//CAMERA SURVEILLANCE//

PROLOGUE. 

EDMONTON, ALBERTA. 

SEPTEMBER 29.

02:34.

“I don’t like this.” 

“So you’ve said.” Prowl doesn’t even grant Chromedome the courtesy of meeting his eyes in the rear view mirror. She just drives on through a yellow light and around another corner, leading them further and further away from any part of the city Chromedome knows. He’s walked and driven near here before, sure, but never spent any amount of time in the neighborhood, mostly because it lacks infrastructure other than old office buildings and empty retail storefronts. 

“I really don’t like this, Prowl, I’m serious.”

“I had gathered as much.” Prowl doesn’t signal when she turns. Chromedome is pretty sure all the car’s lights are off. Chromedome is also sure this is Prowl’s car, not any one of the number of official vehicles she has access to courtesy of her position. Maybe they’ll get pulled over and this will all end like some sort of weird nightmare. “However, you did agree to it, and the terms of your agreement are still very much relevant. Unless you’ve changed your mind?” 

“No, no,” Chromedome hurries to say. “I haven’t changed my mind. It’s just… You’re sure you have this under control?” 

“Have you ever known me to be out of control?” 

“Literally all of the time.” Chromedome’s sure the next turn they take is a bit sharper than it needs to be, and he doesn’t say anything when the next stop sign introduces his knees to the back of the seat in front of him. Well, when in Rome and all that. “So, if we’re really doing this–”

“We are.” 

“--Remind me again. Why this one? Why do we care so much about her?” 

“I’m afraid of interference.” 

“Right. Explain to me again exactly what that means.” 

Prowl sighs. “Really, Tumbler, it’s not that difficult.” 

“I told you not to call me that.”

“Mm. Anyways, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, our new technology has a few limiting factors.” 

“Yeah, the whole ‘it needs a source of human suffering to work’ thing is a bit of a drawback.” 

“It’s not– never mind. Anyway, that’s not what I was referring to. Right now, we’re only able to broadcast generally. What we need, should this work as intended, is a directed signal. Something that reaches its intended destination and only its intended destination.”

“So you’re using a civilian as a guinea pig.”

“Correct. More specifically, we’re using a civilian no one is ever going to believe.” The car pulls up and the two passengers step out into the damp September night. 

“No, no, wait. Hang on. If you really wanted to test this thing, the best way would be to do it under laboratory conditions. Involving civilians doesn’t—it just doesn’t make any sense!” 

“Doesn’t it?”

Chromedome jumps as a man emerges from the shadow of the building next to them. 

“After all, it’s so much more fun.” The man’s voice is deep, as dark as the night around them, and Chromedome recognizes it at once. 

“You—I—you’re working with him?” 

“We’re working with him,” Prowl corrects. “And yes, he happens to fit our needs quite nicely. All I need you to do is… how shall I put this? Ah, yes. Domesticate him.” 

INCIDENT DESCRIPTION. 

EDMONTON, ALBERTA. 

OCTOBER 5. 

15:07. 

“So you say it happened two nights in a row?” Rung looks up at her over the top of his round glasses, pen poised over his notebook.

“Not two nights in a row, but two nights this week, yeah. There was like, a day or two between them?” She reaches for her bag. “I don’t know, I can check me journal and—” 

“That’s quite alright, Red Alert. Describe the incident for me, if you’d be so kind?” 

“Alright. Um. Well.” She shifts in her seat, tucking one leg up underneath her. She’s always been thankful for Rung’s comfortable chairs. The last psychotherapist she’d seen had had these awful hospital waiting room chairs that dug into her legs and left her with welts every time she wore shorts. Rung’s office, though, was more like an old-fashioned study, and had, among other things, a large, plush armchair for Red Alert to sit in during sessions. She ran her fingers over the worn velvet and tried to center herself enough to know where to start. “I was on the couch. I sleep on the couch a lot, you know, because sometimes it helps with the insomnia, or I fall asleep watching TV or something. You know. I know it’s supposed to be bad for you, or whatever, but I like sleeping on the couch, so, yeah. I was sleeping on the couch a few nights ago, and then I woke up. I wasn’t sure why. There was no noise or anything, and I don’t think I was having a nightmare. Suddenly, I was just wide awake, and something felt off.

“According to my cable box, it was just after three am. Everything was dark, which was kind of weird, because I usually keep a little light on over my desk to get around by. There was some light from the street coming in around the edges of my curtains, but other than that, the only light was from the television. Right away, I had this sort of sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Dread. You know me. You know that if anyone knows fear, it’s me. I’m practically an expert at being afraid of things and making myself nervous about normal stuff. This was beyond that. This was complete certainty that something was very, very wrong. I laid as still as possible and tried not to breathe too loudly, or do anything else to alert the presence I was sure was in the apartment with me. You know how I get. I have the whole thing about being watched, and at first I tried to tell myself that that was all it was. But usually, you know, when I’m having that delusion, I can’t reality check it, so then I started to get really worried.

“Then, the television screen flickered. It had been playing some sort of rerun of an old sitcom I’d never seen before, and I hadn’t been paying it much mind, but then the screen went black, and then flickered black and static for a few seconds, and then these words showed up. 

“It just said kill me. In all caps, right in the middle of the screen, kill me. And I thought, what? Kill the television? Then, the screen flickered again, and when it refocused, it was so dark it was hard to make anything out of it at all. There was a lot of movement and it was pretty blurry, but then this big pale shape came into view and the camera started to stabilize and I realized I was looking at a body. A naked body of a white woman with blonde hair laying on this gurney-looking thing. She was about my age, maybe a little younger, and she was covered in cuts and bruises. I’d never seen her before, and I had certainly never been in whatever sort of warehouse room she was in. I couldn’t see much of it, because all the light was coming from one of those big tall lamps right over her table, but yeah. It looked like a warehouse, a really big, empty one, the kind where most of it is all one room.

“In the dim light, I couldn’t see anyone other than the woman, and she wasn’t moving or anything. I could tell she was still alive, she was breathing, but she wasn’t moving. The person behind the camera was breathing, too, really slowly and steadily. You know when you’re a little kid at school and you’ve been running in the hallway but you don’t want the teachers to know, so when you get back, you breathe really weirdly to hide your panting? He was breathing like that. I could tell it was a guy, or at least someone who sounded male. That’s how loudly he was breathing. The camera moved oddly. Not like he was holding it in his hand, more like it was attached to him. I’ve seen some videos of people doing sports and stuff on youtube with attached cameras, and it reminded me of that.” 

“He took a few steps towards the woman, and I knew whatever was going to happen, I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted to turn the TV off, to make it stop, but I was still too scared to move. I just laid there and watched while he…

“I don’t know how to describe what he did to her, or even if I want to. He. He cut her. He cut her all over, and I… I… There was so much blood and she was screaming and—” 

“That’s enough, Red Alert. Thank you.” She sighs and slumps against the back of the chair. Rung regards her over the top of his wire-frame glasses. “You said there were two incidents like that?”

“Yes. The other one was just last night, and it was mostly the same.” 

“And that was all? There have been no incidents since?” 

Red Alert shakes her head. “No, nothing. I mean, that was just last night, though, so maybe it’ll happen again tonight.”

“Perhaps.” Rung doesn’t move, just keeps looking at her with steepled fingers and pursed lips. He’s sitting in a large, world-weary maroon armchair, at home in the muted earthy tones of his office decor. Rung is every inch the stereotypical psychoanalyst, short and thin and dressed in a shirt and vest twenty years out of date and smelling of mothballs. He is, undoubtedly, the most nonthreatening therapist she’s ever had, and she wonders if he cultivates the image on purpose. She knows she’s not his only paranoid patient, so she wouldn’t doubt it. “You’re sure you weren’t dreaming?” 

“If those were dreams, they were more vivid than anything I’ve ever experienced. I’m not a lucid dreamer, either. Never have been.” She reaches for one of the fidget toys on the table between them and winds it around her fingers instead of tugging at her hair. “You don’t believe me.” 

“I didn’t say that.”

Of course. “So you don’t.” He never does.

Rung sighs, sitting up straighter and looking her dead in the eye. “I believe you saw something disturbing, and that worries me. You know what this sounds like.” 

She knows exactly what it sounds like. She’s been sick to her stomach with anxiety ever since the second incident, well aware that this is likely the beginning of another psychotic episode. That in itself wouldn’t be concerning. She’s been psychotic before. Hell, technically, she’s always psychotic. Delusions are familiar to her, hallucinations less so, but still not in the realm of the unexpected. What’s worrying about this incident is the severity. She’s not convinced that what she saw wasn’t real, and that scares her. “I know. I just… it was convincing.” Convincing and viscerally terrifying. 

“That is the nature of psychosis.” Rung makes another note in his journal. She wants to snap his stupid fucking pen in half. 

