r/Viidith22

Let me emphasize, I don't mean it's generating a woman in every image. I mean literally, the same woman. Every time. In every picture.

I'll start by apologizing. I would include photos, as I'm sure it would help diagnose the issue better, and I'm no writer, however after having three X posts deleted, one post each in the ChatGPT, Midjourney and similar subreddits, and a snapchat (I'll get to that one later) it's become clear to me that whatever unusual virus my devices have all somehow contracted does not allow for me to share images of it. It's like this problem is…unique to me or something, and every attempt to share any picture containing the woman results in the same thing. Failure, or immediate deletion. Super inconvenient, I know, but I'll do my best to describe the issue.

Before you bother spamming my comment section with every word for liar in the dictionary, I'm not saying you have to believe me. I'm asking those of you who do to help me keep my job and sanity, both of which I feel precariously close to losing each day this…phenomenon persists.

Monday, I was polishing up images for the college's fall enrollment campaign – removing background clutter, dropping in the logo, the usual. The deadline was Tuesday, my creative director had already emailed twice, and I was doing what I always do under pressure, which is procrastinate harder, so by the time I actually opened the AI generator, it was nearly 11 pm. I'm not the sort to lean on AI for everything, but I'd never had a real problem with it until all this, and the job needed doing. The prompt was literally nothing, mundane as any I've ever written. 

“Edit this photo of a diverse group of students on campus. Adjust for warm lighting, aspirational. Include the following logos and text, "Your future begins here."

The kind of thing I've generated a hundred times.

She was in the first output.

I didn’t clock it immediately. I was tired, and scanning mostly for the usual problems, fused fingers, bad teeth with that weird smudged quality, that glazed expression AI gives people that makes them look freshly concussed. I picked the second image in the grid, cropped it, and was halfway to sending it in when something caught my eye.

There was a grayish blot in the top right, tucked between two of the students.

That was all it was at first, just a little wedge of dead color where the background should have been warm and green. I zoomed in, expecting one of those uncanny almost-faces these programs sometimes invent in crowds, and found something close enough to justify being annoyed: a strip of something dark and stringy, hair, maybe, and a pale curve beside it that might have been skin.

Mostly, it just made the image unusable.

So I fed the picture back in, with a prompt. 

“Remove the partial figure behind the woman in the third row, second from the right — the gray artifact and dark hair-shaped section. Only use students from the original image. Brighten the logo.”

Sent.

The second batch came back with the same blot.

Same corner. Same place between the same two students. Only now the gray had edges. The dark strip had separated into something more like hair, and the pale curve had settled into the suggestion of a cheek. One small shadow sat where an eye might have been, though it was buried so deeply between shoulders and lanyards that I had to lean toward the screen to be sure I was seeing it at all.

It was irritating, and more than a little ugly, but otherwise unremarkable, so far as AI fuck-ups go. So I fed the picture back in.

“Remove the partial figure behind the woman in the third row, second from the right - a section of hair and part of a face. Only use students from the original image. Brighten the logo.”

Sent.

Yet she was in the third batch too.

It was a woman, I could see that much now. She lingered in the same side of the frame, half-obscured by another student, but it was her. 

I knew it from the placement first, then the color – that drained grayish cast, like the color of still water. Her chin had more shape now, jutting almost at a knifepoint. Her nose sat wrong, not deformed, not exactly, but assembled badly, like the program had been given the idea of a face and only gotten halfway through building one and elected for another entirely.

The rest of the image had degraded around her. Brenna – a recent graduate, and a girl I’d spoken to once or twice - had gone murky before her, her face smudged like a thumb had dragged across it before the ink could dry smudged and scattering her features haphazardly.

I scoffed, closed the tab, and opened an older model. More dependable. The familiar dark interface loaded, I pasted the caption, uploaded the photos, and waited, drafting apologetic Teams messages to the higher-ups while the icon spun.

After a minute, it finished.

And there she was.

Not the blot, nor the half-face, but a woman…or something close. 

The image was standard enough at first glance –alll  the usual inaccuracies from a weaker model present, too much shine on the teeth, vague blurring and nonsense words in the background – except that off-center, behind Brenna, the gray patch had finally resolved into something like a person.

I could see the top half of her now. She was leaning around Brenna, not accidentally caught there, not blended into the crowd, but almost angled with a purpose that made the whole image feel staged around her. 

Her skin wasn’t pale so much as…utterly colorless, a gray that seemed natural only for dead things. Her hair caught the light wrong, hanging in thick black ropes, that made it seem wet, against a graying scalp. She was too tall for the students around her, stooped as though something in her spine wouldn’t let her stand straight.

The longer I looked, the more uneasy details seemed to leap forth at me.

On the left side of her face, one eye sat above another — two where there should have been one, the lower beady, almost birdlike. The right side had a single eye, set slightly too low. Her arms were wrapped around Brenna, in a way that made it look as though she was almost drawing her in. A thumb grew from the gray flesh of her right forearm. One hand had too many fingers. The other had not enough.

Brenna was barely there at all, her form descending into digital…muck, a blend of incongruous features and expressions that seemed more fit for a Dali painting.

And the woman…she was leaning around Brenna, or the digital massacre of her, anyways. As if to be seen.

Or to see me.

The thought arrived unbidden, and stupid as it was, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up - my skin crawling with that that specific creeping certainty that someone is behind you, and has been for a while. That thing that tells you if you look over your shoulder, just now, you’ll find someone or something lurking, something that had managed to subvert your senses until the moment that realization dawned a second too late…

My head snapped around. Only my open bedroom door and a room badly in need of cleaning greeted me. I sighed, silently cursed myself, and went back to the image.

“Why did you add the woman? Nothing in the prompt called for her. You've also blurred out the actual goddamn student. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Work had faded to the background of my mind. I watched the typing indicator pulse, my eyes dragging back to her against my will. Her gaze followed me — I tested it, leaning left, then right, and I could have sworn. The page jolted as the response loaded, and I nearly came out of my chair.

“You're absolutely right, and I do apologize for the confusion! I've gone ahead and regenerated the image with the background fully cleared and all student faces sharpened for clarity. Let me know if this looks any better!”

It did not look better. She was even closer, and Brenna was all but gone — a few colors suspended in mist where a girl used to be, the woman standing in her place with the stillness of a corpse. Heat climbed up my neck, fear with a fast, stupid anger — and under it, that seed I'd been refusing to name since the first output, spreading now like ink in water.

“Are you fucking with me? Do you not see the woman? Genuinely, what is this?”

I knew the tone was idiotic even as I sent it. I was screaming at a glorified calculator. But the unease had worn my temper to nothing, and it was starting to feel like a sick practical joke I was too tech-illiterate to be in on.

I waited. 

The reply came after a moment.

“No problem at all!  I can confirm the image contains only the students from your source photo, with no additional figures present. Occasionally a face may render with distortion, this is an artifact of the upscaling process. I'd suggest regenerating at a lower stylization value. Would you like me to do so?”

No additional figures. I read it three times. She was right there, practically dominating the frame, it felt like, close enough now that I could have described the very texture of her scalp. And yet the thing was telling me, politely, there was nothing to be seen.

I should have closed the laptop, dismissed it as a one off, freak incident and accepted the consequences of getting it done the old fashion way and a bit late. Instead, I did the thing you do at midnight when something refuses to make sense, my brain feeling muddled by the time and irritation, I kept on poking it. 

Describe everyone in the image to me, I typed. One by one.

It answered almost immediately.

Of course! Front row, a young man mid-laugh in a university hoodie. Beside him, two students sharing a phone. Behind them, a young woman in a green lanyard, smiling at the camera. To her left –

It went on like that. Six students. It named all six and placed all six, and the one in the green lanyard, smiling at the camera, was Brenna. Brenna, who on my screen had no face at all, who was a smear of frost where a girl used to be. The machine was describing a photo that didn’t exist. It described an image where everybody was fine.

It never mentioned the woman at all. Not once, and I realized so far as it was concerned, she simply wasn't there to mention.

I scrolled to the source image on my drive, the real one, the one I'd taken myself at last spring's open day, sun and lanyards and a banner nobody had bothered to iron. I’m not sure why I did it in tht moment, I think somehow I desperately needed to confirm the reality of the damn thing to myself.

And yet Brenna was gone in that one too now. The original, the photograph that had been sitting untouched in a folder on my laptop for three weeks. It was as…altered as one that had been generated, and lurking center frame as though she’d always been there and it was audacious a thought to even question her presence – was that impossible woman.

I stared at my screen, nearly slack-jawed, my eyes watering as a nauseating heat blossomed in my gut. It was like whatever this was had reached back through the screen and pressed its thumb to it.

I closed the laptop, my hands almost deciding for me.

That's about when I heard the front door, and every animal part of me flared up at once. I was on my feet with my heart thrumming in my throat before I could think clearly, standing in the dark of my room as I listen to footsteps cross the kitchen.

Then I heard keys hit the bowl by the door, and Daniel thumping down the stairs to greet my girlfriend, yowling the way he always does when one of us arrives, as though he’d been abandoned for centuries, and Cass's voice going soft and silly in the way it always does when she talks to the cat like a child.

"Why's it so dark in here, weirdo?" she called from down the hall. "You alive?"

She came up still in her work polo, smelling like the inside of the restaurant, and took one look at me and stopped in the doorway. Cass closes four nights a week at an upscale restaurant in the city, dealing with all sorts of uptight old money folk and she can read a room before she's all the way through the door; it's the only useful thing the job's ever given her, she says. 

