IT was mid-July, the cosmos were blooming. Asher Doyle had noticed them all over the city -- busted planters outside shuttered real estate offices, overflowing median strips, a whole vacant lot near 47th Street where they’d overtaken a broken trampoline. No one plants cosmos on purpose. That’s what made them feel important. They arrived when things fell apart. He stood under the rusted awning of a defunct cornerstore, waiting for Just Nicole and trying not to sweat through his second shirt of the day. She was late, which apparently meant she was on time, at least in whatever system she operated by. A dog barked in the distance. Or maybe it was a man coughing into a traffic cone. Philadelphia sounds collapsed into each other in July.
When she appeared, it was through the side gate of a community garden he hadn’t even known existed. She wore what looked like a men’s tuxedo shirt over cargo shorts and orthopedic sandals, and carried a single stalk of rhubarb like a wand. She looked like someone who taught at five universities but wasn't technically employed at any of them.
“You brought your face,” she said, “that's good. That’s the one we remembered.”
Asher: “You said this was urgent?”
She shrugged, “I also said that about the time Scout locked himself in the laundromat trying to reverse engineer the Mayan calendar with a bottle of fabric softener.”
Asher followed her into the garden. It smelled like tomato leaves and sun-baked hose rubber.
“You’re walking better,” she said without looking at him.
“I’m feeling better.”
“Scout says that means it’s time to give you more information.”
“Do you always defer to Scout?”
“No,” she said, stepping over a hose in an unnecessarily dramatic lunge, “but he’s been wrong in useful ways before.”
Asher didn’t know what that meant. He wasn’t sure she did either, but that was the pattern now: something between revelation and free jazz. She led him to a folding table half-buried in sweet alyssum and stacked with xeroxed documents. A single post-it read: DO NOT TOUCH UNLESS YOU MEAN IT. Just Nicole blew a ladybug off a manila folder and handed it to him.
W. HOUSE 1963–Present the label read.
“You’re giving me homework?”
“I’m giving you a spine,” she said, “you get to decide whether you use it.”
Asher flipped open the folder. Glossy photographs. Newspaper clippings. A business card that simply read
Pan Am -- ask for Morningstar. His stomach twinged. “And Scout?” he asked, “he’s okay with this?”
“He's at the cemetery,” she said, “tracking a clue we got in the form of a crossword puzzle. Six down. ‘One who knows but cannot say.’”
“What was the answer?”
“Too early to tell.”
Asher sat down on a cracked lawn chair. Just Nicole didn’t. The cosmos, he noticed again, were everywhere here too. Cracked pavement. Gutters. Blooming like secrets no one had the nerve to bury. He took a breath. The folder on his lap. The garden around him. The sun hovering like it was trying to make up its mind. The scent of the folder was that of burnt coffee, microfiche plastic, and something faintly metallic.
Asher reminded himself, flipping open the folder, that the only thing he was
really honest-to-god afraid of was dinosaurs. Not metaphorical ones, not institutions or old men in suits, but the actual prehistoric lizards. Something about the teeth, the proportions, the way they didn’t belong to time as we understood it -- but even he had to admit: what he was looking at now felt worse. The first few pages were smeared photocopies, off-center and fading at the edges. Memos with half-redacted sender lines and CIA crests melted from fax heat. A hand-scrawled note across the top of one read
Culled from LIBRA archives, 8/82. Below that, the acronym:
Low-Incidence Ballistic Response Apparatus. The text was half-scientific, half-theological. Something about aerial guidance systems designed not to launch missiles, but to catch them. Or delay them. Or redirect them. It was never entirely clear. One memo referenced a town in Missouri -- Times Beach -- which Asher vaguely remembered from a YouTube rabbit hole years ago. Evacuated. Disappeared. Dioxin. And yet here, in the folder, it was labeled a “communications trial site.” There were images: dead birds, children in hazmat suits holding birthday balloons, a satellite diagram with parts of it circled in cherry-red pencil.
