The Bishop's face came apart in pieces.
In the dream, Arthur stood on the Everett dock with his boots sinking into something wet and warm, watching Leopold Glasser's skull fracture in slow motion—bone splitting like wet wood, fragments spiraling outward through air thick with the smell of sulfur and copper. The Bishop's mouth kept moving even as the jaw separated from the skull, forming words Arthur couldn't hear over the roar of something vast and hungry pressing against the membrane of the world.
Behind Glasser, the boy stood in shadow. Jeremy. His eyes were black from lid to lid, and when he opened his mouth, Emily's voice came out—small and sweet and five years old, asking why Daddy never came home.
Arthur tried to reach for the photograph in his pocket, but his hands were slick to the wrists and the pocket was full of teeth. The dock groaned beneath him. The water below was not water. It churned with faces—dozens of them, children's faces, mouths open in silent screams, their eyes rolled back to whites. Thirty faces. Thirty names on a list, the letters dark as dried blood.
The Bishop's body hit the dock. Where it fell, the wood blackened and split, and from the cracks rose the sweet-rot stench of something that had died and refused to stay dead. Glasser's hand twitched once, twice, and then the fingers began crawling toward Arthur's ankle like a pale spider detached from its body.
He woke gasping, hand locked around the tranquilizer pistol beneath his pillow, heart hammering against cracked ribs. The sulfur smell lingered in his sinuses for three full breaths before the stale mildew of the Shamrock Motor Inn replaced it. Water-stained ceiling. Highway light crawling across stucco. The low drone of semis on the interstate.
The phone rang at 3:47 in the morning.
Arthur had been awake for the better part of two hours since the nightmare released him. Sleep was a negotiation he'd stopped having, so he lay in the dark running scenarios instead—where Jeremy would go first, which cells he'd activate, what pattern would emerge from the chaos. Headlights crawled across the stucco as cars passed on the highway outside, and he tracked them absently while his mind built and dismantled possibilities. The Everett shipyard crept back in through the gaps—not the tactical details but the sensory ones: the wet-meat sound of Glasser hitting the dock, the copper taste in Arthur's own mouth where he'd bitten through his cheek, the boy's scream cutting through the salt air as he fled into the darkness.
The worst part wasn't the violence. He'd survived worse—dealt worse, if he was honest with himself. The worst part was the boy's face in that last moment before he ran. Not rage, not hatred, not the cold emptiness of someone conditioned beyond feeling. Fear. The raw, animal terror of a child who had just watched the only father he'd ever known die in front of him. Arthur had seen that fear before, in a photograph he couldn't stop looking at—a crime scene photo from his own kitchen, the one the detective had tried to keep from him, showing Emily's face frozen in the same expression.
That was what the nightmare was really about. Not Glasser. Not the dock. The look in a child's eyes when the world stopped making sense.
He rolled onto his side and picked up the burner phone from the nightstand. Only one person had this number.
"Arthur." The voice on the other end belonged to Cardinal Richter, thin and clipped, filtered through encryption that made it sound like the man was speaking from the bottom of a well. "We have a situation."
"It's four in the morning, Your Eminence. It had better be a situation."
"A church in Duluth, Minnesota was attacked six hours ago. Three dead. The priest who called it in described the assailant as a teenage girl who moved objects without touching them."
Arthur sat up. The springs of the cheap mattress groaned beneath him. "Telekinesis?"
"Among other things. She barricaded the doors from across the sanctuary and set the altar cloth on fire by looking at it. Local police are calling it an arson with a confused eyewitness, but we both know better."
"One of Glasser's."
"That is our belief, yes. But this is not an isolated incident."
Arthur swung his legs off the bed and reached for the lamp. Yellow light flooded the room, exposing water-stained wallpaper and a carpet that had been ugly before it got old. His ribs ached from where he'd been thrown against a shipping container five days ago—another gift from the Everett operation. He pressed his palm against the bruise and winced.
"What do you mean, not isolated?"
