The horror in the control room was a closed circuit. The horror in the Crestwood PD Major Crimes bullpen was a sprawling, open wound.
Detective Nia Holloway sat cross-legged on a rolling chair, her posture the only elegant thing in the room. Her tailored skirt was wrinkled, her blouse untucked, but she held herself with a weary grace. On her screen was the split broadcast: the shattered boy screaming at a mask, and the frothing, textual sewage of the chat. Her lip curled, not in professional detachment, but in visceral disgust. "Look at them," she said to no one in particular, her voice husky with fatigue. "They're not even human anymore. They're piranhas. A digital feeding frenzy."
The tech pit was a graveyard of morale. The specialists—the replacements for the missing Rhea and Lily—slumped at their stations. Shoulders were hunched, faces lit by the cold glow of failure. They'd been the best in the county. Now they were spectators.
Lieutenant Caleb Thorne stood apart, a pillar of tense silence. He wasn't pacing. He was planted, his feet shoulder-width apart, hands clenched behind his back. His posture screamed military rigidity, but his eyes betrayed him. They were bloodshot, flickering between the large monitor showing his son Marcus's frozen, defiant profile in the control room, and the scrolling nightmare of the chat. He saw the comment about Richie's father. He saw the deletion poll. His jaw was a knot of muscle, grinding slowly.
Something else nagged at him, a detective's instinct poking through the paternal terror. The comments, while vile, had a certain… rhythm. The outrage felt manufactured, the bloodlust somehow generic, as if generated by an algorithm learning human cruelty.
His voice cut through the low hum of despair, aimed at the lead tech, a woman with electric blue streaks in her dark ponytail named Stacy. "The comments, Stacy. Are they real?"
Stacy didn't look up from her array of monitors, her fingers pausing over the keys. The question hung in the air. She let out a long, weary breath. "The traffic volume is real. The origin points are global, proxy-layered to hell and back. But the pattern of engagement, Lieutenant…" She finally turned, her face grim. "It's off. Our models show a surge of bot activity that spiked ninety seconds before the broadcast hijacked the airwaves. Sophisticated, high-end puppets. They're inflating the numbers, steering the narrative. The 'audience' is being curated."
She gestured to a secondary screen, a complex network map. "The M.O.C. confirms it."
The mention of the Mystrium Operatives Clan sent a fresh chill through the room. They weren't just hackers; they were a mythic blend of cyber-espionage and esoteric intelligence, rumored to trace data flows through means that bordered on the mystical. If they'd been consulted and had hit a wall…
"And the feed?" Caleb asked, his voice dangerously quiet.
Stacy's expression was one of profound professional frustration. "The Witnessing Hollow feed on the left? It's a perfect, 18.4-second seamless loop. No artifacts, no degradation. It's not a live stream. It's a recording. He—or it—isn't even watching them in real time."
The implication settled like lead dust. This wasn't an interactive performance. It was a staged play where one principal actor was a phantom, and the audience was partly a fiction.
Detective Owen Kessler, his bulk seeming to take up more than his share of the gloomy air, kept glancing from the screen to Caleb. It wasn't the usual worried look of a subordinate. It was assessing, suspicious even. Caleb felt the weight of the glances but had no space for departmental politics.
He turned to the case board, a monument to chaos. His eyes traced the red tape connecting the victims. Otis Freeman (stern-faced, a former Halvern security chief, found with his own service weapon). Lena Shaw (smiling in her headshot, a PR fixer for the family, drowned in her swimming pool). Damien Halvern (the rebellious nephew, overdose ruled accidental). Raj Mehra (the resigned CFO, apparent suicide).
Caleb's finger stabbed at the board, connecting the lines. "They're all tied to the Halvern family. Past sins, present liabilities. Cleaned up. This isn't random. It's… housekeeping."
Nia swiveled her chair, her expression pragmatic but etched with despair. "Even if that's true, Caleb. Look at the scale. The Halverns aren't just wealthy. They're a sovereign nation. They have senators on retainer, federal judges who owe them. What's the endgame here? Public humiliation? It doesn't fit. Serial killers have signatures, patterns of compulsion. This feels like… a transaction."
Transaction. The word resonated with the artificial audience, the pre-recorded host. Caleb's frustration was a physical pressure behind his eyes, a heat in his chest. His son was trapped in a snare that was part reality TV, part corporate purge, part ghost story. The might of the M.O.C., trained to hunt shadows in both the digital and the psychic ether, had found nothing. The helplessness was a taste of copper and ashes.
To his exhausted, hyper-alert senses, the room seemed to warp. The air grew thick, charged. From his own clenched form, he saw—or felt—faint, shimmering tendrils of a dull, heat-haze red seep into the air. They wavered like plasma, the visual echo of his impotent rage. From Nia, a steady, grey mist of frustration coiled upward. From the defeated techs, lighter wisps of anxious yellow drifted toward the ceiling vents. They were emotions made visible, bleeding out of them and being siphoned away by the room's stale circulation. No one else reacted. He blinked, and the faint colors were gone, leaving only the ache of a headache behind his eyes.
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Marylene Park, Inner Center
Night had fully claimed Crestwood, but the park was alive with a ghastly, silent vitality. Clusters of people stood or sat on benches, their faces illuminated by the blue-white glow of phone screens. All tuned to the same channel. A low murmur hung in the air—gasps, muttered curses, the occasional nervous laugh. They were consuming the spectacle, the terror of the five in the control room a form of communal electricity.
Here, the emotional bleed was not a subtle shimmer. It was a fog. From the crowd, a deep, indigo cloud of collective fear and voyeuristic thrill seeped into the night air. It was thick, almost oily, a palpable miasma of dread and dark excitement. It didn't dissipate. It gathered above the park like a thunderhead, churning silently. Then, as if caught in a powerful, unseen current, the entire indigo mass began to flow. It streamed in a coherent ribbon across the city skyline, a wavelength of harvested horror, moving with purpose toward the industrial docks on the city's southern edge.
---
The wavelength plunged down, down, into a nondescript ventilation shaft on the roof of a derelict textile mill. It was sucked into the darkness.
Inside, the reality was not derelict.
It was a cathedral of silent, humming machinery. A vast, dark space where the only light came from the sources themselves: row upon row of towering cylinders made of polished obsidian glass. Inside each, suspended in a viscous, amniotic fluid, rotated a complex crystalline core. They pulsed with captured light—amethyst, crimson, sickly yellow.
The river of indigo fear from the park funneled into the chamber. It was drawn through spectral filters that split it into its constituent emotional hues before each strand was vacuumed into a waiting core. The cores spun faster, their inner light intensifying, glowing brighter with the infusion of stolen human sentiment.
In the center of this harvesting floor, silhouetted against the pulsating glow of a dozen freshly-fed cores, stood a single figure.
No details were visible in the profound gloom. No height, no shape, no gender.
Only, as the indigo light flared in a core before it, the dark glass of the cylinder reflected back a single, unmistakable detail for a fraction of a second:
The cold, curved reflection of an evil grin.
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