Chapter 2: Division 7

Chapter 2: Division 7

The ringing in Carina’s ears wouldn’t stop. It was the ghost of the copper pipe, a phantom 770-hertz tone that had saved her life. It hummed in time with the thrumming of the sedan’s engine as Jon drove them away from the Miller house, leaving local law enforcement to scratch their heads over a basement that now smelled faintly of ozone and was conspicuously empty.

Carina stared out the window, the sleepy, wrong-feeling town of Bonners Ferry sliding by in a blur of muted colors. Her mind was a frantic battlefield. On one side stood eighteen years of FBI training, a fortress built on evidence, procedure, and the cold, hard logic of the material world. On the other side was the impossible memory of what she’d just seen. The shimmering, joint-snapping horror. The bullets that were swallowed like raindrops in a pond.

And the text.

The crimson, glowing interface. It was burned onto the backs of her eyelids. PSYCHO-SPECTRAL ENTITY. DIMENSIONAL ANCHOR. The words were meaningless, gibberish from a fever dream, yet she had acted on them without a sliver of doubt. It was an instinct deeper and more certain than any she’d ever known. An adrenaline-induced hallucination, she told herself. A trick of the flashlight beam hitting her eye at a weird angle. Her brain, facing certain death, had simply snapped and manufactured a solution. It was the only explanation that made sense.

It was also a lie, and she knew it.

"You're quiet," Jon said, his voice a low rumble. He kept his eyes on the road, but she could feel his attention on her, heavy and calculating.

"Thinking about the report," she said, the words tasting like ash. "How do we explain a hostile suspect who… evaporated?"

"We don't," Jon replied, his tone flat. "The official narrative is a gas leak. A buildup of swamp gas in the basement caused a brief, intense series of hallucinations in both agents present. The Miller family is now a national missing persons case. We move on."

Carina’s head snapped towards him. "Move on? Jon, a family is gone, and we were almost killed by… by whatever the hell that was. And you want to chalk it up to swamp gas?" The anger was a welcome anchor in the sea of her confusion.

Jon pulled the sedan into the cracked parking lot of the Starlight Motel, a sad, flickering monument to the American road trip. He killed the engine, and the sudden silence was deafening, broken only by the buzz of the neon sign.

"Get your medkit," he said, wincing as he unbuckled his seatbelt. "I think I've got a couple of broken ribs."

In the sterile, bleach-scented anonymity of their motel room, the tension finally broke. Carina was taping Jon’s ribs, her movements sharp and efficient, her mind still racing. The image of the creature lunging, of its shadowy maw opening, played on a loop.

"It felt like my father's case file," she said, her voice barely a whisper. She didn’t mean to say it aloud.

Jon didn’t flinch, but a stillness came over him. "What do you mean?"

"The redacted parts. The coroner’s notes that were blacked out. The official cause of death that never fit the evidence," she said, pulling the tape tight. "The… impossibility of it all. What was in that basement, Jon? The truth. Now."

He looked at her then, his tired eyes holding a depth of sorrow and weariness she had never seen before. The mask of the easy-going consultant fell away, replaced by the grim visage of a veteran from a war she never knew existed.

"The truth is you shouldn't have been on this case," he said softly. "I tried to get you reassigned. Robert wouldn't have wanted you anywhere near this."

Hearing her father’s name was like a key turning in a lock. "What does my father have to do with this?"

Jon sighed, a long, rattling exhalation. "Everything. The world you think you know, Carina… it’s a stage play. A carefully maintained illusion. We call it The Veil. It’s a barrier, not quite physical, not quite psychic, that separates our reality from… everything else. From the things that lurk in the static between dimensions."

Carina stared at him, her heart pounding a frantic rhythm against her ribs. "You're not serious."

"The stopped clocks? The frost on the mirrors? Those are symptoms," Jon continued, ignoring her disbelief. "A reality bleed. The Veil is thin in Bonners Ferry. It’s tearing. And things are slipping through. Our job, our real job, isn't consulting. It's policing that border. We’re the men in black, Keel, without the flashy suits. We’re Division 7."

Division 7. The name was unfamiliar, a phantom designation in the Bureau's vast hierarchy. "I've never heard of it."

"No one has. That's the point," Jon said. "It's the part of the FBI that deals with the impossible. We were founded to investigate cases that defy rational explanation, to contain threats that would shatter the public's sanity, and to protect The Veil at all costs. Your father, Robert Keel, wasn't just an agent in Division 7. He was a legend. He wrote half the book on this stuff."

The room seemed to tilt. Her father. The man she'd idolized, the ghost she'd been chasing through case files and commendations, had been living a life she couldn't have even imagined. The grotesque horror of his death suddenly snapped into a terrifying new focus.

"The thing in the basement," she breathed, the words catching in her throat. "What was it?"

"We call them Harbingers," Jon said, his gaze unwavering. "They’re scouts. Probes. Sent out by a larger consciousness. They're not truly alive in the way we understand it. They're more like… psychic tumors that grow where the Veil is weak."

Carina felt a cold dread wash over her, a certainty that chilled her to the bone. The way the creature had felt, the psychic shriek, the feeling of being consumed.

"The thing that killed my father," she asked, the question she had been running from her entire life finally taking shape. "Was it a Harbinger?"

Jon’s face was a mask of grim sympathy. He reached out, not to comfort her, but to steady her, as if he knew the next words would knock her off her feet.

"No, Carina," he said, his voice heavy with the weight of a long-held secret. "The thing that killed your father was what the Harbinger works for. A primeval psychic predator. A consciousness that feeds on entire towns, digesting their memories and souls. They call it the Hive."

He paused, letting the monstrous name settle in the air between them.

"And that crimson text you saw? That impossible data that told you how to survive? That wasn't a hallucination. That was his legacy to you. The Crimson Cipher. You just used the weapon your father died to protect."