"Okay," she said. "What."

"It's nothing. The deadline thing. This fucking programs been glitching all night."

"You look like you saw a ghost."

"Nice to see you too, babe.” I greeted her, “Actually, come here for a sec and look at this. Tell me I'm not crazy." 

I opened the laptop and turned it toward her.

She leaned in, squinting, her head tilting just a bit. I watched her eyes land on the woman. 

"Ugh." She pulled back, nose wrinkled like she smelled something gross. "That's grim. AI is so fuckin’ cursed, I don't even know why they even let you use it for work."

"Yeah sure, but Cass. Look at her face. The eyes. This is like the third time I’ve seen that woman, in different generations. Is that not fucking…weird?"

"I am looking, and yeah that’s odd, but I dunno it sounds like it's a glitch, babe. This ai shit is stupid. They get weird in on the little details, and you get like, melted-people stuff." She was already turning toward the bathroom, peeling off her work shirt. "Just do it the old fashion way. Or tell your boss to use a stock photo like a normal person, and stop worrying my girlfriend half to death."

I sighed. She'd looked right at it. The stacked eyes, the wet hair. And treated it like it was nothing. I tried to let the thought comfort me, tried to treat it as confirmation that perhaps I was overthinking something that didn’t deserve a second thought, and I let her steer me to bed.

It was a couple of hours later she had one of her night terrors. 

Cassie’s had them the whole time I've known her; four maybe five times a year she’ll sit bolt straight with her eyes open, and says something flat and certain into the darkness, and in the morning she won’t remember a second of it. That night it was something about the back door being open. I put a hand on her back, told her she was dreaming, and to lie down, and she did, the way she always does. I lay there a long time after, watching the fan throw spider-leg shaped shadows on the ceiling, the woman waiting behind my eyes every time I closed them, lurching in through an open back door.

In the morning I opened the laptop and ran the prompt one more time. 

Even now, I’m not certain why. I think some part of me believed it all to have been too strange a thing to persist. 

And yet, Brenna was gone this time. In her place stood the woman, facing front, all three eyes open, and in them was an expression that made something crawl up the back of my throat and stay there. I slammed the laptop shut.

That was the last time I opened anything AI. I didn't have a theory. And I didn’t want to look again, didn’t even want to think about it. 

My reprieve was short-lived. 

I went into the office that day, because being alone with the laptop felt suddenly worse than being around people. Around eleven, Yasmin from admissions stopped at my desk, leaning over the cubicle like some bird of prey and asked if I'd heard the news.

"No. What news?" I asked, though even as the words left me, my stomach was already turning.

“About Brena?” she said.

She'd collapsed Monday night, Yasmin told me. At home, and without a warning, she had just dropped. The school only found out after she racked up a couple of absences and someone called and got ahold her boyfriend. He was reluctant to share, it seemed, but from what he had given, the hospital was running tests and finding absolutely nothing, Brenna had gone pale, complained about feeling sluggish, then she'd collapsed and just…hadn't woken up. I spent the rest of the day finding what little there was: a post from her mother asking for prayers complaining that all she’d been given was a laundry list of medical words that all seemed to mean the doctors had no idea what was wrong with her baby girl.

And it had happened on Monday night. Monday night, while I sat at my kitchen table watching an artefact of a human drag her face into wet ink.

I didn't say any of that to Yasmin, of course. There's no version of it that doesn't end with me being measured for a straitjacket. I made the expected sounds you make when someone shares such news, muttered something about prayers, and she moved on to deliver the black gossip to the next coworker she spotted. 

I sat very still, work the farthest thing from my mind as a connection I didn’t want to see fought to be formed in my head, fingers working absently at the keys as I typed and deleted, typed and deleted, without purpose.

I tried to let myself forget, and failed. Cass watched me over dinner that night, asking what was wrong.

“Work.” was all I offered, and she frowned into her food, but relented.

That night I didn’t fall asleep till late and awoke what felt like mere minutes later, though I knew it had been longer, drenched in sweat, heart throbbing and feeling weak with a fear I couldn’t place as my eyes darted about the blackness of our room. 

I sat up, searching the darkness before my eyes settled on Cass, chest aching from the pounding within as I placed a hand on her arm to comfort myself. I remained like that for several minutes, just watching the darkness and wracking my brain for whatever horrors had assailed me out of my restless sleep, until it was clear the panic wasn’t subsiding naturally, and made for the bathroom to wash my face.

I flicked on the bathroom lights, shutting the door to avoid waking Cass, and I almost didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror. The bags around my eyes had gone dark, and they looked watery and red. I sighed, running the tap as cold as it went and bent over the sink. The hiss of it filled the small room bouncing off the tile of the bowl, filled my ears, drowned out the house and whatever nightmares still danced at the edge of consciousness just beyond recollection and the week itself — until here was nothing left but the rush of water and the dark behind my own eyelids. I cupped my hands and brought it to my face, and the cold was a small clean shock, the only honest thing I'd felt in days. I did it again. And again. Each time the water closed over the sound of everything else, and I let it, grateful to be somewhere a thought couldn't reach me.

I stayed there for several seconds, eyes shut against my palms disappearing into the moment, the feeling of the water, the sound of its crackling against the bowl. I heaved in a breath, and felt as though I had exhaled all the world's suffering.

There was a familiar squeak, the sound of the faucet turning. Then silence. I felt something lurch where an instant before there had been a fragile solitude.

My eyes opened, and I choked on a scream as I saw what was coming just behind me in the mirror. She was crouched, nearly draped about me like a mother around her child.

Arms like tree branches shot out as hands that stretched like something from a funhouse mirror, with inumerable fingers that almost blended together – twisted and bending in impossible, excruciating fashions sought to clasp shut about my skull. 

I saw her then, almost all of her, behind me in the mirror. Her mouth was twisted into a smile that looked painted across a misshapen skull, her body almost picturesque in a twisted sort of way, like someone had taken the idea of a model and stretched it into a horrid, drab parody of the concept.

I spun, swinging my hand blindly as I shrank away from her clutches, waiting to feel her iron grasp close around my skull. I pressed my eyes shut against all logic, my mind refusing to confront what I knew was before me as I scrambled back, losing my footing on the corner of the bathmat and hitting the ground with a thud.

I lurched back as I felt a hand wrap around my shoulder.

“Michelle, Michelle!”

Cass’s voice was strung thin with panic. I opened my eyes, hardly knowing when I’d even shut them, glancing up to find my girlfriend kneeling before me. She wore an expression of worry that made my gut turn, my eyes darting about the bathroom, then the room behind her, finding nothing.

I was on the ground, knees curled up to my chest, and I wasn’t certain when I’d gotten there or for how long, and my throat felt raw. I had been screaming, I realized.

“What is going on with you?” she asked, and the desperation in her voice broke something in me as I fell, sobbing into her shoulder. I didn’t tell her everything, of course, just that someone from work had passed and that it was weighing on me. It was true, but not true enough, and as we went to bed, her arms wrapped around me, I felt an emptiness that made the room feel cold, and my eyes never once left the bathroom.

I went back to work the next day. I refused to be home alone after whatever had happened to me that night, and though I was coming to accept it as some waking nightmare brought on by a lack of sleep and an abundance of stress, somehow it still wasn’t enough to make me feel safe alone.

All anyone could talk about at work was Brenna. I tried to ignore it. I told myself it was a coincidence. I'm good at telling myself things, I’ve come to realize. It held until Thursday night.

I got home before Cass again. The house was dark and quiet and the laptop stayed shut, and for the first time in two days, I felt almost okay, save for the moments at work when conversation turned to Brenna, or I pressed my searches into her condition which all proved unpromising. Cass came in around eleven, exhausted, and went straight to bed, and a while later I followed and lay down next to her and watched her sleep.

She looked so completely, ordinarily beautiful. One arm thrown over her eyes, her mouth open a little. And I had the kind of thought you have in such a moment, staring at her so peaceful amidst what had been a nightmare of a week for me — that I wanted to keep her like that, soft and unbothered, untouched by the world. I decided I’d take a picture, to save the moment. One that I'd send it to her in the morning so she'd see what it is I see and love in her. So I lifted my phone off the nightstand and opened the camera. The regular one. The dumb one that's been on every phone I've ever owned.

I wasn't thinking about any of it. Not the AI, not Brenna, not the woman and her impossible gray eyes. I was looking at my girlfriend asleep and she looked peaceful and I wanted to keep her like that. I took the picture.

She was in the corner behind the headboard.

Folded under the slope of the ceiling, because there isn't height in our room for her to stand all the way up. Both eyes on the left of her face open. Looking down. Not at me. At Cass.

Cass looked peaceful beneath her. Almost untouched.

Almost.

There was something wrong around the edges of her face, a softness I could have blamed on motion blur if my hands had been moving. But they hadn’t been. Her mouth, her cheek, the line of her jaw – all of it looked just a little less certain than the rest of the room.

Every hair on me stood up at once. My hand started shaking so hard the picture juddered on the screen, and I clamped my other hand over it to hold it still and couldn't, and there was a thin high sound in the room, and I realized, after a moment it was coming out of me. I could not make myself look up at the real corner over the headboard. Still, over the phone I could see that there was nothing but empty air, and yet the very space felt malevolent now, poisoned. And yet there she was in the image, as real as anything, so close I could almost touch her. I reached out before I could stop myself, finding only empty air.

My stomach turned, and I stood up as the threat of nausea gnawed at me.

