We stood at the chain-link fence that surrounded District Zero, staring into a void the city pretended didn't exist. The wind was sharp this morning — colder than it should've been for early spring. It carried the scent of rust and old smoke, as if the great fire from two decades ago still smoldered in the belly of that ghost district.
I rubbed the stubble on my jaw and adjusted my scarf. "Looks abandoned."
Alex stood beside me, hands in his coat pockets. "Looks like it wants to stay that way."
He wasn't wrong. Beyond the fence, District Zero sprawled like the skeleton of a long-dead beast — half-burned buildings, cracked streets overtaken by weeds, fire-gutted towers with gaping windows like empty eyes. It was as if time had frozen the moment the flames died and never restarted the clock.
We snuck in through a hole in the fence, hidden behind a rusted billboard that once advertised a hotel chain that no longer existed. The ground was soft, overgrown. No one had maintained this place in years. The deeper we moved into the ruins, the quieter the world became.
Birds didn't sing here. Not even rats dared scurry.
"Keep your eyes peeled," I whispered, my voice almost swallowed by the concrete bones around us.
Alex nodded silently, holding a small camcorder we'd brought to document anything we found. We moved like shadows, slipping through alleys choked with ash, past hollowed-out storefronts and graffiti-covered subway entrances. It was a graveyard.
We found the first sign three blocks in: a smile ball shoved in the eye socket of a broken mannequin, its mouth sewn shut with wire.
The smile ball was orange.
That was new.
I photographed the scene, bagged the ball, and scrawled the location on our map.
"He's left a trail," I said. "Breadcrumbs. He wants us to follow."
Alex didn't say anything, but I saw his eyes scanning the ruined landscape, always alert. That was one of the things I admired about him — quiet, methodical, never distracted by fear.
We kept walking.
The second smile ball was inside a burned-out church.
The roof had long since collapsed, and only half the stained glass remained. What was once a place of worship now resembled a cavern of melted stone and fractured light. The yellow smile ball was resting on the altar.
Someone had painted a spiral around it in black tar.
I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
"I don't like this," I said.
Alex looked at the spiral. "It's too precise."
"Like always."
We moved carefully, documenting everything. There were symbols etched into the marble — not letters, but jagged lines and spiral motifs. Some were fresh.
"He's been here," I said. "Recently."
But why these places?
What was he trying to show us?
The deeper we went, the stranger things became.
Third smile ball — green. Tied to a children's swing in a park blackened by fire. Beneath it, the words "SMILE IS NOT HAPPY" etched into the bark of a tree.
Fourth smile ball — white. Floating in a rust-stained bathtub inside what looked like a collapsed asylum. Walls covered in handprints, all too small to be adult.
Fifth smile ball — red. Inside a shattered vending machine, surrounded by empty candy wrappers and piles of small bones that looked suspiciously human.
Each one felt like a station in some demented ritual — a psychological maze designed to wear us down, to test what remained of our resolve.
I didn't realize until I glanced at my watch how much time had passed.
Six hours.
We'd been walking the ruins for six hours and still hadn't found the center.
We stopped to eat in what had once been a bakery, now reduced to mold and memories. I sat on an overturned milk crate, chewing on a protein bar I had in my pocket like it was rubber.
"I don't get it," I said. "Why bring us here? There's nothing but ghosts."
Alex drank from a water bottle, wiped his mouth. "Maybe he wants us to feel what he feels. Isolation. Abandonment."
I stared at him. "You think this is personal?"
He shrugged. "Isn't it always?"
He wasn't wrong.
This kind of killing — calculated, ceremonial, symbolic — it was never just about the victims. It was always about the killer. The performance. The attention.
And now he had ours.
As the sun began to set behind the ashen towers, we finally reached what I believed to be the spiral's true center.
It was a building unlike the others — untouched by fire, intact but buried beneath ivy and shadow. A three-story structure with no signs, no identifiers, just a heavy iron door sealed shut by a sliding bar.
We pried it open and stepped inside.
Darkness greeted us like an old friend.
Our flashlights illuminated a long hallway lined with mirrors — cracked, stained, warped. Each one reflected us in distorted angles. Some made us look too tall. Others too wide. One of them… didn't show us at all.
I paused.
"What the hell…"
Alex moved beside me. "It's a funhouse mirror."
"No. Look."
We both stared into the black panel. No reflection.
Then, faintly, something flickered in the glass — a grin. A yellow arc, wide and jagged.
I turned away, breath catching in my throat.
"Let's move," I muttered.
The building had multiple levels, each one worse than the last.
First floor: corridors lined with broken toys and audio tapes playing warped children's laughter on loop. Smile balls hanging from the ceiling like ornaments.
Second floor: a gallery of photographs — real victims, real corpses, all with their mouths disfigured into permanent grins. Dates scribbled on the walls. Our first crime scene was there. And our second. And third.
He'd been watching us.
Tracking us.
Anticipating.
Third floor: the heart of the spiral.
A single room. Clean. Sterile. Walls painted white.
In the center, a table. On it: a book.
Bound in human skin.
I stepped forward, slowly.
Alex held his breath.
I opened the book.
Inside were sketches — spirals, patterns, dissected smile balls, autopsy diagrams. Notes in a language I didn't understand. One page was torn and taped back in, marked with dried blood and a note in English:
"You are almost ready to smile."
I closed the book and felt the room tilt.
The killer wasn't just leading us here.
He was preparing us.
This place wasn't the end of his plan.
It was only the beginning.
We left District Zero as the sky turned the color of bruised flesh. Neither of us spoke for a while. The streets of the city felt alien now, too bright, too loud. Like we'd walked through a veil and returned to a different world.
Back at the precinct, I laid out everything we found.
Five smile balls.
A book made of skin.
