Tiny Horror

Kaelen leaned against a brick wall in the alleyway. His lungs were burning with a cold, metallic fire. His nose was bleeding. It was a thick, dark stream that tasted of iron and salt. This was the hemorrhage: the physical cost of a deep state resonance. His body was trying to purge the excess energy by rupturing the vessels in his own face.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. His fingers were shaking so violently he nearly dropped it into the gutter. He dialed the private line belonging to Sarah.

"Pick up. Please, Sarah, pick up."

It went to voicemail. The sound of her recorded voice felt like a phantom limb rubbing against his brain.

He tried again. Nothing but the static hum of the city.

The tether was still there. In the eye of his mind, he could see the red fog of the intent of Vane. The killer was moving. He was not in a car. He was walking. He was close. The geography of the city began to blur with the geography of the plan of Vane. Every street corner felt like a bruise.

Vane was heading toward the old Medical District. Specifically, he was going to the Orthos Facility: a decommissioned research center where Sarah still kept a private lab. It was a place of ghosts and mercury.

Kaelen pushed off the wall. He stumbled toward the street. He flagged down a taxi. The thoughts of the driver hit him like a wave of stale cigarette smoke and a dull, pulsing anxiety about a failing transmission.

"Medical District. The Orthos building. Fast," Kaelen gasped.

"Hey, buddy, you're bleeding. You look like you're dying."

"Drive!" Kaelen roared.

As the taxi lurched forward, Kaelen closed his eyes. He had to go deeper. He had to find the frequency of the device he had seen in the mind of Vane.

It was not just a weapon. It was a prototype. It was a neurointerface designed to harvest synaptic data. The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. The Orthos Group was not just the employer of Sarah. They were a shadow conspiracy of neurophysicists and black ops contractors. They did not want Kaelen because he was a psychic. They wanted him because he was a proof of concept.

Sarah had been protecting his data. She'd been hiding the truth of his biology from the people who wanted to weaponize it. She had even gone so far as to encrypt the master files using her own neural signature as the biometric vault. She had turned her own brain into a safe. And now, Cassian Vane was the cleaner sent to rip the door off the hinges.

The tale continues...