Part 1: The Code of Grief

My name is Jack Miller. For twenty years, I carried a badge in New York City. I dealt in hard facts, fingerprints, ballistics, and the cold, gray reality of the pavement. I didn’t believe in miracles, and I certainly didn’t believe in prophecies. In my line of work, if you couldn’t bag it and tag it, it didn’t exist. That cynicism kept me alive on the streets, but it didn’t save my wife, Sarah. It didn’t save me from the darkness that swallowed my life whole three years ago.

It was a Tuesday. It’s always a Tuesday, isn’t it? The day Sarah was taken from me in a senseless act of violence—a robbery gone wrong at a bodega in Queens. I was on duty, miles away, chasing a low-level d*aler while my world was ending. I remember the call. I remember the silence in the precinct when I walked in. I remember the captain refusing to look me in the eye.

After the funeral, I fell into a bottle and didn’t climb out for months. I lost my badge. I lost my way. I sat in our empty apartment, surrounded by boxes of her things I couldn’t bear to move, staring at the dust motes dancing in the light, wondering why. Why her? Why then? Was it just random chaos, or was there a design to this cruelty?

That’s when I found the book. It was buried in a stack of Sarah’s old reading material—she was always the spiritual one, interested in mysteries and ancient history. It was about the Bible Code. A theory that the Hebrew Bible contained encrypted messages about the past, present, and future.

I laughed when I first opened it. It sounded like a scam, a parlor trick for the desperate. The theory was that if you treated the text as a giant crossword puzzle, skipping letters at equal intervals—every 4th letter, every 50th letter—you could find names, dates, and events. They called it Equidistant Letter Sequences (ELS).

Desperation makes you do strange things. One night, fueled by whiskey and insomnia, I booted up my old laptop. I downloaded a cracking program designed to search these text arrays. I told myself I was doing it to debunk it, to prove that Sarah’s death was just bad luck, not some divine script written three thousand years ago.

I ran the search.

I typed in “Sarah Miller.” The program churned. It found her name. Okay, coincidence. Probability says any short name will appear in a text that long. Then I typed in the date of her death.

The cursor blinked. The program highlighted a vertical string of Hebrew letters crossing her name.

It matched.

My breath hitched in my throat. I felt a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck. I typed in “Queens.” It appeared diagonally, intersecting her name and the date.

“No,” I whispered to the empty room. “No, this is impossible.”

I spent the next week running names of every perp I’d ever collared. I ran the dates of major crimes in NYC. The assassination of Rabin? It was there, just like the book said: “Assassin will assassinate.” The exact date. The Gulf War. The moon landing. It was all there, locked in a matrix of letters for millennia.

The skepticism that had armored me for twenty years shattered. I wasn’t looking at random chance. I was looking at a transcript of reality.

But if the past was there, what about the future?

That’s when the obsession truly took hold. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I became a ghost in my own life, hunting for the next tragedy. If I had known about this code three years ago, could I have saved Sarah? That question haunted me, a jagged splinter in my mind.

Then, last week, I found it.

I was searching for information on global tensions—old habits from my days in Intel before the force. I typed in “Atomic Holocaust.”

The phrase appeared.

My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I looked for the intersecting words, the cross-references that give the code its context.

“Libya.” “Terror.”

And then, a location.

“New York.”

And a date.

Three weeks from today.

I sat back, the glow of the monitor illuminating my unshaven face, the empty takeout containers, the shrine of a broken man. The code had predicted the death of Prime Minister Rabin a year before it happened, and he had ignored the warning. It predicted the exact date of the impact of the Shoemaker-Levy comet on Jupiter.

Now, it was predicting fire from the sky over my city.

I tried to take it to my old contacts at the precinct. They looked at me like I was a lunatic. “Jack, go home,” they said. “Get some help. You’re grieving.”

They didn’t see the matrix. They didn’t see the invisible wire that connects us all, the script we are unknowingly acting out.

I realized then that I was on my own. The code wasn’t just a record; it was a warning. And warnings are useless if no one listens. I remembered reading about a “Key”—a stone Obelisk rumored to be buried in Jordan, near the Red Sea, that could unlock the ultimate cipher of the code, allowing us to not just see the future, but change it.

I packed a bag. I grabbed Sarah’s photo. I have three weeks. I’m just a washed-up detective with a laptop and a bottle of bourbon, but I’m the only one who sees the train coming.

