the targeted zone were located. He was lucky the place wasn't 
densely populated — the properties were large, each plot several 
acres, the homes spread far apart. It could've been a lot worse, and 
he grimaced at the memory of past missions involving an apartment 
complex, and another — not too long ago — a trailer park. 


He'd studied the four residences on his phone, through 3D rendering 
composed of satellite imagery and GIS data. House number one 
was a modern two-story with a manicured lawn. The second house 
was more of the same. House number three was a ranch with a 
wrap-around porch, and like the first two there was an unobstructed 
view from the street. They were all possible candidates, but Nathan 
doubted it. For his money he was betting on house number four — a 
Cape Code built in the eighteenth century, set a hundred yards from 
the street, accessible only by foot or via a long dirt driveway. That 
would be the one. 


The Sothian cultists would want their privacy. 


Then again it might not be in any of the homes. Half a square 
kilometer also covered a lot of forested area, and he didn't like the 
idea of having to trudge through the woods at night looking for what 
amounted to a needle in a haystack. 


A dark sedan was parked in front of house number four, blocking the 
driveway. The windows were tinted and he couldn't tell if it was 
occupied. The car idled next to a rusted mailbox, the name 
MCKEOWN written on it in faded letters. 


He seized control of the wheel and drove past. 
"Looks like we've got company." 
| know. | saw. 


"You know | hate it when you watch the feed from my eyes. It's so... 
intimate." 


Grow up. I'm using all available resources at my disposal, so don't 
flatter yourself. Aerial surveillance shows two SUVs and a box truck 
up at the house. | don't know what's inside the box truck, it's either 


empty or shielded somehow. 


Nathan wasn't surprised. Rival factions were like an iceberg — if you 
saw two agents, it usually meant there were ten more close by. 


He hit the blinker and swung onto the next street, driving slowly and 
careful to obey all traffic laws, buying some time before he had to 
loop back around. From the travel kit riding shotgun he pulled out a 
Benzedrine nasal inhaler and gave each nostril two pumps. In 
addition to the methamphetamine, it also contained a cocktail of 
sensory enhancing chemicals. He felt his sinuses immediately 
respond and open up, and he inhaled deeply. 


I'm tracing the plates. Registration belongs to a Megan Parsons. No 
criminal record. Next the Director would run a background check, 
employment history, credit bureau scores, taxes, everything he 
could get his hands on. /t's a dummy alias. 


That was fast. "How do you know?" 


Social networking accounts are boilerplate. Digital photographs 
along with the same exact comments have been identified on eight 
other profiles with mutual friends averaging at twenty-five percent. 
Two of these mutual friends also share the same date of birth and 
college degree as our Megan, and another has the same license 
number. There are other overlapping convergences | won't bore you 
with. 


"Someone got sloppy.” It was easy to forge social security numbers 
and medical documents to pass cursory examinations. The 
Director's examinations, though, were anything but cursory, and it 
took time and energy to craft convincing social networking accounts 
that could fool him and his search algorithms. Cutting and pasting 
wouldn't do the trick. 


"Any idea who my new friends are?" 


Nothing yet. The aliases must be fresh, no known affiliations coming 
back. 


"Great." There was a huge difference between going up against 


present in any copy of this software to date. 


Sample 887-3412: Page is entirely shaded in black apart from four 
long triangles and a circle left white, making the featureless head, 
arms and legs of a humanoid figure. All triangles taper to points at 
the extremities. DIE ANSTECKERIN written in capitals on the back. 
Title is in German; an approximate translation would be ‘the woman 
who pins things down’. 


Researcher: Dr. Wilkinson 


Sample 887-3523: Seventeen (17) pages of what appear to be a 
discussion thread from an Internet forum, in modern Cyrillic script. 
Thread titled "Love and Death". Thread mostly consisted of praises 
and confessions to numerous serial killers, assassins and rapists, 
most notably the Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin. Other 
mentioned killers include Charles Manson, Mark David Chapman, 
and Yoshio Kodaira. Several thread participants express lust for the 
convicted murderers. No dates or URLs were included on the pages. 


Researcher: Dr. Eriksson 


Sample 887-6121: A play in the style of William Shakespeare that 
follows the plot of the novel |, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Apparently 
intended as a comedy. 


Sample 887-6184: An illustration of the constellation Gemini, with 
the stars Castor and Pollux absent. 


