Delta Null immediately marched Freya toward one of the townhouses bordering the parking lot—mute witnesses to the slaughter they hadn’t bothered to eliminate.
They went through the patio; both the gate and the sliding glass door to the veranda were open. Inside, the house was dark—the blue moonlight couldn't penetrate the glass of the veranda door.
But one of the Delta Null agents tapped the earpiece on his helmet, and the lights inside the house snapped on. The refrigerator began to hum, the air conditioner beeped, and the ventilation system whirred to life. Somewhere, a robotic vacuum began to buzz purposefully.
Freya flinched. When the lights came on, she instinctively braced herself for blood smeared on the wallpaper, for the corpses of the homeowners slaughtered by Delta Null, for a dog pinned to the wall.
But instead, she found herself in a clean, modern, and spacious open-plan kitchen and living room, all done in pale tones. There was a beige sofa, a breakfast bar, and an eighty-inch plasma screen mounted on the wall.
And the moment Freya's slender figure was reflected in the black mirror of the TV, the screen flickered to life.
The screen rippled with waves of multicolored digital static, hissing like the surf through the speakers. With a steady hum, a pyramid with a radiant eye emerged through the noise. Like the one on the dollar bill. The Illuminati pyramid.
Then the static vanished, replaced by an image of Manhattan.
It was rendered in blue-black, like an online map set to night mode—three-dimensional and completely transparent. As the view zoomed in, Freya could make out glowing orange figures scurrying through the streets and inside the buildings: adults, children, civilians. Green military tanks and APCs herded their flows, periodically clashing with small, swift groups of red silhouettes. Shrampists. But the special services, marked in white, and Delta Null, in black, were already on to them, countering their attempts to seize the initiative.
This is how a god saw the world—a dark and malevolent god, the god of the Deep State. He saw right through the world, and for a fleeting moment, Freya was seeing through his eyes.
Her gaze swept over the map; she could see right through every building, every street in Manhattan. But the island was surrounded by a gaping black void, and Manhattan itself was patchy. Here and there, scraps of streets were missing, sometimes entire blocks. In those spots, drones swarmed, their cameras like flashlights snatching events from the darkness, picking out people through windows but unable to penetrate the buildings' shells.
Freya quickly realized it wasn’t the Prophet showing her Manhattan—she was navigating the map with her own mind, and it bent to the soft pressure of her focus, willingly revealing its secrets. The realization broke her concentration, and the image on the screen faded.
It dissolved back into the white noise it had always been. Somehow, like a stereogram, it was her own brain assembling the static into an image.
But there was no time to be amazed. A nuclear strike was at stake. Finding nothing out of the ordinary on the map, Freya brought the phone in its pink bunny case to her lips and spoke.
"So where are the aliens?"
She felt another mind on the map—the Prophet. He pulled her focus downward, toward the buildings.
Her perspective sank through a network of television and cell network antennas, all pulsing with faint waves. Like a bat's sonar, these radio waves shot out at the speed of light, bouncing off everything in their path and illuminating the world around Manhattan for the eye of the Deep State.
Through the lens of these radio waves, Freya could make out the sea’s mirror-like surface surrounding the island, stretching for miles. It was shallow; beneath the surface, she could sense the bottom, soft and viscous. Above the water, the pinpricks of startled birds flared up from time to time, while below, a countless mass of aquatic life teemed. Countless objects bobbed on the surface, but the radio-eye could no longer make out the details.
What the Prophet meant by this was unclear, but Freya had no time to ask—the image shifted instantly. They were back in the city, and this time the Prophet guided her toward the ships—an aircraft carrier moored at a pier to the north.
Its radar was also emitting radio waves—not the faint, gentle kind, but hard, focused beams, like a flashlight. And this beam, along with a few other radars hidden here and there in the city, was picking something out in the distance.
An airship. Its outline kept flickering and distorting, but Freya could make out the swollen, oblong gasbag and the bus-like gondola slung beneath it. The airship resisted being seen. Its outline kept trembling and blurring as it tried to dissolve into the darkness. But the radar would change the melody of its waves, the vessel would surface back into the light, and the struggle would begin all over again.
Each time, New York's radars won.