I’m going to find that Obelisk. I’m going to break the code. Or I’m going to d*e trying. Because if I couldn’t save Sarah, I have to save everyone else.

Part 2

The Descent into the Desert

The flight to Amman was a blur of plastic food trays, fitful sleep, and the stale air of recycled oxygen. I sat in seat 34C, clutching my laptop bag like it contained the nuclear launch codes. In a way, I believed it did. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the matrix of Hebrew letters glowing green against the black screen. I saw Sarah’s face. I saw the words “Atomic Holocaust” intersecting with “New York” and the date that was now only nineteen days away.

When the wheels touched down in Jordan, the heat hit me the moment the cabin doors opened. It was a dry, ancient heat, the kind that bakes the moisture right out of your skin. I wasn’t in Queens anymore. I wasn’t a detective here; I was a tourist with a obsession, a ghost chasing a shadow. I rented a battered Land Rover from a guy who looked like he’d traded his camels for carburetors about a week ago. My destination was Petra, but not for the sightseeing. I was heading to a small dig site just north of the ancient city, near the Lisan Peninsula of the Dead Sea.

According to the research I’d pulled from the Bible Code files—files that the original researcher, a man I’ll call ‘Drosnin’ to protect the real identity, had spent decades compiling—the “Key” was buried there. The Obelisk. The stone that would unlock not just the warnings, but the solutions.

I needed a translator. More than that, I needed a believer. Back in New York, before I left, I’d reached out to an old contact from my days working counter-terrorism intelligence. He’d given me a name: Dr. Elias Thorne. An expatriate American archaeologist who had been effectively exiled from academia for his “fringe” theories about biblical history.

I found Thorne in a dusty tea house on the outskirts of Wadi Musa. He was a scarecrow of a man, sun-bleached hair, skin like leather, wearing a linen suit that had gone out of style in the 1940s. He was drinking something dark and thick, staring at a map spread out on the table.

“You’re Miller,” he said without looking up. “You look terrible.”

“Nice to meet you too, Doc,” I grunted, sliding into the chair opposite him. “I haven’t slept in three days. You’d look bad too.”

“I haven’t slept in three decades,” Thorne quipped, finally raising his eyes. They were sharp, blue, and unsettlingly intelligent. “You said on the encrypted line you have something on the Code. I usually charge for my time, but for the Code… I make exceptions. Show me.”

I opened the laptop. The battery was dying, but I had enough juice to show him the grid. I pulled up the file labeled ‘Sarah.’

Thorne adjusted his glasses. He traced the screen with a trembling finger. “Miller… Sarah… M*rder… Queens.” He read the Hebrew letters fluently. He looked at the date. He looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need sympathy, Doc. I need verification. Look at the next file.”

I switched to the file labeled ‘New York – Tishrei.’

Thorne’s eyes went wide. He leaned in, his nose almost touching the screen. “Fire from the Heavens… New York… Terror… Atomic.” He whispered the words. He sat back, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. His hands were shaking. “The skip sequence is tight. Every 47th letter. That’s… statistically significant. Extremely significant.”

“The odds?”

“One in fifty million,” Thorne murmured. “Maybe higher. This isn’t random chance, Jack. You know about the Great Rabbis Experiment? Rips, Witztum, Rosenberg? They found the names of 66 sages, their birth dates, and death dates encoded in Genesis. The math held up. The skeptics tried to debunk it, tried to find it in War and Peace or Moby Dick, but they couldn’t replicate the density of the information. This…” He gestured to my screen. “This is happening now.”

“Where is the Key, Elias?” I asked, my voice low. “The notes say there’s an Obelisk. Something the agency classified fifty years ago.”

Thorne took a long drag of his cigarette. “The Agency. The CIA kept photos of the Ararat anomaly classified for decades. You think they don’t know about this? If there is a Key, if there is a way to decode the prevention of these events, it’s not just buried in the sand. It’s buried under layers of red tape, black ops, and b*llets.”

“I don’t care about the politics,” I snapped. “I have eighteen days. If this code is right, my city—my home—is going to be turned into glass. I need to find that pillar.”

Thorne crushed out the cigarette. “Then we drive. But Jack? Check your six. Because if the Code is real, and it predicted the assassination of a Prime Minister, it probably predicted us sitting here right now. And it might predict who’s coming to stop us.”