Sample 887-6305: A document in the form of a standard SCP 
object briefing in German, titled SCP-704121. The entirety of the 
Special Containment Procedures and Description are expunged, 
with the exception of the phrase "keep me locked up forever." 


Sample 887-6322: An elaborate qualitative description of eight 
pieces of silverware, written in the first person. The author 
addresses each item by the name of a star. 


Sample 887-6560: A choreography (in Labanotation) of a waggle 


members of the Voltaic Counsel and the GOC, or the Chaos 
Insurgency and the Branch Lakivians, and being able to identify 
which group it was could be a matter of life and death. 


I'm piggybacking on their communications but they're currently radio 
silent. When I know you'll know. 


"You want me to wait?" 


Absolutely not. You wasted too much time already getting here and 
it's lost us the initiative. 


"Hey, that's your fault. If you'd chartered a private jet | could've flown 
straight from Paris to Worcester, and from there | can get to 
Millbrook by car in less than half an hour. It would've shaved ten 
hours off my arrival.” 


| didn't like the the risk assessment. Only two private flights have 
flown from Paris to Worcester in the past year. There was a sixty- 
five percent chance your unexpected flight would have been flagged 
as atypical and subjected to further scrutiny. 


Nathan was grateful to hear there was an actual reason behind the 
Director forcing him to fly commercial, but he'd never express it. 
"Well, what about flying into Logan?" he responded instead. 


Nineteen percent, and if you'd then flown from Boston to Worcester 
it climbs back up. Higher if we used a helicopter. TF Green was at 
twenty-five percent. Flying commercial had less than a single 
percentage point probability of you getting flagged. So | sacrificed 
the hours and went with the safest option. 


Nathan decided to let it go. He should've known better than to 
question the Director's logic. "So what's my approach on this one? 
Think | should try bluffing?" 


| think they'll shoot you before you could get close enough. 
"Okay... How many combatants?" 


Counting seven armed by the house, four covering the sides and 
three about to breach. There're another two in the car that you 


passed. 
He made a three-point turn and headed back onto Hammond. 
Pull in here. 


Nathan stopped the car half a mile from the McKeown house, 
parking it on an old fire road. He stepped out and stripped naked, 
breath pluming in the spring air, and squeezed into a suit of combat 
armor that was in the trunk. It was tailored for him, but still a tight fit. 
The suit was a magnetorheological fluid-based weave. The 
insulation and reflective surfaces blinded optoelectonics, rendering 
him effectively invisible to everything besides motion sensors and 
the naked eye. A reinforced cowl covered his head without 
restricting movement or his field of vision. The phone in Nathan's 
brain made additional components — such as a helmet-mounted 
display, WPSM or a situational-awareness hub — superfluous. 


When he finished selecting the last of his gear and weapons from 
the trunk, buckling an explosive belt around his waist, he jogged 
back to the house, careful to stay out of the arc-sodium streetlamps. 
He told himself he was about to engage nine people, all of them 
probably highly-trained. Hopefully his own training and technology 
would prove superior, lending him an advantage by force 
multiplication to try and even the odds. 


The sedan hadn't moved, was still next to the mailbox. Nathan crept 
toward it and planted a proximity mine on the side panel, then slunk 
away, up the muddy driveway before the thirty second delay ran out 
and the mine armed itself. 


He heard commotion up ahead as he approached the house — a 
door kicked in followed by boots stomping across warped planks. 
Orders shouted to "Get the fuck down!" and "Let me see your 
hands!" Nathan paused at the top of the driveway and tilted his 
head, hidden under the eaves of pine trees that ringed the barren 
yard. The house was dilapidated, paint eroding from the few 
clapboards that remained. All of the windows were either capped by 
plywood or covered with newspapers that had gone bankrupt and 
folded decades ago. There was a hole in the gabled roof, the 
shutters had been stripped and the chimney was slanting so much a 


strong breeze probably could have toppled it. 


Five are inside, now. There's one standing by the vehicles, and the 
last one is at the rear of the house, on the opposite side. 


The two SUVs were parked on a patch of gravel to his right, 
sandwiching the box truck between them. He moved swiftly, circling 
the SUVs. A stocky man loitered by the rear of the truck. He had on 
a bullet-proof vest over a tactical uniform sans insignia, head 
covered in a helmet and balaclava. He looked like a member of 
SWAT. These guys — whoever they might be — definitely weren't 
Voltaic or Lakivians. Judging by their hardware they might have 
been agents of the Insurgency. 


