Chapter 2: What Lies In Storage

Storerooms are designed to hold things without immediate use, and nobody performatively curates themselves for the contents of their shelves. This is another way of saying they were designed for the truth.

You can tell a lot about the truth of a place by what it stores. The clinic's storeroom is a narrow cubicle – barely wide enough for two people yet to decide how much space to afford each other. It stands stacked floor to ceiling across shelves from three distinct decades, crowding each other for real estate.

A battered metal utility rack, original to the building's 1987 renovation, holds the industrial cleaners and the biohazard disposal supplies with the authority of a load-bearing wall. In front of it, a wooden shelving unit circa 2003 (someone's well-meaning IKEA gesture) lists slightly to the left, carrying gauze and dressings and boxes of sterile gloves. Meekly standing before that: a modern wire rack of newer vintage holds the surgical stock, a locked case of isoflurane canisters, and the suture packs within their cellophane sleeves. A card taped to one shelf reads ‘SMALL (PEDS): ORDER TUES’ in handwriting that has stood confident so long it now resembles a font. There is a stepladder in the corner, all drenched in the scent of plastic, sweet particulates and something underneath that: the dust of redundancy and overstock from things which function yet were put back wrong.

Sonny has spent a significant portion of his adult life in storage rooms. He considers this among his finest qualifications.

He produces the key from a ring with fourteen others, selecting it in the way one finds a familiar chord in the dark – not by memory but with knowing muscle. The door swings ajar on hinges voicing their protest. The practice suture pads glide into his hands, retrieved without turning his head. Sonny could map this room’s geography in the dark, which he's literally done twice: once during a power failure that took out the block, once for reasons he doesn't examine.

She's watching him do it.

"’SAL’," she says, scanning his name tag.

"Sonny," he responds, placing three pads down on a counter beside her without being asked, a gesture which she files. "This tag's from the last guy. ‘Spose they didn't replace it. I figure we're about the same.", he chuckles.

"Are you?” she queries with a faint, rhetorical wryness.

"Sal… Sonny…" He makes a balancing gesture with one gloved hand. "Four letters different. Starts with S. Similar enough for labels."

She picks up one of the pads, turning it in her hands as a visuomotor analogue to her inner deductions. There’s something enthralling to his expressions, a distinct wordplay that invites questions. "So, what happened to the last guy?"

Something passes through his face – fast, like weather. There then corrected. "He found steadier hours."

This is, Amelia will realize later, not an answer to the question she asked. He has given her the silhouette of an answer. The place where an answer would stand if it wanted. She will catalogue this, too.

"You're a new trainee?"

"Two more years before boards." She leans her hip against the doorframe in a way that communicates that she has decided not to leave yet and is constructing plausible deniability. "You're too careful," she adds.

He goes very still. "S-sorry?"

"The way you move in here." She shifts her eyes back toward the shelving, making consideration for the sudden spotlight she has evidently shone upon the man. "You know exactly where you are but move like you're not allowed to disturb anything." A pause. Her gaze softens decisively. "Most people simply grab what they want."

The Fire flares briefly: this one notices.

It announces this with the characteristic pre-conscious tightening of the gut before a car accident, something that has no direct translation but arrives like the sawtooth whine of a razor held too close to the ear: 003E – CAREFUL.

"I work nights," he smiles dimly. "Can't make a lot of noise. It's hard, sometimes, but you adapt."

She continues, collecting the remaining pads, "How long have you worked here?"

"Seven months." He reaches past her for the light switch. His arm does not touch her. Precise in the specific way of someone who has learned that the body is not always its own. "Nights only. I do days at the Costco on Route 9."

"Two jobs?"

"Three, if the band counts."

"You're in a band." She reaffirms, amused and yet somehow entirely unsurprised.

"I am the band, mostly. The other guys are enthusiastic." He states, an animism regaining him as he performs his well-choreographed lock-up procedure. "I play bass. I also sing. The singing is—“, He considers the ceiling for a moment with an undefined expression that contains reams of compressed history. "Involuntary, sometimes. It's easier to make it a job than fight it."