Gateway Candidate (Failed). Beneath that, something called
Project Gateway. No acronym, just a stamped date: 3/11/73 and a logo of a staircase that led both upward and downward simultaneously. It appeared over and over again throughout the folder -- on maps, on postcards, on a Polaroid of a warehouse that could have been in Marcus Hook or Bucharest or nowhere at all. There was a section of poetry, attributed to someone only identified as
Brother Axiom. Phrases underlined: “
The child was blue with light”, “
Everything we touch becomes telepathic eventually”, “
Pan Am as Eve”. That last one had a scribbled note in Just Nicole’s handwriting:
tie to the girl in yellow? Then came the materials about LIBRA’s cultural offshoots. Internal memos on “public harmonization events,” which appeared to be code for massive media distractions. A failed comic book initiative called
Starshard. A children’s show of the same name that aired for a single week in 1986 before being pulled. An image of a puppet character -- something like a lion in a suit -- captioned only:
Sammie says: Secrets are for Sharing! There were organizational charts with names scratched out and replaced in blue ink:
Project Morningstar, GATEKEEPER NORTH, AFTERIMAGE, SVALBARD CELL. And everywhere, somehow, the name Westinghouse -- never directly, never plainly. Just fragments. Scribbled into the margins. Buried in footnotes. A utility bill paid by “W.H. Ouse.” A CIA note reading “Is ‘W. House’ tied to the Pan Am leak? Who is the woman?” And then, pasted to the inside of the folder’s back flap: a color printout, aged from too many toner passes. A mock-up film poster: Tim Burton’s
Superman Lives, or at least, the version that never got made. Nicolas Cage in a rainbowed suit, staring dead-eyed into cosmic fire. Except here, someone had drawn an “
X” over Cage’s face and written “WE DON’T NEED STARS.” Beneath the mock-up of
Superman Lives was a small envelope stapled to a blank manila page. Inside: two items. A spent scratch-off lottery ticket from 1994 -- the kind printed with gold foil, long since rubbed away -- and a photo of what looked like a church gymnasium repurposed for group therapy. Everyone in the photo wore masks. Not for anonymity, but for choreography: Nixon, Garfield, Garfield again. A post-it note stuck to the photo’s edge read:
Meeting of the Elastic Table, Baton Rouge Satellite Cell. Pancake Day. There was a cassette tape too, unlabeled, but wrapped in a sheet of paper with the scrawled title:
Music to Transmit By. Beneath it, in Just Nicole’s smaller, surgical handwriting:
Do not play without Scout present. Next came a newspaper clipping -- yellowed, brittle -- about a girl named Tilly Wex, aged 13, who had vanished from a field trip to the Franklin Institute and reappeared three days later in Wilmington, Delaware. The article claimed she hadn’t spoken since. Tucked into the crease was a second article, this one from 1999, reporting that the same girl, same photo, had gone missing again. Different name. Same eyes. A few pages further in: a full-color printout of a CRT computer screen showing a defunct GeoCities page titled
FutureTrainspottersOfAmerica. No links worked. The page background blinked between two low-res images: the Liberty Bell and what might’ve been a cockpit. Over it all: flashing text in Comic Sans.
WE HAVE SEEN THE TERMINALS. YOU ARE THE FREIGHT. The footer was signed:
–W. A folded printout revealed an email thread, though the headers had been redacted. The subject line:
re: RE: THE SEVENTH BELL (CONFIRMED). The contents were mostly garbled -- symbols in place of letters, timestamps that looped back on themselves -- but someone had circled a line in black Sharpie:
If she’s been activated, the boy must be rerouted. He is still dreaming. The woman in yellow holds the override. Taped to the back of that page was a grocery list that read like abstract poetry from the 20th century:
ʘ lemons
ʘ off-brand Tang
ʘ yellow thread
ʘ five small mirrors
ʘ milk (not cow)
ʘ three photos of the same building
ʘ the voice
Another photograph: a blurry image of a Waffle House in heavy fog. The windows flickered. A man stood in the doorway. His shirt read “I WAS THERE WHEN THE LIGHT WENT OUT.” His face was half-erased, but there was something familiar in the slouch. Then came the printouts from academic journals. Not peer-reviewed, not even entirely legible. A paper attributed to
The Gateway Project on the electromagnetic profile of lunar soil. Another on “non-linear migration events” tracked along the Schuylkill River. A third, underlined in two separate pens, theorized the psychological effects of repeating one’s own birth date aloud in a mirror while under hypnosis. At the very bottom: a form stamped “DO NOT FILE,” dated 11/11/66, with a diagram of a rail station that didn’t appear to exist. The form described the opening of a door “into another layer of civic operation,” one that could only be accessed “through ordinary devotion, rhythmic pattern, and meaningful error.” Someone had added, in the margin:
Philadelphia was never built. It was revealed.
