Primal Arizona

The Dissent: Entries

|-TALLIE-|

[Recording begins.]

Now, I know you ain't never seen the sea, honey. I'll try to keep it short, and you can just use your imagination.

Go ahead and close your eyes. Think about an endless ocean, with water cool and salty. The sun shines on countless waves, movin' everywhere and goin' nowhere–infinity's funny like that, y'see. Got that in your head? Good girl. Now look closer and follow one wave as it moves across the sea.

There's a funny thing about waves, honey–they don't exist, not really. A wave is just a shape the water borrows for an instant. The water's the real thing, the thing with guts and weight and teeth. The wave is motion, life, energy that picks up the water and sets it a-tumblin' and a turnin'. If you're clever, that energy and shape can be yours, honey. You can use it to spin the tumblers of a machine, or ride it on a long board like sea folks do.

This is the tricky part, so pay attention. It's like that with stories too, spreadin' and changin', a shape that sends the shapeless folk a-tumblin' in one direction or another. Most times it all evens out–there's lots of waves, and lots of stories. But what if there was a big story, a big wave, stirred by somethin' deep underwater? What if there was someone who could ride a wave from place to place, and wanted to take that wave and do somethin' incredible? And most importantly, what if there was a shore, and the huge, howlin' wall of water could finally come crashin' down?

[Unintelligible noises intercut with static.]

No need to be frightened, now. It's just a picture, honey, all drew up to help you understand. It ain't real.

I'm givin' you this to help you with the next part of the story. Not about me, not yet–this is about that little boy who went into the dark and got all ate up. O'course, there weren't no boy anymore, just the water wearin' his skin and name. But boys don't just spring up outta campfires to wander off and cause mischief. They got mommas and daddies, family who care if they go off and never come back. I'm sure you understand that at least. It were the same with him. When the boy didn't come back, his momma and daddy went out lookin' for him, tryin' to find where he went.

They didn't find him. But they did find it.

Everyone knows the kind of story I'm beginning here, and it's a right spooky tale. The monster lookin' like their son goes to them with big eyes and a big pout, says I'm so sorry I wandered, momma, don't spank me to hard and I'll mind you right proper. Then the momma and daddy are so relieved they ignore the little signs that their boy ain't right, folks get ate up left right and center, and it all ends in tragedy. Then the monster drops the act and goes back to its hidey-hole in the dirt, and that's that.

The real story is this: that momma and daddy were cleverer than the ones in the spooky tale. They saw right from the start their baby boy was all gone and the monster was all that stood in front of 'em. That momma and daddy turned and ran lickety-split, cryin' and refusin' to heed the monster's call. And as awful as the hungry waters are, it was in the shape of a little boy with little boy's legs. It couldn't keep pace, and eventually it gave up.

Can you see where this is goin', honey? Cause if they'd been fooled, there would be no Idle, no you, no nothin'. The waters would have eaten the story, and that would be that. But they saw the monster for what it was, and they told their family, who told their friends and family, who told others and others, spreading out like ripples on water.

What was that story, at its core? "Stay away from here. There are evil spirits here, things that look like people but ain't, things that are rotten to their core. Avoid the badlands, for here there be dragons." And that's when I saw my chance.

Y'see, honey, I'm just a wave-rider–I don't make the waves or tell 'em what shape to take. If nobody said a word about the place, I'd have no power over it. But when they told the stories of the land of monsters, I had somethin' to work with.

"This is a wicked place," they said. I liked it just fine. Wicked things always make for the best stories. "Evil spirits live here, monsters." I took that shape, that story, and I made it true. I pressed the shape onto the land–this was the home of monsters, of weird and wicked things. The story said that if you stayed away, you would avoid them. I made it so–the hungry waters would no longer roam, for this was now it's territory, the patch of land in the desert that was a danger to all who entered. But in doin' so, I did somethin' I didn't understand.

That momma and daddy all those years ago didn't know what the hungry waters were, and the story didn't say. As it grew, it changed: the waters became a ghost, a man built of metal and plastic, a witch, a shape-shiftin' hunter. Sometimes it was a dead fella, bones risin' to hunt the livin'. Sometimes it was a visitor from another world. So my cage of tale made real started catchin' those as well. I had my den of monsters, but what a den it became!

[Spike in static temporarily drowns out the words.]

Well if you must think of things in terms of fault, then that's right. The fault is mine. I made this place what it is–the home of monsters, to which they all must return in time. But really, honey, that's not the right way to look at things. Fault's a thing for people, and we ain't people. There's just the tall tale for the likes of us, and the taller, the better. Why don't you put that silly thought right outta your head?

You wanted to know what all this had to do with you, ain't that right? I'll cut through the chatter, then.

What you have to understand, honey, is that I was layin' the groundwork for somethin' bigger and better, somethin' new. It wouldn't be the most important parts yet, not for a good while. It had to become home to plenty of strange and wicked things first, something the first monster could eat and toy with and I could shape and battle. But it was the foundation, the outline. I poured myself into that building, that story. I fought with the hungry waters and the shapes it took. We wrestled for control for absolute ages. Oh, I hated it so badly, and it hated me. But we still needed each other: it and my trap shaped around each other, strainin' to burst. I poured myself into workin' more and more until I realized I wasn't just the shaper, the rider on the tale–I had become a part of it. I went from bein' the warden, the scientist to bein' the jail itself, the petri dish. What a shock that was, honey, a shock as bad as fallin' off your board into the cold ocean. Can you picture it?

Of course you can. You were there, after all.

Now, all this is a roundabout way of sayin': it weren't no shock to me when I stepped through those busted doors and saw the security footage. Idle's been a cage longer than it's been a town, and that's the gospel truth. So what if the bars were made of metal, not story? So what if they wanted to leave but physically couldn't, instead of able to leave, but not wantin' to? The effect's the same in the end, and you ought to know that endings are the part that matter the most.

Still, I'd like to think Idle was a bit more comfortable than this place. If you were miserable in town, honey, it was probably your own fault in the first place. In that ugly little hold, I saw trapped rats that had started to eat themselves–no foolin', there was a rabid lookin' woman in an airtight cube who had started to eat herself up. Most folks were sprawled and sleepin', or pacin' around. One boy was glowin' as he looked up at the roof. Maybe he thought he could see the sky through it–he and his family were always aimin' to go back there. The fella made to love the lonely boy was turned off, it seemed. They didn't even bother tyin' him up. At that point he was more an it than a he, anyway.

It was an awful place, is all I'm sayin'. But there's lots of awful places in the world. What's one more? Besides, most of the things in that hold coulda deserved to be there. Maybe. Deserve ain't my specialty. Could I have freed 'em? Maybe. We're not there yet, honey. Be patient, now. It'll get clearer, I promise.

The door into the hold was locked tighter than the devil's ass. Wrestlin' with metal ain't my strong suit, so I let it be. All around me, screen showed countless tiny tales of misery and drudgery, or boredom and confinement under the earth. I looked at every one of them. Counted the cells twice, and then once more for good luck. It was no use.

There was a cell here for every livin' resident in Idle, and a few who couldn't be called livin' even if you were bein' nice about it. Everyone in Idle, honey, except you.

You gotta understand that I'm not a good person, honey. I ain't a person at all, y'see. I didn't come here for them, much as I might pity them. I came here for you, and you weren't there. So I let 'em be. They would keep. What's the use freein' 'em from one cage just to leave them in another?

There's only one thing in the world I cared to find, and it was you. My darlin' daughter, Barbara.

[Recording ends.]

|-MABEL O'CONNOR-|

LIFE IS SHORT GO ROGUE DO WHATEVER YOU WANT LIVE FAST LAUGH HARD DIE YOUNG

No one ever left Idle, Arizona.

As a teenager, Brooklynn Lowes couldn't wait to leave one day and see the world. She used to think Idle was a dead-end, backwards tourist trap in the middle of a desert with nothing to see or do except count tumbleweeds and die slowly.

And she was mostly right.

But things changed when she was fifteen, as they often do. Her dad (who was some kind of hell-ghost-demon-thing) stabbed her over the pentagram in the basement, and her mum stopped him by I-want-to-speak-with-the-manager-ing the devil.

She thought her mum was just a judgemental Karen with nothing better to do than terrorise the other residents and make her life difficult.

She was mostly right about that, too. But her mum was also an undying zombie and the coolest person Brooklynn knew.

It turns out, there were a lot of things about Idle that she hadn't realised. The head cheerleader at her school was a vampire. The bartender could read minds. One of the hippies was a literal star. The girl who worked at the grocery store was a monster hunter, and her girlfriend was a werewolf. Some of her neighbours could actually do magic. John Doe was... whatever John Doe was.

No one ever left Idle, Arizona, and Brooklynn finally understood why. It was a dead-end, backwards tourist trap, but it was also a safe haven for weirdos and freaks who didn't fit in anywhere else. She didn't have to leave Idle to see the world; she already lived in the coolest town she knew.

But, as all teenagers do, Brooklynn grew up. She finished high school, and the next step was college. Only, there were no colleges in Idle, Arizona. Brooklynn didn't really want to leave anymore, but she knew she couldn't stay forever. As her mum had always told her, "You have to go college, sweetie. No one will accuse any of my children of being uneducated. Besides, it will make it a lot easier to find a good man to marry. Or woman, whichever you prefer, as long as they are nice. And rich."

It was a stressful time for her mum. She joked one too many times about how Brooklynn could stay home and do college online, you know, that's always an option. But she also helped Brooklynn with all her applications, paid for her tuition, and bought an apartment for her near her chosen university on the East coast (after all, no daughter of Linda Lowes will be forced to live in a dormitory). It had always been just her, her mum, and the twins, and their relationship had never been stronger. Neither of them wanted her to leave, but they both knew she had to.

