A flicker of eyes, a slight turn of the head. The pink sweatsuit was a flare in the monochrome green-and-black world. She was an anomaly, a soft variable in their hard equation. Snippets of conversation washed over her as she moved.
"—heard it's a promotion, but to where? Alaska?"
"—Sterling's packing up now.Whole thing's hushed."
"—deserves it,after what happened to Hale. Fresh start."
Captain Sterling's transfer. The gossip confirmed it; she was being moved, quickly and quietly. The machinery of the base was already ejecting a key piece, sanitizing the narrative.
Sloane reached an intersection where the main hallway branched toward the officers' quarters. A group of four soldiers, broad-shouldered and laughing about something, filled the space. She paused, waiting for them to pass. Her gaze drifted down the side corridor, landing on a man just exiting a room, locking the door behind him. He was older, a master sergeant by his stripes, with a face that looked carved from seasoned oak.
As the group cleared, she walked over, the sound of her sneakers a soft squeak against the boot-dulled floor. "Excuse me," she said, her voice clear. "Can you direct me to Captain Sterling's room?"
The sergeant looked her up and down, his expression unreadable. The pink sweatsuit clearly didn't compute. "Captain Sterling," he repeated, as if verifying the request. He jerked a thumb vaguely down the left branch of the hallway. "It's by the left at the middle hallway. Number's on the door." His tone indicated his duty to assist was concluded.
"Thank you," Sloane said, but he was already turning away, his focus returning to the inner world of the base.
By the left at the middle hallway. It was military-direction: technically accurate, deliberately unhelpful to an outsider. She walked, the folder held tight against her chest, feeling the weight of the stares that followed her. The hallways were a labyrinth of identical doors, identical lights, identical smells. She passed a laundry room, a common area with a blaring television, the fog pressing against the windows like a pale, curious beast.
Then, she saw him. Detective James Wilson stood like a sentinel outside a door marked 208. He wasn't leaning; he was planted, his posture tense, radiating a focused intensity that seemed to make the very air around him still. He held a small, black notebook, but his eyes were fixed on the grain of the door as if trying to see through it.
"Sir," Sloane said, approaching.
James turned, his gaze sharp, taking in her appearance and the folder in one swift assessment. The casual wear didn't seem to register as incongruous to him; he was looking for data, not adherence to dress code.
"Sloane. What is it?"
"We've found more police reports," she said, handing him the folder. "Local, rural. They were buried. Ben pulled them."
James took the file, his large hands making it seem small. He flipped it open, his eyes scanning the top page. For a moment, there was nothing but the distant sound of a shouted order from the parade ground, muffled by the fog. Then, his body went perfectly still. It wasn't a relaxation of tension, but a freezing of it. The blood seemed to drain from his face, leaving his skin taut and pale.
He didn't look up. He slowly turned to the next page, then the next. His breathing, usually so imperceptible, became a slow, controlled draw.
"A snake… but with legs," he murmured, his voice low and rough. "Grey. Low to the ground. Chirping-hiss." He finally looked at her, and his eyes were the colour of a winter sky just before a storm. There was no surprise in them, only a dreadful, grim confirmation. "They're not dismissing hysteria, Sloane. They're documenting a hatchling."
"A hatchling?" she asked, the word feeling archaic and dangerous.
"Wyrm-kin," he said, the word tasting of old ash and older fear. "From the deepest parts of the lore. Not shifters like us, not truly. They're… older. More elemental. Amphibious. They're born in the still, lightless waters under the world. The sacred caves. They start small, terrestrial, hunting on land." He tapped a report about the cleanly sliced coop door. "Their forelimbs have retractable claws—like obsidian splinters—that can slice bone. They hunt in the dark, and they eat… everything. As they grow, they become more aquatic, larger. The thing in the river…"
"The tendrils," Sloane finished, the horror dawning. "That's not the juvenile. That's the adult. Or a sub-adult."
James nodded, closing the folder with a definitive snap. "And if the juveniles are out, hunting livestock, it means a nest has been activated. Disturbed. Or…" he trailed off, his jaw working.
"Or harvested," Sloane said, voicing his fear. "The samples Eleanor mentioned. Live-tissue extraction. Cryogenics to preserve viability."