Asher stared at the phrase, feeling the outline of it move through him like a ghost brushing past. He stared, dazed. His pulse in his jaw. The only thing he knew for sure was that whatever W. HOUSE was, it had been operating for a long time. Through abandoned missile programs, forgotten towns, and media glitches no one remembered seeing. That -- and the growing certainty that Westinghouse wasn’t a person so much as a vector. A field. A force moving beneath the known coordinates. He sat back and looked up at the cosmos swaying against the sky, the breeze twitching the petals just enough to imply a kind of breath. He thought of dinosaurs again -- less the teeth now, and more the shape. The way a shadow like that might still move, even extinct. The way something lost might still be traced.
The Propeller Club -- half sunken behind a strip mall and a shuttered vape kiosk -- smelled like wet copper and day-old ginger ale. It was the kind of bar with no signage, where the only lighting came from mismatched neon and a flickering TV mounted above the shelves like a shrine to static. A single ceiling fan circled in protest. Someone had left a shoe on the jukebox. Asher puked. Not a gentle retch. A full-body ejection. It came on like a pirate radio broadcast: weird, half-garbled, and definitely not meant for this world. The linoleum caught most of it; the rest got his shoes. For a moment, the music felt louder, like the room was embarrassed for him.
“Whoa,” said Scout, already at his side, “did you eat tonight?”
Just Nicole had a napkin in her hand before Asher even registered her moving, “don’t think he did,” she said, “he was drinking that stuff he came with."
Asher tried to talk, failed. His teeth felt loose. His eyes weren’t focusing right. Somewhere behind his left ear, a fire alarm had started. He tried to stand: “Sit,” said Scout, steering him by the shoulders, “or don’t. Just -- stay vertical -- adjacent.”
Just Nicole pressed a hand to his chest, like checking a radio dial. “It’s okay,” she said, not unkindly, “you’re not dying. This happens sometimes.”
It did not, in fact, happen sometimes. At least not to Asher. He was vaguely aware of his hands, too cold, and of the fact that his legs no longer seemed to belong to him. The ceiling flickered in and out like a bad slideshow. After a moment, they got him moving. Out the back, past the broken pool table and the guy asleep in the coat closet. The night air smelled like thawed city. A car idled across the lot, a dented Saturn with Texas plates --
665 JFK -- its rear bumper held on with twine. Scout opened the door. “If you puke again,” he said, “I’m making you drink the windshield fluid.”
Asher squinted at him: “Am I being abducted?”
Just Nicole laughed, gently. “If we were abducting you,” she said, “you’d already be wearing the helmet.”
She drove. Scout took shotgun and cracked the window. Asher drifted between nausea and dream, watching lampposts pass like witnesses. They didn’t ask where he lived. They didn’t need to. The car turned down the right street, slowed at the right bodega, took the curve near the post office where the curb jutted out like a trick question. His building looked different from the outside. Smaller. Like a set.
“How do you know --?” he started, but faded off...
“You live above the place with the fake cat in the window,” said Just Nicole. “C’mon -- everyone knows that.”
They got him inside. Scout had the front gate open before Asher remembered it was locked. Just Nicole found his keys in the jacket he didn’t remember taking off. He mumbled something about his neighbor and the noise, but no one answered. Then, inside, Scout flopped into Asher's reading chair like he’d done it a hundred times. Just Nicole righted a picture frame. Asher plopped down on the couch, stomach first, and stayed there. The last thing he saw, before sleep pulled him sideways, was Scout scrolling through his books and saying, “God, three different editions of
The Third Policeman? You’re worse than I thought.”
