We spent the week preparing like it was war.
Quiet tension stretched over six days, sharp as a guitar string. A slow erosion of normalcy disguised as logistics—burner phones, untraceable vehicles, and the art of becoming someone else. As I’m standing in the precinct’s back office, staring at a coffee ring bleeding into a stack of useless memos, everything in me feels like it’s running two beats behind.
Kelsi’s voice echoes from the server room, a muffled swear and the clatter of keys. She’s been living off energy drinks and spite since Monday, building a backstopped digital identity we can’t afford to screw up. The fake Facebook persona—Claire Reeves—is Kelsi’s masterpiece after all: vulnerable enough to be believable and desperate enough to turn up at a cult party.
And Dalia... She’s changed. I watched her dye her hair in the office bathroom four nights ago, her signature platinum blonde tips vanishing under a coat of chestnut brown. Soft, warm, forgettable. She wore plastic gloves and the kind of expression that dares you to offer sympathy. Her reflection in the mirror almost looked younger, eyes shining brighter with hope for what the future may hold. Someone halfway between who she was and who she’d want to be.
Dalia scrubbed herself out in layers, piece by piece. Neutral colors. Thin, lived-in clothing. Faded denim. A canvas bag with frayed straps. She even practiced how Claire might walk—shoulders slightly hunched, like she was afraid to take up space. Voice pitched softer, less command, more need. I watched her rehearse three different greetings to strangers and I couldn’t say a word. Because it worked.
And that scares the hell out of me.
I shift into a chair, stretch out my leg. My knee pops. Another reminder I’m not twenty anymore, another thing I won’t say out loud.
Desks hum with screensavers and dying hope. It’s so bloody quiet I can hear the hiss of Kelsi’s monitors and the slow tick of the analog clock on the wall. Each second lands like a drop of water from a faucet you thought you fixed months ago. Then the door opens for what I’ve been waiting for.
Dalia walks in, and every thought in my head stops. She’s completely transformed into Claire now. Her jeans are faded like they’ve seen a few too many laundromat cycles. The hem of her cream-colored tee pokes out beneath a muted pink cardigan, a mother’s softness stitched into something tactical. Her eyes find me and don’t flinch—it’s in those hazel eyes that I still feel her, the way she looks at me with soft familiarity, every blink a reassurance she will be alright. There she is. My Dalia.
The steel beneath all that fake cotton.
“Morning,” she says. It’s barely a breath, but it carries more weight than it should because she says it like Claire would.
I nod, hands slightly trembling. “Morning.”
She scans me, pausing for a second at the crooked line of my collar. “Did you sleep?”
“Define sleep.”
She half-smiles in a friendly way. Her bag slips off her shoulder with a whisper of worn canvas and lands with a soft thud. I want to say something—to offer her a line, a tether, something steady—but the words snag in my throat. Instead, I watch her inventory the day. I know this routine.
“Claire Reeves has two kids,” she says, almost idly. “One ten, one six. She lives outside town and works nights. Likes candles. Doesn’t drink. She’s been in three spiritual groups in the past year, all for grief support. Lost her mom to breast cancer. Used to believe in God. Not anymore.”
I know this of course, it’s just more rehearsal, more drilling, more making sure there aren’t any hiccups. I exhale. “Sounds like someone I’d believe.”
“That’s the point,” Dalia says.
Footsteps approach and Kelsi rounds the corner, holding a tablet like it’s made of glass and bad intentions. Her hair’s tied up messily, still wearing yesterday’s hoodie.
“We’re good,” she says without preamble. “Tracker’s live. The burner’s synced.”
Kelsi hands over the burner phone. “No signal in the Dunhaven Glade area, so stay visible until you’re in.”
I glance at Dalia. “We taking the rental?”
She nods. “Keys are in my jacket.”
We don’t talk as we move toward the exit. The sky is still bleeding light—navy blue giving way to dull gray. The world feels unfinished. At the car, she hands me the keys.
“You want me driving?”
She slides into the passenger seat without answering. “You chew your lip when you’re nervous.”
I stare at her. “You notice that?”
“Of course I do.”
I don’t reply, just start the engine. The road hums beneath us, low and steady, as we pull away from the precinct and toward the dark line of woods beyond the horizon.
Claire Reeves has never been to Dunhaven Glade. But tonight, she walks into something none of us can name.
And I’m not sure if she’ll come out whole.
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The road narrows as the woods thicken. What passes for a shoulder is just churned-up dirt, flecked with old beer cans. Pines rise tall and close, their trunks straight as prison bars, needles whispering in a language I don’t trust. I keep one hand on the wheel, the other loose in my lap. Dalia doesn’t speak but her eyes track the trees like they might peel themselves open and let something out. She’s doing that thing again—inventorying without moving, counting every turn, every shadow, every gap between branches.
I glance at her once, quickly.
The dye’s darker in this light. Brown verging on auburn, tucked into a messy twist that could pass for rushed or indifferent, depending on who’s watching. Her jaw is set, lips twitching faintly with whatever thought she’s refusing to say out loud.
The road curves left. Then again.
We’re nearly there.
The GPS dies just before the marker, but we find it anyway—the turnoff is unpaved, a break in the tree line marked by a wooden post with the numbers 436 burned into the grain. No signage, just a gravel path swallowed by foliage. I slow the car. The tires crunch as we roll over broken stone and half-dead leaves. Up ahead, a long rectangular cabin sits back from the road, low to the ground, camouflaged by time and rot. Windows glazed with road dust and the kind of grime you can only get from disuse.