So she did. She packed up her things and travelled across the country with a promise to call home every night. She settled into her new place, started classes, made friends. All the while, she talked to her mum constantly, keeping up to date on the latest news from Idle. Kenny J. was a teacher now, apparently. Thanks to Linda's new Singles Community Events, the florist has finally started dating a real human man–well, he wasn't a human, but that was still an improvement on the robot lookalike of his deceased ex. The Sage girl caused an explosion the 4th of July and unearthed some kind of crystal in the ground. Honestly, who let that silly girl near the fireworks?

As Brooklynn continued her studies, things in Idle changed. The town grew busier. All sorts of people flew in to check out the pretty rocks. Too many people, in Linda's opinion. People with bad intentions. They were going to try moving there and ruin the town. Brooklynn reassured her mum that everything would probably blow over eventually.

But they didn't. Her mum's calls became more agitated. Some government lackeys showed up and started a mining operation. They took control of the main square. Who did they think they were, marching into their town and bossing people around? The locals were becoming nervous. Some people were leaving. They were ruining her town. Brooklynn made mer mum promise not to eat any of the newcomers. Linda said she wouldn't if they didn't deserve it. This seemed like a fair compromise to Brooklynn, who was more than a little worried about Idle and her mum.

The last call Brooklynn had with her mum was short. It was very early in the morning for Brooklynn; about 3 in the morning back home. Brooklynn awoke to her ringtone (Metallica's Ecstasy Of Gold) and answered in a daze. "Hi mum, what's u–"

"Sweetie, listen. They're planning something." Linda was speaking quickly and quietly. Crickets were chirping in the distance and a slight breeze crackled on the receiver of the phone. "More people have arrived every night this week, and now they're all sitting around in their vans on every corner and the noise coming from that bloody hole has never been so loud."

"Wait, what's happ–"

"Listen, sweetie, I don't want you to worry, but I'm going to get the twins and leave Idle."

Brooklynn shot up in her bed. "What? Mum, are you sure–"

"Yes." Linda's voice was shaken in a way that was unfamiliar to Brooklynn. Few things truly worried an unkillable woman. "We have to. I don't trust them. We'll come to you."

"Are you okay, mum? Are you safe?"

"If anything happens to us before we get to you, don't come looking for us. Okay?"

Brooklynn's heart sank. "What? What does that even mean? You can't say that."

"Yes I can," Linda snapped back. "I am your mother and I can do what I want. You need to stay safe, okay? That's the most important thing to me. These are dangerous people and I don't want them hurting you. Promise me, sweetheart. Promise me you will stay safe."

Brooklynn's voice was caught in her throat. Her heart was working double time. Her eyes prickled with tears. "Yes, okay, I promise," she choked out.

Brooklynn could hear the strained smile in Linda's voice, "Everything's fine, sweetheart. We'll be okay. I'm just stressed, you know how I get when I'm stressed. I just... I love you, Brooklynn. I am so proud of the young woman you are. I don't tell you enough."

"I know, mum," Brooklynn whimpered. "I love you, too."

A quiet moment hung in the air between them.

"I'll see you soon, sweetie."

"Stay safe, mum. Bye."

That was the worst wake-up Brooklynn ever experienced, and it was followed by the worst week of waiting in her life. She received no more calls, no more texts. Just her mum staying off the grid, she hoped. She imagined her mum, Paesleigh, and Kingston knocking on her apartment door and scooping her up into a big group hug. Her mum would make a show about being 'disappointed' in how messy her kitchen was so she could immediately start re-arranging everything. She could show the twins the best window to sit at motionlessly for hours on end. One day they could all go back home to Idle, back to normal after everyone had cleared out the expensive crystal from the mines beneath the town.

A week after the phone call, Brooklynn got a knock on the door. It wasn't her family. It was a pair of sympathetic FBI agents. Something tragic happened in Idle. It was the subject of a vicious biochemical attack from a foreign entity. Everyone in the town had passed, including Linda Lowes, Paesleigh Lowes, and Kingston Lowes. They expressed their deepest sympathies, and their assurance that the United States government was doing everything to avenge the horrific, senseless act. The matter was of a sensitive nature, so there would not be any broadcast of the event and they hoped that Brooklynn would not cause a panic among the American people. They told Brooklynn that all of her families' possessions and assets were being transferred to her as they spoke. They offered their deepest condolences on behalf of the United States government.

Brooklynn was silent. The agents shared their own personal stories of losing loved ones and feeling shocked. Brooklynn wasn't shocked. She was scared. Her mum wasn't dead. She literally couldn't be. But she was right. These people were lying to Brooklynn. They had kidnapped her family. She wanted to shout at them and hit them until they stopped lying about her mother. She wanted to find her family and save them.

But she promised her mum that she would stay safe.

Brooklynn cried. She accepted their condolences. Professed her hatred of Foreign Entities and thanked the agents for fighting back. She bided her time, staying in her apartment and saving cash in a bag in her wardrobe. She pretended that she wasn't being watched when she caught a stranger staring at her at the corner of her eye. She finished her Bachelor of Arts with a major in English and a minor in Psychology.

And Brooklynn Lowes vanished off the face of the Earth.

Londynn Heights has lived on the West coast for some years now. She stopped dyeing her hair black and let her natural blonde show, something her mother begged her to do since she Sharpee'd her hair when she was ten. Londynn didn't wear all black clothing anymore. She wasn't in a metal band. She didn't have any family.

Londynn was the assistant manager of a local bar well-known for their live music. She tried to live her life like she promised she would. She tried to stay safe, make her mother proud. She was happy, mostly. But, in her spare time, she researched government conspiracies. Ghost stories. Fairy tales. People with oddities. Londynn knew it was real. Not all of it, obviously, but some at least. She tried to piece together what could have happened in Idle. Where everything went. She never heard from anyone there ever again, and she was too scared to ever go back and break her promise to her mother.

Londynn didn't let anyone get too close to her. She didn't trust strangers, and everyone was a stranger now. There wasn't anyone she would call a 'boyfriend'... Until recently. He was the manager of some local bands. Kind. Witty. Patient. Despite herself, Londynn was enjoying the closeness of his company, and things were getting serious.

Recently, Brooklynn missed her period. She bought a test from the drugstore. And then two more.

She didn't tell her boyfriend. There was only one person she wanted to talk to right now.

She wanted her mum.

In less than 24 hours, Londynn quit her job and started driving to Idle, Arizona. She knew she shouldn't, but she was going to be a mother now–she could do whatever she wanted. That's what her mum told her.

No one ever left Idle, Arizona. At least, not forever.

|-ROSALINE EUBANKS-|

Tuesday meant it was laundry day. Coincidentally, Tuesday was also the day that the privates went on tour across the abandoned city. Rose was armpit deep inside a container of clothes fumbling around for a small silver key that should have been inside her pocket, but instead of being in her pocket, it was inside the laundry bin. Because she'd dropped it while she folded the laundry.

Each basket was sorted by size. Small. Medium. Large. Extra large.

Rose was certain that hers was inside the medium bin, where she'd been folding the last shirt of the day. She'd rolled up each article of clothing tight into their little balls and tossed them in. Somehow, while she'd been absentmindedly folding, she'd reached into her pocket and pulled out the key. It was like it wasn't her at all moving.

It'd been this way for a few days. She'd wake up, complete her routine, follow through with chores, patrol, then mess hall for food. Shower, bed. Wake up. And somehow, during this time, she managed to fall asleep while she was moving and would wake up hours later, often covered in sweat and aching. She didn't dare express this to anyone. She'd be in a hell of trouble if they knew. They'd question her sanity. She didn't need her sanity questioned.

All she needed was to breathe in that good old Arizona air to feel alive again. It was enough to keep her going. So she took a deep breath, then squeezed her arm in deeper until she could feel something metal. Just as her fingers gripped the key, she heard footsteps outside.

"You 'bout finished yet?"

You are so tired.

It was Sgt. Landon, also known in private by the nickname 'Crocodile' due to his sharp teeth and ability to bite through bone like it was nothing.

She yanked her hand out fast–just fast enough that as he entered she was slipping her hand into her pocket to both hold the key and hide the fact that she'd cut her finger on one of the zippers and it was bleeding fast.

"Affirmative," she said. She regarded him as she was supposed to, and then, once he nodded, she left the room.

"Say," he called after her. "You been acting real strange lately. You having trouble with something? Consistency?"

She stopped. Consistency? That was an odd comment. Unlike him. She turned to answer but he was already gone, having left the room and walked down the hall the other direction.

She shook her head. It was weird how people behaved and spoke in these parts. At times, it was like they weren't even real people. Just video game "NPC"s walking around and giving short sentences without any substance behind them. The whole US army felt like a walking video game.

She knew if that were true, then she had to be another NPC. There wasn't anything unique in her responses. She wasn't even certain who she was at the basis of her existence. She felt hollow. Like someone, something, else had crawled inside her body and shoveled out everything important. They were carving her insides out just like the miners carved out the town with their mines that extended perhaps too far down inside the trepid earth.

Somehow as she left the building and went back to her bunk, she ran back into Sgt. Crocodile. He gave her a toothy grin, placed his hands on her shoulders, and twisted her back the direction she'd come from.

"That way, sweetheart." She bristled as he spoke, his breath hot like barbecue wings left out on a mild spring day. "I need you to head back towards the base. At the back of the main lobby room, head to the door with the Illuminati symbol on it and then go into the door next to that one. It'll take you back towards the hold. I need you go and monitor the cages inside. I need to take a shit. I'll be back in fifty."

She turned as if to question, but he'd already gone again.

She really didn't like being called sweetheart. Especially not by a man. But he was her Seargent, whether she liked it or not. So she grit her teeth, checked on the key in her pocket (it was still there), and took a deep breath of the nice dry air. It always seemed to calm her nerves.