Asher’s apartment was doing its best to camouflage itself as a used bookstore mid-collapse. Books overflowed from every conceivable surface -- stacks on the windowsills, stacks on the floor, stacks balanced precariously atop other stacks like philosophical jenga. Dirty t-shirts -- (some folded, some not) -- formed geological strata on the couch and dining chairs. There were knickknacks everywhere: a plastic snow globe filled with glitter and some unknown skyline; a tiny bust of Freud that, upon closer inspection, was actually a pencil sharpener; a row of miniature commemorative cereal boxes perched above the radiator, their cartoon mascots faded like saints in stained glass. The record player sat in its corner like a sleeping oracle, surrounded by its black-vinyl congregation -- Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Morton Subotnick, someone’s bootleg of
Trout Mask Replica. Just Nicole picked up a cracked copy of
Time Out of Joint, blew dust from the cover, and gently put it back in its place.
But it was the office that bore the true character signature. On the back wall, above the desk, hung the W. HOUSE board. A corkboard the size of a small door, filled to the edges with clippings, thumbtacks, red string, handwritten notes on index cards, printed-out forum posts and blurry photos circled in blue pen. The kind of thing someone on a date might mistake for a joke -- except it wasn’t. There were fragments labeled “Whisper Engine,” “Thurber Hall,” “Contact via Sleep,” and “Cross-Refer: O.T.O.” In one corner, a grainy printout of the Liberty Bell, overexposed and slightly off-center, was pinned beside a sticky note that simply read:
Ask re: Mercy Seat (ritual?) -- who was there? A crude sketch of a spiral staircase looped around itself like a Möbius strip, not labeled but circled twice in orange marker. Another card read, in his own rushed handwriting:
W. HOUSE = ???
Scout studied the board with the beady, sidelong glance of someone used to finding meaning in puddles. “You know,” he murmured to Just Nicole, adjusting his jacket, “if someone walked in and saw this, they might think he’s building a bomb. Or founding a religion.”
Asher, facedown on the couch with his shoes still half on, didn’t stir. Just Nicole draped a blanket over him and clicked the kettle on in the kitchen. Somewhere outside, the SEPTA rumbled by, heading east. The night was warm, April-sweet, thick with pollen and secrets. From the office, the board watched over them all like a confused god who loved them anyway.
The next morning Asher came to slowly as light seeped in through the blinds in horizontal slats, striping the floor like evidence. His head throbbed gently. The couch beneath him had collapsed a bit on one side. His left sock was missing. There'd been a dream, there’d been a boy -- wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon snake smoking a joint. The snake had been laughing, maybe crying. It had said something important, but all Asher could remember now was the boy’s expression: not quite recognition, not quite warning.
Something clinked in the kitchen.
Asher sat up. Scout was perched at his desk, delicately flipping through the pages of Asher's thesis proposal as though they might molt if handled too roughly. His feathers -- metaphorical, maybe -- looked preened but disordered, like he'd recently flown through mild psychic turbulence. His eyes had that glossy, pre-dawn glint of someone who’d been awake since a time no one should be.
"Did you know you footnote yourself six times?" Scout murmured, without looking up, "either you're a genius or deeply unwell."
Just Nicole was at the tiny stove, wearing one of Asher’s oversized Penn hoodies like she owned the lease. She held a fork in one hand, a steaming mug in the other.
“Eggs?” she offered, “they’re weirdly fluffy.”
Scout flipped another page. “This part here -- about semiotic disjunction in urban folklore -- it reads like you’re trying to win an argument you haven’t had yet. Which is charming, in its way.”
Asher rubbed his eyes: “Who are you people?”
Just Nicole didn’t look up from her eggs, “we’ve been waiting for you.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s better than most,” Scout said, tapping the paper. “We were at the Propeller Club in case you made the call. You might not remember, but you did.”
Asher stood up, the dream already peeling away like wet wallpaper. “I never said --”
“We’ve seen the logs,” Just Nicole interrupted gently, chewing. “Someone at the library put you through. You wanted to know about W.HOUSE.” The name hung there, the punctuation heavy in the air.
