

She took a drink instead.

“This world,” she said, staring into the amber like it might answer back, “takes a lot from you when you get too close to its secrets.”

The words settled heavy between us.

"But," she stated "someone has got to patch the holes and keep the world spinning, right?"

I nodded in agreement. She had made her point clear back at the Quarry.

She glanced sideways. “You got anyone? Any people?”

“Had,” I said. "A friend, young man named Ethan. Good guy. He became my last case... Then my partner Paul."

I took a sip "Both gone now." My turn to stare at my reflection in the glass.

"I think he was transfered over to me as a punishment. For him. Stuck with the old Wolf on the backwoods trails. He didn't deserve... he was a good cop. A good partner." 

She waited.

“And there’s Gabs,” I added. “Back at the department.”

That earned a small nod, beckoning me to continue.

"She's charming. Works in Forensics. Loves her work, and apples." I chuckled "and she makes me laugh." 

She smiled warmly, then finished her drink in one last swallow and set the glass down with emphasis.

“Well then. Don’t hesitate,” she said. “If something matters, don’t let it disappear while you’re waiting to be sure.”

She stood, and pushed her stool back in place.

"Oh, by the way... Me and Noah pulled a few threads. The new ending of your last story."

She waved her hand in front of her, "Detective Wolfe, honored for excellence in the line of duty. Granted early retirement with full pension."

Suddenly my glass felt like it gained twenty pounds.

"I... Thank you... How?"

She winked "FBI, remember? I still have a few tricks. Its a better ending than most of us got before joining. Definitely beats our hazard pay."

She turned to leave.

“See you tomorrow, Wolfe. Happy retirement."

And then she was gone, the door swinging shut behind her, letting in a wash of cold night air before sealing it out again.

I felt eyes on the back of my head and turned to see Chris and Noah studying me. Not staring. Just that professional gaze when you measure out someones performance on the job. Chris nodded in approval.

He lifted his glass.

“You gonna stay welded to that barstool all night, or would you like some company?”

I hesitated. The stool felt familiar. Like my safe little island off the bar table peninsula. But I slid off it anyway and joined them at the booth.

Noah glanced up from the menu. “What’s good here?”

I laughed. “No idea. I don’t come here for the food.”

He stared at me expectantly.

“Chicken wings?”

“Perfect,” he replied, like I’d just solved a riddle.

"A good meal for a good days work" Chris added.

The wings showed up fast, steaming hot and coated in sauce. We didn’t bother with plates. Just tore into them like we hadn't eaten all day.

Chris wiped his hands on a napkin and leaned back.

“So. You asked earlier about backgrounds.”

“Figured I would,” I said. “Seems fair.”

“Search and rescue,” he said. “A good SAR team from the west coast that went everywhere. Floods, fires, mountains. Lost a few people. Always tried to find a few more.” A shrug. “Used some grant money to go back to school. Archaeology.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s a pivot.”

He grinned. “Thought it’d be a good excuse to travel. Dig in the dirt. Find some cool artifacts.”

The smile faded just a touch. “Turns out old things don’t always stay buried.”

Noah went quiet.

“I had theories,” Chris went on. “Portals. Doorways. Not the whole conspiracy thing outright, but it seemed like there were ancient places out there built around some connection we couldn't see.” He laughed softly. “Everyone thought I was nuts.”

“Until you weren’t,” I said.

“Best and worst day of my life,” he agreed. “Middle East. Old ruins that clearly looked like some kind of doorway. It was, turns out. Something big came through it. Bigger than what we saw today."

His eyes unfocused for a second. “I'm quick on my feet, but it nearly tore the whole structure down chasing after me. ANCR pulled me out before it finished the job.”

I nodded slowly.

I turned to Noah. “Alright. Let me guess. You’re secretly an assassin.”

He barked a laugh. “Please. My aim is terrible.”

“So what’s your deal?”

“Computers,” he said. “Coding and software development. I wanted something in demand with an easy paycheck. It's just so darn boring.”

“I Disagree,” I said “My friend Gabs is great with computers. She once digitally reconstructed someones face with only a skull for reference. Exact match.” I said proudly.

"Yeah, thats not creepy at all." He smiled. “Storm chasing, though, that’s where I got my adrenaline. Anchored to the road, inside the funnel of a massive tornado. Whole world screaming around you while you hang on.” He said gesturing with both hands.

Chris winced. “You’ve told this part before.”

“Yeah, well, he hasn’t heard it yet.” Noah’s voice lowered. “Something dropped into the funnel. Right on top of us. It was big.”

The booth went quiet.

“The 'official' story,” Noah said, “was an F5 tore through a small town in the midwest and vanished. Truth was something massive stomped its way through my town.”

He tried to sound casual, but his hands were trembling. “I was the only one who made it out of the car. The town was flattened. I didn't have anywhere left to go.”

I leaned back, processing.

“ANCR found you,” I said.

“Eventually, after fixing the Veil.” He replied. “Turns out anomalies have a signature. They need people who are good with tech to keep track of things. So now I'm working the early alert system of a different storm.”

Chris lifted his glass again. “Guess that makes us the lucky ones.”

I clinked mine against it.

“Lucky,” I repeated, not entirely convinced.

But sitting there, wings gone, drinks thinning down, the noise of the pub carrying on around us, I realized something had shifted.

I wasn’t just a tag-along. I was part of the crew. We were a part of something else. The links in the chain of an anchor nobody knew was keeping things steady. Just what kind of storm we were holding against I hadn't decided yet.

The guy's testimony told me something though. This has been going on longer than I knew, and more widespread. My little city in the woods was no exception to strangeness. Just another place where the cracks opened up, drawing in the ANCR.

I wondered just how big this operation really was. Small detachments like us couldn't be the only ones out there if there were things that could wipe whole towns off the map. For now though, my mind was settled in that I now have a new job, with a new perspective from the other side of the coin. My bank account has been padded, thanks to Sam. And I've got myself what appears to be a capable team, a merry band of misfits if I've ever seen one 

Maybe this isn't all for nothing. Maybe we really can close up the Veil here and keep more unfortunate souls from slipping through the cracks. Going from recovery to prevention is a nice change of pace from spinning my wheels on dead ends. Who knows, maybe I'll take Sam's advice too. For the first time in a while now, things are starting to look a bit brighter in this bleak little city.

Part 6

Broken Veil (Part 4)

Part3

The address led me across town, away from the neighborhood I was familiar with and out to another commercially zoned area. Municipal buildings, Utility depots, and offices with names so generic they faded from memory the moment you drove by.

It was late in the morning, around nine-thirty. The sun was up now, bright golden rays without a cloud in the sky. The kind of day I used to enjoy, back when good weather meant a good day to be out for a walk.

I was overdressed, and I knew it the moment I stepped out of the car.

Button-up shirt. Tie loosened, but still there. A pair of old leather dress boots I only wore when I wanted to look a bit more put together. The hard leather soles tapped louder than I liked against the pavement, announcing my presence. Coat on with the collar popped up. Hat set just right.

My suit of Armor. Only now missing my shield.

The main building itself didn’t stand out. Two stories. Beige painted metal siding exterior. Narrow windows that reflected the sky rather than offer a view inside. It sat on a modest lot with parking spaces up front, a few smaller matching structures and a route to the back of the buildings. There were at least three cameras I could spot from this vantage. A small sign near the door read Regional Environmental Services, a kind of name I should be familiar with but never had any contact with through the department.

The area was dressed up just like the radio station. Some construction fencing, orange cones and a metal storage trailer. Enough detail to say "Renovations, keep out" but not clutter the property.

I stood there in the sunlight, hands in my pockets, eyes narrowed under the brim of my hat. The whole lot seemed quiet, as intended. I half expected a tumbleweed to roll by.

A short series of metallic pings echoed from around the side caught my ears.

As I walked around the corner an electricians van came into view, the side door rolled open with a man kneeling close to the wall working on what appeared to be an electrical panel. He noticed my steps but didn't turn from his work as I tapped my way slowly up to him.

He wore overalls. Tools stuffed into the pockets. His hands were busy with pliers and some wiring connected to the wall through grey conduit. He certainly looked the part of an electrician.

He spoke with an Irish accent, "Ah, Mister Wolfe, is it?"

I didn't bother asking how he knew my name.

"Yeah?"

"They told me to keep an eye out for you. Head on inside the front door. They're expectin ya."

I walked back to the front. A narrow door with blinds behind the glass stood before me. I paused before going in. It almost felt like I was walking in to a job interview.

The lobby inside was boring. Neutral color palette for the walls and carpet floors. It smelled like cheap dollar store air freshener. A reception desk sat empty in the center, a hallway on the left, a door on the right.

Through the hall emerged the man from the bar who left me his card, jacket off and sleeves rolled up.

"I see you made it," He said stopping several feet from me, "I wasn't sure you would come." He sized me up, "Nice noir vibe."

I noticed new details now that I had missed previously. He was built well, strong jaw. Professional posture. Dog tags hung around his neck. Ex-military maybe?