The pieces slammed together with an almost physical force. The military base wasn't just covering up a death. It was sitting on top of, or had discovered, a biological anomaly of staggering proportions. A nest of creatures from legend. And someone—a black budget project, a rogue unit—was experimenting. Corporal Hale hadn't stumbled upon a creature. He'd stumbled upon the theft of one, or perhaps its release. He'd seen the handlers. And for that, he had been silenced with the project's own terrifying technology.
The door to room 208 remained closed. Captain Sterling was inside, a woman connected to the victim, now being hastily transferred. She was either a target, a witness, or part of the cover-up. James's knock had gone unanswered.
"We need to get to Sterling," James said. "Before they ship her out. She knows something about what Hale was doing, what he saw."
"And we need to see the body again," Sloane said, a forensic certainty solidifying in her gut. "With this in mind. If these things have distinct morphology… claws, dentition…"
"We might find trace evidence the initial scan missed," James concluded. "Evidence of what really killed him, before the cryo-beam finished the job."
---
Inciting Incident: In the morgue,
The refrigerated darkness of the Sprinter van was now a crime scene awaiting a new language. James and Sloane stood over Corporal Hale's body, Eleanor Thompson a silent, watchful presence at the head of the gurney, her MISTRAL workstation humming on a trolley beside her.
Sloane had changed into blue surgical scrubs, her pink sweatsuit a discarded splash of colour in the corner. She held a high-intensity forensic light, angled to rake across the skin. "We're looking for punctures, scratches, anything that doesn't match the clean cryo-trauma. Think small. Think… reptilian, or amphibian."
James, his senses heightened in the way of his kind, leaned close. He wasn't just looking; he was feeling for the residual echo of violence, for the scent of something alien beneath the overwhelming chemical smell of preservation.
"Right forearm," Eleanor said quietly. "Lateral side. I catalogued it as post-mortem abrasion from transport."
Sloane bent the light there. It was a cluster of four tiny, perfect punctures, arranged in a shallow crescent. They were almost invisible, seared shut by the same intense cold that had cauterized the larger wounds. "These weren't from the ground," she breathed. She took a digital caliper from Eleanor's tray. "Two-millimeter spacing. Too precise for random debris." She moved to the ankles, to the restraint marks. Among the broader cryo-burns were more of the tiny, patterned punctures. "Claw marks. From something small, clinging. Or… from multiple somethings."
"The juveniles," James said, his voice a gravelly whisper in the cold air. "Hale wasn't just grabbed by the large one. He was swarmed by the small ones. They immobilized him. Held him." The image was grotesque: a man weighed down by a skittering, chirping mass of lizard-snake hatchlings, their obsidian claws pricking his skin, while the larger, tendril-wreathed form emerged from the water to claim him.
"There's more," Eleanor said. She had been running a UV wand over the torso. Now, she pointed to a patch of skin near the collarbone, away from the main devastation. Under the ultraviolet light, a faint, phosphorescent smear glowed a sickly green-yellow. "Bioluminescent residue. It matches the spectral signature of the nodes in that river photo. It's transfer. He made contact with it."
Sloane took a sterile swab, gently collected the residue. "This is the connective tissue. Literally. The juveniles hold the victim. The adult administers the… the harvest. Or the kill." She looked at James. "This wasn't a random attack. This was a coordinated predation. But why him? Why there?"
James stared at the glowing smear, his mind racing through the lore. The Wyrms were guardians, in a sense. They were drawn to spiritual potency, to the energy of sacred places… and of sacred blood. "The caves are ours," he said slowly. "My pack's. Our rites, our history, are in that stone. Hale's DNA was altered, interlaced with non-human code. To a creature of instinct and ancient magic, he might have smelled… significant. Like a trespasser in a church. Or like an offering."
The door to the morgue van suddenly hissed open, letting in a blade of grey morning light and a figure backlit by the fog. It was Ben, their digital analyst, his face pale.
"Boss," he said, ignoring the corpse, his eyes fixed on James. "I just cracked the encryption on a data packet pulled from the base's satellite uplink. It was sent the night Hale died. Destination is a shell corporation, front for that private military research firm we've been eyeing—KryoSect."
He held out a tablet. On it was a single, chilling line of text, time-stamped 23:47, the estimated time of Hale's death:
Package acquired. Specimen J-3 sedated for transport. Loose end neutralized with extreme prejudice. Clean-up required at LZ Delta.
