CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The world had shrunk to the view through a pair of dusty binoculars.
We were perched in the skeleton of an office building two blocks from the sanctuary. Below, the street was a river of desperate people flowing towards the old community center. The air, even up here, was thick with their fear. It was a scent I knew better than my own.
Alex leaned against the broken window frame, her rifle propped beside her, a statue of cold purpose. I was on my knees, the binoculars pressed hard against my face, trying to make the people into shapes, into problems, into anything but what they were.
"See anyone?" Alex's voice was flat. It wasn't a question of concern. It was a request for a status report.
"Just people," I mumbled. A sea of faces blurred by tears, dirt, and exhaustion. They were a monolith of misery. It was easier that way.
"Look closer, Thorne," she commanded, not looking at me. "Find the unit. The core. A mother, a father, a child. The Archon prefers a complete set. It craves the dynamic."
My hands were sweating, making the binoculars slick. The Anchor was a block of ice in my inner jacket pocket, its cold seeping through the fabric to numb my skin. I scanned the crowd, my breath hitching. I saw an elderly couple supporting each other. I saw a group of teenagers trying to look tough. I saw a woman alone, clutching a cat carrier.
Then I found them.
They were off to the side, away from the main press of the crowd, trying to carve out a small island of normalcy on the cold concrete steps. A man, broad-shouldered but with a gentle slump to his posture, had his arm around a woman who was shivering despite the blanket wrapped around her. Between them, a boy. He was small, maybe eight, with messy brown hair and eyes that were too wide for his face. He was clutching a worn-looking action figure, his knuckles white. I recognised them, vividly.
The man—Mark—leaned down and said something to the boy. The boy, Leo, shook his head, his lip trembling. Mark didn't get angry. He just nodded, pulled a comic book from a backpack, and started reading to him in a low, steady voice. The woman, Sarah, watched them, her hand resting on Leo's back, her love for them a physical thing you could almost touch.
My throat closed. They were real. They weren't a concept. They were a family.
"I see a family," I said, my voice strangled.
"Describe them."
"A man, a woman, a boy. The boy's name is Leo." Saying his name out loud felt like a sin.
"Good. The child is the best conduit. The Archon finds their innocence… flavorful." Alex's clinical tone was a violation. She was talking about them like livestock.
I couldn't look away. I watched Mark finish a page and make a silly sound effect, pulling a weak smile from Leo. I saw Sarah tuck the blanket tighter around her son's shoulders. They were a perfect, self-contained world of love and protection. And I was the meteor about to hit them.
The cold from the Anchor seemed to spread, reaching into my chest. This wasn't a strategic sacrifice. This was murder. A slower, more cruel murder than any I had ever committed with my knife. I was going to hand their child to a thing that would hollow him out from the inside, that would use his love for them as the weapon to destroy them all.
A memory, unbidden and viciously sharp, stabbed into my brain.
Lily, age five, sitting in a pool of sunlight on the living room floor. She was building a tower of blocks, her tiny tongue stuck out in concentration. She looked up at me, her eyes the color of warm honey, and beamed. "Look, Daddy! It's a castle for us!"
The love I felt in that moment was a physical pain, so intense it stole my breath. It was clean. It was pure. It was everything the Archon was not.
And then, a sound.
It wasn't in the room. It wasn't in my ears. It was in my head. A high, thin, psychic shriek that tore through the static of the Archon's presence.
"DADDY! IT'S SO DARK IN HERE! IT HURTS!"
It was Lily's voice. Not the flat, distorted chorus of the Quiet Man. It was my little girl's voice, raw with a terror so profound it froze the blood in my veins. It was a flash of her, the real her, trapped and screaming in the dark behind the monster's eyes.
The sound vanished as quickly as it came, swallowed by the returning hum. But it had been there. She was in there. She was fighting. And she was losing.
I dropped the binoculars. They clattered on the dusty floor. I bent over, hands on my knees, dry heaves wracking my body. The pain in my side was nothing compared to this.
Alex was beside me in an instant. Not to comfort me. To assess the asset.
"What is it?" she demanded. "Is the Archon close?"
I shook my head, unable to speak. Tears I didn't know I could still produce streamed down my face, cutting paths through the grime. It was the first time I had cried for my daughter. Really cried for her, not for the problem she represented.
"She's in there," I choked out. "I heard her. She's… she's terrified."
Alex's expression didn't soften, but it shifted. The cold calculation in her eyes was joined by a flicker of something else. Recognition. "The entity is consolidating its control. The bond is straining. We're out of time, David. You have to choose. Now."
I looked up at her, my vision blurred. "I can't. You don't understand… that boy… his father was reading him a comic book."
"And your daughter is being eaten alive by a cosmic parasite," she shot back, her voice low and fierce. "Your sentiment is a luxury you lost the moment you put a knife in your wife. You wanted the power to decide who lives and dies. This is what it looks like. Now, look through those binoculars and confirm your target."
Her words were whips. They stripped away the last of my self-delusion. I was a killer. I had always been a killer. The only question left was what kind of killer I would be.
I picked up the binoculars. My hands were steady now. A terrible, dead calm had settled over me. I found the Carter family again. Mark was now showing Leo how to do a trick with a piece of string. Sarah was watching them, a sad, brave smile on her face.
I memorized their faces. I let their love for each other, their fragile, beautiful hope, become a brand on my soul.
"The Carters," I said, my voice hollow, the words tasting of ash and damnation. "Mark, Sarah, and Leo. They're the ones."
The Anchor against my chest seemed to pulse once, a single, hungry heartbeat. The deal was struck. The hook was baited.
Somewhere in the dying city, my little girl was screaming in the dark. And I had just chosen the price of her silence.