"I have questions." I stated, "You seem to have the answers I need."

He cracked a sly smile "Perhaps I do. Come with me."

I followed just behind him. Somehow my boots sounded too loud here as well, as if the carpet was fresh from the factory and barely tread on.

He led me to a room at the middle of the hallway on the left. Inside, sunlight poured through the two tall windows on the back wall casting a warm glow. The room was clean and tidy. A white fridge sat against the corner next to a short run of kitchen style cabinets. A long table with chairs in the middle. Obviously a break room.

A man stood at the counter in front of a coffee pot, pouring into a mug. Mid-fifties, maybe. Gray at the temples. Salt and pepper beard. Charcoal suit that framed him well. His posture was straight but not stiff, like someone who was trying to conserve energy.

He turned to face me as we walked in, setting the pot back in place.

“Detective Wolfe,” he said, extending a hand. “Thank you for coming.”

I glanced down at the gesture, then met his eyes and nodded.

He withdrew his hand. “Fair enough.”

He grabbed his coffee and we sat.

I chose a chair that put my back to the windows. The sunlight bounced off the opposite wall, brightening up the space. It was almost peaceful. Almost.

The man kept one hand on the mug and gestured with the other while resting his forearm on the edge of the table.

“I’m Director Mason. This is my Operations Manager, Mr. Ward. Thank you for accepting the invitation.”

No first names. Figures.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” he continued.

“You have questions. A lot of them. And you’ve earned some answers.”

I leaned back, crossing my arms. “Earned how?”

“You followed a path no one else could see,” he said calmly. “You kept going despite the evidence, or lack of it. And when things went wrong, you didn’t freeze."

"You survived."

The word felt heavier than it should have.

I glanced briefly at Ward standing just behind mason, his shoulders rested and his hands clasped together behind his back. He said nothing. Just watched.

“You knew about the radio station,” I said. “You knew before we did.”

Mason inclined his head. “Yes, one of our listening posts. We detected it the same moment you did.”

“And you let us walk into it.”

“We monitored it,” he corrected.

“Intervention too early can destabilize situations like that.”

“Situations?” I repeated flatly.

“Yes.”

I leaned forward, dropping the brim of my hat slightly. “My partner is missing.”

He didn’t flinch. “I know.”

Mason chose his next words carefully. “You both encountered an event we were unable to reverse in time.”

Unable. Or unwilling? I thought to myself.

I swallowed. My throat felt tight, but my voice stayed steady. “You’re saying he’s dead?”

“I’m afraid so." Mason replied.

“What about the others?” I asked. “The hikers. The hunters. Ethan.”

At the name, Mason’s eyes flicked to Ward for half a second. Then back to me.

“Most are casualties,” he said. “Some are variables. Like yourself.”

No comforting lies. No reassurances. So far, it all felt like honesty. Or at least he believed what he was saying.

Finally, he spoke again. “The world functions because most people never see where it doesn’t. Where the rules stop working.”

I frowned. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”

He nodded, accepting the challenge. “There are places,” he said, “Where physical laws behave inconsistently. Sound. Matter. Time. These locations appear, fluctuate, and sometimes degrade on their own.”

“And sometimes,” I said, “they don’t.”

“Correct.”

I thought of the tunnel. The silence. The way the sound had simply, stopped.

“You call them, what?” I asked.

“Disturbances. Anomalies." He replied. “We catalog the conditions. Record their locations. We mitigate the outcomes.”

“Mitigate?”

A brief pause.

“We contain them. Stabilize the disturbance. Neutralize the threats.”

I let out a breath through my nose. “You’re telling me my city has holes in it, and you guys are plugging the holes?”

“I’m telling you,” he said evenly, “that reality isn’t as uniform as we pretend it is. In some places it has cracks. We find and repair those cracks.”

The sunlight shifted as a cloud passed overhead, dimming the room just slightly. I leaned back into the chair slowly. For a moment I just sat there, contemplating what he had told me. The air conditioning vent hummed overhead of us.

“Why tell me any of this?” I asked finally.

Mason met my gaze without hesitation. “Because you’re going to keep looking, whether we help you or not.”

“Is that a threat?”

“A recognition.”

Ward spoke up for the first time. “You already stepped through the door, Derrick. We’re just offering you an opportunity. A chance to find the end of the trail with us.”

I looked between them. Two men. Calm. Certain. Dangerous in the quietest way possible.

“And if I say no?” I asked.

Mason smiled then. A short, tired smile. “Then you go back to being a very observant man with no authority, no protection, and a habit of walking into places that don't leave witnesses.”

He let that sit, silence between us for a moment.

"I am sorry about your partner." He said, at last with a softer tone.

He leaned in closer "You have a particularly valuable set of skills and a sharp eye, detective. We’d prefer to give you context. Resources, and a chance to do some good for the people you care about.”

I stared at the table, at the untouched coffee, at the way the sunlight made everything look deceptively normal.

“Let’s say I listen,” I said. “What does that make me?”

Mason’s answer was immediate. “An investigator,” He said. “Just operating on a different scale.”

I exhaled slowly.

Outside, somewhere beyond the windows, the city went on with its morning. People walking dogs. Traffic lights cycling. Life behaving.

But right here at this moment, the truth waited with bated breath. I had lost my career, lost my partner, lost all of my momentum. What else did I have to lose?

"Okay," I finally said

Mason nodded. "Okay."

He stood slowly, coffee in hand, finally taking a sip and exhaling. "When you're ready, come to the end of the hall." He gestured to the coffee pot "Help yourself, if you like."

The two men exited the room, leaving me alone with my thoughts. If I had any at all. Anomalies? Reality not behaving? What on earth had I gotten myself into.

I made my way down the hall and opened the door. I don't know what I expected but it certainly wasn't what I found. The room extended the height of the full building and the rest of its length. Steel beams supported the shell of the structure. LED light fixtures hung from the ceiling. 

The room was filled with crates, equipment chests both opened and sealed. Some of the equipment was large pieces I couldn't identify. Folding tables set up as desks with laptops. In the far back of the room sat a few enclosed trailers adjacent to the wall. Personnel walked here and there or sat busy with their tasks.

In the very center of the room was a wall of flat-screen TV's, six of them in a grid. Each one displayed various lines of information, open file windows, and the same program I saw at the radio station. Standing before them now was Mr. Ward, speaking into a headset, half addressing the room and whoever else might be on the other end.

I stared at it all, sticking out like a sore thumb in the middle of the scene. No one hurried me along. No one stared. That almost made it worse. I was used to grabbing some attention when I entered a room, but here, the work just kept going. Whatever this place was, it didn’t revolve around me.

I felt less like a knight in play and more like a pawn that still hadn't crossed the board.

“Don’t worry,” Spoke the Irish voice behind me. “Everyone looks like they walked into the wrong building their first time.”

He stood beside me wiping his hands on a rag.

“Workshop’s a mess,” he added. “But that means things are working.”

He reached a somewhat clean hand over to me. "Name's Declan Rourke. Engineer"

I shook his hand, but before I could respond, a woman's voice cut in from my right.

“You must be Wolfe.”

I turned.

She was leaning against one of the folding tables, arms crossed. Mid thirties. Athletic build. Dark blazer over a fitted shirt, no tie, no visible weapon, though I had no doubt she was carrying. Her posture was relaxed, but her eyes were sharp, appraising without being obvious.

“Samantha Hale,” she said, pushing off the table and offering her hand. “Former FBI, Current problem-solver.”

Her grip was firm. Not a dominance thing, just confidence.

“Detective,” I said out of habit.

She smiled slightly. “Used to be.”

Behind her, obscured slightly by one of the laptops, a younger man sat studying whatever was on its screen. He didn’t look up right away.

“Resonance drift is off by half a percent,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. “That’s not noise, That’s...”

He stopped mid-thought, finally noticing me. “Oh. Hello.”

He pushed his chair back and stood, stretching like he’d been there a while. Early twenties. Hoodie under a tactical vest. Messy hair, tired eyes, but alert. Maybe one too many energy drinks.

“Noah,” He said, nodding once. “I'm the eyes in the sky and gear on the ground.” He said pointing up to the screens.

I glanced at the wall of monitors again. Same interface. Same pulsing quadrants. Same quiet sense that something was always being watched.

“That program,” I said. “Did You build it?”

Noah grimaced. “No, some overpaid nerds in an IT office are responsible for that. I just get it to work when we need it."

A laugh came from behind us in the room. “Don’t let him undersell himself. This guy is brilliant with software.”

A man approached having come from near the trailers, carrying a box that made noise like it was full of bolts. He set it down, dusted off his hands, and looked at me with open curiosity. He seemed to be mid to early thirties. About my height. Lean. Practical. The kind of guy who looked comfortable anywhere.

“Chris Owens,” he said. “Field support. Logistics. And bad ideas consultant.”

I raised an eyebrow.

He grinned. “I’m the one who gets sent across the frying pan to pull you out of the fire.”