"What kind of music?"

"Good music," he says, which is not an answer, and both know it this time, yet it is delivered with such cheerful completeness that she doesn't mind the deflection. "Doo-wop, rock ‘n’ roll. Some original stuff. The originals are different – they come out already finished, like I'm remembering them rather than writing them, which is either exciting or unsettling depending on who you ask." The prosody of his speech breathlessly accelerates to a gallop. "I got lucky and wrangled an agent after a gig once, y’know? He thought we were great! But he said I’d freak out the suits in the music biz. They’re not ready for something truly original! Actually – come to think of it - most people I've asked find it unsettling."

"Most people you ask about your own music?" she asks, wilfully carried by his eager torrent.

"I solicit feedback aggressively. It's a flaw." He tilts his head, grinning with the slightest strain to his brow as though restraining a more compromising disclosure. He pivots. "What about you. Do you – is there something outside? Outside of this, I mean."

A sudden shift. She thinks about her skateboard parked in the hallway of her apartment. She thinks about the morning three weeks ago when she drove two hours before dawn to abseil a limestone face with a woman from her college cohort she has since stopped texting back, not for any specific reason, more the accumulated weight of having no specific reason. She thinks about the sci-fi novel on her nightstand with the same bookmark lodged in it for six weeks because her shifts end at a time when words just slide off her eyes like water off a window.

"Some things," she concludes.

He nods, and the nod holds no judgment and no follow-up, which is the correct response and sufficiently rare that she notices it.

She holds the practice pads under her arm. The building breathes around them – overnight machinery of a place that holds many small lives in suspension. There is something she wants to ask. It is not a professional question.

Just as they accept the natural conclusion of the lull in conversation before a farewell, she speaks.

"What was it?"

"What was what?"

"The thing you were humming."

He doesn't know. He is never quite sure. The melodies come like rainstorms – a flux carrying wherever they have been. He opens his mouth and it flows out, barely above a whisper:

“’Bright before it breaks’, she says, like satellites in the deep… Everything my head makes, is never mine to keep…"

He stops. The night absorbs it.

"That's a good line," she says, as if assessing it in the same manner she would assess her sutures. It holds; it is true.

His face tentatively eases into a configuration equal part puzzled yet indicative of having heard affirmations one never knew one needed. He pines for a more eloquent expression of gratitude but fumbles, dropping a “Shucks.” Instead.

"You should go home.” She notes. “Your shift—"

"Ended at eleven." He calmly presents this fact the way you show a library card: easily, without embarrassment. "I was finishing up the corridor."

"You stayed."

He softly studies her with those scorched eyes, and the Fire adjusts itself around her like a lens finding its refractive focus. She registers it as the slightly uncomfortable feeling of being apprehended. Not watched. Apprehended. Like being understood by something that hasn't yet decided what to do with said understanding.

"The corridor wasn't going to mop itself." he says.



Sonny punches out at 2:15 AM. He sheds his nitrile gloves, signs the log in the back office: ‘S. Volero, 22:00 – 02:15, LG A+B, rec. ward, break rm., rear exit’ – then collects his jacket, which is a worn sky-blue bomber with an embroidered patch of an emperor butterfly on its left shoulder. He has explained the patch to exactly no-one. Partly because no-one has asked; partly because the long explanation would only raise further questions.

His car is parked in the far corner of the clinic's rear lot on Fischer Boulevard because proximity to other machines is a form of intimacy he feels he hasn't consented to.

The car is a 1995 Volvo 850 T5-R, sporting a paint coat officially dubbed ‘Cream Yellow’ but, in certain lighting conditions, resembles the color of an argument someone lost. To Sonny, it remains the color of something you might draw when you were seven years old before learning to be conservative about joy. He has had the car for six years. Its name is Reverie – a datapoint in his unannounced trend of ascribing names to things he spends meaningful time with.

