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Prologue - Shit Unhappens
Here’s a fun little mystery. Well, not actually “fun,” more “pants-shittingly haunting as you realize the forward march of time is an illusion, and you’ve never been in control of anything,” but sure. Fun.
So I’m at my desk in the Collectors’ Department bullpen, proudly filing away another completed case file in my aptly named “Heroic Moments” drawer. The inside of that drawer is, admittedly, not very heroic at first glance. It’s just a single, sad-looking K-Form sitting at the bottom. But the stories inside that K-Form? Oh boy.
One neat thing about K-Forms is that they’re basically analog zip files. They’re always the same thickness whether they contain thirty pages or thirty million. Every time I finish a case, I like to peel the files out and spread them across my desk, take in the full scope of my career as a Collector. It’s nice. Reflective. A great way to revisit the time I almost died, or the time right after that when I almost died again, or the case that immediately followed, when I was technically dead for six minutes before someone hit me with a defibrillator and politely asked me not to make a habit of it.
Except this time, as I peel the files out of the K-Form, the case files keep coming, and I end up with a handful of weird tales and apocalyptic near-misses that I definitely don’t remember, but they all have my signature on them.
And that feels… less nice.
I take the stack and go find Agent Luis Cho. His office door is open in a vain attempt to air out the smell of cigarettes that have long since soaked into the walls. I tap on the frame. “Hey, quick question. I just found these case files I definitely don’t remember doing. A couple of them are dated in the future. I’m kind of freaking out here.”
Cho flips through the mystery files with all the emotional investment of a takeout menu, and shrugs. “Congratulations. You found your first stand-alones.”
“…My what?”
He hands them back. “Shit happens. Then it unhappens. Not much you can do about it.” He leans back in his chair. “Did you die in any of them?”
“If I did, I’m assuming I wasn’t around to write it up.”
Cho gives a small, humorless huff. “You’d be surprised.”
He pulls out a fresh K-Form and hands it over without looking, knowing it’s already formatted exactly the way he needs it.
I read the title. “’Outside-of-Canon Event Registration.’ What the fuck, man?”
Cho puts his feet up on the desk like we aren’t casually discussing reality coming apart at the seams. “Time is linear, until it isn’t. For whatever reason, K-Forms are immune to the changes. It’s why we use them over computers.” He gestures lazily. “I find it helps to start at the beginning and figure out where things went sideways.”
I take a breath, staring at the long-ass anomalous form. “Right, then.”
Cho shifts and clears his throat, and I stifle a groan. Oh, “Bob.” He’s trying.
“I, uh, heard about you and—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say and quickly turn on my heels.
Back at my desk, I start flipping through the first impossible case file, occasionally muttering, “Huh.”
I flag down Agent Mohammed Darvish. “Hey, do you know an Agent Milton?”
A complicated mix of emotions crosses Mo’s face. “Barry? Yeah. He was a great guy. People handle stress differently. Barry’s thing was… he took care of people. World’s ending, and he’s going around making sure everyone ate something. We were in the middle of a hostage situation once, and he stopped to tie my shoes.”
I can’t help but chuckle.
Mo doesn’t. He pauses, handling his words like they are something fragile and already broken. “He died during the Collector screenings. He was the one interviewing Sinner.” He gives me a half-smile that carries way too much weight. “We used to joke that his Chekhov gun chose him because he was the only thing holding the department together.”
Oh… Oh damn. I look down at the meta gun I found that fateful day, now sitting on my desk. Its miraculous appearance is the only reason I’m still alive. It’s also why Milton is dead.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”
Mo sighs and shifts in place, scratching his head—Oh Goddamnit. He’s about to try too. I hit my head on my desk and moan.
“Hey, I heard through the grapevine—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I mumble, half-muffled from my face smushed against a K-Form. The paper smells like root beer for some reason. Weird.
“Right, well…” Mo claps a hand on my shoulder and gives it a reassuring shake. “Shit happens. Then you die. Feel better, man.”
He walks off, and I call after him, “Apparently, it also unhappens! How the hell is this not a bigger deal?”
I go back to the files. Agent Milton being alive in these reports actually explains a lot. As far as I can tell, these cases come from a timeline where Edie and I joined the Bureau, and everything was hunky-dory—well, except for all the times it went to hell in a handbasket, but that’s to be expected when you’re a Collector. No one got murdered during our interviews. We weren’t framed for anything. In this timeline, the secret lizard people were still secretly lizard people… which meant a whole lot of trouble was kicked down the road.
