Hand braced on a dumpster, Bennie shook his head. “It’s a trick! Goddamned Halloween freaks.”

“What fucking trick does that,” Big Mark barked.

“The bad kind,” Fuckerina purred to Hush, rolling their head like someone savoring a chord. “Do you feel this…energy?”

She smiled, eyes wide. “I could always hear you from across the room.” Hush tapped the side of her skull. “Thump, thump, thump.” The whisper that followed was tiny, delighted. “Kill them?” Gnash jerked on the chain; his glass button eyes flashed. His mouth split into rusted razors.

Two of the skinheads clung to the alley mouth, two more groaned upright, one lay gasping — a smear of blood where he’d hit the asphalt. Then, sudden and ugly, Big and Little Mark surged from opposite sides while Bennie lunged from the far end. The pair at the mouth abandoned the rest and vanished into the night.

Hush flung Gnash overhead; the bear spun like a ragged pinwheel and Little Mark took the brunt of it. Hush pivoted, swung a roundhouse at Bennie; ribs absorbed most of the force. Bennie trapped her leg and flung her to the ground; the chain ripped from her grasp. Gnash clamped onto Little Mark’s skull—claws sank, teeth ground — Little Mark slid down the brick, twitching, as the bear chewed.

Big Mark approached Fuckerina like a man meeting a staged fight — muscle arranged for spectacle — while Fuckerina moved as if dancing. The first blow hit with bull strength; Fuckerina caught and twisted the hulking man’s wrist. A scream bled out as shoulder and arm separated with a wet, obscene sound like undercooked meat pulled away. Flesh and tendon hung like discarded rags. Big Mark’s mind, chaotic with shock, pictured a holiday turkey leg being snatched.

The alley became the music of terror — gasps, wet tearing, bodies slapping pavement. Big Mark heard his own howl but felt nothing else until weight took him — head striking pavement, the rest of him folding away in the opposite direction. He watched, briefly and with a dull, raw clarity, the bear atop Little Mark’s twitching body in a spreading pool of dark.

Turning to consider the head, Fuckerina swung the disconnected arm back and forth. “Keep your hands to yourself, or I will keep them for you,” they said, crimson eyes flat.

As they grappled on the ground, Hush hauled Bennie close, smiling with eyes that offered no comfort. Across the alley, Gnash continued to work down Little Mark’s torso with clinical focus; where bone had been ragged ruin remained.

Another attacker fled. The last on trembling knees, pleading. “Don’t…” His voice was small. The hard ground under him steamed with sweat and piss.

Fuckerina let the arm flop; blood spattered horns and cheek. “You think you get a say,” they asked, bored. With whip-crack speed they brought the arm down across the cringing man’s skull, neck driven inward, spine snapping. As he toppled aside, Hush opened wide — canines seemingly longer than normal…were she still human — and sank into Bennie’s neck with a precise, brutal bite. She rolled him, holding him there, considering depth. No, she didn’t want him dead yet. Then, something almost instinctual crawled into her mind. Drawing back, she breathed, “Glass Tongue.” Blue sigils bloomed around them, spinning and closing in, then shattering into fine, glittering fragments that fell and stung the alley like rain.

Within Bennie, coherence unraveled: language splintered, muscles spasmed as neurons misfired, vertigo rolled through him with a nausea that tasted like bile. His arms went slack except for a useless twitch; he looked up at Hush with wide, trembling eyes, capable of perception but incapable of thought or action. Hush rode him like a tide, sliding back and forth as one hand plunged between them into his pants. Every stray filament of intention in him sparked and failed, dissolving into pain and panic where, minutes before, there had been only hate.

Fuckerina turned and watched Hush hunched over the man, shoving a bloody fistful of something into her mouth. Through whatever tether bound them, the horned thing understood. “Really? You don’t know where that’s been.”

Hush licked her lips and then her palm; her face was shadow, her irises ice bright. “I know where it’s gone,” she whispered.