The seat knowingly sighs as it adjusts around him. He puts both hands on the wheel, and he sits there for two minutes without starting the engine.

This is normal. This is the decompression chamber between one pressure and another. Sonny breathes. Beyond the sodium-arc hues of the lot, Route 35 moves: a truck, an empty cab heading west, the red pulse of something distant and aviation-minded.

The engine starts and the Volvo turns with its particular, trustworthy conviction out onto Wayside, beginning the fourteen-minute drive back to the house on Sumner Avenue.

The radio stays off.

The Parkway runs parallel to the dark on his left, with the Atlantic out there beyond it somewhere, two miles east as the crow flies over the low, marshy dunes. It is a smell rather than a sight from here – cold salt and marine funk. Through the Fire, he feels the accumulated force of its crashing waves through the density in the air, sitting on his shoulders like a reassuring hand. The flowing water is the one external thing he permits without armor.

He drives.

At the red on Pitney Road, with the intersection empty and traffic signal cycling for nobody, he sings, letting four bars out:

“Don't – keep me – out… Don't – let me – …”

The melody is 1968 and his voice within the car is fuller, unedited, moving with the ease of something that hasn't been told yet that it causes problems. He holds the last note until the light changes.

The Fire marks its withdrawal from daily performance the way the world thins out when it's just you, the night and the inside of your skull, which you share, it turns out, with a considerable population.

Philco comes first. Their names given not by Sonny, this time, but through some engraved intuition.

In the rearview mirror, the back seat holds what appears to be a person assembled parsimoniously by a committee that didn't communicate. One arm terminating in an alabaster prosthetic hand, pale resin adjoining the wrist. One leg clearly different from the other in both length and articulation, mangled like some prehistoric beast. The torso’s architecture a grammatical error in of porcelain, Bakelite, and flesh panels, displaying a menagerie of discarded body-parts. The head displaced by a vintage tube radio clad in flesh and bone, its frequencies cycling: a gabble of overlapping stations, voices from 1945, 1961, 1987, a weather forecast, a frenetic sermon, a commercial for products no sane man could want or conceive. Philco's various mouths, distributed across its shambolic figure, emit their garbled chatter. The noise resolves briefly into an appraisal with the vaguest implication of instruction:

“-YET REMAINS INCOMPLETE.”

003D 001K#, Sonny thinks at it. Not now.

A discordant, electronic wail surges impatiently from the static within it, as it leers forward, gripping the back of the driver’s seat.

Sonny turns the heater up and stares at the road.

"I said, not now." he restates aloud, firmly.

Philco returns to the distant waves. Not because of the dismissal. Because it has noted his refusal and filed it somewhere. It keeps a very organized ledger. Sonny does not like to think about what's written there.

006E. 001D. 004W.

With the windows down, he passes the Methodist church with the incomplete marquee sign that has been trying to spell something profound for three weeks, passes the ShopRite whose parking lot contains one cart and one man in a lawn chair for reasons Sonny has decided are private and none of the Fire's business. He drives through the city's wreckage and renewal: the restoration project condominiums sitting alongside boarded facades, the beachfront hotels twinkling against the Convention Hall's stolid frame, all of it saying: 'something happened here but we haven’t decided what it means.'.

Finally, he turns onto Sumner Avenue.

The house is a rental. A split-level construction with white vinyl siding in need of one more hot summer before giving up entirely. It is one of a dozen identical structures on the block, the kind of residential geography designed to be temporarily inhabited and has absorbed that intention. It doesn't look like the inside of it is a home, from the outside. Most homes Sonny has known do not.

The kitchen light is on. This means Denise is up.



The kitchen smells of sepia hues glowing in sesame, ginger and the warmth of a meal recently composed with care. At the island table sits Denise in her usual habitat.