She squeezes the fidget toy too hard, and several of the little segments disconnect from each other. “I know.” 

Rung takes another deep breath and contemplates her for a moment before speaking. “I know this is something of a sensitive topic, but have you given any thought to moving back in with someone else? I know your last experience with a roommate was somewhat stressful, but–”

“No.” She shuts him down immediately. The six months she’d lived with Swerve were more than enough to turn her off the notion of roommates permanently. However difficult living on her own is, it’s worlds better than sharing her personal space with someone else, especially if that someone else happens to be Swerve. 

“Just consider it. Many people with psychosis find living alone challenging, and having another person around might help you ground yourself in situations like this.” 

“So we’re not even considering that this might be real.” 

“Right now,” Rung says, “I don’t believe that would be helpful, no.” 

“Right.” Of course not. Considering Red Alert’s side of things is never helpful.

“I’ll tell you what, Red Alert. We’re almost at the end of our time for today, so I’m going to give you some homework. The next time this happens, I want you to record it on your phone. Then, whenever you feel ready, make a journal entry about the encounter. What happened before, what happened during, what happened after, how you felt at all those points, the usual. Maybe that will shed some light on what’s going on here, real or not.” 

“Yeah. Yeah, alright.” 

“I’ll see you next week, Red Alert.”

“See you next week.” 

She heads out of the clinic at a brisk walk, not sure where she’s going, but sure she’s too wired to sit on the bus. It’s chilly, and the wind doesn’t make it any better, but she needs the time to think. Maybe the chill will clear her head. It’s sunny, that kind of cold clear fall afternoon that always ends too soon, but her head is still a tangle of foggy, half-formed nonsense. It’s one of her days off, so after leaving Rung, she heads to one of her favorite coffee places. Downtown isn’t usually somewhere she’d stop and linger, far too loud and crowded, but she’d brought her headphones and it’s fairly quiet, so she settles down at a window booth with a mug of coffee for some people-watching to clear her thoughts. 

Rung has a point about the whole “going insane” thing. Red’s condition puts her at an acute risk for psychosis, and she’s sure she would struggle to notice an episode coming on, but this doesn’t feel like psychosis. Sure, the world’s felt a bit off since the first video, but she thinks that has more to do with terror and a lack of sleep than any serious mental problem. It’s not like she’s developed any new strange beliefs lately, and she monitors those pretty closely in her journal. Whatever she saw, she’s sure it’s real, and she’s sure it’s dangerous. More than that, she has a suspicion that it might be paranormal. 

Red Alert and ghosts have a complicated relationship. She saw ghosts as a child. From what she’s gathered from talking to other children, this isn’t as unusual as she originally thought. Children are imaginative, and the difference between ghost and imaginary friend isn’t exactly strictly definable. She would like to say she believes in the existence of the paranormal, but that’s not really an option for her. It’s one of those funny things about being psychotic. She isn’t allowed spirituality or religion. 

There’s one thing that’s nagging at her. Televisions aren’t like radios. They can’t accidentally pick up other signals, and it takes quite a bit of effort to cut into someone else’s feed. Moreover, failing a total takeover of a channel, something she’s sure she would have heard about, it’s something that has to be done individually. If this is real, and she’s confident it is, either no one else has seen or reported the channel interruptions yet (unlikely, unless they’re experiencing similar difficulties around being believed) or she’s being targeted by someone for some reason (highly disturbing). 

Option two, she decides, is probably the best assumption to operate under at the moment. If later it turns out that it’s a widespread problem and of no danger to her, it’s better to be safe than sorry. If she is being targeted and ignores it, she could end up in serious trouble. 

So she’s being targeted by a specific person, as a specific time of night, on a specific channel. Whoever it is wants her to see recordings of someone being tortured. Why? Who are they? Is she the next target? Could it be that the sender and the torturer are two completely different people? What would that mean? 

Too many questions, too many implications. She pulls out her notebook and starts to write them down. Rung might be on her bad side at the moment, but he’s right about some things, including the value of getting her thoughts out on paper on a regular basis. It clears space in her head, gets the tangled confusion out onto paper and lets her pick through the delusions and anxieties to find the true nature of the situation. 

Possibilities, she writes. 

• I am being targeted by someone

• The person sending me the videos is the same as the person taking them

• The person sending me the videos is a different person

• This is a coincidence

• These videos are intended for someone else

• These videos were never intended for anyone

…

By the time she’s done mapping out possibilities and guessing at likelihoods, her coffee is cold and her hands are covered in black ink smears. Rush hour hasn’t hit yet, but it will soon, so she hurries out of the shop and onto the bus before she can get caught in the crowd. Best to be home by the time five o’clock comes, she’s learned since moving to the city. 

The next morning, she’s up early. Her hands are still streaked with ink from last night’s writing, which she’d continued at her desk, filling a good chunk of her notebook with suspicions and thoughts and observations and every detail she could remember from the two incidents. She’d spent some time reading through them, too, looking for anything she missed, but none of it makes sense. It’s all so disjointed, so random. She’s not even sure why she’s scared, but there’s something viscerally disturbing about the videos that she can’t put into words. Something about them is just wrong, something that goes beyond the fact that they’re there at all.

There had been nothing last night. She’d slept on the couch, phone at her side, blanket wrapped tightly around her and kitchen lights on, but nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Well, if it had, it hadn’t woken her up. She’d slept as soundly as she ever does, tossing and turning, sure, but nothing too bad. She’s actually feeling somewhat energized, more ready than usual for her nine to five shift watching the cameras for a commercial building in Strathcona. Nothing particularly exciting, and she’s looking forward to time spent closed up in a small, dark room, unbothered by everything except Optimus’s occasional check-ins. It’s a good job for someone like her. Not too stressful, but it gets her out of the house and pays the bills. She wonders, sometimes, how she’d managed to land it with her CV in the state it’s in, but best not to look gift horses in the mouth and all that.

Her hands shake as she drinks her coffee and her leg won’t stop bouncing. She’s so full of this odd, jittery energy that refuses to dissipate. Maybe the coffee isn’t a great idea when she’s like this, but honestly it’s such a constant part of her morning routine that either the caffeine withdrawal or the break in her schedule would get to her before she could do anything useful with the energy. 

She’s shaky and tense all the way through showering, brushing her teeth, and getting dressed, leg bouncing to the rhythm of her music and hands trembling, rattling everything she touches. The walk to work in the cool October wind calms her somewhat, but there’s only so much calming that can be done when she’s out in public around other people. She’s been getting better about the agoraphobia, and she can reliably leave the house at least once a day now, but it’s still a struggle. It’s not really the outdoors or the open space, it’s just the people. Strangers are bad, but people she sees over and over again, cashiers, bus drivers, regular commuters, are worse. All she can think about when she sees them is the way they can see her. They know things about her, they make assumptions about her she can’t know or control, and it makes her want to crawl out of her skin. There’s something so claustrophobic about knowing people. She tried to explain to Rung once the difference between the claustrophobia and the paranoia, but she’s pretty sure he didn’t understand. 

When she was younger, she wore an evil eye. She’d read in some old library book that it was thought to offer protection from malicious intent, from jealous gazes. Looking back, she thinks she’d misunderstood it a bit, but she saw the eye symbol and the word “protection” and thought maybe it could help the itch of other people’s eyes on her, get them off her skin and cast a bubble of protection around her. She wanted to be invisible so badly she would hold her breath until her face flushed and her vision swam, half-convinced that if she just didn’t move, she wouldn’t be seen. 

She doesn’t wear the evil eye anymore, and she doesn’t hold her breath, but she still sits very very still on the bus and tenses whenever people look her way.

Today, the bare trees sway in the wind, scraping the low, steel-grey clouds. It’s rush hour and there are quite a few people out and about, but somehow it still feels lonely in that way Iacon always does. The Midwestern sprawl of low buildings creeps out in every direction, bleeding away into plains that never comforted her like the embrace of the mountains could. She always feels exposed here, like something might look down and see her, reach out and grab her. She’s never lived anywhere else, though, and at this point, she’s not sure she could. The few times she’s left the province have been stressful, and air travel isn’t for her, and she gets antsy in cars, and besides all that, she’s pretty sure the watched feeling is coming from her, not from the sky. 

By the time she gets to work, she’s in a strange split state, half calmed by the walk and half paranoid, plagued not only with her usual anxiety, but flashes of what she’d seen last night. Her conversation with Rung plays over and over in her head and she wonders how long she has before… something. Insanity or murder or haunting or something.

Optimus greets her as he normally does, Jazz is already out on her rounds like she normally is, and when Prowl gives her her instructions for the day, nothing is out of the ordinary. It’s comforting, too, to follow the routine of putting her things at her desk, getting coffee, returning to her desk, logging into her computer. Everything is normal. Everything is fine. 