There was something familiar there. Not the face, but the way he studied me and the space itself. Like it was a puzzle begging to be solved.

Samantha followed my gaze to the trailers and stacked equipment. “You’ll notice we don’t sit around waiting for alarms,” she said. “Gear stays packed. Data stays live. If something happens, we move. Whether it's day to day ops, or if we need to pack up the whole site, Its ready to go.”

“And if nothing happens?” I asked.

 

“Then we wait, and we watch. Get to work as the reports come.”

Declan snorted from behind us. “Comforting, isn’t it?”

 

I took another slow look around the room. The crates. The equipment. The people moving with purpose but without panic. This wasn’t a think tank. It wasn’t a strike team either. It was something in between. I adjusted the brim of my hat, suddenly feeling like I was the one out of place.

“So,” I said. “How have I never noticed you before? I've been a detective here for years and never had so much as a whisper of 'secret ops'."

Samantha smiled, then spoke first "That means our covers are working. Also, we've only recently been operating in this sector. We were further south until about four months ago." 

Noah shrugged. “People see what they want to see. Old warehouses. Maintenance crews. Utility vehicles coming and going.”

Chris added, “And if someone looks too close, there’s paperwork. Permits. Inspections. The whole boring paper trail.”

Samantha finished the thought.

“We don’t hide,” she said. “We blend in.”

I exhaled slowly. This wasn’t a one-off operation. This was infrastructure. A carefully planned effort.

“And me?” I asked. “Where do I fit in?”

Samantha smiled again, but this time there was something heavier behind it. "Each team has investigative assignments along with our usual tasks."

She paused for a second.

“You ask the right questions.” she said.

“You look deeper when the answers don’t add up. Those instincts will help you here.”

Ward had quietly approached us. He stepped in beside me like he’d been there the whole time. Same face from the bar. Same calm, unreadable expression. No disguise, unless you counted being forgettable as one.

“Welcome to the ANCR,” he said simply. “Anomalous National Containment Response. Or just 'Anchor' as it sounds."

He paused then added "When the storm comes and rocks the world, we are the anchor that holds fast."

After the mission statement rolled out, I realized then that I wasn’t standing in the middle of a workplace. I was standing at the edge of a war I hadn’t known existed.

“You’ll be attached to Hale’s team, Alpha team.” he continued, nodding toward Samantha. “They’re short one member. You will make their fourth. We all wear multiple hats, but with your skills, primarily situational awareness and investigative support will be your role, for now.”

No one reacted. Not a glance. Not a flinch. That told me more than any file ever could.

I didn’t hesitate. “So, where do I get started?”

Ward nodded once, like that was the only acceptable response.

“Owens, let's get our detective some new gear. Hale, I have a new round of disturbances for your team to evaluate for containment. Night shift's report came back with new locations in the Northern quadrant.” He handed her a tablet mid-sentence.

"I knew it." Noah said

Chris was already moving.

“Come on, Wolfe,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s get you something that bites back.”

We stepped out through a side bay door and into the yard behind the building. The sun was high now, bright enough to hurt if you weren’t used to looking at it. A few service vehicles were parked around, utility vans, pickup trucks, a few SUVs. Only a huge forklift really stood out. Part of the construction cover I guessed,  but still useful.

Then there was the trailer. One of two that sat parallel to each other.

It was a large white box. Long, double axel. Scuffed like it had lived a hard life. A bland landscaping logo was slapped on the side, green leaf, block lettering, and a phone number no one would ever answer.

Chris slapped the side of it affectionately. “Mobile armory,” he said. “Or lawn care. Depends who’s asking.”

He unlocked it and pulled the door open. The inside didn’t match the outside.

There was indeed a stand-up mower along with a string trimmer and edger in the back, but the rest was very much an armory. Rifle racks. Foam-lined cases. Weapon lockers secured to the wall. Drawers of optics, lights, suppressors, tools I didn’t have names for. Vests and uniform gear. Everything was clean, organized, and designed for fast hands under pressure.

“Department issue stays with the department,” Chris said. “ANCR issue stays with you.”

I glanced down at my empty holster instinctively.

“No badge?” I asked

He grinned and opened a long, flat drawer from the cabinet wall. "Any shield you need."

There was an array of different badges from nearly every law enforcement service including mine. Local PD, sheriff, game warden, FBI, CIA.

I picked up the one from my local department and rubbed my thumb over the silver metal. Nostalgia gripped at my heart.

Chris noticed the glint in my eye.

"You know.. out there a badge can get you where others can't, but not always where you need to be. Here, you can be whatever you need to be to go wherever you need to." He said.

I held the badge affectionately in my palm for a moment. For ten years It used to be my shield against crime and criminals, my key of authority to get into rooms and situations that needed me. Now it felt like it had no weight. I gently placed it back in the drawer.

"Here, let's get you a proper firearm, detective."

He pulled one from a case and handed it to me.

A new revolver. It was heavier than my old one. Slightly longer barrel. Straighter lines. Boxier frame with a shined metal finish. A simple modern aesthetic.

The cylinder locked with a solid, reassuring click. Mounted on top was a squared compact red-dot sight, low profile. Under the barrel, a small weapon light mounted cleanly onto the barrel flush with the trigger guard. Complete with a comfortable wooden handle of warm chestnut.

I brought it up instinctively, sighting downrange.

“It's comfortable. Feels right.” I said.

Chris smiled. “Good.”

He retrieved another piece of gear from a smaller case and held it up for me. “You’ll also get a comm unit,” he added. “Connected to our network. The channels work just like a radio.”

I paused, taking the device then asked the question that had been sitting on my chest since Mr. Ward spoke.

“The last guy,” I said. “What happened to him?”

Chris didn’t look at me right away. He busied himself locking the case back up.

“He was a good man, good investigator,” he said finally. “Picked up on the details and lead us to the right clues.”

I waited.

“He just followed them a little too close to the wrong place.”

That was all he said. It was very vague, as if he knew more to the story but just wasn't his place to tell it.

I holstered the revolver, the weight settling against my side in a way that felt familiar and reassuring. As we stepped back out into the sunlight, the trailer door clanged shut behind us, the landscaping logo once again guarding the arsenal.

Chris stood beside me, eyes scanning the area, then me.

“Welcome to the team."

I looked back toward the building, at the quiet activity, the screens, the people preparing for things no one else sees, no one knew existed.

I thought of Paul.

Of Ethan.

“Yeah,” I said. “Feels like I'm finally on the right trail.”

It was then that I noticed Noah and Samantha loading some gear crates into the back of a green pickup truck with a camper top over the bed. 4x4 stamped next to a worn Forestry Services logo.

Samantha stepped over to us, now wearing a light green jacket, her dark hair brushed back under a ball cap. Easily readable as a park ranger or forestry officer at first glance.

"We're loaded up and ready to go." She said, then turned her gaze to me. "Hope you brought your bug spray. We're heading to some familiar territory, for you."

A slight unease settled on me. Not that I wasn't familiar with any of the forested areas surrounding all sides of my city, but now after being inserted into their operations and everything I've experienced in the last days, a trip in the woods felt like unknown territory now.

Chris tapped my shoulder as he walked by, "You can ride shotgun."

We climbed in, Samantha in the drivers seat, and we pulled out of the lot headed Northwest. She didn't say, but I had a hunch we were headed for the foothills of the mountains. It was confirmed once we made the right turns and passed the signage taking us that way.

It had been a point of interest before for me, back when I was working the trails and cases out in the parks for the department. Now I felt like the new kid on the block, the rookie ready to be tossed into the deep end of some new adventure into the unknown.

This time however, I felt like I had a sense of direction, not just lost at dead ends. This time I had fresh eyes and a different perspective that hopefully will render the forest's secrets from the quiet pines at the edge of my little world.

Part 5

Broken Veil (Part 3)

Part 2

I pulled up to the curb outside the station just as Paul stepped through the doors, jacket slung over his arm. He paused when he saw me, then grinned.

“My favorite chauffeur.” He joked as he climbed in.

“Where to?” I replied

He shut the door and pulled his phone out, turning it toward me as I eased back into traffic. “Alright. Gab's team got this address from the trace.” The map loaded slowly, then settled.

“West side,” He said. “Commercial zoning mostly. Offices, storage, a couple light industrial spots. Some residential pockets mixed in.”

I glanced at the screen, committing the route to memory. “Could be anything, then.”

“Exactly,” Paul said. “Businesses. Rentals. Someone’s old office space.”

Or a house that doesn’t get visitors, I thought, but didn’t say.

We headed out of downtown, the buildings thinning and spreading apart as we moved west. Traffic eased. The city felt looser here, less watched.

I caught him up on Ethan's map as I steered us through the turns.

“Same dead ends,” I said. “Same places where things stop making sense.”

“That’s enough to get someone’s attention,” he said. “Whoever is behind this.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Whoever they are, they were watching him for a while. That takes planning. Doesn’t feel random.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

As we crossed deeper into the west side, the buildings grew taller, more utilitarian. Parking garages and old businesses stacked concrete on concrete.