LZ Delta. Landing Zone Delta. James knew it. A cleared, rocky flat by the river, half a mile from the mouth of the sacred caves.
James looked from the damning message on the screen to the corpse on the table, to the tiny claw punctures on the cold skin. The story was no longer one of mythic horror, but of cold, calculated theft. They hadn't just found a creature. They had stolen a child from its nest. And Corporal David Hale had died because he'd witnessed the kidnapping.
"Sterling," James said, his voice now iron-clad. "We find her now. She knows about KryoSect. She knows about Hale's last patrol. She's not being transferred. She's being extracted before she talks."
He turned and strode from the morgue, the file of police reports clutched in his hand like a weapon, the ghosts of serpentine hatchlings and a stolen "Specimen J-3" coiling in the fog behind his eyes. The hunt had just changed shape. They were no longer pursuing a monster. They were pursuing the men who had leashed it.
The analysis had become an archaeological dig, each layer revealing a more disturbing epoch of violence. Eleanor Thompson worked in her mobile lab with a focused, surgical calm, but the data she was exhuming felt increasingly profane.
The pack-specific mineral, the hexagonal crystals from the sacred caves, were now just the bedrock. Layered atop them, extracted from the particulate caught in Corporal Hale's uniform seams and the microscopic follicles of his skin, was something else: a complex cocktail of synthetic pheromones. Eleanor's gas chromatograph had isolated the compounds, and a cross-check with a restricted bioweapons database had provided a match. They were engineered analogues of lupine territorial markers—specifically, the sub-variants unique to James Wilson's pack lineage. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to mimic the scent-signature of his people. This wasn't just a frame; it was a bespoke, biological forgery.
But it was the third finding that made her hands go still over the mass spectrometer's readout. A deep-tissue saturation of carboxyhemoglobin. Carbon monoxide. At levels inconsistent with ambient environmental exposure, even near a vehicle. This was the product of concentrated, inhaled combustion fumes. The binding pattern suggested it wasn't from a slow leak, but from a rapid, overwhelming dose administered shortly before death.
She leaned back, the stool creaking. An outdoor attack by a mythological aquatic creature did not involve carbon monoxide poisoning. It did not involve synthetic, pack-specific pheromones. These were tools. Tools of misdirection, and tools of restraint. The picture that formed was chillingly clinical: Hale had been subdued first—likely rendered groggy, disoriented, and physically weakened by CO inhalation, perhaps in a confined space like the back of a vehicle. Then, he'd been doused in the synthetic pheromones. Then, he'd been taken to the riverbank, where the juvenile Wyrm-kin and their parent had been… deployed? Lured?… to finish the grim tableau, with the cryo-beam as the final, erasing stroke.
This was not an encounter. It was an execution with a monster as the fall guy.
She needed James. The alliance between her forensic truth and his intuitive, cultural knowledge was no longer just beneficial; it was the only way to untangle this. She found him in the tactical operations room they'd commandeered, a map of the region spread on a table, the blurry river-creature photos and livestock reports pinned beside it. Sloane was with him, correlating GPS data from the livestock attacks.
"We need to talk," Eleanor said, her voice cutting through their low conversation. She placed three printouts on the map, weighting them down with a spare stapler. "The narrative is manufactured. The minerals place him at the caves, yes. But the pheromones are synthetic, keyed to your pack's signature. And he had a lethal load of carbon monoxide in his blood before a single claw touched him."
James's eyes darkened as he absorbed the data. The muscle in his jaw pulsed. "They gassed him. Made him smell like us. Then fed him to the thing." The simplicity of the statement held a volcanic rage. "They wanted the attack to look like a territorial dispute. My people versus a guardian spirit. A tragic clash of old powers that would explain everything and blame no one human."
"It's a sophisticated, multi-stage kill," Sloane said, looking ill. "The CO explains the lack of severe defensive wounds against a human assailant. He was already half-dead when the creatures arrived."