"In the last forty-eight hours we have received reports of six separate incidents across four states. A possession in Austin. A mass hysteria event at a middle school in Sacramento. Two more church attacks, one in Georgia and one in South Carolina. All involving adolescents. All exhibiting abilities consistent with Glasser's program."
Arthur's jaw tightened. The pattern he'd been tracing in the dark for two hours—Glasser's network, the sleeper structure, the fail-safe logic—it was activating exactly as he'd feared. Bishop Leopold Glasser had spent forty years building his network, recruiting children with latent psychic potential and cultivating their abilities through a combination of religious indoctrination and something far darker. The children were weapons. Glasser had never intended for them to be anything else.
"Someone activated them," Arthur said.
"We intercepted coded messages sent from Glasser's personal phone three days ago. The messages went to at least thirty recipients. We are still working on identifying all of them."
"Thirty." The number settled in his chest like a stone. "Glasser's phone. The boy—Jeremy—he took it when he fled the docks."
"That is our assessment. Jeremy Caldwell sent the activation codes."
Arthur stood and crossed to the small table where he'd spread his notes from the Everett operation. Maps, photographs, intercepted communications, a partial list of known associates. He'd been building a picture of Glasser's network for days, filling gaps with inference where the fragments they'd recovered left holes. The picture was incomplete, but its shape grew clearer with each piece he fitted into place.
"You said thirty recipients. How many have you identified?"
"Seventeen with confidence. Another eight as probabilities. The remaining five are unknown, but we are working on it."
"Send me everything."
"It has already been sent. Check your secure drop. Arthur—there is more."
Of course there was. There was always more.
"The Ohio cell. Two of Glasser's most powerful assets are stationed in the Akron area. A girl named Megyn Willford, thirteen years old, telekinetic. Her abilities exceed anything we have documented in the last century. And based on the phone's location data before the signal went dark, that is where Jeremy Caldwell is heading."
Arthur closed his eyes. Akron, Ohio. A mid-sized city with hospitals, schools, churches—all the soft targets a vindictive teenager with psychic powers and a dead father to avenge could want.
"How long until he arrives?"
"Based on driving time from Everett, he may already be there."
Silence filled the motel room, broken only by the drone of the highway outside and the faint hum of the ice machine in the corridor. Arthur pressed his knuckles against the table until the wood creaked.
"I need Niccolo."
"Father Paladina is in Cleveland, debriefing with the diocese. He can meet you in Akron by midday."
"And backup? The Vatican can't send anyone else?"
A pause. The kind of pause that told Arthur everything he needed to know before the Cardinal spoke.
"Our resources are stretched to breaking, Arthur. Six incidents in forty-eight hours, and more are inevitable. I am diverting teams to the most critical situations, but there are not enough of us. There have never been enough of us. You and Father Paladina will have to handle Ohio."
"Two of us. Against a psychic who can overpower minds and a telekinetic who can toss cars."
"I did not say it would be easy. I said it is necessary."
Arthur exhaled through his teeth. Necessary. The Cardinal's favorite word, wielded like a scalpel to cut away inconveniences such as adequate preparation and reasonable odds.
"I'll be in Akron by morning."
"God go with you."
"He'd better," Arthur said, and ended the call.
***
He downloaded the intelligence packet from the secure server while packing his bag. The motel's Wi-Fi was barely functional, but the file was small: a spreadsheet, a set of photographs, and a summary brief. The Vatican's intelligence apparatus was efficient if nothing else.
The spreadsheet contained the list.
Thirty names. Thirty children, ages ranging from eight to twenty-two. Some had been with Glasser since infancy, recruited from orphanages and shelters and homes where no one would notice a child disappearing into the orbit of a charismatic bishop. Others were more recent acquisitions, identified through the Church's own monitoring of psychic phenomena and funneled to Glasser through a network of sympathetic clergy who believed they were helping troubled youth find purpose.
Arthur scrolled through the entries. Each contained a name, an age, a location, and a brief assessment of abilities. Some had question marks where the ability should be. Others had clinical descriptions that read like horror stories.