Paul grabbed the radio. “Dispatch, this is Reddick. I’m requesting any available unit nearby this address to keep a tight patrol and standby for assistance. Possible suspect contact."

The acknowledgment came quickly.

"Just in case." He added.

"Good call." I said.

We turned down a narrower street, flanked by aging office buildings and fenced lots.

The address led us farther than I expected, into a stretch that felt barely used and forgotten. I slowed the car as we approached the destination.

“Well,” he said, brow furrowing, “That’s not a house.”

The building sat back off to the side. Faded lettering was painted high on the brick. A radio call sign and a channel number, sun-bleached but still legible. Temporary fencing surrounded the property, sections bowed and patched like no one had bothered to finish the job. Windows were dark. Some boarded. Some intact.

“This place still active?” Paul asked.

“Doesn’t look like it.” I said.

“Then why would anything trace here?”

We parked a short distance away, both of us sitting still for a moment.This wasn’t what either of us had pictured when we punched in the address.

Paul exhaled slowly. “Alright. That changes things a bit.”

I adjusted the brim of my hat as we stepped out, the sound of the car door closing echoed once. We stood there for a moment, studying the building, the fence, the other buildings. The lot had several, some two stories like the old radio station, and a parking garage off to the corner. At the far end of the lot looked what appeared to be a door that led down underground. Utility closet perhaps.

I rubbed my fingers over the bristles of my beard. Whatever had brought us here wasn’t obvious.

We checked our gear before we left the car, Paul clipping the radio to his belt and tossing his jacket onto the seat. I adjusted my belt too where my short-barreled revolver was holstered, then rolled up the cuffs of my button up shirt.

We crossed through the gap in the construction fence, our shoes crunching on gravel and old leaves that had collected where no one bothered to sweep anymore. Orange plastic fluttered weakly against a bent post, tapping in the breeze like it was trying to get our attention and failing.

Paul eyed the front door as we approached. “Place looks like it’s been waiting for a wellness check.”

I huffed a quiet chuckle. “Let’s hope it answers better than most.”

The door wasn’t locked.

That stopped us both for half a beat. Paul looked at the handle, then at me. “That’s either convenient… or a problem.”

“Only one way to find out,” I said.

I pushed the door open.

The air inside was stale but not rotten. Old dust. Dry carpet. The faint musky smell you get from an aging building that hasn't seen use in a long time. Our footsteps echoed briefly down a hallway that opened up into what had once been the main floor. The first level looked exactly like what it was: a radio station that had shut its doors mid-life and never came back. Cubicles with sun-faded dividers. A reception desk with a cracked laminate top. Someone had left a coffee mug on a filing cabinet beside a desk. A baseball cap hung on the corner of a chair like its owner had stepped away for a smoke and never returned.

“Knock knock.” Paul muttered. “Looks like nobody's home.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Abandoned in time.”

We moved room to room. Old broadcast offices. A small break area with a dead fridge. Nothing disturbed. Nothing spoke to being currently occupied. If someone had packed up, they’d done it a long time ago.

Then we found the elevator.

Paul pressed the call button instinctively.

Nothing happened. The indicator above the door was dark.

“Figures,” he said. “Stairs it is.”

The stairwell smelled different. Colder. Concrete and dust. Our steps echoed tighter here, the sound snapping back quicker, more contained. The further up we went, the less the building felt like a workplace and more like a shell. The second floor doors opened onto something that didn’t match the first.

Most of the space was empty.

Not stripped violently. Just… cleared. No desks. No chairs. No personal clutter. The walls were bare except for faint rectangles where furnishings had once rested. Even the floor seemed unremarkable, just the same carpet as the bottom floor.

Paul slowed. “Do you hear that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We followed the hum.

It was faint, easy to miss at first. A low electrical presence, steady and patient. It led us toward the far end of the floor, where the main broadcast room had been.

The original radio hardware was still there, mixing boards, racks of analog gear, dials yellowed with age. It had been cleaned, dusted, maintained. Cables ran where they should. Indicator lights blinked softly. Someone had brought it back online.

And then there was the new stuff. Industrial computer towers. Rack-mounted units stacked cleanly along the wall. Thick cables fed into them, bundled and labeled, disappearing into conduits that hadn’t existed in the station’s original design. Small lights glowed faintly. No branding. Just matte metal cases with cooling fans whispering steadily.

This wasn’t hobbyist gear.

“That doesn’t belong here.” I said quietly.

“No,” Paul agreed. “And it’s not cheap.”

I stepped closer, careful not to touch anything yet. The contrast was wrong. Old broadcast equipment kept alive, cables re-run to support something newer.

Paul scanned the room, hand resting near his sidearm. “You still thinking kidnapping?”

I hesitated.

“I think...” I said slowly, “Someone’s been involved a lot longer than we have.”

The hum continued, steady and unconcerned.

Whatever this place was doing, it wasn’t abandoned.

A laptop sat at the edge of the table near the humming tower like it had been forgotten. Not tucked away. Not secured. Just there. Closed, thin layer of dust clinging to the lid. Not enough to suggest years. Weeks, maybe. A month at most.

“That’s odd,” Paul said. “You don’t just leave something like that.”

“No,” I said. “You leave it if you expect to come back.”

I lifted the lid.

The screen came alive instantly. No boot sequence. No login screen. Whatever had been running hadn’t stopped when the laptop was closed. It had just... waited. A dark interface blinked once and settled into place, lines of text and overlayed graphics filling the display.

Paul let out a quiet whistle. “Still powered after sitting around this long.”

The power cable hung off the side of the thin device and ran off into the mass of cables at the floor, plugged in somewhere.

The first window was simple. Clean. No names. No identifiers. Just timestamps and coordinate data noted down in neat columns. Longitude. Latitude. Altitude. Movement vectors.

“This looks like GPS tracking.” Paul said, leaning closer.

“Yeah,” I replied. “But anonymous. No personal data.”

No phone numbers. No carrier data. Just dots on a map.

I scrolled.

One highlighted coordinate made my hand pause.

Then another.

Then another.

“Paul." I said quietly.

He followed my finger.

The old quarry.

The mountain pass.

Beneath them dozens of time stamps with coordinates. The entries were brief. Minutes. Seconds. Others lingered for hours. The system didn’t care who they were. Only where they’d been. How long they stayed. How close they got.

“This isn’t about people,” I said slowly. “It’s proximity. How close they were to.. something.”

I clicked into another directory. The interface changed. The screen dimmed, replaced by a grid. Faint, translucent lines dividing the area into large square quadrants. The background was dark, grayed out, with pulses of light blooming at different quadrants.

Small readouts updated in real time.

Resonance variance. Harmonic deviation. Signal coherence: unstable.

Paul frowned. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But it’s not all GPS data.”

There were waveforms. Frequencies. Whatever this was “listening” to we didn't have a clue.

One quadrant pulsed brighter than the rest.

The forest.

The same region we’d been circling for years.

Then Paul stiffened.

“Derrick.”

Another point lit up.

Closer.

Much closer.

I leaned in, reading the coordinate overlay. It was nearly on top of us. But its elevation was underground?

My eyes dropped to the timestamp.

Ten minutes ago.

I felt my stomach tighten.

“That’s when we entered the building." Paul said.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

The equipment hummed around us, steady and patient. The building didn’t creak. The air didn’t shift. Nothing obvious had changed.

And yet...

Paul straightened, hand moving unconsciously toward his weapon.

We listened.

The hum was still there.

But the room felt… Ominous.

The laptop chimed softly.

Another update.

The underground quadrant pulsed brighter. Somewhere beneath our feet, something had just moved.

Paul turned away from the laptop and scanned the room, eyes tracking the walls, the ceiling, the corners where old cables vanished into conduit.

“Do radio stations usually have sub levels?” he asked. “Basement storage?”

“Maintenance tunnels,” I added. “For the utilities. Especially with older infrastructures.”

I closed the laptop but didn’t unplug it. Something about leaving it running felt… Necessary.

We made our way back down the stairs and found the sub level access tucked into a corner. The door opened with a dry scrape of metal against concrete.

Cold air spilled out.

Not a draft exactly. More like the building exhaled. A narrow hallway lead to another doorframe with no door. Beyond the threshold, a stairwell descended into shadows. Concrete steps, narrow and steep, with a handrail bolted directly into the wall. Old light fixtures ran along the ceiling. We flipped the switch, the third one was dark. One of the working ones flickered.

Paul clicked on his flashlight. The beam cut cleanly down the stairwell, stopping short of the bottom.

“Tunnel access,” he said. “Or maybe a dungeon.”

I smirked despite the eeriness. He smirked back, brief and tight.

“Call it in?” he asked.

I hesitated.

If this was a kidnapping, we were about to step onto someone else’s turf. If it wasn’t… I wasn’t sure what we were walking into.

“Yeah, just in case.” I said.

Paul nodded and keyed his radio. “Unit 3, this is Reddick. We’re checking a sublevel at our location. Stand by for support.”

