Night pressed low, like someone had thrown an oil-soaked rag over the city. Streetlights burned with a sickly yellow halo.
Ethan leaned by the cracked hotel window, the cigarette in his fingers flaring and going out. His head replayed his friend's warning: "The Bureau… is lying." The words looped like a scratched tape, distorted and noisy, a soundtrack designed to keep him awake.
Behind him, his partner Vera methodically took apart her pistol, wiping each part with cold efficiency.
"I don't believe him." Her first sentence hit like a bullet—clean, loaded with powder.
Ethan didn't turn around; he let the smoke curl up. "You didn't even properly look at his face."
"I did." Vera's voice was flat. "I've read the autopsy. I've seen the nightmare fragments. He's dead. Completely. Your so-called 'friend coming back' looks to me a lot more like a malicious experiment."
She snapped the slide home; the metal click sounded loud in the dim room.
"A dead man suddenly shows up in front of you and tells you the Bureau is conspiring?" Vera's mouth curled in a cold smile. "Either it's a trap, or your nerves finally frayed."
Ethan turned, weary. "You think I'm crazy?"
"Crazy or not is irrelevant." Vera shrugged. "What matters is we can't treat a possible illusion as evidence. Unless you want to lead the whole squad into the fire."
Silence rose like a tide and swallowed their breaths.
Vera changed tone. "Honestly, I suspect the Bureau's been using you."
"Using me?" Ethan lifted a brow.
"You're a 'half-nightmare type'—they never truly trusted you. But you're useful: you can go into rifts, you resonate with those things in ways others don't. A shove from them and you'll walk right where they want you to." Her voice was clinical, almost cruelly frank. "Now maybe they've even let your 'dead friend' appear to destabilize you."
Ethan snuffed the cigarette in an ashtray. The room felt frozen, waiting for an answer.
"If he really is a trap?" Ethan asked softly.
"Then it's worse than real." Vera snorted. "At least a corpse can't lie. An illusion will find the exact angle to crawl into your head and snap your reason in two."
A siren wailed outside, its tail long and urgent like a warning.
Ethan leaned back, rubbing his temples. "You know, Vera, sometimes I wish he were fake. Because if he's real…"
"Then it means the person you trusted most crawled from his grave to tell you your boss plans to sell you out." Vera's words were a razor. "And you'll have to pretend you can take it."
They sat in silence—tobacco, gun oil, nerves thick between them.
Vera rose, holstered her pistol, paused at the door and looked back. "Listen to me: don't trust anyone yet. Especially not the dead. They're the best liars."
She left. The lamp swayed. Ethan remained in the gloom, his heart caged and pounding. His friend's voice and Vera's suspicion fought inside him like two arguing ghosts.
He laughed, an empty, brittle sound—stage laughter after the audience left.
—Maybe Vera's right. Maybe every word from the dead is just a carefully staged piece of black humor.
But what if she's wrong?
What if everything he's heard is true?
The siren outside rose, more urgent than before, as if coaxing him to make a choice.