The Matrix of the Desert

We drove north along the King’s Highway, the landscape shifting from jagged red mountains to the lunar salt flats of the Dead Sea. The air conditioning in the Land Rover was broken, and the heat was a physical weight, pressing down on my chest. Or maybe that was the grief.

I kept thinking about Sarah. About the Tuesday she d*ed. The Code had said “Robbery.” It had said “Bodega.” It was all there. If I had just looked… if I had just known where to look. That guilt was a fuel, burning hotter than the Jordanian sun.

Thorne talked as he drove. He explained the mechanics of the Code to keep me awake. “It’s like looking at a word search puzzle,” he shouted over the roar of the wind. “But the puzzle is three-dimensional and infinite. The text of the Torah has 304,805 letters. If you alter one letter, the code breaks. The sequence collapses. It’s remained unchanged for thousands of years for a reason. It’s a time capsule.”

“Who wrote it?” I asked. “God? Aliens? Time travelers?”

“Does it matter?” Thorne glanced at me. “The ‘Who’ is a question for theology. The ‘What’ is a question for survival. Michael Drosnin believed it was a warning system. That the future isn’t fixed. It’s a probability tree. The Code tells us what will happen if we don’t change the path. ‘Will you change it?’ That’s the phrase found crossing the assassination of Rabin. He didn’t change it. He ignored it.”

“And the Atomic Holocaust?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Thorne said grimly.

We reached the coordinates late in the afternoon. It was a desolate stretch of rock and sand, overlooking the shimmering haze of the Dead Sea. There was nothing there. Just wind and silence.

“This is it?” I asked, stepping out of the car. The ground crunched under my boots.

“The coordinates intersect with the word ‘Pillar’ and ‘Hidden,’” Thorne said, consulting a handheld GPS and a crumpled paper map. “And ‘Jordan.’ We’re in the right box.”

I grabbed a shovel from the back of the Rover. “Then we dig.”

We dug for hours. The sun began to dip, painting the sky in bruises of purple and orange. My hands blistered. My back screamed. I was a forty-five-year-old ex-drunk digging a hole in the desert because a computer program told me to. It was insanity.

But then, my shovel hit something hard. Not rock. Metal.

“Thorne!” I yelled.

He scrambled over, dropping into the pit with me. We brushed away the sand. It wasn’t an Obelisk. It was a casing. A heavy, lead-lined box, stamped with markings that looked dangerously modern.

“This isn’t ancient,” I said, wiping sweat from my eyes. “This looks like…”

“Cold War tech,” Thorne finished. “1950s. Maybe early 60s.”

We pried the lid open. Inside wasn’t a stone pillar, but a set of metallic plates, engraved with Hebrew text, preserved in a vacuum seal.

“The Copper Scroll,” Thorne breathed. “Or something like it. But look at the text.”

I shined my flashlight on the plates. I didn’t need to run the program to see the patterns. The letters were arranged in a grid.

“It’s a cipher key,” I realized. “A manual decoder. Someone found the Obelisk years ago, Jack. They transcribed it. They hid the transcription here.”

“Who?”

“The Watchers,” a voice said from above us.

I froze. My hand went to the waistband of my jeans, instinctively reaching for the service weapon I no longer carried. I looked up.

Silhouetted against the dying light were three figures. They weren’t wearing desert robes. They were wearing tactical gear. High-end, American-made military spec. They held assault r*fles, aimed directly at us.

“Step away from the box, Mr. Miller,” the lead figure said. His accent was flat, mid-Atlantic. American. “You’ve gone far enough.”

“Who are you?” I demanded, shielding my eyes.

“We’re the ones who ensure the timeline remains… stable,” the man said. “The Code isn’t for public consumption. It’s classified.”

“Classified?” I laughed, a harsh, barking sound. “It predicted my wife’s m*rder. It predicts a nuke in New York City in two weeks. You call that classified? I call it negligence.”

“We call it containment,” the man replied. He racked the slide of his w*apon. “Get out of the hole. Now.”

The Pursuit

I looked at Thorne. He looked terrified. But I saw something else in his eyes—calculating intelligence. He was holding one of the heavy metal plates behind his back.

“Jack,” Thorne whispered. “Duck.”

Thorne swung the plate like a frisbee. It caught the setting sun, flashing brilliantly, and sailed through the air, striking the lead gunman in the shin. He grunted, his aim wavering.