THE ALIENS ARE ALTERING THEIR PERMEABILITY TO BECOME INVISIBLE. BUT THEY'RE DOING IT AT THE SPEED OF HUMAN THOUGHT. THE DEEP STATE IS FASTER. BUT I DON'T KNOW IF THE ALIENS THEMSELVES ARE AWARE OF THIS.
What the Prophet did know was how the aliens would move. The airship suddenly multiplied into a whole chain of copies, showing its position across time. In fast-forward, the trail of ghostly airships reached an office skyscraper north of the Upper West Side.
FIRST CONTACT IN FIFTY-THREE MINUTES, SEVEN SECONDS. MARGIN OF ERROR: TEN SECONDS. AFTER THAT, THE ENTROPY OF THE FUTURE BECOMES CRITICAL. THEN, THE SILENCE SHATTERS.
Freya's head throbbed from the Prophet's presentation and the mental strain. She almost lost it. Oh, she was thrilled, of course, that a real Pruner was supposed to know what The Silence was and crack the Prophet's riddles like nuts. But the Pruner, Roman, hadn't shown up to the ball—and now human lives rested in her own delicate hands.
"How will The Silence shatter, Prophet?" Freya did her best to hide her irritation. "Show me."
THE UNINITIATED WILL LEARN THE TRUTH. THE TRUTH THAT OUR WORLDBRANCH HAS MERGED. THE TRUTH OF WHAT EARTH IS. THIS IS HOW IT WILL HAPPEN, ROMAN.
The Prophet rewound time, letting the airship from the future drift toward New York again.
The moment it neared the coastline, red dots began to ignite across the city, radiating red waves like ripples from raindrops. Looking closer, Freya realized the dots were igniting inside the heads of the people and soldiers who saw the airship. And instantly, a wave of them would capture it on their phones—recording, grabbing the attention of others.
The airship has to become visible somehow, Freya figured.
A WAVE OF TRUTH ARTIFACTS BEGINS IN FORTY-TWO MINUTES. THEY ARE SUPPRESSIBLE. THE SILENCE PRESERVATION PROTOCOL HAS BEEN DRAFTED.
Freya watched as the black figures of Delta Null stormed the houses. At every door, every turn, they branched out into ghostly probability trees—the Prophet knew thousands of battle scenarios in advance and was choosing the optimal paths. And the red dots of Truth in people's heads were extinguished along with their lives. Physical artifacts were burned; digital ones simply vanished.
HOWEVER, IN FIFTY-THREE MINUTES, THE CRISIS POINT IS REACHED. THE SPREAD OF TRUTH ERUPTS FROM A MULTITUDE OF FUTURES. TOTAL ENTROPY. THE SILENCE WILL SHATTER.
For the moment the airship on the map touched the skyscraper's roof, a powerful red wave erupted from it. It shot like lightning down the skyscraper’s core and surged through the streets in a burst, igniting people, phones, even the microchipped pigeons skittering across the pavement. In a matter of seconds, Manhattan was ablaze with the red fire of Truth.
But the pieces didn't fit for Freya. She frowned.
"But what the hell will they learn?" she asked. "If the Truth is just knowing the aliens exist... How does the whole city find out in seconds, Prophet? The internet is down!"
"But what the hell will they learn?" she asked. "If the Truth is just knowing the aliens exist... How does the whole city find out in seconds, Prophet? The internet is down!"
It is down, right? Freya snatched a look at the phone in its pink bunny case and saw, to her horror, four full bars of 5G service.
But it turned out the Prophet was worried about something else entirely.
THE ALIENS ARE NOT IN THE FUTURE. I DON'T KNOW WHAT THERE IS TO LEARN ABOUT THEM. THE SILENCE IS SACRED, ROMAN. WHEN KNOWLEDGE IS AN UNKNOWN, IT MEANS ANYTHING CAN BE LEARNED.
And the Prophet knew only one way to solve this problem with absolute certainty.
Manhattan stirred on the map. Sewer manholes yawned open, streets were torn wide, skyscrapers unfolded like books. And from them—from everywhere, from the most unexpected places—missiles erupted.
Heavy, nuclear missiles. They had slumbered for decades, awaiting their hour. Their Judgment Hour.
