Crestwood PD HQ, Marylene area
The bullpen had transformed into something resembling a war room, though the war being fought was one they couldn't touch, couldn't influence, could only watch with increasing helplessness. The space was cluttered with the detritus of a long investigation going nowhere—empty coffee cups forming rings on desks, printouts scattered like fallen leaves, whiteboards covered in diagrams and theories that led to dead ends.
The silence was oppressive, broken only by the soft, relentless hiss of the Vtube livestream emanating from the large monitor mounted on the far wall. The audio was tinny, compressed, carrying with it the echo of suffering from somewhere that existed in a space between reality and nightmare.
Detective Nia Holloway sat at her desk, her posture the only thing orderly in the chaos. Cross-legged, back straight, hands folded in her lap—she looked like she was meditating, but her eyes told a different story. They were fixed on the screen with an intensity that bordered on obsessive, tracking every movement, cataloging every detail. Her analytical mind, trained through years of pattern recognition and criminal profiling, was working overtime.
She wasn't watching the terrified captives as they climbed. She'd seen enough suffering in her career to know that staring at it didn't help anyone. Instead, her focus was laser-focused on the two young men—Elijah and Marcus.
She had watched Elijah's cold calculus when he'd saved Vivian, the way he'd moved with absolute certainty even as the girl dangled over an abyss. There had been no hesitation, no fumbling, no wasted motion. Just brutal efficiency wrapped in perfect technique.
She had watched Marcus's anchored strength during the shaft climb, the way he'd transformed himself into a living foundation for Elijah's swing. The collar-grabbing rescue of Richie had been equally precise—aggressive, yes, but controlled. Measured. The violence of it had been purposeful, not panicked.
But it was the moves in the shaft that kept replaying in her mind like a film stuck on loop. The coordinated maneuver around the overhang. The silent communication. The execution that would have made a special forces team proud.
Isolated, any single action could be explained away. Luck. Adrenaline. The human body's ability to perform superhuman feats when death was on the line. But together? In sequence? They formed something else entirely.
A pattern.
And patterns were what Nia Holloway lived for.
A slow, puzzled frown etched itself between her perfectly groomed brows, creating two vertical lines that hadn't been there a moment before. She uncrossed her legs, the movement deliberate and controlled, and leaned forward in her chair. The leather creaked softly under the shift in weight.
"Caleb," she said, her voice cutting through the room's grim silence like a blade through silk.
Lieutenant Caleb Thorne didn't look away from the screen, where his son was now climbing again, his young face set in lines of exhaustion and determination that no eighteen-year-old should have to wear. Caleb's knuckles were white where they gripped the edge of the desk, his entire body rigid with the effort of watching without being able to act.
"What," he said, the word flat and devoid of inflection.
Nia chose her next words carefully. She'd been holding onto this particular piece of information for years, uncertain if it was paranoid conspiracy theory or dangerous truth. Now seemed like the time to find out.
"I heard something once," she began, keeping her tone professional, clinical. "From a source in D.C. who liked to talk when he was three scotches deep and thought he was among friends." She kept her eyes on Elijah's fluid, recovering movements on screen, watching the way he assessed each handhold before committing his weight. "He worked in... procurement. Defense contracts. Black budget stuff. The kind of operations that don't show up on congressional oversight committees."
The room's attention shifted subtly. Techs who'd been staring blankly at their monitors pretending to work suddenly found reasons to pause. Officers who'd been shuffling papers went still. Everyone was listening now, even if they pretended not to be.
Nia continued, her voice dropping slightly. "He said there are... assets. Not soldiers. Something else entirely. Younger. Much younger. Trained in discrete batches at facilities that officially don't exist. Not for frontlines or conventional warfare, but for..." she searched for the right word, "integration. For problems that need to look like accidents, like natural occurrences, like anything except what they actually are—sanctioned operations."
She paused, gauging the room's reaction. The silence had grown denser, heavier with implication.
"He called them 'malleable operatives,'" she finished. "He said governments produce them like... like products. Teenagers. Early twenties. Kids who can slip into society, who look normal, who nobody would ever suspect of being anything other than what they appear to be." She finally turned away from the screen to look directly at Caleb. "Could that... could any of that actually be true?"
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
The techs stopped their futile key-tapping entirely, hands frozen over keyboards. Officers who'd been leaning against walls straightened imperceptibly. The question hung in the air like smoke from a gun that had already been fired.