“Run!” Thorne screamed.

I didn’t hesitate. I scrambled up the side of the pit, grabbing the bag with the remaining plates. B*llets kicked up sand around my feet. Thwip-thwip-thwip. Suppressed fire. They wanted this quiet.

We dove behind the Land Rover just as the glass shattered.

“Can you drive?” I yelled at Thorne.

“I can drive!” he yelled back, fumbling with the keys.

The engine roared to life. We peeled out, sand spraying everywhere, the Rover fishtailing wildly. More shots pinged off the chassis. I looked back. The tactical team was running toward black SUVs that had been parked behind a ridge, invisible until now.

“They were waiting for us,” I shouted. “How did they know?”

“The Code!” Thorne screamed, wrestling the steering wheel as we bounced over jagged rocks. “If it predicts the future, Jack, it predicted we would find the plates today! They didn’t need a tracker. They just needed to read the Book!”

We hit the highway doing eighty. The SUVs were close behind. I opened the laptop, balancing it on my knees as the car shook.

“What are you doing?” Thorne yelled.

“I’m asking the Code where to go!” I typed frantically. ‘Escape.’ ‘Safe Haven.’ ‘Jordan.’

The program spun.

“Jack, they’re gaining!”

“I got it!” I yelled. “Petra! The Siq! ‘Hidden in the cleft of the rock.’ It intersects with ‘Sanctuary’ and… ‘Today’!”

“Petra is a tourist trap!” Thorne argued.

“It’s a maze,” I countered. “And at night, it’s a tomb. Turn left!”

Thorne swerved. We careened off the highway onto the access road leading to the ancient city. The SUVs followed, their headlights blinding in the rearview mirror.

We were running out of time. We were running out of road. And I was holding the only copy of a manual that might stop the apocalypse.

Part 3

The City of Stone

Night had fully fallen by the time we crashed the gate at Petra. Thorne drove the Land Rover through the flimsy wooden barrier, the tires screeching on the ancient cobblestones. We abandoned the vehicle at the entrance to the Siq—the narrow, mile-long gorge that leads into the heart of the ancient Nabatean city.

“On foot from here,” I ordered, grabbing the heavy bag of plates and my laptop.

The Siq was pitch black, a winding tear in the earth with cliffs shooting up hundreds of feet on either side. It was like running through the throat of a giant. The air was cool and smelled of dust and history. Behind us, the roar of the SUVs’ engines cut out, replaced by the slamming of doors and the rhythmic thud of tactical boots hitting the ground. They were coming.

Thorne was wheezing, his older frame struggling with the pace. “Jack… I can’t… I can’t outrun them.”

“You don’t have to,” I whispered, pulling him into a shadowed alcove carved into the sandstone wall. “We have to outsmart them. The Code said ‘Hidden in the cleft.’ That implies we stay put, or we go deep.”

I cracked open the laptop again, shielding the screen glow with my jacket. I needed more. I typed in “Pursuers.” I typed in “night.”

The matrix shifted. A new set of words appeared. Ambush. Confusion. Flash.

“Flash?” I muttered.

“Jack,” Thorne hissed, grabbing my arm. “Look.”

Down the canyon, beams of tactical flashlights were cutting through the dark, sweeping the walls. They were systematic. Professional. These weren’t just hired thugs; this was a black-ops unit, likely working off the books for whatever agency wanted the Code silenced.

I looked at the metal plates in the bag. I pulled one out. It was heavy, gold-plated copper. “Thorne, do you have a lighter?”

“A lighter? Yes, why?”

“The Code said ‘Flash.’ The Code also mentioned ‘Ark’ and ‘Capacitor’ in the transcripts. These plates… they’re conductive. If we create a short, maybe we can blind their night vision.”

It was a desperate, MacGyver-style Hail Mary, but I was out of options. I grabbed the spare battery from my laptop bag—an external power bank I used for long stakes. I stripped the wires with my teeth.

“You’re going to electrocute yourself,” Thorne whispered, horrified.

“Better than getting shot,” I grunted.

The footsteps were close now. I could hear their breathing. I could hear the radio chatter. “Target enters the Siq. flush them out. lethal force authorized.”

Lethal force. They weren’t trying to capture the plates anymore. They were cleaning up loose ends.

I waited until the first beam of light swept past our alcove. Then, I pressed the exposed wires against the copper plate.

CRACK.