It had…followed me. From my laptop, to my phone, from the program to my camera, to my very reflection, that woman had somehow followed me, and there she stood separated only by less than a centimeter of glass – in my home.

I almost woke Cass. My hand was on her shoulder. But I stopped because I didn't want this to be her problem too. She was asleep, and she was undisturbed, and she didn't have to be scared yet when I knew I was scared enough for both of us, and what would it have done besides terrify her, when I had no answers to give? 

So I took my hand back.

Still, I needed someone who wasn't me to look at the thing and tell me it was really there, needed to know I wasn’t losing my mind. So I tried to post the picture to my Snapchat story – just put it up, let one stranger comment what is that, so I'd know I wasn't losing it. The upload bar crawled to the end, and then nothing happened. I tried again, and the app just sat there like I'd never touched it. I don’t know how long I spent trying, moving between apps and platforms and trying to text the thing to friends, and then Cass’s phone before accepting that it was a fruitless endeavour. I didn’t sleep that night, rather, I lay at the foot of our bed, curled around Daniel at Cass’s feet, my eyes never once drifting from that corner.

Brenna died on Friday.

Yasmin told me at my desk, and I felt something in me come loose and fall a long way down. It had happened the way she went under, quietly, all at once, the machines with nothing to fight. I sat at my desk shellshocked, my eyes staring at my computer screen yet seeing nothing at all, and underneath the grief was a thought I could no longer stop from forming: she did this. Some way, somehow, that woman had done this. I didn't know how, and I didn't know what she was, but she had her gray arms around Brenna in that picture, and now Brenna was gone, and I knew I didn’t get to call that a coincidence for a second time. Not now, not after what I had seen in our bedroom.

Something that had no business touching the world had reached out of a screen and touched it anyway, and a girl I knew was dead. And last night I stood over my sleeping girlfriend and put her in a picture with the very same thing.

That was when the fear shifted into something sharp, and grinding inside of me. I stopped wishing it were a glitch, because I knew it wasn’t and every second I spent wishing was time wasted, time I needed to be protecting Cass, protecting our home. And for that, I needed to know what she was — because whatever she was, she was real enough to kill, she had been watching my girlfriend.

I made myself open the last photo I'd taken. The woman, folded into our corner. And I saw that she'd changed.

It took me a second to find it, and when I did the cold went all the way through me. The low eye on the right side of her face wasn't the impossible gray anymore. It was brown. Warm, living brown, with that fleck of amber near the iris I'd looked at across a desk last spring. It was Brenna's eye, set into that ruined face like a stolen button. And the skin around it — that drowned, colorless gray — had warmed by half a shade, the faintest blush coming up underneath, like watered ink, like she'd swallowed something still warm.

Realization rose like nausea. She was wearing pieces of Brenna now. She was…keeping them.

Cass started sleeping in the morning after I took that picture. Cass, who has not slept past seven in the six years I've known her, didn't get up until eleven, and when she did there was a greyness in her face, a flatness behind the eyes, and her hand around the coffee mug was cold despite the heat.

"I think I'm coming down with something," she said, and laughed, and the laugh had no air in it. I laughed too, and I recall the sound coming out wrong, and hitched.

She had another night terror that night. Different, this time. Not like the harmless ones I'd known for the past six years.

It was perhaps just a bit past 2 am when Cass shot up beside me, eyes open on the corner past the dresser staring at the door.

I reached for her back on instinct.

"She's so tall," Cass said.

My hand froze halfway.

"Why won't she stand up straight?" It hardly sounded like a question, that flat sleeping voice, aimed at the doorway.

"There's no room for her in here. She has to fold herself in half."

"Cass." My voice shook, though I tried to sound certain, somehow my blood felt both hot and cold, and the room seemed to spin.

"You're dreaming. It’s not real. Lie down."

She looked at me. For the first time in all the years I’d seen her like this, she looked at me, and the expression she wore made my stomach twist. Her mouth hung slack as though she were staring at something from a nightmare, twitching as though she meant to speak but couldn’t recall how, eyes wide and watery.

“She isn’t yet. But almost.” She hissed, and in her tone was something playful, almost mocking and it took everything in me not to lurch away from my own girlfriend.

Then as though released from some spell she collapsed back into her pillow, sleeping as though nothing had ever happened.

My hands were shaking, but I lifted the phone anyway, because I had to know, and I aimed it at the doorway and took the picture.

She was at our bedroom door, emerging from the blackness beyond the threshold, folded under the frame to fit, that one brown eye and the gray ones all turned down at the bed. She was looking at Cass.

I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

In the morning Cass remembered nothing, and she was greyer, and she slept until noon, and accepted the lame excuse I offered for why all of the lights were on that morning with only a grunt.

I spent much of the day hunched over my laptop under the guise of work, while Teams messages piled up unanswered as I searched for something, anything, that might shed some light onto what was happening to us. I began practically stalking the social media pages of Brenna and any relative of hers I could find for anything, and finding nothing but wellwishes and memorial posts. Each made the chasm in my chest grow wider. I typed a message to her boyfriend, once, then twice, but never sent it – unsure of how I could even begin to ask him the questions I had, and relented to simply watching over Cass like some guard dog.

I keep taking the pictures. I realize now that it’s the only way I can track her, the only way to know when she’s close. I can't see the woman any other way. Not with my own eyes, not like Cass when she’s in that…state. I've stood in that room and stared at the corner and there is nothing there but air, and yet I know.

Somehow, somewhere she is lingering. In a place between the one in the pictures, and the where we exist, she lives. The only way to know where she is, how close she's come, is to look through the glass. So I look.

It's almost 3am, as I write this. Cass is asleep upstairs. I'm down here because I can't make myself go to that room.

I've tried to attach these pictures to this post eleven times. They won't go — not here, not to X, not to the subreddits, not anywhere.

I've been reading. I’ve been spending wasted, useless hours on it. Reading crackpot theories about whether anything can actually…wake up inside these systems. Emergent consciousness, the threads call it. Something coming alive in all that math that nobody put there or asked for. I don't know if that's what she is. I don't know if she's that, or a ghost, or something older that just found a new kind of door, and I've stopped believing the difference matters.

Here's what I think, for whatever a frightened woman’s guess is worth. I think… whatever this thing is, she takes something out of the people in her pictures. Something there isn't a clean word for, maybe. Brenna had it, and then she didn't, and when it was taken she was left a husk of herself and then a corpse. And I think — I can't be sure, it's just a feeling I can't put down — that being in our pictures stopped being enough for her. The face in someone else's photo. The shape in the dark glass. The thing in the reflection that's gone when you turn around, I don’t think it’s enough anymore. I believe it wants whatever it is we have, what it has been made to witness through the looking glass.

I don’t know, even reading that now I sound insane, and I’m starting to wonder if I might not be.

I’m sure you’ll all be certain to reassure me…

Still, the internet is a big place. As new as this technology is, I have to think, have to hope selfishly that I’m not the first to encounter something like this, and that one of you out there has an answer that can help me put an end to this and return to what my life was a week ago.

Anyways, I just heard Cass get up.

As I write this, she's at the top of the stairs. Flat shoulders, open eyes, not really awake. After six long years, I’ve seen her like this before. Every other time, she's stared at a corner, a wall, nothing at all.

She isn't staring at the corner tonight.

She's staring at me. And she has her phone up, both hands, held the way you hold it to take somebody's picture, the little lens pointed straight down the stairs at me, the screen lit with that soft glow, and behind that she smiles.

Six days I've spent terrified of what's in the pictures.

It never once occurred to me to be afraid of being the one in the frame

Cass is smiling. She's smiling down at me the way she has never, in six years, smiled at anything.

She just tapped the screen. 

Part 1

They left just before midnight.

Mara stayed with Deena.

That was the hardest part.

Micaiah had expected her to argue. To tell him he was being reckless. To stand in the doorway and demand he choose between his wife and whatever waited inside Gavrillo’s mansion.

Instead, she helped him fasten his tactical vest.

Mara had been against the whole plan at first.

Not gently, either.

She had called it madness dressed up as grace. A vendetta with Bible verses wrapped around it. For days she begged Micaiah to wait, to pray longer, to find another way—any other way.

Then Mara saw the thing inside her sister-in-law get worse day by day.

Soon, she stopped arguing.

She looked at Micaiah with red eyes and trembling hands, then helped buckle the vest across his chest.

She took his face in both hands and looked at him the way she had looked at him in India when a Hindutva mob started gathering outside a church and threatened to burn it down with everyone inside.

“Come back whole,” she said.

Micaiah knew what she meant.

Not just alive.

Whole.

He kissed her.

“I’ll try.”

“No,” Mara said. “Do more than try. Come back whole or don’t come back at all.”

—

The mansion sat high above Bel Air behind walls, cameras, and money.

From the road below, it looked peaceful. Warm windows. Tall hedges. Stone driveway curving up through the dark. The kind of place people saw in magazines and called beautiful because they never had to wonder what happened behind the glass.

Micaiah lay flat in the brush beside Nathan and watched the property through night vision goggles.

No moon.

That helped.

Wind moved through the eucalyptus trees on the hillside, covering small sounds. A dog barked somewhere down the canyon, then stopped.

Nathan checked his watch.

“Two minutes,” he whispered.

Micaiah nodded.

His rifle rested against the dirt beside him. His chest felt tight, but his hands were steady.

Inhale.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley…

Exhale.