Almost three years ago, when she’d lived with Swerve, she’d wake up every few weeks to find things in their apartment rearranged. Furniture would be sitting at slightly different angles, drawers had different contents, her toothbrush would be on the other side of the sink. Nothing big, just enough to convince her that something was going on. She addressed the problem with Swerve, who claimed not to notice anything. For a while, she’d suspected someone was coming into their apartment in the middle of the night and rearranging things. Then, one night, sitting up waiting for their intruder, she’d caught Swerve reordering the books on the living room bookshelf. The remaining weeks of their lease had been tense, to say the least. Swerve was annoyed at the end of her fun, and Red Alert was annoyed at having spent two months in a panic, worrying in turns about intruders, the end of her sanity, and the end of reality as she knew it, all because Swerve thought it was funny to–

Anyway. That trigger, like this one, had been localized to her apartment, and like this one, when she left the apartment there was always this odd feeling as if she were standing apart from the world. She was questioning reality in its entirety, and it seemed as though the rest of the world neither noticed nor cared. She wonders sometimes what it must be like to live without paranoia. What do other people think about when they’re not worrying? It seems as if worrying is all she ever does. 

Lost in thought, it takes her a few minutes to figure out what keeps drawing her attention on camera seventeen. It’s one of the cameras in the electronics store, so she tries to keep a closer eye on it than some of the others. Even so, there’s something about it that’s bothering her more than usual. It takes her a few glances to pinpoint it, but finally, she notices that one of the display laptops is on. At first, she assumes someone had been using it and walked away, but then she notices something else: it’s playing a video.

The background of the screen is black, flickering like an old tape recording. The letters on it are stark, tall, white. They flash on and off, too small to make out, but she already knows what they say. Once, twice, three times. The screen fades to black, and just as she’s sure it’s about to change to the video feed, the door to her office opens. 

“Red Alert?” 

She startles at the sound of Jazz’s voice. At some point in the last minute, she’d leaned so far forward in her chair that she falls out of it, smacking her elbow on the edge of the desk and landing on the floor. 

“Woah! Sorry, Red, didn’t mean to scare you. You alright?” Jazz extends a hand and Red Alert takes it, letting Jazz help her back into her chair. 

“Fine, I’m fine.” She bats Jazz’s hands away from her elbow. “Just don’t sneak up on me, alright?” 

Jazz frowns. “I didn’t sneak up on you. I knocked twice before I said your name, but you looked pretty absorbed in something on the screen. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I was just…” She turns back to the monitors, squinting at camera seventeen. The laptop is off again, and there are no customers in the store. “Just thought I saw something. It’s nothing.” 

“If you’re sure.” Jazz gives her another concerned look but mercifully says nothing else on the subject. “Anyways, I was just dropping by to tell you Prowl’s going out to that place down the street if you wanted her to grab you anything for lunch?” 

Red Alert’s not even sure which place down the road she’s referring to. She’s always just packed her lunch. “Uh, no thanks. I’m good.” In the six months Red Alert’s worked here, Jazz has yet to give up on her mission to become Red Alert’s friend. Really, it’s not that she minds Jazz, but rather that Jazz and Prowl come as a pair and she very, very much minds Prowl. That, and she just prefers to take her lunch alone. It gives her time to think, and the less her coworkers see of her, the less they have to talk about behind her back. She’s sure they still do, but they don’t have much to say, as they hardly know anything about her. She wants to keep it that way, much as Jazz seems to be opposed to that idea.

“‘Kay! Just wanted to check.” Jazz leaves as quickly as she came, and once again, Red Alert is alone. She looks back at camera seventeen and she swears she sees the laptop screen flicker again. Suddenly, she’s very aware of the fact that her back is facing the open room. 

“Jazz? Hey, Jazz? Actually, do you mind if I eat with you guys today?” 

As it turns out, her coworkers probably do talk about her behind her back. Well, at least Jazz talks about her behind her back, because Jazz talks about everyone and everything. All the time. Red Alert tries to tune her out, but she has one of those voices you can’t help but listen to, and it would be rude even for her to put her headphones on when she’s sitting at the same table. 

Mercifully, Jazz seems to be wrapping up her story about two friends of hers who’ve been in an on again, off again relationship for several years. Apparently, it’s an ongoing saga, and even Prowl seems grudgingly invested, if only to voice her opinion regularly and with much judgment. 

Unmercifully, lacking another story about someone else’s private life to share, Jazz turns to Red Alert as the next source of entertainment. “So, Red! What’s been going on with you?” 

“Excuse me?” 

“I mean, like, what have you been up to? How’s things? I’ve worked with you for six months and I feel like I hardly know you! Come on, give me something,” Jazz implores her, leaning across the table with wide, intense eyes. Everything about Jazz is intense. Red Alert’s grandmother had always called people like her vibrant. Sometimes, Red Alert wishes she had that kind of energy, but she’s what most people would call high strung instead. 

“I, uhh.” It’s been a while since she’s talked about herself to anyone but Rung. She’s not sure what to say that won’t have Jazz talking about her later, or worse, hoarding all the little bits of information and using them to put together an image of Red Alert’s life like she seems to do with everyone else. “I don’t know.” I’ve been seeing videos of people being tortured. “Nothing, I guess.” 

“Nothing? Come on, you’ve gotta have something going on.”

Red Alert just looks at her. Surely, Jazz has picked up on the fact that she doesn’t want to be spoken to. 

“Red Alerrrrrtttt…..” Jazz leans even further across the table.

“I’m gonna, actually–” She gathers the remnants of her lunch and zips her bag quickly. “I’m just gonna go now.” She leaves the break room as quickly as she can. 

Just before the door shuts, she hears Prowl chastising Jazz. “See, you scared her. I told you not to do that.” 

“I was just trying to be friendly!”

Fortunately, the rest of the day passes without coworker or computer related incident. Red Alert takes the long way home, walking slowly and letting the autumn breeze cool her face and clear her head. It’s a nice afternoon, and she’s glad to catch the last of the sun. Soon, it’ll be dark by the time her shift ends. Best to soak it up now while she has the chance. 

Winters have always been difficult for Red Alert. At such a high latitude, they’re long, dark affairs, six months of bitter cold and cloudy skies, the kind of weather that would bring even the happiest person down. She likes fall, though. Just cool enough to wear sweaters, and the city is quieter than it is during the summer. So many people leave to spend their winters down south. 

A year ago, just after her stint in inpatient care, her parents had moved to Vancouver. They’d been planning it for a long time, and had offered to let her move back in with them for a few months if she wanted to come with them, but between the timing and the tension following her breakdown, they all knew the offer was nothing but a formality. Red Alert couldn’t move back in with them, not after that. 

When she’d been accepted to graduate school at the University of Alberta, her parents had been so proud. She was finally bouncing back, they said, getting back on her feet after the wreck undergrad had made of her mental state. This was progress. Red Alert would finally live up to her potential, as long as she moved back in with them to do it. 

Red Alert had denied. She was twenty-two years old and had been living alone on campus for four years, and she had no desire to relinquish that freedom to move back in with her overly-concerned parents at the behest of her overly-condescending psychiatrist. She could manage on her own, no matter what her parents and Rung thought. 

She’d lasted three weeks. The fight with her mother and father had been legendary, and she’d moved in with Swerve, a woman she’d just met, rather than follow them to Vancouver. These days, she speaks to them once or twice a month over the phone, and things are… cold. Still, she sits on a park bench for a long few minutes staring at her mother’s name in her contacts before putting her phone away and continuing on her walk home. Maybe if things got worse, she’d consider it, but right now, she’s thoroughly invested in keeping her parents out of the loop when it comes to her mental health. She wants to reach out to somebody, though, talk to someone other than Rung about what’s going on. 

When she gets like this, when she gets paranoid, she often begins to feel a bit untethered from the world. Everything seems distant and she’s not sure whether or not she’s living on the same plane as everyone else. As much as she loathes socialization most of the time, when she’s like this, it serves as an anchor. It reminds her that she can touch the world and it can touch her back. The problem is, most of her friends are Swerve’s friends and thus not her friends anymore, and the others are Inferno’s friends and thus not her friends anymore. The implosion of her last serious relationship and the dissolution of her roommate arrangement with Swerve had come one right after the other, decimating her social life and leaving her largely alone. Not being a social person, she rarely notices it. When she does, though, it… stings. A year ago, surrounded by pseudo-friends she didn’t entirely like having around, she would never have dreamed of saying it, but more and more these days she finds herself feeling lonely. It’s odd. Swerve and Inferno’s friends were never very good to her and she knows for a fact they talked about her behind her back, but they were company, if nothing else. People to go to the mall with or get coffee with or go clubbing with. A social quota filled and a distraction from the circles her mind tends to run itself in when left unoccupied. 