Scout leaned back, chair creaking under him. “We’ve been on the case a while. Long enough to notice when someone starts tugging the same threads. Uline invoices, blacksite paper trails, student orgs that don't officially exist. You weren’t subtle.”
“I wasn’t trying to be,” Asher said, “I didn’t think anyone was watching.”
“Well,” Scout shrugged, “we weren’t watching you. We were watching them. You just wandered into the frame.”
“
‘Them,’” Asher echoed.
“Them go by a lot of names,” said Just Nicole, forking more eggs. “W.HOUSE is just the one that’s currently in fashion. A joke with sharp teeth.”
Scout nodded: “They’re not a cult in the usual sense. More like... a cooperative hallucination with funding. And you -- you started looking at the wrong files. Or the right ones, depending on your sense of self-preservation.”
Asher let the silence swell. “So what do you actually know?”
“About the organization?” Scout said. “Enough to stay just this side of sane. Enough to leave notes under pseudonyms. Enough to run when the lights flicker twice in the same second.” He hesitated, “but you’re not asking about the organization...”
Asher’s voice was low now. “What about the boy?” Scout stopped fiddling with the papers. Just Nicole’s fork paused mid-air. Asher looked between them -- “Bobby Hodges. What do you know about him?”
Scout finally looked up, posture folding in slightly -- as if something was collapsing behind his eyes. “We’ve been following the Hodges thread for months,” he said. “If you pull on it, the whole sweater comes undone -- he shows up everywhere,” Scout continued, “not as himself. Fragments. Variants. ‘R. Hodges’ in the old W.HOUSE coursework archives. ‘B. H.’ in the registrar’s shadow files -- the ones nobody’s supposed to know exist. Even a ‘William H.’ in the footnotes of a grant proposal that got mysteriously funded, then withdrawn, then funded again under a different name.” He hesitated a moment: “There’s a yearbook photo too. It moves.”
Just Nicole reached over and twisted the salt shaker open with one hand. “The files say he was your boyfriend,” she said, matter-of-fact.
Asher sat down slowly, “what does that mean?”
“It means,” she said, tapping her fork against the plate, “you don’t have to remember someone to love them. And you don’t have to be right for it to hurt.” Then, softer, with an odd warmth: “Love makes space for lies. That’s how it survives the winter, sometimes.”
Scout smiled at that, a little sadly.
“But why can’t I remember him?” Asher asked. “Why do I only feel...” He didn’t finish.
Scout rubbed his temples. “Because W.HOUSE doesn’t erase,” he said, “it overwrites.”
Silence. A bird outside called once and then, as if embarrassed, didn’t call again. Asher looked at the coffee table, at a pile of paperbacks, at the salt.
He asked, quietly: “Was Bobby even real?”
Just Nicole speared a final piece of egg. “Real’s a spectrum, hon,” she said, “you’re sitting next to a duck in a flight jacket.”
Scout raised a hand, “postal. Not pilot.”
It wasn’t that Asher couldn’t remember Bobby Hodges. It was that what he remembered refused to arrange itself into anything nameable. No image held. No origin point. Just impressions -- a laugh that split the air like a sparkler, the way someone’s knees bent inward slightly when they stood barefoot, the presence of another body beside his in bed that made the room feel less haunted. There were no photographs in his phone, but sometimes, when he scrolled too fast, a thumbnail would glitch and for a second he’d see a face -- soft, blurred, half-turned -- and then it would be gone. Like a memory that didn’t want to be caught. He remembered songs he didn’t like until someone else liked them with him. He remembered watching
Fire Walk With Me and crying in a way he never let himself cry alone. He remembered being angry once -- screaming in the hallway of his apartment, no one there to hear it, just shadows and the click of the heat turning on. He remembered that, and not the fight that caused it. There was no name in his contacts, no shared lease, no hoodie left behind. But his body knew how to reach for someone in sleep. His hands curled in fists sometimes when he was dreaming, like they were still grasping the end of a shirt as it pulled away. He remembered the ache. That was the most reliable part. The pit in his stomach when he saw other people laughing in public, or touching shoulders casually. The sharp breath he took whenever someone with kind eyes looked at him too long. The way he kept checking the mirror not for how he looked, but for whether he still looked like someone who had once been loved.