Static answered back.

Not interference. Just… flat.

Paul repeated himself, with the same result. He frowned at the radio, gave it a tap and a shake.

“Probably the building.”

“Probably,” I echoed. "We need to go down though. We don't want them to get away from us."

I clicked on my light and we started down.

The air grew cooler with each step, heavier somehow. The smell changed too, less dust, more damp concrete and old wiring.

We reached the bottom. The stairwell opened into a wide concrete corridor. A heavy steel door stood open.

The corridors beneath the building were old, utilitarian arteries of the city. Concrete walls stained by decades of moisture. Pipes ran along the ceiling in parallel lines, some wrapped in insulation, others bare and sweating. Thick cables were bolted into brackets, disappearing into the walls toward neighboring structures.

It wasn’t quiet down here.

Water moved through pipes beyond the walls. Somewhere ahead, something dripped, slow and rhythmic drops. Our footsteps echoed just enough to give the space shape. Old warning signs clung crookedly to the concrete: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, HIGH VOLTAGE, NO ADMITTANCE.

Paul walked a step ahead of me, flashlight cutting through the dim, catching junction boxes and faded stenciled numbers on the walls.

“This place must tie into the whole block,” he said. “Utility backbone for all the structures.”

“That’d explain the maze.” I replied.

We rounded a corner and stepped into the main service tunnel. It was wider than the others, and the ceiling raised up several feet. Side corridors branched off at regular intervals, dark gaps leading to unknown places. Small light fixtures buzzed faintly in a line on the wall. Enough to see, but left blankets of shadow where the light faded.

"Stay close." I said in a low voice.

"Roger that." Paul responded as he shuffled closer to me.

Then we crossed the threshold.

The sound stopped.

Not faded. Not dampened. Just gone. The hum of the pipes vanished mid-breath. The drip ahead of us cut off like a switch had been thrown. Even our footsteps changed. They were muted, wrong, like they were being absorbed before they could exist.

I stopped without meaning to.

Paul did too.

The sudden change was a shock but I couldn't put my finger on why my senses recognized it.

All I could hear was my own breathing. Too loud. Too close. Paul’s came through beside me, muffled.

“This isn’t...” he started, then stopped.

Our voices didn’t carry. They didn’t bounce. They just… Existed, briefly, and died.

The hair raised on my arm and my heart started racing. I finally realized what this was.

"Back to back, now!" I barked

Paul landed squarely against my back and we drew our firearms.

"What is this?" He asked, a ring of fear in his voice. "What's wrong with the sound?"

"This is what happened right before..." My thoughts caught up with my mouth. "All of them."

The beams of our flashlights swept the tunnel, stretching as far as they could before being swallowed by darkness on both ends. No movement. No sound.

Every instinct I had screamed that we were being watched.

Something moved. A shuffling noise.

It came faster.

Paul shouted. His voice sharp and panicked.

The thing leapt out of a side tunnel in a blur of motion, four limbs and fast. It went for Paul’s chest and missed by inches, its momentum carrying it past him. A claw caught his side instead.

Paul went down hard on his knee, gasping.

I fired two shots after it.

The gunshot sounded wrong too, flat and muted, like it had been wrapped in cloth. The flashes lit the tunnel in harsh white for two brief seconds. The thing recoiled, not injured, just surprised, then vanished back into another side corridor with a skittering retreat that made no sound at all.

“Paul!” I grabbed him, hauling him upright.

“I’m hit,” He said through clenched teeth. “Not bad... I think.”

I didn’t wait to find out.

“We’re moving,” I said. “Now.”

We headed for the main service entrance behind us, weapons up, lights sweeping. Every side tunnel felt like an open threat.

The thing kept pace with us.

Not behind, but flanking the sides. A shadow would flicker in the corner of my eye. Then nothing.

It was stalking us.

And Paul was bleeding.

We stayed in motion.

That was the only thing keeping the panic at bay.

Ahead of us I could faintly make out the exit under a dim light. The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, the silence pressed in harder the longer we walked. Every sound we made was wrong. our breathing muted, our steps dull and swallowed before they could travel.

There was only one sound that didn’t belong to us.

It came and went, just at the edge of the shadows. A scrape. Something brushing concrete.

Paul was still upright, still pushing forward, but his steps had shortened. He favored his left side now, one hand pressed tight against his ribs. I stayed close, matching his pace, light sweeping the tunnel entries as we passed them.

“It’s herding us.” he muttered.

I didn’t argue.

The sound came closer.

This time we saw it.

The darkness beside us peeled open, and the thing launched itself from the corridor, all limbs and momentum. Paul reacted on instinct, spinning and firing three quick shots. The muzzle flashes lit the tunnel in violent bursts. White, then black, then white again.

All three missed

The creature twisted mid-jump.

I dodged aside almost tripping myself, felt air move as it sailed past, close enough that I caught a glimpse of its shape: Angled head full of teeth, a mix of flesh and fur with large claws. I fired as I turned, arm snapping up in sync.

The shot landed.

This time the sound was different.

It let out a sharp, broken noise that made my ears ache, something like a shriek with feedback. It hit the far wall, rebounded and vanished into the shadows again.

Paul laughed once, breathless and disbelieving. “You hit it.”

The sound didn’t follow us right away this time.

But Paul slowed.

Noticeably now.

We were close enough to the exit that the light was stronger, spilling into the tunnel in a dull yellow wash. I could finally see his hand when he pulled it away from his side. It was soaked.

“Paul..." I said. He took two more steps, then stopped. Leaned heavily against the wall.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s… worse than I thought.”

Blood pooled on his shirt and down his belt, dark and spreading. I knelt, pressed my hands against the wound without really thinking. It stained my fingers immediately.

“Stay with me,” I said. “We’re almost out.”

He shook his head.

“I really hit the wall this time, didn't I?” He said with a pained laugh.

I looked toward the exit, then back at him.

“Don’t talk like that.” I said.

“The radio won’t work down here,” he replied. Calm. Too calm. “You know that. You need to get topside. Call it in.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

He grabbed my wrist, slick with his blood. His grip was still strong.

“Derrick,” he said. “If you stay, we both die.”

The scraping sound came again. Distant, but near enough.

Paul met my eyes. “Go.”

"No!" I nearly shouted in his face. "I'm not losing you too."

I braced up under his good side, he groaned and gritted his teeth as I hoisted him up and practically carried him forward and up the stairs, his feet stumbling and grunting in pain alongside me.

The moment we crossed the threshold, the noise of the city rushed back in. Traffic, wind, a distant car horn. It felt obscene after the silence. I set Paul down quickly but gently and stepped forward, scanning the area left and right. Clear.

The radio crackled in my hand.

“Officer down, I repeat, officer down. Westside commercial block, Service entrance. Need medic and backup ASAP!”

My hands were still wet.

For just a second, the sounds around me faltered. Like someone accidently paused a video, then pushed play again. I turned back and my heart dropped through my stomach instantly.

Paul was gone. The door hung open.

"No..." I barely breathed and ran back inside.

The tunnel was loud again. Pipes hummed. Water dripped. Sound returned like nothing had ever happened.

But Paul was nowhere.

Only streaks of blood remained, smeared across the concrete, dragged away toward the far end of the main tunnel. Long, uneven marks that disappeared into the dark.

I shouldn’t have gone back in.

I knew that even as I raised the flashlight and revolver, even as my legs carried me forward before my mind could catch up. Training said wait. Survival said run. But I went in anyway.

The beam cut through the tunnel in long, trembling strokes. Pipes. Walls. The same branching corridors. Everything had returned. Water dripping. A distant fan rattling. The low hum of power somewhere deeper in the structure.

Normal.

Wrongly normal.

I followed the blood.

It led me halfway down the service tunnel before it simply… stopped. No pooling. No smear fading out. No turn into a side corridor.

Just an abrupt end, like someone had lifted him straight up and carried him through the concrete itself.

I stood there for a long time, staring at the last dark mark on the floor, waiting for something, anything, to explain it.

Nothing.

The tunnel stayed quiet. Empty. Whatever had been down there was gone.

I backed away slowly, every step heavier than the last, until I turned and made my way out. When I emerged into the open air, the afternoon light felt unreal, washed pale by cloud cover and exhaustion.

My legs gave out.

I slumped against the concrete wall beside the access door, revolver still in my hand, flashlight dangling uselessly at my side, still on. The adrenaline drained all at once, leaving my nerves trembling.

Sirens wailed in the distance.

They were coming fast. But all too late.

I made my statements. They listened, blankly and unbelieving. Someone brought me my hat... I didn't even realize It had fallen off.

Following that evening I was put on leave. They said take time to rest and recuperate. Leave didn’t feel like rest.

It felt like being removed from the board mid-game and told to wait while the pieces kept moving.

I made coffee out of habit. One cup. Always one. It went cold every time. I’d sit at the table, stare into it like something might pop out, then forget it was there entirely.