Sarah Mendez, 16, Dallas TX. Pyrokinesis. Documented ignition of organic material at distances up to 30 feet. Control: poor. Emotional trigger: anger.
David Park, 11, Sacramento CA. Telepathy (receptive). Able to read surface thoughts of individuals within 10-meter radius. Side effects include chronic migraines and nosebleeds.
Curtis Brandt, 19, Duluth MN. Clairsentience. Remote viewing at distances exceeding 100 miles. Used by Glasser for reconnaissance.
Maggie Chen, 8, Rapid City SD. Biokinesis (touch-activated). Physical contact induces involuntary muscle spasms in target. Glasser notes describe ability as "crude but developing." Foster family unaware of ability. Note: Subject bites when frightened.
Thomas Reeves, 14, Baton Rouge LA. Micro-telekinesis. Manipulation of small objects (locks, switches, ignition mechanisms) at distances up to 20 feet. Insufficient strength for combat application. Glasser assessment: "Useful for infiltration. Limited offensive potential." Subject has been living homeless for 6+ months.
He kept scrolling. Each name was a life derailed, a childhood stolen, a child shaped into something that served the Bishop's vision of a world where the supernatural was no longer hidden. Some of these children had families who missed them. Others had been so thoroughly erased from the system that no one would ever come looking.
The youngest was Maggie Chen, eight years old. Arthur stared at her entry for a long time. Eight. The same age as Abigail. The same age Emily would have been three years after she died. The clinical language of the assessment couldn't quite obscure what it was describing: a terrified little girl whose touch hurt people, living with a foster family who didn't know why she flinched every time someone reached for her hand. Glasser had been watching her for two years, the notes said. Watching, and waiting, and building a file on an eight-year-old child the way a predator builds a dossier on prey.
He found the pattern within twenty minutes of systematic analysis. Glasser hadn't recruited randomly. The children were clustered geographically—two or three per region, spaced across the country like nodes in a communications network. And the abilities weren't random either. Each cluster contained a complementary set: a telepath paired with a telekinetic, an empath paired with a pyrokinetic. As if Glasser had been assembling teams, each one capable of independent operations.
It was military thinking. Arthur recognized it because it was exactly how he would have organized a cell structure during his intelligence days. Independent teams, decentralized command, built-in redundancy. Kill one node and the network survives. The Bishop hadn't just been collecting children—he'd been building an army with the organizational sophistication of a seasoned intelligence operative.
Then he reached the two entries that stopped his hand on the trackpad.
Jeremy Caldwell, 15, MOBILE. Telepathy (projective). Able to override conscious will of targeted individuals. Effective range: approximately 50 feet. Resistant subjects can be overpowered with sustained effort. Control: exceptional. NOTE: Caldwell was Glasser's primary operative. Accompanied Glasser during the Everett operation. Fled following Glasser's death. Considered extremely dangerous. Do not engage alone.
Megyn Willford, 13, Akron OH. Telekinesis. Documented manipulation of objects exceeding 2,000 lbs. Fine motor control sufficient for intercepting projectiles mid-flight. Sustained use causes hemorrhaging (nasal, ocular). Control: moderate but improving. NOTE: Willford has been in isolation at an Ohio safehouse for approximately 9 months. Psychological profile suggests strong emotional dependency on Glasser's "family" structure. Potentially recruitable if separated from network.
Arthur stared at the two entries. A boy who could crawl inside your mind and rewrite your decisions. A girl who could crush a car with a thought. Both of them children. Both of them Glasser's creations, shaped by decades of manipulation into weapons that didn't know they were weapons.
He closed the laptop and sat in the harsh yellow light of the motel room, listening to the highway traffic thin as the hour crept toward dawn.
Thirty children. Activated, like sleeper cells awakening simultaneously. Set loose across the country like matches dropped into dry grass. And somewhere in Ohio, the two most dangerous of them were about to come together, united by the ghost of a dead bishop and the rage of a grieving son.
