Chapter 23: The Mountain Town Crisis (7)
They came back the same way they’d left, quietly, without incident, without answers.
The kitchen door closed behind them with a soft, familiar click that felt almost disappointing in its normalcy.
The building welcomed them like nothing had happened, like the city outside hadn’t spent the entire day politely pretending it wasn’t being stalked by something it didn’t understand.
Lena shrugged out of her jacket and let it hang over the back of a chair.
Her shoulders ached in that deep, unpleasant way that came from too many hours on her feet layered over too many hours of vigilance.
The kind of tired that didn’t go away with sleep so much as accumulate.
Khalid dropped into a chair and leaned back, stretching until something in his spine cracked. “Well,” he said, staring at the ceiling, “that was thrilling.”
Li Wei set his tablet down on the counter with more care than usual. The screen still showed the route they’d walked, a neat loop traced over the city map. No spikes. No anomalies. No flags.
“Nothing followed,” Li said. “Nothing intersected. No deviations.”
“Which is somehow worse,” Lena replied.
The boss stood near the prep table, sleeves rolled up, hands braced against the stainless steel as he stared down at a scatter of papers and open files. He hadn’t looked up when they entered. He didn’t need to ask how it went.
Gorchov lingered near the doorway to the back room, arms folded, expression unreadable. His eyes flicked over the trio briefly, checking, cataloguing, before returning to the floor.
Lena cleared her throat.
“So. We walked. We observed."
The boss nodded once. “And it did nothing.”
“Correct.”
He finally looked up then, his gaze sharp but not accusing.
“That’s still information.”
Khalid sighed.
“I’m getting real tired of information that tries to kill us later.”
“That’s the only kind worth collecting,” the boss said mildly.
Li leaned against the counter. “We didn’t feel pressure. Not even false positives.”
“That suggests restraint,” the boss said.
“Or confidence,” Lena countered.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Or both.”
He gathered the papers into a neater stack, movements precise. “For now, that’s all we get.”
Khalid frowned. “So what’s next?”
The boss exhaled slowly, the sound barely audible over the hum of the building.
“Now we wait.”
Lena groaned. “You love that word.”
“I love survival,” he replied. “Waiting is usually part of it.”
He straightened and looked at all three of them properly this time.
“You’ve done what you can for today. Go rest.”
Khalid blinked. “That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“No extra patrol?”
“No second route?”
“No,” the boss said. “Not tonight.”
Lena searched his face.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure that exhaustion makes mistakes more likely,” he said. “And mistakes are what it’s waiting for.”
That shut her up.
Li nodded first.
“Understood.”
Khalid followed with a reluctant grunt. “Fine. Rest.”
Gorchov shifted slightly.
“I’ll stay up.”
The boss didn’t argue.
“I know.”
They dispersed slowly, the energy bleeding out of them now that permission had been given. Lena washed her hands at the sink longer than necessary, staring at the water as it ran over her fingers. The sound was grounding. Ordinary. Reassuring in a way she didn’t want to think too hard about.
Upstairs, the rooms were dim and quiet. The city outside had begun its nightly withdrawal, voices thinning, lights winking out one by one. Lena kicked off her boots and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees.
Her body was exhausted. Not just from the walking, but from the kitchen work earlier, the endless prep, the heat, the repetition. Rolling dough. Folding wrappers. Standing over burners while pretending everything was normal. Add to that the nightly walks through a city that felt increasingly like it was holding its breath, and the fatigue settled deep.
She lay back without bothering to change, staring up at the ceiling.
Across the hall, Khalid’s door shut with a soft thud. A moment later, Li’s did the same. The building creaked quietly, adjusting to stillness.
Downstairs, the boss remained at the table, papers spread out again, eyes moving steadily as he cross-referenced timelines and locations. Disappearances. Survivors. Catatonia. Patterns that almost lined up and then didn’t.
Gorchov stood nearby, silent, a coiled presence in the corner of the room.
“It’s patient,” the boss said finally, more to himself than anyone else.
“Yes,” Gorchov replied. “And it’s enjoying this.”
The boss didn’t deny it.
Upstairs, Lena closed her eyes.
Tomorrow would be more of the same, cooking, watching, walking routes that led nowhere. Waiting for a mistake. Waiting for a signal. Waiting for something to finally decide they were worth noticing.
She hated waiting.
But she was too tired to fight it tonight.
Outside, the town settled into its unnatural calm, streets emptying, lights dimming, the geography itself seeming to relax now that fewer eyes were on it.
And somewhere in that quiet, something listened, content, for now, to let them rest before the next move.
***
The computer never slept.
The screen cast a cold, clinical light across the kitchen long after the rest of the building had gone dark.
Every other monitor was off, every overhead light dimmed, but the encrypted interface glowed steadily, waiting, patient in a way the boss had learned not to trust.