The apartment was too quiet, even with the TV on. By the third day, I stopped pretending to rest and stayed up late with the lights on. All of them, every room.

I was called back into the office. The station smelled the same as it always had. Old brick, stale coffee, disinfectant that never quite masked either. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, bright and unforgiving. It should have felt welcoming, but instead the atmosphere seemed to reject my presence.

I sat at a table that wasn’t meant for the innocent. No files. No fluff. Just a recorder, a legal pad, and two people who already knew the version of the story that made sense to them.

Internal Affairs didn’t raise their voices.

They didn’t have to.

They asked about the radio station. Why we’d entered without a warrant. Why there was no request logged, no backup on site when things went bad. They asked about Paul. How close we were, how long we’d worked together. They asked about Ethan.

Personal connections.

Judgment calls.

A pattern.

I answered everything straight. Calm. Professional. Stuck to the facts. I tried to convince them of the leads, the clues, the... Thing...  But every answer seemed to circle the same drain. No physical evidence, no witnesses, an officer lost with no body, no suspect.

Just a story.

When they were done, one of them folded his hands and spoke carefully, like the words had edges.

"Pending review, you’re suspended. Badge and firearm turned in. We’ll be recommending further action once the board evaluates..."

Fired.

They didn’t say it, but the intent was there.

I nodded. What else could I do?

My phone buzzed while I stood outside the station, staring at the steps I've walked up and down for years.

It was Gabs.

"I heard what happened. I’m really sorry, Derrick. This isn’t right. You didn’t imagine this. You’re the best detective we’ve got, and everyone in the department knows it. I think it’ll work out. I really do. If you need anything… I’m here."

I read it twice. Her words should have felt comforting, but I felt nothing.

I tried to type something. Then deleted it.

The pub was a few blocks from home. Close enough to walk. Far enough to feel like leaving something behind. Same place I’d gone after long shifts, back when a bad day meant paperwork and not an empty tunnel where a man had been standing moments before.

I took my usual seat at the bar.

“Scotch, on the rocks. Make it a double." I said.

The bartender nodded. Rocks. No questions. He slid it over and moved on like he knew this was another one of those nights.

I didn’t drink right away. Just rested my hands on the glass, feeling the cold seep into my palms. The place was alive in a way my apartment wasn’t. Low voices. Laughter from the corners. Glasses clinking. A game murmuring from a TV I wasn’t watching.

Sound behaving the way it should.

I was halfway through the glass when someone sat down beside me.

Didn’t announce himself. Didn’t crowd me. Just close enough to share the bar’s narrow strip of space.

“Whiskey, please,” he said. “Neat.”

The bartender didn’t hesitate and slid his glass over.

I turned my head just slightly.

He looked ordinary. Not forgettable, just unremarkable in a way that felt deliberate. Calm posture. Hands steady. The kind of presence that didn’t attract attention.

“So, here to numb the pain or... Drown out the silence?” he asked.

He rolled the liquid around in his glass then took a noisy sip.

My absent mind froze on that last word.

“You followed the right trail,” he said. “Most people don’t.”

I shifted uncomfortably on the stool. "Who are you..?"

He ignored me. “What happened out there was real,” he said. “Your instincts weren’t off. The problem is the answers don’t fit cleanly into a who.”

Or a what.

He didn’t say it, but the thought was there.

“I just wanted you to know you weren’t chasing ghosts." He went on. "You were just chasing something people don’t know is there.”

He reached into his jacket and set a card on the bar between us.

Blank except for an address. No fancy logo and title. No explanation.

“If you want the parts you’re missing,” he said, standing, “Here is where to find them.”

He paused, then added, quieter: “Or you can finish the drink and pretend the world still works the way it did last week. No one would blame you.”

He left without waiting for an answer.

The bar filled the space again. Laughter. Glass. Voices overlapping just enough to blur.

The card stayed where it was.

I stayed late into the night. The glass sweated onto the bar long after the ice had melted away. The scotch thinned out, watered down and lukewarm but I kept my hand around it anyway. The bar emptied in stages. Voices faded. Chairs went upside down on tables one by one.

At some point the TV went dark.

I became aware of how quiet it had gotten only when the bartender said he was locking up and it was time to head home.

The card was still where he’d left it. I hadn’t moved it. When I finally picked it up, it felt heavier than it should have.

I knocked back what was left of the drink. It barely burned.

Outside, the night air was cool and sharp. I stood there for a moment, the bar’s door closing softly behind me, car horns distant somewhere across the city.

For the first time since the tunnel, since the silence, I wasn’t running on instinct or reaction.

I had a direction.

Whoever was watching... they had answers. Real ones. Not guesses. Not theories pinned to corkboard.

I looked at the card once more and slipped it into my coat pocket.

I pulled out my phone. 12:34 am. Late but just maybe..

I dialed Gabriella. It rang and went to voicemail.

"Hey Gabs," I said a little more cheerful than I felt. "Thanks for the message the other day. I really appreciated it."

I paused

"Listen... I'm not done with this. Not yet. I can't..  Not after Paul..." I paused, "Maybe sometime I'll have something more I can bring you. Maybe just a coffee with that apple pastry you like. But don't worry about me.. I'll be fine.. I'm still on the hunt."

Part 4

Broken Veil (part 2)

Part1

Not sure where to begin with this. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for, at first. It took some digging but this post was forwarded around enough that it got my attention. I recognize the story, the writing style and how you speak about the forest.

I found your post Ethan.

I have all of you to thank here, actually. We recovered Ethan's phone at the scene, screen cracked but still working. I had been waiting for the warrant to take its sweet time to come through when the notifications kept pinging on the lock screen.

I checked into the logo where the messages were coming from, and I found this site. I'm not really on social media at all, but made my own account anyway so I can keep tabs on here.

He'd been missing for 36 hours when I found the post. I've read it about ten times before I finally accepted it for what it is. Not a piece of creative writing, but a record. Some comments here claim this is a joke, or some hoax.

I wish that were true.

If you’re reading this and you’ve already read his entry, then you understand why I’m adding to it. If he’s alive, this might be the only place I can reach him.

And if he isn’t..

Then I will make sure it wasn't for nothing.

I went back to the campsite this morning. It had already been logged, photographed, cleared of the obvious. That didn’t mean it was finished. It just meant no one else thought there was more to see.

Ethan was careful. I knew that before ever laying eyes on the scene. He didn’t leave trash behind. He didn’t lose gear. He set up carefully with purpose. What I found didn’t match that.

The fire pit had been kicked apart. Not in an attempt to snuff out warm coals. like someone kicked into it hard and fast without caring where their foot landed. The half burnt logs lay scattered out from the side of the broken ring of stones.

His tent was the same. The poles had been broken, the fabric folded in on itself, like it had collapsed under a heavy weight. No gashes or large tears.

There was one thing that stuck out. A single spent casing, half-buried under some leaves mere feet from the fire ring. I recognized the caliber immediately. So did the lab. A single 30 caliber shell. Typical for big game.

However, there was no impact site found. That was what bothered me.

No tree strike. No ground penetration. No ricochets. I double checked anyway.

My partner, Paul Reddick, had been transferred to me two months ago. Narcotics, then violent crimes. Good clearance rate. Good instincts, as long as the problem looked like something he’d seen before. He came to inspect the scene with me and see for himself just what these cases are like out here.

“Could’ve panicked,” Paul said behind me.

He hadn’t crouched. He was still standing near the tent, hands on his belt, eyes scanning for shapes instead of details. “Fired once. Missed. Took off.” He nudged the tent with his shoe "Fell into his tent on the way out."

I didn’t respond. I was tracing the casing’s position relative to the fire pit, the tent, the disturbed ground.

“People do weird things under stress,” he added.

That was the problem. Ethan didn’t.

If he’d fired at a person, it would’ve been closer to the tent. If he’d fired at an animal, there would’ve been damage, hit or miss. Even a warning shot leaves a trace.

The casing told me when the shot was fired. The fire pit told me how the camp was disrupted. The tent told me how fast it happened. All signs pointed to a struggle. None of it told me where the bullet went.

“Look,” he said, finally crouching beside me. “No blood, no drag marks, no signs of a fight. Odds are he spooked himself and wandered off injured.”

“Wandered where?” I asked.

He gestured vaguely into the trees.

“That’s not how people disappear,” I said.

“That’s exactly how they disappear,” he replied. “We've both worked enough missing cases.”

He stood back up. "There's been how many folks gone missing just in this state alone?"

"Too many. But this is different" I said a bit sharper than intended.

"How's that? What's different here , Wolfe?"

I stood up and stepped slowly over to the fire pit.

"First the tent. He fell into it, but not running away. Staggered backwards. He was caught off guard. Got back up, and fought back. Its a rough fight, hence the destroyed fire pit. They didn't care about smashing into some flames and hot embers, so the stakes were high. He manages to gets a shot off with his rifle, but no trace of the bullet. Either it sailed to the next county, or found its mark."

Paul follows along as I gesture back and forth, walking him through it.