As insane as it sounds, in this version of reality, Edie and I just did our jobs.
And goddamn, what a job it was.
Chapter 1 - Anthropology 301: Elder Millennial Studies
The campanile tolls. Dylan glances down at her phone. 2:00 PM. She has Stage Lighting I in Murphy Hall at 2:30. She should already be heading there. At the same time…
Kristy walks through Watson Library as if she owns it, breezing past a few students working on projects. She looks back over her shoulder at Dylan and whispers, “Come on, slowpoke,” then pushes open a door tucked into the back wall.
Dylan slows at the door. The space behind the library is… bare. Too bare. It’s just cement floors, a low ceiling, and rows of books on metal shelves stretching into dim light. Her brow tightens into a worried frown she wishes could be a playful cocked eyebrow. “Braggadocious” comes to mind. She wishes she could be braggadocious. “Are you allowed back there?”
Kristy shrugs. “Yeah. It’s the stacks. You haven’t been?”
Dylan shakes her head.
“You’re gonna love it.” Kristy giggles, flicks her blonde hair as she turns, and disappears through the door. Dylan exhales through her nose because her mouth is too busy cracking a stupid puppy-dog grin. That was a very specific giggle. A “we’re not at a party, I’ve had zero drinks, and I’m still bisexual” kind of giggle.
“Screw it,” she mutters. “Those Fresnels can gel themselves.”
She steps through, and the air changes immediately. Cooler. Denser. There’s a quiet in here that makes the main library feel like a soccer riot by comparison. Dylan squeezes between shelves, the smell of dust and paper leaving her feeling like she’s the first person in a couple of thousand years to breathe the air of a pharaoh’s tomb. Ahead of her, Kristy’s collegiate pajama pants swish lazily past rows of forgotten hardcovers.
They reach an intersection. Dutch Neoplasticism to the left. French Dadaism to the right.
Kristy turns. Dylan follows. And then Kristy is gone. The hum of an old air conditioner fills the space.
“Kris?” Dylan calls, keeping her voice low without meaning to. She’s still half-convinced they shouldn’t be in here. “Where’d you go?”
“Over here.”
A hand juts out from a metal stairwell and waves. Dylan relaxes, and the stairs quietly clink underfoot as she descends, passing a rusted sign bolted to the wall: “FALLOUT SHELTER.” There’s a nuclear symbol on it and everything.
“That’s… comforting,” she mutters. She reaches a landing and reads off a small plaque. “’Floor 1½.’ That’s not a thing—is that a thing?”
Kristy shrugs and keeps moving. They go deeper. The stacks repeat. Identical shelves. Identical tables. An old elevator sits in one corner, the kind with the metal lattice door that probably ripped off a few toddler arms back in its day.
“Do you even know where you’re going?” Dylan asks.
“Sort of,” Kristy says, running her finger along a row of books, leaving a clean line through the dust.
Something about the space leaves Dylan feeling unmoored. Kristy keeps cutting through the bookshelves, never taking the same flight of stairs down. By the time they’re moving through the third floor, she has no idea where they are in relation to the rest of the building, much less the surface. She’s completely derealized as they start wandering through the 3½ floor, because half-floors can’t exist, so this place can’t be real.
By the time she’s traveling down the fourth-floor stairwell, she becomes convinced that this is the kind of space you could explore forever and never meet another living soul. The kind of place that doesn’t understand the concept of outside.
It isn’t.
But places like that do tend to show up next door.
Dylan finds Kristy standing frozen, pointing down. “That’s… That’s new.”
Dylan looks past her. A second stairwell drops down into darkness.
“It doesn’t look new,” Dylan says, turning to a nearby pillar. A floor plan is bolted to it. They’re in the fourth-floor basement. The bottom floor. Nowhere around the “You are here” star is there a set of stairs leading to floor 4½.
Kristy shakes her head. “I was cramming in here yesterday. Those stairs weren’t there.”
Dylan slides past and gives her a wink, which feels like it could be construed as braggadocious. “Maybe this is where they keep the restricted books, like in… you know.”
Kristy snorts. “That book series we’ve all read but aren’t supposed to talk about because they’re written by She Who Must Not Be Named?”