On the street the survivors had scattered, pressing past pedestrians, shooting terrified looks back the way they’d come. The alley had been made into something ritual and final in Bastion’s rot. When it stilled, the air smelled of iron, wet paper, and something oddly sweet. Gnash licked his paws while Hush hoisted him into her arms; they stood together, two shapes in the gutter light. Across the street the neon sign with the crosses for T’s flickered once, then died.

When the two turned to look at each-other, the eyes which met were those of Juno and Natsuko. The Others had returned to their places within, yet adjacent. Content. Simultaneously they two opened their mouths to speak, and seemed to think better of it, glancing away.

Silently, Natsuko gathered her bag, making certain nothing had spilled out, and Juno found their camera, housing scratched, cap knocked free, lens broken. Gathering the cap, Juno stood, slinging the strap over their shoulder. Quietly they both considered the slaughter around them. After a long moment, Juno took Nat’s free hand; they stepped out of the alley without words, without tears, without staying.

They were late to the ride share.

Outside the Pikesville hospital, Donna took a long drag from her cigarette. Her body shook in short, sharp spasms that came and went. Not, she thought, from her mother’s passing — that had been inevitable. It felt almost like relief that the suffering had stopped. She barely moved the cigarette from her lips before breathing smoke out and taking another drag.

<<Someone got let out,>> the wrongways voice said. <<Someone got fed.>>

Donna fished her phone from her back pocket and typed her PIN with a thumb that then hovered over the contact labeled "Asshole." <<Don’t be a dumb bitch.>> She scrolled, paused, then pressed another name and held the phone to her ear. The ringtone cut under a thudding bass.

“Donna, dollbaby,” her boss answered, voice thick with music. “How’ya doin’? Guys wanna know when their favorite goth girl is coming back. Next to a preacher’s daughter, country boys love a freaky chick.”

“I…” <<It was a mistake to call him.>> Who else was there? Her contacts amounted to five numbers: the Asshole, the Asshole’s shop, her boss, the landlord, and her mother’s dealer for desperate nights. “Look, Rudy, my…my mom just died.”

“Oh, shit, Donna,” he said flatly. “Well, you’re not scheduled tomorrow anyway, so…can we expect you the next day?”

“Rudy, I—”

“It’s just, Holly’s about to break her water on stage and Nicole needs that rash to clear up before she loses half the clients.” Noise bled through: laughter, someone cheering. “Shit. Grandma Opal just fell off the stage. I’ll see you Friday, Donna. Take care.”

The line went dead. Donna flicked ash from the cigarette and sighed.

She thumbed open her podcast app — something to fill the void, something to drown out the voice. The algorithm auto-played the next episode in her queue. A woman's voice crackled through, warm and sharp like a match struck in the dark.

"This is Annie Social, and you're listening to Social Suicide."

«Oh, this bitch.» Donna exhaled smoke and watched it trail into the night sky, half-listening.

"Today we're talking about Meridian Row," Annie continued, her tone clipping between casual and scathing. "You know, that shiny little gentrification project southeast of Bastion where rich assholes with too much money and not enough taste decided to 'revitalize' the lakefront. They bulldozed the old homes — where actual working people used to live — and replaced it with artisan coffee shops and galleries that sell twelve-thousand-dollar paintings of, like, a single red line on a white canvas."

A bitter laugh threaded through the audio. It made Donna smile. Just a little.

"And the kicker? The city council approved every permit, every zoning change, every tax break. Why? Because Aedon Kest and her Meridian Row LLC donated half a million to their campaigns. That's not urban renewal. That's a fucking bribe with a bow on it."

Donna's lips twitched. She didn't know who Aedon Kest was, but she appreciated the venom. Anything that took a hammer to her old home-town kept a piece of her warm.

"Now, I'm not saying Meridian Row is a front for something shady," Annie went on, her voice dipping into mock innocence. "I'm just saying it's strange that a bunch of rich weirdos bought up half the city's southeast, gutted it, and turned it into their private playground. Ten years ago. And it's pretty damned off that the people who used to live there no longer have addresses in the city. These impoverished folks who couldn't count on their next meal had the money to…what? Move away from Bastion? I call bullshit."

The ire was suddenly almost too much, given the moment, and Donna's thumb hovered over the pause button. She didn't press it.