It wasn’t just a spark. It was like a lightning bolt was born in my hands. The plate amplified the discharge, creating a blinding, magnesium-white flash that turned the pitch-black canyon into noon-day brightness for a split second.

Screams echoed off the walls. The operatives, wearing night-vision goggles, were instantly blinded. The optics would have flared out, leaving them disoriented and seeing spots.

“Move!” I roared.

We sprinted past the stunned operatives. I shoulder-checked one who was clawing at his face, knocking him into the dirt. We burst out of the Siq and into the Treasury plaza—the famous Al-Khazneh, carved directly into the cliff face. Under the starlight, it looked ghostly, a monument to the dead.

But we didn’t stop at the Treasury. The Code had given me one more coordinate. High Place.

“We have to climb,” I told Thorne, pointing to the winding, treacherous stairs carved into the mountain that led to the High Place of Sacrifice.

“You’re trying to k*ll me,” Thorne wheezed, but he started climbing.

The Negotiation

We reached the summit an hour later. My lungs were burning, my legs turning to jelly. We were hundreds of feet up, overlooking the entire valley. It was silent up here. Closer to the stars.

I set up the laptop on the sacrificial altar—a flat stone slab used by the Nabateans two thousand years ago. I laid out the plates.

“Thorne, translate,” I commanded. “I need to know what these plates say about New York. Now.”

Thorne adjusted his glasses, squinting under the light of the moon and the faint glow of the screen. “It’s… it’s a list of dates. But they aren’t just dates. They’re activation codes. Coordinates.”

“For what?”

“For the ‘Agency’s’ countermeasures,” Thorne said, his voice trembling. “Jack, look at this. The Atomic Holocaust… it’s not a foreign attack. It’s a false flag. Or a mistake. The Code says ‘The weapon is ours.’ Intersecting with ‘Manhattan Project’ and ‘Dormant’.”

My blood ran cold. “There’s a nuke in New York? Already?”

“Buried,” Thorne read. “Since the Cold War. A fail-safe. Someone is going to trigger it. Not from the outside… but from the inside.”

A helicopter rotor thumped in the distance. They had called in air support. A spotlight swept the mountaintop.

“We have nowhere to go, Jack,” Thorne said, defeated.

“No,” I said, a strange calm washing over me. “We have the truth. And we have an internet connection.”

I pulled out my satellite phone—another relic from my intel days. I tethered it to the laptop. The connection was slow, agonizingly slow, but it was there.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m uploading it,” I said. “To the New York Times. To the Washington Post. To the FBI tip line. To every conspiracy forum on the dark web. I’m putting the Code out there. All of it. The plates, the translation, the dates.”

“They’ll k*ll us before you hit send,” Thorne warned.

The helicopter hovered directly overhead. The downdraft kicked up dust, stinging my eyes. A voice boomed over a loudspeaker. “DROP THE DEVICE. HANDS ON YOUR HEADS.”

I stood up. I held the laptop high, the upload bar at 85%.

“Jack!” Thorne yelled.

I looked at the camera mounted on the chopper’s belly. I knew they could see the screen. I knew they could see what I was doing.

“If you shoot me,” I screamed into the roaring wind, “the dead man switch triggers! It goes everywhere! You can’t stop the signal!”

It was a bluff. There was no dead man switch. Just a terrified ex-cop praying that the Wi-Fi gods were listening.

90%.

A laser dot appeared on my chest. Right over my heart.

“Do it!” I screamed at the chopper. “Make me a martyr! See what happens!”

95%.

I thought of Sarah. I thought of the bodega. I thought of the empty apartment. I realized, finally, that this wasn’t about saving her. She was gone. This was about saving the millions of other Sarahs walking around New York City right now, oblivious to the fire beneath their feet.

99%.

Upload Complete.

I dropped to my knees, exhaling a breath I felt like I’d been holding for three years.

The laser dot lingered on my chest for a terrifying eternity. Then, it vanished. The helicopter banked away.

The radio on my belt—stolen from the operative I’d knocked down in the Siq—crackled to life.

“Stand down,” a voice said. A different voice. Older. Weary. “The cat is out of the bag. Bringing them in. We have a containment breach in Sector 7.”

Thorne looked at me, his face pale. “What did you just do, Jack?”

“I just changed the future,” I said, closing the laptop.

