The cold thing that had run through me while watching the video changed.
Moved deeper.
I’d spent ten years studying what happened whensomethingwent wrong inside a nervous system: the cascading failures, the way behavior unraveled before the body did, the speed with which a contained system could become uncontainable.
Overnight fast wasn’t the part that scared me.
The part that scared me was that I believedit.
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
The fluorescent lights too bright overhead, the breakroom seemed to have become smaller. Too small. Too warm, as if the air had been recycled one too many times.
“It’s fake,” I said.
The words came out flat and certain, the way I needed them to. They settled in the space between us like stones dropped into still water.
Jason’s face fell. His mouth opened and closed. “No, it’s…I mean, there’s…”
“Look at it.” I kept my voice even. Reasonable. The voice I used when I was explaining something to someone who didn’t want to hear it, which was a voice I had a lot of practice with. “Blurry footage. Perfect framing. Someone was filming at exactly the right moment, at exactly the right angle.” I handed the phone back to him. “Classic rage-bait. I’ve watched a dozen of these cycle through the internet. They all use the same playbook.”
People loved being afraid. They sought it out, curated it, passed it around like a dish at a dinner table. Fear was the most shareable thing humans had ever discovered.
I knew that.
I was telling myself that.
Jason frowned, a small crease forming between his brows. The gleam in his eyes had dimmed slightly, uncertainty moving in to replace the excitement.
“But there’s like…” He glanced down at the phone. “Multiple videos. Different angles. Different locations.”
“There are always multiple videos,” I said.
The words were right. My tone was right. Everything was exactly as dismissive and certain as it needed to be.
I just couldn’t quite get it to align with my thoughts.
I handed the phone back and stepped away, reaching for my coffee on the counter.
My fingers trembled against the ceramic.
I tightened my grip, willing the trembling to stop through sheer force of the stubbornness that had gotten me through a marine biology PhD, two grant collapses, and six years of Callan Ward.
It mostly worked.
I forced my shoulders back, lifted the cup to my lips, and kept my face neutral. Around me, the breakroom continued its ordinary morning business—the coffee maker gurgling, someone’s microwave counting down, the low whir of the ventilation system doing its thankless job.
Everything is normal. Everything is fine.
Except that the woman’s scream was still there, living somewhere at the back of my brain where I couldn’t reach it. And the cold thing that had taken up residence in my chest hadn’t moved, hadn’t warmed, hadn’t been reasoned with by any of the very reasonable things I’d just said.
“It’s fake,” I told Jason.
I pressed my palm flat against the ceramic and let the warmth travel up through my hand.
I needed everything to be steady: my hands, my voice, my face, the careful, rational architecture of my understanding of the world.
Because if it wasn’t—