Bruce had been staring at the fogged inside of his windshield for so long that he’d memorized the pattern of streaks. Thin arcs and smudges caught the faint morning light as though someone had dragged cold, tired fingers across the glass. Jac slept upright beside him, chin tucked into her collar, her breath puffing shallow and uneven. The heater rattled every few minutes, threatening to quit.

  It was a little after seven when Stanley stepped out of his front door.

  Bruce nudged Jac with the side of his knuckles. “Look alive, kid.”

  She startled awake, blinking hard. One look outside told her everything: the gray Montana morning, the hard frost over the lawns, and Mark Stanley shuffling down his driveway like a man convinced the universe was after him.

  They followed from half a block back, staying invisible behind two pickups and a station wagon. Bruce kept a steady distance through the slush and early commuters, his hands firm on the wheel. His eyes burned from sleep deprivation, but adrenaline carried him the rest of the way to MentaTech.

  The morning passed without incident. They watched Stanley trudge into work, watched employees badge in, watched snow soften the edges of the parking lot. They didn’t talk much. No reason to. Their minds were already tangled in too many threads.

  Around noon, Stanley emerged again, scanning the parking lot like he expected someone to pop out from behind a minivan. He spotted their car—just barely—and walked toward it.

  Jac stiffened. Bruce lowered the window halfway.

  Stanley leaned down, eyes darting everywhere. “I worked something out with IT.”

  Bruce’s eyebrow arched. “That so?”

  “I told them I needed to re-check a batch of archived emails. Legal audit.” He swallowed. “They believed it.”

  “And?” Bruce asked.

  Stanley slipped a folded sheet of paper through the cracked window. “Login. Temporary credentials. Won’t last long.”

  Bruce took the paper without looking at it.

  “And how do we use this?” Jac asked quietly.

  “Javier will meet you at the back loading door.” Stanley’s voice cracked. “Eight p.m. He’ll bring you straight to Stall’s lab. I can’t do more than that.”

  He didn’t wait for a thank-you. He turned and hurried back inside, his shoulders hunched.

  Bruce rolled the window back up.

  “Well. We got our shot.”

  Jac rubbed her arms for warmth. “You think he’s telling the truth?”

  “Doesn’t matter anymore,” Bruce said. “It’s the only lead we have left.”

  Night swallowed the industrial park. Dim security bulbs hummed above loading docks, casting pale cones of light onto melting snow. A few trucks idled in the distance; everything else looked abandoned.

  Bruce and Jac approached the back of MentaTech on foot, keeping close to shadows. The cold clung to their coats, their breath showing with every step.

  A door near the loading bay was cracked open—only by an inch, but enough to show a sliver of yellow light inside.

  Jac whispered, “That’s him.”

  Bruce knocked once.

  The door widened just enough for a man to appear—Javier, according to Stanley. Mid-50s, exhausted, smelling faintly of bleach and industrial soap. His face said he’d been doing overnight shifts for twenty years, and this was the first time anyone had ever asked him to open a door for the police.

  “You detectives?” he murmured.

  “Yeah,” Bruce said.

  “No trouble. I don’t want trouble.” Javier stepped back. He waved them in.

  He shut the door behind them and guided them through a maze of service corridors. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, making everything feel both too bright and too dim at the same time.

  They passed darkened labs, stripped rooms, crates stacked shoulder-high. Cardboard labels flashed by: “ARCHIVE.” “DISPOSE.” “TRANSFER.”

  The hum of a ventilator echoed somewhere above the ceiling tiles.

  “This way,” Javier said, stopping at a door half-covered by a sheet of plastic. He peeled it back and nodded them inside. “Stall’s room.”

  And then he slipped away without another word.

  Bruce stepped in first. The whole lab felt freshly vacated. Half the benches were stripped, leaving chalk-clean squares on the counters where equipment once sat. The other half was boxed: cardboard, cable-tied, labeled for storage or disposal. A faint scent of isopropyl and old dust hung in the air.

  The laboratory stretched out in regimented silence, rows of black resin tables aligned like soldiers at parade rest. Each bore the same secret anatomy: a hollow belly with vented doors, compartments where gas cans might sleep, waiting to feed the brass throats of burners above. The repetition gave the room a strange rhythm, as though the tables themselves were chanting in mute unison, altar after altar to fire and experiment.

  In the far corner, Stall’s computer glowed. The only active thing in the whole room. Jac moved toward it instinctively, drawn like a moth to a flame. Bruce let her work.