Arthur pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes until spots bloomed in the dark. When he dropped them, stubble scraped against callused palms. He caught his reflection in the dark window: a man in his late forties who looked ten years older, deep lines carved around his eyes, shoulders bowed from the weight of too many years spent doing work that no sane person would volunteer for.
The last time he'd been in this position—staring at a list of names, knowing some of them would be dead before the operation was over—the list had been shorter. Four names. Four people in an Everett warehouse, and one of them had been a fifteen-year-old boy with frightened eyes and a psychic gift he'd never asked for.
Three of those four were dead now.
The fourth was Jeremy Caldwell, and he was heading to Ohio with his father's phone and a head full of grief and a plan that Arthur couldn't yet see the shape of.
He finished packing in silence. Two tranquilizer pistols, loaded and spare cartridges. A Kevlar vest that wouldn't stop telekinetic force but might help with conventional weapons. A crucifix that Niccolo had blessed—he wasn't a believer, but in his line of work superstition and pragmatism were the same thing. A photograph of Emily, tucked into the interior pocket of his jacket where it always lived. He didn't look at it. He didn't need to. The weight of it against his chest was enough.
***
The drive from the motel took six hours. Six hours of interstate monotony with cracked ribs that turned every pothole into a sharp education in anatomy. He stopped twice—once for gas at a Flying J outside Monroeville where the coffee tasted like it had been brewed from engine parts and a handwritten sign on the fountain machine read ALL POP $1.29, the fluorescent lights humming above pumps slicked with old diesel, and once at a rest area in the Appalachian foothills where he stood in the cold under a sky that couldn't decide between rain and sleet. He pressed his palm against his side at that second stop, leaning against the truck's fender while semis growled past on the interstate, their tires hissing on wet asphalt.
At that rest stop, he called Frieda.
She picked up on the first ring, which meant she'd been waiting. "Did Richter brief you?"
"Four AM wake-up call. Thirty children, six incidents, two targets in Ohio."
"It's worse than six now. Garfield just picked up a girl in South Dakota who's been biting everyone in sight. Charles and his wife are chasing a clairvoyant across Michigan who sees them coming before they leave the parking lot. And I've got reports of a boy in Louisiana who can unlock doors with his mind—he's been breaking into houses across three parishes."
Arthur absorbed this in silence. The scope of what Glasser had built was staggering—not thirty isolated children, but thirty interconnected nodes in a network designed to survive its creator's death.
"What about Curtis Brandt in Minnesota?"
"The Vatican is sending someone to handle him. A priest named Mikael. I'm heading there myself with Abigail—Richter wants me to coordinate."
"Keep Abigail safe."
"That's the plan." A pause. "Arthur—be careful in Ohio. Jeremy's not just grieving. He's organizing. The activation codes weren't random; they went out in a specific sequence, timed to create maximum confusion. He's thinking tactically."
"I noticed."
"He learned from the best. Glasser raised him like a general raises a protégé."
The line went quiet. Arthur listened to the wind buffet the phone's microphone, the distant grind of tires on highway.
"I'll check in when I reach Akron," he said.
"You'd better."
The landscape shifted as he crossed into Ohio, the forested ridges of western Pennsylvania flattening into farmland that stretched to every horizon, gray and bare under the November sky. Old billboards for Goodyear and Firestone appeared along the highway like tombstones for an industry that had once made Akron the rubber capital of the world—faded paint on rusting steel, advertising jobs that hadn't existed in decades. A hand-painted sign outside a tire shop read NEED YOUR ALIGNMENT FIXED? in that particular Ohio grammar that dropped the infinitive from every sentence. By the time he reached the outskirts of Akron, his hands had locked into the shape of the steering wheel and the bruise along his ribs had deepened into a permanent ache.