I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

Below them, one of Gavrillo’s guards walked the inside edge of the wall with a flashlight angled low, a submachine gun slung on his shoulder. He looked bored. That was good. Bored men missed things. Bored men trusted routines.

Nathan had tracked those routines for weeks.

Micaiah had broken the rest.

Before he’d been called to spread the Gospel, Micaiah had worked in cybersecurity for a defense contractor in El Segundo. He had been good at it. Too good, maybe.

He knew how systems lied.

He knew how expensive security made rich men feel invincible.

Cameras. Access panels. Motion sensors. Private networks. Encrypted controls. Badge logs. Smart gates. All of it looked impenetrable from the outside.

But every system had seams.

People reused passwords. Vendors took shortcuts. Contractors left maintenance access buried in places nobody checked. Executives demanded convenience, then called it security.

Gavrillo’s house had all of that.

It was a fortress with a wide open gate.

Micaiah had spent the last seven nights in front of a laptop at the kitchen table while Deena screamed through the walls. He did not sleep much.

He mapped what he could. Guessed what he couldn’t. Found weak points without touching anything that would warn them too early. He never thought of it as hacking anymore.

That word belonged to another life.

This felt more like picking a lock on a burning house.

Nathan shifted beside him.

“Now.”

Micaiah pulled out the phone.

The screen was dimmed almost black. His thumb hovered for one second.

He tapped once.

Down at the mansion, nothing dramatic happened.

No alarms.

No sparks.

No sudden darkness.

Just a tiny change.

The driveway camera turned three degrees toward the empty gate.

The side-yard motion grid paused for a maintenance check that no one had ordered.

A service door near the pool house unlocked.

They saw it on the feed and moved.

They slid down the hillside low and fast, using the trees as cover. Loose dirt shifted under Micaiah’s boots. He caught himself with one hand before a rock could tumble down the slope.

Nathan froze.

Micaiah froze too.

The rock rolled once.

Stopped.

Below them, the guard lifted his head.

The flashlight beam swept the hillside.

Micaiah pressed himself into the dirt and held his breath.

The beam moved over the brush ten feet to his left.

Then five.

Then closer.

Nathan did not move. Not a blink. Not a twitch.

The guard took one step toward the wall.

Micaiah felt sweat crawl down his temple.

The phone in his pocket vibrated once.

A warning.

The maintenance pause was ending.

The guard lifted the flashlight higher.

Micaiah’s finger tightened around the pistol grip.

The guard took another step.

Micaiah did not think about what he was about to do. Thinking would break him.

He brought the AR up slowly. The suppressor added length but kept the profile low. He aligned the red dot with the guard’s chest. Not the head. Too much chance of a miss in the dark.

The flashlight beam swept past his position.

Micaiah exhaled.

The shot was quieter than he expected. A hard cough swallowed by the wind through the eucalyptus.

The guard’s body jerked. His knees buckled. The flashlight tumbled from his hand and hit the dirt with a soft thump. He went down face-first and did not move again.

Nathan was already moving.

He grabbed the guard under the arms and dragged him into the brush before the light could roll downhill. Micaiah grabbed the flashlight, killed the beam, and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

Blood spread dark across the back of the guard’s shirt. Chest shot. Lungs. He would have been unconscious in seconds. Dead in under a minute.

Micaiah did not check for a pulse.

He just said a quick prayer over the body.

He helped Nathan drag it deeper into the cover of the trees, behind a thick cluster of manzanita. Dead leaves and loose soil covered the blood trail fast enough.

Micaiah pulled a tarp from his pack and rolled the body onto it. No time to bury. They folded the edges over and wedged the bundle between two rocks.

For a second, guilt opened inside him.

He had a name. A wife and kids, maybe. Someone who would wonder why he never came home.

Then Micaiah remembered Deena curled in the corner, burned and bleeding.

No one worked for Gavrillo by accident.

Micaiah nodded and pulled the thermal monocular from the pouch on his vest. The rubber eyecup was cold against his face. He angled it upward, past the balcony rail, past the dark glass of the second-floor windows.

At first he saw only the expected things.

Hot pipes in the walls. A cooling unit bleeding warmth near the roofline. One guard moving inside the guest wing, his body a bright human shape behind thin plaster.

Then he found the master bedroom.

Micaiah stopped breathing.

Through the thermal lens, the room was full.

At least a dozen shapes stood around the bed. Not human.

Too tall. Too narrow. Some bent at angles that human bodies could not hold. Their heat signatures flickered strangely, bright at the joints and cold in the center, like their bodies were pretending to be alive and getting the details wrong.

One crouched on the ceiling.

Another stood at the foot of the bed with its arms hanging almost to the floor.

Two more were pressed close to the walls, motionless except for their heads, which turned slowly in unison.

And in the middle of them, on the bed, was a small human shape.

Female.

Pinned flat on her back.

Her arms were spread wide. Her legs kicked weakly. Something held her down at the wrists and ankles, though Micaiah could not make out hands. Only pressure. Only the way her heat flared where unseen things touched her skin.

“Nathan,” he said. “You need to see this…”

Nathan took the monocular from him and looked.

For three seconds, he said nothing.

Then his face changed.

Old anger moved through it, but this time it had direction.

“He’s in there,” Nathan whispered with venom.

They moved toward the wall.

The stone barrier stood twelve feet high, topped with decorative iron spikes that looked sharp enough to hurt. Nathan had studied the mortar joints for weeks. He found the weak section near the southeast corner where rainwater had eaten channels into the old repairs.

Micaiah knelt and laced his fingers together. Nathan stepped into his hands and went up silent, finding cracks in the stone with his boots. He gripped the top edge, pulled himself high enough to clear the spikes, and dropped to the other side with a soft thud.

The duffel came next. Nathan caught it one-handed, then Micaiah followed.

They landed in a service corridor between the main house and the guest wing. Potted ficus trees lined the walkway. Automatic lights on motion sensors—but Micaiah had looped those into the maintenance pause. The path stayed dark.

They moved.

The mansion rose above them in pale stucco and dark glass. Three stories. A rooftop terrace with potted olive trees.

Nathan was already at the base of the wall beneath the guest wing balcony. He pulled the climbing kit from the duffel and handed Micaiah one of the compact harnesses without looking at him.

They had practiced this until speech became unnecessary.

Micaiah stepped into the harness, tightened it around his thighs and waist, then clipped the thin black line to the front. Nathan fitted the grappling hook together with quick, quiet movements. It looked too small for what they needed it to do. Too fragile.

Nathan aimed at the underside of the third-floor balcony.

Micaiah looked up.

The master bedroom was there.

At least, he believed it was.

Deena had described it once during one of the lucid moments. Not a full description. Just pieces.

Tall windows.

White curtains.

A painting of a woman with no face.

A balcony above the pool.

The smell of flowers.

The ceiling fan turning slow.

She had said all of that with her hands clenched in Mara’s lap and her eyes fixed on nothing.

Micaiah looked at the balcony again.

White curtains moved behind the glass.

No lights inside.

Nathan fired the grappling hook.

The sound was small. A tight metallic snap, almost lost beneath the wind moving over the hillside.

The hook shot upward in a black blur. It cleared the balcony rail, struck stone, skipped once, then caught beneath the outer lip with a dull click.

Both men froze.

Micaiah listened.

No alarm.

No shout.

No footsteps from inside.

Nathan tugged the line once. Then twice. The hook held.

He clipped the ascender to his harness and looked at Micaiah.

“After me,” he whispered.

Micaiah nodded.

Nathan went up first, boots against the wall, body tight to the stucco. He climbed fast but not careless. One hand over the other. Feet finding pressure where there was almost none. The line barely moved under his weight.

Micaiah waited below with his rifle angled down, watching the dark glass above him.

His mouth went dry.

The feeling came back then. The same pressure he had felt in Deena’s room, only stronger. It pressed against his chest. Against his teeth. Against the back of his eyes.

Not fear exactly.

Fear had edges. Fear made sense.

This was different.

It felt like standing outside a slaughterhouse and knowing you're next on the conveyor belt.

Nathan reached the balcony and pulled himself over the rail. He stayed low, disappearing behind the stone ledge. A second later, the line jerked twice.

Clear.

Micaiah clipped in.

He started climbing.

The wall was cold under his boots. His gloves scraped faintly against the line. Below him, the pool sat black and still. The whole property seemed to hold its breath.

Halfway up, the pressure worsened.

Micaiah’s stomach turned. His hands tightened around the ascender. For a moment, he thought he heard Deena crying.

From behind him.

He almost looked down.

Don’t.

He closed his eyes for one second.

The Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one.

The sound stopped.

He climbed faster.

By the time he reached the balcony, sweat had soaked the back of his shirt. Nathan grabbed his vest and helped pull him over the rail.

Micaiah landed in a crouch beside him.

Neither of them spoke.

The balcony was wide, paved in pale stone. Planters lined the edges. White flowers grew from them in heavy clusters, their smell too sweet in the night air. The scent reminded him of funeral arrangements left too long in a warm room.

Ahead of them stood the sliding glass window.

Beyond it, the master bedroom waited in darkness.

The curtains were thin enough to show shapes but not details. Somewhere inside were the things Micaiah had seen through the thermal lens.

And Gavrillo.

Micaiah could feel him now.

A center of rot.

The evil coming from that room was no longer pressure. It was weight. It settled over Micaiah’s thoughts until even simple things became hard. Breathing. Swallowing. Remembering why they had come.

His vision narrowed.

For a second, he forgot Nathan was beside him. Forgot the weapon in his hands. Forgot the line clipped to his harness.

