Detroit swallowed Dare Jackson whole, but this time, the factory he ran into felt infinitely more dangerous than the streets outside. The deeper he fled from Sylvia's operatives and the terrifying concussive wave he'd unleashed, the heavier the silence became. It wasn't just an absence of sound; it was a pressure, thick and unnatural, muffling even the frantic hammering of his own heart. Only the searing agony in his skull remained loud, a cruel counterpoint to the oppressive quiet. The Dumpster Coin pulsed erratically in his pocket, a dying ember radiating waves of nausea. His nosebleed had slowed to a tacky trickle, staining the collar of his parka. He felt hollowed out, scraped raw from pushing the coin too hard, too deep into the realm of pure physical force. Survival cost, he thought grimly, tasting iron. Always bleeding it out.
Behind him, chaos reigned. Shouted commands, crackling comms bursts distorted into static screams, and the frantic beeping of medical devices monitoring the operative Dare had flung against the beam echoed faintly through the ruined factory's vast skeleton. Sylvia's team wasn't following him into the deeper darkness. They were scrambling, securing their wounded, wrestling with tech that stubbornly refused to function in specific sectors near where Dare had vanished and where that chilling purple-white light had flickered. He heard one operative yell about "dead zones" and "EM pulse ghosts." It bought him time. Precious, terrifying time.
He navigated by touch and memory, his vision swimming. He knew these ruins like the cracks in the sidewalk where forgotten souls slept. He bypassed collapsed storage rooms reeking of mold and forgotten chemicals, skirted flooded pits where rainwater pooled like toxic black oil, and finally slid through a narrow gap in a shattered cinderblock wall. Cold air, sharp and metallic, hit his face. Not the polluted city air, but something cleaner, colder, smelling of ozone and… burned plastic? The sound of rushing water, distant but powerful, grew louder. He'd reached the old overflow culverts. Hidden access points snaked beneath the factory complex, connecting to the city's forgotten runoff tunnels before emptying, miles away, into the Detroit River.
His emergency stash was here: a battered, waterproof backpack tucked behind a partially collapsed valve housing. Inside: two protein bars (past expiry, but edible desperation), a mostly full plastic water bottle (condensation frozen solid), a roll of duct tape (universal repair kit), and… a salvaged digital thermometer screen from a broken medical device he'd found. It couldn't measure temperature reliably anymore, but it still had a weak LED backlight. Better than nothing in this suffocating dark. He jammed a protein bar in his mouth, the chalky texture almost making him gag, and washed it down with shaved ice from the bottle. The simple act calmed his frayed nerves slightly. He needed to regroup. He needed to think.
The coin felt heavy against his thigh. He pulled it out, the strange purple-gold surface barely visible even with the thermometer's feeble green glow. It was lukewarm now, the angry buzz subsided to a weary tremor. The shard he'd picked up after the scout's visit felt icy cold beside it. He held them together. The coin's hum shifted subtly, a faint resonance like a tuning fork finding a harmonic frequency with the shard. Connected. Definitely not Earth tech.
Who are you? he thought at the coin, the shard, the silent watchers tapping on roofs and dropping scouts. What do you want? No answer came, only the oppressive silence and the distant rush of water. Fear warred with the dawning realization of his own terrifying vulnerability. He wasn't just a ghetto kid caught in a rich girl's orbit anymore. He was holding an artifact powerful enough to throw grown men through the air like ragdolls, powerful enough to scramble tech, powerful enough to attract attention from… elsewhere. And he had no clue how to control it. Every use was a gamble with his own sanity as the ante.
He remembered Pete's words: "Like your fist." And the scout, confused by his clumsy mental push. The coin amplified intent. It made thoughts… real for others. Or vibrate the goddamn air molecules into a weapon. The potential was staggering, horrifying. He couldn't run forever. Not from Sylvia, not from the Van der Lindes, and certainly not from whatever left the shard and the scout. He needed leverage. Information. Something besides this cursed coin and a nosebleed.
His gaze fell on the digital thermometer screen. Weak light… weak power… but maybe… An idea sparked, desperate and probably stupid, born from years of jury-rigging broken electronics just to steal a few watts of power or scavenge usable parts. His fingers shook slightly as he rummaged in the backpack. Duct tape. Always duct tape. He needed a conductor. He found it: a thin piece of insulated copper wire he'd saved from a stripped cable.
[INTENT]: Connect.
He focused the thought at the coin. Not a command to do anything drastic, just a focused desire to establish a tiny, controlled link. Like plugging a dying phone into a power grid. He visualized energy flowing gently, purposefully, from the coin, through the copper wire, to the little LED screen. He imagined the connection being passive, minimal – just enough to give the screen a jolt without frying it. He tried to shield himself, mentally constructing a thin barrier between his own mind and the coin's flow.