The Interrogation

They didn’t k*ll us. That would have been too messy with the files already circulating on the web. Instead, they bagged us, zip-tied us, and flew us to a black site in the Negev desert.

For three days, I sat in a windowless room. No clock. No sleep. Just a steel table and a mirror.

Finally, the door opened. A man in a suit walked in. He looked like an accountant, but his eyes were dead.

“Mr. Miller,” he said softly. “You have caused a significant amount of trouble.”

“Did you find it?” I asked, my voice raspy. “The device in Manhattan?”

The man paused. He placed a folder on the table. “Because of your… leak… the NYPD and FBI received credible intelligence regarding a Cold War-era infrastructure anomaly under the foundation of a building in Midtown. A specialized team was sent in.”

“And?”

“They found a device,” he admitted. “It was active. The timer was set for T-minus fourteen days. It has been secured and dismantled.”

I slumped back in the chair. Tears pricked my eyes. Not of sadness, but of relief so profound it felt like pain.

“Why?” I asked. “Why was it there?”

“The Code,” the man said, tapping the table. “You think you discovered it? We’ve been using it for fifty years. We use it to predict markets, elections, wars. But sometimes… sometimes the Code creates a loop. We saw the explosion in the matrix. We thought it was inevitable. We didn’t realize the device was ours until you translated the plates.”

He leaned in. “You didn’t just read the Code, Miller. You became part of it. The matrix predicted a ‘Watcher’ would reveal the truth. We tried to stop you because we thought you were the trigger. Turns out, you were the safety.”

“So what now?” I asked. “You put a b*llet in my head?”

“No,” the man stood up. “The world knows your name now. If you die, it confirms the conspiracy. You’re free to go, Jack. But know this: The Code isn’t done. You stopped one event. But the matrix is infinite. And you’re awake now.”

He tossed my badge—my old NYPD shield—onto the table. I hadn’t seen it in three years.

“You might need this,” he said. “New York is going to need eyes that can see what others can’t.”

Part 4

The Watcher

The flight back to New York was different. I was in First Class this time—courtesy of “The Agency,” a golden parachute to keep me quiet. I drank club soda. The whiskey didn’t appeal to me anymore. I needed to be sharp.

When I landed at JFK, it was raining. The gray sky of Queens looked beautiful. I took a cab to the cemetery.

I stood over Sarah’s grave. The grass had grown over the dirt. It looked peaceful.

“I did it, baby,” I whispered, touching the cold stone. “I stopped it. I couldn’t save you, but… I saved them.”

I pulled out my phone. The news feeds were going crazy. “Terror Plot Foiled in Midtown,” “FBI Raids Cold War Bunker,” “Mystery Whistleblower Leaks Ancient Codes.” The world was buzzing. Most people called it a hoax. Some called it a miracle.

I knew the truth. It was math. It was destiny.

I went back to my apartment. It was still a mess, but it felt different now. It wasn’t a tomb; it was a command center. I sat down at my desk and opened the laptop.

I had kept a copy of the plates’ translation. Thorne had gone back to academia, suddenly very well-funded and very quiet. But I wasn’t done.

I opened the program. The cursor blinked, waiting.

I wasn’t just a detective looking for fingerprints anymore. I was a detective looking for timelines.

I typed in a new search. I typed in “Jack Miller.”

The letters scrolled. My name appeared.

I looked for the intersection. I looked for the future.

Intersecting with my name were the words: Guardian. Search. The Others.

The Others?

A chill went down my spine. The Atomic Holocaust was just one node in the web. There were other threats, other events locked in the cipher of the Torah. And there were other people like me—people whose tragedies had awakened them to the Code.

My phone buzzed. It was a text from an unknown number.

“We saw what you did in Jordan. We need your help. San Francisco. October 12th. Earthquake. It’s not natural.”

I looked at the date. Two months from now.

I looked at the Code on my screen. I typed in “San Francisco.”

There it was. Tectonic. Artificial. October.

I picked up my badge. I pinned it to my belt. It felt heavy, grounded.

The grief was still there, a dull ache that would never truly go away. But it was no longer a cage. It was a lens. Sarah hadn’t d*ed for nothing. She had led me to the book. She had given me the eyes to see the invisible war being fought in the spaces between the letters.

I cracked my knuckles and started typing.

“Okay,” I said to the empty room. “Let’s get to work.”

The story wasn’t over. It was just beginning. And this time, I was writing the ending.