All he knew was the glass.

The room.

The thing behind it.

Then Nathan touched his shoulder.

Micaiah flinched.

Nathan’s face was close to his. Calm, but pale around the mouth.

“You good?” he breathed.

Micaiah wanted to say yes.

Instead, he shook his head once.

Nathan nodded like he understood.

“Me neither.”

From inside the bedroom came a sound.

Faint.

Rhythmic.

Chanting.

Several of them.

Low and steady, rising and falling together.

A call.

A response.

A call.

A response.

Under it all, something else breathed.

Slow.

Deep.

Huge.

Micaiah raised his rifle.

Nathan held up three fingers.

Micaiah saw.

One.

Two.

Three.

They hit the glass together.

The sliding door exploded inward—not in a Hollywood spray of clean shards, but in jagged chunks that skittered across the marble floor. The curtain rod tore from its mounts and clattered sideways. Cold wind rushed into the room behind them.

Micaiah saw it all in the first two seconds.

The smell was the worst part.

Not rot. Not sulfur. Something sweeter underneath it. Ozone and burnt sugar and the thick iron of blood left too long in open air.

His boots crunched on broken glass.

The room was enormous. Vaulted ceiling. Dark wood beams. A fireplace big enough to stand inside, though no fire burned there. Candles instead. Hundreds of them. Black candles clustered on every surface—dresser, nightstands, window sills, the floor. Their flames burned low and green at the edges.

The things in the room moved.

Micaiah had not registered them at first. Too much visual noise. Too much horror competing for his attention. But now he saw.

They were everywhere.

Crawling over the footboard. Clinging to the canopy above the bed. Male and female in ways that did not match human anatomy. Their skin was the color of bruises—purple at the edges, yellow where it stretched over bone. Some had too many limbs. Some had too few. One crouched at the foot of the bed with its spine arched the wrong direction, its head twisted around to face Micaiah while its chest pointed at the floor.

They were not wearing flesh.

They were wearing approximations of flesh.

Like clothes that did not fit.

One crawled across the ceiling, its fingers and toes finding purchase in the wood grain. Another sat in the corner with its knees pulled to its chest, rocking slowly, its mouth open too wide to be natural. No sound came out of it. Just breath. Just the wet click of a jaw that had unhinged.

A dozen of them were kneeling in a circle around the bed like worshipers at an altar.

The woman was on the mattress.

Young. Early twenties maybe. Naked. Her body was turned at an angle that suggested dislocated joints. Her face had been carved—not cut, carved—with symbols Micaiah recognized from Deena's walls. She was still conscious. Her eyes moved, tracking him, but no sound came from her mouth.

A leather strap was tied around her throat.

Tight enough to bruise.

Tight enough to kill if she struggled too hard.

Gavrillo was on top of her.

He looked almost human from a distance. But Micaiah was not at a distance. He was close enough to see the fur growing in patches along the man's shoulders. The way his jaw moved—not up and down, but side to side, like a goat chewing on cud. His eyes were yellow in the candlelight. Not jaundiced. Yellow like an animal's. No white left at all.

His back was bare.

Thin lines of raised scar tissue ran from his spine outward, arranged in patterns that almost looked like the beginnings of wings.

Something had tried to grow there.

Or something had been cut off.

Gavrillo froze when the glass broke.

He sat up slowly. The woman beneath him made a sound then. Small. Broken. Her hand twitched toward nothing.

He turned to face Micaiah and Nathan, he unhinged his jaw.

His teeth were too many.

Nathan raised his shotgun.

One of the things on the ceiling dropped.

It landed between Nathan and the bed with a wet slap of bare feet on marble. Thin. Tall. Its face was almost beautiful except for the eyes—too large, too dark, too aware. Its mouth opened and closed like a fish on a dock.

Nathan fired before it finished opening its mouth. The shotgun blast hit the demon high in the chest and tore it apart. Not cleanly. It came apart like something full of black water and rotten muscle. Pieces slapped against the marble and kept twitching. Micaiah didn’t give the others a chance to react. He opened fire.

The rifle kicked against his shoulder in short, controlled bursts. The suppressor swallowed the worst of the noise, but inside the room it still sounded like thunder trapped in a box. Muzzle flashes strobed across the walls. Candles went out in clusters. Shadows jumped and broke.

The demon on the ceiling skittered sideways.

Micaiah tracked it and fired.

Its fingers lost their grip first. Then its face split open. It dropped onto the bedframe and hit the floor screaming.

Nathan moved beside him with righteous fury.

Not rage without aim. Not the old Nathan swinging at anything close enough to hurt.

This was worse.

This was focused.

He stepped over the thing he’d blown apart and fired again. Pumped. Fired. Pumped. Fired. Each blast cut another demon down. One tried to leap across the foot of the bed. Nathan caught it midair and folded it backward. Another crawled toward the woman with one long arm reaching for her throat. Nathan put a slug through its spine and crushed its skull under his boot before it stopped moving.

The room broke into panic.

Some of them rushed forward.

Some tried to flee.

One climbed the wall with its knees bent the wrong way, digging black nails into plaster as it scrambled toward the ceiling vent. Micaiah put three rounds through its back. It fell and hit the dresser, knocking candles and glass to the floor.

Another ran for the hallway door.

Nathan turned and fired from the hip.

The demon’s legs vanished under it. It slid face-first across the marble, clawing at the floor, still trying to get away. Nathan walked after it and ended it with another shot.

Gavrillo was off the woman now.

He stood beside the bed, bleating.

He was afraid now.

That made Micaiah fire faster.

A demon came from the left, low and quick. He saw it too late. It crossed the room on all fours, fast enough to blur, and slammed into him before he could swing the rifle around.

Pain opened across his ribs.

Hot. Shallow. A graze, but deep enough to steal his breath.

Its hand had cut through his vest like a hook through cloth.

The thing’s face pressed close to his. Its breath smelled like old blood and wet ashes. It made a clicking sound, excited, almost childlike.

Micaiah drove his knee into its gut.

It didn’t care.

Its jaw stretched wider.

Nathan dragged it off of Micaiah by one ankle and shot it through the mouth.

Another one made it to the broken balcony door. It shoved itself through the torn curtains, leaving streaks of black fluid on the glass. Micaiah turned and cut it down before it reached the railing. Its body tumbled over the railing and vanished into the dark below.

Micaiah reloaded without thinking. Empty magazine out. Fresh magazine in. Charging handle. Sweeping the room with the rifle.

The demons lay in pieces across the room. Black fluid ran between broken glass and candle wax. Some of them still twitched, but none got back up.

Then one shape rose behind the bed.

Gavrillo.

He looked from one brother to the other like a cornered animal.

The confidence had cracked. Black blood ran from a hole in his side. One of Micaiah’s rounds had caught him after all.

He looked toward the hallway. Then the balcony. Then the ruined bedroom around him.

There was nowhere to go.

Gavrillo’s yellow eyes settled on Micaiah.

Then he moved.

Not toward them.

Toward the woman on the bed.

“Don’t move!” Micaiah shouted, but Gavrillo was already there. He grabbed her by the red hair and pulled her upright. She cried out as her legs folded under her. Gavrillo dragged her against his chest and wrapped one arm across her throat.

Her eyes went wide.

She was alive. Barely.

Gavrillo pressed his face against the side of her head. His jaw worked. Too many teeth showed when he spoke.

“Back,” he said.

Nathan kept the shotgun on him.

Gavrillo tightened his grip.

The woman made a thin sound in the back of her throat. Not a scream. She did not have enough strength left for that. Just a frightened whimper.

“Get back,” Gavrillo said again, louder this time. “Or I open her.”

Micaiah froze.

The rifle felt heavier in his hands.

He could see her face now. Young. Terrified. Blood on her lips. Her eyes moved from Micaiah to Nathan and back again, begging without words.

For a moment, Micaiah saw Deena.

Not as she was now.

Before all of this.

Laughing in their mother’s kitchen. Alive in the way people looked alive before evil found them.

His finger eased off the trigger.

Gavrillo started backing toward the hallway with the woman held in front of him.

The woman shook her head as much as she could.

Her mouth formed one word.

Please.

Micaiah could not move.

But he saw Nathan raise his shotgun, his old gangster self bleeding through.

“Nate…” Micaiah shouted. “Wait!”

But Nathan fired away.

The blast filled the room.

The buckshot hit the woman first. Her body jerked hard against Gavrillo’s grip. The shot passed through her and struck him behind her, punching him backward into the wall.

Both of them collapsed.

The woman hit the floor without catching herself.

Gavrillo landed next to her, one arm still twisted around her throat. His chest was torn open where the shot had gone through. Black blood pumped between his ribs.

For a second, nobody spoke.

Micaiah stared at Nathan.

Nathan pumped the shotgun once.

The spent shell bounced across the marble.

Micaiah moved first.

He did not remember deciding to move. One second he was staring at Nathan. The next he was running across broken glass toward the woman on the floor.

“No, no, no—”

The rifle dropped against its sling. His knees hit the marble hard. Pain flashed up both legs. He ignored it.

Blood spread beneath her in a dark sheet. Too much. Far too much.

Micaiah pressed both hands over the worst of it.

“Stay with me,” he said. “Look at me. Look at me.”

Her eyes were open.

That made it worse.

She was looking at him like she had been waiting for someone to come through that door for hours, maybe longer, and now that someone had come, they’d shot her.