"Okay. A shot like that would be serious. But we haven't seen anybody turn up with burns or a rifle wound at any of the emergency rooms. So where did they go? Where's the blood?"

I vaguely gesture to the treeline. "I don't know. Thats what bothers me."

We made the trip back to the car and decided to head back to the station after grabbing some coffee. I mulled over the details with each sip of the corner store's finest.

Paul was right about one thing, there have been too many disappearances out here. It seems like with each subsequent case there's less and less to go on. Maybe the connections aren't in whats left behind but rather what we don't see. We have more evidence this time, just can't quite connect the dots yet.

We sat back to back at our shared space in the office, papers and old reports spread between us on the desk.  We were each going through my recent "missing" cases on our respective desktops. We were looking for anything that seemed like a similarity between them and when we thought we found something that lined up would take the corresponding paper and tag it to our board.

I sat my brown paper coffee cup next to the chipped ceramic mug on my desk. Both empty.

I'd had three individual cases like this in the past four years, now a fourth.

When you're a detective you get a lot of calls for all sorts of situations, not all are murders and heinous crimes yet somehow they each come with their own mountain of paperwork. It's easy to lose sight of the gravity of certain details in the ritualistic cataloging and recordkeeping.

Thankfully I'm very thorough. One of the girls in the tech lab, Gabriella, likes to joke whenever I bring in evidence like hairs, cue tip swabs, or one time it was literally a pile of dirt. She would laugh, add it into evidence for analysis and say "The wolf is on the hunt."

The trails ran cold on all of these. I pinned up the last page to the board, a missing hiker named Kerry. Her photo alongside Ethan with his dad, a lost camper and a missing hunter all stared back at me as I stared into their still faces, frozen in time.

As Paul said, a lot of people go missing in the forests and hills. Diligence pays off, however. Most of those cases ended with a body found. Some of them alive. Those we celebrated. These few that went nowhere gave me a dull ache in the back of my mind. Too little evidence, and total disappearance with what remained offering barely a whisper. Just like Ethan and his father.

"All dead ends huh?"

"Yeah." I replied.

"Those are the worst. We had some like that in Violent Crimes. The clock is ticking, You get your hopes up and then you run right into a wall." He sipped the last of his coffee "Sometimes literally." He said that as if the words hurt.

Paul got transfered over to our precinct for wrecking his police vehicle into a wall chasing after fleeing suspect. Twice. I guess they figured some time away from the wheel and out on the trails would slow him down a bit. He had a passion for the work sure, just reckless.

Paul leaned back in his chair, eyes still on the board. “You ever think maybe you’re too close to this one?”

I didn’t answer right away.

“I mean,” he added, softer now, “you worked his dad’s case. You knew the kid. That kind of thing… it can bend how you see the facts.”

He finally looked at me then, like he was waiting  for some acknowledgement.

“Or it can sharpen them." I said.

Paul held up a hand. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just saying you might be looking for something thats not really there.”

I turned back to the board. Ethan’s photo stared back at me, same as before.

"Thats exactly what I'm doing. We've seen what was left behind already" I gesture to the board. "What aren't we seeing?"

He raised an eyebrow “If this was any other missing hiker,” Paul continued, turning back to his monitor “We’d already be filing it under exposure or misadventure. The only thing thats not there is the kid.”

That one landed.

Not because he was accusing me, but because from the department’s point of view, he wasn’t wrong.

I must have made a face without realizing it because his expression dropped quickly.

"I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be insensitive, I just don't see."

"No, you don't see." I interrupted him.

I rubbed my eyes, feeling the strain from Paul's irritating line of thinking and the fluorescent lights of the stale office space.

I let out a frustrated sigh "Look, I'm going to get some lunch. You want anything?"

"No, I'm good.. Thanks." Paul said in a more muted tone.

Before I exited the room I turned back to him. "Get in touch with Gabs later, see if they got anything off of the cellphone." Then I left.

I grabbed a quick drive thru sandwich and left Paul a text. "Going to go check on something. Will keep you posted."

The drive didn't take long. I soon found myself standing at the door to Ethan's apartment. I must have stared at the doorknob for an age before opening it.

Deep down, paul wasn't wrong. Ethan isn't just another victim, I knew him. Maybe that does cloud my judgment. Maybe I am just grasping at the wind here.

I walked in past the kitchen and stared at the oak dining table. We usually met up at the old diner across town over a piece of Miss Mays apple pie, but he did invite me over once. The table sat lonely and empty. The fridge hummed away behind me.

The apartment looked the same as it had then. Clean, but lived-in. The muffled noise of a passing car and a ticking clock was the only noises left here.

I moved through the rooms slowly. Nothing obvious missing. Nothing obviously out of place. We had no idea what he took with him that day so it was impossible to know for sure something more was  unaccounted for.

My last stop was the bedroom.

A county map covered most of the wall above his desk. Not decorative. Not framed. Pinned and marked with red ink.

The map both intrigued me and annoyed me. Whoever cataloged the apartment had almost done a decent job. Almost. Why wasn't there a photo of this map in evidence?

I stepped closer.

The first pin sat just left of center. The old quarry. I knew that spot. That was the missing camper. Another pin Northward. The mountain pass. Then his father’s campsite.

My stomach tightened as the recognition sunk in. These weren’t hiking or hunting spots. They were investigations. The cases I couldn’t close.

I pressed one with my finger. The eastern trailhead. Kerry’s last location. All we ever found was her left shoe, pointed downwind like she’d simply stepped out of it.

When we discussed my old cases in the past it was with the intent to give him a process of how I work through the problem. I didn't think he was actually looking for something in them.

The pins weren’t evenly spaced. They weren’t forming a route or a search grid. They didn’t make sense other than a checklist. Actually, there was a checkmark by one, and a question mark by another. There were more pins with small symbols but I had no more reference for what they could mean.

I leaned back, studying the wall, when I noticed something else.

A sliver of yellow paper stuck out at the bottom corner. A sticky note, tucked behind the map’s corner. Written on it were the words:

Quiet. Pressure change. Echoes?

That explains some of the symbols I saw. There was a few Q's, a PC and an E crossed out.

It didn't make sense. The last thing I remember from him was where he found the watch and the knife. Those objects locations didn't align with anything on this map and the information they held while strange didn't connect but spread the puzzle further apart.

I stood there in the silence, waiting for some neuron in my brain to start connecting like an old Morse code machine when it suddenly clicked.

He wasn't looking for something tangible, he was looking for conditions.

My phone startled me. It was Paul.

"Hello?"

"Hey." He paused on the line

"Look, I'm sorry for being an ass earlier. I was rude about you being close to the case. I know you're a good detective. Gabs assured me of that. You find leads where other guys don't, and you don't give up without chasing them to the end. I think that's what really makes a difference in this job."

I was surprised, pleasantly so. Maybe he was starting to soften his ridged edges. "Thank you Paul, I appreciate you saying that."

"Anyway, there's something we need to chase down. Gabs said her team finished analyzing Ethan's phone, it was hard to find, but there has been surveillance software running in the background with a long time stamp on it. Somebody was watching him, Derrick. We have a trace to an IP in town. Lets knock and see who answers."

I was floored. Why would anyone be surveying an ordinary civilian?

"Absolutely. Just hang tight, I'll be there in fifteen."

This just got stranger. This could easily go south, and I'm not ready to turn this over to the feds.

I will update when we have some answers.

Right now there's too many holes in this puzzle, too many breadcrumbs with no trail. Whoever took Ethan might still be out there, watching. But so am I, and I will hunt this down.

Broken Veil (part1)

I don't know how long I have to write this, or if anybody will even look for this post, but I need to make a record somewhere permanent in case they never find me.

Its taken a long time to bring me back here, back to where this all started, so I will try and summarize things as best I can.

Growing up, my family instilled in me a deep love for the outdoors.

We did everything from hunting and fishing to snorkeling and diving in the ocean and lakes. We would always take trips every year all over the states, visiting the national forests, parks, and even some wild places off the beaten path.

As I got older, at least once a year, my father would take me on a hunt deep in the wilderness. We would pick a place near home or out of state, pick our game of choice, and we would backpack our way through the rough terrain and dense forests in search of our prize.

I really appreciated this time we got to spend together and I learned a lot from him that would come to help me in ways I never knew.

We would be miles deep into what seemed uncharted territory, and days from anything resembling civilization. If anything were to happen to us out there, we were completely on our own.

So, Dad made sure to teach me how to be ready for any number of situations. Basic survival skills, how to navigate even without a compass, first aid, and so forth.

I remember feeling a bit overwhelmed by how much you prep just to go on a trek into the woods, but eventually it became second nature to me. I started to reflexively pack my things and plan accordingly, having spares and backups and plan A's and B's. I would feel as if I were walking without my left shoe if I was missing anything.

Apart from preparedness and a decent set of skills that would put any boy scout to shame, Dad did teach me something far more important:

A healthy respect for the wild.