They didn’t climb high. The moment their blunt, warhead-tipped noses cleared the ground, they ignited with the fire of the sun itself. The brilliant light made Freya instinctively shield her eyes. For just an instant—and when she opened them again, Manhattan was gone from the map. Only darkness remained.
TOTAL ANNIHILATION OF THE WORLD OF SILENCE GUARANTEES THE PRESERVATION OF TRUTH. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR TO EVACUATE TO THE WORLD OF TRUTH WITH THE DEEP STATE, ROMAN.
Freya almost cried out.
"No. That's not happening. Give me other options."
She could tell instantly the Prophet didn't like her order. The future branched and collapsed, slippery and elusive, and only total annihilation offered a satisfying certainty. Still, the Prophet obeyed. And the all-seeing eye of the Deep State shifted back to the warships off Manhattan—but this time, it wasn't following the bright beam of a radar.
A hatch flipped open on the side of a destroyer, and it spat a missile into the air. It shot upward like a dart from a blowgun. Thrusters flared, and the missile pivoted in mid-air. Thunder cracked as a plume of fire erupted from its tail. Like an arrow, it pierced New York, tearing through a gap between skyscrapers and striking the building at the exact moment the airship was mooring to its roof.
The fireball ignited in the air like a star, engulfing an entire city block. Freya never thought things like that happened outside of action movies—the blast wave was bright and transparent, like a bubble. A thermobaric warhead, the Prophet prompted.
Glass rained down. A fire roared to life. Yellow silhouettes of civilians leaped from the windows of buildings engulfed in flames. Firefighters tried to move closer, but the military blocked their path.
A quarantine. A Silence Quarantine.
Jesus Christ. The Deep State weren't just bloodthirsty bastards. They were utterly insane bastards.
"Why can't we just shoot down the alien airship in mid-air?" Freya asked. "That way, no one gets hurt."
And she was right. Even Freya knew American missiles could hit targets dozens of kilometers high and hundreds of kilometers away. And the airship wasn't some hypersonic Chinese jet.
I DO NOT KNOW THE FUTURE. THE DEEP STATE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THE ALIENS ARE CAPABLE OF. IF WE DON'T FIND OUT, THERE WILL BE NO FUTURE.
"To hell with that," Freya waved it away. "Just shoot it down with a missile. We'll figure it out later."
The future was the future, period. All Freya knew about it was that it was guaranteed to happen, as long as you didn't destroy the entire world with nuclear missiles first. And that was exactly what the Prophet was proposing.
But the Prophet disagreed.
THE SILENCE IS IMPERATIVE, ROMAN. IF THERE IS NO FUTURE IN A BRANCH, AND THERE IS A THREAT, I MUST DESTROY THE TRUTH. THAT IS OUR PURPOSE. IF THE ALIENS' ABILITIES ARE UNKNOWN, THEY ARE CAPABLE OF ANYTHING. BUT SINCE THEY ARE MATERIAL, A TACTICAL NUCLEAR STRIKE WILL PROTECT THE SILENCE.
"Then what's the difference?! If you're willing to use missiles on civilians, why can't you just use them on the aliens?"
I HAVE MILLIONS OF EYES IN THE CITY. BEFORE ANNIHILATION, I MUST SEE THE ALIENS. I MUST UNDERSTAND THEM. WITHOUT UNDERSTANDING, THERE IS NO FUTURE. AND WITHOUT A FUTURE, TOTAL SILENCE BECOMES THE IMPERATIVE.
And suddenly the vision the TV was broadcasting into Freya’s mind shifted—so sharply and vividly that the floor seemed to drop out from under her sneakers.
For a moment, she became thousands of street cameras, their purple pupils raised to the airship in the sky, straining to capture every pixel at the very edge of their matrices. She became a forgotten phone on a table, its microphone cranked past the factory maximum, meticulously recording the sound of the aliens’ footfalls. She became a kettle in a kitchen, using its temperature sensor to listen through the water for alien bodies. She became a pigeon in the sky, its bird’s-eye view streaming from a chip in its brain—lovingly implanted by the CIA and powered by a dusting of solar cells that shimmered purple on its wings.