The hold was supposedly where they kept all the fancy little critters that were holed up in this shit-town before the mines first were built. It was a bunch of strange ones that called themselves people and wore clothes, went to school, held PTA meetings, even went to a library–if one could call it that. They were strange, the way they acted. In some ways, it was like they'd never left their pretty little homes. She'd hadn't had the chance to visit and see the creatures herself, only the secondhand knowledge of their existence, which no matter how long she tried to remind herself always seemed to exit her brain the second they were no longer relevant.

They breathe the same way you cannot.

She waltzed in as though this was a common task for her. The men outside the doors gave her warm smiles and insulted her kindly; likewise her insults were better but with just as much softness to remind them what the sun felt like inside that cold, desolate building.

They can feel. You cannot feel.

When the door closed behind her, she had to check once again for her key. It remained in her pocket, where it should be, and she patted her pocket for good luck. Comforted, she took a glance at her surroundings and immediately felt like she'd entered a second dimension. The hold was set up with multiple large cages with what seemed like the set up for a little house inside. A bed, a box, and a little shelf with books on it. A person, resting on the floor with their eyes staring skyward. A man with a beard far too long for his young, beautiful face. Eyes of emerald and blue and eyes that seemed to bore into her very soul.

Their eyes see.

She patted her pocket again. It wouldn't be long before he returned and she could get outside again. If she looked away, the creatures that were human but weren't wouldn't be able to look at her. They couldn't watch as she made her rounds, her long, long rounds, across the room. Everytime she rounded a corner there were more cages. More people. The room spread out far larger than the base itself. It was larger, perhaps, than even the town. People. Things. Creatures with eyes upon eyes upon eyes upon-

You cannot see.

It was suddenly so dark. She looked left, right, up, even down, but nothing made sense. The bright shining lights were to hard to see in. Everything was too dark. She needed to be back inside the mines. She needed to see the light. She needed to see. Every step she took was another in the wrong direction. Where was she headed? She wasn't certain. It was one of the great unknowns, just as this very town was, one giant unknown that clouded her and made her sanity fall apart just like the seams of her pocket, which were ever so frayed.

She patted it to be certain it was there but the key wasn't in her pocket, it was in her hand. She'd already used the key. It was time to go back into her pocket.

Time to move again.

Step.

Step.

Step.

She crossed the corner and when she blinked she could once more understand where she was. The stalactites dripped upon her and the crystals sticking from the walls emitted the crimson glow that warmed her whole body. She looked up and finally saw.

|-ROYAL RIDEN-|

I don't know where I am, but I know where I do not want to be.

The black coil latches to the boy's leg and circles tight, disappearing with neither sight nor sound.

Move, boy.

Royal stumbles forward, one step, then two. He stops, gripping at the nearest object for support, his knees weakening with each unsupported moment. His fingers find a wooden post, dusty and splintered, but he is not asking it to hold up the roof above, only to hold up him.

"Fuck." The single word is a sputtered out mess, spit sticky inside his throat and tongue locked with the top of his mouth. It peels away, a residue leaving with it, coating the outside of his tongue as dirt and dust drag into his lungs. Royal bends in half, hacking out the air until it becomes a glob of spit on the floor.

He is shaking, even if it is unnoticed at first, the thin slivers of light infiltrating the shaft, an untrustworthy source of light. Maybe they are the only thing shaking, or perhaps his body is collapsing in on itself, bruises, cuts, and an undiagnosed concussion trying to drag him down.

"It's fine. You're fine." He hates how shaky and scratchy the sound of his voice is in the hollowed out earth. "You're fine." Royal's gaze flickers to the opening behind him, a shiver tracing its way through each bone in his spine. A few loose pieces of rock tumble down, joining the pile below. A slow groan echoes from farther down the makeshift hall. It's impossible to see anything except for the sky above and the darkness behind him. "It wasn't that big of a fall." Somehow the words aren't reassuring.

Withdrawing his hand, Royal wipes the dust off on his mud-caked jeans and turns forward. The blue light of the monitor is as unfamiliar as it is comforting. The metal wall before him is the only thing that looks properly reinforced within the hall. A broken keypad hangs from a single sputtering wire. An open door stands as the invitation to somewhere worse. Royal shoves his freezing fingers into his pockets and steps forward, tennis shoes leaving a shallow impression in the thickly packed dirt below. His stomach twists tightly as he peaks inside.

Empty. Thank god.

He follows the light to its source, tracking dirt along the empty hallway until the reflection leads to the real thing. The glow turns out not to be from one but ten different screens. They are littered across the small room, several hugging either wall and an extra two resting on top of a desk. Several are taken over by static, the white and gray dancing together. Where there would normally be the telltale sign of angry hissing there is only silence. The room is void of sound aside from the slight squeak of old rollie wheels.

Royal gently pulls the chair from its abandoned spot in the center and, after glancing both ways, gives himself the luxury of sitting down. The sharp ache is instant. From his feet to his knees, butt, back, and arms, the pain travels from top to bottom like a set of kinetic balls. The first hit is to his ass, the second he sits down, the second to his arms from lowering himself, then up to his throbbing head and back down until each individual toe is hurting. The exhaustion and the fall catch up with him at once, joining forces to pummel his body simultaneously.

Royal blows a strained breath through his teeth. He clenches his fists tight and swings them down to his sides. Finding the best source of diversion he's allowed, the boy's eyes raise to the screens. The multiple hallways and cells he'd ignored before are now under the scrutiny of an eye desperate for distraction.

Those in front of him are far from interesting. A bunch of closed doors and guards guarding closed doors. Maybe if he knew the layout they could tell him something. If he was inside this place on purpose, they would show him a clever route. If he was a spy bent on infiltration he could have all the information he wanted at his fingertips. Instead, Royal is struck with mild interest at best, and a creeping sense that if he is found by one of the few roaming guards, that claiming he'd fallen through the ceiling might not be a good enough excuse.

It isn't until Royal relies on the mouse nestled between a picked-apart sandwich and unopened diet coke that he finds something worse.

There aren't words to describe it at first. Seeing a sea of cages, a sea of /people/ contained inside. The first thought he has is that he's wrong. Royal blinks away the images, but they return just as clearly as before. There are so many people. It's overwhelming. The wheels squeak and protest as the chair is scooted closer, Royal's chest pressing against the edge of the desk. His fingers are white-knuckled as he grips the mouse with everything he has. If he had built up any sort of strength, the plastic device would've broken into pieces.

Humans are weak, fragile things.

Royal wants to look away. It's the only thought running through his mind, along with the sentence that passes through his lips. "This can't be real." The words are weak and meaningless because regardless of what he says, it doesn't change the images in front of him. He can not pinch himself hard enough to wake up from reality. It is real, it is in front of him, and it is terrifying.

The images begin to flicker. The faster the scroll wheel moves, the more faces he recognizes. Each one is from Idle. Each person is a friend, a teacher, or a coworker. Except they aren't the same, not in the way that boy expects. His fingers are trembling, his hand falling away from the mouse in fear he might change the latest image, that he might make the slightest adjustment and the pair will disappear before his eyes.

When you expect to see your parents that you loved grow older, it's not like this. You picture them relaxed and enjoying life. Maybe you picture a scrapbook, photos of their wedding when they look younger and happier than you've ever seen them, then with you for your first day of preschool, for your graduation, for your wedding. You expect it to happen slowly, so slowly you don't even realize it. You want them to retire in the house you grew up in. You want them to meet their grandchildren. You want to share all those moments without realizing when their hair turns gray and their eyes aren't good enough to drive anymore. You want to be blissfully ignorant until it's too late. Not like this.

On the monitor are Royal's parents. The pair are sitting together on the floor of a metal cage, wrists bound tight in front of them. His mother's long blonde hair is short now, white and frizzy as it hugs her thin cheekbones. His father is the same. Less bulky than he used to be but with the same salt and pepper hair, the same permanent, distant frown he gets whenever he is deep in thought. At home they didn't even share a bed anymore, not since Royal returned from college, and yet now they are as close as can be, his mother's head pressed against his father's shoulder, the man's hand wrapped around her.

Humans are too fragile. Their minds break as easily as their bodies. A single sentence can consume their waking thoughts for days, corrupt them, twist them, break them.

Royal is crying. Big, fat tears roll down his cheeks. He lets out something between a hiccup and a sob, shoulders shivering from the action. His throat is blocked up, vocal cords stretched so tight they could snap. "Stop." The word is useless, a command directed to a higher power that wouldn't listen even if it could hear him. He chokes out a gasp, desperately heaving in air. His hands go to his head, they hold the sides of it, cradling his skull as his vision blurs. "Please."

The tears sting now, the more he holds them back the harder they fight. It's a useless battle, and one they have the upper hand in, soon spilling down his cheeks in rows. They drip down his chin and onto the desk, slip onto his hands and roll down his arms. Snot bubbles up from his nose and dangles down, the tears dripping down it all the same. He sniffles and snorts, his head throbbing from the sheer amount of snot he tries to swallow. It is thick in his mouth, stopped up at the back of his throat along with his sobs.

"I-" Royal lets out a warble, voice trembling over a mere syllable. His fingers clench at his skin, they dive up into his hair. He yanks at the follicles until it feels they are about to tear. There are no words for something like this, no explanation. The world crumbling down around him from before was a twisted game, but at least then he didn't know he was playing. What was he supposed to do now? Out of time, out of place, out of touch. Stuck in a nightmare of the future that he wasn't able to wake up from.

The desk was slimy and wet, his skin sticking as he placed his arms down and curled them around his head. The slick surface brushed his forehead as fresh tears pooled. The red, puffy cheeks beneath his eyes were shining against the blue light, reflecting it as he sucked in another nose full of snot. Even with his head laying down against the desk and up against his arms, Royal could feel himself trembling. The shake of his legs, the unsteadiness of the chair beneath him. He couldn't will himself to move, yet he couldn't bear to sit still, his heart aching so heavily it felt as if the pain itself would burst through his chest.