Was Bobby Hodges his name? Maybe. Maybe that was a convenience. A label pinned to a sensation. What if W.HOUSE had inserted the name into a place where something real had once lived, like someone sliding a false tooth into a raw gum? What if he had loved someone else, or no one at all? What if he’d made Bobby up out of the longing? But the grief was real. The fucking grief. That was the problem. That was the thing Scout and Just Nicole wouldn’t say -- that the emotions could be genuine even when his love story made no logical sense. That the human heart was the easiest thing in the world to reprogram, so long as it had an empty seat to fill. He didn’t want to be crazy. He just wanted to know if he had loved someone, and if he had, where the hell they’d gone.
And then, as these things go, time did what it does best -- it passed.
April blurred at the edges. That morning -- the one where the light hit the chipped mug just so, where Asher sat barefoot on the cold floor trying to feel something concrete, something bodily -- that morning gave way to another, and another. He didn’t wake up healed. He didn’t even wake up rested. But he did start waking up less alone.
Scout began showing up more often, always under the guise of something else: a secondhand book he “accidentally” got two copies of; a theory he needed Asher to poke holes in; a cryptic headline he couldn’t read without Asher’s specific brand of interpretive paranoia. Just Nicole too, though she never knocked -- she’d just appear, already halfway into the room, smelling faintly of jasmine and city pavement, acting like she'd always been there.
There were side quests. Fragments of Westinghouse ephemera that turned out to be dead ends. A strange URL that only loaded on certain public computers. A cassette tape that was actually a German language learning program. A woman in a stairwell who whispered “she’s still watching” and then dropped her MetroCard and ran. Asher learned to follow, but also to let go. They were all practicing that -- the letting go -- in their own ways.
They were both there the first time Asher tried to describe the movie -- that impossible film he’d seen during initiation, the one they said didn’t exist, or couldn’t, or shouldn’t. Just Nicole was draped over the radiator like a cat, eating raw fennel and blowing smoke through the open window. Scout sat rigid at the edge of the armchair, legs too long for the room, shoulders angled like origami. Asher had grown used to looking past the webbing between Scout’s fingers, the fine feathers that caught the light just wrong. He never asked. Scout never said.
“What was it called?” Just Nicole asked.
“I don’t know. There wasn’t a title card, per se -- just that it was presented by Future Trainspotters of America.”
He tried to explain it again -- not the plot (there was none), but the feeling of it: the way the colors kept changing temperature without warning, the way the camera seemed to watch itself, the scene where a woman in a red fanny pack dissolved into a thousand versions of herself and bled into a train timetable. There were gaps. Always gaps. And yet he remembered too much.
“You’re describing
‘Renaissance of the Instinct Machine,’” Scout muttered, half-hopeful, half-dreading.
“No,” said Just Nicole, “he’s not. That one ends with the water tower, not the beached plane.”
“Yah -- the beached plane was important,” Asher said. “Then the girl, with the woman..." he trailed off, lost in the memory.
They looked at him the way children listen to bedtime stories: reverent, afraid. Not because they didn’t believe him, but because they did.
“No one on the outside has seen it since the East Berlin archive fire,” Scout said, more to himself than anyone else.
“You think it’s the same one?” Just Nicole asked.
“Could be. Or a variation. A remix. The kind they use to test susceptibility.”
“And they showed it to you,” Just Nicole said, eyes narrowed, fennel forgotten, "and you remember all these details?"
“Yes,” Asher said, “because I knew I was supposed to.”
Silence. The holy kind. The kind that happens right after someone opens a sealed tomb. They kept taking notes. And somewhere in there, trust began to accumulate. Not all at once. Not even evenly. But in the way people start to eat meals together without planning to. In the way Scout learned which chair didn't make Asher’s back hurt and stopped sitting in it. In the way Just Nicole started calling him “Ash,” though no one else did.