Owen Kessler, the precinct's resident conspiracy theorist and dark web specialist, slowly swiveled his chair away from his own monitor to look at Caleb. His expression was unreadable, but there was something in his eyes—a knowing, or perhaps a confirmation of suspicions he'd harbored for years.
Caleb finally tore his gaze from Marcus. The movement seemed to cost him something, as if looking away from his son for even a moment might somehow make the boy disappear. He turned to face Nia, and for a long moment, he just stared at her, weighing something in his mind.
Then he coughed—a dry, sarcastic sound that held no humor, only bitter acknowledgment.
"There are highly classified programs, Nia," he said, his voice carrying the weight of someone who knew far more than he was comfortable knowing. "Top secret doesn't even begin to cover the classification level. They exist in a space beyond normal intelligence architecture, beyond standard military operations, beyond anything that would make sense to someone who only sees the surface of how this country—how this *world*—actually functions."
He paused, seeming to choose his next words with extreme care, as if even discussing this topic might trigger alarms somewhere in a windowless building filled with people who erased problems.
"They're not 'super soldiers,'" he continued, putting audible quotation marks around the phrase. "That's comic book nonsense. The reality is simultaneously more mundane and more terrifying. They're called operatives. Just... operatives. Clean term. Professional. Antiseptic. The kind of word that could mean anything, which is precisely the point."
Caleb stood, his chair rolling backward with the abruptness of the movement. He crossed to the window, looking out at the darkening Marylene skyline. His reflection in the glass was gaunt, hollow-eyed.
"Specialties range from neuro-linguistic hacking—psychological warfare that can rewrite how a person perceives reality—to high-risk asset recovery in hostile territories. Some train for physical precision, agility, situational control. Abilities that appear..." he hesitated, searching for the right descriptor, "doubled, compared to normal human capacity. Not superhuman. Just... optimized. Enhanced through training methodologies that push the boundaries of what we thought possible."
He turned back to face the room, his eyes scanning the faces of his officers—people he'd worked with for years, people he trusted with his life.
"Others focus on disciplines that sound like science fiction until you see the actual budget lines," he said. "Until you read the after-action reports. Until you see what they can actually do." His voice dropped lower. "They're ranked. They're categorized. They're ghosts that walk among us. And most importantly, they're completely deniable. If one gets burned, captured, killed—there's no record they ever existed in the first place."
The revelation sat like a stone in the room's collective stomach.
Owen Kessler shifted in his chair, the leather creaking in the silence. His perpetually skeptical face—weathered by years of seeing the worst humanity had to offer and believing the worst of what he couldn't see—took on an expression of grim vindication.
"I've heard rumors," he said, his voice a low rumble that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest. "Whispers on dark nets. Forums that exist for three hours and then vanish. Encrypted channels where people with legitimate clearances talk about things they shouldn't know about."
He leaned back, steepling his fingers in front of his face. "The whispers say that some of these operatives... their training isn't just physical or digital. That it gets..." he paused, seeming to grapple with how to articulate something that defied conventional understanding, "weird. Esoteric. Like modern-day wizardry shit. Psychological conditioning that borders on supernatural. Perceptual enhancements that can't be explained by standard neuroscience."
Caleb's head snapped toward Owen with such speed and intensity that several officers actually flinched. His eyes flashed with a warning so visceral it was almost physical—a look that said *shut up, shut up now, you're crossing a line that will get us all killed.*
"As I told you," Caleb said, each word clipped and precise, delivered with the force of an order being given, "the files pertaining to such entities are beyond top secret. They exist at classification levels that most generals will never see. Clearance sits with people who don't have names in databases, only permissions in systems that require retinal scans and biometric verification. Speculation is a waste of breath, a waste of time, and potentially a waste of a career. Are we clear?"
But Owen held his Lieutenant's gaze for a beat too long—a challenge, a refusal to be cowed. Years of working together had earned him the right to push back, at least a little.
"As if you aren't one of the 'higher-ups' around here," Owen said, the sarcasm dripping from every word like acid. "As if you didn't just confirm everything by trying to shut me down. As if your 'waste of breath' speech isn't exactly what someone who knows the truth would say to protect people from asking the wrong questions."
An awkward, heavy silence descended like a fog. It was the kind of tension that preceded either violence or revelation, the kind that made everyone in the room acutely aware of their own breathing, their own heartbeats, the space they occupied in the world.
The other cops looked anywhere but at Caleb and Owen—at their monitors, at the floor, at the ceiling tiles with their water stains and flickering fluorescent lights. Nobody wanted to be caught in the crossfire of whatever this was.
The tension was a live wire, crackling with unspoken implications.