It’s starting to get cold and she didn’t bring anything warmer than a hoodie, so she stops walking circles around the neighborhood and starts heading back towards her apartment. She wonders why this is rattling her so badly. Sure, it was a disturbing set of experiences, but she’s hallucinated before and, with the exception of the episode that had landed her in inpatient care, none of them have thrown her this badly. According to Rung, her ability to reality-check is one of her best skills, and the thought of losing it is unnerving to say the least.

She gets back to her apartment with no recollection of the route she’d taken to get there. On autopilot, she took off her shoes, set down her backpack, and went through the motions of preparing dinner. As she eats, she tries to think of how a video had broken into her cable feed in the first place. 

Well-versed in technology though she is, she’s not more than passingly familiar with cable television, and the internet is frustratingly vague. All she manages to gather is that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for this to have happened to her by accident. If no one else saw this, it was undoubtedly meant for her alone, an idea supported by what she’d seen on camera seventeen today. This is targeted. She is being targeted. 

She doesn’t sleep much that night. She just lays there in the dark and thinks about… everything. All of it. The videos, work, her friends, Inferno, Rung, her parents. All of it. How hard she’s worked to be able to live on her own, to lead the life she does. It’s not a normal life, but it’s hers, and it’s happy enough, and she’s not ready to lose it to the degradation of her own mind. 

If this is some sort of second psychotic break, a more serious one, it’s possible she won’t recover. She knows how psychotic disorders work. She knows she could be looking her own slow death in the face and, like a coward, she hopes the woman in the video is real. 

The next morning, she sleeps through her alarm and is nearly late for work. It’s not pleasant, but the rush takes her mind off the worries of the night before, and by the time she finishes her first cup of coffee she’s almost ready to dismiss the whole thing as another strange delusion. The idea that she’s the target of some sort of horror movie serial killer is more difficult to believe in the light of day and the company of other people. Surely, if something were that wrong, someone else would notice. She’s just being unreasonable about a few nightmares and a hallucination. That’s all. 

For the first few hours, too, things are normal. There are a few suspicious incidents, a few rowdy customers she sends Jazz after, but again, nothing out of the ordinary. Her day goes on, she drinks her coffee, she takes her lunch, and she relishes the fact that the rest of the world seems to agree with her assessment of the situation. A delusion, nothing more. 

And then, just after lunch, all her screens flicker at once. Then again. A third time, and they go dark.

KILL ME

KILL ME 

KILL ME

She’s frozen, breathless, she can’t move, can’t scream for help, can’t do anything but watch as the video comes up again. A dark warehouse, a gurney, a body. She recognizes the man’s steps, the cadence of his breathing, the color of the woman’s hair. He’s getting closer to her, and Red Alert cringes in anticipation of what she might see next. Then, just before she can get a look at the woman’s injuries, the man stops and whispers slowly, “Kill me.” With her headphones on, it’s as if he’s speaking right into her ear.

She screams, ripping her headset off and throwing it across the room. She turns to run and get help, do something, but before she can so much as stand, Optimus and Prowl come running in. 

“Red Alert?”

“Red Alert, what happened? Are you alright?” 

Trembling all over, she turns and points to the screens, but there’s nothing there except their normal video feeds. “No, no, I– It was right there, I saw–”

Optimus edges around into her field of vision, hands up in a placating gesture. “Take a deep breath, Red. Tell us what happened.” 

In the end, she can’t bring herself to tell them the truth. She says something startled her, maybe something moving in the corner of her vision. They don’t believe her. She can see it in Optimus’s eyes especially, that pitying compassion he’s had for her ever since she told him about her condition. 

To their credit, they’re kind. They make her a cup of tea and Jazz sits with her until she stops shaking. They send her home in an Uber, no questions asked, no complaints made, and she has never felt so belittled. They didn’t do anything wrong and there’s no other way they couldn’t have handled it, but she feels like somehow that makes it worse. They’ve learned to handle it, handle her, because that’s all she is to the people she knows. A basket case. She is losing her mind, and it is lonely. 

She feels herself beginning to slip, just like the weeks before the end of her short stint in graduate school. She tells the Uber driver to let her out at a random house halfway home. Colors shift and blur. Something has come loose within her. She does not think she’s hallucinating the videos, but she is afraid she’s going insane. 

Somehow, she makes it home. She feels feverish, warm all over but shivering, and she lies down on the couch for a quick rest. She just needs to sleep, that’s all. She had a late night and she needs to sleep. 

She wakes up several hours later. The last of the afternoon light is gone. The clock tells her it’s just after eight. The only light in the apartment comes from the entryway and from the television, which is, of course, on. And, of course, on the screen is the mutilated body of the blond woman. 

Red Alert had been, naturally, a paranoid child. The monsters under her bed scared her, and many more besides, and she spent many nights alone in her bed paralyzed with fear. It was a cold, tingly sensation. She feels it again now as strongly as she ever did then, the kind of fear that fixes her to the spot. Her muscles turn to stone.

The man is breathing more heavily this time, panting as though he’s been exercising. She wonders if that has anything to do with the fresh welts scattering the woman’s torso. A knife comes into the frame, and as Red Alert watches him cut into her, she remembers something Rung had said. Her phone. 

Somehow, despite the paralysis of terror, she manages to force herself to reach for her phone. She fumbles with it, struggling to unlock it with her shaking hands, and then leans it against a book on her coffee table and sets it to record. As soon as she’s sure it’s working, she covers her face with her hands and tries to think of anything other than the nightmare she’s living. 

When the screaming starts, she begins to cry. 

According to her phone, she sat like that staring into her hands and listening to the sounds of a woman being tortured for almost an hour. By the time it ends, she’s so stiff she can hardly unfurl herself from the ball she’s curled up into. Despite the terror, despite the echoing sounds she knows she’ll never be able to get completely out of her head, she’s strangely calm. This is it. She has footage now, something to send to Rung, something to take to the police. She sends the video to Rung without so much as looking twice at it, and then she reaches for her journal. After years of working with Rung and other psychotherapists and psychiatrists, journaling is almost an instinct. Just the act of putting pen to paper calms her, and she has a feeling a record of the incident in her own words might come in handy later. 

Wednesday 10/19

Saw the video again. 

Location: my apartment, television

Time: 1:40-2:32am 

Same people, location, general contents as before. Didn’t watch, don’t want to watch, but the woman was the same and the torture was the same.

It feels… wrong, somehow, to write about the incident in her journal. She writes in this journal every day, records her meaningless thoughts and her anxieties and her petty day-to-day nonsense. She doesn’t write about torture and paranormal videos appearing in the middle of the night. This isn’t how her life is supposed to go. 

Suppose anything’s always possible.

Some things stay the same no matter the subject. 

Feel vindicated somehow. Like the terror was all worth it. Something is happening to me, something real. 

When she was younger, she used to daydream that someday she’d be proven right, that all her paranoia would turn out to be justified after all. Maybe it would mean that she was being hunted or followed or spied on, maybe it would mean tragedy would come to her family, maybe it would mean her own death, but at least she would be right. At least someone would take her seriously. 

She actually thought that if something happened, someone would take her seriously. 

Rung likely won’t answer until much later in the morning, and despite everything, she’s growing tired. She curls back up under her blanket, eyes fixed on the now-dark television, and drifts off to sleep. 

2:33 AM

Me: [vid.2393968.mp4]

Me: it happened again

6:54 AM

Rung: Is that a video you took?

Rung: Red Alert, have you reported this to the police?

Rung: I’m assuming you’re asleep now, but I need you to call me immediately when you wake up.

10:23AM

“Hello?”

“I told you it was real.” 

Rung laughs suddenly and harshly. “Yes, you did.” 

“So?” She’s sitting on the couch, still in last night’s clothes, sipping a cup of coffee and trying not to sound too accusatory. “What do I do now?” 

“Well, I believe you go to the police.” 

INTERLUDE.

EDMONTON, ALBERTA.

OCTOBER 1. 

02:57. 

“So it’s working.” 

“Yes, of course it’s working. Did you think it wouldn’t?” 

“Nah, it’s just… There’s a difference between watching it happen in a lab and seeing it in the real world.” Jazz’s eyes are wide and she gestures expansively as she talks. “Exhilarating.” She takes another sip of her coffee and puts her feet up on the table, ignoring Prowl’s warning glare. “Poor Red, but you know. Exhilarating. How’s Brainstorm taking the whole thing? I’m sure he’s thrilled.” 

Prowl rolls his eyes. “He’s just upset he can’t tell Perceptor yet. Says this is the thing that’s going to finally solidify his role as the superior scientist, or something like that.” 

“And Chromedome?” 

“Chromedome is under control. Besides, we have everything we need from him. I’m sure Brainstorm could replicate the surgery if need be. All we need him to do now is keep quiet.” 

“Will he?” 

Prowl frowns. “I don’t know.” 

“That’s not comforting.”

