When the mind forgets what the body remembers, terror is born.
The corpse didn't disappear.
That was the first strange thing.
In every other Veil-related case Elijah had studied, there was always a kind of vanishing. A missing body. A burned room. A scrambled crime scene. It was as if reality itself swept things under the rug before anyone could ask questions.
But this one—this Cipher Hunter—lay broken on the cold stairwell, rain pooling around him, dead in every observable way. The glowing cipher on the floor was gone, yes—but the body remained.
Intentional. It had to be.
They wanted me to find this.
Elijah crouched beside the man.
The mask had cracked during the final convulsion. Half of the face was exposed—young, maybe mid-twenties. The eyes had clouded over, but the veins still pulsed faintly, just under the skin.
He pulled off the glove.
The cipher etched into the glove's interior was complex, far beyond anything he'd seen in standard field codes. Three overlapping layers. One base symbol. One modulation grid. One… unknown script.
Something like Arabic mixed with circuitry.
This isn't a cipher... It's a binding.
He pocketed the glove and reached for his phone.
📞 [CALL LOG] — Dr. Sera Halliday
She answered on the third ring, her voice wrapped in caffeine and exhaustion.
"Graves? I thought you were still in rehab, or... wherever you've been."
"I need a full tox screen and post-mortem on a body. Tonight."
"...I don't work for Blackridge PD anymore."
"You do for me."
A pause.
Then a sigh.
"How bad?"
Elijah looked down at the ruined man beneath him.
"Cipher branded. Self-destructed mentally. Still warm."
Another pause. Then Sera's voice turned cold and clear.
"Send the address."
📍 Two Hours Later – Underground Lab, Blackridge District 6
Sera's lab was built beneath a defunct hospital morgue. Officially, it was a research wing on cryogenic tissue. Unofficially, it was where Blackridge's most illegal autopsies happened.
She hadn't changed much.
Same tied-up black hair, same white coat over combat boots. And the same sharp eyes that had once been called "good enough to find truth in a stain."
"Looks like your boy here fried his brain through his nervous system," she said, pulling on nitrile gloves. "Whatever signal he was synced to, it spiked and snapped all at once."
"You're saying it was remote-triggered?"
"No. Worse." She peeled back part of the scalp, exposing grey matter webbed in black threads. "This wasn't tech. It was organic. He was programmed from the inside."
Elijah stared.
So this is what the Cipher Veil is doing now... rewriting people.
Sera pointed to the base of the spine.
"There's more."
Embedded just above the tailbone was a sliver of etched glass — a cipher shard, still glowing faintly red.
"I've only seen one of these before," she said, lowering her voice. "Five years ago. Ex-Cult Interrogator. His mind was a maze. Took seven men to hold him down."
"And?"
"And he bit off his own tongue before he could speak a word."
Elijah leaned forward, feeling the heat radiate from the shard.
"I need to take it."
"Take it where?"
"I need to decode it."
"Graves… this thing could scramble your brain like an egg."
He looked her dead in the eyes.
"Then let's see what's for breakfast."
She didn't laugh.
But she didn't stop him either.
📍 Later That Night – Elijah's Apartment
The storm hadn't stopped. It just got quieter.
Elijah sat at his desk with the cipher shard under a microscope, sketching the glyphs in his journal. The patterns twisted the longer he stared.
One looked like a clock.
One, like an eye.
One… like his own name.
He blinked.
Gone.
No, he thought. Not gone. Hidden.
This wasn't just a message.
This was a map.
And it was leading him somewhere.
He picked up the photo from the package again. The old crime scene.
He now saw it: hidden in the corner of the picture, drawn in chalk on the alley wall...
The same glyph as on the shard.
I've been here before, he thought.But not just in the photo. In real life.And I don't remember leaving.
He stood up, threw on his coat, and loaded the revolver.
Blackridge was calling.
And something was waiting in the alley where it all began.
➤ To be continued…