Denise Cho is thirty years old and holds the eyes of a woman on the verge of losing an intrapsychic attrition she’s waged against herself since age nineteen. She’s losing so gracefully, you wouldn't immediately identify the loss at all. She sits, surrounded by a panoply of sketchpads and muted lilac fabric draped across her lap. There are rough drawings before her, ten variations on the same silhouette with slight adjustments to collar depth and sleeve articulation. He quietly marvels at the sleeves in particular: delicate feathered wings.

Neglected beside her are the remains of a half-eaten bowl of noodles, sacrificed in the pursuit of her work. She takes moment to notice his entrance, eventually shifting him into her peripheral vision and smiling softly to herself.

"Welcome home," Denise says quietly.

"Hey, thanks."

She returns to her sketches. This is one of the things Sonny values about Denise: she doesn't need him to perform arrival. He can just arrive.

"You smell like floor cleaner," she laughs without looking up.

"It’s an occupational hazard." He echoes.

He drifts toward the refrigerator. Within it, a shelf allocated to each household resident: on one, some leftovers labelled in block-letter handwriting, ‘CHESTER - DO NOT’ beside a range of exotic herbs and garnishes; on another, Denise's meal-prep containers stacked with the geometric optimism of someone who plans on eating well and mostly succeeds. Sonny's shelf contains four cans of San Pellegrino Aranciata soda, a carton of electrolyte powder, and a hot-pocket that he bought a week ago and has not eaten because every time he opens the refrigerator, he forgets why he wanted it.

"Chester made japchae. He ate before you got back. Left the rest on the stove." She pauses. "He feels bad when it goes to waste." She turns to face him this time. "You should eat it.”

Sonny retrieves a soda can and re-emerges into the ambient light above the table.

“Also”, she adds, “There’s a note."

There is always a note.

Chester McDonnel, 36, leaves notes the way some people leave voicemails – with the intention of connection, which he defers to a more comfortable moment that may or may not materialize. Sonny finds the note on the stovetop handle where Chester invariably leaves them: a load-bearing node in Chester's communication proxy. He means well. He leaves food. He fixes flickering lights and leaves a note on the whiteboard by the front door that reads: ‘FIXED IT. YOU'RE WELCOME — CHESTER’, because he is constitutionally incapable of not taking credit for something he does. It is the miniscule impression he feels capable of leaving in the sands of others’ lives. Chester asks how you are and leaves before the answer is fully out because he has remembered something he needed to do – a social escape.

‘FOR SONNY OR DENISE. GOOD NOODLES — CHESTER.’

"I'll eat it tomorrow. I’m okay," Sonny says.

Denise shoots him a discerning look. "You're always okay and you never eat."

"I am eating. I'm drinking orange soda!" He grins.

"That isn't—"

"It’s got calories, Denise! Scientifically. It’s got…" he tilts the can and squints at the label with exaggerated, scholarly attention, "…twenty-seven grams of sugar! Hey now, to some folks that’s probably a feast."

She throws her eraser at him. He catches it without looking. She expected this. He hands it back. Their hands are briefly adjacent across the sketchpad corner, and in that adjacency, Sonny feels her: the embracing harmony of her.

"There's a buyer for the Shin Kyung-won collection," Denise says, fixating upon one of her drafts. "In the Garment District. Maybe." She adds a crosshatch. Erases it. "She wants to see samples by the fifteenth."

"That's good!"

"It's terrifying."

"That's also good."

She returns her gaze to him with unstated, solemn gratitude. She's been working for a smaller label out of Asbury Park for three years while she builds their private fashion line. She shows Sonny things sometimes. He cannot give her the vocabulary of informed critique, but the Fire can tell him the difference between something that has been made with a driving intention behind it and something that hasn't, and hers always has it, which is the only feedback she needs.

"How was the animal hospital." She asks as he takes a swig.

"Quiet. Had a moment." He sets the can down. Doesn't elaborate.

"You met someone," she says.

Genuinely fielding the statement for a moment, he stares at the ceiling contemplatively. "I met a lot of someones! Seventeen cats, a bird and a border collie in a cone."

