Chapter 1
Following
The door groaned open on its own.
Antonio and Ranne froze, their torch beams slicing through the darkness beyond. Dust swirled in the light, thick enough to choke on, obscuring whatever lay inside. The air smelled of mildew and something sharper—chemical, stale.
They’d been down here for hours, picking through the carcass of this forgotten bunker. What should’ve been a military facility felt more like a derelict orphanage: toys strewn across warped floorboards, tiny dresses rotting in puddles, lab coats dangling from rusted hooks. Water dripped from broken pipes, the sound like a ticking clock.
And now this. A door moving by itself.
Antonio exhaled sharply, his breath ragged. “We’re leaving,” he muttered, but Ranne was already stepping forward, torch raised.
“Not yet. Look—an office.”
The room beyond was a graveyard of paperwork. Desks overturned, filing cabinets gutted, a single chair lying on its side like a fallen soldier. Antonio’s skin prickled. Something was wrong here.
Then his legs buckled.
He hit the ground hard, his vision swimming. Ranne’s voice sounded distant: “Antonio!”
For a moment, the world blurred. Then, just as suddenly, clarity returned. Antonio pushed himself up, his muscles tense.
“We need to go. *Now.*”
Ranne hesitated, but the look in Antonio’s eyes cut off any argument. He grabbed the two metal boxes they’d scavenged, tossing one to Antonio. “Then move.”
They retraced their steps—or tried to. The sticky notes they’d left as markers were gone.
“What the hell?” Ranne whispered.
Antonio didn’t answer. His pulse hammered in his throat. He could *feel* it—the weight of unseen eyes tracking them. Every shadow seemed to shift just beyond the torchlight.
“Dining hall,” Antonio hissed. “Third hallway. Go.”
They ran, their boots splashing through stagnant water. The bunker’s layout twisted in on itself, rooms bleeding into identical rooms. But Antonio remembered. He *always* remembered.
Behind them, a soft *click*.
Ranne spun, torch sweeping the darkness. “Did you hear—?”
“Don’t look back.” Antonio’s voice was low, urgent. “Just *run.*”
They burst into the storage room, the exit window still unguarded. Antonio boosted Ranne up first, then passed the boxes through before hauling himself out. Mud sucked at their boots as they crawled through the undergrowth, the fence’s severed wires snagging at their clothes.
Then Antonio saw it—a fresh boot print, sunk deep into the earth.
Too large to be his or Ranne’s.
He didn’t mention it. Just kept moving.
The jeep waited where they’d left it, half-hidden in the trees. Ranne collapsed against the hood, chest heaving. “What the hell was *that*? You drop like a corpse one second, then sprint the next. And those notes—they didn’t just vanish!”
Antonio didn’t answer. His hands shook as he fumbled with the keys.
Because he’d seen it too. Back in the office, just before he collapsed.
A face in the archive window.
Pale. Watching.
And *smiling.*
[At Rannes Apartment]
The boxes landed on Ranne’s sofa with a thud that seemed too loud in the quiet apartment. He rubbed his hands together, fingers twitching with restless energy. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he muttered, shrugging off his jacket and tossing it over the armrest. His sleeves were already rolled up—no patience for formalities now.
Antonio didn’t move. He stood rigid by the door, his back pressed against the wood as if bracing for something. Or someone.
Ranne pried open the first box—a standard-issue file container, unremarkable except for one unsettling detail: it was *clean*. No dust. No water damage. The plastic sleeves inside gleamed under the lamplight, their contents perfectly preserved. Government files weren’t supposed to last like this. They were meant to dissolve into pulp, to be shredded and burned and forgotten.
“This is—” Ranne’s voice hitched as he lifted the top file. A photograph slipped free: a boy, maybe eight or nine, his face bleached of color by the flash. Hollow eyes. A clinical detachment in the way he stared at the camera, like a specimen pinned to a board.
Antonio finally stirred. He crossed the room in three strides, snatching the file from Ranne’s hands. His thumb brushed over the word stamped in red ink across the first page:
RETIRED.
Not discharged. Not relocated.
Retired.
“Failed subject,” Antonio said, too quietly.
Ranne grabbed another file. Same stamp. Another child—a girl this time—her before-and-after X-rays showing a skull subtly changed, the bone warped in ways that made his stomach twist.
“Check the dates,” Antonio ordered. His fingers trembled as he flipped pages, skimming jargon-filled reports—dosages, cognitive assessments, procedural adjustments. The earliest experiment was dated two decades ago. Two months of trials. Two months before the first subject was stamped *retired*.
“They kept trying,” Ranne whispered. “Even after the kids—”
“Died. Yes.” Antonio’s voice was gravel. He pointed to a series of charts. “Look at this. They were injecting something directly into the brain. Testing cognitive enhancement, maybe. Or—”
“Or control.”
The silence between them was thick enough to choke on.
Ranne reached for another file, then recoiled. A photograph stared back at him: a child on a gurney, mouth slack, pupils dilated to black pits. Notes scrawled in the margin read Subject 12: Neural decay accelerated post-injection.
Antonio slammed the file shut. “We shouldn’t have taken these.”
But it was too late.
The boxes were open.
And whatever slept inside them was awake now.
Ranne’s fingers tightened around the file’s edge, the paper crinkling under his grip. "You think the Cradle-Snatcher could be one of them? A survivor?” His voice dropped to a whisper. ”Christ—what if they did something to him? Turned him into... whatever this was supposed to make?”
Antonio’s jaw clenched. He could still see those X-rays in his mind—skulls reshaped, sutures fused too soon. ”Even if this isn’t linked to the Veraopur killings, it’s worse than we imagined. These weren’t experiments. They were factories." He slammed the file shut. ”The public should know. But first—“ A beat. The unspoken truth hung between them: We’re already in this. No backing out now.
"First, we find the killer,” Antonio said, low and deliberate. "Because if he’s one of those scientists? He deserves worse than a cell. And if he’s one of their subjects?”He met Ranne’s gaze. ”Then God help us. Whatever they made him into... we might not be able to stop it.”
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