He pressed the wire's bare end firmly against the coin. Sparks didn't fly. Instead, the coin's surface shimmered for an instant, the purple-gold swirls seeming to accelerate. The copper wire grew warm. Very carefully, holding his breath against the nausea, Dare touched the other end of the wire to the tiny solder points on the back of the thermometers screen.
The screen flickered violently. A jagged green line tore across the display, static hissing faintly from somewhere deep in its cheap circuitry. Numbers flashed – 98.6… 32.0… 451 – then dissolved into chaotic digital snow. Dare flinched, ready to pull back as the migraine pounded harder. But then… the screen stabilized. Sort of.
The chaotic snow didn't resolve into a temperature reading. Instead, it coalesced into patterns. Not random static, but… geometric shapes. Jagged lines connecting dots like a constellation map drawn by a deranged spider. Symbols pulsed in the flickering green light – sharp angles, spirals, glyphs utterly alien to anything Dare had ever seen etched on a subway wall or tagged on crumbling brick. They overlapped, shifted, vanished, reappeared elsewhere on the tiny screen. It wasn't coherent. It wasn't a message. It was chaotic noise… but it felt intentional. Like a ghostly reflection of alien thought patterns being accidentally tapped into via his jerry-rigged connection.
He stared, mesmerized and horrified. This wasn't Earth static. This was alien data bleed. A digital ghost haunting his broken thermometer, speaking in a language of cold angles and spiraling fractals. The coin wasn't just amplifying his thoughts; it was a key, and he'd just unlocked a door onto a frequency humming with signals he couldn't comprehend, signals that felt predatory and ancient. How many signals like this were humming in the background all the time, unseen? Was this what the scout was listening for?
The pressure in his head spiked. A fresh wave of nausea twisted his gut. Too much. Too raw. He broke the connection, yanking the wire away. The thermometer screen went dark instantly. He slumped back against the cold concrete wall, gasping, sweat chilling on his skin despite the cold. But he'd seen it. He'd heard the faint sizzle of alien static. He had proof etched into cheap green LED light. The trouble wasn't coming. It was already here, buzzing just beneath the surface of his crumbling world.
He couldn't stay. Sylvia's people would sweep the whole plant eventually. The alien watchers might send something bigger than a scout. Stuffing the coin, the shard, the wire, and the useless-but-suspiciously-glitching thermometer back into his backpack, Dare slid into the dark mouth of the overflow culvert. The air stank of damp concrete and unseen things. The distant roar of flowing water was louder here. It called him deeper. Into the city's concrete veins, beneath the forgotten feet of Detroit. It wasn't safe. Nowhere was safe. But it was a direction. A way to slip the net, for now. He needed to surface somewhere unexpected. Somewhere he could watch, and maybe… listen.
Manhattan pulsed with orchestrated tension. Olivia paced the penthouse's opulent living space, the plush carpet no longer a comfort, but a cage. Sylvia stood rigid, the sleek tablet clutched in her hand like a shield against the madness filtering through the comms.
"Ma'am," Sylvia's voice was tight, stripped of its usual polished calm. "Casualty report: Operator Kano has a fractured skull, concussion, severe spinal contusion. Stable, but critical. Possible internal bleeding. He was… thrown, Ma'am." She swallowed hard. "No physical trauma on him consistent with impact. Like he slammed into an invisible wall moving at high speed."
Olivia felt the blood drain from her face. The invisible wall. Darius Jackson, eyes wide, nose bleeding. The memory of that bizarre vibration in the air just before she'd been forced away… He did that? With his coin? The thought was chilling.
Sylvia continued, her gaze fixed on the tablet's screen scrolling with frantic reports. "Operator Riggs reported a weapon discharge malfunction. Operator Teller's thermal imaging failed completely within a specific zone." She tapped the screen, bringing up a pulsing red overlay on a schematic of the Packard Plant. "Designated 'Sector Gamma' based on reported phenomena. Total electronic failure zone. Sustained high levels of anomalous electromagnetic activity centered near…" she hesitated, "…where Jackson was last seen before fleeing."
"And Jackson?" Olivia pressed, her voice thin. "Where is he?"
"Gone, Ma'am. He fled deeper into the industrial sector, towards the old overflow culverts and subsurface tunnels. Teams are attempting penetration but encountering significant structural instability and… lingering EM effects hampering sensors. Pursuit is delayed." Sylvia paused, then added, the words clipped, "There's more. Teller also reported a transient visual anomaly. A high-intensity photon emission." She looked up, meeting Olivia's gaze. "Purple-white light. Brief duration. Not from the team. Coming from a deeper structure."
Purple-white light. The same description as Sylvia's report back in Detroit earlier that day. Cold dread coiled in Olivia's stomach. "Not his."