Do something, you insolent child. Are you so keen to sit and mope? Wallowing in the what if's instead of taking charge of what can be?

Black tendrils, invisible in the dim blue light of the security room, trace their way up through the boy's skin. Royal stands. His feet wobble beneath him, legs as stable as cooked spaghetti. He doesn't know how he manages to move or why. Wrapping both arms over his chest, the boy stumbles back from the row of monitors. He wipes his eyes and nose on his skin, caking his arm hair in another layer of filth and rubbing some back on his face in the process.

"Okay," Royal pants quietly, the words hoarse and hollow as he struggles forward a few steps. His body still aches. With every step, it sends a jolt of pain from his feet up. He needs a rest, to lay down, possibly forever. Still, he manages to fumble his way out of the room. He's shaking, hand out against the wall for support.

Everything is twisting around him as he walks. The cameras are staring at him as he moves, even though he knows the room is now empty without him. The sound of his footsteps echo back, the only sound aside from his shaky breathing. He can't hear anything over his heavy thudding, his rasps, his heart. There is a large metal door waiting for him as he stumbles back out into the lobby. The open door back out to the gaping hole in the earth greets him. There's nothing back that way except for fresh air and silence, yet even still a part of him tugs in that direction. Maybe he can clamber back out onto the street and try to teleport again, go back the way he came, jump until the general store repairs and Dell and Macy are still chatting away.

Royal rubs away the fresh tears from his eyes, raw skin stinging in protest. No. He can't. He doesn't know how, and even if he could try, his body doesn't have enough energy. Instead, almost against his will, Royal turns to the metal door at the end of the lobby. The handle is screwed on tight. He tries it once, then twice. Not so much as a twitch. His stomach swirls, but there is a feeling, an indescribable knowledge that he has to get to the other side. He has to. He doesn't even want to, hasn't connected what is waiting for him, yet something is pressing him to with every fiber of his being.

Bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Each loud pound echoes out from the door into the empty room. Royal's fist is throbbing. It hurts. The door is too thick, too solid. He tries to pull back, but his fist keeps pounding. Bang, bang, bang. Like rapid fire, the boy throws his fist against the door. When it doesn't work, he starts wailing on it with both at once.

Royal's vision begins to blur again. His cheeks grow warm as fresh tears spring up. He can't seem to stop them, but this time they are purely from pain. The door is too strong, but it's as if his body doesn't know it or doesn't care. He strikes at it until he is sobbing.

Weak. Pitiful. Useless.

Red streaks now coat the door in two rows. Royal slumps to his knees, finally able to stop. He is crying, the action made violent. A small whimper of anguish escapes as he sees the smeared blood on the metal above him. His hands lay in his lap, warm and tingling, almost so painful they are numb. The sides of his fists are raw and bloody, skin broke open in a useless attempt against the door. He can only sob harder as his head bows against it.

I need something stronger. Someone stronger.

I need access to the other side.

|-SKY WONG-|

"It kinda looks like you, uh, blew up a government facility?" Sky puts his hands up in the universal motion for 'surrender' to indicate he's not actually accusing her of anything - hold on. This is a woman who somehow made it past eight different armed guards, a reinforced steel door, and blew up at minimum a tiny keypad and at maximum the entrance to the mine. He puts his hands up a little higher to indicate that she shouldn't blow him up, just in case she's capable of doing so. "Which...no judgment, but that seems super illegal? Not saying I'm blameless here, I've done my fair share of jaywalking, but - "

The strange woman watches him with all the impassive stoicness of a frozen lake before abruptly turning on her heel and striding through the busted door, which: party foul, and still illegal. In his panic, Sky dives towards her, making a grab for her wrist; he barely makes contact, her hand warm and human in contrast to her marble frigidity, before she turns on him with wide-eyed anger so incredulous and fierce he puts his hands up again.

"What are you doing?" She hisses.

"Hey, you're the one who's not supposed to be here!" Sky fumbles with his pockets before digging his wallet free from the depths of his jacket, shaking it open and dangling his ID in her face. Her expression doesn't change as he swings it closed triumphantly and tucks it back into his clothing. "And hey again - you're the one who said it wasn't what it looked like!"

She opens her mouth, then closes it and crosses her arms. "It isn't," she says, so matter-of-factly he can't help but believe her.

He waits, but she just continues to stare him down for a few moments, the static from the computer monitors sending cascading shadows down the stark planes of her face.

And then she turns around again.

"I - can you just hold on a second? I'm not done yet!"

This time when Sky reaches for her shoulder she slaps his hand away, rounding on him with a twist of her heel so startling he stumbles two steps back. "What?!"

"You know, when people say it's not what it looks like they usually follow it up by explaining what it actually is - especially when the 'it' in question is a felony, y'know? The first time you said it, alright, sure, I might've snuck up on you, but the second time - "

"Do you ever stop talking?"

The woman's delivery is so flat Sky can't help but laugh in her face. "S-sorry! Sorry, it's just - no, and also that's exactly what my friends always say."

"I'm not your friend," she says. And right into his most sunny smile, too.

"Wouldn't dream of assuming so." Even so, he can't shake the lingering grin. "And that's why I gotta ask: what are you doing? I don't know much, but I do know the door's not supposed to be like that and you're not supposed to be here like this." If she were, she would've shown him her ID already.

Finally, the woman has a reaction; her eyes dart, for the briefest moment, down away from his own. The motion is so quick and sudden that seeing it happen is like watching gold flash in a pan, a revelation. Huh. So she can be nervous. Sky waits, allowing her time to scrounge up an excuse. Rather magnanimous of him, if he does say so himself.

"...I'm here because I left something of mine down in the tunnels," she finally says. Her expression is as vacant as always, but the jut of her chin as she lifts her gaze to meet his is laced with defiance. Another scarce glimpse of her thoughts; Sky tilts his head, chasing that hint of humanity even as it vanishes into stoniness again. "I was searching for it when I found the broken door." She draws herself up to her full height, the firm set of her mouth tightening as her next words come out with so much gravitas it almost masks the waspishness: "I. did not. blow. it. up."

"...Alright, I believe you." Sky finally breaks their tense quasi-staring contest, rubbing the tension out of his neck as he thinks. "But you still gotta get out of here - you can leave your info with the guards up front and when we find whatever you lost, we'll call you, okay?"

"Not okay," she says firmly, and then turns and makes a beeline directly for the security room.

"Will you stop doing that?!" Sky tries to pull the same quick one-two step he'd managed to cut her off with earlier, but all he manages is to stumble over his own feet as he bursts into the security room on the woman's heels. "Listen, I know 'snitches get stitches' or whatever, but I - "

It takes his mouth a while to catch up to his brain as his eyes adjust to the bright contrast of the monochromatic monitors; for a second he thinks he's just seeing live footage of one of the break rooms. Then he realizes that those are bars, that it's a prison; the grainy footage pans achingly slowly around an entire room of indistinct, vaguely humanoid blobs in what is undeniably a cage.

" - I - I - " Sky stutters like a broken record as he stops short, his eyes darting over the screen. He's not entirely sure what that is, but it sure does look like Slenderman and - alright, so maybe there's a reason that one's in a cage, but who the hell are the rest of them? " - What the fuck is that?!"

"Hm." The woman hums in response to Sky's entirely rhetorical and slightly hysterical question. She's shuffling files and rifling through journals at the table, entirely unperturbed. "Probably the residents of Idle. Didn't you wonder where any of them were?"

"Hey, we were very clearly told the town was abandoned. There was a manual and everything." Sky draws closer to the security screen, reaching toward the controls bolted to the table. They seem intuitive enough; he fiddles with the joystick, though the results are limited. Shoddy government work and also holy fuck there are people trapped in cages. "Okay, yes, in retrospect there was something going on and I should have expected this and why aren't you more freaked out about people in cages?!"

The woman grants him the honor of a single raised eyebrow before turning back to her files. "It's terrible, but there's nothing I can do about it." She breaks away, striding over to the nearest file cabinet and pulling out papers seemingly at random. "As I said, I'm looking for something."

Sky turns away from the active war crimes playing out on camera to squint at the woman as she tosses another fistfull of papers aside. "...What, and you think you dropped it at the bottom of that folder of classified documents?"

"This is the center of whatever operations you're conducting, yes?" The woman's hair is askew, fists crumpling the papers in her hands. She'd look more unhinged if her voice weren't so calm. "I'm looking for a map. A shortcut deeper. A sense of where I am."

She glances down at her hip momentarily, and that's when Sky notices it: a long red thread disappearing into her pocket, stark in the darkness. Shadows and light barely change the color - the thread in the pitch-black security room is nearly the same blinding hue as the thread winding across the floor of the brightly-lit area outside, a ruthless, bloody slash.

His wrist itches.

"What?"

That same cutting voice snaps him out of his reverie; it takes Sky a moment of rapid blinking to realize he's been staring. "What's that?"

"What's - " The woman looks to where Sky is pointing and swings the trailing thread behind her leg with an irritated flick of the wrist. "None of your business. The point is, I'm not leaving until I've found what I'm looking for, so leave me be."

Sky turns to look at the monitors over his shoulder again. The static fizzles as he watches a soldier tap smartly against a civilian's viewing window. Then he looks back at the woman. She's really tearing through those files, skimming and discarding them at a pace he'd find dubious if it weren't so methodically efficient.

"Alright," he hears himself say. "I'll help you look, then."

The woman doesn't even pause. Sky can hear her scoff between the loud rustle of moving paper. "Do you have the layout of these mines conveniently stashed in your pocket?"

