"But why infiltrate us?" Holtz asked. "Why appear as a councilor?"
Elara looked pale. "Because we represent the city that failed him. He wants us to suffer the way he did."
Kael leaned forward. "Or worse—he wants us to understand."
Freyer nodded slowly. "That's why he didn't kill us. Not yet. He wants to see if we'll see it. What he sees. He's testing us."
Tobias let out a bitter laugh. "And if we fail?"
The lights dimmed slightly.
They all went still.
On the main screen, the image shifted. Not by command—but by intrusion. A still photo appeared, grainy but unmistakable: the Harrington boy, Lukas, in a school hallway. Smiling.
The next image showed the ruins of the BangBangs' house—reduced to ash.
The third: A frame of the council conference room… from inside the room.
"No one took that photo," Kael said slowly. "At least… none of us."
The final image flickered onto the screen: a close-up of Milburn's—Michael's—face. The illusion breaking, the wires showing beneath his jaw, the faint light bleeding from his pupils.
Then black.
Silence again.
Reddick exhaled shakily. "We need to find the survivors."
Bishop nodded. "They've faced him. They know more than we do."
"We don't know where they went," Elara reminded. "They fled, and there are no traces."
"Then we track them down," Kael said firmly. "If this thing spreads—we're the first to go. And the only way out of this might lie with the ones who lived through it."
Bishop nodded. "We'll prepare a search unit. Quietly. Off-grid."
"And the shop?" Holtz asked.
They all stared at the screens. The feed had returned to live footage of Gallagher Street. The shop sat there—unchanged, untouched. Waiting.
"We leave it alone," Elara said. "Until we understand what we're dealing with."
As the room settled back into silence, somewhere in the depths of the building, a low mechanical click echoed through the vents.
The air outside was bitter, thick with cold and the iron scent of ruined soil. The search team had set out just after dawn, weaving through what remained of Gallagher Street. Six black vans moved like ghosts through the fog, their tires crunching ice and ash. Officer Reddick rode in the lead vehicle, silent, his thoughts haunted by the whispers that clung to the corners of the council's last meeting.
They had formed a team—himself, Officer Ezra, Tobias Glenn, and Dr. Lennox—along with a handful of specialized officers. Their goal: track the survivors. Find Missy, Kevin, Dina, and Natasha. Understand what happened. And if Michael Harrington truly walked again, to confront whatever remained of him.
But their leads were thin. The streets were empty, the city hushed as though it feared to wake something older than sound. No footprints, no signs of entry or exit from any of the scattered safehouses. Every address they checked was abandoned, doors wide open, walls pulsing faintly with that same static hum that came from the shop.
"They're not here," Dr. Lennox said, her voice muffled under a thick scarf. "Either they're gone... or they're hiding somewhere deeper. Somewhere we can't see."
"I hate this," Ezra muttered. "Every street's the same. Quiet. Wrong."
Then the radio crackled.
"Movement," a voice snapped. "South road, alley behind the old grain refinery. We saw something—looked like a shadow dragging itself."
The vans turned fast, wheels shrieking against the frost-covered road.
They never made it.
It hit them from the side. Not an explosion—worse.
A shape. A blur of memory and metal.
Something with the smell of burnt cloth and engine oil. It slammed into the third van at full speed, knocking it sideways into the trees. The others swerved, screamed, and shattered into the frozen pines like dominoes. Steel twisted. Bones snapped. Glass turned to rain.
When Reddick came to, everything was still.
He gasped, blood in his mouth. The van's roof was crushed beside him. Smoke hissed from the engine. Beside him, Lennox groaned, alive but dazed. In the seat behind her, someone wasn't moving.
"Ezra?" Reddick rasped.
No answer
The radios were still crackling when the scream came.
Not from a person. From the signal.
A high, glitching shriek ripped through every headset, every speaker—so loud it bent the air, rattled bones, and made Reddick clutch his ears. Lights inside the vans flickered, dashboards flaring red as static hissed from the speakers in rhythmic bursts, like breath.
He crawled from the wreckage, boots crunching glass. Around him, black shapes lay sprawled across the road. Tobias van had wrapped around a tree. One of the officers had been thrown through the windshield—what was left of him hung in the branches.
He counted bodies. Ezra. Tobias. Three officers.
Dead.
Six were alive. Reddick. Lennox. Four others, shaken, bleeding, wide-eyed with trauma.
But something was wrong.
The forest was too still. Not silent—still—like it had been paused. Frozen between seconds.
Then came the dragging sound. Wet and slow.
Reddick turned.
From the shadows of the wreckage, a figure crawled. Its limbs jerked, spasming like a marionette. A long coat clung to its shoulders, soaked with mud and blood. Its head lifted—revealing an eyeless face, sockets leaking threads of oily light.
"Led…" Lennox whispered. "It's back."
"No," Reddick said. "We killed it. We—"
Led opened its mouth.
But no sound came.
Only a memory.
Flashes hit them all at once—visions of the shop's walls opening like lungs, of Lukas screaming, of the boy-machine crawling from a bathtub of blood. Missy's voice. Natasha's tears. The scent of something ancient and hungry, pressing behind their eyes.
Two of the surviving officers dropped to their knees, screaming.
"Fall back!" Reddick barked, dragging Lennox away. "We're not equipped for this!"
One of the remaining officers—Martens—opened fire. Bullets hit Led's shoulder, bursting static instead of blood. The thing jerked, tilted its head, and charged.
Martens vanished in its blur.
They ran.
The five survivors fled through the trees, chased by something that shouldn't be alive. But in Gallagher, things didn't die right. Not anymore.
Somewhere behind them, Led dragged itself forward.
And somewhere deeper still, Michael Harrington watched through its eyes.
Waiting for them to return to the shop.
To New Life.