Wind brushes the trees and makes the building groan.
“This is it?” I ask.
Dalia nods. “Yeah. It’s under the fake name.”
She’s already unbuckling before the car fully stops. I kill the engine and step out into a silence too clean to trust, only the dull percussion of the wind and a single bird somewhere high above, calling once, then vanishing into the hush. The air smells like damp earth and pine sap. There’s a taste to it—like rain that hasn’t fallen yet.
I pop the trunk. Dalia shoulders her bag like it’s nothing. Her eyes linger on the treetops for a beat too long.
“What’re you thinking?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Thinking about how fast things vanish out here.”
Well, that’s reassuring.
We walk up the creaking steps together. She has the keys. Slides one into the lock, jiggles it once, twice—then the door clicks open.
Inside, the cabin smells like dust and cleaner, the kind of chemical freshness that covers up everything except time. The main room is sparse. A couch that’s seen too many summers and a table with two chairs that don’t match. The floorboards flex under our weight. A kitchenette sits to the right—no microwave, but there’s a two-burner stovetop and a fridge humming faintly. There’s a window over the sink. It doesn’t look out at anything but trees. Creeps me out.
Dalia drops her bag near the wall, then disappears down the hallway, her boots quiet on the floor.
I stay where I am. The couch groans as I lower myself into it, elbows resting on my knees. I reach into my coat for the burner phone. I scroll back through the Facebook group posts. Most are generic pictures of gatherings—people in loose clothing standing in groups, their faces blurred by dusk and distance. The captions are always vague:
“He moves through us.”
”The cleansing begins with surrender.”
And always that phrase.
“The vessel suffers for our salvation.”
I don’t know what they’re expecting Claire Reeves to bring to this, but it’s more than a desperate prayer or a notebook full of grief. Dalia reappears a few minutes later, pulling her hoodie off and tossing it onto a nearby chair.
“One room’s clean enough,” she says. “Water runs. No signal, like I said.”
I nod once. “Cozy.”
“We’ve stayed worse.”
She’s right, we have. Motels where the light flickered nonstop and the carpet smelled like mildew. Cases that dragged us through corpses and suspects and nights we couldn’t wash off. But this is different. Dalia doesn’t sit, just pulls her phone from her pocket and checks it instinctively, like maybe the rules will have changed in the last five seconds.
Then she glances at me. “What?”
I shake my head. “Just wondering when we became the kind of people who pack for cult retreats.”
She exhales something like a laugh. “We’ve got this. Still have time to scope the grounds, learn the terrain.”
I nod, pushing up from the couch. “And if you go in?”
“When I go in,” she corrects.
Her eyes find mine.
That’s all I get. That’s all I need.
Outside, the woods sway like something sleeping with one eye open.
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The night settles like smoke in the lungs.
I sit at the small table by the window, staring into the trees. Dalia hasn’t said much since dinner—if reheated canned soup and dry crackers count as that. She’s mentally building a map of the glade and every point of potential entry. Her version of comfort.
I lean back in the chair, let my eyes lose focus on the glass. My hand hovers near the burner phone. Still no signal.
Dalia emerges from the bedroom, hoodie swapped for a loose black t-shirt and worn sweats. She moves like she doesn’t want to disturb the air. Her hair’s down—messy from running her hands through it too many times—and she carries a folder tucked under one arm.
She sets it on the table. Sits.
“Floor plan,” she says. “Best I could make out.”
She sketches it fast with a pencil, enough detail to outline the glade’s clearing, the slope behind it, the old fire pit, and two smaller trails leading into the trees.
“There’s no fencing,” she mutters. “But they’ve been using stone markers.”
I study the crude map. She says everything like it’s only logistics. This is what unnerves me about her—how easily she moves between fear and function.
“Do you think they’re planning something violent?” I ask.
She looks up. Her eyes are dark in the half-light. “I think if they weren’t, they wouldn’t hide.”
That lands hard. She leans forward, fingertip tracing the drawn trail. “We won’t get close without them seeing. The way they’ve laid it out… it’s a funnel. Forces you into the open.”
“We’ll adjust.”
She leans back. “I’ll have to go in blind.”
I hesitate. My mouth opens. Closes.
Say something.
Instead, I grab the flashlight from the counter and stand. “I’m going to do a walk of the perimeter.”
She doesn’t stop me. There is a hum of faint acknowledgment, already studying the paper again.
Outside, the air is colder. The trees are louder now, wind shifting through the branches like breath over bone. I walk slow, sweeping the beam of light across the underbrush, watching for prints, for trash, for signs of anyone else moving through here.
There’s nothing. But that’s what bothers me.
By the time I return, Dalia’s dozed off on the couch. Not fully asleep—her breathing’s too shallow, her posture too tense—but her eyes are closed. The folder’s still in her lap. I ease it away gently and place it on the table. I stand there for a minute, looking at the shape of her jaw softened by exhaustion. That ever-present tightness between her brows finally relaxed. There’s something about this version of her—unguarded in the flicker of the cabin’s yellow lamp—that makes something shift in me.
I take the folded throw blanket from the back of the couch and place it over her gently.
The woods are still awake.
So I stay awake, too.
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