His grief stayed, but it softened -- got tucked into pockets of laughter and shared cigarettes and long nights at the Propeller Club, where the jukebox only worked if you fed it a riddle. They didn’t solve the case. Not yet. But the case began to feel like something they were all part of, not just a puzzle to solve but a condition to live inside of, like humidity or dream logic.
And then: July.
The air was syrupy and slow. Cicadas tuning up somewhere behind the trellis. Asher had just finished pouring over the files. He sat, composing his thoughts, Just Nicole hovering in the background.
Scout arrived, back from the graveyard looking like he’d seen a ghost, which was ironic, given how often he claimed to
be one.
“There’s a tomb,” he said. No hello. No preamble. “Westinghouse. It’s real. Or at least it
was. Family plot’s got the name etched right in stone. And get this --” he tossed something on the table. A laminated record from the city archive, still curled at the edges from his pocket. Just Nicole picked it up like it might burn.
“Azorean immigrants. São Miguel. They came over sometime in the nineties. Paper trail goes cold after that.”
Asher frowned: “The
1990s?”
“Yup.” Scout grinned without teeth. “Neon windbreakers. Rebooted Dracula movies. A time when old myths were being recycled poorly. Slick government archives. Strange money. Quiet exits. Westinghouses.”
“That’s impossible,” Just Nicole said, but not like she meant it.
Scout nodded, “exactly. So that’s where we go next.”
“Where?” Asher asked.
Scout’s grin widened, “keep up Asher -- the Azores -- São Miguel, specifically. I’ve got the old Clipper fueled and moored off the Schuylkill.”
“A
Pan Am Clipper?” Asher asked, shocked.
“You think I’d
not have a flying boat?” Scout was already halfway to the door. “Pack light. No checked baggage in dreamspace.”
Just Nicole exhaled through her nose, half a laugh. “Figures.”
Asher looked down at the city record, the name
Westinghouse etched in smudgy toner. Something in his body buzzed like a tuning fork. This wasn’t a lead. It was a summons.
The plane looked like something out of a Cold War postcard -- all chrome guts and hopeful engineering, patched together by someone with a high tolerance for ambiguity and a low regard for FAA oversight. Scout called her
The Antiphon, said it used to be part of Pan Am’s Clipper fleet, though it was unclear if that was literal history or just another one of his allegories.
Asher stood on the bank of the river blinking into the heat haze, backpack slung over one shoulder, already sweating through the collar of his shirt. "You’re sure this thing flies?"
"It flew here," Scout said, rubbing a smudge off the nose with his sleeve, "and so that’s usually a good sign."
Inside the cabin smelled like kerosene and lemon-scented mildew. There were only six seats. The safety instructions had been replaced with tarot cards laminated into the seat backs. Asher’s was the Nine of Swords. They took off around noon, the air above the coast already choppy with convection. The plane bucked and creaked like an attic in a thunderstorm. Just Nicole sat calm as ever, chewing a piece of cinnamon gum and staring straight ahead. She was co-piloting, or pretending to, humming tunelessly into a headset that may or may not have been plugged in.
Asher gripped the armrests. Every time the plane lurched, he imagined his soul misfiring inside his body, jumping like a skipped record. He’d never liked flying. Not the physics of it -- he understood lift and drag just fine -- but the symbolism. Being flung between one life and another without a firm grip on either. No real ground beneath you. Just forward momentum and a lot of loud promises from people in uniforms. He stared out the window. Below, the Atlantic looked infinite and untrustworthy. What had he gotten himself into?
A few months ago he was a doctoral student with a desk in a converted mailroom and the beginnings of a dissertation about liminal spaces in urban mythologies. Now he was following a maybe-duck and a jasmine-scented old hippie through a breadcrumb trail of tombs and tarot cards, chasing a figure named Westinghouse who may or may not have ever been born. Was this still research? He wasn’t sure when it happened -- when he crossed that line, not into madness exactly, but into a world that seemed to be waiting for him.
He thought about Bobby, or whoever Bobby was. About the way grief made you do stupid things. Dangerous things. Was that what this was -- a grief fugue in the shape of a mystery? A jolt of turbulence sent his stomach lurching toward his ribs. Just Nicole put a hand on his knee, brief but grounding. Like she’d done it a thousand times before.