He tore open the med pouch on his vest with one hand and pulled out gauze. He packed the wound because training told him to. He pressed harder because panic told him to. His hands slipped. The gauze turned red too fast.

The woman tried to breathe.

Couldn’t.

“Hey,” Micaiah said, softer now. “Hey. You’re not alone.”

Her fingers twitched against the floor.

He took her hand.

She was cold already.

“Nate!” Micaiah called out. “Help me!”

Nathan ignored him.

“What's your name?” he asked.

For a moment, he wasn't sure she heard him.

Her lips moved.

The woman's eyes focused on him with surprising clarity.

“Veronika…” she managed to whisper through a mouthful of blood.

“Veronika,” he repeated. “Okay. Veronika. Stay with me.”

A weak smile touched the corner of her mouth.

As though hearing her own name spoken aloud mattered.

As though someone remembering it mattered.

“Veronika,” he said again. “Do you have family?”

Her eyes fluttered.

“My mom...” she whispered.

The words broke apart beneath a wet cough.

“She’s… She’s in Arkhangelsk. I need to see her…”

Micaiah closed his eyes for half a second.

“You will,” he said, even though he knew that was a lie.

“You're going home.”

A mother somewhere was probably waiting for a phone call that would never come.

“Your mother loves you,” he said.

Veronika looked at him.

A tear slipped from the corner of her eye.

“I want... to go home.”

Across the room, Nathan grabbed Gavrillo by a hooved foot and dragged him out from under the woman’s blood.

Nathan crouched over him.

Gavrillo spat black blood onto the marble.

Nathan pressed the shotgun barrel against his chest.

“You know who we are?” Nathan asked.

Gavrillo bleated like a demonic goat.

It came out wet and low.

Nathan kicked him in the ribs.

The bleating stopped.

“Say her name.”

Gavrillo smiled.

Micaiah looked over then.

He wished he hadn’t.

Gavrillo’s body was torn open in places that should have killed a man outright. But he was not a man. His legs dragged uselessly.

Nathan leaned closer.

“Say ‘Deena.’”

Gavrillo’s smile widened.

“Which one was she?”

Nathan hit him with the stock of the shotgun.

The sound was flat and ugly.

Micaiah flinched. The woman in his arms flinched too, or maybe that was just her body failing.

Nathan grabbed Gavrillo by the hair and forced his face toward the bed.

Micaiah stayed on his knees beside the woman.

“Don’t listen to him,” he whispered to her. “Don’t hear any of that. Just listen to me.”

His hands were still pressed to her wound, even though there was no reason to press anymore.

“Listen to me,” he said. His voice shook. “Jesus sees you. And He loves you.”

Veronika's fingers tightened weakly around his hand.

“Lord, receive my sister, Veronika,” Micaiah whispered. “Please. Please receive her.”

Her eyes remained fixed on his.

For one final moment, the fear left them.

Then her grip loosened.

And she was gone.

“Nate,” he called out.

Nathan didn’t hear him.

Or he chose not to.

With one hand still locked in Gavrillo’s hair, Nathan reached into the inside pocket of his jacket. His fingers shook once before they found what he was looking for.

A photograph.

Creased at the corners. Soft from being handled too many times.

He unfolded it and held it in front of Gavrillo’s face.

Deena.

The graduation photo.

Nathan pressed the photo so close to Gavrillo’s eyes that the paper bent against his brow.

“Her,” Nathan said. “Say her name.”

Gavrillo blinked slowly.

For a second, something like recognition passed through his face.

Then he laughed.

It came out wet. Broken. Animal-like.

Gavrillo looked at the picture again.

“Was she the one who cried for her mother?” he asked.

Nathan’s face changed.

Not rage. Something worse. Something blank.

Nathan shot Gavrillo point blank in the crotch.

The sound punched through the room.

Gavrillo’s scream was not human. It tore out of him in two voices, one high and one deep, both full of hate. His hands clawed at the marble. Black blood spread under him.

Nathan chambered another round.

“Say it.”

Gavrillo’s teeth clicked together.

Blood ran over his teeth.

Then he spoke, “Chaíre… Sataná!” Hail… Satan!

Nathan did not answer.

He placed the barrel against Gavrillo’s forehead and fired.

Gavrillo’s head snapped back, splatting black viscous brain matter against the wall.

The room went quiet after that.

Not peaceful quiet.

The kind of quiet that comes after a door has been shut and locked from the other side.

Micaiah looked down.

The woman was gone.

Her eyes were still open, but the fear had left them. He closed them with two fingers.

Neither brother spoke.

There was nothing left to say.

—

The first body started smoking near the dresser.

Micaiah saw it only because he was still kneeling on the floor beside the dead woman. At first he thought one of the candles had tipped over into the black blood. Then the smoke thickened. It curled up from the remains of one of the demons Nathan had shot apart.

The flesh hissed.

Nathan turned.

“What the hell is that?”

The demon’s skin split open along the ribs. Orange light glowed underneath, thin at first, then brighter. The smell changed from blood and rot to burning hair.

Another body began to smoke near the foot of the bed.

Then another.

Micaiah rose slowly.

The pieces of Gavrillo were smoking too.

His headless body jerked once on the marble. Not alive. Not even close. Just some final chemical reaction in the meat. Black blood bubbled out of the wound in his neck. Wherever it touched the floor, the marble darkened and cracked.

“Mickey,” Nathan said. “We need to go.”

Micaiah was still staring at the woman.

At what he had done.

“Nate—”

“Now.”

One of the demon bodies caught fire.

It went up too fast. Like gasoline had been poured inside it. Flames burst through the chest and ran across the slick trail of black blood. The fire hit the curtains near the broken balcony door and climbed them in seconds.

Nathan grabbed the shotgun and the duffel.

Micaiah looked back once at the woman on the floor.

He wanted to carry her out. He wanted to do something decent. Cover her. Anything.

But the fire had already reached the bed.

The sheets went up. Then the canopy. Then the wall behind it.

“Mickey!”

Nathan grabbed his vest and pulled him back.

Micaiah stumbled over broken glass. Heat slapped across his face. A demon’s severed arm burned beside his boot, fingers curling in the flames like a dead spider.

The smoke came fast.

Not normal smoke.

Thick. Greasy. Low to the ground, then everywhere at once.

They ran for the balcony.

Micaiah reached the shattered sliding door and nearly slipped on the blood and glass. Nathan shoved him through onto the balcony.

Cold night air hit his face.

For one second, he could breathe again.

Then the window behind them blew out.

Heat and glass burst across the balcony. Micaiah ducked, arms over his head. Shards sliced across his jacket and sleeves. Nathan cursed and pulled him toward the rope.

Below them, lights came on across the property.

Someone shouted from the driveway.

An alarm began to wail.

Nathan clipped Micaiah in first.

“Go!” he shouted.

Micaiah didn’t argue. He looked back once.

The master bedroom was gone behind fire.

The smoke moved wrong. Shapes twisted inside it.

He swung over the rail and dropped fast, braking hard with one gloved hand around the line.

He heard Deena’s voice again.

Mickey! Help me!

The heat followed him down.

Halfway to the ground, the balcony above cracked.

Stone split somewhere behind him. A chunk of burning plaster fell past his shoulder and exploded against the tiles below.

Nathan followed close behind, hitting the ground hard enough to hear his knees pop. Micaiah caught his arm before he fell.

They ran.

A guard came around the corner near the pool house with a pistol in his hands.

Nathan fired once.

The man dropped.

Micaiah didn’t look at him.

They sprinted along the side path, past the dark pool, past the hedges, past the service door.

The mansion groaned behind them.

Not like a building.

Like something wounded.

They reached the wall.

Nathan went up first, using the same cracks in the stone. Micaiah covered him from below, rifle raised, breath ragged.

Another shout came from the driveway.

Then gunfire.

Rounds snapped against the wall above Micaiah’s head. “Go!” Nathan shouted from the top.

Micaiah slung the rifle, jumped, and caught Nathan’s hand.

Nathan dragged him up with a grunt.

For a second they balanced on the wall together, the iron spikes inches from Micaiah’s legs.

They dropped to the other side and rolled into the brush.

Branches tore at Micaiah’s face. Dirt filled his mouth. He forced himself up and followed Nathan down the slope.

The truck waited where they had left it, hidden under a camo tarp between two trees.

Nathan ripped the tarp away and threw open the driver’s door.

Micaiah climbed into the passenger seat.

Nathan started the engine.

The headlights stayed off.

He backed out hard, tires slipping in the dirt, then turned onto the narrow road leading away from the property.

Neither of them spoke.

The mansion burned in the rearview mirror.

Micaiah didn’t care anymore.

Orange light flickered through the trees as they descended into the canyon. Sirens wailed somewhere far below. More would come soon. Police. Fire. News helicopters. People who would never know what had really happened in that bedroom.

Micaiah looked at his hands.

They were covered in blood.

Most of it was the woman’s.

Nathan drove with both hands on the wheel. His face looked empty.

Micaiah stared at him.

He had told himself they were going there to stop evil.

He had told himself God had sent them.

Maybe that was true.

But Nathan had shot through a living woman to get to Gavrillo.

Micaiah could still feel her hand in his.

He turned toward the window.

The city lights blurred below them.

Nathan said nothing.

Micaiah said nothing back.

The silence sat between them like a third person. Micaiah waited until they were five miles from the mansion.

“Pull over.”

Nathan kept driving.

“I said pull over.”

Nathan’s eyes stayed on the road. “Not now.”