  There was something satisfying in watching her, even now when everything felt like it was tilting off the rails. She was young—but she wasn’t green anymore. Not after the past two weeks. She navigated Stall’s file structure like she’d known him personally. Her eyes moved quickly, sure, cutting through nested folders, scanning filenames, memorizing patterns.

  Bruce stood beside her, hands on hips, feeling that familiar twinge of protective instinct tighten in his chest.

  “This guy was organized,” Jac murmured. “Like… obsessively.”

  “Fits everything we heard,” Bruce said.

  She clicked into a folder titled DRAFTS—>DERMAL—>THEORY—>PRELIM.

  A dense document filled the screen.

  She scrolled until a block of code appeared halfway down. Strings of matrices, exponential decay sequences, tissue interface coefficients.

  Jac froze. “Bruce… it’s here.”

  Bruce unfolded the slip of paper Milo had given them. It looked small and fragile now, almost stupidly insignificant.

  Jac read from the screen. Bruce read from the paper. The match was impossible to deny. Everything lined up. Ducks. SynthiDermis. The leak. The murders.

  Bruce exhaled, almost a laugh, almost a groan. “Son of a bitch.”

  Jac turned toward him, voice low. “Bruce… Milo warned us. He said if we kept going—”

  “Yeah,” Bruce muttered. “I remember.”

  She swallowed. “There’s more I didn’t say. When I asked who was coming, he told me… about the machine….”

  Bruce clenched his jaw.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he muttered. “We’re finding a killer. That’s what we’re doing.”

  “But if Milo was right—”

  “Jac.” He put a hand on the desk, grounding himself. “Mick rotting in a jail cell for something he didn’t do? That’s not happening.”

  Jac looked like she wanted to argue—but something behind Bruce caught her attention. She stiffened.

  Bruce didn’t turn yet.

  He heard it too: A soft thump. Far down the hall. Then a dragging footstep. Then another. Someone was coming.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Not running. Not hurrying; they moved slower than a walk. Just… approaching. Deliberate.

  Slow.

  Bruce finally turned—and saw the shadow enter the doorway.

  The figure in the doorway leaned heavily against the frame, his shoulder dragging as if the act of standing upright required negotiation with his own body. At first, Bruce thought the man was drunk. Or injured. Or both. But then the man lifted his head—and the light caught the long, pale scar running from temple to jaw.

  Mid-thirties. Face gaunt. Eyes unfocused, and his coat: A long black coat, damp around the hem, smelling faintly of cold asphalt and something metallic underneath it.

  Bruce’s hand drifted toward the butt of his weapon without drawing it. “Sir?” he said carefully. “You lost?”

  The man didn’t answer immediately. His breathing hitched, like each inhale was caught on broken glass. Then he muttered: “Milo.”

  Bruce froze, mind tightening around the word.

  Jac shifted closer to him, eyes narrowed.

  The man wasn’t talking to them, wasn’t even looking at them. His head twitched to the side, as if someone just outside of their view had spoken into his ear. His voice cracked again:

  “Milo… you— you— damn you.” Then his gaze drifted to Jac and Bruce. “Damn you… both.”

  Jac took half a step back. Bruce felt her tense behind him.

  The man wavered, catching himself on a lab table. His fingers gripped the edge so hard the table moaned under the pressure. His knee buckled, then straightened with an unnatural snap that made Bruce’s stomach twist.

  “Jac,” Bruce murmured, so low he barely heard himself. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  The man shook his head violently, as if disagreeing with someone Bruce couldn’t see.

  “W-wait,” he gasped out, but his tone was strangled, trapped, as if the word itself were being pushed through clenched teeth. “Wait— I know what you’re planning…”

  Bruce didn’t blink. He couldn’t take his eyes away for even a second.

  “These are— c-civilians—” He was pleading now. “They couldn’t get much further than—than—“ The voice trailed, as if he was listening to a response.

  Jac whispered, “Bruce—something’s wrong with him.”

  The man jerked, spine bowing backward as though a cord had been pulled through him. His head snapped forward, his voice flattening without warning: “Blackout protocol engaged.”

  Then, as though fighting himself, he rasped,“No. Override— override. These… are regular people. They don’t— they don’t know— they don’t—”

  He staggered sideways, palms slapping the lab table. His shoes scraped the tile. His breath came in choking bursts. Then he stopped moving. Completely. Like someone unplugged him.

  Jac lifted her gun. “Bruce…”

  “I see it.”

  The man’s head drifted upward. Slowly, and his eyes weren’t unfocused anymore.

  They were empty, fixed directly on Bruce.