"I mean a person someone." She taps the sketchpad with her pencil expectantly. "You've got the thing."

"I don't have a thing." He sighs.

"The frequency thing you told me about. You go a different color when-"

“Guess I’m colorful, so sue me!” He playfully jests, overtly feigning ignorance to curtail the inquisition.

She makes the face that means she is choosing not to win this argument right now, reserving the right for when she has further evidence.

“How's your chest," she asks, which is what she asks in place of ‘are you alright’, because early in their acquaintance she identified how that question produces a different and less useful answer from him.

"Smoldering," he replies flatly. "Not lookin’ too bad tonight."

She nods and draws the line she was deliberating.

Sonny finishes his soda. They don't say much else. By 3:00 AM, he bids her his usual ‘night, Dee’. She nods as he exits, furrowing her brows intently as if to say ‘sleep, actually, this time’. He senses this.

"I'm going to, don’t worry."

At most, he promises to try.



His room is the back bedroom on the second floor; it is the one with the window that peers into the branches of a mature oak tree rather than the street – a key criterion in his selection of it. The branches come close enough that in summer he can push the window open and the nearest branch will present itself like a patient hand. It is a haven of his own, which is to say: the organized chaos of a mind that has been forced to externalize its filing system because whoever installed the interior default cannot be trusted.

The shelves are lined with paperbacks of varying condition intermixed with spiral notebooks whose covers have been decorated with colorful drawings – creatures with coiling, amorphous bodies, multiple heads and hands growing from the tops of each skull, the recurring butterflies. On the desk: a dismantled Apple IIe computer, whose guts he has been respectfully studying for five months, never reassembled. Comic drafts are tacked to the wall above it, hand-drawn in ink. They tell the continuing legend of a man comprised of a thousand humming bees, how he hears the buzzing of people on the street who don't know they are leaking. Frantic lines connect disjointed epics and portions of his tale into its lateral chronology. Sonny is very far into this story, but yet to determine where it ends.

On the windowsill: twelve items arranged systematically, all blue. A popsicle stick wrapper. Two pen lids. An infant’s grippy sock. A pristine robin's egg shell, found last spring. A length of aquamarine ribbon. A piece of sea glass worn down to the placid teal of a shallow bay. A child's barrette. A Matchbox car. A chip of periwinkle tile from a condemned mall. A bottle cap. And an old, cracked lighter of which he cannot recall the origin; the first resident in this panoply.

The wall beside his bed holds a corkboard with a grid of index cards providing a sensory catalogue of his current environment, updated nightly. He produces three new cards from the desk draw, noting:

Dog, recovery cage 3: dreaming, simple, kinetic. Duration: approx. 3 hrs.

Cat, new post-surgical patient: searching, fragmented, electrical.

Radio, break room: Left on station 94.3. Slow pulses, water divination.

He does not know exactly why he does this. However, he knows that if he stops, things begin to blur at the edges in precarious ways.

The bed itself is made with military precision and then immediately unmade by the addition of three extra pillows and various vibrant Hawaiian shirts. On the floor beside the bed: a pair of sneakers. A Califone 45-RPM turntable with an array of both loose and neatly stowed singles. A library hardcover, face-down to mark the page, containing a collection of mid-century American folk songs. The kind that have three verses, a bridge and largely concern themselves with leaving places and the people left behind.

He changes out of the facility polo. Sits on the bed.

The Fire starts to shift.

This is what it does when he transitions toward unconsciousness himself. He does not sleep, conventionally. What he does instead is closer to what a radio tower does: powering down to a maintenance frequency, still broadcasting, still receiving, only quieter. His own control loosens and the Fire’s signals that were being held at arm's length move closer. Two blocks north, someone in another house is angry at the television, a bright hot flare. Farther, attenuated to the point of impression rather than vision: the general soft static of the sleeping shore. Neptune City in the small hours.