“I am aware. I’m handling the situation.” 

“You always are.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Jazz laughs. “I mean, you make these elaborate bullshit plots and then ‘handle’ them. It’s some sort of game to you.” 

“This is not an–” 

“We’re sitting in a warehouse next to a lobotomized serial killer and a mad scientist working on a government-funded dark magic— no, don’t say it’s not dark magic because you know that’s what we’re fucking with here—a dark magic machine that transmits radio frequencies so long as there’s enough torture going on around it. And to top all that off, you’ve brought civilians into it. Without telling Optimus. And now we’re complicit in serial murder. That’s an elaborate bullshit plot if I’ve ever heard one. There was literally no need for half of this to happen.” 

Prowl sets her jaw. Somewhere on the other side of the warehouse, Overlord groans. “I do what needs to be done.” 

“You keep telling yourself that.” 

INCIDENT CONTINUES. 

EDMONTON, ALBERTA.

OCTOBER 1. 

09:21.

“So what exactly are you here to report? You weren’t quite clear in your phone call.” Deputy Magnus, a tall, imposing woman with a tight knot of dark hair and a face permanently chiseled into a frown, regards her from the other side of the desk. Really, she couldn’t have been any taller than Red Alert, but between the glower and the height of her chair, Red Alert feels a little like a kid at the principle’s office. She twists a strand of hair around her finger, tugging gently. 

 “Um, a video of, um.” She bites her lip. “I think I saw a video of someone being tortured in a warehouse.” 

Magnus blinks. “Ah. Well. Could you describe it to me?” 

As Red Alert recounts the times, dates, locations, and rough details of each of the incidents, Magnus types mechanically into her computer. She never breaks eye contact with Red Alert and she never presses backspace. Red Alert wonders if she really doesn’t make any typos or if it’s some sort of intimidation tactic. “I have a video,” she says when she’s finished.

Magnus raises her eyebrows, and they stay raised all through her silent observation of the first two minutes of Red Alert’s video. She pauses it when the man starts using the knife to take off the woman’s fingernails. “Is the rest of the video comparable?”

“Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s pretty much all like that.” She twists her hair faster. “So?” 

Deputy Magnus takes a deep breath and glances at something on her computer screen. “I see you have a file in our database.” Red Alert nods. An incident from a few years back. “It says you have a history of mental health issues.” 

Red Alert sits bolt upright. “Are you fucking serious?” 

“Quite. Now, I’m not familiar with horror movies, so I couldn’t say which this is from, but I think what’s happened here is that you’ve fallen asleep watching a horror movie and frightened yourself.” 

Red Alert gapes in disbelief. She pulls her hair harshly before slamming her hands down on the edge of the table and standing. “Are you fucking serious.”

Magnus doesn’t look impressed. “I understand that it can be difficult–”

“It’s not from a horror movie,” she insists. “I’m not lying.” 

Ultra Magnus continues to regard her with cool, unaffected disbelief. “I didn’t say I thought you were lying. I’m saying I think you’ve gotten confused and given yourself a scare. Now, there’s no rule or law against making a report you believe to be true, even if that report is based in delusion or psychosis–”

“I have video evidence!” Red Alert cries. “You can’t just ignore me! I have video of it!” 

Ultra Magnus takes her glasses off, pinching the bridge of her nose and sighing. “Yes, I understand, but you have to admit that what you’re suggesting you’ve seen sounds much more like a hallucination than anything—”

“I don’t have to admit anything! I’m telling you the truth, and the truth is that I saw someone being tortured on Channel 113 last night!” She stands up and her chair clatters to the ground. “I saw it. I know I did, and if you won’t do anything about it, then I will.” 

Ultra Magnus stands. “Alright, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she says in that special voice that means Red Alert is being handled. 

She can’t take this anymore. She’s had a lifetime of being talked down to, treated like a crazy idiot, and right now, today, she’s had too much of it. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to visit the police station right after a psychiatry appointment, but here she is, and she’s all out of patience. “No! Listen to me,” she bursts out. “I know what I saw!” 

“Yes, I understand.” Magnus starts walking her towards the door. She tries to put her hands on Red Alert, but Red Alert dodges. 

Her own hands are twisted in her hair, winding curls around her fingers and tugging in in a bid for some sort of grounding stimulus. “Why don’t you care?” 

Magnus opens the door. “I do care. I care very deeply about your mental health, and that’s why I recommend you see a psychiatrist and work to resolve this issue.” 

“I do see a psychiatrist! I talked to one today, and you know what? He told me to come to you! You’re all fucking useless!” 

Magnus takes another step forward, forcing her out into the hallway. “Good afternoon, Red Alert. Please take care of yourself.”

The door slams in her face just as she screams, “I am not psychotic!” There’s resounding silence in the bullpen. She turns around to see a dozen police officers staring at her. “What are you looking at?” 

She leaves the police station and walks for a long time. She’s got no destination, she just walks all her usual routes, drifting from known place to known place until she finds herself in front of her apartment building again. The sun is setting. She’s lost the better part of a day, numb and as though she’s the last real person in the world. Is this really a psychotic break? Has she lost her mind entirely? 

Maybe the police have something to do with it. The way Ultra Magnus rejected her was frankly ridiculous, and a quick text conversation with Rung confirms that’s true, not her own distortion of the situation. Unless, of course, she’s misremembering or misinterpreting it. All Rung has is her account to go by, unless he has some way of watching her. Maybe the police are in communication with him, or maybe he’s just agreeing with her to handle her in the same way Magnus handled her. 

She lets these thoughts chase each other around in circles as she does the dishes and puts in a load of laundry, too tired and apathetic to stop the paranoia. This is enough, she tells herself. It’s enough to recognize them as delusions. She doesn’t always have to be strong enough to stop them. 

For the first time in several months, she contemplates moving back in with her parents. It’s not ideal, sure, no twenty-four year old wants to end up back in their childhood bedroom, but it might be time to consider it again. Living on her own has always been a luxury, something afforded to her when her mental health is stable enough to manage her own care and keeping. Still, she’d hoped this last move-out would at least mark the end of her time living with her parents. 

They’re not bad people, her parents. Really, all things considered, they did their best. But when their bright, if high-strung, eleven year old was referred to her first child psychiatrist, their dream of happy, bland suburban retirement crashed down around them. Red Alert would need care and support, her doctors warned, likely for the rest of her life. For the rest of her parents’ lives. 

They’re convinced that, with enough effort, they can fix Red Alert, or she can fix herself. They’re waiting for a miracle cure Red Alert has told them time and again doesn’t exist, but they’re going to keep waiting, because the alternative is accepting that what they lost won’t come back and probably never existed at all. 

When she settles down for the night, she unplugs the television and takes the batteries out of the remote. She curls up in bed and turns on her IPad, ready to spend as much time watching Netflix as it takes to put her to sleep. They’re not expecting her at work in the morning, so maybe she can sleep in. Maybe they’ll give her enough time off that she can sleep until she’s not tired anymore, until she can turn the television on again. 

She opens Netflix, selects a show, and settles down with her back pressed firmly to the wall and her weighted blanket between her and the world. The opening credits play. The screen goes blue. 

“KILL ME”

She screams, and turns the screen off so fast she knocks the tablet off the bed. It hits the floor and the screen shatters. That’s not right. It’s a cable thing, not a—it’s not right. 

She’s lacing her boots up before she’s even really thought about what she’s doing. She’s not sure where she’ll go or what she’ll do, but she needs to get out of this apartment and away from whatever’s jumped from her television to her tablet. It has to be the wifi, right? Or someone targeting her, in which case leaving is a stupid idea but staying is worse. Her breathing is ragged, panicky, and she pauses just outside her door to get it under control. She’s outside, the door is locked, she’s got her wallet and her phone and her keys, she’s fine. There’s no one waiting outside for her, at least no one she can see, or no one who jumps her right away. 

Actually, there’s no one, period. Sure, she lives on a quiet street and it’s ten at night, but there aren’t even any cars parked on the road. Did she miss something? A bus goes by just down the block, and it’s empty. Then, a man walks by. He doesn’t look at her or acknowledge her in any way, but she breathes a sigh of relief. She’s not alone out here. It’s funny; usually it’s the crowds and noise that get to her, drive her back inside. Now, it’s the lack thereof that’s bothering her. It really shouldn’t. After all, she knows she’s not alone. 

Somewhere out there, in the city, in the dark, is a man in a warehouse. Somewhere out there is a woman being tortured, possibly right this moment. Red Alert tries to imagine it. What if it’s happening right across the street in the abandoned strip mall? What if they’re in the basement right now, or in one of the old stock rooms? She pictures the blood, imagines the screams. She tries to think of the pain, but all she comes up with is a phantom feeling of metal scraping bone. 

