Elsewhere in Melbourne...
A body floated in the Maribyrnong River.
Not the first. Not the last. But this one had something unusual.
Burn marks.
On the inside of the skull.
Detective Marcus Vey, two years shy of retirement and already half-detached from the world he used to believe in, stood by the bank. His cigarette was wet. His patience worse.
"Who found him?" he asked.
"Cyclist," the constable replied. "Coming off the bridge. Thought it was a dog."
"It's never a dog," Marcus muttered.
The forensic pathologist was pale. Not because of the corpse. But because of the scorch pattern in the brain cavity.
"What the hell kind of weapon does this?" Marcus asked.
"None that we've ever seen."
---
Inside a warehouse in Footscray
Ronan Vale pulled the tarp off an old 1978 Ford Falcon. The car looked like it had died in the '90s and stayed dead. But underneath the dust, it was armored. Reinforced. Modified for war.
He opened the glovebox.
Inside was a faded photograph: five men in military fatigues. All smiling. All now dead.
He stared at it for a long moment, then folded it and slid it into his coat.
He had returned to Melbourne for one reason.
To finish the war that never officially started.
---
6:00 a.m. – Federation Square
A screen lit up on the plaza, playing a routine public service broadcast.
But for 2.7 seconds, the feed glitched.
A symbol appeared.
A red circle with a vertical line running through its center. Ancient. Obscure. Forgotten.
But not by everyone.
Far away, in a basement beneath a luxury hotel, a group of men in suits stared at a terminal.
"He's awake," one of them whispered.
"What do we do?"
The oldest man stood. His face was covered in ritual scars. His eyes didn't blink.
"We wait."
---
The war Melbourne never knew it fought was starting again. And the only man who could stop it was the one they buried in the dark twenty years ago.
But Ronan Vale had not died.
He had been learning.
Now, he was back.
And he wasn't alone.