"No, Ma'am," Sylvia confirmed. "Likely not. Teller suggested it had characteristics inconsistent with known terrestrial sources." She paused again, her professional composure cracking just enough to show raw tension beneath. "Ma'am… the initial assessment… the tap on the roof prior to Jackson's encounter with the scout… our analysts suggest it resembles known signals associated with one group's early surveillance patterns. Signals they code as… 'Black Beetle' signatures."
Olivia froze. "Black Beetle?" The name wasn't public knowledge. It was Van der Linde security classification. Level Omega. Reserved for the deepest, strangest shadows.
"A fringe group," Sylvia explained, her voice low. "Not politically or ideologically motivated. They… operate differently. Their tech is anomalous. Unregistered. Highly advanced. Our intel suggests possible… extraterrestrial contact."
The words hung in the air like radioactive dust. Extraterrestrial. The diamonds at Olivia's ears felt absurdly heavy. Her carefully constructed world, built on finance, influence, and controlled appearances, tilted violently. Darius Jackson wasn't just some ghetto mystic with a weird artifact. He was a focal point. He'd drawn the attention of Black Beetle. And Black Beetle, her father's most guarded secret project whispered about in hushed tones at closed-door security briefings, couldn't be ignored.
"What does my father say?" Olivia asked, her voice remarkably steady.
"King Haakon is en route from the Zurich summit. He's been briefed. His orders are explicit." Sylvia took a deep breath. "Recover Subject Jackson immediately. Priority Alpha. He is considered a potential source of unique strategic intelligence regarding… Black Beetle and associated phenomena. Use any means necessary. His physical integrity is secondary to retrieval of the artifact and acquisition of his cooperation."
Cooperation? Olivia thought bitterly. More like interrogation. Means necessary. Haakon's velvet glove was off.
"Ma'am," Sylvia continued, her expression unreadable. "There is additional surveillance data from the area surrounding the plant earlier today. Satellite sweeps flagged an unregistered signal source originating from within a highly secure industrial research facility just north of the Detroit River." She pulled up another image. "The location is owned by a shell subsidiary."
"Of?" Olivia demanded.
"Van der Linde Industries, Ma'am," Sylvia stated flatly. "Facility designation: Orion Prime. Black Beetle adjacent."
Olivia stared. Her father had a facility that close? Researching what? Why hadn't she known? The sheer scale of the hidden world Haakon moved in slammed into her. And now, it felt like worlds were colliding – Darius Jackson's desperate survival, her own rebellion, her father's hidden wars, and something that came tapping on a rusted Detroit roof, leaving behind cold metal shards.
"What kind of signal?"
"Transient pulse. Ultra-low frequency. Very powerful. Buried deep in the local EM spectrum. Highly encrypted. Purpose unknown." Sylvia frowned at the data. "It started transmitting approximately thirty minutes before our team deployed to the Packard Plant. Transmission ceased immediately after Jackson fled into the tunnels." She met Olivia's gaze again, her eyes grave. "Ma'am, whatever is happening at Orion Prime, it's reacting to Jackson's movements. And vice versa. This is beyond street-level retrieval. This is… containment."
Olivia walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. The glittering skyline below looked fragile now, a facade masking currents darker and deeper than any ocean trench. Darius Jackson was lost beneath Detroit, holding a key to something cosmic, hunted by her father's forces and things that whispered in the static of broken screens. And the signal from Orion Prime? It hadn't stopped, Sylvia had said it ceased when Jackson vanished underground. Was it hunting him too? Or warning him?
Her decision solidified, cold and hard. She couldn't let her father's "any means necessary" consume Darius Jackson. He wasn't just an artifact to be seized. He was at the center of this storm, just like her. And she needed to find him before Haakon's shadows did.
"Plot the signal trace again, Sylvia," Olivia ordered, her voice suddenly sharp with focus, her previous fragility replaced by a diamond-hard resolve. "And get me a map of those overflow culverts. Forget my father's acquisition team. We need to get there first." She turned, her platinum hair catching the city lights. "It's time I met Darius Jackson on my terms. Before the shadows do."
Sylvia blinked, momentarily thrown by the "we." The princess had officially stepped off the gilded path. "Ma'am," she acknowledged, a flicker of respect, or perhaps apprehension, in her eyes as her fingers flew over the tablet. "Where do we start?"
Olivia looked at the faint red overlay on the factory schematic marking the 'Sector Gamma' dead zone. "Where the lights go out, Sylvia. Where the signals bleed. Start where his power left its mark." She didn't yet know the cost of what she was doing, the war she might be stepping into, but she knew silence wasn't an option anymore. The concrete whispers of Detroit held answers, and she was done listening only to the curated echoes of her tower.