“Exactly.” Dylan grips the railing and starts down. “I call dibs on the Necronomicon.”
Kristy follows her down, and the space below opens up in a way that doesn’t make sense with the floor above. Where there should be a wall, there are more shelves. Endless rows stretching into darkness, vanishing beyond the reach of the flickering motion-activated lights.
Something glints on the floor between two shelves. Dylan crouches and picks it up, turning it over in the dim glow. Kristy leans in, standing on her toes, and looks over Dylan’s shoulder, partly out of curiosity, but mostly to get all up in that personal bubble. It’s a tiny metallic blue rectangle with a pair of wired AirPods dangling from it.
“What is that?”
Dylan turns it over in her hand and squints at the words. “It’s an… ‘Ip-Odd.’”
“Oh! My dad has one of these in the junk drawer, except it was bigger. He said they kept their music on it, like before Spotify. When their phone was just, low-key, a phone.”
Dylan makes a face at that archaic concept, and somewhere, millennials collectively feel another hair follicle turn gray. She presses the center button and gasps when the logo appears. “Dude, this one isn’t even in color. How old is it?”
She clicks around and selects “Artists,” muttering, “Academy Is… Alkaline Trio… As I Lay Dying—a bit extra, but alright.”
“Wait, go to ‘Brand New.’ Maybe we can date it,” Kristy says, putting a wired AirPod in her ear.
Dylan glances at Kristy, grinning and bobbing along to the beat, and realizes exactly how far inside her personal bubble she is. Dylan looks away to hide her blush. That’s when she notices the surrounding shelves. Something’s off. The titles all look like English at first glance, but they fall apart on closer inspection. Alphabets bleed together. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew, with a few numbers stitched in for good measure. It’s like trying to read in a dream.
For a brief moment, she considers the worried voice in her head politely suggesting, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be vibing on the floor of a haunted underground basement library that, as previously established, does not fucking exist.”
Then the Vocalist Who Will Not Be Named starts singing, and Kristy goes still with an anthropological revelation. “Oh, is this—I think this is emo!”
She hands over a wired AirPod, partly so Dylan can hear, mostly because it’s a solid move in all the old rom-coms she’s seen.
“It’s really whiny,” Dylan says, chuckling as she looks down at the iPod. She glances at Kristy again and trails off. “No wonder they were all… cutting… themselves…”
She’s got a look—dazed and hungry—punctuated by the blink of those adorable hazel eyes. And, goddamn, they are really, really close. Whatever fragile thread of horror-movie logic running through Dylan’s head snaps as Kristy silently, gently turns her around.
They crash into each other and start trying to swap tongues. Things escalate fast. What starts as over-the-pants PG-13 slides straight into a Blue Is the Warmest Colour “Okay, uh, it’s been ten minutes. At a certain point, this is just porn.”
I’ll spare you the details partly because this is not that kind of story. But mostly? I don’t want to speak ill of the victims.
Dylan’s back slams into the shelf hard enough to make it rock. WHOMP. They both flinch. Kristy yelps and jerks back. A thick textbook lies on the ground, fallen from the shelf behind them. Not the shelf Dylan just hit. On some level, they both know that doesn’t make sense.
And maybe it’s from the force of the fall, or maybe it’s something else, but the book slowly opens on its own. Neither notices the small, torn scrap of notebook paper slipping free.
They pull apart, wiping their mouths, suddenly aware of how quiet it is.
“Shit,” Kristy whispers. “Did someone see us?”
“I don’t—” Dylan scans the rows, tugging her shirt back into place. “I don’t see anyone.”
“Hello?” Kristy calls, her voice thin. “Who’s there?”
No answer. Kristy crouches and peers through the narrow gap where the book used to sit. It’s too dark to make out anything. She pulls out her phone, switches on the flashlight, and gently nudges the neighboring books aside.
The beam cuts into the darkness. Two black pits stare back, inches from her face, separated only by the thin metal of the shelf divider.
Kristy screams and scrambles backward, dropping her phone, kicking wildly, knocking books loose in a cascading clatter. She fumbles for her phone, nearly dropping it again, then snatches it back up and shines the light.