For one brief, all-encompassing moment, the Prophet was all of this and more, right there with her.
A moment that ended with missiles bursting in to grant sacred certainty and Silence in an all-consuming fire.
One could almost envy his persistence, his passion for destruction. But Freya couldn't take it anymore.
"No! No nuclear missiles!" she cried out. "That's an order from the Pruner! Show me a scenario with zero civilian casualties, Prophet!"
Oh, Phopet was displeased now. The Prophet's discomfort was palpable, even through Freya's own irritation and fear. Silence, Silence... all the Prophet wanted was Silence and a Future. But he had neither, and Freya was backing him into a corner.
But the Prophet couldn't disobey. And after another moment, the thundering, sepulchral voice returned, so cold it made her teeth ache.
ANNIHILATION CAN BE AVOIDED ONLY IF THE FUTURE OF THE ALIEN BRANCH IS PLACED UNDER YOUR MANUAL CONTROL, ROMAN. YOU WILL CONFRONT THE ALIENS AND RESOLVE THE SUPERPOSITION IN FAVOR OF SILENCE.
And Freya saw a tiny helicopter—tiny on the scale of the map—racing across the city, trying with all its might to beat the airship. It landed on a neighboring building.
After which, Manhattan plunged into darkness.
Uncertainty.
But Freya's mind was already elsewhere.
What did "manual control" mean? Did she have to go after the aliens and eliminate them herself? Her imagination immediately conjured shapeless, inhuman creatures. Spawn of the abyss with tentacles for mouths and slick, fish-like bodies.
It was strange that she hadn't pictured the typical aliens from the movies—green, with big black eyes and egg-shaped heads. No, her imagination had helpfully offered her a scenario from an arthouse horror film.
The Prophet was silent, so Freya asked.
"You mean, I have to kill these aliens myself?"
No. Not herself.
This time, the Prophet answered not with words, but with a new stream of images. Black-clad figures of Delta Null formed up in battle formations; the military cordoned off the building, suppressing curious Shrampists drawn to the disturbance with artillery. The Prophet projected thousands of scenarios for the agents' movements inside the building itself.
Freya needed to be there.
She needed to lead.
She needed to change the future.
She needed to decide.
This decision, the need for it, engulfed the Prophet in hellfire.
And Freya made her choice.
This time, a black military helicopter landed for her in the parking lot—never mind that they’d risked their lives traveling by ground before because of the anomalies.
"So this was an option all along?" Freya asked one of the agents.
They didn't answer.
Inside the helicopter, Freya settled into a special "throne" and buckled herself in while Delta Null took up positions opposite her. The military helicopter was heavily armored, with no windows to the outside. But the sense of space from the map-illusion on that stranger's TV still lingered with her.
And when the helicopter took off, the woman felt it in her very skin: they were rapidly approaching the residential tower where the Prophet had marked the aliens' interception point.
Giving in to the anxious feeling, Freya gripped the green hilt of her katana with the scarlet rose. Delta Null had returned the sword to her after their conversation. An absurd weapon for a battle... a sword. But clutching its warm handle, she found it easier to fight the chill crawling over her skin.
And besides, her skin had become hypersensitive—because of the new outfit.
When Freya had worried about going into battle in a business skirt, it turned out the Pruner’s suit was already waiting for her. As if the Prophet had known all along, counting on her to agree. Or had he known what Roman would do...?
In any case, her resolve hadn't wavered, not even when the garment bag revealed a black leather jumpsuit.
It was skin-tight, like thermal underwear, with thin armor plates made of some rough, black material scattered here and there, and adorned with elegant pauldrons and a collar of black rings, like an Egyptian queen's. The suit clung to her hips and ass, crushing her chest flat like some sexist superheroine's costume—flattering in places, but endlessly vulgar.
But despite the fact she now looked like a pervert's latex fantasy, Delta had assured her that the suit could withstand a bullet, an explosion, and teeth. And paired with the red-eyed, hermetically sealed Delta Null mask she was forced to wear per protocol, it could even handle a chemical attack or the vacuum of space.
A bullet. A chemical attack. Space. Teeth.
When she'd agreed to go after the aliens, Freya hadn't actually expected to get shot or have to fight for real. And now, as her destination drew closer, she felt she had made a fatal mistake.