Niccolo was waiting for him in the parking lot of Kozlowski's Diner on the outskirts of Akron, a brick-fronted place wedged between a tire shop and a shuttered rubber supplier, the kind of establishment that had survived the industry's collapse through stubbornness, pierogies, and three-way chili served on hot dogs the menu called coneys. A neon sign in the window flickered DORTMUNDER GOLD ON TAP beside a faded Browns schedule taped to the glass. The priest leaned against the hood of a rental car, hands wrapped around a paper cup of coffee, his Roman collar bright against the gray November morning. He looked like he hadn't slept either.
"You look terrible," Niccolo said by way of greeting.
"You should see the other guy." Arthur climbed out of his truck, stiff from the drive, and stretched until his spine cracked. The cold Ohio air cut at his exposed skin—the damp, bone-deep chill that rolled off Lake Erie and settled into every city in the northern half of the state. Winter was settling into these flatlands early and with conviction.
"I read the file," Niccolo said. His expression was careful, controlled, but the strain showed beneath it—tight lines around his mouth, bruised shadows under his eyes. The priest had killed Leopold Glasser five days ago—put a bullet through the Bishop's face at the Everett shipyard—and the act was eating him alive. "Thirty children."
"Thirty that we know of. Glasser spent forty years building this network. There could be more we haven't identified."
"More." Niccolo took a long sip of coffee. His hand was steady, but the small muscle along his jaw twitched the way it did when he was fighting to maintain composure. "And we are responsible for this. If we hadn't killed Leopold—"
"If we hadn't killed Leopold, he would have completed the ritual in Everett and we'd have far worse than thirty psychic children to worry about."
"The children were contained while he was alive. They followed his orders. They waited for his signal."
"And now they've received a different signal, from a fifteen-year-old boy with a dead father and a mind full of grief. That's not our fault, Niccolo. That's Glasser's legacy. He built this system to outlive him, and it's working exactly as designed."
The priest looked down at his coffee. Steam curled upward in the cold air, ghostlike, dissolving before it reached his face.
"I keep seeing his face." Niccolo's voice dropped below the wind. "Every time I close my eyes."
"I know."
"Does it get easier?"
The pastoral lie was right there—comfort that might give the young priest a foothold in the dark hours. He let it pass. Niccolo deserved better than comfortable fiction.
"No. You just get better at carrying it."
Niccolo absorbed this without flinching. He nodded once, a small tight motion, and finished his coffee.
"So. Where do we start?"
Arthur unfolded a map of the Akron area on the hood of the car. He'd marked it during the drive, red circles around locations from the intelligence file: the service station off Route 43 south of I-76 listed as Megyn Willford's last known position, a cluster of churches that might serve as symbolic targets, and Akron General Hospital where Glasser had been stripped of his title and cast out of the Church thirty years ago.
"Megyn Willford has been hiding in an old service station off Route 43, about twenty miles south of the city. That's our first stop. If Jeremy is coming to Akron, he's coming for her."
"You think he'll recruit her?"
"I think he needs her. Jeremy's power is mental—he can overpower individual minds, but it takes effort and concentration. He can hold a few people at once, but his reach has limits. Megyn's telekinesis is the heavy artillery. She can stop bullets, move cars, hold dozens of people immobile. Together, they're a force multiplier. A nightmare."
Niccolo studied the map. His finger traced the roads between the service station and the city center.
"And if they've already joined forces?"
"Then we separate them. Jeremy without Megyn is dangerous but containable. Jeremy with Megyn is catastrophic."
"What about the girl herself? If she's been isolated for nine months, she may not be a willing participant in whatever Jeremy has planned."
"She may not be. But she's thirteen, she's been raised inside a cult since she was small, and the only authority figures she's ever known are the people who locked her in that service station. Jeremy will exploit that. He'll manipulate her loyalty, her fear, her need for the only family she's ever had. He's Glasser's son in every way that counts."
Arthur folded the map and slid it into his jacket pocket. His fingers brushed the photograph he kept there—a creased and faded wallet-size print of a girl with dark curls and a gap-toothed grin. Emily. Five years old in the photo. Five years old forever.
He left the photograph where it was and looked at Niccolo.