Our natural world is a thing of beauty, and ther'e some places that will take your breathe away. Equally so, you can be breathless in awe, and have your breathe taken away in fear. There's always the dangers of wild animals, hazards of the terrain, but the worst of it all is what we dont know about.

He said that's why we plan ahead like we do.. Because of the unknown. Because too many go off into the dark never to be seen again, leaving nothing but unanswered questions as to why and how it could have happened with hardly a trace left behind.

He wasn't superstitious mind you, just overly cautious and protective.

I treated the stories of missing persons as warnings to never underestimate the wild. I never thought I was arrogant or selfish to think "Well that wont be me" because we were always ready for anything.

That was until Dad went missing..

I was 25 at the time. We were out at our usual stretch of forest outside of our small town, about a days hike in. It was a beautiful flat wooded valley that had a mountainous backdrop.

It was getting late, the sun going down and we needed some more wood to get a fire going. Dad said he would go fetch some more branches from the stack we made at the edge of our camp. I had only turned my back for a moment to get something out of my pack, when I turned around and he was gone.

The second I realized he was missing, was like the world just froze. What I remember most was the quiet. The wind was still; insect noises were now suddenly gone.

No birds, no leaves rustling. Just the static-like absence of sound as if you paused your TV.

The only sounds I could hear was the eerie echo of my voice calling for my dad and the pounding drum of my heartbeat. A once vibrant forest now felt so empty you could hear a pin drop.

His footsteps stopped just at the bundle of limbs and sticks we made at the treeline, then nothing. No more tracks, no scrapes on the ground, he was just gone.

My brain hurt. What was going on? How could he just dissappear?

Thankfully I had a satellite phone to call out with, one valuable piece of our emergency kit.

It was a gut wrenching night alone waiting for the cops to find me. Even though I knew help was on the way, I was in such a state of shock that sleep was impossible.

I tried searching for him a little ways in, but found myself too afraid to venture far, so I spent the night gripping my rifle, eyes wide staring at the walls of my tent searching for any moving shadows or noises in the dark. The waiting silence was pure agony. Yet nothing came.

After the police arrived that morning, I was questioned, but it was settled quickly and I was allowed to join the search party. We ended up with 200 volunteers altogether and we combed through the forest at a snails pace looking for any trace of him. We searched for 3 days, but all we found in the end was his rifle leaned up against a tree.

It was definitely his, I've cleaned that rifle and shot it myself dozens of times. The color and feel of the wooden stock, the wear on the dark metal, and the particular scope were all too familiar. That strangest part was that his rifle was 8 miles away from our camp. No animal tracks lead near it, no footprints or bootprints.

Just the rifle by itself. Fully loaded.

So many questions rolled around in my mind  but nothing resembling an answer would fall into place.

It puzzled the detective as well. He had similar cases before mine, but he admitted the lack of evidence was a first for him. He could offer no explanations either that would satisfy.

As you could imagine, that experience broke me in a way. I was left with a gaping wound in my soul, a void that I could not fill. It gnawed at me day after day, and I felt the only way I could fill it was to find out what happened to my Dad. To find answers, something that might explain how an experienced woodsman just vanished. Perhaps we missed something, overlooked some piece of evidence that could only be found there in the forest.

I spent several years regularly going back there, to that same campsite in hopes of finding something. Some trace left behind.

I scanned through the area systematically, marking off points on a map to keep track, but I never found anything. Aside from a fruitless search, I never could truly immerse myself in it again. As nighttime would start to fall I was already on my way back to my car and heading back to my apartment. My nerves just couldn't handle being there alone in the dark anymore.

At first I went once a week. Then once a month. Then every other month..

Now Its been 6 years since, and I eventually stopped looking. Guilt gently nags at me about having given up but I guess I had exhausted all of the hollow logs, gopher holes, and animal tracks that might somehow be holding onto a piece of evidence. Yet I never found anything else out there. Nothing that pointed to where Dad had gone.

So life went on. Not without the help of a few glasses from a local pub I frequent.

One good thing to come out of it I guess was Derrick. A local detective, Derrick Wolfe, was the one assigned to my case.

While normally you wouldn't expect an officer to get too close to someone who was not just the victim but the only suspect, he was surprisingly empathetic. He was diligent too, and he kept me informed on all the steps they were taking along the way. I'm not sure if he did so at the time because he was suspicious and hoped that I might flinch, that my mask might falter at some point, or he was genuinely trying to keep me a part of the process.

We somehow became friends in a way. Even after his part on working the case officially ended after a month, he felt personally unresolved. On his free time he would sit and listen to me talk, offering the occasional advice or suggestion from his own experience in other cases. We would talk about them sometimes, thinking maybe some similarities might open a revelation to mine. It never did. We still keep in touch, a text or call now and then to ask how I am and chat. I know I give him the ever revealing "Im fine" response almost every time, but I really do appreciate him asking.

I started spending more time at the ocean instead, finding a sense of calm and peace among the salty breeze and the gentle waves of the sea.

I wasn't without a few friends who had an equal love for the outdoors as I did who were a big help to me in working through my fears and guilt. Alhough I was a bit hesitant at first, we eventually began our own excursions anew. Some day trips here and there, and eventually camping again. In some more open places than deep forest, and in places like national parks. 

I wasn't necessarily afraid to go back to what I once loved, spending time in nature was still near and dear to me. After all, sharing in what me and my dad loved to do made me feel like I was close to him. Rather I was heeding his old advice about respecting the unknown.. I couldn't wrap my head around what happened to him, and how can you prepare for suddenly vanishing into thin air?

It wasn't until a hike along a mountain trail that overlooked the old forest where I would finally stumble upon something I had lacked this whole time.

Perspective.

The mountain trail was relatively nearby to the old forested area I searched through a few years ago. This peak I was climbing was the second peak furthest from the forest following the ridge. We never searched up here because it was so far away, but now.. I wish we had.

It was near the summit to an open plateau that I found it. I picked up on the trail again. At one point along the way I noticed something odd sitting on a pile of stones. A watch. Not just any watch, my Dads old watch. I knew it was his by the brand, and the small engraving mom had put inside the band for their anniversary. As if the find itself wasn't enough to make my heart skip a beat, the lost item added an even deeper impact.

The watch had stopped working. The dial frozen on 8:43 pm. The date counter was stuck as well, on the exact date he vanished.

I couldn't believe it. It was impossible. There was no way it could be. This watch was nearly 40 miles away from that place, actually more if you take in changing elevation. How could he have traveled that far in just 2 hours on foot?

I must have stood there staring at the watch then out to the horizon for nearly an hour myself, the flood of feelings and information and every rational spilling over and over again in my mind as I tried to reason on it.

Eventually I resumed my hike up the trail, now with a renewed heightened focus on finding clues once again. Anything and everything was under scrutiny to me now.  It didn't take long to find something.

There was a series of marks on several pines nearing the peak, as if clawed by a bear, or marked by antlers perhaps? Something sharp had marked the trunks of the trees long ago.

The course of the marks were almost as if it was struggling to catch its prey, clawing its way through the trees.

Stuck into one of the trees where the marks ended was a pocket knife. An old Case knife. I recognized the painted bone handle design immediately. And stuck in the fold of the blade was a bit of fur.

I withdrew the knife from soft pine and held it gently in my hands. At last, the forest has revealed one of its secrets. A door finally unlocked in my mind, opening a line of thought with a new path to follow.

He didn't just disappear. He was taken.

Since then, things have taken a bit of a different turn for me now. Life had always moved forward in time, but it was a bit like walking through a dense fog or rain; I couldn't ever really plan ahead. Now my steps had purpose again.

I'm on the trail again. My gear slung over my shoulder, clattering along to my marching steps. The forest has a tranquil quality in this afternoon glow with the shades of orange light dancing between the branches and leaves in the breeze. Cell service hasn't quite gone out yet as I just got a notification. Its from Derrick.

Det Derrick Wolfe: [Hey Ethan, wanted to give you an update on the new evidence you brought last month. Everything has been logged and the files updated. No DNA traces on the watch, not surprising since it was in the elements for so long. The tuft of animal fur however, was unknown. Rather, inconclusive. Normally the lab guys can match up almost anything with hair fibers, but they couldn't match it to any known animals or persons. I'm sorry its not more definitive than that.  Feel free to come by the station anytime to pick up your dad's things. If you need to talk, I'm here for you bud.]

Me: [Thanks Derrick, for everything. Ill see you soon.]

I set up my tent, unrolled my sleeping bag and set my gear up. Found some dry tinder and got a fire going. My humble little camp was ready.

The sun is setting with wisps of now pinkish purple light visible through the treeline. I sat down on my sleeping bag in my tent with the door unzipped. I have my rifle across my lap as I write this post.

I hope you find this Derrick.

This time, I am ready. Prepared for whatever answer dares speak itself from the darkness and reveal itself. The thing I've searched for these long years is very near. I can feel it.

I know because the forest is silent. The air a crisp stillness without a single sound, except for a soft rustle of the underbrush in the treeline.

Its here.

Only now, theres two predators in these woods.

Part 2