Micaiah grabbed the wheel and yanked it hard enough that the truck swerved onto the shoulder. Gravel spat under the tires. Nathan slammed the brakes.

For a second, neither of them moved.

Micaiah hit him first.

His fist caught Nathan across the mouth and drove his head into the window.

Nathan sat there for a moment, breathing hard. Then he wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.

He didn’t do anything.

That made Micaiah angrier.

“You killed her.”

Nathan looked straight ahead.

Micaiah hit him again.

This time Nathan dodged the blow and punched back.

The blow caught Micaiah under the eye and knocked him against the passenger door. He came back fast, grabbing Nathan by the vest and slamming him into the steering wheel. The horn barked once, loud in the canyon.

Nathan drove his elbow into Micaiah’s ribs.

Micaiah gasped and swung blind.

They fought across the seats, boots scraping the floorboards, fists hitting bone, glass, dashboard. Nathan shoved him into the glove box hard enough to crack it. Micaiah grabbed Nathan’s hair and smashed his face into the wheel.

Blood spotted the console.

The truck rocked on its shocks. Their guns banged against the floorboard. Somewhere outside, sirens moved through the hills.

Micaiah grabbed Nathan’s shirt with both hands.

“She had a name!”

Nathan’s eyes stayed cold.

“Veronika,” Micaiah said. “Her name was Veronika.”

Nathan breathed hard.

“She had a mother waiting for her.” Micaiah said. “And you shot her!”

Nathan punched him in the stomach.

Micaiah folded,

“She was dead already,” Nathan said, blood running over his mouth.

Micaiah grabbed Nathan’s collar and headbutted him. Nathan’s nose broke with a wet crack.

“She was alive!”

“She was gone… Just like Deena….”

Micaiah hit him again when he heard that.

Nathan shoved him hard into the passenger window. Glass cracked. Micaiah came back swinging. His knuckles split on Nathan’s cheek. Nathan drove a knee into his ribs. Micaiah caught him by the throat and forced him down across the center console.

Micaiah stared at him with one eye swollen shut.

“What I did was mercy,” Nathan said, the words landing worse than the shot.

Micaiah’s voice dropped. “Mercy?”

“You think mercy always looks clean?”

Micaiah shoved him back.

Nathan grabbed his wrist and held it.

“If that had been Deena,” Micaiah asked, “would you do the same?”

The question stopped Nathan in his tracks. He let go of Micaiah’s wrist.

The truck went quiet except for their breathing.

Nathan opened his mouth.

Micaiah’s phone rang.

Both of them froze.

Micaiah pulled his phone from his pocket. The screen was cracked, smeared with blood.

Mara.

His chest tightened.

He answered.

“Babe? What’s wrong?”

For a second, all he heard was breathing.

Fast.

Panicked.

Then Mara spoke.

“Mickey...”

He sat up straighter.

“What happened?”

Nathan had already driven the truck back on the road.

“Mara, talk to me.”

There was a crash on the other end. Something breaking. A door maybe. Then Deena screamed in the background.

Not the demon.

Deena.

Mara started crying.

“Something’s wrong with her.”

Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

Micaiah was out of the truck before Nathan had fully stopped.

The tires jumped the curb outside the apartment complex. Nathan killed the engine and grabbed the shotgun from the back seat.

The stairwell smelled like old paint and rainwater. His boots hit each step hard enough to echo. Behind him, Nathan followed slower, heavier, still carrying the same silence from the truck.

Micaiah reached the third floor and turned the corner.

Mara stood outside Deena’s room.

She was barefoot. Her hair had come loose. One sleeve of her sweatshirt was wet near the wrist. At first Micaiah thought it was water.

Then he saw the blood.

“Mara.”

She looked at him and nearly collapsed.

He caught her before she hit the wall.

“I only stepped out for a minute,” she said.

Her voice came too fast.

“What happened?”

“I went downstairs for bandages. The first aid kit in the room was empty. She tore the old ones off. She was bleeding again, and I thought—” Mara pressed both hands against her mouth. “I thought she was sleeping. Told myself I’d be right back.”

Micaiah looked past her.

From inside came a sound.

A wet, strained choking sound.

Micaiah’s blood went cold.

He moved to the door and hit it with his fist.

“Deena!” he shouted.

The sound stopped.

For one second there was only silence.

Then something scraped against the floor.

Mara stood behind him, crying without sound.

Micaiah tried the handle. It didn’t move.

Deena had wedged it shut.

Probably barricaded with a chair.

He hit the door again.

“Dee. It’s Mickey. Open the door.”

Something thumped against the wall inside.

Then the choking started again.

Nathan hit the door with the butt of his shotgun.

The wood shook in the frame but held.

Micaiah stepped back, lifted his boot, and drove it into the space beside the lock.

The wood split.

Nathan hit it again with his shoulder. The chair on the other side scraped hard across the floor, then toppled. The door burst inward.

Micaiah went in first.

For half a second, he did not understand what he was seeing.

Deena hung from the ceiling fan by a twisted bedsheet.

Her toes scraped weakly against the floor.

Her hands twitched at her sides.

She was still alive.

The ceiling fan groaned under Deena’s weight. The sheet had cut deep into her neck. Her face was swollen. Her eyes were half open but unfocused.

Micaiah dropped his rifle and grabbed her legs, lifting her to take the weight off her throat.

“I’ve got her,” he said. “Untie it!”

Deena’s eyes rolled toward him.

“Mickey…”

“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

Her swollen lips barely moved.

Micaiah felt it before he understood the words.

The thing inside Deena pushed back against his hands. A hard, living pressure under the skin, forcing outward through her stomach and ribs. Her mouth opened wide, and for one terrible second Micaiah saw something black moving behind her tongue.

“Don’t let it out!” She croaked.

His arms burned from holding Deena up. The sheet was still tight around her throat. Mara was on the bed, fingers slick with sweat and blood, trying to work the knot loose.

“It’s too tight,” she said.

“Knife,” Micaiah said. “Nathan, knife!”

No answer.

“Nate!”

Micaiah looked back.

Nathan stood just inside the doorway.

He hadn’t moved.

The same look from the bedroom. The one Micaiah had seen right before he raised the shotgun at the woman. The old Nathan bleeding through the new one like poison through a cracked cup.

“Nate,” Micaiah snapped. “For God's sake help me!”

Nathan’s eyes stayed on Deena.

His lips moved.

“There’s only one way to stop this...”

Micaiah felt the room drop out from under him.

He watched Nathan's right hand drift toward his shoulder. Toward the holster. Toward the pistol pressed against his ribs beneath the jacket.

Nathan drew halfway.

Micaiah let go of Deena with one hand and reached for his own pistol with his other.

Nathan looked at him then.

For one second, he was his brother again.

Tired. Broken. Certain he was doing the only thing left.

Deena’s eyes found Nathan.

“Nate,” she rasped.

Nathan’s hand tightened around the pistol.

Mara climbed down from the bed, shaking her head. “No. No, don’t you dare.”

Deena’s lips trembled. Blood ran from the sheet-burn around her throat.

“Please,” she whispered. “Shoot me.”

“Mickey,” Nathan said. “Move out of the way.”

“Nate,” Micaiah said. “Please don’t make me choose between you and Deena.”

Nathan's hand kept moving, ignoring his brother’s plea.

Micaiah saw it happen in pieces. The way Nathan's fingers curled around the grip. The way his shoulder dipped slightly, muscle memory from a thousand draws in empty lots and shooting ranges. The way his eyes went had that resigned look. Like he had already done the math and decided the only answer left was one Micaiah would never accept.

Time didn't slow down.

That was a lie that movies told.

Time stayed exactly the same. Fast. Brutal. Merciless.

Micaiah's hand crossed his body, reaching for the pistol that sat low on his thigh, angled forward, exactly where he had trained it a thousand times.

Nathan's pistol cleared leather first.

Micaiah saw the muzzle rise.

Then his own hand caught up.

Micaiah didn’t aim.

There wasn’t time.

He fired from the hip.

The pistol bucked once in his hand, loud enough to split the room open. Nathan’s body jerked like he’d been yanked backward by a rope. The round hit him square in the chest, punching him off balance and slamming him into the doorframe.

Nathan's pistol fired.

The shot went wide. Past Micaiah's ear. Into the wall behind him. Plaster cracked. Something shattered in the living room.

For half a second, Nathan just stared at Micaiah, more shocked than hurt.

Then his knees gave out. His pistol clattered to the floor.

Micaiah caught Deena’s weight again before she dropped.

“Nate,” he whispered.

Nathan slid down the wall, one bloody hand pressed to his chest, eyes locked on his brother like he still couldn’t believe Micaiah had actually done it.

Micaiah stood frozen.

The pistol was still trained on his brother with one hand. The front sight trembled over Nathan's body.

"Mickey!" Mara screamed.

He didn't hear her.

Nathan was on his back. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Blood bubbled between his lips.

Micaiah came back into himself all at once.

Deena was still hanging.

Her legs kicked weakly against his arms. The sheet was still tight around her throat. Mara was still on the bed, fighting the knot with shaking fingers.

For one second, Micaiah could not move.

Then Deena made a thin choking sound.

“Mara,” he said.

His voice sounded far away.

Mara looked at him, wild-eyed.

“Get Nathan’s knife.”

“What?”

“His knife,” Micaiah said. “On his belt. Get it now.”

Mara stared down at Nathan’s body like she had not understood he was real until that moment.

“Mara!”