"So if you're one of those Meridian Row types," Annie said, her voice sharpening like a blade finding its edge, "if you're sipping your oat milk latte in your reclaimed-wood café and pretending you're not part of the problem? Fuck you. You are the problem. And if you think I'm gonna let this slide just because you threw some money at a charity gala, you don't know me."

A beat of silence. Then:

"This has been Social Suicide. Stay angry, stay loud, and don't let the bastards win."

The episode ended. It had been a short rant, and not one of the usual multi-part pods. Donna turned from the sky. The cigarette had burned down to the filter; she flicked it into the gutter and lit another.

<<Let us hurt someone.>> the wrongways voice purred.

"Shut up," Donna muttered, but her mouth curved faintly. For a moment, the void felt a little smaller. Someone out there was angry, too. Someone out there was still fighting. Then she thought about her next bill, and wondered if the podcaster with the rude rebel mouth had to worry about her own bills.

Pikesville seemed so far away from Bastion sometimes. For that, Donna was grateful.

Dawn came soft with a foggy rain that made the city look like an old instant photograph left out too long. The yellow tape bowed under the wind across the alley. People clustered in small islands: detectives with tablets, a uniformed officer pacing, the usual neighborhood faces drawn by a morning that smelled like news.

Across the way a garage light stayed stubbornly dark. A rough, middle‑aged man stood in the threshold, thumb working a switch, cursing under his breath as he dragged fingers through hair threaded with gray. The bakery next door had already been humming for an hour; the owner and her small staff moved with the dependability of people who start work before dawn.

Ro kept her phone close, sweatshirt hood low, breathing steady. She moved through the crowd with the practiced air of someone who could be tucked into any frame and never noticed. Pressing the bud into her ear, she ran a finger counterclockwise, heard the chime, and spoke the time into the mic: “Nightmaps. Ro. 6:07 a.m.” She filmed shoulders, the gutter seam where a bottle lay, the angle where light cut off, and kept her fingers steady until a reporter reached for the tape and a uniformed woman in a plastic poncho yelled at them.

Pausing, the nineteen-year-old woman tucked her phone into her hoodie and took her glasses, wiping the mist from the lenses. As she slipped them back on, she scanned the crowd. Thick, but with curves, dark-skinned, shaped afro covering the top half of her face, a woman near her age in a long black trench coat seemed to consider her intently. If only Ro could see her eyes. But either way, she knew her ability to be nondescript had failed when the other woman offered a frown and dismissively shook her head. Ro scowled and grabbed for her phone, raising it again to continue filming.

Pulling her phone from her trench coat, the other woman opened the voice recorder app. "Bastion alley. Foundry edge. Morning after. Bodies. Nazis. Heavy police presence. Locals. One Fed. Two civilians in designer clothes watching from the bakery; private interest masquerading as public concern." Tapping stop, she opened the camera, snapped three specific shots — the covered bodies, the crowd, the two in finery across the street — and departed.

Across the street, under the bakery awning, Aedon Kest watched in a suit that cost more than the monthly intake of some high‑end firms she kept on retainer. Léonie Lévaux leaned at her side, lipstick bright, amusement written in the way she hooked back the heel of one boot on the curb. They did not cross the tape. They did not need to. Aedon’s hand brushed Léonie’s wrist; Léonie nodded once toward a thin young man threading the crowd with a paper cup and a slow, cataloguing gaze.

Word of the massacre, and then the charter flight, had come through Aedon’s people before first light; the alley and the flight felt choreographed, two lines the city had drawn to intersect. The Canon of Saint‑Array and Meridian Row trafficked in similar currencies, and both kept note of the uncanny.

The thin young man with the paper cup stood a few paces from Ro, deliberately nondescript, collar up against the rain, watching with the calm of someone who reads patterns, not people. He made no move to break cordon; the Canon had other ways of collecting data. His eyes marked the phone's video recorder dot and he had already logged the words "Nightmaps" and "Ro." He glanced toward Aedon and Léonie and made an additional mental note.

The city had stacked its witnesses into neat columns: institutional, mercantile, stray. For now they all watched the same scene through rain and tape. The alley kept its secrets.