"No, but I've got it up here." He taps smartly at the side of his temple. She pauses at his assertion before turning slowly to fix him with a skeptical stare. "I'm dead serious. I've been staring at those maps for so long they're burned into my eyelids. Anything the government's dug deep enough to find, they've charted, and anything they've charted, I know." He schools his face into as serious of an expression he can manage, trying to convey his honesty and dependability through sheer force of will alone. She continues to look unimpressed, which is insulting considering he's the least suspicious person in the room. "Besides, if anyone else finds you, they're not gonna be half as nice. I've got the clearance to talk us both out."

"...You're joking."

"Nope." Sky shakes his head - a little hesitantly, at first, but then more fiercely. The more he does so, the more it feels right. "I'm not. No, this is actually good. I'll help you find whatever you're looking for - what are you looking for, anyway?"

"It's still none of your business." But the woman shuts the file cabinet door. She looks him up and down as she takes a step closer, her critical glance making Sky's spine straighten reflexively the way it does when those high-ranking soldiers pass him in the cafeteria. Whatever she sees, something about him makes her expression shutter like a door. "What's in it for you?"

God, she's so shady. But maybe that's why Sky inexplicably trusts her: because everything in his life has been shady lately. The project he filled out enough paperwork to kill a rainforest for has unperson'd an entire town. The mine he's been federally mandated to work in feels like it'll snap closed around him at any second. And here's this woman, poking around in the center of those mines and entirely unwilling to explain herself. She's the most obviously untrustworthy thing Sky has seen since he came here, but there's one crucial difference.

Of all the suspicious things Sky's seen lately, she's the only one that doesn't make his skin crawl.

As a matter of fact...he hadn't noticed it, but the scant few minutes he's spent talking with her are the only moments he hasn't felt physically, viscerally uncomfortable since he stepped foot in Idle at all.

Sky doubts she'll accept that as an answer, though. He buys himself time to prevaricate with a thoughtful hum. "Well, whatever you're looking for can't be easy to find, or you wouldn't be poking around for maps, right?" He gestures vaguely towards the security screens. "Wherever that prison is, it's not on any of the maps either - well, duh. But there's only so many big gaping blanks, and if we look deep enough, we're bound to stumble on it eventually. You're looking for something, I'm looking for something: we'll cover more ground if we work together, and we'll seem more legit if we're not found alone."

The woman doesn't look convinced. If anything, she looks warrier than ever. For a second, Sky wonders what would happen if he told her he'd turn her in otherwise - but no, that's mean, and an empty threat to boot.

"Let's be real, I'll probably follow you either way," he says sweetly instead.

The woman crosses her arms and glares at him for a second before looking at the wreckage she's left of the security room, blowing the hair out of her eyes with a frustrated sigh as she assesses the damage she's done. She examines him again, her gaze steely enough to cut him to the quick. Sky, not to be outdone, cocks his head to the side with a friendly smile like an inquisitive child, swaying easily back on his heels as he waits for her decision.

"...Fine." She breathes out through her nose, and then pauses indecisively, glancing around as if unsure where to go from here. It's so different from her detached control that it makes Sky smile, entirely involuntary. "...Uh. I'm..." She jerks her head at the door, then takes a step, perhaps wondering whether their new partnership means she should wait for him. "...I'm gonna go?"

"Yeah, alright." Sky hops forward to catch up with her, swinging the door open a little wider and holding it for her to walk through. He bows cheekily when she does so; she gives him a little pause and a hesitant, regal nod. "Hey, hey - since we're working together now, we should get to know each other, right?"

Her uncertainty crystallizes into a glower. "No."

"See? I'm learning new things about you already. You don't like talking about yourself." He smiles as they finally step beyond the threshold of the base back into the musty stasis of the cave. The air's still gritty and smells too sterile, but the woman's presence is still magic even beyond those metallic walls; she keeps the crawling at bay. "C'mon, at least tell me your name, I gotta have something to call you when people find us - "

"Make something up."

" - and trust me, you don't want me to make something up, I'll be really awful about it." Ha! The woman picks a direction at random, beginning her trek down the path back up to the main entrance with her thread tossed out behind her like the wake from a boat. Sky nudges her gently toward a crack that'll take them deeper down instead. "Oh, you're in for it now. What to call you...how about Desiree? You look like a Desiree."

That unimpressed face decidedly does not look like a Desiree. Sky plows on, gleefully ignoring her judgemental stare. "Alright, alright, maybe not. Well, I found you in the mines, so maybe there's something there. Minerva. Minestrone. Cave...something. Octcaveia." Sky allows her a moment of silence to surrender, but she stays strong. "Cavernicus?"

"Please." She gives him a pained look. Clearly, she's already regretting her decision. "If I tell you my name, will you please be quiet?"

Sky mimes zipping his lip before immediately opening his mouth. "I'm Sky, for the record. Sky Wong."

The woman sags, defeated, before breathing out heavily. An exasperated sigh - or maybe an exasperated laugh. She takes the hand he's holding out in a handshake; her hand is still warm. Perhaps she'll thaw yet.

"...My name is Mabel."

|-EDEN DE LOS SANTOS-|

The door to the hold reverberated with another metallic clang.

Eden toggled her gaze between the dozens of security room screens, eyes flitting from one to the next. When she'd first glanced at them, she'd noticed the ones showing footage from around town. Near-empty streets, roads, suburbs, dust drifting lazily across the screens. Then something else had moved. Swiftly, like a monster darting back into shadows. Her gaze had narrowed in on that second group of screens, eyes roving over them quickly. Left, right, the pieces falling into place as quickly as more questions rose to replace them. She'd felt Dominic stiffen next to her at the same time that her heart had fallen like a stone, like two halves of the same equation fitted together.

"What the fuck," he'd whispered.

Fuck, she'd thought back.

Now she continued studying the images before her, turning over every corner of them in her mind, hoping to find a sign, a detail, some movement that would help her figure out what was going on. Every time her thoughts stuck on something, that same metallic clang walloped across them, and she tried to push out the sound of Dominic running full speed at the hold door in his attempts to demolish the place. He'd been going at it for the past few minutes, pushing, kicking, shoving, hacking at it with a chair. To his credit, he'd made a few dents in the door. Penny-sized ones, but dents nonetheless.

She cleared her mind and tried to focus—again. The screens were displaying footage from what seemed like a lab, though the sight took her out with its resemblance to a science fiction set. It would've been so much easier to believe that this was an immersive Halloween experience developed by the town council. It would've explained the glassy cells, the tubes, the chains... The chains attached to walls, attached to people. And most of them seemed like normal people, albeit gaunt, ghostly versions of them. She'd felt nothing but blind rage at first. There was no convention in which caging people up wasn't a blatant human rights violation, but as she continued picking up clues, she'd noticed aberrations on some of the prisoners. Like a merperson's tail on one, fur growing in patches on another.

She glanced at Dominic, who had switched back into his earlier attempts to pick the lock, fiddling thoughtfully with the keyhole with a piece of wire he'd found on the floor.

"Dominic," she said.

"Give me a hand or something," he grunted.

"Help me figure out what's going on."

Dominic sighed. "Obviously they're being experimented on for some sick fucking reason."

"I know that," she said irritably. Step by step, she told herself. All she had to do was trace the mindmap from node to node and she could figure it all out. Idle was mostly deserted. Idle had a mine. Idle apparently had people locked in its fucking basement. Her hands shook. She crossed her arms and wrapped her fingers around them, trying to stop the tremors, then took a few deep breaths in hopes that her voice would be calm when it left her throat. "But let's think this through. Right? Either they're doing research on the abnormalities, or their research is about imbuing people with some kind of genetic code that creates abnormalities. If we're circling back to what we know about—"

"Eden!" Dominic snapped, dropping the crooked wire with a plink. "It literally does not matter. There are people in fucking cages. They put people in cages all the time it's literally on the news. This is exactly what it looks like. And you know it." His eyes flashed with what looked like malice, but he averted his gaze before she could get a good look. He stared at the lock with a glare that could've incinerated its innards and left the steel trickling onto the ground, but his voice was quiet when he next spoke. "Or maybe you don't. Because you forgot."

He could've set her on fire with flames from the darkest pits of hell, but all she felt was cold. A sub-zero numbness that froze her bones so quickly they began to crumble. "I just wanted to find the right path through that door," she said quietly.

"And of course mine isn't the right one," he said, voice low. The air between them was still, silent. "I'll take your advice," he muttered, "and find another." Then he got up and walked out through the door to the security room.

Eden listened to the sound of his receding footsteps, then lowered herself into a chair. She leaned back and angled her face towards the cavernous ceiling where the sounds bounced from wall to wall. She closed her eyes and tried to find him in the noise, but he wasn't there. There was no sign of him in the gulf between them. He had gone someplace she could no longer reach him with no indication that he'd ever been there.

It was getting too loud, that silence.

She reached for her phone.

The familiar shape of Petr's name next to the pear emoji, forever at the top of her chat list, was like home to her now. There'd been days at Smith she didn't know she could've survived without knowing he'd been rooting for her. Well, she would've—she always found a way—but he was like a hand squeeze before a boxing match, and that was more than enough. The ache of missing him curled tightly against her breastbone.

Hope your day's been going better than mine, she texted. Got into another row with Dominic. Tough times ahead :)

His response came within seconds. Still flirting too much to focus?

She sighed. Hesitated. It was too early to worry him. Ethical concerns about the study. Technically true. He thinks we should pivot. He might be right. Still thinking about it.

I can talk it through with you if you need, he offered, but you should talk to him. He wants you to listen. You want to listen. It will work that way.

Funny of him to leave if he wanted me to listen.

Maybe he needs time to be angry, he said. Let him breathe. You'll figure it out, like always. You care about each other.

She wanted him to be right. She wanted so badly for him to be right. I'll fix it, she said.