Nia broke it, her voice respectful but insistent, threading the needle between deference and determination. "Caleb. Putting the rumors aside. Putting classification levels and career-ending conversations aside." She pointed at the screen with one perfectly manicured finger. "Look at them. Really look."
On screen, Elijah was now helping Chloe navigate a final, tricky lip of rock, his hands guiding her precisely where she needed to grip, his voice—barely audible through the stream's audio—calm and instructional despite the exhaustion that must have been crushing him.
"That coordination," Nia continued. "That predictive movement. The way they communicate without speaking. The efficiency of every action. I've seen trained officers perform worse in controlled scenarios." She turned back to Caleb, her dark eyes intense. "Do you think the Azaqor perpetrator... could be one of those? An operative gone rogue? Someone with that kind of training who decided to use it for... whatever this is?"
Caleb stared at the screen, but not at the climbers. His focus had shifted to the left side of the feed, where Witnessing Hollow sat in its study like a king surveying its kingdom. The figure was a picture of relaxed, scholarly malice, its posture suggesting someone completely in control, completely at ease with the suffering it had orchestrated.
The mask seemed to drink in the pain radiating from the captives, to savor it like a connoisseur sampling a particularly fine vintage. There was pleasure in that stillness, in the way the head tilted slightly to track the climbers' progress. Pleasure in the control, in the power, in the absolute dominion over life and death.
A deep, worrying look settled into the lines of Caleb's face—the kind of expression that aged a person visibly, that carved new valleys into skin and hollowed out eyes. The paternal fear for his son, which had been the dominant emotion for hours, was now threaded with something worse. A professional dread that came from understanding implications others hadn't yet grasped.
"If he is," Caleb said, his voice barely above a whisper, each word weighted with terrible certainty, "then this isn't a murder case anymore. It's not even terrorism in the conventional sense. It's an insurgency. A highly trained asset operating with complete operational freedom, no oversight, no chain of command, no rules of engagement."
He looked around the room, his gaze taking in his defeated team—good cops, dedicated professionals, people who'd solved hundreds of cases. But those had been normal cases. Human cases. This was something else.
His eyes swept across the walls of their mundane precinct, taking in the motivational posters, the bulletin boards, the coffee maker that had been broken for three weeks, the water cooler, the scratched linoleum floors. The ordinary reality of law enforcement.
"We..." he gestured vaguely at everything around them, the helpless sweep of his hand encompassing their entire world, "we are not equipped. Not for this. Not even close. We'd need to call in the cavalry. Federal assets. Maybe the kind of people who don't carry badges, who don't make arrests, who make problems disappear in ways that never get written in reports."
His voice dropped even lower, almost inaudible. "And God only knows what door that would open. What kind of attention it would bring. What kind of people would show up asking questions we can't answer, looking at things we don't want them to see."
The implications hung in the air like poison gas—invisible but lethal. Calling in those kinds of resources meant admitting this was beyond them. It meant surrendering control. It meant bringing in people who might be just as dangerous as the threat they were facing, people who operated in the same shadows that had produced Witnessing Hollow in the first place.
Caleb turned back to the screen, his eyes locking onto the masked figure. He stared at it with an intensity that bordered on obsessive, as if he could somehow peel away the layers of disguise through sheer force of will, could reach through the digital barrier and unmask the monster.
The figure gave nothing back. It was a void dressed in Victorian clothing. A silence shaped like a person. A question mark wearing a plague doctor's mask. A puzzle with pieces that didn't fit any pattern Caleb had ever encountered in twenty-three years of police work.
His own reflection was faintly visible in the dark glass of the monitor, superimposed over the mask like a ghostly double exposure. He saw himself—pale, strained, hollow-eyed—staring back from the darkness. A man haunted by a ghost he couldn't name, fighting a war he didn't understand, with his son's life as the battleground.
Behind him, the bullpen remained silent. Nobody had answers. Nobody had solutions. They could only watch, and wait, and pray that whatever happened next, they'd be ready for it.
But deep down, in places they didn't want to acknowledge, they all knew the truth: they wouldn't be ready. They couldn't be ready. Some things existed beyond preparation, beyond training, beyond the capacity of normal people to comprehend or combat.
And Witnessing Hollow was one of those things.
On screen, the captives climbed higher, driven by fear and survival instinct, unaware that miles away, people were watching, analyzing, recognizing patterns that suggested this nightmare was deeper and darker than anyone had imagined.
The stream continued. The mask watched. And somewhere in the shadows between classified operations and criminal insanity, the truth waited like a blade in the darkness.