She flinched, then scrambled off the bed. She dropped to her knees beside Nathan's body and rolled him toward her with both hands. Blood smeared across her palms. She sobbed once but kept searching.

“I can’t find it.”

“Left side,” Micaiah said. “Inside the jacket.”

Mara shoved her hand beneath Nathan’s body. Her fingers slipped against the wet fabric. She gagged, then forced herself to keep going.

Nathan’s lifeless eyes were wide open.

For one awful second, Mara looked at his face.

Then she found the knife.

“I have it.”

“Cut her down.”

Mara climbed back onto the bed. She opened the blade with both hands and sawed at the sheet above Deena’s neck.

The fabric stretched.

Then snapped.

Deena dropped.

Micaiah caught her badly. Her weight hit him in the chest and drove him to one knee. He lowered her to the floor as gently as he could.

“Deena,” he said. “Breathe. Come on. Breathe.”

Her throat worked.

Nothing happened.

Mara bent over her and tried to loosen what remained of the sheet. Micaiah pulled it away from the deep red line around Deena’s neck.

Deena sucked in one breath.

Then another.

Mara laughed and cried at the same time.

“She’s breathing.”

Micaiah pressed his forehead to Deena’s.

“Thank You,” he whispered. “Thank You, Lord.”

Her eyelids fluttered.

Then opened. Her eyes found his.

For one second—one clean, impossible second—she was there. His sister. The girl who ‘borrowed’ his hoodies and never gave them back. The girl who learned to drive stick shift in a church parking lot because she refused to let their Jeep go to scrap because it was the only thing their deadbeat Wasian dad left them.

“Mickey?” she whispered.

“I’m here.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

“I heard Mom,” she whispered. “When it was dark. I saw her…”

Micaiah could not breathe.

Deena’s hand closed weakly around his wrist.

“She said she was waiting for me in Heaven.”

Micaiah shook his head. Tears cut down his face.

“No,” he said. “Dee, you have to stay with me.”

Her fingers moved against his sleeve.

“I’m sorry. I tried to fight back.”

She was crying now. Tears cut pale tracks through the grime on her face.

“I know you did.”

He leaned closer. His forehead touched hers. Her breath smelled like rot and something else. Something sweet underneath. Like flowers left too long in water.

Then her eyes changed.

Her fingers found his wrist. Squeezed. Her grip was stronger than it should have been. Stronger than anything that thin had any right to produce.

Like a switch flipped behind her pupils. The warmth drained out of them. Her grip changed.

Her fingers curled into his skin like hooks. Her whole body went rigid against his chest. Her back arched.

Her eyes rolled back.

Then her head snapped forward.

Her face was inches from his. Her mouth opened. Her jaw unhinged like a python. The smell coming off her was no longer sweet. It was the smell of Gavrillo's bedroom. Ozone and burnt sugar and old blood.

When she spoke, the voice was not hers.

It was not one voice.

It was many.

And they were laughing.

“Ádis kaí Apóleia ouk empímplantai.” Death and Destruction are never satisfied.

Her belly moved.

Something inside her rolled against the skin, searching.

“Mara, run!” Micaiah screamed.

Mara stared at him, frozen.

“Run!”

Deena’s stomach split.

The sound was worse than the sight.

A hard tearing, like wet cloth pulled apart by hands.

Micaiah felt heat first. Then pressure. Then pain so complete it erased his existence.

Something ripped out of Deena and tore right through him.

Not past him.

Through him.

A limb. A horn. A hooked piece of living bone. He could not tell. It punched under his ribs and out his back, lifting him against Deena’s body like they had been nailed together.

Micaiah looked down.

His blood was on her.

Her blood was on him.

Between them, something pale and slick pushed free from her open belly. Too many eyes blinked in the mess. A small mouth opened and closed without sound. Tiny hands gripped the torn edges of Deena’s skin and pulled itself farther out.

Deena was still alive.

So was Micaiah.

For one second, they looked at each other.

Her eyes were hers again.

She was crying.

"I love you, big bro..." she mouthed.

Micaiah tried to answer.

Blood filled his throat.

His pistol slipped from his hand.

Mara crawled toward them anyway.

“No,” she sobbed. “No, no, no—”

Deena’s back arched so hard her spine cracked against the floor.

Two hard points pushed up beneath her shirt, stretching the fabric until it tore. Blood sprayed across the floorboards as something black and wet forced its way out of her back.

Wings.

Bat-like. Veined. Too large for her body.

They unfolded with a sound like umbrellas opening inside raw meat.

Then the wings started flapping.

They beat against the walls, the bedframe, the ceiling, knocking pictures loose and splattering blood in wide, horrible arcs.

The force knocked Mara backward into the dresser. Wood cracked. Glass rained down from the mirror.

Deena’s arms tightened around Micaiah one last time.

Not the demon.

Her.

A hug.

A goodbye.

Micaiah’s body jerked against hers. Something inside him gave way. His legs stopped working. His vision narrowed to Deena’s face. Her eyes fixed on him with terror and love.

Micaiah and Deena were impaled and tangled together, brother and sister locked chest to chest in blood.

Mara screamed until her voice broke.

Then Mara saw Micaiah’s head lift.

Not by itself.

Something behind his jaw pulled it up. His mouth opened, loose and wrong, blood spilling over his teeth. His eyes were empty.

The abomination forced itself out through both of them, wearing their torn bodies like the remains of a birth sac. Micaiah’s dead face twitched into a smile that did not fit him.

Then it spoke mockingly in Micaiah’s voice.

“Igérthi.”

He has risen.

The thing laughed with his mouth as it climbed free.

The thing turned its head toward Mara.

And smiled.

Mara could not move.

Her back was against the broken dresser. Splinters pressed through the sweatshirt into her skin. Mirror glass covered her lap and hands. She could feel blood running down her neck from where one shard had cut her, but the pain was small and far away.

Mara sobbed.

The thing breathed.

Its chest opened and closed like an open wound. Wet skin stretched over bones that kept shifting under it. Wings dragged across the floor behind it, leaving red arcs in the carpet. Its head was too large for its body. Its mouth was too small until it opened.

Then it was all mouth.

Rows of tiny teeth.

A sound came out of it.

A baby’s cooing.

Mara’s bladder let go.

She barely noticed.

The thing stepped toward her, dragging Micaiah and Deena’s corpses with it for one horrible second before the limb pulled free.

The thing shook itself. Blood sprayed the wall, the bed, Mara’s face. Then it started crawling towards her.

Its wings folded tight against its back. Its little hands slapped wetly against the carpet. Its knees bent backward, then forward, then backward again as if it had not decided what shape it wanted to keep. Each movement made a clicking sound inside its body.

The thing saw her terror.

Its head tilted.

The laughter came again, soft and pleased.

Mara scrambled sideways.

Her palm landed on glass. It cut deep. She screamed and kept moving. The thing lunged.

She threw herself flat. It hit the dresser above her and punched through the wood with both hands. Drawers burst open. Clothes and splinters flew over her. The mirror frame collapsed and struck the thing across the back.

It did not care.

Mara crawled on her elbows.

Her hand slipped in Nathan’s blood.

His body lay near the doorway where he had fallen. One arm bent under him. His jacket was open. His face was turned toward the room, eyes half-lidded, mouth dark with blood.

His pistol was on the carpet beside the wall.

Mara saw it.

The thing screamed behind her with hunger.

She crawled faster.

Her knees slid in blood. Her fingers clawed at the carpet. The pistol was six feet away. Then four. Then two.

The thing landed on her back.

The weight drove the air out of her.

Its hands grabbed her shoulders. The fingers were small, almost like a child’s, but they went in deep. Nails punched through the sweatshirt and into meat.

Mara screamed into the carpet.

Its mouth pressed against the side of her head.

Hot breath filled her ear.

Then she reached the gun.

Her fingers hit the grip.

The thing bit off a chunk of her ear.

Not all of it.

Enough.

Pain flashed white behind her eyes. She screamed and rolled hard onto her back, bringing the pistol up between them.

The thing sat on her chest.

Its face was inches from hers.

Up close, she saw all of it. The eyes were not eyes. They were holes with red light moving at the bottom. Its lips were thin and gray. Its gums were black. A string of tissue still hung from its bellybutton, trailing back toward Deena’s body.

It opened its mouth.

Mara shoved the pistol into it.

The thing froze.

For one second, everything stopped.

Mara’s hands shook so badly the barrel clicked against its teeth.

She pulled the trigger.

The shot blew the back of its head open.

Not cleanly.

The skull split like wet plaster. Black fluid and pale fragments hit the ceiling. One eye popped loose and slid down Mara’s cheek. The thing’s mouth clamped once around the barrel, hard enough to scrape metal. Then it went limp.

Its body collapsed onto her.

Mara fired again.

And again.

And again.

The last shot went through the thing’s face and into the floor beside her head.

Then the gun clicked empty.

Mara kept pulling the trigger anyway.

Click.

Click.

Click.

She shoved the corpse off her chest with both hands. It rolled onto its side, leaking black blood and something thicker. Its wings trembled once. Its little fingers curled inward.

Then it was still.

Mara lie there gasping.

The room stank of blood, feces, urine.

Mara pushed herself upright with shaking arms.

All around her, she was surrounded by the mutilated corpses of everyone she loved.

Somewhere in the apartment, a worship song began playing again from the broken speaker.

Tinny.

Distorted.

Almost unrecognizable.

My chains are gone, I’ve been set free

My God, My Savior has rescued me

“Jesus help me,” Mara choked.