You will, he said. And then in a second text, :^)

Eden smiled back at it. I'll fix it, she told herself. I'll fix it. I'll fix it.

|-DOMINIC NARVAEZ-|

Dominic set his phone down on one of the empty tables before him and then rolled up his sleeves—partly to feel cooler than he actually was but also because the fabric was getting in his way as he reached across to pluck at the keyboard. The monitors in the security room were off, and clicking the mouse hadn't done anything. The screen was showing black, and the dim lighting showed parts of his reflection on the empty screens. To say the least, Dominic looked like shit.

His shirt was dusty from sandy desert residue from outside, and his eyes looked droopy from lack of sleep. But then, in the middle of the night, inside a military-occupied mine he was not supposed to be in, what more could he expect? Even America's sexiest man alive couldn't look good after a long day like this one. And really, it'd been a long day.

He sighed.

From just outside the entrance to the security room, he could hear Eden was still on the phone. It was hard not to when the only other sound was the click-click-clicking of the keyboard he was messing with. She spoke Spanglish and used her lovey-dovey tone that was sticky-sweet like the artificial honey you put in tea. It made him nauseous but, more than that, annoyed. She was distracted, and he didn't want her to be—not at a time like this. Some soldier could come poking in the room any time and see two delinquents casually snooping around their base. But did she pay any mind to that? No. Because, of course, she didn't. She was Eden.

To make himself feel better about the fact that she was on a different planet, he turned his attention to the backside of the monitors. There had to be an 'on' button or a switch somewhere, and if he could only find a way to boot up their security, he'd have an answer or two. Which fundamentally was better than breaking in and leaving with no answers or hints at all when something was definitely happening around here. A military base randomly out in the middle of nowhere. A mysterious door that was unlocked. A ghost town that used to have much more people if the abandoned houses were anything to go by.

Something was off, and he needed to know what. It was almost exciting. At least, if he thought about it in terms of being like an adventure scene from his favorite movie back when he was a kid.

Eden as the brilliant Dr. Ellen Taylor and himself as the talented big-game hunter Frank Walsh from the movie Primal. A film from 2019 that, despite performing atrociously at the box office, had become his favorite for no other reason besides it had been filmed in Puerto Rico, just a few blocks from his house. Which, according to his little kid logic at the time, was enough to be considered a "good" movie.

In retrospect, a terrible movie. But it was still fun to fantasize, and anything was better than waiting tables or conducting another goddamn survey.

The opening scene would feature the mine, and then close-up camera two would cut to the hero and heroine outside the mine. Dominic Narvaez and Eden De Los Santos, college students who heroically broke into a mine to do...something. Somewhere along the line, there would be some exposition, stuff about somebody's traumatic backstory, and then it would cut to the next scene inside the base. Close up camera three where the hero—

"What are you doing?"

Fantasy over. A quick glance over his shoulder and there were black curls in his face. Eden was finally off the phone and looking at him with eyes wide enough she looked ike a deer in headlights.

Another sigh. He turned his attention back to the monitors. Maybe they were unplugged or something.

"What's that? I can't hear you," he said.

"Dominic."

He was checking around the desk. "I can't hear you right now."

"This is ridiculous."

"I'm just ignoring you the same way you ignored me."

"If you're ignoring me then why are you still responding?"

Shit. That's a good point. He paused before speaking again. "Dios mío, the winds in these mines sure are loud. It's almost like I can hear a voice."

He tried to hide the smile creeping on his face. He'd wanted to laugh at his own joke but that would've been lame so he held it in and kept doing what he was doing. In the next moment, an overwhelming scent of freshly cut flowers hit his nose and Eden was laying her head on his shoulder, hugging him from behind. She felt warm and he couldn't help but to relax a bit.

"I'm sorry you're an attention whore."

"The one and only," said Dominic. She let go of him and he straighted up. "Anyway, I'm looking for the switch to these monitors. Help me out?"

"Did you try the power button?'

"I couldn't find one."

Suddenly Eden leaned across the desk and pressed the small power button on the first monitor in front of her. Heat rushed to Dominic's face and he was flushed red with embarrassment. But before he had time to dwell on it, the screens came alive with almost a blinding brightness. They lit up the almost whole room in a bluish tint. As his eyes adjusted to the new light, different figures appeared across the screens. People.

For a moment they looked like regular people sitting in what looked to be a type of military confinment, but as he leaned closer to the screens, he noticed something unusual. Some of them looked inhuman. One prisoner in particular was pale, and blonde. Ugly. She paced around the small room with blisters in her skin and black laceration marks. Her skin was rotting. Dominic flinched and took a step backward. It looked painful. Inhumane.

More than that, she was pacing around her cell with a certain anxiety that was uncomfortable to watch. The woman was like a scared animal that desperately wanted out. She looked like she was suffering. She had to be. All of them were.

Before Dominic could find the words to say anything, Eden spoke up first.

"We should leave."

His eyes met her. "What?"

"I don't think we should be seeing this."

"They're suffering, and you wanna leave?"

He couldn't believe what he was hearing. They didn't find gold, they didn't find a secret nuclear weapon, they stumbled across tortured prisoners. Hell, they'd just found some element to some type of government project that involved human suffering, and she wanted to leave now? Pretend they didn't see people who needed help? That was crazy people talk.

"We're not even supposed to be in here, we don't even know where they are—"

"Then we find the cells."

"Dominic," she said in her I-definitely-know-better-than-you tone. Better yet, her condescending tone. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes on the spot. "They could be sick, they could be injected with something that could create the next pandemic. They could be terrorists tortured for information. We don't have enough information and I don't think we should—"

"I'll tell you what," he started, "you can study the theory of doing nothing since you're so good at that, while I go do the heavy lifting."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Figure it out."

He didn't know how to pick a lock, but he was sure he could figure it out.

|-THE ROC-|

It's been a long time since I last went back to Sidra.

I used to visit when I was younger. Sia would sneak me onto her starship, snapping the velcro beneath my chin and patting the helmet that hid my curls. The Cradle's crew must've known who I was, who Father was, but they'd pick me up and twirl me in the air, and ask, "is the lil' bird flying with us today?" Even now, I wonder if they ever knew my name. I'd been a little bird to them at first, and later, even when others called me "The Roc," they'd play-punch me in the shoulder or back and call me the same as they'd always done.

Back then, I didn't know why Sia and her crew flew to Sidra so often. I think some part of me thought it was for me—a special rendezvous planned for her—their—little brother. It wasn't until years after the first time, when I hid in the cargo deck and snuck a peek into a crate did I discover the dark side of the family business. The blasters were of a similar make to the ones from back before Father picked me up—I think that was when I had my first fight with Father.

It was Father who sent me after Kane, sent me bumbling about in Idle. If Father knew exactly what happened in Idle, what I did in Idle, perhaps he'd hate me even more. But it's been a long time since I stopped caring about what Father felt.

When I caught sight of the security cameras in that maze of metal deep down under Idle, I wasn't as bothered as I should've been, as I wish I had been. A tail of scales, a woman in garb ancient anywhere in the Intergalactic Alliance—it wasn't new to me. Even the iron bars that fizzled and sparked around them couldn't faze me. There were far too many ships I'd boarded, and back then, I felt like I'd seen anything and everything. Once, I'd seen something similar on Kian's ship when he docked back home in Moathea 0X4. He hadn't seen me, but it wasn't like I'd gone to the docks to give my older brother a welcome-back hug.

I wasn't even thinking about Kane. It didn't even occur to me that he could've been in one of those metal cubes, wrists bloodied and eyes dimmed—perfect for negotiating an extra shell sum to have him board my ship.

When I looked into those tiny, bordered rectangles that made the world seem so small, I was drawn to a guy in some shadowed corner whose head was raised, eyes open and lips moving in what appeared to be a murmur. I couldn't hear anything through those boxes (there was only some low hum that reminded me of my ship's vents), but the way his fingers drummed against his leg stood out to me through the grainy screen. He reminded me of Leon, The Cradle's technician.

Leon was Jibbers to almost everyone, but he was Leon to me. He used to tell me stories about Sidra, about his little sister that he rode The Cradle to find, and about the little planet at the edge of the Olympia Solar System he planned to take her to. It was a planet with no government, no rules, no anything. It was a place, he liked to say, that would never feel like a prison.

Looking back, there really wasn't much of a resemblance between that Earther in the cell below Idle and Leon. Maybe it was just the way his lips continued to move or how his fingers tightly grasped something unidentifiable in the same way Leon used to hold his little sister's favorite plastic rocket model. Maybe it was the way the gleam in his eyes matched the one on my bangle.

I hadn't completely forgotten about Kane. His cuffs were tucked in my pack, and there was a seat on my ship with his name on it. It wasn't until I met Rumi later that the fire blazed through my veins again. I just needed that spark of competition.

But seeing that man through that rectangle made me determine a detour—the Hold. I didn't know what I was going to do when I got there, and at the time, I didn't really care. I just knew I wanted to get closer.

I hadn't been a little bird in a long time. Leon, Sia, and the rest of the crew—well, it wasn't like I could hop on The Cradle to Sidra whenever I wanted anymore. Sia stopped sending me messages years back, and I'd heard The Cradle stopped running soon after.

It wasn't until years later that I realized Father had long known about my adventures aboard The Cradle.

|-RUMI-|

The solidity of the rock walls ground her into her current, rather annoying, situation. At times such as these, Rumi deeply regretted being bound to the bounty code; she could've easily dispatched this one to the land of the dead and gotten an Earthen gun as well.

But no. Collected alive.

Blowing off some dust from her sleeve, she slid her goggles up, wiping away the sweat on her temple. Watching her tracker carefully without the tint from her goggles, she noted the bounty's progress further down away from her. Please, as if. She had a 100% success rate.