  Bruce drew his weapon in one fluid motion. “Stay behind me.”

  The man didn’t react to the gun, didn’t even flinch. Instead, he planted both hands on the table, braced himself—and vaulted onto it with a speed that didn’t match the body that carried it. Within seconds, the man was airborne, leaping from the table top in Bruce’s direction.

  Jac gasped. Bruce dove sideways on instinct.

  The table shattered under the man’s landing—splintered into fragments that shot across the floor. Metal supports bent inward with a groan, exposing a mounted gas tank beneath the bench.

  The man rose from the debris, his head turning mechanically toward Jac. His coat tore at the shoulder seam as muscles tensed, bulging unnaturally.

  Jac fired. One shot. Two.

  Both rounds hit center mass—Bruce saw them hit—but the man only jerked, gripping his chest once before his hand dropped uselessly to his side. He kept coming.

  “Door!” Bruce barked.

  Jac moved fast, weaving around the overturned equipment, but the man stepped to block her path—until his foot landed wrong on a shard of metal and twisted. His ankle snapped sideways with a pop.

  Jac fired into the compromised leg.

  He collapsed—but not the way a person did. He didn’t grab the floor. Didn’t try to brace. He simply crashed down, like a dropped appliance.

  Bruce grabbed Jac’s arm. “Move!”

  She sprinted.

  Behind them, the man’s hand closed around the gas tank. Bruce barely had time to shout before the man hurled it—missing them, but hitting the wall behind Jac.

  The tank struck concrete and ruptured with a deep, concussive boom.

  The blast picked Jac up, hurled her forward, and slammed Bruce against the far wall. The lights flickered. A support pillar rattled violently overhead. Ceiling dust rained down like ash.

  Jac rolled, coughing, her jacket smoldering at the shoulder. Bruce scrambled toward her, batting out the small flame with his bare hand.

  “You good—? Jac—look at me—”

  She nodded, eyes watery, but conscious.

  Behind them, the lab groaned dangerously. A chain reaction of cracking sounds echoed in the ceiling rafters. Something heavy collapsed deeper in the building. There was the hiss of gas and another explosion from a tank, then another.

  The man—whatever he was—had been knocked backward by the blast. Bruce caught a glimpse of him under a settling cloud of smoke. His body was twitching irregularly beneath a broken ceiling panel.

  Bruce didn’t wait to see if he would get up. He hauled Jac to her feet. “Out. Out now.”

  They ran. Through the service corridor. Past the flickering lights. Down the hall where the first thump had echoed minutes earlier. The building shook again—metal piping rattling, drywall fracturing.

  By the time they burst out the back door into the open air, sirens were already screaming toward them from multiple directions—security, fire, maybe half the damn county.

  Jac doubled over in the cold, coughing, adrenaline shuddering through her limbs.

  Bruce placed a hand on her back. “Breathe. Just breathe.”

  Inside the building, something heavy gave way with a roar and the night lit up orange. Jac stared at the flames clawing at the broken windows.

  Bruce stared too. Not at the fire. At the knowledge that somebody—or something—had been standing in that room with them. And had tried to kill them.

  Not the way a man would, or any killer Bruce had ever heard of would. He didn’t know what that was.

  Bruce forced himself to breathe. “We’re not reporting this yet,” he said quietly. “Not until we know what the hell we saw.”

  Jac nodded, trembling. “Okay. What do we tell them?” The sirens were already forming in the distance.

  Bruce didn’t have an answer, his eyes lost in the blaze of the fire growing before them.

  They didn’t speak again until they were a full block away from MentaTech, standing in the shadowed corner of a deserted employee lot. The sirens were thick now—multiple units converging, blue and red flashing off warehouse windows across the street.

  Jac braced her hands on her knees, sweat still cold on her skin despite the frigid night.

  Bruce kept scanning the perimeter. His ears were ringing from the blast and his ribs throbbed where he’d slammed into the wall, but he stayed alert. He had to. That was the only thing keeping the shaking in his hands from being visible.

  “Bru—Bruce,” Jac finally managed, voice scraping out of her. “What— what was that? That wasn’t a person. Not— not a normal one.”

  Bruce took a slow breath. His shoulder hurt, his hands stung from putting out the fire on her jacket, and his head felt like someone had kicked it with a steel-toe boot. But he kept his tone steady.

  “It was a person,” he said. “Just not one we’re used to dealing with.”

  Jac shook her head hard. “Don’t give me that detective-poetry bullshit. He threw a gas tank across a room like it weighed nothing. The table— Bruce, he broke it like it was cardboard. And he didn’t even— he didn’t feel the bullets.”