He sat alone at the prep table with a mug of coffee cradled in one hand, steam curling upward in thin, tired spirals.
The coffee had gone bitter an hour ago.
He drank it anyway.
Incident Report #0417-A
Status: Unresolved
He scrolled.
The first few were familiar. Disappearances logged by local authorities. Times and places highlighted, coordinates overlaid on satellite imagery. He skimmed those quickly, eyes trained to pick out anomalies in the margins, gaps in time, contradictions in witness statements, patterns that didn’t want to be patterns.
A man missing after leaving work late.
A woman who never arrived home despite being seen on three separate cameras.
A delivery rider whose GPS showed continuous movement long after his phone stopped transmitting.
He took a sip of coffee and clicked into the next file.
Incident Report #0429-C
Status: Survivor – Catatonic
Medical scans filled the screen. Brain activity present. Motor function intact. No trauma consistent with assault. No chemical markers. No explanation.
Attached notes detailed the interview attempts.
‘Subject unresponsive. Eyes open. Appears to track movement intermittently but does not react to sound or touch. Pupils dilate during periods of low light.’
The boss’s jaw tightened.
He scrolled again.
Incident Report #0442-F
Status: Survivor – Partial Recall
This one had audio.
He hesitated for half a second, then pressed play.
Static hissed, then a voice, shaky, thin, threaded with a fear that hadn’t dulled with time.
“I thought… I thought if I stayed under the light it couldn’t see me. It was cold. I remember the cold. And then the wind-”
The recording cut off abruptly, followed by a note in red.
‘Subject became unresponsive mid-interview. Condition worsened after sunset.’
The boss muted the audio and rubbed at his eyes with two fingers. He didn’t stop scrolling.
Incident Report #0451-B
Status: Unresolved
This one included photographs.
He studied them carefully. A stairwell in an apartment block. Concrete steps descending into shadow. Nothing obviously wrong, until you looked at the timestamps.
Each photo had been taken minutes apart.
In every image, the darkness at the bottom of the stairs had crept higher.
He set the mug down without realizing he’d done it.
Next.
Incident Report #0463-D
Status: Fatal – Body Recovered
Recovered was generous.
The notes were sparse, clinical, stripped of anything unnecessary.
‘Cause of death indeterminate. No visible injuries consistent with fatal trauma. Subject found collapsed near residence entrance. Door unlocked. No signs of forced entry.’
Attached was a single image.
The boss stared at it longer than the others.
The body lay face-up, eyes wide open, mouth slightly parted as if mid-breath. There was no damage. No wounds. Just an expression frozen somewhere between confusion and recognition.
As if the subject had understood something too late.
He took another sip of coffee. It tasted like ash.
Incident Report #0470-E
Status: Pattern Escalation
This one had annotations layered over it, notes from analysts, field operatives, systems that tried very hard to quantify the unquantifiable.
‘Area of effect expanding.’
‘Behavior non-reactive to standard containment.’
‘Possible adaptive intelligence.’
Possible.
The boss leaned back slightly, the chair creaking under the shift of his weight. His eyes flicked briefly to the staircase leading upstairs, where the rest of the crew slept, breathing, dreaming, blissfully unaware of the exact shape of the thing moving closer to them with every nightfall.
He minimized the file and opened another.
Incident Report #0479-Z
Status: Redacted
This one made him pause.
Large sections of the text were blacked out—not for security, but for sanity. Even so, enough remained to be unsettling.
‘Subject reports sensation of being “held in place” by wind.’
‘Reports voice calling name despite absence of known speaker.’
‘Reports door as only remaining point of resistance.’
The boss exhaled slowly through his nose.
He glanced at the time.
Early morning. The hour where night loosened its grip but hadn’t quite let go.
The most dangerous hour, according to more than one report.
He scrolled once more.
Incident Report #0483-G
Status: Pending
New.
Too new.
He opened it.
The file was incomplete, just a location pin, a timestamp from less than an hour ago, and a single line of text.
‘Potential encounter avoided. Subject reached shelter. Door integrity compromised but held.’
The boss straightened.
His fingers hovered over the trackpad as he pulled up the attached metadata. Wind anomalies logged. Pressure fluctuation. Audio interference.
Close.
Too close.
He reached for his mug again, found it empty, and didn’t bother refilling it.
The caffeine wasn’t what was keeping him awake anymore.
A sound broke the quiet.
A knock.
Not loud.
Not frantic.
Just firm enough to be unmistakable.
The boss froze.
The portal screen continued to glow, incident report still open, red status indicator pulsing softly in the corner. Upstairs, the building remained silent, unaware.
The knock came again.
Measured.
Patient.
The boss stood slowly, every sense sharpening as he turned toward the front of the building.
Someone, or something, was at the door.