Picking up a few rocks and tucking them into a pocket of her black cargo pants, she scanned the cavern again. Rumi needed a new path of action: something different, taking into consideration the new lethality of her bounty (damn his gun). Spotting a doorway across the dark space with faint, artificial light coming through, she zeroed in on it. It must have some more Earthen tech. She carefully picked her way to the entrance, her blaster and stolen knife at the ready, before slinking in.

Nothing. No one.

A trickle of relief flowed through her body, but stopped in a sudden, cold splash of disgust.

The light that she had seen was coming from Earthen screens. Screen upon screen, displayed on the rock wall in an orderly fashion, some on the fritz and others functioning perfectly. No matter the low-tech pixelation: she could see clearly enough, so much so that she wished she couldn't.

There were tens of cramped cages filled with absolutely miserable Earthens. The skeletal figures in their grey, tattered clothing barely moved, open ration packets littering the cages' dark floors. Her arms dropped to her sides, harrowing memories creeping back out from the dark recesses of her mind. Memories that she thought had been locked and kept away for good.

She hadn't seen such terrible conditions since her time in the mining systems of the Outskirts. It was as if she could sense the dreadful feeling, of not living, of losing all sense of fragile hope, roiling off of these Earthens as it had back then.

A sudden, brief movement in a screen on the top right caught her eye, and her swirling, consuming thoughts disappeared in a flash.

Found you.

Rumi watched with pleasant surprise as her bounty scrutinised a metal door directly in the camera's line of sight. Noting the location, she collected her wits to finally hunt down her bounty and leave this godforsaken place (and collect her whopping 90 grand payment) when she noticed a large switch on the console below the screens.

Lock. Unlock.

She guessed that it was for the cages. For the wretched Earthens. She paused in her excitement, in her hurry.

Perhaps.

Her hand, and as an extension, the knife, slowly moved towards the switch. Normally, Rumi couldn't care less what happened to outsiders during her hunts, but this: she felt it twinging on her heart strings. With a paltry excuse for morals, she knew she would regret this moment for eternity if she just walked away. Like she already did. Like she had already done, once, before.

But would it be her fault? No one would ever know; if they did, she would make sure they didn't live to tell it.

"I wouldn't do that. They aren't what you think."

Rumi whirled, cursing her brief foray into the depths of her mind, her blaster's safety off in a flash and the knife in a defensive position. It was the guy from above, awkwardly leaning against the doorframe in a poor display of confidence. She noted triumphantly that the laser links still held his arms in the uncomfortable position she had wrestled them into. She probably should've tied his legs up too; that was a small mistake on her part.

"Now why should I listen to you, when you were going to shank me?" Rumi questioned with a grin, the light from her blaster beaming right into his face; the light reflected off his square-rimmed glasses. Rumi began to recognize him; she had seen him frequent a few diners in Kiote's territory. The bright streak of red in his otherwise black hair gave him away.

"You're kidding, right?" Red-hair pushed off of the frame to stand straight.

"Why would I be kidding? What's your name, kid?"

The guy pointed at his tracker with some difficulty due to the laser links, which was blinking on Rumi's belt.

"Right, I know what you are. Anyone could guess that. But not who. Answer my question."

"There are more important things right now, Rumi."

"My name isn't Rumi. I'm...the Roc." Rumi had flinched, a miniscule flinch, at her name, then began advancing on him. Blast it. Blast him. How did he know?

The boy held up his hands in the face of her blaster, placating, pleading, proposing. Rumi stalked to him with a glare, placing the tip of the blaster on his forehead.

He gulped.

However, just one tiny thing was wrong: Rumi hadn't anticipated his height. He was slightly, only slightly, taller than her. She considered stepping back to give herself more of an upper ground, but ultimately decided against it. Backing down would put a small dent in the Roc's reputation.

"How about I help you handle this hunt? It doesn't seem like you're very good underground. Besides, I'm trusting you with my life right now." His Adam's apple bobbed, a bead of sweat forming on his temple. She smirked, noting his discomfort.

"I don't need your help, Red-streak-hair-boy. Besides, I'm guessing this is your first hunt?" Rumi firmly believed that an experienced bounty hunter wouldn't use a knife. Close combat was always better avoided.

"That doesn't matter. I've been scouting this place for years. I know what they are. And they aren't something you've dealt with before, I know for sure."

"Why would you say that? Are you my stalker?" Rumi snorted, suspicion still swirling in her mind.

"These things: they aren't Earthens, they're monsters. I've seen what they did, and I know what they will do. Will you untie these? I have to show you something. And my name's Spear, not Red-hair-whatever-you-just-called-me." Spear began babbling once he felt his knife press into his side.

Rumi twisted it a little against his grey coat for fun.

"Sorry, sorry, I promise you can trust me. I'll let you take the whole bounty for this hunt. I don't need the prize. I think you know me, I can just take from my parents. Just let me help you." Spear's voice began climbing in pitch, making Rumi want to laugh; she barely managed to hold it in.

Nodding with satisfaction at his offer, she stepped back, kicking him down onto his knees and throwing some of her newer laser links onto his ankles. She didn't trust him at all: that would be a completely rookie mistake.

"What will you show me? And why would you even help me?" Rumi nudged him with her boot so that she could keep an eye on the cavern, him, and the screens.

He nodded towards the console.

"It's all here. What these monsters did. And what they will do if you release them. So don't."

Rumi stood in silence, blinking.

"Such a dramatic line, Spear. Honestly, I'd rather that you didn't tell me what to do, especially considering who's tied up and who's not." Rumi tauntingly reached for the switch, keeping Spear still with her blaster aimed at his red-streaked head. He made to stand up, his eyes widening with panic, but Rumi forced him back down.

"I never said you could stand up. Stay." She pressed the blaster into his head, enjoying toying with the anxious kid, when suddenly, she was thrown to the ground. A deafening explosion resounded within the rocky walls and the cavern itself seemed to stir, metal screeches filling the air as the stairs and scaffolding began shifting.

Earth didn't seem to like Earthens messing around with it.

Rumi ducked from a sudden shower of pebbles, crouching behind the door frame as the walls of the cavern seemed to groan. In her fear of being crushed and forgotten in the depths of the earth, which frankly scared her more than she would ever admit, she forgot to pay attention to the slimy little git: the boy suddenly crashed into her from behind, even with his arms and legs still bound. She cried out, reaching for the knife that had skittered away as she tried to break her fall, when her hand was unceremoniously crushed under his boot. A really heavy combat boot. Needless to say, Rumi didn't like that very much.

"Blast it! Get off, what are you doing! Are you sitting on me?!" Rage filled her, its dark energy coursing through her veins as she shot at his boot. She probably shouldn't have. The laser bounced off, hitting the wall just above her head. Pebbles skittered down, serving only to make her panic more.

"You should've listened! That explosion, something bad is happening," Spear grunted as he struggled to grasp the knife with his bound hands, avoiding Rumi's murderous gaze as she twisted beneath him.

She manoeuvred her free hand to her pants pocket, yanking out one of the stones she had picked up earlier and ignoring the stunner in her belt (if she shocked him, she might knock herself out too). Turning, she squirmed so that she was within reach of his head, which was bent. With a deep breath, she swung her arm, using the momentum to smash the rock against his head while he focused on grasping his knife. She did all of this in under three seconds (Her goggles kept track for her. Quite impressive, no?).

Spear promptly crumpled at her three-second attack. Unfortunately, while he was still sitting on her.

Wriggling out from beneath him, she gingerly studied her hand, which was beginning to bruise. Glaring at the unconscious kid, she pulled out a cold pack from her belt, snapping it so that it began to freeze. Binding it to her hand, Rumi easily slipped the knife out of Spear's limp fingers. She contemplated carving an X into his hand as revenge, but she stopped herself. Pettiness is a temptation best avoided.

Small rocks continued to skitter down in the aftershocks of the explosion as Rumi glanced at the few screens that still displayed the inner depths of the caves. She did a double take. Several of the cages had been opened, and the Earthens that had been trapped in there were gone.

Her bounty was nowhere to be seen.

Anger still swirled in her as she stalked over to the stirring boy, blood oozing from the wound on the back of his head. She kicked his side.

"You absolute bastard! Of course something bad happened! I knew you couldn't be trusted," Rumi took out the knife again, sticking it under his chin. She would return to the issue of the missing bounty in a little bit. He blearily opened his eyes, his glasses crooked.

"Huh..."

"Don't you 'huh' me. You sneaky son-of-a-gun. You astronomical git. You..." Rumi trailed off as she heard the sound of footsteps echoing throughout the cavern. Gulping, she jumped behind the door frame, Spear's warnings coming up unbidden in her head. Blast that stupid boy. But honestly, how bad could these poor Earthens be?

Double checking that the safety was off, she tucked away the knife and aimed her blaster; luckily, it was her left hand that was hurt, and she could aim quite well with her right.

The sudden silence following the footsteps seemed to stretch out into a thousand and one years, suspense wracking her nerves and shortening her breaths. She was already slightly addled with pain, and now this haunted-house-type-drama was not doing her any favours.

Spear was still on the ground, dazed. His eyes looked up at her, then out into the cavern. He jerked back. Rumi sneaked a peek around the door, just in time to see a gas canister thrown into the middle of the cavern, a green, sinister gas filling the dusty air.

"What? Oh seriously, why can't anything be fairly normal for once," Rumi muttered as she tugged down her goggles over her mask. As she made to close the door, a rapid shuffle in the dark of the cavern towards their direction startled her, the gas masking the figure's movements. Just as Rumi was about to tug the metal door shut, which took a while considering its size, the person burst in, gasping for breath and holding a gun and a bag.

Wait.

A gun?