The beam settles. It’s the iPod’s owner, or rather, what’s left of him. A desiccated corpse kneels on the other side of the shelf, wrapped in a black hoodie and loose-fitting skinny jeans. Zelda’s winged Triforce is screen-printed across the chest in flaking gold. His forehead rests against the metal divider, jaw slack, frozen mid-scream. The eye sockets are empty. Not collapsed. Not rotted. Torn open. Scooped out.
The two dark, hollow holes stare straight through the gap at her, and the thought hits Kristy like a slap. “He has no eyes,” she whispers. “Someone took his eyes.”
She turns, breath coming fast and shallow. “Dylan! Oh my God, we need to go. We need to go now.”
Dylan doesn’t respond. She’s staring down at the open book, whispering. Her hair hangs forward, obscuring her face. A long string of drool slips from the corner of her mouth, spattering onto the page below.
“Dylan?” Kristy says, caught between a scream and a whisper.
She steps closer. Reaches out. Her hand lands on Dylan’s shoulder, then recoils.
The girl is burning, feverish. Her body is rigid, every muscle locked tight.
Kristy grabs her and shakes. “Dylan, snap out of it!”
Dylan stumbles, taking a stiff, unnatural step backward. Her shoulders twitch, shudder. Both arms rise, wrists slack, as if pulled upward by invisible strings. Her hands clamp onto her own face, fingers curling. Her nails dig into her forehead.
The whispering builds into a strained, broken whine as she slowly drags her fingers down, carving through skin. Blood beads, then trickles as her lips pull back into a snarl.
Kristy freezes. Every instinct in her body is screaming at her to run.
Then her gaze locks on the little scrap of paper between Dylan’s feet, inexplicably floating half an inch off the ground. She sees what is written on it. It’s just seven letters written in ballpoint pen. All it takes is a split second—long enough for her brain to turn those letters into words.
Two words that form a single thought that implants itself deep within her mind.
Kristy’s breath catches. She goes still. Then she starts whispering too, in perfect sync with Dylan…
…as her perfectly manicured nails begin to dig into her eyelids.
* * *
“ACTIVE A.O. EVENT. ALL HANDS ON DECK.”
Agent Luis Cho, head of the Collectors, hits send.
He stands in the bullpen at the center of the department, a space that looks like a shopping mall violently fused with a 90s living room in a teleporter accident. It’s all beige and brown under sickly yellow incandescent lights, wrapped in textured peach walls because the Great Paint Roller Famine of the late-1900s left everyone using sea sponges for some reason.
Why is it a 90s living room mall?
Don’t know. Ask Liminal Space.
I round the corner with Carrie, my trusty No. 2 pencil, floating at my side, and jog past a fountain that absolutely should not be surrounded by plush carpeting. “I’m here! I’m here!” I call, slightly out of breath.
Cho turns, and I get his classic “Oh, you done did it this time, John” look. It’s subtle. His scarred face and glass eye stay flat, slightly off-center, but his real eye takes you in with all the emotional warmth of a damp floor towel. “Glad you could join us, Fuck Up.”
I slow, taking in the scene. The other Collectors are already suiting up, strapping on Kevlar, checking metal cases packed with scientific doodads, military hardware, and esoteric Tactical Anomalous Objects.
I look back at Cho. “Come on, I can’t be that late.”
Cho glances at his phone. “No. You’re early. Far too early. I just sent that text, and it’s your day off.” He looks back up. “What are you doing at work?”
Poop. That’s actually worse.
“Oh, well…” I wince, briefly consider lying, then glance at Carrie for help.
The pencil just shrugs a universal, “I dunno.”
“Maybe I’m just that good of an employee.”
Agents Smith and Milton exchange a look.1 Milton snorts and goes back to cleaning his fancy Chekhov gun. “You keep digging that hole, kid.”1
I open my mouth to defend myself, which never helps, but Cho cuts me off.
“What did I say about you exploring the Backrooms with that pencil?”
I sigh and recite his lecture from memory.2 “That you don’t care that I think it’s a magical place where every weekend stretches into three days. It’s a dangerous death trap, not a playground. Then you speculate on whether I’m insane or just stupid for continuing to frolic in it.” I gesture vaguely. “But are we really pretending? We’ve run the drills. You care about response time. You were banking on your favorite Vibe-hound popping out of a chalk portal the second you hit send.”
Cho just stares me down. We both know I kind of got him pegged, but he’s also my boss daddy, and can’t let the kid think he won.