A melody wants to finish itself.

Not yet. Not alone with the dark.

He puts his forearm over his eyes and gently starts to sing:

“Because if I stop, it stays in my hands…”

He stirs, rising sluggishly to peer at his own hands.

"What stays in mine?” he silently mouths in response, then presses his palm back flat against the mattress. The fingerless gloves are still on. They always are.

001S. 002P. Hopeful, curious – his state in that doorway. Free of the iron-taste and raucous crowding of a threat vector. Truly hopeful. He hadn't had a reading like that in a long time.



Amelia Wren drives home south in a 2019 Honda Fit with a cracked rear bumper from a parking lot in Red Bank three months ago and a backseat that contains, at any given time: two tote bags of veterinary textbooks, a spare set of scrubs folded less neatly than she intended, and a reusable coffee cup she has been telling herself she'll wash since Tuesday.

The window is down two inches providing a necessary bite of November frost to keep the other thing – the cold lost thing she grappled with in its biohazard bag – from writhing to her eyes as an emotional display she is not yet ready to perform.

After a silent slog east through Route 36, she parks in front of the duplex on Emory Street in Long Branch, illuminated by the one streetlight there which always makes her car appear like evidence. The apartment is the upper unit. She rents it alone, a deliberate choice she defends to her mother on the phone as the need for quiet when studying and defends to herself as the need to simply exist comfortably. Two arguably related positions.

It is a small apartment with a significant amount of light during the day, a welcome nourishment to both herself and the various succulents she keeps on each windowsill. Most of them remain alive.

The apartment is exactly as she left it: complicated. It is indicative of a person who began things with the full force of herself and then ran out of some crucial resource, be it time, rationale or motivation.

There is a Lego set on the coffee table currently mid-construction, a botanical garden set, the greenhouse section still sealed within its factory bags. She built for three nights straight with the focused intensity she brings to everything, and then a run of surgeries stole the evenings, and the greenhouse has been waiting since. It looks, at this hour, like an optimistic ruin. On the wall above the couch: a star chart of the Northern Hemisphere, dog-eared at the Cygnus quadrant where she hoped to find the means to frame it properly for eight months. Beside it, the cat knee anatomy poster, which represents the one professional item in the apartment. It was the thing she put up first when she moved in two summers prior; the territorial claim of a person arriving in a life they intend to inhabit. Then, on the wall across from the couch, the photograph of the Icelandic road she tore from a travel magazine and blu-tacked while it was still bright and aspirational rather than the map to an escape she has been postponing for years, now.

She takes off her shoes inside the doorway, stepping passed her propped-up skateboard -- still sporting its shredded grip tape. She flicks her kettle on and heads to the shower.

The shower runs at the very edge of hot, the way she likes it: hot enough to feel like something, not hot enough to scald. She stands in it for longer than is necessary. She is not thinking about Sniffles, now. She is thinking about the superior suture work she achieved in the last twenty minutes of her shift through sufficient grief, practice, improvement.

She is thinking, in a smaller and less examined corner, about the man in the corridor. About "I know what that is." About the way he said it. Not with the inflection of some comfort offering, but that of a person making a topographic statement regarding familiar regain. To say, I have been here.

She turns off the shower.

She pours her white jasmine tea into a floral glass mug and steadily sits on the couch next to the partially built Lego greenhouse, clasping the cup tightly between both hands.

Some time later, her state of contemplation flutters and she compulsively reaches down to check her phone, a habit that has replaced the habit of not checking her phone, which she'd given up sometime in her second year of clinical placement when being unreachable felt irresponsible.

3:06 AM

Three notifications.

Her mother – sent at 11:45 PM: “Amelia. if working late again call me tomorrow. tita's birthday dinner is sunday your brothers are coming.” The text has the tone of a woman who has been issuing summonses for so long she no longer distinguishes them from conversation. Unseasoned, plain facts.

