Location: Near the Oregon Border — Off-Grid Cabin
Time: Unknown
His name used to be Dr. Silas Reed, Senior Behavioral Profiler, FBI's Division 7.He was one of the first assigned to the Ghost Protocol murders, back when they had a different name. Back when no one was ready to admit what they were seeing. Now, he lived in a shack strung together with copper mesh, antique radios, and chalk marks on every wall. The power was solar, the internet hard-cabled through six layers of analog filtration. He didn't have smart devices or screens. Instead his walls were lined with notebooks. Each one dated and coded. He hadn't used his voice in years, but he still listened. The mornings came in grayscale. He would wake to a buzzing in his jaw, a tremor in his molars—the signal always started that way. Like the hum of a wrong frequency brushing bone. This morning, it was louder. He sat at the desk beneath the window and pulled a notebook labeled:
"The dream returned. The pawn wasn't in the ice this time. It was under my skin. Pressed against the inside of my ribs. I tried to cut it out with a spoon. The spoon melted."
He paused, then wrote again.
"He's not chasing victims. He's chasing recognition. Trying to find someone who can see him. That's the trigger. That's always been the trigger."
A tone pinged from the shortwave radio. A sharp, elegant triplet identical to the one from twelve years ago. Silas froze. That code hadn't played since the day he quit the Bureau. He stood up and crossed the room, taking the old headphones off the hook and pressed them to his ears. The tone repeated. Then a voice, distorted, but familiar.
"REED.
IF YOU CAN HEAR THIS, IT'S STARTING AGAIN.
NULLUS HAS MOVED. THE PATTERN IS WAKING UP.
YOU'RE NOT FORGOTTEN."
Silas swallowed. Then, very slowly, he turned to face the wall behind him; the one no one else had seen in over a decade. It was covered in spirals and lines of binary; A map of movement across time zones. At the center, he'd drawn an incomplete chessboard, but there was only one piece in play. A black pawn. Silas whispered to himself, voice rusted with disuse:
"I was never chasing him. He was teaching me how to look."
Twenty-two Years Ago – FBI Behavioral Sciences Division – Quantico, VA
Clearance Level: Delta-Seven
The Nullus case hadn't even been called Nullus yet. To most, it was a cold string of unlinked murders: clean crime scenes, missing blood, the occasional symbol or whisper. No pattern the system could flag. But Reed had seen it. Not in the data, but in the gaps between them. He'd stopped sleeping because the dreams kept coming. Frozen pieces formed static patterns in his vision. Fractal spirals inside blinking cursor boxes. He ran every behavioral model. Ritual, sadistic, symbolic, experimental. Nothing held. Each time the system tried to predict the next victim, it failed. Not because the pattern was random, but because it was recursive. Somehow Self-aware and reflective. He once wrote on the back of a napkin during a briefing:
"The killer doesn't pick victims. The victims manifest him."
His supervisor laughed. But he didn't.
Office of Records – 2:41 AM
Reed slipped in through a door he wasn't supposed to have access to. He wore Bureau ID and carried the proper badge, but his authorization had been frozen earlier that night. He was already off the grid. He just hadn't told them yet. The secure room buzzed with electromagnetic dampening. Every file not meant to exist ended up here. Its what agents called The Black Drawer. He pulled an unlabeled drive from his coat and plugged it in. The screen lit up with a ripple of warnings he promptly ignored. Then came the voice.
"You shouldn't be here, Dr. Reed."
It wasn't live. It was recorded. But not from anyone in the Bureau. It was his own voice. From a field interview five years ago. The timestamp had been falsified. Or... not yet recorded.
"I saw the pawn. It wasn't a threat. It was an instruction. We're all pieces. But some of us remember the rules."
Reed froze. Grainy video footage played on the screen, showing an interrogation cell. A subject was seated, but his face was obscured. Reed sat behind the glass, but beside him was…another man. One he didn't recognize, but he wore his clothes. Same voice. Same posture, but distinctly not him.
"What is this?" Reed whispered.
The system glitched. The screen collapsed into code—spirals of data collapsing inward. The power failed, returned, and displayed an auto-wiped drive. Gone.
Four Hours Later – Reed's Apartment, Arlington, VA
The walls had already started to bleed static. Lines buzzed at the edges of his sight. Phones rang that no one called. Clocks spun backward for seconds at a time. And every surface reflected him slightly... wrong. He packed no suitcase. Left no message. He wrote one thing on the mirror in grease pencil:
"If perception is the medium, Nullus is the waveform. And I am the carrier."
He left the mirror, apartment, and his name. And stepped into silence.
Back to Present – Reed's Cabin
The fire crackled in the stove behind him as he lit a match and touched it to the newest page in his notebook, watching it burn. Then he turned to the shortwave and began tuning. Someone else had opened the Ghost Protocol file and seen the pattern now. The system was watching again, and if Nullus was truly awake…then so was Reed. The radio signal had gone silent again. He sat alone beneath the dim amber glow of a low-watt bulb, his fingers hovering over an ancient landline hardwired through analog repeaters. It had taken hours to reroute the number through old switchboards, dead nodes, and hidden jumps. There would be no tracing this call back to its origin, and no record of it. He allowed himself one chance.
The line rang.