Then Edie shows up, exactly two minutes after I arrived, walking around the corner from the other end of the department, and there’s nothing fishy about that at all.
Cho smirks, because I’m actually the one who got pegged, and man, does he love giving me a good, hard pegging. “I was also banking on Agent Sinner showing up, even though I only texted you.” He tilts his head. “Should we unpack that with HR?”
I go stiff. “Nope. I think I’m good.”
Cho extends his hand. “Hand it over.”
I sigh and produce the anomalous chalk. He takes it and pockets it without a word.
Edie stops beside me, sipping her usual coffee. Cream, two sugars, and a splash of AB negative. “What was it this time?” she asks out of the corner of her mouth.
“Too early,” I mutter. “Also, you were right about the text.”2
Cho turns his resting boss face toward Edie’s unblinking murder glare and nods once. “Sinner. Glad you could join us. Suit up. You’ll be coordinating Tac, so no one will question why you’re in full kit.”
Edie walks off without so much as a comment, which is such bullshit. Just because she’s an extremely deadly, century-old meta vampire—Ugh.
Milton waits until Cho moves off, then leans in. “I take it you didn’t just drop everything and run?”
I snort. “No, I dropped everything, made a sandwich, ate it, then took a proactive shit because time dilation is amazing.”
“Attaboy.”
I beam. The man looks exactly like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, and I can’t shake the feeling my personal Jesus just praised me for maintaining my Slack.
Cho claps his hands, pulling the room together. “Alright, listen up. Our contacts inside the Bureau report an A.O. incursion event inside a University of Kansas library. The entire campus is on lockdown.”
My stomach drops. “KU? Which one? Watson or Anschutz or—”
“Watson.” Cho glances at me. “You familiar with the campus?”
“Yeah,” I say, a little too quickly. “I lived in Lawrence. Spent a lot of time there.”
“Good. Doe, you’re on point. We don’t have time for a tour.” He turns back to the group. “Local PD and FBI are already on scene. The library’s locked down, so the A.O. is contained for now. That’s the only good news. Multiple reported victims. We are very much going in blind.”
He lets that sit because the idea sucks just that much.
Agent Vasquez, the foul-mouthed, tough-as-nails tomboy who I’m pretty sure moonlights as a Colonial Space Marine, rolls her eyes. “Great, another fuckin’ scavenger hunt.”
“Law enforcement is treating this as an active shooter,” Cho continues. “Tac Team will join us once we assess the threat. Obfuscations is already deploying crisis actors to maintain that narrative.”
I drift over beside Agent Mohammed Darvish, who’s generally more receptive to my dumb questions.
His mustache twitches before I even speak. “Yes, some anomalous object events are covered up by labeling them mass shootings. It is also true that A.O.s have created more than a few active shooters. And yes, the B.O.B. employs crisis actors to reinforce the narrative.”
I stare at him. “Okay, please tell me there’s a strong ‘but’ coming, because this is getting a little too InfoWars for my sanity.”
Mo raises a finger. “But—and this cannot be stressed enough—that does not mean all mass shootings are fake. They’re not. The only thing more terrifying than some Ken-doll nudging an incel toward an AR-15 is the reality that most mass shooters have nothing behind them at all. No conspiracy. No anomaly. Just broken people with guns.”
I exhale. “Oh, thank ‘Bob.’”
The briefing ends, but nobody seems willing to kick into gear, and I can’t help but notice all the worried eyes on me. They may be going in blind, but not me.
That’s why Cho put me on point and made sure everyone heard it. They think I’m their lucky charm. Their Vibe-hound.
I put on a brave face and rub my hands together. “After we knock this one out, I can introduce you all to the local artisanal wonder that is The Burger Stand. You haven’t lived until you’ve eaten an Ostrich Burger with house-made black garlic aioli.”
The Collectors trade looks. A few nod. Then they all start moving.
Agent Smith AKA the secret Lizard person who ruthlessly killed Agent Milton during Edie’s job interview. Apparently, they’re real buddy-buddy in this timeline? Go figure.
I’m getting a Jim and Pam vibe from Edie and me in this timeline, even though it involves completely different circumstances, which leaves me with so many questions. Like, “How?” and “No, really. How?” Also, “Please God, I’m begging you, tell me how!”