A classmate in her cohort – 12:41 AM: a meme about sleep deprivation and veterinary board examinations that she will find funnier at a different hour. She flatly acknowledges it with a terse double-tap, stamping the message with the exaggerated grin of a yellow cartoon face, in lieu of a response of her own.

The third notification is from a number she does not recognize – 2:50 AM. A 732 area code: Monmouth County; Local.

She almost ignores it.

She fails to ignore it.

The message contains a single line of text consisting of two words, and then an attachment.

“Daddy’s girl.”

The attachment is a screenshot of a document. The scan is imperfect — low resolution and corners clipped as if snapped by someone in a hurry pressing paper against glass in a dim room. At the top: a letterhead. She expands it with two fingers.

'OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR GENERAL'

Below that, a case number, a date within the last two months, and then the dense, redacted body of the document. Heavy, blotting black bars obscuring names, locations, operational specifics. Yet incomplete. Documents redacted in haste leave seams, which lure eyes desperate for resolutions.

She scans what is visible.

...field agent ██████ flagged anomalous conduct by a contracted research affiliate operating under federal sanction in the █████████████████nning the period █████████–█████████. Subject's concerns centered on the non-therapeutic application o█████████████████████████ and neu████████████████████tion techniques to unwitting civilian subjects, including those sourc███████████████████████etworks. Subject attempted relay of findings via ██████████ in contravention of standing protocol and without SOP clearance from ██████████.

█████████rnal review concluded that subject's conduct constituted an unauthorized disclosure vulnerability for ███████████████████ and associated subprojects itemized under ████████████████ file. Matter was referred t█████████████ for disposition. Subject's case was subsequently closed █████████ 1998. Manner of closure: █████████.

The present case has been reopened under this office following the submission of new testimony by ██████████████████ and the emergence of residual beh██████████████████████ from a ████████████ asset associated with the original program. Asset was processed ████ █████████████ █████████████ integrated ████████████████████████under resettlement protocols effective ██████5. █████████ was considered robust and complete at time of discharge. The concerned individual is currently operating in the civilian sphere under a ████████████████ assigned █████████████████. Ongoing maintenance delegate█████████████████████.

... subsequent monitoring has detected non-directed outbound transmissions consistent with a partial degradation of inst█████████████ ███████████arameters. Signal p██████████████████ ██████ indicative of non-conscious ████████████████eration, divorced of residual ██████████. Caution is indicated. ████████████ directive and capability profile remain ████████████ Intelligence of proximity to persons connected to original █████████████████████ure events not recommended; pending full ███████. Reclaim██████ to res███████████████. ██████ emissions received at █████████.

... ████████████████ is cross-referenced in the original ████████████████ operations docket under the following internal designator:

MONTAUK

Current operational status: ACTIVE

Directive status: ████████████████



The animal in her chest – that reeling, hot mammalian feeling – does not flex this time. It falls deathly still. Which is what it does when what lies in front of you is new enough that the body has to wait for the mind to catch up and the mind is still three pages behind.

She picks the phone back up, scrolls to the top of the message and reads it again from the beginning, pacing through her now increasingly asphyxiating apartment. She reads it once more in the darkness of her bedroom.

She does not sleep for a long time but, when she eventually does, she dreams of birds.

A bird raised in isolation will still, eventually, attempt the specific song of its species. Fragmented and dissonant, yet discernible; the pattern emerging from some depth below choice or learning,

One by one, the birds in her dream petrify and disintegrate, their vibrant plumage reduced to cool grays before fading entirely, until one bird remains. She gently coaxes the creature to gingerly perch upon her extended index finger. It looks intently at her, flitting and cocking its head as if encoding each facet of her nebulous dream form before it opens its mouth.

And then, very quietly, as if from a distant endpoint over a garbled phone line, the first bars of something human. A melody she has heard before, through twelve inches of institutional drywall, just approaching the threshold of audible.

She sits with this information for exactly as long as it takes her to understand it.

By dawn, she has understood just enough for it to be dangerous.