The way he was standing, the man's back was against the cargo 
door of the box truck, and the two SUVs covered his flanks. Nathan 
either had to come at him from the front or go under the vehicles, 
and the latter would limit his strike zone to nonlethal parts of the 
body save the femoral. 


He couldn't afford the time to let him bleed out. Nathan switched on 
the active-camouflage system of the suit and rushed head-on, 
relying on his speed and the darkness to keep him concealed until 
he struck. He had three million photoreceptor cells in each retina — 
more than twice as many rods than average — allowing for better 
scotopic vision. To him the world at night was clearly visible, 
although it came in drained of color, like an old black-and-white 
movie. What he saw as nothing more than shade, what the foliage of 
a tree might cast on a bright afternoon, everyone else saw as inky, 
abyssal black. 


The midnight zone. 


He clung to it, that fathomless dark, and unsheathed his knife. The 
padded soles of his boots didn't make a sound as he swept forward, 
launching into the air to cover the last ten feet. 


The blade flashed as he pounced and buried it in the agent's throat, 
his other hand cupped around the mouth to muffle any potential 
scream. He twisted the handle and dragged it horizontally. Blood 
sprayed in a fan. There was the wet sound of running water as if 


someone had turned on a spigot. The eyes went wide even as the 
body began to sag. Nathan wrenched the knife free and slipped the 
blade between the ribs. 


He gently laid the corpse on the ground and rolled it under the truck. 


Around the house, he turned the corner and sprinted to the back. 
The ground was uneven, an obstacle course of depressions and 
hillocks and half-submerged rocks, dead grass slick with dew. 
Scattered leaves crunched underfoot. He cut around the next corner 
and there was the other agent, exactly where the Director said he'd 
be. He was dressed identical to the previous man, watching the 
windows and backdoor in case anyone tried to escape that way. 


He swiveled in Nathan's direction, raising the gun muzzle. But his 
reaction was too slow, too slow... 


"What-" he managed to utter, and then Nathan was on top of him, 
his weight driving the agent to the ground. He jammed his finger into 
the trigger guard to prevent the gun from discharging as the knife 
severed the jugular, cutting deep, almost to the point of decapitation. 
He sped death along with another thrust to the heart, and left the 
body where it fell. 


They're about to exit through the front. They've got three unarmed 
with them. | think they're bound prisoners by the way they're moving. 


He girded the side of the Cape Cod, hugging the crumbling 
foundation as he made his way back toward the front and peeked 
around the corner. An agent emerged from the house and tramped 
down the uneven porch steps. He was less than ten feet away from 
Nathan, but the angle was poor, and the line of fire was broken by 
an old man trailing close behind him. The old man's hands and feet 
were shackled, he was blindfolded with his mouth gagged. Another 
agent pushed him along with a catchpole — a noose made from 
steel cable attached to a long rod, like the kind animal control 
officers used to snare dogs — forcing him to march outside. 


The old man staggered and almost fell on the top step, the wire 
drawing taut around his neck as he tried to catch his breath, nostrils 
flared and cheeks ballooning around the ball-gag. 


Nathan backpedaled, returning to the edge of the pine trees that 
encircled the property in order to gain a wider perspective. Two 
more civilians in matching restraints to the old man were led out: a 
woman in a stained house dress and a boy — couldn't have been 
more than seventeen. Both were being led by catchpoles. Bringing 
up the rear were the final two agents. 


The old man was emaciated whereas the woman was obese, the 
boy as big and fit as a farmhand. Despite these differences there 
was a familial resemblance to all three, and Nathan surmised that he 
was looking at three generations of the McKeown family. 


Overwatch is trying to update them on the deceased status of the 
two agents you killed. I'm blocking the receivers but it's only a matter 
of time before they switch to a back channel. They can't see you but 
they know someone is there; they think it might be snipers and are 
broadening their search pattern. 


Nathan wanted to broach the topic that they had an Overwatch at 
all, but was preoccupied and filed it away for later. He waited until 
the group reached the medial point between the house and the 
vehicles and then opened fire, focusing on the two agents forming 
the rearguard, as they were clustered together. He mowed them 
down, rounds perforating their chests in red cloudbursts, and moved 
up the line. The vests offered no protection against the 
antipersonnel flechettes Nathan was using for ammunition, the 
needle tips puncturing the ballistic material like tissue paper.