"One more thing. These are children, Niccolo. Whatever Glasser turned them into, they didn't choose any of it. If there's any way to end this without killing them, that's what we do."
"And if there isn't a way?"
Arthur held the priest's gaze. The wind gusted across the parking lot, carrying the smell of exhaust and fry grease from the diner. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolled the hour, its note flat and mournful in the heavy air.
"Then we carry that, too," he said. "Let's go."
***
They drove south through the Ohio countryside, past fallow fields and small towns with boarded storefronts, Lutheran churches whose steeples were the tallest structures for miles, and high school marquees already advertising Friday night football matchups in letters big enough to read from the highway. The sky hung low and gray, featureless, the kind of sky that promised nothing and delivered less. They passed through a town where a brick warehouse still bore the ghost of a painted sign—AKRON TIRE AND RUBBER CO.—the letters barely legible beneath forty years of weather. Arthur watched the road and let his mind work through the problem.
Thirty names on a list. Six incidents in forty-eight hours, and the pace would only accelerate. Every hour that passed was another hour for Jeremy to dig in, recruit Megyn, and prepare whatever spectacle he had in mind. The boy wanted attention—that much was clear from the activation codes. He wasn't hiding. He was announcing.
Leopold Glasser had spent his entire career operating in the shadows, building his network in secret, using the Church's own infrastructure to conceal his activities from those who would stop him. Jeremy was the opposite. He wanted the world to witness what his father had built. He wanted validation, revenge, and above all he wanted the institution that destroyed Leopold to face consequences it could not suppress or deny.
Grief made people reckless. Grief in a teenager with the power to overwrite human free will made them apocalyptic.
Arthur's phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it at a red light: a text from Cardinal Richter. A seventh incident, this one in Iowa. A twelve-year-old boy had walked into a police station and convinced every officer inside to handcuff themselves to their desks. He'd then walked back out and vanished.
He showed the text to Niccolo.
"It's starting," the priest said.
"It started three days ago when Jeremy sent those codes. We're playing catch-up."
"Can the Vatican teams handle the other cells?"
"They're deploying to Minnesota, Texas, California, and the Southeast. But each cell requires investigation, containment, and extraction. Some of these kids will come quietly once they realize Glasser is dead and no one is coming to lead them. Others won't."
"And the ones who won't?"
Arthur didn't answer. He watched a hawk circling over a frozen field, spiraling upward on a thermal that existed only in the invisible architecture of the wind. Patient. Unhurried. Certain of what came next.
They passed a green highway sign: AKRON — 15 MILES.
"Niccolo."
"Yes?"
"Whatever we find at that service station, stay behind me. If Jeremy is there and he gets inside your head, you won't know it's happening until it's too late. He doesn't shout—he whispers. He'll make you think your own thoughts are his suggestions. He'll make you lower your weapon and believe it was your choice."
"How do I protect myself?"
"Not entirely, you can't. But conviction helps. The stronger your sense of self, the harder you are to rewrite. Hold on to something true, something that's yours and no one else's. Something he can't counterfeit."
"Like what?"
Arthur let the silence hold for a breath. "Your faith. Not the institution, not the politics, not the hierarchy—the real thing. The part that lives in your chest when everything else burns away. If you've got something in there that's bedrock, he'll break his teeth trying to move it."
Niccolo nodded slowly, his eyes growing distant, already turning inward to find the stone he would stand on when the ground gave way beneath him.
They drove on. The city appeared on the horizon, its skyline modest against the overcast sky. Somewhere in those streets and suburbs, in a crumbling service station off Route 43 south of I-76, two of Glasser's most dangerous creations were converging.
Thirty names on a list. Arthur couldn't save them all. He understood that with the cold certainty of a man who had spent years choosing which fires to fight while others burned unchecked. Some of these children were already lost, consumed by abilities they couldn't control and a mission they didn't understand.
But he would try to save the ones in front of him. One at a time. Starting here.
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as the first Akron exit came into view, and turned south toward the service station.
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