She shivers, overcome with the feeling, and it does not fade. She looks back to the silent street and wonders where everyone has gone. Have they all gotten some sort of message she’s missed? Was there some sort of evacuation? She thinks of the silence of a forest as a predator walks through it and wonders if she should go back inside. She probably should. Nevertheless, she takes another step out into the cold night and away from the light of her apartment building’s door. 

A man walks by, alone. The windows of the houses are lit, and down the street she can see the lights of the gas station and the pub, but she cannot see inside. Colors are too bright, smearing into each other like noise on a highway. Something is wrong with her, she thinks. Something is very wrong, and she is very afraid. 

A couple walks by walking a dog. A car passes. The sound of it hurts her ears, makes the color and the light seem more intense. There are people out here, though. There hasn’t been an evacuation, she hasn’t imagined all of civilization, nothing has happened. She’s just delusional. She should be used to that. 

She is used to none of this. None of this is typical, and she is very afraid. 

With shaking hands, she pulls out her phone. It’s almost fully charged, a fact for which she’s thankful. Being left out in the city with no phone has always been a fear of hers. She likes to bring portable chargers with her, but she can’t muster up the nerve to go back inside and get her backpack. It would be quick, she can imagine all the steps now, it’s packed right inside the door, but she can’t do it. She can imagine the television, too, and she can imagine what she might see there. She takes another step, now standing in the middle of the sidewalk, and dials Rung’s number. It rings for a long time and goes to voicemail. He’s asleep. 

Who else can she call? It occurs to her that having no one but a psychotherapist to call might be indicative of a lonely life. She wonders if the woman in the video is lonely, was lonely, will be lonely wherever she goes after death. 

It occurs to Red Alert that the woman is going to die, that she might already be dead. She imagines being dead. She’s done this many times, and it never gets any easier. She imagines writing a suicide note. She’s written one twice before, and both times, it was calming. Almost changed her mind about the whole thing the first time, solidified it the second. 

She does not want to die. 

The woman in the video does not want to die. 

Somewhere in Iacon, a man is killing a woman, torturing her to death. Red Alert calls Rung again and leaves him a message telling him that it’s gotten worse, that something’s happened. 

“Uh, hi, Rung. Sorry for calling so late, and, you know. Twice. Um. Well, I’m. I saw the video again. It’s getting worse. I think there’s something wrong with me, even if the video’s real. I’m going to try to get a hold of someone to do my emergency plan with. Call me in the morning?” 

She wonders if she should go to the emergency room. She hasn’t updated her crisis plan since breaking up with Inferno, and she has no one else to call. She could call a coworker, but she’s not close enough with any of them to feel comfortable with that sort of thing, and she has a feeling her job would be in jeopardy should Optimus find out. It’s happened before, and she’s sure it will happen again. The life of a madwoman is lonely. 

Life is lonely.

The end of life is lonely. 

Red Alert does not want to die. 

She walks out into the night. 

It’s cool outside, and the dry chill perks her up a little bit. Things come into sharper focus, the fog begins to clear. It’s late, almost midnight, but it seems darker than it should be. Some of the street lights are out, she thinks, and there are no cars parked on the street. There’s no one on the sidewalk, either, and when a bus goes by, it’s empty, save for the driver, who she can hardly make out. Similarly, the few lit windows in the nearby houses are foggy somehow. 

She pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through her contacts in search of anyone she can call. Inferno doesn’t answer, neither does Chromedome. Optimus is a no-go, bad time and place to call your boss. Swerve, her ex-roommate, is likely to be awake but unlikely to take her seriously. Rung also doesn’t answer, presumably already asleep, so she just… starts walking. 

She must walk for hours, because when she reaches an all-night diner, it’s almost two. She wanders inside, suddenly ravenously hungry. Her antipsychotics do that to her sometimes, make her hungry. Or the walking. She’s a little confused, and she’s hoping the greasy weight of a Denny’s breakfast will help settle her. Maybe if she weighs more, the floating feeling will stop. 

She goes in and is immediately derailed by the sight of Inferno of all people at a table in the far corner. She’s surrounded by people Red Alert doesn’t know and she looks like a light in the darkness.

“Inferno! I’ve been looking for you.”

Inferno’s just as roughly handsome as Red Alert remembers. She’s sat at a table with a few people Red Alert doesn’t know, and they all look up when she approaches. “Red?” Inferno frowns. She doesn’t look happy to see Red Alert. Maybe she looks strange? Her hair’s probably a mess. She runs a hand through it in an attempt to smooth it. 

“Inferno,” she repeats, suddenly at a loss for anything else to say. The other people at the table (Inferno’s friends, she realizes, people she’s never met) are giving her strange looks, but honestly, she’s got so much frantic energy running through her right now she can’t bring herself to care. Whatever they think about her isn’t her problem. All that matters is the fact that Inferno’s here, which means Red Alert finally has someone to talk to about this, someone who’ll understand that she’s not losing it. 

“Red Alert,” Inferno says, slow. “Are you… okay?” 

She laughs. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine! I’m. Yeah, I’m so fine right now.” 

“Uh,” Inferno starts, turning to the rest of the table. “How about I meet you guys outside, or something? Or, you know what? I’ll catch up to you at Flyaway’s house.” 

There are some vague noises of assent, people get up, and soon, it’s just her and Inferno in the booth. She didn’t mean to drive them all away, but, well. No, she did. She needs some time to talk to Inferno privately, and the others don’t exactly look like the understanding types. 

“Inferno,” she says again, for the third time. Her head’s a bit foggy, and she’s caught up on the way Inferno hasn’t changed at all. She looks just the same as she used to. 

“Yeah.” She sounds the same, too. Resigned, tired. She didn’t used to sound like that. Red Alert remembers when she was excited to see her, like every date was their first, like everything Red Alert said or did was a wonderful miracle. “What are you doing here, Red Alert?” 

“I’m, uh.” She tucks her hands under her thighs, then puts them back on the table again. Drums her fingers on the table. Tucks them back under her thighs. “I’m, you know. Out for a walk.” 

“It’s two in the morning.” 

“You’re out.”

“I’m with friends.” 

Rub it in, why don’t you. “Well, I’m not. And I was, uh, hungry, so. Diner. Yeah.” 

Inferno stares at her long and hard. “Red Alert,” she says slowly. “What’s going on? Have you been taking your medication?” 

“God, why does everyone keep asking me that? Don’t answer that,” she warns when Inferno opens her mouth. “I know, I know. Okay? I know. I get that I look like a wreck right now, but I just need you to listen to me, alright? I’ve… something happened, and I need someone to talk to.” 

“Listen, Red, maybe I’m not that person.” Inferno rubs the back of her neck, shifting from foot to foot. She’s lying. Red Alert’s not sure why or what reason she has to lie, other than a desire to get away, but she’s hiding something from her. 

“Inferno.” Red Alert stands, looking down on her for once instead of the other way around, and pushes a strand of hair out of her face. “Please. I have no one else to talk to.” 

“Alright. Just to talk, though, and just quickly, understand?”

“Ahh! Inferno, yes yes yes, like that!” 

Inferno uses Red Alert’s back to slam the door shut, pinning her up against it and biting down hard on Red Alert’s shoulder. She sinks her hands into the short mess of Inferno’s hair, grabbing handfuls and pulling wherever she can. Inferno moans into her neck and then, when dragged there, into her mouth. They kiss for a moment or a minute, lost in the feel and taste of each other. Inferno tastes sweet, like syrup. 

She picks Red Alert up and carries her to the bedroom, placing her gently on the bed and following her down. She’s still kissing her as if it would kill her to stop. Red Alert is lost in the pleasure of Inferno’s teeth on her lip and Inferno is lost in the pleasure of Red Alert’s body against hers. They broke up two months ago and haven’t seen each other in six weeks. Muscle memory lasts much longer than that. 

Red Alert remembers the way Inferno fits against her, legs over Inferno’s shoulders, hands in her hair. Inferno kisses down her stomach and across her thighs, stopping occasionally to bite bruises into them.

Red Alert is certainly present in her body now. This is grounding her, bringing her back to reality just as much as Inferno’s hot touch sends her soaring. Inferno kisses across the waistband of her underwear, then looks up, asking for permission. 

“Yes,” Red Alert breathes, taking one hand off Inferno’s head to tangle in her own hair. Already, her legs are shaking. Inferno has always been so good with her mouth. 

She brings Red Alert to orgasm gently twice, and then once more with such staggeringly sharp precision and intensity that Red Alert has to take a moment or two just to breathe through the aftershocks. 

“Good?” Inferno asks her as if she doesn’t already know. Red Alert looks down. Inferno’s leaning against her thigh, eyes half-lidded. She’s too tall for this bed, always has been, and her legs hang awkwardly over the edge. Red Alert loves the broken slope of her nose. 

“So good.” 

“Good.” Pause. Then, “Red Alert, what’s going on?” 