"A forced partnership," James muttered, his gaze going distant, seeing not the map but the brutal logic. "Between the thieves who stole the juvenile Wyrm and the creature itself. They use the hatchlings to swarm and immobilize, they use the adult's cryogenic capability to kill and preserve tissue… and they use the whole scenario to cover their tracks." He looked at Eleanor, then Sloane. The last vestiges of professional distance between them burned away in the face of this conspiratorial evil. "We work this together. Full sharing. No silos. Your science, my knowledge, Sloane's pattern analysis. We find who's behind KryoSect. We find the nest. And we find that stolen 'Specimen J-3'."
It was a pact sealed not with a handshake, but with a shared, grim nod. The tense alliance was forged in the cold fire of these revelations.
---
The new crime broke not through their channels, but across the national news cycle twenty-four hours later. It was a glossy, tragic headline: "Prominent Aviation Executive Perishes in Private Plane Crash." A small charter jet, en route from a regional airport to a business meeting, had suffered a catastrophic failure and gone down in a remote wooded area. No survivors. The executive was identified as Alistair Vance, a well-connected figure in aerospace logistics.
James watched the report on the muted television in the ops room, a stone of foreboding in his gut. The name meant nothing to him. But he saw Sloane freeze, her face draining of colour.
"Simone's cousin," she whispered.
"Who?" Eleanor asked, looking up from her microscope.
"Simone Laurent. My… our… pack Alpha's wife," James said, the connection snapping into place with an electric jolt. Simone came from old money with tendrils in defense and transport. "Alistair was her favourite cousin. Not a shifter, but family. A bridge to the human world."
The coincidence was a screaming siren. A military operation stealing legendary creatures. A man connected to a shifter pack Alpha killed in a convenient crash. James's phone buzzed. It was a message from a panicked pack elder: "The threads are being cut, James. On both sides of the veil."
An hour later, Eleanor's secured line chimed. She listened, her expression turning to ice. She hung up and turned to them.
"That was a contact in the National Transportation Safety Board. The investigation is already being fast-tracked as pilot error. But the whisper is… the regular pilot, a man with thirty years of experience, called in sick fifteen minutes before the flight. His replacement was a last-minute hire through a temp agency that doesn't seem to exist. The agency's number is disconnected. The replacement pilot's credentials are forgeries so good they passed the initial gate check."
"A switch," James said, the word flat and heavy.
"A patsy," Sloane corrected, her forensic mind racing ahead. "They put an unqualified man in the cockpit to ensure the crash. Either he was incompetent by design, or the plane was sabotaged and he was the fall guy who wouldn't know how to save it."
The air in the room grew thick, charged with a new and more terrifying dimension of the conspiracy. This wasn't confined to a riverbank and a military base. It was reaching out, strategically severing connections. Alistair Vance wasn't a random victim. He was a target.
"Why?" Eleanor posed the central question. "What does an aviation executive have to do with stolen biological specimens?"
James began to pace, the pieces clicking into a horrifying new mosaic. "KryoSect. Private military research. They need transport. Not just for people, but for sensitive, living cargo. Cargo that might need specialized, discreet, temperature-controlled air transport. The kind an executive with Alistair's connections could provide… or could block."
"Or," Sloane interjected, "he found out something. Simone is the Alpha's wife. She might have gone to her trusted, human cousin with concerns—about Hale's death, about strange rumours from the base. He starts asking questions in the wrong boardrooms…"
"And becomes a loose end," James finished. Just like Hale. But this was a cleaner, more deniable method. A plane crash. An accident. No strange claws, no cryo-beams. Just fire and twisted metal.
He stopped pacing and faced the map. The livestock attacks formed a rough ring around the base and the river. The sacred caves were a focal point. The plane crash site was sixty miles to the east.
"They're cleaning house," James said. "Hale saw the operation. He was neutralized. Alistair Vance might have learned of the operation's logistics. He was neutralized. Captain Sterling knew Hale's movements. She's being 'transferred'—likely to be neutralized or disappeared into some classified oblivion." He turned to Eleanor. "That carbon monoxide. How would you administer a concentrated dose, outdoors, quickly?"
Eleanor didn't hesitate. "Portable generator. A vehicle's exhaust piped into a confined space. A commercial-grade pressure washer or leaf blower with a modified combustion engine. It wouldn't take long."
"They wouldn't have done that at the riverbank," Sloane said. "They'd have done it at the point of capture. Which means there's a primary crime scene we haven't found. Where they took him, gassed him, and applied the pheromones."