How kind. Her bounty had come right to her.

|-NEIL TANNENBAUM-|

———— i dont knowwwwwww

|-GREY REDMOND REED-|

Zonaco was the finest thing to come to Idle's side of Arizona—all of Arizona, in fact. There was nothing to gain but power when striking black gold as the Vanderwilt family had. Hailing from the area of Europe everyone thinks they know, the Vanderwilts operated as the other oil corporations had. Then they conquered the market and, it seemed, by the time they did it the politicians no longer cared about trust-busting. So the Vanderwilts were the sole source of oil from the mighty Grand Canyon, Copper, and Valentine state. God enriches, Arizonans say, and he sure did for the Vanderwilts. Can't find a barrel of that black stuff that doesn't have a V stamped on the rim.

Now, having all that power comes with many people knowing you, or thinking they do. And lots of people talked about them: a new breed of American dreams. The men from the Eastern Seaboard said "they're the new Rockefellers" but only to each other because the men from Arizona seemed to blankly nod, grunt, and nothing more. They knew the truth, and in their bars, they seemed to hate how the Yankee-blooded workers always sought a comparison. It seemed like once a week that the local mixologist heard "the thing about those Vanderwilts, no one knows what they really do."

That is, except for the fact that the Vanderwilts used to boast about their thousand-acre oil leases with the government. Then that kind of energy talk moved out of fashion and so they had to hold their tongue. If no one knows you own the land no one speaks to you about the land, and the land out in that kind of Arizona has a lot of questions. So they remained silent. There were no more talks about their leases unless behind closed doors until they began bankrolling scientists.

That era began with a press conference. "My fellow Americans," current Chief Executive Officer Ramses Vanderwilt started. Ramses was from the new generation of Vanderwilts that was not yet conceived when his grandfather Herod Vanderwilt found that first miraculous pocket of oil. After that first phrase, there was a soft grunt from the miners standing behind Ramses, noting the use of Americans and not Arizonans. He paid no attention, as his big-name degree had taught him to do. So Ramses continued. "With so much prosperity, there is an obligation to education. And Zonaco is proud to be a leading figure in that age-old American belief." He paused before continuing, "which is why Zonaco is proud to inaugurate their first class of grants to support the geological study of the American Southwest."

He was met with applause, of course, and thirty years passed and people asked even fewer questions because everyone had someone they knew that received a little push from a Zonaco study. The company had much more money than it knew what to do with the oil that never seemed to exhaust itself. So Idle's area of Arizona saw lots of bright minds coming their way but never staying. And that's how Grey got there.

Now Grey knew from his time working in the first few years of his degree that no company was perfect and Zonaco was no exception, especially when it worked with the government. But they paid well and that was enough for him. He made more money than the rest of his cohort and didn't have any mouths to feed but himself so he also felt he lived the best. But that level of comfort also made him less willing to comment. He Was to get a degree and leave. He was not an activist and he was not a leader. He was a scientist.

So the leaking oil from the corner was not a concern to Grey at all. Nor was the security absence. None of this was his responsibility so there was no need to worry. He took a seat in the security chair and took a sip out of his water bottle strapped through his belt loop. He had gotten bad rest the previous night earlier so he welcomed the short pause in what was otherwise another day of data crunching.

But no one came. Grey was unable to tell how long it was because the security office lacked an analog clock because the government didn't like people knowing how long they spent in that cave. Unawareness was key, something powerful. But the lack of every-second tick affirmed the silence that enveloped the facility. There was still the slight buzz of machinery deeper into the cave, no sound that bore a nearby presence.

Eventually growing stiff, Grey stood up and stretched. While he starkly avoided responsibilities that were not his, he was still curious as most scientists are. So he exited the room and walked around the facility. There was an air that government work wore in that mine, some of the flattest and least imaginative people Grey knew. The miners, at least, were curious about tools and supplies. But the government workers—the guards, engineers, and personnel—are always presented as blank versions of a person. Whether that was from training or something else was unknown to Grey, but their seeming incapacity to go beyond an idle state drove some level of motivation towards crossing the hallway and checking the handles of any of the other rooms.

Much like how Zonaco bragged about their acres, there were still advertisements of a time when the government promoted their work in facilities like this. A smiling pair—a man and woman—seemingly endorsing the state-of-the-art facilities and helping them understand the region by working in any capacity. It seemed once the government found enough personnel to fill enough vacancies they never updated the posters. And in a region that seldom saw mass explosions of population and even decayed, decayed like one of those perfect case studies in a lecture hall, as the fateful region of Arizona had, there was nothing to replace the posters. So they bleached and ink grew volatile and seemed to warp. The facilities saw a fate just like the posters. They were now old, a time capsule of what was once a timeless frontier of tech.

The doors opened without issue. The ones he checked were unlocked for the side rooms along the same hallway. Most were boring and confirmed Grey's suspicions. There were break rooms with carpet and motor rooms that had sharp aromas of mechanical fluids. There were file rooms but those didn't interest him that much because he knew they were just endless files of meeting notes.

But there was one room, tucked deep in the hallway, that piqued his interest. It was not the government. Plastered on the front was the Zonaco logo, fresh and vivid in color. And like the other doors, it was unlocked and so Grey opened it.

Inside were rows of filing cabinets. It was not unlike the rooms he saw previously, those rooms of endless and ageless government documents. While all the lights were off in the room and the flick of a switch resulted in persevering darkness, Grey still had his flashlight. The beam was accompanied by the dim glow of the seemingly eternal emergency lights of the government base.

He knew the room was actively used because the air was cool, that temperature to prevent decay or mildew. But there was also a calendar on the door, one of that year with the days getting crossed out as they elapsed. That, too, confirmed the constant use of the room.

These features brought Grey to the contents of the filing cabinets themselves. They were labeled at first with indecipherable serial numbers before coming upon a string of initials: A.P.C., Q.N.P., A.E.S., and more and more. The handwriting changed at some and continued again before getting replaced by the letters of a different strand. He continued scanning the words until he arrived at the last one labeled. There were several empty containers to the sides but the last one bore three letters G.R.R.

Having reached his own cabinet, he grew apprehensive. The cabinet—like all other things—was open. He drew out the first one. It was heavy, stuffed with paper chronicled by dates. He opened the one below it. It was exactly like the first, full of paper. The reams were seemingly separated chronologically. But the first date marked the first week of October, four years in the past—the time he began his Ph.D.

Grey pressed his finger down on the file marker and extracted one of the pieces of paper. It bore a specific date in October and on it a series of data measurements that were collected that day. He continued moving. All the pieces of paper were like that, string on string of numbers and codes and units. On some of the papers, there were annotations on the markings and calculations. Some were stamped and others were full of coffee rings or smudges. But they were his data, indisputably.

His hands glided across the top. He moved across days, months, and even years, scanning over all the hours that made up his research. And he reached that day's date and there was paper and then saw the paper for the days, months, years beyond. There was still paper, lots of it. He dipped his finger down again, pulling out a day in May of the following year. It, too, had a series of measurements that he would need for his research. He worked backward, he found the data from the day before. It matched. And then to that day, with data filled in for work he had not completed yet. On the top, above the printed data, was a statement: Please replace with a documented sheet after confirming planting in G.R.R.'s laptop.

Grey placed his hand on the handle of the bottom drawer. He opened it and grabbed the piece of paper for the last date. It was two years in the future. It was marked by a folder. Lifting it revealed messy handwriting on the front. Concise summary of G.R.R. research data, assuming mental viability. Request submission to Nature Geoscience. Mark for R. Vanderwilt to email Publishers about confirmation.

The note continued. Grey removed the envelope, returned to grab the pages for the next few days, and walked into the hallway. He walked back to the office where he was to wait for the arrival of a security guard for the power to resume. And when he returned and put the raw data, regardless of what it was, into the analytic program it would feed him exactly what was on the sheets in his hand. It was all preprogrammed, it seemed. All of it.

From the door, he first entered through echoes of a new hum. It was higher in pitch than the rumbling and was followed by the rotating sound of a motor that lagged in starting a few seconds afterward. Inside his room, a fan began. Then the screen grew into static before the scattering of color settled into a scene.

It was Idle, that Grey knew. The first bit showed a Zonaco building with Ramses Vanderwilt standing outside and beginning a speech. "My fellow Americans," he began. Grey knew it was him, but when his hair still had that rich oil black color only youth provides. The last time Grey had seen him, it was approaching silver. But the speech ended, likely on a tape that was loaded with two tapes.

And soon enough the second one began. It also focused on Idle, but from an aerial view like that from the point of a helicopter. As it veered closer to the rooftops the perspective shifted to that from a soldier's chest. A soldier, in their unit, made their approach home and pushed the door down. Others rushed in to drag a family out. The home was decorated with new-age spirituality and recycled materials. An old woman was lifted from a chair, offering an attempt at resistance. The perspective shifted again, and again, and again. People were displaced from their homes and rounded up in a central location that no longer existed from Grey's own trips around the town.

Grey looked down. He flipped through the packet and free sheets in the folder. The point of his finger grazed the corner of all of them. He was much more focused on the secrets hidden in that collection of documents, whatever it meant for him, and all the time he had spent beneath the surface. Him, working under the pretense that whatever he was doing was constructive, something new.

When he peered up again the culling of people was getting loaded into cages. Grey gazed, mostly out of interest for a history unknown to him. But, frankly, it didn't matter to him. That was years before he was born, and protests would've happened or didn't happen. And that was that.

His attention was tethered and lured to the material that sat in his lap. He stared at the handwriting, thinking about whether it was familiar or not. And he looked up again. The camera scanned across the front of the cages. Grey looked away again before confirming something marked on the front panel of the cages. There was a V, pressed into the panel, and that ever-familiar circle of the Zonaco logo on the other side.

|-BENTLEY MORELET-|

Oh no! It seems a crocodile ate this entry.