“I… Let me get you a glass of water.” 

Inferno looks for a moment as if she might argue, but then she swallows and reconsiders. “...Okay. I’ll be here, I suppose.” 

When Red Alert comes back with the water, she pauses in the doorway, thoughts of what to say about her current situation scattered by how right Inferno looks sitting on her bed. Already two months have passed, but the memory is strong. How many times has Inferno sat in that spot, in that exact position? The expression, though, is different. She looks worried in a way that’s new to Red Alert. She’s never seen this exact flavor of concern on Inferno’s face before. She sets Inferno’s cup on the bedside table and takes a deep drink from her own. She wishes she’d gotten something alcoholic, but perhaps she doesn’t need it. Already, the floating feeling is returning. Already, the floating feeling is returning. Nothing seems real, and inferno’s presence is too familiar to break through it. Maybe the past two months have been a bad dream. She’d like to wake up now. 

“Red Alert,” Inferno starts, ignoring her own water. “We need to talk. You’re not doing well.” 

“I’m doing perfectly fine.” 

“Your apartment is a wreck and you can’t look me in the eye. You’re not fine.” 

Red Alert stands abruptly. “Fuck you.” Ridiculously, she realizes she hasn’t put her boxers back on yet. She struggles into them while Inferno talks. This is a familiar routine. 

“Red, I’m not trying to start an argument. I’m trying to help you. No, wait, listen to me. I know we broke up, but I still worry about you. I’m allowed to do that. And since you brought me back into your apartment, I kind of feel like you want to be worried about.” inferno takes a deep breath, then pats the empty space beside her. “so tell me. What’s going on?” 

Reluctantly, red alert sits back down. “I. You. You have to promise not to laugh at me or call me crazy.” 

“When have I ever done that?” 

Red Alert nods, steeling herself. “I… I’ve been. Seeing things. Horrible things.” 

Inferno blinks, chewing her lip and clearly holding something back. Red Alert wishes she would just say it, wishes she could trust inferno to say anything she meant, ever, but they’d already tried to mend that fault for two years. It wasn’t going to happen. Red Alert forges ahead, trying to keep her focus. 

“Not in a personality disorder way. At least, not like anything I’ve experienced before. You know, when I see things, it’s not like… like, I don’t know.” 

“Like a bad horror movie about schizophrenia?”

“Yes, exactly. This is like a bad horror movie about schizophrenia.” 

“That’s…”

“Worrying? I know. You sound like my therapist. Point is, I don’t think that whatever’s going on is all in my head. I think some of it’s in my head, but some of it is flat-out impossible, and I am lucid enough to realize that no one is actually paying enough attention to me to play some sort of elaborate trick or run some sort of government scheme on me, so I think that makes it even weirder.” 

“Just… tell me what you’ve been seeing.” 

Red Alert looks down at her hands, then back over at Inferno. “I’ve been seeing a woman on my television. She’s being tortured, and I think the man’s planning on killing her.” Inferno bites her lip. She looks into her water glass, over to the wall, and then back at Red Alert. She opens her mouth as if to say something, and Red Alert realizes that whatever it is, she can’t hear it right now. “I can try and show you? Like, on my TV? I would show you on my tablet, but I kind of, yeah. Kind of broke it.” She gestures lamely over to where it’s still laying on the floor. 

“You know what? Sure. Yeah.” 

Honestly, Red Alert’s not sure what she’s expecting when she leads Inferno out into the living room and turns on the television. She’s not even sure what to hope for, which outcome would be best. She presses the power button and holds her breath. 

KILL ME

KILL ME

KILL ME

Inferno gasps. Then, the screen flickers, blue to black to static, and comes back into focus on the same woman as always, the same table as always. This time, though, there is a gaping hole in the middle of her chest. 

Inferno falls backwards onto the couch. 

Red Alert’s never been a fan of horror or gore, and she’s certainly never seen a real stab wound before. She finds that she can’t look away. Blood oozes from the hole, too slow to be healthy. The camera’s too close to the woman’s body to see anything more than the wound and the surrounding skin, but the placement and the way the blood flows and something about the stillness of the whole thing makes it clear: the woman is dead. 

Before she can do anything more than stare, Inferno grabs the remote from her hand and turns the television off. 

At first, both of them are so stunned they can’t look away from the blank screen. Despite the graphic content, the implication that this girl is dead, that Red Alert is too late to do anything about it, hardly registers beyond the revelation that apparently, inferno can see the video, too. Then, she realizes that Inferno can see the video and the girl has just died. She turns the television off and turns back to Inferno. 

Neither of them talk for a minute. 

Then, Inferno stands. “I can’t be a part of this,” she says. 

“What?”

“I don’t know if this is some sort of sick prank or if you’ve gotten yourself into something really fucked up,” she says. “but I don’t want any part of this.” 

“Inferno, no, wait!” 

Inferno leaves, slamming the door behind her. Red Alert is left standing in her living room in her hoodie and damp boxers, still holding the remote. 

She puts the remote down, finds her pants, finds her shoes, and heads back out into the dark.

This time, when she walks, there’s a distinctly more nightmarish quality to the city. It’s around three in the morning at this point, maybe a bit closer to four, and it’s as dark as it’s going to get. There are no shadows except those cast by streetlights. Red Alert is cold, and she wishes she had something more substantial than tennis shoes to wear. She’s been walking for a long time, and she suspects she’ll be walking for a long time more. 

She keeps trying to focus long enough to figure out where she should go, what she should do, but every time she starts to pull herself together, she catches a glimpse of a television or a computer screen or even her own reflection and it threatens to flash to those words, that scene again. 

She has no idea what the man behind the camera might sound like, but she imagines she can hear him chanting to the beat of her steps. 

Kill me, kill me, kill me, kill me

Somehow, at this hour (3:45 in the morning, her dying phone informs her), she finds a bus, and that bus is going south. She is the only one on, and she’s not even sure enough of the glimpse she caught of the driver to confirm his humanity, his reality. If asked, she wouldn’t be able to tell you whether or not the world was real right now. 

Again, she wonders if she is dreaming, or maybe waking up from a dream. 

Maybe she took something Wheeljack cooked up again, and this is some sort of bad trip. If so, what would happen if she just rode the bus forever? 

Inaction hasn’t helped her thus far, though, and there’s no reason to believe it would start working now. 

The city rushes by in a nighttime blur, streetlights and headlights and window lights smearing in front of her eyes. She’s not sure what she’s waiting for, but she knows when it’s arrived. Her stop. She pulls the cord to request a stop and the bus driver deposits her on a sidewalk in the middle of an area of South Edmonton she’s never seen before. It doesn’t occur to her to wonder where she’s going. It’s pulling her in. The air itself seems to pulse in time with the chanting in her head. She’s getting closer.

When she finds it, she knows. The warehouse rises up in front of her, looming over the street at an odd angle to the rest of the world like a loose tooth. She wants to turn around and go home. 

It occurs to her, standing there on the street with the world bending around her, that she probably should have hidden. With that thought comes the realization that she should have planned on her walk here, but that would have required a level of conscious thought she’s not sure she was capable of. She’s not quite sure she’s capable of it now, if she’s being perfectly honest. 

There is a faint light inside the warehouse, cold and white and clinical like the light from the videos. There is no noise from inside, and she can hear her heart beating in her ears. She takes a step forward, then another. She’s really going to do it. She’s going to open that door. 

Before she can get within ten meters of it, though, it opens on its own. A man walks out, tall and broad and covered in blood. 

In the darkness, he meets her eyes. 

She runs all the way home. 

She doesn’t sleep that night. She locks her door, turns all her lights out, and locks herself in her bedroom until the sun comes up. She avoids windows, doesn’t make a sound, lays very very still under her covers and wonders if the man from the video had followed her home. 

At last, the sun is peeking around the corners of her blackout curtains and she feels safe enough to come out. It’s difficult to move her body after being so tense for so long, but she manages to drag herself to the bathroom and then to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and hopefully, call rung. She’s calm. Oddly calm. Nothing makes sense, but she knows it is real because she knows the countertop under her fingers and the coffee in her mouth are real, and the rest follows. She was never good at proofs in math, but she’s sure of this. 

She’s equally sure she was dreaming last night. 

She hopes she was dreaming last night. She has always had such vivid nightmares. 

As if compelled, she moves to the living room and turns on the television. It brings her to the news. 

There is an alert for a missing person. A blonde woman about Red Alert’s age has gone missing on her jog near an industrial park in South Edmonton. 

Red Alert makes it to the bathroom just in time to throw up.

INCIDENT CONCLUDED. 

EDMONTON, ALBERTA. 

OCTOBER 25. 

09:00.