"Almost there," she said, though he hadn’t asked.
He looked ahead. Through the cockpit window, the clouds were thinning. Somewhere beyond them, the Azores waited. He tried to remember if he’d packed toothpaste. Or a notebook. Or a sense of self. Maybe the plane wasn't the only thing cobbled together.
Not long after,
The Antiphon skimmed the ocean like a ghost remembering how to land. Its hull slapped the surface of the harbor with a shuddering grace, sending up twin fans of brine as it coasted toward the mooring dock outside Ponta Delgada. The plane groaned as if exhausted from its own obsolescence. Asher clutched the porthole, nauseated not from turbulence now, but from the surreal calm of arrival. The water was too still. The island too green. São Miguel unfurled ahead of them like an elaborate set -- all volcanic peaks and riotous flora, clouds stitched around the caldera rims like insulation.
They disembarked by launch,
The Antiphon bobbing behind them like a patient relic. On shore, the old customs building stood hollow-eyed, stucco peeling in precise sheets. Hydrangeas bloomed in unnatural blue, like the island had been color-corrected. Everything smelled like sulfur and sweet milk. Asher took in the streets of Ponta Delgada -- black basalt curbs, alleyways named after saints who never made it to canonization. The tiles underfoot formed geometric spirals that resembled the patterns he'd once seen in satellite photos of crop circles. Statues watched them pass with birdshit cataracts for eyes. Locals moved slow but looked fast. A priest ducked into a butcher shop. Some kid spat into the road, looked at Asher, and whispered something in a dialect too old for translation. Scout was unbothered. He was already talking about how the airport hadn’t been built until decades after the Clipper’s heyday -- as if the island had been waiting for them in the meantime, preserved in an amber of neglect.
Just Nicole lit a cigarette with hands that didn’t shake. “This place smells like a library,” she said, “but the kind that doesn’t let you leave.” And Asher -- jetlagged, salt-soaked, vibrating with some future he hadn’t yet admitted to -- felt a sensation he’d later struggle to name. Not dread, exactly. But the sharp awareness that the island was looking back.
They agreed to split up over breakfast -- thick coffee, rolls that tasted faintly of fennel, and butter that somehow already knew your sins. Scout wanted to trace the old telegraph lines rumored to crisscross the island’s interior, still pulsing with ghost frequencies if you brought the right equipment. Just Nicole said she was going to “walk the edges of the town and see who salutes.” She didn’t elaborate. Asher didn’t ask.
That left him with the archives. The building was pale and rectangular, built in the early 20th century and renovated badly at some point in the ‘90s. It had the distinct aura of a place that had once been important and now functioned mainly to ward off questions. The kind of structure that appeared on no postcards but might show up in the background of an important assassination.
Scout handed Asher a folder, too clean to have come from anywhere legitimate. “Start with the 1940s,” he said, “or earlier. Look for anything involving coded language, disappearances, or contested land use. And of course, Westinghouse.”
Just Nicole kissed him on the temple, left a smudge of lipstick like an exit wound, and walked off without a word. Her cigarette was still burning.
The door closed behind them with a sound that felt permanent.
Asher exhaled and looked around. It was quiet -- but not peacefully so. The kind of quiet that suggested surveillance, or at least a forgotten radio playing at low volume in a nearby room. Outside, the town continued to unfold like a staged event. A pair of men carried a ladder down the same street three times, in opposite directions. A stray dog sat perfectly still in the shade of a payphone, watching him. The church bells rang at an odd interval, seven times, then twice more —- a timecode or warning, depending on who you asked.
He told himself it was just a sleepy island town. He didn’t believe it.
Asher turned toward the archives’ front desk, steeling himself for the smell of old paper and a long day spent thumbing through bureaucracy’s forgotten children. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. But he was starting to understand that the search itself was part of the seduction -- the way stories lured you deeper by pretending not to want you.
Behind the desk, a woman looked up and said, in strangely formal Portuguese: “We’ve been expecting someone.”
Of course they had.