Any business coach knows you don't give in to impulse. Emotions are fickle, feelings temporary; what gets results is strategy—steady, daily steps in one direction.
And here she was, Freya Axelsen, caught in that very trap. She’d been drunk on power, drunk on her own heroism. For a brief moment, she'd felt like the savior of the world, the person making the right call, the choice of a lifetime—and she had made a mistake.
It's all the Prophet, Freya thought. He broadcast the consequences straight into my brain...
The Prophet was insidious. No normal person could have just stood by while people were being killed right before their eyes, while feeling the slaughter on their own skin, while personally deciding the fate of thousands. This wasn't some news report about starving children in Africa or a war in some third-world country.
The woman remembered being deeply shocked by the rapes and murders in the Ukrainian city of Bucha. She’d reposted the image of the woman’s hand with the fresh manicure, clutching a set of car keys. But Ukraine was so distant from her audience, emotionally and physically, that within two weeks, her posts about the war were joined by pleas to save the manatees—a cause she used to save herself from the thousands of apolitical people who were unfollowing.
An audience is power, but only when you have one. And Freya decided she’d done enough for the women and children of Ukraine. Then came “Rainbow June,” and a new battle began…
Jesus Christ, was she really on her way to kill aliens?
Freya snapped to attention—everything was in motion.
The helicopter's side door flew open, and a blast of wind tore into the cabin. The woman saw their target: an office skyscraper, dark and still, its windows reflecting the blue moon.
The alien airship was somewhere behind it. As it neared the city, it had become visible—naively assuming, she guessed, that New York wouldn't risk firing on it among the buildings. But then Freya reminded herself how naive it was to assume she could know what the aliens were assuming. Or to assume anything at all. Just a few hours ago, she couldn't have imagined her night would end up like this.
"Ten minutes until alien landing!" a Delta agent's voice hissed in her earpiece. "Any closer and we breach protocol!"
"We're jumping!" another commanded. "Agent S, you've got the Pruner! Squad, Code Three!"
Agent S helped Freya unbuckle and, after a moment's hesitation, scooped her into his arms—and leaped with the woman out of the helicopter and into the night.
Freya screamed, clutching her katana and grabbing onto Agent S's vest. A jet blast, like a shot from a fire extinguisher, erupted from the agent's pack. They shot toward the skyscraper like a missile. With a shriek of glass and metal, they punched through a panoramic window like a bullet, bursting into someone's open-plan office in a crystalline torrent of a thousand shards.
Agent S used his boots to brake, blasting reverse thrust that washed Freya’s legs with hot air. They smashed through two cardboard cubicle walls and skidded to a stop, bracing themselves against a desk. Behind them, in a shower of glass and debris, the rest of the Delta Null squad crashed into the room.
Then another, unfamiliar squad of figures in black punched through the same shattered window. Freya could see a stream of helicopters flying up to the skyscraper, using its silhouette as cover from the aliens. They launched troopers on jetpacks like missiles before peeling away behind the other buildings.
Agent S set Freya gently on her feet, then immediately shielded her with his body. A ballistic shield deployed in his hand, and he braced his assault rifle against it. Trios of figures in black began moving between the cubicles, covering one another.
"Ten minutes to contact, milord," the Agent rumbled, without turning to face her. "Delta Null is taking up firing positions."
This was bad. Freya's legs had turned to jelly, and if she hadn't been boxed in on all sides by Delta, she doubted she could have taken a single step.
Delta Null formed a shield wall around her, and they advanced. The Prophet's plan was to catch the aliens between a hammer and an anvil. The hammer was the assault team that would board the airship the moment it moored. The anvil was Freya. Freya, and ten more Delta Null squads inside the building.
Everything was going according to plan. Her mask's projector overlaid a mini-map of the agents' movements onto her vision. They cleared the open-plan office, entered a hallway, and broke into a jog. The Delta squads were supposed to rendezvous in the office cafeteria before taking the fire stairs to the upper floors, where contact was expected.
Oh, god. Oh, god.