Rung sends her back to the partial hospitalization program, after. The trauma of the whole thing, he said, warranted some more intensive care, so back to the grind it is. She’s already spent ten hours at this place and it’s only Wednesday morning, so she’s feeling a little haggard when she drags herself into her nine am group therapy session. She’s not the only one. No one looks particularly happy to be there, but then again, the seriously mentally ill are not notorious for their early rising habits.

Group therapy had never been her favorite, but during her rediagnosis session, she’d been unable to talk the new psychiatrist out of it. Apparently, community-building is more important now than ever, Red Alert, and schizophrenics with solid support networks have significantly better treatment outcomes, Red Alert. Right. Because she’s schizophrenic now. Always has been? Is, pending further assessment? Red Alert’s never been sure how much to trust those tests. She chooses a seat furthest from the supervising counselor and waits through five minutes of opening conversation to be invited to introduce herself. 

“Uh, hi. I’m Red Alert, and I’ve recently been rediagnosed, so I guess I’m schizophrenic now. I feel a little stupid coming here, because I’m not traumatized or anything. Well, actually, I guess I am now, but the trauma is kind of a secondary thing. I’m not schizophrenic because I’m traumatized; I was just born this way.”

“Hi, Red Alert,” everyone choruses. 

“Welcome, Red Alert,” the counselor says. “Can you tell us what you hope to get out of this group?” 

“Honestly, my psychiatrist told me it was either this or going back to inpatient, so I don’t know yet.” Hopefully, she’ll figure something out as she goes. Otherwise, this could be a very, very long series of sessions. 

“That’s alright. Thank you for sharing. Now, does anyone have any questions, comments, or concerns before we begin today’s session?” 

Red Alert tunes out most of the session. She’s been to enough group therapy in her life that she feels like she must be qualified to lead one of these by now, but if this is what rung wants, this is what Rung gets. It’s not the worst part of partial hospitalization. It’s also not the worst thing in the world to tune out and scribble a little in her notebook while they go over some very basic panic attack management tips. But she tunes back in to listen to one girl’s description of the incident that brought her here. The group is a group meant for those with both psychosis and significant trauma, and it sounds like she’s had both, the trauma bringing on the psychosis. More importantly, she sounds and looks like the blonde girl Red Alert saw on the news that morning after the warehouse. The missing girl. 

The more Red Alert hears, the more sure she is. The girl is vague, but she describes being captured and assaulted. She describes being in the hospital for a few days, then leaving for a few more days, then being taken to this hospital after a psychotic break, so the timeline fits.  She’s determined to talk to the girl. Maybe this way, she can figure out a little more of what happened, find some answers, maybe get some closure.  She still has so few answers, so little idea of what happened that week. There is still some part of her that suspects the whole thing is psychosis. Maybe what she’s experiencing now is a distortion. Maybe everything is fake–

No. That’s not a helpful path to go down. She takes a few deep breaths, draws a few more lopsided flowers. She is real. Her surroundings are real. She has to trust that.

Besides the return to the hospital and the loss of her job, nothing’s really changed since her encounter at the warehouse. Were it not so vivid in her memory, she might have written the whole thing off as a series of strange dreams. Not anymore. Not with this girl sitting across from her, the girl she’d seen on the news. Red Alert has to talk to her. Maybe she’d seen something, maybe she knows something more about what had happened. 

A torturous hour and a half later, the session’s over. Red Alert shoots out of her chair the moment permission leaves the counselor’s mouth, but the blonde girl is already out the door. Red runs after her, bag thumping against her thigh with every step. 

“Hey! Hey, Max, right?” 

The girl stops, but doesn’t turn. She’s standing too straight, too tall. Nervous. She says nothing, but she doesn’t keep walking, so Red Alert jogs up next to her. “Sorry, I’m just. I’m Red Alert, and I don’t usually introduce myself to people, so I’m kind of bad at this?” Fuck, she’s blowing this. Come on, Red, you’ve been taught social skills enough times to have a basic conversation.

“...Okay.” Max looks wary, about to run. Inferno’s friends used to get the same looks on their faces when she would show up. 

Well, Max’s reaction can’t get much worse, so she’ll just keep going. “So, uh. There’s really no way to say this without sounding weird. I think I saw the guy who took you the morning you got grabbed.” 

The look Max gives her is perhaps most kindly described as incredulous. “Listen–”

“No, wait! Just grab coffee with me? Really quick? I want to talk to you.” 

Max regards her, looking her up and down a few times. Then, after some contemplative lip chewing, she says, “Alright.” 

Twenty minutes later finds them in the small, bleak cafeteria on the first floor of the hospital. Red Alert dumps enough sugar into her coffee to hide the fact that it’s instant, and Fortress Maximus (what a name) snorts. 

“What?”

“Nothing.” 

“Don’t judge my coffee.” Red Alert clutches the styrofoam cup protectively to her chest, biting back a smile. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Max puts a more reasonable amount of sugar and cream into her own coffee and leads Red Alert to a table by the window. “So.”

“So.”

“So you said you wanted to talk to me about something. Start talking.” Fort Max’s eyes are very brown, Red Alert notices as Max stares at her. She has a very intense way of looking at Red Alert that makes her feel so put on the spot she forgets what she was going to say. “Well?”

“Uh, right. Yeah. Well, it started with videos? On my television.” 

Fort Max blanches. “You saw video footage of me?” 

Red Alert puts her hands up defensively. “No, no! Not you! The woman before you.” Red Alert spends the next fifteen minutes trying to spin her experience into a cohesive narrative. It’s difficult. Nothing that happened makes much sense, and when she hears it all laid out out loud, it sounds a bit trivial. Seeing a few scary videos is nothing compared to what Fort Max went through, but she listens, rapt and silent, as Red Alert tells her side of the story. When it’s over, she stares into her coffee for a long time. 

Finally, she speaks. “He had a camera. Like, a regular GoPro or something strapped to his chest the whole time. At first, I thought it was kind of weird, but I was more preoccupied with the whole ‘being grabbed off the street’ thing. But then, when he brought me back to that warehouse, there was all this equipment, stuff I’ve never seen before. One side of the room was all set up like a workstation with all the electronics and stuff, but he never went over there. It was… weird.” 

“Weird how?” There’s something liberating about being in the company of other psychotic people, something that makes her comfortable enough to say, “Some stuff happened when I was outside the building, some really strange stuff. It was like…” 

“Like everything was bending?” Fort Max has this distant look in her eyes. 

“Yeah, exactly like that. Like the world had a heartbeat, and it was coming from that warehouse.” She pauses and takes a drink of her now-cold coffee. “It. I. I think something really, really wrong happened in that warehouse.” 

“Yeah. I think so, too.” 

“Do you think it was…” 

“It couldn’t have been natural. Trust me, I. What happened in there was not natural.” 

Red Alert nods. “Okay. Yeah.” 

“Yeah.” 

Suddenly, Red Alert bursts out laughing. “Sorry, sorry,” she says at the offended look on Fort Max’s face. “It’s not you, it’s just this whole thing, you know? It’s been a weird few weeks for me, and now apparently magic is real and I saw it and you saw it and I don’t know. It’s a lot.” 

“I’ve been trying not to think too hard about it,” Fort Max admits. 

“Probably for the best.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching the birds outside the window. Then, Fortress Maximus meets her eyes over the tiny, scratched table. “Thank you,” she starts. “For getting me to talk about it. It’s not easy.” 

“Well, and it literally just happened. When did you get out of the hospital, like, last week?” 

“Two weeks ago.” 

“Yeah, you’re gonna be fine.” Red Alert smiles. 

“You think?”

“I do.” 

Fort Max smiles back, tucking a piece of curly blonde hair behind her ear. “Thank you.”

Fuck it. Red Alert tries to curb her nervous lip chewing long enough to ask, “Do you want to maybe do this again next week? I mean, not the talking about horrific supernatural serial killers. Just the, just the coffee part.” 

Fort Max blushes from ear to ear. “I would.”

“It’s a date!”

EPILOGUE. 

EDMONTON, ALBERTA. 

OCTOBER 25.

09:00.

“You are an idiot.” 

“Don’t start.”

“You are, without a doubt, the most selfish, stuck-up, arrogant person I’ve ever met, and I work for the Canadian government.” 

“That’s enough, Jazz.” 

“It’s really, really not.” Jazz stops her pacing and wheels around to face Prowl. “She saw him. She saw Overlord, and you want to write this up as a successful mission?” 

“For all intents and purposes—” 

“For all intents and purposes, a woman is dead, two more are traumatized for life, and we’ve lost track of one of the most high-profile serial killers in the world. You know, the one who’s supposed to be locked up somewhere in B.C. right now.”

“Yes, and we’re also now in possession of state-of-the-art, instantaneous, untraceable wireless communication tech.” 

“Oh, well, it was all worth it for a radio, I guess.” 

“You didn’t have to get involved.” 

“You would have done it anyway.” 

“Yes. Now, are you going to help me, or not?”

“...What do you need?”