A spiral that led to the oldest, darkest part of the city.
And still no trace of the killer.
No fingerprints.
No witnesses.
Not even a silhouette caught on a security cam.
He was a ghost. A patternless predator with perfect precision.
"Leo," Alex said suddenly.
I looked up.
"I don't think he's done."
I stared at the board. "No," I said. "He's only just begun."
And deep inside me, something twisted — a quiet dread, low and steady, like a scream held too long in the throat.
The precinct looked wrong after the return, I felt so.
Too sterile. Too bright. A mismatch with the grime we'd just crawled out of. I could still smell the mildew and smoke of District Zero clinging to my coat, but inside the precinct it was all lemon cleaner and coffee.
Alex sat quietly across from me, reviewing the camcorder footage. I paced like a caged animal.
"There's something we're missing," I muttered, running my fingers through my hair. "The mirrors, the recordings, the book… it's all part of something bigger."
Alex didn't answer immediately. He was scrubbing through the tape, pausing every few frames, analyzing the finer details with a focus I admired.
"There's a consistency in his inconsistency," he finally said. "He doesn't leave fingerprints or DNA, but he always leaves… presence."
I turned to him. "Presence?"
Alex nodded. "Symbols. Locations. Emotional cues. It's like each crime scene is designed not to be solved — but to be felt."
I hated how right he sounded.
The killer didn't want us to find him. He wanted us to understand him. He wanted us to stand in the spiral long enough for it to consume us.
"He's trying to shape us," I said quietly. "Like we're part of the performance."
"Maybe we are," Alex said.
I looked at the evidence board. Five victims. Five locations. Smile balls. And now… us. Always watching. Always chasing.
Were we the audience? Or the next act?
Later that evening, I walked the city streets alone.
I needed air. Needed to escape the eyes of the precinct — the stares of other officers who saw our wall of spirals and smile balls and began to think maybe we were becoming insane.
But no.
I was sharpening.
I lit a cigarette I didn't plan on finishing and found myself drawn toward the museum district — a place I used to visit before the murders started. Before the job turned from duty into obsession.
That's when I saw it.
Spray paint. Fresh.
On the wall outside an old art supply store.
A spiral — massive, maybe six feet wide — drawn in dark red. At its center: a single smile. No ball. Just the shape. A painted grin.
I froze.
This wasn't reported. There'd been no call about vandalism in this district. And yet it was here — bold, wet, deliberate.
He was expanding his reach.
Marking his territory.
I snapped photos from every angle and called dispatch. Told them I needed surveillance pulled for the last 12 hours within a three-block radius.
If this was his work — and I was sure it was — then maybe he'd gotten sloppy. Maybe, for once, he left a thread loose.
When I returned to the precinct, Alex was still at the board.
He turned slightly when I entered. "Find something?"
I dropped the photos on the desk. "Fresh spiral. Red. Near 9th and Hayworth."
Alex's eyes narrowed. "He's moving outward?"
"Or drawing us in."
He stared at the pictures. "This doesn't match the previous style. This one's… more chaotic."
I paused. "You think it's a copycat?"
"No," he said, too quickly. "I think it's emotional. Raw. Like he was angry."
I frowned. "Why would he be angry?"
Alex shrugged, but I caught a flicker in his eyes. Fatigue, maybe. Or something else. I didn't push it.
I looked at the timestamps from the District Zero footage again. We'd spent almost ten hours in the ruins. Ten hours away from the outside world. And in that time, someone had walked into the public eye and left a fresh spiral behind.
He was playing with our schedule.
Learning our habits.
He knew we'd be gone.
He knew we wouldn't be watching.
It chilled me.
Just before midnight, a call came in.
Another body.
Sixth victim. Which means.. Sixth smile ball(the onces we got at District zero doesn't count for now. Only the onces we got near a victim.)
This one… inside a public library.
We drove through empty streets, sirens silent, lights off. No need to alert a killer who already knew everything.
The library was quiet — abandoned for the night, save for the two uniformed officers who stood pale-faced at the entrance.
Inside, it looked like any other crime scene.
Except it wasn't.
The body lay slumped over a reading table, head twisted at an unnatural angle, mouth stretched with surgical wire into a grin that bled from the corners. On the open book beneath the corpse's face: a single word carved with a knife.
"Smile."
The smile ball was wedged into the dead man's throat.
Purple this time.
I swallowed bile and motioned for Alex to begin taking photographs while I examined the wounds.
No signs of struggle. No defensive marks. Same precision. Same ritualistic mutilation. And the same smile ball.
But something was different.
There were no spiral symbols. No graffiti. No symbols etched into the skin or furniture.
"Why change the formula?" I murmured.
Alex stepped beside me. "Maybe this one wasn't part of the spiral."
I looked at him. "A one-off?"
He nodded. "Or something else. A trigger."
I stared at the corpse, then at the word carved into the book.
Smile.
This wasn't a murder.
It was a message. A message for us.
Back at the precinct, I collapsed onto the breakroom couch. My brain was burning. My limbs ached. My soul felt like it had been sandpapered.
Alex brought me coffee. Black. No sugar.
"Thanks," I muttered, sipping slowly.
We sat in silence for a while. I listened to the hum of the vending machine, the distant murmur of officers two rooms over. It should've felt safe.
It didn't.
"I think he's changing the game," I said finally. "We've seen the pattern. We've felt the spiral. But this new victim… he's improvising now. Reacting."
"To us?" Alex asked.
I nodded. "He knows we're close. And I think that scares him."
Alex looked down into his own coffee. "Or maybe it excites him."
The words hung there for a moment, heavy as stone.
I didn't sleep that night.
I just stared at the photos of the purple smile ball and wondered what came after the spiral.
What came after the center?
Because whatever it was…
We were heading straight for it.