The cafeteria was huge, tables and food scattered everywhere—through her mask, Freya could smell cold lasagna. Apparently, the merging of worlds had caught people during a late lunch. Freya saw movement on the far side of the room. With a flicker of her eyelids, the mask's lenses zoomed in—more Delta Null squads were filing in.
"Contact with Bravo team," Agent S confirmed into his radio. "The 'Anvil' is at the rendezvous point."
My God, they'd split into groups. A backup strike team, in case the helicopters were shot down or the building collapsed. The Prophet had accounted for everything in his contact protocol. And now, knowing what horrors could be waiting, Freya scanned her surroundings intently—
BAM!
Freya whipped around to see a crumpled Coke can ricochet off Agent S's helmet. Driven by a prehistoric, universal human instinct, her eyes snapped to where the can had come from—and widened.
Right in the middle of the cafeteria, a bearded, scruffy-looking man with a gleaming bald head had materialized out of thin air. With his baggy clothes, tangled hair, and streaks of gray, he could have passed for a homeless man—except for the chainmail worn over his rags, and the talismans of coins and feathers draped over the mail.
The agents around Freya locked their shields. Every figure in black bristled, their weapons snapping up.
"Contact!" the call thundered through her earpiece.
With one hand, the bearded man leaned on a gnarled wooden staff with a large, hollow knot at the top; with the other, he cradled a Heineken keg he had clearly stolen from the cafeteria.
"Alien! Protocol deviation! Fifteen-minute discrepancy!"
An alien?
Freya saw a circle of peculiar, mysterious symbols drawn around the bearded man... in blood? No, ketchup! Outside and inside the circle, dozens of squeezed-dry red bottles lay strewn about. This could have been the work of a crazed New York vagrant, but an *alien*...
Freya locked her eyes on him. The man seemed intoxicated. His beard was damp, and the smell of beer was heavy in the air. But the small eyes under his bushy eyebrows darted rapidly, as quick and vicious as a ferret's.The Prophet, it seemed, had seen enough of the man who had appeared from thin air. A command boomed in everyone's earpieces:
"FIRE!"
The rifles roared. Casings rained down. Freya hunched behind the shields as a hail of bullets flew toward the bearded man.
And through the thick, transparent armor of the shield, Freya saw the bearded alien smile.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
A burst of bullets hammered against the glass. The Delta Null formation around Freya faltered, tightening to seal her in a glass cocoon of shields. The bright tracers converged in a furious vortex around the bearded man, following the contour of the ketchup sigils before ricocheting back into the Delta Null ranks.
Screams erupted. Agents across the room went down. The barrage faltered, dissolving into chaos. Delta Null scrambled for cover; Freya's personal guard began to turtle backward into the corridor.
"ICAT! I repeat, ICAT!" the agents' voices roared in her earpiece. "Requesting occult support!"
It was all happening too fast. How many were dead? How many were left? Here and there, through gaps in the shields, Freya could see still, black forms. A couple of her own guards must have been hit, because the ring around her was now tighter.
Clutching her sword until her fingers went numb, the woman’s gaze snapped back to the bearded man. She had a bad feeling.
Because once the barrage died down, the bearded man straightened up. He gripped his staff, looking like he was about to fall over and puke on himself. Then he let out a deep, guttural moan—a prayer.
Freya couldn't make out the words, but she knew what it was. A prayer. Full of pain and hope. But she didn't have time to process it.
For in that same moment, the bearded man's eyes flew open, his yellow-toothed mouth gaping wide. And a torrent of foamy, yellow vomit erupted from his mouth with the force of a fire hose.
The torrent slammed into the shields around Freya. The blast ripped a shield from one of the agents and hit him in the chest. The agent staggered. His rifle clattered to the floor. He turned toward Freya and her guards. The outline of the agent's shoulders seemed to liquefy beneath his armor, like a melting wax figure.
The agent collapsed, bloated like an overstuffed bag, and burst.
Red torrents gushed from every seam of his armor, carrying with them small, brown shreds of flesh and bones as white as snow. His mask fell away, and a smooth, white skull rolled across the floor.
But then came the smell. Even through her mask, Freya caught the overpowering stench of strong red wine—with a heavy, fermented, fruity finish.
It was the smell of meat wine.
It was the last thing Freya registered before her legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor like a sack.