  “That’s why we don’t report it yet.”

  His voice was low. Controlled.

  She stared at him, still gasping a little. “Are you kidding? We need to report everything—this was a chemical explosion, an assault on two officers inside a private lab, property damage—”

  “And then what?” Bruce snapped before he could temper it. “Huh? What do you think happens?”

  Jac recoiled a little at his tone. “We have a body! Took out the mess! When the fire crews get here, they’ll find him and that’s our proof!”

  Bruce closed his eyes briefly, forced himself to swallow it back down. He lowered his voice. “Look, if we tell Ritter and Twigs what happened—exactly what happened—they’ll pull us from the case. Or worse, they’ll bury it.”

  “Bury it?” she whispered.

  “We’re off duty right now. They think we took the day off. Nobody can know we were here. You heard Milo. Something’s wrong here. Something bigger than we understand. I don’t trust half the people we’re supposed to report to. And neither should you.”

  Jac went quiet. Her breath steadied. But Bruce saw the pulse still hammering in her throat.

  The wind cut harder between the buildings, carrying the smell of burning plastics from the MentaTech wing they’d escaped. Bruce shoved his hands into his coat pockets to keep from rubbing the bruises blooming along his forearm.

  “Come on,” he said. “We need to move. Before anyone sees us standing here.”

  They hurried to Bruce’s car. The interior was cold, stiff from hours of idling earlier during the stakeout. Jac sat rigid, arms folded, forehead pressed against the back of her wrist as she stared at the dashboard.

  Bruce started the engine and kept the headlights off until they’d cleared two blocks.

  “What if he followed us?” Jac murmured.

  Bruce tightened his grip on the wheel.

  “He didn’t.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “He didn’t,” Bruce repeated, slower. “We don’t know who he was. He could have been another disgruntled employee hopped up on drugs. Some of the shit on the streets can make you a tank. You saw that. Something was wrong with him. Physically wrong. He couldn’t even keep his balance.”

  Jac swallowed.

  “That wasn’t—physical. That looked like—like… I don’t know. Some kind of seizure or…”

  “Or something was controlling him,” Bruce said. Silence fell thick in the car.

  Jac stared out the passenger window, watching the city lights smear across the glass as they drove.

  After a minute, she spoke again. “Bruce… if that man wasn’t after us—what was he doing there? Why was he in Stall’s lab of all places? He said Milo’s name. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Bruce admitted. “But the only thing keeping me from thinking he was there to kill us is that he didn’t. Not right away.”

  Her arms tightened around herself. “Milo said something was coming. Something that wouldn’t stop, something that could level the whole department—”

  “And now we have a guy in a lab coat throwing gas tanks around like a damn gorilla,” Bruce finished. “Yeah. I put that together too.”

  They reached another intersection. Bruce stopped at the red light even though the streets were empty. His hands shook faintly. He dropped them from the wheel, flexing them once.

  Jac watched him. “You’re hurt,” she said softly.

  “Fine.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  Bruce looked out the windshield. The light turned green. He didn’t move. For a few seconds he just sat there, breathing in the dim quiet of the cab.

  “Jac… listen to me,” he said, low. “Tonight, what happened in that lab? Nobody’s gonna believe it unless they see it. And even then, I don’t know if they’ll accept it. So we keep it to ourselves until we have something that makes sense to the rest of the world. Understand?”

  She hesitated, torn between instinct and fear. Then nodded. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Got it.”

  Bruce finally drove through the intersection. They rode in silence for a while, the city thinning out as they crossed into quieter streets. Jac leaned her head against the window, watching snow flurries start to drift under the glow of the lamps.

  Bruce kept driving. Only when he pulled up outside her apartment did Jac lift her head.

  “You’re dropping me off again?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re going back to Stanley’s.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bruce… don’t be alone tonight,” she said. “Not after this.”

  He gave a tired, lopsided smirk. “Kid, after the night we just had? I’m not sure I know how to be anything else.”

  She opened her door, pausing with one foot on the pavement. “You scared me, you know,” she said. “In that lab.”

  “You scared me too,” he replied.

  Jac closed the door gently. The hallway light in her building flickered as she stepped inside. Bruce waited until he saw her disappear up the stairs before pulling away.

  He sat there for a long time, staring at the faint glow of Jac’s living room through the curtains, listening to his own pulse hammer in his ears. He didn’t know what the hell was coming next. But he knew it wasn’t over. Not even close.