And rang.
Then—"Hello?"
The voice was cracked with sleep, but unmistakable. Special Agent Naomi Tellis. Retired. Former Bureau profiler. The only one who had ever believed him.
Reed closed his eyes. "It's me," he said softly.
There was a pause on the other end. Silence filled with disbelief. Then: "...Silas?"
He heard the breath catch in her throat, could feel the ache through the wires. "Is this real?" she asked.
"I'm not sure anything is real anymore," he said. "But yes. It's me."
"Where the hell have you been?"
"Somewhere quiet," he answered. "Somewhere I couldn't hurt anyone with what I knew."
Her voice cracked. "We thought you were dead. I held your memorial. We lit candles, Silas."
"I saw the pictures," he said gently. "That was kind of you."
"Do you even hear yourself?"
He smiled faintly. "That's the first normal thing anyone's said to me in a long time."
Naomi was crying now, quietly. On his end, he continued.
"I didn't leave because I gave up. I left because I finally understood the pattern, Naomi. And it scared me. Not because I couldn't stop it, but because I could almost see it. Like it was right there, brushing the edges of my mind, waiting for me to notice."
She sniffled. "And now?"
Reed looked at the spiral on the wall. "It's moving again. Someone else opened the door. Someone with eyes like mine. Maybe better."
Silence stretched between them, a thin thread of static holding the connection.
"Are you okay?" she finally asked.
A beat passed. "No," he admitted. "But I'm better than I was. And that's enough, for now."
"You're not alone anymore, Silas."
He almost believed it. "I know," he whispered.
And then, because it had been too long, he added, "Thank you for remembering me."
There was a pause—just the sound of two hearts held together by an old wire.
"Naomi," he said softly. "Could I ask something of you?"
"Anything."
"There's a woman in the Bureau now. Agent Mara Cale. I've been watching the ripples—her name keeps surfacing in the right places. I think she's the one. The only one who can follow this farther than I did."
"You want me to reach out?"
"Yes. Quietly. Carefully. Just... let her know someone sees what she sees. That she's not alone in this."
He hesitated, his voice thinning. "And after this—whatever this is—I'd like a chance. At something close to a normal life."
She didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice was soft. "You still believe that's possible?"
His reply came with a trembling exhale. "I don't know. But I've missed you, Naomi. I've missed people. I've missed being one."
Her voice broke again. "Then come back to us, Silas. After this—come home."
"I'll try," he whispered.
He didn't say goodbye. He just listened to the line go quiet.
And for the first time in years, he didn't feel like a ghost.
Location: Reed's Cabin – Oregon Border
Time: 5:03 AM
The line was dead now, but the warmth of her voice still lingered in the room like the last heat in dying coals. Silas Reed sat unmoving. The phone rested in his hand for a long while before he finally placed it back in its velvet-lined drawer; right beside the copper crucifix his mother had given him when he was ten, the last photograph of his Bureau team, and the pawn he had carved from black volcanic glass on the night he walked away. His fingers lingered there, resting lightly on the drawer's edge, before he slid it shut with quiet finality. Outside, the wind shifted. Pine branches scraped across the roof like distant whispers, too soft to be threatening, too persistent to be ignored. He rose and walked to the wall, watching the spiral pulse faintly under the red UV light. It was a living thing; subtle in motion, bending just slightly as your perspective shifted. Reed tilted his head. The center was narrowing. Drawing in. He lit a lantern. He knew every nail and groove of this place. But the warm flicker made the cabin feel more human. Less like a bunker. Less like a personal tomb. Then, for the first time in almost a year, he stepped outside. The cold hit him like an old memory. sharp, clean, and honest. The forest stretched out in every direction, vast and black, the towering pines silent and still. But above them, the stars held steady. Real and unblinking. He stood barefoot on the porch, the wood cold and rough beneath his feet, creaking softly beneath his weight.
And then, slowly—he smiled.
It wasn't forced. He didn't do it out of reflex or as some type of positive reinforcement. It was deeper than that. A real, aching pull of muscles that had almost forgotten how to do it with meaning. His eyes stung from the wind, or maybe from the memory of Naomi's voice still echoing in his mind. He breathed in the crisp mountain air, filling his lungs like it was the first clean breath he'd had in years. And when he exhaled, it came out as a sigh of release. Somehow, Naomi still cared. Somehow, he wasn't forgotten, and that truth, fragile as it was, felt almost too good to believe. He stayed there a long time, watching the stars. When he returned inside, he poured himself a glass of collected rainwater and sat cross-legged on the wooden floor without the spiral, notebooks, and distractions. From a nearby shelf, he pulled down an old wooden box and opened it. Inside was a cassette player; a worn and dented box full of magnetic tape and memory. He slid in a cassette labeled in faded ink: FIELD RECORDING – SPRING 2012 – TELLIS / REED / TRAIL M76
He pressed play.
The soft hiss of wind filled the room. Then footsteps crunching in snow. Naomi laughing. His own voice, younger, asking questions with curiosity instead of fear. There was breath, visible on that long-ago morning. There was silence—easy, shared. He closed his eyes and let the memory play all the way to the end. When the tape clicked off, he didn't rewind it. He let it stay finished. Tonight, that was enough.
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