While the others babbled in confusion, Nia Holloway stood a few feet from Caleb, her stillness a stark contrast. She wasn't watching the panicked people or her stunned colleagues. Her entire being was fixed on the light at the cyclone's heart. That specific, rusty red-orange. It wasn't a sunset. It wasn't fire. It was a color that scratched at a door in her mind—a door she kept locked, barred, and forgotten.
The scratch became a splintering crash.
A different room. Not a sky, but a ceiling of cracked concrete and exposed pipes. The smell was damp earth, ozone, and something coppery. The memory didn't arrive as a story, but as a sensory blast. She was younger, her knees watery, but her arm was extended, the weight of her service pistol a familiar anchor. Across the room, a man. Or something shaped like a man. His clothes were rough, worn through at the elbows. His face was unshaven, hard. But his eyes… they held no human thought. They were flat, polished stones. And around him, the air… shimmered. Not with heat, but with a crawling, visible wrongness. It was like looking at a television through warped glass, but the distortion was alive. It pulsed with a spectrum of color that felt sick—deep ultraviolet blacks and nausea-green halos. It wasn't light; it was radiation. A visual signature of pure, ravenous hunger. It pulled at the light in the room, at the warmth, making everything around it seem faded and cold. It smelled of static, of burnt hair, of an emptiness so profound it was a physical force trying to become full.
And in that fractured, terror-frozen second, she saw something else. From her own trembling form, a pale, silvery wisp—like the last breath of a dandelion clock—detached. It was barely there, a shimmer of exhaust from a living engine. It didn't float; it was drawn, inexorably, into that devouring distortion surrounding the rough-faced man. He saw it. His lips peeled back from yellowed teeth in a grin that had no joy, only a vile, knowing satisfaction.
Then, nothing. The memory ended not with an outcome, but with a void. A blank space where the next moment should be.
She snapped back to the present, a soft, involuntary gasp escaping her lips. The precinct window was cool against her forehead where she'd unconsciously leaned forward.
The sky-light was different. Grander. Softer at the edges. It didn't have that claustrophobic, predatory intimacy. It was vast, alien, almost serene in its power. It reminded her of photographs from space probes, of the rusty, majestic glow of Mars hanging in the black. But the texture of the energy, the signature of the appetite thrumming through the air… it was the same. The flavor was identical. Only the scale had changed from a personal violation to a planetary one.
Her thoughts, usually orderly compartments, became a chain reaction of dread. Danny. Oh god, Danny. Her informant, his hands always shaking, his eyes too wide. He'd talked in circles about parasites. Not worms, but conceptual parasites. Things that slip into people and wear them, hollowing them out to puppet the skin. They'd humored him, filed his rants under the vague heading of "mental unwellness." But his demeanor that last time… The fear in his eyes wasn't street-fear, the fear of a bust or a rival. It was a primal, wordless terror. He'd been trying to tell her something about Azaqor's pattern, about why they could never triangulate the "region" he'd taken the victims to. "It's not a place on a map, Nia," he'd whispered, his voice cracking. "It's a place on a… a spectrum." He'd looked like he wanted to vomit the words out. Then the men had arrived. Two of them, in suits that were too nice, too sharp for the grimy diner. They didn't look like cops or feds. They looked like lawyers or bankers who handled toxic assets. One leaned down, whispered in Danny's ear. Danny's face went slack, all the frantic energy draining away. He'd stood, robotically, and walked out with them. He hadn't looked back. She'd never seen him again.
The pieces, jagged and nonsensical, began to tilt towards a horrifying cohesion. Azaqor. The killings—Desai, the mother of that girl Aubrey. The vanishings—Elijah, Chloe, Vivian… Marcus. Caleb's Marcus. All different walks of life, all seemingly random. But Danny had mumbled about hidden connections, about trails that always went cold at a certain threshold. A threshold named Orphagenynx Industries. The pharmaceutical giant. The world's benevolent face of medicine. The Halvern family's crown jewel. A "front," Danny had spat. A front for what?
This cyclone outside wasn't weather. It was an emission. A beacon from a source that wasn't supposed to be there. And the memory of her own fragile light being siphoned into that hungry distortion years ago told her the core truth: this wasn't a human problem. It was an infestation. The higher-ups, the smooth men in suits, they weren't just hiding evidence. They were hiding the fence around the feeding pen. Normal folk were just… cattle, blissfully unaware of the slaughterhouse design.
A cold realization, absolute and heavy as a stone, settled in her stomach. This isn't just Crestwood. This is a leak. A leak from a place we're not supposed to know exists, and someone built the pipe. The hope that this wouldn't spiral into catastrophic chaos felt pathetic, a whispered prayer against the roar of a collapsing dam.
Her professional mask, the calm, analytical detective, finally fissured. The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin clammy and pale. Her lips parted slightly, not to speak, but in a mute, stunned acknowledgment.
Her eyes, wide and locked on the pulsing anomaly, held a fear so deep it was vertigo. Beneath the fear swam a worse emotion: a crushing, cosmic-scale worry for every oblivious soul on the street below, for Caleb burning silently beside her, for a world that was about to learn it was not alone, and that its guests were starving.