John Holloway stood in the ashes of what used to be a government annex building — now a skeleton of steel and shattered glass. His boots crunched over the debris as he walked the perimeter alone. Sirens wailed in the distance, but no one came here anymore. No one but him.
A silver disk embedded in his palm hummed faintly. His body still ached from his last transformation — steel bones knitting back to flesh, diamond nerves slowly re-softening. Every shift was getting harder.
He knelt near a blackened support beam, scanning the perimeter. The explosion wasn't random. It was surgical. Precise. The kind of precision he recognized — not from his time with the Unaligned 5, but from something darker. Something older.
From his past.
A whisper crept up the back of his mind: "Your blood is a signal. Your bones remember."
He shook it off. Not now. Not again.
Footsteps echoed behind him. Speen approached quietly, eyes sunken, shadow twitching unnaturally at his feet like it had a life of its own. He wasn't alone anymore — hadn't been since the fusion.
John stood. "You feel it too?"
Speen nodded, casting a glance toward the horizon. "It's not just the building. There's something underneath. Something that's… watching."
John turned to the crater. "Whoever did this, they weren't trying to send a message. They were answering one."
Speen hesitated. "You think it's the Black Parade?"
John didn't answer. He couldn't—not without revealing what he knew. The blood. The chanting in dreams. The memories that didn't belong to him.
He kept his voice calm. "We should warn the others. If someone's testing power like this again…"
Speen looked up sharply. "You think it's like Hawkins?"
"No," John said, his voice flat. "I think it's worse."
Cams lab
Cam adjusted the lens on his arm-mounted rig, tuning the neural stabilizer in real-time. A tiny hologram of E's chemical profile pulsed in red and yellow. "Come on," he muttered. "Give me something that lasts more than ten minutes."
He barely heard the door open behind him. Derek entered, his heavy boots thudding against the polished tile. The cybernetic arm on his left side hissed quietly, its joints adapting to his breathing rhythm.
"Your guy was on fire again. Literally," Derek said, tossing a data drive onto the table.
Cam sighed, rubbing his temples. "How bad?"
"Nothing fatal. Not this time. But the crowd turned on him."
Cam clicked the stabilizer closed. "They always do."
Derek leaned against the workbench. "You sure this tech is helping? Or is it just making things worse?"
Cam looked him dead in the eyes. "It's saving his life. If I could do more, I would."
There was a long pause between them — one filled with history neither of them needed to voice.
"We need to get the others together," Cam said. "Something's moving in the city. Bigger than Hawkins. Older."
Derek's voice lowered. "You think it's really back?"
Cam's voice was grim. "I think it never left."